[{"content":"tl;dr\u0026gt; I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to take a new job as an early engineering manager/tech lead, at a data analytics/database startup. And I hope to begin blogging/journaling here more about software development and the way that software and databases interact with other things that grab my interest.\nThis post doesn\u0026rsquo;t really have a narrative. It\u0026rsquo;s just a collection of thoughts. I\u0026rsquo;m sort of out of the habit of writing blog posts, and one of the things that\u0026rsquo;s gotten me stuck on writing in the past year or so is feeling like the narrative of any given blog post is not quite right.1 But we have to start somewhere, and the story will happen over the next few posts.\nIn the middle of 2020 I left a job at a company that I\u0026rsquo;d been at for almost 9 years. It seemed like the world was on fire, what it meant to work at a globally distributed tech company was changing (and still is!), and it felt like a good time to make a change. But to what? I\u0026rsquo;ve spent the last few years working on different projects and exporing different things: I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on cool distributed systems problems, I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on product-focused (backend) engineering, I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on familiar latency-sensitive compute provisioning and orchestration, and a little bit this and that between.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve identified a few things about jobs and working in this process:\nwhile remote work is (and has been for a while) definitely a reality of our world,2 the one thing you can\u0026rsquo;t really accommodate for is timezones. A friend, zmagg, claims (and I believe this) that time differences between 9 hours and 16 hours are basically unworkable as there isn\u0026rsquo;t really enough overlap to really collaborate. if the center of gravity in a company is in a place, or in an office, remote teams really have to be intentional about making sure to include people who are outside of that bubble. the interesting parts of software engineering is what happens between people building software on a team: programming is a means to an end, and while the tools change every so often, how you build together is really fascinating (and hard)! My new job is different from any job I\u0026rsquo;ve ever had: First, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be working on building and developing teams and helping support the engineers and the engineering teams rather than working directly/full-time on the software. I probably will end up doing some software work too. This isn\u0026rsquo;t that novel: I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely done \u0026ldquo;the management thing\u0026rdquo; a few times of times, but more of my time will be doing this, and I get to be more intentional about how I approach it. Second, my work (mostly) has been in support of products that other people--largely my coworkers develop, in the sense that the work that I\u0026rsquo;m drawn to is the internal infrastructure of software. I like infrastructure a lot, and I think I tend to focus on these kinds of problems because I feel like it gives me the biggest opportunity to make an impact. In this sense, in a lot of ways this role is very similar to my previous jobs: building the infrastructure to enable and support the people working around me. Only this time it is (not entirely) software. I\u0026rsquo;m actually looking forward to mapping concrete business goals to actual research and development problems and projects, helping to provide context and prioritize projects without needing to filter through layers of indirection.\nI have been blogging in one form or another (mostly this form) to greater and lesser (mostly lesser) extent for a (really) really long time. The landscape of the way we interact on the internet is changing: twitter is really a shell of its former self, \u0026ldquo;big\u0026rdquo; social media networks (facebook, instagram, ticktock, twitter, etc.) have really segmented by generation and region, and little social media sites are still niche.\nFor my part, I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending more time in \u0026ldquo;group chat,\u0026rdquo; with sort of wacky combinations of random friends. This isn\u0026rsquo;t new for me, and I take a lot of joy of building out very small communities of folks. Also, as I think about it, the thing I most want to do is have coversations with people. Sometimes that conversation is longer form (like this,) and sometimes, it\u0026rsquo;s more one-to-many (like this sort of half baked telegram channel idea that\u0026rsquo;s just sort of a \u0026ldquo;things I would have said on twitter\u0026rdquo; but as a chat,) but rarely is it \u0026ldquo;I would like to become a publisher,\u0026rdquo; or I want to use blogging as a way to market some other entrepreneurial effort. Not that there are anything wrong with these reasons for blogging.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s easy (as a software engineer, though I think this probably holds true for anyone who process for \u0026ldquo;building\u0026rdquo; thing requires a lot of just \u0026ldquo;thinking,\u0026rdquo; about things,) to do a lot of the thinking part in private and to only show up with the \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo; solution (with maybe a few alternatives for rhetorical effect,) or to mostly focus our writing on conclusions reached rather than questions asked.\nSo perhaps, (and we\u0026rsquo;ll see if holds,) I can use this space more as a journal and as a collection of questions and (perhaps) failed attempts and less of news feed.\nI think I often get stuck on where to start, and how much exposition to provide for the topic. I think too much time as a technical writer where my job was to explain difficult concepts means I can (at least try) to start to start to early, and then feel like I get to the end of a post before I\u0026rsquo;ve said what I think needs to be said. The answer to this might be to just write more and post more, so the exposition is just in the scroll back rather than trying to do too much in one post. And to always err on the side of not enough exposition. Let me know, though if you have an opinion on that one.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\ncompanies are often necessarily global in scope, and having a team or project spread between different offices isn\u0026rsquo;t all that different than when it is spread between a bunch of people\u0026rsquo;s homes. Once you have more than one location, n locations are pretty much the same.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-mid-career-shuffle/","summary":"tl;dr\u0026gt; I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to take a new job as an early engineering manager/tech lead, at a data analytics/database startup. And I hope to begin blogging/journaling here more about software development and the way that software and databases interact with other things that grab my interest.\nThis post doesn\u0026rsquo;t really have a narrative. It\u0026rsquo;s just a collection of thoughts. I\u0026rsquo;m sort of out of the habit of writing blog posts, and one of the things that\u0026rsquo;s gotten me stuck on writing in the past year or so is feeling like the narrative of any given blog post is not quite right.1 But we have to start somewhere, and the story will happen over the next few posts.\nIn the middle of 2020 I left a job at a company that I\u0026rsquo;d been at for almost 9 years. It seemed like the world was on fire, what it meant to work at a globally distributed tech company was changing (and still is!","title":"The Mid Career Shuffle"},{"content":"Developers love to complain about their tools, particularly continuous integration (CI) software, everyone has a pet idea of how to make it faster to run or make the results easier to interpret, or more useful. They\u0026rsquo;re all wrong.1\nI spent a few years as the, I guess tech lead(?),2 of a team that was developing a CI tool/platform. It was a cool project, big scale (IO-bound workloads! Cloud!) in an organization that grew rapidly and was exactly the right age for the organization to believe in CI, but also predate the maturity of really mature off-the-shelf CI systems (e.g. Github Actions.)\nWe did a lot of cool things, but I think the most useful thing we ever built was a notification system that let people know when their tests were done running.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s it.\nSee, people were always asking \u0026ldquo;I want my test to run in 5 minutes, or 10 minutes,\u0026rdquo; so that I don\u0026rsquo;t lose too much time waiting for the results and I can avoid getting distracted or losing focus. You could spend a lot of time making things faster, and in some cases this is a great idea: slow things are bad, compute time is expensive (particularly in aggregate), and for trivial things you do want a fast response time.\nThe problem is really that sometimes things can\u0026rsquo;t be made all that much faster without an exceptional amount of effort, and while compute time is expensive sometimes you end up spending significantly more on faster machines or more machinesfor increased parallelism, which can result in for only modest gains.\nThis of course misses the point: human attention spans are incredibly fickle and while really well focused and disciplined engineers might be able to wait for 5 minutes, anything longer than that and most people will have moved on and at that point it might as well taken an hour. While there are some upper bounds and pragmatic aspects on this just because if a build takes 2 hours (say) a developer can only really has time to try 1 or 2 things out in a given work day, but it does mean that execution times between a minute and about 20 minutes are functionally the same.\nSo, just notify people when their build is done. Don\u0026rsquo;t beat distraction by being really fast, beat distraction by interrupting the distraction. People don\u0026rsquo;t need to spend their day looking at a dashboard if the dashboard tells them (gently) to come back when their task is done.\nWhy doesn\u0026rsquo;t every CI tool do this? It might be the feature that every developer wants, and yet, there\u0026rsquo;s no really good \u0026ldquo;tell me when my build is done,\u0026rdquo; feature in any of the popular tools. It\u0026rsquo;s a hard feature to get right, and there are a lot of tricky bits:\nPeople generally don\u0026rsquo;t want to get emails; emails would be easy, but they\u0026rsquo;re not a good way to send a quick--largely ephemeral--reminder. While you can pull emails out of commits (which isn\u0026rsquo;t a great strategy most of the time,) or (presumably) usernames if you\u0026rsquo;re on a platform like GitHub, there are some important user settings that you have to store somewhere. Who to notify for a particular build is a little hard, it turns out. People often want to opt into notifications and be able to only receive notifications that are important to them. Sometimes the person who wants the notification isn\u0026rsquo;t the set of the authors of a commit, or the user that submitted the branch/pull request. When to send a notification isn\u0026rsquo;t clear either. Whenall tasks in the build complete? What if some tasks are blocked from starting because one thing failed? Is \u0026ldquo;do what I mean\u0026rdquo; notifications something like \u0026ldquo;notify me on the first failure, or when all (runable) tasks succeed\u0026rdquo;? If a task fails (and generates a notification,) and then a task is restarted and then the build goes on to succeed do you send a second notification (probably?) Not only are these hard questions, but different teams might want different semantics. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those things that seems simple, but there\u0026rsquo;s just enough complexity that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to build and hard to get right. Easier, a bit to do when all of your CI platform is developed in house, but only a bit, and (probably for the better) there aren\u0026rsquo;t many specific tasks Anyway, I hope someone builds something like this, I\u0026rsquo;d certainly use it.\nWell not all of them. The problem is that developers are very likely to get stuck spinning in weird local optimizations and it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to think about CI features as a user. Developing CI software is also a fun ride because all your users are also engineers, which is a tough crowd.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIn retrospect I realize I was doing tech-lead things, but my title and how we talked about I what I was doing at the time wasn\u0026rsquo;t indicative of this reality. Ah well.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-most-forgotten-ci-feature/","summary":"Developers love to complain about their tools, particularly continuous integration (CI) software, everyone has a pet idea of how to make it faster to run or make the results easier to interpret, or more useful. They\u0026rsquo;re all wrong.1\nI spent a few years as the, I guess tech lead(?),2 of a team that was developing a CI tool/platform. It was a cool project, big scale (IO-bound workloads! Cloud!) in an organization that grew rapidly and was exactly the right age for the organization to believe in CI, but also predate the maturity of really mature off-the-shelf CI systems (e.g. Github Actions.)\nWe did a lot of cool things, but I think the most useful thing we ever built was a notification system that let people know when their tests were done running.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s it.\nSee, people were always asking \u0026ldquo;I want my test to run in 5 minutes, or 10 minutes,\u0026rdquo; so that I don\u0026rsquo;t lose too much time waiting for the results and I can avoid getting distracted or losing focus.","title":"The Most Forgotten CI Feature"},{"content":"Once upon a time, I wrote this logging library for Go called grip and used it a lot at a couple of jobs, where it provided a pretty great API and way to think about running logging and metrics infrastructure for an application. For the last year and a half, I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly ignored it. I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to be that guy about loggers, so I mostly let it drop, but I was looking at some other logging systems and I felt inspired to unwrap it a bit and see if I could improve things and if the time away would inspire me to rethink any of the basic assumptions.\nThis post is about a lot of things (and maybe it will spill over,) but generally:\nthe practice and use of logging, and how that is changing, adoption of libraries out side of the standard library for common infrastructure, the process of changing grip, and also digging into some more specific changes. Logging Trends Grip came about sort of at the height of the structured logging craze, and I think still focuses more on being a way to provide not just the ability to do slightly cooler than a collection of print statements but also be the primary way your software transmits events. Because all of the parts of grip are pretty plugable, we used this for everything from normal application logging to our entire event notification system, and kind of everything in between, including a sort of frightful amount of managing the output of a distributed build farm. The output of these messages went to all of the usual notification targets (e.g. email, slack, github, jira,) but also directly to log aggregation services (e.g. splunk) and the system log without being written to a file, which just made the services much easier to operate.\nLike me, grip is somewhat opinionated. A lot of loggers compete based on \u0026ldquo;speed\u0026rdquo; (typically of writing messages to standard output or to any file) or on features (automatic contextual data collection and message annotation, formatting tools, hierarchical filtering, etc.) but I think grip\u0026rsquo;s selling point is really:\ngreat interfaces for doing all of the things that you normally do with a logger, and all the things you want to do. provide ways of logging data that doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve building/formatting strings, and lets the normal data. make logging work just as well for the small CLI process as the large distributed application, and with similar amounts of ease. Pursuant to this I really think that any logging system or architecture that requires lots of extra stuff (agents, forwarders, rotation tools, etc.) to actually be able to use the logs is overkill. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing particularly exciting about sending logs over the network (or to a file, or a local socket,) and it should be possible to reduce the amount of complexity in this part of the deployment, which is good for just about everyone. provide good interfaces and paradigms for replacing or custimizing core logging behavior. It should be possible for applications to write their own tools for sending log messages to places, or functions to filter and format log messages. This is a logging tool kit that can grow and develop with your application. in the x hierarchy include implementations for many messaging formats, and tools: use grip implementations to send alerts to telegram, email, slack, jira, etc. Also, support for sending logs _directly to wherever they need to be (splunk, syslog, etc.). Whever the logs need to be, grip should be able to get you there. The core grip package provides logging multiplexers, buffers, and batching tools to help control and manage the flow of logging from your application code to whatever logging backend you\u0026rsquo;re targeting.' Implementations and bridges between grip\u0026rsquo;s interfaces and other logging framework and tools. Grip attempts to make it possible to become the logging system for existing applications without needing to replace all logging call sites immediately (or ever!) Tools to support using grip interfaces and backends inside of other tools: you can use a grip Sender as a writer, or access a standard-library logger implementation that writes to the underlying grip logger. logging should be fast, but speed of logging only really matters when data volume is really high, which is usually a problem for any logger: when data volume is lower even a really slow logger is still faster than the network or the file system. Picking a logger that\u0026rsquo;s fast, given this, is typically a poor optimization. Grip should be fast enough for any real world application and contains enough flexibility to provide an optimized path for distributing log messages as needed. provide features to support some great logging paradigms: lazy construction of messages: while the speed of writing messages to their output handler typically doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, sometimes building log messages can be intensive. Recently I ran into a case where calling [Sprintf]{.title-ref} at the call site of the logger for messages that were not logged (e.g. debug messages,) had material effects on the memory usage of the program. While string formating is a common case (and grip has \u0026ldquo;[Logf]{.title-ref}\u0026rdquo; style handlers that are lazy by default,) we found a bunch of metrics collection workloads that had similar sorts of patterns and lazy execution of these metrics tended to help a lot. conditional logging, rather than wrapping a log statement in an [if]{.title-ref} block, I found that you could have logging handlers that randomized logging or sampled logging: In some cases, I want to have log messages that only get logged half the time or something similar. In some high-volume code paths logging all the time is too much, and never is also too much, but it\u0026rsquo;s possible to devise a happy medium. Grip, for years now, has implemented this in terms of the conditional logging functionality. structured logging, rather than logging strings, it\u0026rsquo;s sometimes nice to just pass data, in the form of a special structure or just a map and let the logging system package deal with the output formating and transmission of messages. In general, line-oriented JSON makes for a good logging format, assuming most or enough of your messages have related structures and your log viewing and processing tools support this kind of data, although alternate human-readable string formats should also be available. None of these things changed in the rewrite: by default, grip mostly just looks and works like the Go standard library logger (and even uses the logger under the hood for a lot of things,) but it was definitely fun to look at more contemporary logging practices and tools and think about what makes a logging library compelling (or not).\nInfrastructure Libraries Infrastructure libraries are an interresting beast: ideally every dependency carries some kind of maintenance cost, so you want to minimize the number of dependencies you require. At the same time, not using libraries is also bad because it means you end up writing more code and that has even more maintenance costs. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that software engineers love writing infrastructure code and are often quite opinionated about the ergonomics of their infrastructure libraries.\nOn top of that, you make infrastructure software decisions once and then are sort of stuck with them for a really long time. I\u0026rsquo;ve changed loggers in projects and it\u0026rsquo;s rough, and in general you want to choose libraries: as an application developer you have the great feeling that no one\u0026rsquo;s differentiating feature is going to have anything to do with the logger1 and you want something that\u0026rsquo;s battle tested and familiar to everyone. Sometimes--as in the logging package in Python--the standard library has a library just works and everyone just uses that; other times, there are one or two options that most project uses (e.g. log4j in java, etc.).\nEven if grip is great, it seems unlikely that everyone (or anyone?) will switch to using grip over some of the other more popular options. I\u0026rsquo;m OK with that, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that beyond writing a few blog posts I\u0026rsquo;m really that excited about doing the kind of marketing and promotion that it might take to promote a logging library like this, and at the same time the moment for a new logging library might have already passed.\nGrip Reborn The \u0026ldquo;new grip\u0026rdquo; is a pretty substantial change. A lot of implementation details changed and I deleted big parts of the interface that didn\u0026rsquo;t quite make sense, or that I thought were a bit fussy to use. Basically just sanding off a lot of awkward edges. The big changes:\ngreatly simplified dependencies, with more packages and an x hierarchy for extensions. The main grip package, and it\u0026rsquo;s primary sub packages\u0026rsquo; no longer has any external dependencies (beyond github.com/tychoish/fun.) Any logging backend or message type that has additional dependencies are in x. I deleted a lot of code. There were a lot of things that just weren\u0026rsquo;t needed, there was an extra interface, a bunch of constructors for various objects that weren\u0026rsquo;t useful. I also simplified the concept of levels/priority within the logging system. simpler high level logging interface. I used to have an extra interface and package to hold all of the Info, Error, (and so forth), and I cut a lot of that out and just made a Logger type in the main package which just wraps an underlying interface and doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be mutable, and doing this made it possible to simplify a lot of the code. added some straight forward handlers to attach loggers to contexts. I think previously, I was split on the opinion that loggers should either be (functionally) global or passed explicitly around as objects, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ve come around to the idea that loggers maybe ought to hang off the context object, but contextual loggers, global loggers, and logging objects are all available. the high level logging interface is much smaller, with handlers for all the levels and formatting, line, and conditional (e.g. f, ln, When) logging. I\u0026rsquo;m not 100% sold on having ln, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with having things be pretty simple and streamlined. The logger interface, as with the standard logger is mirrored in the grip package, with a shim. new message.Builder interface and methods that provides a chainable interface for building messages without needing to mess with the internals of the message package which might be ungainly at logging call sites. new KV message type: this makes it possible to have structured logging payloads without using map types, which might prove easier easier to integrate with the new zerolog and zap backends. I have begun exploring in the [series]{.title-ref} package, what it\u0026rsquo;d mean to have a metrics collection and publication system that is integrated into a logger. I wrote probably too much code, but I am excited to do some more work to do some more work in this area. Arguably, in a CI platform, most of the hard problems have something to do with logging, so this is an exception, but perhaps one of the only exceptions\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reintroducing-grip/","summary":"Once upon a time, I wrote this logging library for Go called grip and used it a lot at a couple of jobs, where it provided a pretty great API and way to think about running logging and metrics infrastructure for an application. For the last year and a half, I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly ignored it. I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to be that guy about loggers, so I mostly let it drop, but I was looking at some other logging systems and I felt inspired to unwrap it a bit and see if I could improve things and if the time away would inspire me to rethink any of the basic assumptions.\nThis post is about a lot of things (and maybe it will spill over,) but generally:\nthe practice and use of logging, and how that is changing, adoption of libraries out side of the standard library for common infrastructure, the process of changing grip, and also digging into some more specific changes.","title":"Reintroducing Grip"},{"content":"This is a follow up to my New Go Modules post about a project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the past few months: github.com/tychoish/fun.\nfun is a collection of simple libraries using generics to do a collection of relatively mundane things, with a focus on well-built tools to make it easier for developers to solve higher level problems without needing to re-implement low level infrastructure, or use some rougher parts of the go standard library. It has no dependencies outside of the standard library, and contains a number of pretty cool tools, which were fun to write. Some of the basic structures were:\nI wrote linked list implementations (single and double), adapted a single-ended Queue implementation that a former coworker did as part of an abandoned branch of development, and wrote a similar Deque. (fun/pubsub)\nI adapted and developed a \u0026ldquo;broker\u0026rdquo; which uses the queues above to be able to do one-to-many pubsub implementations. (fun/pubsub)\nI made a few high-level standard library synchronization tools (sync.Map, sync.WaitGroup, sync.Pool, and atomic.Value) even more higher level, with the help generics and more than a few stubborn opinions. (fun/adt; atomic data types)\nI revisited an error aggregation tool that I wrote years ago, and made it a bunch faster, less quirky, and more compatible with the current state of the art with regards to error handling (e.g. errors.Is and errors.As). (fun/erc). I also wrote some basic error mangling tools including a more concise errors.Join, tools to unwind/unwrap errors, and a simple error type ers.Error to provide for constant errors (fun/ers)\nI wrote an iterator interface and a collection of function wrappers and types (in the top level package), for interacting with iterators (or really, streams in one way or another,) and decorating those handlers and processors with common kinds of operations, modifications, and simple semantics.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know that it will catch on, but I\u0026rsquo;ve written (and rewritten) a lot of worker pools and stream processing things to use thse tools, and it\u0026rsquo;s been a useful programming model. By providing the wrappers and the iteration, users can implement features almost functionally (which should be easy to test.)\nI built a collection of service orchestration tools to manage long running application services (e.g. http servers, worker pools, long running subprocesses, etc.) and a collection of context helpers to make it easier to manage the lifecycle of the kind of long-running applications I end up working on most of the time. Every time I\u0026rsquo;ve joined a new project\u0026hellip; ever, I end up doing some amount of service orchestration work, and this is the toolkit I would want. (fun/srv)\nI wrote some simple testing frameworks and tools for assertions (fun/assert) halt-on-failure, but with a tesitfy-inspired interface, and better reporiting along with a mirrored, fail-but-continue fun/assert/check, along with fun/testt (\u0026ldquo;test-tee\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;testy\u0026rdquo;) which has a bunch of simple helpers for using contexts, and fun/ensure, which is a totally different take on an assertion library.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want this post to be documentation about the project; there are a lot of docs in the README and on the go documentation, also the implementations are meant to be pretty readable, so feel free to dive in there. I did want to call out a few ways that I\u0026rsquo;ve begun using this library and the lessons it\u0026rsquo;s taught me in my day to day work.\nI set a goal of writing code that\u0026rsquo;s 100% covered by tests. This is hard, and only possible in part because it\u0026rsquo;s a stateless library without dependencies, but I learned a lot about the code I was writing, and feel quite confident in it as a result.\nI also set a goal of having no dependencies outside of the module and the standard library: I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to require users opt in using a set of tools that I liked, or that would require on going maintenance to update and manage. Not only is this a good goal in terms of facilitating adoption, it also constrained what I would do, and forced me to write things with external extensibility: there had to be hooks, interfaces and function types had to be easy to implement, and I decided to limit scope for other things.\nHaving a more complete set of atomic types and tools (particularly the map and the typed atomic value, also the typed integer atomic types in the standard library are great), has allowed me to approach concurrent programming problems without doing crazy things with channels or putting mutexes everywhere. I don\u0026rsquo;t think either channels or mutexes are a problem in the hands of a practiced practitioner, but having a viable alternative means it\u0026rsquo;s one less thing to go wrong, and you can save the big guns (mutexes) for more complex synchronization problems.\nLinked lists are super cool. I\u0026rsquo;ve previously taken the opinion that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t implement your own sequence types ever, and mostly avoided writing one of these before now. Having now done it, and now having truly double-ended structures means things like \u0026ldquo;adding something to the beginning\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;inserting into/removing from the middle\u0026rdquo; of a sequence isn\u0026rsquo;t so awkward.\nThe experimental slices library makes this a little less awkward with standard library slices/arrays, and they are proably faster.\nIt was really fun to take the concept of an interator and then build out from this concept to build tools that would make them easy to use, and got some good filtering, parallel processing, and map/reduce tools. I definitely learned a bunch but also I think (and have found) these tools useful.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve long held that most go applications should be structured so that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t really need to think too much about concurrency when writing business logic. I\u0026rsquo;ve previously tried to posit that the solution to this was to provide robust queue processing tools (e.g. amboy), but I think that\u0026rsquo;s too heavy weight, and it was cool to be able to think about the solution to this concept from a different angle.\nAnyway, give it a try, and tell me what you think! Also pull requests are welcome!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-go-module-fun/","summary":"This is a follow up to my New Go Modules post about a project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the past few months: github.com/tychoish/fun.\nfun is a collection of simple libraries using generics to do a collection of relatively mundane things, with a focus on well-built tools to make it easier for developers to solve higher level problems without needing to re-implement low level infrastructure, or use some rougher parts of the go standard library. It has no dependencies outside of the standard library, and contains a number of pretty cool tools, which were fun to write. Some of the basic structures were:\nI wrote linked list implementations (single and double), adapted a single-ended Queue implementation that a former coworker did as part of an abandoned branch of development, and wrote a similar Deque. (fun/pubsub)\nI adapted and developed a \u0026ldquo;broker\u0026rdquo; which uses the queues above to be able to do one-to-many pubsub implementations.","title":"New Go Module: tychoish/fun"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a little big of programming for fun in recent months, and I wanted to do a little big of blogging here to explain myself, so expect that over the next few days.\nBy way of creating the facade of suspense--which the astute among you will be able to spoil by way of looking at my github--this post isn\u0026rsquo;t going to mention the actual projects, but rather answer two questions that are more interesting from a higher level:\nWhy have you done this? What have you learned about yourself as a programmer? Why Have You Done This? First, while I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing Go for a long time, I must confess that I was a long time generic skeptic and hold out. Writing some code for myself and I wanted to get a better feeling for how they worked, now that they\u0026rsquo;re here.\nIn my day to day work, I have found myself writing similar code again and again: while I have definitely have a class of problems that I tend to work on, I\u0026rsquo;d be ok if I never wrote another function to bridge the gap between a [context.Context]{.title-ref} and a [sync.WaitGroup]{.title-ref} (and I\u0026rsquo;m not holding my breath for this in the standard library.)\nFinally, over the years I\u0026rsquo;ve written a few projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on professionally have been open source, and a few of them I\u0026rsquo;ve even rather liked, and I wanted to see what it would be like to revisit some of these projects with (potentially) wiser eyes and fingers.\nWhat Have You Learned? I actually think I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot:\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of the part of software development which is \u0026ldquo;deleting code\u0026rdquo; in my professional work, it was really interesting to take that to code that I knew I\u0026rsquo;d written (or directed the writing of) and been able to see what I could cut. I\u0026rsquo;m better at writing tests and writing testable code than I was even a few years ago. While I believe in writing defensive code, I found myself writing an implementation and then going through and deleting a lot of code that wasn\u0026rsquo;t useful or was (fundamentally) superstitious when I discovered that there was no way to trigger a potential case. Because I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a few years mostly working on relatively high level projects and not having the bandwidth to work on lower (mid?) level infrastructural code, in practice I\u0026rsquo;ve spent more time assessing other people\u0026rsquo;s libraries and I was keenly aware that I was developing code that would only be used if someone chose to, and in thinking about how those decisions are made. This isn\u0026rsquo;t new, but I care a lot about the erognomics of software. I think 5 or 6 years ago, ergonomics meant \u0026ldquo;code which was easy to use and provented users from doing wrong things,\u0026rdquo; and I think my view of erognomic code has expanded to include interfaces that are easy and obvious to use, and promote the users of my code to write better code. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-go-modules/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a little big of programming for fun in recent months, and I wanted to do a little big of blogging here to explain myself, so expect that over the next few days.\nBy way of creating the facade of suspense--which the astute among you will be able to spoil by way of looking at my github--this post isn\u0026rsquo;t going to mention the actual projects, but rather answer two questions that are more interesting from a higher level:\nWhy have you done this? What have you learned about yourself as a programmer? Why Have You Done This? First, while I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing Go for a long time, I must confess that I was a long time generic skeptic and hold out. Writing some code for myself and I wanted to get a better feeling for how they worked, now that they\u0026rsquo;re here.\nIn my day to day work, I have found myself writing similar code again and again: while I have definitely have a class of problems that I tend to work on, I\u0026rsquo;d be ok if I never wrote another function to bridge the gap between a [context.","title":"New Go Modules"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been kntting off and on since 2002 or 2003 (or so) but have been particularly \u0026ldquo;on\u0026rdquo; in the last couple of years. When I started working as a computer programmer (without formal training as such,) I quipped that I learned how to program from hand knitting. This is a simplification--of course--but it\u0026rsquo;s not that incorrect. Knitting is a system with some basic fundamentals (stitches, yarn, needle), a lot of variables (gauge, tension), repeated procedures, and a hell of a lot of prior art. This is a lot like programming.\nSpinning too, has many of the same properties, but similarities aside they feel like different kinds of crafts: where knitting feels like you\u0026rsquo;re applying a set of understood procedures to produce something that\u0026rsquo;s unique, spinning is often about figuring out how to apply the same procedures in a way that prodcues consistent result. This makes sense you want to produce a quantity of yarn that\u0026rsquo;s on average similar enough that when you knit (or I suppose weave,) you have good consistent results. In many ways, spinning leads naturally to an idea of \u0026ldquo;production\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;scale\u0026rdquo; as an aspect of craft.\nJust to be clear, these kinds of crafts should be fun and rewarding on their own merits. If you want to spin and are excited and happy to make and have yarn with variable thickness, or where every skein is unique, then do that. For me, particularly now, I find the problem of figuring out how to be consistent while spinning a couple of pounds of wool over the course of a few weeks to be really exciting and entrancing.\nThe kind of knitting that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing recently has had some of these production/scale aspects as well: knitting with very similar white yarns removes color and minimizes texture as a variable. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting roughly the same sock at production scale, the sweater\u0026rsquo;s I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on have some bespoke aspects, though the process is broadly similar. There\u0026rsquo;s something so compelling about being able to understand my craft and procedure so thoroughly that I can make things that aren\u0026rsquo;t wonky with confidence.\nProgramming is also very much like thsi for me these days. I spent years as a programmer trying to figure out how code worked, and how basic fundamental systems and protocols worked (e.g. webservers, Linux, databases,) and now I know how to build most things, or feel confident in my ability to figure out how to build a new thing when needed. The exciting things about software engineering is more about making the software work at large scale, the processes that allow increasingly large teams of engineers work together effectively, and being able to figure out the right solution for the problem users have.\nI\u0026rsquo;m currently somewhere on the 7th 100 gram skein of approximately worsted weight, 3-ply merino yarn. My consistency isn\u0026rsquo;t quite where I want it, but if you look at all of the skeins they seem roughly related, so I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to make a sweater easily from it. I have two more skeins after this one. My plan from here is to alternate spinning batches of white yarn with spinning batches of not-white/natural colored wool for variety. Probably mostly 3 ply for now, though I may give 2 ply a go for one of them.\nI\u0026rsquo;m knitting a white seamless style sweater, using Elizabeth Zimmerman\u0026rsquo;s method for bottom up sweaters. I\u0026rsquo;ve changed many of the numbers and some of the proportions, but nothing particularly fundamental about the process. I\u0026rsquo;ve knit 3 sweaters back to back with this same process, though this is the first with this specific yarn. I do have enough of this yarn to knit 3 or 4 sweaters, which I find both daunting and exciting, taken as a whole. With the sleeves done, I\u0026rsquo;m about halfway to the underarms on the body. I want to try knitting a saddle shouldered garment for this one.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/crafts-at-scale/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been kntting off and on since 2002 or 2003 (or so) but have been particularly \u0026ldquo;on\u0026rdquo; in the last couple of years. When I started working as a computer programmer (without formal training as such,) I quipped that I learned how to program from hand knitting. This is a simplification--of course--but it\u0026rsquo;s not that incorrect. Knitting is a system with some basic fundamentals (stitches, yarn, needle), a lot of variables (gauge, tension), repeated procedures, and a hell of a lot of prior art. This is a lot like programming.\nSpinning too, has many of the same properties, but similarities aside they feel like different kinds of crafts: where knitting feels like you\u0026rsquo;re applying a set of understood procedures to produce something that\u0026rsquo;s unique, spinning is often about figuring out how to apply the same procedures in a way that prodcues consistent result. This makes sense you want to produce a quantity of yarn that\u0026rsquo;s on average similar enough that when you knit (or I suppose weave,) you have good consistent results.","title":"Crafts at Scale"},{"content":"A few years ago, I sent my spinning wheel away because I was living in a very small apartment with two very attentive cats. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been living in an apartment with more room (and doors!) for a few years now, only this week has my wheel returned: I realized that I missed spinning, and it\u0026rsquo;s not like soothing hobbies are unwelcome these days.\nI started spinning about 15 years ago, and did it a bunch for a few years and then more or less stopped for a long time. It\u0026rsquo;s been interesting to start up again, and discover that my hands/body more or less remembered exactly how to do it. I had a few hours and about 200g of yarn to spin before some of the finer points came back and now I\u0026rsquo;ve spun a couple more skeins closer to my intention.\nThe other human asked \u0026ldquo;What do you like about spinning?\u0026rdquo;--well the question was phrased more like \u0026ldquo;is handspun yarn better?\u0026rdquo;, but I will paraphrase to better capture intent. There are, of course, a few answers:\nthe act of spinning is quite satisfying. Sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s enough for things to be fun and satisfying even if they aren\u0026rsquo;t productive. the yarn can be sort of nifty, and although I\u0026rsquo;ve spun a lot of yarn, I have mostly not knit much with handspun yarn. I tend to like consistent and fine (fingering) yarns in my own knitting, and machines just do better at making this kind of yarn, so I end up giving a lot of handspun away to friends who I know will knit it better. spinning gives you a lot of control over the wool (and kind of sheep) that go into the yarn you get, in a way that just doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale up to larger production schemes. I quite enjoy being able to first select what kind of sheep the wool I use comes from and then decide what kind of yarn I want from it. When other people spin, you can usually only pick one of these variables. I\u0026rsquo;m currently spinning some white merino roving that I\u0026rsquo;ve (apparently had for years.) There\u0026rsquo;s a piece of paper in the bag that says \u0026ldquo;2 lbs\u0026rdquo; but between my practice skeins and whatever I did before I stopped, there\u0026rsquo;s probably only about a pound and a half left: this is fine. Merino is great, but it\u0026rsquo;s quite common and I knit a lot of merino. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on getting a pretty stable 3-ply worsted weight yarn, and I\u0026rsquo;m roughly there. I like 3-ply because of the round construction, and worsted weight is about the heaviest yarn I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in knitting with or using (and it\u0026rsquo;s easy to design with/for!)\nMy next few spinning projects are with wool from different breeds of sheep (BFL! Targhee! Rambouillet!) though mostly undyed (and largly white), and mostly in larger batches (a pound or two.) I\u0026rsquo;ve never really gotten into hand-dyed roving, and mostly really enjoy spinning undyed wool: in most cases dying the finished garment or the yarn before knitting leads to the best result anyway. I guess one of the most The thing I like about spinning, in a lot of ways, is that it lets me focus on the wool and the sheep.\nAs a spinner, I\u0026rsquo;m far more interested in the wool and the sheep, in much the same way that as a knitter I\u0026rsquo;ve become far more interested in the structure of what I\u0026rsquo;m knitting than the color or the yarn. This feels entirely consistent to me: as a spinner I\u0026rsquo;m far more interested in the process and the wool than I am in yarn, and as a knitter I\u0026rsquo;m far more interested in using the yarn to explore the structure. Somehow, the yarn itself isn\u0026rsquo;t the thing that compells me, despite being kind of at the center of the process.\nAnyway, back to the wheel!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-spinning/","summary":"A few years ago, I sent my spinning wheel away because I was living in a very small apartment with two very attentive cats. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been living in an apartment with more room (and doors!) for a few years now, only this week has my wheel returned: I realized that I missed spinning, and it\u0026rsquo;s not like soothing hobbies are unwelcome these days.\nI started spinning about 15 years ago, and did it a bunch for a few years and then more or less stopped for a long time. It\u0026rsquo;s been interesting to start up again, and discover that my hands/body more or less remembered exactly how to do it. I had a few hours and about 200g of yarn to spin before some of the finer points came back and now I\u0026rsquo;ve spun a couple more skeins closer to my intention.\nThe other human asked \u0026ldquo;What do you like about spinning?","title":"Why Spinning?"},{"content":"Last night I finished knitting a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;d been working on for either a while (pictures in this twitter thread) or not all that long, and promptly started the next sweater.\nAlso last weekend I handed off a bag of undyed (white) knitting to a friend of mine who is way more excited about dying than I am. This includes 13 or 14 pairs of socks (in a few different batches,) and a sweater that I knit. We also found someone who the sweater is more likely to fit than me, and I always quite like finding homes for wayward sweaters.\nI have a couple of long flights for work trips coming up so I wanted to make sure that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t bringing a sweater that I was two-thirds of the way through and would likely finish. The next sweater is the 4th I\u0026rsquo;ve made from this yarn, and the 3rd plain sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ve made two plain raglans, and this last one was a crew neck.\nBy now I have a reasonable set of numbers/patterns for a \u0026ldquo;fingering weight sweater that basically fits an adult medium/small\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;ve been honing, and enough yarn stashed to make about 9 of these sweaters. That should get me through the winter.\nThe crew neck is a touch lower than I think it needed to be, but it looks pretty smart. The thing about knitting Elizabeth Zimmerman-style seamless sweaters is that for the entire time you\u0026rsquo;re knitting the yoke section it really does not seem like it\u0026rsquo;s going to work out, so you have low-key panic the entire time, and then somehow, magically it all does. The key to success is to not overthink things too much and not fuck around.\nI think this last sweater had a bit too much fucking around with the neckline, so it looks a bit weird (to my somewhat exacting tastes) where the ragland decreases interact with the neck shaping. The front of the neck could have been higher, and I think I could have done like 3-4 sets of short rows near the end to get the right effect for the front. Perhaps one of the next few sweaters can be another attempt at a raglan.\nMy plan for the next/current sweater is to do set-in sleeves with a crew neck. I have the math all worked out, so that seems like it might be fun. I\u0026rsquo;ve also never done EZ\u0026rsquo;s saddle shoulder (or hybrid) yoke, so that seems like some fun winter knitting. Regardless, saddles and set in sleeves are mostly constructed the same way, so I can wait quite a while to make a decision. After about 18 months of mostly knitting socks (and having gotten ~30 pairs done,) a (minor) change seems good.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-most-plain-knitting/","summary":"Last night I finished knitting a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;d been working on for either a while (pictures in this twitter thread) or not all that long, and promptly started the next sweater.\nAlso last weekend I handed off a bag of undyed (white) knitting to a friend of mine who is way more excited about dying than I am. This includes 13 or 14 pairs of socks (in a few different batches,) and a sweater that I knit. We also found someone who the sweater is more likely to fit than me, and I always quite like finding homes for wayward sweaters.\nI have a couple of long flights for work trips coming up so I wanted to make sure that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t bringing a sweater that I was two-thirds of the way through and would likely finish. The next sweater is the 4th I\u0026rsquo;ve made from this yarn, and the 3rd plain sweater.","title":"The Most Plain Knitting"},{"content":"I spent a few days last week isolating after attending a larger social event in a friends apartment in a (mostly) unfamiliar neighborhood and I got to spend a few days enjoying (a dear friend\u0026rsquo;s) book collection.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have many paper books left: enough moves and small new York city apartments, combined with vague personal preference for e-ink have left me with only about 100 books, but I do sometimes enjoy reading paper books when I\u0026rsquo;m visiting someone else. My perfect vacation has always been some combination of \u0026ldquo;drinking too much coffee and reading books,\u0026rdquo; and given that I\u0026rsquo;m kind of in an in-between moment job-wise right now, this was actually pretty much perfect.\nI started out the week reading Slouching Toward Bethlehem (Joan Diddion) and finished it reading the first half of The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy). It was pretty much everything.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been an admirer of Diddon, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never read Bethlehem and I\u0026rsquo;ve meant to sort of spend a few years trawlling luxuriously through her backlist, but hadn\u0026rsquo;t gotten around to it. The writing is perfect in exactly the sort of austere but precise way that I\u0026rsquo;ve come to expect. I\u0026rsquo;m doubly impressed also that she was so young when these essays were published.\nI had in my mind that this was a book that was an account of the state of counter-culture in the 60s, and the title essay definitely is that, but having read the entire book over the course of a few days, I\u0026rsquo;m left with the impression that this book is really a big \u0026ldquo;why I left New York City in my late 20s\u0026rdquo; combined with a love letter to California from a returning native child, who remembers \u0026ldquo;the (really) old California\u0026rdquo; and what is by now \u0026ldquo;the (simply) old California\u0026rdquo;.\nThe \u0026ldquo;why I left New York City in my late 20s\u0026rdquo; story is pretty familiar, and it\u0026rsquo;s actually nice to see, now 60 years on, that people coming to New York in their 20s and then burning out or not figuring out how to be in New York sustainably is a very old story indeed. I\u0026rsquo;m also of course, heartened that she returned to the city for the last 25 years of her life. I hope that this also proves to be an enduring pattern for my generation.\nI was also struck by the way that the reflection (and really, critique) of the counter culture managed to be very early but also consistent with what a lot of people were saying earlier. To my eyes, it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly surprising but the date is a bit.\nThe God of Small Things is, of course, lush in all the ways that Slouching is austere. Almost provoking whiplash.\nI typically find these sort of lush non-linear books to be a bit Extra. Lovely, to be sure, but the lushness and non-linearity can so distract from the plot or the characters or the impact. Lush and non-linear prose has also started to feel faddish and at least for me, a signifies of a certain kind of academic/\u0026ldquo;art school\u0026rdquo; approach to prose. This is not true at all of Small Things: the story directly and explicitly explores childhood memories and trauma in ways that are reflected both in the characters and the story telling. It extremely works.\nAs is, I suppose, the intent, the book and writing has me thinking a lot about imperialism1 and the history therein, and I think there\u0026rsquo;s a way that the non-linearity of the story telling manages to engage this fundamental question2 \u0026ldquo;why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation,\u0026rdquo; and watching this\nI\u0026rsquo;m not done yet with the book, but I\u0026rsquo;m excited to dig in more.\nThe next book on my friend\u0026rsquo;s bookshelf that I\u0026rsquo;m excited by was a collection of Grace Paley stories and essays. I haven\u0026rsquo;t really started it, yet, but I think I will soon.\nI wrote this sentence as \u0026ldquo;post/colonialism\u0026rdquo; but I think there are so many layers and intersections that expand have echos and impacts that are much larger than the history of the British in India, which isn\u0026rsquo;t (and shouldn\u0026rsquo;t!) be the at the center of the story, despite it\u0026rsquo;s outsized and unrefutable impact.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIn a bit of my own non-linearity, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on an essay that plays with this famous quote/question from Deleuze (derived from Riech, derived from Spinoza). The full (ish) quote is, \u0026ldquo;the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: \u0026lsquo;Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?\u0026rsquo; How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: \u0026lsquo;More taxes! Less bread!\u0026rsquo;? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/isolation-reading/","summary":"I spent a few days last week isolating after attending a larger social event in a friends apartment in a (mostly) unfamiliar neighborhood and I got to spend a few days enjoying (a dear friend\u0026rsquo;s) book collection.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have many paper books left: enough moves and small new York city apartments, combined with vague personal preference for e-ink have left me with only about 100 books, but I do sometimes enjoy reading paper books when I\u0026rsquo;m visiting someone else. My perfect vacation has always been some combination of \u0026ldquo;drinking too much coffee and reading books,\u0026rdquo; and given that I\u0026rsquo;m kind of in an in-between moment job-wise right now, this was actually pretty much perfect.\nI started out the week reading Slouching Toward Bethlehem (Joan Diddion) and finished it reading the first half of The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy). It was pretty much everything.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been an admirer of Diddon, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never read Bethlehem and I\u0026rsquo;ve meant to sort of spend a few years trawlling luxuriously through her backlist, but hadn\u0026rsquo;t gotten around to it.","title":"Isolation Reading"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about what I do as a software engineer for a while, as there seems to be a common thread through the kinds of projects and teams that I\u0026rsquo;m drawn toward and I wanted to write a few blog posts on this topic to sort of collect my thoughts and see if these ideas resonated with anyone else.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve never been particularly interested in building new and exciting features. Hackathon\u0026rsquo;s have never held any particular appeal, and the things I really enjoy are working on are on the spectrum of \u0026ldquo;stabilize this piece of software,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;make this service easy to operate\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;refactor this code to make support future development\u0026rdquo; and less \u0026ldquo;design and build some new feature.\u0026rdquo; Which isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I don\u0026rsquo;t like building new features or writing code, but that I\u0026rsquo;m more driven by the code and supporting my teammates than I am by the feature.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s great that I\u0026rsquo;m different from software engineers who are really focused on the features, both because I think the tension between our interests pushes both classes of software engineer to do great things. Feature development keeps software and products relevant and addresses users\u0026rsquo; needs. Stabilization work makes projects last and reduces the incidence of failures that distract from feature work, and when there\u0026rsquo;s consistent attention paid to aligning infrastructure1 work with feature development of the long term, infrastructure engineers can significantly lower the cost of implementing a feature.\nThe kinds of projects that fall into these categories inculde the following areas:\nmanaging application state and workload in larger distributed contexts. This has involved designing and implementing things like configuration management, deployment processes, queuing systems, and persistence layers. concurrency control patterns and process lifecycle. In programming environments where threads are available, finding ways to ensure that processes can safely shut down, and errors can be communicated between threads and processes takes some work and providing mechanisms to shutdown cleanly, communicate abort signals to worker threads, and handle communication patterns between threads in a regular and expected way, is really important. Concurrency is a great tool, but being able to manage concurrency safely and predictably and in descret parts of the code are useful. programming model and ergonomic APIs and services. No developers produces a really compelling set of abstractions on the first draft, particularly when they\u0026rsquo;re focused on delivering different kinds of functionality. The revision and iteration process helps everyone build better software. test infrastructure and improvements. No one thinks tests should take a long time or report results non-deterministically, and yet so many test are. The challenge is that tests often look good or seem reasonable or are stable when you write them, and their slow runtimes compound overtime, or orthogonal changes make them slower. Sometimes adding an extra check in some pre-flight test-infrastructure code ends ups causing tests that had been just fine, thank you to become problems. Maintaining and structure test infrastructure has been a big part of what I\u0026rsquo;ve ended up doing. Often, however, working back from the tests, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to see how a changed interface or an alternate factoring of code would make core components easier to test, and doing a cleanup pass of tests on some regular cadence to improve things. Faster more reliable tests, make it possible to develop with greater confidence. In practice this has included:\nchanging the build system for a project to produce consistent artifacts, and regularizing the deployment process to avoid problems during deploy. writing a queuing system without any extra service level dependencies (e.g. in the project\u0026rsquo;s existing database infrastructure) and then refactoring (almost) all arbitrary parallel workloads to use the new queuing system. designing and implementing runtime feature flagging systems so operators could toggle features or components on-and-off via configuration options rather than expensive deploys. replacing bespoke implementations with components provided by libraries or improving implementation quality by replacing components in-place, with the goal of making new implementations more testable or performant (or both!) plumbing contexts (e.g. Golang\u0026rsquo;s service contexts) through codebases to be able to control the lifecycle of concurrent processes. implementing and migrating structured logging systems and building observability systems based on these tools to monitor fleets of application services. Refactoring tests to reuse expensive test infrastructure, or using table-driven tests to reduce test duplication. managing processes\u0026rsquo; startup and shutdown code to avoid corrupted states and efficiently terminate and resume in-progress work. When done well (or just done at all), this kind of work has always paid clear dividends for teams, even when under pressure to produce new features, because the work on the underlying platform reduces the friction for everyone doing work on the codebase.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s something of an annoyance that the word \u0026ldquo;infrastructure\u0026rdquo; is overloaded, and often refers to the discipline of running software rather than the parts of a piece of software that supports the execution and implementation of the business logic of user-facing features. Code has and needs infrastructure too, and a lot of the work of providing that infrastructure is also software development, and not operational work, though clearly all of these boundaries are somewhat porous.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/software-engineering-for-2.0/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about what I do as a software engineer for a while, as there seems to be a common thread through the kinds of projects and teams that I\u0026rsquo;m drawn toward and I wanted to write a few blog posts on this topic to sort of collect my thoughts and see if these ideas resonated with anyone else.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve never been particularly interested in building new and exciting features. Hackathon\u0026rsquo;s have never held any particular appeal, and the things I really enjoy are working on are on the spectrum of \u0026ldquo;stabilize this piece of software,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;make this service easy to operate\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;refactor this code to make support future development\u0026rdquo; and less \u0026ldquo;design and build some new feature.\u0026rdquo; Which isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I don\u0026rsquo;t like building new features or writing code, but that I\u0026rsquo;m more driven by the code and supporting my teammates than I am by the feature.","title":"Software Engineering for 2.0"},{"content":"For years now, the idea of the terrible stack, or the dynamic duo of Terraform and Ansible, from this tweet has given me a huge amount of joy, basically anytime someone mentions either Terraform or Ansible, which happens rather a lot. It\u0026rsquo;s not exactly that I think that Terriform or Ansible are exactly terrible: the configuration management problems that these pieces of software are trying to solve are real and actually terrible, and having tools that help regularize the problem of configuration management definitely improve things. And yet the tools leave things wanting a bit.\nWhy care so much about configuration management?\nConfiguration matters because every application needs some kind of configuration: a way to connect to a database (or similar), a place to store its output, and inevitably other things, like a dependencies, or feature flags or whatever.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s the simple case. While most things are probably roughly simple, it\u0026rsquo;s very easy to have requirements that go beyond this a bit, and it turns out that while a development team might--but only might--not have requirements for something that qualifies as \u0026ldquo;weird\u0026rdquo; but every organization has something.\nAs a developer, configuration and deployment often matters a bunch, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty common to need to make changes to this area of the code. While it\u0026rsquo;s possible to architect things so that configuration can be managed within an application (say), this all takes longer and isn\u0026rsquo;t always easy to implement, and if your application requires escalated permissions, or needs a system configuration value set then it\u0026rsquo;s easy to get stuck.\nAnd there\u0026rsquo;s no real way to avoid it: If you don\u0026rsquo;t have a good way to manage configuration state, then infrastructure becomes bespoke and fragile: this is bad. Sometimes people suggest using image-based distribution (so called \u0026ldquo;immutable infrastructure,\u0026rdquo;) but this tends to be slow (images are large and can take a while to build,) and you still have to capture configuration in some way.\nBut how did we get here?\nI think I could weave a really convincing, and likely true story about the discipline of system administration and software operations in general and its history, but rather than go overboard, I think the following factors are pretty important:\ncomputers used to be very expensive, were difficult to operate, and so it made sense to have people who were primarily responsible for operating them, and this role has more or less persisted forever. service disruptions can be very expensive, so it\u0026rsquo;s useful for organizations to have people who are responsible for \u0026ldquo;keeping the lights on,\u0026rdquo; and troubleshoot operational problems when things go wrong. most computer systems depend on state of some kind--files on disks, the data in databases--and managing that state can be quite delicate. recent trends in computing make it possible to manipulate infrastructure--computers themselves, storage devices, networks--with code, which means we have this unfortunate dualism of infrastructure where it\u0026rsquo;s kind of code but also kind of data, and so it feels hard to know what the right thing to do. Why not just use \u0026lt;xyz\u0026gt;\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t fair, really, but and you know it\u0026rsquo;s gonna be good when someone trivializes an adjacent problem domain with a question like this, but this is my post so you must endure it, because the idea that there\u0026rsquo;s another technology or way of framing the problem that makes this better is incredibly persistent.\nUsually \u0026lt;xyz\u0026gt;, in recent years has been \u0026ldquo;Kubernetes\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;docker\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;containers,\u0026rdquo; but it sort of doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, and in the past solutions platforms-as-a-service (e.g. AppEngine/etc.) or backend-as-a-service (e.g. parse/etc.) So let\u0026rsquo;s run down some answers:\n\u0026ldquo;bake configuration into the container/virtual machine/etc. and then you won\u0026rsquo;t have state,\u0026rdquo; is a good idea, except it means that if you need to change configuration very quickly, it becomes quite hard because you have to rebuild and deploy an image, which can take a long time, and then there\u0026rsquo;s problems of how you get secrets like credentials into the service. \u0026ldquo;use a service for your platform needs,\u0026rdquo; is a good solution, except that it can be pretty inflexible, particularly if you have an application that wasn\u0026rsquo;t designed for the service, or need to use some kind of off-the-shelf (a message bus, a cache, etc.) service or tool that wasn\u0026rsquo;t designed to run in this kind of environment. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that the hard cost of using platforms-as-a-service can be pretty high. \u0026ldquo;serverless\u0026rdquo; approaches something of a bootstrapping problem, how do you manage the configuration of the provider? How do you get secrets into the execution units? What\u0026rsquo;s so terrible about these tools?\nThe tools can\u0026rsquo;t decide if configuration should be described programatically, using general purpose programming languages and frameworks (e.g. Chef, many deployment tools) or using some kind of declarative structured tool (Puppet, Ansible), or some kind of ungodly hybrid (e.g. Helm, anything with HCL). I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that there\u0026rsquo;s a good answer here. I like being able to write code, and I think YAML-based DSLs aren\u0026rsquo;t great; but capturing configuration creates a huge amount of difficult to test code. Regardless, you need to find ways of being able to test the code inexpensively, and doing this in a way that\u0026rsquo;s useful can be hard. Many tools are opinionated have strong idioms in hopes of helping to make infrastructure more regular and easier to reason about. This is cool and a good idea, it makes it harder to generalize. While concepts like immutability and idempotency are great properties for configuration systems to have, say, they\u0026rsquo;re difficult to enforce, and so maybe developing patterns and systems that have weaker opinions that are easy to comply with, and idioms that can be applied iteratively are useful. Tools are willing to do things to your systems that you\u0026rsquo;d never do by hand, including a number of destructive operations (terraform is particularly guilty of this), which erodes some of their trust and inspires otherwise bored ops folks, to write/recapitulate their own systems, which is why so many different configuration management tools emerge. Maybe the tools aren\u0026rsquo;t actually terrible, and the organizational factors that lead to the entrenchment of operations teams (incumbency, incomplete cost analysis, difficult to meet stability requirements,) lead to the entrenchment of the kinds of processes that require tools like this (though causality could easily flow in the opposite direction, with the same effect.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/systems-administrators-are-the-problem/","summary":"For years now, the idea of the terrible stack, or the dynamic duo of Terraform and Ansible, from this tweet has given me a huge amount of joy, basically anytime someone mentions either Terraform or Ansible, which happens rather a lot. It\u0026rsquo;s not exactly that I think that Terriform or Ansible are exactly terrible: the configuration management problems that these pieces of software are trying to solve are real and actually terrible, and having tools that help regularize the problem of configuration management definitely improve things. And yet the tools leave things wanting a bit.\nWhy care so much about configuration management?\nConfiguration matters because every application needs some kind of configuration: a way to connect to a database (or similar), a place to store its output, and inevitably other things, like a dependencies, or feature flags or whatever.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s the simple case. While most things are probably roughly simple, it\u0026rsquo;s very easy to have requirements that go beyond this a bit, and it turns out that while a development team might--but only might--not have requirements for something that qualifies as \u0026ldquo;weird\u0026rdquo; but every organization has something.","title":"Systems Administrators are the Problem"},{"content":"I touched on the idea of API ergonomics in Values for Collaborative Codebases, but I think the topic is due a bit more exploration. Typically you think about an API as being \u0026ldquo;safe\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;functionally complete,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;easy to use,\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;ergonomic\u0026rdquo; is a bit far afield from the standard way that people think and talk about APIs (in my experience.)\nI think part of the confusion is that \u0026ldquo;API\u0026rdquo; gets used in a couple of different contexts, but let\u0026rsquo;s say that an API here are the collection of nouns (types, structures,) and verbs (methods, functions) used to interact with a concept (hardware, library, service). APIs can be conceptually really large (e.g. all of a database, a public service), or quite small and expose only a few simple methods (e.g. a data serialization library, or some kind of hashing process.) I think some of the confusion is that people also use the term API to refer to the ways that services access data (e.g. REST, etc.) and while I have no objection to this formulation, service API design and class or library API design feel like related but different problems.\nErgonomics, then is really about making choices in the design of an API, so that:\nfunctionality is discoverable during programming. If you\u0026rsquo;re writing in a language with good code completion tools, then make sure methods and functions are well located and named in a way to take advantage of completion. Chainable APIs are awesome for this. use clear naming for functions and arguments that describe your intent and their use. types should imply semantic intent. If your programming language has a sense of mutability (e.g. passing references verses concrete types in Go, or const (for all its failings) in C++), then make sure you use these markers to both enforce correct behavior and communicate intent. do whatever you can to encourage appropriate use and discourage inappropriate use, by taking advantage of encapsulation features (interfaces, non-exported/private functions, etc.), and passing data into and out of the API with strongly/explicitly-typed objects (e.g. return POD classes, or enumerated values or similar rather than numeric or string types.) reduce the complexity of the surface area by exporting the smallest reasonable API, and also avoiding ambiguous situations, as with functions that take more than one argument of a given type, which leads to cases where users can easily (and legally) do the wrong thing. increase safety of the API by removing or reducing and being explicit about the API\u0026rsquo;s use of global state. Avoid providing APIs that are not thread safe. Avoid throwing exceptions (or equivalents) in your API that you expect users to handle. If users pass nil pointers into an API, its OK to throw an exception (or let the runtime do it,) but there shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be exceptions that originate in your code that need to be handled outside of it. Ergonomic interfaces feel good to use, but they also improve quality across the ecosystem of connected products.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/api-ergonomics/","summary":"I touched on the idea of API ergonomics in Values for Collaborative Codebases, but I think the topic is due a bit more exploration. Typically you think about an API as being \u0026ldquo;safe\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;functionally complete,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;easy to use,\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;ergonomic\u0026rdquo; is a bit far afield from the standard way that people think and talk about APIs (in my experience.)\nI think part of the confusion is that \u0026ldquo;API\u0026rdquo; gets used in a couple of different contexts, but let\u0026rsquo;s say that an API here are the collection of nouns (types, structures,) and verbs (methods, functions) used to interact with a concept (hardware, library, service). APIs can be conceptually really large (e.g. all of a database, a public service), or quite small and expose only a few simple methods (e.g. a data serialization library, or some kind of hashing process.) I think some of the confusion is that people also use the term API to refer to the ways that services access data (e.","title":"API Ergonomics"},{"content":"This is a post I wrote a long time ago and never posted, but I\u0026rsquo;ve started getting back into doing some work in Common Lisp and thought it\u0026rsquo;d be good to send this one off.\nOn my recent \u0026ldquo;(re)learn Common Lisp\u0026rdquo; journey, I\u0026rsquo;ve happened across a few things that I\u0026rsquo;ve found frustrating or confusing: this post is a collection of them, in hopes that other people don\u0026rsquo;t struggle with them:\nImplementing an existing generic function for a class of your own, and have other callers specialize use your method implementation you must import the generic function, otherwise other callers will (might?) fall back to another method. This makes sense in retrospect, but definitely wasn\u0026rsquo;t clear on the first go. As a related follow on, you don\u0026rsquo;t have to define a generic function in order to write or use a method, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found that using methods is actually quite nice for doing some type checking, at the same time, it can get you into a pickle if you later add the generic function and it\u0026rsquo;s not exported/imported as you want. Property lists seem cool for a small light weight mapping, but they\u0026rsquo;re annoying to handle as part of public APIs, mostly because they\u0026rsquo;re indistinguishable from regular lists, association lists are preferable, and maybe with make-hash even hash-tables. Declaring data structures inline is particularly gawky. I sometimes want to build a list or a hash map in-line an alist, and it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to do that in a terse way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve building the structure programatically. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing (list (cons \u0026quot;a\u0026quot; t) (cons \u0026quot;b\u0026quot; nil)) sort of things, which I don\u0026rsquo;t love. If you have a variadic macro (i.e. that takes \u0026amp;rest args), or even I suppose any kind of macro, and you have it\u0026rsquo;s arguments in a list, there\u0026rsquo;s no a way, outside of eval to call the macro, which is super annoying, and makes macros significantly less appealing as part of public APIs. My current conclusion is that macros are great when you want to add syntax to make the code you\u0026rsquo;re writing clearer or to introduce a new paradigm, but for things that could also be a function, or are thin wrappers on for function, just use a function. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/common-gotchas/","summary":"This is a post I wrote a long time ago and never posted, but I\u0026rsquo;ve started getting back into doing some work in Common Lisp and thought it\u0026rsquo;d be good to send this one off.\nOn my recent \u0026ldquo;(re)learn Common Lisp\u0026rdquo; journey, I\u0026rsquo;ve happened across a few things that I\u0026rsquo;ve found frustrating or confusing: this post is a collection of them, in hopes that other people don\u0026rsquo;t struggle with them:\nImplementing an existing generic function for a class of your own, and have other callers specialize use your method implementation you must import the generic function, otherwise other callers will (might?) fall back to another method. This makes sense in retrospect, but definitely wasn\u0026rsquo;t clear on the first go. As a related follow on, you don\u0026rsquo;t have to define a generic function in order to write or use a method, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found that using methods is actually quite nice for doing some type checking, at the same time, it can get you into a pickle if you later add the generic function and it\u0026rsquo;s not exported/imported as you want.","title":"Common Gotchas"},{"content":"I talk to lots of people about software and programming: people who are trying to make a technical decision for a new project or who are interested in learning something new, and some form of the question \u0026ldquo;what programming language should I learn?\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s the best language for this new project?\u0026rdquo; comes up a lot.\nThese are awful questions, because there is no singular right answer, and in some senses all answers are wrong. This post will be an exploration of some decent answers to this question, and some useful ways to think about the differences between programming languages.\nIf you already build and maintain software in one programming language, build new components in the same language you already use. Adding new tools and technologies increases maintenance burden for all engineers, and software tends to stick around for a long time, so this cost can stick around for a long time.\nSometimes the software you want to write must target a specific runtime or environment, there\u0026rsquo;s really only one reasonable choice. The prototypical examples of these are things like: iOS apps (Swift,) Android apps (Kotlin), or things that run in the browser (JavaScript,) although:\nGiven things like React Native and Electron, it\u0026rsquo;s reasonable to just write JavaScript for all GUI code, although often this might actually mean TypeScript in practice. While it used to be the case that it made sense to write GUI code in various native tool kits, at this point it seems like it makes sense to just figure out ways of doing it all in JS.\nIf you already know how to program in one language, and want to learn something new, but don\u0026rsquo;t have a specific project in mind attempt to learn something that\u0026rsquo;s quite different from you already know: if you\u0026rsquo;re comfortable in something like Python, try and learn something like Go or Rust. If you\u0026rsquo;re primarily a Java programmer, something like JavaScript or Python might be an interesting change of pace.\nThe same basic ideas applies to selecting languages that will be used by teams: choose a tool that\u0026rsquo;s complementary to what you\u0026rsquo;re already doing, and that could provide value.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re more familiar with a few programming languages or don\u0026rsquo;t feel you need to learn a new language for professional reasons pick something fun and off the wall: Ocaml! Common Lisp! Rust! Haskell! Scheme! Elixir! It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter and in these cases you probably can probably learn new languages when you need, the point is to learn something that\u0026rsquo;s radically different and to help you think about computers and programming in radically different ways.\nChoose the language that people working on similar projects are already using. For instance, if you\u0026rsquo;re doing a lot of data science, using Python makes a lot of sense; if you\u0026rsquo;re writing tools that you expect banks (say) to use, something that runs on the JVM is a good bet. The idea here is you may be able to find more well developed tools and resources relevant to the kinds of problems you encounter.\nWhen starting a new project and there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of prior art in the area that you\u0026rsquo;re working, or you want to avoid recapitulating some flaw in the existing tools, you end up having a lot of freedom. In general:\nThink about concurrency and workload characteristics. Is the workload CPU, Network, or IO bound? Is the application multithreaded, or could take advantage of parallelism within processes? There are different kinds of concurrency, and different execution models, so this isn\u0026rsquo;t always super cut-and-dry: theoretically languages that have \u0026ldquo;real threads\u0026rdquo; (C/C++, Java, Rust, Common Lisp, etc.) or a close enough approximation (Go,) are better, but for workloads that are network bound, event-driven systems (e.g. Python\u0026rsquo;s Tornado and Node.J\u0026rsquo;s) work admirably. How will you distribute and run the application? There are some languages that can provide static binaries that include all of their dependencies for distribution, which can simplify some aspects of distribution and execution process, but for software that you control the runtime (e.g. services deployed on some kind of container based-platform,) it might matter less. Are there strong real-time requirements? If so, and you\u0026rsquo;re considering a garbage collected language, make sure that the GC pauses aren\u0026rsquo;t going to be a problem. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that all GCsare not the same, so having a clear idea of what the tolerances Is this software going to be maintained by a team, and if so, what kind of tools will they need in order to succeed and be productive. Would static typing help? What\u0026rsquo;s the developer tooling and experience like? Are there libraries that you\u0026rsquo;d expect to need that are conspicuously missing? Have fun! Build cool things!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-to-choose-a-programming-language/","summary":"I talk to lots of people about software and programming: people who are trying to make a technical decision for a new project or who are interested in learning something new, and some form of the question \u0026ldquo;what programming language should I learn?\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s the best language for this new project?\u0026rdquo; comes up a lot.\nThese are awful questions, because there is no singular right answer, and in some senses all answers are wrong. This post will be an exploration of some decent answers to this question, and some useful ways to think about the differences between programming languages.\nIf you already build and maintain software in one programming language, build new components in the same language you already use. Adding new tools and technologies increases maintenance burden for all engineers, and software tends to stick around for a long time, so this cost can stick around for a long time.","title":"How to Choose a Programming Language"},{"content":"This is a post in my alignment series. See the introductory post Finding Alignment for more context.\nI think, in practice, most of what managers do--and indeed all leadership--is about building alignment. The core concept, of alignment, having a shared understanding of the problem space and its context combined with relevant goals and objectives, and grasp of how the context contexts to these objectives. Alignment isn\u0026rsquo;t just \u0026ldquo;agreement\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;understanding the solution,\u0026rdquo; and really centers on this connection between context and goals. Alignment shows up in many different situations and interactions:\na small working group (2-4 people) who are working on building or developing something. The thing can be any kind of work product: a piece of software, documentation, a business process, a marketing campaign, a sales deal. When you have more than one person working on something, if they\u0026rsquo;re not aligned, each person may be able to work on a piece of work as delegated or assigned, but lacks the ability to (reliably) continue to work on the next piece of work after finishing a narrow task, or be able to assess if a line of work is still germane to the goals as things develop. If we view people\u0026rsquo;s roles in projects as machines, and they perform assigned tasks well, then alignment isn\u0026rsquo;t super critical, but if you need people to make decisions and act upon them, then they have to be aligned, as a group otherwise the project runs a huge risk of stalling out as each contributor pulls in an opposite direction. one person aligning with the rest of their team to understand how their background and personal goals contribute to and interact with the team\u0026rsquo;s context and goals. Individuals all bring unique skills and interests and (hopefully) useful to teams, and teams (e.g. their leaders) need to be able to understand how to effectively use those skills and interests to support the team\u0026rsquo;s goals. This happens over conversation and in the context of someones participation in a team over time, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to take a lot of time on a regular basis, but cannot be entirely abandoned. managers need to align their teams with the company\u0026rsquo;s objectives. This takes the form of making sure that the projects that the team is working on (and will work on in the future,) support the organization and company\u0026rsquo;s larger goals. across all level each team needs to align with its peer teams and the organization that it belongs in. This is true in organizations with 30 people and 3-4 teams, and in organizations of 2000 people and dozens of teams. Alignment is hierarchical, and largely the responsibility of leaders to monitor alignment above and below them, and understand if their teams or specific contributors are falling out of alignment. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily mean that it\u0026rsquo;s not participatory and discursive: individuals can impact the direction, goals, or alignment of their teams, but there must be well formed goals of the organization (that they can understand!) and they must be supported by their team in order to actualize in this dimension. Despite being hierarchical, and individuals and teams must align up building and maintaining alignment in all directions is actually the responsibility of leadership at all levels.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s easy to frame this as \u0026ldquo;you must align with the goals sent from above,\u0026rdquo; this couldn\u0026rsquo;t be further from the truth. Some organizations function like this, but it\u0026rsquo;s probably not healthy for anyone, because the kinds of alignment that it builds are fleeting and tactical. Teams and contributors do need to align with broader goals (up), but their job is not building alignment, it\u0026rsquo;s building whatever their specialty is: attending to the organizational health and alignment is the concern of leadership whose work must center on building alignment. At almost every level, the alignment goes both ways: you work with leaders above you to align your own work and team, and work with the people you collaborate and mentor to build alignment.\nWhen it works, and even though it takes a while, it helps teams and organizations work really well.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spheres-of-alignment/","summary":"This is a post in my alignment series. See the introductory post Finding Alignment for more context.\nI think, in practice, most of what managers do--and indeed all leadership--is about building alignment. The core concept, of alignment, having a shared understanding of the problem space and its context combined with relevant goals and objectives, and grasp of how the context contexts to these objectives. Alignment isn\u0026rsquo;t just \u0026ldquo;agreement\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;understanding the solution,\u0026rdquo; and really centers on this connection between context and goals. Alignment shows up in many different situations and interactions:\na small working group (2-4 people) who are working on building or developing something. The thing can be any kind of work product: a piece of software, documentation, a business process, a marketing campaign, a sales deal. When you have more than one person working on something, if they\u0026rsquo;re not aligned, each person may be able to work on a piece of work as delegated or assigned, but lacks the ability to (reliably) continue to work on the next piece of work after finishing a narrow task, or be able to assess if a line of work is still germane to the goals as things develop.","title":"Spheres of Alignment"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking more recently about that the way that we organize software development projects, and have been using this model of \u0026ldquo;hard mode\u0026rdquo; vs \u0026ldquo;easy mode\u0026rdquo; a bit recently, and thought it might be useful to expound upon it.\nOften users or business interests come to software developers and make a feature request. \u0026ldquo;I want it to be possible to do thing faster or in combination with another operation, or avoid this class of errors.\u0026rdquo; Sometimes (often!) these are reasonable requests, and sometimes they\u0026rsquo;re even easy to do, but sometimes a seemingly innocuous feature or improvement are really hard sometimes, engineering work requires hard work. This isn\u0026rsquo;t really a problem, and hard work can be quite interesting. It is perhaps, an indication of an architectural flaw when many or most easy requests require disproportionately hard work.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also the case that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to frame the problem in ways that make the work of developing software easier or harder. Breaking problems into smaller constituent problems make them easier to deal with. Improving the quality of the abstractions and testing infrastructure around a problematic area of code makes it easier to make changes later to an area of the code.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve definitely been on projects where the only way to develop features and make improvement is to have a large amount of experience with the problem domain and the codebase, and those engineers have to spend a lot of consentrated time building features and fighting against the state of the code and its context. This is writing software in \u0026ldquo;hard mode,\u0026rdquo; and not only is the work harder than it needs to be, features take longer to develop than users would like. This mode of development makes it very hard to find and retain engineers because of the large ramping period and consistently frustrating nature of the work. Frustration that\u0026rsquo;s often compounded by the expectation or assumption that easy requests are easy to produce.\nIn some ways the theme of my engineering career has been work on taking \u0026ldquo;hard mode projects\u0026rdquo; reducing the barriers to entry in code bases and project so that they become more \u0026ldquo;easy mode projects\u0026rdquo;: changing the organization of the code, adding abstractions that make it easier to develop meaningful features without rippling effects in other parts of the code, improving operational observability to facilitate debugging, restructuring project infrastructure to reduce development friction. In general, I think of the hallmarks of \u0026ldquo;easy mode\u0026rdquo; projects as:\nabstractions and library functions exist for common tasks. For most pieces of \u0026ldquo;internet infrastructure\u0026rdquo; (network attached services,) developer\u0026rsquo;s should be able to add behavior without needing to deal with the nitty gritty of thread pools or socket abstractions (say.) If you\u0026rsquo;re adding a new REST request, you should be able to just write business logic and not need to think about the applications threading model (say). If something happens often (say, retrying failed requests against upstream API,) you should be able to rely on an existing tool to orchestrate retries. APIs and tools are safe ergonomic. Developers writing code in your project should be able to call into existing APIs and trust that they behave reasonably and handle errors reasonably. This means, methods should do what they say, and exported/public interfaces should be difficult to use improperly, and (e.g. expected exception handling/safety, as well as thread safety and nil semantics ad appropriate.) While it\u0026rsquo;s useful to interact with external APIs defensively, you can reduce the amount of effort by being less defensive for internal/proximal APIs. Well supported code and operational infrastructure. It should be easy to deploy and test changes to the software, the tests should run quickly, and when there\u0026rsquo;s a problem there should be a limited number of places that you could look to figure out what\u0026rsquo;s happening. Making tests more reliable, improving error reporting and tracing, exposing more information to metrics systems, to make the behavior of the system easier to understand in the long term. Changes are scoped to support incremental development. While there are lots of core technical and code infrastructure work that support making projects more \u0026ldquo;easy mode\u0026rdquo; a lot of this is about the way that development teams decide to structure projects. This isn\u0026rsquo;t technical, ususally, but has more to do with planning cadences, release cadences, and scoping practices. There are easier and harder ways of making changes, and it\u0026rsquo;s often worthwhile to ask yourself \u0026ldquo;could we make this easier.\u0026rdquo; The answer, I\u0026rsquo;ve found, is often \u0026ldquo;yes\u0026rdquo;. Moving a project from hard to easy mode is often in large part about investing in managing technical debt, but it\u0026rsquo;s also a choice: we can prioritize things to make our projects easier, we can make small changes to the way we approach specific projects that all move projects toward being easier. The first step is always that choice.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/easy-and-hard-mode/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking more recently about that the way that we organize software development projects, and have been using this model of \u0026ldquo;hard mode\u0026rdquo; vs \u0026ldquo;easy mode\u0026rdquo; a bit recently, and thought it might be useful to expound upon it.\nOften users or business interests come to software developers and make a feature request. \u0026ldquo;I want it to be possible to do thing faster or in combination with another operation, or avoid this class of errors.\u0026rdquo; Sometimes (often!) these are reasonable requests, and sometimes they\u0026rsquo;re even easy to do, but sometimes a seemingly innocuous feature or improvement are really hard sometimes, engineering work requires hard work. This isn\u0026rsquo;t really a problem, and hard work can be quite interesting. It is perhaps, an indication of an architectural flaw when many or most easy requests require disproportionately hard work.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also the case that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to frame the problem in ways that make the work of developing software easier or harder.","title":"Easy Mode, Hard Mode"},{"content":"Before I started actually working as a software engineer full time, writing code was this fun thing I was always trying to figure out on my own, and it was fun, and I could hardly sit down at my computer without learning something. These days, I do very little of this kind of work. I learn more about computers by doing my job and frankly, the kind of software I write for work is way more satisfying than any of the software I would end up writing for myself.\nI think this is because the projects that a team of engineers can work on are necessarily larger and more impactful. When you build software with a team, most of the time the product either finds users (or your end up without a job.) When you build software with other people and for other people, the things that make software good (more rigorous design, good test discipline, scale,) are more likely to be prevalent. Those are the things that make writing software fun.\nWait, you ask \u0026ldquo;this is a lisp post?\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;where is the lisp content?\u0026rdquo; Wait for it\u0026hellip;\nIn Pave the On/Off Ramps1 I started exploring this idea that technical adoption is less a function of basic capabilities or numbers of features in general, but rather about the specific features that support and further adoption and create confidence in maintenance and interoperability. A huge part of the decision process is finding good answers to \u0026ldquo;can I use these tools as part of the larger system of tools that I\u0026rsquo;m using?\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;can I use this tool a bit without needing to commit to using it for everything?\u0026rdquo;\nTechnologies which are and demand ideological compliance are very difficult to move into with confidence. A lot of technologies and tools demand ideological compliance, and their adoption depends on once-in-a-generation sea changes or significant risks.2 The alternate method, to integrate into people\u0026rsquo;s existing workflows and systems, and provide great tools that work for some usecases and to prove their capability is much more reliable: if somewhat less exciting.\nThe great thing about Common Lisp is that it always leans towards the pragmatic rather than the ideological. Common Lisp has a bunch of tools--both in the langauge and in the ecosystem--which are great to use but also not required. You don\u0026rsquo;t have to use CLOS (but it\u0026rsquo;s really cool), you don\u0026rsquo;t have to use ASDF, there isn\u0026rsquo;t one paradigm of developing or designing software that you have to be constrained to. Do what works.\nI think there are a lot of questions that sort of follow on from this, particularly about lisp and the adoption of new technologies. So let\u0026rsquo;s go through the ones I can think of, FAQ style:\nWhat kind of applications would a \u0026ldquo;pave the exits\u0026rdquo; support?\nIt almost doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, but the answer is probably a fairly boring set of industrial applications: services that transform and analyze data, data migration tools, command-line (build, deployment) tools for developers and operators, platform orchestration tools, and the like. This is all boring (on the one hand,) but most software is boring, and it\u0026rsquo;s rarely the case that programming langauge actually matters much.\nIn addition, CL has a pretty mature set of tools for integrating with C libaries and might be a decent alternative to other langauges with more complex distribution stories. You could see CL being a good langauge for writing extensions on top of existing tools (for both Java with ABCL and C/C++ with ECL and CLASP), depending.\nHow does industrial adoption of Common Lisp benefit the Common Lisp community?\nFirst, more people writing common lisp for their jobs, which (assuming they have a good experience,) could proliferate into more projects. A larger community, maybe means a larger volume of participation in existing projects (and more projects in general.) Additionally, more industrial applications means more jobs for people who are interested in writing CL, and that seems pretty cool.\nHow can CL compete with more established languages like Java, Go, and Rust?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure competition is really the right model for thinking about this: there\u0026rsquo;s so much software to write that \u0026ldquo;my langauge vs your langauge\u0026rdquo; is just a poor model for thinking about this: there\u0026rsquo;s enough work to be done that everyone can be successful.\nAt the same time, I haven\u0026rsquo;t heard about people who are deeply excited about writing Java, and Go folks (which I count myself among) tend to be pretty pragmatic as well. I see lots of people who are excited about Rust, and it\u0026rsquo;s definitely a cool langauge though it shines best at lower level problems than CL and has a reasonable FFI so it might be the case that there\u0026rsquo;s some exciting room for using CL for higher level tasks on top of rust fundamentals.\nIn line with the idea that product management and design is about identifying what people are doing and then institutionalizing this is similar to the urban planning idea of \u0026ldquo;paving cowpaths,\u0026rdquo; I sort of think of this as \u0026ldquo;paving the exits,\u0026rdquo; though I recognize that this is a bit force.d\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking of things like the moment of enterprise \u0026ldquo;object oriented programing\u0026rdquo; giving rise to Java and friends, or the big-data watershed moment in 2009 (or so) giving rise to so-called NoSQL databases. Without these kinds of events you the adoption of these big paradigm-shifting technologies is spotty and relies on the force of will of a particular technical leader, for better (and often) worse.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/methods-of-adoption/","summary":"Before I started actually working as a software engineer full time, writing code was this fun thing I was always trying to figure out on my own, and it was fun, and I could hardly sit down at my computer without learning something. These days, I do very little of this kind of work. I learn more about computers by doing my job and frankly, the kind of software I write for work is way more satisfying than any of the software I would end up writing for myself.\nI think this is because the projects that a team of engineers can work on are necessarily larger and more impactful. When you build software with a team, most of the time the product either finds users (or your end up without a job.) When you build software with other people and for other people, the things that make software good (more rigorous design, good test discipline, scale,) are more likely to be prevalent.","title":"Methods of Adoption"},{"content":"This is a post in my alignment series. See the introductory post Finding Alignment for more context.\nI really want to dig into some topics related to building alignment and figuring out when you\u0026rsquo;re aligned as a contributor, or when the people you\u0026rsquo;re working with are falling out of alignment with you and/or your team or organization, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth it to start slow and chew on a big question: What it feels like when you and your team are well aligned, and why that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing.\nTo my mind, when you have a foundation of alignment, and an understanding of what the business goals are for your organization, then it becomes really easy to work independently, because you know what\u0026rsquo;s important, you know what needs to happen next and the people your working for/with can be confident that you\u0026rsquo;ll be moving in the right direction, and don\u0026rsquo;t need to do as much monitoring. Every so often, teams find this, and can really grind on it and deliver great features and products on the basis of this. It takes a long time (months!) for a team to gel like this, and sometimes teams don\u0026rsquo;t quite get there.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that needing more guidance and wokring less independently means that you\u0026rsquo;re unaligned just that you (or the people you\u0026rsquo;re working with/for) are newer to the team, or there\u0026rsquo;s been a change recently and everyone needs more touch points to build alignment. One of the risks of hiring people and growing teams that are really well aligned is that the change in team dynamic can throw off alignment, and I think this is one of the reasons that teams sometimes struggle to grow. In any case, while alignment is great and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t happen for free, and it\u0026rsquo;s fine for it to be a thing you\u0026rsquo;re working on.\nAlignment also reduces a lot of potentially contentious conversations and interactions: when you have alignment within a team or between teams you have a framework for prioritizing decisions: the most possible things that have the largest positive impact on the goals that you have are more important than\u0026hellip; everything else. It all ends up being pretty simple. Sometimes you have to spend a bit of time on something that\u0026rsquo;s locally lower priority if another team depends on it, or if you\u0026rsquo;re helping someone learn something, but for the most part alignment helps you move toward the right direction.\nWhen teams (and contributors) lack alignment, it\u0026rsquo;s easy for low priority work to get done, or projects that don\u0026rsquo;t end up supporting the business goals and so fail to find use (projects fail for other reasons, some of which are expected, so failed projects don\u0026rsquo;t necessarily indicate miss-alignment). An unaligned team can end up competing with peer teams and internal collaborators. If some parts of a team or organization are well aligned and other\u0026rsquo;s aren\u0026rsquo;t, resentment and frustration can brew between teams. Basically, without alignment you can--if you\u0026rsquo;re lucky--skate by with a little wasted effort, but often alignment deficits are a blight that can threaten a team\u0026rsquo;s ability to be productive and make it really hard to retain great team members.\nNot everything is an alignment problem: teams and projects fail for technical or logistical reasons. Sometimes conflicts emerge between collaborators who are well aligned but working on disconnected projects, or hold different concerns within a project. Alignment is a framework for understanding how organizations can move together and be productive particularly as they grow, and in this I hope that this has been helpful!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/signs-of-alignment/","summary":"This is a post in my alignment series. See the introductory post Finding Alignment for more context.\nI really want to dig into some topics related to building alignment and figuring out when you\u0026rsquo;re aligned as a contributor, or when the people you\u0026rsquo;re working with are falling out of alignment with you and/or your team or organization, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth it to start slow and chew on a big question: What it feels like when you and your team are well aligned, and why that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing.\nTo my mind, when you have a foundation of alignment, and an understanding of what the business goals are for your organization, then it becomes really easy to work independently, because you know what\u0026rsquo;s important, you know what needs to happen next and the people your working for/with can be confident that you\u0026rsquo;ll be moving in the right direction, and don\u0026rsquo;t need to do as much monitoring.","title":"Signs of Alignment"},{"content":"I posted something about how I organize my own work, and I touched on \u0026ldquo;multi-tasking,\u0026rdquo; and I realized immediately that I had touched something that required a bit more explanation.\nI feel like a bit of an outlier to suggest that people spend time learning how to multitask better, particularly when the prevaling conventional wisdom is just \u0026ldquo;increase focus,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;decrease multitasking,\u0026rdquo; reduce \u0026ldquo;context switches,\u0026rdquo; between different tasks. It\u0026rsquo;s as if there\u0026rsquo;s this mythical word where you can just \u0026ldquo;focus more\u0026rdquo; taking advantage of longer blocks of time, with fewer distractions, and suddenly be able to get more done.\nThis has certainly never been true of my experience.\nI was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit disorganized as a kid. Couldn\u0026rsquo;t sit still, forgot deadlines, focused inconsistently on things: sometimes I was unstoppable, and sometimes nothing stuck. As an adult, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned more about myself and I know how to provide the kind of structure I need to get things done, even for work that I find less intrinsically fascinating. Also I drink a lot more caffeine. I\u0026rsquo;m also aware that with a slightly different brain or a slightly different set of coping strategies, I would struggle a lot more than I do.\nThere are a lot of reasons why it can be difficult to focus, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think the why matters much here: thinking pragmatically about how to make the most of the moments we do have, the focus that\u0026rsquo;s available. Working on multiple things just is, and I think to some extent its a skill that we can cultivate or at least approximate. Perhaps some of the things I do would be useful to you:\nfit your tasks to the attention you have. I often write test code later in the day or during my afternoon slump between 2-3:30, and do more complicated work with my morning coffee between 9:30 and 11:30, and do more writing later in the day. There are different of tasks, and knowing what kinds of work makes sense for which part of the day can be a great help. break tasks apart as small as you can do, even if it\u0026rsquo;s just for yourself. It\u0026rsquo;s easy to get a little thing done, and bigger tasks can be intimidating. If the units of work that you focus on are the right size it\u0026rsquo;s possible to give yourself enough time to do the work that you need to do and intersperse tasks from a few related projects. plan what you do before you do it, and leave yourself notes about your plan. As I write code I often write a little todo list that contains the requirements for a function. This makes it easy to pick something up if you get interrupted. My writing process also involves leaving little outlines of paragraphs that I want to write or narrative elements that I want to pass. leave projects, when possible, at a stopping point. Make it easy for yourself to pick it back up when you\u0026rsquo;re ready. Maybe this means making sure that you finish writing a test or some code, rather than leaving a function half written. When writing prose, I sometimes finish a paragraph and write the first half of the next sentence, to make it easier to pick up. exercise control what and when you do things. There are always interruptions, or incoming mesages and alerts that could require our attention. There are rarely alerts that must cause us to drop what we\u0026rsquo;re currently working on. While there are \u0026ldquo;drop everything\u0026rdquo; tasks sometimes, most things are fine to come back to in a little while, and most emails are safe to ignore for a couple of hours. It\u0026rsquo;s fine to quickly add something to a list to come back to later. It\u0026rsquo;s also fine to be disrupted, but having some control over that is often helpful. find non-intrusive ways to feel connected. While it should be possible to do some level of multitasking as you work, there are some kind of interruptions that take a lot of attention. When you\u0026rsquo;re focusing on work, checking your email can be a distraction (say), but it can be hard to totally turn off email while you\u0026rsquo;re working. Rather than switch to look at my email on some cadence throughout the day, I (effectively,) check my phone far more regularly just to make sure that there\u0026rsquo;s nothing critical, and can go much longer between looking at my email. The notifications I see are limited, and may messages never trigger alerts. I feel like I know what\u0026rsquo;s going on, and I don\u0026rsquo;t get stuck replying to email all day.1 This is, more or less, what works for me, and I (hope) that there\u0026rsquo;s something generalizable here, even if we do different kinds of work!\nEmail is kind of terrible, in a lot of ways: there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of it, messages come in at all times, people are bad at drafting good subject lines, a large percentage of email messages are just automated notifications, historically you had to \u0026ldquo;check it\u0026rdquo; which took time, and drafting responses can take quite a while, given that the convention is for slightly longer messages. I famously opted out of email, basically for years, and gleefully used all the time I wasn\u0026rsquo;t reading email to get things done. The only way this was viable, was that I\u0026rsquo;ve always had a script that checks my mail and sends me a notification (as an IM) with the From and Subject line of most important messages, which gives me enough context to actually respond to things that were important (most things aren\u0026rsquo;t) without needing to actually dedicate time to looking at email.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tips-for-more-effective-multi-tasking/","summary":"I posted something about how I organize my own work, and I touched on \u0026ldquo;multi-tasking,\u0026rdquo; and I realized immediately that I had touched something that required a bit more explanation.\nI feel like a bit of an outlier to suggest that people spend time learning how to multitask better, particularly when the prevaling conventional wisdom is just \u0026ldquo;increase focus,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;decrease multitasking,\u0026rdquo; reduce \u0026ldquo;context switches,\u0026rdquo; between different tasks. It\u0026rsquo;s as if there\u0026rsquo;s this mythical word where you can just \u0026ldquo;focus more\u0026rdquo; taking advantage of longer blocks of time, with fewer distractions, and suddenly be able to get more done.\nThis has certainly never been true of my experience.\nI was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit disorganized as a kid. Couldn\u0026rsquo;t sit still, forgot deadlines, focused inconsistently on things: sometimes I was unstoppable, and sometimes nothing stuck. As an adult, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned more about myself and I know how to provide the kind of structure I need to get things done, even for work that I find less intrinsically fascinating.","title":"Tips for More Effective Multi-Tasking"},{"content":"I participated in a great conversation in the #commonlisp channel on libera (IRC) the other day, during which I found a formulation of a familar argument that felt more clear and more concrete.\nThe question--which comes up pretty often, realistically--centered on adoption of Common Lisp. CL has some great tools, and a bunch of great libraries (particularly these days,) why don\u0026rsquo;t we see greater adoption? Its a good question, and maybe 5 year ago I would have said \u0026ldquo;the libraries and ecosystem are a bit fragmented,\u0026rdquo; and this was true. It\u0026rsquo;s less true now--for good reasons!--Quicklisp is just great and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of coverage for doing common things.\nI think it has to do with the connectivity and support at the edges of a project, an as I think about it, this is probably true of any kind of project.\nWhen you decide to use a new tool or technology you ask yourself three basic questions:\n\u0026ldquo;is this tool (e.g. language) capable of fulfilling my current needs\u0026rdquo; (for programming languages, this is very often yes,) \u0026ldquo;are there tools (libraries) to support my use so I can focus on my core business objectives,\u0026rdquo; so that you\u0026rsquo;re not spending the entire time writing serialization libraries and HTTP servers, which is also often the case. \u0026ldquo;will I be able to integrate what I\u0026rsquo;m building now with other tools I use and things I have built in the past.\u0026rdquo; This isn\u0026rsquo;t so hard, but it\u0026rsquo;s a thing that CL (and lots of other projects) struggle with. In short, you want to be able to build a thing with the confidence that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to finish, that you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to focus on the core parts of the product and not get distracted by what should be core library functionality, and finally that the thing you build can play nicely with all the other things you\u0026rsquo;ve written or already have. Without this third piece, writing a piece of software with such a tool is a bit of a trap.\nWe can imagine tools that expose data only via quasi-opaque APIs that require special clients or encoding schemes, or that lack drivers for common databases, or integration with other common tools (metrics! RPC!) or runtime environments. This is all very reasonable. For CL this might look like:\ngreat support for gRPC\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a grpc library that exists, is being maintained, and has basically all the features you\u0026rsquo;d want except support for TLS (a moderately big deal for operational reasons,) and async method support (not really a big deal.) It does depend on CFFI, which makes for a potentially awkward compilation story, but that\u0026rsquo;s a minor quibble.\nThe point is not gRPC qua gRPC, the point is that gRPC is really prevalent globally and it makes sense to be able to meet developers who have existing gRPC services (or might like to imagine that they would,) and be able to give them confidence that whatever they build (in say CL) will be useable in the future.\ncompilation that targets WASM\nSomewhat unexpectedly (to me, given that I don\u0026rsquo;t do a lot of web programming,) WebAssembly seems to be the way deploy portable machine code into environments that you don\u0026rsquo;t have full control over,1 and while I don\u0026rsquo;t 100% understand all of it, I think it\u0026rsquo;s generally a good thing to make it easier to build software that can run in lots of situation.\nunequivocally excellent support for JSON (ex)\nI remember working on a small project where I thought \u0026ldquo;ah yes, I\u0026rsquo;ll just write a little API server in CL that will just output JSON,\u0026rdquo; and I completely got mired in various comparisons between JSON libraries and interfaces to JSON data. While this is a well understood problem it\u0026rsquo;s not a very cut and dry problem.\nThe thing I wanted was to be able to take input in JSON and be able to handle it in CL in a reasonable way: given a stream (or a string, or equivalent) can I turn it into an object in CL (CLOS object? hashmap?)? I\u0026rsquo;m willing to implement special methods to support it given basic interfaces, but the type conversion between CL types and JSON isn\u0026rsquo;t always as straight forward as it is in other languages. Similarly with outputting data: is there a good method that will take my object and convert it to a JSON stream or string? There\u0026rsquo;s always a gulf between what\u0026rsquo;s possible and what\u0026rsquo;s easy and ergonomic.\nI present these not as a complaint, or even as a call to action to address the specific issues that I raise (though I certianly wouldn\u0026rsquo;t complain if it were taken as such,) but more as an illustration of technical decision making and the things that make it possible for a team or a project to say yes to a specific technology.\nThere are lots of examples of technologies succeeding from a large competitive feild mostly on the basis of having great interoperability with existing solutions and tools, even if the core technology was less exciting or innovative. Technology wins on the basis of interoperability and user\u0026rsquo;s trust, not (exactly) on the basis of features.\nI think the one real exception is runtimes that have really good static binaries and support for easy cross-compiling (e.g. Go, maybe Rust.)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pave-the-on-off-ramps/","summary":"I participated in a great conversation in the #commonlisp channel on libera (IRC) the other day, during which I found a formulation of a familar argument that felt more clear and more concrete.\nThe question--which comes up pretty often, realistically--centered on adoption of Common Lisp. CL has some great tools, and a bunch of great libraries (particularly these days,) why don\u0026rsquo;t we see greater adoption? Its a good question, and maybe 5 year ago I would have said \u0026ldquo;the libraries and ecosystem are a bit fragmented,\u0026rdquo; and this was true. It\u0026rsquo;s less true now--for good reasons!--Quicklisp is just great and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of coverage for doing common things.\nI think it has to do with the connectivity and support at the edges of a project, an as I think about it, this is probably true of any kind of project.\nWhen you decide to use a new tool or technology you ask yourself three basic questions:","title":"Pave the On and Off Ramps"},{"content":"I keep making notes for writing a series of essays about alignment, the management concept, and it\u0026rsquo;s somewhere in between a blog post and a book, so maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll make it a series of blog posts. This is the introduction.\nAlignment is this kind of abstract thing that happens when you have more than one entity (a person, working group, or team) working on a project (building or doing something). Leaving aside, for a moment, \u0026ldquo;entity\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;project,\u0026rdquo; when efforts well aligned in that all of the effort is in persuit of the same goal and collaborators do work in support of each other. When efforts are out of alignment, collaborators can easily undermine eachother or persue work that doesn\u0026rsquo;t support the larger goal.\nBeing well aligned sounds pretty great, you may think, \u0026ldquo;why wouldn\u0026rsquo;t you always just want to be aligned?\u0026rdquo; And I think deep down people want to be aligned, but it\u0026rsquo;s not obvious: as organizations grow and the problems that the organizations address become bigger (and are thus broken down into smaller parts,) it\u0026rsquo;s easy for part of a team to fall out of alignment with the larger team. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that two parts of an organization may have needs or concerns that appear to be at odds with each other which can cause them to fall out of alignment.\nConsider building a piece of software, as I often do: you often have a group of people who are building features and fixing bugs (engineers), and another group of people who support and interact with the people who are using the software (e.g. support, sale, or product management depending). The former group wants to build the product and make sure that it works, and the later group wants to get (potential) users using the software. While their goals are aligned in the broad sense, in practice there is often tension either between engineers who want things to be correct and complete before shipping them and product people who want to ship sooner or conversely between engineers who want to ship software early and product people who want to make sure the product actually works before it sees use. In short, while the two teams might be aligned on the larger goal, these teams often struggle to find alignment on narrower issues. The tension between stability and velocity is perennial and teams must work together to find alignment on this (and other issues.)\nWhile teams and collaborators want to be in alignment, there are lots of reasons why a collaborator might fall out of alignment. The first and most common reason is that managers/leaders forget to build alignment: collaborators don\u0026rsquo;t know what the larger goals are or don\u0026rsquo;t know how the larger goals connect to the work that they\u0026rsquo;re doing (or should be doing!) If there\u0026rsquo;s redundancy in the organization that isn\u0026rsquo;t addressed\u0026rsquo;, collaborators might end up compeating against eachother or defending their spheres or fifedomes. This is exacerbated if two collaborators or groups have overlapping areas of responsibility. Also, when the businesses falter and leaders don\u0026rsquo;t have a plan, collaborators can fall out of alignment to protect their own projects and jobs. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that collaborators interests change over time, and they may find themselves aligned in general, but not to the part of the project that they\u0026rsquo;re working on. When identified, particularly, early, there are positive solutions to all these problems.\nAlignment, when you have it feels great: the friction of collaboration often falls away because you can work independently while trusting that your collaborators are working toward the same goal. Strong alignment promotes prioritization, so you can be confident that you\u0026rsquo;re always working on the parts of the problem that are the most important.\nSaying \u0026ldquo;we should strive to be aligned,\u0026rdquo; is not enough of a solution, and this series of posts that I\u0026rsquo;m cooking up addresses different angles of alignment: how to build it, how to tell when you\u0026rsquo;re missing alignment, what alignment looks like between different kinds of collaborators (individuals, teams, groups, companies,) and how alignment interacts with other areas and concepts in organizational infrastructure (responsibility, delegation, trust, planning.)\nStay tuned!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/finding-alignment/","summary":"I keep making notes for writing a series of essays about alignment, the management concept, and it\u0026rsquo;s somewhere in between a blog post and a book, so maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll make it a series of blog posts. This is the introduction.\nAlignment is this kind of abstract thing that happens when you have more than one entity (a person, working group, or team) working on a project (building or doing something). Leaving aside, for a moment, \u0026ldquo;entity\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;project,\u0026rdquo; when efforts well aligned in that all of the effort is in persuit of the same goal and collaborators do work in support of each other. When efforts are out of alignment, collaborators can easily undermine eachother or persue work that doesn\u0026rsquo;t support the larger goal.\nBeing well aligned sounds pretty great, you may think, \u0026ldquo;why wouldn\u0026rsquo;t you always just want to be aligned?\u0026rdquo; And I think deep down people want to be aligned, but it\u0026rsquo;s not obvious: as organizations grow and the problems that the organizations address become bigger (and are thus broken down into smaller parts,) it\u0026rsquo;s easy for part of a team to fall out of alignment with the larger team.","title":"Finding Alignment"},{"content":"For a long time I\u0026rsquo;ve used this go library testify, and mostly it\u0026rsquo;s been pretty great: it provides a bunch of tools that you\u0026rsquo;d expect in a testing library, in the grand tradition of jUnit/xUnit/etc., and managed to come out on top in a field similar libraries a few years ago. It was (and is, but particularly then) easy to look at the testing package and say \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if there were a bit more higher-level functionality,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;ve recently come around to the idea that maybe it\u0026rsquo;s not worth it.1 This is a post to collect and expand upon that thought, and also explain why I\u0026rsquo;m going through some older projects to cut out the dependency.\nFirst, and most importantly, I should say that testify isn\u0026rsquo;t that bad, and there\u0026rsquo;s definitely a common way to use the library that\u0026rsquo;s totally reasonable. My complaint is basically:\nThe \u0026ldquo;suite\u0026rdquo; functionality for managing fixtures is a bit confusing: first it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to get the capitalization of the Setup/Teardown (TearDown?) functions wrong and have part of your fixture not run, and they\u0026rsquo;re enough different from \u0026ldquo;plain tests\u0026rdquo; to be a bit confusing. Frankly, writing test cases out by hand and using Go\u0026rsquo;s subtest functionality is more clear anyway. I\u0026rsquo;ve never used testify\u0026rsquo;s mocking functionality, in part because I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to do much mock-based testing (which I see as a good thing,) and for the cases where I want to use mocks, I tend to prefer either hand written mocks or something like mockery. While I know \u0026ldquo;require\u0026rdquo; means \u0026ldquo;halt on failure\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;assert\u0026rdquo; means \u0026ldquo;continue on error,\u0026rdquo; and it makes sense now, \u0026ldquo;assert\u0026rdquo; in most2 other languages means \u0026ldquo;halt on failure\u0026rdquo; so this is a bit confusing. Also while there are cases where you do want continue on error semantics for test assertions, (I suppose,) it doesn\u0026rsquo;t come up that often' There are a few warts, with the assertions (including requires,) most notably that you can create an \u0026ldquo;assertion object\u0026rdquo; that wraps a *testing.T, which is really an anti-pattern, and can cause assertion failures to be reported at the wrong level. There are a few testify assertions that have some wonky argument structure, notably that Equal wants arguments in expected, actual form but Len wants arguments in object, expected form. I have to look that up every time. I despise the failure reporting format. I typically run tests in my text editor and then use \u0026ldquo;jump to failure\u0026rdquo; point when a test fails, and testify assertions aren\u0026rsquo;t well formed in the way that basically every other tool are (including the standard library!)3 such that it\u0026rsquo;s fussy to find a failure when it happens. The alternative is just to check the errors manually and use t.Fatal and t.Fatalf to halt test execution (and t.Error and t.Errorf for the continue on error case.) So we get code that looks like this: :\n// with testify: require.NoErorr(t, err) // otherwise: if err != nil { t.Fatal(err) } In addition to giving us better reporting, the second case looks like code that is more typical of code that you might write outside of test code, and so gives you a chance to use the production API which can help you detect any awkwardness but also serve as a kind of documentation. Additionally, if you\u0026rsquo;re not lazy, the failure messages that you pass to Fatal can be quite useful in explaining what\u0026rsquo;s gone wrong.\nTestify is fine and it\u0026rsquo;s not worth rewriting existing tests to exclude the dependency (except maybe in small libraries) but for new code, give it a shot!\nI must also confess that my coworker played some role in this conversion.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;d guess all, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t done a survey.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nOk, the stdlib failures have the problem, where the failures are just attributed to the filename (no path) of the failure, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t work great in the situation where you have a lot of packages with similarly named files and you\u0026rsquo;re running tests from the root of the project.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/against-testify/","summary":"For a long time I\u0026rsquo;ve used this go library testify, and mostly it\u0026rsquo;s been pretty great: it provides a bunch of tools that you\u0026rsquo;d expect in a testing library, in the grand tradition of jUnit/xUnit/etc., and managed to come out on top in a field similar libraries a few years ago. It was (and is, but particularly then) easy to look at the testing package and say \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if there were a bit more higher-level functionality,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;ve recently come around to the idea that maybe it\u0026rsquo;s not worth it.1 This is a post to collect and expand upon that thought, and also explain why I\u0026rsquo;m going through some older projects to cut out the dependency.\nFirst, and most importantly, I should say that testify isn\u0026rsquo;t that bad, and there\u0026rsquo;s definitely a common way to use the library that\u0026rsquo;s totally reasonable. My complaint is basically:\nThe \u0026ldquo;suite\u0026rdquo; functionality for managing fixtures is a bit confusing: first it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to get the capitalization of the Setup/Teardown (TearDown?","title":"Against Testify"},{"content":"I write a lot of Go code, increasingly so to the point that I don\u0026rsquo;t really write much code in other languages. This is generally, fine for me, and it means that most of the quirks of the language have just become sort of normal to me. There are still a few things that I find irritating, and I stumbled across some code at work a few weeks ago that was awkwardly aggregating errors from a collection of goroutines and decided to package up some code that I think solves this pretty well. This is an introduction and a story about this code.\nBut first, let me back up a bit.\nThe way that go models concurrency is very simple: you start gorountines, but you have to explicitly manage their lifecycle and output. If you want to get errors out of a thread you have to collect them somehow, and there\u0026rsquo;s no standard library code that does this so there are a million bespoke solutions to this, and while every Go programmer has or will eventually write a channel or some kind of error aggregator to collect errors from a goroutine, it\u0026rsquo;s a bit dodgy because you have to stop thinking about whatever thing you\u0026rsquo;re working on to write some thread-safe, non-deadlocking aggregation code, which inevitably means even more goroutines and channels and mutexes or some such.\nYears ago, I wrote this type that I called a \u0026ldquo;catcher\u0026rdquo; that was really just a slice of errors and a mutex, wrapped up with [Add(error)]{.title-ref} and [Resolve() error]{.title-ref} methods, and a few other convenience methods. You\u0026rsquo;d pass or access the catcher from different goroutines and never really have to think much about it. You get \u0026ldquo;continue-on-error\u0026rdquo; semantics for thread pools, which is generally useful, and you never accidentally deadlock on a channel of errors that you fumbled in some way. This type worked its way into the logging package that I wrote for my previous team and got (and presumably still gets) heavy use.\nWe added more functionality over time: different output formats, support for error annotation when it came and also the ability to have a catcher annotate incoming errors with a timestamp for long running applications of the type. The ergonomics are pretty good, and it helped the team spend more time implementing core features and thinking about the core problems of the product\u0026rsquo;s domain and less time thinking about managing errors in goroutines.\nWhen I left my last team, I thought that it\u0026rsquo;d be good to take a step back from the platform and tools that I\u0026rsquo;d been working on and with for the past several years, but when I saw some code a while back that implemented its own error handling again something clicked, and I wanted just this thing. '\nSo I dug out the old type, put it in a new package, dusted off a few cobwebs, improved the test coverage, gave it a cool name, and reworked a few parts to avoid forcing downstream users to pickup unnecessary dependencies. It was a fun project, and I hope you all find it useful!\nCheck out emt! Tell me what you think!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/emt-golang-error-tools/","summary":"I write a lot of Go code, increasingly so to the point that I don\u0026rsquo;t really write much code in other languages. This is generally, fine for me, and it means that most of the quirks of the language have just become sort of normal to me. There are still a few things that I find irritating, and I stumbled across some code at work a few weeks ago that was awkwardly aggregating errors from a collection of goroutines and decided to package up some code that I think solves this pretty well. This is an introduction and a story about this code.\nBut first, let me back up a bit.\nThe way that go models concurrency is very simple: you start gorountines, but you have to explicitly manage their lifecycle and output. If you want to get errors out of a thread you have to collect them somehow, and there\u0026rsquo;s no standard library code that does this so there are a million bespoke solutions to this, and while every Go programmer has or will eventually write a channel or some kind of error aggregator to collect errors from a goroutine, it\u0026rsquo;s a bit dodgy because you have to stop thinking about whatever thing you\u0026rsquo;re working on to write some thread-safe, non-deadlocking aggregation code, which inevitably means even more goroutines and channels and mutexes or some such.","title":"emt -- Golang Error Tools"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s not a super controversial to assert that the software engineering interview process is broken, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to do that anyway. The software engineering interview is broken. There are lots of reasons for this:\ninterview processes are overoptimized for rejecting candidates that aren\u0026rsquo;t good, that they often reject candidates that are good. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a problem if it happens occasionally, but it\u0026rsquo;s really routine. it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to design an interview process that\u0026rsquo;s works consistently well across different levels and different kinds of roles, and companies/teams can easily get into a place where they really can only hire one type or level of engineer. while many engineering teams know that the hiring process is biased, most of the attempts to mitigate this focus on the bias of the interviewer by making interview processes more consistent across candidate or easier to score objectively, while abdicating for the ways that the process can be biased toward certain kinds of candidates. I\u0026rsquo;ve been part of lots of conversations over the years about \u0026ldquo;making interviews better,\u0026rdquo; and many of the improvements to the process that come out of these conversations don\u0026rsquo;t do much and sometimes exacerbate the biases and inefficiencies of the process. I think also, that the move toward remote work (and remote interviewing,) has presented an underrealized opportunity to revisit some of these questions and hopefully come up with better ways of interviewing and building teams.\nTo unwind a bit, the goals of an interview process should be:\nhave a conversation with a candidate to ensure that you can communicate well with them (and them with you!) and can imagine that they\u0026rsquo;ll fit into your team or desired role. identify skills and interests, based on practical exercises, review of their past work (e.g. portfolio or open source work,) that would complement your team\u0026rsquo;s needs. Sometimes takes \u0026ldquo;figure out if the person can actually write code,\u0026rdquo; but there are lots of ways to demonstrate and assess skills. learn about the candidates interests and past projects to figure out if there\u0026rsquo;s alignment between the candidate\u0026rsquo;s career trajectory and the team you\u0026rsquo;re building. Most processes focus on the skills aspect and don\u0026rsquo;t focus enough on the other aspects. Additionally, there are a bunch of common skills assessments that lots of companies use (and copy from eachother!) and most of them are actually really bad. For example:\nlive coding exercises often have to be really contrived in order to fit within an hour interview, and tend to favor algorithims problems that folks either have memorized because they recently took a class or crammed for interviews. As engineers we almost never write code like this, and the right answer to most of these problems is \u0026ldquo;use a library function\u0026rdquo;, so while live coding is great for getting the opportunity to watch a candidate think/work on a problem, success or failure aren\u0026rsquo;t necessarily indicative of capability or fit. take home coding problems provide a good alternative to live coding exercises, but can be a big imposition timewise particularly people on people who have jobs while interviewing. Often take home exercises also require people to focus more on buildsystems and project-level polish rather than the kind of coding that they\u0026rsquo;re likely to do more of. The impulse with take home problems is to make them \u0026ldquo;bigger,\u0026rdquo; and while these problems can be a little \u0026ldquo;bigger\u0026rdquo; than an hour, a lot of what you end up looking at with these problems is also finishing touches so keeping it shorter is also a good plan. portfolio-style reviews (e.g. of open source contributions or public projects,) can be great in many situations, particularly when paired with some kind of session where the candidate can provide context, but lots of great programmers don\u0026rsquo;t have these kinds of portfolios because they don\u0026rsquo;t program for fun (which is totally fine!) or because their previous jobs don\u0026rsquo;t have much open source code. It can also be difficult to assess a candidate in situations where these work samples are old, or are in codebases with awkward conventions or requirements. There isn\u0026rsquo;t one solution to this, but:\nyour goal is to give candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their competencies and impress you. Have an interview menu1 rather than an interview process, and let candidates select the kind of problem that they think will be best for them. This is particularly true for more senior candidates, but I think works across the experience spectrum.\nif you want to do a programming or technical problem in real time, there are lots of different kinds of great exercises, so avoid having another candidate implement bubble sort, graph search, or reverse a linked list. Things like:\nfind a class (or collection of types/functions) in your codebase that you can share and have the candidate read it and try and understand/explain how it works, and then offer up suggestions for how to improve it in some way. I find this works best with 100/200 lines of code, and as long as you can explain idioms and syntax to them, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter if they know the language. Reading code you don\u0026rsquo;t know ' provide the candidate with a function that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have side effects, but is of moderate length and have them write tests for all the edge cases. It\u0026rsquo;s ok if the function has a bug that can be uncovered in the course of writing tests, but this isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly important. provide the candidate with a set of stubs and a complete test suite and have them implement the interface that matches the test cases. This works well for problems where the class in question should implement a fairly pedestrian kind of functionality like \u0026ldquo;a hash map with versioned values for keys,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;implement an collection/cache that expires items on an LRU basis.\u0026rdquo; have the candidate do a code review of a meaningful change. This is an opportunity to see what it\u0026rsquo;s like to work with them, to give them a view into your process (and code!), and most importantly ask questions, which can provide a lot of insight into their mindset and method. I think that the menu approach also works well here: different people have different skills and different ways of framing them, and there\u0026rsquo;s no real harm in giving people a choice here.\nindependent/take home/asynchronous exercises tend to be better (particularly for more senior candidates,) as it more accurately mirrors the way that we, as programmers work. At the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to give people problems that are too big or too complex or just take too long to solve well. You can almost always get the same kind of signal by doing smaller problems anyway. I also believe that offering candidates some kind of honoraria for interview processes are generally a good practice.\none of the big goals of the interview processes is to introduce a candidate to the team and give them a sense for who\u0026rsquo;s on the team and how they operate, which I think has given rise to increasingly long interview sequences. Consider pairing up interviewers for some or all of your interview panel to give candidates greater exposure to the team without taking a huge amount of their time. This is also a great way to help your team build skills at interviewing.\nassessing candidates should also balance the candidates skills, alignment with the team, with the team\u0026rsquo;s needs and capacity for ramping new members. Particularly for organizations that place candidates on teams late in the process, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to effectively have two processes (which just takes a while,) and end up with \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo; candidates that are just haphazardly allocated to teams that aren\u0026rsquo;t a good fit.\nThese are hard problems, and I think its important both to be open to different ways of interviewing and reflecting on the process over time. One of the great risks is that a team will develop an interview process and then keep using it even if it turns out that the process becomes less effective as interviewers and needs change. Have (quick) retrospectives about your interview process to help make sure that stays fresh and effective.'\nI think this is a follow up, in someways, to my earlier post on Staff Engineering. If you liked this, check that out!\nTo be clear, I think the interview menu has to be tailored to candidates and roles. There\u0026rsquo;s a danger of decision paralysis, so recruiters and hiring managers should definitely use part of their time with the candidate to select a good interview plan. The options need to make sense for the role, the interviewers need to prepare, and the hiring manager/recruiter should be able to eliminate options from the menu that don\u0026rsquo;t make sense for the candidates background.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rescoping-the-engineering-interview/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s not a super controversial to assert that the software engineering interview process is broken, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to do that anyway. The software engineering interview is broken. There are lots of reasons for this:\ninterview processes are overoptimized for rejecting candidates that aren\u0026rsquo;t good, that they often reject candidates that are good. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a problem if it happens occasionally, but it\u0026rsquo;s really routine. it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to design an interview process that\u0026rsquo;s works consistently well across different levels and different kinds of roles, and companies/teams can easily get into a place where they really can only hire one type or level of engineer. while many engineering teams know that the hiring process is biased, most of the attempts to mitigate this focus on the bias of the interviewer by making interview processes more consistent across candidate or easier to score objectively, while abdicating for the ways that the process can be biased toward certain kinds of candidates.","title":"Rescoping the Engineering Interview"},{"content":"Last year I wrote a draft of a book about knitting that I\u0026rsquo;m working on revising and also drafting something of a sequal to. The book contains a discussion of some fundamental techniques but mostly describes the process for knitting a collection of projects, mostly sweaters, but a few other things as well. The chapters exist somewhere between an unconventional pattern and a long form account of the design and construction process of several specific garments, though I hope there\u0026rsquo;s a sort of companionable air about it, even if the details end up being mostly technical.\nIn any case, this post is an attempt at the same form, more or less, but focused on a hat that I recently completed.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting a hat with a sort of unconventional empirical construction. There\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of preparation work that you need: no gauge, no sizing information, no counting stitches (unless you want,) just knitting and figuring it out as you go along. The hat itself is a simple beanie-style knitted cap, with a \u0026ldquo;lining\u0026rdquo; for extra warmth and potentially comfort.\nCast on 16 stitches. Your gauge probably doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, within reason. I chose a fingering weight wool on the heavier side of fingering, and US size 0 needles. 16 stitches is about an inch and a half or two inches: from these stitches you\u0026rsquo;ll knit a strip of fabric that will encircle your head, so better to keep it narrower than 3 or 4 inches at the outside. I cast on using the long tail method, and I made sure that there was a generous tail left over afterwards as I intended to take advantage of this tail.\nKnit, in garter stitch, until the strip is long enough to fit around your head.\nI, for my part, made the strip 21 inches or so, around. My head is (unfortunately) 24 inches around, and I think if or when I do it again, I\u0026rsquo;d make it shorter: maybe 19 or 20 inches around. You can figure out the length empirically, buy placing the knitting around your head and seeing what fits. It\u0026rsquo;s okay to stretch the band a bit for a closer fit, but because there\u0026rsquo;s going to be another layer of knitting on the inside of the hat, it\u0026rsquo;s even expected that the hat will be a little bit big at this point.\nWhen the strip is large enough, bind off, but do not break the yarn. You should have the tail from the cast on be on the same side of the work as the end of the working yarn from where you cast off.\nWith the same working yarn that you just bound off with, pick up stitches, knitwise, along the side of the strip, creating one sititch in every garter \u0026ldquo;ridge.\u0026rdquo; When you get all the way around the strip, join and knit in the round. Knit about an inch plain, and then begin shaping the crown.\nI do this weird crown shaping that I wrote about here 15 years ago (!!) that I adapted from the toe shaping of a sock. I think it works better for hats than socks, and is great when you don\u0026rsquo;t want to figure out how to evenly divide into 4 or 5 \u0026ldquo;spokes\u0026rdquo; and have a spiral decrease. Convienetly, it also structures the decreases so that you switch to double points relatively late in the process. It does something like: repeat \u0026ldquo;knit eight stitches, decrease once (e.g. knit two together),\u0026rdquo; all the way around a single round, and then knit 8 rows plain. Then replace 8 with 7: knit 7 stitches and decrease, repeating around, then knit 7 plain rows. Continue on in this manner, moving the decreases closer together in the decrease rounds, and moving the decrease rounds closer together. Eventually, all your stitches will be decreases, and you can just alternate \u0026ldquo;decrease and plain\u0026rdquo; rows until you have 8 stitches or something, and then graft the remaining stitches together. I definitely always have the feeling of totally winging the ending: worry not.\nOnce you take have taken care of the crown stitches, I break the yarn and weave in this end. Turning my attention back to the long tail, I sew up the cast on and bind off ends of the original strip, and have the tail ready and the lower edge of the hat. With this yarn I fuse in the remaining working yarn using a felted or sewn join, and pick up stitches along the remaining garter edge, again at a rate of one stitch for every garter ridge, all the way around.\nKnit about an inch here, until the hat is your desired length: I like to have 4 or 5 inches between the lower edge of the hat and the start of the crown shaping, but this is a point of personal preference. When the hat is the proper length, purl the next row to provide a turning round, and then stop. It\u0026rsquo;s important at this point to make some decisions about the lining of the hat:\nif you plan to knit the interior hat with the same color and yarn as the exterior hat, purl a second row and continue. if you want to switch colors, knit the next row with the new color, and then purl the following row in the new color, before continuing. if you want to switch yarns to a different weight, be careful, but proceed as if you were changing colors (even if you\u0026rsquo;re not!) and do increases or decreases as required so that the interior hat is either the same or slightly smaller than the exterior hat. if you aren\u0026rsquo;t changing yarn, or are changing between two colors of the same yarn, then you could omit all purl rounds, and just knit plain. For my part, I switched colors and to a different yarn type with a substantially finer gauge, and increased rather a lot at this point. I think I probably increased a bit too much, though the hat still works fine. I think I\u0026rsquo;d probably tend to keep things more simple in the future.\nFinally, knit the interior hat straight away until the distance between the lower edge (purl round(s)) and the beginning of the shaping row are the same, and then repeat the shaping for the interior hat, and finish it off. Fold the inner at into the outer hat and place on head.\nObservations:\nthe hat will be quite warm, so knitting with finer yarn is probably better. Also because the hat is so heavy, it\u0026rsquo;s viable to knit a bit loser than you might if it were single weight. making sure that the inner hat\u0026rsquo;s total length from the brim to the crown is the same as the interior measurement of the outer hat can be a bit tricky, but getting it right avoids flaring in either direction. Avoiding the purl/turning round entirely gives you a bit of wiggle room, if you like. this is a weird hat: while the hat looks great while on my head, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite lay flat. While I could have re-knit the crown to have a less aggressive decrease sequence (e.g. start with k9 k2tog, etc.) over more rows, I kind of like the flatter top look. Hats are super forgiving, and hats don\u0026rsquo;t really need to lie flat anyway because heads are three dimensional.' ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/doubled-hat-pattern/","summary":"Last year I wrote a draft of a book about knitting that I\u0026rsquo;m working on revising and also drafting something of a sequal to. The book contains a discussion of some fundamental techniques but mostly describes the process for knitting a collection of projects, mostly sweaters, but a few other things as well. The chapters exist somewhere between an unconventional pattern and a long form account of the design and construction process of several specific garments, though I hope there\u0026rsquo;s a sort of companionable air about it, even if the details end up being mostly technical.\nIn any case, this post is an attempt at the same form, more or less, but focused on a hat that I recently completed.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting a hat with a sort of unconventional empirical construction. There\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of preparation work that you need: no gauge, no sizing information, no counting stitches (unless you want,) just knitting and figuring it out as you go along.","title":"Doubled Hat Pattern"},{"content":"I know it seems like I write a lot about knitting, and it is the case that knitting covers a lot of the \u0026ldquo;stuff I do\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s certainly not the only thing I\u0026rsquo;m doing, and I thought it\u0026rsquo;d be fun to quickly review a bunch of things:\nAs of this week, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working at Interchain GmbH on Tendermint Core which is a consensus engine for state machine replication. After spending a huge part of my career on projects that were either \u0026ldquo;enterprise technology\u0026rdquo; (e.g. writing documentation for database engines), or technical operations (e.g. systems administration), or mostly internal facing (e.g. developer tools,) it\u0026rsquo;s been really interesting to work on something that is definitely core product engineering with a great team. My work has mostly focused on what I think of as \u0026ldquo;platform concerns:\u0026rdquo; service construction, networking, workload management, and test architecture: these are the things I really enjoy, so that\u0026rsquo;s been great. More recently I\u0026rsquo;ve begun reballancing my time work to spend some time (intentionally) on what I think of as \u0026ldquo;engineering issues\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;software issues.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m still writing basically the same amount of code as I ever did, but I\u0026rsquo;m also thinking about how to support teams as they grow and function. At basically every organization and team that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked in, the main constraining factor in shipping features has always been coordination with other engineering projects and not really \u0026ldquo;how quickly can I write code\u0026rdquo; (I\u0026rsquo;m pretty fast, all told.) I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought that challenges of how people coordinate their labor and organize their efforts in distributed (conceptually, temporally, geographically) environments, is one of the cool/hard problems. I\u0026rsquo;ve been cooking a lot more. I\u0026rsquo;m getting better at making simple dishes that last for a few meals that I enjoy eating. I\u0026rsquo;ve been really getting into bean and letils, and have also made some good lentils making a lot of white bean and sausage dishes, lentils, pasta sauces, roast veggies. I\u0026rsquo;m knitting a lot! Most of the time I have 2 or 3 projects going: a sweater, a pair of socks that is easily portable for travel or times when I\u0026rsquo;m not at home, and more recently a series of plain white socks. I\u0026rsquo;m quite enjoying all of this. As a backdrop to knitting, I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching Poirot recently, which has been fun. I have a couple of \u0026ldquo;writing about knitting\u0026rdquo; projects that I\u0026rsquo;m writing and preparing drafts of. These are mostly book-length (though on the short side,) type projects, and one needs more editing (which I\u0026rsquo;m hoping to hire someone to help with,) and one is roughly half way through a first draft. The idea is to provide a lot of technical depth about the craft of knitting--techniques, skills, and design--combined with discussions of projects (mostly from a process perspective,) with some personal reflections and anecdotes sprinkled in. It\u0026rsquo;s been a fun exercise, both because writing about things you understand well is fun, but also because (as weird as this sounds) it\u0026rsquo;s been nice to sort of explore the boundary between technical writing and more creative writing. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a bit more things that I think of as \u0026ldquo;general personal care/growth:\u0026rdquo; reading more books just for fun and because reading is good for inspiration generally; doing duolingo every day (Russian, which I studied as a kid in school); upgrading a bunch of my personal computing practices (new laptop, better remote editing environments, staying on top of my email, switching to tmux, etc). I definitely go in cycles of paying greater and less attention to all of these sorts of things, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth while to dedicate time and attention to these kinds of things. I want to find more ways of writing little things quickly. There\u0026rsquo;s that old quip \u0026ldquo;sorry for writing a 10 page letter, I didn\u0026rsquo;t have enough time to write a one page letter,\u0026rdquo; but also I think that I do most of my writing in the morning and tend to not do this on days when I\u0026rsquo;m working, though this seems like a tractable thing to reorganize and think through ways of doing more writing (and other projects!) throughout the week.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/current-work/","summary":"I know it seems like I write a lot about knitting, and it is the case that knitting covers a lot of the \u0026ldquo;stuff I do\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s certainly not the only thing I\u0026rsquo;m doing, and I thought it\u0026rsquo;d be fun to quickly review a bunch of things:\nAs of this week, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working at Interchain GmbH on Tendermint Core which is a consensus engine for state machine replication. After spending a huge part of my career on projects that were either \u0026ldquo;enterprise technology\u0026rdquo; (e.g. writing documentation for database engines), or technical operations (e.g. systems administration), or mostly internal facing (e.g. developer tools,) it\u0026rsquo;s been really interesting to work on something that is definitely core product engineering with a great team. My work has mostly focused on what I think of as \u0026ldquo;platform concerns:\u0026rdquo; service construction, networking, workload management, and test architecture: these are the things I really enjoy, so that\u0026rsquo;s been great.","title":"Current Work"},{"content":"A while ago I packaged up my emacs configuration for the world to see/use and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty proud of this thing: it works well out of the box, it\u0026rsquo;s super minimal and speedy, and has all of the features. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s the right solution for everyone, but I think there are a case of users for whom this configuration makes sense. I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely also benefited a lot for thinking about this \u0026ldquo;configuration\u0026rdquo; as a software project at least in terms of keeping things organized and polished and reasonably well tested. It\u0026rsquo;s a good exercise.\nHistorically, I\u0026rsquo;ve used my emacs configuration ans as a sort of \u0026ldquo;fun side project\u0026rdquo; and while I tried to avoid spending too much time tweaking various things, it did feel like the kind of thing that was valuable (given how much time I spend in a text editor,) without being too distracting. Particularly, early in the pandemic, or during periods over the summer when I was between jobs.\nThen, I put the configuration in a public repo, and I basically haven\u0026rsquo;t made any meaningful changes since then. One part of this is clearly that I put a lot of time into polishing things in the initial push to get it released, and there haven\u0026rsquo;t been many bugs that have inspried any kind of major development effort. Another part is that, the way I use an editor isn\u0026rsquo;t really changing. I\u0026rsquo;m writing code and English and using a couple of applications (e.g. email and org-mode) within emacs, but I\u0026rsquo;m not really (often) adding new or different kinds of work, and while this isn\u0026rsquo;t exacting from a blogging perspective* it is exciting from a \u0026ldquo;things just work perspective.\u0026rdquo;\nI have refered to myself as a degenerate emacs user. I\u0026rsquo;ve sometimes said unrepentant, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s basically the same. I\u0026rsquo;ve also realized that, given that I\u0026rsquo;ve basically been using emacs the same way since 2008 or so, I\u0026rsquo;m kind of an old timer, even if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t much feel like that, and there are lots of folks with longer histories.\nI think I used care more about what tools other people used to edit text, even a couple of years ago, I thought that having good initial configuration and better out of the box experiences for emacs would lead to more people using emacs, which would be cool because they\u0026rsquo;d get to use a cool piece of software and we\u0026rsquo;d get more emacs users.\nIncreasingly, however, while I think emacs is great and people should use it, I\u0026rsquo;m less concerned: people should use what they want, and I think there will always be a enough people here and there who want to use emacs and that\u0026rsquo;s good enough for me. I think having good out of the box experiences are important, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a one-size fits all kind of situation. I also think that VS Code is pretty great software, and I like a lot of the implications for remote editing, even if I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in it for myself.\nEnjoy the repo, and let me know if there\u0026rsquo;s anything terrible about it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been getting back into blogging recently, and have started tweaking a few things about the ways I use computers/emacs, mostly in terms of exploring tmux (hah!) and also considering avoiding GUI emacs entirely. Stay tuned if you\u0026rsquo;re interested!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/emacs-stability/","summary":"A while ago I packaged up my emacs configuration for the world to see/use and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty proud of this thing: it works well out of the box, it\u0026rsquo;s super minimal and speedy, and has all of the features. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s the right solution for everyone, but I think there are a case of users for whom this configuration makes sense. I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely also benefited a lot for thinking about this \u0026ldquo;configuration\u0026rdquo; as a software project at least in terms of keeping things organized and polished and reasonably well tested. It\u0026rsquo;s a good exercise.\nHistorically, I\u0026rsquo;ve used my emacs configuration ans as a sort of \u0026ldquo;fun side project\u0026rdquo; and while I tried to avoid spending too much time tweaking various things, it did feel like the kind of thing that was valuable (given how much time I spend in a text editor,) without being too distracting. Particularly, early in the pandemic, or during periods over the summer when I was between jobs.","title":"Emacs Stability"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s this relatively minor Emacs bug that I\u0026rsquo;ve been aware of for a long time, years. The basic drift is that on Linux systems, when running with GTK/Emacs as a daemon, and the X11 session terminates for any reason the Emacs daemon terminates. Emacs daemons are great: you start Emacs once, and it keeps running independently of what ever windows you have open. You can leave files open in Emacs buffers and not have move between different projects with minimal context switching costs.\nFirst of all, emacs\u0026rsquo;s daemon mode is weird. I can\u0026rsquo;t think of another application that starts as a daemon (in the conventional UNIX double-forking manner,) and then a client process runs and spawns GUI (potentially) windows. If there are other applications that work this way, there aren\u0026rsquo;t many.\nNevertheless, being able to restart the window manager without loosing the current state of your Emacs session is one of the chief reasons to run Emacs in daemon mode, so this bug has always been a bit irksome. Also since it\u0026rsquo;s real, and for sure a thing, why has it taken so long to address? Lets dig a little bit deeper.\nThere are two GNOME bugs related to this:\nClosing Displays Emacs Disconnect Followup What\u0026rsquo;s happening isn\u0026rsquo;t interesting or complicated: Emacs calls an API, which behaves differently than Emacs expects and needs, but not (particularly) differently than GNOME expects or needs. Which means GNOME has little incentive to fix the bug--if they even could without breaking other users of this API.\nEmacs can\u0026rsquo;t fix the problem on their own, without writing a big hack around GNOME components, which wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be particularly desirable or viable, and because this works fine with the other toolkit (and is only possible in some situations,) it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel like an Emacs bug.\nWe have something of a stalemate. Both party thinks the other is at fault. No one is particularly incentivized to fix the problem from their own code, and there is a work around,1 albeit a kind of gnarly one.\nThis kind of issue feels, if not common, incredibly easy for a project--even one like emacs--to stumble into and quite easy to just never resolve. This kind of thing happens, in some form, very often and boundaries between libraries make it even more likely.\nOn the positive side, It does seem like there\u0026rsquo;s recent progress on the issue, so it probably won\u0026rsquo;t be another 10 years before it gets fixed, but who knows.\nTo avoid this problem either: don\u0026rsquo;t use GUI emacs windows and just use the terminal (fairly common, and more tractable as terminal emulators have improved a bunch in the past few years,) or use the Lucid GUI toolkit, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t depend on GTK at all. The lucid build is ugly (as the widgets don\u0026rsquo;t interact with GTK settings,) but its light weight and doesn\u0026rsquo;t suffer the '\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-emacs-daemon-gtk-bug-a-parable/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s this relatively minor Emacs bug that I\u0026rsquo;ve been aware of for a long time, years. The basic drift is that on Linux systems, when running with GTK/Emacs as a daemon, and the X11 session terminates for any reason the Emacs daemon terminates. Emacs daemons are great: you start Emacs once, and it keeps running independently of what ever windows you have open. You can leave files open in Emacs buffers and not have move between different projects with minimal context switching costs.\nFirst of all, emacs\u0026rsquo;s daemon mode is weird. I can\u0026rsquo;t think of another application that starts as a daemon (in the conventional UNIX double-forking manner,) and then a client process runs and spawns GUI (potentially) windows. If there are other applications that work this way, there aren\u0026rsquo;t many.\nNevertheless, being able to restart the window manager without loosing the current state of your Emacs session is one of the chief reasons to run Emacs in daemon mode, so this bug has always been a bit irksome.","title":"The Emacs Daemon GTK Bug, A Parable"},{"content":"Having recently started knitting a new sweater I realized that there are a lot of little things that I do, that are worth collecting in one place:\nDo not tie a slip not to start, simply twist the yarn around the needle as a basis for casting on the first stitch. This twist looks like a stitch, but isn\u0026rsquo;t, you should decrease it at the end of the row, with the last stitch to complete the join.\nAlways used the German Twisted long tail cast on variant, which makes things a bit more elastic and just looks great, particularly when knitting ribbing, which I often do at the beginning of a sweater.\nWrap the yarn around the needle once per number of stitches that you need to cast on to estimate the length of the long tail that you\u0026rsquo;ll need to cast on. I find this overestimates a bit, but I\u0026rsquo;ve rarely regretted having too-long of a tail rather than having too short. While you can start again from the beginning in the case that you run out of tail, you can also splice in a second yarn.\nIf you do run out of yarn while casting on for the sweater, and you\u0026rsquo;ve been using the long tail for the finger yarn (loops around the needle,) you can sometimes get a few extra stitches out of switching to having that needle\nPlace markers periodically to make it easier to count, roughly every 20 stitches or so, and I try and make sure that one of the markers gets placed half way through the round. For example, to cast on 228 stitches, I placed 12 markers every 19 stitches, and the 6th marker was the \u0026ldquo;half way\u0026rdquo; point.\nI did one sweater where I put markers every 32 stitches and one sweater where I put markers every 16, and found that I spent far more time casting on the one with fewer markers because I had to double check my counts more. They really help.\nCast on to a needle that\u0026rsquo;s a bit bigger than the size you intend to use. I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite happy using a US 2.5 to cast on for a US 0 sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using interchangeable needles, and being able to replace the larger needle for the smaller needle before beginning to knit has made things much easier to knit for the first row. It\u0026rsquo;s also an option to hold two needles together for the cast on.\nI also have to think about not pulling on the \u0026ldquo;thumb yarn\u0026rdquo; at all, as this will also make things tigheer.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s good to be careful to avoid twisting the first row, if you do accidentally twist, undo the twist between the last and first stitch, which will hardly be noticeable.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tips-for-casting-on-a-sweater/","summary":"Having recently started knitting a new sweater I realized that there are a lot of little things that I do, that are worth collecting in one place:\nDo not tie a slip not to start, simply twist the yarn around the needle as a basis for casting on the first stitch. This twist looks like a stitch, but isn\u0026rsquo;t, you should decrease it at the end of the row, with the last stitch to complete the join.\nAlways used the German Twisted long tail cast on variant, which makes things a bit more elastic and just looks great, particularly when knitting ribbing, which I often do at the beginning of a sweater.\nWrap the yarn around the needle once per number of stitches that you need to cast on to estimate the length of the long tail that you\u0026rsquo;ll need to cast on. I find this overestimates a bit, but I\u0026rsquo;ve rarely regretted having too-long of a tail rather than having too short.","title":"Tips for Casting On a Sweater"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working my way through C.J. Cherryh\u0026rsquo;s Alliance-Union stories for a few years: in part because I\u0026rsquo;ve not been reading as much, in part because some of these stories are a bit hard to get into and only available in paper books, but mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve been hording them. These are incredibly me-type stories, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found them really inspiring. I\u0026rsquo;ve \u0026lsquo;wanted to collect a number of things about these stories and world that I\u0026rsquo;m quite excited by:\nI really like that it\u0026rsquo;s all so concrete: Cherryh\u0026rsquo;s talked about designing the stories by taking a star chart and drawing out the \u0026ldquo;map\u0026rdquo; on stars that are near to Earth. This makes the setting feel both really big, because stars are far apart and also quite small, because there are really a small selection of planets and they\u0026rsquo;re pretty close in relative terms, so it\u0026rsquo;s I enjoy the ways that it\u0026rsquo;s a product of its historic moment. The medium of information storage is \u0026ldquo;tape\u0026rdquo;, and I think if someone was writing this today, there\u0026rsquo;d be more planets, say. Similarly, While there are computers, the way characters interact with technology is much less ubiquitous and networked. The scarcity of planets, and the cost of getting out of a gravity well creates these interesting economic effects which drive a lot of tension in the stories. I enjoy that Earth exists, but that most of the people on Earth are very disconnected from what happens in the world of the stores (either by distance before FTL, or by isolationism.) While there is FTL travel, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t 100% throw relativistic effects out of the window, so \u0026ldquo;ship time\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;station/planet\u0026rdquo; time (and lives!) move at different paces, and the stories explore the impact of this on culture/society/economics/lives. FTL is also hard on the people who travel this way, so while many of the characters we interact with are spacers it\u0026rsquo;s clear that they\u0026rsquo;re a minority. Also, there aren\u0026rsquo;t ways for messages to pass faster than ships, which has the effect of making the world seem small at the same time. These elements of the setting (distance between stars, limited goods from planets, cost of travel, etc) feed back into the imagined economics of the society, with lots of interesting thoughts about taxation policy, and what we\u0026rsquo;d call \u0026ldquo;local economies/currency\u0026rdquo; these days. Anyway, I read a few dozen pages of the last of the \u0026ldquo;mainline\u0026rdquo; Alliance-Union book in my queue (Tripoint). I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about going back and re-reading Downbelow Station (the first I read) and Cyteen (because I love it), but also am going to enjoy reading other things for a while.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cool-things-in-the-alliance-union-stories/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working my way through C.J. Cherryh\u0026rsquo;s Alliance-Union stories for a few years: in part because I\u0026rsquo;ve not been reading as much, in part because some of these stories are a bit hard to get into and only available in paper books, but mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve been hording them. These are incredibly me-type stories, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found them really inspiring. I\u0026rsquo;ve \u0026lsquo;wanted to collect a number of things about these stories and world that I\u0026rsquo;m quite excited by:\nI really like that it\u0026rsquo;s all so concrete: Cherryh\u0026rsquo;s talked about designing the stories by taking a star chart and drawing out the \u0026ldquo;map\u0026rdquo; on stars that are near to Earth. This makes the setting feel both really big, because stars are far apart and also quite small, because there are really a small selection of planets and they\u0026rsquo;re pretty close in relative terms, so it\u0026rsquo;s I enjoy the ways that it\u0026rsquo;s a product of its historic moment.","title":"Cool Things in the Alliance Union Stories"},{"content":"My knitting projects, recently (and currently!) have been big not just \u0026ldquo;knit sweaters out of fingering weight yarn on US 0s, which I\u0026rsquo;m certainly doing, but big on another scale. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this kind of project as epic knitting, but I\u0026rsquo;ve really gone down the rabbit hole on this one. I\u0026rsquo;ve started thinking about knitting projects less bounded by a single object or garment, and more as a \u0026ldquo;meta project,\u0026rdquo; here are the two examples:\nAll socks are hand knit. Right now I mostly wear machine knit socks. I have about 10 or 12 pairs of wool socks, and I just wear them every day. The thing I like about my current socks is that they\u0026rsquo;re comfortable, easy to care for and very easy to match up when I\u0026rsquo;m folding laundry. I also have three weights of socks, and the heavy and medium socks are definitely good even in warmer months.\nTo avoid needing to buy new socks when the current batch wear out, I probably need about as many socks (10-12, maybe a few more to cover light weight cases,) and a slightly longer laundry cycle if I want to segregate sock laundry. But the project isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly about \u0026ldquo;just enough\u0026rdquo; socks, but also about having socks that are mostly the same, not just in terms of pattern, but also in terms of yarn content.\nIn persuit of this, last week I sat down with a 1.5 kilo cone of sock yarn (merino, bamboo, nylon) and cast on for a sock, and I\u0026rsquo;m already on the second sock, of what I expect will be many. Gotta figure out some situation for dying them all the same color.\nI\u0026rsquo;d kind of like to explore some more corners of the seamless yoke sweater paradigm. I\u0026rsquo;ve made, I think, 2 raglan sweaters ever, and a few of the \u0026ldquo;set in sleeve\u0026rdquo; type and that\u0026rsquo;s it! I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;ve ever made saddle shoulders! I\u0026rsquo;ve also gotten into the habit of wearing sweaters more often these days, I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to do something more comprehensive along these lines. Having really nailed down a sleeve, as well as a way to shape the body of a sweater, it seems fun to explore different shoulder shapes for variety. The truth of the matter is that I really like knitting plain sweaters, so this gives some exciting opportunity.\nThere are other kinds of sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;d like to get better at: cardigans, mostly, and also I think I\u0026rsquo;d enjoy exploring hems that aren\u0026rsquo;t ribbing, and also finding ways of knitting crew necks that I\u0026rsquo;d enjoy knitting.\nIn persuit of this, as alluded above, I\u0026rsquo;ve acquired a bunch of un-dyed yarn, in interesting fibers to knit \u0026ldquo;a few\u0026rdquo; sets of socks (maybe some gifts!) and to really get some practice in on these different sweater types. I\u0026rsquo;m definitely hunkering down into knitting at this scale and thinking about the ways that this broader\nEven if it makes for somewhat less exciting blogging about knitting.\n\u0026ldquo;Ah, yup, just knit another white sock.\u0026rdquo;\nAnyway! I hope, if you\u0026rsquo;re knitting, you\u0026rsquo;re enjoying it as much as I am.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/opus-knitting/","summary":"My knitting projects, recently (and currently!) have been big not just \u0026ldquo;knit sweaters out of fingering weight yarn on US 0s, which I\u0026rsquo;m certainly doing, but big on another scale. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this kind of project as epic knitting, but I\u0026rsquo;ve really gone down the rabbit hole on this one. I\u0026rsquo;ve started thinking about knitting projects less bounded by a single object or garment, and more as a \u0026ldquo;meta project,\u0026rdquo; here are the two examples:\nAll socks are hand knit. Right now I mostly wear machine knit socks. I have about 10 or 12 pairs of wool socks, and I just wear them every day. The thing I like about my current socks is that they\u0026rsquo;re comfortable, easy to care for and very easy to match up when I\u0026rsquo;m folding laundry. I also have three weights of socks, and the heavy and medium socks are definitely good even in warmer months.","title":"Opus Knitting"},{"content":"I know I\u0026rsquo;ve been bad at blogging regularly, and it may be obvious from reading things here or talking to me that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a lot. What is less obvious is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot about knitting.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;d like to do some meta posting about these projects, instead I\u0026rsquo;m going to just jump in with a bit about the way I knitted the sleeve of the last sweater I made that I\u0026rsquo;m already duplicating because it was just that good.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a huge fan of well fitted sleeves on sweaters: I like to wear layers, and having a sweater sleeve hug my wrist often just means that I won\u0026rsquo;t wear the sweater: it\u0026rsquo;s good to get the sleeve right, in this context. At the same time, too bulky and the sweater looks goofy (to my sensibilities) and the sleeves take forever to knit. I\u0026rsquo;ve solved this problem, often, by knitting sleeves from the shoulder down: this way I can try things on as I go and easily re-knit the last few inches of the sleeve if things feel off.\nThe shoulder-down method works, but it\u0026rsquo;s bulky to carry the entire sweater around to knit a relative small piece of fabric, and it precludes knitting single-piece seamless sweaters, as you have to get too clever to make it all work.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve come to:\nStart by casting on as you would for a sock: for me this means fingering weight wool with 64 stitches, US 0s (2.00mm) on 4 double pointed needles in knit 2 purl 2 ribbing. There should be 16 stitches on each needle, and knit for 2 inches.\nThis has several advantages not the least of which is you can chicken out after 2 inches and just knit a pair of socks. Your wrists and ankles (or calves) might be different than mine, and while my wrists are slimmer than my calves, ribbing is elastic, and I know that it won\u0026rsquo;t be too small. I know Elizabeth says to figure out the chest circumference and derive the sleeve from that, and you could do that, but chest circumferences vary more than wrists.\nIn the next row switch to stocking stitch, and increase to 72 stitches, or 18 stitches per needle. I use a raised bar-type increase between the knit and purl stitches on the first and third ribs.\nIncreasing a bit after the ribbing helps achieve both \u0026ldquo;the cuff pulls in and isn\u0026rsquo;t floppy\u0026rdquo; which is desireable, and also \u0026ldquo;sleeve isn\u0026rsquo;t too tight\u0026rdquo;. You could achieve this by using smaller needles, but I like to avoid needles smaller than US 0s whenever possible.\nFor sizing the rest of the sleeve, I believe that the \u0026ldquo;top\u0026rdquo; of the sleeve should be as wide as my expected yoke depth. To unpack: if the distance between the shoulder and the underarm should be 9 inches, then the sleeve should be 18 inches around. Given a gauge of 8 stitches to the inch, this means 144 stitches, and given paired increases in sleeves, 36 pairs of increases.\nI do increases every 5 rounds. This means, knit five rounds, do an increase, knit five rounds. This means that there are actually 6 total rounds in any increase repeat. The increase are paired on either side of four stitches.\n\u0026ldquo;Increase every 5th row\u0026rdquo; is a common knitting instruction and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty ambiguous. Do you mean \u0026ldquo;increase on the fifth row,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;increase after the fifth row\u0026rdquo;? In computer programming we call this \u0026ldquo;a fencepost counting problem,\u0026rdquo; and over the course of 36 repeats (as is the case )\nIn the past I used to pair increases around an odd number of stitches so that there\u0026rsquo;d be a single \u0026ldquo;seam\u0026rdquo; stitch, but as the sleeve has an even number of stitches, and most sweater bodies have even numbers of stitches and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been particularly keen on EZ style pseudo seams, particularly since putting the increases 4 stitches away creates a clear \u0026ldquo;seam\u0026rdquo;-like effect. It definitely works.\nThe target size (144 stitches, or increasing 36 times for a total of 72 stitches,) means that the sleeve doubles in diameter between the end of the cuff and its final sleeve. My arms are a longer than average (particularly for my height, but that\u0026rsquo;s no matter,) but given everything, it means that after doing these increases I only need to knit 3/4s of an inch before I\u0026rsquo;m done with the sleeve. Perfect. In my estimation if you can space your increases evenly across the sleeve the result is pretty enjoyable. Having a sleeve that\u0026rsquo;s slightly longer than your arm increases the blousing effect, which by a little isn\u0026rsquo;t always a problem. If you need a longer sleeve, putting more plain knitting at the top is good too, and the increases can always be closer together at the beginning of the sleeve if needed. Having an idea of your row gauge can help figure out the math.\nThere you have it!\nWhile I was writing this up, I managed to knit both sleeves for another sweater, but I have yet to figure out how I want the lower hem of the body of this sweater to go, so I think I\u0026rsquo;ll knit some socks in the mean time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-perfect-sleeve/","summary":"I know I\u0026rsquo;ve been bad at blogging regularly, and it may be obvious from reading things here or talking to me that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a lot. What is less obvious is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot about knitting.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;d like to do some meta posting about these projects, instead I\u0026rsquo;m going to just jump in with a bit about the way I knitted the sleeve of the last sweater I made that I\u0026rsquo;m already duplicating because it was just that good.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a huge fan of well fitted sleeves on sweaters: I like to wear layers, and having a sweater sleeve hug my wrist often just means that I won\u0026rsquo;t wear the sweater: it\u0026rsquo;s good to get the sleeve right, in this context. At the same time, too bulky and the sweater looks goofy (to my sensibilities) and the sleeves take forever to knit. I\u0026rsquo;ve solved this problem, often, by knitting sleeves from the shoulder down: this way I can try things on as I go and easily re-knit the last few inches of the sleeve if things feel off.","title":"The Perfect Sleeve"},{"content":"I know I\u0026rsquo;ve been bad a blogger regularly, and it may be obvious from reading things here or talking to me that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a lot. What is less obvious is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot about knitting. While I\u0026rsquo;d like to do some meta posting about these projects, instead I\u0026rsquo;m going to just jump in with a bit.\nI was getting my blood drawn last week--just routine--and the phlebotomist said \u0026ldquo;how are you doing with all the snow?\u0026rdquo; it had snowed almost five days ago, and while most of it had melted it was the first real snow of the year.\nMost people didn\u0026rsquo;t spend 3 years in Wisconsin, I guess. It didn\u0026rsquo;t really register as that much snow.\nWe must rewind, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t actually hear her correctly the first time and though she said \u0026ldquo;how are you doing with all this,\u0026rdquo; and I just assumed that the \u0026ldquo;all this\u0026rdquo; was the omircon spike of the coronavirus pandemic in New York City.\nI clarified, just because I\u0026rsquo;m not used to small talk about such enduring existential issues. After we chuckled, I said something like \u0026ldquo;oh, not much\u0026hellip; Just knitting mostly.\u0026rdquo;\nShe was intensely interested, she asked what I was knitting (sweaters) and she (a crocheter it turns out,) was interested in learning to knit. I did the only thing that was reasonable and said \u0026ldquo;there are a lot of good videos on youtube, and also there\u0026rsquo;s this book called Knitting Without Tears by Elizbeth Zimmerman and you should read it, it\u0026rsquo;s great.\u0026rdquo; Good deed done.\nIn the course of this conversation she said \u0026ldquo;oh how many sweaters have you made?\u0026rdquo; I could tell that she was like \u0026ldquo;oh a couple,\u0026rdquo; but the truth is somewhat alarming, and I also don\u0026rsquo;t remember exactly.\n\u0026ldquo;30 or 40, I think.\u0026rdquo; This has the potential to be correct, though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, I dunno, I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing this for a while.\u0026rdquo;\nAlso true. Lots of these sweaters were total rubbish, and since I knit my first sweater in 2003 or (or something,) and while I managed to make a number of sweaters that were really great, I also made a lot of sweaters that were really terrible in one way or another. The process of making sweaters better, in my experience is to knit one, and see what works and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t work and then fix it in the next go round. While having nice sweaters to wear is a good side effect of knitting, the process is the important part.\nThis is one of the reasons why I buy yarn in larger lots (often by the kilo or more, so I can knit a few sweaters) and while I usually just cast on a for a new sweater (or pair of socks) as soon as I finish the preceding one. While this might be an extreme implementation of this idea, the general approach is perhaps more applicable.\nI started writing this post a few days ago as a kind of introduction to what I hoped was going to be some kind of pithy instructions for knitting a sleeve, but I decided to split it out after it was clear that I\u0026rsquo;d gotten a bit carried away.\nThen, last night, I came to a realization about a different sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting for a couple of weeks. Basically I wanted to take the basic pattern for a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve knit a bunch of times before and update it to be more like the sweaters I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting more recently: slim sizing, vnecks, set in sleeves for the shoulders.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think it worked out: the sweater is a touch on the small side (but not unworkable), knitting the sleeve caps with short rows in two color patterns is frightfully difficult (and likely to look really messy in a part of the sweater where the eye is drawn to.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m also not wild about the v-neck (as implemented) because I didn\u0026rsquo;t account for the fact that in two-color knitting the stitches are more narrow (and therefore the row gauge is equal to the stitch gauge) and as a result the angle of the v-neck is shallower than I wanted.\nFinally, and while this is tractable, I\u0026rsquo;m grumpy about the fact that I made the steeks a bit narrower than I should have and the\u0026rsquo;ve all been threatening to unravel in an unexpected way: there\u0026rsquo;s some hubris here, as I did the \u0026ldquo;just cut, don\u0026rsquo;t worry\u0026rdquo; method of steek preparation.\nThey don\u0026rsquo;t all work out. \u0026lsquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve put the sweater in a bag and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to let it sit for a little while before I really cut my losses, but I think I\u0026rsquo;d rather knit something I\u0026rsquo;m far more excited about than slog through a sweater I\u0026rsquo;m unlikely to wear (and would be unable to give away given the sizing.)\nTo my mind, it\u0026rsquo;s just as important to celebrate, learn from, and write about the sweaters that didn\u0026rsquo;t turn out as it is the ones that did.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/iterative-knitting/","summary":"I know I\u0026rsquo;ve been bad a blogger regularly, and it may be obvious from reading things here or talking to me that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a lot. What is less obvious is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot about knitting. While I\u0026rsquo;d like to do some meta posting about these projects, instead I\u0026rsquo;m going to just jump in with a bit.\nI was getting my blood drawn last week--just routine--and the phlebotomist said \u0026ldquo;how are you doing with all the snow?\u0026rdquo; it had snowed almost five days ago, and while most of it had melted it was the first real snow of the year.\nMost people didn\u0026rsquo;t spend 3 years in Wisconsin, I guess. It didn\u0026rsquo;t really register as that much snow.\nWe must rewind, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t actually hear her correctly the first time and though she said \u0026ldquo;how are you doing with all this,\u0026rdquo; and I just assumed that the \u0026ldquo;all this\u0026rdquo; was the omircon spike of the coronavirus pandemic in New York City.","title":"Iterative Knitting"},{"content":"As I said in Knitting Catchup, I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a bunch recently--a few sweaters, and a bunch of socks--and I found myself writing a list of sweaters that I was thinking about knitting, and thought it\u0026rsquo;d be interesting to share. But first, some background\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve begun a writing project that explores, in great detail, how to knit a very basic sock. I\u0026rsquo;ve knit socks here and there forever, but I think in the past year knitting lots of socks has become a thing and I think one of the most thrilling aspects of knitting is the way that repetition (at many levels,) gives you the space to develop a deep understanding of your project and I think this gives rise to craft. I definitely want to knit a bunch more socks, and also I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying more with the idea of knitting sets of socks, maybe on the order of 5 or 10 pairs (for myself and friends) so I can see what it\u0026rsquo;d be like to only wear hand knit socks.\nThe last sweater I finished was a bottom-up-raglan seamless number with a v-neck, and the whole process was a lot of fun and I definitely want to explore some variants on this. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been working on a colorwork sweater for a couple of weeks, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed that a lot, I think that I\u0026rsquo;d like to mostly stick with a few more plain sweaters, to explore different shapes and also be able to have a collection of sweaters that I can wear most days during the cooler months.\nPursuant to both of these projects I\u0026rsquo;ve recently begun buying yarn in bulk, mostly un-dyed (either to stay natural or to be garment dyed at some point.) This affords reasonable and predictable options for getting really soft yarn. The first batch appeared over the weekend, so I\u0026rsquo;m itching to cast on a new sleeve!\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the list of sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in knitting:\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to explore knitting more bottom up yoke sweaters, I\u0026rsquo;ve never made the hybrid yoke sweater, and while i\u0026rsquo;ve done the set-in-sleeve option a few times, I haven\u0026rsquo;t done the saddle-shouldered sweater yet. I\u0026rsquo;d like to give crew necks another go. Particularly with some of these silk blends, I think a nice crew neck could be fun to explore, both to see if I can tolerate wearing them. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of collars with ribbing recently, and I think a crew neck with a rolled edge might be nice. While I sometimes find lots of garter stitch to be too densen and sometimes awkward, a little garter stitch edge here and there can be really fetching, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore what it\u0026rsquo;d be like to put more garter stitch in places, like as a v-neck collar or maybe even the lower hem of a garment. I think, for me the challenge is mostly in finding a way so that he extra depth of the fabric doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel like it\u0026rsquo;s flaring out. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about doing a sweater that was entirely made out of 2 by 2 ribbing. This might be a terrible idea. I made a sweater last year that had garter rib on the yoke, but was plane otherwise, and I really enjoyed it, though it has some flaws (Henley neck that doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite work, sleeves were a bit wrong,) and I\u0026rsquo;d like to play around with this idea, both with \u0026ldquo;garter rib for the yoke\u0026rdquo; but also more garter rib (in general,) including maybe a garter rib cardigan. I\u0026rsquo;m excited. Looking back at this, I think I need to also pull together a list of more concrete pattern ideas rather than just a list of variables, but there\u0026rsquo;s time! And I definitely can cast on a sleeve for fun!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/plain-knitting-ahead/","summary":"As I said in Knitting Catchup, I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a bunch recently--a few sweaters, and a bunch of socks--and I found myself writing a list of sweaters that I was thinking about knitting, and thought it\u0026rsquo;d be interesting to share. But first, some background\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve begun a writing project that explores, in great detail, how to knit a very basic sock. I\u0026rsquo;ve knit socks here and there forever, but I think in the past year knitting lots of socks has become a thing and I think one of the most thrilling aspects of knitting is the way that repetition (at many levels,) gives you the space to develop a deep understanding of your project and I think this gives rise to craft. I definitely want to knit a bunch more socks, and also I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying more with the idea of knitting sets of socks, maybe on the order of 5 or 10 pairs (for myself and friends) so I can see what it\u0026rsquo;d be like to only wear hand knit socks.","title":"Plain Knitting Ahead"},{"content":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing or blogging much in the past few months, but I definitely have been knitting a bunch. Things have been busy and overwhelming, in totally unexceptional ways, and my knitting has been a near constant companion in providing balance and focus in various ways.\nI embarked in the late spring in a kind of epic project: I bought a kilo of a lovely gray fingering weight Silk/Yak/Merino blend, and promptly started a cabled sweater based on Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Na Cragga sweater (the cover of Aran Knitting). I changed a lot: the gauge (ran weight to fingering) and the construction (knit flat with pieces to in the round) and the shape (tapered body, short rows across the back, set-in sleeves and saddles,) and monkeyed with the pattern (added two repeats of the center panel, dropped one of the patterns, extended the ribbing pattern into the body of the sweater,) and made a v-neck. I kind of stalled out on the project, at roughly the underarms, in June and took a few months off of regular knitting.\nIn the late summer, as delta began to spike here, I started knitting socks again. I\u0026rsquo;ve always loved socks, and have gotten really into knitting really plain cuff-down socks with medium length ribbed cuffs. I\u0026rsquo;ve knit maybe 20 pairs of these socks, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve taken a bit of a sock-knitting break in the last couple of months--I guess during the depths of winter and the omicron spike--I definitely hope to knit a bunch more socks.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on two sweaters:\na second sweater that I just finished knit out of the second half of the aforementioned kilo of Silk/Yak/Merino. I ran out of yarn on the collar which of course necessitated ordering more of this yarn, which is just utterly delightful. It\u0026rsquo;s a bottom-up raglan sweater with a v-neck. Nothing else special, and it\u0026rsquo;s so comfy and soft in every way. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I\u0026rsquo;m sold on Raglan shaping, but I\u0026rsquo;d forgotten how much fun this construction is. I started a two-color pull-over using some of my favorite color patterns from Norwegian and Turkish patterns. I\u0026rsquo;m almost to the shoulder, and the plan is to knit set in shoulders and sleeve caps (short rows!) with a v-neck. This is the first color work sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve made in years, and it\u0026rsquo;s been really fun and engaging to knit this sweater. I\u0026rsquo;d also given away almost all of my previous colorwork sweaters and they are very much my thing, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t know that it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing I want to focus on, making one of these every so often seems good. There have been a few things that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned about myself as a knitter recently:\nI don\u0026rsquo;t really enjoy knitting cables: the dense fabric rarely appeals to me as a sweater wearer, anything that isn\u0026rsquo;t really simple ends up breaking up the rhythm in a way that I find distracting and the result is that knitting feels like a chore. I\u0026rsquo;m no longer afraid of grafting as I once was. I seem to only be able to really do it effectively if I hold the \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo; sides together and graft from the \u0026ldquo;inside\u0026rdquo; of the garment (sock, sweater/etc,) but this seems to actually be fine in practice. This makes seamless bottom up sweater (as well as socks) much more approachable. In the past I struggled through it or tricked someone into doing it for me (or used 3 needle bind-offs.) I did a lot of sweaters with open-henly-style collars for years, because I often find that crew neck sweaters are too warm and otherwise overwhelming. Since I started on this path, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun making sweaters out of fingering weight yarn, and have switched to the v-neck as a solution for the \u0026ldquo;more open\u0026rdquo; neck problem. I think this demands more investigation. In an upcoming post, I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore some upcoming knitting projects and the design questions that I\u0026rsquo;ve been contemplating.\nStay tuned!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-catchup/","summary":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing or blogging much in the past few months, but I definitely have been knitting a bunch. Things have been busy and overwhelming, in totally unexceptional ways, and my knitting has been a near constant companion in providing balance and focus in various ways.\nI embarked in the late spring in a kind of epic project: I bought a kilo of a lovely gray fingering weight Silk/Yak/Merino blend, and promptly started a cabled sweater based on Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Na Cragga sweater (the cover of Aran Knitting). I changed a lot: the gauge (ran weight to fingering) and the construction (knit flat with pieces to in the round) and the shape (tapered body, short rows across the back, set-in sleeves and saddles,) and monkeyed with the pattern (added two repeats of the center panel, dropped one of the patterns, extended the ribbing pattern into the body of the sweater,) and made a v-neck.","title":"Knitting Catchup"},{"content":"Short rows are this little magic thing that you can do in hand knitting where you knit a row over only some of the stitches to create a piece of fabric that is longer in one part than in another, and also when coordinated correctly a sequence of short rows can cause the fabric to curve and bend. It\u0026rsquo;s makes things possible in hand knitting that aren\u0026rsquo;t at all possible using other textile process, because you\u0026rsquo;re creating a piece of fabric that is a custom shape in three dimensions. Short rows appear for lots of reasons: dropping the bottom edge of the sweater, sloping the shoulders of a sweater, forming a top-down-sleeve cap, or to turn a sock heel, for example.\nThe problem with short rows, is that it can be quite difficult to hide them in an existing fabric, because there\u0026rsquo;s a little gap or hole where the short row starts. Solving this little problem has given rise to an entire discipline of knitting techniques. Most of the time, after knitting a short row, you \u0026ldquo;wrap\u0026rdquo; the next stitch, which you slip and move the yearn around, as the basis of a transition. This anchors the yarn from the short row, and helps reduces an awkward effect on the stitches that you knit.\nThe problem is that the \u0026ldquo;wrap\u0026rdquo; is (often) visiable in your knitting, so that\u0026rsquo;s in ideal. The options are:\nin garter stitch the best thing to do is to just ignore the wrap. If the tension of the wrap itself is right, the wrap doesn\u0026rsquo;t look out of place, and you can just ignore it. most of the time you want to \u0026ldquo;process\u0026rdquo; the wraps, by picking up the wrap and knitting it together with the (now formerly) wrapped stitch. Getting the tension on this is quite hard, though you can twist the wrap or clean things up in the next row most of the time. If you\u0026rsquo;re having trouble with wrapping: consider wrapping in the other direction. So that you move the yarn to the front of the piece before or after slipping the stitch, depending on what you\u0026rsquo;re presently doing. In my practice, wrapping front to back is slightly tighter than wrapping back to front, but I think this depends on your hands a bit. rather than wrapping the stitch, a small yarn over can serve the same purpose, as long as you\u0026rsquo;re sure to knit the yarn over with the stitch that was not part of the short row. Use this if your wraps are too tight. for sock heels, and in some other situations, you can skip the wrap, but slip the first stitch of the short row and decease the short sliped stitch into the next (non-short row) stitch on the next row. This works only in situations where you can stand to decrease 1 stitch for every short row turn. Some folks enjoy not processing the wraps, in situations where you\u0026rsquo;re knitting a sleeve cap off from the shoulder down in a sweater. You can see the wraps, but because you\u0026rsquo;re doing lots of sequential short rows, it looks like a pattern. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/short-row-wrapping/","summary":"Short rows are this little magic thing that you can do in hand knitting where you knit a row over only some of the stitches to create a piece of fabric that is longer in one part than in another, and also when coordinated correctly a sequence of short rows can cause the fabric to curve and bend. It\u0026rsquo;s makes things possible in hand knitting that aren\u0026rsquo;t at all possible using other textile process, because you\u0026rsquo;re creating a piece of fabric that is a custom shape in three dimensions. Short rows appear for lots of reasons: dropping the bottom edge of the sweater, sloping the shoulders of a sweater, forming a top-down-sleeve cap, or to turn a sock heel, for example.\nThe problem with short rows, is that it can be quite difficult to hide them in an existing fabric, because there\u0026rsquo;s a little gap or hole where the short row starts.","title":"Short Row Wrapping"},{"content":"As a degenerate emacs user, as it were, I have of course used org-mode a lot, and indeed it\u0026rsquo;s probably the mode I end up doing a huge amount of my editing in, because it\u0026rsquo;s great with text and I end up writing a lot of text. I\u0026rsquo;m not, really, an org mode user in the sense that it\u0026rsquo;s not the system or tool that I use to stay organized, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t really done much development of my own tooling or process around using orgmode to handle document production, and honestly, most of the time I use reStructuredText as my preferred lightweight markup language.\nI was thinking, though, as I was pondering ox-leanpub, what even is org-mode trying to do and what the hell would a product manager do, if faced with org-mode.\nIn some ways, I think it sucks the air out of the fun of hacking on things like emacs to bring all of the \u0026ldquo;professionalization of making software\u0026rdquo; to things like org-mode, and please trust that this meant with a lot of affection for org-mode: this is meant as a thought experiment.\nOrg has a lot going on:\nit provides a set of compelling tools for interacting with hierarchical human-language documents. it\u0026rsquo;s a document markup and structure system, the table editing features are, given the ability to write formula in lisp, basically a spreadsheet. it\u0026rsquo;s a literate programming environment, (babel) it\u0026rsquo;s a document preparation system, (ox) it\u0026rsquo;s a task manager, (agenda) it\u0026rsquo;s a time tracking system, it even has pretty extensive calendar management tools. Perhaps the thing that\u0026rsquo;s most exciting about org-mode is that it provides functionality for all of these kinds of tasks in a single product so you don\u0026rsquo;t have to bounce between lots of different tools to do all of these things.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s got most of the \u0026ldquo;office\u0026rdquo; suite covered, and I think (particularly for new people, but also for people like me,) it\u0026rsquo;s not clear why I would want my task system, my notes system, and my document preparation system to all have their data intermingled in the same set of files. The feeling is a bit unfocused.\nThe reason for this, historically makes sense: org-mode grew out of technically minded academics who were mostly using it as a way of preparing papers, and who end up being responsible for a lot of structuring their own time/work, but who do most of their work alone. With this kind of user story in mind, the gestalt of org-mode really comes together as a product, but otherwise it\u0026rsquo;s definitely a bit all over the place.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think this is bad, and particularly given its history, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to understand why things are the way they are, but I think that it is useful to take a step back and think about the workflow that org supports and inspires, while also not forgetting the kinds of workflows that it precludes, and the ways that org, itself, can create a lot of conceptual overhead.\nThere are also some gaps, in org, as a product, which I think grow out of this history, and I think there are\nThey are, to my mind:\nimporting data, and bidirectional sync. These are really hard problems, and there\u0026rsquo;ve been some decent projects over the years to help get data into org, I think org-trello is the best example I can think about, but it can be a little dodgy, and the \u0026ldquo;import story\u0026rdquo; pales in comparison to the export story. It would be great if: you could use the org interface to interact with and manipulate data that isn\u0026rsquo;t actually in org-files, or at least where the system-of-record for the data isn\u0026rsquo;t org. Google docs? Files in other formats? collaborating with other people. Org-mode files tend to cope really poorly with multiple people editing them at the same time (asynchronously as with git,) and also in cases where not-everyone uses org-mode. One of the side effects of having the implementation of org-features so deeply tied to the structure of text in the org-format, it becomes hard to interact with org-data outside of emacs (again, you can understand why this happens, and it\u0026rsquo;s indeed very lispy,), which means you have to use emacs and use org if you want to collaborate on projects that use org. this might look like some kind of different diff-drivers for git, in addition to some other more novel tools. bi-directional sync might also help with this issue. beyond the agenda, building a story for content that spans multiple-file. Because the files are hierarchical, and org provides a great deal of taxonomic indexing features, you really never need more than one org-file forever, but it\u0026rsquo;s also kind of wild to just keep everything in one file, so you end up with lots of org-files, and while the agenda provides a way to filter out the task and calendar data, it\u0026rsquo;s sort of unclear how to mange multi-file systems for some of the other projects. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case, that because you can inject some configuration at the file level, it can be easy to get stuck. tools for interacting with org content without (interactive or apparent) emacs. While I love emacs as much as the next nerd, I tend to think that having a dependency on emacs is hard to stomach, particularly for collaborative efforts, (though with docker and the increasing size of various runtimes, this may be less relevant.) If it were trivially easy to write build processes that extracted or ran babel programs without needing to be running from within emacs? What if there were an org-export CLI tool? ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-org-mode-product/","summary":"As a degenerate emacs user, as it were, I have of course used org-mode a lot, and indeed it\u0026rsquo;s probably the mode I end up doing a huge amount of my editing in, because it\u0026rsquo;s great with text and I end up writing a lot of text. I\u0026rsquo;m not, really, an org mode user in the sense that it\u0026rsquo;s not the system or tool that I use to stay organized, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t really done much development of my own tooling or process around using orgmode to handle document production, and honestly, most of the time I use reStructuredText as my preferred lightweight markup language.\nI was thinking, though, as I was pondering ox-leanpub, what even is org-mode trying to do and what the hell would a product manager do, if faced with org-mode.\nIn some ways, I think it sucks the air out of the fun of hacking on things like emacs to bring all of the \u0026ldquo;professionalization of making software\u0026rdquo; to things like org-mode, and please trust that this meant with a lot of affection for org-mode: this is meant as a thought experiment.","title":"The Org Mode Product"},{"content":"I can\u0026rsquo;t quite decide if this title is ironic or not. I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying really hard to not be a build system guy, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m succeeding--mostly--but sometimes things come back at us. I may still be smarting from people proposing \u0026ldquo;just using docker\u0026rdquo; to solve any number of pretty irrelevant problems.\nThe thing is that docker does help solve many build problems: before docker, you had to either write code that supported any possible execution environment. This was a lot of work, and was generally really annoying. Because docker provides a (potentially) really stable execution environment, it can make a lot of sense to do your building inside of a docker container, in the same way that folks often do builds in chroot environments (or at least did). Really containers are kind of super-chroots, and it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing to be able to give your development team a common starting point for doing development work. This is cool.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also the case that Docker makes a lot of sense as a de facto standard distribution or deployment form, and in this way it\u0026rsquo;s kind of a really fat binary. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s too big, maybe it\u0026rsquo;s the wrong tool, maybe it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, but for a lot of applications they\u0026rsquo;ll end up running in containers anyway, and treating a docker container like your executable format makes it possible to avoid running into issues that only appear in one (set) of environments.\nAt the same time, I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to keep these use-cases separate: try to avoid using the same container for deploying that you use for development, or even for build systems. This is good because \u0026ldquo;running the [deployment] container\u0026rdquo; shouldn\u0026rsquo;t build software, and it\u0026rsquo;ll also limit the size of your production containers, and avoid unintentionally picking up dependencies. This is, of course, less clear in runtimes that don\u0026rsquo;t have a strong \u0026ldquo;compiled artifacts\u0026rdquo; story, but is still possible.\nThere are some notes/caveats:\nDockerfiles are actually kind of build systems, and under the hood they\u0026rsquo;re just snapshotting the diffs of the filesystem between each step. So they work best if you treat them like build systems: make the steps discrete and small, keep the stable deterministic things early in the build, and push the more ephemeral steps later in the build to prevent unnecessary rebuilding. \u0026ldquo;Build in one container and deploy in another,\u0026rdquo; requires moving artifacts between containers, or being able to run docker-in-docker, which are both possible but may be less obvious than some other workflows. Docker\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;build system qualities,\u0026rdquo; can improve the noop and rebuild-performance of some operations (e.g. the amount of time to rebuild things if you\u0026rsquo;ve just built or only made small changes.) which can be a good measure of the friction that developers experience, because of the way that docker can share/cache between builds. This is often at the expense of making artifacts huge and at greatly expanding the amount of time that the operations can take. This might be a reasonable tradeoff to make, but it\u0026rsquo;s still a tradeoff. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/docker-isnt-a-build-system/","summary":"I can\u0026rsquo;t quite decide if this title is ironic or not. I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying really hard to not be a build system guy, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m succeeding--mostly--but sometimes things come back at us. I may still be smarting from people proposing \u0026ldquo;just using docker\u0026rdquo; to solve any number of pretty irrelevant problems.\nThe thing is that docker does help solve many build problems: before docker, you had to either write code that supported any possible execution environment. This was a lot of work, and was generally really annoying. Because docker provides a (potentially) really stable execution environment, it can make a lot of sense to do your building inside of a docker container, in the same way that folks often do builds in chroot environments (or at least did). Really containers are kind of super-chroots, and it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing to be able to give your development team a common starting point for doing development work.","title":"Docker Isn't A Build System"},{"content":"I end up reviewing a lot of code, and while doing code review (and getting reviews) used to take up a lot of time, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten better at doing reviews, and knowing what\u0026rsquo;s important to comment on and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t\nThe code review process is not there to discover bugs. Write tests to catch bugs, and use the code review process to learn about a specific change, and find things that are difficult to test for. As yourself if something is difficult to follow, and comment on that. If you can\u0026rsquo;t figure out what something is doing, or you have to read it more than once, then that\u0026rsquo;s probably a problem. Examine and comment on the naming of functions. Does the function appear to do what the name indicates. Think about the interface of a piece code: What\u0026rsquo;s exported or public? How many arguments do your functions take? Look for any kind of shared state between functions, particularly data that\u0026rsquo;s mutable or stored in globally accessable, or package local structures. Focus your time on the production-facing, public code, and less on things like tests and private/un-exported APIs. While tests are important, and it\u0026rsquo;s important that there\u0026rsquo;s good test coverage (authors should use coverage tooling to check this), and efficient test execution, beyond this high level aspect, you can keep reading? Put yourself in the shoes of someone who might need to debug this code and think about logging as well as error handling and reporting. Push yourself and others to be able to get very small pieces of code reviewed at a time. Shorter reviews are easier to process and while it\u0026rsquo;s annoying to break a logical component into a bunch of pieces, it\u0026rsquo;s definitely worth it. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/my-code-review-comments/","summary":"I end up reviewing a lot of code, and while doing code review (and getting reviews) used to take up a lot of time, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten better at doing reviews, and knowing what\u0026rsquo;s important to comment on and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t\nThe code review process is not there to discover bugs. Write tests to catch bugs, and use the code review process to learn about a specific change, and find things that are difficult to test for. As yourself if something is difficult to follow, and comment on that. If you can\u0026rsquo;t figure out what something is doing, or you have to read it more than once, then that\u0026rsquo;s probably a problem. Examine and comment on the naming of functions. Does the function appear to do what the name indicates. Think about the interface of a piece code: What\u0026rsquo;s exported or public? How many arguments do your functions take? Look for any kind of shared state between functions, particularly data that\u0026rsquo;s mutable or stored in globally accessable, or package local structures.","title":"My Code Review Comments"},{"content":"I somehow managed to knit the body of a sweater in like 10 days, and am once again knitting sleeves. I also want to re-knit the cuffs of the last sweater, because I\u0026rsquo;m coming to terms with the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m not really happy with them, and my current plan is to knit the sleeves of my next sweater before knitting the body, which means I have a little bit of a queue for knitting sleeves.\nIn preparation I measured a lot of sleeves of sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;ve knitted (and still have, to try and figure out what I like. Here are my conclusions:\nI realized that regardless of the shoulder shaping, the length of the sleeve should be basically the same. This is based on the assumption that the shoulder fits, and sometimes you can compensate for an illfitting shoulder by modifying the length of the sleeve, so take it with a grain of salt. I\u0026rsquo;ve been measuring sleeves, on drop shouldered garments from the shoulder seam to the cuff, and for other shoulder shaping, from the underarm to the cuff. I prefer sleeves that are a little bloused (e.g. bigger, with a more aggressive cuff,) because I like to wear sweaters over shirts, so having a bit more room makes things more comfortable. Also having floppy cuffs is not great. The sweaters that I like the most, seem to have 21 inch sleeves total with 1-2 inch cuffs. I try and spread the decreases out, as evenly as possible. The cuffs seem to be between 8 and 9 inches around (ideally,) and shoulder apertures tend to be between 18 and 20 inches around. I\u0026rsquo;m tentatively coming out in favor of knitting all sleeves from the shoulder down to the cuff, but I do want to give it a shot going the other way at least a couple of times before I\u0026rsquo;m definitive on that subject. When you knit the sleeves first of a sweater, the process of knitting the sleeve dictates the yoke of the sweater, which means if you\u0026rsquo;re off a bit in the sleeve the whole sweater seems off. Knitting sleeves after the yoke, means you don\u0026rsquo;t have to figure out the entire sweater when you\u0026rsquo;re knitting the cuff. Separating thinking about the sleeve cap from thinking about the sleeve, is conceptually useful (sleeve caps take a while, the process of knitting them in the round is different,) even if this doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense when you\u0026rsquo;re actually knitting or thinking about a garment. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sleeve-survey/","summary":"I somehow managed to knit the body of a sweater in like 10 days, and am once again knitting sleeves. I also want to re-knit the cuffs of the last sweater, because I\u0026rsquo;m coming to terms with the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m not really happy with them, and my current plan is to knit the sleeves of my next sweater before knitting the body, which means I have a little bit of a queue for knitting sleeves.\nIn preparation I measured a lot of sleeves of sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;ve knitted (and still have, to try and figure out what I like. Here are my conclusions:\nI realized that regardless of the shoulder shaping, the length of the sleeve should be basically the same. This is based on the assumption that the shoulder fits, and sometimes you can compensate for an illfitting shoulder by modifying the length of the sleeve, so take it with a grain of salt.","title":"Sleeve Survey"},{"content":"After, my post on what I do for work I thought it\u0026rsquo;d be good to describe the kinds of things that make software easy to work on and collaborative. Here\u0026rsquo;s the list:\nMinimal Documentation. As a former technical writer this is sort of painful, but most programning environments (e.g. languages) have idioms and patterns that you can follow for how to organize code, run tests and build artifacts. it\u0026rsquo;s ok if your project has exceptional requirements that require you to break the rules in some way, but the conventions should be obvious and the justification for rule-breaking should be plain. If you adhere to convention, you don\u0026rsquo;t need as much documentation. It\u0026rsquo;s paradoxical, because better documentation is supposed to facilitate accessibility, but too much documentation is sometimes an indication that things are weird and hard. Make it Easy To Run. I\u0026rsquo;d argue that the most difficult (and frustrating) part of writing software is getting it to run everywhere that you might want it to run. Writing software that runs, even does what you want on your own comptuer is relatively, easy: making it work on someone else\u0026rsquo;s computer is hard. One of the big advantages of developing software that runs as web apps means that you (mostly) get to control (and limit) where the software runs. Making it possible to easily run a piece of software on any computer it might reasonably run (e.g. developer\u0026rsquo;s computers, user\u0026rsquo;s computers and/or production environments.) Your software itself, should be responsible for managing this environment, to the greatest extent possible. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that you need to use containers or some such, but having packaging and install scripts that use well understood idioms and tools (e.g. requirements.txt, virtualenv, makefiles, etc.) is good. Clear Dependencies. Software is all built upon other pieces of software, and the versions of those libraries are important to record, capture, and recreate. Now it\u0026rsquo;s generally a good idea to update dependencies regularly so you can take advantage of improvements from upstream providers, but unless you regularly test against multiple versions of your dependencies (you don\u0026rsquo;t), and can control all of your developer and production environments totally (you can\u0026rsquo;t), then you should provide a single, centralized way of describing your dependencies. Typically strategies involve: vendoring dependencies, using lockfiles (requirements.txt and similar) or build system integration tends to help organize this aspect of a project. Automated Tests. Software requires some kind of testing to ensure that it has the intended behavior, and tests that can run quickly and automatically without requiring users to exercise the software manually is absolutely essential. Tests should run quickly, and it should be possible to run a small group of tests very quickly to support iterative development on a specific area of the code. Indeed, most software development can and should be oriented toward the experience of writing tests and exercising new features with tests above pretty much everything else. The best test suites exercise the code at many levels, ranging from very small unit tests to ensure the correct behavior of the functions and methods, to higher level tests that test the functionality of higher-order functions and methods, and full integration tests that test the entire system. Continuous Integration. Continuous integration system\u0026rsquo;s are tools that support development and ensure that changes to a code pass a more extensive range of tests than are readily available to developers. CI systems are also useful for automating other aspects of a project (releases, performance testing, etc.) A well maintained CI environment provide the basis for commonality for larger projects with a larger number for projects larger groups of developers, and is all but required to ensure a well supported automated test system and well managed dependency. Files and Directories Make Sense. Code is just text in files, and software is just a lot of code. Different languages and frameworks have different expectations about how code is organized, but you should be able to have a basic understanding of the software and be able to browse the files, and be able to mostly understand what components are and how they relate to each other based on directory names, and should be able to (roughly) understand what\u0026rsquo;s in a file and how the files relate to eachother based on their names. In this respect, shorter files, when possible are nice, are directory structures that have limited depth (wide and shallow,) though there are expections for some programming language. Isolate Components and Provide Internal APIs. Often when we talk about APIs we talk about the interface that users access our software, but larger systems have the same need for abstractions and interfaces internally that we expose for (programmatic) users. These APIs have different forms from public ones (sometimes,) but in general: Safe APIs. The APIs should be easy to use and difficult to use incorrectly. This isn\u0026rsquo;t just \u0026ldquo;make your API thread safe if your users are multithreaded,\u0026rdquo; but also, reduce the possibility for unintended side effects, and avoid calling conventions that are easy to mistake: effects of ordering, positional arguments, larger numbers of arguments, and complicated state management. Good API Ergonomics. The ergonomics of an API is somewhat ethereal, but it\u0026rsquo;s clear when an API has good ergonomics: writing code that uses the API feels \u0026ldquo;native,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s easy to look at calling code and understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on, and errors that make sense and are easy to handle. It\u0026rsquo;s not simply enough for an API to be safe to use, but it should be straightforward and clear. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/values-for-collaborative-codebases/","summary":"After, my post on what I do for work I thought it\u0026rsquo;d be good to describe the kinds of things that make software easy to work on and collaborative. Here\u0026rsquo;s the list:\nMinimal Documentation. As a former technical writer this is sort of painful, but most programning environments (e.g. languages) have idioms and patterns that you can follow for how to organize code, run tests and build artifacts. it\u0026rsquo;s ok if your project has exceptional requirements that require you to break the rules in some way, but the conventions should be obvious and the justification for rule-breaking should be plain. If you adhere to convention, you don\u0026rsquo;t need as much documentation. It\u0026rsquo;s paradoxical, because better documentation is supposed to facilitate accessibility, but too much documentation is sometimes an indication that things are weird and hard. Make it Easy To Run. I\u0026rsquo;d argue that the most difficult (and frustrating) part of writing software is getting it to run everywhere that you might want it to run.","title":"Values for Collaborative Codebases"},{"content":"For a few years, rather than really double down on some kind of electronic note taking and task management tool, I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly done that kind of work long hand, using pen a paper. I\u0026rsquo;m not great at using a pen to write, but it can be fun, and I quite enjoy the opportunity to take a step back, slow down, and focus on some brain work. I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a system, as such, though I did read the bullet journal website and I guess I probably stole some of those ideas.\nI definitely keep a pad on my desk that\u0026rsquo;s some kind of loose idea of \u0026ldquo;things I want to get done today or in the next couple of days.\u0026rdquo; Its less a \u0026ldquo;todo list,\u0026rdquo; in the sense that it\u0026rsquo;s not really an exhaustive list of everything that I need to get done, and I don\u0026rsquo;t use so that I can write things down and then forget them, but more so that when I sit down at my desk, I can more quickly find something useful to do, and that every few days when look over the previous list, I can get a sense of what I\u0026rsquo;ve done (or not done.)\nI also, and this is perhaps more interesting, have a notebook that\u0026rsquo;s just for brainstorming. I\u0026rsquo;ve sort of intentionally selected \u0026ldquo;half-size\u0026rdquo; (e.g. 6.5\u0026quot; x 8.25\u0026quot;) notebooks for this purpose. My routine is pretty simple: make a point of sitting down with a pen and a blank sheet of paper periodically and just brainstorming or writing about a topic. It\u0026rsquo;s really easy to fill a page and often easy enough to fill the facing page with a bunch of ideas about whatever topic it is, usually something I\u0026rsquo;m writing but also sometimes code or another kind of project.\nI think I developed this practice when writing fiction, which I don\u0026rsquo;t seem to do much of, any more, (though I\u0026rsquo;ve been making notes for a couple of years so I suspect it\u0026rsquo;ll happen,) but the idea is less to be systematic about the notes, or to collect them in ways that will be textually useful in the future, but more as a way of focusing and putting all or most of your attention on a problem for a few minutes. Often, though, the notes are useful, both because they force you to answer questions about what you\u0026rsquo;re working on and can function as a creative jumpstart, both when doing work as a thing to review and also because sometimes once you start doing the mental work moving into actual work (typically for me, typing) becomes compelling. I suppose there is almost a meditative quality to the activity.\nWhen thinking about writing fiction, the \u0026ldquo;write a half sized page full of notes\u0026rdquo; about an anecdote from a character, or a bit of worldbuilding, or a description of a plot progression (at any scale,) makes a lot of sense and use a useful exercise.\nIn some ways, I suppose, this is a little bit if a follow up to my Get More Done post, as one of the things I do help begin to make progress or make sure that it\u0026rsquo;s easy to focus and have a clear idea of what to do when you\u0026rsquo;re ready to write more formally.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-one-page-brainstorm/","summary":"For a few years, rather than really double down on some kind of electronic note taking and task management tool, I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly done that kind of work long hand, using pen a paper. I\u0026rsquo;m not great at using a pen to write, but it can be fun, and I quite enjoy the opportunity to take a step back, slow down, and focus on some brain work. I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a system, as such, though I did read the bullet journal website and I guess I probably stole some of those ideas.\nI definitely keep a pad on my desk that\u0026rsquo;s some kind of loose idea of \u0026ldquo;things I want to get done today or in the next couple of days.\u0026rdquo; Its less a \u0026ldquo;todo list,\u0026rdquo; in the sense that it\u0026rsquo;s not really an exhaustive list of everything that I need to get done, and I don\u0026rsquo;t use so that I can write things down and then forget them, but more so that when I sit down at my desk, I can more quickly find something useful to do, and that every few days when look over the previous list, I can get a sense of what I\u0026rsquo;ve done (or not done.","title":"The One Page Brainstorm"},{"content":"i am a self taught programmer. i don\u0026rsquo;t know that i\u0026rsquo;d recommend it to anyone else there are so many different curricula and training programs that are well tested and very efficacious. for lots of historical reasons, many programmers end up being all or mostly self taught: in the early days because programming was vocational and people learned on the job, then because people learned programming on their own before entering cs programs, and more recently because the demand for programmers (and rate of change) for the kinds of programming work that are in the most demand these days. and knowing that it\u0026rsquo;s possible (and potentially cheaper) to teach yourself, it seems like a tempting option.\nthis post, then, is a collection of suggestions, guidelines, and pointers for anyone attempting to teach themselves to program:\nfocus on learning one thing (programming language and problem domain) at a time. there are so many different things you could learn, and people who know how to program seem to have an endless knowledge of different things. knowing one set of tools and one area (e.g. \u0026ldquo;web development in javascript,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;system administration in python,\u0026rdquo;) gives you the framework to expand later, and the truth is that you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to learn additional things more easily once you have a framework to build upon.\nwhen learning something in programming, always start with a goal. have some piece of data that you want to explore or visualize, have a set of files that you want to organize, or something that you want to accomplish. learning how to program without a goal, means that you don\u0026rsquo;t end up asking the kinds of questions that you need to form the right kinds of associations.\nprogramming is all about learning different things: if you end up programming for long enough you\u0026rsquo;ll end up learning different languages, and being able to pick up new things is the real skill.\nbeing able to clearly capture what you were thinking when you write code is basically a programming super power.\nprogramming is about understanding problems1 abstractly and building abstractions around various kinds of problems. being able break apart these problems into smaller core issues, and thinking abstractly about the problem so that you can solve both the problem in front of you and also solve it in the future are crucial skills.\ncollect questions or curiosities as you encounter them, but don\u0026rsquo;t feel like you have to understand everything, and use this to guide your background reading, but don\u0026rsquo;t feel like you have to hunt down the answer to every term you hear or see that you don\u0026rsquo;t already know immediately. if you\u0026rsquo;re pretty rigorous about going back and looking things up, you\u0026rsquo;ll get a pretty good base knowledge over time.\nalways think about the users of your software as you build, at every level. even if you\u0026rsquo;re building software for your own use, think about the future version of yourself that will use that software, imagine that other people might use the interfaces and functions that you write and think about what assumptions they might bring to the table. think about the output that your program, script, or function produces, and how someone would interact with that output.\nthink about the function as the fundamental building block of your software. lower level forms (i.e. statements) are required, but functions are the unit where meaning is created in the context of a program. functions, or methods depending, take input (arguments, ususally, but sometimes also an object in the case of methods) and produce some output, sometimes with some kind of side-effect. the best functions:\nclearly indicate side-effects when possible. have a mechanism for reporting on error conditions (exceptions, return values,) avoid dependencies on external state, beyond what is passed as arguments. are as short as possible. use names that clearly describe the behavior and operations of the function. if programming were human language (english,) you\u0026rsquo;d strive to construct functions that were simple sentences and not paragraph\u0026rsquo;s, but also more than a couple of words/phrases, and you would want these sentences to be clear to understand with limited context. if you have good functions, interfaces are more clear and easier to use, code becomes easier to read and debug, and easier to test.\navoid being too weird. many programmers are total nerds, and you may be too, and that\u0026rsquo;s ok, but it\u0026rsquo;s easier to learn how to do something if there\u0026rsquo;s prior art that you can learn from and copy. on a day-to-day basis, a lot of programming work is just doing something until you get stuck and then you google for the answer. If you\u0026rsquo;re doing something weird--using a programming language that\u0026rsquo;s less widely used, or in a problem space that is a bit out of mainstream, it can be harder to find answers to your problems.\nNotes I use the term \u0026ldquo;problem\u0026rdquo; to cover both things like \u0026ldquo;connecting two components internally\u0026rdquo; and also more broadly \u0026ldquo;satisfying a requirement for users,\u0026rdquo; and programming often includes both of these kinds of work.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-to-become-a-self-taught-programmer/","summary":"i am a self taught programmer. i don\u0026rsquo;t know that i\u0026rsquo;d recommend it to anyone else there are so many different curricula and training programs that are well tested and very efficacious. for lots of historical reasons, many programmers end up being all or mostly self taught: in the early days because programming was vocational and people learned on the job, then because people learned programming on their own before entering cs programs, and more recently because the demand for programmers (and rate of change) for the kinds of programming work that are in the most demand these days. and knowing that it\u0026rsquo;s possible (and potentially cheaper) to teach yourself, it seems like a tempting option.\nthis post, then, is a collection of suggestions, guidelines, and pointers for anyone attempting to teach themselves to program:\nfocus on learning one thing (programming language and problem domain) at a time. there are so many different things you could learn, and people who know how to program seem to have an endless knowledge of different things.","title":"How to Become a Self-Taught Programmer"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always enjoyed watching television while knitting, knitting itself is easy and doesn\u0026rsquo;t take much thought most of the time, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never needed to watch it for every stitch, so it makes sense. I\u0026rsquo;ve never really felt as engaged with audio-only media while knitting for long stretches, though I do try sometimes.\nMy tastes, in this context, tend toward procedurals: not particularly because I love crime and/or medical shows, but because the cadence of the story telling is a good fit for my attentional needs while knitting, and the overall predictability means my attention can drift in and out as need be. It\u0026rsquo;s also helpful that a lot of procedurals have had long runs which means there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of material to keep me busy. Things that I\u0026rsquo;ve watched recently:\nBones has been quite fun to watch because it sort of fits the bill correctly, there are a lot of episodes. It\u0026rsquo;s also very interesting because I remember watching some of the early seasons more or less when they aired, and it totally feels dated now. Stargate Universe, which couldn\u0026rsquo;t stick with, despite a lot of affection for earlier Stargate shows, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t stick it out. I think that some combination of the show being very dark and isolating, with a few of the characters being deeply unlikeable. The last few years of Star Trek TNG and Voyager. Which were nice, but it\u0026rsquo;s super weird to watch television that\u0026rsquo;s this episodic, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve watched a lot of Star Trek here and there, I must confess that I didn\u0026rsquo;t really watch them systematically before. Eureka is totally absurd, but was fun to watch, and was the right kind of \u0026ldquo;delightful, but mostly lighthearted.\u0026rdquo; White Collar has been fun. I\u0026rsquo;m particularly partial to shows set in New York City, and it\u0026rsquo;s fun to be able to pick out the settings from familiar places. Sometimes the characters are great, and sometimes some of the \u0026ldquo;character growth\u0026rdquo; stories are a little bit ham-fisted. I also wonder what\u0026rsquo;d be like if there was a buddy-cop show where there characters were actually gay and not just incredibly homoerotic all the time. I\u0026rsquo;m not super sure where to go after this, and would gladly take suggestions if people have favorites. I haven\u0026rsquo;t tended to enjoy things like CSI very much, for whatever that\u0026rsquo;s worth.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/quarantine-knitting-television/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always enjoyed watching television while knitting, knitting itself is easy and doesn\u0026rsquo;t take much thought most of the time, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never needed to watch it for every stitch, so it makes sense. I\u0026rsquo;ve never really felt as engaged with audio-only media while knitting for long stretches, though I do try sometimes.\nMy tastes, in this context, tend toward procedurals: not particularly because I love crime and/or medical shows, but because the cadence of the story telling is a good fit for my attentional needs while knitting, and the overall predictability means my attention can drift in and out as need be. It\u0026rsquo;s also helpful that a lot of procedurals have had long runs which means there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of material to keep me busy. Things that I\u0026rsquo;ve watched recently:\nBones has been quite fun to watch because it sort of fits the bill correctly, there are a lot of episodes.","title":"Quarantine Knitting Television"},{"content":"While I took a bunch of time off knitting, I didn\u0026rsquo;t quite take enough time off to completely divest myself of all of my knitting things, which means when I decided rather abruptly that I wanted to start knitting again, I just had to run and pull a couple of boxes down off a shelf and I was off to the races. At the same time, after many years of small apartment living I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a very large collection of gadgets or yarn.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a great interest in building a collection of knitting things, or yarn outside of material I have proximal use for, in the nearly 10 years, since I was a regular knitter, the state of the craft has evolved or at least changed a bit. While my collection of things hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed much, the following objects\nknitting needles, have always been complicated. I tend to work at fairly small sizes which makes needle flex/bend an issue, and my skin tends to react with nickle which rules out a lot of options. at my mother\u0026rsquo;s recommendation I got a few Dyak Craft knitting needles. The small-sized interchangeable needles are great, and the US 0s (which has been my primary needle) don\u0026rsquo;t bend or flex at all, and have good cable/needle joins. I have a small collection of 5 inch carbon fiber, double pointed needles in some small sizes and I think they\u0026rsquo;re just perfect. I\u0026rsquo;m a loose knitter, so the little bit of grip that they have is great. Somehow, metal needles and six inch needles end up hurting my hands, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never used a pair of wooden needles that haven\u0026rsquo;t broken tragically. After a couple of projects where I was just breaking the yarn by hand, or using kitchen scissors, I gave in and bought a 4 inch pair of very plain Gingher embroidery scissors (for 20 bucks,) and they\u0026rsquo;re brilliant for trimming threads and cutting open steeks. As a left handed human, scissors have always been something of a sore spot, and these are quite good. I bought a couple of boxes of those lightbulb-shaped coil-less safety pins. I think the going rate is 6 bucks for a pack of 120, and they come in a few different colors. These are great both as stitch markers for the needle, and also to mark rows while knitting. When I was going through my knitting things, I very quickly found a little cone of 8/2 mercerized cotton that I\u0026rsquo;ve had for years in lime green--a color I\u0026rsquo;ve never even gotten close to knitting with--that\u0026rsquo;s really perfect for setting stitches aside or for provisional cast-ons. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to use smooth, non-wool yarns for this purpose, and you don\u0026rsquo;t use very much of it, but it\u0026rsquo;s great to have around. While I\u0026rsquo;ve had this cone for 16 years or more, and it\u0026rsquo;s conceivable that I may never finish it, it\u0026rsquo;s great. I\u0026rsquo;ve also given in a started storing in-progress knitting projects in draw-string canvas bags purpose built for knitting/crafting, as opposed to the vinyl bags that bed-linens come in, which had previously been my default. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty essential that I be able to keep things safe from cats or the other things in my backpack (not that I leave the house much these days,) so containment is necessary, and avoiding velcro and zippers is ideal. And that\u0026rsquo;s about it!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-gadgets/","summary":"While I took a bunch of time off knitting, I didn\u0026rsquo;t quite take enough time off to completely divest myself of all of my knitting things, which means when I decided rather abruptly that I wanted to start knitting again, I just had to run and pull a couple of boxes down off a shelf and I was off to the races. At the same time, after many years of small apartment living I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a very large collection of gadgets or yarn.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a great interest in building a collection of knitting things, or yarn outside of material I have proximal use for, in the nearly 10 years, since I was a regular knitter, the state of the craft has evolved or at least changed a bit. While my collection of things hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed much, the following objects\nknitting needles, have always been complicated. I tend to work at fairly small sizes which makes needle flex/bend an issue, and my skin tends to react with nickle which rules out a lot of options.","title":"Knitting Gadgets"},{"content":"Editoral Note: this is a follow up to my earlier Principles of Test Oriented Software Development post.\nIn software development, we write tests to make sure the code we write does what we want it to do. Great this is pretty easy to get behind.\nTests sometimes fail.\nThe goal, is that, most of the time when tests fail, it\u0026rsquo;s because the code is broken: you fix the code and the test passes. Sometimes when test fail there\u0026rsquo;s a bug in the test, it makes an assertion that can\u0026rsquo;t or shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be true: these are bad because they mean the test is broken, but all code has bugs, and test code can be broken so that\u0026rsquo;s fine.\nIdeally either pass or fail, and if a test fails it fails repeatedly, with the same error. Unfortunately, this is of course not always true, and tests can fail intermittently if they test something that can change, or the outcome of the test is impacted by some external factor like \u0026ldquo;the test passes if the processor is very fast, and the system does not have IO contention, but fails sometimes as the system slows down.\u0026rdquo; Sometimes tests include (intentionally or not) some notion of \u0026ldquo;randomnesses,\u0026rdquo; and fail intermittently because of this.\nA test suite with intermittent failures is basically the worst. A suite that never fails isn\u0026rsquo;t super valuable, because it probably builds false confidence, a test suite that always fails isn\u0026rsquo;t useful because developers will ignore the results or disable the tests, but a test that fails intermittently, particularly one that fails 10 or 20 percent of the time, means that developers always will always look at the test, or just rerun the test until it passes.\nThere are a couple of things you can do to fix your tests:\nwrite better tests: find sources of non-determinism in your test and rewrite tests to avoid these kinds of \u0026ldquo;flaky\u0026rdquo; outcomes. Sometimes this means restructuring your tests in a more \u0026ldquo;pyramid-like\u0026rdquo; structure, with more unit tests and fewer integration tests (which are likely to be less deterministic.) run tests more reliably: find ways of running your test suite that produce more consistent results. This means running tests in more isolated environments, changing the amount of test parallelism, ensure that tests clean up their environment before they run, and can be as logically isolated as possible. But it\u0026rsquo;s hard to find these tests and you can end up playing wack-a-mole with dodgy tests for a long time, and the urge to just run the tests a second (or third) time to get them to pass so you can merge your change and move on with your work is tempting. This leaves:\nrun tests multiple times: so that a test doesn\u0026rsquo;t pass until it passes multiple times. Many test runner\u0026rsquo;s have some kind of repeated execution mode, and if you can combine with some kind of \u0026ldquo;stop executing after the first fail,\u0026rdquo; then this can be reasonably efficient. Use multiple execution to force the tests to produce more reliable results rather than cover-up or exacerbates the flakiness. run fewer tests: it\u0026rsquo;s great to have a regression suite, but if you have unreliable tests, and you can\u0026rsquo;t use the multi-execution hack to smoke out your bad tests, then running a really full matrix of tests is just going to produce more failures, which means you\u0026rsquo;ll spend more of your time looking at tests, in non-systematic ways, which are unlikely to actually improve code. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/test-multiexecution/","summary":"Editoral Note: this is a follow up to my earlier Principles of Test Oriented Software Development post.\nIn software development, we write tests to make sure the code we write does what we want it to do. Great this is pretty easy to get behind.\nTests sometimes fail.\nThe goal, is that, most of the time when tests fail, it\u0026rsquo;s because the code is broken: you fix the code and the test passes. Sometimes when test fail there\u0026rsquo;s a bug in the test, it makes an assertion that can\u0026rsquo;t or shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be true: these are bad because they mean the test is broken, but all code has bugs, and test code can be broken so that\u0026rsquo;s fine.\nIdeally either pass or fail, and if a test fails it fails repeatedly, with the same error. Unfortunately, this is of course not always true, and tests can fail intermittently if they test something that can change, or the outcome of the test is impacted by some external factor like \u0026ldquo;the test passes if the processor is very fast, and the system does not have IO contention, but fails sometimes as the system slows down.","title":"Test Multi-Execution"},{"content":"This is the follow up to Pattern Fragment 0, Pattern Fragment 1, Pattern Fragment 2, and Pattern Fragment 3.\nCut open the arm hole steeks, and joining new yarn at the top of the opening (after the shoulder seam), pick up stitches around the arm hole, at a rate of 2 stitches for every three rows. I picked up two extra stitches in the \u0026ldquo;corners\u0026rdquo; at the bottom of the sleeve and did not pick up a stitch from the shoulder seam.\nAlso, place markers where the shoulder decreases start at the bottom of the opening.\nKnit 9 stitches, move yarn to front, slip the next stitch, move the yarn to the back, change directions,1 slip the first stitch (again,) and work back to the \u0026ldquo;beginning of the row,\u0026rdquo; at the shoulder seam. Work the next nine stitches, slip the next stitch, move the yarn to the front, change directions, slip the first stitch (again), move the yarn to the back, and knit across.\nWhen you get to a \u0026ldquo;wrapped stitch\u0026rdquo; at the end of this \u0026ldquo;short row,\u0026rdquo; pick up the wrap and knit it together with the stitch it wrapped, and then wrap the next stitch.\nContinue in this manner until you get to the markers where the arm hole shaping ends, before switching to knitting in the round for the main body of the sleeve.\nYou could turn the work, but I do this part just by knitting back backwards.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pattern-fragment-4/","summary":"This is the follow up to Pattern Fragment 0, Pattern Fragment 1, Pattern Fragment 2, and Pattern Fragment 3.\nCut open the arm hole steeks, and joining new yarn at the top of the opening (after the shoulder seam), pick up stitches around the arm hole, at a rate of 2 stitches for every three rows. I picked up two extra stitches in the \u0026ldquo;corners\u0026rdquo; at the bottom of the sleeve and did not pick up a stitch from the shoulder seam.\nAlso, place markers where the shoulder decreases start at the bottom of the opening.\nKnit 9 stitches, move yarn to front, slip the next stitch, move the yarn to the back, change directions,1 slip the first stitch (again,) and work back to the \u0026ldquo;beginning of the row,\u0026rdquo; at the shoulder seam. Work the next nine stitches, slip the next stitch, move the yarn to the front, change directions, slip the first stitch (again), move the yarn to the back, and knit across.","title":"Pattern Fragment 4"},{"content":"In addition to all of my other weird hobbies and practices, I have a minor fascination with and enjoyment of fountain pens, and have for a long time. After many years of not really writing very much long hand, I decided to get back to it a couple of years ago, and have amassed some pens, but perhaps more relevantly here, some opinions, which I thought I\u0026rsquo;d reflect on here.\nA few notes and pieces of context first:\nI am left handed, which I think makes me more intolerant of slow drying inks, and pens that have unexceptional writing experiences. All of my long-hand writing is for myself. Aside from occasionally writing my name in the cover of a tune books, or something similar. I\u0026rsquo;m color blind, and have stayed away from ink colors in the red/purple spectrum, opting for mostly blue/black, blues, and blue-green, colors (with one exception.) None of these recommendations are sponsored. If you enjoy them, let me know! So here we go.\nI mostly enjoy using Clairefontaine notebooks, mostly wirebound, and mostly as it turns out in the A5 size. I keep a steno pad on my desk for todolists and notes, and a side-bound notebook around for longer form notes. At least Somewhat to my own surprise, my favorite pens appear to be piston-filled German made pens with medium nibs. European pens tend to run more broad than average, and that\u0026rsquo;s definitely true of my favorites: Lamy 2000 is very modern looking and feeling, and it feels great to write with. The nib is very wet, so I\u0026rsquo;ve made a habit of using the quickest drying ink I have, and it\u0026rsquo;s worked out well. If there\u0026rsquo;s a complain, it\u0026rsquo;s that the cap-seal is less than perfect if you are (as I am) an infrequent writer. Pelikan m405 looks like a fountain pen, and while I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s classic, and it is a very smart pen, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t expecting this to be such a perfect pen. It\u0026rsquo;s a joy to write with, the gold nib felt worth it, and the small size is actually an asset (I also have the larger m805, and find myself going for the smaller pen more often.) Also compelling are Namiki Vanishing Point which write really well. and are just really damn cool. The VP pens are great for regular use and short-bursts of writing. As a Japanese pen, the nibs run fine, and the gold nib versions are worth it. The Decimo version is great (smaller and thinner,) but the carbon-fiber ones are pretty compelling. I use the bladder converters, and I like them, but it\u0026rsquo;s a bit weird. Namiki cartrages are great as well, particularly the blue-black ones and they\u0026rsquo;re particularly easy to eye-dropper, if that\u0026rsquo;s your thing. Additionally, I have a Lamy Studio with a fine (steel) nib that\u0026rsquo;s way more compelling. Surprisingly compelling also is the TWSBI Diamond Mini and TWSBI Eco. I think I have a slight preference for the Mini over its larger version, and the Eco as well, but they\u0026rsquo;re all great pens, particularly for the price, and as piston fillers, they\u0026rsquo;re great if you\u0026rsquo;re new to fountain pens or you want to have a color of ink available to you but not in regular rotation. The nibs are steel and you can tell, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a huge detriment. The most compelling inks are, to my mind: Noodler\u0026rsquo;s Q-Eternity, which is a nice blue-black color and dries really fast. Having said that, it\u0026rsquo;s probably still second in my mind to Diamine Twilight, which also dries quite quickly, is a very similar color, and has really compelling shading. Thankfully there\u0026rsquo;s no need to pick favorites. I have a short list of inks that I think are really good and worth being aware of if you\u0026rsquo;re not. First Pilot\u0026rsquo;s Standard Blue Black is a great ink, it dries pretty quick, the bottles are huge, and is somehow not super wet but also wet enough. I have a steel-nibbed Vanishing point pen, and this ink turned it from \u0026ldquo;meh\u0026rdquo; to compelling. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t expecting to really like Diamine Oxblood which is a red-black ink, I suppose, but it\u0026rsquo;s very nice. Finally, the Pilot Iroshizuku inks are very nice, and the colors are cool. I\u0026rsquo;m particularly fond of Tuski-Yo and Shin-Kai, but I suspect it\u0026rsquo;s hard to go wrong. That\u0026rsquo;s it! I probably won\u0026rsquo;t blog much about this, but would definitely be down to chat more about it, or pull together some posts if it\u0026rsquo;s not too for you all.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-selection-of-foutain-pen-recommendations/","summary":"In addition to all of my other weird hobbies and practices, I have a minor fascination with and enjoyment of fountain pens, and have for a long time. After many years of not really writing very much long hand, I decided to get back to it a couple of years ago, and have amassed some pens, but perhaps more relevantly here, some opinions, which I thought I\u0026rsquo;d reflect on here.\nA few notes and pieces of context first:\nI am left handed, which I think makes me more intolerant of slow drying inks, and pens that have unexceptional writing experiences. All of my long-hand writing is for myself. Aside from occasionally writing my name in the cover of a tune books, or something similar. I\u0026rsquo;m color blind, and have stayed away from ink colors in the red/purple spectrum, opting for mostly blue/black, blues, and blue-green, colors (with one exception.) None of these recommendations are sponsored.","title":"A Selection of Foutain Pen Recommendations"},{"content":"I want to like test-driven-development (TDD), but realistically it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I ever actually do. Part of this is because TDD, as canonically described is really hard to actually pratice: TDD involves writing tests before writing code, writing tests which must fail before the implementation is complete or correct, and then using the tests to refactor the code. It\u0026rsquo;s a nice idea, and it definitely leads to better test coverage, but the methodology forces you to iterate inefficiently on aspects of a design, and is rarely viable when extending existing code bases. Therefore, I\u0026rsquo;d like to propose a less-dogmatic alternative: test-oriented-development.1\nI think, in practice, this largely aligns with the way that people write software, and so test oriented development does not describe a new way of writing code or of writing tests, but rather describes the strategies we use to ensure that the code we write is well tested and testable. Also, I think providing these strategies in a single concrete form will present a reasonable and pragmatic alternative to TDD that will make the aim of \u0026ldquo;developing more well tested software\u0026rdquo; more achievable.\nMake state explicit. This is good practice for all kinds of development, but generally, don\u0026rsquo;t put data in global variables, and pass as much state (configuration, services, etc.) into functions and classes rather than \u0026ldquo;magicing\u0026rdquo; them. Methods and functions should be functional. I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to think of myself as a functional programmer, as my tendencies are not very ideological, in this regard, but generally having a functional approach simplifies a lot of decisions and makes it easy to test systems at multiple layers. Most code should be internal and encapsulated. Packages and types with large numbers of exported or public methods should be a warning sign. The best kinds of tests can provide all desired coverage, by testing interfaces themselves, Write few simple tests and varry the data passed to those tests. This is essentially a form of \u0026ldquo;table driven testing,\u0026rdquo; where you write a small sequence of simple cases, and run those tests with a variety of tests. Having test infrastructure that allows this kind of flexibility is a great technique. Begin writing tests as soon as possible. Orthodox TDD suggests that you should start writing tests first, and I think that this is probably one of the reasons that TDD is so hard to adopt. It\u0026rsquo;s also probably the case that orthodox TDD emerged when prototyping was considerably harder than it is today, and as a result TDD just feels like friction, because it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to plan implementations in a test-first sort of way. Having said that, start writing tests as soon as possible. Experiment in tests. Somehow, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to write a lot of code without working an interactive debugger into my day-to-day routine, which means I do a lot of debugging by reading code, and also by writing tests to try and replicate production phenomena in more isolated phenomena. Writing and running tests in systems is a great way to learn about them. Sorry that this doesn\u0026rsquo;t lead to a better acronym.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/principles-of-test-oriented-software-development/","summary":"I want to like test-driven-development (TDD), but realistically it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I ever actually do. Part of this is because TDD, as canonically described is really hard to actually pratice: TDD involves writing tests before writing code, writing tests which must fail before the implementation is complete or correct, and then using the tests to refactor the code. It\u0026rsquo;s a nice idea, and it definitely leads to better test coverage, but the methodology forces you to iterate inefficiently on aspects of a design, and is rarely viable when extending existing code bases. Therefore, I\u0026rsquo;d like to propose a less-dogmatic alternative: test-oriented-development.1\nI think, in practice, this largely aligns with the way that people write software, and so test oriented development does not describe a new way of writing code or of writing tests, but rather describes the strategies we use to ensure that the code we write is well tested and testable.","title":"Principles of Test Oriented Software Development"},{"content":"This is the follow up to Pattern Fragment 0, Pattern Fragment 1, and Pattern Fragment 2.\nStarting at the \u0026ldquo;end\u0026rdquo; of the back of the neck, join new yarn, and with a short circular needle pick up stitches around the steek. Be sure to pick up the first/last stitch of the steek. If you did not set aside a stitch at the bottom of the neck, increase one stitch at the bottom point of the neck.\nWhen you\u0026rsquo;ve completed picking up stitches and have knit (plain) across the back of the neck, begin knitting in Knit 1 Purl One Ribbing, being sure to mirror left-to-right at the bottom of the knit (i.e. if the last stitch before your \u0026ldquo;point\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;bottom of the neck stitch\u0026rdquo; is a knit, then you should knit the stitch right after the point.) Always knit the \u0026ldquo;point\u0026rdquo; stitch. Additionally, on this first row you should do a centered double decrease at the point.\nMy favorite centered double decrease is a \u0026ldquo;slip 2 together, knit 1, lift the two slipped stitches over the knit stitch.\u0026rdquo;\nContinue knitting the collar, in this ribbing, doing one double decrease every other row, for an inch and a half. Bind off normally.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pattern-fragment-3/","summary":"This is the follow up to Pattern Fragment 0, Pattern Fragment 1, and Pattern Fragment 2.\nStarting at the \u0026ldquo;end\u0026rdquo; of the back of the neck, join new yarn, and with a short circular needle pick up stitches around the steek. Be sure to pick up the first/last stitch of the steek. If you did not set aside a stitch at the bottom of the neck, increase one stitch at the bottom point of the neck.\nWhen you\u0026rsquo;ve completed picking up stitches and have knit (plain) across the back of the neck, begin knitting in Knit 1 Purl One Ribbing, being sure to mirror left-to-right at the bottom of the knit (i.e. if the last stitch before your \u0026ldquo;point\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;bottom of the neck stitch\u0026rdquo; is a knit, then you should knit the stitch right after the point.) Always knit the \u0026ldquo;point\u0026rdquo; stitch. Additionally, on this first row you should do a centered double decrease at the point.","title":"Pattern Fragment 3"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s not real secret that I\u0026rsquo;m red-green colorblind. It\u0026rsquo;s not really a major life obstacle: I\u0026rsquo;ve got a wardrobe of clothes in colors that I can easily tell apart, I have developed a number of heuristics for guessing colors that are right enough, and mostly it just creates funny stories where I get a confused look if I try to describe something that might be purple, or have to convince a coworker into reading a graph for me.\nOne challenge historically, however, has been various kinds of text editing color themes: so often they end up having some kind of low contrast situation that\u0026rsquo;s hard to read, or two different aspects of code that should be highlighted differently but aren\u0026rsquo;t. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried lots of themes out, and I would always end up just going back and using default emacs themes, which might not have been great, but I always found it useable.\nUntil Protesilaos Stavrou\u0026rsquo;s Modus Themes, that is.\nThese are super compelling and I never really knew how good an editor could look until I started using it. Like is this what it\u0026rsquo;s really like for the rest of you all the time? Things are clear: I never get confused between type names and function names any more. There are rarely situations where I feel like the highlighting color and text color are the same, which used to happen all the time.\nThe real win, I think, is that Modus\u0026rsquo; makes dark themes accessible to me, in a way that they never were before. For the most part \u0026ldquo;dark themes\u0026rdquo; which have been so popular recently, are just impossible to see clearly (for me), I also find that it\u0026rsquo;s less taxing to spend time in front of screens when darker backgrounds, so being able to spend most of my time doing work in an environment that\u0026rsquo;s easy to read. I tend to keep to light backgrounds when using a laptop and dark backgrounds otherwise.\nThe second piece is that, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve caved in and decided to increase the size of the font, by default in my text editor, at least when I\u0026rsquo;m using my desktop/external monitor. I think my vision is as good as it\u0026rsquo;s been, though I should probably get that checked out post-pandemic. I think there\u0026rsquo;s a balance between \u0026ldquo;small fonts let you see more of the file you\u0026rsquo;re working on,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;larger fonts let you focus on the area that you\u0026rsquo;re editing.\u0026rdquo; When I\u0026rsquo;m writing English, the focus is great, and when writing software I tend to want more context. There\u0026rsquo;s a balance also in wanting to keep an entire line length viable at once, and an ideal words-per-line limit for text that\u0026rsquo;s useful for making things easier to read. So there\u0026rsquo;s some tuning there, depending on what your workload looks like.\nI guess if there is any lesson in this it\u0026rsquo;s that: Comfort matters, and you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t push yourself into uncomfortable display situations if you can.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/editor-themes/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s not real secret that I\u0026rsquo;m red-green colorblind. It\u0026rsquo;s not really a major life obstacle: I\u0026rsquo;ve got a wardrobe of clothes in colors that I can easily tell apart, I have developed a number of heuristics for guessing colors that are right enough, and mostly it just creates funny stories where I get a confused look if I try to describe something that might be purple, or have to convince a coworker into reading a graph for me.\nOne challenge historically, however, has been various kinds of text editing color themes: so often they end up having some kind of low contrast situation that\u0026rsquo;s hard to read, or two different aspects of code that should be highlighted differently but aren\u0026rsquo;t. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried lots of themes out, and I would always end up just going back and using default emacs themes, which might not have been great, but I always found it useable.","title":"Editor Themes"},{"content":"Cloud computing, and with it most of tech, has been really hot on the idea of \u0026ldquo;serverless\u0026rdquo; computing, which is to say, services and applications that are deployed, provisioned, and priced separate from conventional \u0026ldquo;server\u0026rdquo; resources (memory, storage, bandwidth.) The idea is that we can build and expose ways of deploying and running applications and services, even low-level components like \u0026ldquo;databases\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;function execution\u0026rdquo;, in ways that mean that developers and operators can avoid thinking about computers qua computers.\nServerless is the logical extension of \u0026ldquo;platform as a service\u0026rdquo; offerings that have been an oft missed goal for a long time. You write high-level applications and code that is designed to run in some kind of sandbox, with external services provided in some kind of ala carte model via integrations with other products or services. The PaaS, then, can take care of everything else: load balancing incoming requests, redundancy to support higher availability, and any kind of maintains on the lower level infrastructure. Serverless is often just PaaS but more: provide a complete stack of services to satisfy needs (databases, queues, background work, authentication, caching, on top of the runtime,) and then change the pricing model to be based on request/utilization rather than time or resources.\nFundamentally, this allows the separation of concerns between \u0026ldquo;writing software,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;running software,\u0026rdquo; and allows much if not all of the running of software to be delegated to service providers. This kind of separation is useful for developers, and in general runtime environments seem like the kind of thing that most technical organizations shouldn\u0026rsquo;t need to focus on: outsourcing may actually be good right?\nWell maybe.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s be clear, serverless platforms primarily benefit the provider of the services for two reasons:\nserverless models allow providers to build offerings that are multi-tenant, and give provider the ability to reap the benefit of managing request load dynamically and sharing resources between services/clients. utilization pricing for services is always going to be higher than commodity pricing for the underlying components. Running your on servers (\u0026ldquo;metal\u0026rdquo;) is cheaper than using cloud infrastructure, over time, but capacity planning, redundancy, and management overhead, make that difficult in practice. The proposition is that while serverless may cost more per-unit, it has lower management costs for users (fewer people in \u0026ldquo;ops\u0026rdquo; roles,) and is more flexible if request patterns change. So we know why the industry seems to want serverless to be a thing, but does it actually make sense?\nMaybe?\nMakers of software strive (or ought to) make their software easy to run, and having very explicit expectations about the runtime environment, make software easier to run. Similarly, being able to write code without needing to manage the runtime, monitoring, logging, while using packaged services for caching storage and databases seems like a great boon.\nThe downsides to software producers, however, are plentiful:\nvendor lock-in is real, not just because it places your application at the mercy of an external provider, as they do maintenance, or as their API and platform evolves on their timeframe. hosted systems, mean that it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to do local development and testing: either every developer needs to have their own sandbox (at some expense and management overhead), or you have to maintain a separate runtime environment for development. application\u0026rsquo;s cannot have service levels which exceed the service level agreements of their underlying providers. If your serverless platform has an SLA which is less robust than the SLA of your application you\u0026rsquo;re in trouble. when something breaks, there are few operational remedies available. Upstream timeouts are often not changeable and most forms of manual intervention aren\u0026rsquo;t available. pricing probably only makes sense for organizations operating at either small scale (most organizations, particularly for greenfield projects,) but is never really viable for any kind of scale, and probably doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense in any situation at scale. some problems and kinds of software just don\u0026rsquo;t work in a serverless model: big data sets that exceed reasonable RAM requirements, data processing problems which aren\u0026rsquo;t easily parallelizable, workloads with long running operations, or workloads that require lower level network or hardware access. most serverless systems will incur some overhead over dedicated/serverfull alternatives and therefore have worse performance/efficiency, and potentially less predictable performance, especially in very high-volume situations. Where does that leave us?\nMany applications and bespoke tooling should probably use serverless tools. Particularly if your organization is already committed to a specific cloud ecosystem, this can make a lot of sense. Prototypes, unequivocally make sense to rely on off-the-shelf, potentially serverless tooling, particularly for things like runtimes. If and when you begin to productionize applications, find ways to provide useful abstractions between the deployment system and the application. These kinds of architectural choices help address concerns about lock-in and making it easy to do development work without dependencies. Think seriously about your budget for doing operational work, holistically, if possible, and how you plan to manage serverless components (access, cost control, monitoring and alerting, etc.) in connection with existing infrastructure. Serverless is interesting, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to say \u0026ldquo;what if application development happened in a very controlled environment with a very high level set of APIs.\u0026rdquo; There are clearly a lot of cases where it makes a lot of sense, and then a bunch of situations where it\u0026rsquo;s clearly a suspect call. And it\u0026rsquo;s early days, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see in a few years how things work out. In any case, thinking critically about infrastructure is always a good plan.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/does-anyone-actually-want-serverless/","summary":"Cloud computing, and with it most of tech, has been really hot on the idea of \u0026ldquo;serverless\u0026rdquo; computing, which is to say, services and applications that are deployed, provisioned, and priced separate from conventional \u0026ldquo;server\u0026rdquo; resources (memory, storage, bandwidth.) The idea is that we can build and expose ways of deploying and running applications and services, even low-level components like \u0026ldquo;databases\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;function execution\u0026rdquo;, in ways that mean that developers and operators can avoid thinking about computers qua computers.\nServerless is the logical extension of \u0026ldquo;platform as a service\u0026rdquo; offerings that have been an oft missed goal for a long time. You write high-level applications and code that is designed to run in some kind of sandbox, with external services provided in some kind of ala carte model via integrations with other products or services. The PaaS, then, can take care of everything else: load balancing incoming requests, redundancy to support higher availability, and any kind of maintains on the lower level infrastructure.","title":"Does Anyone Actually Want Serverless?"},{"content":"I made a tongue-in-cheek comment on twitter a while back that, k8s is just the contemporary API for mainframe computing., but as someone who is both very skeptical and very excited about the possibilities of kube, this feels like something I want to expand upon.\nA lot of my day-to-day work has some theoretical overlap with kube, including batch processing, service orchestration, and cloud resource allocation. Lots of people I encounter are also really excited by kube, and its interesting to balance that excitement with my understanding of the system, and to watch how Kubernetes(as a platform) impacts the way that we develop applications.\nI also want to be clear that my comparison to mainframes is not a disparagement, not only do I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of benefit to gain by thinking about the historic precedents of our paradigm. I would also assert that the trends in infrastructure over the last 10 or 15 years (e.g. virtualization, containers, cloud platforms) have focused on bringing mainframe paradigms to a commodity environment.\nObservations clusters are static ususally functionally. I know that the public clouds have autoscaling abilities, but having really elastic infrastructure requires substantial additional work, and there are some reasonable upper-limits in terms of numbers of nodes, which makes it hard to actually operate elastically. It\u0026rsquo;s probably also the case that elastic infrastructure has always been (mostly) a pipe dream at most organizations. some things remain quite hard, chiefly in my mind: autoscaling, both of the cluster itself and of the components running within the cluster. Usage patterns are don\u0026rsquo;t always follow easy to detect patterns, so figuring out ways to make infrastructure elastic may take a while to converse or become common. Indeed, VMs and clouds were originally thought to be able to provide some kind of elastic/autoscaling capability, and by and large, most cloud deployments do not autoscale. multi-tenancy, where multiple different kinds of workloads and use-cases run on the same cluster, is very difficult to schedule for reliably or predictably, which leads to a need to overprovision more for mixed workloads. kubernettes does not eliminate the need for an operations team or vendor support for infrastructure or platforms. decentralization has costs, and putting all of the cluster configuration in etcd imposes some limitations, mostly around performance. While I think decentralization is correct, in many ways for Kubernetes, applications developers may need systems that have lower latency and tighter scheduling abilities. The fact that you can add applications to an existing cluster, or host a collection of small applications is mostly a symptom of clusters being over provisioned. This probably isn\u0026rsquo;t bad, and it\u0026rsquo;s almost certainly the case that you can reduce the overprovisioning bias with kube, to some degree. Impact and Predictions applications developed for kubernettes will eventually become difficult or impossible to imagine or run without kubernettes. This has huge impacts on developer experience and test experience. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is a problem, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s a hell of a dependency to pick up. This was true of applications that target mainframes as well. Kubernetes will eventually replace vendor specific APIs for cloud infrastructure for most higher level use cases. Kubernetes will primarily be deployed by Cloud providers (RedHat/IBM, Google, AWS, Azure, etc.) rather than by infrastructure teams. Right now, vendors are figuring out what kinds of additional services users and applications need to run in Kubernetes, but eventually there will be another layer of tooling on top of Kubernetes: logging and metrics collection. deployment operations and configuration, particularly around coordinating dependencies. authentication and credential management. low-latency offline task orchestration. At some point, we\u0026rsquo;ll see a move multi-cluster orchestration, or more powerful tools approach to workload isolation within a single cluster. Conclusion Kubernetes is great, and it\u0026rsquo;s been cool to see how, really in the last couple of years, it\u0026rsquo;s emerged to really bring together things like cloud infrastructure and container orchestration. At the same time, it (of course!) doesn\u0026rsquo;t solve all of the problems that developers have with their infrastructure, and I\u0026rsquo;m really excited to see how people build upon Kubernetes to achieve some of those higher level concerns, and make it easier to build software on top of the resulting platforms.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-kubernetes-cloud-mainframe/","summary":"I made a tongue-in-cheek comment on twitter a while back that, k8s is just the contemporary API for mainframe computing., but as someone who is both very skeptical and very excited about the possibilities of kube, this feels like something I want to expand upon.\nA lot of my day-to-day work has some theoretical overlap with kube, including batch processing, service orchestration, and cloud resource allocation. Lots of people I encounter are also really excited by kube, and its interesting to balance that excitement with my understanding of the system, and to watch how Kubernetes(as a platform) impacts the way that we develop applications.\nI also want to be clear that my comparison to mainframes is not a disparagement, not only do I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of benefit to gain by thinking about the historic precedents of our paradigm. I would also assert that the trends in infrastructure over the last 10 or 15 years (e.","title":"The Kubernetes Cloud Mainframe"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing more and more Common Lips recently and while I reflected a bunch on the experience in a recent post that I recently followed up on .\nWhy Ecosystems Matter Most of my thinking and analysis of CL comes down to the ecosystem: the language has some really compelling (and fun!) features, so the question really comes down to the ecosystem. There are two main reasons to care about ecosystems in programming languages:\na vibrant ecosystem cuts down the time that an individual developer or team has to spend doing infrastructural work, to get started. Ecosystems provide everything from libraries for common tasks as well as conventions and established patterns for the big fundamental application choices, not to mention things like easily discoverable answers to common problems.\nThe more time between \u0026ldquo;I have an idea\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;I have running (proof-of-concept quality) code running,\u0026rdquo; matters so much. Everything is possible to a point, but the more friction between \u0026ldquo;idea\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;working prototype\u0026rdquo; can be a big problem.\na bigger and more vibrant ecosystem makes it more tenable for companies/sponsors (of all sizes) to choose to use Common Lisp for various projects, and there\u0026rsquo;s a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here, admittedly. Companies and sponsors want to be confidence that they\u0026rsquo;ll be able to efficiently replace engineers if needed, integrate or lisp components into larger ecosystems, or be able to get support problems. These are all kind of intangible (and reasonable!) and the larger and more vibrant the ecosystem the less risk there is.\nIn many ways, recent developments in technology more broadly make lisp slightly more viable, as a result of making it easier to build applications that use multiple languages and tools. Things like microservices, better generic deployment orchestration tools, greater adoption of IDLs (including swagger, thrift and GRPC,) all make language choice less monolithic at the organization level.\nGreat Things I\u0026rsquo;ve really enjoyed working with a few projects and tools. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably write more about these individually in the near future, but in brief:\nchanl provides. As a current/recovering Go programmer, this library is very familiar and great to have. In some ways, the API provides a bit more introspection, and flexibility that I\u0026rsquo;ve always wanted in Go. lake is a buildsystem tool, in the tradition of make, but with a few additional great features, like target namespacing, a clear definition between \u0026ldquo;file targets\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;task targets,\u0026rdquo; as well as support for SSH operations, which makes it a reasonable replacement for things like fabric, and other basic deployment tools. cl-docutils provides the basis for a document processing system. I\u0026rsquo;m particularly partial because I\u0026rsquo;ve been using the python (reference) implementation for years, but the implementation is really quite good and quite easy to extend. roswell is really great for getting started with CL, and also for making it possible to test library code against different implementations and versions of the language. I\u0026rsquo;m a touch iffy on using it to install packages into it\u0026rsquo;s own directory, but it\u0026rsquo;s pretty great. ASDF is the \u0026ldquo;buildsystem\u0026rdquo; component of CL, comparable to setuptools in python, and it (particularly the latest versions,) is really great. I like the ability to produce binaries directly from asdf, and the \u0026ldquo;package-inferred\u0026rdquo; is a great addition (basically, giving python-style automatic package discovery.) There\u0026rsquo;s a full Apache Thrift implementation. While I\u0026rsquo;m not presently working on anything that would require a legit RPC protocol, being able to integrate CL components into larger ecosystem, having the option is useful. Hunchensocket adds websockets! Web sockets are a weird little corner of any stack, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to be able to have the option of being able to do this kind of programming. Also CL seems like a really good platform to do make-hash makes constructing hash tables easier, which is sort of needlessly gawky otherwise. ceramic provides bridges between CL and Electron for delivering desktop applications based on web technologies in CL. I kept thinking that there wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be good examples of various things, (there\u0026rsquo;s a Kafka driver! there\u0026rsquo;s support for various other Apache ecosystem components,) but there are, and that\u0026rsquo;s great. There\u0026rsquo;s gaps, of course, but fewer, I think, than you\u0026rsquo;d expect.\nThe Dark Underbelly The biggest problem in CL is probably discoverability: lots of folks are building great tools and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to really know about the projects.\nI thought about phrasing this as a kind of list of things that would be good for supporting bounties or something of the like. Also if I\u0026rsquo;ve missed something, please let me know! I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to look for a lot of things, but discovery is hard.\nQuibbles rove doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to work when multi-threaded results effectively. It\u0026rsquo;s listed in the readme, but I was able to write really trivial tests that crashed the test harness. Chanl would be super lovely with some kind of concept of cancellation (like contexts in Go,) and while it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a bit more thread introspection, given that the threads are somewhat heavier weight, being able to avoid resource leaks seems like a good plan. There doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be any library capable of producing YAML formated data. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a specific need, but it\u0026rsquo;d be nice. it would be nice to have some way of configuring the quicklisp client to be able to prefer quicklisp (stable) but also using ultralisp (or another source) if that\u0026rsquo;s available. Putting the capacity in asdf to produce binaries easily is great, and the only thing missing from buildapp/cl-launch is multi-entry binaries. That\u0026rsquo;d be swell. It might also be easier as an alternative to have support for some git-style sub-commands in a commandline parser (which doesn\u0026rsquo;t easily exist at the moment\u0026rsquo;), but one-command-per-binary, seems difficult to manage. there are no available implementations of a multi-reader single-writer mutex, which seems like an oversite, and yet, here we are. Bigger Projects There are no encoders/decoders for data formats like Apache Parquet, and the protocol buffers implementation don\u0026rsquo;t support proto3. Neither of these are particular deal breakers, but having good tools dealing with common developments, lowers to cost and risk of using CL in more applications. No support for http/2 and therefore gRPC. Having the ability to write software in CL with the knowledge that it\u0026rsquo;ll be able to integrate with other components, is good for the ecosystem. There is no great modern MongoDB driver. There were a couple of early implementations, but there are important changes to the MongoDB protocol. A clearer interface for producing BSON might be useful too. I\u0026rsquo;ve looked for libraries and tools to integrate and manage aspects of things like systemd, docker, and k8s. k8s seems easiest to close, as things like cube can be generated from updated swagger definitions, but there\u0026rsquo;s less for the others. Application delievery remains a bit of an open. I\u0026rsquo;m particularly interested in being able to produce binaries that target other platforms/systems (cross compilation,) but there are a class of problems related to being able to ship tools once built. I\u0026rsquo;m eagerly waiting and concerned about the plight of the current implementations around the move of ARM to Darwin, in the intermediate term. My sense is that the transition won\u0026rsquo;t be super difficult, but it seems like a thing. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/programming-in-the-common-lisp-ecosystem/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing more and more Common Lips recently and while I reflected a bunch on the experience in a recent post that I recently followed up on .\nWhy Ecosystems Matter Most of my thinking and analysis of CL comes down to the ecosystem: the language has some really compelling (and fun!) features, so the question really comes down to the ecosystem. There are two main reasons to care about ecosystems in programming languages:\na vibrant ecosystem cuts down the time that an individual developer or team has to spend doing infrastructural work, to get started. Ecosystems provide everything from libraries for common tasks as well as conventions and established patterns for the big fundamental application choices, not to mention things like easily discoverable answers to common problems.\nThe more time between \u0026ldquo;I have an idea\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;I have running (proof-of-concept quality) code running,\u0026rdquo; matters so much. Everything is possible to a point, but the more friction between \u0026ldquo;idea\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;working prototype\u0026rdquo; can be a big problem.","title":"Programming in the Common Lisp Ecosystem"},{"content":"This is the follow up to Pattern Fragment 0 and Pattern Fragment 1.\nAfter the yoke decreases, in addition to the steeks, there should be 196 stitches in total, or 98 stitches on the front and back of the neck.\nKnit the yoke section plain, until it is--in total--3 inches deep. On the front of the sweater, knit 49 stitches (half), cast on 10 steek stitches, and continue knitting round marking the stitches. Knit the next round plan, and then decrease one stitch on either side of the steek, every other round, 21 or 22 times to shape the neck (42 or 44 rounds). Knit plain from here to the end of the sweater. After the first 2-3 inches of decreases, you may choose to space out the decreases more for a gradual slope, though I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t.\nMeanwhile, when the yoke is 7.5 inches deep, set aside at least 26 stitches in the middle of the back for back-of-neck-shaping, cast on a 10 stitch steak, and then decrease on alternating sides of the steek over the next inch and a half, until the number of stitches decreased at the front is exactly equal to the number of stitches decreased at the back.\nWhen the yoke is 9 inches deep, in the last round bind off the middle two stitch of both of the armhole steeks, ending with knitting across the back one last time. Turn the work inside out and using a three-needle bind off, join and bind off the shoulders.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pattern-fragment-2/","summary":"This is the follow up to Pattern Fragment 0 and Pattern Fragment 1.\nAfter the yoke decreases, in addition to the steeks, there should be 196 stitches in total, or 98 stitches on the front and back of the neck.\nKnit the yoke section plain, until it is--in total--3 inches deep. On the front of the sweater, knit 49 stitches (half), cast on 10 steek stitches, and continue knitting round marking the stitches. Knit the next round plan, and then decrease one stitch on either side of the steek, every other round, 21 or 22 times to shape the neck (42 or 44 rounds). Knit plain from here to the end of the sweater. After the first 2-3 inches of decreases, you may choose to space out the decreases more for a gradual slope, though I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t.\nMeanwhile, when the yoke is 7.5 inches deep, set aside at least 26 stitches in the middle of the back for back-of-neck-shaping, cast on a 10 stitch steak, and then decrease on alternating sides of the steek over the next inch and a half, until the number of stitches decreased at the front is exactly equal to the number of stitches decreased at the back.","title":"Pattern Fragment 2"},{"content":"I have, for a long time, done rather a lot of knitting from yarn directly off of cones, which is maybe a bit weird or at least uncommon, so I thought I\u0026rsquo;d elaborate a bit more:\nTheoretically a cone of yarn, which often contains at least 250 grams or more of yarn, has fewer breaks in it than you\u0026rsquo;d have with an equivalent weight of yarn packaged in skeins or balls. This isn\u0026rsquo;t always true, as cones of yarn do have breaks, sometimes, but if you have a construction that doesn\u0026rsquo;t require you break the yarn very much you can probably save a lot of weaving in by knitting off of a cone. Cones of yarn are often not quite ready for use: most often the yarn hasn\u0026rsquo;t received its final wash, which often means that the spinning oil is still in the wool. This is potentially only true for yarn that\u0026rsquo;s undyed or dyed before being spun, and not the case for yarn that\u0026rsquo;s dyed after being spun. It\u0026rsquo;s also likely the case that the yarn will be wound onto the cone slightly tighter than it would be otherwise. The effect is that the yarn will be a bit limp relative to it\u0026rsquo;s final state. The color can also change a bit. You can knit with the unwashed yarn, but know that the final product will require a bit more washing, and the texture can change. Typically the kind of yarn that\u0026rsquo;s available on cones is boring, which is to say that there are less varieties in general but also of different colors. I think this is actually a great thing: knitting in more plain colors and simple smooth yarns draws attention to the knitting itself, which is often my goal. Cones of yarn feel like buying yarn in bulk, and buying yarn by the pound or kilo (!) means that you can really get a feel for the yarn and it\u0026rsquo;s behavior and knit with it for more than one project. Make a few sweaters, or many pairs of socks. See what happens! Because yarn on cones is often used as a method of distributing undyed yarn to dyers in bulk, you can select materials on the basis of fiber content in a way that can be difficult when you also have to balance color considerations. The clear solution to this problem is, of course, to wind the yarn off the cone into a hank (typically using a niddy nody or similar,) avoid tying the yarn too tightly, soak and wash the yarn gently with wool wash, and then hang it up to dry, and then wind it back into balls. I never do this. I should, but realistically I never do.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-off-the-cone/","summary":"I have, for a long time, done rather a lot of knitting from yarn directly off of cones, which is maybe a bit weird or at least uncommon, so I thought I\u0026rsquo;d elaborate a bit more:\nTheoretically a cone of yarn, which often contains at least 250 grams or more of yarn, has fewer breaks in it than you\u0026rsquo;d have with an equivalent weight of yarn packaged in skeins or balls. This isn\u0026rsquo;t always true, as cones of yarn do have breaks, sometimes, but if you have a construction that doesn\u0026rsquo;t require you break the yarn very much you can probably save a lot of weaving in by knitting off of a cone. Cones of yarn are often not quite ready for use: most often the yarn hasn\u0026rsquo;t received its final wash, which often means that the spinning oil is still in the wool. This is potentially only true for yarn that\u0026rsquo;s undyed or dyed before being spun, and not the case for yarn that\u0026rsquo;s dyed after being spun.","title":"Knitting off the Cone"},{"content":"I said a thing on twitter that I like, and I realized that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t really written (or ranted) much about performance engineering, and it seemed like a good thing to do. Let\u0026rsquo;s get to it.\nMaking software fast is pretty easy:\nMeasure the performance of your software at two distinct levels:\nfigure out how to isolate specific operations, as in unit test, and get the code to run many times, and measure how long the operations take. Run meaningful units of work, as in integration tests, to understand how the components of your system come together. If you\u0026rsquo;re running a service, sometimes tracking the actual timing of actual operations over time, can also be useful, but you need a lot of traffic for this to be really useful. Run these measurements regularly, and track the timing of operations over time so you know when things actually chair.\nWhen you notice something is slow, identify the slow thing and make it faster. This sounds silly, but the things that are slow usually fall into one of a few common cases:\nan operation that you expected to be quick and in memory, actually does something that does I/O (either to a disk or to the network,) an operation allocates more memory than you expect, or allocates memory more often than you expect. there\u0026rsquo;s a loop that takes more time than you expect, because you expected the number of iterations to be small (10?) and instead there are hundreds or thousands of operations. Combine these and you can get some really weird effects, particularly over time. An operation that used to be quick gets slower over time, because the items iterated over grows, or a function is called in a loop that used to be an in-memory only operation, now accesses the database, or something like that. The memory based ones can be trickier (but also end up being less common, at least with more recent programming runtimes.)\nCollect data, and when something gets slower you should fix it.\nWell no.\nMost of the time slow software doesn\u0026rsquo;t really matter. The appearance of slowness or fastness is rarely material to user\u0026rsquo;s experience or the bottom line. If software gets slower, most of the time you should just let it get slower:\nComputers get faster and cheaper over time, so most of the time, as long as your rate of slow down is slow and steady over time, its usually fine to just ride it out. Obviously big slow downs are a problem, but a few percent year-over-year is so rarely worth fixing.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also the case that runtimes and compilers are almost always getting faster, (because compiler devlopers are, in the best way possible, total nerds,) so upgrading the compiler/runtime regularly often offsets regular slow down over time.\nIn the vast majority of cases, the thing that makes software slow is doing I/O (disks or network,) and so your code probably doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter and so what your code does is unlikely to matter much and you can solve the problem by changing how traffic flows through your system.\nFor IX (e.g. web/front-end) code, the logic is a bit different, because slow code actually impacts user experience, and humans notice things. The solution here, though, is often not about making the code faster, but in increasingly pushing a lot of code to \u0026ldquo;the backend,\u0026rdquo; (e.g. avoid prossing data on the front end, and just make sure the backend can always hand you exactly the data you need and want.)\nCode that\u0026rsquo;s fast is often harder to read and maintain: to make code faster, you often have to be careful and avoid using certain features of your programming language or runtime (e.g. avoiding ususing heap allocations, or reducing the size of allocations by encoding data in more terse ways, etc,) or by avoiding libraries that are \u0026ldquo;slower,\u0026rdquo; or that use certain abstractions, all of which makes your code less conventional more difficult to read, and harder to debug. Programmer time is almost always more expensive than compute time, so unless it\u0026rsquo;s big or causing problems, its rarely worth making code harder to read.\nSometimes, making things actually faster is actually required. Maybe you have a lot of data that you need to get through pretty quickly and there\u0026rsquo;s no way around it, or you have some classically difficult algorithm problem (graph search, say,), but in the course of generally building software this happens pretty rarely, and again most of the time pushing the problem \u0026ldquo;up\u0026rdquo; (from the front end to the backend and from the backend to the database, similar,) solves whatever problems you might have.\nWhile there are obviously pathological counter-examples, ususally related to things that happen in loops, but a lot of operations never have to be fast because they sit right next to another operation that\u0026rsquo;s much slower:\nLots of people analyze logging tools for speed, and this is almost always silly because all log messages either have to be written somewhere (I/O) and generally there has to be something to serialize messages (a mutex or functional equivalent,) somewhere because you want to write only one message at a time to the output, so even if you have a really \u0026ldquo;fast logger\u0026rdquo; on its own terms, you\u0026rsquo;re going to hit the I/O or the serializing nature of the problem. Use a logger that has the features you have and is easy to use, speed doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter. anything in HTTP request routing and processing. Because request processing sits next to network operations, often between a database as well as to the client, any sort of gain by using a \u0026ldquo;a faster web framework,\u0026rdquo; is probably immeasurable. Use the ones with the clearest feature set. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-to-write-performant-software-and-why-you-shouldnt/","summary":"I said a thing on twitter that I like, and I realized that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t really written (or ranted) much about performance engineering, and it seemed like a good thing to do. Let\u0026rsquo;s get to it.\nMaking software fast is pretty easy:\nMeasure the performance of your software at two distinct levels:\nfigure out how to isolate specific operations, as in unit test, and get the code to run many times, and measure how long the operations take. Run meaningful units of work, as in integration tests, to understand how the components of your system come together. If you\u0026rsquo;re running a service, sometimes tracking the actual timing of actual operations over time, can also be useful, but you need a lot of traffic for this to be really useful. Run these measurements regularly, and track the timing of operations over time so you know when things actually chair.\nWhen you notice something is slow, identify the slow thing and make it faster.","title":"How to Write Performant Software and Why You Shouldn't"},{"content":"This is the follow up to Pattern Fragment 0\nAfter all of the shaping for the body of the sweater, you\u0026rsquo;ll have 256 stitches. The goal is to have 196 stitches total for the yoke section, or 98 stitches front and back. This gives me a yoke width of 14 inches, which I know fits me well. Your shoulder width may turn out to be deeply personal, modify as needed to accommodate your personal shoulders.\nPut 14 stitches on holders at each underarm, this should be the 7 stitches before and after your round beginning and middle markers. Cast on 10 steek stitches using the backward loop (e-wrap) method above each steek. These are the underarms.\nOn the next row, after creating the steeks, decrease one body stitch into the first and last steek stitches, and continue these decreases in alternating rows, 7 times (14 total rows), until there are 98 stitches ready for the yoke.\nThe division between \u0026ldquo;stitches set aside\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;stitches decreased\u0026rdquo; at the beginning of the yoke are flexible, as long as you\u0026rsquo;ve finished shaping the yoke before its about 2 inches long.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pattern-fragment-1/","summary":"This is the follow up to Pattern Fragment 0\nAfter all of the shaping for the body of the sweater, you\u0026rsquo;ll have 256 stitches. The goal is to have 196 stitches total for the yoke section, or 98 stitches front and back. This gives me a yoke width of 14 inches, which I know fits me well. Your shoulder width may turn out to be deeply personal, modify as needed to accommodate your personal shoulders.\nPut 14 stitches on holders at each underarm, this should be the 7 stitches before and after your round beginning and middle markers. Cast on 10 steek stitches using the backward loop (e-wrap) method above each steek. These are the underarms.\nOn the next row, after creating the steeks, decrease one body stitch into the first and last steek stitches, and continue these decreases in alternating rows, 7 times (14 total rows), until there are 98 stitches ready for the yoke.","title":"Pattern Fragment 1"},{"content":"I finished knitting a sweater a bit ago, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool. Some thoughts:\nThe cuffs ended up being a touch too wide, but it\u0026rsquo;s workable. I think this sweater is really good for wearing over an oxford, and as such slightly wider cuffs may be fine. I used the placket / open neck line reminiscent of 1/4 zip sweaters, but chose for the first time to do garter stitch rather than ribbing for the horizontal parts of the plackets, which worked pretty well, though I might choose to execute them differently in the future. Having said that, I think I want to explore different neck shapes. I didn\u0026rsquo;t do any kind of lower body shaping, which is fine, particularly on such a boxy garment, but waist shaping is a good thing that I\u0026rsquo;d use again in the future. This is the first drop shouldered garment I\u0026rsquo;ve made since the knitting hiatus. It was comforting, but I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll not knit another for quite a while. I\u0026rsquo;d knit this sweater before using exactly these colors, albeit in a thicker weight yarn, and a few times with different color combinations. It was really fun and familiar. HD Shetland Yarn is pretty awesome. This was the first time I\u0026rsquo;d used it for non-stranded knitting, and it was great fun to knit. The previous couple of sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;d made were both knit at about 9 stitches to the inch, and this was about 7 stitches to the inch, which means that it felt like it went really fast. It\u0026rsquo;s wild how we acclimate to things. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/finished-a-sweater/","summary":"I finished knitting a sweater a bit ago, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool. Some thoughts:\nThe cuffs ended up being a touch too wide, but it\u0026rsquo;s workable. I think this sweater is really good for wearing over an oxford, and as such slightly wider cuffs may be fine. I used the placket / open neck line reminiscent of 1/4 zip sweaters, but chose for the first time to do garter stitch rather than ribbing for the horizontal parts of the plackets, which worked pretty well, though I might choose to execute them differently in the future. Having said that, I think I want to explore different neck shapes. I didn\u0026rsquo;t do any kind of lower body shaping, which is fine, particularly on such a boxy garment, but waist shaping is a good thing that I\u0026rsquo;d use again in the future. This is the first drop shouldered garment I\u0026rsquo;ve made since the knitting hiatus.","title":"Finished a Sweater"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on continuous integration systems for a few years, and while the basic principle of CI is straightforward, it seems that most CI deployments are not. This makes sense: project infrastructure is an easy place to defer maintenance during the development cycle, and projects often prioritize feature development and bug fixing over tweaking the buildsystem or test infrastructure, but I almost think there\u0026rsquo;s something more. This post is a consideration of what makes CI hard and perhaps provide a bit of unsolicited advice.\nThe Case for CI I suppose I don\u0026rsquo;t really have to sell anyone on the utility or power of CI: running a set of tests on your software regularly allows developers and teams to catch bugs early, and saves a bucket of developer time, and that is usually enough. Really, though, CI ends up giving you the leverage to solve a number of really gnarly engineering problems:\nhow to release software consistently and regularly. how to support multiple platforms. how to manage larger codebases. anything with distributed systems. how to develop software with larger numbers of contributors. Doing any of these things without CI isn\u0026rsquo;t really particularly viable, particularly at scale. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say, that they \u0026ldquo;come free\u0026rdquo; with CI, but that CI is often the right place to build the kind of infrastructure required to manage distributed systems problems or release complexity.\nBuildsystems are Crucial One thing that I see teams doing some times is addressing their local development processes and tooling with a different set of expectations than they do in CI, and you can totally see and understand how this happens: the CI processes always start from a clean environment, and you often want to handle failures in CI differently than you might handle a failure locally. It\u0026rsquo;s really easy to write a shell script that only runs in CI, and then things sort of accumulate, and eventually there emerge a class of features and phenomena that only exist for and because of CI.\nThe solution is simple: invest in your buildsystem,1 and ensure that there is minimal (or no!) indirection between your buildsystem and your CI configuration. But buildsystems are hard, and in a lot of cases, test harnesses aren\u0026rsquo;t easily integrated into build systems, which complicates the problem for some. Having a good build system isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly about picking a good tool, though there are definitely tradeoffs for different tools, the problem is mostly in capturing logic in a consistent way, providing a good interface, and ensuring that the builds happen as efficiently as possible.\nRegardless, I\u0026rsquo;m a strong believer in centralizing as much functionality in the buildsystem as possible and making sure that CI just calls into build systems. Good build systems:\nallow you to build or rebuild (or test/subtest) only subsets of work, to allow quick iteration during development and debugging. center around a model of artifacts (things produced) and dependencies (requires-type relationships between artifacts). have clear defaults, automatically detect dependencies and information from the environment, and perform any required set up and teardown for the build and/or test. provide a unified interface for the developer workflow, including building, testing, and packaging. The upside, is that effort that you put into the development of a buildsystem pay dividends not just for managing to complexity of CI deployments, but also make the local development stable and approachable for new developers.\nT-Shaped Matrices There\u0026rsquo;s a temptation with CI systems to exercise your entire test suite with a comprehensive and complete range of platforms, modes, and operations. While this works great for some smaller projects, \u0026ldquo;completism\u0026rdquo; is not the best way to model the problem. When designing and selecting your tests and test dimensions, consider the following goals and approaches:\non one, and only one, platform run your entire test suite. This platform should probably be very close to the primary runtime of your environment (e.g. when developing a service that runs on Linux service, your tests should run in a system that resembles the production environment,) or possibly your primary development environment. for all platforms other than your primary platform, run only the tests that are either directly related to that runtime/platform (e.g. anything that might be OS or processor specific,) plus some small subset of \u0026ldquo;verification\u0026rdquo; or acceptance tests. I would expect that these tests should easily be able to complete in 10% of the time of a \u0026ldquo;full build,\u0026rdquo; consider operational variants (e.g. if your product has multiple major-runtime modes, or some kind of pluggable sub-system) and select the set of tests which verifies these modes of operations. In general the shape of the matrix should be t-shaped, or \u0026ldquo;wide across\u0026rdquo; with a long \u0026ldquo;narrow down.\u0026rdquo; The danger more than anything is in running too many tests, which is a problem because:\nmore tests increase the chance of a false negative (caused by the underlying systems infrastructure, service dependencies, or even flakey tests,) which means you risk spending more time chasing down problems. Running tests that provide signal is good, but the chance of false negatives is a liability. responsiveness of CI frameworks is important but incredibly difficult, and running fewer things can improve responsiveness. While parallelism might help some kinds of runtime limitations with larger numbers of tests, this incurs overhead, is expensive. actual failures become redundant, and difficult to attribute failures in \u0026ldquo;complete matrices.\u0026rdquo; A test of certain high level systems may pass or fail consistently along all dimensions creating more noise when something fails. With any degree of non-determinism or chance of a false-negative, running tests more than once just make it difficult to attribute failures to a specific change or an intermittent bug. some testing dimensions don\u0026rsquo;t make sense, leading to wasted time addressing test failures. For example when testing an RPC protocol library that supports both encryption and authentication, it\u0026rsquo;s not meaningful to test the combination of \u0026ldquo;no-encryption\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;authentication,\u0026rdquo; although the other three axes might be interesting. The ultimate goal, of course is to have a test matrix that you are confident will catch bugs when they occur, is easy to maintain, and helps you build confidence in the software that you ship.\nConclusion Many organizations have teams dedicated maintaining buildsystems and CI, and that\u0026rsquo;s often appropriate: keeping CI alive is of huge value. It\u0026rsquo;s also very possible for CI and related tools to accrued complexity and debt in ways that are difficult to maintain, even with dedicated teams: taking a step back and thinking about CI, buildsystems, and overall architecture strategically can be very powerful, and really improve the value provided by the system.\nCanonically buildsystems are things like makefiles (or cmake, scons, waf, rake, npm, maven, ant, gradle, etc.) that are responsible for converting your source files into executable, but the lines get blurry in a lot of languages/projects. For Golang, the go tool plays the part of the buildsystem and test harness without much extra configuration, and many environments have a pretty robust separation between building and testing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/continuous-integration-is-harder-than-you-think/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on continuous integration systems for a few years, and while the basic principle of CI is straightforward, it seems that most CI deployments are not. This makes sense: project infrastructure is an easy place to defer maintenance during the development cycle, and projects often prioritize feature development and bug fixing over tweaking the buildsystem or test infrastructure, but I almost think there\u0026rsquo;s something more. This post is a consideration of what makes CI hard and perhaps provide a bit of unsolicited advice.\nThe Case for CI I suppose I don\u0026rsquo;t really have to sell anyone on the utility or power of CI: running a set of tests on your software regularly allows developers and teams to catch bugs early, and saves a bucket of developer time, and that is usually enough. Really, though, CI ends up giving you the leverage to solve a number of really gnarly engineering problems:","title":"Continuous Integration is Harder Than You Think"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s really easy to over think the way that we approach our work and manage our own time and projects. There are no shortage of tools, services, books, and methods to organizing your days and work, and while there are a lot of good ideas out there, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to get stuck fiddling with how you work, at the expense of actuallying getting work done. While I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely thought about this a lot over time, for a long time, I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly just done things and not really worried much about the things on my to-do list.1\nI think about the way that I work similarly to the way that I think about the way I work with other people. The way you work alone is different from collaboration, but a lot of the principles of thinking about big goals, and smaller actionable items is pretty transferable.\nMy suggestions here are centered around the idea that you have a todo list, and that you spend a few moments a day looking at that list, but actually I think the way I think about my work is really orthogonal to any specific tools. For years, most of my personal planning has revolved around making a few lists in a steno pad once or twice a day,2 though I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to do more digital things recently. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I like it. Again, tools don\u0026rsquo;t matter.\nSmaller Tasks are Always Better It\u0026rsquo;s easy to plan projects from the \u0026ldquo;top down,\u0026rdquo; and identify the major components and plan your work around those components, and the times that I run in to trouble are always the times when my \u0026ldquo;actionable pieces\u0026rdquo; are too big. Smaller pieces help you build momentum, allow to move around to different areas as your attention and focus change, and help you use avalible time effectively (when you want.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s easy to find time in-between meetings, or while the pasta water is boiling, to do something small and quick. It\u0026rsquo;s also very easy to avoid starting something big until you have a big block of unfettered time. The combination of these factors makes bigger tasks liabilities, and more likely to take even longer to complete.\nMulti-Task Different Kinds of Work I read a bunch of articles that suggest that the way to be really productive is to figure out ways of focusing and avoiding context switches. I\u0026rsquo;ve even watched a lot of coworkers organize their schedules and work around these principles, and it\u0026rsquo;s always been something of a mystery for me. It\u0026rsquo;s true that too much multi-tasking and context switching can lead to a fragmented experience and make some longer/complicated tasks harder to really dig into, but it\u0026rsquo;s possible to manage the costs of context switching, by breaking apart bigger projects into smaller projects and leaving notes for your (future) self as you work.\nEven if you don\u0026rsquo;t do a lot of actual multitasking within a given hour or day of time, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to avoid really working on different kinds of projects on the scale of days or weeks, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found that having multiple projects in flight at once actually helps me get more done. In general I think of this as the idea that more projects in flight means that you finish things more often, even if the total number of projects completed is the same in the macro context.\nRegardless, different stages of a project require different kind of attention and energy and having a few things in flight increases the chance that when you\u0026rsquo;re in the mood to do some research, or editing, or planning, you have a project with that kind of work all queued up. I prefer to be able to switch to different kinds of work depending on my attention and mood. In general my work falls into the following kinds of activities:\nplanning (e.g. splitting up big tasks, outlining, design work,) generative work (e.g. writing, coding, etc.) organizational (email, collaboration coordination, user support, public issue tracking, mentoring, integration, etc.) polishing (editing, writing/running tests, publication prepping,) reviewing (code review, editing, etc.) Do the Right Things My general approach is \u0026ldquo;do lots of things and hope something sticks,\u0026rdquo; which makes the small assumption that all of the things you do are important. It\u0026rsquo;s fine if not everything is the most important, and it\u0026rsquo;s fine to do things a bit out of order, but it\u0026rsquo;s probably a problem if you do lots of things without getting important things done.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m not saying establish a priority for all tasks and execute them in strictly that priority, at all. Part of the problem is just making sure that the things on your list are still relevant, and still make sense. As we do work and time passes, we have to rethink or rechart how we\u0026rsquo;re going to complete a project, and that reevaluation is useful.\nPrioritization and task selection is incredibly hard, and it\u0026rsquo;s easy to cast \u0026ldquo;prioritization\u0026rdquo; in over simplified terms. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about prioritization, for my own work, as being a decision based on the following factors:\ndeadline (when does this have to be done: work on things that have hard deadlines or expected completion times, ordered by expected completion date, to avoid needing to cram at the last moment.) potential impact (do things that will have the greatest impact before lesser impact, this is super subjective, but can help build momentum, and give you a chance to decide if lower-impact items are worth doing.) time availability fit (do the biggest thing you can manage with the time you have at hand, as smaller things are easier to fit in later,) level of understanding (work on the things that you understand the best, and give yourself the opportunity to plan things that you don\u0026rsquo;t understand later. I sometimes think about this as \u0026ldquo;do easy things first,\u0026rdquo; but that might be too simple.) time outstanding (how long ago was this task created: do older things first to prevent them from becoming stale.) number of things (or people) that depend on this being done (work on things that will unblock other tasks or collaborators before things that don\u0026rsquo;t have any dependencies, to help increase overall throughput.) Maintain a Pipeline of Work Productivity, for me, has always been about getting momentum on projects and being able to add more things. For work projects, there\u0026rsquo;s (almost) always a backlog of tasks, and the next thing is ususally pretty obvious, but sometimes this is harder for personal projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed a tendency in myself to prefer \u0026ldquo;getting everything done\u0026rdquo; on my personal todo list, which I don\u0026rsquo;t think particularly useful. Having a pipleine of backlog of work is great:\nthere\u0026rsquo;s always something next to do, and there isn\u0026rsquo;t a moment when you\u0026rsquo;ve finished and have to think about new things. keeping a list of things that you are going to do in the more distant future lets you start thinking about how bigger pieces fit together without needint to starting to work on that. you can add big things to your list(s) and then break them into smaller pieces as you make progress. As an experiment, think about your todo list, not as a thing that you\u0026rsquo;d like to finish all of the items, but as list that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be shorter than a certain amount (say 20 or 30?) items with rate of completion (10 a week?) though you should choose your own numbers, and set goals based on what you see yourself getting done over time.\nThough, to be clear, I\u0026rsquo;ve had the pleasure and benefit of working in an organization that lives-and-dies by a bug tracking system, with a great team of folks doing project management. So there are other people who manage sprints, keep an eye on velocity, and make sure that issues don\u0026rsquo;t get stuck.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMy general approach is typically to have a \u0026ldquo;big projects\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;things to think about\u0026rdquo; list and a \u0026ldquo;do this next list\u0026rdquo;, with occasional lists about all the things in a specific big project. In retrospect these map reasonable well to SCRUM/Agile concepts, but it also makes sense.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/get-more-done/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s really easy to over think the way that we approach our work and manage our own time and projects. There are no shortage of tools, services, books, and methods to organizing your days and work, and while there are a lot of good ideas out there, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to get stuck fiddling with how you work, at the expense of actuallying getting work done. While I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely thought about this a lot over time, for a long time, I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly just done things and not really worried much about the things on my to-do list.1\nI think about the way that I work similarly to the way that I think about the way I work with other people. The way you work alone is different from collaboration, but a lot of the principles of thinking about big goals, and smaller actionable items is pretty transferable.\nMy suggestions here are centered around the idea that you have a todo list, and that you spend a few moments a day looking at that list, but actually I think the way I think about my work is really orthogonal to any specific tools.","title":"Get More Done"},{"content":"I took years and years off of knitting: life and priorities change and I must confess that a few years of living in a very small apartment with very active cats made it difficult to have the space to really get into knitting. Anyway, it was really nice to have a hobby sitting on the metaphoric shelf that I could get right back into without a big learning curve.\nThe interesting thing, I think is in observing is that the hiatus made some subtle changes to the way that I approach knitting things, at least relative to what I remember.\nI\u0026rsquo;m less opposed to garter stitch, and have been using little bits of it here and there in some projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten much better at wrap-and-turn short rows in stocking stitch., they now look pretty good and I remember them always looking terrible. I knit the yoke of a sweater back and forth, which is a thing that I would have found unimaginable. Knitting plain stocking stitch in the round has always been a great joy of mine, but in the last couple of months I\u0026rsquo;ve done it rather a lot, knitting 3, or so, plain sweaters, which I\u0026rsquo;ve found quite captivating. I always seemed to feel like I needed some kind of patterning (color work, lace, cables etc) to keep things interesting, and that doesn\u0026rsquo;t really seem to be the case. I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to knit anything post-hiatus on needles other than US 0s (which are quite small,) and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to bug me very much. I continue to make progress on projects and rounds with 250-340 (or so) stitches don\u0026rsquo;t seem oppressively long. The problem of having little gaps between the sleeve of a sweater and the body at the \u0026ldquo;bottom corner,\u0026rdquo; always used to be a big problem, and these days I haven\u0026rsquo;t need to sew up these gaps at all, which is kind of novel. My cast on edges have gotten better: I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get edges that are as elastic as they need to be, and all of the usual problems (a twist, mistakes in rubbing, problems in counting, misjudging the length of the long-tail) haven\u0026rsquo;t been a problem at all. Of course some things didn\u0026rsquo;t change:\nI still don\u0026rsquo;t really like to do things that involve knitting rows very much, and would prefer to knit as much as possible in the round. My taste in yarns seems to be heavy on the \u0026ldquo;boring fine wool\u0026rdquo; and while I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking around at the kinds of yarns that are available and popular, I am (for the most part,) pretty content to stick to the really simple and boring yarn. I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet vanquished a number of old fears/struggles like making an EPS-style sweater that I really like, knitting sleeves from the cuff-up, cardigans. Many of these things are on my list of things to explore more in the future, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see how I fair. It\u0026rsquo;s all very curious! I\u0026rsquo;m excited to see if anything else changes!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lessons-from-the-knitting-hiatus/","summary":"I took years and years off of knitting: life and priorities change and I must confess that a few years of living in a very small apartment with very active cats made it difficult to have the space to really get into knitting. Anyway, it was really nice to have a hobby sitting on the metaphoric shelf that I could get right back into without a big learning curve.\nThe interesting thing, I think is in observing is that the hiatus made some subtle changes to the way that I approach knitting things, at least relative to what I remember.\nI\u0026rsquo;m less opposed to garter stitch, and have been using little bits of it here and there in some projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten much better at wrap-and-turn short rows in stocking stitch., they now look pretty good and I remember them always looking terrible. I knit the yoke of a sweater back and forth, which is a thing that I would have found unimaginable.","title":"Lessons from the Knitting Hiatus"},{"content":"In retrospect I\u0026rsquo;m not totally sure why I released my emacs configuration to the world. I find tweaking Emacs Lisp to be soothing, and in 2020 these kinds of projects are particularly welcome. I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought about making it public: I feel like I get a lot out of Emacs, and I\u0026rsquo;m super aware that it\u0026rsquo;s very hard for people who haven\u0026rsquo;t been using Emacs forever to get a comparable experience.1\nI also really had no idea of what to expect, and while it\u0026rsquo;s still really recent, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed a few things which are worth remarking:\nMaking your code usable for other people really does make it easy for people to find bugs. While it\u0026rsquo;s likely that there are bugs that people never noticed, I found a few things very quickly:\nSomeone reported higher than expected CPU use, and I discovered that there were a number of functions that ran regularly in timers, and I was able to quickly tune some knobs in order to reduce average CPU use by a lot. This is likely to be great both for the user in question, but also because it\u0026rsquo;ll help battery life. The config includes a git submodule (!) with the contents of all third-party packages, mostly to reduce friction for people getting started. Downloading all of the packages fresh from the archive would take a few minutes, and the git clone is just faster. I realized, when someone ran into some problems when running with emacs 28 (e.g. the development/mainline build,) that the byte-compilation formats were different, which made the emacs27 files not work on emacs28. I pushed a second branch. More than anything the experience of getting bug reports and feedback has been great. It both makes it possible to focus time because the impact of the work is really clear, and it also makes it clear to me that I\u0026rsquo;ve accumulated some actually decent Emacs Lisp skills, without really noticing it.2\nI was inspired to make a few structural improvements.\nFor a long time, including after the initial release, I had a \u0026ldquo;settings\u0026rdquo; file, and a \u0026ldquo;local functions\u0026rdquo; file that held code that I\u0026rsquo;d written or coppied from one place or another, and I finally divided them all into packages named tychoish-\u0026lt;thing\u0026gt;.el which allowed me to put all or most of the configuration into use-package forms, which is more consistent and also helps startup time a bit, and makes the directory structure a bit easier. I also cleaned up a bunch of local snippets that I\u0026rsquo;d been carrying around, which wasn\u0026rsquo;t hurting anything but is a bit more clear in the present form. I believe that I\u0026rsquo;ve hit the limit, with regards to startup speed. I\u0026rsquo;d really like to get a GUI emacs instance to start (with no buffers) in less than a second, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem super plausible. I got really close. At this point there are two factors that constrain:\nRaw CPU speed. I have two computers, and the machine with the newer CPU is consistently 25% faster than the slow computer. While the default configuration doesn\u0026rsquo;t do this, my personal configuration sets a font (this is reasonable,) but seems that the time to do this is sometimes observable, and proportional to the number of fonts you have installed on the system.3 Dependencies during the early load. I was able to save about 10% time by moving a function between package to reduce the packages that startup code depended upon. There\u0026rsquo;s just a limit to how much you can clean up here. Having said that, these things can drift pretty easily. I\u0026rsquo;ve added some helper macros with-timer and with-slow-op-timer that I can use to report the timing of operations during startup to make sure that things don\u0026rsquo;t slow down.\nInterestingly, I\u0026rsquo;ve experimented with byte-compiling my local configuration and I haven\u0026rsquo;t really noticed much of a speedup at this scale, so for ease I\u0026rsquo;ve been leaving my own lisp directory unbytecompiled.\nWith everything in order, there\u0026rsquo;s not much to edit! I guess I\u0026rsquo;ll have other things to work on, but I have made a few improvements, generally:\nUsing the alert package for desktop notification, which allowed me to delete a legacy package I\u0026rsquo;ve been using. Deleting code is awesome. I finally figured out how to really take advantage of projectile, which is now configured correctly, and has been a lot of help in my day-to-day work. I\u0026rsquo;ve started using ERC more, and only really using my irssi (in screen) session as a fallback. My IRC/IM setup is a bit beyond the scope of this post but ERC has been a bit fussy to use on machines with intermittent connections, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to tweak that pretty well and have an experience that\u0026rsquo;s quite good. It\u0026rsquo;s been interesting! And I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to continuing to do this!\nSure, other editors also have long setup curves, but Emacs is particularly gnarly in this regard, and I think adoption by new programmers is definitely constrained by this fact.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI never really thought of myself as someone who wrote Emacs Lisp: I\u0026rsquo;ve never really written a piece of software in Emacs, it\u0026rsquo;s always been a function here or there, or modifying some snippet from somewhere. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I have a project or a goal that would involve writing more emacs software, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to recognize that I\u0026rsquo;ve accidentally acquired a skill.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nOn Windows and macOS systems this may not matter, but you may have more fonts installed than you need. I certianly did. Be aware that webbrowsers often downlaod their own fonts separately from system fonts, so having fonts installed is really relevant to your GTK/QT/UI use and not actually to the place where you\u0026rsquo;re likely doing most of your font interaction (e.g. the browser.)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-emacs-configuration-improvements/","summary":"In retrospect I\u0026rsquo;m not totally sure why I released my emacs configuration to the world. I find tweaking Emacs Lisp to be soothing, and in 2020 these kinds of projects are particularly welcome. I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought about making it public: I feel like I get a lot out of Emacs, and I\u0026rsquo;m super aware that it\u0026rsquo;s very hard for people who haven\u0026rsquo;t been using Emacs forever to get a comparable experience.1\nI also really had no idea of what to expect, and while it\u0026rsquo;s still really recent, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed a few things which are worth remarking:\nMaking your code usable for other people really does make it easy for people to find bugs. While it\u0026rsquo;s likely that there are bugs that people never noticed, I found a few things very quickly:\nSomeone reported higher than expected CPU use, and I discovered that there were a number of functions that ran regularly in timers, and I was able to quickly tune some knobs in order to reduce average CPU use by a lot.","title":"Open Source Emacs Configuration Improvements"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve never been really good at the blogging+picture game, and while maybe once upon a time it was technical limitation--taking photos and getting them online was complicated--anymore it\u0026rsquo;s probably not. To this end, I\u0026rsquo;ve started a knitting specific Instagram account as a kind of photoblog for knitting things. It\u0026rsquo;s @gestaltknitting, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested.\nWhile I took this picture a while ago, I must confess that my knitting basically looks the same now.\nThe same, not because I\u0026rsquo;ve made no progress, but because sleeves take a while and it\u0026rsquo;s just plain knitting, so unless you have a very discerning eye, you might miss the details.\nIndeed, I really want my next project to also have a lot of plain knitting with black yarn: I expect the photographs will be captivating. Perhaps it will be enjoyable for people to be able to spot the different patterns of embedded cat hair in the sweaters.\nI get that knitting is visual for a lot of people, and I do like a smart looking sweater as much as the next guy, but I\u0026rsquo;ve always felt somewhat resistant to this view: knitting is about the process and the act more than it is about the product, and so the things that are most exciting aren\u0026rsquo;t the visuals.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s gotten much easier to take high quality pictures, my intention for this book that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing is that it mostly would not be a book with a lot of picture, though we\u0026rsquo;ll see: If anything, I suspect that diagrams and cartoons may be more effective for this kind of application.\nHaving said that, it\u0026rsquo;s nice to see what other people are knitting, and I like the way that the ephemeral nature of instagram stories make it less daunting to post in-progress updates on projects. So I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely been enjoying that.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll see!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-pictures/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve never been really good at the blogging+picture game, and while maybe once upon a time it was technical limitation--taking photos and getting them online was complicated--anymore it\u0026rsquo;s probably not. To this end, I\u0026rsquo;ve started a knitting specific Instagram account as a kind of photoblog for knitting things. It\u0026rsquo;s @gestaltknitting, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested.\nWhile I took this picture a while ago, I must confess that my knitting basically looks the same now.\nThe same, not because I\u0026rsquo;ve made no progress, but because sleeves take a while and it\u0026rsquo;s just plain knitting, so unless you have a very discerning eye, you might miss the details.\nIndeed, I really want my next project to also have a lot of plain knitting with black yarn: I expect the photographs will be captivating. Perhaps it will be enjoyable for people to be able to spot the different patterns of embedded cat hair in the sweaters.","title":"Knitting Pictures"},{"content":"In a recent post I spoke about abandoning a previous project that had gone off the rails, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing more work in Common Lisp, and I wanted to report a bit more, with some recent developments. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of writing about learning to program for the first time, and a fair amount of writing about lisp itself, neither are particularly relevant to me, and I suspect there may be others who might find themselves in a similar position in the future.\nMy Starting Point I already know how to program, and have a decent understanding of how to build and connect software components. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot of Go (Lang) for the last 4 years, and wrote rather a lot of Python before that. I\u0026rsquo;m an emacs user, and I use a Common Lisp window manager, so I\u0026rsquo;ve always found myself writing little bits of lisp here and there, but it never quite felt like I could do anything of consequence in Lisp, despite thinking that Lisp is really cool and that I wanted to write more.\nMy goals and rational are reasonably simple:\nI\u0026rsquo;m always building little tools to support the way that I use computers, nothing is particularly complex, but it\u0026rsquo;d enjoy being able to do this in CL rather than in other languages, mostly because I think it\u0026rsquo;d be nice to not do that in the same languages that I work in professionally.1 Common Lisp is really cool, and I think it\u0026rsquo;d be good if it were more widely used, and I think by writing more of it and writing posts like this is probably the best way to make that happen. Learning new things is always good, and I think having a personal project to learn something new will be a good way of stretching my self as a developer. Most of my development as a programmer has focused on Common Lisp has a bunch of features that I really like in a programming language: real threads, easy to run/produce static binaries, (almost) reasonable encapsulation/isolation features. On Learning Knowing how to program makes learning how to program easier: broadly speaking programming languages are similar to each other, and if you have a good model for the kinds of constructs and abstractions that are common in software, then learning a new language is just about learning the new syntax and learning a bit more about new idioms and figuring out how different language features can make it easier to solve problems that have been difficult in other languages.\nIn a lot of ways, if you already feel confident and fluent in a programming language, learning a second language, is really about teaching yourself how to learn a new language, which you can then apply to all future languages as needed.\nExcept realistically, \u0026ldquo;third languages\u0026rdquo; aren\u0026rsquo;t super common: it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get to the same level of fluency that you have with earlier languages, and often we learn \u0026ldquo;third-and-later\u0026rdquo; languages are learned in the context of some existing code base or project4, so it\u0026rsquo;s hard to generalize our familiarity outside of that context.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also the case that it\u0026rsquo;s often pretty easy to learn a language enough to be able to perform common or familiar tasks, but fluency is hard, particularly in different idioms. Using CL as an excuse to do kinds of programming that I have more limited experience with: web programming, GUI programming, using different kinds of databases.\nMy usual method for learning a new programming language is to write a program of moderate complexity and size but in a problem space that I know pretty well. This makes it possible to gain familiarity, and map concepts that I understand to new concepts, while working on a well understood project. In short, I\u0026rsquo;m left to focus exclusively on \u0026ldquo;how do I do this?\u0026rdquo; type-problems and not \u0026ldquo;is this possible,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what should I do?\u0026rdquo; type-problems.\nConclusion The more I think about it, the more I realize that when we talk about \u0026ldquo;knowing a programming language,\u0026rdquo; inevitably linked to a specific kind of programming: the kind of Lisp that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing has skewed toward the object oriented end of the lisp spectrum with less functional bits than perhaps average. I\u0026rsquo;m also still a bit green when it comes to macros.\nThere are kinds of programs that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have much experience writing:\nGUI things, the front-half of the web stack,2 processing/working with ASTs, (lint tools, etc.) lower-level kind of runtime implementation. There\u0026rsquo;s lots of new things to learn, and new areas to explore!\nNotes There are a few reasons for this. Mostly, I think in a lot of cases, it\u0026rsquo;s right to choose programming languages that are well known (Python, Java+JVM friends, and JavaScript), easy to learn (Go), and fit in with existing ecosystems (which vary a bit by domain,) so while it might the be right choice it\u0026rsquo;s a bit limiting. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that putting some boundaries/context switching between personal projects and work projects could be helpful in improving quality of life.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBecause it\u0026rsquo;s 2020, I\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot of work on \u0026ldquo;web apps,\u0026rdquo; but most of my work has been focused on areas of applications including including data layer, application architecture, and core business logic, and reliability/observability areas, and less with anything material to rendering web-pages. Most projects have a lot of work to be done, and I have no real regrets, but it does mean there\u0026rsquo;s plenty to learn. I wrote an earlier post about the problems of the concept of \u0026ldquo;full-stack engineering\u0026rdquo; which feels relevant.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/learning-common-lisp-again/","summary":"In a recent post I spoke about abandoning a previous project that had gone off the rails, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing more work in Common Lisp, and I wanted to report a bit more, with some recent developments. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of writing about learning to program for the first time, and a fair amount of writing about lisp itself, neither are particularly relevant to me, and I suspect there may be others who might find themselves in a similar position in the future.\nMy Starting Point I already know how to program, and have a decent understanding of how to build and connect software components. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot of Go (Lang) for the last 4 years, and wrote rather a lot of Python before that. I\u0026rsquo;m an emacs user, and I use a Common Lisp window manager, so I\u0026rsquo;ve always found myself writing little bits of lisp here and there, but it never quite felt like I could do anything of consequence in Lisp, despite thinking that Lisp is really cool and that I wanted to write more.","title":"Learning Common Lisp Again"},{"content":"I was doing some knitting pattern math,1 and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share it without a lot of context:\nCast on 228 stitches using the \u0026ldquo;German Twisted\u0026rdquo; method,2, placing a marker half way, after 114 stitches. Knit 2 inches of knit 1 purl 1 ribbing.\nAfter two inches, switch to stocking stitch: knit 21 stitches, increase 1 stitch, place a marker, knit 72 stitches, place a marker, increase 1 stitch, knit 21 more stitches. You should have arrived at the \u0026ldquo;half way\u0026rdquo; marker from before.\nOver the next half (115 stitches), space out 14 increases. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t divide evenly, so try: knit 5, increase 1 stitch and then knit 8 stitches, increase 1 stitch 13 times, or in short hand: K5 M1, * K8 M1, repeat from * 13 times, K5).\nThe \u0026ldquo;first half\u0026rdquo; is the back of the sweater and the \u0026ldquo;second\u0026rdquo; half is the front. Increase one stitch before and after the markers on the back of the sweater 7 times, every 1.5 or 2 inches (somewhere between 10 or 20 rows,) depending on how you\u0026rsquo;d like the taper.\nMeanwhile3 insert 3 sets of short rows across the back of the sweater, which should get wider. For the first short row stop 3 inches from the edges, for the second 2 inches, and for the last 1 inch. I\u0026rsquo;d put an inch or two between each short row, maybe half way between the first three increases.\nNotes I\u0026rsquo;ve not, to be clear, actually knit this yet, though I plan to soon.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nAs in this video, though there are many videos that may be more clear for you. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that learned this method from Meg Swansen and/or Amy Detjin.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI have to say, that the \u0026ldquo;meanwhile\u0026rdquo; part of knitting patterns is always my favorite.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pattern-fragment-0/","summary":"I was doing some knitting pattern math,1 and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share it without a lot of context:\nCast on 228 stitches using the \u0026ldquo;German Twisted\u0026rdquo; method,2, placing a marker half way, after 114 stitches. Knit 2 inches of knit 1 purl 1 ribbing.\nAfter two inches, switch to stocking stitch: knit 21 stitches, increase 1 stitch, place a marker, knit 72 stitches, place a marker, increase 1 stitch, knit 21 more stitches. You should have arrived at the \u0026ldquo;half way\u0026rdquo; marker from before.\nOver the next half (115 stitches), space out 14 increases. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t divide evenly, so try: knit 5, increase 1 stitch and then knit 8 stitches, increase 1 stitch 13 times, or in short hand: K5 M1, * K8 M1, repeat from * 13 times, K5).\nThe \u0026ldquo;first half\u0026rdquo; is the back of the sweater and the \u0026ldquo;second\u0026rdquo; half is the front. Increase one stitch before and after the markers on the back of the sweater 7 times, every 1.","title":"Pattern Fragment 0"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m presently in the middle of knitting a sweater that I knit and designed years and years ago, with only minor modifications, and I have a number of projects that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about that involve \u0026ldquo;reknitting\u0026rdquo; past projects. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I\u0026rsquo;ve peaked, or am out of ideas for knitting, it\u0026rsquo;s very clear to me that novelty isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly my guiding principle as a knitter: I enjoy the process and the act above all else, and the pleasure of wearing handknits is (for me) mostly about custom fit and less about novelty or fashion, exactly.\nThe chance to re-knit things, removes a lot of the questions of a design from the process and not only fix mistakes, but also polish and iterate on a garment with less guess work. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that these projects often feel like returning to an old friend, which is incredibly comforting. Some of these projects, on my backlog include:\nThis basic two-color sweaters (colorblock, I suppose,) that I\u0026rsquo;m presently knitting and have/will knit again where the lower part of the body is in black--or similar very dark--except for the top 3-4 inches of the body in a contrasting color, matched by the sleeves and the collar, which I try and push into the black section. Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Faroe Sweater, from Fishermen\u0026rsquo;s Sweaters, but scaled to actually fit and maybe with a more fitted shoulder. I\u0026rsquo;ve also, apparently knit a very heavy weight version of the Norway sweater that I never wore, and they\u0026rsquo;re such great classic designs that are very fun to knit that knitting them again to modernize them sounds like a fun project. A round pi shawl in a dark color, with no lace work (including using raised bar increases rather than yarn overs), and a contrasing set of stripes along the outer edge. There\u0026rsquo;s this stripe pattern that I think of as \u0026ldquo;Calvin Klein\u0026rdquo; stripes, but I don\u0026rsquo;t kno what the origin of that association is, the basic plan is three stripes, two wide stripes in the contrasting color, and a thin stripe of the original color in between, with the wide stripes being 3 times the width of the interior stripe. I\u0026rsquo;ve knit two sweaters from Joyce Willams\u0026rsquo; Latvian Dreams book, the sweater on the cover and one that I knit from several charts, using yarn that ended up pilling a lot. They were delightful to knit: the patterns were originally weaving charts rather than knitting patterns, and thus had a 4-way radial summary symmetry that was just fun to knit. I\u0026rsquo;d like to try some of these again with better yarn and perhaps use this as a space to explore color work again, but in ways that might be more subtle and also well suited to cardigans and the like. I\u0026rsquo;ve knit a handful of sweaters with all-over mitten or stocking patterns from various extant knitting traditions, mostly Scandinavian and Turkish, and I think it would be fun to revisit these patterns. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reknitting-projects/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m presently in the middle of knitting a sweater that I knit and designed years and years ago, with only minor modifications, and I have a number of projects that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about that involve \u0026ldquo;reknitting\u0026rdquo; past projects. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I\u0026rsquo;ve peaked, or am out of ideas for knitting, it\u0026rsquo;s very clear to me that novelty isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly my guiding principle as a knitter: I enjoy the process and the act above all else, and the pleasure of wearing handknits is (for me) mostly about custom fit and less about novelty or fashion, exactly.\nThe chance to re-knit things, removes a lot of the questions of a design from the process and not only fix mistakes, but also polish and iterate on a garment with less guess work. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that these projects often feel like returning to an old friend, which is incredibly comforting. Some of these projects, on my backlog include:","title":"Reknitting Projects"},{"content":"I never used to like garter stitch1 very much, and hadn\u0026rsquo;t really knit things with a lot of garter stitch. Sure, a scarf here or there in the beginning, and I think I used it for the hem of an early sweater that didn\u0026rsquo;t turn out particularly well. There are so many clever patterns that use a lot of garter stitch, and I\u0026rsquo;d never really felt it. While I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;m rushing to knit or design patterns out of a lot of garter stitch, I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely discovered that I\u0026rsquo;ve softened on it over my hiatus.\nMy earlier discontent with garter stitch was the combination of:\ngarter stitch is quite dense, because the fabric pulls in so much vertically, so it takes a lot of yarn and a lot of time, and results in a warmer fabric that I often don\u0026rsquo;t like' the vertical pull in of the fabric can get pulled out by blocking or by the weight of the fabric which can be rather uneven. normal tension irregularity is super apparent. I\u0026rsquo;ve never much liked the way that knitting things with rows require you to flip the knitting and I don\u0026rsquo;t like the way that this can break up the rhythm of the knitting. the strong horizontal line of the garter ridges always feels awkward to work with. I always struggled to get a selvage edge that I really liked that wasn\u0026rsquo;t totally sloppy. These, however, are tractable problems I realized, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always used a few garter stitches for selvage on the edge of sock heel flaps. The things that I\u0026rsquo;ve realized:\ngarter stitch often works best with very fine yarn, which helps ameliorate the additional bulk, and at least for me, helps provide for more even tension. the look of garter stitch sideways is quite compelling, for me, and in most cases it won\u0026rsquo;t stretch out in the same way. a little bit goes a long way, particularly when embedded in another piece of knitting. I\u0026rsquo;ve settled down and find that knitting, rather than slipping, the first stitch and giving the yarn a slight tug when knitting the second stitch leads to a pretty clean edge. designing with garter stitch is quite compelling, because the ratio of stitches to rows is basically 2:1, because of the way the ridges pull in, you can sort of approach it as \u0026ldquo;square,\u0026rdquo; picking up one stitch for every garter ridge lays very flat, so the math is never very complicated. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a hat where I knit a ~2 inch wide garter stitch strip to fit around my head and then picked up to knit the crown of the hat along one of the sides of the strip, and along the other to knit a lining. I could have used a provisional cast on, of course, but the strip allowed me to be more confident about sizing, and it ends up being pretty sharp.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure I\u0026rsquo;m going to plan to knit things out of primarily garter stitch, but I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely softened rather a lot.\nThe fabric that results from knitting all stitches on both the front and back of the fabric. The fabric is dense, and it grows slowly, because the \u0026ldquo;ridges\u0026rdquo; account for two rows of knitting and it pulls in rather a lot.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/for-and-against-garter-stitch/","summary":"I never used to like garter stitch1 very much, and hadn\u0026rsquo;t really knit things with a lot of garter stitch. Sure, a scarf here or there in the beginning, and I think I used it for the hem of an early sweater that didn\u0026rsquo;t turn out particularly well. There are so many clever patterns that use a lot of garter stitch, and I\u0026rsquo;d never really felt it. While I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;m rushing to knit or design patterns out of a lot of garter stitch, I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely discovered that I\u0026rsquo;ve softened on it over my hiatus.\nMy earlier discontent with garter stitch was the combination of:\ngarter stitch is quite dense, because the fabric pulls in so much vertically, so it takes a lot of yarn and a lot of time, and results in a warmer fabric that I often don\u0026rsquo;t like' the vertical pull in of the fabric can get pulled out by blocking or by the weight of the fabric which can be rather uneven.","title":"For and Against Garter Stitch"},{"content":"Hand knitting provides the opportunity to customize sizing and shaping to fit your body (or that of whomever you\u0026rsquo;re knitting for,) and it\u0026rsquo;s possible to produce garments that really fit, but even though it\u0026rsquo;s possible it\u0026rsquo;s not always easy.\nFirst, measuring a body directly is complicated:\nposture impacts the measurements, and it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to get measurements of the body in the kinds of shapes and positions that you\u0026rsquo;re likely to hold while wearing the garment. ease, or the difference between the actual measurement of your body and the actual measurement of the garment, is both subjective and a matter of preference. For this reason, I normally recommend measuring another sweater that has a fit that you enjoy as a starting point, but there are challenges:\nmeasurements for different styles of sweaters can have different internal proportions: the length of the sleeve depends on the width of the shoulders, and the depth of the armhole most machine produced garments and conventional knitting patterns are based on typical measurements and proportions which are good as starting points but typically leave something to be desired. While people\u0026rsquo;s measurements are broadly similar, and proportional, they\u0026rsquo;re not the same, so if you have slightly longer arms or shoulders that are a bit more broad or angular, the \u0026ldquo;average\u0026rdquo; might be off by an inch or two, which might be enough to care about.\nI\u0026rsquo;d still recommend starting from a garment that you know fits well, and record the garment\u0026rsquo;s measurements as clearly as possible, but also note modifications separately. The basic idea is lay the garment out as flat as possible and measure the garment which is less likely to move than a person. There are three or four measurements that are really critical:\nwidth of body at across the chest below the arms. width of the body at the bottom hem/edge. distance from the middle of the back of the neck to the cuff. length of the sweater from the top of the shoulder to the bottom hem. Sleeve length is pretty stable when measured from the bottom of the sleeve (where it joins the body at the underarm) to the cuff, as this avoids the impact of shoulder shape on the sleeve. Measuring arm length from a common point, the middle back of the neck, to the cuff is also a stable way to take this measurement. You may also require additional measurement\u0026rsquo;s if you want the body of the garment to have contores.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s true that you can deduce other measurements from the four basic measurements, there are other fit considerations that are worth noting: width of the sleeve at/above the cuff and at the shoulder; depth, height, and aperture of the collar; as well as \u0026ldquo;true\u0026rdquo; shoulder width. May of these details I\u0026rsquo;ve figured out empirically and iteratively for myself: it\u0026rsquo;s sometimes difficult to get these measurements correctly from a model garment.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweater-measurements/","summary":"Hand knitting provides the opportunity to customize sizing and shaping to fit your body (or that of whomever you\u0026rsquo;re knitting for,) and it\u0026rsquo;s possible to produce garments that really fit, but even though it\u0026rsquo;s possible it\u0026rsquo;s not always easy.\nFirst, measuring a body directly is complicated:\nposture impacts the measurements, and it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to get measurements of the body in the kinds of shapes and positions that you\u0026rsquo;re likely to hold while wearing the garment. ease, or the difference between the actual measurement of your body and the actual measurement of the garment, is both subjective and a matter of preference. For this reason, I normally recommend measuring another sweater that has a fit that you enjoy as a starting point, but there are challenges:\nmeasurements for different styles of sweaters can have different internal proportions: the length of the sleeve depends on the width of the shoulders, and the depth of the armhole most machine produced garments and conventional knitting patterns are based on typical measurements and proportions which are good as starting points but typically leave something to be desired.","title":"Sweater Measurements"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using company mode, which is a great completion framework for years now, and in genreal, it\u0026rsquo;s phenomenal. For a while, however, I\u0026rsquo;ve had the feeling that I\u0026rsquo;m not getting completion options at exactly the right frequency that I\u0026rsquo;d like. And a completion framework that\u0026rsquo;s a bit sluggish or that won\u0026rsquo;t offer completions that you\u0026rsquo;d expect is a drag. I dug in a bit, and got a much better, because of some poor configuration choices I\u0026rsquo;d made, and I thought I write up my configuration.\nBackend Configuration Company allows for configurable backends, which are just functions that provide completions, many of which are provided in the main company package, but also provided by many third (fourth?) party packages. These backends, then, are in a list which is stored in the company-backends, that company uses to try and find completions. When you get to a moment when you might want to complete things, emacs+company iterate through this list and build a list of expansions. This is pretty straight forward, at least in principle.\nNow company is pretty good at making these backends fast, or trying, particularly when the backend might be irrelevant to whatever you\u0026rsquo;re currently editing--except in some special cases--but it means that the order of things in the list matters sometimes. The convention for configuring company backends is to load the module that provides the backend and then push the new backend onto the list. This mostly works fine, but there are some backends that either aren\u0026rsquo;t very fast or have the effect of blocking backends that come later (because they\u0026rsquo;re theoretically applicable to all modes.) These backends to be careful of are: company-yasnippet, company-ispell, and company-dabbrev.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve never really gotten company-ispell to work (you have to configure a wordlist,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve never been a dabbrev user, but I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely made the mistake to putting the snippet expansion near the front of the list rather than the end. I\u0026rsquo;ve been tweaking things recently, and have settled on the following value for company-backends: :\n(setq company-backends '(company-capf company-keywords company-semantic company-files company-etags company-elisp company-clang company-irony-c-headers company-irony company-jedi company-cmake company-ispell company-yasnippet)) The main caveat is that everything has to be loaded or have autoloads registered appropriately, particularly for things like jedi (python,) clang, and irony. The \u0026ldquo;capf\u0026rdquo; backend is the integration with emacs' default completion-at-point facility, and is the main mechanism by which lap-mode interacts with company, so it\u0026rsquo;s good to keep that at the top.\nMake it Fast I think there\u0026rsquo;s some fear that a completion framework like company could impact the perceived responsiveness of emacs as a whole, and as a result there are a couple of knobs for how to tweak things. Having said that, I\u0026rsquo;ve always run things more aggressively, because I like seeing possible completions fast, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never seen any real impact on apparent performance or battery utilization. use these settings: :\n(setq company-tooltip-limit 20) (setq company-show-numbers t) (setq company-idle-delay 0) (setq company-echo-delay 0) Configure Prompts To be honest, I mostly like the default popup, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to be able to look at more completions and spill over to helm when needed. It\u0026rsquo;s a sometimes thing, but it\u0026rsquo;s quite nice: :\n(use-package helm-company :ensure t :after (helm company) :bind ((\u0026quot;C-c C-;\u0026quot; . helm-company)) :commands (helm-company) :init (define-key company-mode-map (kbd \u0026quot;C-;\u0026quot;) 'helm-company) (define-key company-active-map (kbd \u0026quot;C-;\u0026quot;) 'helm-company)) Full Configuration Some of the following is duplicated above, but here\u0026rsquo;s the full configuration that I run with: :\n(use-package company :ensure t :delight :bind ((\u0026quot;C-c .\u0026quot; . company-complete) (\u0026quot;C-c C-.\u0026quot; . company-complete) (\u0026quot;C-c s s\u0026quot; . company-yasnippet) :map company-active-map (\u0026quot;C-n\u0026quot; . company-select-next) (\u0026quot;C-p\u0026quot; . company-select-previous) (\u0026quot;C-d\u0026quot; . company-show-doc-buffer) (\u0026quot;M-.\u0026quot; . company-show-location)) :init (add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'company-mode) (add-hook 'sgml-mode-hook 'company-mode) (add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'company-mode) (add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'company-mode) (add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook 'company-mode) :config (eval-after-load 'c-mode '(define-key c-mode-map (kbd \u0026quot;[tab]\u0026quot;) 'company-complete)) (setq company-tooltip-limit 20) (setq company-show-numbers t) (setq company-dabbrev-downcase nil) (setq company-idle-delay 0) (setq company-echo-delay 0) (setq company-ispell-dictionary (f-join tychoish-config-path \u0026quot;aspell-pws\u0026quot;)) (setq company-backends '(company-capf company-keywords company-semantic company-files company-etags company-elisp company-clang company-irony-c-headers company-irony company-jedi company-cmake company-ispell company-yasnippet)) (global-company-mode)) (use-package company-quickhelp :after company :config (setq company-quickhelp-idle-delay 0.1) (company-quickhelp-mode 1)) (use-package company-irony :ensure t :after (company irony) :commands (company-irony) :config (add-hook 'irony-mode-hook 'company-irony-setup-begin-commands)) (use-package company-irony-c-headers :ensure t :commands (company-irony-c-headers) :after company-irony) (use-package company-jedi :ensure t :commands (company-jedi) :after (company python-mode)) (use-package company-statistics :ensure t :after company :config (company-statistics-mode)) ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/better-company/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using company mode, which is a great completion framework for years now, and in genreal, it\u0026rsquo;s phenomenal. For a while, however, I\u0026rsquo;ve had the feeling that I\u0026rsquo;m not getting completion options at exactly the right frequency that I\u0026rsquo;d like. And a completion framework that\u0026rsquo;s a bit sluggish or that won\u0026rsquo;t offer completions that you\u0026rsquo;d expect is a drag. I dug in a bit, and got a much better, because of some poor configuration choices I\u0026rsquo;d made, and I thought I write up my configuration.\nBackend Configuration Company allows for configurable backends, which are just functions that provide completions, many of which are provided in the main company package, but also provided by many third (fourth?) party packages. These backends, then, are in a list which is stored in the company-backends, that company uses to try and find completions. When you get to a moment when you might want to complete things, emacs+company iterate through this list and build a list of expansions.","title":"Better Company"},{"content":"At a certain scale, most applications end up having to contend with a class of \u0026ldquo;distributed systems\u0026rdquo; problems: when a single computer or a single copy of an application can\u0026rsquo;t support the required throughput of an application there\u0026rsquo;s not much to do except to distribute it, and therein lies the problem. Taking one of a thing and making many of the thing operate similarly can be really fascinating, and frankly empowering. At some point, all systems become distributed in some way, to a greater or lesser extent. While the underlying problems and strategies are simple enough, distributed systems-type bugs can be gnarly and having some framework for thinking about these kinds of systems and architectures can be useful, or even essential, when writing any kind of software.\nConcerns Application State Applications all have some kind of internal state: configuration, runtime settings, in addition to whatever happens in memory as a result of running the application. When you have more than one copy of a single logical application, you have to put state somewhere. That somewhere is usually a database, but it can be another service or in some kind of shared file resource (e.g. NFS or blob storage like S3.)\nThe challenge is not \u0026ldquo;where to put the state,\u0026rdquo; because it probably doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much, but rather in organizing the application to remove the assumption that state can be stored in the application. This often means avoiding caching data in global variables and avoiding storing data locally on the filesystem, but there are a host of ways in which application state can get stuck or captured, and the fix is generally \u0026ldquo;ensure this data is always read out of some centralized and authoritative service,\u0026rdquo; and ensure that any locally cached data is refreshed regularly and saved centrally when needed.\nIn general, better state management within applications makes code better regardless of how distributed the system is, and when we use the \u0026ldquo;turn it off and turn it back on,\u0026rdquo; we\u0026rsquo;re really just clearing out some bit of application state that\u0026rsquo;s gotten stuck during the runtime of a piece of software.\nStartup and Shutdown Process creation and initialization, as well as shutdown, is difficult in distributed systems. While most configuration and state is probably stored in some remote service (like a database,) there\u0026rsquo;s a bootstrapping process where each process gets enough local configuration required to get that configuration and startup from the central service, which can be a bit delicate.\nShutdown has its own problems set of problems, as specific processes need to be able to complete or safely abort in progress operations.\nFor request driven work (i.e. HTTP or RPC APIs) without statefull or long-running requests (e.g. many websockets and most streaming connections), applications have to stop accepting new connections and let all in progress requests complete before terminating. For other kinds of work, the process has to either complete in progress work or provide some kind of \u0026ldquo;checkpointing\u0026rdquo; approach so that another process can pick up the work later.\nHorizontal Scalability Horizontal scalability, being able to increase the capability of an application by adding more instances of the application rather than creasing the resources allotted to the application itself, is one of the reasons that we build distributed systems in the first place,1 but simply being able to run multiple copies of the application at once isn\u0026rsquo;t always enough, the application needs to be able to effectively distribute it\u0026rsquo;s workloads. For request driven work this is genreally some kind of load balancing layer or strategy, and for other kinds of workloads you need some way to distribute work across the application.\nThere are lots of different ways to provide loadbalancing, and a lot depends on your application and clients, there is specialized software (and even hardware) that provides loadbalancing by sitting \u0026ldquo;in front of\u0026rdquo; the application and routing requests to a backend, but there are also a collection of client-side solutions that work quite well. The complexity of load balancing solutions varies a lot: there are some approaches that just distribute responses \u0026ldquo;evenly\u0026rdquo; (by number) to a single backend one-by-one (\u0026ldquo;round-robin\u0026rdquo;) and some approaches that attempt to distribute requests more \u0026ldquo;fairly\u0026rdquo; based on some reporting of each backend or an analysis of the incoming requests, and the strategy here depends a lot on the requirements of the application or service.\nFor workloads that aren\u0026rsquo;t request driven, systems require some mechanism of distributing work to workers, ususally with some kind of messaging system, though it\u0026rsquo;s possible to get pretty far using a just a normal general purpose database to store pending work. The options for managing, ordering, and distributing the work, is the meat of problem.\nChallenges When thinking about system design or architecture, I tend to start with the following questions.\nhow does the system handle intermittent failures of particular components? what kind of downtime is acceptable for any given component? for the system as a whole? how do operations timeout and get terminated, and how to clients handle these kinds of failures? what are the tolerances for the application in terms of latency of various kinds of operations, and also the tolerances for \u0026ldquo;missing\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;duplicating\u0026rdquo; an operation? when (any single) node or component of the system aborts or restarts abruptly, how does the application/service respond? Does work resume or abort safely? what level of manual intervention is acceptable? Does the system need to node failure autonomously? If so how many nodes? Concepts like \u0026ldquo;node\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;component\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;operation,\u0026rdquo; can mean different things in different systems, and I use the terms somewhat vaguely as a result. These general factors and questions apply to systems that have monolithic architectures (i.e. many copies of a single type of process which performs many functions,) and service-based architectures (i.e. many different processes performing specialized functions.)\nSolutions Ignore the Problem, For Now Many applications run in a distributed fashion while only really addressing parts of their relevant distributed systems problems, and in practice it works out ok. Applications may store most of their data in a database, but have some configuration files that are stored locally: this is annoying, and sometimes an out-of-sync file can lead to some unexpected behavior. Applications may have distributed application servers for all request-driven workloads, but may still have a separate single process that does some kind of coordinated background work, or run cron jobs.\nIgnoring the problem isn\u0026rsquo;t always the best solution in the long term, but making sure that everything is distributed (or able to be distributed,) isn\u0026rsquo;t always the best use of time, and depending the specific application it works out fine. The important part, isn\u0026rsquo;t always to distribute things in all cases, but to make it possible to distribute functions in response to needs: in some ways I think about this as the \u0026ldquo;just in time\u0026rdquo; approach.\nFederation Federated architectures manage distributed systems protocols at a higher level: rather than assembling a large distributed system, build very small systems that can communicate at a high level using some kind of established protocol. The best example of a federated system is probably email, though there are others.2\nFederated systems have more complex protocols that have to be specification based, which can be complicated/difficult to build. Also, federated services have to maintain the ability to interoperate with previous versions and even sometimes non-compliant services, which can be difficult to maintain. Federated systems also end up pushing a lot of the user experience into the clients, which can make it hard to control this aspect of the system.\nOn the upside, specific implementations and instances of a federated service can be quite simple and have straight forward and lightweight implementations. Supporting email for a few users (or even a few hundred) is a much more tractable problem than supporting email for many millions of users.\nDistributed Locks Needing some kind of lock (for mutual exclusion or mutex) is common enough in programming, and provide some kind of easy way to ensure that only a single actor has access to a specific resource. Doing this within a single process involves using kernel (futexes) or programming language runtime implementations, and is simple to conceptualize, and while the concept in a distributed system is functionally the same, the implementation of distributed locks are more complicated and necessarily slower (both the lock themselves, and their impact on the system as a whole).\nAll locks, local or distributed can be difficult to use correctly: the lock must be acquired before using the resource, and it must fully protect the resource, without protecting too much and having a large portion of functionality require the lock. So while locks are required sometimes, and conceptually simple, using them correctly is hard. With that disclaimer, to work, distributed locks require:3\nsome concept of an owner, which must be sufficiently specific (hostname, process identifier,) but that should be sufficiently unique to protect against process restarts, host renaming and collision. lock status (locked/link) and if the lock has different modes, such as a multi-reader/single-writer lock, then that status. a timeout or similar mechanism to prevent deadlocks if the actor holding a lock halts or becomes inaccessible, the lock is eventually released. versioning, to prevent stale actors from modifying the same lock. In the case that actor-1 has a lock and stalls for longer than the timeout period, such that actor-2 gains the lock, when actor-1 runs again it must know that its been usurped. Not all distributed systems require distributed locks, and in most cases, transactions in the data layer, provide most of the isolation that you might need from a distributed lock, but it\u0026rsquo;s a useful concept to have.\nDuplicate Work (Idempotency) For a lot of operations, in big systems, duplicating some work is easier and ultimately faster than coordinating and isolating that work in a single location. For this, having idempotent operations4 is useful. Some kinds of operations and systems make idempotency easier to implement, and in cases where the work is not idempotent (e.g. as in data processing or transformation,) the operation can be, by attaching some kind of clock to the data or operation.5\nUsing clocks and idempotency makes it possible to maintain data consistency without locks. At the same time, some of the same considerations apply. Having all operations duplicated is difficult to scale so having ways for operations to abort early can be useful.\nConsensus Protocols Some operations can\u0026rsquo;t be effectively distributed, but are also not safe to duplicate. Applications can use consensus protocols to do \u0026ldquo;leader election,\u0026rdquo; to ensure that there\u0026rsquo;s only one node \u0026ldquo;in charge\u0026rdquo; at a time, and the protocol. This is common in database systems, where \u0026ldquo;single leader\u0026rdquo; systems are useful for balancing write performance in distributed context. Consensus protocols have some amount of overhead, and are good for systems of a small to moderate size, because all elements of the system must communicate with all other nodes in the system.\nThe two prevailing consensus protocols are Paxos and Raft--pardoning the oversimplification here--with Raft being a simpler and easier to implement imagination of the same underlying principles. I\u0026rsquo;ve characterized consensus as being about leader election, though you can use these protocols to allow a distributed system to reach agreement on any manner of operations or shared state.\nQueues Building a fully generalized distributed application with consensus is a very lofty proposition, and commonly beyond the scope of most applications. If you can characterize the work of your system as discrete units of work (tasks or jobs,) and can build or access a queue mechanism within your application that supports workers on multiple processes, this might be enough to support a great deal of your distributed requirements for the application.\nOnce you have reliable mechanisms and abstractions for distributing work to a queue, scaling the system can be managed outside of the application by using different backing systems, or changing the dispatching layer, and queue optimization is pretty well understood. There are lots of different ways to schedule and distribute queued work, but perhaps this is beyond the scope of this article.\nI wrote one of these, amboy, but things like gearman and celery do this as well, and many of these tools are built on messaging systems like Kafka or AMPQ, or just use general purpose databases as a backend. Keeping a solid abstraction between the applications queue and then messaging system seems good, but a lot depends on your application\u0026rsquo;s workload.\nDelegate to Upstream Services While there are distributed system problems that applications must solve for themselves, in most cases no solution is required! In practice many applications centralize a lot of their concerns in trusted systems like databases, messaging systems, or lock servers. This is probably correct! While distributed systems are required in most senses, distributed systems themselves are rarely the core feature of an application, and it makes sense to delegate these problem to services that that are focused on solving this problem.\nWhile multiple external services can increase the overall operational complexity of the application, implementing your own distributed system fundamentals can be quite expensive (in terms of developer time), and error prone, so it\u0026rsquo;s generally a reasonable trade off.\nConclusion I hope this was as useful for you all as it has been fun for me to write!\nIn most cases, some increase in reliability, by adding redundancy is a strong secondary motivation.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nxmpp , the protocol behind jabber which powered/powers many IM systems is another federated example, and the fediverse points to others. I also suspect that some federation-like features will be used at the infrastructure layer to coordinate between constrained elements (e.g. multiple k8s clusters will use federation for coordination, and maybe multi-cloud/multi-region orchestration as well\u0026hellip;)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThis article about distributed locks in redis was helpful in summarizing the principles for me.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nAn operation is idempotent if it can be performed more than once without changing the outcome. For instance, the operation \u0026ldquo;increment the value by 10\u0026rdquo; is not idempotent because it increments a value every time it runs, so running the operation once is different than running it twice. At the same time the operation \u0026ldquo;set the value to 10\u0026rdquo; is idempotent, because the value is always 10 at the end of the operation.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nClocks can take the form of a \u0026ldquo;last modified timestamp,\u0026rdquo; or some kind of versioning integer associated with a record. Operations can check their local state against a canonical record, and abort if their data is out of date.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/distributed-systems-problems-and-strategies/","summary":"At a certain scale, most applications end up having to contend with a class of \u0026ldquo;distributed systems\u0026rdquo; problems: when a single computer or a single copy of an application can\u0026rsquo;t support the required throughput of an application there\u0026rsquo;s not much to do except to distribute it, and therein lies the problem. Taking one of a thing and making many of the thing operate similarly can be really fascinating, and frankly empowering. At some point, all systems become distributed in some way, to a greater or lesser extent. While the underlying problems and strategies are simple enough, distributed systems-type bugs can be gnarly and having some framework for thinking about these kinds of systems and architectures can be useful, or even essential, when writing any kind of software.\nConcerns Application State Applications all have some kind of internal state: configuration, runtime settings, in addition to whatever happens in memory as a result of running the application.","title":"Distributed Systems Problems and Strategies"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a sweater out of HD (Harrisville Designs) Shetland yarn for the past week or so and it\u0026rsquo;s been great, but there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot to look at because it\u0026rsquo;s just a plain sweater in black yarn, but I thought I\u0026rsquo;d write a bit about the experience.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve knit a lot out of this yarn, mostly in stranded color work, and it\u0026rsquo;s probably the yarn that I have the most of in my possesion, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never really used it alone until recently, and hadn\u0026rsquo;t really knit anything with it in years. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit more than half way through a plain sweater in this yarn, and I find myself entranced.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a simple 2-ply yarn, woolen spun, dyed before spinning, and it comes in hanks (which I\u0026rsquo;ve never used,) and on half pound cones. In color work, I tend to get 8 or 8.5 stitches to the inch (US 2.5/3mm), against a plain 7 stitches to the inch (US 0/2mm), and the fabric is light but solid. There are a bunch of colors, which is why I started using it for color work, including a number of heathers as well as natural colors. I would by a pound (2 cones) of each color to make a stranded sweater, but I always ended up with a lot of left overs. A plain sweater (for me) is under a pound, though I expect fewer left overs.\nThe name \u0026ldquo;Shetland\u0026rdquo; describes the weight, not the fiber contribution: the wool is a blend of unspecified breeds (probably some collection of Corriedale, another Merino cross, and/or Merino), but the effect is quite similar to actual Shetland Wool. While the wool is imported, the Mill is in New England, and the yarn is stocked by many yarn stores that supply weavers (though you can buy directly from the mill as well.) There\u0026rsquo;s something classic about the yarn: it smells like wool (probably the spinning oil, but still,) and the way that the fibers cling to each other makes it a jot to knit with.\nHD Shetland isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly soft, but it isn\u0026rsquo;t rough either. I think part of this is about expectation management: because we know that this isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be yarn to wear against more sensitive skin (wrists, etc.), the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s actually pretty soft is a pleasant surprise. I also think that because the yarn is lofty and woolen spun the ends of the individual fibers end up less likely to be irritating or trigger reactions in the same way that smoother yarns can.\nConclusion: heartily recommend!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/yarn-thoughts-hd-shetland/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a sweater out of HD (Harrisville Designs) Shetland yarn for the past week or so and it\u0026rsquo;s been great, but there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot to look at because it\u0026rsquo;s just a plain sweater in black yarn, but I thought I\u0026rsquo;d write a bit about the experience.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve knit a lot out of this yarn, mostly in stranded color work, and it\u0026rsquo;s probably the yarn that I have the most of in my possesion, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never really used it alone until recently, and hadn\u0026rsquo;t really knit anything with it in years. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit more than half way through a plain sweater in this yarn, and I find myself entranced.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a simple 2-ply yarn, woolen spun, dyed before spinning, and it comes in hanks (which I\u0026rsquo;ve never used,) and on half pound cones. In color work, I tend to get 8 or 8.5 stitches to the inch (US 2.","title":"Yarn Thoughts: HD Shetland"},{"content":"One of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve realized about myself is a knitter is that I really like epic projects, or sequences of projects.\nBefore my knitting hiatus, I bought a kilo of undyed sock yarn--because I liked the fiber content, and I wanted to explore knitting sweaters at finer gauges, because heavier weight yarns always made sweaters that felt too warm. Seemed like a good project. Due to a sizing error, I was only really able to get 2 sweaters out of the cone of yarn, but I think in the future three sweaters from a kilo seems useful. There\u0026rsquo;s something epic about this as a project, and I definitely intend to knit more sweaters in this vein. I was thinking about \u0026ldquo;epic knitting projects,\u0026rdquo; and came up with the following ideas:\n10 identical socks: After many years of having a somewhat hodgepodge and recently well worn collection of socks, this year, I purchased 14 pairs of new socks and it\u0026rsquo;s been great, both because nothing is teetering on the edge of being worn out, and I decided to buy 5 pairs of two different kinds of socks that I like a lot, plus 4 of a heavier weight, and I like that every day is a \u0026ldquo;good sock\u0026rdquo; day. I also like that having a bunch of identical socks socks makes it easier to wash and pair them up. I\u0026rsquo;ve never really knit more than one pair of socks that matched so it seems like a fun challenge. Knit all of Elizabeth Zimmerman\u0026rsquo;s Yoke Sweater shaping variations. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve made about three of them, and none of these yoke sweaters have really ever entered more regular rotation. I think knitting them in lighter weights, and reducing the yoke depth a bit to fit more could help a lot. Knit a collection of sweater\u0026rsquo;s inspired by classic Alice Starmore patterns, but modified for modern sensibilities in terms of fit and shaping. I\u0026rsquo;ve knit three patterns (Henry VIII, Norway, and Faroe) and would gladly knit them all again and I\u0026rsquo;d love to try the cabled sweaters as well. While the designs and stitch patterns of these sweaters are compelling the fit is not, which is probably a feature of these patterns being written in the late 80s and early 90s. I think the changes would be mostly to knit things at a finer gauge (Faroe, Norway, and the cabled sweaters,) but also to modify the shaping for better fits at the shoulder, and maybe modify neck shape for v-necks or open necklines. I\u0026rsquo;ve also thought about knitting a bunch of lace, but I lack the floor space in my current apartment to actually block any kind of lace shawl reasonably.\nAnyone else have Epic-scale knitting projects for this list?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/epic-knitting/","summary":"One of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve realized about myself is a knitter is that I really like epic projects, or sequences of projects.\nBefore my knitting hiatus, I bought a kilo of undyed sock yarn--because I liked the fiber content, and I wanted to explore knitting sweaters at finer gauges, because heavier weight yarns always made sweaters that felt too warm. Seemed like a good project. Due to a sizing error, I was only really able to get 2 sweaters out of the cone of yarn, but I think in the future three sweaters from a kilo seems useful. There\u0026rsquo;s something epic about this as a project, and I definitely intend to knit more sweaters in this vein. I was thinking about \u0026ldquo;epic knitting projects,\u0026rdquo; and came up with the following ideas:\n10 identical socks: After many years of having a somewhat hodgepodge and recently well worn collection of socks, this year, I purchased 14 pairs of new socks and it\u0026rsquo;s been great, both because nothing is teetering on the edge of being worn out, and I decided to buy 5 pairs of two different kinds of socks that I like a lot, plus 4 of a heavier weight, and I like that every day is a \u0026ldquo;good sock\u0026rdquo; day.","title":"Epic Knitting"},{"content":"It seems obligatory to mark the new year, and what a year it was, for me and everyone else: pandemic, quarantine, changing jobs, new hobbies, totally different routines. The backdrop of the pandemic makes looking back (and forward!) so weird, and I find myself asking: will the things that changed in my life still be true when there\u0026rsquo;s less quarantine? did the things that happen in 2020 happen because of the pandemic or would they have happened anyway? The certainty that most (but not all!) of 2021 will, in practical terms, look a lot like 2020 is intense and makes this whole \u0026ldquo;obligatory new years\u0026rdquo; thing a bit harder. Instead of doing something like \u0026ldquo;resolutions\u0026rdquo;/\u0026ldquo;goals\u0026rdquo;--which are always fraught--or some kind of lofty synthetic review of the last year, I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to muse on features of 2020 that I hope and expect to continue in 2021\nKnitting: I took a lot of time off of knitting, but I found that I\u0026rsquo;d been missing it, and I think there are ways that it fits well into my life quarantine or no. It\u0026rsquo;s also been quite fun to write about knitting and knitting projects, and become more engaged with other knitters, and I look forward to knitting things for friends and family. I have list in my head of some nifty ideas for sweaters and some other things to knit, so I expect this to stay. Blogging: I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing blog posts for years and while I\u0026rsquo;ve always found it rewarding, but everything else related to blogging has been hard. During the summer, while I was interviewing for jobs, I wrote blog posts most days, and sort of fell down on posting them, and still have 25 (or so) in the draft folder. Writing is the easy part, it\u0026rsquo;s editing (or letting go!) promotion, and remembering to move things out of draft. I\u0026rsquo;ve spruced up the blog and done some work to automate regular publishing, and it seems like I might be able to make this work! I definitely want to. Pickling: I\u0026rsquo;ve really enjoyed pickling things, and if anything I expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy doing this more after quarnainte when it\u0026rsquo;s easier to share these things. Right now I have some cranberries on the go, and a lot of sauerkraut in the fridge that I\u0026rsquo;m slowly eating. It\u0026rsquo;ll be fun to have more people to share it with! I\u0026rsquo;m excited to explore radishes as well as nappa cabbage. Coffee: I started drinking coffee in 2014 and have mostly had coffee made by other people: tech jobs in NYC have pretty great office coffee, and the process was something of a mystery to me at the beginning. While I had a Chemex and made coffee for myself sometimes, it was definitely a special occasion sort of thing and not part of my regular routine. Now making a pot of coffee is part of my morning routine, and I find it pretty satisfying, and while I definitely look forward to drinking coffee that other people make more often in the future, I really like getting up making a pot of coffee and sitting down to write nearly every morning. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pandemic-new-years/","summary":"It seems obligatory to mark the new year, and what a year it was, for me and everyone else: pandemic, quarantine, changing jobs, new hobbies, totally different routines. The backdrop of the pandemic makes looking back (and forward!) so weird, and I find myself asking: will the things that changed in my life still be true when there\u0026rsquo;s less quarantine? did the things that happen in 2020 happen because of the pandemic or would they have happened anyway? The certainty that most (but not all!) of 2021 will, in practical terms, look a lot like 2020 is intense and makes this whole \u0026ldquo;obligatory new years\u0026rdquo; thing a bit harder. Instead of doing something like \u0026ldquo;resolutions\u0026rdquo;/\u0026ldquo;goals\u0026rdquo;--which are always fraught--or some kind of lofty synthetic review of the last year, I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to muse on features of 2020 that I hope and expect to continue in 2021\nKnitting: I took a lot of time off of knitting, but I found that I\u0026rsquo;d been missing it, and I think there are ways that it fits well into my life quarantine or no.","title":"Pandemic New Years"},{"content":"While I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this knitting book project, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I\u0026rsquo;ve developed something of a backlog of sweaters that I want to knit (for this project, and others,) and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d write them all down for our collective enjoyment.\nA second version of the favorite sweater I knit during college: a plain sweater with a black body, gray at shoulders, drop shoulder, steeks, and gray sleeves. I want to do this out of fingering weight wool, probably HD Shetland. [in progress] The same sweater as above, except with set in sleeves, and probably light blue as the contrasting color at the sleeve. Sock yarn sweater, superwash, with v-neck, and some kind of textrued stitch pattern at the yoke that would be knitted without. I made one of these sweaters already, but it came out a touch smaller than I think I really want, and there are a collection of small modifications that I\u0026rsquo;d like to make, again for verification purposes. A fully gray sweater, also out of HD Shetland, with the sleeves knit cuff-up, and with the yoke knit with \u0026ldquo;set-in sleeves,\u0026rdquo; in the round. I knit a sweater like this in the fall, and I want to verify that a basic a set of changes would make the sweater really wearable. I have the first 3-5 inches of a color work cardigan that I started before my hiatus from knitting: I think there are a number of flaws with this sweater: the sizing is off, I didn\u0026rsquo;t handle the bottom hem correctly, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I have enough yarn in these specific collors, but I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to attempt the pattern again. A color work sweater with set in sleeves. Because knitting rows (back and forth) in stranded is annoying and a bit fussy, most patterns use drop shoulder shaping, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to experiment and see if I can perfect the technique a more fitted style for these sweaters. Using a \u0026ldquo;garter rib\u0026rdquo; stitch for the full body of a sweater, both because I like the idea of a gentle rib pulling in to provide more fit, while also being fun and keeping a fairly simple shape over the entire length of the sweater. I think that\u0026rsquo;s enough for now!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweater-backlog/","summary":"While I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this knitting book project, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I\u0026rsquo;ve developed something of a backlog of sweaters that I want to knit (for this project, and others,) and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d write them all down for our collective enjoyment.\nA second version of the favorite sweater I knit during college: a plain sweater with a black body, gray at shoulders, drop shoulder, steeks, and gray sleeves. I want to do this out of fingering weight wool, probably HD Shetland. [in progress] The same sweater as above, except with set in sleeves, and probably light blue as the contrasting color at the sleeve. Sock yarn sweater, superwash, with v-neck, and some kind of textrued stitch pattern at the yoke that would be knitted without. I made one of these sweaters already, but it came out a touch smaller than I think I really want, and there are a collection of small modifications that I\u0026rsquo;d like to make, again for verification purposes.","title":"Sweater Backlog"},{"content":"While I mostly run emacs as a daemon managed by systemd I like to keep my configuration nimble enough that I can just start emacs and have an ad-hoc session for editing some files.1 Or that\u0026rsquo;s the goal. This has been a long running project for me, but early on in quarantine times, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten things tightened up to the point that I feel comfortable using EDITOR=emacs just about all the time. On my (very old) computers, emacs starts and in well under 1 or 2 seconds, and does better on faster machines. If your emacs setup takes a long time to start up, this article is for you! Let\u0026rsquo;s see if we can get the program to start faster.\nMeasure! The emacs-init-time function in emacs will tell you how long it took emacs to start up. This tends to be a bit under the actual start time, because some start-up activity gets pushed into various hooks, after startup. Just to keep an eye on things, I have a variant of the following as the first line in my config file: :\n(add-to-list 'after-init-hook (lambda () (message (concat \u0026quot;emacs (\u0026quot; (number-to-string (emacs-pid)) \u0026quot;) started in \u0026quot; (emacs-init-time))))) It\u0026rsquo;s also possible to put additional information in this hook (and in reality I use something that pushes to a desktop notification tool, rather than just to message/logging.\nYou can also lower this number by putting more work into the after-init hook, but that sort of defeats the purpose: if you get the init time down to a second, but have 10 seconds of init-hook runtime, then that\u0026rsquo;s probably not much of a win, particularly if the init-hook tasks are blocking.\nThe second thing to do is have a macro2 available for use that allows to measure the runtime of a block of code, something like: :\n(defmacro with-timer (name \u0026amp;rest body) `(let ((time (current-time))) ,@body (message \u0026quot;%s: %.06f\u0026quot; ,name (float-time (time-since time))))) You can then do something like: :\n(with-timer \u0026quot;mode-line-setup\u0026quot; (set-up-mode-line)) And then look in the *Message* buffer to see how long various things take so you know where focus your efforts.\nStrategies use-package makes it possible to do much less during applciation startup, and makes it possible to load big lisp packages only when you\u0026rsquo;re going to use them, and registers everything so you never feel the difference. Audit your use-package forms and ensure that they all declare one of the following forms, which insures that things are loaded upon use, rather than at start time: :bind registers specific keybindings, but as autoloads so that the pacakge is only loaded when you use the keybinding. :command registers function names as autoloads, like keybinding, so the commands/functions are available but again the package isn\u0026rsquo;t loaded until it\u0026rsquo;s used. :mode attaches the package to a specific file extension or extensions so again, the package doesn\u0026rsquo;t get loaded until you open a file of that type. :after for loading a package after another package it depends on or is only used after. :hook this allows you to associate something from this package into another package\u0026rsquo;s hook, with the same effect of deferring loading of one package until after another is used. Avoid having the default-scratch buffer trigger loading as much as possible. It\u0026rsquo;s very tempting to have *scratch* default to org-mode or something, but if you keep it in fundamental-mode you can avoid loading most of your packages until you actually use them, or can avoid pulling in too much too quickly. Keep an eye on startup both for GUI, terminal, and if you use daemons, daemon instances of emacs. There are some subtleties that may be useful or important. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that terminal startup times are often much less than GUI times. Think about strategies for managing state-management (e.g. recentf session-mode and desktop-mode.) I\u0026rsquo;ve definitley had times when I really wanted emacs to be able to restart and leave me exactly where I was when I shut down. These session features are good, but often it\u0026rsquo;s just crufty, and causes a lot of expense at start up time. I still use desktop and session, but less so. Fancy themes and modelines come at some cost. I recently was able to save a lot of start up time by omiting a call to spaceline-compile in my configuration. Theme setup also can take a bit of time in GUI mode (I think!), but I dropped automatic theme configuration so that my instances would play better with terminal mode.3 Helpful Settings I think of these four settings as the \u0026ldquo;start up behavior\u0026rdquo; settings from my config: :\n(setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message \u0026quot;tychoish\u0026quot;) (setq inhibit-startup-message 't) (setq initial-major-mode 'fundamental-mode) (setq initial-scratch-message 'nil) I\u0026rsquo;ve had the following jit settings in my config for a long time, and they tend to make things more peppy, which can only help during startup. This may also just be cargo-cult, stuff: :\n(setq jit-lock-stealth-time nil) (setq jit-lock-defer-time nil) (setq jit-lock-defer-time 0.05) (setq jit-lock-stealth-load 200) If you use desktop-mode to save state and re-open buffers, excluding some modes from this behavior is good. In my case, avoiding reopening (and rereading) potentially large org-mode buffers was helpful for me. The desktop-modes-not-to-save value is useful here, as in the following snippet from my configuration: :\n(add-to-list 'desktop-modes-not-to-save 'dired-mode) (add-to-list 'desktop-modes-not-to-save 'Info-mode) (add-to-list 'desktop-modes-not-to-save 'org-mode) (add-to-list 'desktop-modes-not-to-save 'info-lookup-mode) (add-to-list 'desktop-modes-not-to-save 'fundamental-mode) Notes Ok, ok, I live with a vim user and the \u0026ldquo;quick startup time,\u0026rdquo; situation is very appealing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI tweaked this based on what I found this on stack overflow which stole it from this listserv post.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMixed GUI/Terminal mode with themes can be kind of finicky because theme settings are global and color backgrounds often won\u0026rsquo;t play well with terminal frames. You can say \u0026ldquo;if this is a gui mode,\u0026rdquo; but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t play well with daemons, and hooking into frame-creation has never worked as seamlessly as I would expect, because the of the execution context the hook functions (and slowing down frame creation can defeat part of the delight of the daemon.)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/towards-faster-emacs-start-times/","summary":"While I mostly run emacs as a daemon managed by systemd I like to keep my configuration nimble enough that I can just start emacs and have an ad-hoc session for editing some files.1 Or that\u0026rsquo;s the goal. This has been a long running project for me, but early on in quarantine times, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten things tightened up to the point that I feel comfortable using EDITOR=emacs just about all the time. On my (very old) computers, emacs starts and in well under 1 or 2 seconds, and does better on faster machines. If your emacs setup takes a long time to start up, this article is for you! Let\u0026rsquo;s see if we can get the program to start faster.\nMeasure! The emacs-init-time function in emacs will tell you how long it took emacs to start up. This tends to be a bit under the actual start time, because some start-up activity gets pushed into various hooks, after startup.","title":"Towards Faster Emacs Start Times"},{"content":"A couple of months ago I started writing a thing that I think will be a book, or something close, about knitting. A few weeks ago, I jokingly called it \u0026ldquo;Gestalt Knitting,\u0026rdquo; and the name stuck, at least for myself for now. The idea is to write a book, that\u0026rsquo;s mostly about knitting, that\u0026rsquo;s less a collection of patterns, and more of a meditation on the process of designing and knitting some sweaters, hats, and socks.\nAs a knitter, I\u0026rsquo;ve never really followed patterns: even when I see a design that I like, I always end up changing it somehow: changing the process to be something that I\u0026rsquo;d enjoy more (e.g. knitting in the round,) or modifying the size a bit (I\u0026rsquo;ve always been slim and I know I like to avoid wearing things that feel like tents,) or adding features that I know increase the comfort (e.g. making the neckline more open, or the sleeves a touch wider.) Patterns, thus, for me are sort of an opening volley in a conversation about a project rather than a description of a project, and I think in practice this is pretty common, though I think that often, knitters think about their modification as minor and inconsequential when really they\u0026rsquo;re super cool and important.\nI\u0026rsquo;m less interested in any specific design or pattern, and more interested in these kinds of basic patterns that we can reach to when faced with a pile of yarn and a desire to knit a sweater (or socks, etc.). Sort of the knitting equivalent of a family recipe that you can make without looking at any instructions and maybe without really measuring the ingredients. After a while, I suspect many knitters have a few things that they can just make on their own--like a hat or some simple socks--and one of my goals of this project is to help expand the collection of \u0026ldquo;house patterns\u0026rdquo; by explaining and exploring some of the basic garments that I tend to knit.\nAs a writer, I have a lot of practice writing about the details of complicated ideas and processes in unambiguous and clear terms. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in seeing if I can take my style for writing about procedures and concepts can translate to another subject area. Knitting patterns are, by convention, super concise and linear in a way that gives people just enough information to reproduce a specific garment, but ends up leaving out so much useful information about why you would knit something in a specific way, options for modification, or interactions between the pattern, the shape, and the process of knitting. When I\u0026rsquo;m knitting I get a lot of delight from the way all of details of a project come together, and I want to frame and present knitting projects in ways that really highlight that aspect of knitting. I also want to write something that\u0026rsquo;s knitters would find engaging to read all on its own, even without overlapping any of my specific knitting projects.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;ve made a lot of progress on the draft, I still have a bunch of work to do on this project: both in terms of more writing and also knitting \u0026ldquo;research.\u0026rdquo; I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll write a bit about it here. Stay tuned!\nI made a new instagram account, because that seems to be a thing, for knitting specific things: @gestaltknitting\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-project-gestalt-knitting/","summary":"A couple of months ago I started writing a thing that I think will be a book, or something close, about knitting. A few weeks ago, I jokingly called it \u0026ldquo;Gestalt Knitting,\u0026rdquo; and the name stuck, at least for myself for now. The idea is to write a book, that\u0026rsquo;s mostly about knitting, that\u0026rsquo;s less a collection of patterns, and more of a meditation on the process of designing and knitting some sweaters, hats, and socks.\nAs a knitter, I\u0026rsquo;ve never really followed patterns: even when I see a design that I like, I always end up changing it somehow: changing the process to be something that I\u0026rsquo;d enjoy more (e.g. knitting in the round,) or modifying the size a bit (I\u0026rsquo;ve always been slim and I know I like to avoid wearing things that feel like tents,) or adding features that I know increase the comfort (e.g. making the neckline more open, or the sleeves a touch wider.","title":"New Project: Gestalt Knitting"},{"content":"While I knit a lot in college, and for a few years afterwords, my attention to knitting as a hobby kind of trailed off, and I have basically not knit at all in the last five years, but suddenly a bit before Thanksgiving, I found myself listening to an audio book and playing a silly game on my phone really wishing that I could knit, and given that it was 2020 I did, and it\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of fun and pretty satisfying to get back into knitting.\nThere were lots of reasons for the hiatus, but the leading reasons were:\nMy professional work, first technical writing for software engineers, and then software engineering itself, was actually quite similar to knitting at least conceptually: knitting and software require lots of problem solving and similar kinds of iterative math. Particularly for the first few years where I was teaching myself how to program, I felt like knitting ended up being more like work than I wanted. I lived in southern Wisconsin in college, and it was actually cold. Between climate change, and ending up living in New York City--being a huge city that holds heat, and being on a island with the harbor as a heat sink, most buildings in the City have very aggressive heating systems--it felt like I never really wanted to wear wool, because I was often too warm. These problems seem solveable: my learning curve as a programmer has become less steep, and my day-to-day engineering work tends has shifted to be higher level and organizational in some ways that feel less like knitting. I think the \u0026ldquo;always too warm\u0026rdquo; feeling about my city has changed a bit as I\u0026rsquo;ve acclimated and I think it will be possible to just knit very light weight things and combine them with light weight jackets for increased wearability.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m back.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve finished the sweater I started in 2015 (it\u0026rsquo;s not exceptional, but I know how to fix it for the future,) knit another sweater that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with, and I\u0026rsquo;ve started a third and I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a book about knitting that I\u0026rsquo;m quite excited about. I never kept a really extensive collection of yarn, but I have enough to keep me busy for a while, and using the yarn I already have has been interesting as a constraining function in planning new projects.\nI suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll be blogging about knitting a bit more over the next little bit, about both specific projects and maybe some higher level things. I hope you don\u0026rsquo;t mind!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-hiatus-and-knitting-again/","summary":"While I knit a lot in college, and for a few years afterwords, my attention to knitting as a hobby kind of trailed off, and I have basically not knit at all in the last five years, but suddenly a bit before Thanksgiving, I found myself listening to an audio book and playing a silly game on my phone really wishing that I could knit, and given that it was 2020 I did, and it\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of fun and pretty satisfying to get back into knitting.\nThere were lots of reasons for the hiatus, but the leading reasons were:\nMy professional work, first technical writing for software engineers, and then software engineering itself, was actually quite similar to knitting at least conceptually: knitting and software require lots of problem solving and similar kinds of iterative math. Particularly for the first few years where I was teaching myself how to program, I felt like knitting ended up being more like work than I wanted.","title":"Knitting Hiatus and Knitting Again"},{"content":"In August of 2019 I became a Staff Engineer, which is what a lot of companies are calling their \u0026ldquo;level above Senior Engineer\u0026rdquo; role these days. Engineering leveling is a weird beast, which probably a post onto itself. Despite my odd entry into a career in tech, my path in the last 4 or 5 years has been pretty conventional; however, somehow, despite having an increasingly normal career trajectory, explaining what I do on a day to day basis has not gotten easier.\nStaff Engineers are important for scaling engineering teams, but lots of teams get by with out them, and unlike more junior engineers who have broadly similar job roles, there are a lot of different ways to be a Staff Engineer, which only muddies things. This post is a reflection on some key aspects of my experience organized in to topics that I hope will be useful for people who may be interested in becoming staff engineers or managing such a person. If you\u0026rsquo;re also a Staff Engineer and your experience is different, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be particularly surprised.\nStaff Engineers Help Teams Build Great Software Lots of teams function just fine without Staff Engineers and teams can build great products without having contributors in Staff-type roles. Indeed, because Staff Engineers vary a lot, the utility of having more senior individual contributors on a team depends a lot of the specific engineer and the team in question: finding a good fit is even harder than usual. In general, having Senior Technical leadership can help teams by:\ngiving people managers more space and time to focus on the team organization, processes, and people. Particularly in small organizations, team managers often pick up technical leadership. providing connections and collaborations between groups and efforts. While almost all senior engineers have a \u0026ldquo;home team\u0026rdquo; and are directly involved in a few specific projects, they also tend to have broader scope, and so can help coordinate efforts between different projects and groups. increasing the parallelism of teams, and can provide the kind of infrastructure that allows a team to persue multiple streams of development at one time. supporting the career path and growth of more junior engineers, both as a result of direct mentoring, but also by enabling the team to be more successful by having more technical leadership capacity creates opportunities for growth for everyone on the team. Staff Promotions Reflect Organizational Capacity In addition to experience and a history of effusiveness, like other promotions, getting promoted to Staff Engineer is less straight forward than other promotions. This is in part because the ways we think about leveling and job roles (i.e. to describe the professional activities and capabilities along several dimensions for each level,) become complicated when there are lots of different ways to be a Staff Engineer. Pragmatically, these kind of promotions often depend on other factors:\nthe existence of other Staff Engineers in the organization make it more likely that there\u0026rsquo;s an easy comparison for a candidate. past experience of managers getting Staff+ promotions for engineers. Enginering Managers without this kind of experience may have difficulty creating the kinds of opportunities within their organizations and for advocating these kinds of promotions. organizational maturity and breadth to support the workload of a Staff Engineer: there are ways to partition teams and organizations that preclude some of the kinds of higher level concerns that justify having Staff Engineers, and while having senior technical leadership is often useful, if the organization can\u0026rsquo;t support it, it won\u0026rsquo;t happen. teams with a sizable population of more junior engineers, particularly where the team is growing, will have more opportunity and need for Staff Engineers. Teams that are on the balance more senior, or are small and relatively static tend to have less opportunity for the kind of broadly synthetic work that tends to lead to Staff promotions. There are also, of course, some kinds of technical achievements and professional characteristics that Staff Engineers often have, and I\u0026rsquo;m not saying that anyone in the right organizational context can be promoted, exactly. However, without the right kind of organizational support and context, even the most exceptional engineers will never be promoted.\nStaff Promotions are Harder to Get Than Equivalent Management Promotions In many organizations its true that Staff promotions are often much harder to get than equivalent promotions to peer-level management postions: the organizational contexts required to support the promotion of Engineers into management roles are much easier to create, particularly as organizations grow. As you hire more engineers you need more Engineering Managers. There are other factors:\nmanagers control promotions, and it\u0026rsquo;s easier for them to recapitulate their own career paths in their reports than to think about the Staff role, and so more Engineers tend to be pushed towards management than Senior IC roles. It\u0026rsquo;s also probably that meta-managers benefit organizationally from having more front-line managers in their organizations than more senior ICs, which exacerbates this bias. from an output perspective, Senior Engineers can write the code that Staff Engineers would otherwise write, in a way that Engineering Management tends to be difficult to avoid or do without. In other terms, management promotions are often more critical from the organization\u0026rsquo;s perspective and therefore prioritized over Staff promotions, particularly during growth. cost. Staff Engineers are expensive, often more expensive than managers particularly at the bottom of the brackets, and it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to imagine that the timing of Staff promotions are not impacted by budgetary requirements. Promoting a Staff Engineer is Easier than Hiring One Because there are many valid ways to do the Staff job, and so much of the job is about leveraging context and building broader connections between different projects, people with more organizational experience and history often have an advantage over fresh industry hires. In general:\nSuccess as a Staff Engineer in one organization does not necessarily translate to success at another. The conventions within the process for industry hiring, are good at selecting junior engineers, and there are fewer conventions for more Senior roles, which means that candidates are not assessed for skills and experiences that are relevant to their day-to-day while also being penalized for (often) being unexceptional at the kind of problems that junior engineering interviews focus on. While interview processes are imperfect assessment tools in all cases, they\u0026rsquo;re particularly bad at more senior levels. Senior engineering contributors have a the potential to have huge impact on product development, engineering outcomes, all of which requires a bunch of trust on the part of the organization, and that kind of trust is often easier to build with someone who already has organizational experience This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to hire Staff engineers, I\u0026rsquo;m just deeply dubious of the hiring process for these kinds of roles having both interviewed for these kinds of roles and also interviewed candidates for them. I\u0026rsquo;ve also watched more than one senior contributor not really get along well with a team or other leadership after being hired externally, and for reasons that end up making sense in retrospect. It\u0026rsquo;s really hard.\nStaff Engineers Don\u0026rsquo;t Not Manage Most companies have a clear distinction between the career trajectories of people involved in \u0026ldquo;management\u0026rdquo; and senior \u0026ldquo;individual contributor\u0026rdquo; roles (like Staff Engineers,) with managers involved in leadership for teams and humans, with ICs involved in technical aspects. This seems really clear on paper but incredibly messy in practice. The decisions that managers make about team organization and prioritization have necessary technical implications; while it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to organize larger scale technical initiatives without awareness of the people and teams. Sometimes Staff Engineers end up doing actual management on a temporary basis in order to fill gaps as organizations change or cover parental leave\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also the case that a huge part of the job for many Staff Engineer\u0026rsquo;s involves direct mentorship of junior engineers, which can involve leading specific projects, conversations about career trajectories and growth, as well as conversations about specific technical topics. This has a lot of overlap with management, and that\u0026rsquo;s fine. The major differences is that senior contributors share responsibility for the people they mentor with their actual managers, and tend to focus mentoring on smaller groups of contributors.\nStaff Engineers aren\u0026rsquo;t (or shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be!) managers, even when they are involved in broader leadership work, even if the specific engineer is capable of doing management work: putting ICs in management roles, takes time away from their (likely more valuable) technical projects.\nStaff Engineers Write Boring and Tedious But Easy Code While this is perhaps not a universal view, I feel pretty safe in suggesting that Staff Engineers should be directly involved in development projects. While there are lots of ways to be involved in development: technical design, architecture, reviewing code and documents, project planning and development, and so fort, I think it\u0026rsquo;s really important that Staff Engineers be involved with code-writing, and similar activies. This makes it easy to stay grounded and relevant, and also makes it possible to do a better job at all of the other kinds of engineering work.\nHaving said that, it\u0026rsquo;s almost inevitable that the kinds of contribution to the code that you make as a Staff Engineer are not the same kinds of contributions that you make at other points in your career. Your attention is probably pulled in different directions. Where a junior engineer can spend most of their day focusing on a few projects and writing code, Staff Engineers:\nconsult with other teams. mentor other engineers. build long and medium term plans for teams and products. breaking larger projects apart and designing APIs between components. All of this \u0026ldquo;other engineering work\u0026rdquo; takes time, and the broader portfolio of concerns means that more junior engineers often have more time and attention to focus on specific programming tasks. The result is that the kind of code you end up writing tends to be different:\nfixing problems and bugs in systems that require a lot of context. The bugs are often not very complicated themselves, but require understanding the implication of one component with regards to other components, which can make them difficult. projects to enable future development work, including building infrastructure or designing an interface and connecting an existing implementation to that interface ahead of some larger effort. This kind of \u0026ldquo;refactor things to make it possible to write a new implementation.\u0026rdquo; writing small isolated components to support broader initiatives, such as exposing existing information via new APIs, and building libraries to facilitate connections between different projects or components. projects that support the work of the team as a whole: tools, build and deployment systems, code clean up, performance tuning, test infrastructure, and so forth. These kinds of projects can amount to rather a lot of development work, but they definitely have their own flavor. As I approached Staff and certainly since, the kind of projects I had attention for definitely shifted. I actually like this kind of work rather a lot, so that\u0026rsquo;s been quite good for me, but the change is real.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s definitely a temptation to give Staff Engineers big projects that they can go off and work on alone, and I\u0026rsquo;ve seen lots of teams and engineers attempt this: sometimes these projects work out, though more often the successes feel like an exception. There\u0026rsquo;s no \u0026ldquo;right kind\u0026rdquo; of way to write software as a Staff Engineer, sometimes senior engineer\u0026rsquo;s get to work on bigger \u0026ldquo;core projects.\u0026rdquo; Having said that, if a Staff Engineer is working on the \u0026ldquo;other engineering\u0026rdquo; aspects of the job, there\u0026rsquo;s just limited time to do big development projects in a reasonable time frame.\nRelated Reading More than coding: What is Exploratory Work StaffEng.com ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/staff-engineering/","summary":"In August of 2019 I became a Staff Engineer, which is what a lot of companies are calling their \u0026ldquo;level above Senior Engineer\u0026rdquo; role these days. Engineering leveling is a weird beast, which probably a post onto itself. Despite my odd entry into a career in tech, my path in the last 4 or 5 years has been pretty conventional; however, somehow, despite having an increasingly normal career trajectory, explaining what I do on a day to day basis has not gotten easier.\nStaff Engineers are important for scaling engineering teams, but lots of teams get by with out them, and unlike more junior engineers who have broadly similar job roles, there are a lot of different ways to be a Staff Engineer, which only muddies things. This post is a reflection on some key aspects of my experience organized in to topics that I hope will be useful for people who may be interested in becoming staff engineers or managing such a person.","title":"Staff Engineering"},{"content":"I left my job at MongoDB (8.5 years!) at the beginning of the summer, and started a new job at the beginning of the month. I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing and posting more about my new gig, career paths in general, reflections on what I accomplished on my old team, the process of interviewing as a software engineer, as well as the profession and industry over time. For now, though, I want to write about one of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this summer: making a bunch of the open source libraries that I worked on more generally useable. I\u0026rsquo;ve been calling this the deciduous platform,1 which now has its own github organization! So it must be real.\nThe main modification in these forks, aside from adding a few features that had been on my list for a while, has been to update the buildsystem to use go modules2 and rewrite the history of the repository to remove all of the old vendoring. I expect to continue development on some aspects of these over time, though the truth is that these libraries were quite stable and were nearly in maintenance mode anyway.\nBackground The team was responsible for a big monolith (or so) application: development had begun in 2013, which was early for Go, and while everything worked, it was a bit weird. My efforts when I joined in 2015 focused mostly on stabilization, architecture, and reliability. While the application worked, mostly, it was clear that it suffered from a few problem, which I believe were the result of originating early in the history of Go: First, because no one had tried to write big applications yet, the patterns weren\u0026rsquo;t well established, and so the team ended up writing code that worked but that was difficult to maintain, and ended up with bespoke solutions to a number of generic problems like running workloads in the background or managing Apia. Second, Go\u0026rsquo;s standard library tends to be really solid, but also tends towards being a little low level for most day-to-day tasks, so things like logging and process management end up requiring more code3 than is reasonable.\nI taught myself to write Go by working on a logging library, and worked on a distributed queue library. One of the things that I realized early, was that breaking the application into \u0026ldquo;microservices,\u0026rdquo; would have been both difficult and offered minimal benefit,4 so I went with the approach of creating a well factored monolith, which included a lot of application specific work, but also building a small collection of libraries and internal services to provide useful abstractions and separations for application developers and projects.\nThis allowed for a certain level of focus, both for the team creating the infrastructure, but also for the application itself: the developers working on the application mostly focused on the kind of high level core business logic that you\u0026rsquo;d expect, while the infrastructure/platform team really focused on these libraries and various integration problems. The focus wasn\u0026rsquo;t just organizational: the codebases became easier to maintain and features became easier to develop.\nThis experience has lead me to think that architecture decisions may not be well captured by the monolith/microservice dichotomy, but rather there\u0026rsquo;s\u0026rsquo; this third option that centers on internal architecture, platforms, and the possibility for developer focus and velocity.\nPlatform Overview While there are 13 or so repositories in the platform, really there are 4 major libraries: grip, a logging library; jasper, a process management framework; amboy, a (possibly distributed) worker queue; and gimlet, a collection of tools for building HTTP/REST services.\nThe tools all work pretty well together, and combine to provide an environment where you can focus on writing the business logic for your HTTP services and background tasks, with minimal boilerplate to get it all running. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty swell, and makes it possible to spin up (or spin out) well factored services with similar internal architectures, and robust internal infrastructure.\nI wanted to write a bit about each of the major components, addressing why I think these libraries are compelling and the kinds of features that I\u0026rsquo;m excited to add in the future.\nGrip Grip is a structured-logging friendly library, and is broadly similar to other third-party logging systems. There are two main underlying interfaces, representing logging targets (Sender) and messages, as well as a higher level \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; interface for use during programming. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty easy to write new message or bakcends, which means you can use grip to capture all kinds of arbitrary messages in consistent manners, and also send those messages wherever they\u0026rsquo;re needed.\nInternally, it\u0026rsquo;s quite nice to be able to just send messages to specific log targets, using configuration within an application rather than needing to operationally manage log output. Operations folks shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be stuck dealing with just managing logs, after all, and it\u0026rsquo;s quite nice to just send data directly to Splunk or Sumologic. We also used the same grip fundamentals to send notifications and alerts to Slack channels, email lists, or even to create Jira Issues, minimizing the amount of clunky integration code.\nThere are some pretty cool projects in and around grip:\nsupport for additional logging targets. The decudous version of grip adds twitter as an output format as well as creating desktop notifications (e.g. growl/libnotify,) but I think it would also be interesting to add fluent/logstash connections that don\u0026rsquo;t have to transit via standard error.' While structured logging is great, I noticed that we ended up logging messages automatically in the background as a method of metrics collection. It would be cool to be able to add some kind of \u0026ldquo;intercepting sender\u0026rdquo; that handled some of these structured metrics, and was able to expose this data in a format that the conventional tools these days (prometheus, others,) can handle. Some of this code would clearly need to be in Grip, and other aspects clearly fall into other tools/libraries. Amboy Amboy is an interface for doing things with queues. The interfaces are simple, and you have:\na queue that has some way of storing and dispatching jobs. implementations of jobs which are responsible for executing your business logic, and with a base implemention that you can easily compose, into your job types, all you need to implement, really is a Run() method. a queue \u0026ldquo;group\u0026rdquo; which provides a higher level abstraction on top of queues to support segregating workflows/queues in a single system to improve quality of service. Group queues function like other queues but can be automatically managed by the processes. a runner/pool implementation that provides the actual thread pool. There\u0026rsquo;s a type registry for job implementations and versioning in the schema for jobs so that you can safely round-trip a job between machines and update the implementation safely without ensuring the queue is empty.\nThis turns out to be incredibly powerful for managing background and asynchronous work in applications. The package includes a number of in-memory queues for managing workloads in ephemeral utilities, as well as a distributed MongoDB backed-queue for running multiple copies of an application with a shared queue(s). There\u0026rsquo;s also a layer of management tools for introspecting, managing, the state of jobs.\nWhile Amboy is quite stable, there is a small collection of work that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in:\na queue implementation that store jobs to a local Badger database on-disk to provide single-system restartabilty for jobs. a queue implementation that stores jobs in a PostgreSQL, mirroring the MongoDB job functionality, to be able to meet job backends. queue implementations that use messaging systems (Kafka, AMPQ) for backends. There exists an SQS implementation, but all of these systems have less strict semantics for process restarts than the database options, and database can easily handle on the order of a hundred of thousand of jobs an hour. changes to the queue API to remove a few legacy methods that return channels instead of iterators. improve the semantics for closing a queue. While Amboy has provisions for building architectures with workers running on multiple processes, rather than having queues running multiple threads within the same process, it would be interesting to develop more fully-fledged examples of this.\nJasper Jasper provides a high level set of tools for managing subprocesses in Go, adding a highly ergonomic API (in Go,) as well as exposing process management as a service to facilitate running processes on remote machines. Jasper also manages/tracks the state of running processes, and can reduce pressures on calling code to track the state of processes.\nThe package currently exposes Jasper services over REST, gRPC, and MongoDB\u0026rsquo;s wire protocol, and there is also code to support using SSH as a transport so that you don\u0026rsquo;t need to expose remote these services publically.\nJasper is, perhaps, the most stable of the libraries, but I am interested in thinking about a couple of extensions:\nusing jasper as PID 1 within a container to be able to orchestrate workloads running on containers, and contain (some) support for lower level container orchestration. write configuration file-based tools for using jasper to orchestrate buildsystems and distributed test orchestration. I\u0026rsquo;m also interested in cleaning up some of the MongoDB-specific code (i.e. the code that downloads MongoDB versions for use in test harnesses,) and perhaps reinvisioning that as client code that uses Jasper rather than as a part of Jasper.\nGimlet I\u0026rsquo;ve written about gimlet here before when I started the project, and it remains a pretty useful and ergonomic way to define and regester HTTP APIs, in the past few years, its grown to add more authentication features, as well as a new \u0026ldquo;framework\u0026rdquo; for defining routes. This makes it possible to define routes by implementing an interface that:\nmakes it very easy to produce paginated routes, and provides some helpers for managing content separates the parsing of inputs from executing the results, which can make route definitions easy to test without integration tests. rehome functionality on top of chi router. The current implementation uses Negroni and gorilla mux (but neither are exposed in the interface), but I think it\u0026rsquo;d be nice to have this be optional, and chi looks pretty nice. Other Great Tools The following libraries are defiantly smaller, but I think they\u0026rsquo;re really cool:\nbirch is a builder for programatically building BSON documents, and MongoDB\u0026rsquo;s extended JSON format. It\u0026rsquo;s built upon an earlier version of the BSON library. While it\u0026rsquo;s unlikely to be as fast at scale, for many operations (like finding a key in a document), the interface is great for constructing payloads. ftdc provides a way to generate (and read,) MongoDB\u0026rsquo;s diagnostic data format, which is a highly compressed timeseries data format. While this implementation could drift from the internal implementation over time, the format and tool remain useful for arbitrary timeseries data. certdepot provides a way to manage a certificate authority with the certificates stored in a centralized store. I\u0026rsquo;d like to add other storage backends over time. And more\u0026hellip;\nNotes My old team built a continuous integration tool called evergreen which is itself a pun (using \u0026ldquo;green\u0026rdquo; to indicate passing builds, most CI systems are not ever-green.) Many of the tools and libraries that we built had got names with tree puns, and somehow \u0026ldquo;deciduous\u0026rdquo; seems like the right plan.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nFor an arcane reason, all of these tools had to build with an old version of Go (1.10) that didn\u0026rsquo;t support modules, so we had an arcane and annoying vendoring solution that wasn\u0026rsquo;t compatible with modules.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nGo tends to be a pretty verbose language, and I think most of the time this creates clarity; however, for common tasks it has the feeling of offering a poor abstraction, or forcing you to write duplicated code. While I don\u0026rsquo;t believe that more-terse-code is better, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a point where the extra verbosity for route operations just creates the possibility for more errors.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe team was small, and as an internal tools team, unlikely to grow to the size where microservices offered any kind of engineering efficiency (at some cost,) and there weren\u0026rsquo;t significant technical gains that we could take advantage of: the services of the application didn\u0026rsquo;t need to be globally distributed and the boundaries between components didn\u0026rsquo;t need to scale independently.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-beginnings-deciduous-platform/","summary":"I left my job at MongoDB (8.5 years!) at the beginning of the summer, and started a new job at the beginning of the month. I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing and posting more about my new gig, career paths in general, reflections on what I accomplished on my old team, the process of interviewing as a software engineer, as well as the profession and industry over time. For now, though, I want to write about one of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this summer: making a bunch of the open source libraries that I worked on more generally useable. I\u0026rsquo;ve been calling this the deciduous platform,1 which now has its own github organization! So it must be real.\nThe main modification in these forks, aside from adding a few features that had been on my list for a while, has been to update the buildsystem to use go modules2 and rewrite the history of the repository to remove all of the old vendoring.","title":"New Beginnings: Deciduous Platform"},{"content":"So I made a thing, or at least, I took a thing I\u0026rsquo;ve built and made it presentable for other people. I\u0026rsquo;m talking, of course, about my Emacs configuration.\nCheck it out at github.com/tychoish/.emacs.d! The README is pretty complete, and giving it a whirl is simple, just do something like: :\nmv ~/.emacs.d/ ~/emacs.d-archive git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:tychoish/.emacs.d.git ~/.emacs.d/ If you\u0026rsquo;re using Emacs 27, you might also be able to clone it into ~/.config/emacs, for similar effect. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much to me. Let me know what you think!\nThe tl;dr of \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s special about this config,\u0026rdquo; is that, it has:\na good set of defaults out of the box. a lot of great wiz-bang features enabled and configured. very quick start times, thanks to lazy-loading of libraries. great support for running as a daemon, and even running multiple daemons at once. I\u0026rsquo;ve sporadically produced copies of my emacs config for other folks to use, but those were always ad hoc, and difficult to reproduce and maintain, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on and off to put more polish on things, so making it usable for other people seemed like a natural step at this point.\nI hope other people find it useful, but also I think it\u0026rsquo;s a good exercise for me in keeping things well maintained, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t bother me much one way or another.\nDiscussion I think a lot about developer experience: I\u0026rsquo;ve spent my career, thus far, working on infrastructure products (databases, CI systems, build tools, release engineering,) that help improve developer experience and productivity, and even my day-to-day work tends to focus mostly on problems that impact the way that my teams write software: system architecture, service construction, observability, test infrastructure, and similar.\nNo matter how you slice it, editor experience is a huge factor in people\u0026rsquo;s experience, and can have a big impact on productivity, and there are so many different editors with wildly different strengths. Editors experience is also really hard: unlike other kinds of developer infrastructure (like buildsystems, or even programming languages) the field conceptualizes editors as personal: your choice in editor is seen to reflect on you (it probably doesn\u0026rsquo;t), and your ability to use your editor well is seen to be a reflection of your skills as a developer (it isn\u0026rsquo;t). It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that because editors are so personal, it\u0026rsquo;s very difficult to produce an editor with broad appeal, and the most successful editors tend to be very configurable and can easily lack defaults, which means that even great editors are terrible out of the box, which mostly affects would-be and new developers.\nNevertheless, time being able to have an editor that you\u0026rsquo;re comfortable with and that you can use effectively without friction does make it easier to build software, so even if folks often conceptualize of editors in the wrong way, improving the editing experience is important. I think that there are two areas for improvement:\neditor configurations should--to some extent--be maintained at the project (or metaproject) level, rather than on the level individual engineer. The hard part here is how to balance individual preference with providing a consistent experience, particularly for new developers.1 there should be more \u0026ldquo;starter kits\u0026rdquo; (like this one! or the many other starter kits, but also for (neo)vim, vscode, and others.) that help bootstrap the experience, while also figuring out ways to allow layering other project-based extensions on top of a base configuration. Also, I want to give chemacs a shout out, for folks who want to try out other base configurations.\nThere are two kinds of new developers with different experiences but some overlap: folks who have development experience in general but no experience with a specific project, and folks who are new to all development.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tycho-emacs-config-kit/","summary":"So I made a thing, or at least, I took a thing I\u0026rsquo;ve built and made it presentable for other people. I\u0026rsquo;m talking, of course, about my Emacs configuration.\nCheck it out at github.com/tychoish/.emacs.d! The README is pretty complete, and giving it a whirl is simple, just do something like: :\nmv ~/.emacs.d/ ~/emacs.d-archive git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:tychoish/.emacs.d.git ~/.emacs.d/ If you\u0026rsquo;re using Emacs 27, you might also be able to clone it into ~/.config/emacs, for similar effect. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much to me. Let me know what you think!\nThe tl;dr of \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s special about this config,\u0026rdquo; is that, it has:\na good set of defaults out of the box. a lot of great wiz-bang features enabled and configured. very quick start times, thanks to lazy-loading of libraries. great support for running as a daemon, and even running multiple daemons at once. I\u0026rsquo;ve sporadically produced copies of my emacs config for other folks to use, but those were always ad hoc, and difficult to reproduce and maintain, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on and off to put more polish on things, so making it usable for other people seemed like a natural step at this point.","title":"Tycho Emacs Config Kit"},{"content":"What a year, am I right?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve avoided writing a more \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo;-type post because there\u0026rsquo;s both too much to say and somehow not enough all at the same time. This is a tough time to be a human, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been incredibly lucky in many regards: I can stay busy, I have a living situation that makes quarantining easy and tolerable, and while I wish the produce at my local grocery had better produce, it\u0026rsquo;s nice to live in a very walkable and accessible neighborhood. Even though \u0026ldquo;nowtimes\u0026rdquo; are fundamentally different from the \u0026ldquo;beforetimes,\u0026rdquo; the speed at which things become routine--if not normal--is almost disturbing. Delightfully, though, I\u0026rsquo;ve felt like I\u0026rsquo;m still getting things done. In no particular order:\nAs the title of the post suggests I have firmly entered the home pickling phase of quarantine, and have begun fermenting rather a lot of cauliflower, with additional vegetables to follow. Frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t know why I didn\u0026rsquo;t think of this earlier: I love pickles and it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to get compelling pickles for things that aren\u0026rsquo;t cucumbers. My first batch is cauliflower, and I\u0026rsquo;m also excited to do things like: baby okra, cabbage, greenbeans, and maybe some of my favorite root vegetables (shallots, raddishes, horseradish, jerusalem artichokes, etc.) Details forcoming, perhaps. I\u0026rsquo;ve begun cooking more often. My go to, is to make a pot of chicken stock, and then figure out things to use the stock to cook. I\u0026rsquo;ve done some nice proto-beef stew things, and have made some pretty great lentil dishes. Nothing fancy or complex. I\u0026rsquo;m also delightfully, getting to a point where I can produce a meal that consists of more than one flavor profile, which is nice. I\u0026rsquo;ve written enough common lisp that writing little bits of software in CL seem doable. It\u0026rsquo;s still a bit harder to get into bigger projects, and I have a lot to learn still, but I\u0026rsquo;ve crossed a line, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have an additional skill. I replaced the video card in my home desktop, and I feel like I have a totally new computer! It\u0026rsquo;s amazing. I got this computer in 2013, and have mostly been using laptops for the past few years. Before quarantine, I was even planning to de-accession it, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been using it a lot more and the new video card really changes things. Since I don\u0026rsquo;t do a lot of graphics things and my computer use is not particularly performance intensive, I forget how much having an underpowered GPU can really impact perceptions: I was suffering through a lot of rendering-hangs and glitches that just don\u0026rsquo;t happen any more. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing blog posts more, and am working on a plan to have something that resembles a publication schedule. I wrote professionally for so long, that writing for fun never seemed like a viable way to spend time, but as time goes on, it\u0026rsquo;s clear that I really want to be able to experiment with ideas and reflect on things in a more regular way, and continuing to write posts here seems like a good way to do that. My lisp-related posts are now appearing on Planet Lisp, and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in expanding my reach\u0026hellip; slightly. I completed a sort of long term project to modernize the way that I use and configure emacs: I got all of the hardcoded weirdness undercontrol, I started using use-package, and I got lsp-mode to work, and I fixed a number of hilarious little bugs in how my config worked. The end result, is I get to use the editor I want in the way that I want, and it all starts up on my (old) computers in well under 2 seconds, not that I start up all that often. I expect I\u0026rsquo;ll write a bit more on this soon. Since quarantine started I\u0026rsquo;ve gone through an entire complete box of Chemex filters (plus the tail end of a box, and I\u0026rsquo;m a few pots into the next box.) I started drinking coffee during the summer of 2015, and have primarily consumed coffee produced by other people (i.e. at work) in that time. While I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely gone through a few boxes of Chemex filters over the years, my new rate is noticeable. But quarantine means making your own coffee, and apparently I\u0026rsquo;ve made a lot of coffee. It feels like a milestone. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pickle-quarantine/","summary":"What a year, am I right?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve avoided writing a more \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo;-type post because there\u0026rsquo;s both too much to say and somehow not enough all at the same time. This is a tough time to be a human, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been incredibly lucky in many regards: I can stay busy, I have a living situation that makes quarantining easy and tolerable, and while I wish the produce at my local grocery had better produce, it\u0026rsquo;s nice to live in a very walkable and accessible neighborhood. Even though \u0026ldquo;nowtimes\u0026rdquo; are fundamentally different from the \u0026ldquo;beforetimes,\u0026rdquo; the speed at which things become routine--if not normal--is almost disturbing. Delightfully, though, I\u0026rsquo;ve felt like I\u0026rsquo;m still getting things done. In no particular order:\nAs the title of the post suggests I have firmly entered the home pickling phase of quarantine, and have begun fermenting rather a lot of cauliflower, with additional vegetables to follow. Frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t know why I didn\u0026rsquo;t think of this earlier: I love pickles and it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to get compelling pickles for things that aren\u0026rsquo;t cucumbers.","title":"Pickle Quarantine"},{"content":"tychoish.com is an eclectic blog on programming, documentation, software development, folk dance, science fiction literature, cyborgs, political economy, emacs, Common Lisp, Go, shape note singing, and hand knitting.\ntycho garen (and tychoish) are the digital identities of Sam Kleinman, a Brooklyn-based software engineer and writer.\nBiography I grew up in St. Louis1 and went to college in southern Wisconsin, before moving to the east coast, and finally settling in Brooklyn.\nAs a young human, I was always nerdy I have memories of tinkering with old computers and even trying to install Linux on them, without a lot of success. For whatever reason I was never particularly into science/math as a kid, and ended up majoring in Psychology and Women\u0026rsquo;s and Gender Studies. I also rushed through college in 3 years. While I think I probably picked the wrong major,2 finishing early was definitely the right choice: I had learned a lot and really didn\u0026rsquo;t want to be in rural Wisconsin any more.\nFor a couple of years, I lived in my hometown taught knitting lessons, writing a bunch, and disabusing myself of the idea that I wanted to go to graduate school. While I think that intellectualism remains central for me, I realized that I was actually quite interested in technology and computers, and also that somewhere in all of my formal education I\u0026rsquo;d managed to figure out how to get pretty good at teaching myself new things, relatively unassisted.\nI started by writing documentation, which really ironed out a bunch of personal writing and editing idiosyncrasies, and eventually discovered through that I rather enjoyed doing sys-admining and software development work, and so here I am.\nMeanwhile, I\u0026rsquo;d moved to the Philadelphia area and eventually New York City, the former being somewhat expected up until that point, and the later being totally surprising. In 2014 I moved to Brooklyn and it felt great, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never really looked back. I\u0026rsquo;m still making software, still doing cool things with Linux, still thinking about how people build technology, and how our decisions about technology impact our lives and our world.\nBlogging At one point I tried to separate blogging into different topics and areas, personal journals, topical material, technical projects, and so forth, and it never really seemed to work out: I have a lot of different interests and while I enjoy writing about what I\u0026rsquo;m working on, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think I want to personally be responsible for a small publishing empire, though there are categories and you can subscribe only to specific segments of blog, if you like.\nIn general, I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot recently about a few areas, and don\u0026rsquo;t expect that this will change much in the coming months and years:\nspecific technologies and my projects with them: Common Lisp, Emacs, some application infrastructure projects in the Go programming language. trends in contemporary technology and software development, ranging from the organization of technical teams, to the ways that various trends in software delivery impact the way that we build software personal journal, to record more personal details or accounts of things I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about or working on. knitting, to reflect on current projects, share ideas, and insights. There may be other posts that address other topics, but as a genreal guide line that should cover the main points.\nI\u0026rsquo;m super interested in hearing from folks both via email or comments. Be in touch!\nColophon tychoish.com is published using a custom version hugo, that uses shimgo that cuts the build time by about an order of magnitude.\nComments rely on disqus.\nNotes Yeah, yeah, Metro High School.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIf I got a chance to choose again, I think I would do a double major in Anthropology and History.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/about/","summary":"tychoish.com is an eclectic blog on programming, documentation, software development, folk dance, science fiction literature, cyborgs, political economy, emacs, Common Lisp, Go, shape note singing, and hand knitting.\ntycho garen (and tychoish) are the digital identities of Sam Kleinman, a Brooklyn-based software engineer and writer.\nBiography I grew up in St. Louis1 and went to college in southern Wisconsin, before moving to the east coast, and finally settling in Brooklyn.\nAs a young human, I was always nerdy I have memories of tinkering with old computers and even trying to install Linux on them, without a lot of success. For whatever reason I was never particularly into science/math as a kid, and ended up majoring in Psychology and Women\u0026rsquo;s and Gender Studies. I also rushed through college in 3 years. While I think I probably picked the wrong major,2 finishing early was definitely the right choice: I had learned a lot and really didn\u0026rsquo;t want to be in rural Wisconsin any more.","title":"About"},{"content":"Alternate title: yolo lentils\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been cooking more in the last few months that I have, basically ever. I\u0026rsquo;m not a bad cook, and my instincts and raw skills are pretty decent, but I\u0026rsquo;m not super inspired, I guess. Left to my own devices I eat the same few things again and again. So the exercise of mostly cooking for myself has been a lot about figuring out things to cook that taste good (and different!) and that I can reproduce reliably. Sometimes I\u0026rsquo;m more successful than other times, and frankly a lot of what I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with isn\u0026rsquo;t super inspiring, but I recently stumbled upon something that was pretty great:\nIngredients:\n1 Cup of Black Lentils 2 Cups of Chicken Stock 1 Onion chopped reasonably finely. 3 cloves of garlic sliced. 1 inch piece of fresh ginger microplaned or minced. (some) Olive Oil Spices: Sweet Curry Powder, Garam Masala, Tumeric Salt and Pepper Procedure:\nSaute garlic onion, and ginger in olive oil until soft and becoming translucent, adding spices near the end. (5 minutes.) Add stock and lentils, and cook until lentils soften. I did the whole thing in an instant pot for 8-10 minutes and let the pressure release naturally (without keep warm). I\u0026rsquo;m sure other kinds of pots and cooking methods work well too. That\u0026rsquo;s it.\nModifications and notes:\nI put the spices in at the end of the sauteing phase, and I might have put them in slightly earlier, but it\u0026rsquo;s fine. I like that black lentils retain their form after cooking, but if you like more mushy texture other lentils would be fine. If you don\u0026rsquo;t use a pressure cooker, it seems reasonable that more liquid would be useful. I used chicken stock because it\u0026rsquo;s delicious and I had just made a batch of right before I made the lentils so it seemed reasonable. The stock flavor is secondary to the spices. I didn\u0026rsquo;t measure the spices (which were not particularly fresh, I must confess,) but I listed them roughly in terms of amount. Enjoy!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lazy-lentils/","summary":"Alternate title: yolo lentils\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been cooking more in the last few months that I have, basically ever. I\u0026rsquo;m not a bad cook, and my instincts and raw skills are pretty decent, but I\u0026rsquo;m not super inspired, I guess. Left to my own devices I eat the same few things again and again. So the exercise of mostly cooking for myself has been a lot about figuring out things to cook that taste good (and different!) and that I can reproduce reliably. Sometimes I\u0026rsquo;m more successful than other times, and frankly a lot of what I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with isn\u0026rsquo;t super inspiring, but I recently stumbled upon something that was pretty great:\nIngredients:\n1 Cup of Black Lentils 2 Cups of Chicken Stock 1 Onion chopped reasonably finely. 3 cloves of garlic sliced. 1 inch piece of fresh ginger microplaned or minced. (some) Olive Oil Spices: Sweet Curry Powder, Garam Masala, Tumeric Salt and Pepper Procedure:","title":"Lazy Lentils"},{"content":"OK, this is a weird post, but after reading a post about running emacs with systemd, 1 I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that the my take on how I run and manage processes is a bit unique, and worth enumerating and describing. The short version is that I regularly run multiple instances of emacs, under systemd, in daemon mode, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty swell. Here\u0026rsquo;s the rundown:\nOn Linux systems, I use a build of emacs with the lucid toolkit, rather than GTK, because of this bug with GTK, which I should write more about at some point. Basically, if the X session crashes with GTK emacs, even if you don\u0026rsquo;t have windows open, the daemon will crash, even if the dameon isn\u0026rsquo;t started from a GUI session. The lucid toolkit doesn\u0026rsquo;t have this problem.\nI run the process under my user\u0026rsquo;s systemd instance, rather than under the PID 1 systemd instance. I like keeping things separate. Run the following command to ensure that your user\u0026rsquo;s systemd will start at boot rather than at login: :\nsudo loginctl enable-ligner $(whoami) I have a systemd service file named emacs@.service in my ~/.config/systemd/user/ directory that looks like this: :\n[Unit] Description=Emacs-tychoish: the extensible, self-documenting text editor. [Service] Type=forking ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon=%i --chdir %h ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --server-file=hud --eval \u0026quot;(progn (setq kill-emacs-hook 'nil) (kill-emacs))\u0026quot; Restart=always TimeoutStartSec=0 [Install] WantedBy=default.target I then start emacs dameons: :\nsystemctl --user start emacs@work systemctl --user start emacs@personal systemctl --user start emacs@chat To enable them so that they start following boot: :\nsystemctl --user enable emacs@work systemctl --user enable emacs@personal systemctl --user enable emacs@chat Though to be honest, I use different names for daemons. I have some amount of daemon specific code, which might be useful: :\n(setq server-use-tcp t) (if (equal (daemonp) nil) (setq tychoish-emacs-identifier \u0026quot;solo\u0026quot;) (setq tychoish-emacs-identifier (daemonp))) ;; this makes erc configs work less nosily. There's probably no harm in ;; turning down the logging (if (equal (daemonp) \u0026quot;chat\u0026quot;) (setq gnutls-log-level 0) (setq gnutls-log-level 1)) (let ((csname (if (eq (daemonp) nil) \u0026quot;generic\u0026quot; (daemonp)))) (setq recentf-save-file (concat user-emacs-directory system-name \u0026quot;-\u0026quot; csname \u0026quot;-recentf\u0026quot;)) (setq session-save-file (concat user-emacs-directory system-name \u0026quot;-\u0026quot; csname \u0026quot;-session\u0026quot;)) (setq bookmark-default-file (concat user-emacs-directory system-name \u0026quot;-\u0026quot; csname \u0026quot;-bookmarks\u0026quot;)) (setq helm-c-adaptive-history-file (concat user-emacs-directory system-name \u0026quot;-\u0026quot; csname \u0026quot;--helm-c-adaptive-history\u0026quot;)) (setq desktop-base-file-name (concat system-name \u0026quot;-\u0026quot; csname \u0026quot;-desktop-file\u0026quot;)) (setq desktop-base-lock-name (concat system-name \u0026quot;-\u0026quot; csname \u0026quot;-desktop-lock\u0026quot;))) Basically this just sets up some session-specific information to be saved to different files, to avoid colliding per-instance.\nAdditionally, I use the tychoish-emacs-identifier from above to provide some contextual information as to what emacs daemon/window I\u0026rsquo;m currently in: :\n(setq frame-title-format '(:eval (concat tychoish-emacs-identifier \u0026quot;:\u0026quot; (buffer-name)))) (spaceline-emacs-theme 'daemon 'word-count) (spaceline-define-segment daemon tychoish-emacs-identifier) Also, on the topic of configuration, I do have a switch statement that loads different mu4e configurations in different daemons.\nTo start emacs sessions, I use operations in the following forms: :\n# create a new emacs frame. Filename optional. emacsclient --server-file=\u0026lt;name\u0026gt; --create-frame --no-wait \u0026lt;filename\u0026gt; # open a file in an existing (last-focus) frame/window. Filename required. emacsclient --server-file=\u0026lt;name\u0026gt; --no-wait \u0026lt;filename\u0026gt; # open a terminal emacs mode. Filename optional . emacsclient --server-file=\u0026lt;name\u0026gt; --tty --no-wait \u0026lt;filename\u0026gt; That\u0026rsquo;s a lot to type, so I use aliases in my shell profile: :\nalias e='emacsclient --server-file=personal --no-wait' alias ew='emacsclient --server-file=personal --create-frame --no-wait' alias et='emacsclient --server-file=personal --tty' I create a set of aliases for each daemon prefixing e/ew/et with the first letter of the daemon name.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s about it. When I\u0026rsquo;ve used OS X, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed something similar using launchd but the configuration files are a bit less elegant. On OS X, I tend to install emacs with cocoa toolkit, using homebrew.\nUsing multiple daemons is cool, though not required, for a number of reasons:\nyou can have good separation between personal things and professional/work things, which is always nice, but particularly gratifying during the pandemic when it\u0026rsquo;s easy to work forever. Managing multiple separation of email. While mu4e has profiles and contexts, and that\u0026rsquo;s great, I like a firmer boundary, and being able maintain separate email databases. Running emacs lisp applications that do a lot of networking, or do other blocking operations. The main case where this matters in my experience is running big erc instance, or something else that isn\u0026rsquo;t easily broken into async/subprocesses. And commenting!\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/running-emacs/","summary":"OK, this is a weird post, but after reading a post about running emacs with systemd, 1 I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that the my take on how I run and manage processes is a bit unique, and worth enumerating and describing. The short version is that I regularly run multiple instances of emacs, under systemd, in daemon mode, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty swell. Here\u0026rsquo;s the rundown:\nOn Linux systems, I use a build of emacs with the lucid toolkit, rather than GTK, because of this bug with GTK, which I should write more about at some point. Basically, if the X session crashes with GTK emacs, even if you don\u0026rsquo;t have windows open, the daemon will crash, even if the dameon isn\u0026rsquo;t started from a GUI session. The lucid toolkit doesn\u0026rsquo;t have this problem.\nI run the process under my user\u0026rsquo;s systemd instance, rather than under the PID 1 systemd instance. I like keeping things separate.","title":"Running Emacs"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using emacs for a long time, and it\u0026rsquo;s mostly pretty unexceptional. A few months ago, I started using LSP mode, and it\u0026rsquo;s been pretty great\u0026hellip; mostly. This post reflects on some of the dustier corners, and some of the broader implications.\nHistory and Conflict Language Server is a cool idea, that (as far as I know) grew out of VS Code, and provides a way to give a text editor \u0026ldquo;advanced, IDE-like\u0026rdquo; features without having to implement those features per-language in the text editor. Instead, editor developers implement generic integration for the protocol, and language developers produce a single process that can process source code and supports the editor features. Sounds great!\nThere are challenges:\nThe LSP protocol uses JSON for encoding data between the server and emacs. This is a reasonable choice, and makes development easy, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a perfect fit. Primarily, in emacs, until version 27, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t reached an official release yet (but is quite usable on Linux), parsed JSON in lisp rather than C, which made everything rather slow, but emacs 27 helps a lot. Second,\nThere is some overhead for the lsp, particularly as you attempt to scale very large numbers of files or very large files. Emacs is really good with large files, as an artifact of having had to support editing larger files on computers 20 or 30 years ago, and lsp feels sluggish in these situations.\nI think some of this overhead is probably depends on the implementation of the language server\u0026rsquo;s themselves, and some percentage is probably protocol itself: http\u0026rsquo;s statelessness is great in big distributed web services, and for the local use cases where responsiveness matters, it\u0026rsquo;s less good. Similarly JSON\u0026rsquo;s transparency and ubiquity is great, but for streaming streaming-type use cases, perhaps less so.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not poked around the protocol, or any implementations, extensively, so I\u0026rsquo;m very prepared to be wrong about these points.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also some tension about moving features, like support for adding editor support for a language, out of lisp and into an external process. While I\u0026rsquo;m broadly sympathetic, and think there are a bunch of high-quality language integrations in emacs lisp, and for basic things, the emacs lisp ones might be faster. Having said that, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of interface inconsistency between different support for languages in emacs, and LSP support feels spiffy my comparisons. Also at least for python (jedi,) go (gocode), and C/C++ (irony,) lisp (slime,) the non-lsp services were already using external processes for some portion of their functionality.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also the case that if people spend their emacs-lisp-writing time doing things other than writing support for various development environments it\u0026rsquo;s all for the better anyway.\nSuggestions / Notes things will break or get wedged, call lsp-restart-workspace to restart the server (I think.) It helps. use lsp-file-watch-ignored to avoid having the language servers process emacs process files from vendored code, intermediate/generated code, or similar, in cases where you might have a large number of files that aren\u0026rsquo;t actually material to your development work I believe some (many? all?) servers are sourced from the PATH (e.g. clang/llvm, gopls), which means you are responsible for updating them and their dependencies. I\u0026rsquo;ve found it useful to update lsp-mode itself more often than I typically update other emacs packages. I also try and keep the language servers as up to date as possible in coordination with lsp-mode updates. If Emacs 27 can work on your system, it\u0026rsquo;s noticeably faster. Do that. If you have an existing setup for a language environment, the LSP features end up layering over existing functionality, and that can have unexpected results. My Configuration None of this is particularly exciting, but if you use use-package, then the following might be an interesting starting point. I stole a lot of this from other places, so shrug.\nI must say that I don\u0026rsquo;t really use dap or treemacs, because I tend to keep things pretty barebones.\n(use-package helm-lsp :ensure t :after (lsp-mode) :commands (helm-lsp-workspace-symbol) :init (define-key lsp-mode-map [remap xref-find-apropos] #'helm-lsp-workspace-symbol)) (use-package lsp-mode :diminish (lsp-mode . \u0026quot;lsp\u0026quot;) :bind (:map lsp-mode-map (\u0026quot;C-c C-d\u0026quot; . lsp-describe-thing-at-point)) :hook ((python-mode . #'lsp-deferred) (js-mode . #'lsp-deferred) (go-mode-hook . #'lsp-deferred)) :init (setq lsp-auto-guess-root t ; Detect project root lsp-log-io nil lsp-enable-indentation t lsp-enable-imenu t lsp-keymap-prefix \u0026quot;C-l\u0026quot; lsp-file-watch-threshold 500 lsp-prefer-flymake nil) ; Use lsp-ui and flycheck (defun lsp-on-save-operation () (when (or (boundp 'lsp-mode) (bound-p 'lsp-deferred)) (lsp-organize-imports) (lsp-format-buffer)))) (use-package lsp-clients :ensure nil :after (lsp-mode) :init (setq lsp-clients-python-library-directories '(\u0026quot;/usr/local/\u0026quot; \u0026quot;/usr/\u0026quot;))) (use-package lsp-ui :ensure t :after (lsp-mode) :commands lsp-ui-doc-hide :bind (:map lsp-ui-mode-map ([remap xref-find-definitions] . lsp-ui-peek-find-definitions) ([remap xref-find-references] . lsp-ui-peek-find-references) (\u0026quot;C-c u\u0026quot; . lsp-ui-imenu)) :init (setq lsp-ui-doc-enable t lsp-ui-doc-use-webkit nil lsp-ui-doc-header nil lsp-ui-doc-delay 0.2 lsp-ui-doc-include-signature t lsp-ui-doc-alignment 'at-point lsp-ui-doc-use-childframe nil lsp-ui-doc-border (face-foreground 'default) lsp-ui-peek-enable t lsp-ui-peek-show-directory t lsp-ui-sideline-update-mode 'line lsp-ui-sideline-enable t lsp-ui-sideline-show-code-actions t lsp-ui-sideline-show-hover nil lsp-ui-sideline-ignore-duplicate t) :config (add-to-list 'lsp-ui-doc-frame-parameters '(right-fringe . 8)) ;; `C-g'to close doc (advice-add #'keyboard-quit :before #'lsp-ui-doc-hide) ;; Reset `lsp-ui-doc-background' after loading theme (add-hook 'after-load-theme-hook (lambda () (setq lsp-ui-doc-border (face-foreground 'default)) (set-face-background 'lsp-ui-doc-background (face-background 'tooltip)))) ;; WORKAROUND Hide mode-line of the lsp-ui-imenu buffer ;; @see https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-ui/issues/243 (defadvice lsp-ui-imenu (after hide-lsp-ui-imenu-mode-line activate) (setq mode-line-format nil))) ;; Debug (use-package dap-mode :diminish dap-mode :ensure t :after (lsp-mode) :functions dap-hydra/nil :bind (:map lsp-mode-map (\u0026quot;\u0026lt;f5\u0026gt;\u0026quot; . dap-debug) (\u0026quot;M-\u0026lt;f5\u0026gt;\u0026quot; . dap-hydra)) :hook ((dap-mode . dap-ui-mode) (dap-session-created . (lambda (\u0026amp;_rest) (dap-hydra))) (dap-terminated . (lambda (\u0026amp;_rest) (dap-hydra/nil))))) (use-package lsp-treemacs :after (lsp-mode treemacs) :ensure t :commands lsp-treemacs-errors-list :bind (:map lsp-mode-map (\u0026quot;M-9\u0026quot; . lsp-treemacs-errors-list))) (use-package treemacs :ensure t :commands (treemacs) :after (lsp-mode)) ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/emacs-and-lsp-mode/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using emacs for a long time, and it\u0026rsquo;s mostly pretty unexceptional. A few months ago, I started using LSP mode, and it\u0026rsquo;s been pretty great\u0026hellip; mostly. This post reflects on some of the dustier corners, and some of the broader implications.\nHistory and Conflict Language Server is a cool idea, that (as far as I know) grew out of VS Code, and provides a way to give a text editor \u0026ldquo;advanced, IDE-like\u0026rdquo; features without having to implement those features per-language in the text editor. Instead, editor developers implement generic integration for the protocol, and language developers produce a single process that can process source code and supports the editor features. Sounds great!\nThere are challenges:\nThe LSP protocol uses JSON for encoding data between the server and emacs. This is a reasonable choice, and makes development easy, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a perfect fit. Primarily, in emacs, until version 27, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t reached an official release yet (but is quite usable on Linux), parsed JSON in lisp rather than C, which made everything rather slow, but emacs 27 helps a lot.","title":"Emacs and LSP Mode"},{"content":"Last week, I did a release, I guess, of cl-grip which is a logging library that I wrote after reflecting on common lisp logging earlier. I wanted to write up some notes about it that aren\u0026rsquo;t covered in the read me, and also talk a little bit4 about what else I\u0026rsquo;m working on.\ncl-grip This is a really fun and useful project and it was really the right size for a project for me to really get into, and practice a bunch of different areas (packages! threads! testing!) and I think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to boot. The read me is pretty comprehensive, but I thought I\u0026rsquo;d collect some additional color here:\nReally at it\u0026rsquo;s core cl-grip isn\u0026rsquo;t a logging library, it\u0026rsquo;s just a collection of interfaces that make it easy to write logging and messaging tools, which is a really cool basis for an idea, (I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on and with a similar system in Go for years.)\nAs result, there\u0026rsquo;s interfaces and plumbing for doing most logging related things, but no actual implementations. I was very excited to leave out the \u0026ldquo;log rotation handling feature,\u0026rdquo; which feels like an anachronism at this point, though it\u0026rsquo;d be easy enough to add that kind of handler in if needed. Although I\u0026rsquo;m going to let it stew for a little while, I\u0026rsquo;m excited to expand upon it in the future:\nadditional message types, including capturing stack frames for debugging, or system information for monitoring. being able to connect and send messages directly to likely targets, including systemd\u0026rsquo;s journal and splunk collectors. a collection of more absurd output targets to cover \u0026ldquo;alerting\u0026rdquo; type workloads, like desktop notifications, SUMP, and Slack targets. I\u0026rsquo;m also excited to see if other people are interested in using it. I\u0026rsquo;ve submitted it to Quicklisp and Ultralisp, so give it a whirl!\nSee the cl-grip repo on github.\nEggqulibrium At the behest of a friend I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on an \u0026ldquo;egg equilibrium\u0026rdquo; solver, the idea being to provide a tool that can given a bunch of recipes that use partial eggs (yolks and whites) can provide optimal solutions that use a fixed set of eggs.\nSo far I\u0026rsquo;ve implemented some prototypes that given a number of egg parts, attempt collects recipes until there are no partial eggs in use, so that there are no leftovers. I\u0026rsquo;ve also implemented the \u0026ldquo;if I have these partial eggs, what can I make to use them all.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve also implemented a rudimentary CLI interface (that was a trip!) and a really simple interface to recipe data (both parsing from a CSV format and an in memory format that makes solving the equilibrium problem easier.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m using it as an opportunity to learn different things, and find a way to learn more about things I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet touched in lisp (or anywhere really,) so I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about:\nbuilding a web-based interface using some combination of caveman, parenscript, and related tools. This could include features like \u0026ldquo;user submitted databases,\u0026rdquo; as well as links to the sources the recpies, in addition to the basic \u0026ldquo;web forms, APIs, and table rendering.\u0026rdquo; storing the data in a database (probably SQLite, mostly) both to support persistence and other more advanced features, but also because I\u0026rsquo;ve not done database things from Lisp at all. See the eggquilibrium repo on github it\u0026rsquo;s still pretty rough, but perhaps it\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting!'\nOther Projects Writing more! I\u0026rsquo;m trying to be less obsessive about blogging, as I think it\u0026rsquo;s useful (and perhaps interesting for you all too.) I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a bunch and not posting very much of it. My goal is to mix sort of grandiose musing on technology and engineering, with discussions of Lisp, Emacs, and programming projects. Working on producing texinfo output from cl-docutils! I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying around with the idea of writing a publication system targeted at producing books--long-form non-fiction, collections of essays, and fiction--rather than the blogs or technical resources that most such tools are focused on. This is sort of part 0 of this process. Hacking on some Common Lisp projects, I\u0026rsquo;m particularly interested in the Nyxt and StumpWM. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/common-lisp-grip-project-updates-and-progress/","summary":"Last week, I did a release, I guess, of cl-grip which is a logging library that I wrote after reflecting on common lisp logging earlier. I wanted to write up some notes about it that aren\u0026rsquo;t covered in the read me, and also talk a little bit4 about what else I\u0026rsquo;m working on.\ncl-grip This is a really fun and useful project and it was really the right size for a project for me to really get into, and practice a bunch of different areas (packages! threads! testing!) and I think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to boot. The read me is pretty comprehensive, but I thought I\u0026rsquo;d collect some additional color here:\nReally at it\u0026rsquo;s core cl-grip isn\u0026rsquo;t a logging library, it\u0026rsquo;s just a collection of interfaces that make it easy to write logging and messaging tools, which is a really cool basis for an idea, (I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on and with a similar system in Go for years.","title":"Common Lisp Grip, Project Updates, and Progress"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve made the decision to make all of personal project code that I write to do in Common Lisp. See this post for some of the background for this decision.\nIt didn\u0026rsquo;t take me long to say \u0026ldquo;I think I need a logging package,\u0026rdquo; and I quickly found this wonderful comparsion of CL logging libraries, and only a little longer to be somewhat disappointed.\nIn general, my requirements for a logger are:\nstraightforward API for logging. levels for filtering messages by importance library in common use and commonly available. easy to configure output targets (e.g. system\u0026rsquo;s journal, external services, etc). support for structured logging. I think my rationale is pretty clear: loggers should be easy to use because the more information that can flow through the logger, the better. Assigning a level to all log messages is great for filtering practically, and it\u0026rsquo;s ubiquitous enough that it\u0026rsquo;s really part of having a good API. While I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to writing my own logging system,1 but I think I\u0026rsquo;d rather not in this case: there\u0026rsquo;s too much that\u0026rsquo;s gained by using the conventional choice.\nConfigurable outputs and structured logging are stretch goals, but frankly are the most powerful features you can add to a logger. Lots of logging work is spent crafting well formed logging strings, when really, you just want some kind of arbitrary map and makes it easier to make use of logging at scale, which is to say, when you\u0026rsquo;re running higher workloads and multiple coppies of an application.\nEcosystem I\u0026rsquo;ve dug in a bit to a couple of loggers, sort of using the framework above to evaluate the state of the existing tools. Here are some notes:\nlog4cl My analysis of the CL logging packages is basically that log4cl is the most mature and actively maintained tool, but beyond the basic fundamentals, it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;selling\u0026rdquo; features are\u0026hellip; interesting.2 The big selling features:\nintegration with the developers IDE (slime,) which makes it possible to use the logging system like a debugger, almost. This is actually a phenomenal feature, particularly for development and debugging. The downside is that it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be totally unreasonable to use it production, and that\u0026rsquo;s sort of terrifying. it attempts to capture a lot of information about logging call sites so you can better map back from log messages to the state of the system when the call was made. Again, this makes it a debugging tool, and that\u0026rsquo;s awesome, but it\u0026rsquo;s overhead, and frankly I\u0026rsquo;ve never found it difficult to grep through code. lots of attention to log rotation and log file management. There\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of utility in writing log data to files directly. In most cases you want to write to standard out: the program is being used interactively, and users may want to see the log of what happens. In cases where you\u0026rsquo;re running in a daemon mode, any more you\u0026rsquo;re not, systemd or similar just captures your output. Even then, you\u0026rsquo;re probably in a situation where you want to send the log output to some other process (e.g. an external service, or some kind of local socket for fluentd/etc.) hierarchical organization of log messages is just less useful than annotation with metadata, in practice, and using hierarchical methods to filter logs into different streams or reduce logging volumes just obscures things and makes it harder to understand what\u0026rsquo;s happening in a system. Having said that, the API surface area is big, and it\u0026rsquo;s a bit confusing to just start using the logger.\na-cl-logger The acl package is pretty straightforward, and has a lot of features that I think are consistent with my interests and desires:\nsupport for JSON output, internal support for additional output formats (e.g. logstash,) more simple API It comes with a couple of pretty strong draw backs:\nthere are limited testing. it\u0026rsquo;s SBCL only, because it relies on SBCL fundamentals in collecting extra context about log messages. There\u0026rsquo;s a pending pull request to add ECL compile support, but it looks like it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be quite that simple. the overhead of collecting contextual information comes at an overhead, and I think logging should err on the side of higher performance, and making expensive things optional, just because it\u0026rsquo;s hard to opt into/out of logging later. Conclusion So where does that leave me?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not really sure.\nI created a scratch project to write a simple logging project, but I\u0026rsquo;m definitely not prioritizing working on that over other projects. In the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ll probably end up just not logging very much, or maybe giving log4cl a spin.\nNotes When I started writing Go I did this, I wrote a logging tool, for a bunch of reasons. While I think it was the right decision at the time, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it holds up. Using novel infrastructure in projects makes integration a bit more complicated and creates overhead for would be contributors.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nTo be honest, I think that log4cl is a fine package, and really a product of an earlier era, and it makes the standard assumptions about the way that logs were used, that makes sense given a very different view of how services should be operated.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/common-lisp-and-logging/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve made the decision to make all of personal project code that I write to do in Common Lisp. See this post for some of the background for this decision.\nIt didn\u0026rsquo;t take me long to say \u0026ldquo;I think I need a logging package,\u0026rdquo; and I quickly found this wonderful comparsion of CL logging libraries, and only a little longer to be somewhat disappointed.\nIn general, my requirements for a logger are:\nstraightforward API for logging. levels for filtering messages by importance library in common use and commonly available. easy to configure output targets (e.g. system\u0026rsquo;s journal, external services, etc). support for structured logging. I think my rationale is pretty clear: loggers should be easy to use because the more information that can flow through the logger, the better. Assigning a level to all log messages is great for filtering practically, and it\u0026rsquo;s ubiquitous enough that it\u0026rsquo;s really part of having a good API.","title":"Common Lisp and Logging"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been intermittently working on a common lisp library to produce a binary encoding of arbitrary objects, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to be abandoning the project. This is an explanation of that decision and an reflection on my experience.\nWhy Common Lisp? First, some background. I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought that Common Lisp is a language with a bunch of cool features and selling points, but unsurprisingly, I\u0026rsquo;ve never really had the experience of writing more than some one-off bits of code in CL, which isn\u0026rsquo;t surprising. This project was a good experience for really digging into writing and managing a conceptually larger project which was a good kick in the pants to learn more.\nThe things I like:\nthe implementations of the core runtime are really robust and high quality, and make it possible to imagine running your code in a bunch of different contexts. Even though it\u0026rsquo;s a language with relatively few users, it feels robust in a way. The most common implementations also have ways of producing fully self contained static binaries (like Go, say), which makes the thought of distributing software seem reasonable. quicklisp, a package/library management tool is new (in the last decade or so,) has really raised the level of the ecosystem. It\u0026rsquo;s not as complete as I\u0026rsquo;d expect in many ways, but quicklisp changed CL from something quaint to something that you could actually imagine using. the object system is really nice. There isn\u0026rsquo;t quite compile time-type checking on the values of slots (attributes) of objects, though you can opt in. My general feeling is that I can pretty easily get the feeling of writing statically typed code with all of the freedom of writing dynamic code. multiple dispatch, and the conceptual approach to genericism, is amazing and really simplifies flow control in a lot of cases. You implement the methods you need, for the appropriate types/objects and then just write the logic you need, and the function call machinery just does the right thing. There\u0026rsquo;s surprisingly little conditional logic, as a result. Things I don\u0026rsquo;t like:\nthere are all sorts of things that don\u0026rsquo;t quite have existing libraries, and so I find myself wanting to do things that require more effort than necessary. This project to write a binary encoding tool would have been a component in service of a much larger project. It\u0026rsquo;d be nice if you could skip some of the lower level components, or didn\u0026rsquo;t have your design choices so constrained by gaps in infrastructure. at the same time, the library ecosystem is pretty fractured and there are common tools around which there aren\u0026rsquo;t really consensus. Why are there so many half-finished YAML and JSON libraries? There are a bunch of HTTP server (!) implementations, but really you need 2 and not 5? looping/iteration isn\u0026rsquo;t intuitive and difficult to get common patterns to work. The answer, in most cases is to use (map) with lambdas rather than loops, in most cases, but there\u0026rsquo;s this pitfall where you try and use a (loop) and really, that\u0026rsquo;s rarely the right answer. implicit returns seem like an over sight, hilariously, Rust also makes this error. Implicit returns also make knowing what type a function or method returns quite hard to reason about. Writing an Encoder So the project I wrote was an attempt to write really object oriented code as a way to writing an object encoder to a JSON-like format. Simple enough, I had a good mental model of the format, and my general approach to doing any kind of binary format processing is to just write a crap ton of unit tests and work somewhat iteratively.\nI had a lot of fun with the project, and it gave me a bunch of key experiences which make me feel comfortable saying that I\u0026rsquo;m able to write common lisp even if it\u0026rsquo;s not a language that I feel maximally comfortable in (yet?). The experiences that really helped included:\nproducing enough code to really have to think about how packaging and code organization worked. I\u0026rsquo;d written a function here and there, before, but never something where I needed to really understand and use the library/module/packaging (e.g. systems and libraries.) infrastructure. writing and running lots of tests. I don\u0026rsquo;t always follow test-driven development closely, but writing lots of tests is part of my process, and being able to watch the layers of this code come together was a lot of fun and very instructive. this project for me, was mostly about API design and it was nice to have a project that didn\u0026rsquo;t require much design in terms of the actual functionality, as object encoding is pretty straight forward. From an educational perspective all of my goals were achieved.\nFailure Mode The problem is that it didn\u0026rsquo;t work out, in the final analysis. While the library I constructed was able to encode and decode objects and was internally correct, I never got it to produce encoding that other implementations of the same specification could reliably read, and the ability to read data encoded by other libraries only worked in trivial cases. In the end:\nthis was mostly a project designed to help me gain competence in a programming language I don\u0026rsquo;t really know, and in that I was successful. adding this encoding format isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly useful to any project I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of working on in the short term, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t directly enable me to do anything in particular. the architecture of the library would not be particularly performant in practice, as the encoding process didn\u0026rsquo;t deploy a buffer pool of any kind, and it would have been harder than not to back fill that in, and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t particularly interested in that. it didn\u0026rsquo;t work, and the effort to debug the issue would be more substantive than I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in doing at this point, particularly given the limited utility. So here we are. Onto a different project!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-common-failure/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been intermittently working on a common lisp library to produce a binary encoding of arbitrary objects, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to be abandoning the project. This is an explanation of that decision and an reflection on my experience.\nWhy Common Lisp? First, some background. I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought that Common Lisp is a language with a bunch of cool features and selling points, but unsurprisingly, I\u0026rsquo;ve never really had the experience of writing more than some one-off bits of code in CL, which isn\u0026rsquo;t surprising. This project was a good experience for really digging into writing and managing a conceptually larger project which was a good kick in the pants to learn more.\nThe things I like:\nthe implementations of the core runtime are really robust and high quality, and make it possible to imagine running your code in a bunch of different contexts. Even though it\u0026rsquo;s a language with relatively few users, it feels robust in a way.","title":"A Common Failure"},{"content":"Software engineers use terms like \u0026ldquo;backend\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;frontend\u0026rdquo; to describe areas of expertice and focus, and the thought is that these terms map roughly onto \u0026ldquo;underlying systems and business logic\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;user interfaces.\u0026rdquo; The thought, is that these are different kinds of work and no person can really specialize on \u0026ldquo;everything.\u0026rdquo;\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s all about perspective. Software is build in layers: there are frontends and backends at almost every level, so the classification easily breaks down if you look at it too hard. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that that logical features, from the perspective of the product and user, require the efforts of both disciplines. Often development organizations struggle to hand projects off between groups of front-end and back-end teams.1\nBackend/Frontend is also a poor way to organize work, as often it forces a needless boundary between people and teams wokring on related projects. Backend work (ususally) has to be completed first, and if that slips (or estimation is off) then the front end work has to happen in a crunch. Even if timing goes well, it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to maintain engineering continuity through the handoff and context is often lost in the process.\nIn response to splitting projects and teams into front and backend, engineers have developed this idea of \u0026ldquo;full stack\u0026rdquo; engineering. This typically means \u0026ldquo;integrated front end and backend development.\u0026rdquo; A noble approach: keep the same engineer on the project from start to finish, and avoid an awkward handoff or resetting context halfway through a project. Historic concerns about \u0026ldquo;front end and backend being in different languages\u0026rdquo; are reduced both by the advent of back-end javascript, and a realization that programmers often work in multiple languages.\nWhile full stack sounds great, it\u0026rsquo;s a total lie. First, engineers by and large cannot maintain context on all aspects of a system, so boundaries end up appearing in different places. A full stack engineer might end up writing front end and the APIs on the backed that the front end depends on, but not the application logic that supports the feature. Or an engineer might focus only a very specific set of features, but not be able to branch out very broadly. Second, specialization is important for allowing engineers to focus and be productive, and while context switching projects between engineers, having engineers that must context switch regularly between different disciplines is bad for those engineers. In short you can\u0026rsquo;t just declare that engineers will be able to do it all.'\nSome, particularly larger, teams and prodcuts can get around the issue entirely by dividing ownership and specialization along functional boundaries rather than by engineering discipline, but there can be real technical limitations, and getting a team to move to this kind of ownership model is super difficult. Therefore, I\u0026rsquo;d propose a different organization or a way of dividing projects and engineering that avoids both \u0026ldquo;frontend/backend\u0026rdquo; as well as the idea of \u0026ldquo;full stack\u0026rdquo;:\nfeature or product engineers, that focus on core functionality delivered to users. This includes UI, supporting backend APIs, and core functionality. The users of these teams are the users of the product. These jobs have the best parts of \u0026ldquo;full stack\u0026rdquo; type orientation, but draw an effective \u0026ldquo;lower\u0026rdquo; boundary of responsibility and allow feature-based specialization. infrastructure or product platform engineers, that focus on deployment, operations and supporting internal APIs. These teams and engineers should see their users as feature and product engineers. These engineers should fall somewhere between \u0026ldquo;backend engineers,\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;devops\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;sre\u0026rdquo; -type roles of the last decade, and cover the area \u0026ldquo;above\u0026rdquo; systems (e.g. not inclusive of machine management and access provisioning,) and below features. This framework helps teams scale up as needs and requirements change: Feature teams can be divided and parallelized and focus in functionality slices, while, infrastructure teams divide easily into specialties (e.g. networking, storage, databases, internal libraries, queues, etc.) and along service boundaries. Teams are in a better position to handle continuity of projects, and engineers can maintain context and operate using more agile methods. I suspect that, if we look carefully, many organizations and teams have this kind of de facto organization, even if they use different kind of terminology.\nThoughts?\nIn truth this problem of coordination between frontend and backend teams is really that it forces a waterfall-like coordination between teams, which is always awkward. The problem isn\u0026rsquo;t that backend engineers can\u0026rsquo;t write frontend code, but that having different teams requires a handoff that is difficult to manage correctly, and around that handoff processes and management happens.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/theres-no-full-stack/","summary":"Software engineers use terms like \u0026ldquo;backend\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;frontend\u0026rdquo; to describe areas of expertice and focus, and the thought is that these terms map roughly onto \u0026ldquo;underlying systems and business logic\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;user interfaces.\u0026rdquo; The thought, is that these are different kinds of work and no person can really specialize on \u0026ldquo;everything.\u0026rdquo;\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s all about perspective. Software is build in layers: there are frontends and backends at almost every level, so the classification easily breaks down if you look at it too hard. It\u0026rsquo;s also the case that that logical features, from the perspective of the product and user, require the efforts of both disciplines. Often development organizations struggle to hand projects off between groups of front-end and back-end teams.1\nBackend/Frontend is also a poor way to organize work, as often it forces a needless boundary between people and teams wokring on related projects. Backend work (ususally) has to be completed first, and if that slips (or estimation is off) then the front end work has to happen in a crunch.","title":"There's No Full Stack"},{"content":"I wrote this post nearly 5 years ago, and have been sitting on the draft for a long time: not for any reason, I think it\u0026rsquo;s actually pretty good post. For non-knitters, this is kind of a \u0026ldquo;ask a great cook for their comfort food recpie,\u0026rdquo; but in a narrative form.\nIn any case, I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting very much recently, and while I enjoy writing knitting patterns there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work in writing a well formed knitting pattern that I\u0026rsquo;m poorly positioned for ring now (test knitting! good photography! talking with knitters!) But, perhaps someone will find it useful\u0026hellip; Enjoy!\nPart of my recent return to knitting has been about taking a much more simple approach to yarn. I think yarn is cool and working with good yarn is awesome but at a certain point, I think yarn distracts from the things that I like most about knitting: the consistency, the dependability, the rhythm of the activity, and coordination of parallel activities.\nNovel yarns and yarn variety actually makes the process of knitting less enjoyable for me. It also doesn\u0026rsquo;t really jive with my taste in clothing: I like plain things that fit well without a lot of adornment. While I enjoy knitting patterned sweaters for the rhythm, I don\u0026rsquo;t really wear them much. I also, live and spend my time in a climate where a I\u0026rsquo;m almost always wearing a light sweater (during the cold months) and inside during the rest of the months.\nThe result of this is that I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly been working on sock knitting. I like wearing wool socks, and after a period of not wearing them for a few reasons, I didn\u0026rsquo;t actually have that many wool socks. Which has lead me to get acclimated to knitting fingering weight yarn with size 0 needles.\nSo I want to make a sweater in this mold: fingering weight, very plain lines, probably knit in the round using the Elizabeth Zimmerman system. Starting from the bottom, I\u0026rsquo;ve been leaning away from ribbings at the bottom, and have tended to like hems though they sometimes flare. Ususally, I just cast on provisionally and add the hem (or whatever) at the end anyway. There\u0026rsquo;s time yet to decide.\nMore importantly, I\u0026rsquo;m quite interested in having a rolled collar for the neck, but I tend to think that rolled ends mostly have a flare look anyway. I can defer this decision for a while.\nFor shaping and even most of the styling I intend to copy the Chrome Cobra Zip Up, which is, by far, my favorite article of clothing.\nI think really subtle increases (so that the sweater tapers to the waist) is a good feature and might choose to do some of those, particularly if the model sweater has them. The model sweater has a really long back, and I think I might moderate this slightly.\nThe shoulders are an open question. If this goes well, I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to knit my way though most of the standard EZ shoulder constructions: I think I\u0026rsquo;ve knit all of the options at least once, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not done all of them in plain knitting, and most of the sweaters are a bit odd in one way or another. There\u0026rsquo;s a long project. I want to start with, and hopefully master, the set-in-sleeve.\nFor those of you playing along at home, set-in-sleeves are probably what you think of as \u0026ldquo;normal\u0026rdquo; sleeves, the garment fits in the shoulders, and the sleeves angle gently down from the shoulders. Most shirts have this shaping but the shapes aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly natural for knitting.\nTo knit set in sleeves in the round, you join the sleeves to the body, setting some stitches aside where the pieces meet and then decreasing body snitches into the sleeves as you knit until the body is just as wide as the shoulders. Then decrease the sleeve stitches into the body until you have about 3 inches of sleeve stitches left. Finally, knit knit short rows across the front and back (or just the front) stitches, decreasing the remaining stitches in the short rows ending with a 3 needle bind-off at the appropriate moment. To get a good crew neck, begin shaping the front of the neck every row 1.5 inches before you start the shoulder short-rows, and shape the back of the neck every other row when you start the shoulder short rows.\nThe shaping and body of the knitting is pretty straightforward from design perspective. The hard part from the perspective of the success of the sweater is the hems and/or ribbing, and figuring out the right thing to for each hem. It\u0026rsquo;s always something.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/experimental-sweater-pattern/","summary":"I wrote this post nearly 5 years ago, and have been sitting on the draft for a long time: not for any reason, I think it\u0026rsquo;s actually pretty good post. For non-knitters, this is kind of a \u0026ldquo;ask a great cook for their comfort food recpie,\u0026rdquo; but in a narrative form.\nIn any case, I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting very much recently, and while I enjoy writing knitting patterns there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work in writing a well formed knitting pattern that I\u0026rsquo;m poorly positioned for ring now (test knitting! good photography! talking with knitters!) But, perhaps someone will find it useful\u0026hellip; Enjoy!\nPart of my recent return to knitting has been about taking a much more simple approach to yarn. I think yarn is cool and working with good yarn is awesome but at a certain point, I think yarn distracts from the things that I like most about knitting: the consistency, the dependability, the rhythm of the activity, and coordination of parallel activities.","title":"Experimental Sweater Pattern"},{"content":"The longer that I have this job, the more difficult it is to explain what I do. I say, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a programmer,\u0026rdquo; and you\u0026rsquo;d think that I write code all day, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t map onto what my days look like, and the longer it seems the less code I actually end up writing. I think the complexity of this seemingly simple question grows from the fact that building software involves a lot more than writing code, particularly as projects become more complex.\nI\u0026rsquo;d venture to say that most code is written and maintained by one person, and typically used by a very small number of pepole (often on behalf of many more people,) though this is difficult to quantify. Single maintainer software is still software, and there are lots of interesting problems, but as much as anything else I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the problems adjacent to multi-author code-bases and multi-operator software development.1\nFundamentally, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the following questions:\nHow can (sometimes larger) groups of people collaborate to build something that\u0026rsquo;s bigger than the scope of any of their work? How can we build software in a way that lets individual developers focus most of the time on the features and concerns that are the most important to them and their users.2 The software development process, regardless of the scope of the problem, has a number of different aspects:\nOperations: How does is this software execute and how do we know that its successful when it runs? Behavior: What does it do, and how do we ensure it has the correct behavior? Interface: How will users interact with the process, and how do we ensure a consistent experience across versions and users' environment? Product: Who are the users? What features do they want? Which features are the most important? Sometimes we can address these questions by writing code, but often there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of talking to users, other developers, and other people who work in software development organizations (e.g. product managers, support, etc.) not to mention writing a lot of English (documentation, specs, and the like.)\nI still don\u0026rsquo;t think that I\u0026rsquo;ve successfully answered the framing question, except to paint a large picture of what kinds of work goes into making software, and described some of my specific domain interests. This ends up boiling down to:\nI write a lot of documents describing new features and improvements to our software. [product] I think a lot about how our product works as it grows (scaling), and what kinds of changes we can make now to make that process more smooth. [operations] How can I help the more junior members of my team focus on the aspects of their jobs that they enjoy the most, and help illustrate broader contexts to them. [mentoring] How can we take the problems we\u0026rsquo;re solving today and build the solution that balances the immediate requirements with longer term maintainability and reuse. [operations/infrastructure] The actual \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m spending my time boils down to reading a bunch of code, meeting with my teamates, meeting with users (who are also coworkers.) And sometimes writing code. If I\u0026rsquo;m lucky.\nI think the single-author and/or single-operator class is super interesting and valuable, particularly because it includes a lot of software outside of the conventional disciplinary boundaries of software and includes things like macros, spreadsheets, small scale database, and IT/operations (\u0026ldquo;scripting\u0026rdquo;) work.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s very easy to spend most of your time as a developer writing infrastructure code of some sort, to address either internal concerns (logging, data management and modeling, integrating with services) or project/process automation (build, test, operations) concerns. Infrastructure isn\u0026rsquo;t bad, but it isn\u0026rsquo;t the same as working on product features.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/what-is-it-that-you-do/","summary":"The longer that I have this job, the more difficult it is to explain what I do. I say, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a programmer,\u0026rdquo; and you\u0026rsquo;d think that I write code all day, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t map onto what my days look like, and the longer it seems the less code I actually end up writing. I think the complexity of this seemingly simple question grows from the fact that building software involves a lot more than writing code, particularly as projects become more complex.\nI\u0026rsquo;d venture to say that most code is written and maintained by one person, and typically used by a very small number of pepole (often on behalf of many more people,) though this is difficult to quantify. Single maintainer software is still software, and there are lots of interesting problems, but as much as anything else I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the problems adjacent to multi-author code-bases and multi-operator software development.","title":"What is it That You Do?"},{"content":"A lot of my work, these days, focuses on figuring out how to improve how people develop software in ways that reduces the amount of time developers have to spend doing work outside of development and that improves the quality of their work. This post, has been sitting in my drafts folder for the last year, and does a good job of explaining how I locate my workand* makes a case for high quality generic build system tooling that I continue to feel is compelling.*\nIncidentally, it turns out that I wrote an introductory post about buildsystems 6 years ago. Go past me.\nCanonically, build systems described the steps required to produce artifacts, as system (graph) of dependencies1 and these dependencies are between source files (code) and artifacts (programs and packages) with intermediate artifacts all in terms of the files they are or create. Though different development environments, programming languages, and kinds of software have different.\nWhile the canonical \u0026ldquo;build systems are about producing files,\u0026rdquo; the truth is that the challenge of contemporary _software development isn\u0026rsquo;t really just about producing files. Everything from test automation to deployment is something that we can think about as a kind of build system problem.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s unwind for a moment. The work of \u0026ldquo;making software,\u0026rdquo; breaks down into a collection of--reasonably disparate--tasks, which include:\ncollecting requirements (figuring out what people want,) project planning (figuring out how to break larger collections of functionality into more reasonable units.) writing new code in existing code bases. exploring unfamiliar code and making changes. writing tests for code you\u0026rsquo;ve recently written, or areas of the code base that have recently chaining. rewriting existing code with functionally equivalent code (refactoring,) fixing bugs discovered by users. fixing bugs discovered by an automated test suite. releasing software (deploying code.) Within these tasks developers do a lot of little experiments and tests. Make a change, see what it\u0026rsquo;s impact is by doing something like compiling the code, running the program or running a test program. The goal, therefore, of the project of developer productivity projects is to automate these processes and shorten the time it takes to do any of these tasks. In particular the feedback loop between \u0026ldquo;making a change\u0026rdquo; and seeing if that change had an impact. The more complex the system that you\u0026rsquo;re developing, with regards to distinct components, dependencies, target platforms, compilation model, and integration\u0026rsquo;s, them the more time you spend in any one of these loops and the less productive you can be.\nBuild systems are uniquely positioned to suport the development process: they\u0026rsquo;re typically purpose built per-project (sharing common infrastructure,) most projects already have one, and they provide an ideal environment to provide the kind of incremental development of additional functionality and tooling. The model of build systems: the description of processes in terms of dependency graphs and the optimization for local environments means.\nThe problem, I think, is that build systems tend to be pretty terrible, or at least many suffer a number of classic flaws:\nimplicit assumptions about the build or development environment which make it difficult to start using. unexpressed dependencies on services or systems that the build requires to be running in a certain configuration. improperly configured dependency graphs which end up requiring repeated work. incomplete expression of dependencies which require users to manually complete operations in particular orders. poorly configured defaults which make for overly complex invocations for common tasks. operations distributed among a collection of tools with little integration so that compilation, test automation, release automation, and other functions. By improving the quality, correctness, and usability of build systems, we:\nimprove the experience for developers every day, make it really easy to optimize basically every aspect of the development process, reduce the friction for including new developers in a project\u0026rsquo;s development process. I\u0026rsquo;m not saying \u0026ldquo;we need to spend more time writing build automation tools\u0026rdquo; (like make, ninja, cmake, and friends,) or that the existing ones are bad and hard to use (they, by and large are,) but that they\u0026rsquo;re the first and best hook we have into developer workflows. A high quality, trustable, tested, and easy to use build system for a project make development easier, continuous integration easy and maintainable, and ultimately improve the ability of developers to spend more of their time focusing on important problems.\nideally build systems describe directed acylcic graph, though many projects have buildsystems with cyclic dependency graphs that they ignore in some way.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-case-for-better-build-systems/","summary":"A lot of my work, these days, focuses on figuring out how to improve how people develop software in ways that reduces the amount of time developers have to spend doing work outside of development and that improves the quality of their work. This post, has been sitting in my drafts folder for the last year, and does a good job of explaining how I locate my workand* makes a case for high quality generic build system tooling that I continue to feel is compelling.*\nIncidentally, it turns out that I wrote an introductory post about buildsystems 6 years ago. Go past me.\nCanonically, build systems described the steps required to produce artifacts, as system (graph) of dependencies1 and these dependencies are between source files (code) and artifacts (programs and packages) with intermediate artifacts all in terms of the files they are or create. Though different development environments, programming languages, and kinds of software have different.","title":"The Case for Better Build Systems"},{"content":"I wrote this thing about monitoring in software, and monitoring in web applications (and similar) about a year ago, and I sort of forgot about it, but as I was cleaning up recently I found this, and think that I mostly still agree with the point. Enjoy!\nIt is almost always the case that writing software that does what you want it to do is the easy part and everything else is the hard part.\nAs your software does more a number of common features emerge:\nother people are responsible for operating your software. multiple instances of the program are running at once, on different computers. you may not be able to connect to all of the running instances of the program when something goes wrong. people will observe behaviors that you don\u0026rsquo;t expect and that you won\u0026rsquo;t be able to understand by observing the program\u0026rsquo;s inputs or outputs'' There are many things you can do to take a good proof of concept program and turn it into a production-ready program, but I think logging and introspection abilities are among the most powerful: they give you the most bang for your buck, as it were. It\u0026rsquo;s also true that observability (monitoring) is a hot area of software development that\u0026rsquo;s seeing a lot of development and thought at the moment.\nWhile your application can have its own internal reporting system, its almost always easier to collect data in logs first rather than\nAggregate Logs Conventionally operators and developers interact with logs using standard unix stream processing tools: tail, less, and grep and sometimes wc, awk, and sed. This is great when you have one (or a small number) process running on one machine. When applications get bigger, stream processing begins to break down.\nMostly you can\u0026rsquo;t stream process because of volume there\u0026rsquo;s too much data, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to justify spending disk space on all of your application servers on logs, and there\u0026rsquo;s too much of it to look at and do useful things. It\u0026rsquo;s also true that once you have multiple machines, its really helpful to be able to look at all of the logs in a single place.\nAt the lowest level the syslog protocol and associated infrastructure solves this problem by providing a common way for services to send log data via a network (UDP, etc.) It works but you still only have stream processing tools, which may be fine, depending on your use case and users.\nAdditionally there are services and applications that solve this problem: splunk (commercial/enterprise software ) sumologic (commercial/cloud software) and the ELK stack (an amalgamation of open source tools.) that provide really powerful ways to do log search, reporting, and even build visualizations. There are probably others as well.\nUse them.\nStructure Logs The most common interview question for systems administrators that my colleagues give is a \u0026ldquo;log sawing\u0026rdquo; question. This seems pretty standard, and is a pretty common exercise for parsing information out of well known streams of log data. Like \u0026ldquo;find a running average request time,\u0026rdquo; or figure out the request rate.\nThe hard part is that most logs, in this example are unstructured in the sense that they are just line-wise printed strings, and so the exercise is in figuring out the structure of the messages, parsing data from the string, and then tracking data over the course of the logs. Common exercise, definitely a thing that you have to do, and also totally infuriating and basically impossible to generalize.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re writing software, don\u0026rsquo;t make your users do this kind of thing. Capture events (log messages) in your program and output them with the information already parsed. The easiest way is to make your log messages mapping types, and then write them out in JASON, but there are other options.\nIn short, construct your log messages so that they\u0026rsquo;re easy to consume by other tools: strongly (and stably) type your messages, provide easy way to group and filter similar messages. Report operations in reasonable units (e.g. seconds rather than nanoseconds) to avoid complex calculations during processing, and think about how a given data point would beinteresting to track over time.\nAnnotate Events Building on the power of structured logs, it\u0026rsquo;s often useful to be able to determine the flow of traffic or operations through the system to make it possible to understand the drivers of different kinds of load, and the impact of certain kinds of traffic on overall performance. Because a single operation may impact multiple areas of the system, annotating messages appropriately makes it possible to draw more concrete conclusions based on the data you collect.\nFor example when a client makes a user request for data, your system probably has a request-started and request-ended event. In addition this operation may retrieve data, do some application-level manipulation, modify other data, and then return it to the user. If there\u0026rsquo;s any logging between the start and end of a request, then it\u0026rsquo;s useful to tie these specific events together, and annotations can help.\nUnlike other observability strategies, there\u0026rsquo;s not a single software feature that you can use to annotate messages once you have structured capabilities, although the ability of your logging systems to have some kind of middleware to inject annotations is quite useful.\nCollect Metrics In addition to events produced by your system, it may be useful to have a background data collection thread to report on your application and system\u0026rsquo;s resource utilization. Things like, runtime resource utilization, garbage collector stats, and system IO/CPU/Memory use can all be useful.\nThere are ways to collect this data via other means, and there are a host of observability tools that support this kind of metrics collection. But using multiple providers complicates actually using this data, and makes it harder to understand what\u0026rsquo;s going in the course of running a system. If your application is already reporting other stats, consider bundling these metrics in your existing approach.\nBy making your application responsible for system metrics you immediately increase the collaboration between the people working on development and operations, if such a divide exists.\nConclusion In short:\ncollect more data, increase the fidelity and richness of the data you collect, aggregate potentially related data in the same systems to maximize value, annotate messages to add value, and provide increasingly high level details. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/observation-at-scale/","summary":"I wrote this thing about monitoring in software, and monitoring in web applications (and similar) about a year ago, and I sort of forgot about it, but as I was cleaning up recently I found this, and think that I mostly still agree with the point. Enjoy!\nIt is almost always the case that writing software that does what you want it to do is the easy part and everything else is the hard part.\nAs your software does more a number of common features emerge:\nother people are responsible for operating your software. multiple instances of the program are running at once, on different computers. you may not be able to connect to all of the running instances of the program when something goes wrong. people will observe behaviors that you don\u0026rsquo;t expect and that you won\u0026rsquo;t be able to understand by observing the program\u0026rsquo;s inputs or outputs'' There are many things you can do to take a good proof of concept program and turn it into a production-ready program, but I think logging and introspection abilities are among the most powerful: they give you the most bang for your buck, as it were.","title":"Observation at Scale"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking recently about the way that my interest in writing and publishing blog posts has waned, and while there are a lot of factors that have contributed to this, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a big part of me that questions what the purpose of writing is or should be, and because I mostly write about the things I\u0026rsquo;m learning or thinking about, my posts end up being off-the-cuff explanations of things I\u0026rsquo;ve learned or musings on a theoretical point which aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly well referenced, and while they\u0026rsquo;re fun to write and useful for my own process they\u0026rsquo;re not particularly useful to anyone else. Realizing this puts me at something of a crossroads with my own writing, and has me thinking a lot about the practice of citation.1\nMechanically, citation anchors text in relationship to other work,2 but it also allows discussion to happen in and between texts. Also, the convention for citation in the context of informal writing is a link or an informal reference, so it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to track over time, and hard to be systemtic in the way that one text interacts with its sources.\nBlogs bring out confessional writing with ambling3 structure and the freedom to say just about anything, which I have found liberating and generally instructive, but it\u0026rsquo;s also limiting. For writing that comes out of personal experience, it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to extrapolate and contextualize your argument, or even to form an argument, particularly in the context of a blog where you\u0026rsquo;re writing a larger number of shorter pieces. It\u0026rsquo;s also probably true that by framing discussions in personal experience its hard for people with different experiences to relate to the content, and more importantly the concepts within.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not arguing against journaling: journals are greatgreat, but sometimes, I think journals might be best unpublished. I\u0026rsquo;m also not arguing against the personal essay as a form: there are many topics that are well served by that genre of writing. I do want to think about what else is possible4 and how to write things that are stronger, more grounded, and easier to relate to and interact with. I think more citations and references are the key, but I\u0026rsquo;m left with two problems:\nStyle. There aren\u0026rsquo;t great conventions for referencing things in informal writing. Throwing a link in the right context works, and is clear, but it might not be enough as it\u0026rsquo;s hard to know what\u0026rsquo;s a citation-typed-reference and other kinds of links. Also links don\u0026rsquo;t hold up well over time. The more formal approaches are rooted in out of date technologies and tactics. Citations often reference page numbers, footnotes don\u0026rsquo;t often make sense in informal situations,5 and bibliography conventions are mostly non-existant. Tooling. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that well cited texts are well-cited, because their authors have great memories for things they\u0026rsquo;ve read, but because researchers often have tooling that supports managing a database of references, notes and bibliographic information. If you have a record of the resources you\u0026rsquo;ve read (or otherwise consumed), it becomes easier to pull out citations as you write and edit.6 Neither of these are insurmountable, but I think would require a good deal of work both on figuring out better citation formats and patterns, as well as developing better tooling. I don\u0026rsquo;t have answers yet, but I do want to think more about it, and probably play with writing some tools.\nMy initial intent was to sort of discuss the personal conflict, and reflect on the corpus of this site and consider my own growth as a writer, which might have been a fine way to tell this story, but it felt much more self indulgent, and I think probably makes my point by example better than I am here.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nAdmittedly this should be cited.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nLimited, of course, by size.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe problem is that I think there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of great examples or models to follow. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about other kinds of writing (e.g. journalism, academic writing, and fiction,) for potential models. The academic writing and journalism are clearly the starting points for this post.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMy attempts to the contrary aside. Having said that I expect that\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nZotero is probably the most popular one. There are tools that allow you to maintain BibTeX files, with similar effects. The space is probably underdeveloped, and most tooling is targeted at researchers in specific fields. It\u0026rsquo;s unfortunately a difficult space to develop a compelling tool in because the technology is easy (so it\u0026rsquo;s easy to overengineer,) and there are just enough users (and different kinds of users) to make the interface/interaction design problems non trivial.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/citation-practices-in-informal-writing/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking recently about the way that my interest in writing and publishing blog posts has waned, and while there are a lot of factors that have contributed to this, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a big part of me that questions what the purpose of writing is or should be, and because I mostly write about the things I\u0026rsquo;m learning or thinking about, my posts end up being off-the-cuff explanations of things I\u0026rsquo;ve learned or musings on a theoretical point which aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly well referenced, and while they\u0026rsquo;re fun to write and useful for my own process they\u0026rsquo;re not particularly useful to anyone else. Realizing this puts me at something of a crossroads with my own writing, and has me thinking a lot about the practice of citation.1\nMechanically, citation anchors text in relationship to other work,2 but it also allows discussion to happen in and between texts. Also, the convention for citation in the context of informal writing is a link or an informal reference, so it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to track over time, and hard to be systemtic in the way that one text interacts with its sources.","title":"Citation Practices in Informal Writing"},{"content":"I think the queue is a really powerful metaphor for organizing and orchestrating the internal architecture of an application. Once you have a queue, and tasks that are running in that queue, making that system run well requires some attention. This post is very much a sequel to the application framework post.\nFactors of your queue implementation and system may impact the applicability of any of these suggestions for your particular application. Additionally, there is lots of work on queue theory so there are formally described properties of queues, and this is really just a collection of informal knowledge that I\u0026rsquo;ve collected on this subject. I hope you find it useful!\nAs the operator of a queue there are two properties: latency, or time to completion, for work in the queue and throughput, or total amount of work completed. These properties are generally trade-offs with each other, and often work to improve throughput will impact latency, and vice versa. It turns out, however, that the theoretical limits of your system\u0026rsquo;s capacity for either latency or throughput are below the actual requirements of your application, so you can generally just focus on improving one area or the other without really feeling like you\u0026rsquo;re trading latency for throughput.\nAll tasks in the queue should, generally, of similar size in terms of execution time and resource usage. When there are tasks that run slowly or take a long time and tasks that run quickly, you can easily end up in situations where long running tasks group together. Indeed, this isn\u0026rsquo;t just a possibility, but a near certainty. If you can\u0026rsquo;t break work into similar sized units, then you main recourse is to either separate the work into different queues and proportion resources as needed to ensure that both queues are making progress. You generally want to run longer tasks before shorter tasks, but the impact on overall performance depends on other characteristics and the way that your application expects certain kinds of latency and throughput.\nAlways monitor task runtime (by type,) as well as overall queue depth, and if possible currently running operations. When something goes wrong, or there\u0026rsquo;s an external event that impacts queue performance, you\u0026rsquo;ll need these data to understand the state of your world and debug the underlying issue. Don\u0026rsquo;t wait for something to go wrong to set this up.\nIdempotentcy, or the ability of a task to run more than once without chaining the final outcome is a great property in any distributed system, but the more idempotent your operations are the less you have to worry about edge cases where you might run them more than once, particularly around process restarts and deployments. While you generally only want to run things once for efficiency sake, it\u0026rsquo;s important to be able to know that you can run things more than once without causing a crisis.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s easy to think about the time a task spends waiting in a queue when tasks are ordered in the queue in a first-in-first-out model, other ordering mechanisms can easily lead to items getting stuck in the queue. Consider the following behaviors:\nif there are dependencies between tasks, or cases where doing work leads to the creation of more tasks, always run these tasks earlier before other tasks. consider boosting the relative priority of tasks that have been waiting longer relative to other tasks in the queue. If tasks have a priority, and new tasks come in that have higher priority than older tasks, then some lower priority tasks may never get done. While priority of tasks is important, if its important that all tasks get done, balance wait time with priority. alternatively, consider elimiting tasks that have been waiting in the queue for longer than a specified period. These \u0026ldquo;TTL\u0026rdquo; for queue items can avoid wasting resources doing work that is not useful. separate desperate priority or types of work into seperate queues to reduce latency. Having additional queues often incurs some per-queue/per-worker resource overhead. When worker infrastructure canbe shared between queues, and both queues are not consistently running at capacity (e.g. have backlogs). quantify the job dispatching overhead. While generally breaking apart larger tasks into smaller execution units improves efficiency, if the overhead of creating, dispatching, and running jobs is a significant portion of a job\u0026rsquo;s runtime, then your system is probably spending too many resources on overhead and you can increase throughput by increasing the overall task size. There\u0026rsquo;s more, but this definitely covers the basics.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things-i-learned-about-queues/","summary":"I think the queue is a really powerful metaphor for organizing and orchestrating the internal architecture of an application. Once you have a queue, and tasks that are running in that queue, making that system run well requires some attention. This post is very much a sequel to the application framework post.\nFactors of your queue implementation and system may impact the applicability of any of these suggestions for your particular application. Additionally, there is lots of work on queue theory so there are formally described properties of queues, and this is really just a collection of informal knowledge that I\u0026rsquo;ve collected on this subject. I hope you find it useful!\nAs the operator of a queue there are two properties: latency, or time to completion, for work in the queue and throughput, or total amount of work completed. These properties are generally trade-offs with each other, and often work to improve throughput will impact latency, and vice versa.","title":"Things I Learned About Queues"},{"content":"It happened gradually, and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t entirely an intentional thing, but at some point I became a software engineer. While a lot of people become software engineers, many of them have formal backgrounds in engineering, or have taken classes or done programs to support this retooling (e.g. bootcamps or programming institutes.)\nI skipped that part.\nI wrote scripts from time to time for myself, because there were things I wanted to automate. Then I was working as a technical writer and had to read code that other people had written for my job. Somewhere in there I was responsible for managing the publication workflow, and write a couple of build systems.\nAnd then it happened.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that is right for everyone, but I was your typical, nerdy/bookish kid who wasn\u0026rsquo;t great in math class, and I suspect that making software is the kind of thing that a lot of people could do. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that my experience is particularly replicable, but I have learned a number of useful (and important) things, and I realize as I\u0026rsquo;ve started writing more about what I\u0026rsquo;m working on now, I realize that I\u0026rsquo;ve missed some of the fundamentals1\nFormal education in programming, from what I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to gather strikes me as really weird: there are sort of two main ways of teaching people about software and computer science: Option one is that you start with a very theoretical background that focuses on data structures, the performance of algorithms, or the internals of how core technologies function (operating systems, compilers, databases, etc.) Option two, is that you spend a lot of time learning about (a) programming language and about how to solve problems using programming.\nThe first is difficult, because the theory2 is not particularly applicable except invery rare cases and only at the highest level which is easy to back-fill as needed. The second is also challenging, as idioms change between languages and most generic programming tasks are easily delegated to libraries. The crucial skill for programming is the ability to learn new languages and solve problems in the context of existing systems, and developing a curriculum to build those skills is hard.\nThe topics that I\u0026rsquo;d like to write about include:\nQueue behavior, particularly in the context of distributed systems. Observability/Monitoring and Logging, particularly for reasonable operations at scale. build systems and build automation. unit-testing, test automation, and continuous integration. interface design for users and other programmers. maintaining and improving legacy systems. These are, of course, primarily focused on the project of making software rather than computer science or computing in the abstract. I\u0026rsquo;m particularly interested (practically) in figuring out what kinds of experiences and patterns are important for new programmers to learn, regardless of background.3 I hope you all find it interesting as well!\nThis is, at least in part, because I mostly didn\u0026rsquo;t blog very much during this process. Time being finite and all.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIn practice, theoretical insights come up pretty infrequently and are mostly useful for providing shorthand for characterizing a problem in more abstract terms. Most of the time, you\u0026rsquo;re better off intuiting things anyway because programming is predominantly a pragmatic exercise. For the exceptions, there are a lot of nerds around (both at most companies and on the internet) who can figure out what the proper name is for a phenomena and then you can look on wikipedia.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nA significant portion of my day-to-day work recently has involved mentoring new programmers. Some have traditional backgrounds or formal technical education and many don\u0026rsquo;t. While everyone has something to learn, I often find that because my own background is so atypical it can be hard for me to outline the things that I think are important, and to identify the high level concepts that are important from more specific sets of experiences.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/nontrad-software-engineer/","summary":"It happened gradually, and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t entirely an intentional thing, but at some point I became a software engineer. While a lot of people become software engineers, many of them have formal backgrounds in engineering, or have taken classes or done programs to support this retooling (e.g. bootcamps or programming institutes.)\nI skipped that part.\nI wrote scripts from time to time for myself, because there were things I wanted to automate. Then I was working as a technical writer and had to read code that other people had written for my job. Somewhere in there I was responsible for managing the publication workflow, and write a couple of build systems.\nAnd then it happened.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that is right for everyone, but I was your typical, nerdy/bookish kid who wasn\u0026rsquo;t great in math class, and I suspect that making software is the kind of thing that a lot of people could do.","title":"Non-Trad Software Engineer"},{"content":"The byproduct of a lot of my work on Evergreen over the past few years has been that I\u0026rsquo;ve amassed a small collection of reusable components in the form of libraries that address important but not particularly core functionality. While I think the actual features and scale that we\u0026rsquo;ve achieved for \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; features, the infrastructure that we built has been particularly exciting.\nIt turns out that I\u0026rsquo;ve written about a number of these components already here, even. Though I think, my initial posts were about these components in their more proof-of-concept stage, now (finally!) we\u0026rsquo;re using them all in production so their a bit more hardened.\nThe first grip is a logging framework. Initially, I thought a high-level logging framework with plug-able backends was going to be really compelling. While configurable back-ends has been good for using grip as the primary toolkit for writing messaging and user-facing alerting, the most compelling feature has been structured logging.\nMost of the logging that we do, now, (thanks to grip,) has been to pass structures (e.g. maps) to the logger with key/value data. In combination with log aggregation services/tools (like ELK, splunk, or sumologic,) we can basically take care of nearly all of our application observablity (monitoring) use cases in one stop. It includes easy to use system and golang runtime metrics collection, all using an easy push-based collection, and can also power alert escalation. After having maintained an application using this kind of event driven structured logging system, I have a hard time thinking about running applications without it.\nNext we have amboy which is a queue-system. Like grip, all of the components are plug-able, so it support in-memory (ephemeral) queues, distributed queues, dependency graph systems and priority queue implementations as well as a number of different execution models. The most powerful thing that amboy affords us is a single and clear abstraction for defining \u0026ldquo;background\u0026rdquo; execution and workloads.\nIn go it\u0026rsquo;s easy to spin up a go routine to do some work in the background, it\u0026rsquo;s super easy to implement worker pools to parallelize the processing of simple tasks. The problem is that as systems grow, it becomes pretty hard to track this complexity in your own code, and we discovered that our application was essentially bifurcated between offline (e.g. background) and online (e.g. request-driven) work. To address all of this problem, we defined all of the background work as small, independent units of work, which can be easily tested, and as a result there is essentially no-adhoc concurrency in the application except what runs in the queues.\nThe end result of having a unified way to characterize background work is that scaling the application because much less complicated. We can build new queue implementations, without needing to think about the business logic of the background work itself, and we add capacity by increasing the resources of worker machines without needing to think about the architecture of the system. Delightfully, the queue metaphor is independent of external services, so we can run the queue in memory backed by a heap or hash map with executors running in dedicated go-routines if we want, and also scale it out to use databases or dedicated queue services with additional process-based workers, as needed.\nThe last component, gimlet, addresses building HTTP interfaces, and provides tools for registering routes, writing responses, managing middleware and authentication, an defining routes in a way that\u0026rsquo;s easy to test. Gimlet is just a wrapper around some established tools like negroni, gorilla/mux, all built on established standard-library foundations. Gimlet has allowed us to unify a bunch of different approaches to these problems, and has lowered the barrier to entry for most of our interfaces.\nThere are other infrastructural problems still on the table: tools for building inter-system communication and RPC when you can\u0026rsquo;t communicate via a queue or a shared database (I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking a lot about gRPC and protocol buffers for this,) and also about object-mapping and database access patterns, which I don\u0026rsquo;t really have an answer for.1\nNevertheless, with the observability, background tasks, and HTTP interface problems well understood at supported, it definitely frees developers to spend more of their time focused core problems of importance to users and the goals of the project. Which is a great place to be.\nI built a database migration tool called anser which is mostly focused on integrating migration workflows into production systems so that migrations are part of the core code and can run without affecting production traffic, and while these tools have been useful, I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen a clear path between this project and meaningfully simplifying the way we manage access to data.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-favor-of-application-infrastructure-framework/","summary":"The byproduct of a lot of my work on Evergreen over the past few years has been that I\u0026rsquo;ve amassed a small collection of reusable components in the form of libraries that address important but not particularly core functionality. While I think the actual features and scale that we\u0026rsquo;ve achieved for \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; features, the infrastructure that we built has been particularly exciting.\nIt turns out that I\u0026rsquo;ve written about a number of these components already here, even. Though I think, my initial posts were about these components in their more proof-of-concept stage, now (finally!) we\u0026rsquo;re using them all in production so their a bit more hardened.\nThe first grip is a logging framework. Initially, I thought a high-level logging framework with plug-able backends was going to be really compelling. While configurable back-ends has been good for using grip as the primary toolkit for writing messaging and user-facing alerting, the most compelling feature has been structured logging.","title":"In Favor of an Application Infrastructure Framework"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had a blog1 for more than 15 years, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found this experience to be generally quite rewarding. I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot about writing, and enjoyed the opportunity to explore a number of different topics2 in great detail. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t blogged as much in recent years, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking in the past few weeks about getting back into writing more regularly, which has lead me to reflect on my writing in the past and my goals for this in the future.\nFirst, the blog as a genre has changed fundamentally in the last 17 or 18 years. In 2000 or 2001, blogs were independent things that grew out of communities (e.g. MetaFilter, or web-diary/journaling) and were maintained by independent writers or small groups. Then the tooling got better, the community got better and eventually started to segment based on topic, and finally the press3 gained competence in the form.\nPublishing a blog today, is a vastly different proposition today even in the recent past.\nTrue to my form, this leaves me with a collection of divergent thoughts:\nmaybe the \u0026ldquo;write everything in one blog even though the topics are not really of interest to any specific group\u0026rdquo; approach that I\u0026rsquo;ve always taken. More distinct blogs means more writing (maybe a good thing,) having a writing practice is good for focusing thoughts, but also for sharing and distributing understating, and I think that sharing understanding is a really important part of learning and growing, and I miss having a structure for these kinds of notes. perhaps, it would make sense to outsource/hire a freelancer to take care of some editing and marketing-adjacent work, which is more required if you want to engage with users more consistently but that I find distracting and outside of my ability to focus on properly. The problem then is figuring out how to fund that work in a longer-term/sustainable way. In the past RSS has been a (the?) leading way to distribute content to serious readers, but that isn\u0026rsquo;t true now and likly hasn\u0026rsquo;t been true for years. So while I feel able to write a lot of things, I don\u0026rsquo;t know what the best way to engage with regular readers is I used to think that I wanted to organize group blogs, and while I think that blog-discussions are fun, and I think there is merit to combined efforts, I\u0026rsquo;m less interested in doing the organizing myself. There was a period where I wasn\u0026rsquo;t blogging much because my day job was very writing focused, and I needed side projects that didn\u0026rsquo;t involve the English language, and I spent a long time focusing on learning programming, which took a lot of time. Now that work mostly involves programming, and only a little writing, and I\u0026rsquo;ve had some time to recover as a writer, it feels like I have some space. I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure how to host a blog in 2018. The old set up and server I have is more than functional, but there are a lot of services, tools, and patterns that I\u0026rsquo;m not familiar with and I have some learning to do, even though I probably mostly just want to write things. In one form or another, though the archives are all here.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written blogs about Philosophy, Hand Knitting, Technology, Documentation, Programming, Science Fiction, Folk Music and Dance, and Economics.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBoth old media institutions (news papers, television companies, book and magazine publishers) and new institutions that grew out of blogging itself (e.g. HuffPo, Gawker, etc.)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-write/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had a blog1 for more than 15 years, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found this experience to be generally quite rewarding. I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot about writing, and enjoyed the opportunity to explore a number of different topics2 in great detail. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t blogged as much in recent years, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking in the past few weeks about getting back into writing more regularly, which has lead me to reflect on my writing in the past and my goals for this in the future.\nFirst, the blog as a genre has changed fundamentally in the last 17 or 18 years. In 2000 or 2001, blogs were independent things that grew out of communities (e.g. MetaFilter, or web-diary/journaling) and were maintained by independent writers or small groups. Then the tooling got better, the community got better and eventually started to segment based on topic, and finally the press3 gained competence in the form.","title":"Why Write"},{"content":"Almost two years ago, I switched teams at work to join the team behind evergreen which is a homegrown continuous integration tool that we use organization wide to host and support development efforts and operational automation. It\u0026rsquo;s been great.\nFrom the high level, Evergreen takes changes that developers make to source code repositories and runs a set of tasks for each of those changes on a wide variety of systems, and is a key part of the system that allows us to verify that the software we write works on computers other than the ones that we interact with directly. There are a number of CI systems in the world, but Evergreen has a number of interesting features:\nit runs tasks in parallel, fanning out tasks to a large pool of machines to shorten the \u0026ldquo;wall clock\u0026rdquo; time for task execution. tasks execute on ephemeral systems managed by Evergreen in response to demands of incoming work. the service maintains a queue of work and handles task dispatching and results collection. This focus on larger scale task parallelism and managing host pools gives Evergreen the ability to address larger scale continuous integration workflows with a lower maintenance overhead. This is totally my jam: we get to both affect the development workflow and engineering policies for basically everyone and improving operational efficiency is a leading goal.\nMy previous gig was more operational, on a sibling team, so it\u0026rsquo;s been really powerful to be able to address problems relating to application scale and drive the architecture from the other side. I wrote a blog post for a work-adjacent outlet about the features and improvements, but this is my blog, and I think it\u0026rsquo;d be fun to have some space to explore \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on,\u0026rdquo; rather than focusing on Evergren as a product.\nMy first order of business, after becoming familiar with the code base, was to work on logging. When I started learning Go, I wrote a logging library (I even bloged about it), and using this library has allowed us to \u0026ldquo;get serious about logging.\u0026rdquo; While it was a long play, we now have highly structured logging which has allowed the entire logging system to become a centerpiece in our observably story, and we\u0026rsquo;ve been able to use centralized log aggregation services (and even shop around!) As our deployment grows, centralized logging is the thing that has kept everything together.\nRecently, I\u0026rsquo;ve been focusing on how the application handles \u0026ldquo;offline\u0026rdquo; or background work. Historically the application has had a number of loosely coupled \u0026ldquo;cron-job\u0026rdquo; like operations that all happened on single machine at a regular interval. I\u0026rsquo;m focusing on how to move these systems into more tightly coupled, event-driven operations that can be distributed to a larger cluster of machines. Amboy is a big part of this, but there have been other changes related to this project.\nOn the horizon, I\u0026rsquo;m also starting to think about how to reduce the cost of exposing data and operations to clients and users in a way that\u0026rsquo;s lightweight and flexible, and relatively inexpensive for developer time. Right now there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of technical debt, a myriad of different ways to describe interfaces, and inconsistent client coverage. Nothing insurmountable, but definitely the next frontier of growing pains.\nThe theme here is \u0026ldquo;how do we take an application that works and does something really cool,\u0026rdquo; and turn it into a robust piece of software that can both scale as needs grown, but also provide a platform for developing new features with increasing levels of confidence, stability, and speed.\nThe conventional wisdom is that it\u0026rsquo;s easy to build features fast-and-loose without a bunch of infrastructure, and that as you scale the speed of feature development slows down. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty convinced that this is untrue and am excited to explore the ways that improved common infrastructure can reduce the impact of this ossification and lead to more nimble and expansive feature development.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll see how it goes! And I hope to be able to find the time to write about it more here.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/evergreen-intro/","summary":"Almost two years ago, I switched teams at work to join the team behind evergreen which is a homegrown continuous integration tool that we use organization wide to host and support development efforts and operational automation. It\u0026rsquo;s been great.\nFrom the high level, Evergreen takes changes that developers make to source code repositories and runs a set of tasks for each of those changes on a wide variety of systems, and is a key part of the system that allows us to verify that the software we write works on computers other than the ones that we interact with directly. There are a number of CI systems in the world, but Evergreen has a number of interesting features:\nit runs tasks in parallel, fanning out tasks to a large pool of machines to shorten the \u0026ldquo;wall clock\u0026rdquo; time for task execution. tasks execute on ephemeral systems managed by Evergreen in response to demands of incoming work.","title":"Evergreen Intro"},{"content":"I wrote some notes about to write a post about a software project I worked on a year and a half ago, that I think is pretty cool, but I was on writing hiatus. Even better the specific code in question is now no longer in use. But I think it serves as a useful parable, but I will attempt to reflect.\nGo\u0026rsquo;s logging1 support in standard library works, and it successfully achieves its goals on its own terms. The problem is that it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly simple and lacks a number of features that are standard in most logging systems.2 So as a result, I\u0026rsquo;m not surprised that most applications of consequence either use a couple of more fully featured logging packages or end up writing a large number of logging wrappers.\nThe fact that my project at work was using a special logging library is not particularly surprising, particularly because the project is old for a Go project. The logging library in question is a log4j-inspired package, that had been developed by a different group internally, but was no longer being used by that group. It worked, but there were a host of problems.3\nI\u0026rsquo;d also written a logging package myself which was a definite improvement on the state of the art. I had two chief problems:\nhow to convince teammates to make the change, how to make the change without disrupting ongoing work or the functioning of the system which had to be always deploy-able. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I did\u0026hellip;\nFirst, I learned as much as I could about the existing system, it\u0026rsquo;s history and how we used it. I read a lot of code, documentation (such as it was,) and also related bug reports, feature requests, and history.\nSecond, I implemented wrappers for my system that (mostly) cloned the interfaces for the existing library in my own package. It\u0026rsquo;s called slogger, and it\u0026rsquo;s still there, though I hope to delete it soon. I wanted to make it possible to make the switch4 in the project initialization without needing to change every last logging statement.5\nThen, we actually made the change so that logging used the new code internally but wrapped by the old interfaces. I think there were a couple of very obvious bugs early on, but frankly none of them are so memorable that I could describe them any more.\nFinally, we went through and updated all of the logging statements. It was a big change, and impacted all of the code, but it happened quite late in the process and there were no bugs, because it was the least interesting or radical part of the project.\nAnd then we had a new logger. It\u0026rsquo;s been great. With the new tool we\u0026rsquo;ve been able to easily add support for more structured approaches to logging and collecting log output in a variety of third party services.\nIn summary:\nreplacing legacy subsystems can be a good way to improve the functionality of your project. change is hard, but there are ways to make changes easier and less disruptive. They often involve doing even more work.* write code to facilitate transitions, and then delete it later. the larger a change is, the less risky it should be. While there are lots of small-and-low risk changes you can make, the inverse should be true as rarely as possible. This is to say, application logging facility.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThis includes filtering by log level, different formatting options, (semi) structured logging, conditional logging, buffering, and other options.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nHilariously something in the way we were using the logger was tripping up the race detector. While the logger did a decent job of providing the file name and line number of the logging statement, it was pretty focused on printing content to a file/standard output.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nPotentially this should have been behind a feature flag, though I think I didn\u0026rsquo;t actually use a feature flag.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe short version here is, \u0026ldquo;interfaces are great.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/combating-legacy-code/","summary":"I wrote some notes about to write a post about a software project I worked on a year and a half ago, that I think is pretty cool, but I was on writing hiatus. Even better the specific code in question is now no longer in use. But I think it serves as a useful parable, but I will attempt to reflect.\nGo\u0026rsquo;s logging1 support in standard library works, and it successfully achieves its goals on its own terms. The problem is that it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly simple and lacks a number of features that are standard in most logging systems.2 So as a result, I\u0026rsquo;m not surprised that most applications of consequence either use a couple of more fully featured logging packages or end up writing a large number of logging wrappers.\nThe fact that my project at work was using a special logging library is not particularly surprising, particularly because the project is old for a Go project.","title":"Combating Legacy Code"},{"content":"The subtitle of this post should be \u0026ldquo;or, how the internet learned about intersectionality,\u0026rdquo; but while I love a good pretentious academic title, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s particularly representative of my intent here.\nSometime in the last 5 or 10 years, the popular discourse on justice on the internet learned about intersectionality. Which is great. Intersectionality, generally is the notion that a single identity isn\u0026rsquo;t sufficient to explain an individuals social experience particularly vis a vis privilege. Cool.\nThis is really crucial and really important for understanding how the world works, but for totally understandable and plain ways. People have a lot of different identities which lead to many different experiences, perspectives, and understandings. All of these identities, experiences, perspectives, and understandings interact with each other in a big complex system\nTherefore our analysis of our experiences, thought, understandings, and identities, must explore identities (ET AL) not only on their own terms, but in conversation with each other and with other aspects of experience.\nIntersectionality is incredibly important. It\u0026rsquo;s also incredibly useful as a critical tool because it makes it possible for our thought to reflect actual lived experiences and the way that various aspects of experience interact to create culture and society.1\nWhile intersectionality is an interesting and important concept that could certainly support an entire blog post, I\u0026rsquo;m more interested, the genealogy of this concept in the popular critical discourse.\nI know that I read a lot about intersectionality in college (in 2004-2007), I know that the papers I read were at least 10 years old, and I know that intersectionality wasn\u0026rsquo;t an available concept to political conversations on the internet at the time in the way that it is now.2\nConcepts take a long time, centuries sometimes, to filter into general awareness, so the delay itself isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly notable. Even the specific route isn\u0026rsquo;t that interesting in and for itself. Rather, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in how a concept proliferates and what is required for a concept to become available to a more popular discourse.\nIf interesectionality was an available concept in the academic literature, what changes and evolutions in thought--both about intersectionality, but in the context--needed to happen for that concept to become available more broadly.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly exciting to trace the recent intelectual history of a specific concept in discourse, because it might give us insight into the next concepts that will help inform our discourse and things we can do to facilitate this process in the future for new concepts and perspectives.\nAs we understand the history of this proliferation, we can also understand its failures and inefficiencies and attempt to deploy new strategies that resolve those shortcomings.\nA lot of arguments in favor of intersectional analysis and perspectives are political, and raise the very real critique that analysis that is not intersectional tends to recapitulate normative cultural assumptions. I\u0026rsquo;d argue, additionally, that intersectionality is really the only way to pull apart experiences and thoughts and understand fundamentally how culture works. It\u0026rsquo;s not just good politics, but required methodology for learning about our world and our lives.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI admit that this post is based on the conceit that there was a point when the popular discourse (on the internet) was unaware of intersectionality followed linearly by another point where the concept of intersectionality was available generally. This isn\u0026rsquo;t how the dissemination of concepts into discourses work, and I\u0026rsquo;m aware that I\u0026rsquo;ve oversimplified the idea somewhat. This is more about the process of popularization.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/consciousiness-rising/","summary":"The subtitle of this post should be \u0026ldquo;or, how the internet learned about intersectionality,\u0026rdquo; but while I love a good pretentious academic title, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s particularly representative of my intent here.\nSometime in the last 5 or 10 years, the popular discourse on justice on the internet learned about intersectionality. Which is great. Intersectionality, generally is the notion that a single identity isn\u0026rsquo;t sufficient to explain an individuals social experience particularly vis a vis privilege. Cool.\nThis is really crucial and really important for understanding how the world works, but for totally understandable and plain ways. People have a lot of different identities which lead to many different experiences, perspectives, and understandings. All of these identities, experiences, perspectives, and understandings interact with each other in a big complex system\nTherefore our analysis of our experiences, thought, understandings, and identities, must explore identities (ET AL) not only on their own terms, but in conversation with each other and with other aspects of experience.","title":"Consciousness Rising"},{"content":"Twice this fall I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on code that takes a group of files and ensures that the total size of the files are less than a given size. The operation is pretty simple: identify all the files and their size (recursively, or not but accounting for the size of directories,) sort them, and and delete files from the front or back of the populated list. When you\u0026rsquo;ve reached the desired size.\nIf you have a cache and you\u0026rsquo;re constantly adding content to it, eventually you will either need an infinite amount of storage or you\u0026rsquo;ll have to delete something.\nBut what to delete? And how?\nPresumably you use some items in the cache more often than others, and some files that change very often while others change very rarely, and in many cases, use and change frequency are orthogonal.\nFor the cases that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on, the first case, frequency of use, is the property that we\u0026rsquo;re interested in. If we haven\u0026rsquo;t used a file in a while relative to the other files, the chances are its safe to delete.\nThe problem is that access time (atime) is that while most file systems have a concept of atime, most of them don\u0026rsquo;t update it. Which makes sense: if every time you read a file you have to update the metadata, then every read operation becomes a write operations, and everything becomes slow.\nRelative access time or, relatime, helps some. Here atime is updated, but only if you\u0026rsquo;re writing to the file or if it\u0026rsquo;s been more than 24 hours since your last update. The problem, of course, is that if cache are write-once-read-many and operates with a time granularity of less than a day, then relatime is often just creation time. That\u0026rsquo;s no good.\nThe approach I\u0026rsquo;ve been taking is to use the last modification time, (mtime), and to intentionally update mtime (e.g. using touch or a similar operation,) after cache access. It\u0026rsquo;s slightly less elegant than it could be, but it works really well and requires very little overhead.\nArmed with these decisions all you need is a thing that crawls a file system, collects objects and stores their size and time, so we know how large the cache is, and can maintain an ordered list of file objects by mtime. The ordered lists of files should be a heap, but the truth is that you build and sort the structure once, and then just remove the \u0026ldquo;lowest\u0026rdquo; (oldest) items until the cache is the right size and then throwing it all away, so you\u0026rsquo;re not really doing many heap-ish operations.\nTherefore, I present lru. Earlier this summer I wrote a less generic implementation of the same principal, and was elbows deep into another project when I realized I needed another cache pruning tool. Sensing a trend, I decided to put a little more time into the project and built it out as a library that other people can use, though frankly I\u0026rsquo;m mostly concerned about my future self.\nThe package has two types, a Cache type that incorporates the core functionality and FileObject which represents items in the cache.\nOperation is simple. You can construct and add items to the cache manually, or you can use DirectoryContents or TreeContents which build caches from a starting file system point. DirectoryContents looks at the contents of a single directory (skipping sub-directories optionally) and returns a Cache object with those contents. If you do not skip directories, each directory has, in the cache the total size of its contents.\nTreeContents recurses through the tree and ignores directories, and returns a Cache object with all of those elements. TreeContents does not clean up empty directories.\nOnce you have a Cache object, use its Prune method with the maximum size of the cache (in bytes), any objects to exclude, and an optional dry-run flag, to prune the cache down until it\u0026rsquo;s less than or equal to the max size.\nDone.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not planning any substantive changes to the library at this time as it meets most of my needs but there are some obvious features:\na daemon mode where the cache object can \u0026ldquo;watch\u0026rdquo; a file system (using ionotify or similar) and add items to or update existing items in the cache. Potentially using fsnotify. an option to delete empty directories encountered during pruning. options to use other time data from the file system when possible, potentially using the times library. With luck, I can go a little while longer without doing this again. With a little more luck, you\u0026rsquo;ll find lru useful.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cache-maintence/","summary":"Twice this fall I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on code that takes a group of files and ensures that the total size of the files are less than a given size. The operation is pretty simple: identify all the files and their size (recursively, or not but accounting for the size of directories,) sort them, and and delete files from the front or back of the populated list. When you\u0026rsquo;ve reached the desired size.\nIf you have a cache and you\u0026rsquo;re constantly adding content to it, eventually you will either need an infinite amount of storage or you\u0026rsquo;ll have to delete something.\nBut what to delete? And how?\nPresumably you use some items in the cache more often than others, and some files that change very often while others change very rarely, and in many cases, use and change frequency are orthogonal.\nFor the cases that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on, the first case, frequency of use, is the property that we\u0026rsquo;re interested in.","title":"Cache Maintence"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading, two books non-fiction intermittently in the last little bit: Andy Grove\u0026rsquo;s High Output Management and Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s What is Philosophy?. Not only is reading non-fiction somewhat novel for me, but I\u0026rsquo;m sorting delighting in the juxtaposition. And I\u0026rsquo;m finding both books pretty compelling.\nThese are fundamentally materialist works. Grove\u0026rsquo;s writing from his experience as a manager, but it\u0026rsquo;s a book about organizing that focuses on personal and organizational effectiveness, with a lot of corporate high-tech company examples. But the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s a high-tech company that works on actually producing things, means that he\u0026rsquo;s thinking a lot about production and material constraints. It\u0026rsquo;s particularly interesting because the discussion technology and management often lead to popular writing that\u0026rsquo;s handwavey and abstract: this is not what Grove\u0026rsquo;s book is in the slightest.\nDeleuze is more complex, and Guatteri definitely tempers the materialism, though less in the case of What is Philosophy than the earlier books. Having said that, I think What is Philosophy is really an attempt to both justify philosophy in and for itself, but also to discuss the project of knowledge (concept) creation in material, mechanistic terms.\nTo be honest this is the thing that I find the most compelling about Deleuze in general: he\u0026rsquo;s undeniably materialist in his outlook and approach, but but his work often--thanks to Guatteri, I think--focuses on issues central to non-materialist thought: interiority, subjectivity, experience, and identity. Without loosing the need to explore systems, mechanisms, and interfaces between and among related components and concepts.\nI talked with a coworker about the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading both of these pieces together, and he said something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;yeah, Grove rambles a bunch but has a lot of good points, which is basically the same as Deleuze.\u0026rdquo; Fair. I\u0026rsquo;d even go a bit further and say that these are both books, that are despite their specialized topics and focus, are really deep down books for everyone, and guides for being in the world.\nRead them both.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deleuze-and-grove/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading, two books non-fiction intermittently in the last little bit: Andy Grove\u0026rsquo;s High Output Management and Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s What is Philosophy?. Not only is reading non-fiction somewhat novel for me, but I\u0026rsquo;m sorting delighting in the juxtaposition. And I\u0026rsquo;m finding both books pretty compelling.\nThese are fundamentally materialist works. Grove\u0026rsquo;s writing from his experience as a manager, but it\u0026rsquo;s a book about organizing that focuses on personal and organizational effectiveness, with a lot of corporate high-tech company examples. But the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s a high-tech company that works on actually producing things, means that he\u0026rsquo;s thinking a lot about production and material constraints. It\u0026rsquo;s particularly interesting because the discussion technology and management often lead to popular writing that\u0026rsquo;s handwavey and abstract: this is not what Grove\u0026rsquo;s book is in the slightest.\nDeleuze is more complex, and Guatteri definitely tempers the materialism, though less in the case of What is Philosophy than the earlier books.","title":"Deleuze and Grove"},{"content":"Following the 2016 election my father, who is a much more active participant in Facebook than I, said something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t mourn; organize. I had a long winded post on the topic of \u0026lsquo;don\u0026rsquo;t celebrate; organize\u0026rsquo;, but the bottom line is the same: organize.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;d append to this just to make clear that I\u0026rsquo;m of the opinion that self care, survival and the care for and survival of our communities is crucial. Which sometimes means celebration and sometimes means mourning and sometimes means a quiet night at home with the and friends.\nAt the 2016 New England Sacred Harp Convention a friend of mine gave a lesion for those members of the community who were unable to attend because of profound illness which was delivered in conjunction with a lession in memorial for members of the community who had died in the last year. These lessons are a common and enduring tradition of Sacred Harp conventions.\nThe lesson focused on isolation, and the ways that illness, care-giving (and indeed dying, death, and grief) are isolating. But it went on to discuss the ways that we combat isolation, through connections to people and communities, and by the project of meaning making.\nConnection and meaning making are related, of course, and are central to why I sing. I mean I also enjoy the music, but it\u0026rsquo;s the connection with other singers, and the ways that our practices in and around singing are about making meaning.\nI heard this almost 6 weeks ago, but I keep coming back to this in a number of different contexts. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot in the world that either directly isolates, or provokes feelings of isolation.\nBottom line, the way that we can fight isolation is by forming connections and by working to create meaning in our lives.\nI was talking on Wednesday with a couple of friends, one of who was most distraught at the seeming impossibility of progress. \u0026ldquo;What can I do? There are all these people, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure anything I can do will have any effect.\u0026rdquo; I think this distress is incredibly common and reasonable, given the size of the task and the amount of time any person has in the world.\nThe task of effecting change is huge on its own, but the project is compounded by its scale: there are a lot of people in the world and a lot of different views. It\u0026rsquo;s difficult to even know where to begin.\nI think fundamentally this kind of distress is about the isolation created by the experience of difference, by the size of the task.\nThere are tools that we can use for managing and fighting our own isolation: building connections to each other, creating meaning in our lives and in our social spheres.\nThis is also, interestingly, these are the same methods that we use to organize, to build consciousness, and to change ideologies.\nOn Wednesday, I said, that (for the most part) people are just people: the way that thought changes is through meaningfulrelationships, conversation, and through additional opportunities to make meaning and to form connections in a larger context.\nSeek out people and experiences that are different. Stay safe. Listen. Learn. Talk. Teach. Share your experiences with people who are like you. Work hard. Take breaks. Remember that people are, for the most part, just people, and we\u0026rsquo;re all alone in this together. All of us.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/isolation-ideology-change/","summary":"Following the 2016 election my father, who is a much more active participant in Facebook than I, said something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t mourn; organize. I had a long winded post on the topic of \u0026lsquo;don\u0026rsquo;t celebrate; organize\u0026rsquo;, but the bottom line is the same: organize.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;d append to this just to make clear that I\u0026rsquo;m of the opinion that self care, survival and the care for and survival of our communities is crucial. Which sometimes means celebration and sometimes means mourning and sometimes means a quiet night at home with the and friends.\nAt the 2016 New England Sacred Harp Convention a friend of mine gave a lesion for those members of the community who were unable to attend because of profound illness which was delivered in conjunction with a lession in memorial for members of the community who had died in the last year. These lessons are a common and enduring tradition of Sacred Harp conventions.","title":"Isolation and Ideology Change"},{"content":"In an effort to relaunch tychoish with a more contemporary theme and a publishing tool that (hopefully) will support a more regular posting schedule, I also wrote a nifty go library for dealing with reStructuredText, which may be useful and I think illustrates something about build systems.\nIn my (apparently still) usual style, there\u0026rsquo;s some narrative lead in that that takes a bit to get through.\nOver the past couple of weeks, I redesigned and redeployed my blog. The system it replaced was somewhat cobbled together, was missing a number of features (e.g. archives, rss feeds, social features, etc) and to add insult to injury it was pretty publishing was pretty slow, and it was difficult to manage a pipeline of posts.\nIn short, I didn\u0026rsquo;t post much, though I\u0026rsquo;ve written things from time to time that I haven\u0026rsquo;t done a great job of actually posting them, and it was hard to actually get people to read them, which was further demotivating. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading a lot of interesting things, and I\u0026rsquo;m not writing that much for work any more, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing enough things recently that I want to write about them. See this twitter strand I had a bit ago on the topic.\nSo I started playing around again. Powering this blog is hard, because I have a lot of content1 and I very much want to use restructuredText. 2 There\u0026rsquo;s this thing called hugo which seems to be pretty popular. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using static site generators for years, and prefer the approach. It\u0026rsquo;s also helpful that I worked with Steve (hugo\u0026rsquo;s original author) during its initial development, and either by coincidence, or as a result our conversations and a couple of very small early contributions a number of things I cared about were included in its design:\nsupport for multiple text markup features (including reStructuredText,) (I cobbled together rst support. ) customizeable page metadata formats. (I think I pushed for support of alternate front-matter formats, specifically YAML, and might have made a few prototype commits on this project) the ability to schedule posts in the future, (I think we talked about this.) I think I also winged a bunch in those days about performance. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this here before, but one of the classic problems with static site generators is that no one expects sites with one or two thousand posts/content atoms, and so they\u0026rsquo;re developed against relatively small corpus\u0026rsquo; and then have performance that doesn\u0026rsquo;t really scale.\nHugo is fast, but mostly because go is fast, which I think is, in most cases, good enough, but not in my case, and particularly not with the rst implementation as it stood. After all this preamble, we\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to the interesting part: a tool I\u0026rsquo;m calling shimgo.\nThe initial support for rst in hugo is straight forward. Every time hugo encounters an rst file, it calls the shell rst2html utility that is installed when you install docutils, passing it the content of the file on standard input, and parsing from the output, the content we need. It\u0026rsquo;s not pretty, it\u0026rsquo;\u0026rsquo;s not smart, but it works.\nSlowly: to publish all of tychoish it took about 3 minutes.\nI attempted an rst-to-markdown translation of my exiting content and then ran that through the markdown parsers in hugo, just to get comparative timings: 3ish seconds.\nreStructuredText is a bit slower to parse than markdown, on account of it\u0026rsquo;s comparative strictness and the fact that the toolchain is in python and not go, but this difference seemed absurd.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a go-rst project to write a pure-go implementation of reStructuredText, but I\u0026rsquo;ve kept my eye on that project for a couple of years, and it\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work that is pretty far off. While I do want to do more to support this project, I wanted to get a new blog up and running in a few weeks, not years.\nBased on the differences in timing, and some intuition from years of writing build systems, I made a wager with myself: while the python rst implementation is likely really slow, it\u0026rsquo;s not that slow, and I was loosing a lot of time to process creation, teardown, and context switching: processing a single file is pretty quick, but the overhead gets to be too much at scale.\nI built a little prototype where I ran a very small HTTP service that took rst as a POST request and returned processed HTML. Now there was one process running, and instead of calling fork/exec a bunch, we just had a little but of (local) network overhead.\nFaster: 20 second.\nI decided I could deal with it.\nWhat remains is making it production worthy or hugo. While it was good enough for me, I very much don\u0026rsquo;t want to get into the position of needing to maintain a single-feature fork of a software project in active development, and frankly the existing rst support has a difficult to express external dependency. Adding a HTTP service would be a hard sell.\nThis brings us to shimgo: the idea is to package everything needed to implement the above solution in an external go package, and package it behind a functional interface, so that hugo maintainers don\u0026rsquo;t need to know anything about its working.\nIsn\u0026rsquo;t abstraction wonderful?\nSo here we are. I\u0026rsquo;m still working on getting this patch mainlined, and there is some polish for shimgo itself (mostly the README file and some documentation), but it works, and if you\u0026rsquo;re doing anything with reStructuredText in go, then you ought to give shimgo a try.\nWhile I think it would be reasonable to start afresh, I think the whole point of having archives is that you mostly just leave them around.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not the most popular markup language, but I\u0026rsquo;ve used it more than any other text markup, and I find the fact that other langauges (e.g. markdown) vary a lot between implementations to be distressing. Admitedly the fact that there aren\u0026rsquo;t other implementations of rst is also distressing, but one the balance is somewhat less distressing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/shimgo-hugo/","summary":"In an effort to relaunch tychoish with a more contemporary theme and a publishing tool that (hopefully) will support a more regular posting schedule, I also wrote a nifty go library for dealing with reStructuredText, which may be useful and I think illustrates something about build systems.\nIn my (apparently still) usual style, there\u0026rsquo;s some narrative lead in that that takes a bit to get through.\nOver the past couple of weeks, I redesigned and redeployed my blog. The system it replaced was somewhat cobbled together, was missing a number of features (e.g. archives, rss feeds, social features, etc) and to add insult to injury it was pretty publishing was pretty slow, and it was difficult to manage a pipeline of posts.\nIn short, I didn\u0026rsquo;t post much, though I\u0026rsquo;ve written things from time to time that I haven\u0026rsquo;t done a great job of actually posting them, and it was hard to actually get people to read them, which was further demotivating.","title":"Shimgo Hugo"},{"content":"I wrote a post about moving on from being a technical writer, and I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely written some since then about programming and various side projects, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really done the kind of public reflection on this topic that I\u0026rsquo;ve done historically about, many other things.\nWhen I switched to a programming team, I knew some things about computers, and I was a decent Python programmer. The goal, then was to teach myself a second programming language (Go,) and learn how to make \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; software with other people, or on teams with other people. Both of those projects are going well: I think I\u0026rsquo;ve become pretty solid as a Go programmer, although, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to say what \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; software is, or if I\u0026rsquo;m good at making it, but all indications are positive.\nThis weekend, for various reasons, I\u0026rsquo;ve been reviving a project that I did some work on this fall and winter, that I\u0026rsquo;ve abandoned for about 6 months. It\u0026rsquo;s been both troubling (there are parts that are truly terrible,) and kind of rewarding to see how much I\u0026rsquo;ve grown as a programmer just from looking at the code.\nQueue then, I guess, the self reflective interlude.\nMy reason for wanting to learn--really learn--a second programming language, was to make sure that all the things I knew about system design, algorithms, and data structures was generalizable, and not rooted in the semantics of a specific language or even implementation of that language. I was also interested in learning more about the process of learning new programming languages so that I had some experience with the learning process, which may come in handy in the future.\nLearning Go, I think helped me achieve or realize these goals. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t really set out to learn a third language yet, it feels tractable. I\u0026rsquo;ve also noticed some changes and differences in some other aspects of my interests.\nI used to be really interested in programming qua programming, and I thought a lot about programming languages. While I still can evaluate programming languages, and have my own share of opinions about \u0026ldquo;the way things work,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m less concerned with the specific syntax or implementation. I think a lot about build tools, platform support, deployment models, and distributing methods and stories, rather than what it can do or how you have to write it. Or, how you make it ship it and run it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also gotten less interested in UNIX-esque systems administration and operations, which is historically a thing I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite interested in. These days, I find myself thinking more about the following kinds of problems:\nbuild systems, the tools building software from source files, (and sometimes testing it!) and the ways to do this super efficiently and sensibly. Build systems are quite hard because in a lot of ways they\u0026rsquo;re the point through which your software (as software) interacts with all of the platforms it runs on. Efficient build systems have a huge impact on developer productivity, which is a big interest. developer productivity, this is a big catch all category, but it\u0026rsquo;s almost always true that people are more expensive than computers, so working on tools and features (like better build systems, or automating various aspects of the development process,) continuous integration and deployment, again connected to developer productivity, but taking the \u0026ldquo;automate building and testing,\u0026rdquo; story to its logical conclusion. CD environments mean you deploy changes much more often, but you also require and force yourself to trust the automated systems and make sure that project leadership and management is just as automated as the development experience. internal infrastructure, as in \u0026ldquo;internal services and tools that all applications need,\u0026rdquo; like logging, queuing systems, abstractions for persistence, deployment systems, testing, and exposed interfaces (e.g. RPC systems, REST/HTTP, or command line option option parsing). Having good tools for these generic aspects of the application make writing actual features for users easier. I\u0026rsquo;m also increasingly convinced that the way to improve applications and systems is to improve these lower level components and their interfaces. Free Software and open source are still important, as is UNIX, but these kinds of developer productivity and automation issues are a level above that. I\u0026rsquo;ve changed in the last 5 years, software has changed in the last five years, the way we run software on systems has changed in the last 5 years. I\u0026rsquo;m super excited to see what kinds of things I can do in this space, and where I end up in 5 years.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also interested in thinking about ways to write about this. I\u0026rsquo;d written drafts of a number of posts that were about learning how to program, about systems administration, and now that I\u0026rsquo;m finding and making more time for writing, one of the things I don\u0026rsquo;t really know about is what kind of writing on these topics I\u0026rsquo;m interested in doing, or how to do it in a way that anyone would be interested in reading.\nWe shall see. Regardless, I hope that I\u0026rsquo;m back, now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/going-forward/","summary":"I wrote a post about moving on from being a technical writer, and I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely written some since then about programming and various side projects, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really done the kind of public reflection on this topic that I\u0026rsquo;ve done historically about, many other things.\nWhen I switched to a programming team, I knew some things about computers, and I was a decent Python programmer. The goal, then was to teach myself a second programming language (Go,) and learn how to make \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; software with other people, or on teams with other people. Both of those projects are going well: I think I\u0026rsquo;ve become pretty solid as a Go programmer, although, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to say what \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; software is, or if I\u0026rsquo;m good at making it, but all indications are positive.\nThis weekend, for various reasons, I\u0026rsquo;ve been reviving a project that I did some work on this fall and winter, that I\u0026rsquo;ve abandoned for about 6 months.","title":"Going Forward"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve posed about some of these projects before, and I used to regularly post little overviews of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. But I\u0026rsquo;ve not done a lot of this recently. Time to do some back fill.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s probably good to take a step back from time to time and inventory and evaluate the priorities of various projects. Not to mention the fact that I usually say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not really doing much these days,\u0026rdquo; when this isn\u0026rsquo;t really true. Here goes:\nMango This is a project that is private, at the moment, because its mostly useful as an experimental piece of testing infrastructure for work. The idea is to use the same underlying infrastructure to start, stop, and configure processes, but provide REST and command line interfaces for all of these operations.\nWe have a lot of distinct software that does this internally and it\u0026rsquo;s always fragile and limited. While grand discussions of code reuse are sort of silly, in this case, it\u0026rsquo;s a bit annoying that we\u0026rsquo;ve reinvented this wheel a dozen times\u0026hellip; And have to make different changes to a dozen tools as configurations change.\nThis was also my first project written in Go, which means its been a great learning experience and the place where a number of other Go packages that have become useful in their own right.\nFuture work:\nWrite all the tests. Make the REST interface feature compatible with one of the legacy tools it aims to supplant. Make a new REST interface that\u0026rsquo;s more sensible and might be easier to use in more circumstances. Figure out better ways to block for the appearance of synchronous operations, despite the fact that internally the operations are non-blocking. Gimlet Gimlet Blog Post\nGimlet Github\nThis is really just some convenience work to make it easy to build REST interfaces in Go, without needing to suffer through tools that are designed to support complete \u0026ldquo;full-stack\u0026rdquo; web applications. It\u0026rsquo;s built on the same Negroni/Gorilla Mux stack that I think everyone uses, and it\u0026rsquo;s very net/http compliant, but with an API that makes it easy (even fun,) to provide high quality JSON+HTTP interfaces.\nIt struck me, when working on part of Mango, that this chunk of the code didn\u0026rsquo;t have anything to do with the actual core application and was all about getting a REST-like application to happen. So I split that out, for everyone\u0026rsquo;s pleasure/suffering.\nFuture work:\nDocumentation. More tests. Exposed API stabilization and versioning. Develop story for authentication, sessions and SSL termination. Grip Grip Blog Post\nGrip Github\nGrip is a logging package for Go that attempts to resolve my constant feelings of \u0026ldquo;I miss x feature of the Python logging package.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s not feature comparable with Python logging (but that\u0026rsquo;s ok,) and since I was working on writing a logging package, I got to add some nifty features.\nFuture Work:\nMore documentation. Better examples, and potentially support for \u0026ldquo;print this message x% of the time.\u0026rdquo; Support for logging to conventional syslog sources in addition to systemd\u0026rsquo;s logging. Archer/Dropkick I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to work on a tool to unify a number of personal operations and scripts in a single system and tool. The problem that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to solve is that I have a number of different computers that I use with some frequency, including laptops, desktops, and a number of servers, and test systems, and I want to be able to describe their configuration, and synchronize files and git data between machines with ease.\nMy first approach was getting a bunch of random system setup scripts out of a makefile and into a configuration file that a Go program knew how to read and process, and then to expand from there.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten to the git repository management stuff, because I was working on the Gitgone project.\nFuture Work:\nadd better support for creating and managing containers and images using systemd-nspawn and docker. support for setting up git repositories support for syncing automatically (i.e. dropox-like functional it -\u0026gt; dropkick). report status of repositories via a REST API triggering syncs on remote systems. Gitgone Gitgone Github\nThe idea here is to provide a consistent and full featured way to access and interact with git repositories from Go without needing to wrap the git command yourself (or worse, learn the ins and outs of the git2go). This is largely modeled off of a similar project I did as part of libgiza that does the same sort of thing for Python repositories.\nThe cool thing about this project is its build abstractly so that you can use one interface and switch between a libgit2 implementation and one that wraps the git command itself.\nFuture Work:\ncomplete implementation using libgit2 write more extensive tests. add support for creating repository tags. provide access to the log. Novel Project I\u0026rsquo;ve been, sporadically, working on notes for writing a new novel. It\u0026rsquo;s not going anywhere fast, and I\u0026rsquo;m not even to the point. where I\u0026rsquo;m outling plot.\nI\u0026rsquo;m trying to tell a story about urban development and how smaller local communities/groups participate in larger communities/groups. How does urban development in place a, impact nation building more globally, and what does this all look like to people as they get to work in the morning, and have to build neighborhood institutions like gyms and restaurants and grocery stores.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work to do, and while thinking about the project is fun, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work, and I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to commit to a writing project of this scope and, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how publishable this project will be (and furthermore, even if its' publishable, will I be willing to do all of that work.)\nSoftware projects are much harder to justify and prioritize than writing projects.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/works-in-progress/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve posed about some of these projects before, and I used to regularly post little overviews of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. But I\u0026rsquo;ve not done a lot of this recently. Time to do some back fill.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s probably good to take a step back from time to time and inventory and evaluate the priorities of various projects. Not to mention the fact that I usually say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not really doing much these days,\u0026rdquo; when this isn\u0026rsquo;t really true. Here goes:\nMango This is a project that is private, at the moment, because its mostly useful as an experimental piece of testing infrastructure for work. The idea is to use the same underlying infrastructure to start, stop, and configure processes, but provide REST and command line interfaces for all of these operations.\nWe have a lot of distinct software that does this internally and it\u0026rsquo;s always fragile and limited.","title":"Works In Progress"},{"content":"I made another Go(lang) thing. Grip is a set of logging tools modeled on Go\u0026rsquo;s standard logging system, with some additional (related) features, including:\nlevel-based logging, with the ability to set a minimum threshold to exclude log messages based on priority (i.e. debugging.) Error capture/logging, to log Go error objects. Error aggregation, in continue-on-error situations, where you want to perform a bunch of operations and then return any errors if any of them returned an error but don\u0026rsquo;t want to return an error after the first operation fails. Logging to the systemd journal with fallback to standard library logging to standard output. There are helper functions for logging using different kinds of default string formatting, as well as functions that take error objects, and a \u0026ldquo;lazy\u0026rdquo; logging method that take a simple interface for building log messages at log-time rather than at operation time.\nNone of these features are terribly exciting, and the systemd library wraps the systemd library from CoreOS. I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of log levels and priority filtering, so it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a tool for that.\nIn the future, I\u0026rsquo;d like to add more generic syslog support if that\u0026rsquo;s useful, and potentially tools for better categorical logging. There\u0026rsquo;s also a good deal of repeated code and it might be nice to us this as an excuse to write a code-generator using go tool.\nPull requests and feedback are, of course, welcome.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/get-a-grip/","summary":"I made another Go(lang) thing. Grip is a set of logging tools modeled on Go\u0026rsquo;s standard logging system, with some additional (related) features, including:\nlevel-based logging, with the ability to set a minimum threshold to exclude log messages based on priority (i.e. debugging.) Error capture/logging, to log Go error objects. Error aggregation, in continue-on-error situations, where you want to perform a bunch of operations and then return any errors if any of them returned an error but don\u0026rsquo;t want to return an error after the first operation fails. Logging to the systemd journal with fallback to standard library logging to standard output. There are helper functions for logging using different kinds of default string formatting, as well as functions that take error objects, and a \u0026ldquo;lazy\u0026rdquo; logging method that take a simple interface for building log messages at log-time rather than at operation time.\nNone of these features are terribly exciting, and the systemd library wraps the systemd library from CoreOS.","title":"Get a Grip"},{"content":"I finished, on the train this week, reading Freud and the Non-European by Edward Said (on the recommendation of zmagg and it was, one of the better reading experiences I\u0026rsquo;ve had in a while.\nSaid is brilliant, and clear and says really complex important hard things in a really clear and approachable style. He\u0026rsquo;s also frustratingly correct, which isn\u0026rsquo;t really a problem, but as an engaged and independent reader, I occasionally realize that the internal monologue of my response is an unintelligent \u0026ldquo;yep yep\u0026rdquo; chorus, and I feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve fallen down on the job of being a good reader.\nI might have a bit of a complex.\nThe thing is, that he actually is very right, and does an amazing job of meeting Freud in his historical context, respecting in that context for the audacity of his mission and the power of his insights to encourage us to think about culture, its impact on human motivation, and how personal and cultural histories combine to produce identity, and inspire behavior. Or, more simply, that self-hood and experience are a product of history and context.\nWithout, of course, in anyway excusing the flaws in Freud\u0026rsquo;s methods, biases, basis in fact (or lack there of), or utility (or lack there of) in the care of the mentally ill.\nMoreso, Said uses Frued, and his ideas about Jewish identity, and himself as an example of late a certain phenotype of 19th century Jewishness, to help contextualize (roughly) contemporary thinking about jewish identity and Israeli culture and statehood.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s roughly brilliant.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve long struggled with any kind of theory that engages seriously with Freud or his intellectual successors: there\u0026rsquo;s so much crap around Freud, and it sort of feels like good energy after bad to try and justify or resuscitate the tradition. And hurts when Freudian are used to support what are otherwise really interesting intellectual projects.\nIf nothing else Said gives a good example of a successful intellectual interaction with Freud can occur, and what kinds of parameters and context promote that kind of successful and productive interaction.\nMaybe someday, I\u0026rsquo;ll learn how to be a quarter the reader that Said was. If I\u0026rsquo;m lucky.\nIn the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;m just going to keep reading things on the train.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/said-on-the-train/","summary":"I finished, on the train this week, reading Freud and the Non-European by Edward Said (on the recommendation of zmagg and it was, one of the better reading experiences I\u0026rsquo;ve had in a while.\nSaid is brilliant, and clear and says really complex important hard things in a really clear and approachable style. He\u0026rsquo;s also frustratingly correct, which isn\u0026rsquo;t really a problem, but as an engaged and independent reader, I occasionally realize that the internal monologue of my response is an unintelligent \u0026ldquo;yep yep\u0026rdquo; chorus, and I feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve fallen down on the job of being a good reader.\nI might have a bit of a complex.\nThe thing is, that he actually is very right, and does an amazing job of meeting Freud in his historical context, respecting in that context for the audacity of his mission and the power of his insights to encourage us to think about culture, its impact on human motivation, and how personal and cultural histories combine to produce identity, and inspire behavior.","title":"Said on the Train"},{"content":"Look folks, I made a thing!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s called gimlet, and it\u0026rsquo;s a Go(lang) tool for making JSON/HTTP APIs (i.e. REST with JSON). Give it a whirl!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s actually even less a tool, and more of a toolkit or just \u0026ldquo;a place to put all of the annoying infrastructure that you\u0026rsquo;ll inevitably need when you want to build an JSON/HTTP interface, but that have nothing to do what whatever your API/application does: routing, serializing and serializing JSON.\nNothing hard, nothing terribly interesting, and certainly not anything you couldn\u0026rsquo;t do another way, but, it\u0026rsquo;s almost certainly true that this layer of application infrastructure is totally orthogonal to whatever you application is actually doing, so you should focus on that, and probaly use something like Gimliet.\nBackground I\u0026rsquo;m using the term HTTP/JSON APIs for services where you send and recive JSON data over HTTP. Sometimes people call these REST APIs, and that\u0026rsquo;s not inaccurate, but I think REST is a bit more complicated, and not exactly the core paradigm that I\u0026rsquo;m pursuing with Gimlet.\nSending and reviving JSON over HTTP makes a lot of sense: there are great tools for parsing JSON and HTTP is a decent high level protocol for interprocess communication between simple data applications. Look up \u0026ldquo;microservices\u0026rdquo; at your leisure.\nGo is a great language for this it has a lot of tooling that anticipates these kinds of applications, and the deployment model is really friendly to operations teams and systems. Also the static\ntyping and reasonable separation of private and public interfaces is particularly lovely.\nSo it should be no surprise that there are a lot tools for building stweb applications, frameworks even. They\u0026rsquo;re great, things like gorilla and negroni are great and provide a very useful set of tools for building Go web apps. Indeed even Gimlet uses components of each of these tools.\nThe issue, and reason for Gimlet, is that all of these tools assume that you\u0026rsquo;re building a web application, with web pages, static resources, form handling, session state handling, and other things that are totally irrelevant to writing JSON/HTTP interfaces.\nSo then, Gimlet is a tool to build these kinds of APIs: simple, uses Negroni and Gorilla\u0026rsquo;s mux, and does pretty much everything you need except actually write your code.\nExample Set up the app with some basic configuration: :\nimport \u0026quot;github.com/tychoish/gimlet\u0026quot; app := gimlet.NewApp() app.SetPort(9001) app.SetDefaultVersion(1) This sets which port the HTTP server is going to listen for requests and configures the default version of the API. You do want all of your endpoints prefixed with \u0026ldquo;/v\u0026lt;number\u0026gt;\u0026rdquo; right? The default version of the API is also avalible without the prefix, or if the version of the route is 0. If you don\u0026rsquo;t set it to 0.\nThen register some routes: :\napp.AddRoute(\u0026quot;/\u0026lt;path\u0026gt;\u0026quot;).Version(\u0026lt;int\u0026gt;).Get().Handler(http.HandlerFunc) app.AddRoute(\u0026quot;/\u0026lt;path\u0026gt;\u0026quot;).Version(\u0026lt;int\u0026gt;).Post().Handler(http.HandlerFunc) app.AddRoute returns an API route object with a set of chainable methods for defining the routes. If you add multiple HTTP methods (GET POST and the like,) then Gimlet automatically defines multiple routes with the same handler for each method.\nFor handlers, I typically just write functions that take arguments from the top level context (database connections, application configuration, etc) and returnhttp.HandlerFunc objects. For example: :\nfunc helloWorld(config *Configuration) http.HandlerFunc { return func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { input := make(map[string]interface{}) response := make(map[string]interface{}) err := gimlet.GetJSON(input) // do stuff here gimlet.WriteJSON(w, response) } } Gimlet has the following functions that parse JSON out of the body of a request, or add JSON output to the body of a response, they are:\nWriteJSONResponse(w http.ResponseWrite, code int, data interface{}) GetJSON(r *http.Request, data interface) Which read or write data into the interface{} object (typically a struct.) The following three provide consistent response writers for common exit codes:\nWriteJSON(w http.ResponseWriter, data interface{}) // 200 WriteErrorJSON(w http.ResponseWriter, data interface{}) // 400 WriteInternalErrorJSON(w http.ResponseWriter, data interface{}) // 500 Finally, when you\u0026rsquo;ve written your app, kick it all off, with the following: :\nerr := app.Run() if err != nil { fmt.Println(err) os.Exit(1) } And that\u0026rsquo;s it. Enjoy, tell me in the comments or on the issues feed if you find something broken or confusing. Contribution welcome, of course.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/have-a-gimlet-a-go-json-http-api-toolkit/","summary":"Look folks, I made a thing!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s called gimlet, and it\u0026rsquo;s a Go(lang) tool for making JSON/HTTP APIs (i.e. REST with JSON). Give it a whirl!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s actually even less a tool, and more of a toolkit or just \u0026ldquo;a place to put all of the annoying infrastructure that you\u0026rsquo;ll inevitably need when you want to build an JSON/HTTP interface, but that have nothing to do what whatever your API/application does: routing, serializing and serializing JSON.\nNothing hard, nothing terribly interesting, and certainly not anything you couldn\u0026rsquo;t do another way, but, it\u0026rsquo;s almost certainly true that this layer of application infrastructure is totally orthogonal to whatever you application is actually doing, so you should focus on that, and probaly use something like Gimliet.\nBackground I\u0026rsquo;m using the term HTTP/JSON APIs for services where you send and recive JSON data over HTTP. Sometimes people call these REST APIs, and that\u0026rsquo;s not inaccurate, but I think REST is a bit more complicated, and not exactly the core paradigm that I\u0026rsquo;m pursuing with Gimlet.","title":"Have a Gimlet: A Go JSON/HTTP API Toolkit"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing the draft of this from an airplane bound for Ireland for a week of singing. I travel often: taking weekend jaunts to go to folk festivals, singing conventions, Morris dancing tours, and so forth, I don\u0026rsquo;t really vacation often. I find travel and managing the logistics of being in unfamiliar places stressful, and my idea of a good time has a lot to do with sipping a cup of coffee1 writing something, and reading a book.\nEven though I love spending time at home, it\u0026rsquo;s still important to (sometimes) leave, try new things, and exist somewhere differently for a little while to reset and reflect a bit. With luck, this vacation thing will become something I feel comfortable doing, at least occasionally.\nWhile it certainly wasn\u0026rsquo;t part of the initial plan, it turns out that this trip is pretty well timed both as denotes a relatively significant change in my life, and I think is a fitting celebration of a period of large changes in my life.\nI am no longer a technical writer.\nWhen I return to work, I\u0026rsquo;m joining the core engineering team to work on build infrastructure and systems projects. I\u0026rsquo;ll be working on automating our release process, maintaining continuous integration systems, along with an eclectic set of other projects (some of which may involve some of technical writing. There are somethings that you can never escape.)\nThe truth though, is that this change has been a long time coming: it feels pretty natural. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on the documentation build system for a while, and that\u0026rsquo;s increasingly been the most fun part of my job, so it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to spend more time doing that kind of work and learn from folks who know more about this kind of thing. Also, build infrastructure and packaging is incredibly important to how people use software and how engineers work, which have been consistent interests of mine for years.\nAlso, through the last release process, I\u0026rsquo;ve also found that I\u0026rsquo;m burning out on writing documentation. I can do it, and I\u0026rsquo;m not bad at it. After writing, editing and shepherding, more than a million words of documentation (over several thousand pages,) I sometimes feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve seen it all. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in seeing the new ideas and perspectives that will prosper in my absence. I\u0026rsquo;m also eager to see how the foundation I\u0026rsquo;ve built stands up without me around. It was time.\nThe decision to change jobs happened rather suddenly. While I\u0026rsquo;ve built a narrative (see above), in reality, something clicked and I realized it was time. Ten days later there was a plan. I said to myself, \u0026ldquo;Shit I thought I was done with major life changes for a while.\u0026rdquo;\nIn the last year, I\u0026rsquo;ve bought an apartment and moved to Brooklyn and reorganized my local family grouping:2 The good news is that I find my self in a good state, and \u0026rsquo;there\u0026rsquo;s nothing left to change.3\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been a rocky year, nothing is going to change that. Even if in retrospect I find myself satisfied with my actions and decisions, and even if I come out the other end better for my struggle, this is a year I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t care to repeat.\nAnd even so, I\u0026rsquo;m excited about the future, about continuing to do interesting work professionally, about enjoying my city and local geography, to surround myself with top notch humans, and to make cool things.\nThese are early days, and there\u0026rsquo;s work to do.\nIn the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;ll be over here, enjoying something different for a little while.\nAstute readers of the blog will note that I am historically a tea drinker. I changed to coffee in late June 2014: I discovered that I didn\u0026rsquo;t mind the taste as much as I thought, and I like a slightly more potent caffeine delivery system.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBreak ups suck, each in its own special fucked up way.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started singing more tenor, I guess, so maybe there\u0026rsquo;s more to change after all.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-new-era/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing the draft of this from an airplane bound for Ireland for a week of singing. I travel often: taking weekend jaunts to go to folk festivals, singing conventions, Morris dancing tours, and so forth, I don\u0026rsquo;t really vacation often. I find travel and managing the logistics of being in unfamiliar places stressful, and my idea of a good time has a lot to do with sipping a cup of coffee1 writing something, and reading a book.\nEven though I love spending time at home, it\u0026rsquo;s still important to (sometimes) leave, try new things, and exist somewhere differently for a little while to reset and reflect a bit. With luck, this vacation thing will become something I feel comfortable doing, at least occasionally.\nWhile it certainly wasn\u0026rsquo;t part of the initial plan, it turns out that this trip is pretty well timed both as denotes a relatively significant change in my life, and I think is a fitting celebration of a period of large changes in my life.","title":"A New Era"},{"content":"When I started my current job there were three major problems with the documentation:\nThere was too much duplicated content, so it was difficult to know where to point people. Given that there were always multiple versions of the product in use, it was hard to figure out which paragraph refereed to which version, particularly as the product changed. Each page felt like it was written by someone else (it was!) and the reading experience could be quite jarring. The first two were huge tasks, but the solutions were pretty straight forward: build system for documentation that was structured such that it could theoretically hold all the information (replace lots of information repositories with a single information repository) and then use maintenance branches in a version control system to snapshot and fork off old branches as they\u0026rsquo;re released.\nDone.\nThe last problem is harder. Much harder.\nI did a pretty good job, at first, of just writing everything myself, which meant that the first drafts all sounded like they were written by one person: because they were. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale. The next step was to edit the hell out of all contributions that weren\u0026rsquo;t by me.\nThis also doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale.\nThere are some canonical solutions: write a long style guide and try to get people to comply with it; use templates and standard formats for documents so that everything uses common structure and forms. It\u0026rsquo;s still hard to enforce, but it\u0026rsquo;s something.\nI put a lot of time into content reuse systems that had additional structure. It helps, and reduces some editorial overhead, but has the same weak points as the conventional solution.\nAt some point, you need actual humans to edit and make sure things are clear and consistent across the entire corpus. If you don\u0026rsquo;t have the resources for good editors, then either writers have to spend a significant amount of time editing, which is a huge time suck (and slows progress,) or you start to get drift.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that we have a good answer yet. In the mean time\nAppendices Style in Group Processes As you innovate and improve it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to resist the impulse to go back to older pieces to revise them. You should make passes through all your content on some sort of schedule, but you have to give yourself permission and allowance to go back and fix style later. Common style is less about \u0026ldquo;being right,\u0026rdquo; and more about figuring out the kind of communication that\u0026rsquo;s appropriate for the target audience(s) and using effective structure to support them. In short: compromise. Style is about the entire reading expenses, not just the syntax, or the typesetting: it is both of these things as well as others. For some kinds of texts, the trick is to often to write as few words as possible, and to make it so that people can scan through documents as quickly as possible while only reading the sections that are relevant to them. Personal Observations It\u0026rsquo;s actually interesting to write blogs again, as I\u0026rsquo;m (re?)discovering a style of writing that I have been very comfortable with in the past but haven\u0026rsquo;t really exercised recently. It\u0026rsquo;s also interesting to see how my own writing and writing process has changed as a result of writing so much technical material.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/style-chameleon/","summary":"When I started my current job there were three major problems with the documentation:\nThere was too much duplicated content, so it was difficult to know where to point people. Given that there were always multiple versions of the product in use, it was hard to figure out which paragraph refereed to which version, particularly as the product changed. Each page felt like it was written by someone else (it was!) and the reading experience could be quite jarring. The first two were huge tasks, but the solutions were pretty straight forward: build system for documentation that was structured such that it could theoretically hold all the information (replace lots of information repositories with a single information repository) and then use maintenance branches in a version control system to snapshot and fork off old branches as they\u0026rsquo;re released.\nDone.\nThe last problem is harder. Much harder.\nI did a pretty good job, at first, of just writing everything myself, which meant that the first drafts all sounded like they were written by one person: because they were.","title":"Style Chameleon"},{"content":"For 2013 and some of 2012 and 2014, I mostly stopped knitting and spent the time teaching myself how to really make software. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t exactly that intentional in the moment, but time is finite and both knitting and coding require similar kinds of attention and thought. In retrospect this is what happened.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting again, not as much or in the same ways that I used to, but there\u0026rsquo;s a bit more space in my brain for additional projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought often about writing about similarities between knitting and programming.\nThe two activities have much in common. Code and knitting are both highly structured activities, with a reasonably finite syntax of possible component operations. Most programming languages have a few dozen keywords, fundamental types, and built in operations that give rise to all programs (more or less,) and knitting similarly provides a small number of operations (knit, purl, increase, decrease, slip) that you can combine and alter to produce pretty much any kind of fabric.\nKnitting patterns are procedural (like programs, generally) and have a standard syntax that shares a number of common elements with contemporary programming languages, including loops, conditionals, map (functional) operations, as well as some non-trivial concurrency.\nWhile each knitting stitch depends on the stitches that happen before and after it, they are all reasonably atomic within the knitted object. At the same time, many knitting projects have lots other objects that happen at the same time, along different dimensions: shaping, stitch patterns, short rows, sleeves/gloves as well as parallel objects like socks. Knitters routinely track multiple things happening at the same time, with some success: a task that many programmers struggle with.\nThe connection between knitting and programming isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly surprising or novel: indeed there\u0026rsquo;s a long history between the development of textile production and technology more broadly, but hand knitting is sort of a technological oddity, so the connections don\u0026rsquo;t have the same history that you\u0026rsquo;d have in weaving (say.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve struggled to write this post for a while and have always had a hard time figuring out what the conclusion is or should be. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve felt like there should be some potential for synthesis, some way to take the things I\u0026rsquo;ve learned about software and use that to write programs to support knitting or design work, or vice versa. Increasingly, I think that this is the anti-conclusion.\nSure you can represent knitting patterns using formal languages (such as programming languages,) and it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be that hard to write software that converted a pattern, or validated the math, but the math is really the easy part of knitting.\nThe hard part about knitting things is not figuring out how many stitches you need to knit an object that\u0026rsquo;s the right size, but rather figuring out what the right size is. It\u0026rsquo;s easy to know how many stitches you need, and hard to decide how big or small a thing should be. It\u0026rsquo;s also true that actually knitting things takes the largest amount of time; figuring out the math and making the design decisions are comparatively quick for most projects.\nComputers wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be able to tell how long we should knit the cuffs of our socks or the sleeves of our sweaters, no matter how much code we write.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;ll be over here, knitting away at my sweater.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-programming/","summary":"For 2013 and some of 2012 and 2014, I mostly stopped knitting and spent the time teaching myself how to really make software. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t exactly that intentional in the moment, but time is finite and both knitting and coding require similar kinds of attention and thought. In retrospect this is what happened.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting again, not as much or in the same ways that I used to, but there\u0026rsquo;s a bit more space in my brain for additional projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought often about writing about similarities between knitting and programming.\nThe two activities have much in common. Code and knitting are both highly structured activities, with a reasonably finite syntax of possible component operations. Most programming languages have a few dozen keywords, fundamental types, and built in operations that give rise to all programs (more or less,) and knitting similarly provides a small number of operations (knit, purl, increase, decrease, slip) that you can combine and alter to produce pretty much any kind of fabric.","title":"Knitting and Programming"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of change in my life in the last six months or a year, and I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly avoided reflecting about it in writing. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried writing about it and tried fictionalizing it: I\u0026rsquo;ve concluded that I\u0026rsquo;m just not comfortable with my own interpretation of either the last six months or my current state in a way that I could write from. Nevertheless, given the recent calendar roll over, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of reflection in the air.\nThe longer I don\u0026rsquo;t write, the larger the burden of not writing becomes. Surprisingly, I\u0026rsquo;ve not been alarmed by the feeling that I am not trustworthy observer of my own life: I\u0026rsquo;m confident that I am rapidly reaching a place where the present and the future will be easy to write from, particularly on the smaller scale. There\u0026rsquo;s just this hole in the larger narrative of my life, that I feel obligated to feel.\nBut maybe it\u0026rsquo;s alright if I don\u0026rsquo;t. Or if I don\u0026rsquo;t just yet.\nIt also feels fine to start writing about little things that have changed, things that I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying in my life that are new and different. This will be the first post of this kind, but hopefully not the last.\nToday I had four people at my house for brunch.\nI made collard greens cooked with a whole onion, an entire head of garlic, and one beef sausage for flavor. I\u0026rsquo;d never made collards before (it was great). For next time, I definitely need a larger pan, and need more onion and garlic, perhaps adding mushrooms instead of the sausage, which was nice but not noteworthy. Will make again.\nI also made oatmeal, of the steal cut variety cooked using the overnight method where you boil the oats in milk and let it simmer for two minutes, and then let it cool and sit over night, and then boil again in the morning and simmer for 10-12 minutes. My modification was to put a couple of tea spoons of olive oil in with the oats at night. I served with blackberry jam and greek yogurt.\nAnd, of course, several pots of coffee. (Chemex, for the win.)\nSimple, not a lot of work. Excessively delicious. Nice to have people in my living room, chatting, eating, and enjoying being with people, and a good way to spend time on a weekend.\nI used to think of weekend mornings as an opportunity to write or work on my own projects that required a lot of attention and focus. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I really like this way of ritualizing creativity. I also now live in the same neighborhood as a large number of my friends with half a dozen brunch places (or more!) within a mile. Brunch became a comfortable baseline ritual, and something that I\u0026rsquo;m much more interested in carving out space for.\nWhile I certainly enjoy going somewhere for brunch, there\u0026rsquo;s something great about having people over and feeling awesome and comfortable about having friends over.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m a different person now than I was before. I don\u0026rsquo;t think its fair or correct to narrate the changes in my life as a progress narrative. Lives change, settings change, people change: things are different, and perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s enough.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/brunch-plans/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of change in my life in the last six months or a year, and I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly avoided reflecting about it in writing. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried writing about it and tried fictionalizing it: I\u0026rsquo;ve concluded that I\u0026rsquo;m just not comfortable with my own interpretation of either the last six months or my current state in a way that I could write from. Nevertheless, given the recent calendar roll over, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of reflection in the air.\nThe longer I don\u0026rsquo;t write, the larger the burden of not writing becomes. Surprisingly, I\u0026rsquo;ve not been alarmed by the feeling that I am not trustworthy observer of my own life: I\u0026rsquo;m confident that I am rapidly reaching a place where the present and the future will be easy to write from, particularly on the smaller scale. There\u0026rsquo;s just this hole in the larger narrative of my life, that I feel obligated to feel.","title":"Brunch Plans"},{"content":"For the last 9 years or so, I\u0026rsquo;ve kept a copy of a novel that I wrote during my junior year of high school. It\u0026rsquo;s so crappy: I think I have a Word 95 file of it somewhere, but it mainly exists in this binder, which turns out to be just the right height to use as a foot rest, to keep my feet planted on the floor while I sit up at my desk.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s so bad folks. So bad. A few years back I reread the prologue in order to rip off a few things for a different, only slightly less terrible story. The plotting isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly inventive, the characters are juvenile, and the settings are bland.\nI realized the other day that it\u0026rsquo;s like all of those shell scripts that I wrote when I was learning to program that are hundreds of lines long, that intermingle argument parsing with actual logic, with horrible unabstracted data structures and access patterns, and implementations that are neither clear nor efficient. Those same scripts that I run a few dozen times a day because they just work, and if I don\u0026rsquo;t think about it too hard, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also the two hundred thousand words of total crap that I wrote for my last job. And another couple of un-salvageable fiction projects that I didn\u0026rsquo;t even bother to print. Even with my current job, I sometimes come across awful paragraphs that I know that I must have written a few years ago, but completely fail to understand what I was thinking.\nWe all, probably have our own examples of the detritus of our past efforts. I spent a long time feeling like these concrete examples of my ineptitude were a burden, a body of work that I had to revise before I could start working on new projects.\nUntrue.\nI learned a lot from writing these crappy pieces of code, the failed stories, and terrible pieces of work product. Furthermore all of the work I\u0026rsquo;ve done in these areas since producing the terrible dark piles, has been better, and continues to get better.\nEmbedded in the idea that these dark piles are a burden is the notion that the production of text, of code is difficult, challenging, and the majority of the work in creation. But this isn\u0026rsquo;t true. The work is in figuring out the interfaces, the implementation, figuring out the structure and flow of ideas through a system of functions or paragraphs. Typing it all out is the easy and fun part. It is, of course, important to revise and polish work, but sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s enough to learn from your mistakes, to remind ourselves of our progress, and move on.\nEvery time I sit down to write, I put my feet on this binder and remember how far I\u0026rsquo;ve come.\nMore than anything, I am thankful.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dark-piles/","summary":"For the last 9 years or so, I\u0026rsquo;ve kept a copy of a novel that I wrote during my junior year of high school. It\u0026rsquo;s so crappy: I think I have a Word 95 file of it somewhere, but it mainly exists in this binder, which turns out to be just the right height to use as a foot rest, to keep my feet planted on the floor while I sit up at my desk.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s so bad folks. So bad. A few years back I reread the prologue in order to rip off a few things for a different, only slightly less terrible story. The plotting isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly inventive, the characters are juvenile, and the settings are bland.\nI realized the other day that it\u0026rsquo;s like all of those shell scripts that I wrote when I was learning to program that are hundreds of lines long, that intermingle argument parsing with actual logic, with horrible unabstracted data structures and access patterns, and implementations that are neither clear nor efficient.","title":"Deep Dark Piles"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not posted for a long time. A lot of things have changed since I last wrote, and this post is probably not the best place to recount all of them. Indeed many things haven\u0026rsquo;t changed, but the highlights..\nI\u0026rsquo;m still living in New York, but I bought a coop in Brooklyn and moved, which has been great. I\u0026rsquo;m surprised at how quickly I have felt at home and rooted. The sequence of changes in my life that brought me there are simple, really, but I\u0026rsquo;ve struggled to make sense of things even so. The fact that I am aware of development is both a great comfort, but it has been hard to write about my life with confidence.\nI replaced my tea habit with a coffee habit. I attend yoga classes regularly. I sing Sacred Harp (and sometimes other shaped notes). I Morris dance with the Bowery Boys, the Men\u0026rsquo;s team in New York City, and continue to dance with Braintrust Morris, an kind of butch Morris team with a spiritual center in the Midwest.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still working on the same kinds of developer documentation, build systems, and software development projects for the same company as before. I still think open source software is important. I am really interested in helping people develop technological literacy and understanding. I want to work on improving infrastructure for developers and development. I use Linux extensively, write a lot of Python, tinker with Go and Common Lisp, and live and breathe in Emacs.\nLife is good. Life is difficult. Life is.\nI look forward to writing about it here.\nSo the blog looks different. I changed some things:\nI switched from using ikiwiki to using Sphinx and an extension called ablog. I wanted to use a system that I was familiar with and could hack on (that\u0026rsquo;s Sphinx, which is the core of the tool chain I use at work.) Also, I wanted to use reStructuredText, which I prefer.\nIkiwiki is great software, and I quite enjoy it\u0026rsquo;s architecture and use. The problem is that it\u0026rsquo;s not in particularly active development, the code base is in Perl (which I don\u0026rsquo;t know, and except for ikiwiki, have no reason to learn,) and the project has probably peaked in terms of its adoption curve. To boot, my goals and user story aren\u0026rsquo;t totally inline it\u0026rsquo;s goals and user stories.\nSphinx isn\u0026rsquo;t totally right for a blogging engine either, but it\u0026rsquo;s solid. I actively develop and maintain tools around Sphinx. Indeed, I was able to make some small changes in ablog that shaved about a third of the time off of the total build time. Not bad.\nIt took a lot of time to convert all the posts to the new format, but now that everything is in order and the tools are usable it is time to start writing again.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s good to be home.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/as-you-mean-to-go-on/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not posted for a long time. A lot of things have changed since I last wrote, and this post is probably not the best place to recount all of them. Indeed many things haven\u0026rsquo;t changed, but the highlights..\nI\u0026rsquo;m still living in New York, but I bought a coop in Brooklyn and moved, which has been great. I\u0026rsquo;m surprised at how quickly I have felt at home and rooted. The sequence of changes in my life that brought me there are simple, really, but I\u0026rsquo;ve struggled to make sense of things even so. The fact that I am aware of development is both a great comfort, but it has been hard to write about my life with confidence.\nI replaced my tea habit with a coffee habit. I attend yoga classes regularly. I sing Sacred Harp (and sometimes other shaped notes). I Morris dance with the Bowery Boys, the Men\u0026rsquo;s team in New York City, and continue to dance with Braintrust Morris, an kind of butch Morris team with a spiritual center in the Midwest.","title":"As You Mean to Go On"},{"content":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t really written very much in the past six months or more, and while I think I\u0026rsquo;ve done cool things and learned about cool things,\nLet me take that back. I haven\u0026rsquo;t written anything in a sustained sort of way that wasn\u0026rsquo;t for work. Hell, even what I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for work has been smaller and more tactical. Unfortunately you don\u0026rsquo;t write books, or book-like-objects as small tactical approaches.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to figure out how to get back to that. It\u0026rsquo;s about rhythm more than anything. If you approach time management for log-form rationally, there\u0026rsquo;s never enough time, so you have to make time, and trick yourself into writing and figure out how to make a little progress on a regular\nAs someone who definitely tends towards binge writing (and who doesn\u0026rsquo;t) remembering to write a little bit on a regular basis is hard and nearly counter intuitive. So as I\u0026rsquo;ve been attempting to restart the writing habit, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about what I\u0026rsquo;ve done in the past that\u0026rsquo;s worked to keep up the momentum and work on projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve uncovered:\nReading Even more important, I think, than reestablishing a habig of writing regularly, is restablishing the practice of reading regularly. I often get hung up on the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m a very fast or very through reader. But reading is quite inspiring, and I often find that the more I read, the more I want to write.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading the Vorkosigan novels, and it\u0026rsquo;s been great.\nTracking Word Counts I like having some record of my progress, and I\u0026rsquo;ve taken different approaches to tracking progress, mostly using word counts, over time.\nWhen you\u0026rsquo;re writing longer pieces, particularly in editors that don\u0026rsquo;t reflect word counts or page numbers in the interface, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to loose context for how much progress you\u0026rsquo;re making.\nWay back when, I used to record the current page and word count for all of my projects in a note boot, and this developed into a rather incurable tick to mash a few keys down every few sentences to check the word count. Then, three years ago, I wrote a script to check the word count of all my projects on a regular interval.\nI stopped really using it about a year ago, because the script handled different branches (in git) of the same project really poorly, and there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a good way to hack that in.\nSo I recently rewrote this program, and I rather like it. I\u0026rsquo;ll post more about it soon.\nPhysical Activity and Care To do writing one definitely needs to spend a serious amount of time in front of a computer typing. Unless you really like notebooks and pens, there\u0026rsquo;s no other way to get things written.\nBut you can\u0026rsquo;t take this to the extreme: if all you do is sit in front of your computer and stare at cursor waiting for inspiration to strike. As people we need different kinds of focus, and different kinds of experiences, on the small scale, to keep the generative impulses functional.1\nReading voraciously, as above, is a key part of being able to write effectively, but other kinds of activity are also useful. When I\u0026rsquo;m not writing, my first instinct is to try and find more time to write, but sometimes--often--what I need more is more time for things that aren\u0026rsquo;t writing: exercise, reading, and so forth.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started to do yoga, as I\u0026rsquo;ve written before, a few times a week. I need to also remember to set aside time for other non-writing activities: more exercise, walks, dinners with friends, dates with my email backlog, etc.\nOnward and Upward!\nI like the idea of generative impulses rather than creative muscles. Writing isn\u0026rsquo;t always creative, but it is, like any other kind of production, work, and always requires energy and effort.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-more-again/","summary":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t really written very much in the past six months or more, and while I think I\u0026rsquo;ve done cool things and learned about cool things,\nLet me take that back. I haven\u0026rsquo;t written anything in a sustained sort of way that wasn\u0026rsquo;t for work. Hell, even what I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for work has been smaller and more tactical. Unfortunately you don\u0026rsquo;t write books, or book-like-objects as small tactical approaches.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to figure out how to get back to that. It\u0026rsquo;s about rhythm more than anything. If you approach time management for log-form rationally, there\u0026rsquo;s never enough time, so you have to make time, and trick yourself into writing and figure out how to make a little progress on a regular\nAs someone who definitely tends towards binge writing (and who doesn\u0026rsquo;t) remembering to write a little bit on a regular basis is hard and nearly counter intuitive.","title":"Writing More Again"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been a big fan of fabric which is a Python tool for deployment orchestration: deploying a new release of an application, uploading files, deploying new configurations to a group of hosts in a cluster. Before fabric, the options were either to write fragile shell scripts that often didn\u0026rsquo;t do a good job of handling multiple hosts, or use more heavy weight configuration management tools, which had a lot of overhead and bother.\nFabric is great. Make a python module called \u0026ldquo;fabfile,\u0026rdquo; write idiomatic Python, stick anywhere, and then you can call functions in that module using the fab command. And it includes a lot of helpers for interacting with groups of hosts and dealing with remote and local resources that is designed for takes into consideration common contemporary application development.\nFor a while, I basically thought that fabric, or tools like it would completly obviate the need for shell scripting\nI think there are two major problems with using fabric as a framework for general purpose scripting:\nGlobal state can get messy.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t only an issue with Fabric, but I think the fab solution isn\u0026rsquo;t great here. Fabric has this envy object that you can import and then use to track the settings or set custom \u0026ldquo;global\u0026rdquo; data values. It\u0026rsquo;s better than having actual global data, maybe, but you end up having to use it too much, particularly it for communication between different related operations and you end up using tasks and global state to run-time configuration.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no real overriding abstraction to guide code organization.\nIn a lot of ways fab scripts are just a way of writing a large number of scripts within a single code base and a command line interface for specifying different entry points. It would be nice to be able to express relationships between tasks, or centralize the registry of tasks in some of non-adhoc.\nI actually don\u0026rsquo;t think that these are problems with fabric, itself, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably the case that we need a few different kinds of tools and patterns to help support the authorship of useful and maintainable shell scripts and build systems.\na good, usable, non-procedural way manage argument parsing.\nIn python, I like argprase and think it works really well, so I\u0026rsquo;m not saying we need some set of tools to actually parse the arguments that people input on the command line. But I think when you\u0026rsquo;re writing a script, argparse is too low level, and pretty soon there are a few hundred lines of declarative code, and you still have to connect this up with the actual code, which leads to maintenance headaches and all sorts of dumb errors.\na good framework for expressing multi-stage tasks and their dependencies and relationships.\nThis may basically be waf, but I think we can do something similar. I made an attempt at this with buildcloth but I think I ended up with something that\u0026rsquo;s too much of a (meta) build automation tool, and not enough of a general purpose paradigm for organizing code to perform related tasks in a clean, modular, and well organized sort of way.\nThese aren\u0026rsquo;t fabric specific problems, or Python-specific problems, of course. But they are particularly relevant to Python moderatly sized Python code bases in general and most fabric implementations that I\u0026rsquo;veb seen. Maybe Python and fabric make writing useful code easy enough that we start to see complexity problems earlier than we would otherwise. Not sure.\nAs you may have been able to guess at this point, I am somewhat burdened by a large and somewhat overgrown fabric-based project, that needs refactoring. Thankfully, matters are not critical, but I do want to figure out the right way to solve this kind of problem before I start hacking.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fabric-complexity/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been a big fan of fabric which is a Python tool for deployment orchestration: deploying a new release of an application, uploading files, deploying new configurations to a group of hosts in a cluster. Before fabric, the options were either to write fragile shell scripts that often didn\u0026rsquo;t do a good job of handling multiple hosts, or use more heavy weight configuration management tools, which had a lot of overhead and bother.\nFabric is great. Make a python module called \u0026ldquo;fabfile,\u0026rdquo; write idiomatic Python, stick anywhere, and then you can call functions in that module using the fab command. And it includes a lot of helpers for interacting with groups of hosts and dealing with remote and local resources that is designed for takes into consideration common contemporary application development.\nFor a while, I basically thought that fabric, or tools like it would completly obviate the need for shell scripting","title":"Fabric Complexity"},{"content":"At work people often ask for more \u0026ldquo;best practices\u0026rdquo; guides. In some ways this is sign of success: they\u0026rsquo;re no longer begging for fundamental reference material and descriptions of basic use. Nevertheless I almost always wince:\n1. \u0026ldquo;Best practices\u0026rdquo; carries an implicit sense of guarantee along the lines of \u0026ldquo;if you adhere to the best practices, then you won\u0026rsquo;t run into problems,\u0026rdquo; which is sort of difficult to assert with confidence, and is really a product design issue, not a documentation issue.\nIt is really hard to make one-size-fits-all recommendations. 3. Best practice-guides don\u0026rsquo;t address actual needs of users, or actual solutions to real problems, because they generalize problems and solutions beyond the point of re-usability.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it\u0026rsquo;s difficult or impossible to give recommendations, and indeed documentation is the best way that the purveyors of software have to to shape practices. However, the documentation should guide users towards better practices everywhere and isolating recommendations into certain types of documents is probably counter productive.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/best-practice-practices/","summary":"At work people often ask for more \u0026ldquo;best practices\u0026rdquo; guides. In some ways this is sign of success: they\u0026rsquo;re no longer begging for fundamental reference material and descriptions of basic use. Nevertheless I almost always wince:\n1. \u0026ldquo;Best practices\u0026rdquo; carries an implicit sense of guarantee along the lines of \u0026ldquo;if you adhere to the best practices, then you won\u0026rsquo;t run into problems,\u0026rdquo; which is sort of difficult to assert with confidence, and is really a product design issue, not a documentation issue.\nIt is really hard to make one-size-fits-all recommendations. 3. Best practice-guides don\u0026rsquo;t address actual needs of users, or actual solutions to real problems, because they generalize problems and solutions beyond the point of re-usability.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it\u0026rsquo;s difficult or impossible to give recommendations, and indeed documentation is the best way that the purveyors of software have to to shape practices. However, the documentation should guide users towards better practices everywhere and isolating recommendations into certain types of documents is probably counter productive.","title":"Best Practice Practices"},{"content":"As part of my project to learn common lisp, or at least write more common lisp as part of my day to day work and life, I\u0026rsquo;ve\nThis is a total rip off of this blog post, with a few minor changes:\nI hacked some makefile goodness so that it will automatically create binaries for all .lisp files, and means that you can drop a script in the directory and not have to edit the makefile to get the magic to happen. I switched to using buildapp to rather than cl-launch. Buildapp feels a bit more maintained, and I wanted practice using it. Otherwise, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it matters. The makefile:\nTARGETS := $(subst .lisp,,$(wildcard *.lisp)) all:$(TARGETS) %:%.lisp @echo [build]: creating $@ @buildapp --load $\u0026lt; --entry script:run --output $@ @echo [build]: created $@ clean: @rm -f $(TARGETS) Hello world:\n(cl:defpackage #:script (:use #:cl) (:export #:run)) (cl:in-package :script) (defun run (argv) (format t \u0026quot;hello world~%\u0026quot;)) As an aside, I also updated the buildapp aur package.\nPros:\nCommon lisp scripts. The ability to integrate writing lisp into your existing Linux/Unix workflow and processes. Not having to think about packaging or build architecture for trivial operations. Cons:\n~40+ meg executable. Only one source file per script. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/common-lisp-scripts/","summary":"As part of my project to learn common lisp, or at least write more common lisp as part of my day to day work and life, I\u0026rsquo;ve\nThis is a total rip off of this blog post, with a few minor changes:\nI hacked some makefile goodness so that it will automatically create binaries for all .lisp files, and means that you can drop a script in the directory and not have to edit the makefile to get the magic to happen. I switched to using buildapp to rather than cl-launch. Buildapp feels a bit more maintained, and I wanted practice using it. Otherwise, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it matters. The makefile:\nTARGETS := $(subst .lisp,,$(wildcard *.lisp)) all:$(TARGETS) %:%.lisp @echo [build]: creating $@ @buildapp --load $\u0026lt; --entry script:run --output $@ @echo [build]: created $@ clean: @rm -f $(TARGETS) Hello world:\n(cl:defpackage #:script (:use #:cl) (:export #:run)) (cl:in-package :script) (defun run (argv) (format t \u0026quot;hello world~%\u0026quot;)) As an aside, I also updated the buildapp aur package.","title":"Common Lisp Scripts"},{"content":"The backstory: I\u0026rsquo;m trying to learn Common Lisp. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of an arcane programming language with a few aspects that I rather like, and I\u0026rsquo;m viewing this as an exercise to generalize my programming experience/knowledge.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written some common lisp over the years, mostly because I use stumpwm, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling to find a good project to start on my own or hack on an existing project.\nA few weekends ago, I started hacking on coleslaw, which is a static site generator written in common lisp. The reasons are simple:\nI know something about the static site generator domain, so I\u0026rsquo;m only trying to learn one thing. Coleslaw is typical in many respects of site generators, but the architecture makes sense, and it\u0026rsquo;s reasonably simple and hasn\u0026rsquo;t been overly optimized. There are three features I\u0026rsquo;m interested in adding:\nI want make it so that Coleslaw builds content incrementally: there\u0026rsquo;s no reason that programs like this should have to rebuild all content on every build. There are two missing concepts \u0026ldquo;which pages changed,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;if one page changes, what other pages must change.\u0026rdquo; I want to make the entire build process more configurable. Thise includes expanding the options that are available in the site configuration, and allowing users to define and edit themes within their projects. It feels wrong to leave the program signally threaded, particularly when build systems are inherently parallel, and Common Lisp real threads. I want to make this blog more blog-like. The current site works fine, but I\u0026rsquo;m growing restless, and I want to explore more. So I began hacking and managed to learn a lot about the codebase, and am getting into the swing of this project. I played with a naive concurrency approach but it didn\u0026rsquo;t stick. For about a day of work, I:\nMade the docutils package usable from coleslaw and fixed some issues there. See pull request.\nAdded a lot of configuration and made more things customizable. Pull requests.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a lot of little things that I like or feel like I will shortly like, but the sticking points at the moment are:\nA lot of things have started to make sense. let forms feel very natural. The object system is pretty great. I feel comfortable with the organization of code within a function. I don\u0026rsquo;t mind the parentheses.\nI remain pretty confused by the variable binding system outside of the basic let forms. I\u0026rsquo;m never sure about setf and setq (my policy thus far has just been to setf and troubleshoot if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do what I want.) If Python is all about the power of the namespace, it feels like CL is all about the power of scopes and I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet learned all of them.\nOddly, conditionals feel really hard and cumbersome. The if form is more limited and not particularly clear, cond is pretty useful but often feels like a sledge hammer. unless, and when are clear but not perfect.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not found the idiomatic way to perform \u0026ldquo;set a variable to the return of a function if it\u0026rsquo;s current value is 0/null/false, otherwise pass\u0026rdquo; which I find myself reaching for pretty frequently (and awkwardly.)\nMore to come, I\u0026rsquo;m sure!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/common-lisp-progress/","summary":"The backstory: I\u0026rsquo;m trying to learn Common Lisp. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of an arcane programming language with a few aspects that I rather like, and I\u0026rsquo;m viewing this as an exercise to generalize my programming experience/knowledge.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written some common lisp over the years, mostly because I use stumpwm, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling to find a good project to start on my own or hack on an existing project.\nA few weekends ago, I started hacking on coleslaw, which is a static site generator written in common lisp. The reasons are simple:\nI know something about the static site generator domain, so I\u0026rsquo;m only trying to learn one thing. Coleslaw is typical in many respects of site generators, but the architecture makes sense, and it\u0026rsquo;s reasonably simple and hasn\u0026rsquo;t been overly optimized. There are three features I\u0026rsquo;m interested in adding:\nI want make it so that Coleslaw builds content incrementally: there\u0026rsquo;s no reason that programs like this should have to rebuild all content on every build.","title":"Common Lisp Progress"},{"content":"Learning how to make computer software is hard. Not fundamentally hard: lots of people can do it, and even more people do things that are functionally equivalent to programming though they wouldn\u0026rsquo;t think of it as such. But teaching people how to write good computer software is a challenge, and one that I\u0026rsquo;m generally interested in exploring more.\nFor a long time, I\u0026rsquo;ve been interested in this problem from the outside: I didn\u0026rsquo;t really know how to program in any meaningful sort of way and I was interested in deconstructing the process of making software. Then something clicked and years of tinkering with systems administration and reading about programming languages and practices clicked and while I think I have a lot left to learn, I\u0026rsquo;ve started thinking about the problem from the other side.\nWe accumulate many skills and kinds of knowledge in an incremental sort of way: you study and practice and little by little our brains (and bodies) form new connections and we \u0026ldquo;learn.\u0026rdquo; Other kinds of learning follow a more \u0026ldquo;step-based\u0026rdquo; approach: we practice and study for a long period of time without much discernible change in understanding or skill until at some point we experience some sort of larger improvement in ability.\nAt least for me (and perhaps you as well,) things like dance, knitting, writing, and most structured/classroom-based topics tend to be incremental, mostly. Other things, like programming (at least initially) and singing/music tend to be step-based.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that step-based areas of focus don\u0026rsquo;t require regular ongoing practice, just that the observable markers of progress may lag inconsistently behind effort and pedagogy.\nWhen I was doing more non-professional writing, I was fond of the school of writing advice that said \u0026ldquo;the way to learn how to write (fiction) is to have a good story to tell;\u0026rdquo; when I think about learning to program I think the first step has to be a need to automate something on a computer.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve even written up something on the topic\nHackers describe this as the \u0026ldquo;scratch your own itch\u0026rdquo; method (from CatB and elsewhere.)\nNeither the idea of step-based versus incremental learning nor the notion of using a personal need to drive learning are new, but I think they illuminate eachother well.\nSince I stopped being a student somewhat abruptly in 2007, I\u0026rsquo;ve become increasingly glad both that my education and personal development has continued and I\u0026rsquo;ve had the opportunity to explore things in ways that didn\u0026rsquo;t make sense in a structured context (e.g. \u0026ldquo;I want to learn about how databases work without formal CS/systems training,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I want to learn how to sing and withouta lot of music theory.\u0026rdquo;)\nFor most of the past year I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty heads-down on the \u0026ldquo;learning to program\u0026rdquo; project, and I\u0026rsquo;ve had a number of interesting problems that I\u0026rsquo;ve used to help explore the topic:\ngeneralized `Sphinx \u0026lt;http://sphinx-doc.org\u0026gt;`_ publishing toolkit.\nThis is both a work project and a personal project.\nSphinx is a great tool for producing text, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of it. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of its architecture (and have a number of approaches to optimize the build process,) and there are a number of tasks: dependency resolution, version management, theme management, and deployment that any reasonably complex Sphinx-based project needs to address.\nWhile this project requires ongoing development and improvement, it\u0026rsquo;s basically feature complete, and it\u0026rsquo;s given\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a couple of personal side projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve used to explore different kinds of programming problems, with greater and lesser success.\nBuildcloth, which is pretty cool and needs more work but I fear may be too complicated for the use-case.\ncsc, which isn\u0026rsquo;t fully off the ground and may not provide a significant improvement upon Sphinx for most cases.\ndtf, which is a decent idea, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not had time to really implement and exercise the program and I fear that the core code quality isn\u0026rsquo;t great.\nMore recently I\u0026rsquo;ve begun working on a dependency analytics package with a co-worker/friend to help him and his teammates understand and untangle a larger C++ project.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been nice to be able to actively work on a project with another developer, and to be able to focus on performance and architecture issues while someone else focuses on feature prototyping and use-cases.\nIn a lot of ways this is a good \u0026ldquo;capstone\u0026rdquo; project for me because I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to use and apply many of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve learned from writing concurrent/parallel Python, as well as moderate sized Python programs comes together well here.\nMost of the projects that had been open and on my plate for the last few months have mostly wrapped up. There\u0026rsquo;s more work to be done on them, I could do a lot more work, and I think I will, but none of them are lacking a feature that I really need in order to accomplish something that I want to do.\nI\u0026rsquo;m interested in learning more: about writing (documentation, science fiction, etc.), about software development and computing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/learning-problems/","summary":"Learning how to make computer software is hard. Not fundamentally hard: lots of people can do it, and even more people do things that are functionally equivalent to programming though they wouldn\u0026rsquo;t think of it as such. But teaching people how to write good computer software is a challenge, and one that I\u0026rsquo;m generally interested in exploring more.\nFor a long time, I\u0026rsquo;ve been interested in this problem from the outside: I didn\u0026rsquo;t really know how to program in any meaningful sort of way and I was interested in deconstructing the process of making software. Then something clicked and years of tinkering with systems administration and reading about programming languages and practices clicked and while I think I have a lot left to learn, I\u0026rsquo;ve started thinking about the problem from the other side.\nWe accumulate many skills and kinds of knowledge in an incremental sort of way: you study and practice and little by little our brains (and bodies) form new connections and we \u0026ldquo;learn.","title":"Learning Problems"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m interested in using metaphors and methods from programming and engineering to make documentation better. There are some obvious elements that are ripe for stealing in terms of process (scrum, iteration, etc.) as well as tooling (issue tracking, version control.) As I\u0026rsquo;ve continued to explore the connections and metaphors have become less obvious, but remain very helpful.\nRecently I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about and using the idea of inheritance to help address content duplication issues. The new approach to tutorial content is one of these applications. Actually, this is a bit of retroactive intellectualizing: the need for reuse came first, and relating this back to inheritance is an idea that I want to explore.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking about inheritance in the same way that we talk about the inheritance of classes in object oriented programs.\nIn the past, I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about the failure of the promise of single sourcing to solve the complexity problems in documentation as being related to the failure of object oriented programming styles to resolve code duplication and promote widespread code reuse. Or, if not related, symptoms of related causes.\nFor code, I think the issue is that while there are a couple of applications for inheritance (i.e. representing trees, some basic templating,) it\u0026rsquo;s not a universally applicable metaphor. The mantra composition over inheritance draws attention to the fact that \u0026ldquo;has a\u0026rdquo; relationships are more prevalent and useful than \u0026ldquo;is a\u0026rdquo; relationships.\nTactically, speaking, using inheritance rather than simple inlining or inclusion is quite helpful for thinking about content reuse in documentation. Inlining is technically easy to implement, but doesn\u0026rsquo;t actually help facilitate content reuse because it\u0026rsquo;s hard to write content for inclusion that\u0026rsquo;s sufficiently \u0026ldquo;context free,\u0026rdquo; whereas using inheritance makes it possible to reuse structures and portions of content without requiring writers to write context-free content.\nInheritance isn\u0026rsquo;t perfect of course: if you have to overload all or most inherited elements you end up with a confusing mush that\u0026rsquo;s hard to untangle, but it\u0026rsquo;s a decent starting point.\nOnward and upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/inheritance-metaphors-and-documentation/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m interested in using metaphors and methods from programming and engineering to make documentation better. There are some obvious elements that are ripe for stealing in terms of process (scrum, iteration, etc.) as well as tooling (issue tracking, version control.) As I\u0026rsquo;ve continued to explore the connections and metaphors have become less obvious, but remain very helpful.\nRecently I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about and using the idea of inheritance to help address content duplication issues. The new approach to tutorial content is one of these applications. Actually, this is a bit of retroactive intellectualizing: the need for reuse came first, and relating this back to inheritance is an idea that I want to explore.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking about inheritance in the same way that we talk about the inheritance of classes in object oriented programs.\nIn the past, I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about the failure of the promise of single sourcing to solve the complexity problems in documentation as being related to the failure of object oriented programming styles to resolve code duplication and promote widespread code reuse.","title":"Documentation Inheritance"},{"content":"I spent some time yesterday evening dealing with a bug in some code I wrote/maintain, and I thought it would be a good exercise to just talk about the issue, and approaches problem solving. This is both an effort to demystify the act of programming and debugging and a brainstorming exercise. I explained a bunch of the background in an external page, to make the content a bit more accessible.\nThe System To build a large complex documentation site we use Sphinx as the core \u0026ldquo;compiler\u0026rdquo; to translate source into outputs like HTML and PDFs, but this is really just the core operation, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of other work: generating content, analyzing content to make sure that everything that needs to be recompiled is, and migrating content to staging and production environments.\nEssentially the build happens in three-parts:\nIn the first step, we generate a bunch of content from structured sources. Then we have to assemble a dependency graph of all the content and update the time stamp (i.e. mime) all files that depend on files that have changed so that Sphinx will actually rebuild the files that need it.\nMost of this work happens in some sort of parallel execution model. I\u0026rsquo;ll rant about concurrency in Python in a bit. Hold your questions.\nIn the second step Sphinx runs. For testing purposes, this just builds one output (i.e. HTML), but our production builds need to build multiple output formats. When there are multiple builds, this runs each build in its own thread. Builds execute as sub-processes. Sphinx\u0026rsquo;s processing has a two-phase approach: there\u0026rsquo;s a read phase and a write phase. The read phase happens in one linear execution, but writing files can happen in a processing pool (if sphinx needs to write large numbers of multiple files.)\nFinally we do a bunch of post-processing on the builds to move the files into the right places. This happens (typically) in a process pool that runs within the thread where the build executed.\nSee my overview of concurrency, and rant on Python concurrency for some background.\nThe Problem There\u0026rsquo;s a deadlock. Sometimes, one of the Sphinx will just die, and stop doing anything, produces no messages and waits forever. (This is in step 2 above.) Everything else works fine.\nGreat.\nThe problem, or part of the problem, is that all of the parts of the system work fine in isolation. The code that starts the external process gets called extensively and works fine. The thread/process management code is also well exercised. In essence the question is:\n\u0026ldquo;What could make code that works fine most of the time, fail oddly only sometimes.\u0026rdquo;\nAs I think about it, I\u0026rsquo;ve observed intermittent deadlocks from time to time, but they\u0026rsquo;ve gotten much worse recently:\nWe weren\u0026rsquo;t doing automated building for a few weeks, for an unrelated reason and the problem shows up more frequently in automated builds. We moved the execution of the Sphinx process to thread pools from process pools: they were already running in yielding operations, no need to double the overhead. A few more operations moved to threads as well, again, mostly operations with lots of yielding, to reduce the overhead of processes and in one situation when a task was incompatible with processes (i.e. not pickelable.) Attempts Make sure that the output of the sphinx build isn\u0026rsquo;t filling the output buffering that subprocess is doing. Write output to a temporary file rather than using the buffer. (see tempfile) Use Popen.poll() to figure out when an operation is done rather than using a blocking call which might prevent the thread from ever waking up. Current state. The bug is difficult to reproduce, but the above issues seems to reduce the incidence of the bug by a significant margin. My current theory is there were two deadlocks: one in sphinx itself that was pretty uncommon, and one with how we were calling sphinx that was more common and exacerbated by switching to the pool that ran sphinx from a process pool to a thread pool.\nSo the bug has probably been around for a while, but was much more rare given the different execution model. And regardless, was easily confused with another bug. Delightful.\nHaving resolved the bigger issue, it\u0026rsquo;s no longer a real problem for our automated testing, so I consider it a (minor) success. Longer term, I think we need to streamline the execution and process management, but this is not crucial now s we can continue to increment toward that solution.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rambling-about-a-bug/","summary":"I spent some time yesterday evening dealing with a bug in some code I wrote/maintain, and I thought it would be a good exercise to just talk about the issue, and approaches problem solving. This is both an effort to demystify the act of programming and debugging and a brainstorming exercise. I explained a bunch of the background in an external page, to make the content a bit more accessible.\nThe System To build a large complex documentation site we use Sphinx as the core \u0026ldquo;compiler\u0026rdquo; to translate source into outputs like HTML and PDFs, but this is really just the core operation, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of other work: generating content, analyzing content to make sure that everything that needs to be recompiled is, and migrating content to staging and production environments.\nEssentially the build happens in three-parts:\nIn the first step, we generate a bunch of content from structured sources.","title":"Rambling about a Bug"},{"content":"What and Why Concurrency is the term we use to think about operations that can happen at the same time. A computer program is just a list of operations that have some sort of ordering. If you run those operation in the order the programmer wrote them in, and the programmer wrote the right code, everything should work fine: If operation B depends on the outcome of operation A, then you just have to make sure that operation A happens before B.\nThere are two kinds of problems that this kind of model doesn\u0026rsquo;t address well:\nPrograms that respond to user or environmental interactions.\nMany programs don\u0026rsquo;t actually have a linear procedure, and depend on user input (e.g. a word processor or text editor must wait for you to type text).\nLet\u0026rsquo;s call these \u0026ldquo;event driven\u0026rdquo; programs.\nPrograms may consist of operations that don\u0026rsquo;t depend on each other.\nConsider a program that has operations A, B, C, and D. Sometimes, you may have to run D after C and C after B, and B after A; but sometimes B, C, and D are totally (or mostly) independent of each other and can run in any order.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s call these \u0026ldquo;potentially parallel workloads.\u0026rdquo;\nWhile both of these kinds of models help us to think about ways that software can reflect and respond to operations happening at the same time, concurrency is more subtle than \u0026ldquo;parallelism.\u0026rdquo; Concurrency is about modeling the dependencies and relationships between operations, parallelism is really just an implementation detail.\nParallelism requires concurrency; but you can execute concurrent designs in parallel or not as needed or desired.\nThere are caveats both during development and at runtime:\nConcurrency makes some aspects of programming harder because if the order and timing of operations changes, the possibilities for conflicts and errors grows. It also makes it harder to follow the (possible) chain of operations. At runtime, if you use parallelism to execute a concurrent program, there\u0026rsquo;s an amount of overhead spent managing the more complex execution model. Reference: \u0026lt;http://blog.golang.org/concurrency-is-not-parallelism\u0026gt;\nImplementation Details (Python) A single Python process does not support parallel execution: only one operation can execute at a time. Sort of. The rule is more complex:\nPython operations in Python code.\nThis covers all Python code you write and depend on, and much of the standard library.\n(some) Python operations implemented in C.\nThis covers some operations like computing hashes and reading and writing to files or network connections.\nOperations that run external processes. (e.g. \u0026ldquo;run this shell command\u0026rdquo;)\nThe second two operations can run in parallel with each other and with execution of Python code (i.e. these operations are \u0026ldquo;yielding\u0026rdquo;). These yielding operations typically account for the operations that take the most amount of time. The downside is that yielding operations account for a small percentage of the number of operations in a Python program.\nPython provides two (native) parallelism metaphors: threads and processes.\nThreads are lightweight, have low start-up costs, and have access to the shared state of the master process. The downsides is that only yielding operations can actually run in parallel. Otherwise only one Python operation can run at once. Except that operations will interleave at some level, which means you can get some kinds of concurrency bugs (deadlocks/races) even though there\u0026rsquo;s limited parallel operation. Processes are less lightweight, have slightly higher start-up costs, but can all execute Python code at the same time. They also don\u0026rsquo;t have access to shared state, which means there are more costs associated with copying memory to-and-from the process. While there are more limitations on what can run in processes, because there\u0026rsquo;s isolation and no shared state, its more safe. The best part is that the interfaces for working with threads and processes are the same, which makes testing easier.\nThe Rant The problem isn\u0026rsquo;t that Python doesn\u0026rsquo;t have concurrency tools, it\u0026rsquo;s that no one started writing Python with the idea that parallelism and concurrency would be a defining element of most systems that people would need or want to write.\nThe result is that while it\u0026rsquo;s theoretically possible to modify Python itself to be more concurrent, one of the two things happen:\nEverything breaks. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of Python that depends on the current behavior and concurrency semantics. The Python Standard Library is big. The ecosystem of software written in Python is even bigger and everything would break. In order to prevent everything from breaking, to make the changes required to support more intrinsic parallelism you actually end up slowing-down the arguably more common non-parallel operation. The work on this is ongoing, of course, and eventually I suspect there will be some solution, but the change is unlikely to be revolutionary. In the mean time, it\u0026rsquo;s awkward and sometimes awful:\nYou can write concurrent code, which is nice, but there is some awkwardness around these expression: calling lots of functions inside of [multiprocessing.Pool.apply_async()]{.title-ref} (or something similar) is pain; callbacks and passing passing function pointers around is awkward and prone to error. Because so little of the Python tooling expects thing to be running in parallel, there are huge warts: error handling blows; the documentation doesn\u0026rsquo;t really cover what yields or doesn\u0026rsquo;t, and what can or will block. In some situations, you can get pretty good parallel performance. This feels great, but often doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel predictable or reproducible. What would make this better?\nThere should be standard ways to express concurrency that feels less like a hack. This is a syntax/library deficiency. Errors in processes should bubble up more forcefully. Documentation of Python APIs should affirmatively describe the concurrency semantics of all operations. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/python-concurrency-rant/","summary":"What and Why Concurrency is the term we use to think about operations that can happen at the same time. A computer program is just a list of operations that have some sort of ordering. If you run those operation in the order the programmer wrote them in, and the programmer wrote the right code, everything should work fine: If operation B depends on the outcome of operation A, then you just have to make sure that operation A happens before B.\nThere are two kinds of problems that this kind of model doesn\u0026rsquo;t address well:\nPrograms that respond to user or environmental interactions.\nMany programs don\u0026rsquo;t actually have a linear procedure, and depend on user input (e.g. a word processor or text editor must wait for you to type text).\nLet\u0026rsquo;s call these \u0026ldquo;event driven\u0026rdquo; programs.\nPrograms may consist of operations that don\u0026rsquo;t depend on each other.\nConsider a program that has operations A, B, C, and D.","title":"Python Concurrency Rant"},{"content":"a checklist\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a difference between software that works, software that\u0026rsquo;s brilliant, software that\u0026rsquo;s maintainable, and software that\u0026rsquo;s good. This is post that begins to enumerate the kinds of things that you can do as you write software to help make it sane and possibly good.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t about computer science, or really even about engineering principals. We all have a sense of what makes a physical object (furniture, buildings, electronics) feel like they are well made. This is about making software have the same feel, and what you can think about when you\u0026rsquo;re writing code to help give the finished product that feel.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll expand on these items later, but as an outline.\nHave logging everywhere. Solid test code that mirrors app functionality. If you feel like you can safely make a change to the code and be confident that your tests will catch regressions, then you\u0026rsquo;re good, otherwise; write more tests.\nNever more hierarchy then you need. Make the building infrastructure really robust. 5. Have internal abstractions for internal configuration and persistence.\nConfiguration and data persistence should be encapsulated by some internal interface and the application logic shouldn\u0026rsquo;t depend on the implementations of how the application is configured or how you persist the data.\nConsider concurrency when possible. Don\u0026rsquo;t confuse exceptions and conditions. Break long sequences of sections into groups of logical operations. Avoid unnecessarily tangled execution paths. Please discuss!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/write-sane-software/","summary":"a checklist\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a difference between software that works, software that\u0026rsquo;s brilliant, software that\u0026rsquo;s maintainable, and software that\u0026rsquo;s good. This is post that begins to enumerate the kinds of things that you can do as you write software to help make it sane and possibly good.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t about computer science, or really even about engineering principals. We all have a sense of what makes a physical object (furniture, buildings, electronics) feel like they are well made. This is about making software have the same feel, and what you can think about when you\u0026rsquo;re writing code to help give the finished product that feel.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll expand on these items later, but as an outline.\nHave logging everywhere. Solid test code that mirrors app functionality. If you feel like you can safely make a change to the code and be confident that your tests will catch regressions, then you\u0026rsquo;re good, otherwise; write more tests.","title":"Write Sane Software"},{"content":"At work I\u0026rsquo;ve introduced a new method for storing the content for procedural documents (i.e. tutorials/how-to guides/etc,) that is more structured. Rather than just writing a tutorial in a conventional way, we capture the steps in a specific structure that we use to generate the content in a specific way. The structure lets us do cool things with the presentation that would be hard to do well otherwise and help us focus theses kinds of documents on the core procedural or sequence-based nature of these documents.\nDoing documentation well is really hard, but probably not for the reasons you think: Writing clear text about complex ideas isn\u0026rsquo;t easy, but it is straight forward. Figuring out what needs to be documented is harder, but it boils down to a business problem and if you talk to the right people it\u0026rsquo;s not a significant challenge. Ensuring that the documentation remains correct over time as the product develops, particularly with regards to duplicated content: really hard. Managing complexity of large texts that are always growing and changing, particularly with regards to correctness and content duplication: really fucking hard.\nThe problem is that the solutions to the hard problems are at odds with each other: you help address the complexity problems by decoupling the organization of the source material from the presentation, which never works well enough. You solve the duplication problem using a \u0026ldquo;single sourcing strategy\u0026rdquo; where you store common bits of information in one place and then inject that text as needed, which increases complexity.\nThere is no winning.\nThe new structured approach to procedures may not be winning, exactly, but it works pretty well. Essentially we put a huge core of our content into a YAML document and then render it out, but we get some nice benefits:\nFor each step in a sequence we can inherit from any other step in the project and override any component of that step. This facilitates reuse, and forces us to think about potential reuse throughout the process. The compiler and parsers tell us when we get something wrong. The output is very regular, so we can be confident that all of the tutorials look the same and have the same structure. Minimal loss of editing clarity: YAML is great to edit, the structure is like a JSON document, but commentsare allowed and the syntax does smart things with newlines and requires less escaping. Basically, at its core, we\u0026rsquo;re restricting the available structural possibles for some documents and using (simple) software to enforce those requirements. The results are quite good, but in some ways it makes the writing part a bit more difficult. There\u0026rsquo;s less room for imprecision, and there are some weak rhetorical formulations that become more important to avoid. For example: complex conditional structures don\u0026rsquo;t always work well and positional references (i.e. \u0026ldquo;as above\u0026rdquo;) are almost always unhelpful.\nIn some ways the effect is kind of like writing in a specific poetic form. Less metric, but the same kind of toying with squeezing an idea into a very specific form. The coolest side effect is that given the constraints that the new system imposes, the quality of everyone\u0026rsquo;s output has improved.\nI can live with that!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/structure-documentation-and-poetry/","summary":"At work I\u0026rsquo;ve introduced a new method for storing the content for procedural documents (i.e. tutorials/how-to guides/etc,) that is more structured. Rather than just writing a tutorial in a conventional way, we capture the steps in a specific structure that we use to generate the content in a specific way. The structure lets us do cool things with the presentation that would be hard to do well otherwise and help us focus theses kinds of documents on the core procedural or sequence-based nature of these documents.\nDoing documentation well is really hard, but probably not for the reasons you think: Writing clear text about complex ideas isn\u0026rsquo;t easy, but it is straight forward. Figuring out what needs to be documented is harder, but it boils down to a business problem and if you talk to the right people it\u0026rsquo;s not a significant challenge. Ensuring that the documentation remains correct over time as the product develops, particularly with regards to duplicated content: really hard.","title":"Structure, Documentation, and Poetry"},{"content":"In response to my Knitting Practices post, on Facebook my father commented \u0026ldquo;The word \u0026ldquo;practice\u0026rdquo; is apt. Is there an influence from yoga?\u0026rdquo;\nThe answer is obviously \u0026ldquo;yes,\u0026rdquo; though the route is somewhat indirect and travels through a story about programming. Stick with it for a little while.\nGenerators and Python Memory Efficiency I was talking with a dancing friend about memory efficiency in Python programs, particularly with regards to loops and the range() function. Say you want to do something 1000 times, in Python the easiest way to do this is:\nfor it in range(1000): do_thing(it) This says, \u0026ldquo;make a list of numbers from 1 to 1000,\u0026rdquo; and then call the do_thing() operation on that number (i.e. assigned to the variable it). range(1000) evaluates to a list, which Python stores in memory and the code above loops over.\nThe way to get this effect in other languages (JavaScript below) is to do something like this:\nfor (var it=0; it\u0026lt;= 1000; it++) { do_thing(it) } The for loop has three statements: an action to perform running the content of the loop (create a variable), a condition that will terminate the loop by returning false (variable is less than or equal to 1000), and an operation to run after each loop. The effect of the JavaScript is the same as the Python, except that the Python has to build this (potentially large) list for grins.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a couple of quick answers to this specific question:\n(In Python 2) use xrange() which is a special iterable type (i.e. it works with loops), that doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to build a list in memory, it just spits out values incrementally as needed.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s imagine that it does this by having a function that returns values starting at a certain point (i.e. 0) pausing after each value, and then returning the next value the next time it runs. Thes ea re called \u0026ldquo;generators\u0026rdquo; in Python.\nWait for the Python 3 switch to complete: In Python 3, range() is a generator of sorts, and it\u0026rsquo;s efficient in this way.\nNot care about memory use so much. In most cases this will not be the bottle neck in your application. Really long lists of integers may take up megabytes of memory, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a huge deal.\nGenerators are great, and they\u0026rsquo;re worth using in most cases, but no one will laugh at you if you don\u0026rsquo;t use them in this situation.\nThe coolest thing, really is that you can really easily write generator functions. Here\u0026rsquo;s a silly example: :\ndef animals(\u0026quot;input_animal\u0026quot;=None): for animal in [ 'cat', 'dog', 'cow']: if input_animal != animal: yield animal This function returns an animal, as long as the input_animal isn\u0026rsquo;t in the list.\nI explained how generators work to my friend and he said something like \u0026ldquo;Nifty, I guess they\u0026rsquo;re not really part of my Python practice yet.\u0026rdquo;\nThe phrase sort of stuck with me.\nProgramming is a Practice There\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of theory to programming that\u0026rsquo;s grounded in how computers work, and a lot of things that are actually useful for programmers to know but in truth programming is a practice. Being able to look at a design or a program and understand how to write code to achieve some goal or connect two pieces of functionality, is really about the practice\nBeyond understanding what makes good software good and how the machines work, most of programming is knowing the tools really wall and being able to identify the right tool for the job. Everything else is just typing and flow.\nWhile the fundamental knowledge and knowledge of the tools is always important, at some point programming becomes more about being to figure out what the right solution is for any given obstacle or situation.\nKnitting as Practice Knitting is kind of the same. There are some fundamental skills (stitches, operations) and there are some basic fundamental modalities/patterns1 that you use and combine to make some common objects.\nKnitting itself is always about repetition, stitch after stitch, but it\u0026rsquo;s also about repetition on a higher level. Knitting the second sock, the second sleeve. Making pair of sock after pair of sock, or sweater after sweater.\nAt some point being a knitter stops being about the skills and modalities/patterns and starts being about actually making things and figuring out how to apply what you know about knitting to a new situation: the thing you want to make, the yarn your using, and the tools you\u0026rsquo;re using.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all practice. All the way down.\nIn programming terms, these would be patterns. I\u0026rsquo;m using the term modality/pattern to disambiguate. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about things like \u0026ldquo;how to shape a neck opening on a sweater,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;turn a heel on a sock.\u0026rdquo; Not the pattern for an entire object, but the method for knitting a particular object.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/practicing/","summary":"In response to my Knitting Practices post, on Facebook my father commented \u0026ldquo;The word \u0026ldquo;practice\u0026rdquo; is apt. Is there an influence from yoga?\u0026rdquo;\nThe answer is obviously \u0026ldquo;yes,\u0026rdquo; though the route is somewhat indirect and travels through a story about programming. Stick with it for a little while.\nGenerators and Python Memory Efficiency I was talking with a dancing friend about memory efficiency in Python programs, particularly with regards to loops and the range() function. Say you want to do something 1000 times, in Python the easiest way to do this is:\nfor it in range(1000): do_thing(it) This says, \u0026ldquo;make a list of numbers from 1 to 1000,\u0026rdquo; and then call the do_thing() operation on that number (i.e. assigned to the variable it). range(1000) evaluates to a list, which Python stores in memory and the code above loops over.\nThe way to get this effect in other languages (JavaScript below) is to do something like this:","title":"Practicing"},{"content":"I recently finished my first knitting project after my [[return to knitting|/knitting/a-knitting-practice/]]: a pair of ankle socks in a medium (for socks) weight yarn. The socks are plain and I\u0026rsquo;m pleased with the result, but there were some unexpected parts of the project, and some useful lessons:\nThese Aren\u0026rsquo;t The Socks You Meant To Make For the most part I\u0026rsquo;m interested in knitting pretty plain socks in plain (solid) yarn: probably even undated yarn that I can soak in tea or henna post-knitting. So the fact that this is one of those patterned, superwash sock yarn is something of a misnomer.\nI also intended to get 7 inch cuffs out of the yarn (in a 50 gram ball and I even knit most of a sock: but I ran out of yarn. My assumption that I could knit a 64 stitch sock with sport weight yarn was a touch over the mark, but it was close.\nSo having failed that project I took a break from the yarn and ripped it all back, and attempted to do a 60 stitch sock (right choice!) and knit a 2 inch cuff.\nI could have gotten away with a slightly longer cuff, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been wanting to have a couple of short pairs of socks to wear while dancing, and to be honest the yarn looked better on the ball than knitted up.\nThe first moral: Given enough time, I figured it out.\nThe second moral: It\u0026rsquo;s ok to rip something out if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work out. It\u0026rsquo;s also ok to not rip it out immediately after you realize it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work out.\nI Kitchnered Toes All By Myself I\u0026rsquo;ve never really been successful at kitchnering anything. I find every instruction to be incomprehensible, and every attempt to kitchner something has ended in disaster. My solution for the past couple of years has been to send the occasional sock off to my mother for her to do the honors.\nThe thing is, I understand the concept of what\u0026rsquo;s happening, which makes the fact that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t do it so frustrating. While I was knitting the first sock, I decided that I could probably think my way through the problem, and after a bit of fussing, I was ale to actually complete the sock toe.\nI had to turn the sock inside out, and the ends weren\u0026rsquo;t perfect, but it was close.\nThe Wearing Report I wore these socks to a big Balkan Dance festival, and they worked! I thought the cuffs were a bit too short, but the sizing was correct in every other regard. Next pair will have slightly longer cuffs.\nHuzzah!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-first-ankle-sock/","summary":"I recently finished my first knitting project after my [[return to knitting|/knitting/a-knitting-practice/]]: a pair of ankle socks in a medium (for socks) weight yarn. The socks are plain and I\u0026rsquo;m pleased with the result, but there were some unexpected parts of the project, and some useful lessons:\nThese Aren\u0026rsquo;t The Socks You Meant To Make For the most part I\u0026rsquo;m interested in knitting pretty plain socks in plain (solid) yarn: probably even undated yarn that I can soak in tea or henna post-knitting. So the fact that this is one of those patterned, superwash sock yarn is something of a misnomer.\nI also intended to get 7 inch cuffs out of the yarn (in a 50 gram ball and I even knit most of a sock: but I ran out of yarn. My assumption that I could knit a 64 stitch sock with sport weight yarn was a touch over the mark, but it was close.","title":"The First Ankle Sock"},{"content":"I knit socks on four (5 inch) double pointed needles, these days from the cuff down, and I enjoy socks with some amount of ribbing at the cuff.\nSeems reasonable. I also tend to have two other restrictions:\nEach needle should have the same number of stitches. In the ribbing, each needle should begin with a knit stitch and end with a purl stitch. This somewhat constrains the possibilities. Also given a preference for rubbings that are biased towards knit stitches, I tend to veto options that might otherwise be workable. Here\u0026rsquo;s a quick cheat sheet of compliant patterns. Patterns are for one needle, repeat for each\n12 stitches (48): Knit 2, purl 2 till end. Knit 3, purl 1 till end. 13 stitches (52): Knit 3, purl 2 twice; then knit 2, purl 1. 14 stitches (56): Knit 3, purl 2 twice; then knit 3, purl 1. 15 stitches (60): Knit 3, purl 2 till end. Knit 2, purl 1 till end. 16 stitches (64): Knit 2, purl 2 till end. Knit 3, purl 1 till end. 17 stitches (68): Knit 2, purl 2 twice; then knit 2, purl 1 three times. 18 stitches (72): Knit 2, purl 1 till end. Knit 3, purl 2 three times; then knit 2, purl 1. 19 stitches (76): Knit 3, purl 2 three times; then knit 3, purl 1. 20 stitches (80): Knit 2, purl 2 till end. Knit 3, purl 1 till end. Knit 2, purl 1 till end. Knit 3, purl 2 three times; then knit 2, purl 1. 21 stitches (84): Knit 2, purl 1 till end. Knit 3, purl 2 three times; then knit 2, purl 2. 22 stitches (88): Knit 2, purl 1 six times, then knit 2, purl 2. Knit 3, purl 3; then, knit 2, purl 2 till end.. 23 stitches (92): Knit 2, purl 2 five times; then knit 2, purl 1 Knit 3, purl 1 five times; then knit 2, purl 1 Knit 3, purl 2 four times; then knit 2, purl 1 24 stitches (96): Knit 2, purl 2 till end. Knit 3, purl 1 till end. Knit 2, purl 1 till end. Knit 3, purl 2 three times; then knit 2, purl 1. 25 stitches (100): Knit 3, purl 2 till end. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-perfect-rib/","summary":"I knit socks on four (5 inch) double pointed needles, these days from the cuff down, and I enjoy socks with some amount of ribbing at the cuff.\nSeems reasonable. I also tend to have two other restrictions:\nEach needle should have the same number of stitches. In the ribbing, each needle should begin with a knit stitch and end with a purl stitch. This somewhat constrains the possibilities. Also given a preference for rubbings that are biased towards knit stitches, I tend to veto options that might otherwise be workable. Here\u0026rsquo;s a quick cheat sheet of compliant patterns. Patterns are for one needle, repeat for each\n12 stitches (48): Knit 2, purl 2 till end. Knit 3, purl 1 till end. 13 stitches (52): Knit 3, purl 2 twice; then knit 2, purl 1. 14 stitches (56): Knit 3, purl 2 twice; then knit 3, purl 1. 15 stitches (60): Knit 3, purl 2 till end.","title":"The Perfect Rib"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not done much knitting for the last year or so. I have a sweater in progress (a cardigan,) and I have an in progress scarf thing, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it.\nOr was.\nI enjoy knitting, and find it both relaxing (the rhythm) and stimulating (the meditative aspects, the project planning and design). And I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting (mostly on) for the last 10 years (or so,) and am very technically competent (I think.)\nAt the same time I lost a lot of interest in knitting. There were and are other things in my life: learning how to make software became (and is) more challenging than making sweaters and shawls, and then there\u0026rsquo;s singing, a full time (and then some) job, and what not.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also burnt out on knitting culture. For a long time, part of knitting involved, blogging about knitting, reading knitting blogs, taking pictures of projects and yarn, shopping for yarn, hanging out on ravelry, working in yarn shops, and while knitting itself is a big part of knitting culture I\u0026rsquo;m realizing a few things:\nI don\u0026rsquo;t really need more sweaters.\nI have a huge pile of sweaters that I never wear in my apartment (where storage is a premium,) and have a huge stack of sweaters in my parents house. While a few exceptions, most of the sweaters that I have (the ones here) aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly wearable in my day to day life. (They\u0026rsquo;re odd, or a bit loud, or more commonly too damn warm.)\nIndeed, I bought this Merino cycling zip-up sweater (from Chrome) and it\u0026rsquo;s basically my new uniform. This has proven a couple of things, first that I can wear wool against my skin without discomfort and second that the more plain and fitted a sweater is the more likely I am to wear it.\nThe thing that I like the most about knitting is being able to sit down, and let my hands work and let my mind go thinking about the knitting or about something that I\u0026rsquo;m writing, or nothing at all.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m good at designing things, and good at doing complicated sweaters, I find that I tend to avoid projects where I end up focusing too much on what needs to happen next, or worry about running out of yarn, or need to follow a pattern.\nKnitting is a personal rather than a social act.\nI can knit with other people, but it\u0026rsquo;s not the kind of thing that I want to do when having a conversation, or actively doing something else. I can concentrate on things that are happening around me, but I can\u0026rsquo;t really read and I can\u0026rsquo;t really talk much.\nThe solution seems pretty clear: don\u0026rsquo;t knit things you don\u0026rsquo;t want to do, and knit in a way that makes sense for your interests. I\u0026rsquo;ll continue to work on the projects that I have in progress, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably still make sweaters, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be oing a lot more plain knitting I think a lot more sock knitting.\nSock Knitting Historically I\u0026rsquo;ve not knit very many socks, I\u0026rsquo;ve made a half dozen pairs, some more successful than others, most wearable. I can knit a sock completely off book, and am have a basic sock pattern memorized and don\u0026rsquo;t even really need to do much test knitting.\nI finished the pair of socks that I started knitting (probably six months in the running) worsted socks with a wierd ribbing pattern in an evening and then and cast on for a couple of new pairs. Given that I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered how awesome wool socks are with a new pair of boots that I have (and that I can wear them on my skin without wanting to die.) I\u0026rsquo;m even more inspired to knit socks.\nThe new socks are:\na pair of sport weight socks using some striping German sock superwash yarn. 64 stitches, planed 7 inch cuff, 2.5mm (US 1.5) needles, cuff down, 2x2 ribbing. a pair of fingering weight socks (undyed LB 1878) 80 stitches, planed 7 inch cuff, 2.5mm (US 1.5) needles, cuff down, 2x2 ribbing. The details probably won\u0026rsquo;t change much. My hope is to be able to figure out a handknit sock pattern that\u0026rsquo;s suitable for year round wear.\nKnitting Blogging Here I\u0026rsquo;ll probably continue to write about knitting here, I like writing, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about it, but I\u0026rsquo;ll probably address this space more like I would a software or philosophy blog, rather than the more typical knitting blog format. I hope to see you around!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-knitting-practice/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not done much knitting for the last year or so. I have a sweater in progress (a cardigan,) and I have an in progress scarf thing, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it.\nOr was.\nI enjoy knitting, and find it both relaxing (the rhythm) and stimulating (the meditative aspects, the project planning and design). And I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting (mostly on) for the last 10 years (or so,) and am very technically competent (I think.)\nAt the same time I lost a lot of interest in knitting. There were and are other things in my life: learning how to make software became (and is) more challenging than making sweaters and shawls, and then there\u0026rsquo;s singing, a full time (and then some) job, and what not.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also burnt out on knitting culture. For a long time, part of knitting involved, blogging about knitting, reading knitting blogs, taking pictures of projects and yarn, shopping for yarn, hanging out on ravelry, working in yarn shops, and while knitting itself is a big part of knitting culture I\u0026rsquo;m realizing a few things:","title":"A Knitting Practice"},{"content":"I have a hard time passing up a significant calendar event as an opportunity to reflect and synthesize past experiences. Having said that, while I had a pretty good year, it was not a year of big changes. There were a lot of pretty interesting and fun smaller changes and developments in my world and my projects in the last year. In no particular order:\nThis was the year that I went from being \u0026ldquo;someone who tinkers on code\u0026rdquo; to being someone who can write code when the situation calls for it. This felt like an revolutionary change as it happened, but I recognize now that it has been a long time coming and in retrospect\nThis was the year where I finally slayed my copy quality woes. I\u0026rsquo;ve long struggled with producing clean copy (English text) in a reasonable amount of time (without spelling/grammar errors.) A couple years ago, I got to a point where I could write clean copy but it felt like I had to spend hours being neurotic. Now, I\u0026rsquo;ve trained myself to catch things in much more quickly. I\u0026rsquo;m not perfect, but it\u0026rsquo;s no longer something that I feel like I struggle with constantly.\nI reevaluated my relationship with my hobbies and avocational pursuits. I decided to spend more time learning about technology and computer science, I decided to spend less time writing science fiction and less time knitting. I decided to prioritize my social/folk times to go to more singings both in town and out of town, and focus my dancing around spending time with my friends rather than dancing for the sake of dancing.\nThis was the year that I decided to stay in New York City. I\u0026rsquo;ve been here for almost three years now, and I like living here. While I can envision living somewhere else in the right situation, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to stay for the long haul. This has meant doing things like furniture shopping (though not buying,) and saving for the eventual purchase of an apartment.\nI worked too much. But I think I accomplished cool things. In most ways, I think we\u0026rsquo;re doing some really innovative things with documentation and documentation processes (and writing strong documentation for a cool product.) There have been struggles, as always, but it\u0026rsquo;s been good. And a lot of work. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I would go back and change anything, but I do look forward to trying to establish a little more sanity here.\nThere are other things, of course, but that covers it. It seems hard to avoid making resolutions, or at least articulating goals at his juncture:\nKeep doing the cool things that I\u0026rsquo;m doing: learning, coding, doing cool things at work.\nDevelop a reading practice. I love reading things, but I\u0026rsquo;m not very good at reading regularly and keeping up with my reading habit. I\u0026rsquo;d like to read novels as well as stay generally on top of Asimov\u0026rsquo;s (and potentially the New York Review of Science Fiction.)\nDevelop a more extensive knitting practice. Full post on the subject forth coming, but I want to knit because I enjoy the activity of knitting and the cadence of making things like socks.\nI want to stop feeling like my knitting needs to have an increasing complexity to make it interesting, or that every thing I knit needs to be unique in some specific way.\nBecome proficient in a programming language that isn\u0026rsquo;t Python.\nStart or restart a non-day-job related writing project, and implement a project plan that centers on regular ongoing progress rather than binges.\nComing Soon: Thoughts on implementing goals.\nHappy New Year!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/2013-reflections/","summary":"I have a hard time passing up a significant calendar event as an opportunity to reflect and synthesize past experiences. Having said that, while I had a pretty good year, it was not a year of big changes. There were a lot of pretty interesting and fun smaller changes and developments in my world and my projects in the last year. In no particular order:\nThis was the year that I went from being \u0026ldquo;someone who tinkers on code\u0026rdquo; to being someone who can write code when the situation calls for it. This felt like an revolutionary change as it happened, but I recognize now that it has been a long time coming and in retrospect\nThis was the year where I finally slayed my copy quality woes. I\u0026rsquo;ve long struggled with producing clean copy (English text) in a reasonable amount of time (without spelling/grammar errors.) A couple years ago, I got to a point where I could write clean copy but it felt like I had to spend hours being neurotic.","title":"2013 Reflections"},{"content":"For a year or more I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with the idea of writing my own static site generator. I\u0026rsquo;ve been producing websites using static site generators for the last 4 or 5 years. For an overwhelming majority of cases, static generation is the right modality; however, there are some significant ways in which the tool chain is not mature.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on an initial pass at a better kind of static site generator, which is a ways away from being \u0026ldquo;production quality,\u0026rdquo; but the initial idea is in place, so I feel comfortable discussing some of the details.\nMost static site compilers retain simple designs where the process of building the site is non-incremental: all pages are always rebuilt even if the content of the page has not changed. Furthermore, there\u0026rsquo;s no parallelism, so pages must be built one at a time.\nTypically the program will need to process all pages twice, because the rendering phase may require links between content, which complicates the requirements slightly.\nThe simple design is a huge win for three reasons: it\u0026rsquo;s easy to understand how these build systems work. There are never any false negatives where pages aren\u0026rsquo;t rebuilt that should be. Best of all, for small and moderately sized sites, serial/non-incremental approaches are faster.\nThe downside is pretty big: the amount of time to build the site grows linearly with the number of pages, and there\u0026rsquo;s no real way to improve performance, particularly as sites become larger.\nThe design of the \u0026ldquo;improved\u0026rdquo; solution is pretty obvious. Iterate through all pages to build and \u0026ldquo;ingest\u0026rdquo; their content and metadata. You can do this in parallel, and if possible it makes sense to as much here as you can: build pages that don\u0026rsquo;t depend on other pages if possible. Also tag pages that include aggregated content here for latter processing.\nAs you collect the results from these operations, you have enough information to generate the pages that include aggregated information, and you can run and do any remaining rendering.\nThe only other efficiency is hashing the input page upon initial read as well as the rendered page when you\u0026rsquo;re done so that you can completely skip pages that don\u0026rsquo;t need rendering.\nFor most builds, you might only need to render changed pages; unfortunately, there\u0026rsquo;s still a fixed cost per-page, which can be amortized somewhat.\nFor smaller collections of pages, doing everything in a row is faster, and requires less code to get to a proof of concept. As a result, most static site generator implementations follow the serial/non-incremental pattern. The problem is, of course, that this doesn\u0026rsquo;t hold up as sites grow.\nThe current state of the art isn\u0026rsquo;t great:\nMy current blogging solution, ikiwiki does incremental rebuilds but doesn\u0026rsquo;t rebuild in parallel. Sphinx does incremental rebuilds, though it\u0026rsquo;s spotty in cases, and for thewrite phase only works in parallel (latest version only). The tinkerer blog tool is built on top of Sphinx. I think it\u0026rsquo;s possible to do most of the work of the build in parallel, and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in writing a site compiler that uses a concurent design, targeted not at raw speed but maximum efficiency. My hope is that such a site generator could make these systems more plausible for general content management for organizations and groups that need flexible systems but don\u0026rsquo;t need the overhead or complexity of database-driven applications.\nI\u0026rsquo;m using the python job runner as a starting point, building using reStructuredText pages in using the general format of Jekyll pages. Supporting markdown doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem beyond the realm of possibility. The initial implementation is, of course, in Python on account of my personal comfort and affection for reStructuredText, though I think it would be useful to attempt to port the system to Go at some point, no plans for that at the moment.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/static-site-compiler-design-notes/","summary":"For a year or more I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with the idea of writing my own static site generator. I\u0026rsquo;ve been producing websites using static site generators for the last 4 or 5 years. For an overwhelming majority of cases, static generation is the right modality; however, there are some significant ways in which the tool chain is not mature.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on an initial pass at a better kind of static site generator, which is a ways away from being \u0026ldquo;production quality,\u0026rdquo; but the initial idea is in place, so I feel comfortable discussing some of the details.\nMost static site compilers retain simple designs where the process of building the site is non-incremental: all pages are always rebuilt even if the content of the page has not changed. Furthermore, there\u0026rsquo;s no parallelism, so pages must be built one at a time.\nTypically the program will need to process all pages twice, because the rendering phase may require links between content, which complicates the requirements slightly.","title":"Static Site Compiler Design Notes"},{"content":"I spent a lot of time at the end of the summer working on finishing out the basic buildcloth functionality, and haven\u0026rsquo;t really gotten the chance to use it properly. There were some flaws:\na dumb oversight means that the hash-based dependency checking doesn\u0026rsquo;t work. Buildcloth is a bit complicated and designed for a general purpose. In practical terms, I made buildcloth to perform a task that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to accomplish with 10% or less of the code. There\u0026rsquo;s no good separation between \u0026ldquo;the management of a build system\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the build system data\u0026rdquo; in the system as it currently exists. Buildcloth is a nifty idea, and one that I\u0026rsquo;d like to expand upon. Also since the project is still pre-1.0, it seems reasonable to take these lessons and work on building a more usable implementation.\nThis post is a collection of thoughts on what I\u0026rsquo;d like to accomplish for 0.3:\npull out the job queue/running system from the build data organization. collect more state in the dependency checking system/infrastructure. separate data ingestion from build system organization. remove ingestion and processing logic from the command line tool. impose sub-module structure to make the interfaces for all of the different aspects of the program. No clue about time frame. Feel free (and encouraged) to leave comments if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in helping or have a feature that you\u0026rsquo;d really like to see.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/buildcloth-v03-planning/","summary":"I spent a lot of time at the end of the summer working on finishing out the basic buildcloth functionality, and haven\u0026rsquo;t really gotten the chance to use it properly. There were some flaws:\na dumb oversight means that the hash-based dependency checking doesn\u0026rsquo;t work. Buildcloth is a bit complicated and designed for a general purpose. In practical terms, I made buildcloth to perform a task that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to accomplish with 10% or less of the code. There\u0026rsquo;s no good separation between \u0026ldquo;the management of a build system\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the build system data\u0026rdquo; in the system as it currently exists. Buildcloth is a nifty idea, and one that I\u0026rsquo;d like to expand upon. Also since the project is still pre-1.0, it seems reasonable to take these lessons and work on building a more usable implementation.\nThis post is a collection of thoughts on what I\u0026rsquo;d like to accomplish for 0.","title":"Buildcloth v0.3 Planning"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a little bit of time building some non-critical tools for my teammates on my work project, which has got me thinking about tooling for documentation systems.\nThis collection of tools is something that we\u0026rsquo;ve started to take for granted, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty novel and worth talking about a bit more.\nDocumentation toolkits, traditionally refer to the system that deals with the production of the documentation for end use, which typically means taking the source text and rendering it into web sites, pdfs, ebooks, and embedded \u0026ldquo;online help\u0026rdquo; text.\nThese toolkits are really important and I think one of the best things you can do for a documentation tool kit is to produce documentation using a tool specifically designed to address the needs of documentation projects and technical writers.\nUnfortunately, documentation production is mostly for readers and business owners of documentation and not really for the writers. Tooling for documentation, particularly the kind that I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending time on recently is about making documentation easier to maintain, and easier to improve at scale. For example:\ntools to make common textual chunks easier to reuse. tools that enforce common structures. tools that detect common patterns of weak constructions. tools that that analyize text for common readability conventions. I was going to write this up as a blog post, but I think it makes sense as a collection of wiki pages:\nInclusion Management Tools Structured Content Generation Static Analysis of Text Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/documentation-tooling/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a little bit of time building some non-critical tools for my teammates on my work project, which has got me thinking about tooling for documentation systems.\nThis collection of tools is something that we\u0026rsquo;ve started to take for granted, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty novel and worth talking about a bit more.\nDocumentation toolkits, traditionally refer to the system that deals with the production of the documentation for end use, which typically means taking the source text and rendering it into web sites, pdfs, ebooks, and embedded \u0026ldquo;online help\u0026rdquo; text.\nThese toolkits are really important and I think one of the best things you can do for a documentation tool kit is to produce documentation using a tool specifically designed to address the needs of documentation projects and technical writers.\nUnfortunately, documentation production is mostly for readers and business owners of documentation and not really for the writers. Tooling for documentation, particularly the kind that I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending time on recently is about making documentation easier to maintain, and easier to improve at scale.","title":"Documentation Tooling"},{"content":"I use Sphinx a lot. Both in the sense that I have easily a dozen active (or reasonably so) projects that I maintain and work with on a regular basis. Sphinx is great, and I feel safe asserting that it\u0026rsquo;s probably the best documentation toolkit in existence and more generally the best tool kit for the production of structured text.\nThere are flaws. I\u0026rsquo;ve written here before with greater and lesser descriptions of the pain points of Sphinx. All of the problems are fixable, some fixes are delicate, and some small fixes require major work in some cases. In all, the challenges aren\u0026rsquo;t insurmountable and Sphinx remains extremely usable and effective.\nLike any large and complex system, there are ways to manage resources with Sphinx with greater flexibility and ease. This post explores several ways that have helped me (and my collaborators!) manage big Sphinx deployments.\nThese suggestions fall into two general categories: suggestions for making Sphinx projects with large volumes of content manageable and strategies for handling and managing larger groups of Sphinx deployments.\nSingle Source Content To avoid duplicated content, when possible, it makes sense to reuse content. reStructuredText has an include directive for this purpose. In general, the best strategy is:\nmaintain a directory of included content that\u0026rsquo;s distinct from the other directories that hold content. In our projects we use source/includes, where source/ is holds all content. Use a different extension for the included text than you use for your content files. For example if all of your Sphinx processed rst files use .rst extensions, include files should have .txt extensions. Smaller, more restricted resources are more effective, typically. Longer bits of text are more difficult to slipstream into the text. If your include snippet requires a section heading its probably too big. This is most crucial for larger technical resources, and less crucial for other kinds of content, but in general, avoid duplicating common sections when possible.\nTo make this really awesome you might want to add tooling for yourself/writers so that you can:\nsee where a file is included in the larger text. see if any include files are not being used. detect if any two redirects are substantially similar. Pre-process and Generate Content reStructuredText is great for providing a human-friendly way to edit a structured text documents. However, for some kinds of structures its probably better to build the restructured text from some other common structure. For instance: repeated content, tables of contents, image declarations, and dealing with different output for different content types are all good cases for building content yourself.\nMy main mode of doing this is to use rstcloth to write scripts that read YAML files that contain the content and can be converted into rst content. As an alternative you could write extensions to the reStructuredText processors (docutils) to handle this content, but that may make the production of the documents more (differently?) fragile.\nMinimize Configuration Differences The best thing about Sphinx configuration is that the configuration file itself is a Python module. Which means you can inject pretty much whatever logic you want into the configuration and via html_template_options, the template. This is an awesome power, but if you need to manage more than one similar Sphinx site, the more complex your configuration is, the harder everything becomes. Therefore, tend toward minimal configurations.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been experimenting with a number of solutions, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a \u0026ldquo;Sphinx Configuration Toolkit\u0026rdquo; established (yet,) but I\u0026rsquo;ve been trending toward where the canonical information about the project (urls, theme data, etc.) in a configuration object constructed from a metadata file. Then to populate site-specific lists (interspinx inventories; pdfs, manpages, etc.), I read from other data files. Keeping site-specific data seperate from the configuration code seems to work well.\nTake Advantage of the Theme System Sphinx\u0026rsquo;s HTML output uses jinja, which is incredibly flexible. To be honest, I kind of wish that the LaTeX builder was also Jinja based, but I\u0026rsquo;ll take what I can get. Sphinx gives you full access to build and customize really sophisticated display systems. If you\u0026rsquo;re using default templates, then you can skip this tip.\nIf you do have custom display code, then take some time to read through the Jinja Documentation and the Sphinx Templating Documentation so you know what\u0026rsquo;s possible. When developing a template for Sphinx (or in general,) remember the following:\nminimize the amount of runtime logic required to render each template. While some template logic is unavoidable, and for some projects the performance hit may not be noticable.\nHowever, putting logic elsewhere (e.g. in the values passed to the template.) makes the data handled by the template as a compile-time rather than run-time cost (plus or minus the memory costs of larger template memory.)\nuse template inheritance.\nBasically, Jinja makes it possible to describe a complete template composed of \u0026ldquo;blocks.\u0026rdquo; The blocks don\u0026rsquo;t have any impact on the output; however, you take this template and use it as a \u0026ldquo;base\u0026rdquo; and then describe a new template that is like the base except that you can override some or all of the blocks. This is awesome, and makes it possible to reuse a lot template code without needing to duplicate anything or drive yourself crazy.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s easy to forget about this capability when you\u0026rsquo;re trying to hack something together and template inheritance, like class inheritance in object oriented programming can add complexity and fragility. So you\u0026rsquo;reprobably well justified in being wary of using inheritance, but give it a shot!\nEvaluate Build System Requirements Sphinx is a documentation tool kit, and it\u0026rsquo;s very extensible, and awesome. However, in the base configuration it\u0026rsquo;s not a complete end-to-end publishing system: it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have built in version control/maintenance, it\u0026rsquo;s in general only aware of the current build (i.e. the HTML version of your documentation is unaware of the PDF version (and so forth,)) and once Sphinx compiles a site you still have to deploy it somewhere.\nIn short, to build a website or resource using Sphinx, there are other things the build system before and after running Sphinx to get the product you need. You can reduce a great deal of complexity and provide a number of common points to synchronize multiple projects.\nAlso, avoid doing crazy things with Makefiles.\nOther Useful Optimizations Download intersphinx inventories independently of Sphinx.\nSphinx will attempt to download each intersphinx inventory each time you build your site and it will download each inventory serially. It\u0026rsquo;s trivial to do better on your own. Here\u0026rsquo;s what we do: intersphinx.py\nThe index objects (which Sphinx uses for all special objects) live in a flat namespace, and collisions are not well handled.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/large-sphinx-deployments/","summary":"I use Sphinx a lot. Both in the sense that I have easily a dozen active (or reasonably so) projects that I maintain and work with on a regular basis. Sphinx is great, and I feel safe asserting that it\u0026rsquo;s probably the best documentation toolkit in existence and more generally the best tool kit for the production of structured text.\nThere are flaws. I\u0026rsquo;ve written here before with greater and lesser descriptions of the pain points of Sphinx. All of the problems are fixable, some fixes are delicate, and some small fixes require major work in some cases. In all, the challenges aren\u0026rsquo;t insurmountable and Sphinx remains extremely usable and effective.\nLike any large and complex system, there are ways to manage resources with Sphinx with greater flexibility and ease. This post explores several ways that have helped me (and my collaborators!) manage big Sphinx deployments.\nThese suggestions fall into two general categories: suggestions for making Sphinx projects with large volumes of content manageable and strategies for handling and managing larger groups of Sphinx deployments.","title":"Large Sphinx Deployments"},{"content":"Today I did a (slightly) more formal release of a software project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on pretty consistently for the last two months. It\u0026rsquo;s an extension or elaboration on the buildcloth, and is the groundwork for some other projects I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on.\nWhile there are some new fixes and improvements to the initial meta-build tool components of the project as I\u0026rsquo;d been working on 5 months ago, this one goes even further and includes a complete build automation tool.\nThe deal with this is that I\u0026rsquo;d been running a build system for months that had a bunch of very small tasks, and performance was awful for no really good reason. Well for one reason: process creation. Each task needed to create its own shell, run, and exit, which was awful. The solution to this problem was running each task (which was ultimately just a Python function) in a Python multi-processing pool. The new version of buildcloth is an attempt to build some common infrastructure around this practice.\nIt still needs some real world testing, and there are some missing features that I\u0026rsquo;d like to add, and always more documentation, but it\u0026rsquo;s good enough that I wanted to get it out there so that people could start using it and giving feedback.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll post more later on the the experience and lessons learned here in a bit. While I work on that, see:\nBuildcloth Documentation Buildcloth on PIPY Buildcloth on Github the Buildcloth issue tracker Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/buildcloth-v0.2.0-release/","summary":"Today I did a (slightly) more formal release of a software project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on pretty consistently for the last two months. It\u0026rsquo;s an extension or elaboration on the buildcloth, and is the groundwork for some other projects I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on.\nWhile there are some new fixes and improvements to the initial meta-build tool components of the project as I\u0026rsquo;d been working on 5 months ago, this one goes even further and includes a complete build automation tool.\nThe deal with this is that I\u0026rsquo;d been running a build system for months that had a bunch of very small tasks, and performance was awful for no really good reason. Well for one reason: process creation. Each task needed to create its own shell, run, and exit, which was awful. The solution to this problem was running each task (which was ultimately just a Python function) in a Python multi-processing pool.","title":"Buildcloth v0.2.0 Release"},{"content":"In many ways this is the follow up to hard is good and the post I promised recounting the lessons of the buildcloth v0.2.0 release\nThis release of buildcloth is in some ways, the first real piece of software I\u0026rsquo;ve written from the ground up. I\u0026rsquo;ve written a bunch of code, and I\u0026rsquo;ve implemented a decent amount of functionality as extensions and additions to other programs, written some very small programs, and written an endless number of throw away scripts, but never something quite on this scale. The remainder of this post is\nWhats the coolest thing about Buildcloth 0.2.0? The buildsystem feature is pretty awesome, mostly because it makes it possible to have legitimate, honest-to-goodness build systems running with an Python project. Integration is a sweet thing.\nWhy make another build tool? Aren\u0026rsquo;t there enough of those already? I started working on this for two reasons, first because the MongoDB documentation build process was lagging under some process creation overhead and using buildcloth as a meta-build system was clearly not holding up.\nSecond, I wanted to write a static site generator that used a fully concurrent internal model. My initial plan was to use the buildcloth meta-build system, but that clearly wouldn\u0026rsquo;t hold up at scale so I needed something like buildcloth.\nFinally, there aren\u0026rsquo;t actually a lot of generalized build automation tools: Make, Ninja, SCons, Waf, and Rake plus a small cluster of Java tools (Ant, Maven, sbt, Gradle). See the wikipedia list of build automation tools.\nHow can I use Buildcloth? Is Buildcloth right for my project? If you want, you can use Buildcloth as a Make replacement, using the buildc front end. For build systems that already have Python code to wrap or implement build steps, Buildcloth may be much more efficient than using something like Make. For other kinds of builds, the benefits may be less pronounced.\nYou can also use Buildcloth as a library in your own Python programs if you need a way of ruining build-jobs in a parallel, dependency aware mode.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started to think think buildcloth is really a sort of embedable, small-scale, local version of something like celery. Or maybe it\u0026rsquo;s just a collections of decent wrappers around multiprocessing.Pool. Regardless, there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of really intuitive tools around that make async processing/parallel execution easy and fun in Python, so if you need to do this kind of processing work, take a look.\nHow well tested is Buildcloth? There\u0026rsquo;s a complete unit test suite with 400 tests (last count) that should ensure that things stay stable as the product continues to develop. In this respect buildcloth is really well tested (particularly for a project of its age.) In other respects, its less well tested.\nNow that things are comparatively stable, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty eager to begin using the buildsystem and make sure all of the higher-level aspects work well.\nWhat aspects need the most improvement? I need to devise a way to save some state between builds so that buildcloth can check to see if a target needs to be rebuilt by seeing if the content of the dependent files has changed. Currently, (like many tools,) buildcloth must rebuild things based on a comparison of modified times from the file system, which do not necessarily indicate a required rebuild.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t really a buildcloth problem, but I also find myself frustrated by the error reporting of tasks running inside the multiprocessing pool. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of wrapping tasks right before calling them in a way that will capture output and make it easier to kill zombie tasks and dead pools.\nWhat would you do differently next time? I wrote the implementation in a very bottom-up sort of way, and as a result the design and testing suite feels a little bottom up. In the long term I think it was the right decision, but I think that in the medium term it will lead to some awkwardness.\nFurthermore, build systems are fundamentally static and there\u0026rsquo;s no good way to \u0026ldquo;add jobs to the top of the pipe.\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t yet have a good answer to this problem (yet,) but shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be insurmountable.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/uphill-forever/","summary":"In many ways this is the follow up to hard is good and the post I promised recounting the lessons of the buildcloth v0.2.0 release\nThis release of buildcloth is in some ways, the first real piece of software I\u0026rsquo;ve written from the ground up. I\u0026rsquo;ve written a bunch of code, and I\u0026rsquo;ve implemented a decent amount of functionality as extensions and additions to other programs, written some very small programs, and written an endless number of throw away scripts, but never something quite on this scale. The remainder of this post is\nWhats the coolest thing about Buildcloth 0.2.0? The buildsystem feature is pretty awesome, mostly because it makes it possible to have legitimate, honest-to-goodness build systems running with an Python project. Integration is a sweet thing.\nWhy make another build tool? Aren\u0026rsquo;t there enough of those already? I started working on this for two reasons, first because the MongoDB documentation build process was lagging under some process creation overhead and using buildcloth as a meta-build system was clearly not holding up.","title":"Uphill Forever"},{"content":"In the hard part of software you could easily chose to read the word \u0026ldquo;hard\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;sucky,\u0026rdquo; which makes it seem like a big whine on the topic of \u0026ldquo;polishing your work is hard and annoying,\u0026rdquo; but really, that\u0026rsquo;s unfair.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s probably better to read the word \u0026ldquo;hard\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;important\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;sucky\u0026rdquo;.\nWhile you may be able to get someone to try your software on the basis of its core implementation or design, people keep using software because it\u0026rsquo;s reliable (i.e. \u0026ldquo;has tests\u0026rdquo;) understandable (i.e. \u0026ldquo;has documentation\u0026rdquo;) and is easy to operate (i.e. \u0026ldquo;has a user interface.\u0026rdquo;)\nFurthermore, doing the hard work of adding infrastructure to a project is what allows software to grow in awesome ways. When you do the hard work, you make it possible to:\nadd functionality and utility without needing to rewrite large amounts of code. add options and globules to expose features and behaviors in response to users needs. Basically infrastructure begets agility.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hard-is-good/","summary":"In the hard part of software you could easily chose to read the word \u0026ldquo;hard\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;sucky,\u0026rdquo; which makes it seem like a big whine on the topic of \u0026ldquo;polishing your work is hard and annoying,\u0026rdquo; but really, that\u0026rsquo;s unfair.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s probably better to read the word \u0026ldquo;hard\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;important\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;sucky\u0026rdquo;.\nWhile you may be able to get someone to try your software on the basis of its core implementation or design, people keep using software because it\u0026rsquo;s reliable (i.e. \u0026ldquo;has tests\u0026rdquo;) understandable (i.e. \u0026ldquo;has documentation\u0026rdquo;) and is easy to operate (i.e. \u0026ldquo;has a user interface.\u0026rdquo;)\nFurthermore, doing the hard work of adding infrastructure to a project is what allows software to grow in awesome ways. When you do the hard work, you make it possible to:\nadd functionality and utility without needing to rewrite large amounts of code. add options and globules to expose features and behaviors in response to users needs.","title":"Hard is Good"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing build system tool that allows users to specify concurrent build processes using a lightweight, Python-based system that minimizes overhead.\nProgress is decent. I hope to use this to replace a hodgepodge of fabric and Makefile for my work and personal projects. I have a decent spec (3 hours), an initial implementation of the internal parts (3 hours,) a good first draft at a command line utility (1.5 hours,) internal/APO documentation (10 hours,) and none of the unit tests and procedural and conceptual documentation. In essence the hard stuff.\nBasically what happened, is I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem, a little bit of time coding, and if all goes according to plan a lot of time writing rather droll code and good if uninteresting documentation.\nWhich is, all things considered, what all software boils down to.\nWriting the core implementation is (often) this intense impassioned process that is necessarily flow-like, because there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of state that you have to keep hot in your mind while solving hard problems, and if your attention drifts too far, you start breaking things.\nNot that flow-like states are the best or only way to write code for core functionality, but it works and it\u0026rsquo;s enjoyable.\nEverything else, is different:\nWriting documentation is an exercise in context switching: you have to read code, or poke at a running program to figure out how it works, and then turn that information on its head so you can tell people how to use it.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s fun, but it\u0026rsquo;s much more fussy.\nWriting tests is similarly hard: it\u0026rsquo;s also about balancing \u0026ldquo;how it works\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;how its used,\u0026rdquo; but rather than describing something for future users, tests are about defining what constitutes \u0026ldquo;correctness\u0026rdquo; and what\u0026rsquo;s incorrect.1\nWriting test-code is intellectually challenging work, and requires many of the same base skills as writing implementation-code but requires a different kind of focus and thinking.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a lot of code that remains once the core logic exists, including: user interfaces, logging, test, managing edge cases, optimization, and tuning the parameters of the behavior (business logic tweaks.)\nWhich isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that any particularly portion of the work is more or less difficult or important. But, if you don\u0026rsquo;t work in this world every day it\u0026rsquo;s easy to see the hard initial work as being \u0026ldquo;the real part of software development,\u0026rdquo; and allow all the other work to sort of fade into the background. Which is unfair, and I think is representative of a larger misunderstanding of how software works and gets made.\nAnother project for another day.\nOnward and Upward!\nThis assumes that you\u0026rsquo;re not writing code in a test-driven manner, which is I think is probably statistically likely, if somewhat in-ideal.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-hard-part-of-software/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing build system tool that allows users to specify concurrent build processes using a lightweight, Python-based system that minimizes overhead.\nProgress is decent. I hope to use this to replace a hodgepodge of fabric and Makefile for my work and personal projects. I have a decent spec (3 hours), an initial implementation of the internal parts (3 hours,) a good first draft at a command line utility (1.5 hours,) internal/APO documentation (10 hours,) and none of the unit tests and procedural and conceptual documentation. In essence the hard stuff.\nBasically what happened, is I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem, a little bit of time coding, and if all goes according to plan a lot of time writing rather droll code and good if uninteresting documentation.\nWhich is, all things considered, what all software boils down to.\nWriting the core implementation is (often) this intense impassioned process that is necessarily flow-like, because there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of state that you have to keep hot in your mind while solving hard problems, and if your attention drifts too far, you start breaking things.","title":"The Hard Part of Software"},{"content":"I wrote a long time ago, about /technical-writing/atomicity which (more or less) is the same as topic based authoring. Both describe the process of breaking information into the smallest coherent blocks and then using the documentation toolkit to compile the kind resource.\nTopic based approaches to documentation promise reduced maintenance costs and greater documentation reuse. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if anyone\u0026rsquo;s used \u0026ldquo;ease of authorship,\u0026rdquo; as an argument in favor of topic based approaches (they\u0026rsquo;re conceptually a bit difficult for the author,) but you get the feeling that it was part of the intention.\nThe obvious parallel is object orientation in programming, and I think the comparison is useful: they both present with optimism about reuse and collaboration through modularity and modern tool chains. While object oriented programming predates topic based authoring, both have been around for a while and even if you aren\u0026rsquo;t an adherent of object orientation or topic-based authoring, I think it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to approach programming or documentation without being influenced by either of these paradigms.\nUnless you\u0026rsquo;re working with a really small resource, without some topic-based you end up with redundant documentation that looses consistency and a maintenance nightmare.\nThe downfalls of \u0026ldquo;topics,\u0026rdquo; don\u0026rsquo;t negate it\u0026rsquo;s overall utility, but they are significant:\ntopic based authoring makes it harder for non-writers to contribute to the documentation. This makes it more challenging to keep documentation up to date and can hurt overall accuracy. topics force writers to focus on the \u0026ldquo;micro\u0026rdquo; documentation at the expense of the \u0026ldquo;macro\u0026rdquo; documentation experience. The content is clear, the completeness is good, but the overall experience for users is awful. topic-centrism sometimes leads to deeper hierarchies which leads to duplicated content across the hierarchy as \u0026ldquo;cousin\u0026rdquo; nodes address related concepts. What\u0026rsquo;s the solution? I\u0026rsquo;m not sure there is a single one, but:\nit\u0026rsquo;s important to avoid duplication, by having great support for \u0026ldquo;single sourcing\u0026rdquo; (inlining/inclusion,) and simple cross referencing. isolate all content in concrete topical units. start with flat global organization and add interpage hierarchy only when necessary. use as much intrapage organization and hierarchy as you need, and allow intrapage hierarchy. build great reference material first. Everything else is gloss, and you should layer the gloss on top of strong reference rather than try and build reference under an existing structure. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/topic-based-authoring-failure/","summary":"I wrote a long time ago, about /technical-writing/atomicity which (more or less) is the same as topic based authoring. Both describe the process of breaking information into the smallest coherent blocks and then using the documentation toolkit to compile the kind resource.\nTopic based approaches to documentation promise reduced maintenance costs and greater documentation reuse. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if anyone\u0026rsquo;s used \u0026ldquo;ease of authorship,\u0026rdquo; as an argument in favor of topic based approaches (they\u0026rsquo;re conceptually a bit difficult for the author,) but you get the feeling that it was part of the intention.\nThe obvious parallel is object orientation in programming, and I think the comparison is useful: they both present with optimism about reuse and collaboration through modularity and modern tool chains. While object oriented programming predates topic based authoring, both have been around for a while and even if you aren\u0026rsquo;t an adherent of object orientation or topic-based authoring, I think it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to approach programming or documentation without being influenced by either of these paradigms.","title":"Topic Based Authoring Failure"},{"content":"For work, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on revising our build system so that less of the build definition happens in Makefiles and more of it happens in Python scripts. This post is an elaboration.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a complete partisan of reusing standard tools, and so moving away from Make felt like a big/hard jump. However:\n1. Process creation is expensive, and every \u0026ldquo;job\u0026rdquo; starts a new shell and process, which takes time.\n2. Most of the build logic was in Python anyway: over time most shell lines called Python code rather than commands directly. This seems like a common artifact of more complex build processes.\nBeyond this, the generation of the Makefiles itself was encoded in Python code.\nFor our project, at least, we were indirecting through Make, sort of through the hell of it.\n3. It turns out that multiprocessing in Python is crazy easy to use.\nThe transition isn\u0026rsquo;t complete of course, we\u0026rsquo;re still using make to handle dependencies between groups of tasks, and there\u0026rsquo;s no particular rush or need to rid ourselves of Make, but the gains are huge. Things build faster one or two orders of magnitude in some cases. There\u0026rsquo;s less flakiness. Rebuild times are much faster, and there are fewer moving parts.\nGreat win!\nThis has me thinking about ways of doing build systems in a generic, maintainable way without relying on something like Make. I have a prototype on my Laptop at the moment that provides a way to specify build processes concurrently. The rest of this post will be a high level overview of the design of this system. Please provide feedback and enjoy!\nBuild systems are basically collections of tasks expressed in a graph structure. The tools exist to enforce and encode the graph structure, or less abstractly to ensure that tasks run in the proper order. If you\u0026rsquo;re paining a wall, the build system ensures that you spackle, apply the primer, and then apply the final coat, in that order.\nThere are, as near as I can tell, three different kinds of relationships among/between groups of tasks in a build process:\n1. There are groups tasks that don\u0026rsquo;t depend on each other and can run concurrently with each other.\n2. There are some tasks or groups of tasks that must not run before or after another group of tasks.\n3. There are sequences of tasks that must run in a specific order, but can run at the same time as other tasks or sequence of tasks.\nWhat Make, and related systems do is provide a mechanism to specify \u0026ldquo;dependency\u0026rdquo; relationships between files (and tasks after a fashion,) or groups of files/tasks. After a fashion, Make takes the dependency information and runs tasks more or less according to one of those patterns. In many ways, my project is an experiment to see if it\u0026rsquo;s possible to \u0026ldquo;outsmart Make,\u0026rdquo; by generalizing the kinds of operations and forcing users to specify the concurrency constraints of the tasks explicitly, rather than letting the concurrency emerge out of the dependency graph. Thoughts:\nThis depends on users being able to intuit the actual dependencies abstractly, rather than rely on the emergence properties of Make. Arguably, Make also requires you to think abstractly about the potential concurrent modeling of the build, but allows you to avoid it in some situations. If some large portion of the compilation process relies external processes, the performance gains will probably be more modest. Process creation is still expensive, but it\u0026rsquo;s probably marginally cheaper to use subprocess than it is to start a full shell. In addition to the basic machinery, I\u0026rsquo;ve written a few helper functions to read build definitions from a YAML file, which will produce a usable build system. I\u0026rsquo;ll release this once: I\u0026rsquo;ve written some tests, there\u0026rsquo;s better logging, and some basic README-level documentation.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/build-stages/","summary":"For work, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on revising our build system so that less of the build definition happens in Makefiles and more of it happens in Python scripts. This post is an elaboration.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a complete partisan of reusing standard tools, and so moving away from Make felt like a big/hard jump. However:\n1. Process creation is expensive, and every \u0026ldquo;job\u0026rdquo; starts a new shell and process, which takes time.\n2. Most of the build logic was in Python anyway: over time most shell lines called Python code rather than commands directly. This seems like a common artifact of more complex build processes.\nBeyond this, the generation of the Makefiles itself was encoded in Python code.\nFor our project, at least, we were indirecting through Make, sort of through the hell of it.\n3. It turns out that multiprocessing in Python is crazy easy to use.\nThe transition isn\u0026rsquo;t complete of course, we\u0026rsquo;re still using make to handle dependencies between groups of tasks, and there\u0026rsquo;s no particular rush or need to rid ourselves of Make, but the gains are huge.","title":"Build Stages"},{"content":"I spent a bunch of time this week taking a bunch of my work project\u0026rsquo;s build system. We\u0026rsquo;ve gone from having most of the heavy lifting done by Make, to having only doing the general high level orchestration with Make and doing all of the heavy lifting with (simple) custom Python code.\nThe logic in the previous system was:\nMake is everywhere, stable, and consistent. In the spirit of making the project as compatible and accessible to everyone it made sense to use common tools and restrict dependencies. Concurrency and parallelism are both super hard, and Make provided a way to model the build in a knowable way, and the parallels the build as much as possible. Before starting this project, I\u0026rsquo;d spent two years being a write working with a build system that was not concurrently and ran in one thread, and I was eager to avoid this problem. It turns out:\nIf you write Makefiles by hand they\u0026rsquo;re the inverse of portable. In the same way that \u0026ldquo;Portable Bash Script\u0026rdquo; is a thing that can lead only to insanity.\nAs Make-based build systems grow, the only thing you can do to preserve your sanity is wrap up all build instructions as scripts of some kind and/or use some sort of meta-build tool to generate the Makefiles programatically, using some sort of meta-build tool.\nComplexity abounds.\nForcing you to model your build process as a graph, is actually not a bad thing, and frankly is the strongest selling point. Make doesn\u0026rsquo;t enforce graphs (and how could you really?) but if you pay attention to the ordering and build performance it\u0026rsquo;s not hard to keep things running in parallel.\nBy contrast, Make\u0026rsquo;s parallel execution is SO BAD. I think the problem is mostly shell/process creation overhead rather than scheduling. Regardless, for build systems with lots of small pieces, you loose a lot to overhead.\nSo I took the logic that\u0026rsquo;d I\u0026rsquo;d been using to generate the Makefiles, implemented some simple mtime based dependency checking, and used it to call the build functions directly in Python.\nThe results were huge. Speed gains of 300x, using 30% of the code and better processor utilization. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that. Even the steps that required external (i.e. non-Python) sub-processes components were considerably faster\nSo I was thinking: build systems tend to be big sources of blight, they tend to be hard to maintain and require a bunch of specialized knowledge that\u0026rsquo;s distinct from the actual domain knowledge of a project, and most generic build tools have problems, (like Make,) so what gives?\nIf the generic tools had better performance or were significantly easier to maintain, there\u0026rsquo;d be a rather convincing argument in their favor. As it is, I\u0026rsquo;m not really seeing it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/do-build-systems-need-to-be-generic/","summary":"I spent a bunch of time this week taking a bunch of my work project\u0026rsquo;s build system. We\u0026rsquo;ve gone from having most of the heavy lifting done by Make, to having only doing the general high level orchestration with Make and doing all of the heavy lifting with (simple) custom Python code.\nThe logic in the previous system was:\nMake is everywhere, stable, and consistent. In the spirit of making the project as compatible and accessible to everyone it made sense to use common tools and restrict dependencies. Concurrency and parallelism are both super hard, and Make provided a way to model the build in a knowable way, and the parallels the build as much as possible. Before starting this project, I\u0026rsquo;d spent two years being a write working with a build system that was not concurrently and ran in one thread, and I was eager to avoid this problem. It turns out:","title":"On Generic Build Systems"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been enjoying blogging over on the micro tychoish site and thought I\u0026rsquo;d catalog these posts here.\nA Day in the Life Software Packaging Personal Software Change Small Data More to come!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/micro-events/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been enjoying blogging over on the micro tychoish site and thought I\u0026rsquo;d catalog these posts here.\nA Day in the Life Software Packaging Personal Software Change Small Data More to come!","title":"Micro Events"},{"content":"(Note: Because I\u0026rsquo;m terrible at remembering to post entries during the week, this post is actually from last week. But it\u0026rsquo;s still interesting!)\nThe past few weeks have been somewhat disjointed for me. I\u0026rsquo;d been working a lot to wrap up a long expected release, followed by a vacation without a project plan, and a few more busy weeks. On top of this, I spent a bunch of time working on wrapping up, or at least releasing a few personal project to assuage some guilt.\nAfter all that, I found myself at loose ends: I didn\u0026rsquo;t have new projects because I hadn\u0026rsquo;t had enough time to think about them or more importantly I was so interested in finishing something that I\u0026rsquo;d been trying to suppress thinking about new projects.\nWell that was a great idea. Not. Now, finally after spending too long lolling about and trying to restart the creative (and project planning) engines, I\u0026rsquo;ve actually done some things:\nRstCloth Basically this the first break at a very very simple API for generating reStructuredText. It\u0026rsquo;s modeled on the interface for my buildcloth which does the same sort of thing for generating Makefiles.\nreStrucutredText exists to make text easier for humans to write well formed documents, which is great and useful for about 95% of use cases: human editable text formats for machine parsing are an amazing boon to documentation productivity.\nThere are cases, where it makes more sense to store content in a regular format, like JSON or YAML and build the content programatically, tabular data, integrating content from external sources. If most of your tool chain uses reStructuredText, then something like RstCloth is probably exactly what you need.\nAnd because it\u0026rsquo;s a second-generation *Cloth tool, I already have most of the awkwardness worked out.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s still dev, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be getting documentation, a readme, and some examples nailed out in the next few weeks. In the meantime:\nrstcloth on pypi rstcloth on github tumblr -- m.tycho.co I reactivated my tumblr account, hooked it up to the awesome tumblesocks plugin for emacs, and have attached it to the concise m.tycho.co domain. I\u0026rsquo;m also mirroring the content at tychoish.com/micro.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to try to avoid over thinking this, but:\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;ve had some struggles with the emacs integration, it\u0026rsquo;s generally really idiomatic.\nI really like that you can queue posts. This is the feature that I miss the most about systems that I\u0026rsquo;ve used in the past to host tychoish.\nI like that there are some community features, and that the tagging isn\u0026rsquo;t worthless in light of being able to use tags to jump to relevant posts from other people.\nWhile I like self-hosted websites, and am kind of freaked out by the whole \u0026ldquo;my blog is a service,\u0026rdquo; I think that the connection to a community/audience is useful and powerful, and is not to be overrated.\nI like that tumblr does automatic integration with facebook and twitter. You can sort of do this manually, but baking things in leads to a better experience.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/weekend-accomplishments/","summary":"(Note: Because I\u0026rsquo;m terrible at remembering to post entries during the week, this post is actually from last week. But it\u0026rsquo;s still interesting!)\nThe past few weeks have been somewhat disjointed for me. I\u0026rsquo;d been working a lot to wrap up a long expected release, followed by a vacation without a project plan, and a few more busy weeks. On top of this, I spent a bunch of time working on wrapping up, or at least releasing a few personal project to assuage some guilt.\nAfter all that, I found myself at loose ends: I didn\u0026rsquo;t have new projects because I hadn\u0026rsquo;t had enough time to think about them or more importantly I was so interested in finishing something that I\u0026rsquo;d been trying to suppress thinking about new projects.\nWell that was a great idea. Not. Now, finally after spending too long lolling about and trying to restart the creative (and project planning) engines, I\u0026rsquo;ve actually done some things:","title":"Weekend Accomplishments"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned that I was working on a new sweater a few months ago, but I\u0026rsquo;ve neglected to post or write about the project at all. Let\u0026rsquo;s change that now:\nIn most respects it\u0026rsquo;s just like a number of existing sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;ve made: two color patterns, using a combination of mid-sized extrapolation of Scandinavian mitten patterns, with some influence of Turkish stocking patterns arranged in panels to convey strong vertical lines. The yarn is Harrisville Shetland, and another unidentified Shetland from a cone I got years ago and have now used in three sweaters. The plan is to have a simple fisherman\u0026rsquo;s-style drop shoulder construction with a simple short crew neck color.\nThe plan diverges somewhat from \u0026ldquo;tychoish standard\u0026rdquo; in two respects:\nThe biggest change is that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a cardigan. I\u0026rsquo;ve never made a cardigan that I\u0026rsquo;d call a rocking success. I can do it, but the finishing always leaves something to be desired and it hangs funny or flares in a way that I don\u0026rsquo;t want.\nThe plan for finishing the cardigan opening this time around is to use the steek (the bit that you cut open) as the facing for a hem. the idea is minimal prep and let the yarn do its thing. For closure, I\u0026rsquo;ll do an attached i-cord band with room for buttons.\nThe slightly smaller change is that rather than use a hem, I used the \u0026ldquo;purl-when-you-can-and-want-to\u0026rdquo; for bottom hem treatment. The idea is that if you purl occasionally for the first few inches you can counteract the tendency of knitted fabric from rolling. It\u0026rsquo;s not perfect yet, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not steamed it, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s fun to knit so far, and I look foraward to finally conquering my fear/avoidance of cardigans and perhaps finding the perfect lower edge finishing approach for stranded sweaters.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-knitting-project-cardigan/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned that I was working on a new sweater a few months ago, but I\u0026rsquo;ve neglected to post or write about the project at all. Let\u0026rsquo;s change that now:\nIn most respects it\u0026rsquo;s just like a number of existing sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;ve made: two color patterns, using a combination of mid-sized extrapolation of Scandinavian mitten patterns, with some influence of Turkish stocking patterns arranged in panels to convey strong vertical lines. The yarn is Harrisville Shetland, and another unidentified Shetland from a cone I got years ago and have now used in three sweaters. The plan is to have a simple fisherman\u0026rsquo;s-style drop shoulder construction with a simple short crew neck color.\nThe plan diverges somewhat from \u0026ldquo;tychoish standard\u0026rdquo; in two respects:\nThe biggest change is that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a cardigan. I\u0026rsquo;ve never made a cardigan that I\u0026rsquo;d call a rocking success. I can do it, but the finishing always leaves something to be desired and it hangs funny or flares in a way that I don\u0026rsquo;t want.","title":"New Knitting Project: Cardigan"},{"content":"\u0026hellip; from blogging. See this post for the background.\nI sometimes look at other people\u0026rsquo;s blogs, and think \u0026ldquo;wow, that\u0026rsquo;s sharp,\u0026rdquo; and while I really like the current tychoish theme, there\u0026rsquo;s a distinct lack of gradients, really polished typography, strong crisp lines, and elegant side bars.\nNot that I have a clue what I\u0026rsquo;d put in a side bar: Hell, I can\u0026rsquo;t even find good things to put in the Cyborg Institute side bar. But it\u0026rsquo;s not just that my design has grown dated (I don\u0026rsquo;t think it has, that much,) and more that the practice of blogging has changed in a few ways:\nThe State of Blogging self-hosted blogs are the exception rather than the rule.\nit\u0026rsquo;s become increasingly difficult to aggregate content, the demise of Google Reader, both the removal of the product and the declining trend it its use point to the idea that RSS isn\u0026rsquo;t a user facing transmission method.\nPeople are getting content through other means, and publishers probably can\u0026rsquo;t depend that users will poll any content, which changes the role of the publishing system.\nIn fact, I don\u0026rsquo;t have a real clue what the current state of the art for publishing tools for blogs is these days. My sense is that a greater portion of blogs are hosted on services like Tumblr and WordPress.com.\nThe big \u0026ldquo;advancements,\u0026rdquo; in blogging technology are probably related to integration and distribution of content to third party systems, which services can probably do better than hosted solutions.\nThere are fewer long-lived personal blogs, and even fewer that stray beyond a single niche.\nAre there blogs that you read regularly? How do you know when there\u0026rsquo;s a new post?\nChanges Afoot Given these changes, and the chance to rethink how I approach this blog:\nI\u0026rsquo;m curious as to the state of commenting and discourse related to blogs. Do people actually comment, in anything other than exceptional situations? Are most conversations on hacker-news/reddit or other domain specific common space and other blogs?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the prospect of even turning off the discussion/discourse pages here. They don\u0026rsquo;t get used, they\u0026rsquo;re kind of weird, people don\u0026rsquo;t really know how to use them, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure they get used. At the same time, providing a space for conversation seems essential. More on this on a later post.\nEdit: I totally did this, and while I have some regrets, I think it\u0026rsquo;s generally a good move.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;d be nice to automate submitting content to various aggregation sites and social network-sites, I\u0026rsquo;ve added various browser extensions to do these submissions. It\u0026rsquo;s a pain in the ass, but I guess auto-submits makes for less useful content aggregator.\nJust as tagging systems are inefficient and broken for wikis and \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; technical resources (see /posts/taxonomic-failure/ for my thoughts,) they\u0026rsquo;re not all that great for blogs. I\u0026rsquo;m considering completely removing the tagging system on tychoish, and just letting the search tool (which is pretty good) make content easy to discover.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/while-ive-been-gone/","summary":"\u0026hellip; from blogging. See this post for the background.\nI sometimes look at other people\u0026rsquo;s blogs, and think \u0026ldquo;wow, that\u0026rsquo;s sharp,\u0026rdquo; and while I really like the current tychoish theme, there\u0026rsquo;s a distinct lack of gradients, really polished typography, strong crisp lines, and elegant side bars.\nNot that I have a clue what I\u0026rsquo;d put in a side bar: Hell, I can\u0026rsquo;t even find good things to put in the Cyborg Institute side bar. But it\u0026rsquo;s not just that my design has grown dated (I don\u0026rsquo;t think it has, that much,) and more that the practice of blogging has changed in a few ways:\nThe State of Blogging self-hosted blogs are the exception rather than the rule.\nit\u0026rsquo;s become increasingly difficult to aggregate content, the demise of Google Reader, both the removal of the product and the declining trend it its use point to the idea that RSS isn\u0026rsquo;t a user facing transmission method.","title":"While I've Been Gone..."},{"content":"In On my Return to Blogging post I attributed the fact that I\u0026rsquo;d taken a break from blogging because I wanted to get out and do things rather than just spend my free time writing and thinking about things.\nA Critique The problem with this kind of statement is that it evokes a certain kind of anti-intellectualism: thinking isn\u0026rsquo;t as good as doing things, which is counter productive. Actions, creation, feed and grow out of thinking (and vice versa.)\nIn light of this it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to re-calibrate ones practice without on the one hand taking an anti-intellectual stance or becoming too ungrounded in practice.\nCogitative Side Effects I read an article a while back (source lost to the depths of the internet,) that mentioned the following effect; when you talk about something publicly the recognition and validation you get from talking about it is pretty much the same as the recognition and validation you\u0026rsquo;d get from actually doing something. The result is, if you talk about doing something, you become less likely to actually do it because you\u0026rsquo;ve already experienced most of the gratification of doing something.\n(Sorry for the poor translation.)\nIn any case, it seems plausible, and certainly worth testing. So when I say \u0026ldquo;I want to spend time doing things,\u0026rdquo; rather than theorizing about possible future projects or talking about things I want to work on, as has been my wont, I\u0026rsquo;m just not.\nThis is an interesting conundrum for free software/open source: how do you start developing a project in a community centered way without shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. Sometimes it works (e.g. GNU MediaGoblin,) but often people hack a working prototype (and often a lot more) before talking about the project. There are too many examples to list.\nThere are also a large number of examples of projects that started that languish because they were clearly announced too soon. On the other hand, maybe early-public discussion or announcements is purely epiphenomenal and early public discussion is just a symptom of an always already weak project, that you\u0026rsquo;re more interested in talking about something that doing something. (Which might just prove the point?)\nThe Take Away Don\u0026rsquo;t blog about something until it exists, and is in a form that you\u0026rsquo;d be willing to share and discuss. Corollary: code names are probably the same as real names.\nStrive for balance between \u0026ldquo;project work,\u0026rdquo; and meta-work. The ideal proportions are unclear. Avoid anti-intellectualism when possible. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/doing-versus-talking/","summary":"In On my Return to Blogging post I attributed the fact that I\u0026rsquo;d taken a break from blogging because I wanted to get out and do things rather than just spend my free time writing and thinking about things.\nA Critique The problem with this kind of statement is that it evokes a certain kind of anti-intellectualism: thinking isn\u0026rsquo;t as good as doing things, which is counter productive. Actions, creation, feed and grow out of thinking (and vice versa.)\nIn light of this it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to re-calibrate ones practice without on the one hand taking an anti-intellectual stance or becoming too ungrounded in practice.\nCogitative Side Effects I read an article a while back (source lost to the depths of the internet,) that mentioned the following effect; when you talk about something publicly the recognition and validation you get from talking about it is pretty much the same as the recognition and validation you\u0026rsquo;d get from actually doing something.","title":"Doing versus Talking"},{"content":"Today I released the first version of Buildcloth which is a tool that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using at work to programatically (and in some cases) dynamically generate build systems (i.e. Makefiles.)\nBackground It\u0026rsquo;s obviously been \u0026ldquo;production ready\u0026rdquo; in some sense for a while, but I recently finished the API documentation, and a lot of the infrastructure for packaging and distribution, so it seemed like this was a good starting point.\nThe initial idea was basically that while Make syntax can be really powerful, in a number of situations:\nto specify conditional elements, to generate build targets and procedures based on system configuration or project state, for large numbers similar of targets, and for build with where single targets have a group of related rules, defining build systems programatically ends up producing a much more reliable and maintainable build system. The wins are pretty big in terms of maintainability, clarity, and flexibility.\nThe idea, and naming, is sort of: do what fabric does for shell scripts and deployment but for build system generators. Maybe this is exactly what you\u0026rsquo;re looking for.\nMore Information Check it out:\nbuildcloth on Pypi buildcloth github repo Bugs go here, and patches/pull requests are always welcome.\nCool Improvements: full documentation. support for specifying targets/dependencies as a list. a build-rule abstraction called RuleCloth. improved ninja support. The Roadmap making the tutorial and high level documentation better. improving the \u0026ldquo;RuleCloth.\u0026rdquo; adding some preliminary tools for managing data interactions. pypy support (why not?) ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/buildcloth-release-no-1/","summary":"Today I released the first version of Buildcloth which is a tool that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using at work to programatically (and in some cases) dynamically generate build systems (i.e. Makefiles.)\nBackground It\u0026rsquo;s obviously been \u0026ldquo;production ready\u0026rdquo; in some sense for a while, but I recently finished the API documentation, and a lot of the infrastructure for packaging and distribution, so it seemed like this was a good starting point.\nThe initial idea was basically that while Make syntax can be really powerful, in a number of situations:\nto specify conditional elements, to generate build targets and procedures based on system configuration or project state, for large numbers similar of targets, and for build with where single targets have a group of related rules, defining build systems programatically ends up producing a much more reliable and maintainable build system. The wins are pretty big in terms of maintainability, clarity, and flexibility.","title":"Buildcloth Release, No. 1"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been a blogging slacker in the last few months. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot (software releases! content migrations!) and spending my free-time singing and working on a few odds-and-ends projects. And not blogging.\nBut I did this /posts/delegated-builds project and it seemed like blogging about it would be good.\nAnd it was\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had this blog, in one form or another for 10 years, and my relationship to this blog has grown and changed a lot in that time and I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to really think about all the turns too much, but the recent developments are novel:\nI write for a living, and have pretty consistently for the last 4-ish years (holy crap!) It\u0026rsquo;s not exactly that I\u0026rsquo;m burnt out on writing, but it does mean that I write differently now, which is a good thing, but I don\u0026rsquo;t always have the same ability to sit down after work and want to write more, for fun.\nI noticed that blogging rigorously meant that I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have time to work on \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; projects, which is to say, I was putting a lot of energy into writing about ideas and theories but not too much time into actually doing things.\nI love theory. I love working on theory, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I see use for theory that doesn\u0026rsquo;t interact with the world outside of it. For example, before I started my current job I wrote some about technical writing here, and those theories definitely guide what I\u0026rsquo;m working on today and I think I can stand by what I said, but I think my understanding and knowledge of documentation has grown a lot for the experience of working on it.\nTo continue on this theme, the programming projects I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, which I haven\u0026rsquo;t blogged about too much here, have been helpful in teaching me a lot about software development, (which I\u0026rsquo;ve long been fascinated by,) which improves the documentation I write and the way I approach problems.\nFurthermore, it means that things I used blog about and say \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if a tool that did existed?\u0026rdquo; and now I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make them exist. Which isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;m a really fluent programmer (yet,) but I\u0026rsquo;m not helpless.\nSo in short, I\u0026rsquo;m back, and I\u0026rsquo;m hopeful that in the coming weeks and months I can use this space to talk about the things I\u0026rsquo;m working on and help build a little bit of (mostly personal) momentum behind these projects.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-my-return-to-blogging/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been a blogging slacker in the last few months. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot (software releases! content migrations!) and spending my free-time singing and working on a few odds-and-ends projects. And not blogging.\nBut I did this /posts/delegated-builds project and it seemed like blogging about it would be good.\nAnd it was\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had this blog, in one form or another for 10 years, and my relationship to this blog has grown and changed a lot in that time and I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to really think about all the turns too much, but the recent developments are novel:\nI write for a living, and have pretty consistently for the last 4-ish years (holy crap!) It\u0026rsquo;s not exactly that I\u0026rsquo;m burnt out on writing, but it does mean that I write differently now, which is a good thing, but I don\u0026rsquo;t always have the same ability to sit down after work and want to write more, for fun.","title":"On My Return to Blogging"},{"content":"This post accumulates what I thought would be the common questions about the /posts/delegated-builds post/tool. For more background see the /posts/build-woes post.\nCouldn\u0026rsquo;t you just have a separate build-only repository? Sure, but you\u0026rsquo;d still have to manage that repository which would probably require a non-trivial amount of code and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t support building/testing topic branches. Furthermore unless you linked the build directories in some way, which this solution does, you\u0026rsquo;d end up chronically overbuilding.\nDoesn\u0026rsquo;t this use lot of disk space? Sure, some. But I think in most competitions between disk space and improved productivity, productivity always wins. That not withstanding:\n1. Little known fact: when run git clone and specify the remote as a \u0026ldquo;local\u0026rdquo; repository, git uses hardlinks, if possible, for it\u0026rsquo;s objects database. This means, that you\u0026rsquo;re only copying the source tree, indeed there are two or three copies of the source tree lying around as it is.\n2. Most build processes aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly space intensive: the second checkout is only 7 megs, our .git directory is 7.3 megs (packed), which translates to a 5.4 meg source directory. By contrast the output of a full build of a branch is about 150 megabytes plus production staging.\nAt least in our case, the additional space costs are effectively trivial both given the size of contemporary hard drives and scale of other size requirements.\nSource code may be larger: the MongoDB source tree has a 16 megabyte source tree (not counting 50+ megs of in-tree third party libraries) that becomes tens of gigabytes with build artifacts. Even so, given a project of this scale space costs wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be hard to justify. Having said that, most software build problems (that I\u0026rsquo;m aware of,) don\u0026rsquo;t face this kind of contention, so it\u0026rsquo;s pretty irrelevant.\nThis doesn\u0026rsquo;t make anything faster, so how does it help? Indeed it probably makes things slower (tests are not yet conclusive,) but it means that any build process can happen entirely in the background and without possibly affecting your current work.\nSometimes the best way to optimize an inefficient process is to apply intelligence and actually make something slow faster. This is great, but it\u0026rsquo;s also quite hard (and time consuming) and often intelligence can only increase performance by a few percentage points. As a caveat, always make sure that things aren\u0026rsquo;t slow for a dumb and simple reason, but if an improvement isn\u0026rsquo;t obvious or there isn\u0026rsquo;t a simple easy to fix source of slowness, intelligence is often overrated in this regard.\nOther times, perhaps even often, the best way to optimize an inefficient process is to make it not matter that it\u0026rsquo;s slow. Some things take a long time to do, and while it\u0026rsquo;s great to do things synchronously, it\u0026rsquo;s not always a real requirement.\nThis is a smart hack that falls into the second category: if builds are going to take 4 to 6 minutes to run, I don\u0026rsquo;t want that to prevent things from happening in that time. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to think about coordinating activities around a given period of dead time: this hack solves this handily.\nFour to 6 minutes isn\u0026rsquo;t that long, but it\u0026rsquo;s starting to get to a point where it\u0026rsquo;s too long to maintain focus on a task and wait around for a build to finish, particularly for the longer ends.\nWith this I think we could tolerate ~15 minute builds without really causing a problem. Beyond that and we might need to reopen this case.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/questions-about-delegated-builds/","summary":"This post accumulates what I thought would be the common questions about the /posts/delegated-builds post/tool. For more background see the /posts/build-woes post.\nCouldn\u0026rsquo;t you just have a separate build-only repository? Sure, but you\u0026rsquo;d still have to manage that repository which would probably require a non-trivial amount of code and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t support building/testing topic branches. Furthermore unless you linked the build directories in some way, which this solution does, you\u0026rsquo;d end up chronically overbuilding.\nDoesn\u0026rsquo;t this use lot of disk space? Sure, some. But I think in most competitions between disk space and improved productivity, productivity always wins. That not withstanding:\n1. Little known fact: when run git clone and specify the remote as a \u0026ldquo;local\u0026rdquo; repository, git uses hardlinks, if possible, for it\u0026rsquo;s objects database. This means, that you\u0026rsquo;re only copying the source tree, indeed there are two or three copies of the source tree lying around as it is.","title":"Delegated Build Questions"},{"content":"I thought I\u0026rsquo;d back up after the /posts/delegated-builds post and expand on the nature of the build engineering problem that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dealing with (at my day job) on a documentation related problem.\nwe do roughly continuous deployment. All active development and editing happens in topic branches, and there\u0026rsquo;s no really good reason to leave typos and what not on the site any longer than we need to. we publish and maintain multiple versions of the same resource in parallel, and often backport basic changes to maintenance branches. This is great for users, and great for clarity, but is awful practically, because to deploy continuously, you have to be rebuilding. all build is self-contained. This isn\u0026rsquo;t strictly a requirement, and we do use some internal continuous integration tools for internal development, but at the core, for a number of reasons I think it\u0026rsquo;s important that all writers be able to build the project locally: as an open source project, it\u0026rsquo;s important that users can easily contribute at any level. We do lots of things to make it easy for people to submit patches, but if the build isn\u0026rsquo;t portable (within reason,) then it\u0026rsquo;s difficult for developers to work as peers. if it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to view rendered content while developing, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to develop well or efficiently. While I think the what-you-see-is-what-you-get model (WYSIWYG) is the wrong answer, good feedback loops are important and being able to build locally, after you make changes, whenever you want, regardless of the availability of a network connection, is terribly important. the tool we use, Sphinx, in combination with the size of our resource is a bottleneck. A single publication run takes anywhere from 4:30-6 depending on the hardware, and has grows on average 30 seconds every six months. I could rant about parallelism in documentation, but basically, if you want a system that handles cross referencing and internal links, and you want to generate static content, long compile times are mostly unavoidable. Now there are a number of tricks that we\u0026rsquo;ve established to fight this underlying truth: Sphinx does some dependency checking to avoid \u0026ldquo;overbuilding,\u0026rdquo; which helps some, and I\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot of mangling in the Makefiles to make the build process more efficient for most common cases, but even so, long growing build times are inevitable.\nThe Sphinx part of the build has two qualities that are frustrating:\neach build is single threaded, so it has to read all the files one by one, and then write each file one by one. You can build other output formats in parallel (with a small hack from the default makefile,) but you can\u0026rsquo;t get around the speed of a single build. There is a patch in consideration for the next version that would allow the write-stage of the build to run concurrently, but that\u0026rsquo;s not live yet. during the read stage of the build, you can\u0026rsquo;t touch the source files, and extra files in the source tree can affect or break the build, which means that for the most part you can\u0026rsquo;t build and work at the same time, until now. The solutions are often not much better than the problem:\nuse a different build tool, that was built to do incremental builds. The problem is that there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of good options in this area, and the build is really the primary objectionable feature of the build.\nimprove the build tool, or wait for it to improve. The aforementioned patch to let the write phase run concurrently will help a lot. Having said that, it\u0026rsquo;s important to keep the project on a standard public release of Sphinx and it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to modify core Sphinx behavior from the extension system.\nPerhaps I have Stockholm Syndrome with the build, but I tend to thing that on some level this is a pretty difficult problem, and building a safe concurrent build system is hard there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of extant solutions. At the same time, this blog is about 2.5 times as large as the documentation project and can do a complete rebuild in 20% of the time or less as much time. While the blog is probably a little less complex, they\u0026rsquo;re largely similar and it\u0026rsquo;s not 5-6 times less complex.\nI think the problem is that people writing new documentation systems have to target and support new users and smaller test projects, that by the time people have serious problems with the road blocks, the faulty designs are too baked in.\nbrute force the problem by making use non-local build infrastructure that has faster less contentious processor and disk resources. This sounds good, except our test machines are pretty fast, and the gains made by better hardware don\u0026rsquo;t keep up with continued growth. While we might gain some speed by moving builds off of our local machines, the experience is quite worse. Furthermore, we do build-non locally, and that\u0026rsquo;s great, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a replacement.\nThere aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of solutions and most of them seem to come down to \u0026ldquo;deal with it and build less,\u0026rdquo; which is hardly a solution.\nThis is the foundation of the /posts/delegated-builds script that I wrote, which addresses the problem by making it less intrusive. I\u0026rsquo;m also working on a brief FAQ, which might help address some of the big questions about this project.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/build-woes/","summary":"I thought I\u0026rsquo;d back up after the /posts/delegated-builds post and expand on the nature of the build engineering problem that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dealing with (at my day job) on a documentation related problem.\nwe do roughly continuous deployment. All active development and editing happens in topic branches, and there\u0026rsquo;s no really good reason to leave typos and what not on the site any longer than we need to. we publish and maintain multiple versions of the same resource in parallel, and often backport basic changes to maintenance branches. This is great for users, and great for clarity, but is awful practically, because to deploy continuously, you have to be rebuilding. all build is self-contained. This isn\u0026rsquo;t strictly a requirement, and we do use some internal continuous integration tools for internal development, but at the core, for a number of reasons I think it\u0026rsquo;s important that all writers be able to build the project locally: as an open source project, it\u0026rsquo;s important that users can easily contribute at any level.","title":"Build Woes"},{"content":"Introduction I cooked up something at work that I think is going to be awesome for building the project that I work on a day to day basis. Here\u0026rsquo;s the basic problem, in a different post, I\u0026rsquo;ll expand on these in more depth:\nwe do continuous deployment. we maintain and publish multiple branches. our builds take a non-trivial amount of time (4-6 minutes depending on hardware,) and will continue to get longer. our documentation toolkit, Sphinx, lacks concurrency for some steps, which means builds take too long and leave most of a contemporary computer idle. Furthermore, given our use of topic-branches it can be hard to get work done during a build. So there are a couple of notable hacks that I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with, over the past few months that help:\nduplicate some of the initial work so that different output formats can build in parallel (using Make\u0026rsquo;s job control) at the expense of disk some space. using a source proxy, (i.e. copying the source content into the build directory and building from this copy so that the actual source files can change during the build.) These changes are simple and amount to some really minor changes to commands and Make files. This next fix required a non-trivial amount of code, but is really awesome:\nbuilding content, if it\u0026rsquo;s already committed, from a local checkout in the build directory. This way you can build (and publish!) from a different branch without doing anything to your current working directory. The Code See the gist for a basic overview, and keep your eyes on the repositories:\ncyborg institute delegated-build repository github.com/tychoish/delegated-build/ Some implementation notes:\nit needs a bit more clean up and configuration with regards to a few hard-coded directory names, and assumptions about projects.\nin practice it should work fine with Python 2.7 and 3.0. If you have the backported argparse module for 2.6, that should work too.\nthis plugs in really nicely with some existing infrastructure: becasuse we generate most of our Makefiles, it\u0026rsquo;s trivial to make this script smart and only permit sane things with regards to branch creation/management, and build targets.\nBuilding on this, I\u0026rsquo;ve written up a separate script to generate makefile targets to invoke these commands, which allows the script to fit more nicely into the existing idiom. That\u0026rsquo;s not included here, yet.\nthis, so far, has been the best introduction I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to the subprocess module, so perhaps this will be useful to you.\nthere\u0026rsquo;s no good way to queue builds in make, except to use the blocking mode and use a bunch of make calls, which is reasonably inefficient. To get better at this, we\u0026rsquo;ll need to make some underlying build changes, but the gains could be pretty significant.\nfinally, this is the first bit of Python I\u0026rsquo;ve written since I had the breakthrough where I finally understood classes of a moderate amount of complexity without classes. No harm, and it\u0026rsquo;s not like there\u0026rsquo;s any internal state; at the same time, a bit of encapsulation around the interactions with git might be useful.\nPull request, suggestions, are always welcome.\nMore On Delegated Builds I\u0026rsquo;ve written a bunch more about this problem and script and will be posting some of that very soon!\n(Also it\u0026rsquo;s good to return to blogging/posting. Thanks for sticking around!)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/delegated-builds/","summary":"Introduction I cooked up something at work that I think is going to be awesome for building the project that I work on a day to day basis. Here\u0026rsquo;s the basic problem, in a different post, I\u0026rsquo;ll expand on these in more depth:\nwe do continuous deployment. we maintain and publish multiple branches. our builds take a non-trivial amount of time (4-6 minutes depending on hardware,) and will continue to get longer. our documentation toolkit, Sphinx, lacks concurrency for some steps, which means builds take too long and leave most of a contemporary computer idle. Furthermore, given our use of topic-branches it can be hard to get work done during a build. So there are a couple of notable hacks that I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with, over the past few months that help:\nduplicate some of the initial work so that different output formats can build in parallel (using Make\u0026rsquo;s job control) at the expense of disk some space.","title":"Delegated Builds"},{"content":"This is an awful pun, but I\u0026rsquo;ve recently written the following script to help with some of the work of back-porting patch sets to maintenance branches. Basically you pass it a bunch of commit identifiers and it cherry picks them all in order.\n#!/usr/bin/python import os import sys import subprocess\nfor commit in sys.argv[1:]: with open(os.devnull, \u0026ldquo;w\u0026rdquo;) as fnull: subprocess.call( [\u0026lsquo;git\u0026rsquo;, \u0026lsquo;cherry-pick\u0026rsquo;, commit ], stdout=fnull, stderr=fnull )\nWhat I\u0026rsquo;d been doing, previously is assembling commit hashes in an emacs buffer, and then copy-pasting git cherry-pick before each line and then pasting those lines into the shell and hoping nothing goes wrong. The script isn\u0026rsquo;t much better but it\u0026rsquo;s a start.\nTo use, save in a file named git-raspberry in your $PATH, chmod +x the file, and then just run \u0026ldquo;git raspberry\u0026rdquo;. Turns out git runs any program in the path that starts with git- as a sub command.\nThe more you know.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-raspberry/","summary":"This is an awful pun, but I\u0026rsquo;ve recently written the following script to help with some of the work of back-porting patch sets to maintenance branches. Basically you pass it a bunch of commit identifiers and it cherry picks them all in order.\n#!/usr/bin/python import os import sys import subprocess\nfor commit in sys.argv[1:]: with open(os.devnull, \u0026ldquo;w\u0026rdquo;) as fnull: subprocess.call( [\u0026lsquo;git\u0026rsquo;, \u0026lsquo;cherry-pick\u0026rsquo;, commit ], stdout=fnull, stderr=fnull )\nWhat I\u0026rsquo;d been doing, previously is assembling commit hashes in an emacs buffer, and then copy-pasting git cherry-pick before each line and then pasting those lines into the shell and hoping nothing goes wrong. The script isn\u0026rsquo;t much better but it\u0026rsquo;s a start.\nTo use, save in a file named git-raspberry in your $PATH, chmod +x the file, and then just run \u0026ldquo;git raspberry\u0026rdquo;. Turns out git runs any program in the path that starts with git- as a sub command.\nThe more you know.","title":"git raspberry"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve started a new project, much to my own surprise. After many years of looking at the merino/tencel blend \u0026ldquo;colrain\u0026rdquo; I ordered a cone of it, and have cast on a project: a plain tube using size 0s..\nI think I may be crazy.\nThe thing is, I got one of these neck tubes a month or two ago, and it\u0026rsquo;s the most amazing thing ever. Looks good with most things, not weird, very comfortable, etc.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m making myself one\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m calling it \u0026ldquo;Ballstown\u0026rdquo; after a tune in the Sacred Harp of the same name. The tune is named after the town in the capital region of New York State, now known as \u0026ldquo;Ballston Spa.\u0026rdquo; Why? Because I cast on 217 stitches.\nIt turns out, I\u0026rsquo;ve really rather missed plain knitting that you can just knit on for hours without really thinking about, or can knit on in the dark.\nOne of the reasons that I\u0026rsquo;ve not been knitting as much recently, other than available time is that I\u0026rsquo;ve found it difficult to actually wear or use the things I knit. Sweaters, even finer weight ones are too warm to wear inside, and not windproof enough to keep me warm outside without substantial jacket.\nThe answer is to knit finer fabrics, of course, but this has been easier said than done, for me. Mostly I\u0026rsquo;ve stuck to fair isle sweaters, which are great fun to knit, and reasonably wearable, but difficult to knit on casually: lots to lug around, and starting to knit something with a pattern requires some \u0026ldquo;spin up time,\u0026rdquo; as you remember where you were and what you\u0026rsquo;re supposed to be doing.\nIn most ways this plain tube is the perfect answer to this problem\u0026hellip;.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll blog more about this (or not,) as I progress.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-knitting-project-ballstown/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve started a new project, much to my own surprise. After many years of looking at the merino/tencel blend \u0026ldquo;colrain\u0026rdquo; I ordered a cone of it, and have cast on a project: a plain tube using size 0s..\nI think I may be crazy.\nThe thing is, I got one of these neck tubes a month or two ago, and it\u0026rsquo;s the most amazing thing ever. Looks good with most things, not weird, very comfortable, etc.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m making myself one\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m calling it \u0026ldquo;Ballstown\u0026rdquo; after a tune in the Sacred Harp of the same name. The tune is named after the town in the capital region of New York State, now known as \u0026ldquo;Ballston Spa.\u0026rdquo; Why? Because I cast on 217 stitches.\nIt turns out, I\u0026rsquo;ve really rather missed plain knitting that you can just knit on for hours without really thinking about, or can knit on in the dark.","title":"New Knitting Project: Ballstown"},{"content":"This is a rough sketch of some things that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned about the Sphinx documentation generation system. I should probably spend some time to collect what I\u0026rsquo;ve learned in a more coherent and durable format, but this will have to do for now:\nIf you describe a type in parameter documentation it will automatically link to the Python documentation for that type when using the Python Domain and if you have intersphinx connected. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool.\nSphinx let\u0026rsquo;s you define a scope for a file in some cases. If you\u0026rsquo;re documenting command-line options to a program. (i.e. with the \u0026ldquo;program\u0026rdquo; with subsidiary \u0026ldquo;option\u0026rdquo; directives,) or if you\u0026rsquo;re documenting Python objects and callables within the context of a module, the module and program directives have a scoping effect.\nCool but it breaks the reStructuredText idiom, which only allows you to decorate and provide semantic context for specific nested blocks within the file. As in Python code, there\u0026rsquo;s no way to end a block except via white-space,1 which produces some very confusing markup effects.\nThe \u0026ldquo;default-domain\u0026rdquo; directive is similarly\u0026hellip; odd.\nSphinx cannot take advantage of multiple cores to render a single project, except when building multiple outputs (i.e. PDF/LaTeX, HTML with and/or directories.) if with a weird caveat that only one builder can touch the doctree directory at once. (So you either need to put each builder on its own doctree directory, or let one build complete and then build the reset in parallel.)\nFor small documentation sets, under a few dozen pages/kb, this isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge problem, for larger documentation sets this can be quite frustrating.2\nThis limitation means that while it\u0026rsquo;s possible to write extensions to Sphinx to do additional processing of the build, in most cases, it makes more sense to build custom content and extensions that modify or generate reStructuredText or that munge the output in some way. The include directive in reStructuredText and milking the hell out of make are good places to started.\nBe careful when instantiating objects in Sphinx\u0026rsquo;s conf.py file: since Sphinx stores the pickle (serialization) of conf.py and compares that stored pickle with the current file to ensure that configuration hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed (changed configuration files necessitate a full rebuild of the project.) Creating objects in this file will trigger full (and often unneeded) rebuilds.\nDelightfully, Sphinx produces .po file that you can use to power translated output, using the gettext sphinx builder. Specify a different doctree directory for this output to prevent some issues with overlapping builds. This is really cool.\nSphinx is great. Even though I\u0026rsquo;m always looking at different documentation systems and practices I can\u0026rsquo;t find anything that\u0026rsquo;s better. My hope is that the more I/we talk about these issues and the closer I/we\u0026rsquo;ll get to solutions, and the better the solutions will be.\nOnward and Upward!\nIn Python this isn\u0026rsquo;t a real problem, but reStructuredText describes a basically XML-like document, and some structures like headings are not easy to embed in rst blocks.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nreality documentation sets would need to be many hundreds of thousands of words for this to actually matter in a significant way. I\u0026rsquo;ve seen documentation take 2-3 minutes for clean a regeneration using Sphinx on very powerful hardware (SSDs, contemporary server-grade processors, etc.), and while this shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a deal breaker for anyone, documentation that\u0026rsquo;s slow to regenerate is harder to maintain and keep up to date (e.g. difficult to test the effect of changes on output, non-trivial to update the documents regularly with small fixes.)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sphinx-caveats/","summary":"This is a rough sketch of some things that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned about the Sphinx documentation generation system. I should probably spend some time to collect what I\u0026rsquo;ve learned in a more coherent and durable format, but this will have to do for now:\nIf you describe a type in parameter documentation it will automatically link to the Python documentation for that type when using the Python Domain and if you have intersphinx connected. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool.\nSphinx let\u0026rsquo;s you define a scope for a file in some cases. If you\u0026rsquo;re documenting command-line options to a program. (i.e. with the \u0026ldquo;program\u0026rdquo; with subsidiary \u0026ldquo;option\u0026rdquo; directives,) or if you\u0026rsquo;re documenting Python objects and callables within the context of a module, the module and program directives have a scoping effect.\nCool but it breaks the reStructuredText idiom, which only allows you to decorate and provide semantic context for specific nested blocks within the file.","title":"Sphinx Caveats"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t think the tension between having good, robust, and bug-free software and having software with new features and capabilities is solvable in the macro case. What follows is a musing on this subject, related in my mind to the On Installing Linux post.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not exactly making the argument that we should all prefer to use unstable and untested software, but I think there is a way in which the stability1 of the most prevalent Linux distributions is a crutch. Because developers can trust that the operating system will effectively never change, there\u0026rsquo;s no need to write code that expects that it might change.\nThe argument for this is largely economic: by spacing updates out to once a year or once every 18 months, you can batch \u0026ldquo;update\u0026rdquo; costs and save some amount of overhead. The downside here is that if you defer update costs, they tend to increase. Conversely, its difficult to move development forward if you\u0026rsquo;re continuously updating, and if your software is too \u0026ldquo;fresh,\u0026rdquo; you may loose time to working out bugs in your dependencies rather than your system itself.\nThe logic of both arguments holds, but I\u0026rsquo;m not aware of comparative numbers for the costs of either approach. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that there are deployments of significant size that actually deploy on anything that isn\u0026rsquo;t reasonably stable. Other factors:\nautomated updating and system management. testing infrastructure. size of deployment. number and variety of deployment configurations. Reliably updated and patched regularly for several years of maintenance, but otherwise totally stable and static.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/stability-is-a-crutch/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t think the tension between having good, robust, and bug-free software and having software with new features and capabilities is solvable in the macro case. What follows is a musing on this subject, related in my mind to the On Installing Linux post.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not exactly making the argument that we should all prefer to use unstable and untested software, but I think there is a way in which the stability1 of the most prevalent Linux distributions is a crutch. Because developers can trust that the operating system will effectively never change, there\u0026rsquo;s no need to write code that expects that it might change.\nThe argument for this is largely economic: by spacing updates out to once a year or once every 18 months, you can batch \u0026ldquo;update\u0026rdquo; costs and save some amount of overhead. The downside here is that if you defer update costs, they tend to increase. Conversely, its difficult to move development forward if you\u0026rsquo;re continuously updating, and if your software is too \u0026ldquo;fresh,\u0026rdquo; you may loose time to working out bugs in your dependencies rather than your system itself.","title":"Stability is a Crutch"},{"content":"I (mostly) lurk on the markdown discussion list, which is a great collection of people who implement and develop projects that use markdown. And there\u0026rsquo;s been a recent spate of conversation about standardization of markdown implementations and syntax. This post is both a reflection on this topic and a brief overview of the oft-forgotten history.\nA History of Markdown Standardization Markdown is a simple project that takes the convention that most people have been using to convey text formatting and style in plain text email, and providing a very minimalist and lightweight script that translates this \u0026ldquo;markup\u0026rdquo; (i.e. \u0026ldquo;markdown\u0026rdquo;) into HTML. It\u0026rsquo;s a great idea, and having systems that make it possible for people to focus on writing rather than formating is a great thing.\nPeople should never write XML, HTML, or XHTML by hand. *Ever*.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the problem: the initial implementation is a Perl script that uses a bunch of pattern matching regular expressions (as you\u0026rsquo;d expect) to parse the input. It\u0026rsquo;s slow, imprecise, there are a few minor logical bugs, there\u0026rsquo;s no formal specification, and the description of the markdown language are ambiguous on a few key questions. Furthermore, there are a number of features that are simple, frequently requested/desired, with no official description of the behavior.\nAs people have gone about developing markdown implementations and extensions in other languages, to fix up the inconsistencies, to provide markdown support in every programming language under the sun, without a formal specification and disambiguation of the open question, the result is fragmentation: all the implementations are subtly different. Often you\u0026rsquo;ll never notice, but if you use footnotes (which are non-standard,) or want to have nested lists, you will end up writing implementation-dependent markdown.\nThe result is that either you tie your text to a specific implementation, or you go blithely on with the knowledge that the markdown that you write or store today will require intervention of some sort in the future. If you need to extend markdown syntax, you can\u0026rsquo;t without becoming an implementer of markdown itself.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s an awful thing. And there\u0026rsquo;s no real path out of this: the originator of markdown has publicly stated that he has no interest in blessing a successor, continuing development of the reference implementation, or in contributing to a specification process. Insofar as he controls the authoritative definition of markdown, the project to standardize markdown is dead before it even begins.\nThe problem is that while most people involved (implementers, application developers, etc.) in markdown want some resolution to this problem: it\u0026rsquo;s bad for users and it makes implementing markdown difficult (which markdown flavor should you use? should you reimplemented bugs for consistency and compatibility, or provide a correct system that breaks compatibility?) At the same time, markdown implementations are not commercial products and were built to address their author\u0026rsquo;s needs, and none of those maintainers really have the time or a non-goodwill interest in a standardization process.\nIf markdown standardization weren\u0026rsquo;t doomed from the start, the fact that the only people with any real ability to rally community support for a standardized markdown, are not inclined to participate in a standardization process.\nMarkdown Isn\u0026rsquo;t For Text That Matters If markdown were better, more clear, and more rigorously defined and implemented, this wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a problem, but the truth is that markdown\u0026rsquo;s main role has been for README files, blog posts, wikis, and comments on blog posts and in discussion forms.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a great \u0026ldquo;lowest common denominator\u0026rdquo; for multi-authored text that needs rich hypertext features but needs markdowns simplicity and intuitiveness. Big projects? Multi-file projects? Outputs beyond single files?\nSure you can hack it with things like maruku and multi-markdown to get LaTeX output, and footnotes, and more complex metadata. And there are some systems that make it possible to handle projects beyond the scope of a single file, but they\u0026rsquo;re not amazing, or particularly innovative, particularly at scale.\nTo recap, markdown is probably not an ideal archival format for important text, because:\nThe implementation-dependency means that markdown often fails at genericism, which I think is supposed to be it\u0026rsquo;s primary features.\nGeneric text representation formats are a must.\nIf you need output formats beyond HTML/XHTML then markdown is probably not for you.\nYou can get other formats, but it\u0026rsquo;s even more implementation specific.\nThe Alternatives Don\u0026rsquo;t standardize anything. While markdown isn\u0026rsquo;t perfect the way it is now, there\u0026rsquo;s no real change possible that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t make markdown worse. There are two paths forward, as I see it:\nGive up and use reStructuredText for all new projects.\nRST is fussy, but has definite and clear solutions to the issues that plague markdown.\nIt has support for every major output format, and it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too hard to expand on that. It\u0026rsquo;s fast. In addition to the primary implementation, Pandoc supports python and there are early stage Java/PHP implementations. Most tools just wrap the Python implementation, which isn\u0026rsquo;t really a problem. There are clear paths for extending rst as needed for new projects. Design and implement a new markdown -like implementation. I think reMarkdown would be a good name. This will be a lot of work, and have the following components:\na complete test suite that other implementations could use to confirm compatibility with reMarkdown. a formal specification. a lexer/parser design and reference implementation. With an abstract XML-like output format. We want a realistic model implementation that isn\u0026rsquo;t overly dependent upon a single output format. an explicit and defined process for changing and improving the syntax. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/markdown-standardization/","summary":"I (mostly) lurk on the markdown discussion list, which is a great collection of people who implement and develop projects that use markdown. And there\u0026rsquo;s been a recent spate of conversation about standardization of markdown implementations and syntax. This post is both a reflection on this topic and a brief overview of the oft-forgotten history.\nA History of Markdown Standardization Markdown is a simple project that takes the convention that most people have been using to convey text formatting and style in plain text email, and providing a very minimalist and lightweight script that translates this \u0026ldquo;markup\u0026rdquo; (i.e. \u0026ldquo;markdown\u0026rdquo;) into HTML. It\u0026rsquo;s a great idea, and having systems that make it possible for people to focus on writing rather than formating is a great thing.\nPeople should never write XML, HTML, or XHTML by hand. *Ever*.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the problem: the initial implementation is a Perl script that uses a bunch of pattern matching regular expressions (as you\u0026rsquo;d expect) to parse the input.","title":"Markdown Standardization"},{"content":"(alternately, \u0026ldquo;Installing Linux the Hard Way\u0026rdquo;)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had the occasion to install Linux on three systems in the recent past. People don\u0026rsquo;t really install Linux anymore, it seems: with \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; instances and provisioning that\u0026rsquo;s based on images means that no one really has to install Linux as such. My experiences have been mostly awful:\nI couldn\u0026rsquo;t make my current laptop do a full LCM boot for the life of me. I partitioned the hard drive in the conventional way, and while the system works fine, I think non-abstracted disk volumes are bad practice.\nDisk partitioning and bootloaders remain the most difficult and frustrating aspect of the installation process, and there\u0026rsquo;s no automation to support this work. Furthermore, even if it takes you a day to get it right, usually you don\u0026rsquo;t have to mess with it for a year or two. Which makes it difficult to improve practically.\nThe Debian installer will do this pretty well, but you can\u0026rsquo;t get the auto partitioning tool to not use the full disk. Or I can\u0026rsquo;t figure it out.\nI recently tried to install Arch Linux on an infrastructural system. Apparently in the last couple of months Arch totally did away with the installation system. So it dumps you into a mostly working shell and provides a couple of shell scripts to \u0026ldquo;automate\u0026rdquo; the installation.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a great idea, as long as you never have to use it.\nConversely, it\u0026rsquo;s a great idea if you\u0026rsquo;re constantly running installations.\nIf you install Arch once every year or two, as I suspect is the most common case, good luck.\nI need to do it again: to update an older laptop to the 64-bit version of Arch, and I fear this is going to be terribly painful. I\u0026rsquo;m left with two main questions:\n1. Have we given up on the idea that desktop Linux may be viable for people who aren\u0026rsquo;t already familiar with Linux, or who aren\u0026rsquo;t software developers (or the next best thing?)\nDoes the desktop experience actually matter? I\u0026rsquo;m asking this in a more narrow line of questioning. There\u0026rsquo;s computer usage that revolves around things that happen in the browser, which is (probably) better suited for embeded systems (i.e. Android and iOS based devices,) and it\u0026rsquo;s not clear where the line between that and \u0026ldquo;General Purpose\u0026rdquo; computing will fall.\nIf we end up using embeded systems for most of the computers that we actually touch, this fundamentally changes the desktop experience as we know it, particularly for things like installation.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/installing-linux-the-hard-way/","summary":"(alternately, \u0026ldquo;Installing Linux the Hard Way\u0026rdquo;)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had the occasion to install Linux on three systems in the recent past. People don\u0026rsquo;t really install Linux anymore, it seems: with \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; instances and provisioning that\u0026rsquo;s based on images means that no one really has to install Linux as such. My experiences have been mostly awful:\nI couldn\u0026rsquo;t make my current laptop do a full LCM boot for the life of me. I partitioned the hard drive in the conventional way, and while the system works fine, I think non-abstracted disk volumes are bad practice.\nDisk partitioning and bootloaders remain the most difficult and frustrating aspect of the installation process, and there\u0026rsquo;s no automation to support this work. Furthermore, even if it takes you a day to get it right, usually you don\u0026rsquo;t have to mess with it for a year or two. Which makes it difficult to improve practically.\nThe Debian installer will do this pretty well, but you can\u0026rsquo;t get the auto partitioning tool to not use the full disk.","title":"On Installing Linux"},{"content":"Note: This is an old post about a script I wrote a few months ago about a piece of code that I\u0026rsquo;m no longer (really) using. I present it here as an archival piece with a boatload of caveats. Enjoy!\nI have a problem that I think is not terribly unique: I have a directory of files and I want to maintain two distinct copies of these files at once, and I want a tool that looks at both directories and makes sure they\u0026rsquo;re up to date. That\u0026rsquo;s all. Turns out nothing does exactly that, so I wrote a hacked up shell script, and you can get it from the code section:\nmerge-script\nI hope you enjoy!\nBackground You might say, \u0026ldquo;why not just use git to take care of this,\u0026rdquo; which is fair. The truth is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really care about the histories as long as there\u0026rsquo;s revision. Here\u0026rsquo;s the situation:\nI keep a personal ikiwiki instance for all of my notes, tasks, and project stuff. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing revolutionary, and I even use deft, dired, and some hacked up lisp to do most of the work. But I also work on a lot of projects that have their own git repositories and I want to be able to track the notes of some of those files in those repositories as well.\nConflicts.\nThere are some possible solutions:\n1. Use hard links so that both files will point at the same data on disk.\nGreat idea, but it breaks on multiple systems. Even if it might have worked in this case, it freight ens me to have such fragile systems.\nNote: the more I play with this, the less suitable I think that it might be for multi system use. If one or both of the sides is in a git repo, and you make changes locally and then pull changes in from a git upstream, the git files, may look newer than the files that you changed. A flaw.\n2. Only edit files in one repository or the other, and have a pre-commit hook, or similar, that copies data from the new system to the old system.\nI rejected this because I thought I\u0026rsquo;d have a hard time enforcing this behavior.\n3. Write a script that uses some diff3 to merge (potential) changes from both sources of changes.\nThis is what I did.\nThe script actually uses the merge command which is a wrapper around diff3 from rcs. shrug.\nBeyond my somewhat trivial and weird use-case, I actually think that this script is more useful for the following situation:\nYou use services like Dropbox as a way of getting data onto mobile devices (say,) but you want the canonical version of the file to live in a git repository on your system.\nThis is the script for you.\nI hope you enjoy it!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/three-way-merge-script/","summary":"Note: This is an old post about a script I wrote a few months ago about a piece of code that I\u0026rsquo;m no longer (really) using. I present it here as an archival piece with a boatload of caveats. Enjoy!\nI have a problem that I think is not terribly unique: I have a directory of files and I want to maintain two distinct copies of these files at once, and I want a tool that looks at both directories and makes sure they\u0026rsquo;re up to date. That\u0026rsquo;s all. Turns out nothing does exactly that, so I wrote a hacked up shell script, and you can get it from the code section:\nmerge-script\nI hope you enjoy!\nBackground You might say, \u0026ldquo;why not just use git to take care of this,\u0026rdquo; which is fair. The truth is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really care about the histories as long as there\u0026rsquo;s revision. Here\u0026rsquo;s the situation:","title":"Three Way Merge Script"},{"content":"Computers are always getting faster. From the perspective of the casual observer it may seem like every year all of the various specs keep going up, and systems are faster.1 In truth, progress isn\u0026rsquo;t uniform across all systems and subsystems, and thinking about this progression of technology gives us a chance to think about the constraints that developers2 and other people who build technology face.\nFor most of the past year, I\u0026rsquo;ve used a single laptop, for all of my computing work, and while it\u0026rsquo;s been great, in this time I lost touch with the comparative speed of systems. No great loss, but I found myself surprised to learn that all computers did not have the same speed: It wasn\u0026rsquo;t until I started using other machines on a regular basis that I remembered that hardware could affect performance.\nFor most of the past decade, processors have been fast. While some processors are theoretically faster and some have other features like virtualization extensions and better multitasking capacities (i.e. hyperthreading and multi-core systems) the improvements have been incremental at best.\nMemory (RAM) manages to mostly keep up with the processors, so there\u0026rsquo;s no real bottleneck between RAM and the processor. Although RAM capacities are growing, at current volumes extra RAM just means services/systems that had to be distributed given RAM density can all run on one server. In general: \u0026ldquo;ho hum.\u0026rdquo;\nDisks are another story all together.\nWhile disks got faster over this period, they didn\u0026rsquo;t get much faster during this period, and so for a long time disks were the bottle neck in computing speed. To address this problem, a number of things changed:\nWe designed systems for asynchronous operation. Basically, folks spilled a lot of blood and energy to make sure that systems could continue to do work while waiting for the disk to reading or writing data. This involves using a lot of event loops, queuing systems, and so forth.\nThese systems are really cool, the only problem is that it means that we have to be smarter about some aspects of software design and deployment. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t fix the tons of legacy sitting around, or the fact that a lot of tools and programmers are struggling to keep up.\nWe started to build more distributed systems so that any individual spinning disk is responsible for writing/reading less data.\nWe hacked disks themselves to get better performance.\nThere are some ways you can eek out a bit of extra performance from spinning disks: namely RAID-10, hardware RAID controllers, and using smaller platters. RAID approaches use multiple drives (4) to provide simple redundancy and roughly double performance. Smaller platters require less movement of the disk arm, and you get a bit more out of the hardware.\nNow, with affordable solid state disks (SSDs,) all of these disk related speed problems are basically moot. So what are the next bottlenecks for computers and performance:\nProcessors. It might be the case that processors are going to be the slow to develop bottleneck. There are a lot of expectations on processors these days: high speed, low power consumption, low temperature, high amount of parallelism (cores and hyperthreading.) But these expectations are necessarily conflicting.\nThe main route to innovation is to make the processors themselves smaller, which does increase performance and helps control heat and power consumption, but there is a practical limit to the size of a processor.\nAlso, no matter how fast you make the processor, it\u0026rsquo;s irrelevant unless the software is capable of taking advantage of the feature.\nSoftware.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re still not great at building software with asynchronous components. \u0026ldquo;Non-blocking\u0026rdquo; systems do make it easier to have systems that work better with slower disks. Still, we don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of software that does a great job of using the parallelism of a processor, so it\u0026rsquo;s possible to get some operations that are slow and will remain slow because a single threaded process must grind through a long task and can\u0026rsquo;t share it.\nNetwork overhead.\nWhile I think better software is a huge problem, network throughput could be a huge issue. The internet endpoints (your connection) has gotten much faster in the past few years. That\u0026rsquo;s a good thing, indeed, but there are a number of problems:\nTransfer speeds aren\u0026rsquo;t keeping up with data growth or data storage, and if that trend continues, we\u0026rsquo;re going to end up with a lot of data that only exists in one physical location, which leads to catastrophic data loss.\nI think we\u0026rsquo;ll get back to a point where moving physical media around will begin to make sense. Again.\nWireless data speeds and architectures (particularly 802.11x, but also wide area wireless,) have become ubiquitous, but aren\u0026rsquo;t really sufficient for serious use. The fact that our homes, public places, and even offices (in some cases) aren\u0026rsquo;t wired correctly to be able to provide opportunities to plug in will begin to hurt.\nThoughts? Other bottlenecks? Different reading of the history?\nBy contrast, software seems like its always getting slower, and while this is partially true, there are additional factors at play, including feature growth, programmer efficiency, and legacy support requirements.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBecause developers control, at least to some extent, how everyone uses and understands technology, the constrains on the way they use computers id important to everyone.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/todays-bottleneck/","summary":"Computers are always getting faster. From the perspective of the casual observer it may seem like every year all of the various specs keep going up, and systems are faster.1 In truth, progress isn\u0026rsquo;t uniform across all systems and subsystems, and thinking about this progression of technology gives us a chance to think about the constraints that developers2 and other people who build technology face.\nFor most of the past year, I\u0026rsquo;ve used a single laptop, for all of my computing work, and while it\u0026rsquo;s been great, in this time I lost touch with the comparative speed of systems. No great loss, but I found myself surprised to learn that all computers did not have the same speed: It wasn\u0026rsquo;t until I started using other machines on a regular basis that I remembered that hardware could affect performance.\nFor most of the past decade, processors have been fast. While some processors are theoretically faster and some have other features like virtualization extensions and better multitasking capacities (i.","title":"Today's Bottleneck"},{"content":"Github is great, and I think they\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot--for the better--to change and shape the way that everyone uses and does really awesome things with git.\nBut I worry about lock-in, I worry about having a project that relies on some feature of github that can\u0026rsquo;t be easily accomplished on another platform.\nThis post is an index of \u0026ldquo;git ecosystem\u0026rdquo; tools that let you get something that looks a bit like github on your own servers. Feel free to edit this page (it\u0026rsquo;s a wiki!) if you have other tools you like or can recommend!\nPermissions Control Gitosis Gitolite Wiki / Pages Github has a wiki system that\u0026rsquo;s open source. I\u0026rsquo;ve never played around with it, because there\u0026rsquo;s ikiwiki which is better anyway.\nTheir page\u0026rsquo;s functionally is also open source, it\u0026rsquo;s Jekyll there\u0026rsquo;s no particular shortage of programs that do this kind of thing, and most aren\u0026rsquo;t that good but that\u0026rsquo;s an orthogonal point.\nHosted Solutions There are about a million different repository viewers, but the magic of the github website is that there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of other integrated functionality (bug tracking, merge request queues, automatic forking/branching/etc.\ngitorious - functional but inelegant. gitlab - promising but untested. repo.or.cz - functional but not practical for casual administration. Web hooks I\u0026rsquo;ve only recently found notify-webhook, but it basically implements something like github\u0026rsquo;s service hooks, as a traditional git post-recieve hook.\nThe Rest There\u0026rsquo;s no great stand alone merge (pull) request system. Other code review tools are uneven, but the truth is that pull requests are not a sufficiently advanced code review tool.\nPatchwork might work, but its a bit rustic for contemporary workflows.\nIntegrated issue tracking, hell any kind of issue tracking, remains an unsolved problem, but I think github\u0026rsquo;s approach is a good start, and that feature set isn\u0026rsquo;t as easily available from other projects/products/tools.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/github-without-github/","summary":"Github is great, and I think they\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot--for the better--to change and shape the way that everyone uses and does really awesome things with git.\nBut I worry about lock-in, I worry about having a project that relies on some feature of github that can\u0026rsquo;t be easily accomplished on another platform.\nThis post is an index of \u0026ldquo;git ecosystem\u0026rdquo; tools that let you get something that looks a bit like github on your own servers. Feel free to edit this page (it\u0026rsquo;s a wiki!) if you have other tools you like or can recommend!\nPermissions Control Gitosis Gitolite Wiki / Pages Github has a wiki system that\u0026rsquo;s open source. I\u0026rsquo;ve never played around with it, because there\u0026rsquo;s ikiwiki which is better anyway.\nTheir page\u0026rsquo;s functionally is also open source, it\u0026rsquo;s Jekyll there\u0026rsquo;s no particular shortage of programs that do this kind of thing, and most aren\u0026rsquo;t that good but that\u0026rsquo;s an orthogonal point.","title":"Github without Github"},{"content":"\u0026hellip; and planning\nI did a little bit of holiday knitting shopping. Given how infrequently I buy yarn and knitting things and the fact that shopping for knitting things correlates strongly with my project planning, it seems worth sharing:\nI got a cone of merino/tencel lace weight yarn in a steel blue color to knit a long plain tube to wear as a neck tube/scarf thing. I bought one of these a few months ago knit out of a jersey tencel knit, and I adore it, so it makes sense to knit something similar.\nHopefully knitting these scarves will prove successful and useful. I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a knitted sock wearer, I find most flat scarves dreadful to knit, I find shawls difficult to pull off, and I enjoy knitted hats but don\u0026rsquo;t find them windproof enough for common use. Having good, small, lightweight, and plain knitting projects would probably be very good thing indeed.\nI bought a couple of carbon fiber knitting needles, in sizes 2.5 (the size that my sweaters have been and will be for a little while,) and 0s (for the scarfs and hem facings as needed.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m a chronic needle bender and like sharp points and reasonably slippery needles. I also have a set of carbon fiber needles for socks which are great. Very much looking forward to trying these out.\nFinally, I\u0026rsquo;ve procured a few cones of HD Shetland to complement some of my left overs. On the sweater queue:\na few cardigans. One for my mother, and a second one for me? maybe something with shoulders/sleeves in a different color? I\u0026rsquo;ve used this kind of shading on otherwise plain sweaters, but it seems interesting to see how it might look on a two color sweater. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-shopping/","summary":"\u0026hellip; and planning\nI did a little bit of holiday knitting shopping. Given how infrequently I buy yarn and knitting things and the fact that shopping for knitting things correlates strongly with my project planning, it seems worth sharing:\nI got a cone of merino/tencel lace weight yarn in a steel blue color to knit a long plain tube to wear as a neck tube/scarf thing. I bought one of these a few months ago knit out of a jersey tencel knit, and I adore it, so it makes sense to knit something similar.\nHopefully knitting these scarves will prove successful and useful. I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a knitted sock wearer, I find most flat scarves dreadful to knit, I find shawls difficult to pull off, and I enjoy knitted hats but don\u0026rsquo;t find them windproof enough for common use. Having good, small, lightweight, and plain knitting projects would probably be very good thing indeed.","title":"Knitting Shopping"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting! Here\u0026rsquo;s an update:\nI finished a sweater. Still need to block it, but it looks great so far. It\u0026rsquo;s a (near) duplicate of a sweater that I made a few years ago in blues. The biggest difference in construction is that I did the hem in a very slightly different way. Other than that, it\u0026rsquo;s very much the exemplar of \u0026ldquo;the default tychoish sweater.\u0026rdquo;\nNote to self, it would be good to have a version of this sweater in brown.\nI started another sweater. This one is a medium gray and light blue-gray as a cardigan. Rather than do hems, the idea with this is:\npurl when you can and want to border.\nThis is an Elizabeth Zimmerman and Meg Swansen technique for colorwork to avoid ribbing or hems. If you purl occasionally in the first few inches, you can prevent rolling. Seems to work well enough, and it makes the bottom edge less bulky and more integrated into the sweater.\nCrocheted front steek with knitted cord (i-cord) edge, using the steek as facing.\nAnother Meg Swansen technique where you use the steek as facing, by crocheting along the edges and then knitting an i-cord to cause the steak to \u0026ldquo;fold\u0026rdquo; under and act as a facing. Blocking does the rest. Again, the end result is lightweight, flexible, and easy to handle.\nI have about five inches done, and I expect slow but steady progress on this over the next few months.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweater-evolutions/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting! Here\u0026rsquo;s an update:\nI finished a sweater. Still need to block it, but it looks great so far. It\u0026rsquo;s a (near) duplicate of a sweater that I made a few years ago in blues. The biggest difference in construction is that I did the hem in a very slightly different way. Other than that, it\u0026rsquo;s very much the exemplar of \u0026ldquo;the default tychoish sweater.\u0026rdquo;\nNote to self, it would be good to have a version of this sweater in brown.\nI started another sweater. This one is a medium gray and light blue-gray as a cardigan. Rather than do hems, the idea with this is:\npurl when you can and want to border.\nThis is an Elizabeth Zimmerman and Meg Swansen technique for colorwork to avoid ribbing or hems. If you purl occasionally in the first few inches, you can prevent rolling. Seems to work well enough, and it makes the bottom edge less bulky and more integrated into the sweater.","title":"Sweater Evolutions"},{"content":"You may hear people, particularly people who don\u0026rsquo;t like to write documentation, something like:\nUsers need minimalist documentation that only answers their questions, and there\u0026rsquo;s no point in overwhelming users with bloated, maximalist documentation that they\u0026rsquo;ll never read.\nWhich sounds great, but doesn\u0026rsquo;t reflect reality or best practice. Consider the following:\nDocumentation is as much for the producers of the software as it is for the users. Having extensive documentation contributes too, and reflects a sane design process. Collecting and curating the documentation helps ensure that the software is usable and knowable. Having complete documentation reduces support costs, both by reducing the volume of support requests and by lowering the complexity of the work associated with support. Good extensive documentation drives adoption of software. Products with better documentation will always see better adoption than comparable products with worse documentation. Without users, software is useless.\nDoes this mean that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t value minimalism, particularly conceptual minimalism, and visual minimalism? Does this mean you should avoid customizing the documentation to fit the needs and patterns of your users?\nNo, of course not.\nBut minimalism for the sake of minimalism, without a particular strategy is an awful and ill-gotten ideology.\nEven if it looks good, and particularly if it sounds good.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-favor-of-documentation-maximalism/","summary":"You may hear people, particularly people who don\u0026rsquo;t like to write documentation, something like:\nUsers need minimalist documentation that only answers their questions, and there\u0026rsquo;s no point in overwhelming users with bloated, maximalist documentation that they\u0026rsquo;ll never read.\nWhich sounds great, but doesn\u0026rsquo;t reflect reality or best practice. Consider the following:\nDocumentation is as much for the producers of the software as it is for the users. Having extensive documentation contributes too, and reflects a sane design process. Collecting and curating the documentation helps ensure that the software is usable and knowable. Having complete documentation reduces support costs, both by reducing the volume of support requests and by lowering the complexity of the work associated with support. Good extensive documentation drives adoption of software. Products with better documentation will always see better adoption than comparable products with worse documentation. Without users, software is useless.\nDoes this mean that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t value minimalism, particularly conceptual minimalism, and visual minimalism?","title":"Documentation Maximalism"},{"content":"Like technical debt, information debt is a huge problem for all kinds of organizations, and one that all technical writers need to be aware and able to combat directly. Let\u0026rsquo;s backup a little\u0026hellip;\nInformation debt is what happens when there aren\u0026rsquo;t proper systems, tools, and processes in place to maintain and create high quality information resources. A number of unfortunate and expensive things result:\nPeople spend time recreating documents, pages, and research that already exists. This is incredibly innefficent and leads to: Inaccurate information propagates throughout the organization and to the public. Information and style \u0026ldquo;drifts,\u0026rdquo; when information and facts exist in many places. Organizations spend more money on infrastructure and tools as a band-aid when data is poorly organized. People lose confidence in information resources and stop relying on them, preferring to ask other people for information. This increases the communication overhead, noise level, and takes longer for everyone, than using a good resource. To help resolve information debt:\nDedicate resources to paying back information debts. It takes time to build really good resources, to collect and consolidate information, and to keep them up to date. But given the costs of the debt, it\u0026rsquo;s often worth it. Documents must be \u0026ldquo;living,\u0026rdquo; usefully versioned, and there must be a process for updating documents. Furthermore, while it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to actually limit editing privileges, it\u0026rsquo;s important that responsibility for editing and maintaining documents isn\u0026rsquo;t diffused and thus neglected. Information resources, must have an \u0026ldquo;owner\u0026rdquo; within an organization or group who is responsible for keeping it up to date, and making sure that people know it exists. You can have the best repository for facts, if no one uses it and the documents are not up to date, it\u0026rsquo;s worthless. Minimize the number of information resources. While it doesn\u0026rsquo;t always make sense to keep all information in the same resource or system, the more \u0026ldquo;silos\u0026rdquo; where a piece of information or document might live the less likely a reader/user will find it. \u0026hellip; and more.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on adding a lot of writing on information debt in the technical writing section of the wiki. I\u0026rsquo;ll blog more about this, while I continue to work through some of these ideas, but I\u0026rsquo;m quite interested in hearing your thoughts on this post and on the information-debt pages as well.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/information-debts/","summary":"Like technical debt, information debt is a huge problem for all kinds of organizations, and one that all technical writers need to be aware and able to combat directly. Let\u0026rsquo;s backup a little\u0026hellip;\nInformation debt is what happens when there aren\u0026rsquo;t proper systems, tools, and processes in place to maintain and create high quality information resources. A number of unfortunate and expensive things result:\nPeople spend time recreating documents, pages, and research that already exists. This is incredibly innefficent and leads to: Inaccurate information propagates throughout the organization and to the public. Information and style \u0026ldquo;drifts,\u0026rdquo; when information and facts exist in many places. Organizations spend more money on infrastructure and tools as a band-aid when data is poorly organized. People lose confidence in information resources and stop relying on them, preferring to ask other people for information. This increases the communication overhead, noise level, and takes longer for everyone, than using a good resource.","title":"Information Debts"},{"content":"This post is a follow up to the interlude in the /posts/programming-tutorials post, which part of an ongoing series of posts on programmer training and related issues in technological literacy and education.\nIn short, creating novel automations is hard. The process would have to look something like:\nRealize that you have an unfulfilled software need. Decide what the proper solution to that need is. Make sure the solution is sufficiently flexible to be able to support all required complexity. Then sit down, open an empty buffer and begin writing code. Not easy.1\nSomething I\u0026rsquo;ve learned in the past few years is that the above process is relatively uncommon for actual working programmers: most of the time you\u0026rsquo;re adding a few lines here and there, testing various changes or adding small features built upon other existing systems and features.\nIf this is how programming work is actually done, then the kinds of methods we use to teach programmers how to program should hold some resemblance to the actual work that programmers do. As an attempt at a case study, my own recent experience:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with Buildbot for a few weeks now for personal curiosity, and it may be useful to automate some stuff for the Cyborg Institute. Buildbot has its merits and frustrations, but this post isn\u0026rsquo;t really about buildbot. Rather, the experience of doing buildbot work has taught me something about programming and about \u0026ldquo;building things,\u0026rdquo; including:\nWhen you set up buildbot, it generates a python configuration file where all buildbot configuration and \u0026ldquo;programming\u0026rdquo; goes.\nAs a bit of a sidebar, I\u0026rsquo;ve been using a base configuration derived from the buildbot configuration for buildbot itself, and the fact that the default configuration is less clean and a big and I\u0026rsquo;d assumed that I was configuring a buildbot in the \u0026ldquo;normal way.\u0026rdquo;\nTurns out I haven\u0026rsquo;t, and this hurts my (larger) argument slightly.\nI like the idea of having a very programmatic interface for systems that must integrate with other components, and I really like the idea of a system that produces a good starting template. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what this does for overall maintainability in the long term, but it makes getting started and using the software in a meaningful way, much more possible.\nUsing organizing my buildbot configuration as I have, modeled on the \u0026ldquo;metabuildbot,\u0026rdquo; has nicely illustrated the idea software is just a collection of modules that interact with each other in a defined way. Nothing more, nothing less.\nDistributed systems are incredibly difficult to get people to conceptualize properly, for anyone, and I think most of the frustration with buildbot stems from this.\nBuildbot provides an immediate object lesson on the trade-offs between simplicity and terseness on the one hand and maintainability and complexity on the other.\nThis point relates to the previous one. Because distributed systems are hard, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to configure something that\u0026rsquo;s too complex and that isn\u0026rsquo;t what you want at all in your Buildbot before you realize that what you actually need is something else entirely.\nThis doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that there aren\u0026rsquo;t nightmarish Buildbot configs, and there are, but the lesson is quite valuable.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something interesting and instructive in the way that Buildbot\u0026rsquo;s user experience lies somewhere between \u0026ldquo;an application,\u0026rdquo; that you install and use, and a program that you write using a toolkit.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s clearly not exactly either, and both at the same time.\nI suspect some web-programming systems may be similar, but I have relatively little experience with systems like these. And frankly, I have little need for these kinds of systems in any of my current projects.\nThoughts?\nIndeed this may be why the incidence of people writing code, getting it working and then rewrite it from the ground up: writing things from scratch is an objectively hard thing, where rewriting and iterating is considerably easier. And the end result is often, but not always better.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/novel-automation/","summary":"This post is a follow up to the interlude in the /posts/programming-tutorials post, which part of an ongoing series of posts on programmer training and related issues in technological literacy and education.\nIn short, creating novel automations is hard. The process would have to look something like:\nRealize that you have an unfulfilled software need. Decide what the proper solution to that need is. Make sure the solution is sufficiently flexible to be able to support all required complexity. Then sit down, open an empty buffer and begin writing code. Not easy.1\nSomething I\u0026rsquo;ve learned in the past few years is that the above process is relatively uncommon for actual working programmers: most of the time you\u0026rsquo;re adding a few lines here and there, testing various changes or adding small features built upon other existing systems and features.\nIf this is how programming work is actually done, then the kinds of methods we use to teach programmers how to program should hold some resemblance to the actual work that programmers do.","title":"Novel Automation"},{"content":"This post is a follow up to my :doc`/posts/coding-pedagogy` post. This \u0026ldquo;series,\u0026rdquo; addresses how people learn how to program, the state of the technical materials that support this education process, and the role of programming in technology development.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to learn how to program for a while and I\u0026rsquo;ve been perpetually frustrated by pretty much every lesson or document I\u0026rsquo;ve ever encountered in this search. This is hyperbolic, but it\u0026rsquo;s pretty close to the truth. Teaching people how to program is hard and the materials are either written by people who:\ndon\u0026rsquo;t really remember how they learned to program. Many programming tutorials were written by these kinds of programmers, and the resulting materials tend to be decent in and of themselves, but they fail to actually teach people how to program if they don\u0026rsquo;t know how to program already.\nIf you already know how to program, or have learned to program in a few different languages, it\u0026rsquo;s easy so substitute \u0026ldquo;learning how to program,\u0026rdquo; with \u0026ldquo;learn how to program in a new language\u0026rdquo; because that experience is more fresh, and easier to understand.\nThese kinds of materials will teach the novice programmer a lot about programming languages and fundamental computer science topics, but not anything that you really need to learn how to write code.\npeople who don\u0026rsquo;t really know how to program. People who don\u0026rsquo;t know how to program tend to assume that you can teach by example, using guided tutorials. You can\u0026rsquo;t really. Examples are good for demonstrating syntax and procedure, and answering tactical questions, but aren\u0026rsquo;t sufficient for teaching the required higher order problem solving skills. Focusing on the concrete aspects of programming syntax, the standard library, and the process for executing code isn\u0026rsquo;t enough.\nThese kinds of documents can be very instructive, and outsider perspective are quite useful, but if the document can\u0026rsquo;t convey how to solve real problems with code, you\u0026rsquo;ll be hard pressed to learn how to write useful programs from these guides.\nIn essence, we have a chicken and egg problem.\nInterlude:\nEven six months ago, when people asked me \u0026ldquo;are you a programmer?\u0026rdquo; (or engineer,) I\u0026rsquo;d often object strenuously. Now, I wave my hand back and forth and say \u0026ldquo;sorta, I program a bit, but I\u0026rsquo;m the technical writer.\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t write code on a daily basis and I\u0026rsquo;m not very nimble at starting to write programs from scratch, but sometimes when the need arises, I know enough to write code that works, to figure out the best solution to fix at least some of the problems I run into.\nI still ask other people to write programs or fix problems I\u0026rsquo;m having, but it\u0026rsquo;s usually more because I don\u0026rsquo;t have time to figure out an existing system that I know they\u0026rsquo;re familiar with and less because I\u0026rsquo;m incapable of making the change myself.\nEven despite these advances, I still find it hard to sit down with a blank buffer and write code from scratch, even if I have a pretty clear idea of what it needs to do. Increasingly, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to believe that this is the case for most people who write code, even very skilled engineers.\nThis will be the subject of an upcoming post.\nThe solution(s):\n1. Teach people how to code by forcing people to debug programs and make trivial modifications to code.\nPeople pick up syntax pretty easily, but struggle more with the problem solving aspects of code. While there are some subtle aspects of syntax, the compiler or interpreter does enough to teach people syntax. The larger challenge is getting people to understand the relationship between their changes and behavior and any single change and the reset of a piece of code.\n2. Teach people how to program by getting them to solve actual problems using actual tools, libraries, and packages.\nToo often, programming tutorials and examples attempt to be self-contained or unrealistically simple. While this makes sense from a number of perspectives (easier to create, easier to explain, fewer dependency problems for users,) it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly uncommon and probably leads to people thinking that a lot of programming revolves around re-implementing solutions to solved problems.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not making a real argument about computer science education, or formal engineering training, with which I have very little experience or interest. As contemporary, technically literate, actors in digital systems, programming is a relevant for most people.\nI\u0026rsquo;m convinced that many people do a great deal of work that is effectively programming: manipulating tools, identifying and recording procedures, collecting information about the environment, performing analysis, and taking action based on collected data. Editing macros, mail filtering systems, and spreadsheets are obvious examples though there are others.\nWould teaching these people how programming worked and how they could use programming tools improve their digital existences? Possibly.\nWould general productivity improve if more people new how to think about automation and were able to do some of their own programming? Almost certainly.\nWould having more casual programmers create additional problems and challenges in technology? Yes. These would be interesting problems to solve as well.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/programming-tutorials/","summary":"This post is a follow up to my :doc`/posts/coding-pedagogy` post. This \u0026ldquo;series,\u0026rdquo; addresses how people learn how to program, the state of the technical materials that support this education process, and the role of programming in technology development.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to learn how to program for a while and I\u0026rsquo;ve been perpetually frustrated by pretty much every lesson or document I\u0026rsquo;ve ever encountered in this search. This is hyperbolic, but it\u0026rsquo;s pretty close to the truth. Teaching people how to program is hard and the materials are either written by people who:\ndon\u0026rsquo;t really remember how they learned to program. Many programming tutorials were written by these kinds of programmers, and the resulting materials tend to be decent in and of themselves, but they fail to actually teach people how to program if they don\u0026rsquo;t know how to program already.\nIf you already know how to program, or have learned to program in a few different languages, it\u0026rsquo;s easy so substitute \u0026ldquo;learning how to program,\u0026rdquo; with \u0026ldquo;learn how to program in a new language\u0026rdquo; because that experience is more fresh, and easier to understand.","title":"Programming Tutorials"},{"content":"(or my latest attempt to do things in a more \u0026ldquo;project oriented way.\u0026rdquo;)\nThis post is about recent projects, projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on, and how my work has changed in recent months.\nA couple of weeks ago, I finally posted all of the content that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the new, revived Cyborg Institute. While the book on systems administration itself had been mostly done for a while, I\u0026rsquo;d delayed for two reasons:\nI wanted to have a couple of other projects completed to demonstrate that the Institute as a project wasn\u0026rsquo;t just isolated to book-like objects. I wanted to have some infrastructure in place to be able to sanely publish the Institute site without using some gnarly content management system.1 The end result is that in addition to the book, I\u0026rsquo;ve put together a few other projects and documentation. The more exciting thing is that I might do more things like this in the future.\nIn addition to a lot of day-job work--forthcomming releases and team growth are eating a lot of my time--I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a series of wiki pages (and related blog posts,) that address \u0026ldquo;information debt that happens when organizations don\u0026rsquo;t put resources and energy into maintaining resources and \u0026ldquo;knoweldge.\u0026rdquo; Expect to hear more on this topic.\nThe truth is that I really like working on bigger projects. Writing blog posts and participating in online conversations has been very rewarding to me over the past ~10 years, I feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve hit a wall: I\u0026rsquo;ve written ~830,000 words on tychoish.com, and am frustrated that there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot to show for it:\nreadership is steady, even increasing, but not inspiring,\nI don\u0026rsquo;t actually want to work as a blogger, and\nmost importantly the work I\u0026rsquo;ve done here doesn\u0026rsquo;t really build to anything more than a half-dozen or so blog posts.\nWhile there are themes throughout all of the posts, the work isn\u0026rsquo;t very rigorous, and it lacks a certain kind of depth.\nSo here I am, writing books-like objects things about technology that I hope are and will be useful for both technical and non-technical audiences, as well as compiling the little things that I hack on for other people to improve and benefit fromm, and writing fiction (that I may try and publish conventionally, but I may end up self-publishing using a similar proccess.) The goal is to:\nWrite things with more rigor, including better citations and research.\nWork on projects that address topics more comprehensively.\nProduce, document, and maintain scripts and other programs that I write rather than endlessly critique existing tools and approaches. In short, less talking about stuff and more making stuff.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s see how this goes!\nAll content management systems are gnarly.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/project-orientation/","summary":"(or my latest attempt to do things in a more \u0026ldquo;project oriented way.\u0026rdquo;)\nThis post is about recent projects, projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on, and how my work has changed in recent months.\nA couple of weeks ago, I finally posted all of the content that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the new, revived Cyborg Institute. While the book on systems administration itself had been mostly done for a while, I\u0026rsquo;d delayed for two reasons:\nI wanted to have a couple of other projects completed to demonstrate that the Institute as a project wasn\u0026rsquo;t just isolated to book-like objects. I wanted to have some infrastructure in place to be able to sanely publish the Institute site without using some gnarly content management system.1 The end result is that in addition to the book, I\u0026rsquo;ve put together a few other projects and documentation. The more exciting thing is that I might do more things like this in the future.","title":"Project Orientation"},{"content":"For a while, I\u0026rsquo;ve been envious of some of the project and file navigation features in emacs for browsing bigger projects/programs, things like imenu and tags have always seems awesome but given that I spend most of time editing restructured text and markdown files (I\u0026rsquo;m a technical writer), these tools have been distant and not a part of my day to day work.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that it would be impossible to write interfaces for imenu or etags, for the formats I use regularly, but more that I\u0026rsquo;ve never gotten around to it until now.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re still a ways away on the question of etags, but it turns out that when I wasn\u0026rsquo;t looking rst mode got imenu support, and with the following little bit of elisp you can get imenu for markdown.\n(setq markdown-imenu-generic-expression '((\u0026quot;title\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^\\\\(.*\\\\)[\\n]=+$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h2-\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^\\\\(.*\\\\)[\\n]-+$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h1\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^# \\\\(.*\\\\)$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h2\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^## \\\\(.*\\\\)$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h3\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^### \\\\(.*\\\\)$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h4\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^#### \\\\(.*\\\\)$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h5\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^##### \\\\(.*\\\\)$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h6\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^###### \\\\(.*\\\\)$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;fn\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^\\\\[\\\\^\\\\(.*\\\\)\\\\]\u0026quot; 1) )) (add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook (lambda () (setq imenu-generic-expression markdown-imenu-generic-expression))) Pretty awesome! I hope it helps you make awesome things.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/imenu-for-markdown-and-writing/","summary":"For a while, I\u0026rsquo;ve been envious of some of the project and file navigation features in emacs for browsing bigger projects/programs, things like imenu and tags have always seems awesome but given that I spend most of time editing restructured text and markdown files (I\u0026rsquo;m a technical writer), these tools have been distant and not a part of my day to day work.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that it would be impossible to write interfaces for imenu or etags, for the formats I use regularly, but more that I\u0026rsquo;ve never gotten around to it until now.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re still a ways away on the question of etags, but it turns out that when I wasn\u0026rsquo;t looking rst mode got imenu support, and with the following little bit of elisp you can get imenu for markdown.\n(setq markdown-imenu-generic-expression '((\u0026quot;title\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^\\\\(.*\\\\)[\\n]=+$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h2-\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^\\\\(.*\\\\)[\\n]-+$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h1\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^# \\\\(.*\\\\)$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h2\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^## \\\\(.*\\\\)$\u0026quot; 1) (\u0026quot;h3\u0026quot; \u0026quot;^### \\\\(.","title":"imenu for Markdown"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve recently gone from being someone who uses git entirely \u0026ldquo;on my own,\u0026rdquo; to being someone who uses git with a lot of other people at once. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had to introduce git to the uninitiated a few times. These have both been notable challenges.\nGit is hard, particularly in these contexts: not only are there many concepts to learn, but there\u0026rsquo;s no single proscribed workflow and a multitude of workflow possibilities. Which is great from a philosophy perspective, and arguably good from a \u0026ldquo;useful/robust tool perspective,\u0026rdquo; but horrible from a \u0026ldquo;best practices\u0026rdquo; perspective. Hell, it\u0026rsquo;s horrible for a \u0026ldquo;consistent\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;sane\u0026rdquo; practices perspective.\nThere are a lot of solutions to the \u0026ldquo;finding a sane practice,\u0026rdquo; when working with git and large teams. Patching or reformulating the interface is a common strategy. Legit is a great example of this, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s enough, because the problem is really one of bad and unclear defaults. For instance:\nThe \u0026ldquo;master\u0026rdquo; branch, in larger distributed systems is highly confusing. If you have multiple remotes (which is common), every remote has its own master branch, which all (necessarily) refer to different possible points in a repository\u0026rsquo;s history. The names of a local branch do not necessarily refer to the names of the remote branch in any specific repository. The decoupling of local and remote branches, makes sense from a design perspective, but it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to retain this mapping in your head, and it\u0026rsquo;s also difficult to talk about branch configurations because your \u0026ldquo;view of the universe,\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t often coincide with anyone else\u0026rsquo;s? Here are some ideas:\nHave two modes of operation: a maintainer\u0026rsquo;s mode that resembles current day git with a few basic tweaks described in later options, and a contributors mode, that is designed with makes the following assumptions:\nThe \u0026ldquo;mainline\u0026rdquo; of the project\u0026rsquo;s development will occur in a branch to which this user only has read-only access. Most of this user\u0026rsquo;s work will happen in isolated topic branches. Branch naming enforcement:\nAll branches will be uniquely named, relative to a username and/or hostname. This will be transparent (largely) to the history, but will make all conversations about branches less awkward. This is basically how branches work now, with [remote]/[branch], except that all local branches need self/[branch], and the software should make this more transparent. Remote branches will implicitly have local tracking branches with identical names. You could commit to any of the local tracking branches, and pull will have the ability to convert your changes to a self/[branch] if needed. All local branches, if published, will map to a single remote branch. One remote, will be the user\u0026rsquo;s default \u0026ldquo;publication target,\u0026rdquo; for branches. This is basically what the origin remote does today, so again, this isn\u0026rsquo;t a major change.\nWhen you run git clone, this remote repository should be the upstream repository, not the origin.\nUse the origin remote, which should be the default \u0026ldquo;place to publish my work,\u0026rdquo; and would be configured separately.\nMinor tweaks.\nMap local branches directly to remote branches. Be able to specify a remote branch as a \u0026ldquo;mirror\u0026rdquo; of another branch. Make cherry-picked commits identifiable by their original commit-id internally. The goal is to push people to cherry-pick commits as much as possible to construct histories without needing to rebase.1 Have sub-module support automatically configured, without fussing. Have better functions to cleaning up branch cruft. Particularly on remotes. Have some sort of configurable \u0026ldquo;published pointer,\u0026rdquo; that users can use as a safe block against rebases before a given point. The goals here are to:\nMake working with git all about branches and iteration rather than a sequence of commits. Provide good tools to prevent people from rebasing commits, which is always confusing and rarely actually required. Make branch names as canonical as possible. The fact that there can be many possible names for the same thing is awful. Who\u0026rsquo;s with me? We can sort out the details, if you want in comments.\nTo make this plausible, github needs to allow cherry-picked commits to close a pull request.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/practical-branch-layout/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve recently gone from being someone who uses git entirely \u0026ldquo;on my own,\u0026rdquo; to being someone who uses git with a lot of other people at once. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had to introduce git to the uninitiated a few times. These have both been notable challenges.\nGit is hard, particularly in these contexts: not only are there many concepts to learn, but there\u0026rsquo;s no single proscribed workflow and a multitude of workflow possibilities. Which is great from a philosophy perspective, and arguably good from a \u0026ldquo;useful/robust tool perspective,\u0026rdquo; but horrible from a \u0026ldquo;best practices\u0026rdquo; perspective. Hell, it\u0026rsquo;s horrible for a \u0026ldquo;consistent\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;sane\u0026rdquo; practices perspective.\nThere are a lot of solutions to the \u0026ldquo;finding a sane practice,\u0026rdquo; when working with git and large teams. Patching or reformulating the interface is a common strategy. Legit is a great example of this, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s enough, because the problem is really one of bad and unclear defaults.","title":"Practical Branch Layout"},{"content":"I recently took some of my writing time to create a makefile (Novel Makefile) to manage work I hope to be doing on a new novel project. I\u0026rsquo;ve started outlining and researching the story in earnest after having spent the past few couple of years talking about it, and I think writing will commence soon. In another post I\u0026rsquo;d like to write up some thoughts on the tooling and technology of writing non-technical/non-manual long-form.\nThis post, drawing from the spending some time buried deep in production is about the state of (conceptually) longer form work in digital mediums. Or, at least a brief commentary on same.\nThe tools that I use to write technical materials do all sorts of cool things, like:\nprovide instant cross referencing, generate great indexes, and automatically generate and link glossaries. This is not particularly unusual, and in fact Sphinx is somewhat under-featured relative to other documentation generation systems like DocBook.1\nAnd yet people publish ebooks that virtually identical to paper books. Ebooks seem to say \u0026ldquo;*this electronic book is the best facsimile of a paper book that we can imagine right now,*\u0026rdquo; while totally ignoring anything more that a *hyper*text rightfully might be.\nI enjoy reading ebooks, just as I have enjoyed reading paperbooks, but mostly because ebooks basically are paperbooks. I\u0026rsquo;ve written posts in the past challenging myself,and fiction writers in general, to actually do hypertext rather than recapitulating prior modalities in digital form.\nAt various points I\u0026rsquo;ve thought that wikis might be a good model of how to do hypertext, because the form is structurally novel. Any more, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that this is the case: wikis are unstructured and chaotic, and I\u0026rsquo;ve come to believe that the secret to hypertext is structure. There are so many possibilities in hypertext, and I think much experimentation in hypertext has attempted to address the chaos of this experience. This does serve to highlight the extent to which \u0026ldquo;the future is here,\u0026rdquo; but it obscures the fact that structure makes narratives understandable. Think about how much great, new, innovative (and successful!) fiction in the past decade (or so) is not structurally experimental or chaotic. (Answer: there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of it.)\nThe not-so-secret of hypertext, is (I suspect,) tooling: without really good tools the mechanics of producing a complex, interactive textual experience2 is difficult for a single writer, or even a small group of writers. Most tools that manage the publication and writing of text are not suited to helping the production of large-multi-page and mutli-component texts. One potential glimmer of hope is that tools for developing programs (IDEs, build systems, compilers, templating systems, introspection tools, pattern matching, etc.) are well developed and could modified for use in text production.\nThe second non-so-secret of hypertext is probably that hypertext is an evolution of text production and consumption, not a revolution. Which only seems reasonable. We have the technology now to produce really cool text product. While tooling needs to get better, the literature needs to do some catching up.\nLets start making things!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that Sphinx is \u0026ldquo;bad,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s clearly designed for a specific kind of documentation project, and if you stray too far outside of those bounds, or need formats that aren\u0026rsquo;t quite supported, then you end up without a lot of recourse. Having said that, the \u0026ldquo;normal,\u0026rdquo; well supported and most projects--documentation or otherwise--will only very rarely hit upon an actual limitation of Sphinx itself.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nTo be clear, I\u0026rsquo;m partial to the argument that today\u0026rsquo;s computer games, particularly role-playing games, are the things that the futurists of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Theodor Holm Nelson) called \u0026ldquo;hypertext.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hypertextuality/","summary":"I recently took some of my writing time to create a makefile (Novel Makefile) to manage work I hope to be doing on a new novel project. I\u0026rsquo;ve started outlining and researching the story in earnest after having spent the past few couple of years talking about it, and I think writing will commence soon. In another post I\u0026rsquo;d like to write up some thoughts on the tooling and technology of writing non-technical/non-manual long-form.\nThis post, drawing from the spending some time buried deep in production is about the state of (conceptually) longer form work in digital mediums. Or, at least a brief commentary on same.\nThe tools that I use to write technical materials do all sorts of cool things, like:\nprovide instant cross referencing, generate great indexes, and automatically generate and link glossaries. This is not particularly unusual, and in fact Sphinx is somewhat under-featured relative to other documentation generation systems like DocBook.","title":"Hypertextuality"},{"content":"Access control is both immensely useful and incredibly broken.\nAccess control, or the ability to constrain access to data and programs in a shared system is the only way that we, as users of shared systems, can maintain our identities, personal security, and privacy. Shared systems include: databases, file servers, social networking sites, virtualized computing systems, vendor accounts, control panels, management tools, and so forth all need robust, flexible, granular, and scalable access control tools.\nContemporary access control tools--access control lists (ACL,) and access control groups--indeed the entire conceptual framework for managing access to data and resources, don\u0026rsquo;t work. From a theoretical practice, ACLs that express a relationship between users or groups of users and data or resources, represent a parsimonious solution to the \u0026ldquo;access control problem:\u0026rdquo; if properly deployed only those with access grants will have access to a given resource.\nIn practice these these kinds of relationships do not work. Typically relationships between data and users is rich and complex and different users need to be able to do different things with different resources. Some users need \u0026ldquo;read only\u0026rdquo; access, others need partial read access, some need read and write access but only to a subset of a resource. While ACL systems can impose these kinds of restrictions, the access control abscration doesn\u0026rsquo;t match the data abstraction or the real-world relationships that it supposedly reflects.\nCompounding this problem are two important factors:\nAccess control needs change over time in response to social and cultural shifts among the users and providers of these resources. There are too many pieces of information or resources in any potential shared system to allocate access on a per-object or per-resource basis, and the volume of objects and resources is only increasing. Often many objects or resources have the same or similar access control patterns, which leads to the \u0026ldquo;group\u0026rdquo; abstraction. Groups make it possible to describe a specific access control pattern that apply to a number of objects, and connect this pattern with specific resources.\nConceptual deficiencies:\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a volume problem. Access control data represents a many-to-many-to-many relationship. There are many different users and (nested) groups, many different kinds of access controls that systems can grant, and many different (nested) resources. This would be unmanageably complex without the possibility for nesting, but nesting means that the relationships between resources and between groups and users are also important. With the possibility for nesting access control is impossible.\nACLs and group-based access control don\u0026rsquo;t account for the fact that access must be constantly evolving, and current systems don\u0026rsquo;t contain support for ongoing maintenance. (we need background threads that go through and validate access control consistency.) Also all access control grants must have some capacity for automatic expiration.\nAccess control requirements and possibilities shift as data becomes more or less structured, and as data use patterns change. The same conceptual framework that works well for access control in the context of a the data stored in a relational database, doesn\u0026rsquo;t work so when the data in question is a word processing document, an email folder, or a spread sheet.\nThe fewer people that need access to a single piece of data, the easier the access control system can be. While this seems self evident, it also means that access control systems are difficult to test in the really large complex systems in which they\u0026rsquo;re used.\nGroup-based access control systems, in effect, normalize data about access control, in an effort to speed up data access times. While this performance is welcome, in most cases granting access via groups leads to an overly liberal distribution of access control rights. At once, its too difficult to understand \u0026ldquo;who has access to what\u0026rdquo; and too easy to add people to groups that give them more access than they need.\nSo the solution:\nDenormalize all access control data, don\u0026rsquo;t grant access to groups, and forbid inheritance. This is totally counter to the state of the art. In most ways, normalized access control data, with role/group-based access control, and complex inheritance are the gold standard. Why would it work?\nIf you have a piece of data, you will always be able to determine who has access to data, without needing to do another look-up.\nIf you can deactivate credentials, then a background process can go through and remove access without causing a large security problem. (For partial removes, you would freeze an account, let the background process modify access control and then unfreeze the account.)\nThe down side is that, potentially, in a large system, it may take a rather long time for access grants to propagate to users. Locking user accounts makes the system secure/viable, but doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the process any more quick.\nAs an added bonus, these processes could probably be independent and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t require any sort of shared state or lock, which means many such operation could run in parallel, and they could stop and restart at will.\nThe inheritance option should be fuzzy. Some sort of \u0026ldquo;bucket-based\u0026rdquo; access control should be possible, if there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of data with the same access control rules and users.\nOnce things get more complex, buckets are the wrong metaphor, you should use granular controls everywhere.\nProblems/Conclusion:\nDenormalization might fix the problems with ACLs and permissions systems, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t fix the problems with distributed identity management.\nAs a counterpoint, this seems like a cryptography management problem.\nStoring access control information with data means that it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to take a user and return a list of what these credentials have access to.\nIn truth, centralized ACL systems are subject to this flaw as well.\nA huge part of the problem with centralized ACL derives from nesting, and the fact that we tend to model/organize data in tree-like structures, that often run counter to the organization of access control rights. As a result access control tools must be arbitrary.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/denormalize-access-control-metadata/","summary":"Access control is both immensely useful and incredibly broken.\nAccess control, or the ability to constrain access to data and programs in a shared system is the only way that we, as users of shared systems, can maintain our identities, personal security, and privacy. Shared systems include: databases, file servers, social networking sites, virtualized computing systems, vendor accounts, control panels, management tools, and so forth all need robust, flexible, granular, and scalable access control tools.\nContemporary access control tools--access control lists (ACL,) and access control groups--indeed the entire conceptual framework for managing access to data and resources, don\u0026rsquo;t work. From a theoretical practice, ACLs that express a relationship between users or groups of users and data or resources, represent a parsimonious solution to the \u0026ldquo;access control problem:\u0026rdquo; if properly deployed only those with access grants will have access to a given resource.\nIn practice these these kinds of relationships do not work.","title":"Denormalize Access Control"},{"content":"I tell people that I\u0026rsquo;m a professional writer, but this is a bit misleading, because what I really do is figure out how to organize information so that it\u0026rsquo;s useful and usable. Anyone, with sufficient training and practice, can figure out how to convey simple facts in plain language, but figuring out how to organize simple facts in plain language into a coherent text is the more important part of my job and work.\nThis post and the \u0026ldquo;Information Debt\u0026rdquo; wiki page, begin to address some of these the problem of information resource maintenance, organization, and institutional practices with regards to information and knowledge resources.\nOrganization is hard. Really hard. One of the challenges for digital resources is that they lack all of the conventions of /technical-writing/books, which would seem to be freeing: you get more space and you get the opportunity to do really flexible categorization and organization things.\nGreat right?\nRight.\nReally flexible and powerful taxonomic systems, like tagging systems have a number of problems when applied to large information resources:\nthe relationship between the \u0026ldquo;scope\u0026rdquo; of the tag, and the specificity of the tag matters a lot. Too much. Problems arise when: tags are really specific, pages include a number of pieces of information, and tags can only map to pages. tags are general and the resources all address similar or related topics. the size of the tag \u0026ldquo;buckets\u0026rdquo; matters as well. If there are too many items with a tag, users will find not the tag for answering their questions. if your users or applications have added additional functionality using tags, tags begin to break as a useful taxonomic system. For example, if your system attaches actions to specific tags (i.e. send email alerts when content with a specific tag,) or if you use a regular notation to simulate a hierarchy, then editors begin adding content to tags, not for taxonomic reasons, but for workflow reasons or to trigger the system. The resulting organization isn\u0026rsquo;t useful from a textual perspective.\nIf you have to have multiple tagging systems or namespaces.\nUsing namespaces is powerful, and helps prevent collisions. At the same Sat Aug 16 10:50:00 2014, if your taxonomic system has collisions, this points to a larger problem.\nIf the taxonomy ever has more than one term for a conceptual facet, then the tagging system is broken.\nThese problems tend to exacerbate as:\nthe resource ages. the number of contributors grow. There\u0026rsquo;s this core paradox in tagging systems: To tag content effectively, you need a fix list of potential tags before you begin tagging content, and you need to be very familiar with the corpus of tagged contentbefore* beginning to tag content.*\nAnd there\u0026rsquo;s not much you can do to avoid it. To further complicate the problem, it\u0026rsquo;s essentially impossible to \u0026ldquo;redo\u0026rdquo; a taxonomic system for sufficiently large resources given the time requirements for reclassification and the fact that classification systems and processes are difficult to automate.\nThe prevalence of tagging systems and the promises of easy, quick taxonomic organization are hard to avoid and counteract. As part of the fight against information debt it\u0026rsquo;s important to draw attention to the failure of broken taxonomy systems. We need, as technical writers, information custodians, and \u0026ldquo;knowledge workers,\u0026rdquo; to develop approaches to organization that are easy to implement and less likely to lead to huge amounts of information debt.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/taxonomic-failure/","summary":"I tell people that I\u0026rsquo;m a professional writer, but this is a bit misleading, because what I really do is figure out how to organize information so that it\u0026rsquo;s useful and usable. Anyone, with sufficient training and practice, can figure out how to convey simple facts in plain language, but figuring out how to organize simple facts in plain language into a coherent text is the more important part of my job and work.\nThis post and the \u0026ldquo;Information Debt\u0026rdquo; wiki page, begin to address some of these the problem of information resource maintenance, organization, and institutional practices with regards to information and knowledge resources.\nOrganization is hard. Really hard. One of the challenges for digital resources is that they lack all of the conventions of /technical-writing/books, which would seem to be freeing: you get more space and you get the opportunity to do really flexible categorization and organization things.","title":"Taxonomic Failure"},{"content":"Joey Hess\u0026rsquo; blog of his work on git-annex-assitant has been a great inspiration to me. Basically, Joey had a very successful Kickstarter campaign to fund his work on a very cool tool of his that he wants to expand to be a kind of drop-box replacement. As part of the project, he\u0026rsquo;s been blogging nearly every day about the work, his progress, and the problems he\u0026rsquo;s faced.\nI really admire this kind of note taking, and think it\u0026rsquo;s really interesting to see how people progress on cool projects. More than that, I think it\u0026rsquo;s a cool way to make yourself accountable to the world, and help ensure things get done.\nBy the same token, when your project work is writing, increasing daily workload by writing notes/posts rather than actually doing work is a problem, on the other hand, given the right kind of templates, and a good end of day habit, it might be easy and a good habit.\nAnyone else interested in this? Thoughts on using rhizome versus some other area of tychoish.com? So many choices!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/work-logging/","summary":"Joey Hess\u0026rsquo; blog of his work on git-annex-assitant has been a great inspiration to me. Basically, Joey had a very successful Kickstarter campaign to fund his work on a very cool tool of his that he wants to expand to be a kind of drop-box replacement. As part of the project, he\u0026rsquo;s been blogging nearly every day about the work, his progress, and the problems he\u0026rsquo;s faced.\nI really admire this kind of note taking, and think it\u0026rsquo;s really interesting to see how people progress on cool projects. More than that, I think it\u0026rsquo;s a cool way to make yourself accountable to the world, and help ensure things get done.\nBy the same token, when your project work is writing, increasing daily workload by writing notes/posts rather than actually doing work is a problem, on the other hand, given the right kind of templates, and a good end of day habit, it might be easy and a good habit.","title":"Work Logging"},{"content":"This is really a short rant, and should come as a surprise to no one.\nI hate DOC files, and RTF files, to say nothing of ODF, DOCX, and their ilk because they have two necessarily conflicting properties:\n1. They\u0026rsquo;re oriented at producing documents on paper. Which is crazy. Paper is an output, but it\u0026rsquo;s not the only output in common use, so it\u0026rsquo;s nuts that generic document representation formats would be so tightly coupled with paper.\n2. The rendering of the content is editor specific, particularly with regards to display options. If I compile a document and send it to you, I have no guarantee whatsoever about the presentation or display of the document on your system, particularly if I\u0026rsquo;m not certain that your system is similarly configured. Particularly with respect to fonts, page breaks, etc.\nThis is particularly idiotic with respect to 1.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that PDF is great, or especially usable, but it\u0026rsquo;s consistent and behaves as expected. Furthermore, it does a good job of appropriately expressing the limitations of paper.\nSo use PDF and accept no substitutions.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-favor-of-pdf/","summary":"This is really a short rant, and should come as a surprise to no one.\nI hate DOC files, and RTF files, to say nothing of ODF, DOCX, and their ilk because they have two necessarily conflicting properties:\n1. They\u0026rsquo;re oriented at producing documents on paper. Which is crazy. Paper is an output, but it\u0026rsquo;s not the only output in common use, so it\u0026rsquo;s nuts that generic document representation formats would be so tightly coupled with paper.\n2. The rendering of the content is editor specific, particularly with regards to display options. If I compile a document and send it to you, I have no guarantee whatsoever about the presentation or display of the document on your system, particularly if I\u0026rsquo;m not certain that your system is similarly configured. Particularly with respect to fonts, page breaks, etc.\nThis is particularly idiotic with respect to 1.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that PDF is great, or especially usable, but it\u0026rsquo;s consistent and behaves as expected.","title":"In Favor of PDF"},{"content":"Things you should know about, dear readers:\nI published a book and released a mess under the banner of the new Cyborg Institute. These projects are: Systems Administration for Cyborgs\nThis is a high level guide that introduces key systems administration knowledge domains and concepts. Possible subtitles include: \u0026ldquo;How to think like a systems administrator,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Just add man pages.\u0026rdquo;\nRead it now. Tell your friends. And please, send feedback and comments.\nTaskfile\nRather than use org-mode, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to using a sort of hacked together makefile that aggregates task items from other textfiles. It works surprisingly well.\nstl\nThe idea behind this script is that it would provide a good way to report activity in a regular way so that I\u0026rsquo;d be able to look back over a log file and see how much I\u0026rsquo;d written (i.e. report word counts,) and also do a bunch of other straightforward reporting and logging.\nI plan to do a revision of this that\u0026rsquo;s a bit less complicated and a bit more modular, but it\u0026rsquo;s a nice proof of concept.\nstack\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been meaning to publish this for a long time, but this project contains configuration files for emacs and StumpWM, with other systems to follow.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve made a bunch of wiki pages on Information Debt. Current pages include:\nBooks Taxonomy Wiki Document Management Hierarchy I was planning on speaking at the Open Help Conference, on August 10-15th,\n2012. But then, United Airlines canceled my flight and I spent the day in Terminal C of Newark Airport and ultimately couldn\u0026rsquo;t make it for the conference. Which is a huge shame. My talk was going to be is about involving developers in documentation processes, about maintaining documentation, and about working with documentation \u0026ldquo;as code.\u0026rdquo;\nThe site I made for the talk is at: http://tychoish.net/oh-2012\nAnd the last draft of the slides are at: http://tychoish.net/oh-2012/slides/\n(I was speaking on behalf of `10gen \u0026lt;http://10gen.com/\u0026gt;`_, my employer, `MongoDB \u0026lt;http://docs.mongodb.org/\u0026gt;`_ `documentation project \u0026lt;http://docs.mongodb.org/\u0026gt;`_ that I work on by day (and sometimes night.))\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/annoucement-cycle/","summary":"Things you should know about, dear readers:\nI published a book and released a mess under the banner of the new Cyborg Institute. These projects are: Systems Administration for Cyborgs\nThis is a high level guide that introduces key systems administration knowledge domains and concepts. Possible subtitles include: \u0026ldquo;How to think like a systems administrator,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Just add man pages.\u0026rdquo;\nRead it now. Tell your friends. And please, send feedback and comments.\nTaskfile\nRather than use org-mode, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to using a sort of hacked together makefile that aggregates task items from other textfiles. It works surprisingly well.\nstl\nThe idea behind this script is that it would provide a good way to report activity in a regular way so that I\u0026rsquo;d be able to look back over a log file and see how much I\u0026rsquo;d written (i.e. report word counts,) and also do a bunch of other straightforward reporting and logging.","title":"Announcement Cycle"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s a folk song with the line \u0026ldquo;let the toast go free,\u0026rdquo; to which an assembled crowd of singers will often stand up and cry \u0026ldquo;free the toast!\u0026rdquo; in response.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been spending the morning going through email, reading feeds, tweaking some of the issues raised in the site improvements page, and trying to rock getting things done. In the mean time I have a few links to share.\nThe Everyday Lives Of Video Game Developers The Price of Free This article, and the one before, are both open on my \u0026ldquo;things to read list. Imagine that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m doing this afternoon. Branchable - ikiwiki (like the wiki that powers this site) hosting service, based on publicly available tools. I kinda want to set up a branchable instance. Pybtex - a python/yaml drop in replacement for BibTeX, which is really cool, and I suspect that this will probably be my next citation management tool. I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking for one for a long time. Kindle Feeder - a tool to crawl your feeds and move them to your kindle. I\u0026rsquo;m currently sifting through my feeds and seeing what might make sense to read on the kindle. Might as well, and the automatic delivery makes a lot of sense. I played with ehsell for the first time today in response to this post, and I have to say that I really like it, and it\u0026rsquo;s much more intuitive and usable than I thought it\u0026rsquo;d be. I like the idea of being able to write shell functions in emacs-lisp. As an aside the post is, I think, an example of really great casual technical writing. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/free-work/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s a folk song with the line \u0026ldquo;let the toast go free,\u0026rdquo; to which an assembled crowd of singers will often stand up and cry \u0026ldquo;free the toast!\u0026rdquo; in response.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been spending the morning going through email, reading feeds, tweaking some of the issues raised in the site improvements page, and trying to rock getting things done. In the mean time I have a few links to share.\nThe Everyday Lives Of Video Game Developers The Price of Free This article, and the one before, are both open on my \u0026ldquo;things to read list. Imagine that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m doing this afternoon. Branchable - ikiwiki (like the wiki that powers this site) hosting service, based on publicly available tools. I kinda want to set up a branchable instance. Pybtex - a python/yaml drop in replacement for BibTeX, which is really cool, and I suspect that this will probably be my next citation management tool.","title":"Free the Work"},{"content":"There are two parts to this post: first, the relationship or non-relationship between the ability to write code and technical literacy; and second, the pedagogical methods for teaching people how to program/code.\nIn some ways, I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing about this and related topics for quite a while: see /posts/objective-whatsis for an earlier iteration in this train of thought.\nProgramming and Technical Literacy Programmers and other technical folks talk a lot about teaching young people to code as the central part of any young technical person\u0026rsquo;s education and basic computer literacy. Often this grows out of nostalgia for their own experience learning to program, but there are other factors at play.1\nIn some cases, they even start or point to projects like Codecademy. Which are, in truth, really cool ideas, but I think that effectively equating the ability to write code with technical literacy is fraught:\nThere are many different kinds of technical literacy and writing code is really such a small part. Sure code gives us a reasonable way to talk about things like design and architecture, but actually writing code is such a small part of developing technology.\nWriting code isn\u0026rsquo;t that important, really. In a lot of ways, code is just an implementation detail. Important as a way of describing some concepts pretty quickly, important because it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to iterate on ideas without something concrete to point to, but the implementation isn\u0026rsquo;t nearly as important as the behavior or the interface.\nFor the last ~40 years, code has been the way that people design behavior and specify interfaces for software. While there are a lot of reasons why this predominantly takes the form of code, there\u0026rsquo;s not particular reason that we can\u0026rsquo;t express logic and describe interfaces using other modalities.\nThere are many people who are very technically literate and productive who don\u0026rsquo;t write code, and I think that defining literacy as being able to write code, is somewhat short sighted. Also, there is another group of people who are actually programmers who don\u0026rsquo;t think of the things they do as \u0026ldquo;programming,\u0026rdquo; like people who do crazy things with spreadsheets, most librarians, among others. These non-coding programmers may shy away from programming or are mostly interested in the output of the program they write and less interested in the programming itself.\nThis is a huge problem. I hope that this /posts/computer-literacy-project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been planning will start to address some of these issues, but there\u0026rsquo;s even more work to do.\nHow to Teach People to Code (This section of the post derives from and summaries the \u0026ldquo;How to Teach People to Program\u0026rdquo; wiki page.)\nMost of the way that programming books and courses teach programming are frustrating and somewhat dire, for a few reasons:\nMost examples in programming books are dumb. Basic computer science/engineering knowledge is fundamental to the way that accomplished programmers think about programming but aren\u0026rsquo;t always required to teach people how to program. Syntax isn\u0026rsquo;t that important, but you can\u0026rsquo;t ignore it either. Slow reveals are really frustrating. The kinds of code that you write when learning to programming bear little resemblance to the actual work that programmers do. The solutions to these problems are complex and there are many possible solutions. As a starting point:\nSeparate the way you present core concepts (i.e. data structures, typing, functions, classes, etc.) from actual code examples and from actual explanations of the syntax.\nInterlink/cross reference everything, but if you give people the tools to answer their own questions they\u0026rsquo;ll learn what they actually need to know, and you can then do a better job of explaining the syntax, basic concepts, and practical examples.\nProvide longer examples that aren\u0026rsquo;t contrived.\nExamples don\u0026rsquo;t need to start from first principals, and don\u0026rsquo;t need to be entirely self contained. Programming work rarely starts from first principals (relative,) and is rarely actually self contained. It\u0026rsquo;s foolish, then to use these sorts of pedagogical tools.\nThoughts?\nIn addition there\u0026rsquo;s a related fear that many people who don\u0026rsquo;t have experience with the technology of the 1980s and 1990s won\u0026rsquo;t have the required technological skills to innovate in another 10 or 20 years.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/coding-pedagogy/","summary":"There are two parts to this post: first, the relationship or non-relationship between the ability to write code and technical literacy; and second, the pedagogical methods for teaching people how to program/code.\nIn some ways, I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing about this and related topics for quite a while: see /posts/objective-whatsis for an earlier iteration in this train of thought.\nProgramming and Technical Literacy Programmers and other technical folks talk a lot about teaching young people to code as the central part of any young technical person\u0026rsquo;s education and basic computer literacy. Often this grows out of nostalgia for their own experience learning to program, but there are other factors at play.1\nIn some cases, they even start or point to projects like Codecademy. Which are, in truth, really cool ideas, but I think that effectively equating the ability to write code with technical literacy is fraught:\nThere are many different kinds of technical literacy and writing code is really such a small part.","title":"Coding Pedagogy"},{"content":"I kind of want to title this piece \u0026ldquo;the remains of the day,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you.\nThis week I found myself doing something sort of different with my task list. Since I use org-mode to manage my todo list, my explanation will include a bit of \u0026ldquo;introduction to org-mode,\u0026rdquo; but I think this practice may be generally applicable regardless of the software you use.\nIn org-mode you can take elements of an outline--any outline--and turn it into a \u0026ldquo;todo\u0026rdquo; item, and using the agenda feature, generate views of these tasks. This is great because you can do planning and brainstorming in a manner that makes sense for you, and when you\u0026rsquo;re ready to start working, the list that you work from is organized in way that\u0026rsquo;s conducive to doing things. It\u0026rsquo;s a great system.\nWhen you create a task, org-mode provides the ability to schedule it for a particular day or set a deadline. You can generate agenda views organized by day. This is how I work, most of the time. In the morning (on the train) I open the agenda and I see about five things per day, and I start working. The key to success, for any situation, but particularly fragmented situations like mine, is figuring out how to structure your projects and tasks such that there\u0026rsquo;s always a task that\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;small enough\u0026rdquo; no matter how short your free time is.\nThis works pretty well, except sometimes, you run out of free time, something takes longer than you\u0026rsquo;d like, or you reprioritize. The system of scheduling tasks breaks. Solution, at the end of your work day (or evening,) spend a moment or two going though the remains of the day\u0026rsquo;s tasks and figuring out:\nIf you couldn\u0026rsquo;t get to a task was it because you simply didn\u0026rsquo;t have time, or because there was an unforeseen dependency. Which tasks can be rescheduled for another day (and what days would be best for this.) What no longer needs to be done? At the end of the process there should be nothing left on your todo list. Now you may be tempted to engage in a little \u0026ldquo;productivity theater,\u0026rdquo; but the goal is less to \u0026ldquo;get everything done,\u0026rdquo; and more to check in with yourself more regularly, and make sure everything is on track. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced being faced with scads of overdue tasks, particularly tasks that have grown stale is hardly a wining strategy either.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/winning-your-todo-list/","summary":"I kind of want to title this piece \u0026ldquo;the remains of the day,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you.\nThis week I found myself doing something sort of different with my task list. Since I use org-mode to manage my todo list, my explanation will include a bit of \u0026ldquo;introduction to org-mode,\u0026rdquo; but I think this practice may be generally applicable regardless of the software you use.\nIn org-mode you can take elements of an outline--any outline--and turn it into a \u0026ldquo;todo\u0026rdquo; item, and using the agenda feature, generate views of these tasks. This is great because you can do planning and brainstorming in a manner that makes sense for you, and when you\u0026rsquo;re ready to start working, the list that you work from is organized in way that\u0026rsquo;s conducive to doing things. It\u0026rsquo;s a great system.\nWhen you create a task, org-mode provides the ability to schedule it for a particular day or set a deadline.","title":"Winning Your Todo List"},{"content":"With the last post /posts/writing-about-technical-writing about the kind of writing I do every day for work (and work related) project, I thought it would be fun to muse, briefly about the kind of writing, I do for me.\nThat sounded pretentious. But it\u0026rsquo;s less pretentious, I think, than saying I write fiction for art.\nWriting fiction, genre fiction at that, for me, is about talking to people directly about the way they see their worlds, about the way that we construct theories of reality, about complex systems, and maybe about all of the little thoughts and ideas that sound too foolish or too simple to justify saying plainly but are nevertheless important to say.\nFiction is a luxury, and perhaps there is why it is so crucial.\nSaying, \u0026ldquo;I want to have a career as a fiction writer,\u0026rdquo; seems not very grounded in reality, and potentially even more pretentious. So here I am. I write professionally (documentation,) and I write science fiction because it\u0026rsquo;s the best way to say things that I think need saying. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably even get around to publishing fiction \u0026ldquo;professionally,\u0026rdquo; if I can, in the next couple of years, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll ever really give up the professional writing either. Writing fiction, I think, is a piece of a much larger puzzle. So there.\nTwo fiction writing related updates:\n1. I wrote fiction Tuesday morning on the train. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on other things for a few weeks/months, and hadn\u0026rsquo;t been able to squeeze any fiction writing in for a long time. It was good to get back to it, good to realize that I\u0026rsquo;d finished a section that had been nagging me, and could start fresh, and good to remember than I\u0026rsquo;m well into the final little stretch of this book. Just need to finish now. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be posting more about this soon.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;m really amazed by how much my \u0026ldquo;work writing\u0026rdquo; has effected and improved my fiction writing. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I was ever, exactly, a bad writer, but I\u0026rsquo;ve certainly become a better and more efficient writer, and despite the fact that fiction writing is probably the thing that has \u0026ldquo;slipped\u0026rdquo; the most for me in the last couple of years, it feels good to know that I\u0026rsquo;m still getting better at it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-about-science-fiction-writing/","summary":"With the last post /posts/writing-about-technical-writing about the kind of writing I do every day for work (and work related) project, I thought it would be fun to muse, briefly about the kind of writing, I do for me.\nThat sounded pretentious. But it\u0026rsquo;s less pretentious, I think, than saying I write fiction for art.\nWriting fiction, genre fiction at that, for me, is about talking to people directly about the way they see their worlds, about the way that we construct theories of reality, about complex systems, and maybe about all of the little thoughts and ideas that sound too foolish or too simple to justify saying plainly but are nevertheless important to say.\nFiction is a luxury, and perhaps there is why it is so crucial.\nSaying, \u0026ldquo;I want to have a career as a fiction writer,\u0026rdquo; seems not very grounded in reality, and potentially even more pretentious. So here I am.","title":"Writing about Science Fiction Writing"},{"content":"I posted something new to Critical Futures today. It\u0026rsquo;s a piece about technical writing, as part of the latest installment in which has become something of a series on technical writing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been playing, and watching this new tool, called dexy, which is really cool in its own right, but is also really cool insofar as it says: technical writing, documentation, is important and deserves great documentation tooling.\nFor those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t write documentation and who aren\u0026rsquo;t very involved in the mechanics of publishing lots of text to websites probably don\u0026rsquo;t find this very exciting. But it is.\nIn any case, in recognition of the fact that this is now a theme in my blogging and writing, I\u0026rsquo;ve created a manually generated archive for this \u0026ldquo;series\u0026rdquo; of posts. See: Posts about technical writing at Critical Futures.\nThere are some other modifications that I\u0026rsquo;ve made, and am making to Critical Futures. Namely: the archives page now displays a full list of all the content on the site. Hopefully this will help Google find older posts, and make them more accessible. Despite how I feel about these old posts, I think it\u0026rsquo;s good to prevent them from falling into oblivion too soon.\nMore changes to come soon, of course. Also real content? Hopefully!\nNow: off to sing sacred harp and eat dinner with friends!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-about-technical-writing/","summary":"I posted something new to Critical Futures today. It\u0026rsquo;s a piece about technical writing, as part of the latest installment in which has become something of a series on technical writing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been playing, and watching this new tool, called dexy, which is really cool in its own right, but is also really cool insofar as it says: technical writing, documentation, is important and deserves great documentation tooling.\nFor those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t write documentation and who aren\u0026rsquo;t very involved in the mechanics of publishing lots of text to websites probably don\u0026rsquo;t find this very exciting. But it is.\nIn any case, in recognition of the fact that this is now a theme in my blogging and writing, I\u0026rsquo;ve created a manually generated archive for this \u0026ldquo;series\u0026rdquo; of posts. See: Posts about technical writing at Critical Futures.\nThere are some other modifications that I\u0026rsquo;ve made, and am making to Critical Futures.","title":"Writing about Technical Writing"},{"content":"Other than shortening sentences, inserting lists, and using document structure, there are a couple of \u0026ldquo;easy edits\u0026rdquo; that I make to most documents that other send to me for review:\nRemove all first person, both singular and plural. 2. Remove all passive sentences, typically by making the sentences more imperative.\nIn practice these changes are often related.\nExpunge the First Person Removing the first person is important less because it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;more formal\u0026rdquo; to avoid the first person and more because it\u0026rsquo;s always unclear in documentation: Who are \u0026ldquo;we,\u0026rdquo; and who is \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rdquo;? Should I read \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;me\u0026rdquo; or as the author of the documentation? What if my experiences and environment isn\u0026rsquo;t like \u0026ldquo;ours?\u0026rdquo; While we can resolve these confusion points pretty quickly it gives users another set of information that they must track. And given that technical subjects can be difficult without confusing language, there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to make things more confusing.\nPeople tend to think that this makes their documentation \u0026ldquo;friendlier,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;personable,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;intimate.\u0026rdquo; People used to interacting directly with users (i.e. people doing user support) are particularly susceptible to first person problems. In support cases, that little bit of personal touch is incredibly valuable and goes a long way toward making people feel comfortable.\nThose people are wrong. Don\u0026rsquo;t do it. Speak simply. Write about the product and the processes you\u0026rsquo;re documenting, not yourself. Convey facts, not opinions. Provide context, not perspective. If you\u0026rsquo;re writing the official documentation for a product, your perspective is obvious to readers; if you\u0026rsquo;re not writing the official documentation, that\u0026rsquo;s also apparent and probably not your job to disclaim.\nUse Good Verbs Passive sentences and weak verbs are a huge problem. Huge. People with science and engineering back rounds seem to prefer passive sentences because they think that passive sentences convey objectivity, and that this objectivity is desirable.\nPassive sentences do convey a sense of objectivity, and there are some cases where there\u0026rsquo;s no way to avoid describing a property of a thing except passively. That doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the passive voice generally acceptable. Related to the reason above, passive voice tends to provide a level of \u0026ldquo;syntatic indirection,\u0026rdquo; and means that complicated sentences become unnecessarily difficult to comprehend.\nIn documentation, unlike some other forms, it\u0026rsquo;s possible (and desirable!) to use imperative verbs, which provides some relief. One of the main projects of documentation is to inculcate \u0026ldquo;best practices\u0026rdquo; (i.e. values and conventions,) in users. Imperative verbs are great for this purpose.\nIn short: Do it!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/documentation-rhetoric/","summary":"Other than shortening sentences, inserting lists, and using document structure, there are a couple of \u0026ldquo;easy edits\u0026rdquo; that I make to most documents that other send to me for review:\nRemove all first person, both singular and plural. 2. Remove all passive sentences, typically by making the sentences more imperative.\nIn practice these changes are often related.\nExpunge the First Person Removing the first person is important less because it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;more formal\u0026rdquo; to avoid the first person and more because it\u0026rsquo;s always unclear in documentation: Who are \u0026ldquo;we,\u0026rdquo; and who is \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rdquo;? Should I read \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;me\u0026rdquo; or as the author of the documentation? What if my experiences and environment isn\u0026rsquo;t like \u0026ldquo;ours?\u0026rdquo; While we can resolve these confusion points pretty quickly it gives users another set of information that they must track. And given that technical subjects can be difficult without confusing language, there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to make things more confusing.","title":"Documentation Rhetoric"},{"content":"My Decision Throughout this spring I\u0026rsquo;ve been eagerly waiting for the announcement and arrival of the new X-series laptops from Lenovo. I\u0026rsquo;ve been incredibly happy with every Thinkpad I\u0026rsquo;ve ever had, and while my existing laptop--a very swell T510--has been great, it was time:\nI needed a system with a bit more power. The power of my existing system was being to frustrate me. Things took too long to compile, I was having some annoying networking processing issues, and to make matters worse\u0026hellip;\nThe thing was huge. I think 15 inch laptops are a great size for doing actual work, and I\u0026rsquo;m not getting rid of this one, but it\u0026rsquo;s not the kind of thing I want to lug on my back. Which I was doing a lot.\nI needed more redundancy. Most of my work in the world--writing, hacking, communicating--happens with a computer. While my data is backed up (never well enough, of course, but it\u0026rsquo;s there,) I worry more about the case where I\u0026rsquo;m stranded for a period of time without a working system.\nThis facilitates not only piece of mind, but also makes it possible to do things like: upgrade the T510 from 32 to 64 bits. (Don\u0026rsquo;t ask.)\nIn the long run, the older laptop might need to go to R. who\u0026rsquo;s personal system bit the dust a few months ago.\nWhat Happened But, when the new x230s came out and I found myself unimpressed. The revision got a different keyboard and I adore the old keyboard. To make matters worse the screen on the new model wasn\u0026rsquo;t any better than the one on the old: the pixel density is somewhat crappy.\nIn light of this, and mostly for the older keyboard, I decided to buy the older model. In short: it\u0026rsquo;s great.\nI bought the RAM and hard drive aftermarket, and replaced them before booting the first time. Having 16 gigs of RAM is pretty much amazing, and I\u0026rsquo;m sold on the notion that SSDs are now a must for most common personal computing work.\nIncidentally I discovered that this computer is about the same weight as the 13 inch Macbook Air (and I have the larger battery), for those of you keeping score at home. And way beefier. Thicker obviously, but still\u0026hellip;\nPoint by Point Pros:\nThe keyboard is the same great Thinkpad keyboard we\u0026rsquo;ve always had. I\u0026rsquo;m sure eventually I\u0026rsquo;ll give in and learn to enjoy the new keyboard, but for now, I\u0026rsquo;m going to stick with the old. It\u0026rsquo;s way fast. Because, the speed of my old computer defined \u0026ldquo;the speed of computers,\u0026rdquo; in my mind, it was kind of nifty to learn that computers had actually gotten faster. It\u0026rsquo;s way small. Turns out, if I\u0026rsquo;m lugging a sub-3 pound laptop around, I can totally use my awesome shoulder bag. I also don\u0026rsquo;t feel like my wrist is going to give out if I need to walk 30 feet holding the laptop in one hand. Cons:\nThe screen could be so much better than it is, and there\u0026rsquo;s really no excuse. It\u0026rsquo;s not enough of a deal breaker for me, but\u0026hellip; That\u0026rsquo;s really it. I think 12 inch wide screen laptops don\u0026rsquo;t have quite enough wrist-rest area on them, but that\u0026rsquo;s really an unavoidable problem: if you have a wide secreen (and thus a full keyboard,) the wrist area is short and narrow. If you have a more square screen and a squished keyboard, then you have enough wrist area. One adjusts. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/thinkpad-x220/","summary":"My Decision Throughout this spring I\u0026rsquo;ve been eagerly waiting for the announcement and arrival of the new X-series laptops from Lenovo. I\u0026rsquo;ve been incredibly happy with every Thinkpad I\u0026rsquo;ve ever had, and while my existing laptop--a very swell T510--has been great, it was time:\nI needed a system with a bit more power. The power of my existing system was being to frustrate me. Things took too long to compile, I was having some annoying networking processing issues, and to make matters worse\u0026hellip;\nThe thing was huge. I think 15 inch laptops are a great size for doing actual work, and I\u0026rsquo;m not getting rid of this one, but it\u0026rsquo;s not the kind of thing I want to lug on my back. Which I was doing a lot.\nI needed more redundancy. Most of my work in the world--writing, hacking, communicating--happens with a computer. While my data is backed up (never well enough, of course, but it\u0026rsquo;s there,) I worry more about the case where I\u0026rsquo;m stranded for a period of time without a working system.","title":"ThinkPad x220 Review"},{"content":"In no particular order:\nOrg Mode Guilt and a Lisp Function I have some guilt about having mostly forsaken org-mode,1 in particular because I was watching Sacha Chua\u0026rsquo;s chat with John Wiegley, and I think both are such nifty hackers, and have done so many things that are pretty darn nifty.\nI liked what I heard about johnw\u0026rsquo;s org mode setup so much that I might give it a try again. But in the mean time, I wanted to make my \u0026ldquo;recompile my tasklist function\u0026rdquo; to be a bit more clean. The result is follows:\n(defun tychoish-todo-compile () (interactive) (if (get-buffer \u0026quot;*todo-compile*\u0026quot;) (progn (switch-to-buffer-other-window (get-buffer \u0026quot;*todo-compile*\u0026quot;)) (recompile)) (progn (compile \u0026quot;make -j -k -C ~/wiki\u0026quot;) (switch-to-buffer-other-window \u0026quot;*compilation*\u0026quot;) (rename-buffer \u0026quot;*todo-compile*\u0026quot;))) (revbufs)) Notables:\nThis is the first time I\u0026rsquo;ve used progn which is somewhat embarrassing, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing to have in the toolkit now. Link: progn I hadn\u0026rsquo;t realized until now that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t an else-if form in emacs lisp. Weird, but it makes sense. Compilation Mode is pretty much my current favorite thing in emacs. revbufs is this amazing thing that reverts buffers if there aren\u0026rsquo;t local modifications, and also reports to you if a buffer has changed outside of emacs and there are local modifications. So basically \u0026ldquo;does everything you want without destroying anything and then tells you what you need to do manually.\u0026rdquo; Smart. Simple. Perfect. I might need to \u0026ldquo;macro-ize\u0026rdquo; this, as I have a lot of little compile processes for which I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to trigger/maintain unique compile buffers. That\u0026rsquo;s a project for another day.\nEmacs Thoughts I\u0026rsquo;m even thinking about putting together a post about how, although I\u0026rsquo;m a diehard emacs user, and I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a fair bit of time learning how to do really great things with emacs, there are a lot of vim-ish things in my workflow:\nI read email with mutt and I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to get into GNUS, and I try it again every now and then, but I always find it so unbelievably gnarly. At least the transition. Same with Notmuch, which I like a lot more (in theory,) but I find the fact that Notmuch and mutt have this fundamental misunderstanding about what constitutes a \u0026ldquo;read\u0026rdquo; email, to be tragic.\nI use a crazy ikiwiki + deft + makefile setup for task tracking. As (obliquely) referenced above.\nI might give org another shot, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking at task warrior, but the sad truth is that what I have works incredibly well for in most cases, and switching is hard.\nI tend jump to a shell window to do version control and other things, even though I\u0026rsquo;m familiar with magit and dired, my use of these tools is somewhat spotty.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that I think org-mode sucks, or anything. Far from it, but how I was using org-mode was fundamentally not working for me. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about giving it a try again, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/emacs-thoughts-and-a-lisp-function/","summary":"In no particular order:\nOrg Mode Guilt and a Lisp Function I have some guilt about having mostly forsaken org-mode,1 in particular because I was watching Sacha Chua\u0026rsquo;s chat with John Wiegley, and I think both are such nifty hackers, and have done so many things that are pretty darn nifty.\nI liked what I heard about johnw\u0026rsquo;s org mode setup so much that I might give it a try again. But in the mean time, I wanted to make my \u0026ldquo;recompile my tasklist function\u0026rdquo; to be a bit more clean. The result is follows:\n(defun tychoish-todo-compile () (interactive) (if (get-buffer \u0026quot;*todo-compile*\u0026quot;) (progn (switch-to-buffer-other-window (get-buffer \u0026quot;*todo-compile*\u0026quot;)) (recompile)) (progn (compile \u0026quot;make -j -k -C ~/wiki\u0026quot;) (switch-to-buffer-other-window \u0026quot;*compilation*\u0026quot;) (rename-buffer \u0026quot;*todo-compile*\u0026quot;))) (revbufs)) Notables:\nThis is the first time I\u0026rsquo;ve used progn which is somewhat embarrassing, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing to have in the toolkit now. Link: progn I hadn\u0026rsquo;t realized until now that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t an else-if form in emacs lisp.","title":"Emacs Thoughts + Some Lisp"},{"content":"After doing the first pass of editing on my technical book, \u0026ldquo;Systems Administration for Cyborgs\u0026rdquo; on a screen and feeling utterly buried by it, (See: /posts/the-editing-hole,) and I\u0026rsquo;m considering different approaches for the next book. Specifically, for this novel I have, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about getting the novel printed somehow and then editing it \u0026ldquo;analog style.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to hear feedback from anyone who has done this, particularly recently. Particularly from people who are very digitally savy. Here\u0026rsquo;s my pro/con list:\nPros: It might be nice to have a different \u0026ldquo;editing context,\u0026rdquo; to help me keep focus on the project without the distractions of the internet and current writing projects. Having marked-up pages gives me an actual marker of progress, rather than a list of commits or diffs. It might be nice to get some practice writing longhand again. It\u0026rsquo;s embarrassing when someone hands me a pen and I\u0026rsquo;ve basically forgotten how to use it. It gives me a start to a collection of paper ephemera that I can burden some archivist with at some point. Cons: Context switching, from a computer, to paper, to a tablet, or whatever is annoying and eats time/focus. Paper would force a more linear editing process, which may get me to focus on the story and characters more closely at the possible expense of seeing \u0026ldquo;broken sentences,\u0026rdquo; and other things that may be distracting to the next readers/editors/etc. If I edit on paper, I have to go through and apply those changes to the actual text. Which adds a step, and probably a number of additional weeks to the editing process. I\u0026rsquo;m awful writing things out long hand and I pretty much haven\u0026rsquo;t written anything long hand in 4 or 5 years. Reflections There\u0026rsquo;s also another little thorny problem: I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the future of this book is: The prologue stands alone, and I want to try shopping it around. If I can get that published as a short that might be the hook to getting the rest of the book published.\nInitially my plan was to have a friend read it as a podcast, and attempt to publish the prologue as a short, and then try and for-real publish the next book. The podcasting idea, while nice, wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work out as originally planned (long story.) Besides, it really depended on having someone else to the reading (I have neither the time, technical skills, nor the real ability to do the reading.) Which leaves me without a plan, and the following thoughts about the publication of this text:\nI feel like my writing career1 is in good (enough) shape that my identity as a writer depends on publishing this novel in a particular way. On the other hand, getting the novel (or parts of it published) would be a great thing, and validates all this time/energy/interest that I have in writing science fiction. I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to self publishing, except that it means more work for me for what is probably less impact (i.e. readers.) It took me embarrassingly long to write this novel. And knowing how much better my writing has gotten in the last three or four years, means that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty worried that this is really a cold pile of shit. I recognize that this is probably more reason to get the novel out to first readers, but I also feel like I should do them the favor of at least a little editing. Printing in the Digital Age As an aside, this has given me some time to do research on getting things printed, which I\u0026rsquo;d like to record here and share with you:\n(Given a 325-350 page manuscript)\nI don\u0026rsquo;t own a printer, and have no particular interest in owning one, but a good color laser (in the 300-400 USD) or a good black and white (200-300 USD) becomes much more economical if analog editing becomes a thing.\nThe downside of printing things yourself is that you still need some way to bind things. And there are maintenance and supply costs not factored into the above.\nThe price to get printing/binding done at Staples is in the 35-40 range. Chances are that these copies are likely to be the highest quality, quickest turn around, and the web interface--though annoying--is probably the most straight forward.\nYou can use Lulu.com to order prints. The same book costs 15 bucks. It\u0026rsquo;s also spiral bound (which seems preferable to perfect binding for writing.) I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what \u0026ldquo;lulu standard\u0026rdquo; paper is like quality wise, but I suspect it will be ok. If you\u0026rsquo;re ok with a fussy online interface, a weird approach to covers (no really, I\u0026rsquo;d just like transparent covers,) and turn around time, the price seems unbeatable.\nAlso, Lulu\u0026rsquo;s cover making interface makes it really hard to get a plain cover that doesn\u0026rsquo;t look like a joke.\nI did some hunting around for local copy shops (I swear it seems like I pass several on my walk to work,) but had difficult finding a shop who would be able to do a very small order, and has the digital setup to accept a PDF for printing via email or a web site.\nI have a full time job writing and editing. While its not the same as writing fiction, it is rewarding and economically viable, and I\u0026rsquo;m working on the kinds of projects that I want to work on. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/analog-editing/","summary":"After doing the first pass of editing on my technical book, \u0026ldquo;Systems Administration for Cyborgs\u0026rdquo; on a screen and feeling utterly buried by it, (See: /posts/the-editing-hole,) and I\u0026rsquo;m considering different approaches for the next book. Specifically, for this novel I have, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about getting the novel printed somehow and then editing it \u0026ldquo;analog style.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to hear feedback from anyone who has done this, particularly recently. Particularly from people who are very digitally savy. Here\u0026rsquo;s my pro/con list:\nPros: It might be nice to have a different \u0026ldquo;editing context,\u0026rdquo; to help me keep focus on the project without the distractions of the internet and current writing projects. Having marked-up pages gives me an actual marker of progress, rather than a list of commits or diffs. It might be nice to get some practice writing longhand again. It\u0026rsquo;s embarrassing when someone hands me a pen and I\u0026rsquo;ve basically forgotten how to use it.","title":"Analog Editing"},{"content":"The success or failure of the collar of a sweater determines the success or failure of an entire sweater. This post provides an overview of my basic: \u0026ldquo;how to knit a collar\u0026rdquo; system that usually works for me and some thoughts on why collars are so important.\nThe hard part of collars is that on the whole, collar shaping accounts for five or ten percent of the knitting, but weeks or months worth of work hangs in the balance. The collar affects both the overall style of the sweater and has a great impact on how you will feel about the sweater when you wear it. A collar that doesn\u0026rsquo;t hang right, or is too narrow or too wide is the worst: the right collar can also make a sweater that is otherwise too light feel just warm enough and more importantly the sweater that\u0026rsquo;s too heavy not feel oppressively warm.\nSo how do you knit a collar?\nEasy.\nThe fine print: These instructions assume that you\u0026rsquo;re knitting the sweater in the round.\u0026lt;/small\u0026gt;\nFor a basic, round, crew neck\u0026hellip;\nFigure out how long your sweater will be from the top of the shoulder seam to the bottom hem. Typically this is the length measurement in the pattern and you can measure it easily yourself.\nFigure out how many stitches around your collar opening needs to be at the very end, but the width of the hole at the top seam. Because you\u0026rsquo;re shaping the collar, the number of stitches on the collar as you knit it will be slightly higher because of the angles/sloped edges. Typically this is 13-16 inches for most people.\nElizabeth Zimmerman would figure 1/3rd of K, which is a good starting point, but if your sweater has too much ease or if your making a sweater in excess of 40 inches (which isn\u0026rsquo;t too big,) I think you\u0026rsquo;ll end up with neck openings that are a little too wide.\nBefore you start, compute the following values:\nHalf of the total collar width. This is the total number of stitches that you need to set aside or decrease by the time you get to the shoulder seam on the front and the back. About half of this number or a quarter of the total (or a bit less, round down here, if need be) to set aside at the base of the neck. The total number of stitches minus the actual number of stitches set aside at the bottom of the neck, if your math is fuzzy. This is the number of stitches that you have to decrease on either side of the neck. This number must be even. The distance between the bottom of the neck and the top of the shoulder. This is almost always within a half an inch of 3 inches. Also record the number of rows. With these numbers in hand, do the following.\nThree (3) inches before this length, begin the collar shaping. (Change depth as needed.)\nSet aside stitches at the bottom of the neck.\nDecrease on either side of the neck opening (possibly using a steek,) every row until you have decreased half of the number of stitches that you need to decrease. Typically this should take about an inch and a half of knitting, or half of the total collar depth to accomplish.\nAfter you\u0026rsquo;ve knitted half of the total collar depth, figure out how many stitches you\u0026rsquo;ve decreased at this point. Set this number of stitches aside in the middle of the back of the sweater.\nMeanwhile: Create a new steak or begin decreasing at the back of the neck at the same rate as you decrease at the front.\nNow decrease at half the rate (e.g. every other row) for the remainder of the depth of your collar opening. Bind off. You\u0026rsquo;ve made a sweater.\nIf you time it right, and your stitches are not too short and wide, this basically works out to: set aside stitches at the front, decrease every row for an inch and a half, set aside stitches at the back, decrease every other row for an inch and a half. Bind off for shoulders.\nVariants:\nKnit more on the front so that the shoulder seam is actually at the top of the back, and the front of the sweater extends over the top of the shoulder.\nUse shoulder saddles or straps to increase the depth of the neck. This is a perpendicular strip of knitting that starts at the side of the neck and extends across the shoulders and forms the top part of the sleeve.\nIn this case, subtract half of the width of the saddle/strap from the depth of the collar opening, and twice the width from the opening. Adjust accordingly: typically the best thing to do is figure out how much additional depth you need to decrease, figure out how many rows that will be, and plan to decrease on every row and set aside the remainder. Depending on the depth you may need to \u0026ldquo;fill in\u0026rdquo; or shape some of the depth on the back of the neck.\nIf your shoulders slope downward, consider short rows across one or both of the sides, to make the top of the sweater a bit more conical.\nI often make Henly-style sweaters by setting aside a single stitch (and knitting a steek) 3-5 inches bellow the bottom of the collar. This keeps sweaters from becoming too warm.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/collar-design/","summary":"The success or failure of the collar of a sweater determines the success or failure of an entire sweater. This post provides an overview of my basic: \u0026ldquo;how to knit a collar\u0026rdquo; system that usually works for me and some thoughts on why collars are so important.\nThe hard part of collars is that on the whole, collar shaping accounts for five or ten percent of the knitting, but weeks or months worth of work hangs in the balance. The collar affects both the overall style of the sweater and has a great impact on how you will feel about the sweater when you wear it. A collar that doesn\u0026rsquo;t hang right, or is too narrow or too wide is the worst: the right collar can also make a sweater that is otherwise too light feel just warm enough and more importantly the sweater that\u0026rsquo;s too heavy not feel oppressively warm.","title":"Collar Design"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had a nice quiet weekend, the first such weekend in quite a while. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to be able to relax, work on projects without deadlines, and avoid all of the editing that I ought to be doing.\nSome notable accomplishments, current projects, and other events in the last few weeks:\nIf you ever visit tychoish.com in your web browser (as opposed to by way of its aggregation,) you\u0026rsquo;ll note that the design has changed somewhat.\nThis is the design that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for my personal wiki for months, and so I\u0026rsquo;m quite used to it, but feedback is welcome.\nThe design change has inspired a bit of introspection, hence this post, and perhaps some of the posts that will follow. Please bear with me.\nMonths ago a friend of mine said \u0026ldquo;some of us might like to know how you\u0026rsquo;re doing every now and then, and your blog is just stuff about obscure technology.\u0026rdquo;\nGuilty as charged. Recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve been much more interested in using this blog as a scratch space for projects that I don\u0026rsquo;t have quite enough time to pursue in appropriate depth.\nHaving said that, I think (or hoped,) that I\u0026rsquo;ve calmed down a bit in recent months and years: My career/professional identity seems a bit more stable. I\u0026rsquo;m doing a better job at focusing big projects, which means some shorter posts and more personal posts may be in order.\nI got a new computer last week. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a post that addresses this in a bit more depth. In short it\u0026rsquo;s great. So my largely unnecessary justification is:\nA smaller machine, which is better on my back when I am walking around. Beefier system, which means I can compile things quicker (and I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing more of this recently.) The ability to dedicate the older system to some stay at home things: having a working desk at home, playing music, running some buildbot stuff, and the like. I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that even though there are little things that I might like to change about how my computer works, and things that I\u0026rsquo;d like to setup and get working for the most part, things just work. And that\u0026rsquo;s really great.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a host of stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m working on that probably isn\u0026rsquo;t apparent to the internet:\nMy day job. I\u0026rsquo;m doing awesome documentation things for a neat New York City database software company/open source project that you\u0026rsquo;ve probably heard of (if you\u0026rsquo;re into this kind of thing.) It\u0026rsquo;s rewarding, interesting, and it means I can spend all most of my time day making things. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on submitting documentation patches to a couple of open source projects: buildbot and MediaGoblin. I need to do more of this work. The editing pile. Currently on tap: a mess of blog posts, the prologue of my most recently drafted novel, and some of the last little pieces of the Cyborg Institute launch. Speaking of which that should happen in the next week or so. Next up? More of the novel and suggestions from frist readers of the systems administration book (see next item.)\nNever to be deterred, I\u0026rsquo;m hard at work on the outline for another novel. The plan is to have something I can start drafting in earnest by the end of the summer. I feel pretty good about the project, although as I was working on an outline last night, I changed the last third of the book. Oops.\nThe systems administration book. Available via git today, With general release following shortly. All feedback as well as pull or merge requests with comments and suggestions are all welcome. See the following for git repositories\nadministration on git.cyborginstitute.net administration on github.com (Both are identical.)\nThe cyborg institute listserv would be a good place for bug/issue tracking at least for now.\nOn the topic of editing, I\u0026rsquo;ve recently discovered the one clause per-line formatting style.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve long attempted to keep lines short to promote cleaner diffs, but in truth, if you end up reflowing paragraphs, the resulting diffs are basically useless. I\u0026rsquo;ve encountered one-sentence-per-line tactics, which seems like a good idea, except that sentences often exceed 80 characters.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not yet decided on the subject, especially for writing longer sections of text, but it does make editing easier.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lazy-sunday/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had a nice quiet weekend, the first such weekend in quite a while. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to be able to relax, work on projects without deadlines, and avoid all of the editing that I ought to be doing.\nSome notable accomplishments, current projects, and other events in the last few weeks:\nIf you ever visit tychoish.com in your web browser (as opposed to by way of its aggregation,) you\u0026rsquo;ll note that the design has changed somewhat.\nThis is the design that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for my personal wiki for months, and so I\u0026rsquo;m quite used to it, but feedback is welcome.\nThe design change has inspired a bit of introspection, hence this post, and perhaps some of the posts that will follow. Please bear with me.\nMonths ago a friend of mine said \u0026ldquo;some of us might like to know how you\u0026rsquo;re doing every now and then, and your blog is just stuff about obscure technology.","title":"Lazy Sunday"},{"content":"In the course of writing a computer program, engineers typically face the same kinds problems again and again. As a result programmers have developed a way of thinking about different kinds of solutions and situations as \u0026ldquo;patterns,\u0026rdquo; which provide generalized ways of talking about common problems and strategies.\n\u0026gt; See: Portland Pattern Repository for an \u0026gt; example catalog of programming patterns.\nWhen I opened the editor to write this post, I wanted to write something to connect this idea of a \u0026ldquo;pattern\u0026rdquo; with a knitting pattern, which I think is (or could be) a very related concept.\nRather thank think about knitting designs as these static instructions for constructing a single kind of garment, I think it might be cool to think of knitting patterns in the sense that programmers use the word: as a set of generalized responses to various states and situations.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t revolutionary. If you\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting seriously for more than a couple of years, you probably already think about knitting in this way. At the same time, knitting publishers organize information in other ways: knitting \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; is either design and object centric (how to knit a \u0026ldquo;thing,\u0026rdquo;) or it\u0026rsquo;s technique centric (how to make a specific kind of \u0026ldquo;stitch\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;how to execute a specific kind of operation.\u0026rdquo;)\nPatterns are good because they are guides to become more creative and more resourceful knitters. Patterns help us understand how to effectively use resources, to execute the objects that we want to without dithering, and how to fix mistakes in our knitting when we make them. Focusing on knitting \u0026ldquo;patterns,\u0026rdquo; is not only important because knitters will find them useful, but because it will advance the state of the craft.\nPatterns also help resolve an ongoing \u0026ldquo;problem\u0026rdquo; in the knitting world: an online, free culture repository of information about knitting.\nIn the decade or so, I\u0026rsquo;ve watched a number of knitters attempt to create online information resources that serve as a free culture repository for knitting. Nothing has been particularly successful, and there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of \u0026ldquo;knitting free culture\u0026rdquo; out there.\nWhile the lack of knitting free culture is due to a large number of factors, the fact that knitting content has always centered on \u0026ldquo;objects\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;techniques\u0026rdquo; is almost certainly a factor:\nobjects are difficult to design, represent professional designer\u0026rsquo;s only real way of generating a reputation and income, and it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to divide the work of writing instructions for creating objects. there are a few (3-5) really, really good knitting techniques compendiums, and while new techniques emerge every now and then the books from 1938 (Mary Thomas\u0026rsquo;) are as good as any of the more recent examples. Patterns in this sense might be the best way to build an online knitting resource. Rather than store indexes upon indexes of cast on methods, full patterns for garments, and stitch patterns, we could create an index of knitting patterns, generated and indexed by situation and purpose. Example patterns might include:\nHeels for Light Weight socks. Heels for thick socks. Crew neck collars. How to knit sweaters in the round when you don\u0026rsquo;t want to steek. How to secure a steek if the yarn isn\u0026rsquo;t wool. Knitting socks for high arches. And so forth\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to use my (admittedly sporadic) knitting blogging to begin capturing some of these knitting patterns. Then, if there\u0026rsquo;s interest, we can convert these into a more robust form.\nAnyone interested?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-patterns/","summary":"In the course of writing a computer program, engineers typically face the same kinds problems again and again. As a result programmers have developed a way of thinking about different kinds of solutions and situations as \u0026ldquo;patterns,\u0026rdquo; which provide generalized ways of talking about common problems and strategies.\n\u0026gt; See: Portland Pattern Repository for an \u0026gt; example catalog of programming patterns.\nWhen I opened the editor to write this post, I wanted to write something to connect this idea of a \u0026ldquo;pattern\u0026rdquo; with a knitting pattern, which I think is (or could be) a very related concept.\nRather thank think about knitting designs as these static instructions for constructing a single kind of garment, I think it might be cool to think of knitting patterns in the sense that programmers use the word: as a set of generalized responses to various states and situations.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t revolutionary. If you\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting seriously for more than a couple of years, you probably already think about knitting in this way.","title":"Knitting Patterns"},{"content":"This is an entry in my loose series of posts about build systems.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking recently about why I\u0026rsquo;ve come to think that build systems are so important, and this post is mostly just me thinking aloud about this issue and related questions.\nMaking Builds Efficient Writing a build systems for a project is often relatively trivial, once you capture the process, and figure out the base dependencies, you can write scripts and make files to automate this process. The problem is that the most rudimentary build systems aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly efficient, for two main reasons:\n1. It\u0026rsquo;s difficult to stumble into a build process that is easy to parallelize, so these rudimentary solutions often depend on a series of step happening in a specific order.\n2. It\u0026rsquo;s easier to write a build system that rebuilds too much rather than too little for subsequent builds. From the perspective of build tool designers, this is the correct behavior; but it means that it takes more work to ensure that you only rebuild what you need to.\nAs a corollary, you need to test build systems and approaches with significantly large systems, where \u0026ldquo;rebuilding too much,\u0026rdquo; can be detectable.\nMaking a build system efficient isn\u0026rsquo;t too hard, but it does require some amount of testing and experimentation, and often it centers on having explicit dependencies, so that the build tool (i.e. Make, SCons, Ninja, etc.) can build output files in the correct order and only build when a dependency changes.1\nThe Benefits of a Fast Build Fast builds increase overall personal productivity.\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t have to wait for a build to complete, and you\u0026rsquo;re not tempted to context switch during the build, so you stay focused on your work.\nFast builds increase quality.\nIf your build system (and to a similar extent, your test system,) run efficiently, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to detect errors earlier in the development process, which will prevent errors and defects. A tighter feedback loop on the code you write is helpful.\nFast builds democratize the development process.\nIf builds are easy to run, and require minimal cajoling and intervention, it becomes much more likely that many people\nThis is obviously most prevalent in open source communities and projects, this is probably true of all development teams.\nFast builds promote freshness.\nIf the build process is frustrating, then anyone who might run the build will avoid it and run the build less frequently, and on the whole the development effort looses important feedback and data.\nContinuous integration systems help with this, but they require significant resources, are clumsy solutions, and above all, CI attempts to solve a slightly different problem.\nOptimizing Builds Steps you can take to optimizing builds:\n(Note: I\u0026rsquo;m by no means an expert in this, so feel free to add or edit these suggestions.)\nA large number of smaller jobs that can complete independently of other tools, are easy to run in parallel. If the jobs that create a product take longer and are more difficult to split into components, then the build will be slower, particularly on more powerful hardware. Incremental builds are a huge win, particularly for larger processes. Most of the reasons why you want \u0026ldquo;fast builds,\u0026rdquo; only require fast rebuilds and partial builds, not necessarily the full \u0026ldquo;clean builds.\u0026rdquo; While fast initial builds are not unimportant, they account for a small percentage of use. Manage complexity. There are a lot of things you can do to make builds smarter, which should theoretically make builds faster.\nExamples of this kind of complexity include storing dependency information in a database, or using hashing rather than \u0026ldquo;mtime\u0026rdquo; to detect staleness, or integrating the build automation with other parts of the development tool chain, or using a more limited method to specify build processes.\nThe problem, or the potential problem is that you lose simplicity, and it\u0026rsquo;s possible that something in this \u0026ldquo;smarter and more complex\u0026rdquo; system can break or slow down under certain pressures, or can have enough overhead to render them unproductive optimizations.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s too easy to use wild-cards so that the system must rebuild a given output if any of a number of input files change. Some of this is unavoidable, and generally there are more input files than output files, but particularly with builds that have intermediate stages, or more complex relationships between files it\u0026rsquo;s important to attend to these files.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-favor-of-fast-builds/","summary":"This is an entry in my loose series of posts about build systems.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking recently about why I\u0026rsquo;ve come to think that build systems are so important, and this post is mostly just me thinking aloud about this issue and related questions.\nMaking Builds Efficient Writing a build systems for a project is often relatively trivial, once you capture the process, and figure out the base dependencies, you can write scripts and make files to automate this process. The problem is that the most rudimentary build systems aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly efficient, for two main reasons:\n1. It\u0026rsquo;s difficult to stumble into a build process that is easy to parallelize, so these rudimentary solutions often depend on a series of step happening in a specific order.\n2. It\u0026rsquo;s easier to write a build system that rebuilds too much rather than too little for subsequent builds. From the perspective of build tool designers, this is the correct behavior; but it means that it takes more work to ensure that you only rebuild what you need to.","title":"In Favor of Fast Builds"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve found myself writing a fair number of Makefiles in the last few weeks: In part because it was a tool, hell a class of tools, that I didn\u0026rsquo;t really understand and I\u0026rsquo;m a big sucker for learning new things, and in part because I had a lot of build process-related tasks to automate. But I think my interest is a bit deeper than that.\nMake and related tools provide a good metaphor for thinking about certain kinds of tasks and processes. Build systems are less about making something more efficient (though often it does do that,) and more about making processes reproducible and consistent. In some respects I think it\u0026rsquo;s appropriate to think of build tools as.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written here before about the merits of /technical-writing/compilation for documentation, and I think that still holds true: build processes add necessary procedural structure. Indirectly, having formalized build process, also makes it very easy to extend and develop processes as needs change. There\u0026rsquo;s some up-front work, but it nearly always pays off.\nWhile I want to avoid thinking that everything is a Makefile-shaped nail, I think it\u0026rsquo;s also probably true that there are a lot of common tasks in general purpose computing that are make shaped: format conversion, extracting and importing data, typesetting (and all sorts of publication related tasks,) archiving, system configuration, etc. Perhaps, more generic build tools need to be part of basic computer literacy. That\u0026rsquo;s another topic for a much larger discussion.\nFinally, I want to raise (or re-raise) the question, that another function of build systems is reduce friction on common tasks and increase the likelihood that tasks will get done, and that people will need less technical background to do fundamentally mundane tasks. Build systems are absolutely essential for producing output from any really complex process because it\u0026rsquo;s hard to reliably produce builds without them; for less complex processes they\u0026rsquo;re essential because no one (or fewer people) do those tasks without some kind of support.\nRough thoughts as always.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-build-processes/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve found myself writing a fair number of Makefiles in the last few weeks: In part because it was a tool, hell a class of tools, that I didn\u0026rsquo;t really understand and I\u0026rsquo;m a big sucker for learning new things, and in part because I had a lot of build process-related tasks to automate. But I think my interest is a bit deeper than that.\nMake and related tools provide a good metaphor for thinking about certain kinds of tasks and processes. Build systems are less about making something more efficient (though often it does do that,) and more about making processes reproducible and consistent. In some respects I think it\u0026rsquo;s appropriate to think of build tools as.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written here before about the merits of /technical-writing/compilation for documentation, and I think that still holds true: build processes add necessary procedural structure. Indirectly, having formalized build process, also makes it very easy to extend and develop processes as needs change.","title":"On Build Processes"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m working on the final touches of a treatise on Systems Administration that I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned in passing here before. I hope to have this project up on a web-server near you (near me?) in a few months. Because I\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of fun working on this project, I decided that it would be cool to do a similar project on another topic dear to my technical interest: Computing Literacy.\nComputing literacy? Isn\u0026rsquo;t that a little *early nineties* for you and or everyone?\nWell yes, I suppose, but don\u0026rsquo;t think that the improvements that have aided the adoption of technology in the last 20 years have necessarily raised the amount of computing literacy. In fact, it would not surprise me if all of the abstraction and friendly user interfaces make it more difficult for users to understand how their computers actually work.\nBecause their computers play such an important role in everyone\u0026rsquo;s life and work, I suspect that there are a lot of folks who don\u0026rsquo;t know how these things work but want to learn. And the truth is that there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of resources around for people who aren\u0026rsquo;t already tinkerers and hackers.\nThis is where I fit in: I can write a book-like object that provides useful information in an easy to understand way that technical people can provide their friends and family say things like \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s a database?\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what do you mean compiled?\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s a server?\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what is this file system thing?\u0026rdquo;\nAre you so arrogant as to think that you can add something new to this subject?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to develop new technology here, or suddenly make things easier to understand, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s a niche for computer users between people like me, who download putty on other people\u0026rsquo;s computers to ssh into their VPS server which hosts a VPN that their laptops are connected to, to ssh into their laptops to kill misbehaving X11 sessions (no really, I just did that,)* and most people who just know how to open MS word and send emails, and browse the web.\nAnd I think that giving folks who are technically creative, intuitive, and curious a way to learn about their computers and technology would be great. Particularly in a way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t assume too much prior knowledge, or an interest in complicated math.\nOk, so you\u0026rsquo;re convinced that it\u0026rsquo;s a good idea, what\u0026rsquo;s going to be special about this?\nFirst, while the material will not be so complicated or so novel, I think the presentation may be. Additionally, I envision this document as a useful reference for describing and defining basic computing concepts, to support more technical blog posts and articles.\nFinally , I think it would be fun to do this book-like object in a more iterative style, relative to the Systems Administration book: I\u0026rsquo;ll sketch out the basics, put a disclaimer at the top about links breaking and then publish it, and publish changes and make the whole thing accessible by git..\nSound cool to anyone?\nSo there you have it.\nExpect to hear more in the late summer or fall\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/computer-literacy-project/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m working on the final touches of a treatise on Systems Administration that I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned in passing here before. I hope to have this project up on a web-server near you (near me?) in a few months. Because I\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of fun working on this project, I decided that it would be cool to do a similar project on another topic dear to my technical interest: Computing Literacy.\nComputing literacy? Isn\u0026rsquo;t that a little *early nineties* for you and or everyone?\nWell yes, I suppose, but don\u0026rsquo;t think that the improvements that have aided the adoption of technology in the last 20 years have necessarily raised the amount of computing literacy. In fact, it would not surprise me if all of the abstraction and friendly user interfaces make it more difficult for users to understand how their computers actually work.\nBecause their computers play such an important role in everyone\u0026rsquo;s life and work, I suspect that there are a lot of folks who don\u0026rsquo;t know how these things work but want to learn.","title":"Computing Literacy Project"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m stuck in an editing hole, and not only am I not editing the things I need to edit, I\u0026rsquo;m not getting anything done.\nI\u0026rsquo;m at a point where I have about 25 things on my personal task list, and 16 of them are editing related tasks: edit the article in this file, edit this fiction, edit this documentation, edit these would-be-blog posts, and so forth. It seems like I went on something of a six month writing bender, and while I did a little bit of editing during this period, I have clearly fallen behind.\nThere are a number of factors:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ve been making a point of putting editing tasks on the todo list because I want to make sure that I actually finish projects rather than just abandon them. I\u0026rsquo;ve not been particularly good with follow through in the past few years, so that\u0026rsquo;s been a big personal improvement project.\nThe sad part is that my editing queue is probably 10-20 times larger, but I\u0026rsquo;ve got some projects on the less-actionable back burner.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a very good editor. I\u0026rsquo;m awful at copy (or otherwise) editing my own work, and while I know that I\u0026rsquo;ve become better at this in the past few years. I still know that it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect and so it seems sort of futile, which makes it hard to get inspired to do editing.\n3. I find writing to be rewarding, and given the choice I will probably always choose to write new stuff. While this is clearly a learned response to the kind of work, this doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the effect any less real.\nI find editing to be really difficult work. This is probably related to #2, but editing wears me out. I find it difficult to spend long periods of time editing, which makes it difficult to make any really substantial progress on the pile of editing tasks.\nAs a result, I take a long time to edit things, I\u0026rsquo;m most effective at editing in short bursts. I often want to break up longer editing tasks with other kinds of work just to keep a clean mind set. After a week or so of this, I have almost everything else done on the list, leaving me with a big pile of editing that looks even bigger for the lack of other things on the list.\nSo now, I\u0026rsquo;m trying the following:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;m working on making editing tasks smaller, which will turn into more editing tasks, but it\u0026rsquo;ll be possible to face editing tasks in units less than 10 or 20 pages.\nMake more tasks for other projects. There are two ways to get stuff done: 1) You can be really focused and work on one project at a time until it\u0026rsquo;s finished, or 2) you can be working on a lot of projects in parallel and when you start to loose focus, you switch to another kind of project. The idea is that you end up getting more done because you\u0026rsquo;re being productive more of the time. I subscribe to the second theory.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s hoping it works!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-editing-hole/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m stuck in an editing hole, and not only am I not editing the things I need to edit, I\u0026rsquo;m not getting anything done.\nI\u0026rsquo;m at a point where I have about 25 things on my personal task list, and 16 of them are editing related tasks: edit the article in this file, edit this fiction, edit this documentation, edit these would-be-blog posts, and so forth. It seems like I went on something of a six month writing bender, and while I did a little bit of editing during this period, I have clearly fallen behind.\nThere are a number of factors:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ve been making a point of putting editing tasks on the todo list because I want to make sure that I actually finish projects rather than just abandon them. I\u0026rsquo;ve not been particularly good with follow through in the past few years, so that\u0026rsquo;s been a big personal improvement project.","title":"The Editing Hole"},{"content":" The ability to mark a branch \u0026ldquo;diverged,\u0026rdquo; to prevent (or warn) on attempted merges from master (for example) into a maintenance branch.\nThe ability to create and track dedicated topic branches, and complementary tooling to encourage rebasing commits in these sorts of branches. We might call them \u0026ldquo;patch sets\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;sets\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;branches.\u0026rdquo; Also, it might be useful to think about using/displaying these commits, when published, in a different way.\nRepresent merge commits as hyperlinks to the user, when possible. I think GitHub\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;network graph\u0026rdquo; and similar visualizations are great for showing how commits and branches interact and relate to each other.\nThis would probably require some additional or modifies output from \u0026ldquo;git log\u0026rdquo;.\nNamed stashes.\nBranched stashes (perhaps this is closer to what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about for the request regarding topic branches.)\nThe ability to checkout \u0026ldquo;working copies,\u0026rdquo; of different points/branches currently from a single repository at the same time, using \u0026ldquo;native\u0026rdquo; git utilities.\nRelated, \u0026ldquo;shelf\u0026rdquo; functionality is scriptable, but this too needs to be easier and more well supported.\nI think legit is a step in the right direction, but it\u0026rsquo;s weird and probably makes it more difficult to understand what\u0026rsquo;s happening with git conceptually as opposed to the above features which would provide more appropriate conceptual metaphors for the work that would-be-git-users need.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-feature-requests/","summary":"The ability to mark a branch \u0026ldquo;diverged,\u0026rdquo; to prevent (or warn) on attempted merges from master (for example) into a maintenance branch.\nThe ability to create and track dedicated topic branches, and complementary tooling to encourage rebasing commits in these sorts of branches. We might call them \u0026ldquo;patch sets\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;sets\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;branches.\u0026rdquo; Also, it might be useful to think about using/displaying these commits, when published, in a different way.\nRepresent merge commits as hyperlinks to the user, when possible. I think GitHub\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;network graph\u0026rdquo; and similar visualizations are great for showing how commits and branches interact and relate to each other.\nThis would probably require some additional or modifies output from \u0026ldquo;git log\u0026rdquo;.\nNamed stashes.\nBranched stashes (perhaps this is closer to what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about for the request regarding topic branches.)\nThe ability to checkout \u0026ldquo;working copies,\u0026rdquo; of different points/branches currently from a single repository at the same time, using \u0026ldquo;native\u0026rdquo; git utilities.","title":"Git Feature Requests"},{"content":"Assumption:\ngit is pretty awesome, but it\u0026rsquo;s conceptually complex. As a result using git demands a preexisting familiarity with git itself or some sort of wrapper to minimize the conceptual overhead. The collaboration methods (i.e. hosting) provided by git, which are simple by design to allow maximum flexibility, do not provide enough structure to be practically useful. As a result providers like GitHub (and BitBucket and gitorious) offer a valuable service that makes it easier--or even possible--for people to use git. Caveats:\nthere are problems with using centralized repository services controlled by third parties, particularly for open source/free software projects.\nThere are ways that GitHub succeeds an fails in this regard. but this dynamic is too complex to fully investigate within the scope of this post.\nIf you use GitHub as designed, and the way that most projects use nGitHub, then you have a very specific and particular view of how Git works.\nWhile this isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, it\u0026rsquo;s less easy to use git in some more distributed workflows as a result. This isn\u0026rsquo;t GitHub\u0026rsquo;s fault so much as it is an artifact of people not really knowing how git itself works.\nAssertions:\nGitHub\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;fork\u0026rdquo; model[^fork] disincentives people from working in \u0026ldquo;topic\u0026rdquo; branches.\nBy making it really easy for people to publish their branches, GitHub disincentives the most productive use of the \u0026ldquo;git rebase\u0026rdquo; command that leads to clean and clear histories.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no distinction between a \u0026ldquo;soft fork\u0026rdquo; where you create a fork for the purpose of submitting a patch (i.e. a \u0026ldquo;pull request\u0026rdquo;) and a \u0026ldquo;hard fork,\u0026rdquo; where you actually want to break the relationship with the original project.\nThis is mostly meaningful in context of the other features that GitHub provides, notably the \u0026ldquo;Network\u0026rdquo; chart, and the issue tracker. In a soft-fork that I would intend to merge back in, I\u0026rsquo;d like the issues to \u0026ldquo;come with,\u0026rdquo; the repository, or at least connect in some way to the \u0026ldquo;parent.\u0026rdquo; For hard forks, it might make sense to leave the old issues behind. The same with the network chart, which is incredibly powerful, but it\u0026rsquo;s not great at guessing how your repository relates to the rest of its \u0026ldquo;social network.\u0026rdquo;\nThe solution: keep innovating, keep fighting lock-in, and don\u0026rsquo;t let GitHub dictate how you work.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-limitiations-of-the-github-fork-model/","summary":"Assumption:\ngit is pretty awesome, but it\u0026rsquo;s conceptually complex. As a result using git demands a preexisting familiarity with git itself or some sort of wrapper to minimize the conceptual overhead. The collaboration methods (i.e. hosting) provided by git, which are simple by design to allow maximum flexibility, do not provide enough structure to be practically useful. As a result providers like GitHub (and BitBucket and gitorious) offer a valuable service that makes it easier--or even possible--for people to use git. Caveats:\nthere are problems with using centralized repository services controlled by third parties, particularly for open source/free software projects.\nThere are ways that GitHub succeeds an fails in this regard. but this dynamic is too complex to fully investigate within the scope of this post.\nIf you use GitHub as designed, and the way that most projects use nGitHub, then you have a very specific and particular view of how Git works.","title":"Limitiations of GitHub Forks"},{"content":"I spent a lot of time in the past few months thinking about \u0026ldquo;automation,\u0026rdquo; as a project to take things that take a long time and require a lot of human intervention into things that just do themselves, and I think this is the wrong approach.\nWhile total automation is an admirable, it\u0026rsquo;s difficult, both because it requires more complex software to deal with edge cases, but also because it\u0026rsquo;s hard to iterate into a fully automated solution.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s back up for a moment and talk about automation in general.\nComputers are great at automating things. When you figure out how exactly to accomplish something digitally (i.e. polling an information source for an update, transforming data, testing a system or tool,) writing a program to perform this function is a great idea: not only does it reduce the workload on actual people (i.e. you.) I think the difference between people who are \u0026ldquo;good with computers,\u0026rdquo; and people who are \u0026ldquo;great with computers,\u0026rdquo; is the ability to spot opportunities for these kinds of automations, and potentially implement them..\nTo my mind the most important reason to automate tasks is to ensure consistency and to make it more likely that tedious tasks get done.\nHaving said this, rather than develop complete task automations for common functions, the better solution is probably to approach automation on the bottom up: instead of automating a complete process, automate smaller pieces particularly the most repetitive and invariable parts, and then provide a way for people to trigger the (now simplified) task.\nThe end result, is a system that\u0026rsquo;s more flexible easier to write, and less prone to failure under weird edge cases. Perhaps this is a manifestation of \u0026ldquo;worse is better\u0026rdquo; also.\nThoughts?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/making-things-easier/","summary":"I spent a lot of time in the past few months thinking about \u0026ldquo;automation,\u0026rdquo; as a project to take things that take a long time and require a lot of human intervention into things that just do themselves, and I think this is the wrong approach.\nWhile total automation is an admirable, it\u0026rsquo;s difficult, both because it requires more complex software to deal with edge cases, but also because it\u0026rsquo;s hard to iterate into a fully automated solution.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s back up for a moment and talk about automation in general.\nComputers are great at automating things. When you figure out how exactly to accomplish something digitally (i.e. polling an information source for an update, transforming data, testing a system or tool,) writing a program to perform this function is a great idea: not only does it reduce the workload on actual people (i.e. you.) I think the difference between people who are \u0026ldquo;good with computers,\u0026rdquo; and people who are \u0026ldquo;great with computers,\u0026rdquo; is the ability to spot opportunities for these kinds of automations, and potentially implement them.","title":"Making Things Easier"},{"content":"The free software/open source/software development world needs a distributed bug tracking story. Because the current one sucks.\n::: {.contents} :::\nThe State of the Art There are a number of tools written between 2006 and 2010 or so that provide partial or incomplete solutions to the problem. Almost isn\u0026rsquo;t quite good enough. The \u0026ldquo;resources\u0026rdquo; section of this post, contains an overview of the most important (my judgment,) representatives of the current work in the area with a bit of editorializing.\nIn general these solutions are good starts, and I think they allow us (or me) a good starting point for thinking about what distributed bug tracking could be like. Someday.\nBug tracking needs are diverse, which creates a signifigant design challenge for any system in this space. There are many existing solutions, that everyone hates, and I suspect most would-be developers and innovators in the space would like to avoid opening this can of worms.\nAnother factor is that, while most people have come to the conclusion that distributed source control tools are the \u0026ldquo;serious\u0026rdquo; contemporary tool for managing source code the benefits of distributed bug tracking hasn\u0026rsquo;t yet propogated in the same way. Many folks have begun to come to terms with the fact that some amount of tactical centralization is inevitable, required, and even desirable1 in the context of a issue tracking systems.\nAdd to this the frequent requirement that non-developer users often need to track and create issues, and the result is that we\u0026rsquo;ve arrived at something of an impasse.\nRequirements A distributed bug tracking system would need:\nA good way to provide short, unique identifiers for individual issues and comments so that users can discuss issues canonically.\nAn interface contained in a single application, script, or binary, that you could distribute with the application.\nA simple/lightweight web-based interface so that users can (at least) review, search, and reference issues from a web browser.\nWrite access would also be good, but is less critical. Also, it might be more practical (both from a design and a workflow perspective,) to have users submit bugs on the web into a read-only \u0026ldquo;staging queue,\u0026rdquo; that developers/administrators would then formally import into the project. This formalizes a certain type of triage approach that many projects may find useful.\nTo be separable from the source code history, either by using a branch, or by using pre-commit hooks to ensure that you never commit changes to code/content and the bugs at the same time.\nTo be editable, and to interact with commonly accessible tools that users already use. Email, command line tools, the version control systems, potentially documentation systems, build systems, testing frameworks and so forth.\nBuilt on reliable tools.2\nTo provide an easy way to customize your \u0026ldquo;views\u0026rdquo; on bugs for a particular team or project. In other words, each team can freely decide which extra fields get attached to their bugs, along with which fields are visible by default, which are required, and so on--without interfering with other projects.\nThe Future of the Art We (all) need to work on building new and better tools to help solve the distributed issue tracking problem. This will involve: learning from the existing attempts, continuing to develop and solidify the above requirements, (potentially) test and develop a standard (yaml/json?) based data storage format that is easy to parse, and easily merged that multiple tools can use. Develop some simple prototype tools, potentially as a suite of related utilities (a la early versions of git.) that facilitate interaction with the git database. With an eye towards flexibility and extensible. While there are implications for free software hosting as well as vendor independence and network service autonomy (a la `Franklin Street Statement \u0026lt;http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/\u0026gt;`_.) I think the primary reason to pursue distributed bug tracking has more to do with productivity and better engineering practices, and less with the policy. In summary: Bug database systems that run locally and are fast3 and always available. Tools that permit offline interaction with issue database. Tools that allow users to connect issues to branches. Tools that make it possible to component-ize bug databases in parallel with software Resources (With commentary,)\ndist-bugs mailing list\nThis is the canonical source for discussion around distributed bug tracking.\nBugs Everywhere\nThis is among the most well developed solution speaking holistically. \u0026ldquo;be\u0026rdquo; is written in Python, can generate output for the web. It uses its own data format, and has a pretty good command line tool. The HTML output generate is probably not very fast at scale (none are,) but I have not tested it.\nDitz\nDitz is a very well developed solution. Ditz: implemented in Ruby, has a web interface, has a command line tool, uses a basic YAML data format, and stores data in branch. Current development is slow, getting it up and running is non-trivial, and my sense is that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a very active community of contributors. There are reasons for this, likely but they are beyond the scope of this overview.\npitz\nPitz is a Python re-implementation of Ditz, and while the developer(s?) have produced a \u0026ldquo;release,\u0026rdquo; the \u0026ldquo;interface\u0026rdquo; is a Python shell, and to interact with the database you have to, basically write commands in Python syntax. From a data perspective, however, Pitz, like Ditz is quite developed. Pitz while it stores data in-tree, I think it\u0026rsquo;s important source of ideas/examples/scaffolding.\nArtemis\nThis is a really clever solution that uses Maildirs to store issues. As a result you can interact with and integrate Artimis issues with your existing email client. Pull down changes, and see new bugs in your email, without any complicated email and list server setups.\nThe huge caveat is that it\u0026rsquo;s implemented as a plugin for Mercurial, and so can\u0026rsquo;t be used with git projects. Also, all data resides in the tree.\ngit-issues\nIn most ways, git-issues is my favorite: it\u0026rsquo;s two Python files, 1700 lines of code, stores issues outside of the source branch, and has a good command line interface. On the downside, it uses XML (which shouldn\u0026rsquo;t matter, but I think probably does, at least in terms of attracting developers,) and doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a web-based interface. It\u0026rsquo;s also currently un-maintained.\nProphet/sd\nSD, which is based on a distributed database named Prophet, is a great solution. The primary issue is that it\u0026rsquo;s currently unmentioned and is not as feature complete as it should be. Also a lot of SD focuses on synchronizing with existing centralized issue trackers, potentially at the expense of developing other tools.\nIt seems that you want centralized issue databases, or at least the fact that centralized issue databases appear canonical is a major selling point for issue tracking software in general. Otherwise, everyone would have their own text file with a bunch of issues, and that would suck.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBecause I don\u0026rsquo;t program (much) and it\u0026rsquo;s easy to criticize architectural decisions from afar, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to explicitly say \u0026ldquo;we need to write this in Python for portability reasons\u0026rdquo; or something that would be similarly unfounded. At the same time, adoption and ease of use is crucial here, both for developers and users. Java and Ruby (and maybe Perl,) for various reasons, add friction to the adoption possibilities.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n\u0026ldquo;Is Jira/Bugzilla/etc. slow for you today?\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/supporting-distributed-bug-tracking/","summary":"The free software/open source/software development world needs a distributed bug tracking story. Because the current one sucks.\n::: {.contents} :::\nThe State of the Art There are a number of tools written between 2006 and 2010 or so that provide partial or incomplete solutions to the problem. Almost isn\u0026rsquo;t quite good enough. The \u0026ldquo;resources\u0026rdquo; section of this post, contains an overview of the most important (my judgment,) representatives of the current work in the area with a bit of editorializing.\nIn general these solutions are good starts, and I think they allow us (or me) a good starting point for thinking about what distributed bug tracking could be like. Someday.\nBug tracking needs are diverse, which creates a signifigant design challenge for any system in this space. There are many existing solutions, that everyone hates, and I suspect most would-be developers and innovators in the space would like to avoid opening this can of worms.","title":"Distributed Bug Tracking"},{"content":"I went to a fabulous all day Sacred Harp singing in New Haven Connecticut last weekend. It was great. Thoughts:\nSize and Space This wasn\u0026rsquo;t a huge singing. There plenty of singings in the Northeast that have higher attendance, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, there was something nice about getting to sing with the people assembled.\nIt helped that the room was great for singing, and it was the perfect size for the crowd. Sacred Harp singers are often big folklore geeks or big music geeks, but I think deep down, we\u0026rsquo;re all really huge room geeks. Because a room that just sounds and feels good, makes all the difference in the world.\nNote to self: Go to more awesome regional singings in great rooms in the future.\nHeat It was a pleasantly warm spring day, and with 80 or so people in a room, it got warm, and while this did subtract something from the comfort level, it also sets the mood somehow, and changes the tone of the day. Also, when the air is a bit more humid (but it only needs to be a bit,) and it\u0026rsquo;s not as drafty and cold, its easier to keep your voice warmed up. The end result: I (or one) will sing better between April and September.\nMy Voice Part In an unusual move for me, I spent 3 out of 4 sessions singing Tenor. While I don\u0026rsquo;t have a \u0026ldquo;super bass\u0026rdquo; voice, I\u0026rsquo;m defiantly on bass side of baritone. In Sacred Harp, theoretically everyone can sing tenor, and it\u0026rsquo;s fun to mix things up a bit and songs sound different in different parts. I am also finding that having a sense of another part makes it possible to have a more rich sense of the music. Highly recommended.\nAlso, every time I sing tenor it takes me 25 minutes to remember (or remind my body) how to do it, so it was particularly nice to have a good long spell of singing to both figure out how to sing the part but also to get more comfortable with it.\nMy local singing community has been a bit bereft of basses lately, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t had much opportunity to actually sing tenor as much as I might like recently, so it was a particularly good change of pace.\nSong Selection I had something of an epiphany about leading and choosing your song at a singing.\nWhile choosing a song that you like and enjoy hearing is obviously a part of the processes, I think song choice is more about choosing the right song for the moment, and figuring out what will sound best next, given the previous few songs.\nI used to obsess a great deal about what song I would lead, and study it (at least some) before the singing even began. This weekend, I came with a few songs that I\u0026rsquo;d been thinking about but changed at the last moment when I thought that the song I had picked out wouldn\u0026rsquo;t fit very well.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sacred-harp-new-haven-2012/","summary":"I went to a fabulous all day Sacred Harp singing in New Haven Connecticut last weekend. It was great. Thoughts:\nSize and Space This wasn\u0026rsquo;t a huge singing. There plenty of singings in the Northeast that have higher attendance, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, there was something nice about getting to sing with the people assembled.\nIt helped that the room was great for singing, and it was the perfect size for the crowd. Sacred Harp singers are often big folklore geeks or big music geeks, but I think deep down, we\u0026rsquo;re all really huge room geeks. Because a room that just sounds and feels good, makes all the difference in the world.\nNote to self: Go to more awesome regional singings in great rooms in the future.\nHeat It was a pleasantly warm spring day, and with 80 or so people in a room, it got warm, and while this did subtract something from the comfort level, it also sets the mood somehow, and changes the tone of the day.","title":"2012 New Haven Singing"},{"content":"When you\u0026rsquo;re out in the world Morris Dancing, everyone asks what you\u0026rsquo;re doing. Actually, more typically people ask \u0026ldquo;What country is this from?\u0026rdquo; but I don\u0026rsquo;t know what that means. In any case, this past weekend I witnessed the following exchange between elderly spectator to the foreman of a certain New York City Men\u0026rsquo;s Team as the tour was moving between stands:\nSpectator: What is this and where is it from?\nJ.D.: It\u0026rsquo;s English Morris Dancing, do you know what that is?\nSpectator: No.\nJ.D.: Do you care?\nSpectator (pauses, unsure of how to continue) Yes, is it like cricket or football?\nJ.D. Cricket.\n(At this point the spectator continued about his way satisfied and the tour continued to the next stand.)\nThis exchange, as these usually go, was pretty good. And the cricket part is totally right. There\u0026rsquo;s actually, as I understand it, a lot of connection between the history of cricket and Morris Dancing: village\u0026rsquo;s teams would play cricket and dance Morris, Morris Kits were often cricket uniforms with ribbons and bells, and before cricket, most Morris dancers wore black pants.\nStill.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-the-origins-of-morris-dancing/","summary":"When you\u0026rsquo;re out in the world Morris Dancing, everyone asks what you\u0026rsquo;re doing. Actually, more typically people ask \u0026ldquo;What country is this from?\u0026rdquo; but I don\u0026rsquo;t know what that means. In any case, this past weekend I witnessed the following exchange between elderly spectator to the foreman of a certain New York City Men\u0026rsquo;s Team as the tour was moving between stands:\nSpectator: What is this and where is it from?\nJ.D.: It\u0026rsquo;s English Morris Dancing, do you know what that is?\nSpectator: No.\nJ.D.: Do you care?\nSpectator (pauses, unsure of how to continue) Yes, is it like cricket or football?\nJ.D. Cricket.\n(At this point the spectator continued about his way satisfied and the tour continued to the next stand.)\nThis exchange, as these usually go, was pretty good. And the cricket part is totally right. There\u0026rsquo;s actually, as I understand it, a lot of connection between the history of cricket and Morris Dancing: village\u0026rsquo;s teams would play cricket and dance Morris, Morris Kits were often cricket uniforms with ribbons and bells, and before cricket, most Morris dancers wore black pants.","title":"The Origins of Morris Dancing"},{"content":".. that developers tell.\nAll the documentation you\u0026rsquo;d need is in the test cases. My comments are really clear and detailed. 3. I\u0026rsquo;m really interested and committed to having really good documentation.\nThis code is easy to read because its so procedural. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t really need documentation. 6. I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a really powerful way to extract documentation from this code.\nThe documentation is up to date. We\u0026rsquo;ve tested this and nothing\u0026rsquo;s changed. This behavior hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed, and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t affect users anyway. The error message is clear. 11. This entire document needs to be rewritten to account for this change.\nYou can document this structure with a pretty clear table. Often this is true, more often these kinds of comments assume that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to convey 3-5 dimension matrixes clearly on paper/computer screens.\nI can do that. I will do that. No one should need to understand. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lies-developers-tell-about-documentation/","summary":".. that developers tell.\nAll the documentation you\u0026rsquo;d need is in the test cases. My comments are really clear and detailed. 3. I\u0026rsquo;m really interested and committed to having really good documentation.\nThis code is easy to read because its so procedural. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t really need documentation. 6. I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a really powerful way to extract documentation from this code.\nThe documentation is up to date. We\u0026rsquo;ve tested this and nothing\u0026rsquo;s changed. This behavior hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed, and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t affect users anyway. The error message is clear. 11. This entire document needs to be rewritten to account for this change.\nYou can document this structure with a pretty clear table. Often this is true, more often these kinds of comments assume that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to convey 3-5 dimension matrixes clearly on paper/computer screens.\nI can do that. I will do that. No one should need to understand. ","title":"Lies About Documentation..."},{"content":"I have a question for game theory/urban planning/transit geeks, in part for practical reasons, and in part for a story I\u0026rsquo;m developing:\nIs there some sort of resource that explains \u0026ldquo;most efferent\u0026rdquo; rapid transit rider strategies, perhaps from a game theory perspective?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been living in NYC for almost a year, with frequent visits for about 6 months before that and I\u0026rsquo;ve learned things like:\nThe physical layouts of a number of station complexes and transfer points, to facilitate quick/easy transfers.\nA faltering sense of when to take an express and when to take a local, and when it makes sense to switch.\nA decent sense of which route will be more direct/quicker in a given situation.\nAn acceptable sense of which part of the train you need to be on.\nI\u0026rsquo;m interested in knowing if there is any work aimed at a general audience that addresses any of these questions, in particular:\nThe express/local decision making logic, particularly given situations like:\nWhen does it make sense to walk ~5-10 blocks to an express stop (possibly in the wrong direction,) rather than walk a shorter distance to a local stop that would require a transfer. (If your destination is an express stop?)\nAt what point in a journey does it make the most sense to transfer between trains?\nHow does time-of-day affect the logic.\nSpecific differences (if any) for navigating subway lines with multiple converging services. (e.g. the \u0026ldquo;M\u0026rdquo; with regards to the F and E, as well as the R with regards to the N in Manhattan.)\nLogic for transferring between non-parallel train services that intersect at multiple points in a given journey (e.g. in Brooklyn, vs. Manhattan, if needed for inter-borough trips; E/M; 4,5,6 vs N, R.)\nLogic for transferring between services that run on the same track (e.g. in NYC: N/R, E/C, F/M, etc.) with respect to how your journey overlays the route divergence and convergences.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/transit-and-nyc-subway-strategy/","summary":"I have a question for game theory/urban planning/transit geeks, in part for practical reasons, and in part for a story I\u0026rsquo;m developing:\nIs there some sort of resource that explains \u0026ldquo;most efferent\u0026rdquo; rapid transit rider strategies, perhaps from a game theory perspective?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been living in NYC for almost a year, with frequent visits for about 6 months before that and I\u0026rsquo;ve learned things like:\nThe physical layouts of a number of station complexes and transfer points, to facilitate quick/easy transfers.\nA faltering sense of when to take an express and when to take a local, and when it makes sense to switch.\nA decent sense of which route will be more direct/quicker in a given situation.\nAn acceptable sense of which part of the train you need to be on.\nI\u0026rsquo;m interested in knowing if there is any work aimed at a general audience that addresses any of these questions, in particular:","title":"NYC Subway Strategy"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s this saying, I traced it down once but have forgotten the source again, that before you can write anything good, you have to write a million words of crap.\nWell I\u0026rsquo;ve done it. I\u0026rsquo;m guessing that most writers hit this number without much difficulty fairly early on in their lives/careers, but it\u0026rsquo;s hard keep records and do proper accounting of this data. And let\u0026rsquo;s be frank, it\u0026rsquo;s kind of a stupid thing to track. While I\u0026rsquo;m definitely a better writer these days than I was even 2 years ago, I know that I have a lot more to learn.\nIn any case, I have a firm account of a million words of crap that I\u0026rsquo;ve written in the last 10 years or so:\ntychoish.com this wiki, mostly rhizome accounts for a bit more than 800,000 words. I wrote a novel in 2002 and 2003 that now exists primarily as a paper volume in a zippered binder that I use as a foot rest. That was 100,000 words. Since September 26, 2011 I\u0026rsquo;ve written a bit under 101,500 words for my work. The number is slightly inflated on account of code samples, some repetitive sections, and a few articles that colleagues wrote that I did some significant editing/rewriting. Between June 2009 and May 2011, I wrote somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 words for a previous job (again some measure of redundant content, other people\u0026rsquo;s work, and code samples makes this figure hard to track.) The Knowing Mars novella that I wrote between July 2007 and ~March 2008 is about 35,000 words. The novel that I finished the first draft of few weeks ago is about 85,000 words. I\u0026rsquo;m 35,000 words into the first draft of a technical book-like object. I have 10,000 words in a couple of other projects. Which puts me way way way, over (what? 1,300,000.) I wonder when I broke the million word mark?\nSome observations on writing.\nI still make all kinds of writing mistakes that I find embarrassing and difficult. Particularly with fiction (which probably only accounts for 200,000-250,000 words,) I feel incredibly clumsy.\nAt the same time, as long as I have a clear idea of what a piece of text needs to say, I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably comfortable pulling together a draft without much fuss. Sometimes figuring out what I need to say involves a bunch of reading and long walk, but it\u0026rsquo;s possible.\nI\u0026rsquo;m getting better at writing less. Writing concisely is hard work and it\u0026rsquo;s easy to get into the habit of generating \u0026ldquo;word stew\u0026rdquo; that don\u0026rsquo;t say anything useful and are impenetrable to read.\nWriting is hard. I\u0026rsquo;ve always been an awful speller and I have some dyslexic moments, but--as longtime readers of the blog have surely noticed--I\u0026rsquo;m getting way better and writing cleaner copy.\nEditing other peoples writing on a regular basis has also been enlightening because it allows me to put things in perspective, and be able to see value in what I can do with words. Also it\u0026rsquo;s cool to be able to help other people write.\nThis is totally a correlation, but I pretty much never write anything longhand, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m a better writer for it. The downside is that I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly dependent on my own computer and its setup to do anything.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-million-words-of-crap/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s this saying, I traced it down once but have forgotten the source again, that before you can write anything good, you have to write a million words of crap.\nWell I\u0026rsquo;ve done it. I\u0026rsquo;m guessing that most writers hit this number without much difficulty fairly early on in their lives/careers, but it\u0026rsquo;s hard keep records and do proper accounting of this data. And let\u0026rsquo;s be frank, it\u0026rsquo;s kind of a stupid thing to track. While I\u0026rsquo;m definitely a better writer these days than I was even 2 years ago, I know that I have a lot more to learn.\nIn any case, I have a firm account of a million words of crap that I\u0026rsquo;ve written in the last 10 years or so:\ntychoish.com this wiki, mostly rhizome accounts for a bit more than 800,000 words. I wrote a novel in 2002 and 2003 that now exists primarily as a paper volume in a zippered binder that I use as a foot rest.","title":"The Million Words of Crap"},{"content":"This post provides a few quick overviews of cool bits of shell script that I\u0026rsquo;ve written or put together recently. Nothing earth shattering, but perhaps interesting nonetheless.\nMaking a Bunch of Symbolic Links. I have two collection of Maildir folders to store my mail. One in a ~/work/mail folder for my work mail, and ~/mail for my personal projects. I want the work mailboxes to be symbolically linked to the personal ones (some work email, notably from GitHub comes to a personal address, and I want to be able to refile as necessary.) I moved the work maildirs last week, so I needed to create about 15 symbolic links, and so I wrote the following little loop:\ncd ~/mail for i in `find ~/work/mail -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1`; do ln -s $i work.`echo $i | cut -d / -f 6` done Should be useful, no?\nCommit all Git Changes For a long time, I used the following bit of code to provide the inverse operation of \u0026ldquo;git add .\u0026rdquo;. Where \u0026ldquo;git add .\u0026rdquo; adds all uncommited changes to the staging area for the next commit, the following commit automatically removes all files that are no longer present on the file-system from the staging area for the next commit.\nif [ \u0026quot;`git ls-files -d | wc -l`\u0026quot; -gt \u0026quot;0\u0026quot; ]; then git rm --quiet `git ls-files -d` fi This is great if you forget to use \u0026ldquo;git mv\u0026rdquo; or you delete a file using rm, you can run this operation and pretty quickly have git catch up with the state of reality. In retrospect I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure why I put the error checking if statement in there.\nThere are two other implementations of this basic idea that I\u0026rsquo;m aware of:\nfor i in `git ls-files -d`; do git rm --quiet $i done Turns out you can do pretty much the same thing with the following statement using the xargs command and you end up with something that\u0026rsquo;s a bit more succinct:\ngit ls-files --deleted -z | xargs -0 git rm --quiet I\u0026rsquo;m not sure why, I think it\u0026rsquo;s because I started being a Unix nerd after Linux dropped the argument number limit, and as a result I\u0026rsquo;ve never really gotten a chance to become familiar with xargs. While I sometimes sense that a problems is xargs shaped, I almost never run into \u0026ldquo;too many arguments\u0026rdquo; errors, and always attempt other solutions first.\nA Note About xargs If you\u0026rsquo;re familiar with xargs skip this section. Otherwise, it\u0026rsquo;s geeky story time.\nWhile this isn\u0026rsquo;t currently an issue on Linux, some older UNIX systems (including older versions of Linux,) had this limitation where you could only pass a limited number of arguments to a command. If you had too many, the command would produce an error, and you had to find another way.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the number was, and the specific number isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly important to the story. Generally, I understand that this problem would crop up when attempting to take the output of a command like find and piping or passing it to another command like grep or the like. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if you can trigger \u0026ldquo;too many arguments\u0026rdquo; errors with globbing (i.e. *) but like I said this kind of thing is pretty uncommon these days.\nOne of the \u0026ldquo;other ways\u0026rdquo; was to use the xargs command which basically takes very long list of arguments and passes them one by one (or in batches?) to another command. My gut feeling is that xargs can do some things, like the above a bit more robustly, but that isn\u0026rsquo;t experimentally grounded. Thoughts?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/code-snippets-loops-and-git-automation/","summary":"This post provides a few quick overviews of cool bits of shell script that I\u0026rsquo;ve written or put together recently. Nothing earth shattering, but perhaps interesting nonetheless.\nMaking a Bunch of Symbolic Links. I have two collection of Maildir folders to store my mail. One in a ~/work/mail folder for my work mail, and ~/mail for my personal projects. I want the work mailboxes to be symbolically linked to the personal ones (some work email, notably from GitHub comes to a personal address, and I want to be able to refile as necessary.) I moved the work maildirs last week, so I needed to create about 15 symbolic links, and so I wrote the following little loop:\ncd ~/mail for i in `find ~/work/mail -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1`; do ln -s $i work.`echo $i | cut -d / -f 6` done Should be useful, no?\nCommit all Git Changes For a long time, I used the following bit of code to provide the inverse operation of \u0026ldquo;git add .","title":"Loops and Git Automation"},{"content":"Cron is great, right? For the uninitiated, if there are any of you left, Cron is a task scheduler that makes it possible to run various scripts and programs at specified intervals. This means that you can write programs that \u0026ldquo;do a thing\u0026rdquo; in a stateless way, set them to run regularly, without having to consider any logic regarding when to run, or any kind of state tracking. Cron is simple and the right way to do a great deal of routine automation, but there are caveats.\nAt times I\u0026rsquo;ve had scads of cron jobs, and while they work, from time to time I find myself going through my list of cron tasks on various systems and removing most of them or finding better ways.\nThe problems with cron are simple:\nIts often a sledge hammer, and it\u0026rsquo;s very easy to put something in cron job that needs a little more delicacy.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s possible to capture the output of cron tasks (typically via email,) the feedback from cronjobs is hard to follow. So it\u0026rsquo;s hard to detect errors, performance deterioration, inefficiencies, or bugs proactively.\nIts too easy to cron something to run every minute or couple of minutes. A task that seems relatively lightweight when you run it once can end up being expensive in the aggregate when they have to run a thousand times a day.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that there aren\u0026rsquo;t places where using cron isn\u0026rsquo;t absolutely the right solution, but there are better solutions. For instance:\nInclude simple tests and logic for the cron task to determine if it needs to run before actually running.\nMake things very easy to invoke or on demand rather than automatically running them regularly.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve begun to find little scripts and dmenu, or an easily called emacs-lisp function to be preferable to a cron job for a lot of tasks that I\u0026rsquo;d otherwise set in a cron job.\nWrite real daemons. It\u0026rsquo;s hard and you have to make sure that they don\u0026rsquo;t error out or quit unexpectedly--which requires at least primitive monitoring--but a little bit of work here can go a long way.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cron-is-the-wrong-solution/","summary":"Cron is great, right? For the uninitiated, if there are any of you left, Cron is a task scheduler that makes it possible to run various scripts and programs at specified intervals. This means that you can write programs that \u0026ldquo;do a thing\u0026rdquo; in a stateless way, set them to run regularly, without having to consider any logic regarding when to run, or any kind of state tracking. Cron is simple and the right way to do a great deal of routine automation, but there are caveats.\nAt times I\u0026rsquo;ve had scads of cron jobs, and while they work, from time to time I find myself going through my list of cron tasks on various systems and removing most of them or finding better ways.\nThe problems with cron are simple:\nIts often a sledge hammer, and it\u0026rsquo;s very easy to put something in cron job that needs a little more delicacy.","title":"Cron is the Wrong Solution"},{"content":"Most people don\u0026rsquo;t use git particularly well. It\u0026rsquo;s a capable piece of software that supports a number of different workflows, but because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mandate any particular workflow it\u0026rsquo;s possible to use git productively for years without ever really touching some features.\nAnd some of the features--in my experience mostly those related to more manual branching, merging, and history manipulation operations--are woefully underutilized. Part of this is because Github, which is responsible for facilitating much of git\u0026rsquo;s use, promotes a specific workflow that makes it possible to do most of the (minimal required) branch operations on the server side, with the help of a much constrained interface. Github makes git usable by making it possible to get most of the benefit of git without needing to mess with SHA1 hashes, or anything difficult on the command-line.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a good thing. Mostly.\nNevertheless, there are a few operations that remain hard with git: I sometimes encounter situations that I have to try a few times before I get it right, and there are commands that I always have to check the man page to figure out how to specify the references. And even then I\u0026rsquo;m sometimes still confused. So maybe I (or we?) can spend a little bit of time and figure out what processes remain hard with git and maybe try and see if there is a way to make the process a bit more streamlined.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s my list:\nReorder all commits since x commit.\nThis is basically: find the commit before the earliest one that you want to change, run git rebase -i \u0026lt;commit hash\u0026gt; to reorder the commits even though git sorts the commits in the order that I find most un-intuitive.\nCreate local branches to track remote branches or repositories.\nSetup the remotes, if necessary, and then run: git branch --track \u0026lt;local-branch-name\u0026gt; \u0026lt;remote\u0026gt;/\u0026lt;branch-name\u0026gt; and git config branch.{name}.push {local-branch}:master.\nStash all local changes and switch branches.\nIt would also be nice if you could figure out way for git (or a helper) to see any open files in your text editor and save/close them if needed.\nPull a commit from the history of one branch into another branch without pulling anything else.\nI think this is chery-pick? It might also be nice to pull a series of commits from one branch, rebase them into one commit in the destination branch, and then commit that.\nPretty much every time I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to use the merge command to get something other than what I would have expected to happen by using \u0026ldquo;pull,\u0026rdquo; it ends tragically.\nReader suggestions:\nPut your process/procedural frustrations with git here. How about we work on figuring out how to solve these problems in comments?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-in-practice/","summary":"Most people don\u0026rsquo;t use git particularly well. It\u0026rsquo;s a capable piece of software that supports a number of different workflows, but because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mandate any particular workflow it\u0026rsquo;s possible to use git productively for years without ever really touching some features.\nAnd some of the features--in my experience mostly those related to more manual branching, merging, and history manipulation operations--are woefully underutilized. Part of this is because Github, which is responsible for facilitating much of git\u0026rsquo;s use, promotes a specific workflow that makes it possible to do most of the (minimal required) branch operations on the server side, with the help of a much constrained interface. Github makes git usable by making it possible to get most of the benefit of git without needing to mess with SHA1 hashes, or anything difficult on the command-line.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a good thing. Mostly.\nNevertheless, there are a few operations that remain hard with git: I sometimes encounter situations that I have to try a few times before I get it right, and there are commands that I always have to check the man page to figure out how to specify the references.","title":"Git In Practice"},{"content":"I learned about artbollocks-mode.el from Sacha Chua\u0026rsquo;s post, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty freaking amazing.\nBasically, it does some processing of your writing--while you work--to highlight passive sentences and affected jargon.1 And that\u0026rsquo;s all. There are some functions for generating statistics about your writing, but I find I don\u0026rsquo;t use that functionality often. You can enable it all of the time, or just turn it on when you\u0026rsquo;re doing editing.\nAfter a few weeks, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed a marked improvement in the quality of my output. I leave it on all the time, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at resisting the urge to edit while I\u0026rsquo;m writing. Or at least I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at picking up again after going back to tweak a wording. In general it\u0026rsquo;s hard to keep more than a few things in an editing pass at any time.\nIt turns out that the instant feedback on passive sentences, even though it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, is great for improving the quality of my content the first time out. And it\u0026rsquo;s even better for doing editing work. It\u0026rsquo;s harder to ignore a passive sentence when the editor is highlighting you see a screen full of them for you.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s of course important to be able to ignore its suggestions from time to time, and it\u0026rsquo;s no harder to ignore than \u0026ldquo;flyspell-mode\u0026rdquo; (the on-the-fly spell checker in emacs.)\nThis is perhaps the clumsiest part of the default distribution, as jargon is terribly specific to the kind of writing you\u0026rsquo;re doing, and it turns out that one of the \u0026ldquo;art critic\u0026rdquo;/post-modern words (i.e. \u0026ldquo;node\u0026rdquo;) is a word that I end up using (acceptably, I think) in a technical context when describing a clustered system. And there\u0026rsquo;s a difference between a technical lexicon and a jargon, and regular expressions aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly sensitive to this, so the actual list of words that you need to call yourself out on, varies a bit from person to person. But once you customize it, it\u0026rsquo;s great.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/assisted-editing/","summary":"I learned about artbollocks-mode.el from Sacha Chua\u0026rsquo;s post, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty freaking amazing.\nBasically, it does some processing of your writing--while you work--to highlight passive sentences and affected jargon.1 And that\u0026rsquo;s all. There are some functions for generating statistics about your writing, but I find I don\u0026rsquo;t use that functionality often. You can enable it all of the time, or just turn it on when you\u0026rsquo;re doing editing.\nAfter a few weeks, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed a marked improvement in the quality of my output. I leave it on all the time, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at resisting the urge to edit while I\u0026rsquo;m writing. Or at least I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at picking up again after going back to tweak a wording. In general it\u0026rsquo;s hard to keep more than a few things in an editing pass at any time.\nIt turns out that the instant feedback on passive sentences, even though it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, is great for improving the quality of my content the first time out.","title":"Assisted Editing"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I\u0026rsquo;d fully realized it before, but the key problems in systems administration--at least the kind that I interact with the most--are really manifestations of a tension between complexity and reliability.\nComplex systems are often more capable flexible, so goes the theory. At the same time, complexity often leads to operational failure, as a larger number of moving parts leads to more potential points of failure. I think it\u0026rsquo;s an age old engineering problem and I doubt that there are good practical answers.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this writing project where I\u0026rsquo;ve been exploring a number of fundamental systems administration problem domains, so this kind of thing is on my mind. It seems, that the way to address the hard questions often come back to \u0026ldquo;what are the actual requirements, and are you willing to pay the premiums to make the complex systems reliable?\u0026rdquo;\nTrade-offs around complexity also happen in software development proper: I\u0026rsquo;ve heard more than a few developers talk in the last few months weigh the complexity of using dynamic languages like Python for very large scale projects. While the quests and implications manifest differently for code, it seems like this is part of the same problem.\nRather than prattle on about various approaches, I\u0026rsquo;m just going to close out this post with a few open questions/thoughts:\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the process for determining requirements that accounts for actual required complexity?\nHow do things that had previously been complex, become less complex?\nPerhaps someone just has write the code in C or C++ and let it mature for a few years before administrators accept it as stable?\nIs there an corresponding level of complexity threshold in software development and within software itself? (Likely yes,) and is it related to something intrinsic to particular design patterns, or to tooling (i.e. programming language implementations, compilers, and so forth.)\nMight better developer tooling allow us to programs of larger scope in dynamic languages (perhaps?)\nReader submitted questions:\nYour questions here. Answers, or attempts thereat in comments.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/allowable-complexity/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I\u0026rsquo;d fully realized it before, but the key problems in systems administration--at least the kind that I interact with the most--are really manifestations of a tension between complexity and reliability.\nComplex systems are often more capable flexible, so goes the theory. At the same time, complexity often leads to operational failure, as a larger number of moving parts leads to more potential points of failure. I think it\u0026rsquo;s an age old engineering problem and I doubt that there are good practical answers.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this writing project where I\u0026rsquo;ve been exploring a number of fundamental systems administration problem domains, so this kind of thing is on my mind. It seems, that the way to address the hard questions often come back to \u0026ldquo;what are the actual requirements, and are you willing to pay the premiums to make the complex systems reliable?\u0026rdquo;\nTrade-offs around complexity also happen in software development proper: I\u0026rsquo;ve heard more than a few developers talk in the last few months weigh the complexity of using dynamic languages like Python for very large scale projects.","title":"Allowable Complexity"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been subject to a rather annoying emacs bug for months. Basically, when you start emacs with the --daemon switch, and the X11 session exits, and any emacs frames are open, then the emacs process dies. No warning. The whole point, to my mind, of the daemon mode is to allows emacs sessions to persist beyond the current X11 session.\nThis shouldn\u0026rsquo;t happen. I think this is the relevant bug report, but I seem to remember that the issue has something to do with the way that GTK interacts with the X11 session and emacs\u0026rsquo;s frames. It\u0026rsquo;s something of a deadlock: the GTK has no real need to fix the bug (and/or it\u0026rsquo;s a behavior that they rely on for other uses,) and it might not really be possible or feasible for emacs to work around this issue.1\nI also think that it\u0026rsquo;s probably fair to say that daemon mode represent a small minority all emacs usage.\nRegardless, I\u0026rsquo;ve figured out the workaround:\nTurns out, it\u0026rsquo;s totally possible to build GNU emacs without GTK, by using the \u0026ldquo;Lucid\u0026rdquo; build. Which is to say, use the windowing system kit built for Lucid Emacs (i.e. XEmacs,) rather than GTK. I was able, using the code below, to get an emacs experience with the new build that seems identical2 to the one I used to get with GTK, except without the frustrating crashes every time that X11 spazzed when I decided to unplug a monitor or some such. A welcome improvement, indeed.\nThe following emacs-lisp covers all of the relevant configuration of the \u0026ldquo;look and feel\u0026rdquo; of my emacs session. Install the Inconsolata font if you haven\u0026rsquo;t already, you\u0026rsquo;ll be glad you did.\n(setq-default inhibit-startup-message 't initial-scratch-message 'nil save-place t scroll-bar-mode nil tool-bar-mode nil menu-bar-mode nil scroll-margin 0 indent-tabs-mode nil flyspell-issue-message-flag 'nil size-indication-mode t scroll-conservatively 25 scroll-preserve-screen-position 1 cursor-in-non-selected-windows nil) (setq default-frame-alist '((font-backend . \u0026quot;xft\u0026quot;) (font . \u0026quot;Inconsolata-14\u0026quot;) (vertical-scroll-bars . 0) (menu-bar-lines . 0) (tool-bar-lines . 0) (alpha 86 84))) (tool-bar-mode -1) (scroll-bar-mode -1) (menu-bar-mode -1) Hope this helps you and/or anyone else that might have run into this problem.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to add the citation and more information here, but can\u0026rsquo;t find it.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nTo be fair, I mostly don\u0026rsquo;t use the GUI elements in emacs, though having emacs instances outside of the terminal is nice for displaying images when using emacs-w3m, and for having a little bit of additional display flexibility for some more rich modes.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/persistent-emacs-daemons/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been subject to a rather annoying emacs bug for months. Basically, when you start emacs with the --daemon switch, and the X11 session exits, and any emacs frames are open, then the emacs process dies. No warning. The whole point, to my mind, of the daemon mode is to allows emacs sessions to persist beyond the current X11 session.\nThis shouldn\u0026rsquo;t happen. I think this is the relevant bug report, but I seem to remember that the issue has something to do with the way that GTK interacts with the X11 session and emacs\u0026rsquo;s frames. It\u0026rsquo;s something of a deadlock: the GTK has no real need to fix the bug (and/or it\u0026rsquo;s a behavior that they rely on for other uses,) and it might not really be possible or feasible for emacs to work around this issue.1\nI also think that it\u0026rsquo;s probably fair to say that daemon mode represent a small minority all emacs usage.","title":"Persistent Emacs Daemons"},{"content":"*tl;Dr\u0026gt;* I got one of those nifty laptop risers that puts your laptop up closer to eye level, and it has pretty much improved all of my interactions with computers a thousand fold and it\u0026rsquo;s made it possible for me to effectively use two screens. This post explores this.\nOne of my coworkers had a laptop stand she wasn\u0026rsquo;t using and I asked to borrow it for an afternoon, and my neck stopped hurting. I never thought my neck hurt before, but apparently it does.\nOr did.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s more: for years now I\u0026rsquo;ve kept an extra monitor around (and had one at work) but the truth is that I have never really felt like I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get the most out of an external monitor.\nSomehow, putting my laptop 4 inches in the air was the little change that made everything better. The laptop is generally on the left of the external monitor, and I have task lists, notes buffers, the chat window, and my status logging window on the laptop, and then three windows on the external (emacs buffer, terminal, emacs buffer) on the right. My primary focus centers between the monitors, but probably edges slightly toward the external, most of the time.\nAlso, I discovered that I--apparently--have a slight processing/attention defect whereby I find it painful and difficult to focus on things that are happening on the right side of the screen for any amount of time. Which is weird because my right eye has always been noticeably stronger. I\u0026rsquo;ll ponder this more later.\nMy virtual desktops for email and web browsing are a bit less rigid, but the same basic idea. Somehow it seems to work. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of work recently to get the layouts right, to minimize the impact of the window management of most context switching (scripting various transitions, saving layouts, etc.) In all things are going great.\nIt strikes me that I\u0026rsquo;ve not posted here even a little about my setup in a while. The truth is that it\u0026rsquo;s not terribly surprising and I\u0026rsquo;ve not changed very much recently. I\u0026rsquo;m back to one laptop, and as anxious as having one laptop makes me sometimes (I fear the lack of redundancy,) not having to keep it synced makes life easier. I\u0026rsquo;ve put some time into doing a little bit of polish on all of little bits of configuration/code that I have that makes my computing world go around, but mostly it\u0026rsquo;s pretty good.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s nice, and I\u0026rsquo;d write more about it, but I want to get back to getting things done around here. Exporting and exploring some of this stuff in greater depth is definitely on my list, so hang in there, and if there\u0026rsquo;s something you particularly want to see, be in touch.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-laptop-riser-that-changed-my-life/","summary":"*tl;Dr\u0026gt;* I got one of those nifty laptop risers that puts your laptop up closer to eye level, and it has pretty much improved all of my interactions with computers a thousand fold and it\u0026rsquo;s made it possible for me to effectively use two screens. This post explores this.\nOne of my coworkers had a laptop stand she wasn\u0026rsquo;t using and I asked to borrow it for an afternoon, and my neck stopped hurting. I never thought my neck hurt before, but apparently it does.\nOr did.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s more: for years now I\u0026rsquo;ve kept an extra monitor around (and had one at work) but the truth is that I have never really felt like I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get the most out of an external monitor.\nSomehow, putting my laptop 4 inches in the air was the little change that made everything better. The laptop is generally on the left of the external monitor, and I have task lists, notes buffers, the chat window, and my status logging window on the laptop, and then three windows on the external (emacs buffer, terminal, emacs buffer) on the right.","title":"A Life Changing Laptop Riser"},{"content":"For the most part, I\u0026rsquo;m quite happy with everything that I was able to accomplish last year. I\u0026rsquo;ve moved cities (for the second year in a row) and last year I changed jobs twice: in both cases, I think the current will stick for a while. And I\u0026rsquo;m working on other projects, with some impressive speed. Last year wasn\u0026rsquo;t been great for finishing things, but I guess there\u0026rsquo;s room for improvement this year.\nAfter a fair amount of professional angst I\u0026rsquo;m finally doing pretty much exactly what I want to be doing: I\u0026rsquo;m writing a substantial/total revision of a software manual for a company developing an open source database system. I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you to figure out the details, but it\u0026rsquo;s great.\nA couple years ago, I said to myself, that I wanted to be a \u0026ldquo;real technical writer,\u0026rdquo; which is to say, work with engineering teams, write documentation and tutorials for a single product or group of products, and operate on a regular release schedule. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a great deal of writing for technology companies: from project proposals and journalism, to tutorials and content for distributors, to white papers, marketing, and sales materials. Delightfully, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get there, and in retrospect it\u0026rsquo;s both somewhat amazing, and incredibly delightful.\nA while back, I had dinner with a friend who\u0026rsquo;s been doing the same thing I do for a long time (we know each other through folk dance and singing,) and by comparing our experiences it was great to learn that my experience is quite typical, both in terms of the work I\u0026rsquo;m doing and the procedural engineering practice frustrations (e.g. \u0026ldquo;What do you mean you changed the interface without telling me?!?!\u0026rdquo;)\nAt work we have this thing where we send in an account of what we did during the day so that other people know what we\u0026rsquo;re working on, and so that we can keep our team on the same page. After all, when you\u0026rsquo;re all looking at computer screens all day, and in a few different time zones, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to loose track of what people are working on.\nAt the bottom of these emails, we\u0026rsquo;re prompted to ask \u0026ldquo;what are your blockers and impediments.\u0026rdquo; Often I say something clever like \u0026ldquo;Compiler issue with Spacetime interface or Library.\u0026rdquo; Or something to that effect. It feels like a good description of the last year.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/retrospectives-in-2011-work-spacetime/","summary":"For the most part, I\u0026rsquo;m quite happy with everything that I was able to accomplish last year. I\u0026rsquo;ve moved cities (for the second year in a row) and last year I changed jobs twice: in both cases, I think the current will stick for a while. And I\u0026rsquo;m working on other projects, with some impressive speed. Last year wasn\u0026rsquo;t been great for finishing things, but I guess there\u0026rsquo;s room for improvement this year.\nAfter a fair amount of professional angst I\u0026rsquo;m finally doing pretty much exactly what I want to be doing: I\u0026rsquo;m writing a substantial/total revision of a software manual for a company developing an open source database system. I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you to figure out the details, but it\u0026rsquo;s great.\nA couple years ago, I said to myself, that I wanted to be a \u0026ldquo;real technical writer,\u0026rdquo; which is to say, work with engineering teams, write documentation and tutorials for a single product or group of products, and operate on a regular release schedule.","title":"2011 Retrospective"},{"content":"I have an Aeron chair at my desk at home. Confession.\nI got it in April when I moved to New York City. The only piece of furniture that I had that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t move in my (now former) car was my desk chair. I found a good deal on an Aeron chair and I rationalized to myself that the cost of the chair was actually about the cost of movers. Savings right?\nIt also helped, that I was leaving a job where I had an Aeron chair in my office, and I knew that in the short term I would be working from home. While my old desk chair was (and is) quite nice, it\u0026rsquo;s not quite the same. Sit in an Aeron chair for a couple of two years, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to go back. I\u0026rsquo;ve sat in other chairs since then, and it\u0026rsquo;s never quite the same.\nHaving said that, after a cleaning incident today, I would like to collect a few gripes about the Aeron chair for your consideration.\nThe assembly right beneath the chair collects dust and dirt in a proportion that doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem quite possible. It\u0026rsquo;s clearly an artifact of the mesh, and likely a commentary on the air circulation of my apartment.\nRegardless, dusting nightmare.\nThe arms scuff and scratch on desks, if the bottom of the desk isn\u0026rsquo;t completely smooth. This isn\u0026rsquo;t an actual problem: the chair still works fine and is as comfortable as ever, but it\u0026rsquo;s a annoying.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve never looked at the underside of a desk before seriously. With every other chair I\u0026rsquo;ve either ordered a variant sans arms, or I\u0026rsquo;ve take then arms off as soon as possible.\nThe Aeron arms are low enough that they\u0026rsquo;ve never bothered me, so I thought \u0026ldquo;might as well.\u0026rdquo; But it\u0026rsquo;s still annoying.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/aeron-woes/","summary":"I have an Aeron chair at my desk at home. Confession.\nI got it in April when I moved to New York City. The only piece of furniture that I had that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t move in my (now former) car was my desk chair. I found a good deal on an Aeron chair and I rationalized to myself that the cost of the chair was actually about the cost of movers. Savings right?\nIt also helped, that I was leaving a job where I had an Aeron chair in my office, and I knew that in the short term I would be working from home. While my old desk chair was (and is) quite nice, it\u0026rsquo;s not quite the same. Sit in an Aeron chair for a couple of two years, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to go back. I\u0026rsquo;ve sat in other chairs since then, and it\u0026rsquo;s never quite the same.","title":"Aeron Woes"},{"content":"I stumbled across a link somewhere along the way to a thread about the Pyramid project\u0026rsquo;s documentation planning process. It\u0026rsquo;s neat to see a community coming to what I think is the best possible technical outcome. In the course of this conversation Iain Duncan, said something that I think is worth exploring in a bit more depth. The following is directly from the list, edited only slightly:\nI wonder whether some very high level tutorials on getting into Pyramid that look at the different ways you can use it would be useful? I sympathize with Chris and the other documenters because just thinking about this problem is hard: How do you introduce someone to Pyramid easily without putting blinders on them for Pyramid\u0026rsquo;s flexibility? I almost feel like there need to 2 new kinds of docs:\neasy to follow beginner docs for whatever the most common full stack scaffold is turning out to be (no idea what this is!) some mile high docs on how you can lay out pyramid apps differently and why you want to be able to do that. For example, I feel like hardly anyone coming to Pyramid from the new docs groks why the zca under the hood is so powerful and how you can tap into it. Different sets of users have different needs from documentation. I think my \u0026ldquo;:Multi-Audience Documentation\u0026rdquo; post also addresses this issue.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think there are good answers and good processes that always work for documentation projects. Targeted users and audience changes a lot depending on the kind of technology at play. The needs of users (and thus the documentation) varies in response to the technical complexity and nature every project/product varies. I think, as the above example demonstrates, there\u0026rsquo;s additional complexity for software whose primary users are very technical adept (i.e. systems administrators) or even software developers themselves.\nThe impulse to have \u0026ldquo;beginner documentation,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;functional documentation,\u0026rdquo; is a very common solution for many products and reflects two main user needs:\nto understand how to use something. In other words, \u0026ldquo;getting started,\u0026rdquo; documentation and tutorials. to understand how something works. In other words the \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; documentation. I think it\u0026rsquo;s feasible to do both kinds of documentation within a single resource, but the struggle then revolves around making sure that the right kind of users find the content they need. That\u0026rsquo;s a problem of documentation usability and structure. But it\u0026rsquo;s not without challenges, lets think about those in the comments.\nI also find myself thinking a bit about the differences between web-based documentation resources and conventional manuals in PDF or dead-tree editions. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to resolve these challenges, or even what the right answers are, but I think the questions are very much open.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/documentation-emergence/","summary":"I stumbled across a link somewhere along the way to a thread about the Pyramid project\u0026rsquo;s documentation planning process. It\u0026rsquo;s neat to see a community coming to what I think is the best possible technical outcome. In the course of this conversation Iain Duncan, said something that I think is worth exploring in a bit more depth. The following is directly from the list, edited only slightly:\nI wonder whether some very high level tutorials on getting into Pyramid that look at the different ways you can use it would be useful? I sympathize with Chris and the other documenters because just thinking about this problem is hard: How do you introduce someone to Pyramid easily without putting blinders on them for Pyramid\u0026rsquo;s flexibility? I almost feel like there need to 2 new kinds of docs:\neasy to follow beginner docs for whatever the most common full stack scaffold is turning out to be (no idea what this is!","title":"Documentation Emergence"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m sure that most \u0026ldquo;hacker bloggers\u0026rdquo; have probably done their own \u0026ldquo;N Git Tricks,\u0026rdquo; post at this point. But git is one of those programs that has so much functionality and everyone uses it differently that there is a never ending supply of fresh posts on this topic. My use of git changes enough that I could probably write this post annaully and come up with a different 9 things. That said here\u0026rsquo;s the best list right now.\n::: {.contents} :::\nSee Staged Differences The git diff command shows you the difference between the last commit and the state of the current working directory. That\u0026rsquo;s really useful and you might not use it as much as you should. The --cached option shows you just the differences that you\u0026rsquo;ve staged.\nThis provides a way to preview your own patch, to make sure everything is in order. Crazy useful. See below for the example:\ngit diff --cached Eliminate Merge Commits In most cases, if two or more people publish commits to a shard repository, and everyone commits to remote repositories more frequently then they publish changes, when they pull, git has to make \u0026ldquo;meta commits\u0026rdquo; that make it possible to view a branching (i.e. \u0026ldquo;tree-like\u0026rdquo;) commit history in a linear form. This is good for making sure that the tool works, but it\u0026rsquo;s kind of messy, and you get histories with these artificial events in them that you really ought to remove (but no one does.) The \u0026ldquo;--rebase\u0026rdquo; option to \u0026ldquo;git pull\u0026rdquo; does this automatically and subtally rewrites your own history in such a way as to remove the need for merge commits. It\u0026rsquo;s way clever and it works. Use the following command:\ngit pull --rebase There are caveats:\nYou can\u0026rsquo;t have uncommitted changes in your working copy when you run this command or else it will refuse to run. Make sure everything\u0026rsquo;s committed, or use \u0026ldquo;git stash\u0026rdquo; Sometimes the output isn\u0026rsquo;t as clear as you\u0026rsquo;d want it to be, particularly when things don\u0026rsquo;t go right. If you don\u0026rsquo;t feel comfortable rescuing yourself in a hairy git rebase, you might want to avoid this one. If the merge isn\u0026rsquo;t clean, there has to be a merge commit anyway I believe. Amend the Last Commit This is a recent one for me..\nIf you commit something, but realized that you forgot to save one file, use the \u0026ldquo;--amend\u0026rdquo; switch (as below) and you get to add whatever changes you have staged to the previous commit.\ngit commit --amend Note: if you amend a commit that you\u0026rsquo;ve published, you might have to do a forced update (i.e. git push -f) which can mess with the state of your collaborators and your remote repository.\nStage all of Current State I\u0026rsquo;ve been using a versing of this function for years now as part of my download mail scheme. For some reason in my head, it\u0026rsquo;s called \u0026ldquo;readd.\u0026rdquo; In any case, the effect of this is simple:\nIf a file is deleted from the working copy of the repository, remove it (git rm) from the next commit. Add all changes in the working copy to the next commit. git-stage-all(){ if [ \u0026#34;`git ls-files -d | wc -l`\u0026#34; -gt \u0026#34;0\u0026#34; ]; then; git rm --quiet `git ls-files -d`; fi git add . } So the truth of the matter is that you probably don\u0026rsquo;t want to be this blasé about commits, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great time saver if you use the rm/mv/cp commands on a git repo, and want to commit those changes, or a have a lot of small files that you want to process in one way and then snapshot the tree with git.\nEditor Integration The chances are that your text editor has some kind of git integration that makes it possible to interact with git without needing to drop into a shell.\nIf you use something other than emacs I leave this as an exercise for the reader. If you use emacs, get \u0026ldquo;magit,\u0026rdquo; possibly from your distribution\u0026rsquo;s repository, or from the upstream.\nAs an aside you probably want to add the following to your .emacs somewhere.\n(setq magit-save-some-buffers nil) (add-hook \u0026#39;before-save-hook \u0026#39;delete-trailing-whitespace) Custom Git Command Aliases In your user account\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;~/.gitconfig\u0026rdquo; file or in a per-repository \u0026ldquo;.git/config\u0026rdquo; file, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to define aliases that add bits of functionality to your git command. This is useful defining shortcuts, combinations, and for triggering arbitrary scripts. Consider the following:\n[alias] all-push = \u0026quot;!git push origin master; git push secondary master\u0026quot; secondary = \u0026quot;!git push secondary master\u0026quot; Then from the command line, you can use:\ngit secondary git all-push Git Stash \u0026ldquo;git stash\u0026rdquo; takes all of the staged changes and stores them away somewhere. This is useful if you want to break apart a number of changes into several commits, or have changes that you don\u0026rsquo;t want to get rid of (i.e. \u0026ldquo;git reset\u0026rdquo;) but also don\u0026rsquo;t want to commit. \u0026ldquo;git stash\u0026rdquo; puts staged changes onto the stash and \u0026ldquo;git stash pop\u0026rdquo; applies the changes to the current working copy. It operates as a FILO stack (e.g. \u0026ldquo;First In, Last Out\u0026rdquo;) stack in the default operation.\nTo be honest, I\u0026rsquo;m not a git stash power user. For me it\u0026rsquo;s just a stack that I put patches on and pull them off later. Apparently it\u0026rsquo;s possible to pop things off the stash in any order you like, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;m missing other subtlety.\nEveryone has room for growth.\nIgnore Files You can add files and directories to a .gitignore file in the top level of your repository, and git will automatically ignore these files. One \u0026ldquo;ignore pattern\u0026rdquo; per line, and it\u0026rsquo;s possible to use shell-style globing.\nThis is great to avoid accidentally committing temporary files, but I also sometimes put entire sub-directories if I need to nest git repositories within git-repositories. Technically, you ought to use git\u0026rsquo;s submodule support for this, but this is easier. Here\u0026rsquo;s the list of temporary files that I use:\n.DS_Store *.swp *~ \\#*# .#* \\#* *fasl *aux *log Host Your Own Remotes I\u0026rsquo;ve only once accidentally said \u0026ldquo;git\u0026rdquo; when I meant \u0026ldquo;github\u0026rdquo; (or vice versa) once or twice. With github providing public git-hosting services and a great compliment of additional tooling, it\u0026rsquo;s easy forget how easy it is to host your own git repositories.\nThe problem is that, aside from making git dependent on one vendor, this ignores the \u0026ldquo;distributed\u0026rdquo; parts of git and all of the independence and flexibility that comes with that. If you\u0026rsquo;re familiar with how Linux/GNU/Unix works, git hosting is entirely paradigmatic.\nIssue the following commands to create a repository:\nmkdir -p /srv/git/repo.git cd /srv/git/repo.git git init --bare Edit the .git/config file in your existing repository to include a remote block that resembles the following:\n[remote \u0026quot;origin\u0026quot;] fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* url = [username]@[hostname]:/srv/git/repo.git If you already have a remote named origin, change the occurrence of the word remote in the above snippet with the name of your remote. (In multi-remote situations, I prefer to use descriptive identifier like \u0026ldquo;public\u0026rdquo; or machine\u0026rsquo;s hostnames.)\nThen issue \u0026ldquo;git push origin master\u0026rdquo; on the local machine, and you\u0026rsquo;re good. You can us a command in the following form to clone this repository at any time.\ngit clone [username]@[hostname]:/srv/git/repo.git Does anyone have git tricks that they\u0026rsquo;d like to share with the group?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/9-awesome-git-tricks/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m sure that most \u0026ldquo;hacker bloggers\u0026rdquo; have probably done their own \u0026ldquo;N Git Tricks,\u0026rdquo; post at this point. But git is one of those programs that has so much functionality and everyone uses it differently that there is a never ending supply of fresh posts on this topic. My use of git changes enough that I could probably write this post annaully and come up with a different 9 things. That said here\u0026rsquo;s the best list right now.\n::: {.contents} :::\nSee Staged Differences The git diff command shows you the difference between the last commit and the state of the current working directory. That\u0026rsquo;s really useful and you might not use it as much as you should. The --cached option shows you just the differences that you\u0026rsquo;ve staged.\nThis provides a way to preview your own patch, to make sure everything is in order. Crazy useful. See below for the example:","title":"9 Awesome Git Tricks"},{"content":"A couple of years ago I wrote \u0026ldquo;Why Arch Linux Rocks\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Getting the most from Arch Linux.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve made a number of attempts to get more involved in the Arch project and community, but mostly I\u0026rsquo;ve been too busy working and using Arch to do actual work. Then a few weeks ago when I needed to do something minor with my system--I forget what--and I found myself thinking \u0026ldquo;this Arch thing is pretty swell, really.\u0026rdquo;\nThis post is a collection of the clever little things that make Arch great.\n::: {.contents} :::\nabs I\u0026rsquo;m using abs as a macro for all of the things about the package build system that I enjoy.\nArch packages are easy to build for users: you download a few files read a bash script in the PKGBUILD file and run the makepkg command. Done. Arch packages are also easy to specify for developers: just specify a \u0026ldquo;build()\u0026rdquo; function and some variables int eh PKGBUILD file.\nArch may not have as many packages as Debian, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s clear that you don\u0026rsquo;t need comprehensive package coverage when making packages is trivially easy.\nIf you use Arch and you don\u0026rsquo;t frequent that AUR, or if you ever find yourself doing \u0026ldquo;./configure; make; make install\u0026rdquo; then you\u0026rsquo;re wasting your time or jeopardizing the stability of your server.\nyaourt The default package management tool for Arch Linux, pacman, is a completely sufficient utility. This puts pacman ahead of a number of other similar tools, but to be honest I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly wild about it. Having said that, I think that yaourt is a great thing. It provides a wrapper around all of pacman\u0026rsquo;s functionality and adds support for AUR/ABS packages in a completely idiomatic manner. The reduction in cost of installing this software is quite welcome.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not \u0026ldquo;official\u0026rdquo; or supported, because it\u0026rsquo;s theoretically possible to really screw up your system with yaourt but if you\u0026rsquo;re cautious, you should be good.\nyaourt -G The main yaourt functions that I use regularly are the \u0026ldquo;-Ss\u0026rdquo; which provides a search of the AUR, and the -G option. -G just downloads the tarball with the package specification (e.g. the PKGBUILD and associated files) from the AUR and untars the archive into the current directory.\nWith that accomplished, it\u0026rsquo;s trivial to build and install the package, but you get to keep a record of the build files for future reference and possible tweaking. So basically, you this is the way to take away the tedium of getting packages from the AUR, while giving you more control and oversight of package installation.\nrc.conf If you\u0026rsquo;ve installed Arch, then you\u0026rsquo;re already familiar with the rc.conf file. In case you didn\u0026rsquo;t catch how it works, rc.conf is bash script that defines certain global configuration values, which in turn controls certain aspects of the boot process and process initialization.\nI like that it\u0026rsquo;s centralized, that you can do all kinds of wild network configuration in the script, and I like that everything is in one place.\nnetcfg In point of fact, one of primary reasons I switched to Arch Linux full time, was because of the network configuration tool, netcfg. Like the rc.conf setup, netcfg works by having a network configuration files which define a number of variables which are sourced by netcfg when imitating a network connection.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all in bash, of course, and it works incredibly well. I like having network management easy to configure, and setup in a way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t require a management daemon.\nInit System Previous points have touched on this, but the \u0026ldquo;BSD-style\u0026rdquo; init system is perfect. It works quickly, and boot ups are stunningly fast: even without an SSD I got to a prompt in less than a minute, and probably not much more than 30 seconds. With an SSD: it\u0026rsquo;s even better great. The points that you should know:\nDaemon control scripts, (i.e. init scripts) are located in /etc/rc.d. There\u0026rsquo;s a pretty useful \u0026ldquo;library\u0026rdquo; of shell functions in /etc/rc.d/function and a good template file in``/etc/rc.d/skel` for use when building your own control scripts. The convention is to have clear and useful output and easy to understand scripts, and with the provided material this is pretty easy.\nIn /etc/rc.conf there\u0026rsquo;s a DAEMON variable that holds an array. Place names, corresponding to the /etc/rc.d file name, of daemons in this array to start them at boot time. Daemons are started synchronously by default (i.e. order of items in this array matters and the control script must exit before running the next script.) However, if a daemon\u0026rsquo;s name is prefixed by an @ sign, the process is started in the background and the init process moves to the next item in the array without waiting.\nStart-up dependency issues are yours to address, but using order and background start-up this is trivial to implement. Background start ups lead to fast boot times.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/6-awesome-arch-linux-tricks/","summary":"A couple of years ago I wrote \u0026ldquo;Why Arch Linux Rocks\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Getting the most from Arch Linux.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve made a number of attempts to get more involved in the Arch project and community, but mostly I\u0026rsquo;ve been too busy working and using Arch to do actual work. Then a few weeks ago when I needed to do something minor with my system--I forget what--and I found myself thinking \u0026ldquo;this Arch thing is pretty swell, really.\u0026rdquo;\nThis post is a collection of the clever little things that make Arch great.\n::: {.contents} :::\nabs I\u0026rsquo;m using abs as a macro for all of the things about the package build system that I enjoy.\nArch packages are easy to build for users: you download a few files read a bash script in the PKGBUILD file and run the makepkg command. Done. Arch packages are also easy to specify for developers: just specify a \u0026ldquo;build()\u0026rdquo; function and some variables int eh PKGBUILD file.","title":"6 Awesome Arch Linux Tricks"},{"content":"Life has been incredibly busy and full lately and that\u0026rsquo;s been a great thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been focusing my time on big projects recently rather than posting updates here and updating the wiki. And then I have this day job which basically counts as a big project. While I like the opportunity to focus deeply on some subjects, I also miss the blog.\ntycho is conflicted about something. Shocking.\nIn any case, I want to do something useful with this space more regularly. So here I am and expect me more around these parts.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a total refresh of my Cyborg Institute project. I want it to be an umbrella for cool projects, nifty examples, great documentation, and smart people1 working on cool projects. If that\u0026rsquo;s ever going to happen, I need to get something together myself. The first release will contain:\nA book-like object, that provides an introduction to the basic principals of Systems Administration for developers, \u0026ldquo;web people,\u0026rdquo; and other people who find themselves in charge of systems, without any real introduction to systems administration. (Status: 70% finished, with a couple more sections to draft and some editing left.) A Makefile based tasklist aggregator, inspired by org-mode but largely tool agnostic. (Status: 95% finished, with documentation editing and some final testing remaining.) A logging system for writers. I use it daily, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s a vast improvement over some previous attempts at script writing, and I did a pretty good job of documenting it, but it\u0026rsquo;s virtually impossible to manage/maintain. Having said that, I always wanted to rewrite it in Python (as a learning exercise,) so that might be a cool next step (Status: Finished save editing and an eventual rewrite.) Emacs and StumpWM config files, packaged as \u0026ldquo;starter-kits\u0026rdquo; for new users. I have good build processes for both of these. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I need to document them fully, but I need to write some READMEs. Since there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of redistribution of others code, I need to figure out the most compatible/appropriate license. (Status: Finished except for the work of free afternoon.) Probably, all of these Cyborg Institute projects will get released at about the same time. The blockers will be finishing/editing the book and editing everything else. I might make the release a thing, we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nOther than that, I:\nUpdated /technical-writing/compilation. Finished the first draft of this novel. Editing will commence in June. I\u0026rsquo;ve also started planning a fiction project, for a draft to begin in the fall? Wrote a few paragraphs on the ISD page, but I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that as my time becomes more limited, that the critical-futures wiki project, as such, will probably be the first thing to fall on the floor, unless someone else is really interested in making that be a thing. Onward and Upward!\nMy intention for the Cyborg Institute has always been (and shall remain,) as a sort of virtual think tank for cool projects put up by myself and others. You all, dearest readers, count in this group.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/task-updates/","summary":"Life has been incredibly busy and full lately and that\u0026rsquo;s been a great thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been focusing my time on big projects recently rather than posting updates here and updating the wiki. And then I have this day job which basically counts as a big project. While I like the opportunity to focus deeply on some subjects, I also miss the blog.\ntycho is conflicted about something. Shocking.\nIn any case, I want to do something useful with this space more regularly. So here I am and expect me more around these parts.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a total refresh of my Cyborg Institute project. I want it to be an umbrella for cool projects, nifty examples, great documentation, and smart people1 working on cool projects. If that\u0026rsquo;s ever going to happen, I need to get something together myself. The first release will contain:\nA book-like object, that provides an introduction to the basic principals of Systems Administration for developers, \u0026ldquo;web people,\u0026rdquo; and other people who find themselves in charge of systems, without any real introduction to systems administration.","title":"Task Updates"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s been a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve written one of these \u0026ldquo;clip posts,\u0026rdquo; but there\u0026rsquo;s no time like the present to get started with that. I hope everyone out there in internet-land is having a good end of the year. I\u0026rsquo;ll try and get a retrospective/new years out in the next few days, and avoid belaboring the point here.\nAs I said last friday it\u0026rsquo;s my intent to focus here on shorter/quicker thoughts, and focus my free writing/project time for work on longer projects (fiction, non-fiction, perhaps some programming.) So far so good.\nRecent Posts Around Here /posts/erstwhile-programmer /posts/ikiwiki-tasklist-update /posts/representation-and-race-futurism /posts/the-future-of-file-organization-and-security /posts/multiaudience-documentation /posts/knitting-in-three-dimensions /posts/intellectual-audience /posts/minimalism-versus-simplicity /posts/back-to-basics-tasklist-and-organization /posts/cyberpunk-sunset /posts/writing-software-for-android-and-tablets /posts/xen-and-kvm-failing-differently-together /posts/technical-writing-fiction /posts/whiteness-and-diversity /posts/longer-forms Other Cool Things on the Internet Sales Cycle Theater Why Programmers Work at Night ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/update/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s been a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve written one of these \u0026ldquo;clip posts,\u0026rdquo; but there\u0026rsquo;s no time like the present to get started with that. I hope everyone out there in internet-land is having a good end of the year. I\u0026rsquo;ll try and get a retrospective/new years out in the next few days, and avoid belaboring the point here.\nAs I said last friday it\u0026rsquo;s my intent to focus here on shorter/quicker thoughts, and focus my free writing/project time for work on longer projects (fiction, non-fiction, perhaps some programming.) So far so good.\nRecent Posts Around Here /posts/erstwhile-programmer /posts/ikiwiki-tasklist-update /posts/representation-and-race-futurism /posts/the-future-of-file-organization-and-security /posts/multiaudience-documentation /posts/knitting-in-three-dimensions /posts/intellectual-audience /posts/minimalism-versus-simplicity /posts/back-to-basics-tasklist-and-organization /posts/cyberpunk-sunset /posts/writing-software-for-android-and-tablets /posts/xen-and-kvm-failing-differently-together /posts/technical-writing-fiction /posts/whiteness-and-diversity /posts/longer-forms Other Cool Things on the Internet Sales Cycle Theater Why Programmers Work at Night ","title":"Update Pending"},{"content":"A friend asked me a question (several weeks ago by publication) on a technical topic and I spent most of the next few days writing a missive on database administration strategy. That seemed like a normal response. I was delighted to find that: I liked the voice, I enjoyed writing the longer document, and there are a dozen or so other related topics that I wanted to explore. So, apparently, I\u0026rsquo;m writing a book. This is exactly what I need: more projects. Not.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing: I find the writing inspiring and invigorating. I have a perspective and collection of knowledge that hasn\u0026rsquo;t been collected and presented in a single place. I like long form writing. The larger piece might also be a good contribution to my portfolio (such as it is.)\nI think this kind of writing suits my attention span.\nThis has left me without a lot of spare time for blogging, and (as I\u0026rsquo;m prone to do every so often,) rethinking the future of my efforts on tychoish.com and as a blogger. This is boring for all of you, but I\u0026rsquo;ll give some higher level stuff here and we can follow up in comments:\nBlogging is fun, and even though I\u0026rsquo;ve not been posting regularly, I\u0026rsquo;m always writing blog posts. Sometimes I find myself writing posts in emails to friends, but I\u0026rsquo;m never really going to stop writing blog posts.\nThe general explosion of blog publishing that we saw a few years ago has declined. Audience fragmentation happened, readership got entrenched. I feel like I weathered the storm pretty well and I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with the site and readers I have, but I\u0026rsquo;m also pretty confident that blogging isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be the means by which I \u0026ldquo;level up.\u0026rdquo;1\neBooks have finally happened. For the last decade most people have been saying that ebooks are great for reference material (given search-ability,) and for providing an introduction to a text that people will eventually buy in a paper edition. That may be true, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s changing rapidly, and with kindles and tablets and smart-phones, I think eBooks have effectively won, such as it is.\nIn another ten years, perhaps, we\u0026rsquo;ll just call them books.\nI\u0026rsquo;m pretty clear that keeping a blog, and perhaps most of the writing I do in my spare time is for my own enjoyment and betterment and helps to develop a personal portfolio and account of my work. I have no (real) interest in using my writing on tychoish.com or any other side that I maintain, as a way of supporting myself to any greater or lesser extent.\nI want to be in the business of writing things and working with technology and ideas and people, not the business of publishing. While the line is not always clear between \u0026ldquo;writing projects that you publish yourself online,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;new media publisher,\u0026rdquo; I want to stay away from the later as much as possible.\nSo I think this means that most of my \u0026ldquo;tychoish,\u0026rdquo; writing time will go to writing this book project, and to fiction, and once my blog post backlog is fully depleted (heh,) most of my postings will either be announcements/progress-reports or a bunch of shorter more off-the-cuff notes.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s hoping at least.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t really believe that I just used \u0026ldquo;level up\u0026rdquo; in this context.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/longer-forms/","summary":"A friend asked me a question (several weeks ago by publication) on a technical topic and I spent most of the next few days writing a missive on database administration strategy. That seemed like a normal response. I was delighted to find that: I liked the voice, I enjoyed writing the longer document, and there are a dozen or so other related topics that I wanted to explore. So, apparently, I\u0026rsquo;m writing a book. This is exactly what I need: more projects. Not.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing: I find the writing inspiring and invigorating. I have a perspective and collection of knowledge that hasn\u0026rsquo;t been collected and presented in a single place. I like long form writing. The larger piece might also be a good contribution to my portfolio (such as it is.)\nI think this kind of writing suits my attention span.\nThis has left me without a lot of spare time for blogging, and (as I\u0026rsquo;m prone to do every so often,) rethinking the future of my efforts on tychoish.","title":"Longer Forms"},{"content":"This post is a follow up to my earlier post on diversity and representation In short, while I think it\u0026rsquo;s great that we\u0026rsquo;re beginning to talk and write about race and representation in our fiction and field, I think we1 need to expand our analysis of whiteness.\nWhiteness in Science Fiction I\u0026rsquo;m still working on figuring out what this means, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I haven\u0026rsquo;t developed my thinking sufficiently to be more clear on this. In light of that here are a collection of my thoughts on representation:\nWhiteness is multiple and I think it\u0026rsquo;s possible (and important) to depict whiteness and white characters critically and without recapitulating normalization. At the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s important to avoid falling victim to a lot of the normalization to which uncritical representations of racial diversity often fall pray. The theory around race and representation must deal with issues around assimilation. More diversity is useful, but to move forward on issues of representation, the field needs to better understand the process of assimilation. I want to see stories that help us unpack assimilation. Whiteness is complex and a major problem with stories that \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t do race well,\u0026rdquo; is not just that the characters aren\u0026rsquo;t explicitly of color, but that whiteness isn\u0026rsquo;t portrayed very well. This is part of the struggle of privilege, but not only does science fiction need to be better about diversity and representation of non-white characters, but we the thinking on whiteness needs to continue to evolve apace. Diversity and Quotas Discussions about diversity and representation in fiction often lead the under-informed to ask \u0026ldquo;So what, do you want to impose some sort of quota system? Does that mean diversity is more important than quality?\u0026rdquo;\nThe answer is almost always no.\nI\u0026rsquo;d also like to point out that this is one of those cases where whiteness and systematic bias conspire to define \u0026ldquo;quality,\u0026rdquo; in unuseful ways. But this is another argument for another time.\nThe canonical answer is: there\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of amazing work written by people of color and a lot of great fiction that incorporates and addresses the experiences of people of color. This is great, and if we\u0026rsquo;ve learned anything in the last couple of years, it\u0026rsquo;s that if you look for this work it\u0026rsquo;s there. The real challenge revolves around cultivating that work so that there\u0026rsquo;s more of it, and promoting2 that work so that there\u0026rsquo;s a large audience.\nThe science fiction writing/reading/editing community.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nPromoting and marketing literature is by no means a solved problem under any conditions.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/whiteness-and-diversity/","summary":"This post is a follow up to my earlier post on diversity and representation In short, while I think it\u0026rsquo;s great that we\u0026rsquo;re beginning to talk and write about race and representation in our fiction and field, I think we1 need to expand our analysis of whiteness.\nWhiteness in Science Fiction I\u0026rsquo;m still working on figuring out what this means, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I haven\u0026rsquo;t developed my thinking sufficiently to be more clear on this. In light of that here are a collection of my thoughts on representation:\nWhiteness is multiple and I think it\u0026rsquo;s possible (and important) to depict whiteness and white characters critically and without recapitulating normalization. At the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s important to avoid falling victim to a lot of the normalization to which uncritical representations of racial diversity often fall pray. The theory around race and representation must deal with issues around assimilation. More diversity is useful, but to move forward on issues of representation, the field needs to better understand the process of assimilation.","title":"Whiteness and Diversity"},{"content":"On Outer Alliance Podcast #8, David Levine talked about having worked as a technical writer for some 15 years and then said something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s a point of great personal pride that I\u0026rsquo;ve never put a bulleted list in a piece of fiction.\u0026rdquo;\nI laughed out loud. Perhaps frightening a woman walking her dog nearby.\nIn most ways, the kind of writing that I do for work, API references, tutorials, administration overviews, best-practice descriptions, is very different from the kinds of things I write away from work, or at least I like to think so.\nThe truth is that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a bunch about writing and about communicating in general from writing documentation. While my \u0026ldquo;professional background,\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t include formal technological training, I definitely \u0026ldquo;broke in\u0026rdquo; because I was familiar with technology and could write, rather than being a particularly skilled or trained writer. Any more (just 2.5 years on,) I think the inverse is more true, but that\u0026rsquo;s conjecture.\nTechnical writing has definitely shaped the evolution of my taste: a couple years ago, I found myself most drawn to complex tightly constructed prose in fiction. These days I mostly go for sparse clear concise prose that isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly ornamented. Perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s only really possible to tune the internal editor for one kind of style at a time.\nHaving said that, I will confess to feeling--and resisting--the urge to put a bulleted list or some other structured convention of software manuals in fiction.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s the little things, really.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technical-writing-fiction/","summary":"On Outer Alliance Podcast #8, David Levine talked about having worked as a technical writer for some 15 years and then said something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s a point of great personal pride that I\u0026rsquo;ve never put a bulleted list in a piece of fiction.\u0026rdquo;\nI laughed out loud. Perhaps frightening a woman walking her dog nearby.\nIn most ways, the kind of writing that I do for work, API references, tutorials, administration overviews, best-practice descriptions, is very different from the kinds of things I write away from work, or at least I like to think so.\nThe truth is that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a bunch about writing and about communicating in general from writing documentation. While my \u0026ldquo;professional background,\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t include formal technological training, I definitely \u0026ldquo;broke in\u0026rdquo; because I was familiar with technology and could write, rather than being a particularly skilled or trained writer. Any more (just 2.","title":"Technical Writing Fiction"},{"content":"When I bought what is now my primary laptop, I had intended to use the extra flexibility to learn the prevailing (industrial-grade) virtualization technology. While that project would have been edifying on its own, I also hoped to use the extra flexibility to some more consistent testing and development work.\nThis project spurned a xen laptop project, but the truth is that Xen is incredibly difficult to get working, and eventually the \u0026ldquo;new laptop\u0026rdquo; just became the \u0026ldquo;every day laptop,\u0026rdquo; and I let go of the laptop Xen project. In fact, until very recently I\u0026rsquo;d pretty much given up on doing virtualization things entirely, but for various reasons beyond the scope of this post I\u0026rsquo;ve been inspired to begin tinkering with virtualization solutions again.\nAs a matter of course, I found myself trying KVM in a serious way for the first time. This experience both generated a new list of annoyances and reminded me about all the things I didn\u0026rsquo;t like about Xen. I\u0026rsquo;ve collected these annoyances and thoughts into the following post. I hope that these thoughts will be helpful for people thinking about virtualization pragmatically, and also help identify some of the larger to pain points with the current solution.\nXen Hardships: It\u0026rsquo;s all about the Kernel Xen is, without a doubt, the more elegant solution from a design perspective and it has a history of being the more robust and usable tool. Performance is great, Xen hosts can have up-times in excess of a year or two.\nThe problem is that dom0 support has, for the past 2-3 years, been in shambles, and the situation isn\u0026rsquo;t improving very rapidly. For years, the only way to run a Xen box was to use an ancient kernel with a set of patches that was frightening, or a more recent kernel with ancient patches forward ported. Or you could use cutting edge kernel builds, with reasonably unstable Xen support.\nA mess in other words.\nNow that Debian Squeeze (6.0) has a pv-ops dom0 kernel, things might look up, but other than that kernel (which I\u0026rsquo;ve not had any success with, but that may be me,) basically the only way to run Xen is to pay Citrix1 or build your own kernel from scratch, again results will be mixed (particularly given the non-existent documentation,) maintenance costs are high, and a lot of energy will be duplicated.\nWhat to do? Write documentation and work with the distributions so that if someone says \u0026ldquo;I want to try using Xen,\u0026rdquo; they\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get something that works.\nKVM Struggles: It\u0026rsquo;s all about the User Experience The great thing about KVM is that it just works. \u0026ldquo;sudo modprobe kvm kvm-intel\u0026rdquo; is basically the only thing between most people and a KVM host. No reboot required. To be completely frank, the prospect of doing industrial-scale virtualization on-top of nothing but the Linux kernel and with a wild module in it, gives me the willies is inelegant as hell. For now, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty much the best we have.\nThe problem is that it really only half works, which is to say that while you can have hypervisor functionality and a booted virtual machine, with a few commands, it\u0026rsquo;s not incredibly functional in practical systems. There aren\u0026rsquo;t really good management tools, and getting even basic networking configured off the bat, and qemu as the \u0026ldquo;front end\u0026rdquo; for KVM leaves me writhing in anger and frustration.2\nXen is also subject to these concerns, particularly around netowrking. At the same time, Xen\u0026rsquo;s basic administrative tools make more sense, and domU\u0026rsquo;s can be configured outside of interminable non-paradigmatic command line switches.\nThe core of this problem is that KVM isn\u0026rsquo;t very Unix-like, and it\u0026rsquo;s a problem that is rooted in it\u0026rsquo;s core and pervades the entire tool, and it\u0026rsquo;s probably rooted in the history of its development.\nWhat to do? First, KVM does a wretched job of anticipating actual real-world use cases, and it needs to do better at that. For instances it sets up networking in a way that\u0026rsquo;s pretty much only good for software testing and GUI interfaces but sticking the Kernel on the inside of the VM makes it horrible for Kernel testing. Sort out the use cases, and there ought to be associated tooling that makes common networking configurations easy.\nSecond, KVM needs to at least pretend to be Unix-like. I want config files with sane configurations, and I want otherwise mountable disk images that can be easily mounted by the host.\nEasy right?\nThe commercial vendor behind Xen, under whose stewardship the project seems to have mostly stalled. And I suspect that the commercial distribution is Red Hat 5-based, which is pretty dead-end. Citrix doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be very keen on using \u0026ldquo;open source,\u0026rdquo; to generate a sales channel, and also seems somewhat hesitant to put energy into making Xen easier to run for existing Linux/Unix users.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe libvirtd and Virt Manager works pretty well, though it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly flexible, and it\u0026rsquo;s not a simple command line interface and a configuration file system.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/xen-and-kvm-failing-differently-together/","summary":"When I bought what is now my primary laptop, I had intended to use the extra flexibility to learn the prevailing (industrial-grade) virtualization technology. While that project would have been edifying on its own, I also hoped to use the extra flexibility to some more consistent testing and development work.\nThis project spurned a xen laptop project, but the truth is that Xen is incredibly difficult to get working, and eventually the \u0026ldquo;new laptop\u0026rdquo; just became the \u0026ldquo;every day laptop,\u0026rdquo; and I let go of the laptop Xen project. In fact, until very recently I\u0026rsquo;d pretty much given up on doing virtualization things entirely, but for various reasons beyond the scope of this post I\u0026rsquo;ve been inspired to begin tinkering with virtualization solutions again.\nAs a matter of course, I found myself trying KVM in a serious way for the first time. This experience both generated a new list of annoyances and reminded me about all the things I didn\u0026rsquo;t like about Xen.","title":"Xen and KVM: Failing Differently Together"},{"content":"This is the story of how I occasionally realize I exist on the continuum of \u0026ldquo;programmers,\u0026rdquo; rather than just being an eccentric sort of writer type.\n::: {.contents} :::\nEvidence download-mail I have this somewhat peculiar method of downloading email that I think works great. A few weeks ago, however, I was trying to compress things in \u0026ldquo;hot storage,\u0026rdquo; and realized that I had a problem.\nFor a year or so, I had been automating commits to the git repository that held all my mail. In order to effectively archive and compress some mail, I needed to do some serious rebasing to not only remove a bunch of messages from the current repository but also pull that content from the history and flatten the history somewhat.\nThe problem was that I had 50,000 commits and there\u0026rsquo;s simply no effective way to rebase that many commits in a reasonable amount of time, particularly given I/O limitations. So I gave up, started from (relative) scratch, and rewrote the scripts to be a little bit more smart\u0026hellip; You know in an afternoon.\nSee the revised code here: download mail\nikiwiki-tasklist I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this before in my post on my new personal organization stuff, but it\u0026rsquo;s no great announcement that I\u0026rsquo;m moving away from working in emacs\u0026rsquo; org-mode and doing more work with ikiwiki and some hand-rolled scripts. I think org-mode is great, it just ended up getting in my way a bit and I think I can get more of what I need to get done in other ways.\nI have learned a great deal from org-mode. I made the biggest leap away from org-mode when I wrote ikiwiki tasklist, which does all of the things I had been using org-mode\u0026rsquo;s agenda for. It\u0026rsquo;s not a complicated at all: look in some files for some lines that begin with specific strings and put them into a page that is the perfect task list.\nSee the code here: ikiwiki tasklist.\nCommon Lisp Weenie \u0026ldquo;What Window Manager is that,\u0026rdquo; he asked.\n\u0026ldquo;StumpWM, it\u0026rsquo;s written in Common Lisp,\u0026rdquo; I said, launching into a 30 second pitch for Stump.\nMy pitch about stump is pretty basic: the Common Lisp interface allows you to evaluate code during run-time without restarting the window manager or loosing state; it\u0026rsquo;s functionally like screen, which is very intuitive for window management; and it has emacs-like key-bindings, which I think work pretty well.\n\u0026ldquo;So you\u0026rsquo;re a Common Lisp programmer?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Well not really, I mean, I know enough to get by.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Right.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Right.\u0026rdquo;\nConclusion In several (technical writing) job interviews recently, people asked me about my programming experience, and my answer varied a lot.\nI know how computer programs work, I know how people write computer programs, I understand how software testing and debugging works, I understand the kinds of designs that lead to good programs and the kinds that lead to bad software. I don\u0026rsquo;t write code--really--but I can sort of hack things together in shell scripts when I need to.\nThe answer to the question, these days, is \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a programmer in the way that most people are writers: most people are comfortable writing a quick email or a short blurb, but get stuck and have trouble really writing longer or more complicated kinds of text. Reasonably capable but not skilled.\u0026rdquo;\nThe above code examples work: they do what I need them to do, and particularly in the case of the mail script, they work much better than the previous iteration. I need to do more work, and I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m reaching the boundaries of what can be comfortably done in shell scripting. My next big programming project is to go through these two scripts and port them to Python and see if I can add just a little bit of additional functionality in the process.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll report to you on this as my work progresses.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/erstwhile-programmer/","summary":"This is the story of how I occasionally realize I exist on the continuum of \u0026ldquo;programmers,\u0026rdquo; rather than just being an eccentric sort of writer type.\n::: {.contents} :::\nEvidence download-mail I have this somewhat peculiar method of downloading email that I think works great. A few weeks ago, however, I was trying to compress things in \u0026ldquo;hot storage,\u0026rdquo; and realized that I had a problem.\nFor a year or so, I had been automating commits to the git repository that held all my mail. In order to effectively archive and compress some mail, I needed to do some serious rebasing to not only remove a bunch of messages from the current repository but also pull that content from the history and flatten the history somewhat.\nThe problem was that I had 50,000 commits and there\u0026rsquo;s simply no effective way to rebase that many commits in a reasonable amount of time, particularly given I/O limitations.","title":"Erstwhile Programmer"},{"content":"I added a few lines to a script that I use to build my task list, and for the first time ever, I opened a file with code in it, added a feature, tested it, and it worked. Here\u0026rsquo;s the code with enough context so it makes sense (explained later if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to spend the time parsing it:)\nARG=`echo \u0026quot;$@\u0026quot; | sed -r 's/\\s*\\-[c|p|s]\\s*//g'` WIKI_DIR=\u0026quot;`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 1`\u0026quot; if [ \u0026quot;`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2 | grep -c /`\u0026quot; = 1 ]; then TODO_PAGE=\u0026quot;`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2`\u0026quot; elif [ \u0026quot;`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2 | grep -c $EXT`\u0026quot; = 1 ]; then TODO_PAGE=\u0026quot;$WIKI_DIR/`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2`\u0026quot; else TODO_PAGE=\u0026quot;$WIKI_DIR/`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2`.$EXT\u0026quot; fi This is from the section of the script that processes the arguments and options on the command line. Previously, commands were issued such that:\nikiwiki-tasklist [-c -p -s] [DIR_TO_CRAWL] [OUTPUT TODO FILE NAME] My goal with the options was to have something that \u0026ldquo;felt like\u0026rdquo; a normal command with option switches and had a lot of flexibility. The two fields that followed: however, I didn\u0026rsquo;t provide as much initial flexibility. The directory to crawl for tasks (i.e. \u0026ldquo;[DIR_TO_CRAWL]\u0026rdquo;) was specified the way it is now, but the output file was 1) assumed to have an extension specified in a variable at the top of the script, 2) automatically placed the output file in the top level of the destination directory.\nIt worked pretty well, but with the advent of a new job I realized that I needed some compartmentalization. I needed to fully use the tasklist system for personal and professional tasks without getting one set of items mixed in with the other. Being able to have better control of the output is key to having full control over this.\nThe modification detects if the output file looks like a path rather than a file name. If it\u0026rsquo;s senses a path, it creates the task list in the path specified, with no added extension. If a file name specifies the extension, then you won\u0026rsquo;t get \u0026ldquo;.ext.ext\u0026rdquo; files. And the original behavior is preserved.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a hacker by inclination: I take code that I find and figure out how to use it. Sometimes I end up writing or writing code, but I\u0026rsquo;m not really a programmer. My own code, at least until recently has tended to be somewhat haphazard and until now (more or less) I\u0026rsquo;ve not felt like I could write code from scratch that was worth maintaining and enhancing in any meaningful way.\nApparently some of that\u0026rsquo;s changed.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve made a few additional changes to the scripts, but most of these feel more trivial and can be described as \u0026ldquo;I learned how to write slightly tighter shell scripts. so if you\u0026rsquo;re using it you might want to update: the ikiwiki tasklist page is up to date.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ikiwiki-tasklist-update/","summary":"I added a few lines to a script that I use to build my task list, and for the first time ever, I opened a file with code in it, added a feature, tested it, and it worked. Here\u0026rsquo;s the code with enough context so it makes sense (explained later if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to spend the time parsing it:)\nARG=`echo \u0026quot;$@\u0026quot; | sed -r 's/\\s*\\-[c|p|s]\\s*//g'` WIKI_DIR=\u0026quot;`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 1`\u0026quot; if [ \u0026quot;`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2 | grep -c /`\u0026quot; = 1 ]; then TODO_PAGE=\u0026quot;`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2`\u0026quot; elif [ \u0026quot;`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2 | grep -c $EXT`\u0026quot; = 1 ]; then TODO_PAGE=\u0026quot;$WIKI_DIR/`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2`\u0026quot; else TODO_PAGE=\u0026quot;$WIKI_DIR/`echo $ARG | cut -d \u0026quot; \u0026quot; -f 2`.$EXT\u0026quot; fi This is from the section of the script that processes the arguments and options on the command line.","title":"Ikiwiki Tasklist Update"},{"content":"I had an item on my list of blog posts to write for a couple of years to write something reflecting on \u0026ldquo;RaceFail,\u0026rdquo; and finally a gave up, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to write a book, I didn\u0026rsquo;t know what to say, and I was more interested in the actual discourse itself than finding the \u0026ldquo;side of right,\u0026rdquo; in a conversation that was both way too simple and way too complex all at once.\nSo rather than reboot the conversation, which has ended in some senses and continues on in others, I want to start writing a bit here about race and representation in fiction, but also discussing the way that conversations transpire online. Here\u0026rsquo;s part one. I\u0026rsquo;ll figure out some way to index them all together once they\u0026rsquo;re posted and assembled.\nI wrote this scene a while back where a character who grew up on a small1 outpost visits a space ship. Given relativistic space travel, from the character\u0026rsquo;s perspective, the crew of the space ship are 750 years old or so, despite being in their subjective early forties. That means the character\u0026rsquo;s 31st-great-grandparents (roughly) were cousins of the people he\u0026rsquo;s looking at.\nHe notices a few things: the people on the ship are all taller than he is and also taller than everyone from the outpost. He also notices that there\u0026rsquo;s more more skin tone variation amongst the people on the ship than there is among the people in the outpost.\nThere are a bunches of problems with this story. Including the fact that its not finished and that there are parts of the execution that I think need a lot work. But this part, I quite like. For this story (and I think in general,) I\u0026rsquo;ve drawn the following conclusion:\nRace is temporally constrained. We understand racial difference and our own racial experiences in terms of our current reality. This changes. The aspects of race which are the result of lineage (skin color, bone structure,) are likely to change over time as lineages continue. We can assume that these kinds of changes will be pronounced in smaller populations over longer periods of time. To a large extent the tension between the \u0026ldquo;outpost people\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;ship people\u0026rdquo; is the core of the conflict in this story. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking in this story about the impact of colonialism (and race as a result) on societies and political outlook. It\u0026rsquo;s almost certainly not perfect, but I enjoy the possibilities, the story has its moments, and I\u0026rsquo;m finding the theory building productive.\nI\u0026rsquo;m circling around a point: in-story diversity, particularly, diversity that reflects late 20th/early 21st century notions of difference alone cannot further thought race and racism. In other words, diversity is not criticism. There are many ways to productively further the discussion of difference in (genre) fiction, lets not stop with representation.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be writing more about this in the future. Comments are very welcome!\nUnder a billion people.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/representation-and-race-futurism/","summary":"I had an item on my list of blog posts to write for a couple of years to write something reflecting on \u0026ldquo;RaceFail,\u0026rdquo; and finally a gave up, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to write a book, I didn\u0026rsquo;t know what to say, and I was more interested in the actual discourse itself than finding the \u0026ldquo;side of right,\u0026rdquo; in a conversation that was both way too simple and way too complex all at once.\nSo rather than reboot the conversation, which has ended in some senses and continues on in others, I want to start writing a bit here about race and representation in fiction, but also discussing the way that conversations transpire online. Here\u0026rsquo;s part one. I\u0026rsquo;ll figure out some way to index them all together once they\u0026rsquo;re posted and assembled.\nI wrote this scene a while back where a character who grew up on a small1 outpost visits a space ship.","title":"Representation and Race Futurism"},{"content":"I was having a conversation with a (now former) coworker (a while ago) about the future of shared file systems, unstructured organization and management, and access control. What follows are a collection of notes and thoughts on the subject that have stuck with me.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s start with some general assumptions, premises, ideas:\nFile system hierarchies are dead or dying. To have a useful file system hierarchy the following qualities are essential:\nEvery piece of data needs to belong in one location and only one location.\nEvery container (e.g. directory or folder) needs to hold at least two objects.\nHierarchy depth ought to be minimized. Every system can use two levels. After the second level, each additional level should only be added a very large number of additional objects are added to the system. If you have 3 functional levels and less than 1000 objects, you might be in trouble.\nAs you might imagine, this is very difficult to achieve, and the difficulty is compounded by huge amounts of legacy systems, and the fact that \u0026ldquo;good enough is good enough,\u0026rdquo; particularly given that file organization is secondary to most people\u0026rsquo;s core work.\nWhile there are right ways to build hierarchical structure for file system data, less structure is better than more structure, and I think that groups will tend toward less over time.\nAccess control is a lost cause. Legacy data and legacy practices will keep complex ACL-based systems for access control in place for a long time, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty clear that for any sort of complex system, access control isn\u0026rsquo;t an effective paradigm. In some ways, access control is the last really good use of file system hierarchies. Which is to say, by now the main use of strong containers (as opposed to tags) is access control.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think that \u0026ldquo;enterprise content management\u0026rdquo;-style tools are there, yet. I suspect that the eventual solution to \u0026ldquo;how do I control access to content\u0026rdquo; will either: be based on a an cryptography key system which will control access and file integrity, or there will be a class of application, a la ECMS, with some sort of more advanced abstracted file system interface that\u0026rsquo;s actually use-able.\nI\u0026rsquo;m betting on encryption.\nTagging and search are the ways forward. In many cases, the location of files in hierarchy help determine the contents of those files. If there are no hierarchies then you need something more useful and more flexible to provide this level of insight.\nGreat search is a necessity. Luckily it\u0026rsquo;s also easy. Apache Solr/Lucene, Xapian, and hell Google Search Appliances make great search really easy.\nSome sort of tagging system. In general, only administrators should be able to create tags, and I think single tag-per object (i.e. categories) versus multiple tags per object should be configurable on a collection-by-collection.\nTag systems would be great for creating virtualized file system interfaces, obviating the need for user-facing links, and leveraging existing usage patterns and interfaces. It\u0026rsquo;s theoretically possible to hang access control off of tag systems but that\u0026rsquo;s significantly more complicated.\nOne of the biggest challenges with tag systems is avoiding recapitulating the problems with hierarchical organization.\nThe most difficult (and most interesting!) problem in this space is probably the access control problems. The organizational practices will vary a lot and there aren\u0026rsquo;t right and wrong answers. This isn\u0026rsquo;t true in the access control space.\nUsing public key infrastructure to encrypt data may be an effective access control method. It\u0026rsquo;s hard replicate contemporary access control in encryption schemes. Replicating these schemes may not be desirable either. Here are some ideas:\nBy default all files will be encrypted such that only the creator can read it. All data can then be \u0026ldquo;world readable,\u0026rdquo; as far as the storage medium and underlying file systems are concerned.\nThe creator can choose to re-encrypt objects such that other users and groups of users can access the data. For organizations this might mean a tightly controlled central certificate authority-based system. For the public internet, this will either mean a lot of duplicated encrypted data, or a lot of key chains.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll need to give up on using public keys as a method of identity testing and verification. Key signing is cool, but at present it\u0026rsquo;s complex, difficult to administer, and presents a significant barrier to entry. Keys need to be revocable, particularly group keys within organizations.\nFor the public internet, a some sort of social capital or network analysis based certification system will probably emerge to supplement for strict-web-of-trust based identity testing.\nIf all data is sufficiently encrypted, VPNs become obsolete, at least as methods for securing file repositories. Network security is less of a concern when content is actually secure. Encryption overhead, for processing isn\u0026rsquo;t a serious concern on contemporary hardware.\nThoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-future-of-file-organization-and-security/","summary":"I was having a conversation with a (now former) coworker (a while ago) about the future of shared file systems, unstructured organization and management, and access control. What follows are a collection of notes and thoughts on the subject that have stuck with me.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s start with some general assumptions, premises, ideas:\nFile system hierarchies are dead or dying. To have a useful file system hierarchy the following qualities are essential:\nEvery piece of data needs to belong in one location and only one location.\nEvery container (e.g. directory or folder) needs to hold at least two objects.\nHierarchy depth ought to be minimized. Every system can use two levels. After the second level, each additional level should only be added a very large number of additional objects are added to the system. If you have 3 functional levels and less than 1000 objects, you might be in trouble.\nAs you might imagine, this is very difficult to achieve, and the difficulty is compounded by huge amounts of legacy systems, and the fact that \u0026ldquo;good enough is good enough,\u0026rdquo; particularly given that file organization is secondary to most people\u0026rsquo;s core work.","title":"The Future of File Organization and Security"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written before about different types of documentation, and the different purposes and goals that each type services. Rather than rehash what documentation is, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in using this post to think about ways of managing and organizing the documentation process to produce better documentation more easily, with the end goal of being able to increase both maintainability and usability of documentation resources.\nDifferent groups of users--say: administrators, end-users, and developers--interact with technology in overlapping but distinct ways. For some technologies, the differences between the classes of users is not significant and one set of documentation is probably good do every one, plus or minus a very small set. In most other cases, multiple resources are required to be able to address the unique needs of different user groups. Figuring out effective ways to address the different kinds of questions that various groups of users ask, but in a way that makes sense to those users is often the primary challenge in writing documentation.\nHaving said that, writing different sets of documentation for different users is a lot of work, but given time its not insurmountable. The problem is after six months or more (say,) or a couple of new releases when its time to update the documentation, there are three manuals to update instead of one. This is pretty much horrible. Not only is it more work, but the chances for errors skyrockets, and it\u0026rsquo;s just a mess.\nThe solution, to my mind, is to figure out ways to only ever have to write one set of documentation. While it might make theoretical sense to split the material into multiple groups, do everything you can to avoid splitting the documentation. Typically, a well indexed text can be used by multiple audiences if its easy enough for users to skip to read only the material they need.\nThe second class of solutions revolves around taking a more atomic approach to writing documentation. In my own work this manifests in two ways:\nSetting yourself up for success: understanding how software is going to be updated, or how use is likely to change over time allows you to construct documents that are organized in a way that makes them easy to update. For example: Separate processes from reference material, and split up long processes into logical chunks that you can interlink to remove redundancies.\nUnfortunately, in many cases, it\u0026rsquo;s necessary to learn enough about a project and the different use patterns before you have the background needed to predict what the best structure of the documentation ought to be.\nSeparate structure from content: This is a publishing system requirement, at the core, but using this kind of functionality must be part of the writer\u0026rsquo;s approach. Writers need to build documentation so that the organization (order, hierarchy, etc.) is not implicit in the text, but can be rearranged and reformed as needed. This means writing documentation \u0026ldquo;atoms\u0026rdquo; in a structurally generic way. Typically this also leads to better content. As a matter of implementation, documentation resource would require a layer of \u0026ldquo;meta files\u0026rdquo; that would provide organization that would be added at build time.\nIn effect this approach follows what most systems are doing anyway, but in practice we need another processing layer. Sphinx is pretty close in many ways but most document formats and build systems don\u0026rsquo;t really have support for this kind of project organization (or they require enough XML tinkering to render them unfeasible.) Once everything\u0026rsquo;s in place and once all of the atoms exist, producing documents for a different audience is just a matter of compiling a new organization layer and defining an additional output target.\nThis also produces problems for organization. If content is segregated into hundreds of files for a standard-book-length manual (rather than dozens, say) keeping the files organized is a challenge. If nothing else, build tools will need to do a lot more error checking and hopefully documentation writers will develop standard file organizations and practices that will keep things under control.\nThoughts? Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/multiaudience-documentation/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written before about different types of documentation, and the different purposes and goals that each type services. Rather than rehash what documentation is, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in using this post to think about ways of managing and organizing the documentation process to produce better documentation more easily, with the end goal of being able to increase both maintainability and usability of documentation resources.\nDifferent groups of users--say: administrators, end-users, and developers--interact with technology in overlapping but distinct ways. For some technologies, the differences between the classes of users is not significant and one set of documentation is probably good do every one, plus or minus a very small set. In most other cases, multiple resources are required to be able to address the unique needs of different user groups. Figuring out effective ways to address the different kinds of questions that various groups of users ask, but in a way that makes sense to those users is often the primary challenge in writing documentation.","title":"Multi-Audience Documentation"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s relatively straight forward to think about knitting in terms of creating two dimensional shapes. Most of us start by knitting something \u0026ldquo;easy\u0026rdquo;1 like a scarf. From there it\u0026rsquo;s easy enough to teach knitters to create a never ending variety of polygons. This, however, misses what I think of as the really cool part of knitting. I think the way to understand how knitting works, to be able to knit things that more closely resemble what you want, and to have the most fun knitting is to always think about knitting as three dimensional.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t an elaborate argument in favor of circular knitting: that argument has been fairly well made and I\u0026rsquo;ll recount my favorite points on request, but circular knitting is a great technique and knitting in three dimensions is an entire practice.\nKnitting Gestalts / Knitting Shapes I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this before but one of the best parts about sweater knitting is thinking about how the sweater--the whole object--comes together into a garment. Rather than knitting a collection of flat pieces that can be sewn into a garment (tailoring) knitting lets you build and shape garments with various seamless and nearly-seamless methods.\nI sometimes describe this kind of knitting as \u0026ldquo;architectural,\u0026rdquo; but the key (for me) is thinking about the entire object as a whole. There\u0026rsquo;s something that\u0026rsquo;s nearly magical that happens when you can take a few rows curled up on a circular needle and see in your mind fits into the object that you\u0026rsquo;re knitting. The process of using knitting stitches, increases and decreases to get from the former to the later is relatively trivial if have can think about the entire object (a \u0026ldquo;knitting gestalt\u0026rdquo;) in three dimensions in your mind.\nKnitting Mechanics If \u0026ldquo;knitting gestalts\u0026rdquo; provide a top-down perspective on knitting, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a \u0026ldquo;bottom up\u0026rdquo; three dimensional perspective that is important when thinking about how stitches fit together. While a big part of knitting has to do wit the shapes and forms, the textures, drape and \u0026ldquo;hand\u0026rdquo; of the fabric all have a lot to do with the final evaluation of the object. To understand drape and texture, it\u0026rsquo;s important to consider the properties of individual knitting stitches and the effects of yarn weight/texture, needle size, and personality of the knitter. The second part (yarn type, needle size, knitting style) is pretty common, the first (knitting stitch) is less so.\nI have a favorite example of this kind of thinking. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where I learned this but it\u0026rsquo;s suck with me:\nKnitted fabric typically curls. This happens because the \u0026ldquo;purl side\u0026rdquo; of the knitted stitch has a greater surface area than the \u0026ldquo;knit side,\u0026rdquo; which causes unaltered stocking stitch to roll up. At the same time, the \u0026ldquo;knit\u0026rdquo; side of the stitch is a little bit wider than the \u0026ldquo;purl\u0026rdquo; side of the stitch, so the edges will curl in. The way to counteract this, is to mix knit-and-purl stitches on the same row to balance the surface areas out and thus counteract the effects. Think about ribbing and seed stitch\u0026hellip; Think about knit and purl patterns and how they change the tendency of the fabric to roll. Think about the path of the yarn through a knitting stitch.\nSee? Isn\u0026rsquo;t is cool?\nIn Conclusion Whatever kind of knitting you want to do is fine with me: I don\u0026rsquo;t care to tell anyone that the way they knit is wrong. At the same time, I don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s any sense in being afraid of your knitting: knitting is great fun and I think once you know the basics most knitters can knit just about everything. So my goal in this post, and in all of my knitting posts, is to share my own process and encourage you (all) to branch out in your own work.\nHave fun!\nOnward and Upward!\nScarf knitting seems so easy and mechanically it is: knit the same number of stitches row after row after row. But there are issues. First, garter stitch to the uninitiated doesn\u0026rsquo;t look like \u0026ldquo;knitting,\u0026rdquo; and with a high rows per inch ratio these scarves take forever to knit. Such projects are always discouraging.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-in-three-dimensions/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s relatively straight forward to think about knitting in terms of creating two dimensional shapes. Most of us start by knitting something \u0026ldquo;easy\u0026rdquo;1 like a scarf. From there it\u0026rsquo;s easy enough to teach knitters to create a never ending variety of polygons. This, however, misses what I think of as the really cool part of knitting. I think the way to understand how knitting works, to be able to knit things that more closely resemble what you want, and to have the most fun knitting is to always think about knitting as three dimensional.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t an elaborate argument in favor of circular knitting: that argument has been fairly well made and I\u0026rsquo;ll recount my favorite points on request, but circular knitting is a great technique and knitting in three dimensions is an entire practice.\nKnitting Gestalts / Knitting Shapes I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this before but one of the best parts about sweater knitting is thinking about how the sweater--the whole object--comes together into a garment.","title":"Knitting in Three Dimensions"},{"content":"My friend Jo wrote a post a while ago that addressed the subject of building an audience for your scholarly work. You can read the post on her blog, here.\nOne of the things that I think Jo is really great at is thinking practically about academic careers and trajectories in light of the current academic job market. While people working in traditional academic spaces and on a traditional academic course have a different set of challenges than folks like me, her points still resonate.\nHow do you build networks and audiences? Two things:\nYou talk to people. Audiences are built on relationships. While we might like to think that writers and scholars are able to attract audiences purely on the basis of their work, in practice additional work is required.\nYou make sure you have something to show for yourself. Everyone\u0026rsquo;s got ideas, and projects that they\u0026rsquo;d like to work on. People love to talk about their ideas. Success, I think, comes when you have something to show for yourself and your projects, and give people some level of confidence that your can make good on your ideas.\nIn sort, write more, publish more. While quality matters some, being more than someone to talks well at parties is really important.\nI think this approach is useful for people doing any kind of creative or intellectual work that engages an audience, but I\u0026rsquo;m interested in your thoughts.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/intellectual-audience/","summary":"My friend Jo wrote a post a while ago that addressed the subject of building an audience for your scholarly work. You can read the post on her blog, here.\nOne of the things that I think Jo is really great at is thinking practically about academic careers and trajectories in light of the current academic job market. While people working in traditional academic spaces and on a traditional academic course have a different set of challenges than folks like me, her points still resonate.\nHow do you build networks and audiences? Two things:\nYou talk to people. Audiences are built on relationships. While we might like to think that writers and scholars are able to attract audiences purely on the basis of their work, in practice additional work is required.\nYou make sure you have something to show for yourself. Everyone\u0026rsquo;s got ideas, and projects that they\u0026rsquo;d like to work on.","title":"Intellectual Audience"},{"content":"A couple of people, cwebber and Rodrigo have (comparatively recently) switched to using StumpWM as their primary window managers. Perhaps there are more outside of the circle of people I watch but it\u0026rsquo;s happened enough to get me to think about what constitutes software minimalism.\nWhile StumpWM is a minimal program in terms of design and function; however, in terms of ram usage or binary size, it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly lightweight. Because of the way Common Lisp works, \u0026ldquo;binaries\u0026rdquo; and RAM footprint is in the range of 30-40 megs. Not big by contemporary standards, but the really lightweight window managers can get by with far less RAM.\nIn some senses this is entirely theoretical: even a few years ago, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t uncommon for desktop systems to have only a gig of ram, so the differences would hardly have been noticeable. Now? Much less so. Until 2006 or so, RAM was the most performance effecting limited resource on desktop system, since then, even laptops have more than enough for all uses. Although Firefox challenges this daily.\nRegardless, while there may be some link between binary size and minimalism, I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably harmful to reduce minimalism and simplicity to what amounts to an implementation detail. Let\u0026rsquo;s think about minimalism more complexly. For example:\nWrite a simple (enough) script in Python/Perl and C. It should scan a file system and change the permissions of files such that they match the permissions of the enclosing folder, but not change the permissions of a folder if it\u0026rsquo;s different from it\u0026rsquo;s parent. Think of it as \u0026ldquo;chmod -R\u0026rdquo; except from the bottom up. This is a conceptually simple task and it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too hard to implement, but I\u0026rsquo;m not aware of any tool that does this and it\u0026rsquo;s not exactly trivial (to implement or in terms of its resource requirements.)\nWhile the C program will be much more \u0026ldquo;lightweight,\u0026rdquo; and use less RAM during while running, the chances are that the Python/Perl version will be easier to understand and use much more straightforward logic. The Python/Perl version will probably take longer to run and there will be some greater overhead for the Python/Perl runtime. Is the C version more minimal because it uses more RAM? Is the Perl/Python program more minimal because it\u0026rsquo;s interface and design is more streamlined, simple and easier to use?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the answer is, but lets add the following factor to our analysis: does the \u0026ldquo;internal\u0026rdquo; design and architecture of software affect the minimalism or maximalism of the software?\nI think the answer is clearly yes, qualified by \u0026ldquo;it depends\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;probably not as much as you\u0026rsquo;d think initially.\u0026rdquo; As a corollary as computing power increases the importance of minimalist implementations matters less generally, but more in cases of extremely large scale which are always already edge cases.\nReturning for a moment to the question of the window manager, in this case I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty clear: StumpWM is among the most minimal window managers around, even though it\u0026rsquo;s RAM footprint is pretty big. But I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear your thoughts on this specifically, or technological minimalism generally.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/minimalism-versus-simplicity/","summary":"A couple of people, cwebber and Rodrigo have (comparatively recently) switched to using StumpWM as their primary window managers. Perhaps there are more outside of the circle of people I watch but it\u0026rsquo;s happened enough to get me to think about what constitutes software minimalism.\nWhile StumpWM is a minimal program in terms of design and function; however, in terms of ram usage or binary size, it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly lightweight. Because of the way Common Lisp works, \u0026ldquo;binaries\u0026rdquo; and RAM footprint is in the range of 30-40 megs. Not big by contemporary standards, but the really lightweight window managers can get by with far less RAM.\nIn some senses this is entirely theoretical: even a few years ago, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t uncommon for desktop systems to have only a gig of ram, so the differences would hardly have been noticeable. Now? Much less so. Until 2006 or so, RAM was the most performance effecting limited resource on desktop system, since then, even laptops have more than enough for all uses.","title":"Minimalism Versus Simplicity"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of emacs\u0026rsquo; org-mode on so many levels: as an IDE for knowledge workers, as a task management system, as a note taking system, and as the ideal basic mode for so many tasks. However, I\u0026rsquo;ve been bucking against org-for a number of tasks recently. The end result is that I\u0026rsquo;m becoming less org-dependent. This post is a reflection on how I\u0026rsquo;ve changed the way I work, and how my thinking has changed regarding org-mode.\nFair warning: this is a really geeky post that has a somewhat specialized context. If you\u0026rsquo;re lost or bored. check back later in the week.\nThe Perils of Org The problem I keep running into with org is that I really don\u0026rsquo;t prefer to work in org-mode.1 Org is great and very flexible, but I don\u0026rsquo;t like that it means that all text-based work is dependent on emacs. My brain is already wired for Markdown and reStructured Text from years of blogging and work projects respectively.\nAnd then there\u0026rsquo;s this organization problem. There are two ways you can organize content in org-mode. The first is to just dump every thing in one org-mode file and use the hierarchical outlining to impose organization to organize everything. The second is to have every project inside of it\u0026rsquo;s own file and use outlining incidentally as the project needs it. Content aggregation happens in the agenda.\nThe problem with the \u0026ldquo;large files\u0026rdquo; approach is that you end up with a small handful of files with thousands of lines and imposing useful organization is difficult (too many levels and things get buried; not enough and inevitably your headings aren\u0026rsquo;t descriptive enough and you get confused. Furthermore, I end up living in clone-indirect-buffer-other-window\u0026rsquo;d and org-narrow-to-subtree\u0026rsquo;d buffers, which is operationally the same as having multiple files it just takes longer to set up.\nThe problem with the other approach, having lots of different files, is that I have a hard time remembering what is in each file, or in logically splitting big projects into multiple files. The agenda does help with this, but the truth is that the kinds of org-headings for organization and tasks are not always the same kinds of headings that make sense for the project itself. I often need more tasks than organizational divides in a project. I tried this approach a couple of times, and ended up with useless mush in my files.\nTypically, I can never make the \u0026ldquo;lots of file approach\u0026rdquo; really work, and the big files problem lead me to general avoidance of everything. Not good. The key to success here is good aggregation tools.\nHodgepodge In response, I\u0026rsquo;ve made a couple of tweaks to how I\u0026rsquo;m doing\u0026hellip; pretty much everything. That is:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve moved most of my open projects into a locally ruining and compiling ikiwiki instance. Both laptops have this setup, and there\u0026rsquo;s a central remote to keep both (all?) machines in sync. I\u0026rsquo;m using ikiwiki tasklist to basically replicate the functions of org-agenda. Basically this crawls the entire wiki looking for lines that begin with certain keywords and generates a \u0026ldquo;todo\u0026rdquo; page based on these notes. Really simple, incredibly useful and it solves much of my aggregation needs. I still have some stuff in org-mode: notes for the nearly-finished novel, lots of random old (legacy) data, 12 various open tasks, and org-capture. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of pointing various org-capture templates at files in the wiki but haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten there yet. I\u0026rsquo;ve basically taken the \u0026ldquo;lots of little files,\u0026rdquo; approach to my writing and work. I\u0026rsquo;ve not over-leaded the system yet. Each major project gets a page in the root level of the wiki for overview and planing, and then sub-pages for all related project files (if/as needed) It turns out that the markdown-mode for emacs has gotten a few improvements since the last time I downloaded the file, including better support for wiki-links that are mostly compatible with ikiwiki. Also from the same developer deft which implements a pretty nifty incremental search for text files in a given directory. So between these tools, ikiwiki, and the ikiwiki-tasklist there\u0026rsquo;s support for the most important things. In terms of publishing, beyond ikiwiki for tychoish.com and the personal organization instance, I have a couple of other smaller wikis (also ikiwiki powered,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with Sphinx as publishing for more structured documents and resources (i.e. documentation, novels, and collections,) particularly those that need multiple formats and presentations. I\u0026rsquo;m sure there will be more shifts in the future, I\u0026rsquo;m sure. I think this is a good start. Thoughts?\nThis has pretty much always been the case. I think of it as a personal quirk.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/back-to-basics-tasklist-and-organization/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of emacs\u0026rsquo; org-mode on so many levels: as an IDE for knowledge workers, as a task management system, as a note taking system, and as the ideal basic mode for so many tasks. However, I\u0026rsquo;ve been bucking against org-for a number of tasks recently. The end result is that I\u0026rsquo;m becoming less org-dependent. This post is a reflection on how I\u0026rsquo;ve changed the way I work, and how my thinking has changed regarding org-mode.\nFair warning: this is a really geeky post that has a somewhat specialized context. If you\u0026rsquo;re lost or bored. check back later in the week.\nThe Perils of Org The problem I keep running into with org is that I really don\u0026rsquo;t prefer to work in org-mode.1 Org is great and very flexible, but I don\u0026rsquo;t like that it means that all text-based work is dependent on emacs. My brain is already wired for Markdown and reStructured Text from years of blogging and work projects respectively.","title":"Back to Basics Tasklist and Organization"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where I picked up the link to this post on the current state of cyberpunk, but I find myself returning to it frequently and becoming incredibly frustrated with the presentation.\nIn essence the author argues that while the originators of the cyberpunk genre (i.e. Gibson and Sterling, the \u0026ldquo;White Men\u0026rdquo;) have pronounced cyberpunk \u0026ldquo;over,\u0026rdquo; the genre is in fact quite vibrant and a prime location for non-mainstream (\u0026ldquo;other\u0026rdquo;) voices and per perspectives. Also, somehow, the author argues that by denying that cyberpunk continues to be relevant and active we\u0026rsquo;re impinging the diversity that\u0026rsquo;s actively occurring in the space.\nMy thoughts are pretty simple:\nThis is old news. People have been pronouncing cyberpunk dead since 1992 or thereabouts. And they\u0026rsquo;ve largely been right. Cyberpunk died, because the technological horizon 1980s (e.g. BBSs) developed in a particular way. In someways the cyberpunks got it right (there is a digital reality, there are digital natives, and unique digital social conventions.) In many ways no one got it right: more people are using the internet per-capita than anyone thought in 1984 and no one predicted that the internet would be as commercial as it is.\nIn light of this the kinds of things that the people active in technology and in cyberpunk are thinking about and addressing have changed a lot. In many ways, Cory Doctorow is a pretty fitting heir to the cyberpunk lineage, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s also true that the cyberpunk tradition has shifted it\u0026rsquo;s focus into other issues and ideas.\nThat interest in the present and the near future has always been a significant defining characteristic of cyberpunk, at least as relevant as the DIY and outsider aspect. In this respect, cyberpunk\u0026rsquo;s critique was accepted and quite transformative for the genre.\nAt the same time, the \u0026ldquo;hackers,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;cyberpunks,\u0026rdquo; grew out of academia (e.g. Free Software) and not the punk movement.\nThe cyberpunks, even when (white) men were the front men for the (sub)genre, have always been outsiders. In the 80s were the \u0026ldquo;Young Turks\u0026rdquo; of the science fiction world. Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s Nova is often cited a key cyberpunk-precursor, and there are some pretty important precursors in Stars in My Pocket, Dhalgren, and The Einstein Intervention.\nI want to be sure to not forget about Melissa Scott while we\u0026rsquo;re at it. Trouble and her Friends is a great example of using cyberpunk to explore subcultures and experiences of people (queers, PoC, etc.) on the margins. While Trouble is almost on the late end for \u0026ldquo;original\u0026rdquo; cyberpunk I think it counts. The blogger seems to think that only queers and PoC and others have only recently taken up cyberpunk, and that seems particularly shortsighted, and not particularly true.\nOne of the most troubling aspects of the argument is the assumption that if \u0026ldquo;cyberpunk\u0026rdquo; is over than no one can write cyberpunk anymore and that to declare such would be to silence all of the would be *punks.\nThis is absurd.\nNot only is this not true, but it\u0026rsquo;s also not how literature works. I\u0026rsquo;m also pretty sure that this is not consistent with the origins of cyberpunk, or the way the genre memes play out.\nWhat I think happened when cyberpunk stopped being on the cutting edge and we realized that a critique of the present required different science fictional method (I think that resurgence in \u0026ldquo;New Space Opera\u0026rdquo; in the 90s is part of this, as well as a hard-SF turn in the form of Beggers in Spain and a turn toward alternate histories.) As a result, what\u0026rsquo;s happening cyberpunk has become something closer to fantasy.\nThe division (and implications) of the difference between \u0026ldquo;fantasy\u0026rdquo; and/or \u0026ldquo;super soft science fiction\u0026rdquo; and the science fiction mainstream is at play and probably out side of the scope of this post.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m not that sure where we\u0026rsquo;re left? Am I missing something? Lets hear it out in comments!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cyberpunk-sunset/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where I picked up the link to this post on the current state of cyberpunk, but I find myself returning to it frequently and becoming incredibly frustrated with the presentation.\nIn essence the author argues that while the originators of the cyberpunk genre (i.e. Gibson and Sterling, the \u0026ldquo;White Men\u0026rdquo;) have pronounced cyberpunk \u0026ldquo;over,\u0026rdquo; the genre is in fact quite vibrant and a prime location for non-mainstream (\u0026ldquo;other\u0026rdquo;) voices and per perspectives. Also, somehow, the author argues that by denying that cyberpunk continues to be relevant and active we\u0026rsquo;re impinging the diversity that\u0026rsquo;s actively occurring in the space.\nMy thoughts are pretty simple:\nThis is old news. People have been pronouncing cyberpunk dead since 1992 or thereabouts. And they\u0026rsquo;ve largely been right. Cyberpunk died, because the technological horizon 1980s (e.g. BBSs) developed in a particular way. In someways the cyberpunks got it right (there is a digital reality, there are digital natives, and unique digital social conventions.","title":"Cyberpunk Sunset"},{"content":"There are two major problems in sweater making (design.) First, figure out how to make the shape you want out of knitting, and second to place some sort of ornamental feature (pattern) in the knitting without disrupting the shape.\nShaping isn\u0026rsquo;t easy, but it\u0026rsquo;s solvable. Once you figure out how to make the shapes you want, it\u0026rsquo;s just a matter of implementing a known process. Shaping becomes trivial.\nThe second problem, the design, is the really clever part.\nFitting patterns and embellishments onto a shape, just isn\u0026rsquo;t solvable, and never becomes trivial. There are tricks, and practices makes it easier, but the possibilities are truly endless and there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to make any two sweaters exactly the same.1\nThe patterns and embellishments can be pretty broadly defined: cables, colorowork, other texture patterns, and so forth.\nIn my own knitting, I have taken to focusing almost entirely on the second problem. I have a basic sweater form that works really well for me, and each sweater explores a different combination of patterns.\nMy approach is as follows:\nDivide the sweater into quadrants and plan a single quadrant of the sweater. Repeat this pattern over the entire sweater. This automatically centers the pattern on the sweater.\nBe flexible with the number of stitches but not too flexible. Also remember to account for a \u0026ldquo;middle\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;end\u0026rdquo; stitch which may not be repeated on every quarter.\nThink of birds eye view of the design. This means thinking about sweater design as a collection of pattern columns.\nUse patterns at either side of the sweater both for a nice effect and to \u0026ldquo;bound\u0026rdquo; the patterns. This can be helpful in controlling the number of stitches.\nUnless you plan to knit your sweater horizontally, plan your sweater virtually even if you have horizontal patterns. It\u0026rsquo;s crucial to center patterns that run horizontally across the sweater. Thinking vertically is the easiest way to do this visually for all kinds of patterns.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re using only one pattern that\u0026rsquo;s fewer than 10-15 stitches, you may be able to just make sure that your pattern divides in the total number of stitches in the sweater, but that\u0026rsquo;s a much less common problem.\nBeyond that, it\u0026rsquo;s all trial, error, and practice. Onward and Upward!\nThere may be some exceptions, but generally.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/arranging-patterns-for-sweater-design/","summary":"There are two major problems in sweater making (design.) First, figure out how to make the shape you want out of knitting, and second to place some sort of ornamental feature (pattern) in the knitting without disrupting the shape.\nShaping isn\u0026rsquo;t easy, but it\u0026rsquo;s solvable. Once you figure out how to make the shapes you want, it\u0026rsquo;s just a matter of implementing a known process. Shaping becomes trivial.\nThe second problem, the design, is the really clever part.\nFitting patterns and embellishments onto a shape, just isn\u0026rsquo;t solvable, and never becomes trivial. There are tricks, and practices makes it easier, but the possibilities are truly endless and there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to make any two sweaters exactly the same.1\nThe patterns and embellishments can be pretty broadly defined: cables, colorowork, other texture patterns, and so forth.\nIn my own knitting, I have taken to focusing almost entirely on the second problem. I have a basic sweater form that works really well for me, and each sweater explores a different combination of patterns.","title":"Arranging Patterns for Sweater Design"},{"content":"This post is mostly just an overview of Epistle by Matteo Villa, which is--to my mind--the best Android note taking application ever. By the time you read this I will have an Android Tablet, but it\u0026rsquo;s still in transit while you read this and that\u0026rsquo;s a topic that dissevers it\u0026rsquo;s own post.\nEpistle is a simple notes application with two features that sealed the deal:\n1. It knows markdown, and by default provides a compiled rich text view of notes before providing a simple notes editing interface. While syntax highlighting would be nice, we\u0026rsquo;ll take what we can get.\n2. It\u0026rsquo;s a nice, simple application. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing clever or fancy going on. This simplicity means that the interface is clean and it just edits text.\nFor those on the other side there\u0026rsquo;s Paragraft that seems similar. While in my heart of hearts I\u0026rsquo;m probably still holding out for the tablet equivalent1 of emacs. In the mean time, I think developing a text editing application that provide a number of paradigmatic text editing features and advances for the touch screen would be an incredibly welcome development.\nIn the end there\u0026rsquo;s much work to be done, and the tools are good enough to get started.\nI want to be clear to say equivalent and not replacement, because while I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to use emacs and have that kind of slipstream writing experience on an embeded device, what I really want is something that is flexible and can be customized and lets me do all the work that I need to do, without hopping between programs, without breaking focus, that makes inputting and manipulating text a joy. And an application that we can trust (i.e. open source, by a reputable developer,) in a format we can trust (i.e. plain text.) Doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be emacs and doesn\u0026rsquo;t need lisp, but I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t complain about the lisp.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-software-for-android-and-tablets/","summary":"This post is mostly just an overview of Epistle by Matteo Villa, which is--to my mind--the best Android note taking application ever. By the time you read this I will have an Android Tablet, but it\u0026rsquo;s still in transit while you read this and that\u0026rsquo;s a topic that dissevers it\u0026rsquo;s own post.\nEpistle is a simple notes application with two features that sealed the deal:\n1. It knows markdown, and by default provides a compiled rich text view of notes before providing a simple notes editing interface. While syntax highlighting would be nice, we\u0026rsquo;ll take what we can get.\n2. It\u0026rsquo;s a nice, simple application. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing clever or fancy going on. This simplicity means that the interface is clean and it just edits text.\nFor those on the other side there\u0026rsquo;s Paragraft that seems similar. While in my heart of hearts I\u0026rsquo;m probably still holding out for the tablet equivalent1 of emacs.","title":"Constraints for Mobile Software"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I\u0026rsquo;ve not posted here very much recently and also that the links in this post will be pretty unadorned. I\u0026rsquo;ll make up for it with table of contents:\n::: {.contents} :::\nOk, so it\u0026rsquo;s not much, but lets get started.\nNew Posts While my posting volume has gone down, I have posted something since the last update post.\n/posts/teaching-writing-skills /posts/is-dropbox-the-mobile-file-system-standard /posts/why-you-dont-want-programers-to-write-your-documentation /posts/remote-accessibility-reverse-tunneling-super-dynamic-dns Rest assured that there\u0026rsquo;s more stuff in the pipeline.\nLost Posts For some reason, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t figured out and don\u0026rsquo;t really care to, for a number of months, my posts from July of 2009 went missing. Usually this wouldn\u0026rsquo;t even be worth mentioning, except I July of 2009 was a big month for me writing wise--I\u0026rsquo;d just moved to the east coast, I had my first real tech job and my mind was full and I felt on fire. I consider a couple of these posts to be \u0026ldquo;tychoish classics.\u0026rdquo; The good news is I\u0026rsquo;ve found them, so here they are:\n/posts/are-web-standards-broken /posts/distribution-habits-and-change /posts/fa-sol-la /posts/infrastructural-commerce /posts/multiple-computers-and-singular-systems /posts/my-workstation-choices /posts/new-workstation-trials /posts/on-package-management /posts/on-public-key-encryption-and-security /posts/org-mode-pitfalls /posts/personal-desktop /posts/personal-desktop-2 /posts/stars-in-my-torchwood-pocket /posts/technology-as-infrastructure-act-one /posts/technology-as-infrastructure-act-two /posts/technology-as-infrastructure-act-three /posts/the-blog-is-dead-long-live-the-blog /posts/why-arch-linux-rocks They seem to be arranged alphabetically rather than sequentially, Sorry about that!\nContra Dancing Feature A contra dancing friend of mine solicited an email from me a few weeks ago about a couple of contra related topics, which have worked their way into posts that you can read below.\nPart one: Gender Swaping Part two: Improv Contra The Internet is A Cool Place: Tablet/Cloud Computing I found the following link on twitter from a few of my awesome (former) coworkers. It\u0026rsquo;s a blog post about a programmer who is using an iPad, a remote server, and a computer to do all of his work. read more\nIt\u0026rsquo;s an interesting possibility, frankly and I could probably make the shift easily enough if I wanted. Having said that, I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m a little too sensitive to TCP/SSH hiccups and I feel weird throwing all of my (potential?) productivity into something totally network dependent.\nAn Emacs Tip Interlude I picked up the following little bit of emacs configuration, that I think is wicked cool. It removes some of the limitations on m mini-buffers, which gives them a lot of pretty cool features. It seemed like the kind of configuration that I should have known about and didn\u0026rsquo;t, so maybe some of you don\u0026rsquo;t know either.\n(setq shell-command-default-error-buffer t) (setq enable-recursive-minibuffers t) Git, not Hypertext, Is the tool by which we experience becoming Nomad I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely sure why I\u0026rsquo;m following Stephen Ramsay on twitter, but I am. The other day I saw the following exchange, and I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s worth recording:\n\u0026lt;sramsay\u0026gt; Back in the day, it was fashionable to say that hypertext enacted certain theories associated with postmodernism (Deleuze, etc.) \u0026lt;sramsay\u0026gt; We had it totally wrong. *Git* is the tool by which we experience becoming nomad. I love this idea, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been saying variants of this for a while, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to get reinforcements. At the same I think it\u0026rsquo;s possible to easy to loose sight of how git is actually used of git when focusing on its transformative aspects. Which makes the theory read a little more hollow.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/update-irregular/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I\u0026rsquo;ve not posted here very much recently and also that the links in this post will be pretty unadorned. I\u0026rsquo;ll make up for it with table of contents:\n::: {.contents} :::\nOk, so it\u0026rsquo;s not much, but lets get started.\nNew Posts While my posting volume has gone down, I have posted something since the last update post.\n/posts/teaching-writing-skills /posts/is-dropbox-the-mobile-file-system-standard /posts/why-you-dont-want-programers-to-write-your-documentation /posts/remote-accessibility-reverse-tunneling-super-dynamic-dns Rest assured that there\u0026rsquo;s more stuff in the pipeline.\nLost Posts For some reason, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t figured out and don\u0026rsquo;t really care to, for a number of months, my posts from July of 2009 went missing. Usually this wouldn\u0026rsquo;t even be worth mentioning, except I July of 2009 was a big month for me writing wise--I\u0026rsquo;d just moved to the east coast, I had my first real tech job and my mind was full and I felt on fire. I consider a couple of these posts to be \u0026ldquo;tychoish classics.","title":"Update Irregular"},{"content":"I have a question for my system administrator readers. And maybe the rest of you as well.\nI run a web server on my laptop that hosts about 8 test sites. Nothing special: mostly test and development sites for various public sites, but from time to time I think, \u0026ldquo;shit, wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if I could just give someone a link to this.\u0026rdquo; My solution is generally to copy whatever it is that I\u0026rsquo;m working on up to the server that runs this website, and while that generally work just fine, it could be better.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking:\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to hook my laptop up to the internet and be able to let people access (some) of the content running on this web server. I don\u0026rsquo;t want it to be automatic, or open my entire machine to the world (though\u0026hellip; I could secure it, I suppose.) The options I\u0026rsquo;ve considered.\nI set up a VPN that I can connect to the public server (that hosts this website) from the laptop, and I have a virtual host (or set of virtual hosts) that proxy requests to the laptop. Wherever I am, it works. I\u0026rsquo;m not worried about the bandwidth or the strain on the server given the usage pattern I\u0026rsquo;m expecting.\nPros: Simple, Secure, works even if I\u0026rsquo;m on a weird local network. Potentially useful for other kinds of nifty hacking including tunneling all traffic through the VPN on insecure connections. Cons: Way complex, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it will work. I\u0026rsquo;ll need to set up VPN software. And it\u0026rsquo;s total overkill. Some sort of scripted dynamic DNS solution, probably involving running my own DNS server.\nPros: less proxy madness. Pretty simple. Cons: running a DNS server. Won\u0026rsquo;t work on some (most) local networks. There has to be some sort of alternate approach using a minimalist tunneling solution. There are a few of them, I think they\u0026rsquo;re nifty, and it would probably be perfect. I\u0026rsquo;m just not sure what it is.\n\u0026hellip;and then half the night later, I finished deploying the VPN. I have to say that I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with it:\nIt can (and has) replaced my ssh tunnels for sending email. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty great.\nThe web server stuff works, though I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything really up there yet. I feel like I need some sort of access restriction method, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really like any of the options. HTTP Auth is annoying rather than protective, SSL is terribly imperfect and fussy, host based control isn\u0026rsquo;t very tight.\nI think I will be able to finally sacrifice a laptop to the \u0026ldquo;homeserver\u0026rdquo; because aside from dis/re-enabling the \u0026ldquo;sleep on laptop close\u0026rdquo; function. If needed it\u0026rsquo;ll be dead simple to convert a sever laptop to a mobile laptop.\nThoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/remote-accessibility-reverse-tunneling-super-dynamic-dns/","summary":"I have a question for my system administrator readers. And maybe the rest of you as well.\nI run a web server on my laptop that hosts about 8 test sites. Nothing special: mostly test and development sites for various public sites, but from time to time I think, \u0026ldquo;shit, wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if I could just give someone a link to this.\u0026rdquo; My solution is generally to copy whatever it is that I\u0026rsquo;m working on up to the server that runs this website, and while that generally work just fine, it could be better.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking:\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to hook my laptop up to the internet and be able to let people access (some) of the content running on this web server. I don\u0026rsquo;t want it to be automatic, or open my entire machine to the world (though\u0026hellip; I could secure it, I suppose.","title":"Remote Accessibility/Reverse Tunneling/Super Dynamic DNS"},{"content":"All of my friends who have taught composition are appalled when they hear me say that I want to teach writing. But it\u0026rsquo;s true: I would be interested in having the opportunity to give people the kind of writing education that I never got to have. I\u0026rsquo;ve even collected a few of these ideas on a very rough \u0026ldquo;pedagogy\u0026rdquo; page. This post, by contrast, will be a list of \u0026ldquo;things I wish I could have learned before I got a job writing.\u0026rdquo;\nHow to write in long form. The skils and process for writing something that\u0026rsquo;s a hundred pages is fundamentally different from the process for writing pieces that are a few hundred words or a few pages. Project management, planning, and organization are totally different skills. Working with editors. In school, the editing process is very conversational. Editors, comment and ask you to make changes if agree with their judgment. Writers need to learn how to gather requirements, write the best possible content, and then hand it over to an editor who will modify the text without comment. Not only is it important to learn how to \u0026ldquo;get over this,\u0026rdquo; but also in how to learn from this kind of editing How to revise work. While I\u0026rsquo;ve learned to avoid making a number of mistakes to which I\u0026rsquo;m particularly prone, and spot those errors when the slip through, it\u0026rsquo;s really the process of applying for jobs that has taught me how to revise my own writing. Revision is probably the hardest writing skill, and I think there are probably better ways to teach revision than some sort of idealized \u0026ldquo;drafting process.\u0026rdquo; How to write at volume, even when you\u0026rsquo;re not feeling inspired. We\u0026rsquo;re pretty good at teaching people to write when they\u0026rsquo;re inspired or have done a lot of research. But writing Writing needs to be as instinctive as speech and the kind of thing that you don\u0026rsquo;t need to be inspired to be able to do. Not because anyone writes that much, but it\u0026rsquo;s a comfort thing. How to document things. Which is to say, how to record a practice, wprocedure, or interface, to tell people (and your future self,) how to do something. I had to figure this out on my own, and I think people would be much better writers for being 10% worse at writing essays and 10% better at writing processes. That would do it! I\u0026rsquo;ve included some work in this direction in the pedagogy page, but comments, are always valuable.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/teaching-writing-skills/","summary":"All of my friends who have taught composition are appalled when they hear me say that I want to teach writing. But it\u0026rsquo;s true: I would be interested in having the opportunity to give people the kind of writing education that I never got to have. I\u0026rsquo;ve even collected a few of these ideas on a very rough \u0026ldquo;pedagogy\u0026rdquo; page. This post, by contrast, will be a list of \u0026ldquo;things I wish I could have learned before I got a job writing.\u0026rdquo;\nHow to write in long form. The skils and process for writing something that\u0026rsquo;s a hundred pages is fundamentally different from the process for writing pieces that are a few hundred words or a few pages. Project management, planning, and organization are totally different skills. Working with editors. In school, the editing process is very conversational. Editors, comment and ask you to make changes if agree with their judgment.","title":"Teaching Writing Skills"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve started using Dropbox on my Android devices recently (and my laptop as a result,1) and I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly impressed with the software and with the way that this service is a perfect example of the kind of web services that we need to see more of. While I have some fairly uninteresting concerns about data security and relying on a service that I\u0026rsquo;m not administrating personally, I think it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to get caught up the implications of where the data lives and forget what the implications of having \u0026ldquo;just works,\u0026rdquo; file syncing between every computer.\nI used to think that the thing that kept mobile devices from being \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; was the fact that they couldn\u0026rsquo;t sell \u0026ldquo;post-file system\u0026rdquo; computer use. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that we\u0026rsquo;re ready to do away with the file system metaphor yet. I think Dropbox is largely successful because it brings files back and makes them available in a way that makes sense for mobile devices.\nThe caveat is that it provides a file system in a way that makes sense in the context for these kinds of \u0026ldquo;file systemless\u0026rdquo; platforms. Dropbox provides access to files, but in a way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t require applications (or users) to have a firm awareness of \u0026ldquo;real files. Best of all, Dropbox (or similar) can handle all of the synchronization, so that every application doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to have its own system.\nThis might mean that Dropbox is the first functionally Unix-like mobile application. I think (and hope) that Dropbox\u0026rsquo;s success will prove to be an indicator for future development. Not that there will be more file syncing services, but that mobile applications and platforms will have applications that \u0026ldquo;do one thing well,\u0026rdquo; and provide a functionality upon which other applications can build awesome features.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that there aren\u0026rsquo;t other important issues with Dropbox. Where your data lives does matter, who controls the servers that your data lives on is important. Fundamentally, Dropbox isn\u0026rsquo;t doing anything technologically complicated. When I started writing the post, I said \u0026ldquo;oh, it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too hard to get something similar set up,\u0026rdquo; and while Dropbox does seem like the relative leader, it looks like there is a fair amount of competition. That\u0026rsquo;s probably a good thing.\nSo despite the concerns about relying on a proprietary vendor and about trusting your data on someone else\u0026rsquo;s server, data has to go somewhere. As long as users have choices and options, and there are open ways of achieving the same ends, I think that these issues are less important than many others.\nTo be fair, I\u0026rsquo;m using it to synchronize files to the Android devices, and not really to synchronize files between machines: I have a server for simple file sharing, and git repositories for the more complex work. So it\u0026rsquo;s not terribly useful for desktop-to-desktop sharing, But for mobile devices? Amazing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/is-dropbox-the-mobile-file-system-standard/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve started using Dropbox on my Android devices recently (and my laptop as a result,1) and I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly impressed with the software and with the way that this service is a perfect example of the kind of web services that we need to see more of. While I have some fairly uninteresting concerns about data security and relying on a service that I\u0026rsquo;m not administrating personally, I think it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to get caught up the implications of where the data lives and forget what the implications of having \u0026ldquo;just works,\u0026rdquo; file syncing between every computer.\nI used to think that the thing that kept mobile devices from being \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; was the fact that they couldn\u0026rsquo;t sell \u0026ldquo;post-file system\u0026rdquo; computer use. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that we\u0026rsquo;re ready to do away with the file system metaphor yet. I think Dropbox is largely successful because it brings files back and makes them available in a way that makes sense for mobile devices.","title":"Is Dropbox the Mobile File System Standard"},{"content":"So the documentation sucks. Hire someone to make the documentation suck less.\nSimple enough, right?\nRight.\nJust don\u0026rsquo;t hire a programmer to write documentation, even though this seems to be a pretty common impulse. There are a lot of reasons, but here are some of the most important from my perspective:\nProgrammers focus on the code they write, or might write, to be able to describe and document entire projects. It\u0026rsquo;s really hard to get programmers to approach documentation from the biggest possible frame. Programmers have a hard time organizing larger scale documentation resources, because they approach it as a database problem rather than a cognitive/use problem. Programmers solve problems by writing code, not by documenting it. You can push programmers to write notes and you can push the best programmers who can write to work on documentation; but unless you dedicate an engineer to writing documentation full time (which is a peculiar management decision) documentation will always come second. I\u0026rsquo;d wager that every organization large enough to have documentation that sucks is probably large enough to have enough documentation for a full time technical writer. Engineers, particularly those who are familiar with a piece of technology, do this really interesting thing where they explain phenomena from the most basic assumptions prompted to describe something, but regularly skip crucial steps in processes and parts explanations if they think they\u0026rsquo;re obvious. Interesting cognitive phenomena do not make for good documentation.\nWhat am I missing?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-you-dont-want-programers-to-write-your-documentation/","summary":"So the documentation sucks. Hire someone to make the documentation suck less.\nSimple enough, right?\nRight.\nJust don\u0026rsquo;t hire a programmer to write documentation, even though this seems to be a pretty common impulse. There are a lot of reasons, but here are some of the most important from my perspective:\nProgrammers focus on the code they write, or might write, to be able to describe and document entire projects. It\u0026rsquo;s really hard to get programmers to approach documentation from the biggest possible frame. Programmers have a hard time organizing larger scale documentation resources, because they approach it as a database problem rather than a cognitive/use problem. Programmers solve problems by writing code, not by documenting it. You can push programmers to write notes and you can push the best programmers who can write to work on documentation; but unless you dedicate an engineer to writing documentation full time (which is a peculiar management decision) documentation will always come second.","title":"Why you Don't Want Programers to Write Your Documentation"},{"content":"I went through a few days ago to collect all of the updates and work that I\u0026rsquo;d done since the last time I did one of these posts. Sometimes just looking through an activity log is all you need to remember that you\u0026rsquo;re actually doing something. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on:\nisd\u0026quot; is a developing page of material for my ongoing story project. I\u0026rsquo;ve written it in my \u0026ldquo;Wiki Fiction\u0026rdquo; post. This particular page is basically sysadminning-punk, if I may be so bold. The story as a whole is largely a future history of human\u0026rsquo;s expansion into the solar system and beyond, using Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s idea of Accelerando. This piece in particular is all about the emergence of an asynchronous database network that eventually replaces the Internet as we know it, because interstellar distances render trans-planetary TCP (in any form) unworkable. I\u0026rsquo;ve got an outline and I\u0026rsquo;m slowly working to fill in the blanks. Editing, ideas, and any amount of text are all welcome. I added a page to the technical writing section on \u0026ldquo;Why the Documentation Sucks,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;ve done some additional editing and revising of this section of the wiki. The /technical-writing/documentation-sucks page has also served as the foundation of my post about documentation publishing systems. I\u0026rsquo;ve added a number of new posts that I hope won\u0026rsquo;t be forgotten too quickly. They are: Is Android the Future of Linux Advice for Blogging Successfully :Issue Tracking and the Health of Open Source Software Tablet Interfaces and Intuition Org Mode and Mobile Writing Publishing System Requirements Android Tablets and the Workstations of the Future There has also been some discussions of new and old rhizomes on the discourse pages. A few weeks ago I posted a few new scripts in the code section. Tell me what you think: ikiwiki tasklist download mail My post, 9 Awesome SSH Tricks from March 2011, spent a number of hours on the front page of hacker new. You can read the comments over there, and probably on some other sites as well. The coolest part about this is that some of you have helped to build a page of ssh tricks on the wiki that go above and beyond the little tricks that I use.\nAnd finally,I \u0026rsquo;d like to welcome Kevin Grande, who made a new folk page recently. I\u0026rsquo;m also very sorry that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been updating more frequently. I started a new job on September 26, and between that and my usual gallivanting around for singing and dancing my blogging habit has. One the other hand I\u0026rsquo;m writing about 1200 words a day, and life is pretty good so no complaints there.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/overdue-update/","summary":"I went through a few days ago to collect all of the updates and work that I\u0026rsquo;d done since the last time I did one of these posts. Sometimes just looking through an activity log is all you need to remember that you\u0026rsquo;re actually doing something. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on:\nisd\u0026quot; is a developing page of material for my ongoing story project. I\u0026rsquo;ve written it in my \u0026ldquo;Wiki Fiction\u0026rdquo; post. This particular page is basically sysadminning-punk, if I may be so bold. The story as a whole is largely a future history of human\u0026rsquo;s expansion into the solar system and beyond, using Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s idea of Accelerando. This piece in particular is all about the emergence of an asynchronous database network that eventually replaces the Internet as we know it, because interstellar distances render trans-planetary TCP (in any form) unworkable. I\u0026rsquo;ve got an outline and I\u0026rsquo;m slowly working to fill in the blanks.","title":"Overdue Update"},{"content":"The ideal writing application is emacs, at least for me. In the absence of emacs (as on a tablet,) I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about what features I actually need in a writing application. While I\u0026rsquo;ve grown to admire the power of a full Lisp machine in my text editor, I accept that it\u0026rsquo;s not, strictly speaking required. Here\u0026rsquo;s a first stab at the list of requirements. Feel free to comment or submit a patch to this page.\nSimple, primarily full screen editing. The ability edit very large files, 100kbs should present no issue. Some sort of syntax highlight during the editing process, preferably support for LaTeX, Markdown, and org-mode. Word count generation for the entire files and for current selections. Auto-save as crash protection. Undo/Redo last typing action. Nice to have (but not crucial) features:\nThe ability to edit one file and reference another (or potentially edit) at the same time. Bonus points for being able to switch between to parts of a single file at once. The ability to hide or collapse some sections of a file. Optional spell checking. Parenthetical and double-quote matching. Soft and hard line/word wrapping. Other than that I don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s anything that I really need to have to get writing done 90% of the time. How about you?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-software-beyond-emacs/","summary":"The ideal writing application is emacs, at least for me. In the absence of emacs (as on a tablet,) I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about what features I actually need in a writing application. While I\u0026rsquo;ve grown to admire the power of a full Lisp machine in my text editor, I accept that it\u0026rsquo;s not, strictly speaking required. Here\u0026rsquo;s a first stab at the list of requirements. Feel free to comment or submit a patch to this page.\nSimple, primarily full screen editing. The ability edit very large files, 100kbs should present no issue. Some sort of syntax highlight during the editing process, preferably support for LaTeX, Markdown, and org-mode. Word count generation for the entire files and for current selections. Auto-save as crash protection. Undo/Redo last typing action. Nice to have (but not crucial) features:\nThe ability to edit one file and reference another (or potentially edit) at the same time. Bonus points for being able to switch between to parts of a single file at once.","title":"Writing Software Beyond Emacs"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve only had the tablet for a few weeks, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure the tablet incarnation of Android is probably 80% of what most users need in a workstation. I\u0026rsquo;m not most users, but I figure: hook up a big screen and a real keyboard. Create some key bindings to replace most of the gestures, and write a few pieces of software to handle document production, presentations, and spreadsheets in a slightly more robust manner, and you\u0026rsquo;re basically there. I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t give up my laptop today for a tablet, and I think the platforms still have a ways yet to go, but that\u0026rsquo;s not insurmountable.\nPrediction: in the next decade, we\u0026rsquo;ll see embeded tablet-like devices begin to replace desktops computers for some classes of use and users. General web surfing, reading, quick email, and watching videos on YouTube seem like the obvious niche for now. I started to explore this in \u0026ldquo;Is Android the Future of Linux,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s not abusrd to suggest that Android or iOS like devices might begin to address more \u0026ldquo;general purpose desktop computing.\u0026rdquo;\nI want to be clear: we\u0026rsquo;re not there yet. These systems aren\u0026rsquo;t versatile and fully featured enough to keep up with full time use on an extended basis. This is mostly an application/software problem. As applications evolve and as more functionality moves to remote systems anyway (this is the \u0026ldquo;cloud,\u0026rdquo; we\u0026rsquo;ve heard so much about,) tablet operating systems will seem much more capable for general purpose work. Better mobile productivity software will help as well. Eventually, I think Android and similar platforms will have a shot at the desktop market for most usage because:\nIT departments will get a lot more control over intra-organization information flow, which could save a lot of money for various IT categories: administration, support, and data protection costs.\nBehind the firewall dropbox-like services, and creating some sort of centralized workstation configuration management (which makes sense for a flash based device,) means backups can happen automatically, and if devices need to be re-imaged or are lost or damaged, it only takes a few minutes to get someone back to work after a technology failure.\nLimited multi-tasking ability will probably increase productivity.\nDisconnecting keyboards from the screen will probably lead to better ergonomic possibilities.\nEventually, it will be easier to integrate Android-like devices with various workflow management/content management systems.\nThe technology needs to mature and workers and IT departments need to become more comfortable with tablets, without question. Also, there are some fundamental developments in the technology that need to transpire before \u0026ldquo;desktop tablets\u0026rdquo; happen, including:\nMore power user-type interface features.\nSplit screen operation. There are enough \u0026ldquo;common tasks\u0026rdquo; that require looking at two different pieces of information at the same time that I think tablets will eventually have to give up \u0026ldquo;full screen everywhere,\u0026rdquo; operation. Conventional windowing is unnecessary, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think anyone would go for that, but displaying two different and distinct pieces of information at once is essential.\nBetter \u0026ldquo;Office\u0026rdquo; software for spreadsheets, presentations and document preparation. A necessary evil.\nBehind the firewall (preferably open source) solutions to replace services like Dropbox/Box.net and whatever other services emerge as essential parts of the \u0026ldquo;tablet/smartphone\u0026rdquo; stack.\nVPN clients and shared file system clients that are de ad simple to use. I think these are features for operating system vendors to develop.\nThoughts? Onward and upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/android-tablets-and-the-workstations-of-the-future/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve only had the tablet for a few weeks, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure the tablet incarnation of Android is probably 80% of what most users need in a workstation. I\u0026rsquo;m not most users, but I figure: hook up a big screen and a real keyboard. Create some key bindings to replace most of the gestures, and write a few pieces of software to handle document production, presentations, and spreadsheets in a slightly more robust manner, and you\u0026rsquo;re basically there. I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t give up my laptop today for a tablet, and I think the platforms still have a ways yet to go, but that\u0026rsquo;s not insurmountable.\nPrediction: in the next decade, we\u0026rsquo;ll see embeded tablet-like devices begin to replace desktops computers for some classes of use and users. General web surfing, reading, quick email, and watching videos on YouTube seem like the obvious niche for now. I started to explore this in \u0026ldquo;Is Android the Future of Linux,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s not abusrd to suggest that Android or iOS like devices might begin to address more \u0026ldquo;general purpose desktop computing.","title":"Android Tablets and the Workstations of the Future"},{"content":"Like issue tracking systems, documentation publication systems are never quite perfect. There are dozens of options, and most of them are horrible and difficult to use for one reason or another. Rather than outline why these systems are less than ideal, I want to provide a list of basic requirements that I think every documentation publishing system1 should have.\nRequirements Tag System. You have to be able to identify and link different pieces of content together in unique and potentially dynamic ways across a number of dimensions. Tagging systems, particularly those that can access and create lists of \u0026ldquo;other posts with similar tags,\u0026rdquo; are essential for providing some much needed organization to projects that are probably quite complex. Tagging systems should provide some way of supporting multiple tag namespaces. Also operations affecting tags need to be really efficient, from the users and software\u0026rsquo;s perspective, or else it won\u0026rsquo;t work at realistic scales. Static Generation. Content needs to be statically generated. There are so many good reasons to have static repositories. It allows you to plan releases (which is good if you need to coordinate documentation releases with software releases) most documentation changes infrequently. The truth is this feature alone isn\u0026rsquo;t so important, but static generation makes the next several features possible or easier. Development Builds. As you work on documentation, it\u0026rsquo;s important to be able to see what the entire resource will look like when published. This is a mass-preview mode, if you will. The issue here, is that unlike some kinds of web-based publications, documentation often needs to be updated in batches, and it\u0026rsquo;s useful to be able to see those changes all at once because the can all interact in peculiar ways. These test builds need to be possible locally, so that work isn\u0026rsquo;t dependent on a network connection, or shared infrastructure. Verification and Testing. While building \u0026ldquo;self-testing\u0026rdquo; documentation is really quite difficult (see also /technical-writing/dexy,) I think publication systems should be able to do \u0026ldquo;run tests\u0026rdquo; against documents and provide reports, even if the tests are just to make sure that new of software versions haven\u0026rsquo;t been released, or that links still work. It\u0026rsquo;s probably also a good idea to be able to verify that certain conventions are followed in terms of formatting: trailing white space, optional link formats, tagging conventions, required metadata, and so forth. Iteration Support. Documents need to be released and revised on various schedules as new versions and products are developed. Compounding this problem, old documentation (sometimes,) needs to hang around for backwards compatibility and legacy support. Document systems need to have flexible ways to tag documents as out of date, or establish pointers that say \u0026ldquo;the new version of this document is located here.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s possible to build this off of the tag system, but it\u0026rsquo;s probably better for it to be a separate piece of data. Version Control. These systems are great for storing content, facilitating easy collaboration, and supporting parallel work. Diffs are a great way to provide feedback for writers, and having history is useful for being able to recreate and trace your past thinking when you have to revisit a document or decision weeks and months later. Lightweight Markup. It\u0026rsquo;s dumb to make people write pure XML in pretty much every case. With rst, markdown, and pandoc the like there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to write XML. Ever. of story End. Renaming and Reorganization. As document repositories grow and develop, it seems inevitable that the initial sketch of the organization for the body of work change. Documents will need to be moved, URLs will need to be redirected or rewritten, and links will need to be updated. The software needs to support this directly. Workflow Support. Documentation systems need to be able to facilitate editorial workflows and reviews. This should grow out of some combination of a private tag name space and a reporting feature for contributions, which can generate lists of pages to help groups distribute labor and effort. This might just be a quirk of my approach, but I tend approach documentation, terms of process and tooling, as if it were programming and writing software. They aren\u0026rsquo;t identical tasks, of course, but there are a lot of functional similarities And definitely enough to take advantage of the tooling and advances (i.e. make, git, etc.) that programmers have been able to build for themselves. Am I missing something or totally off base?\nThink knowledge bases, documentation sites, and online manuals. I\u0026rsquo;m generally of the opinion that one should be able to publish all of these materials using the same tool.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/publishing-system-requirements/","summary":"Like issue tracking systems, documentation publication systems are never quite perfect. There are dozens of options, and most of them are horrible and difficult to use for one reason or another. Rather than outline why these systems are less than ideal, I want to provide a list of basic requirements that I think every documentation publishing system1 should have.\nRequirements Tag System. You have to be able to identify and link different pieces of content together in unique and potentially dynamic ways across a number of dimensions. Tagging systems, particularly those that can access and create lists of \u0026ldquo;other posts with similar tags,\u0026rdquo; are essential for providing some much needed organization to projects that are probably quite complex. Tagging systems should provide some way of supporting multiple tag namespaces. Also operations affecting tags need to be really efficient, from the users and software\u0026rsquo;s perspective, or else it won\u0026rsquo;t work at realistic scales.","title":"Publishing System Requirements"},{"content":"This post is adapted from a post I made to the org-mode email list a few weeks ago. I proposed an application to compliment MobileOrg for writing. Where MobileOrg collects the core bits of org-mode\u0026rsquo;s task planning functionality in a form that makes sense for smart phone users, the parts of org-mode functionality that people use to for writing and organizing the content of larger form projects isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly accessible.\nI spend (or should spend) 70% or more of my time in front of a computer writing or editing something in org-mode. Most of my org files have tens of thousands of words of blog posts, notes, drafts of articles, and so forth. While I can store that data on an android device with only minor problems using a little script that I put together, and I can capture content into my org-files using email and some nifty filters, and there are text editors that can let me edit these files: it could be better.\nThe proposal is simple. Can we build something like Epistle for org-mode? It might just render org-mode text to HTML, and frankly that would be enough for me. If the editing interface had an org-indent-mode equivalent, org-syntax highlighting, and even collapsing trees or org-narrow-to-subtree, that\u0026rsquo;d be kind of like heaven.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a mobile developer, so I can\u0026rsquo;t promise to start making an app this instant if there\u0026rsquo;s interest but if anyone\u0026rsquo;s bored and thinks this might be a good idea (or knows of something that might work better for this.) I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear about it. If someone wants to start work on this, I\u0026rsquo;ll do whatever I can to help make this a reality.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/org-mode-and-mobile-writing/","summary":"This post is adapted from a post I made to the org-mode email list a few weeks ago. I proposed an application to compliment MobileOrg for writing. Where MobileOrg collects the core bits of org-mode\u0026rsquo;s task planning functionality in a form that makes sense for smart phone users, the parts of org-mode functionality that people use to for writing and organizing the content of larger form projects isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly accessible.\nI spend (or should spend) 70% or more of my time in front of a computer writing or editing something in org-mode. Most of my org files have tens of thousands of words of blog posts, notes, drafts of articles, and so forth. While I can store that data on an android device with only minor problems using a little script that I put together, and I can capture content into my org-files using email and some nifty filters, and there are text editors that can let me edit these files: it could be better.","title":"Org Mode and Mobile Writing"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using FBReaderJ to read .epub files on my tablet recently, and I discovered a nitfty feature: you can adjust the screen\u0026rsquo;s brightness by dragging your finger up or down the left side of the screen. Immediately this felt like discovering a new keybinding or a new function in emacs that I\u0026rsquo;d been wishing for a while time. Why, I thought, aren\u0026rsquo;t there more tricks like this?\nThe iPhone (and the iPad by extension) as well as Android make two major advances over previous iterations of mobile technology. First, they\u0026rsquo;re robust enough to run \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; programs written in conventional programming environment. Better development tools make for better applications and more eager developers (which also makes for better applications.) Second, the interfaces are designed to be used with fingers rather than stylus (thanks to capacitive touch screens) and the design aesthetic generally reflects minimalist values and simplicity. The mobile applications of today\u0026rsquo;s app stores would not work if they were visually complex and had multi-tiered menus, and hard to activate buttons.\nThe tension between these two features in these platforms makes it difficult to slip nifty features into applications. Furthermore, th economy of application market places does not create incentives for developers to build tools with enduring functionality. The .epub reader I mentioned above is actually free software.1 I write a couple of posts a while back on innovation (one and two) that address the relationship between free software and technological development but that\u0026rsquo;s beside the point.\nGiven this, there are two major directions that I see tablet interfaces moving toward:\n1. Tablet interfaces will slowly begin to acquire a more complete gestural shorthand and cross-app vocabulary that will allow us to become more effective users of this technology. Things like Sywpe are part of this, but I think there are more.\n2. There will be general purpose systems for tablets that partially or wholly expect a keyboard, and then some sort of key-command system will emerge. This follows from my thoughts in the \u0026ldquo;Is Android the Future of Linux?\u0026rdquo; post.\nI fully expect that both lines of development can expand in parallel.\nI also found the base configuration of FBReader (for the tablet, at least) to be horrible, but with some tweaking, it\u0026rsquo;s a great app.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tablet-interfaces-and-intuition/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using FBReaderJ to read .epub files on my tablet recently, and I discovered a nitfty feature: you can adjust the screen\u0026rsquo;s brightness by dragging your finger up or down the left side of the screen. Immediately this felt like discovering a new keybinding or a new function in emacs that I\u0026rsquo;d been wishing for a while time. Why, I thought, aren\u0026rsquo;t there more tricks like this?\nThe iPhone (and the iPad by extension) as well as Android make two major advances over previous iterations of mobile technology. First, they\u0026rsquo;re robust enough to run \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; programs written in conventional programming environment. Better development tools make for better applications and more eager developers (which also makes for better applications.) Second, the interfaces are designed to be used with fingers rather than stylus (thanks to capacitive touch screens) and the design aesthetic generally reflects minimalist values and simplicity. The mobile applications of today\u0026rsquo;s app stores would not work if they were visually complex and had multi-tiered menus, and hard to activate buttons.","title":"Tablet Interfaces and Intuition"},{"content":"I read something recently that suggested that the health of an open source project and its community could be largely assessed by reviewing the status of the bug tracker. I\u0026rsquo;m still trying to track down the citation for this remark. This basically says that vital active projects have regularly updated bugs that are clearly described and that bugs be easy to search and easy to submit.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that free software communities and projects can be so easily assessed or that conventional project management practices are the only meaningful way to judge a project\u0026rsquo;s health. While we\u0026rsquo;re at it, I don\u0026rsquo;t know that it\u0026rsquo;s terribly useful to focus too much attention or importance on project management. Having said that, the emergence of organizational structure is incredibly fascinating, and could probably tolerate more investigation.\nAs a starting point, I\u0026rsquo;d like to offer two conjectures:\nFirst, that transparent issue tracking is a reasonably effective means of \u0026ldquo;customer service,\u0026rdquo; or user support. If the bug tracking contains answers to questions that people encounter during use, and provide a way to resolve issues with the software that\u0026rsquo;s productive and helps with support self-service. Obviously some users and groups of users are better at this than others. Second, issue tracking is perhaps the best way to do bottom-up project/product management and planning in the open, particularly since these kinds or projects lack formal procedures and designated roles to do this kind of organizational work. While the overriding goal of personal task management is to break things into the smallest manageable work units, the overriding goal of issue tracking systems is to track the most intellectually discrete issues within a single project through the development process. Thus, issue tracking systems have requirements that are either much less important in personal systems or actively counter-intuitive for other uses. They are:\nTask assignment, so that specific issues can be assigned different team members. Ideally this gets a specific developer can \u0026ldquo;own\u0026rdquo; a specific portion of the project and actually be able to work and coordinate efforts on the project. Task prioritization, so that less important or crucial issues get attention before \u0026ldquo;nice to have,\u0026rdquo; items are addressed. Issue comments and additional attached information, to track progress and support information sharing among teams, particularly over long periods of time with asynchronous elements. While it\u0026rsquo;s nice to be able to integrate tasks and notes (this is really the core of org-mode\u0026rsquo;s strength) issue tracking systems need to be able to accommodate error output and discussion from a team on the best solution, as well as discussion about the ideal solution.\nThe truth is that a lot of projects don\u0026rsquo;t do a very good job of using issue tracking systems, despite how necessary and important bug trackers. The prefabricated systems can be frustrating and difficult to use, and most of the minimalist systems1 are hard to use in groups.2 The first person to write a fully featured, lightweight, and easy to use issue tracking system will be incredibly successful. Feel free to submit a patch to this post, if you\u0026rsquo;re aware of a viable systems along these lines.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking about using ikiwiki or org-mode to track issues, but ditz suffers from the same core problem.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBasically, they either sacrifice structure or concurrency features or both. Less structured systems rely on a group of people to capture the same sort of information in a regular way (unlikely) or they capture less information, neither option is tenable. Without concurrency (because they store things in single flat files) people can\u0026rsquo;t use them to manage collaboration, which make them awkward personal task tracking systems.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/issue-tracking-and-the-health-of-open-source-software/","summary":"I read something recently that suggested that the health of an open source project and its community could be largely assessed by reviewing the status of the bug tracker. I\u0026rsquo;m still trying to track down the citation for this remark. This basically says that vital active projects have regularly updated bugs that are clearly described and that bugs be easy to search and easy to submit.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that free software communities and projects can be so easily assessed or that conventional project management practices are the only meaningful way to judge a project\u0026rsquo;s health. While we\u0026rsquo;re at it, I don\u0026rsquo;t know that it\u0026rsquo;s terribly useful to focus too much attention or importance on project management. Having said that, the emergence of organizational structure is incredibly fascinating, and could probably tolerate more investigation.\nAs a starting point, I\u0026rsquo;d like to offer two conjectures:\nFirst, that transparent issue tracking is a reasonably effective means of \u0026ldquo;customer service,\u0026rdquo; or user support.","title":"Issue Tracking and the Health of Open Source Software"},{"content":"By now, several weeks ago, in correspondence Matt Lundin that he thought Android was probably future of Linux,\u0026quot; mostly as a throw away line. This feels like a really bold statement,1 and I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed thinking about Android and \u0026ldquo;the future of Linux.\u0026rdquo;2\nOn the face of it, Android is the future of Linux. Android is the Linux that most people will interact with before all others in a concrete manner. In all likelihood The future of Linux is probably mostly in running web servers, virtualization hosts, and any other server that matters. At this point, Linux\u0026rsquo;s platform support and use cases is far less interesting than its prevalence: the ubiquity of Linux, GNU, and BusyBox, is more import an that the fact that Linux runs everywhere in hundreds of different usage profiles.\nAnd really, \u0026ldquo;desktop Linux\u0026rdquo; or even \u0026ldquo;Linux for end-users,\u0026rdquo; is something of a distraction. We don\u0026rsquo;t all have to use Linux on the machines beneath our fingers for Linux to be successful. I\u0026rsquo;m a desktop Linux user because it\u0026rsquo;s the right system for the work I do, and I can\u0026rsquo;t work the way I need to with any other kind of system. But I use my systems in a very peculiar way and the thing that makes Linux ideal for me (and the people who are good at building Linux systems,) is not necessarily the qualities that make the best Linux distributions for most users.\nAs someone who cares about Linux adoption and the use of free software, I don\u0026rsquo;t want my argument to lead to the very common \u0026ldquo;let non-technical users use Macs\u0026rdquo; argument. Although it\u0026rsquo;s true that OS X can be a convincing introduction to power and use of having a full UNIX-like system on your lap: this was my root (as it were.) Rather, I think that the way to encourage Linux adoption is to increase computer literacy until users respect and value and power that Linux-based systems offer.\nEasier said than done, of course.\nIf this is the case, then Android isn\u0026rsquo;t a very good introduction to Linux-based operating systems. Not because it\u0026rsquo;s bad software, but because the kernel is pretty irrelevant to the overall user experience, or the interface that most users have.\nRegardless, while madalu is probably right, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it matters. Android is largely orthogonal to the adoption of Linux. The bigger questions are:\nDoes Microsoft have a tablet strategy? Really? The last time Linux made headway into users\u0026rsquo; hands (i.e. netbooks,) Microsoft changed strategies, and not only pushed Linux-based systems out of the market, but they also basically killed the device class. Netbooks really aren\u0026rsquo;t a thing anymore. How close are we to tablet-like (or tablet-derived) devices from replacing general purpose computers for some classes of day to day activity. I suspect corporate machines will be the first to fall (more constrained/specific use cases; tablet systems give IT administrators more control, and increasingly work happens in web apps.) If corporate fleets are the first to fall, the first question becomes much more important. In any case, stay tuned, I\u0026rsquo;m working on collecting the rest of my thoughts on these questions. In the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;d look forward to hearing from you.\nOnward and Upward!\nI would like to fully apologize ahead of the time if I\u0026rsquo;m characterizing the argument unfairly.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThough mostly ceremonial to mark the 20th anniversary, and because there have been 39 releases of the 2.6.x series kernel which is absurd to keep track of after a while, Linux is getting a version boost to version 3.x.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/is-android-the-future-of-linux/","summary":"By now, several weeks ago, in correspondence Matt Lundin that he thought Android was probably future of Linux,\u0026quot; mostly as a throw away line. This feels like a really bold statement,1 and I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed thinking about Android and \u0026ldquo;the future of Linux.\u0026rdquo;2\nOn the face of it, Android is the future of Linux. Android is the Linux that most people will interact with before all others in a concrete manner. In all likelihood The future of Linux is probably mostly in running web servers, virtualization hosts, and any other server that matters. At this point, Linux\u0026rsquo;s platform support and use cases is far less interesting than its prevalence: the ubiquity of Linux, GNU, and BusyBox, is more import an that the fact that Linux runs everywhere in hundreds of different usage profiles.\nAnd really, \u0026ldquo;desktop Linux\u0026rdquo; or even \u0026ldquo;Linux for end-users,\u0026rdquo; is something of a distraction. We don\u0026rsquo;t all have to use Linux on the machines beneath our fingers for Linux to be successful.","title":"Is Android the Future of Linux?"},{"content":"Although I forget it, sometimes, the following video is probably the single best piece of advice for better blogging. Watch the video:\nCory Docotorow - How to be an Uber Blogger\nAttention and time are scarce while content is plentiful. \u0026ldquo;If you write it they\u0026rsquo;ll read\u0026rdquo; cannot, thus, be true of blogging. Interesting and important content is interesting, but success lies in managing the attention economy and focusing on output that is easy to read and easy to skim. Its not glamorous, and it requires giving up a bunch of pride, but writers must write with readers in mind.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll skip the meandering analysis and get to a couple of key questions that I think remain open, even 4 years after this video was posted:\nWhat about non-newsreel blogs? Blogs that are more analysis and less regurgitation\u0026rsquo;s of boingboing/metafilter/slashdot? What about non-blog content? Are books and articles, subject to the same overload (yes?) but are the solutions always \u0026ldquo;write easy to process, easy to skip,\u0026rdquo; content? (Maybe?) The connection between the \u0026ldquo;attention\u0026rdquo; economy, evolving search engine use patterns, and mobile technology change the way that we interact with and compensate for overload? Discuss!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/advice-for-blogging-successfully/","summary":"Although I forget it, sometimes, the following video is probably the single best piece of advice for better blogging. Watch the video:\nCory Docotorow - How to be an Uber Blogger\nAttention and time are scarce while content is plentiful. \u0026ldquo;If you write it they\u0026rsquo;ll read\u0026rdquo; cannot, thus, be true of blogging. Interesting and important content is interesting, but success lies in managing the attention economy and focusing on output that is easy to read and easy to skim. Its not glamorous, and it requires giving up a bunch of pride, but writers must write with readers in mind.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll skip the meandering analysis and get to a couple of key questions that I think remain open, even 4 years after this video was posted:\nWhat about non-newsreel blogs? Blogs that are more analysis and less regurgitation\u0026rsquo;s of boingboing/metafilter/slashdot? What about non-blog content? Are books and articles, subject to the same overload (yes?","title":"Advice for Blogging Successfully"},{"content":"I wonder if, at some point, this constant state of overload and flux in my world will begin to seem normal and I\u0026rsquo;ll just adjust to that normal. In the mean time, exciting things are happening and I\u0026rsquo;m not quite sure of the best way to write about them. Perhaps soon. For now, I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get better about updating more regularly and I have a bunch of links of stuff that have happened on the wiki in the past couple of weeks that I\u0026rsquo;d like to share. Here we go:\nDiscussion of Rhizomes jfm and I had a good exchange about an old post, /posts/ideology-and-systems-administration. Basically the posts says, \u0026ldquo;systems administrators have a unique approach to solving technological problems,\u0026rdquo; and discussed the implications of systems administrators background on technology development. I think our clarifications were useful.\nThere are a couple of comments on my recent series on a productivity. First, I wrote a post about task planning and creating task items, and Matt posted a comment. Second, a number of us had an ongoing conversation on mobile productivity in response to the \u0026ldquo;Mobile Productivity Challenges\u0026rdquo; post that touched on emacs (of course!) input, and context switching.\nSite Tweaks This is a pretty minor point, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been subtly tweaking the design a little in the site. There are now links to the tags page and the site map in the upper right hand corner. I\u0026rsquo;ve also made links to as-of-yet-uncreated wiki pages red (according to wiki-convention.) I think (and hope) that red links are easier to spot when they\u0026rsquo;re red. Feedback on the design would be most welcome. My goal is to make the site welcoming, easy to use, and to minimize the amount of \u0026ldquo;fussiness.\u0026rdquo; It might be time for a full refresh, but feedback on the subject might be good.\nCritical Futures and Wiki Fiction Eventually the story will move to the Critical Futures domain, but that\u0026rsquo;s a bit down the road. Right now I\u0026rsquo;d rather focus my time/energy on writing some stories, for now (on this wiki.) Infrastructure can come next.\nI hope to work on a series of posts that explore collaborative fiction organizing over the next few weeks. If people are interested, that is.\nExternal Links I came across a blog from the comment on the make emacs better post that I wanted to offer as a link The Babbage Files is a great cyborg/emacs/free software blog.\nThis is probably not news to anyone, but from John Wiegley I learned about the following two emacs gems that merit mention:\nparedit which makes handling all of the parentheses in Lisp coding much easier. redshank, which basically adds a number of tempting systems and associated tools for And in another direction, I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with pylookup. This emacs add on makes it possible to access python documentation from within emacs, from a local copy. The interface is a little bit fiddly but it\u0026rsquo;s pretty much heaven. More things should work like this.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/update-rhythm/","summary":"I wonder if, at some point, this constant state of overload and flux in my world will begin to seem normal and I\u0026rsquo;ll just adjust to that normal. In the mean time, exciting things are happening and I\u0026rsquo;m not quite sure of the best way to write about them. Perhaps soon. For now, I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get better about updating more regularly and I have a bunch of links of stuff that have happened on the wiki in the past couple of weeks that I\u0026rsquo;d like to share. Here we go:\nDiscussion of Rhizomes jfm and I had a good exchange about an old post, /posts/ideology-and-systems-administration. Basically the posts says, \u0026ldquo;systems administrators have a unique approach to solving technological problems,\u0026rdquo; and discussed the implications of systems administrators background on technology development. I think our clarifications were useful.\nThere are a couple of comments on my recent series on a productivity. First, I wrote a post about task planning and creating task items, and Matt posted a comment.","title":"Update Rhythm"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m starting preliminary development on a wiki fiction project that will eventually take over the criticalfutures.com domain. This post is a discussion of that history, my idea, and what I hope to accomplish.\nMy friend Julia and I have been corresponding on topics related to the future of publishing and genre fiction for a few weeks. When the topic turned to wikis, I spouted off the things I usually say about bootstrapping wiki participation (it\u0026rsquo;s hard and pretty lonely,) then I had an idea.\nI read wikis, mostly wikipeida, a lot. For fun. I\u0026rsquo;m sure a lot of people do this, as \u0026ldquo;getting lost in wikipedia,\u0026rdquo; is a thing that happens. You say, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m interested in public transit in Iran,\u0026rdquo; and you get lost clicking through various pages related to rapid transit systems in the middle east, and then an hour or two is past and you really ought to finish that blog post. The same thing happens on the c2 wiki for me.\nWhile I wish I were less compulsive about it, reading wikis is a pleasurable reading experience, and since the format seems the web, why not run with it? The question becomes: why are we spending so much time figuring out the most ideal way to publish novels and short stories--forms that developed with the physicality of the book--in the digital age?\nTo be fair, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a place for digital distribution of paper-centric forms (periodicals and monographs,) but I doubt that in 50 years \u0026ldquo;digital fiction,\u0026rdquo; will mean eBook editions of novels. People have been making a similar point for some time about video games for a while. Interactive fiction is definitely a part of digital fiction, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s the full story.\nMeanwhile back at the point\u0026hellip;\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the idea. We use wiki software to construct a website that is written as a light-hearted encyclopedia. In the vein of TV Tropes meets Wikipedia except with fictional content. But there needs to be more than just page after page of exposition and condensed blather: my current plan is to have a \u0026ldquo;dialogue\u0026rdquo; section, which will be bits of dialogue and scenes published with some contextual metadata (when it happened, who was present, where it happened.) The dialogues can then be linked to as quasi-citations in the more conventional expository wiki pages.\nSo basically I\u0026rsquo;m proposing a couple of things here. First, I want to splitting up all content into small self contained pages. This makes it better for multiple people to edit, because editing and writing can happen in a more parallel manner, and you don\u0026rsquo;t need to agree to an outline, or write things in any sort of sequence. Second, shorter pages with more segmented content is easier to read for the attention limited.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that collaborative, for all that will editing is really the way to go. The truth is that so few people edit wikis relative to the number of people who could edit wikis, that you might be better off having some sort of more select editorial community, just in terms of establishing buy-in from contributors and avoiding diffusion of responsibility. I\u0026rsquo;m undecided.\nAlong a similar line of thought, I\u0026rsquo;m considering releasing release updates and new content on a regular basis (e.g. bi-weekly or monthly?) rather than every time an edit is made. This will require some sort of closed-development process. At the same time new wiki projects often fail because there\u0026rsquo;s little incentive to return to a wiki to \u0026ldquo;see what\u0026rsquo;s changed. Blogs, contrast are good at securing return visits.\nThoughts? Anyone interested in being on the editorial board?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wiki-fiction/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m starting preliminary development on a wiki fiction project that will eventually take over the criticalfutures.com domain. This post is a discussion of that history, my idea, and what I hope to accomplish.\nMy friend Julia and I have been corresponding on topics related to the future of publishing and genre fiction for a few weeks. When the topic turned to wikis, I spouted off the things I usually say about bootstrapping wiki participation (it\u0026rsquo;s hard and pretty lonely,) then I had an idea.\nI read wikis, mostly wikipeida, a lot. For fun. I\u0026rsquo;m sure a lot of people do this, as \u0026ldquo;getting lost in wikipedia,\u0026rdquo; is a thing that happens. You say, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m interested in public transit in Iran,\u0026rdquo; and you get lost clicking through various pages related to rapid transit systems in the middle east, and then an hour or two is past and you really ought to finish that blog post.","title":"Wiki Fiction and Critical Futures"},{"content":"Ok, I caved and got a tablet. This is a post about my experiences with the tablet and some general thoughts on the format.\nI opted for the Motorola Xoom. It\u0026rsquo;s an Android device, I appreciate the Motarola build quality, and I\u0026rsquo;m very pleased with my choice. First impressions first:\nReading on the tablet is great. I have a Kindle, and while I respect how lightweight the Kindle is itself. Despite the extra weight, the slightly larger screen and the back light is very very nice and very welcome. I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll be doing a lot of writing on the tablet, a laptop is never really going to be that far away, but I\u0026rsquo;m really surprised by how easy it is to (almost) touch type on the tablet. A number of very simple and probably straightforward innovations to the keyboard could make things so much better. I think all devices need some sort of \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t auto rotate\u0026rdquo; hardware switch. In fact, I think apple\u0026rsquo;s whole \u0026ldquo;lets get rid of hardware buttons,\u0026rdquo; movement to be really annoying. Buttons should be overloaded, sure, but I hate having to hunt through menus to modify basic behavior. Having said that, the \u0026ldquo;software control bar\u0026rdquo; at the bottom of Android 3.0 is brilliant and a good move (given screen rotation.) I lament not having a Google voice widget for the tablet. Makes sense that they wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want this for tablets that had data plans, but I just have a wifi tablet. The Kindle app doesn\u0026rsquo;t let you bookmark your place in periodicals. Which might make sense if you were reading the Times, but doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense when reading fiction magazines with articles in the rage of 10k words. I\u0026rsquo;m in love with the calendar application, except for the \u0026ldquo;full month view,\u0026rdquo; in which you scroll by weeks, not by months. Even with this glitch, I\u0026rsquo;m curious as to why there aren\u0026rsquo;t (stand alone) calendar applications of this quality for desktops. I\u0026rsquo;ve tended to use the tablet for situations where I want to have a distraction free experience (usually for reading,) or where I want to do \u0026ldquo;computer things\u0026rdquo; in a situation where I might need to interact with other people. Having a tablet in your lap is more social than a laptop. As such, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would ever be able to replace a \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; computer for very long, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t make it less useful. I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing more about the tablet experience and some cyborg features of tablet use and usability.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/and-then-i-broke-down-and-got-a-tablet/","summary":"Ok, I caved and got a tablet. This is a post about my experiences with the tablet and some general thoughts on the format.\nI opted for the Motorola Xoom. It\u0026rsquo;s an Android device, I appreciate the Motarola build quality, and I\u0026rsquo;m very pleased with my choice. First impressions first:\nReading on the tablet is great. I have a Kindle, and while I respect how lightweight the Kindle is itself. Despite the extra weight, the slightly larger screen and the back light is very very nice and very welcome. I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll be doing a lot of writing on the tablet, a laptop is never really going to be that far away, but I\u0026rsquo;m really surprised by how easy it is to (almost) touch type on the tablet. A number of very simple and probably straightforward innovations to the keyboard could make things so much better. I think all devices need some sort of \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t auto rotate\u0026rdquo; hardware switch.","title":"And Then I Broke Down and Got a Tablet"},{"content":"This post comes in two parts: an update on the current knitting project and an introduction to a new sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve started recently. See the Ideal Sweater and Sweater Stories posts for more information on my current thinking about knitting and writing.\nCurrent Sweater: Gray and Black I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to write an update on my current knitting, but to be honest I\u0026rsquo;d rather be knitting than writing little updates and taking picture of the thing that I\u0026rsquo;m knitting. Also, while there\u0026rsquo;s something engaging and captivating about the long slog from the hem to the shoulder during the knitting, even though progress is always apparent, there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot to talk about for weeks and weeks while the piece grows.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a great sweater, and while it\u0026rsquo;s not the first thing I\u0026rsquo;ve really knit recently, I think it\u0026rsquo;s the first that I care to finish. There are a lot of great things about this sweater: the pattern is fun to knit, it\u0026rsquo;s the perfect size, it matches the cats, and it\u0026rsquo;s visually interesting without being busy. Also, I used Shetland yarn, and it\u0026rsquo;s really impossible to say enough about how much little things like that matter.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not yet done with the sweater. As I draft this post, I\u0026rsquo;ve knit the body and the collar, and just have sleeves left to do. I knit sleeves from the top-down, and am three inches or so past the shoulder. The sleeves will be pretty straight forward and are just a matter of spending some time.\nThe problem with knitting sleeves from the top down is that you have to have a full sweater on your lap. In the summer this means overheating with a pound of wool on your lap or knitting at a table. Neither of which is terribly ideal. As a result I\u0026rsquo;ve started the next sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ll try and post something about the sweater as a whole when its done but in the mean time I\u0026rsquo;d like to collect a few thoughts and lessons learned so far.\nI think the neck opening is a bit too wide. I have a crew-neck formula that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for a while that might need to be tweaked.\nBasically three inches before the shoulder, decrease every row on both sides of the neck for an inch and a half, decrease every other row for the last inch and a half. Create a steek over the back of the neck after the first inch and a half and decrease both the front and the back at the same rate. Start at the bottom of the front steek with half the number of stitches you\u0026rsquo;ll eventually decrease (from the front.)\nIn EPS terms, the total neck opening should consume a third of the total number of stitches and one sixth of the total number of stitches three inches before the shoulder seam. But divide everything in half for the front and back to get a usable number.\nI think my gauge has changed noticeably in the last 4 years, but only the row gauge. I for one find this strange, though there\u0026rsquo;s not much I can do with it except deal with it.\nThis sweater has a number of turned hems, and I\u0026rsquo;ve realized a two important facts about knitting turned hems:\nThe conventional instructions say: knit a facing, knit a round of Purl stitches to \u0026ldquo;turn the hem\u0026rdquo; and then knit on. (Can be done in reverse, depending on which direction your going.) Don\u0026rsquo;t. Knit two rounds of purl stitches. The turn is much more sharp. Knit the hem facing on two needle sizes smaller than the actual knitting. If you can knit the facing on 80-90% of the number of stitches as well (in some situations this isn\u0026rsquo;t feasible.) Knit the purl stitches with the smaller needle rather than switching to the smaller needle to knit the facing. Knit one more round before joining the hem in than you think you need. If you\u0026rsquo;re knitting with Shetland and not planning to treat your steaks to secure them, steam the steek before cutting. Also, an extra couple of stitches wouldn\u0026rsquo;t hurt. Tragedy was averted, but it was closer than I\u0026rsquo;d like. I\u0026rsquo;ll get more notes out (and perhaps elaborations of these points? If there\u0026rsquo;s interest.) after I finish.\nNew Sweater: Blue and Blue I started a new sweater because the existing sweater was a bit to heavy and too warm. And I had yarn in the closet that was begging to be knit. This won\u0026rsquo;t be the first sweater I started knitting in August for this reason.\nAlso, I had the plan for the new sweater all developed and I wanted to get started: I\u0026rsquo;m an adult and I can do that.\nThe yarn is Shetland. Harrisville Designs \u0026ldquo;Midnight,\u0026rdquo; is the darker color, and I\u0026rsquo;m using some light blue-gray that I got from Webs a few years ago for the contrasting color. Probably the last great mill end from webs. The lighter color came in a 3 pound cone, and I\u0026rsquo;ve already made a sweater (a flop) out of the yarn and didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to make much of a dent.\nThe pattern itself is built around the same snowflake pattern that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using (this makes sweater number 4 with the same pattern,) but is the most reminiscent of the first sweater in the series, with some improvements for greater knitability. The effect, I hope, will be reminiscent of cables.\nAt the time of drafting, I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet joined the hem facing and the lower edge. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably post again about this one again after it starts looking like a sweater but before the long slog starts.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-sweater/","summary":"This post comes in two parts: an update on the current knitting project and an introduction to a new sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve started recently. See the Ideal Sweater and Sweater Stories posts for more information on my current thinking about knitting and writing.\nCurrent Sweater: Gray and Black I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to write an update on my current knitting, but to be honest I\u0026rsquo;d rather be knitting than writing little updates and taking picture of the thing that I\u0026rsquo;m knitting. Also, while there\u0026rsquo;s something engaging and captivating about the long slog from the hem to the shoulder during the knitting, even though progress is always apparent, there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot to talk about for weeks and weeks while the piece grows.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a great sweater, and while it\u0026rsquo;s not the first thing I\u0026rsquo;ve really knit recently, I think it\u0026rsquo;s the first that I care to finish.","title":"New Sweater"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been mentioning what I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading as part of my weekly \u0026ldquo;accomplishment\u0026rdquo; posts, but I wanted to take the opportunity to write a slightly longer review and reflection of some recent reading.\nAfter delaying for far too long, I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten through the April/May issue of Asimov\u0026rsquo;s. There are probably all sorts of reasons why double issues make a lot of sense for publishers, but I have to say that I find them a bit grueling to read. Maybe it was just this particular issue, but I found that the balance between novellas and short stories wasn\u0026rsquo;t terribly good, but maybe it was these stories, and my own tastes rather than anything wrong with the editing itself. There were some great stories: I loved Kristen Kathryn Rusch\u0026rsquo;s story, and I thought the cover story was fun but weird in that way that I don\u0026rsquo;t think Steampunk always works as well as it seems like it should. Michael Swanwick\u0026rsquo;s and Mike Resnick\u0026rsquo;s stories were high on the poignant-factor and low on the larger meaning but they worked.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve still not read the June or August issues, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and start reading Clarkesworld. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping I still have time to do other things after periodical reading obligations.\nI also read (in about two weeks) Excision by Iain M. Banks. As I was moving to the east coast I made the decision to start going through all of the late 80s and 90s era space opera that I had totally missed, and I can\u0026rsquo;t quite recall why I chose Banks. I think there\u0026rsquo;s something about the grandiosity of The Culture that I really quite like. I found the first two really hard to grok, and now they mostly make sense. I think if I could do it again1 I\u0026rsquo;d read Use of Weapons, maybe Excision, I\u0026rsquo;d make Player of Games optional but definitely 3rd if anything and then Consider Phlebas. I think Phlebas is among the best, but without the context of the others its a bit too odd.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been listening to podcasts: The Outer Alliance Podcast, FLOSS Weekly, FaiF, and Escape Pod. Good content, great pacing for my now daily walks, and it\u0026rsquo;s good to stay in touch with all of that content. Podcasts were something I\u0026rsquo;d listened to a lot when I was exercising or driving alone. I\u0026rsquo;ve not driven very much in the last year, and my exercise routine has only recently started to become regular. So it\u0026rsquo;s nice to get back in that habit.\nWhat are you all reading?2\nAnd if I weren\u0026rsquo;t such an ardent traditionalist about reading series of books in the order of their publication.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nAnd, admittedly, listening to.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/science-fiction-reading-progress/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been mentioning what I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading as part of my weekly \u0026ldquo;accomplishment\u0026rdquo; posts, but I wanted to take the opportunity to write a slightly longer review and reflection of some recent reading.\nAfter delaying for far too long, I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten through the April/May issue of Asimov\u0026rsquo;s. There are probably all sorts of reasons why double issues make a lot of sense for publishers, but I have to say that I find them a bit grueling to read. Maybe it was just this particular issue, but I found that the balance between novellas and short stories wasn\u0026rsquo;t terribly good, but maybe it was these stories, and my own tastes rather than anything wrong with the editing itself. There were some great stories: I loved Kristen Kathryn Rusch\u0026rsquo;s story, and I thought the cover story was fun but weird in that way that I don\u0026rsquo;t think Steampunk always works as well as it seems like it should.","title":"Science Fiction Reading Progress"},{"content":"I read this post by one of the partners in one of the coolest web services around, you should open that in a new window and then come back.\nBack? Great!\nLars, proposes crowd-funding as a way to support free software development. Basically, run a \u0026ldquo;sponsor me to develop stuff\u0026rdquo; program, but rather than fund free software as a start-up around a single project or work for a big vendor.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a nifty idea, and it\u0026rsquo;s got me thinking about micro-entrepreneurship. This would be where you make or do things, but not on a big scale. The businesses you create are small, and probably aren\u0026rsquo;t completely full-time equivalent, but in aggregate it\u0026rsquo;s good enough. While this is not the most prominent form of entrepreneurship on the internet, my sense is that it\u0026rsquo;s way bigger than most people think.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re too used to seeing multi-million dollar venture capital fund raising, IPOs, big acquisition deals, to realize the multitude of people who are making a few to several tens of thousands of dollars doing much smaller amounts of work.\nI suppose I could write a whole post on good enough economics in the vein of this post on patronage from JamesGovernor but I\u0026rsquo;ll just leave a place holder link to a wiki page, in case someone else wants to fill things in.\nThoughts:\nService-businesses don\u0026rsquo;t scale particularly well, any individual work can only produce so much work, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to make individuals any more productive. In light of that, large service-based firms are unlikely to form. Most people have pretty specialized skills and abilities. Self-employment, particularly full time employment makes it difficult for people to spend most of their time doing what their best at. Specialization and differing skills is also what creates a market for service-based endeavors. Lacking health care and other benefits of traditional employment, it\u0026rsquo;s hard for people to be more self-employed and less conventionally-employed. Given this, doing entrepreneurial projects on a smaller scale makes more sense. Some kinds of entrepreneurial activities are attractive because, while they may not produce the same level of income as a salaried position, they allow more freedom and flexibility. This is the conventional justification for self-employment, and also the reason that most aligns with the \u0026ldquo;good enough\u0026rdquo; policy. The problem with these kinds of \u0026ldquo;little businesses,\u0026rdquo; is that it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to focus on income earning work (e.g. freelance, and client work,) at the expense of doing basic work (e.g. developing core free software, doing basic research, writing fiction.) While the crowd sourcing notion makes a lot of sense, it requires a lot of faith in the crowd. I\u0026rsquo;m also unsure of how sustainable it is: while individuals can justify small amounts of money for such purposes, organizations cannot. Without organizational support, revenue is much lower, and it probably puts the larger financial burden on the smaller users, relatively speaking.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/microentrepreneurship/","summary":"I read this post by one of the partners in one of the coolest web services around, you should open that in a new window and then come back.\nBack? Great!\nLars, proposes crowd-funding as a way to support free software development. Basically, run a \u0026ldquo;sponsor me to develop stuff\u0026rdquo; program, but rather than fund free software as a start-up around a single project or work for a big vendor.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a nifty idea, and it\u0026rsquo;s got me thinking about micro-entrepreneurship. This would be where you make or do things, but not on a big scale. The businesses you create are small, and probably aren\u0026rsquo;t completely full-time equivalent, but in aggregate it\u0026rsquo;s good enough. While this is not the most prominent form of entrepreneurship on the internet, my sense is that it\u0026rsquo;s way bigger than most people think.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re too used to seeing multi-million dollar venture capital fund raising, IPOs, big acquisition deals, to realize the multitude of people who are making a few to several tens of thousands of dollars doing much smaller amounts of work.","title":"Micro-Entrepreneurship, Good Enough, and Crowd Sourcing"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s Friday and I have a bunch of links, notes, and accomplishments to share.\nFirst up, jfm and I have been continuing the discussion we had about task lists in a new discussion of the /posts/mobile-productivity-challenges. I\u0026rsquo;ve also imported some conversation from facebook (to a discourse page, since removed) following up on the :Cyborg Analysis and Technology Policy post that I made this last week. I\u0026rsquo;m really really proud of the extent to which the comments and edits that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten have made my writing and thinking clearer on these subjects.\nAlso, a thanks to the people who have done things like fix links and correct stupid typos. Sorry to have caused the trouble, and I\u0026rsquo;m eternally grateful for the helping hand.\nNext up, I wrote a tutorial for a reader who commented in the Make Emacs Better thread. The question addressed how to load optional functionality and \u0026ldquo;contributed\u0026rdquo; lisp code in emacs, and I wrote a little tutorial on how to load .el files in emacs. I think of this as a very basic and straightforward piece of customizing emacs; but it\u0026rsquo;s sufficiently complicated and counter-intuitive enough that I think a little bit of documentation is in order.\nThe above also marks the debut of a documentation section within the wiki, like the code section, that I hope to update every now and then as I write tutorials and reference material that I think someone may be able to use. No promises, and feel free stash content here as well. It\u0026rsquo;s all gravy.\nSpeaking of the code section, I wrote a little script that I use as dbl, that I describe in the Epistle Linker. Basically this little function goes through a directory and creates symbolic links to that directory in a specified directory and mangles the names of the file (prepends a few charters and changes the extension.) You an read the code, but it makes it possible to use a service like Dropbox without disrupting your local git setup and file organization. There\u0026rsquo;s a known issue with Dropbox that makes it slightly less than ideal, but what can you do.\nWhen I was posting the epistle-linker, I realized that I had probably forgotten to mention the fact that I have this nifty little bit of glue that uses a procmail filter (you do use procmail, don\u0026rsquo;t you?) to deposit note to a particular email address (configurable) into an org-mode file for filtering. This is ideal for emailing your brain (i.e. org-mode) an item from your phone or tablet, say.\nAnd finally: I have an external link. I think this follows nicely from the \u0026ldquo;how to work and \u0026rsquo;live\u0026rsquo; in the mobile world.\u0026rdquo; Apparently ecl, an embeded Common Lisp implementation, has been built to run on Android and iOS. How awesome is that?\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have. I (finally) finished the April/May issue of Asimov\u0026rsquo;s, I subscribed to Clarkesworld, as if I needed more short fiction to read and distract me from everything else. been I\u0026rsquo;ve reading Iain M. Banks' Excision, which has been a great deal of fun.\nOther than that. It\u0026rsquo;s been a pretty quiet couple of weeks.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lately-review/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s Friday and I have a bunch of links, notes, and accomplishments to share.\nFirst up, jfm and I have been continuing the discussion we had about task lists in a new discussion of the /posts/mobile-productivity-challenges. I\u0026rsquo;ve also imported some conversation from facebook (to a discourse page, since removed) following up on the :Cyborg Analysis and Technology Policy post that I made this last week. I\u0026rsquo;m really really proud of the extent to which the comments and edits that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten have made my writing and thinking clearer on these subjects.\nAlso, a thanks to the people who have done things like fix links and correct stupid typos. Sorry to have caused the trouble, and I\u0026rsquo;m eternally grateful for the helping hand.\nNext up, I wrote a tutorial for a reader who commented in the Make Emacs Better thread. The question addressed how to load optional functionality and \u0026ldquo;contributed\u0026rdquo; lisp code in emacs, and I wrote a little tutorial on how to load .","title":"Lately Review"},{"content":"This document outlines the use of emacs\u0026rsquo; require and provide functions to help new users understand how to better configure the text editor. While there are a number of different strategies for organizing emacs configuration files and lisp systems and there is no single dominant best practice, consider this document if you find your .emacs or [init.el]{.title-ref}` file growing out of control.\nBackground and Overview After using emacs for any period of time, one begins to develop a rather extensive emacs configuration. Emacs comes with very little default configuration and large number of configuration possibilities. Because writers, programmers, and researchers of all persuasions and backgrounds use emacs for a larger array of tasks and work profiles, the need for customization is often quite high. n Rather than have a massive emacs configuration with thousands of lines, I\u0026rsquo;ve broken the configuration into a number of files that are easier to manage, easier to troubleshoot, and easier to make sense of. These files are then linked together and loaded using emacs\u0026rsquo; native require function. This document explains that organizational principal and provides the code needed to duplicate my configuration.\nI store all of my emacs configuration in a folder that I will refer to as ~/emacs/, in actuality this is a sub-folder within a git repository that I use to store all of my configuration folders, and you should modify this location to suit your own needs. Additionally, I have the habit of prepending the characters tycho- to every function and emacs file name that are my own writing. This namespace trick helps keep my customization separate from emacs\u0026rsquo; own functions or the functions of loaded packages and prevents unintended consequences in most cases. You might want to consider a similar practice.\nConfiguring .emacs My .emacs file is really a symbolic link to the ~/emacs/config/$HOSTNAME.el file. This allows the contents of .emacs to be in version control and if you have your emacs configuration on multiple machines to use the same basic configuration on multiple machines with whatever machine specific configuration you require. To create this symlink, issue the following command: :\nln -s ~/emacs/config/$HOSTNAME.el ~/.emacs Make sure that all required files and directories exist. My .emacs file is, regardless of it\u0026rsquo;s actual location, is very minimal because the meat of the configuration is in ~/emacs/tycho-init.el. Take the following skeleton for ~/.emacs: :\n;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; ;; Startup and Behavior Controls ;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; (setq load-path (cons \u0026quot;~/emacs\u0026quot; load-path)) (setq custom-file \u0026quot;~/emacs/custom.el\u0026quot;) (add-to-list 'load-path \u0026quot;~/emacs/snippet/\u0026quot;) (add-to-list 'load-path \u0026quot;/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/slime/\u0026quot;) (require 'tycho-display) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; ;; Machine Specific Configuration Section ;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; (tycho-font-medium) (setq bookmark-default-file \u0026quot;~/garen/emacs/bookmarks/arendt\u0026quot; w3m-session-file \u0026quot;~/garen/emacs/bookmarks/w3m-session-arendt\u0026quot; bookmark-save-flag 1) (if (file-directory-p \u0026quot;~/garen/emacs/backup\u0026quot;) (setq backup-directory-alist '((\u0026quot;.\u0026quot; . \u0026quot;~/garen/emacs/backup\u0026quot;))) (message \u0026quot;Directory does not exist: ~/garen/emacs/backup\u0026quot;)) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; ;; Load the real init ;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; (require 'tycho-init) (menu-bar-mode -1) The first seq defines the load path. Like other configuration paths, this is the directory that emacs will look for files to load when you use require later. load-path does not crawl a directory hierarchy, so if you store emacs lisp within ~/emacs/, you\u0026rsquo;ll need to add those directories here. To see the value of the load-path use \u0026ldquo;C-h v\u0026rdquo; in emacs. I then define \u0026ldquo;custom.el\u0026rdquo; as it\u0026rsquo;s own file to prevent customize from saving configuration in my init file. Then I use require to load a number of display-related functions (from the file ~/emacs/tycho-display.el,) including the tycho-font-medium function.\nThen I have a number of machine-specific configuration opens set, mostly to keep multiple machines from overwriting state files.\nFinally, I load the file with the real configuration with the (require 'tycho-init) sexp. The configuration is located in the ~/emacs/tycho-init.el file. The file closes with the (menu-bar-mode -1) sexp, which is the last part of the configuration to evaluate and ensures that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a menu-bar at all.\nRequire and Provide require, however, does not simply load .el files in the load path. Rather, the file needs to be announced to emacs. Accomplish this with provide functions in the file. For ~/emacs/tycho-display.el the relevant parts are as follows: :\n(provide 'tycho-display) (defun tycho-font-medium () (interactive) (setq default-frame-alist '((font-backend . \u0026quot;xft\u0026quot;) (font . \u0026quot;Inconsolata-13\u0026quot;) (vertical-scroll-bars . 0) (menu-bar-lines . 0) (tool-bar-lines . 0) (alpha 86 84))) (tool-bar-mode -1) (scroll-bar-mode -1)) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026quot;C-c f m\u0026quot;) 'tychoish-font-medium) (setq-default inhibit-startup-message 't initial-scratch-message 'nil save-place t scroll-bar-mode nil tool-bar-mode nil menu-bar-mode nil scroll-margin 0 indent-tabs-mode nil flyspell-issue-message-flag 'nil size-indication-mode t scroll-conservatively 25 scroll-preserve-screen-position 1 cursor-in-non-selected-windows nil) The provide call, identifies this file as the location of the tycho-display functionality. tycho-font-medium describes the font and display parameters that I called in the .emacs file. And the file ends with a keybiding to call that function and a number of default settings.\nInit and Conclusion While the tycho-init.el file holds all of the interesting configuration options, functions and settings, it\u0026rsquo;s mostly beyond the scope of this file. When you download contributed emacs.lisp files from emacswiki, put them in ~/emacs/ and put the require call in tycho-init.el. By convention provide names map to file names but be sure to check files to ensure that this is the case.\nUsing this setup as a framework, you can create--without confusion--a number of configuration files to properly collect and organize your settings, emacs modes, and other emacs code and functions that you\u0026rsquo;ve gotten from other users. Good luck!\nYou may also be interested in a couple other tutorials I\u0026rsquo;ve collected on emacs, notably:\n/posts/running-multiple-emacs-daemons-on-a-single-system /posts/decreasing-emacs-start-times ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/managing-emacs-configuraiton-and-lisp-systems/","summary":"This document outlines the use of emacs\u0026rsquo; require and provide functions to help new users understand how to better configure the text editor. While there are a number of different strategies for organizing emacs configuration files and lisp systems and there is no single dominant best practice, consider this document if you find your .emacs or [init.el]{.title-ref}` file growing out of control.\nBackground and Overview After using emacs for any period of time, one begins to develop a rather extensive emacs configuration. Emacs comes with very little default configuration and large number of configuration possibilities. Because writers, programmers, and researchers of all persuasions and backgrounds use emacs for a larger array of tasks and work profiles, the need for customization is often quite high. n Rather than have a massive emacs configuration with thousands of lines, I\u0026rsquo;ve broken the configuration into a number of files that are easier to manage, easier to troubleshoot, and easier to make sense of.","title":"Managing Emacs Configuration"},{"content":"This post is a continuation of my human solution to IT and IT policy issues series. This post discusses a couple of ideas about \u0026ldquo;enterprise\u0026rdquo; software, and its importance the kind of overall analysis of technology that this posts (and others on this site) engage in. In many ways this is a different angle on some of the same questions addressed in my \u0026ldquo;Caring about Java\u0026rdquo; post: boring technologies are important, if not outright interesting.\nThere are two likely truths about software that make sense upon reflection, but are a bit weird when you think about it:\nThe majority of software is used by a small minority of users. This includes software that\u0026rsquo;s written for and used by other software developers, infrastructure, and the applications which are written for \u0026ldquo;internal use.\u0026rdquo; This includes various database, CRM, administrative tools, and other portals and tools that enterprise uses. Beautiful and intuitive interfaces are only worth constructing if your software has a large prospective userbase or if you\u0026rsquo;re writing software where a couple of competing products share a set of common features. Otherwise there\u0026rsquo;s no real point to designing a really swanky user interface. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that these theories hold up pretty well, and are reasonably logical. The following conclusions are, I think, particularly interesting:\nPeople, even non-technical users, adjust to really horrible user interfaces that are non-intuitive all the time.\nWe think that graphical user interfaces are required for technological intelligibility, while the people who design software use GUIs as minimally as possible, and for the vast majority of software the user interface is the weakest point.\nThe obvious questions then, is: why don\u0026rsquo;t we trust non-technical users with command lines? Thoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interfaces-in-enterprise-software/","summary":"This post is a continuation of my human solution to IT and IT policy issues series. This post discusses a couple of ideas about \u0026ldquo;enterprise\u0026rdquo; software, and its importance the kind of overall analysis of technology that this posts (and others on this site) engage in. In many ways this is a different angle on some of the same questions addressed in my \u0026ldquo;Caring about Java\u0026rdquo; post: boring technologies are important, if not outright interesting.\nThere are two likely truths about software that make sense upon reflection, but are a bit weird when you think about it:\nThe majority of software is used by a small minority of users. This includes software that\u0026rsquo;s written for and used by other software developers, infrastructure, and the applications which are written for \u0026ldquo;internal use.\u0026rdquo; This includes various database, CRM, administrative tools, and other portals and tools that enterprise uses. Beautiful and intuitive interfaces are only worth constructing if your software has a large prospective userbase or if you\u0026rsquo;re writing software where a couple of competing products share a set of common features.","title":"Interfaces in Enterprise Software"},{"content":"I was paging through a list of things that I made for myself during a call I was in a few weeks ago, and was utterly dismayed by how useless the items were on the list. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t sure what needed to be done, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t remember what things meant, and I was left with the sinking suspicion that I had forgotten something crucial. I write this, in part, as a lesson to my past self on how to write good task list items.\nHopefully you\u0026rsquo;ll find it useful.\nTask items must be actionable. You need to be able to read the subject or summary and know: what the project is, what kind of work it is, what needs to be done, and what very next thing you need to do is.\nTasks cannot be open ended. It\u0026rsquo;s really tempting to write tasks in the form of \u0026ldquo;work on a project\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;make progress on email backlog,\u0026rdquo; but don\u0026rsquo;t. How do you know if you\u0026rsquo;ve done the task? Is all progress the same? Is the actual work activity plainly obvious from an open ended task description?\nTasks need to concise. I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of including some sort of status information and some sort of instruction and context with your tasks, but you need to be able to look at a task list and triage what to do next without thinking very much and without spending more than a few seconds deciphering messages from your past self. Write good summaries.\nTry to organize your projects and tasks so that most of your task items are not dependent upon other items. Sometime dependencies are unavoidable, but I find if you\u0026rsquo;re clever, you can chop things up into parallel tasks that are easier to work on but that accomplish the same goal. In some cases, long strings of dependent tasks can be just as troublesome as large open tasks, because in the moment they amount to clutter.\nAlso your feedback and suggestions from your own experience may be of interest to all of us! I look forward to hearing from you!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/create-better-task-items/","summary":"I was paging through a list of things that I made for myself during a call I was in a few weeks ago, and was utterly dismayed by how useless the items were on the list. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t sure what needed to be done, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t remember what things meant, and I was left with the sinking suspicion that I had forgotten something crucial. I write this, in part, as a lesson to my past self on how to write good task list items.\nHopefully you\u0026rsquo;ll find it useful.\nTask items must be actionable. You need to be able to read the subject or summary and know: what the project is, what kind of work it is, what needs to be done, and what very next thing you need to do is.\nTasks cannot be open ended. It\u0026rsquo;s really tempting to write tasks in the form of \u0026ldquo;work on a project\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;make progress on email backlog,\u0026rdquo; but don\u0026rsquo;t.","title":"Create Better Task Items"},{"content":"I want to put together a series of posts about cyborg perspectives on industrial IT practices. This post introduces that series.\nThe \u0026ldquo;cyborg analysis,\u0026rdquo; makes difficult to ignore that most problems with technology, even seemingly outright \u0026ldquo;technological problems\u0026rdquo; are better as understood as problems at the intersection of humans and technology. Ignoring either people or technology, leads to imperfect analysis. While, false divides between \u0026ldquo;problems with users,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;problems with technology\u0026rdquo; aren\u0026rsquo;t helpful either, this might be a conceptually useful exercise.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking that many of the seemingly technological problems of IT policy are really not technological problems at all, and are better thought of as \u0026ldquo;people problems.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of \u0026ldquo;problems\u0026rdquo; like file permissions, access control, group and user management, desktop management, and data organization. Obviously, some problems, like workflow and tool optimization, are seen human problems while others are often targeted as technological problems.\nI think of human solutions as those responses to technology issues that address misunderstanding by providing training and education to users. There\u0026rsquo;s also a class of automations that make these human solutions easier to provide: for example, test harnesses of various sorts, code/text validation, and some template systems. Technological solutions, by contrast are those that, through the use of code, enforce best practices and business objectives: web filters, access management systems, and anything that are designed to \u0026ldquo;break\u0026rdquo; if business policy are not satisfied.\nThe divides between solutions are not natural or clear, just as problem domains in IT are rarely neatly or easily \u0026ldquo;silo\u0026rsquo;d.\u0026rdquo; There is often a fine line between writing code to automate a process to make users' work easier and writing code to control users and save users from themselves.\nThis post, and the series that follows it, are thus to explore this tension, and what I suspect are under-realized opportunities for human-solutions. I would like to think that problem domains in the larger IT world, particularly with thorny issues that require lots of code, may be better addressed with more human-centric solutions. Current thoughts revolve around:\nThe practice and method of software design. The development and use of software developed for \u0026ldquo;internal use,\u0026rdquo; rather than as a software product. Refraining the discussion about digital security to address it from a human angle rather than from a purely technological angle. As always, I\u0026rsquo;d like to invite comments and discussion.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cyborg-analysis-and-technology-policy/","summary":"I want to put together a series of posts about cyborg perspectives on industrial IT practices. This post introduces that series.\nThe \u0026ldquo;cyborg analysis,\u0026rdquo; makes difficult to ignore that most problems with technology, even seemingly outright \u0026ldquo;technological problems\u0026rdquo; are better as understood as problems at the intersection of humans and technology. Ignoring either people or technology, leads to imperfect analysis. While, false divides between \u0026ldquo;problems with users,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;problems with technology\u0026rdquo; aren\u0026rsquo;t helpful either, this might be a conceptually useful exercise.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking that many of the seemingly technological problems of IT policy are really not technological problems at all, and are better thought of as \u0026ldquo;people problems.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of \u0026ldquo;problems\u0026rdquo; like file permissions, access control, group and user management, desktop management, and data organization. Obviously, some problems, like workflow and tool optimization, are seen human problems while others are often targeted as technological problems.\nI think of human solutions as those responses to technology issues that address misunderstanding by providing training and education to users.","title":"Cyborg Analysis and Technology Policy"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve never really figured out how to do work with anything less than a full computer. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried everything: Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs in the early 2000s, laptops, and eventually I just settled on just dragging a (smaller) laptop almost everywhere circa 2005. I get the feeling that, most people who have been thinking about mobile technology and productivity assume that the only impediments to mobile productivity are better hardware and software. Contemporary (multi)touch screen devices are the current embodiment of this theory.\nI\u0026rsquo;m convinced that the theory is wrong.\nHaving better and more powerful technology doesn\u0026rsquo;t hurt anything. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of the smaller, integrated, and more powerful devices. Software written specifically with mobile users in mind does improve the potential for productivity. These technological improvements, however, make the underlying problem more apparent.\nThe challenge of getting things done when mobile has little to do with the capabilities of the mobile platform, and more with the way people think about and plan work when mobile. Not only is this hugely frustrating to users, but technological capability that people can\u0026rsquo;t use threatens the ongoing development and adoption of new technology.\nUsing Mobile Technology More Effectively The solution, here, I think is two-fold:\nFully Integrated Applications Let\u0026rsquo;s develop integrated applications, not just integrated devices with different applications. Just as we didn\u0026rsquo;t need separate devices for every mobile function: telephony, music playing, book reading, mobile internet, and so forth. We don\u0026rsquo;t need different applications for every function: calendaring, messaging, email, contact management, notes, reading, and so forth.\nAt the very least applications need to be highly interoperable, so that users can send data between application functions easily, and synchronize data back to desktop and web portals seamlessly.\nTask Planning Strategies for Mobile Productivity I don\u0026rsquo;t think that the \u0026ldquo;user stories\u0026rdquo; for mobile technology are really fully developed, and as a result any interaction with a mobile device that isn\u0026rsquo;t responsive (i.e. there\u0026rsquo;s an alert of a new event, and people respond to it,) is either \u0026ldquo;twiddling nobs\u0026rdquo; (i.e. non productive,) or entertainment focused (i.e. playing music, video, or opening a book.) Perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s enough for some uses, but these this kind of workflow covers a small percentage of what people do with computers.\nIf mobile technology is going to replace a general purpose laptop, ever, even in limited situations, we need to figure out how to work in different ways. I know that I am loosing a great deal of time, when I\u0026rsquo;m using my phone switching between the notes app, the reader, the task list, and the calender. This task switching gets in the way of doing things to a much larger extent than similar behavior does when using a conventional computer. I would even posit that, the cost of context switching is inversely related to the size of the interface.\nBetter application integration will help this, but I think the real solution is providing a method for people to organize their mobile time more effectively. The task list that we build for ourselves when we\u0026rsquo;re doing \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; work (i.e. things that we need to remember to do, open projects, open issues,) aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly useful or usable when we\u0026rsquo;re looking at a tablet or a phone. If we don\u0026rsquo;t know what we ought to be doing, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter what the device or software is capable of in theory.\nThere are probably a dozen or more solutions to this problem, but here\u0026rsquo;s my first stab at it. What if there was a way to \u0026ldquo;forward tasks\u0026rdquo; to ourselves when we\u0026rsquo;re on the run, but have a few moments? We all loose time waiting in queues, or waiting for trains, and these seem like ideal phone times. If we had a way to queue things for ourselves, so we could spend the time doing something. Even better, would be software that would not only collect and display the queue but would also connect with the application where whatever needed to be done was and then record the results and send the back to our desktops when we were done.\nThoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mobile-productivity-challenges/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve never really figured out how to do work with anything less than a full computer. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried everything: Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs in the early 2000s, laptops, and eventually I just settled on just dragging a (smaller) laptop almost everywhere circa 2005. I get the feeling that, most people who have been thinking about mobile technology and productivity assume that the only impediments to mobile productivity are better hardware and software. Contemporary (multi)touch screen devices are the current embodiment of this theory.\nI\u0026rsquo;m convinced that the theory is wrong.\nHaving better and more powerful technology doesn\u0026rsquo;t hurt anything. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of the smaller, integrated, and more powerful devices. Software written specifically with mobile users in mind does improve the potential for productivity. These technological improvements, however, make the underlying problem more apparent.\nThe challenge of getting things done when mobile has little to do with the capabilities of the mobile platform, and more with the way people think about and plan work when mobile.","title":"Mobile Productivity Challenges"},{"content":"While this week flew by in many respects and I only got a couple of posts out, there is much change and progress afoot. This post is an attempt to catalog some of the work I (and others) have been doing that hasn\u0026rsquo;t made it onto the blog:\nDiscussion of the \u0026ldquo;Better Task List\u0026rdquo; post by jfm`. Including spoilers for posts that I hope to have ready next week.\nFurther discussion of the make emacs better post. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that it\u0026rsquo;s probably nearly time to split that into a few pages. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of great content there and people have added a lot. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan.\nNot a link, except to say that I did some fairly substantial tweaks of the site\u0026rsquo;s design, which is probably only worth mentioning because I suspect most people read the site on RSS. Different fonts in the headers, and I rearranged the masthead to be a little more clean, and changed the links a bit.\nI\u0026rsquo;m in the slow process of cleaning up the Cyborg Institute site which I\u0026rsquo;ve neglected for far too long. I\u0026rsquo;m importing a lot of the content that I wrote over there, notably sygn and tubmle-manager. Next up, some straggling blog posts, and a clean up of the existing content to match my current projects and work.\nThe knitting posts, which is collected separately from rhizome posts is in full swing, and I hope to be able to post a few things there every now and then.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s now a real tag index and a tag cloud that looks like something. I\u0026rsquo;d avoided putting together a page like this for some time, because there were a lot of junk tags and enough really big tags that the cloud didn\u0026rsquo;t really work. I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly cleaned that up, leaving the wiki with a rather awesome tag cloud\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also found a few things on the web that I think you might enjoy on the web:\nA new blog called observatory. I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking to the author a bit. I realized that there aren\u0026rsquo;t very many blogs that are so verbose. I suppose ByteBaker is another example, but there aren\u0026rsquo;t many of them around.\nundo-tree-mode is a nifty little emacs hack that makes undoing and redoing much less complicated and weird. (From that make emacs better discussion.) Though I have to admit that I no longer have a problem with the default behavior, even if I know it\u0026rsquo;s a bit counter intuitive.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been reading Strange Horizons more than I have in the past, thanks mostly to instapaer and InstaFetch for Android. I was particularly found of Genevieve Valentine\u0026rsquo;s column/review of a glorious mess of a movie trope.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have for this week.\nComments Undo-tree also allows for undoing based on time (see here), apparently a feature that vim has.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/links-reviews-and-updates/","summary":"While this week flew by in many respects and I only got a couple of posts out, there is much change and progress afoot. This post is an attempt to catalog some of the work I (and others) have been doing that hasn\u0026rsquo;t made it onto the blog:\nDiscussion of the \u0026ldquo;Better Task List\u0026rdquo; post by jfm`. Including spoilers for posts that I hope to have ready next week.\nFurther discussion of the make emacs better post. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that it\u0026rsquo;s probably nearly time to split that into a few pages. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of great content there and people have added a lot. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan.\nNot a link, except to say that I did some fairly substantial tweaks of the site\u0026rsquo;s design, which is probably only worth mentioning because I suspect most people read the site on RSS. Different fonts in the headers, and I rearranged the masthead to be a little more clean, and changed the links a bit.","title":"Links, Reviews, and Updates"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned a few times that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing more knitting recently. Nothing for the most part to get excited about. But, now that I have a bit more free time its became apparent that I can\u0026rsquo;t write all the time and it\u0026rsquo;s good to have something to do with my hands when other things require a bit of extra attention.\nAn explanation of my current knitting requires a bit of a back story. There always is and I think that is part of the joy.\nThe last sweater I started during college is probably the best one I\u0026rsquo;ve ever made. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it\u0026rsquo;s the most impressive, or that it took me the longest, or was the most complicated, or was the most striking, or the had simplest pattern. No. If I had a dozen of this sweater, I\u0026rsquo;d wear them constantly all winter. It\u0026rsquo;s warm without being unbearably warm except during the coldest week of the year. The sleeves are big enough to support layering without weird bunching. The sweater fits me without being too tight or too baggy. It looks great over long sleeve t-shirts and oxfords. And it was a lot of fun to knit, both because of the yarn (Harrisvile Shetland,) and the pattern (a modified snowflake design of Swedish inspiration.)\nA lot of the sweaters I knit after that were too complicated: I was trying to show off my knitting prowess, or I was experimenting with different yarns. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve come to the following conclusion:\nTwo color stranded patterns are the best kind of pattern. The pattern affects the shape of the knitting stitches (in a good way!) and the drape of the eventual fabric, in a way that provides a bit more structure. If you make the right design decisions for the pattern itself, the act of knitting becomes so much more captivating and rhythmic. The best neck lines are basically crew necks, but are open to mid-chest like polo or henley shirts. I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to put button holes or clasps and just leave them open. The effect on the sweaters is that they are wearable over any kind of shirt (unlike v-neck sweaters) and are well ventilated (unlike unmodified crew neck sweaters.) I tend to leave the front corners of the collar squared and unmodified, but they can be rounded. I\u0026rsquo;ve gone back and forth on this a bit, but now, I\u0026rsquo;m firmly of the opinion that turned hems are better on stranded garments than corrugated ribbing. Knit a hem facing, purl two rounds, and then start the pattern, and join the hem at the appropriate moment. Done. Corrugated ribbing is really appealing, but it\u0026rsquo;s not really ribbing, and it\u0026rsquo;s very loud, on finished garments. After much experimentation with different shapes, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that plain old drop-shouldered fisherman-style shaped sweaters are the only way to go. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten pretty good at making saddle shoulders, set in sleeves, modified drop shoulders, and pretty much anything else. But at the end of the day I have a chest of funny looking shoulders that I don\u0026rsquo;t really wear. Patterns need to draw the eyes up along vertical lines, which is incredibly flattering on most people\u0026rsquo;s bodies and is more fun to knit because panels of pattern can interact in cool ways up and down and across the sweater.I\u0026rsquo;ve been in a Swedish/Scandinavian kick for a while now, and have been working on variations on a ~26 row snowflake pattern. Shetland yarn is really the best yarn in the world. It\u0026rsquo;s robust without being too itchy, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t pill. I like Harrisvile\u0026rsquo;s selection because you can buy the yarn on cones, it\u0026rsquo;s consistent, and I think they have enough colors. So I\u0026rsquo;m making more sweaters like this.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ideal-sweater/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned a few times that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing more knitting recently. Nothing for the most part to get excited about. But, now that I have a bit more free time its became apparent that I can\u0026rsquo;t write all the time and it\u0026rsquo;s good to have something to do with my hands when other things require a bit of extra attention.\nAn explanation of my current knitting requires a bit of a back story. There always is and I think that is part of the joy.\nThe last sweater I started during college is probably the best one I\u0026rsquo;ve ever made. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it\u0026rsquo;s the most impressive, or that it took me the longest, or was the most complicated, or was the most striking, or the had simplest pattern. No. If I had a dozen of this sweater, I\u0026rsquo;d wear them constantly all winter. It\u0026rsquo;s warm without being unbearably warm except during the coldest week of the year.","title":"Ideal Sweater"},{"content":"Just about everyone keeps a task list of some sort, or has at some point. To the casual observer, task list management might seems like a simple problem that could be augmented with a little bit of automation for great effect. Fire up your nearest \u0026ldquo;app store\u0026rdquo; and I would bet money that you\u0026rsquo;ll find a at least a few developers that have had the same thought.\nFor such a seemingly simple engineering problem there is an inordinate amount of really bad software. While this might tempt us to reassess the complexity of the task management problem, I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is really true. What happens, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced, is that people (i.e. cyborgs) make lists of tasks to solve different problems in their realities, and these different lists often require different automation. So while there are 10-20 basic task management applications, the number of distinct usage profiles exceeds that by several times. That\u0026rsquo;s the theory at any rate.\nArchetypes Allowing for large amount of diversity, there are still a few generally useful task list \u0026ldquo;archetypes\u0026rdquo; that we can use to characterize how people use task lists. I just want to enumerate them, here for now. I might move them out to another page, and you should feel free to edit the page (it\u0026rsquo;s a wiki!) if you think I\u0026rsquo;ve missed anything!\nCollaboration Facilitation: Teams need systems to keep track of and work on shared issue queues. These are \u0026ldquo;bug trackers,\u0026rdquo; and are totally essential when items or \u0026ldquo;issues:\u0026rdquo; take a significant time to complete, require the effort/input/awareness of multiple people, and need to be created or added by a number of people. Memory Enhancement: People create todo lists when they\u0026rsquo;re working more things than they can comfortably remember at any one time. The lists tend to be ephemeral, the items can be quickly resolved, but we make these lists so we don\u0026rsquo;t have to remember a long list of things while working. Think post-it notes. Obligation Management: These lists bring us close to calendars, but we keep them to make sure we remember to do required tasks. Often these lists are helpful in helping people make sure that they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;caught up,\u0026rdquo; so that they can enjoy and use free time without interruption or nagging. Task Prioritization: When time is limited, a list of tasks is useful in organizing an order, and making use of available time, so that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to keep track of all open tasks, while also being able to allocate effort and time to tasks in a smart way that accounts for available time, importance, and deadlines. The goal is to get the most crucial things done while also never wondering what one could be doing with a few free moments. Progress Tracking: These lists are less to track things todo and more to track have done. When working on a number of long term and short term projects, a list of what\u0026rsquo;s open, what\u0026rsquo;s been finished, along with a status of where things are is useful to avoid loosing track of projects and tasks. Based on this, I think we can distill a number of overriding qualities of task lists from these five archetypal use cases. That working list is:\nitem granularity, project-level organization, scheduling and deadlines, and use of priority markers. ## Personal Case Studies When I had an epic commute my issue was that while I had free time, it was all in 20 or 40 minute segments on trains. The challenge was to be organized and focused enough to really use this time. It was early and while I was awake enough to get work done, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t always awake enough to figure out what needed my attention. And I didn\u0026rsquo;t have enough routine minutia or enough other free time to be able to spend these blocks of time doing minutia. I needed a task list that told me what to do and when to do it. I needed Task prioritization with a little obligation management or something close to that. I chopped every task into the smallest actionable items, which is annoying in creative projects and often not very useful, and then scheduled items out so that I could do 6 or so things a day, and anytime I opened the laptop there was a list of things I could jump into. It worked, more or less.\nNow, I have free time. I even have a few hours strung together. The issue is less that I need help filling in every little moment with something to do, and more that I have too much that I could be working on, and I need help figuring out what the status is of ongoing projects are and where I ought to things are and what needs my attention the most. Progress tracking, more or less with a little task prioritization but in a very different way than I\u0026rsquo;d been doing. it. I\u0026rsquo;ve got a lot of things, and I need to be able to see where projects, and what needs attention now. I\u0026rsquo;ve not figured out the best solution, but I think less scheduling and bigger conceptual task objects is more the way to go.\nDoes this way of thinking about things make sense to other people?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/better-task-lists/","summary":"Just about everyone keeps a task list of some sort, or has at some point. To the casual observer, task list management might seems like a simple problem that could be augmented with a little bit of automation for great effect. Fire up your nearest \u0026ldquo;app store\u0026rdquo; and I would bet money that you\u0026rsquo;ll find a at least a few developers that have had the same thought.\nFor such a seemingly simple engineering problem there is an inordinate amount of really bad software. While this might tempt us to reassess the complexity of the task management problem, I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is really true. What happens, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced, is that people (i.e. cyborgs) make lists of tasks to solve different problems in their realities, and these different lists often require different automation. So while there are 10-20 basic task management applications, the number of distinct usage profiles exceeds that by several times.","title":"Better Task Lists"},{"content":"Philadelphia is replacing, or at least promising to replace, the trains that run the commuter rail system. The new trains are 35-40 years newer than the usual fair, and are replete with \u0026ldquo;new technologies,\u0026rdquo; one of which is an automated (I believe GPS-based) announcement system, which figures out what station is next, and which line you\u0026rsquo;re on. This is great in theory, but there\u0026rsquo;s a problem.\nThis system gives you too much information. Trains in Philly are named by their terminus, and all trains converge (and pass through) downtown. There\u0026rsquo;s history here which makes things a bit easier to understand if you\u0026rsquo;re a transit geek, but after every stop--including outlying stops--the train tells you what line you\u0026rsquo;re on, and which stops it makes or skips. The problems:\nAt most outlying stations, you can tell by the station you\u0026rsquo;re at, which line you\u0026rsquo;re on. It\u0026rsquo;s sometimes useful to know where the train you\u0026rsquo;re on is headed, but the trains only tell you that on the outside of the train, until you get downtown, when the announcements change from \u0026ldquo;where you\u0026rsquo;ve been,\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;where you\u0026rsquo;re going.\u0026rdquo; The \u0026ldquo;this is the train you\u0026rsquo;re on,\u0026rdquo; announcements don\u0026rsquo;t change as you pass stops, so you hear where the train\u0026rsquo;s been at every stop after even you passed the relevant stops. The announcements make sense, as there are 5 or six \u0026ldquo;main line\u0026rdquo; stops that some trains stop on, and others don\u0026rsquo;t, so as you\u0026rsquo;re heading towards doubtful stops, it\u0026rsquo;s useful information, when you\u0026rsquo;re passed them: less so. All announcements are displayed on screens in written form and read by a speech synthesizer. I understand the accessibility concerns, but there are still conductors and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the information is presented in a way that is usable by people who don\u0026rsquo;t already have a significant understanding of the transit system. Given this background, as a technical writer, and someone who geeks out on information presentation, I felt that there are a number of things that can be learned from this case:\nMore information is sometimes confusing, and can make concepts harder to grasp. Figuring out what people need to know in any given situation is more important (and more difficult) than figuring out what is true or correct. Sometimes multi-modal presentation may not actually add value in proportion with the amount of annoyance it generates. Presentation matters. The speech synthesizer does not sound very good and it\u0026rsquo;s inefficient. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/public-transit-information-overload-a-lesson/","summary":"Philadelphia is replacing, or at least promising to replace, the trains that run the commuter rail system. The new trains are 35-40 years newer than the usual fair, and are replete with \u0026ldquo;new technologies,\u0026rdquo; one of which is an automated (I believe GPS-based) announcement system, which figures out what station is next, and which line you\u0026rsquo;re on. This is great in theory, but there\u0026rsquo;s a problem.\nThis system gives you too much information. Trains in Philly are named by their terminus, and all trains converge (and pass through) downtown. There\u0026rsquo;s history here which makes things a bit easier to understand if you\u0026rsquo;re a transit geek, but after every stop--including outlying stops--the train tells you what line you\u0026rsquo;re on, and which stops it makes or skips. The problems:\nAt most outlying stations, you can tell by the station you\u0026rsquo;re at, which line you\u0026rsquo;re on. It\u0026rsquo;s sometimes useful to know where the train you\u0026rsquo;re on is headed, but the trains only tell you that on the outside of the train, until you get downtown, when the announcements change from \u0026ldquo;where you\u0026rsquo;ve been,\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;where you\u0026rsquo;re going.","title":"Public Transit Information Overload: A Lesson"},{"content":"I think the difference between writing technical documentation and knitting patterns is not terribly significant, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been known to talk at some length about this connection. While I\u0026rsquo;ve always been technically inclined, I started writing documentation after learning how to write knitting patterns. In the end, the things you have to know and do to write clear instructions is less about knowing about the technical underpinning, more about the mechanics of writing clear instructions and understanding process abstractly.\nShortly after I started my first technical writing job, I realized that all of the things I was learning about writing documentation was applicable to knitting patterns. In retrospect this makes a lot of sense to me: My interest in knitting is the process, not the design. At about this time, I came to terms with the fact that I liked to design boring knitting. Sweaters with plain shapes and fairly repetitive designs, look great and have a lot of appeal but I tend to make the same basic sweater with only minor variations, if any.\nSo I started writing what I hoped would be a series of essays about designs and sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;d knit. My hope was to get a collection of these pieces written and put together as a book, and I made some headway in this project I never finished one of these essays. I was writing essays that a knitter could read and be able to knit a sweater that looks like the one I knit, but also just enjoy the story and a collection anecdotes. Then, as life, singing, dancing, and writing got in my way knitting slowed and changed, and I was working on other writing projects, and for a thousand reasons it became a languished project.\nAnd then my world calmed down, I started knitting again, and after beginning a new sweater (or two,) and I thought: it might be worth putting a little more time into the project. Which brings us mostly to the present.\nThe second piece of this is that, as a reader of knitting content (books, blogs, etc.) I\u0026rsquo;m most interested in learning about design decisions, creative inspirations, and how people\u0026rsquo;s knitting parallels and reflects life beyond the needles. When I look at a sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve made, I can instantly remember where I was when I was knitting it, and why I decided to attach the sleeve just so. The great thing about these stories is that unlike shelf space for finished sweaters, or potentially garish designs, they are endless and endlessly useful: as inspiration, as comfort, and sometimes just plain comedy.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not written about knitting on this site for quite a while, and I think that knitting is one of those subjects that might be better served by a little bit of segregation from my more regular fare. So this post is the first in a new knitting series that I\u0026rsquo;ve put together. Posts will still show up in the main index\nI won\u0026rsquo;t be posting full descriptions of sweaters, I want to experiment with this writing apart from the blog and publication cycle for a while, but I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to post notes on progress or on interesting little parts of sweaters. If nothing else a little blogging ought to make it easier for me to stay on track with knitting for the project.\nOnward and Upward\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweater-stories/","summary":"I think the difference between writing technical documentation and knitting patterns is not terribly significant, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been known to talk at some length about this connection. While I\u0026rsquo;ve always been technically inclined, I started writing documentation after learning how to write knitting patterns. In the end, the things you have to know and do to write clear instructions is less about knowing about the technical underpinning, more about the mechanics of writing clear instructions and understanding process abstractly.\nShortly after I started my first technical writing job, I realized that all of the things I was learning about writing documentation was applicable to knitting patterns. In retrospect this makes a lot of sense to me: My interest in knitting is the process, not the design. At about this time, I came to terms with the fact that I liked to design boring knitting. Sweaters with plain shapes and fairly repetitive designs, look great and have a lot of appeal but I tend to make the same basic sweater with only minor variations, if any.","title":"Sweater Stories"},{"content":"Though short, this week has been pretty good. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing cool things at work, I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing and posting blog entries, and fiction(!), I\u0026rsquo;m on top of email, and the sweater is growing. I hope this isn\u0026rsquo;t just a fluke and that I can keep this up and also expand slightly into doing a bit more reading. Small steps.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of work on the wiki and site. Notably, selected entries are mirrored on Planet Emacsen. Also consider the following links to updates on the wiki and other sites:\nDiscussion of \u0026ldquo;/posts/make-emacs-better\u0026rdquo;, which has been incredibly productive and an interesting discussion of emacs adoption and use by non-programmer niches. I think this discussion and the original post connect pretty well with a post that made the rounds a few weeks ago: Lets Just Use Emacs A link from my father on the history of computing. I replied to him with Code Quarterly Interview with Hal Abelson. I\u0026rsquo;ve also collected a few LaTeX System links, of related projects, ideas and collaborators. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had a few conversations that I need to transcribe into the wiki. Watch this space. Then there\u0026rsquo;s emacs-instapaper, which isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly a FaiF web service, but the functionality is great for the subway, and I like being able to keep Firefox closed more of the time. That\u0026rsquo;s all for now!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hyperlinks/","summary":"Though short, this week has been pretty good. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing cool things at work, I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing and posting blog entries, and fiction(!), I\u0026rsquo;m on top of email, and the sweater is growing. I hope this isn\u0026rsquo;t just a fluke and that I can keep this up and also expand slightly into doing a bit more reading. Small steps.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of work on the wiki and site. Notably, selected entries are mirrored on Planet Emacsen. Also consider the following links to updates on the wiki and other sites:\nDiscussion of \u0026ldquo;/posts/make-emacs-better\u0026rdquo;, which has been incredibly productive and an interesting discussion of emacs adoption and use by non-programmer niches. I think this discussion and the original post connect pretty well with a post that made the rounds a few weeks ago: Lets Just Use Emacs A link from my father on the history of computing. I replied to him with Code Quarterly Interview with Hal Abelson.","title":"Hyperlinks"},{"content":"Being a critic is not simply looking for the points of failure, shortcomings, and breaking points in cultural artifacts (e.g. music, art, literature, software, technology, and so forth.) Criticism is a practice of comparison and rich analysis and a way of understanding cultural production. One might even call criticism a methodology, though \u0026ldquo;methodologizing\u0026rdquo; criticism does not give us anything particularly useful, nor does it make any practices or skills more concrete.\nCriticism is really the only way that we can understand culture and cultural products. In short, criticism renders culture meaningful.\nI wrote the above in response to this \u0026ldquo;On Being a Critic\u0026rdquo; post that a long time reader of this site wrote a while ago. Most of the differences between our approaches to criticism derives from technical versus non-technical understandings of critical practice. With that in mind, and in an effort to consolidate some thoughts about methodology, criticism, and theoretical practice, I\u0026rsquo;d like to provide two theses that define good critical practice, and provide some starting points for \u0026ldquo;getting it right:\u0026rdquo;\nCriticism is comparative. If you analyze a single thing in isolation, this analysis is not criticism. By contrast, one of the best ways to make poor criticism more powerful is to include more information (data) to strengthen the comparison. Comparison should highlight or help explain the phenomena or objects you are critiquing, but should always serve agenda and goals of the criticism to avoid overloading readers with too much information. Criticism ought to have its own agenda. It is impossible to avoid bias entirely, and from this impossibility springs criticism\u0026rsquo;s greatest strength: the power to productively examine and contribute to cultural discourses. While critical essays are perhaps the most identifiable form of criticism, there are others: novels, lectures, films, art, and perhaps even technology itself, can all be (and often are) critical practices in themselves. Everything else is up for grabs.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/critical-practice/","summary":"Being a critic is not simply looking for the points of failure, shortcomings, and breaking points in cultural artifacts (e.g. music, art, literature, software, technology, and so forth.) Criticism is a practice of comparison and rich analysis and a way of understanding cultural production. One might even call criticism a methodology, though \u0026ldquo;methodologizing\u0026rdquo; criticism does not give us anything particularly useful, nor does it make any practices or skills more concrete.\nCriticism is really the only way that we can understand culture and cultural products. In short, criticism renders culture meaningful.\nI wrote the above in response to this \u0026ldquo;On Being a Critic\u0026rdquo; post that a long time reader of this site wrote a while ago. Most of the differences between our approaches to criticism derives from technical versus non-technical understandings of critical practice. With that in mind, and in an effort to consolidate some thoughts about methodology, criticism, and theoretical practice, I\u0026rsquo;d like to provide two theses that define good critical practice, and provide some starting points for \u0026ldquo;getting it right:\u0026rdquo;","title":"Critical Practice"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over this post about big data in the IT world for quite a while. It basically says that given large (and growing) data sets, companies that didn\u0026rsquo;t previously need data researchers suddenly need people to help them use \u0026ldquo;big data.\u0026rdquo; Everyone company is a data company. In effect we have an ironic counter example to the effect of automation on the need for labor.\nThese would be \u0026ldquo;data managers\u0026rdquo; have their work cut out for them. Data has value, sure, but unlike software which has value as long as someone knows how to use it,1 poorly utilized data is just as good as no data. Data researchers need to be able to talk to developers and help figure out what data is worth collecting and what data isn\u0026rsquo;t. Organizations need someone to determine what data has real value, if only to solve a storage-related problem. Perhaps more importantly data managers would need to guide data usage both technically (in terms of algorithms, and software design) and in terms of being able to understand the abilities and shortfalls of data sets.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a long history of IT specialist positions: database developers, systems administrators, quality assurance engineers, release engineering, and software testing. Typically we divide this between developers and operations folks, but even the development/operations division is something of a misnomer. There are merits to generalism and specialization, but as projects grow, specialization makes sense and data may just be another specialty in a long tradition of software development and IT organization.\nSpeicailization also makes a lot of sense in the context of data, where having a lot of unusable data adds no value and can potentially subtract value from an organization.\nA Step Back There are two very fundamental points that I\u0026rsquo;ve left undefined: what \u0026ldquo;data\u0026rdquo; am I talking about and what kinds of skills differentiate \u0026ldquo;data specialists\u0026rdquo; from other kinds of technicians.\nWhat are big data? Big data sets are, to my mind, large collections of data, GIS/map based information, \u0026ldquo;crowd sourced\u0026rdquo; information, and data that is automatically collected through the course of normal internet activity. Big data is enabled by increasingly powerful databases and the ubiquity of the computing power, which lets developers process data on large scales. For examples: the aggregate data from foursquare and other similar services, comprehensive records of user activity within websites and applications, service monitoring data and records, audit trails of activity on shared file systems, transaction data from credit cards and customers, tracking data from marketing campaigns.\nWith so much activity online, it\u0026rsquo;s easier for software developers and users (which is basically everyone, directly or otherwise) to create and collect a really large collection of data regarding otherwise trivial events. Mobile devices and linkable accounts (OpenID, and other single sign-on systems) simplify this process. The thought and hope is all this data equals value and in many circumstances it does. Sometimes, it probably just makes things more complicated.\nData Specialists Obviously every programmer is a kind of \u0026ldquo;data specialist\u0026rdquo; and the last seven or eight years of the Internet has done everything to make every programmer a data specialist. What the Internet hasn\u0026rsquo;t done is give programers a sense of basic human factors knowledge, or a background in fundamental quantitative psychology and sociology. Software development groups need people who know what kinds of questions data can and cannot answer regardless of what kind or how much data is present.\nData managers, thus would be one of those posistions that sits between/with technical staff and business staff, and perhaps I\u0026rsquo;m partial to work in this kind of space, because this is very much my Chance. But there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work in bridging this divide, and a great deal of value to be realized in this space. And it\u0026rsquo;s not like there\u0026rsquo;s a shortage of really bright people who know a lot about data and social science who would be a great asset to pretty much any development team.\nBig Data Beyond Software Development The part of this post that I\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling over for a long time is the mirror of what I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about thus far. In short, do recent advancements in data processing and storage (NoSQL, Map Reduce, etc.) that have primarily transpired amonst startups, technology incubators, and other \u0026ldquo;Industry\u0026rdquo; sources have the potential to help acdemic research? Are there examples of academics using data collected from the usage habits of websites to draw conclusions about media interaction, reading habits, cultural particpation/formation? If nothing else are sociologists keeping up with \u0026ldquo;new/big data\u0026rdquo; developents? And perhaps most importantly, does the prospect of being able to access and process large and expansive datasets have any affect on the way social scientists work? Hopefully someone who knows more about this than I do will offer answers!\nThankfully there are a number of conventions that make it pretty easy for software designers to be able to write programs that people can use without needing to write extensive documentation.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/big-data-impact/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over this post about big data in the IT world for quite a while. It basically says that given large (and growing) data sets, companies that didn\u0026rsquo;t previously need data researchers suddenly need people to help them use \u0026ldquo;big data.\u0026rdquo; Everyone company is a data company. In effect we have an ironic counter example to the effect of automation on the need for labor.\nThese would be \u0026ldquo;data managers\u0026rdquo; have their work cut out for them. Data has value, sure, but unlike software which has value as long as someone knows how to use it,1 poorly utilized data is just as good as no data. Data researchers need to be able to talk to developers and help figure out what data is worth collecting and what data isn\u0026rsquo;t. Organizations need someone to determine what data has real value, if only to solve a storage-related problem. Perhaps more importantly data managers would need to guide data usage both technically (in terms of algorithms, and software design) and in terms of being able to understand the abilities and shortfalls of data sets.","title":"Big Data Impact"},{"content":"The Debate Computer programmers want data to be as structured as possible. If you don\u0026rsquo;t give users a lot of room to do unpredictable things, it\u0026rsquo;s easier to write software that does cool things. Users on the other hand, want (or think that they want) total control over data and the ability to do whatever they want.\nThe problem is they don\u0026rsquo;t. Most digital collateral, even the content stored in unstructured formats, is pretty structured. While people may want freedom, they don\u0026rsquo;t use it, and in many cases users go through a lot of effort to recreate structure within unstructured forms.\nDefinitions Structured data are data that is stored and represented in a tabular form or as some sort of hierarchical tree that is easily parsed by computers. By contrast, unstructured data, are things like files that have data and where all of the content is organized manually in the file and written to durable storage manually.\nThe astute among you will recognize that there\u0026rsquo;s an intermediate category, where largely unstructured data is stored in a database. This happens a lot in content management systems, in mobile device applications, and in a lot of note taking and project management applications. There\u0026rsquo;s also a parallel semi-structured form, where people organize their writing, notes, content in a regular and structured manner even though the tools they\u0026rsquo;re using don\u0026rsquo;t require it. They\u0026rsquo;d probably argue that this was \u0026ldquo;best practice,\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;semi-structured\u0026rdquo; data, but it probably counts.\nThe Impact The less structured content or data is the less computer programs are able to do with the data, and the more people have to work to make the data useful for them. So while we as users want freedom, that freedom doesn\u0026rsquo;t get us very far and we don\u0026rsquo;t really use it even when we have it. Relatedly, I think we could read the crux of the technological shift in Web 2.0 as a move toward more structured forms, and the \u0026ldquo;mash up\u0026rdquo; as the celebration of a new \u0026ldquo;structured data.\u0026rdquo;\nThe lines around \u0026ldquo;semi-structured\u0026rdquo; data are fuzzy. The trick is probably to figure out how to give people just enough freedom so that they don\u0026rsquo;t feel encumbered by the requirements of the form, but so much freedom that the software developers are unable to do really smart things behind the scene. That\u0026rsquo;s going to be difficult to figure out how to implement, and I think the general theme of this progress is \u0026ldquo;people can handle and developers should err on the side of stricture.\u0026rdquo;\nCurrent Directions Software like org-mode and twiki are attempts to leverage structure within unstructured forms, and although the buzz around enterprise content management (ECM) has started to die down, there is a huge collection of software that attempts to impose some sort of order on the chaos of unstructured documents and information. ECM falls short probably because it\u0026rsquo;s not structured enough: it mandates a small amount of structure (categories, some meta-data, perhaps validation and workflow,) which doesn\u0026rsquo;t provide significant benefit relative to the amount of time it takes to add content to these repositories.\nThere will be more applications that bridge the structure boundary, and begin to allow users to work with more structured data in a productive sort of way.\nOn a potentially orthogonal note, I\u0026rsquo;m working on cooking up a proposal for a LaTeX-based build system for non-technical document production that might demonstrate--at least hypothetically--how much structure can help people do awesome things with technology. I\u0026rsquo;m calling it \u0026ldquo;A LaTeX Build System.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you think, either about this \u0026ldquo;structure question,\u0026rdquo; or about the LaTeX build system!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-structured-and-unstructured-data-challenge/","summary":"The Debate Computer programmers want data to be as structured as possible. If you don\u0026rsquo;t give users a lot of room to do unpredictable things, it\u0026rsquo;s easier to write software that does cool things. Users on the other hand, want (or think that they want) total control over data and the ability to do whatever they want.\nThe problem is they don\u0026rsquo;t. Most digital collateral, even the content stored in unstructured formats, is pretty structured. While people may want freedom, they don\u0026rsquo;t use it, and in many cases users go through a lot of effort to recreate structure within unstructured forms.\nDefinitions Structured data are data that is stored and represented in a tabular form or as some sort of hierarchical tree that is easily parsed by computers. By contrast, unstructured data, are things like files that have data and where all of the content is organized manually in the file and written to durable storage manually.","title":"The Structured and Unstructured Data Challenge"},{"content":"Most of the sites I visit these days are: Wikipedia, Facebook, sites written by people I\u0026rsquo;ve known online since the late 1990s, people who I met online around 2004, and a few sites that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned about through real life connections, open source, and science fiction writing. That\u0026rsquo;s about it, it sounds like a lot, and it is, but the collection is pretty static.\nAs I was writing about my nascent list of technical writing links, I realized that while I\u0026rsquo;ve been harping on the idea of manually curated links and digital resources for for a single archives for a couple of years now, I\u0026rsquo;ve not really thought about the use or merits of manually curated links to the internet writ large.\nAfter all you can find anything you need with Google. Right?\nI mostly assumed that if I could get people to curate their own content, \u0026ldquo;browsing\u0026rdquo; would become more effective, and maybe Google technology could adapt to the evolving social practice?\nThough the inner workings of Google are opaque, we know that Google understands the Web by following and indexing the links that we create between pages. If we don\u0026rsquo;t link, Google doesn\u0026rsquo;t learn. Worse, if we let software create all the links between pages, then Google starts to break.\nPut another way: the real intelligence of Google\u0026rsquo;s index isn\u0026rsquo;t the speed and optimization of a huge amount of data--that\u0026rsquo;s a cumbersome engineering problem--but rather our intelligence derived from the links we make. As our linking patterns change, as all roads begin to lead back to Wikipedia, as everyone tries to \u0026ldquo;game\u0026rdquo; Google (at least a little) the pages that inevitably float to the top are pages that are built to be indexed the best.\nAnd Google becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because whatever page we do find out about and create links to are the links that we\u0026rsquo;ve found using Google. We\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot time thinking about what happens if google becomes evil, to think about what happens to us as Google stops providing new and useful information. We\u0026rsquo;ve spent considerably less work considering what happens when Google becomes useless.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/are-we-breaking-google/","summary":"Most of the sites I visit these days are: Wikipedia, Facebook, sites written by people I\u0026rsquo;ve known online since the late 1990s, people who I met online around 2004, and a few sites that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned about through real life connections, open source, and science fiction writing. That\u0026rsquo;s about it, it sounds like a lot, and it is, but the collection is pretty static.\nAs I was writing about my nascent list of technical writing links, I realized that while I\u0026rsquo;ve been harping on the idea of manually curated links and digital resources for for a single archives for a couple of years now, I\u0026rsquo;ve not really thought about the use or merits of manually curated links to the internet writ large.\nAfter all you can find anything you need with Google. Right?\nI mostly assumed that if I could get people to curate their own content, \u0026ldquo;browsing\u0026rdquo; would become more effective, and maybe Google technology could adapt to the evolving social practice?","title":"Are We Breaking Google?"},{"content":"I love emacs. I\u0026rsquo;m also aware that emacs is a really complex piece of software with staggering list of features and functionality. I\u0026rsquo;d love to see more people use emacs, but the start up and switch cost is nearly prohibitive. I do understand that getting through the \u0026ldquo;emacs learning curve\u0026rdquo; is part of what makes the emacs experience so good.\nThat said, there really ought to be a way to make it easier for people to start using emacs. Think of how much more productive some developers and writers would be if the initial experience of emacs was less overwhelming. And if emacs were easier to use, developers could use emacs as a core (embeded, even) component of text-editing applications, for instance, some sort of specific IDE built with emacs tools, or a documentation creation and editing toolkit built with emacs. I\u0026rsquo;d go for it, at least.\nTo my mind there are three major challenges for greater emacs usability. Some of these may be pretty easy to change non-intrusively, others less so. Feedback is, of course, welcome:\n1. The biggest problem is that there\u0026rsquo;s no default configuration. While I appreciate that this provides a neutral substrate for people to customize emacs for themselves, you have to write lisp in order to do pretty much anything in emacs other than write lisp. And customize-mode is well unmentioned, but not particularly usable.\nPerhaps one solution to this problem would be to create a facility within emacs to build \u0026ldquo;distributions,\u0026rdquo; that come configured for specific kinds of work. That way, emacs can continue to be the way it is, and specialized emacs can be provided and distributed with ease.\n2. Improve the customize interface. I like the idea of customize, but I find it incredibly difficult to use and navigate, and end up setting all configuration values manually because that\u0026rsquo;s easier to keep track of and manage. I\u0026rsquo;d prefer an option where you configure your emacs instance the way you want (through some sort of conventional menu system), and then have the option of \u0026ldquo;dumping state\u0026rdquo; to an arbitrary file that makes a little more sense than the lisp structure that customize produces. Then, as needed, you could load these \u0026ldquo;state file(s),\u0026rdquo; But then I\u0026rsquo;ve never used the menu-bar at all, so perhaps I\u0026rsquo;m not the best person to design such a system.\nThis strikes me as a more medium term project, and would make it easier for people who want to modify various basic behaviors and settings. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that it would need to totally supplant customize, but it might make more sense.\n3. Improve and add the ability to extend emacs beyond emacs-lisp. I initially thought emacs-lisp was a liability for emacs adoption and I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is uncommon, but I\u0026rsquo;ve since come to respect and understand the utility of emacs lisp. Having said that, I think offering some sort of interopperability between emacs and other languages and interperators, might be a good thing. Ideas like ParrotEmacs and using the Guile VM to run existing emacs-lisp in addition to other new code would be great.\nThis is a longer term project, of course, but definitely opens emacs up to more people with a much more moderate learning curve.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working (slowly) on getting my base configuration into a presentable state that I can push it to a git repository for everyone to see and use, which (at least for me) might start to address problems one and two, but three is outside of the scope of my time and expertise. The truth is that emacs is so great and so close to being really usable for everyone, that a little bit of work on these, and potentially other, enhancements could go a long way toward making emacs better for everyone.\nWho\u0026rsquo;s with me? Let\u0026rsquo;s talk!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/make-emacs-better/","summary":"I love emacs. I\u0026rsquo;m also aware that emacs is a really complex piece of software with staggering list of features and functionality. I\u0026rsquo;d love to see more people use emacs, but the start up and switch cost is nearly prohibitive. I do understand that getting through the \u0026ldquo;emacs learning curve\u0026rdquo; is part of what makes the emacs experience so good.\nThat said, there really ought to be a way to make it easier for people to start using emacs. Think of how much more productive some developers and writers would be if the initial experience of emacs was less overwhelming. And if emacs were easier to use, developers could use emacs as a core (embeded, even) component of text-editing applications, for instance, some sort of specific IDE built with emacs tools, or a documentation creation and editing toolkit built with emacs. I\u0026rsquo;d go for it, at least.\nTo my mind there are three major challenges for greater emacs usability.","title":"Make Emacs Better"},{"content":"I think blogging died when two things happened:\n1. A blog became a required component in constructing a digital identity, which happened around the time that largely-static personal websites started to disappear. Blogs always dealt in the construction of identities, but until 2004, or so, they were just one tool among many.\n2. Having a blog became the best, most efficient way for people to sell things. Blogging became a tool for selling goods and services, often on the basis of the reputation of the writer\nAs these shifts occurred, blogs stopped being things that individual people had, and started being things that companies created to post updates, do out reach, and \u0026ldquo;do marketing.\u0026rdquo; At about the same time, traditional media figured out, at least in part, what makes content work online. The general public has become accustomed to reading content online. The end result is that blogs are advertising and sales vectors, and this makes them much less fun to read.\nWhen blogging was just a thing people did, mostly because it let them present and interact with a group of writers better than they could otherwise, there was vitality: people were interested in reading other people\u0026rsquo;s blogs and comment threads. This vitality makes it more interesting to write blogs than pretty much any kind of content. The excitement of direct interaction with readers, the vitality of blogging transcends genre, from technical writing and documentation to fiction to news analysis and current events.\nThe vitality of blogging is what makes blogs so attractive to traditional media and to corporations for marketing purposes, so maybe you can\u0026rsquo;t have the good without the bad.\nEveryone blogs. And perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s a bit of the problem: too much content means that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to have a two way conversation between blogs and bloggers. Who has time to read all those words anyway? Blogging is great in part because it\u0026rsquo;s so democratic: anyone can publish a blog. This isn\u0026rsquo;t without a dark side: we run the risk of blogging without audience, or without significant interaction with the audience, as a result of the volume of content which threatens the impact of that democracy. But it makes sense, New forms and media don\u0026rsquo;t solve the problem cultural participation and engagement, they just shift the focus a little bit.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-death-of-blogging/","summary":"I think blogging died when two things happened:\n1. A blog became a required component in constructing a digital identity, which happened around the time that largely-static personal websites started to disappear. Blogs always dealt in the construction of identities, but until 2004, or so, they were just one tool among many.\n2. Having a blog became the best, most efficient way for people to sell things. Blogging became a tool for selling goods and services, often on the basis of the reputation of the writer\nAs these shifts occurred, blogs stopped being things that individual people had, and started being things that companies created to post updates, do out reach, and \u0026ldquo;do marketing.\u0026rdquo; At about the same time, traditional media figured out, at least in part, what makes content work online. The general public has become accustomed to reading content online. The end result is that blogs are advertising and sales vectors, and this makes them much less fun to read.","title":"The Death of Blogging"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m still not totally settled into my new routine, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s apparent in the blog. These things happen, and I just realized that this is the third summer in a row with some sort of major life change. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ve forgotten how to exist in a summer routine. While I should probably give myself a break, I think it\u0026rsquo;s more realistic to accept a certain level of disruption as \u0026ldquo;the new normal,\u0026rdquo; and figure out how to develop a routine around that. That\u0026rsquo;s the hope at any rate. So, I\u0026rsquo;m getting there, slowly.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve posted a number of new rhizomes in the last week. They are:\nSecurity isn\u0026rsquo;t A Technological Problem, A post in my series about addressing problems in IT as human-issue, that need documentation and training rather than more software.\nThese Shoes Were Made for Cyborgs, which attempts to limit the potential for overly expansive theorizing of \u0026ldquo;the cyborg,\u0026rdquo; in a common but not overly productive manner.\nLittle Goals and Big Projects, a list of projects that I want to work on. Think mid-year resolutions meet five-year plan, meet time management review.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also done some maintenance (gardening?) on the wiki and added or edited the following pages:\nI imported some comments from Facebook regarding my intellectual-practice post onto the discussion page. These comments are pretty valuable and I\u0026rsquo;ve found the conversation useful, hopefully you will too. Feel free to add your own comments there.\nSimilarly, I imported some comments onto the discussion for the Career Pathways post.\nIn response to one of the comments the Intellectual Practice post, I put together a pedagogy page, including some very rough descriptions of \u0026ldquo;writing classes I wish I\u0026rsquo;d taken and would love to teach.\u0026rdquo;\nNot strictly tychoish related, but I revised my personal profile at tychogaren.com to be a bit more up to date and generally less weird/awkward.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/never-ending/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m still not totally settled into my new routine, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s apparent in the blog. These things happen, and I just realized that this is the third summer in a row with some sort of major life change. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ve forgotten how to exist in a summer routine. While I should probably give myself a break, I think it\u0026rsquo;s more realistic to accept a certain level of disruption as \u0026ldquo;the new normal,\u0026rdquo; and figure out how to develop a routine around that. That\u0026rsquo;s the hope at any rate. So, I\u0026rsquo;m getting there, slowly.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve posted a number of new rhizomes in the last week. They are:\nSecurity isn\u0026rsquo;t A Technological Problem, A post in my series about addressing problems in IT as human-issue, that need documentation and training rather than more software.\nThese Shoes Were Made for Cyborgs, which attempts to limit the potential for overly expansive theorizing of \u0026ldquo;the cyborg,\u0026rdquo; in a common but not overly productive manner.","title":"Never Ending"},{"content":"Security, of technological resources, isn\u0026rsquo;t a technological problem. The security of technological resources and information is a problem with people.\nThere.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not a very ground breaking conclusion, but I think that the effects of what this might mean for people doing security1 may be more startling.\nBeyond a basic standard of \u0026ldquo;writing and using quality software\u0026rdquo; and following sane administration practices, the way to resolve security issues is to fix the way people use and understand the implications of their use.\nThere are tools that help control user behavior to greater or lesser degrees. Things like permissions control, management, auditing, and encryption, but they\u0026rsquo;re just tools: they don\u0026rsquo;t solve the human problems and the policy/practice issues that are the core of best security practice. Teaching people how their technology works, what\u0026rsquo;s possible and what\u0026rsquo;s not possible, and finally how to control their own data and resources is the key to increasing and providing security services to everyone.\nI think of this as the \u0026ldquo;free software solution,\u0026rdquo; because it draws on the strengths and methods of free software to shape and enhance people\u0026rsquo;s user experience and to improve the possible security of the public network as a whole. One of the things that has always drawn me to free software, and one of its least understood properties, deals with the power of source code to create an environment that facilitates education and inquiry. People who regularly use free software, I\u0026rsquo;d bet, have a better understanding of how technology works than people who don\u0026rsquo;t, and it\u0026rsquo;s not because free software users have to deal with less polished software (not terribly true), but has something to do with a different relationship between creators and users of software. I think it would be interesting to take this model and apply it to the \u0026ldquo;security problem.\u0026rdquo;\nWith luck, teaching more people to think about security processes will mean that users will generally understand:\nhow encryption works, and be more amenable to managing their own cryptography identities and infrastructure. (PGP and SSH) how networking works on a basic level to be able to configure, set, and review network security. (LAN Administration, NetFilter) how passwords are stored and used, and what makes strong passwords that are easy to remember and difficult to break. how to control and consolidate identity systems to minimize social engineering vulnerabilities. (OpenID, OAuth, etc.) There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of pretty basic knowledge that I think most people don\u0026rsquo;t have. At the same time, I think it\u0026rsquo;s safe to say that most of the difficult engineering questions have been solved regarding security, there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of tooling and infrastructure on the part of various services that would make better security practices easier to maintain (i.e. better PGP support in mail clients). In the mean time\u0026hellip;.\nStay smart.\nSecurity, being a process, rather than a product. Cite.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/security-isnt-a-technological-problem/","summary":"Security, of technological resources, isn\u0026rsquo;t a technological problem. The security of technological resources and information is a problem with people.\nThere.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not a very ground breaking conclusion, but I think that the effects of what this might mean for people doing security1 may be more startling.\nBeyond a basic standard of \u0026ldquo;writing and using quality software\u0026rdquo; and following sane administration practices, the way to resolve security issues is to fix the way people use and understand the implications of their use.\nThere are tools that help control user behavior to greater or lesser degrees. Things like permissions control, management, auditing, and encryption, but they\u0026rsquo;re just tools: they don\u0026rsquo;t solve the human problems and the policy/practice issues that are the core of best security practice. Teaching people how their technology works, what\u0026rsquo;s possible and what\u0026rsquo;s not possible, and finally how to control their own data and resources is the key to increasing and providing security services to everyone.","title":"Security Isn't a Technological Problem"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Do eye glasses make us all cyborgs?\u0026rdquo; Someone asked me a few days ago.\nI was annoyed more than anything.\nOf course they do. Corrective lenses are a non-biological technology that shape our experience of the world and of our bodies. By this logic, pretty much every tool developed as a product of \u0026ldquo;technology\u0026rdquo; (applied science; otherwise known as tinkering with stuff,) renders us cyborgs.\nI like the notion that cyborgism is the rule and not the exception in the course of human history, but it makes the conversation about the cyborg moment more banal. A more banal cyborg moment makes it harder to think about the parts that I think are most interesting: the internet, distributed collaboration, free software and open source, and the impact of technology on literature and reading/writing.\nAs a retort, I said something like, \u0026ldquo;Perhaps, but if you accept that eye glasses create cyborg beings, then you\u0026rsquo;d have to accept that shoes also create cyborgs. And the effects of shoes are much more interesting.\u0026rdquo;\nShoes affect how far people can walk, the speed of independent locomotion, they prevent all sorts of awful injuries, and probably lengthen the lifespan as a result. Shoes probably also change our feet and make us dependent upon wearing shoes, and more prone to certain kinds of injuries when barefoot. Fascinating stuff.\nAll other things being equal, I\u0026rsquo;m going to stick to internet and the cyborgs resulting from the encounter of humans and that technology.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/these-shoes-were-made-for-cyborgs/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;Do eye glasses make us all cyborgs?\u0026rdquo; Someone asked me a few days ago.\nI was annoyed more than anything.\nOf course they do. Corrective lenses are a non-biological technology that shape our experience of the world and of our bodies. By this logic, pretty much every tool developed as a product of \u0026ldquo;technology\u0026rdquo; (applied science; otherwise known as tinkering with stuff,) renders us cyborgs.\nI like the notion that cyborgism is the rule and not the exception in the course of human history, but it makes the conversation about the cyborg moment more banal. A more banal cyborg moment makes it harder to think about the parts that I think are most interesting: the internet, distributed collaboration, free software and open source, and the impact of technology on literature and reading/writing.\nAs a retort, I said something like, \u0026ldquo;Perhaps, but if you accept that eye glasses create cyborg beings, then you\u0026rsquo;d have to accept that shoes also create cyborgs.","title":"These Shoes Were Made for Cyborgs"},{"content":"Given all of the recent changes in my life, I found myself building and rebuilding a list of things that I\u0026rsquo;d like to \u0026ldquo;in the future,\u0026rdquo; sometime. The list is more than a set of mid-year \u0026ldquo;New Years Resolutions,\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s not quite as impressive as a \u0026ldquo;5 Year Plan.\u0026rdquo; As a blogger with firmly ingrained habits, I feel compelled to share this list with you:\nProperly resume my knitting and spinning habit. Read more veraciously. A book a month, plus the Asimov\u0026rsquo;s subscription with which I\u0026rsquo;ve done a bad job of keeping current. And that\u0026rsquo;s probably just a starting point. I have a backlog of things I want to read, there\u0026rsquo;s new stuff that I want to read coming out all the time, and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to get that done without attending to it. I\u0026rsquo;d like to refresh/redo the cyborg institute site to reflect the reality of what I want to accomplish there, what I\u0026rsquo;m actually doing, and make it be updatable in a meaningful sort of way. I also want to get a number of project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been sitting on for a while together and published there. Those are: The ikiwiki templates and configuration for tychoish.com. A general purpose emacs \u0026ldquo;starter configuration,\u0026rdquo; based on my configuration. It would be fairly simple to generate, but I want to write a build script so that I can keep it updated as I tweak my own configuration. I would also need to write some documentation. Similarly, I would like to produce a basic configuration for StumpWM that would make it easier to use Stump. A couple of other specifications along the lines of the Sygn. I would like to start dancing regularly with a Morris Dance team. I would like to reestablish a thrice-weekly non-dance exercise regime that includes some weight training. I want to apply to go to Clarion. But not before 2013, and preferably before 2016. I\u0026rsquo;d like to try learning to play melodeon for Morris, and maybe other tune good playing times. I\u0026rsquo;d like to go to Camp FaSoLa in 2012 or 2013. I\u0026rsquo;m also a little interested in maybe learning how to key sacred harp. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ve been singing too much tenor recently and found myself as one of the not-new basses more than a few times that I\u0026rsquo;m getting a bit more confident. I\u0026rsquo;d like to finish this damn novel sometime soon, revise the first bit into a passable short story, and begin shopping the story around. I\u0026rsquo;d like to try writing short stories for a little while. But I also want to revise Knowing Mars, finish Station Keeping in some form, and potentially figure out a way to make the other open/lingering story on my plate become Knowing Mars, Part 2. Write more regularly here. I think about a lot of things that I think are interesting, and writing ideas and asking questions is really the only way to make progress on scholarly, intellectual, and/or creative projects. I\u0026rsquo;m aware of a lot of potential in this work on tychoish.com, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to make significant progress. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/little-goals-and-big-projects/","summary":"Given all of the recent changes in my life, I found myself building and rebuilding a list of things that I\u0026rsquo;d like to \u0026ldquo;in the future,\u0026rdquo; sometime. The list is more than a set of mid-year \u0026ldquo;New Years Resolutions,\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s not quite as impressive as a \u0026ldquo;5 Year Plan.\u0026rdquo; As a blogger with firmly ingrained habits, I feel compelled to share this list with you:\nProperly resume my knitting and spinning habit. Read more veraciously. A book a month, plus the Asimov\u0026rsquo;s subscription with which I\u0026rsquo;ve done a bad job of keeping current. And that\u0026rsquo;s probably just a starting point. I have a backlog of things I want to read, there\u0026rsquo;s new stuff that I want to read coming out all the time, and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to get that done without attending to it. I\u0026rsquo;d like to refresh/redo the cyborg institute site to reflect the reality of what I want to accomplish there, what I\u0026rsquo;m actually doing, and make it be updatable in a meaningful sort of way.","title":"Little Goals and Big Projects"},{"content":"Continuing from the discussion regarding intellectual practice, I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking with a number of people (my father in particular) about graduate school and the prospect of \u0026ldquo;bootstrapping\u0026rdquo; a scholarly practice using \u0026ldquo;new media,\u0026rdquo; like blogging, and wiki making. I want to explore both my thoughts graduate school and bootstrapping with new media, and as you\u0026rsquo;d expect both of these ideas are rather intertwined. My initial gloss follows:\nBootstrapping for Success The \u0026ldquo;new media,\u0026rdquo; even 10 or more years on, is still quite new. The media shift and technological changes have had a pretty clear impact on economic and industry practices. At the same time, reading, participation, and writing are still in flux. People say, \u0026ldquo;oh look, blogging and wikis; we can use this as a teaching and learning tool!\u0026rdquo; and then there are classes, tools, and software to integrate blogging into courses and learning management systems, but the media itself is still in flux and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that anyone has blogging and wikis (as an example) figured out.\nWhile the changes in new media are important, the changes to education itself is probably more important. Educators of all kinds have begun to take this we begin to think about the was that traditional education has changed and will change. Given new media, a changing job market, and the shifting economics of education it\u0026rsquo;s hard to think that education isn\u0026rsquo;t changing.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure it\u0026rsquo;s changing that much.\nThere are cases of successful auto-didacts, and people who\u0026rsquo;ve been able acheive success\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to be wrong about this, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that the only people who blog/wiki and have found real success in fields are people with some other more conventional route to success: people who are already successful and figure out how to use new media, people who have conventional training or have achieved success in traditional media and then moved to using blogs:\nSome examples: Cory Doctorow began publishing fiction conventionally and doing freelance work for Weird magazine, and became a blogger and used that to multiply existing success. John Scalzi (and Tobias Buckell) published non-fiction and had successful professional writing careers before beginning to blog and write and publish fiction. The Valve is a successful academic blog/publication/forum, but as near as I can tell all of the contributors have traditional literary training, and all/most have academic postings. Bitch, Ph.D. has/had a formal background.\nSamuel Delany doesn\u0026rsquo;t have formal training but has had a scholarly career, and while his is an inspiring story there\u0026rsquo;s not much that\u0026rsquo;s reproducible from it given some historical constraints: he started publishing before the demise of SF pulp magazines and Ace Double, because creative writing hadn\u0026rsquo;t been established when he entered the academy, etc.\nI\u0026rsquo;m certainly willing to believe that my sample is skewed, and that people have been able to move in the other direction (from online success to conventional success, or been able to bootstrap their own success online,) but I can\u0026rsquo;t think of a single anecdote. I\u0026rsquo;d love to be proved wrong here.\nDisciplining and Formal Education I think that working as a technical writer is something to which I am very suited, something that provides a great deal of value, gives me access to the kinds of people that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in talking with (software developers, admins.) And writing experience and skill is largely fungible, so the skill I\u0026rsquo;m honing and developing is very transferable.\nSo, while I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to doing academic work eventually, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that no matter what kind of industry work I end up doing (product management, community management/organization, training, etc.) I\u0026rsquo;ll sill basically be a technical writer. And here\u0026rsquo;s the thing, if graduate school has no effect on my career except dominating my time and earning potential for a few years? It becomes very difficult to justify.\nThe equation that keeps going through my head is: two job searches within a few years years1 and a hundred thousand dollars or more,2 for what amounts to a personal betterment project. It\u0026rsquo;s not getting any easier to justify.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the catch: I\u0026rsquo;m a decent writer and I\u0026rsquo;m getting better all the time can I write or help people write books, articles, essays, stories, and a whole host of more specific forms. I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure that I could write a quality academic paper without an unreasonable amount of effort. I don\u0026rsquo;t know the process, I don\u0026rsquo;t know how to start, which literature to look at for resources, or for models, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where the line between concision and complexity is in academic prose, and so forth. That\u0026rsquo;s the kind of knowledge that I\u0026rsquo;m certain I could get out of graduate education. And perhaps I\u0026rsquo;ve been a technical writer for too long, but I think not being able to \u0026ldquo;write like a scholar\u0026rdquo; makes it hard to participate in scholarly discussions.\nThe Remains of the Practice I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where this leaves me. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about seeing if I can take a seminar and a methods class at CUNY in the next year I might be able to get what I need. The right collaborative project might be a good way to build the required skills, but that\u0026rsquo;s even more complicated. As far as using the blog/wiki to build and participate in a conversation about new media practices, collaboration, and digital labor practices\u0026hellip; there is much work left to be done.\ni.e. getting into graduate school, getting a post-graduate school job.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nthe 100k number is mostly opportunity costs, and assumes a funded/cheap 2 year masters program.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/methodology-and-bootstrapping-intellectual-practice/","summary":"Continuing from the discussion regarding intellectual practice, I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking with a number of people (my father in particular) about graduate school and the prospect of \u0026ldquo;bootstrapping\u0026rdquo; a scholarly practice using \u0026ldquo;new media,\u0026rdquo; like blogging, and wiki making. I want to explore both my thoughts graduate school and bootstrapping with new media, and as you\u0026rsquo;d expect both of these ideas are rather intertwined. My initial gloss follows:\nBootstrapping for Success The \u0026ldquo;new media,\u0026rdquo; even 10 or more years on, is still quite new. The media shift and technological changes have had a pretty clear impact on economic and industry practices. At the same time, reading, participation, and writing are still in flux. People say, \u0026ldquo;oh look, blogging and wikis; we can use this as a teaching and learning tool!\u0026rdquo; and then there are classes, tools, and software to integrate blogging into courses and learning management systems, but the media itself is still in flux and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that anyone has blogging and wikis (as an example) figured out.","title":"Methodology and Bootstrapping Intellectual Practice"},{"content":"What I want, it seems to me, isn\u0026rsquo;t a career--I have one of those--but to sustain intellectual life and practice. I would like to be able to ask questions, read seriously, participate in important conversations, and to write about this work and practice effectively for an audience that is invested in these discussions. This post is a follow up to my \u0026ldquo;career pathways\u0026rdquo; post.\nI have a blog and wiki, I can read, and my writing continues to improve. How hard can it be to achieve these goals and establish this practice on my own? Famous last words.\nThe thing is, I hate auto-didacticism as an approach to knowledge production and learning. Sure it works, sometimes, and professionally I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to succeed on the basis of being able to learn things on my own. At the same time, self teaching at more advanced levels, and avoiding formal study feels like a mechanism for people to use to avoid challenging themselves or their assumptions about the world. The challenge here, in addition to discipline (in a number of senses of the word,) is to avoid scholarly isolationism.\nConversely, it might be true that sufficiently advanced study is always already self-lead and self-taught anyway. That\u0026rsquo;s not a conjecture I have the experience or specialty to comment upon, but it\u0026rsquo;s a possibility.\nIn any case, my success at being able to do meaningful and fulfilling work, hinges upon:\nbeing able to write and interact effectively for your communications medium. In my case this means, use blogging and wikis well. being able to maintain an active presence and participation in the discussions and work you want to do. This means posting regularly, in addition to writing, reading, and thinking about various projects. Work needs to be sustained and ongoing. being able to make leisure time sacrifices to support the work. There\u0026rsquo;s only so much time in the day, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s also important to manage expectations somewhat in recognition of this fact. being able to find or establish and interact with a community of peers. Regardless of interest or focus, it\u0026rsquo;s important to find colleagues who do work that is enough like yours to allow them to grasp the intricacies of your work and different enough to infuse the conversation with useful context and ideological breadth. At least, that\u0026rsquo;s my hope. What am I forgetting?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/intellectual-practice/","summary":"What I want, it seems to me, isn\u0026rsquo;t a career--I have one of those--but to sustain intellectual life and practice. I would like to be able to ask questions, read seriously, participate in important conversations, and to write about this work and practice effectively for an audience that is invested in these discussions. This post is a follow up to my \u0026ldquo;career pathways\u0026rdquo; post.\nI have a blog and wiki, I can read, and my writing continues to improve. How hard can it be to achieve these goals and establish this practice on my own? Famous last words.\nThe thing is, I hate auto-didacticism as an approach to knowledge production and learning. Sure it works, sometimes, and professionally I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to succeed on the basis of being able to learn things on my own. At the same time, self teaching at more advanced levels, and avoiding formal study feels like a mechanism for people to use to avoid challenging themselves or their assumptions about the world.","title":"An Intellectual Practice"},{"content":"I started writing this post on Thursday, which was my actual birthday, to write a post blathering about the things I was working and about routines and forming new habits, and some changes that I\u0026rsquo;ve made to the site. And then I got swept into work and doing things, and the writing just never happened. Friday and the weekend were filled with family time, dancing, and my goal for this comparatively quiet Sunday afternoon is not so much to get caught up on various projects, but to get a little bit done to jump start my momentum for the week.\nThe biggest development that I\u0026rsquo;ve made last week, during that hiatus, is that I merged the \u0026ldquo;essay\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;rhizome\u0026rdquo; section of the site. Everything\u0026rsquo;s a rhizome, though if a post is seeming particularly \u0026ldquo;essay\u0026rdquo;-like the essay page will sill pull those out. This seems to be the best technological solution and it solves the logical overhead of needing to maintain two sites. Maybe other people can deal with maintaining more than one site or blog, but I really can\u0026rsquo;t deal with. This is one of those things that seems like a good idea every couple of years, and then I give up and merge everything back together.\nI also wrote up a project spec called A LaTeX Build System, which describes (very roughly) a notional piece of free-software infrastructure that would make LaTeX easier to use in and for itself but also designed in such a way as to make LaTeX based systems preferable for all sorts of publishing operations. Read the page for more info, but it\u0026rsquo;s basically a way to sand offf all the rough edges of LaTeX so that everyone who makes documents (that\u0026rsquo;s most people) can make beautiful consistent documents easier than with any conventional method.\nI finished reading Player Of Games, last week. It\u0026rsquo;s another one of Iain M. Banks\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Culture\u0026rdquo; novels, which I like. They\u0026rsquo;re frustrating because they all (so far) have a lot of plot that circles around itself endlessly, and seems really important but you know that anything that you might find out in the plot going to has already happened in the set up. The result is this an ironically claustrophobic novel feels like a really drawn out world building experience. While the experience works, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel like it ought to to work. And there you are.\nSpeaking of reading, I finished reading the book above on my new phone which is quite nice. I\u0026rsquo;m not sold on the Kindle Mobile app for reading short fiction periodicals, as it doesn\u0026rsquo;t save/sync pages, and I find it hard to read an entire novella in a single sitting. I\u0026rsquo;ve started paying for Readability, which is a great tool for bookmarking, reading and archiving articles and other medium-to-long form pieces on the web. I\u0026rsquo;ve started paying, because I think they\u0026rsquo;re doing something really cool that I really want to succeed, and I like being able to use it as a way of getting content to my phone for reading. I\u0026rsquo;m a little frustrated that there\u0026rsquo;s no good way to load up the phone with articles for reading while on the subway. Get on that, ye horde of mobile developers!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting again. Just reached the bottom of arm holes (armscye for the pedantic) for a new sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on (or ignoring more likely) for a few months. That\u0026rsquo;s exciting, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to get a few rows done most days. I\u0026rsquo;m not obsessive (much) about the knitting, and certainly not in the way that I have been in the past, but it\u0026rsquo;s a nice thing to do and a good change of pace when I get tired of looking at screens. I\u0026rsquo;ve long toyed with the idea of writing knitting stories something sort of between an essay and a knitting pattern and if nothing else I think doing some of that writing will require a regular knitting practice. Add that to the list.\nSpeaking of lists, I ought to work on making some progress on my list! With luck I\u0026rsquo;ll be around a bit more this week!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/inevitable-returns/","summary":"I started writing this post on Thursday, which was my actual birthday, to write a post blathering about the things I was working and about routines and forming new habits, and some changes that I\u0026rsquo;ve made to the site. And then I got swept into work and doing things, and the writing just never happened. Friday and the weekend were filled with family time, dancing, and my goal for this comparatively quiet Sunday afternoon is not so much to get caught up on various projects, but to get a little bit done to jump start my momentum for the week.\nThe biggest development that I\u0026rsquo;ve made last week, during that hiatus, is that I merged the \u0026ldquo;essay\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;rhizome\u0026rdquo; section of the site. Everything\u0026rsquo;s a rhizome, though if a post is seeming particularly \u0026ldquo;essay\u0026rdquo;-like the essay page will sill pull those out. This seems to be the best technological solution and it solves the logical overhead of needing to maintain two sites.","title":"Inevitable Returns"},{"content":"By eliminating the artificial scarcity of software, open source software forces businesses and technology developers to think differently about their business models. There are a few ways that people have traditionally built businesses around open free and open source software. There are pros and cons to every business model, but to review the basic ideas are:\nUsing open source software as a core and building a thin layer of proprietary technology on top of the open source core. Sometimes this works well enough (e.g. SugarCRM, OS X,) and sometimes this doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to work as well (e.g. MySQL, etc.) Selling services around open source software. This includes support contracts, training services, and infrastructure provisioning. Enterprises and other organizations and projects need expertise to make technology work, and the fact that open source doesn\u0026rsquo;t bundle licensing fees with support contracts doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the support (and other services) less useful or needed for open source. Custom development services. Often open source projects provide a pretty framework for a technology, but require some level of customization to fit the needs and requirements of the \u0026ldquo;business case.\u0026rdquo; The work can be a bit uneven, as with all consulting, but the need a service are both quit real. While the custom code may end up back in the upstream, sometimes this doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite happen for a number of reasons. Custom development obviously overlaps with service and thin-proprietarization, but is distinct: it\u0026rsquo;s not a it doesn\u0026rsquo;t revolve around selling proprietary software, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve user support or systems administration. These distinctions can get blurry in some cases. In truth, when you consider how proprietary software actually convey value, it\u0026rsquo;s really the same basic idea as the three models above. There\u0026rsquo;s just this minor mystification around software licenses, but other than that, the business of selling software and services around software doesn\u0026rsquo;t vary that much.\nJames Governor of Red Monk suggests a fourth option: Packaging technology.\nThe packaging model is likely just an extension of the \u0026ldquo;services\u0026rdquo; model, but it draws attention to the ways that companies can create real value not just by providing services and not just by providing a layer of customization, but by spending time attending to the whole experience, rather than the base technology. It also draws some attention to the notion that reputation matters.\nI suppose it makes sense: when businesses (and end users) pay for proprietary software, while the exchange is nominally \u0026ldquo;money\u0026rdquo; for \u0026ldquo;license\u0026rdquo; usage rights, in reality there are services and other sources of value. Thus it is incumbent upon open source developers and users to find all of the real sources of value that can be conveyed in the exchange of money for software, and find ways to support themselves and the software. How hard can it be?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/packaging-technology-creates-value/","summary":"By eliminating the artificial scarcity of software, open source software forces businesses and technology developers to think differently about their business models. There are a few ways that people have traditionally built businesses around open free and open source software. There are pros and cons to every business model, but to review the basic ideas are:\nUsing open source software as a core and building a thin layer of proprietary technology on top of the open source core. Sometimes this works well enough (e.g. SugarCRM, OS X,) and sometimes this doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to work as well (e.g. MySQL, etc.) Selling services around open source software. This includes support contracts, training services, and infrastructure provisioning. Enterprises and other organizations and projects need expertise to make technology work, and the fact that open source doesn\u0026rsquo;t bundle licensing fees with support contracts doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the support (and other services) less useful or needed for open source.","title":"Packaging Technology Creates Value"},{"content":"(I\u0026rsquo;ve been tinkering on this post all weekend, and I wanted to get it out of the door before it\u0026rsquo;s next week. Here goes!)\nI always forget, and there\u0026rsquo;s no good reason for this, how difficult it is to establish new routines and new habits. Two weeks ago, I moved for the second time this year. this week I started a new job and even though I have more free time than I did before, I\u0026rsquo;m still coming up at loose ends and I find myself wondering why I have a hard time concentrating and getting into \u0026ldquo;the grove.\u0026rdquo; There\u0026rsquo;s so much to do, so many tasks collecting dust on my todo list, and I\u0026rsquo;m only half keeping ahead of everything.\nI have two things to report that I missed on the last update: I have new full-text feeds for posts about org-mode and emacs. Hopefully these will get included in relevant planets soon for your reading pleasure.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also been some :discussion on the \u0026ldquo;Bad Org Mode Habits\u0026rdquo; post. You may be interested.\nAs an aside: the astute among you will notice that Matt Lundin and I have made a folk page that is automatically updated anytime there\u0026rsquo;s a page that links to or is tagged with Matt\u0026rsquo;s handle (i.e. \u0026ldquo;madalu.\u0026rdquo;) This includes an RSS feed that he (or you) can use to track his updates and mentions. Use the edit page functionality to see how to make such a page for your own notification purposes.\nEverything else on my list is pretty boring. I\u0026rsquo;m, slowly trying to follow my own advice in bad org mode habits.\nThe organization I was using for my lists and notes worked really well when I was commuting all of the time and working off of laptops on the go. Among other limitations, I think I basically had to give up any sort of really complex project. Now that I have more time, I can tend to more gnarly projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to tinker with that I just haven\u0026rsquo;t had the time for. Without a train ride and \u0026ldquo;home time\u0026rdquo; to define my free time for fiction writing and other projects, it\u0026rsquo;s been hard to adjust.\nIt has also been hard for me to get a real sense of how my free time remains limited (because that\u0026rsquo;s the nature of free time,) even if there\u0026rsquo;s a lot more of it to go around. Adjustment is always hard and changes, particularly big changes, have a ripple effect. Things I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing differently include:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve made some big changes to the blog post writing tooling, so that new blog posts are written in my org-mode files rather than in their own directory. (I updated the above emacs code with some shell functions that make the publication process easier (if you\u0026rsquo;re using that code.) This seems minor, but is pretty big in terms of how I\u0026rsquo;m using org I\u0026rsquo;ve never really used org for anything other than notes and one off projects. It\u0026rsquo;s a good shift. While I used to dock my laptop to the desk and use it with an external monitor, I\u0026rsquo;m switching to just using the laptop dock and working on the laptop on the desk. This might not be ergonomically ideal, but it feels better and is a bit more coherent. Particularly with the addition of a third laptop for work. I caved and installed emacs on my work laptop (Windows.) Rather than adapt all of my emacs crap to work with Windows, I\u0026rsquo;m basically copying and pasting the important parts, and starting from scratch. It\u0026rsquo;s not pretty, but it works. And being able to use emacs and do the things that I want to do there, is a good thing indeed. With only a few thousand more words to go on the novel. I\u0026rsquo;m taking a bit of a break to rethink things, and hopefully this afternoon rewrite a few outlines so I have a good way of drawing this project to a close. Then writing, then lots of editing and lots of other writing. A bit more than two weeks ago, I got a new cell phone. It\u0026rsquo;s a HTC Inspire (ATT \u0026ldquo;4g,\u0026rdquo;) and I like it rather a lot. I still think that Blackberry does email and messaging better. This is a better computer to have in your pocket. The Kindle App is really usable. I have a text editor/note program that works great, and all the other little incidentals just seem to work and be there. If only the messaging where a bit better. eh. The new job is going well, though I\u0026rsquo;m still in the \u0026ldquo;I wonder what this will look like when I\u0026rsquo;m actually fully up to speed\u0026rdquo; phase. I expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll write even less about this job than my last job, and retreat further into \u0026ldquo;tycho.\u0026rdquo; I like this. I may, however, write some features of the new job: the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m using Windows on my work machine and various aspects of digital collaboration, which I still find fascinating. That\u0026rsquo;s all the news that\u0026rsquo;s fit to print!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-feeds-habits-and-jobs/","summary":"(I\u0026rsquo;ve been tinkering on this post all weekend, and I wanted to get it out of the door before it\u0026rsquo;s next week. Here goes!)\nI always forget, and there\u0026rsquo;s no good reason for this, how difficult it is to establish new routines and new habits. Two weeks ago, I moved for the second time this year. this week I started a new job and even though I have more free time than I did before, I\u0026rsquo;m still coming up at loose ends and I find myself wondering why I have a hard time concentrating and getting into \u0026ldquo;the grove.\u0026rdquo; There\u0026rsquo;s so much to do, so many tasks collecting dust on my todo list, and I\u0026rsquo;m only half keeping ahead of everything.\nI have two things to report that I missed on the last update: I have new full-text feeds for posts about org-mode and emacs. Hopefully these will get included in relevant planets soon for your reading pleasure.","title":"New Feeds, Habits, and Jobs"},{"content":"I always thought that I would go to graduate school sometime in my twenties. I ask questions that are pretty geeky and difficult to answer, I think learning and research are pretty important, and I want to talk to people about ideas, projects, and theories. There are skills I need to be able to address the questions I have and background literates that I wish I were way more familiar with.\nIt seems like a good fit. Right?\nRight. Well, right only if we accept that graduate school is a mechanism for personal betterment. While that has to be part of it, mostly graduate school is a job and the first in a long line of possible jobs. The academic career path has merits and demerits, but it\u0026rsquo;s still work, and I think to ignore this, makes it possible to accept atrocious labor practices in the academic world.\nSomehow, without much intentionally on my part, I\u0026rsquo;ve found a career that I enjoy. Even more curious is the fact that being a professional writer with some technical background is the kind of thing that enjoys a certain kind of perpetual demand. And better yet, it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to get a degree to support this career: as near as I can tell literature degrees, history degrees, theology degrees, theater degrees, and psychology degrees are all equally relevant and irrelevant.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced that I never want to teach, if the \u0026ldquo;getting a job\u0026rdquo; portion of going to graduate school is somewhat moot, then I\u0026rsquo;m left with a couple of questions:\nIf additional schooling doesn\u0026rsquo;t affect career options and possibilities, then does it make sense to spend significant time in pursuit of an advanced degree? How do I develop and maintain an intellectual and scholarly practice without graduate school? How do I prevent my career from stagnating and from getting stuck in less than ideal jobs in mid-career and late career stages? I work in field where the need for human labor is constantly (and ideally) being automated away. The conventional wisdom is \u0026ldquo;develop specialties, but don\u0026rsquo;t get too cemented in a particular function so that you have options for after your job gets replaced. Combined with the orthogonal issue that writing and the work of writers is horribly misunderstood by just about everyone, figuring out \u0026ldquo;career paths is not necessarily easy. How do I deal with this long term concern in a more manageable way while being mindful of the future concerns. While I sometimes feel like this blog can stray into the \u0026ldquo;overly meta\u0026rdquo;, I think that prefer intentionally over aimless wandering. Indeed, I think this career issue might have been a great deal easier for me had I figured some of these things out earlier. I know that we don\u0026rsquo;t always find clear and definitive answers to these problems and that solutions come in pieces and very slowly.\nThis series is about thinking about these issues to increase the possibility of intentionally and to document my process so that people can provide feedback. With luck, this will also help form a model for people who want to think about ways of contributing to scholarly conversations and grow intellectually, but needn\u0026rsquo;t do that in the context of the academic training and labor market.\nI look forward to hearing from you and working with you all!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/career-pathways/","summary":"I always thought that I would go to graduate school sometime in my twenties. I ask questions that are pretty geeky and difficult to answer, I think learning and research are pretty important, and I want to talk to people about ideas, projects, and theories. There are skills I need to be able to address the questions I have and background literates that I wish I were way more familiar with.\nIt seems like a good fit. Right?\nRight. Well, right only if we accept that graduate school is a mechanism for personal betterment. While that has to be part of it, mostly graduate school is a job and the first in a long line of possible jobs. The academic career path has merits and demerits, but it\u0026rsquo;s still work, and I think to ignore this, makes it possible to accept atrocious labor practices in the academic world.\nSomehow, without much intentionally on my part, I\u0026rsquo;ve found a career that I enjoy.","title":"Career Pathways"},{"content":"A few weeks ago we moved the furniture around. The biggest objective was to get some desk space setup in a more usable fashion. I find myself doing this a couple times a year. It\u0026rsquo;s easy for me to get in the habit of having everything a certain way without realizing that the chair I like to sit on is always in the sun during the mornings when I like to write, or that I never put the dishes away, because the cabinets were arranged backwards. The same sort of thing happens with computers and the way we use technology.\nMatt Lundin and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I think at the core of the issue is that the kind of work we do with computers, changes subtly: either what we do actually changes as a result of our progress, or we learn more about what we\u0026rsquo;re doing and what we ought to be doing from completing work. Like the furniture, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to get accustomed to doing things in one particular way and not realize that there\u0026rsquo;s a better way.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s useful then to spend a little time every now and then to do a little bit of digital spring cleaning. There are two major parts of this process:\n3. Figure out if \u0026ldquo;what you do\u0026rdquo; has changed significantly. As our projects grow the work we do changes, sometimes in ways that make it hard to continue to organize our efforts and tools in the same way.\n4. Looking for new tools that you can use to do what you do. This includes flat out new tools of which you weren\u0026rsquo;t aware, little automations that you may be able to build, and tools that solve problem domains that you\u0026rsquo;d previously ignored. It\u0026rsquo;s also sometimes useful to look at your tools and figure out what is more trouble than it\u0026rsquo;s worth. Ideally these don\u0026rsquo;t all change annually, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth doing a review.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no guarantee, of course, that you\u0026rsquo;ll find a solution to any issue that you come across but you might. You might also be able to gain new insights into issues that have nagged at you by approaching a number of issues and pain points all at once. It\u0026rsquo;s also, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure, more productive to spend most of your time doing stuff (writing, coding, etc.) even if your world isn\u0026rsquo;t perfectly optimized, than it is to spend all your time tinkering with things.\nAnd the sofa really does look better over there.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/moving-the-furinture/","summary":"A few weeks ago we moved the furniture around. The biggest objective was to get some desk space setup in a more usable fashion. I find myself doing this a couple times a year. It\u0026rsquo;s easy for me to get in the habit of having everything a certain way without realizing that the chair I like to sit on is always in the sun during the mornings when I like to write, or that I never put the dishes away, because the cabinets were arranged backwards. The same sort of thing happens with computers and the way we use technology.\nMatt Lundin and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I think at the core of the issue is that the kind of work we do with computers, changes subtly: either what we do actually changes as a result of our progress, or we learn more about what we\u0026rsquo;re doing and what we ought to be doing from completing work.","title":"Moving the Furinture"},{"content":"This has been a strange week. It\u0026rsquo;s strange, but not terribly surprising, that given a comparative expanse of free time with not a lot to do except write, that every little thing I\u0026rsquo;ve meant to do for a while but have been putting off suddenly came up and required all of my attention.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve spent all of my time doing chores and running errands. I\u0026rsquo;m actually taking this as proof in favor of my general theory that writing and other avocational pursuits ought to be habitual and ongoing rather than the focus of occasional binges. But there are some things that take a lot of time and its worth binging on a little. This week, I got some writing done, but mostly did things like tinkering with my computers and tending to some long overdue systems administration tasks. I also switched to a new cell phone, oversaw delivery of furniture, sang, danced, and cooked. Not a bad week.\nI do have some links and notes for you.\nI made a rough introductory page for my efforts to run the xen hypervisor on a laptop. There was some confusion this week as I reorganized the blog post files on the wiki. Basically, all blog posts are now in /posts/ directory (no more /posts/ and /posts/) with the different feeds generated by tags. So I did post some cool stuff, but it didn\u0026rsquo;t get out. This includes: Bad Org-Mode Habits about the best ways to use emacs\u0026rsquo; org-mode. Poetry Has a Purpose which addresses a little bit of literary theory/criticism/practice that got under my skin and into my head. I\u0026rsquo;ve imported a few recent discussions from Facebook threads associated with my posts here onto discussion pages pages, which I think you might enjoy: I spent some time this morning working on a system to capture notes into org-mode using procmail and my cellphone\u0026rsquo;s email client. See that here. Most of this post, excluding the links, was written on the aforementioned cell phone. It\u0026rsquo;s still not quite the same as writing from a computer, but for getting raw material out of my head, I kind of like it. We\u0026rsquo;ll see if that sticks. That\u0026rsquo;s about all I have for now!\nThe new job starts next week, so I would say that my posting schedule may be a bit erratic. But if you\u0026rsquo;ve been reading tychoish for any length of time, you\u0026rsquo;re probably used to a far more irregular posting pattern.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you on the flip side.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-week-that-was/","summary":"This has been a strange week. It\u0026rsquo;s strange, but not terribly surprising, that given a comparative expanse of free time with not a lot to do except write, that every little thing I\u0026rsquo;ve meant to do for a while but have been putting off suddenly came up and required all of my attention.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve spent all of my time doing chores and running errands. I\u0026rsquo;m actually taking this as proof in favor of my general theory that writing and other avocational pursuits ought to be habitual and ongoing rather than the focus of occasional binges. But there are some things that take a lot of time and its worth binging on a little. This week, I got some writing done, but mostly did things like tinkering with my computers and tending to some long overdue systems administration tasks. I also switched to a new cell phone, oversaw delivery of furniture, sang, danced, and cooked.","title":"The Week that Was"},{"content":"I was reading an Ian M. Banks novel, `The Use of Weapons \u0026lt;\u0026gt;`_, and there\u0026rsquo;s a scene where the main character reports on having spent a few years \u0026ldquo;trying to become a poet.\u0026rdquo; And we get this very idyllic tale of him surrounding himself with beauty and simplicity. It didn\u0026rsquo;t work for the character and I suspect it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work for you.\nThis reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago that made the argument that poems are made of words rather than images or some sort of spiritually inspired emotional state. In short, poetry is about form, structure, and the conveyance of meaning at the level of the word and that \u0026ldquo;transcendence\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t really play into the craft or purpose of poetry. Or at least, poetry is not exceptional among literary forms in this regard. I think that this is basically true, and is probably a good way of approaching creative writing and texts in general. Maybe this is just a tychoish thing.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a corollary, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that it\u0026rsquo;s too contradictory even though it nearly sounds it:\nPoetry, and texts in general, exist in the real world and require a purpose to succeed. Poets don\u0026rsquo;t just spend a lot of time \u0026ldquo;living like a poet\u0026rdquo; and are then write poems that grow from these experiences. Writing well requires some skills and some basic training, but beyond that foundation writing needs a purpose or a goal. It\u0026rsquo;s easy to see how this might be true in prose forms, but I think the exact same is true of poetry. Perhaps more so.\nThe character in the novel was attempting to achieve some sort of aesthetic, working from an idea of \u0026ldquo;how poets should work.\u0026rdquo; While it can be hard to learn what the poet\u0026rsquo;s ulterior purpose is, that is a different issue. The most important thing is that you have something to say, regardless of the form.\nHear Hear!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/poetry-has-a-purpose/","summary":"I was reading an Ian M. Banks novel, `The Use of Weapons \u0026lt;\u0026gt;`_, and there\u0026rsquo;s a scene where the main character reports on having spent a few years \u0026ldquo;trying to become a poet.\u0026rdquo; And we get this very idyllic tale of him surrounding himself with beauty and simplicity. It didn\u0026rsquo;t work for the character and I suspect it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work for you.\nThis reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago that made the argument that poems are made of words rather than images or some sort of spiritually inspired emotional state. In short, poetry is about form, structure, and the conveyance of meaning at the level of the word and that \u0026ldquo;transcendence\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t really play into the craft or purpose of poetry. Or at least, poetry is not exceptional among literary forms in this regard. I think that this is basically true, and is probably a good way of approaching creative writing and texts in general.","title":"Poetry Has a Purpose"},{"content":"Org-mode is great. Org is this super-task management package that merges outlining and structured document editing abilities with task management glue. It sounds like a weird combination at first, when you realize that it means that you can effectively do work and organize your work in the same set of files without needing to \u0026ldquo;switch modes,\u0026rdquo; between a planning/task list interface and a \u0026ldquo;doing things\u0026rdquo; interface, the effects are amazing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave \u0026ldquo;the awesomeness org-mode\u0026rdquo; to other people and other posts, and spend time here focusing on why \u0026ldquo;org-mode is awesome but won\u0026rsquo;t do your work for you,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;if you\u0026rsquo;re new to org-mode you will probably want to do things in a certain way, but don\u0026rsquo;t\u0026rdquo; issues. Org-mode is great and it can be even better if you avoid developing a few bad habits.\nUse `org-capture \u0026lt;http://orgmode.org/manual/Capture.html\u0026gt;`_ as much as possible. Org-capture is a quick interface within emacs that lets you open a temporary buffer, take a few notes, and save the notes into a file. It has advanced features for more complex data entry features and data types. The temptation is to use it as a \u0026ldquo;quick entry\u0026rdquo; tool for task list items, but don\u0026rsquo;t just use it to capture new tasks. Capture links and bookmarks, store notes and important information, If org-mode is your outboard emacs-based brain, then org-capture is it\u0026rsquo;s main input device. Fighting it, means that your org files end up being less useful.\nAvoid using org-mode as a simple task list, and particularly avoid constructing the content in your org files to \u0026ldquo;game\u0026rdquo; your agenda view. The agenda compiles a working task list for your actionable notes, working backwards from this means your notes are less than useful things can get lost and all of the really cool things that org lets you do aren\u0026rsquo;t accessible to you.\nThis may just be the application of a good general information management practice, but: distribute information evenly throughout all levels of the organizational hierarchy of the file. Use the org-narrow-to-subtree function to focus your current work on a specific portion of a file, and don\u0026rsquo;t bury information or have it sitting around in one big unorganized pile.\nHope this helps!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bad-org-mode-habits/","summary":"Org-mode is great. Org is this super-task management package that merges outlining and structured document editing abilities with task management glue. It sounds like a weird combination at first, when you realize that it means that you can effectively do work and organize your work in the same set of files without needing to \u0026ldquo;switch modes,\u0026rdquo; between a planning/task list interface and a \u0026ldquo;doing things\u0026rdquo; interface, the effects are amazing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave \u0026ldquo;the awesomeness org-mode\u0026rdquo; to other people and other posts, and spend time here focusing on why \u0026ldquo;org-mode is awesome but won\u0026rsquo;t do your work for you,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;if you\u0026rsquo;re new to org-mode you will probably want to do things in a certain way, but don\u0026rsquo;t\u0026rdquo; issues. Org-mode is great and it can be even better if you avoid developing a few bad habits.\nUse `org-capture \u0026lt;http://orgmode.org/manual/Capture.html\u0026gt;`_ as much as possible. Org-capture is a quick interface within emacs that lets you open a temporary buffer, take a few notes, and save the notes into a file.","title":"Bad Org-Mode Habits"},{"content":"In response to 9 Awesome SSH Tricks some posted the following quote (on the old commenting system):\nThe workarounds have become smoother and some of the things we can do with networks of Unix machines are pretty impressive, but when ssh is the foundation of your security architecture, you know things aren\u0026rsquo;t working as they should.\n-- Rob Pike, 2004\nSo let\u0026rsquo;s clarify things a bit. SSH is great as an end user protocol, and great for dealing with the realities of our distributed computing environment in an exigent manner, SSH lets us:\nconnect securely to remote systems. quickly establish tunnels through remote machines. admister remote systems securely. provide end-users with key-based authentication. SSH is great for providing end users with a secure way of interacting with computer systems in networked environment. It\u0026rsquo;s not, however, the magic bullet for security policy. If you or your organizations security practices revolve entirely around SSH tunnels, then you\u0026rsquo;re probably in trouble or about to be in trouble. Use traditional VPNs and TLS/SSL when it makes sense and develop a sane security policy.\nBut don\u0026rsquo;t forget SSH and if you do use SSH, know that there are some really awesome things that OpenSSH makes possible.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/flaws-with-ssh/","summary":"In response to 9 Awesome SSH Tricks some posted the following quote (on the old commenting system):\nThe workarounds have become smoother and some of the things we can do with networks of Unix machines are pretty impressive, but when ssh is the foundation of your security architecture, you know things aren\u0026rsquo;t working as they should.\n-- Rob Pike, 2004\nSo let\u0026rsquo;s clarify things a bit. SSH is great as an end user protocol, and great for dealing with the realities of our distributed computing environment in an exigent manner, SSH lets us:\nconnect securely to remote systems. quickly establish tunnels through remote machines. admister remote systems securely. provide end-users with key-based authentication. SSH is great for providing end users with a secure way of interacting with computer systems in networked environment. It\u0026rsquo;s not, however, the magic bullet for security policy. If you or your organizations security practices revolve entirely around SSH tunnels, then you\u0026rsquo;re probably in trouble or about to be in trouble.","title":"Flaws with SSH"},{"content":"This is a post drafted a couple of weeks ago, while I was still doing the commute.\nI wonder sometimes, what the people on the trains I take actually do. While there\u0026rsquo;s some variation on who\u0026rsquo;s aboard, there\u0026rsquo;s a very common and consistent cast of characters on each leg of my journey. God only knows what they\u0026rsquo;re doing.\nOne fellow, I\u0026rsquo;ve spent the winter thinking of as \u0026ldquo;the short dorky one.\u0026rdquo; He\u0026rsquo;s white and pretty pale, has darkish-blond with hair that\u0026rsquo;s seems too long, under 5'6,\u0026quot; and wears glasses that are several years behind current styles, his teeth are noticibly in a poor condition. I should also point out that my commute is largely \u0026ldquo;pre-rush hour,\u0026rdquo; and that I see this fellow around 6:20 in the morning.\nToday, he wasn\u0026rsquo;t wearing the oversized and a bit more than \u0026ldquo;slightly worn\u0026rdquo; jacket and I noticed two things: first he was muscular in a way that suggested he put some time into the appearance and, two his entire right arm was covered by a tattoo. I would have never pegged him as the type, and none of the fantastic stories I would have thought to tell myself about him included either of these details.\nMost of the time, my primary reaction to my fellow commuters is annoyance when they won\u0026rsquo;t stop talking or using their cell phones. Sometimes, I\u0026rsquo;m just confounded.\nWelcome to life.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/undercover/","summary":"This is a post drafted a couple of weeks ago, while I was still doing the commute.\nI wonder sometimes, what the people on the trains I take actually do. While there\u0026rsquo;s some variation on who\u0026rsquo;s aboard, there\u0026rsquo;s a very common and consistent cast of characters on each leg of my journey. God only knows what they\u0026rsquo;re doing.\nOne fellow, I\u0026rsquo;ve spent the winter thinking of as \u0026ldquo;the short dorky one.\u0026rdquo; He\u0026rsquo;s white and pretty pale, has darkish-blond with hair that\u0026rsquo;s seems too long, under 5'6,\u0026quot; and wears glasses that are several years behind current styles, his teeth are noticibly in a poor condition. I should also point out that my commute is largely \u0026ldquo;pre-rush hour,\u0026rdquo; and that I see this fellow around 6:20 in the morning.\nToday, he wasn\u0026rsquo;t wearing the oversized and a bit more than \u0026ldquo;slightly worn\u0026rdquo; jacket and I noticed two things: first he was muscular in a way that suggested he put some time into the appearance and, two his entire right arm was covered by a tattoo.","title":"Undercover"},{"content":"A week ago, I quit my job.\nFor a number of reasons this shouldn\u0026rsquo;t come as a huge surprise: I\u0026rsquo;d been burning out on a 2-hour each way commute from Philadelphia where I live(d), nominally. The boyfriend in New York City, didn\u0026rsquo;t make things easier. And while, I really liked a lot of things about my job, I knew that it was getting to be time to move on. My last day was Friday.\nI spent the intervening time packing all of the stuff that\u0026rsquo;s going to New York into my car, and driving it to New York. For the rest of the week, I get to donate a bunch of my stuff that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dragging from place to place for the last 2 plus years. Add in some car maintenance, a few dinners and visits with friends, and a visit with my mother. She has awesomely agreed to drive said car back to the Midwest where it will be infinitely more useful. And I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get some writing done, and readjust my brain and body to a different work/life schedule.\nNext week, there is settling in, more adjustment, waiting for deliveries, and more writing. The adjustment thing is tough: no matter how late I manage to stay up I wake up feeling rested and like I\u0026rsquo;ve slept in luxuriously. And then I look at the clock and see that it\u0026rsquo;s 6am. Time to get up and start writing, I guess.\nThe new job, is in many ways much like the old one. Different technology, different customers, different kind of writing, different sorts of problems, but I\u0026rsquo;m really excited. When I started my last job, I was not a very confident writer, and the experience of writing professionally for the last two years has increased my confidence as a writer and the strength of my identity as such.\nI think being forced to not only write something regularly for a couple of years, but also be responsible for maintaining and improving that text can be very eye opening. If nothing else, I\u0026rsquo;ve become very aware of how my writing has changed and improved.1 While it\u0026rsquo;s still occasionally surprising that other people want to pay me to write things for them, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten better at recognizing the tangible value of my work and abilities. Somewhere along the line, I stumbled into one of these \u0026ldquo;career\u0026rdquo; things and it suits me. Who would have guessed?\nI don\u0026rsquo;t tend to write very much about what I do for my day job for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that I want this blog to be my own. Having said that, what I\u0026rsquo;m doing at work undeniably influences and shapes my thinking and writing here, and I don\u0026rsquo;t expect this to change. In the mean time, this whole \u0026ldquo;changing jobs and moving to New York,\u0026rdquo; moment in my life has a pretty significant impact in how I think about the future of my career, my writing, and possible graduate school trajectories. I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing a series of posts on the blog over the next couple of weeks on this topic. You\u0026rsquo;ve been warned.\nOnward and Upward!\nAs it turns out, the process of finding a new job has also made me a better editor of my own work. I hope this, and the residual improvements from the lessons I\u0026rsquo;ve learned at work are apparent in my writing here.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/changes-and-resetting/","summary":"A week ago, I quit my job.\nFor a number of reasons this shouldn\u0026rsquo;t come as a huge surprise: I\u0026rsquo;d been burning out on a 2-hour each way commute from Philadelphia where I live(d), nominally. The boyfriend in New York City, didn\u0026rsquo;t make things easier. And while, I really liked a lot of things about my job, I knew that it was getting to be time to move on. My last day was Friday.\nI spent the intervening time packing all of the stuff that\u0026rsquo;s going to New York into my car, and driving it to New York. For the rest of the week, I get to donate a bunch of my stuff that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dragging from place to place for the last 2 plus years. Add in some car maintenance, a few dinners and visits with friends, and a visit with my mother. She has awesomely agreed to drive said car back to the Midwest where it will be infinitely more useful.","title":"Changes and Resetting"},{"content":"Let us understand \u0026ldquo;social networks,\u0026rdquo; to mean networks of people interacting in a common group or substrate rather than the phenomena that exists on a certain class of websites (like Facebook): we can think of this as the \u0026ldquo;conventional sense\u0026rdquo; of the term.\nAs I watch Anonymous, the \u0026lsquo;hacktivist\u0026quot; group, to say nothing of the movements in Egypt and Tunisia, I\u0026rsquo;m fascinated by the way that such an ad hoc group can appear to be organized and coherent on the outside without appearing to have real leadership. External appearance and reality is different, of course, and I\u0026rsquo;m not drawing a direct parallel between what Anonymous is doing and what happened in Egypt, but there is a parallel. I think we\u0026rsquo;re living in a very interesting moment. New modes of political and social organizing do not manifest themselves often.\nWe still have a lot to learn about what\u0026rsquo;s happened recently in Egypt/Tunisia/Libya and just as much to learn about Anonymous. In a matter of months or years, we could very easily look back on this post and laugh at its naivete. Nevertheless, at least for the moment, there are a couple of big things that I think are interesting and important to think about:\nWe have movements that are lead, effectively, by groups rather than individuals, and if individuals are actually doing leadership work, they are not taking credit for that work. So movements that are not lead by egos. These are movements that are obviously technologically very aware, but not in a mainstream sort of way. Anonymous uses (small?) IRC networks and other collaborative tools that aren\u0026rsquo;t quite mainstream yet. The Egyptian protesters in the very beginning had UStream feeds of Tahrir Square, and I\u0026rsquo;d love to know how they were handling for internal coordination and communication. I think the way that these movements \u0026ldquo;do ideology,\u0026rdquo; is a bit unique and non conventional. I usually think of ideology as being a guiding strategy from which practice springs. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s happening here. The member activists, who are doing the work in these movements are not professional politicians or political workers. The more I ponder this, the more I realize how improbable these organizations are and the more I am impressed by the ability of these groups to be so effective. In addition to all of my other questions, I\u0026rsquo;m left wondering: how will this kind of leadership (or non-leadership) method and style influence other kinds of movements and projects.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/leadership-in-distributed-social-networks/","summary":"Let us understand \u0026ldquo;social networks,\u0026rdquo; to mean networks of people interacting in a common group or substrate rather than the phenomena that exists on a certain class of websites (like Facebook): we can think of this as the \u0026ldquo;conventional sense\u0026rdquo; of the term.\nAs I watch Anonymous, the \u0026lsquo;hacktivist\u0026quot; group, to say nothing of the movements in Egypt and Tunisia, I\u0026rsquo;m fascinated by the way that such an ad hoc group can appear to be organized and coherent on the outside without appearing to have real leadership. External appearance and reality is different, of course, and I\u0026rsquo;m not drawing a direct parallel between what Anonymous is doing and what happened in Egypt, but there is a parallel. I think we\u0026rsquo;re living in a very interesting moment. New modes of political and social organizing do not manifest themselves often.\nWe still have a lot to learn about what\u0026rsquo;s happened recently in Egypt/Tunisia/Libya and just as much to learn about Anonymous.","title":"Leadership in Distributed Social Networks"},{"content":"Over the past few weeks, I have developed (redeveloped?) the habit of pushing through a few hundred words of fiction writing a day on the train. If nothing else, this means I get a few pages done a day. I sometimes wish that I were able to write more, writing something is better than nothing, and I\u0026rsquo;m within a chapter and some change of the end of this beast, so I\u0026rsquo;ll take it. Some, dare I say most, days the writing is pretty easy, but it can get a bit rough. The problem is really when the writing is impossible. After all, if writing were easy, than we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t really think of it as work.\nMost of the time, I don\u0026rsquo;t feel \u0026ldquo;blocked,\u0026rdquo; but I got close last week. I got to the end of a section and I realized I was in a bit of a corner. I\u0026rsquo;d changed the order of a few little events, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t think it would change much.\nExcept it did, which left me pretty stuck.\nIt wasn\u0026rsquo;t an unsolvable problem, but because I was faced with writing a scene under a different set of assumptions than the one I\u0026rsquo;d been thinking about, I didn\u0026rsquo;t know how to proceed. My solution was to take a step back, think about things, and then redesign the next scene so that it accomplished what I needed. This took a day or two.\nMost of the time the only real marker for progress in writing is in \u0026ldquo;number of words recorded,\u0026rdquo; but the truth is this is the fun part of writing. The hard part is, and the part that I had gotten stuck in was, figuring out what\u0026rsquo;s worth writing. Here are some interesting lessons about writing for your consideration:\nSometimes the most productive thing you can do as a writer is to not write and spend time figure out what doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be said. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t make your writing longer, but it does make your writing more clear and more useful as a result.\nAs a corallary, sometimes the most important thing you can do to a text is remove stuff that is distracting.\nAlthough having too many \u0026ldquo;open projects\u0026rdquo; on your plate can make you feel like you\u0026rsquo;re spread too thin, it\u0026rsquo;s true that having a lot of things in the air increases your chance of getting thigns done, because having multiple projects in different stages lets you get more work done in general.\nSometimes the best way to solve these kinds of problems with writing is to take a break and go for a walk. Or a couple of walks. This is difficult to do on the train and can be hard to practice effectively in more conventional situations life. What\u0026rsquo;s the difference between taking a break to clear your mind, and breaking your writing ritual/habit? It\u0026rsquo;s hard to say.\nIf you do it right, the great thing is that after a break and some serious thinking time, a clear mind makes it possible to get past bigger challenges accomplish something important. I\u0026rsquo;ll leave the judgements of \u0026ldquo;how much time away is enough,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;how much time is too much,\u0026rdquo; to the reader (and myself!) as an exercise, but don\u0026rsquo;t always be afraid of taking a break.\nAnd if you won\u0026rsquo;t, I won\u0026rsquo;t either.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/breaks-and-dodging-writers-block/","summary":"Over the past few weeks, I have developed (redeveloped?) the habit of pushing through a few hundred words of fiction writing a day on the train. If nothing else, this means I get a few pages done a day. I sometimes wish that I were able to write more, writing something is better than nothing, and I\u0026rsquo;m within a chapter and some change of the end of this beast, so I\u0026rsquo;ll take it. Some, dare I say most, days the writing is pretty easy, but it can get a bit rough. The problem is really when the writing is impossible. After all, if writing were easy, than we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t really think of it as work.\nMost of the time, I don\u0026rsquo;t feel \u0026ldquo;blocked,\u0026rdquo; but I got close last week. I got to the end of a section and I realized I was in a bit of a corner. I\u0026rsquo;d changed the order of a few little events, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t think it would change much.","title":"Breaks and Dodging Writer's Block"},{"content":"I wish there was a good way, in the context of a blog post or some other convenient digital media, to regularly say: \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve done some things, you may be interested in them,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;d like to do some things, here are some notes of what I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to be working on in the next little bit.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to find a good way to get in the habit of writing this kind of post.\nMy instinct is to have something that I can template and automate pretty strongly so that I can mostly focus on doing things rather than writing blog posts about doing things. Or as is presently the case, blog posts blog posts about doing things. Oy. Ideas and suggestions on this topic would be most appreciated.\nSo what have I been up to? Well\u0026hellip;\nI got back into writing fiction this week after several weeks away. I was in a difficult part of the story and life got very\u0026hellip; full\u0026hellip; and I stopped writing regularly. These things happen, but it\u0026rsquo;s good to be back at least some.\nAfter the work I did just last night, I realize that I\u0026rsquo;m much closer to the end of this novel than I had thought. Even if things go very slowly for the next few months, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get this thing done by the end of May. I just have to write about a thousand words to finish Chapter 11, and there are three to four little vignettes in chat per 12 to wrap the whole thing up. And it\u0026rsquo;s going to be awesome.\nI\u0026rsquo;m super excited to be done with this project and to be able to spend some time cleaning it up and making it an awesome text, but also being able to work on making other things I\u0026rsquo;ve written better, and to be able to write new things, with my undivided attention.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve updated the /posts/anti-rodentia and the associated discussion page with some changes that I think make the system work much better.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve upgraded to Firefox 4, which I really like a lot: it\u0026rsquo;s much faster, it\u0026rsquo;s much more minimal (visually) which is great. Also all of my plugins and extensions work without issue. Good job!\nI went through a blast from my past when I pulled together the queer theories page, which does some--at this point utterly redundant--definitional work about what it means to be queer, and potential limitations on queer identity/politics in the era of a broadly defined queer.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started adding recurring tasks to keep me on track with writing and posting entries to this post. This means I don\u0026rsquo;t end up posting things months after I write them. As was the case with Mutt Sucks Less, a post I wrote many months ago and posted with some revisions last week.\nI made a folk page for frequent comm enter and discourse participant Matt Lundin that includes a snippet which makes a list (and RSS feed!) of all pages that link to \u0026ldquo;madalu\u0026rdquo; or are tagged with \u0026ldquo;madalu\u0026rdquo; (his handle). You can see this by editing the page, and use it when making your own folk pages. Which you should totally do.\nHave a good weekend!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/progress-reports/","summary":"I wish there was a good way, in the context of a blog post or some other convenient digital media, to regularly say: \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve done some things, you may be interested in them,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;d like to do some things, here are some notes of what I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to be working on in the next little bit.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to find a good way to get in the habit of writing this kind of post.\nMy instinct is to have something that I can template and automate pretty strongly so that I can mostly focus on doing things rather than writing blog posts about doing things. Or as is presently the case, blog posts blog posts about doing things. Oy. Ideas and suggestions on this topic would be most appreciated.\nSo what have I been up to? Well\u0026hellip;\nI got back into writing fiction this week after several weeks away.","title":"Progress Reports"},{"content":"At POSSCON there were a lot of talks, most of which did little to interest me. I don\u0026rsquo;t think this was the fault of the conference: I\u0026rsquo;m a weirdo. I tend to be developer-grade geeky, but am still not a developer and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise representative of the general audience. By the end, I was starting to think that the thing most people talk about at conferences isn\u0026rsquo;t very cutting edge. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s just POSSCON (surely not!) but I\u0026rsquo;ve not been to enough conferences to be able to speak definitively. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;d like to propose in open forum (i.e. this wiki,) a number of conference presentations that I\u0026rsquo;d like to see or would be willing to present.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re interested in any of these presentation, or want to help/inspire me to work up notes, please create or add to the wiki pages linked to below.\nEmacs Productivity and Production, Org-Mode and Beyond Emacs, with its extensive feature list, endless customizations, and arcane approach to user interface, is often the butt of many jokes. While some of this is certainly valid, there are many incredibly innovative and intensely useful pieces of software written for Emacs. This talk would center on the org-mode package, but would branch out to talk workflows and automation in Emacs and using Emacs to help people make awesome work.\nThe Year of The Linux Desktop: Amazing Window Manager Paradigms I\u0026rsquo;m always distraught by the way that discussion of \u0026ldquo;The Linux Desktop\u0026rdquo; revolves around convincing people that the major desktop environments (KDE/GNOME) either: are feature comparable to the Windows/OS X desktop or are able to \u0026ldquo;out-Windows\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;out-OS X\u0026rdquo; each other/Windows/OS X. Both of these propositions seem somewhat tenuous and unlikely to be convincing in the long run, and do little to inspire enthusiasm for the platform. This is sad because there is a lot of very interesting activity in the Linux desktop space. This talk would present and explore a couple of projects in the tiling window manger space and explain why this kind of software is what should drive adoption of the Linux desktop.\nCloud Independence, Infrastructure, and Administration The \u0026ldquo;cloud computing\u0026rdquo; paradigm and the shift to thinking about technology resources as service based raises some interesting questions about software/computing freedom and the shape of data ownership in the contemporary moment. This talk would address these questions, provide an overview of how to \u0026ldquo;go it alone,\u0026rdquo; and how to be responsible for managing and administering for your own personal \u0026ldquo;cloud infrastructure.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/talk-proposals/","summary":"At POSSCON there were a lot of talks, most of which did little to interest me. I don\u0026rsquo;t think this was the fault of the conference: I\u0026rsquo;m a weirdo. I tend to be developer-grade geeky, but am still not a developer and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise representative of the general audience. By the end, I was starting to think that the thing most people talk about at conferences isn\u0026rsquo;t very cutting edge. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s just POSSCON (surely not!) but I\u0026rsquo;ve not been to enough conferences to be able to speak definitively. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;d like to propose in open forum (i.e. this wiki,) a number of conference presentations that I\u0026rsquo;d like to see or would be willing to present.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re interested in any of these presentation, or want to help/inspire me to work up notes, please create or add to the wiki pages linked to below.\nEmacs Productivity and Production, Org-Mode and Beyond Emacs, with its extensive feature list, endless customizations, and arcane approach to user interface, is often the butt of many jokes.","title":"Talk Proposals"},{"content":"I use a mail client called mutt. The quality of this software may largely explain my opinion this post on the continued relevance of email\nI think mutt warrants a bit of extra attention for two reasons. First, because I think there are enough people out there who don\u0026rsquo;t use mutt who could and perhaps should, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to do a little encouraging; and second,like all fundamentally wonderful pieces of software, mutt can teach us something important about what makes technology great and pleasurable to use.\nWorking with any new kind of software is always a challenge. It is unfortunate that \u0026ldquo;features\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;functions\u0026rdquo; are the currency by which we judge software. Which is unfair to both the technology and ourselves, as the utility and quality of these features/functions depends on a number of subjective/individual factors. That said, with regards to mutt, my list is as follows:\nMutt is agnostic on the editor question. I suspect the fact that I could use any text editor I wanted to write email was probably my original reason for switching to mutt in the first place. It\u0026rsquo;s amazing what a sane editing experience can do for the overall experience of writing emails. Support for PGP/GPG encryption. Signing and encrypting emails with PGP is probably only a minor advantage, and of limited actual utility, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important and valuable to have this capability in your email client. After all, the success of PGP depends on a crowd effect: if it\u0026rsquo;s easy, sign all your email and hope that others will join you. Mutt makes this easy, which is a good thing indeed. Mutt operates independently of mail transmission protocols, which are universally flawed. In many ways, by not including support for mail transmission, mutt is more useful and more flexible than it would be if it was designed to handle mail transmission. Having said that, recent versions of mutt have internal support for IMAP/POP/SMUT. Not that I\u0026rsquo;d use it or recommend that you do use it and I suspect most mutt users don\u0026rsquo;t either. Mutt operates independently of mail storage format: you can maintain complete control over your mail data, and store email pretty much however you like. While this may be a burden to some, I\u0026rsquo;m somewhat controlling when it comes to data storage and preservation, and I think email archives are incredibly important. And I\u0026rsquo;m a weirdo about email storage. Mutt\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;sidebar patch\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t even a part of the core of the software, but it\u0026rsquo;s absolutely crucial to my experience of the software. Basically it gives you a heads-up-display of your mailboxes and tells you at a glance: if there are new messages and how many messages (new, flagged, read) are in an mailbox. While it eats into some screen real estate, it\u0026rsquo;s generally unused screen space and it\u0026rsquo;s more than worth the expenditure of pixels. Mutt runs on console and can be compiled on pretty much any contemporary UNIX-like system. Chances are there are packages for most operating system. So I feel pretty confident that I\u0026rsquo;ll pretty much be able to use mutt no matter what kind of system I end up using. Also console apps generally run pretty well in screen, which makes them accessible (and persistent) across the internet. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mutt-sucks-less/","summary":"I use a mail client called mutt. The quality of this software may largely explain my opinion this post on the continued relevance of email\nI think mutt warrants a bit of extra attention for two reasons. First, because I think there are enough people out there who don\u0026rsquo;t use mutt who could and perhaps should, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to do a little encouraging; and second,like all fundamentally wonderful pieces of software, mutt can teach us something important about what makes technology great and pleasurable to use.\nWorking with any new kind of software is always a challenge. It is unfortunate that \u0026ldquo;features\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;functions\u0026rdquo; are the currency by which we judge software. Which is unfair to both the technology and ourselves, as the utility and quality of these features/functions depends on a number of subjective/individual factors. That said, with regards to mutt, my list is as follows:\nMutt is agnostic on the editor question.","title":"Mutt Sucks Less"},{"content":"This is a post about mobile technology in an unconventional sense. I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably an extreme \u0026ldquo;mobile\u0026rdquo; technology user: I ride a lot commuter rail and use my laptop extensively on the train. Then, I work on a laptop all day. In the evening, I often do at least a little additional work, again on the same laptop. There is, after all, always writing (like this post!) to fill any remaining free time.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a terribly typical mobile user. My main \u0026ldquo;mobile device\u0026rdquo; is a little ThinkPad (and sometimes a larger ThinkPad,) running Linux and a lot of Lisp (emacs and otherwise.) It\u0026rsquo;s not ideal for every situation: there are times when I just can\u0026rsquo;t bare to open the laptop again or it\u0026rsquo;s unfeasible (and there\u0026rsquo;s always the Kindle for times like those.) Most of the time it works well.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s hard to omit discussion of the \u0026ldquo;tablet\u0026rdquo; and the iPad. For me, the fact that tablets are not general purpose computers is a huge deterrent. This is probably not the case for everyone, though there are lots of shades to this debate. I think the more interesting question is not \u0026ldquo;do people need general purpose tablets?\u0026rdquo; and more \u0026ldquo;how will more ubiquitous embeded-type systems effect the way people will approach \u0026lsquo;general purpose\u0026rsquo; computing environments\u0026rdquo; from here on out? Honestly, this in computing practice has already happened, but I think it will continue to pose important questions for users and developers as it continues.\nThe struggle, for me, revolves less around the question \u0026ldquo;how do I work remotely?\u0026rdquo; and more around \u0026ldquo;how do I also work when I\u0026rsquo;m at a desk?\u0026rdquo; The adjustment can be hard: For a while, I was so used to working on the train, and in random chairs, that I had a hard time focusing if the computer wasn\u0026rsquo;t actually on my lap. Bad ergonomics is only the start of this.\nThe current solution is to set up desks and workstations that use the same laptops and systems so that I\u0026rsquo;m not perpetually switching between fixed computers and mobile computers. I\u0026rsquo;m also keen for these desks to have their own appeal: bigger monitors, nice keyboards, and easy to attach power cords. I\u0026rsquo;ve also attempted to tie together all of the \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;d like to switch between laptop-mode and desk-mode,\u0026rdquo; functions (e.g. network connection, monitor attachment, window layout) into easy to trigger operations, so I can get started more quickly. Nice. Seamless. Efficient.\nThe lessons: There are many ways to maintain technical (cyborg) coherence despite/during geographical movement and sometimes that technology isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly cutting edge. Sometimes the best way to break yourself of a habit you don\u0026rsquo;t like is to play a game with yourself where you establish a more attractive option. Finally, a very small change or automation can be enough to take something difficult and make it much easier or something unpleasantly and make it workable.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/desks-and-stationary-mobility/","summary":"This is a post about mobile technology in an unconventional sense. I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably an extreme \u0026ldquo;mobile\u0026rdquo; technology user: I ride a lot commuter rail and use my laptop extensively on the train. Then, I work on a laptop all day. In the evening, I often do at least a little additional work, again on the same laptop. There is, after all, always writing (like this post!) to fill any remaining free time.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a terribly typical mobile user. My main \u0026ldquo;mobile device\u0026rdquo; is a little ThinkPad (and sometimes a larger ThinkPad,) running Linux and a lot of Lisp (emacs and otherwise.) It\u0026rsquo;s not ideal for every situation: there are times when I just can\u0026rsquo;t bare to open the laptop again or it\u0026rsquo;s unfeasible (and there\u0026rsquo;s always the Kindle for times like those.) Most of the time it works well.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s hard to omit discussion of the \u0026ldquo;tablet\u0026rdquo; and the iPad.","title":"Desks and Stationary Mobility"},{"content":"I realized that I made a lot of changes to the way my websites were arranged and worked recently, and I thought that it would be good to write a few about the hottest new thing, and my rationale for messing everything up. Again.\nBasically, I took the CriticalFutures.com site, and turned it into the posts section here, moving a bunch of content back to tychoish.com that used to be here. This time, everything is powered by ikiwiki, and while I callously dropped all comments1, I think the move is one of general and overall improvement.\nAt the same time, I think there are challenges. Rather than comment pages, there\u0026rsquo;s now a \u0026ldquo;discourse\u0026rdquo; link at the top left of the pages, which lets you sign in and create a new page for discussion related to the page you\u0026rsquo;re currently viewing. I liked the name \u0026ldquo;discourse\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;discussion,\u0026rdquo; but I fear there may be some confusion. I can change it over back without much issue, if any one feels strongly.\nMostly, it\u0026rsquo;s still the same blog that it\u0026rsquo;s always been, and I\u0026rsquo;m having fun with it. The essay/rhizome divide may turn out to be tenuous in the long term, and it might disappear, but for now it makes sense. I\u0026rsquo;ve not been doing as many wiki-based things, though I have worked on a queer theories page, and the technical writing section is something that I\u0026rsquo;m pleased with. Wikis are much more difficult to use and produce than one would initially guess. The concept is simple, the software is simple, and the work is remarkably time consuming and difficult to do right. And then there\u0026rsquo;s the problem of contributors.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know how it\u0026rsquo;s going to sort out, but I look forward to hearing from you, and making stuff on this domain.\nWhich totally sucks, but I had already given into using disqus, the migration would be really difficult, and the truth be told, I\u0026rsquo;d much rather participate in discussions that involved the creation of new wiki pages, and that involved invitations to email lists, and direct emails contact over IRC or IM. Maybe this is more fragmented, and maybe I\u0026rsquo;m shooting nascent conversation in the foot before it has a chance to get off the ground, but I think \u0026ldquo;conversation at any cost,\u0026rdquo; is not the best model for a community.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/long-live-the-tycho-wiki/","summary":"I realized that I made a lot of changes to the way my websites were arranged and worked recently, and I thought that it would be good to write a few about the hottest new thing, and my rationale for messing everything up. Again.\nBasically, I took the CriticalFutures.com site, and turned it into the posts section here, moving a bunch of content back to tychoish.com that used to be here. This time, everything is powered by ikiwiki, and while I callously dropped all comments1, I think the move is one of general and overall improvement.\nAt the same time, I think there are challenges. Rather than comment pages, there\u0026rsquo;s now a \u0026ldquo;discourse\u0026rdquo; link at the top left of the pages, which lets you sign in and create a new page for discussion related to the page you\u0026rsquo;re currently viewing. I liked the name \u0026ldquo;discourse\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;discussion,\u0026rdquo; but I fear there may be some confusion.","title":"Long Live the Tycho Wiki"},{"content":"I recently attended POSSCON as part of my day-job. I don\u0026rsquo;t usually blog directly about this kind of stuff (\u0026ldquo;You like to keep your church and state separate,\u0026rdquo; a fellow attendee said, which fits.) But, I had a number of awesome conversations with the speakers, attendees and sponsors, that may spawn a series of brief posts here. POSSCON is a regional open source convention that drew developers, leaders of informational technology departments, and IT consultants of various types.\nI had a number of conversations that revolved around the adoption of open source in opposition to proprietary systems. People asked questions like \u0026ldquo;what do we have to do to get more people to use open source software?\u0026rdquo; and many people apologized for doing work with proprietary software for mostly economic reasons (e.g. \u0026ldquo;I have a .NET development job,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;people need windows administration and I can\u0026rsquo;t turn away work.\u0026rdquo;)\nThis led me to have one of three reactions:\n1. Working with any specific (proprietary) technology, particularly because you have to make ends meet should never require excusing. There are cases where \u0026ldquo;working with proprietary technology,\u0026rdquo; may more like \u0026ldquo;building a business model on proprietary technology,\u0026rdquo; and that sort of thing needs to be watched out for, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s morally ambiguous to make a living.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the success of technology, particularly open source, is determined solely on the basis of adoption rates. Successful technology is technology that efficiently allows people/cyborgs to do work, not overwhelmingly ubiquitous technology.\n3. In many many contexts, open source technology has triumphed over proprietary alternatives: Linux-based systems are the dominant UNIX-like operating system. OpenSSH is the dominant SSH implementation (and remote terminal protocol/implementation). Darwin/FreeBSD is incredibly successful (as Mac OS X.) Other domains where open source packages have very high (dominating) adoption rates: OpenSSL, gcc, perl/python/php/ruby (web development), Apache/Lighttpd/nginx (web servers) etc.\nWhile I think the end-user desktop isn\u0026rsquo;t unimportant, I think there may be merit in playing to the strengths of open source (servers, infrastructure, developers.) Additionally, it seems more productive to have the discussion about \u0026ldquo;how do we advance open source,\u0026rdquo; couched in terms of a battle for technological dominance in which open source has already won.\nAnd Free Software/Open Source has won. While there remain sectors and domains where non-free software remains prevalent and business models that don\u0026rsquo;t value user\u0026rsquo;s freedom, I think that most people who know anything about technology will say that all paths forward lead toward a greater level of software freedom.\nMaybe this is a symptom of the situation in which I work and maybe I\u0026rsquo;m being too optimistic, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think so. Thoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/inevitability-of-open-source/","summary":"I recently attended POSSCON as part of my day-job. I don\u0026rsquo;t usually blog directly about this kind of stuff (\u0026ldquo;You like to keep your church and state separate,\u0026rdquo; a fellow attendee said, which fits.) But, I had a number of awesome conversations with the speakers, attendees and sponsors, that may spawn a series of brief posts here. POSSCON is a regional open source convention that drew developers, leaders of informational technology departments, and IT consultants of various types.\nI had a number of conversations that revolved around the adoption of open source in opposition to proprietary systems. People asked questions like \u0026ldquo;what do we have to do to get more people to use open source software?\u0026rdquo; and many people apologized for doing work with proprietary software for mostly economic reasons (e.g. \u0026ldquo;I have a .NET development job,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;people need windows administration and I can\u0026rsquo;t turn away work.\u0026rdquo;)\nThis led me to have one of three reactions:","title":"The Inevitability of Open Source"},{"content":"I hate computer mice. A lot.\nThe closest I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to liking a pointing device is an acquiescence to the TrackPoint on the laptops I use. That\u0026rsquo;s the little red dot in the middle of the ThinkPad keyboards. My problem with computer mice is the context switch between \u0026ldquo;typing-mode\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;mousing-mode.\u0026rdquo; Moving between the modes is jarring and inefficient. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using StumpWM and other similar window managers for years now and as my need for the mouse decreases my irritation with needing to use a mouse increases.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling for a few months with a bit of a problem: Several months ago I got a new bigger ThinkPad, a T510, while it has my beloved TrackPoint there is also a TouchPad. After years of only using laptops with the red dot, this was very disconcerting. How did I keep from triggering the touchpad with my wrists? Couldn\u0026rsquo;t I just turn the damn thing off?\nI did, and everyone who tried to use the computer after that was dismayed, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t care. Except, I found out that, apparently, disabling the touchpad also disables all non-TrackPoint pointers. So when I plugged the laptop into the docking station, the external mouse didn\u0026rsquo;t work.\nBlast.\nThe solution to disabling and enabling the mouse on the fly, that follows isn\u0026rsquo;t as pretty as I\u0026rsquo;d like, but it works.\nUPDATE: Turns out that my original procedure only appears to work. I\u0026rsquo;ve made the following modification to the toggle-mouse script, using a stock xorg.conf file.\nFile: /usr/bin/toggle-mouse\n#!/bin/sh TOUCHPAD=`xinput list | egrep \u0026ldquo;TouchPad\u0026rdquo; | sed -r \u0026rsquo;s/.id=([0-9]).*$/1/\u0026rsquo;`\nif [ [xinput list-props \u0026ldquo;$TOUCHPAD\u0026rdquo; | egrep -o \u0026ldquo;[0-9]$\u0026rdquo; | head -n1]{.title-ref} -eq 0 ]; then xinput set-prop \u0026ldquo;$TOUCHPAD\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Device Enabled\u0026rdquo; 1 elif [ [xinput list-props \u0026ldquo;$TOUCHPAD\u0026rdquo; | egrep -o \u0026ldquo;[0-9]$\u0026rdquo; | head -n1]{.title-ref} -eq 1 ]; then xinput set-prop \u0026ldquo;$TOUCHPAD\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Device Enabled\u0026rdquo; 0 else xmpp-notify \u0026ldquo;Your mouse is probably screwed up somehow\u0026rdquo; fi\nTest the output of \u0026ldquo;xinput list | egrep \u0026quot;TouchPad\u0026quot; | sed -r 's/.*id=([0-9]*).*$/\\1/'\u0026rdquo;, and inspect \u0026ldquo;xinput list\u0026rdquo; to make sure that the value of $TOUCHPAD is the xorg id of the touchpad (or other device) that you want to disable.\nI\u0026rsquo;d actually recommend not putting this in /usr/bin/, but just so long as it\u0026rsquo;s in the path. Then run toggle-mouse at the command line. You may need to run this as root-suid, for your system system is configured. Tweak the TOUCHPAD variable as needed.\nIf you have a better solution, I would be terribly interested in hearing about it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/anti-rodentia/","summary":"I hate computer mice. A lot.\nThe closest I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to liking a pointing device is an acquiescence to the TrackPoint on the laptops I use. That\u0026rsquo;s the little red dot in the middle of the ThinkPad keyboards. My problem with computer mice is the context switch between \u0026ldquo;typing-mode\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;mousing-mode.\u0026rdquo; Moving between the modes is jarring and inefficient. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using StumpWM and other similar window managers for years now and as my need for the mouse decreases my irritation with needing to use a mouse increases.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling for a few months with a bit of a problem: Several months ago I got a new bigger ThinkPad, a T510, while it has my beloved TrackPoint there is also a TouchPad. After years of only using laptops with the red dot, this was very disconcerting. How did I keep from triggering the touchpad with my wrists? Couldn\u0026rsquo;t I just turn the damn thing off?","title":"Anti-Rodentia"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m always interested in how the lessons that people learn in IT trickle down to other kinds of work and problems. This is one of the reasons that I1 am so interested in what developers are interested in: if you want to know what\u0026rsquo;s happening in the technology space, it\u0026rsquo;s best to start at the top of the food chain. For this reason this article from IBM, which addresses the use of IT/Data Center management tools outside of the data center was incredibly interesting for me.\nWhen you think about it, it makes sense. IT involves a lot of physical assets, even more virtual assets, and when projects and systems grow big enough, it can be easy to lose track of what you have, much less what state it\u0026rsquo;s in at any given time. Generalized, this is a prevalent issue in many kinds of complex systems.\nAs an aside, I\u0026rsquo;m a little interested when software that provides asset management and monitoring features, will scale down to the personal level. That\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting too. There are the beginnings of this kind of thing (e.g. iTunes, and git-annex) but only the beginnings.\nI\u0026rsquo;m left with the following questions:\nObviously moving from managing and monitoring networked devices to managing and monitoring infrastructure objects like water filtration systems, storm water drainage, the electrical grid, snow removal, etc. presents a serious challenge for the developers of these tools, and this adaptation will likely improve the tools. I\u0026rsquo;m more interested in how cities improve in this equation. And not simply with regards to operating efficiencies. What do we learn from all this hard data on cities? Will cities actually be able to become more efficient, or will they need to expand to include another layer of management management, that nullifies the advances. There are also concerns about additional efficiency increasing the \u0026ldquo;carrying capacity of cities,\u0026rdquo; into unsustainable levels. Can the conclusions from automated city-wide reporting lead to advancements in quality of service, if we\u0026rsquo;re better at determining defective practices and equipment. In this vein, how cities share data between them will also be quite interesting. I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear from you!\nRedMonk also use a similar argument.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/city-infrastructure/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m always interested in how the lessons that people learn in IT trickle down to other kinds of work and problems. This is one of the reasons that I1 am so interested in what developers are interested in: if you want to know what\u0026rsquo;s happening in the technology space, it\u0026rsquo;s best to start at the top of the food chain. For this reason this article from IBM, which addresses the use of IT/Data Center management tools outside of the data center was incredibly interesting for me.\nWhen you think about it, it makes sense. IT involves a lot of physical assets, even more virtual assets, and when projects and systems grow big enough, it can be easy to lose track of what you have, much less what state it\u0026rsquo;s in at any given time. Generalized, this is a prevalent issue in many kinds of complex systems.\nAs an aside, I\u0026rsquo;m a little interested when software that provides asset management and monitoring features, will scale down to the personal level.","title":"City Infrastructure"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;What do you do?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a technical writer.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Do you write other stuff?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;A bit, sometimes.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Poetry?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;No Poetry.\u0026rdquo; I laugh.\n\u0026ldquo;Fiction?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, Some.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Do you read philosophy too?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;A bit.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, good! Materalist or Idealist?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Materialist.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Who do you read?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a bit of an unreformed Deluzian.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Deleuze wasn\u0026rsquo;t a materialist.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, but he wanted to be. Really bad.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;There\u0026rsquo;s that. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading Hegel recently.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, really.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/do-you-read-philosophy/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;What do you do?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a technical writer.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Do you write other stuff?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;A bit, sometimes.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Poetry?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;No Poetry.\u0026rdquo; I laugh.\n\u0026ldquo;Fiction?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, Some.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Do you read philosophy too?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;A bit.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, good! Materalist or Idealist?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Materialist.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Who do you read?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a bit of an unreformed Deluzian.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Deleuze wasn\u0026rsquo;t a materialist.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, but he wanted to be. Really bad.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;There\u0026rsquo;s that. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading Hegel recently.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, really.\u0026rdquo;","title":"Do You Read Philosophy?"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m a writer. I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer, with an open text editing program, and I write things that hopefully--after a bit of editorial work--will be useful, enlightening, and/or entertaining as appropriate. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing this since I was a teenager and frankly it never seemed to be particularly notable a skill. The fact that I came of age with the Internet a member of its native participant-driven textual culture had a profound effect, without question. This is a difficult lineage to manage and integrate.\nObviously I\u0026rsquo;m conflicted: on the one hand I think that the Internet has been great for allowing people like me to figure out how to write. I am forever thankful for the opportunities and conversations that the Internet has provided for me as a writer. At the same time, the Internet, and particularly the emergence of \u0026ldquo;Social Media\u0026rdquo; as a phenomena complicates what I do and how my work is valued.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s be totally clear. I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly saying \u0026ldquo;Dear Internet, Leave content generation to the professionals,\u0026rdquo; but rather something closer to \u0026ldquo;Dear Internet, Let\u0026rsquo;s not distribute the responsibility of content generation too thinly, and have it come back to bite us in the ass.\u0026rdquo; Let me elaborate these fears and concerns a bit:\nI\u0026rsquo;m afraid that as it becomes easier and easier to generate content, more will start creating things, and there will be more and more text and that will lead to all sorts of market-related problems, as in a vicious cycle. If we get too used to crowd sourcing content, it\u0026rsquo;s not clear to me that the idea of \u0026ldquo;paying writers for their efforts,\u0026rdquo; will endure. Furthermore, I worry that as the amount of content grows, it will be harder for new content to get exposure and the general audience will become so fragmented that it will be increasingly difficult to generate income from such niche groups.\nSome of these fears are probably realistic: figuring out how we will need to work in order to our jobs in an uncertain future is always difficult. Some are not: writing has never been a particularly profitable or economically viable project, and capturing audience is arguably easier in the networked era.\nThe answer to these questions is universally: we\u0026rsquo;ll have to wait and see, and in the mean time, experimenting with different and possibly better ways of working. My apologies for this rip-off, but it\u0026rsquo;s better to live and work as if we\u0026rsquo;re living in the early days of an exciting new era, rather than the dying days of a faltering regime.\nPerhaps the more interesting implication of this doesn\u0026rsquo;t stem from asking \u0026ldquo;how will today\u0026rsquo;s (and yesterday\u0026rsquo;s) writers survive in the forthcoming age,\u0026rdquo; but rather \u0026ldquo;how do these changes affect writing itself.\u0026rdquo; If I don\u0026rsquo;t have an answer to the economic question, I definitely don\u0026rsquo;t have an answer to the literary question. I\u0026rsquo;m hoping some of you do.\nAs an interesting peak behind the curtain, this post was mostly inspired as a reaction to this piece of popular criticism that drove me batty. It\u0026rsquo;s not a bad piece and I think my objections are largely style and form related rather than political. Perhaps I\u0026rsquo;m responding to the tropes of fan writing, and in retrospect my critique of this piece isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly relevant here. But that article might provide good fodder for discussion. I look forward to your thoughts in comments or on a wiki page.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/profesional-content-generation/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m a writer. I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer, with an open text editing program, and I write things that hopefully--after a bit of editorial work--will be useful, enlightening, and/or entertaining as appropriate. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing this since I was a teenager and frankly it never seemed to be particularly notable a skill. The fact that I came of age with the Internet a member of its native participant-driven textual culture had a profound effect, without question. This is a difficult lineage to manage and integrate.\nObviously I\u0026rsquo;m conflicted: on the one hand I think that the Internet has been great for allowing people like me to figure out how to write. I am forever thankful for the opportunities and conversations that the Internet has provided for me as a writer. At the same time, the Internet, and particularly the emergence of \u0026ldquo;Social Media\u0026rdquo; as a phenomena complicates what I do and how my work is valued.","title":"Professional Content Generation"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s sometimes easy to forget all of the little things that I do during the week, and how they add up to something of note. In the moment--any moment--most things seem much smaller and much less important than they do with a little bit of perspective and when viewed out of context with coordinating achievements. So here\u0026rsquo;s the highlights from last week:\nI gave up on the \u0026ldquo;having two sites to maintain thing,\u0026rdquo; and have merged Critical Futures into the tychoish.com blog/wiki. I really like this, and it gave me some time to get elbows deep into the wiki system, which means things work better, the display is a bit cleaner, my life is easier, and I\u0026rsquo;m very happy with it. Also, as part of this process I\u0026rsquo;ve been revising the index page, and I think it is in a state that I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with.\nSome dancing friends on Facebook said \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if there was a wiki for contra dancers.\u0026rdquo; Now there is. Contra Dance Wiki is there for you all if you want it. I\u0026rsquo;ve done some preparatory work on the index page, and I\u0026rsquo;ll continue to add things as I can.\nThe work I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing in the last few weeks with ikiwiki, both for tychoish and now for the CDW means that I\u0026rsquo;m really close to being able to share all of the assorted templates and configuration files I use to make this work. It\u0026rsquo;s all in the git repository for tychoish, but I\u0026rsquo;m going to pull together a more generic version so people can get started easier. It might also make sense to write a deployment script of sorts. We\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nI meant to post this on Friday, but posted my review of maple morris, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want that to linger. In any case, I had a brilliant weekend singing (and dancing) in Western Massachusetts. It has however left me a bit under the weather, so I\u0026rsquo;m spending a day recovering and doing some writing. Good stuff there. I\u0026rsquo;ll write about WMSHC soon.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/news-fit-to-sing/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s sometimes easy to forget all of the little things that I do during the week, and how they add up to something of note. In the moment--any moment--most things seem much smaller and much less important than they do with a little bit of perspective and when viewed out of context with coordinating achievements. So here\u0026rsquo;s the highlights from last week:\nI gave up on the \u0026ldquo;having two sites to maintain thing,\u0026rdquo; and have merged Critical Futures into the tychoish.com blog/wiki. I really like this, and it gave me some time to get elbows deep into the wiki system, which means things work better, the display is a bit cleaner, my life is easier, and I\u0026rsquo;m very happy with it. Also, as part of this process I\u0026rsquo;ve been revising the index page, and I think it is in a state that I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with.\nSome dancing friends on Facebook said \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if there was a wiki for contra dancers.","title":"News, Fit to Sing"},{"content":"A few weekends ago, I went to very weird get together. The week before I went to upstate New York to a festival that drew 5000 attendees. Then, I went to Washington, DC to dance with 24 or 25 other people from across the country and Canada. I think of it as \u0026ldquo;my generation,\u0026rdquo; Morris dance gathering.\nThis May marks my 10th anniversary of being a Morris dancer. I\u0026rsquo;ve spent most of that time, easily being twenty years away from the next-youngest Morris dancer on my team. Morris isn\u0026rsquo;t aging quite that fast: but there are a lot of quirky things that happen given the small sample sizes.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been involved in the folk world for years. Lots of folk dance and traditional music. I\u0026rsquo;m so accustomed to this, that I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure what people who aren\u0026rsquo;t do with their time. When I think about other communities, I always reach back to experiences and phenomena that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen in the folk world.\nWhile I grew up in the folk dance world, I\u0026rsquo;m coming to terms with a couple of things: First, folk communities are different in different parts of the country/world, and the community in Boston (or New York, or Philadelphia) is very different from what I grew up with. Second, I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that while I\u0026rsquo;m \u0026ldquo;a young person\u0026rdquo; who grew up with music and dance, I\u0026rsquo;m no longer \u0026ldquo;a folk dance kid,\u0026rdquo; (and that\u0026rsquo;s a nifty thing to experience.)\nGiven this, I\u0026rsquo;ve had the following Morris related thoughts, that seem worth recording:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really nice to be part of a single age cohort in this activity, mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve not had significant opportunity to dance with people in my general age group. I quite enjoy being more than just a familiar face in a contra dance line, or someone that you see across the square when singing sacred harp. These weekends always challenge me to be a better dancer, and make me realize that I need to focus and work on certain aspects of my dancing. While it\u0026rsquo;s in-ideal to have gatherings capped at really small numbers, having a small group means a greater strength of connection between everyone, and it means that a few people can do the organizing work without much institutional/organizational overhead. That\u0026rsquo;s really cool. Once again, my motto is \u0026ldquo;you don\u0026rsquo;t have to do everything.\u0026rdquo; Which is particularly difficult around Morris. But I think by avoiding overdoing it I\u0026rsquo;m able to: avoid injury and have greater successes at the things I do try. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that. I\u0026rsquo;m young and I hope to dance for many years to come, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be time enough for Sherborne then. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/maple-morris-review/","summary":"A few weekends ago, I went to very weird get together. The week before I went to upstate New York to a festival that drew 5000 attendees. Then, I went to Washington, DC to dance with 24 or 25 other people from across the country and Canada. I think of it as \u0026ldquo;my generation,\u0026rdquo; Morris dance gathering.\nThis May marks my 10th anniversary of being a Morris dancer. I\u0026rsquo;ve spent most of that time, easily being twenty years away from the next-youngest Morris dancer on my team. Morris isn\u0026rsquo;t aging quite that fast: but there are a lot of quirky things that happen given the small sample sizes.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been involved in the folk world for years. Lots of folk dance and traditional music. I\u0026rsquo;m so accustomed to this, that I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure what people who aren\u0026rsquo;t do with their time. When I think about other communities, I always reach back to experiences and phenomena that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen in the folk world.","title":"Maple Morris Review"},{"content":"I went to the Dance Flurry a couple of weeks ago (!) and I wanted to write a few notes here about the experience, and a little bit of reflection. I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll spare me the indulgence.\nA year ago, I was pretty new to the East Coast: I didn\u0026rsquo;t really know people, and while I\u0026rsquo;d been dancing for a while and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t a bad dancer by any means, but I wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite comfortable in my own skin in big dance events.\nThis year, many things were different. I\u0026rsquo;d been to a number of other important regional events: I knew more people, I knew the bands and the callers, I knew the venue, and I knew what to expect.\nIt was great. I got to dance with friends that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen in months. I got to dance to great bands. The callers were top notch, and there was never a shortage of great ways to spend my time.\nMy motto for the weekend was \u0026ldquo;you don\u0026rsquo;t have to do everything.\u0026rdquo; Which meant not staying until 1am, just because there was a dance going on; or not showing up at 9am because that\u0026rsquo;s when things started. Prevailing sanity is an amazing thing.\nIt meant that I didn\u0026rsquo;t hurt myself; I didn\u0026rsquo;t come back from the vacation more tired than I was when I left; and I still had a great time.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s amazing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dance-flurry-review/","summary":"I went to the Dance Flurry a couple of weeks ago (!) and I wanted to write a few notes here about the experience, and a little bit of reflection. I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll spare me the indulgence.\nA year ago, I was pretty new to the East Coast: I didn\u0026rsquo;t really know people, and while I\u0026rsquo;d been dancing for a while and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t a bad dancer by any means, but I wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite comfortable in my own skin in big dance events.\nThis year, many things were different. I\u0026rsquo;d been to a number of other important regional events: I knew more people, I knew the bands and the callers, I knew the venue, and I knew what to expect.\nIt was great. I got to dance with friends that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen in months. I got to dance to great bands. The callers were top notch, and there was never a shortage of great ways to spend my time.","title":"Dance Flurry, Review"},{"content":"With the new laptop, I once again have more than one computer, and with it a need to synchronize the current state of my work. This is a crucial function, and pretty difficult to do right: I\u0026rsquo;ve had multiple systems before and condensed everything into one laptop because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to deal with the headache of sitting down in front of a computer and cursing the fact that the one thing that I needed to work on was stuck somewhere that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t get to.\nI store most of my files and projects in git version control repositories for a number of reasons, though the fact that this enables a pretty natural backup and synchronization system, was a significant inspiration for working this way. But capability is more than a stones throw from working implementation. The last time I tried to manage using more than one computer on a regular basis, I thought \u0026ldquo;oh, it\u0026rsquo;s all in git, I\u0026rsquo;ll just push and pull those repositories around and it\u0026rsquo;ll be dandy.\u0026rdquo; It wasn\u0026rsquo;t. The problem is, if you keep different projects in different repositories (as you should, when using git,) remembering to commit and push all repositories before moving between computers is a headache.\nIn the end synchronization is a rote task, and it seems like the kind of thing that was worth automating. There are a number of different approaches to this and what I\u0026rsquo;ve done is some very basic bash/zsh script1 that takes care of all of this syncing process. I call it \u0026ldquo;git sync,\u0026rdquo; you may use all or some of this as you see fit.\ngit sync lib The first piece of the puzzle is a few variables and functions. I decided to store this in multiple files for two reasons: First, I wanted access to the plain functions in the shell. Second, I wanted the ability to roll per-machine configurations using the components described within. Consider the source.\nThe only really complex assumption here is that, given a number git repositories, there are: some that you want to commit and publish changes too regularly and automatically, some that you want to fetch new updates for regularly but don\u0026rsquo;t want to commit, and a bunch that you want to monitor but probably want to interact with manually. In my case: I want to monitor a large list of repositories, automatically fetch changes from a subset of those repositories, and automatically publish changes changes to a subset of the previous set.\nInsert the following line into your .zshrc:\nsource /path/to/git-sync-lib Then configure the beginning of the git-sync-lib file with references to your git repositories. When complete, you will have access to the following functions in your shell: gss (provides a system-wide git status,) autoci (automatically pulls new content and commits local changes to the appropriate repository,) and syncup (pulls new content from the repositories and publishes any committed changes.\nsyncup and autoci do their work in a pretty straightforward for [...] done loop, which is great, unless you need some repositories to only publish in some situations (i.e. when you\u0026rsquo;re connected to a specific VPN.) You can modify this section to account for this case, take the following basic form:\nsyncup(){ CURRENT=`pwd` for repo in $force_sync_repo; do cd $repo; echo -- syncing $repo git pull -q git push -q done cd $CURRENT } Simply insert some logic into the `for`` loop, like so:\nfor repo in $force_sync_repo; do cd $repo; if [ $repo = ~/work ]; then if [ `netcfg current | grep -c \u0026quot;vpn\u0026quot;` = \u0026quot;1\u0026quot; ]; then echo -- syncing $repo on work vpn git pull -q git push -q dev internal else echo -- $repo skipped because lacking vpn connection fi elif [ $repo = ~/personal ]; then if [ `netcfg current | grep -c \u0026quot;homevpn\u0026quot;` = \u0026quot;1\u0026quot; ]; then echo -- syncing $repo with homevpn git pull -q git push -q else echo -- $repo skipped because lacking homevpn connection fi else echo -- syncing $repo git pull -q git push -q fi done Basically, for two repositories we test to make sure that a particular network profile is connected before operating on those repositories. All other operations are as in the first example. I use the output of \u0026ldquo;netcfg current\u0026rdquo;, which is an ArchLinux network configuration tool that I use. You will need to use another test, if you are not using Arch Linux.\ngit sync You can use the functions provided by the \u0026ldquo;library\u0026rdquo; and skip this part if you don\u0026rsquo;t need to automate your backup and syncing process. The whole point of this project was specifically to automate this kind of thing, so this--though short--is kind of the cool part. You can download git sync here.\nPut this script in your $PATH, (e.g. \u0026ldquo;/usr/bin\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;/usr/bin/local\u0026rdquo;; I keep a \u0026ldquo;~/bin\u0026rdquo; directory for personal scripts like this in my path, and you might enjoy.) You will then have access to the following commands at any shell prompt:\ngit-sync backup git-sync half git-sync full Backup calls a function in git-sync to backup some site-specific files to a git repository (e.g. crontabs, etc.) The half sync only downloads new changes, and is meant to run silently on a regular interval: I cron this every five minutes. The full sync runs the backup, commits local changes, downloads new changes, and sends me an xmpp message to log when it finishes successfully: I run this a couple of times an hour. But there\u0026rsquo;s an exception: if the laptop isn\u0026rsquo;t connected to a Wifi or ethernet network, then it skips sync options. If you\u0026rsquo;re offline, you\u0026rsquo;re not syncing. If you\u0026rsquo;re connected on 3g tethering, you\u0026rsquo;re not syncing.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s it! Feedback is of course welcome, and if anyone wants these files in their own git repository so they can modify and hack them up, I\u0026rsquo;m more than willing to provide that, just ask.\nOnward and Upward!\nI wrote this as a bash script but discovered that something with the way I was handling arrays was apparently a zsh-ism. Not a big fuss for me, because I use zsh on all my machines, but if you don\u0026rsquo;t use zsh or don\u0026rsquo;t have it installed, you\u0026rsquo;ll need to modify something in the array or install zsh (which you might enjoy anyway.)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-sync/","summary":"With the new laptop, I once again have more than one computer, and with it a need to synchronize the current state of my work. This is a crucial function, and pretty difficult to do right: I\u0026rsquo;ve had multiple systems before and condensed everything into one laptop because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to deal with the headache of sitting down in front of a computer and cursing the fact that the one thing that I needed to work on was stuck somewhere that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t get to.\nI store most of my files and projects in git version control repositories for a number of reasons, though the fact that this enables a pretty natural backup and synchronization system, was a significant inspiration for working this way. But capability is more than a stones throw from working implementation. The last time I tried to manage using more than one computer on a regular basis, I thought \u0026ldquo;oh, it\u0026rsquo;s all in git, I\u0026rsquo;ll just push and pull those repositories around and it\u0026rsquo;ll be dandy.","title":"Git Sync"},{"content":"Sorry for the lame title. I was thinking the other day, about how awesome SSH is, and how it\u0026rsquo;s probably one of the most crucial pieces of technology that I use every single day. Here\u0026rsquo;s a list of 10 things that I think are particularly awesome and perhaps a bit off the beaten path.\nUpdate: (2011-09-19) There are some user-submitted ssh-tricks on the wiki now! Please feel free to add your favorites. Also the hacker news thread might be helpful for some.\nSSH Config I used SSH regularly for years before I learned about the config file, that you can create at ~/.ssh/config to tell how you want ssh to behave.\nConsider the following configuration example:\nHost example.com *.example.net User root Host dev.example.net dev.example.net User shared Port 220 Host test.example.com User root UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null StrictHostKeyChecking no Host t HostName test.example.org Host * Compression yes CompressionLevel 7 Cipher blowfish ServerAliveInterval 600 ControlMaster auto ControlPath /tmp/ssh-%r@%h:%p I\u0026rsquo;ll cover some of the settings in the \u0026ldquo;Host *\u0026rdquo; block, which apply to all outgoing ssh connections, in other items in this post, but basically you can use this to create shortcuts with the ssh command, to control what username is used to connect to a given host, what port number, if you need to connect to an ssh daemon running on a non-standard port. See \u0026ldquo;man ssh_config\u0026rdquo; for more information.\nControl Master/Control Path This is probably the coolest thing that I know about in SSH. Set the \u0026ldquo;ControlMaster\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;ControlPath\u0026rdquo; as above in the ssh configuration. Anytime you try to connect to a host that matches that configuration a \u0026ldquo;master session\u0026rdquo; is created. Then, subsequent connections to the same host will reuse the same master connection rather than attempt to renegotiate and create a separate connection. The result is greater speed less overhead.\nThis can cause problems if you\u0026rsquo; want to do port forwarding, as this must be configured on the original connection, otherwise it won\u0026rsquo;t work.\nSSH Keys While ControlMaster/ControlPath is the coolest thing you can do with SSH, key-based authentication is probably my favorite. Basically, rather than force users to authenticate with passwords, you can use a secure cryptographic method to gain (and grant) access to a system. Deposit a public key on servers far and wide, while keeping a \u0026ldquo;private\u0026rdquo; key secure on your local machine. And it just works.\nYou can generate multiple keys, to make it more difficult for an intruder to gain access to multiple machines by breaching a specific key, or machine. You can specify specific keys and key files to be used when connected to specific hosts in the ssh config file (see above.) Keys can also be (optionally) encrypted locally with a pass-code, for additional security. Once I understood how secure the system is (or can be), I found my self thinking \u0026ldquo;I wish you could use this for more than just SSH.\u0026rdquo;\nSSH Agent Most people start using SSH keys because they\u0026rsquo;re easier and it means that you don\u0026rsquo;t have to enter a password every time that you want to connect to a host. But the truth is that in most cases you want to have unencrypted private keys that have meaningful access to systems because once someone has access to a copy of the private key the have full access to the system. That\u0026rsquo;s not good.\nBut the truth is that typing in passwords is a pain, so there\u0026rsquo;s a solution: the ssh-agent. Basically one authenticates to the ssh-agent locally, which decrypts the key and does some magic, so that then whenever the key is needed for the connecting to a host you don\u0026rsquo;t have to enter your password. ssh-agent manages the local encryption on your key for the current session.\nSSH Reagent I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where I found this amazing little function but it\u0026rsquo;s great. Typically, ssh-agents are attached to the current session, like the window manager, so that when the window manager dies, the ssh-agent loses the decrypted bits from your ssh key. That\u0026rsquo;s nice, but it also means that if you have some processes that exist outside of your window manager\u0026rsquo;s session (e.g. Screen sessions) they loose the ssh-agent and get trapped without access to an ssh-agent so you end up having to restart would-be-persistent processes, or you have to run a large number of ssh-agents which is not ideal.\nEnter \u0026ldquo;ssh-reagent.\u0026rdquo; stick this in your shell configuration (e.g. ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc) and run ssh-reagent whenever you have an agent session running and a terminal that can\u0026rsquo;t see it.\nssh-reagent () { for agent in /tmp/ssh-*/agent.*; do export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$agent if ssh-add -l 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 \u0026gt; /dev/null; then echo Found working SSH Agent: ssh-add -l return fi done echo Cannot find ssh agent - maybe you should reconnect and forward it? } It\u0026rsquo;s magic.\nSSHFS and SFTP Typically we think of ssh as a way to run a command or get a prompt on a remote machine. But SSH can do a lot more than that, and the OpenSSH package that probably the most popular implementation of SSH these days has a lot of features that go beyond just \u0026ldquo;shell\u0026rdquo; access. Here are two cool ones:\nSSHFS creates a mountable file system using FUSE of the files located on a remote system over SSH. It\u0026rsquo;s not always very fast, but it\u0026rsquo;s simple and works great for quick operations on local systems, where the speed issue is much less relevant.\nSFTP, replaces FTP (which is plagued by security problems,) with a similar tool for transferring files between two systems that\u0026rsquo;s secure (because it works over SSH) and is just as easy to use. In fact most recent OpenSSH daemons provide SFTP access by default.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s more, like a full VPN solution in recent versions, secure remote file copy, port forwarding, and the list could go on.\nSSH Tunnels SSH includes the ability to connect a port on your local system to a port on a remote system, so that to applications on your local system the local port looks like a normal local port, but when accessed the service running on the remote machine responds. All traffic is really sent over ssh.\nI set up an SSH tunnel for my local system to the outgoing mail server on my server. I tell my mail client to send mail to localhost server (without mail server authentication!), and it magically goes to my personal mail relay encrypted over ssh. The applications of this are nearly endless.\nKeep Alive Packets The problem: unless you\u0026rsquo;re doing something with SSH it doesn\u0026rsquo;t send any packets, and as a result the connections can be pretty resilient to network disturbances. That\u0026rsquo;s not a problem, but it does mean that unless you\u0026rsquo;re actively using an SSH session, it can go silent causing your local area network\u0026rsquo;s NAT to eat a connection that it thinks has died, but hasn\u0026rsquo;t. The solution is to set the \u0026ldquo;ServerAliveInterval [seconds]\u0026rdquo; configuration in the SSH configuration so that your ssh client sends a \u0026ldquo;dummy packet\u0026rdquo; on a regular interval so that the router thinks that the connection is active even if it\u0026rsquo;s particularly quiet. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\n/dev/null .known_hosts A lot of what I do in my day job involves deploying new systems, testing something out and then destroying that installation and starting over in the same virtual machine. So my \u0026ldquo;test rigs\u0026rdquo; have a few IP addresses, I can\u0026rsquo;t readily deploy keys on these hosts, and every time I redeploy SSH\u0026rsquo;s host-key checking tells me that a different system is responding for the host, which in most cases is the symptom of some sort of security error, and in most cases knowing this is a good thing, but in some cases it can be very annoying.\nThese configuration values tell your SSH session to save keys to `/dev/null (i.e. drop them on the floor) and to not ask you to verify an unknown host:\nUserKnownHostsFile /dev/null StrictHostKeyChecking no This probably saves me a little annoyance and minute or two every day or more, but it\u0026rsquo;s totally worth it. Don\u0026rsquo;t set these values for hosts that you actually care about.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sure there are other awesome things you can do with ssh, and I\u0026rsquo;d live to hear more. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/9-awesome-ssh-tricks/","summary":"Sorry for the lame title. I was thinking the other day, about how awesome SSH is, and how it\u0026rsquo;s probably one of the most crucial pieces of technology that I use every single day. Here\u0026rsquo;s a list of 10 things that I think are particularly awesome and perhaps a bit off the beaten path.\nUpdate: (2011-09-19) There are some user-submitted ssh-tricks on the wiki now! Please feel free to add your favorites. Also the hacker news thread might be helpful for some.\nSSH Config I used SSH regularly for years before I learned about the config file, that you can create at ~/.ssh/config to tell how you want ssh to behave.\nConsider the following configuration example:\nHost example.com *.example.net User root Host dev.example.net dev.example.net User shared Port 220 Host test.example.com User root UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null StrictHostKeyChecking no Host t HostName test.example.org Host * Compression yes CompressionLevel 7 Cipher blowfish ServerAliveInterval 600 ControlMaster auto ControlPath /tmp/ssh-%r@%h:%p I\u0026rsquo;ll cover some of the settings in the \u0026ldquo;Host *\u0026rdquo; block, which apply to all outgoing ssh connections, in other items in this post, but basically you can use this to create shortcuts with the ssh command, to control what username is used to connect to a given host, what port number, if you need to connect to an ssh daemon running on a non-standard port.","title":"9 Awesome SSH Tricks"},{"content":"How\u0026rsquo;s that for a Malcolm Gladwell-style subtitle title?\nAlex Payne posed a piece on why he thought that, basically Hacker News had jumped the shark. He\u0026rsquo;s right, of course, but I think that his analysis of the root cause of the problem, and therefore the solution he proposes, is a bit too optimistic.\nIt seems to me that all of these socially edited link-based blogs where lots of people submit links and then the community votes on these stories to generate headlines and a filtered and sorted selection of content based on the appetites of the communities.\nHacker News tried, and succeeded for a time because the contributors (people who voted on, submitted, and commented on items) was small and focused enough that the content managed to coherent overall. There wasn\u0026rsquo;t enough content to necessarily overwhelm, both the readers and the potential contributors, and most things were interesting to most people. It was a golden age.\nI think the problem with this model of generating content is that the golden ages don\u0026rsquo;t last very long. Sites \u0026ldquo;jump the shark\u0026rdquo; as the tightly focused content of the early, gives way to a more loose, less specialized, and more self-interested content submissions and selections. The factors that I think lead to this are:\nThere\u0026rsquo;s too much content. Such sites should be \u0026ldquo;filters,\u0026rdquo; and their fundamental service is to take the whole internet and tell readers \u0026ldquo;you should be reading this because we think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting/important.\u0026rdquo; As communities of editors grow, as the marketing power of filter sites increases, and if the \u0026ldquo;cost\u0026rdquo; of submitting a link remains constant, then the use of the filter breaks down and everyone gets overwhelmed. There\u0026rsquo;s not enough focus/responsibility on the part of the editors. When you have a few dedicated and professional editors, you begin to see consistency and perspective and approach in the content that is curated. When this function is distributed among a large group of community members: amazing things can happen but that\u0026rsquo;s not a guarantee. Community edited sites tend to become incredibly self interested after a certain point. There\u0026rsquo;s a certain kind of story either about the community itself or that strikes submitters as being \u0026ldquo;about the kind of people that participate in the community, or \u0026ldquo;the kind of thing that people who read the site might like,\u0026rdquo; rather than things that interest them. Perhaps some of this comes from the game-based dynamic of rating systems and karma, perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s just a thing that happens. In many ways, Trivium is probably the best example of a link filter blog. Alex Payne points to MetaFilter as an example of a site which has solved this problem, and although I have had a MeFi account for years, I\u0026rsquo;ve never been able to really get into it. Long story short, we still need editors and editorial vision, and the issues we\u0026rsquo;re seeing isn\u0026rsquo;t about the \u0026ldquo;focus\u0026rdquo; of a community, as much as it is a property of communities themselves.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-hacker-news-and-social-editing-has-jumped-the-shark/","summary":"How\u0026rsquo;s that for a Malcolm Gladwell-style subtitle title?\nAlex Payne posed a piece on why he thought that, basically Hacker News had jumped the shark. He\u0026rsquo;s right, of course, but I think that his analysis of the root cause of the problem, and therefore the solution he proposes, is a bit too optimistic.\nIt seems to me that all of these socially edited link-based blogs where lots of people submit links and then the community votes on these stories to generate headlines and a filtered and sorted selection of content based on the appetites of the communities.\nHacker News tried, and succeeded for a time because the contributors (people who voted on, submitted, and commented on items) was small and focused enough that the content managed to coherent overall. There wasn\u0026rsquo;t enough content to necessarily overwhelm, both the readers and the potential contributors, and most things were interesting to most people.","title":"How Hacker News and Social Editing has Jumped the Shark"},{"content":"Stan reminded me recently that I have now written two posts about the Java programing and software development. For something that I admittedly don\u0026rsquo;t particularly care for, and don\u0026rsquo;t know a great deal about I\u0026rsquo;ve sure ranted a lot about it. I think I keep returning to think about Java because of how incredibly important Java is to the technology we use and how prevalent Java development remains.\nMaybe I\u0026rsquo;ve read too much by Red Monk folks, but they tend take a very productive approach to these kinds of things. For reference, my posts on the subject are:\nCaring about Java and Where is Java Today Most \u0026ldquo;end-users\u0026rdquo; don\u0026rsquo;t really care much about things like Java except when it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, as is the case when some component of the Java platform isn\u0026rsquo;t present when you want to run a Java program or when you run a \u0026ldquo;cross platform\u0026rdquo; java application that doesn\u0026rsquo;t really work as indented on your platform. For a long time these two issues were prevalent enough that being written in Java was a decernable quality of an application. In most situations, computer programs are just computer programs.\nWith one exception.\nThe way software developers use computers and interface with technology leads and constrains the technological reality for the rest of us. For instance, in Google Reader you can scroll up and down using the \u0026ldquo;j\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;k\u0026rdquo; keys, which is derived from interaction paradigm of the Vi text editors. It\u0026rsquo;s great, but was almost certainly put into the software because a developer on the project was a Vi user. While a most features are driven by formal design processes, so much of the way software works is lead by the way developers think about software.\nUltimately Java developers are what make Java is important, not just for me but for everyone.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/java-and-me/","summary":"Stan reminded me recently that I have now written two posts about the Java programing and software development. For something that I admittedly don\u0026rsquo;t particularly care for, and don\u0026rsquo;t know a great deal about I\u0026rsquo;ve sure ranted a lot about it. I think I keep returning to think about Java because of how incredibly important Java is to the technology we use and how prevalent Java development remains.\nMaybe I\u0026rsquo;ve read too much by Red Monk folks, but they tend take a very productive approach to these kinds of things. For reference, my posts on the subject are:\nCaring about Java and Where is Java Today Most \u0026ldquo;end-users\u0026rdquo; don\u0026rsquo;t really care much about things like Java except when it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, as is the case when some component of the Java platform isn\u0026rsquo;t present when you want to run a Java program or when you run a \u0026ldquo;cross platform\u0026rdquo; java application that doesn\u0026rsquo;t really work as indented on your platform.","title":"Java and Me"},{"content":"(Note: I was going through some old files earlier this week and found a couple of old posts that never made it into the live site. This is one of them. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of polishing around the edges, but this is as much a post for historical interest as is a reflection of the contemporary state of my thought.)\nThis post is a follow up to my not much organization post, and as part of my general reorganization, I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying with anything for emacs which is a tool, or set of tools, which provide search-based interaction with some tasks (opening files, finding files, accessing other information, etc.) in a real-time search-based paradigm. Mmmm buzzwords. Think of it as being like quicksilver or launchy, except for emacs. I\u0026rsquo;ve come to a conclusion, that I think is generalizable, but made particularly obvious by this particular problem space.\nSearch, as an interface to a corpus, is only more effective than other organizational methods when you don\u0026rsquo;t know what the location of what your looking for is, or don\u0026rsquo;t understand the organizational system that governs the collection where your object is located. When you do know where the needed object is, search may be more cumbersome.\nThis feels obvious, when put in this way, but is counter to contemporary practice. Take the Google search use case where you find websites that you already know exist. You\u0026rsquo;d be surprised at how many people find this site by searching for \u0026ldquo;tychoish\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;tycho garen blog.\u0026rdquo; These are people who already know that the site exists and are probably people who have visited the site already. Google is forgiving in a way that typing an address into a search bar is not.\nThis works out alright in the end for websites: there\u0026rsquo;s no organizing standard for mapping domain names to websites. This is mostly due to the fact that you don\u0026rsquo;t, in the present practice, use the domain name system in the way that it was originally intended, in that the content of domain names are \u0026ldquo;brands\u0026rdquo; rather than a domain of systems and services described by the content of the domain. In the end this is not a huge problem since Google is around to help sort things out.\nSimilarly \u0026ldquo;desktop search\u0026rdquo; tools are helpful when you have a bunch of files scattered throughout file systems, with lots of hierarchy (directories and sub-directories). When you know where files are located, search less helpful. This is not to say that they\u0026rsquo;re ineffective: you\u0026rsquo;ll find what you\u0026rsquo;re looking for, it\u0026rsquo;ll just take longer.\nI think this theory on the diminishing utility of search tool holds up, though I don\u0026rsquo;t exactly know how to do the research to further the develop the idea in a more concrete direction. Having said that, I think the following questions are important.\nAre there practical ways to organize our files, that don\u0026rsquo;t require too much over-thinking before a collection grows unmanageable that make \u0026ldquo;resorting to search\u0026rdquo; less necessary? Is (or might) building search tools for people who work with a given body of data (and therefore are familiar with the data, and are less likely to need search) different from building search for people who aren\u0026rsquo;t familiar with a given corpus? Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/searching-for-known-results/","summary":"(Note: I was going through some old files earlier this week and found a couple of old posts that never made it into the live site. This is one of them. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of polishing around the edges, but this is as much a post for historical interest as is a reflection of the contemporary state of my thought.)\nThis post is a follow up to my not much organization post, and as part of my general reorganization, I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying with anything for emacs which is a tool, or set of tools, which provide search-based interaction with some tasks (opening files, finding files, accessing other information, etc.) in a real-time search-based paradigm. Mmmm buzzwords. Think of it as being like quicksilver or launchy, except for emacs. I\u0026rsquo;ve come to a conclusion, that I think is generalizable, but made particularly obvious by this particular problem space.\nSearch, as an interface to a corpus, is only more effective than other organizational methods when you don\u0026rsquo;t know what the location of what your looking for is, or don\u0026rsquo;t understand the organizational system that governs the collection where your object is located.","title":"Searching for Known Results"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with this idea for a Critical Futures blog post for a few days, so you\u0026rsquo;ll probably see this again at some point. Still, I wanted to pose a couple of questions that have been nagging at me for a while:\nDoes the fact that we think of content as something that is becoming increasingly user generated, or generated outside of traditional professional structures, affect writers\u0026rsquo; ability to survive from an economic perspective? Does this \u0026ldquo;crowd sourcing\u0026rdquo; (if you\u0026rsquo;ll indulge me,) mean that everyone will think of themselves as writers henceforth? While that\u0026rsquo;s potentially inspiring from the perspective of democracy, it feels hard to maintain from a literary/textual culture perspective. If everyone is a writer, is there an audience of readers for any kind of writing (fiction, critical, or non-fiction) separate from writers? If not, is there enough audience amongst fellow writers to support the project writing? (Answer: doubtful.) I\u0026rsquo;m totally willing to accept that the publishing industry as we\u0026rsquo;ve come to know it is (and will continue) to undergo great change. At the same time, \u0026ldquo;great change,\u0026rdquo; means (I think) that some practices will need to change in a fundamental sort of way. It is not enough to manipulate the length publishing schedules of periodicals in order to get them to appear profitable for a while, it\u0026rsquo;s not enough to publish lots of small runs of books tight budgets that break even really fast. These strategies delay the inevitable, but don\u0026rsquo;t address several fundamental problems:\nThe group of readers (e.g. audience) is significantly smaller than the public at large. If we want to grow audiences for our books, blogs, wikis, and other (hyper?)textual products we need to enlarge the group of people who read. Most people who fail read any given text on any given day, fail to do so because they didn\u0026rsquo;t know it existed, and probably because they felt like they didn\u0026rsquo;t have time to do so. Largely I think these issues can be extrapolated to other forms of media, I\u0026rsquo;m just a writer and think of things in terms of essays, articles, stories, and novels.\nIn any case, I think the way to save the \u0026ldquo;media industry\u0026rdquo; and media creators in particular, is to figure out how to get more people to read and figure out how to improve the discovery process. Hefty challenges, for sure.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/antisocial-media/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with this idea for a Critical Futures blog post for a few days, so you\u0026rsquo;ll probably see this again at some point. Still, I wanted to pose a couple of questions that have been nagging at me for a while:\nDoes the fact that we think of content as something that is becoming increasingly user generated, or generated outside of traditional professional structures, affect writers\u0026rsquo; ability to survive from an economic perspective? Does this \u0026ldquo;crowd sourcing\u0026rdquo; (if you\u0026rsquo;ll indulge me,) mean that everyone will think of themselves as writers henceforth? While that\u0026rsquo;s potentially inspiring from the perspective of democracy, it feels hard to maintain from a literary/textual culture perspective. If everyone is a writer, is there an audience of readers for any kind of writing (fiction, critical, or non-fiction) separate from writers? If not, is there enough audience amongst fellow writers to support the project writing? (Answer: doubtful.","title":"Anti-Social Media"},{"content":"I often find it difficult to feign interest the discussion of Java in the post Sun Microsystems era. Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I get that there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of Java out there, I get that there are a number of technological strengths and advantages that Java has in contrast some other programming platforms. Consider my post about worfism and computer programing for some background on my interest in programing languages and their use.\nI apologize if this post is more in the vein of \u0026ldquo;a number of raw thoughts,\u0026rdquo; rather than an actual organized essay.\nIn Favor of Java Java has a lot of things going for it: it\u0026rsquo;s very fast, it runs code in a VM that lets the code execute in a mostly isolated environment which increases reliability and security of the applications that run on the Java Platform. I think of these as \u0026ldquo;hard features\u0026rdquo; or technological realities that are presently implemented and available for users.\nThere are also a number of \u0026ldquo;soft features,\u0026rdquo; that Java has that inspire people to use it: an extensive and reliable standard library, a large expanse of additional library support for most things, a huge developer community, and it has inclusion in computer science curricula so people are familiar with it. While each of these aspects are relatively minor, and could theoretically apply to a number of different languages and development platforms, they represent a major rationale for it\u0026rsquo;s continued use.\nOne of the core selling points of Java has long been the fact that because Java runs on a virtual machine that can abstract differences between different operating systems and architectures, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to write and compile code once and then run that \u0026ldquo;binary\u0026rdquo; on a number of different machines. The buzzword/slogan for this is \u0026ldquo;write once, run anywhere.\u0026rdquo; This doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit easily into the hard/soft feature dichotomy I set up above, but it nevertheless and important factor.\nAgainst Java Teasing out the history of programing language development is probably a better project for another post (or career?), but while Java might have once had a greater set of support for many common programming tasks, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s sizable standard library and common tooling continues to overwhelm it\u0026rsquo;s peers. At best this is a draw with languages like Perl and Python, but more likely the fact that the JDK is so huge and varied increases incompatibility potentials. And needing to download the whole JDK to run even minimalist Java programs. Other languages have addressed the tooling and library support in different way, and I think the real answer to this problem is write with an eye towards minimalism and make sure that there are really good build systems.\nMost of the arguments in favor of Java revolve around the strengths of the Java Virtual Machine, which is the substrate where Java programs run. And it is undeniable that the JVM is an incredibly valuable platform, and every report that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen concludes that the JVM is really fast, and the VM model does provide a number of persuasive features (e.g. sandboxing, increased portability, performance gains.) That\u0026rsquo;s cool, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that any of these \u0026ldquo;hard\u0026rdquo; features matter these days:\nMost programing languages use a VM architecture these days. Raw speed, of the sort that Java has, is less useful than powerful concurrent programing abilities and is offset by the fact that computers themselves are absurdly fast. It\u0026rsquo;s not to say that Java fails because others have been able to replicate the strengths of the Java platform, but it does fail to inspire excitement.\nThe worth of Java\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;cross platform\u0026rdquo; capabilities are probably negated by service-based computing (the \u0026ldquo;cloud,\u0026rdquo;) and the fact that cross platform applications, GUI or otherwise, are probably an ill gotten dream anyway.\nThe more I construct these arguments, I keep circling around the idea that while Java pushed a lot of programmers and language designers to think about what kind of features that programing languages needed. The world of computing and programming has changed in a number of significant ways, and we\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot about the art of designing programming languages in the mean time. I wonder if my lack of enthusiasm (and yours as well, if I may be so bold) has more to do with a set of assumptions about the way programing languages should be that haven\u0026rsquo;t aged particularly well. Which isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that Java isn\u0026rsquo;t useful, or that it is no longer important, merely that it\u0026rsquo;s become uninteresting.\nThoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/caring-about-java/","summary":"I often find it difficult to feign interest the discussion of Java in the post Sun Microsystems era. Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I get that there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of Java out there, I get that there are a number of technological strengths and advantages that Java has in contrast some other programming platforms. Consider my post about worfism and computer programing for some background on my interest in programing languages and their use.\nI apologize if this post is more in the vein of \u0026ldquo;a number of raw thoughts,\u0026rdquo; rather than an actual organized essay.\nIn Favor of Java Java has a lot of things going for it: it\u0026rsquo;s very fast, it runs code in a VM that lets the code execute in a mostly isolated environment which increases reliability and security of the applications that run on the Java Platform. I think of these as \u0026ldquo;hard features\u0026rdquo; or technological realities that are presently implemented and available for users.","title":"Caring about Java"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching the Egyptian revolution, off and on since it started. There\u0026rsquo;s so much interesting stuff going on: the pragmatics of political organization, the foundations of revolutionary movement, the evolving state of American political power, and the way that Egyptians are racialized particularly in contrast to Iranians and Tunisians.\nThe aspect that I\u0026rsquo;m most interested is in what western analysis of \u0026ldquo;Janurary 25th\u0026rdquo; tells us about how the west has made sense of past revolutionary moments in the last \u0026lsquo;50 years notably the Iranian revolution and \u0026ldquo;May'68.\u0026rdquo;\nLargely I fear that it is way too soon to really say anything terribly useful on the subject. That hasn\u0026rsquo;t stopped people, of course.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what to make of either Ken MacLeod\u0026rsquo;s or Slavoj Žižek\u0026rsquo;s articles on the subject. There are aspects of this kind of theorizing that I really like and that really appeals to me. At the same time, optimism seems foolhardy.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s work still to be done: both theoretical and revolutionary. But isn\u0026rsquo;t there always?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/philosophy-of-egypt/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching the Egyptian revolution, off and on since it started. There\u0026rsquo;s so much interesting stuff going on: the pragmatics of political organization, the foundations of revolutionary movement, the evolving state of American political power, and the way that Egyptians are racialized particularly in contrast to Iranians and Tunisians.\nThe aspect that I\u0026rsquo;m most interested is in what western analysis of \u0026ldquo;Janurary 25th\u0026rdquo; tells us about how the west has made sense of past revolutionary moments in the last \u0026lsquo;50 years notably the Iranian revolution and \u0026ldquo;May'68.\u0026rdquo;\nLargely I fear that it is way too soon to really say anything terribly useful on the subject. That hasn\u0026rsquo;t stopped people, of course.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what to make of either Ken MacLeod\u0026rsquo;s or Slavoj Žižek\u0026rsquo;s articles on the subject. There are aspects of this kind of theorizing that I really like and that really appeals to me. At the same time, optimism seems foolhardy.","title":"Philosophy of the Present, Egypt"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m old fashioned,\u0026rdquo; R. said to me in an email, with that link to an article about how tablets have replaced and supplanted netbooks.\nIn many ways, you have two netbooks: the little one that\u0026rsquo;s been broken since may that I\u0026rsquo;m fixing and your real laptop. Which is to say: the advancement of netbooks was not, so much, the small form factor, but the fact that they were under powered computer systems meant to be used mostly with web-based applications.\nInitially, netbooks were to have low capacity solid state hard drives and run Linux-based OSes. That was cool, for a while, but the cheap solid state drives turned out to perform more poorly than people expected and conventional hard drives became very cheap/available. Also Microsoft got scared and having seen that small-form factor computing was a real thing, adapted its strategy to seriously target these kinds of devices.\nAt which point everyone realized that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of point in making really small laptops: they were hard to type on and fundamentally they did everything for which you needed \u0026ldquo;big computers.\u0026rdquo; So companies started making \u0026ldquo;big netbooks.\u0026rdquo; The end result most 14\u0026quot;-15\u0026quot; laptops are basically big netbooks (including having similar resolutions.) The extra size is nice for most mundane uses, and for most the \u0026ldquo;mobility niche\u0026rdquo; is filled by smartphones anyway, rendering netbooks-sized device useful. Except they\u0026rsquo;re still around in different packaging.\nTechnology, I think, rarely fails. Rather, it gets reimplemented and reabsorbed by the next iteration of the technology. If we don\u0026rsquo;t pay attention we may miss the connections between iterations, but they are there.\nInterestingly, and perhaps orthogonally, Linux lead the development for netbooks. Though tablets are different, and the history is less easily accessible, I think the same thing is happening there. It\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting to see how that pans out.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-rise-and-fall-of-netbooks/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m old fashioned,\u0026rdquo; R. said to me in an email, with that link to an article about how tablets have replaced and supplanted netbooks.\nIn many ways, you have two netbooks: the little one that\u0026rsquo;s been broken since may that I\u0026rsquo;m fixing and your real laptop. Which is to say: the advancement of netbooks was not, so much, the small form factor, but the fact that they were under powered computer systems meant to be used mostly with web-based applications.\nInitially, netbooks were to have low capacity solid state hard drives and run Linux-based OSes. That was cool, for a while, but the cheap solid state drives turned out to perform more poorly than people expected and conventional hard drives became very cheap/available. Also Microsoft got scared and having seen that small-form factor computing was a real thing, adapted its strategy to seriously target these kinds of devices.\nAt which point everyone realized that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of point in making really small laptops: they were hard to type on and fundamentally they did everything for which you needed \u0026ldquo;big computers.","title":"The Rise and Fall of Netbooks"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been somewhat remiss in posting here. Nevertheless, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get rather a lot of things done in the couple of weeks that I think merits an update post.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve posted two new things to Critical Futures, my final post--for now--about dexy, called make all dexy. and a post about new media on What we Learn from WikiLeaks.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also updated the Critical Futures Archive, particularly the posts on technical writing series and the new media series. I think hand crafted archives are incredibly valuable, but they\u0026rsquo;re hard to maintain, which I suppose is the point, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been a poor steward over the past few years. At the moment, the full archives of Critical Futures (nee tychoish.com, nee tealart.com) are listed on the archive page. The content has never gone anywhere, nor do I think the old content is any better than I used to, but it\u0026rsquo;s good to not have it totally hidden. I\u0026rsquo;m also trying to keep the hand crafted archives more up to date. It\u0026rsquo;s a struggle.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been doing some wiki work around these parts, mostly in the technical writing section, including new pages about automicity, automation, compilation, dexy (tag), and /technical-writing/filters. I\u0026rsquo;m also working on ways of marrying this wiki with the blog, by way of the critical futures section. It\u0026rsquo;s in progress, of course but there\u0026rsquo;s a blurb at the bottom of all CF posts that says:\nDisqus comments are provided to support legacy comments on old posts, and as a last resort in cases where other means of communication are ineffective. Otherwise please consider leaving a comment.\nThe link doesn\u0026rsquo;t work as well as I want to, and maybe I need to set up a specific comments page adding widget, as on the submissions page. Couldn\u0026rsquo;t hurt. Also on my list of things to do: make a more fitting index page that draws attention to all sorts of content on the wiki, not just rhizome. That\u0026rsquo;s on the list.\nAlso on the list:\nWriting fiction like crazy: I\u0026rsquo;m working on the penultimate chapter of the novel. Something with the Cyborg Institute. It needs to happen. More regular blogging here. It\u0026rsquo;s on the list! ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/progressions/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been somewhat remiss in posting here. Nevertheless, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get rather a lot of things done in the couple of weeks that I think merits an update post.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve posted two new things to Critical Futures, my final post--for now--about dexy, called make all dexy. and a post about new media on What we Learn from WikiLeaks.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also updated the Critical Futures Archive, particularly the posts on technical writing series and the new media series. I think hand crafted archives are incredibly valuable, but they\u0026rsquo;re hard to maintain, which I suppose is the point, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been a poor steward over the past few years. At the moment, the full archives of Critical Futures (nee tychoish.com, nee tealart.com) are listed on the archive page. The content has never gone anywhere, nor do I think the old content is any better than I used to, but it\u0026rsquo;s good to not have it totally hidden.","title":"Progressions"},{"content":"Wikileaks, and the drama that has surrounded it for the past few months, brings forth images of the Internet as a very lawless and juvenile place, exactly the kind of thing that the cyberpunks of the 1980s were predicting. This isn\u0026rsquo;t always far from the truth, but the story of spies and international espionage, and digital attacks and counter attacks may distract us from thinking about other issues. Obviously Wikileaks causes us think about censorship, but issue of publishing, journalism, audience and community participation, transparency, and globalism in the digital context are also at play. Lets take the highlights:\nCensorship In the print world, I tend to think of post-facto censorship is incredibly difficult. Once print copies of something exist they\u0026rsquo;re there and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get every copy and you can\u0026rsquo;t get people to \u0026ldquo;unread\u0026rdquo; what they\u0026rsquo;ve already seen. In the digital world, it\u0026rsquo;s really difficult to get content taken down, and once there are copies in people\u0026rsquo;s hands, the cost of making additional copies is low enough that censorship stops working. Right?\nI suppose the appearance of multiple mirrors and copies of Wikileaks post-takedown proves this, but it also proves that there are aspects of the world wide web that are not decentralized and it\u0026rsquo;s possible to pull a domain and site off the Internet at a single point. That\u0026rsquo;s a very scary proposition. While information survives, I think many people thought that \u0026ldquo;you couldn\u0026rsquo;t effectively censor the Internet,\u0026rdquo; and Wikileaks says \u0026ldquo;yes you can, and here\u0026rsquo;s how.\u0026rdquo; (cite)\nIn response I think people have started to think about the shape and structure of the network itself. The Internet is designed to be resilient to this kind of thing, and this is a very startling example that it\u0026rsquo;s not.\nPublishing, Journalism and Wikis I suppose the thing that I get most offended by \u0026ldquo;Wikileaks\u0026rdquo; for is the appropriation of the term \u0026ldquo;Wiki,\u0026rdquo; because in the current (or last) form, Wikileaks wasn\u0026rsquo;t a wiki. Content was not edited or supervised by a community, the Wiki process didn\u0026rsquo;t allow the site to provide consumers with a more diverse set of opinions, it didn\u0026rsquo;t increase transparency. In this respect, Wikileaks mostly resembles a traditional \u0026ldquo;old media,\u0026rdquo; publication.\nOnce wikileaks stops being this radical new journalistic departure, and this community-driven site, what remains may be pretty difficult to reconcile. Is it useful for journalists to publish raw source material without analysis? What audience and purpose does that serve? The censorship of Wikileaks is problematic and requires some reflection, but there are problems with wikileaks itself that also require some serious thinking.\nAnd just because it\u0026rsquo;s a sore point, particularly since Wikileaks is/was a traditional publication and is not a platform for independent speech, we have to think about this as \u0026ldquo;freedom of the press\u0026rdquo; issue rather than a \u0026ldquo;freedom of speech\u0026rdquo; issue.\nCommunity Involvement The involvement of a community in Wikileaks, is over-shadowed by the groundswell of \u0026ldquo;community\u0026rdquo; activity by Anonymous and other groups. Look to Gabriella Coleman (twitter) for more thorough analysis. I don\u0026rsquo;t have any answers or conclusions but: the role and effectiveness of (distributed) denial of service attacks in this instance is really quite important.\nUsually DoSes are quick, messy and easily dealt with affairs: DoS someone, get noticed, target and attacking addresses get taken off the air and people loose interest and things return to normal. This back and forth, seems a bit unique (but not unheard of) the fact that the 4chan/Anon gang picked Wikileaks jives with their ethos, but it is impressive that they were able to get organized to support Wikileaks. I find myself curious and more surprised that someone was able to, at least for a while, throw something in the neighborhood of 10 gigabits (an unverified number, that originates with Wikileaks itself, so potentially inflated) at the original Wikileaks site. That\u0026rsquo;s huge, and I think largely unexplored.\nTransparent Operations In July, Quinn Norton wrote about transparency and wikileaks, basically, that exposing information doesn\u0026rsquo;t solve the problem that governments don\u0026rsquo;t operate in a transparent manner, and that access to documents and transparency are the result of a more open way of doing business/government. Particularly in light of this, the fact that wikileaks focuses on data dumps rather than more curated collections of information or actual analysis, is all the more problematic.\nSimilarly, \u0026ldquo;wiki\u0026rdquo; as practiced in the original model (as opposed to wikileaks,) is about editing and document creation in an open and transparent manner. Thus the issue with wikileaks is not that they have/had a professional staff, but that they didn\u0026rsquo;t disclose their process.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/what-we-learn-from-wikileaks/","summary":"Wikileaks, and the drama that has surrounded it for the past few months, brings forth images of the Internet as a very lawless and juvenile place, exactly the kind of thing that the cyberpunks of the 1980s were predicting. This isn\u0026rsquo;t always far from the truth, but the story of spies and international espionage, and digital attacks and counter attacks may distract us from thinking about other issues. Obviously Wikileaks causes us think about censorship, but issue of publishing, journalism, audience and community participation, transparency, and globalism in the digital context are also at play. Lets take the highlights:\nCensorship In the print world, I tend to think of post-facto censorship is incredibly difficult. Once print copies of something exist they\u0026rsquo;re there and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get every copy and you can\u0026rsquo;t get people to \u0026ldquo;unread\u0026rdquo; what they\u0026rsquo;ve already seen. In the digital world, it\u0026rsquo;s really difficult to get content taken down, and once there are copies in people\u0026rsquo;s hands, the cost of making additional copies is low enough that censorship stops working.","title":"What We Learn from Wikileaks"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not a programmer. I find myself saying this with great frequency. Which is weird, because I end up writing a fair amount of content that looks like (and probably is) code. Almost always this takes the forms of little shell scripts that do the things that I would other wise have to do by hand.\nVery early on in my development as a programmer and Linux user, bear told me that the greatest thing about the shell was that once you figured something out, you could save it and reuse it whenever you needed it, and you never had to figure out that thing again. That\u0026rsquo;s sort of the basis of how I live my life with computers these days.\nAnd it works great, and it means that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty comfortable with a lot of really powerful shell tools. I\u0026rsquo;m personally amazed by everything that I can make sed do. The problem is that there are limitations to what one can do with shell programing (nothing for the web, and no way to edge yourself into object orientation) or other more advanced programming techniques. Though certainly there are a lot of things that I could do using the shell, I sort of know enough to know the bounds of what\u0026rsquo;s possible and what\u0026rsquo;s absurd.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to teach myself Python. Because it seems like a good option. Though I\u0026rsquo;m not a coder by any stretch, I read a bunch of code, and know enough about all of the various languages to appreciated Python and it\u0026rsquo;s possibilities. Seems like a good neutral option and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure it can do everything I want or need it to for a while, and the worst case scenario is that the skills will be transferable if I need to change later.\nMy first \u0026ldquo;project,\u0026rdquo; I think is to rewrite build novel to Python. I get what needs to happen, and it mostly just mangles some text files into a number of other files to keep source and publication versions of Knowing Mars in step with each other. The hope being that the script will be a bit more resilient, and also be more easily generalized to publishing other projects as I have them to publish.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten the hang of mangling variables and reading settings from configuration (YAML rocks, and is killer easy to use.) Next up, learning more about creating, writing, and copying files, with a likely side course in regular expressions for Python. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/learning-python/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not a programmer. I find myself saying this with great frequency. Which is weird, because I end up writing a fair amount of content that looks like (and probably is) code. Almost always this takes the forms of little shell scripts that do the things that I would other wise have to do by hand.\nVery early on in my development as a programmer and Linux user, bear told me that the greatest thing about the shell was that once you figured something out, you could save it and reuse it whenever you needed it, and you never had to figure out that thing again. That\u0026rsquo;s sort of the basis of how I live my life with computers these days.\nAnd it works great, and it means that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty comfortable with a lot of really powerful shell tools. I\u0026rsquo;m personally amazed by everything that I can make sed do.","title":"Learning Python"},{"content":"The Price of Free Eventually, the Facebooks and Twitters of the world may be dethroned and replaced by provider-agnostic protocols, in much the same way AOL is no longer synonymous with email. However, no one is going to build protocols that threaten their bottom line. So long as \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; is paid for by surveillance, the Internet will represent a Faustian bargain for radical social movements.\n-- The Price of Free\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-price-of-free/","summary":"The Price of Free Eventually, the Facebooks and Twitters of the world may be dethroned and replaced by provider-agnostic protocols, in much the same way AOL is no longer synonymous with email. However, no one is going to build protocols that threaten their bottom line. So long as \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; is paid for by surveillance, the Internet will represent a Faustian bargain for radical social movements.\n-- The Price of Free","title":":author: tychoish"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m doing my commute somewhat differently this morning. Same wake time, same destination, and many of the same trains, but a special event necessitated a different pattern. It\u0026rsquo;s amazing how much this shift has thrown me out of sync with my day. Not in a bad way, but in the way that I was sort of jittery about missing my train in a way that my normal patter has really ceased to evoke.\nI told my fellow commuter that, while I could probably live without the time expenditure of the commute I\u0026rsquo;d grown fond of the rhythm and structure of the commute. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to have my body in programmed to get up at a specific time, it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a fixed departure time to encourage me to get work done early and effectively, it\u0026rsquo;s even nice to have some firewalled time on the train to get things done like emails and blogging. Obviously if it was possible to change some things, I would, but all in all its not as bad as it could be or as it may sound.\nThe main take away lesson from this is: that habits and patterns make it easier for us to cope with the world. And not just in a \u0026ldquo;habits make stressful situations, like commutes and compulsions easier to live,\u0026rdquo; but having a routine established make it easier to spend your available time and brain cycles doing things you really care about rather than on keeping your head above water.\nAlso, I think as a secondary point, being able to take a block of available time and accomplish something concrete is an incredibly valuable skill. One of my biggest frustrations is with \u0026ldquo;dead time\u0026rdquo; where I\u0026rsquo;m waiting for something to happen, and I can\u0026rsquo;t do anything with that time. Some technology helps with this: long battery life and systems that suspend/resume quickly and preserve \u0026ldquo;state\u0026rdquo; are great. Having a list of things that you can do that are easy to pick up and for a number of different situations, with different amounts of free time. Ideally, you don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to spend time that you could be doing something, on thinking about what you ought to be doing.\nWhich I suppose is just another way of approaching habits.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/creature-of-habit/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m doing my commute somewhat differently this morning. Same wake time, same destination, and many of the same trains, but a special event necessitated a different pattern. It\u0026rsquo;s amazing how much this shift has thrown me out of sync with my day. Not in a bad way, but in the way that I was sort of jittery about missing my train in a way that my normal patter has really ceased to evoke.\nI told my fellow commuter that, while I could probably live without the time expenditure of the commute I\u0026rsquo;d grown fond of the rhythm and structure of the commute. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to have my body in programmed to get up at a specific time, it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a fixed departure time to encourage me to get work done early and effectively, it\u0026rsquo;s even nice to have some firewalled time on the train to get things done like emails and blogging.","title":"Creature of Habit"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s something about public transit, particularly train systems, that seeps into the riders. Little facts that make getting around easier. \u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re waiting for the R3? It\u0026rsquo;s always late,\u0026rdquo; they\u0026rsquo;ll say, or they\u0026rsquo;ll be able to tell you which stop is next by looking out the window in what looks like total blackness. Routines do that to you, I guess.\nI was on a train last week, not my usual evening train--which is a short turned local train that ends one stop past mine--that only has two intermediate stops before my stop, and as we were getting of the train, a group of regular shad a conversation that resembled the following. I suppose I should also preface this by saying that we were all sitting near a person who discussed their health insurance coverage woes at great depth and volume with their seatmates.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s nice to take these express trains, I usually just get on whatever\u0026rsquo;s next.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;If this counts as express.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I mean, it\u0026rsquo;s better than the ones that stop at--\u0026rdquo;\n[unison] \u0026ldquo;--North Broad.\u0026rdquo;\nSee, there\u0026rsquo;s this stop in northern Philadelphia that a lot of trans pass, but very few stop at, and hardly anyone gets on or off at. It\u0026rsquo;s near a subway stop too, which decreases it\u0026rsquo;s usage. It\u0026rsquo;s main purpose, I think, is to irritate those of us who *just want to get where we\u0026rsquo;re going.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also, apparently, good for allowing irritated and tired commuters to commiserate over the unreclaimable minutes of their lives that they loose on a regular basis. It\u0026rsquo;s these kinds of interactions and phenomena that make urban living so attractive.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-ones-that-stop-at-north-broad/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s something about public transit, particularly train systems, that seeps into the riders. Little facts that make getting around easier. \u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re waiting for the R3? It\u0026rsquo;s always late,\u0026rdquo; they\u0026rsquo;ll say, or they\u0026rsquo;ll be able to tell you which stop is next by looking out the window in what looks like total blackness. Routines do that to you, I guess.\nI was on a train last week, not my usual evening train--which is a short turned local train that ends one stop past mine--that only has two intermediate stops before my stop, and as we were getting of the train, a group of regular shad a conversation that resembled the following. I suppose I should also preface this by saying that we were all sitting near a person who discussed their health insurance coverage woes at great depth and volume with their seatmates.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s nice to take these express trains, I usually just get on whatever\u0026rsquo;s next.","title":"The Ones that Stop at North Broad"},{"content":"git is a version control system that does a number of things rather \u0026ldquo;differently.\u0026rdquo; By now, I suspect most people are familiar with git so I will refrain from focusing too much time here on explaining what git is or how it works. Git does things differently, and to make a long story short, git has no concept of a file rename. To be honest git doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of sense of individual files at all, but that\u0026rsquo;s another story. As a result git looks at the contents of the files, and if a new file is similar enough to an old file that was deleted git recognizes this as a \u0026ldquo;rename,\u0026rdquo; or a moved filed. It can process file copies in the same manner.\nYou\u0026rsquo;d think this would be a problem, but it turns out that it isn\u0026rsquo;t. In fact it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing. You can store a bunch of data on a file system, use conventional tools to manipulate, move, and rename those files in the normal manner, and then do a little magic, and git automatically knows everything that it needs to know about what files were renamed and when.\nThis post is about that magic.\nWhat you need to do is find out the names of the files that existed in the last commit but have been removed from the file system. If you run \u0026ldquo;git rm\u0026rdquo; on these files and then add everything that remains, git will be able to pick up the rename operations implicitly, and the next commit will reflect the current state of the file system.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve thrown this little snippet in the code section of the site: `git-readd \u0026lt;/code/git-readd\u0026gt;`_.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve used this process as part of scripts in the past, and it\u0026rsquo;s great for managing Maildirs with git, but I found myself needing this operation from time to time as I\u0026rsquo;m manging a git repository. Enter, \u0026ldquo;git aliases.\u0026rdquo;\nAliases let you create git sub commands from your own scripts. Add the following lines to the ~/.gitconfig file on your system, and create it if necessary:\n[alias] readd = \u0026quot;~/scripts/git-readd\u0026quot; Now you can run this command in any git repository on your system with the following command:\ngit readd Magic!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-readd-and-git-aliases/","summary":"git is a version control system that does a number of things rather \u0026ldquo;differently.\u0026rdquo; By now, I suspect most people are familiar with git so I will refrain from focusing too much time here on explaining what git is or how it works. Git does things differently, and to make a long story short, git has no concept of a file rename. To be honest git doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of sense of individual files at all, but that\u0026rsquo;s another story. As a result git looks at the contents of the files, and if a new file is similar enough to an old file that was deleted git recognizes this as a \u0026ldquo;rename,\u0026rdquo; or a moved filed. It can process file copies in the same manner.\nYou\u0026rsquo;d think this would be a problem, but it turns out that it isn\u0026rsquo;t. In fact it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing. You can store a bunch of data on a file system, use conventional tools to manipulate, move, and rename those files in the normal manner, and then do a little magic, and git automatically knows everything that it needs to know about what files were renamed and when.","title":"git readd and git aliases"},{"content":"See \u0026ldquo;Why The World Is Ready For Dexy\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Dexy and Literate Documentation\u0026rdquo; as well as the technical writing section section of the tychoish wiki for some background to this post.\nThe brief synopsis: dexy is a new tool for handling the process of the documentation work flow between writing and publication. It takes snippets of code, and bits of documentation and passes these atomic chunks through filters to generate technical articles, manuals, and other high quality resources. It\u0026rsquo;s exciting because it may provide a way to write and manage the documentation process in a manner that is more effective than many other options and has the potential to produce better quality technical texts.\nThe reason, I think, is that dexy treats documentation like code. This is different, fundamentally, from systems that expect that developers write documentation. The former has interesting implications about the way technical writers work, and the later is nearly always a foolhardy proposition doomed to end in failure.\nDocumentation has a lot in common with code: documentation is written and revised in response to software versions, so the process of iterations has a lot in common. Documentation should typically be compiled, and the build process should produce a static product, between iterations. Documentation, like code, must also be maintained and fixed in response to new bugs and use-cases as they are found/developed.\nIf we accept this analogy, Dexy begins to look more like a tool like make which is used to manage compilation of code. make figures out what source files have changed, and what needs to be rebuilt in order to produce some sort of binary code. That doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound like a very important tool, but it is. make makes it easy to automate tasks with dependencies, without writing a bunch of novel code to check to see what\u0026rsquo;s been done and what has yet to be done, particularly when build processes need to be done in parallel. Furthermore, make is one of these typical \u0026ldquo;UNIX-like\u0026rdquo; utilities that does only one thing (but does it very well) and ties together functionality from a number of different kinds of programs (compilers, configuration tools, etc.)\nDexy is kind of like that. It manages a build process. It ties together a group of existing tools, thereby saving developer time and building something that can be more flexible and consistent.\nThis is, however, imperfect analogy: I think Dexy isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;make for documentation,\u0026rdquo; because it would be possible to use make to manage the build process for documentation as well as code.1 Dexy manages text processing, make can work one level up--if needed--to build coherent texts from Dexy-processed documentation units. Dexy and make are glue that turns documentation and code into useful resources.\nThere are obviously some situations where this developer-like workflow may be overly complicated. For starters, Dexy, like make, really provides a framework for building documents. A portion of creating every project and text in this manner would necessarily go to developing build-related infrastructure. It\u0026rsquo;s not a huge burden, but it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that requires a little bit of thought, and maybe some good \u0026ldquo;default\u0026rdquo; or base configuration for new projects and texts. Dexy is a great first step into a new way of thinking about and working with documentation, but there is much work yet to be done.\nOnward and Upward!\nI should thank, or perhaps blame, a coworker for planting this idea in my mind.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/make-all-dexy/","summary":"See \u0026ldquo;Why The World Is Ready For Dexy\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Dexy and Literate Documentation\u0026rdquo; as well as the technical writing section section of the tychoish wiki for some background to this post.\nThe brief synopsis: dexy is a new tool for handling the process of the documentation work flow between writing and publication. It takes snippets of code, and bits of documentation and passes these atomic chunks through filters to generate technical articles, manuals, and other high quality resources. It\u0026rsquo;s exciting because it may provide a way to write and manage the documentation process in a manner that is more effective than many other options and has the potential to produce better quality technical texts.\nThe reason, I think, is that dexy treats documentation like code. This is different, fundamentally, from systems that expect that developers write documentation. The former has interesting implications about the way technical writers work, and the later is nearly always a foolhardy proposition doomed to end in failure.","title":"make all dexy"},{"content":"When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, there was a lot of (warranted) concern for what would happen to the Open Source projects that Sun started, supported, and championed. Though the acquisition began years ago, now, I think we\u0026rsquo;re still in the process of figuring out how all of this filters down. The concern, largely grows from the fact that while Sun licensed a lot of work under free and permissive terms, and was an active contributor to communities, Sun (and now Oracle) remains the ultimate owner of that work moving forward. Thus, Free Software/Open Source projects are somewhat stranded because the leadership of these projects were supported by Sun, are supported by no one.\nIn response, there\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of movement among these projects to formally establish \u0026ldquo;rule-by-community\u0026rdquo; systems, that give community contributors authority and voice in the management of these projects.\nNevertheless, it feels a lot like writing policy to save oneself from the mistakes of the past. It also seems like an action of democracy fetish rather than bottom up democratic organization. I\u0026rsquo;m always struck by how not democratic open source projects are, in practice, and how little this matters. Python and Perl are iconic examples of this, but most other projects have one or two people who are in charge of everything, and while they know that their \u0026ldquo;rule\u0026rdquo; is subject to the confidence of the community, their leadership isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly democratic. I think this recent event in the org-mode community is a particularly useful example.\nMaybe Sun was inflating an Open Source bubble of sorts, maybe corporate-sponsored open source, and community/consultancy-sponsored open source are different things that need different sorts of approaches.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rule-by-community/","summary":"When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, there was a lot of (warranted) concern for what would happen to the Open Source projects that Sun started, supported, and championed. Though the acquisition began years ago, now, I think we\u0026rsquo;re still in the process of figuring out how all of this filters down. The concern, largely grows from the fact that while Sun licensed a lot of work under free and permissive terms, and was an active contributor to communities, Sun (and now Oracle) remains the ultimate owner of that work moving forward. Thus, Free Software/Open Source projects are somewhat stranded because the leadership of these projects were supported by Sun, are supported by no one.\nIn response, there\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of movement among these projects to formally establish \u0026ldquo;rule-by-community\u0026rdquo; systems, that give community contributors authority and voice in the management of these projects.\nNevertheless, it feels a lot like writing policy to save oneself from the mistakes of the past.","title":"Rule By Community"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a series of terribly self indulgent posts about thinking about creative projects as work and about the habit and rhythm that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using to get work done, even under adverse circumstances. As exciting as the increased blogging and progress on fiction projects is, I\u0026rsquo;m just as excited about figuring out how to squeeze in knitting and reading time into my days.\nAnd not to overshadow the importance of figuring out how to make the best of my time, but the other major factor in my return to knitting is that I finally finished the plain sweater that I\u0026rsquo;d been working on for 7 months (or so) and got to cast on a sweater with a two-color pattern, in a nifty yarn, and a pattern that\u0026rsquo;s strongly reminiscent of my favorite sweater.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that while plain knitting is soothing, in many ways, it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly fulfilling or engaging. I\u0026rsquo;ve knit--at time of writing--about 9 inches of the body section. This means, I\u0026rsquo;m about half way to the under arm of the sweater. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if this will linger, but at the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m so looking forward to this sweater, that I think I might make a series of sweaters based on this, or similar patterns.\nI suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll be blogging about this project for a little while, but here are the basics: the pattern is Swedish/Norwegian in styling. The yarn are black and a hand-dyed, from a dyer in Wisconsin that I had made specifically for this project. The background color is called \u0026ldquo;tree bark,\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s very autumnal and the foreground color is black, so it has a sort of stained glass/water color look to it. The contrast isn\u0026rsquo;t as strong as I had hoped, but the base yarn is similar to the \u0026ldquo;Shaffer Anne\u0026rdquo; sock yarn (if that\u0026rsquo;s meaningful to any of you,) and it feels lovely.\nGood enough for me!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-pattern-complexity/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a series of terribly self indulgent posts about thinking about creative projects as work and about the habit and rhythm that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using to get work done, even under adverse circumstances. As exciting as the increased blogging and progress on fiction projects is, I\u0026rsquo;m just as excited about figuring out how to squeeze in knitting and reading time into my days.\nAnd not to overshadow the importance of figuring out how to make the best of my time, but the other major factor in my return to knitting is that I finally finished the plain sweater that I\u0026rsquo;d been working on for 7 months (or so) and got to cast on a sweater with a two-color pattern, in a nifty yarn, and a pattern that\u0026rsquo;s strongly reminiscent of my favorite sweater.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that while plain knitting is soothing, in many ways, it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly fulfilling or engaging.","title":"Knitting Pattern Complexity"},{"content":"See \u0026ldquo;Why The World Is Ready For Dexy\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Dexy and Literate Documentation\u0026rdquo; as well as the technical writing section section of the tychoish wiki for some background to this post.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s establish some basics. Content, as I think of it, in the context of new/web/digital media, is all of the stuff we read and right on the web. Documentation are those texts which supports the use and creation of technical tools, and explains technical concepts. While obviously read literally, documentation is content, but I think the way we\u0026rsquo;ve come to understand other kinds of digital content provides an incomplete basis for understanding how technical texts are published and consumed on line.\nConsider the following assumptions that we can make about most forms of content on the web:\nThe basic unit of content is pretty short. 1000-1500 tops is the upper boundary for most blog posts and articles, and while some kinds of content can sneak by with slightly longer units--particularly in well structured contexts--these are exceptions. Most content on the web is time-sensitive. While everything gets archived, the focus of publication is often on volume, which increases the chance of producing something that \u0026ldquo;goes viral\u0026rdquo; and gets a lot of attention. All other things being equal, the most successful on-line publishers are the ones with the shortest publication processes and the most regular publication cadences. After a short period of time, what\u0026rsquo;s in the site archives is probably largely irrelevant. Given the way that some content competes with other content, success is often determined by specialization, and the tightness of focus. It\u0026rsquo;s easier to be the loudest voice in a very small room than it is to be the loudest voice in a large room or a lot of small rooms. Content, thus, needs to be very focused and address very niche interests. in contrast:\nDocumentation texts tend to be pretty long, and while there are some \u0026ldquo;quick reference\u0026rdquo;-scoped texts, and some very complete texts that are quite long, on average documentation is substantially longer than \u0026ldquo;content.\u0026rdquo; This means it needs to be produced differently, and we can expect different usage patterns.\nIn general people don\u0026rsquo;t read documentation. This isn\u0026rsquo;t just that people don\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;rtfm,\u0026rdquo; but that if generally people\u0026rsquo;s interaction with a piece of documentation begins with a specific question or problem. They don\u0026rsquo;t say \u0026ldquo;oh, that manual for $xvz product looks interesting, i\u0026rsquo;ll read it,\u0026rdquo; and i think the \u0026ldquo;i should read the documentation for $uvw before i begin doing $task,\u0026rdquo; is much less common than we\u0026rsquo;d like to think.\nPeople read documentation very tactically. So it\u0026rsquo;s important that documentation exist and be complete, but we should have no illusions that people read any documentation from beginning to end as \u0026ldquo;clean slates.\u0026rdquo;\nDocumentation is always already very tightly focused, unlike content. While some technical publishers may publish \u0026ldquo;second hand documentation,\u0026rdquo; and thus be able to focus on documenting different aspects of the user experience, most documentation producers must aim to cover as much as possible, and allow users to find and take advantage of whatever information that is most useful for them.\nAs a result, it\u0026rsquo;s absolutely crucial that we don\u0026rsquo;t think of and produce documentation as being crucial. I think treating documentation as something that needs to be compiled. is probably the first step in \u0026ldquo;doing right\u0026rdquo; by documentation. Build tools like dexy, similarly, are great because they let writers and developers produce documentation in ways that make sense.\nIf you write or produce documentation--and better content as well--I\u0026rsquo;m interested in hear what you think about these issues. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/documentation-isnt-content/","summary":"See \u0026ldquo;Why The World Is Ready For Dexy\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Dexy and Literate Documentation\u0026rdquo; as well as the technical writing section section of the tychoish wiki for some background to this post.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s establish some basics. Content, as I think of it, in the context of new/web/digital media, is all of the stuff we read and right on the web. Documentation are those texts which supports the use and creation of technical tools, and explains technical concepts. While obviously read literally, documentation is content, but I think the way we\u0026rsquo;ve come to understand other kinds of digital content provides an incomplete basis for understanding how technical texts are published and consumed on line.\nConsider the following assumptions that we can make about most forms of content on the web:\nThe basic unit of content is pretty short. 1000-1500 tops is the upper boundary for most blog posts and articles, and while some kinds of content can sneak by with slightly longer units--particularly in well structured contexts--these are exceptions.","title":"Documentation isn't Content"},{"content":"One part of finding momentum and working to dedicate a bit of energy to some projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been neglecting for a while. I\u0026rsquo;ve written a bit about finding the rhythm of my current routine, I\u0026rsquo;ve not written about what I\u0026rsquo;m actually doing. I hope this isn\u0026rsquo;t too boring for words.\nSince the end of July, I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen to undertake a 2 hour each-way commute. Thankfully it\u0026rsquo;s all by rail, so the thought is that while I might not have a lot of time at home, I have more than enough time to get work done, of any sort, on the train. In practice my ability to actually get work done on the train is awful. In the past few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a bunch better at this, and have actually managed to write fiction, get back on the blogging bandwagon, and stay on top of emails, and even reading a bit.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how a typical days works. I have a 20 minute train ride, a three to five minute walk, a 20 minute train ride, 10-15 minutes of waiting, and then 40 minutes of a train ride. Reversed in the evening. The first/last trains are sometimes standing room only. I try and spend the second and third train in the morning on the computer writing blog posts and fiction. If I can write first thing in the morning I can take it, but I always think about what writing needs to be done. On the way home I wrap up loose ends, read email, and at least a couple of days a week I get some knitting try to read and knit.\nAnd it works. Most of the time, or at least enough of the time, for me to be able to notice that I\u0026rsquo;m actually doing things. I think as much anything, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get a much clearer idea of what I can expect to accomplish in any given time span, which makes it much easier and more productive to make a todo list. I think the main purpose of keeping a todo list is to focus working times so that I never find myself thinking \u0026ldquo;I have a few free moments, what should I work on today,\u0026rdquo; because the list tells me these things. If I know how much time I have, about, I know how to best spread out tasks for optimal working without ever needing to waste time wondering what I ought to be working on. It seems to work.\nIn the end, the novel keeps getting longer and closer to the end. I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that I may be a bit too ahead of myself on the blog. My sweater-in-progress gets longer, and the progressing bar on my kindle progresses. That\u0026rsquo;s worth something.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/specific-rhythms/","summary":"One part of finding momentum and working to dedicate a bit of energy to some projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been neglecting for a while. I\u0026rsquo;ve written a bit about finding the rhythm of my current routine, I\u0026rsquo;ve not written about what I\u0026rsquo;m actually doing. I hope this isn\u0026rsquo;t too boring for words.\nSince the end of July, I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen to undertake a 2 hour each-way commute. Thankfully it\u0026rsquo;s all by rail, so the thought is that while I might not have a lot of time at home, I have more than enough time to get work done, of any sort, on the train. In practice my ability to actually get work done on the train is awful. In the past few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a bunch better at this, and have actually managed to write fiction, get back on the blogging bandwagon, and stay on top of emails, and even reading a bit.","title":"Specific Rhythms"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing around with writing a story or a few stories about transpiration infrastructure,\nI spend a lot of time on trains. And I in a part of the world where there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of transportation infrastructure, but most of it is nearly 100 years old. So while it\u0026rsquo;s nice that there are trains, it\u0026rsquo;s also apparent that the trains are designed to serve a reality which is radically different from the one that people today occupy.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m drawn to stories about people living in worlds that are out of sync with their reality. The story I\u0026rsquo;m writing now revolves around this idea, using the problem of relativistic space travel as a device to pull people \u0026ldquo;out of time,\u0026rdquo; but I think there are ways that people\u0026rsquo;s relationship to their present is shifted without science fictional devices: by history, by political rhetoric, by development, and by illness.\nThe two ideas I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with recently are:\na story about the people who build some sort of railroad system on a new colony or outpost. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking Mars Trilogy (Robinson) meets Heart of Darkness meets Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin). a story about a commuter on the Moon mid/post-Accelerondo. Sort of \u0026ldquo;Philadelphia in Space.\u0026rdquo; This is probably more of a short story/vignette sequence, and I have a little bit sketched out but it\u0026rsquo;s all in first person and I need to make that not be the case. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/infrastructure-and-place/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing around with writing a story or a few stories about transpiration infrastructure,\nI spend a lot of time on trains. And I in a part of the world where there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of transportation infrastructure, but most of it is nearly 100 years old. So while it\u0026rsquo;s nice that there are trains, it\u0026rsquo;s also apparent that the trains are designed to serve a reality which is radically different from the one that people today occupy.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m drawn to stories about people living in worlds that are out of sync with their reality. The story I\u0026rsquo;m writing now revolves around this idea, using the problem of relativistic space travel as a device to pull people \u0026ldquo;out of time,\u0026rdquo; but I think there are ways that people\u0026rsquo;s relationship to their present is shifted without science fictional devices: by history, by political rhetoric, by development, and by illness.","title":"Infrastructure and Place"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written between 100 and 300 words on this novel that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for two and a half years, for the past two weeks. After too many months of writing much less than this, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that it\u0026rsquo;s been much longer since I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to write this regularly (regardless of length) on a fiction project. This feels amazing, and for the first time in forever, I feel like a real writer. Which is kind of an amazing thing.\nThis Project; My Life Even when I\u0026rsquo;m not writing fiction, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty prolific, so I suppose, I almost always feel like a writer. At the same time, writing endless emails and writing stories is very different. I think it takes a few months for life to settle down, for new routines to establish themselves, and the for habits to emerge that make it possible to write. This project has lingered along for way too long, and while I\u0026rsquo;m still interested in it, and interested in the ideas that it raises, I\u0026rsquo;m in a very different place in my life right now, and I would like to put this to bed so I can work on other things.\nI want to write short stories, and work on pulling together application together for Clarion (or Viable Paradise?) for 2012 or so. And I have this story that I\u0026rsquo;ve been pondering for months about non-normative family geometries and adult relationship structures (in the way that Le Guin\u0026rsquo;s Left Hand Darkness addressed similar issues regarding gender.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m putting together the final scenes of Chapter 10. I think I have another week or two here. Then there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of explosion and general climatic goings on in 11, and I\u0026rsquo;ve only planned 12 chapters. Actually in a moment of foresight, I planned out 11 chapters, skipping Chapter 9 and leaving the words \u0026ldquo;overflow here.\u0026rdquo; And really, the prospect of being able to write the awesomeness that is Chapter 12 has been the main thing that\u0026rsquo;s kept me going through all of this.\nArt as Work; Art as Habit There are two parts of this. First, I think art isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing where you take raw talent, and wait for divine inspiration, and find quality creative work. No. Doing art is about participating in conversations, about pushing yourself to create better work, learning skills, and figuring out a way to make a living doing your art (or something related) so that you\u0026rsquo;re able to continue to be involved and productive. Art is hard work, and perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s (part) of why it\u0026rsquo;s so important. I\u0026rsquo;m okay with this.\nI am also a very strong proponent of the idea that being successful as a creator/writer/artist--is less about having \u0026ldquo;great days\u0026rdquo; and more about getting a certain amount of writing done every day. The hardest part of writing is always in getting started. Once you have a little momentum, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to write a modest amount every day, and that\u0026rsquo;s the kind of writing that adds up and makes novels.\nAt least that\u0026rsquo;s the plan.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/art-work/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written between 100 and 300 words on this novel that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for two and a half years, for the past two weeks. After too many months of writing much less than this, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that it\u0026rsquo;s been much longer since I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to write this regularly (regardless of length) on a fiction project. This feels amazing, and for the first time in forever, I feel like a real writer. Which is kind of an amazing thing.\nThis Project; My Life Even when I\u0026rsquo;m not writing fiction, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty prolific, so I suppose, I almost always feel like a writer. At the same time, writing endless emails and writing stories is very different. I think it takes a few months for life to settle down, for new routines to establish themselves, and the for habits to emerge that make it possible to write. This project has lingered along for way too long, and while I\u0026rsquo;m still interested in it, and interested in the ideas that it raises, I\u0026rsquo;m in a very different place in my life right now, and I would like to put this to bed so I can work on other things.","title":"Art Work"},{"content":"Yesterday, I posted over at Critical Futures the second of, an apparent, series of four posts on dexy. Dexy is cool because it\u0026rsquo;s a pretty nifty tool for doing documentation in a new and potentially very powerful manner. While I think playing around with Dexy is cool and important (and I\u0026rsquo;m having fun tinkering a little, seeing the world in a slightly different way and then running away to absorb and re-assess) it\u0026rsquo;s also very important to think about the reasons why tools like Dexy are incredibly important.\nRead on for: `Dexy and Literate Documentation \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/2011/01/dexy-and-literate-documentation\u0026gt;`_\nAlso, as part of this post and series (archive recently updated!) I\u0026rsquo;ve been developing a technical writing section of this wiki, which has included a couple of little pages and snippets that I\u0026rsquo;ve been hanging onto for a while, and a number of pages that I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to write wiki pages on. These include three major issues in technical writing and the tools used to build documentation resources that build tools that yesterday\u0026rsquo;s addresses. They are: /technical-writing/atomicity or smaller \u0026ldquo;atomic\u0026rdquo; units of documentation, /technical-writing/compilation or generating documentation statically before publication rather than dynamically on view, and flitering as an approach to document generation.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to perceptively apologize if my blogging here is not particularly interesting, or topical except in a very \u0026ldquo;meta\u0026rdquo; sort of way. One of my primary goals for tychoish.com-as-a-wiki is to be able to keep track of and document the work that I\u0026rsquo;m doing on line that isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily blog-post related. Blogging is great, but it\u0026rsquo;s hard to balance writing blog posts and providing a good media outlet and the kind of work required for developing wiki pages and moving forward on other sorts of projects. These posts, in addition to spreading links, and offering short partially formed thoughts, will likely serve to draw attention to various things I\u0026rsquo;m working on.\nThe idea of wiki gardening isn\u0026rsquo;t new, but I like it. Wiki\u0026rsquo;s are so simple and so easy to create that the only thing you can really do to cause a wiki to fail is to neglect it. Not that the proper care and feeding of a wiki isn\u0026rsquo;t challenging, but it is simple. In any case I suspect many of the meta posts will be \u0026ldquo;gardening\u0026rdquo; posts in the sense that they\u0026rsquo;ll draw attention to recent edits of wiki pages and note the new and developing pages in solicitation of your contribution.\nShovels up!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tech-writing-wiki-gardening-and-updates/","summary":"Yesterday, I posted over at Critical Futures the second of, an apparent, series of four posts on dexy. Dexy is cool because it\u0026rsquo;s a pretty nifty tool for doing documentation in a new and potentially very powerful manner. While I think playing around with Dexy is cool and important (and I\u0026rsquo;m having fun tinkering a little, seeing the world in a slightly different way and then running away to absorb and re-assess) it\u0026rsquo;s also very important to think about the reasons why tools like Dexy are incredibly important.\nRead on for: `Dexy and Literate Documentation \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/2011/01/dexy-and-literate-documentation\u0026gt;`_\nAlso, as part of this post and series (archive recently updated!) I\u0026rsquo;ve been developing a technical writing section of this wiki, which has included a couple of little pages and snippets that I\u0026rsquo;ve been hanging onto for a while, and a number of pages that I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to write wiki pages on. These include three major issues in technical writing and the tools used to build documentation resources that build tools that yesterday\u0026rsquo;s addresses.","title":"Updates: Tech Writing and Wiki Gardening"},{"content":"See \u0026ldquo;Why The World Is Ready For Dexy\u0026rdquo; for the lead into this post. The short version: most tools for building documentation are substandard, and most attempts at \u0026ldquo;fixing documentation processes\u0026rdquo; are flawed. But there\u0026rsquo;s this new project called \u0026ldquo;Dexy\u0026rdquo; that is doing something that is pretty exciting.\nBasically, Dexy is a text filtering framework, you write documentation, code samples, and code, and then you tell Dexy how to stitch everything together, and bingo. It\u0026rsquo;s success, or potential success, is built around its simplicity and flexibility.\nThis model Dexy proposes something called \u0026ldquo;Literate Documentation,\u0026rdquo; which is a cool concept, which expands upon the notion of \u0026ldquo;literate programming,\u0026rdquo; both concepts require a little bit of unpacking.\nLiterate programing is the idea that code, documentation, and all specifications should be contained in one file, with blocks of machine readable code and human readable text should be interleaved with each other. Literate programming tools, then take this \u0026ldquo;mega source\u0026rdquo; and build programs that do cool things. There are a number of literate programming tools, and some notable programs that are written in this manner, but it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly popular: code and text tend to flow in different ways, and a manageable literate programming text, is often not particularly maintainable software.\nLiterate documentation, on the other hand, as implemented by Dexy is documentation where the documentation is compiled from an amalgamation of text and code which can be run and tested at build time. You write code snippets and documentation snippets, and a tool like Dexy takes all of it, runs the code and stitches together a document out of all the pieces. Then, anytime you need to make a change to the code, or the text, you rerun Dexy and the documentation mostly tests itself. Good deal.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s not yet obvious if Literate Documentation will actually be a \u0026ldquo;thing.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s a great idea but, like literate programming, it\u0026rsquo;s unclear of how this kind of practice will actually catch on, and how useful/feasible writing documentation will be in this manner. \u0026ldquo;Dexy the method\u0026rdquo; may or may not find greater acceptance, because \u0026ldquo;Literate Documentation\u0026rdquo; may depend on developers writing documentation. At the same time I think that \u0026ldquo;Dexy the tool,\u0026rdquo; is certainly a valuable contribution to the field of technical writing. Nevertheless, I think there are some important things about the way Dexy works that are worth extrapolating.\n(Links to `tychoish wiki \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/readers-guide/\u0026gt;`_ pages concerning `technical writing \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/technical-writing/\u0026gt;`_ in some state of existence.)\nAtomic Documentation. Dexy reinforces the idea that documentation should be written in very small units that are self sufficient, and address very small and specific topics, questions, and features. The system which builds and displays documentation should then be able to either usefully present these \u0026ldquo;atomic\u0026rdquo; units or stitch more complete documentation together from these units. This makes documentation easier to maintain, and arguably makes documentation more valuable for users. Compiled Documentation. The \u0026ldquo;end-product\u0026rdquo; Documentation should be statically compiled, unlike (most) web-based content that is dynamically generated. This allows writers and teams to verify the quality of the text prior to publication, and allows the \u0026ldquo;build system\u0026rdquo; to automate various quality control tests. Documentation is particularly suited to this kind of display generation because it changes very irregularly (no more than a few times a day, and often much much less often.) Pipes and Filters. the process of publication can--like code--is basically passing text (and examples) through various levels of processing until the arriving at a \u0026ldquo;final product.\u0026rdquo; Dexy is very explicit about this and provides writers/developers a framework to manage a complex filtering process in a sane manner. I look forward to thinking about these aspects of documentation and documentation systems, and about how writing texts with Dexy, or in the \u0026ldquo;Literate Documentation,\u0026rdquo; mode affects the writing process and the shape that texts take. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments or on the wiki pages!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dexy-and-literate-documentation/","summary":"See \u0026ldquo;Why The World Is Ready For Dexy\u0026rdquo; for the lead into this post. The short version: most tools for building documentation are substandard, and most attempts at \u0026ldquo;fixing documentation processes\u0026rdquo; are flawed. But there\u0026rsquo;s this new project called \u0026ldquo;Dexy\u0026rdquo; that is doing something that is pretty exciting.\nBasically, Dexy is a text filtering framework, you write documentation, code samples, and code, and then you tell Dexy how to stitch everything together, and bingo. It\u0026rsquo;s success, or potential success, is built around its simplicity and flexibility.\nThis model Dexy proposes something called \u0026ldquo;Literate Documentation,\u0026rdquo; which is a cool concept, which expands upon the notion of \u0026ldquo;literate programming,\u0026rdquo; both concepts require a little bit of unpacking.\nLiterate programing is the idea that code, documentation, and all specifications should be contained in one file, with blocks of machine readable code and human readable text should be interleaved with each other. Literate programming tools, then take this \u0026ldquo;mega source\u0026rdquo; and build programs that do cool things.","title":"Dexy and Literate Documentation"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s the problem: most of my computing happens on laptops which are both unreliably active (i.e. suspended) and also have unreliable network connections. (i.e. trains, etc.). I\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot of work to make it possible for my digital life to continue without interruptions. This includes writing cron jobs that exit before performing network intensive operations and making sure that most data can be downloaded and consumed in offline formats. But this is not quite ideal.\nAnd I thought, \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be great if, I could just bundle up tasks into little chunks and throw them in a pile that the computer will process and perform when it can, so that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to remember to do things when I have a network connection and I can just drift in and out various states (active network, low-quality network, no network, and suspend/resume) without worrying about managing these states.\u0026rdquo; Sort of like a cross between cron and some sort of queuing/bus system.\nWait. A queue.\nAs many of you who are still reading know, the contemporary solution (and, actually historical as well, but we won\u0026rsquo;t get into that.) to enabling web applications to scale to be able to handle large amounts of work is to use queuing systems which allow applications to distribute and absorb bursts of activity, by spreading work out between high and low utilization periods. Basically: if you don\u0026rsquo;t have to do everything all at once, split everything into little \u0026ldquo;atomic\u0026rdquo; jobs, make a list and then process, and do jobs as you can until everything is done.\nThese are high performance systems, meant to handle nearly incomprehensible amounts of activity, but the idea is the same: I (and perhaps you too?) need a system that can figure out what state a machine is in and can save tasks and run them when the conditions are right. Simple, right?\nAnyone want to work on this with me? Come on, it\u0026rsquo;ll be fun!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/laptop-queuing-systems/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s the problem: most of my computing happens on laptops which are both unreliably active (i.e. suspended) and also have unreliable network connections. (i.e. trains, etc.). I\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot of work to make it possible for my digital life to continue without interruptions. This includes writing cron jobs that exit before performing network intensive operations and making sure that most data can be downloaded and consumed in offline formats. But this is not quite ideal.\nAnd I thought, \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be great if, I could just bundle up tasks into little chunks and throw them in a pile that the computer will process and perform when it can, so that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to remember to do things when I have a network connection and I can just drift in and out various states (active network, low-quality network, no network, and suspend/resume) without worrying about managing these states.\u0026rdquo; Sort of like a cross between cron and some sort of queuing/bus system.","title":"Laptop Queuing System"},{"content":"I have a bunch of links that have been hanging around too long, that I\u0026rsquo;d like to share with you, so here they are. Enjoy!\nDistrust Simplicity is a great short form blog, that I\u0026rsquo;m really liking. The Singularity Summit is a cyborg/futurist event that a reader wrote me a note about a rather long time ago. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in the singularity and issues and ideas related to that. Hypo a literate programing (with org-babel) based asset management system for game development. (hypo example. Common Lisp Support in Org-Babel. I feel like there\u0026rsquo;s probably a joke here. Mango.io a markdown-based CMS, using Python tools. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;m likely to ever want to use myself but it\u0026rsquo;s an idea. A New York Times Article about Podcasting and Leo Laporte\u0026rsquo;s TWiT Network While the content of this article is interesting in it\u0026rsquo;s own right, there are a couple of \u0026ldquo;bigger\u0026rdquo; picture things happening. First, the old media (i.e. \u0026ldquo;the Times\u0026rdquo;) covering the new media (i.e. \u0026ldquo;TWiT,\u0026rdquo;) is always interesting. Secondly, and less obviously, it\u0026rsquo;s interesting how the biggest successes in the \u0026ldquo;New Media,\u0026rdquo; are by veterans of the \u0026ldquo;Old Media,\u0026rdquo; (like Laporte, who had a career in Radio and television before doing TWiT.) Social Text Journal: The Dramatic Face of Wikileaks, is a meta-meta-meta look at wikileaks and the \u0026ldquo;new media\u0026rdquo; moment that it represents. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/link-storm/","summary":"I have a bunch of links that have been hanging around too long, that I\u0026rsquo;d like to share with you, so here they are. Enjoy!\nDistrust Simplicity is a great short form blog, that I\u0026rsquo;m really liking. The Singularity Summit is a cyborg/futurist event that a reader wrote me a note about a rather long time ago. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in the singularity and issues and ideas related to that. Hypo a literate programing (with org-babel) based asset management system for game development. (hypo example. Common Lisp Support in Org-Babel. I feel like there\u0026rsquo;s probably a joke here. Mango.io a markdown-based CMS, using Python tools. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;m likely to ever want to use myself but it\u0026rsquo;s an idea. A New York Times Article about Podcasting and Leo Laporte\u0026rsquo;s TWiT Network While the content of this article is interesting in it\u0026rsquo;s own right, there are a couple of \u0026ldquo;bigger\u0026rdquo; picture things happening.","title":"Link Storm"},{"content":"(Note: I was going through some old files earlier this week and found a couple of old posts that never made it into the live site. This is one of them. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of polishing around the edges, but this is as much a post for historical interest as is a reflection of the contemporary state of my thought.)\nWhen I decided to publish my novella Knowing Mars, I decided that I wanted to use my existing publication system and that I wanted to automate the process of generating of all the necessary versions that made it possible to keep my original files in sync, without needing to duplicate effort. I decided that the few hours it would take to write a script would both save a lot of time later and make it more likely to maintain the text.\nSo I have this script that:\nCopies the source files into the publication directory. Generates: full html files for every chapter, plain text files for every chapter, a full html edition of the complete text, a plain text edition of the complete text, a minimally styled html edition of the complete text. Keeps these editions synchronized. Keep the original source files synchronized. Ideally provide a tool that would prove useful in the future. I\u0026rsquo;ve included the code of what I came up with in this wiki, at `\u0026lt;/code/build-novel\u0026gt;`_, and you can find the full source of tychogaren.com and Critical Futures here. For the full source of theKnowing Mars text consider the gitweb. I would be very grateful for any feedback or input.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/make-all-novella/","summary":"(Note: I was going through some old files earlier this week and found a couple of old posts that never made it into the live site. This is one of them. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of polishing around the edges, but this is as much a post for historical interest as is a reflection of the contemporary state of my thought.)\nWhen I decided to publish my novella Knowing Mars, I decided that I wanted to use my existing publication system and that I wanted to automate the process of generating of all the necessary versions that made it possible to keep my original files in sync, without needing to duplicate effort. I decided that the few hours it would take to write a script would both save a lot of time later and make it more likely to maintain the text.\nSo I have this script that:\nCopies the source files into the publication directory.","title":"Make All Novella"},{"content":"At one time or another, I suspect that most programmers and technical writers have attempted to \u0026ldquo;fix\u0026rdquo; technical writing in one way or another. It\u0026rsquo;s a big problem space:\nEverything, or at least many things, need to be documented, because undocumented features and behaviors cause problems that *one really ought not need to review the source code and understand the engineering to fix (potentially) trivial problems, every time the occur. The people who write code are both not suited to the task of writing documentation because writing code and writing documentation are in fact different skills. Also, I think the division of labor makes some sense here. Documentation, like code, requires maintenance, review, and ongoing quality control, as the technology and practice change. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work and particularly for large projects, that can be a rather intensive task. Lots of different kinds of documentation are needed, and depending on the specific needs of the user, a basic \u0026ldquo;unit of documentation,\u0026rdquo; may need to be presented in a number of different ways. There are a number of ways to implement these various versions and iterations, but they all come with various levels of complexity and maintenance requirements. The obvious thing to do, if you\u0026rsquo;re a programmer, is to write some system that \u0026ldquo;solves technical writing.\u0026rdquo; This can take the form of a tool for programmers that encourages them to write the documentation as the write the code, or it can take the form of a tool that enforces a great deal of structure for technical writing, to make it \u0026ldquo;easier\u0026rdquo; for writers and programmers to get good documentation. Basically \u0026ldquo;code your way out\u0026rdquo; of needing technical writers.\nYou can probably guess how I feel about this kind of approach.\nThere is definitely a space for tooling that can make the work of technical writing easier, as well as space for tools that make the presentation of documentation clearer and more valuable for users. Tools won\u0026rsquo;t be able to make developers to write, at least not without a serious productivity hit, nor will tools decrease the need for useful documentation.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a difficult problem domain. While there is a lot of room for building programs that make it easier to write better documentation, the problem is that the temptation to write too much software is great. Often the problems in the technical writing process, including high barriers to entry, complicated build/publication systems, and difficult to master organizational methods, which are easy to address in programs. Meanwhile, most of these issues can be traced to overly complex build tools and human-centered problems, which are harder to address in code.\nAnd since documentation takes the form of simple text, which seems easy to deal with, developers frustrated by documentation requirements, or technical writing teams, are prone to trying to write something to fix the apparent problem.\nWhich brings us to the present, where, if you want to write and publish documentation, your choices are:\nUse a wiki, which isn\u0026rsquo;t documentation but the software generally does a good job of publishing content, and wiki engines mostly don\u0026rsquo;t have arcane structures of their own that might get in the technical writer\u0026rsquo;s way. Downside: it\u0026rsquo;s the wrong tool for the job and it forces writers and editors to maintain style themselves across an entire corpus, which is difficult and eventually counterproductive. Use some other existing content management system. Typically these aren\u0026rsquo;t meant for documentation, they have difficult to use interfaces, because they\u0026rsquo;re meant to power websites and blogs, and they almost impose some sort of structure (like a blog,) which isn\u0026rsquo;t ideal for conveying documentation. Use an XML-based documentation tool-set. This is probably the best option around, at the moment, as these tools were built for the purpose of creating documentation. The main problems are: they\u0026rsquo;re not particularly well suited for generating content for the web (which I think is essential these days) and as near as I can tell they make humans edit XML by hand which I think is always a bad idea. Build your own system from the ground up. Remember text is easy to munge and most of the other options are undesirable. Downside: homegrown projects take a lot of time, they\u0026rsquo;re always a bit more complex than anyone (except the technical writers?) expect, and it\u0026rsquo;s easy to almost finish and that\u0026rsquo;s bad because half-baked documentation systems are most of what get us into this problem in the first place. So it\u0026rsquo;s a thorny problem and one that lots of people have (and are!) trying to solve. I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching a tool called dexy for the last few weeks (months?) and I\u0026rsquo;ve been very interested in it\u0026rsquo;s development and the impact that it, and similar tools, might have on my day-to-day work. This post seems to be the first in a series of thoughts about the tools that support technical writing and documentation.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-the-world-is-ready-for-dexy/","summary":"At one time or another, I suspect that most programmers and technical writers have attempted to \u0026ldquo;fix\u0026rdquo; technical writing in one way or another. It\u0026rsquo;s a big problem space:\nEverything, or at least many things, need to be documented, because undocumented features and behaviors cause problems that *one really ought not need to review the source code and understand the engineering to fix (potentially) trivial problems, every time the occur. The people who write code are both not suited to the task of writing documentation because writing code and writing documentation are in fact different skills. Also, I think the division of labor makes some sense here. Documentation, like code, requires maintenance, review, and ongoing quality control, as the technology and practice change. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work and particularly for large projects, that can be a rather intensive task. Lots of different kinds of documentation are needed, and depending on the specific needs of the user, a basic \u0026ldquo;unit of documentation,\u0026rdquo; may need to be presented in a number of different ways.","title":"Why The World is Ready for Dexy"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ll probably do a fair piece of this \u0026ldquo;metablogging\u0026rdquo; thing here, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry.\nAlso, I totally intended for rhizome to be a much shorter form blogging project, and while the posts are shorter here than at critical futures, they\u0026rsquo;re not exactly short, and I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly as prolific as I might like to be.\nI think I might just be somewhat long-winded.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also found that I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly not succeeded as using the wiki functions. Which is probably as much a result of my minimal posting as it is a function of my inclination.\nThough I do realize that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty set in my existing blogging habit, and it takes a lot for me to break out of this form. Though I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to try. You can help by editing pages and continuing conversations that I start. I think I need to tweak some of the templates, to include \u0026ldquo;discuss this further\u0026rdquo; links (both here and on critical futures.) to remind people that anyone can edit and contribute.\nAlso you should all check out On Wireless Data, if you haven\u0026rsquo;t already. This is a post that I wrote a while back (and posted last week) about the that the technological constraints of wireless data networks constrains and effects the kinds of applications that are developed for these kinds of environments. This in turn affects the ways that people use technology. Which is interesting (and important) to think about.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s all for now. I\u0026rsquo;ll see you around later!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wiki-blogging/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ll probably do a fair piece of this \u0026ldquo;metablogging\u0026rdquo; thing here, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry.\nAlso, I totally intended for rhizome to be a much shorter form blogging project, and while the posts are shorter here than at critical futures, they\u0026rsquo;re not exactly short, and I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly as prolific as I might like to be.\nI think I might just be somewhat long-winded.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also found that I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly not succeeded as using the wiki functions. Which is probably as much a result of my minimal posting as it is a function of my inclination.\nThough I do realize that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty set in my existing blogging habit, and it takes a lot for me to break out of this form. Though I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to try. You can help by editing pages and continuing conversations that I start. I think I need to tweak some of the templates, to include \u0026ldquo;discuss this further\u0026rdquo; links (both here and on critical futures.","title":"Wiki Blogging"},{"content":"This is a little bit of documentation/technical writing around an issue that I had for a while. SBCL is a Common Lisp implementation that I use, and would recommend as a good starting point for people interested in tinkering with Common Lisp. SLIME is an emacs-based development tool kit that lets you interact with a lisp session in real time.\nSLIME works as you\u0026rsquo;re writing code and makes it possible to connect to (potentially any) running lisp process and execute code and access documentation, among other functions. The connection between Emacs/Slime and the running application is provided by a connector called \u0026ldquo;Swank.\u0026rdquo; Lisp is pretty cool, Common Lisp is really nifty, but SLIME is what makes working with Lisp fun/easy and really powerful.\nOk. Here\u0026rsquo;s what happens. You upgrade SBCL (which happens every now and then for me with Arch Linux,) and you probably have to recompile a number of things to work with the new package. That\u0026rsquo;s a bit annoying, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a huge burden. Then you try and load Swank, and it bombs. You reinstall Slime but no dice, and you still can\u0026rsquo;t connect to your application in slime.\nThis is where I lingered for about 3 months. No working Slime meant going back to interacting with my lisp applications in the conventional manner, which kind of sucked.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the fix, and it\u0026rsquo;s crazy simple. In emacs run \u0026ldquo;M-x slime\u0026rdquo; Restart the application or reload the swank loader, and then try and connect to the application with Slime. Bingo.\nTurns out that Slime (and therefore swank) build a few .fasl files that are version specific to SBCL that hang around after the upgrade. The only way these files are rebuilt is if you load slime, which you may only do by way of swank, which won\u0026rsquo;t work unless you reload slime. It\u0026rsquo;s a chicken and egg issue.\nProblem solved. Sorry it wasn\u0026rsquo;t more interesting: most aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/upgrade-sbcl-and-slime/","summary":"This is a little bit of documentation/technical writing around an issue that I had for a while. SBCL is a Common Lisp implementation that I use, and would recommend as a good starting point for people interested in tinkering with Common Lisp. SLIME is an emacs-based development tool kit that lets you interact with a lisp session in real time.\nSLIME works as you\u0026rsquo;re writing code and makes it possible to connect to (potentially any) running lisp process and execute code and access documentation, among other functions. The connection between Emacs/Slime and the running application is provided by a connector called \u0026ldquo;Swank.\u0026rdquo; Lisp is pretty cool, Common Lisp is really nifty, but SLIME is what makes working with Lisp fun/easy and really powerful.\nOk. Here\u0026rsquo;s what happens. You upgrade SBCL (which happens every now and then for me with Arch Linux,) and you probably have to recompile a number of things to work with the new package.","title":"Upgrade SBCL and SLIME"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s easy to look around at all of the \u0026ldquo;smart phones,\u0026rdquo; iPads, wireless modems, and think that the future is here, or even that we\u0026rsquo;re living on the cusp of a new technological moment. While wireless data is amazing particularly with respect to where it was a few years ago--enhanced by a better understanding of how to make use of wireless data--it is also true that we\u0026rsquo;re not there yet.\nAnd maybe, given a few years, we\u0026rsquo;ll get there. But it\u0026rsquo;ll be a while. The problem is that too much of the way we use the Internet these days assumes high quality connections to the network. Wireless connections are low quality regardless of speed, in that latency is high and dropped packets are common. While some measures can be taken to speed up the transmission of data once connections are established, and this can give the illusion of better quality, the effect is mostly illusory.\nIndeed in a lot of ways the largest recent advancements in wireless technology have been with how applications and platforms are designed in the wireless context rather than anything to do with the wireless transmission technology. Much of the development in the wireless space in the last two or three years has revolved around making a little bit of data go a long way, in using the (remarkably powerful) devices for more of the application\u0026rsquo;s work, and in figuring out how to cache some data for \u0026ldquo;offline use,\u0026rdquo; when it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to use the radio. These are problems that can be addressed and largely solved in software, although there are limitations and inconsistencies in approach that continue to affect user experience.\nWe, as a result, have a couple of conditions. First that we can transmit a lot of data over the air without much trouble, but data integrity and latency (speed) are things we may have to give up on. Second that application development paradigms that can take advantage of this will succeed. Furthermore, I think it\u0026rsquo;s fairly safe to say that in the future, successful mobile technology will develop in this direction as opposed against these trends. Actual real-time mobile technology is dead in the water, although I think some simulated real-time communication works quite well in these contexts.\nPractically this means, applications that tap an APO for data that is mostly processed locally. Queue-compatible message passing systems that don\u0026rsquo;t require persistent connections. Software and protocols that assume you\u0026rsquo;re always \u0026ldquo;on-line\u0026rdquo; and are able to store transmissions gracefully until you come out of the subway or get off of a train. Of course, this also means designing applications and systems that are efficient with regards to their use of data will be more successful.\nThe notion that fewer transmissions that consist of bigger \u0026ldquo;globs\u0026rdquo; of data will yield better performance than a large number of very small intermediate transmissions, is terribly foreign. It shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be, this stuff has been around for a while, but nevertheless here we are.\nIsn\u0026rsquo;t the future grand?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-wireless-data/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s easy to look around at all of the \u0026ldquo;smart phones,\u0026rdquo; iPads, wireless modems, and think that the future is here, or even that we\u0026rsquo;re living on the cusp of a new technological moment. While wireless data is amazing particularly with respect to where it was a few years ago--enhanced by a better understanding of how to make use of wireless data--it is also true that we\u0026rsquo;re not there yet.\nAnd maybe, given a few years, we\u0026rsquo;ll get there. But it\u0026rsquo;ll be a while. The problem is that too much of the way we use the Internet these days assumes high quality connections to the network. Wireless connections are low quality regardless of speed, in that latency is high and dropped packets are common. While some measures can be taken to speed up the transmission of data once connections are established, and this can give the illusion of better quality, the effect is mostly illusory.","title":"On Wireless Data"},{"content":"Typically, I\u0026rsquo;m writing my new years post on January 3rd, knowing full well that I won\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to publish it until the 4th. This probably explains how my 2010 closed and how my 2011 is shaping out.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been writing emails today and over the weekend to family and friends, making plans for various events and weekends over the next six months. There are only so many weekends, and there is so much to do. My preliminary outline for May/June is--I think this is par for the course when one is a Morris dancer--exhausting, and I have five or six months to prepare. The rest of spring is similarly exciting.\nThe last year was, on the whole, a good year: I have started new relationships and enriched existing ones in was that I am quite pleased with, I had a move that\u0026rsquo;s been good for me in a number of ways, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to travel regionally a great deal, and I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot in my travels. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t all positive: I definitely didn\u0026rsquo;t finish the writing projects I wanted to, I didn\u0026rsquo;t knit or read as much as I would have liked to, and I have a number of personal projects that I\u0026rsquo;m throwing a lot of energy into that I hope to resolve in the next few months. But all of the low points can be directly correlated to the high points: success requires sacrifice, and on balance it\u0026rsquo;s been a successful year.\nI hope that in the new year, we all are able to have great successes, without needing to make untenable sacrifices. I think the core of all new years resolutions is a wish to make our lives a little bit better than they were previously, hopefully in small manageable ways. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to keep working on making my world (and self) a better place to be me.\nI hope, if you too are embarking on any kind of project like this, that you will succeed, and I look forward to sharing parts of my journey with you in this blog.\nCheers!\n(real content will resume shortly, I promise!)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/some-new-years/","summary":"Typically, I\u0026rsquo;m writing my new years post on January 3rd, knowing full well that I won\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to publish it until the 4th. This probably explains how my 2010 closed and how my 2011 is shaping out.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been writing emails today and over the weekend to family and friends, making plans for various events and weekends over the next six months. There are only so many weekends, and there is so much to do. My preliminary outline for May/June is--I think this is par for the course when one is a Morris dancer--exhausting, and I have five or six months to prepare. The rest of spring is similarly exciting.\nThe last year was, on the whole, a good year: I have started new relationships and enriched existing ones in was that I am quite pleased with, I had a move that\u0026rsquo;s been good for me in a number of ways, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to travel regionally a great deal, and I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot in my travels.","title":"Some New Years"},{"content":"So I think I\u0026rsquo;m back to being a knitter. I started a sweater last May: something fine gage, very very plain, using my \u0026ldquo;default, this sweater is awesome\u0026rdquo; pattern in my head. It has had its ups and downs, but its a good project: and like all good projects, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned something.\nFirst, the sweater is much larger than I wanted it to be: thankfully, it\u0026rsquo;s going to fit my roommate perfectly and I\u0026rsquo;ve been meaning in to knit him something for a while. At the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s such a fine sweater that the extra size means that it took extra long to knit.\nThe second thing, and perhaps more importantly, when I started the sweater I hadn\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting very much and I thought that what I really needed was something plain and simple and meditative. Apparently, except when I need distraction, plain knitting is not what I need, and I ended up being far too bored to actually want to work on this.\nThankfully, this week, I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly needed distraction, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to make rather impressive progress on the sleeves, and I expect to finish the last third of the second sleeve by this evening. That means I can start on new knitting projects, and I have a new sweater planed out and ready to go.\nVery exciting, I know.\nI got rid of a lot of yarn stash this fall--stuff that I had collected (on the cheap) that I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a project in mind for, with the hope that a smaller stash would let me focus on being able to knit on projects that I really wanted to knit. Which is sweaters, primarily sweaters in finer gages with nice two color patterns.\nAnd so I will.\nFor this holiday week, in addition to the aforementioned plain sweater, I have a sweaters worth of the most amazing fingering weight yarn in two colors, and a graph for a new sweater.\nIt will be glorious.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/obsessive-knitting/","summary":"So I think I\u0026rsquo;m back to being a knitter. I started a sweater last May: something fine gage, very very plain, using my \u0026ldquo;default, this sweater is awesome\u0026rdquo; pattern in my head. It has had its ups and downs, but its a good project: and like all good projects, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned something.\nFirst, the sweater is much larger than I wanted it to be: thankfully, it\u0026rsquo;s going to fit my roommate perfectly and I\u0026rsquo;ve been meaning in to knit him something for a while. At the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s such a fine sweater that the extra size means that it took extra long to knit.\nThe second thing, and perhaps more importantly, when I started the sweater I hadn\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting very much and I thought that what I really needed was something plain and simple and meditative. Apparently, except when I need distraction, plain knitting is not what I need, and I ended up being far too bored to actually want to work on this.","title":"Obsessive Knitting"},{"content":"The following tweet/identica post made this morning, pretty much sums up my reaction to the incumbent holiday:\nso last night I was like \u0026ldquo;why am I not getting email\u0026rdquo; and then \u0026ldquo;I better check on the server\u0026rdquo; and then \u0026ldquo;oh right #otherpeoplesholidays\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m getting on a plane later this morning to fly to my home town for the first time since last October. It\u0026rsquo;ll be good to see family and friends out there, and I\u0026rsquo;m always appreciative of a break from some aspects of my routine. Including the opportunity to be in my apartment during daylight for the first time in a month.\nI often think of this holiday break as a \u0026ldquo;free time\u0026rdquo; to make progress on different things that I\u0026rsquo;ve had to neglect on the account of life for the fall. While obviously more pronounced when I\u0026rsquo;ve been a student, I am very much looking forward to the opportunity to get up early and write, and spending long afternoons working on a sweater.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;ll have some other posts this weekend, and early next week about the knitting project.\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be new Critical Futures on Tuesday as there was last Tuesday (about new technology). I hope you forgive my indulgence while I get the new rhythm sorted out.\nAnd if this is your holiday, I hope you enjoy it!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/other-peoples-holidays/","summary":"The following tweet/identica post made this morning, pretty much sums up my reaction to the incumbent holiday:\nso last night I was like \u0026ldquo;why am I not getting email\u0026rdquo; and then \u0026ldquo;I better check on the server\u0026rdquo; and then \u0026ldquo;oh right #otherpeoplesholidays\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m getting on a plane later this morning to fly to my home town for the first time since last October. It\u0026rsquo;ll be good to see family and friends out there, and I\u0026rsquo;m always appreciative of a break from some aspects of my routine. Including the opportunity to be in my apartment during daylight for the first time in a month.\nI often think of this holiday break as a \u0026ldquo;free time\u0026rdquo; to make progress on different things that I\u0026rsquo;ve had to neglect on the account of life for the fall. While obviously more pronounced when I\u0026rsquo;ve been a student, I am very much looking forward to the opportunity to get up early and write, and spending long afternoons working on a sweater.","title":"Other People's Holidays"},{"content":"Sometimes, particularly when it feels like I\u0026rsquo;m not getting very much done, I\u0026rsquo;d probably tell you that I\u0026rsquo;m not very good at keeping myself a routine and that I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly focused most of the time.\nI\u0026rsquo;d probably be lying.\nWhile I wish that I had additional routines and habits more firmly established (blogging, writing, excercise, the truth is (I think, in retrospect) that a lot of how I exist in the world has to do with routines, and winning the mind-over-matter game.\nSince graduating from college, or there abouts I\u0026rsquo;ve been very keen to limit/control the amount of sleep I get in an effort to control normal fluctuations in mood. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty keen on waking up \u0026ldquo;early\u0026rdquo; so that I can spend a few hours in the morning before the day starts writing and tending to my own things in \u0026ldquo;me time.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m also pretty mindful of how I use caffeine to control awakeness and focus, and I primarily do exercise/gym things to modulate my mood and energy level, to control how much I sleep and am able to focus.\nWelcome to my life.\nI realized much to my delight, that I\u0026rsquo;d reached that stage of sleep deprivation where I\u0026rsquo;m able to fall asleep directly after drinking a cup of tea and stay asleep, until the morning. I\u0026rsquo;ve also managed to get in a habit, where, most nights, I roll over and check the clock between sleep cycles. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the sleep feel less restful, but I do feel more grounded in reality when I wake up, and tend to be less groggy as a result.\nFrankly this is kind of exciting for me.\nYesterday, I made tea right before I left the office, but left the mug there, and my night was noticeably effected by the chemical difference (I usually drink up to 24 ounces of tea on the train home.) All is better today.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/caffeine-dependence/","summary":"Sometimes, particularly when it feels like I\u0026rsquo;m not getting very much done, I\u0026rsquo;d probably tell you that I\u0026rsquo;m not very good at keeping myself a routine and that I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly focused most of the time.\nI\u0026rsquo;d probably be lying.\nWhile I wish that I had additional routines and habits more firmly established (blogging, writing, excercise, the truth is (I think, in retrospect) that a lot of how I exist in the world has to do with routines, and winning the mind-over-matter game.\nSince graduating from college, or there abouts I\u0026rsquo;ve been very keen to limit/control the amount of sleep I get in an effort to control normal fluctuations in mood. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty keen on waking up \u0026ldquo;early\u0026rdquo; so that I can spend a few hours in the morning before the day starts writing and tending to my own things in \u0026ldquo;me time.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m also pretty mindful of how I use caffeine to control awakeness and focus, and I primarily do exercise/gym things to modulate my mood and energy level, to control how much I sleep and am able to focus.","title":"Caffeine Dependence"},{"content":"in no particular order:\n\u0026ldquo;Aww, you look like you\u0026rsquo;re annoyed at the water for being wet. Good morning.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;[The broken heater] had only the vaguest reminiscence of warmth.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Wasn\u0026rsquo;t your major Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Yes.\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Then how did you learn about the Internet?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You look like the kind of fellow who wants a jolly rancher.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/almost-poetry/","summary":"in no particular order:\n\u0026ldquo;Aww, you look like you\u0026rsquo;re annoyed at the water for being wet. Good morning.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;[The broken heater] had only the vaguest reminiscence of warmth.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Wasn\u0026rsquo;t your major Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Yes.\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Then how did you learn about the Internet?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You look like the kind of fellow who wants a jolly rancher.\u0026rdquo;","title":"Almost Poetry"},{"content":"I was originally going to write this post as a \u0026ldquo;reasons I don\u0026rsquo;t need a new computer,\u0026rdquo; piece explaining my current setup (one laptop, a virtual server, and a lot of bailing wire) and explaining that despite some problems (a lack of local redundancy and small screen size) a new computer wasn\u0026rsquo;t exactly warranted. Though I wanted one, particularly after seeing the new MacBook Air, and I\u0026rsquo;ve long thought about getting a 15 inch laptop as I still lament my last 15 inch machine. Since I didn\u0026rsquo;t really need a new machine and there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a convincing reason to do an upgrade, I was going to write about good reasons to avoid upgrading just \u0026lsquo;cause.\nClearly I failed.\nParticularly, since I\u0026rsquo;m writing this post from a new laptop.\nA few weeks ago I saw a very good deal on a current-model 15\u0026quot; Lenovo ThinkPad (T510) with all of the specifications that I wanted: the larger resolution screen, integrated Intel graphics and wireless, a bunch of RAM (4g) and a 7200rpm drive. It even has a Core i7 processor (quad proc), which was a pleasant bonus, and so I went for it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m quite happy with it. Besides a great deal and in many ways an ideal machine, I decided that being dependent on one (and only one!) system for all work and non-work computing was probably a bad idea. Additionally, I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to reorganize the way my laptops\u0026rsquo; hard drive partitions in a way that requires at least a short period of down time, and a process that I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to attempt without some sort of back up.\nIt took me a few days to get everything sorted out on the new machine, as it usually does, and there are some cool new things that I can do that I have yet to get ironed out, mostly around figuring out some virtualization technology to do awesome things with this system. But for the day to day stuff, it\u0026rsquo;s perfect and works just as I like.\nThis is the first time in several years where I\u0026rsquo;ve regularly used two systems for day-to-day work, and it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve tended to avoid as much as possible. It\u0026rsquo;s just a hassle to switch between systems in terms of getting everything synchronized. I\u0026rsquo;ve got a pretty clever setup sketched out that I hope to be able to share with you all shortly.\nIn the end, this might not have been an absolutely essential purchase, but I think it was wise (in terms of the redundancy,) it makes some interesting things possible (virtualization, more processor intensive tasks,) and for the kinds of things I do, the extra screen space is very appreciated.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll write here from time to time about these things, but for the moment: Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-technology/","summary":"I was originally going to write this post as a \u0026ldquo;reasons I don\u0026rsquo;t need a new computer,\u0026rdquo; piece explaining my current setup (one laptop, a virtual server, and a lot of bailing wire) and explaining that despite some problems (a lack of local redundancy and small screen size) a new computer wasn\u0026rsquo;t exactly warranted. Though I wanted one, particularly after seeing the new MacBook Air, and I\u0026rsquo;ve long thought about getting a 15 inch laptop as I still lament my last 15 inch machine. Since I didn\u0026rsquo;t really need a new machine and there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a convincing reason to do an upgrade, I was going to write about good reasons to avoid upgrading just \u0026lsquo;cause.\nClearly I failed.\nParticularly, since I\u0026rsquo;m writing this post from a new laptop.\nA few weeks ago I saw a very good deal on a current-model 15\u0026quot; Lenovo ThinkPad (T510) with all of the specifications that I wanted: the larger resolution screen, integrated Intel graphics and wireless, a bunch of RAM (4g) and a 7200rpm drive.","title":"New Technology"},{"content":"Fantisque Unfettered is a new fantasy magazine from the editorial team that did the Aether Age shared world project. You can learn more about this by listening to the latest version of the outer alliance podcast. I must confess that reading/listening to all of these things is still in my queue, but I have a lot of respect for the creators of all of these things, and I\u0026rsquo;d love for this wiki play host to a discussion of any of these works.\nI pulled together an archive or collection of my Critical Futures posts that discuss systems administration, administrators, and what \u0026ldquo;normal\u0026rdquo; folks can learn about technology and techno/social phenomena from the practice of system administration. I\u0026rsquo;m calling it \u0026ldquo;Lessons from Systems Administration.\u0026rdquo; If anyone has an idea for a more archives for Critical Futures posts, see the archives.\nI hope your week is awesome!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/unfettered-monday/","summary":"Fantisque Unfettered is a new fantasy magazine from the editorial team that did the Aether Age shared world project. You can learn more about this by listening to the latest version of the outer alliance podcast. I must confess that reading/listening to all of these things is still in my queue, but I have a lot of respect for the creators of all of these things, and I\u0026rsquo;d love for this wiki play host to a discussion of any of these works.\nI pulled together an archive or collection of my Critical Futures posts that discuss systems administration, administrators, and what \u0026ldquo;normal\u0026rdquo; folks can learn about technology and techno/social phenomena from the practice of system administration. I\u0026rsquo;m calling it \u0026ldquo;Lessons from Systems Administration.\u0026rdquo; If anyone has an idea for a more archives for Critical Futures posts, see the archives.\nI hope your week is awesome!","title":"Unfettered Monday"},{"content":"Apparently Delicious is shutting down. This is either not news to you, because you\u0026rsquo;ve been hearing people natter on about it for days, or you don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what Delicious is. Which is more likely, because it\u0026rsquo;s probably being shut down for under-use, which means most people don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue. Right. It\u0026rsquo;s a website that allows you to post links \u0026ldquo;bookmarks\u0026rdquo; and then tag them, and then search for new links based on tag, with everyone\u0026rsquo;s links so you can discover whats happening based on what everyone is posting and tagging with what. Nifty idea. It\u0026rsquo;s also worth pointing out that Delicious was one of the first big web 2.0 startups, and got to the whole idea of the social web pretty early.\nAnyway, enough history, and on to the news of the day.\ntofu said \u0026ldquo;with all of this talk of delicious, I am surprised that I have heard little about creating a decentralized social bookmark alternative\u0026rdquo; which is a good thought and echo\u0026rsquo;s a slightly more complex proposal that marn made on the topic the other day.\nIn short, leaders of the contemporary revolution in federated network technology (\u0026ldquo;web services should be federated and exportable so that everyone\u0026rsquo;s data doesn\u0026rsquo;t get hosed when one website closes down, and people can share data with friends who uses different services\u0026rdquo;) are saying \u0026ldquo;let\u0026rsquo;s not make this mistake again, if we\u0026rsquo;re going to build an alternative, let\u0026rsquo;s make it better.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I think, in typical me-fashion, I\u0026rsquo;m saying: is social bookmarking still a thing? Have twitter and identi.ca replaced our need for this kind of service? The problem I think lays in the fact that there\u0026rsquo;s so much Internet that services like delicious very quickly become \u0026ldquo;lets catalog everything\u0026rdquo; and as a result \u0026ldquo;bookmarking\u0026rdquo; as a concept isn\u0026rsquo;t very useful for sharing links and exposing information to new audiences.\nHaving said that, I think the notion of writing a tool to use identi.ca or a status.net installation to replace delicious functionality seems like a great idea. Similarly, while it\u0026rsquo;s not federated pinboard.in has been around for a while and while it\u0026rsquo;s not federated, (or open source, particularly,) I like just about everything they\u0026rsquo;ve done.\nPonder that!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/delicious-aftertaste/","summary":"Apparently Delicious is shutting down. This is either not news to you, because you\u0026rsquo;ve been hearing people natter on about it for days, or you don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what Delicious is. Which is more likely, because it\u0026rsquo;s probably being shut down for under-use, which means most people don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue. Right. It\u0026rsquo;s a website that allows you to post links \u0026ldquo;bookmarks\u0026rdquo; and then tag them, and then search for new links based on tag, with everyone\u0026rsquo;s links so you can discover whats happening based on what everyone is posting and tagging with what. Nifty idea. It\u0026rsquo;s also worth pointing out that Delicious was one of the first big web 2.0 startups, and got to the whole idea of the social web pretty early.\nAnyway, enough history, and on to the news of the day.\ntofu said \u0026ldquo;with all of this talk of delicious, I am surprised that I have heard little about creating a decentralized social bookmark alternative\u0026rdquo; which is a good thought and echo\u0026rsquo;s a slightly more complex proposal that marn made on the topic the other day.","title":"Delicious Aftertaste"},{"content":"This used to be a knitting blog. No really, it did. Then I got a technology job, move east, and started singing and dancing constantly, and didn\u0026rsquo;t really have a lot of spare time to knit. Compound this with the fact that I came of age as a knitter in Southern Wisconsin, and the heavy sweaters and thick socks that were essential there were pretty much unwearable in everywhere I\u0026rsquo;ve lived since.\nWhich isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve stopped knitting, hardly, but I have slowed, and I\u0026rsquo;ve tended to choose particularly boring projects for their meditative quality rather than for their knitterly interest. Not that meditative knitting is a bad thing, but it means I\u0026rsquo;m less likely to be enthralled in a project in a serious way, which means they take longer. Such projects are probably also uninteresting for you all to read about. But I have been knitting and thinking about knitting things.\nI gave away a bunch of yarn that I acquired during college and in my dark period after college. Yarn that I got because it was a good deal, yarn that I was given, yarn that I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a plan to use, and yarn I didn\u0026rsquo;t particularly want to knit. It felt really good, to pare down the stash to yarn that I really liked and yarn that I really wanted to knit, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never been a serious knitter when I\u0026rsquo;ve had a legitimate disposable income, so I\u0026rsquo;ve never really been in a position to say \u0026ldquo;I want to make a sweater, let me go buy the perfect yarn for it.\u0026rdquo; Now I am, and it means I need to keep a lot less \u0026ldquo;rainy day yarn.\u0026rdquo; Good feelings.\nAs for what I\u0026rsquo;m working on now? I have a cowl/scarf device mostly done in a ribbing that\u0026rsquo;s my \u0026ldquo;current\u0026rdquo; project. I also have a sweater that just needs sleeves, and the collar hem sown down, and I\u0026rsquo;m stalled on a Alice Starmore-inspired Aran sweater (needs sleeves and some hem\u0026rsquo;s) because I\u0026rsquo;m probably going to run out of yarn, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really know how to precede properly (it\u0026rsquo;s also going to be unwearably warm.) And some socks. I seem to almost always have a pair of socks in progress, but they\u0026rsquo;re never interesting, and I don\u0026rsquo;t wear many wool socks most of the time.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure when I\u0026rsquo;m going to have more time, but I am hoping to clear some of the decks soon and finish some of the above lingering projects, and perhaps move on to more exciting knitting. With luck!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/still-knitting/","summary":"This used to be a knitting blog. No really, it did. Then I got a technology job, move east, and started singing and dancing constantly, and didn\u0026rsquo;t really have a lot of spare time to knit. Compound this with the fact that I came of age as a knitter in Southern Wisconsin, and the heavy sweaters and thick socks that were essential there were pretty much unwearable in everywhere I\u0026rsquo;ve lived since.\nWhich isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve stopped knitting, hardly, but I have slowed, and I\u0026rsquo;ve tended to choose particularly boring projects for their meditative quality rather than for their knitterly interest. Not that meditative knitting is a bad thing, but it means I\u0026rsquo;m less likely to be enthralled in a project in a serious way, which means they take longer. Such projects are probably also uninteresting for you all to read about. But I have been knitting and thinking about knitting things.","title":"Still Knitting"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been on vacation this week, if that wasn\u0026rsquo;t clear to you all. There\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of \u0026ldquo;doing things,\u0026rdquo; notably this website, a nifty lunch at a big tech company you\u0026rsquo;ve heard of, family stuff, bumming around New York City with R., and writing seemingly thousands of emails regarding projects, events, and possible meetings that I will probably not have time to commit to or maintain once I return to my regular routine. But it feels good to be able to pay attention to all sorts of work that I\u0026rsquo;m forced to neglect most of the time.\nI really like this new wiki, and I really like the new publishig work flow, the way that people have interacted with the site and the ability to blog casually again. Here are some exciting links/thoughts:\nWillie Taylor, an English/Irish folk song, sung in this version by a couple of friends at Bard College (Jeremy Carter-Gordon and Ben Bath). It\u0026rsquo;s nice to know that I\u0026rsquo;m not the only person in my generation who\u0026rsquo;s into this kind of music pinboard.in, a delicious (rip) like, link-sharing/storing service. The thing I like most about Pinboard (I have an account, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really use it.) is that they charge a nominal fee for creating an account. This supports the site and controls who gets an account. While I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I like a world where content/services on the web are all pay-to-play, I really don\u0026rsquo;t like the world where no one is willing to pay for anything digital, because there\u0026rsquo;s an expectation that things ought to be free. I wrote about this more than a year ago, but I think that halvm (an implementation of Haskell that runs on bare Xen) is really cool, and probably an indicator of things to come, but it\u0026rsquo;ll be a while before this (and other tools like it) are really ready for general use. Which is probably a good thing because engineers and IT people need some time to adapt to thinking about software in this way. Keep warm!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/vacation-magic/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been on vacation this week, if that wasn\u0026rsquo;t clear to you all. There\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of \u0026ldquo;doing things,\u0026rdquo; notably this website, a nifty lunch at a big tech company you\u0026rsquo;ve heard of, family stuff, bumming around New York City with R., and writing seemingly thousands of emails regarding projects, events, and possible meetings that I will probably not have time to commit to or maintain once I return to my regular routine. But it feels good to be able to pay attention to all sorts of work that I\u0026rsquo;m forced to neglect most of the time.\nI really like this new wiki, and I really like the new publishig work flow, the way that people have interacted with the site and the ability to blog casually again. Here are some exciting links/thoughts:\nWillie Taylor, an English/Irish folk song, sung in this version by a couple of friends at Bard College (Jeremy Carter-Gordon and Ben Bath).","title":"The Magic of Vacation"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m going to present this post somewhat out of order. Here\u0026rsquo;s the proposal.\nI want to think about moving this blog (or starting another?) to be a blog/wiki hybrid, and at the very least, moving forward I\u0026rsquo;d like the \u0026ldquo;discussion\u0026rdquo; or comment\u0026rsquo;s link to link to a wiki page rather than a comments thread.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the blog recently. I really enjoy writing posts, and there are days when I rely on writing a blog post to get me thinking and moving in the morning (or afternoon!) and kinds of projects that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I would be able to work on if it weren\u0026rsquo;t for having the space to write and the opportunity to have conversations with you all.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve done some work recently to streamline and simplify the publishing process, which does a lot to make me more likely to post on the fly, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the tone of this site, or the current design, or my own habits would really support a different kind of publishing schedule.\nAs an aside, I think the technological shift that made blogs possible were \u0026ldquo;content management systems\u0026rdquo; and website building tools that made updating a website with new content incredibly simple. While blogging has come to mean many other things and is defined by a number of different features, having the ability to publish on very short notice has a large effect on the way people write blog content.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the thing about blog comments: I don\u0026rsquo;t think that they\u0026rsquo;re used particularly well, and there are some important flaws in so many of the options around. First, the best systems, like the one used on LiveJournal, IntenseDebate, and Disqus (which I use on this site) are all proprietary systems that are depending on an external service to function. The worse systems all have independent authentication methods, often lack proper threading (which most comm enters aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly good at using anyway,) and it\u0026rsquo;s very difficult to prevent all these systems from being filled with spam.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s more, people don\u0026rsquo;t really comment that much. At least for most blogs.\nbetter comment systems, better discussions. catering to people who want to write a lot. in comments. allowing the conversation to grow from comments, in productive rather than purely discursive ways. And once you\u0026rsquo;ve moved comments into a wiki, why not move the rest of the blog as well? My preferred engine, ikiwiki, has support for blog-like content so while there would be some work involved, it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a major hassle to manage. And the worst case scenario is that the old content remains in the old system, which might not be a bad thing in the end.\nAnyone out there in reader land have any thoughts on the subject? While I\u0026rsquo;ll probably make some sort of revision to the way I blog/maintain tychoish.com, any such change is probably a month or two in the future.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-modest-blogging-proposal/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m going to present this post somewhat out of order. Here\u0026rsquo;s the proposal.\nI want to think about moving this blog (or starting another?) to be a blog/wiki hybrid, and at the very least, moving forward I\u0026rsquo;d like the \u0026ldquo;discussion\u0026rdquo; or comment\u0026rsquo;s link to link to a wiki page rather than a comments thread.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the blog recently. I really enjoy writing posts, and there are days when I rely on writing a blog post to get me thinking and moving in the morning (or afternoon!) and kinds of projects that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I would be able to work on if it weren\u0026rsquo;t for having the space to write and the opportunity to have conversations with you all.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve done some work recently to streamline and simplify the publishing process, which does a lot to make me more likely to post on the fly, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the tone of this site, or the current design, or my own habits would really support a different kind of publishing schedule.","title":"A Modest Blogging Proposal"},{"content":"I have misgivings about Open Stack. Open Stack is an open source \u0026ldquo;Cloud\u0026rdquo; or infrastructure/virtualization platform, that allows providers to create on-demand computing instances, as if \u0026ldquo;in the cloud,\u0026rdquo; but running on their own systems. This kind of thing is generally refereed to as \u0026ldquo;private clouds,\u0026rdquo; but as all things in the \u0026ldquo;cloud space,\u0026rdquo; this is relatively nebulous concept.\nTo disclose, I am employed by a company that does work in this space, that isn\u0026rsquo;t the company that is responsible for open space. I hope this provides a special perspective, but I am aware that my judgment is very likely clouded. As it were.\nLet us start from the beginning, and talk generally about what\u0026rsquo;s on the table here. Recently the technology that allows us to virtualize multiple instance on a single piece of hardware has gotten a lot more robust, easy to use, and performant. At the same time, for the most part the (open source) \u0026ldquo;industrial-grade\u0026rdquo; virtualization technology isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly easy to use or configure. It can be done, of course, but it\u0026rsquo;s non trivial. These configurations and the automation to glue it all together--and the quality therein--is how the cloud is able to differentiate itself.\nOn some level \u0026ldquo;the Cloud\u0026rdquo; as a phenomena is about the complete conversion of hardware into a commodity. Not only is hardware cheap, but it\u0026rsquo;s so cheap that we can do most hardware in software, The open sourcing of this \u0026ldquo;OpenStack\u0026rdquo; pushes this barrier one step further and says, that the software is a commodity as well.\nIt was bound to happen at some point, it\u0026rsquo;s just a curious move and probably one that\u0026rsquo;s indicative of something else in the works.\nThe OpenStack phenomena is intensely interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it has a lot of aspects of some contemporary commercial uses of open source: the project has one contributor and initial development grows out of the work of one company that developed the software for internal use and then said \u0026ldquo;hrm, I guess we can open source it.\u0026rdquo; Second, if I\u0026rsquo;m to understand correctly, OpenStack isn\u0026rsquo;t software that isn\u0026rsquo;t already open source software (aside from a bunch of glue and scripts), which is abnormal.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure where this leads us, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over what this all means for a while, and have largely ended up here: it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting move, if incredibly weird and hard to really understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/against-open-stacks/","summary":"I have misgivings about Open Stack. Open Stack is an open source \u0026ldquo;Cloud\u0026rdquo; or infrastructure/virtualization platform, that allows providers to create on-demand computing instances, as if \u0026ldquo;in the cloud,\u0026rdquo; but running on their own systems. This kind of thing is generally refereed to as \u0026ldquo;private clouds,\u0026rdquo; but as all things in the \u0026ldquo;cloud space,\u0026rdquo; this is relatively nebulous concept.\nTo disclose, I am employed by a company that does work in this space, that isn\u0026rsquo;t the company that is responsible for open space. I hope this provides a special perspective, but I am aware that my judgment is very likely clouded. As it were.\nLet us start from the beginning, and talk generally about what\u0026rsquo;s on the table here. Recently the technology that allows us to virtualize multiple instance on a single piece of hardware has gotten a lot more robust, easy to use, and performant. At the same time, for the most part the (open source) \u0026ldquo;industrial-grade\u0026rdquo; virtualization technology isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly easy to use or configure.","title":"Against Open Stacks"},{"content":"I was writing a blog post about the ideological tendencies in free software and I found myself on a side note that I think really wants to be it\u0026rsquo;s own post. Funny how that happens. I was thinking about the role and importance of system administrators in free software communities and development. This post is part of an ongoing thread on dialectical futurism about systems administration and its implications.\nOne might think, because free software communities produce software, that free software communities are communities of software developers. Programmers make software, free software is software, ergo\u0026hellip; But I really think that a significant differentiating factor between free and non-free software is that free software tends to be created, shaped, and designed by people who are systems administrators by trade and inclination rather than people who are primarily software developers.\nThis is a somewhat difficult argument, and one that requires us to presume that the boundary between developers and administrators is impermeable (it isn\u0026rsquo;t,) but I think people who are programmers first and administrators second approach technological problems. Systems administrators write code. Lots of code. Any system that must be administered (deployed, modified, and maintained) \u0026ldquo;by hand\u0026rdquo; is probably a broken system. Scripting and automation are the keys to making systems maintainable in the long run. And the boundary between writing a few (dozen (dozen)) scripts and writing an operating system is probably not that great in the grand scheme of things.\nAnd knowing how operating systems work is probably a key to making them work. In this case, we can imagine that systems administrators like open source operating systems (i.e. Linux and GNU based ones) because their inner workings are knowable, so system administrators are likely to reap much larger benefits from free software than other classes of users.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve often found that understanding the richness and complexity of the \u0026ldquo;value\u0026rdquo; of Free Software and Open Source software is important for understanding why free software continues to exist and may be worth adopting. The value of free software comes from: the fact that there are no licensing costs, the freedom you have to modify the software to your needs and potentially largely ameliorate development costs, finally free software is valuable because it creates smarter users by virtue of its origins in academia and the way that it promotes user independence and community involvement.\nBusiness decision makers might like the fact that the initial cost of free software is minimal and controlled, but most software related costs are probably support related and free software may not do much to minimize those costs. Developers may like that free software could make their jobs easier, but they may also suffer from \u0026ldquo;not invented here\u0026rdquo; syndrome, and be resistant to working on projects that (potentially) suffer from design decisions that they disagree with. Systems administrators may have preferences regarding certain pieces of software, but will generally like the additional control that free software offers them.\nI wonder about the inverse: has the involvement of systems administrators in free software had an affect on the shape of that software? Do we use Linux and BSD-Unix because they\u0026rsquo;re easier to administer? Does this extend to the network protocols and technologies that get used more frequently?\nLet\u0026rsquo;s file this under \u0026ldquo;questions I wish I knew how to answer\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sys-admin-legacies-in-free-software/","summary":"I was writing a blog post about the ideological tendencies in free software and I found myself on a side note that I think really wants to be it\u0026rsquo;s own post. Funny how that happens. I was thinking about the role and importance of system administrators in free software communities and development. This post is part of an ongoing thread on dialectical futurism about systems administration and its implications.\nOne might think, because free software communities produce software, that free software communities are communities of software developers. Programmers make software, free software is software, ergo\u0026hellip; But I really think that a significant differentiating factor between free and non-free software is that free software tends to be created, shaped, and designed by people who are systems administrators by trade and inclination rather than people who are primarily software developers.\nThis is a somewhat difficult argument, and one that requires us to presume that the boundary between developers and administrators is impermeable (it isn\u0026rsquo;t,) but I think people who are programmers first and administrators second approach technological problems.","title":"Sys Admin Legacies in Free Software"},{"content":"Welcome to this new little blog/wiki project. I made a post to the \u0026lsquo;blog about reorganizing the way I did my blog comments and blogging called a modest blogging proposal.\nI wrote this post a few weeks ago. I was so inspired by the prospect of reorganizing the blog, and also so frustrated by the less-than-useful structure of my blogging that, I did the \u0026ldquo;big reorganization\u0026rdquo; of the blog the very same day that I published the post that started it all.\nThis proves, it seems, the neccessity of these changes, which are:\nMoving the \u0026ldquo;dialectical futurism\u0026rdquo; blog to my \u0026ldquo;Critical Futures\u0026rdquo; domain, as an \u0026ldquo;essay\u0026rdquo; blog. I\u0026rsquo;m planning to post a new essay here every Tuesday. I might also add a second day a week for some other feature (podcast? contributed essay?) Move the \u0026ldquo;wikish\u0026rdquo; wiki that I\u0026rsquo;d been hosting on the \u0026ldquo;tychoish.com\u0026rdquo; domain to be tychoish.com, and add a more short-form blog to the \u0026ldquo;blog/wiki.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m calling it \u0026ldquo;Rhizomatics,\u0026rdquo; and this is the first post. I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing here pretty regularly, and with less intense posts. Do all of the above in a way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t break all of the existing links. And I think I\u0026rsquo;ve done it all. I\u0026rsquo;ll be doing some tweaking in the next few days and weeks to make it all work a bit better, but suggestions are always welcome.\nStay tuned!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/welcome-rhizome/","summary":"Welcome to this new little blog/wiki project. I made a post to the \u0026lsquo;blog about reorganizing the way I did my blog comments and blogging called a modest blogging proposal.\nI wrote this post a few weeks ago. I was so inspired by the prospect of reorganizing the blog, and also so frustrated by the less-than-useful structure of my blogging that, I did the \u0026ldquo;big reorganization\u0026rdquo; of the blog the very same day that I published the post that started it all.\nThis proves, it seems, the neccessity of these changes, which are:\nMoving the \u0026ldquo;dialectical futurism\u0026rdquo; blog to my \u0026ldquo;Critical Futures\u0026rdquo; domain, as an \u0026ldquo;essay\u0026rdquo; blog. I\u0026rsquo;m planning to post a new essay here every Tuesday. I might also add a second day a week for some other feature (podcast? contributed essay?) Move the \u0026ldquo;wikish\u0026rdquo; wiki that I\u0026rsquo;d been hosting on the \u0026ldquo;tychoish.com\u0026rdquo; domain to be tychoish.com, and add a more short-form blog to the \u0026ldquo;blog/wiki.","title":"Welcome to Tychoish Rhizomatics"},{"content":"I do some work as a systems administrator, both personally and for friends. And I work with a lot of admins, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really think of myself as a sys admin. Though you may feel free to argue the point. Nevertheless, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the way systems administrators think and work. This makes sense: as my professional work is written for entry level systems administrators and I work with a bunch of admins. But I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably bigger than that. This post is part of an ongoing thread on dialectical futurism about systems administration and its implications.\nThe best systems administrators are unnoticed and unremarkable. When a system is working smoothly, it works and no one has reason to think about who is maintaining the system. Thus, to be a better systems administrator you have to become confident in your abilities (leading to a somewhat grounded stereotype in arrogance) and you have to be resistant to change.\nFor example, take this slide deck of a systems administration problem. It presents a thorny sysadmin problem where the chmod utility (which is used to render files executable) has been marked unexecutable. The presentation goes through a number of different methods of fixing this, however (spoiler alert) the final solution is \u0026ldquo;the easy fix is to reboot the machine and fix it then (or something), and the machine\u0026rsquo;s running so there isn\u0026rsquo;t a problem.\u0026rdquo; While this is a funny example, I think it\u0026rsquo;s also largely a true example of the way systems administrators approach and resolve problems.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve seen this kind of \u0026ldquo;well it\u0026rsquo; may not be perfect, but it works,\u0026rdquo; logic as well as the \u0026ldquo;is it worth building something new and different that might be better?\u0026rdquo; reasoning at work, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably apparent in all sorts of free software and other discussion forums where sys admins discuss things.\nThus, I wonder: Does this ideology extend beyond the administration of systems and into other spheres of life and thinking? About technology? About politics and economics? I\u0026rsquo;m not sure, though I\u0026rsquo;m of course inclined to say yes, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s something that requires some deliberation, and further thinking.\nI look forward to hearing your thoughts, and figuring out the best way to answer this question.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ideology-and-systems-administration/","summary":"I do some work as a systems administrator, both personally and for friends. And I work with a lot of admins, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really think of myself as a sys admin. Though you may feel free to argue the point. Nevertheless, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the way systems administrators think and work. This makes sense: as my professional work is written for entry level systems administrators and I work with a bunch of admins. But I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably bigger than that. This post is part of an ongoing thread on dialectical futurism about systems administration and its implications.\nThe best systems administrators are unnoticed and unremarkable. When a system is working smoothly, it works and no one has reason to think about who is maintaining the system. Thus, to be a better systems administrator you have to become confident in your abilities (leading to a somewhat grounded stereotype in arrogance) and you have to be resistant to change.","title":"Ideology and Systems Administration"},{"content":"About a week ago, time of writing, I switched all of my instant messaging to a little program called Bitlbee. Basically this is a program that runs locally as an IRC server and connects to various instant messaging and \u0026ldquo;presence\u0026rdquo; protocols and exposes them to the end user client as if they were IRC. Weird.\nThis is, emphatically, the wrong solution to the problem of finding a sane technological solution to consuming real-time information (e.g. instant messaging, twitter, xmpp, etc.) Previously, I\u0026rsquo;d been using an XMPP-only client and running jabber-to-IM transports on the server, which I think is more of a right solution. Why then did I switch?\nI wanted to use irssi, which I think one of the most cleverly designed and useful pieces of software out there.\nTransports that allow XMPP to interact with other services are an ideal solution and I think the inclusion of transports in the design of the XMPP protocol is a major selling point for the XMPP technology. At the same time the most stable transports aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly stable and while there could be transport widgets for all sorts of things there are only a few general purpose transports.\nPractically speaking the jabber-to-AIM transport that I had been using, had a habit of dying without cause once or twice a week, and it used a lot of system resources for something that could (should?) have been much simpler.\nThe truth is that while XMPP is a nifty technology, and I really enjoy using it, I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that it\u0026rsquo;s not ideal to expect that XMPP replace IRC, as both accomplish different things for their users. So while I always saw bitlbee as \u0026ldquo;giving into IRC\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s really just an interface. And frankly IRC clients do IM better than IM clients do IRC.\nBitlbee works really well as a client for Facebook chat (which is a weird XMPP flavor) and is a functional twitter client. With the delight of using irssi, I\u0026rsquo;m able to really interact on these networks without having to spend too much brain power sifting through crud.\nSo here I am. Switched. The buddy list on bitlbee leaves something to be desired (but I have a particularly large buddy list) and I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to get used to the syntax for creating and administering group chats inside of bitlbee, but other than that? It\u0026rsquo;s pretty rocking.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bitlbee-wrong-solution-that-works/","summary":"About a week ago, time of writing, I switched all of my instant messaging to a little program called Bitlbee. Basically this is a program that runs locally as an IRC server and connects to various instant messaging and \u0026ldquo;presence\u0026rdquo; protocols and exposes them to the end user client as if they were IRC. Weird.\nThis is, emphatically, the wrong solution to the problem of finding a sane technological solution to consuming real-time information (e.g. instant messaging, twitter, xmpp, etc.) Previously, I\u0026rsquo;d been using an XMPP-only client and running jabber-to-IM transports on the server, which I think is more of a right solution. Why then did I switch?\nI wanted to use irssi, which I think one of the most cleverly designed and useful pieces of software out there.\nTransports that allow XMPP to interact with other services are an ideal solution and I think the inclusion of transports in the design of the XMPP protocol is a major selling point for the XMPP technology.","title":"Bitlbee, The Wrong Solution that Works"},{"content":"I spent a lot of formative time in high school and college listening to writing teachers and would be mentors tell me that I was too sloppy or too disorganized to write effectively. They were probably right. Furthermore, this is probably not something that I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to keep secret from anyone who has read my blog for any measurable period of time. (Though I do think most of my more recent entries are better than nearly all of my early entries.) What no one really dared to tell me, are probably the most important things I\u0026rsquo;ve learned as a writer:\nFirst, that editors are not only essential to the writing process, but that there\u0026rsquo;s something fundamentally wrong if something leaves the original author and is handed to final readers without passing through at least one editor, and often more. Second, the skill of writing isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily being able to write artful sentences, or being able to perfectly apply all of the rules of grammar (which, aren\u0026rsquo;t detrimental to the craft of writing). No, writing is about being able to get things written. Writing is pobably about being able to do research while keeping in mind the parameters of the project and ending up with a few paragraphs on a given topic that make sense and enlighten more than they confuse. That is considerably more rare. The problem, and I wish I had a solution for this, is that there is no real way to teach people to write and to love writing. Exposing people to lots of examples of writing (i.e. literature) is helpful in teaching people to read and cherish the practice of reading. Unfortunately, I think reading and writing pull on vastly different skills. And while readers have a useful and required prospective on the text, readers who don\u0026rsquo;t write often provide ambiguous and difficult to assimilate feedback.1\nFundamentally, I think, readers live on the plane of words, and writers--at least writer\u0026rsquo;s like me--live on the plane of paragraphs. And then there\u0026rsquo;s the whole issue of confusing a love of reading with a need or desire to write, but that\u0026rsquo;s another story for another time.\nThe way, I think, to learn how to write better is to write a lot of crappy stuff and learn how to \u0026ldquo;fail\u0026rdquo; better and more gracefully. Blogging has and is a great tool for me in this regard, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a cure-all, and I think integrating blogging in the writing curriculum is a difficult project that requires a very nuanced view of blogging, and the right set of learning objective. Beyond this, the project of learning to write and learning to write \u0026ldquo;better\u0026rdquo; is one that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to properly facilitate in myself or in others.\nAt the end of the day, I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to realize that growth as a writer isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that happens quickly. Being a writer is a life-long project with slow and steady improvement, minor regressions, stunning breakthroughs, dashed hopes, and tactical successes.\nOnward and Upward!\nReaderly feedback often comes in the form of thinking that large swaths of text need to be rewritten, when the addition of a single sentence clarifies the required point. Similarly, I think readers aren\u0026rsquo;t as prone to thinking about texts and paragraphs as things that can be reordered above the level of the word.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-and-growing-professionally/","summary":"I spent a lot of formative time in high school and college listening to writing teachers and would be mentors tell me that I was too sloppy or too disorganized to write effectively. They were probably right. Furthermore, this is probably not something that I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to keep secret from anyone who has read my blog for any measurable period of time. (Though I do think most of my more recent entries are better than nearly all of my early entries.) What no one really dared to tell me, are probably the most important things I\u0026rsquo;ve learned as a writer:\nFirst, that editors are not only essential to the writing process, but that there\u0026rsquo;s something fundamentally wrong if something leaves the original author and is handed to final readers without passing through at least one editor, and often more. Second, the skill of writing isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily being able to write artful sentences, or being able to perfectly apply all of the rules of grammar (which, aren\u0026rsquo;t detrimental to the craft of writing).","title":"Writing and Growing Professionally"},{"content":"There are so many sexy topics in computing and information technology these days. In light of all this potential excitement, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about email. Which isn\u0026rsquo;t sexy or exciting.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t we should be clear, to say that email doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, because it seems that email still matters a great deal. Rather that email is still a relevant and useful paradigm. What\u0026rsquo;s more, the email system (i.e. SMTP and associated tools) remains in many ways superior to all of the technologies and platforms that have attempted to replace email.\nThe Good Email works. The servers (e.g. Postfix, Exim, Sendmai, but most Postfix) are stable, known, and very functional. While there are flaws in a lot of email clients, there are a lot of tools that exist for processing and dealing with email, and that makes it possible for everyone to interact with their email on their own terms, in a variety of contexts that make sense the them. And email is such that we can all use it and interact with each other without requiring that we all participate in some restrictive platform or interface.\nIn short, email is open, decentralized, standard, lightweight, push-based, and multi-modal.\nCompare this to the systems that threaten to replace email: Facebook and social networking utilities, twitter, text messaging, real-time chat (i.e. IRC, IM, and Jabber). The advantages of email on these crucial, I think, dimensions are pretty clear.\nThe Bad The problem, of course, with email is that it\u0026rsquo;s terribly difficult to manage to keep current with one\u0026rsquo;s email. Part of this problem is spam, part of the problem is \u0026ldquo;bacon,\u0026rdquo; or legitimate (usu sally automated) email that doesn\u0026rsquo;t require attention or is difficult to process, and it\u0026rsquo;s undeniable that a big part of of it is that most end user email clients are inefficient to use. And there\u0026rsquo;s the user error factor: most people aren\u0026rsquo;t very good at using email effectively.\nIt Gets Better No really it does. But I don\u0026rsquo;t think we can wait for a new technology to swoop in and replace email. That\u0026rsquo;s not going to happen. While I\u0026rsquo;m not going to write a book on the subject, I think there are some simple things that most people can do to make email better:\n1. Do use search tools to make the organization of email matter less. Why file things carefully, when you can quickly search all of your email to find exactly what you need.\n2. Filter your email, within an inch of it\u0026rsquo;s life. Drop everything you can bare to. Put email lists into their own mail boxes. Dump \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;client\u0026rdquo; email into its own folders. Successful filtering means that almost nothing gets to your \u0026ldquo;inbox.\u0026rdquo;\n3. Use your inbox as a hotlist of things that need attention. Move email that needs responses to your inbox, and move anything that got through your filters to where it ought to be.\n4. Use multiple email addresses that all redirect to a single email box. You only want to ever have to check one email system, but you probably want multiple people in multiple contexts to be able to reach you via email. This makes email filtering easier, and means that you just spend time working rather than time switching between email systems and wondering where messages are.\n5. When writing emails, be brief and do your damnedest to give the people you\u0026rsquo;re writing with something concrete to respond to. Emails that expect responses but are hard to respond to are among the worst there are, because you have to say something there\u0026rsquo;s nothing worth saying.\n6. Avoid top posting (i.e. responding to an email with the quoted material from previous exchanges below your respone.) When appropriate interleave your responses in their message to increase clarity and context without needing to be overly verbose.\n7. Email isn\u0026rsquo;t real time. If you need real time communication use some other medium. Don\u0026rsquo;t feel like you need to respond to everything immediately. Managing expectations around email is a key to success.\nThat addresses most of the human problem. The technological problem will be solved by addressing spam, by building simpler tools that are easier to use effectively and support the best kind of email behaviors.\nWhy Email will Improve 1. Email is great in the mobile context. It\u0026rsquo;s not dependent upon having a net connection which is good when you depend on wireless.\n2. Email is a given. Having email is part of being a digital citizen and we mostly assume that everyone has an email. The largest burden with most new technologies is often sufficient market share to make a \u0026ldquo;critical mass\u0026rdquo; rather than some sort of threshold of innovation.\n3. Email is both push-based (and delivery times are pretty fast) and asynchronous. Though this doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound sexy, there aren\u0026rsquo;t very many other contemporary technologies that share these properties.\nOnward an Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-email-still-matters/","summary":"There are so many sexy topics in computing and information technology these days. In light of all this potential excitement, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about email. Which isn\u0026rsquo;t sexy or exciting.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t we should be clear, to say that email doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, because it seems that email still matters a great deal. Rather that email is still a relevant and useful paradigm. What\u0026rsquo;s more, the email system (i.e. SMTP and associated tools) remains in many ways superior to all of the technologies and platforms that have attempted to replace email.\nThe Good Email works. The servers (e.g. Postfix, Exim, Sendmai, but most Postfix) are stable, known, and very functional. While there are flaws in a lot of email clients, there are a lot of tools that exist for processing and dealing with email, and that makes it possible for everyone to interact with their email on their own terms, in a variety of contexts that make sense the them.","title":"Why Email Still Matters"},{"content":"Rather than authenticate to a SMTP server to send email, which is fraught with potential security issues and hassles, I use a SSH tunnel to the machine running my mail server. This is automatic, easy to configure both for the mail server and mail client, and incredibly secure. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nThe downside, if there is one, is that the tunnel has to be active to be able to send email messages, and SSH tunnels sometimes disconnect a bit too silently particularly on unstable (wireless) connections. I (and others, I suspect) have had some success with integrating the tunnel connection with pre- and post- connection hooks, so that the network manager automatically creates a tunnel after connecting to the network. but this is a flawed solution that produces uneven results.\nRecently I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered this program called \u0026ldquo;AutoSSH,\u0026rdquo; which creates an SSH tunnel and tests it regularly to ensure that the tunnel is functional. If it isn\u0026rsquo;t, AutoSSH recreates the tunnel. Great!\nFirst start off by getting a copy of the program. It\u0026rsquo;s not part of the OpenSSh package, so you\u0026rsquo;ll need to download it separately. It\u0026rsquo;s in every pacakge management repository that I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to get it from. So installation, will probably involve one of the following commands at your system\u0026rsquo;s command line:\napt-get install autossh pacman -S autossh yum install autossh port install autossh When that\u0026rsquo;s done, you\u0026rsquo;ll issue a command that resembles the following\nautossh -M 25 -f tychoish@foucault.cyborginstitute.net -L 25:127.0.0.1:25 Really, the important part here is the \u0026ldquo;autossh -M 25\u0026rdquo; part of the command. This tells autossh to watch (\u0026ldquo;monitor\u0026rdquo;) port number 25 on the local system for a tunnel. The rest of the command (e.g. \u0026ldquo;-f -L 127.0.0.1:25:127.0.0.1:25 mailserver@tychoish.com -N\u0026rdquo;) is just a typical call to the ssh program.\nThings to remember:\nIf you need to create a tunnel on a local port with numbered lower than 1000, you\u0026rsquo;ll need to run the autossh command as root. SSH port forwarding only forwards traffic from a local port to a remote port, through an SSH connection. All traffic is transmitted over the wire on port 22. Unless you establish multiple tunnels, only traffic sent to the specific local port will be forwarded. Perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s obvious, but there has to be some service listening on the specified remote end of the tunnel, or else the tunnel won\u0026rsquo;t do anything. In a lot of ways, depending on your use case autossh, can obviate the need for much more complex VPN setups for a lot of deployments. Put an autossh command in an @reboot cronjob, with an account that has ssh keys generated, and just forget about it for encrypting things like database traffic and the like. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/persistent-ssh-tunels-with-autossh/","summary":"Rather than authenticate to a SMTP server to send email, which is fraught with potential security issues and hassles, I use a SSH tunnel to the machine running my mail server. This is automatic, easy to configure both for the mail server and mail client, and incredibly secure. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nThe downside, if there is one, is that the tunnel has to be active to be able to send email messages, and SSH tunnels sometimes disconnect a bit too silently particularly on unstable (wireless) connections. I (and others, I suspect) have had some success with integrating the tunnel connection with pre- and post- connection hooks, so that the network manager automatically creates a tunnel after connecting to the network. but this is a flawed solution that produces uneven results.\nRecently I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered this program called \u0026ldquo;AutoSSH,\u0026rdquo; which creates an SSH tunnel and tests it regularly to ensure that the tunnel is functional.","title":"Persistent SSH Tunels with AutoSSH"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t read romance literature.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not my thing, which isn\u0026rsquo;t saying much: there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of literature that I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to consider \u0026ldquo;my thing,\u0026rdquo; for one reason or another. I don\u0026rsquo;t really read fantasy, or horror, and I\u0026rsquo;m even picky within science fiction. There are enough books out there and there is only so much time. At least that\u0026rsquo;s what I tell myself.\nNevertheless, Susan Groppi wrote a great post about coming out as a reader of romance that I found useful. I\u0026rsquo;m also reminded of comments that N. K. Jemison made about the in progress merging of the fantasy and romance genres (sorry if I\u0026rsquo;ve miss-cited this), and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about how I view Romance fiction, and perhaps a bit more generally about genre fiction ghettos.\nIn general, I think Romance has merit, both because it\u0026rsquo;s entrancing and I think fiction which captures people\u0026rsquo;s imaginations and interest I worthwhile and important to not dismiss because it\u0026rsquo;s commercial, or the readership/writers are largely women. There are potential problems with romance, at least insofar as we typically envision it: with strong hetero tendencies, an idealization of monogamy as a social practice and marriage as an institution, and the potential to accept a very conventional conceptualization of gender. I\u0026rsquo;m sure some romance literature has been able to engage and trouble these troupes productively, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s a potential concern.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that Romance has a lot of future as a genre. This is to say that I think many of the elements of romance--female characters, and an engagement with sexuality and relationships--will increasingly merge into other genres. Romance as an independent genre will linger on, but I think the \u0026ldquo;cool stuff happening in the Romance field,\u0026rdquo; will probably eventually move out into corners of other genres: thriller, fantasy, maybe science fiction.\nActually, as I think about this, it\u0026rsquo;s probably backwards. I think it\u0026rsquo;s less that Romance doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a future, as it is that the future of most popular literature lies in engaging with romance-elements and other aspects of romance stories the context of non-romance specific styles. This kind of thing is happening, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll probably continue to happen.\nI wish I could speak with greater certainty about the reasons why romance literature enjoy higher readership, or what elements of romance stories can be transplanted to other genres, but I think these are probably questions which are beyond the scope of this post. Thanks for reading!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-romance/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t read romance literature.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not my thing, which isn\u0026rsquo;t saying much: there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of literature that I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to consider \u0026ldquo;my thing,\u0026rdquo; for one reason or another. I don\u0026rsquo;t really read fantasy, or horror, and I\u0026rsquo;m even picky within science fiction. There are enough books out there and there is only so much time. At least that\u0026rsquo;s what I tell myself.\nNevertheless, Susan Groppi wrote a great post about coming out as a reader of romance that I found useful. I\u0026rsquo;m also reminded of comments that N. K. Jemison made about the in progress merging of the fantasy and romance genres (sorry if I\u0026rsquo;ve miss-cited this), and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about how I view Romance fiction, and perhaps a bit more generally about genre fiction ghettos.\nIn general, I think Romance has merit, both because it\u0026rsquo;s entrancing and I think fiction which captures people\u0026rsquo;s imaginations and interest I worthwhile and important to not dismiss because it\u0026rsquo;s commercial, or the readership/writers are largely women.","title":"On Romance"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting again.\nShocking.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not been knitting very much in recent months, because I\u0026rsquo;ve had less time, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been focusing my energy on other projects: keeping my head above water, writing, dancing, singing, etc. It\u0026rsquo;s a shame too, because knitting is a great deal of fun, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty rewarding, and it\u0026rsquo;s something that I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly good at.\nI suppose at one point there were a lot of knitters who read this blog, but I suspect many of them don\u0026rsquo;t so much any more. Anyway, I hope this post won\u0026rsquo;t alienate everyone who reads this.\nFirst up, for some project review:\nI have a cabled sweater in progress that I\u0026rsquo;m working on the first sleeve at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;m afraid I\u0026rsquo;m going to run out of yarn (but I have a plan!) and frankly cables have never really been \u0026ldquo;my thing,\u0026rdquo; but this is the only thing that remains that I was working on when I left the Midwest, so there\u0026rsquo;s nostalgia and I do want to finish it. The biggest problem, I think, is that unless I move north a lot, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to live in a place where I can really wear something like this. I have a sweater in jumper-weight Shetland (i.e. fingering weight) wool that I\u0026rsquo;m knitting for a friend. I have the collar and the sleeves to do, but it\u0026rsquo;s very plain and a very straightforward knit. I just need to do it. This is probably the next thing on my list. It\u0026rsquo;s been on hiatus since May. I\u0026rsquo;m making socks. As I write this, I have just completed a pair of socks that I started in May. They\u0026rsquo;re simple, and plain (which is how my socks tend to be) using Dyebolical Yarn. I also got to use a set of Blackthron Needles that my mother got for my birthday. Both are quite wonderful. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered how much knitting can be done on a commute, and I do expect to do a lot more commute knitting, but I need to find a way to balance knitting with writing and reading on the train. Perhaps some sort of morning/night split. Aside from finishing the socks and immediately casting another pair, I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of \u0026ldquo;yarn stash\u0026rdquo; reorganization and trimming. This last week or so I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten inspired to reevaluate all of the stuff that I have to see what I really need in my life and what I\u0026rsquo;m just keeping because it\u0026rsquo;s there. I\u0026rsquo;ve been through my clothing, the book collection, and the yarn.\nAlthough I\u0026rsquo;ve done \u0026ldquo;stash culls\u0026rdquo; before I felt like my collection of yarn had a lot of stuff in it that I got without any intention of a project, or for any reason other than \u0026ldquo;I might like to make something with it some day.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve never really been a knitter when I\u0026rsquo;ve had a real budget for hobbies and entertainment, nor have I ever knitted at such a moderate pace. So I made the decision to not keep yarn around just for insulation, and just get the yarn that I really want to knit with rather than what I feel like I ought to knit with because it\u0026rsquo;s in the bin. It\u0026rsquo;s been quite liberating.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also, as I sit knitting, thinking about the overlap between what I do professionally (documenting technical solutions and systems administration practices) and pattern writing for knitters.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a lot of overlap in how I write and think about both, enough to inspire me to think about doing more knitting related writing. *As if I didn\u0026rsquo;t have enough projects already.\nIn any case, I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;ll blog regularly about knitting as I continue to knit more, but it might come up from time to time. You have been warned.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-resumed/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting again.\nShocking.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not been knitting very much in recent months, because I\u0026rsquo;ve had less time, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been focusing my energy on other projects: keeping my head above water, writing, dancing, singing, etc. It\u0026rsquo;s a shame too, because knitting is a great deal of fun, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty rewarding, and it\u0026rsquo;s something that I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly good at.\nI suppose at one point there were a lot of knitters who read this blog, but I suspect many of them don\u0026rsquo;t so much any more. Anyway, I hope this post won\u0026rsquo;t alienate everyone who reads this.\nFirst up, for some project review:\nI have a cabled sweater in progress that I\u0026rsquo;m working on the first sleeve at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;m afraid I\u0026rsquo;m going to run out of yarn (but I have a plan!) and frankly cables have never really been \u0026ldquo;my thing,\u0026rdquo; but this is the only thing that remains that I was working on when I left the Midwest, so there\u0026rsquo;s nostalgia and I do want to finish it.","title":"Knitting Resumed"},{"content":"I mentioned in a recent update post, that I had recently gotten a new cell phone, which given who I am and how I interact with technology means that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about things like the shifting role of cell phones in the world, the way we actually use mobile technology, the ways that the technology has failed to live up to our expectations, and of course some thoughts on the current state of the \u0026ldquo;smart-phone\u0026rdquo; market. Of course.\nI think even two years ago quasi-general purpose mobile computers (e.g. smart phones) were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are today. The rising tide of the iPhone has, I think without a doubt, raised the boat of general smart phone adoption. Which is to say that the technology reached a point where these kinds of devices--computers--are of enough use to most people that widespread adoption makes sense. We\u0026rsquo;ve reached a tipping point, and the iPhone was there at the right moment and has become the primary exemplar of this moment.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s probably neither here nor there.\nWith more and more people connected in an independent and mobile way to cyberspace, via either simple phones, (which more clearly matches Gibson\u0026rsquo;s original intentions for the term,) or via smart phones I think we might begin to think about the cultural impact of having so many people so connected. Cellphone numbers become not just convenient, but in many ways complete markers of identity and person-hood. Texting in most situations overtakes phone calls as the may way people interact with each other in cyberspace, so even where phone calls may be irrelevant SMS has become the unified instant messaging platform.\nAs you start to add things like data to the equation, I think the potential impact is huge. I spent a couple weeks with my primary personal Internet connection active through my phone, and while it wasn\u0026rsquo;t ideal, the truth is that it didn\u0026rsquo;t fail too much. SSH on Blackberries isn\u0026rsquo;t ideal, particularly if you need a lot from your console sessions, but it\u0026rsquo;s passable. That jump from \u0026ldquo;I really can\u0026rsquo;t cut this on my phone,\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;almost passable\u0026rdquo; is probably the hugest jump of all. The series of successive jumps over the next few years will be easier.\nLest you think I\u0026rsquo;m all sunshine and optimism, I think there are some definite short comings with contemporary cell phone technology. In brief:\nThere are things I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to do with my phone that I really can\u0026rsquo;t do effectively, notably seamlessly sync files and notes between my phone and my desktop computer/server. There aren\u0026rsquo;t even really passable note taking applications. There are a class of really fundamental computer functionality that could theoretically work on the phone, but don\u0026rsquo;t because the software doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist or is of particularly poor quality. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of SSH, of note taking, but also of things like non-Gmail Jabber/XMPP functionality. Some functionality which really ought to be more mature than it is (e.g. music playing) is still really awkward on phones, and better suited to dedicated devices (e.g. iPods) or to regular computers. The central feature in all of these complaints is software related, and more an issue of software design, and an ability to really design for this kind of form factor. There are some limitations: undesirable input methods, small displays, limited bandwidth, unreliable connectivity, and so forth. And while some may improve (e.g. connectivity, display size) it is also true that we need to get better at designing applications and useful functionality in this context.\nMy answer to the problem of designing applications for the mobile context will seem familiar if you know me.\nI\u0026rsquo;d argue that we need applications that are less dependent upon a connection and have a great ability to cache content locally. I think the Kindle is a great example of this kind of design. The Kindle is very much dependent upon having a data connection, but if the device falls offline for a few moments, in most cases no functionality is lost. Sure you can do really awesome things if you assume that everyone has a really fat pipe going to their phone, but that\u0026rsquo;s not realistic, and the less you depend on a connection the better the user experience is.\nSecondly, give users as much control over the display, rendering and interaction model that their software/data uses. This, if implemented very consistently (difficult, admittedly,) means that users can have global control over their experience, and users won\u0026rsquo;t be confused by different interaction models between applications.\nAlthough the future is already here, I think it\u0026rsquo;s also fair to say that it\u0026rsquo;ll be really quite interesting to see what happens next. I\u0026rsquo;d like a chance to think a bit about the place of open source on mobile devices and also the interaction between the kind of software that we see on mobile devices and what\u0026rsquo;s happening in the so-called \u0026ldquo;cloud computing\u0026rdquo; world. In the mean time\u0026hellip;\nOutward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/phone-torched/","summary":"I mentioned in a recent update post, that I had recently gotten a new cell phone, which given who I am and how I interact with technology means that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about things like the shifting role of cell phones in the world, the way we actually use mobile technology, the ways that the technology has failed to live up to our expectations, and of course some thoughts on the current state of the \u0026ldquo;smart-phone\u0026rdquo; market. Of course.\nI think even two years ago quasi-general purpose mobile computers (e.g. smart phones) were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are today. The rising tide of the iPhone has, I think without a doubt, raised the boat of general smart phone adoption. Which is to say that the technology reached a point where these kinds of devices--computers--are of enough use to most people that widespread adoption makes sense. We\u0026rsquo;ve reached a tipping point, and the iPhone was there at the right moment and has become the primary exemplar of this moment.","title":"Phone Torched"},{"content":"Surely I\u0026rsquo;m not the only person who\u0026rsquo;s wanted to run multiple distinct instances of the emacs daemon at once. Here\u0026rsquo;s the use case:\nI use one laptop, but I work on a number of very distinct projects many of which involve having a number of different buffers open, most of which don\u0026rsquo;t overlap with each other at all. This wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a huge problem except that I\u0026rsquo;ve easily gotten up to two hundred buffers open at once. It can get a bit confusing. Particularly since I never really need to touch my work related stuff when I\u0026rsquo;m writing blags, and my blogging and website design buffers never intersect with fiction writing.\nIf I weren\u0026rsquo;t using emacs in daemon mode (that is, invoked with the \u0026ldquo;emacs --daemon\u0026rdquo; command) I\u0026rsquo;d just open separate instances of emacs. The problem with that is, when X11 crashes (as it is so wont to do) the emacs instances crash too and that\u0026rsquo;s no good. Under normal conditions if you start emacs as a daemon, you can only run one at a time, because it grabs a socket and the emacsclient program isn\u0026rsquo;t smart enough to be able to decide which instance of emacs you want. So it\u0026rsquo;s a big ball of failure.\nExcept I figured out a way to make this work.\nIn your .emacs file, at the very beginning, put the following line:\n(setq server-use-tcp t) In the default configuration, the emacs daemon listens on a UNIX/system socket. However, in emacs can also, with the above option set, can also listen for connections over TCP. I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet figured out how to create the required SSH tunnel to make this particularly cool, but it makes this use case possible.\nNow, when you start emacs, use commands in the following form:\nemacs --daemon=tychoish emacs --daemon=work Each server process creates a state file in the \u0026ldquo;~/.emacs.d/server/\u0026rdquo; folder. If you are using version control on this file, you may want to consider explicitly ignoring this folder to avoid confusion.\nTo open an emacs client (i.e. an emacs frame attached to the emacs daemon,) use commands in the following form\nemacsclient --server-file=tychoish -c -n emacsclient --server-file=work -c -n You may append a file name to open a specific client with one of these emacsclient invocations, or use any of the other emacsclient options. Although these commands are long, I have integrated them into my default zsh configuration as aliases, and as key shortcuts in my window manager. So opening a frame on a specific emacs instance isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly difficult.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s it. It just works. I have the following two lines in my user\u0026rsquo;s crontab file:\n@reboot emacs --daemon=tychoish @reboot emacs --daemon=work These lines ensure that the usual (and expected) named emacs daemons are started following reboot. More generally, the @reboot cronjob is great for making the \u0026ldquo;my computer just rebooted, and now I have to fuss over it for ten minutes before I can work\u0026rdquo; problem seem much less daunting.\nIn conclusion I\u0026rsquo;d like to present one piece of unsolicited advice, and ask a question the assembled.\nAdvice: Even though it\u0026rsquo;s possible to create a large number of emacs instances, and on modern systems the required RAM is pretty low, avoid this temptation. The more emacs instances you have to juggle the greater the chance that you\u0026rsquo;ll forget what buffers are open in what instance. Undesirable. Question: Is there a way to get the value of server-name in into emacs lisp so that I can if things against it? Haven\u0026rsquo;t figured this one out yet, but it seems like it would be nice for conditionally loading buffers and things like org-mode agenda. Any ideas? Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/running-multiple-emacs-daemons-on-a-single-system/","summary":"Surely I\u0026rsquo;m not the only person who\u0026rsquo;s wanted to run multiple distinct instances of the emacs daemon at once. Here\u0026rsquo;s the use case:\nI use one laptop, but I work on a number of very distinct projects many of which involve having a number of different buffers open, most of which don\u0026rsquo;t overlap with each other at all. This wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a huge problem except that I\u0026rsquo;ve easily gotten up to two hundred buffers open at once. It can get a bit confusing. Particularly since I never really need to touch my work related stuff when I\u0026rsquo;m writing blags, and my blogging and website design buffers never intersect with fiction writing.\nIf I weren\u0026rsquo;t using emacs in daemon mode (that is, invoked with the \u0026ldquo;emacs --daemon\u0026rdquo; command) I\u0026rsquo;d just open separate instances of emacs. The problem with that is, when X11 crashes (as it is so wont to do) the emacs instances crash too and that\u0026rsquo;s no good.","title":"Running Multiple Emacs Daemons on a Single System"},{"content":"I wrote a bit about sacred harp singing for a few months about a year ago, when I was really starting to get into it, and then I mostly stopped. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a few singing related experiences recently that I think are worth recounting, even if they\u0026rsquo;re a bit disjointed. So I\u0026rsquo;ll just hop in and hope that it adds up to something in the end. Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with Sacred Harp Singing, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry if there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of sub tittling. Thanks for reading!\nI was hanging out with R.F. and we were flipping through my copy of the sacred harp, and he was trying to get how the relative pitching thing works (having more formal experience singing with choirs and what not, and a sense of pitch that\u0026rsquo;s way more closely tied to a piano than mine.) and he said something like \u0026ldquo;so this one would start \u0026lsquo;here?\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; I think it was 300, and I have no clue how \u0026ldquo;right,\u0026rdquo; I was or what inspired this, but his pitch was about a step and a half (I think,) high, and so I gave something that was more or less where I thought the song was supposed to sit. We sang through a little bit of it, and it seemed to work.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve never really had a lot of interest in being able to offer pitches to a class of Sacred Harp singers, beyond the very selfish ability to lead signings without needing to make sure that someone who can offer keys in attendance.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on memorizing the book--strategically, of course-- as I can. This makes signings more fun because you can look at people, while singing rather than having your nose in a book the whole time. While there aren\u0026rsquo;t songs that I can safely leave the book closed for the shapes, I know the tunes (mostly bass parts) and words to most of the common ones (e.g. 178, 155, 89, 312b, 355, 300, 146, 148, 153, 112, 422, 209, 189, 186,) save a few middle verses that are sung rarely. I don\u0026rsquo;t think of my memory as being particularly good for this kind of information, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have reality prove you wrong.\nOne of the things that made Sacred Harp \u0026ldquo;click\u0026rdquo; for me when I really started to get into it was that I had the good sense to sing bass. My voice is pretty low, so this seems to fit, and I think staying in one section for a long time helped solidity my sense of the music.\nSince March/April, or thereabouts, I\u0026rsquo;ve started singing tenor (the lead/melody) a bit. It\u0026rsquo;s a stretch for my voice, and I\u0026rsquo;m slightly more prone to loosing track of the key when singing higher notes (a not uncommon problem,) but it\u0026rsquo;s good for my brain, and I think it makes me a better singer and leader. I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly done this at local singings, and smaller signings when there are enough basses, or for a few songs at a bigger singing when the mood strikes.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking of doing this more often, and at more singings, as part of an effort to become a better singer.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s easy (at least for me) particularly in accounts like this to focus on the singing, the technical aspects of the music, and the texts used. And all of these components contribute to what makes singing so great: its a gestalt experience, but I think its easy to gloss over the best part of being a singer. Which is, of course, all the other singers.\nBeing a \u0026ldquo;community guy,\u0026rdquo; I think it might be easy for me to wax poetic about how great sacred harp singings are--and they are--but I think there\u0026rsquo;s something deeper and specific about singing communities that make them more accepting, more engaged, more inclusive than other communities (dancing, writing, professional,) that I\u0026rsquo;ve been involved in\nMaybe it\u0026rsquo;s that singing is a more transcendent experience that the focal points of other communities to begin with so people are willing to connect a bit more. Maybe the fact that singings are sometimes (often?) held in people\u0026rsquo;s homes is a factor. Maybe the extreme inclusiveness combined with the somewhat substantial learning curve creates the right environment to foster a strong and self selecting community. Perhaps all of the travel to all day singings and conventions, combined with the effort to arrange socials, unifies the community.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure, but I\u0026rsquo;ve met a bunch of great people singing, and people with whom I share more than just sufficient common interest in a shared activity. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure every singing community is like this, but the conversations and connections I\u0026rsquo;ve had with other singers have been depthy, interesting, and have expanded beyond singing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sing-the-shapes/","summary":"I wrote a bit about sacred harp singing for a few months about a year ago, when I was really starting to get into it, and then I mostly stopped. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a few singing related experiences recently that I think are worth recounting, even if they\u0026rsquo;re a bit disjointed. So I\u0026rsquo;ll just hop in and hope that it adds up to something in the end. Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with Sacred Harp Singing, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry if there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of sub tittling. Thanks for reading!\nI was hanging out with R.F. and we were flipping through my copy of the sacred harp, and he was trying to get how the relative pitching thing works (having more formal experience singing with choirs and what not, and a sense of pitch that\u0026rsquo;s way more closely tied to a piano than mine.) and he said something like \u0026ldquo;so this one would start \u0026lsquo;here?","title":"Sing the Shapes"},{"content":"Git is a very\u0026hellip; different kind of software. It\u0026rsquo;s explicitly designed against the paradigm for other programs like it (version control/source management) and to make maters worse most of it\u0026rsquo;s innovations and eccentricities are very difficult to create metaphors and analogies around. This is likely because it takes a non-proscriptive approach to workflow (you can work with your collaborators in any way that makes sense for you) and more importantly it lets people do away with linearity. Git makes it possible, and perhaps even encourages, creators to give up an idea of a singular or linear authorship process.\nThat sounds great (or is at least passable) in conversation but it is practically unclear. But even when you sit down and can interact with a \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; git repository, it can still be fairly difficult to \u0026ldquo;grok.\u0026rdquo; And to make matter worse, there are a number of very key concepts that regular users of git acclimate to but that are still difficult to grasp from the ousted. This post, then, attempts to illuminate a couple of these concepts more practically in hopes of making future interactions with git less painful. Consider the following:\nThe Staging Area The state of every committed object (i.e. file) as of the last commit is the HEAD. Every commit has a unique identifying hash that you can see when you run git log.\nThe working tree, or checkout, is the files you interact with inside of the local repository. You can checkout different branches, so that you\u0026rsquo;re not working in the \u0026ldquo;master\u0026rdquo; (default or trunk) branch of the repository, which is mostly an issue when collaborating with other people.\nIf you want to commit something to the repository, it must first be \u0026ldquo;staged\u0026rdquo; or added with the git add command. Use git status to see what files are staged and what files are not staged. The output of git diff generates the difference between the HEAD plus all staged changes, and all unstaged changes. To see the difference between all staged changes and HEAD use the \u0026ldquo;git diff --cached\u0026rdquo;.\nThe staging area makes it possible to construct commits in very granular sorts of ways. The staging area makes it possible to use commits, less like \u0026ldquo;snapshots\u0026rdquo; of the entire tree of a repository, and rather as discrete objects with that contain a single atomic change set. This relationship to commits is enhanced by the ability to do \u0026ldquo;squash merges\u0026rdquo; and squash a series of commits in a rebase, but it starts with the staging area.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve staged files incorrectly you can use the git reset command to reset this process. Used alone, reset is a non destructive operation.\nBranches The ability to work effectively in branches is the fundamental function of git, and probably also the easiest to be confused by. A branch in git, fundamentally, is just a different HEAD in the same repository. Branches within a single repository allow you to work on specific sets of changes (e.g. \u0026ldquo;topics\u0026rdquo;) and track other people\u0026rsquo;s changes, without needing to make modifications to the \u0026ldquo;master\u0026rdquo; or default branch of the repository.\nThe major confusion of branches springs from git\u0026rsquo;s ability to treat every branch of every potentially related repository as a branch of each other. Therefore it\u0026rsquo;s possible to push to and pull from multiple remote branches from a single remote repository and to push to and pull from multiple repositories. Ignore this for a moment (or several) and remember:\nA branch just means your local repository has more than one \u0026ldquo;HEAD\u0026rdquo; against which you can create commits and \u0026ldquo;diff\u0026rdquo; your working checkout. When something happens in one of these branches that\u0026rsquo;s worth saving or preserving or sharing, you can either publish this branch or merge it into the \u0026ldquo;master\u0026rdquo; branch, and publishes these changes.\nThe goal of git is to construct a sequence of commits that represent the progress of a project. Branches are a tool that allow you to isolate changes within tree\u0026rsquo;s until you\u0026rsquo;re ready to merge them together. When the differences between HEAD and your working copy becomes to difficult to manage using git add and git reset, create a branch and go from there.\nRebase Rebasing git repositories is scary, because the operation forces you to rewrite the history of a repository to \u0026ldquo;cherry pick\u0026rdquo; and reorder commits in a way leads to a useful progression and collection of atomic moments in a project\u0026rsquo;s history. As opposed to the tools that git replaces, \u0026ldquo;the git way\u0026rdquo; suggests that one ought to \u0026ldquo;commit often\u0026rdquo; because all commits are local operations, and this makes it possible to use the commit history to facilitate experimentation and very small change sets that the author of a body of code (or text!) can revert or amend over time.\nRebasing, allows you to take the past history objects, presumably created frequently during the process of working (i.e. to save a current state) and compress this history into a set of changes (patches) that reflect a more usable history once the focus of work has moved on. I\u0026rsquo;ve read and heard objects to git on the basis that it allows developers to \u0026ldquo;rewrite history,\u0026rdquo; and individuals shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be able to perform destructive operations on the history of a repository. The answer to this is twofold:\nGit, and version control isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily supposed to provide an consistently reliable history of a projects code. It\u0026rsquo;s supposed to manage the code, and provide useful tools to managing and using the history of a project. Because of the way the staging area works, sometimes commits are made out of order or a \u0026ldquo;logical history object\u0026rdquo; is split into two actual objects. Rebasing makes these non-issues. Features like rebasing are really intended to happen before commits are published, in most cases. Developers will make a series of commits and then, while still working locally, rebase the repository to build a useful history and then publish those changes to his collaborators. So it\u0026rsquo;s not so much that rebasing allows or encourages revisionist histories, but that it allows developers to control the state of their present or the relative near future. Bonus: The git stash The git stash isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a concept that\u0026rsquo;s difficult to grasp, but a tool for interacting with the features describe above that is pretty easy to get. Imagine one of the following cases:\nYou\u0026rsquo;re making changes to a repository, you\u0026rsquo;re not ready to commit, but someone writes you an email, and says that they need you to quickly change 10 or 12 strings in a couple of files (some of which you\u0026rsquo;re in the middle of editing,) and they need this change published very soon. You can\u0026rsquo;t commit what you\u0026rsquo;ve edited as that might break something you\u0026rsquo;re unwilling to risk breaking. How do you make the changes you need to make without committing your in-progress changes?\nYou\u0026rsquo;re working in a topic branch, you\u0026rsquo;ve changed a number of files, and suddenly realized that you need to be working in a different branch. You can\u0026rsquo;t commit your changes and merge them into the branch you need to be using that would disrupt the history of that branch. How do you save current changes and then import them to another branch without committing?\nBasically invoke git stash which saves the difference between the index (e.g. HEAD) and the current state of the working directory. Then do whatever you need to do (change branches, pull new changes, do some other work,) and then invoke git stash pop and everything that was included in your stash will be applied to the new working copy. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of like a temporary commit. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of additional functionality within git stash but, that\u0026rsquo;s an entirely distinct bag of worms.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/key-git-concepts/","summary":"Git is a very\u0026hellip; different kind of software. It\u0026rsquo;s explicitly designed against the paradigm for other programs like it (version control/source management) and to make maters worse most of it\u0026rsquo;s innovations and eccentricities are very difficult to create metaphors and analogies around. This is likely because it takes a non-proscriptive approach to workflow (you can work with your collaborators in any way that makes sense for you) and more importantly it lets people do away with linearity. Git makes it possible, and perhaps even encourages, creators to give up an idea of a singular or linear authorship process.\nThat sounds great (or is at least passable) in conversation but it is practically unclear. But even when you sit down and can interact with a \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; git repository, it can still be fairly difficult to \u0026ldquo;grok.\u0026rdquo; And to make matter worse, there are a number of very key concepts that regular users of git acclimate to but that are still difficult to grasp from the ousted.","title":"Key Git Concepts"},{"content":"\u0026hellip; when you\u0026rsquo;re a tycho.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not been blogging very much. There were even two weeks where I totally forgot to post anything to the blog. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if there\u0026rsquo;s been a hiatus of that length at any other point in the last three years. Strange, but not bad. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing--not as much as I\u0026rsquo;d like, but enough--but nothing has really managed to filter through to the blog. Seems, then, like a good time for a general \u0026ldquo;what the hell have you been up to and what are you working on post?\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been plugging away on the novel project for a while I\u0026rsquo;m in the home stretch: two and a half chapters to write. I know I can write a chapter in a couple of weeks if I put my mind to it, and have a good weekend day to do nothing other than sit around and write. I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered some things about the story that have made it much easier and clear for me to write. A character that I thought was the main is a horrible point-of-view character, I have a more clear idea of what I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to get after the entire story, I\u0026rsquo;ve started to really like the project again. The problem now, is just finding time to finish it.\nI moved nearly two months ago: it was a good thing indeed. I\u0026rsquo;m closer to friends and activities that I find fulfilling. Although I\u0026rsquo;m not in the heart of my city, I have a train pass and am a block away from a train station that will get me into the city pretty much whenever I want. Train passes are a fantastic innovation, and my only real complaint (on this note) is that for varied historical reasons Tran service in America is woefully pathetic. But it\u0026rsquo;s great to be in a place where public transit is a viable option for most commuting.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve recently started dating someone, which is a terribly atypical experience for me given how independent and quirky I am in \u0026ldquo;default mode.\u0026rdquo; Nifty though, and utterly unintended: but there\u0026rsquo;s something delightful about the whole deal. Who am I to argue?\nAnd by \u0026ldquo;recently started\u0026rdquo; I mean almost three months ago. Right.\nI got a new phone. After a long time with a Blackberry Bold, I took an upgrade and got the new Blackberry Torch. I had been strongly pondering an Android phone, but the one I wanted most (HTC EVO) is on a network that I\u0026rsquo;d like to avoid, and the other offerings seem lackluster. Blackberries have never (rarely?) been exciting, but they have worked, and there are some features that make sense to me (massively configurable ring/tone behavior, central messages feed that all applications can create entries in.) Having said that, I\u0026rsquo;m not wild about being on a closed platform, though I think we shouldn\u0026rsquo;t delude ourselves into thinking that from the user\u0026rsquo;s perspective that Android is an open platform.\nWith a web browser that is basically mobile Safari, and applications to do the major things I need to do (IM, email, calendar, GPS, web browsing, address book, twitter, alarm clock, ebook reading, emergency ssh,) and a device that is build wonderfully, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t be happier. I wish there was a better solution for writing/note taking/outlining for the Blackberry, but these things happen.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s probably a symptom of the commute as much as anything but I\u0026rsquo;ve had a hard time figuring out how to write on the train. I did ok for a while, and then I\u0026rsquo;ve had a horrible time with it for the past few weeks. The new plan is to do a little reboot of my organizational system and to switch back to using the laptop as my only computer.\nThe first part, the organizational reboot, is important because I\u0026rsquo;m not used to thinking about my available time as existing in the \u0026ldquo;shape\u0026rdquo; that it currently exists. If I\u0026rsquo;ve learned one thin in the past couple of years, its that staying organized and on top of ones personal project is almost entirely dependent upon being able to successfully break apart big projects into \u0026ldquo;doable\u0026rdquo; pieces that you can tackle in the time you have. That sounds easy, but it\u0026rsquo;s pretty hard to know what your project will require and what your near-future is going to hold enough to be able to get everything to line up. Sometimes it requires little reboots.\nThe second, much more technological remedy, is mostly that while the separation between my work system (and tasks) and my personal system (and tasks) has been nice, in practice it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work that well. The context switch between the train and the office is too hard, and not being able to just unplug and shut down, means that the start up/shut down costs for the context switches are simply too high and I\u0026rsquo;m the one who feels the impact. So re-merging my systems seems to be the way to win this game, at least for the moment.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to ultimately invest in a hot spare laptop that\u0026rsquo;s mostly identical to my current laptop to reduce some of the anxiety regarding the \u0026ldquo;what happens if my machine croaks,\u0026rdquo; worry. Which is always a fear.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/its-a-great-time-to-be-alive/","summary":"\u0026hellip; when you\u0026rsquo;re a tycho.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not been blogging very much. There were even two weeks where I totally forgot to post anything to the blog. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if there\u0026rsquo;s been a hiatus of that length at any other point in the last three years. Strange, but not bad. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing--not as much as I\u0026rsquo;d like, but enough--but nothing has really managed to filter through to the blog. Seems, then, like a good time for a general \u0026ldquo;what the hell have you been up to and what are you working on post?\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been plugging away on the novel project for a while I\u0026rsquo;m in the home stretch: two and a half chapters to write. I know I can write a chapter in a couple of weeks if I put my mind to it, and have a good weekend day to do nothing other than sit around and write.","title":"It's A Great Time To Be Alive"},{"content":"It seems I\u0026rsquo;m writing a minor series on the current status (and possible future direction?) of technical writing and documentation efforts. Both in terms of establishing a foundation for my own professional relevancy, as well as in and for itself because I think documentation has the potential to shape the way that people are able to use technology. I started out with Technical Writing Appreciation and this post will address a few sore points regarding the use of wikis as a tool for constructing documentation.\nAt the broadest level, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a persistent myth regarding the nature of the wiki and the creation of content in a wiki that persists apart from their potential use in documentation projects. Wiki\u0026rsquo;s are easy to install and create. It is easy to say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m making a wiki, please contribute!\u0026rdquo; It is incredibly difficult to take a project idea and wiki software and turn that into a useful and vibrant community and resource. Perhaps these challenges arise from the fact that wiki\u0026rsquo;s require intense stewardship and attention, and this job usually falls to a very dedicated leader or a small core of lead editors. Also, since authorship on wikis is diffuse and not often credited, getting this kind of leadership and therefore successfully starting communities around wiki projects can be very difficult.\nAll wikis are like this. At the same time, I think the specific needs of technical documentation makes these issues even more prevalent. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that wiki software can\u0026rsquo;t power documentation teams, but the \u0026ldquo;wiki process\u0026rdquo; as we might think of it, is particularly unsuited to documentation.\nOne thing that I think is a nearly universal truth of technical writing is that the crafting of texts is the smallest portion of the effort of making documentation. Gathering information, background and experience in a particular tool or technology is incredibly time consuming. Narrowing all this information down into something that is useful to someone is a considerable task. The wiki process is really great for the evolutionary process of creating a text, but it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly conducive to facilitating the kind of process that documentation must go through.\nWikis basically \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s a simple editing interface without any unnecessary structure: go and edit, we don\u0026rsquo;t care about the structure or organization, you can take care of that as a personal/social problem.\u0026rdquo; Fundamentally, documentation requires an opposite approach, once a project is underway and some decisions have been made, organization isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that you want to have to manually wrestle, and structure is very necessary. Wikis might be useful content generation and publication tools, but they are probably not suited to supporting the work flow of a documentation project.\nWhat then?\nI think the idea of a structured wiki, as presented by twiki has potential but I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of experience with it. My day-job project uses an internally developed tool, and a lot of internal procedures to enforce certain conventions. I suspect there are publication, collaboration, and project management tools that are designed to solve this problem, but I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly familiar with anything specific. In any case, it\u0026rsquo;s not a wiki.\nDo you have thoughts? Have I missed something? I look forward to hearing from you in comments!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wikis-are-not-documentation/","summary":"It seems I\u0026rsquo;m writing a minor series on the current status (and possible future direction?) of technical writing and documentation efforts. Both in terms of establishing a foundation for my own professional relevancy, as well as in and for itself because I think documentation has the potential to shape the way that people are able to use technology. I started out with Technical Writing Appreciation and this post will address a few sore points regarding the use of wikis as a tool for constructing documentation.\nAt the broadest level, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a persistent myth regarding the nature of the wiki and the creation of content in a wiki that persists apart from their potential use in documentation projects. Wiki\u0026rsquo;s are easy to install and create. It is easy to say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m making a wiki, please contribute!\u0026rdquo; It is incredibly difficult to take a project idea and wiki software and turn that into a useful and vibrant community and resource.","title":"Wikis are not Documentation"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m a technical writer. This is a realization that has taken me some time to appreciate and understand fully.\nTechnical writing is one of those things that creators of technology, a term that I will use liberally, all agree is required, but it\u0026rsquo;s also something that\u0026rsquo;s very difficult to do properly. I think this difficulty springs from the following concerns: What constitutes describing a technology or process in too much detail? Not enough? Are all users of a technology able to make use of the same level of documentation sets? If users are too diverse, what is the best way to make sure that their needs are addressed: do we write parallel documentation for all users, or do we try and equalize less advanced users so that the core documentation is useful to everyone?\nThe answers to these questions vary of course with the needs of the product being documented and the use cases, but I think resolving these concerns presents a considerable challenge to any kind of technical documentation project, and the way that the documentation developers resolve these issues can have a profound effect not only on the documentation itself but the value and usefulness of the documentation itself. As I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the utility and value of technical writing, a professional hazard, I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with a brief taxonomy of approaches to technical writing:\nFirst, there\u0026rsquo;s the document everything approach. Starting with a full list of features (or even an application\u0026rsquo;s source) the goal here is to make sure that there\u0026rsquo;s no corner unturned. We might think of this as the \u0026ldquo;manual\u0026rdquo; approach, as the goal is to produce a comprehensive manual. These are great reference materials, particularly when indexed effectively, but the truth is that they\u0026rsquo;re really difficult for users to engage with, even though they may have all the answers to a users questions (e.g. \u0026ldquo;RTFM.\u0026rdquo;) I suspect that the people who write this kind of documentation either work closely with developers or are themselves developers. Second, there\u0026rsquo;s what I think of as the systems or solutions document, which gives up comprehensiveness, and perhaps even isolation to a single tool or application, and documents outcomes and processes. They aren\u0026rsquo;t as detailed, and so might not answer underlying questions, but when completed effectively they provide an ideal entry point into using a new technology. In contrast to the \u0026ldquo;manual\u0026rdquo; these documents are either slightly more general interest or like \u0026ldquo;white papers.\u0026rdquo; This class of documentation, thus, not simply explains how to accomplish specific goals but illuminates technical possibilities and opportunities that may not be clear from a function-based documentation approach. I strongly suspect that the producers of this kind of documentation are very rarely the people who develop the application itself. In contrast to the above, I think documentation written for education and training purposes, may appear to be look either a \u0026ldquo;manual\u0026rdquo; or a \u0026ldquo;white paper,\u0026rdquo; but have a fundamentally different organization and set of requirements. Documentation that supports training is often (I suspect) developed in concert with the training program itself, and needs to impart a level of deeper understanding of how a system works (like the content of a manual,) but doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be comprehensive, and needs mirror the general narrative and goals of the training program. Process documentation finally, is most like solution documentation, but rather than capture unrealized technological possibilities or describe potentially hypothetical goals, these kinds of documents capture largely institutional knowledge to more effectively manage succession (both by future iterations of ourselves, and our replacements). These documents have perhaps the most limited audience, but are incredibly valuable both archival (e.g. \u0026ldquo;How did we used to do $*?\u0026rdquo;) and also for maintaining consistency particularly amongst teams as well as for specific tasks. I think the fundamental lesson regarding documentation here isn\u0026rsquo;t that every piece of technology needs lots and lots of documentation, but rather that depending on the goals for a particular technology development program or set of tools, different kinds of documentation may be appropriate, and more useful in some situations.\nAs a secondary conclusion, or direction for more research: I\u0026rsquo;d be interested in figuring out if there are particular systems that allow technical writers (and development teams) to collect multiple kinds of information and produce multiple documentation for different organizations. Being able to automatically generate different wholes out of documentation \u0026ldquo;objects\u0026rdquo; if we may be so bold.\nI must look into this. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technical-writing-appreciation/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m a technical writer. This is a realization that has taken me some time to appreciate and understand fully.\nTechnical writing is one of those things that creators of technology, a term that I will use liberally, all agree is required, but it\u0026rsquo;s also something that\u0026rsquo;s very difficult to do properly. I think this difficulty springs from the following concerns: What constitutes describing a technology or process in too much detail? Not enough? Are all users of a technology able to make use of the same level of documentation sets? If users are too diverse, what is the best way to make sure that their needs are addressed: do we write parallel documentation for all users, or do we try and equalize less advanced users so that the core documentation is useful to everyone?\nThe answers to these questions vary of course with the needs of the product being documented and the use cases, but I think resolving these concerns presents a considerable challenge to any kind of technical documentation project, and the way that the documentation developers resolve these issues can have a profound effect not only on the documentation itself but the value and usefulness of the documentation itself.","title":"Technical Writing Appreciation"},{"content":"Although I haven\u0026rsquo;t used LaTeX much in the past few years, it was one of the primary tools that hastened my shift to using GNU/Linux full time. Why? I\u0026rsquo;d grown sick of fighting with document preparation and publishing systems (e.g. Microsoft Word/Open Office), and had started using LaTeX on my Mac to produce all of my papers and documents that needed to be output to paper-formats. Why switch? Because after a certain point of having every tool you use be Free software (because it\u0026rsquo;s better!), it becomes easier and more cost effective to just jump the gun and by commodity hardware and use a system that\u0026rsquo;s designed to support this kind of software (managing a large selection lots of free software packages on OS X can become cumbersome).\nSo why LaTeX? What\u0026rsquo;s the big deal? Why do I care now? Well\u0026hellip;\nLaTeX is a very usable front-end/set of macros for the TeX typesetting engine. Basically, you write text files in a particular way, and then run LaTeX (or pdflatex) and it generates the best looking PDF in the world of your document. You get full control over things that matter (layout, look and feel) and you don\u0026rsquo;t have to worry about things that ought to be standard (titles, headlines, citations with BibTeX, page numbering, hyphenation). The best part, however, is that once you figure out how to generate a document correctly once, you never have to figure it out again. Once you realize that most of the things you need to output to paper are in the same format, you can use the same template and be able to generate consistently formated documents automatically. There\u0026rsquo;s a \u0026ldquo;compile\u0026rdquo; step in the document production process, which means changes aren\u0026rsquo;t often immediately recognizable, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is a major obstacle.\nWord processing and document preparation is a critical component of most common computer users. At least, I\u0026rsquo;d assume so, though I don\u0026rsquo;t have good numbers on the subject. In any case, I think it might be an interesting project to see how teaching people how to use LaTeX might both improve the quality of their work, and also the way that they\u0026rsquo;re able to work. It\u0026rsquo;s advanced, and a bit confusing at first, but I\u0026rsquo;d suspect that once you got over the initial hump LaTeX presents a more simple and consistent interface: you only get what you tell it to give you and you only see the functionality that you know about. This might make the discovery of new features more difficult, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t limit functionality.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this post is the right space to begin a lesson or series on getting started with LaTeX, but I think as a possible teaser (if there\u0026rsquo;s interest) that the proper stack for getting started with LaTeX would consist of:\nA TeXlive distribution. You need the basic tool kit including pdflatex, TeX, Metafont, LaTeX, and BibTeX. A Text Editor with LaTeX support: emacs, TextMate, etc. Plain text can be difficult and cumbersome to edit unless you have the right tools for the job, which include a real text editor. Some sort of macro or snippet expansion system. TeX is great. But it\u0026rsquo;s also somewhat verbose, and having an easy way to insert text into your editing environment, both for templates but also for general operations (emphasis, notes, etc.) is incredibly useful, and reduces pain greatly. A template management system. This probably needn\u0026rsquo;t be a formal software system, but just something to organize and store the basic templates that you will use. And the rest is just learning curve and practice. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/covered-in-latex/","summary":"Although I haven\u0026rsquo;t used LaTeX much in the past few years, it was one of the primary tools that hastened my shift to using GNU/Linux full time. Why? I\u0026rsquo;d grown sick of fighting with document preparation and publishing systems (e.g. Microsoft Word/Open Office), and had started using LaTeX on my Mac to produce all of my papers and documents that needed to be output to paper-formats. Why switch? Because after a certain point of having every tool you use be Free software (because it\u0026rsquo;s better!), it becomes easier and more cost effective to just jump the gun and by commodity hardware and use a system that\u0026rsquo;s designed to support this kind of software (managing a large selection lots of free software packages on OS X can become cumbersome).\nSo why LaTeX? What\u0026rsquo;s the big deal? Why do I care now? Well\u0026hellip;\nLaTeX is a very usable front-end/set of macros for the TeX typesetting engine.","title":"Covered In LaTeX"},{"content":"I have a computer, an old laptop, that I mostly use as the foundation of my stereo system. It\u0026rsquo;s just a basic system with a few servers (a web server and the music player daemon), and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a running window manager. This configuration usually doesn\u0026rsquo;t bug me: I connect remotely and the computer sits under the couch, but since my recent move I\u0026rsquo;ve not had a network connection at home and I\u0026rsquo;ve defaulted to playing music and managing the system from the console.\nThis works just fine for me. The virtual terminals aren\u0026rsquo;t noticeably different from the terminal I get over ssh (as you would expect/hope), except now I have to walk across the room. The people who listen to music with me haven\u0026rsquo;t yet been other terminal geeks, and so I\u0026rsquo;ve taken on the role of stereo whisperer. Until a friend looked over my shoulder and wanted to change the track. Using the console is sometimes (often) a slippery slope.\nI realized immediately that this situation was much more conducive to learning to use the console than the kinds of introductions to using the console that I\u0026rsquo;ve typically written. The commands we used were very limited: the mpc program that acts as a simple command-line client to the music player daemon (mpd) and grep. We also used the pipe operator.\nThere are thousands of commands on most Linux/UNIX systems and remembering all of them can be a bit challenging. The console is a limiting environment basically you can do one thing at a time with it, and you don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of leeway with common errors. At the same time, there are a great number of programs and commands that a beginner has no way of knowing about or knowing when to use. Legitimately, the console is both too limiting and expansive to be quickly accessible to the uninitiated. Starting with a very limited selection of commands is way to break through this barrier.\nThe terminal environment is also very \u0026ldquo;goal-oriented.\u0026rdquo; Enter a command to generate some sort of output or result and then repeat. At the end your system will have done something that you needed it to, and/or you\u0026rsquo;ll learn something that you didn\u0026rsquo;t already know. When you\u0026rsquo;re just trying to learn, all of the examples seem fake, contrived, and bothersome because many people already have an easy way of accomplishing that task using GUI tools. Learning how the terminal works, thus, needs a real example, not just a potentially realistic example.\nThe great thing, I think, is that once you have a need to learn command line interaction, it makes a lot of sense even to people who aren\u0026rsquo;t die-hard geeks: Commands all have a shared structure that is fairly predictable and inconsistencies are apparent. Perhaps most importantly the command line\u0026rsquo;s interaction model is simple: input a command and get a response. Advanced users may be able to bend the interaction model a bit, but it is undeniably parsimonious.\nIt seems, in conclusion, that the command-line is easy to learn for the new user for the same reason it is beloved by the advanced. Ongoing questions, include:\nIf this kind of realization were to catch on, how might it affect interaction design in the long run? Might \u0026ldquo;simple to design\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;easy to use\u0026rdquo; move closer together?\nIs there a way to build training and documentation to support users who are new to this kind of interaction style?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/console-use-for-the-uninitiated/","summary":"I have a computer, an old laptop, that I mostly use as the foundation of my stereo system. It\u0026rsquo;s just a basic system with a few servers (a web server and the music player daemon), and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a running window manager. This configuration usually doesn\u0026rsquo;t bug me: I connect remotely and the computer sits under the couch, but since my recent move I\u0026rsquo;ve not had a network connection at home and I\u0026rsquo;ve defaulted to playing music and managing the system from the console.\nThis works just fine for me. The virtual terminals aren\u0026rsquo;t noticeably different from the terminal I get over ssh (as you would expect/hope), except now I have to walk across the room. The people who listen to music with me haven\u0026rsquo;t yet been other terminal geeks, and so I\u0026rsquo;ve taken on the role of stereo whisperer. Until a friend looked over my shoulder and wanted to change the track.","title":"Console Use for the Uninitiated"},{"content":"I agreed to work on an article for a friend about the collaborative technology \u0026ldquo;stuff\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about for a long time. I don\u0026rsquo;t have an archive that covers this subject, but perhaps I should, because I think I\u0026rsquo;ve written about the technology that allows people to make things with other people a number of times, though I have yet to pull together these ideas into some sort of coherent post or essay.\nThis has been my major post-graduation intellectual challenge. I have interests, even some collected research, and no real way to turn these half conceptualized projects into a \u0026ldquo;real paper.\u0026rdquo; So I\u0026rsquo;ve proposed working with a friend to collect and develop a report that\u0026rsquo;s more concrete and more comprehensive than the kind of work that I\u0026rsquo;ve been attempting to accomplish on the blog. Blogging is great, don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, but I think it leads to certain kinds of thinking and writing (at least as I do it,) and sometimes other kinds of writing and thinking are required.\nRegarding this project, I want to think about how technology like \u0026ldquo;git\u0026rdquo; (a distributed version control system) and even tools like wiki\u0026rsquo;s shape the way that groups of people can collaborate with each other. I think there\u0026rsquo;s an impulse in saying \u0026ldquo;look at the possibilities that these tools create! This brave new world is entirely novel, and not only changes the way I am able to complete my work, but how I look at problems, and make it so much easier for me to get things done..\u0026rdquo; At the same time, the technology can only promote a way of working it doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily enforce a way of working, nor does any particular kind of technology really remove the burdens and challenges of \u0026ldquo;getting things done.\u0026rdquo; More often perhaps new kinds of technology, like distributed version control, is responsible for increasing the level of abstracting and allowing us (humans) to attend to higher order concerns.\nThen, moving up from the technology, I think looking at how people use technology in this class allows us to learn a great deal about how work is accomplished. We can get an idea of when work is being done, an idea of how quality control efforts are implemented. Not only does this allow us to demystify the process of creation, but having a more clear idea of how things are made could allow us to become better makers.\nThe todo list, then, is something like:\nCondense the above into something that resembles a thesis/argument. Become a little more familiar with the git-dm (\u0026ldquo;data mining\u0026rdquo;) tool that the Linux Foundation put together for their \u0026ldquo;state of Kernel development.\u0026rdquo; Develop some specific questions to address. I think part of my problem above and heretofore has been that I\u0026rsquo;m saying \u0026ldquo;there\u0026rsquo;s something interesting here, if we looked,\u0026rdquo; rather than. \u0026ldquo;I think w kind of projects operate in x ways, where y projects will operate in z ways.\u0026rdquo; Literature review. I\u0026rsquo;ve done some of this, but I\u0026rsquo;ve felt like I need to do even more basic methodological and basic theory reading. And even though an unread Patterns of Culture is on my bookshelf, I don\u0026rsquo;t need to read that to begin reading articles. That\u0026rsquo;s a start. Feedback is always useful. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted as I progress.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/collaborative-technology/","summary":"I agreed to work on an article for a friend about the collaborative technology \u0026ldquo;stuff\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about for a long time. I don\u0026rsquo;t have an archive that covers this subject, but perhaps I should, because I think I\u0026rsquo;ve written about the technology that allows people to make things with other people a number of times, though I have yet to pull together these ideas into some sort of coherent post or essay.\nThis has been my major post-graduation intellectual challenge. I have interests, even some collected research, and no real way to turn these half conceptualized projects into a \u0026ldquo;real paper.\u0026rdquo; So I\u0026rsquo;ve proposed working with a friend to collect and develop a report that\u0026rsquo;s more concrete and more comprehensive than the kind of work that I\u0026rsquo;ve been attempting to accomplish on the blog. Blogging is great, don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, but I think it leads to certain kinds of thinking and writing (at least as I do it,) and sometimes other kinds of writing and thinking are required.","title":"Collaborative Technology"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying around with the Notmuch Email Client which is a nifty piece of software that provides a very minimalist and powerful email system that\u0026rsquo;s inspired by the organizational model of Gmail.\nMind you, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve quite gotten it.\nNotmuch says, basically, build searches (e.g. \u0026ldquo;views\u0026rdquo;) to filter your email so you can process your email in the manner that makes the most sense to you, without needing to worry about organizing and sorting email. It has the structure for \u0026ldquo;tagging,\u0026rdquo; which makes it easy to mark status for managing your process (e.g. read/unread, reply-needed), and the ability to save searches. And that\u0026rsquo;s about it.\nFunctionally tags and saved searches work the way that mail boxes in terms of the intellectual organization of mailboxes. Similarly the ability to save searches, makes it possible to do a good measure of \u0026ldquo;preprocessing.\u0026rdquo; In the same way that Gmail changes the email paradigm by saying \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t think about organizing your email, just do what you need to do,\u0026rdquo; not much says \u0026ldquo;do less with your email, don\u0026rsquo;t organize it, and trust that the machine will be able to help you find what you need when the time comes.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been saying variations of the following for years, but I think on some level it hasn\u0026rsquo;t stuck for me. Given contemporary technology, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to organize any kind of information that could conceivably be found with search tools. Notmuch proves that this works, and although I\u0026rsquo;ve not been able to transfer my personal email over, I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable asserting that notmuch is a functional approach to email. To be fair, I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like my current email processing and filtering scheme is that broken, so I\u0026rsquo;m a bad example.\nThe questions that this raises, which I don\u0026rsquo;t have a particularly good answers for, are as follows:\nAre there good tools for the \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t organize when you can search crew,\u0026rdquo; for non-email data? And I\u0026rsquo;m not just talking about search engines themselves (as there are a couple: xapian, namazu), or ungainly desktop GUIs (which aren\u0026rsquo;t without utility,) but the proper command-line tools, emacs interfaces, and web based interfaces? Are conventional search tools the most expressive way of specifying what we want to find when filtering or looking for data? Are there effective improvements that can be made? I think there\u0026rsquo;s intellectual value created by organizing and cataloging information \u0026ldquo;manually,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;punting to search\u0026rdquo; seems like it removes the opportunity to develop good and productive information architectures (if we may be so bold.) Is there a solution that provides the ease of search without giving up the benefits that librarianism brings to information organization? ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/notmuch-organization/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying around with the Notmuch Email Client which is a nifty piece of software that provides a very minimalist and powerful email system that\u0026rsquo;s inspired by the organizational model of Gmail.\nMind you, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve quite gotten it.\nNotmuch says, basically, build searches (e.g. \u0026ldquo;views\u0026rdquo;) to filter your email so you can process your email in the manner that makes the most sense to you, without needing to worry about organizing and sorting email. It has the structure for \u0026ldquo;tagging,\u0026rdquo; which makes it easy to mark status for managing your process (e.g. read/unread, reply-needed), and the ability to save searches. And that\u0026rsquo;s about it.\nFunctionally tags and saved searches work the way that mail boxes in terms of the intellectual organization of mailboxes. Similarly the ability to save searches, makes it possible to do a good measure of \u0026ldquo;preprocessing.\u0026rdquo; In the same way that Gmail changes the email paradigm by saying \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t think about organizing your email, just do what you need to do,\u0026rdquo; not much says \u0026ldquo;do less with your email, don\u0026rsquo;t organize it, and trust that the machine will be able to help you find what you need when the time comes.","title":"Saved Searches and Notmuch Organization"},{"content":"At the end of the day (or even the beginning,) I\u0026rsquo;m just another geek, and despite all of the incredibly (I\u0026rsquo;d like to think at least) reasoned ways I think about the way I use technology, I occasionally get an old fashioned hankering for something new. We\u0026rsquo;ve all had them. Perhaps my saving graces are that I do occasionally need new things (computers wear out, cellphones are replaced, needs change), and the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m both incredibly frugal and task oriented (rational?) about the way I use technology.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m still a geek. And gear is cool. Thoughts, in three parts.\nPart One, Phones and the HTC EVO I\u0026rsquo;ve been using a Blackberry for 18 months, and I\u0026rsquo;ve come to two conclusions: blackberries are great and they have the \u0026ldquo;how ot integrate messaging into a single usable interface.\u0026rdquo; I was skeptical at first, and it\u0026rsquo;s very simple, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never quite gotten my email to function in an ideal way, largely because I think the Blackberry works really well for email. It\u0026rsquo;s everything else that I might want to do with my phone that I can\u0026rsquo;t, and I\u0026rsquo;d probably like to: I have an SSH client and it\u0026rsquo;s nearly usable. Nearly. I have IM clients, that are nearly functional. Nearly.\nWhen I got the Blackberry, is and was the most important communication I was doing. I worked for a very email-centric company, and I wanted to be able to stay in the email-loop even when I was off doing something else. These days, IRC and XMPP are a far more central feature of my digital existence, and I tend to think that it\u0026rsquo;s not an Internet connection if I can\u0026rsquo;t open SSH. I\u0026rsquo;m also switching on a much longer public-transit focused commute in the next few week, and being able to do research for writing projects will be nice. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the best solution is exactly, though the HTC EVO is a pretty swell phone.\nAs the kids these days say, \u0026ldquo;Do want.\u0026rdquo;\nPart two, Infrastructural Computing and Home Servers I\u0026rsquo;ve fully adopted an infrastructural approach to technology, at least with regards to my own personal computing. That was a mouthful. Basically, although I work locally on the machine that\u0026rsquo;s in front of me (writing, email, note taking, collaboration,) much of the \u0026ldquo;computing\u0026rdquo; that I interact with isn\u0026rsquo;t actually connected to the machine I interact with directly. In some ways, I suppose this is what they meant when they said \u0026ldquo;cloud computing,\u0026rdquo; but the truth is that my implementation is somewhat more\u0026hellip; archaic: I use a lot of SSH, cron, and a little bailing wire to distribute computing tasks far and wide, and the process of moving everything in my digital world from a laptop that I carried around with me everywhere (college,) to a more sane state of affairs has been a long time coming.\nRight.\nThe long story short is that aside from a machine (my old laptop) that\u0026rsquo;s at capacity powering my \u0026ldquo;stereo,\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t have any computer\u0026rsquo;s at home aside from my laptop, and I tend to take it everywhere with me, which makes it unideal for some sorts of tasks. Furthermore, without an extra machine setting around, file storage, some kinds of backups, are somewhat more complicated than I\u0026rsquo;d like. So, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about getting some sort of robust server-type machine to stick in a corner in my apartment.\nNot exactly sure what the best option is there. I\u0026rsquo;m burdened by: frugality, sophisticated tastes, and the notion that having quality hardware really does matter.\nMore thinking required.\nPart three, More Laptops So I might have a laptop related illness. Back in the day, laptops always seemed like a frivolity: underpowered, never as portable as you wanted, awkward to use, and incredibly expensive. Now, laptops are cheap, and even the Atom-based \u0026ldquo;netbooks,\u0026rdquo; are functional for nearly every task. I tend to buy used Thinkpad Laptops, and as I think about it, I\u0026rsquo;ve probably spent as much on the three Thinkpads, all of which are still in service, as I did on any one mac laptop.\nThe thing about my current laptop is that when you think about it, it\u0026rsquo;d make a decent home server: the processor has virtualization extensions, the drive is fast (7200 rpm) and it can handle 4 gigs of ram (and maybe more.) What more could I want? And I distributed things correctly, the \u0026ldquo;server\u0026rdquo; laptop could be pressed into service as a backup/redundant laptop, in case something unforeseen happened.\nOr I could dither about it for another few months, and come to some other, better, fourth solution.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gear-mongering/","summary":"At the end of the day (or even the beginning,) I\u0026rsquo;m just another geek, and despite all of the incredibly (I\u0026rsquo;d like to think at least) reasoned ways I think about the way I use technology, I occasionally get an old fashioned hankering for something new. We\u0026rsquo;ve all had them. Perhaps my saving graces are that I do occasionally need new things (computers wear out, cellphones are replaced, needs change), and the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m both incredibly frugal and task oriented (rational?) about the way I use technology.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m still a geek. And gear is cool. Thoughts, in three parts.\nPart One, Phones and the HTC EVO I\u0026rsquo;ve been using a Blackberry for 18 months, and I\u0026rsquo;ve come to two conclusions: blackberries are great and they have the \u0026ldquo;how ot integrate messaging into a single usable interface.\u0026rdquo; I was skeptical at first, and it\u0026rsquo;s very simple, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never quite gotten my email to function in an ideal way, largely because I think the Blackberry works really well for email.","title":"Gear Mongering"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little tweaking to the archives for dialectical futurism recently, including creating a new archive for science fiction and writing and being who I am this has inspired a little of thought regarding the state and use of archives of blogs.\nThe latest iteration of this blog has avoided the now common practice of having large endless lists of posts organized by publication month or by haphazardly assigned category and tag systems. While these succeed at providing a complete archive of every post written, they don\u0026rsquo;t add any real value to a blog or website. I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that one feature of successful blogs moving forward will be archives that are curated and convey additional value beyond the content of the site.\nPerhaps blogs as containers for a number of posts will end up being to ephemeral than I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to think about them, and will therefore not require very much in the way of archives, Perhaps, Google\u0026rsquo;s index will be sufficient for most people\u0026rsquo;s uses. Maybe. I remain unconvinced.\nHeretofore, I have made archives for tychoish as quasi-boutique pieces: collections of the best posts that address a given topic. This is great from the perspective of thinking about blog posts as a collection of essays, but I\u0026rsquo;ve started to think that this may be less less useful if we think of blogs as a collection of resources that people might want to have access to beyond it\u0026rsquo;s initial ephemeral form.\nRight now my archives say \u0026ldquo;see stuff from the past few months, and several choice topics on which I wrote vaguely connected sequences of posts.\u0026rdquo; The problem with the list of posts from the last few months is that beyond date, there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of useful information beyond the title and the date. The problem with the topical archives is that they\u0026rsquo;re not up to date, their not comprehensive even for recent posts, and there\u0026rsquo;s little \u0026ldquo;preview\u0026rdquo; of a given post beyond it\u0026rsquo;s title. In the end I think the possibility of visiting a topical archive looking for a specific post and not finding it is pretty large.\nIn addition to editorial collecting, I think archives, guides, or indexes of a given body of information ought to, provide some sort of comprehensive method for accessing information. There has to be some middle ground.\nI think the solution involves a lot of hand mangling of content, templates, and posts. I\u0026rsquo;m fairly certain that my current publication system is probably not up for the task without a fair amount of mangling and beating. As much as I want to think that this is an problem in search of the right kind of automation, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that\u0026rsquo;s really the case. I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to editing things by hand, but it would increase the amount of work in making any given post significantly.\nThere is, I suspect, no easy solution here.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/creating-useful-archives/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little tweaking to the archives for dialectical futurism recently, including creating a new archive for science fiction and writing and being who I am this has inspired a little of thought regarding the state and use of archives of blogs.\nThe latest iteration of this blog has avoided the now common practice of having large endless lists of posts organized by publication month or by haphazardly assigned category and tag systems. While these succeed at providing a complete archive of every post written, they don\u0026rsquo;t add any real value to a blog or website. I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that one feature of successful blogs moving forward will be archives that are curated and convey additional value beyond the content of the site.\nPerhaps blogs as containers for a number of posts will end up being to ephemeral than I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to think about them, and will therefore not require very much in the way of archives, Perhaps, Google\u0026rsquo;s index will be sufficient for most people\u0026rsquo;s uses.","title":"Creating Useful Archives"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a little bit of time addressing some organizational and workflow angst in the past few weeks, and one thing I\u0026rsquo;d been focusing on had been to update and fine tune my emacs (text editor) and irssi (irc/chat) configuration. Part of my goal had been to use irssi-xmpp to move all of my chat/synchronous communication into one program; unfortunately I\u0026rsquo;ve not been able to get irssi-xmpp to build and function in a fully stable way. This is probably because I\u0026rsquo;m hard on software and not because of anything specific to the software itself.\nIn any case, this lead me to come to the following conclusion about these programs, as they are probably the two most central and most heavily used applications in my arsenal, and without a doubt are the applications that I enjoy using the most. I scribbled the following note a few days ago in preparation for this entry:\nIn many ways the greatest advance or feature that these programs provide isn\u0026rsquo;t some killer feature, it\u0026rsquo;s a simple but more powerful abstraction that allows users to interact with their problem domain. Emacs is basically a text-editing application framework, and provides users with some basic fundamentals for interacting with textual information, and a design that allows users to create text editing modalities or paradigms which bridge the divide between full blown applications and custom configurations. By the same token, Irssi is really a rather simple program that\u0026rsquo;s easy to script, and contains a number of metaphors that are useful for synchronous communication (chat.)\nAnd we might be able to expand this even further: these are two applications that are not only supremely functional, but are so usable because they are software projects that really only make sense in context of free software.\nI want to be very careful here: I don\u0026rsquo;t want to make the argument that free software isn\u0026rsquo;t or can\u0026rsquo;t be commercial, because that\u0026rsquo;s obviously not the case. At the same time, free software, like these applications needn\u0026rsquo;t justify itself in terms of \u0026ldquo;commercial features,\u0026rdquo; or a particular target market in order to remain viable. It\u0026rsquo;s not that these programs don\u0026rsquo;t have features, it is that they have every feature, or the potential for every feature, and are thus hard to comprehend and hard to sell. Even if it only takes a use over a short period of time for users to find them incredibly compelling.\nThe underlying core extensibility that both of these \u0026ldquo;programs\u0026rdquo; have is probably also something that is only likely to happen in the context of open source or free software. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to suggest that proprietary software doesn\u0026rsquo;t recognize the power or utility of extensible software, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think giving users so much control over a given application makes sense from a quality control perspective. Giving users the power to modify their experience of software in an open ended fashion, also gives them the power to break things horribly, and that just doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense from a commercial perspective.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s probably also some hubris at play: free software applications, primarily these two, are written by hackers, with a target audience of other hackers. Who needs a flexible text editing application framework (e.g. emacs), but other programmers. And the primary users of IRC for the past 8-10 years have largely been hackers and developers and other \u0026ldquo;geek\u0026rdquo; types. irssi is very much written for these kinds of users. To a great extent, I think it\u0026rsquo;s safe to suggest that when hackers write software for themselves, this is what it looks like.\nThe questions that must linger is: why isn\u0026rsquo;t other software like this? (Or is it, and I\u0026rsquo;m missing it in my snobbishness,) and where is the happy medium between writing software for non-hackers and using great software (like these) to \u0026ldquo;make more hackers.\u0026rdquo;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-favor-of-simple-software/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a little bit of time addressing some organizational and workflow angst in the past few weeks, and one thing I\u0026rsquo;d been focusing on had been to update and fine tune my emacs (text editor) and irssi (irc/chat) configuration. Part of my goal had been to use irssi-xmpp to move all of my chat/synchronous communication into one program; unfortunately I\u0026rsquo;ve not been able to get irssi-xmpp to build and function in a fully stable way. This is probably because I\u0026rsquo;m hard on software and not because of anything specific to the software itself.\nIn any case, this lead me to come to the following conclusion about these programs, as they are probably the two most central and most heavily used applications in my arsenal, and without a doubt are the applications that I enjoy using the most. I scribbled the following note a few days ago in preparation for this entry:","title":"In Favor of Simple Software"},{"content":"This post is inspired by Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s Inventory about the technology he uses for his work and ongoing personal angst and gadget lust.\nFor the past six months or so I collapsed my entire computing existence into one, single, computer. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty Thinkpad x200, a small laptop with just the right balance of usable screen space, sufficient computing power, and great build quality. And when I say \u0026ldquo;everything,\u0026rdquo; I mean it. I hook it up to a monitor and keyboard at the office and do my day-job (technical writing/sys admin stuff) on this system, I have a similar \u0026ldquo;desktop\u0026rdquo; situation at home, and I write fiction, do all of my email, write and blog posts, off of this system. I even have development web servers running here.\nIn a number of ways it\u0026rsquo;s great, and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t trade this for the world. Everything just works the way I want it to, and I never have to worry that I\u0026rsquo;ve left some important edits to a file on a system elsewhere. Everything is always with me.\nNow to be fair, I have additional computers. My old(der) desktop at home keeps backups of files, plays music, and does a number of other tasks. I have (and use) the server that this and other websites run on for some tasks, and I have another instance at the office that manages some work functions, but despite their varying physical distance from me at any given point, my interactions with these computers is always as if they\u0026rsquo;re remote. When I use a computer, it\u0026rsquo;s this one.\nNow there isn\u0026rsquo;t a real problem here, except that from a workspace and mindspace perspective the context switching can be somewhat complicated and frustrating. While I\u0026rsquo;ve got most of the kinks worked out of the docking (monitors and keyboards) process figured out, it takes me a few moments to settle into or out of \u0026ldquo;laptop-mode\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;workdesk-mode\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;homedesk-mode.\u0026rdquo; While not having to worry if my files are all up to date, it\u0026rsquo;s also somewhat distracting for all my different projects to be open all the time. The article I\u0026rsquo;m working on for work is always open and a few key presses away from the novel I\u0026rsquo;m working on or the latest in-progress blog post.\nAgain, this isn\u0026rsquo;t a really huge issue, but it means that when I get somewhere and want to begin working I have to take a deep breath, and spend a moment or two getting going again. These do fit into the category of \u0026ldquo;first world problems,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if there\u0026rsquo;s a really easy solution. I\u0026rsquo;ve toyed with a number of resolutions to this angst:\nDistribute my existing machines such that I have a machine that lives at work and a machine that lives at home so that I can just sit down at a desk and start working without shenanigans. Given the available hardware, this might mean that I\u0026rsquo;d spend most of my time using systems that I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly fond of. I\u0026rsquo;ve toyed with having a \u0026ldquo;tycho writing laptop\u0026rdquo; that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have a web browser installed, for more distraction free writing. I\u0026rsquo;ve got my old laptop set up to do this, but I\u0026rsquo;m not likely to take it anywhere (i.e. for the commute,) so it might make sense to get a little netbook for the train for this function, but that seems like overkill. I might redistribute more of my workload to servers rather than doing everything on the laptop. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about having the terminal sessions that I use for email primarily live in screen sessions elsewhere. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about getting a second laptop, (like my main system at the moment,) both for redundancy and to help reduce the cost of switching between various contexts. As I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying with this, I\u0026rsquo;ve been making a number of tweaks to my work flow to help address the pain of context switching, most of which are too trivial and too specific to outline here. Mostly I\u0026rsquo;ve been tweaking some customizations, improving how I use virtual desktops. While these tweaks have improved things greatly, better internal system management doesn\u0026rsquo;t solve the underlying issues: it takes time to reconnect to networks, to close tabs in the web browser, to get to the relevant files open in emacs, and navigate to the proper desktop. All the while other contexts (other files, other virtual desktops,) lurk nearby.\nAnd figuring out how to solve this problem involves a certain amount of \u0026ldquo;head game\u0026rdquo; for me: avoiding having \u0026ldquo;the old laptop\u0026rdquo; be the primary computer for a given task, making sure that I don\u0026rsquo;t need a network connection for essential tasks. Assorted other weirdnesses.\nIf anyone recognizes features of this angst that in their own work they\u0026rsquo;ve managed to resolve, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear about your setup.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/focus-and-context-switching/","summary":"This post is inspired by Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s Inventory about the technology he uses for his work and ongoing personal angst and gadget lust.\nFor the past six months or so I collapsed my entire computing existence into one, single, computer. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty Thinkpad x200, a small laptop with just the right balance of usable screen space, sufficient computing power, and great build quality. And when I say \u0026ldquo;everything,\u0026rdquo; I mean it. I hook it up to a monitor and keyboard at the office and do my day-job (technical writing/sys admin stuff) on this system, I have a similar \u0026ldquo;desktop\u0026rdquo; situation at home, and I write fiction, do all of my email, write and blog posts, off of this system. I even have development web servers running here.\nIn a number of ways it\u0026rsquo;s great, and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t trade this for the world. Everything just works the way I want it to, and I never have to worry that I\u0026rsquo;ve left some important edits to a file on a system elsewhere.","title":"Focus and Context Switching"},{"content":"Thanks to `Shaun Duke \u0026lt;http://skiffyandfanty.wordpress.com\u0026gt;`_ for inspiring this little rant.\nI must confess that I\u0026rsquo;m mostly uninvolved in the world of fan fiction these days, though I have traveled in \u0026ldquo;fanish\u0026rdquo; circles at various points in my past. It\u0026rsquo;s not because I don\u0026rsquo;t think fans have interesting things to say about literature and media, or that I don\u0026rsquo;t think what\u0026rsquo;s happening in fandom important and fascinating. No, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly withdrawn because I have too much on my plate and participating in fandom doesn\u0026rsquo;t really contribute to the specific goals I have at this moment. But I sometimes feel that way about social science.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;d like to put forth the following arguments for viewing fan fiction as a form a literary criticism rather than a literary attempt in it\u0026rsquo;s own right:\nFan fiction is a form of literary criticism. Sure it\u0026rsquo;s casual, sure it\u0026rsquo;s written in the forum of a story, but the fan fictioner and the critic both write from the same core interest in interpreting texts and using varying readings of texts to create larger understandings of our world. The fact that fan fiction looks like a story, is mostly distracting to what\u0026rsquo;s happening in these texts. Fan fiction, has always been written in communities. The people who read fan fiction are largely the people who write fan fiction. Fan fiction inspires The quality of fan fiction is also largely irrelevant to the point of whether fan fiction is worthwhile. More so than other forms of writing, fan fiction is less about the technical merits of the text, and more about the discursive process under which the texts are created. Better quality writing makes better fan fiction, certainly but I don\u0026rsquo;t think fan fiction centers on those kinds of values. Copyright, and the \u0026ldquo;intellectual property\u0026rdquo; status of fan fiction is also sort of moot. It\u0026rsquo;s true that if we\u0026rsquo;re being honest fan fiction impinges upon the copyright of the original author. At the same time, fan fiction doesn\u0026rsquo;t really hurt creators: people aren\u0026rsquo;t confused that fan fiction is \u0026ldquo;real fiction,\u0026rdquo; fan fiction by and large doesn\u0026rsquo;t divert sales from \u0026ldquo;real fiction,\u0026rdquo; and so forth. Sure, it\u0026rsquo;s a bit weird for some others to find other people playing in their sand boxes, but the truth is that authors have never had a great deal of control over what happens to their work post-publication, so it\u0026rsquo;s fair. Additionally, I think that fan fiction accomplishes something that are incredibly powerful and worthwhile that \u0026ldquo;normal\u0026rdquo; fiction cannot accomplish. Writing fan fiction can be, I\u0026rsquo;d wager, an incredibly effective educational experience for new writers, particularly genre fiction writers. By providing a very fast feedback loop with an audience of readers and writers (and lovers of literature and story telling.) Not to mention the fact that because fan fiction tends to be somewhat ephemeral and there\u0026rsquo;s a wealth of inspiration and impetus for fiction, fan writers can write a lot, and if they choose in a very productive sort of way.\nAnd that is almost certainly a good thing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fan-fiction-is-criticism/","summary":"Thanks to `Shaun Duke \u0026lt;http://skiffyandfanty.wordpress.com\u0026gt;`_ for inspiring this little rant.\nI must confess that I\u0026rsquo;m mostly uninvolved in the world of fan fiction these days, though I have traveled in \u0026ldquo;fanish\u0026rdquo; circles at various points in my past. It\u0026rsquo;s not because I don\u0026rsquo;t think fans have interesting things to say about literature and media, or that I don\u0026rsquo;t think what\u0026rsquo;s happening in fandom important and fascinating. No, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly withdrawn because I have too much on my plate and participating in fandom doesn\u0026rsquo;t really contribute to the specific goals I have at this moment. But I sometimes feel that way about social science.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;d like to put forth the following arguments for viewing fan fiction as a form a literary criticism rather than a literary attempt in it\u0026rsquo;s own right:\nFan fiction is a form of literary criticism. Sure it\u0026rsquo;s casual, sure it\u0026rsquo;s written in the forum of a story, but the fan fictioner and the critic both write from the same core interest in interpreting texts and using varying readings of texts to create larger understandings of our world.","title":"Fan Fiction is Criticism"},{"content":"Every resource, every person, every project, every machine you have to manage comes with an ongoing cost. This is just as true of servers as is it is of people who work on projects that you\u0026rsquo;re in charge of or have some responsibility for, and while servers and teammates present very different kinds of management challenges, working effectively and managing management costs across contexts is (I would propose) similar. Or at least similar enough to merit some synthetic discussion.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s basically only one approach to managing \u0026ldquo;systems administration costs,\u0026rdquo; and that\u0026rsquo;s to avoid it as much as possible. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that sys admins avoid admining, but rather we work very hard to ensure that systems don\u0026rsquo;t need administration. We write operating systems that administer themselves, we script procedures to automate most tasks as much as possible (the Perl programing language was developed and popularized for use of easing the administration of UNIX systems,) and we use tools manage larger systems more effectively.\nPeople, time, and other resources cannot be so easily automated, and I think in response there are two major approaches (if we can create a somewhat false dichotomy for a moment:)\nOn the one hand there\u0026rsquo;s the school of thought that says \u0026ldquo;admit and assess management costs early, and pay them up front.\u0026rdquo; This is the corporate model in many ways. Have (layers upon layers of) resources dedicated to managing management costs, and then let this \u0026ldquo;middle management\u0026rdquo; make sure that things get done in spite of the management burden. On servers this is spending a lot of time choosing tools, configuring the base system, organizing the file system proactively, and constructing a healthy collection of \u0026ldquo;best practices.\u0026rdquo;\nBy contrast, the other perspective suggests that management costs should only be paid when absolutely necessary. make things, get something working and extant and then if something needs to be managed later, do it then and only as you need. On some level this is inspiring philsophy behind the frequent value of favoring \u0026ldquo;working code\u0026rdquo; over \u0026ldquo;great ideas\u0026rdquo; in the open source world.1 Though I think they phrase it differently, this is the basic approach that many hacker-oriented start ups have taken, and it seems to work for them. On the server, this approach is the \u0026ldquo;get it working,\u0026rdquo; approach, and these administrators aren\u0026rsquo;t bothered by having to go in every so often to \u0026ldquo;redo\u0026rdquo; how things are configured, and I think on some level this kind of approach to \u0026ldquo;management overhead\u0026rdquo; grows out of the agile world and the avoidance of \u0026ldquo;premature optimizations.\u0026rdquo;\nBut like all \u0026ldquo;somewhat false dichotomies,\u0026rdquo; there are flaws in the above formulation. Mostly the \u0026ldquo;late management\u0026rdquo; camp is able to delay management most effectively by anticipating their future needs (either by smarts or by dumb luck) early and planning around that. And the \u0026ldquo;early management\u0026rdquo; camp has to delay some management needs or else you\u0026rsquo;d be drowned in overhead before you started: and besides, the MBA union isn\u0026rsquo;t that strong.\nWe might even cast the \u0026ldquo;early management\u0026rdquo; approach as being \u0026ldquo;top down,\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;late management\u0026rdquo; camp as being \u0026ldquo;bottom up.\u0026rdquo; If you know, we were into that kind of thing. It\u0026rsquo;s always, particularly in the contemporary moment to look at the bottom-up approach and say \u0026ldquo;that\u0026rsquo;s really innovative and awesome, that\u0026rsquo;s better,\u0026rdquo; and view \u0026ldquo;top-down\u0026rdquo; organizations as \u0026ldquo;stodgy and old world,\u0026rdquo; when neither does a very good job of explaining what\u0026rsquo;s going on and there isn\u0026rsquo;t inherent radicalism or stodginess in either organization. But it is interesting. At least mildly.\nThoughts? Onward and Upward!\nAlan Cox\u0026rsquo;s Cathedrals, Bazaars and the Town Council\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-overhead-of-management/","summary":"Every resource, every person, every project, every machine you have to manage comes with an ongoing cost. This is just as true of servers as is it is of people who work on projects that you\u0026rsquo;re in charge of or have some responsibility for, and while servers and teammates present very different kinds of management challenges, working effectively and managing management costs across contexts is (I would propose) similar. Or at least similar enough to merit some synthetic discussion.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s basically only one approach to managing \u0026ldquo;systems administration costs,\u0026rdquo; and that\u0026rsquo;s to avoid it as much as possible. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that sys admins avoid admining, but rather we work very hard to ensure that systems don\u0026rsquo;t need administration. We write operating systems that administer themselves, we script procedures to automate most tasks as much as possible (the Perl programing language was developed and popularized for use of easing the administration of UNIX systems,) and we use tools manage larger systems more effectively.","title":"The Overhead of Management"},{"content":"I wrote about my efforts to automate my publishing workflow a couple of weeks ago, (egad!) and I wanted to follow that up with a somewhat more useful elucidation of how all of the gears work around here.\nAt first I had this horrible scheme setup that dependent on regular builds triggered by cron, which is a functional, if inelegant solution. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of tasks that you can give the appearance of \u0026ldquo;real time,\u0026rdquo; responsiveness by scheduling more brute tasks regularly enough. The truth is, however, that its not quite the same, and I knew that there was a better way.\nBasically the \u0026ldquo;right way\u0026rdquo; to solve this problem is to use the \u0026ldquo;hooks\u0026rdquo; provided by the git repositories that I use to store the source of the website. Hooks, in this context refer to a number of scripts which are optionally run before or after various operations in the repositories that allow you to attach actions to the operations you perform on your git repositories. In effect, you can say \u0026ldquo;when I git push do these other things\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;before I git commit check for these conditions, and if they\u0026rsquo;re not met, reject the commit\u0026rdquo; and so forth. The possibilities can be a bit staggering.\nIn this case what happen is: I commit to the tychoish.com repositories a script that synchronizes the appropriate local packages runs and publishes changes to the server. It then sends me an xmpp message saying that this operation is in progress. This runs as the post-commit hook, and for smaller sites could simply be \u0026ldquo;git push origin master\u0026rdquo;. Because tychoish is a large site, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to be rebuilding it constantly, I do the following:\n#!/bin/bash # This script is meant to be run in a cron job to perform a rebuilding # of the slim contents of a jekyll site. # # This script can be run several times an hour to greatly simplify the # publishing routine of a jekyll site. cd ~/sites/tychoish.com/ # Saving and Fetching Remote Updates from tychoish.com git pull \u0026gt;/dev/null \u0026amp;\u0026amp; # Local Adding and Committing git checkout master \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 git add . git commit -a -q -m \u0026quot;$HOSTNAME: changes prior to an slim rebuild\u0026quot; \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt; # Local \u0026quot;full-build\u0026quot; Branch Mangling git checkout full-build \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 \u0026amp;\u0026amp; git merge master \u0026amp;\u0026amp; # Local \u0026quot;slim-bild\u0026quot; Branch Magling and Publishing git checkout slim-build \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 \u0026amp;\u0026amp; git merge master \u0026amp;\u0026amp; git checkout master \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 \u0026amp; git push --all # echo done Then on the server, once the copy of the repo on the server is current with the changes published to it (i.e. the post-update hook), the following code is run:\n#!/bin/bash # # An example hook script to prepare a packed repository for use over # dumb transports. # # To enable this hook, make this file executable by \u0026quot;chmod +x post-update\u0026quot;. unset GIT_DIR unset GIT_WORKING_TREE export GIT_DIR export GIT_WORKING_TREE cd /path/to/build/tychoish.com git pull origin; /path/to/scripts/jekyll-rebuild-tychoish-auto-slim \u0026amp; exit When the post-update hook runs, in runs in the context of the repository that you just pushed to, and unless you do the magic (technical term, it seems) the GIT_DIR and GIT_WORKING_TREE variables are stuck in the environment and the commands you run fail. So basically this is a fancy git pull, in a third repository (the one that the site is built from.) The script jekyll-rebuild-tychoish-auto-slim looks like this:\n#!/bin/bash # to be run on the server # setting the variables SRCDIR=/path/to/build/tychoish.com/ DSTDIR=/path/to/public/tychoish/ SITENAME=tychoish BUILDTYPE=slim DEFAULTBUILD=slim build-site(){ cd ${SRCDIR} git checkout ${BUILDTYPE}-build \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 git pull source \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/jekyll ${SRCDIR} ${DSTDIR} \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 echo \\\u0026lt;jekyll\\\u0026gt; completed \\*${BUILDTYPE}\\* build of ${SITENAME} | xmppipe garen@tychoish.com git checkout ${DEFAULTBUILD}-build \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 } build-site; This sends me an xmpp message when the build has completed. And does the needful site rebuilding. The xmppipe command I use is really the following script:\n#!/usr/bin/perl # pipes standard in to an xmpp message, sent to the JIDs on the commandline # # usage: bash$ `echo \u0026quot;message body\u0026quot; | xmppipe garen@tychoish.com # # code shamelessly stolen from: # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/170503/commandline-jabber-client/170564#170564 use strict; use warnings; use Net::Jabber qw(Client); my $server = \u0026quot;tychoish.com\u0026quot;; my $port = \u0026quot;5222\u0026quot;; my $username = \u0026quot;bot\u0026quot;; my $password = \u0026quot;; my $resource = \u0026quot;xmppipe\u0026quot;; my @recipients = @ARGV; my $clnt = new Net::Jabber::Client; my $status = $clnt-\u0026gt;Connect(hostname=\u0026gt;$server, port=\u0026gt;$port); if (!defined($status)) { die \u0026quot;Jabber connect error ($!)\\n\u0026quot;; } my @result = $clnt-\u0026gt;AuthSend(username=\u0026gt;$username, password=\u0026gt;$password, resource=\u0026gt;$resource); if ($result[0] ne \u0026quot;ok\u0026quot;) { die \u0026quot;Jabber auth error: @result\\n\u0026quot;; } my $body = ''; while (\u0026lt;STDIN\u0026gt;) { $body .= $_; } chomp($body); foreach my $to (@recipients) { $clnt-\u0026gt;MessageSend(to=\u0026gt;$to, subject=\u0026gt;\u0026quot;, body=\u0026gt;$body, type=\u0026gt;\u0026quot;chat\u0026quot;, priority=\u0026gt;10); } $clnt-\u0026gt;Disconnect(); Mark the above as executable and put it in your path somewhere. You\u0026rsquo;ll want to install the Net::Jabber Perl module, if you haven\u0026rsquo;t already.\nThe one final note. If you\u0026rsquo;re using a tool like gitosis to manage your git repositories, all of the hooks will be executed by the gitosis user. This means that this user will need to have write access the \u0026ldquo;build\u0026rdquo; copy of the repository and the public directory as well. You may be able to finesse this with the +s \u0026ldquo;switch uid\u0026rdquo; bit, or some clever use of the gitosis user group.\nThe End.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/jekyll-publishing/","summary":"I wrote about my efforts to automate my publishing workflow a couple of weeks ago, (egad!) and I wanted to follow that up with a somewhat more useful elucidation of how all of the gears work around here.\nAt first I had this horrible scheme setup that dependent on regular builds triggered by cron, which is a functional, if inelegant solution. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of tasks that you can give the appearance of \u0026ldquo;real time,\u0026rdquo; responsiveness by scheduling more brute tasks regularly enough. The truth is, however, that its not quite the same, and I knew that there was a better way.\nBasically the \u0026ldquo;right way\u0026rdquo; to solve this problem is to use the \u0026ldquo;hooks\u0026rdquo; provided by the git repositories that I use to store the source of the website. Hooks, in this context refer to a number of scripts which are optionally run before or after various operations in the repositories that allow you to attach actions to the operations you perform on your git repositories.","title":"Jekyll Publishing"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve started to realize that, fundamentally, the questions I\u0026rsquo;m asking of the world and that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to address by learning more about technology, center on work and the meaning and process of working. Work lies at the intersection of the all the things that I seem to revisit endlessly: interfaces, collaboration technology, cooperatives and economics institutions, and open source software development. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I\u0026rsquo;m interested in work because it\u0026rsquo;s the unifying theme of a bunch of different interests, or this is the base from which other interests spring.\nI realize that this makes me an incredibly weird geek.\nI was talking to caroline about our respective work environments, specifically about how we (and our coworkers) relocated (or didn\u0026rsquo;t) for our jobs, and I was chagrined to realize that this novel that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working at (or not,) for way too long at this point spends some time revolving around these questions:\nHow does being stuck in a single place and time constrain one agency to effect the world around them? What does labor look like in a mostly/quasi post-scarcity world? Perhaps the most worrying thing about this project is that I started writing this story in late August of 2008. This was of course before the American/Financial Services economic crash that got me blogging and really thinking about issues outside of technology.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s interesting, and perhaps outside the scope of this post, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting how since graduating from college, my \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; interests as they were, all work them into fiction (intentionally or otherwise.) I suppose I haven\u0026rsquo;t written fiction about Free Software/open source, exactly, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s a good enough reason for that.1\nI\u0026rsquo;m left with two realizations. First, that this novel has been sitting on my plate for far too long, and there\u0026rsquo;s no reason why I can\u0026rsquo;t write the last 10/20 thousand words in the next few months and be done with the sucker. Second, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in thinking about how \u0026ldquo;being an academic\u0026rdquo; (or not) affects the way I (we?) approach learning more about the world and the process/rigor that I bring to those projects.\nBut we\u0026rsquo;ll get to that later, I have writing to do.\nI write fiction as open source, in a lot of ways, so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem too important to put it in the story as well.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-meaning-of-work/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve started to realize that, fundamentally, the questions I\u0026rsquo;m asking of the world and that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to address by learning more about technology, center on work and the meaning and process of working. Work lies at the intersection of the all the things that I seem to revisit endlessly: interfaces, collaboration technology, cooperatives and economics institutions, and open source software development. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I\u0026rsquo;m interested in work because it\u0026rsquo;s the unifying theme of a bunch of different interests, or this is the base from which other interests spring.\nI realize that this makes me an incredibly weird geek.\nI was talking to caroline about our respective work environments, specifically about how we (and our coworkers) relocated (or didn\u0026rsquo;t) for our jobs, and I was chagrined to realize that this novel that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working at (or not,) for way too long at this point spends some time revolving around these questions:","title":"The Meaning of Work"},{"content":"Now that I\u0026rsquo;m fairly confident in my ability to do basic Linux systems administration tasks: manage web and email servers, maintain most Linux systems, convince desktop systems that they really do want to work the way they\u0026rsquo;re supposed to, I\u0026rsquo;m embarking on a new learning process. I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing around with \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; virtualization on my desktop, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading a bunch about systems administration topics that are generally beyond the scope of what I\u0026rsquo;ve dealt with until now. Here is a selection of the projects I\u0026rsquo;m playing with:\nGetting a working xen setup at home. This requires, learning a bit more about building working operating systems, and also in the not to distant future buying a new (server) computer. Installing xen on the laptop, because it\u0026rsquo;ll support it, I have the resources to make it go, and it\u0026rsquo;ll be awesome. Learning everything I can about LVM, which is a new (to me) way of managing partitions and disk images, that makes backups, disk snapshots, and other awesomeness much easier. It means, some system migration stuff that I have yet to tinker with, as none of my systems currently support LVM. Doing package development for Arch Linux, because I think that\u0026rsquo;s probably within the scope of my ability, because I think it would add to my skill set, and because I appreciate the community, and I want to be able to give back. Also I should spend some time editing the wiki, because I\u0026rsquo;m really lazy with that. I guess the overriding lesson of all these projects is a more firm grasp of how incredibly awesome, powerful, and frankly stable Arch Linux is (or can be.) I mean there are flaws of course, but given how I use systems, I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to run into something show stopping. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/theres-always-something-new-to-learn/","summary":"Now that I\u0026rsquo;m fairly confident in my ability to do basic Linux systems administration tasks: manage web and email servers, maintain most Linux systems, convince desktop systems that they really do want to work the way they\u0026rsquo;re supposed to, I\u0026rsquo;m embarking on a new learning process. I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing around with \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; virtualization on my desktop, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading a bunch about systems administration topics that are generally beyond the scope of what I\u0026rsquo;ve dealt with until now. Here is a selection of the projects I\u0026rsquo;m playing with:\nGetting a working xen setup at home. This requires, learning a bit more about building working operating systems, and also in the not to distant future buying a new (server) computer. Installing xen on the laptop, because it\u0026rsquo;ll support it, I have the resources to make it go, and it\u0026rsquo;ll be awesome. Learning everything I can about LVM, which is a new (to me) way of managing partitions and disk images, that makes backups, disk snapshots, and other awesomeness much easier.","title":"There's Always Something New to Learn"},{"content":"Before a road trip a, by now, a couple of months ago, I installed a copy of nginx on my laptop on the hope of doing some web development and working on other projects when I was in the car. For the uninitiated (you mean you don\u0026rsquo;t all write technical documentation for web developers and systems administrators?!?) nginx is an incredibly powerful web server. As of June 11th, foucualt the server that hosts the Cyborg Institute and tychoish.\nThis is, almost always, I think, a loosing proposition.\nI never get any sort of substantial (or insubstantial) work done during my road trips up-and-down the north east corridor. Not that that\u0026rsquo;s a bad thing, but I also expect that there\u0026rsquo;ll be more awake-time when I\u0026rsquo;m not driving or gossiping.\nAnd there never is.\nSo the web server sat unused for a long time on my laptop, but recently I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with it a bit and I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten a number of cool things set up. I have a local \u0026ldquo;git web\u0026rdquo; instance which makes it easier to track progress on local and private projects that are stored in git. Perhaps more importantly, I have set up quick local ikiwiki instances for a number of projects. They\u0026rsquo;re easy to configure, quick to setup, and while I suppose I could hack something together in nifty for myself, there\u0026rsquo;s something nifty about being able to take an alternate view of some content and also being able to really preview changes to you work before publishing them.\nAlso, and the real reason for this post, is that by virtue of this development, I have revisited a few projects that had been lingering in the home directory of my computer for far too long. Which has been a powerful and useful exercise.\nBy which I mean, it\u0026rsquo;s been painful.\nBesides \u0026ldquo;the novel,\u0026rdquo; which has been the lingering and dragging front burner project for a year, there are a number of quasi-serial stories that have lingered in some state of incompleteness for a couple of years now. I\u0026rsquo;m kind of amazed both at how foreign these stories seem to me both in terms of the style (good to know that I\u0026rsquo;m a better writer than I was a few years ago,) and also how quickly I can fall right back into the story and tell you every little thing about the world, situation, and moment where I left off.\nThe mind is, indeed, an amazing thing.\nWhere my strategy for the past year has been to \u0026ldquo;plow through and finish the novel,\u0026rdquo; I think my tactic this summer will be to move all of my projects forward in some way. Small daily writing goals for the novel, combined with somewhat less regular (but more specific) goals with regards to other projects. In the next two months I want to have a fairly active and varied writing schedule worked out that isn\u0026rsquo;t based around the monthly (or so) weekend binges that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for most of the last year.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the plan at any rate.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-old-projects-project/","summary":"Before a road trip a, by now, a couple of months ago, I installed a copy of nginx on my laptop on the hope of doing some web development and working on other projects when I was in the car. For the uninitiated (you mean you don\u0026rsquo;t all write technical documentation for web developers and systems administrators?!?) nginx is an incredibly powerful web server. As of June 11th, foucualt the server that hosts the Cyborg Institute and tychoish.\nThis is, almost always, I think, a loosing proposition.\nI never get any sort of substantial (or insubstantial) work done during my road trips up-and-down the north east corridor. Not that that\u0026rsquo;s a bad thing, but I also expect that there\u0026rsquo;ll be more awake-time when I\u0026rsquo;m not driving or gossiping.\nAnd there never is.\nSo the web server sat unused for a long time on my laptop, but recently I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with it a bit and I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten a number of cool things set up.","title":"The Old Projects Project"},{"content":"As this blog ambles forward, albeit haltingly, I find that the process of generating the site has become a much more complicated proposition. I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s the price of success, or at least the price of verbosity.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the problem: I really cannot abide by dynamically generated publication systems: there are more things that can go wrong, they can be somewhat inflexible, they don\u0026rsquo;t always scale very well, and it seems like horrible overkill for what I do. At the same time, I have a huge quantity of static content in this site, and it needs to be generated and managed in some way. It\u0026rsquo;s an evolving problem, and perhaps one that isn\u0026rsquo;t of great specific interest to the blog, but I\u0026rsquo;ve learned some things in the process, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to do a little bit of rehashing and extrapolating.\nThe fundamental problem is that the rebuilding-tychoish.com-job takes a long time to rebuild. This is mostly a result of the time it takes to convert the Markdown text to HTML. It\u0026rsquo;s a couple of minutes for the full build. There are a couple of solutions. The first would be to pass the build script some information about when files were modified and then have it only rebuild those files. This is effective but ends up being complicated: version control systems don\u0026rsquo;t tend to version mtime and importantly there are pages in the site--like archives--which can become unstuck without some sort of metadata cache between builds. The second solution is to provide very limited automatically generated archives and only regenerate the last 100 or so posts, and supplement the limited archive with more manual archives. That\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen to do.\nThe problem is that even the last 100 or so entries takes a dozen seconds or more to regenerate. This might not seem like a lot to you, but the truth that at an interactive terminal, 10-20 seconds feels interminable. So while I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time recently trying to fix the underlying problem--the time that it took to regenerate the html--when I realized that the problem wasn\u0026rsquo;t really that the rebuilds took forever, it was that I had to wait for them to finish. The solution: background the task and send messages to my IM client when the rebuild completed.\nThe lesson: don\u0026rsquo;t optimize anything that you don\u0026rsquo;t have to optimize, and if it annoys you, find a better way to ignore it.\nAt the same time I\u0026rsquo;ve purchased a new domain, and I would kind of like to be able to publish something more or less instantly, without hacking on it like crazy. But I\u0026rsquo;m an edge case. I wish there were a static site generator, like my beloved jekyll that provided great flexibility, and generated static content, in a smart and efficient manner. Most of these site compilers, however, are crude tools with very little logic for smart rebuilding: and really, given the profiles of most sites that they are used to build: this makes total sense.\nI realize that this post comes off as pretty complaining, and even so, I\u0026rsquo;m firmly of the opinion that this way of producing content for the web is the most sane method that exists. I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking with a friend for a little while about developing a way to build websites and we\u0026rsquo;ve more or less come upon a similar model. Even my day job project uses a system that runs on the same premise.\nSince I started writing this post, I\u0026rsquo;ve even taken this one step further. In the beginning I had to watch the process build. Then I basically kicked off the build process and sent it to the background and had it send me a message when it was done. Now, I have rebuilds scheduled in cron, so that the site does an automatic rebuild (the long process) a few times a day, and quick rebuilds a few times an hour.\nIs this less efficient in the long run? Without a doubt. But processors cycles are cheap, and the builds are only long in the subjective sense. In the end I\u0026rsquo;d rather not even think that builds are going on, and let the software do all of the thinking and worrying.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/jekyll-and-automation/","summary":"As this blog ambles forward, albeit haltingly, I find that the process of generating the site has become a much more complicated proposition. I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s the price of success, or at least the price of verbosity.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the problem: I really cannot abide by dynamically generated publication systems: there are more things that can go wrong, they can be somewhat inflexible, they don\u0026rsquo;t always scale very well, and it seems like horrible overkill for what I do. At the same time, I have a huge quantity of static content in this site, and it needs to be generated and managed in some way. It\u0026rsquo;s an evolving problem, and perhaps one that isn\u0026rsquo;t of great specific interest to the blog, but I\u0026rsquo;ve learned some things in the process, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to do a little bit of rehashing and extrapolating.\nThe fundamental problem is that the rebuilding-tychoish.com-job takes a long time to rebuild.","title":"Jekyll and Automation"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working with a reader and friend on a project to build a tool for managing information for humanities scholars and others who deal with textual data, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the problem of information management a bit more seriously. Unlike numerical, or more easily categorized information data, how to take a bunch of textual information--either of your own production or a library of your own collection--is far from a solved problem.\nThe technical limitation--from a pragmatic perspective--is that you need to have an understanding not only of the specific tasks in front of you, but a grasp of the entire collection of information you work with in order to effectively organize, manage, and use the texts as an aggregate.\n\u0026ldquo;But wait,\u0026rdquo; you say. \u0026ldquo;Google solved this problem a long time ago, you don\u0026rsquo;t need a deterministic information management tool, you need to brute force the problem with enough raw data, some clever algorithms, and search tools,\u0026rdquo; you explain. And on some level you\u0026rsquo;d be right. The problem is of course, you can\u0026rsquo;t create knowledge with Google.\nGoogle doesn\u0026rsquo;t give us the ability to discover information that\u0026rsquo;s new, or powerful. Google works best when we know exactly what we\u0026rsquo;re looking for, the top results in Google are most likely to be the resources that the most people know and are familiar. Google\u0026rsquo;s good, and useful and a wonderful tool that more people should probably use but Google cannot lead you into novel territory.\nWhich brings us back to local information management tools. When you can collect, organize, and manipulate data in your own library you can draw novel conclusions, When the information is well organized, and you can survey a collection in useful and meaningful ways, you can see holes and collect more, you can search tactically, and within subsets of articles to provide. I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking for more than a year about the utility of curation in the creation of value on-line. and fundamentally I think the same holds true for personal information collections.\nWhich brings us back to the ways we organize information. And my firm conclusion that we don\u0026rsquo;t have a really good way of organizing information. Everything that I\u0026rsquo;m aware of either relies on search, and therefore only allows us to find what we already know we\u0026rsquo;re looking for, or requires us to understand our final conclusions during the preliminary phase of our investigations.\nThe solution to this problem is thus two fold: First, we need tools that allow us to work with and organize the data for our projects, full stop. Wiki\u0026rsquo;s, never ending text files, don\u0026rsquo;t really address all of the different ways we need to work with and organize information. Secondly we need tool tools that are tailored to the way researchers who deal in text work with information from collection and processing to quoting and citation, rather than focusing on the end stage of this process. These tools should allow our conceptual framework for organizing information to evolve as the project evolves.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what that looks like for sure, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to find out. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested, do help us think about this!\n(Also, see this post `regarding the current state of the Cyborg Institute \u0026lt;http://www.cyborginstitute.com/2010/06/a-report-from-the-institute/\u0026gt;`_.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/organize-your-thoughts-more-betterly/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working with a reader and friend on a project to build a tool for managing information for humanities scholars and others who deal with textual data, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the problem of information management a bit more seriously. Unlike numerical, or more easily categorized information data, how to take a bunch of textual information--either of your own production or a library of your own collection--is far from a solved problem.\nThe technical limitation--from a pragmatic perspective--is that you need to have an understanding not only of the specific tasks in front of you, but a grasp of the entire collection of information you work with in order to effectively organize, manage, and use the texts as an aggregate.\n\u0026ldquo;But wait,\u0026rdquo; you say. \u0026ldquo;Google solved this problem a long time ago, you don\u0026rsquo;t need a deterministic information management tool, you need to brute force the problem with enough raw data, some clever algorithms, and search tools,\u0026rdquo; you explain.","title":"Organize Your Thoughts More Betterly"},{"content":"Wow. Hello blog.\nI\u0026rsquo;m pretty busy. It even seems sort of cliche to complain about such things on ones blog, but I think being busy has coincided with a somewhat larger reevaluation of nearly everything.\nWait, no. I\u0026rsquo;m not quitting blogging.\nI\u0026rsquo;m actually really proud of the Knowing Mars launch, and it feels really good to have that project \u0026ldquo;done,\u0026rdquo; even if I think it needs a major revision, and I have a lot more fiction on my plate that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to just \u0026ldquo;let go\u0026rdquo; like that.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also somewhat displeased with the kind of blog posts that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing recently. It seems that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing about some basic ideas: my disdain for the way the web functions as a user interface, some general work flow topics, some basic cyber-culture topics, and half way through most of these blog posts I mostly loose interest, and I suspect you have as well.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a post in my \u0026ldquo;write this soon list,\u0026rdquo; about digging in deeper and striving for a more rich engagement with the topics I try and cover here, and I\u0026rsquo;ve pretty much failed with that. In any case, this post was supposed to be more about the things that are on my schedule:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot offline these past few weeks. It\u0026rsquo;s May and that means it\u0026rsquo;s Morris Dancing season. I seem to have joined an interesting phenomena called \u0026ldquo;Maple Morris,\u0026rdquo; (more reflection on that when I\u0026rsquo;ve processed a bit more,) the usual Mayday festivities, Midwest Morris Ale. And then there are a bunch of singing conventions, which are a great deal of fun and fulfilling, and then there are contra dancing things, but none of these things transmit to quiet weekends alone writing. Or even quiet evening around writing. At least very often. Some highlights of the recent past and near future:\nMaple Morris; A my-generation Morris dancing event, last weekend in Boston. A bunch of Morris dancers in my general age rage got together to dance some really challenging dances and to sing great songs. I was totally overwhelmed. The Midwest Morris Ale; My regular annual Morris dancing ale. This is my 9th consecutive ale (and my 10th anniversary of dancing Morris.) Since last September, I\u0026rsquo;ve gone to an all- or mulit- day Sacred Harp singing convention most months, since last September, and there\u0026rsquo;s one on my calender every month between now and this September. I\u0026rsquo;m going to \u0026ldquo;Youth Dance Weekend\u0026rdquo; in Vermont in September, which I\u0026rsquo;ve never been to, but I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be a a great deal of fun, and I\u0026rsquo;m very much looking forward to it. I\u0026rsquo;ve not been contra dancing as much, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a huge problem for me. I\u0026rsquo;m moving to Philadelphia in the summer, which means a drastically longer commute, but an easier to orchestrate social life, and a better work/life balance. This means apartment hunting and all that jazz. While this means less writing time and time for taking care of my own projects, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that I don\u0026rsquo;t have any writing time. Sure writing takes time, but the largest challenge as a writer is in using the time I/we already have effectively, and getting the most out of those opportunities.\nIt also, I think, means finding a way to develop a writing (and blogging) habit that:\nDoesn\u0026rsquo;t revolve around a fixed daily publication schedule. I still want to write essays, but I need to write essays when I have a compelling argument for an essay, rather than around the same core of ideas that I\u0026rsquo;ve been running around for the last year. I need to be able to put the blog on the back burner while I focus on things like writing fiction, or hacking projects, or Cyborg Institute stuff. The blog is great, and I love writing the blog, but It\u0026rsquo;s far to easy for me to fall into a pattern where the blog becomes the project, rather than the journal in support of the project. I need to organize my projects and tasks into clumps of work that are easier to manage in shorter periods of time. This is probably a reorganization problem that needs to mostly occur within my head. So where does that leave us? I have a few posts piled up that I\u0026rsquo;ll parcel out over the next few weeks, though on the whole there will probably be less posting by me around here. I\u0026rsquo;m probably going to do more posts along the lines of \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to, go read my work elsewhere.\u0026rdquo; There will be some guest posts and I\u0026rsquo;ve already begun working with some writers for that. Beyond that, I guess we\u0026rsquo;ll both be able to be surprised.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-schedule/","summary":"Wow. Hello blog.\nI\u0026rsquo;m pretty busy. It even seems sort of cliche to complain about such things on ones blog, but I think being busy has coincided with a somewhat larger reevaluation of nearly everything.\nWait, no. I\u0026rsquo;m not quitting blogging.\nI\u0026rsquo;m actually really proud of the Knowing Mars launch, and it feels really good to have that project \u0026ldquo;done,\u0026rdquo; even if I think it needs a major revision, and I have a lot more fiction on my plate that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to just \u0026ldquo;let go\u0026rdquo; like that.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also somewhat displeased with the kind of blog posts that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing recently. It seems that I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing about some basic ideas: my disdain for the way the web functions as a user interface, some general work flow topics, some basic cyber-culture topics, and half way through most of these blog posts I mostly loose interest, and I suspect you have as well.","title":"The Schedule"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t know about this. But here it goes, anyway.\nI\u0026rsquo;m pleased to announce the complete publication of my novella \u0026ldquo;`Knowing Mars \u0026lt;http://tychogaren.com/mars/\u0026gt;`_\u0026rdquo; on `tychogaren.com \u0026lt;http://tychogaren.com/\u0026gt;`_.\n\u0026ldquo;Knowing Mars\u0026rdquo; is an important story for me. I wrote it after I graduated from college, after I didn\u0026rsquo;t go to graduate school the first time, and in a lot of ways it was the project that got me started down the path of being a \u0026ldquo;real writer,\u0026rdquo; post-graduation. I\u0026rsquo;d written fiction before college, and mostly avoided writing fiction in college, and then right as I was finishing college I started writing stories again. It was strange for a while, but it was delightful to be able to tell stories and be so much better at it than I was the first time.\nI find that this is fundamentally a recurring issue. When I started writing \u0026ldquo;Knowing Mars,\u0026rdquo; I felt like I was starting out light years ahead of what I had written four or five years before. Now, I feel like the stuff I\u0026rsquo;m working on now is light years ahead of \u0026ldquo;Knowing Mars.\u0026rdquo; This is probably an encouraging sign.\nI suppose you\u0026rsquo;d like to know a bit more about the story. I\u0026rsquo;ll leave most of the details to the reading, but basically it\u0026rsquo;s a sort of superhero/cyberpunk story that explores themes related to diaspora, political organization, historical narrative, and gender. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I\u0026rsquo;ve ever described it as such before.\nThe story is available in multiple formats. Each chapter is available in full HTML as part of tychogaren.com and in a plan Markdown formatted plain text. Furthermore the complete text of the novella is available in both of these formats, and a simple un-styled HTML version that should be ideal for conversion to various electronic reading platforms. If you want to read the novella but would find another format easier to process, talk to me about it and I\u0026rsquo;ll get something pulled together for you.\nAll \u0026ldquo;full html\u0026rdquo; versions of the text have comments enabled using the same system as the blog. I look forward to your comments. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more fiction.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knowing-mars-a-novella/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t know about this. But here it goes, anyway.\nI\u0026rsquo;m pleased to announce the complete publication of my novella \u0026ldquo;`Knowing Mars \u0026lt;http://tychogaren.com/mars/\u0026gt;`_\u0026rdquo; on `tychogaren.com \u0026lt;http://tychogaren.com/\u0026gt;`_.\n\u0026ldquo;Knowing Mars\u0026rdquo; is an important story for me. I wrote it after I graduated from college, after I didn\u0026rsquo;t go to graduate school the first time, and in a lot of ways it was the project that got me started down the path of being a \u0026ldquo;real writer,\u0026rdquo; post-graduation. I\u0026rsquo;d written fiction before college, and mostly avoided writing fiction in college, and then right as I was finishing college I started writing stories again. It was strange for a while, but it was delightful to be able to tell stories and be so much better at it than I was the first time.\nI find that this is fundamentally a recurring issue. When I started writing \u0026ldquo;Knowing Mars,\u0026rdquo; I felt like I was starting out light years ahead of what I had written four or five years before.","title":"Knowing Mars, a Novella"},{"content":"This post ties together a train of thought that I started in \u0026ldquo;The Worst Technologies Always Win\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Who Wants to be a PHP Developer\u0026rdquo; with the ideas in the \u0026ldquo;Ease and the Stack\u0026rdquo; post. Basically, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about why the unpopular technologies, or even unpopular modes of using technologies are so appealing and seem to (disproportionately) capture my attention and imagination.\nI guess it would first be useful to outline a number of core values that seems to guide my taste in technologies:\nUnderstandable Though I\u0026rsquo;m not really a programmer, so in a lot of ways it\u0026rsquo;s not feasible to expect that I\u0026rsquo;d be able to expand or enhance the tools I use. At the same time, I feel like even for complex tasks, I prefer using tools that I can have a chance of understanding how they work. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if this creates value in the practical sense, however, I tend to think that I\u0026rsquo;m able to make better use of technologies that I understand the fundamental underpinnings of how they work.\nOpenness and Standard I think open and standardized technologies are more useful, in a way that flows from \u0026ldquo;understandable,\u0026rdquo; I find open source and standardized technology to be more useful. Not in the sense that open source technology is inherently more useful because source code is available (though sometimes that\u0026rsquo;s true), but more in the sense that software developed in the open tends to have a lot of the features and values that I find important. And of course, knowing that my data and work is stored in a format that isn\u0026rsquo;t locked into a specific vendor, allows me to relax a bit about the technology.\nSimple Simpler technologies are easier to understand and easier--for someone with my skill set--to customize and adopt. This is a good thing. Fundamentally most of what I do with a computer is pretty simple, so there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of reason to use overly complicated tools.\nTask Oriented I\u0026rsquo;m a writer. I spend a lot of time on the computer, but nearly everything I do with the computer is related to writing. Taking notes, organizing tasks, reading articles, manipulating texts for publication, communicating with people about various things that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. The software I use supports this, and the most useful software in my experience focuses on helping me accomplish these tasks. This is opposed to programs that are feature or function oriented. I don\u0026rsquo;t need software that could do a bunch of things that I might need to do, I need tools that do exactly what I need. If they do other additional things, that\u0026rsquo;s nearly irrelevant.\nThe problem with this, is that although they seem like fine ideals and values for software development, they are, fundamentally unprofitable. Who makes money selling simple, easy to understand, software with limited niche-targeted feature sets? No one. The problem is that this kind of software and technology makes a lot of sense, and so we keep seeing technologies that have these values that seem like they could beat the odd and become dominant, and then they don\u0026rsquo;t. Either they drop task orientation for a wider feature set, or something with more money behind it comes along, or the engineers get board and build something that\u0026rsquo;s more complex, and the unpopular technologies shrivel up.\nWhat to do about it?\nLearn more about the technologies you use. Even, and epically if you\u0026rsquo;re not a programmer. Develop simple tools and share them with your friends. Work toward task oriented computing, and away from feature orientation. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-favor-of-unpopular-technologies/","summary":"This post ties together a train of thought that I started in \u0026ldquo;The Worst Technologies Always Win\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Who Wants to be a PHP Developer\u0026rdquo; with the ideas in the \u0026ldquo;Ease and the Stack\u0026rdquo; post. Basically, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about why the unpopular technologies, or even unpopular modes of using technologies are so appealing and seem to (disproportionately) capture my attention and imagination.\nI guess it would first be useful to outline a number of core values that seems to guide my taste in technologies:\nUnderstandable Though I\u0026rsquo;m not really a programmer, so in a lot of ways it\u0026rsquo;s not feasible to expect that I\u0026rsquo;d be able to expand or enhance the tools I use. At the same time, I feel like even for complex tasks, I prefer using tools that I can have a chance of understanding how they work. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if this creates value in the practical sense, however, I tend to think that I\u0026rsquo;m able to make better use of technologies that I understand the fundamental underpinnings of how they work.","title":"In Favor of Unpopular Technologies"},{"content":"This post is the culmination of two things:\n1. Who wants to be a PHP Developer?\n2. An ongoing conversation I\u0026rsquo;ve had with a number of coworkers about the substandard technologies that always seem to triumph over the \u0026ldquo;better\u0026rdquo; options.\nThe examples of the success of inferior technologies are bountiful. MySQL\u0026rsquo;s prevalence despite some non-trivial technical flaws (around clustering, around licensing as highlighted by the Oracle merger); PHP as the de facto glue language of the web despite the fact that every other language in it\u0026rsquo;s class is probably a better programming language (e.g. Python, Perl); VHS and Beta Max; BlueRay (which are proprietary and a physically less durable media) and HD-DVD; and so forth.\nThe factors are (of course) multiple:\nMarketing. People have to know about technologies at some stage in their development if the technology is to take off. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what that crucial point is, and frankly marketing is something that not only I don\u0026rsquo;t understand, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really think anyone understands. Having said that, I think it\u0026rsquo;s clear that technologies don\u0026rsquo;t compete simply on their technical merits, and this is in recognition of that.\nTiming. Technologies that appear at the right time, with regards to availability of alternatives and the needs/interests in the market on those technologies matter a great deal, and can sometimes tip the balance between competing technologies. Arguably MySQL beat PostgreSQL not because it was better, but because it existed in a firm way a little bit earlier. Linux \u0026ldquo;won\u0026rdquo; market share over BSD, because BSD wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite fully free/open source (or available) in 1990-1992 when Linux was taking off.\nMomentum. A project that doesn\u0026rsquo;t look like it has energy and a large team behind it is probably doomed to fail on some level, not because it\u0026rsquo;s a bad technology, but potential users of a technology need to feel confident that it\u0026rsquo;s going to stick around. If no one is excited about it, then it\u0026rsquo;ll never win, even if it\u0026rsquo;s superior in the final analysis.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s nothing, really, to be done. I think the truly superior technologies might benefit by paying attention to these factors when it matters, but then the developers of said technologies are probably less interested in marketing and proper timing than the competition. Which is perhaps as it should be.\nI guess the lingering questions that I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with relate to thinking about the ways that open source and free software relate to other technologies. It strikes me that while there\u0026rsquo;s a pretty good balance between open source and proprietary technologies in the examples I provided above, all of the open source technologies were commercialized very early on and very intensely in a way that none of their competitors really did. Are \u0026ldquo;wining technologies,\u0026rdquo; a mystification of the proprietary technology world? Can community-based open source and free software technologies innovate and \u0026ldquo;win\u0026rdquo; in relation to their competitors?\nI look forward to sorting out the answers in the comments. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-worst-technologies-always-win/","summary":"This post is the culmination of two things:\n1. Who wants to be a PHP Developer?\n2. An ongoing conversation I\u0026rsquo;ve had with a number of coworkers about the substandard technologies that always seem to triumph over the \u0026ldquo;better\u0026rdquo; options.\nThe examples of the success of inferior technologies are bountiful. MySQL\u0026rsquo;s prevalence despite some non-trivial technical flaws (around clustering, around licensing as highlighted by the Oracle merger); PHP as the de facto glue language of the web despite the fact that every other language in it\u0026rsquo;s class is probably a better programming language (e.g. Python, Perl); VHS and Beta Max; BlueRay (which are proprietary and a physically less durable media) and HD-DVD; and so forth.\nThe factors are (of course) multiple:\nMarketing. People have to know about technologies at some stage in their development if the technology is to take off. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what that crucial point is, and frankly marketing is something that not only I don\u0026rsquo;t understand, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really think anyone understands.","title":"The Worst Technologies Always Win"},{"content":"So PHP is this programming language that\u0026rsquo;s widely used, and often reviled by systems administrators and people who fancy theme selves \u0026ldquo;real programmers.\u0026rdquo; And yet, I think, while the \u0026ldquo;real programmers\u0026rdquo; were busy being \u0026ldquo;real,\u0026rdquo; PHP got something very fundamental right that explains its success despite the disdain.\nI should interject with some context. First, I think this is another in my ongoing series of posts regarding linguistic relativism and computer programming. Second, for those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t spend your days in this space PHP is a programming language designed specifically for use in the context of the web, and it has only comparatively recently emerged as a possibility for \u0026ldquo;general programming tasks,\u0026rdquo; in contrast to other languages in \u0026ldquo;the space\u0026rdquo; (ruby, python, perl, etc.) which started as general purpose languages that have become common for use for web programming. Also as a computer language, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing particularly innovative about PHP, which earns it no small amount of ire.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the thing. PHP is easy. It\u0026rsquo;s designed to be easy. The syntax is familiar to people who are know even a little Perl or other C-like languages. Although the language has had object oriented support for several years, most PHP applications aren\u0026rsquo;t written in an object oriented manner and in a number of contexts that makes things a bit easier to understand.\nAnd here\u0026rsquo;s the thing that I seem to notice in the context of administration: compared to other languages and frameworks, PHP is dead simple to deploy. Sure, everything under big loads becomes complex, and sure PHP applications consume more server resources than perhaps they should, but basically you configure a web-server to process PHP code, and then you write your code, inside of your page, and the web server generates what you need it to, and it just works. You don\u0026rsquo;t have to screw around with writing boilerplate CGI stuff, you don\u0026rsquo;t have to screw around with cgi-bins/ and script aliases which were never intuitive, you don\u0026rsquo;t need special servers, it just works.\nAnd I already know that, someone is going to tell me that there\u0026rsquo;s a Perl module that lets you use perl in the same way, or that Python and Ruby don\u0026rsquo;t make you write CGI boilerplate either (or that there\u0026rsquo;s a Perl module to write the CGI boilerplate). And I know these things, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it matters anymore. PHP, as a language is written around the needs of web development, and there\u0026rsquo;s merit in that.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not saying, \u0026ldquo;go forth and write your next application in PHP:\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t even know if dynamic web applications are worth writing anymore. I am saying that despite all of the dreck in the PHP space, there are some things that are incredibly worthwhile that the current generation of web developers may miss.\nThat is all. For now. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/who-wants-to-be-a-php-developer/","summary":"So PHP is this programming language that\u0026rsquo;s widely used, and often reviled by systems administrators and people who fancy theme selves \u0026ldquo;real programmers.\u0026rdquo; And yet, I think, while the \u0026ldquo;real programmers\u0026rdquo; were busy being \u0026ldquo;real,\u0026rdquo; PHP got something very fundamental right that explains its success despite the disdain.\nI should interject with some context. First, I think this is another in my ongoing series of posts regarding linguistic relativism and computer programming. Second, for those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t spend your days in this space PHP is a programming language designed specifically for use in the context of the web, and it has only comparatively recently emerged as a possibility for \u0026ldquo;general programming tasks,\u0026rdquo; in contrast to other languages in \u0026ldquo;the space\u0026rdquo; (ruby, python, perl, etc.) which started as general purpose languages that have become common for use for web programming. Also as a computer language, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing particularly innovative about PHP, which earns it no small amount of ire.","title":"Who wants to be a PHP Developer?"},{"content":"As if I needed a new project, this post introduces a new project that\u0026rsquo;s floating around in my mind. I was having a conversation with a friend about how I use the computer, I realized that while I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about various elements of how I use computer\u0026rsquo;s (the short story: peculiarly), I\u0026rsquo;ve not really talked about the holistic experience. As I started to talk about the various components and how they connect and work together, I realized that with out an example it was about as clear as mud.\nSo, in light of this, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to make a \u0026ldquo;tychoish stack,\u0026rdquo; which won\u0026rsquo;t be anything particularly novel, but a repackaging of the software--mostly configurations and little bits here and there--that I use on a daily basis. My stumpwm configuration. The highlights of my Emacs configuration, and a few install scripts to make it all work together. An SSH configuration file that will make your life much easier, a list of packages that you\u0026rsquo;ll want to install on common operating systems (Debian/Ubuntu and Arch Linux), and--because I am who I am--a fair piece of writing about best practices and how to these tools effectively.\nI was talking with Chris the other day in one of our never ending conversations regarding is ever changing choices of desktop operating systems. \u0026ldquo;Windows just feels more polished to me right now,\u0026rdquo; he said after a stint with the latest Ubuntu or one of its derivatives.\nTo which I said, \u0026ldquo;of course it does,\u0026rdquo; they pay bunches of people lots of money to make sure that Windows is polished and it\u0026rsquo;s a high priority given the failure of Vista and the direction of the market. The reason I use Linux full time is not because I want a better more polished experience, I use Linux full time, because I want something very specific: a window manager that stays out of my way and doesn\u0026rsquo;t distract me with \u0026ldquo;chrome,\u0026rdquo; emacs buffers that run in the way that I expect them to, package management tools that allow my system to work and function day in and day out, the ability to customize all of these functions to suit the evolving needs of my work, and nothing else that I have to mess around with.\nThis is something that I can only get from a UNIX system, and the more I play with different systems, the more I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to think that the only way to get this is with Arch Linux. But that\u0026rsquo;s just me. I\u0026rsquo;ve played with a bunch of different operating systems (that\u0026rsquo;s an aspect of my day job) and I\u0026rsquo;ve spent time using OS X, and it just doesn\u0026rsquo;t work for me. I don\u0026rsquo;t need smooth, I don\u0026rsquo;t want polish, I just want something that lets me work.\nDifferent computer systems make sense for different people. There\u0026rsquo;s no problem with that assertion, I think.\nThe problem of course, that my setup doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale. I can go from a bare arch installation to a working version of my system in a few hours by using rsync to copy over my home directory, updating a few git repositories, installing a list of packages, and creating a half dozen symbolic links, but building this from the bottom up would take a long time.\nThe goal of this project then, is to make that process easier. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a bunch of work to get a setup that does what I need it to do, I know which applications work, I know how to plug everything together to make it easier to manage. I want to build a stack so that you all can take it, learn from what I\u0026rsquo;ve done, and spend the time customizing it to what you do, rather than going through the trouble of building it up yourselves.\nHow\u0026rsquo;s that sound?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ease-and-the-stack/","summary":"As if I needed a new project, this post introduces a new project that\u0026rsquo;s floating around in my mind. I was having a conversation with a friend about how I use the computer, I realized that while I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about various elements of how I use computer\u0026rsquo;s (the short story: peculiarly), I\u0026rsquo;ve not really talked about the holistic experience. As I started to talk about the various components and how they connect and work together, I realized that with out an example it was about as clear as mud.\nSo, in light of this, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to make a \u0026ldquo;tychoish stack,\u0026rdquo; which won\u0026rsquo;t be anything particularly novel, but a repackaging of the software--mostly configurations and little bits here and there--that I use on a daily basis. My stumpwm configuration. The highlights of my Emacs configuration, and a few install scripts to make it all work together. An SSH configuration file that will make your life much easier, a list of packages that you\u0026rsquo;ll want to install on common operating systems (Debian/Ubuntu and Arch Linux), and--because I am who I am--a fair piece of writing about best practices and how to these tools effectively.","title":"Ease and The Stack"},{"content":"In many ways, I think you could say, I live and work in a bubble of the technical future that, as Gibson said \u0026ldquo;isn\u0026rsquo;t evenly distributed,\u0026rdquo; yet. I have developed a set of tools and work flows that enable me to work nearly anywhere and on a moment\u0026rsquo;s notice. I work for a company which great and open internal infrastructure that allows us to securely communicate and collaborate in whatever way we think will best serve the projects we\u0026rsquo;re working on. And I know enough to be able to automate the boring parts of my technological experience. In all, pretty good.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the thing though: despite all of this technological infrastructure, all this know how and frankly awesome connectivity: all of the tools we use to collaborate technologically: chat rooms, wikis, paste-bins, version control systems, instant messages and email all work better when you\u0026rsquo;re in the same room. Examples:\nI was sitting in a talk with a coworker, and we were both logged into an IRC room from our laptops, where we were able to share some useful examples, links, and other commentary without being (very) disruptive. In day to day work, I (and my coworkers) spend a lot of time using chat rooms to communicate and share information with people who are only a few feet away, and in the end we get a lot done.\nThere are probably a lot of reasons why this is the case: digital relationships are almost always supported by real life relationships, there\u0026rsquo;s a level of hard to document interstitial and context setting that we do in real life that is difficult to efficiently create digitally, but that can be accomplished without second thought *in real life, and so forth. But, having made this realization, I think there are a few conclusions to be drawn about collaboration technology:\nIt helps to centralize information flow. So much collaboration technology is \u0026ldquo;pull\u0026rdquo; based, and there\u0026rsquo;s no good way to ensure that people know you\u0026rsquo;ve done something that they might consider without pushing information to them in some manner. Even so, create one place where the people you\u0026rsquo;re working with can see what you\u0026rsquo;re working on.\nUse something like an IRC channel, or an xmpp MUC room, combined with a service like notifixious or something similar. In a lot of ways, the incessant emails Facebook sends achieve the same goal.\nCommunities come together to work on something specific and concrete, but inevitably they bond and endure for other reasons and other kinds of conversations. While creating \u0026ldquo;off topic\u0026rdquo; silos is awkward, creating the space for people to get to know each other is essential to making people work together well (and thus use collaborative technology better.)\nFocus most of your attention on \u0026ldquo;getting things done,\u0026rdquo; and less attention on the \u0026ldquo;how things are done.\u0026rdquo; There are so many technological solutions, so many options, and so many different contexts that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really matter how things get done as long as they do get done. The right and preferred tools will arise and present themselves when needed, and as long as things are getting done using the right tool doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-internet-in-real-life/","summary":"In many ways, I think you could say, I live and work in a bubble of the technical future that, as Gibson said \u0026ldquo;isn\u0026rsquo;t evenly distributed,\u0026rdquo; yet. I have developed a set of tools and work flows that enable me to work nearly anywhere and on a moment\u0026rsquo;s notice. I work for a company which great and open internal infrastructure that allows us to securely communicate and collaborate in whatever way we think will best serve the projects we\u0026rsquo;re working on. And I know enough to be able to automate the boring parts of my technological experience. In all, pretty good.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the thing though: despite all of this technological infrastructure, all this know how and frankly awesome connectivity: all of the tools we use to collaborate technologically: chat rooms, wikis, paste-bins, version control systems, instant messages and email all work better when you\u0026rsquo;re in the same room. Examples:\nI was sitting in a talk with a coworker, and we were both logged into an IRC room from our laptops, where we were able to share some useful examples, links, and other commentary without being (very) disruptive.","title":"The Internet in Real Life"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to figure out wikis for a long time. It always strikes me that the wiki is probably the first truly unique (and successful) textual form of the Internet age. And there\u0026rsquo;s a lot to figure out. The technological innovation of the wiki is actually remarkably straightforward,1 and while difficult the community building aspects of wikis are straightforward.2 The piece of the wiki puzzle that I can\u0026rsquo;t nail down in a pithy sentence or two is how to organize information effectively on a wiki.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not entirely true.\nThe issue, is I think that there are a number of different ways to organize content for a wiki, and no one organizational strategy seems to be absolutely perfect, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never been able to settle on a way of organizing wiki pages that I am truly happy with. The goals of a good wiki \u0026ldquo;information architecture\u0026rdquo; (if I may be so bold) are as follows:\nClarity: It should be immediately clear to the readers and writers of a wiki where a page should be located in the wiki. If there\u0026rsquo;s hierarchy, it needs to fit your subject area perfectly and require minimal effort to grok. Because you want people to focus on the content rather than the organization, and we don\u0026rsquo;t tend to focus on organizational systems when they\u0026rsquo;re clear. Simplicity: Wikis have a great number of internal links and can (and are) indexed manually as needed, so as the proprietor of a wiki you probably need to do a lot less \u0026ldquo;infrastructural work\u0026rdquo; than you think you need to. Less is probably more in this situation. Intuitive: Flowing from the above, wikis ought to strive to be intuitive in their organization. Pages should answer questions that people have, and then provide additional information out from there. One shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have to dig in a wiki for pages, if there are categories or some sort of hierarchy there pages there shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be overlap at the tips of various trees. Strategies that flow from this are:\nIn general, write content on a very small number of pages, and expand outward as you have content for those pages (by chopping up existing pages as it makes sense and using this content to spur the creation of new pages. Use one style of links/hierarchy (wikish and ciwiki fail at this.) You don\u0026rsquo;t want people to think: Should this be a camel case link? Should this be a regular one word link? Should this be a multiple word link with dash separated words or underscore separated words? One convention to rule them all. Realize that separate hierarchies of content within a single wiki effectively create separate wikis and sites within a single wiki, and that depending on your software, it can be non-intuitive to link between different hierarchies. As a result: use as little hierarchy and structure as possible. hierarchy creates possibilities where things can go wrong and where confusion can happen. At some point you\u0026rsquo;ll probably need infrastructure to help make the navigation among pages more intuitive, but that point is always later than you think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be. Avoid reflexivity. This is probably generalizable to the entire Internet, but in general people aren\u0026rsquo;t very interested in how things work and the way you\u0026rsquo;re thinking about your content organization. They\u0026rsquo;re visiting your wiki to learn something or share some information, not to think through the meta crap with you. Focus on that. Have content on all pages, and have relatively few pages which only serve to point visitors at other pages. Your main index page is probably well suited as a traffic intersection without additional content, but in most cases you probably only need a very small number of these pass through pages. In general, make it so your wikis have content everywhere. \u0026hellip; and other helpful suggestions which I have yet to figure out. Any suggestions from wiki maintainers?\nThere are a number of very simple and lightweight wiki engines, including some that run in only a few lines of Perl. Once we had the tools to build dynamic websites (CGI, circa 1993/1994), the wiki became a trivial implementation.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe general Principal of building a successful community edited wiki is basically to pay attention to the community in the early stages. Your first few contributors are very important, and contributions have to be invited and nurtured, and communities don\u0026rsquo;t just happen. In the context of wikis, in addition to supporting the first few contributors, the founders also need to construct a substantive seed of content.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/strategies-for-organizing-wiki-content/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to figure out wikis for a long time. It always strikes me that the wiki is probably the first truly unique (and successful) textual form of the Internet age. And there\u0026rsquo;s a lot to figure out. The technological innovation of the wiki is actually remarkably straightforward,1 and while difficult the community building aspects of wikis are straightforward.2 The piece of the wiki puzzle that I can\u0026rsquo;t nail down in a pithy sentence or two is how to organize information effectively on a wiki.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not entirely true.\nThe issue, is I think that there are a number of different ways to organize content for a wiki, and no one organizational strategy seems to be absolutely perfect, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never been able to settle on a way of organizing wiki pages that I am truly happy with. The goals of a good wiki \u0026ldquo;information architecture\u0026rdquo; (if I may be so bold) are as follows:","title":"Strategies for Organizing Wiki Content"},{"content":"My most sincere apologies to Virginia Woolf for the title.\nWe use a lot of git at work, and I\u0026rsquo;ve earned a bit of a reputation as \u0026ldquo;the git guy,\u0026rdquo; both at work and amongst the folks who read the blog. So, I suppose it should come as no surprise that a coworker (hi stan!) said \u0026ldquo;You should write something about using git when it\u0026rsquo;s just one person.\u0026rdquo; And I said \u0026ldquo;well sure, but it\u0026rsquo;s not nearly as interesting as you think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be.\u0026rdquo; He didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to mind, so here I am.\nLets back up for a second.\nGit is a tool that programmers use to facilitate collaboration. It stores versions of computer code (and associated file) and save incremental sets of changes to those files, so that programmers can easily experiment with changes without destroying code, and so that teams of programmers (sometimes even large teams) can all work and develop on a single code base without stepping on eachothers toes, or duplicating efforts because you end up working on different versions of the code.\nGit makes a number of innovations that make version control with git much preferable (at least in my experience) to other tools, but fundamentally that\u0026rsquo;s what git does. Git has all sorts of innovations that make it awesome: it\u0026rsquo;s fast, it can take \u0026ldquo;diverged branches\u0026rdquo; and merge them together painlessly and almost automatically. It\u0026rsquo;s great and mind bending, and I think really forces us to rethink all sorts of assumptions about authorship, and the coherency of \u0026ldquo;texts\u0026rdquo; in general.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m famous for using git all alone, with just me. Here are the lessons and conclusions that I\u0026rsquo;d draw from my experiences over the past\u0026hellip; two or three (or so) years of using git:\nUse fewer features. Git can do all sorts of funny stuff with branches and merges, but the truth is that when you\u0026rsquo;re working alone you don\u0026rsquo;t really want to have to much with branches. Because they\u0026rsquo;re the really novel feature (at least in terms of their usability) in git, everyone wants to use them but they add complexity, and there are other approaches to managing files and content with git that are probably preferable. Resist the temptation to store binary files in git. It\u0026rsquo;ll work, but you won\u0026rsquo;t be really happy with it. Even though you don\u0026rsquo;t need to have a remote repository to push your git repositories to, keep an off site repository in almost every case. You get incremental backups for free with git, and remote back ups are nearly free. Use a tool like gitosis (but it\u0026rsquo;s probably in your distribution\u0026rsquo;s repository and you should use that version) to manage repositories. It\u0026rsquo;s overkill for your use-case, but it makes things easier in terms of creating repositories. Perhaps consider something like girocco if you want even more overkill, and more web-based interface. There are git tools for most text editors and graphical tools that you may choose to use, but don\u0026rsquo;t, at least until you understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on behind the scenes. Learn git commands, and do stuff from the command line, as you\u0026rsquo;ll be much better (in the long term,) at fixing things as issues come up. If you need to maintain multiple machines, think of each machine as a collaborator, and it\u0026rsquo;s probably easiest to have a centralized group of repositories that you can push to in order to keep these machines up to date. If you\u0026rsquo;re using git to manage configuration files (which is great) I strongly recommend having a \u0026ldquo;sub-home\u0026rdquo; directory in a git repository with your configuration files with symbolic links pointing to the files in the repository. This strikes me as towing the balance between utility and control, without being a total pain the ass. As it were. And that\u0026rsquo;s about it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-git-of-ones-own/","summary":"My most sincere apologies to Virginia Woolf for the title.\nWe use a lot of git at work, and I\u0026rsquo;ve earned a bit of a reputation as \u0026ldquo;the git guy,\u0026rdquo; both at work and amongst the folks who read the blog. So, I suppose it should come as no surprise that a coworker (hi stan!) said \u0026ldquo;You should write something about using git when it\u0026rsquo;s just one person.\u0026rdquo; And I said \u0026ldquo;well sure, but it\u0026rsquo;s not nearly as interesting as you think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be.\u0026rdquo; He didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to mind, so here I am.\nLets back up for a second.\nGit is a tool that programmers use to facilitate collaboration. It stores versions of computer code (and associated file) and save incremental sets of changes to those files, so that programmers can easily experiment with changes without destroying code, and so that teams of programmers (sometimes even large teams) can all work and develop on a single code base without stepping on eachothers toes, or duplicating efforts because you end up working on different versions of the code.","title":"A Git of One's Own"},{"content":"The background:\nSun Microsystems developed this file system called \u0026ldquo;ZFS,\u0026rdquo; which is exceptionally awesome in it\u0026rsquo;s capabilities and possibilities. The problem, is that it was developed and released as part of the Open Solaris project which has a licensing incompatibility with the Linux Kernel. Both are open source, but there is a technical (and not all together uncommon) conflict in the terms of the license that makes it possible to combine code from both licenses in a single executable.\nBasically the GPL, under which the Linux Kernel is distributed, says if you distribute a binary (executable) under the terms of the GPL, the source code is all files that you used to make that binary. By contrast ZFS\u0026rsquo;s license says \u0026ldquo;here are all the files that we used to make this binary, if you change them when you make your binary and give that binary to other people you have to give them, but if you add additional files, you don\u0026rsquo;t have to give those out to people.\u0026rdquo;\nApparently the idea behind the ZFS license (i.e. the CDDL, and the MPL from whence it originated,) is that it allows for easier embedding of ZFS (and other technologies) in proprietary code because the resulting binary isn\u0026rsquo;t list covered by the CDDL in most cases. Even though the CDDL is incredibly confusing, apparently it\u0026rsquo;s more \u0026ldquo;business friendly,\u0026rdquo; but I diverge from my original point.\nAnd so if Linux users want to run ZFS, they have to run it as a user-space process (i.e. not in the kernel,) which is suboptimal, or they have to run Solaris in a vitalized environment (difficult,) or something. There\u0026rsquo;s also a ZFS-like file system called \u0026ldquo;btrfs,\u0026rdquo; which can be included in the kernel (interestingly, developed by Oracle who of course now own ZFS itself,) but it is not production ready.\nWhat I\u0026rsquo;m about to propose is an end run around the GPL. Because it seems to me that combining the source code violates neither license, distributing source code violates no license. Compiling the source code for your own use violates no license. I mean it\u0026rsquo;s annoying and would require a bit of bootstrapping to get a Linux+zfs system up and running, but this is the kind of thing that Gentoo Linux users do all the time, and isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge technological barrier.\nIt feels a bit creepy of course. but I think it works. The logic has also been used before. We\u0026rsquo;ll call it the \u0026ldquo;PGP loophole.\u0026rdquo;\nPGP is an encryption system that\u0026rsquo;s damn good so good in fact, that when it was first released, there were export restrictions on the source code because it qualified as military-grade munitions in America. Source code. How peculiar. In any case there were lawsuits, and PGP source was released outside of America by printing it in a book. Which could be disassembled and scanned into a computer and then compiled. Books were never and--as far as I know--are not classified as munitions, and so they could be exported. Of course I\u0026rsquo;m not a lawyer, but it strikes me that linux+zfs and PGP in the 90\u0026rsquo;s may be in analogous situations.\nAnd I think, because this proposal centers around the distribution of source code and only source code this kind of distribution is fully within the spirit of free software. Sure it\u0026rsquo;s pretty easy, even for the \u0026ldquo;good guys,\u0026rdquo; to run a foul by distributing a binary, but this would be easy to spot, and there are already suitable enforcement mechanisms in place, for the Linux kernel generally, and Oracle\u0026rsquo;s legal department which we can assume will take care of itself.\nOr Oracle could release ZFS under GPL. Either solution works for me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/i-want-zfs-in-the-kernel/","summary":"The background:\nSun Microsystems developed this file system called \u0026ldquo;ZFS,\u0026rdquo; which is exceptionally awesome in it\u0026rsquo;s capabilities and possibilities. The problem, is that it was developed and released as part of the Open Solaris project which has a licensing incompatibility with the Linux Kernel. Both are open source, but there is a technical (and not all together uncommon) conflict in the terms of the license that makes it possible to combine code from both licenses in a single executable.\nBasically the GPL, under which the Linux Kernel is distributed, says if you distribute a binary (executable) under the terms of the GPL, the source code is all files that you used to make that binary. By contrast ZFS\u0026rsquo;s license says \u0026ldquo;here are all the files that we used to make this binary, if you change them when you make your binary and give that binary to other people you have to give them, but if you add additional files, you don\u0026rsquo;t have to give those out to people.","title":"I want ZFS in the Kernel"},{"content":"A reader (hi grandma!) asked me to write a post about why I\u0026rsquo;m so interested in open source, and who am I to refuse. In fact, I tend to do requests pretty well, so if there\u0026rsquo;s a subject you\u0026rsquo;d like to see me cover here, just ask and I\u0026rsquo;ll see what I can do. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve been involved, for varying definitions of involved, in Free Software and open source for a few years now. On a personal level, I use this software (almost exclusively) because I can make it do exactly what I need it to do, because it\u0026rsquo;s very stable, and because from an architecture perspective I understand how these systems work and that\u0026rsquo;s useful for me. Having said that, I think open source is important and worth considering for reasons beyond the fact that I (and people like me) find it to be the most important tool for the work we do.\nWhen folks get together and say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m going to work on an open source project,\u0026rdquo; I think some interesting things happen. First, they\u0026rsquo;re making a number of interesting economic decisions about their work. There are business models around open source, but they are more complex than \u0026ldquo;I make software, you give me money for software,\u0026rdquo; and thus require people to think a little bit more widely about the economic impact of their work. I think the way that people view the implications of their labor is incredibly important, and free software presents an interesting context to think about these questions.\nThe second, and perhaps larger reason I\u0026rsquo;m interested in open source is the community. Open source developers often know that the things they want to create are beyond the scope of their free time and personal ability, so they collaborate with other people to make something of value and worth. How this collaboration happens: what motivates developers, how they create tools and technologies to support this kind of work flow, how the \u0026ldquo;intellectual property\u0026rdquo; is negotiated (particularly in projects that don\u0026rsquo;t use the GNU GPL,) how leaders are selected and appointed, how decisions are made as a community, and how teams are organized and organize themselves. These are intensely fascinating.\nAnd these phenomena matter, both in and for themselves, but also as they impact and connect with other questions and phenomena in the world. For instance:\nI think that the decision making process in free software projects is instructive for thinking about how all sorts of communities can reach a \u0026ldquo;decision making fork\u0026rdquo; resolve it somehow and then continue with their work. Some open source projects have formal structures, and that is easier to understand from the outside, but most make decisions in an informal way, and that decision making process is potentially novel, I\u0026rsquo;d argue. In what other context do people have to construct projects outside of work. While leaders in the open source community are rarely elected (aside from a number of notable examples; the Debian Project Leader springs instantly to mind) most projects are very democratic. But this requires that we keep in mind a fairly broad definition of democracy. Because there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of voting, and sometimes decisions aren\u0026rsquo;t discussed thoroughly before people start doing things, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t look democratic. But everything is volunteer based, and leaders I think have a sense of responsibilities to their constituencies, which is meaningful. The tools that open source developers use are, unsurprisingly open source, and are often picked up and used by teams that aren\u0026rsquo;t making free software. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in thinking about how \u0026ldquo;ways of working,\u0026rdquo; proliferate out of open source and into other spheres. Is non-open source developed differently if the developers are familiar with and use open source tools? Similarly, I think I\u0026rsquo;m interested in thinking about how the architecture of Linux and Unix give rise to a thought about APIs and open standards in a way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily happen on closed platforms. After a certain point, I think I\u0026rsquo;m forced to ask: is GNU/Linux the leading free software/open source platform because it just happens to be, or because it\u0026rsquo;s UNIX. Is there something special about the design of UNIX that leads to openness, and the practices of openness? To what extent does the limitations of the environment (operating system here) the social conventions that are built on it? And then beyond the specific questions--which are terribly important in and of themselves--open source present a terribly exciting subject for the study of these issues. There is so much data on the ground concerning open source: version control history, email logs, IRC logs, and so forth. Not only are the issues important but the data is rich, and I think has a lot to tell us if we (I?) can bother to spend some time with it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-open-source-matters/","summary":"A reader (hi grandma!) asked me to write a post about why I\u0026rsquo;m so interested in open source, and who am I to refuse. In fact, I tend to do requests pretty well, so if there\u0026rsquo;s a subject you\u0026rsquo;d like to see me cover here, just ask and I\u0026rsquo;ll see what I can do. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve been involved, for varying definitions of involved, in Free Software and open source for a few years now. On a personal level, I use this software (almost exclusively) because I can make it do exactly what I need it to do, because it\u0026rsquo;s very stable, and because from an architecture perspective I understand how these systems work and that\u0026rsquo;s useful for me. Having said that, I think open source is important and worth considering for reasons beyond the fact that I (and people like me) find it to be the most important tool for the work we do.","title":"Why Open Source Matters"},{"content":"I finished chapter eight of the novel that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for\u0026hellip; Oh? Way. Too. Fucking. Long. And you want to know how I\u0026rsquo;m even comfortable asserting that I\u0026rsquo;m done with the initial draft of Chapter 8? I wrote an entire scene from Chapter 9 without saying \u0026ldquo;wow, I need another scene in Chapter 8 so that the story works out.\u0026rdquo; Because I\u0026rsquo;ve finished Chapter 8 at least three times, but this time I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure. There are a couple of interesting, or at least quasi interesting factors that I think are worth some attention.\nFor starters, I made some progress on the novel. I know that I don\u0026rsquo;t have endless time to write fiction, and in addition to a day job that requires a bunch of my time and brain cycles, I write the blog, and work on other side projects: fiction, programming related things, the Cyborg Institute, dancing, singing, and occasionally sleeping. These are all projects that are important to me, and I think create value for me (and I hope in their own ways, you as well) so I don\u0026rsquo;t want to sound as if I\u0026rsquo;m complaining about being too busy and overextended (perhaps I am), but as a result I think I\u0026rsquo;m being pragmatic to accept a slower pace of development.\nAt the same time, damn I need to finish this thing. It\u0026rsquo;s good, I\u0026rsquo;m finally back in a place where I don\u0026rsquo;t hate the story, but at the same time I\u0026rsquo;m very aware that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot.\nAnd perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s the problem with taking so long to finish novels. Not so much that writing is a race, but if you aren\u0026rsquo;t able to pull it off in a reasonable period of time, say 12 months, or so by the time you get to the end, you know so much more about the way you work about how to put together stories, and how to write, that creating a cohesive work becomes an actual challenge. At least for me, the thing I probably want more than anything right now, is a chance to work on other fiction projects, to take the lessons that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned from writing this story and apply them to writing other projects. I have a great idea for a new story laying around in a text file, but I\u0026rsquo;m not touching it yet.\nThe two most important things about being a writer, as far as I\u0026rsquo;m concerned, are actually writing things (done!) and finishing things (at which I think I get a middling B). So just starting new projects at whim, isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly an option either. So in light of all this, what\u0026rsquo;s my strategy? Fairly simple\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve set a recurring task in my org system to write 100 words a day on the novel. Just 100 words. And if I know it\u0026rsquo;s not going to happen I can mark the task as \u0026ldquo;skipped\u0026rdquo; or do it \u0026ldquo;late.\u0026rdquo; But the truth is that 100 words is the kind of thing I can do in only a few moments, so it\u0026rsquo;s not only a regular reminder to write, but also an eminently reasonable goal. Not only do 100 word segments add up (in a way that 0 word segments never do,) but the real trick is that in my mind I\u0026rsquo;m not trying to write very much, just enough to get started. If I don\u0026rsquo;t, at least I\u0026rsquo;ve made a little progress. If I do, then all the better.\nIn addition to the regular writing task for the fiction project, I\u0026rsquo;ve also started keeping a journal using this method. I\u0026rsquo;ve also created a recurring tasks for keeping the journal, and I find this method tends to have a positive effect on my productivity. To-do lists are great for remembering and prioritizing tasks when you have a lot of balls up in the air, but they often fail at tracking real life in a reasonable way. The journal provides a good way to keep track of, and recognize the importance of all the things that we spend time doing, but that don\u0026rsquo;t often have an opportunity to be captured into the to-do list before they get done. I think of it as a sort of inverse-to-do list.\nIt doesn\u0026rsquo;t always work, of course. There are days when I don\u0026rsquo;t get to either one of these tasks, and there are some days where I catch up on one or the other of them. But it\u0026rsquo;s a good practice, and I focus on the things that are important: actually producing something and then also building and maintaining a habit.\nBecause I don\u0026rsquo;t know how else things get done. Not that I\u0026rsquo;d be unwilling to listen if you have a better solution. See you in comments\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ritual-velocity-and-getting-things-done/","summary":"I finished chapter eight of the novel that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for\u0026hellip; Oh? Way. Too. Fucking. Long. And you want to know how I\u0026rsquo;m even comfortable asserting that I\u0026rsquo;m done with the initial draft of Chapter 8? I wrote an entire scene from Chapter 9 without saying \u0026ldquo;wow, I need another scene in Chapter 8 so that the story works out.\u0026rdquo; Because I\u0026rsquo;ve finished Chapter 8 at least three times, but this time I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure. There are a couple of interesting, or at least quasi interesting factors that I think are worth some attention.\nFor starters, I made some progress on the novel. I know that I don\u0026rsquo;t have endless time to write fiction, and in addition to a day job that requires a bunch of my time and brain cycles, I write the blog, and work on other side projects: fiction, programming related things, the Cyborg Institute, dancing, singing, and occasionally sleeping.","title":"Ritual, Velocity, and Getting Things Done"},{"content":"Ok, confession time, I don\u0026rsquo;t really get object orientation. So in an effort to increase my understanding, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write some overview and discussion in an effort to understand things a bit better. Hopefully some of you will find this helpful. I\u0026rsquo;ve tinkered with programing for a long time. I read a huge chunk of a popular Python introductory text, and I\u0026rsquo;ve read a chunk of Practical Common Lisp, but people start talking about objects and I loose track of everything. I think there\u0026rsquo;s something slightly unconventional--at least initially--about object orientation.\nWe understand procedural programming pretty easily. There\u0026rsquo;s a set of steps that you need to perform, and you tell the computer what they are, and then data gets handed off to the program, it runs, and the steps are performed at the end. Or, conversely, someone calls your program and says \u0026ldquo;I want data\u0026rdquo; (perhaps implicitly) and the program says \u0026ldquo;ok, to go get data, I need to do these things,\u0026rdquo; and then it runs and at the end you see data.\nObject orientation turns this sort of sideways and says \u0026ldquo;lets build a representation of our data (objects) then write code that says what happens to those objects.\u0026rdquo; Ok, that almost makes sense, data happens to your program and you write code to provide behaviors and responses to all of the things that will happen when your program runs. So you feed objects (data) into your program it does its thing in response to those objects and different data (probably) exists on the other end.\nI hope I haven\u0026rsquo;t lied yet! To continue\u0026hellip;\nThe thing that always confused me, given my utter lack of background is this whole \u0026ldquo;methods,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;classes,\u0026rdquo; thing that programmer types launch into almost immediately. To overview:\nObjects as I said above, are just another way to think about data. It\u0026rsquo;s a \u0026ldquo;thing,\u0026rdquo; that the program has to deal with. Classes really just represent the structure of a program. We hear \u0026ldquo;objects are instances of classes,\u0026rdquo; but this feels sort of backwards, it feels more intuitive to say that classes provide a framework for interacting with objects: they describe the loose \u0026ldquo;shape\u0026rdquo; of their objects and then create a place for behaviors to exist. Methods, then, are those behaviors. Often methods \u0026ldquo;belong\u0026rdquo; to classes (either literally in the structure of the code, or just conceptually) and they define what happens to objects as the program runs.\nThus the role of an object oriented runtime (or compiler? I think that\u0026rsquo;s the right word for the program that executes the program,) is to take data that comes in, figure out what class (or classes) the object \u0026ldquo;fits into,\u0026rdquo; and then apply the methods that belong to that class.\nWhew! So, how\u0026rsquo;d I do?\nAssuming my understanding is correct, allow to offer the following analysis:\nBy using multiple methods, in given sequence you can reuse code within a class, rather than needing to define and redefine a set of increasingly complex procedures.\nAt the same time there\u0026rsquo;s a much higher start up cost for object oriented code. Because we think about getting things done in programs we--or I--tend to think in terms of procedures, rather than objects, it takes a bit of extra brainpower to do the object oriented way. And for most tasks--which are pretty small--creating classes and creating methods seems like a lot of stuff to have to hold in your head when you\u0026rsquo;re figuring out what needs to done?\nIt sort of seems like, in order to do object orientation right, you have to already know what has to happen in the program. Otherwise, classes fail to properly describe the data/methods that you need.\nOk, so now that I, more or less, understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on here, might we be better off calling it class-oriented programming? Or \u0026ldquo;class-centered\u0026rdquo; programming?\nThoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/objective-whatsis/","summary":"Ok, confession time, I don\u0026rsquo;t really get object orientation. So in an effort to increase my understanding, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write some overview and discussion in an effort to understand things a bit better. Hopefully some of you will find this helpful. I\u0026rsquo;ve tinkered with programing for a long time. I read a huge chunk of a popular Python introductory text, and I\u0026rsquo;ve read a chunk of Practical Common Lisp, but people start talking about objects and I loose track of everything. I think there\u0026rsquo;s something slightly unconventional--at least initially--about object orientation.\nWe understand procedural programming pretty easily. There\u0026rsquo;s a set of steps that you need to perform, and you tell the computer what they are, and then data gets handed off to the program, it runs, and the steps are performed at the end. Or, conversely, someone calls your program and says \u0026ldquo;I want data\u0026rdquo; (perhaps implicitly) and the program says \u0026ldquo;ok, to go get data, I need to do these things,\u0026rdquo; and then it runs and at the end you see data.","title":"Objective Whatsis"},{"content":"A few years ago, at a Morris Dance weekend, I saw a woman sitting in one of the common rooms obviously struggling with a piece of knitting. I helped her figure out something, and then went back to singing or whatever it was. When I returned to my chair the experienced dancer sitting next to me assumed I was the student and said, \u0026ldquo;Getting a knitting lesson, eh?\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I chuckled in between choruses and said \u0026ldquo;Not really, I\u0026rsquo;m an even better knitter than I am a Morris dancer.\u0026rdquo;\nImpressed he said \u0026ldquo;Wow, and you\u0026rsquo;re a pretty good Morris Dancer.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich was an utterly delightful thing to hear, particularly from this chap. I\u0026rsquo;m an ok Morris dancer, and--particularly then--I tend to use youth as a compensation for skill. And I don\u0026rsquo;t knit as much now I as used to, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t know all there is to know about knitting, not by a long shot, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good. I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting for 8 years, or so and the thing that\u0026rsquo;s keeping me from knitting these days is time, and the fact that I live in a pretty warm climate at the moment. I never see something knitted and think \u0026ldquo;wow that\u0026rsquo;s too hard for me.\u0026rdquo; In a lot of ways, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve mastered knitting.\nIn some ways that\u0026rsquo;s kind of cool. It\u0026rsquo;s nifty to be able to think about something and say, \u0026ldquo;yes! I can do this.\u0026rdquo; And at the same time, I can\u0026rsquo;t help but have a little bit of regret for the fact that I spent so much time figuring out how to do something that I can\u0026rsquo;t really use most of the time: I don\u0026rsquo;t live in a climate that really calls for woolens most of the time, I don\u0026rsquo;t have any real interest in being a knitwear designer, and I consistently have trouble finding time to knit amongst all of the other things that I find myself committed to.\nSpeaking of which, I\u0026rsquo;ve certainly committed myself to other things. The dancing, I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time dancing and learning how to be a better dancer. And it\u0026rsquo;s sort of paid off. I\u0026rsquo;m not great, and I fake my way though far too many things, but I feel competent, and I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten some pretty good feedback. And that\u0026rsquo;s awesome. While it\u0026rsquo;s fun and socially fulfilling--and that\u0026rsquo;s good enough--at the same time I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it gets me anywhere in particular. I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to play music, and I\u0026rsquo;m not a very good teacher of dance.\nI am incredibly grateful that I started dancing when I was in high school. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I\u0026rsquo;d have been able to pick things up as easily without those experiences. As with knitting in college, the early and intense experiences gave confidence and enough base-skill to make mastery a possibility. Had I started not when I did, I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I would have had the patience, confidence, or persistence as a(n albeit-young) adult to learn the things that I do automatically. I can\u0026rsquo;t really fathom it.\nWhich brings me to writing. And I don\u0026rsquo;t even have a clue what to say there. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good--I mean, I definitely have the persistence nailed--but I have no delusions that I\u0026rsquo;m a great writer. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing forever, and I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely been in situations where I\u0026rsquo;ve had to edit other people\u0026rsquo;s work and thought \u0026ldquo;wow, my prose may be flawed, but at least it isn\u0026rsquo;t that.\u0026rdquo; I wonder why writing is different then, at least for me. Am I a better dancer/knitter than I am a writer? Is it simply easier to critique writing than it is to critique a sweater or ones ability to dance socially? Is the fact that one some level the production of text has economic baggage in a way that a waltz so rarely does?\nMy own angst aside, I was talking with a longtime reader of the blog about employment and changing careers and about figuring what your skills and assets are. Because the transition from \u0026ldquo;I know how to knit sweaters and write things and dance,\u0026rdquo; into \u0026ldquo;I have a job writing about Linux-based systems administration,\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that makes sense immediately.\nBut when you dig, I think it does: it turns out that writing knitting patterns in a the narrative/Elizabeth Zimmerman-inspired way that I do/did, is very much like process for writing about systems administration tasks. And I think dancing gives you the ability to be nimble and quick, not just physically (which may be of limited use more generally,) but also in social situations. Fixing a contra dance line that\u0026rsquo;s gone awry in the middle of the line has transferable skills. We hope, at least.\nThe challenge is in making those connections is difficult, and figuring out how to calculate the value that these skills might provide to the world. And isn\u0026rsquo;t this always the case?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/skill-and-mastery/","summary":"A few years ago, at a Morris Dance weekend, I saw a woman sitting in one of the common rooms obviously struggling with a piece of knitting. I helped her figure out something, and then went back to singing or whatever it was. When I returned to my chair the experienced dancer sitting next to me assumed I was the student and said, \u0026ldquo;Getting a knitting lesson, eh?\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I chuckled in between choruses and said \u0026ldquo;Not really, I\u0026rsquo;m an even better knitter than I am a Morris dancer.\u0026rdquo;\nImpressed he said \u0026ldquo;Wow, and you\u0026rsquo;re a pretty good Morris Dancer.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich was an utterly delightful thing to hear, particularly from this chap. I\u0026rsquo;m an ok Morris dancer, and--particularly then--I tend to use youth as a compensation for skill. And I don\u0026rsquo;t knit as much now I as used to, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t know all there is to know about knitting, not by a long shot, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good.","title":"Skill and Mastery"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had a tab open for most of last week for a 128 gig solid state hard disk that would fit my laptop, and that had a list price that I was comfortable with, and a maker that I tend to consider reputable. I haven\u0026rsquo;t ordered if for a number of reasons (not ready to swap drives, I\u0026rsquo;m using the wrong kind of file systems, given that my current drive works fine it\u0026rsquo;s a bit more than I want to spend at the moment.) But the fact that these things are \u0026ldquo;affordable,\u0026rdquo; and cost half what I thought they did, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about my current stable of gear. This is, as those of you who think about technology in a way similar to me, not surprising. Here\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on my mind in terms of new gadgets:\nNetbooks, the small laptops are awfully sexy and I kind of want one. This isn\u0026rsquo;t logical: my real laptop is both small (12 inches,) has a full sized keyboard, decent resolution, and is totally functional: I use it for everything from the writing and production of this blog, to most of my day job, to all of my entertainment computing. I take my laptop everywhere, so a notebook doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense. Also the relative (and ongoing!) cost of maintain a full \u0026ldquo;tycho-stack\u0026rdquo; on more than one machine is difficult and not something I want to get into. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that I don\u0026rsquo;t find all the netbooks extremely cute and desirable but I don\u0026rsquo;t really need one. I suppose the interest in the SSD is part of an effort to make the existing laptop into more of a netbook.\nAlso on the stack I\u0026rsquo;m approaching the time in my cell phone contract when it\u0026rsquo;s time to upgrade again. I\u0026rsquo;ve been debating the Nokia N900 for some time. Though I\u0026rsquo;ve not played around with the n900 I think all of my \u0026ldquo;I wish my phone could do X,\u0026rdquo; problems could be solved by using a phone that actually uses Debian. Except I\u0026rsquo;ve learned in the last week that the screen on the n900 is resistive, like all of the old Palm Pilots (say,) and not capacitive like the iPhone/iPod Touch/Android phones. Big bummer. Not only is the phone not subsidized, and expensive, but it uses outmoded technology for the most important component. Fail.\nAt the same time it looks like Android phones are finally starting to make it to ATT. I\u0026rsquo;m not a good candidate for the iPhone (not being a reliable Mac User) and while I\u0026rsquo;m not sure about the enduring possibilities of the Android Platform, it seems like the best option at the moment.\nI like my blackberry, really, but the replacement for the blackberry I have at the moment? The same phone. Really. Well, I think it has a different model number and a slightly different trackball, but otherwise, it\u0026rsquo;s the same. I mean\u0026hellip; Throw me something here? Upgrades are supposed to be upgrades. I wonder if Blackberry smart-phones are today\u0026rsquo;s Nokia S60.\nIn any case, dithering about cell phones, netbooks, and SSDs aside, nothing else in my technology stable needs changing really. I geeked out a few weeks ago, and reorganized some of my mail config (but not much of it!), and I think if I had free time, I might redeploy the server to use nginx and prosody which are a bit more lightweight that my current stack, but that\u0026rsquo;s all minor and will totally wait. It\u0026rsquo;s a good place to be.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/planned-obsolescence/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had a tab open for most of last week for a 128 gig solid state hard disk that would fit my laptop, and that had a list price that I was comfortable with, and a maker that I tend to consider reputable. I haven\u0026rsquo;t ordered if for a number of reasons (not ready to swap drives, I\u0026rsquo;m using the wrong kind of file systems, given that my current drive works fine it\u0026rsquo;s a bit more than I want to spend at the moment.) But the fact that these things are \u0026ldquo;affordable,\u0026rdquo; and cost half what I thought they did, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about my current stable of gear. This is, as those of you who think about technology in a way similar to me, not surprising. Here\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on my mind in terms of new gadgets:\nNetbooks, the small laptops are awfully sexy and I kind of want one. This isn\u0026rsquo;t logical: my real laptop is both small (12 inches,) has a full sized keyboard, decent resolution, and is totally functional: I use it for everything from the writing and production of this blog, to most of my day job, to all of my entertainment computing.","title":"Planned Obsolescence and Gadgets"},{"content":"As a follow up to my, surprisingly popular post on the Limitations of Wordpress, and also I suppose my post on the current status of tumblelogs, I wanted to ruminate on \u0026ldquo;where Wordpress\u0026rdquo; is as a piece of software (and a platform,) and what the whole content management space looks like today.\nIn a lot of ways Wordpress won. Wordpress does what it does very well. And the thing it does, powering blogs, is in point of fact what most people need. The wordpress plug-in and theme ecosystems are vibrant and powerful and add a great deal of value to the system. Concerns about performance are largely solved by Wordpress Super Cache, and even though I\u0026rsquo;m squidgy about MySQL and PHP as a platform, for the job at hand it works.\nThe limitations that I spoke to a year ago are--I think--largely still relevant: exceedingly few (and fewer) innovative websites and blogs will be started that use Wordpress. This is, I think mostly because the prescribed form (\u0026ldquo;blog\u0026rdquo; as seen by Wordpress,) has become very cemented in our minds, and it becomes harder and harder to break from that form. In a lot of ways the largest limitation of Wordpress is not the software itself but the habits we have developed as users of Wordpress.\nIndeed this is the general problem behind most content management systems: all sites that use X-platform tend to look very much like all other sites that use X-platform. Content management systems that purport to be web development frameworks (Rails/Django) are a bit better in this regard, but the problem remains. But this post is about the future, not about the histories or even the stale-present.\nSome predictions and forward looking trends are thus in order:\nContent management systems will increasingly manage work-flow rather than content presentation. Every site needs to be built and constructed, and in a lot of ways building a site and creating content are fixed costs no matter what system you use. The work flow that you use to maintain content is highly variable and can be pragmatically managed in more effective ways. Stay tuned for this. The \u0026ldquo;built-in\u0026rdquo; feature set, or default configuration of a content management system will become less important than the possibilities of the platform. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think frameworks and CMS\u0026rsquo;s will merge in the next few years, they\u0026rsquo;ll get closer. Smart static generation is still the future. Most things don\u0026rsquo;t need fully dynamic content, and the intense caching that we have to do to offset the dynamic overhead of contemporary systems isn\u0026rsquo;t the real solution to this problem. Content management systems are, at the moment, at the center of a web site stack/deployment, and thus are huge all encompassing programs. I think increasingly content management systems can be designed to be much smaller applications, and only manage content and content work-flows rather than entire websites. We might call this the API-ization or the Unix-ification of web development. Anything else? Am I totally off my rocker? Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/content-management-beyond-wordpress/","summary":"As a follow up to my, surprisingly popular post on the Limitations of Wordpress, and also I suppose my post on the current status of tumblelogs, I wanted to ruminate on \u0026ldquo;where Wordpress\u0026rdquo; is as a piece of software (and a platform,) and what the whole content management space looks like today.\nIn a lot of ways Wordpress won. Wordpress does what it does very well. And the thing it does, powering blogs, is in point of fact what most people need. The wordpress plug-in and theme ecosystems are vibrant and powerful and add a great deal of value to the system. Concerns about performance are largely solved by Wordpress Super Cache, and even though I\u0026rsquo;m squidgy about MySQL and PHP as a platform, for the job at hand it works.\nThe limitations that I spoke to a year ago are--I think--largely still relevant: exceedingly few (and fewer) innovative websites and blogs will be started that use Wordpress.","title":"Content Management Beyond Wordpress"},{"content":"mcabber is console based XMPP or Jabber client. It runs happily within a screen session, its lightweight, and it does all of the basic things that you want from an IM client without being annoying and distracting. For the first time since I started using this software a year or two ago, there\u0026rsquo;s a major release that has some pretty exciting features. So I wanted to install it. Except, there aren\u0026rsquo;t packages for it for Debian Lenny, and I have a standing policy that everything needs to be installed using package management tools so that things don\u0026rsquo;t break down the line.\nThese instructions are written for Debian 5.0 (Lenny) systems. Your millage may vary for other systems, or other versions of Ubuntu. Begin by installing some dependencies:\napt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5 libncursesw5-dev pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libloudmouth1-dev The following optional dependencies provide additional features, and may already be installed on your system:\napt-get install libenchant-dev libaspell-dev libgpgme-dev libotr-dev When the dependencies are installed, issue the following commands to download the latest release into the /opt/ directory, unarchive the tarball, and run the configure script to install mcabber into the /opt/mcabber/ folder so that it is easy to remove later if something stops working.\ncd /opt/ wget http://mcabber.com/files/mcabber-0.10.0-rc3.tar.gz tar -zxvf mcabber-0.10.0-rc3.tar.gz ./configure --prefix=/opt/mcabber When that process finishes, run the following:\nmake make install Now copy the following /opt/mcabber-0.10-rc3/mcabberrc.example file into your home directory. If you don\u0026rsquo;t already have mcabber configured, you can use the following command to copy the file to your home directory.\ncp /opt/mcabber-0.10-rc3/mcabberrc.example ~/.mcabberrc If you do have an existing mcaber setup, then use the following command to copy the example configuration file to a non-overlapping folder in your home directory\ncp /opt/mcabber-0.10-rc3/mcabberrc.example ~/mcabber-config Edit the ~/.mcabberrc or ~/mcabber-config as described in the config file. Then start mcabber with the following command, if your config file is located at ~/.mcabberrc:\n/opt/mcabber/bin/mcabber If you have your mcabber config located at ~/mcabber-config start mcabber with the following command:\n/opt/mcabber/bin/mcabber -f ~/mcabber-config And you\u0026rsquo;re ready to go. Important things to note:\nIf something gets, as we say in the biz \u0026ldquo;fuxed,\u0026rdquo; simply \u0026ldquo;rm rf /opt/mcabber/\u0026rdquo; and reinstall. Check mcabber for new releases and release candidates. These instructions should work well once there\u0026rsquo;s a final release, at least for Debian Lenny. The release files are located here. Make sure to stay up to date with new releases to avoid bugs and potential security issues. If you come across bugs, report them to the developers there is also a MUC for the mcabber community here: xmpp:mcabber@conf.lilotux.net. If you have an additional dependency that I missed in this installation do be in touch and I\u0026rsquo;ll get it added here. Debian Lenny ships with version 0.9.7 of mcabber. If you don\u0026rsquo;t want to play with the new features and the magic in 0.10, then go for it. If you just want a regular client, install the stable mcabber with the \u0026ldquo;apt-get install mcabber\u0026rdquo; command and ignore the rest of this email. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/installing-mcabber-10rc3-on-debian-lenny/","summary":"mcabber is console based XMPP or Jabber client. It runs happily within a screen session, its lightweight, and it does all of the basic things that you want from an IM client without being annoying and distracting. For the first time since I started using this software a year or two ago, there\u0026rsquo;s a major release that has some pretty exciting features. So I wanted to install it. Except, there aren\u0026rsquo;t packages for it for Debian Lenny, and I have a standing policy that everything needs to be installed using package management tools so that things don\u0026rsquo;t break down the line.\nThese instructions are written for Debian 5.0 (Lenny) systems. Your millage may vary for other systems, or other versions of Ubuntu. Begin by installing some dependencies:\napt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5 libncursesw5-dev pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libloudmouth1-dev The following optional dependencies provide additional features, and may already be installed on your system:","title":"Installing Mcabber .10-rc3 on Debian Lenny"},{"content":"One of my favorite meme\u0026rsquo;s on twitter is the \u0026ldquo;OH:\u0026rdquo; meme, where folks post little snippets of things they\u0026rsquo;ve heard in the world that are (usually) hilarious. This post will be, I think, a collection of the best little quotes I\u0026rsquo;ve heard, heard about, or seen recently.\n\u0026ldquo;Chicken is easily divisible\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;If you\u0026rsquo;re hand is one space off on your keyboard and you start typing server, you start typing awesome. servers are awesome.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I will be eagerly awaiting the New York Times style piece on the growing trend of the \u0026lsquo;ZOMG WE\u0026rsquo;RE NOT EVEN DATING GUYS\u0026rsquo; rings.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The emacs makes the text, I am but a humble servant.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;We should get facebook married so everyone would know its the fakes.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;If [company] were a musical, there\u0026rsquo;d be a song here. Thankfully it\u0026rsquo;s not.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Caffeine is like liquid naps.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;For epic lulz you should switch your keyboard [with blank keys] to Dvorak.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;wat.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/overheard/","summary":"One of my favorite meme\u0026rsquo;s on twitter is the \u0026ldquo;OH:\u0026rdquo; meme, where folks post little snippets of things they\u0026rsquo;ve heard in the world that are (usually) hilarious. This post will be, I think, a collection of the best little quotes I\u0026rsquo;ve heard, heard about, or seen recently.\n\u0026ldquo;Chicken is easily divisible\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;If you\u0026rsquo;re hand is one space off on your keyboard and you start typing server, you start typing awesome. servers are awesome.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I will be eagerly awaiting the New York Times style piece on the growing trend of the \u0026lsquo;ZOMG WE\u0026rsquo;RE NOT EVEN DATING GUYS\u0026rsquo; rings.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The emacs makes the text, I am but a humble servant.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;We should get facebook married so everyone would know its the fakes.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;If [company] were a musical, there\u0026rsquo;d be a song here. Thankfully it\u0026rsquo;s not.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Caffeine is like liquid naps.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;For epic lulz you should switch your keyboard [with blank keys] to Dvorak.","title":"Overheard"},{"content":"Ok. I can\u0026rsquo;t be the only one.1\nI look at open source projects like OpenSolaris, Alfresco, Resin, Magento, OpenSuSE, Fedora, and MySQL, among others, and I wonder \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s the community around these projects that people are always talking about.\u0026rdquo; Sure I can download the source code under licenses that I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable with, sure they talk about a community, but what does that mean?\nWhat, as a company, does it mean to say that the software you develop (and likely own all the rights to,) is \u0026ldquo;open source,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;supported by a community?\u0026rdquo;\nIf I were sensible, I\u0026rsquo;d probably stop writing this post here. From the perspective of the users of and participants in open source software, this is the core question, both because it dictates what we can expect from free software and open source and more importantly because it has been historically ill defined.\nThere are two additional, but related, questions that lurk around this question, at least in my mind:\n1. Why are new open source projects only seen as legitimate if the developers are able to build a business around the project?\n2. What does it mean to be a contributor to open source in this world, and what do contributors in \u0026ldquo;the community,\u0026rdquo; get from contributing to commercial projects?\nThere are of course exceptions to this rule: the Debian Project, the Linux Kernel itself, GNU packages, and most open source programming languages among others. I\u0026rsquo;d love to know if I\u0026rsquo;ve missed a class of software in this list--and there\u0026rsquo;s one exception that I\u0026rsquo;ll touch on in a moment--but the commonality here is that that these projects are so low level that it seems too hard to build businesses around directly.\nWhen \u0026ldquo;less technical\u0026rdquo; free software projects began to take off, I think a lot of people said \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know if this open source thing will work when the users of the software aren\u0026rsquo;t hackers,\u0026rdquo; because after all what does open source code do for non-hackers? While it\u0026rsquo;s true that there are fringe benefits that go beyond the simple \u0026ldquo;free as in beer\u0026rdquo; quality of open source for non-hacker users, these benefits are not always obvious. In a lot of ways the commercialization around open source software helps add a buffer between upstreams and end users. This is why I included Debian in the list above. Debian is very much a usable operating system, but in practice it\u0026rsquo;s often an upstream of other distributions. Ubuntu, Maemo, etc.\nThe exception that I mentioned is, to my mind, projects like Drupal and web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. These communities aren\u0026rsquo;t sponsored or driven by venture capital funded companies. Though the leader of the Drupal community has taken VC money for a Drupal-related start up. I think the difference here is that the economic activity around these projects is consulting based: people use Drupal/Django/Rails to build websites (which aren\u0026rsquo;t, largely open source) for clients. In a lot of ways these are much closer to the \u0026ldquo;traditional free software business model,\u0026rdquo; as envisioned in the eighties and nineties, than what seems to prevail at the moment.\nSo to summarize the questions:\nWhat, as a company, does it mean to say that the software you develop (and likely own all the rights to,) is \u0026ldquo;open source,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;supported by a community?\u0026rdquo; What does it mean to participate in and contribute to a community around a commercial product that you don\u0026rsquo;t have any real stake in? How does the free software community, which is largely technical and hacker centered, transcend to deal with and serve end users? How do we legitimize projects that aren\u0026rsquo;t funded with venture capital money? Onward and Upward!\nI think and hope this is the post I meant to write when I started writing this post on the work of open source\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/enterprise-open-source-community/","summary":"Ok. I can\u0026rsquo;t be the only one.1\nI look at open source projects like OpenSolaris, Alfresco, Resin, Magento, OpenSuSE, Fedora, and MySQL, among others, and I wonder \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s the community around these projects that people are always talking about.\u0026rdquo; Sure I can download the source code under licenses that I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable with, sure they talk about a community, but what does that mean?\nWhat, as a company, does it mean to say that the software you develop (and likely own all the rights to,) is \u0026ldquo;open source,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;supported by a community?\u0026rdquo;\nIf I were sensible, I\u0026rsquo;d probably stop writing this post here. From the perspective of the users of and participants in open source software, this is the core question, both because it dictates what we can expect from free software and open source and more importantly because it has been historically ill defined.\nThere are two additional, but related, questions that lurk around this question, at least in my mind:","title":"Enterprise Linux Community"},{"content":"This post covers the role and purpose (and utility!) of analysts and spectators in the software development world. Particularly in the open source subset of that. My inspirations and for this post come from:\nWhy is there no Anthropology Journalism? This Video Featuring an interview with Michael Coté of Red Monk In the video Coté says (basically,) open source projects need to be able to justify the \u0026ldquo;business case\u0026rdquo; for their project, to explain what\u0026rsquo;s the innovation that this project seeks to provide the world. This is undoubtedly a good thing, and I think we should probably all be able to explore and clearly explain and even justify the projects we care about and work on in terms of their external worth.\nProject leaders and developers should be able to explain and justify the greater utility of their software clearly. Without question. At the same time, problems arise when all we focus on is the worth. People become oblivious to how things work, and become unable to successfully participate in informed decisions about the technology that they use. Users, without an understanding of how a piece of technology functions are less able to take full advantage of that technology.\nAs an aside: One of the things that took me forever to get used to about working with developers is the terms that they describe their future projects. They use the imperative case with much more ease than I would ever consider: \u0026ldquo;the product will have this feature\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;It will be architected in such a way.\u0026rdquo; From the outside this kind of talk seems to be unrealistic and grandiose, but I\u0026rsquo;ve learned that programmers tend to see their projects evolving in real time, and so this kind of language is really more representative of their current state of mind than their intentions or lack of communications skills.\nReturning for a moment to the importance of being able to communicate the business case of the projects and technology that we create. As we force the developers of technology to focus on the business cases for the technology they develop we also make it so that the only people who are capable of understanding how software works, or how software is created, are the people who develop software. And while I\u0026rsquo;m all in favor of specialization, I do think that the returns diminish quickly.\nAnd beyond the fact that this leads to technology that simply isn\u0026rsquo;t as good or as useful, in the long run, it also strongly limits the ability of observers and outsiders (\u0026ldquo;analysts\u0026rdquo;) to be able to provide a service for the developers of the technology beyond simply communicating their business case to outside world. It restricts all understanding of technology to journalism rather than the sort of \u0026ldquo;rich and chewy\u0026rdquo; (anthropological?) understanding that might be possible if we worked to understand the technology itself.\nI clearly need to work a bit more to develop this idea, but I think it connects with a couple of previous arguments that I\u0026rsquo;ve put forth in these pages one regarding Whorfism in Programming, and also in constructing rich arguments.\nI look forward to your input as I develop this project. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/analyzing-the-work-of-open-source/","summary":"This post covers the role and purpose (and utility!) of analysts and spectators in the software development world. Particularly in the open source subset of that. My inspirations and for this post come from:\nWhy is there no Anthropology Journalism? This Video Featuring an interview with Michael Coté of Red Monk In the video Coté says (basically,) open source projects need to be able to justify the \u0026ldquo;business case\u0026rdquo; for their project, to explain what\u0026rsquo;s the innovation that this project seeks to provide the world. This is undoubtedly a good thing, and I think we should probably all be able to explore and clearly explain and even justify the projects we care about and work on in terms of their external worth.\nProject leaders and developers should be able to explain and justify the greater utility of their software clearly. Without question. At the same time, problems arise when all we focus on is the worth.","title":"Analyzing the Work of Open Source"},{"content":"Just about the time I was ready to call OpenID a total failure, something clicked and, if you asked how I thought \u0026ldquo;OpenID was doing,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;d have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s largely a success. But it certianly took long enough to get here.\nLets back up and give some context.\nOpenID is a system for distributing and delegating authentication for web services to third party sites. Basically to the end user, rather than signing into a website with your username and password, you sign in with your profile URL on some secondary site that you actually log into. The site you\u0026rsquo;re trying to log in, asks the secondary site \u0026ldquo;is this legit,\u0026rdquo; the secondary site prompts you (usually just the first time, though each OpenID provider may function differently here.) then you\u0026rsquo;re good to go.\nAdditionally, and this is the part that I really like about Open ID is that you can delegate the OpenID of a given page to a secondary host. So on tychoish.com you\u0026rsquo;ll find the following tags in the header of the document:\n\u0026lt;link rel=\u0026quot;openid.server\u0026quot; href=\u0026quot;http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml\u0026quot; /\u0026gt; \u0026lt;link rel=\u0026quot;openid.delegate\u0026quot; href=\u0026quot;http://tychoish.livejournal.com/\u0026quot; /\u0026gt; So I tell a third party site \u0026ldquo;I wanna sign in with http://tychoish.com/ as my OpenID,\u0026rdquo; it goes and sees that I\u0026rsquo;ve delegated tychoish.com\u0026rsquo;s OpenID to LiveJournal (incidentally the initiators of OpenID if memory serves,) and LiveJournal handles the authentication and validation for me. If at some point I decide that LiveJournal isn\u0026rsquo;t doing what I need it to, I can change these tags to a new provider, and all the third party sites go talk to the new provider as if nothing happened. And it\u0026rsquo;s secure because I control tychoish.com and contain a provider-independent identity server, while still making use of these third party servers. Win.\nThe thing is that OpenID never really caught on. Though managing a single set of authentication credentials, and a common identity across a number of sites has a lot of benefits to the users, it never really caught on. Or I should say, it took a very long time to be taken seriously. There are a number of reasons for this, in my understanding:\n1. Third party vendors wanted to keep big user databases with email addresses. OpenID means, depending on implementation that you can bypass the traditional sign up method. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a technological requirement but can be confusing in some instances. By giving up the \u0026ldquo;traditional\u0026rdquo; value associated with sponsoring account creation, OpenID seemed like a threat to traditional web businesses. There were ways around this, but it\u0026rsquo;s confusing and as is often the case a dated business model trumped an inspiring business model.\n2. There was and is some fud around security. People thought if they weren\u0026rsquo;t responsible for the authentication process that they wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be able to ensure that only the people who were supposed to were able to get into a given account. Particularly since the only identifying information associated with an account was a publicly accessible URL. Nevertheless it works, and I think people used these details to make people feel like the system isn\u0026rsquo;t/wasn\u0026rsquo;t secure.\n3. There are some legitimate technological concerns that need to be sorted out. Particularly around account creation. This is the main confusion cited above. If someone signs up for an account with an OpenID, do they get a username and have to enter that, or do we just use the OpenID URL? Is there an email address or password associated with the account? What if they get locked out and need to get into the account but there\u0026rsquo;s no email? What if they need to change their OpenID provider/location at some point. These are legitimate concerns, but they\u0026rsquo;re solvable problems.\n4. Some users have had a hard time groking it. Because it breaks with the conventional usage model, and it makes signing into sites simple it\u0026rsquo;s a bit hard to grok.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s fascinating about this is that eventually it did succeed. More even than joy at the fact that I get to use OpenID, finally, I think OpenID presents an interesting lesson in the eventual success of emergent technological phenomena. Google accounts, flickr accounts, and AIM accounts all provide OpenID. And although \u0026ldquo;facebook connect\u0026rdquo; is not using OpenID technology, it\u0026rsquo;s conceptually the same. Sites like StackOverflow have OpenID only authentication, and it\u0026rsquo;s becoming more popular.\nOpenID succeeded not because the campaign to teach everyone that federated identity vis a vis OpenID was the future and the way we should interact with web services, but rather because the developers of web applications learned that this was the easier and more effective way to do things. And, I suspect in as much as 80% or 90% of cases when people use OpenID they don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue that that\u0026rsquo;s the technology they\u0026rsquo;re using. And that\u0026rsquo;s probably an ok thing.\nThe question that lingers in my mind as I end this post is: is this parallel any other optimistic technology that we\u0026rsquo;re interested in right now? Might some other \u0026ldquo;Open*\u0026rdquo; technology take away a strategic lesson from the tactical success of OpenID? I\u0026rsquo;d love to see that.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-successful-failure-of-openid/","summary":"Just about the time I was ready to call OpenID a total failure, something clicked and, if you asked how I thought \u0026ldquo;OpenID was doing,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;d have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s largely a success. But it certianly took long enough to get here.\nLets back up and give some context.\nOpenID is a system for distributing and delegating authentication for web services to third party sites. Basically to the end user, rather than signing into a website with your username and password, you sign in with your profile URL on some secondary site that you actually log into. The site you\u0026rsquo;re trying to log in, asks the secondary site \u0026ldquo;is this legit,\u0026rdquo; the secondary site prompts you (usually just the first time, though each OpenID provider may function differently here.) then you\u0026rsquo;re good to go.\nAdditionally, and this is the part that I really like about Open ID is that you can delegate the OpenID of a given page to a secondary host.","title":"The Successful Failure of OpenID"},{"content":"So I, like any self respecting geek trying to learn Common Lisp started to read the cliki, which is a wiki that supports Common Lisp projects. Nifty right? Right. It\u0026rsquo;s full of stuff, and between it and Common-Lisp.net, you can be pretty sure that if it exists in the common Lisp world it\u0026rsquo;ll appear on one of those two sites. And for every cool lisp thing, rather than usable instructions for installing the software it would just say \u0026ldquo;use asdf install and have fun.\u0026rdquo; Which is good if you know what asdf is or what it\u0026rsquo;s supposed to, and how to use it.\nBut, there\u0026rsquo;s a decent chance that you\u0026rsquo;re like me, and were completely clueless.\nTurns out asdf-install is the common lisp equivalent of the CPAN shell or Ruby gems, or the Debian project\u0026rsquo;s dpkg, with some lisp-centric variations. This post provides an overview and a \u0026ldquo;quick start guide\u0026rdquo; in case you want to get started. The directions I provide are in line with \u0026ldquo;the way I like to keep my file system organized (e.g. ~/) and center around the Arch Linux and SBCL system that I use. However, this should hold true (more or less) for any distribution of Linux with SBCL and possibly to other lisps. Feel free to add your own modifications in comments or in the lisp page on wikish.\nBegin by getting to a CL REPL. If you have emacs and \u0026ldquo;slime\u0026rdquo; installed get to a REPL using \u0026ldquo;M-x slime\u0026rdquo; otherwise just type sbcl at a system prompt. Installing slime, emacs, and sbcl are beyond the scope of this post, but in general use the packages designed for your platform and you should be good. MacPorts for OS X users and the package managers for most prevalent Linux-based operating systems should have what you need.\nAt the REPL do the following:\n(require 'asdf) (require 'asdf-install) (asdf-install:install '[package-name]) Remember to replace the [package-name] with the dependency or package that you want to install. asdf will ask you if you want to install the package system wide, or in a user-specific user directory. I tend to install things in the user-specific directories because it gives me a bit more control over things. The user specific directory is located in ~/.sbcl if you want to poke around the files yourself. Done. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty straight forward. Lets get to the awesome parts.\nMake a ~/lisp directory. I keep mine stored in a git repository. I\u0026rsquo;ve also kept my .sbcl directory inside ~/lisp and then created a symbolic link so that the computer is none the wiser. Issue the following commands to accomplish this:\ncd ~/ mkdir -p ~/lisp/systems mv .sbcl ~/lisp/ ln -s ~/lisp/.sbcl Adjust the path as necessary. Additionally You will also want to create a ~/.sbclrc file with some code for asdf to initialize itself when SBCL runs. Do the following:\ncd ~/ touch ~/lisp/.sbclrc ln -s ~/lisp/.sbclrc In your .sbclrc file you\u0026rsquo;ll probably want something like the following:\n(require 'asdf) (pushnew #p\u0026quot;/usr/share/common-lisp/systems/\u0026quot; asdf:*central-registry* :test #'equal) (push #p\u0026quot;/usr/share/common-lisp/systems/\u0026quot; asdf:*central-registry*) (pushnew #P\u0026quot;/home/[username]/lisp/systems/\u0026quot; asdf:*central-registry* :test #'equal) (push #P\u0026quot;/home/[username]/lisp/systems/\u0026quot; asdf:*central-registry*) This tells SBCL and asdf where all of the required lisp code is located. Alter path\u0026rsquo;s as needed. We\u0026rsquo;ve not talked very much about the ~/lisp/ directory yet. Basically it\u0026rsquo;s a directory that serves as a playground for all things lisp related. Each \u0026ldquo;project\u0026rdquo; or package should have it\u0026rsquo;s own directory, which will contain lisp code and an .asd file. To make a package accessible via asdf on your system create a symbolic link for these .asd files in your ~/lisp/system folder. Done.\nSo let\u0026rsquo;s set up a basic \u0026ldquo;hello world\u0026rdquo; package that we\u0026rsquo;ll call \u0026ldquo;reject,\u0026rdquo; just for grins. File one, ~/lisp/reject/reject.asd:\n(defsystem \u0026quot;reject\u0026quot; :description \u0026quot;a reject program :version \u0026quot;0.1\u0026quot; :author \u0026quot;tycho garen\u0026quot; :licence \u0026quot;ISC License\u0026quot; :depends-on (\u0026quot;cl-ppcre\u0026quot;) :components ((:file \u0026quot;reject\u0026quot;) (:file \u0026quot;package\u0026quot;))) The dependency on cl-ppcre isn\u0026rsquo;t required, but that\u0026rsquo;s how it would work if you needed a regex engine for a reject hello world application. File two, ~/lisp/reject/package.lisp:\n(defpackage reject (:use :common-lisp)) File three, ~/lisp/reject/reject.lisp:\n(in-package :reject) (defun hello-world () () (print \u0026quot;Hello World, tycho\u0026quot;)) (hello-world) Once those fils are saved, issue the following commands to create the needed symbolic link:\ncd ~/lisp/system/ ln -s ~/lisp/reject/reject.asd Now, from the REPL issue the following expression to load the package:\n(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'reject) And then the following expression to test that it works:\n(hello-world) And you\u0026rsquo;re set to go. As to how you\u0026rsquo;d write or package up something that might actually have value? That\u0026rsquo;s a problem I\u0026rsquo;m still wrapping my head around. But that can all happen later.\nIf I\u0026rsquo;ve overlooked something or you think my understanding of something here isn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly clear, do be in touch. I hope this helps!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/using-asdf-install-with-sbcl/","summary":"So I, like any self respecting geek trying to learn Common Lisp started to read the cliki, which is a wiki that supports Common Lisp projects. Nifty right? Right. It\u0026rsquo;s full of stuff, and between it and Common-Lisp.net, you can be pretty sure that if it exists in the common Lisp world it\u0026rsquo;ll appear on one of those two sites. And for every cool lisp thing, rather than usable instructions for installing the software it would just say \u0026ldquo;use asdf install and have fun.\u0026rdquo; Which is good if you know what asdf is or what it\u0026rsquo;s supposed to, and how to use it.\nBut, there\u0026rsquo;s a decent chance that you\u0026rsquo;re like me, and were completely clueless.\nTurns out asdf-install is the common lisp equivalent of the CPAN shell or Ruby gems, or the Debian project\u0026rsquo;s dpkg, with some lisp-centric variations. This post provides an overview and a \u0026ldquo;quick start guide\u0026rdquo; in case you want to get started.","title":"Common Lisp, Using ASDF Install With SBCL"},{"content":"I read this post by Bruce Sterling about \u0026ldquo;Cloud Culture\u0026rdquo;, and haven\u0026rsquo;t quite been able to formulate an appropriate response. It\u0026rsquo;s true that I often find myself ranting about this or that thing Bruce Sterling has written, so I\u0026rsquo;m perhaps not the most impartial\nTo summarize, his notion is that \u0026ldquo;the cloud,\u0026rdquo; as evidenced by a wealth of usable digital information and content, combined with an uptick in digital participation will lead to some sort of minimalistic cultural singularity that he\u0026rsquo;s calling \u0026ldquo;Cloud Culture.\u0026rdquo;\nRight.\nSo lets attack this full on. The \u0026ldquo;Cloud\u0026rdquo; is marketing dribble. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing there, it\u0026rsquo;s just a different way of organizing the servers that provide content and services on the Internet. In a lot of way the Amazon and Rackspace \u0026ldquo;Clouds\u0026rdquo; have brute forced the server and hosting business with utterly conventional hardware, off the shelf open source software, and a bunch of [insert-favorite-scripting-language-here] scripts. Oh, and a lot of capital.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the back-end, and moving upwards in the stack, we\u0026rsquo;ll find that the tools (e.g. Apache, Relational Databases, Perl) that we\u0026rsquo;re using now are for the most part the same this time around as they were ten or fifteen years ago. Sure we have new practices, and there are new frameworks, new versions of some software, but the changes are mostly evolutionary. Until you get to what the users see, and now we have applications that live in web browsers, and a more robust set of interconnected network services.\nOtherwise, the cloud is just the Internet bundled up in a differed way. And it\u0026rsquo;s true that the bundling matters, but at the end of the day just because the \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; presents a better way to do the work of the Internet (in some situations,) it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that any of the fundamental principals have changed.\nAnother phenomena that hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed with the cloud: we\u0026rsquo;ve not quite gotten the economic system for the Internet figured out in a way that\u0026rsquo;s reliable and sustainable. New things on the Internet are supported by capital from \u0026ldquo;old-world\u0026rdquo; industries by way of venture capital and spin off subsidiaries. The leading business models are advertising (very print media) and premium subscription services (which are often contrived). So eventually it all collapses, and any gains in cultural participation run up against the hard costs of keeping power flowing to the servers in some way.\nA few thoughts:\nWe could just as easily call this whole \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; thing \u0026ldquo;the matrix,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;cyberspace,\u0026rdquo; in Gibson\u0026rsquo;s original formulation. Cloud is a horrible metaphor for most things, but particularly this. The apparent cohesiveness of the Internet in 2010 is almost entirely due to the success of Google. As much as we might try and avoid Google, I firmly believe if Google were to go away without warning, while the Internet would still work most of the economy around it would crash and burn: people wouldn\u0026rsquo;t discover new things, the on-line advertising industry would largely collapse, a lot of the software that a lot of people inside and outside of google use would be without maintainers. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure cultural participation is problem space that can be brute forced, and certainly the development of additional applications in the cloud is unlikely to increase participation in a direct manner. I\u0026rsquo;m not being an elitist and saying \u0026ldquo;cultural participation by the unschooled and unwashed masses isn\u0026rsquo;t worthwhile,\u0026rdquo; but rather cultural participation is about developing direct relationships and making/building things, and that requires forming relationships that don\u0026rsquo;t scale well. Thoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-cloud-culture-isnt/","summary":"I read this post by Bruce Sterling about \u0026ldquo;Cloud Culture\u0026rdquo;, and haven\u0026rsquo;t quite been able to formulate an appropriate response. It\u0026rsquo;s true that I often find myself ranting about this or that thing Bruce Sterling has written, so I\u0026rsquo;m perhaps not the most impartial\nTo summarize, his notion is that \u0026ldquo;the cloud,\u0026rdquo; as evidenced by a wealth of usable digital information and content, combined with an uptick in digital participation will lead to some sort of minimalistic cultural singularity that he\u0026rsquo;s calling \u0026ldquo;Cloud Culture.\u0026rdquo;\nRight.\nSo lets attack this full on. The \u0026ldquo;Cloud\u0026rdquo; is marketing dribble. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing there, it\u0026rsquo;s just a different way of organizing the servers that provide content and services on the Internet. In a lot of way the Amazon and Rackspace \u0026ldquo;Clouds\u0026rdquo; have brute forced the server and hosting business with utterly conventional hardware, off the shelf open source software, and a bunch of [insert-favorite-scripting-language-here] scripts. Oh, and a lot of capital.","title":"Why Cloud Culture Isn't"},{"content":"The file system is dead. Long live the File system.\nWe live in an interesting time. There are two technologies that aim to accomplish two very goals. On the one hand we have things like Amazon\u0026rsquo;s S3, Hadoop, NoSQL, and a host of technologies that destroy the file system metaphor as we know it today. The future, if you believe it, lays in storing all data in some sort of distributed key/value store-based system. And then, on the other hand we have things like \u0026ldquo;FUSE\u0026rdquo; that attempt to translate various kinds of interfaces and data systems onto the file system metaphor.\nOk, so the truth is that the opposition between the \u0026ldquo;lets replace file systems\u0026rdquo; with non-file based data stores folks and the \u0026ldquo;lets use the file system as a metaphor for everything,\u0026rdquo; is totally contrived. How data is stored and how we interact with data are very different (and not always connected) problems.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s lay down some principals:\nThere are (probably) more tools to interact with, organize, manage, and manipulate files and file system objects than there are for any other data storage system in contemporary technology.\nMost users of computers have some understanding of file systems and how they work, though clearly there are a great diversity of degrees here.\nIn nearly every case, only one system can have access to a given file system at a time. In these days of such massive parallel computing, the size of computer networks, (and the associated latency) this has become a rather substantial limitation.\nFrom the average end user\u0026rsquo;s perspective, it\u0026rsquo;s probably the case that file systems provide too much flexibility, and can easily become disorganized.\nThere are all sorts of possible problems regarding consistency, backups, and data corruption that all data storage systems must address, but that present larger problems as file systems need to scale to handle bigger sets of data, more users, and attach to systems that are more geographically disparate.\nGiven these presumptions, my personal biases and outlook, and a bit of extrapolation here\u0026rsquo;s a basic feature set for \u0026ldquo;information storage system.\u0026rdquo; These features will transcend the storage engine/interface boundary a bit. You\u0026rsquo;ve been warned.\nMultiple people and systems need to be able to access and edit the same objects concurrently.\nExisting tools need to be able to work in some capacity. Perhaps using FUSE-like systems. File managers, mv, ls, and cp should just work, etc.\nThere ought to be some sort of off-network capability so that a user can loose a network connection without loosing access to his or her data.\nSearch indexing and capabilities should be baked into the lowest levels of the system so that people can easily find information.\nThere ought to be some sort of user facing meta-data system which can affect not just sort order, but also attach to actions, to create notifications, or manipulate the data for easier use.\nThese sorts sorts of features are of course not new ideas. My sygn project is one example, as is haven, as is this personal information management proposal.\nNow all we need to do is figure some way to build it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/file-system-metaphors/","summary":"The file system is dead. Long live the File system.\nWe live in an interesting time. There are two technologies that aim to accomplish two very goals. On the one hand we have things like Amazon\u0026rsquo;s S3, Hadoop, NoSQL, and a host of technologies that destroy the file system metaphor as we know it today. The future, if you believe it, lays in storing all data in some sort of distributed key/value store-based system. And then, on the other hand we have things like \u0026ldquo;FUSE\u0026rdquo; that attempt to translate various kinds of interfaces and data systems onto the file system metaphor.\nOk, so the truth is that the opposition between the \u0026ldquo;lets replace file systems\u0026rdquo; with non-file based data stores folks and the \u0026ldquo;lets use the file system as a metaphor for everything,\u0026rdquo; is totally contrived. How data is stored and how we interact with data are very different (and not always connected) problems.","title":"File System Metaphors"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of saying \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not a programmer or software developer,\u0026rdquo; on this blog, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t think that there\u0026rsquo;s a great chance that I\u0026rsquo;ll be employed as a developer, it\u0026rsquo;s becoming more apparent that the real difference between me and a \u0026ldquo;real developer\u0026rdquo; is vanishingly small. Stealth Developer, or something. In any case, my ongoing tooling around with common lisp and more recently the tumble manager project have given me opportunities to think about lisp and to think about why I enjoy it.\nThis post started when a friend asked me \u0026ldquo;so should I learn common lisp.\u0026rdquo; And my first response was something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;no, are you crazy?\u0026rdquo; or, alternately \u0026ldquo;well if you really want to.\u0026rdquo; And then I came to my senses and offered a more reasonable answer that I think some of you might find useful.\nLet us start by asking \u0026ldquo;Should You Study Common Lisp?\u0026rdquo;\nYes! There are a number of great reasons to use Common Lisp:\nThere are a number of good open source implementations of the common lisp language including a couple of very interesting and viable options. They\u0026rsquo;re also stable: SBCL which is among the more recent entrants to this field is more than a decade old. There are sophisticated development tools, notably SLIME (for emacs) which connects and integrates emacs with the lisp process, as well as advanced REPLs (i.e. interactive mode). So getting started isn\u0026rsquo;t difficult. Common Lisp supports many different approaches to programming. Indeed, contemporary \u0026ldquo;advanced\u0026rdquo; languages like Ruby and Python borrow a lot from Lisp. So it\u0026rsquo;s not an \u0026ldquo;archaic\u0026rdquo; language by any means. Dynamic typing, garbage collection, macros, and so forth. CL is capable of very high performance, so the chance of saying \u0026ldquo;damn, I wish I wrote this in a faster language,\u0026rdquo; down the road isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly likely. Most implementations run on most platforms of any consequence, which is nice. You\u0026rsquo;re probably tired of hearing that \u0026ldquo;Learning Lisp will make your a better programmer in any language,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s probably true on some level. The reasons to not learn Lisp or to avoid using it are also multiple:\n\u0026ldquo;Compiled\u0026rdquo; Lisp binaries are large compared to similarly functional programs in other languages. While most CL implementations will compile native binaries, they also have to compile in most of themselves. Lisp is totally a small niche language, and we\u0026rsquo;d be dumb to assume that it\u0026rsquo;s ever going to take off. It\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; by most measurements, but it\u0026rsquo;s never really going to be popular or widely deployed in the way that other contemporary languages are. Other programmers will think you\u0026rsquo;re weird. Having said that all of I think we should still start projects in CL, and expand the amount of software that\u0026rsquo;s written in the language. Here\u0026rsquo;s why my next programing project is going to be written in lisp:\nI enjoy it. I suspect this project like many projects you may be considering is something of an undertaking. Given that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to work in an environment that I don\u0026rsquo;t enjoy, simply because it\u0026rsquo;s popular or ubiquitous. Although Lisp isn\u0026rsquo;t very popular, it\u0026rsquo;s popular enough that all of the things that you might want to do in your project have library support. So it\u0026rsquo;s not exactly a wasteland. The Common Lisp community is small, but it\u0026rsquo;s dedicated and fairly close knit. Which means you may be able to get some exposure for your application in the CL community, simply because your app is written in CL. This is a question of scale, but it\u0026rsquo;s easier to stand out in a smaller niche. Of course there are some advantages to \u0026ldquo;sticking with the crowd\u0026rdquo; and choosing a different platform to develop your application in:\nIf you want other people to contribute to your project, it\u0026rsquo;s probably best to pick a language that the people who might be contributing to your application already know. While there are libraries for most common things that you might want to do with Common Lisp, there might not be libraries for very new or very esoteric tasks or interfaces. Which isn\u0026rsquo;t always a problem, but can be depending on your domain. The binary size problem will be an issue if you plan to deploy in limited conditions (we\u0026rsquo;re talking like a 15 meg base size for SBCL, which is a non issue in most cases, but might become an issue.) If you run into a problem, you might have a hard time finding an answer. This is often not the case, but it\u0026rsquo;s a risk. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-bother-with-lisp/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of saying \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not a programmer or software developer,\u0026rdquo; on this blog, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t think that there\u0026rsquo;s a great chance that I\u0026rsquo;ll be employed as a developer, it\u0026rsquo;s becoming more apparent that the real difference between me and a \u0026ldquo;real developer\u0026rdquo; is vanishingly small. Stealth Developer, or something. In any case, my ongoing tooling around with common lisp and more recently the tumble manager project have given me opportunities to think about lisp and to think about why I enjoy it.\nThis post started when a friend asked me \u0026ldquo;so should I learn common lisp.\u0026rdquo; And my first response was something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;no, are you crazy?\u0026rdquo; or, alternately \u0026ldquo;well if you really want to.\u0026rdquo; And then I came to my senses and offered a more reasonable answer that I think some of you might find useful.\nLet us start by asking \u0026ldquo;Should You Study Common Lisp?","title":"Why Bother With Lisp?"},{"content":"A few weeks ago a coworker walked into my office to talk about the architecture of a project, complete with diagrams, numbers I didn\u0026rsquo;t grasp (nor really need to,) and the examples of potential off the shelf components that would make up the stack of the application at hand. I asked scores of questions and I think it was a productive encounter. Normal day, really. I seem to be the guy developers come to and pitch ideas to for feedback. Not sure why but I thin think that the experience of talking through a programing or design problem tends to be a productive learning experience for everyone. In any case the details aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly important\nWhat stuck in my head is that an off the self, but non-trivial part of the system was written in Java.\nWe all inhaled sharply.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know what it is about Java, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s just me, but the moment I find out that an application is written in Java, I have a nearly visceral reaction. And I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s just me.\nJava earned a terrible reputation in the 90s, because although it was trumped as the next big thing every user facing application in Java sucked: first you had to download a lot of software (and hope that you got the right version of the dependency) and then when you ran the app it took a while to start up and looked like crap. And then your system ground to a halt and the app crashed. But these problems have been fixed: the dependency issue is more clear with the GPLing of Java, GUI bindings for common platforms are a bit stronger, computers have gotten a lot faster, and perhaps most importantly the hopes of using Java as the cross platform application development environment have been dashed. I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably fair to say that most Java these days runs on the server side, so we don\u0026rsquo;t have to interact with it in the same sort of hands on way.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that administering Java components in server operations is without problems: Java apps tend to run a bit hot (in terms of RAM,) and can be a bit finicky, but Java applications seem to fit in a bit better in these contexts, and certainly have been widely deployed here. Additionally, I want to be very clear, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to blame the language for the poor programs that happen to be written in it.\nHere are the (hopefully not too leading) questions:\n1. Is the \u0026ldquo;write once run everywhere,\u0026rdquo; thing that Java did in the beginning still relevant, for server-based applications? It\u0026rsquo;s a server application after all, you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be loosing much by targeting a more concrete native platform.\n2. Is the fact that Java is statically typed more of hindrance in terms of programmer time? And will the comparative worth of Java\u0026rsquo;s efficiency wear off as computers continue to get more powerful\nConventional wisdom being that while statically typed apps \u0026ldquo;run faster,\u0026rdquo; but take longer to develop. This is the argument used by Python/Perl/Ruby/etc proponents, and I don\u0026rsquo;t know how the dynamics of these arguments shift in response to the action of Moore\u0026rsquo;s Law.\n3. One of the great selling points of Java is that it executes code in a \u0026ldquo;managed\u0026rdquo; environment, which provides some security and safety to the operator of the system. Does the emergence of system-level visualization tools make the sandboxing features of the JVM less valuable?\n4. I don\u0026rsquo;t think my experiences are particularly typical, but all of the Java applications I\u0026rsquo;ve done any sort of administrative work with have been incredibly resource intensive. This might be a product of the problem domains. Using Java is often like slinging a sledge hammer around, and so many problems these days don\u0026rsquo;t really require a sledge hammer.\n5. At this point, the amount of \u0026ldquo;legacy\u0026rdquo; Java code in use is vast. I sometimes have trouble understanding if Java current state is the result of all of the tools that have already been invested in the platform or the result of actually interesting and exciting developments in the platform. Like Clojure. Is Clojure (as an example,) popular because Lisp is cool again and people have finally come to their senses (heh, unlikely) or because it\u0026rsquo;s been bootstrapped by java and provides a more pain free coding experience for Java developers?\nAnyone have ideas on these points? Questions that you think I\u0026rsquo;m missing?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/where-is-java-today/","summary":"A few weeks ago a coworker walked into my office to talk about the architecture of a project, complete with diagrams, numbers I didn\u0026rsquo;t grasp (nor really need to,) and the examples of potential off the shelf components that would make up the stack of the application at hand. I asked scores of questions and I think it was a productive encounter. Normal day, really. I seem to be the guy developers come to and pitch ideas to for feedback. Not sure why but I thin think that the experience of talking through a programing or design problem tends to be a productive learning experience for everyone. In any case the details aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly important\nWhat stuck in my head is that an off the self, but non-trivial part of the system was written in Java.\nWe all inhaled sharply.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know what it is about Java, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s just me, but the moment I find out that an application is written in Java, I have a nearly visceral reaction.","title":"Where is Java Today?"},{"content":" The Contra Purity Test: A couple friends and thought it might be cool to work on a \u0026ldquo;purity test\u0026rdquo; for contra dancing/dancers. Mostly for jokes, I said \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll make a wiki page,\u0026rdquo; and then I did. It is, I\u0026rsquo;d say 70% done. Some writing and thinking about TumbleManager, tumblelog engine in response to this post. I\u0026rsquo;m writing this as a design document/spec sheet because I\u0026rsquo;m a writer and my brain works like this. The Lessons from System Administration is the beginning of an archive of posts that I\u0026rsquo;ve written recently drawing lessons learned in system administration into other more generally useful contexts. Sygn Networking - I\u0026rsquo;ve done some editing recently on this older project with an attempt to move it forward. Reorganization, cleaning up of text, adding new points in where they make sense. Of particular interest is, I think the data examples of what sygn profiles might look like. I hope this all helps illuminate the project a bit. Although this only barely counts: I did some very wiki-like editing to the tubmlelog post, which I think cleaned up the text a bit. I\u0026rsquo;m, as you\u0026rsquo;re aware, not a very polished sort of writer. But I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at cleaning things up after a fashion, and once I have the right distance. Or something. It\u0026rsquo;s a bit clearer now, at any rate. Also not wiki related specifically, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some rolling revisions on the Cyborg Institute website recently. I don\u0026rsquo;t want the CI project to die, but I want it to be more realistic, and useful to other people as a platform for some really awesome projects. I think by focusing the site, and pulling out some cruft we\u0026rsquo;re getting in that direction. In addition to the above, I wanted to explore the possibility of doing more posts like this occasionally as a way of saying \u0026ldquo;Hey! I\u0026rsquo;m working on cool things like the stuff I write about here, but the stuff isn\u0026rsquo;t getting posted here. Check them out\u0026rdquo; is that a valuable use of this space? Or would this tedious?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things-im-wiking-on/","summary":"The Contra Purity Test: A couple friends and thought it might be cool to work on a \u0026ldquo;purity test\u0026rdquo; for contra dancing/dancers. Mostly for jokes, I said \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll make a wiki page,\u0026rdquo; and then I did. It is, I\u0026rsquo;d say 70% done. Some writing and thinking about TumbleManager, tumblelog engine in response to this post. I\u0026rsquo;m writing this as a design document/spec sheet because I\u0026rsquo;m a writer and my brain works like this. The Lessons from System Administration is the beginning of an archive of posts that I\u0026rsquo;ve written recently drawing lessons learned in system administration into other more generally useful contexts. Sygn Networking - I\u0026rsquo;ve done some editing recently on this older project with an attempt to move it forward. Reorganization, cleaning up of text, adding new points in where they make sense. Of particular interest is, I think the data examples of what sygn profiles might look like.","title":"Things I'm Wiking On"},{"content":"In response mostly to my own comentary of the iPad I\u0026rsquo;d like to lead a collective brainstorming of input and computer interact modalities in \u0026ldquo;the next wave.\u0026rdquo;\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the next wave? That thing that\u0026rsquo;s always coming \u0026ldquo;soon,\u0026rdquo; but isn\u0026rsquo;t quite here yet, the thing that we are starting to see glimpses of, but don\u0026rsquo;t really know. Accepting for a moment that things like Blackberries, netbooks, Kindles, iPads, iPhones and the like are these \u0026ldquo;harbingers\u0026rdquo; of the next wave.\nThe \u0026ldquo;make or break\u0026rdquo; feature of all these new and shiny things is the input method: how we get stuff from our heads into a format that a computer can do something with. While I\u0026rsquo;m a particularly\u0026hellip; textual sort of guy, the \u0026ldquo;input question,\u0026rdquo; is something everyone who uses technology will eventually come to care about. Blackberry\u0026rsquo;s sell because they speak \u0026ldquo;messaging,\u0026rdquo; and because most of them have hardware keyboards. The iPad, with its bigger onscreen keyboard and external keyboard dock, is--to my mind--an admission that the little onscreen keyboard of the iPhone doesn\u0026rsquo;t work if you want enter more than 50 or 60 characters at any given time.\nI love a good hardware keyboard. A lot, and I\u0026rsquo;m not just talking about the kind on the blackberry, but a real keyboard. The truth is I can\u0026rsquo;t even quite bring myself to justify one of the little \u0026ldquo;netbooks\u0026rdquo; on the principal that everything I do involves massive amounts of typing. And fundamentally, at the moment there doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be a good replacement for getting data into a computer system, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve a keyboard. Clearly this can\u0026rsquo;t hold out forever, and so I\u0026rsquo;d like to pose two questions:\nWhat kind of computer interfaces will replace the command line? So in 2010 most people interact with their computers by way of the mouse and a lot of pretty pictures. Even mobile environments like the iPhone/iPad/etc. and the Blackberry have some sort of a pointer that the user has to manipulate.\nBut the truth is that this kind of modality has always been inefficient: switching between the mouse and the keyboard is the greatest time sink in current user interfaces. Graphical environments require increasingly sophisticated graphics hardware, they require users to memorize interfaces in a visual way that may not be intuitive (even if we\u0026rsquo;re accustomed,) and they have incredibly high development costs relative to other kinds of software. Furthermore, most of us use a lot of text-based interfaces weather we know it or not. Google is a command line interface, as are most web browser\u0026rsquo;s address bars. And although my coworkers and I are hardly typical, we all have a handful of terminals open at any given time.\nClearly shells, (e.g. bash, zsh, and the like) are not going to be around forever, but I think they\u0026rsquo;re going to be around until we find some sort of solution that can viably replace the traditional shell. We need computer interfaces that are largely textual, keyboard driven, powerful, modern, lightweight, fast, and designed to be used interactively. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what it looks like, but I know that it needs to exist.\nWhat kind of interfaces will replace the keyboard for data entry? When I was writing the iPad reflection, I thought it might be cool to have an input device that was mostly on the back of the device, so that you hold the device in both hands, your fingers make contact with some sort of sensors on the back, with your thumbs touching something on the front, and there\u0026rsquo;s some sort of on-screen interface that provides feedback to make up for the fact that you can\u0026rsquo;t see \u0026ldquo;the keys.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;d be inclined to think that this would be QWERTY derived, but that\u0026rsquo;s as much a habit as it is anything. I\u0026rsquo;m a pretty good touch typist, not perfect, and not the fastest, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have to think at all about typing it just happens. But I don\u0026rsquo;t know or think that the QWERTY keyboard is going to be the interface modality of the future. While I do want to learn DVORAK typing--but haven\u0026rsquo;t managed to really feel inspired enough to do that--I think its more productive to think about replacements for the keyboard itself rather than alternate layouts.\nThoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/input-in-the-next-wave/","summary":"In response mostly to my own comentary of the iPad I\u0026rsquo;d like to lead a collective brainstorming of input and computer interact modalities in \u0026ldquo;the next wave.\u0026rdquo;\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s the next wave? That thing that\u0026rsquo;s always coming \u0026ldquo;soon,\u0026rdquo; but isn\u0026rsquo;t quite here yet, the thing that we are starting to see glimpses of, but don\u0026rsquo;t really know. Accepting for a moment that things like Blackberries, netbooks, Kindles, iPads, iPhones and the like are these \u0026ldquo;harbingers\u0026rdquo; of the next wave.\nThe \u0026ldquo;make or break\u0026rdquo; feature of all these new and shiny things is the input method: how we get stuff from our heads into a format that a computer can do something with. While I\u0026rsquo;m a particularly\u0026hellip; textual sort of guy, the \u0026ldquo;input question,\u0026rdquo; is something everyone who uses technology will eventually come to care about. Blackberry\u0026rsquo;s sell because they speak \u0026ldquo;messaging,\u0026rdquo; and because most of them have hardware keyboards. The iPad, with its bigger onscreen keyboard and external keyboard dock, is--to my mind--an admission that the little onscreen keyboard of the iPhone doesn\u0026rsquo;t work if you want enter more than 50 or 60 characters at any given time.","title":"Input in the Next Wave"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking recently about the relationship and dynamic between the corporations and \u0026ldquo;enterprises\u0026rdquo; which participate in and reap benefits from open source/free software and the quasi-mythic \u0026ldquo;communities\u0026rdquo; that are responsible for the creation and maintenance of the software. Additionally this post may be considered part of my ongoing series on cooperative economics.\nWhen people, ranging from business types, to IT professionals, to programmers, and beyond, talk about open source software we talk about a community: often small to medium sized groups of people who all contribute small amounts of time to creating software. And we\u0026rsquo;re not just talking about dinky little scripts that make publishing blogs easier (or some such), we\u0026rsquo;re talking about a massive amount of software: entire operating systems, widely used implementations of nearly all relevant programing languages, and so forth. On some level the core of this question is who are these people, and how do they produce software?\nOn the surface the answer to these questions is straightforward. The people who work on open source software are professional programmers, students, geeks, and hacker/tinkerer-types who need their computers to do something novel, and then they write software. This works as model for thinking about who participates in open source, if we assume that the reason why people contribute to open source projects is because their individual works/contributions are too small to develop business models around. This might explain some portion of open source contributions, but it feels incomplete to me.\nThere are a number of software projects that use open source/free software licenses, with accessible source code, supported by \u0026ldquo;communities,\u0026rdquo; which are nonetheless developed almost entirely by single companies. MySQL, Alfresco, and Resin among others serve as examples these kinds of projects which are open source by many any definitions and yet don\u0026rsquo;t particularly strike me as \u0026ldquo;community,\u0026rdquo; projects. Is the fact that this software provides source code meaningful or important?\nOther questions\u0026hellip;\n1. If there are companies making money from open source code bases, particularly big companies in a business directly related to software, does this effect participation of people who are not employed by that company in the project?\nIn my mind I draw distinctions between technology businesses that use/sell/support open source software (e.g. Red-Hat, the late MySQL AB, etc.) and businesses that do something else but use open source software (i.e. everyone with a Linux server in the basement, every business with a website that runs on Apache, etc.)\n2. Does corporate personhood extend to the open source community. Are corporate developers contributing as people, or as representatives of their company?\nI largely expect that it\u0026rsquo;s the former; however, I\u0026rsquo;d be interested in learning more about the various factors which affect the way these contributors are perceived?\n3. Do people participate in open source because it is fun or for the enjoyment of programming,\n4. Has software become so generic that open source is a current evolution of industry standards groups. Do we write open source software for the same reason that industries standardized the size and threading of bolts?\n5. Are potential contributors disinclined to contribute to software that is controlled by a single entity, or where projects\n6. Is the cost of forking a software project too high to make that a realistic outcome of releasing open source software?\nConversely, were forks ever effective?\n7. Do communities actually form around software targeted at \u0026ldquo;enterprise\u0026rdquo; users, and if so in what ways are those communities different from the communities that form around niche window p managers or even community projects like Debian?\nI don\u0026rsquo;t of course have answers yet, but I think these questions are important, and I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear if you have any ideas about finding answers to these questions, or additional related questions that I\u0026rsquo;ve missed.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/if-open-source-is-big-business-then-whither-the-community/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking recently about the relationship and dynamic between the corporations and \u0026ldquo;enterprises\u0026rdquo; which participate in and reap benefits from open source/free software and the quasi-mythic \u0026ldquo;communities\u0026rdquo; that are responsible for the creation and maintenance of the software. Additionally this post may be considered part of my ongoing series on cooperative economics.\nWhen people, ranging from business types, to IT professionals, to programmers, and beyond, talk about open source software we talk about a community: often small to medium sized groups of people who all contribute small amounts of time to creating software. And we\u0026rsquo;re not just talking about dinky little scripts that make publishing blogs easier (or some such), we\u0026rsquo;re talking about a massive amount of software: entire operating systems, widely used implementations of nearly all relevant programing languages, and so forth. On some level the core of this question is who are these people, and how do they produce software?","title":"If Open Source is Big Business Then Whither the Community?"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about how ideas, projects, and ideas scale a bit in the past few weeks, and as usual, I wanted to collect a few of these thoughts. This post is generally in my series of posts of \u0026ldquo;Extrapolations from Systems Administration.\u0026rdquo; Inspirations and origins of these ideas come from, in part:\nMy Tumblr Killed the Tumblelog Star post. My Google reader unread count. Savage Minds Post on Social Enterpernurship and Anthropology post. All the television I don\u0026rsquo;t watch. The nginx HTTP Proxy module. Seeing the Forest for the Brand The internet is a big place, you don\u0026rsquo;t need me to tell you this, but I think that it\u0026rsquo;s really incomprehensibly big. Even the small corners of the internet that we (well, I at least,) inhabit contain vast amounts of information and it\u0026rsquo;s very difficult to keep your head above water, to feel like you\u0026rsquo;re in touch with what\u0026rsquo;s happening. Strategies for managing this information successfully are as concerned with \u0026ldquo;figuring out what to ignore,\u0026rdquo; as they are about figuring out how to absorb information successfully.\nScaling an idea or a concept (like a blog, or a piece of software or a web server) to be able to address problem sets (like an audience, or a given set of data, or both) of different sizes is just as difficult. It\u0026rsquo;s tough to get a web server to be able to host really large loads, its difficult to be able to write a blog that appeals to a huge audience: the this nexuses of related problems are quite large.\nI think, however, we can begin to draw some conclusions. I do hope that you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to help me add to this list. Perhaps in a wikish page.\nBe the biggest fish in the smallest possible pond.\nThe core strategy here is to avoid having to figure out how to scale up to \u0026ldquo;full speed,\u0026rdquo; by reframing the problem set. You don\u0026rsquo;t have to become the most popular or widely consumed blogger/novelist: you just have to become the most popular blogger about cyborg philosophy, or the political economics and philosophy of the open source world. You have to become the most popular post-colonial historiography space opera novelist.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t participate in the proliferation of crap: only build/use what you need to.\nI see lots of people say something along the lines of \u0026ldquo;I want to make a websites for all of the people interested in what I\u0026rsquo;m interested in, and we\u0026rsquo;ll need a wiki and some discussion forums, and some sort of blogs, maybe a lot of blogs, and\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; This inevitably leads to a bunch of organization and building of things for their websites, and then everything is built and\u0026hellip; no one is interested in using the crap.\nThis is a classic premature optimization problem. Don\u0026rsquo;t build things that you think you might need later. Build things that you need now. Or things that you really needed last week. Focus on the thing you do, and build the infrastructure as you need it, when you need it.\nWork in a scalable and sustainable manner, and assume that other people will need to pick up on your projects.\nWhile you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t expend the effort to scale before you need to, because that could end in failure, it\u0026rsquo;s common sense to approach your projects with the assumption that other people might have to finish them for you, if things take off and you need to delegate later you\u0026rsquo;ll be ready for them. Consider the possibility that you might need to scale a project when you\u0026rsquo;re in the initial planning stages and avoid getting backed into a corner by a decision.\nIgnore everything you can possibly stand to.\nThere are so many things that you could be doing with your time. There are so many distractions. Email lists, RSS feeds, the work of other people in your field. Charity projects of one sort or another. All of these things are important and you should participate fully in the communities that surround your work, but be fully aware that humans as individuals don\u0026rsquo;t scale well, and succeeding at [your project] is dependent upon your ability to ignore everything that you can stand to.\nConsume information on your terms, in the formats that make the most sense to you.\nAs a corollary to the above, the way to successfully engage and manage everything that you can\u0026rsquo;t possibly stand to ignore is to as much as possible engage on your terms. Figure out what your terms are first, and then work to consume content in these terms.\nUse technology and media to build relationships rather than accumulate information.\nToo often, I think, the geekier among us (and I count myself among this number) are interested in technology because it\u0026rsquo;s cool, and we\u0026rsquo;re tempted to solve technological problems and learn about the inner workings of stuff because they interest us. And that\u0026rsquo;s okay, as a hobby: in the pursuit of doing work, technology is only useful insofar as it allows you to get things done. And in most cases, the core function that technology provides is to enable relationships. So focus on that, and fiddle with the technical underpinnings, only when you must.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/conceptualizing-scale/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about how ideas, projects, and ideas scale a bit in the past few weeks, and as usual, I wanted to collect a few of these thoughts. This post is generally in my series of posts of \u0026ldquo;Extrapolations from Systems Administration.\u0026rdquo; Inspirations and origins of these ideas come from, in part:\nMy Tumblr Killed the Tumblelog Star post. My Google reader unread count. Savage Minds Post on Social Enterpernurship and Anthropology post. All the television I don\u0026rsquo;t watch. The nginx HTTP Proxy module. Seeing the Forest for the Brand The internet is a big place, you don\u0026rsquo;t need me to tell you this, but I think that it\u0026rsquo;s really incomprehensibly big. Even the small corners of the internet that we (well, I at least,) inhabit contain vast amounts of information and it\u0026rsquo;s very difficult to keep your head above water, to feel like you\u0026rsquo;re in touch with what\u0026rsquo;s happening.","title":"Conceptualizing Scale"},{"content":"When I talk about Sacred Harp singing with my friends from college, they all look at me like I\u0026rsquo;m crazy. \u0026ldquo;Right, I go sing 18th century hymns set to music in the 19th century (and later,) with my hippie and queer friends in quasi-archaic harmonies. It\u0026rsquo;s a blast!\u0026rdquo; This isn\u0026rsquo;t my tradition, both in the sense that I don\u0026rsquo;t come from a sacred harp singing family, and in the sense that I come from a particularly unobservant Jewish family.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something about Sacred Harp, that I think is hard to describe. Everyone comes to it for different worlds, and there are a lot of people who grew up with it and/or identify as Christian in the community. While I think most people who sing Sacred Harp find it a deeply fulfilling experience, for many its as much about the shared experience, the guttural experience of the chords, and the \u0026ldquo;sacred/special space\u0026rdquo; as it is about the texts. This is something that I think is pretty difficult to explain to someone who hasn\u0026rsquo;t felt a singing.\nI mentioned a while ago my interest in writing hymns in the tradition of the sacred harp, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything to present to you yet, or even some example of what I\u0026rsquo;m playing with, as I haven\u0026rsquo;t actually constructed anything. I do have the following observation.\nThe texts and aesthetics of the Sacred Harp is encapsulated with what I think is probably a not very contemporary view of the divine. In my reading, the texts display a relationship to the divine that is distant and detached. I might even say reserved and tentative. The speakers in the text are not individuals but more collectively constituted persons--this fits well with the way the music is sung--and the speakers generally do not interact with or speak to the divinity directly, except possibly to give thanks or appreciation. Like the harmonies themselves, the texts are spare and stark; indeed I suspect their simplicity makes the tunes easier to sing (words are almost always easier to sing than shapes,) while being very careful to not distract from the tunes.\nAs I said, this isn\u0026rsquo;t my tradition, at all, in addition to the structural constraints of the form (common meter, for the most part,) I think the stylistic constraints present the larger challenge. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out how to write text that isn\u0026rsquo;t cloyingly spiritual, and that fits my own worldview (such as it is,) but that also respects this kind of spiritual aesthetic, for lack of a better term. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading up on various religious phenomena, contemplative orders, and the Religious Society of Friends. Because it seems appropriate.\nAs is, I think always the case, minimalism is always a lot harder than it looks. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/distance-from-the-divine/","summary":"When I talk about Sacred Harp singing with my friends from college, they all look at me like I\u0026rsquo;m crazy. \u0026ldquo;Right, I go sing 18th century hymns set to music in the 19th century (and later,) with my hippie and queer friends in quasi-archaic harmonies. It\u0026rsquo;s a blast!\u0026rdquo; This isn\u0026rsquo;t my tradition, both in the sense that I don\u0026rsquo;t come from a sacred harp singing family, and in the sense that I come from a particularly unobservant Jewish family.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something about Sacred Harp, that I think is hard to describe. Everyone comes to it for different worlds, and there are a lot of people who grew up with it and/or identify as Christian in the community. While I think most people who sing Sacred Harp find it a deeply fulfilling experience, for many its as much about the shared experience, the guttural experience of the chords, and the \u0026ldquo;sacred/special space\u0026rdquo; as it is about the texts.","title":"Distance from the Divine"},{"content":"This post represents two major ideas, first of \u0026ldquo;app stores,\u0026rdquo; and second of \u0026ldquo;Sass\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;software as a service,\u0026rdquo; which seems to be the prevailing business model for contemporary technology companies that aren\u0026rsquo;t stuck in the 80s. With reflection on free software, open source, and the technology industry as a whole. Because that\u0026rsquo;s sort of my thing.\nOn the one hand the emergence of these tightly controlled software distribution methods represent a fairly serious threat to free software, as does SaaS particular insofar as SaaS exploits a GPL loophole. On the other hand these models, potentially, represent something fundamentally awesome for the technology and software world, because it represents a commonly accepted paradigm where users of software recognize the value of software, and the creators of software can get compensated for their work. It\u0026rsquo;s not without its flaws, but I think it opens interesting possibilities.\nFree and Freedom Obviously app stores present a quandary for those of us involved in the free software world. On the one hand app stores are not free, which is a trivial complaint. It\u0026rsquo;s not the cost, around which \u0026ldquo;free software\u0026rdquo; is truly centered, the true failing here is that creators of software cannot choose to participate in an app store system and distribute source code: the interaction and relationship between developers and users is very scripted and detached. These issues all grow out of the reality that app stores--by design--are they\u0026rsquo;re controlled by a single institution or organization.\nWhich isn\u0026rsquo;t itself a bad thing--there are contexts where centralized organization means things get done more effectively, but centralized authority is not without risk. So while this question isn\u0026rsquo;t resolved, it\u0026rsquo;s also the kind of question that requires ongoing attention and reflection.\nPaying for Software At the same time, I think it\u0026rsquo;s very true that the \u0026ldquo;app store model\u0026rdquo; and indeed the more successful \u0026ldquo;Web 2.0\u0026rdquo; business models (e.g. new businesses on the web, post-2003/2004) have posited that:\nSoftware is a thing of value that users should expect to pay for.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s not, at least to my mind, a bad thing for the software world. Free or otherwise. Or not always a bad thing, particularly for end-user software. For larger pieces of software (in the \u0026ldquo;Enterprise\u0026rdquo;) money is largely exchanged for support contracts and for services related to the software: custom features, IT infrastructure, etc. For end user software, support contracts and custom features don\u0026rsquo;t tend to make a lot of sense in context: so perhaps moving back to the exchange of money for software isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing.\nThe connection between \u0026ldquo;value\u0026rdquo; (which software almost certainly creates), and currency in the context of software is fraught. Software isn\u0026rsquo;t scarce, and will never be (by nature.) At the same time it does have value and I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth considering how to arrange economies that involve exchanging money for software. There are a lot of factors that can effect the way that app stores might work, and I think given the possibility for causing interesting things to happen we shouldn\u0026rsquo;t dismiss them out of hand.\nRelated Reading Despite my (potential) lack of clarity at the moment, I think the following posts reflect some of my earlier thoughts on this subject.\nPackage Management and why your Platform Needs and App Store iPad Reactions Free Network Businesses There\u0026rsquo;s a Widget for that Owning Bits ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/software-as-app-store/","summary":"This post represents two major ideas, first of \u0026ldquo;app stores,\u0026rdquo; and second of \u0026ldquo;Sass\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;software as a service,\u0026rdquo; which seems to be the prevailing business model for contemporary technology companies that aren\u0026rsquo;t stuck in the 80s. With reflection on free software, open source, and the technology industry as a whole. Because that\u0026rsquo;s sort of my thing.\nOn the one hand the emergence of these tightly controlled software distribution methods represent a fairly serious threat to free software, as does SaaS particular insofar as SaaS exploits a GPL loophole. On the other hand these models, potentially, represent something fundamentally awesome for the technology and software world, because it represents a commonly accepted paradigm where users of software recognize the value of software, and the creators of software can get compensated for their work. It\u0026rsquo;s not without its flaws, but I think it opens interesting possibilities.\nFree and Freedom Obviously app stores present a quandary for those of us involved in the free software world.","title":"Software as app Store"},{"content":"I said to a new writing friend \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m young, particularly given that anyone under the age of 40 in the science fiction community is considered \u0026lsquo;a young writer.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; Which is, more or less true (on both counts,) and brought on a couple of trains of thought that I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore in a bit more depth:\n1. The \u0026ldquo;youth\u0026rdquo; of a writer is long, indeed much longer than one would expect.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;ve found a community of science fiction writers. Admittedly I\u0026rsquo;m new and very much on the outside, but I find it delightful that all of the \u0026ldquo;things I do,\u0026rdquo; are part of communities one sort or another: Sacred Harp singing, Morris Dancing (in the Midwest, particularly,) Contra Dancing (on the East Cost, particularly,) Free/Open Source software, blogging, and apparently Science Fiction writing.1\nThe Portrait of the Author During Youth I\u0026rsquo;ve written here before about the challenges and inherent problems of \u0026ldquo;being a writer:\u0026rdquo; the work we do is potentially hard to understand, good writing is more than the sum of its parts, and because writing is a sign of education for most people, sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to figure out (even those of us who \u0026ldquo;are writers\u0026rdquo;) to figure out what\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;writing,\u0026rdquo; and what\u0026rsquo;s just throwing words together.\nNow to be fair, I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining that the period of \u0026ldquo;youth\u0026rdquo; as a writer is so long. This standard seems wrapped up in the idea that a large component of being a \u0026ldquo;real writer,\u0026rdquo; is having lived long enough to have enjoyed a great deal of unique experiences (which can inform your work,) and also to have had enough time writing \u0026ldquo;crap\u0026rdquo; to be able to have the (learned) skill of being able to construct quality texts.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really hard to tell people, epically the young, that they need to \u0026ldquo;wait until they\u0026rsquo;re older.\u0026rdquo; But I think once we (I) get done with the pouting, there\u0026rsquo;s a pretty strong silver lining: the extended adolescence of the writer provides a longer window to read, to experiment, to apprentice to other writers, and to grow as a writer. Additionally, if the \u0026ldquo;youth\u0026rdquo; of a science fiction writer is longer than it is for writers in other fields (and I suspect it is, slightly,) the science fiction community has created a way to compensate for the exclusion of science fiction from most academic writing programs. These are all largely good things, to my mind.\nCommunity Discourses I think communities are fascinating, and I\u0026rsquo;m delighted to touch so many different and interesting communities. It seems to me that the formation of communities is very much not a project for youth. As young people, our communities are local, and based on where we go to school, where we live, even where we work. The communities I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about there are, in turn based on what we\u0026rsquo;re interested in and what we love to do. Although there\u0026rsquo;s a potential for insularity and self-selecting qualities, there\u0026rsquo;s also a great potential for diversity. There are a lot of different kinds of science fiction writers, sacred harp singers, folk dancers, open source hackers, and so forth.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s another interesting set of common factors for these communities: they\u0026rsquo;re all built around shared experiences and activities in the \u0026ldquo;real world\u0026rdquo; (as it is,) but the members of these communities tend to be scattered across a given geographic area. Though I don\u0026rsquo;t have much to compare this to, personally, but I think the ways that these communities are supported and connected through the Internet. As much as Facebook irritates me on a technological level, its done it\u0026rsquo;s job.\nThe principals under which communities function and adhere are not something I have a terribly firm grasp of, I must confess, but I know what I find myself in one, it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing indeed.\nI have, it seems too many hobbies and avocations.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/coming-of-age-in-the-science-fiction-community/","summary":"I said to a new writing friend \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m young, particularly given that anyone under the age of 40 in the science fiction community is considered \u0026lsquo;a young writer.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; Which is, more or less true (on both counts,) and brought on a couple of trains of thought that I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore in a bit more depth:\n1. The \u0026ldquo;youth\u0026rdquo; of a writer is long, indeed much longer than one would expect.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;ve found a community of science fiction writers. Admittedly I\u0026rsquo;m new and very much on the outside, but I find it delightful that all of the \u0026ldquo;things I do,\u0026rdquo; are part of communities one sort or another: Sacred Harp singing, Morris Dancing (in the Midwest, particularly,) Contra Dancing (on the East Cost, particularly,) Free/Open Source software, blogging, and apparently Science Fiction writing.1\nThe Portrait of the Author During Youth I\u0026rsquo;ve written here before about the challenges and inherent problems of \u0026ldquo;being a writer:\u0026rdquo; the work we do is potentially hard to understand, good writing is more than the sum of its parts, and because writing is a sign of education for most people, sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to figure out (even those of us who \u0026ldquo;are writers\u0026rdquo;) to figure out what\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;writing,\u0026rdquo; and what\u0026rsquo;s just throwing words together.","title":"Coming of Age In The Science Fiction Community"},{"content":"Ok, so not really.\nThis post is mostly about playing a head game with yourself, in an effort to get more organized. But not \u0026ldquo;head games\u0026rdquo; in a bad way. On my to do list for the past few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve had something like \u0026ldquo;write a blog post about todo list item titles,\u0026rdquo; because in light of this post about org-mode it seems like a topic in need of further definition. Basically my goal is to explore, the best way to think about what we have to do, to allow us to accomplish what we want to. The GTD system which so many people are enamored of present a few ideas on the topic, and while the GTD way is a good place to start thinking, it\u0026rsquo;s not a good place to stop thinking.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve all done it. Made a todo list that we didn\u0026rsquo;t end up using for one reason or another. Todo lists, need to be useful: they should help us organize our day, and help us keep track of all the things wee need to accomplish. In a lot of ways, maintaining focus over our day and all of the tasks that nag at us are contradictory, so todo lists are failed by design.\nThe first, and frequent issue in my own organization are lists and plans that go too far and list too many \u0026ldquo;actionable items.\u0026rdquo; This divides your time and actions into too many little pieces, leading to a number of outcomes. The first risk is that you might start to ignore the list entirely because it\u0026rsquo;s too long and complicated, even if it\u0026rsquo;s an illusion caused by the size of the items on your list. Ergo, the total length of the list you \u0026ldquo;work off of,\u0026rdquo; needs to be manageable and comprehensible.\nThe second risk, is that, an overactive todo list is one where you over plan for yourself, such that your list--while accurate and comprehensible--isn\u0026rsquo;t useful. Beyond simply providing \u0026ldquo;outboard memory,\u0026rdquo; the best todo lists allow us to structure and make plans for our working time. When working (e.g. writing, at the computer, etc.), I like to have my projects chopped up into pieces that can conceivably get done in the time I have to work on them, but that give me the time and freedom to bury myself on a side project, or follow inspiration or a train of thought to its completion when needed. While effective todo lists help you structure your time, flexibility is still valuable.\nThere are issues on the other end of the spectrum as well: when lists are too short, and the \u0026ldquo;actionable items\u0026rdquo; on a list are too conceptually large, the effectiveness of lists is degraded as well. A reminder to \u0026ldquo;write a novel,\u0026rdquo; even a specific novel, is less than helpful for helping you accomplish something in the moment. Even a dozen items, on a list where you end up checking something off once every day or two doesn\u0026rsquo;t help you figure out \u0026ldquo;Ok, what do I need to work on now.\u0026rdquo; Besides the chances are, if the items are too large and the list is too small, that you probably have it memorized anyway.\nRight? Other strategies?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things-im-going-to-do-today/","summary":"Ok, so not really.\nThis post is mostly about playing a head game with yourself, in an effort to get more organized. But not \u0026ldquo;head games\u0026rdquo; in a bad way. On my to do list for the past few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve had something like \u0026ldquo;write a blog post about todo list item titles,\u0026rdquo; because in light of this post about org-mode it seems like a topic in need of further definition. Basically my goal is to explore, the best way to think about what we have to do, to allow us to accomplish what we want to. The GTD system which so many people are enamored of present a few ideas on the topic, and while the GTD way is a good place to start thinking, it\u0026rsquo;s not a good place to stop thinking.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve all done it. Made a todo list that we didn\u0026rsquo;t end up using for one reason or another.","title":"The Things I'm Going To Do Today"},{"content":"As you all might have heard that Amazon (finally) released a Kindle Application for the Blackberry. When I heard this I thought that this would be a good thing, as I have (and quite enjoy) both my Blackberry and Kindle. Here\u0026rsquo;s the rundown:\nThe Kindle App for the blackberry is probably the most well designed blackberry application I\u0026rsquo;ve seen thus far. Having said that, the bar isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly high.\nIn a lot of ways, the way (before the Kindle app) to make a \u0026ldquo;successful\u0026rdquo; blackberry application is one that figures out how to make its data \u0026ldquo;fit\u0026rdquo; into an email or messaging context and then blend that data into the messaging/event feed in a useful sort of way.\nThis doesn\u0026rsquo;t do that, and I think learns a great deal from advancements made in iPhone app development. The resolution on the Blackberry Bold is amazing (same number of pixels as the iPhone, much greater density.) and the buttons/interface is really intuitive and well designed. The app itself gets as many thumbs up as I can manage.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been having phone angst recently. I don\u0026rsquo;t use it very much, I need to have better filtering of my email and reorganize how I do my voice mail, and while this is easy enough to say here it\u0026rsquo;s a much more substantial project than I\u0026rsquo;ve got time for now.\nThe Kindle App isn\u0026rsquo;t a replacement for the kindle, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great compliment, and it makes it much more possible to lighten the load in my back-bag, and it makes it easier for me to entertain myself with my phone. This might not seem like a bit deal, but I think it is.\nThere are also situations where the Kindle isn\u0026rsquo;t usable (in bed when the lights are off and various other low light situations) and that\u0026rsquo;s alright, but the Kindle app is. So that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing indeed.\nI had hoped that the kindle would make it easier to read in the in between moments throughout the day when I might read but didn\u0026rsquo;t. That isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly true, as it turns out. Reading on the Kindle still requires a fair piece of directed attention, and it\u0026rsquo;s not the kind of thing you can idly whip out while you\u0026rsquo;re waiting in the grocery check out line.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure at this point, of course, but I do think that having access to the Kindle on the phone will improve this usability feature.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sort of annoyed by the lack of subscriptions. While you can have multiple devices attached to your Kindle account, when you subscribe to a periodical, that content is only accessible to you on one of your devices. I don\u0026rsquo;t really like this, and it represents a huge loss of value for the Kindle store.\nWhile I got the Blackberry shortly after the first iPhone 3g came out, the \u0026ldquo;app explosion\u0026rdquo; hadn\u0026rsquo;t really happened yet. I must confess some \u0026ldquo;app jealousy.\u0026rdquo; The Blackberry is awesome, and really it does the messaging quite better than anything else around (I\u0026rsquo;m convinced.) And I love the hardware keyboard. But when I think \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;d like to do something with my phone,\u0026rdquo; the chance of getting a Blackberry app to do that is\u0026hellip; unlikely. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I want a lot of apps on my phone, in the end, but I know the hardware is capable, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to take advantage of that from time to time. In any case\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/kindle-and-paradise-regained/","summary":"As you all might have heard that Amazon (finally) released a Kindle Application for the Blackberry. When I heard this I thought that this would be a good thing, as I have (and quite enjoy) both my Blackberry and Kindle. Here\u0026rsquo;s the rundown:\nThe Kindle App for the blackberry is probably the most well designed blackberry application I\u0026rsquo;ve seen thus far. Having said that, the bar isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly high.\nIn a lot of ways, the way (before the Kindle app) to make a \u0026ldquo;successful\u0026rdquo; blackberry application is one that figures out how to make its data \u0026ldquo;fit\u0026rdquo; into an email or messaging context and then blend that data into the messaging/event feed in a useful sort of way.\nThis doesn\u0026rsquo;t do that, and I think learns a great deal from advancements made in iPhone app development. The resolution on the Blackberry Bold is amazing (same number of pixels as the iPhone, much greater density.","title":"Kindle and Paradise Regained"},{"content":"Perhaps part of the reason the iPad doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense for me is that I\u0026rsquo;ve never really used an iPhone, and at the core iPad is basically iPhone++. I opted to get a Blackberry because I wanted a device that did email right and messaging, I had/have an iPod Touch that I don\u0026rsquo;t really use and the little isolated applications that don\u0026rsquo;t interact well with my existing work flow and lock data in didn\u0026rsquo;t really appeal to me.\nPeople are always talking about \u0026ldquo;the apps,\u0026rdquo; as if there\u0026rsquo;s something revolutionary happening here, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always been a bit non plussed. At least for my personal use, more \u0026ldquo;applications,\u0026rdquo; or places where \u0026ldquo;things can be done,\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t always equate into more productivity.\nRunning in parallel to this, of course is the whole Web 2.0/web-based application development thing. (Is Web2.0 coasting to a halt yet? In any case, it\u0026rsquo;s probably still a current phenomena worth noting.) Although iPhone applications and Web applications are constructed in very ways that are quite technically distinct, there\u0026rsquo;s an underlying commonality between the way that both function. These applications are very much not general purpose. The best iPhone (or web) applications take a specific kind of data or information (or a collection of such), and provide a way for you to interact with that information in a way that\u0026rsquo;s (hopefully) intuitive.\nIn contrast the old familiar applications typically are designed to be either: platforms that enable you to accomplish a whole range of tasks within a certain sphere (\u0026ldquo;Office tools,\u0026rdquo; email applications, emacs), or some sort of filter or pipe that allows you to access data in one format in an interface that\u0026rsquo;s easy to use (RSS readers, Content management systems, pdf readers, web brwosers, etc.) There are certainly web applications that are basically pipes, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure Google would love it if we all used their application stack.\nSo, then, what describes this new \u0026ldquo;widget,\u0026rdquo; class of applications for mobile devices and the web? On the one hand it\u0026rsquo;s a case of developers \u0026ldquo;making do with what there is:\u0026rdquo; the iPhone imposes a number of serious constraints: small screen, limited on board computing resources, and a potentially inconsistent data connection. Small structured apps that are all about allowing you to interact with a small set of data work best in this environment. Additional I suspect that technology has advanced to a point where making these kinds of applications is finally possible and worth the it takes to build them: MVC frameworks have finally matured perhaps.\nThe enduring questions in my mind:\nIs the data that we\u0026rsquo;re throwing into databases by way of iPhone apps and web applications going to continue to be useful in the future? This gets at the \u0026ldquo;open data\u0026rdquo; question as much if not more than the \u0026ldquo;open source\u0026rdquo; aspect of applications. What\u0026rsquo;s the realistic utility of our data in the long form? Does this shift mark a move away from a certain kind of \u0026ldquo;paper-based logic,\u0026rdquo; to a more digital way of organizing or data and digital experiences? Is this just the process of bringing the kinds of \u0026ldquo;business applications,\u0026rdquo; that enterprises have developed and used for decades into the consumer sphere? How do the concepts of software freedom and data ownership transfer to this mode of using technology. While it\u0026rsquo;s easy to say \u0026ldquo;data ought to be free,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;source code still matter\u0026rdquo; (both of which are true,) I think practically it\u0026rsquo;s a bit more difficult. What do these applications look like on the Desktop? Is the future JavaFX, Flex, Silverlight, and Apple Desktop Widgets? Is the desktop going to be stuck in the browser? Are there other options? And while I think we\u0026rsquo;re definitely using and creating this kind of software with abandon, I don\u0026rsquo;t know if we\u0026rsquo;ve reached good answers to these (and other related) questions. I look forward to exploring these ideas, and hearing your thoughts!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/theres-a-widget-for-that/","summary":"Perhaps part of the reason the iPad doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense for me is that I\u0026rsquo;ve never really used an iPhone, and at the core iPad is basically iPhone++. I opted to get a Blackberry because I wanted a device that did email right and messaging, I had/have an iPod Touch that I don\u0026rsquo;t really use and the little isolated applications that don\u0026rsquo;t interact well with my existing work flow and lock data in didn\u0026rsquo;t really appeal to me.\nPeople are always talking about \u0026ldquo;the apps,\u0026rdquo; as if there\u0026rsquo;s something revolutionary happening here, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always been a bit non plussed. At least for my personal use, more \u0026ldquo;applications,\u0026rdquo; or places where \u0026ldquo;things can be done,\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t always equate into more productivity.\nRunning in parallel to this, of course is the whole Web 2.0/web-based application development thing. (Is Web2.0 coasting to a halt yet? In any case, it\u0026rsquo;s probably still a current phenomena worth noting.","title":"There's a Widget for That"},{"content":"A few years ago, highly citational, link/youtube video blogs came back into style again. This time rather than calling them blogs, we called them \u0026ldquo;tumblelogs.\u0026rdquo; I never really got into it, though I tried, and even my original inspiration for starting tychoish.com was to do a more \u0026ldquo;tumblelog-esque\u0026rdquo; blog.It never quite worked out. Then I read this post by Michael Coté which inspired a few things:\nFirst, it got the following title to stick in my head and refuse to get out. Second, it left me with the idea that, although successful, sites like tumblr and to a different extent posterous basically ruined the tumblelogging revival.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the thing about tumblelogs: they worked and worked so well because they were efficient, because the people creating tumblogs were doing something unique and had unique voices, because you could keep your pulse on most of a single discourse by watching only a few sites/rss feeds. And then it became, very suddenly, trivial to make a tumble log. And so everyone had a tumblelog, and it was like blogging was new again, except things \u0026ldquo;meme\u0026rsquo;d out\u0026rdquo; at an epic pace and it became difficult to track what anyone was saying. It was like a distributed denial of service attack on our attention spans.\nAnd as the dust settled, tumblelogs, at least as far as I could see, became less about a sort of delightful amalgamation of interesting content and more about templates, about piping in a fire hose of content from delicious/twitter/etc. So not only were there too many tumblelogs, but the style had devolved somewhat into this weird unedited, awkwardly template-ed mass of \u0026ldquo;crap\u0026rdquo; that is (in my opinion) quite hard to read or derive value from.\nWhat Made Tumblelogs Work Originally The systems that powered them were kludgy but they made it very possible to post content easily. That\u0026rsquo;s a good thing. They used a unique sort of web design where design elements (tables/grids/CSS magic,) reflected and accented the content type. They were largely editorial functions. People followed tumblelogs because their authors were able to filter though content with exceptional speed and grace, and in the process of filtering provide real value. They were multimedia, and incorporated many different kinds of content. Not just links, not just embedded youtube videos, but snippets of IM and IRC conversations, song lyrics, pictures from flickr, and so forth. projectionist one of the first and best, was a group effort: when group blogs work, they really work. The tumblelog, seems like an ideal platform for group blogging. How We Can Make Tumblelogs Work Again We use publishing systems and tools that are unique and that stretch and bend the form. A tumblelog theme for Wordpress, will probably always reek like wordpress. Same with other popular content management systems. Tumblelogs work because they\u0026rsquo;re not just blogs, they need to distinguish themselves both visually, and in terms of how their authors write the content. We undertake tumblogs as a collaborative effort. Group projects complicate things, of course, but they also create great possibilities. Vary content, intentionally, post quotes, chat excerpts, links, videos, lyrics, etc. Make sure that there\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of diversity of content. This is perhaps a problem to be solved in software, at least in port. Emphasize and cultivate editorial voice, and create an interface that forces authors and editors to touch the data. Thoughts? Suggestions?\nETA: I\u0026rsquo;ve started to work on this wiki page outlining a \u0026ldquo;tumble manager\u0026rdquo; tool. I also did a bit of textual refactoring on February 27, 2010\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tumblr-killed-the-tumblelog-star/","summary":"A few years ago, highly citational, link/youtube video blogs came back into style again. This time rather than calling them blogs, we called them \u0026ldquo;tumblelogs.\u0026rdquo; I never really got into it, though I tried, and even my original inspiration for starting tychoish.com was to do a more \u0026ldquo;tumblelog-esque\u0026rdquo; blog.It never quite worked out. Then I read this post by Michael Coté which inspired a few things:\nFirst, it got the following title to stick in my head and refuse to get out. Second, it left me with the idea that, although successful, sites like tumblr and to a different extent posterous basically ruined the tumblelogging revival.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the thing about tumblelogs: they worked and worked so well because they were efficient, because the people creating tumblogs were doing something unique and had unique voices, because you could keep your pulse on most of a single discourse by watching only a few sites/rss feeds.","title":"Tumblr Killed the Tumblelog Star"},{"content":"I went to a Dance festival a few weeks ago, and wanted to collect, as I am wont to do, some thoughts on the subject. No particular order or organization.\nThere was a sacred harp singing event at the festival, and then a group of us had a little ad hoc sacred harp session in a hallway (better acoustics) afterwords and the next day. The end result: I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m starting to really have a clue about Sacred Harp singing. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not great or anything, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel epically lost at a singing. Because I don\u0026rsquo;t come from a particularly background, and don\u0026rsquo;t have any real training with the singing thing, singing from the Sacred Harp has been an adventure. But now I sort of feel like I have the basics: I\u0026rsquo;m able to get the pitch most of the time. I feel like I have a good sense of myself as a leader and the kinds of songs I like. I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to become more familiar with a number of different songs in the book, and so forth. I don\u0026rsquo;t have the shapes memorized (or the middle verses to most songs!) but these things are coming.\nIt was also a very rewarding experience to be part of a group of singers who did that--for lack of a better term--jamming in the hallway. I don\u0026rsquo;t play an instrument, I don\u0026rsquo;t really lead songs in informal settings, so the whole \u0026ldquo;jamming in the hallway thing\u0026rdquo; is something I\u0026rsquo;ve never really been able to participate in. And getting the chance to do that was pretty cool.\nBut it was a dance festival. So how was the dancing? Pretty good. the space sucked (bad floor,) but the quality of the dance was wonderful. Contra-dancing in the Midwest, where I hail from, isn\u0026rsquo;t the hip musically experimental thing that it is out here. Part of that is due to the incredibly strong Old-time music community in St. Louis, which isn\u0026rsquo;t a good thing (even the less amazing contra bands in St. Louis are pretty damn good.) And there are a lot of factors that make contra dancing awesome out here: open/participatory bands as musical training grounds, more bands that travel (because things are closer together,) and more dancers that travel as well. That\u0026rsquo;s always nice.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;ve never really felt like a contra dancer. In high school, when I got into folk dance, I did a lot of international folk dance, and I think my defining folk-dance participation these days is Morris dancing, even though I probably do more contra than anything these days. When you\u0026rsquo;re a kid in the dance community, particularly one of the few kids in your local dance community you can pretty much glide through everything on enthusiasm and good intentions. While I think I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a few things about folk dance, I\u0026rsquo;m aware that I\u0026rsquo;m not the flashiest, or the most polished dancer around. This is particularly apparent at big dance festivals. But I got to dance with people who I think of as great dancers, and I had a lot of fun, so maybe it all works out. And then I went to a local dance and felt like a great dancer, particularly in terms of my ability to gracefully recover from flubs, and my sense of a dance\u0026rsquo;s relative complexity. So there you have it.\nThings that are awesome about contra dance:\nGender swapping partners in a dance. Particularly when everyone can go with the flow. Dips. Long rooms where you don\u0026rsquo;t get to the other end of the set in a given dance. Bands with awesome elements like foot percussion and woodwinds. Changing lines when you get to the other end of the dance. Rewriting a dance from the dance floor. Partner do si dos that become balance and swings. Shadow alamandes that become swings. Spins with your neighbor\u0026rsquo;s partner in the middle of heys for four. Conspiring with your partner to mess with neighbors. Graceful recoveries from dance flubs. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-flurry-of-contra-dance/","summary":"I went to a Dance festival a few weeks ago, and wanted to collect, as I am wont to do, some thoughts on the subject. No particular order or organization.\nThere was a sacred harp singing event at the festival, and then a group of us had a little ad hoc sacred harp session in a hallway (better acoustics) afterwords and the next day. The end result: I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m starting to really have a clue about Sacred Harp singing. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not great or anything, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel epically lost at a singing. Because I don\u0026rsquo;t come from a particularly background, and don\u0026rsquo;t have any real training with the singing thing, singing from the Sacred Harp has been an adventure. But now I sort of feel like I have the basics: I\u0026rsquo;m able to get the pitch most of the time. I feel like I have a good sense of myself as a leader and the kinds of songs I like.","title":"A Flurry of Contra Dance"},{"content":"I suppose I should apologize for the awful relationship between the title and what I\u0026rsquo;m about to write about. Titles, particularly for blog posts should be functional and descriptive: google won\u0026rsquo;t enjoy or take pleasure in your puns. Nevertheless\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on something of binge of blog posts to prevent this from happening again any time soon, and I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed something: my posts aren\u0026rsquo;t nearly as epic as they used to be. Nothing that I have in my drafts folder is longer than 750 words, and most of the posts are under 650.\nThis probably calls for some sort of celebration.\nI\u0026rsquo;m notoriously long-winded, and although I\u0026rsquo;ve been a really bad practitioner of \u0026ldquo;keep your blog posts short, concise, and clear,\u0026rdquo; I really do think that there\u0026rsquo;s a sweet spot for website-based content around around 600 words that\u0026rsquo;s really easy to read and comprehend on a computer screen. Even if most of my posts are a bit over this mark.\nSo what gives? why have I finally been able to figure out how to say what I want to say in fewer words? Here are the current theories:\nThe writing I do for the day job is teaching me (slowly) to be a bit more concise. My self imposed schedule is forcing me to be a bit more granular in the topics I choose to attack in a single blog post. I\u0026rsquo;m getting to the point quicker. I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like I\u0026rsquo;m spending as much time running around my arguments attempting to explain the premise. I\u0026rsquo;ve become more of a textual stylist than I ever used to be before. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m a stunning prose stylist, I\u0026rsquo;m much more aware of how my paragraphs come together these days, and I think that leads to more clear prose. I\u0026rsquo;m getting better at using unordered lists to organize information rather than as a rhetorical crutch. (Most reflexive bullet point ever.) I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this before. I had a class in college, where the professor assigned these short (250 words,) \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; entries that were due on a weekly basis. They didn\u0026rsquo;t have a topic, and most people reflected on the readings. I reflected on my other classes and how they related to the topic of the class I was taking. Half way through my roomate (who was also in the class,) commented that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t actually written about the readings for the class.\n\u0026ldquo;The journal entries don\u0026rsquo;t have topics. And I\u0026rsquo;m writing about the core material of the class,\u0026rdquo; I said.\n\u0026ldquo;You have to admit that it\u0026rsquo;s a bit absurd,\u0026rdquo; she said.1 She was right.\nI wrote the professor who was apparently fine with my eclectic interpretation of the assignment. The pieces were mostly technical exercises in being clear and concise, and she thought my entries were fine, if a bit esoteric. (I think the exact words were something along the lines of \u0026ldquo;delightful and widely synthetic.\u0026rdquo;) And so I kept writing those kinds of pieces.\nA year later I started really getting into blogging. The rest is history. When I first started at this, I enjoyed the freedom being able to write about whatever I wanted. Now I cherish the structure more than anything.\nIts funny how things change, sometimes.\nApologies to H.S. for the liberties I\u0026rsquo;ve taken with her words.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/simple-gifts/","summary":"I suppose I should apologize for the awful relationship between the title and what I\u0026rsquo;m about to write about. Titles, particularly for blog posts should be functional and descriptive: google won\u0026rsquo;t enjoy or take pleasure in your puns. Nevertheless\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on something of binge of blog posts to prevent this from happening again any time soon, and I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed something: my posts aren\u0026rsquo;t nearly as epic as they used to be. Nothing that I have in my drafts folder is longer than 750 words, and most of the posts are under 650.\nThis probably calls for some sort of celebration.\nI\u0026rsquo;m notoriously long-winded, and although I\u0026rsquo;ve been a really bad practitioner of \u0026ldquo;keep your blog posts short, concise, and clear,\u0026rdquo; I really do think that there\u0026rsquo;s a sweet spot for website-based content around around 600 words that\u0026rsquo;s really easy to read and comprehend on a computer screen. Even if most of my posts are a bit over this mark.","title":"Simple Gifts"},{"content":"Every system that requires your attention and responsibility comes with some sort of \u0026ldquo;management cost,\u0026rdquo; this includes servers that run websites and email, as well as the notes you take and--in my case--the novels you avoid writing.\nThis post, and really the last one as well, grows out of my interest and desire to stay organized, to work effectively without spending too much time and energy thinking about organization. Except of course that I write a bunch about this sort of thing on the blog, so maybe I\u0026rsquo;m a bad example of success. At the end of the day we\u0026rsquo;re all just folk\u0026rsquo;, I guess.\nThe argument at the present moment revolves around consolidation rather than an approach to design or organization. And the basic premise is: \u0026ldquo;no matter how complex your organizational problem is, you can probably accomplish what you need to by doing less.\u0026rdquo;\nFeel like you spend too much time reading email, or have too many email inboxes to check (personal email, work email, special project email, listserv email, facebook email, etc.)? Forward your email into one box and filter the hell out of it so that you only read what you really have to and it\u0026rsquo;s manageable. Feel like you have too many todo lists? Compile them into a single list and use some sort of tag system to organize it. Feel like your notes and documents are scared in too many places? Combine them and use some sort of search tool to find things when you need them. And so forth. In the analog information world (i.e. with papers, notebooks, and books) we often take the approach of sorting things into distinct piles of similar sorts of things, and arranging things physically in our worlds to reflect this basic sorting. For instance, \u0026ldquo;the science fiction books will be on the first three shelves, the 20Th century philosophy on the next three, college textbooks on the next, and [\u0026hellip;]\u0026rdquo; These habits, combined with unfortunate conventions like referring to hierarchical organizational units of a file system (e.g. directories) \u0026ldquo;folders,\u0026rdquo; encourages us to translate these real-world conventions to our digital existences. This is undoubtedly a bad idea.\nThe more data you pile together in one place, even dissimilar data, the more powerful it becomes. Say you have a PDF collection of articles on the anthropology of death and dying, post-colonial literature, and linguistics hanging out in different directories of your file system, and you begin to do research for a story you want to write set in the 1930s in India, where do you look? What if there are relevant articles in all three folders. What if you have a dozen or two dozen folders? What if you have a number of hierarchical organizational trees, and you store your notes, the actual text of what you\u0026rsquo;re working on, and your reference materials separately with parallel hierarchies?1 Quite suddenly you\u0026rsquo;re over-organized and disorganized all at the same time,\nThe more \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; you have the more difficult it is to manage. The key to success, or part of it at any rate, is being minimalist about your organization. Recognize that adding responsibilities, projects, directories, lists, email accounts, and so forth all come with a cost. And sometimes, being a little less organized means that you\u0026rsquo;re able to get more done, if that makes sense.\nIf your experiences reflect this (or run contrary to this logic,) I\u0026rsquo;d be very interested in hearing about how you have solved, and have continued to solve the issue.\nThis kind of system actually makes a lot of sense in the paper world, but is borderline absurd in the digital systems.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/managing-management-costs/","summary":"Every system that requires your attention and responsibility comes with some sort of \u0026ldquo;management cost,\u0026rdquo; this includes servers that run websites and email, as well as the notes you take and--in my case--the novels you avoid writing.\nThis post, and really the last one as well, grows out of my interest and desire to stay organized, to work effectively without spending too much time and energy thinking about organization. Except of course that I write a bunch about this sort of thing on the blog, so maybe I\u0026rsquo;m a bad example of success. At the end of the day we\u0026rsquo;re all just folk\u0026rsquo;, I guess.\nThe argument at the present moment revolves around consolidation rather than an approach to design or organization. And the basic premise is: \u0026ldquo;no matter how complex your organizational problem is, you can probably accomplish what you need to by doing less.\u0026rdquo;\nFeel like you spend too much time reading email, or have too many email inboxes to check (personal email, work email, special project email, listserv email, facebook email, etc.","title":"Managing Management Costs"},{"content":"By day I write documentation for systems administrators, and as a result I spend a lot (perhaps too much?) time thinking about how we organize computer systems so that they can be both useful and easy to manage in the long run. \u0026ldquo;Right, so\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; you say? Well indeed. Recently it\u0026rsquo;s become clear to me that there are some generalizable lessons to be learned from sys-admining that might be helpful to those of us who are less organized than they\u0026rsquo;d like to be.\nWhich is pretty much everyone, right?\nRight. In brief:\nAutomate everything that can be automated. Closely followed by don\u0026rsquo;t automate something that doesn\u0026rsquo;t need automation. Prefer simplicity over complexity, and prefer systems that require you to remember fewer things. Design systems to make it possible for others to easily understand what you\u0026rsquo;ve done. To elaborate:\nAutomation Computers are really good at doing what you tell them to do, and although we often like to finddle with them to make them work better, ideally the more we let systems take care of themselves. Also tasks that are automated, if the automation is designed and tested properly don\u0026rsquo;t make silly mistakes. If you\u0026rsquo;ve written systems to automate your tasks, you can understand and predict how your system is going to handle the kind of data that you throw at it.\nThe admonishment to \u0026ldquo;not automate\u0026rdquo; until you need something, is basically a variant on age old recommendation to \u0026ldquo;avoid premature optimization.\u0026rdquo; While automation is a good thing indeed, and if the thing you\u0026rsquo;re automating is really something that can be delegated to the machine without intervention on your part, then that may be worth your while to automate that task. By the same token, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to think \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;re going to need to do this thing a lot, I might as well automate it before hand.\u0026rdquo; Which is a reasonable thought to hand, but this puts the cart before the horse, and leads to two undesirable and possible outcomes: first the task doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be automated because it isn\u0026rsquo;t needed very often; you misunderstand what needs to be done and automate the wrong part of the task, or your automation doesn\u0026rsquo;t cover the edge cases and will need to be rewritten later.\nConventionally, automation tends to cover \u0026ldquo;coding\u0026rdquo; or scripting of some sort of task. Outside of programming and systems development, \u0026ldquo;automating\u0026rdquo; a task could be as simple as creating some sort of editor macro, or developing some new structure in your data store (database, files, etc.) to hold or manage a particular kind of data.\nSimplicity and Complexity The basic reasoning here is that while complex solutions are often elegant and attractive, and make a lot of sense when you\u0026rsquo;re setting something up, they always make you scratch your head six months or a year later when you need to go back and find something that you did back then or make a change to the system. Be wary of solutions to any problem that require too much consistency on the part of the user. If a system only works if you must remember to follow more than a few steps in a precise order, chances are things are too complex, and you\u0026rsquo;ll end up screwing yourself over later.\nErgo: Err on the side of simplicity, you\u0026rsquo;ll thank yourself later.\nThe more components and connections there are in a website application or deployment server the more potential for breakage is. The more complexity there is the better chance that FurtureYou or someone working in your footsteps will be totally confused by what you have set up. The same thing holds for whatever your trying to organize and manage.\nGeneralizable Organizational Methods Chances are you\u0026rsquo;re the only one who will be taking notes/organizing your work/storing information in your system. Nevertheless, I think it always helps to assume that other people are going to need to be able to make sense of your system. Be it your notes, and research or in your web-servers. Other people are sometimes our future selves.\nI tend to use the word system, in a way that most people would use the word \u0026ldquo;method.\u0026rdquo; I hope that\u0026rsquo;s not too confusing or distracting. I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably elaborate on these topics a bit more before in a later post. In a lot of ways this is part of the core of Cyborg Institute, and if you feel interested or inspired by this kind of stuff, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear more from you. Be in touch!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/system-design-and-organization/","summary":"By day I write documentation for systems administrators, and as a result I spend a lot (perhaps too much?) time thinking about how we organize computer systems so that they can be both useful and easy to manage in the long run. \u0026ldquo;Right, so\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; you say? Well indeed. Recently it\u0026rsquo;s become clear to me that there are some generalizable lessons to be learned from sys-admining that might be helpful to those of us who are less organized than they\u0026rsquo;d like to be.\nWhich is pretty much everyone, right?\nRight. In brief:\nAutomate everything that can be automated. Closely followed by don\u0026rsquo;t automate something that doesn\u0026rsquo;t need automation. Prefer simplicity over complexity, and prefer systems that require you to remember fewer things. Design systems to make it possible for others to easily understand what you\u0026rsquo;ve done. To elaborate:\nAutomation Computers are really good at doing what you tell them to do, and although we often like to finddle with them to make them work better, ideally the more we let systems take care of themselves.","title":"System Design and Organization"},{"content":"I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s The Martians, on my Kindle the other day (the short review: It was great, I don\u0026rsquo;t know how I felt about the poetry at the end, but I liked the collection.) and promptly began reading this month\u0026rsquo;s Asimov\u0026rsquo;s. The first story is an alternate history/fantastic history/I-think-there\u0026rsquo;s-science-fiction-coming-but-it\u0026rsquo;s-not-here-yet, piece and I can\u0026rsquo;t bring myself to really read get into it. It\u0026rsquo;s well written, and I even find myself delighting at the text (in a technical sense.) I think the issue that I\u0026rsquo;m running into is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really get the alternate history thing.\nWhich is, you know, weird. I should break out and say that my fiction tends to be very historically concerned. I\u0026rsquo;m fascinated by history and there are a lot of historiographical themes and ideas in the stories I write. But they\u0026rsquo;re all set in the future, and try as I might, I don\u0026rsquo;t really have much interest in writing stories set in the past of our world. Alternate or otherwise.\nMaybe it has something to do with my view of history. I tend to take a big picture approach to history and I tend to think that single events and single individuals rarely really affect history. If you called me a determinist I\u0026rsquo;d probably gnash my teeth for a few moments and then agree. Which makes constructing alternate histories sort of difficult. Add to that the fact that quasi-deterministic big pictures, though probably accurate and helpful, don\u0026rsquo;t lend themselves to good stories. When you don\u0026rsquo;t feel like your characters--any of them--have agency, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make for terribly interesting story telling.\nAt least for me. I think other people can pull it off.\nThis whole \u0026ldquo;I want my science fiction to be set in the future,\u0026rdquo; thing isn\u0026rsquo;t something I can rationalize or support very well. Clearly I don\u0026rsquo;t find the past to be a very good \u0026ldquo;escape.\u0026rdquo; The future is fun, vast, and full of possibilities and enables the sorts of things that I enjoy most in science fiction: the ability to engage in a critique of the present, high energy stories with adventure, and for lack of a better term, stories that impart a \u0026ldquo;sense of wonder.\u0026rdquo; There\u0026rsquo;s more out there, I just can\u0026rsquo;t seem to muster the interest.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I don\u0026rsquo;t sometimes find myself enchanted by non-futuristic stories, it\u0026rsquo;s just not a terribly frequent or predictable sort of experience. I should also be clear, I\u0026rsquo;m not of the opinion that when science fiction stories talk about the future and are set in a future, that they are about anything except the present at all.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly proud of this. I suppose we all have our things.\nI worry that my tastes aren\u0026rsquo;t sophisticated enough, that I enjoy stories for the wrong reasons, or that I get too caught up in the scenery and forget to pay attention to what really matters. Despite this whole \u0026ldquo;writer thing,\u0026rdquo; that I have going on these days I don\u0026rsquo;t have very much formal training in literature. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of awkward to say \u0026ldquo;I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m not a very good reader,\u0026rdquo; that\u0026rsquo;s definitely something that I battle with.\nFor those of you who are part of the larger community of science fiction/fantasy/genre fiction readers (which I think necessarily includes writers,) I\u0026rsquo;d be very interested to learn your thoughts on this subject: how do you relate to the future in the stories that you write and read? The past? Alternate histories? Is there some connection that I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly failed to see? Am I not alone in this?\nThank you (preemptively) for your feedback.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/some-future-in-your-science-fiction/","summary":"I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s The Martians, on my Kindle the other day (the short review: It was great, I don\u0026rsquo;t know how I felt about the poetry at the end, but I liked the collection.) and promptly began reading this month\u0026rsquo;s Asimov\u0026rsquo;s. The first story is an alternate history/fantastic history/I-think-there\u0026rsquo;s-science-fiction-coming-but-it\u0026rsquo;s-not-here-yet, piece and I can\u0026rsquo;t bring myself to really read get into it. It\u0026rsquo;s well written, and I even find myself delighting at the text (in a technical sense.) I think the issue that I\u0026rsquo;m running into is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really get the alternate history thing.\nWhich is, you know, weird. I should break out and say that my fiction tends to be very historically concerned. I\u0026rsquo;m fascinated by history and there are a lot of historiographical themes and ideas in the stories I write. But they\u0026rsquo;re all set in the future, and try as I might, I don\u0026rsquo;t really have much interest in writing stories set in the past of our world.","title":"Some Future in your Science Fiction"},{"content":"The Context git writing on wikish. haikus in git writing like a programer git thoughts git is this version control system that\u0026rsquo;s designed to be used in a distributed manner, and supports a very divers and non-linear workflow. While it\u0026rsquo;s designed to support the work of software developers--particularly in large projects like the linux kernel--at the core, git is just a file system layer that has an awareness of time and iteration. It also does its magic on any kind of text files\u0026hellip; code or writing. I use git to manage a lot of my writing--indeed, most of my digital life, which is a bit weird admittedly; and as a result people on the Internet, not to mention my coworkers,come to me with git questions from time. This post is a response to a more recent change.\nHow I Work I have two kinds of repositories: general repositories which store a bunch of different kinds of files that I need to work: the general repositories that store files that I always need to get things done, and specific project-only repositories that only have the text (and possibly notes) for a very specific project. I also have a \u0026ldquo;writing\u0026rdquo; repository where I do drafting for the blog, and start writing projects that I\u0026rsquo;d like to version, but are too small yet for their own project repositories. The brief overview:\ngaren is like my home directory within my home directory, and it has config files, scripts. and other daily essentials. org stores my org-mode files. fiction projects: I have five repositories in ~/ that store fiction projects, that I\u0026rsquo;m theoretically working on in some capacity, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t touched most of them regularly. writing holds blog drafting, and a couple of not-exactly-fiction, projects that I\u0026rsquo;m not quite ready to admit exist. website content: wikish, tychoish.com, cyborginstitute.com, the cyborg institute wiki and a few other website projects that I\u0026rsquo;m involved with have repositories to store their content. The lesson here, about repository organization, is that git wants you to have distinct repositories for different projects. Its possible to merge repositories together (really!) and also to separate the histories of specific directories into their own repositories if you\u0026rsquo;re so inclined.\nI write in emacs almost exclusively, I sometimes use magit, which is a delightful interface to git that works within emacs in a very emacs-centric way. If you use dired, magit will be familiar. Having said that, I mostly just add files, make commits and push repositories. Although I\u0026rsquo;ve been very interested in flashbake for some time, I\u0026rsquo;ve never really used it: it seems designed for people who aren\u0026rsquo;t used to version control or git, and the fact that I am means that it feels cumbersome to me. I suppose I should take this as a challenge, and attempt to hack it into something more usable from my perspective, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not felt the urge yet.\nI use gitosis (but it\u0026rsquo;s in the debian repositories) on foucault (my server) to manage the publication of my git repositories. I push regularly, both to make sure that all of my machines are up to date, and also as a way of keeping my systems backed up. While I don\u0026rsquo;t take snapshots of my systems, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to set up systems and been up and running inside of ninety minutes after reimaging a laptop without loosing a single bit. Although unorthodox, git is my backup strategy, and the restores work fine. I strongly recommend having your own git hosting set up. It\u0026rsquo;s not difficult, and while I think git hub is awesome on it\u0026rsquo;s own terms, independence and self sufficiency is really important here.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t really take advantage of any branching and merging in git, though I\u0026rsquo;ve played with it enough to know how it works. I do have a branch in the repository for the novel I\u0026rsquo;m writing for an editor to be able to edit the novel as I write on it without needing to see their changes and comments until I get to that point.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s sort of it. I use jekyll (or an old personal fork) and soon to be cyblog) as well as ikiwiki to publish content, but other than that, I just write stuff.\nIn any case, if you have thoughts on the subject I\u0026rsquo;d love to see your input on the wikish git writing page.\nWrite on!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-tips-for-writers/","summary":"The Context git writing on wikish. haikus in git writing like a programer git thoughts git is this version control system that\u0026rsquo;s designed to be used in a distributed manner, and supports a very divers and non-linear workflow. While it\u0026rsquo;s designed to support the work of software developers--particularly in large projects like the linux kernel--at the core, git is just a file system layer that has an awareness of time and iteration. It also does its magic on any kind of text files\u0026hellip; code or writing. I use git to manage a lot of my writing--indeed, most of my digital life, which is a bit weird admittedly; and as a result people on the Internet, not to mention my coworkers,come to me with git questions from time. This post is a response to a more recent change.\nHow I Work I have two kinds of repositories: general repositories which store a bunch of different kinds of files that I need to work: the general repositories that store files that I always need to get things done, and specific project-only repositories that only have the text (and possibly notes) for a very specific project.","title":"Git Tips for Writers"},{"content":"Ok, as a self-respecting geek, I think I have to say something about this whole \u0026ldquo;iPad\u0026rdquo; thing.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not as much of an Apple geek as I used to be, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure. It\u0026rsquo;s not that I don\u0026rsquo;t think that Apple\u0026rsquo;s doing something quasi-innovative and useful in the world of technology and the business around consumer technology. I think bringing UNIX to the hands of \u0026ldquo;mass market\u0026rdquo; desktop users was a great move. Although the iTunes Store is not without it\u0026rsquo;s issues and concerns, the fact that Apple was able to create a viable environment and market that allowed people to exchange money for software and content is probably a good thing. And Apple has brought to a general public a number of hardware configuration (in recent years) that I think make a lot of sense: the mini-tablet (iPhone/iPod Touch), laptops with usable battery lives, the pocket jukebox (iPod Classic,) and so forth.\nDeep breath. Having said that\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly impressed with the iPad, or moved by it\u0026rsquo;s potential at the moment. I know Apple often takes a few generations to make something really work, and so I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to not say \u0026ldquo;this implementation sucks, and so the whole notion sucks, and is with out merit.\u0026rdquo; Of all the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve heard (or said,) in the past few weeks of the iPad the following two threads have stood out:\nI\u0026rsquo;m really quite interested to see what other makers are going to be doing in this space. What\u0026rsquo;s the Lenovo tablet going to look like? HP? One of the leading complaints about the iPad (and iPhone) is Apple\u0026rsquo;s total-lock-down over the platform, and I think an Android tablet, or a super Nokia N900 is likely to be much more open and killer awesome. I\u0026rsquo;m interested to see what the iPad platform looks like in a revision or two. Add an SD slot? Multi-tasking? Additional input methods? It could look really awesome, and while I have misgivings (see below) I don\u0026rsquo;t want to write it off entirely. At the same time, I don\u0026rsquo;t really feel like there\u0026rsquo;s an in-between device that I don\u0026rsquo;t currently have that I\u0026rsquo;d like to have. In a lot of ways, even I feel like I have too many devices, too many inboxes (of one sort or another), and too much technology to manage. I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining. The truth of the matter is that my laptop gets great battery life, isn\u0026rsquo;t very big at all, and does everything I need of a computer, and almost everything I need of technology in general. iPods are better for playing music if I\u0026rsquo;m moving around or in the car, and the Kindle is great for what it is, and I do sort of have a Blackberry habit.. but\u0026hellip;\nMy technological challenge at the moment is that I don\u0026rsquo;t have enough time to get done that which I would like to get done, not that I have a situation where I could be more productive if I only I had a device that would do something more.\u0026quot; That\u0026rsquo;s not something that seems to cross my mind very much. It might be nice to have a slightly more accessible emacs instance that I could use to enter snippets of text and work on things in the kinds of moment. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking a Nokia N900 might fit that bill pretty well, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re thinking about getting an iPad, what\u0026rsquo;s the niche that you see it filing? Do you have a niche that seems like it might be iPad sized?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ipad-reactions/","summary":"Ok, as a self-respecting geek, I think I have to say something about this whole \u0026ldquo;iPad\u0026rdquo; thing.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not as much of an Apple geek as I used to be, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure. It\u0026rsquo;s not that I don\u0026rsquo;t think that Apple\u0026rsquo;s doing something quasi-innovative and useful in the world of technology and the business around consumer technology. I think bringing UNIX to the hands of \u0026ldquo;mass market\u0026rdquo; desktop users was a great move. Although the iTunes Store is not without it\u0026rsquo;s issues and concerns, the fact that Apple was able to create a viable environment and market that allowed people to exchange money for software and content is probably a good thing. And Apple has brought to a general public a number of hardware configuration (in recent years) that I think make a lot of sense: the mini-tablet (iPhone/iPod Touch), laptops with usable battery lives, the pocket jukebox (iPod Classic,) and so forth.","title":"iPad Reactions"},{"content":"Ok, a confession: I totally ran out of my usual backlog of blog posts, that keeps these pages humming with the signs of life despite the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t have time to write a post every day, and often don\u0026rsquo;t have reliable weekend time to write blog posts. This hasn\u0026rsquo;t happened in a few months, so it\u0026rsquo;s sort of disconcerting. One of the reasons why I ran out, is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been busy doing non-writing things for a few weekends, but a third (or forth?) weekend away from home was too much for my backlog to bear, so here we are.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a brief overview of what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to and the kinds of projects I\u0026rsquo;m working on, and what the near future holds:\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to Dance Flury in a couple of weeks. I\u0026rsquo;ve not done the usual dance weekend thing before, aside from the Morris Dance gathering I\u0026rsquo;ve been going to for years. I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to it. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get a better handle on the blog. I do this binge cycle thing with my blog posts, that leads to situations like the one that I\u0026rsquo;m currently experiencing, but also doesn\u0026rsquo;t actually mean that I have spare time to write fiction in a way that I might like. I\u0026rsquo;m working a bunch, and while every day is some kind of learning experience, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve figured out (largely) how to do what I do in a way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have me leaving every night feeling like a fraud. There will be more learning curves, for sure, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to not feel like I know what I\u0026rsquo;m doing. I\u0026rsquo;ve been throwing around the idea of writing poetry (hynms) vaguely in the tradition of the sacred harp. I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a poet, and the project I have in mind is a little bit peculiar (but then, this is me we\u0026rsquo;re talking about, so lets not be too surprised.) At the same time I\u0026rsquo;m irrationally interested in this project, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it goes. I switched to using Chromium as my primary browser. There are still a few plug-ins that I really liked on Firefox that aren\u0026rsquo;t quite as awesome or comfortable in their Chrome-equivalents, but it\u0026rsquo;s close and I\u0026rsquo;m sure it\u0026rsquo;ll get there. I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking for a viable non-Mac WebKit browser for a while, and am pretty happy with the Chrome. Check out git for writers, wiki page that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on over at wikish to try and explore how writers use and might use the git version control system to manage their writing. Contribute if you like. This weekend (yay! snowpocolypse) I hooked up my laptop to my desktop rig, and have basically abandoned my desktop as a machine that I will interact with directly. (I\u0026rsquo;m a server guy, so it\u0026rsquo;ll get used.) This means I\u0026rsquo;m using xrandr with StumpWM (pretty swank,) and I must say that I love it. While I adore my laptop, and I really like only having to manage one computer, having this \u0026ldquo;desktop\u0026rdquo; setup makes it really perfect: I\u0026rsquo;m often most comfortable in desk chairs and I like the bigger screen and a real keyboard. So it works well. At some point I\u0026rsquo;ll write up a more thorough account of how I hacked this together. Ok, this document has been open on my desktop for a few day and I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything new to add to it, so lets call it done.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/status-update/","summary":"Ok, a confession: I totally ran out of my usual backlog of blog posts, that keeps these pages humming with the signs of life despite the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t have time to write a post every day, and often don\u0026rsquo;t have reliable weekend time to write blog posts. This hasn\u0026rsquo;t happened in a few months, so it\u0026rsquo;s sort of disconcerting. One of the reasons why I ran out, is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been busy doing non-writing things for a few weekends, but a third (or forth?) weekend away from home was too much for my backlog to bear, so here we are.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a brief overview of what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to and the kinds of projects I\u0026rsquo;m working on, and what the near future holds:\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to Dance Flury in a couple of weeks. I\u0026rsquo;ve not done the usual dance weekend thing before, aside from the Morris Dance gathering I\u0026rsquo;ve been going to for years.","title":"Status Update"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of canceling my home data connectivity and going with a 3G/4G wireless data connection from Sprint.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the argument for it:\nI\u0026rsquo;m not home very much. I work a lot (and there is plenty of internet there), and I spend about two thirds of my weekends away from home. This is something that I expect will become more--rather than less--intense as time goes on. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to pay for a full Internet connection here that I barely use. My bandwidth utilization is, I think, relatively low. I\u0026rsquo;ve turned on some monitoring tools, so I\u0026rsquo;ll know a bit more later, but in general, most of my actual use of the data connection is in keeping an SSH connection with my server alive. I download email, refresh a few websites more obsessively than I\u0026rsquo;d like (but I\u0026rsquo;m getting better with that), and that\u0026rsquo;s sort of it. I\u0026rsquo;ve also started running a reverse proxy because that makes some measure of sense. I find it difficult to use the data package on my cellphone. The fact that I get notified of all important emails on my phone, has disincentivized me from actually attending to my email in a useful way, and other than the occasional use of googlemaps (and I really should get an actual GPS to replace that\u0026hellip;) If I get the right Wireless modem, however, it would be quasi-feasible to pipe my phone through the wireless Internet connection, so this might be a useful clarification. The arguments against it are typical:\nThe technology isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly mature, or particularly well deployed. Metered bandwidth is undesirable. Sprint sucks, or has in my experience, and the other providers are worse. The questions that remain in my mind are:\nHow well do these services work in moving vehicles? Cars? Trains? How much bandwidth do I actually use? Is this practical? Feedback is, as always, very much welcomed here. I\u0026rsquo;m not in a huge rush to act, but I think it makes sense to feel things out. It also, I think posses an interesting question about how I (and we) use the Internet. Is the minimalist thing I do more idealistic than actual? I know that we have a pretty hard time conceptualizing how big a gigabyte of data actually is in practical usage. Further research is, clearly, indicated.\nEdit: This plan would have to rely on the fact that I might be spending a large amount of time in a city with unmetered 4G access with sprint. I\u0026rsquo;ve used a gig and a half of transfer to my laptop\u0026rsquo;s wireless interface in 5 days. I think that would coincide with when I would be doing the heaviest traffic anyway. I wonder how unlimited the unlimited is\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/putting-the-wires-in-the-cloud/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of canceling my home data connectivity and going with a 3G/4G wireless data connection from Sprint.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the argument for it:\nI\u0026rsquo;m not home very much. I work a lot (and there is plenty of internet there), and I spend about two thirds of my weekends away from home. This is something that I expect will become more--rather than less--intense as time goes on. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to pay for a full Internet connection here that I barely use. My bandwidth utilization is, I think, relatively low. I\u0026rsquo;ve turned on some monitoring tools, so I\u0026rsquo;ll know a bit more later, but in general, most of my actual use of the data connection is in keeping an SSH connection with my server alive. I download email, refresh a few websites more obsessively than I\u0026rsquo;d like (but I\u0026rsquo;m getting better with that), and that\u0026rsquo;s sort of it. I\u0026rsquo;ve also started running a reverse proxy because that makes some measure of sense.","title":"Putting the Wires in the Cloud"},{"content":"One oft made complaint about emacs is that it takes forever to start up, particularly if you\u0026rsquo;ve got a lot of packages to load it can take a few seconds for everything to start up. In a lot of respects this is an old problem, that isn\u0026rsquo;t as relevant given contemporary hardware. Between improvements to emacs, and the fact that computers these days are incredibly powerful, it\u0026rsquo;s just not a major issue.\nHaving said that, until recently an emacs instance took as much as 7 seconds to start up. I\u0026rsquo;ve beaten it down to under two seconds, and using emacsclient and starting emacs with \u0026ldquo;emacs --daemon\u0026rdquo; makes the start up time much more manageable.\nStep One: Manage your Display Yourself I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this before, but really even a 2 second start time feels absurd, if I had to start a new emacs session each time I needed to look into a file. \u0026ldquo;emacs --daemon\u0026rdquo; and emacsclient mean that each time you \u0026ldquo;run\u0026rdquo; emacs rather than start a new emacs instance, it just opens a new frame on the existing instance. Quicker start up times. It means you can open a bunch of buffers in one frame, settle into work on one file, and then open a second buffer and edit one of the previous files you opened. Good stuff. The quirk is that if you\u0026rsquo;ve set up your emacs files to load the configuration for your window displays late in game, the windows won\u0026rsquo;t look right. I have a file in my emacs files called gui-init.el, and it looks sort of like this:\n(provide 'gui-init) (defun tychoish-font-small () (interactive) (setq default-frame-alist \u0026lsquo;((font-backend . \u0026ldquo;xft\u0026rdquo;)(font . \u0026ldquo;Inconsolata-08\u0026rdquo;) (vertical-scroll-bars . 0) (menu-bar-lines . 0) (tool-bar-lines . 0) (left-fringe . 1) (right-fringe . 1) (alpha 86 84))) (tool-bar-mode -1) (scroll-bar-mode -1) )\n(if (string-match \u0026ldquo;laptop\u0026rdquo; system-name) (tychoish-font-big))\nModifying, of course, the system name, and the settings to match your tastes and circumstances. The (if) statement allows you to have a couple of these -font- functions defined and then toggle between them based on which machine you load emacs on. Then in your init file (e.g. .emacs), make sure the first two lines are:\n(setq load-path (cons \u0026quot;~/confs/emacs\u0026quot; load-path)) (require 'gui-init) Establish the load path first so that emacs knows where to look for your required files, and then use the (require) sexep to load in the file. Bingo.\nPackage Things Yourself We saw this above, but as much as possible avoid using the load function. When you use load emacs has to (I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure) do a fairly expensive file system operation and then load the file and then compile and load the file. This takes time. Using the require function is not without it\u0026rsquo;s own cost, but it does save some time compared to load because it lets you take advantage of the work emacs does with the library loading. At least in my experience.\nIn your various .el files, insert the following statement:\n(provide 'package) And then in your .emacs, use the following statement\n(require 'package) To load it in. You\u0026rsquo;re probably already familiar with using these to configure packages that you download. Better yet, don\u0026rsquo;t require at all, but use the auto-load function. This just creates a little arrow inside of emacs that says \u0026ldquo;when this function is called, load this file, and hopefully the \u0026lsquo;real\u0026rsquo; function by this name will be in there.\u0026rdquo; This lets you avoid loading packages that you don\u0026rsquo;t use frequently until you actually need them. The following example provides an auto-load for the identica-mode:\n(autoload 'identica-mode \u0026quot;identica-mode.el\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Mode for Updating Identi.ca Microblog\u0026quot; t) Byte Compile files as much as you can. Contrary to whatever you\u0026rsquo;ve been told, emacs isn\u0026rsquo;t a text editor, as much as it is a virtual machine with a good deal of low level functions established for interacting with text and textual environments and some editing-based interfaces. But really at the core, it\u0026rsquo;s just virtual machine that interprets a quirky Lisp dialect.\nThe execution model is pretty simple and straightforward, particularly to people who are used to Java and Python: you load source files, emacs imports them and compiles them half way, they\u0026rsquo;re not the kind of thing that you could read on your own or would want to write, but it\u0026rsquo;s not quite machine code either. Byte-compiled files are easier for the machine to read, and quicker to process, but they\u0026rsquo;re not human intelligible. Then when you need to do something with the function that it\u0026rsquo;s byte-compiled, emacs compiles it the rest of the way into machine code and executes it. Usually this all happens too fast that we don\u0026rsquo;t really notice it.\nOne tried and true means of speeding up emacs load times is to byte-compile files manually so that emacs doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to do it itself when it loads. The emacs-lisp libraries are byte compiled when emacs installs itself, but your files probably aren\u0026rsquo;t. Now generally, only byte-compile files that you\u0026rsquo;re not going to be editing yourself regularly. Byte compiled files have an .elc extension, and as soon as there\u0026rsquo;s a .el file and a .elc of the same name in a directory, emacs will ignore the .el file even if there have been changes made. To byte compile an emacs-lisp file, simply type M-x to get the execute-extended-command prompt, and then run the function byte-compile (i.e. \u0026ldquo;M-x byte-compile\u0026rdquo;). Viola!\nI hope these all help you all and lead to a slightly more efficient emacs experience.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/decreasing-emacs-start-times/","summary":"One oft made complaint about emacs is that it takes forever to start up, particularly if you\u0026rsquo;ve got a lot of packages to load it can take a few seconds for everything to start up. In a lot of respects this is an old problem, that isn\u0026rsquo;t as relevant given contemporary hardware. Between improvements to emacs, and the fact that computers these days are incredibly powerful, it\u0026rsquo;s just not a major issue.\nHaving said that, until recently an emacs instance took as much as 7 seconds to start up. I\u0026rsquo;ve beaten it down to under two seconds, and using emacsclient and starting emacs with \u0026ldquo;emacs --daemon\u0026rdquo; makes the start up time much more manageable.\nStep One: Manage your Display Yourself I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this before, but really even a 2 second start time feels absurd, if I had to start a new emacs session each time I needed to look into a file.","title":"Decreasing Emacs Start Time"},{"content":"I meant to write a more thorough overview of what I was doing with the \u0026ldquo;extra time\u0026rdquo; over the holidays. But I don\u0026rsquo;t think I had as much extra time at the end of the year as I expected to have. What follows is a brief overview what I did do, how the new year has begun and what I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about.\nIn years past the time at the end of the year was a time to catch up on lost sleep and connections that had fallen by the wayside in the recent months. I also used the time, in some years, to get a lot done: one year I knit about 10 hats. Another, I wrote about a quarter of a novel on a binge. Some years I just vegged.\nThis year, is different. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been in school full time for years, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t received any college credit in a year. I didn\u0026rsquo;t have significant time off of work. There\u0026rsquo;s a way in which the holidays were incredibly relaxing. I still have a bunch of friends who are in the later stages of being students, and there\u0026rsquo;s something awesome about not being a student that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly relaxing. I mean, working a regular job is not all sunshine and rainbows, but it\u0026rsquo;s pretty swell, and there\u0026rsquo;s something about the structure of regular and the mostly even routine that makes it--to my mind--have a greater potential for productivity than \u0026ldquo;the academic routine.\u0026rdquo;\nIn a lot of ways, while I looked forward to holiday time off, and saved up countless projects for that time off, not only did I not make \u0026ldquo;epic headway\u0026rdquo; on my projects but I came into the new year feeling sort of behind and tired. Wierd. I blame this on the holidays themselves. It\u0026rsquo;s as if the entire world slows down: everything gets more difficult for a month or as if the planet is slowly careening to toward this thing that we don\u0026rsquo;t really enjoy (if we\u0026rsquo;re being honest,) but that we pretend we really love.\nAnd there\u0026rsquo;s no getting away from it. You can\u0026rsquo;t really opt out of the holidays: even if you\u0026rsquo;re not particularly festive, you can\u0026rsquo;t control the celebration of other people. You can\u0026rsquo;t control the fact that the same four songs play on endless repeat in public spaces, you can\u0026rsquo;t control that everyone wishes you a good holiday, you can\u0026rsquo;t control all of the federal holidays, you can\u0026rsquo;t escape tacky decorations, you just can\u0026rsquo;t escape. And after like 3 days of this, you get tired.\nIn previous years, the break, the chance to take time off from the big projects I\u0026rsquo;d been working on (school, applying to graduate school, etc.) was a great opportunity to get \u0026ldquo;other things done.\u0026rdquo; Now, there\u0026rsquo;s no real break from the daily grind, just modulations and finding good balance. That\u0026rsquo;s an ongoing project, and one that\u0026rsquo;s better serviced by a good routine and not a few extra days off during a stressful time of year. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;m glad to have gotten back into things, and I look forward to getting things done.\nOnward an Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/winter-break-in-reality/","summary":"I meant to write a more thorough overview of what I was doing with the \u0026ldquo;extra time\u0026rdquo; over the holidays. But I don\u0026rsquo;t think I had as much extra time at the end of the year as I expected to have. What follows is a brief overview what I did do, how the new year has begun and what I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about.\nIn years past the time at the end of the year was a time to catch up on lost sleep and connections that had fallen by the wayside in the recent months. I also used the time, in some years, to get a lot done: one year I knit about 10 hats. Another, I wrote about a quarter of a novel on a binge. Some years I just vegged.\nThis year, is different. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been in school full time for years, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t received any college credit in a year.","title":"Winter Break in Reality"},{"content":"First, an announcement. I\u0026rsquo;ve started a tychoish.com wiki. I\u0026rsquo;m calling it, appropriately enough \u0026ldquo;wikish.\u0026rdquo; You can see a brief introduction and note about my intentions there.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written a bunch here about the peculiarities of building communities and practices around \u0026ldquo;the wiki,\u0026rdquo; as I think it represents a new paradigm for thinking about collaboration and \u0026ldquo;the text.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m, slowly, working on building a community around the cyborg institute wiki, and that\u0026rsquo;s an ongoing (and fairly specific) project. I\u0026rsquo;ve also, in much smaller ways, done things with wikis in a couple of other situations: for some group projects I\u0026rsquo;ve been involved with, a few things for work, and so forth. Perhaps more relevantly, I also used a wiki--much like this one and the others I am responsible for--as the system I used for storing everything in my brain. From these experiences I\u0026rsquo;ve come to the following conclusion:\nIn any given wiki, most of the \u0026ldquo;work,\u0026rdquo; particular at the beginning, is accomplished by a very small number of contributors. Potentially only one contributor.\nCritical mass is a difficult thing to manage or predict, and if you start a wiki and you want it to succeed, you have to be ready to do all of the work of getting it to critical mass, which could take a long time. Fair warning.\nWikis are incredibly unstructured. It\u0026rsquo;s easy to impose structure on a new wiki, in cases where structure will actually hinder growth and development rather than promote development. Particularly if the kind of content you hope to develop is wiki like. For personal organization tasks, wikis are often not the right answer, even if they appear to work for a long time.\nCreating a page in a wiki is often better and more effective than writing an email of some length (say, more than 250 words), particularly when more than two people are involved in the correspondence.\nI need another wiki like I need a hole in the head. But, I like that wikish is both public--you all can watch and contribute to what I\u0026rsquo;m working on--and focused on what I\u0026rsquo;m working on. The personal wiki, the one that was just for internal use suffered from lack of audience even an imagined audience.\nI think putting the novella that I wrote in late 2007 into a wiki and working on revisions and tweaks in that context makes a great deal of sense, and I think wikish feels like the \u0026ldquo;right place\u0026rdquo; to put that work.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s the plan. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably post from time to time about new things that I\u0026rsquo;m posting there, and I\u0026rsquo;m perfectly happy to have you all make pages in wikish as you want. I\u0026rsquo;ve also decided, that wikish will require OpenIDs as the only means of authentication. Just cause. See you there!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wikish-and-the-personal-public-wiki/","summary":"First, an announcement. I\u0026rsquo;ve started a tychoish.com wiki. I\u0026rsquo;m calling it, appropriately enough \u0026ldquo;wikish.\u0026rdquo; You can see a brief introduction and note about my intentions there.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written a bunch here about the peculiarities of building communities and practices around \u0026ldquo;the wiki,\u0026rdquo; as I think it represents a new paradigm for thinking about collaboration and \u0026ldquo;the text.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m, slowly, working on building a community around the cyborg institute wiki, and that\u0026rsquo;s an ongoing (and fairly specific) project. I\u0026rsquo;ve also, in much smaller ways, done things with wikis in a couple of other situations: for some group projects I\u0026rsquo;ve been involved with, a few things for work, and so forth. Perhaps more relevantly, I also used a wiki--much like this one and the others I am responsible for--as the system I used for storing everything in my brain. From these experiences I\u0026rsquo;ve come to the following conclusion:\nIn any given wiki, most of the \u0026ldquo;work,\u0026rdquo; particular at the beginning, is accomplished by a very small number of contributors.","title":"Wikish and the Personal Public Wiki"},{"content":"So much of the time, when we talk about network services, technological/software freedom, and this idea of \u0026ldquo;Cloud\u0026rdquo; computing, there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of debate: \u0026ldquo;is it a good idea?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;are we giving up too much freedom?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;how does this work out economically?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;what about privacy in the cloud?\u0026rdquo; While these are important questions, without doubt, I fear that they\u0026rsquo;re too ethereal, and we end up tussling with a bunch of questions about the future and present of computing that might not be entirely worth debating (at least for the moment.)\nLets take 2 assertions, to start:\n1. There are some applications--things we do with technology--that work best when these applications are running on high performance servers that have consistent connections to the Internet, that we can access regardless of where we are in the world.\n2. The only way to have control over your data and computing experience is to be responsible for the administration and maintenance of these services yourself.\nHuh?\nI mean to say, that if we care about our autonomy, and our freedom as we use computers in the contemporary age (i.e. in the era of cloud computing), the only thing to be done is to run our own services. If the fact that Google has all of your data scares you: run your own mail server. If the fact that all of your microblogging output is on twitter, run your own status.net instance. And so forth.\nIf we really care about having power over our technological experiences, we must take responsibility for services on the Internet. We can say \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if service providers weren\u0026rsquo;t such dicks with our data,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nice if software developers wrote networked software that respected our freedom.\u0026rdquo; And while it would be nice, these convinces don\u0026rsquo;t in and of themselves\nControl over technology and autonomy in the networked context ultimately means that we as users have to:\nAdminister networked servers that provide us with the services that we want and need to do whatever it is that we do. Participate in some exchange for networked services (i.e. pay for service, either in cash or by way of access to data.) That\u0026rsquo;s hard! Computers should get easier to use not harder, right?\nLeading question there, but\u0026hellip;\nYes. One of the leading arguments for consumer-\u0026ldquo;Cloud Computing\u0026rdquo; is that by accessing computer services (software) in the browser, developers can provide a more structured and \u0026ldquo;safe\u0026rdquo; user experience. At least that\u0026rsquo;s how I understand it.\nWhile this is a great thing in terms of making computers more accessible, no argument from me, I think we must be careful to avoid confusing of use\u0026quot; with technologically limiting. I fervently believe that its possible to design powerful software that is also easy to use, and I think that as often as not, a confusing technology is an opportunity to provide a teaching experience as much as it presents an opportunity to improve a given technology.\nAnd if it comes down to it, there are situations where it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter so much if you\u0026rsquo;re the one entering the commands into the server. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t much matter if you are the one managing the server or if you\u0026rsquo;ve hired someone to configure it for you. As I think about it, there\u0026rsquo;s probably something of a niche here for people to offer management services in a very boutique sort of style.\nIf we have to contract to people to do our administration for us, is that really a step in the right direction?\nI think, it is. At the moment we pay for our networked computing services (i.e. gmail) by looking at google\u0026rsquo;s ads next to our mail and giving Google access to the aggregate of our mail spools so that they can mine it for whatever data they need. The other price that we pay for these services is \u0026ldquo;lock in:\u0026rdquo; once we commit to using a service it\u0026rsquo;s quite difficult to change to an alternate provider. Since these are \u0026ldquo;real costs,\u0026rdquo; it seems reasonable to expect and want to pay (money) for services that don\u0026rsquo;t have these costs. Which is where cooperative and boutique-style services make a lot of sense.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not a systems administrator, I just want to do [the thing that I do] and not have to tinker with my computer. This is a lousy idea.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s a lousy question.\nTo dig in a bit further. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that \u0026ldquo;doing the [whatever you do],\u0026rdquo; would necessarily require a lot of tinkering. It might, of course, and the chances are that we\u0026rsquo;ve all had to tinker with our technology at one point or another. In most cases tinkering is an upfront rather than ongoing cost. Ideally, the other thing that having full control over your network services you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to use have services which are more tailored to [the thing you do] than the one size fits all application provided by a third party.\nOk, so what\u0026rsquo;s the stack look like.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure. There\u0026rsquo;s clearly a common set tasks that we currently use in the networked context. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the application is, exactly, but here\u0026rsquo;s a beginning of what this \u0026ldquo;application stack\u0026rdquo; looks like.\nAn XMPP Server like Prosody.im, with PyAIMt and other convectional IM network transports. Some sort of Email Service: Citadel springs instantly to mind as an \u0026ldquo;all in one solution,\u0026rdquo; but some postfix+procmail+fetchmail+horde/squirrelmail seems to make some sense A web server, either for hosting personal websites, or with some sort of authentication scheme (digest?) for sharing files with yourself. The truth is that web servers, are pretty darn lightweight and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to not install one. Having said that, people see \u0026ldquo;web hosting,\u0026rdquo; and probably often think \u0026ldquo;Well, I don\u0026rsquo;t really need web hosting,\u0026rdquo; when that\u0026rsquo;s almost beside the point. SSH and some system for FUSE (or FUSE-like) mount points, so that they can use and store remote files. There\u0026rsquo;s probably a host of web-based applications that would need to be installed as a matter of course: some sort of web-based RSS reader, wiki-like note taking. Bookmarking. Some sort of notification service, Etc. [your suggestion here.] ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/independent-web-services/","summary":"So much of the time, when we talk about network services, technological/software freedom, and this idea of \u0026ldquo;Cloud\u0026rdquo; computing, there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of debate: \u0026ldquo;is it a good idea?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;are we giving up too much freedom?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;how does this work out economically?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;what about privacy in the cloud?\u0026rdquo; While these are important questions, without doubt, I fear that they\u0026rsquo;re too ethereal, and we end up tussling with a bunch of questions about the future and present of computing that might not be entirely worth debating (at least for the moment.)\nLets take 2 assertions, to start:\n1. There are some applications--things we do with technology--that work best when these applications are running on high performance servers that have consistent connections to the Internet, that we can access regardless of where we are in the world.\n2. The only way to have control over your data and computing experience is to be responsible for the administration and maintenance of these services yourself.","title":"Independent Web Services"},{"content":"I was talking with bear probably two years ago, about programing and how I\u0026rsquo;m not really a programmer, but I understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on when programmers talk, and that any time I got close to code, I sort of kludged things together until it worked. This was probably long enough ago, that I was just on the cusp of getting into using Linux full time and being a command line guru.\nOf shell scripting, he said something that left something of an impression on me. Something like, \u0026ldquo;The great thing about the shell, is once you figure out how to do something you never have to figure out how to do it again because you just make it into a script and run it again when you need to.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich, now seems incredibly straightforward, but it blew my mind at the time. The best thing, I think, about using computers in the way that I now tend to, is that any time I run across a task that is in anyway repetitive I can save it as a macro (in a non technical sense of the word macro) and then call it back in the future. Less typing, less reading over help text, more doing things that matter.\nOne thing that got me for a while, was the \u0026ldquo;loop\u0026rdquo; in bash. I had a hell of a time making them work. And then a few weekends a go I had a task that required a loop, and I wrote one on the command line, and it worked on the first time through. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ve learned something after all. For those of you who want to learn how to build a loop in shell scripting, lets take the following form:\nfor [variable] in [command]; do [command using] $[variable]; done Typically these are all mashed up onto one line, which can be confusing. Conventionally [variable] is just the letter i, for \u0026ldquo;item.\u0026rdquo; Note that the semi colons are crucial, and I think the bacticks are as well (I\u0026rsquo;d not leave them out,) but they might not be required.\nSo the loop I wrote. I noticed that there were a number of attempted SSH logins against my server, and while these sorts of SSH probes aren\u0026rsquo;t a huge risk\u0026hellip; better to not risk it. So I wanted to add rules to the firewall to block these IP addresses. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I came up with:\nfor i in `sudo egrep 'Invalid user.*([[:digit:]]{1,3}\\.){3}[[:digit:]]{1,3}' /var/log/auth.log -o | \\ egrep '([[:digit:]]{1,3}\\.){3}[[:digit:]]{1,3}' -o | sort | uniq`; do `sudo iptables -I INPUT -s $i -j DROP`; done Basically, search the /var/log/auth.log for invalid login attempts, and return only the string captured by the regex. Send this to another egrep command which strips this down to the IP address. Then put the IP addresses in order, and throw out duplicates. Every item in the resulting list is then added to an iptables rule that blocks access. Done. QED.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s inefficient, sure, but not that inefficient. And it works. Mostly this just cleans up logs, and I suppose using something like fail2ban would work just as well, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what kind of added security benefit that would offer, and besides it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t make me feel quite so smart.\nI hope this is helpful for you all.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bash-loops/","summary":"I was talking with bear probably two years ago, about programing and how I\u0026rsquo;m not really a programmer, but I understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on when programmers talk, and that any time I got close to code, I sort of kludged things together until it worked. This was probably long enough ago, that I was just on the cusp of getting into using Linux full time and being a command line guru.\nOf shell scripting, he said something that left something of an impression on me. Something like, \u0026ldquo;The great thing about the shell, is once you figure out how to do something you never have to figure out how to do it again because you just make it into a script and run it again when you need to.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich, now seems incredibly straightforward, but it blew my mind at the time. The best thing, I think, about using computers in the way that I now tend to, is that any time I run across a task that is in anyway repetitive I can save it as a macro (in a non technical sense of the word macro) and then call it back in the future.","title":"Bash Loops"},{"content":"The following, mostly accurate conversation (apologies for any liberties) should be a parable for the use of the git version control system: As I was about to leave work the other day\u0026hellip;\ntycho: I pushed today\u0026rsquo;s work to our repository, have at, I\u0026rsquo;m headed out.\nCoworker A: Awesome. I did too. (pause) wait. It\u0026rsquo;s screwed up. I deleted a file I didn\u0026rsquo;t mean to. (pastes link to diff into chatroom)\ntycho: Oh, that\u0026rsquo;s easy to fix. You can reset back to before the file, add all the changes that are in you\u0026rsquo;re repository, except the deletion of the file, commit, and then \u0026ldquo;git reset --hard\u0026rdquo; and then publish that.\nCoworker A: But your changes\u0026hellip;\n(as an aside, the original solution should still work, I think)\ntycho: Oh. Hrm. Right. Well\u0026hellip; Rebase to remove the bad commit and then add the file in question back on top of my changes.\nCoworker A: Wait, what?\ntycho: (looks at clook). Shit, I\u0026rsquo;ll do it. (turns to Coworker P), have you pulled recently?\nCoworker P: Nope I\u0026rsquo;ll do that no--\ntycho: Dont\u0026rsquo;t!\nCoworker P: Alright then!\ntycho: (mumbles and works)\nAt this juncture, I pull out crazy git commands and rebase the repository, back a few commits to pull out a single changeset. And then recommit the file with the changes worth saving (which I had copied into ~/ before beginning this operation.)\nOne thing I\u0026rsquo;ve learned about using git rebase is that you always have to go back a commit or two before I think I need to, pick out the hash for the last good commit. Also when using \u0026ldquo;git rebase -i\u0026rdquo; I find that the commits are listed in the reverse order that I want them to be listed in.\nAnother great hint: Issue the following command if you\u0026rsquo;re an emacs user and you don\u0026rsquo;t want git to open rebase editing sessions in vim.\ngit config --global core.editor \u0026quot;emacsclient -t -a emacs -NOW\u0026quot; The one issue here is that I had to rewrite the history of an already published series of changes. This is why I didn\u0026rsquo;t want P to pull. When I was done, and the state of my repository was as it should have been, my next push (predictably failed), as it needed to be a \u0026ldquo;git push -f\u0026rdquo;, which is something of a scary operation. It worked out, and when everyone pulled the next time everything was fine: I knew it would be for P because their local repository never knew about the first iteration of the history. I was less sure if A\u0026rsquo;s would adjust so seamlessly, but it did.\ntycho: Ok, done. Pull A.\nCoworker A: All better! I have no clue what happened.\ntycho: It\u0026rsquo;s cool, don\u0026rsquo;t sweat it. There\u0026rsquo;s very little that isn\u0026rsquo;t fixable. As long as you don\u0026rsquo;t hard reset changes, and don\u0026rsquo;t do crazy rebasing stuff, you should be ok.\nCoworker A: Like what you just did?\ntycho: Pretty much.\nHere are the lessons:\n\u0026ldquo;git push\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;git pull\u0026rdquo; would seem like parallel operations but they\u0026rsquo;re not. Pull with abandon, it never hurts to pull. But if lots of people are pulling from the same repository, and you push a change that you don\u0026rsquo;t mean to push, it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to take that change back in a logical and productive way. So push with caution. Rebasing is a tool that has great power shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be feared even though theoretically you can screw stuff up with it. The git way says \u0026ldquo;commit your changes early and often,\u0026rdquo; is great, but it can be sort of anti-social, as individual commits become sort of meaningless, and change logs can get hard to manage. Rebasing, though scary, can make it possible to both commit as often as you need to, and then rebase to be presentable. Fear forced pushes. Everything in git can be changed, so play with things, and then only publish changes when the repository is in a good working state. Onward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-magic/","summary":"The following, mostly accurate conversation (apologies for any liberties) should be a parable for the use of the git version control system: As I was about to leave work the other day\u0026hellip;\ntycho: I pushed today\u0026rsquo;s work to our repository, have at, I\u0026rsquo;m headed out.\nCoworker A: Awesome. I did too. (pause) wait. It\u0026rsquo;s screwed up. I deleted a file I didn\u0026rsquo;t mean to. (pastes link to diff into chatroom)\ntycho: Oh, that\u0026rsquo;s easy to fix. You can reset back to before the file, add all the changes that are in you\u0026rsquo;re repository, except the deletion of the file, commit, and then \u0026ldquo;git reset --hard\u0026rdquo; and then publish that.\nCoworker A: But your changes\u0026hellip;\n(as an aside, the original solution should still work, I think)\ntycho: Oh. Hrm. Right. Well\u0026hellip; Rebase to remove the bad commit and then add the file in question back on top of my changes.\nCoworker A: Wait, what?","title":"git magic"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this problem in org-mode, the emacs outlining and organization tool that I us, before, but I\u0026rsquo;m readdressing it for my benefit as well as yours.\nOrg mode is an outlining tool, fundamentally. It provides a nice interface for editing and manipulating information arranged in an outline format. Additionally, and this is the part that everyone is drawn to, it makes it very easy to mark and treat arbitrary items in the outline as \u0026ldquo;actionable,\u0026rdquo; or todo items in need of done. The brilliance of org-mode, I think, is the fact that you spend all your time working on building useful outlines and then it has a tool which takes all this information and compiles it into a useful todo list. How awesome is that. For more information on org-mode, including good demonstrations, check out this video.\nThe problem is a common and recurring one for me. I basically live in the agenda mode--that compiled list of todo items--and I don\u0026rsquo;t so much use org-mode for making outlines. Truth is, I have a \u0026ldquo;Tasks\u0026rdquo; heading in most org files, and I use the automatic capture option (e.g. org-remember) to stuff little notes into the files, and beyond that, I mostly don\u0026rsquo;t interact with the outlines themselves.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, I suppose, but it means that org-mode can\u0026rsquo;t really help you, and you\u0026rsquo;ve short-circuted the ability of org-mode to improve the organization. Under ideal circumstances, org allows you to embed and extract todo lists from the recorded record of your thought process. If you\u0026rsquo;re not actively maintaining your thoughts in your org-mode files, it\u0026rsquo;s just another todo list. That isn\u0026rsquo;t without merit, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t allow the creation of tasks and the flow of a project to spring organically from your thoughts about the project, which is the strength of org mode.\nIntermission: I took a break from writing this post to go and reorganize my org files. What follows are a list of \u0026ldquo;things I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing wrong\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;things I hope to improve.\u0026rdquo;\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think I had enough org-files. There are lots of approaches to organizing information in org: one giant file, lots of small files for individual projects, a few mid to large files for each \u0026ldquo;sphere\u0026rdquo; of your life.\nInitially I took the \u0026ldquo;medium sized files for major ongoing projects.\u0026rdquo; I had a writing file, and a work file, and a writing file, and files for the fiction projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on, and a notes file, and a clippings file, and so forth. Say about 8-10 files. It works, but I think the thing it did was it caused me to use the org-remember functions to just dump things in a \u0026ldquo;tasks\u0026rdquo; heading, and then work from the agenda buffer, and not ever really have to touch the files themselves. Org files need to be specific enough that you would want to keep them open in another window while you\u0026rsquo;re working on a project. I think the point where you know you\u0026rsquo;ve gone too far is when the first level headings start to replicate organization that might better be handled by the file-system.\nUse the scheduling and deadline functions to filter the todo list into something that is workable. It\u0026rsquo;s easy to just look at the task list and say \u0026ldquo;oh no, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to work on this task right now because it depends on too many things that aren\u0026rsquo;t done, and there are other things that I could work on.\u0026rdquo; Scheduling an item, if not setting a deadline, forces me (at least) to think practically about the scope of a given project, what kind of time I\u0026rsquo;ll have to work on it, and what other tasks depend upon it.\nWhen you\u0026rsquo;re using org to manage huge blocks of text--or any system, really--it can be difficult if you have multiple hierarchies and depths of greater than two or three. It just gets hard to manage and keep track of things and figure out where things are, particularly given how useful and prevalent search tools are.\nHaving said that, When you\u0026rsquo;re organizing tasks in org, that limitation, one that I find myself imposing upon myself doesn\u0026rsquo;t really work terribly well, and leads to files that might actually be more difficult to read and to work out of.\nI started using the \u0026ldquo;org-archive-subree\u0026rdquo; function for archiving content when I was through with parts of the outline, This sends the archive to a separate file and while it works, I find it\u0026hellip; less than useful. I\u0026rsquo;ve since discovered \u0026ldquo;org-archive-to-archive-sibling\u0026rdquo; which is a great deal of awesome, and I recommend using it exclusively.\nWrite content in org mode when possible. Though some people (hi Matt!) are keen on using org as a publication system, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if this is the right answer, but I do think that its good during very creative phases of projects to do the work in org, mostly as I think it facilitates focusing on the current problem (through collapsing of the tree to show you just what you\u0026rsquo;re working on,) and also for working non-linearly as you can leave yourself TODO items for later action.\nAt the same time, if you tend to maintain org files that contain planning for more than one project, I find it cumbersome to also draft in these files. So I think \u0026ldquo;keep smaller very focused org files, and maybe do drafting in them if appropriate.\u0026rdquo;\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a start at least. I\u0026rsquo;ve made these changes--which are really quite subtle--and I like the way it feels, but we\u0026rsquo;ll have to see how things shake down in a few weeks. As much as I want to avoid tinkering with things--because tinkering isn\u0026rsquo;t the same as getting things done--I really do find it helpful to review processes from time to time and make sure that I\u0026rsquo;m really working as effectively as I can.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/beyond-lists-in-org-mode/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this problem in org-mode, the emacs outlining and organization tool that I us, before, but I\u0026rsquo;m readdressing it for my benefit as well as yours.\nOrg mode is an outlining tool, fundamentally. It provides a nice interface for editing and manipulating information arranged in an outline format. Additionally, and this is the part that everyone is drawn to, it makes it very easy to mark and treat arbitrary items in the outline as \u0026ldquo;actionable,\u0026rdquo; or todo items in need of done. The brilliance of org-mode, I think, is the fact that you spend all your time working on building useful outlines and then it has a tool which takes all this information and compiles it into a useful todo list. How awesome is that. For more information on org-mode, including good demonstrations, check out this video.\nThe problem is a common and recurring one for me. I basically live in the agenda mode--that compiled list of todo items--and I don\u0026rsquo;t so much use org-mode for making outlines.","title":"Beyond Lists in Org Mode"},{"content":"I finished knitting a sweater. I posted pictures of this to twitter, so I guess in a way, I\u0026rsquo;ve scooped myself.\nBut I did it. This sweater has a special story\u0026hellip;\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s worth mentioning that--if there are any knitters left reading this that I\u0026rsquo;m sort of haphazardly working on a collection of knitting patterns and stories/essays. Patterns in the sense that you could get a bunch of yarn and some needles and read and end up with a sweater that probably looks like the one I have. But not patterns in the sense that I\u0026rsquo;m not writing instructions for knitting, but rather stories about my life and the creative process that embed the instructions for knitting sweater. This post isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly one of those, thought I do hope to get to the sweater in question at some point soon.\nBut then don\u0026rsquo;t they all.\nI initially called this sweater \u0026ldquo;Latvian Dreams\u0026rdquo; and the idea was that I\u0026rsquo;d blog about the sweater as I knitted it as a sort of adventuresome knit along.\nIt turned into a nightmare.\nAnd I never did really blog about it in the way that I might have liked to\u0026hellip;.\nI was working in a yarn store at the time, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was knitting a lot. I was pretty serious into blogging at this point, and it seemed like a good idea.\nIt wasn\u0026rsquo;t.\nIn an effort to create a pattern that would be easy for other people to pickup, particularly people who might not have been particularly adept at the kind of stranded two color knitting I find so entrancing, the patterns I chose were almost too simple, and I never really got into them.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not, I suppose terribly fair to say that the patterns were too simple\u0026hellip;\nThe patterns were all symmetrical, both top to bottom and side to side. I chose three different patterns, arranged things to be reminiscent of an Aran sweater, and they even synced up with each-other so that there was a regular repeat that I thought would help people memorize the stitches.\nAnd the whole thing was sort of like pulling teeth.\nI mean it all worked out in the end, so I suppose I can\u0026rsquo;t complain about anything but the time that it took to make the blasted thing. It\u0026rsquo;s a good sweater. Even though I haven\u0026rsquo;t blocked it yet, I\u0026rsquo;m struck by how well it works. The yarn is fine--hence part of the scope of the project--and it fits really well. I must know a thing or two about how to knit sweaters.\nAnd somehow it\u0026rsquo;s a bit bittersweet.\nIn a lot of ways this is the kind of sweater that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have the attention or focus to be able to even ponder making now. Too much attention even in the planning, not to mention the scope of the carry through. It\u0026rsquo;s not that I\u0026rsquo;ve lost the technical ability to knit a sweater like this, it\u0026rsquo;s as if my life has moved on, and it took those kinds of sweaters with it, and that\u0026rsquo;s sort of hard.\nNo lies, I\u0026rsquo;m glad to be done. For sure.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-two-year-sweater/","summary":"I finished knitting a sweater. I posted pictures of this to twitter, so I guess in a way, I\u0026rsquo;ve scooped myself.\nBut I did it. This sweater has a special story\u0026hellip;\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s worth mentioning that--if there are any knitters left reading this that I\u0026rsquo;m sort of haphazardly working on a collection of knitting patterns and stories/essays. Patterns in the sense that you could get a bunch of yarn and some needles and read and end up with a sweater that probably looks like the one I have. But not patterns in the sense that I\u0026rsquo;m not writing instructions for knitting, but rather stories about my life and the creative process that embed the instructions for knitting sweater. This post isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly one of those, thought I do hope to get to the sweater in question at some point soon.\nBut then don\u0026rsquo;t they all.\nI initially called this sweater \u0026ldquo;Latvian Dreams\u0026rdquo; and the idea was that I\u0026rsquo;d blog about the sweater as I knitted it as a sort of adventuresome knit along.","title":"The Two Year Sweater"},{"content":"People have been thinking about databases recently. Even I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about databases, and I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly prone to thinking about databases. It\u0026rsquo;s fair given the ongoing drama of the Oracle/Sun, and even mainstream press of the NoSQL Movement. I\u0026rsquo;d like to take a step back and think a bit more honestly and holistically about the database application, aboth this \u0026ldquo;NoSQL\u0026rdquo; phenomena, and about the evolving role of relational database management systems in our technology \u0026ldquo;ecosystems.\u0026rdquo;\n(Seriously folks this is what I think about for fun in my free time.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over the notion that databases, like MySQL and PostgreSQL and Oracle\u0026rsquo;s RDBM products, are not particularly \u0026ldquo;Unix-like.\u0026rdquo; Sure they run on Unix systems, and look and feel like Unix applications, but the niche fulfill--providing quick access to structured data with a specialized query language, doesn\u0026rsquo;t jive with the Unix philosophies: small specialized tools for precise tasks. \u0026ldquo;Plain text\u0026rdquo; as lingua franca of system tools, and so forth.\nDatabases solve a problem. Indeed they solve a problem in a very functional and workable manner. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to suggest that the relational database model is somehow broken; however, I would like to suggest that industrial strength database systems are over utilized, and have become the go-to solution for storing and interacting with data of any kind, even in cases where they\u0026rsquo;re not a good fit for the job at hand.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not the first person to suggest this, not by a long shot. The NoSQL \u0026ldquo;movement,\u0026rdquo; addresses this issue from a couple different direction. It\u0026rsquo;s true that NoSQL refers to a collection of practices and approaches related to providing systems for storing data that goes above and beyond the type and model of a database system. In the end NoSQL is about addressing the scaling problem: what happens when we have so much data that it can\u0026rsquo;t easily fit in one database system, or in situations where centralized model is untmaintable for any number of reasons. I think NoSQL is also relevant as we think about storing data that doesn\u0026rsquo;t easily fit into RDBMs\u0026rsquo;es: I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a lot of very poorly architected database systems, that suffer from a \u0026ldquo;square peg in round hole\u0026rdquo; problem.\nIndeed, as we try and put all of our data in these RDBMs systems, particularly data that doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit very well, these databases loose their ability to scale. The complex logic required to pull more complex data back out of a database and reassemble it for use and analysis is computationally expensive and doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale particularly well.\nBut let\u0026rsquo;s focus for a moment on the scaling question, apart from the data modeling and storage question. The real problem at the core of the scaling question is: we need a way, a thing, that allows multiple systems to access a shared data store in a reliable and consistent manner.\nThe ongoing work around clustered file systems seems to address this issue from a much different direction, and perhaps a more interesting perspective. Beyond a certain point--and its a fuzzy point--database systems basically become file system replacements. So rather than work on making databases more like file systems, the thought is (I assume) lets make file systems a bit more \u0026ldquo;database like.\u0026rdquo; Like I said, I don\u0026rsquo;t know a lot about the ins-and-outs of clustered file systems, but I think, in addition to worrying and thinking the future of current database systems, we need to also think about the future of these very scalable and clustered manner.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the next-generation data storage technology really looks like, the NoSQL stuff is a step in the right direction, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it\u0026rsquo;s a large enough step in a lot of ways, as its focus is a bit narrow. To be honest, I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly familiar with the work that\u0026rsquo;s going on in the clustered file system space. Nonetheless, I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to not just think about the future of the relational database platforms as such, but the model and the underlying problems that these kinds of data storage methods address, and to think about other possible ways of addressing the original issues.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/beyond-sql-and-database-technology/","summary":"People have been thinking about databases recently. Even I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about databases, and I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly prone to thinking about databases. It\u0026rsquo;s fair given the ongoing drama of the Oracle/Sun, and even mainstream press of the NoSQL Movement. I\u0026rsquo;d like to take a step back and think a bit more honestly and holistically about the database application, aboth this \u0026ldquo;NoSQL\u0026rdquo; phenomena, and about the evolving role of relational database management systems in our technology \u0026ldquo;ecosystems.\u0026rdquo;\n(Seriously folks this is what I think about for fun in my free time.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over the notion that databases, like MySQL and PostgreSQL and Oracle\u0026rsquo;s RDBM products, are not particularly \u0026ldquo;Unix-like.\u0026rdquo; Sure they run on Unix systems, and look and feel like Unix applications, but the niche fulfill--providing quick access to structured data with a specialized query language, doesn\u0026rsquo;t jive with the Unix philosophies: small specialized tools for precise tasks. \u0026ldquo;Plain text\u0026rdquo; as lingua franca of system tools, and so forth.","title":"Beyond SQL and Database Technology"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not written here about time management and productively very much recently. I\u0026rsquo;m a pretty busy guy, I work a lot, I live an hour away (minimum) from my social life, and I have a lot of things simmering in various stages. While I might accept the challenge that I\u0026rsquo;m spreading myself a bit too thin (I\u0026rsquo;m working on it!) I feel like the largest challenging isn\u0026rsquo;t that my attention is too divided, or even that I don\u0026rsquo;t have enough time to do the things I want to do.\nRather, I think my biggest challenge at the moment is that I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly good at using very short blocks of time to get things done. The twenty minutes of free time I have in the morning before work, the time after work when I\u0026rsquo;m too tired of looking at words to write, but not tired enough to go to bed. One of the great things about having lots of projects is that they\u0026rsquo;re all in different stages and require different kinds attention.\nAs a result, I\u0026rsquo;m taking the following strategies in an effort to use time a bit more effectively:\n1. Stub out projects during binges, fill in the gaps in the interstitial time.\nOne of the problems with writing in short little bits and pieces throughout the week, is that writing is often a game of momentum, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to really build up speed and absorb yourself in a project, however big or small in a few moments. In most cases, the hardest thing to do in writing is figure out \u0026ldquo;Okay, so what do I need to write here.\u0026rdquo; Given this, it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly easy (at least for me) to become enchanted with the successful binge and the ability to bury myself in a long writing session for hours on end; because that tends to work well, I\u0026rsquo;m prone to just not trying to write in the interstitial moments.\nMy approach, recently, and one that I need to pay a bit more attention to maintaining, has been to use binges to start projects, to do a lot of free writing and note taking, and then with things mostly sketched out and \u0026ldquo;stubbed out\u0026rdquo; (to borrow a term from the wiki world), it\u0026rsquo;s easier to write things during the week.\nWork on keeping the \u0026ldquo;to do\u0026rdquo; list more populated. I suppose this is really an extension of the above, but I sometimes find myself avoiding adding items to my todo list if I\u0026rsquo;m close to \u0026ldquo;clearing the decks\u0026rdquo; (OCD much?) and I sometimes fall out of the habit of really using my todo list as a method for planning my day and week out. Todo lists have three main purposes that I can see: first they help with remembering things that you might otherwise forget. That\u0026rsquo;s not something I struggle with in any major way. The second is to do some organizational work up front so that big and hugely imposing tasks seem much more manageable when you sit down to work. Finally, they should all but moot the question \u0026ldquo;what should I work on now?\u0026rdquo;\nIn any case, a todo list is completely useless when left unmaintained, and underpopulated. There\u0026rsquo;s always something that needs doing, and there\u0026rsquo;s often time to do something. Todo take the thought out of figuring what to do in those spaces, and they can\u0026rsquo;t really do that when they\u0026rsquo;re not kept up to date.\n3. Get away from the computer when I\u0026rsquo;ve lost the ability to concentrate.\nWhen I\u0026rsquo;m tired or bored (or both) and don\u0026rsquo;t think I could muster the ability concentrate on a sentence, I rarely muster the courage to get up and do something else. Instead, I usually tab into a web browser and doddle away the evening doing something like refreshing Facebook endlessly, or some-such. While there\u0026rsquo;s nothing wrong with a little bit of harmless perusal of the Internet, it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to get sucked in and then not get other stuff done. I think of this as the \u0026ldquo;cut your looses strategy.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly good at it most of the time, but when it works I\u0026rsquo;m pleased.\nRead more, particularly when I\u0026rsquo;ve \u0026ldquo;run out of words.\u0026rdquo; At the end of a day, I sit down on the couch with my laptop, and I find whatever emacs buffer open that I\u0026rsquo;d been hacking or writing away on in the morning (or the previous evening), and I think \u0026ldquo;Dear god, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t possibly write anything more,\u0026rdquo; which is a fair feeling: I stare at emacs buffers and hack away on words all day as it is, coming home to do more of this, even if the topics are a bit different, is sometimes difficult. I enjoy writing a bunch and find it to be a very rewarding experience so this isn\u0026rsquo;t always a problem, but when it is, it is.\nMy goal is to avoid waisting time because I\u0026rsquo;m bored or tired and using this time to read instead. I tend to find reading to be refreshing and I feel like I don\u0026rsquo;t have enough time to read as it is, so this solves a few problems. I think if we look honestly at our days and our goals, most of us might be able to find a way to get the more things done that we want to get done, with such a strategy.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll see how that works.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/time-management/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not written here about time management and productively very much recently. I\u0026rsquo;m a pretty busy guy, I work a lot, I live an hour away (minimum) from my social life, and I have a lot of things simmering in various stages. While I might accept the challenge that I\u0026rsquo;m spreading myself a bit too thin (I\u0026rsquo;m working on it!) I feel like the largest challenging isn\u0026rsquo;t that my attention is too divided, or even that I don\u0026rsquo;t have enough time to do the things I want to do.\nRather, I think my biggest challenge at the moment is that I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly good at using very short blocks of time to get things done. The twenty minutes of free time I have in the morning before work, the time after work when I\u0026rsquo;m too tired of looking at words to write, but not tired enough to go to bed. One of the great things about having lots of projects is that they\u0026rsquo;re all in different stages and require different kinds attention.","title":"Time Management"},{"content":"Alternate Title: \u0026ldquo;How to start a collaborative writing project or die trying,\u0026rdquo;\nStep 1: Lock yourself in your office, fire up Emacs, and write an initial draft from beginning to end yourself.\nStep 2: Post it on the Internet.\nStep 3: Encourage contributions and hands on feedback from your collaborators. Have a piece of cake.\nYou may thing that I\u0026rsquo;m kidding, but it\u0026rsquo;s true. I think there\u0026rsquo;s a misconception that the way to write something with other people follows a path that might look like: having a meeting to establish the common goals and an outline of what needs to get said, and then another meeting to divide up who is going to write want, and then people go back and write their little parts, and then you mash them all up and everyone rewrites their part till it meshes with the other parts, and then you pray it says what you need it to say, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t need further revising--except it sort of dose, so you repeat the whole process over again, to revise the text, except with editing instead of writing. And because each stage requires endless conversation, when you don\u0026rsquo;t have the benefit of face-to-face meetings, things can take a long time: so long, in fact, that most people will have probably lost interest long before something has been written. The short of it is that this method, though very democratic and open seeming, isn\u0026rsquo;t.\nI think there\u0026rsquo;s a fear, that when a single person puts a lot of individual energy into a text (or any kind of project, really,) and doesn\u0026rsquo;t consult with collaborators at every turn that it somehow becomes not a collaboration. This is emphatically not true. There is significant difference between endless group process and the collection of meaningful feedback; a real distinction between a text created with a process that involves many people, and a text that many people can agree represents their interest, purposes, and needs.\nI think, though I\u0026rsquo;m not certain, that one could replace the words \u0026ldquo;writing\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;text\u0026rdquo; in the above, with \u0026ldquo;programing\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;code\u0026rdquo; but I don\u0026rsquo;t know for sure.\nAt work, I have a moto: \u0026ldquo;you can\u0026rsquo;t edit it if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist yet.\u0026rdquo; The more interesting thing, I think, in every context is when you go off into your own office, fire up the emacs, write something, and then say \u0026ldquo;so how does this look?\u0026rdquo; People sometimes say, \u0026ldquo;nice, but you used \u0026lsquo;setup\u0026rsquo; as a verb in the third paragraph,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;ok, but you left out a section about flux capacitors in section two, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s crucial for understanding most of section three,\u0026rdquo; but these are problems that are fairly easily addressed.\nNow it could be the case that I\u0026rsquo;m just that awesome (unlikely), but I think it boils down to the fact that most people don\u0026rsquo;t understand how to make texts. I also think that a lot of \u0026ldquo;group process,\u0026rdquo; can be obsoleted by an individual who can produce something, and has a good sense of the group\u0026rsquo;s desires, and who knows how to check in with various group members at the right moments. While these skills can be listed quite effectively, and it\u0026rsquo;s true that there is no rocket science involved: some things are easier said than done.\nNot every collaboration works, and there are a lot of variables at play in any situation where a group of people must come together to make something, but in nearly every situation beginning with \u0026ldquo;hey, I want make something with you, look at this draft,\u0026rdquo; is better than \u0026ldquo;I was thinking about making something with you but I wanted to get your feedback first.\u0026rdquo;\nJust sayin\u0026rsquo;\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/starting-a-collaboration/","summary":"Alternate Title: \u0026ldquo;How to start a collaborative writing project or die trying,\u0026rdquo;\nStep 1: Lock yourself in your office, fire up Emacs, and write an initial draft from beginning to end yourself.\nStep 2: Post it on the Internet.\nStep 3: Encourage contributions and hands on feedback from your collaborators. Have a piece of cake.\nYou may thing that I\u0026rsquo;m kidding, but it\u0026rsquo;s true. I think there\u0026rsquo;s a misconception that the way to write something with other people follows a path that might look like: having a meeting to establish the common goals and an outline of what needs to get said, and then another meeting to divide up who is going to write want, and then people go back and write their little parts, and then you mash them all up and everyone rewrites their part till it meshes with the other parts, and then you pray it says what you need it to say, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t need further revising--except it sort of dose, so you repeat the whole process over again, to revise the text, except with editing instead of writing.","title":"Starting a Collaboration"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m very close to declaring feed reader bankruptcy. And not just simple \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll ever catch up with my backlog,\u0026rdquo; but rather that I\u0026rsquo;ll pull out of the whole RSS reading game all together. Needless to say, because of the ultimate subject matter--information collection and utilization and cultural participation on the Internet--and my own personal interests and tendencies this has provided some thinking\u0026hellip; Here goes nothing:\nProblems With RSS Web 2.0 in a lot of ways introduced the world to ubiquitous RSS. There were now feeds for everything. Awesome right?\nI suppose.\nMy leading problem with RSS is probably a lack of good applications to read RSS with. It\u0026rsquo;s not that there aren\u0026rsquo;t some good applications for RSS, its that RSS is too general of a format, and there are too many different kinds of feeds, and so we get these generic applications that simply take the chronology of RSS items from a number of different feeds and present them as if they were emails or one giant feed, with some basic interface niceties. RSS readers, at the moment, make it easier to consume media in a straightforward manner without unnecessary mode switching, and although RSS is accessed by way of a technological \u0026ldquo;pull,\u0026rdquo; the user experience is essentially \u0026ldquo;push.\u0026rdquo; The problem then, is that feed reading applications don\u0026rsquo;t offer a real benefit to their users beyond a little bit of added efficiency.\nComing up a close second, is the fact that the publishers of RSS sometimes have silly ideas about user behaviors with regards to RSS. For instance there\u0026rsquo;s some delusion that if you truncate the content of posts in RSS feeds, people will click on links and visit your site, and generate add revenue. Which is comical. I\u0026rsquo;m much more likely to stop reading a feed if full text isn\u0026rsquo;t available than I am to click through to the site. This is probably the biggest single problem with that I see with RSS publication. In general, I think publishers should care as much about the presentation of their content in their feed as they do about the presentation of content on their website. While it\u0026rsquo;s true that it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;easier\u0026rdquo; to get a good looking feed than it is to get a good looking website, attending to the feed is important.\nThe Solution Web 2.0 has allowed (and expected) us to have RSS feeds for nearly everything on our sites. Certainly there are so many more rss feeds than anyone really cares to read. More than anything this has emphasized the way that RSS has become the \u0026ldquo;stealth data format of the web,\u0026rdquo; and I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty clear, that for all its warts, RSS is not a format that normal people are really meant to interact with.\nIndeed, in a lot of ways the success of Facebook and Twitter have been as a result of the failure of RSS-ecosystem software to present content to us in a coherent and usable way.\nPersonally, I still have a Google Reader account, but I\u0026rsquo;m trying to cull my collection of feeds and wean myself from consuming all feeds in one massive stew. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using notifixlite for any feed where I\u0026rsquo;m interested in getting the results in very-near-real time. Google alerts, microblogging feeds, etc.\nI\u0026rsquo;m using the planet function in ikiwiki, particularly in the cyborg institute wiki as a means of reading collection of feeds. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot better than the conventional feed reader, but it might be a start. I\u0026rsquo;m looking at plagger for the next step.\nI hope the next \u0026ldquo;thing\u0026rdquo; in this space are some feed readers that add intelligence to the process of presenting the news. \u0026ldquo;Intelligent\u0026rdquo; features might include:\nNoticing the order you read feeds/items and attempting to present items to you in that order. Removing duplicate, or nearly duplicate items from presentation. Integrate--as appropriate--with the other ways that you typically consume information: reading email and instant messaging (in my case.) Provide notifications for new content in an intelligent sort of way. I don\u0026rsquo;t need an instant message every time a flickr tag that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in watching updates, but it might be nice if I could set these notifications up on a per-folder or per-feed manner. Better yet, the feed reader might be able to figure this out. Integrate with feedback mechanisms in a clear and coherent way. Both via commenting systems (so integration with something like Disqus might be nice, or the ability auto-fill a comment form), and via email. It\u0026rsquo;d be a start at any rate. I look forward to thinking about this more with you in any case. How do you read RSS? What do you wish your feed reader would do that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/end-user-rss/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m very close to declaring feed reader bankruptcy. And not just simple \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll ever catch up with my backlog,\u0026rdquo; but rather that I\u0026rsquo;ll pull out of the whole RSS reading game all together. Needless to say, because of the ultimate subject matter--information collection and utilization and cultural participation on the Internet--and my own personal interests and tendencies this has provided some thinking\u0026hellip; Here goes nothing:\nProblems With RSS Web 2.0 in a lot of ways introduced the world to ubiquitous RSS. There were now feeds for everything. Awesome right?\nI suppose.\nMy leading problem with RSS is probably a lack of good applications to read RSS with. It\u0026rsquo;s not that there aren\u0026rsquo;t some good applications for RSS, its that RSS is too general of a format, and there are too many different kinds of feeds, and so we get these generic applications that simply take the chronology of RSS items from a number of different feeds and present them as if they were emails or one giant feed, with some basic interface niceties.","title":"End User RSS"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a crazy idea: in addition to posting an RSS feed, say I start posting the content of the blog as Common Lisp code. Not, to replace any format that I currently publish in, but as an additional output option. Entries might look something like this:\n(tychoish:blog-post (tychoish:meta-data :title \u0026quot;The Blog, Next in Lisp\u0026quot; :author \u0026quot;tycho garen\u0026quot; :pubtime #'(format () time-t) (tychoish:blog-tags '(lisp cyborg crazy)) (tychoish:archive-collection '(programing))) (tychoish:blog-content (markdown) \u0026quot;Here's a crazy idea: in addition to posting an RSS feed, say I start posting the content of the blog as Common Lisp code. Not, to replace any format that I currently publish in, but as an additional output option. Entries might look something like this: [...]\u0026quot;)) That\u0026rsquo;s pretty. In a lispy story of way. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s actually correct, and it makes calls to functions that don\u0026rsquo;t exist, of course. But I hope you can get the gist enough to see where I\u0026rsquo;m going with this, and maybe enough to correct my newbish mistakes.\nBy my count there needs to be functions for: blog-post, meta-data, blog-tags, blog-content, and markdown. And of course it\u0026rsquo;s missing some notion of what these functions might do. I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly sure what they could do, build a better indexing system for the site (lord knows I need it), or more easily create a Lisp-based content reader/browser thatls like a feed reader but more in some way that I haven\u0026rsquo;t envisioned.\nIn a lot of ways, this isn\u0026rsquo;t any different from RSS. And it is RSS, basically, except you don\u0026rsquo;t have to parse it into some format that your programing language can understand, (assuming you\u0026rsquo;re programing with Lisp, of course, but you are, aren\u0026rsquo;t you?) because it is your programing language. At least in my mind this has a lot in common with the Sygn Project in that both projects focus on providing some sort of loose standard that allow us to share and use data openly and freely, using formats that are easy (enough) to construct by hand, are human readable, and easy to process and use programatically.\nIn any case, it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be terribly hard to generate this format, the question is: does seeing the data like this present possiblities to anyone? And, while we\u0026rsquo;re at it, if anyone wants to help define some of the more basic functions, that might be awesome. I look forward to hearing from you all?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-blog-next-in-lisp/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a crazy idea: in addition to posting an RSS feed, say I start posting the content of the blog as Common Lisp code. Not, to replace any format that I currently publish in, but as an additional output option. Entries might look something like this:\n(tychoish:blog-post (tychoish:meta-data :title \u0026quot;The Blog, Next in Lisp\u0026quot; :author \u0026quot;tycho garen\u0026quot; :pubtime #'(format () time-t) (tychoish:blog-tags '(lisp cyborg crazy)) (tychoish:archive-collection '(programing))) (tychoish:blog-content (markdown) \u0026quot;Here's a crazy idea: in addition to posting an RSS feed, say I start posting the content of the blog as Common Lisp code. Not, to replace any format that I currently publish in, but as an additional output option. Entries might look something like this: [...]\u0026quot;)) That\u0026rsquo;s pretty. In a lispy story of way. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s actually correct, and it makes calls to functions that don\u0026rsquo;t exist, of course. But I hope you can get the gist enough to see where I\u0026rsquo;m going with this, and maybe enough to correct my newbish mistakes.","title":"The Blog, Next in Lisp"},{"content":"I was talking to someone, probably a coworker, and I was saying something about a \u0026ldquo;government,\u0026rdquo; except I slipped and said \u0026ldquo;corporation.\u0026rdquo; An easy mistake, if not a common one, perhaps, and certainly somewhat telling. In this post I want to discuss a number of ideas that have been lingering about in my thoughts regarding the role of corporations on culture and technology, and the role of corporate structures on the conveyance of cultural values.\nIn a lot of ways this post is the successor to my posts on: Martian Economics and Transformational Economics\nMaybe that\u0026rsquo;s a bit much for one blog post. In brief:\nCorporations and Governments We can think of both corporations and governments fall into the larger category of \u0026ldquo;formal social institutions,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;formal collective institutions.\u0026rdquo; They are both, at least in theory, productive beyond the ability of a single individual, and both dominate the shape and course of our lives to significant degrees.\nCorporate Structure and Cultural Transmission How corporations, and governments more obviously, are structured and behave is--I would argue--a means of creating and transmitting cultural values.\nPraxis and IBM: Autonomy and Bottom Up Organization I use these two examples--one fictional, one actual--as possible illustrations of a different sorts of ways of thinking about corporate organization. Both of these examples represent large institutions engaged in diverse operations, that are organized (I think) with a great number of quasi-autonomous operations and divisions, which contribute to common project but have the freedom to operate independently and encapsulated ways. This strikes me as a unique modality.\nThis leads to a lot of questions, and not very many good answers. I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s not intrinsically a bad thing.\nOne of the biggest problems with corporations as far as I\u0026rsquo;m concerned is that by virtue of their fiduciary responsibility they have no obligation to operate in a sustainable manner or in the common interests of either their employees or the public.\nCan the potentially harmful potentials inherent in corporate person-hood be offset by certain types of organization?\nIs there a better way to manage and organize our political society that balances the power of governments, corporations, that is sustainable and efficient?\nWe talk, and think, a lot about how the Internet affects how people use technology, and how the Internet creates new possibilities for business. How does the Internet change the way we organize our work lives? Has technology made smaller corporate operations more sustainable and able to compete?\nAre the alternatives loose and autonomous-cells in corporate organizations that might be able to address the concerns regarding efficiency and sustainability?\nAnd so forth\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/corporate-government/","summary":"I was talking to someone, probably a coworker, and I was saying something about a \u0026ldquo;government,\u0026rdquo; except I slipped and said \u0026ldquo;corporation.\u0026rdquo; An easy mistake, if not a common one, perhaps, and certainly somewhat telling. In this post I want to discuss a number of ideas that have been lingering about in my thoughts regarding the role of corporations on culture and technology, and the role of corporate structures on the conveyance of cultural values.\nIn a lot of ways this post is the successor to my posts on: Martian Economics and Transformational Economics\nMaybe that\u0026rsquo;s a bit much for one blog post. In brief:\nCorporations and Governments We can think of both corporations and governments fall into the larger category of \u0026ldquo;formal social institutions,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;formal collective institutions.\u0026rdquo; They are both, at least in theory, productive beyond the ability of a single individual, and both dominate the shape and course of our lives to significant degrees.","title":"Corporate Government"},{"content":"So in the emacs session running on my laptop (13 days plus) I have a number of buffers open, a great many of which include the entirety of Practical Common Lisp thanks to emacs-w3m, which I\u0026rsquo;ve been working through slowly. I\u0026rsquo;ve written here about how I find Lisp to be intriguing and grok-able in a way that other programing languages aren\u0026rsquo;t really.\nMy exposure to lisp isn\u0026rsquo;t great. I hack about with my emacs code, and I do a little bit of tweaking with the window manager that I use (written in common lisp), StumpWM, but other than that I don\u0026rsquo;t actually have much experience. What follows are a series of reflections that I have with regards to lisp:\nAlthough there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of really amazing capabilities in Common Lisp, and a lot of open source energies behind Lisp\u0026hellip; Lisp isn\u0026rsquo;t flourishing.\nThis shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a great surprise to anyone, lisp is sort of the epitome of \u0026ldquo;Programing Languages that don\u0026rsquo;t get enough respect.\u0026rdquo; Having said that there are a lot of lisp projects that aren\u0026rsquo;t really well maintained at all. Even things that would just be standard and maintained for other languages (various common libraries and the like) haven\u0026rsquo;t been touched in a few years. While it\u0026rsquo;s not a huge worry, it does make it a bit worrying. Having said that, I don\u0026rsquo;t think lisp is ever really going to go anywhere, and Common Lisp seems like a pretty darn good spec. But I don\u0026rsquo;t have any real exposure to Scheme, and Arc isn\u0026rsquo;t really real yet, I guess.\nLisp works funny, particularly for people who only have a passing familiarity with programming.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re used to programming languages that either pass the source code through an interpreter (e.g. Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, and I suppose Java and C#) compile into some sort of intermediate bytecode and then run that code on a virtual machine, then output stuff; conversely there are languages which compile down to some sort of native binary and then execute directly on the hardware. Examples of this second class of languages include: C, C++, and Haskell. Sorry if my examples or descriptions of the execution model aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly precise.\nWhen you run lisp code, you define stuff and load it into the memory of a lisp process, and then stuff happens as the program runs. It\u0026rsquo;s compiled to native code (I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure at least,) but there aren\u0026rsquo;t binaries, in the conventional sense. To get a \u0026ldquo;binary,\u0026rdquo; you have to dump the memory of the program, and pretty much the entire lisp process into a blob. So the base size for executables is way bigger than one might expect. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had some success at running scripts with sbcl shebangs from the terminal. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty, not that I\u0026rsquo;ve really done very much of that, but its nice to know that it\u0026rsquo;s possible.\nWeb programing in Lisp. I\u0026rsquo;m not so sure about that.\nSo you might see lisp code, and think: \u0026ldquo;So. Many. God. Damn. Parentheses.\u0026rdquo; and you\u0026rsquo;d be right. But even well formatted HTML is considerably less \u0026ldquo;human readable\u0026rdquo; than Lisp, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of room for debate there. But when you think about it, Lisp actually makes a fair amount of sense for the web.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve actually done a little bit of poking around and from what I can see, the actual architecture and deployments of lisp aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly bad. There are Apache modules that will pass requests back to a single lisp process (mod_lisp similar to how fastcgi works,) and there\u0026rsquo;s always the option of running performance CL specific web-application servers and just proxying requests to those servers from Apache. Lisp is, or can be, pretty damn fast by contemporary standards, and although there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of under-maintained lisp infrastructure, the basics are covered, including database connectors and java script facilities which might not be incredibly enticing, but all the parts are there.\nI mean, having said that, I\u0026rsquo;m not a web developer, or really much of a developer in general, but it\u0026rsquo;s fun to think about, and even if I only use Lisp to hack on various things here and there, I\u0026rsquo;m still learning a bunch from the book and that seems more than worthwhile.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/common-lisp-practically/","summary":"So in the emacs session running on my laptop (13 days plus) I have a number of buffers open, a great many of which include the entirety of Practical Common Lisp thanks to emacs-w3m, which I\u0026rsquo;ve been working through slowly. I\u0026rsquo;ve written here about how I find Lisp to be intriguing and grok-able in a way that other programing languages aren\u0026rsquo;t really.\nMy exposure to lisp isn\u0026rsquo;t great. I hack about with my emacs code, and I do a little bit of tweaking with the window manager that I use (written in common lisp), StumpWM, but other than that I don\u0026rsquo;t actually have much experience. What follows are a series of reflections that I have with regards to lisp:\nAlthough there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of really amazing capabilities in Common Lisp, and a lot of open source energies behind Lisp\u0026hellip; Lisp isn\u0026rsquo;t flourishing.\nThis shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a great surprise to anyone, lisp is sort of the epitome of \u0026ldquo;Programing Languages that don\u0026rsquo;t get enough respect.","title":"Common Lisp, Practically"},{"content":"Alternate titles for this post include, \u0026ldquo;Depending on When You Start Counting,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Happy New Year.\u0026rdquo;\nI must confess that I don\u0026rsquo;t do holiday\u0026rsquo;s very well. It\u0026rsquo;s not that I\u0026rsquo;m a huge curmudgeon (though I probably am) or that I don\u0026rsquo;t like celebrations (though I don\u0026rsquo;t much.) More, I think it\u0026rsquo;s that I\u0026rsquo;m mostly a homebody, and given the option, will in most cases, choose to spend any given evening at home writing and hanging out with the cats. Furthermore, I\u0026rsquo;m generally of the opinion that formal excuses are not needed for spending time with your friends and family. Nevertheless there is a certain sort of cultural momentum around holidays like New Years, and its hard to avoid them entirely.\nFor many years, my annual cycle has largely been on the academic calendar. Indeed for a few years after I graduated formally, I still took a few classes, and was wrapped up in applying for graduate school and enough of my friends were still in school that I seemed to stay on the academic year. This year with, I noted the beginning of the academic year, mostly because for the first time, really the first time in a long time I wasn\u0026rsquo;t in school, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t trying to be in school, and that wasn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing. I still have a lot of academic habits: the impulse to review and summarize my work about every four months, the way I stricture and organize my work is very reminiscent of a sort of academic way of looking at things. Shrug.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s a new year, depending on when you start counting, and given what a ride 2009 was, it seems like a bit of reflection is in order. The most significant thing was the fact that I took a job half way across the country and moved in late June. This has lead to a number of interesting developments: I met a number of people in \u0026ldquo;real life\u0026rdquo; who had previously been on-line friends, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot about my skills and abilities and myself as a writer, I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a circle of friends that delight me.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it was a stellar year. I spent six months not working (really,) and a lot of time unsure about what I was going to do for work, let alone \u0026ldquo;my career,\u0026rdquo; all my friends were in graduate school and most of them weren\u0026rsquo;t anywhere near where I was, and so forth.\nBut I kept, hacking away at various projects, kept thinking and writing about new things, and did my best to seize opportunities when they arose. And somehow it all worked out. In retrospect it\u0026rsquo;s all very weird, to think how monumental this year has been, and the ways that I\u0026rsquo;ve really pushed myself to do things that don\u0026rsquo;t seem very \u0026ldquo;me\u0026rdquo; like. In the end I\u0026rsquo;m pleased with where I am and where I\u0026rsquo;ve come.\nBut perhaps, more significantly, I\u0026rsquo;m excited to what the next year holds.\nAs it should be, I suppose. I hope you all are doing well in this regard and I look forward to talking with you throughout the year to come.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/another-one-already/","summary":"Alternate titles for this post include, \u0026ldquo;Depending on When You Start Counting,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Happy New Year.\u0026rdquo;\nI must confess that I don\u0026rsquo;t do holiday\u0026rsquo;s very well. It\u0026rsquo;s not that I\u0026rsquo;m a huge curmudgeon (though I probably am) or that I don\u0026rsquo;t like celebrations (though I don\u0026rsquo;t much.) More, I think it\u0026rsquo;s that I\u0026rsquo;m mostly a homebody, and given the option, will in most cases, choose to spend any given evening at home writing and hanging out with the cats. Furthermore, I\u0026rsquo;m generally of the opinion that formal excuses are not needed for spending time with your friends and family. Nevertheless there is a certain sort of cultural momentum around holidays like New Years, and its hard to avoid them entirely.\nFor many years, my annual cycle has largely been on the academic calendar. Indeed for a few years after I graduated formally, I still took a few classes, and was wrapped up in applying for graduate school and enough of my friends were still in school that I seemed to stay on the academic year.","title":"Another One Already"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Being a writer,\u0026rdquo; is a strange thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this before, but there\u0026rsquo;s more here. I had a conversation with Caroline about what it means to be a writer and I thought some of the things we came up with were pretty good. I hope I\u0026rsquo;ve done a sufficient job of capturing what we talked about.\nOne of the things that we emphatically agreed upon was the fact that writing, despite being something that we\u0026rsquo;re all taught to do in school, as part of being \u0026ldquo;an educated person\u0026rdquo; is not something that everyone is particularly capable of.1 Not that that\u0026rsquo;s a bad thing. Having said that, because everyone reads at least in some capacity, and most people know how to write, when you tell someone \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a writer,\u0026rdquo; or you say something like \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this novel for about 16 months,\u0026rdquo; you\u0026rsquo;ll get funny looks. Guaranteed.\nThere are, I think, a few major issues at play here:\n1. Because reading is an automatic facility for most people, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that laypeople are very prone to misunderstanding the amount of work that any given text represents.\nI might even go so far as to say, writing is not something that people automatically think of as \u0026ldquo;work.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m going to sit down and spend some time talking to imaginary people in my head who live on a spaceship a thousand years hence, in an attempt and hope that I can productively explore the post-colonial condition in a new and different way, doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound like it should be hard. But it is, and I think much more difficult than the kind of writing that I do professionally.\n2. Because most writing education focuses on grammar and extensive reading (which are great things,) the gulf between \u0026ldquo;people who write\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;people who don\u0026rsquo;t,\u0026rdquo; is often not about writing technically solid prose or not (despite the fact that in primary and secondary education, this is the major p).2 Rather, the ability to understand something (a process, event, or story) in enough detail to describe with an awareness of an audience is the real challenge.\nIndeed when successful, all of the \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; of writing is entirely opaque to the reader.\n3. Writing a text (an article, essay, or story, as opposed to a memo or message,) is not something that an individual can--or should be expected--to accomplish independently. You can\u0026rsquo;t tell a writer \u0026ldquo;go write this story, and when you get back we\u0026rsquo;ll print it.\u0026rdquo; Editors, from the person who says \u0026ldquo;I need you to write this,\u0026rdquo; to the people who give you feedback as you progress on a project, to the people who prepare a text for publication. You can\u0026rsquo;t do it alone: there are too many conflicting interests at play in the writing of any text that make it challenging for a single person to write alone.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t bring these up to complain. Nor do I think the solution to these problems is to \u0026ldquo;just give writers a bit more respect.\u0026rdquo; Knowing these things about writing, I think we could, quite productively, change the way we educate students to write. It might also, I think lead to some productive reorganizations of how writers and editors organize themselves to get \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; produced.\nAfter a while of talking through these ideas, the conversation produced the following gem, which I simply must share with you:\ncaroline: you know how everyone has a memoir now?\ntycho: yeah\u0026hellip;\ncaroline: you know what I don\u0026rsquo;t care about?\ncaroline: most people\u0026rsquo;s memoirs\nOnward and Upward!\nI\u0026rsquo;m aware this sentence ended in a preposition. Piss off.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI had the longest run of \u0026ldquo;highest-possible C\u0026rdquo; grades on my papers in high school English, and while I think I might have managed to average out to a B, mostly, that always felt like an accomplishment. In a lot of ways, my failure to achieve in high school English is probably mostly responsible for the fact that I avoided writing almost entirely in college.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-care-and-feeding-of-a-writer/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;Being a writer,\u0026rdquo; is a strange thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this before, but there\u0026rsquo;s more here. I had a conversation with Caroline about what it means to be a writer and I thought some of the things we came up with were pretty good. I hope I\u0026rsquo;ve done a sufficient job of capturing what we talked about.\nOne of the things that we emphatically agreed upon was the fact that writing, despite being something that we\u0026rsquo;re all taught to do in school, as part of being \u0026ldquo;an educated person\u0026rdquo; is not something that everyone is particularly capable of.1 Not that that\u0026rsquo;s a bad thing. Having said that, because everyone reads at least in some capacity, and most people know how to write, when you tell someone \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a writer,\u0026rdquo; or you say something like \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this novel for about 16 months,\u0026rdquo; you\u0026rsquo;ll get funny looks. Guaranteed.\nThere are, I think, a few major issues at play here:","title":"The Care and Feeding of a Writer"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading a lot about web development in the last few weeks. I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly sure why. There are some interesting things going on in terms of the technology. Frameworks that provide for some interesting possibilities abound, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t know if the web is the only future for programing, it\u0026rsquo;s certainly a big part of the future of the way we interact with computers.\nSo what are you working on developing tycho?\nA whole lot of noting. I know how the technology works. I know--more or less--how to build things for the web, and yet I\u0026rsquo;ve not said \u0026ldquo;you know what I need to build? A web app that does [this awesome thing]\u0026rdquo;\nMaybe it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m unimaginative in this regard, or that I tend to think of web applications being a nearly universally wrong solution to any given problem.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s quite possible that both of these things are true. It\u0026rsquo;s also likely that when approached with a problem with technology or with data, I don\u0026rsquo;t instinctively think about how to solve it pragmatically, much less with some sort of web-based system. As I think about it might be the fact that my mind is intensely qualitative. In my psych major days I always had problems coming up with ides for non-hokey quantitative studies (Insofar as such things exist.)\nIn a lot of ways the questions I ask of the technology aren\u0026rsquo;t (particularly) \u0026ldquo;how can I manage this data better,\u0026rdquo; but rather how can I interact with this technology more efficiently. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think data interaction is a solved problem, I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m pretty far ahead of the game, and that the things I do to improve how I work has more to do with tweaking my system to shape the content and way that I\u0026rsquo;m working. While there\u0026rsquo;s often some little bits of code involved, it\u0026rsquo;s not the kind of thing that\u0026rsquo;s generalizable in the way that an application or web site might be.\nThe Imperative Tense\nMost of the time, you put me in a room with programmers and tell us to talk about our work, the conversation will be really lively. Aside from the fact that I use programmers tools to write, and use a very iterative approach\nOne thing I notice many of my coworkers doing is saying \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m going to write a program that\u0026rsquo;s going to do these four things, and it\u0026rsquo;s going to be written in such a way as to make these other things possible,\u0026rdquo; (insert words of awesomeness in this sentence.) And I think \u0026ldquo;Cool! I can\u0026rsquo;t wait!\u0026rdquo;\nFor a long time this way of talking confused me and almost put me on edge. When I have an idea for a new project, I get these images, and an interesting concept to toy with and I have little conversations in my head with the characters, and I see their world from their eyes, and it\u0026rsquo;s sort of an absurd experience and I don\u0026rsquo;t tell people about this. I mean, I might say \u0026ldquo;I got an awesome idea for a new book,\u0026rdquo; but usually not more than that. And the truth is that I get ideas for stories all the time and I know that I\u0026rsquo;ll never really be able to write most of them.\nI\u0026rsquo;m okay with the way programmers plan projects, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with my own methodology. Having said that, I think the difference in the way that I think about and plan projects has a lot to do with the way I think about these things.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/thinking-like-a-web-developer/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading a lot about web development in the last few weeks. I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly sure why. There are some interesting things going on in terms of the technology. Frameworks that provide for some interesting possibilities abound, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t know if the web is the only future for programing, it\u0026rsquo;s certainly a big part of the future of the way we interact with computers.\nSo what are you working on developing tycho?\nA whole lot of noting. I know how the technology works. I know--more or less--how to build things for the web, and yet I\u0026rsquo;ve not said \u0026ldquo;you know what I need to build? A web app that does [this awesome thing]\u0026rdquo;\nMaybe it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m unimaginative in this regard, or that I tend to think of web applications being a nearly universally wrong solution to any given problem.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s quite possible that both of these things are true.","title":"Thinking Like a Web Developer"},{"content":"I bought a Kindle. I am weak.\n(Note: I drafted this post early last week, and it arrived last Wednesday, and I started using it in earnest over the weekend. Nevertheless, this post is written from the perspective of my past self.)\nIn any case, there are a number of questions that you may be asking yourself at this juncture.\nZOMG That\u0026rsquo;s a lot of DRM that you\u0026rsquo;ve signed up for. How does that make you feel?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not wild about it. I mostly view the DRMed kindle stuff as: not as a collection, but rather as a convince for reading specific texts on demand and as needed. And on those terms, I can live with it. There\u0026rsquo;s all sorts of things wrong with what I\u0026rsquo;m about to say but: DRM is most onerous if you think that the files you download are \u0026ldquo;your possessions.\u0026rdquo; Because they aren\u0026rsquo;t. When it\u0026rsquo;s just a dinky file that you have the ability to read in a highly convenient way, that\u0026rsquo;s easier to swallow. Having said that, if you\u0026rsquo;re not buying something that you get to keep the books as they are now are too expensive.\nI\u0026rsquo;m about 100 pages into the book I\u0026rsquo;m currently reading (it rocks, more on this later) and I picked it up the other day to discover that the cats had helpfully chewed the back corner. This isn\u0026rsquo;t the first time this has happened. While I don\u0026rsquo;t really care, I can still read it, part of reason I don\u0026rsquo;t seem to care is that the quality of books as objects these days doesn\u0026rsquo;t particularly impress me. So I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like I\u0026rsquo;m loosing anything. And if I want a real book-object, such a thing can be had.\nI have a suspicion that you have more than a few paper books that you haven\u0026rsquo;t read. What are you going to do with them now?\nRead them. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I\u0026rsquo;ll stop reading paper books, though I think a great deal depends on context. I suspect that I might not take paper-books out of the house very much. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of books, but I certainly have a few, and I know that I mostly have them with me for nostalgia, and not because I actually intend to read them any time soon.\nPaper books, on my shelf, represent possibilities, in a way that the object of the Kindle is a possibility. I think even considering the limitations of the Kindle, these two truisms balance each-other out.\nHow do you think you\u0026rsquo;ll use the kindle?\nI think once the initial buzz of the Kindle wears off, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably settle into a rhythm whereby I\u0026rsquo;ll read periodicals, fiction, and documents that I generate (along the lines of slush) on the Kindle along with anything I read out of the house, and then read reference material off of paper. I\u0026rsquo;m mostly worried about how the kindle might screw with my--often quite good--spatial memory for texts. We\u0026rsquo;ll have to see how this develops.\nI\u0026rsquo;m strongly considering joining a gym in the next few weeks and I hope/expect to read whilst doing the aerobic thing. The kindle seems ideal for this.\nI hear your a slow reader, is this really worthwhile?\nPerhaps, and I think that my main issue is that I\u0026rsquo;m really bad at setting aside time to read when I\u0026rsquo;m awake enough to actually read. This is separate issue from the Kindle, and one I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll address in future posts. Having said that, I\u0026rsquo;m attempting to carve out a bit more time for reading in my day--as reading more is a personal goal--so I\u0026rsquo;d say that yes: Despite my apparent slow pace, a Kindle is worthwhile.\nDo you have any Kindle related questions for me?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reading-habits/","summary":"I bought a Kindle. I am weak.\n(Note: I drafted this post early last week, and it arrived last Wednesday, and I started using it in earnest over the weekend. Nevertheless, this post is written from the perspective of my past self.)\nIn any case, there are a number of questions that you may be asking yourself at this juncture.\nZOMG That\u0026rsquo;s a lot of DRM that you\u0026rsquo;ve signed up for. How does that make you feel?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not wild about it. I mostly view the DRMed kindle stuff as: not as a collection, but rather as a convince for reading specific texts on demand and as needed. And on those terms, I can live with it. There\u0026rsquo;s all sorts of things wrong with what I\u0026rsquo;m about to say but: DRM is most onerous if you think that the files you download are \u0026ldquo;your possessions.\u0026rdquo; Because they aren\u0026rsquo;t. When it\u0026rsquo;s just a dinky file that you have the ability to read in a highly convenient way, that\u0026rsquo;s easier to swallow.","title":"Reading Habits"},{"content":"Ok folks, here we go. I\u0026rsquo;ve put the word futurism is in the title of the blog and its near the end of the calendar year, so I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair that I do a little bit of wild prediction about the coming year (and some change.) Here goes:\nOpen technology will increasingly be embedded into \u0026ldquo;closed technology\u0026rdquo; The astute among you will say, \u0026ldquo;but that is already the case:\u0026rdquo; The Motorola Razor cell phone that my grandmother has runs the Linux Kernel (I think.) And there\u0026rsquo;s the TiVo, lets not forget the TiVo. Or, for that matter the fact that Google has--for internal use, of course--a highly modified branch of the Linux Kernel that will never see the light of day.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s old news, and in a lot of ways reflects the some of the intended and unintended business models that naturally exist around Open Source.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not so much, in this case talking about \u0026ldquo;openness\u0026rdquo; as a property of code, but rather openness as a property of technology, and referring to long running efforts like XMPP and OpenID. These technologies exist outside of the continuum of free and proprietary code but promote the cyborg functioning of networks in an transparent and networked way.\nXMPP says if you want to do real time communication, here\u0026rsquo;s the infrastructure in which to do it, and we\u0026rsquo;ve worked through all the interactions so that if you want to interact with a loose federation (like a \u0026ldquo;web\u0026rdquo;) of other users and servers, here\u0026rsquo;s how.\nOpenID solves the \u0026ldquo;single sign on\u0026rdquo; problem by creating an infrastructure for developers to be able to say \u0026ldquo;If you\u0026rsquo;re authenticated to a third party site, and you tell me that authenticating to that third party site is good enough to verify your identity, then it\u0026rsquo;s good enough for us.\u0026rdquo; Which makes it possible to preserve consistent identity between sites, it means you only have to pass credentials to one site, and I find the user experience to be better as well.\nIn any case, we\u0026rsquo;ve seen both of these technologies become swallowed up into closed technologies more and more. Google Wave and Google Talk use a lot of XMPP, and most people don\u0026rsquo;t know this unless their huge geeks (compared to the norm.) Similarly, even though it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly easy to run and delegate OpenIDs through third parties, the main way that people sign into OpenID sites is with their Flickr or Google accounts.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not saying that either of these things are bad, but I think we\u0026rsquo;re going to see a whole lot more of this.\nA major player on the content industry will release a digital subscription plan I think, perhaps the most viable method for \u0026ldquo;big content\u0026rdquo; to survive in the next year or so, will be to make content accessible as part of a subscription model. Pay 10 to 20 dollars a month and have access to some set quantity of stuff. Turn it back in, and they give your more bits. Someone\u0026rsquo;s going to do this: Amazon, Apple, Comcast, etc.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s definitely a hold over from the paper days when content was more scarce. But it gets us away from this crazy idea that we own the stuff we downaload with DRM, it makes content accessible, and it probably allows the of devices to shoot down (to nominal amounts). While it probably isn\u0026rsquo;t perfect, its probably sustainable, and it is a step in the right direction.\nVirtualization technology will filter down to the desktop. We have seen tools like VirtualBox and various commercial products become increasingly prevalent in the past couple of years, to decrease the impact of operating system bound compatibility issues. This is a good thing, but I think that it\u0026rsquo;s going to go way further, and we\u0026rsquo;ll start to see this technology show up on desktops in really significant ways. I don\u0026rsquo;t think desktop computing is in need of the same kinds of massive parallelism that we need on servers, but I think we\u0026rsquo;ll see a couple of other tertiary applications of this technology.\nFirst, I think hypervisors will abstract hardware interfaces away from operating systems. No matter what kind of hardware you have or what it\u0026rsquo;s native method of communication is, the operating system will be able to interact with it in a uniform manner.\nSecond, there are a number of running image manipulation functions that think operating system developers might be able to take advantage of: first the ability to pause, restart, and snapshot the execution stat of a running virtual machine has a lot of benefit. A rolling snapshot of execution state makes suspending laptops much easier, it makes consistent desktop power is less crucial. And so forth.\nFinally, system maintenance is much easier. We loose installation processes: rather than getting an executable that explodes over our file system and installs an operating system, we just get a bootable image. We can more easily roll back to known good states.\nNot to mention the fact that it creates a lot of economic benefits. You don\u0026rsquo;t need IT departments maintaining desktops, you just have a guy making desktop images and deploying them. Creating niche operating system images and builds is a valuable service. Hardware vendors and operating system vendors get more control over their services.\nThere are disadvantages: very slight performance hits, hyepervisor technology that isn\u0026rsquo;t quite there yet, increased disk requirements. But soon.\nSoon indeed.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/three-predictions/","summary":"Ok folks, here we go. I\u0026rsquo;ve put the word futurism is in the title of the blog and its near the end of the calendar year, so I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair that I do a little bit of wild prediction about the coming year (and some change.) Here goes:\nOpen technology will increasingly be embedded into \u0026ldquo;closed technology\u0026rdquo; The astute among you will say, \u0026ldquo;but that is already the case:\u0026rdquo; The Motorola Razor cell phone that my grandmother has runs the Linux Kernel (I think.) And there\u0026rsquo;s the TiVo, lets not forget the TiVo. Or, for that matter the fact that Google has--for internal use, of course--a highly modified branch of the Linux Kernel that will never see the light of day.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s old news, and in a lot of ways reflects the some of the intended and unintended business models that naturally exist around Open Source.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not so much, in this case talking about \u0026ldquo;openness\u0026rdquo; as a property of code, but rather openness as a property of technology, and referring to long running efforts like XMPP and OpenID.","title":"Three Predictions"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not a web developer. I write the content for (a couple) of websites, and I\u0026rsquo;m a fairly competent systems administrator. Every once and a while someone will need a website, or I\u0026rsquo;ll need my site to do something new that I haven\u0026rsquo;t needed to do before and I\u0026rsquo;ll hack something together, but for the most part, I try and keep my head out of web development. Indeed, I often think that designing applications to run in the web browser is the wrong solution to most technological problems. Nevertheless, my work (and play) involves a lot of tinkering and work with web-applications, and I do begrudgingly concede the relevance of web applications.\nIn any case I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading through the following recently, and I (unsurprisingly have a few thoughts:)\nThe Trouble with Frameworks The Web.py Tutiorial The Trouble With Frameworks I really enjoyed how this post located \u0026ldquo;web frameworks\u0026rdquo; in terms of the larger context: what they\u0026rsquo;re good for, what they\u0026rsquo;re not good for, and why they\u0026rsquo;re so popular. I often feel like I see a lot of writing about why FrameworkA is better or worse than FrameworkB, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t really answer a useful question. While I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t blame my gripe with web-based applications entirely on the shoulders of frameworks, it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to think of \u0026ldquo;the framework problem\u0026rdquo; as being a problem with the framework (and the limitations therein) rather than a problem with the web itself.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that frameworks are inherently bad. Indeed, there is a great deal of work that websites require in-order to function: HTML is a pain to write \u0026ldquo;by hand,\u0026rdquo; consistent URLs are desirable, but it\u0026rsquo;s undesirable to have to mange that by hand. If you need content that\u0026rsquo;s dynamic, particularly content that is database-backed, there is all sorts of groundwork that needs to be done that\u0026rsquo;s basic and repetitive even for the most basic functionality. Eliminating this \u0026ldquo;grunt work\u0026rdquo; is the strength of the framework, and in this they provide a great utility.\nHowever, from an operations (rather than development) perspective, frameworks suck. By producing tools that are broadly useful to a large audience, the frameworks are by nature not tuned for high performance operations, and they don\u0026rsquo;t always enforce the most efficient operations (with regards to the databases). Thankfully this is the kind of issue that can be safely delegated to future selves, as premature optimization remains a challenge.\nThoughts on Web.py Though I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a Python person, I have a great deal of respect for Python tools. I swear if I were going to learn a language of this type it would almost certainly be Python. Having said that, the tool looks really interesting: it\u0026rsquo;s minimal and stays out of the way for the most part. It does the really \u0026ldquo;dumb\u0026rdquo; things that you don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to fuss with, but doesn\u0026rsquo;t do a lot of other stuff. And that\u0026rsquo;s a great thing.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how accurate this is, but one of the things that initially intrigued me about web.py is that it sort of felt like it allows for a more \u0026ldquo;UNIX-y\u0026rdquo; approach to web applications. Most frameworks and systems for publishing content to the web work really well as long as you don\u0026rsquo;t try and use anything but the application or framework. Drupal, Wordpress, and Rails seem to work best this way. Web.py seems to mostly be a few hooks around common web-programing tasks for Python developers, so that they can build their apps in whatever way they need to. The the monolithic content management approach doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel very UNIXy by contrast. I think this is something that I need to explore in greater deal.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly sure if there are problems that I see in the world that need to be addressed in this manner. So while I can sort of figure out how to make it work, I don\u0026rsquo;t find myself thinking \u0026ldquo;wow, the next time I want to do [this], I\u0026rsquo;ll definitely use web.py.\u0026rdquo;\nBut then I\u0026rsquo;m just a dude who writes stuff.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/web-frameworks/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not a web developer. I write the content for (a couple) of websites, and I\u0026rsquo;m a fairly competent systems administrator. Every once and a while someone will need a website, or I\u0026rsquo;ll need my site to do something new that I haven\u0026rsquo;t needed to do before and I\u0026rsquo;ll hack something together, but for the most part, I try and keep my head out of web development. Indeed, I often think that designing applications to run in the web browser is the wrong solution to most technological problems. Nevertheless, my work (and play) involves a lot of tinkering and work with web-applications, and I do begrudgingly concede the relevance of web applications.\nIn any case I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading through the following recently, and I (unsurprisingly have a few thoughts:)\nThe Trouble with Frameworks The Web.py Tutiorial The Trouble With Frameworks I really enjoyed how this post located \u0026ldquo;web frameworks\u0026rdquo; in terms of the larger context: what they\u0026rsquo;re good for, what they\u0026rsquo;re not good for, and why they\u0026rsquo;re so popular.","title":"Web Frameworks"},{"content":"(ETA: On second thought, perhaps this essay should have been called \u0026ldquo;Materialism and the Utility of Deleuze,\u0026rdquo; but both work.)\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the second part in my (re)contemplation of Deleuzian theory. Here\u0026rsquo;s part one.\nEverything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines--all of them connected to those of [the] body. [\u0026hellip;] There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all species of life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever. (p. 2)\n-- Giles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri Anti-Oedipus Originally published in 1972, English translation 1977. Translated by Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem.\nI think one of the key reasons that I keep returning to Anti-Oedipus is that it provides a way to be a fierce materialist while addressing the kinds of questions that idealists (i.e. psychoanalysts) raise. This in itself isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly unique (I suppose,) but I\u0026rsquo;m particularly taken with the way that they approach questions of subjectivity, identity, experience, and development without engaging or furthering the discourse of psychoanalytic thought.\nInitially I think I was off put by all the psychoanalytic language in the text, and the way that they seem to argue incredibly fine points against Lacan and Freud. As I look at it more and more, I realize the point of Anti-Opedipus is to say \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t think about these issues in Freudian terms, and with Freudian assumptions! Think about subjectivity and identity as phenomena with material foundations and mechanistic underpinnings!\u0026rdquo;\nI, perhaps unlike the milieu that Deleuze and Guatteri were writing in, was never particularly enchanted by psychoanalysis, but I have been incredibly interested in the kinds of issues that analytic thought engages, and Anti-Oedipus provides a way to entertain those kinds of discussions without engaging in a troublesome intellectual lineage.\nBut to tie this post back to the last one, this approach to thinking about ourselves as subjects, to our creativity and desire, to the cultural implications of our identity, is not something that\u0026rsquo;s particularly useful addition to a theoretical framework. Right? I\u0026rsquo;ve not done a lot of this kind writing recently, but it strikes me that the call to be a materialist, and to think about the mechanics of social and personal phenomena is, as we say, \u0026ldquo;non-trivial.\u0026rdquo; Being Anti-Oedipal isn\u0026rsquo;t just something that you sprinkle here and there; it\u0026rsquo;s not a grand-theory-of-everything, but once it seeps in a bit, it makes it possible to think about the world and experiences in--what I\u0026rsquo;d call--a more productive way. Perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s true that Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics after all.\nI underlined the paragraph from the last post nearly four years ago. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten it. I think, more than anything, that is a marker of my own development.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deleuze-and-the-utility-of-materialism/","summary":"(ETA: On second thought, perhaps this essay should have been called \u0026ldquo;Materialism and the Utility of Deleuze,\u0026rdquo; but both work.)\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the second part in my (re)contemplation of Deleuzian theory. Here\u0026rsquo;s part one.\nEverything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines--all of them connected to those of [the] body. [\u0026hellip;] There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all species of life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever. (p. 2)\n-- Giles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri Anti-Oedipus Originally published in 1972, English translation 1977. Translated by Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem.\nI think one of the key reasons that I keep returning to Anti-Oedipus is that it provides a way to be a fierce materialist while addressing the kinds of questions that idealists (i.","title":"Deleuze and the Utility of Materialism"},{"content":"I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular \u0026ldquo;readership:\u0026rdquo; being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living.) How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out this fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christan Moralists sought out the traces of the Flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guatteri, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.\n-- Michel Foucault, writing in the preface to Anti-Oedipus, by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent a while away from Academia and geeky theoretical academic thoughts for a while. Then I discovered this twitter account and I got drawn back into it. I read the tweets and I thought, \u0026ldquo;you know,\u0026rdquo; these are hilarious on their own because they are so off the well, but I think I actually understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on. I\u0026rsquo;d have conversations with unsuspecting coworkers about little bits of Deleuzian theory. H.S. came for a visit and we had a rather long conversation about Deleuze and theory. I don\u0026rsquo;t know that \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m back,\u0026rdquo; is exactly the right way to phrase this, but I definitely enjoy the added perspective that I\u0026rsquo;m able to bring to this stuff now.\nI was never a very good theorist or philosopher, though I enjoy watching from a far, I tend want answers to different kinds of questions. I\u0026rsquo;m not, nor have I ever been \u0026ldquo;a scholar\u0026rdquo; of the \u0026ldquo;Capitalism and Schizophrenia\u0026rdquo; diptych--I haven\u0026rsquo;t even read it in its entirety--but it\u0026rsquo;s been a great influence me. Of the things that I read and interacted with in college, I\u0026rsquo;d have to say that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are the texts that I return to with the greatest frequency. And I never even took a class that assigned D\u0026amp;G!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve read a fair number of papers and other pieces that have attempted to use Deleuze\u0026rsquo;s work as theoretical framework or some such, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always been disappointed by what happens as a result. For starters, the chance of Deleuze citations being: of the Rhizomatics essay at the beginning of \u0026ldquo;A Thousand Plateaus,\u0026rdquo; or from his collections of film criticism are overwhelming. This is unsurprising as this probably represents the most accessible of portions of Deleuze\u0026rsquo;s work. Also unsurprising is my sense that no matter what the paper is about, the Deleuzian theory overpowers whatever the author is trying to say. Deleuze\u0026rsquo;s thought is pretty darn heavy, and there\u0026rsquo;s no way around it.\nAnd from some perspectives this is actually pretty funny: when you read Anti-Oedipus it\u0026rsquo;s not \u0026ldquo;fluffy,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s pretty playful. There are lots of metaphors and images that draw out the logic and the point. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot going on, but it\u0026rsquo;s not dense (certainly not in the way that Derrida is dense.) This has lead me to ask a two important questions:\nIf the writing is not very difficult or opaque, why do (Americans) who attempt to use the work fail to capture the playfulness, and seem too fall flat? Why am I (and clearly others as well) so intrigued by this work, and why do I (we?) keep returning to this text? Particularly since it\u0026rsquo;s so difficult to use in support of other arguments. The answers, I think bring us back to Foucault\u0026rsquo;s assertion in the preface, that Anti-Oedipus is (counter to first impressions) a book of ethics rather than a book of cultural and social theory or even a commentary on Marxist and Freudian theory. When reading the texts, Anti-Oedipus (and A Thousand Plateaus) don\u0026rsquo;t feel like ethical manifestos, but I think that this explains why it\u0026rsquo;s so difficult to use and remains so intriguing.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s enough for now, but I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll pardon my impulse to blog about Deleuze for a little longer, as I think there\u0026rsquo;s another post or two here.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/perhaps-someday-well-call-this-deleuzian/","summary":"I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular \u0026ldquo;readership:\u0026rdquo; being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living.) How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out this fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christan Moralists sought out the traces of the Flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guatteri, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.\n-- Michel Foucault, writing in the preface to Anti-Oedipus, by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent a while away from Academia and geeky theoretical academic thoughts for a while.","title":"Perhaps Someday We'll Call This Deleuzian"},{"content":"I know I just wrote a long piece about Arch Linux and for most things I\u0026rsquo;ve pretty much switched to Arch Linux as my primary, day to day, distribution. In fact, when an Arch Linux issue comes up at work my coworkers call me first. And I suppose it\u0026rsquo;s well earned. But if you were to ask me what my favorite Linux distribution project was, I\u0026rsquo;d probably say Debian as often as not.\nI run a lot of Debian, straight up, unmolested (mostly) Debian Stable. There are a lot of practical reasons for this: it\u0026rsquo;s stable, I have faith that it\u0026rsquo;s going to work and do what I need it to. Aside from keeping on top of normal security issues, the system is stable and doesn\u0026rsquo;t require attention to keep up to date. And, in nearly every case the package manager can be trusted to do the right thing. There are also a ton of little niceties in the distribution: debconf, the management tools for Apache, and the shear diversity of the packages. It all adds up.\nI mean, I have gripes with some things that Debian does, but they\u0026rsquo;re always little. I find myself asking \u0026ldquo;Why didn\u0026rsquo;t you enable mod_rewrite by default? Really?\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Would it have killed you to include software that was less than 3 years old in this release?\u0026rdquo; But never \u0026ldquo;Why is this broken by default?\u0026rdquo;\nWith projects like Ubuntu getting press, attention, and energy (and money!) I can\u0026rsquo;t help but think that the outsider might think of Debian as being a bit\u0026hellip; put upon? Or not good enough in it\u0026rsquo;s pure form? The Ubuntu folks are pretty good about talking about their Debian roots, and it\u0026rsquo;s totally clear to anyone who really takes a good look at Ubuntu that most of its awesomeness is due to being Debian-derived. Even if that isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly clear from the outside.\nI also really enjoy the ways in which Debian has managed to grow and sustain itself, and create something that is so magnificent in scope. The Linux Kernel project is huge, the desktop projects are massive in terms of what they carry under their umbrellas. Distribution projects that start from nothing and control and build the entire stack are, I think, particularly intense because of the shear size of the project.\nThis of course holds true for all distribution projects, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t make Debian particularly special, I suppose. The thing is that Debian\u0026rsquo;s coverage is massive compared to other tools. Arch provides a great framework for an operating system, and makes it really easy to do a number of things, but there are nowhere near as many packages nor as many contributors. Ubuntu is, by contrast a great project but is mostly a process of \u0026ldquo;tuning\u0026rdquo; Debian into a system that\u0026rsquo;s more targeted for specific applications. Again these aren\u0026rsquo;t criticisms, but it does make Debian more of an impressive proposition.\nAnd I guess, because of this, even though most of the time when I interact with a Linux system it isn\u0026rsquo;t actually Debian, I almost automatically categorize myself as a \u0026ldquo;Debian person.\u0026rdquo;\nShrug.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/well-always-have-debian/","summary":"I know I just wrote a long piece about Arch Linux and for most things I\u0026rsquo;ve pretty much switched to Arch Linux as my primary, day to day, distribution. In fact, when an Arch Linux issue comes up at work my coworkers call me first. And I suppose it\u0026rsquo;s well earned. But if you were to ask me what my favorite Linux distribution project was, I\u0026rsquo;d probably say Debian as often as not.\nI run a lot of Debian, straight up, unmolested (mostly) Debian Stable. There are a lot of practical reasons for this: it\u0026rsquo;s stable, I have faith that it\u0026rsquo;s going to work and do what I need it to. Aside from keeping on top of normal security issues, the system is stable and doesn\u0026rsquo;t require attention to keep up to date. And, in nearly every case the package manager can be trusted to do the right thing. There are also a ton of little niceties in the distribution: debconf, the management tools for Apache, and the shear diversity of the packages.","title":"We'll Always Have Debian"},{"content":"I remember having this epic fight conversation with a poet-friend from college about aesthetics and art and literature. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure exactly what brought it on, or particularly why I thought my side of the argument was in any way defensible, but it came back to me recently. So as I\u0026rsquo;m wont to do, here\u0026rsquo;s a post in review of these thoughts.\nAct One: Poems are Just Words I think in the first iteration of the argument, I took the opinion that poems existed (mostly) to transcend the experience of the written word on the page. That the project of poetry was about getting past words and constructing some sort of image or transcendent experience, or something.\nDid I mention that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t a poet? I\u0026rsquo;m not. Not at all. I\u0026rsquo;m not even particularly good at reading poetry. I\u0026rsquo;ve sometimes written poems, and even I am a good enough reader to tell that they\u0026rsquo;re crap.\nIn any-case, H.S.\u0026rsquo;s argument was that poems were just words on paper (or screens)1 and that\u0026rsquo;s it. That writing itself is an act of putting words together, and experimenting with how words come together in (quasi) fixed mediums. And nothing more.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t really know what my beef in this argument was. This was certainly before I started writing again. I guess my argument was that writing was simply an imperfect means of conveying an idea, and the real work and creativity of \u0026ldquo;being a writer\u0026rdquo; was really in coming up with good ideas and practical logic that illustrates your arguments.\nAnd while that\u0026rsquo;s true, from one perspective if you squint at things the right way, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s really true about writing as a whole, and certainly not creative projects. It might be true that that\u0026rsquo;s a pretty good summary of academic writing, particularly entry level academic writing, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure.\nWhen I find writing that I\u0026rsquo;m impressed with, I keep coming back to the idea that it\u0026rsquo;s just \u0026ldquo;words on the page,\u0026rdquo; and somehow that makes. My skill--insofar as I have one--and the asset that makes me employable (I think) is the fact that I can turn ideas and thoughts (which are thick on the ground) into something useful and understandable by normal folk.\nAct Two: Rethinking William Gibson So, ok, lets be honest. I don\u0026rsquo;t really like William Gibson\u0026rsquo;s work very much. I thought Neuromancer expressed a social commentary that was totally obvious almost instantly, and it hadn\u0026rsquo;t stood the test of time particularly well, and I felt it sort of read like the rehab journal of an addict who hadn\u0026rsquo;t quite cleaned up entirely. This was just my reaction on reading it, and not a particularly well reasoned critique.\nI mean I will acknowledge the book\u0026rsquo;s impact, and I think I read it too late which probably accounts for my reaction. And although I responded so poorly to it, I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a lot of a problem with literature that is of its time. In any case, I was thinking about Gibson recently, and casually comparing him to some other writers, and I found myself saying (of another writer of the cyberpunk ilk), pretty much without realizing it:\n\u0026hellip;which is fine, except [they] didn\u0026rsquo;t have Gibson\u0026rsquo;s literary chops. I mean Gibson\u0026rsquo;s work is incredibly frustrating but his writing is superb.\nAnd I sort of realized after I\u0026rsquo;d said the above, that I had inadvertently conceded the argument from Act One, years later. Sure there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of idealism in writing, but writers aren\u0026rsquo;t differentiated on the basis of how awesome their ideas are. It all comes down to how they put the words together.\nThe side effect of this transposition is that, somehow, I\u0026rsquo;ve started to be able to read (and enjoy) short stories more than I ever was before. And much to my surprise, I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing the end of this (damned) novel as a sequence of short stories. At least in how I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking of it. I could go on with more and additional examples, but I think I better leave it at that for now. Thoughts? Anyone?\nOr in my case emacs buffers.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/poems-are-made-out-of-words/","summary":"I remember having this epic fight conversation with a poet-friend from college about aesthetics and art and literature. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure exactly what brought it on, or particularly why I thought my side of the argument was in any way defensible, but it came back to me recently. So as I\u0026rsquo;m wont to do, here\u0026rsquo;s a post in review of these thoughts.\nAct One: Poems are Just Words I think in the first iteration of the argument, I took the opinion that poems existed (mostly) to transcend the experience of the written word on the page. That the project of poetry was about getting past words and constructing some sort of image or transcendent experience, or something.\nDid I mention that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t a poet? I\u0026rsquo;m not. Not at all. I\u0026rsquo;m not even particularly good at reading poetry. I\u0026rsquo;ve sometimes written poems, and even I am a good enough reader to tell that they\u0026rsquo;re crap.","title":"Poems are Made out of Words"},{"content":"Much to my surprise, my essay of a few months ago on Why Arch Linux Rocks is quickly becoming one of my most popular posts. Who would have thunk? In any case, while I\u0026rsquo;ve written a few additional bits here and there about using Arch, I thought it would be good to write some more concrete and practical reflections on what I\u0026rsquo;ve learned from Arch and hopefully someone out there will find this useful.\nThe thing about arch, is that it\u0026rsquo;s by nature a very minimal operating system, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t shy away from the command line. There\u0026rsquo;s this peculiar logic amongst GNU/Linux Distribution Developers that says: we want people to use our operating system and to use Free Software, and since most people are scared off by command line interfaces and editing config files, lets try and obscure the command lines and the config files as much as possible. That\u0026rsquo;s a good idea.\nRight. Not really.\nAnd for some distributions, this really works. Arch says, rather, that while command line interfaces and config files can be confusing they\u0026rsquo;re not \u0026ldquo;bad,\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s possible to teach people how to interact with the command line and edit their config files. Furthermore, while command lines and config files might be different and unfamiliar to users who are used to checkboxes and menus, they are extraordinarily simple.\nBack to the minimal part.\nWhen you install Arch, you get a prompt, the basic GNU tool chain (install base-devel during the install process, it\u0026rsquo;s worth it,) the Kernel (of course), the GRUB boot loader, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it. Everything else you have to install yourself. While you might thing \u0026ldquo;this is a huge bother\u0026rdquo; the first time you install Arch, the when you get to the end of the process you have a system that does exactly what you want it to and nothing more. Having a computer system so tailored to your needs and workflows is actually, sort of a unique and wonderful experience. Rarely, I think, in this day and age do we get work with a computer in this way.\nNevertheless, having a system that is this minimalist means that setup can be a bit\u0026hellip; intense. Once things are installed the right way it works great, but I found that the first few times I ran an Arch install, it was like I spent the next two weeks installing little things over and over because I couldn\u0026rsquo;t keep track of what I needed. And then I installed a second system, and it was the same thing over again. The third time I did it, I\u0026rsquo;d wised up and managed to have a better time with it. A few weeks ago I created and redeployed a virtual machine (in virtual box) that I use as my primary work computer (long story), and it was painless.\nWhat remains of this post are a collection of lessons that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned and some suggestions I have for having the best arch experience possible.\nSave your /home directory and copy it to the new machine. I used the following command over the local network from the home server: :\nrsync -azrv /home/tychoish tychoish@192.168.256.1:/home Changing the paths, usernames, and IP address to their relevant and valid values. This way all your configuration files and data end up on the new machine, with permissions preserved. This typically takes the longest time of any setup operation.\nRun system updates as soon as possible. Arch is a rolling release distribution. The longest you\u0026rsquo;ll typically go between updates is the time between when the installation media was created and when you install your machine. The longer the divide between current status and when you run an update the greater the chance of breakage happening.\nUse ABS, the \u0026ldquo;Arch Build System,\u0026rdquo; to compile any software that isn\u0026rsquo;t in the main arch repositories. Save the PKGBUILD scripts (if not the packages you\u0026rsquo;ve made with them,) in your `~/abs/`` directory. This makes installing all of the weird and tedious software much easier.\nAvoid getting a machine with weird or uncommon wireless or video drivers. At this point, I\u0026rsquo;m choosy enough about my hardware that I won\u0026rsquo;t get a computer (much less install Linux on it,) if it\u0026rsquo;s not \u0026ldquo;Intel everything:\u0026rdquo; wireless card, video card, chipset, etc. Sure a fancy NVidia card might be more sexy, and there are a lot of good reasons to use AMD and ATI silicone. But, one can be very sure that Intel hardware is going to work with Linux; and with other gear, it\u0026rsquo;s much more hit and miss. Or it can be. And my time and serenity is not without value.\nMaintain a list of what packages you want to install on your system:\nX11 Dependencies\nLets not talk about how long it\u0026rsquo;s taken for me to remember to install the X11 keyboard and mouse drivers:\nxf86-input-keyboard xf86-input-mouse Additional package management tools\nThe abs tool provides a BSD-ports like interface for building packages, while the \u0026lsquo;yaourttool makes it easy to make and build packages from the [Arch User Repository][aur] (AUR.) Typically I use [yaourt][] to download a package and then build it in theabsdirectory. Make sure you've installedbase-devel` as well, because you\u0026rsquo;ll want to eventually.\nMusic Applications\nI use the music player daemon and a number of additional applications to play music. And I install these packages as a matter of course.\nmpd mpc gmpc alsa-utils jack-audio-connection-kit The tychoish Tool Chain\nYour specific list of \u0026ldquo;tools that you must have in order to function properly,\u0026rdquo; probably varies a bit. Here\u0026rsquo;s mine (some packages are from AUR):\ngit emacs emacs-org-mode emacs-w3m-cvs rxvt-unicode screen wcalc sudo htop urxvtcd zsh swiftfox-i686 To explain quickly those packages which aren\u0026rsquo;t obvious from their title: wcalc is a command line calculator tool; swiftfox-i686 is an optimized build of Firefox, except it runs more smoothly in my experience and is compatible with the FF plugins that I depend upon. urxvtcd is a shell wrapper for urxvt that opens a client of the urxvt-daemon (urxvtc) if there\u0026rsquo;s a daemon already running, and starts a daemon and opens a window if there isn\u0026rsquo;t. htop is a system process monitor.\nEmail Tool Chain\nI use the following packages to manage my email:\nprocmail msmtp fetchmail gnugpg From AUR I also use:\nlbdb mutt-sidebar lbdb is an address book database tool, and I use my build to get the best mail-reading client in the world.\nWindow Management\nArch is great for having pretty good support and inclusion of up-to-date packages for esoteric window managers. The sequence for installing StumpWM is a bit non intuitive. First, install the following packages from the normal repositories:\nsbcl nitrogen gtk-chtheme The last two are tools for changing the look and feel the desktop and GTK applications (respectively). Now from AUR, install (in the following sequence):\nclx cl-ppre stumpwm-git Put the following code in your ~/.sbcl file:\n(require 'asdf) (pushnew #p\u0026quot;/usr/share/common-lisp/systems/\u0026quot; asdf:*central-registry* :test #'equal) (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'cl-ppcre) (push #p\u0026quot;/usr/share/common-lisp/systems/\u0026quot; asdf:*central-registry*) (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'cl-ppcre) And you should be good. Configure your .xinitrc to your liking, and make sure your have a .stumpwmrc.\nNetworking Tools\nTo manage my own connections and connect to the OpenVPN I use netcfg and OpenVPN. This requires the following packages:\nnetcfg netcfg-auto zsh-netcfg netcfg-openvpn openvpn There are also a suite of network diagnostic tools that I always install, but seem to forget for various parts of a week.\nmtr whois dnsutils Also, I\u0026rsquo;m always befuddled by this for a few moments, but ssh isn\u0026rsquo;t installed by default. I, as a result install the following tools:\nopenssh sshfs And add the following line to /etc/hosts.allow to permit inbound SSH connections.\nsshd: ALL Spelling Correction\nThis always frustrates me, though I understand the logic. Install the following three packages to get spelling support thought the system:\naspell ispell aspell-en If you need spelling correction for a non-English language, replace aspel-en with that language, or add that language to the end of this list.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/getting-the-most-from-arch-linux/","summary":"Much to my surprise, my essay of a few months ago on Why Arch Linux Rocks is quickly becoming one of my most popular posts. Who would have thunk? In any case, while I\u0026rsquo;ve written a few additional bits here and there about using Arch, I thought it would be good to write some more concrete and practical reflections on what I\u0026rsquo;ve learned from Arch and hopefully someone out there will find this useful.\nThe thing about arch, is that it\u0026rsquo;s by nature a very minimal operating system, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t shy away from the command line. There\u0026rsquo;s this peculiar logic amongst GNU/Linux Distribution Developers that says: we want people to use our operating system and to use Free Software, and since most people are scared off by command line interfaces and editing config files, lets try and obscure the command lines and the config files as much as possible. That\u0026rsquo;s a good idea.","title":"Getting the Most from Arch Linux"},{"content":"I have a collection of links that I\u0026rsquo;d like to share with you. I hope you enjoy and find them as enlightening as I have. Some of these are dated but, I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling through them for a while and I feel like they\u0026rsquo;re worth sharing. In three parts:\nComputer Programming and Hacking Art of Computer Programing Software Artisans Unit testing and Agile There\u0026rsquo;s a long tradition of computer scientists and eminent developers thinking about their software development as an Art. Donald Knuth\u0026rsquo;s major work is called \u0026ldquo;The Art of Computer Programming,\u0026rdquo; and literate programing is fundamentally an artistic rather than a technical idea. The idea of the \u0026ldquo;lazy programmer\u0026rdquo; from the Perl world has some obvious artistic implications (hell, Perl\u0026rsquo;s license is called the \u0026ldquo;Artistic License\u0026rdquo;), and the Extreme Programing (XP)/Agile Programming world is very much about addressing programming as creative challenge rather than a purely technical challenge.\nI particularly like the contrast of the first two articles with the third. While I\u0026rsquo;m not sure it\u0026rsquo;s particularly conclusive in the brief overview and with such a small sample, the insights about the ways that programmers approach problems is pretty useful. Makes me want to get the book.\nOn Functional Programing How John Wiegley uses git I may not be a programmer in the conventional sense (or even any of the unconventional senses that I\u0026rsquo;m aware of) but there are two things that I know for sure. First: functional programming makes sense to me in a way that nothing else ever really has, and secondly that I am fascinated by the different ways that people use and manage projects with Git.\nI think functional program makes sense to me because little blocks that \u0026ldquo;do something\u0026rdquo; matches the way my brain is shaped in some useful way. Every introduction to object oriented programming I\u0026rsquo;ve ever experienced starts with like 50 pages (or equivalent) of crud about data structures and types . Which I\u0026rsquo;m sure make sense if you know what\u0026rsquo;s coming next, but if you\u0026rsquo;re a programing n00b: less than helpful.\nAlso, regarding the use of git: it\u0026rsquo;s fascinating how many different ways and different work-flows people manage to squeeze out of software like this! What he\u0026rsquo;s doing makes sense, a lot of sense on paper, but most people don\u0026rsquo;t publish long-running branches in such an organized manner. Sure there are \u0026ldquo;vendor branches\u0026rdquo; for release maintenance, but branches in git tend to be much more ad hoc from what I\u0026rsquo;ve seen. Anyway, good one for the file.\nThe Trouble With Frameworks I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking over weppy for the past few weeks, along with the bindings for a couple of weird databases (of the NoSQL variety, loosely), as part of a brief attempt to learn how to think like a web-developer. (It\u0026rsquo;s hard more on this later.) I find myself both incredibly enchanted with the prospect of some of these frameworks (particularly the python ones), and yet at the same time very unsure of what they represent in terms of the Internet. Frameworks aren\u0026rsquo;t going anywhere, and I think by some measure they are \u0026ldquo;getting better,\u0026rdquo; I do think they make it awfully easy to avoid putting in the time to \u0026ldquo;get it right,\u0026rdquo; which might not matter most of the time, but when it does oh boy, does it.\nAcademia, Anthropology, Literature The Past Future Literary Magazines The Future of Books I wrote a series of articles on the future of publishing and I found myself returning again and again to these two essays as a source of inspiration, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t quite gotten them out of my head.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I agree with this consensus, but it seems pretty clear that multi-media websites, twitter, and \u0026ldquo;blogs\u0026rdquo; (by some definition of the term) are acceptable replacements for journalistic publishing (newspapers, magazines). These essays, engage literary publishing, and force (particularly the second) us to think about the economics of booksellers, including branding, brick and mortar shops, which I think is incredibly important.\nAaron Swartz on Disciplinary Bubbles Cyborg Anthropology and the Singularity In the piece on Cyborg Anthropology, Amber Case discusses looks at the Singularity from a much less technical perspective. In a lot of ways this reminds me of my post on the Dark Singularity from a few months back. The singularity is, of course ultimately a cyborg problem.\nAaron Swartz\u0026rsquo;s piece on the academy\u0026hellip; I don\u0026rsquo;t know that he\u0026rsquo;s wrong, exactly, but I think I would avoid being as unilateral as he is. On the one had disciplines exist mostly to organize education not research, and if I were going to make a conjecture: we see more disciplanarity and sub-disciplining in fields with substantive funding outside of the academy. Doctors, lawyers, psychologists, biologists, chemists, have teeny-tiny little sub-fields; and by contrast you see a lot more interdisciplinary activity in the academic study of anthropology, literature, mathematics, and, say musicology. Interesting, nonetheless.\nThe Industry of Technology Two posts here from James Governor of RedMonk that have guided (at least topically) my thinking in a couple of areas recently. This is particularly noticeable if you look over the recent archives. The first addresses Flash and the business of advancing the platform of the web. My trepidation with regards to flash is mostly the same as my trepidation with regards to all web technology. When you get down to it, my grumbling all goes back to the fact that the web is developing into this thing that is all about media rich software, and less about hypertext, which is where my heart has always been. My argument keeps going back to \u0026ldquo;take the applications off of the web as we know it, and use a platform that (like GTK+ or QT) that\u0026rsquo;s designed for applications, and create a hypertext experience that really works.\u0026rdquo; But it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have articles like this one to pull my head out of (or into?) the clouds to remind me (and us?) what\u0026rsquo;s really going on in the industry.\nThis is an old one from the same source, about the new \u0026ldquo;patronage economy\u0026rdquo; which in many ways defines what\u0026rsquo;s going on at RedMonk. I particularly enjoy how Governor contrasts the New Patronage with other popular web 2.0-era business models. I do worry, looking at this in retrospect about the ways in which such patronages are stable even when the economy is in the crapper (as it were.) I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if there\u0026rsquo;s an answer to that one yet, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see. I guess my questions, at this juncture are: first, does patronage-type-relationships give \u0026ldquo;start ups\u0026rdquo; another funding option which is more stable than venture capital. Second, doesn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of organization and work that\u0026rsquo;s funded by these patronages subvert the kind of work that they depend upon (i.e. big high-margin businesses?)\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have at the moment. If you have links or thoughts to share, I\u0026rsquo;d live to see them!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/links-on-the-art-of-technology/","summary":"I have a collection of links that I\u0026rsquo;d like to share with you. I hope you enjoy and find them as enlightening as I have. Some of these are dated but, I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling through them for a while and I feel like they\u0026rsquo;re worth sharing. In three parts:\nComputer Programming and Hacking Art of Computer Programing Software Artisans Unit testing and Agile There\u0026rsquo;s a long tradition of computer scientists and eminent developers thinking about their software development as an Art. Donald Knuth\u0026rsquo;s major work is called \u0026ldquo;The Art of Computer Programming,\u0026rdquo; and literate programing is fundamentally an artistic rather than a technical idea. The idea of the \u0026ldquo;lazy programmer\u0026rdquo; from the Perl world has some obvious artistic implications (hell, Perl\u0026rsquo;s license is called the \u0026ldquo;Artistic License\u0026rdquo;), and the Extreme Programing (XP)/Agile Programming world is very much about addressing programming as creative challenge rather than a purely technical challenge.\nI particularly like the contrast of the first two articles with the third.","title":"Links on the Art of Techology"},{"content":"Email is broken. I don\u0026rsquo;t think the assertion really even requires an example for everyone to concur. Spam, ongoing wars over decades old standards and protocols, bacon (automatically generated email that you want), listservs, poorly written clients, and mixed expectations regarding replays, make email frustrating to deal with under the best of situations.\nEmail is also inescapable. There\u0026rsquo;s no other technology around at the moment which pushes messages out to users as effectively (every other thing is pull), provides administrators with as many tools and options, or has such ubiquitous adoption rates. I\u0026rsquo;d love to be able to say \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t send me emails, I won\u0026rsquo;t get it,\u0026rdquo; but the truth is that I get and send a bunch of email, and every other option for \u0026ldquo;next wave\u0026rdquo; digital communication fails to impress.\nIncluding Google Wave.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, Wave is nifty. Hampered mostly by an interface which is foolish and gimmicky, I think Wave provides capabilities that we need on the Internet. Wave makes multi-user chat useful for people who have trouble wrapping their brain around IRC. Wave strikes the right balance between \u0026ldquo;real-time\u0026rdquo; and persistence (which is mighty difficult), and most importantly\u0026hellip;\nWave gets people thinking about email, and what the ideal replacement might look like. And that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing indeed.\nMaybe, more importantly, Wave moves many of the trivial uses of email, into a more suitable format (XMPP) so that email, or whatever replaces it, has a more easily defined task. Maybe there are a couple of XMPP applications: Jabber, Wave, and (----)1 that work in concert to alleviate the pressure on email and make it much more clear what \u0026ldquo;the email killer\u0026rdquo; will look like.\nTo my mind, one of the biggest problems with email is that we use it for too much, including a number of things that it\u0026rsquo;s not ideally suited for. Perhaps the way to fix email is to fix all of these other communication problem, and see what\u0026rsquo;s left.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a list of the things what I think we use email for today, to which it is unsuited, followed by a couple of examples?\nNotifications. There\u0026rsquo;s been a reply to a comment on your blog, someone has commented on your face-book status update, it\u0026rsquo;s time to renew your domain name, your payment has been processed. Etc. File Transfer. Look at my resume. Here\u0026rsquo;s the paper I owe you. I was looking for your article and wondered if you might have a copy you could share? Here\u0026rsquo;s this funny picture my uncle sent me. Etc. Content Review. Could you take a look at this essay or bug report? I mentioned this in an IM but didn\u0026rsquo;t want to send it in that format. This leaves us with a relatively short list of things: genuine letters (i.e. first class mail; generally \u0026ldquo;asynchronous personal communication\u0026rdquo;) and listservs (which like Usenet are probably the best way to have async-group communication online from the users perspective). And spam, but we don\u0026rsquo;t care about that.\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s the best way to handle what\u0026rsquo;s left? Hell, what\u0026rsquo;s the best way to handle the rest of it?\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think there are good answers yet, at all, and I look forward to continuing to thing about these issues in a big way.\nI think this might tie back to my posts on notification systems, but more along the lines of what we currently use SMS for (say,) but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what this looks like in a personal (much less interpersonal) method. Lots and lots of whitelisting, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/email-is-still-broken-but-at-least-people-are-talking/","summary":"Email is broken. I don\u0026rsquo;t think the assertion really even requires an example for everyone to concur. Spam, ongoing wars over decades old standards and protocols, bacon (automatically generated email that you want), listservs, poorly written clients, and mixed expectations regarding replays, make email frustrating to deal with under the best of situations.\nEmail is also inescapable. There\u0026rsquo;s no other technology around at the moment which pushes messages out to users as effectively (every other thing is pull), provides administrators with as many tools and options, or has such ubiquitous adoption rates. I\u0026rsquo;d love to be able to say \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t send me emails, I won\u0026rsquo;t get it,\u0026rdquo; but the truth is that I get and send a bunch of email, and every other option for \u0026ldquo;next wave\u0026rdquo; digital communication fails to impress.\nIncluding Google Wave.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, Wave is nifty. Hampered mostly by an interface which is foolish and gimmicky, I think Wave provides capabilities that we need on the Internet.","title":"Email is Still Broken, but at Least People are Talking"},{"content":"In my last post on this topic I tried to avoid talking too much about the actual details of an implementation of what my ideal notification system would look like. In part because I think that the problem of staying on top of our digital (cyborg?) in a \u0026ldquo;real time\u0026rdquo; manner is something that transcends the specific method of implementation. I and many other awesome people have been thinking about this \u0026ldquo;real time\u0026rdquo; problem for a couple of years, and mostly we\u0026rsquo;ve thinking about things like microblogging (think twitter and identi.ca) and XMPP and related topics. These are all important issues that we need to get worked out, but there are issues regarding the use of \u0026ldquo;real time data\u0026rdquo; that I think need to be addressed from a more indivudal/user perspective. This notification issue is one of them.\nMy requirements, in summary:\nThere should be some common method of creating and distributing notifications that\u0026rsquo;s easy to setup up and tie into scripts (i.e. with some sort of command line interface.) and that is independent on application. I don\u0026rsquo;t want notifications from my email to appear in a different place from notifications from IRC, for instance. Taking the above one step further, notifications should be machine independent. If an event that I\u0026rsquo;d like to be notified of happens on my server (in the cloud, as it were) or the desktop at home, I\u0026rsquo;d like to know about it on my laptop when I\u0026rsquo;m on the road. Preferably, I\u0026rsquo;d like the system to know if I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a notification on my work computer before alerting me to it at home, but I\u0026rsquo;m willing to slide on this one. I need the ability to filter and control what notifications I see. There are times when I really want to track a particular word or phrase on twitter, and there are times when the last thing I want to know is weather or not someone has said something or other on twitter. Fine grained controls are key. I\u0026rsquo;d really like to put some sort of filtering pipe intweent \u0026ldquo;messages received\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;notifications sent,\u0026rdquo; so I can use it the way I use procmail for email. Thoughts on Implementation:\nXMPP seems like an obvious tool for implementing the backbone of this. From my perspective of a slightly-more-than-casual observer, getting one machine to know if a notification has been seen by machines is a bit thorny at best. Notifications need to tie into the window manager and desktop experiences. in some sort of unobtrusive way, but also in a way that is consistent with that window manager normally works. While many notifications will probably be created by sending a simple string to a command, some notifications will probably be generated from RSS or JSON feeds, and the best systems would provide some baked in support for pulling events from these kinds of data. You can get irssi to send xmpp notifications, which is both incredibly ironic, and kind of awesome, as a building block. Also, this emacs-fu for using lib-notify from emacs might be another good starting point. Dumping a firehose of notifications in an XMPP window, might be a good start, but I think once a notification has been sent (and logged and dismissed?), notifications need to disappear forever. Also--and this is the point of the filtering--raw events take processing in order to be useful. The firehose, of anything when exposed to the user, isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly useful. [insert your thoughts here] I will, of course let you know how this goes.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-id-like-to-be-notified/","summary":"In my last post on this topic I tried to avoid talking too much about the actual details of an implementation of what my ideal notification system would look like. In part because I think that the problem of staying on top of our digital (cyborg?) in a \u0026ldquo;real time\u0026rdquo; manner is something that transcends the specific method of implementation. I and many other awesome people have been thinking about this \u0026ldquo;real time\u0026rdquo; problem for a couple of years, and mostly we\u0026rsquo;ve thinking about things like microblogging (think twitter and identi.ca) and XMPP and related topics. These are all important issues that we need to get worked out, but there are issues regarding the use of \u0026ldquo;real time data\u0026rdquo; that I think need to be addressed from a more indivudal/user perspective. This notification issue is one of them.\nMy requirements, in summary:\nThere should be some common method of creating and distributing notifications that\u0026rsquo;s easy to setup up and tie into scripts (i.","title":"How I'd Like to Be Notified"},{"content":"The latest in a fine tradition of tychoish posts\u0026hellip;\nFive People I Enjoy on Twitter soliloqueer abstractnixon rickerje qunnorton tommorris and a bonus (DeleuzeGuatteri) Five Improvements to Web Browsers Enforce document structure standards on the server. Documents must be structured and organized within the constraints of a couple of conventions or else the server throws a 500 error. Locate all design and presentation on the client side, and allow designs to be fully independent of the design. Scripting happens on the client side, in sandboxes, and are integral parts of the browser applications. Therefore, scripts shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be provided with the browser or by the viewer, not by the content creator. In other words, die JavaScript, die, and replace it with lightweight greasemonkeyesque+webkit-style browsers. Except might as well use python/perl/ruby/etc. while you\u0026rsquo;re at it. Applications, can and should interact with servers and infrastructure and data over the network, but \u0026ldquo;the web\u0026rdquo; shouldn\u0026rsquo;t convert interactive applications. The goal here is to make the web-as-information-distribution work. Five Things I\u0026rsquo;m quasi likely to Acquire in the Next Few Months An Amazon Kindle Some sort of roasting pan A New Laptop Bag A table and chairs (one of which might be good for spinning) A gym membership Five Things That are Awesome about Dance Weekends You can dance with someone more than once, without it being creepy or weird. At an evening of a dance, it\u0026rsquo;s only really realistic to dance with someone once because there are 15 or 20 dances max. At an all day dance, we\u0026rsquo;re talking 60 or 70 dances. Innocent and awesome dance crushes. The \u0026ldquo;gender\u0026rdquo; thing is more flexible at big dance weekends. Which is fun. It\u0026rsquo;s probably true that part of the fun is in part due to the fact that queering up the gender roles in a contra dance makes contra a little harder, but I also just enjoy it for it\u0026rsquo;s awesome factor. M.N. also noted that when you come across older men dancing together in the contra lupine, you know it\u0026rsquo;s all gravy. And that\u0026rsquo;s more likely to happen at a dance weekend. Awesome bands. In short: Giant Robot Dance. Squares that don\u0026rsquo;t suck. Five Changes in Habits that I Would Have Never Expected to See In Myself Sacred Harp/Shape Note Singing A Decrease in knitting output and interest Weekend plans and events three to four weekends out of five. The degree with which I\u0026rsquo;m a neat freak about my apartment. (Not absurd, but I still have moments where I surprise myself.) Contra dancing as my main form of dance, as opposed to Morris and/or International folk. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/five-more-things/","summary":"The latest in a fine tradition of tychoish posts\u0026hellip;\nFive People I Enjoy on Twitter soliloqueer abstractnixon rickerje qunnorton tommorris and a bonus (DeleuzeGuatteri) Five Improvements to Web Browsers Enforce document structure standards on the server. Documents must be structured and organized within the constraints of a couple of conventions or else the server throws a 500 error. Locate all design and presentation on the client side, and allow designs to be fully independent of the design. Scripting happens on the client side, in sandboxes, and are integral parts of the browser applications. Therefore, scripts shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be provided with the browser or by the viewer, not by the content creator. In other words, die JavaScript, die, and replace it with lightweight greasemonkeyesque+webkit-style browsers. Except might as well use python/perl/ruby/etc. while you\u0026rsquo;re at it. Applications, can and should interact with servers and infrastructure and data over the network, but \u0026ldquo;the web\u0026rdquo; shouldn\u0026rsquo;t convert interactive applications.","title":"Five. More. Things."},{"content":"Wiki started as this weird idea that seemed to work against all odds. And then it seemed to really work. And now wiki is just a way to make and host a website without taking full responsibility for the generation of all the content. To say wiki is to say \u0026ldquo;collaboration\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;distributed authorship,\u0026rdquo; in some vague handwaving way.\nBut clearly, getting a wiki \u0026ldquo;right,\u0026rdquo; is more difficult than just throwing up a wiki engine and saying \u0026ldquo;have at it people.\u0026rdquo; Wiki\u0026rsquo;s need a lot of stewardship, and care, that I think people don\u0026rsquo;t realize off the bat. Even wikis that seem to be organic and loosey-goosey.\nI have this wiki project, at the Cyborg Institute Wiki that I\u0026rsquo;ve put some time into, but not, you know a huge amount of time particularly recently. Edits have been good, when they\u0026rsquo;ve happened. But all additions have come from people who I have asked specifically for their contributions. I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is a bad thing but this experience does run counter to the \u0026ldquo;throw up a wiki and people will edit it\u0026rdquo; mindset.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started (or restarted?) [a wiki that I set up for the OuterAlliance][oa-wik]. You can find out more about the OA there (as it gets added) or on the OuterAlliance Blog. Basically, O.A. is a group of Science Fiction writers, editors, and critics (and agents? do we have agents?) who are interested in promoting the presentation and visibility of positive queer characters and themes in science fiction (literature).1\nIn any case, the group needed a wiki, and unlike the C2 Wiki, the people who are likely to contribute to this wiki are probably not hackers in the conventional sense. As I\u0026rsquo;ve sort of taken this wiki project upon myself, I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to think of ways to ensure success in wikis.\nIdeas, thoroughly untested:\nInvite people to contribute at every opportunity, but not simply by saying \u0026ldquo;please add your thoughts here.\u0026rdquo; Rather, write in a way that leaves spaces for other people to interject ideas and thoughts.\nCreate stubs and pages where people can interject their own thoughts, but \u0026ldquo;red links\u0026rdquo; (or preceding question marks in my preferred wiki engine) are just as effective as stubs in many cases. The thing is that wikis require a lot of hands on attention. While stubs don\u0026rsquo;t require a lot of attention and maintenance, they require some. My favored approach recently is to make new pages when the content in the current page grows too unwieldy and to resist the urge to make new pages except when that happens.\nReduce hierarchy in page organization unless totally needed. You don\u0026rsquo;t want potential collaborators to have to thing very much about \u0026ldquo;where should I put this thing.\u0026rdquo; The more hierarchy there is the greater the chance that they\u0026rsquo;ll have to either think about it and/or that they\u0026rsquo;ll not find a place to put their contribution and then not contribute. This is undesirable.\nHierarchy is problematic for most organizational systems, but in most wiki systems, it is really easy and attractive to divide things into lots of layers of hierarchy because it makes sense at the time. The truth is, however, that this almost never makes sense a couple of weeks or months down the road. Some hierarchy makes sense, but it\u0026rsquo;ll take you hundreds of thousands of words to really need 3 layers of hierarchy in most wikis.\nLeaders and instigators of wiki projects also, should know that creating and having a successful wiki represents the output of a huge amount of effort. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of figuring out what people mean to say and making sure that their words actually convey that. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of making sure people\u0026rsquo;s comments really do belong on the page where they put them. And more often than not leaders put in the effort to write a huge amount of \u0026ldquo;seed\u0026rdquo; content as an example to contributors in the future. It\u0026rsquo;s not a bad gig, but it\u0026rsquo;s also not the kind of hting you can just sit back and let happen.\nOther thoughts? Onward and Upward!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s an awesome group, and a useful and powerful mission, and I think the OA has learned a lot from, and is well connected to some of the activity around anti-racism, that\u0026rsquo;s been lingering in science fiction over the last year to eighteen months as a result of the \u0026ldquo;RaceFail\u0026rdquo; hubbub of a year ago. The fact that there\u0026rsquo;s this kind of activity in and around Science fiction is one of the reasons that I love being a part of this genre.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/doing-wikis-right/","summary":"Wiki started as this weird idea that seemed to work against all odds. And then it seemed to really work. And now wiki is just a way to make and host a website without taking full responsibility for the generation of all the content. To say wiki is to say \u0026ldquo;collaboration\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;distributed authorship,\u0026rdquo; in some vague handwaving way.\nBut clearly, getting a wiki \u0026ldquo;right,\u0026rdquo; is more difficult than just throwing up a wiki engine and saying \u0026ldquo;have at it people.\u0026rdquo; Wiki\u0026rsquo;s need a lot of stewardship, and care, that I think people don\u0026rsquo;t realize off the bat. Even wikis that seem to be organic and loosey-goosey.\nI have this wiki project, at the Cyborg Institute Wiki that I\u0026rsquo;ve put some time into, but not, you know a huge amount of time particularly recently. Edits have been good, when they\u0026rsquo;ve happened. But all additions have come from people who I have asked specifically for their contributions.","title":"Doing Wikis Right"},{"content":"Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s just be but I think notifications of events on our computers suck. On OS X there\u0026rsquo;s Growl, and GNU/Linux desktops have the libnotify stuff, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure there\u0026rsquo;s something on windows, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think this really addresses the problem at hand. Not that the software doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, becuase it mostly does what it says it\u0026rsquo;s going to do. The issue, I think is that we need, or will very shortly need, much more from a notification system than anything around can handle.\nLets back up.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know about you but there are a lot of events and messages that I get or need to get, including: new mail, some instant messages, mentions of cerain words on IRC (perhaps only in certain channels), notifications of when a collaborator has pushed something to a git repository, updates to certain RSS feeds, notifications of the completion of certain long-running commands (file copies, data transferes, etc.) and so forth. I think everyone likely has their own list of \u0026ldquo;things it would be nice if their computer could tell them about.\u0026rdquo;\nThe existing notification systems provide a framework that enables locally running applications to present little messages in a consistent, and unified manner. This is great. The issue is that for most of us the things that we need to be notified of aren\u0026rsquo;t locally running. At least in my case, instant messaging, IRC, git, and the key RSS feeds that I want to follow aren\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;locally running applications.\u0026rdquo; And to further complicate matters, no matter how your slice things, I use more than one computer, and in an ideal world it would be nice for one machine to know what notifications I\u0026rsquo;d seen on another computer when I sat down. In other words, my personal notification system should retain memory of what it\u0026rsquo;s shown me and what I\u0026rsquo;ve awknowladged across a number of machines.\nThat doesn\u0026rsquo;t happen. At least not today.\nI have a few ideas about the implementation that I will probably cobble together into another post, and I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear some feedback if any of you have addressed this problem and have solutions.\nIt strikes me that there are two larger themes at work here:\n1. Personal computing events occur locally and remotely, and notification systems need to be able to seemlessly provide these kinds of notifications. While I think a lot of the hype around clound computing is--frankly--absurd, it is fair to say that our computing is incredibly networked.\n2. People don\u0026rsquo;t have \u0026ldquo;a computer,\u0026rdquo; any more, but rather several: phones, desktops, \u0026ldquo;cloud services,\u0026rdquo; virtual private servers, and so forth. While we use these systems differently, and our own personal \u0026ldquo;setup\u0026rdquo; are often unique, we need to move between these setups with ease.\nThese two shifts, networked computing and multiple computing contexts, affect more than just the the manner in which we receive notifications. But really, I think, outline the ways that the way we use computing has changed in the past few years. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of buzzwords around this shift, in the web appliacation and cloud computing space particularly, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that the \u0026ldquo;hipster\u0026rdquo;/\u0026ldquo;buzzword\u0026rdquo; experience is widely generalizable. It\u0026rsquo;s my hope that these conclusions are more widely applicable and useful: both for the development of a notification system that we need, and for thinking about application development in the future.\nLike I said above, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear your thoughts on this subect, and perhaps we can work on collecting thoughts on the Cyborg Institute Wiki. Take care!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/notifications-and-computing-contexts/","summary":"Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s just be but I think notifications of events on our computers suck. On OS X there\u0026rsquo;s Growl, and GNU/Linux desktops have the libnotify stuff, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure there\u0026rsquo;s something on windows, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think this really addresses the problem at hand. Not that the software doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, becuase it mostly does what it says it\u0026rsquo;s going to do. The issue, I think is that we need, or will very shortly need, much more from a notification system than anything around can handle.\nLets back up.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know about you but there are a lot of events and messages that I get or need to get, including: new mail, some instant messages, mentions of cerain words on IRC (perhaps only in certain channels), notifications of when a collaborator has pushed something to a git repository, updates to certain RSS feeds, notifications of the completion of certain long-running commands (file copies, data transferes, etc.","title":"Notifications and Computing Contexts"},{"content":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t write a novel last month.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been a bit of a contrarian about NaNoWriMo, the project where writers and people who don\u0026rsquo;t think of themselves as writers attempt a novel writing sprint during the month of November. Well, it\u0026rsquo;s a 50,000 word \u0026ldquo;novel,\u0026rdquo; which is in the end a bit short for a novel and a bit too long for a novella, but we\u0026rsquo;ll call it a novel for the sake of simplicity.\nMy basic gripe is that NaNoWriMo is a fun gimmick for people who aren\u0026rsquo;t used to turning out huge volumes of writing every day anyway, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do a lot to really ensure or guarantee success. At it\u0026rsquo;s heart NaNo has a very democratizing idea: anyone can write a novel, I fear that it does more to impede success than encourage it.\nMy reasoning:\nNovember is the worst month, with the holidays and the time change, potentially. November also tends to be bad for people who are in school or who teach school, as the semester draws to an end. December might be even worse in these respects. Here are some arguments for other months: February or March, (in the northern hemisphere) are cold months where you just want to stay at home, and what better time to write a novel? May is upbeat and fresh. June has no major holidays and rides a wave of Summer euphoria. Defenders of NaNo say \u0026ldquo;There\u0026rsquo;s no good month, so we might as well use November.\u0026rdquo; I reject this logic. Picking a bad month of the year can do a lot for the success rate of the people who attempt the project, I figure. The novel is too short. While it would probably also decrease success rate to make the NaNo Novel a publishable length (60-80k or so), I think having people end up with a piece that\u0026rsquo;s sort of unusable in the \u0026ldquo;real world\u0026rdquo; can be discouraging as well. If they get something they like from NaNo, and they want to publish it, they have to write at least another ten thousand words and possibly as much as 50 thousand words. Digital distribution helps these things a bit, but the size is an issue. What \u0026ldquo;real writers\u0026rdquo; do, is write every single day. The trick to being able to be a writer isn\u0026rsquo;t the ability to turn out a quantity of prose on demand. It\u0026rsquo;s the ability to sustainably work on projects all year round. To turn off the internal editor long enough that you get something on the paper, and then turn it back on so that \u0026ldquo;something\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t suck. They\u0026rsquo;re able to take experiences and turn them into texts. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the fetishization of the novel form is particularly productive. I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of power and future in shorter forms. For learning how to be a writer, writing shorter works is probably a more effective way to learn to tell stories and create characters anyway. Having said that, congrats to the people who did NaNo. Keep writing. You\u0026rsquo;ve probably found a few extra hours in your day that you didn\u0026rsquo;t know you had. Keep writing and doing awesome things with that time. And if you\u0026rsquo;re a huge fan of NaNo, don\u0026rsquo;t worry too much about me, I\u0026rsquo;m just an ornery guy with too many opinions.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s true: I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a Novel for more than a year, and while I\u0026rsquo;m closing in on the end of the draft. Its now done yet. Soon, perhaps. Also, I think I should probably do some blogging here about learning to write, and teaching writing given that I got here by way of a strange path and feel so strongly about these things.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/i-didnt-write-a-novel-last-month/","summary":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t write a novel last month.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been a bit of a contrarian about NaNoWriMo, the project where writers and people who don\u0026rsquo;t think of themselves as writers attempt a novel writing sprint during the month of November. Well, it\u0026rsquo;s a 50,000 word \u0026ldquo;novel,\u0026rdquo; which is in the end a bit short for a novel and a bit too long for a novella, but we\u0026rsquo;ll call it a novel for the sake of simplicity.\nMy basic gripe is that NaNoWriMo is a fun gimmick for people who aren\u0026rsquo;t used to turning out huge volumes of writing every day anyway, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do a lot to really ensure or guarantee success. At it\u0026rsquo;s heart NaNo has a very democratizing idea: anyone can write a novel, I fear that it does more to impede success than encourage it.\nMy reasoning:\nNovember is the worst month, with the holidays and the time change, potentially.","title":"I Didn't Write A Novel Last Month"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s an issue in tiling window managers, that I think a lot folks who are used to floating window managers never expect. I wrote a post to the Awesome listserv a while back explaining this to someone, and it seems to have struck a chord (I saw the post linked to last week). I thought I\u0026rsquo;d write a brief post here to explain what\u0026rsquo;s going on in a more clear and general way.\nThe Problem When tiled, windows don\u0026rsquo;t seem to take up all the space that\u0026rsquo;s available to them. This creates weird \u0026ldquo;gaps\u0026rdquo; between windows. But only some windows: Firefox is immune to this problem, while terminal emulators like xterm, and urxvt, and gVim, and emacs get all funky.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s Happening The application that are affected by this draw their windows based upon a number of fixed width columns. We\u0026rsquo;ll note that terminal emulators, as well as GUI versions of programmer\u0026rsquo;s text editors like vim and emacs, all used fixed-width fonts and often allow you to set window sizes based on the number of columns (of characters).\nAs a result, these applications are only able to use space on the screen in increments of full characters. Most of the time, in floating window managers, we never really notice this limitation.\nIn tiling window managers you do notice, because the window manager forces the windows to use all available space, except in some windows it leaves these weird gaps at the bottom and right of the window. Sometimes the gaps end up in the window, as unusable buffers, and sometimes they end up between windows. It looks funny, pretty much no matter how you slice it.\nWhat You Can Do About It The truth? Not much.\nThe Awesome Window Manager, by default shows the gaps between the windows. I always found this to be the \u0026ldquo;more ugly\u0026rdquo; option. You can alter this behavior by searching your configuration file for size_hints_honor and making the line look like this:\nc.size_hints_honor = false This tells Awesome to ignore windows (client\u0026rsquo;s) when they say \u0026ldquo;I want to have these dimensions.\u0026rdquo; It doesn\u0026rsquo;t fix the problem but it does get rid of the gaps.\nThe real solution is to tweak text sizes, fonts, and any buffering elements (like a status bar, mode line, or widget box), and window borders so that the windows aren\u0026rsquo;t left with extra space that they don\u0026rsquo;t know how to cope with.\nBy real solution, I really mean \u0026ldquo;only option:\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s really impossible to get all of your fixed width applications to have exactly the right number of pixels. You can get close in a lot of situations, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always found this to be much less annoying than using floating window managers.\nThe Original Post Just for giggles, I\u0026rsquo;ve included a quoted portion of what I posted original to the listserv on the topic.\nThe one big of information that might be important: The urxvt terminal emulator, when not \u0026ldquo;honoring size hints,\u0026rdquo; is unable to really properly draw the \u0026ldquo;extra space\u0026rdquo; with the proper background. I suspect this is a bug with the pseudo-transparency system they use. As a result there are often a few pixels with the background in an inverted color scheme. Same problem as above, but it looks funny if you\u0026rsquo;re not used to it.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s happening is that urxvt (like many terminal emulators) can only draw windows of some specific sizes based on the size of the characters (eg. x number of rows, and y number of columns.) So while you may have larger and the equivalent of say 80.4x20.1, urxvt can\u0026rsquo;t do anything with this extra space.\nIf you honor size hints, the windows will end wherever they can, and use as much space as they can, but leave gaps between windows if the total space isn\u0026rsquo;t properly divisible. If you don\u0026rsquo;t honor size hints, the windows themselves take up the extra room (but they can\u0026rsquo;t do anything with the extra room, so they just leave it blank, and sometimes the transparency is a bit wonky in those \u0026ldquo;buffers\u0026rdquo;).\nSo there you have it. I hope this helps!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/window-sizes-in-tiling-window-managers/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s an issue in tiling window managers, that I think a lot folks who are used to floating window managers never expect. I wrote a post to the Awesome listserv a while back explaining this to someone, and it seems to have struck a chord (I saw the post linked to last week). I thought I\u0026rsquo;d write a brief post here to explain what\u0026rsquo;s going on in a more clear and general way.\nThe Problem When tiled, windows don\u0026rsquo;t seem to take up all the space that\u0026rsquo;s available to them. This creates weird \u0026ldquo;gaps\u0026rdquo; between windows. But only some windows: Firefox is immune to this problem, while terminal emulators like xterm, and urxvt, and gVim, and emacs get all funky.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s Happening The application that are affected by this draw their windows based upon a number of fixed width columns. We\u0026rsquo;ll note that terminal emulators, as well as GUI versions of programmer\u0026rsquo;s text editors like vim and emacs, all used fixed-width fonts and often allow you to set window sizes based on the number of columns (of characters).","title":"Window Sizes in Tiling Window Managers"},{"content":"A while back, lets say, in August or so1, I redid the design of this site and added a new subtitle: \u0026ldquo;Dialectical Futurism.\u0026rdquo; The dweeby, philosophy geek in me really enjoys this, just as an idea. As it\u0026rsquo;s sat at the top of the page, I\u0026rsquo;ve also thought more and more that the subtitle is actually a pretty good summary of what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to accomplish here. This post is an attempt to do two things:\n1. Concisely summarize my \u0026ldquo;blogging project\u0026rdquo; and thus explain what dialectical futurism means.\n2. To do a bit of a status update on the blog, as a sort of \u0026ldquo;self report,\u0026rdquo; of what I think seems to be working and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t.\nPart One: What \u0026ldquo;Dialectical Futurism\u0026rdquo; Meas In Practice. It\u0026rsquo;s always risky, I think for a self-claimed \u0026ldquo;Science Fiction\u0026rdquo; writer, to declare themselves a \u0026ldquo;Futurist\u0026rdquo; of any sort. Because of the genre\u0026rsquo;s link to the future, I think there the danger that people might think that we\u0026rsquo;re putting forth our stories as works of prediction.\nWhile I think my interest in futurism comes from a similar place as the interests that drive my fiction, the practice of futurism (in the form of this blog) and the practice of fiction are very different. Ultimately, both are historical endeavors and futurism is tends to be much more tightly focused on the recent history. At least for me.\nDialectical futurism, is about a conversation between me, and the past, and me and the possible future, it\u0026rsquo;s an attempt to synthesize a pragmatic view of what will happen, with an optimistic view of what I would like to happen. It\u0026rsquo;s about putting all of the topics I blog about like Open Source, Free Software, Cooperative structure, Economics, and the \u0026ldquo;New Media\u0026rdquo; in conversation with each other and seeing what kind of cool innovative things happen.\nPart Two: The Status of the Project The project of being a writer is one of constant self improvement, I think. One thing that I didn\u0026rsquo;t mention in that post is that no matter how awesome you are as a writer, you\u0026rsquo;re always trying to get better at writing. There\u0026rsquo;s always some improvement to make, some short-falling in your ability to communicate that you\u0026rsquo;re working at improving.\nI have the sense that I am getting better, if that\u0026rsquo;s a meaningful judgment. One improves as a writer, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced, by writing, and writing a lot, and as I write a bunch for this site and a bunch for work, and a bunch for other projects, I think I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get better. Also, I get a lot of feedback from coworkers on my writing, which I think has been helpful. Editors are a good thing indeed.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten better at figuring out how to write good blog entries--it still takes time, but I get into the grove more quickly. I\u0026rsquo;m getting better feedback, and I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably happy with where the traffic is. I mean, there\u0026rsquo;s always room for improvement, but things are headed in the right direction.\nMy short term goals are two fold:\nTo focus my energies on reading and improving my background knowledge in a number of areas. I want to be more contextually grounded in existing conversations regarding economics, anthropology, and cyborg-related materials. To spend a lot more time on fiction writing. This means developing new habits, adjusting priorities, and spending some serious time making fiction projects work. So there. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how this goes, and thanks as always for reading and putting up with me.\nI\u0026rsquo;m just guessing here. I could go back and check, but August sounds right.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-dialectical-futurism/","summary":"A while back, lets say, in August or so1, I redid the design of this site and added a new subtitle: \u0026ldquo;Dialectical Futurism.\u0026rdquo; The dweeby, philosophy geek in me really enjoys this, just as an idea. As it\u0026rsquo;s sat at the top of the page, I\u0026rsquo;ve also thought more and more that the subtitle is actually a pretty good summary of what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to accomplish here. This post is an attempt to do two things:\n1. Concisely summarize my \u0026ldquo;blogging project\u0026rdquo; and thus explain what dialectical futurism means.\n2. To do a bit of a status update on the blog, as a sort of \u0026ldquo;self report,\u0026rdquo; of what I think seems to be working and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t.\nPart One: What \u0026ldquo;Dialectical Futurism\u0026rdquo; Meas In Practice. It\u0026rsquo;s always risky, I think for a self-claimed \u0026ldquo;Science Fiction\u0026rdquo; writer, to declare themselves a \u0026ldquo;Futurist\u0026rdquo; of any sort. Because of the genre\u0026rsquo;s link to the future, I think there the danger that people might think that we\u0026rsquo;re putting forth our stories as works of prediction.","title":"Of Dialectical Futurism"},{"content":"I, rather innocently, posted something to identi.ca / twitter / Facebook. The canonical text is:\nsigns you\u0026rsquo;ve spent too much time in the upper midwest: sometimes when stressed, you impulse buy cheese\nI spent three years in Wisconsin--southern Wisconsin--for college. Ever since then I\u0026rsquo;ve related to cheese differently.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s what happened:\nI was shopping, Mostly minding my own business when I passed the cheese display. Not the fancy cheese display, you know, but the one next to the designer coffee creamers, and the pre-made baking doughs.\nAnd, pretty much before I realized what had happened, I scooped up a half pound of store-brand mozzarella. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I even stopped the cart.\nIn the parking lot, I realized what had happened. I had cheese at home. A half pound of Munster--and pretty nice Munster I thought, though I\u0026rsquo;ve not met a Munster I didn\u0026rsquo;t like--waited for me in the fridge at home. The reason why I got it? Easy:\nA few weeks ago, I was in Philadelphia staying with a friend who grew up in the Twin Cities and we had the most amazing mozzarella for dinner. I looked up after my second slice and said. \u0026ldquo;Wow, we\u0026rsquo;re so Midwestern.\u0026rdquo; It was undeniably true. A friend from the east cost, immediately confirmed for us that she thought we were weird. But it was amazing cheese. And we didn\u0026rsquo;t\nAs for my little block of cheese: it too was amazing. Not quite as good, I suppose, but it was refreshing and in a weird way it reminded me of home.\nThe people on Facebook also responded with a rather active little thread. Morris dancers from Minnesota. Contra Dancers from St. Louis. Classmates from College. Perhaps my experience wasn\u0026rsquo;t uncommon.\nCheese. Who would have thought it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/comfort-cheese/","summary":"I, rather innocently, posted something to identi.ca / twitter / Facebook. The canonical text is:\nsigns you\u0026rsquo;ve spent too much time in the upper midwest: sometimes when stressed, you impulse buy cheese\nI spent three years in Wisconsin--southern Wisconsin--for college. Ever since then I\u0026rsquo;ve related to cheese differently.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s what happened:\nI was shopping, Mostly minding my own business when I passed the cheese display. Not the fancy cheese display, you know, but the one next to the designer coffee creamers, and the pre-made baking doughs.\nAnd, pretty much before I realized what had happened, I scooped up a half pound of store-brand mozzarella. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I even stopped the cart.\nIn the parking lot, I realized what had happened. I had cheese at home. A half pound of Munster--and pretty nice Munster I thought, though I\u0026rsquo;ve not met a Munster I didn\u0026rsquo;t like--waited for me in the fridge at home.","title":"Comfort Cheese"},{"content":"I was talking to my grandmother (Hi!) last week, as I do most weeks, and we discussed the blog. She\u0026rsquo;s been a regular reader of the site for many years, and lately, we\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed digging a little deeper into some of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve written about here. She said, I think of the Owning Bits, and I agree, that it sort of seemed that I was building something\u0026hellip; more.\nBut of course.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;ve connected all of the dots, either in my head or on the blog, but I think that the things I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging about for the last year or so are all conected, interwoven, and illuminate incredibly interesting features of each other when considered as a whole. There is \u0026ldquo;something building\u0026rdquo; here. To recap, so that we\u0026rsquo;re on the same page, the nexus of subjects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over are:\nFree Software and Open Source Software Development. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in how communities form around these projects, how work is accomplished, both technically, and organizationally. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in how innovation happens or is stifled. How the communities are maintained, started, and lead. From a social and economic perspective there\u0026rsquo;s something fundamentally unique happening in this domain, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to learn a lot more about what those things are.\nThis topic and area of thought have taken a backseat to other questions more recently, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s fundamentally the core question that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to address at the moment. I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be making a larger point of addressing open source methodologies in the coming weeks and months as part of an attempt to pull things back together. I think.\nThe Information Technology Industry. I started writing about the IT industry because I found itreally difficult to think about Free Software without really knowing about the context of free software. One really needs to understand the entire ecosystem in order to really make sense of what open source means (and doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean.) Particularly in this day and age. Initially I was particularly interested in the Oracle/Sun Merger, and the flap around the ownership of MySQL; but since then, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve branched out a little bit more.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried very hard to not frame the discussion about the IT industry and open source as a \u0026ldquo;community\u0026rdquo; versus \u0026ldquo;enterprise\u0026rdquo; discussion, or as being \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; versus \u0026ldquo;non-free,\u0026rdquo; or worse \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; versus \u0026ldquo;commercial.\u0026rdquo; These are unhelpful lenses, as Free Software and Open Source are incredibly commercial, and incredibly enterprise-centric phenomena, once you get past the initial \u0026ldquo;what do you mean there\u0026rsquo;s no cost or company behind this thing.\u0026rdquo;\nThe Cyborg \u0026ldquo;Moment,\u0026rdquo; or the way people actually use computers and technology, and the ways that people *might* use technology in the future. In the same way that thinking about the IT Industry provides much needed context for properly understanding why \u0026ldquo;open source communities\u0026rdquo; exist and persist: thinking about how we actually use technology, how we relate to techno-social phenomena, and how these relationships, interfaces, and work-flows are changing. Both in changing response to technology, and changing the technology itself. It\u0026rsquo;s all important, and I think the very small observations are as useful as the very large observations.\nIn some respects, certainly insofar as I\u0026rsquo;ve formulated the Cyborg Institute, the \u0026ldquo;cyborg\u0026rdquo; moment can really be seen as the framing domain, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t strike me a distinction that is particularly worth making.\nCorporate Law and Structure and Cooperative Economics. Interestingly, my discussion of cooperatives and corporate organization began as a \u0026ldquo;pro-queer rejection of gay marriage,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;ve used it as an opportunity to think about the health care issue, as a starting point in my thinking regarding EconomyFail-2008/09. The economics of open source and Free Software are fascinating, and very real and quite important, and I found myself saying about six months ago that I wished I knew more about economics. Economics was one of those overly quantitative things in college that I just totally avoided because I was a hippie (basically.)\nWhile it could be that my roots are showing, more recently I\u0026rsquo;ve come to believe that it\u0026rsquo;s really difficult to understand any social or political phenomena without thinking about the underlying economics. While clearly I have opinions, and I\u0026rsquo;m not a consummate economic social scientist, I do think that thinking about the economics of a situation is incredibly important.\nNew Media and the Publishing Industry. I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging for a long time. And I\u0026rsquo;m a writer. And I want to write and publish fiction as a part of my \u0026ldquo;career,\u0026rdquo; such as it is. As you might imagine these factors make me incredibly interested in the future of publishing of \u0026ldquo;content,\u0026rdquo; and of the entire nexus of issues that relate to the notion of \u0026ldquo;new media.\u0026rdquo;\nCreative Commons shows us that there has been some crossover between ideas that originated in the \u0026ldquo;open source\u0026rdquo; world with \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; (writ large.) The future of publishing and media is a cyborg issue, an ultimately techno-social phenomena, and thinking about the technology. that underpins the new media is really important. And of course, understanding the economic context of the industry that\u0026rsquo;s built around content is crucial.\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s this all building to? Should I write some sort of monograph on the subject? Is there anyone out there who might want to fund a grad student on to do research on these subjects in a few years?\nThe problem my work here so far--to my mind--is that while I\u0026rsquo;m pretty interested in the analysis that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to construct, I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly satisfied with my background, and with the way that I\u0026rsquo;ve been largely unable to cite my intellectual heritage for my ideas and thoughts. I never studied this stuff in school, I have a number of books of criticism, potentially relevant philosophy, and important books in Anthropology (which seems to fit my interests and perspectives pretty well.) I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at figuring things out, but I\u0026rsquo;m acutely aware of a lacking in my work of reference, methodology, and structure. As well as of any sort of empirical practice.\nSo maybe that\u0026rsquo;s my project for the next year, or the next few months at any rate: increase rigor, read more, consider new texts, pay more attention to citations, and develop some system for doing more empirical work.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll see how this goes. I\u0026rsquo;d certainly appreciate feedback here. Thanks!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/building-the-argument/","summary":"I was talking to my grandmother (Hi!) last week, as I do most weeks, and we discussed the blog. She\u0026rsquo;s been a regular reader of the site for many years, and lately, we\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed digging a little deeper into some of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve written about here. She said, I think of the Owning Bits, and I agree, that it sort of seemed that I was building something\u0026hellip; more.\nBut of course.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;ve connected all of the dots, either in my head or on the blog, but I think that the things I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging about for the last year or so are all conected, interwoven, and illuminate incredibly interesting features of each other when considered as a whole. There is \u0026ldquo;something building\u0026rdquo; here. To recap, so that we\u0026rsquo;re on the same page, the nexus of subjects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over are:\nFree Software and Open Source Software Development.","title":"Building the Argument"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s a weird thing, this \u0026ldquo;being a writer\u0026rdquo; stuff. I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this here to some extent. As a kid, I think--at least I tell myself now--that I wanted to be a writer. There was something about writing that mystified me and challenged me and had me totally entranced. I had a hell of a time with writing in high school, enough that I really shied away from formal training as a writer in college in almost entirely. I took two English classes in college, sort of (they were cross listed as something else), and I knew for sure that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to be a writer.\nRight.\nAnd then I got out of school, and something clicked. Actually, the revival of my blogging efforts that stuck hit during my final semester of college. And one thing lead to another and, here I am. I write this blog, that\u0026rsquo;s you know\u0026hellip; fairly prolific. I have job where I write things day in and day out. I write fiction a fair piece, though not as much as I might like.\nOne might think--I certainly did--that getting a job as a writer would put to bed all of my insecurities and doubts about being a writer. But it doesn\u0026rsquo;t. I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining, mind you, but it\u0026rsquo;s still weird.\nFundamentally, writers have a peculiar way of being in the world that is always a bit unsettling and alienating. Certainly we\u0026rsquo;re all different, and the experience of being a poet is different than the experience of being a technical writer is different from being a science fiction, but I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that there are some common features.\nWriting, at least for me, is sort of about turning experiences into words. This isn\u0026rsquo;t some wishy washy practices of translating the feeling of moments into words; but rather a pretty simple observation about practices. No matter if I\u0026rsquo;m writing science fiction stories or systems administration documentation, my ability to write is always dependent upon doing things in the world and gathering experience. Without this, I run out of stored experiences, of \u0026ldquo;mojo\u0026rdquo; and my writing becomes flat and painful, if I can manage to write anything at all.\nNow the writing part, after a while becomes pretty straightforward: Sit down. Figure out where you need to go in a given text and about how long you have to get there plus a few other variables, like voice and audience. And then you just sort of let the \u0026ldquo;experience,\u0026rdquo; part flow out onto the page1 as you sort of mold the thoughts into the path you need to follow.\nAnd this leaves the walking through the world part. It\u0026rsquo;s reflexive and feels normal, until you realize that you are instinctively collecting images, snippets of speech, moments, situations, little stories, and other bits of miscellany, in some master database in your head. Every conversation becomes an experiment in expressing an idea or a theory. It\u0026rsquo;s not so overt that it makes \u0026ldquo;living\u0026rdquo; difficult, or conversations awkward (though it does sometimes), but I sometimes have to remind myself that what\u0026rsquo;s going on in my head isn\u0026rsquo;t what\u0026rsquo;s going on in everyone\u0026rsquo;s head. No really.\nAnother problem with being a writer is that, everyone writes, or knows how to, at least in the abstract. Some folks don\u0026rsquo;t like it, and some folks aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly \u0026ldquo;skilled written communicators,\u0026rdquo; but we all know how to do it. This isn\u0026rsquo;t the case for a lot of professions, disciplines, or even hobbies. Not everyone can write a computer program, not everyone can knit a sweater, or cook a meal, or analyze great amounts of data, engineer more advanced agricultural technologies and crops, and so forth.\nThis creates some tension: since so many people know how to write, and yet most people don\u0026rsquo;t as a matter of course, there is some mystification around what writing requires. \u0026ldquo;What are you doing this weekend,\u0026rdquo; they\u0026rsquo;ll ask. \u0026ldquo;I was thinking of staying home and writing, and maybe going for a walk or two,\u0026rdquo; I say gleefully. \u0026ldquo;That sounds dull, and don\u0026rsquo;t you \u0026quot; they say. \u0026ldquo;Well, yes, but it sounds amazing. I wonder if I have enough food to get me through the weekend,\u0026rdquo; I say. Welcome to my life.\nDespite all this I nearly always feel like a cheat and a fake. My fiction is totally unpublished, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I\u0026rsquo;m writing in the correct direction, or doing the right things to be able to really have an active fiction writing career in the next 7-10 years. I\u0026rsquo;m constantly unsure about the success of the blog: it\u0026rsquo;s self published, sometimes it feels like I don\u0026rsquo;t have any reviewers outside of friends and readers-who-have-become-friends. And while I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased and proud of what I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to accomplish at work, and I think that We/I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to be pretty successful, I\u0026rsquo;m really part of a team and what I write is so terribly niche.\nI think that\u0026rsquo;s the other part of being a writer that\u0026rsquo;s so strange. No matter how much of it you do, no matter how much of your income is the direct result of the way you commit words to paper (or emacs buffer): you\u0026rsquo;re still just another hacker.\nBut maybe this is true for everyone. I can accept that. I hope you all have a good day.\nWow, I used a dead-tree metaphor. Have no fear, when I say \u0026ldquo;page\u0026rdquo; I really mean emacs buffer.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/i-am-a-writer/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s a weird thing, this \u0026ldquo;being a writer\u0026rdquo; stuff. I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ve written about this here to some extent. As a kid, I think--at least I tell myself now--that I wanted to be a writer. There was something about writing that mystified me and challenged me and had me totally entranced. I had a hell of a time with writing in high school, enough that I really shied away from formal training as a writer in college in almost entirely. I took two English classes in college, sort of (they were cross listed as something else), and I knew for sure that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to be a writer.\nRight.\nAnd then I got out of school, and something clicked. Actually, the revival of my blogging efforts that stuck hit during my final semester of college. And one thing lead to another and, here I am. I write this blog, that\u0026rsquo;s you know\u0026hellip; fairly prolific.","title":"I Am a Writer"},{"content":"Thought I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten away from it a bit in recent months, tychoish has a long history of being an outlook of lists of various things. While I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I want to post all of my lists for everyone to point and laugh at, the following might be worth exploring.\nThis is a list of things I need to get worked out with my new computer, with technology in general. I post it both because I need an excuse to do a little brainstorming, and because it might be nice to get a little feedback from you all. Without further ado:\nGet USB Mounting/Auto-mounting to work more smoothly. I use USB mass storage devices so rarely that I\u0026rsquo;m totally oblivious as to how I should go about setting this up with Arch Linux.\nReformat and server-ify my desktop. Since I\u0026rsquo;m basically not using my desktop as a desktop anymore\u0026hellip; and there are some things that just don\u0026rsquo;t work\u0026hellip; and there are no files left on it that I don\u0026rsquo;t have backed up elsewhere\u0026hellip; I think it\u0026rsquo;s time to do a system wipe. I want to put Arch on it. I had thought about putting Xen on it and using virtual machines, but I\u0026rsquo;m now in a place where the increased management burden of that would outweigh the benefits of that. So I think I\u0026rsquo;m just going to set it up like a server, (but I suppose setting up a lightweight desktop wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a big stress). Mostly I think having a server at home will be useful for testing, development, and othersuch projects. In any case, it\u0026rsquo;s not terribly useful as it is.\nReorganize my music collection (now on laptop). I copied over my music collection and while I\u0026rsquo;ve had a bunch of luck with mpd, I need to spend some time reorganizing the music. It\u0026rsquo;s on the list, and I shall do it.\nStraighten out the situation with my external hard drive. Yeah, no clue here. I hope it\u0026rsquo;s alright. I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and use the Mac at work to see if I can\u0026rsquo;t make it work better. I may crack the enclosure and put it in my desktop once that\u0026rsquo;s in better working order.\nAcquire accessories: There\u0026rsquo;s stuff I\u0026rsquo;ve had on my shopping list for a while. In no particular order:\nA more suitable laptop sleeve. As it turns out, I have this backpack that\u0026rsquo;s great for lugging stuff around, but it\u0026rsquo;s bigger than I need most of the time, and the laptop padding could handle my 15.4\u0026quot; PowerBook back in the day. Current laptop is quite small, so it\u0026rsquo;s sort of overkill. This is lower priority.\nAdditional power adapters. The battery on this puppy is amazing. Having said that it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a power adapter that can just live in my bag so I don\u0026rsquo;t have to fuss with repacking the power adapter every time I leave somewhere. I think one at my desk at work, one for home, and one for my bag is my usual complement and Lenovo power adapters are a lot cheaper than mac ones\u0026hellip;\nWireless access point for home. Somehow I don\u0026rsquo;t have one. Oversight. Must procure soon. The thing is that I have an ancient 100 foot Ethernet cable that seems to do the job pretty well.\nSort out Sleep/Wake Cycle I think I mostly have this one sorted out. Basically, I had problems with the new laptop freezing when waking up from suspend/sleep when the network state upon return was different than when the laptop went into suspend. A little tweak to the ACPI event script, and everything seems to be in order.\nWrite Network Management Triggers I\u0026rsquo;m using the preferred network manager suite for Arch Linux (e.g. \u0026ldquo;netcfg\u0026rdquo;) and it works great, except it\u0026rsquo;s sometimes a bit bothersome to mange things, when I think it ought to just work. So I think I have a solution: create shortcuts and triggers in the window manager to get network stuff working a bit more smoothly. Now I just have to make it work.\nTinker with StumpWM contrib packages Once I got Stump WM working and set up, I mostly abandoned it. There\u0026rsquo;s all sorts of cool lisp things in the contrib/ directory that I haven\u0026rsquo;t tinkered with. Well, except for mpd.lisp, and even then not terribly much. I think I\u0026rsquo;d get something out of playing with those and so it\u0026rsquo;s on the list.\nFigure out what to do with the x41. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. The old laptop works, and I feel like I should do something with it\u0026hellip; But what?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technology-task-list/","summary":"Thought I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten away from it a bit in recent months, tychoish has a long history of being an outlook of lists of various things. While I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I want to post all of my lists for everyone to point and laugh at, the following might be worth exploring.\nThis is a list of things I need to get worked out with my new computer, with technology in general. I post it both because I need an excuse to do a little brainstorming, and because it might be nice to get a little feedback from you all. Without further ado:\nGet USB Mounting/Auto-mounting to work more smoothly. I use USB mass storage devices so rarely that I\u0026rsquo;m totally oblivious as to how I should go about setting this up with Arch Linux.\nReformat and server-ify my desktop. Since I\u0026rsquo;m basically not using my desktop as a desktop anymore\u0026hellip; and there are some things that just don\u0026rsquo;t work\u0026hellip; and there are no files left on it that I don\u0026rsquo;t have backed up elsewhere\u0026hellip; I think it\u0026rsquo;s time to do a system wipe.","title":"technology task list"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about publishing and the publishing industry of late. I\u0026rsquo;m sure some of it is related to my wanting of a kindle and my resulting thoughts on consolidation, and maybe some small measure of it has to do with the fact that sometimes it easier to think about publishing and the future of publishing than it is to think about ones own creative projects. So be it.\nFirst, \u0026ldquo;what is there to think about?\u0026rdquo; you ask? Well, lots of things: I\u0026rsquo;ve written about wanting a kindle, and some thoughts about consolidation, and finally some thoughts on digital publishing More recently I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking more about the \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; of publishing and content creation, apart from the changing business models and technological context.\nPublishers (of any kind, and their editorial departments), by contemporary convention are responsible for reading through the slush and figuring what\u0026rsquo;s good and what not. Ideally publishers are the stewards of taste, and the people who figure out whats \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo; and what people want to read. On some fundamental level, publishers are curators. The second main function of publishers are as the provider and organizer around services. Publishers contract with copy editors, with design and layout people, they get the cover art, they do promotional work, and the million other things it takes to turn a manuscript into a book.\nAs the traditional publishing model has\u0026hellip; deteriorated, I think a lot of people have been interested in figuring out \u0026ldquo;what happens next?\u0026rdquo; myself as much as anyone. Having said that, the way in which the traditional publishing model has deteriorated has shaped how we think about what comes next. This makes sense of course, but I want to challenge myself to think about things more broadly (and you, dear friends as well, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;ve already figured this one out.)\nI mean, it\u0026rsquo;s not like the old media died in a day. The blogging phenomena started, and writers/etc. were able to promote their work directly in ways that they hadn\u0026rsquo;t managed to before. Margins on book sales went down, which has cut into promotional budgets (as much as anything). Also, thanks to developments in technology the size of most first runs is much smaller than it used to be. This is probably a good thing, but it also means that the capital investment on new authors and books is much less than it used to be. \u0026hellip;and the end result of this is that we\u0026rsquo;re prone to seeing publishing companies as \u0026ldquo;Authors Services\u0026rdquo; companies.\nAs a model for \u0026ldquo;what comes next,\u0026rdquo; services for authors is a huge part of what we need from the publishing companies. Centralizing and connecting authors with people who can provide big-picture editing, with people who do copy editing and proof reading, with people who do the cover art and layout of the book itself, and with people who can do the promotional work, getting the book plugged into the distribution channels. These are real needs, that aren\u0026rsquo;t going to evaporate any time soon.\nBut what about the editorial and curatorial roles of publishers? What about the branding associated with publishing houses? I think there\u0026rsquo;s probably some future for critical discourse in blogs and in digital forums, which will provide some of these functions, but that\u0026rsquo;s not the full answer, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the full answer is.\nAs I wrote, earlier, I think figuring out some sort of subscription system to support content creation and distribution. I think having the economic superstructure in place, or at least worked out conceptually is really important before we start working on new technologies, like ebook readers, and digital content distribution channels.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s an interesting time to be around, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-publishing/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about publishing and the publishing industry of late. I\u0026rsquo;m sure some of it is related to my wanting of a kindle and my resulting thoughts on consolidation, and maybe some small measure of it has to do with the fact that sometimes it easier to think about publishing and the future of publishing than it is to think about ones own creative projects. So be it.\nFirst, \u0026ldquo;what is there to think about?\u0026rdquo; you ask? Well, lots of things: I\u0026rsquo;ve written about wanting a kindle, and some thoughts about consolidation, and finally some thoughts on digital publishing More recently I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking more about the \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; of publishing and content creation, apart from the changing business models and technological context.\nPublishers (of any kind, and their editorial departments), by contemporary convention are responsible for reading through the slush and figuring what\u0026rsquo;s good and what not. Ideally publishers are the stewards of taste, and the people who figure out whats \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo; and what people want to read.","title":"On Publishing"},{"content":"Some First Principals: It is difficult, and likely impossible to technologically restrict the duplication and redistribution of digital resources. In other-words, digitally accessible resources will never be scarce. Creators of content (music, literature, software) should be reimbursed for their work, and there should be business models that support these kinds of pursuits. In other words people should be compensated for the creation of content in a viable and sustainable manner. Information probably does want to be free. Creators of information, should want their information to be \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; because the information that has the most power and influence is that which is most accessible. The conveyance of physical objects (books, etc.) is a source of concrete value. Physicality is not the only basis for economic exchange, of course, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good place to start. Questions and Answers: What is the \u0026ldquo;content problem?\u0026rdquo;\nI suppose the core of the problem with content these days is that we don\u0026rsquo;t have a good set of business models that can support the creation of new content in an ongoing sort of way. The industry around content is unstable and in flux: newspapers are hemorrhaging money and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem likely that they\u0026rsquo;re going to be able to do anything other than (maybe) prolonging the amount of time between now and when they collapse. Some paper companies might surrivive, but the consolidation and \u0026ldquo;flufification\u0026rdquo; of a great many newspapers, doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to have a great deal of long term potential.\nSame thing with the book publishers. There are some that seem to be doing interesting things. Tor.com seems to be a good example of a step in the right direction. And maybe there will be an ebook platform that makes sense, or maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll see some sort of revival in niche-booksellers that will revive an interest in book collection.\nBut the bottom line seems to be that we need to find some better way to support the creation of content. Because what we have now doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to fit the bill. And whats on the horizon, doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be much better.\nIsn\u0026rsquo;t content a horrible word for this?\nI confess that the word \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; makes me a bit sick from time to time. Not only is it awkward to lump the concerns of musicians, academics, writers, journalists, and perhaps even software developers all in one label. I\u0026rsquo;m not even sure if the concerns of content producers as a whole, if we can address these folks as a group, are particularly aligned.\nSome academics use the term \u0026ldquo;knowledge production,\u0026rdquo; to refer to the core output of their work, and I\u0026rsquo;m using content in a similarly broad context. Writing/Literature/Music, \u0026ldquo;Art,\u0026rdquo; and even thought this might be a tad bit unconventional I think there\u0026rsquo;s not much that separates the consumption of software and the consumption of essays (for example.)\nThere are also a number of different dimensions upon which we can think about content and the future of content: the experience of consumption; the process of generation; and the business models which support the creation and consumption of content.\nOwning Bits? What do you mean?\nI said, a few weeks ago of the whole DRM issue, that I thought \u0026ldquo;we needed to get away from the whole \u0026lsquo;owning bits\u0026rsquo; metaphor for content distribution.\u0026rdquo; The whole DRM thing that so many of us find so onerous would be mostly become a non issue if we dropped the pretense that when you download a song or a book or a movie that you\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;buying them.\u0026rdquo; If you\u0026rsquo;re just watching the bits for a while, who cares what the digital restrictions are? If prices are reasonable for content, who cares if you can only \u0026ldquo;have\u0026rdquo; a half dozen books at once? I think it would all work out. But maybe that\u0026rsquo;s just me.\nThe questions that result, however are much more interesting: What does it mean, socially and politically, if we don\u0026rsquo;t own information? What is reasonable and sustainable pricing? What kinds of distribution schemes make sense?\nBesides the general \u0026ldquo;fear of copying\u0026rdquo; that has heretofore plagued the content industry, what new technological challenges might the content industry face in the mid-to-short term future?\nOne of the major issues that I think we\u0026rsquo;re going to have to deal with is the fact that digital information systems are too mutable.\nWhile this flexibility gives us lots of very powerful information resources, like Wikipedia and the ability to correct flaws in digital versions, it also means that Amazon can remove books from the Kindle at will. Furthermore, it means that creators and publishers can (attempt) to \u0026ldquo;take back\u0026rdquo; content if they have second thoughts about it. The mutability issue is obviously a mixed bag, but I think the most useful information and the most free information will have some sort of versioning information.\nWhat are the business models that will support content in the in the future?\nThe one downfall of Project Xanadu is that it pushed forward an idea of \u0026ldquo;micropayments,\u0026rdquo; and the idea if we charge a la carte for content and have the per unit cost for content low enough that somehow it\u0026rsquo;ll all work out. The problem with this, however, is that the psychological border between \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;not-free\u0026rdquo; is much larger than the border between \u0026ldquo;a few cents\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;a few dollars.\u0026rdquo; The end result: micropayments keep failing.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a shame that this idea was the most successful idea to proliferate from Xanadu.\nMy current bet is that some sort of subscription model is likely to win out. Pay a few dollars a month, and get access to some reasonable quantity of content. Have different levels of subscription to meet different needs and demands, and I think there\u0026rsquo;s potential there.\nThe other prevailing model is the \u0026ldquo;rockstar\u0026rdquo; model, where the content creator goes on a tour and uses honoraria and merchandise sales to offset the cost of content creation. We see this both for authors who tour to support books as well as the musicians for whom I\u0026rsquo;ve named the model. It works, it focuses the transaction of physical objects.\nYou seem to like subscription models. What are the implications of a shift toward subscription models in terms of the way people relate to the information (music, writing, etc.) that they consume?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure. I think creating a technological limitation which stores version information in some sort of immutable index. I don\u0026rsquo;t think publishers will really go for this.\nI think subscription models may also revive (in part) the interest and power of the physical-object-market. In the way that Libraries don\u0026rsquo;t cannibalize booksales (and may encourage and support the sale of real books,) I think digital content subscriptions could have the same effect on content.\nAs always I look forward to your thoughts and responses to these questions. See you in comments!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/owning-bits/","summary":"Some First Principals: It is difficult, and likely impossible to technologically restrict the duplication and redistribution of digital resources. In other-words, digitally accessible resources will never be scarce. Creators of content (music, literature, software) should be reimbursed for their work, and there should be business models that support these kinds of pursuits. In other words people should be compensated for the creation of content in a viable and sustainable manner. Information probably does want to be free. Creators of information, should want their information to be \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; because the information that has the most power and influence is that which is most accessible. The conveyance of physical objects (books, etc.) is a source of concrete value. Physicality is not the only basis for economic exchange, of course, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good place to start. Questions and Answers: What is the \u0026ldquo;content problem?\u0026rdquo;\nI suppose the core of the problem with content these days is that we don\u0026rsquo;t have a good set of business models that can support the creation of new content in an ongoing sort of way.","title":"Owning Bits"},{"content":"This post is an attempt to ask \u0026ldquo;what next?\u0026rdquo; in the world of contemporary application development. I\u0026rsquo;m disturbed by the conveyance of applications in this format. This is not news to popular readers, but, rather than complain extensively about the state of the contemporary technology, I think it would be more productive to muse on possible improvements and some of the underlying structural concerns in this space\nIn No Particular Order\u0026hellip;\nToday, we routinely design and implement user interfaces in HTML and JavaScript these days. I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced that HTML, or any XML based format is really all that good for conveying well formatted structured text, much less pixel perfect graphic design and application interface.\nLightweight text markups like Markdown, reStructuredText (for all it\u0026rsquo;s warts), and Textile are human readable, provide structure, and convey text well. Furthermore, it\u0026rsquo;s very possible to efficiently translate them into very high quality output formats, including XML formats and LaTeX.\nOne of the driving forces behind the convergence on \u0026ldquo;web-technologies\u0026rdquo; is that JavaScrpt/HTML/CSS are all thought to be \u0026ldquo;cross platform\u0026rdquo; technologies. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter if you\u0026rsquo;re running on a Mac, or a PC, or UNIX system, if it has a web browser it\u0026rsquo;ll run there. The web application movement realizes the \u0026ldquo;write once run everywhere,\u0026rdquo; notion that Sun attempted with Java in the 90s (except, that Java never really worked for that.) Except that every browser implements JavaScript/HTML/CSS in a different way which means, that it\u0026rsquo;s really \u0026ldquo;write once and tweak it to death so that IE/Firefox/Webkit don\u0026rsquo;t break.\u0026rdquo; There are some things (like jQuery; HTML5) that make this better, but the browser market is dirty and browser makers will never be incentivized to comply with the standards.1\nRESTful APIs2 are, I think, leading to more desktop applications. Or at least making them more possible. It used to be very much the case that if you wanted web-connected data you had to go to a website. Now, if you want data from the Internet, in most cases it can be gotten in an easy to process formant (i.e. YAML/JSON) and then folded into a desktop application. In addition to \u0026ldquo;rounded corner power\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;social media,\u0026rdquo; the biggest impact of \u0026ldquo;Web 2.0\u0026rdquo; has been the increasing awareness and interest the API[^quality] in the more general public.\nAdobe AIR is a wonderful idea. Even smaller lightweight devices like smartphones and netbooks are so powerful that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense to have them operate as such \u0026ldquo;dumb\u0026rdquo; clients. Conventional web development has developers cobble together server applications that put together content and then chuck it off to the client for rendering. With APIs (see above) it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense to leave all the heavy lifting on the server. Adobe understood this with AIR, the problem with AIR? It\u0026rsquo;s wildly proprietary, applications look out of place on every platform, and performance is miserable relative to \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; native applications. Its a great idea, and I\u0026rsquo;m terribly interested to see what comes next in this space.\nI\u0026rsquo;m grumpy about HTML 5 because I remain unconvinced that web standards are really a viable way of regulating sane design and development practices. It also seems too likely that HTML 5 solves the problems we were having 2 years ago, rather than the problems we\u0026rsquo;ll have over the next 10 years. Also, I think this world needs a hell of a lot less XML, in any form.\nWhat are your thoughts?\n[^qualit]y]:I\u0026rsquo;m not sure there is any singular aspect of the whole \u0026ldquo;Web 2.0 thing\u0026rdquo; that is unequivocally bad or good. I think on the whole web design is better now than it used to be, but \u0026ldquo;rounded corner power\u0026rdquo; at this point all looks the same, and it\u0026rsquo;s really difficult to achieve in a clean technological sort of way. And the web has always been social; so while that\u0026rsquo;s not new, it\u0026rsquo;s nice that the web has caught on even if the whole \u0026ldquo;social networking silo\u0026rdquo; phenomena is less than desirable. The same thing goes for RESTful APIs: it\u0026rsquo;s great that data is more accessible, but it sucks that APIs can be so proprietary and I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced that HTTP is the \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;best\u0026rdquo; protocol for this technology. But these things happen.\nYou may think that I\u0026rsquo;m simply being pessimistic, and you might say that IE 7 and 8 are a huge step in the right direction and I think that this might be true, but the only reason to create and maintain a browser (to my mind) are: masochism, to get people to use your search engine, and to be able to implement special proprietary (and non-standard) features. The competitive advantage comes from the unique enhancements that a given browser is able to offer over the other browsers in the market. For a while (e.g. 1999-2007?) the more standards compliant a browser was the better pages looked in it. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that will continue to hold true.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThis is a simplification, but lets think of this as the obligatory API that all web-services provide today: from twitter to flickr, to YouTube, and beyond. These allow programmers to connect to the service using the HTTP protocol\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-web-application-layer/","summary":"This post is an attempt to ask \u0026ldquo;what next?\u0026rdquo; in the world of contemporary application development. I\u0026rsquo;m disturbed by the conveyance of applications in this format. This is not news to popular readers, but, rather than complain extensively about the state of the contemporary technology, I think it would be more productive to muse on possible improvements and some of the underlying structural concerns in this space\nIn No Particular Order\u0026hellip;\nToday, we routinely design and implement user interfaces in HTML and JavaScript these days. I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced that HTML, or any XML based format is really all that good for conveying well formatted structured text, much less pixel perfect graphic design and application interface.\nLightweight text markups like Markdown, reStructuredText (for all it\u0026rsquo;s warts), and Textile are human readable, provide structure, and convey text well. Furthermore, it\u0026rsquo;s very possible to efficiently translate them into very high quality output formats, including XML formats and LaTeX.","title":"The Web Application Layer"},{"content":"I fear I\u0026rsquo;ve been posting too many posts in the vein of \u0026ldquo;so here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m up to folks,\u0026rdquo; rather than you know writing about things that may be interesting to folks out there in Internet land. Nevertheless, here\u0026rsquo;s another slightly more technical post.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned in passing a few times over the past few months that:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been interested in shifting to Arch Linux. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been running Arch in a VM on my work desktop, I have been quite slow to move additional machines over to Arch. It\u0026rsquo;s not for lack of wanting, but I have a hard time disrupting something that works when it\u0026rsquo;s already working. Also on the software front, I\u0026rsquo;ve switched to using the Stump Window Manger, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve talked a bit about this on the blog, I\u0026rsquo;ve done virtually no reporting of my ongoing progress with this. I missed the days when I only had one computer and it went everywhere with me. While I like having all this computing possibility around, I\u0026rsquo;m moving around enough these days that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to be tied down to a desktop. I like sitting on the couch and writing, and I like being able to go off for a weekend and be able to work on the projects that I really need/want to work on. That\u0026rsquo;s hard when you have a desk and an \u0026ldquo;office.\u0026rdquo; This post provides updates with regards to these subjects.\nMoving to Arch Linux and StumpWM A few weeks ago, I had this massive cascade of software issues. Mostly things were provoked by the switch to Stump. Basically, the issue was that Stump wasn\u0026rsquo;t embedded in all of the desktop frameworks that are so popular these days, there were a number of system resources that just didn\u0026rsquo;t work with the new Window Manager.\nThe thing was that my systems were running a terribly hacked up version of Ubuntu. I was running weird kernels, I\u0026rsquo;d mostly given up on the display managers, and the systems were just messy. So the problem wasn\u0026rsquo;t so much with Stump, as it was with the way that Ubuntu packages and manages certain aspects of the system inside of desktop functionality. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking specifically of the ways that networking and sound are managed by dbus. If that didn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to you, don\u0026rsquo;t worry.\nSince the chief problem boiled down to \u0026ldquo;this system is too complex for me to be able to manage,\u0026rdquo; and it no longer became an effective use of my time to maintain the system as it was\u0026hellip; I wiped everything and finally put Arch on the laptop.\nAnd it went on smoothly, and everything worked. Arch is a tinkerers distribution, there\u0026rsquo;s no doubt about that. Since I did have Arch experience it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a terribly traumatic experience. It took a little while to figure out how to make Suspend and Resume work (i.e. for the laptop when the lid closes,) and manually managing network connections isn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly straightforward until you get the hang of it, but it all works now. And I couldn\u0026rsquo;t be happier\nThe Experience of StumpWM This isn\u0026rsquo;t really a full report, but more a note to say that my brain has really adapted to Stump, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite happy with the experience. Stump doesn\u0026rsquo;t in and of itself increase the ways I\u0026rsquo;m able to be productive, but\u0026hellip; I do think that I work more efficiently when using Stump.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s still a lot left to be done with regards to the tweaking of stump for me. I need to play some more with the MPD (music player) integration, and there are a number of other contributed Lisp packages that I really want to play with. Also, I finally figured out how the Key Binding Map works when I had gotten my basic keybidning needs taken care of and I haven\u0026rsquo;t touched it since then. Now I know how I use the system and I\u0026rsquo;m ready to tweak things again, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten around to it.\nAdditional thoughts regarding Stump, from a more \u0026ldquo;objective\u0026rdquo; perspective: it is incredibly stable, and while it\u0026rsquo;s not blindingly lightweight, it lives in 20 megs of ram and that\u0026rsquo;s about it. I never need to restart the window manager or X anymore, and that\u0026rsquo;s kind of nice.\nSo in short, the Stump WM is a great thing and I need to write a bit more about the actual using of it. But first I need to do a little more tinkering. Because I\u0026rsquo;m like that.\nThe Consolidation of the Gear and Laptops What a strange heading. In any case. I gave in and bought a new laptop, last week. I found a great deal on a used Lenovo x200 with great specs, and I thought that it would solve the majority of my issues with my existing technology.\nFirst, it was considerably newer than the laptop I have been using for most of the past year: more RAM, dual core system, bigger and faster hard drive. Second, it had all of the qualities of the old laptop that I adored: it\u0026rsquo;s a 12\u0026quot; laptop which means very portable without making sacrifices, and it forgoes a trackpad for a \u0026ldquo;ThinkPad Nipple\u0026rdquo; for a mouse. Finally (and perhaps most importantly,) the screen resolution is 1200x800 (up from 1024×768) which makes it possible to comfortably tile two windows next to each-other at once. This is the same resolution as my 15\u0026quot; PowerBook G4 (and I think all of the 13 inch MacBooks). It\u0026rsquo;s a good size, and I was really aching for the increased screen space.\nIt turns out that all of these concerns were addressed fully with this new system. The screen is perfect, it\u0026rsquo;s peppy. it\u0026rsquo;s also nice to return to the modern computing world. I continue to be mightily impressed with the build quality, design, and functionality of IBM/Lenovo hardware.\nMy computer consolidation isn\u0026rsquo;t yet complete: my desktop hasn\u0026rsquo;t yet been backed up and converted to Arch, but it\u0026rsquo;s getting there. I\u0026rsquo;m also not quite sure what happens with the old laptop. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of keeping it around as a spare, but if anyone has a need for a really awesome ThinkPad x41 they should be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technology-update/","summary":"I fear I\u0026rsquo;ve been posting too many posts in the vein of \u0026ldquo;so here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m up to folks,\u0026rdquo; rather than you know writing about things that may be interesting to folks out there in Internet land. Nevertheless, here\u0026rsquo;s another slightly more technical post.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned in passing a few times over the past few months that:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been interested in shifting to Arch Linux. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been running Arch in a VM on my work desktop, I have been quite slow to move additional machines over to Arch. It\u0026rsquo;s not for lack of wanting, but I have a hard time disrupting something that works when it\u0026rsquo;s already working. Also on the software front, I\u0026rsquo;ve switched to using the Stump Window Manger, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve talked a bit about this on the blog, I\u0026rsquo;ve done virtually no reporting of my ongoing progress with this. I missed the days when I only had one computer and it went everywhere with me.","title":"Technology Update"},{"content":"I mentioned in an earlier post that I thought Barnes and Noble was largely responsible for the ongoing and impending collapse of the publishing industry, and that\u0026rsquo;s just the sort of thing that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t leave a lone without a little bit of further pondering.\nThe assertion is that Barnes and Nobel, and Borders particularly as they competed for near total domination of the local-book retail market, forced a consolidation of the publishing industry at the very moment when the worst possible thing for publishing was consolidation.\nConsolidation allows an operation to make a bunch of money quickly. The mechanics of this are pretty simple, after all. When yo consolidate you can cut all sorts of mundane expenses, from the physical costs of maintaining parallel operations, to hard costs like printing and shipping costs that can benefit from collective organization.\nAmazon had a role in the consolidation of sale of books, certainly, but Amazon has always been a distribution and data company, primarily. Their strategy is to find a way to turn a profit on the sale of goods, any goods: they do this by having a complete inventory of everything and levering a lot of data concerning buying habits and browsing habits to make sure people who are shopping find something to buy.\nWhere Amazon\u0026rsquo;s limiting factor is connecting people who want to buy things (books) with books they might like to buy, the \u0026ldquo;traditional\u0026rdquo; book sellers, are limited by the amount of shelf space they can use to display and promote books. So they edged all of the little booksellers out of business by having huge stores and coffee shops and so forth, and then faced with too many books and not enough shelf space, they used their muscle to push the publishing industry toward increased consolidation and a \u0026ldquo;blockbuster\u0026rdquo; business model.\nBlockbusters are how the movie industry works. Production companies make a bunch of movies, on the premise that if one or two turn a huge profit, they can afford to make a number of movies that flop or that just break-even. Hence the great power of reliable successes: another John Grisham novel, Return of the Mummy King VI, etc., the \u0026ldquo;copy-cat\u0026rdquo; phenomena and the erosion of the independent movie production business.\nBook sellers were culpable as well--consolidation is attractive in what are essentially commodity businesses--and selling easily produced paper-based volumes is a commodity business. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but the undeniable market success of Barnes and Nobel is not, given what I can tell from where I\u0026rsquo;m sitting, a marker of success of the publishing industry as a whole.\nAnd you know, when you\u0026rsquo;re a book seller, throwing the publishing industry onto the tracks before an oncoming train, to achieve some mildly impressive profits for a decade seems\u0026hellip; not incredibly bright. And not the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in supporting or putting my faith in.\nIt strikes me that this \u0026ldquo;consolidation meme\u0026rdquo; is a common feature of unsustainable and inauthentic economy, and it extends beyond book retail into other failed and failing sectors of the ecomony.\nBanks. Obvious here. The big banks lost track of the micro economics that make the macro economics go, and we got things like sub-prime morgages, because while they make sense from the consolidated-bank perspective they don\u0026rsquo;t make sense to people. Like, the John Grisham-esque Legal/Drama/Thriller book makes a lot of sense to the booksellers and the publishers, but most people can only really read so many of them before loosing interest. Software. Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s production of windows makes a lot of sense if you\u0026rsquo;re a big company, but if you use computers in a specialized way, Windows is like an illfitting suit from Target. It works, but it\u0026rsquo;s uncomfortable and rough around the edges. There is general consensus that \u0026ldquo;The Microsoft Way\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t the best technological solution to the various problem, even among people who use it regularly (developer tools might require a slightly more complex investigation). Your Example Here. Leave a note in the comments. Thoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-dangers-of-consolidation/","summary":"I mentioned in an earlier post that I thought Barnes and Noble was largely responsible for the ongoing and impending collapse of the publishing industry, and that\u0026rsquo;s just the sort of thing that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t leave a lone without a little bit of further pondering.\nThe assertion is that Barnes and Nobel, and Borders particularly as they competed for near total domination of the local-book retail market, forced a consolidation of the publishing industry at the very moment when the worst possible thing for publishing was consolidation.\nConsolidation allows an operation to make a bunch of money quickly. The mechanics of this are pretty simple, after all. When yo consolidate you can cut all sorts of mundane expenses, from the physical costs of maintaining parallel operations, to hard costs like printing and shipping costs that can benefit from collective organization.\nAmazon had a role in the consolidation of sale of books, certainly, but Amazon has always been a distribution and data company, primarily.","title":"The Dangers of Consolidation"},{"content":"I have a confession to make. I really want a Kindle. Bad.\nNo really. I do. The DRM scares me, and I think the books are just the other side of \u0026ldquo;too expensive,\u0026rdquo; and because I come from a long line of \u0026ldquo;book collecting people\u0026rdquo; I think there are a lot of books that I would want to own in the paper. Furthermore, I have a great laptop for reading books (a small tablet), and I have a very long history of using small form computing devices (think palm pilots and pocket pcs) to read books. And yet, I returned to paper a few years ago, and don\u0026rsquo;t feel really bad about that.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to get a Kindle, at least not yet. I want to see what the Barnes and Nobel \u0026ldquo;Nook\u0026rdquo; looks like. I need to upgrade the laptop more, and I think something like the Nokia n900 might end up being a better device in this space and even if it isn\u0026rsquo;t, I think we\u0026rsquo;re going to see a lot of development in the \u0026ldquo;tablet\u0026rdquo; space in the next year, and it seems premature to buy now. For me.\nGiven all these caveats, I think its interesting to think about why I want the Kindle so bad. Here are some questions and answers:\nSo given all these caveats, why do you want a Kindle so bad?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve held one on a number of occasions, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always been struck with how nice they feel. They\u0026rsquo;re solid and they\u0026rsquo;re thin. The text is clear and readable, the page advance buttons fall wonderfully under your thumbs. The experience, at least on these second generation devices, is really quite good.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve rather famously, taken an entire bag of books along with me for a long weekend trip. A weekend where, I ended up reading about two and a half pages. So, the fact that you can take a whole pile of books or more properly the potential for getting the one right book you want, is appealing in a practical way.\nIs this just about the hardware, or is there more?\nI think the Kindle is the ideal distribution mechanism for periodical literature. The codex is likely to be of enduring importance for quite while, but I\u0026rsquo;m almost certain that the magazine and newspaper isn\u0026rsquo;t. While blogs are great, don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a need for publications that are in-between the \u0026ldquo;book\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;blog,\u0026rdquo; and I think the Kindle is a great space for those kinds of texts. Practically, I\u0026rsquo;d like to read more content of that sort, and if I had a kindle, I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;d get a lot of use out of it.\nThe instant distribution model is a huge plus, and I really like to read. Cory Doctorow says something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;Ebook readers will fail, because a \u0026lsquo;good\u0026rsquo; ebook reader would need to remove distractions and malfunction possibilities as effectively as paper, and devices that \u0026lsquo;only\u0026rsquo; read books, won\u0026rsquo;t sell very well next to devices which also check your email and play games.\u0026rdquo; And I think that\u0026rsquo;s probably a true observation, but it looks like the Kindle does single-function pretty well. I think the next year, or so, will be really interesting as we see more tablets in the market.\nYou\u0026rsquo;re obviously not going to get one today, so what would make you change your mind?\nThe DRM and the price of the books. The DRM really needs no additional condemnation. I think 10 dollars is a bit steep for books, particularly because it\u0026rsquo;s so flat rate, and while it\u0026rsquo;s cheaper than the hardcover (and that\u0026rsquo;s good,) it\u0026rsquo;s also more than a paperback in most cases. And at least in a paperback you have something on your shelf. And the DRM really adds insult to injury. If they distributed the files in plain text/html and some weirdass XML format that would be one thing, but they give you a blob that is certain to be next to useless in a year or two. If books were 3 bucks, or 5 bucks, or even 6 or 7 bucks--even if the device was 300--or there was some sort of subscription service, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t mind the DRM, but as it is\u0026hellip; the DRM makes the economics difficult for me to compute.\nIf the DRM is such an issue why have you gotten this far?\nA lot of times in the paper-book world you buy a book. Read a hundred pages (or maybe twenty?), and then are so disgusted by the book that you can\u0026rsquo;t bare to read any more, and you set it aside. And often times a trip to the bookstore (particularly in advance of a trip) means buying a number of books, when only some of these books will be of worth (to you) to justify their expense.\nThese situations are less likely to happen with a Kindle. There are significant samples, and you carry the bookstore around with you. I suspect the chances are that you only really need to \u0026ldquo;buy\u0026rdquo; the books that you read, which might end up being significantly cheaper in the long run.\nThe Kindle is a physical manifestation of a shift away from the physicality of information, but it\u0026rsquo;s only really a symptom and not a leading cause this shift, right? If you accept this, if you accept that most information and knowledge only exists as bits and photons, then all of the rituals that we build around books (collections, libraries, shelves) are less important.\nWhat about the *Nook*?\nThe nook is a more impressive platform. For sure, it fails the Doctorow test of (potentially) being too interesting for tasks that aren\u0026rsquo;t reading books.\nI think I probably have some more writing to do on this subject, but, in general I think Amazon is a better and smarter company than Barnes and Nobel, and if the name of the game in ebook readers is \u0026ldquo;vendor lock-in\u0026rdquo; then I trust Amazon a bit more. In a lot of ways, I hold B\u0026amp;N responsible for the ongoing/impending collapse of the publishing industry.1\nIn any case, mostly, at the moment I just want to wait and see before I make any sort of decision on the subject.\nThoughts?\nThe consolidation that B\u0026amp;N and Borders organized for the sale of books collapsed a lot of the niche markets that were maintained by niche booksellers, and the much lamented disappearance of the midlist and backlist. The current \u0026ldquo;blockbuster supported\u0026rdquo; book industry isn\u0026rsquo;t sustainable beyond the next 5 to 10 years or so.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-wanting-a-kindle/","summary":"I have a confession to make. I really want a Kindle. Bad.\nNo really. I do. The DRM scares me, and I think the books are just the other side of \u0026ldquo;too expensive,\u0026rdquo; and because I come from a long line of \u0026ldquo;book collecting people\u0026rdquo; I think there are a lot of books that I would want to own in the paper. Furthermore, I have a great laptop for reading books (a small tablet), and I have a very long history of using small form computing devices (think palm pilots and pocket pcs) to read books. And yet, I returned to paper a few years ago, and don\u0026rsquo;t feel really bad about that.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to get a Kindle, at least not yet. I want to see what the Barnes and Nobel \u0026ldquo;Nook\u0026rdquo; looks like. I need to upgrade the laptop more, and I think something like the Nokia n900 might end up being a better device in this space and even if it isn\u0026rsquo;t, I think we\u0026rsquo;re going to see a lot of development in the \u0026ldquo;tablet\u0026rdquo; space in the next year, and it seems premature to buy now.","title":"On Wanting a Kindle"},{"content":" Who are you? What do you?\nI\u0026rsquo;m a 19 year old Perl hacker slash college student. I\u0026rsquo;m a Computer Science major at SUNYIT in Utica. To be truthful, I\u0026rsquo;m not a very good student; I spent my study hours teaching myself Perl and UNIX.\nAs for my personal life, I live one boat ride away from Manhattan, so when I do have time home it\u0026rsquo;s pretty hectic. Being upstate for college is so \u0026hellip; quaint, compared to living in the big city.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not really working on any large projects, but I am in the midst of working on a very lightweight an elegant blog software; the goal is to have one page (index.pl), one RSS feed (feed.rss) and one template file (template.html), and combine them all into a fully-functional blog. Then hopefully after that project is done I\u0026rsquo;ll have the time to run my Sysadmin blog -- I plan on publicising a lot of the random hacks I make at work. For example, I just spent the last two days working on a daemon that uses Net::DBus to automatically log a user out when a preset idle time is reached.\nSmaller Computers, More Powerful Computers, or Cheaper Computers?\nSmaller, generally. I like saving money, and I love netbooks. As I always say, the speed of the computer is up to the knowledge of the user installing the software on it. My EeePC 901 running Debian GNU/Linux runs as fast as most \u0026ldquo;modern\u0026rdquo; computers running Windows Vista.\nLets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what\u0026rsquo;s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?\nI love the freedom of expression technology brings. Being universal, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to apply country-wide laws to internet use which opens up a whole new realm of free speech for those who previously haven\u0026rsquo;t had it. But PERSONALLY, I just enjoy tinkering, learning and achieving goals. Nothing feels as good as finally finishing that program you\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the last week.\nWhat I find frustrating is the amount of outdated documentation you run into. The reason I spent so long on my Net::DBus script is because the docs I was using were outdated. Thankfully buu on #perl pointed me to Net::DBus::Dumper, and I figured everything out myself.\nFavorite Linux/UNIX Command (whatever, as long as it fits on one line.)?\nvi, of course :]\nOr if you mean a singular shell command, it\u0026rsquo;s probably between perl, sed and awk. Those three programs have saved me countless hours of file editing.\nThe single scariest thing about the future?\nGoogle SkyNet(tm)\nFavorite Website?\nHmm \u0026hellip; Considering I don\u0026rsquo;t browse the web too much, I\u0026rsquo;d have to go with http://latfh.com/. The laughs never stop coming.\nWhat do you think is going to be the most important event of the next 10 years?\nThis one\u0026rsquo;s hard to say. I think it can be one of three things;\nThe development of high-functioning AI Using computers to replace non-functioning human senses (eyesight, smell, etc) Apple publicly announcing that their computers are overpriced One thing that you wish you could learn?\nFrench. For some reason I can\u0026rsquo;t seem to wrap my brain around spoken language.\nEmacs vs. Vi\nvi, of course :]\nI mean, don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong; Emacs is a great operating system, but it\u0026rsquo;s lacking a good text editor.\nWhere can we find more about you/your projects?\nCurrently I don\u0026rsquo;t have a site setup, but when I do it will be at any of these locations:\nhttp://web.cs.sunyit.edu/~pobegam/ http://fuzzydev.org/ http://fuzzydev.org/~pobega Or you can just follow me on Identica, @pobega\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interview-with-michael-pobega/","summary":"Who are you? What do you?\nI\u0026rsquo;m a 19 year old Perl hacker slash college student. I\u0026rsquo;m a Computer Science major at SUNYIT in Utica. To be truthful, I\u0026rsquo;m not a very good student; I spent my study hours teaching myself Perl and UNIX.\nAs for my personal life, I live one boat ride away from Manhattan, so when I do have time home it\u0026rsquo;s pretty hectic. Being upstate for college is so \u0026hellip; quaint, compared to living in the big city.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not really working on any large projects, but I am in the midst of working on a very lightweight an elegant blog software; the goal is to have one page (index.pl), one RSS feed (feed.rss) and one template file (template.html), and combine them all into a fully-functional blog. Then hopefully after that project is done I\u0026rsquo;ll have the time to run my Sysadmin blog -- I plan on publicising a lot of the random hacks I make at work.","title":"Interview with Michael Pobega"},{"content":"In \u0026ldquo;Radicalism in Free Software, Open Source\u0026rdquo; I contemplated the discourse of and around radicalism in and about Free Software and Open Source software. I think this post is a loose sequel to that post, and I want to use it to think about the role.\nI suppose the ongoing merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, particularly with regards to the MySQL database engine weights heavy on many of our minds.\nThere are a number of companies, fairly large companies, who have taken a fairly significant leadership role in open source and free software. Red Hat. Sun Microsystems. IBM. Nov ell. And so forth. While I\u0026rsquo;m certainly not arguing against the adoption of open source methodologies in the enterprise/corporate space, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that we can totally ignore the impact that these companies have on the open source community.\nA lot of people--mistakenly, I think--fear that Free Software works against commercialism1 in the software industry. People wonder: \u0026ldquo;How can we make money off of software if we give it away for free?\u0026rdquo;2 Now it is true that free software (and its adherents) prefer business that look different from proprietary software businesses. They\u0026rsquo;re smaller, more sustainable, and tend to focus on much more custom deployments for specific users and groups. This is in stark contrast to the \u0026ldquo;general releases\u0026rdquo; for large audiences, that a lot of proprietary audiences strive for.\nIn any case, there is a whole nexus of issues related to free software projects and their communities that are affected by the commercial interests and \u0026ldquo;powers\u0026rdquo; that sponsor, support, and have instigated some of the largest free software projects around. The key issues and questions include:\nHow do new software projects of consequence begin in an era when most projects of any notable size have significant corporate backing? What happens to communities when the corporations that sponsor free software are sold or change directions? Do people contribute to free software outside of their jobs? Particularly for big \u0026ldquo;enterprise\u0026rdquo; applications like Nagios or Jboss? Is the \u0026ldquo;hobbyist hacker\u0026rdquo; a relevant and/or useful arch-type? Can we intuit which projects attract hobbyists and which projects survive because businesses sponsor their development, rather than because hobbyists contribute energy to them. For example: desktop stuff, niche window managers, games, etc. are more likely to be the province of hobbyists and we might expect stuff like hardware drivers, application frameworks, and database engines might be the kind of thing where development is mostly sponsored by corporations. Is free software (or, Open Source may be the more apropos terminology at the moment) just the contemporary form of industry group cooperation? Is open source how we standardize our nuts and bolts in the 21st century? How does \u0026ldquo;not invented here syndrome\u0026rdquo; play out in light of the genesis of open source? In a similar vein, how do free software projects get started in today\u0026rsquo;s world. Can someone say \u0026ldquo;I want to do this thing\u0026rdquo; and people will follow? Do you need a business and some initial capital to get started? Must the niche be clear and undeveloped? I\u0026rsquo;m sort of surprised that there haven\u0026rsquo;t been any Lucid-style forks of free software projects since, well, Lucid Emacs. While I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly arguing that the Lucid Emacs Fork was a good thing, it\u0026rsquo;s surprising that similar sorts of splits don\u0026rsquo;t happen any more. That\u0026rsquo;s the train of thought. I\u0026rsquo;d be more than happy to start to hash out any of these ideas with you. Onward and Upward!\nPeople actually say things like \u0026ldquo;free software is too communist for me\u0026rdquo; which is sort of comically absurd, and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of both communism/capitalism and the radical elements of the Free Software movement. So lets avoid this, shall we?\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nTo be totally honest I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of sympathy for capitalists who say \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;re doing something that makes it hard for me to make money in the way that I\u0026rsquo;ve grown used to making money.\u0026rdquo; Capitalist\u0026rsquo; lack of creativity is not a flaw in the Free Software movement.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/industry-community-open-source/","summary":"In \u0026ldquo;Radicalism in Free Software, Open Source\u0026rdquo; I contemplated the discourse of and around radicalism in and about Free Software and Open Source software. I think this post is a loose sequel to that post, and I want to use it to think about the role.\nI suppose the ongoing merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, particularly with regards to the MySQL database engine weights heavy on many of our minds.\nThere are a number of companies, fairly large companies, who have taken a fairly significant leadership role in open source and free software. Red Hat. Sun Microsystems. IBM. Nov ell. And so forth. While I\u0026rsquo;m certainly not arguing against the adoption of open source methodologies in the enterprise/corporate space, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that we can totally ignore the impact that these companies have on the open source community.\nA lot of people--mistakenly, I think--fear that Free Software works against commercialism1 in the software industry.","title":"Industry, Community, Open Source"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s been a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve written about what I\u0026rsquo;m working on, so I wanted to write up a little post on the subject. Just to keep myself honest.\nLast time I did this, I tried to promise myself that I\u0026rsquo;d get a draft the novel I\u0026rsquo;m working on done by the beginning of November in time for me to not do the NaNoWriMo project--as is my custom. That isn\u0026rsquo;t going to happen.\nI have, however, begun to stub out three files which will form the core of the remainder of the book. I have the very end of the biggest section of chapter eight, and then four more chapters. The plan is to write what feels more like four short stories with four or five adjoining little scenes. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this will seem all that different from the outside when I\u0026rsquo;m done, but I think this change in plan will make things easier to write.\nThis project is one that I both adore, and am pretty pleased with (at least at the moment,) but I\u0026rsquo;m also keenly aware that I need to be done with it, and I need to move on, as it\u0026rsquo;s been in progress for more than a year, and none of my reasons for not finishing it yet are very good.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been slowly working on a knitting project. A sweater knit at a fairly fine gauge, and incredibly plain. I\u0026rsquo;m happy with the project but I\u0026rsquo;ve pretty much given up entirely on Television watching, and as a result haven\u0026rsquo;t found a lot of time to do knitting on a regular basis. I knit during a meeting, and for a few moments here and there during a couple of social interludes, but haven\u0026rsquo;t really gotten into it. It\u0026rsquo;s going well, and I\u0026rsquo;ve got about 9 inches done of the body. 7 more till the armhole shaping begins.\nI\u0026rsquo;m continuing to do the contra dance and shape note things. I think the shape note experience has been helpful for the way that I understand and participate in music, and that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing indeed. I\u0026rsquo;ve picked up a few new contra dance things, though if a given week is busy, contra dancing tends to be the first thing to disappear. I\u0026rsquo;m okay with that. I\u0026rsquo;ve also taken to going for walks in the morning before work, rather than in the evening, which is, I think better for my mind during the day at work, and also for getting work done on projects in the evening.\nIt seems like there\u0026rsquo;s always something else in the project of \u0026ldquo;getting your technology to work the way it ought to,\u0026rdquo; and as a result it seems like I always have something to hack upon. With my laptop running the right operating system, and doing so pretty well, the list of things to hack on have cleared up significantly. I have a desktop that I\u0026rsquo;m not using as well as I could. There\u0026rsquo;s always something else to work on with regards to my writing setup, though that\u0026rsquo;s mostly abated for the moment. I really need to find some better way to read RSS feeds. I have some hacking to do with regards to websites. There\u0026rsquo;s always something to work on, I suppose.\nOh, and I\u0026rsquo;m working a lot, but then that\u0026rsquo;s how it goes. The work projects are actually pretty fun, and they\u0026rsquo;re going well, so that\u0026rsquo;s good. If only there were more hours in the day.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/current-projects/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s been a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve written about what I\u0026rsquo;m working on, so I wanted to write up a little post on the subject. Just to keep myself honest.\nLast time I did this, I tried to promise myself that I\u0026rsquo;d get a draft the novel I\u0026rsquo;m working on done by the beginning of November in time for me to not do the NaNoWriMo project--as is my custom. That isn\u0026rsquo;t going to happen.\nI have, however, begun to stub out three files which will form the core of the remainder of the book. I have the very end of the biggest section of chapter eight, and then four more chapters. The plan is to write what feels more like four short stories with four or five adjoining little scenes. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this will seem all that different from the outside when I\u0026rsquo;m done, but I think this change in plan will make things easier to write.","title":"Current Projects"},{"content":"Today\u0026rsquo;s interview is with Angie Marshall. I think introductions here are pretty much uncalled for, so here we go:\nWho are you? What do you?\nAngie Marshall, Legal Assistant is my paying job, but I am a Farm wife, mother of 3, a knitter, a former quilter and a half-assed gardener. I have multiple knitting projects OTN currently, but most consistently, I knit socks.\nMerino or Blue Faced Leicester?\nEither is awesome, but I will admit a fondness for Merino.\nLets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what\u0026rsquo;s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?\nI use a palm centro for a phone, but alas, no interwebs connection from that. I like that it keeps my names/addresses/calendar at hand, but I am frustrated that i can\u0026rsquo;t create I have an iPod touch that 98% of the time I use to listen to inspirational speeches or podcasts or audio books. I have music on it, but\u0026hellip; meh. I have Scrabble and Soduko applications on it and I love them. This iPod frustrates me because I cheaped out on it and didn\u0026rsquo;t get a big enough one so I am constantly juggling what gets put on it. I love my laptop, but wished the battery held more charge.\nFavorite book you\u0026rsquo;ve read in the last year? Runners up?\nHanging my head in shame\u0026hellip; the Twilight series. I listen to audiobooks mostly, but I did read those in real book form. I read for entertainment.\nFavorite Websites?\nRavelry and Facebook.\nWhat do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?\nThe election of our current President.\nWhat do you think will be of the next 10?\nI look forward to our scientific minds developing a fuel source that doesn\u0026rsquo;t depend on foreign oil. I hope that we take the lessons learned from this last war and we return to a self-sufficiency mindset so that we never again make the mistake of sending our troups to war over oil. \u0026gt;\nOne thing that you\u0026rsquo;re most looking forward to in the next year?\nGetting better control of my life, cutting back to a 4 day work week (affirming, affirming), vacation, knitting camp, fresh asparagas morel mushrooms\nOne thing that you wish you could learn?\nSpanish, there is such a need for spanish speakers in all areas of employment. My French from long ago High School, just isn\u0026rsquo;t much help.\nCats vs. Dogs?\nCats in the house, Dogs outside. Nothing like a warm cat \u0026ldquo;spot\u0026rdquo; (or 2 or\non a cold morning or a sick day. Where can we find more about you/your projects?\nKnit4Angine; The Grumpy Farmer but I don\u0026rsquo;t post much; perhaps this interview will goad me into posting a little more often.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interview-with-angie-marshall/","summary":"Today\u0026rsquo;s interview is with Angie Marshall. I think introductions here are pretty much uncalled for, so here we go:\nWho are you? What do you?\nAngie Marshall, Legal Assistant is my paying job, but I am a Farm wife, mother of 3, a knitter, a former quilter and a half-assed gardener. I have multiple knitting projects OTN currently, but most consistently, I knit socks.\nMerino or Blue Faced Leicester?\nEither is awesome, but I will admit a fondness for Merino.\nLets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what\u0026rsquo;s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?\nI use a palm centro for a phone, but alas, no interwebs connection from that. I like that it keeps my names/addresses/calendar at hand, but I am frustrated that i can\u0026rsquo;t create I have an iPod touch that 98% of the time I use to listen to inspirational speeches or podcasts or audio books.","title":"Interview with Angie Marshall"},{"content":"The background:\nzonker on Selling vs. Shaming bkuhn on Denouncing vs. Advocating: In Defense of the Occasional Denouncement Various other conversations on identi.ca over the past few weeks. In light of this debate I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the role and manifestations of radicalism in the free software and open source world. I think a lot of people (unfairly, I think in many cases) equate dedication to the \u0026ldquo;Cause of Free Software,\u0026rdquo; as the refusal to use anything but free software, and the admonishment of those who do use \u0026ldquo;unpure\u0026rdquo; software. To my mind this is both unfair to Free Software as well as the radicals who work on free software projects and advocate for Free Software.\nFirst, lets back up and talk about RMS1. RMS is often held up as the straw man for \u0026ldquo;free software radicals.\u0026rdquo; RMS apparently (and I\u0026rsquo;d believe it) refuses to use software that isn\u0026rsquo;t free software. This is seen as being somewhat \u0026ldquo;monkish,\u0026rdquo; because doesn\u0026rsquo;t just involve using GNU/Linux on the desktop, but it also involves things like refusing to use the non-free software written for GNU/Linux, including Adobe\u0026rsquo;s Flash player, and various drivers. In short using the \u0026ldquo;free-only\u0026rdquo; stack of software is a somewhat archaic experience. The moderates say \u0026ldquo;who wants to use a computer which has been willfully broken because the software\u0026rsquo;s license is ideologically incompatible,\u0026rdquo; and the moderates come out looking rational and pragmatic.\nExcept that, as near as I can tell, while the refusal to use non-free software might be a bit traumatic for a new convert from the proprietary operating system world, for someone like RMS, it\u0026rsquo;s not a huge personal sacrifice. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m particularly \u0026ldquo;monkish\u0026rdquo; about my free software habits, and the only non-free software I use is the adobe flash player, and the non-open-source extensions to Sun\u0026rsquo;s Virtual Box. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure I don\u0026rsquo;t even need the binary blob stuff in the kernel. For me--and likely for RMS, and those of our ilk--sticking to the pure \u0026ldquo;free software\u0026rdquo; stuff works better and suits the way I enjoy working.2\nIn short, our ability to use free software exclusively, depends upon our habits and on the ways in which we use and interact with technology.\nTo my mind, the process by which the pragmatic approach to free software and open source radicalizes people like RMS, is terribly unproductive. While we can see that the moderates come away from this encounter looking more reasonable to the more conventional types in the software world, this is not a productive or useful discussion to entertain.\nIn any case I think there are a number of dimensions to the free software (and open source world,) that focusing on \u0026ldquo;how free your software\u0026rdquo; is distracts us from. Might it not be useful to think of a few other issues. They are, as follows:\n1. Free software is about education, and ensuring that the users of technology can and do understand the implications of the technology that they use.\nAt least theoretically, one of the leading reasons why having \u0026ldquo;complete and corresponding source code\u0026rdquo; is so crucial to free software is that with the source code, users will be able to understand how their technology works.\nContemporary software is considerably more complex than the 70s vintage software that spurred the Free Software movement. Where one might have imagined being able to see, use, and helpfully modified an early version of a program like Emacs, today the source code for Emacs is eighty megabytes, to say nothing of the entire Linux Kernel. I think it\u0026rsquo;s absurd to suggest that \u0026ldquo;just looking at the source code\u0026rdquo; for a program will be educational in and of itself.\nHaving said that, I think free software can (and does) teach people a great deal about technology and software. People who use free software know more about technology. And it\u0026rsquo;s not just because people who are given to use free software are more computer literate, but rather using free software teaches people about technology. Arch Linux is a great example of this at a fairly high level, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s a way that Open Office Firefox plays a similar role for a more general audience.\n2. There are a number of cases around free software where freedom--despite licensing choices--can be ambiguous. In these cases, particularly, it is important to think about the economics of software, not simply the state of the \u0026ldquo;ownership\u0026rdquo; of software.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking about situations like the \u0026ldquo;re-licensing\u0026rdquo; such as that employed by MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle over the MySQL database. In these cases contributors assign copyright to the commercial owner of the software project on the condition that the code also be licensed under the terms of a license like the GPL. This way the owning copy has the ability to sell licenses to the project under terms that would be incompatible with the GPL. This includes adding proprietary features to the open source code that don\u0026rsquo;t get reincorporated into the mainline.\nThis \u0026ldquo;hybrid model\u0026rdquo; gives the company who owns the copyright a lot of power over the code base, that normal contributors simply don\u0026rsquo;t have. While this isn\u0026rsquo;t a tragedy, I think the current lack of certainty over the MySQL project should give people at least some pause before adopting this sort of business model.\nWhile it might have once been possible to \u0026ldquo;judge a project by the license,\u0026rdquo; I think the issue of \u0026ldquo;Software Freedom\u0026rdquo; is in today\u0026rsquo;s world so much more complex, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that having some sort of economic understanding of the industry is crucial to figuring this out.\n3. The success of free software may not be directly connected to the size of the userbase of free software\nOne thing that I think Zonker\u0026rsquo;s argument falls apart around is the idea that free software will only be successful if the entire world is using it. Wrong.\nLets take a project like Awesome. It\u0026rsquo;s a highly niche window manager for X11 that isn\u0026rsquo;t part of a Desktop Environment (e.g. GNOME/KDE/XFCE), and you have to know a thing or two about scripting and programing in order to get it to be usable. If there were much more than a thousand users in the world I\u0026rsquo;d be surprised. This accounts for a minuscule amount of the desktop window management market. Despite this, I think the Awesome project is wildly successful.\nSo what marks a successful free software project? A product that creates value in the world, by making people\u0026rsquo;s jobs easier and more efficient. A community that supports the developers and users of the software equally. Size helps for sure, particularly in that it disperses responsibility for the development of a project among a number of capable folks. However, the size of a projects userbase (or developer base) should not be the sole or even the most important quality by which we can judge success.\nThere are other issues which are important to think about and debate in the free software world. There are also some other instances where the \u0026ldquo;hard line\u0026rdquo; is over radicalized by a more moderate element, nevertheless I think this is a good place to stop for today, and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in getting some feedback from you all before I continue with this idea.\nOnward and Upward!\nRichard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, original author of the GNU GPL (perhaps the most prevalent free software license), as well as the ever popular gcc and emacs.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nArguably, it\u0026rsquo;s easier for software developers and hacker types like myself to use \u0026ldquo;just free software\u0026rdquo; because hackers tend to make free software to satisfy their needs (the \u0026ldquo;scratch your own itch\u0026rdquo; phenomena), and so there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of free software that supports \u0026ldquo;working like a hacker,\u0026rdquo; but less for more mainstream audiences. Indeed one could argue that \u0026ldquo;mainstream computer using audiences\u0026rdquo; as a class is largely the product of the \u0026ldquo;proprietary software and technology industry.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/radicalism-in-free-software-open-source/","summary":"The background:\nzonker on Selling vs. Shaming bkuhn on Denouncing vs. Advocating: In Defense of the Occasional Denouncement Various other conversations on identi.ca over the past few weeks. In light of this debate I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the role and manifestations of radicalism in the free software and open source world. I think a lot of people (unfairly, I think in many cases) equate dedication to the \u0026ldquo;Cause of Free Software,\u0026rdquo; as the refusal to use anything but free software, and the admonishment of those who do use \u0026ldquo;unpure\u0026rdquo; software. To my mind this is both unfair to Free Software as well as the radicals who work on free software projects and advocate for Free Software.\nFirst, lets back up and talk about RMS1. RMS is often held up as the straw man for \u0026ldquo;free software radicals.\u0026rdquo; RMS apparently (and I\u0026rsquo;d believe it) refuses to use software that isn\u0026rsquo;t free software.","title":"Radicalism in Free Software, Open Source"},{"content":"When I want to install an application on a computer that I use, I open a terminal and type something to the effect of:\napt-get install rxvt-unicode Which is a great little terminal emulator. I recommend it. Assuming I have a live interned connection, and the application I\u0026rsquo;m installing isn\u0026rsquo;t too large, a minute later or less I have whatever it is I asked for installed and ready to use (in most cases.)\nIndeed this is the major feature of most Linux Distributions: their core technology and enterprise is to take all of the awesome software that\u0026rsquo;s out there (and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of it,) and make it possible to install easily, to figure out what it depends on, and get it to compile safely and run on a whole host of machines. Although this isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that most people think when they\u0026rsquo;re choosing a distribution of Linux, one of the biggest differentiating features between distributions. But I digress.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written about package management here before, but to summarize:\nWe use package managers because many programs share dependencies, that we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to install twice or three times, but that we might not want to install by default with every installation of an operating system. Making sure that everything gets installed is important. This, is I think, a fairly unique-to-open-source problem, because in the proprietary system the dependencies are installed by default (as in there are more monolithic development environments, like .NET, Cocoa, and Java1, and other older non-managed options). One of the defining characteristics of open source software is the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s meant to be redistributed. Package management makes it easy to redistribute software, and provides real value for both the users of the operating system and for the upstream developers. Or so I\u0026rsquo;m lead to believe. In the end, we\u0026rsquo;re back at the beginning where, you can install just about anything in the world if you know what the package is named, and the operating system will blithely keep everything up to date and maintained.2\nWhile GNU/Linux systems get flack for not being as useable as proprietary operating systems, I see package management as this huge \u0026ldquo;killer feature\u0026rdquo; that open source systems have on top of proprietary system. We\u0026rsquo;ll never see something like apt-get for Windows not because it\u0026rsquo;s not good technology, but because it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to mange every component of the system and all of the software with a single tool.3\nAnd then all these \u0026ldquo;App Store\u0026rdquo; things started popping up.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about it, \u0026ldquo;App stores,\u0026rdquo; do the same thing for application delivery on non-GNU/* systems that package management does for open source systems. We\u0026rsquo;re seeing this sort of thing for various platforms from cell phones like the iPhone/Blackberry/Andriod to Inuit\u0026rsquo;s QuickBooks and even for more conventional platforms like Java.\nTechnically it\u0026rsquo;s a bit less interesting. App stores generally just receive and distribute compiled code,4 but from a social and user-centric perspective, the app store experience is really quite similar to the package management experience.\nI\u0026rsquo;m surely not the only one to make this connection, but I\u0026rsquo;d be interesting to move past this and think about the kinds of technological progress that stem from this. App stores clearly provide value to users by making applications easier to find, and to developers who can spend less time distributing their software. Are there greater advancements to be made here? Is this always going to be platform specific, or might there be some other sort of curatorial mechanism that might add even more value in this space? And of course, how does Free Software persist and survive in this kind of environment?\nI look forward to hearing from you.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s not bicker about this, because the argument breaks down here a bit, admittedly, given that Java is now, mostly open. But it wasn\u0026rsquo;t designed as an open system, and all of these solve the dependency problem by--I think--providing a big \u0026ldquo;standard runtime,\u0026rdquo; and statically compiling anything extra into the program\u0026rsquo;s executable. Or something.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nPackage management sometimes breaks things, it\u0026rsquo;s true, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never really had a problem that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to recover from in reasonably short order. I mean, things have broken, and I will be the first to admit that my systems are far from pristine, but everything works, and that\u0026rsquo;s good enough for me.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhile its possible to use more than one package manager at once, and there are cases even on linux where this is common (i.e. CPAN shell, system packages (apt/deb, yum/rpm) and ruby gems, haskell cabal and so forth) it\u0026rsquo;s not preferable: Sometimes a package will be installed by a language-specific program manager and then the system package manager will install (over it) a newer or older version of the package, which you might not notice, or it might just cause something to act a bit funny on some systems. If you\u0026rsquo;re lucky, Usually stuff breaks.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhich means, I think indirectly that we\u0026rsquo;re seeing a move away from static linking and bundling of frameworks and into a single binary or bundle. This is one of the advancements of OS X, that all applications are delivered in these \u0026ldquo;bundles\u0026rdquo; which are just directories that contain everything that an application needs to run. Apple addressed the dependency problem by removing all dependencies. And this works in the contemporary world because if an App had to be a few extra megs to include its dependencies? No big deal. Same with Ram usage.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/package-mangement-and-why-your-platform-needs-an-app-store/","summary":"When I want to install an application on a computer that I use, I open a terminal and type something to the effect of:\napt-get install rxvt-unicode Which is a great little terminal emulator. I recommend it. Assuming I have a live interned connection, and the application I\u0026rsquo;m installing isn\u0026rsquo;t too large, a minute later or less I have whatever it is I asked for installed and ready to use (in most cases.)\nIndeed this is the major feature of most Linux Distributions: their core technology and enterprise is to take all of the awesome software that\u0026rsquo;s out there (and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of it,) and make it possible to install easily, to figure out what it depends on, and get it to compile safely and run on a whole host of machines. Although this isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that most people think when they\u0026rsquo;re choosing a distribution of Linux, one of the biggest differentiating features between distributions.","title":"Package Mangement and Why Your Platform Needs an App Store"},{"content":"A mostly technology-centric collection of links:\nEmacs starter configuration scripts. I can\u0026rsquo;t, for the life of me, recall why I went looking for this, but last week I ended up with a whole host of basic configuration files that people have published. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about doing this for my own files, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not had it properly cleaned up and working in a non-embarrassing way in a while. Most of these are on github, which is a phenomena that could tolerate some investigation, but no matter. Here they are, linked to by screen name: ki, elq, jonshea, larrywright, defmacro (har, just got it), jmhodges, technomancy, markhepburn, and al3x. I\u0026rsquo;d love to collect more of these, so maybe comments or the cyborg wiki.\nAdjunct to that, a few more cool emacs and related links and points: First, paraedit which is a little tool which makes editing lisp easier, as well as an org-mode tip from Nathan Yergler about using org-rembmember with firefox and ubiquity. which might be of interest to some of you. I also have in the file [this link about yet another lisp dialect (yald?) called Lysp, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have much more than that. I, on the other hand will have more to say about this in the coming few weeks.\nMy **friend Chris Fletcher discusses his experience with contemporary blogging services** in this post. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. Right? I mean blogging is so different today than it was when I got into it. I remember when you handed FTP credentials to blogger so they could publish your blog with their system to your site. Surely people don\u0026rsquo;t do that anymore. One of the things that I noticed at Podcamp (more on that on another post) that, frankly horrified me a bit, was that there was a whole class of bloggers who wanted to do \u0026ldquo;this thing,\u0026rdquo; but they had no interest in running their own website or making that investment of time and energy.\nAnd maybe that\u0026rsquo;s what blogging has become. In a lot of ways doing a blog is something anyone can do pretty easily, and having a website is no longer a big part of participating in this discourse. While I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of independence, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think the technological burden is that high. \u0026ldquo;Doing websites,\u0026rdquo; very much made me the geek I am today, so I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. Having said that, LiveJournal has never easily fit into a niche: It was blogging before there was blogging. It was social networking before we said that. It was subculture/niche before that became the thing. If I had more time in my life I\u0026rsquo;d figure out some way to study and capture that history.\nFor all of you OS X Desktop User Interaction Geeks, there\u0026rsquo;s this thing that lets you hide unused windows baked into the window manager. I think. I have access to OS X, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really use it enough to give this a try. GNU Screen and lots (and lots) of Emacs buffers make it possible to keep a lot of irons on the fire without getting distracted.\nA **good example of a zshrc** file if that\u0026rsquo;s your thing. I think it\u0026rsquo;s my thing. Alas. I\u0026rsquo;ll write more about this once I get more used to it and figure some things out. Mostly, I\u0026rsquo;m finding that one can use it as a pure superset of bash without ill effect.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/links-technology-blogging-and-emacs/","summary":"A mostly technology-centric collection of links:\nEmacs starter configuration scripts. I can\u0026rsquo;t, for the life of me, recall why I went looking for this, but last week I ended up with a whole host of basic configuration files that people have published. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about doing this for my own files, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not had it properly cleaned up and working in a non-embarrassing way in a while. Most of these are on github, which is a phenomena that could tolerate some investigation, but no matter. Here they are, linked to by screen name: ki, elq, jonshea, larrywright, defmacro (har, just got it), jmhodges, technomancy, markhepburn, and al3x. I\u0026rsquo;d love to collect more of these, so maybe comments or the cyborg wiki.\nAdjunct to that, a few more cool emacs and related links and points: First, paraedit which is a little tool which makes editing lisp easier, as well as an org-mode tip from Nathan Yergler about using org-rembmember with firefox and ubiquity.","title":"Links on Technology, Blogging, and Emacs"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s been a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve written a status update, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to a few things which haven\u0026rsquo;t managed to work their way onto the site, so I think I\u0026rsquo;ll collect them all here, in a sort of \u0026ldquo;state of the tycho\u0026rdquo; report.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten more into the shape note singing. I went to the New York State Sacred Harp Convention in Cambridge New York and had a blast. I\u0026rsquo;ve written here before about this, and I don\u0026rsquo;t know how much I can really add to that. I\u0026rsquo;m continuing to be impressed by all of the young people who are into Shape Note. A fair number younger than me (though not by much). It\u0026rsquo;s strange to have acquired another hobby that takes even more time that I don\u0026rsquo;t really feel like I have; however, it\u0026rsquo;s a blast, and I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing in my life. I\u0026rsquo;ve made a number of post collections\u0026quot; for the tychoish site), which provide an overview of posts on a number of subjects that aren\u0026rsquo;t generated by some sort of tagging system, nor are they comprehensive. Rather, they represent a hand picked collection of topics that I\u0026rsquo;ve covered in some depth and the posts that best exemplify these subject areas. I expect this list to grow and shift slightly, but for the moment we have: Cooperative Economics Lists New Media and Blogging Technology Futurism I hope you find these archives useful. If you have a suggestion for another topic or theme, or additional posts that you think might work well in one of these posts, do feel free to touch base with me about this.\nThe job. I\u0026rsquo;ve not written here a great deal about my job or my move in late June across the country. I figure I write a lot about work things most of the day anyway. Having said that, I know at least a couple c-workers (Hi M.G. \u0026amp; S.S.) and other work-related folks read this, so it\u0026rsquo;s no great secret. Some brief reflection:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s going well. My team, such as it is, has sort of found a rhythm that works for us, our project progresses, and even though it always feels like I\u0026rsquo;ve written to the end of the subject matter at hand, there\u0026rsquo;s always seems to be something captivating \u0026ldquo;up next to write about.\nAnd I get to work with and write about free software stuff with a bunch of geeks. I\u0026rsquo;m learn stuff about writing all the time somehow, and while I think I probably work a bit too much (or so the cats seem to think) it\u0026rsquo;s going well.\nThe Cyborg Institute is a project that I need to figure out how to do better. I think having it as a \u0026ldquo;blog\u0026rdquo; was the wrong thing to do, an I\u0026rsquo;m glad I\u0026rsquo;ve stopped doing that. I started it when I was in a much different place in so many of my projects. It was long before I started the job, I was writing about different things on the tychoish blog, and a million things. Now, things are different, and I need to figure out a better way of doing things. Having said that, things haven\u0026rsquo;t been completely dead\u0026hellip; News forthcoming.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re approaching the beginning of November, when I said in a previous post that I wanted to finish the novel I was working on by then. Well that didn\u0026rsquo;t happen. Not only did it not happen, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t even manage to finish the blasted scene that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while. Having said that, I have made progress (on that scene), and I have a passable plan for finishing the last of the novel. So that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing.\nI gave up the ghost on my somewhat aged \u0026ldquo;frankenbuntu\u0026rdquo; (eg. a quirky variant of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty) installation on my laptop, and installed Arch Linux on the laptop. I\u0026rsquo;ve been remarkably pleased with this. There are quirks, but lord were there quirks on the old installation. I\u0026rsquo;m happy with the outcome, and I\u0026rsquo;ve basically switched to using this machine as my primary computer.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/updates-and-recent-events/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s been a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve written a status update, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to a few things which haven\u0026rsquo;t managed to work their way onto the site, so I think I\u0026rsquo;ll collect them all here, in a sort of \u0026ldquo;state of the tycho\u0026rdquo; report.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten more into the shape note singing. I went to the New York State Sacred Harp Convention in Cambridge New York and had a blast. I\u0026rsquo;ve written here before about this, and I don\u0026rsquo;t know how much I can really add to that. I\u0026rsquo;m continuing to be impressed by all of the young people who are into Shape Note. A fair number younger than me (though not by much). It\u0026rsquo;s strange to have acquired another hobby that takes even more time that I don\u0026rsquo;t really feel like I have; however, it\u0026rsquo;s a blast, and I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing in my life.","title":"Updates and Recent Events"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another interview for the interview series file. Enjoy!\nWho are you? What do you? I\u0026rsquo;ve had lots of jobs, but at the moment I only have three: running a folk club, host= ing a radio show, and teaching ballad-singing at the Folk School. Two of these are volunteer jobs. I am also a 40/50-hour per week babysitter for my 2-year-old grandson and adult in charge at my house. I have recently acquired a sewing machine and a few art supplies, and got my concertina back from a friend who borrowed it; the projects, they will come.\nOngoing activities for years include folk dancing, especially Border Morris. I have been dancing, I reckon, for roughly 51 years. Singing, roughly 60; collecting songs maybe 53. Reading, since before I started school. (I read history, detective stories, and Kipling, mostly. I will also pick up= anything by Terry Pratchett, and have only been disappointed once there. I like Shakespeare, don\u0026rsquo;t care for Thomas Hardy or most poetry.)\nThings I can do well enough to have made money at, either occasionally or on a regular basis: Drawing and painting. Sewing in a pants factory. General assistance in a doctor\u0026rsquo;s office. Singing. Belly-dancing. Salesclerk-type selling: candy, pictures and mirrors. Writing. Teaching mentally ill and/or learning disabled children. All these jobs have their ups and downs.\nAs for Intellectual stuff: I admire but do not have the temperament for heavy-duty intellectualism: teaching has made my natural instinct for pragmatism even stronger, and too much nitpicky defining and speculation becomes boring to= me fairly quickly. Also there is a heavy-handedness that goes with too muc= h categorizing; I like exceptions to rules.\nJet Packs or Hovercars?\nThey both sound like fun!\nLets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what\u0026rsquo;s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?\nI am a fairly backward person technology-wise: I\u0026rsquo;d say things like \u0026ldquo;the wheel\u0026rdquo; or maybe \u0026ldquo;cars\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;dishwashers\u0026rdquo; here. And I do like my computer. I also like binoculars. And shoes that actual ly fit your feet, that\u0026rsquo;s technology. Digital cameras have proved convenient but slightly disappointing: they don\u0026rsquo;t move fast enough. Cellphones are a mixed blessing too: they always need charging, and people expect you to HAVE one.\nFavorite song at the moment? Tune? Who are the runners up?\nSong, at the moment: Dick Gaughan singing \u0026ldquo;Fair Flooer of Northumberland\u0026rdquo; or Louis Killen singing \u0026ldquo;April Morning.\u0026rdquo; or Peter Bellamy singing \u0026ldquo;We Have Fed Our Sea,\u0026rdquo; or Pete Morton singing \u0026ldquo;Another Train.\u0026rdquo;\nTune: \u0026ldquo;Orange in Bloom/Sherbourne Waltz,\u0026rdquo; and there are millions of runners-up. I like shapenote hymns when someone else is singing them, but am too much of an anarchist to like following dots myself. Plus I am rather surly about church, and all the praise-the-Lord-ing gets to me sometimes. There is no why; there usually isn\u0026rsquo;t, with what I like. I could come up with one if I tried, but I am not by na= ture very introspective.\nFavorite Website?\nWikipedia, for one. YouTube. Gutenberg Press. Sky and Telescope. Amazon.\nWhat do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?\nThe ongoing growth of the Internet--a new Wild West. :D\nOne thing that you\u0026rsquo;re most looking forward to in the next year?\nReclaiming a few lost skills (see the first question)\nOne thing that you wish you could learn?\nGardening. Actually, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure \u0026ldquo;wish\u0026rdquo; is the correct word: if I want to know something I can get a fair start on doing it. But I do intend to try my hand at making a proper garden next spring.\nDoctor Who v. Red Dwarf?\nDr. Who: mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve never seen Red Dwarf but maybe once\u0026hellip;\nWhere can we find more about you/your projects?\nThe Focal Point; The LiveJournal; Folk School, or by asking me!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interview-with-judy-stein/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another interview for the interview series file. Enjoy!\nWho are you? What do you? I\u0026rsquo;ve had lots of jobs, but at the moment I only have three: running a folk club, host= ing a radio show, and teaching ballad-singing at the Folk School. Two of these are volunteer jobs. I am also a 40/50-hour per week babysitter for my 2-year-old grandson and adult in charge at my house. I have recently acquired a sewing machine and a few art supplies, and got my concertina back from a friend who borrowed it; the projects, they will come.\nOngoing activities for years include folk dancing, especially Border Morris. I have been dancing, I reckon, for roughly 51 years. Singing, roughly 60; collecting songs maybe 53. Reading, since before I started school. (I read history, detective stories, and Kipling, mostly. I will also pick up= anything by Terry Pratchett, and have only been disappointed once there.","title":"Interview with Judy Stein"},{"content":"I wrote a post for the Cyborg Institute several weeks ago about the idea of \u0026ldquo;Reusable Software\u0026rdquo;, and I\u0026rsquo;ve thought for a while that it deserved a bit more attention. The first time around, I concentrated a lot about the idea of reusable software in the context of the kinds of computing that people like you and me do on a day to day basis. I was trying to think about the way we interact with computers and how this has changed in the last 30 years (or so) and how we might expect for this to change soon.\nWell that was the attempt at any rate. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how close I got to that.\nMore recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the plight of reusable software in the context of \u0026ldquo;bigger scale\u0026rdquo; information technology. I\u0026rsquo;d say this fits into my larger series of technology futurism posts, except that this is very much a work of presentism. So be it.\nTo back up for a moment I think we can summarize the argument against reusable software, which boils down to a couple of points:\n1. With widely reusable software, most of the people who use computers on a regular basis can pretty much avoid ever having to write software. While it\u0026rsquo;s probably true most people end up doing a very small amount of programming without realizing it, gone are the days when using a computer meant that you had to know how to program it. While more people can slip into using computers than ever before, the argument is that people aren\u0026rsquo;t as good at using computers because they don\u0026rsquo;t know how they work as well.\nArguably this trend is one of the harbingers of the singularity, but that\u0026rsquo;s an aside.\n2. Widely reusable software is often less good software than the single-use, or single-purpose stuff. When software doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be reused, it only needs to do the exact things you need it to do well and can be optimized, tuned, and designed to fit into a single person\u0026rsquo;s or organization\u0026rsquo;s work-flow. When developers know that they\u0026rsquo;re developing a reusable application, they have to take into account possible variances in the environments where it will be deployed, a host of possible supported and unsupported uses. They have to design a feature set for a normalized population, and the end result is simply lower quality software.\nSo with the above rattling around in my head, I\u0026rsquo;ve been asking:\nAre web applications, which are deployed centrally and often only on one machine (or a small cluster of machines), the beginning of a return to single use applications? Particularly since the specific economic goals of the sponsoring organization/company is often quite tightly coupled with the code itself? One of the leading reasons that people give for avoiding open source release is embarrassment at the code base. While many would argue that this is avoidance of one sort or another, and it might be, I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably also true more often than not. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in thinking about what the impact of the open source movement\u0026rsquo;s focus on source code has had on the development of single use code versus multi use code in the larger scope. What do we see people doing with web application frameworks in terms of code reuse? For starters, the frameworks themselves are all about code reuse and bout providing some basic tools to prevent developers from recreating the wheel over and over again. But then, the applications are (within some basic limitations) wildly different from each other and highly un-reusable. Having said that, Rails/Django/Drupal sites suffer from poor performance in particularly high-volume situations for two reasons: Firstly, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to strangle yourself in database queries in the attempt to do something that you\u0026rsquo;d never do if you had to write the queries yourself. Secondly the frameworks are optimized to save developers time, rather than run blindingly fast on very little memory.\nI suppose if I had the answers I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be writing this here blog, but I think the questions are more interesting anyways, and besides, I bet you all know what I think about this stuff. Do be in touch with your questions and answers.\nOnwards and Upwards!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-end-of-reusable-software/","summary":"I wrote a post for the Cyborg Institute several weeks ago about the idea of \u0026ldquo;Reusable Software\u0026rdquo;, and I\u0026rsquo;ve thought for a while that it deserved a bit more attention. The first time around, I concentrated a lot about the idea of reusable software in the context of the kinds of computing that people like you and me do on a day to day basis. I was trying to think about the way we interact with computers and how this has changed in the last 30 years (or so) and how we might expect for this to change soon.\nWell that was the attempt at any rate. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how close I got to that.\nMore recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the plight of reusable software in the context of \u0026ldquo;bigger scale\u0026rdquo; information technology. I\u0026rsquo;d say this fits into my larger series of technology futurism posts, except that this is very much a work of presentism.","title":"The End of Reusable Software"},{"content":"As I said in \u0026ldquo;The Odd Cyborg Out,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of giving StumpWM a run. So I did some musing about tiling window managers, because I am who I am. Here goes,\nSo, like I said, I\u0026rsquo;ve been tinkering a very little with StumpWM, and I thought some background might be useful. For those of you who aren\u0026rsquo;t familiar, StumpWM is another tiling window manager, like my old standard Awesome, except Stump is written in Common Lisp, and is descended from different origins from Awesome. Here\u0026rsquo;s the history as I understand it.\nThe History of Tiling Window Managers There was (and is,) this very minimalist tiling window manager called dwm which is written in less than 2000 lines of code, and is only configurable by modifying the original C code and then recompiling. It\u0026rsquo;s intentionally elitist, and targeted at a very high level of user. While this is ok, particularly given the niche that are likely to want to use tiling window managers, there were a lot of people who wanted very different things from dwm. In a familiar story to those of us who follow free software and open source development: lots of people started maintaining and sharing patch-sets for DWM. These added additional functionality like easier configuration tools, integration with menus, notification libraries, theeing support, API hooks, and the rest is history.\nFast-forwarding a bit, these patch-sets inspired a number of forks, clones, and children projects. DWM was great (so I hear) if you were into it, but I think the consensus is that even if you were geeky/dweeby enough for it, it required a lot of attention and work to get it to be really useable in a day-to-day sort of way. As a result we see things like Awesome, which began life as a fork of DWM with some configuration options, and has grown into it\u0026rsquo;s own project \u0026ldquo;in the tradition of dwm.\u0026rdquo; dwm is also a leading inpsiration for projects like Xmonad, which is a re-implementation of dwm in the Haskell programing language with some added features around extension and configuration options.\nThis default configuration problem is something of an issue in the tiling window manager space, that I might need to return to in a later post. In any case\u0026hellip;\nStump, by contrast has nothing (really) to do with dwm, except that they take a similar sort of approach to the \u0026ldquo;window management\u0026rdquo; problem which is to say that window behavior in both are highly structured and efficient. They tiling windows to use the whole screen and focus on a user experience which is highly keyboard driven operation. Stump, like xmonad, is designed to use one language exclusively for both the core program, the configuration, and the extension of the environment.\nAnd, as I touched on in my last post on the subject I\u0026rsquo;m kind of enamored with lisp, and it clicks in my head. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I \u0026ldquo;chose wrong\u0026rdquo; with regards to Awesome, or that I\u0026rsquo;ve wasted a bunch of time with Awesome. Frankly, I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty likely to remain involved with the project, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m a very different computer user--Cyborg--today than I was back then, and one of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered since I started using Awesome has been emacs and Lisp.\nMy History with Awesome Lets talk a little bit more about Awesome though. Awesome is the thing that set me along the path to being a full-time GNU/Linux user. I found the tiling window manager paradigm the perfect thing that lets me concentrate on the parts of my projects that are important and not get hung up on the distractions of organizing windows, and all of the \u0026ldquo;mouse stuff\u0026rdquo; that took too much of my brain time. I started playing around in a VM on my old Macbook and I found that I just got things accomplished there somehow. And the more I played with things the more I got into it, and the rest is history.\nWhen I finally gave up the mac, however, I realized that my flirtation with vim wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to cut it, and I sort of fell down the emacs rabbit hole, which makes sense--in retrospect--given my temperament and the kind of work that I do, but none the less here I am. While Awesome is something that I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable with and that has severed me quite well, there are a number of inspirations for my switch. Some of them have to do with Awesome itself, but most of them have to do with me:\nI want to learn Common Lisp. While I know that emacs\u0026rsquo; lisp, and Common Lisp aren\u0026rsquo;t the same there are similarities, and Lua was something that I\u0026rsquo;ve put up with and avoided a lot while using Awesome. Its not that Lua is hard, quite the opposite, it\u0026rsquo;s just that I don\u0026rsquo;t have much use for it in any other context, and while I know enough to make awesome really work for me, my configuration is incredibly boring.\nNot that I think Common Lisp is exactly the kind of thing that is going to be incredibly useful to me in my career in the future, but like I said: I like the way Lisp makes me think, and it\u0026rsquo;s a language that can be used for production-grade types of things, and it\u0026rsquo;s a standard, it\u0026rsquo;s not explained from a math-centric1 perspective, and like I said reading lisp code makes sense to me. Go figure.\nThere are several of quirks with Awesome which get to me:\nIf you change your configuration, you have to restart the window manager. Which wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a big problem except\u0026hellip;\nWhen you restart, if you have a window that appears in more than one tag, the window only appears on one tag.\nThe commands for awesome are by default pretty \u0026ldquo;vimmy,\u0026rdquo; and while my current config has been properly \u0026ldquo;emacsified,\u0026rdquo; you have to do a lot of ugliness to get emacs-style chords (e.g. \u0026ldquo;C-x C-r o a f\u0026rdquo; or Control-x, Control-R, followed by o, a, and f.) which I kind of like.)\nBecause one of my primary environments is running a virtual machine (in Virtual Box) on an OS X host, I\u0026rsquo;ve run into some problems around using the Command/Windows/Mod4 key, and there\u0026rsquo;s no really good way to get around this in awesome.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s my beef, along with the change in usage pattern that I talked about last time, which is probably the biggest single factor. I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly familiar with Stump yet, so I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot to offer in terms of thoughts, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been tinkering in the laptop, and it fits my brain, which is rather nice. I\u0026rsquo;ll post more as I progress. For now I think I better cut this off.\nThis is my major problem with haskell. It looks awesome, I sort of understand it when people talk about it, but every \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s how to use haskell\u0026rdquo; guide I read is fully of what I think are \u0026ldquo;simple\u0026rdquo; math examples, of how it works, but I have a hard time tracking the math in the examples, so I have a hard time grasping the code and programming lessons because the examples are too hard for me. This is the problem of having geeked out on 20th continental philosophy in college and not math/programming, I think.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-tiling-window-manager-story/","summary":"As I said in \u0026ldquo;The Odd Cyborg Out,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of giving StumpWM a run. So I did some musing about tiling window managers, because I am who I am. Here goes,\nSo, like I said, I\u0026rsquo;ve been tinkering a very little with StumpWM, and I thought some background might be useful. For those of you who aren\u0026rsquo;t familiar, StumpWM is another tiling window manager, like my old standard Awesome, except Stump is written in Common Lisp, and is descended from different origins from Awesome. Here\u0026rsquo;s the history as I understand it.\nThe History of Tiling Window Managers There was (and is,) this very minimalist tiling window manager called dwm which is written in less than 2000 lines of code, and is only configurable by modifying the original C code and then recompiling. It\u0026rsquo;s intentionally elitist, and targeted at a very high level of user. While this is ok, particularly given the niche that are likely to want to use tiling window managers, there were a lot of people who wanted very different things from dwm.","title":"The Tiling Window Manager Story"},{"content":"So what\u0026rsquo;s the answer to all this operating system and hardware driver angst?\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to make the argument that the answer, insofar as there is one is probably virtualization.\nBut wait, tycho, this virtualization stuff all about servers. Right?\nHeretofore, virtualization technology--the stuff that lets us take a single very powerful piece of hardware, and run multiple instances of an operating system that, in most ways \u0026ldquo;think of themselves\u0026rdquo; as being an actual physical computer--has been used in the server way, as a way of \u0026ldquo;consolidating\u0026rdquo; and utilizing the potential of given hardware. This is largely because hardware has become so powerful that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to write software that really leverages this effectively, and there are some other benefits that make managing physical servers \u0026ldquo;virtually\u0026rdquo; a generally good thing, and there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of people who would be skeptical of this assertion I think.\nBut on desktops? On servers where users access the computer over a network connection, it makes sense to put a number of \u0026ldquo;logical machines\u0026rdquo; on a physical machine. On a desktop machine this doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense, after all, we generally interact with the physicality of the machine; so having multiple, concurrently running, operating systems on your desk (or in your lap!) doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to provide a great benefit. I\u0026rsquo;d suggest the following two possibilities:\nHypervisors (i.e. the technology that talks to the hardware and the operating system instances running on the hardware,) abstract away the driver problem. The hypervisors real job is to talk to the actual hardware, and provide a hardware-like-interface to the \u0026ldquo;guest operating systems.\u0026rdquo; Turns out this technology is 80-90% of where it needs to be for desktop usage. This makes the driver problem a little easier to solve. Application specific operating systems. One of the problems with desktop usability in recent years is that we\u0026rsquo;ve been building interfaces that have needed to do everything, as people use computers for everything. This makes operating systems and stacks difficult to design and support, and there is all sorts of unforeseen interactions between all of the different things that we do, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t help things. So desktop virtualization might allow us to develop very slim operating systems that are exceedingly reliable and portable, but also very limited in what they can accomplish. Which is ok, because we could have any number of them on a given computer. I only need one instance of an operating system on my computer, why do you want me to have more?\nSee above for a couple of \u0026ldquo;ways desktop hypervisors may promote the growth of technology.\u0026rdquo; But there are a number of other features that desktop virtualization would convey to users, but it mostly boils down to \u0026ldquo;Easier management and backup.\u0026rdquo;\nIf the \u0026ldquo;machine\u0026rdquo; is running in a container on top of a hypervisor, its relatively easy to move it to a different machine (the worst thing that could happen is the virtual machine would have to be rebooted, and even then, not always.) It\u0026rsquo;s easy to snapshot known working states. It\u0026rsquo;s easy to redeploy a base image of an operating system in moments. These are all things that are, when we live \u0026ldquo;on the metal,\u0026rdquo; quite difficult at the moment.\nFor the record, I don\u0026rsquo;t think anyone is ever really going have more than five (or so) instances running on their machine, but it seems like there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of room for some useful applications around five machines.\nAnd lets face it, TCP/IPA is the mode of inter-process communication these days, so I don\u0026rsquo;t think application architectures would likely change all that much.\nWon\u0026rsquo;t desktop hypervisors have the same sorts of problems that \u0026ldquo;conventional operating systems,\u0026rdquo; have today. You\u0026rsquo;re just moving the problem around.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re talking about the drivers problem discussed earlier, then in a manner of speaking, yes. Hypervisors would need to be able to support all kinds of hardware that (in many cases) they don\u0026rsquo;t already support. The argument for \u0026ldquo;giving this\u0026rdquo; to hypervisor developers is that largely, they\u0026rsquo;re already working very closely with the \u0026ldquo;metal\u0026rdquo; (a great deal of hardware today has some support for virtualization baked in,) and hypervisors are in total much simpler projects.\nIts true that I\u0026rsquo;m mostly suggesting that we move things around a bit, and that isn\u0026rsquo;t something that\u0026rsquo;s guaranteed to fix a specific problem, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s some benefit in rearranging our efforts in this space. As it were\nDon\u0026rsquo;t some of the leading hypervisors, like KVM and others, use the parts or all of the Linux Kernel, so wouldn\u0026rsquo;t this just recreate all of the problems of contemporary Linux anew?\nI\u0026rsquo;ll confess that I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of the Xen hypervisor which takes a much more \u0026ldquo;thin\u0026rdquo; approach to the hypervisor problem, because I\u0026rsquo;m worried about this very problem. And I think Xen is more parsimonious. KVM might be able to offer some slight edge in some contexts in the next few years, like the ability to more intelligently operate inside of the guest operating system, but that\u0026rsquo;s a ways down the road and subject to the same problems that Linux has today.\nSo there you have it. Thoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/desktop-virtualization-and-operating-systems/","summary":"So what\u0026rsquo;s the answer to all this operating system and hardware driver angst?\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to make the argument that the answer, insofar as there is one is probably virtualization.\nBut wait, tycho, this virtualization stuff all about servers. Right?\nHeretofore, virtualization technology--the stuff that lets us take a single very powerful piece of hardware, and run multiple instances of an operating system that, in most ways \u0026ldquo;think of themselves\u0026rdquo; as being an actual physical computer--has been used in the server way, as a way of \u0026ldquo;consolidating\u0026rdquo; and utilizing the potential of given hardware. This is largely because hardware has become so powerful that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to write software that really leverages this effectively, and there are some other benefits that make managing physical servers \u0026ldquo;virtually\u0026rdquo; a generally good thing, and there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of people who would be skeptical of this assertion I think.\nBut on desktops? On servers where users access the computer over a network connection, it makes sense to put a number of \u0026ldquo;logical machines\u0026rdquo; on a physical machine.","title":"Desktop Virtualization and Operating Systems"},{"content":"So I went to this \u0026ldquo;Podcamp\u0026rdquo; in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of getting together with geeks outside of the Internet (in real life!) to talk about the technology, communities, and practices (let alone skills and ticks). Indeed meeting people in the real world, is often a great way to advance and promote whatever it is you\u0026rsquo;re doing on the Internet, but beyond I often find the experience of having \u0026ldquo;really geeky\u0026rdquo; conversations with people in real life to be rather refreshing. So much of the geeky things we (I?) do are pretty solitary tasks, and it\u0026rsquo;s fun to have space and time with other people who get it.\nOn this premise I went to this podcamp thing. I went to a BarCamp last year that I enjoyed a great deal but I was somewhat intimidated by the flock of staff members from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (ok, so there were only two. or three. In a small room. Oh, and a guy who signed the Agile Manifesto. Right.) And while it was great, and I learned a ton of stuff\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m a writer, and an a critic, and not exactly a programmer, and while I write about programmers and technology a lot I think it might be useful--sometimes--to have separate conversations.\nRight? That sounds reasonable.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the thing about Podcamp. Well the things:\nNew media isn\u0026rsquo;t anymore. Sure its still a useful distinction given that the \u0026ldquo;old media\u0026rdquo; (e.g. book publishing, magazines, newspapers, network television, and radio) are still around. Indeed they remain an incredibly relevant component of the \u0026ldquo;media ecosystem\u0026rdquo; both globally but also online. Having said that \u0026ldquo;new media\u0026rdquo; like social media, podcasts, and the like have been around for 4-5 years at this point, and it\u0026rsquo;s mostly mainstream now: old media like NPR consistently tops the iTunes podcast charts, CNN is on twitter. and so forth. And lets not even get started about blogging.\nOn the frontier of any new media, anyone who is stubborn enough and the first person to stake out a claim to a niche has a pretty good chance of finding success. Four years later or more, success is something that\u0026rsquo;s much more difficult to parse or assure.\nThe Search engine marketing *thing*, hasn\u0026rsquo;t, as I would have hoped, died in a fiery and epic death. This shit is all over the place, and everyone seems to be talking about pay-per-click advertising and not the fact that what really matters is word-of-mouth. I\u0026rsquo;m so incredibly frustrated by all the crap that gets generated both in sport of \u0026ldquo;SEO\u0026rdquo; and in service of it as well.\nI can tell when you write articles that are designed to get voted up on reddit and digg, and I throw up in my mouth a little when I see them.\nI got through a day of that, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t cope with any more.\nEveryone was talking about how to promote a venture, and how to do marketing in \u0026ldquo;this brave new world we\u0026rsquo;re in,\u0026rdquo; but no one was really talking about how to develop and make something online that works. The marketing thing takes works and there are a couple of non-obvious aspects of the marketing effort, but it\u0026rsquo;s not rocket science. Sometimes, figuring out what is likely to work online and how to present things in an effective way is by far the largest challenge.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that hybrid-un/conferences work. And I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that the space didn\u0026rsquo;t work. Unconferneces are great: they let you get what you want out of a meeting, like the Internet they help deconstruct the boundaries between presenter and audience. Here\u0026rsquo;s what didn\u0026rsquo;t work for me with the format at this podcamp:\nThe talks were all in these rooms, and the door was at the front of the room. So unless you sat by the door, you had to walk between the speaker to get in and out of the room in the middle of the talk. Which you\u0026rsquo;re supposed to be able to do. Awkward.\nThe opening session was entirely self-congratulatory, and a general waste of time. Better, I think to have let presenters in the morning sessions talk for a few seconds about their session. There weren\u0026rsquo;t that many sessions.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not wed to the idea that people have to determine the programing on the spot in the morning of a camp, and sometimes preparation is a good thing, but if you\u0026rsquo;re going to have multiple parallel \u0026ldquo;tracks\u0026rdquo; there should be some sort of thematic unity for a given track, and some organization around that. Randomized conference schedules don\u0026rsquo;t provide attendees value.\nIn an effort to provide hyper-accessible content for people, there were a number of topics that I\u0026rsquo;d consider to be \u0026ldquo;hot\u0026rdquo; like, free network services, content curration, microformats and semantic web stuff, the real time web, and so on and so forth. Instead there was a lot of \u0026ldquo;get a facebook account and sign up for google analytics.\u0026rdquo;\nSo yeah. I hear there\u0026rsquo;s a BarCamp in philly in november. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how I\u0026rsquo;m faring, but it might be cool to talk with people about Sygn at that.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/podcamp-philly/","summary":"So I went to this \u0026ldquo;Podcamp\u0026rdquo; in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of getting together with geeks outside of the Internet (in real life!) to talk about the technology, communities, and practices (let alone skills and ticks). Indeed meeting people in the real world, is often a great way to advance and promote whatever it is you\u0026rsquo;re doing on the Internet, but beyond I often find the experience of having \u0026ldquo;really geeky\u0026rdquo; conversations with people in real life to be rather refreshing. So much of the geeky things we (I?) do are pretty solitary tasks, and it\u0026rsquo;s fun to have space and time with other people who get it.\nOn this premise I went to this podcamp thing. I went to a BarCamp last year that I enjoyed a great deal but I was somewhat intimidated by the flock of staff members from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (ok, so there were only two.","title":"podcamp philly"},{"content":"I made a quip the other day about the UNIX Epoch problem (unix time stamps, are measured in seconds since Jan 1, 1970, and displayed in a 10 digit number. Sometime in 2038, there will need to be 11 digits, and there\u0026rsquo;s no really good way to fix that.) Someone responded \u0026ldquo;whatever, we won\u0026rsquo;t be using UNIX in thirty years!\u0026rdquo;\nFamous last words.\nPeople were saying this about UNIX itself years ago. Indeed before Linux had even begun to be a \u0026ldquo;thing,\u0026rdquo; Bell Labs had moved on to \u0026ldquo;Plan 9\u0026rdquo; which was to be the successor to UNIX. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t. Unix came back. Hell, in the late eighties and early nineties we even thought that the \u0026ldquo;monolithic kernel\u0026rdquo; as a model of operating system design was dead, and here we are. Funny that.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s probably the case that we\u0026rsquo;re not going to be using the same technology in thirty years that we are today (i.e. UNIX and GNU/Linux,) it\u0026rsquo;s probably also true that UNIX as we\u0026rsquo;ve come to know it, is not going to disappear given UNIX\u0026rsquo;s stubborn history in this space. More interesting, I think, is to contemplate the ways that UNIX and Linux will resonate in the future. This post is an exploration of one of these possibilities.\nI suppose my title has forced me to tip my hand slightly, but lets ignore that for a moment, and instead present the leading problem with personal computing technology today: hardware drivers.\n\u0026ldquo;Operating System geeks,\u0026rdquo; of which we all know one or two, love to discuss the various merits of Windows/OS X/Linux \u0026ldquo;such and such works better than everything else,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;such and such is more stable than this,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;suck and such feels bloated compared to that,\u0026rdquo; and so on and so forth. The truth is that if we take a step back, we can see that the core problem for all of these operating systems is pretty simple: it\u0026rsquo;s the drivers, stupid.\nLets take Desktop Linux as an example. I\u0026rsquo;d argue that there are two large barriers to it\u0026rsquo;s widespread adoption. First it\u0026rsquo;s not immediately familiar to people who are used to using Windows. This is pretty easily addressed with some training, and I think Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s willingness to change their interface in the last few years (i.e. the Office \u0026ldquo;Ribbon,\u0026rdquo; and so forth,) is a great testimony to the adaptability of the user base. The second, and slightly more thorny issue is about hardware drivers: which are the part of any operating system that allow the software to talk to hardware like video, sound, and networking (including, of course, wireless) adapters. The Kernel has gotten much better in this regard in the past few years (probably by adding support for devices without requiring their drivers be open source), but the leading cause of an \u0026ldquo;install just not working,\u0026rdquo; is almost always something related to the drivers.\n\u0026ldquo;Linux People,\u0026rdquo; avoid this problem by buying hardware that they know is well supported. In my world that means, \u0026ldquo;Intel everything particularly if you want wireless to work, and Nvidia graphics if you need something peppy, which I never really do,\u0026rdquo; but I know people who take other approaches.\nIn a weird way this \u0026ldquo;geek\u0026rsquo;s approach to linux\u0026rdquo; is pretty much the same way that Apple responds to the driver problem in OS X. By constraining their Operating System to run only on a very limited selection of hardware, they\u0026rsquo;re able to make sure that the drivers work. Try and add a third party wireless card to OS X. It\u0026rsquo;s not pretty.\nWindows is probably the largest victim to the driver problem: they have to support every piece of consumer hardware and their hands are more or less tied. The famous Blue Screen of Death? Driver errors. System bloat (really for all operating systems) tends to be about device drivers. Random lockups? Drivers. Could Microsoft build better solutions for these driver problems, or push equipment manufacturers to use hardware that had \u0026ldquo;good drivers,\u0026rdquo; probably; but as much as it pains me, I don\u0026rsquo;t really think that it would make a whole lot of business sense for them to do that, at the moment.\nMore on this tomorrow\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/operating-systems-and-the-driver-issue/","summary":"I made a quip the other day about the UNIX Epoch problem (unix time stamps, are measured in seconds since Jan 1, 1970, and displayed in a 10 digit number. Sometime in 2038, there will need to be 11 digits, and there\u0026rsquo;s no really good way to fix that.) Someone responded \u0026ldquo;whatever, we won\u0026rsquo;t be using UNIX in thirty years!\u0026rdquo;\nFamous last words.\nPeople were saying this about UNIX itself years ago. Indeed before Linux had even begun to be a \u0026ldquo;thing,\u0026rdquo; Bell Labs had moved on to \u0026ldquo;Plan 9\u0026rdquo; which was to be the successor to UNIX. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t. Unix came back. Hell, in the late eighties and early nineties we even thought that the \u0026ldquo;monolithic kernel\u0026rdquo; as a model of operating system design was dead, and here we are. Funny that.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s probably the case that we\u0026rsquo;re not going to be using the same technology in thirty years that we are today (i.","title":"Operating Systems and the Driver Issue"},{"content":"I really don\u0026rsquo;t want to use the web anymore. This should come as no great surprise to most of you, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth pondering a bit, particularly because like all \u0026ldquo;breaking ups,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s a bit difficult. To recap, the reasons for the break up:\nThe software we use to browse the web is awkward and difficult to use efficiently. I\u0026rsquo;m talking here about things like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. While \u0026ldquo;webkit\u0026rdquo; generation browsers are better than everything that\u0026rsquo;s come before (even if their lack of comparability with the Firefox Platform makes them useable,) every browser I\u0026rsquo;ve interacted with is a huge program that just feels unwieldy. There are two many distractions in the browser. I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to find ways to assimilate and interact with nearly all of the information that comes at me in the course of a day or a week in a sane, balanced, and efficient way. Except for the browser. Where I find myself refreshing Facebook or twitter endlessly. I don\u0026rsquo;t even like facebook and the twitter website all that much. The web is too sensitive to the availability of data connectivity. While I have an Internet connection nearly all of the time that I\u0026rsquo;m in front of a connection, I don\u0026rsquo;t really like to rely on this to do my work. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to use applications that rely on connectivity, and I hate situations where I have a few moments to do something, and I have a computer with me, and I get started and then I have to check a fact, or read a little bit about {{something}} on wikipedia, and I can\u0026rsquo;t because I don\u0026rsquo;t have a connection. I don\u0026rsquo;t like that the presentation layer of the web provides so much flexibility to make websites so unreadable and difficult to comprehend. Web browsers interfaces like emacs-w3m improve this somewhat, but even that is somewhat lacking. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a problem with software, but rather it\u0026rsquo;s a problem with designers, design, and the \u0026ldquo;way the web works.\u0026rdquo; So to end on a somewhat positive note. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I think we really need in the next generation of digitally connected applications.\nSome sort of very smart predictive caching software that would run locally. We have the hard-drive space in contemporary machines that we could dedicate--as much as 100 gigabytes to a cache of network data and never really feel a space crunch. In some cases even more. I think most people\u0026rsquo;s digital music collections tend to top out in the 75-100 gig range, and \u0026ldquo;small\u0026rdquo; desktop hard drives have at least 500 gigs. Nothing else--well videos--takes up space. This would make the offline web a much more realistic proposition, it would speed things up and we could work on ways of only sending diffs between the cache and the servers, and it would rock.\nDatabases need to mostly move off of the server and onto local boxes. Extension of point above. Content doesn\u0026rsquo;t change that much, local machines are now fast and smart enough to really be able to handle this. This is in HTML5, but having said that, I worry a bit. Because I\u0026rsquo;m me.\nWe can import a lot of the \u0026ldquo;intelligence\u0026rdquo; of computing onto clients. There\u0026rsquo;s moves toward this already, with Adobe AIR and it\u0026rsquo;s competitors, but this seems to be all about adding \u0026ldquo;bling\u0026rdquo; to the web experience, and use the cross-platform nature of web technologies, even the proprietary ones like Flash, to reinvent desktop application development. I think we can go even further with this. Lets think about the next generation of desktop RSS clients. Offline wiki/wikipedia software.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not trying to buck the \u0026ldquo;software in the 21st century is social and connected\u0026rdquo; trend that we\u0026rsquo;re in the middle of, but rather seriously rethink the interface and work-flow paradigms of the web.\nI hope that the next generation of web-document standards (of which I think sygn is an example) will focus on structure and organization and a much more limited set of \u0026ldquo;features\u0026rdquo; (less is more) that will let content creators make content more useful rather than better looking.\nTake design out of the content, and put all of the display logic (aside from headings and meta-data) on the client. Don\u0026rsquo;t like how a site displays? Use a different client. And so forth.\nAnyone with me?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/breaking-up-with-the-web/","summary":"I really don\u0026rsquo;t want to use the web anymore. This should come as no great surprise to most of you, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth pondering a bit, particularly because like all \u0026ldquo;breaking ups,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s a bit difficult. To recap, the reasons for the break up:\nThe software we use to browse the web is awkward and difficult to use efficiently. I\u0026rsquo;m talking here about things like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. While \u0026ldquo;webkit\u0026rdquo; generation browsers are better than everything that\u0026rsquo;s come before (even if their lack of comparability with the Firefox Platform makes them useable,) every browser I\u0026rsquo;ve interacted with is a huge program that just feels unwieldy. There are two many distractions in the browser. I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to find ways to assimilate and interact with nearly all of the information that comes at me in the course of a day or a week in a sane, balanced, and efficient way.","title":"Breaking up with the Web"},{"content":"I said to my office mate this week, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m switching to zsh,\u0026rdquo; and I believe he said something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;oh dear, what\u0026rsquo;s next.\u0026rdquo;\nI should back up. I\u0026rsquo;m something of an odd duck when it comes to the way I use computers. I\u0026rsquo;m a geek, even in the context of my coworkers who are (also) huge geeks. I\u0026rsquo;m the only one who uses emacs. We\u0026rsquo;re an OS X shop (for the desktop, at least) but I run Arch Linux inside of a virtual machine. Because I\u0026rsquo;m like that. And now, I\u0026rsquo;m switching away from the by-now unix standard \u0026ldquo;bash\u0026rdquo; shell to \u0026ldquo;zsh.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m a bit weird. I\u0026rsquo;m ok with this.\nSo zsh. Why should you care? Well\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not expert, having only really used it for a few days but there are a few things that have won me over:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s mostly backwards compatible with bash. So, except for the stuff that configured my prompt, I was able to copy over my old .bashrc file pretty much as is. There\u0026rsquo;s been no real \u0026ldquo;brain adjustment\u0026rdquo; from all my old bash habits. It\u0026rsquo;s faster. You know, this is the kind of thing taht you don\u0026rsquo;t believe, \u0026ldquo;my terminal is faster than your terminal\u0026rdquo; is kinda lame because bash is pretty peppy compared to GUI stuff. I mean what, bash is a 300-400 kb, how slow can it be? The answer is, zsh just feels faster. This seems to be a quasi universal experience. It does tab-completion within commands. This is seriously amazing, because while command completion and path completion is awesome in bash, you still have to remember all of the sub-commands. This is particularly rough for big commands like \u0026ldquo;git\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;apt-get\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;apt-cache\u0026rdquo;. Very awesome. Getting up the courage to switch and to rewrite my prompt was something that took a little bit of doing, but now I\u0026rsquo;m happy, and I strongly recommend it. If you like me live in the terminal, or have thought about using the command line more, give zsh a try, it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nThe other thing, almost certain to provoke an \u0026ldquo;Oh dear\u0026rdquo; reaction on the part of my geeky friends is the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m strongly considering switching from the Awesome Window Manager to the Stump Window Manager, or more practically StumpWM or just Stump. Here\u0026rsquo;s some background on my adventures with tiling window managers:\nWhen I started using Awesome every thing I did with the computer lived in it\u0026rsquo;s own little window. I was coming from the mac, so I lived with ten or fifteen open TextMate windows, a like number of open tabs in my terminal emulator, and a browser with a gazillion open tabs. I thought that this was sort of \u0026ldquo;the way I worked,\u0026rdquo; and so I replicated this kind of workflow in Awesome.\nAnd here\u0026rsquo;s the thing. Awesome is great for managing a huge number of windows. With 9 workspaces/tags (or more!) it was possible to keep twenty or thirty windows afloat\u0026hellip; a few browsers, a few chat windows, a dozen terminals, a few emacs frames, and the like all happening at once. And the window manager made it possible for me to only have to look at 2 or three windows at a time.\nThen I progressed. With emacs\u0026rsquo; server/daemon mode, I only have one instance of emacs and 20 or so buffers, and in an extreme moment I sometimes have as many as 4 frames open at once, but more often I just have 2 or three (org-mode, writing, and a spare for something.) And terminals? I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to using screen which multiplexes an untabbed terminal, so I typically have a single screen session with 8 screen-windows, and I keep a couple of instances of that open at once for different contexts, so lets say another three windows. I have a remote screen session for IM and chat now that I connect to, and a single web browser.\nFrankly, it\u0026rsquo;s sort of gotten to the point where I don\u0026rsquo;t really need to manage very many windows, and I probably never use more than 4-5 tags/workspaces. My needs for a window manager changed, and one of the core problems that problem that Awesome solves, is one that I\u0026rsquo;ve solved by using multiplexed applications. And that leads me to Stump.\nI see that I probably need to spend a little more time talking about this tiling window manager stuff again. Stay tuned!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-odd-cyborg-out/","summary":"I said to my office mate this week, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m switching to zsh,\u0026rdquo; and I believe he said something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;oh dear, what\u0026rsquo;s next.\u0026rdquo;\nI should back up. I\u0026rsquo;m something of an odd duck when it comes to the way I use computers. I\u0026rsquo;m a geek, even in the context of my coworkers who are (also) huge geeks. I\u0026rsquo;m the only one who uses emacs. We\u0026rsquo;re an OS X shop (for the desktop, at least) but I run Arch Linux inside of a virtual machine. Because I\u0026rsquo;m like that. And now, I\u0026rsquo;m switching away from the by-now unix standard \u0026ldquo;bash\u0026rdquo; shell to \u0026ldquo;zsh.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m a bit weird. I\u0026rsquo;m ok with this.\nSo zsh. Why should you care? Well\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not expert, having only really used it for a few days but there are a few things that have won me over:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s mostly backwards compatible with bash. So, except for the stuff that configured my prompt, I was able to copy over my old .","title":"The Odd Cyborg Out"},{"content":"Today\u0026rsquo;s installment in the interview series is Scott Farquhar. Rather than spend a long time blathering about it, let me just get on with it. Shall we?\nWho are you? What do you?\nWho are any of us, really? Right now I don\u0026rsquo;t seem to be doing much but working at my old house and getting it ready to rent. But what I hope to go back to doing after I\u0026rsquo;m done is the main project of my Royalty Free Music podcast. The break away has been good in some ways. Once I get enough music to produce a commercial CD, I will probably lay that project aside and move on to the next shiny object.\nJet Packs or Hovercars?\nAs exciting and thrilling as the Jet Pack might be, I think I\u0026rsquo;d have to go with the Hovercar so I could carry more stuff with me.\nLets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what\u0026rsquo;s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?\nI think I have to hold up my digital orchestra package as the niftiest piece of technology that I have in my personal arsenal. It essentially let\u0026rsquo;s me have access to creating music with actual sampled orchestral instruments. If I want to write something for 5 violas, timpani, bass trombone, and english horn, I can\u0026hellip; and relatively quickly have an accurate idea of what it will sound like without having to look for and pay those 8 musicians and get them all together to record. The frustrating aspect is that the music created is grounded in equal temperament, so it\u0026rsquo;s got that flat, slightly out-of-tune sound that just doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound quite right. Perhaps it is a good frustration, since it\u0026rsquo;s clear that no matter how good technology will get, live musicians (and by extension into other areas of technology\u0026hellip; people in general) just can\u0026rsquo;t be replaced.\nFavorite Star Trek Series?\nThe original series. As neat and slick as the newer stuff has been, there\u0026rsquo;s just something about the original.\nThe single scariest thing about the future?\nAt the risk of sounding like a complete bastard\u0026hellip; It seems like it\u0026rsquo;s mostly the stupid (rude/inconsiderate/narrow-minded) people who are breeding. |soapbox| Humans are overpopulating this planet, with an ever increasing percentage of the overall population also contributing less and less. I honestly feel like my lifetime will see the beginnings of major strains on more basic resources like water and food, much less the fossil fuels more people are worried about right now. |/soapbox|\nFavorite Website?\nWorking with the idea of \u0026ldquo;favorite\u0026rdquo; being some nifty thing to share with other people (like favorite ice cream, etc.) then I\u0026rsquo;ll have to pick NetFlix. I may visit other sites more often right now, but this is one I think other folks should check out, even though I think most people have probably already heard about it.\nWhat do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?\nIn a world context, I\u0026rsquo;ll have to say what I will call \u0026ldquo;The Rise of the Internet\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip; Sure, one can trace origins back as early as the 60s even, but it really was about 15 years ago that it started to become what it is today. In a personal context, it was buying a home\u0026hellip; \u0026lsquo;cause it started to make me feel like I\u0026rsquo;d finally grown up.\nOne thing that you wish you could learn?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always wanted to learn how to tap dance. Perhaps, one day\u0026hellip;\nCats vs. Dogs\nI do like dogs, and live with one. But I am really very much a cat person. They suit my personality much better.\nWhere can we find more about you/your projects?\nPersonal Website Music Website The Clams of Wisdom Oh, and I am \u0026ldquo;composerscott\u0026rdquo; on facebook, livejournal, and twitter.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interview-with-scott-farquhar/","summary":"Today\u0026rsquo;s installment in the interview series is Scott Farquhar. Rather than spend a long time blathering about it, let me just get on with it. Shall we?\nWho are you? What do you?\nWho are any of us, really? Right now I don\u0026rsquo;t seem to be doing much but working at my old house and getting it ready to rent. But what I hope to go back to doing after I\u0026rsquo;m done is the main project of my Royalty Free Music podcast. The break away has been good in some ways. Once I get enough music to produce a commercial CD, I will probably lay that project aside and move on to the next shiny object.\nJet Packs or Hovercars?\nAs exciting and thrilling as the Jet Pack might be, I think I\u0026rsquo;d have to go with the Hovercar so I could carry more stuff with me.\nLets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what\u0026rsquo;s the coolest thing that technology enables for you?","title":"Interview with Scott Farquhar"},{"content":"I got a Blackberry last December. I blogged about it then, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really talked much about it. There\u0026rsquo;s been a bunch of hubbub recently about the iPhone finally getting Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) support, and this has spurned some thought on my part about smartphones and mobile technology, and all that jazz. It\u0026rsquo;s a big space in the technology world, and most of the time I just ignore all of it, because I don\u0026rsquo;t much care about it. I\u0026rsquo;m a \u0026ldquo;big computing,\u0026rdquo; kind of guy, and I don\u0026rsquo;t much like the whole \u0026ldquo;talking on the phone thing,\u0026rdquo; but this doesn\u0026rsquo;t--you\u0026rsquo;re surely not surprised to learn--mean that I don\u0026rsquo;t have opinions on the subject.\nDespite my disdain for telephones, I really like the whole Blackberry thing. The physical keyboard means I\u0026rsquo;m way faster at typing up messages and notes than I would be otherwise, and that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly useful. Blackberries aren\u0026rsquo;t, \u0026ldquo;sexy\u0026rdquo; as smartphones go, and frankly the software is sort of insane with regards to how it all works, but in comparison to how other phones work, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with the way things are. Here are the Pros:\nI like that I can run applications in the background on the Blackberry. Being able to get alerts when emails come in. Being able to leave a message that I\u0026rsquo;m writing, and go respond to another message, or make a call, or get an instant message or twiddle with Google maps, is really great. I enjoy that the phone is messaging centric. Furthermore, I really like that all messaging: Blackberry Messaging (IM), GoogleTalk (jabber), SMS Texting, and email all appear in one great queue. There\u0026rsquo;s one big list of things, to check and that\u0026rsquo;s it. The key to making this work is good filtering, but that\u0026rsquo;s another point. I really enjoy the ecosystem of applications available for the phone. Blackberries like many smartphones (including the Android platform, after a fashion) use the J2ME (java) platform, which means and the platform is rather established. Sure the sexy things that people do with iPhones aren\u0026rsquo;t there for my phone, and there are applications that I wish I had (better SSH, a text editor, some sort of file synching ability,) but the apps I have all work well, are stable, and integrate well with the system (ie. the messaging thing.) There are host of little things that are great. The charging cradle is an awesome thing. The fact that it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;smart\u0026rdquo; enough to alter its behavior based on if it\u0026rsquo;s in the case or not in the case, so that if it\u0026rsquo;s on your belt it does something different than if it\u0026rsquo;s laying on your desk. It also has a \u0026ldquo;bedside\u0026rdquo; mode which I think is similarly brilliant. Not a huge feature, but exceedingly useful. So Google does this thing with their Sync Tools where your contacts from Gmail end up on your phone, and the sync is pretty seamless. No more futzing around with adding people by hand, no more worrying about backing up your database. I\u0026rsquo;m not thrilled about this reliance on Google, but it just works, and that is an intensely good thing. I do kind of wish that more things on the phone were like this. What I don\u0026rsquo;t like?\nThe twitter apps don\u0026rsquo;t integrate well into the messaging, and I can\u0026rsquo;t think of a sane way to use twitter with my phone. There is no real XMPP/Jabber application aside from Google Talk that I\u0026rsquo;ve found to be useable. (Though I\u0026rsquo;d love to be proven wrong.) It would be nice to be able to connect to my general use XMPP account under a different resource and go from there. I think, as an interaction modality the trackball is a horrible idea, and I think something more joystick-like would be a much more useful and quick. Even, perhaps something that used the keyboard more effectively. As it is, all navigation and system operation uses the trackball, and that\u0026rsquo;s kind of annoying. It\u0026rsquo;s done as well as it could, but I think it could be better. Email filtering is non-intuitive and difficult. Possible, certainly, but difficult. I\u0026rsquo;d like an interface to be able to exclude and block various senders on the phone itself. Configuration options are Byzantine and difficult to navigate. There are so many options particularly around the various noises that the phone will make that I\u0026rsquo;ve not bothered to really modify any of them. I might load up the beginning of \u0026ldquo;Thick as A Brick\u0026rdquo; for my ring tone (and part two for the alarm clock?), but for the most part there are too many chirps and chatters that the damn thing does, that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to really modify it in any real way. It makes it interesting to be in close proximity to other Blackberry users for any length of time, because those noises get embedded in your consciousness. The Blackberry is pretty unfriendly to Free Software stuff, which is a shame, partly because of the whole lack of freedom issue, but almost more because everything else I do with technology uses free software stuff, that it\u0026rsquo;s annoying that my existing stuff doesn\u0026rsquo;t work right on the phone. Would I get another Blackberry? Probably. Though the lack of a good SSH client is a bother, and I\u0026rsquo;d like something that did a bit better with things like PDF/electronic-text reading, but all in all I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy.\nThe interesting thing is that at this point I can\u0026rsquo;t fathom going back to some sort of \u0026ldquo;non-smartphone:\u0026rdquo; this just seems, to me, to be \u0026ldquo;the way a phone should work.\u0026rdquo; That\u0026rsquo;s a pretty strong endorsement, I\u0026rsquo;d say.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/my-phone-is-smarter-than-yours/","summary":"I got a Blackberry last December. I blogged about it then, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really talked much about it. There\u0026rsquo;s been a bunch of hubbub recently about the iPhone finally getting Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) support, and this has spurned some thought on my part about smartphones and mobile technology, and all that jazz. It\u0026rsquo;s a big space in the technology world, and most of the time I just ignore all of it, because I don\u0026rsquo;t much care about it. I\u0026rsquo;m a \u0026ldquo;big computing,\u0026rdquo; kind of guy, and I don\u0026rsquo;t much like the whole \u0026ldquo;talking on the phone thing,\u0026rdquo; but this doesn\u0026rsquo;t--you\u0026rsquo;re surely not surprised to learn--mean that I don\u0026rsquo;t have opinions on the subject.\nDespite my disdain for telephones, I really like the whole Blackberry thing. The physical keyboard means I\u0026rsquo;m way faster at typing up messages and notes than I would be otherwise, and that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly useful. Blackberries aren\u0026rsquo;t, \u0026ldquo;sexy\u0026rdquo; as smartphones go, and frankly the software is sort of insane with regards to how it all works, but in comparison to how other phones work, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with the way things are.","title":"My Phone is Smarter Than Your's"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been, perhaps without good reason, trying to establish a tie between the (for lack of a better term) critical writings I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing here, and the kinds of things I try to accomplish in my creative work. I think my contact with and involvement in the Outer Alliance is probably responsible for this bit of introspection, but blame isn\u0026rsquo;t really required.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a very political kinda of guy, right? I mean, I think about things very politically, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of worth in thinking about how class, economics, and power dynamics (probably in that orders of priority.) I think that talking to people about political ideas, about how to change the world, and share these ideas with people is really a rather huge core of what I\u0026rsquo;m doing with this blog, and related projects.\nWhen talking with OA people, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized how, at least superficially, my writing isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly political. I think I\u0026rsquo;m bold about addressing some of the intellectual ideas that I think are important, and there are ways in which the stories I tell are political on some level, but for the most part, I think\nThis gets me into all sorts of \u0026ldquo;art is apolitical\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;art transcends politics,\u0026rdquo; trouble, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s exactly what I mean. Of course art is political, even my stories--which can\u0026rsquo;t omit to having overly complex political thoughts during the writing of the texts--are quite political. But I think the politics is the kind of thing that happens to a story when people read it, not during the moment of writing. When I\u0026rsquo;m writing, my experience is usually much more along the lines of \u0026ldquo;how do I get this character out of, or through, this scene,\u0026rdquo; and not how do I resolve this political crisis. As it were.\nI think a few OA folks probably read this from time to time, and I\u0026rsquo;d be interested in hearing what they think about the juncture of \u0026ldquo;politics\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;writing fiction.\u0026rdquo; Thoughts?\nOnwards, and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-in-the-moment/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been, perhaps without good reason, trying to establish a tie between the (for lack of a better term) critical writings I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing here, and the kinds of things I try to accomplish in my creative work. I think my contact with and involvement in the Outer Alliance is probably responsible for this bit of introspection, but blame isn\u0026rsquo;t really required.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a very political kinda of guy, right? I mean, I think about things very politically, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of worth in thinking about how class, economics, and power dynamics (probably in that orders of priority.) I think that talking to people about political ideas, about how to change the world, and share these ideas with people is really a rather huge core of what I\u0026rsquo;m doing with this blog, and related projects.\nWhen talking with OA people, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized how, at least superficially, my writing isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly political.","title":"Writing in the Moment"},{"content":"My first year seminar in college was all about Colonizing Mars, and it was built around the Mars Trilogy (which I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing about rather a lot these past few weeks, but I must admit that my first encounter here was not as fruitful.) Even though I spent most (all?) of my college years away from the science fiction world (long story, sorry BSFFA), the whole idea of space travel and colonization has been a fascinating problem.\nAnd not just the recent hubbub about one way journeys to Mars, which I think Karl Schroeder does I fine job of dispelling, though I think there\u0026rsquo;s a much more thorny problem around population pressures and the cost of emigration that deserves some attention than the common discussion about space settlement has really been able to spawn so far.\nSpace is really big. Right? Like huge. The colonization of space if it is to be successful--in its own right, building settlements takes the efforts of a lot of people--is really about moving millions upon millions of people to Mars or the Moon not to mention other possibilities like constructed outposts and longer range colony ships. And that\u0026rsquo;s an incredibly huge proposition. Of course, the there would be some sort of pioneering group, but you\u0026rsquo;d need to be able to commit to being able to send a great deal of people out there in pretty short order. Think a million people a year for ten or twenty years? That\u0026rsquo;s 2,700 people a day and some change. If you wanted to ship a billion people off world over ten years, you\u0026rsquo;d need to lift almost 274,000 people a day.\nWhich isn\u0026rsquo;t anywhere near feasible, with transportation costs, equipment costs, let alone the logistics costs of getting a quarter of a million people to do anything in a concerted fashion every day for ten years. But the truth is to make a settlement viable out there you need a lot of people, perhaps I think more than can be easily transported from Earth.\nSpace is huge, though. Even our little corner of space is huge. Mars, because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have oceans, has as much landmass as Earth. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot of room, and while I\u0026rsquo;m certainly not saying \u0026ldquo;we have to work to fill up the rest of the solar system as fast as possible,\u0026rdquo; I think there are likely critical mass and critical densities of people that would be required to make the settlement of space viable.\nOn top of Schroeder\u0026rsquo;s simple point about the role of launch costs (using current/Apollo-era technology), there is a whole other issue of \u0026ldquo;what to do when we get there,\u0026rdquo; (and how we\u0026rsquo;re going to sport that, whatever it is) are equally important considerations.\nI guess my point, insofar as I have one, is that while we might start to feel a bit crowded on earth in the next hundred years--which may or may not be real--using off planet settlements as a \u0026ldquo;population shunt\u0026rdquo; is difficult. (Anyone else have a good way to get 20k people a day off world. Or more? Way more?) It would be hard to move people off world fast enough to make a dent in the population here, and also hard to move people off world fast enough and in great enough quantities to sufficiently populate those settlements.\nOne of the things I adore about Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand is the huge scope of the universe, and that it\u0026rsquo;s huge not just in the traditional conception of \u0026ldquo;space is big,\u0026rdquo; where we put a lot of thought into \u0026ldquo;Stars are really far apart,\u0026rdquo; but also in the \u0026ldquo;Planets hold a lot of people.\u0026rdquo; There\u0026rsquo;s a segment, which is otherwise not particularly notable, where the narrator talks about the population of the settled universe, and he is--to our eyes--incredibly out of touch with the actual number of people in his \u0026ldquo;world\u0026rdquo; (universe,) and I think the figure the narrator gives is unspecific to the tens of billions of people. Which is sort of boggling.\nAnd I think I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you on that note. Food for thought! Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/space-is-really-big/","summary":"My first year seminar in college was all about Colonizing Mars, and it was built around the Mars Trilogy (which I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing about rather a lot these past few weeks, but I must admit that my first encounter here was not as fruitful.) Even though I spent most (all?) of my college years away from the science fiction world (long story, sorry BSFFA), the whole idea of space travel and colonization has been a fascinating problem.\nAnd not just the recent hubbub about one way journeys to Mars, which I think Karl Schroeder does I fine job of dispelling, though I think there\u0026rsquo;s a much more thorny problem around population pressures and the cost of emigration that deserves some attention than the common discussion about space settlement has really been able to spawn so far.\nSpace is really big. Right? Like huge. The colonization of space if it is to be successful--in its own right, building settlements takes the efforts of a lot of people--is really about moving millions upon millions of people to Mars or the Moon not to mention other possibilities like constructed outposts and longer range colony ships.","title":"Space is Really Big"},{"content":" Who are you? What do you?\nI\u0026rsquo;m a grad student at Washington University until the end of this school year when I will have hopefully finished and defended my dissertation on Hermann Hesse. In general, I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in modernism specifically, but I\u0026rsquo;ll take an intellectual stab at about anything written from 1890 to the present. Despite being a humanist, I\u0026rsquo;m a bit of a computer geek: I\u0026rsquo;m writing my dissertation in LaTeX and a religious Lifehacker reader. I don\u0026rsquo;t really do code, though, apart from the occasional Automator action or Applescript.\nSomeday I would like to have a real job and maybe another cat or, dare I say, a first kid? I love a good book, but usually something that is a balance between complicated/dry and entertaining. I can tolerate a lot of craziness in a book, but let\u0026rsquo;s face it, Ulysses is incredible though not exactly fun reading.\nI\u0026rsquo;m an avid knitter and sometimes spinner. I learned when I was about 6 or 7 from my great aunt, had a long hiatus, and started again in about 2004 with a pair of really loose socks. I also have a bin of worms in my apartment that compost food for me. Oh, and I love my cat, Dot.\nMerino vs. Blue-faced Leicester?\nBlue-faced!\nLets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what\u0026rsquo;s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?\nI\u0026rsquo;m a total mac person, but I dabble in open-source things. My favorite ability at the moment is to be able to sync bookmarks and notes to my computer and iphone via Evernote. I\u0026rsquo;m hoping I don\u0026rsquo;t tire of it. I\u0026rsquo;m very forgetful, so knowing what\u0026rsquo;s on my grocery list at any given time is awesome. I\u0026rsquo;ve even got a notebook of knitting ideas and patterns on there.\nI find Twitter completely frustrating, yet I find myself tweeting all the time. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried about 5 different clients, but none of them hide the messages I\u0026rsquo;ve already read and keep them hidden between computer and phone. Then there are those folks who write drivel constantly, but I can\u0026rsquo;t unfollow them because I\u0026rsquo;m afraid they\u0026rsquo;d be offended. The worst, though, is that people think it\u0026rsquo;s an acceptable form of news reporting.\nFavorite book you\u0026rsquo;ve read in the last year? Runners up?\nMy favorite book for the last couple years has been Donna Tartt\u0026rsquo;s The Secret History. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about reading it again, that\u0026rsquo;s how much I liked it! I tried and got through 3/4ths of Crime and Punishment this summer, but have since abandoned it. Right now I\u0026rsquo;m reading Smilla\u0026rsquo;s Sense of Snow.\nFavorite Website?\nicanhazchezburgur although my browser says that I visit Ravelry more often!\nWhat do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really hard to even begin to answer this question, but I suppose I have to give it a shot. I\u0026rsquo;d say it is probably the proliferation of wireless phones. Especially with the ability to take pictures and send text messages internationally, hostile leaders and regimes can no longer squelch the voices of their people. Honestly, in 1994 I never imagined myself owning a cell phone, let alone one that would be able to let me surf the internet or send email. For that matter, even when I was in college, email attachments were problematic: I also wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have imagined me writing my dissertation in a city five hours away from my advisor.\nThe next 10?\nThis will be us as a society learning to deal with this technology, especially for the type of people not used to teaching themselves to use new technology. Some people, like my parents, are slowly adapting to a digital lifestyle and are even fascinated with new gadgets without being pressured by people like me. I never considered myself a computer person, though, but rather one who could read the instruction manual. So much of the new technology assumes the user has a basic grammar of what it means to interact with a machine. Graphics replace text menus, and all of a sudden squares and triangles are essential instead of quick references. What this also means is that people like my grandparents may soon be completely left in the dark. I find it laughable that stacks of paper phone books still show up on my building\u0026rsquo;s doorstep, but my grandparents would have no idea of how to find a phone number, even if they had a computer.\nOne thing that you\u0026rsquo;re most looking forward to in the next year?\nI\u0026rsquo;m very excited about finishing my dissertation and to finally become what my family refers to as \u0026ldquo;Dr. Ted\u0026rdquo;.\nOne thing that you wish you could learn?\nI would really like to be good at yoga, enough to give me exercise in the winter time and relaxation in the summer. I always feel like I will have to spend a fortune on lessons or classes. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried watching tapes, but I need someone to bend my legs and put my feet where they are supposed to go.\nHegel vs. Heidegger?\nHegel wins in my book because I use his dialectic all the time. Sadly, I don\u0026rsquo;t know much about Heidegger at all.\nWhere can we find more about you/your projects?\nI\u0026rsquo;m Stricken on twitter, On Ravelry, I\u0026rsquo;m tedberlin, There\u0026rsquo;s the Personal blog, and Professional website ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interview-with-ted-jackson/","summary":"Who are you? What do you?\nI\u0026rsquo;m a grad student at Washington University until the end of this school year when I will have hopefully finished and defended my dissertation on Hermann Hesse. In general, I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in modernism specifically, but I\u0026rsquo;ll take an intellectual stab at about anything written from 1890 to the present. Despite being a humanist, I\u0026rsquo;m a bit of a computer geek: I\u0026rsquo;m writing my dissertation in LaTeX and a religious Lifehacker reader. I don\u0026rsquo;t really do code, though, apart from the occasional Automator action or Applescript.\nSomeday I would like to have a real job and maybe another cat or, dare I say, a first kid? I love a good book, but usually something that is a balance between complicated/dry and entertaining. I can tolerate a lot of craziness in a book, but let\u0026rsquo;s face it, Ulysses is incredible though not exactly fun reading.","title":"Interview with Ted Jackson"},{"content":"I think that I seem to have acquired a new hobby.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve known about shape note sining for years and years. The Weavers did a few songs on some albums that I remember from when I was a kid.1 And Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s Dad (with Tim Erickson) came through town when I was kid and they sang a few Shape Note songs.2 And the Morris Dancing gathering I attend has a lot of singing and a number of really awesome singers (many of whom, I think, read this blog, so hi folks.) It\u0026rsquo;s been around.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been intimidated by it.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t come from a singing background. I made the valiant effort to be musical as a kid: I washed out of choir in fourth grade; I played clarinet in middle school but it lost its wonder about half way through (though I still have a clarinet, I don\u0026rsquo;t really play);3 I\u0026rsquo;ve done some very ad hoc harmony singing with Morris Dancers and elsewhere, but my memory for lyrics is bad and while that\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of fun and I don\u0026rsquo;t think of that as a \u0026ldquo;hobby,\u0026rdquo; or as the kind of thing one really does except when one happens around other singers. And the whole \u0026ldquo;book thing,\u0026rdquo; about Sacred Harp singing always confused me.\nAnd then, I had a series of pretty great experiences. I sang at the Morris Ale and had a great time, a couple or (three?) years in a row, and this year, I think something clicked. I got to sit behind a really strong bass and suddenly I could hear \u0026ldquo;it.\u0026rdquo; The harmonies made sense. The book was helpful, but I stopped worrying about getting every note right, and had fun in the moment, and somehow I was able to sing better, or something. So I kept doing it. I went to a local singing right before I moved, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been to four local signings and since I moved out east, and then I went to a singing convention in New York City, and sang for a whole day.\nAnd it rocked. I\u0026rsquo;m still clearly a beginner, but I\u0026rsquo;m starting to be able to see patterns in the music, and learn the words and tunes, figure out the rhythms and all that. And given that I\u0026rsquo;ve failed at doing the musical thing so much before, it\u0026rsquo;s so interesting to me that I get it about something musical. That I can have fun and contribute to something that\u0026rsquo;s kind of awesome to be a part of: both of the tradition, and of the really intense and awesome moments created during singings.\nI wish there were better words to describe all this. The appeal of driving hundreds of miles to go sit in a room with a hundred or two hundred of people you don\u0026rsquo;t really know, and sing these very \u0026ldquo;rustic\u0026rdquo; 19th century protestant hymns, and have it be both a very spiritual experience, and somehow that it not be a very religious experience.\nThe NYC singing that I went to--on Rosh Hashanah--had the opening Prayer in Hebrew. And the Sacred Harp tradition is intentionally very ecumenical, within of course the various American Protestant communities of the 19th century. I\u0026rsquo;m very strongly of the opinion that the appeal of this whole thing is this really hard to describe thing that happens in the moment. The sense of community, the ecstatic experience of the music, the nifty thing, when you feel the harmonies in your chest and the pulse of the rhythm in your whole body. Like that\u0026rsquo;s really nifty, and special and totally worth while.\nI also feel a certain failure as a writer because I\u0026rsquo;m totally unable to communicate this in a way that I think borders on being sufficient. So I think I\u0026rsquo;ll stop trying for the moment, and hopefully I\u0026rsquo;ll sing with some of you soon.\nCheers!\nThe songs were 209 (evening shade) and 155 (Northfield, which is among the most popular/familiar songs in the book and begins with the line \u0026ldquo;How Long Dear Savior\u0026rdquo;).\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n335 (Return Again,) is the one on the recording, and it gasp has an Cello/something doing the Bass part on the recording.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMostly, I think because clarinet is such an awkward instrument for folk music-type things, particularly when my ability to transpose music on the fly is slim to none.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/shaped-notes/","summary":"I think that I seem to have acquired a new hobby.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve known about shape note sining for years and years. The Weavers did a few songs on some albums that I remember from when I was a kid.1 And Cordelia\u0026rsquo;s Dad (with Tim Erickson) came through town when I was kid and they sang a few Shape Note songs.2 And the Morris Dancing gathering I attend has a lot of singing and a number of really awesome singers (many of whom, I think, read this blog, so hi folks.) It\u0026rsquo;s been around.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been intimidated by it.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t come from a singing background. I made the valiant effort to be musical as a kid: I washed out of choir in fourth grade; I played clarinet in middle school but it lost its wonder about half way through (though I still have a clarinet, I don\u0026rsquo;t really play);3 I\u0026rsquo;ve done some very ad hoc harmony singing with Morris Dancers and elsewhere, but my memory for lyrics is bad and while that\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of fun and I don\u0026rsquo;t think of that as a \u0026ldquo;hobby,\u0026rdquo; or as the kind of thing one really does except when one happens around other singers.","title":"shaped notes"},{"content":"From the file of \u0026ldquo;things I would like to be writing if I had more time.\u0026rdquo; Please, if you\u0026rsquo;re inclined or would like to use one of these ideas for the basis of a story, please feel free to.\nA distributed space opera I\u0026rsquo;ve been telling very tight space opera stories for a while now. Stories set within the next 1000 or so years that revolve around our sun, where the civilization shares much of our cultural background. Stories set in the future chronicles of \u0026ldquo;Western Civilization\u0026rdquo; as it were. I\u0026rsquo;d like to get away from that and tell stories that are bigger than that, stories with less ubiquitous communication between worlds.\nAn Alien Story As a kid who grew up with ubiquitous bipedal aliens in Star Trek, I\u0026rsquo;ve been wary of alien stories, as I worry that the aliens will be too campy or too human like. Or I\u0026rsquo;ll fall into the exoticisism trap and have my aliens be too wondrous, and that\u0026rsquo;s not good either. Despite this avoidance, I love alien stories, and I love stories that can take advantage of this additional spectrum of difference and diversity, to mention nothing of the potential communication issues.\nA Planet-bound Space Opera Back to space opera. If this is my thing then, I\u0026rsquo;m happy for it. One of the things that I like about the forum are the ways in which it forces us to expand the limits of possibility and difference, it makes us thing big. The distributed idea above makes the world huge and vast by disconnecting the story-world from ours. I think setting a story on a planet or outpost, in a world where there\u0026rsquo;s a interstellar economy/culture, I think it would be interesting to explore the vastness and world view from the perspective of people who don\u0026rsquo;t actually travel between the stars very much.\nCyberpunk and Internet Networking I\u0026rsquo;d like to write some sort of story that addresses some of the problems with managing \u0026ldquo;big data.\u0026rdquo; Which is to say, we\u0026rsquo;re collecting so much data right now and there\u0026rsquo;s so much raw information that it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to keep track and store it reasonably, much less find a way to make use of it. I think this is a hugely interesting problem, but I think as we begin to expand a little bit the there\u0026rsquo;s going to be technological limitations to the accessibility of data in some locales based on distance and local capacity. Exploring how this plays out practically in cyberspace is I think important. There will clearly be massive shared data collections, and computers will be networked, but will there be one data network in the way that there is now, or will there be many data networks? And where are the breakpoints socially?\nA Story about Death and Closure In my psychology major days I was very interested in development processes and moments around death and dying. Maybe I read too much Irvin Yalom, but I think a science fiction story--perhaps a sort of claustrophobic inmate story about the death of a civilization/society/planet (i.e. a \u0026ldquo;Cultural Fugue\u0026rdquo; to borrow an idea from Delany) handled in an optimistic sort of way, but not terribly sentimentally, to be fair. Because I like that kind of thing.\nOnward, and of course, Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/five-fiction-ideas/","summary":"From the file of \u0026ldquo;things I would like to be writing if I had more time.\u0026rdquo; Please, if you\u0026rsquo;re inclined or would like to use one of these ideas for the basis of a story, please feel free to.\nA distributed space opera I\u0026rsquo;ve been telling very tight space opera stories for a while now. Stories set within the next 1000 or so years that revolve around our sun, where the civilization shares much of our cultural background. Stories set in the future chronicles of \u0026ldquo;Western Civilization\u0026rdquo; as it were. I\u0026rsquo;d like to get away from that and tell stories that are bigger than that, stories with less ubiquitous communication between worlds.\nAn Alien Story As a kid who grew up with ubiquitous bipedal aliens in Star Trek, I\u0026rsquo;ve been wary of alien stories, as I worry that the aliens will be too campy or too human like. Or I\u0026rsquo;ll fall into the exoticisism trap and have my aliens be too wondrous, and that\u0026rsquo;s not good either.","title":"five fiction ideas"},{"content":"I had this idea a few weeks ago, that to break things up during a particularly hectic part of my life--finishing a book, traveling, singing, and so forth--that I\u0026rsquo;d talk to some of the cool people I know on the Internet and elsewhere, and conduct a little interview series where I\u0026rsquo;d get to introduce you to some of the really interesting people that I\u0026rsquo;ve met in my travels thusfar, and ask them some questions about what they do, what they\u0026rsquo;re interested in and up to in the world.\nThe first entry in this series is by my friend Rich Russell who has a rather and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.\nWho are you? What do you?\nI was supposed to be a Rachel. So when mom regained consciousness and dad told her he had named me Richard, you can imagine her initial confusion. And then when my sister was born and I, who liked to sometimes pretend to be a girl when I was little (it was the eighties, after all; what of it?), was confronted by this actual Rachel, you can imagine how threatened I felt; there could be only one Rachel in our house, after all, and the jig was up for me. Rachel is dead; long live Rachel! So robbed of my infant identity, I later became a teacher, like my mom, which was either flattering identification with her or an attempt at character annexation, I can\u0026rsquo;t decide which.\nHandmade or Store bought?\nHandmade\n*Really?*\nWell, unless I have to sew it, carpenter it, cobble it, tan it, cure it, or cook it myself; in which case, store bought.\nLets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what\u0026rsquo;s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?\nI\u0026rsquo;m teaching a few classes online this semester, so it\u0026rsquo;s nice to be able to work with students who might not otherwise be able to attend school, due to their hectic family and/or work schedules. (We use the Blackboard Learning System, in case you\u0026rsquo;re looking for shameless plugs that might generate ad revenue: \u0026ldquo;Blackboard Learning System, connecting students with their teachers and their futures.\u0026rdquo;)\nAnd my sister lives out in L.A. now, so it\u0026rsquo;s nice that we can video chat once a week over coffee; there\u0026rsquo;s an added saccharin intimacy established by the video element. Because it\u0026rsquo;s not real togetherness, is it? It\u0026rsquo;s a kind of ersatz togetherness between my sister and me, the ersatz Rachel. E.M. Forster, in Howard\u0026rsquo;s End, compels us to, \u0026ldquo;Only connect!\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t know what that means anymore, though, when I\u0026rsquo;m teaching online or talking to my sister over Skype. Even when the wireless has a strong connection, I think, \u0026ldquo;This isn\u0026rsquo;t what Forster meant at all.\u0026rdquo; He meant that there would be nothing between human beings -- and other beings --except ourselves. I feel, in some ways, here has risen the connection that repels. We believe we are closer; we believe we are connected, unless Comcast is being a fuck-up. But, like my one student who says he has taken so many of his classes online at this point that he\u0026rsquo;s afraid to enter a real classroom and interact synchronously with fleshy classmates, have we lost the ability to be intimate? What does \u0026lsquo;intimate\u0026rsquo; even mean anymore?\u0026hellip; (But I love my iPhone. But I realize that is a manufactured desire.)\nFavorite Post-structuralist/Post-modernist? Who are the runners up?\nI was going to go with \u0026ldquo;Freddie\u0026rdquo; Jameson, because I loved what we read of him when I read him back in a Post-modernism course at the New School with Professor Joshua Gaylord (lol gay lord) in 2002. Or Roland Barthes; but I\u0026rsquo;m sure a lot of people will go with R.B. So I think I\u0026rsquo;ll choose Angela Carter instead, especially for her novel The Passion of New Eve, which still haunts me nine years after I first read it; some of the most sublime moments in all of literature. Runners-up: Muriel Spark, Laurence Sterne. (Miss Congeniality: Russell Edson.)\nThe single scariest thing about the future?\nThe future is neither good nor bad.\nFavorite Website?\nI subscribe to The Atlantic but still find myself spending a lot of time on theatlantic.com.\nWhat do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years? What\u0026rsquo;s going to be the most important thing about the next 10 years?\n9/11/99; I had been living in New York for about three weeks then. I was about to fall in love. It would be like a holocaust. (This is all about me, after all, isn\u0026rsquo;t it? Or did you mean for humankind in general? Yes, I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s what you must\u0026rsquo;ve meant; well\u0026hellip;) In ten years, the most important thing for humankind (and not just me) will be to see what we have done to this planet. This feels like a lame response, because it\u0026rsquo;s so chic right now to care about the planet (I\u0026rsquo;ve always cared!), but I am curious to see. Will there be sulfur aerosol sprays diffused into the atmosphere like in Blade Runner? Will there be flying cars like we\u0026rsquo;ve been promised there would be flying cars ever since The Jetsons? (FYI: I think we\u0026rsquo;re past wanting flying cars, aren\u0026rsquo;t we? I\u0026rsquo;d be more happy for some high-speed rail.) Will I ever get to see a narwhal?\nOne thing that you wish you could learn?\nI would like to read all of Proust. Because I have masochistic tendencies. And I like small buttery sponge cakes.\nEdmund Spenser or John Milton?\nMilton, hands down. I never did make it through all of The Faerie Queene(lol faerie queene). That old Spenserian scheme drives me coo-coo after awhile; I do believe it is the rhythm of madness.\nWhere can we find more about you/your projects?\nI blog and am rarjr on twitter.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interview-rich-russell/","summary":"I had this idea a few weeks ago, that to break things up during a particularly hectic part of my life--finishing a book, traveling, singing, and so forth--that I\u0026rsquo;d talk to some of the cool people I know on the Internet and elsewhere, and conduct a little interview series where I\u0026rsquo;d get to introduce you to some of the really interesting people that I\u0026rsquo;ve met in my travels thusfar, and ask them some questions about what they do, what they\u0026rsquo;re interested in and up to in the world.\nThe first entry in this series is by my friend Rich Russell who has a rather and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.\nWho are you? What do you?\nI was supposed to be a Rachel. So when mom regained consciousness and dad told her he had named me Richard, you can imagine her initial confusion. And then when my sister was born and I, who liked to sometimes pretend to be a girl when I was little (it was the eighties, after all; what of it?","title":"Interview, Rich Russell"},{"content":"I posted a link to an article about the professionalization of blogging in an earlier link dump post, that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about rather a lot in recent days, and I wanted to reflect on this.\nThe argument of the article, which I think is pretty much spot on, discusses how contemporary blogging has become this thing that that isn\u0026rsquo;t just the sort of thing that \u0026ldquo;nobodies\u0026rdquo; can throw up a blog with WordPress and become an Internet sensation in fairly short order. Now setting aside the fact that this might never have been true in the first place, I think there\u0026rsquo;s some serious merit to this argument: blogs have gone mainstream, lots of people read blogs, and the people who have the resources to write blogs tend to be people groups of people who have a lot of resources, and most of the popular/successful blogs these days require a lot of resources and sustained energies.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, of course, but I think it forces us to rethink what it means to be a blogger writer \u0026ldquo;internet content producer\u0026rdquo; both in the current moment and looking to the future.\nThere are a number of different factors contributing to this larger moment. Some of the more prevalent ones are:\nThere are more blogs now today than there used to be, this means both that the \u0026ldquo;cost of entry\u0026rdquo; is higher than it was five years ago or even a year ago. This means new blogs will: Need to focus on more unique subject areas, this is the \u0026ldquo;long tail\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;embrace your niche\u0026rdquo; approach. Rather than be the most popular blogger on Technoratti (do people still care about technoratti?) be the most popular blogger in the homemade breakfast cereal niche. Blogging can\u0026rsquo;t be the casual thing that it was in the beginning, In the early days people started blogs and posted occasionally and it was just this novel little thing, and they were able to be successful as bloggers. Now, blogging is something that one really has to dedicate an embarrassing amount of energy to to be successful. The \u0026ldquo;Blog\u0026rdquo; as a literary genre, or media forum has become much more cemented, so that rather than be this experimental form that really only describes a website that updates regularly in a serialized format, there are now a whole host of expectations regarding the forum. Blogs that reject the primacy of these forms will tend to be more successful, in that readers will tend to find them more innovative. Forum and approach, as much as a subject area, is one way that small independent content producers will be able to differentiate themselves from \u0026ldquo;big media blogs.\u0026rdquo; Blogs can be projects onto themselves. We\u0026rsquo;ve seen a convention where every site uses a blog as a way of providing more up-to-date content, but independent bloggers are able to create independent blogs which accent other projects, but are nonetheless independent and self contained texts. Independent bloggers might not be able start up and field vast readerships on their own any more, but may be able to define their success on their own terms. Old media business models, that rely on advertising revenue and large readership numbers might not be the most stable anyway, and independent bloggers may be able to contemplate success on their own terms. Possible \u0026ldquo;new media\u0026rdquo; definitions of success include: Using a blog to support and promote a consulting or services based business, by presenting general information to help justify your expertise in a given area. Think RedMonk, Merlin Mann, and in some ways, me. Using a blog (and its moderate audience) to support some sort of \u0026ldquo;rockstar\u0026rdquo; business model, where you sell something (tickets to shows, dead-tree books, tshirts, etc.) that people mostly want because they know you from something which doesn\u0026rsquo;t make you much money (ie. record sales, blogging.) There\u0026rsquo;s more. And I think that I might be talking about this kind of thing at PodCamp 3 Philly. I\u0026rsquo;d love to see you there.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-next-wave-and-independent-media/","summary":"I posted a link to an article about the professionalization of blogging in an earlier link dump post, that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about rather a lot in recent days, and I wanted to reflect on this.\nThe argument of the article, which I think is pretty much spot on, discusses how contemporary blogging has become this thing that that isn\u0026rsquo;t just the sort of thing that \u0026ldquo;nobodies\u0026rdquo; can throw up a blog with WordPress and become an Internet sensation in fairly short order. Now setting aside the fact that this might never have been true in the first place, I think there\u0026rsquo;s some serious merit to this argument: blogs have gone mainstream, lots of people read blogs, and the people who have the resources to write blogs tend to be people groups of people who have a lot of resources, and most of the popular/successful blogs these days require a lot of resources and sustained energies.","title":"The Next Wave and Independent Media"},{"content":"For your consideration:\nPaul Grahm on the Future of Publishing, which is of corse pretty darn spot on. Follow up, I guess to this link from the last link dump post. I think it\u0026rsquo;s generally true to say that the \u0026ldquo;post-publishing\u0026rdquo; world is here, as most writers/content producers--or the young and successful ones at any rate--are already working in post-publishing business models. SF Signal Mind-Meld about Short Fiction Anthologies. In a lot of ways I think short fiction \u0026ldquo;anthologies\u0026rdquo; are a great thing and answer a lot of needs in publishing. It\u0026rsquo;s a sustainable way to publish short fiction (in the way that magazines aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly,) anthologies have the potential to be greater than the sum of their parts (and thus better than single author short story collection.) And they\u0026rsquo;re typically great fun to read. The aforelinked article does a great job of showing the thought process of the editors and anthologists that make these collections possible. Organic Memory Transfer and neurotechology, I\u0026rsquo;m more interested in the limitations of input/output than in the \u0026ldquo;brute power\u0026rdquo; problems that Katz raises in this article, but its interesting. The Professionalization of blogging As an independent blogger myself, this article seems to mostly be true, though I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly happy about it, I must say. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in how the rise of the \u0026ldquo;big professional blog\u0026rdquo; integrates with the ongoing collapse of the media industry. Rough Type - Questioning Accidentalism I seem to be on a \u0026ldquo;posting links about the media today.\u0026rdquo; This one, is pretty historiographical, which is an approach to this \u0026ldquo;evolution of media\u0026rdquo; topics that I approve of with great vigor. I just wish there were a way to sort of say to the world, \u0026ldquo;lets do something different this time.\u0026rdquo; Alas. Gender in the Free Software World no matter how far away from Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies and \u0026ldquo;gender stuff,\u0026rdquo; it seems to follow me. That said, this article, which comments on some gender-related activism, if we can use that word, out of the FSF. The news is a bit old at this point (old links are old,) but I think the analysis here is pretty much spot on, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I have anything that I could add to this. Go read. Also this which I\u0026rsquo;m still reading/groking thinking about. Woot. Tabs closed for now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/links-postpublishing-gender-posthumanism/","summary":"For your consideration:\nPaul Grahm on the Future of Publishing, which is of corse pretty darn spot on. Follow up, I guess to this link from the last link dump post. I think it\u0026rsquo;s generally true to say that the \u0026ldquo;post-publishing\u0026rdquo; world is here, as most writers/content producers--or the young and successful ones at any rate--are already working in post-publishing business models. SF Signal Mind-Meld about Short Fiction Anthologies. In a lot of ways I think short fiction \u0026ldquo;anthologies\u0026rdquo; are a great thing and answer a lot of needs in publishing. It\u0026rsquo;s a sustainable way to publish short fiction (in the way that magazines aren\u0026rsquo;t terribly,) anthologies have the potential to be greater than the sum of their parts (and thus better than single author short story collection.) And they\u0026rsquo;re typically great fun to read. The aforelinked article does a great job of showing the thought process of the editors and anthologists that make these collections possible.","title":"Links on Post-Publishing, Gender, and Post-Humanism"},{"content":"I have an absurd number of tabs open, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to present some interesting reading that I\u0026rsquo;ve had on my plate for a while. Nothing incredibly current, but all of it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. For your consideration:\nInterlaced Knitting Chart from Kim Salazar who is a master knitter/crafter. I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed her blog for years, and I keep coming back to this pattern and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in figuring out how to integrate it best into the project I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of working on next/soon. This Thread about Package Management in Emacs, which is an incredibly essoteric subject, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s a useful conversation, and I think something that will--if its implemented--make emacs even more awesome, and make it easy to spin off specialized instances of \u0026ldquo;emacs distributions,\u0026rdquo; which I think will help emacs be more helpful to more people. I\u0026rsquo;d like multi-threaded support though. I\u0026rsquo;ve had this article about Open Source Business Models open in my browser for weeks, and my mind boggles at it. I tend to think that Free Software and Open Source have pretty much the same business models as all software businesses. There are companies that make money on licencing free software (i.e. Red Hat, Novell), there are a bunch of companies that provide services and custom development around open source software (too numerous to cite,) and there are scads of companies that have businesses offering services that are enabled by open source software (i.e. every Internet company, but Amazon is a great example of this.) So I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure how to respond to this. But it\u0026rsquo;s there, and now I\u0026rsquo;m closing that tab. Open Source: The War is Over or so one blogger thinks. I actually think there\u0026rsquo;s some truth to the idea that proprietary software is mostly a failed project, and most people realize that--moving forward--open source methods and practices are ideal for technology. But I think \u0026ldquo;winning the argument and beginning to move toward open source,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the war being over,\u0026rdquo; are two different things. Furthermore, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable equating \u0026ldquo;enterprise adoption of open source,\u0026rdquo; as the singular marker of success for Open Source (let alone Free Software). Michael Berube on Cultural Studies in the Chronicle I guess it\u0026rsquo;s hard to really take me out of the academy. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge geek for this kind of stuff still. I guess my thoughts are: Michael Berube might be a great blogger, and I think the thigns he\u0026rsquo;s thinking about in this peice are quire useful and worthwhile, but as a piece of writing, this article is too short to really get into a lot of depth about anything, and too long to be easily read American Academic Marxism is a mostly failed project, and I think the \u0026ldquo;inter-discipline\u0026rdquo; of Cultural studies has been a poor steward of said. While Cultural Studies is a liberating interdisciplinary proposition, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty unbalanced (English+Sociology) and I think a bit more economics and anthropology would be helpful. Berube is on the right side of this argument but I think he\u0026rsquo;s too kind to CS on this point. Gina Trapani\u0026rsquo;s Smarterware got a new look and it\u0026rsquo;s both amazing and I think points out the importance of leaving design to the professionals. Good stuff. Against Micropayments and the Media Industry Interesting post, that gets it right. The future of media and publishing of all forms is something that I think about more than a little bit. If people are ever going to pay for content again, it\u0026rsquo;s going to have to be tied into the way that people pay for connectivity, which is also a non-scarce resource, but one that we\u0026rsquo;ve grown used to paying for. There\u0026rsquo;s some unpacking and investigating to be done here, for sure. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/links-emacs-free-software-cultural-studies-future-of-media/","summary":"I have an absurd number of tabs open, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to present some interesting reading that I\u0026rsquo;ve had on my plate for a while. Nothing incredibly current, but all of it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. For your consideration:\nInterlaced Knitting Chart from Kim Salazar who is a master knitter/crafter. I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed her blog for years, and I keep coming back to this pattern and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in figuring out how to integrate it best into the project I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of working on next/soon. This Thread about Package Management in Emacs, which is an incredibly essoteric subject, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s a useful conversation, and I think something that will--if its implemented--make emacs even more awesome, and make it easy to spin off specialized instances of \u0026ldquo;emacs distributions,\u0026rdquo; which I think will help emacs be more helpful to more people. I\u0026rsquo;d like multi-threaded support though. I\u0026rsquo;ve had this article about Open Source Business Models open in my browser for weeks, and my mind boggles at it.","title":"Links on  Knitting, Emacs, Free Software, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Media"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking, a little, recently about frugality. Cast On finished a series earlier in the summer about frugality and consumption, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking with people in a couple of different contexts who think about their own consumption habits (of meat and other comestibles, of material things, of cars and transportation, and so forth) as political acts, in one capacity or another, and I think this all deserves some more extended reflection on my part.\nJust to be clear, I think it would be safe to classify myself as a \u0026ldquo;frugal person.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m pretty simple in my attitudes and my consumption habits. I have stuff, more stuff, probably, than I actually need. I also buy things that I think are almost certainly luxuries. But I\u0026rsquo;m sort of minimal about the things I have and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good about making sure that when I\u0026rsquo;m done with something, its either unusable by all of humanity or goes on to someone who can make better use of it.\nLargely I think of this as a personal quirk. Having a bunch of stuff is sometimes anxiety producing. While many knitters enjoy buying yarn, frankly it makes me jittery, unless my \u0026ldquo;stash\u0026rdquo; of yarn is pretty small and I\u0026rsquo;m actively knitting a lot. Also, as a writer, and a technologist-type, the things I do \u0026ldquo;for fun,\u0026rdquo; mostly involve sitting behind a computer and typing furiously, so while computer stuff is probably my largest \u0026ldquo;luxury expense,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly guilty about it, and lord knows I use a lot of computer stuff.\nAnd beyond this, I tend to think of frugality as being an extened form of common sense. Finding the shortest way to work, finding the best way to get the most nutrition and pleasure from the food you buy, finding the best way to use old computers, using yarn efficiently, and so forth.\nNow, I\u0026rsquo;m well aware that common sense is a culturally constrained and all, but that aside, I\u0026rsquo;m unsure if frugality constitutes a political statement, or a political act. Refusing to participate in consumer society on the grounds of a frual-ethic is admirable, and I think a sane way to approach the world, but I\u0026rsquo;ve often found myself thinking that acting against superstructural cultural phenomena is the kind of thing that isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly something that starts at home. I mean, changing your own habits is a good thing, because it\u0026rsquo;s likely to make you more happy, healthy, and economically resilient; nevertheless, I think to constitute a political act, \u0026ldquo;working against consumption\u0026rdquo; would require contributing to efforts that create viable opportunities for other people.\nSo then, politics are what happens when you get together with a lot of people and do something, not what happens when you\u0026rsquo;re at the store. I think, at least.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure if this logic holds up either, but it\u0026rsquo;s a start\u0026hellip;\nThe world is a weird place sometimes.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-frugality/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking, a little, recently about frugality. Cast On finished a series earlier in the summer about frugality and consumption, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking with people in a couple of different contexts who think about their own consumption habits (of meat and other comestibles, of material things, of cars and transportation, and so forth) as political acts, in one capacity or another, and I think this all deserves some more extended reflection on my part.\nJust to be clear, I think it would be safe to classify myself as a \u0026ldquo;frugal person.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m pretty simple in my attitudes and my consumption habits. I have stuff, more stuff, probably, than I actually need. I also buy things that I think are almost certainly luxuries. But I\u0026rsquo;m sort of minimal about the things I have and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good about making sure that when I\u0026rsquo;m done with something, its either unusable by all of humanity or goes on to someone who can make better use of it.","title":"On Frugality"},{"content":"A number of anecdotes follow\u0026hellip;\nDuring my junior year of College I wrote this paper with my roommate about the emergence of third-wave feminism and post-structuralism-inspired Queer Theory in Lesbian poetry. And the paper wove in and out of conceptions of \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;community\u0026rdquo; and while it was a rough paper to write, I learned a lot about feminism/queer things, and I learned a lot about collaboration and scholarship. Incidentally, I recently discovered that our process for this paper was very reminiscent of what Agile Software Development/Extreme Programing calls \u0026ldquo;Pair Programing.\u0026rdquo;\nAt any rate, H. and I were very religious (in a way that is kinda touching in retrospect,) about setting weekly assignments for ourselves, writing lengthy notes and short informal essays for our mentor, and so forth. Crazy amount of work. And on one of these papers I wrote something that got a comment, I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue what I\u0026rsquo;d written any more but I think it was sort of coyly smart-assy, but the comment itself stuck with me, but the professor said:\nAwkward, but endearingly colloquial\nWhich, I have to say, I think sums me up rather nicely. I used it as the subtitle of this blog for a few years.\nMore recently, I was talking to my friend Caroline and we--as we\u0026rsquo;re occasionally given--were discussing food and cooking. I told her about my recent habit of making popcorn on the stove (my Air Popper broke) and about what I put on my popped corn. Which is these days, salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar.\nAnd it\u0026rsquo;s amazing.\nCaroline\u0026rsquo;s response was, however, priceless:\nThat sounds delicious.\n[beat]\nIf a little abrasive.\nI instantly remembered what the professor had written about my turn of phrase before, and thought \u0026ldquo;wow, that about sums me up.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;d ask you all what you think these things say about me, but I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely sure I want to know.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/catchphrases/","summary":"A number of anecdotes follow\u0026hellip;\nDuring my junior year of College I wrote this paper with my roommate about the emergence of third-wave feminism and post-structuralism-inspired Queer Theory in Lesbian poetry. And the paper wove in and out of conceptions of \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;community\u0026rdquo; and while it was a rough paper to write, I learned a lot about feminism/queer things, and I learned a lot about collaboration and scholarship. Incidentally, I recently discovered that our process for this paper was very reminiscent of what Agile Software Development/Extreme Programing calls \u0026ldquo;Pair Programing.\u0026rdquo;\nAt any rate, H. and I were very religious (in a way that is kinda touching in retrospect,) about setting weekly assignments for ourselves, writing lengthy notes and short informal essays for our mentor, and so forth. Crazy amount of work. And on one of these papers I wrote something that got a comment, I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue what I\u0026rsquo;d written any more but I think it was sort of coyly smart-assy, but the comment itself stuck with me, but the professor said:","title":"catchphrases"},{"content":"1. For many months, I\u0026rsquo;ve been using my Blackberry as a music player for the purpose of listening to podcasts while I walk/drive. I\u0026rsquo;ve recently switched to using an iPod Touch (first gen; obtained as part of a promotion) that I\u0026rsquo;ve been syncing (for podcasts) to my work computer (which is a mac). As nice as \u0026ldquo;convergence was,\u0026rdquo; and as much as this little iPod is \u0026ldquo;overkill\u0026rdquo; for what I\u0026rsquo;m doing with it, I think this is a step in the right direction. So, dedicated media players here I come.\n2. In college I\u0026rsquo;d drink tea pretty much all day--even into the evening--and it didn\u0026rsquo;t really affect my ability to fall asleep when tired. Since graduating I\u0026rsquo;d pretty much scaled back on the caff, to the point where I\u0026rsquo;d avoid drinking tea after about 6pm. In the last couple of weeks, I\u0026rsquo;ve started streaching this downward, and making a big pot of tea in the evening and drinking it pretty much till it runs out, even if that means have a pipping hot cup of caff at 10pm. (mmmm.) The effect seems to be the same no matter what: I fall asleep at 11:30 or midnight-ish; but until then I\u0026rsquo;m a little more productive if I\u0026rsquo;m working on a cup of tea. Often without tea, I have the ability to read about a page in a book before falling asleep; with tea, I can read something of consequence before passing out. Again, I\u0026rsquo;m not actually staying up later, I\u0026rsquo;m just more productive/alert with the time I have. Also, I tend to have my first cup of tea at the office, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really feel like I need to to wake up as much as I need it to stay alert. So, there you go.\n3. I\u0026rsquo;ve had technology angst for a while. I miss having a single, portable machine that I can use for 98% of all my computing tasks. I have this awesome little laptop, but the screen\u0026rsquo;s resolution is 1024x786 and at my (old-normal) font size that was simply too small to really do anything except work in full screen mode. Divide up the screen at all and suddenly you have to scroll horizontally for everything. It\u0026rsquo;s a shame, because I love the portability of this computer, and it\u0026rsquo;s built like a rock, and except for this trivial little thing, it works. After much dithering about on the subject (and spec-ing out the ideal laptop, which I do hope to own some day,) I had the brilliant thought (mid-post draft,) of setting to font size in emacs (my editor) to\u0026hellip; I think the technical term is \u0026ldquo;insanely fucking small,\u0026rdquo; and we\u0026rsquo;ll see how that works. It\u0026rsquo;s a bit too small for comfortable/close reading, but it\u0026rsquo;s fine for moment to moment work, so I\u0026rsquo;ve set up some key-bindings in emacs (if you must know: \u0026ldquo;C-c f s\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;C-c f b\u0026rdquo;) to switch between font sizes, along with some conditional statements in my init file to load big fonts on big screens and small fonts on small screens, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it goes. I\u0026rsquo;ll post the code soon. The sad thing is aside from the screen issue and the fact that my desk doesn\u0026rsquo;t work well for laptops, I\u0026rsquo;ve basically already made the switch.\n4. I\u0026rsquo;ve started to read Jonathan Straham\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The New Space Opera: 2\u0026rdquo; Anthology, and I have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s already better than the first one. I liked the first one, a lot, enough to buy the second, but it was reflexive and subtle and understated in a way that this one is big and exciting and energetic. If these are even acceptable terms for the description of a collection of short stories. Books like this have left me convinced of the fact that there\u0026rsquo;s a future in short fiction, and that the magazine isn\u0026rsquo;t really the ideal format for the consumption of short fiction. Where I think there are some logistical problems with the publication of web-zines, in the \u0026ldquo;fiction periodical\u0026rdquo; model, doing one or two-off anthologies in the Internet-age has potential I think. Another project for Critical Futures, I suspect. (Also, space opera rocks.)\n5. (Messages from the past:) I\u0026rsquo;m going to New York City (first time since I was a kid!) this weekend with some friends to do an all-day-shape-note singing. This is going to rock. I like small regular singings a lot, don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, but I often feel like it takes me a few hours to get to the point where I can really feel the harmonies and chords, and most local signings are almost over by that point. This should be fun. (Summary: It was awesome, and I\u0026rsquo;ll do it justice later, but I think getting into this singing thing counts as an advancement without question.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/five-advancements/","summary":"1. For many months, I\u0026rsquo;ve been using my Blackberry as a music player for the purpose of listening to podcasts while I walk/drive. I\u0026rsquo;ve recently switched to using an iPod Touch (first gen; obtained as part of a promotion) that I\u0026rsquo;ve been syncing (for podcasts) to my work computer (which is a mac). As nice as \u0026ldquo;convergence was,\u0026rdquo; and as much as this little iPod is \u0026ldquo;overkill\u0026rdquo; for what I\u0026rsquo;m doing with it, I think this is a step in the right direction. So, dedicated media players here I come.\n2. In college I\u0026rsquo;d drink tea pretty much all day--even into the evening--and it didn\u0026rsquo;t really affect my ability to fall asleep when tired. Since graduating I\u0026rsquo;d pretty much scaled back on the caff, to the point where I\u0026rsquo;d avoid drinking tea after about 6pm. In the last couple of weeks, I\u0026rsquo;ve started streaching this downward, and making a big pot of tea in the evening and drinking it pretty much till it runs out, even if that means have a pipping hot cup of caff at 10pm.","title":"five advancements"},{"content":"I realize that with all this blabbering I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing about social organizations, and politics, particularly the post on Health Care Cooperatives, some of you may have read something into my thinking that I think is very much not there. I think this resonates with the way people people read a certain kind of libertarian streak in Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s work, which is I think is an uncomfortable association, at least in my reading.\nThere are two parts of my thinking that I think are important:\nFirst, I think there is a not particularly insignificant range of social and economic functions that fall into the broad category of the \u0026ldquo;public interest,\u0026rdquo; that I think would (and are) ill served by the private institutions which are their current guardians. This was the crux of the argument of my health care argument, but I think there are other things that fall under the public interest: education, banking, \u0026ldquo;utilities\u0026rdquo; (water, sewage, power, TCP/IP data,) health care, and infrastructure (roads, public transit, rail, power distribution, ), as well as some operations that benefit from centralized organization like aviation.\nSecond, I would assert that \u0026ldquo;Market Forces,\u0026rdquo; are not sufficiently understood to merit trust in their efficacy. Furthermore, the large-scale global markets that have ruled supreme in the recent past tend to sacrifice long-term authenticity, for short term gains at the expense of individuals. This is the problem with corporations that I\u0026rsquo;ve been harping on for a long time. The way, as far as I can tell to de-incentivize this kind of economic activity, is to focus economic development on more smaller ventures and to decrease the importance of initial capital outlay on business models.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s simply not something you can regulate or deregulate around. To erase the impact of corporate-styled business models on the economy, you have to hack scarcity in some way. Corporation-sized ventures beat cooperative-sized ventures today, because in most areas economies of scale in the production of concrete material, doom cooperative-sized enterprises. One of the effects of the development of technology in the next {{few}}1 years will be, I suspect, to decrease the advantages of economies of scale.\nIf nothing else it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting time to be alive.\nThis gets my standard \u0026ldquo;until the singularity gets here,\u0026rdquo; response, so before 2030 or 2040. You heard it here first.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-the-public-interest/","summary":"I realize that with all this blabbering I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing about social organizations, and politics, particularly the post on Health Care Cooperatives, some of you may have read something into my thinking that I think is very much not there. I think this resonates with the way people people read a certain kind of libertarian streak in Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s work, which is I think is an uncomfortable association, at least in my reading.\nThere are two parts of my thinking that I think are important:\nFirst, I think there is a not particularly insignificant range of social and economic functions that fall into the broad category of the \u0026ldquo;public interest,\u0026rdquo; that I think would (and are) ill served by the private institutions which are their current guardians. This was the crux of the argument of my health care argument, but I think there are other things that fall under the public interest: education, banking, \u0026ldquo;utilities\u0026rdquo; (water, sewage, power, TCP/IP data,) health care, and infrastructure (roads, public transit, rail, power distribution, ), as well as some operations that benefit from centralized organization like aviation.","title":"In The Public Interest"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about Microsoft recently, and thinking about how the trajectory of Microsoft fits in with the trajectory of information technology in general.\nA lot of people in the free software world are very anti-Microsoft, given some of the agregious anti-competitive activites they use, and general crappiness of their software. And while I agree that MS is no great gift to computing, it\u0026rsquo;s always seemed to me that they\u0026rsquo;re johnny-come-lately to the non-free software world (comparatively speaking AT\u0026amp;T and the telecom industry has done way more to limit and obstruct software and digital freedom than microsoft, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking.) But this is an akward argument, because there\u0026rsquo;s no real lost love between me and Microsoft, and to be honest my disagreement with Microsoft is mostly technologcial: microsoft technology presents a poor solution to technical problems. But I digress.\nOne thing that I think is difficult to convey when talking about Microsoft is that \u0026ldquo;The Microsoft We See\u0026rdquo; is not \u0026ldquo;The Core Business of Microsoft;\u0026rdquo; which is to say the lion\u0026rsquo;s share of Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s business is in licensing things like Exchange servers (email and groupware stack) to big organizations, and then there\u0026rsquo;s the whole ASP.NET+SQL-Server stack which a lot of technology is built upon. And Microsoft works licensing in ways that\u0026rsquo;s absurd to those of us who don\u0026rsquo;t live in that world. A dinky instance (ten users?) of Windows Server+Exchange for small corporations easily starts at a grand (per year? bi-annually?) and goes up from there depending on the size of the user-base. I would, by contrast, be surprised if Microsoft saw more than 50 or 60 dollars per desktop installation of Windows that consumers buy.1 And I suspect a given installation of windows lasts three to five years.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s going to happen tomorrow or even next year, but I think netbooks--and the fact that Microsoft won\u0026rsquo;t put anything other than XP on them--and the continued development of Linux on embedded devices, and the growing market share of Apple in the Laptop Market (and the slow death of the desktop computing market as we know it,) all serve to make any attention that we give to market share of Windows on the desktop, increasingly less worthwhile. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I think people will flock in great numbers to other platforms, but\u0026hellip;\nI think what\u0026rsquo;s happening, with the emergence of all these web-based technologies, with Mono, with Flash/Flex/Silverlight/Moonlight, with web-apps, with Qt running cross platform, with native GTK+ ports to windows and OS X, is that what you run on your desktop is (and will continue to become) more and more irrelevant. There won\u0026rsquo;t be \u0026ldquo;the next Microsoft,\u0026rdquo; because whatever you think of the future of IT, there isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be a future where quality software is more scarce, or harder to produce than it is today.\nSo this brings us back to servers licensing, and something that I realized only recently. In the Linux world, we buy commodity hardware, sometimes really beefy systems, and if you have a scaling problem you just set up a new server and do some sort of clustered or distributed setup, which definitely falls under the heading of \u0026ldquo;advanced sysadmining,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s not complex. With virutalization it\u0026rsquo;s even easier to fully utilize hardware, and create really effective distributed environments. At the end of the day, what servers do is not particularly complex work in terms of number crunching, but it is massively parallel. And here\u0026rsquo;s the catch about Windows: developers are disincentived to run more than one server, because as soon as you do that, your costs increase disproportionately with regard to the hardware. Say the cost of a production server (hardware) is 4k and you pay 2k-3k for the software. If at some point this server isn\u0026rsquo;t big enough for your needs, do you: buy an almost-twice-as-good-8k dollar server with a single license, or just shell out another 6k-7k and have a second instance? Now lets multiply this times 10? Or more? (I should point out that I\u0026rsquo;m almost certainly low balling Software licensing costs.)\nAt some point you do have to cave and pay for an extra Microsoft license, but it makes a lot of sense from an operations perspective to throw money at hardware rather than distributed architectures, because not only is it quicker, but it\u0026rsquo;s actually cheaper to avoid clusters.\nMicrosoft, the company that made its money in microcomputer software has backed itself into being the \u0026ldquo;big iron\u0026rdquo; computing business. Which is risky for them, and anyone. Sun Microsystems couldn\u0026rsquo;t make it work, IBM kills in this space (and Linux mainframes are in the 50k-100k range, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t look as absurd in light of the calculations above.)\nAnyway, this post has been all over the place, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I can tie it all together in a neat bow, but I think its safe to say that we live in interesting times, and that this whole \u0026ldquo;cloud thing\u0026rdquo; combined with the rapidly falling price of very high-powered equipment changes all of the assumptions that we\u0026rsquo;ve had about software for the past twenty or thirty years. For free software as well as the proprietary software\u0026hellip;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a line in the Windows EULA, that says if you don\u0026rsquo;t agree with the terms and aren\u0026rsquo;t going to use the windows that comes installed on your computer that you can get a refund on this if you call the right people for your machine\u0026rsquo;s distributor. I\u0026rsquo;ve heard reports of people getting ~130 USD back for this, but it\u0026rsquo;s unclear how much of that goes to Microsoft, or to the support for MS products that OEMs have to provide.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/microsoft-reconsidered/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about Microsoft recently, and thinking about how the trajectory of Microsoft fits in with the trajectory of information technology in general.\nA lot of people in the free software world are very anti-Microsoft, given some of the agregious anti-competitive activites they use, and general crappiness of their software. And while I agree that MS is no great gift to computing, it\u0026rsquo;s always seemed to me that they\u0026rsquo;re johnny-come-lately to the non-free software world (comparatively speaking AT\u0026amp;T and the telecom industry has done way more to limit and obstruct software and digital freedom than microsoft, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking.) But this is an akward argument, because there\u0026rsquo;s no real lost love between me and Microsoft, and to be honest my disagreement with Microsoft is mostly technologcial: microsoft technology presents a poor solution to technical problems. But I digress.\nOne thing that I think is difficult to convey when talking about Microsoft is that \u0026ldquo;The Microsoft We See\u0026rdquo; is not \u0026ldquo;The Core Business of Microsoft;\u0026rdquo; which is to say the lion\u0026rsquo;s share of Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s business is in licensing things like Exchange servers (email and groupware stack) to big organizations, and then there\u0026rsquo;s the whole ASP.","title":"microsoft reconsidered"},{"content":"Remember how, in 2006 and 2007 there was a lot of debate over wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s accuracy and process, and people though about creating alternate encyclopedias that relied on \u0026ldquo;expert contributors?\u0026rdquo; And then, somehow, that just died off and we never hear about those kinds of projects and of concerns anymore? The biggest news regarding wikipedia recently has been with regards to a somewhat subtle change in their licensing terms, which is really sort of minor and not even particularly interesting even for people who are into licensing stuff.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a theory:\nWikipedia reached a point in the last couple of years where it became clear that it was as accurate as any encyclopedia had ever been before. Sure there are places where it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;wrong,\u0026rdquo; and sure, as wikipedians have long argued, wikipedia is ideally suited to fix textual problems in a quick and blindingly efficient manner, but The Encyclopedia Britannica has always had factual inaccuracies, and has always reflected a particular\u0026hellip; editorial perspective, and in light of its competition wikipedia has always been a bit better.\nPractically, where wikipedia was once an example of \u0026ldquo;the great things that technology can enable,\u0026rdquo; the moment when it leap frogged other encyclopedias was the moment that it became functionally irrelevant.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not saying that wikipedia is bad and that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t read it, but rather that even if Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia in the world it is still an encyclopedia, and the project of encyclopedias is flawed, and in many ways runs counter to the great potential for collaborative work on the Internet.\nMy gripe with encyclopedias is largely epistemological:\nI think the project of collecting all knowledge in a single\nfact that the biggest problem in the area of \u0026ldquo;knowing\u0026rdquo; in the contemporary world isn\u0026rsquo;t simply finding information, or even finding trusted information, but rather what to do with knowledge when you do find it. Teaching people how to search for information is easy. Teaching people the critical thinking skills necessary for figuring out if a source is trustworthy takes some time, but it\u0026rsquo;s not terribly complicated (and encyclopedias do a pretty poor job of this in the global sense, even if their major goal in the specific sense is to convey trust in the specific sense.) At the same time, teaching people to take information and do something awesome with it is incredibly difficult.\nKnowledge is multiple and comes from multiple perspectives, and is contextually dependent on history, on cultural contexts, on sources, and on ideological concerns, so the project of collecting all knowledge in a value-neutral way from an objective perspective provides a disservice to the knowledge project. This is the weak spot in all encyclopedias regardless of their editorial process or medium. Encyclopedias are, by definition, imperialist projects.\nThe Internet is inherently decentralized. That\u0026rsquo;s how it\u0026rsquo;s designed, and all though this rounds counter to conventional thought in information management, information on the Internet works best when we don\u0026rsquo;t try to artificially centralize it, and arguably, that\u0026rsquo;s what wikipedia does: it collects and centralizes information in one easy to access and easy to search place. So while wikipedia isn\u0026rsquo;t bad, there are a lot of things that one could do with wikis, with the Internet, that could foster distributed information projects and work with the strengths of the Internet rather than against them. Wikis are great for collaborative editing, and there are a lot of possibilities in the form, but so much depends on what you do with it.\nSo I guess the obvious questions here are:\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s next? What does the post-wikipedia world look like? How do we provide usable indexes for information that let people find content of value in a decentralized format, and preferably in a federated way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t rely on Google Search? Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-day-wikipedia-obsoleted-itself/","summary":"Remember how, in 2006 and 2007 there was a lot of debate over wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s accuracy and process, and people though about creating alternate encyclopedias that relied on \u0026ldquo;expert contributors?\u0026rdquo; And then, somehow, that just died off and we never hear about those kinds of projects and of concerns anymore? The biggest news regarding wikipedia recently has been with regards to a somewhat subtle change in their licensing terms, which is really sort of minor and not even particularly interesting even for people who are into licensing stuff.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a theory:\nWikipedia reached a point in the last couple of years where it became clear that it was as accurate as any encyclopedia had ever been before. Sure there are places where it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;wrong,\u0026rdquo; and sure, as wikipedians have long argued, wikipedia is ideally suited to fix textual problems in a quick and blindingly efficient manner, but The Encyclopedia Britannica has always had factual inaccuracies, and has always reflected a particular\u0026hellip; editorial perspective, and in light of its competition wikipedia has always been a bit better.","title":"the day wikipedia obsoleted itself"},{"content":"Five Things I Could do to Make My Cats Happier 1. Have fewer hobbies that involve non-feline-objects on my lap (knitting, reading, writing/laptop).\nBe at home Sleep More. Grow More Appendages. Get a roommate/spouse. Five Books I Would like to Read in the Next Month Iain M. Banks\u0026rsquo; Consider Phebas The New Space Opera 2 Anthology Tad Williams\u0026rsquo; Otherland Giles Deleuze\u0026rsquo;s Difference and Repetition (ha!) Michael Chabon\u0026rsquo;s The Yiddish Police Man\u0026rsquo;s Union Five Elements of My Daily Ritual That I\u0026rsquo;d like to Improve Wake Time Lunch Preparation (the night before?) Reading RSS feeds. Making more time for knitting Join a Gym to better Exercise at night. Five Improvements I\u0026rsquo;d Like to Make to This Blog Add a wiki Build more useful archives. 3. Streamline Build Process. (Requires serious hacking. Getting #2 might help this.)\nIncrease increase discussion quotient. 5. Provide more useful resources, and include more citations and links to the cool things that are happening on the Internet\nFive Jobs I\u0026rsquo;d Like to Have Before I Retire Editor (of a fiction or non-fiction publication) Workshop leader Researcher/Professor Community Manager Cultural Critic/Industry Analyst ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/five-by-five/","summary":"Five Things I Could do to Make My Cats Happier 1. Have fewer hobbies that involve non-feline-objects on my lap (knitting, reading, writing/laptop).\nBe at home Sleep More. Grow More Appendages. Get a roommate/spouse. Five Books I Would like to Read in the Next Month Iain M. Banks\u0026rsquo; Consider Phebas The New Space Opera 2 Anthology Tad Williams\u0026rsquo; Otherland Giles Deleuze\u0026rsquo;s Difference and Repetition (ha!) Michael Chabon\u0026rsquo;s The Yiddish Police Man\u0026rsquo;s Union Five Elements of My Daily Ritual That I\u0026rsquo;d like to Improve Wake Time Lunch Preparation (the night before?) Reading RSS feeds. Making more time for knitting Join a Gym to better Exercise at night. Five Improvements I\u0026rsquo;d Like to Make to This Blog Add a wiki Build more useful archives. 3. Streamline Build Process. (Requires serious hacking. Getting #2 might help this.)\nIncrease increase discussion quotient. 5. Provide more useful resources, and include more citations and links to the cool things that are happening on the Internet","title":"Five By Five"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another one for the \u0026ldquo;economics\u0026rdquo; collection of posts that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while. Way back when, I started this series by thinking about Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s Mars Trilogy and by the model of economic development presented in the final two books. In short economic activity is organized around ~150 person co-operatives that people \u0026ldquo;buy into,\u0026rdquo; and then work for as long as the co-op exists or until they sell their spot so that they can work on a different project/co-op.\nIn the series, these co-operatives arose as part of a response to the multi/trans/meta-national corporations which were the books antagonists. Corporations which had grown so big, that they resembled nations as much as they did companies in the contemporary perspective. The co-ops came around in part as a response to the metanat\u0026rsquo;s, but then the corporations themselves restructured in response to an ecological/sociological catastrophe, so that they eventually started to look more like the cooperatives. The \u0026ldquo;progressive,\u0026rdquo; meta-national corporation was called \u0026ldquo;Praxis,\u0026rdquo; in the stories and Praxis was the organization that lead the transformation from metanational capitalism to, what followed. As part of this series, I\u0026rsquo;d very much like to think about Praxis and what kinds of lessons we can bring back from this thought, beyond the simplistic \u0026ldquo;cooperatives good, corporations bad,\u0026rdquo; notion that I\u0026rsquo;ve been toting for months. Thus,\nThe corruption and disconnect from authentic economic exchange in that the metanats display in the Mars Books, far outclasses anything that\u0026rsquo;s happening today. On the one hand, given the nature of Science Fictional criticism, this isn\u0026rsquo;t such a great barrier to importing ides from the books; on the other, we must also imagine that Praxis is able to \u0026ldquo;out compete\u0026rdquo; traditional meta-nationals because of the scale of the issue. That is, the Praxis critique and solution may be valid today, but things may have to get much worse before a Praxis-like solution becomes economically viable.\nPraxis succeeds in the story, not because it can out compete the meta-nationals at their own game, not because it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;right.\u0026rdquo; I appreciate fiction (and reality,) where the winning economic solution wins on economic rather than moral terms. While I\u0026rsquo;m hardly a Market proponent, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to divorce economics from exchanges, and I think the following logic fails to convince me: \u0026ldquo;we change current cultural practice to do something less efficient that may create less value, because it complies better with some specific and culturally constrained ethic.\u0026rdquo;\nOne part of my own thinking on this issue has revolved around looking for mechanisms that produce change and I think Praxis is particularly interesting from a mechanistic perspective.\nPraxis presents a case of a revolutionary-scale change, with evolutionary mechanisms, which is something that I think is hard to argue for, or encourage as the change itself is really a result of everything else that\u0026rsquo;s going on in the historical moment. Nevertheless, everyone in the story world is very clear that Praxis-post transformation is fundamentally not the same kind of organization that it was before. In a lot of ways it becomes its own \u0026ldquo;corporate successor state,\u0026rdquo; and I think that leaves us with a pretty interesting question to close with\u0026hellip;\nHow do we setup and/or encourage successor institutions to the flawed economic organizations/coroprations we have today without recapitulating their flaws?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/praxis-and-transformational-economics/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another one for the \u0026ldquo;economics\u0026rdquo; collection of posts that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while. Way back when, I started this series by thinking about Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s Mars Trilogy and by the model of economic development presented in the final two books. In short economic activity is organized around ~150 person co-operatives that people \u0026ldquo;buy into,\u0026rdquo; and then work for as long as the co-op exists or until they sell their spot so that they can work on a different project/co-op.\nIn the series, these co-operatives arose as part of a response to the multi/trans/meta-national corporations which were the books antagonists. Corporations which had grown so big, that they resembled nations as much as they did companies in the contemporary perspective. The co-ops came around in part as a response to the metanat\u0026rsquo;s, but then the corporations themselves restructured in response to an ecological/sociological catastrophe, so that they eventually started to look more like the cooperatives.","title":"Praxis and Transformational Economics"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been flitting about the relm of political economics, technological infrastrucutre, and cyborg-related topics for a number of weeks, maybe months, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t written very much about open source. This post is hopefully a bit of a return to this kind of topic, mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve been staring at a blog post for weeks, and I finally have something that\u0026rsquo;s nearly cogent to about an article that kind of pissed me off. Here goes\nThe article in question seeks to inform would-be-software entrepreneurs how they ought to compete against open source software, and to my mind makes a huge mess of the whole debate. Lets do some more in-depth analysis.\n\u0026ldquo;Open source is only cheap if you don\u0026rsquo;t care about time,\u0026rdquo; is an interesting argument that sort of addresses the constant complaint that open source is \u0026ldquo;fussy.\u0026rdquo; Which it is, right? Right. One of the best open source business models is to provide services around open-source that make it less fussy. Also I think Free Software is often \u0026ldquo;a work in progress,\u0026rdquo; and is thus only occasionally \u0026ldquo;fully polished,\u0026rdquo; and is often best thought of as a base component that can be used to build something that\u0026rsquo;s fully customized to a specific contextual set of requirements. That\u0026rsquo;s part of the value and importance of free software.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think we can have our cake and eat it too on this one, (the cake is a lie!) and in a lot of ways I think this is really a positive attribute of free software.\nThe complaints regarding open source software seem to boil down to: \u0026ldquo;open source software doesn\u0026rsquo;t come with support services, and installation polish\u0026rdquo; (we\u0026rsquo;re working on it, but this is a commercial opportunity to provide support around open source products in general.)\nSo to consolidate the argument, the author seems to suggest that: \u0026ldquo;in order to beat open source software, which sucks because it\u0026rsquo;s not polished enough and doesn\u0026rsquo;t have support, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write a totally different code base, that I\u0026rsquo;ll then have to polish and support.\u0026rdquo;\nMy only real response is. \u0026ldquo;Have fun with that.\u0026rdquo;\nBefore I lay this to rest, I want to give potential \u0026ldquo;Commercial Software Vendors\u0026rdquo; (proprietary software vendors?) the following qualifications on the advice in the original article.\n1. Save your users time: Sound advice. Though I think the best way to save users time is probably to integrate your product with other related tools. Make your product usable and valuable. Provide support, and take advantage skilled interaction designers to provide intuitive interfaces. Don\u0026rsquo;t, however, treat your users like idiots, or assume that because your product might have a learning curve it\u0026rsquo;s flawed. The best software not only helps us solve the problems we know we have, but also solves problems we didn\u0026rsquo;t know we had, and in the process creates tremendous value. Don\u0026rsquo;t be afraid to innovate.\nAlso, **save yourself time*, you can create more value for your customers by not reinventing the proverbial wheel. Use open source software to bootstrap your process, and if the value you create is (as it always is) in support and polish, you can do that to open source just as well as you can to your own software.\n2. Market Hard, might work, but it\u0026rsquo;s all hit and miss. Open source might not be able to advertise, or send people on sales calls to enterprises, but open source has communities that support it, including communities of people who are often pretty involved in IT departments. Not always, mind you, but sometimes.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re a \u0026ldquo;Commercial Software Vendor\u0026rdquo; you\u0026rsquo;re going to have a hell of a time building a community around your product. True fact. And word of mouth, which is the most effective way to predict sales, is killer hard without a community.\n4. Focus on features for people who are likely to buy your product, is a great suggestion, and really, sort of the point of commercial software, as far as I can see. Custom development and consulting around open source if you can provide it, achieves the same goal. At the same time, I think a lot of open source enterprise software exists and succeeds on the absence of licensing fees, and so I think would-be-software vendors should be really wary to think of the enterprise as being \u0026ldquo;cash cows\u0026rdquo; particularly in the long run.\nSo in summary:\nCreate value, real enduring value. Not ephemeral profitability, or in-the-moment utility. Be honest about what your business/endeavor really centers on, and do that as best you can. Understand the social dynamics of open source, not simply the technological constrains of the user experience. And\u0026hellip;. done.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-competition/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been flitting about the relm of political economics, technological infrastrucutre, and cyborg-related topics for a number of weeks, maybe months, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t written very much about open source. This post is hopefully a bit of a return to this kind of topic, mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve been staring at a blog post for weeks, and I finally have something that\u0026rsquo;s nearly cogent to about an article that kind of pissed me off. Here goes\nThe article in question seeks to inform would-be-software entrepreneurs how they ought to compete against open source software, and to my mind makes a huge mess of the whole debate. Lets do some more in-depth analysis.\n\u0026ldquo;Open source is only cheap if you don\u0026rsquo;t care about time,\u0026rdquo; is an interesting argument that sort of addresses the constant complaint that open source is \u0026ldquo;fussy.\u0026rdquo; Which it is, right? Right. One of the best open source business models is to provide services around open-source that make it less fussy.","title":"open source competition"},{"content":"I wrote a while back about wanting to develop a \u0026ldquo;fact file\u0026rdquo; or some way of creating a database of notes and clippings that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t (need to be) project specific research, but that I would none the less like the keep track of. Part of the notion was that I felt like I was gathering lots of information and reading lots of stuff, that I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have any good way of retaining this information beyond whatever I could recall based on what I just happen to remember.\nI should note that this post is very org-mode focused, and I\u0026rsquo;ve not subtitled very much. You\u0026rsquo;ve been warned.\nUltimately I developed an org-remember template, and I documented that in the post linked to above.\nSince then, however, I\u0026rsquo;ve changed things a bit, and I wanted to publish that updated template.\n(setq org-remember-templates'( (\u0026quot;annotations\u0026quot; ?a \u0026quot;* %^{Title} %^g \\n :PROPERTIES:\\n :date: %^t\\n :cite-key: %^{cite-key}\\n :link: %^{link}\\n :END:\\n\\n %?\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/data.org\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Annotations and Notes\u0026quot;) (\u0026quot;web-clippings\u0026quot; ?w \u0026quot;* %^{Title} %^g \\n :PROPERTIES:\\n :date: %^t\\n :link: %^{link}\\n :END:\\n\\n %x %?\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/data.org\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Web Clippings\u0026quot;) (\u0026quot;fact-file\u0026quot; ?f \u0026quot;* %^{Title} %^g \\n :PROPERTIES:\\n :date: %^t\\n :link: %^{link}\\n :END:\\n\\n %x %?\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/data.org\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Fact File\u0026quot;) )) What this does, reflects something I noticed in the way I was using the original implementation. I noticed that I was collecting quotes from both a variety of Internet sources and published sources. Not everything had a cite-key (a key that tracks the information in my bibtex database,) and I found that I also wanted to save copies of blog posts and other snippets that I found useful and interesting, but that still didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to qualify as a \u0026ldquo;fact file entry.\u0026rdquo;\nSo now there are three templates:\nFirst, annotations of published work, all cross referenced against cite-keys in the bibtex database. Second, web clippings, this is where I put blog posts, and other articles which I think will be interesting to revisit and important to archive independently for offline/later reading. Often if I respond to a blogpost on this blog, the chances are that post has made it into this section of the file. Third, miscellaneous facts, these are just quotes, in general. Interesting facts that I pull from wikipedia/wherever, but nothing teleological, particularly. It\u0026rsquo;s good to have a place to collect unstructured information, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found the collection of information in this section of the file to be quite useful. General features:\nWhatever text I select (and therefore add to the X11 clipboard) is automatically inserted into the remember buffer (with the %? tag) I make copious use of tags and tag compleation which makes it easier to use the \u0026ldquo;sparse tree by tag\u0026rdquo; functionality in org-mode to just display heading which are tagged in a certain way.) So that I can see related content easily. Tags include both subject and project-related information for super-cool filtering. All \u0026ldquo;entires\u0026rdquo; exist on the second level of the file. I\u0026rsquo;m often sensative to using too much hierarchy, at the expense of clarity or ease of searching. This seems to be particularly the case in org-mode, given the power of sparse trees for filtering content. So that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m doing. As always, alternate solutions feedback are more than welcome.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fact-files/","summary":"I wrote a while back about wanting to develop a \u0026ldquo;fact file\u0026rdquo; or some way of creating a database of notes and clippings that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t (need to be) project specific research, but that I would none the less like the keep track of. Part of the notion was that I felt like I was gathering lots of information and reading lots of stuff, that I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have any good way of retaining this information beyond whatever I could recall based on what I just happen to remember.\nI should note that this post is very org-mode focused, and I\u0026rsquo;ve not subtitled very much. You\u0026rsquo;ve been warned.\nUltimately I developed an org-remember template, and I documented that in the post linked to above.\nSince then, however, I\u0026rsquo;ve changed things a bit, and I wanted to publish that updated template.\n(setq org-remember-templates'( (\u0026quot;annotations\u0026quot; ?a \u0026quot;* %^{Title} %^g \\n :PROPERTIES:\\n :date: %^t\\n :cite-key: %^{cite-key}\\n :link: %^{link}\\n :END:\\n\\n %?","title":"fact files"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m unique among my coworkers, in that I\u0026rsquo;m not a developer/programmer. This is a good thing, after all, because I\u0026rsquo;m the writer and not a programmer; but as a \u0026ldquo;workflow\u0026rdquo; guy and a student of software development one thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve been particularly struck by since taking this job is how well I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to collaborate with coworkers who come from a completely different background/field and furthermore how helpful this as been to my work and development as a writer. This post is going to contain some of these lessons and experiences.\nFor starters, we\u0026rsquo;re all pretty big fans of git. As git is one of the most interesting and productive technologies that I use regularly, this is really nice. Not only does everyone live in plain text format, but they mostly use the same version control system I do. I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely had jobs and collaborations in the past few years (since I made the transition to pure text) where I\u0026rsquo;ve had to deal with .doc files, so this is a welcome change.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve long thought that working in plain text format has been a really good thing for me as a writer. In a text editor there\u0026rsquo;s only you and the text. All of the bullshit about styles and margins and the like that you are forced to contend with in \u0026ldquo;Office\u0026rdquo; software is a distraction, and so by just interacting with text, by exactly (and only) what I write in the file, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to concentrate on the production of text, leaving only \u0026ldquo;worthwhile distractions\u0026rdquo; to the writing process.\nWorking with programmers, makes this \u0026ldquo;living in plain text\u0026rdquo; thing I do, not seem quite so weird, and that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing for the collaboration but--for me, at least--it represents an old lesson about writing: use tools that you\u0026rsquo;re very comfortable with, and deal with output/production only when you\u0026rsquo;re very ready for it. Good lesson. I might have taken it to the extreme with the whole emacs thing, but it works for me, and I\u0026rsquo;m very happy with it.\nBut, using git, with other people has been a great lesson, and a great experience, and I\u0026rsquo;m getting the opportunity to use git in new ways, which have been instructive for me--both in terms of the technology, but also in terms of my writing process.\nFor instance, when ever I do a git pull (which asks the server for any new published changes and then merges them (often without help from me) with my working coppy) and see that a coworker has changed something, I tend to inspect the differences (eg. diffs) contained in the pull. Each commit (set of changes; indeed each object, but that\u0026rsquo;s tangential) in git are assigned a unique identifier (a cryptographic hash) and you can, with the following command generate a visual representation of the changes between any two objects:\ngit diff 6150726..956BC46 If you have colors turned on in git (to colorize output; only the first line affects diffs, but I find the others are nice too):\ngit config --global color.diff auto git config --global color.status auto git config --global color.branch auto This generates a nice colorized output and of all the changes between the two revisions, or points in history as specified. The diff, is just the output of the format that git uses to apply a set of changes to a base set of files so it displays a full copy of what the lines used to look like at the first point in time, and then new lines which represent what the lines look like in the second point in time, as well as contextual unchanged lines to anchor the changes to, when needed. Colorized the old content are darker (orange?) and the new content is brighter (yellow? green?), contextual anchors are in white.\nThe result is that when you\u0026rsquo;re reviewing edits you can see exactly what was changed, and what it \u0026ldquo;used to be\u0026rdquo; without needing to manually compare new and old files, and also without the risk of getting too wound up in the context.\nNot only is this the best way I\u0026rsquo;ve ever received feedback, in terms of ease, of review and clarity (when you can compare new to old, in very specific chunks, the rationale for changes is almost always evident), but also in what it teaches me about my writing. I can see what works and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, I can isolate feedback on a specific line from feedback on the entire document.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;ve only really been able to do this for a few weeks, not only do I think that it\u0026rsquo;s productive in this context, but that I think it might be an effective way for people to receive feedback and learn about writing. People involved in the polishing of prose (professional editors, writers, etc) often have all sorts of ways to trick themselves in attending to the mechanics of specific texts (on the scale of 7-10 words) stuff like reading backwards, reading paragraphs/sentences out of order. Reading from beginning to end, but reading sentences backwards, and so forth. Reviewing diffs allows you to separate big picture concerns about the narrative from structural concerns, and some how the lesson--at least for me--works.\nProgrammers, of course, use diffs regularly to \u0026ldquo;patch\u0026rdquo; code and communicate changes, and the review patches and diffs are a key part of the way programmers collaborate. I wonder if programmers learn by reviewing diffs in the same sort of way.\nThis will probably slowly develop in to a longer series of posts, but I think that\u0026rsquo;s enough for you. I have writing to do, after all :)\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-like-a-programmer/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m unique among my coworkers, in that I\u0026rsquo;m not a developer/programmer. This is a good thing, after all, because I\u0026rsquo;m the writer and not a programmer; but as a \u0026ldquo;workflow\u0026rdquo; guy and a student of software development one thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve been particularly struck by since taking this job is how well I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to collaborate with coworkers who come from a completely different background/field and furthermore how helpful this as been to my work and development as a writer. This post is going to contain some of these lessons and experiences.\nFor starters, we\u0026rsquo;re all pretty big fans of git. As git is one of the most interesting and productive technologies that I use regularly, this is really nice. Not only does everyone live in plain text format, but they mostly use the same version control system I do. I\u0026rsquo;ve definitely had jobs and collaborations in the past few years (since I made the transition to pure text) where I\u0026rsquo;ve had to deal with .","title":"writing like a programmer"},{"content":"It seems really popular these days to say, about the future of computing, that \u0026ldquo;in a few years, you\u0026rsquo;ll have a supercomputer in your pocket.\u0026rdquo;1 And it\u0026rsquo;s true: the computing power in contemporary handheld/embedded systems is truly astounding. The iPhone is a great example of this, it runs a variant \u0026ldquo;desktop operating system,\u0026rdquo; it has applications written in Objective-C, it\u0026rsquo;s a real computer (sans keyboard and a small screen). But the truth is that Andriod and Blackberries are just as technically complex. And lets not forget about how portable and powerful laptops are these days. Even netbooks, which are \u0026ldquo;underpowered,\u0026rdquo; are incredibly powerful in the grand scheme of things.\nAnd now we have the cloud, where raw computing power is accessible and cheap: I have access to an always-on quad-core system, for something like 86 cents a day. That\u0026rsquo;s crazy cheap, and the truth is that while I get a lot for 86 cents a day, I never run up against the processor limitations. Or even gotten close. Unless you\u0026rsquo;re compiling software/graphics (gaming) the chances of running into the limits of your processor for more than a few seconds here and there, are remarkably slim. The notable exception to this rule, is that the speed of USB devices is almost always processor-bound.\nAll this attention on processing power, leads to predictions about \u0026ldquo;supercomputers in your pockets,\u0026rdquo; and the slow death of desktop computing as we know it. This is, while interesting and sexy to talk about, I think it misses some crucial details that are pretty important.\nThe thing about the \u0026ldquo;supercomputers in your pocket\u0026rdquo; is that mobile gear is almost always highly specialized and task specific hardware. Sure the iPhone can do a lot of things, and it\u0026rsquo;s a good example of a \u0026ldquo;convergence\u0026rdquo; device as it combines a number or features (web browsing/email/http client/phone/media viewer) but as soon as you stray from these basic tasks, it stops.\nThere are general purpose computers in very small packages, like the Nokia Internet tablets, and the Fujitsu ultra mobile PCs, but they\u0026rsquo;ve not caught on in a big way. I think this is generally because the form factor isn\u0026rsquo;t general purpose and they\u0026rsquo;ve not yet reached the commodity prices that we\u0026rsquo;ve come to expect for our general purpose computing gear.\nSo while I think the \u0026ldquo;how we\u0026rsquo;ll use pocket-sized\u0026rdquo; supercomputers still needs to be worked, I think the assertion that computing power will continue to rise, while the size will continue to shrink, at least for a few more years. There are physical limits to Moore\u0026rsquo;s Law, but I think we have a few more years (10?) before that becomes an issue.\nThe question that I\u0026rsquo;ve been asking myself for the past few days isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;what are we going to do with new supercomputers,\u0026rdquo; but rather, \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s that box on your desktop going to be doing.\u0026rdquo;\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think we\u0026rsquo;re going to stop having non-portable computers, and indeed, as laptops and desktops have functionally converged in the last few years: the decision between getting a laptop and a desktop is mostly about economics, and \u0026ldquo;how you work.\u0026rdquo; While I do think that a large part of people\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;personal computing\u0026rdquo; going to happen on laptops, I don\u0026rsquo;t think desktops are going to just cease to exist in a few years, to be replaced by pocket-sized supercomputers.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s as if we\u0026rsquo;ve forgotten about mainframe computing while we were focused on supercomputers.\nThe traditional divide between mainframes and supercomputer is simple, while both are immensely powerful supercomputers tend to be suited to address computationally complex problems, while mainframes are designed to address comparatively simple problems on massive data-sets. Think \u0026ldquo;supercomputers are processors\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;mainframes are input/output.\u0026rdquo;\nMy contention is that as, the kinds of computing that day-to-day users of technology starts to level off in terms of computational complexity (or at least is overtaken by Moore\u0026rsquo;s Law), the mainframe metaphor becomes a more useful perspective to extend into our personal computing.\nThis is sort of the side effect of thinking about your personal computing in terms of \u0026ldquo;infrastructure\u0026rdquo;2 While we don\u0026rsquo;t need super-powerful computers to run our Notepad applications, finding better ways to isolate and run our tasks in parallel seems to make a lot of sense. From the perspective of system stability, from the perspective of resource utilization, and from the perspective of security, parallelizing functionality offers end users a lot of benefits.\nIn point of fact, we\u0026rsquo;ve already started to see this in a number of contexts. First, mutli-core/multi-processor systems are the contemporary standard for processors. Basically, we can make processors run insanely fast (4 and 5 gigahertz clock speeds, and beyond) but no one is ever going to use that much, and you get bottlenecks as processes line up to be computed. So now, rather than make insanely fast processors, (even for servers and desktops) we make a bunch of damn fast processors (2 or 2.5ghz is still pretty fast) that are all accessible in one system.\nThis is mainframe technology, not supercomputing technology.\nAnd then there\u0026rsquo;s virtualization, which is where we run multiple operating systems on a given piece of hardware. Rather than letting the operating system address all of the hardware at once as one big pool, we divide hardware up and run isolated operating system \u0026ldquo;buckets.\u0026rdquo; So rather than having to administer one system, that does everything with shared resources, and having the headache of making sure that the processes don\u0026rsquo;t inter-fear with each-other, we create a bunch of virtualized machines which are less powerful than the main system but only have a few dedicated features, and (for the most part) don\u0026rsquo;t affect each other.\nThis is mainframe technology.\nVirtualization is huge on servers (and mainframes of course,) and we\u0026rsquo;re starting to see some limited use-cases take hold on the desktop (e.g. Parallels desktop, VMware desktop/fusion), but I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of potential and future in desktop virtualization. Imagine desktop hypervisors that allow you to isolate the functions of multiple users? That allow you to isolate stable operations (eg. fileserving, media capture, backups) from specific users\u0026rsquo; operating system instances, from more volatile processes (eg. desktop applications). Furthermore, such a desktop-hypervisor would allow users to rely on stable operating systems when appropriate and use less stable (but more feature rich) operating systems on a per-task basis. There are also nifty backup and portability related benefits to running inside of brutalized containers.\nAnd that is, my friends, really flippin\u0026rsquo; cool.\nThe technology isn\u0026rsquo;t yet there. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about putting a hypervisor and a few guest operating systems on my current desktop sometime later this year. It\u0026rsquo;s a start, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably write a bit more about this soon, but in any case I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying this little change in metaphor and the kinds of potentials that it brings for very cool cyborg applications. I hope you find it similarly useful.\nAbove all, I can\u0026rsquo;t wait to see what happens.\nAdmittedly this is a bit of a straw-man premise, but it\u0026rsquo;s a nifty perception to fight against.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI wrote a series of posts a few weeks ago on the subject in three parts: one, two, and three\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-mainframe-of-the-future/","summary":"It seems really popular these days to say, about the future of computing, that \u0026ldquo;in a few years, you\u0026rsquo;ll have a supercomputer in your pocket.\u0026rdquo;1 And it\u0026rsquo;s true: the computing power in contemporary handheld/embedded systems is truly astounding. The iPhone is a great example of this, it runs a variant \u0026ldquo;desktop operating system,\u0026rdquo; it has applications written in Objective-C, it\u0026rsquo;s a real computer (sans keyboard and a small screen). But the truth is that Andriod and Blackberries are just as technically complex. And lets not forget about how portable and powerful laptops are these days. Even netbooks, which are \u0026ldquo;underpowered,\u0026rdquo; are incredibly powerful in the grand scheme of things.\nAnd now we have the cloud, where raw computing power is accessible and cheap: I have access to an always-on quad-core system, for something like 86 cents a day. That\u0026rsquo;s crazy cheap, and the truth is that while I get a lot for 86 cents a day, I never run up against the processor limitations.","title":"the mainframe of the future"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking with people recently about \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;m working on,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;ve realized two things. First, that I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to get spread thin; and second, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t really used this blog as an effective tool to track these projects and facilitate ongoing work on these projects. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to write an \u0026ldquo;ongoing projects update.\u0026rdquo; So there.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s sense in making this a \u0026ldquo;weekly feature\u0026rdquo; I think taking the opportunity to check in with you all about my projects, to mention cool things that are going on with these projects.\nThe Novel I\u0026rsquo;ve not managed to make this into the habit that I want it to be. Having totally missed my goal of finishing the draft in August, I\u0026rsquo;ve set a more tentative goal of getting it done in time for NaNoWriMo this year. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I\u0026rsquo;ll do a NaNo project this year--probably not, I\u0026rsquo;m too contrary--but it seems like a good and doable goal.\nWhat has me hung up at the moment, is I have a few scenes that I need to be written by a particular character that I\u0026rsquo;ve come to despise, not because he\u0026rsquo;s a bad character, I just find him frustrating to write. This is mostly interesting, insofar as I initially thought that he\u0026rsquo;d be the easy character to write in the story.\nDespite this hang up, I\u0026rsquo;m really quite close to being done with this monster. Three or four more chapters, and some editing across the board. Not a huge deal. I just need to do it. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot of what this Labor Day weekend has been about.\nThis Blog You\u0026rsquo;re all aware of this project, I trust. I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to keep up my \u0026ldquo;mostly daily\u0026rdquo; schedule for a long time now. Two or three years and counting. Since I\u0026rsquo;ve started the new job, and since my posting entries (if not actually writing them,) is a manual task (with Wordpress, I could queue things to Autopost). I\u0026rsquo;m not as good as I once was about getting entries posted in the morning as I would like to be. But it gets there.\nAlso, while I\u0026rsquo;m not cruising toward the A-List like I might have dreamed about when I was a teenager and getting started with this whole blogging thing, I\u0026rsquo;m actually pretty pleased with how this blog is going. Most entries evoke some sort of response that I see: on identi.ca, on facebook, or in comments. I get to have cool email conversations with you all. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased. I\u0026rsquo;m still trying to figure out how to do a little better, because I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be awesome for all of us, if there are more voices and conversations going on, but I love blogging, and I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with this project.\nCyborg Institute and Sygn System This is the project that I\u0026rsquo;ve started with deepspawn, to create a distributed social networking and \u0026ldquo;user generated database engine.\u0026rdquo; Notes and other work related to this project are starting to come together on the Cyobrg Institute Wiki, and it\u0026rsquo;s something that I put a lot of work into a few weeks ago, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really given it the kind of love in the past two weeks that its needed.\nMy list at the moment, for Sygn related projects is to do some reorganization of the wiki (the constant struggle), to announce and promote the xmpp muc for the sygn project (a chat room), to help people develop a basic reference implementation (and maybe learn some Python in the process?), and generate a few more use cases, to help folks understand the implications and possible utility of the project.\nCyborg Institute Systems Administration One of my contentions about the future (of technology specifically, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s generalizable to some extent) is that as \u0026ldquo;previously scarce resources\u0026rdquo; like data connectivity, storage space, and software, become less scarce, the one thing that will continue to have concrete value is systems administration. Having people in the world who are really good at keeping larger systems running, at making sure all of the pieces talk to each-other, at making sure the people who need technological services have the right kind of service that they need. There\u0026rsquo;s real value in that.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s a huge part of what the \u0026ldquo;Cyborg Institute\u0026rdquo; project is about. Sure there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of cyborg-related content and theorizing that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in working and developing, but really I can do that here on tychoish, what Cyborg Institute lets me (and you!) do is make this conversation much larger, it lets us work together and it allows me to help people do awesome things.\nWhile the product of this work isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly visible, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really have the ability to say \u0026ldquo;I did X, Y, and Z for CI\u0026rdquo; this week, there are a lot of little things, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s definitely a worthwhile project.\n5. `Critical Futures \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com\u0026gt;`_ `Relaunch \u0026lt;http://wiki.criticalfutures.com/\u0026gt;`_\nThis is definitely a Cyborg Institute project: it\u0026rsquo;s running on CI servers, we\u0026rsquo;re using CI tools, and I think the project--a collaborative fiction wiki--is very much one of these new technology-things that makes the whole \u0026ldquo;cyborg moment\u0026rdquo; so interesting.\nI should point out that [brush][] is largely spearheading this. I\u0026rsquo;m just doing a bit here and there, and making sure the system runs well. I\u0026rsquo;m excited about this, and I\u0026rsquo;m glad that Critical Futures is going to get some love. There\u0026rsquo;ll be some other projects of mone--the novel, and so forth--on Critical Futures as well someday, but that\u0026rsquo;s down the road I think. Good to do something here, no?\nKnitting I think it\u0026rsquo;s a good day when you can be like \u0026ldquo;You know tycho, you should watch more TV.\u0026rdquo; my current knitting project is very much a \u0026ldquo;do it whilst watching television\u0026rdquo; kind of project, and I\u0026rsquo;d very much like to be able to create a space in my day(s) to get more work on this done.\nThat seems about good for now. What are you working on? :)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ongoing-projects/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking with people recently about \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;m working on,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;ve realized two things. First, that I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to get spread thin; and second, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t really used this blog as an effective tool to track these projects and facilitate ongoing work on these projects. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to write an \u0026ldquo;ongoing projects update.\u0026rdquo; So there.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s sense in making this a \u0026ldquo;weekly feature\u0026rdquo; I think taking the opportunity to check in with you all about my projects, to mention cool things that are going on with these projects.\nThe Novel I\u0026rsquo;ve not managed to make this into the habit that I want it to be. Having totally missed my goal of finishing the draft in August, I\u0026rsquo;ve set a more tentative goal of getting it done in time for NaNoWriMo this year. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I\u0026rsquo;ll do a NaNo project this year--probably not, I\u0026rsquo;m too contrary--but it seems like a good and doable goal.","title":"Ongoing Projects"},{"content":"After a long time of intentionally avoiding tweaking my emacs file, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back into tweaking and hacking on my setup a bit in emacs land. Rather than wax philosophical about emacs and plain text, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share a few things with you all in the hopes that this will prove helpful for you.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve given some thought to publishing a git repository with my emacs files, my awesome config, and the useful parts of my bashrc files. My only hesitation is that all of these files aren\u0026rsquo;t in one repository right now, and I\u0026rsquo;d need to do some clean up to avoid publishing passwords and the like. Encouragement along this direction might be helpful in inspiring me to be a little more forthcoming in this direction.\nKeybinding \u0026ldquo;Name Spaces\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve begun reorganizing key-bindings in a standard pattern, in order to avoid collision of bindings in certain spaces. The problem with the \u0026ldquo;C-x C-[a-z]\u0026rdquo; bindings is that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get really good mnemonic bindings for whatever you\u0026rsquo;re trying to do, and there are few of them. I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to putting all of my custom bindings (mostly) under \u0026ldquo;C-c [a-z],\u0026rdquo; and then grouping them together, based on mode or function.\n(global-set-key (kbd \u0026quot;C-c o a\u0026quot;) 'org-agenda-list) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026quot;C-c o t\u0026quot;) 'org-todo-list) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026quot;C-c o p\u0026quot;) 'org-insert-property-drawer) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026quot;C-c o d\u0026quot;) 'org-date) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026quot;C-c o j\u0026quot;) 'org-journal-entry) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026quot;C-c r\u0026quot;) 'org-remember) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026quot;C-c a\u0026quot;) 'org-agenda) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026ldquo;C-c w s\u0026rdquo;) \u0026lsquo;w3m-search) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026ldquo;C-c w t\u0026rdquo;) \u0026lsquo;w3m-goto-url-new-session) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026ldquo;C-c w o\u0026rdquo;) \u0026lsquo;w3m-goto-url) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026ldquo;C-c w y\u0026rdquo;) \u0026lsquo;w3m-print-this-url) (global-set-key (kbd \u0026ldquo;C-c w l\u0026rdquo;) \u0026lsquo;w3m-print-current-url)\nYou can see here, org-mode related bindings and w3m related bindings. \u0026ldquo;C-c o\u0026rdquo; is wide open, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet found anything in that space that I\u0026rsquo;ve overwritten. Same with \u0026ldquo;C-c w\u0026rdquo;. Even though the command key-chains are a bit longer than they might be if I piled things more sporadically, I can remember them more quickly.\nOrg-journal is something I got from metajack, and I don\u0026rsquo;t use it as much as I should. Everything else is standard org or w3m functionality.\nI suppose I should make mode-specific key-bindings so that I\u0026rsquo;m not eating away global name space for mode-specific functionality, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that would make things too much clearer or easier to remember.\nAlso I really like the (kbd \u0026quot;) syntax for specifying key sequences. Much easier to read and edit.\nCustom File settings A while back I pulled my customize-set variables out of my main init-file, and gave them their own file, which means my init-file isn\u0026rsquo;t quite so long, and the variables that I\u0026rsquo;m not setting.\nNevertheless, I like to set as many variables by hand with setq just so that I can be in better touch with what settings I\u0026rsquo;m changing. This code, moves custom-set variables out of main file:\n(setq custom-file \u0026quot;~/path/to/emacs.d/custom.el\u0026quot;) (load custom-file 'noerror) Window Transparency and Font Settings At the top of my init file, I have the following four lines to set font and window transparency.\n(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(font . \u0026quot;Monaco-08\u0026quot;)) (set-default-font \u0026quot;Monaco-08\u0026quot;) (set-frame-parameter (selected-frame) 'alpha '(86 84)) (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(alpha 86 84)) Note that this depends on running a composting manager like xcompmngr, and the transparency is quite subtle. With great pleasure, running this code at the begining of the init file means that emacs\u0026rsquo; looks and behaves correctly when I start it using a plain,\nemacs --daemon command from a regular bash prompt. I\u0026rsquo;m running fairly recent (but perhaps not the actual release?) builds of emacs 23. Note that I\u0026rsquo;d had trouble getting daemonized versions of emacs to start and capture the right information about font and transparency. That seems to be resolved.\nAliases Here\u0026rsquo;s the alaises I use to make key-commands less work to type. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of a space between \u0026ldquo;creating a key binding\u0026rdquo; and just using the function from M-x Here\u0026rsquo;s the current list:\n(defalias 'wku 'w3m-print-this-url) (defalias 'wkl 'w3m-print-current-url) (defalias \u0026lsquo;afm \u0026lsquo;auto-fill-mode) (defalias \u0026lsquo;mm \u0026lsquo;markdown-mode) (defalias \u0026lsquo;rm \u0026lsquo;rst-mode) (defalias \u0026lsquo;wc \u0026lsquo;word-count) (defalias \u0026lsquo;wcr \u0026lsquo;word-count-region) (defalias \u0026lsquo;qrr \u0026lsquo;query-replace-regexp) (defalias \u0026lsquo;fs \u0026lsquo;flyspell-mode) (defalias \u0026lsquo;oa \u0026lsquo;org-agenda) (defalias \u0026lsquo;uf \u0026lsquo;unfill-region) (defalias \u0026lsquo;ss \u0026lsquo;server-start) (defalias \u0026lsquo;se \u0026lsquo;server-edit) (defalias \u0026rsquo;nf \u0026rsquo;new-frame) (defalias \u0026rsquo;eb \u0026rsquo;eval-buffer) (defalias \u0026lsquo;mbm \u0026lsquo;menu-bar-mode) (defalias \u0026lsquo;hs \u0026lsquo;hs-org/minor-mode)\nThere are a number of these that I don\u0026rsquo;t use much any more, but it\u0026rsquo;s not worth it to edit the list down.\nNew Modes A few new modes that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using\nyassnippet I\u0026rsquo;ve started using yasnippet more, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of it for managing and inserting little templates into files as I\u0026rsquo;m working. There\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of example code that I can share with you, as it just works, but I do have a couple of notes/complaints:\nI have to use C-i to expand snippets. The \u0026ldquo;tab\u0026rdquo; key doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to work to expand snippets ever. The organization of the snippets directory is absurd. I understand how the structure of the hierarchy mirros the way modes are derived from one another, and having the expansion triggers as file names also makes sense, but it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to organize things. Do people use modes that aren\u0026rsquo;t derived from \u0026ldquo;text-mode\u0026rdquo;? Are there any? There should be a \u0026ldquo;global\u0026rdquo; directory in the snippets folder (next to text-mode) where all of the files in any number of folders beneath \u0026ldquo;global\u0026rdquo; are available in all modes. It\u0026rsquo;s amazing useful, and there are some things that I need to create snippets for that I haven\u0026rsquo;t. This is on my list of things to do. w3m w3m is an external text-mode browser that emacs hackers have written a good bridge to emacs for. What this means is you get a text-mode browser that works in emacs, but it\u0026rsquo;s speedy because page rendering happens outside of emacs.\nIt works, and it\u0026rsquo;s immensely use-able, though the key-bindings are a bit hard to remember and there are too many of them to change at once without completely driving yourself crazy.\nI read a thread on the emacs-devel list a few months back about embedding something like uzbl inside of emacs (making emacs more like a window-manager) and I think the project presents an interesting possibility, but I think w3m succeeds because it makes the text of a website accessible within emacs.\nEmbedding a \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; browser in emacs, would just duplicate window manager functionality, and add complication. I think better to make a uzbl config file that was emacs-friendly, and some sort of \u0026ldquo;create emacs buffer with selected uzbl text\u0026rdquo; bridge would be nice, but anything more than that seems foolish.\nMy (few) w3m key-bindings are above.\nnxml mode With all this web-design work I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing, (eg. cyborg institute) I\u0026rsquo;ve needed to stray into using HTML and CSS modes. There\u0026rsquo;s this newer mode called nxml-mode which is delightful because it validates your html/xhtml/xml file on the fly (great!) but I\u0026rsquo;ve found it less than helpful for situations where I just have a snippet of HTML/XML in a given file, because it gets included later. Nonetheless, powerful stuff.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about it for now. There are few other things, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel ready to really explore them at this point, mostly because I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten familiar enough to know if my modifications have been useful. Muse-mode, etc.\nAny good emacs code that I should be looking at?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/useful-emacs-and-orgmode-hacks/","summary":"After a long time of intentionally avoiding tweaking my emacs file, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back into tweaking and hacking on my setup a bit in emacs land. Rather than wax philosophical about emacs and plain text, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share a few things with you all in the hopes that this will prove helpful for you.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve given some thought to publishing a git repository with my emacs files, my awesome config, and the useful parts of my bashrc files. My only hesitation is that all of these files aren\u0026rsquo;t in one repository right now, and I\u0026rsquo;d need to do some clean up to avoid publishing passwords and the like. Encouragement along this direction might be helpful in inspiring me to be a little more forthcoming in this direction.\nKeybinding \u0026ldquo;Name Spaces\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve begun reorganizing key-bindings in a standard pattern, in order to avoid collision of bindings in certain spaces. The problem with the \u0026ldquo;C-x C-[a-z]\u0026rdquo; bindings is that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get really good mnemonic bindings for whatever you\u0026rsquo;re trying to do, and there are few of them.","title":"useful emacs and org-mode hacks"},{"content":"Ways I\u0026rsquo;ve Injured Myself Recently The tip of my right index finger caring a server. 2. My left knee (recurrent, minor) dancing, probably jumping. Design flaw, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced.\n3. I have some sort of strain/dislocation of the first knuckle of my right ring finger, and its oddly sore.\nMy right shoulder, because I sleep on it funny. 5. My left wrist is occasionally stiff from typing and what not, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s sort of interesting that these 3 of the five hand-related.\nThings I would Change about my Cell Phone if I could. 1. I would be able to SSH into my cell phone, for the purpose of sending libnotify-esque notifications to the cell phone\n2. It would have a plethora of hardware keys, potentially some sort of keyboard (on a slider) and only require touch-screen interfaces when intuitive.\nI would want it to run emacs, at least to be able to check on things. I would like some sort of native terminal client on the cellphone. It would be unlocked. Objects that I would like to Combine eBook reader/music player/tablet-or-pocket computer. A tea kettle and yogurt maker. My network router and my computer. A keyboard and desk chair. The mouse (and my computer\u0026rsquo;s dependence on it) and /dev/null Things I wish I spent more time doing Knitting Reading Editing things I\u0026rsquo;ve written Spinning Being social Abilities of which I am Jealous in Others Musical talent, mostly playing the violin/viola and melodian. 2. Signing and leading songs effectively (including remembering lyrics completely).\nThe facility to function on much less sleep than I seem to require. The appetite to drink coffee without wanting to wretch. The ability to write computer programs with skill and grace. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/return-of-five-things/","summary":"Ways I\u0026rsquo;ve Injured Myself Recently The tip of my right index finger caring a server. 2. My left knee (recurrent, minor) dancing, probably jumping. Design flaw, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced.\n3. I have some sort of strain/dislocation of the first knuckle of my right ring finger, and its oddly sore.\nMy right shoulder, because I sleep on it funny. 5. My left wrist is occasionally stiff from typing and what not, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s sort of interesting that these 3 of the five hand-related.\nThings I would Change about my Cell Phone if I could. 1. I would be able to SSH into my cell phone, for the purpose of sending libnotify-esque notifications to the cell phone\n2. It would have a plethora of hardware keys, potentially some sort of keyboard (on a slider) and only require touch-screen interfaces when intuitive.\nI would want it to run emacs, at least to be able to check on things.","title":"return of five things"},{"content":"I began to get to this in my post on health care and cooperatives, and governmental reform but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to get to this point in its own post.\nI guess what I\u0026rsquo;ve been gunning at (whether or not I realized it) is, \u0026ldquo;the shape of social/political change\u0026rdquo; in the contemporary world. What does change look like? What mechanisms can we use to create change? How do the existing ways that we think of revolutionary change fail to address the world we live in?\nSamuel R. Delany, in his essay(s) Time Square Red, Time Square Blue presents what he calls \u0026ldquo;Contact\u0026rdquo; a potential instrument of social reform, of social \u0026ldquo;activism.\u0026rdquo; Contact, boils down to unstructured, seemingly random, intermingling of people in urban contexts. He argues for direct relationships, for an increase in cross-class cross-race relationships, by avoiding \u0026ldquo;gentrification\u0026rdquo; and social segregation. And he illustrates the efficacy of these methods with a number of pretty effective examples.\nWhen I read this the first time, as well as the second and third, I thought remember thinking \u0026ldquo;wow, that was the first social critique I\u0026rsquo;ve read that not just presents an overwhelming critique of a cultural phenomena (gentrification, the sequestering of public sexuality) but that also presents a mechanism for social change.\u0026rdquo;\nThe problem with presenting mechanisms to promote social and political change is that the details are incredibly difficult to clarify, and it\u0026rsquo;s easy to present a valid critique without presenting an idea of how to effect change. It\u0026rsquo;s easy to call for action, and leave the nature of that action up to the in-the-moment activists. It\u0026rsquo;s far too easy to point out a social problem, even a superstructural issue, and then default to the methodology of previous generations (and issues,) to attempt to solve the problem. Here\u0026rsquo;s an example:\nWe see a lot of \u0026ldquo;recursion to Marxist-inspired methodology,\u0026rdquo; without much (I\u0026rsquo;d say) thinking about the industrial/material implications of Marx. This happens, to varying degrees in a number of areas: I think in some more casual Marxist-Feminism, in (some) environmental movements, and other movements that present \u0026ldquo;revolutionary social/political\u0026rdquo; critique. Revolutionary moments are indeed important times for some renegotiation of social values and systems, but it\u0026rsquo;s too easy to say \u0026ldquo;after the revolution\u0026hellip;.\u0026rdquo; and get all misty eyed, and forget that the critique at hand has very little to do with the disconnect between the ownership of resources, labor, and social power.\nFurthermore, I think there are a lot of contemporary civil rights movements (Gay and Lesbian, Women, Immigrant) that refer back to the American Civil Rights Movement in a way that ignores the complexities of the current issue, or the complexity of the earlier issue. In any case, interlude over, I think I\u0026rsquo;m gunning for a way to get past this trap of casting contemporary struggles in the methodological terms of past struggles.\nMy contention is that in the next, 20 or 30 years1 the biggest force of social change won\u0026rsquo;t be (exactly:) the mustering of revolutionary regiments, it won\u0026rsquo;t be about who we elect to legislatures and executive offices, it won\u0026rsquo;t be about where we march; but rather, about the communities we form, about the relationships we develop in these communities.\nBut tycho, I know you\u0026rsquo;re interested in communities, but *revolution?*\nIndeed, it\u0026rsquo;s a stretch, but here\u0026rsquo;s the argument: when people get together, we make things. We see this in free software, we see this in start-ups, we see this in fan communities on the Internet. This production, is going to be an increasingly important part of our economic, political, and social activity, and the conversations the cross-class contact that occurs when people get together to work on something of common interest. Communities are the substrate for the transmission of ethical systems, and are the main way in which ideologies are transmitted to people. This is all incredibly important.\nBut tycho, materialism isn\u0026rsquo;t dead, you\u0026rsquo;re ignoring *things* which continue to have great importance!\nTechnology won\u0026rsquo;t make material things matter less at least in the way that this statement assumes. What technology will almost certainly do is make it possible for fewer people to do the work that once required required great infrastructure and capital outlay. Technology will allow us to coordinate collaboration over greater distances. Technology will lower the impact of large economies of scale on the viability of industries (smaller production runs, etc.) The end result is the things that take huge multi- and trans-national institutions (corporations) to produce today, could potentially be the domain of much smaller cooperatives.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll realize, I think only somewhat after the fact, that the world has changed, and all the things that we used to think \u0026ldquo;mattered\u0026rdquo; don\u0026rsquo;t really. And I think, largely, we can\u0026rsquo;t plan for this. The \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; ahead of is, is to make things do work with other people, to collaborate and draw connections across traditional boundaries (nations, class, race, discipline, gender, skill sets), in the present and let the future attend to itself. These kinds of ad-hoc institutions are already forming, are already making things. And that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly cool.\nThoughts? I need to improve the history section of this, a good bit, and come up with more examples of the kinds of communities that exemplify this kind of organization, but this is a start.\nThese are rough dates, lets just say \u0026ldquo;until the singularity hits.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/revolutionary-communities/","summary":"I began to get to this in my post on health care and cooperatives, and governmental reform but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to get to this point in its own post.\nI guess what I\u0026rsquo;ve been gunning at (whether or not I realized it) is, \u0026ldquo;the shape of social/political change\u0026rdquo; in the contemporary world. What does change look like? What mechanisms can we use to create change? How do the existing ways that we think of revolutionary change fail to address the world we live in?\nSamuel R. Delany, in his essay(s) Time Square Red, Time Square Blue presents what he calls \u0026ldquo;Contact\u0026rdquo; a potential instrument of social reform, of social \u0026ldquo;activism.\u0026rdquo; Contact, boils down to unstructured, seemingly random, intermingling of people in urban contexts. He argues for direct relationships, for an increase in cross-class cross-race relationships, by avoiding \u0026ldquo;gentrification\u0026rdquo; and social segregation. And he illustrates the efficacy of these methods with a number of pretty effective examples.","title":"Revolutionary Communities"},{"content":"This post is in response to two things that I\u0026rsquo;ve observed recently:\n1. A Misinformed Critique of the Debian Project\n2. The largely unfair dismissal of free software/open source/hackers on the grounds of purported zealotry.\nDebian, Critiqued The above linked article, presents a number of critiques, leveled at the Debian project. While these complaints with user experience are valid, I was left with a serious, as we say on the Internet \u0026ldquo;WTF\u0026rdquo; moment. Read the article if you haven\u0026rsquo;t already before you get to my response, if you\u0026rsquo;re so inclined.\nAlso I\u0026rsquo;d like to challenge the Editors of that website to exercise a little more digression in what they publish in the future.\nMy response:\n1. Stable releases of Debian are for the most part not intended to be run as desktop operating systems. The software in Debian Lenny is, at this moment nearly two years old. That\u0026rsquo;s fine (and even desirable) for a server, but most users want things that are a little more up to date than that. This is why we have distributions like Ubuntu, which manages to walk a much better line between stable (and benefits from the efforts of Debian) and current.\n2. It\u0026rsquo;s possible to install Debian packages that aren\u0026rsquo;t contained in the repository, or provided in older versions of the operating system. Download the package with wget and then use dpkg -i [package-file].deb. There may be GUI tools that support this. While we might like to have Linux systems for \u0026ldquo;new comers\u0026rdquo; to the platform that don\u0026rsquo;t require using the command line, Debian stable isn\u0026rsquo;t one of these operating systems.\n3. Installing fonts on most systems is usually as simple as putting the files in /usr/share/fonts or $HOME/.fonts and and running fc-cache -f. The complainer focuses a great deal on the absence of a familiar font management program (which appears to be a command line tool that exists in Ubuntu 9.04 which is a \u0026ldquo;newer\u0026rdquo; system than Lenny).\nI still don\u0026rsquo;t see how \u0026ldquo;contempt\u0026rdquo; is the right word, to describe the fact that a massive project that is the result of a loose organization of hundreds of people, failed the address a few specific needs of a user using the system in a non-standard/non-recommended pattern qualifies as \u0026ldquo;contempt for users.\u0026rdquo;\nAs it stands it sort of feels like the author is attempting to stir up controversy by attacking a historical weak spot, and stretching the bounds of reasonable criticism in the process. I think editors of any publication should be above this sort of thing. thumbs down.\nDismissal of Free Software on the Grounds of Zealotry We see this a lot, and I\u0026rsquo;m kind of sick of it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve seen a lot of people--who actually agree with almost every tenant of the most \u0026ldquo;ideologically pure\u0026rdquo; free software advocates--dismiss version 3 of the GPL, or RMS, or the FSF for being \u0026ldquo;too radical,\u0026rdquo; or obsessive, or \u0026ldquo;communist,\u0026rdquo; which is both intensely interesting and intensely troubling. It\u0026rsquo;s often in the form of \u0026ldquo;I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t say that like RMS,\u0026rdquo; or some such.\nFor starters, I think its interesting to note the prevalence with which \u0026ldquo;communist\u0026rdquo; is used as a dismissal of the \u0026ldquo;Free Software\u0026rdquo; movement, particularly because while there is a very vague \u0026ldquo;anti-corporations\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;anti-trust\u0026rdquo; vein in the free software world, in point of fact the biggest \u0026ldquo;big picture political\u0026rdquo; ideology around is a very ad hoc libertarianism. The \u0026ldquo;communist\u0026rdquo; jab is, probably more at the sort of heavy-handed ideological positionally of the \u0026ldquo;copy left\u0026rdquo; movement. Furthermore, I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably clear that Free software as we know it today wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be possible without commercial interests, input and, energies, and resources.\nAnd yet. Free software/open-source, gets red baited. Interesting. And disappointing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/free-software-misunderstood/","summary":"This post is in response to two things that I\u0026rsquo;ve observed recently:\n1. A Misinformed Critique of the Debian Project\n2. The largely unfair dismissal of free software/open source/hackers on the grounds of purported zealotry.\nDebian, Critiqued The above linked article, presents a number of critiques, leveled at the Debian project. While these complaints with user experience are valid, I was left with a serious, as we say on the Internet \u0026ldquo;WTF\u0026rdquo; moment. Read the article if you haven\u0026rsquo;t already before you get to my response, if you\u0026rsquo;re so inclined.\nAlso I\u0026rsquo;d like to challenge the Editors of that website to exercise a little more digression in what they publish in the future.\nMy response:\n1. Stable releases of Debian are for the most part not intended to be run as desktop operating systems. The software in Debian Lenny is, at this moment nearly two years old. That\u0026rsquo;s fine (and even desirable) for a server, but most users want things that are a little more up to date than that.","title":"Free Software Misunderstood"},{"content":"This is I think part of a \u0026ldquo;phase two\u0026rdquo; of a series of articles I wrote a few months ago about political economies, about corporate structures, about \u0026ldquo;hacker centric\u0026rdquo; business models. In that vein of thought, I suppose this post was inevitable.\nMy argument, in \u0026ldquo;phase one\u0026rdquo; was that big \u0026ldquo;corporations\u0026rdquo; were poorly constituted to develop sustainable business models, to act in the public interest, and to further the best interests of their employees and customers. I made the argument that we needed structures in corporate law (and in culture at large) to recognize \u0026ldquo;co-operative\u0026rdquo; (coops) organizations that promoted organic self-organization, and more nimble institutions that could participate in \u0026ldquo;authentic economic exchange.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been having a lot of conversations in the past few weeks that have revolved around the current progress of the health-care \u0026ldquo;reform\u0026rdquo; process in America, and I find that I keep coming to the same conclusion:\nThe rising costs of health care in the United States, is largely due to the overhead imposed by the insurance industry. Both in the increased bureaucracy that service providers have to endure (so service providers raise their fees to cover this cost,) and secondly in the form of the insurance companies\u0026rsquo; own profit margin.\nAs a result, I\u0026rsquo;ve become convinced that the problem with rising health care costs is the insurance companies themselves and that any scheme that sees legitimacy in attempting to address \u0026ldquo;the health care problem\u0026rdquo; by taking the interests of the insurance companies as being integral to the solution, rather than the root of the problem has already failed to address the problem at hand.\nWhat I\u0026rsquo;ve been saying, is we need to work backwards through this problem. The prevailing logic seems to be to figure out how much procedures cost, how much we as \u0026ldquo;clients\u0026rdquo; need to pay, and how much our employer/the government can afford based on those projections, and then how much we have to pony up to cover the gap. I think it makes much more sense to figure out how much people (doctors, nurses, technicians, clinical providers, etc.) need, how much supplies cost (lab work, supplies, chemicals, physical plant things,) include some fringe expenses (e.g. educational expenses, preventative outlay, technological infrastructure), and then figure out how to pay for these costs: co-pays, tax funding, health care trusts. That\u0026rsquo;s at least a viable solution.\nWith the base expenses taken care of, providers are more free to organize in complementary groups, in co-operatives that provide various kinds of general purpose and centralized services. Alliances can be formed to distribute clerical and management responsibility, on smaller scales. Makes sense.\nGood luck in seeing that happen.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/health-care-cooperatives/","summary":"This is I think part of a \u0026ldquo;phase two\u0026rdquo; of a series of articles I wrote a few months ago about political economies, about corporate structures, about \u0026ldquo;hacker centric\u0026rdquo; business models. In that vein of thought, I suppose this post was inevitable.\nMy argument, in \u0026ldquo;phase one\u0026rdquo; was that big \u0026ldquo;corporations\u0026rdquo; were poorly constituted to develop sustainable business models, to act in the public interest, and to further the best interests of their employees and customers. I made the argument that we needed structures in corporate law (and in culture at large) to recognize \u0026ldquo;co-operative\u0026rdquo; (coops) organizations that promoted organic self-organization, and more nimble institutions that could participate in \u0026ldquo;authentic economic exchange.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been having a lot of conversations in the past few weeks that have revolved around the current progress of the health-care \u0026ldquo;reform\u0026rdquo; process in America, and I find that I keep coming to the same conclusion:\nThe rising costs of health care in the United States, is largely due to the overhead imposed by the insurance industry.","title":"health care co-operatives"},{"content":"In my post against the venture capital model I think one key question that I think I failed to answer is \u0026ldquo;If we do away with venture capital, where does innovation happen?\u0026rdquo; This post locates a number of potentials answers to this question.\n1. Innovation happens in academia and research-oriented institutions. This is where innovation has often happened, and it makes sense: you get smart driven people together and you give them resources and you say learn about the world, and see what new things you can make and think that haven\u0026rsquo;t been made and thought of before. The problem is that research is hard to fund and support, and the Academy is often drawn toward the other great role it fulfills in our society (education).\n2. Innovation happens in external communities. Red Hat, and Sun both externalize innovation via the Fedora Project and Open Solaris projects. Many web-development consultancies externalize their innovation to Open Source projects like Ruby on Rails, and Drupal. It\u0026rsquo;s a pooling of research and development via externalization, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s a trend that we\u0026rsquo;ll probably begin to see more of.\n3. Innovation will happen during 20% time. Google was famous for doing this, initially and I think it\u0026rsquo;s something that we don\u0026rsquo;t hear much of as corporate purses begin to tighten as maximum productivity reappears as the leading way to save corporate business models (See, flawed system,) but I think the concept that some measure of unstructured time will lead to innovation is generally a sound concept.\n4. Innovation, start-ups, the same way that they are formulated now, except without venture capital, so that innovation still happens in start-ups, but business plans will have to be focused on sustainable growth, scaling practices, and profitability. This shifts the focus of start-ups to think about \u0026ldquo;how do we implement this cool idea in a way that will work,\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;what would happen if we did this cool thing.\u0026rdquo; Seems a productive nearly-paradigm shift.\nOther ideas?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/where-innovation-happens-part-two/","summary":"In my post against the venture capital model I think one key question that I think I failed to answer is \u0026ldquo;If we do away with venture capital, where does innovation happen?\u0026rdquo; This post locates a number of potentials answers to this question.\n1. Innovation happens in academia and research-oriented institutions. This is where innovation has often happened, and it makes sense: you get smart driven people together and you give them resources and you say learn about the world, and see what new things you can make and think that haven\u0026rsquo;t been made and thought of before. The problem is that research is hard to fund and support, and the Academy is often drawn toward the other great role it fulfills in our society (education).\n2. Innovation happens in external communities. Red Hat, and Sun both externalize innovation via the Fedora Project and Open Solaris projects. Many web-development consultancies externalize their innovation to Open Source projects like Ruby on Rails, and Drupal.","title":"Where Innovation Happens, Part Two"},{"content":"I read this article by Joel Spoolsky about the first dot-com bust and it help crystallized a series of thoughts about the role of venture capital in the development of technology and software, particularly of Internet technologies. Give it a shot. Also, I think Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Other People\u0026rsquo;s Money,\u0026rdquo; is a helpful contributor to this train of thought.\nThe question I find myself asking myself is: to what extent is the current development of technology--particularly networked technology--shaped by the demands of the venture capital market? And of course, what kind of alternative business models exist for new technologies?\nI guess I should back up and list the problems I have with the VC model. And by VC model I mean private investment firms that invest large sums of money in \u0026ldquo;start up\u0026rdquo; companies. Those issues are:\nBreaking even, even in--say--five years, is exceptionally difficult from a numbers perspective, let alone turning a profit of any note. This is largely because VC funding provides huge sums of money (it is after all really hard to give away 20 billion a year in 60-120k a year tops.) and so seed sums are larger than they need to be, and this has a cascade effect on the way the business and technology develops, particularly in unsustainable ways. VC-funded start-ups favor proprietary software/technologies, because the payoff is bigger up front, which is often the case. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to make the argument that you need seed money for a larger, more slow moving product\u0026hellip; Small and quick seem to work better. The VC-cycle of boom and bust (which is sort of part and parcel with plain-old-capitalism) means that technology development booms and busts: so that a lot of projects tank when the market crashes, and that the projects that get funded during the booms are (probably mostly) not selected for their technological merit. VC firms tend to be very responsive to fads and similar trends in the market. (e.g. dot-com bubble, web 2.0, Linux in the mid nineties, biotech stuff, etc.) which means that VC firms generate a great deal of artificial competition in these markets, which disperses efforts needlessly, without (as near as I can tell) improving the quality of software developed (eg. in the microblogging space, for example, the \u0026ldquo;first one out of the gate,\u0026rdquo; twitter, \u0026ldquo;won\u0026rdquo; without apparent regard for quality or feature set.) Venture capital funding provides outfits and enterprising individuals with the resources for \u0026ldquo;capital outlay\u0026rdquo; and initial research-and-development costs, and in doing so fills an economic niche that is otherwise non-existent, and this is a good thing indeed. At the same time I can\u0026rsquo;t help but wonder if the goals an interests of venture capitalists aren\u0026rsquo;t--in some ways--directly at odds with the technology that they aim to develop.\nI also continue to question the ongoing role of this kind of \u0026ldquo;funding structure\u0026rdquo; (for lack of a better term). I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty clear that the effect of continuing technological development is the fact that the required \u0026ldquo;capital outlay\u0026rdquo; of any given start up is falling like a rock as advanced technology is available at commodity-prices (eg. VPSs, Lulu.com), as open source software tightens development cycles (eg. Ruby on Rails, JQuery). Both of these trends, in combination with the long-standing problems with VC funding, means that I think it\u0026rsquo;s high time we ask some fairly serious questions about the development of this technology. I\u0026rsquo;ll end with the question at the forefront of my thinking on the subject:\nWhere does (and can) innovation and development happen outside of the context of venture-capital funded start ups in the technology world?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/venture-capital-and-software/","summary":"I read this article by Joel Spoolsky about the first dot-com bust and it help crystallized a series of thoughts about the role of venture capital in the development of technology and software, particularly of Internet technologies. Give it a shot. Also, I think Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Other People\u0026rsquo;s Money,\u0026rdquo; is a helpful contributor to this train of thought.\nThe question I find myself asking myself is: to what extent is the current development of technology--particularly networked technology--shaped by the demands of the venture capital market? And of course, what kind of alternative business models exist for new technologies?\nI guess I should back up and list the problems I have with the VC model. And by VC model I mean private investment firms that invest large sums of money in \u0026ldquo;start up\u0026rdquo; companies. Those issues are:\nBreaking even, even in--say--five years, is exceptionally difficult from a numbers perspective, let alone turning a profit of any note.","title":"venture capital and software"},{"content":"One of the aspects of \u0026ldquo;BloggingFail\u0026rdquo;1 during the most recent technology/new media bubble, is the emergence of \u0026ldquo;blog post formulas,\u0026rdquo; which are basic post formats that people use to provide structure to a post, and produce content in a way that\u0026rsquo;s more readable for casual visitors, and better for search engines.\nInterestingly, not all of these formats are as bad as the BlogFail that they helped create, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been interested in collecting/creating a few new and different formats for blog posts. This is a collection of those post templates.\nThe \u0026ldquo;N Things Post\u0026rdquo; This is big, and very mainstream we see this a lot as filler, and I think it grows out of the kinds of articles you see on news stands. Basically the gimmick (and I think it works) is that it promises a post that will be easy to read, provide information in clear ways, and won\u0026rsquo;t encumber a collection of information with complicated rhetoric.\nIt works, there was a long time when digg was filled with \u0026ldquo;N Things posts\u0026rdquo; of dubious merit. Having said that, it\u0026rsquo;s a great format for presenting some kinds of information.\nTip: While we\u0026rsquo;re at it, it helps if the N is a prime number (eg. 5, 7, or 11 make good Ns for N Things Posts)\nThe RedMonk Interview This is mostly Stephen O\u0026rsquo;Grady\u0026rsquo;s invention, though I\u0026rsquo;ve seen it elsewhere. The basic idea is that you ask yourself a bunch of questions and then answer them yourself.\nWhile this might sound contrite by my description, the posts that result are often quite successful at communicating information. In a sort of not-very-subtle way, you\u0026rsquo;re able to frame your discussion by communicating to your reader what questions you think are the most important. It again wins by stripping away potentially complex and linear rhetoric, and lets you sort of jumpstart the conversation that inevitably follows.\nThe Synthetic Review I\u0026rsquo;ve started doing this more, and it\u0026rsquo;s a form I\u0026rsquo;ve totally yanked from Academic journals and other similar sorts of outlets. Basically, you take two or three articles--potentially related, sometimes not--put links to them at the top of the post and then respond to each post and to the juxtaposition created by putting the links together in one post.\nThe questions I (try to) ask myself are both \u0026ldquo;what do I think of each of these articles,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;what would these articles say about each other.\u0026rdquo;\nThe Pattern/Tutorial This is the \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s how to do something\u0026rdquo; post. We see this in a lot of genres, from knitting, to technology, to cooking and back again. These posts tend to be both extremely popular and successful, but they are also quite useful to readers, new and old.\nWhen I got into blogging, we were much closer to the \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; end of the spectrum (as a community), but I think the transition to being about providing/creating value is something that\u0026rsquo;s really emerged in blogging in the last ten years, in part because of the prevalence of a class of posts like this. So there you have it.\nThis is, in my estimation, what happened as a result of the hype around \u0026ldquo;new media,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;social media,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;search engine optimization,\u0026rdquo; that resulted in an explosion in the number of blogs between 2006 and 2009. Blogs which are mostly designed to generate advertising revenue, rather than stimulate useful conversation. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that there\u0026rsquo;s nothing good out there, but I think we\u0026rsquo;ve all come across blogs that fall into this category, and it\u0026rsquo;s always apparent. In my weaker moments, I call it the ProBlogger phenomena.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/blogging-forms/","summary":"One of the aspects of \u0026ldquo;BloggingFail\u0026rdquo;1 during the most recent technology/new media bubble, is the emergence of \u0026ldquo;blog post formulas,\u0026rdquo; which are basic post formats that people use to provide structure to a post, and produce content in a way that\u0026rsquo;s more readable for casual visitors, and better for search engines.\nInterestingly, not all of these formats are as bad as the BlogFail that they helped create, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been interested in collecting/creating a few new and different formats for blog posts. This is a collection of those post templates.\nThe \u0026ldquo;N Things Post\u0026rdquo; This is big, and very mainstream we see this a lot as filler, and I think it grows out of the kinds of articles you see on news stands. Basically the gimmick (and I think it works) is that it promises a post that will be easy to read, provide information in clear ways, and won\u0026rsquo;t encumber a collection of information with complicated rhetoric.","title":"Blogging Forms"},{"content":"I may be a huge geek and a hacker type, but I\u0026rsquo;m a writer and reader first, and although while I\u0026rsquo;m blathering on about my setup it might seem like all I do is tweak my systems, the writing and reading are really more \u0026ldquo;my thing.\u0026rdquo;\nI wrote that sentence a few weeks ago, and I\u0026rsquo;ve written a great many more sentences since then, but I\u0026rsquo;ve felt that that sentence needs some more exploration, particularly because while it seems so obvious and integrated into what I do from behind the keyboard, I think it bares some explanation for those of you playing along at home.\nWhat \u0026ldquo;I do\u0026rdquo; in the world, is write. And that\u0026rsquo;s pretty clear to me, and has only gotten more clear in the last few years/months. There are a couple of important facts about what \u0026ldquo;being a writer\u0026rdquo; means to me on a \u0026ldquo;how I work\u0026rdquo; on a day to day basis. They are:\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a certain level of writing output that\u0026rsquo;s possible in a day, that I sometimes achieve, but it\u0026rsquo;s not sustainable. I can (and do) do the binge thing--and that has it\u0026rsquo;s place--but I can\u0026rsquo;t get up, pound out two thousand or more words every day on a few projects and go to bed happy. Doesn\u0026rsquo;t work like that.\nGetting to write begets more writing, and it\u0026rsquo;s largely transitive. If I write a few hundred words of emails to blog reader, collaborators, and listservs in the morning, what happens in the afternoon is often more cogent than if I spend the morning checking twitter.\nWriting is always a conversation, between the writer and other writers, between the writer and the reader, between the writer and future writers. I find it very difficult to write, even the most mundane things, without reading the extant discourse on the subject.\nWriting is an experimental process. I\u0026rsquo;ve said at work a number of times, \u0026ldquo;you can\u0026rsquo;t edit something that isn\u0026rsquo;t there,\u0026rdquo; and in a very real sense, it is hard to really know \u0026ldquo;what you want\u0026rdquo; until you see the words on the page. Written language is like that I suppose. That\u0026rsquo;s what the blog is about, I guess.\nIdeas aren\u0026rsquo;t real until they\u0026rsquo;re written down. I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a Platonist, I guess, and I think writing things down really helps clarify things, it helps point out the logical flaws in an argument, and it makes it possible for other people to commend and expand on the work that you\u0026rsquo;ve done. That\u0026rsquo;s a huge part of why I blog. It\u0026rsquo;s very much not publication in the sense that I\u0026rsquo;ve created something new and I\u0026rsquo;ve finished and I\u0026rsquo;m ready for other to consider it. Rather, I blog what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about, I use the blog to think about things.\nThough I think it\u0026rsquo;s not clear to me (or to you) at this point, I\u0026rsquo;m very much in the middle of a larger project at the nexus of open source software communities, political economies, and units of authentic social organization. The work on free software that I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging, the stuff about economics, the stuff about co-ops. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how that\u0026rsquo;s all going to come together, but I\u0026rsquo;m working on it. Now, four months into it, it\u0026rsquo;s beginning to be clear to me that this is all one project, but it certainly never started that way.\nThe technology that I write about is something that I obviously think has merit on it\u0026rsquo;s own terms--hence the Cyborg Institute Project--but it\u0026rsquo;s also very true that I use technology in order to enable me to write more effectively, to limit distractions, to connect with readers and colleagues more effectively, to read things more efficiently. Technology, hacking, is mostly a means to an end.\nAnd I think that\u0026rsquo;s a really useful lesson.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-reading/","summary":"I may be a huge geek and a hacker type, but I\u0026rsquo;m a writer and reader first, and although while I\u0026rsquo;m blathering on about my setup it might seem like all I do is tweak my systems, the writing and reading are really more \u0026ldquo;my thing.\u0026rdquo;\nI wrote that sentence a few weeks ago, and I\u0026rsquo;ve written a great many more sentences since then, but I\u0026rsquo;ve felt that that sentence needs some more exploration, particularly because while it seems so obvious and integrated into what I do from behind the keyboard, I think it bares some explanation for those of you playing along at home.\nWhat \u0026ldquo;I do\u0026rdquo; in the world, is write. And that\u0026rsquo;s pretty clear to me, and has only gotten more clear in the last few years/months. There are a couple of important facts about what \u0026ldquo;being a writer\u0026rdquo; means to me on a \u0026ldquo;how I work\u0026rdquo; on a day to day basis.","title":"On Reading and Writing"},{"content":"I just wanted to post something to point out that I\u0026rsquo;ve updated my about page and I think you might enjoy having a look. I always do enjoy reading other peoples\u0026rsquo;. Also another question:\nHow are you all feeling about the archives of this site? I\u0026rsquo;ve been slow on the uptake with regards to updating tychoish.com\u0026rsquo;s new archive system. Which makes it sound as if I have something in the works, when really all I did was grep through the archives and got lists of posts that seemed relevant to a couple of key topics.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not terribly keen on just throwing up an archive with links to everything, becuase there are probably getting close to 1400 entries, and I think not all of them are particularly relevant or interesting. So I guess the question is: what do you find most useful in terms of website archives, and what format works the best for you? What do you want me to do?\nAlso, I think we\u0026rsquo;re slowly creeping up on 600,000 words in the blog, only a month or two more, I think.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/newer-about-page/","summary":"I just wanted to post something to point out that I\u0026rsquo;ve updated my about page and I think you might enjoy having a look. I always do enjoy reading other peoples\u0026rsquo;. Also another question:\nHow are you all feeling about the archives of this site? I\u0026rsquo;ve been slow on the uptake with regards to updating tychoish.com\u0026rsquo;s new archive system. Which makes it sound as if I have something in the works, when really all I did was grep through the archives and got lists of posts that seemed relevant to a couple of key topics.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not terribly keen on just throwing up an archive with links to everything, becuase there are probably getting close to 1400 entries, and I think not all of them are particularly relevant or interesting. So I guess the question is: what do you find most useful in terms of website archives, and what format works the best for you?","title":"new about page"},{"content":"For a few days last week, in between the time that I wrote the Personal Desktop post and when I posed it yesterday, I had a little personal computing saga:\n1. One of my monitors developed a little defect. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to describe it, but the color depth suffered a bit and there was this flicker and I really noticed it. It\u0026rsquo;s not major and I probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have noticed it, except I look at a very nice screen all day at work and I had a working display right next to it, I saw every little flicker.\n2. I decided to pull the second monitor, and just go back to one monitor. While I like the \u0026ldquo;bunches of screens\u0026rdquo; approach, and think it has merit, particularly in tiling environments, I also think that I work pretty well on one screen, and with so many virtual desktops, it\u0026rsquo;s no great loss. Not being distracted by the flicker is better by far.\n3. I pulled the second monitor and bam! the computer wouldn\u0026rsquo;t come back from the reboot. Shit. No error beeps, nothing past the bios splash screen. No USB support. Everything plugged in. Shit.\n4. I let things sit for a few days. I was slamed with stuff in other areas of my life, and I just couldn\u0026rsquo;t cope with this. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t help that I really like to avoid messing with hardware if I can at all help it. Fellow geeks are big on building custom hardware, but the truth is that my needs are pretty minimal and I\u0026rsquo;d rather leave it up the to the pros.\n5. On Friday, I sat down with it, pulled the video card that I\u0026rsquo;d put in it when I got the machine (an old nvidia 7200 series), and I unplugged the hard drives and futzed with the ram, and after re-seating the RAM it worked. I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining, and I figure it was just some sort of fluke as I jostled the case.\n6. So now I\u0026rsquo;m back, with one monitor, no other problems have been fixed from the last post, but I can live with that.\nAs I was fretting with the implications of having a computer die on me like this, and thinking about my future computing trajectory. I realized that my current set up was deployed (as it were) under a number of different assumptions about the way I use computers. I got the desktop with the extra monitors when I was starting a series of remote jobs and needed more resources than I could really expect from my previous setup (a single macbook.) I also, in light of this downgraded my laptop to something smaller and portable that was good for short term tasks, and adding mobility to my setup, but that really didn\u0026rsquo;t work as my only computer for more than a day or two.\nNow things look different. I\u0026rsquo;m not doing the same kind of remote work that I got the desktop for, and I have a killer machine at work that I\u0026rsquo;m only using a portion of (in a VM, no less). I have a VPS server \u0026ldquo;in the cloud\u0026rdquo; that hosts a lot of the \u0026ldquo;always on\u0026rdquo; infrastructural tasks that I needed from my desktop when I first got it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the solution is. Make the desktop at home more \u0026ldquo;server-y\u0026rdquo; (media files, downloading stuff + writing) exchange the laptop at some point for: a 15\u0026quot; notebook that would be my primary machine--particularly useful for long weekend trips, un/conferences and so forth, and some sort of small netbook-class device, for day-to-day portability.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a thought. Anyway, on to more important thoughts.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/personal-desktop-2/","summary":"For a few days last week, in between the time that I wrote the Personal Desktop post and when I posed it yesterday, I had a little personal computing saga:\n1. One of my monitors developed a little defect. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to describe it, but the color depth suffered a bit and there was this flicker and I really noticed it. It\u0026rsquo;s not major and I probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have noticed it, except I look at a very nice screen all day at work and I had a working display right next to it, I saw every little flicker.\n2. I decided to pull the second monitor, and just go back to one monitor. While I like the \u0026ldquo;bunches of screens\u0026rdquo; approach, and think it has merit, particularly in tiling environments, I also think that I work pretty well on one screen, and with so many virtual desktops, it\u0026rsquo;s no great loss.","title":"personal desktop 2"},{"content":"I wrote a series of posts about setting up my new work computer as a way to avoid blathering on and on about how the movers lost the cushions for my couch, and other assorted minutia that seem to dominate my attention. What these posts didn\u0026rsquo;t talk about were what I was doing for \u0026ldquo;tychoish\u0026rdquo; and related computing.\nAbout a week and some change, before I moved, I packed up my desktop computer and started using my laptop full time. It\u0026rsquo;s small, portable, and sufficient, if not particularly speedy.\nI can do everything with the laptop (a ThinkPad x41t, which is a 2005-vintage 12\u0026quot; tablet) that I can do on any other computer I use, and while I often prefer it because small screen means that it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to focus intently on writing one thing at a time. This, inversely, means that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work very well for research intensive work, where I need to switch between contexts regularly. It\u0026rsquo;s a fair trade off, and I did OK for weeks.\nBut then, having been in town for two and a half weeks, I decided it was time to break down and get my personal desktop setup and working. And it\u0026rsquo;s amazing. The thing, works just as well as it always has (which is pretty good,) and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a computer at home that I can do serious writing on, and the extra screen space is just perfect. I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to be much more productive and comfortable with my own projects since this began.\nThere are some things that I need to address with this computer, that have been queuing up. In the spirit of posting my todo lists for the world to see\u0026hellip;\nI need to get a new keyboard. My \u0026ldquo;fancy\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Happy Hacking Lite 2\u0026rdquo; keyboard is at work, as I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable with it, I do a lot of writing at work, and I set up that keyboard first (and the current default Mac keyboard sucks.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking of either, getting another Happy Hacking keyboard, or more likely at this point, getting a das keybaord ultimate because how could I turn down blank keys and variable-pressure mechanical switch keys. And writing is what I do, so totally worth it.\nI need to install Arch on this computer. I feel like cruft is beginning to accumulate here, I\u0026rsquo;ve never quite been happy with the ubutnu experience, and there are some things that I can\u0026rsquo;t get to work right (namely mounting of USB-mass storage devices) My concerns are that getting dual monitors setup on this box was a royal pain. But that might have been ubuntu related. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure.\nMy current thought is that I\u0026rsquo;ll buy a new (small) hard drive (eg. 80 gigs) to run a clean operating system install on (arch) and then use the current drive as storage for the stuff that\u0026rsquo;s already there (music, video). But I might just get a larger additional drive and do it in reverse. I dunno. The current situation isn\u0026rsquo;t that bad, and I think that I\u0026rsquo;ll archify the laptop first.\nAnnnyway\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/personal-desktop/","summary":"I wrote a series of posts about setting up my new work computer as a way to avoid blathering on and on about how the movers lost the cushions for my couch, and other assorted minutia that seem to dominate my attention. What these posts didn\u0026rsquo;t talk about were what I was doing for \u0026ldquo;tychoish\u0026rdquo; and related computing.\nAbout a week and some change, before I moved, I packed up my desktop computer and started using my laptop full time. It\u0026rsquo;s small, portable, and sufficient, if not particularly speedy.\nI can do everything with the laptop (a ThinkPad x41t, which is a 2005-vintage 12\u0026quot; tablet) that I can do on any other computer I use, and while I often prefer it because small screen means that it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to focus intently on writing one thing at a time. This, inversely, means that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work very well for research intensive work, where I need to switch between contexts regularly.","title":"personal desktop"},{"content":"Two things on the agenda. First, the third \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; of the BBC science fiction show Torchwood, which I have recently completed. Second, Samuel R. Delany\u0026rsquo;s novel \u0026ldquo;Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand,\u0026rdquo; which I am two-thirds of the way through.\nAct One: Torchwood I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of torchwood. It\u0026rsquo;s quirky, it\u0026rsquo;s fun, its easy to connect with the characters, and then there\u0026rsquo;s the Ianto/Jack relationship, which is handled amazingly throughout the entire story. The show isn\u0026rsquo;t without its flaws, of course, but it works really well.\nSo about this third season. It was good. While the fan in me says \u0026ldquo;I want more stories, and episodes\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;I want more characters to survive,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;I want to see more of characters that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to see very much of,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;why do they leave so many fucking threads untied,\u0026rdquo; on the whole, I thought it was very well executed.\nI think the mini-series--as this was, undeniably--is likely the future of television. The story telling potential is great, there are marketing reasons why it has merit, and I think from the perspective of the scripted television world, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of potential for this sort of approach to television.\nAs for my quibbles with the story itself, I will attempt to not spoil anything, but I will say, that while the sentimentalist in me would have liked to see something different: it worked. Furthermore, I\u0026rsquo;d almost be tempted to say that \u0026ldquo;more torchwood\u0026rdquo; wouldn\u0026rsquo;t really work, and I don\u0026rsquo;t know that there\u0026rsquo;s anyway to write a season four that would capture \u0026ldquo;what I liked\u0026rdquo; about torchwood. It isn\u0026rsquo;t a pretty as the Battlestar Galatica ending this spring, but there\u0026rsquo;s almost a similar finality. Discuss?\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve not watched torchwood, it is, I think, a worthwhile expenditure of time.\nAct Two: Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand This is an amazing book. The prose is stunning, the world that Delany created is incredibly fascinating, and the story pulls it all together. Amazing. Simply Amazing.\nI know what happens (or doesn\u0026rsquo;t happen) in the end, which but so much of this book revolves around absorbing the ecstatic experience of the characters, that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really seem to matter. There\u0026rsquo;s also, a second book that remains unfinished (though a portion was published in the 90s,) and I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that to be finished, pretty much ever, though I could be surprised.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s so much to say about the book, even with 150 pages left to go, that saying anything seems incomplete. Despite the fact that the main character is human, the world, and \u0026ldquo;his\u0026rdquo; world, is so totally alien. There\u0026rsquo;s this new gendered-pronoun system that the main character (and narrator) uses, where everyone regardless of gender is \u0026ldquo;she,\u0026rdquo; unless the speaker is attracted to the referant, at which point they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;he,\u0026rdquo; and typically people refer to themselves as \u0026ldquo;women.\u0026rdquo; It makes it hard to track things, but it really works.\nThe other cool thing, is that there are these two ideologies that are battling each other for domination. The conservative one, called \u0026ldquo;The Family,\u0026rdquo; take a very structuralist approach to social organization. In today\u0026rsquo;s world we might call them \u0026ldquo;conservative,\u0026rdquo; but I think that misses the point; in contrast there\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;Sygn\u0026rdquo; who take a very radical/post-structuralist approach to social organization, which is useful both as an example, and as it provides a very non-Utopian idea of freedom.\nThis is amazing stuff, and in a totally different way, it\u0026rsquo;s a very worthwhile book and experience. Give it a shot if you\u0026rsquo;re looking for something good.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/stars-in-my-torchwood-pocket/","summary":"Two things on the agenda. First, the third \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; of the BBC science fiction show Torchwood, which I have recently completed. Second, Samuel R. Delany\u0026rsquo;s novel \u0026ldquo;Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand,\u0026rdquo; which I am two-thirds of the way through.\nAct One: Torchwood I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of torchwood. It\u0026rsquo;s quirky, it\u0026rsquo;s fun, its easy to connect with the characters, and then there\u0026rsquo;s the Ianto/Jack relationship, which is handled amazingly throughout the entire story. The show isn\u0026rsquo;t without its flaws, of course, but it works really well.\nSo about this third season. It was good. While the fan in me says \u0026ldquo;I want more stories, and episodes\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;I want more characters to survive,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;I want to see more of characters that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to see very much of,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;why do they leave so many fucking threads untied,\u0026rdquo; on the whole, I thought it was very well executed.","title":"stars in my torchwood pocket"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m giving up blogging because twitter has more energy and satisfies my online media needs these days.\u0026rdquo; I here yet another person say, as they give up the blog that they\u0026rsquo;ve been working on sporadically for the last 4 or five years for a twitter account.\nI\u0026rsquo;m certainly not giving up blogging any time soon, but I hear people say these things. Not always so explicitly, and less often now that twitter has become more established, and less of a novelty. Nevertheless I think its high time to take a step back and take an account of \u0026ldquo;the state of blogging.\u0026rdquo;\nWhile I think we need to consider the impact of twitter on the current state of blogging, I think the past five years and maybe the past seven or eight years (most of which have been without twitter) have had an even larger impact on the forum.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure, exactly, what the state of things are, but the following are the questions I\u0026rsquo;m asking myself.\nAre blogs simply the default way of publishing serialized/periodical content and updates to websites? Blogging, at least in my mind, grew out of online-journal communities, and while there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of division between \u0026ldquo;bloggers\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;journalers\u0026rdquo; there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of connection. Blogs can be self-referential, and first-person, and they can drift between multiple threads of the author(s) life. What\u0026rsquo;s the state of blogging/journaling? Are blogs things that people grow, develop, and build over a long time, or are blogs commodities that serve a specific purpose attached to some other purpose. In other words, do people say, I want to create a blog, and they have a blog which meanders and continues for years, or have blogs become something that people start on a whim in response to communities or current events, and then discard when the mood passes? Do people read blogs? I have a good excuse for being more than a thousand post behind on my feed reader (moving across the country, starting a new job) but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that blog reading isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly flourishing. There are some really well read blogs, of course, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know if people are really reading. My answers, if not obvious are: yes, strained and under-appreciated, more commodity and ephemeral than they used to be as a result of software development, and readership hasn\u0026rsquo;t grown with the growth of the web.\nAnd then we introduce twitter.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always seen twitter as an evolution of the \u0026ldquo;chat room\u0026rdquo; of \u0026ldquo;IRC\u0026rdquo; and phenomena like that, rather than an evolution of the blog, though it makes sense to think about twitter and related formats as being \u0026ldquo;microbiology.\u0026rdquo; At the same time, I think microblogging becomes a viable format because it makes it \u0026ldquo;OK\u0026rdquo; for folks to post lots of little ephemeral thoughts, which is hard in conventional blogging, both in terms of time/energy, but also in terms of what the software and social convention will allow.\nIn order for a blog post--just one--to be \u0026ldquo;successful,\u0026rdquo; in today\u0026rsquo;s world, it needs to be clever and well written, and it needs to hang around for long enough for people to notice it. It might also need to provide a useful analysis in combination with some useful information.\nIn order for a post to twitter to be successful, it needs to be and timely (so that people see it), it probably needs to include some sort of link, and other people need to \u0026ldquo;Retweet\u0026rdquo; it a lot (which has got to be the most annoying thing in the short history of the medium).\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think the \u0026ldquo;short form\u0026rdquo; is going to kill the long form, or that that has even begun to happen, but might twitter kill off some of the cruft that that\u0026rsquo;s built up around commodity blogging? Does twitter reintegrate the journal-form with the more-objective form?\nMaybe. We\u0026rsquo;ll see in a little while.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-blog-is-dead-long-live-the-blog/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m giving up blogging because twitter has more energy and satisfies my online media needs these days.\u0026rdquo; I here yet another person say, as they give up the blog that they\u0026rsquo;ve been working on sporadically for the last 4 or five years for a twitter account.\nI\u0026rsquo;m certainly not giving up blogging any time soon, but I hear people say these things. Not always so explicitly, and less often now that twitter has become more established, and less of a novelty. Nevertheless I think its high time to take a step back and take an account of \u0026ldquo;the state of blogging.\u0026rdquo;\nWhile I think we need to consider the impact of twitter on the current state of blogging, I think the past five years and maybe the past seven or eight years (most of which have been without twitter) have had an even larger impact on the forum.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure, exactly, what the state of things are, but the following are the questions I\u0026rsquo;m asking myself.","title":"The Blog is Dead, Long Live the (micro)Blog"},{"content":"When I started doing this website thing on the eve of the millennium, the burgening buzzword of the time was \u0026ldquo;web standards.\u0026rdquo; All of us in the know were working on learning and then writing to web standards like HTML 4.0 and eventually XHTML 1.0 along with CSS 1 and 2. And we were all hankering for browsers that implemented these standards in a consistent way.\nReally all we wanted was for our web pages to look the same no matter who was viewing the page.\nThis pretty much never happened. Web browsers are pretty good these days, or they at least--in many ways--don\u0026rsquo;t suck as much as they used to, but they\u0026rsquo;re all a bit quirky and they all render things a bit differently from each other. And on top of that they\u0026rsquo;ve got poor architectures, so as programs they\u0026rsquo;re really bloated, and prone to crashing and the like. I\u0026rsquo;ve written before about being \u0026ldquo;against\u0026rdquo; websites, webapps, and the like and I think my disdain for the \u0026ldquo;web\u0026rdquo; grows out of the plan and simple fact that:\nthe web browser is broken, beyond repair.\nSo where does this put the cause of web standards in web design? Thoughts and questions:\nDo we write to standards which aren\u0026rsquo;t going to get adopted usefully? Is ad hearing to standards a productive use of time?\nDo we write to clients (specific browser implementations) that are broken, but at least assure that content looks \u0026ldquo;right?\u0026rdquo;\nWhen the previous goals two goals aren\u0026rsquo;t compatible which wins?\nWill HTML 5 and CSS 4 fix these problems, or is it another moving target that browsers won\u0026rsquo;t adopt for another 10 years, and even then only haphazardly?\nAre there other methods of networked content delivery that bypass the browser that might succeed while the browser space (and the content delivered therein) continues to flounder? I\u0026rsquo;m thinking object/document databases with structured bidirectional, and limited hierarchy (in the system, objects might have internal hierarchy)?\nIs the goal/standard of pixel-perfect layout rendering something which the browser is incapable of providing? Might it be the case that CSS is simply too capable of addressing problems which are outside of the ideal scope for defining a consistent style for a page: Let me run with this idea for a moment:\nMaybe the problem with XHTML and CSS isn\u0026rsquo;t that it\u0026rsquo;s implemented poorly, but rather that we\u0026rsquo;re trying to use CSS classes and IDs and div tags in an attempt to make pixel-perfect renderings of pages, which is really beyond CSS\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;mission.\u0026rdquo; What would web standards and the state of the browser look like, if you dropped CSS IDs (eg. #id-name{ }) and made single instance classes (eg. .class-name{}) verboten? Aside from crashing and burning and completely killing off browser-based applications?\nI look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/are-web-standards-broken/","summary":"When I started doing this website thing on the eve of the millennium, the burgening buzzword of the time was \u0026ldquo;web standards.\u0026rdquo; All of us in the know were working on learning and then writing to web standards like HTML 4.0 and eventually XHTML 1.0 along with CSS 1 and 2. And we were all hankering for browsers that implemented these standards in a consistent way.\nReally all we wanted was for our web pages to look the same no matter who was viewing the page.\nThis pretty much never happened. Web browsers are pretty good these days, or they at least--in many ways--don\u0026rsquo;t suck as much as they used to, but they\u0026rsquo;re all a bit quirky and they all render things a bit differently from each other. And on top of that they\u0026rsquo;ve got poor architectures, so as programs they\u0026rsquo;re really bloated, and prone to crashing and the like. I\u0026rsquo;ve written before about being \u0026ldquo;against\u0026rdquo; websites, webapps, and the like and I think my disdain for the \u0026ldquo;web\u0026rdquo; grows out of the plan and simple fact that:","title":"are web standards broken"},{"content":"I think I\u0026rsquo;ve touched on this question before but with the last technology as infrastructure post it seems like another opportunity to talk about the intersections between this topic--thinking about technology as infrastructure--and about the sort of small scale/cooperative economics that I was writing a lot about a couple of months back.\nThe question on my mind at the moment is, \u0026ldquo;What do the business models of technology firms look like, in a software-freedom-loving, non-corporate/cooperative-business way?\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the answers to this question are. Not really. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about business models for the producers of software/technology services during earlier moments.\nWe have the example of the 70s and 80s when the prevailing technology companies were ATT and IBM. ATT made their money selling phone service, and licensing UNIX. IBM made their money selling mainframes. In the eighties and nineties we had the prevailing Microsoft lead \u0026ldquo;proprietary software licensing\u0026rdquo; business models, where consumers paid for the legal write to run code on their computers.\nIn the nineties and early naughties the successful business models were either from people buying hardware (ie. Sun Microsystems and IBM) or people buying support for operating systems (ie. RedHat). We\u0026rsquo;ve also seen some more stable business models centered around subscriptions-for-services (this seems to be what all the successful startups are doing), and more of the time honored selling hardware, and there are some support-services based companies that remain successful (eg. RedHat), the support market consolidated a lot recently. And it\u0026rsquo;s not like the Microsoft-consumer model doesn\u0026rsquo;t still exist.\nSo when we look at \u0026ldquo;infrastructural technology\u0026rdquo; it sure looks like there are some kinds of businesses that will continue to flourish:\nThe people making mainframes/servers and the high level computing systems that provide the infrastructure. The people who provide the tools that make low level tools successful and useful to users. (eg. What UbuntuOne provides on top of SSH and rsync; What gmail provides on top of IMAP; What MobileMe provides ontop of WebDAV/CalDAV/IMAP). These strike me as rather conventional business models, given the history. Does infrastructural computing also:\nfurther the development of subscription-based businesses? create a new kind of challenge in customizing solutions for organizations and groups that translate raw resources into \u0026ldquo;finished output?\u0026rdquo; Is this too much like IMAP --\u0026gt; Gmail? [other possibilities created by you, here] I\u0026rsquo;m trying to approach this by asking myself \u0026ldquo;what creates value in this market,\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;where\u0026rsquo;s the money.\u0026rdquo; It strikes me that value exists in making systems \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; in a way that\u0026rsquo;s customized to the task at hand. It strikes me that value is created when individuals and organizations are able to take ownership of their own data and computing. Gmail is valuable, but running my own IMAP server is more valuable. Running my own IMAP server without the fuss of needing to personally manage the hardware and software of the server is even more valuable.\nWhat else does the hive mind have for us?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/infrastructural-commerce/","summary":"I think I\u0026rsquo;ve touched on this question before but with the last technology as infrastructure post it seems like another opportunity to talk about the intersections between this topic--thinking about technology as infrastructure--and about the sort of small scale/cooperative economics that I was writing a lot about a couple of months back.\nThe question on my mind at the moment is, \u0026ldquo;What do the business models of technology firms look like, in a software-freedom-loving, non-corporate/cooperative-business way?\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the answers to this question are. Not really. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about business models for the producers of software/technology services during earlier moments.\nWe have the example of the 70s and 80s when the prevailing technology companies were ATT and IBM. ATT made their money selling phone service, and licensing UNIX. IBM made their money selling mainframes. In the eighties and nineties we had the prevailing Microsoft lead \u0026ldquo;proprietary software licensing\u0026rdquo; business models, where consumers paid for the legal write to run code on their computers.","title":"infrastructural commerce"},{"content":"Continued from, Technology as Infrastructure, Act Two.\nAct Three All my discussions of \u0026ldquo;technology as infrastructure\u0026rdquo; thus far have been fairly high level. Discussions of particular business strategies of major players (eg. google and amazon), discussions approaches to \u0026ldquo;the cloud,\u0026rdquo; and so forth. As is my way, however, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that the obvious missing piece of this puzzle is how users--like you and me--are going to use the cloud. How thinking about technology as infrastructure changes the way we interact with our technology, and other related issues.\nOne of my introductory interludes was a new use-case that I\u0026rsquo;ve developed for myself: I run my chat clients on a server, and then using GNU screen which is an incredibly powerful, clever, and impossible to describe application. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about it before, but lets just describe it\u0026rsquo;s functionality as such:\nScreen allows users to begin a persistent (terminal/shell/console) session on one computer, and then \u0026ldquo;detatch\u0026rdquo; and continue that session on another machine where the session runs--virtually--indistinguishable from \u0026ldquo;native sessions.\u0026rdquo;\nSo my chat programs are running on a server \u0026ldquo;inside of\u0026rdquo; a screen session and when I want to talk to someone, I trigger something on my local machine that connects to that screen session, and a second later, the program is up and running just as I left it.\nScreen can of course, be used locally (and I do use it in this mode every waking moment of my day) but there\u0026rsquo;s something fundamentally different about how this specific use case affects the way I think about my connection.\nThis is just one, and one very geeky, example of what infrastructural computing--the cloud--is all about. We (I) can talk till we\u0026rsquo;re (I\u0026rsquo;m) blue in the face, but I think the interesting questions arise not from thinking about how the infrastructure and the software will develop, but rather from thinking about what this means to people on the ground.\nAt a(n apparently) crucial moment in the development of \u0026ldquo;the cloud\u0026rdquo; my personal technological consumption went from \u0026ldquo;quirky but popular and mainstream\u0026rdquo; to fiercely independent, hackerish, and free-software-based. As a result, my examples in this area may not be concretely helpful in figuring out the path of things to come.\nI guess the best I can do, at the moment is to pose a series of questions, and we\u0026rsquo;ll discuss the answers, if they seem apparent in comments:\nDoes \u0026ldquo;the cloud\u0026rdquo; provide more--on any meaningful way--than a backup service? It seems like the key functionality that cloud services provide is hosting for things like email and documents, that is more reliable than saving and managing backups for the ordinary consumer\u0026gt; Is there functionality in standards and conventions that are underutilized in desktop computing that infrastructural approaches could take advantage without building proprietary layers on-top of java-script and HTTP? Is it more effective to teach casual user advanced computing techniques (ie. using SSH) or to develop solutions that make advanced infrastructural computing easier for casual users (ie. front ends for git, more effective remote-desktop services). Is it more effective for connections to \u0026ldquo;the cloud\u0026rdquo; to be baked into current applications (more or less the current approach) or to bake connections to the cloud into the operating system (eg. mounting infrastructural resources as file systems) Is the browser indeed the prevailing modality, or simply the most convenient tool for network interaction. Do we have enough conceptual experience with using technology to collaborate (eg. wikis, source control systems like git, email) to be able to leverage the potential of the cloud, in ways that reduce total workloads rather than increase said workloads? Does infrastructural computing grow out of the problem of limited computing power (we might call this \u0026ldquo;vertical complexity\u0026rdquo;) or a management problem of computing resources in multiple contexts (eg. work, home, laptop, desktop, cellphone; we might call this \u0026ldquo;horizontal complexity\u0026rdquo;) And does this affect the kind of solutions that we are able to think about and use? Perhaps the last question isn\u0026rsquo;t quite user-centric, but I think it leads to a lot of interesting solutions about possible technologies. In a lot of ways the most useful \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; tool that I use, is Google\u0026rsquo;s Blackberry sync tool which keeps my calendar and address book synced (perfectly! so much that I don\u0026rsquo;t even notice) between my computer, the phone, and the web. Git, for me solves the horizontal problem. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that there are many \u0026ldquo;vertical problems,\u0026rdquo; other than search and data filtering, but it\u0026rsquo;s going to be interesting to think about.\nIn any case, I look forward to discussing the answers and implications of these issues with you all, so if you\u0026rsquo;re feeling shy, don\u0026rsquo;t, and leave a comment.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technology-as-infrastructure-act-three/","summary":"Continued from, Technology as Infrastructure, Act Two.\nAct Three All my discussions of \u0026ldquo;technology as infrastructure\u0026rdquo; thus far have been fairly high level. Discussions of particular business strategies of major players (eg. google and amazon), discussions approaches to \u0026ldquo;the cloud,\u0026rdquo; and so forth. As is my way, however, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that the obvious missing piece of this puzzle is how users--like you and me--are going to use the cloud. How thinking about technology as infrastructure changes the way we interact with our technology, and other related issues.\nOne of my introductory interludes was a new use-case that I\u0026rsquo;ve developed for myself: I run my chat clients on a server, and then using GNU screen which is an incredibly powerful, clever, and impossible to describe application. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about it before, but lets just describe it\u0026rsquo;s functionality as such:\nScreen allows users to begin a persistent (terminal/shell/console) session on one computer, and then \u0026ldquo;detatch\u0026rdquo; and continue that session on another machine where the session runs--virtually--indistinguishable from \u0026ldquo;native sessions.","title":"technology as infrastructure, act three"},{"content":"Continued from, Technology as Infrastructure, Act One.\nAct Two Cnet\u0026rsquo;s Matt Assay covering this post by RedMonk\u0026rsquo;s Stephen O\u0026rsquo;Grady suggests that an \u0026ldquo;open source cloud\u0026rdquo; is unlikely because superstructure (hardware/concrete power) matters more than infrastructure (software)--though in IT \u0026ldquo;infrastructure\u0026rdquo; means something different, so go read Stephen\u0026rsquo;s article.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s my understanding that, in a manner of speaking, open source has already \u0026ldquo;won\u0026rdquo; this game. Though google\u0026rsquo;s code is proprietary, it runs on a Linux/java-script/python platform. Amazon\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; (EC2) runs on Xen (the open source virtualization platform) and nearly all of the operating system choices are linux based. (Solaris and Windows, are options).\nI guess the question of \u0026ldquo;what cloud\u0026rdquo; would seem trite at this point, but I think clarifying \u0026ldquo;which cloud\u0026rdquo; is crucial at this point, particularly with regards to openness. There seem to be several:\nCloud infrastructure. Web servers, hosting, email servers. Traditionally these are things an institution ran their own servers for, these days that same institution might run their servers on some sort of virtualized hardware for which there are many providers.\nHow open? Open. There are certainly proprietary virtualization tools (VMware, windows-whatever, etc.), and you can vitalize windows, and I suppose HP-UX and AIX are getting virtualized as well. But Linux-based operating systems are likely virtualized at astonishing rates compared to non-open source OSes. And much of the server infrastructure (sendmail, postfix/exim, Apache, etc.) is open source at some point.\nIn point of fact, this cloud is more or less the way it\u0026rsquo;s always been and is, I\u0026rsquo;d argue, open-source\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;home turf.\u0026rdquo;\nCloud applications: consumer. This would be stuff like Gmail, flickr, wikipedia, twitter, facebok, ubuntuONE, googe docs, google wave, and other \u0026ldquo;application services\u0026rdquo; targeted at non-commercial/enterprise consumers and very small groups of people. This cloud consists of entirely software, provided as services and is largely dominated by google, and other big players (Microsoft, yahoo, etc.)\nHow open? Not very. This space looks very much like the desktop computing world looked in the mid-90s. Very proprietary, very closed, the alternatives are pretty primitive, and have a hard time doing anything but throwing rocks at the feet of the giant (google.)\nCloud applications: enterprise. This would be things like SalesForce (a software-as-a-service CRM tool.) and other SaaS application. I suppose google-apps-for-domains falls under this category, as does pretty much anything that uses the term SaaS.\nHow open? Not very. SaaS is basically Proprietary Software: The Next Generation as the business model is based on the exclusivity of rights over the source code. At the same time, in most sectors there are viable open source projects that are competing with the proprietary options: SugarCRM, Horde, Squirrel Mail, etc.\nCloud services: enterprise. This is what act one covered or eluded to, but generally this covers things like PBX systems, all the stuff that runs corporate intranets, groupware applications (some of which are open source), collaboration tools, internal issue tracking systems, shared storage systems.\nHow open? Reasonably open. Certainly there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of variance here, but for the most part, but Asterisk for PBX-stuff, there are a number of open source groupware applications. Jira/perforce/bitkeeper aren\u0026rsquo;t open source, but Trac/SVN/git are. The samba project kills in this area and is a drop in replacement for Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s file-sharing systems.\nThe relationship, between open source and \u0026ldquo;the cloud,\u0026rdquo; thus, depends a lot on what you\u0026rsquo;re talking about. I guess this means there needs to be an \u0026ldquo;act three,\u0026rdquo; to cover specific user strategies. Because, regardless of which cloud you use, your freedom has more to do with practice than it does with some inherent capability of the software stack.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technology-as-infrastructure-act-two/","summary":"Continued from, Technology as Infrastructure, Act One.\nAct Two Cnet\u0026rsquo;s Matt Assay covering this post by RedMonk\u0026rsquo;s Stephen O\u0026rsquo;Grady suggests that an \u0026ldquo;open source cloud\u0026rdquo; is unlikely because superstructure (hardware/concrete power) matters more than infrastructure (software)--though in IT \u0026ldquo;infrastructure\u0026rdquo; means something different, so go read Stephen\u0026rsquo;s article.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s my understanding that, in a manner of speaking, open source has already \u0026ldquo;won\u0026rdquo; this game. Though google\u0026rsquo;s code is proprietary, it runs on a Linux/java-script/python platform. Amazon\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; (EC2) runs on Xen (the open source virtualization platform) and nearly all of the operating system choices are linux based. (Solaris and Windows, are options).\nI guess the question of \u0026ldquo;what cloud\u0026rdquo; would seem trite at this point, but I think clarifying \u0026ldquo;which cloud\u0026rdquo; is crucial at this point, particularly with regards to openness. There seem to be several:\nCloud infrastructure. Web servers, hosting, email servers. Traditionally these are things an institution ran their own servers for, these days that same institution might run their servers on some sort of virtualized hardware for which there are many providers.","title":"technology as infrastructure, act two"},{"content":"Act One This post is inspired by three converging observations:\n1. Matt posted a comment to a previous post: that read:\n\u0026ldquo;Cloud\u0026rdquo; computing. Seriously. Do we really want to give up that much control over our computing? In the dystopian future celebrated by many tech bloggers, computers will be locked down appliances, and we will rely on big companies to deliver services to us.\n2. A number of podcasts that I listened to while I drove to New Jersey produced/hosted/etc. by Michael Cote for RedMonk that discussed current events and trends in \u0026ldquo;Enterprise-grade Information Technology,\u0026rdquo; which is a world, that I\u0026rsquo;m only beginning to scratch the surface of.\n3. Because my Internet connection at home is somewhat spotty, and because it makes sense have an always on (and mobile) connection to IRC for work, I\u0026rsquo;ve started running my chat clients (mcabber and irssi) inside of a gnu screen session on my server.\nMy specific responses:\n1. Matt\u0026rsquo;s right, from a certain perspective. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of buzz-word-heavy, venture capital driven, consumer targeted \u0026ldquo;cloud computing tools\u0026rdquo; which seem to be all about getting people to use web-based \u0026ldquo;applications,\u0026rdquo; and give up autonomy in exchange for data that may be more available to us because it\u0026rsquo;s stored on someones network.\nReally, however, I think this isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a problem with \u0026ldquo;networked computing,\u0026rdquo; as it is with both existing business models for information technology, and an example of the worst kind of cloud computing. And I\u0026rsquo;m using Matt\u0026rsquo;s statement as a bit of a straw man, as a lot of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m including under the general heading of \u0026ldquo;cloud computing,\u0026rdquo; aren\u0026rsquo;t really what Matt\u0026rsquo;s talking about above.\nAt the same time I think there is the cloud that Matt refers to: the Google/Microsoft/Startup/Ubuntu One/etc. cloud, and then there\u0026rsquo;s all the rest of distributed/networked/infrastructural computing which isn\u0026rsquo;t new or sexy, but I think is really the same as the rest of the cloud.\n2. The \u0026ldquo;enterprise\u0026rdquo; world thinks about computers in a much different way than I ever do. Sometimes this is frustrating: the tendrils of proprietary software are strongest here, and enterprise folks care way too much about Java. In other aspects it\u0026rsquo;s really fascinating, because technology becomes an infrastructural resource, rather than a concrete tool which accomplishes a specific task.\nEnterprise hardware and software exists to provide large corporate institutions the tools to manage large amounts of data/projects/data/communications/etc.\nThis is, I think on some level, the real cloud. This \u0026ldquo;technology-as-infrastructure\u0026rdquo; thing.\n3. In an elaboration of the above, I outsourced a chunk of my computing to \u0026ldquo;the cloud.\u0026rdquo; I could run those applications locally, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t given up that possibility, but one needs a network connection to use a chat client, so the realm of possibilities where I would want to connect to a chat server, but wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be able to connect to my server, is next to impossible (particularly because some of the chat servers run on my hardware.).\nI guess the point I\u0026rsquo;m driving at is: maybe this \u0026ldquo;cloud thing\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t about functionality, or websites, or software, or business models, but rather about the evolution of our computing needs from providing a set of tools and localized resources to providing infrastructure.\nAnd that the shift isn\u0026rsquo;t so much about the technology: in point of fact running a terminal application in a screen session over SSH isn\u0026rsquo;t a cutting edge technology by any means, but rather about how we use the technology to support what it is we do.\nOr am I totally off my rocker here?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technology-as-infrastructure-act-one/","summary":"Act One This post is inspired by three converging observations:\n1. Matt posted a comment to a previous post: that read:\n\u0026ldquo;Cloud\u0026rdquo; computing. Seriously. Do we really want to give up that much control over our computing? In the dystopian future celebrated by many tech bloggers, computers will be locked down appliances, and we will rely on big companies to deliver services to us.\n2. A number of podcasts that I listened to while I drove to New Jersey produced/hosted/etc. by Michael Cote for RedMonk that discussed current events and trends in \u0026ldquo;Enterprise-grade Information Technology,\u0026rdquo; which is a world, that I\u0026rsquo;m only beginning to scratch the surface of.\n3. Because my Internet connection at home is somewhat spotty, and because it makes sense have an always on (and mobile) connection to IRC for work, I\u0026rsquo;ve started running my chat clients (mcabber and irssi) inside of a gnu screen session on my server.","title":"technology as infrastructure, act one"},{"content":"As part of the moving process I got a bank account, and I was reminded, again, of how much the security systems of most online banks are comically flawed, which lead me to even greater anger about security in general. The following rant is what happened.\nI should say at first, that I\u0026rsquo;m not really a security expert, and I just dabble in this stuff. Having said that\u0026hellip;\n\u0026ldquo;Security\u0026rdquo; online and in a digital context covers two pretty distinct aspects:\nIdentity. In real life we can show our drivers license or passport, we can say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m [insert name here],\u0026rdquo; and in many situations another person is probably not too far away to be able to say, \u0026ldquo;I know them, they\u0026rsquo;re [insert name here].\u0026rdquo; Online? Well identity is less easily and reliably verified. Identity is important both for individual\u0026rsquo;s (and organizations\u0026rsquo;) identity and for things that people (and organizations) produce/own: emails, documents, web pages, software, and so forth. Encryption. Basically we encrypt data so that we can be relatively certain that no one gains access to our data unless, by listening into our network connection, or gaining access to physical media. From encryption we get privacy, and as long as the encryption scheme works as it should and the encryption covers communications end-to-end, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty safe to assume some measure of privacy. It turns out, from a technical perspective that encryption is reasonably easy to achieve. It\u0026rsquo;s true that all cryptographic schemes are ultimately breakable, however, if we can generally assume best practices (expiring old keys, keeping your private keys safe, etc.) then I feel fairly safe in asserting that encryption isn\u0026rsquo;t the weak part of the security equation.\nThis leaves identity on the table. Which is sort of a messy affair.\nJust because someone says, \u0026ldquo;Hello my name is Alice,\u0026rdquo; it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that they are Alice. Just because they have Alice\u0026rsquo;s password, doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily mean that they are Alice (but that\u0026rsquo;s a safer bet.) The best, and most reliable way to verify someones identity, it turns out, to have a \u0026ldquo;web of trust.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich basically means, you assert that you are who you say you are, and then \u0026ldquo;vouch\u0026rdquo; for other people who you \u0026ldquo;know\u0026rdquo; are who they say they are. Once you\u0026rsquo;ve vouched for someone you then \u0026ldquo;trust\u0026rdquo; that the people they\u0026rsquo;ve vouched for, and so forth. Good web-of-trust systems allow you to revoke trust, and provide some mechanism for propagating trusted networks of identities among users.\nThe above described system is a very peer-to-peer/ad hoc system (bottom up, if you will), there are also more centralized (top down,) systems which can also function to verify identity in a digital context. These systems depend on commonly trusted third parties that are tasked with researching and verifying the identity of individuals and organization. So called \u0026ldquo;certificate authorities,\u0026rdquo; make it possible to \u0026ldquo;trust identities\u0026rdquo; of without needing a personal web-of-trust network extend to cover people and organizations you\u0026rsquo;d come in contact with.\nLets bring this back to the case study of the bank,\nThey encrypt their traffic, end to end, with SSL (eg. TLS), they pay for a certificate from a certificate authority with a good reputation. The weak part of this equation? You and Me, apparently.\nTo verify our identity, we have this arcane and convoluted scheme where by we have to enter hard to remember passwords in stages (my last bank, had us enter passwords on three pages in succession) so that the back can be sure we\u0026rsquo;re who we say we are. And the sad part is that while encryption and identity verification technology in secure and reliable ways is pretty advanced (in the big picture), we still have to send passwords. Here are my thoughts on passwords:\nThe best passwords are the hardest to remember. The best passwords don\u0026rsquo;t contain words, and contain numbers, letters, and punctuation. But these passwords are difficult to remember, and I think many people avoid picking truly secure passwords because of the difficulty.\nPasswords aren\u0026rsquo;t bad, and they\u0026rsquo;re--I suspect--most useful as a casual deterrent and a reminder to users of the potential gravity of the situation; but they\u0026rsquo;re not exactly a reliable fingerprinting mechanism.\nSome sort of cryptographic handshake would be many magnitudes more secure, and much less painless for users.\nI have this theory, that security for banks (and other similar institutions) is more about giving the appearance of being secure (asking for more complex passwords, making you jump through more hoops, etc.) and less about doing things that would be more secure in the long run. But maybe that\u0026rsquo;s just me.\nAnyway, back onto more general interest topics in the near future.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-public-key-encryption-and-security/","summary":"As part of the moving process I got a bank account, and I was reminded, again, of how much the security systems of most online banks are comically flawed, which lead me to even greater anger about security in general. The following rant is what happened.\nI should say at first, that I\u0026rsquo;m not really a security expert, and I just dabble in this stuff. Having said that\u0026hellip;\n\u0026ldquo;Security\u0026rdquo; online and in a digital context covers two pretty distinct aspects:\nIdentity. In real life we can show our drivers license or passport, we can say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m [insert name here],\u0026rdquo; and in many situations another person is probably not too far away to be able to say, \u0026ldquo;I know them, they\u0026rsquo;re [insert name here].\u0026rdquo; Online? Well identity is less easily and reliably verified. Identity is important both for individual\u0026rsquo;s (and organizations\u0026rsquo;) identity and for things that people (and organizations) produce/own: emails, documents, web pages, software, and so forth.","title":"on public key encryption and security"},{"content":"I was writing my post on distribution habits and change, and I realized that I some elaboration on the concept of package management was probably in order. This is that elaboration.\nMost linux--and indeed UNIX, at this point--systems have some kind of package management:\nRather than provide an operating as one-monolithic and unchanging set of files, distributions with package management provide systems with some sort of database, and common binary file format that allows users to install (and install) all software in a clear/standardized/common manner. All software in a Linux system (generally) is thus, covered by these package managers, which also do things like tracking the way that some packages depend on other packages, and making sure that the latest versions of a package are installed.\nThe issue, is that there are lots of different ways to address the above \u0026ldquo;problem space,\u0026rdquo; and a lot of different goals that operating system designers have when designing package management and selecting packages. For instance: how do we integrate programs into the rest of our system? Should we err on the side of the cutting edge, or err on the side of stability? Do we edit software to tailor it to our system/users or provide more faithful copies of \u0026ldquo;upstream sources\u0026rdquo;? These are all questions that operating system/distribution/package managers must address in some way, and figuring out how a giving Linux distribution deals with this is, I think, key to figuring out which system is the best for you, though to be fair, it\u0026rsquo;s an incredibly hard set of questions to answer.\nThe thing about package management, is that whatever ideologies you choose with regards to what tools you use, what packages to include and how to maintain packages, the following is true: all software should be managed by the package management tools without exception. Otherwise, it becomes frighteningly easy for new versions of software to \u0026ldquo;break\u0026rdquo; old non-managed versions of a piece of software with overlapping file names, by overwriting or deleting old files, by loading one version of a program when you mean to load another version, by making it nearly impossible to remove all remnants of an old piece of software, and so forth, or just by making it hard to know when a piece of software needs to be updated to a new version for security fixes or some such.\nI hope that helps.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-package-management/","summary":"I was writing my post on distribution habits and change, and I realized that I some elaboration on the concept of package management was probably in order. This is that elaboration.\nMost linux--and indeed UNIX, at this point--systems have some kind of package management:\nRather than provide an operating as one-monolithic and unchanging set of files, distributions with package management provide systems with some sort of database, and common binary file format that allows users to install (and install) all software in a clear/standardized/common manner. All software in a Linux system (generally) is thus, covered by these package managers, which also do things like tracking the way that some packages depend on other packages, and making sure that the latest versions of a package are installed.\nThe issue, is that there are lots of different ways to address the above \u0026ldquo;problem space,\u0026rdquo; and a lot of different goals that operating system designers have when designing package management and selecting packages.","title":"on package management"},{"content":"So, long story short, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot with ArchLinux in the last few days, getting it setup, and starting to use this peculiar little distribution. While I will surely be blogging more about Arch in the coming days, I think a brief list of first impressions are in order.\nI share values with the Arch Developers.\nThis is, I think, a factor of \u0026ldquo;choosing a Linux (or BSD) distribution\u0026rdquo; that is really hard to understand or explain. In part because the values that distinguish distributions are hard sometimes hard to suss out, particularly if you\u0026rsquo;re on the outside looking in. This explains the phenomena of \u0026ldquo;distro hopping\u0026rdquo;\nMy sense of the \u0026ldquo;Arch\u0026rdquo; philosophy/approach is largerly what this post is about, but in summary: arch is lightweight and minimal, Arch expects users to be sophisticate and intelligent (Arch would rather tell you how something works, so you can do it \u0026ldquo;right,\u0026rdquo; than try and save you from yourself and do it in a way that might be wrong.) Arch is a community project, and isn\u0026rsquo;t reliant on commercial interests, and arch is firmly dedicated to free software ideas.\nHow does this compare to other distributions you\u0026rsquo;ve heard of. Arch is community oriented/originated like slackware and Debian; Arch is lightweight like debian-netinst and Gentoo; Arch is minimal like Damn Small Linux (though not quite that minimal) and the other tiny-Linuxes; Arch is based on binary packages like Debian and Fedora/RedHat/CentOS; Arch uses linux, but takes inspiration from the BSDs in terms of system architecture; Arch uses a rolling release cycle like Debian testing branch and Gentoo.\nIt doesn\u0026rsquo;t dumb anything down, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t expect users to be either experts *or* total beginners.\nI think the term they use is \u0026ldquo;Intermediate\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Advanced Beginner\u0026rdquo; but in any case, but in any case I think the approach is good. Provide configuration in it\u0026rsquo;s most basic and straightforward form, and rather than try to make the system easier to configure, document and hope that straightforward configuration setup will be easier to manage in the long run than a more convoluted, but \u0026ldquo;easy\u0026rdquo; set up.\nBasically Arch expects and assumes that complexity and difficulty are the same, and opposed and that simplicity and ease of use are similarly connected.\nArch values and promotes minimalism.\nThis comes from a few different aspects of Arch but in general, the avoidance of complexity in the configuration, and the \u0026ldquo;blank slate\u0026rdquo; aspect of the installation process combine to create a system that is minimal and that is almost entirely agnostic with regards to what you might want to do with the system.\nWhere as many linux-based systems are designed for specific tasks (eg. mythbuntu; medibuntu; linux mint; crunch linux, etc.) and include software by default that supports this goal. Arch in contrast, install no (or very little) software by default, and can function well for a wide range of potential uses, from the fully featured desktop to the minimalistic headless server install.\nThe Arch Wiki Rocks.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about wikis and what makes a wiki \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;not work,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to think that the ArchLinux Wiki is another example of a wiki that works.\nI used to think that wikis powered by the MediaWiki engine were always bad: they look too much like wikipedia (and are reasonably hard to customize) and as a result people tend to treat them like wikipedia which caries all sorts baggage from the tradition 19th century encyclopedic projects and colonialism, and fails to capture some of the brilliance and effectiveness of wikis outside of the world of wikipedia (and the MediaWiki engine by association.)\nSo despite this, the ArchLinux wiki is actually really good and provides helpful instructions for nearly everything to do with Arch. It looks good, and the more I read it all of the cool discursive/opinion-based modality that I enjoy the most about wikis is present on the Arch Wiki.\nArchies are really geeky and great, and their interests and tendencies are reflected in the packages provided by the system:\nAllow me to justify this with a few anecdotes:\nArch includes a \u0026ldquo;snapshot package\u0026rdquo; from emacs-23 in the main repository (you have to add another debian repository to get this in debian). There is a great cross over between Awesome--my window manager of nchoice--and Arch, so there are good up to date packages of Awesome. Uzbl, (eg. useable) a super minimalistic, web-kit based browser is developed on/for Arch. As I was getting my first virtual machine setup, I did a bit of distro hopping to see what would work best. I decided to use virtualbox (because it\u0026rsquo;s nearly free software, and reasonably full featured) and I had a hell of a time getting other OSs to work right inside of the virtual box, but it appears that other Archies have had the same thought, and there were pretty good explanations on the wiki and it just worked. How cool is that? I don\u0026rsquo;t think arch is for everyone, but, if any of what I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about today sounds interesting/appealing, give it a shot. Also, my experiences with running it under Virtual Box have been generally favorable, so if that\u0026rsquo;s more your speed, give it a shot.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-arch-linux-rocks/","summary":"So, long story short, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot with ArchLinux in the last few days, getting it setup, and starting to use this peculiar little distribution. While I will surely be blogging more about Arch in the coming days, I think a brief list of first impressions are in order.\nI share values with the Arch Developers.\nThis is, I think, a factor of \u0026ldquo;choosing a Linux (or BSD) distribution\u0026rdquo; that is really hard to understand or explain. In part because the values that distinguish distributions are hard sometimes hard to suss out, particularly if you\u0026rsquo;re on the outside looking in. This explains the phenomena of \u0026ldquo;distro hopping\u0026rdquo;\nMy sense of the \u0026ldquo;Arch\u0026rdquo; philosophy/approach is largerly what this post is about, but in summary: arch is lightweight and minimal, Arch expects users to be sophisticate and intelligent (Arch would rather tell you how something works, so you can do it \u0026ldquo;right,\u0026rdquo; than try and save you from yourself and do it in a way that might be wrong.","title":"why arch linux rocks"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another one for the \u0026ldquo;new workstation series.\u0026rdquo;\nUntil now my linux-usage has been very Debian based. It\u0026rsquo;s good, it\u0026rsquo;s stable, and the package management system is really intensely wonderful. I was happy. And then I was somewhat less happy. Ubuntu--the distribution that I\u0026rsquo;d been using on my desktop.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, Ubuntu is great and I\u0026rsquo;d gladly recommend it to other people, but\u0026hellip; with time, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that the system feels clunky. This is hard to describe, but a growing portion of the software I run isn\u0026rsquo;t included in the normal Ubuntu repositories, some services are hard to turn off/manage correctly (the display manager, various superfluous gnome-parts,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve had some ubuntu-related kernel instability.\nMy server, of course, runs Debian Lenny without incident. There\u0026rsquo;s something really beautiful about that whole stability thing that Debian does. I considered running Debian (lenny/testing) distributions on my desktops because of the wonderful experience I had Lenny, and so I tried running various flavors of Debian and I either found that for the software I wanted to run things were either too stale or too unstable. This is totally to be expected, as Debian\u0026rsquo;s singular goal is stability, and getting a fresher/less stable operating system that\u0026rsquo;s based on Debian is always going to be a difficult proposition.\nIn the past I\u0026rsquo;ve dragged my feet with regards to upgrading operating systems because I take a \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t fix it if it ain\u0026rsquo;t broke,\u0026rdquo; approach to maintaining computers, and all my systems worked so, so until I was faced with this work computer--despite my dissatisfaction--I\u0026rsquo;d never really seriously considered the mechanics of changing distributions, much less the prospect of having to interact with a linux distribution without the pleasures and joys of apt-get.\nBut then I got this new work station and\u0026hellip;\nI switched. At least for one system. So far. ArchLinux uses a system called \u0026ldquo;pacman\u0026rdquo; for package management. Pacman is really nifty, but it\u0026rsquo;s different from apt: it\u0026rsquo;s output is a bit clearer, it\u0026rsquo;s just as fast and \u0026ldquo;smart,\u0026rdquo; and the packages are fresh.\nAnd then there\u0026rsquo;s the whole business of the way Arch approaches management; Arch uses a \u0026lsquo;rolling release system\u0026quot; where rather than release a version of an operating system, that has a given set of packages at a given moment, Arch packages are released when they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;ready\u0026rdquo; on a package-by-package basis (with an awareness toward interactions between packages,) and pacman has a system for easily installing software that isn\u0026rsquo;t in the main repositories as packages. (Which makes upgrading and removal of said packages later much easier.)\nThis sounds complex, maybe too complex, but some how, it\u0026rsquo;s not. When I started thinking about writing this post, I thought, \u0026ldquo;how do I convey how totally strange and different this is from the Debian way.\u0026rdquo; By the time I got around to actually writing this post, I\u0026rsquo;ve settled into a place of stability and I must confess that I don\u0026rsquo;t notice it very much. It\u0026rsquo;s wild, and it just works.\nI was going to go on this whole schpeal about how even though the functional differences between one \u0026ldquo;flavor\u0026rdquo; of GNU/Linux and another are pretty minimal, it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to see how different the systems can \u0026ldquo;feel,\u0026rdquo; in practice. Here\u0026rsquo;s a brief list of what I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed:\nI find the fact that the flags that control operations with pacman to be non-intuitive, and frankly I\u0026rsquo;m a bit annoyed that they\u0026rsquo;re case sensitive so that: pacman -S is different from pacman -s which leads to a lot of typos.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve yet to set up a machine in Arch that uses wireless. I\u0026rsquo;m just wary, mostly, of having to set up the network stuff \u0026ldquo;by hand\u0026rdquo; in Arch, given how finicky these things can be in general.\nThe ABS (arch build system, for installing packages that aren\u0026rsquo;t in the main arch repositories,) took some getting used to, I think this is more about learning how to use a new program/tool and the fact that the commands are a bit weird.\nHaving said that, I really like the way the package building scripts just work and pull from upstream sources, and even, say, use git to download the source.\nI\u0026rsquo;m impressed with how complete the system is. Debian advertises a huge number of packages and prides itself on its completeness (and it is, I\u0026rsquo;m not quibbling,) but I run into programs where I have a hard time getting the right version, or the software plain old isn\u0026rsquo;t in the repository. I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to find something that isn\u0026rsquo;t in the repository. (Well, getting a version of mutt with the sidebar patch was a bit rough, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t installed the urlview package yet, but that\u0026rsquo;s minor.)\nI think this is roughly analogous to the discussions that python/ruby people have with perl people, about actual vs. the advertised worth of the CPAN. (eg. CPAN is great and has a lot of stuff, but it suffers from being unedited and its huge number of modules is more an artifact of time rather than actual value) So that, while Debian (and CPAN) have more \u0026ldquo;stuff\u0026rdquo; than their competitors, in many cases the competitors can still succeed with less \u0026ldquo;stuff,\u0026rdquo; because their \u0026ldquo;stuff\u0026rdquo; has value because it\u0026rsquo;s more edited and they can choose the 80% of stuff that satisfies 94% of need, rather than having 90% of the stuff that satisfies 98% of need. Diminishing returns and all that.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s lightweight and smooth. While the hardware of my work computer is indeed impressive, particularly by my own standards, the hardware of the \u0026ldquo;virtual machine\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly impressive. And it\u0026rsquo;s still incredibly peppy. Lightweight for the win.\nNext up? More reasons Arch Rocks.\nSee you later!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/distribution-habits-and-change/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another one for the \u0026ldquo;new workstation series.\u0026rdquo;\nUntil now my linux-usage has been very Debian based. It\u0026rsquo;s good, it\u0026rsquo;s stable, and the package management system is really intensely wonderful. I was happy. And then I was somewhat less happy. Ubuntu--the distribution that I\u0026rsquo;d been using on my desktop.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, Ubuntu is great and I\u0026rsquo;d gladly recommend it to other people, but\u0026hellip; with time, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that the system feels clunky. This is hard to describe, but a growing portion of the software I run isn\u0026rsquo;t included in the normal Ubuntu repositories, some services are hard to turn off/manage correctly (the display manager, various superfluous gnome-parts,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve had some ubuntu-related kernel instability.\nMy server, of course, runs Debian Lenny without incident. There\u0026rsquo;s something really beautiful about that whole stability thing that Debian does. I considered running Debian (lenny/testing) distributions on my desktops because of the wonderful experience I had Lenny, and so I tried running various flavors of Debian and I either found that for the software I wanted to run things were either too stale or too unstable.","title":"distribution habits and change"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another episode in my \u0026ldquo;work workstation\u0026rdquo; series of posts about setting up my new computer for work, and related thoughts on evolving computer setups. First, some history:\nMy tendency and leading desire is to make my working environment as consistent as possible. For a long time I was a one-laptop, kind of guy. I had a PowerBook, it did everything just the way I wanted it to, and when ever I needed to do something digitally, I had my computer with me, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t have to worry about other people\u0026rsquo;s computers being configured wrong. It meant that I worked better/smarter/more effectively, and I was happy.\nWhen the PowerBook died, particularly as \u0026ldquo;my work\u0026rdquo; became intertwined with my computer, it became clear that I needed a bit more: a computer I could stretch out on, both in terms of things like media (music/video/etc) and in terms of screen space. Concurrently, I also discovered/became addicted to the Awesome window manager, and this has been a great thing for how I use computers, but the end result of this transition was that I had to manage (and needed to use) a couple of machines on a fairly regular basis.\nBasically I have a set of applications and tools that all of my systems have installed on them, either their configurations are all standard or I store a copy of the configuration file in a git repository that I link all of the machines to. My work is all stored in git repositories that I sync between machines as needed. It works pretty well, and it means that aside from hardware constraints its not so much that I have multiple machines, as it is that I have different instances of the same machine.\nNext: the implications\u0026hellip;\nI think above all, I\u0026rsquo;m a Unix guy. UNIX is a modular system that I would describe as being based on a certain kind of modularity, I\u0026rsquo;ve also worked out practices for myself that allow me to keep my application configurations synced between machines. Most of the time configurations don\u0026rsquo;t change, but sometimes they do, and when that happens all I have to do is sync up a git repository.\nThe second implication is that I set up and work with my systems with some notion of stability. While I must confess that I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely pleased with the way ubuntu has my system desktop and laptop running, it is stable and reliable, and I\u0026rsquo;m wary of changing things around for a setup that would be functionally more or less the same, but a bit more parsimonious on the back end. I maybe be a huge geek and a hacker type, but I\u0026rsquo;m a writer and reader first, and although while I\u0026rsquo;m blathering on about my setup it might seem like all I do is tweak my systems, the writing and reading are really more \u0026ldquo;my thing.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/multiple-computers-and-singular-systems/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another episode in my \u0026ldquo;work workstation\u0026rdquo; series of posts about setting up my new computer for work, and related thoughts on evolving computer setups. First, some history:\nMy tendency and leading desire is to make my working environment as consistent as possible. For a long time I was a one-laptop, kind of guy. I had a PowerBook, it did everything just the way I wanted it to, and when ever I needed to do something digitally, I had my computer with me, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t have to worry about other people\u0026rsquo;s computers being configured wrong. It meant that I worked better/smarter/more effectively, and I was happy.\nWhen the PowerBook died, particularly as \u0026ldquo;my work\u0026rdquo; became intertwined with my computer, it became clear that I needed a bit more: a computer I could stretch out on, both in terms of things like media (music/video/etc) and in terms of screen space. Concurrently, I also discovered/became addicted to the Awesome window manager, and this has been a great thing for how I use computers, but the end result of this transition was that I had to manage (and needed to use) a couple of machines on a fairly regular basis.","title":"Multiple Computers and Singular Systems"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking in fairly abstract terms about this new workstation that I\u0026rsquo;ve been setting up, and about how this fits into the general ethos of my existing hardware setup, but I think, it\u0026rsquo;s probably the right time to interject and clarify some of the choices and base-assumptions that I\u0026rsquo;ve made during this process.\nMy current systems (hardware): A moderately powered dual-monitor workstation (ubuntu-from-Dell, circa October 2008) that\u0026rsquo;s running Ubuntu for the moment (probably move to arch or Debian in the next few months.) This was my work computer during the freelance period. A thinkpad x41t (vintage 2005); 1.4 GHZ pentium M (?); 1.5 gigs of ram; 60gb hard drive, running ubuntu with the lenny kernel. This is my main personal computer at the moment, as I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten the desktop setup yet. It\u0026rsquo;s a great machine, but I do feel a bit cramped on it for heavy day-to-day useage, it\u0026rsquo;s great for distraction free writing, and portability. (The work computer) A contemporary vintage iMac running OS X 10.5 latest, and also running Arch Linux in Sun\u0026rsquo;s VirtualBox system. (The infrastructure) Debian based virtual server(s), to provide my own personal cloud (web hosting, git hosting, file syncing, remote shell access, email). My current systems (software; but application centered): Window Mangement: awesome. I run slim as a display manager on the laptop, and just use startx/xinit on the desktop/virtual box sessions. Email: I use mutt for reading email, compose emails in emacs, sort email using procmail, download email using fetchmail (if neccessary), but mostly keep mail synchronized using my own git-mail scripts. For sending email and smtp connectivity I use msmtp, and I suppose I\u0026rsquo;m using postfix on the server as well. Text Editing: I use emacs23 (still the CVS/development/snapshot branch) of emacs (stable is v22). I use 23 because I like the emacs-daemon functionality, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty damn stable. I have aquamacs installed under OS X for the moment, but I\u0026rsquo;ll probably install 23 soon, because it\u0026rsquo;s quirky. Personal Organization: org-mode, which is technically included in emacs (and I use whatever the stock version in 23 is, these days.) I use org-mode for managing my todo lists, shopping lists, project planning and appointments. Shell/Terminal: bash and urxvt(cd) under linux, and terminal.app on Leopard. And GNU Screen. I live in screen. Web Browsing: I use firefox with hit-a-hint, and emacs-key-bindings (firemacs) on linux systems, as I wait for the day when good functional web-kit based browsers begin to become a possibility. IM/IRC/Chat: mcabber for IM (running ejabberd on my server with the pyaimt transport), and irssi for IRC. Linux Distribution: Debian stable on servers; Ubuntu-mostly on desktops with a desire to move to ArchLinux for desktop use. I love debian, but I think for my desktop-use purposes I cant find a setup that I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable with, and while ubuntu is great (and I\u0026rsquo;m glad it works so well with my laptop;) it\u0026rsquo;s a bit heavy and makes assumptions that I\u0026rsquo;m not comfortable with. Alas. That\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m working with. Just so you know. The mocking can begin now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/my-workstation-choices/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking in fairly abstract terms about this new workstation that I\u0026rsquo;ve been setting up, and about how this fits into the general ethos of my existing hardware setup, but I think, it\u0026rsquo;s probably the right time to interject and clarify some of the choices and base-assumptions that I\u0026rsquo;ve made during this process.\nMy current systems (hardware): A moderately powered dual-monitor workstation (ubuntu-from-Dell, circa October 2008) that\u0026rsquo;s running Ubuntu for the moment (probably move to arch or Debian in the next few months.) This was my work computer during the freelance period. A thinkpad x41t (vintage 2005); 1.4 GHZ pentium M (?); 1.5 gigs of ram; 60gb hard drive, running ubuntu with the lenny kernel. This is my main personal computer at the moment, as I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten the desktop setup yet. It\u0026rsquo;s a great machine, but I do feel a bit cramped on it for heavy day-to-day useage, it\u0026rsquo;s great for distraction free writing, and portability.","title":"My Workstation Choices"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a new recreational activity. As if I needed another one.\nI did a little shape note singing at the Morris Dance gathering, as I usually do, but this year something clicked. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure exactly what it was: I\u0026rsquo;d been singing a lot that weekend and my ears were used to listening to and picking out harmonies, my voice was a bit tired (and thus a more comfortable bass), I was sitting directly behind an incredibly powerful base. Any one of or all of these things coincided to produce a really amazing experience, and one where I was able to feel the music. It was amazing\nI should break in and say that I\u0026rsquo;m not an incredibly musical person, and music/singing isn\u0026rsquo;t something that I did very much of growing up. I think teaching people (particularly boys) how to listen, how to sing, and how to listen for harmonies is incredibly difficult, and not something--certainly--that I was ever exposed to as a kid.\nI played Clarinet in middle school (and was in the 4th grade choir,) and while I was able to do ok, I never developed an instinct for it, I didn\u0026rsquo;t really ever figure out how to listen.\nIn high school I started doing the dancing (International folk dance, Morris Dance, Contra/etc.) and that worked for me. I could feel the dance, the beat, the music, and I was able to learn the grace and mechanics after a few months. It was amazing, finally to have away to have \u0026ldquo;an ecstatic experience of the music.\u0026rdquo;\nA friend of mine from dancing described shape note singing, as \u0026ldquo;singing for people who don\u0026rsquo;t dance,\u0026rdquo; because I think in a lot of ways, shape note singing is more like dancing than it is to other musical forms:\nShape not singing is participatory: like folk dance, it\u0026rsquo;s meant to be done rather than watched. The music is arranged and harmonized in such away that makes it hard to record accurately (the melody is in the middle of the harmonic range rather than on the top,) and it\u0026rsquo;s sung loudly by large groups of people, and singers arrange themselves facing each other so the closer you are to the middle the better you can hear. There\u0026rsquo;s a \u0026ldquo;pulsing\u0026rdquo; feeling that you can sort of feel in your gut when you\u0026rsquo;re doing it \u0026ldquo;right.\u0026rdquo; The shapes provide a way for people without classical training to understand and participate in singing, in the same way that folk dancers introduce a choreographical short-hand to teach people how to dance without requiring formal training. It\u0026rsquo;s totally an ecstatic experience, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never left a signing without a little bit of a \u0026ldquo;singing buzz\u0026rdquo; So this being said, this shape note singing thing is incredibly weird for me. Perhaps the weirdest thing I\u0026rsquo;ve done to date, which is saying a lot giving the knitting and the Morris dancing.\nShape note music is very definitely in the category of: Spiritual Music from the American Protestant Tradition. The songs are all hymns many signings--the best ones really--have opening/closing/recess prayers and the best places for signings are inevitably churches (high ceilings, limited upholstery).\nAnd here I am, this dweeby Jewish guy, from a family that isn\u0026rsquo;t (historically/traditionally, on either side) particularly religious (ie. theistic) or observant. My own religious/spiritual views range from: \u0026ldquo;limited\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;existential/queer,\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s not something I loose a lot of sleep/attention over.\nI called a song at the last singing, Hallelujah from the \u0026lsquo;91 Denison (Red) book (forget the number at the moment; it\u0026rsquo;s a popular one). And the leader asked which verses I wanted to sing.\nDude. I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue.\nThe verses are neigh on irrelevant for me. In a strange way, what I think of as the ecstatic experience of the music, the \u0026ldquo;singing buzz,\u0026rdquo; is what a lot of people think of as the \u0026ldquo;spiritual\u0026rdquo; aspect of a singing. And for me it has more to do with the \u0026ldquo;space\u0026rdquo; and the moment and less to do with G-d. But that\u0026rsquo;s just me.\nWe sang, at M.N.\u0026rsquo;s suggestion 1 and 4. But it was a good song, we could have sung \u0026rsquo;em all, and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have cared one bit.\nIn any case, the one thing I know for sure is that I want to sing more often.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fa-sol-la/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a new recreational activity. As if I needed another one.\nI did a little shape note singing at the Morris Dance gathering, as I usually do, but this year something clicked. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure exactly what it was: I\u0026rsquo;d been singing a lot that weekend and my ears were used to listening to and picking out harmonies, my voice was a bit tired (and thus a more comfortable bass), I was sitting directly behind an incredibly powerful base. Any one of or all of these things coincided to produce a really amazing experience, and one where I was able to feel the music. It was amazing\nI should break in and say that I\u0026rsquo;m not an incredibly musical person, and music/singing isn\u0026rsquo;t something that I did very much of growing up. I think teaching people (particularly boys) how to listen, how to sing, and how to listen for harmonies is incredibly difficult, and not something--certainly--that I was ever exposed to as a kid.","title":"Fa Sol La"},{"content":"Rather than bore you with minutia of my move (eg. shit, I need to get a shower curtain; why is all my toilet paper on the moving truck; I\u0026rsquo;m getting really sick of sitting on the floor while I wait for the moving truck) I thought I\u0026rsquo;d talk a little bit about something that seems to occupy a bunch of my thinking these days: how I\u0026rsquo;m setting up my work-desktop computer. It\u0026rsquo;s trivial, an on going process, and of minimal interest to most other people.\nSo I think I\u0026rsquo;ll make a series of it. There\u0026rsquo;s this post, and another that I\u0026rsquo;ve written, and a few other thoughts that I think fit in. And the truth be told, I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending so much time recently packing things, attending to chores and dealing with other crap, that it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to have an excuse to do some writing again.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the setup: I have an iMac of contemporary vintage for a workstation, which is of course running OS X 10.5 Leopard, by default. Here are the challenges I found myself facing:\nOS X is a great operating system, but I\u0026rsquo;m not a mac guy anymore, much to my surprise. I installed quicksilver pretty early on, but the truth is that my head isn\u0026rsquo;t shaped that way any more. The mouse frustrates me, and all the things that make OS X great I don\u0026rsquo;t really use. All my other machines and working environments for the past while have been linux based, and I\u0026rsquo;ve basically come to the conclusion that having one environment that\u0026rsquo;s shared between a large number of boxes is preferable to having different and unique operating environments. For a long time, I got the unified operating environment by virtue of only using one portable computer; now I just keep my laptop and desktop the same (more or less) get a very similar result. This is probably worth it\u0026rsquo;s own post, but I was vary wary of having a work machine that was too radically different from what I\u0026rsquo;m used to and what I use personally.\nSo if I need to run Linux, there are really only three options:\nLevel OS X and just run ubuntu/debian/etc. Set up a dual boot OS X/Linux system, and switch as I need to. Run Linux in some sort of virtual machine environment like VM Ware or VirtualBox. Option one is simple, and I liked the thought of it, but it seems like such a waste and what if there was some mac-specific app that I wanted to try? And it removes the option of using OS X as a back up\u0026hellip; While I\u0026rsquo;m no longer a mac guy, I do think that OS X\u0026rsquo;s desktop environment is superior to any non-tiling window manager for X11/Linux.\nOption two works, certainly, but I hate rebooting, and in a lot of ways option two would be functionally like option one, except I\u0026rsquo;d have less accessible hard drive space, and I\u0026rsquo;d have to reboot somewhat frequently if it turned out I actually needed to use both. Best and worst of both worlds.\nOption three is frustrating: virtual machines give some sort of minor performance hit, integration between host and guest is difficult and confusing sometimes, and guest operating stability is largely dependent upon host operating system stability.\nUltimately I chose option three, and as I used the machine, the fact that performance suffers a hit is totally unnoticeable, and though it took a bunch of futzing, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally settled into something that shows a lot of promise of working. (Ed. note that I\u0026rsquo;ve got a bit of a production lag on the blog.)\nI think that\u0026rsquo;s sufficient introduction. There\u0026rsquo;ll be more, don\u0026rsquo;t worry.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-workstation-trials/","summary":"Rather than bore you with minutia of my move (eg. shit, I need to get a shower curtain; why is all my toilet paper on the moving truck; I\u0026rsquo;m getting really sick of sitting on the floor while I wait for the moving truck) I thought I\u0026rsquo;d talk a little bit about something that seems to occupy a bunch of my thinking these days: how I\u0026rsquo;m setting up my work-desktop computer. It\u0026rsquo;s trivial, an on going process, and of minimal interest to most other people.\nSo I think I\u0026rsquo;ll make a series of it. There\u0026rsquo;s this post, and another that I\u0026rsquo;ve written, and a few other thoughts that I think fit in. And the truth be told, I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending so much time recently packing things, attending to chores and dealing with other crap, that it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to have an excuse to do some writing again.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the setup: I have an iMac of contemporary vintage for a workstation, which is of course running OS X 10.","title":"New Workstation Trials"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing this post for all of the wrong reasons. I\u0026rsquo;ve had this \u0026ldquo;write a post about pitfalls of org-mode,\u0026rdquo; on my org-agenda for weeks, with a list of \u0026ldquo;ways I\u0026rsquo;m not doing things right in org-mode.\u0026rdquo; One of those pitfalls, the main one in fact, was \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;re living too much in the agenda view, and not thinking of your org-files as working documents and outlines onto themselves.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd because I\u0026rsquo;m living too much in the agenda view, I\u0026rsquo;m writing a post (that I need to write, but have been hesitant to write for a while) mostly to get it off my todo list.\nThis is certainly an acceptable way to work, and I think todo lists mostly exist in order for their items to be completed and checked off. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve said (and I keep saying) the beautiful thing about org-mode is that it allows you to plan and process your projects in a way that makes sense for project planning without centering your process on \u0026ldquo;actionable items,\u0026rdquo; which is good for doing things but less good for planning things.\nAnd so I\u0026rsquo;ve been failing at keeping the \u0026ldquo;planning\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;doing\u0026rdquo; as separate thought processes. Note to self: do better with this.\nThe second pitfall is in the \u0026ldquo;org-refile\u0026rdquo; functionality (C-c C-w), which allows you to send items and subtree\u0026rsquo;s to other parts of your org-agenda files. I think part of the problem is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really get how it was intended to be used, and as a result when I try to use it, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work. (I tooled around in customize, after I wrote this and found: that the following bit (in custom-set-variables) to help, bunches:)\n'(org-refile-use-outline-path (quote file)) When I want to refile something, I think to myself \u0026ldquo;it should go to x file, under which heading, hrm\u0026hellip; lets see what\u0026rsquo;s there\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; And my options are presented to me in [Heading]/ (filename.org) format. The problem is that org is thinking backwards from me, and as a result I end up miss-filing things, or not using the refile as much as I should because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really work for me. Hrm. Not sure how to hack this.\nIn anycase, back to working.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/org-mode-pitfalls/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing this post for all of the wrong reasons. I\u0026rsquo;ve had this \u0026ldquo;write a post about pitfalls of org-mode,\u0026rdquo; on my org-agenda for weeks, with a list of \u0026ldquo;ways I\u0026rsquo;m not doing things right in org-mode.\u0026rdquo; One of those pitfalls, the main one in fact, was \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;re living too much in the agenda view, and not thinking of your org-files as working documents and outlines onto themselves.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd because I\u0026rsquo;m living too much in the agenda view, I\u0026rsquo;m writing a post (that I need to write, but have been hesitant to write for a while) mostly to get it off my todo list.\nThis is certainly an acceptable way to work, and I think todo lists mostly exist in order for their items to be completed and checked off. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve said (and I keep saying) the beautiful thing about org-mode is that it allows you to plan and process your projects in a way that makes sense for project planning without centering your process on \u0026ldquo;actionable items,\u0026rdquo; which is good for doing things but less good for planning things.","title":"Org Mode Pitfalls"},{"content":"In light of my otherwise fried state of mind, I would like to present a list of things that I dislike. Because I\u0026rsquo;m snarky like that.\nHTML emails. I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to send or receive an email that really requires rich text formatting provided by HTML emails. While multi-part emails (which send multiple copies of the same email in rich and plain text) are a good thing, it\u0026rsquo;s a huge pain in the ass to get an email (particularly a long email) three times, just for the pleasure. Sites that recreate twitter without adding any useful features or discussion. It\u0026rsquo;s as if the dimwitted internet people said \u0026ldquo;holy shit, if we give people 140 characters to say banal things on our site maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll get traffic like twitter,\u0026rdquo; except this isn\u0026rsquo;t how the internet has ever worked (or worked well.) Facebook is coming out with \u0026ldquo;usernames,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten an invitation to microblog on niche-social networking site, and everyone seems hard set on reimplementing this whole \u0026ldquo;status\u0026rdquo; thing a la twitter in the beginning, without any thought of interpretation (a la laconica) or doing something cool like jaiku-style threads, let alone the next big thing.\nMalformed emails. Dudes. Sending a plain text email is really simple, there\u0026rsquo;s no excuse for it to look like your cat took a nap on the tab key. I\u0026rsquo;m not chiding anyone for neglecting to test every email \u0026ldquo;blast\u0026rdquo; they send (because I\u0026rsquo;d be that lazy) but I am chiding folks for not testing it once. Writing a text file and sending it isn\u0026rsquo;t that hard. Reimplementation of email. I really hate getting facebook messages, and direct messages on [microblogging service], and each and every other fucking social networking site. Just send me email. Real email. It works, I have a good process for dealing with it, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have to screw around with anything. Thanks. The Twitter Fail Whale. Dudes. There was a while about a year ago, when a bunch of geeks were sitting around and thinking, \u0026ldquo;you know this twitter technology is going to be really cool, and there are a lot of possibilities here,\u0026rdquo; and there were, and I suppose there still are, but the truth is that I see the fail whale several times every day, and most of the cool things that I wanted to see in twitter two years ago and then a year ago (real xmpp support, track, federation, custom filtered feeds (a la LJ-style friends\u0026rsquo; filters),) still haven\u0026rsquo;t materialized. I think the addition of OAuth is a great thing, but it\u0026rsquo;s a baby step. The continued prevalence of IRC. Dudes discover jabber/xmpp. Thanks. A while back, I had a lot of nostalgia for IRC, and its true that IRC has a lot of history and is a standard to be reckoned with, but jabber is so much more elegant, secure, and provides features (persistence, logging, independence, etc) without having net-splits and complicated ad hoc registration schemes. That\u0026rsquo;s all for now. What do you hate about the internet?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things-i-hate-about-the-internet/","summary":"In light of my otherwise fried state of mind, I would like to present a list of things that I dislike. Because I\u0026rsquo;m snarky like that.\nHTML emails. I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to send or receive an email that really requires rich text formatting provided by HTML emails. While multi-part emails (which send multiple copies of the same email in rich and plain text) are a good thing, it\u0026rsquo;s a huge pain in the ass to get an email (particularly a long email) three times, just for the pleasure. Sites that recreate twitter without adding any useful features or discussion. It\u0026rsquo;s as if the dimwitted internet people said \u0026ldquo;holy shit, if we give people 140 characters to say banal things on our site maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll get traffic like twitter,\u0026rdquo; except this isn\u0026rsquo;t how the internet has ever worked (or worked well.) Facebook is coming out with \u0026ldquo;usernames,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten an invitation to microblog on niche-social networking site, and everyone seems hard set on reimplementing this whole \u0026ldquo;status\u0026rdquo; thing a la twitter in the beginning, without any thought of interpretation (a la laconica) or doing something cool like jaiku-style threads, let alone the next big thing.","title":"things I hate about the internet"},{"content":"I watched the Helvetica movie a few weeks back and I wanted to say, friends, it changed my world.\nFor those of you haven\u0026rsquo;t heard about Helvetica, which I suspect covers most of you (however, I suspect more of you have heard/seen this movie than the general public, because I think you all are just that cook. at any rate,) it\u0026rsquo;s a documentary that covers design, typography, modernism, post-modernism, and contemporary trends in art/design, all vis a vis the now-52-year-old typeface \u0026ldquo;Helvetica\u0026rdquo; which had a profound impact on the last half-century of visual culture.\nFor real. 90 minutes of a movie about a font face.\nAnd you think this might be boring or get old after a while, but somehow it doesn\u0026rsquo;t. And not only does it not get old, it soaks into your perceptions for a long time afterwords.\nThe thing about helvetica, perhaps its largest strength, is that it blends into the background, that it\u0026rsquo;s value-neutral, and that it is all over the freakin\u0026rsquo; place. Seriously. The side effect of this is that we don\u0026rsquo;t end up \u0026ldquo;seeing\u0026rdquo; it very much, and the movie shines a light on Helvetica and suddenly I\u0026rsquo;ve found it possible to see it everywhere. Everywhere.\nAnd if nothing else, I think its sort of cool to be able to see differences and depths in this thing that sort of exists to be neutral. So that\u0026rsquo;s cool.\nAnd. That\u0026rsquo;s about it.\nStop looking at me like that.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-helvetica-changed-my-life/","summary":"I watched the Helvetica movie a few weeks back and I wanted to say, friends, it changed my world.\nFor those of you haven\u0026rsquo;t heard about Helvetica, which I suspect covers most of you (however, I suspect more of you have heard/seen this movie than the general public, because I think you all are just that cook. at any rate,) it\u0026rsquo;s a documentary that covers design, typography, modernism, post-modernism, and contemporary trends in art/design, all vis a vis the now-52-year-old typeface \u0026ldquo;Helvetica\u0026rdquo; which had a profound impact on the last half-century of visual culture.\nFor real. 90 minutes of a movie about a font face.\nAnd you think this might be boring or get old after a while, but somehow it doesn\u0026rsquo;t. And not only does it not get old, it soaks into your perceptions for a long time afterwords.\nThe thing about helvetica, perhaps its largest strength, is that it blends into the background, that it\u0026rsquo;s value-neutral, and that it is all over the freakin\u0026rsquo; place.","title":"how helvetica changed my life"},{"content":"A post about the distributed version control system \u0026ldquo;git\u0026rdquo; in two parts.\nPart One: Git Puns My identi.ca buddy madalu and frequent commenter here posted a few weeks ago the following notice:\n#ubuntu-one\u0026hellip; No thanks! I\u0026rsquo;ll stick with my home-brewed git + server + usb drive solution. My git repos breed like rabbits!\nWhich basically sums up my opinion on ubuntuone. But I thought that the \u0026ldquo;my git repos breed like rabbits\u0026rdquo; was both accurate (git repositories are designed to be replicated in their entirety), and a sort of funny way to put it. And being the kind of person that I am, I decided to see what other (potentially dirty) puns I could make about git. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I came up with:\nwhat did one git repo say to another git repo? pull my diff\nwhat did mama git say when she found her remote in his room making new branches? octopus merge this instant!\nwhat did one git remote say to entice another remote to branch? it\u0026rsquo;s ok we can just tell them we were cherry picking later.\nwhat did dr. git say when a repo complained of bloating? git gc\nI should point out that these four puns all demonstrate a factual feature of git, though the \u0026ldquo;pull my diff\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly what happens.\n\u0026ldquo;Octopus Merge\u0026rdquo; is the method that git uses when there are a lot of divergent branches (more than three) that need to be merged together. Similarly \u0026ldquo;cherry picking\u0026rdquo; is a way to manually select what changes get merged together if you\u0026rsquo;re not ready to do full merges, and git gc is the cleanup script that goes through and re-compresses and prunes the database so that your repo works faster and with less disk space.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m out of puns, you all are welcome to join in.\nPart Two: Atypical uses of Git. I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ve written a bunch here about how I\u0026rsquo;m not really a programmer, and while this is true I do use git a lot. In part I think this is because git is really mostly an ad-hoc file system and also given how I write, the kind of writing I do isn\u0026rsquo;t that different from programming.\nSo aside from storing my writing projects, and my orgmode, I do things like store all of my mail directories in git. Which you might think is kind of weird, but the truth is that it makes keeping lots of computers in sync a rather simple proposition, and its damn fast.\nI also have a directory I call \u0026ldquo;garen\u0026rdquo; (but used to call \u0026ldquo;main\u0026rdquo;) that is basically my home directory. It has all my emacs lisp files, most of my non-mail related scripts, various configuration files. and so forth. It started out as a backup and workspace for smaller projects, but it\u0026rsquo;s since morphed into \u0026ldquo;that one thing I need to have of my computer in order to actually work.\u0026rdquo; When I was setting up the server it took a thousand things that might have been huge headaches and made them non-issues. Here\u0026rsquo;s what this repo looks like:\nemacs/ This is where my emacs-lisp files all live. I have a \u0026lsquo;init.el\u0026rsquo; file which is basically the standard .emacs file, and a \u0026lsquo;gui-init.el\u0026rsquo; file for code that I only want to run if I\u0026rsquo;m running desktop where I\u0026rsquo;ll be running non-console emacs frames. As a result on my machines my .emacs file looks like this: :\n(load \u0026quot;~/garen/emacs/gui-init.el\u0026quot;) (load \u0026quot;~/garen/emacs/init.el\u0026quot;) With the first line commented out if needed. End result, emacs loads the same everywhere, no thinking.\nscripts/ I add this to my path, so that any little bit of bash script that I want to be able to use is accessable and the same on all my machines.\nconfigs/ Generally my format is to have config_file.machine_name, for example: bashrc.leibniz. In the case of the bashrc, I have a \u0026ldquo;.common\u0026rdquo; file that has everything that all my machines need, while the machine specific files have everything that\u0026rsquo;s\u0026hellip; well specific, and a source statement for the common file. So my \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; .bashrc looks like this: :\nsource /home/tychoish/garen/configs/bashrc.leibniz And everything stays in sync between the machines. How cool is that.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s sort of the most important thing. The great thing is that this makes setting up a new user account on a server, or a box itself a piece of cake.\nFood for thought!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-git-in-two-parts/","summary":"A post about the distributed version control system \u0026ldquo;git\u0026rdquo; in two parts.\nPart One: Git Puns My identi.ca buddy madalu and frequent commenter here posted a few weeks ago the following notice:\n#ubuntu-one\u0026hellip; No thanks! I\u0026rsquo;ll stick with my home-brewed git + server + usb drive solution. My git repos breed like rabbits!\nWhich basically sums up my opinion on ubuntuone. But I thought that the \u0026ldquo;my git repos breed like rabbits\u0026rdquo; was both accurate (git repositories are designed to be replicated in their entirety), and a sort of funny way to put it. And being the kind of person that I am, I decided to see what other (potentially dirty) puns I could make about git. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I came up with:\nwhat did one git repo say to another git repo? pull my diff\nwhat did mama git say when she found her remote in his room making new branches?","title":"on git: in two parts"},{"content":" Monday morning, before I left St. Louis, the trash truck or something took out the phone line behind the house. The phone line which carries the internet. Sigh. So while I\u0026rsquo;ve been driving and have been somewhat out of touch, by the nature of this whole process, the fact that the internet died didn\u0026rsquo;t help things. Sorry for the lack of posts. The midwest (particular the northern and parts that I\u0026rsquo;m most familiar) is, on the whole, incredibly boring to drive through. Not stunningly boring, but not that bad. By the time you get to eastern Ohio, however, things start to get interesting. The miles and miles of corn fields interspersed with the lone standing tree and occasional soybean crop--you know you\u0026rsquo;re in trouble when soybeans come as a refreshing change of pace--were replaced with rolling hills, mountains, and the like. To make up for this, however, it did seem that they were doing a lot of construction/road repair for very little improvement. Parts of the eastern edge of the turnpike were actually pretty good: modern, pretty wide, in good repair; other parts, not so much.\nAlthough, to be sure, heading east was much better than heading west. Better to get the bland out of the way first, and have something interesting at the end.\nI met Chris for the first time, in the flesh. Dude. This requires it\u0026rsquo;s own sublist: I think the common perception is that things that happen in meatspace are somehow more authentic, and meaningful, and \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; than conversations that happen on line, and often I\u0026rsquo;d agree. While I\u0026rsquo;m certainly not complaining about the real-life experience, I do think that there are some distinct disadvantages:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s hard to share links in meatspace, and so \u0026ldquo;hey I was reading this thing, here\u0026rsquo;s a link, and I thought that it was nifty and has implications for ____\u0026rdquo; becomes, not a stepping stone for another thought, but an exercise in \u0026ldquo;hell, I read something not that long ago and thought it seemed relevant.\nChris and I tend to have these interleaved conversations where we\u0026rsquo;ll sort of drift through a few topics at once, and because at least in an ephemeral sort of way chats are logged, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to interrupt the other person, even if there are a couple of threads of quasi-related material on the table at once. Without the benefit of a running transcript you have to remember more and that\u0026rsquo;s weird, or at least it feels weird in this context. I\u0026rsquo;ll adjust I\u0026rsquo;m sure.\nOn the whole, he is (and the occasion was) pretty much what I expected. I\u0026rsquo;ve had this theory about \u0026ldquo;how people turn out to really be in reality versus how they seem online,\u0026rdquo; which is that after enough time (months/years) it\u0026rsquo;s pretty hard to maintain any sort of ruse or false facade. Sure, people lie, and people lie in real life, but those amount to little surprises. Big surprises? Unlikely. That held true.\nThe cats have been reasonably cooperative. They\u0026rsquo;re sort of scared of the outside, and were made nervous by the whole experience. Thankfully their response was to cower/sleep in the carrier and not make a lot of noise. I\u0026rsquo;m leaving them with M.N. in Philadelphia for a night or two while I secure digs for us in New Jersey.\nM.N. and I will have a couple of opportunities this weekend to do shape note singing. Woot!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s nice to know that summer, even early summer, isn\u0026rsquo;t quite as brutal everywhere as it is in St. Louis (or the other places where I\u0026rsquo;ve (semi)recently spent my summers: Kansas City, Nashville, and St. Louis of course.) Between that and the Wisconsin winter tolerance, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t yet worn off, I think I have a freakishly broad temperature tolerance.\nEastern time is weird. Though, at least for a little while, I like it because it sort of means that my body doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite get that it\u0026rsquo;s daylight savings time. And there are very few things that I hate more than daylight savings time.\nAnd I think, that\u0026rsquo;s all the news that\u0026rsquo;s fit to print.\nEdited to add: I\u0026rsquo;m going to continue such musing regarding my current state over on my live journal which seems the more appropriate venue for this kind of blathering. Real post tomorrow. I swear.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/midweek-update/","summary":"Monday morning, before I left St. Louis, the trash truck or something took out the phone line behind the house. The phone line which carries the internet. Sigh. So while I\u0026rsquo;ve been driving and have been somewhat out of touch, by the nature of this whole process, the fact that the internet died didn\u0026rsquo;t help things. Sorry for the lack of posts. The midwest (particular the northern and parts that I\u0026rsquo;m most familiar) is, on the whole, incredibly boring to drive through. Not stunningly boring, but not that bad. By the time you get to eastern Ohio, however, things start to get interesting. The miles and miles of corn fields interspersed with the lone standing tree and occasional soybean crop--you know you\u0026rsquo;re in trouble when soybeans come as a refreshing change of pace--were replaced with rolling hills, mountains, and the like. To make up for this, however, it did seem that they were doing a lot of construction/road repair for very little improvement.","title":"midweek update"},{"content":"Because I\u0026rsquo;m moving soon (eep.) I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that we needed to get a new bed. See my existing bed--now, nearly ten years old--was wedged into the room in my parents house that it is currently in, with some force, and we very much doubt that said bed will ever be able to be removed, given the shape and location of the doorway.\nAnyway, so I went to our local furniture store the other day to scope out and price mattresses and box-springs. This furniture store is this outlet-like store that\u0026rsquo;s pretty near to where my parents live, and over the past ten or twelve years we\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a fair number of things there, so much so that there\u0026rsquo;s a sales guy that recognizes my mother and I when we enter.\nSo we go in, and I try and make a b-line for the mattress section, when we were acosted by a very helpful sales guy (not our usual victim) and he hovered around telling us way too much about the inner workings of the mattresses, even after I tried to make it clear that: a) I wasn\u0026rsquo;t likely to buy the mattress today, b) I just wanted to feel where my price point was.\nI should interject two things, one that I sleep on my stomach, and two that I tend to sleep with my feet hanging off the end of the bed.\nSo after a while of looking around and hoping that the dude would get the picture and leave me alone, he finally suggested that I try a particular bed out.\n\u0026ldquo;Ok,\u0026rdquo; I said, and face planted side ways (so that I was running parallel to the imaginary headboard) onto a sort of mid-to-high end off-brand mattress. \u0026ldquo;Hey,\u0026rdquo; I said, after a moment, \u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s pretty good,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Uh,\u0026rdquo; he said, \u0026ldquo;Is that how you usually sleep on beds?\u0026rdquo;\nI was speechless. Not only was he hovering but he was judging me for how I was laying down on beds. Now to be fair I don\u0026rsquo;t typically lay on beds cross-ways except for naps when I\u0026rsquo;m really tired, but still it seemed out of place, particularly since he\u0026rsquo;d been so accommodating and attentive henceforth.\nSigh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/adventures-in-commerce/","summary":"Because I\u0026rsquo;m moving soon (eep.) I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that we needed to get a new bed. See my existing bed--now, nearly ten years old--was wedged into the room in my parents house that it is currently in, with some force, and we very much doubt that said bed will ever be able to be removed, given the shape and location of the doorway.\nAnyway, so I went to our local furniture store the other day to scope out and price mattresses and box-springs. This furniture store is this outlet-like store that\u0026rsquo;s pretty near to where my parents live, and over the past ten or twelve years we\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a fair number of things there, so much so that there\u0026rsquo;s a sales guy that recognizes my mother and I when we enter.\nSo we go in, and I try and make a b-line for the mattress section, when we were acosted by a very helpful sales guy (not our usual victim) and he hovered around telling us way too much about the inner workings of the mattresses, even after I tried to make it clear that: a) I wasn\u0026rsquo;t likely to buy the mattress today, b) I just wanted to feel where my price point was.","title":"adventures in commerce"},{"content":"Deep Breath.\nI have news for you all which I hope will explain my absence for the past 10 or 15 days. Actually I\u0026rsquo;m surprised that it\u0026rsquo;s only been 10 or 15 days, as it feels so much longer. Anyway, enough suspense:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve accepted a position with Linode to work on (primarily) a really cool technical writing project. You can see the announcement here.\nThis is really awesome because:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a job. Writing. About Linux, and Web Servers, and Free Software/Open Source. Linode rocks. I applied for the job somewhat before I bought a linode, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been nothing but pleased with the service which has worked flawlessly for me so far. The best part, is I think that Linode\u0026rsquo;s approach to technology, to using and developing technology, really fits in with the kinds of values and approaches that I hold. Did I mention it\u0026rsquo;s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software? It puts me on the east coast, near Philadelphia, where the largest concentration of my non-College friends are located, which has me unbelievably excited. I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to gossip and dance with M.N. more than once a year; I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to hang out and with my emergency-backup-big-sister (H.C.) more often; it\u0026rsquo;ll be feasible to hang out with Chris you know ever and more. I\u0026rsquo;m so psyched. Did I mention it\u0026rsquo;s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software? The astute among you will thus, notice that:\nNew job elsewhere means relocation. Which means. I\u0026rsquo;ve been busy doing all of the relocation things: packing, doing this and that\u0026rsquo;s, more packing, getting paperwork in order, even more packing, and so forth that I\u0026rsquo;ve not been really good at keeping on top of the blog. I have a couple of entries stashed, but my rhythm is all off kilter. The job announcement has my real name in it. I have an abandoned a post or two about the whole tycho/sam thing. I should perhaps restart it. I think what I really need is this highly mythologized about page that talks about tycho and sam in different voices. The truth is, that while I don\u0026rsquo;t think my reasons for using \u0026ldquo;tycho garen\u0026rdquo; these days is the same as it was 2.5 or 3 years ago, but I really like what I\u0026rsquo;ve done with the whole tycho thing, and I can\u0026rsquo;t really imagine not using it.\nIn a lot of ways, I think, writing this blog for so long is a lot of the reason why I was able to get this job, both because through the experience of writing about technology for the blog gave me the confidence/knowledge/skills that make this tech-writing thing I do possible, and also the blog I think served to demonstrate that I was for real. This is related to another train of thought that I hope to follow up on in the next few months somewhere, but it strikes me that this, if anything is a marker of success that we\u0026rsquo;re not particularly prone to attending too. We notice successful blogs that get millions of visits a month and can support their authors on advertising revenue and invited speaking engagements. I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve achieved some kind of success here, and there are other kinds of success to be had. I want to think about what this means. But first I want to sit with this.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, and I look forward to continuing this blog in this \u0026ldquo;next part\u0026rdquo; of my journey.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/job-and-updates/","summary":"Deep Breath.\nI have news for you all which I hope will explain my absence for the past 10 or 15 days. Actually I\u0026rsquo;m surprised that it\u0026rsquo;s only been 10 or 15 days, as it feels so much longer. Anyway, enough suspense:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve accepted a position with Linode to work on (primarily) a really cool technical writing project. You can see the announcement here.\nThis is really awesome because:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a job. Writing. About Linux, and Web Servers, and Free Software/Open Source. Linode rocks. I applied for the job somewhat before I bought a linode, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been nothing but pleased with the service which has worked flawlessly for me so far. The best part, is I think that Linode\u0026rsquo;s approach to technology, to using and developing technology, really fits in with the kinds of values and approaches that I hold. Did I mention it\u0026rsquo;s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?","title":"job and updates"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing for weeks and weeks about co-ops, authentic exchange and commerce, the practice of openness and business models, and other related topics. Between the crashing economy, my ongoing contemplation of open source, and a new project that I\u0026rsquo;m almost ready to announce, thinking about the substance of economies and the power of economies to define other aspect of our social experience has seemed really appealing. And it has been.\nI came across this article by Jason Stoddard a while back, and I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I would be remiss in these posts, if I didn\u0026rsquo;t somehow tie it into writing and science fiction, and Stoddard\u0026rsquo;s post provides a great hook into this connection. He\u0026rsquo;s also, basically spot on right.\nInterestingly, the beginning of this series grew out of my experiences reading Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Mars Trilogy,\u0026rdquo; which spent a lot of time (particularly in the last two volumes) contemplating corporations and capitalism. Indeed, in the Mars books, Robinson posits what some readers (without careful examination) might think of as the typical \u0026ldquo;evil mega-corporations.\u0026rdquo;\nThough I think he succeeds at avoiding the traps of having as villains \u0026ldquo;scheming business people in suits,\u0026rdquo; by making sure that none of the executives appear in the stories. The closest we get to having a \u0026ldquo;corporate villain,\u0026rdquo; is a character who allies themselves with the corporations for personal advancement. The result is that, the corporations lumber around, always doing the wrong thing, always getting in the way of the main characters, but they never loose the extra-human nature of being corporations.\nMaybe that\u0026rsquo;s part of the problem with writing fiction about corporations. Fiction tends to revolve around people and social systems of comprehensible complexity and corporations are shaped and steered by a great number of people, and there\u0026rsquo;s too much complexity in corporations to really capture accurately in fiction.\nWhile Stoddard\u0026rsquo;s argument (Corporations exist to make money, they\u0026rsquo;re not evil by nature) is factually true and good advice to anyone writing \u0026lsquo;corporate drama\u0026rsquo; fiction, I think writers (and the rest of us) might benefit from thinking about some other \u0026ldquo;nitty gritty\u0026rdquo; aspects of corporations. Just because corporations may be \u0026ldquo;generally a bad thing in the world,\u0026rdquo; difficult to write about, and \u0026ldquo;not simply evil for the purposes of fiction\u0026rdquo; nonetheless I think it is important to think about the social/political effect corporations and to write about them in fiction.\nThe following list is rough, and incomplete, and I encourage you all to help me out in comments!\nCorporations have a few overriding drives: to grow, to make profit (both by minimizing expenses and by increasing revenue), and to continue to exist. All actions and strategies undertaken by corporations should make sense in context of one or more of these drives. Corporate cultures are largely self selecting, so \u0026ldquo;radicals\u0026rdquo; in corporate settings are really unlikely, either because they\u0026rsquo;re likely to leave or because their self-interest eventually falls in line with the company\u0026rsquo;s interest. Corporations employ huge numbers of people, but we can assume that the number of people at any given company doing things that support the main mission of a company but that aren\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;the thing the company does.\u0026rdquo; Phyisical Plant \u0026ldquo;things,\u0026rdquo; clerical tasks, human resources, \u0026ldquo;infrastructure,\u0026rdquo; operations/financial tasks, internal legal work, and so forth. Probably as much as a quarter or a third of the staff probably falls into one of these categories. Corporations are rarely unilateral. Ever. They have many operations, many projects, many divisions, and thus can be resilient to things changing \u0026ldquo;around them.\u0026rdquo; This also means that coorporations are less likely to take umbrage at potentially threatening individuals and companies, than a single individual would in a similar situation. Career advancement, in companies or elsewhere, generally happens to some greater or lesser extent by moving horizontally between companies rather than \u0026ldquo;through the ranks.\u0026rdquo; The bigger the corporation the more specialized the roles of the workforce would tend to be. For the most part, I think it safe to assume that most corporations don\u0026rsquo;t have a great deal of \u0026ldquo;classified\u0026rdquo; information, or information that\u0026rsquo;s heavily embargoed. This comes as a great blow to conspiracy theorists, but secrets are hard to keep with regards to projects that a lot of people need to know about, and if all the other things we know about corporations are true (size, attrition, etc.) \u0026ldquo;great secrets\u0026rdquo; are unlikely to remain great secrets for long. In light of all these things I think there are a lot of opportunities for realistic story telling, but it\u0026rsquo;s not always so straight forward.\nIn anycase, I look forward to thinking about this some more with you.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-evil-corporations/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing for weeks and weeks about co-ops, authentic exchange and commerce, the practice of openness and business models, and other related topics. Between the crashing economy, my ongoing contemplation of open source, and a new project that I\u0026rsquo;m almost ready to announce, thinking about the substance of economies and the power of economies to define other aspect of our social experience has seemed really appealing. And it has been.\nI came across this article by Jason Stoddard a while back, and I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I would be remiss in these posts, if I didn\u0026rsquo;t somehow tie it into writing and science fiction, and Stoddard\u0026rsquo;s post provides a great hook into this connection. He\u0026rsquo;s also, basically spot on right.\nInterestingly, the beginning of this series grew out of my experiences reading Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Mars Trilogy,\u0026rdquo; which spent a lot of time (particularly in the last two volumes) contemplating corporations and capitalism.","title":"the evil corporations"},{"content":"One element that has been largely missing from my ongoing rambling analysis of economies, corporations, co-ops, and institutions has been higher education and universities. Of course Universities are institutions, and function in many ways like large corporations, but, nostalgia notwithstanding, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s really possible to exempt Universities or dismiss them from this conversation.\nOh, and, there was this rather interesting--but remarkably mundane--article that I clipped recently about that addressed where universities are \u0026ldquo;going\u0026rdquo; in the next decade or two. I say mundane, because I think the \u0026ldquo;look there\u0026rsquo;s new technology that\u0026rsquo;s changing the rules game\u0026rdquo; is crappy futurism, and really fails to get at the core of what kinds of developments we may expect to see in the coming years.\nNevertheless\u0026hellip; Shall we begin? I think so:\nThe expansion of university in the last 60 years, or so, has been fueled by the GI-Bill and the expansion of the student-loan industry. With the \u0026ldquo;population bubble\u0026rdquo; changing, and the credit market changing, universities will have to change. How they change is of course up in the air. There aren\u0026rsquo;t many alternatives to \u0026ldquo;liberal arts/general education\u0026rdquo; post-secondary education for people who don\u0026rsquo;t want, need, or have the preparation for that kind of education at age 18. While I\u0026rsquo;m a big proponent (and product of) a liberal arts education, there are many paths to becoming a well rounded and well educated adult, and they don\u0026rsquo;t all lead through traditional-four-year college educations (or equivalents, particularly at age 18.) Technology is changing higher education and scholarship, already, with all likelihood faster than technology has been and is changing other aspects of our culture (publishing, media production, civic engagement, etc.). Like all of these developments of culture, however, the changes in higher education are probably not as revolutionary as the article suggests. There will probably always be a way in which degree granting institutions will be a \u0026ldquo;useful\u0026rdquo; part of our society, but I think \u0026ldquo;The College,\u0026rdquo; will probably change significantly, but I think forthcoming changes probably have less to do with education and the classroom, and more to do with the evolving role of the faculty. As part of the decline of tenure-systems, I expect that eventually we\u0026rsquo;ll see a greater separation (but not total disconnect) between the institutions which employ and sponsor scholarship, and the institutions that educate students. It strikes me that most of the systems that universities use to convey education online (Blackboard, moodle, etc.,) are hopelessly flawed. Either by virtue of being difficult and \u0026ldquo;gawky\u0026rdquo; to use, or because they\u0026rsquo;re proprietary systems, or that they\u0026rsquo;re not designed for the task at hand, all of the systems that I\u0026rsquo;m aware of are as much roadblocks to the adoption of new technology in education as anything else. Although quality information (effectively presented, even) is increasingly available online for free, what makes this information valuable in the university setting, including interactivity, feedback on progress, individual attention, validation and certification of mastery, are all of the things that universities (particularly \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo;-grade institutions) perform least successfully at. We\u0026rsquo;ve been seeing research and popular press stuff on the phenomena of \u0026ldquo;prolonged adolescence,\u0026rdquo; where young people tend to have a period of several years post-graduation where they have to figure out \u0026ldquo;what next,\u0026rdquo; sometimes there\u0026rsquo;s graduate school, sometimes there\u0026rsquo;s odd jobs. I\u0026rsquo;ve become convinced that in an effort to help fill the gap between \u0026ldquo;vocational education\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;liberal arts/gen ed.\u0026rdquo; we\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to the point where we ask people who are 18 (and don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what they want to do with their lives, for the most part) to make decisions about their careers that are pretty absurd. Other kinds of educational options should exist, that might help resolve this issue. Interestingly these thoughts didn\u0026rsquo;t have very much to do with technology. I guess I mostly feel that the changes in technology are secondary to the larger economic forces likely to affect universities in the coming years. Unless the singularity comes first.\nYour thoughts, as always, are more than welcome.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-future-of-universities/","summary":"One element that has been largely missing from my ongoing rambling analysis of economies, corporations, co-ops, and institutions has been higher education and universities. Of course Universities are institutions, and function in many ways like large corporations, but, nostalgia notwithstanding, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s really possible to exempt Universities or dismiss them from this conversation.\nOh, and, there was this rather interesting--but remarkably mundane--article that I clipped recently about that addressed where universities are \u0026ldquo;going\u0026rdquo; in the next decade or two. I say mundane, because I think the \u0026ldquo;look there\u0026rsquo;s new technology that\u0026rsquo;s changing the rules game\u0026rdquo; is crappy futurism, and really fails to get at the core of what kinds of developments we may expect to see in the coming years.\nNevertheless\u0026hellip; Shall we begin? I think so:\nThe expansion of university in the last 60 years, or so, has been fueled by the GI-Bill and the expansion of the student-loan industry.","title":"the future of universities"},{"content":"I ran across this smear piece with regards to Ubuntu users from the perspective of a seasoned Linux user, which I think resonates both with the problem of treating your users like idiots and differently with the kerfuffle over ubuntu one, though this post is a direct sequel to neither post.\nThe article in question makes critique (sort of) that a little bit of knowledge is a terrible thing, and that by making Linux/Unix open to a less technical swath of users, that the quality of the discourse around the linux world has taken a nose dive. It\u0026rsquo;s a sort of \u0026ldquo;grumble grumble get off my lawn, kid,\u0026rdquo; sort of argument, and while the elitist approach is off-putting (but total par for the course in hacker communities,) I think the post does resonate with a couple of very real phenomena:\n1. Ubuntu has led the way for Linux to become a viable option for advanced beginner and intermediate computer users. Particularly since the beginning of 2008 (eg. the 8.04 release). Ubuntu just works, and a lot of people who know their way around a keyboard and a mouse are and can be comfortable using Linux for most of their computing tasks. This necessarily changes the makeup of the typical \u0026ldquo;Linux User\u0026rdquo; quite a bit, and I think welcoming these people into the fold can be a challenge, particularly for the more advanced users who have come to expect something very different from the \u0026ldquo;Linux Community.\u0026rdquo;\n2. This is mostly Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s fault, but people who started using--likely Windows powered--computers in the nineties (which is a huge portion of people out there), being an \u0026lsquo;intermediate\u0026rsquo; means a much different kind of understanding that \u0026ldquo;old school\u0026rdquo; Linux users have.\nUsing a Windows machine effectively, and knowing how to use one of these systems, revolves around knowing what controls are where in the control panel, around being able to \u0026ldquo;guess\u0026rdquo; where various settings are within applications, knowing how to keep track of windows that aren\u0026rsquo;t visible, understanding the hierarchy of the file system, and knowing to reboot early and often. By contrast, using a Linux Machine effectively revolves around understanding the user/group/file permissions system, understanding the architecture of the system/desktop stack, knowing your way around a command line window, and the package manager, and knowing how to edit configuration files if needed.\nIn short, skills aren\u0026rsquo;t as transferable between operating systems as they may have once been.\nUbuntu, for it\u0026rsquo;s flaws (tenuous relationship with the Debian Project, peculiar release cycle), seems to know what it takes to make a system usable with very little upfront cost: How the installer needs to work, how to provide and organize the graphical configuration tools, and how to provide a base installation that is familiar and functional to a broad swath of potential users.\nWhile this does change the dynamic of the community, it\u0026rsquo;s also the only way that linux on the desktop is going to grow. The transition between windows power user and linux user is not a direct one. (While arguably the transition between OS X and Linux is reasonably straight forward.) The new people who come to the linux desktop are by-and-large going to be users who are quite different from the folks who have historically used Linux.\nAt the same time, one of the magical things about free software is that the very act of using free software educates users about how their software works and how their machines work. The cause of this is partially intentional, partly by virtue of the fact that much free software is designed to be used by the people who wrote the software, and partly because of free software\u0026rsquo;s adoptive home of UNIX-liken systems. Regardless of the reason however, we can expect that even the most \u0026ldquo;n00bish\u0026rdquo; of users to eventually become more skilled and knowledgeable.\nHaving said that, in direct response to the article in question, even though I\u0026rsquo;m a huge devote of a \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; text editor, might it be the case that the era of the \u0026ldquo;do everything text editor\u0026rdquo; may be coming to an end? My thought is not that emacs and vi are no longer applicable, but the truth is that building specialized domain specific editing applications is easy enough that building such editing applications inside of vi/emacs doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the same sort of sense that it made a twenty or thirty years ago? Sure a class of programmers will probably always use emacs, or something like it, but I think the change of emacs being supplanted by things-that-aren\u0026rsquo;t editors, say, is something that isn\u0026rsquo;t too difficult to imagine.\nIf the singularity doesn\u0026rsquo;t come first, that is.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dweebishness-of-linux-users/","summary":"I ran across this smear piece with regards to Ubuntu users from the perspective of a seasoned Linux user, which I think resonates both with the problem of treating your users like idiots and differently with the kerfuffle over ubuntu one, though this post is a direct sequel to neither post.\nThe article in question makes critique (sort of) that a little bit of knowledge is a terrible thing, and that by making Linux/Unix open to a less technical swath of users, that the quality of the discourse around the linux world has taken a nose dive. It\u0026rsquo;s a sort of \u0026ldquo;grumble grumble get off my lawn, kid,\u0026rdquo; sort of argument, and while the elitist approach is off-putting (but total par for the course in hacker communities,) I think the post does resonate with a couple of very real phenomena:\n1. Ubuntu has led the way for Linux to become a viable option for advanced beginner and intermediate computer users.","title":"dweebishness of linux users"},{"content":"About a week ago, by your reading, I finished writing a short story. The fact that I was writing a short story when I should have been working on the novel is perhaps a bit distressing, but I\u0026rsquo;ve taken the opinion that any work on short fiction--particularly short fiction where I\u0026rsquo;m excited about the project and reasonably happy with the results--is worth what ever attention and love I can spare for it.\nSo I took a break from my novel to write a short story. Most of my attempts at short fiction are so abortive that I was hesitant to even talk about it on the blog lest I jinx myself in some way.\nBut nevertheless, I got to a first draft. A first draft, that has an ending which doesn\u0026rsquo;t suck. This is a major accomplishment.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to talk too much about it now, as it still has to pass muster with my reviewers and get edited into something a bit less rambling, but for right now I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen to take pleasure in the acomplishment.\nI will, however, say that the story is basically a compression of a lot of the ideas in the novel I\u0026rsquo;m writing. The short story is set about 10-15 years before the story, but it has many of the same core characters, and--I guess--reformulates the core issues in the novel\u0026rsquo;s story in a different context.\nOh, and it\u0026rsquo;s a pretty cool space-adventure at the same time.\nBecause that\u0026rsquo;s how I swing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-short-story/","summary":"About a week ago, by your reading, I finished writing a short story. The fact that I was writing a short story when I should have been working on the novel is perhaps a bit distressing, but I\u0026rsquo;ve taken the opinion that any work on short fiction--particularly short fiction where I\u0026rsquo;m excited about the project and reasonably happy with the results--is worth what ever attention and love I can spare for it.\nSo I took a break from my novel to write a short story. Most of my attempts at short fiction are so abortive that I was hesitant to even talk about it on the blog lest I jinx myself in some way.\nBut nevertheless, I got to a first draft. A first draft, that has an ending which doesn\u0026rsquo;t suck. This is a major accomplishment.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to talk too much about it now, as it still has to pass muster with my reviewers and get edited into something a bit less rambling, but for right now I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen to take pleasure in the acomplishment.","title":"a short story"},{"content":"I write this post as I am (theoretically) putting the finishing touches on a short story that I\u0026rsquo;ve written.\n\u0026ldquo;But shouldn\u0026rsquo;t you be working on a novel?\u0026rdquo; You ask.\nWell yes. But this short story is related to the novel, and any time I have the overwhelming urge to write a short story, I\u0026rsquo;m prone to take it, because I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a short story writer by temperament and I think it\u0026rsquo;s a good practice/skill to encourage.\nAnyway, so I\u0026rsquo;m writing this short story. And it\u0026rsquo;s cruising in right around the 6,500-7,500 is word length for the first draft, which isn\u0026rsquo;t bad. Actually the whole thing isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly wretched, which is kinda awesome.\nIn any case, I wanted to explain one part of my challenge in writing and thinking about writing short form.\nYou see, for a long time, for some reason, I thought that \u0026ldquo;short stories\u0026rdquo; were all around 2,000 words, and that longer things were really novellas, or novelettes at the very least.\nWhich is totally false the shortest (non-flash) short stories are at least 2,000 words (typically) and novelettes start (according to SFWA) at 7,500 words. This was so embeded in my brain, that I would read (or listen) to stories that were clearly 5,000-10,000 words and think to myself \u0026ldquo;isn\u0026rsquo;t it amazing how they fit that much story into 2,000 words?\u0026rdquo;\nsigh\nAnd while I\u0026rsquo;m not sure having a realistic notion of short story length has made me a better writer of short forms, it\u0026rsquo;s made it possible to write shorter forms.\nAnd that, my friends, is a start.\n[Edit: I totally finished the short story and twittered about it yesterday morning, as I\u0026rsquo;m posting this, I\u0026rsquo;ll post about that later. Anyway, impeding big news, that I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be ready to talk about on Monday or so. Stay tuned and have a good weekend.]\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/short-story-lenghts/","summary":"I write this post as I am (theoretically) putting the finishing touches on a short story that I\u0026rsquo;ve written.\n\u0026ldquo;But shouldn\u0026rsquo;t you be working on a novel?\u0026rdquo; You ask.\nWell yes. But this short story is related to the novel, and any time I have the overwhelming urge to write a short story, I\u0026rsquo;m prone to take it, because I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a short story writer by temperament and I think it\u0026rsquo;s a good practice/skill to encourage.\nAnyway, so I\u0026rsquo;m writing this short story. And it\u0026rsquo;s cruising in right around the 6,500-7,500 is word length for the first draft, which isn\u0026rsquo;t bad. Actually the whole thing isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly wretched, which is kinda awesome.\nIn any case, I wanted to explain one part of my challenge in writing and thinking about writing short form.\nYou see, for a long time, for some reason, I thought that \u0026ldquo;short stories\u0026rdquo; were all around 2,000 words, and that longer things were really novellas, or novelettes at the very least.","title":"short story lenghts"},{"content":"I read a pretty cool interview with Vernor Vinge, in H+ magazine, where he talked about the coming technological singularity, which I thought was really productive. I\u0026rsquo;ve read and participated in a lot criticism of \u0026ldquo;Singularity Theory,\u0026rdquo; where people make the argument that the singularity is just a mystification on the process of normal technological development, and that all this attention to the technology distracts from \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; issues, and/or that singularity is too abstract, too distant, and will only be recognizable in retrospect.\nFrom reading Vinge\u0026rsquo;s comments, I\u0026rsquo;ve come to several realizations:\nVinge\u0026rsquo;s concept of the singularity is pretty narrow, and relates to effect of creating human-grade information technology. Right now, there are a lot of things that humans can do that machines can\u0026rsquo;t, The singularity then, is the point where that changes. I liked how--and I find this to be the case with most \u0026ldquo;science theory,\u0026rdquo; but the scientists often have very narrow theories and the popular press often forces a much more broad interpretation. I think we get too caught up with thinking about the singularity as this cool amazing thing that is the nerd version of \u0026ldquo;the second coming,\u0026rdquo; and forget that the singularity would really mark the end of society and culture as we know it now. That it\u0026rsquo;s a rather frightening proposition. Vinge\u0026rsquo;s comparison of the singularity to the development of the printing press is productive. He argues that the printing press was conceivable before Gutenberg (they had books, the effects, however were unimaginable, admittedly), in a way that the singularity isn\u0026rsquo;t conceivable to us given the current state of our lives and technology. In a lot of ways, the technological developments required in the Singularity, without attending to the social and cultural facts. The singularity is really about the outsourcing of cognition (writing, computers, etc.) rather than cramming more computing power onto our microchips. As i begin to understand this a bit better--as it\u0026rsquo;s pretty difficult to grok--I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to think about the singularity and post-singular experience as being a much more dark possibility than had heretofore. There are a lot of problems with \u0026ldquo;the human era,\u0026rdquo; and I think technology, particularly as humans interact with technology (eg. cyborg) is pretty amazing. So why wouldn\u0026rsquo;t the singularity be made of awesome?\nBecause it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be--to borrow an idea from William Gibson--evenly distributed. The post-human era might begin with the advent of singularity-grade intelligences, but there will be a lot of humans left hanging around in the post-human age. Talk about class politics!\nSecondly, the singularity represents the end of our society in a very real sort of sense. Maybe literature, art, journalism, manufacturing, farming, computer terminals and their operating systems (lending a whole new meaning to the idea of a \u0026ldquo;dumb terminal\u0026rdquo;), and the Internet will continue to be relevant in a post-human age. But probably not exactly. While the means by which these activities and cultural pursuits might be obsoleted (tweaking metabolisms, organic memory transfer, inboard computer interfaces) are interesting, the death of culture is often a difficult and trying process, particularly for the people (like academics, educators, writers, artists, etc.) \u0026ldquo;Unintelligible\u0026rdquo; is sort of hard to grasp.\nAnd I think frightening as a result. Perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s the largest lesson that I got from Vinge\u0026rsquo;s responses: the singularity is on many levels something to be feared: that when you think about the singularity the response should be on some visceral level \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;d really like to avoid that,\u0026rdquo; rather than, \u0026ldquo;Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be cool if this happened.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd somehow that\u0026rsquo;s pretty refreshing. At least for me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-dark-singularity/","summary":"I read a pretty cool interview with Vernor Vinge, in H+ magazine, where he talked about the coming technological singularity, which I thought was really productive. I\u0026rsquo;ve read and participated in a lot criticism of \u0026ldquo;Singularity Theory,\u0026rdquo; where people make the argument that the singularity is just a mystification on the process of normal technological development, and that all this attention to the technology distracts from \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; issues, and/or that singularity is too abstract, too distant, and will only be recognizable in retrospect.\nFrom reading Vinge\u0026rsquo;s comments, I\u0026rsquo;ve come to several realizations:\nVinge\u0026rsquo;s concept of the singularity is pretty narrow, and relates to effect of creating human-grade information technology. Right now, there are a lot of things that humans can do that machines can\u0026rsquo;t, The singularity then, is the point where that changes. I liked how--and I find this to be the case with most \u0026ldquo;science theory,\u0026rdquo; but the scientists often have very narrow theories and the popular press often forces a much more broad interpretation.","title":"the dark singularity"},{"content":"I finally listened to John Gruber and Merlin Mann\u0026rsquo;s podcast of their talk at the 2009 SXSWi conference, on \u0026ldquo;how to succeed at blogging/the Internet\u0026rdquo; and this, in combination with my ongoing discussion with enkerli about the future of journalism, and an article about gawker media has promoted a series of loosely connected thoughts:\nNewspapers are dead, dead, dead. This isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly ground breaking news, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to make note of this fact because of this corollary:\nThe Media/Content industry on the Internet has been unable to develop a successful business model for funding the creation of content to replace the business model of the newspapers (where newspapers fund websites/writer and a model which doesn\u0026rsquo;t revolve around advertising.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about trying to figure out what constitutes success at this \u0026ldquo;content creation thing,\u0026rdquo; for a while, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I have a good answer for what those markers of success are. I think page views, are a part of it certainly, and I think the volume of comments, and/or the number of twitter followers you have may be markers of success, but I think we need to get to a place where we think of success as being something a bit less concrete.\nSuccess might be landing a cool new job because your blog impresses someone. Success might be having enough of a following to be able to sell enough copies of your book/CD/etc. to support yourself. Success might be having enough page-views to support the site in advertising. Success might be five people whose opinion you care about reading your site. Success might be steady progress in the direction of having a readership that eclipses the circulation of the print publications in your field.\nIf we use these kinds of standards to judge our work, rather than the standards of old school publishing (page views), it becomes easier to making meaningful qualitative judgments of success.\nThough I think they\u0026rsquo;re largely correct about success, Gruber and Mann\u0026rsquo;s suggestions--I think--fail to explain their own success.\nI think Merlin Mann is successful because he was friends with people like Cory Doctorow and Danny O\u0026rsquo;Brien at the right moment, because the GTD thing happened, because he\u0026rsquo;s pretty funny, and because MacBreak Weekly emerged at the right time and he played a big role in making that podcast successful. At the same time I think Gruber is successful because he took Apple Computer seriously at a time when no one really did. And he wrote this thing called markdown. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that either isn\u0026rsquo;t deserving of their success--hardly--but their advice to just \u0026ldquo;passionately do your thing and embrace the niche-yness and uniqueness of what you do,\u0026rdquo; is a good, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s all it\u0026rsquo;s going to take to be successful in the next five years.\nAdditionally I think there are a couple of unnecessary assumptions that we\u0026rsquo;ve started to make about the future of content on the interent, that are worth questioning. They are, quickly:\nBlogging as we have known it will endure into the future. Blogging is being fragmented by the emergence of things like twitter and facebook. User generated content (eg. youtube and digg) will destroy professional content producers (ie. NBC and slashdot/the AP.) (Creative) Content will be able to survive in an unstructured format. MediaWiki is the best software to quickly run a wiki-based site. Content Management Systems (drupal, wordpress, MediWiki, etc.) and web programing frameworks (django, rails, drupal) are stable and enduring in the way that we\u0026rsquo;ve come to expect operating systems to be stable and enduring. Content Management Systems, unlike the content they contain, can mostly survive schisms into niches. The key to successful content-based sites/projects is \u0026ldquo;more content,\u0026rdquo; followed by \u0026ldquo;even more content.\u0026rdquo; (ie. Quantity trumps all.) If the singularity doesn\u0026rsquo;t come first, that is.\nps. As I was sifting through my files I realized that this amazing article by Jeff Vandermeer also, influenced this post to some greater or lesser extent, but I read it about a week before I listened to the podcast, so I wasn\u0026rsquo;t as aware of its influence. Read that as well.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-future-of-content/","summary":"I finally listened to John Gruber and Merlin Mann\u0026rsquo;s podcast of their talk at the 2009 SXSWi conference, on \u0026ldquo;how to succeed at blogging/the Internet\u0026rdquo; and this, in combination with my ongoing discussion with enkerli about the future of journalism, and an article about gawker media has promoted a series of loosely connected thoughts:\nNewspapers are dead, dead, dead. This isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly ground breaking news, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to make note of this fact because of this corollary:\nThe Media/Content industry on the Internet has been unable to develop a successful business model for funding the creation of content to replace the business model of the newspapers (where newspapers fund websites/writer and a model which doesn\u0026rsquo;t revolve around advertising.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about trying to figure out what constitutes success at this \u0026ldquo;content creation thing,\u0026rdquo; for a while, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I have a good answer for what those markers of success are.","title":"the future of content"},{"content":"I wrote a post about the 2008 midwest morris ale as a series of vignettes of great moments and memories from that ale.\nThis year I don\u0026rsquo;t have quite the same kinds of stories, or new stories, really: /home/tychoish/websites/tychoish.com/_drafts/ ~/writing/ -There was a killer cool ad-hoc set of \u0026ldquo;Queen\u0026rsquo;s Delight,\u0026rdquo; (Bucknell) my ongoing favorite dance. I handpicked the set, after the organized portion of tour ended, and we did well. Very fun.\nDuring dinner Sunday night, there was a little ad-hoc moment were a bunch of people sang some songs in a hallway with good acoustics. This is one of my favorite things to happen on, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to plan, and you just have to be lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Songs sung included the ever favorite \u0026ldquo;Let Union Be In All Our Hearts,\u0026rdquo; and (at my request, mostly) \u0026ldquo;When we Go Rolling Home/Round Goes the Wheel of Fourtuine.\u0026rdquo; Brilliance. There a dance called \u0026ldquo;Flowers of Edinburgh\u0026rdquo; (something more or less like this, except we do double time and current midwestern trends in the Bampton tradition are a bit different.) Anyway, while the choreography is simple, the dance is physically challenging in the extreme. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those dances that doesn\u0026rsquo;t get done much in daylight. In anycase, someone came up to me and said \u0026ldquo;Sam! we should do flowers!\u0026rdquo; and I of course said yes, and both did the dance and called it. My legs are still sore from the experience, as I think there are several muscle groups that humans only need to do this dance, and to do nothing else. In any case, I find this disturbing/hilarious mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve become the guy you go to when you want to do this dance. Sigh. On the injury front, I think I\u0026rsquo;m doing pretty good, and I definitely think that all of the exercise and stuff I did this year has helped my ability to dance better/longer, in pretty noticeable ways. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t totally unharmed: I basically used up my voice too quickly (calling dances, singing), and I sprained my knee (or something) fairly seriously on the last night doing Queen\u0026rsquo;s Delight (again), which put the kibosh on my dancing. Thankfully that happened near the end, and I hope a few days of rest, stretching, ice, and anti-inflammatories will have me back in dancing condition. Spending a weekend away with \u0026ldquo;my people,\u0026rdquo; people I don\u0026rsquo;t get to see very much, was (and is) an incredibly powerful experience. I think that many folks have \u0026ldquo;going and hanging out with our peeps\u0026rdquo; moments (academic conferences, science fiction conversions, various retreats) and beyond this comparison I don\u0026rsquo;t have a very good way of articulating why this Morris Dance gathering I do is so amazing for me.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;ll be putting some videos up on YouTube and flickr in the next few days that my mother took. So stay tuned for that, and I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to (and continue) to post things here.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/midwest-morris-ale-round-up/","summary":"I wrote a post about the 2008 midwest morris ale as a series of vignettes of great moments and memories from that ale.\nThis year I don\u0026rsquo;t have quite the same kinds of stories, or new stories, really: /home/tychoish/websites/tychoish.com/_drafts/ ~/writing/ -There was a killer cool ad-hoc set of \u0026ldquo;Queen\u0026rsquo;s Delight,\u0026rdquo; (Bucknell) my ongoing favorite dance. I handpicked the set, after the organized portion of tour ended, and we did well. Very fun.\nDuring dinner Sunday night, there was a little ad-hoc moment were a bunch of people sang some songs in a hallway with good acoustics. This is one of my favorite things to happen on, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to plan, and you just have to be lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Songs sung included the ever favorite \u0026ldquo;Let Union Be In All Our Hearts,\u0026rdquo; and (at my request, mostly) \u0026ldquo;When we Go Rolling Home/Round Goes the Wheel of Fourtuine.","title":"Midwest Morris Ale Round Up"},{"content":"I have knitting progress to report. In thee parts.\n1. I have finished my second Pi shawl of the year. The first I completed in March for my grandmother. The second, I completed a couple of weeks ago, and while it was a shawl created without goal (or particular purpose) it is an accomplishment of some note. I have yet to block the shawl, but, as I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where it\u0026rsquo;s supposed to end up, I\u0026rsquo;m in no rush. It\u0026rsquo;s also supremely huge, so I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I have a good place to block it.\n2. I finished my part of my contest entry for my knitting camp. Watch out the rest of you camp-3ers, it\u0026rsquo;s going to be massively awesome and weird. Lots of weird.\n3. This leads us to the most exciting knitting related conclusion I\u0026rsquo;ve had to announce in quite a while: my works in progress list is way down. I have two sweaters on the needles, a sock (no rush, plain knitting, and a cobweb shawl which I don\u0026rsquo;t have particular need or inspiration to work on.) One of the sweaters just has one sleeve left to go, and the other sweater, is almost to the armholes.\nThis is incredibly exciting. While I would like to get both of these sweaters done by the time I go to camp (which will be a bit of a stretch, it\u0026rsquo;s not a requirement. My show-and-tell is something else entirely.) I get to knit sweaters. I love knitting sweaters.\nPictures forthcoming, also the sweater with only a sleeve left to go is indeed the \u0026ldquo;Latvian Dreaming\u0026rdquo; sweater which I started designing/working on a year ago (or more). It\u0026rsquo;s good to be closing in on that so I can get the instructions up on the web. While I did have a big knitting hiatus this year, and while I have been back knitting in some form for several months now, I\u0026rsquo;ve felt more like I\u0026rsquo;ve been in \u0026ldquo;production\u0026rdquo; mode, rather than \u0026ldquo;enjoyment\u0026rdquo; mode\u0026hellip; until now.\nSo it\u0026rsquo;s good to be back.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-progress-ahoy/","summary":"I have knitting progress to report. In thee parts.\n1. I have finished my second Pi shawl of the year. The first I completed in March for my grandmother. The second, I completed a couple of weeks ago, and while it was a shawl created without goal (or particular purpose) it is an accomplishment of some note. I have yet to block the shawl, but, as I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where it\u0026rsquo;s supposed to end up, I\u0026rsquo;m in no rush. It\u0026rsquo;s also supremely huge, so I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I have a good place to block it.\n2. I finished my part of my contest entry for my knitting camp. Watch out the rest of you camp-3ers, it\u0026rsquo;s going to be massively awesome and weird. Lots of weird.\n3. This leads us to the most exciting knitting related conclusion I\u0026rsquo;ve had to announce in quite a while: my works in progress list is way down.","title":"knitting progress ahoy"},{"content":"Recently, Canonical Ltd., the company which sponsors the Ubuntu family of GNU/Linux distributions recently announced the UbuntuOne service, which is at it\u0026rsquo;s core a service that allows users to synchronize files between multiple Ubuntu-based machines. Having your files sync between multiple machines is a huge feature, and the truth is that there aren\u0026rsquo;t really good solutions that accomplish this task, for any operating system. At the same time there\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of hubbub in the community over this release. It\u0026rsquo;s complex but the issues in the complaint are:\nUbuntuOne is a non-free project, in that, the software that\u0026rsquo;s powering the service (on the servers) is not being distributed (in source, or binary) to the users of the service. While the client is being open sourced, the server component is crucial important to users\u0026rsquo; autonomy. Ubuntu, if we are to believe what Canonical says, is the name of a community developed Linux distribution based on Debian. Canonical, is a for-profit organization, and it\u0026rsquo;s using the Ubuntu name (the trademark to which it owns) for a non-free software project. Canonical has also gone back on a promise to release the software that powers LaunchPad under the AGPL. While this isn\u0026rsquo;t directly related to the flap surrounding Ubuntu One, it allows us to (potentially) contextualize the ongoing actions of Canonical with regards to network services. My response comes in three parts.\nPart One, the Technology File syncing services are technologically pretty simple, and easy to create for yourself. I use ssh and git to synchronize all of my files, data, and settings between machines. I keep the sync manual, but I could automate it pretty easy. It\u0026rsquo;s not free, I pay a small monthly fee for some space on a server, but it works, and I have total control over the process.\nGranted, my solution is a bit technical and requires some babying along, and works because 95% of my files are text files. If I had more binary files that I needed to sync, I\u0026rsquo;d probably use something like rsync which is a great tool for keeping large groups of files synchronized.\nIn fact rsync is so good, you can probably bet that UbuntuOne is using rsync or some rsync-variant (because it\u0026rsquo;s GNU GPL software, and it\u0026rsquo;s good.) If you\u0026rsquo;re running OS X, or any GNU or Linux based operating system then the chances are, you\u0026rsquo;ve already got rsync installed. Pulling together something to keep your files synced between more than one machine just requires a few pieces:\nsomething that runs on your computer in the background that keeps track of when files change so that it can send the changes to the server. Conversely this component can also just run on a timer and send changes ever x amount of time (five minutes? if the computer isn\u0026rsquo;t idle.) something that runs on the server that can send changes to other computers when the other computers say (\u0026ldquo;Has anything changed?\u0026rdquo;). Done. I\u0026rsquo;m no programmer--as I\u0026rsquo;m quick to attest--but I think that I could probably (with some help,) pull together a tutorial for how to get this to work in a few hours.\nPart Two, Trademarks, Centralization and Community I think a lot of people feel betrayed by the blurring of this \u0026ldquo;thing\u0026rdquo; that a community has built (Ubunutu) with Canonical Ltd.\nWhich is totally reasonable, but this is largely an orthogonal problem to the problem with UbuntuOne, and I think is a much larger problem within the free software/open source/crowd sourcing world. This is one of the problems when entrusting trademarks and copy rights to single entities. In a very real way, Canonical--by using UbuntuOne--is trading on the social capital of the Ubunutu community, and that leaves a sour taste in a lot of peoples mouths.\nBut the issue of ceding control over a name or a product to a centralized group, is something that we have a lot of experience with, with varying results. Some thoughts and examples:\nHere\u0026rsquo;s one example: There\u0026rsquo;s a huge \u0026ldquo;open source\u0026rdquo; community that\u0026rsquo;s built up around the commercial/proprietary text editor TextMate for OS X. While I think TextMate is really great software, and the TextMate community is made up of really great people, TextMate is largely valuable because of the value created by the community, and it exists (tenuously) on the good graces of the owner of the TextMate intellectual property. While Alan is a great guy, for whom I have a great deal of respect, if anything were to happen to TextMate a lot of people would find that they had nothing to show for their energy and efforts in the TextMate community.\nSimilarly, MySQL AB (and later Sun Microsystems and now Oracle) owns the entire copyright for the MySQL database, which isn\u0026rsquo;t (or wasn\u0026rsquo;t) a major issue for most developers in the early days, but now given the sale of that company (and it\u0026rsquo;s copyright holdings) puts the development of that code-base into some doubt. I\u0026rsquo;ve seen, as a result, much greater buzz around the PostgreSQL project as a result of this doubt, and I think this kind of fall out serves as a good example of what can happen to a community when the centralized body fails to act in the interests of the community, or even threatens to.\nThis is a huge issue, in the whole \u0026ldquo;web 2.0\u0026rdquo;/mashup/social networking/social media space. The logic for the proprietors of these sites and services is \u0026ldquo;build something, attract users create a REST API that makes it easy for people to develop applications using our service that add value to our service, attract more users, stomp out competition in the space, profit.\u0026rdquo; This is basically, the Twitter/Facebook/ning business model, and while it works to some degree it\u0026rsquo;s all built upon: stable APIs and the enduring good will of the community toward the proprietors of the service. Both of these are difficult to maintain, from what I\u0026rsquo;ve seen, as the business model isn\u0026rsquo;t very coherent, and requires the proprietors to balance their own self interest, their community\u0026rsquo;s interests, and find some way to profit in light of an unstable business model. It\u0026rsquo;s tough.\nPart Three, Business and Free Network Services. I\u0026rsquo;ve been treading over ideas related to free network businesses and cooperatives and software freedom for weeks now, but I swear it all fell into my lap here. Some basic thoughts, as conclusion for this already too lengthy essay:\nThe UbuntuOne service, like most free network service, is at it\u0026rsquo;s core providing a systems administration service rather than some sort of software product. The software, is relatively trivial compared to making sure the servers are running/accessible/secure The way to offer users\u0026rsquo; autonomy is to develop easy/free systems administration tools, and to educate them on how to run these systems. Corporations, while important contributors to the free software community, also inevitably serve their own interests, while it\u0026rsquo;s disappointing to see Canonical go down the proprietary track, it\u0026rsquo;s neither surprising nor a betrayal. Canonical has put on a good show and accomplished a great deal, but in retrospect we can imagine a number of things that they could have done differently from way back that would have changed the current situation. (eg. Worked within the Debian Project, developed a tighter business model, etc.) Free software, is very pro-business, but it\u0026rsquo;s not very pro-big-business, as \u0026ldquo;native free software business models\u0026rdquo; are built on personal reputations rather than tangible products. It translates to making an honest living pretty well, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t convert very well into making a lot of money quickly. Anyway, I better get going. Food for thought.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/freedom-and-ubuntu-one/","summary":"Recently, Canonical Ltd., the company which sponsors the Ubuntu family of GNU/Linux distributions recently announced the UbuntuOne service, which is at it\u0026rsquo;s core a service that allows users to synchronize files between multiple Ubuntu-based machines. Having your files sync between multiple machines is a huge feature, and the truth is that there aren\u0026rsquo;t really good solutions that accomplish this task, for any operating system. At the same time there\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of hubbub in the community over this release. It\u0026rsquo;s complex but the issues in the complaint are:\nUbuntuOne is a non-free project, in that, the software that\u0026rsquo;s powering the service (on the servers) is not being distributed (in source, or binary) to the users of the service. While the client is being open sourced, the server component is crucial important to users\u0026rsquo; autonomy. Ubuntu, if we are to believe what Canonical says, is the name of a community developed Linux distribution based on Debian.","title":"canonical freedom and ubuntu one"},{"content":"Joe has remarked that he finds it ironic that--in this blog--I sing the praises of using emacs and storing one\u0026rsquo;s data in plain text files, largely as part of a crusade against databases. I also am an ardent supporter of his haven project, which is basically a database project.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is that contradictory, I do understand how one could make that inference, so I think it might be wise to address this issue explicitly. Lets first do a little bit of recapping:\nReasons Why I don\u0026rsquo;t like databases: Inflexible for many kinds of data, and require users to adapt to structure, rather than the other way around. Databases require too much overhead, both during operation and programming to be totally worthwhile except in some large-scale edge cases. Databases abstract control over data from the owner/user of the data to systems administrators and programmers, rather than leaving data in a form that everyone can access and manage Reasons why I like text files: Everyone and every machine can read text files. They\u0026rsquo;re a lingua-franca. We have many highly sophisticated options for editing and munging data in plain text files. Plain text files are infinitely flexible, both in structure, and in the kinds of data they can store. Caveats There are some kinds of data that are best stored in database systems. Structure in plain text files is dependent upon the self control and education of the users, which may be a risky situation. Reason why I like Haven: It combines numerous features that I think are really powerful and key to the development of how we use computers: cryptographic security, flexibly structured data; distributed computing/data storage; versioned data stores; collaborative systems; non-hierarchical organization of data; etc. Joe is awesome. It expands and improves on the Project Xanadu idea. My response to Joe\u0026rsquo;s question: how does plain text coexist with haven, in your mind.\nThe answer is pretty simple, really.\nAt its core, haven isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a database, as it is a file system. We don\u0026rsquo;t think \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll set up a haven repository/system for this project,\u0026rdquo; but rather \u0026ldquo;Hang on, I can put my data for this, into the haven system.\u0026rdquo; Haven isn\u0026rsquo;t a bucket that can be designed to hold anything, it\u0026rsquo;s a total system that\u0026rsquo;s meant to hold everything.\nAnd it\u0026rsquo;s just a low level system. Joe\u0026rsquo;s work on haven is focused on a server application, and an API. Everything else are just applications that use haven. One such application would (inevitably) be a FUSE-driver which would expose a Haven system as a file system. So your objects in a haven database would be, basically plain text files.\nWhich kind of rocks.\nNow Haven is just a concept right now, but, in general, FUSE is one of those technologies with amazing possibilities because we have so many amazing tools and mature technologies for manipulating data in file systems. FUSE abstracts the mechanics of file systems, and makes it easy to \u0026ldquo;think about\u0026rdquo; data in terms of files, even if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense to store said data in files. That\u0026rsquo;s really, quite cool, and powerful for the rest of us.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve seen fuse drivers for Wikipedia, a nonhierarchial file system, http (ie. the web), blogger, and structured data like RSS and other xml, all of which are really cool. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if any or all of these systems are done, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that any of these creative uses for FUSE are ready for prime time, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s a step in the right direction, generally.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/file-system-databases/","summary":"Joe has remarked that he finds it ironic that--in this blog--I sing the praises of using emacs and storing one\u0026rsquo;s data in plain text files, largely as part of a crusade against databases. I also am an ardent supporter of his haven project, which is basically a database project.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is that contradictory, I do understand how one could make that inference, so I think it might be wise to address this issue explicitly. Lets first do a little bit of recapping:\nReasons Why I don\u0026rsquo;t like databases: Inflexible for many kinds of data, and require users to adapt to structure, rather than the other way around. Databases require too much overhead, both during operation and programming to be totally worthwhile except in some large-scale edge cases. Databases abstract control over data from the owner/user of the data to systems administrators and programmers, rather than leaving data in a form that everyone can access and manage Reasons why I like text files: Everyone and every machine can read text files.","title":"file system databases"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to write this in the evening after a long day of system administration work. For birthday (though, really, it\u0026rsquo;s been on my todo list for a long time), I ordered and set up a server from these fine folks to serve as the technological hub of my activities. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite fond of those fine folks for quite a long time, there was a growing list of things that I always wished worked better with dreamhost, and it was finally starting to limit the kinds of projects I could undertake in. So I bit the bullet and went ahead and ordered the server and spent some time getting everything straightened out.\nFor some background: the server is just an instance running inside of a Xen hypervisor, which runs other servers together on the same hardware: this is good, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t really use a server that powerful all by my lonesome (and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to have to pay for it all either). It\u0026rsquo;s also way more powerful that what I had before, and the vitalization allows me to act with impunity, because it\u0026rsquo;s as if I\u0026rsquo;m running my own server, really. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing computer administration and web development for a long time, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never had to do anything like this so it\u0026rsquo;s been an experience to learn how DNS records really work, how all the different kinds of server applications work, how really cool the Apache web server really is. It\u0026rsquo;s a great learning experience, and I think it would be prudent (and potentially helpful for you) to reflect on the experience. So here are my notes on the adventure:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been running Ubuntu on my personal/desktop machines since the great Linux switch, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty pleased with it. Not totally wowed by it: it works, but my tendencies are toward the more minimal/lightweight systems. But more than anything, I\u0026rsquo;m really drawn to systems that just work more than I am to systems that work perfectly, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at keeping systems working. In 5 years of OS X usage I installed an OS twice, and since I got things stable and running, the only installations I\u0026rsquo;ve done have been to put ubuntu on new machines.\nIn any case, this server was a chance for me really explore debian stable (lenny), which I hadn\u0026rsquo;t ever done before. It\u0026rsquo;s so cool. It\u0026rsquo;s not sexy or daring or anything but in a server you don\u0026rsquo;t want that, and it just works. I think it probably also helps matters somewhat lenny was released only a few months ago, rather than nearly two years ago, but in any case I\u0026rsquo;m quite enamored of how well it works.\nEmail is much more complicated than I think any of us really give it credit for. There\u0026rsquo;s all sorts of complicated mess with regards to how DNS servers identify mail servers to help fight spam, and then there\u0026rsquo;s all the filtering and sorting business, and even the \u0026ldquo;modern\u0026rdquo; email servers are a bit long in the tooth. I hope that it\u0026rsquo;s a \u0026ldquo;set it and forget about it\u0026rdquo; sort of thing, though to be truthful I just got it all running and set up initially, but there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of further setup to do, before I move it all around.\nI\u0026rsquo;m pretty proud of the fact that as i was going thought the set up process, I go to the point where it said \u0026ldquo;ok, now set up the FTP server, and I said \u0026lsquo;meh\u0026rsquo; and moved around.\u0026rdquo; Turns out that I can do everything I need to do in terms of getting files onto the server with git/scp/ssh/rsync and FTP is just lame and old. Welcome to the new world, where file transfers are shorter, versioned, and more secure.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly new, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t tell you the last time I used FTP, but I think this represents both the utility in moving to a \u0026ldquo;real server,\u0026rdquo; and a larger shift in the way we think about webservers. FTP assumes that the main purpose of the webserver is to store and serve files. the ssh/rsync/git model assumes that your webserver exists to be \u0026ldquo;your computer in the sky.\u0026rdquo; Which it is. We interact with the computers on our desks in really complex ways; there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to interact with our computers in the sky by just copying files to and from it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m convinced that systems-administration work will increasingly be the \u0026ldquo;hard currency\u0026rdquo; (basis for exchange) for the networked computing age. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of onerous work, there are skills and knowledge that most people who need network service don\u0026rsquo;t have and don\u0026rsquo;t need to have, there are actual costs, the need is ongoing, and success is quantifiable.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s definitely space here for people (like me, and others) to provide these kinds of services to people. Sort of \u0026ldquo;boutique\u0026rdquo; style. Clearly I have more to learn and more thinking to do on the subject, but it\u0026rsquo;s a start.\nEjabberd is peculiar, and the Debian package is\u0026hellip; less than ideal. I knew going in that there was a \u0026ldquo;web administration\u0026rdquo; interface which sounds cool until you realize that, it\u0026rsquo;s\u0026hellip; not an administration panel as much as it is a sort of \u0026ldquo;web dashboard.\u0026rdquo; You still have to tweak the configuration file which is written in Erlang, and wow. That\u0026rsquo;s pain right there.\nHaving said that, it seems to work just fine, without much fussing, and I\u0026rsquo;m want the jabber-server to do a very limited set of things: host my own IM account and transports; host muc-chats (created by me); and that\u0026rsquo;s about it. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit worried that it might be a bit too heavy for this.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about all. More to come, I\u0026rsquo;m sure.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/adventures-in-systems-administration/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to write this in the evening after a long day of system administration work. For birthday (though, really, it\u0026rsquo;s been on my todo list for a long time), I ordered and set up a server from these fine folks to serve as the technological hub of my activities. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite fond of those fine folks for quite a long time, there was a growing list of things that I always wished worked better with dreamhost, and it was finally starting to limit the kinds of projects I could undertake in. So I bit the bullet and went ahead and ordered the server and spent some time getting everything straightened out.\nFor some background: the server is just an instance running inside of a Xen hypervisor, which runs other servers together on the same hardware: this is good, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t really use a server that powerful all by my lonesome (and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to have to pay for it all either).","title":"adventures in systems administration"},{"content":"Several notes to with regards to information fast that I\u0026rsquo;m undertaking. And because this is the internet and this is my blog\u0026hellip; Well here goes:\nI had initially suspected that the cause of my ailment was the special thinkpad-track point driver that deals with scrolling didn\u0026rsquo;t get updated when I upgraded to jaunty. This turns out to not be the case, as I had a freeze (again in firefox) just moving around with the arrow keys. That theory gone.\nC.K. and I determined that--counter to my supposition--the slight/occasional clunking noise is probably the drive head parking itself, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t seems to correspond with the problem. So replacing the drive is both awkward (weird form factor) and not likely to fix the problem\nI installed emacs-w3m on both computers. It\u0026rsquo;s not entirely intuitive. There are debian/ubuntu packages, but if you install the emacs-snapshot package, then the sequence is upgrade to the latest emacs-snapshot, install w3m-el, uninstall emacs22, and then add w3m code to your emacs init file (.emacs).\nIt\u0026rsquo;s, remarkably nice, particularly for looking up links while I\u0026rsquo;m writing something and reading content-rich pages. The key-bindings are, by default excessively lame and require attention (which I haven\u0026rsquo;t figured out yet). I always thought that emacs web-browsing was way too dweab-y for me, but learning that it\u0026rsquo;s actually really cool is a good thing indeed.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t a real fast, as I am still using firefox a little bit bit, and I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll always need to have it installed, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s generally good to not have firefox be the default environment for everything that isn\u0026rsquo;t emacs or the terminal.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve basically been avoiding my RSS reader during the course of this experiment. Which I need to spend some time tending to, at least so that I can start using some other reader. This has been an issue since I switched to Linux, and I\u0026rsquo;ve failed to come to anything that I really like. I\u0026rsquo;m tempted to use the gnus news reader to read the RSS, but I fear this might be incredibly awkward/complciated for a very small amount of pay off.\nBy moving web browsing, insofar as it needs to occur, into emacs, the windows I see are: stuff inside of emacs (mostly org-mode and writing); and stuff inside of terminals (mutt, Micawber, bash, etc.). As a result, I get the feeling that all of my windows look the same. I\u0026rsquo;m interested how people might solve this problem themselves. How do you make an entirely text-driven, undecorated environment have texture? Have\u0026hellip; variety between windows that might provide some context to specific tasks.\nThis is an aesthetic/design question more than a programmatic one I guess. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried playing around, a little with colors in emacs, and still use the default for emacs23 because the others seem difficult to read. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried different fonts (in both programs) and I\u0026rsquo;m quite wed to my current font. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried transparency (which doesn\u0026rsquo;t run well for emacs on the laptop)\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that adding Conky, or more informative widgets might be helpful, but I\u0026rsquo;d love to get some feedback from you all\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fasting-notes/","summary":"Several notes to with regards to information fast that I\u0026rsquo;m undertaking. And because this is the internet and this is my blog\u0026hellip; Well here goes:\nI had initially suspected that the cause of my ailment was the special thinkpad-track point driver that deals with scrolling didn\u0026rsquo;t get updated when I upgraded to jaunty. This turns out to not be the case, as I had a freeze (again in firefox) just moving around with the arrow keys. That theory gone.\nC.K. and I determined that--counter to my supposition--the slight/occasional clunking noise is probably the drive head parking itself, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t seems to correspond with the problem. So replacing the drive is both awkward (weird form factor) and not likely to fix the problem\nI installed emacs-w3m on both computers. It\u0026rsquo;s not entirely intuitive. There are debian/ubuntu packages, but if you install the emacs-snapshot package, then the sequence is upgrade to the latest emacs-snapshot, install w3m-el, uninstall emacs22, and then add w3m code to your emacs init file (.","title":"notes from the fast"},{"content":"Hello folks!\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to be away from early early in the morning until late in the day on Monday, and (likely) asleep until late (for me) morning on Tuesday, following the Midwest Morris Ale that I\u0026rsquo;m participating in this weekend in Minneapolis Minnesota. The following notes are of interest:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ll have my Blackberry, so if you need to get a hold of me, call, email, text, whatever. I can\u0026rsquo;t promise that I\u0026rsquo;ll be super responsive, but I won\u0026rsquo;t go completely silent, but I\u0026rsquo;m mostly offline for the next four days and some change. Sorry if this is a problem.\n2. If you\u0026rsquo;re in the twin cities, I\u0026rsquo;d love to see you. Check out the Ale Website for more information. If you happen across a Morris dancer in the twin cities this weekend (May 22-25, 2009; likely on saturday) say, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m looking for Sam of the Capering Roisters\u0026rdquo; and someone will find me.\nNo blog post on Monday. Take care of yourself. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ale-and-notes/","summary":"Hello folks!\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to be away from early early in the morning until late in the day on Monday, and (likely) asleep until late (for me) morning on Tuesday, following the Midwest Morris Ale that I\u0026rsquo;m participating in this weekend in Minneapolis Minnesota. The following notes are of interest:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ll have my Blackberry, so if you need to get a hold of me, call, email, text, whatever. I can\u0026rsquo;t promise that I\u0026rsquo;ll be super responsive, but I won\u0026rsquo;t go completely silent, but I\u0026rsquo;m mostly offline for the next four days and some change. Sorry if this is a problem.\n2. If you\u0026rsquo;re in the twin cities, I\u0026rsquo;d love to see you. Check out the Ale Website for more information. If you happen across a Morris dancer in the twin cities this weekend (May 22-25, 2009; likely on saturday) say, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m looking for Sam of the Capering Roisters\u0026rdquo; and someone will find me.","title":"ale and notes"},{"content":"As I mentioned in my link collection post, my thinking about co-operative economics has taken a brief foray into the area of leadership and governance, both on the small scale (eg \u0026ldquo;How do we organize our project, to acomplish our goals\u0026rdquo;) and on the larger scale (eg. \u0026ldquo;How do provide institutional support for the governance of our civilization\u0026rdquo;). Both are important and relevant questions, but it\u0026rsquo;s all complicated of course. Also, we should probably start of with a brief interlude of what an individuals labor/work activity might look like in a post-corporate economy, and then I\u0026rsquo;ll move into two interludes about leadership and government. Seat-belts fastened?\nPost-Corporatism and Labor We\u0026rsquo;re seeing some post-corporatism in the forum of an explosion of freelance and independent consultancies of various stripes and colors. Some key observations:\nMany if not most people working in this don\u0026rsquo;t work full time for one employer, splitting their time and energies between a number of projects. Freelance work allows people to develop flexible careers where growth isn\u0026rsquo;t dependent on moving into management careers. Traditional \u0026ldquo;benefits\u0026rdquo; of employment (eg. health insurance, office resources, data connectivity, etc.) are increasingly procured either through ad-hoc agreements: eg. Marriage for health insurance, Co-working spaces, \u0026ldquo;Freelancers\u0026rsquo; Unions\u0026rdquo; and so forth. Leadership and Co-Operative Governance The question that I think I\u0026rsquo;ve failed to really address in during all of this \u0026ldquo;co-op\u0026rdquo; conversation is If corporations are replaced by cooperative organizations, how are projects managed and where does leadership come from? Indeed one of the biggest benefits/strengths of the corporation (top-down) model, is that corporations are really (or at the least reasonably) well organized and constituted, so if we\u0026rsquo;re doing away with the corporation, how do we remain organized and productive.\nI should, as an interlude, reiterate that I\u0026rsquo;ve advocated for cooperative organizations on the basis that they\u0026rsquo;re more effective at creating real and authentic value, than the American/multinational corporation as we now know it. Furthermore, I\u0026rsquo;m totally convinced in the necessity and utility of effective leadership and management, for our productivity. The post-corporate economy isn\u0026rsquo;t a world without management, but rather a world with a smarter, more distributed system for management.\nPart of the distribution of management comes from the fact that labor itself is to be more distributed. Just as we bring on engineers, artists, manufacturing in an often ad hoc way, we might also bring on project management and other \u0026ldquo;logistical professionals\u0026rdquo; to promote productivity. (Remember that coops are organizations that are unlikely to involve the direct labor of more than 100 or 150 people at any given time.) Higher level administration and guidance can be provided by small elected/nominated executive councils (a la, the KDE project, the Squeak Project, or the Debian Project) or in the \u0026ldquo;benevolent dictator\u0026rdquo; model (eg. Linus\u0026rsquo; for Linux, Larry Wall for Perl, Guido for Python, Dries for Drupal, Matt Mullenweg for WordPress, Rasmus for PHP, etc.)\nAnother \u0026ldquo;inherent\u0026rdquo; solution for providing management derives from the fact that cooperatives have a more pervasive project-based and goal oriented focus. Cooperatives, then, like open source software development projects, work on making something of value, (or providing valuable services,) don\u0026rsquo;t need to expend resources maintaining solubility. When a co-op finishes it\u0026rsquo;s project, the members move on to other projects and co-ops.\nI think creative thinking about leadership in new environments requires a few basic assumptions:\nDemocracy is created by participation rather than by elections. Management/logistical overheads grow geometrically while operations grow arithmetically. Co-ops would exist to both create value, and serve the interests of its members. Corporations exist to serve the interests of the investors. The dissolution of a cooperative isn\u0026rsquo;t antithetical to the purpose of a cooperative in the way that it totally antithetical to the purpose of a corporation. Land and the Problem of Government I\u0026rsquo;m persistently convinced that the \u0026ldquo;State\u0026rdquo; (as in the United States) or province (in the Canadian/Australian sense) is probably a really ineffective way to organize and structure a government. A lot of the people who are object to the American government advocate for states-rights and taking power and authority from the federal government and handing it to the states (eg. Libertarians). This has always struck me as sort of foolish.\nNot because I think local control is a bad thing, or I have any great love of the institutions of liberal democracy, but rather because States themselves fail to convey meaningful/practical/useful administrative or political units. A co-operative ethos would require (and need, though not--strictly speaking--depend upon,) a system where institutions and governance transpired along meaningful and practical political units.\nGreater metropolitan areas make sense as administrative units (including those that straddle existing borders) in a way that states themselves don\u0026rsquo;t really. Gary Indiana and the City of Chicago have a lot more in common than Chicago and Carbondale Illinois. At the same time there\u0026rsquo;s a big problem with the city-state, as \u0026ldquo;the unit of government:\u0026rdquo; it fails to account for, integrate, capture, and empower people in less urban areas. Which is given the importance of food, is incredibly crucial.\nI\u0026rsquo;m interested in thinking about how, particularly with new technologies, we might be able to conceptualize geographically based political units that integrate populations that fairly represents the interests/needs of people who live in areas with lower population densities.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/land-institutions-and-organization/","summary":"As I mentioned in my link collection post, my thinking about co-operative economics has taken a brief foray into the area of leadership and governance, both on the small scale (eg \u0026ldquo;How do we organize our project, to acomplish our goals\u0026rdquo;) and on the larger scale (eg. \u0026ldquo;How do provide institutional support for the governance of our civilization\u0026rdquo;). Both are important and relevant questions, but it\u0026rsquo;s all complicated of course. Also, we should probably start of with a brief interlude of what an individuals labor/work activity might look like in a post-corporate economy, and then I\u0026rsquo;ll move into two interludes about leadership and government. Seat-belts fastened?\nPost-Corporatism and Labor We\u0026rsquo;re seeing some post-corporatism in the forum of an explosion of freelance and independent consultancies of various stripes and colors. Some key observations:\nMany if not most people working in this don\u0026rsquo;t work full time for one employer, splitting their time and energies between a number of projects.","title":"land, institutions, and organization"},{"content":"I seem to have collected a rather lot of links that I think and hope you\u0026rsquo;ll find as interesting as I have. (Some of these are old, but still relevant):\nIn the vein of my economic/political posts of late, I came across the blog of Alexandre Enkerli, a nifty anthropologist and ethnographer that I found via identi.ca. Who says microblogging doesn\u0026rsquo;t have value? In anycase I have a couple of links, first a complaint against journalism, as a field, to which I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly sympathetic. I should probably write some more about journalism, both with regards to its social impact, but also about ongoing collapse of the journalism business. More importantly, however, Enkerli wrote an interesting piece about \u0026ldquo;a global network of city states\u0026rdquo; about government and institutional organization, which I rather liked. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking recently about institutions and governance as a part of the series on co-ops, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a foray into something more governmental here, soon.\nMoving on from the economy, a couple of posts from futurismic which is one of my favorite blogs that I don\u0026rsquo;t read enough. It\u0026rsquo;s in the boing-boing vein, but Paul Raven is made of awesome, and I enjoy the niche. In anycase, this is a bit older, and it\u0026rsquo;s a post announcing another post where Douglas Rushkoff suggests that the economy isn\u0026rsquo;t worth saving. And then another from a few days later about the fantastic nature of the us economy.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how I feel about Rushkoff\u0026rsquo;s theories, and I certainly don\u0026rsquo;t think he\u0026rsquo;s the theoretical oracle of the networked age, but his thinking inspires pretty interesting thoughts, even if it\u0026rsquo;s semi-orthogonal. Can things be semi-orthogonal?\nFinally new territory. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading ultrasparky since, gosh, 2000 or there abouts, I think. Dan (sparky) wrote a post where he contemplated the recent history of blogging and in doing so expressed pretty much exactly how I feel about the current state of blogging. Read it, it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nAnd, oh look here, it\u0026rsquo;s a yet another Drupal-based, niche social networking site targeted at 20 and 30 something technologist-types. You\u0026rsquo;re probably uninterested, but it\u0026rsquo;s my niche, damnit. Also speaking of my niche, there\u0026rsquo;s a new social networking site for gay/queer geeks/nerds, calld doorq.com. For those of you who care, I suspect it\u0026rsquo;s running on DotNetNuke.\nAnd now for some miscellanea: mongodb, a database engine that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have schemeas. like couchdb, only, less erlang. It all depends on how it gets used, of course, but I think Erlang is a good thing for couch, but who knows. Also: a bibliography of academic resources related to teaching and learning in second life. And an academic journal about information technology, policy, and culture (with an Australian focus), called fibre culture. I was particularly interested in this article about Schizoanalysis as Metamodeling, because I still have a lot of affection for Deleuze and Guatteri and their theories.\nFinally an article, by O\u0026rsquo;Reily Editor Andy Oram, called From Open Source Software to Open Culture: Three Misunderstandings. And then a debate about the emacswiki. For background, EmacsWiki is really a working document and a discussion of different approaches--emacs already has a good manual, so the wiki fills a different niche. The wiki, as a result is very rough, coverage isn\u0026rsquo;t consistent across areas, some pages are basically discussions while others are more formal documentation, and the software is simple while the design is straight from the late 90s. I think it\u0026rsquo;s brilliant, but not everyone agrees.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have right now. Enjoy!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/link-collection/","summary":"I seem to have collected a rather lot of links that I think and hope you\u0026rsquo;ll find as interesting as I have. (Some of these are old, but still relevant):\nIn the vein of my economic/political posts of late, I came across the blog of Alexandre Enkerli, a nifty anthropologist and ethnographer that I found via identi.ca. Who says microblogging doesn\u0026rsquo;t have value? In anycase I have a couple of links, first a complaint against journalism, as a field, to which I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly sympathetic. I should probably write some more about journalism, both with regards to its social impact, but also about ongoing collapse of the journalism business. More importantly, however, Enkerli wrote an interesting piece about \u0026ldquo;a global network of city states\u0026rdquo; about government and institutional organization, which I rather liked. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking recently about institutions and governance as a part of the series on co-ops, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a foray into something more governmental here, soon.","title":"link collection"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s my hope that this post will combine the following ideas:\n1. The concept of \u0026ldquo;General Information\u0026rdquo; As Posited Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s 1984 novel Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand.\n2. The hypertext system, Project Xanadu, as described by Theodor Holm Nelson in his book Literary Machines (and elsewhere) which I\u0026rsquo;ve discussed on this blog recently.\n3. The contemporary idea of distributed network service, as described in the Franklin Street Statement, and enacted by technologies like git, xmpp, laconi.ca and open microblogging, and others.\nWe value the Internet--really the \u0026ldquo;web\u0026rdquo;--as it is to today, because it\u0026rsquo;s diverse, and flexible. Web pages can look like anything, can do virtually anything from present the text of a book or newspaper to fulfill most of the functionality of your desktop computing needs. What\u0026rsquo;s more all this is indexed and made accessible with google search. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool.\nWhile the web\u0026rsquo;s ad-hoc and disorganized structure has made many things possible, there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to assume that the future development of the web will continue in the current direction. microformats, and the proliferation of rss in \u0026ldquo;Web 2.0,\u0026rdquo; not to mention human generated portals like Mahalo (or google knoll, and even various WikiMedia Foundation Projects), all seem to point to a larger trend toward more structured, hand curated information.\nAs an aside, I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting that hand-curation (more human involvement) in information networks while structured data means less human involvement those networks.\nI should also clarify that by \u0026ldquo;more structured\u0026rdquo; I basically mean an end to web-design as we know it now. Rather than allow designers and--well, people like me--to have a say with regards to how pages are organized, information would be collected in containers with specific structures (headings, lists, tables, metadata, etc.) and the design or display would happen on the client side in the form of specialized browsers, Site specific browsers, but also domain specific browsers. (eg. use this program to view blags and microblog pages, and this program for reading pages from the news services, and this program to view x-new-class of sites). In short, adding structure to content wouldn\u0026rsquo;t limit the realm of possibility, but it would separate content from this stream of thought.\nStructure is one part of the Xanadu-model of hypertext/content, and perhaps the most lamented by those of us who are\u0026hellip; professionally frustrated by the lack of structure in the contemporary web, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s distribution and federation concepts are too often overlooked, and are quickly becoming relevant to contemporary technology.\nFederation, to subtitle, is the set of technologies technologies that allow network services to function without always-on and real-time network. Federation avoids two other technical problems with distributed network services: first, it removes the need for centralized servers that provide canonical versions of content. Secondly, in a distributed environment federation removes the need for local nodes to contain complete copies of the entire network. Xanadu had provisions for the first aspect by not the second while the Internet (more or less) has provisions for the second, but not the first, and free network services--in some senses--attempt to bring the second form of federation to the web and to the Internet.\nFederation, for free network services, means finding ways of communicating data between websites so that networks of information can be built in the same way that networks of computers have already been built.\nIn Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand Delany\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Internet\u0026rdquo; is a service called \u0026ldquo;General Information\u0026rdquo; or GI which exists in a neural link for some of the characters. GI isn\u0026rsquo;t always complete, or accessible in it\u0026rsquo;s most up to date format--and it\u0026rsquo;s users know this--and accept it as a price for living in an interstellar society, but it is accessible on an interstellar level. GI, like free network services is built (either implicitly or explicitly) with the notion that a node on the network could go offline, continue to develop and be useful, and then go back on-line later, and \u0026ldquo;sync\u0026rdquo; with it\u0026rsquo;s peer nodes, thus creating some measure of resilience in the network.\nThe contemporary network uses a resilient routing system to \u0026ldquo;get around\u0026rdquo; nodes that drop offline, whereas a truly federated system would store diffs across time and use this \u0026ldquo;temporal\u0026rdquo; information to maintain a consistent network. This sort of consistency is going to be really useful--not only because it would allow individuals and small groups to provide their own networked computing services locally, but also because providing data connectivity that is free, always-accessible, fault tallerant, and high speed, is unlikely to appear universally\u0026hellip; ever, and certainly not for a long time.\nI suppose the next step in this train of thought is to include some discussion of my friend joe\u0026rsquo;s project called \u0026ldquo;haven,\u0026rdquo; which would tie this to the discussions I\u0026rsquo;ve been having with regards to databases. But that\u0026rsquo;s a problem for another time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/free-project-xanadu/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s my hope that this post will combine the following ideas:\n1. The concept of \u0026ldquo;General Information\u0026rdquo; As Posited Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s 1984 novel Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand.\n2. The hypertext system, Project Xanadu, as described by Theodor Holm Nelson in his book Literary Machines (and elsewhere) which I\u0026rsquo;ve discussed on this blog recently.\n3. The contemporary idea of distributed network service, as described in the Franklin Street Statement, and enacted by technologies like git, xmpp, laconi.ca and open microblogging, and others.\nWe value the Internet--really the \u0026ldquo;web\u0026rdquo;--as it is to today, because it\u0026rsquo;s diverse, and flexible. Web pages can look like anything, can do virtually anything from present the text of a book or newspaper to fulfill most of the functionality of your desktop computing needs. What\u0026rsquo;s more all this is indexed and made accessible with google search. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool.\nWhile the web\u0026rsquo;s ad-hoc and disorganized structure has made many things possible, there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to assume that the future development of the web will continue in the current direction.","title":"free project xanadu"},{"content":"So, I feel like, in honor of the fact that today is my birthday, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write a little bit of a self centered and reflective post. Don\u0026rsquo;t worry. I have a post ready for you for later today that\u0026rsquo;s\u0026hellip; of more general appeal.\nI feel pretty good about the way things are going these days. I still have a pretty big todo list, of course, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really find myself going to bed wondering \u0026ldquo;how did it get so late and what did I do with my day?\u0026rdquo; which is a sign that I\u0026rsquo;m in rough shape. Nonetheless, I\u0026rsquo;ve been distractable of late, to combat this I\u0026rsquo;ve been working more concertedly on the laptop, and using my desktop-rig as a more social environment. I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely pleased with this setup, but I\u0026rsquo;m getting work done, so that\u0026rsquo;s worth something.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been getting up early (wake-times before 7:00 am) and asleep whenever it feels required, usually 11 (on average), and while I haven\u0026rsquo;t been exercising regularly (as in walks), I have been dancing a lot. It\u0026rsquo;s Morris Dance season, so that makes up for things--slightly. Our ale, the gathering I go to every memorial day, is this weekend (of course) and that promises to be a lot of fun. In any case, I think good self-care/activity levels are a big reason of why I\u0026rsquo;m not in the loony bin. Also, I think my stamina has improved as a result and I\u0026rsquo;m able to do Morris dance without my knees giving me problems, and/or wearing myself out quite as much. At the same time I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time in recent days getting ready for the Morris Ale (it\u0026rsquo;s amazing how many pairs of socks one needs/wants at an ale!)\nI fear that I write with too many parentheticals. I\u0026rsquo;m able to counter this tendency in fiction, but I\u0026rsquo;ve failed at it in blog posts. My brain was made for footnotes, I suppose. I\u0026rsquo;ve not found a suitably fast markdown converter that supports footnotes, so I\u0026rsquo;m not writing with footnotes, and as a result parens usage goes through the rough. I wonder what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen when I have to write real academic things again. As a corollary, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that my blog-writing \u0026ldquo;sounds\u0026rdquo; very much like the way I talk, if you were wondering.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s about it. I\u0026rsquo;m not doing anything really special for the day, be in touch, though, it\u0026rsquo;s always fun to talk to you all.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tycho-happy-birthday/","summary":"So, I feel like, in honor of the fact that today is my birthday, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write a little bit of a self centered and reflective post. Don\u0026rsquo;t worry. I have a post ready for you for later today that\u0026rsquo;s\u0026hellip; of more general appeal.\nI feel pretty good about the way things are going these days. I still have a pretty big todo list, of course, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really find myself going to bed wondering \u0026ldquo;how did it get so late and what did I do with my day?\u0026rdquo; which is a sign that I\u0026rsquo;m in rough shape. Nonetheless, I\u0026rsquo;ve been distractable of late, to combat this I\u0026rsquo;ve been working more concertedly on the laptop, and using my desktop-rig as a more social environment. I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely pleased with this setup, but I\u0026rsquo;m getting work done, so that\u0026rsquo;s worth something.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been getting up early (wake-times before 7:00 am) and asleep whenever it feels required, usually 11 (on average), and while I haven\u0026rsquo;t been exercising regularly (as in walks), I have been dancing a lot.","title":"tycho, happy birthday"},{"content":"As, I\u0026rsquo;m sure many of you know, language and \u0026ldquo;what we call things\u0026rdquo; in the free software/open source world is a huge thing. Some people will probably get mad for my use of the slash in the previous sentence. This post, is mostly for my own good, as an experiment (and for future reference) to see where I stand on various word-choice questions in this area. I\u0026rsquo;m going to organize the post as a series of (brief) reflections a couple of key words.\nFree Software I think free software, addresses and represents the core of what this whole mess is about. Free software--as an idea--addresses the communities, the \u0026ldquo;hacking spirit,\u0026rdquo; the ideological goals, the political and philosophical elements of the community.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also horribly confusing in English, and no matter how often we say \u0026ldquo;free as in speech\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;free as in freedom,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s not really going to get better. I think, also, \u0026ldquo;libre\u0026rdquo; is a poor use of the English language, and I cringe a lot when I read it. I\u0026rsquo;ve taken, when possible to refer to \u0026ldquo;ideas about software freedom\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;the movement for software freedom,\u0026rdquo; which works as long as you don\u0026rsquo;t need to refer to a specific piece of software.\nIn those cases, I often cave and say \u0026ldquo;open source software\u0026rdquo; because it open source is a more clear adjective. I also think that open source describes \u0026ldquo;the thing\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;process\u0026rdquo; more clearly, and that\u0026rsquo;s an advantage. I dislike that open source, means \u0026ldquo;not scary to big businesses,\u0026rdquo; and disregards the fact that this (free/open source) software is better/more valuable than proprietary/closed software because it is free and open source not simply because it happens to be better in quality.\nGNU/Linux I tend to say GNU/Linux, because--at least in my use cases--the kernel isn\u0026rsquo;t nearly as important to how I think about my operating system as all the tools that surround them, and if the next big thing in the Unix-like (open source) operating system was a Debian or Arch-like system with GNU parts around the FreeBSD kernel or the Solaris kernel, I\u0026rsquo;m there.\nI switched from OS X to GNU/Linux mostly because I wanted: better package management and (oddly enough) to be able to run an X11 desktop. The truth was, I was basically running a GNU(ish) system around Darwin (OS X\u0026rsquo;s kernel), anyway.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/free-and-open-terminology/","summary":"As, I\u0026rsquo;m sure many of you know, language and \u0026ldquo;what we call things\u0026rdquo; in the free software/open source world is a huge thing. Some people will probably get mad for my use of the slash in the previous sentence. This post, is mostly for my own good, as an experiment (and for future reference) to see where I stand on various word-choice questions in this area. I\u0026rsquo;m going to organize the post as a series of (brief) reflections a couple of key words.\nFree Software I think free software, addresses and represents the core of what this whole mess is about. Free software--as an idea--addresses the communities, the \u0026ldquo;hacking spirit,\u0026rdquo; the ideological goals, the political and philosophical elements of the community.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also horribly confusing in English, and no matter how often we say \u0026ldquo;free as in speech\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;free as in freedom,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s not really going to get better. I think, also, \u0026ldquo;libre\u0026rdquo; is a poor use of the English language, and I cringe a lot when I read it.","title":"free and open terminology"},{"content":"With all luck, I\u0026rsquo;ll have most of a draft of the short story I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on done by the time this goes live, but if not certainly rather soon there after. This is an exciting announcement in and of itself, but perhaps the more interesting thing is that in the process of doing this I sank into writing this story in org mode.\nMy general M.O. for writing for the last several years has just been to write and store the files in markdown and use whatever text editor I fancy. I write the blog this way, I write papers this way. Everything seems to work fine, there are converters for LaTeX, HTML, and the plain text format is absolutely and completely readable to people who aren\u0026rsquo;t as obsessive about text files as I am.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m a huge org-mode proponent, I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to think that org-mode makes a particularly good writing environment (or haven\u0026rsquo;t, heretofore) because unless you use org-mode org files are sometimes a bit ugly, and the syntax is enough different from markdown to confuse me, and\u0026hellip;\nThe general consensus, that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen is that while org-mode is indeed a great boon to the intensive-emacs user, that it\u0026rsquo;s not an ideal production editing environment. muse-mode, or my favored markdown-mode might be better if you\u0026rsquo;re actually writing text.\nAnd then, as I got into the writing of this story, I realized that I was flipping rather seriously (and annoyingly) between my notes for the story and the story I was writing. Also, when I\u0026rsquo;m writing book-length (or conceptually book-length) work, I tend to break up the text into more manageable chapter-length or scene-length files, which is conceptually useful for me.\nIn a short story, it didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to make sense to break things up into more than one file, and after I\u0026rsquo;d written a couple thousand words, I realized that something needed to be done. I created a file, with some header meta-data (using the yaml form that jekyll), an org-mode statement to define custom-status words that seem relevant to the writing/editing process, and then first level headers define key scenes or breaks in the story. I\u0026rsquo;ve never written (or read, to the best of my memory) a story that required more than one level of organization (but ymmv), and then--and this is the clever part as far as I\u0026rsquo;m concerned--property drawers for notes about what happens in the scene.\nProperty drawers stay folded by default, and are intended to store a collection of key-value pairs, but they don\u0026rsquo;t get exported by default, and so are a good way to keep your notes and your writing together and then export, as needed when drafting is done.\nAlso, I\u0026rsquo;ve recently added the following to my key-binding list, which adds a property drawer to the current heading, which is indeed a good thing:\n(global-set-key \u0026quot;\\M-p\u0026quot; 'org-insert-property-drawer) I\u0026rsquo;ve posted a copy of my template file for your review and edification.\nComments?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-in-org-mode/","summary":"With all luck, I\u0026rsquo;ll have most of a draft of the short story I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on done by the time this goes live, but if not certainly rather soon there after. This is an exciting announcement in and of itself, but perhaps the more interesting thing is that in the process of doing this I sank into writing this story in org mode.\nMy general M.O. for writing for the last several years has just been to write and store the files in markdown and use whatever text editor I fancy. I write the blog this way, I write papers this way. Everything seems to work fine, there are converters for LaTeX, HTML, and the plain text format is absolutely and completely readable to people who aren\u0026rsquo;t as obsessive about text files as I am.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m a huge org-mode proponent, I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to think that org-mode makes a particularly good writing environment (or haven\u0026rsquo;t, heretofore) because unless you use org-mode org files are sometimes a bit ugly, and the syntax is enough different from markdown to confuse me, and\u0026hellip;","title":"writing in org mode"},{"content":"So, my laptop (where I seem to be doing most of my writing these days) seems to have developed a wee-glitch. It seems, that (somewhat randomly) the system just freezes irrevocably whilst, get this, scrolling on twitter.com. No really. I\u0026rsquo;ll be minding my own business, and suddenly firefox freezes, I can\u0026rsquo;t interact with the window manager, I can\u0026rsquo;t kill the window server and start over, I can\u0026rsquo;t switch to another virtual terminal to fix things, nada. Hold down the power button and restart. Interestingly throughout all of this the mouse still works, as if to taunt me.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not been able to produce the freezing in any other application, and I\u0026rsquo;m concerned that it might be hardware related (disk access has been sort of weird lately, it\u0026rsquo;s an older computer,) it could also be related to some of the dependencies in Awesome 3.3. I\u0026rsquo;m waiting for things to sort of even out on a number of fronts before I assign blame. (And switch distributions of GNU/Linux.)\nMy response, of late, has been to just avoid the web entirely. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge problem, as I try and avoid the web as much as possible. I mean, I lead a very networked/digitally connected life, but it turns out that most of it isn\u0026rsquo;t web-based on a day-to-day working sort of way.\nThe experiment, then is to see just how far in my avoidance of the web. The \u0026ldquo;information fast\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t a startlingly new idea, and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of interested in seeing how this affects my computer usage on the whole. Information fasts work, by forcing/allowing you to take a cold turkey break from the information that you consume and then re-evaluating your information consumption habits and seeing what\u0026rsquo;s worth sticking with and what\u0026rsquo;s not. So basically I\u0026rsquo;m using this as an exercise to see: What changes, if I say \u0026ldquo;ok now web-browser,\u0026rdquo; what tools and workflows do I develop, and is this a better way to work?\nHints and suggestions would be helpful. There are some practices that I need to get set up with, and using more effectively. Twitter and identi.ca via IM (check). Offline, multi-computer RSS reading. Offline access/browsing to common resources (eg WikipediaFS and other fuse resources; YaOddMuseMode for the EmacsWiki, some way of reading c2 wiki and so forth.)\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll see where that leads me. Do people have suggestions for tools in this (and other directions)? Has anyone done this before? Would anyone else be interested in doing the fast with me?\nI look forward to hearing from you!\nUpdate: I had a non-twitter related crash. I was browsing, loading a new page and scrolling on the existing page. Bam! I have, in response: upgraded the think-pad touch-point (or whatever) drivers to their jaunty versions as the sources were disabled during the upgrade.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also, in this vein, installed and have a fairly effective copy of w3m, an emacs-accessible browser, running. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is the way forward forcing myself to use an editor-based browser, might allow me to focus more effectively and rely on the Web more for information than for entertainment. As it should be!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/glitch-and-web-experiments/","summary":"So, my laptop (where I seem to be doing most of my writing these days) seems to have developed a wee-glitch. It seems, that (somewhat randomly) the system just freezes irrevocably whilst, get this, scrolling on twitter.com. No really. I\u0026rsquo;ll be minding my own business, and suddenly firefox freezes, I can\u0026rsquo;t interact with the window manager, I can\u0026rsquo;t kill the window server and start over, I can\u0026rsquo;t switch to another virtual terminal to fix things, nada. Hold down the power button and restart. Interestingly throughout all of this the mouse still works, as if to taunt me.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not been able to produce the freezing in any other application, and I\u0026rsquo;m concerned that it might be hardware related (disk access has been sort of weird lately, it\u0026rsquo;s an older computer,) it could also be related to some of the dependencies in Awesome 3.3. I\u0026rsquo;m waiting for things to sort of even out on a number of fronts before I assign blame.","title":"glitch and web experiments"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another in the train of posts about economics and sustainability. I started with meditations on cooperatives, and openness and martian economics, and then business in network service. And finally, a brief thought on the state of contemporary marriage. This post takes a step back so that I can talk about what I mean by sustainability, which I think requires a bit of a sidestep into thinking about ecology and the environment.\nSustainability, as I\u0026rsquo;ve come to think about it seems to be more about directing economic activity toward independence, an self sufficiency rather than toward \u0026ldquo;growth,\u0026rdquo; (the for-profit model) and charitable/philanthropic goals (the non-profit model).\nNo sooner do I say this, and I realize that being a proponent of sustainable approaches to economics makes me seem like something of an economic isolationist, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s the wrong direction. The problem with sustainability isn\u0026rsquo;t just that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to accomplish in pragmatic terms, but also hard to think about. We simply don\u0026rsquo;t have structures or models for people and groups who want to make an honest living creating new things (eg. fiction, computers, cabinets, software, agriculture/comestibles, pharmaceuticals, plumbing, newspapers, etc).\nSure, we know how to make things, and most of us manage to make a living at it, but our economic models rely on lots of growth and expansion in order for capital to be available (cite: current economic crisis). The missing piece--it seems to me--is a more systems-based approach to economic development and corporate organization.\nSustainability is, after all, an ecological idea and in this context. And discussions of the environment and ecology seem way more focused on sentimentality, hydrocarbon intput/output, and humanity\u0026rsquo;s impact on the environment in the context of our existing (non sustainable) business practices and not enough time thinking about our business practices in environmental terms. But taking an \u0026ldquo;ecological\u0026rdquo; approach to economics signifies (in my mind) attention to the economy as a whole, and sustainability as a practice, and that seems like it would be a good thing.\nIn the Mars books (which have been quite influential in this series) a few characters float the notion of an \u0026ldquo;eco-economics\u0026rdquo; where currency (such as it exists), are based on caloric input and output. Which is a nifty way to think about it. The strongest part of the martian government (near the end of the series) is a regulatory \u0026ldquo;environmental court\u0026rdquo; that attempts to manage the ecological/economical activities on a global scale. They\u0026rsquo;re reasonably effective at this.\nI return the Mars books because they\u0026rsquo;re fresh in my mind, and because they present a possibility that\u0026rsquo;s both radically different from our current system and that attends to the weight of our history. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that the Robinson-Mars solution is the answer to our economic problems but it does force us to say \u0026ldquo;20th centry growth-levels are unsustainable, and undesirable,\u0026rdquo; and that \u0026ldquo;from a systems-based approach (if no other) capitalism is unstable.\u0026rdquo; And that\u0026rsquo;s a useful thought exercise.\nAs is the project of thinking about economics in environmental terms. Not because it will diminish human impact on ecologies--though it may--but because that sort of systems approach will lead to more sustainable economies and better lives for all parties to that activity--human and environmental.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a worthwhile goal.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sustainability-ecology/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another in the train of posts about economics and sustainability. I started with meditations on cooperatives, and openness and martian economics, and then business in network service. And finally, a brief thought on the state of contemporary marriage. This post takes a step back so that I can talk about what I mean by sustainability, which I think requires a bit of a sidestep into thinking about ecology and the environment.\nSustainability, as I\u0026rsquo;ve come to think about it seems to be more about directing economic activity toward independence, an self sufficiency rather than toward \u0026ldquo;growth,\u0026rdquo; (the for-profit model) and charitable/philanthropic goals (the non-profit model).\nNo sooner do I say this, and I realize that being a proponent of sustainable approaches to economics makes me seem like something of an economic isolationist, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s the wrong direction. The problem with sustainability isn\u0026rsquo;t just that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to accomplish in pragmatic terms, but also hard to think about.","title":"sustainable ecology"},{"content":"A (gay) friend was talking about the ongoing drama of his parents (decades old) divorce. I said, \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t get this whole [gay] marriage thing.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Right,\u0026rdquo; he said.\n\u0026ldquo;I mean, whatever, but I think we need to work on convincing straight people to not get married rather than convincing states to let us get married,\u0026rdquo; I said.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;ll never happen,\u0026rdquo; he said.\n\u0026ldquo;Right, besides we\u0026rsquo;d need better Corporate law, and good luck seeing that happen,\u0026rdquo; I said. \u0026ldquo;I mean what we really need are ways to incorporate sustainable co-operatives without the concepts/burdens for-profit/non-profit entities.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich is, if you\u0026rsquo;ve ever wondered, what its like to live in my head.\nWhen we get down to the heart of the issue, marriage has a lot to do with inheritance, powers of attorney, legal agent-representation stuff (is that different than powers of attorney), relationships and families are orthogonal.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that either the importance of the combined legal entity of a married couple or the legal recognition of a relationship/family isn\u0026rsquo;t a valuable institution, but marriage seems to be a poor implementation of either and both.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/co-op-marriage/","summary":"A (gay) friend was talking about the ongoing drama of his parents (decades old) divorce. I said, \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t get this whole [gay] marriage thing.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Right,\u0026rdquo; he said.\n\u0026ldquo;I mean, whatever, but I think we need to work on convincing straight people to not get married rather than convincing states to let us get married,\u0026rdquo; I said.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;ll never happen,\u0026rdquo; he said.\n\u0026ldquo;Right, besides we\u0026rsquo;d need better Corporate law, and good luck seeing that happen,\u0026rdquo; I said. \u0026ldquo;I mean what we really need are ways to incorporate sustainable co-operatives without the concepts/burdens for-profit/non-profit entities.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich is, if you\u0026rsquo;ve ever wondered, what its like to live in my head.\nWhen we get down to the heart of the issue, marriage has a lot to do with inheritance, powers of attorney, legal agent-representation stuff (is that different than powers of attorney), relationships and families are orthogonal.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that either the importance of the combined legal entity of a married couple or the legal recognition of a relationship/family isn\u0026rsquo;t a valuable institution, but marriage seems to be a poor implementation of either and both.","title":"co-op marriage"},{"content":"This post is the spiritual sequal to my (slight) diatribe against database powered websites of a few weeks ago. And a continuation of my thoughts regarding the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Just to add a quick subtitle: Oracle is a huge vendor of database software, and about 18 months ago (? or so) Sun acquired mySQL which is the largest and most successful open-source competitor to Oracle\u0026rsquo;s products.\nWith all this swirling around in my head I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the future of database technology. Like ya\u0026rsquo;do\u0026hellip;\nFor many years, 15 at least, relational database systems (rdbms\u0026rsquo;) have ruled without much opposition. This is where Oracle has succeeded, and mySQL is an example of this kind of system, and on the whole they accomplish what they set out to do very well.\nThe issue, and this is what I touched on the last time around, is that these kinds of systems don\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;bend\u0026rdquo; well, which is to say, if you have a system that needs flexibility, or that is storing a lot of dissimilar sorts of data, the relational database model stops making a lot of sense. Relational databases are big collections of connected tabular data and unless the data is regular and easily tabulated\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s a big mess.\nSo we\u0026rsquo;re starting to see things like CouchDB, google\u0026rsquo;s big table, Etoile\u0026rsquo;s CoreObject MonetDB that manage data, but in a much more flexible and potentially multi-dimensional way. Which is good when you need to merge dissimilar kinds of data.\nSo I can tell the winds are blowing in a new direction, but this is very much outside of the boundaries of my area of expertice or familiarity. This leads me to two obvious conclusions\n1. For people in the know: What\u0026rsquo;s happening with database engines, and the software that is built upon these database systems. I suspect there\u0026rsquo;s always going to be a certain measure of legacy data around, and developers who are used to developing against RBDMS\u0026rsquo; aren\u0026rsquo;t going to let go of that easily.\nAt the same time, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of rumbling that suggests that something new is going to happen. Does anyone have a sense of where that\u0026rsquo;s going?\n2. For people who lost me at when I said the word database: In a lot of ways, I think this has a huge impact on how we use computers and what technology is able to do in the near term. Computers are really powerful today. In the nineties the revolution in computing was that hardware was vastly more powerful than it had been before; in the aughts it became cheaper. In the teens--I\u0026rsquo;d wager--it\u0026rsquo;ll become more useful, and the evolution of database systems is an incredibly huge part of this next phase of development.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/database-development/","summary":"This post is the spiritual sequal to my (slight) diatribe against database powered websites of a few weeks ago. And a continuation of my thoughts regarding the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Just to add a quick subtitle: Oracle is a huge vendor of database software, and about 18 months ago (? or so) Sun acquired mySQL which is the largest and most successful open-source competitor to Oracle\u0026rsquo;s products.\nWith all this swirling around in my head I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the future of database technology. Like ya\u0026rsquo;do\u0026hellip;\nFor many years, 15 at least, relational database systems (rdbms\u0026rsquo;) have ruled without much opposition. This is where Oracle has succeeded, and mySQL is an example of this kind of system, and on the whole they accomplish what they set out to do very well.\nThe issue, and this is what I touched on the last time around, is that these kinds of systems don\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;bend\u0026rdquo; well, which is to say, if you have a system that needs flexibility, or that is storing a lot of dissimilar sorts of data, the relational database model stops making a lot of sense.","title":"database market"},{"content":"Before I got started down my current career path--that would be the information management/work flow/web strategy/technology and cultural analyst path--I worked in a library.\nI suppose I should clarify somewhat as the image you have in your mind is almost certainly not accurate, both of what my library was like and of the kind of work I did.\nI worked in a research library at the big local (private) university, and I worked not in the part of library where students went to get their books, but in the \u0026ldquo;overflow area\u0026rdquo; where the special collections, book preservation unit, and the catalogers all worked. What\u0026rsquo;s more, the unit I worked with had an archival collection of film/media resources from a few documentary film makers/companies, so we didn\u0026rsquo;t really have books either.\nNevertheless it was probably one of the most instructive experiences I\u0026rsquo;ve had. There are things about the way Archives work, particularly archives with difficult collections, that no one teaches you in those \u0026ldquo;how to use the library\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;welcome to library of congress/dewy decimal classification systems\u0026rdquo; lessons you get in grade school/college. The highlights?\nPhysical and Intellectual Organization While Archives keep track of, and organize all sorts of information about their collections, the organization of this material \u0026ldquo;on the shelf\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t always reflect this.\nSpace is a huge issue in archives, and as long as you have a record or \u0026ldquo;where\u0026rdquo; things are, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of incentive to store things in the way that will take up the least amount of space physically. Store photographs, separately from oversized maps, separately from file boxes, separately from video cassettes, separately from CDs (and so forth.)\n\u0026ldquo;Series\u0026rdquo; and intellectual cataloging - This took me a long time to get my head around, but Archivists have a really great way of taking a step back and looking at the largest possible whole, and then creating an ad-hoc organization and categorization of this whole, so as to describe in maximum detail, and make finding particular things easier. Letters from a specific time period. Pictures from another era.\nAn acceptance that perfection can\u0026rsquo;t be had. Perhaps this is a symptom of working with a collection that had only been archived for several years, or working with a collection that had been established with one large gift, rather than as a depository for a working collection. In any case, our goal--it seemed--was to take what we had and make it better: more accessible, more clearly described, easier to process later, rather than to make the whole thing absolutely perfect. It\u0026rsquo;s a good way to think about organizational project.\nIn fact, a lot of what I did was to take files that the film producers had on their computers and make them useful. I copied disks off of old media, I took copies of files and (in many cases, manually) converted them to use-able file formats, I created index of digital holdings. Stuff like that. No books were harmed or affected in these projects, and yet, I think I was able to make a productive contribution to the project as a whole.\nThe interesting thing, I think, is that when I\u0026rsquo;m looking through my own files, and helping other people figure out how to manage all the information--data, really--they have, I find that it all boils down to the same sorts of problems that I worked with in the library: How to balance \u0026ldquo;work-spaces\u0026rdquo; with storage spaces. How to separate intellectual and physical organizations. How to create usable catalogs and indices\u0026rsquo;s of a collection. How to lay everything down so that you can, without \u0026ldquo;hunting around\u0026rdquo; for a piece of paper lay your hands on everything in your collection in a few moments, and ultimately how to do this without spending very much energy on \u0026ldquo;upkeep.\u0026rdquo;\nDoes it make me a dork that I find this all incredibly interesting and exciting?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pragmatic-library-science/","summary":"Before I got started down my current career path--that would be the information management/work flow/web strategy/technology and cultural analyst path--I worked in a library.\nI suppose I should clarify somewhat as the image you have in your mind is almost certainly not accurate, both of what my library was like and of the kind of work I did.\nI worked in a research library at the big local (private) university, and I worked not in the part of library where students went to get their books, but in the \u0026ldquo;overflow area\u0026rdquo; where the special collections, book preservation unit, and the catalogers all worked. What\u0026rsquo;s more, the unit I worked with had an archival collection of film/media resources from a few documentary film makers/companies, so we didn\u0026rsquo;t really have books either.\nNevertheless it was probably one of the most instructive experiences I\u0026rsquo;ve had. There are things about the way Archives work, particularly archives with difficult collections, that no one teaches you in those \u0026ldquo;how to use the library\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;welcome to library of congress/dewy decimal classification systems\u0026rdquo; lessons you get in grade school/college.","title":"Pragmatic Library Science"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading the autonomo.us blog and even lurking on their email list for a while, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about \u0026ldquo;free network services,\u0026rdquo; and what it means to have services that respect users\u0026rsquo; freedom in the way that we\u0026rsquo;ve grown to expect and demand from \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; software. This post explores issues of freedom in network services, business models for networked services, and some cyborg issues related to network services. A long list indeed, so lets dive in.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been complaining on this blog about how much web applications, the web as a whole, and networked services on the whole suck. Not the concepts, exactly, those are usually fine, but suck for productive users of computers, and for the health of the Internet that first attracted me to cyberculture lo these many years ago. I still think that this is the case, but I\u0026rsquo;ve come to understand that a lot of the reason that I have heretofore been opposed to network services as a whole is because they\u0026rsquo;re sort of brazen in their disregard users freedom.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that services which do respect users\u0026rsquo; freedom are--as a result--not sucky, but it\u0026rsquo;s a big step in the right direction. The barrier to free network services is generally one of business models. Non-free network services center around the provider deriving profit/benefit from collecting users\u0026rsquo; personal information (the reason why open-id never caught on), from running advertising along side user-generated content (difficult, but more effective than other forms of on-line advertising because the services themselves generally provide persuasive hooks to keep users returning,) or when all else fails, charging a fee.\nSo to back up for a minute, I suppose we should cover what it means to call a network service \u0026ldquo;free.\u0026rdquo; Basically, free network services are ones where fundamentally users have control over their data. They can easily import and export whatever data they need from the providers system. That users can choose to participate in the culture of a networked computing by running software on their computer. There are ideas about copy-left and open source with regards to running code on networked services that are connected to these ideas of freedom, but this is more a means to an end (as all copy-left is) rather than--I should think--an end in itself.\nBasically, data independence and network federation or distribution. Which takes all of the, by now conventional, business models and tears them to bits. If users are free to move their data to another service (or their own servers) then advertising, leveraging personal information are all out of the window. Even free software advocates look at this problem and say, we have a right to keep network services closed. Which is understandable given that there aren\u0026rsquo;t many business models in the free world. While a lot of folks in the FNS space are working to build pillars of free network technologies, I think some theoretical work on the economics are in order. So here I am. Here are the ideas:\nThe primary \u0026ldquo;business\u0026rdquo; opportunity for free network service is in systems administration, and related kinds of tasks. If the software is (mostly) open source and design and implementation can\u0026rsquo;t possibly generate enough income, then keeping the servers running, the software up-to date, and providing support to users is something that provides and generates real value and is a concrete cost that users of software can identify with and justify. Subscription fees are the new advertising. In a lot of ways what a particular service provides (in addition to server resources) is a particular niche community. While federation changes this dynamic somewhat, I think often people are going to be willing to pay some fee to participate in a particular community, so between entrance fees (like meta-filter) and subscription fees (like flickr) you should be able to generate a pretty good hourly rate for the work required. Enterprise Services. We could probably support free network services (and the people behind them) by using those networks as advertisements for enterprise services. See a service on the Internet, and have a company deploy it for internal use on their intranet, and have the developers behind it sell support contracts. Leach money from telecoms. This is my perpetual suggestion, but while most of us Internet folks and network service developers may or may not be making money from our efforts in cyberspace, the telecoms are making money in cyberspace hand over fist, largely on the merits of our work. It\u0026rsquo;s not really possible to bully Ma\u0026rsquo; Bell, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s a part of the equation that we should be focusing on. Your Suggestion Here. The idea behind business in the free network service space, is that providers are paid for concrete value that they provide, rather than speculation on their abstract value, and as a result we can all think about business models without harming the viability of any of these business models. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/free-network-businesses/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading the autonomo.us blog and even lurking on their email list for a while, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about \u0026ldquo;free network services,\u0026rdquo; and what it means to have services that respect users\u0026rsquo; freedom in the way that we\u0026rsquo;ve grown to expect and demand from \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; software. This post explores issues of freedom in network services, business models for networked services, and some cyborg issues related to network services. A long list indeed, so lets dive in.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been complaining on this blog about how much web applications, the web as a whole, and networked services on the whole suck. Not the concepts, exactly, those are usually fine, but suck for productive users of computers, and for the health of the Internet that first attracted me to cyberculture lo these many years ago. I still think that this is the case, but I\u0026rsquo;ve come to understand that a lot of the reason that I have heretofore been opposed to network services as a whole is because they\u0026rsquo;re sort of brazen in their disregard users freedom.","title":"free network businesses"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been (slowly) upgrading to the latest version of the Awesome Window Manager. Since Awesome is a pretty new program, and there was a debian code freeze during development for a huge chunk of the awesome3-series code\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s been hard to install on ubuntu. Lots of dithering about, and then compiling by hand. For the uninitiated, ususally installing new software on a Debain-based system (like ubuntu; and many GNU/Linux systems are this way) is as simple as typing a single command. This hasn\u0026rsquo;t really been the case for awesome.\nIn any case, with the latest release candidates for awesome 3.3 in sid (debian unstable) I added a sid repository to my ubuntu system, updated, installed awesome, removed the sid repository. Breathed a huge sigh of relief, and then got to getting things setup again. I have the following responses to the new awesome:\nI really like the fact that if you change something in your config file and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t parse, awesome loads the default config (at /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua) so that you don\u0026rsquo;t have to kill X11 manually and fix your config file from a virtual terminal. If you\u0026rsquo;re considering awesome, and all this talk of unstable repositories scares you, the truth is that awesome is--at this point--not exactly adding new features to the core code base. There are some new features and reorganizations of the code, but the software is generally getting more and more stable. Also, the config file has been (and is becoming less of) a moving target, so given that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty stable and usable, it makes sense to \u0026ldquo;buy in\u0026rdquo; with the most current version of the configuration so you\u0026rsquo;ll have less tweaking in general. The new (default) config file is so much better than the old ones. I basically reimplemented my old config into the new default config and have been really happy with that. It\u0026rsquo;s short(er) and just yummy. I did have some sort of perverse problems with xmodmap which I can\u0026rsquo;t really explain but they\u0026rsquo;re solved. If you\u0026rsquo;re use a display manager (like gdm) to manage your x sessions, I know you can just choose awesome from the default sessions list, but I\u0026rsquo;d still recommend triggering awesome from an .xinit/.Xsessions file so that you can load network managers and xmodmap before awesome loads. Which seems to work best for me. I\u0026rsquo;d never used naughty, which is a growl-like notification system before, and now that it\u0026rsquo;s included by default I am using it, and I quite adore it. More later.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-awesome/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been (slowly) upgrading to the latest version of the Awesome Window Manager. Since Awesome is a pretty new program, and there was a debian code freeze during development for a huge chunk of the awesome3-series code\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s been hard to install on ubuntu. Lots of dithering about, and then compiling by hand. For the uninitiated, ususally installing new software on a Debain-based system (like ubuntu; and many GNU/Linux systems are this way) is as simple as typing a single command. This hasn\u0026rsquo;t really been the case for awesome.\nIn any case, with the latest release candidates for awesome 3.3 in sid (debian unstable) I added a sid repository to my ubuntu system, updated, installed awesome, removed the sid repository. Breathed a huge sigh of relief, and then got to getting things setup again. I have the following responses to the new awesome:\nI really like the fact that if you change something in your config file and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t parse, awesome loads the default config (at /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.","title":"new awesome"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve realized much to my chagrin that I haven\u0026rsquo;t written a post on about the Awesome Window Manager in a long time. It\u0026rsquo;s funny how window managers just fade into the background, particularly when they work well and suit your needs. Why then, does this seem so important to me and why am I so interested in this? Funny you should ask.\nTiling window managers aren\u0026rsquo;t going to be the Next Big Thing in computing, and if they (as a whole) have an active user-base of more than say 10,000 people that would be really surprising. While I think that a lot of people would benefit and learn from using Awesome (or others), even this is something of a niche group.\nAs a result, I think something really interesting happens in the tiling window manger space. First, the project is driven by a rather unique driving force that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I can articulate well. It\u0026rsquo;s not driven by a desire of profit, and it\u0026rsquo;s not driven by some larger Utopian political goal (as a lot of free software is). This is software that is written entirely for oneself.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the way most (ultimately) free software and open source projects start. A lot of emphasis in the community (and outside) is made on the next stage of the progress, where a project that was previously \u0026ldquo;for oneself\u0026rdquo; becomes something larger with broader appeal. Lets start with the git version control system which started because the kernel development team needed a new version control system, but in the past couple of years has become so much more, by way of phenomena like github and flashbake. The free software and open source worlds are full of similar examples: the Linux Kernel, Drupal, b2/WordPress, Pidgin/Gain, Asterisk, and so forth.\nBut Awesome, and the other tiling window managers will, likely as not never make this jump. There is no commercial competitor for these programs, they\u0026rsquo;re never going to \u0026ldquo;breakthrough\u0026rdquo; to a larger audience. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, it just effects how we think about some rather fundamental aspects of software and software development.\nFirst, if developers aren\u0026rsquo;t driven by obvious \u0026ldquo;us versus them\u0026rdquo; competition, how can the software improve? And aren\u0026rsquo;t there a bunch of tiling window mangers that compete with each other?\nI\u0026rsquo;d argue that competition, insofar as it does occur, happens within a project, and within the developer rather than between projects and between developers. Awesome developers are driven to make Awesome more awesome, because there\u0026rsquo;s no real competition to be had with Aqua (OS X window manger,) or other Kwin and Metacity (GNOME and KDE\u0026rsquo;s window mangers), or even other alternate X11 window managers like OpenBox.\nDevelopers are driven to \u0026ldquo;do better,\u0026rdquo; than the people that preceded them, better than their last attempt, better than the alternate solutions provided by the community. Also, the principals of minimalism which underpins all of these window managers towards simple, clean, and lightweight code, inspires development and change (if not growth, exactly). This seems to hold true under anecdotal observation.\nWhile there are a number of tiling window managers in this space, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how much they actually compete with each other. I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what some folks who use xmonad and StumpWM have to say about this, but it\u0026rsquo;s my sense that the field of tiling window managers has more to do with other interests. Xmonad makes a point about the Haskel programing language. Stump is targeted directly toward emacs users and demonstrates that Lisp/Common Lisp is still relevant. Awesome brings the notion of a framework to window management, and seems to perfectly balances customizable with lightweight design. While Awesome is a powerful player in this space, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of competition.\nSecond, if there\u0026rsquo;s no substantive competition in this domain and if there\u0026rsquo;s a pretty clear \u0026ldquo;cap\u0026rdquo; to the amount of growth, how are tiling window managersnot* entirely pointless.*\nI think there are two directions to go with this. First I think we\u0026rsquo;re seeing some of the benefits of these window managers in other projects like xcb (a new library for dealing with X11) and freedesktop benefit both directly and indirectly from the work being done in the tiling window manager space. Similarly, Xmonad is a great boon to the Haskell community and cause (I suspect).\nThe other direction follows an essay I wrote here a few months ago about the importance of thinking about the capabilities of programing languages even if you\u0026rsquo;re not a programmer because languages, like all sorts of highly technical concepts and tools create and constrain possibilities for all computer users, not just the people who ponder and use them. In the case of the tiling window manager, thinking about how the people who are writing computer programs is productive. In addition to the aforementioned thoughts about competition and open source.\nSo there we are. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-tiling-window-managers-matter/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve realized much to my chagrin that I haven\u0026rsquo;t written a post on about the Awesome Window Manager in a long time. It\u0026rsquo;s funny how window managers just fade into the background, particularly when they work well and suit your needs. Why then, does this seem so important to me and why am I so interested in this? Funny you should ask.\nTiling window managers aren\u0026rsquo;t going to be the Next Big Thing in computing, and if they (as a whole) have an active user-base of more than say 10,000 people that would be really surprising. While I think that a lot of people would benefit and learn from using Awesome (or others), even this is something of a niche group.\nAs a result, I think something really interesting happens in the tiling window manger space. First, the project is driven by a rather unique driving force that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I can articulate well.","title":"why tiling window managers matter"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working a bit--rather a lot, actually--on getting myself ready to apply for graduate school (again) in a year to eighteen months, and one of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get figured out is the \u0026ldquo;why\u0026rdquo; question. Why go? Why bother? Questions like that. For starters, I hope to have some of the youthful angst regarding education knackered by the time I go back, and second, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to make the most of the experience. This post speaks to one part of this challenge: about what research is productive and worthwhile (that is, novel and original), and what research is by contrast merely an explanation of the obvious.\nThis is all predicated on the assumption that there\u0026rsquo;s some sort of qualitative divide between the kind of causal observation and theoretical work that is what I do, (already), and \u0026ldquo;real work,\u0026rdquo; productive work that productively contributes to a discourse. (Too young for impostor syndrome? unlikely!) Now this might be a ill conceived separation but, nevertheless the thought is on my mind.\nThe trains of thought:\nThere\u0026rsquo;s some fundamental difference between blagging and productive \u0026ldquo;knowledge production.\u0026rdquo; Blogging is a practice that doesn\u0026rsquo;t lead to systematic investigation, and thus, while interesting and a productive tool for the development of my thinking, it\u0026rsquo;s a lousy end in and of itself.\nAs I wrote that above paragraph, I remember that it resonated with a thought I\u0026rsquo;ve had about this website (in it\u0026rsquo;s previous iterations) many years ago. Interesting.\nFiction writing has (and continues) to be the most satisfying output of this impulse that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to have thus far. While I do worry that my fiction isn\u0026rsquo;t novel enough, that\u0026rsquo;s a technical (eg. plot, setting, character) issue rather than a theoretical (eg. the science, and historiography) concern.\nFiction writing also has a long publication cycle. My blog posts, from inception to posting, aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly time intensive. Fiction, even/especially short stories require a bunch of extra time, and being able to immerse myself in a collection of ideas for a long time has a bunch of benefit.\nAlso, there\u0026rsquo;s a credential issue that I rather enjoy with-regards to Science Fiction. There\u0026rsquo;s no degree that I could possibly want. I mean, sure, there are popular fiction writing programs, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a requirement, and I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll (try) to go to viable paradise sometime in the 2010s (or Clarion if I am somehow, ever, able to spare 6 grand and the ability to take 6 weeks off of my life), these would just be \u0026ldquo;for me,\u0026rdquo; and there\u0026rsquo;s nothing other that the quality of my work and the merit of my ideas that are between me and acceptance as a science fiction writer. That\u0026rsquo;s really comforting, somehow.\nMost of us read literature of some sort, and talk about literary texts of one stripe or another, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that these activities necessarily make most of us literary critics. The art and project of literary criticism is something more. The difference between reading and talking about a text and practicing literary criticism is an issue of methodology. One of the chief reasons I want to go back to school is to develop an additional methodological tool kit, because my current one is a bit lacking. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty convinced that the difference between \u0026ldquo;thinking/doing cool things\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;doing/thinking important things,\u0026rdquo; is largely an issue of methodology.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t think this would short circuit the gradschool plans, but I think working to develop some sort of more rigorous methodological companion to the blogging process that goes beyond the general \u0026ldquo;so folks, I was thinking about foo so I\u0026rsquo;m going to tell you a story\u0026rdquo; (did I just give away my formula? Eep!)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-obvious-and-the-novel/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working a bit--rather a lot, actually--on getting myself ready to apply for graduate school (again) in a year to eighteen months, and one of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get figured out is the \u0026ldquo;why\u0026rdquo; question. Why go? Why bother? Questions like that. For starters, I hope to have some of the youthful angst regarding education knackered by the time I go back, and second, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to make the most of the experience. This post speaks to one part of this challenge: about what research is productive and worthwhile (that is, novel and original), and what research is by contrast merely an explanation of the obvious.\nThis is all predicated on the assumption that there\u0026rsquo;s some sort of qualitative divide between the kind of causal observation and theoretical work that is what I do, (already), and \u0026ldquo;real work,\u0026rdquo; productive work that productively contributes to a discourse.","title":"The Obvious and the Novel"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking, in light of the Oracle purchase of Sun Microsystems, about the role of big companies in our economy, the role of competition, and what open source business models look like. This is a huge mess of thoughts and trains but I have to start somewhere.\nThe Hacking Business Model isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a business model, as it is an operations model for hacker-run business. In that light it\u0026rsquo;s a quite useful document, and it\u0026rsquo;s understandable that it mostly ignores how to obtain \u0026ldquo;revenue\u0026rdquo; (and therefore, I think, falls in to the trap that assumes that new technology creates value which translates into income, when that doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite work pragmatically.) I\u0026rsquo;m interested in seeing where this kind of thing goes, particularly in the following directions:\nWhere does capital come from in these systems? For start-up costs? Where and how do non-technical (administrative, management, support, business development) staff/projects fit into these sorts of systems? The conventional wisdom in proprietary software (and to a lesser extent in free software) is that in order to develop new technology and improve existing technology code-bases need to compete with each other, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really think that this is the case in open environments. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the competition between Solaris, the BSDs, and Linux (augmented as they all are by GNU to various extents) pushes each UNIX/UNIX-like operating system to improve. Similarly, I don\u0026rsquo;t know that having vim and emacs around keeps pushing the development of the text-editor domain.\nAt the same time, competition does help regulate--after a fashion--the proprietary market. Having Oracle\u0026rsquo;s database products around help keep Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s database products on their toes. OS X spurs development in Windows (usually). Without serious competition we get things like the ribbon interface to Microsoft Office (ugg), and telecoms.\nThis ties into my work and thinking on distributed version control systems, but I think in open systems, (particularly where branching is supported and encouraged,) the competition can happen among a team or with one\u0026rsquo;s own history. We pitting code bases against each other seems to not make a great deal of economic sense.\nI wish I had access to demographic data, but I suspect that there are few if any open source projects with development communities that are bigger than ~100-150 dunbar\u0026rsquo;snumber, and the bigger projects (eg. Drupal, KDE, GNOME, the Linux Kernel, Fedora, Debian) solve this by dividing into smaller working projects under a larger umbrella. And yet, our culture supports the formation of companies that are many many times this big.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written before about the challenges of authenticity in economic activity, and I wonder if having large non-cooperative institutions (companies) is one of the chief sources of in-authenticity is the fact that we can\u0026rsquo;t remain accountable and connected to the gestalt of the most basic economic unit (the corporation).\nI wonder if as we learn from free software and open practices, if cooperative-based business are more likely to become more predominant, or how else our markets and economies will change.\nThis brings us back to the revenue system in the hacking business model from above. In smaller operations we can imagine that some business opportunities would be viable that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be viable in larger operations. Also, because smaller co-ops can specialize more effectively. These factors combine to signify that competition becomes an internal or \u0026ldquo;vertical\u0026rdquo; issue rather than an external/horizontal project and in these situations generating revenue becomes easier.\nThoughts?\nMore to come?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/coops-competition-openness/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking, in light of the Oracle purchase of Sun Microsystems, about the role of big companies in our economy, the role of competition, and what open source business models look like. This is a huge mess of thoughts and trains but I have to start somewhere.\nThe Hacking Business Model isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a business model, as it is an operations model for hacker-run business. In that light it\u0026rsquo;s a quite useful document, and it\u0026rsquo;s understandable that it mostly ignores how to obtain \u0026ldquo;revenue\u0026rdquo; (and therefore, I think, falls in to the trap that assumes that new technology creates value which translates into income, when that doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite work pragmatically.) I\u0026rsquo;m interested in seeing where this kind of thing goes, particularly in the following directions:\nWhere does capital come from in these systems? For start-up costs? Where and how do non-technical (administrative, management, support, business development) staff/projects fit into these sorts of systems?","title":"Cooperatives, Competition, Openness"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading--and by god I hope by the time I post this, I\u0026rsquo;m done reading--Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s Mars Trilogy. I read (parts of) these once before, but I was busy adjusting to college at the moment and I didn\u0026rsquo;t retain a great deal from that experience. In any case, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot in these stories to pick apart and absorb.\nAnd I enjoy that. I really like science fiction that both tells a good story and contributes to some sort of intellectual conversation that\u0026rsquo;s bigger than it. Surely all literature has some theoretical conception of itself, but work that unabashedly tussles with relevant knowledge is particularly powerful.\nHell, at one point, a character in Blue Mars meditates on Deleuzian philosophy. My heart goes pitter pattter at the sight of people who are willing to mediate on Deleuze and do a good job at it. (Ironically, or perhaps not, I think a lot of academics don\u0026rsquo;t quite know what to do with Deleuze.) Anyway\u0026hellip;\nOne of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve really enjoyed thinking about while reading Green and Blue Mars is that Robinson does a lot of economic theorizing and imagination. I find this an interesting playground as a lesson from fiction, and also as a productive consideration of the issues I began to talk about in my essay on co-ops, competition, and openness.\nSo read the book, particularly if you haven\u0026rsquo;t or if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in thinking about economic systems and potentials, but the current economy is\u0026hellip; boggling.\nRobinson posits (a martian) system where land is collectively owned, where projects (research, farming, construction) are undertaken by ~100-person co-ops that workers have to buy-into (with money earned during internships), with everything overseen by a Judaical system that makes judgments on mostly with regards to environmental impact.\nMy father, upon reading this, made the very apt judgment that, the key here is that--on Mars--there\u0026rsquo;s no countryside, and that farming (because it\u0026rsquo;s attached to cities because of the Atmosphere issue). While this is a vast oversimplification--of course--he\u0026rsquo;s right: new age hacker-type economic models need to consider \u0026ldquo;industries\u0026rdquo; like materials engineering and food production more than they currently do.\nWe have a lot of thinking to do.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/martian-economics/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading--and by god I hope by the time I post this, I\u0026rsquo;m done reading--Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s Mars Trilogy. I read (parts of) these once before, but I was busy adjusting to college at the moment and I didn\u0026rsquo;t retain a great deal from that experience. In any case, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot in these stories to pick apart and absorb.\nAnd I enjoy that. I really like science fiction that both tells a good story and contributes to some sort of intellectual conversation that\u0026rsquo;s bigger than it. Surely all literature has some theoretical conception of itself, but work that unabashedly tussles with relevant knowledge is particularly powerful.\nHell, at one point, a character in Blue Mars meditates on Deleuzian philosophy. My heart goes pitter pattter at the sight of people who are willing to mediate on Deleuze and do a good job at it. (Ironically, or perhaps not, I think a lot of academics don\u0026rsquo;t quite know what to do with Deleuze.","title":"martian economics"},{"content":"In the last several days, I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time writing and working on this new novel that seems to be capturing too much of my attention. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty story, definitely the best piece of fiction that I\u0026rsquo;ve written henceforth, despite all my worry, dread, and seemingly limitless self-doubt in relation to the project. Despite the gremlins on my shoulder saying \u0026ldquo;why aren\u0026rsquo;t you working on short fiction; why aren\u0026rsquo;t your characters having more sex; do you really think you can float such a disjointed/complex narrative; do you have a clue where this is going? \u0026hellip;and so forth,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a few rather interesting things from this story this past week.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a time travel story, stupid! Yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m well into the 7th chapter (of about 12?) and I finally figured out that I was, at it\u0026rsquo;s core telling a time travel story. No, it\u0026rsquo;s not a case of getting several tens of thousands of words on paper and realizing that you\u0026rsquo;re writing the wrong story, but rather that I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought of it as a quirky space opera, and just this week I realized that what makes it quirky is that it\u0026rsquo;s fundamentally a time travel story.\nRight.\nMy goal in this project was to write about history and how \u0026ldquo;history\u0026rdquo; emerges from \u0026ldquo;a collection of things that happen\u0026rdquo; to something more coherent and recognizable as such.\nIn a weird way, my fiction (since I started writing again in early 2007, at least) have always addressed the issues at the very kernel of my academic/scholarly interest. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in how communities form, and how people negotiate individual identities amongst groups of people. Open source software, cyberculture in general, and hackers are one way of looking at this that is very much the center of how I\u0026rsquo;m looking at these questions. Queerness is another. Same kernel.\nIn any case, history--however defined or used--is a key part of this community-identity-individual loop. Can you participate in the emacs/emacs-lisp community without knowing about the history of the XEmacs fork? Linux without knowing a little about the early days with Minix and UNIX? Git without knowing a little about CVS and the bitkeeper story? If you can, not for very long. There are other more mainstream culture examples as well, Americans and the great depression (particularly Roosevelt\u0026rsquo;s fireside chats, say?). Queers and stonewall? Etc.\nThis stuff is, to my mind, an incredibly important factor in \u0026ldquo;who we are\u0026rdquo; and how we all exist in our communities and the world at large. And because I\u0026rsquo;m who I am, I\u0026rsquo;m writing a story about this.\nThe science fictional effect, at play is relativity--lacking fantastic super-liminal (FTL; faster than light) space-drives--our characters must endure some pretty intense time dilation during transit: it takes them t weeks to get from planet A to planet B but meanwhile, it\u0026rsquo;s t years later on both of the planets who more or less share a common time line.\nNow I don\u0026rsquo;t do the math right, for it to work out as being sub-light speeds (exigencies of plot; interstellar spaces are really big), but the time dilation is a huge feature of the story and of (many) main characters place in the world, particularly in contrast to each other.\nAnd thus, in a manner of speaking, it\u0026rsquo;s a time travel story. Albeit where the time travel is one way (future bound,) linear, based on Einsteinian principals, and common place.\nAnd it took me half the book or more to recognize the story as such, which will--if nothing else--allow me to explain the story a bit better.\nIn the future Project Xanadu Worked I\u0026rsquo;ll probably touch on this later, but I realized (and this might not be particularly unique to my story) but that my characters were interacting with \u0026ldquo;the database\u0026rdquo; in the world. An internet-like system, only more structured, and more distributed, easier to search, easier to operate locally.\nWhich was basically Project Xanadu, on an interstellar scale. The features that my characters take advantage of:\nDistribution and federation of copies: I have ansible technology in the story, but even so, given the trajectories of data storage technology it makes more sense to store local copies of \u0026ldquo;the database\u0026rdquo; than it does, to route requests to the source of the data, or even your nearest peer for records. Assume massive storage capability, advanced rsync (a contemporary tool synching huge blobs of data across a network), and periods of, potentially, years when various ships, outposts, and systems would be out of contact with each-other. Nah, store stuff locally. Versioning Having a data store that stores data along a temporal axis (versions across time) is handy when you\u0026rsquo;re working on your computer and you accidentally delete something you didn\u0026rsquo;t mean to. It\u0026rsquo;s absolutely essential if you have lots of nodes that aren\u0026rsquo;t always in constant contact. It means you don\u0026rsquo;t loose data after merges, it solves some concurrency problems, interstellar data would require this. Structure: The contemporary world wide web (The Web) is able to function without any real structure, because we\u0026rsquo;ve imported data visualization from (more) analog formats (pamphlet layout/design; pages; index-like links, desktop metaphors), and we\u0026rsquo;ve developed some effective ad-hoc organizations (google, tags, microformats) which help ameliorate the disorganization, but the truth is that the web--as a data organization and storage tool--is a mess. My shtick about curation addresses this concern in one way. Creating a \u0026ldquo;new web\u0026rdquo; that had very strict page-structure requirements would be another. In the novel, their database grew out of the second option. The future is here folks, but you knew that.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lessons-from-fiction/","summary":"In the last several days, I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time writing and working on this new novel that seems to be capturing too much of my attention. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty story, definitely the best piece of fiction that I\u0026rsquo;ve written henceforth, despite all my worry, dread, and seemingly limitless self-doubt in relation to the project. Despite the gremlins on my shoulder saying \u0026ldquo;why aren\u0026rsquo;t you working on short fiction; why aren\u0026rsquo;t your characters having more sex; do you really think you can float such a disjointed/complex narrative; do you have a clue where this is going? \u0026hellip;and so forth,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a few rather interesting things from this story this past week.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a time travel story, stupid! Yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m well into the 7th chapter (of about 12?) and I finally figured out that I was, at it\u0026rsquo;s core telling a time travel story. No, it\u0026rsquo;s not a case of getting several tens of thousands of words on paper and realizing that you\u0026rsquo;re writing the wrong story, but rather that I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought of it as a quirky space opera, and just this week I realized that what makes it quirky is that it\u0026rsquo;s fundamentally a time travel story.","title":"lessons from fiction"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.04 \u0026ldquo;Jaunty Jackalope,\u0026rdquo; and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post some thoughts on the matter.\nOn my desktop the upgrade (eg. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade) was a bit touch and go, but I managed to save things (logging in running the old kernel into a root shell to fix the upgrade which mysteriously held back some packages it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have) and here I am. The laptop was easier to upgrade, and I suspect this has something to do with the blob video card drivers I\u0026rsquo;m using on the desktop.\nOn the whole, I can\u0026rsquo;t say I\u0026rsquo;ve toyed with the updates to gnome terribly much so I don\u0026rsquo;t know what to say, but I suspect that they are in fact newer, better, and worthwhile if you\u0026rsquo;re using intrepid and or interested in trying out ubuntu. It\u0026rsquo;s really a great OS, and it does a great job--in my experience--of just working with minimal fussing.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;d choose an Ubuntu distribution again knowing what I know today. At the same time, I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;d know as much as I do about Linuxes today without it, and given that this still works, I\u0026rsquo;m not switching.\nMy jaunty upgrade, however, inspired a few changes to my setup, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite happy with those improvements. They are:\nI switched to using rxvt-unicode as a terminal emulator (I had been using gnome-terminal). I really like this, because the terminal is low resource (and can run demonized, so you can have a lot of windows open). It\u0026rsquo;s hard as hell to setup (in my experience,) but you can learn from my .Xdefaults file if you\u0026rsquo;re interested. I started (finally) using gnome-color-chooser and gtk-chtheme (debian package names) to remove gnome-settings-daemon from my list of background programs, while still having windows that don\u0026rsquo;t look like 1992. I stopped using vimperator in firefox, opting instead for firemacs (to control keybindings) and LoL for keyboard navigation (hit-a-hint links). Having access to the Awesome bar is a good thing indeed. Still on the list of things to update?\nI need to upgrade to the latest awesome version, as I\u0026rsquo;m behind. I need to actually ditch gdm, which irritates me still. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/jaunty-upgrade/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.04 \u0026ldquo;Jaunty Jackalope,\u0026rdquo; and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post some thoughts on the matter.\nOn my desktop the upgrade (eg. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade) was a bit touch and go, but I managed to save things (logging in running the old kernel into a root shell to fix the upgrade which mysteriously held back some packages it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have) and here I am. The laptop was easier to upgrade, and I suspect this has something to do with the blob video card drivers I\u0026rsquo;m using on the desktop.\nOn the whole, I can\u0026rsquo;t say I\u0026rsquo;ve toyed with the updates to gnome terribly much so I don\u0026rsquo;t know what to say, but I suspect that they are in fact newer, better, and worthwhile if you\u0026rsquo;re using intrepid and or interested in trying out ubuntu. It\u0026rsquo;s really a great OS, and it does a great job--in my experience--of just working with minimal fussing.","title":"jaunty upgrade"},{"content":"As those of you who microblog may have noticed (or were there) I attended and went to a cool little bar camp last weekend. It was a small affair in Central Illinois (I also visited friends, which was amazing.) but there were some cool freelancers, and some folks from NCSA, and I think we all learned something from the encounter. Good times.\nSince I got back, however, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a serious case of the stupids. I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to make an excuse for my lack of productivity. I sat down, I did things that were on my todo-list, I made progress, but I feel like my brain rotted out for a little while there. It\u0026rsquo;s a strange feeling. In any case, I spent some time on Wednesday afternoon pulling together notes, thinking about things, and writing some stuff. Anyway, the brain seems to have un-rotted. Here\u0026rsquo;s a brief list of the things that are on my list of things to write about for you soon.\nOracle\u0026rsquo;s Purchase of Sun Microsystems\nCo-op business models, and Open Source\nThis marks a revival of some of my thinking and writing about economic issues. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about (and the Sun/Oracle deal brought this to the surface) about how competition works (or is irrelevant) in cooperative business, what role open source and free software plays in technological development\nJekyll.\nI sort of assumed that after I made the switch to this new content management system that all the people who were interested in it already knew about it. Not so apparently. I need to talk more about this.\nI upgraded to Jaunty.\n\u0026hellip;and changed a few things in my system configuration that make it a bunch more lightweight. Still on ubuntu.\nI also need to do some more hacking about on things.\nI should cover other topics that I\u0026rsquo;ve touched on in the past that I\u0026rsquo;ve continued to think about, but not continued to write about. Things like git, Awesome, org-mode, my knitting.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/post-bar-camp/","summary":"As those of you who microblog may have noticed (or were there) I attended and went to a cool little bar camp last weekend. It was a small affair in Central Illinois (I also visited friends, which was amazing.) but there were some cool freelancers, and some folks from NCSA, and I think we all learned something from the encounter. Good times.\nSince I got back, however, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a serious case of the stupids. I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to make an excuse for my lack of productivity. I sat down, I did things that were on my todo-list, I made progress, but I feel like my brain rotted out for a little while there. It\u0026rsquo;s a strange feeling. In any case, I spent some time on Wednesday afternoon pulling together notes, thinking about things, and writing some stuff. Anyway, the brain seems to have un-rotted. Here\u0026rsquo;s a brief list of the things that are on my list of things to write about for you soon.","title":"Post Bar Camp Dirrections"},{"content":"At the time of writing, I\u0026rsquo;ve been going through a rough spot in my (day-to-day) travels and have had some trouble focusing on writing things. I suspect it will pass, but as I\u0026rsquo;ve been going through my todo list and my brain for things to write about, in the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve noted something of a pattern in the way that I lead in my blog posts.\nEven though I read something a few years ago that said, basically, the way to be successful at blogging is to write your posts like newspaper articles: strong lead, details to follow, everything but elaboration in the first paragraph. The thought is that this style of writing is the most effective way to reach people and hook them into what you\u0026rsquo;re saying. Expecting reader efficiency. It\u0026rsquo;s a good idea.\nI\u0026rsquo;m remarkably bad at this. I blog like I talk, I fear, and so my posts are often bottom heavy and meander around to the point. I know my flaws.\nIn any case, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve uncovered a (small) list tropes for the way that I begin posts:\nI mention that something has been on my todo list and then write about something that\u0026rsquo;s tangentially related. I tell some sort of semi-funny, self deprecating introductory story, and get to the point at the beginning of the second paragraph. I talk about previous posts that serve as background to the post that I\u0026rsquo;m writing now. May or may not include links. Some sort of abrupt but not all together straight forward beginning, eg. \u0026ldquo;So I was thinking that\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Did I miss any?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/graspin-for-straws/","summary":"At the time of writing, I\u0026rsquo;ve been going through a rough spot in my (day-to-day) travels and have had some trouble focusing on writing things. I suspect it will pass, but as I\u0026rsquo;ve been going through my todo list and my brain for things to write about, in the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve noted something of a pattern in the way that I lead in my blog posts.\nEven though I read something a few years ago that said, basically, the way to be successful at blogging is to write your posts like newspaper articles: strong lead, details to follow, everything but elaboration in the first paragraph. The thought is that this style of writing is the most effective way to reach people and hook them into what you\u0026rsquo;re saying. Expecting reader efficiency. It\u0026rsquo;s a good idea.\nI\u0026rsquo;m remarkably bad at this. I blog like I talk, I fear, and so my posts are often bottom heavy and meander around to the point.","title":"Grasping For Straws"},{"content":"Happy May Day Folks!\nChances are when you\u0026rsquo;re reading this I\u0026rsquo;ve already been to dance the sun up this year (so if the sun\u0026rsquo;s up, you\u0026rsquo;re welcome).\nIn honor of this, I present to you a Morris Dance Video that I quite enjoy.\nNotice a few things:\nMixed set. Looks great. All you nay sayers who think \u0026ldquo;Morris should be danced in single-sex teams?\u0026rdquo; Wrong. Morris need not be done to English tunes. There is latitude here for some creativity, even in the Cotswold tradition. Although in the midwest, we are prone to judging the tradition of Bleddington as being particularly challenging and exuberant given the awesomeness of the Ramsey\u0026rsquo;s Braggarts team. While it\u0026rsquo;s not a sedate tradition like, say Fieldtown, there aren\u0026rsquo;t really sedate Morris Dance traditions, Bleddington can be enjoyed less exuberantly. And of course, the first half of what remains my favorite morris dance ever, done last year by a Toronto team, Queen\u0026rsquo;s Delight:\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/happy-may-day/","summary":"Happy May Day Folks!\nChances are when you\u0026rsquo;re reading this I\u0026rsquo;ve already been to dance the sun up this year (so if the sun\u0026rsquo;s up, you\u0026rsquo;re welcome).\nIn honor of this, I present to you a Morris Dance Video that I quite enjoy.\nNotice a few things:\nMixed set. Looks great. All you nay sayers who think \u0026ldquo;Morris should be danced in single-sex teams?\u0026rdquo; Wrong. Morris need not be done to English tunes. There is latitude here for some creativity, even in the Cotswold tradition. Although in the midwest, we are prone to judging the tradition of Bleddington as being particularly challenging and exuberant given the awesomeness of the Ramsey\u0026rsquo;s Braggarts team. While it\u0026rsquo;s not a sedate tradition like, say Fieldtown, there aren\u0026rsquo;t really sedate Morris Dance traditions, Bleddington can be enjoyed less exuberantly. And of course, the first half of what remains my favorite morris dance ever, done last year by a Toronto team, Queen\u0026rsquo;s Delight:","title":"happy mayday"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading this is stevenf.com recently, and I have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s among my favorite current blogs (by people I don\u0026rsquo;t know). Geeky, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t revolve around code snippets, simple, and minimal but in all of the right ways. And a bunch of fun. Anyway he posted an article a while ago that got me thinking called, \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s my xanadu,\u0026rdquo; go ahead read it and then come back.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a great idea isn\u0026rsquo;t it? I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking a lot about data management and the way we represent, store, access, and use knowledge on the computer, so stuff like this gets me more excited than it really should, all things being equal. My good friend Joseph Spiros is even working on a program would implement something very much like Xanadu and the system that sevenf described.\nFirst order of business should probably be to explain what Project Xanadu is for those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t know.\nXanadu was the first \u0026ldquo;hypertext system\u0026rdquo; designed that recognized that text in digital formats was a different experience and proposition than analog text. Proposed by Theodor Holm Nelson in the 1970s (with floundering development in the 1980s), Xanadu to be something amazing. It had features that contemporary hypertext systems sill lack. I think everyone has their own list of \u0026ldquo;things from xanadu that I want now,\u0026rdquo; but for me the big sells were:\nLinks went both ways: If you clicked on a link, you could reverse directions and see what documents and pages had links to the current page. This means that links couldn\u0026rsquo;t break, or point to the wrong page, among other things\nDynamic transclusions. Beyond simply being able to quote text statically, Xanadu would have been able to include a piece of text from another page that dynamically represent the most current revision of the included page. For example, I include paragraph 13 on page A (A.13) somewhere on page B; later you change A.13 to fix a typo, and the change is reflected in page B. I think links could also reference specific versions of a page/paragraph (but then users could from page B, access new and older dimensions of A.13).\nMicropayments. The system would have had (built in) a system for compensating \u0026ldquo;content creators/originators\u0026rdquo; via a system to collect very small amounts of money from lots of people.\nNeedless to say, it didn\u0026rsquo;t work out. It turns out that these features are really hard to implement in an efficient way--or at least they were in the eighties--because of computing requirements, and the very monolithic nature of the system. Instead we have a hypertext system that:\nIs built around a (real or virtual) system of files, rather than documents.\nHas no unified structural system.\nMust rely on distributed organizational systems (tagging, search engine indexes.)\nIs not version-aware, and it\u0026rsquo;s pages are not self-correcting.\nRelies on out-modded business models.\nTo be fair, much of the conceptual work on the system was done before the Internet was anything like it is today, and indeed many of these features we can more or less hack into the web as we know it now: wiki\u0026rsquo;s have \u0026ldquo;backlinks,\u0026rdquo; and google\u0026rsquo;s link: search is in effect much like Xanadu-Links, using dynamic generation we can (mostly) get transclusions on one site (sort of), and paypal allows for micropayments after a fashion.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s not baked in to the server, like it would have been in Xanadu, this is both the brilliance and the downfall of Xanadu. By \u0026ldquo;baking\u0026rdquo; features into the Xanadu server, hypertext would have been more structured, easier to navigate, easier to collaborate, share and concatenate different texts, and within a structure easier to write.\nAnd yet, in a lot of cases, I (and clearly others) think that Xanadu is worth considering, adopting: indeed, I think we could probably do some fairly solid predictions of the future of hypertext and content on the internet let alone information management in general, based on what was in Xanadu.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about all I have, but for those of you who are familiar with Xanadu I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you \u0026ldquo;miss most\u0026rdquo; about Xanadu, if you\u0026rsquo;re game.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lamenting-xanadu/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading this is stevenf.com recently, and I have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s among my favorite current blogs (by people I don\u0026rsquo;t know). Geeky, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t revolve around code snippets, simple, and minimal but in all of the right ways. And a bunch of fun. Anyway he posted an article a while ago that got me thinking called, \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s my xanadu,\u0026rdquo; go ahead read it and then come back.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a great idea isn\u0026rsquo;t it? I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking a lot about data management and the way we represent, store, access, and use knowledge on the computer, so stuff like this gets me more excited than it really should, all things being equal. My good friend Joseph Spiros is even working on a program would implement something very much like Xanadu and the system that sevenf described.\nFirst order of business should probably be to explain what Project Xanadu is for those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t know.","title":"Lamenting Project Xanadu"},{"content":"Overheard at a Sunday dinner with the family:\n`momtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/momtron\u0026gt;`_: Could you get the Quark [for my potato].\ntycho looks quizzical.\n`momtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/momtron\u0026gt;`_: In the fridge.\n`dadtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/dadtron\u0026gt;`_: It\u0026rsquo;s a yogurt cheese.\ntycho: right. I was about to say\u0026hellip; They\u0026rsquo;re awfully small, and besides, they\u0026rsquo;re all over the place.\n`dadtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/dadtron\u0026gt;`_: Maybe.\n`momtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/momtron\u0026gt;`_ *sighs*\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pass-the-quark/","summary":"Overheard at a Sunday dinner with the family:\n`momtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/momtron\u0026gt;`_: Could you get the Quark [for my potato].\ntycho looks quizzical.\n`momtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/momtron\u0026gt;`_: In the fridge.\n`dadtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/dadtron\u0026gt;`_: It\u0026rsquo;s a yogurt cheese.\ntycho: right. I was about to say\u0026hellip; They\u0026rsquo;re awfully small, and besides, they\u0026rsquo;re all over the place.\n`dadtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/dadtron\u0026gt;`_: Maybe.\n`momtron \u0026lt;http://www.twitter.com/momtron\u0026gt;`_ *sighs*","title":"pass the quark"},{"content":"As I was reviewing the note I posted on my reading progress, realized that there was yet another piece of my effort to read more/better that I failed to cover there, but it\u0026rsquo;s substantive enough to merit it\u0026rsquo;s own post. The issue? Trust.\nI was having a conversation with H. the other day, about reading and how we often find texts difficult to read when it seems like other people have a much easier time reading. Which is kind of funny because we both derive a large part of our self-identity (if not income) from our writing and we both read a lot.\nOne thing I suggested in the course of that conversation which I had theretofore not properly articulate was that I found writing difficult because I\u0026rsquo;ve read a lot of difficult stuff around the edges of philosophy and theory that are pretty complex where every word is (seemingly) meaningful. In the process of learning how to read this I\u0026rsquo;ve learned to not trust myself to understand the words and sentences, to be wary of authorial intentions, and to be afraid of missing important details.\nWhich is, as you might imagine, not that easy. And it requires slow reflexive reading. So it sort of feels like you\u0026rsquo;re not reading something as much as you are watching yourself read something.\nSo my new goal, is not to read faster, I guess, but rather to read less reflexively. To trust that texts have some sort of intentional order that I can understand, and then trust myself to be able to grasp the gestalt of a text (and to read it a second time if I need to,) without supervision or self-monitoring.\nAt least some of the time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reading-trust/","summary":"As I was reviewing the note I posted on my reading progress, realized that there was yet another piece of my effort to read more/better that I failed to cover there, but it\u0026rsquo;s substantive enough to merit it\u0026rsquo;s own post. The issue? Trust.\nI was having a conversation with H. the other day, about reading and how we often find texts difficult to read when it seems like other people have a much easier time reading. Which is kind of funny because we both derive a large part of our self-identity (if not income) from our writing and we both read a lot.\nOne thing I suggested in the course of that conversation which I had theretofore not properly articulate was that I found writing difficult because I\u0026rsquo;ve read a lot of difficult stuff around the edges of philosophy and theory that are pretty complex where every word is (seemingly) meaningful.","title":"reading trust"},{"content":"Sorry for the puny title. I was thinking about the value of writing, and of \u0026ldquo;literature,\u0026rdquo; in our world. Lets call it another post in my sporadic ongoing series of amateur theoretical economics posts. Or something.\nThe overriding theme of this series has centered on thinking about ways to build business models in a way that represents an authentic (and sustainable) concept of the generation of wealth. Basically, to recognize that wealth is created through the exchange of goods and services which themselves have physical costs, rather than through the exchange of money. Business models which are primarily profitable because they\u0026rsquo;re designed to cause money to pass through someones hands (who can charge interest on it,) seem flawed from beginning to end. Business models that seem to increase wealth without creating something or doing something in the world, seem fraught with problems.\nSo then, writing.\nWriting is, I thing (inspite/because of my obvious bias) something valuable, and something that has worth, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think the source of its worth is particularly clear. A lot of literary types are convinced of writing\u0026rsquo;s power to effect change in the world. Aside from rhetoric (essays, etc.), fiction is a powerful vehicle for cultural critique, and for stimulating thought and wonder in any of a number of areas. Writing provides groups of people with shared experience (\u0026ldquo;Did you read that book? What did you think?\u0026rdquo;) and which is certainly socially productive.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s not business, or at least that doesn\u0026rsquo;t suggest some sort of sustainable business model. Long term social value doesn\u0026rsquo;t translate into a publishing industry that can sustainably fund the efforts/lives of writers. In a larger frame of reference, we should be able to fund and support the lives and efforts of artists without much trouble. In a sustainable way.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about trying to tie some sort of notion of sustainability into this evolving economic theory. In one respect economies which value worth, are necessarily sustainable. On the other hand, I totally recognize the logical inconsistencies with saying \u0026ldquo;art has abstract worth, so we should value it; investment banking has abstract worth, so we should abandon it.\u0026rdquo;\nAlso in this nexus of ideas, I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with another concept (in a story, of course) regarding how much (and what kind) of work is required to keep a society fed/clothed/healthy decreases with regards to effort and time. Technology is a powerful thing, and it means, fewer people have to farm (per acre) to grow enough food to feed everyone, better/more efficient refrigeration means less food gets wasted. Better shipping technology means we can centralize tasks. All this filters into \u0026ldquo;less energy spent on survival\u0026rdquo; and thus more energy spent on more\u0026hellip; abstract\u0026hellip; endeavors. Supporting writers, hell supporting everyone, is an increasingly logistical problem.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this translates, very well, into some understanding of busiess models for folks who do work in more \u0026ldquo;abstract\u0026rdquo; markets. I do know, (and have talked at some length here) several things about the business model for writers today: It turns out that bloggers are most successful (it seems) when their \u0026ldquo;blog\u0026rdquo; functions as advertising for \u0026ldquo;actual\u0026rdquo; work in some other arenas. That\u0026rsquo;s not a bad thing, and really I think \u0026ldquo;real writers\u0026rdquo; have a similar gig. From everything I can gather, \u0026ldquo;Authors\u0026rdquo; make money from speaking engagements, book signings, academic contracts, and the like. Just as a blog serves to create a market; a book contract serves to create authority. The business model works for a certain class of writing people, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know how generalizable or future looking this might be.\nAnd maybe that\u0026rsquo;s part of the worth of fiction, of writing in general, and of my work in general: if we have any chance to explore these sorts of ideas, theories, and potentials, it\u0026rsquo;s going to be with the help of researchers who write about their findings, essayists who synthesize information in novel ways, and the fiction/literary writers who explore the implications and possibilities.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-value-of-writing/","summary":"Sorry for the puny title. I was thinking about the value of writing, and of \u0026ldquo;literature,\u0026rdquo; in our world. Lets call it another post in my sporadic ongoing series of amateur theoretical economics posts. Or something.\nThe overriding theme of this series has centered on thinking about ways to build business models in a way that represents an authentic (and sustainable) concept of the generation of wealth. Basically, to recognize that wealth is created through the exchange of goods and services which themselves have physical costs, rather than through the exchange of money. Business models which are primarily profitable because they\u0026rsquo;re designed to cause money to pass through someones hands (who can charge interest on it,) seem flawed from beginning to end. Business models that seem to increase wealth without creating something or doing something in the world, seem fraught with problems.\nSo then, writing.\nWriting is, I thing (inspite/because of my obvious bias) something valuable, and something that has worth, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think the source of its worth is particularly clear.","title":"Words Worth"},{"content":"If you ask a science fiction writer about the future, about what they think is going to be the next big cultural or technological breakthrough they all say something like, \u0026ldquo;science fiction is about the present, dontchaknow the future just makes it easier to talk about the present without getting in trouble.\u0026rdquo;\nWhile this is true, it always sounds (to me) like an attempt to force the \u0026ldquo;mainstream\u0026rdquo; to take science fiction more seriously. It\u0026rsquo;s harder to be dismissive of people who define their work in terms to which you\u0026rsquo;re sympathetic.\nI\u0026rsquo;m of the opinion that when disciplines and genres get really defensive and insistent in making arguments for their own relevancy, it usually reflects some significant doubt.\nScience fiction reflects the present, comments on the present, this is quite true (and key to the genre), but it\u0026rsquo;s also about the future. And that\u0026rsquo;s ok. Thinking about the future, about possibilities, more than the opportunity for critique is (part) of what makes this genre so powerful and culturally useful. To deny this, is to draw attention away from imaginations of the future sacrifice distracts what probably makes the genre so important.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/futuristic-science-fiction/","summary":"If you ask a science fiction writer about the future, about what they think is going to be the next big cultural or technological breakthrough they all say something like, \u0026ldquo;science fiction is about the present, dontchaknow the future just makes it easier to talk about the present without getting in trouble.\u0026rdquo;\nWhile this is true, it always sounds (to me) like an attempt to force the \u0026ldquo;mainstream\u0026rdquo; to take science fiction more seriously. It\u0026rsquo;s harder to be dismissive of people who define their work in terms to which you\u0026rsquo;re sympathetic.\nI\u0026rsquo;m of the opinion that when disciplines and genres get really defensive and insistent in making arguments for their own relevancy, it usually reflects some significant doubt.\nScience fiction reflects the present, comments on the present, this is quite true (and key to the genre), but it\u0026rsquo;s also about the future. And that\u0026rsquo;s ok. Thinking about the future, about possibilities, more than the opportunity for critique is (part) of what makes this genre so powerful and culturally useful.","title":"Futuristic Science Fiction"},{"content":"I finished reading Jonathan Strahan\u0026rsquo;s The Starry Rift Anthology the other day. This was the first anthology that I read from cover to cover (I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get more into short stories). I\u0026rsquo;ve read other anthologies in bits and pieces, and the odd short here and there, but with this book, I thought, that I needed to add a bit of breadth, and I respect Strahan\u0026rsquo;s work a lot, so I gave it a go. And I quite enjoyed it.\nI think that I\u0026rsquo;ll read more anthologies in this fashion in the future. The momentum and immersion of reading a novel is something that I enjoy a lot, and have had a hard time replicating when I\u0026rsquo;m reading short stories, but I figure this can be learned. I feel like I learned a bunch from the stories, both about the discourse and craft of short story writing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also picked up Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. While I guess I read Red Mars years ago for school, I never really got into it. Or so I thought. As I\u0026rsquo;ve read these books again, I\u0026rsquo;m surprised and fascinated to learn how much they\u0026rsquo;ve influenced my writing and the way I think about science fiction world building and dealing with future possibilities.\nAnd the books are really well done. In the last few days, I\u0026rsquo;ve read about a third of the last book (which is big in comparison to the other two,) and I\u0026rsquo;ll likely have read even more by the time I get around to posting this. After that, on to more Delany or another anthology.\nMy goal, I guess, insofar as I have one, is to get to a point where I can read a book a week, give or take. I\u0026rsquo;m not a particularly fast reader by default but I think as I read less than I\u0026rsquo;d like (perhaps) I\u0026rsquo;ve slowed down. Gotta change that.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reading-progress/","summary":"I finished reading Jonathan Strahan\u0026rsquo;s The Starry Rift Anthology the other day. This was the first anthology that I read from cover to cover (I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get more into short stories). I\u0026rsquo;ve read other anthologies in bits and pieces, and the odd short here and there, but with this book, I thought, that I needed to add a bit of breadth, and I respect Strahan\u0026rsquo;s work a lot, so I gave it a go. And I quite enjoyed it.\nI think that I\u0026rsquo;ll read more anthologies in this fashion in the future. The momentum and immersion of reading a novel is something that I enjoy a lot, and have had a hard time replicating when I\u0026rsquo;m reading short stories, but I figure this can be learned. I feel like I learned a bunch from the stories, both about the discourse and craft of short story writing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also picked up Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.","title":"reading progress"},{"content":"I wrote a series of articles nearly two years ago to rethink the GTD system, which I think is worth revisiting again. Not the essays, which were from when I called the website \u0026ldquo;TealArt\u0026rdquo; (don\u0026rsquo;t ask) and were before I really discovered free software and open source in a big way; but rather, I think two years out from my original article and even further out from the heart of the GTD fad, I think that it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to explore GTD again.\nFor those of you playing along at home, GTD (Getting Things Done) is really a \u0026ldquo;personal productive methodology\u0026rdquo; designed by David Allen that swept the geek community a few years ago. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff, and while it\u0026rsquo;s certianly not a one-size-fits-all miricle cure for umproductive and overwhelmed folk; it promotes (to my mind) a number of goals that I think are quite admirable:\nHave a single system, that integrates across all aspects of your life. One place where systems can fail is if you\u0026rsquo;re using different \u0026ldquo;databases\u0026rdquo; (in the non-technical sense) to store information and tasks, and you have a piece of information that might fit in either system: when you go to look for it later (or need to be notified by it later) the chance of you missing the task because it\u0026rsquo;s on the wrong list is much higher if you have more than one place where lists might be. Think about tasks and projects being broken into \u0026ldquo;actionable items,\u0026rdquo; and have actions be the unit of currency in your system. As you assimilate information be sure to record anything that needs doing and keep it in your system Attach two pieces of metadata to your action: project (what larger goal does the action help you acomplish; you\u0026rsquo;ll likely have a list of these projects), and \u0026ldquo;contexts\u0026rdquo; (where do you have to be in order to do the action, things like \u0026ldquo;phone\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;office\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;erands\u0026rdquo;) are helpful for focusing and making it easier to move your projects forward. Do regular reviews of the information on your todolists, and spend (an hour?) once a week making sure you\u0026rsquo;re not foregetting things and that you\u0026rsquo;ve checked off all the actions that you\u0026rsquo;ve actually done and so forth. There are other details, precise methods which GTD people focus on, talk about, and provide in their software applications. Frankly I\u0026rsquo;ve not read the book and I\u0026rsquo;m by no means an expert on the subject. I continue to have objections to the system: it assumes large tasks and quickly and easily be broken down into smaller tasks (which isn\u0026rsquo;t always true), and that projects follow linear and predicatable sequences, which I find to be almost universally false. While the reviews help counteract these sorts of assumptions about projects, I have always tended to find GTD a poor solution to the productivity problem:1 both for myself and in my observations of how other people work.\nAt the same time, I think the notion of a single system that comes to the mainstream via GTD and of weekly/regular reviews, another artifact of GTD, are both really helpful and powerful concepts for organizing ourselves. The other aforementioned \u0026ldquo;features\u0026rdquo; are helpful for many, but I feel that very often organinzing the \u0026ldquo;GTD list,\u0026rdquo; and our lives to fit ino a GTD list is often too much of a burden and gets in the way of doing things.\nI\u0026rsquo;m interesting in finding out how people these days are talking and thinking about GTD these days. I think the fad has died down, and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in seeing what we\u0026rsquo;ve as a geeky community have learned from the experience.\nInterestingly, I\u0026rsquo;m probably doing something much closer to what GTD recomended these days than I ever have before. org-mode is (among many other things) a capiable GTD tool. I think it\u0026rsquo;s successful not simply because it supports GTD, and the task-management features seem to have grown out of an emacs/writing writing platform rather than a calendar platform. The end result is that I\u0026rsquo;ve found the GTD way to be quite effective, though its largely unintentional.\nI\u0026rsquo;m interested in hearing where your own systems are, and how you feel about GTD these days:\nDo you use GTD or GTD based methodologies for your personal organization? If you only use some which, and why? If you don\u0026rsquo;t use GTD, what system if any do you use? If you once used GTD but stopped, or have considered using GTD and then didn\u0026rsquo;t, I\u0026rsquo;m particularly interested to learn why you came to these conclusions? What current factors influence the way that you organize your work? I hope that covers everyone. I\u0026rsquo;m particularly interested by how creative folks work, but i think in the right light that covers most of us. I look forward to hearing from you?\nCheers, sam\nNot the least of which is the way GTD (et al) classify the problem of work acomplishment to be a \u0026ldquo;productivity problem\u0026rdquo; rather than an issue of \u0026ldquo;effectiveness\u0026rdquo;.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/re-re-thinking-gtd/","summary":"I wrote a series of articles nearly two years ago to rethink the GTD system, which I think is worth revisiting again. Not the essays, which were from when I called the website \u0026ldquo;TealArt\u0026rdquo; (don\u0026rsquo;t ask) and were before I really discovered free software and open source in a big way; but rather, I think two years out from my original article and even further out from the heart of the GTD fad, I think that it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to explore GTD again.\nFor those of you playing along at home, GTD (Getting Things Done) is really a \u0026ldquo;personal productive methodology\u0026rdquo; designed by David Allen that swept the geek community a few years ago. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff, and while it\u0026rsquo;s certianly not a one-size-fits-all miricle cure for umproductive and overwhelmed folk; it promotes (to my mind) a number of goals that I think are quite admirable:\nHave a single system, that integrates across all aspects of your life.","title":"Re-Rethinking GTD"},{"content":"New feature, I guess. I got a knitting question on ravelry, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to answer it here. I\u0026rsquo;ll answer your knitting question as well if you send them to me on ravelry, or by email at garen@tychoish.com.\nI have been looking around on Raverly for a while now trying to find an alternative to the Jaimeson Shetland wool. I am going to be making a Fair Isle EZ cardigan but cant tolerate 100% wool. Do you happen to know the name(s) of other yarn that may be a good alternative?\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to make a few of comments in response. First. There\u0026rsquo;s something special about Shetland wool. It\u0026rsquo;s not, soft, but there\u0026rsquo;s something about the wool that makes it much more tolerable, and I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that it has magical properties. Something about the crimp of the wool, and the way it\u0026rsquo;s spun (woolen, so that it\u0026rsquo;s airy.) I encourage everyone to knit something with real Shetland (Jamisons, Harrisville, Etc.) because it\u0026rsquo;s amazing, and you might find that you can stand it.\nThe second \u0026ldquo;try wool solutions anyway,\u0026rdquo; answer is to experiment with some solutions that might make the wool more bearable. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit sensitive to wool, but I think I cope with it fairly well, and there are things you can do to make a sweater \u0026ldquo;easier\u0026rdquo; to wear. For instance, having a sweater with an open (plackets) or v-neck keeps the fabric of the sweater off your skin where it is the most sensitive. Secondly you can knit turned hems out of something that you\u0026rsquo;re not sensitive too: alpaca, cotton, silk. This keeps the wool away from any place that matters while letting you still knit with wool. You can go all out here, as hems don\u0026rsquo;t take very much yarn and you generally want to knit a hem out of a very light weight yarn. How to knit a hem is, however another question entirely. I find silk and wool blends to be the way to go in this direction.\nAs for specific yarn suggestions? There aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of options, and if you\u0026rsquo;re price sensitive (as I often am) there are fewer options. One of the key problems, is that Fair Isle-style sweaters really ought to be knit out of light weight yarn (sport weight or less, but not lace weight), and there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of options here. There are a few silk and wool blends, a few wool/tencel blend (mostly sock yarns), and there is of course cotton (which can be used, though that doesn\u0026rsquo;t strike me as fun). I think Beroco makes their ultra alpaca in a sport/light weight that might be fun for your purposes, but alpaca is much warmer than wool which isn\u0026rsquo;t always a good thing.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about all I have. Anyone else? Send more questions my way\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wool-alternatives/","summary":"New feature, I guess. I got a knitting question on ravelry, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to answer it here. I\u0026rsquo;ll answer your knitting question as well if you send them to me on ravelry, or by email at garen@tychoish.com.\nI have been looking around on Raverly for a while now trying to find an alternative to the Jaimeson Shetland wool. I am going to be making a Fair Isle EZ cardigan but cant tolerate 100% wool. Do you happen to know the name(s) of other yarn that may be a good alternative?\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to make a few of comments in response. First. There\u0026rsquo;s something special about Shetland wool. It\u0026rsquo;s not, soft, but there\u0026rsquo;s something about the wool that makes it much more tolerable, and I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that it has magical properties. Something about the crimp of the wool, and the way it\u0026rsquo;s spun (woolen, so that it\u0026rsquo;s airy.) I encourage everyone to knit something with real Shetland (Jamisons, Harrisville, Etc.","title":"question, wool alternatives"},{"content":"Hey folks,\nHaving spent a few hours (heh) going through my blog and converting and modifying it for jekyll, I think it would be appropriate to list some general directions for improvement of the software. Jekyll is pretty good and it\u0026rsquo;s certainly more than usable, but I think there is enough room for improvement, and some additional features that would be rather interesting to explore. Because I think it\u0026rsquo;s really easy for us to all develop our own forks and work in relative isolation, I worry that there\u0026rsquo;s limited space to have a conversation about how to best improve the platform. Here\u0026rsquo;s a starting point:\nPerformance Jekyll, particularly for larger sites can take a considerable time to run.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not familiar enough with ruby to be able to speak to any areas of improvement in terms of code optimization, though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is the best way to approach this issue. Rather, I think it would probably be best to figure out ways of gracefully preventing jekyll from recompiling pages that haven\u0026rsquo;t changed every time there\u0026rsquo;s an update. The possibility that makes the most sense to me at this point would be to include \u0026ldquo;masks\u0026rdquo; in the config file, that jekyll can skip over unless run with an --all option.\nAnother option might be to develop a way to cache/store certain kinds of output files that require a lot of data to crunch (I\u0026rsquo;m thinking mostly of things like archives and of other long post loops.) Maybe developing some sort of internal index?\nI\u0026rsquo;m (preliminarily) looking at using rpeg-markdown as a another markdown option, which should both allow the extended markdown syntax to work (woot!) and run much faster than maruku (and hopefully rdiscount). It seems difficult to install, but would generally be worthwhile.\nIncrease usability While jekyll just works, and the documentation is reasonably effective given the audience; there isn\u0026rsquo;t any automatic workflow for jekyll use. Having a few shell scripts and/or a \u0026ldquo;using jekyll\u0026rdquo; tutorial that explains day to day use would be quite helpful once you get started.\nAs I finalize and put it through it\u0026rsquo;s paces for a few days I\u0026rsquo;ll get more clear about this, but, in general I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of things like: using git hooks to generate the content automatically on commit/etc.\nIt would be valuable to write up how to use rsync as that would likely make more sense in some situations. Same with running tasks in cron.\nTemplate Directory: Most of the jekyll powered blogs that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen have been pretty good about publishing the repositories for their sites. This is a good thing indeed, but given how the templates work, I think it would be good to collect various templates together for ease of access and educational proposes.\nMake Categories More Flexible: While the current blog categories support is great for adding \u0026ldquo;multiple blog\u0026rdquo; support, it makes it difficult to interact/loop posts that aren\u0026rsquo;t in different categories. I\u0026rsquo;d like to have arbitrary site.key.value objects that work like site.categories.CATEGORY. There are ways to program around this, but they aren\u0026rsquo;t pretty. This would make jekyll even more incredibly powerful, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s a much lower priority.\nIf you use jekyll, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you\u0026rsquo;d like to see from the jekyll in the future. A number of these options (rpeg-markdown, usability/workflow documentation, template directory) are things that I can work on (and will, for sure), but a few of them are beyond me and I\u0026rsquo;d love to help folks do some of this work, if possible.\nOnward and Upward!\n(ps. my _posts directory is about 6.2 megs, with a file count that\u0026rsquo;s a bit south of 1,300 files, so if you wanted to assert that I\u0026rsquo;m pushing the system a bit hard, that\u0026rsquo;d be totally reasonable.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/letter-to-the-jekyll-community/","summary":"Hey folks,\nHaving spent a few hours (heh) going through my blog and converting and modifying it for jekyll, I think it would be appropriate to list some general directions for improvement of the software. Jekyll is pretty good and it\u0026rsquo;s certainly more than usable, but I think there is enough room for improvement, and some additional features that would be rather interesting to explore. Because I think it\u0026rsquo;s really easy for us to all develop our own forks and work in relative isolation, I worry that there\u0026rsquo;s limited space to have a conversation about how to best improve the platform. Here\u0026rsquo;s a starting point:\nPerformance Jekyll, particularly for larger sites can take a considerable time to run.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not familiar enough with ruby to be able to speak to any areas of improvement in terms of code optimization, though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is the best way to approach this issue.","title":"An Open Letter to the Jekyll Community"},{"content":"My grandmother reminds me that she got a laptop in the late eighties,1 it\u0026rsquo;s massive by today\u0026rsquo;s standards (particularly in comparison to my 12 inch thinkpad), but it had a great keyobard, and she remembers using it rather effectively. It had WordPerfect 5.1 back in the day but I think it also had StarWriter/StarOffice (which, the astute will recognize as the predecessor code-base for today\u0026rsquo;s Open Office). It probably weight ten or fifteen pounds, and I think she even brought it between work and home several times a week (using a luggage cart); but this was before her days on the Internet, and like all good things this laptop has gone to the land beyond.\nFor my college years, and a few years after I was a laptop-only computer user. It didn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to have a computer that I\u0026rsquo;d have to move so damn frequently, and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t like I was playing games or anything that would require desktop, and I loved having only one machine to keep current and up to date. It seems like laptop-only is a definite trend among the Internet-hipster/start-up monkey crowd. And it\u0026rsquo;s admirable, and for these folks (who are likely, and appropriately, Apple users) a laptop-tax of 400 dollars isn\u0026rsquo;t too much for people who have already bought into the Apple tax.\nAnd then, along came the \u0026ldquo;netbook\u0026rdquo; phenomena, which posits that most of the time we don\u0026rsquo;t really need a desktop-grade laptop when we\u0026rsquo;re on the run. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of merit to this model as well. We don\u0026rsquo;t really need to carry around powerhouses to check our emails in coffee shops, and for folks like me for whom the vast majority of our computing is pretty lightweight, building a system around a primary desktop computer and a sufficient but not supercharged laptop makes a lot of sense.\nSo what kind of laptop system do you use?\nTurns out it was a toshiba t100. Here\u0026rsquo;s another picture/account\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/laptop-usage/","summary":"My grandmother reminds me that she got a laptop in the late eighties,1 it\u0026rsquo;s massive by today\u0026rsquo;s standards (particularly in comparison to my 12 inch thinkpad), but it had a great keyobard, and she remembers using it rather effectively. It had WordPerfect 5.1 back in the day but I think it also had StarWriter/StarOffice (which, the astute will recognize as the predecessor code-base for today\u0026rsquo;s Open Office). It probably weight ten or fifteen pounds, and I think she even brought it between work and home several times a week (using a luggage cart); but this was before her days on the Internet, and like all good things this laptop has gone to the land beyond.\nFor my college years, and a few years after I was a laptop-only computer user. It didn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to have a computer that I\u0026rsquo;d have to move so damn frequently, and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t like I was playing games or anything that would require desktop, and I loved having only one machine to keep current and up to date.","title":"Laptop Usage"},{"content":"I just wanted to check to see if you all use RSS, and if so I have a few questions:\nIs one of the primary ways you interact with content on the web? What software do you use to read feeds? (Google Reader? NetNewsWire? Lifrea? Newsbeuter? FeedGator/FeedDemon? LiveJournal?). What\u0026rsquo;s your biggest pet peeve about the RSS ecosystem? (including feed readers, feed parsers, variations in feed generation/publication, under/over adoption). Thanks.\n(my answers? yes; google reader; non-full text feeds and generally lackluster reading options.)\nI look forward to hearing what you have to say.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/using-rss/","summary":"I just wanted to check to see if you all use RSS, and if so I have a few questions:\nIs one of the primary ways you interact with content on the web? What software do you use to read feeds? (Google Reader? NetNewsWire? Lifrea? Newsbeuter? FeedGator/FeedDemon? LiveJournal?). What\u0026rsquo;s your biggest pet peeve about the RSS ecosystem? (including feed readers, feed parsers, variations in feed generation/publication, under/over adoption). Thanks.\n(my answers? yes; google reader; non-full text feeds and generally lackluster reading options.)\nI look forward to hearing what you have to say.","title":"Do Y'all Use RSS?"},{"content":"People who use free software are almost all \u0026ldquo;open source/software freedom advocates\u0026rdquo; in on sense or another. There\u0026rsquo;s something empowering about the experience of using software that you control, really control, and we want to share this with others. That makes sense, not just on a \u0026ldquo;lets get the family using GNU/Linux\u0026rdquo; level, that we want to increase the user base of free software as much as possible.\nOne of the chief recruiting concerns for communities, seems to be \u0026ldquo;lets make this piece of software more usable.\u0026rdquo; This gets us into a lot of trouble as a community as there are a lot of similar and intersecting issues that get confused in the project of increasing usability. While \u0026ldquo;usable\u0026rdquo; is a subjective thing in the end, there are a lot of factors that make software more or less useable, they include:\ngreater or lesser functional complexity, more or less visual clarity (of control interface and data visualization,) functional and/or visual minimalism, thoroughness of documentation and support materials, and the learning curve. One of the most powerful effects of free and open source software is the way that it encourages users to learn more about the software and systems they use. We say that one of the reasons for software freedom is \u0026ldquo;education,\u0026rdquo; and you might think that this relates to the great potential for the use of GNU/Linux in schools, but I think it really relates to the way free software encourages users to learn more about the software they\u0026rsquo;re running.\nGiven these notions, I must say that writing software that \u0026ldquo;even a non technical user could learn\u0026rdquo; (dumbing down features and interfaces) doesn\u0026rsquo;t strike me as a very productive project, and a poor excuse for providing good documentation and support for a given project.\nBut maybe that\u0026rsquo;s just me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/idiot-users/","summary":"People who use free software are almost all \u0026ldquo;open source/software freedom advocates\u0026rdquo; in on sense or another. There\u0026rsquo;s something empowering about the experience of using software that you control, really control, and we want to share this with others. That makes sense, not just on a \u0026ldquo;lets get the family using GNU/Linux\u0026rdquo; level, that we want to increase the user base of free software as much as possible.\nOne of the chief recruiting concerns for communities, seems to be \u0026ldquo;lets make this piece of software more usable.\u0026rdquo; This gets us into a lot of trouble as a community as there are a lot of similar and intersecting issues that get confused in the project of increasing usability. While \u0026ldquo;usable\u0026rdquo; is a subjective thing in the end, there are a lot of factors that make software more or less useable, they include:\ngreater or lesser functional complexity, more or less visual clarity (of control interface and data visualization,) functional and/or visual minimalism, thoroughness of documentation and support materials, and the learning curve.","title":"Treating Users Like Idiots"},{"content":"A collection of thoughts about git.\nI caught news, somewhat late in the game, about a project called \u0026ldquo;Flashbake\u0026rdquo; which is a tool to make git use-able for non-programmers to take advantage of git without needing to bother too much with thinking about how to use git. (Which is needed because git is incredibly complex). I think this (and tools like and derived from this) is really cool, and a train of thought that I think we\u0026rsquo;d really benefit from enjoying. Here are some thoughts:\nWhat if, in combination with text converter tools, we had a tool that could: Take a text file written in markdown, and convert it to HTML and LaTeX and insert the output along side the source file in the repo. What if the LaTeX or HTML template was customizable What if it could also generate PDFs. What if it could do all this compilation from a GUI or a text-editor plug-in as well as (or in addition to the current cron-like interface). I guess the inspiration for some of these features would be to make git version-control work, totally without the command line interface.\nI suppose (heh) that I should work on hacking some of this together, the flashbake code is on github, of course.\nI have another brief coding project to deal with before I get to deal with this, but I think I think I\u0026rsquo;ll take a stab at integrating some of the automatic conversion stuff, and talk to some people about GUI layers. My branch will be there, if you\u0026rsquo;re ever so inclined.\nSecond thought about git, is about github. The truth is that I don\u0026rsquo;t use it that much: I can host my own git repositories, I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet gotten to a point where I\u0026rsquo;m working on things that I might publish things with git. But, it\u0026rsquo;s not hard to notice the impact that git hub is having on development communities and code. I think there\u0026rsquo;s clearly some research that\u0026rsquo;s needed on the topic, but something is changing as a result of this site. Thoughts, in no particular order:\nThere are, I think, legitimate, concerns about the openness of github itself. Why are we trusting our open source projects to hosting that isn\u0026rsquo;t open? At the same time, the openness of git itself mitigates this slightly, as well as the fact that github\u0026rsquo;s business model is one of hosting-services rather than one of data lock-in. The fact that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a bug-tracker built in means that people with a problem are, I think more likely to look for the bugs in the code and hack on problems them-self rather than simply provide bug reports and feature requests. Not that bug tracking systems are problematic, but I think presenting users with code and the opportunity to easily publish their own branches without needing permission, increases involvement and connectedness to the code. I saw mojombo post a link to a specific revision of the change-log to a (really awesome) ruby-based git library. Really awesome. But the cool thing, I guess, was that the link to the code was similar to the way that people post links to their latest blog posts. This isn\u0026rsquo;t revolutionary, I suppose, but I think that git promotes a different sort of publishing style for code, that I think is pretty cool/interesting/important. I suspect, though I don\u0026rsquo;t have data to verify this, that github promotes people to publish things that would have previously been too trivial to publish. Flashbake, as above, people are posting repositories of their config files, of the odds and ends scripts that they use to make their computing experience easier. These are the kinds of things that I don\u0026rsquo;t think people have (very frequently) stored in version control, and even less frequently published. The fact that both of these things are happening is very cool indeed. That\u0026rsquo;s all. What are you thinking about?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-thinking/","summary":"A collection of thoughts about git.\nI caught news, somewhat late in the game, about a project called \u0026ldquo;Flashbake\u0026rdquo; which is a tool to make git use-able for non-programmers to take advantage of git without needing to bother too much with thinking about how to use git. (Which is needed because git is incredibly complex). I think this (and tools like and derived from this) is really cool, and a train of thought that I think we\u0026rsquo;d really benefit from enjoying. Here are some thoughts:\nWhat if, in combination with text converter tools, we had a tool that could: Take a text file written in markdown, and convert it to HTML and LaTeX and insert the output along side the source file in the repo. What if the LaTeX or HTML template was customizable What if it could also generate PDFs. What if it could do all this compilation from a GUI or a text-editor plug-in as well as (or in addition to the current cron-like interface).","title":"Thinking about Git"},{"content":"When I packed to come live with my grandmother for an extended stay, I didn\u0026rsquo;t give a lot of thought to my knitting. I packed some, the usual ongoing projects and whatever yarn was attached to them, and that was about it. I\u0026rsquo;m at a point in all of my knitting where I\u0026rsquo;ve made serious progress (but haven\u0026rsquo;t completed) on a number (2? 3? big projects). My hope, by not packing too much yarn, was that I would be able to make some serious progress on all of my projects without being tempted by the sweater (which is my wont).\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a lot of lace: it travels well, the yarn goes a long way, and it can be seriously relaxing. And lace is complex enough to keep the brain satisfied, while still being easy to not wear out the braincells.\nBut the projects are big, so I\u0026rsquo;m prone to thinking \u0026ldquo;why the hell am I doing this,\u0026rdquo; perhaps a bit more than I should. I don\u0026rsquo;t wear lace, while I know a few people who like to wear lace, (even among women,) I\u0026rsquo;ve found that a lot of people don\u0026rsquo;t particularly like lace.\nSo the question is: why knit lace? Particularly if you don\u0026rsquo;t like to wear it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-lace/","summary":"When I packed to come live with my grandmother for an extended stay, I didn\u0026rsquo;t give a lot of thought to my knitting. I packed some, the usual ongoing projects and whatever yarn was attached to them, and that was about it. I\u0026rsquo;m at a point in all of my knitting where I\u0026rsquo;ve made serious progress (but haven\u0026rsquo;t completed) on a number (2? 3? big projects). My hope, by not packing too much yarn, was that I would be able to make some serious progress on all of my projects without being tempted by the sweater (which is my wont).\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a lot of lace: it travels well, the yarn goes a long way, and it can be seriously relaxing. And lace is complex enough to keep the brain satisfied, while still being easy to not wear out the braincells.\nBut the projects are big, so I\u0026rsquo;m prone to thinking \u0026ldquo;why the hell am I doing this,\u0026rdquo; perhaps a bit more than I should.","title":"On Knitting Lace"},{"content":"This isn\u0026rsquo;t a fully formed thought yet, but I was wondering what the status of discussion and commenting is on the web these days. Clearly microblogging like Twitter and Identi.ca produces a powerful platform for conversations and I think what\u0026rsquo;s coming with xmpp (innovative interfaces for group chats, etc.) furthers the potential for conversation online. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m wondering what the status of conversations are \u0026ldquo;older\u0026rdquo; media like blog comments\u0026hellip;\nAre people still commenting on blogs? A few of you comment here now and then, and websites like making light have vibrant comments threads (that I don\u0026rsquo;t have the attention span for or time to read), and the big sites (slashdot, digg, etc.) have active comments as well, but a lot of sites (including those with moderate readership) don\u0026rsquo;t get many comments, and my sense is that a significant percentage of comments these days are in the \u0026ldquo;me too\u0026rdquo; vein, rather than productive themselves (because threads are difficult to read). Here are a few questions:\nDo features (threading? email notification? persistent identities?) make commenting \u0026ldquo;work better\u0026rdquo; or flow more productively? Are conversations about content moving away from comments into more centralized media like twitter, email lists, and discussion forums? Are we more likely to respond to a blog post we read in our own blog, rather than in a comments thread? Has the blogging community reached a saturation point? Dose a vibrant community of comment-posers indicate a marker of blog-success, these days? Did it ever? What might replace comments? I\u0026rsquo;m pretty convinced that comments are dying, but I\u0026rsquo;d love to get your feedback. I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly mournful about this but I\u0026rsquo;m very interested in thinking about how we (as a community will replace this niche.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/commenting/","summary":"This isn\u0026rsquo;t a fully formed thought yet, but I was wondering what the status of discussion and commenting is on the web these days. Clearly microblogging like Twitter and Identi.ca produces a powerful platform for conversations and I think what\u0026rsquo;s coming with xmpp (innovative interfaces for group chats, etc.) furthers the potential for conversation online. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m wondering what the status of conversations are \u0026ldquo;older\u0026rdquo; media like blog comments\u0026hellip;\nAre people still commenting on blogs? A few of you comment here now and then, and websites like making light have vibrant comments threads (that I don\u0026rsquo;t have the attention span for or time to read), and the big sites (slashdot, digg, etc.) have active comments as well, but a lot of sites (including those with moderate readership) don\u0026rsquo;t get many comments, and my sense is that a significant percentage of comments these days are in the \u0026ldquo;me too\u0026rdquo; vein, rather than productive themselves (because threads are difficult to read).","title":"The State of the Discourse"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m working on laying the seed content for a new wiki that I hope to launch in a few weeks. I want the wiki to be a free text/open source, and I have been giving some thought to the best way to accomplish this. This is, as it turns out, is pretty hard to accomplish: open source software licences are designed (not surprisingly) for software, and while Creative Commons Licences are great, I don\u0026rsquo;t think they support community authorship in a way that matches with my ideals/gaols.\nThe brilliance of the GPL (to my mind) is the way that it equalizes the relationship between all contributors (big and small) and between the \u0026ldquo;authors\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;users.\u0026rdquo; While in a lot of open source projects these groups/interests overlap, they don\u0026rsquo;t sometimes and those cases where those interests might obstruct the freedom of the work, the GPL equalizes it.\nThere are two mechanisms in the GPL (to my mind) that make this possible: first, the requirement that source code be made available (and reproducible) with any distribution means that you don\u0026rsquo;t get anything extra because you were/are the original author of the code. The second, is the \u0026ldquo;viral\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;share alike\u0026rdquo; provisions where you can trust that anything released under the GPL will stay under the GPL.\nWhile these mechanisms increase freedom and equity in situations where there are a select group of contributors and one legal author1 the freedoms are most powerful when the boundaries between contributor and author and user are blurred.\nThis is all very basic stuff in the area of software freedom after all. The truth is that, as near as I understand there aren\u0026rsquo;t terms that can be used to get a similar effect with non-code projects (exactly.) There are a couple of copy left licenses, issued by Creative Commons and even the Free Software Foundation, but there are problems with both of these strategies. Here are the issues as I see them:\nThe GNU FDL is designed, primarily for software manuals and documentation in support of free software, and is strategically designed for this kind of text. It, as a result, lacks a certain\u0026hellip; grace and elegance for dealing with other kinds of text, particularly when dealing with derivative and physical reproductions of a work.\nIn contrast, the Creative Commons Licenses2 (CC) don\u0026rsquo;t have a concept of \u0026ldquo;source,\u0026rdquo; so that while they provide the same sorts of rights regarding distribution of work (and thereby equalize some of the rights between distributor/user), they don\u0026rsquo;t facilitate derivative work in the same way that open source licenses do.\nI\u0026rsquo;m mostly worried about the following scenario. Say I release a piece of audio-art in a lossless (high quality; source) format (eg. FLAC/WAV) as well as MP3/OGG file (lower quality; compiled) under a CC license that permits derivative work under a viral/share alike terms. Then you turn around, re-equalize, and mix my audio-art with some other similarly licensed audio, and release it as a derivative work. That\u0026rsquo;s cool. But the derivative work needed be in the higher quality format, because CC doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a concept of source. Not having a concept of source doesn\u0026rsquo;t effect the possibility of derivative works, but it does mean that derivative works are second-class citizens, as it were. CC doesn\u0026rsquo;t equalize this relationship.\nIf I\u0026rsquo;m wrong about this interpretation, I\u0026rsquo;d love to be corrected, for the record.\nFor works where there\u0026rsquo;s a single author, having derivative works as second-class citizens isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, and I can imagine that it would be seen as a feature in some cases. In cases where a text/work is authored by a community this is a major flaw.\nI hear that there\u0026rsquo;s a project to Simplify the GFDL (or provide a way to use the GPL for documents/texts) that might remedy these problems (haven\u0026rsquo;t dug through it yet). In the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;m wondering what folks think on the subject.\nMy inclination is to just use the GPL with the specification that \u0026ldquo;source\u0026rdquo; would be some sort of plain text (ASCII/UTF-8/UTF-16) compatible file. That achieves the goal required, without too much fuss or concocting a new license that would prove incompatible down the road. I think mandating a particular format (markdown/org-mode/xhtml/LaTeX) is a bit too strict, but I\u0026rsquo;d hate to see a document developed in the open, released as a PDF derivative without making (say) LaTeX sources available.\nThough I\u0026rsquo;ll be the first to acknowledge the irony that for non-software works, the \u0026ldquo;source\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;human readable source code\u0026rdquo; but rather \u0026ldquo;machine readable data source.\u0026rdquo;\nThe only real practical concern is that if the FSF releases a 2.0 of the FDL (or a SFDL) that becomes the a standard for free/open source non-software/text projects then going with the GPL might make that a difficult/bothersome transition on that. So the question, seems to be would providing the option to upgrade to the GNU FDL make sense (eg. this work is licensed under the GPL [with an understanding of what the source is] version 3 or (at your choice) a later version [or a later version of the GFDL]).\nAnyway, back to writing.\nCopyleft and the GPL doesn\u0026rsquo;t to be fair, eliminate copyrights, as all code released under the GPL will (theoretically, eventually, should a public domain ever be reinstated in the US) revert to the public domain as described in the constitution. GPL is, in many ways an extension of copyright, albeit one designed to destabilize the copyright system.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThere are many flavors of Creative Commons\u0026rsquo; licenses, which provide various freedoms. The Attribution-Share Alike License is most analogous to the GFDL/GPL.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-words/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m working on laying the seed content for a new wiki that I hope to launch in a few weeks. I want the wiki to be a free text/open source, and I have been giving some thought to the best way to accomplish this. This is, as it turns out, is pretty hard to accomplish: open source software licences are designed (not surprisingly) for software, and while Creative Commons Licences are great, I don\u0026rsquo;t think they support community authorship in a way that matches with my ideals/gaols.\nThe brilliance of the GPL (to my mind) is the way that it equalizes the relationship between all contributors (big and small) and between the \u0026ldquo;authors\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;users.\u0026rdquo; While in a lot of open source projects these groups/interests overlap, they don\u0026rsquo;t sometimes and those cases where those interests might obstruct the freedom of the work, the GPL equalizes it.\nThere are two mechanisms in the GPL (to my mind) that make this possible: first, the requirement that source code be made available (and reproducible) with any distribution means that you don\u0026rsquo;t get anything extra because you were/are the original author of the code.","title":"Open Source Words"},{"content":"Long story, short punch line. I was developing a website the other day, and I realized that I had to do some compatibility testing with other browsers. While I have a webkit-based browser lying around for these purposes I had to turn to BroswerShots to see what the site looked like in certain windows only browsers. this lead me on something of a little mystery hunt.\nI did some checking on my stats and I found that a majority of the visitors to this site are firefox/mozilla (gecko users) and there\u0026rsquo;s a sizable minority that uses Webkit browsers (Safari/Chrome/Etc.). That takes care of about 75% percent of you. The remaining portion uses Internet Explorer (IE).\nSo be it, really, I mean, I\u0026rsquo;d try Chrome, or Firefox if you can, but the truth is that by now IE 8 (and even 7) render pages more or less the way they should, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a big gripe about that (which accounts for 3/4s of all IE useage). There are, however, a quarter of the IE users (so 6% of you,) that are using IE 6. Which actually, can\u0026rsquo;t seem to render any pages correctly, from what I can tell.\nSince I already know what browsers you use the survey then should be:\nWhy do you use the browser you use, particularly if its IE or IE 6 Do you prefer a brwoser that\u0026rsquo;s fast, but light on features (All WebKit browsers henceforth deployed), or a slower but featured filled browser (Firefox?) Are you trying to use your browser less than you currently do (taking work offline,) or more (putting more things into the cloud)? What do you think the \u0026ldquo;next big thing in browsers is?\u0026rdquo; ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/browser-wars/","summary":"Long story, short punch line. I was developing a website the other day, and I realized that I had to do some compatibility testing with other browsers. While I have a webkit-based browser lying around for these purposes I had to turn to BroswerShots to see what the site looked like in certain windows only browsers. this lead me on something of a little mystery hunt.\nI did some checking on my stats and I found that a majority of the visitors to this site are firefox/mozilla (gecko users) and there\u0026rsquo;s a sizable minority that uses Webkit browsers (Safari/Chrome/Etc.). That takes care of about 75% percent of you. The remaining portion uses Internet Explorer (IE).\nSo be it, really, I mean, I\u0026rsquo;d try Chrome, or Firefox if you can, but the truth is that by now IE 8 (and even 7) render pages more or less the way they should, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a big gripe about that (which accounts for 3/4s of all IE useage).","title":"Browser Survey"},{"content":"I wrote a lot yesterday. I write a lot most days to be honest. Though I\u0026rsquo;m not often successful at this, my usual plan of attack is to spend a chunk of time in the morning writing on fiction projects, (after some sort of warm up like a blog post or a few email) before I graduate onto other projects. Often this doesn\u0026rsquo;t work: I have other commitments in the morning, I get sucked into emacs or website hacking, \u0026ldquo;the best laid plans of mice and men,\u0026rdquo; as it were.\nYesterday, something similar happened: I got up and had something to do that took up morning, and I tried to do a little bit of writing, but I fell into another project, where I wrote a lot of content, but none of it was fiction. And then, at about 8pm, I said \u0026ldquo;crap, I need to write fiction.\u0026rdquo;\nSo I did. And I yanked out about 500 words (which is about my current daily fiction writing goal,) and then I was done. And I felt good. One of the reasons I\u0026rsquo;m so intent upon writing fiction despite my utter lack of training, and dubious skill is that in aggregate writing fiction makes me very happy. This example demonstrates--as if we needed more examples--that while it\u0026rsquo;s important to get in the habit of writing, ritualizing the habit is probably counter productive.\nWhen I finished doing school the last time, I thought, \u0026ldquo;yes! no more homework,\u0026rdquo; except that this writing experience (from a procedural point of view) was a lot like homework (\u0026ldquo;ugg time I should do this\u0026rdquo;). Surprisingly this isn\u0026rsquo;t such a bad thing: writing makes me happy, and truth be told I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at doing homework.\nAnyway. Enjoy your day, and write something if you\u0026rsquo;re inclined thusly.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/homework-only-cooler/","summary":"I wrote a lot yesterday. I write a lot most days to be honest. Though I\u0026rsquo;m not often successful at this, my usual plan of attack is to spend a chunk of time in the morning writing on fiction projects, (after some sort of warm up like a blog post or a few email) before I graduate onto other projects. Often this doesn\u0026rsquo;t work: I have other commitments in the morning, I get sucked into emacs or website hacking, \u0026ldquo;the best laid plans of mice and men,\u0026rdquo; as it were.\nYesterday, something similar happened: I got up and had something to do that took up morning, and I tried to do a little bit of writing, but I fell into another project, where I wrote a lot of content, but none of it was fiction. And then, at about 8pm, I said \u0026ldquo;crap, I need to write fiction.\u0026rdquo;\nSo I did.","title":"More on the Writing Habit"},{"content":"I write you from the future! I, as predicted, made the switch over between the wordpress powered version of tychoish.com and the jekyll powered version of my site. I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with this development. Basically it works by taking a repository of posts with all the content from my site and then compiles a website of static pages whenever I trigger an update. Though it hasn\u0026rsquo;t worked flawlessly, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with how this has worked out, and as I clean things up and get to using the system a bit more I\u0026rsquo;ll write up a post regarding jekyll, but I want to get used to it some more.\nThe biggest change is that I\u0026rsquo;m now calling the short form posts, \u0026ldquo;notes\u0026rdquo; and the long form posts, \u0026ldquo;essays\u0026rdquo; (as usual) and I\u0026rsquo;ve changed the landing page a bit. In all I think it\u0026rsquo;s an improvement. I\u0026rsquo;m not done tinkering around here: I hope this system will make it easier to develop and \u0026ldquo;curation\u0026rdquo; lists of related content. If I learned nothing else from this project, it\u0026rsquo;s that I have a lot hanging around in the archives, and the chronological list of content isn\u0026rsquo;t a particularly good presentation of this. So new ways of visualizing the content are in store.\nAlso, if you\u0026rsquo;re inclined, you can get a copy of the repository that powers this site over on github. I\u0026rsquo;ll set up local hosting/cloning of the git repository, in a bit.\nAnyway, Onward and Upward indeed!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fully-jekylled/","summary":"I write you from the future! I, as predicted, made the switch over between the wordpress powered version of tychoish.com and the jekyll powered version of my site. I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with this development. Basically it works by taking a repository of posts with all the content from my site and then compiles a website of static pages whenever I trigger an update. Though it hasn\u0026rsquo;t worked flawlessly, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with how this has worked out, and as I clean things up and get to using the system a bit more I\u0026rsquo;ll write up a post regarding jekyll, but I want to get used to it some more.\nThe biggest change is that I\u0026rsquo;m now calling the short form posts, \u0026ldquo;notes\u0026rdquo; and the long form posts, \u0026ldquo;essays\u0026rdquo; (as usual) and I\u0026rsquo;ve changed the landing page a bit. In all I think it\u0026rsquo;s an improvement. I\u0026rsquo;m not done tinkering around here: I hope this system will make it easier to develop and \u0026ldquo;curation\u0026rdquo; lists of related content.","title":"fully jekylled"},{"content":"I have a confession. I last week (briefly) considered getting a Nokia N810 so that I could sync and use org-mode when I was away from my computer/laptop. The N800/810 is a small tablet that runs a Debian based operating system, which means it could run emacs, and I could write little clickable scripts that could do all of the syncing and awesomeness that I\u0026rsquo;ve grown accustomed to.\nThen I realized how absurd this is, and cast it aside. My laptop is really mobile, and if I needed it to be lighter or more mobile, I could buy a new battery for it. And it has a full sized keyboard.\nThis is a sickness right?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mobile-emacs/","summary":"I have a confession. I last week (briefly) considered getting a Nokia N810 so that I could sync and use org-mode when I was away from my computer/laptop. The N800/810 is a small tablet that runs a Debian based operating system, which means it could run emacs, and I could write little clickable scripts that could do all of the syncing and awesomeness that I\u0026rsquo;ve grown accustomed to.\nThen I realized how absurd this is, and cast it aside. My laptop is really mobile, and if I needed it to be lighter or more mobile, I could buy a new battery for it. And it has a full sized keyboard.\nThis is a sickness right?","title":"Mobile Emacs"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had \u0026ldquo;write post about writing/read sexuality\u0026rdquo; on my todo list for too long and I wanted to make the general note before it got too stale. In a lot of way\u0026rsquo;s this is in response to Nora\u0026rsquo;s post on magic district and I think something else that I can\u0026rsquo;t trace down the reference to.\nBasically I saw a couple of things where non-normative sexualities (more promiscuous, more casual, more queer) were underplayed or criticized fiction because of concerns (real or other wise) that the non-norm sexuality would be distracting or feel \u0026ldquo;Ham handed.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I sort of gawk. Not because I think that this is incorrect. Writing about queer sexualities in fictional contexts is distracting, and something of a big deal, relative to non-queer sexualities in fiction. I also think it\u0026rsquo;s a bit distracting in real life, that the discomfort/distracting experience that many people get isn\u0026rsquo;t the result of ham handed political message insertion into writing, but rather, a fairly reasonable depiction of what it\u0026rsquo;s like to have your embodied experience politicized, to be (nearly constantly) reminded of the cultural dissonance you have.\nSure, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to under-represent queer lives in fiction, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to write queerness inappropriately, or to over-normalize it. But if your readers are distracted, if they\u0026rsquo;re made uncomfortable, you probably did something right.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sex-writing/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had \u0026ldquo;write post about writing/read sexuality\u0026rdquo; on my todo list for too long and I wanted to make the general note before it got too stale. In a lot of way\u0026rsquo;s this is in response to Nora\u0026rsquo;s post on magic district and I think something else that I can\u0026rsquo;t trace down the reference to.\nBasically I saw a couple of things where non-normative sexualities (more promiscuous, more casual, more queer) were underplayed or criticized fiction because of concerns (real or other wise) that the non-norm sexuality would be distracting or feel \u0026ldquo;Ham handed.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I sort of gawk. Not because I think that this is incorrect. Writing about queer sexualities in fictional contexts is distracting, and something of a big deal, relative to non-queer sexualities in fiction. I also think it\u0026rsquo;s a bit distracting in real life, that the discomfort/distracting experience that many people get isn\u0026rsquo;t the result of ham handed political message insertion into writing, but rather, a fairly reasonable depiction of what it\u0026rsquo;s like to have your embodied experience politicized, to be (nearly constantly) reminded of the cultural dissonance you have.","title":"Sex Writing"},{"content":"For the last, call it 8 years, having a website, dynamically generated with most of the content pulled on (nearly) every reload from a database. MySQL or PostgreSQL, or some such. It\u0026rsquo;s a great model, in a lot of ways, because it represents the (near) ultimate separation of content and display, it means that static pages don\u0026rsquo;t have to be generated whenever you generate new content. Dynamic, database driven websites were going to the future, and I think history has proven this argument.\nAt the same time, I think a further analysis is required.\nJust to be super clear the advantages of database driven websites are that:\nPages don\u0026rsquo;t have to be regenerated when content changes. Content is more customizable and can be pulled together in ad-hoc settings. I would argue however, that there are some fundamental weaknesses that this system of deploying websites promotes:\nDatabase driven websites increase the complexity of web-site software by a magnitude or two. I can in my sleep hack together a static website (most people can); working with database requires a much more specialized system that is harder for website owners to maintain. While separating content from display is often an effort to make systems easier to understand and change, in point of fact, databases make website maintenance a specialized task. Database driven websites have a lot of overhead. Because pages need to be regenerated regularly, they require beefy hardware to work correctly. On top of this database systems need to be cached in such a way, that they\u0026rsquo;re not quite as dynamic as they once were. Databases are mostly server-based technologies, which means a lot of the dynamic client-side scripting (EMCAscript/JavaScript and AJAX/AHAH) that are all the rage these days (and what people most often mean when they say \u0026ldquo;dynamic\u0026rdquo;) aren\u0026rsquo;t nearly as dependent on databases as what\u0026rsquo;s going on in that space. Given the very structured nature of databases, websites often need to develop their content structure with near prescience regarding what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen in their site for the next five years. This is complicated, difficult, and often means that the same content-system needs to be redeveloped (often at great cost) far too often. In light of this I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking, increasingly, that the future of websites will likely be powered by a much different kind of website software. Here are some observations about the future of the web:\nStructured data formats, and plain text files are the future. Stored in/with formats like yaml, we can (very easily) have flexible structures can adapt to the changing needs of a website owner. Some very large sites (eg. facebook, wikipedia) will likely always be powered by databases, because in situations where a single website has \u0026gt; 100,000 pieces of content databases begin to make sense. Remarkably, single websites so rarely have that much content. Particularly if engineered correctly. Most content on the web doesn\u0026rsquo;t change very often. We regenerate pages thousands and thousands of times a day that would be unlikely to be update more than a dozen times a day. This is not to say that there aren\u0026rsquo;t several challenges to the prospect of websites powered by static-site generators/compilers. They are:\nSome content will likely always be compiled using some very basic server-side includes, and dynamic content will continue to be generated using java script or something similar. Authentication and web-based security will likely also need to be built into webservers directly (the direction, I think things are going in anyway) and complicated access control (for intranets, say) may still require databases. Web-based interfaces for editing (ubiquitous, in page, \u0026ldquo;edit this\u0026rdquo; links). and commenting systems often need more dynamic functionality than other content. We need to both figure out a way to do commenting/annotation in a static-based system and find a way to do commenting in a more socially productive manner (existing locally hosted commenting systems, are I think fundamentally broken). Concurrent Editing. Wiki engines address this to some degree, and I think we need additional productive ways of addressing this in a truly user friendly manner, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t rely on over powered databases for what is probably an edge case. Thoughts? I\u0026rsquo;m not describing technology that doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist, but I am suggesting that the current \u0026ldquo;way of doing things,\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t the future of how we will \u0026ldquo;do content on the web.\u0026rdquo; The tools are out there, all that\u0026rsquo;s missing is a simple, user friendly, method for pulling all this content together.\nI\u0026rsquo;m really interested in seeing what people are coming up with.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/against-database-powered-websites/","summary":"For the last, call it 8 years, having a website, dynamically generated with most of the content pulled on (nearly) every reload from a database. MySQL or PostgreSQL, or some such. It\u0026rsquo;s a great model, in a lot of ways, because it represents the (near) ultimate separation of content and display, it means that static pages don\u0026rsquo;t have to be generated whenever you generate new content. Dynamic, database driven websites were going to the future, and I think history has proven this argument.\nAt the same time, I think a further analysis is required.\nJust to be super clear the advantages of database driven websites are that:\nPages don\u0026rsquo;t have to be regenerated when content changes. Content is more customizable and can be pulled together in ad-hoc settings. I would argue however, that there are some fundamental weaknesses that this system of deploying websites promotes:\nDatabase driven websites increase the complexity of web-site software by a magnitude or two.","title":"Database Powered Websites"},{"content":"In my post about my fact file I said that I was going to \u0026ldquo;try things out and see how it goes\u0026rdquo; before I posted code to see how things work in the system. Well, I think things are pretty stable (I haven\u0026rsquo;t tweaked much), so I\u0026rsquo;m going to post my remember template, for the system described in that post.\n(setq org-remember-templates '((\u0026quot;data\u0026quot; ?d \u0026quot;* %^{Title} %^g \\n :PROPERTIES:\\n :date: %^t\\n :cit e-key: %^{cite-key}\\n :link: %^{link}\\n :END:\\n\\n %x %?\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/data.org\u0026quot;)))` If you want to tweak further, check out the relevant section of the org manual.\nEnjoy and collect facts with abandon!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fact-file-code/","summary":"In my post about my fact file I said that I was going to \u0026ldquo;try things out and see how it goes\u0026rdquo; before I posted code to see how things work in the system. Well, I think things are pretty stable (I haven\u0026rsquo;t tweaked much), so I\u0026rsquo;m going to post my remember template, for the system described in that post.\n(setq org-remember-templates '((\u0026quot;data\u0026quot; ?d \u0026quot;* %^{Title} %^g \\n :PROPERTIES:\\n :date: %^t\\n :cit e-key: %^{cite-key}\\n :link: %^{link}\\n :END:\\n\\n %x %?\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/data.org\u0026quot;)))` If you want to tweak further, check out the relevant section of the org manual.\nEnjoy and collect facts with abandon!","title":"Fact File Code"},{"content":"When Jaiku gave microbloggers (ie users of services like identi.ca twitter, etc.) the ability to aggregate their content onto Jaiku from blogs, flickr, delicious, and of course twitter as well, I noted that it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t take much for the Jaiku to become a ghost town, where no one would have to actually create new content or read in order for new content to filter through the site. While syndication allows people to do some really amazing things with content, without filtering, context, and moderation it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to become overwhelmed. Frankly Jaiku provide(s/ed) enough filtering ability to make this useful but this \u0026ldquo;problem\u0026rdquo; continues:\nThere are services like ping.fm which let you type once and send widely to a whole host of audiences on a bunch of different websites. Which is great: it lets you be present without taking up all your time, it allows you to reach a very fractured audience. Good stuff. Right?\nExcept not so much. The thing about \u0026ldquo;social media\u0026rdquo; and these new very conversational media is that they\u0026rsquo;re not so much about sending widely. They\u0026rsquo;re great for reaching people, in the moment, but they\u0026rsquo;re really more about having conversations with a community.\nSo we need something better. Because being shut off from your friends because you use different websites is bad; but what amounts to using AM radio cranked up loud to talk to your friends in a couple of different coffee houses is worse. I think open micro blogging (like identi.ca and laconica) is a step in the right direction, better independent profiles and curatorial tools would be another.\nThoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/microblogging-aggregation/","summary":"When Jaiku gave microbloggers (ie users of services like identi.ca twitter, etc.) the ability to aggregate their content onto Jaiku from blogs, flickr, delicious, and of course twitter as well, I noted that it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t take much for the Jaiku to become a ghost town, where no one would have to actually create new content or read in order for new content to filter through the site. While syndication allows people to do some really amazing things with content, without filtering, context, and moderation it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to become overwhelmed. Frankly Jaiku provide(s/ed) enough filtering ability to make this useful but this \u0026ldquo;problem\u0026rdquo; continues:\nThere are services like ping.fm which let you type once and send widely to a whole host of audiences on a bunch of different websites. Which is great: it lets you be present without taking up all your time, it allows you to reach a very fractured audience.","title":"Microblogging Aggregation"},{"content":"I commented to someone, probably Caroline, that I found cooking to be a lot like writing fiction. You start out with a vague I dea of what you\u0026rsquo;re trying to do, some really firm building blocks (ingredients; characters/settings), some rather impressive limiting factors (time, physics, literary conventions), and a number of equally good options (narrative voice, baking, chapter organization, broiling, pacing, frying) and then you get on this roller coaster where, despite whatever training you have, and formal knowledge about how things should work, you mostly just pay attention to your gut and pray that you don\u0026rsquo;t make a huge mess of things as you\u0026rsquo;re shepherding your lunch/novel from the refrigerator/mind to your stomach/readers.\nNeedless to say, I rather enjoy cooking.\nI have a few tendencies in cooking that determines my method: I generally like to cook a lot once, maybe twice, a week and then reheat and reconfigure whatever it is that I made again and again. So I\u0026rsquo;m a fan of soups, stir-frys, roasted veggies, vegetable/pasta salads and pestos, and things like that. I\u0026rsquo;m also prone to just cooking up, say, a lot of zuchini, and then making omlets/pasta/etc. with it throughout the week (without lots extra fuss.)\nI should also add a few things. First I\u0026rsquo;m not a vegetarian, really. I don\u0026rsquo;t mind eating/cooking meat, but I do so with a lot of moderation, and while there are some vegetables that I don\u0026rsquo;t really understand the appeal of (celery? wtf. beets? feh), I\u0026rsquo;ve found that my use of meat in meals is often pretty minimal. My natural tendency, having said all this, is to eat quick things (tuna fish with mayo; noodles; etc.) rather than actually have to cook at all, but sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s good to resist this tendency.\nAs part of my tenure helping my grandmother out, I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of cooking, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of this, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s worked pretty well. Last week I was cooking. I had bought some eggplant which I wanted to roast and make a sort of eggplant/tomato/mushroom sauce to serve over rice. Roast eggplant, mix in tomato sauce, with some red peppers and mushrooms, sounds good?\nLike good novels/meals, it got into the pan and decided to be something totally different. On the upside, it was amazing. Here\u0026rsquo;s a brief recipe/guideline for what I made:\nIngredients Garlic, Fresh, in great quantity. Cut cloves in half. 1 Can of artichoke hearts, drained and quartered. 1 can of straw mushrooms, drained. Some amount of beef sausage (12 oz?) sliced (optional) 1 or 2 red peppers, sliced 2 or 3 Zucchini, sliced 1 sweet onion, chopped 2 - 3 Eggplant roasted with skin and seeds removed (cut in half, spray/apply a minimal amount of olive oil, and sail for roasting, when the skin is blackened and separated peel it, remove seeds and chop the remaining eggplant.) A bit of olive oil Rice vinegar (though other white vinegars should work) Rice (I used sushi rice, but that\u0026rsquo;s personal preference.) Preparation Get all of the ingredients ready. Eggplant roasting can happen earlier. Once everything starts cooking it goes pretty fast.\nBegin by heating the oil with garlic and onion and sausage until they begin to brown, add zucchini and red pepper and cook until the zuchini gives sings of browning. It might take 15 minutes to get to this point.\nAdd Eggplant, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts, cook for ~3-5 minutes, add 3/4 cup of vinegar (or more depending on how much food you\u0026rsquo;re making. You can use wine if that\u0026rsquo;s your speed.) Turn heat down slightly and simmer for 3-5 minutes.\nUse your judgment, my times are really estimates/guesses.\nServe with rice and enjoy.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cooking-adventures/","summary":"I commented to someone, probably Caroline, that I found cooking to be a lot like writing fiction. You start out with a vague I dea of what you\u0026rsquo;re trying to do, some really firm building blocks (ingredients; characters/settings), some rather impressive limiting factors (time, physics, literary conventions), and a number of equally good options (narrative voice, baking, chapter organization, broiling, pacing, frying) and then you get on this roller coaster where, despite whatever training you have, and formal knowledge about how things should work, you mostly just pay attention to your gut and pray that you don\u0026rsquo;t make a huge mess of things as you\u0026rsquo;re shepherding your lunch/novel from the refrigerator/mind to your stomach/readers.\nNeedless to say, I rather enjoy cooking.\nI have a few tendencies in cooking that determines my method: I generally like to cook a lot once, maybe twice, a week and then reheat and reconfigure whatever it is that I made again and again.","title":"Cooking Adventures"},{"content":"So I was hoping to write you this morning from a brand new blogging system powered by jekyll that I did a little bit of tweeking on. Unfortunatly, all the pieces aren\u0026rsquo;t all in place, yet. So tychoish is still a wordpress event still on wordpress. The highlights:\nIt seems to have not worked, because it\u0026rsquo;s notion of categories isn\u0026rsquo;t a bit more firm than my own notion of categories (ie. coda and tychoish), and there isn\u0026rsquo;t any clever (or not so clever) way to get around this. It\u0026rsquo;s way more geeky than normal, but basically there\u0026rsquo;s no way (that I can figure) without categories to get an array/object of some segment of the posts without using jeykll\u0026rsquo;s categories.\nThe categories that jekyll has are really powerful, and my problem isn\u0026rsquo;t so much how they work, as it is that I have 1300-ish posts written \u0026ldquo;in the old way\u0026rdquo; that I need to figure something out for. I\u0026rsquo;ll do that, but it\u0026rsquo;ll take a bit longer, and it\u0026rsquo;ll mean that there\u0026rsquo;ll be a more substantive update to the site.\nI did something that I think improves jekyll, by adding an aditional permalink format to my fork. I\u0026rsquo;m not even passingly familar with Ruby (and I may have a slight professed disdain for it) and while it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a big change nor did it require a bunch of logic/smarts, it works and I think I did it \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo; for whatever that means.\nI also, in the course of this, got sed to work right, which was mostly just a case of me reading the manual wrong for years and then avoiding it. But personal victories are victories all the same.\nI can explain my jekyll issue/need in more detail if anyone wants to help me hack on this. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-jekylled-weekend/","summary":"So I was hoping to write you this morning from a brand new blogging system powered by jekyll that I did a little bit of tweeking on. Unfortunatly, all the pieces aren\u0026rsquo;t all in place, yet. So tychoish is still a wordpress event still on wordpress. The highlights:\nIt seems to have not worked, because it\u0026rsquo;s notion of categories isn\u0026rsquo;t a bit more firm than my own notion of categories (ie. coda and tychoish), and there isn\u0026rsquo;t any clever (or not so clever) way to get around this. It\u0026rsquo;s way more geeky than normal, but basically there\u0026rsquo;s no way (that I can figure) without categories to get an array/object of some segment of the posts without using jeykll\u0026rsquo;s categories.\nThe categories that jekyll has are really powerful, and my problem isn\u0026rsquo;t so much how they work, as it is that I have 1300-ish posts written \u0026ldquo;in the old way\u0026rdquo; that I need to figure something out for.","title":"A Jekylled Weekend"},{"content":"My grandmother watches the evening news, which isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly noteworthy except that it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I do unless I\u0026rsquo;m near someone who does. I tend to get my news via the radio, and the Internet, and while the visuals are instructive, it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of experience watching in recent years.\nWhich is why I was surprised by how bad they\u0026rsquo;ve gotten in the past few years. Not only is the news shorter, but there\u0026rsquo;s less variation in the coverage (all the networks/shows cover the same half dozen stories, with much the same slant.) And there\u0026rsquo;s this pervasive inline advertising thing which I swear is a new phenomena. It\u0026rsquo;s unsettling at the very least.\nps. I also correctly diagnosed a case of spasmodic disphonia in they junior senator from main on the television.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/evening-news/","summary":"My grandmother watches the evening news, which isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly noteworthy except that it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I do unless I\u0026rsquo;m near someone who does. I tend to get my news via the radio, and the Internet, and while the visuals are instructive, it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of experience watching in recent years.\nWhich is why I was surprised by how bad they\u0026rsquo;ve gotten in the past few years. Not only is the news shorter, but there\u0026rsquo;s less variation in the coverage (all the networks/shows cover the same half dozen stories, with much the same slant.) And there\u0026rsquo;s this pervasive inline advertising thing which I swear is a new phenomena. It\u0026rsquo;s unsettling at the very least.\nps. I also correctly diagnosed a case of spasmodic disphonia in they junior senator from main on the television.","title":"Evening News"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of content on the Internet. This as pretty much always been the case, but it\u0026rsquo;s especially true these days. There\u0026rsquo;s so much content that it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to comprehend the amount of content on this (very small) website, let alone the content of \u0026ldquo;all the blogs\u0026rdquo; or other kinds of sites.\nIn the early days of blogging, the largest archives included a hundred or even two hundred posts, no more than a year or two of archives, and if you read the dozen or two dozen blogs in the general network that you covered, you could be pretty sure that you were reading some significant portion of the \u0026ldquo;weblog discourse\u0026rdquo; and all the same blogs that the people writing the blogs were reading. When you found a new blog, the chance is that you could read the entire archive in an hour or two if you were so inclined.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a different world now. Blogs have many years of archives, hundreds upon hundreds of posts, what we read is only a drop in the bucket of whats out there.\nSuccess, (a relative concept indeed) as content creators on the Internet, in this saturated market requires a very different strategy. Pumping out more content, just further saturates our websites, we need some other approach. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t help that the publication systems we use to power content on the web (wordpress, drupal, blogger) are designed for an earlier era.\nI would propose that success in the next era will revolve around, individuals and technological solutions that make \u0026ldquo;curation\u0026rdquo; easier and more effective. Curation you ask? In museums we see the display of only a fraction of the material held in the collection. Likely 10% or less. What you do see is selected (regularly) by curators who know and manage the collection, and take those materials and display them in such a way as to convey some sort of broader message about the subject of an exhibit.\nThe same thing can (and should) happen on the web, with content. We need content producers to go through their writing and say \u0026ldquo;read this first for an introduction to my work/ideas,\u0026rdquo; we need to connect content producers with curators who synthesize posts (with links) to great content that\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;out there\u0026rdquo; (like tumble logs), we to integrate tools and structures that make curation easier in existing content-management software.\nThe truth is that many of these things are starting to happen: I\u0026rsquo;ve seen some bloggers who attempt to filter their posts for their readers (and I\u0026rsquo;m going to be doing more of this,) tumble logs, when well done are curatorial. The software is here in bits and pieces, but the truth is that curation has to be a mostly manual task (which is the source of its value), so I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be a while before we work out the kinks so that the software facilitates this kind of work. In the mean time\u0026hellip;\nWork as if you Live in the Early Days of a Better Nation.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/curation-and-content-overload/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of content on the Internet. This as pretty much always been the case, but it\u0026rsquo;s especially true these days. There\u0026rsquo;s so much content that it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to comprehend the amount of content on this (very small) website, let alone the content of \u0026ldquo;all the blogs\u0026rdquo; or other kinds of sites.\nIn the early days of blogging, the largest archives included a hundred or even two hundred posts, no more than a year or two of archives, and if you read the dozen or two dozen blogs in the general network that you covered, you could be pretty sure that you were reading some significant portion of the \u0026ldquo;weblog discourse\u0026rdquo; and all the same blogs that the people writing the blogs were reading. When you found a new blog, the chance is that you could read the entire archive in an hour or two if you were so inclined.","title":"Curation and Content Overload"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a great deal in the past few days: blog posts, the seed content for a wiki, fiction at a somewhat impressive pace (for me). While (at press time) there are still lots of things on my plate and storms on the horizon it\u0026rsquo;s very true that doing creative things, getting work done makes it considerably easier to do more creative things, and to get more work done. The stuff on my plate and the storms on the horizon in another seem less threatening. It\u0026rsquo;s not logical, but I\u0026rsquo;m not going to argue with that.\nOf note: I posted another story to Critical Futures from Chapter 6 of Knowing Mars, this is the last scene in this chapter, and I\u0026rsquo;ll post it in three chapters. After that, we\u0026rsquo;re going to get PDFs of Chapters 4-6, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting more about that in time. Thanks to everyone\u0026rsquo;s replies to my post about my emacs process, both on the thread and on identi.ca. I\u0026rsquo;m much impressed with all of your wisdom, and assistance. I didn\u0026rsquo;t know about wdired-mode which I shall explore, and while I did know about magit, I hadn\u0026rsquo;t gotten around to trying it yet. Here I come.\nOne last thing, if there are any perl, ikiwiki, CGI::FormBuilder, Dreamhost wizards out there, I would be very flattered and indebted if you\u0026rsquo;d take a look at this bug report I filed on ikiwiki, I\u0026rsquo;m having some sort of minor problem with CGI form generation, which is such a minor bug that I\u0026rsquo;m highly annoyed at the concept. On the one hand, it\u0026rsquo;s a lot of effort to get ikiwiki working under these conditions, on the other hand it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense to pay for a really robust server (with root access) for what will really be a minimal amount of content. Anyway, your help would be much appreciated.\nps. sorry for the late content.\npps. if you record a podcast over a skype (or other VoIP service) with Audacity and you\u0026rsquo;re running Ubuntu/Debian/Linux\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear from you.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wednesday-update/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a great deal in the past few days: blog posts, the seed content for a wiki, fiction at a somewhat impressive pace (for me). While (at press time) there are still lots of things on my plate and storms on the horizon it\u0026rsquo;s very true that doing creative things, getting work done makes it considerably easier to do more creative things, and to get more work done. The stuff on my plate and the storms on the horizon in another seem less threatening. It\u0026rsquo;s not logical, but I\u0026rsquo;m not going to argue with that.\nOf note: I posted another story to Critical Futures from Chapter 6 of Knowing Mars, this is the last scene in this chapter, and I\u0026rsquo;ll post it in three chapters. After that, we\u0026rsquo;re going to get PDFs of Chapters 4-6, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting more about that in time. Thanks to everyone\u0026rsquo;s replies to my post about my emacs process, both on the thread and on identi.","title":"Wednesday Update"},{"content":"For my good (and yours), here\u0026rsquo;s a list of things that I think I should know how to do in emacs, but somehow don\u0026rsquo;t:\nUse the version control package so that I\u0026rsquo;m not constantly popping between bash (terminal) and emacs to talk to git, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s necessary. Batch renaming with Dired. It should work, it should be simple, I\u0026rsquo;ve just not gotten there. File specific org-mode settings, for properties, tags, and TODO keywords. I understand that it\u0026rsquo;s possible, but my brain/system doesn\u0026rsquo;t have room for that yet. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things-to-learn-in-emacs/","summary":"For my good (and yours), here\u0026rsquo;s a list of things that I think I should know how to do in emacs, but somehow don\u0026rsquo;t:\nUse the version control package so that I\u0026rsquo;m not constantly popping between bash (terminal) and emacs to talk to git, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s necessary. Batch renaming with Dired. It should work, it should be simple, I\u0026rsquo;ve just not gotten there. File specific org-mode settings, for properties, tags, and TODO keywords. I understand that it\u0026rsquo;s possible, but my brain/system doesn\u0026rsquo;t have room for that yet. ","title":"Things to Learn in Emacs"},{"content":"I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, \u0026ldquo;I do SEO,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;m not, and I don\u0026rsquo;t, really. The truth is that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good, simple, answer to the question, \u0026ldquo;How do I succeed on-line with social media.\u0026rdquo; I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I\u0026rsquo;ve already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth--like offline--is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that \u0026ldquo;meatspace\u0026rdquo; connections are among the most powerful and valuable \u0026ldquo;cyberspace\u0026rdquo; resources.\nDuring college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it\u0026rsquo;s affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact. The argument was that environments and geographies that promoted situations were individuals would come into contact (randomly, casually) promoted opportunity, satisfying social interaction, and interesting conversations in a way that \u0026ldquo;networking\u0026rdquo; opportunities (conferences, workshops, cocktail parties, etc.) couldn\u0026rsquo;t. In illustration of this, Delany describes situations from talking about philosophy in the pornographic theatres of the old Time Square to finding a vacuum cleaner repair service in the checkout line of the grocery store. Furthermore, \u0026ldquo;contact\u0026rdquo; between people of different classes (as was present in the pornographic theaters of the old time square,) promotes the destabilization of class-based injustices.1\nContact has been an incredibly powerful and useful concept for me in a number of different contexts, because it provides an method for affecting social change in \u0026ldquo;every day life\u0026rdquo; and in creates a notion of \u0026ldquo;politics\u0026rdquo; that\u0026rsquo;s closer to \u0026ldquo;people interacting\u0026rdquo; and further from something tied to institutions of power (\u0026ldquo;government,\u0026rdquo; etc.,) which suits my disposition. I think, largely the internet is most powerful when it promotes something closer to \u0026ldquo;contact\u0026rdquo; and further from something that resembles \u0026ldquo;networking.\u0026rdquo; And by powerful, I mean a number of things: most likely to positively affect people\u0026rsquo;s work, provide meaningful opportunities for commerce and social relationships, to develop unique cultural environments.\nWhile there are opportunities for contact on contemporary social networking websites, they mostly specialize at helping you find people who are actually quite like you, like people you know in real life, people who are interested in the same things you\u0026rsquo;re interested in, and people who are friends with people you know in real life. That\u0026rsquo;s not contact, in the sense provided by Delany.2\nThere is still, I think, contact. I think microblogging (twitter/identi.ca) particularly with \u0026ldquo;track\u0026rdquo; features,3 represents (or did) a move away from \u0026ldquo;networking\u0026rdquo; to contact. The communities that form around open source projects, promote contact, as they are often interest specific, and contain members with disparate skills and backgrounds. Once upon a time, general population/topic (ie. non-project specific) IRC channels (chat rooms) were an immense source of contact for their users.4\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what this means. I remain convinced that contact is a useful and important way of looking at social interactions. I also think it says a lot about my interests in open source. I also think that as technologies and memes in cyberspace (eg. blogs, social networking, microblogging) develop in ways that promote \u0026ldquo;contact,\u0026rdquo; and eventually become \u0026ldquo;networking\u0026rdquo; opportunities not that the latter is bad, but it is an important conceptual shift. It\u0026rsquo;s also quite likely that we\u0026rsquo;d be able to see what ideas are going to be the next big thing based on the degree to which they promote contact. There are other implications I\u0026rsquo;m sure, but I\u0026rsquo;ll leave those for another time.\nI suppose this isn\u0026rsquo;t a wholly radical concept, but in any case, I think the \u0026ldquo;we need to talk to each other,\u0026rdquo; and live in integrated/diverse situations is definitely a step in the right direction. Delany\u0026rsquo;s articulation is quite useful and complete.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIndeed I\u0026rsquo;ve strayed from Delany in a couple of key directions. First his essay(s) described contact as being a uniquely urban phenomena (which I\u0026rsquo;ve totally abandoned), and secondly something that resonates with sub-cultural groups (queers, poor, etc.) In the case of the Internet, I think this works but I recognize that it\u0026rsquo;s a stretch.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nOnce upon a time, you could receive (via IM) twitter updates for any keyword, even if you didn\u0026rsquo;t follow the people who sent the tweets. This means that all of a microblogging can have a conversation with each other, and circumvent the isolating aspects of \u0026ldquo;social networking\u0026rdquo; constructs.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBy general population/topic I mean non-technical (largely) channels, such as rooms for fandom (fans of science fiction; and pop culture) rather than \u0026ldquo;working\u0026rdquo; or customer support channels. Though people would be drawn for a host of reasons, discussions seemed fairly random, and my sense is that (if my experience can be generalized from) that some pretty powerful friendships/connections were developed in these contexts.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/contact-cyberculture-and-samuel-delany/","summary":"I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, \u0026ldquo;I do SEO,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;m not, and I don\u0026rsquo;t, really. The truth is that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good, simple, answer to the question, \u0026ldquo;How do I succeed on-line with social media.\u0026rdquo; I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I\u0026rsquo;ve already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth--like offline--is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that \u0026ldquo;meatspace\u0026rdquo; connections are among the most powerful and valuable \u0026ldquo;cyberspace\u0026rdquo; resources.\nDuring college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it\u0026rsquo;s affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact.","title":"Contact, Cyberculture, and Samuel Delany"},{"content":"Two pieces of knitting news:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting seriously on the cabled sweater I\u0026rsquo;m making. I (for various reasons) have one ball of yarn (for it) to last me the next month, which will--I hope--force me to work on other projects as well. It\u0026rsquo;s going well, after a few mishaps, that I\u0026rsquo;ve corrected for, and while I think my heart is still in color work I do quite enjoy this sweater.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;m knitting a blue shawl. A second blue shawl. A few years ago, I knit a rather massive blue shawl, and now I\u0026rsquo;m making another. I\u0026rsquo;m nearly half done, but not quite. It\u0026rsquo;s progressing slowly, as these things do, but not nearly as slowly as I might have predicted. It should be done for the summer so I can knit sweaters all summer.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a very odd knitting life I lead.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-update-3/","summary":"Two pieces of knitting news:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting seriously on the cabled sweater I\u0026rsquo;m making. I (for various reasons) have one ball of yarn (for it) to last me the next month, which will--I hope--force me to work on other projects as well. It\u0026rsquo;s going well, after a few mishaps, that I\u0026rsquo;ve corrected for, and while I think my heart is still in color work I do quite enjoy this sweater.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;m knitting a blue shawl. A second blue shawl. A few years ago, I knit a rather massive blue shawl, and now I\u0026rsquo;m making another. I\u0026rsquo;m nearly half done, but not quite. It\u0026rsquo;s progressing slowly, as these things do, but not nearly as slowly as I might have predicted. It should be done for the summer so I can knit sweaters all summer.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a very odd knitting life I lead.","title":"knitting update"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that my impulse on these shorter blog posts (codas) that I tend to just do my normal essay thing only shorter, which is more of an old habit than it is something productive or intentional. Weird. To help break out of this bad habit, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post some links that I\u0026rsquo;ve collected recently.\nI saw a couple of articles on user experience issues that piqued my interest, perhaps they\u0026rsquo;ll pique yours as well: Agile Product Desgin on Agile Development and UX Practice and On Technology, User Experience and the need for Creative Technologists.\nCheetah Template Engine for Python. This isn\u0026rsquo;t an announcement but I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying around with the idea of reimplementing Jekyll in python (to learn, because I like python more than Ruby). Cheetah seems to be the template engine for python that looks the coolest/best. I need to read more about it, of course\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t get to go to Drupal Con (alas), but there were a few sessions that piqued my interest, or at least that I\u0026rsquo;d like to look into mostly because the presenters are people I know/watch/respect: Sacha Chua\u0026rsquo;s Rocking your Development Environment Liza Kindred\u0026rsquo;s Bussiness and Open Source James Walker\u0026rsquo;s Why I Hate Drupal.\nSacha\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m always interested in how developers work, and we have emacs in common. Liza\u0026rsquo;s because Open Source business models are really (perversely) fascinating, even if I think the Drupal world is much less innovative (commercially) than you\u0026rsquo;d initially think. Finally, given how grumpy I\u0026rsquo;m prone to being, how could walkah\u0026rsquo;s talk not be on my list?\nAnyone have something good for me?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/links-and-old-habits/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that my impulse on these shorter blog posts (codas) that I tend to just do my normal essay thing only shorter, which is more of an old habit than it is something productive or intentional. Weird. To help break out of this bad habit, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post some links that I\u0026rsquo;ve collected recently.\nI saw a couple of articles on user experience issues that piqued my interest, perhaps they\u0026rsquo;ll pique yours as well: Agile Product Desgin on Agile Development and UX Practice and On Technology, User Experience and the need for Creative Technologists.\nCheetah Template Engine for Python. This isn\u0026rsquo;t an announcement but I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying around with the idea of reimplementing Jekyll in python (to learn, because I like python more than Ruby). Cheetah seems to be the template engine for python that looks the coolest/best. I need to read more about it, of course","title":"Links and Old Habits"},{"content":"I listened to the podcast of \u0026ldquo;After The Siege,\u0026rdquo; a novella by Cory Doctorow, the other week (I\u0026rsquo;ve been driving cross country and walking a lot, I\u0026rsquo;m going through a lot of audio.) It was really cool and I thought it would be good to post a few notes. (For those of you who want to skip right to the podcast, here\u0026rsquo;s the link, but I\u0026rsquo;d get the files straight from cory\u0026rsquo;s podcast).\nThe reading was done by Mary Robinette Kowal, and it was amazing. I very much enjoyed the story, but it was a bit rough for me, at least politically. The story science-fictionalizes stories from the author\u0026rsquo;s grandmother\u0026rsquo;s experiences during the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, to tell a story about contemporary American Imperialism. Politically, something about this comparison, seems a bit fraught; both in its scope, and in the way it understands American Imperialism.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s probably a sign that my politics come very close to intersecting with Cory\u0026rsquo;s that I get so riled up in response to some of his fiction. When there\u0026rsquo;s no chance that I\u0026rsquo;m going to agree with someone, the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t agree doesn\u0026rsquo;t worry me. When I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close, it\u0026rsquo;s a more troubling concern. The story is, however, quite good, so go listen.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/after-the-siege/","summary":"I listened to the podcast of \u0026ldquo;After The Siege,\u0026rdquo; a novella by Cory Doctorow, the other week (I\u0026rsquo;ve been driving cross country and walking a lot, I\u0026rsquo;m going through a lot of audio.) It was really cool and I thought it would be good to post a few notes. (For those of you who want to skip right to the podcast, here\u0026rsquo;s the link, but I\u0026rsquo;d get the files straight from cory\u0026rsquo;s podcast).\nThe reading was done by Mary Robinette Kowal, and it was amazing. I very much enjoyed the story, but it was a bit rough for me, at least politically. The story science-fictionalizes stories from the author\u0026rsquo;s grandmother\u0026rsquo;s experiences during the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, to tell a story about contemporary American Imperialism. Politically, something about this comparison, seems a bit fraught; both in its scope, and in the way it understands American Imperialism.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s probably a sign that my politics come very close to intersecting with Cory\u0026rsquo;s that I get so riled up in response to some of his fiction.","title":"After the Siege"},{"content":"In the latest/forthcoming version of GNU Emacs there exists a daemon mode. The intent is to make it easier to run in one instance of emacs, and rather than starting new instances, you can run everything in one instance. Less overhead on your system, and everyone\u0026rsquo;s happy. Without daemon mode, you can still run in server mode and get nearly the same effect, but you end up with one emacs frame that\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;host,\u0026rdquo; which means, if you\u0026rsquo;re dumb and close it (or it\u0026rsquo;s running inside of another process which crashes\u0026hellip;) all of the frames close.\nI suppose, as an interjection, that my attempt to explain why this is cool to a generalized audience is somewhat of a lost cause.\nIn any case, there\u0026rsquo;s a problem daemon mode doesn\u0026rsquo;t behave like anyone would want it to. This post explains it better than anything else I\u0026rsquo;ve read thus far, but it\u0026rsquo;s not all that clear. Basically when you start emacs --daemon it doesn\u0026rsquo;t load your .emacs init file correctly, and so things like display settings are off kilter, and can\u0026rsquo;t really be fixed. I resorted to running my \u0026ldquo;host\u0026rdquo; emacs frame inside of a terminal/screen session, because that worked and was basically the same from my perspective.\nNevertheless I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered \u0026ldquo;the fix\u0026rdquo; to the emacs daemon it to work like you\u0026rsquo;d expect. Run the following command at the command line (changing username and font/fontsize):\nemacs -u [USERNAME] --daemon --eval \u0026quot;(setq default-frame-alist \\ '((font-backend . \u0026quot;xft\u0026quot;) (font . \u0026quot;[FONT]-[SIZE]\u0026quot;)))\u0026quot; -l ~/.emacs\nAnd then, open an emacsclient.\n\u0026hellip; and there was much rejoicing \u0026hellip;\nThere are a couple of things that I can\u0026rsquo;t get to work reliably. Most notably, though the emacsclient works in terminal instances, it has some sort of problem with attaching new clients to X after an X crash/restart. No clue what this is about. Not quite sure what the deal is with this, but needing to reboot every time X goes down is a bummer. Other than that? Emacs bliss. For the moment.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/getting-emacs-daemon-to-work-right/","summary":"In the latest/forthcoming version of GNU Emacs there exists a daemon mode. The intent is to make it easier to run in one instance of emacs, and rather than starting new instances, you can run everything in one instance. Less overhead on your system, and everyone\u0026rsquo;s happy. Without daemon mode, you can still run in server mode and get nearly the same effect, but you end up with one emacs frame that\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;host,\u0026rdquo; which means, if you\u0026rsquo;re dumb and close it (or it\u0026rsquo;s running inside of another process which crashes\u0026hellip;) all of the frames close.\nI suppose, as an interjection, that my attempt to explain why this is cool to a generalized audience is somewhat of a lost cause.\nIn any case, there\u0026rsquo;s a problem daemon mode doesn\u0026rsquo;t behave like anyone would want it to. This post explains it better than anything else I\u0026rsquo;ve read thus far, but it\u0026rsquo;s not all that clear.","title":"getting emacs daemon to work right"},{"content":"Data, information, in the digital context is really important. Perhaps the most important thing. It\u0026rsquo;s a shame then, I think, that we\u0026rsquo;re, on the whole, so bad at managing data and organizing information so that it is useful to us in the future. I keep starting to write posts on the topic with clever lead-ins, and within a hundred words I realize that I\u0026rsquo;ve bitten off more than I can chew. So I\u0026rsquo;ll spare the introduction and get on with the story.\nA couple of weeks ago, I copied all of my music off of my backups (from iTunes and my days as a mac user), and onto my Linux machine. I\u0026rsquo;d never really looked at the files in years, becuase of course, iTunes abstracts all the files away, so when you play \u0026ldquo;digital music,\u0026rdquo; you just play \u0026ldquo;tracks\u0026rdquo; rather than having to interact with the realities of the files themselves. This is incredibly user friendly, and I think there\u0026rsquo;s something in the iTunes model that is pretty useful. That is, creating user interfaces that let users interact with intelligibly bounded data units rather than with file units makes a lot of sense.\nHaving said that, what ends up happening is that the abstraction of the data often means that we\u0026rsquo;re less in touch with what\u0026rsquo;s being stored, and we rely on (often proprietary) tools to keep track of the meta-data associated with our libraries.\nAs I was going through my Music Library, which I\u0026rsquo;m using with mocp and Rhythm box (minimally, for syncing, eventually.) I realized that my music was organized in an incredibly ass backwards way. Many \u0026ldquo;artists\u0026rdquo; had a number of folders given various alternate spellings of their names (with and with out \u0026ldquo;the\u0026rdquo; or with various ampersand forms), which is a trifle frustrating. And as I was looking over the files I realized that there were things that I thought I had deleted, but in fact hung around in my directory (this is a specific flaw with the \u0026ldquo;are you sure\u0026rdquo; dialogue in iTunes, but it\u0026rsquo;s still an issue).\nI\u0026rsquo;m not done, but I know that the next step: going through the files by hand will mean that my music files will be much more well organized. Problems like this arise, largely, when we just rely on the computer to organize the files itself without input from us. While I like the \u0026ldquo;iTunes\u0026rdquo; way of accessing my music, I expect that my collection of music files is the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;m going to have around for the rest of my computer-using/music-listening life, and after only 5 years my iTunes has stooped being a part of my life. For sure.\nI guess the lesson from this is, interfaces for accessing your files aren\u0026rsquo;t always the best for organizing the files, and don\u0026rsquo;t entrust your organizing responsibility to a script.\nAnother story: PDF files.\nWhen I\u0026rsquo;m doing research stuff, I have this way of collecting PDF files of articles. When I was in school I would make a folder for each class I took and then throw PDFs into one folder, title them productively (author[s] - title.pdf). This worked until I wanted to start reusing material, or drawing connections between various projects/class. And then--being a geek--I had projects that weren\u0026rsquo;t quite class related, where did they go? Never mind the fact that the file names were absurdly long.\nSo I switched to a new system where I keep a BibTeX database of all my files and name PDFs with their cite keys (which are: authorlastYEAR.pdf; if there are more than one paper by an author in a year I append alphabetical characters (eg. a, b, c) to the end in the order that they come into the database. If there are more than one author I take the first author/PI).\nIt took a few weeks of sporadic work get the files into shape, but the end result of that transformation is the fact that my PDFs are incredibly useful to me, and I never have to look very hard for any piece of data.\nThe lesson is to use your data no matter what the system is and make sure it\u0026rsquo;s still working, and then, when needed don\u0026rsquo;t be afraid to change strategies. On this level, organization really ought to be empirical.\nIn light of these two experiences I have come to the conclusion that it\u0026rsquo;s important to really get your hands dirty in the files. While the abstractions are nice, they allow us to be complacent. Touching your data, looking at the files, and deploying a system that is simple and both useful in the present and relevant looking forward is incredibly important. The particulars beyond that are more vague, still but we\u0026rsquo;ll get there in future posts.\nThanks for reading.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/handling-data/","summary":"Data, information, in the digital context is really important. Perhaps the most important thing. It\u0026rsquo;s a shame then, I think, that we\u0026rsquo;re, on the whole, so bad at managing data and organizing information so that it is useful to us in the future. I keep starting to write posts on the topic with clever lead-ins, and within a hundred words I realize that I\u0026rsquo;ve bitten off more than I can chew. So I\u0026rsquo;ll spare the introduction and get on with the story.\nA couple of weeks ago, I copied all of my music off of my backups (from iTunes and my days as a mac user), and onto my Linux machine. I\u0026rsquo;d never really looked at the files in years, becuase of course, iTunes abstracts all the files away, so when you play \u0026ldquo;digital music,\u0026rdquo; you just play \u0026ldquo;tracks\u0026rdquo; rather than having to interact with the realities of the files themselves.","title":"Handling Data"},{"content":"I posted a new story on Critical Futures today. It\u0026rsquo;s another one from the Knowing Mars novella that I wrote a year ago and that I had been posting previously. After a much too long break from posting fiction, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I have enough brain space to work through some projects there and bring it back to life. While I think my first six months was an unparalleled learning experience, I think a different strategy is in order.\nMy goal/intention is to slip into a Monday/Thursday schedule, of posting 400-600 words rather than the every work-day of 200-400 words. The word counts are mostly for my own thoughts and less of a hard guideline. It\u0026rsquo;s also helpful, because I think, that even if I run out of my backlog, which seems pretty likely to happen pretty soon. I feel like I could probably write the requisite 800-1200 words on Saturday/Sunday morning along with my non-fiction essays, no matter what my life is looking like. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the future will hold, or what exactly is going to happen with my fiction, but it\u0026rsquo;s going to be there.\nOne of my background projects, however (and I\u0026rsquo;ll write about the theory here in an essay,) is generate a few \u0026ldquo;curatorial\u0026rdquo; pages for critical futures (and I suppose for tychoish as well). Basically I want to give people an easier \u0026ldquo;in\u0026rdquo; to the stories that I post on the web. This includes more creative templates and some hand-compiled guide pages, and as websites become home to more and more information my thought is that curation is the only real solution to this, and that, in that, it\u0026rsquo;s really the next big thing for content. But that\u0026rsquo;s another thought for another time\u0026hellip;\nCheck out the new Critical Futures story, \u0026ldquo;Knowing Mars, http://criticalfutures.com/2009/03/\u0026rdquo;\nThanks for reading, and do tell your friends/submit fiction if that\u0026rsquo;s your thing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/critical-futures-futures-and-curation-futures/","summary":"I posted a new story on Critical Futures today. It\u0026rsquo;s another one from the Knowing Mars novella that I wrote a year ago and that I had been posting previously. After a much too long break from posting fiction, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I have enough brain space to work through some projects there and bring it back to life. While I think my first six months was an unparalleled learning experience, I think a different strategy is in order.\nMy goal/intention is to slip into a Monday/Thursday schedule, of posting 400-600 words rather than the every work-day of 200-400 words. The word counts are mostly for my own thoughts and less of a hard guideline. It\u0026rsquo;s also helpful, because I think, that even if I run out of my backlog, which seems pretty likely to happen pretty soon. I feel like I could probably write the requisite 800-1200 words on Saturday/Sunday morning along with my non-fiction essays, no matter what my life is looking like.","title":"Critical Futures Futures and Curation Futures"},{"content":"I wrote in \u0026ldquo;The Advertising Bubble\u0026rdquo; that one of the ways to more effectively monetize content and \u0026ldquo;do better on the Internet,\u0026rdquo; was to combine efforts with other content producers. The key thought here is that, people only have so much time, and cooperation can allow you and your fellow content producers to pool resources, readers' attention, and business strategies.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also thought of this post as the \u0026ldquo;just because Wordpress, can be installed in a handful of minutes doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean you should,\u0026rdquo; post. The tools (and skills) required to build websites are fast, easy, and non-technical (by now) so that anyone can have a blog, or a website, or (hell, with enough time/money) a full fledged social networking site to rival digg or facebook. Just because sites are easy to build, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that we need to build new sites. Just because independence is possible, it\u0026rsquo;s not always called for.\nThere are a lot of readers on the Internet, but there are only so many hours in the day. And having a dynamic site with new content, is something that requires a lot of work. Lots of people can pull it off, but a lot of people (with really good things to say) can\u0026rsquo;t. This is sort of the dirty underbelly of the fact that the Internet (and open source) is a great democratizing force: because everyone speaks easily and freely, the challenge to being heard isn\u0026rsquo;t opportunity, it\u0026rsquo;s shear volume.\nI talk with a lot of people about working with the Internet, about using the internet to promote and build various kinds of projects, about blagging, and about strategies for success. There are things that I can help people do better like having good designs, writing top heavy content (I\u0026rsquo;m bad at this), ideas for more content, strategies for posting regularly, places to network with the communities that you hope to speak to, and among other tactics. All of these things should help lead to success; but beyond persistence, creativity, good timing, and a little entropy I have no good way of beating the \u0026ldquo;volume problem,\u0026rdquo; given current conventions.\nThe solution of encouraging group blogs rather that individual blogs is a good start. Each bloggers\u0026rsquo; responsibility to any given site is much lower than a single blogger\u0026rsquo;s responsibility to their personal site. There would be fewer (new) blogs as a result of the increase in collaboration, and possibly a consolidation of existing blogs. We would also expect to see blogs more tightly focused on niches rather than individuals: niche focuses tend to do really well on the web with regards to targeting audiences, so this is a good thing indeed.\nBefore anyone cries that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to suppress individuality (or expression, or identity), this is very much not the case. I think static websites are really important, my suggestion isn\u0026rsquo;t that people shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have websites it\u0026rsquo;s that they shouldn\u0026rsquo;t blog on them (by default). Given the state of syndication and aggregation content, it\u0026rsquo;s even possible for folks to have personal websites that aggregate their content from a number of different sources,1 we get individuality and dynamic content without dividing efforts or audiences.\nThere are other solutions (curation springs instantly to mind) to the \u0026ldquo;volume problem,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;ll get to those soon. In the mean time, remember: group blogs are the future.\nOnward and Outward!\nThink of the aggregated personal website as being the inverse of services like ping.fm, which blast your content to a host of different websites, the personal website should rather aggregate content and conversations from other websites into one location.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-favor-of-group-blogs-and-efforts/","summary":"I wrote in \u0026ldquo;The Advertising Bubble\u0026rdquo; that one of the ways to more effectively monetize content and \u0026ldquo;do better on the Internet,\u0026rdquo; was to combine efforts with other content producers. The key thought here is that, people only have so much time, and cooperation can allow you and your fellow content producers to pool resources, readers' attention, and business strategies.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also thought of this post as the \u0026ldquo;just because Wordpress, can be installed in a handful of minutes doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean you should,\u0026rdquo; post. The tools (and skills) required to build websites are fast, easy, and non-technical (by now) so that anyone can have a blog, or a website, or (hell, with enough time/money) a full fledged social networking site to rival digg or facebook. Just because sites are easy to build, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that we need to build new sites. Just because independence is possible, it\u0026rsquo;s not always called for.","title":"In Favor of Group Blogs and Efforts"},{"content":"I read something a few weeks ago (the problem with being slow to process things from blogs that post regularly), about digital ebook readers and the future of digital books.\nI guess my thoughts are best summed up in a couple of points, basically that electronic texts will succeed as they: develop unique and presentation methods (hardware and software), and as the commerce/distribution models become more transparent.\n1. Words on screens don\u0026rsquo;t work like words on paper. They just don\u0026rsquo;t, and we need to develop new ways of reading/writing that engage the medium better. We got prose out of the transition to bound-books, novels out of printing press (loosely;) the success of ebooks, I think will require some sort of new way of writing/reading/interacting with text, and no ebook implementation has gone there.\n2. The potential for profit of digital goods is immense: distribution/production costs are much lower than their material counterparts, because printing, delivery, etc. aren\u0026rsquo;t factors for digital things. There is, however, value and work that goes into publishing texts, and we need some way of supporting creators. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the existing publishing/content industry\u0026rsquo;s models make a good example to follow, and \u0026ldquo;micropayments\u0026rdquo; (the stock alternate response) don\u0026rsquo;t seem to really work. I tend to think that fellowships funded by a subscription model/tax on connectivity is more the way to go. But that\u0026rsquo;s me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-debate-over-ebooks/","summary":"I read something a few weeks ago (the problem with being slow to process things from blogs that post regularly), about digital ebook readers and the future of digital books.\nI guess my thoughts are best summed up in a couple of points, basically that electronic texts will succeed as they: develop unique and presentation methods (hardware and software), and as the commerce/distribution models become more transparent.\n1. Words on screens don\u0026rsquo;t work like words on paper. They just don\u0026rsquo;t, and we need to develop new ways of reading/writing that engage the medium better. We got prose out of the transition to bound-books, novels out of printing press (loosely;) the success of ebooks, I think will require some sort of new way of writing/reading/interacting with text, and no ebook implementation has gone there.\n2. The potential for profit of digital goods is immense: distribution/production costs are much lower than their material counterparts, because printing, delivery, etc.","title":"the debate over eBooks"},{"content":"At the risk of sounding vague (or overly polite) I had the chance to read/hear a few writers describe the mechanics of their work recently. To clarify, by writers I mean \u0026ldquo;fiction writers,\u0026rdquo; and by mechanics, I mean how the story happens (character, plot, narrative, conflict, development) rather than things about process (how writing happens) or business (how to live/publish). This was, as you might imagine, kind of awkward because the people who write the stories aren\u0026rsquo;t the best judges of what actually happens.\nThere are lots of reasons for this: readers are complex and contextually constrained (as are authours), and creators are too close to the story and the characters to really see have a productive perspective on what we\u0026rsquo;re writing. We can talk about what we meant to write, how we intended for a story to work, but while short measures of this kind of analysis aren\u0026rsquo;t harmful, longer amounts of this kind of talking is pretty unproductive because it detracts from the reader\u0026rsquo;s freedom and the ability of the text to stand on its own.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;m opposed to writers talking about their work, but I think there are some kinds of discussion that work better. The first is your critical focus: it\u0026rsquo;s great when people talk about the ideas that linger in their minds when they\u0026rsquo;re writing the story. These are the big issues that your characters represent/grapple with, but stated in more concrete terms in Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s Mars books, this would include nationalism, interstellar colonization, the challenges of a massively overgrown population, the problem of survival on a different world. In Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s latest (Little Brother) the list of critical issues includes: political action, post-9/11 police powers, law enforcement statistics, youth identity. There\u0026rsquo;s lots of stuff to talk about, without talking about the character or plot development process.\nThe second kind of conversation is about process. Fiction writers aren\u0026rsquo;t the only people who write, and are certainly not the only kind of information workers in the contemporary world. As a result how we work, how we are able to summon creativity, how we manage both creation and business are all things that have a broad appeal, and a lot of my writing about productivity and process here falls into this layout. While there\u0026rsquo;s such thing as too much process talk, there\u0026rsquo;s a way to write about work and process that empowers and encourages lots of other people who do similar work. Where as talking about critical issues provides the opportunity to engage the content of the story, talking about process gives you the chance to communicate your experience of telling the story, without needing to offer analysis\u0026rsquo; of the text itself.\nMaybe my response is my way of dealing with both \u0026ldquo;being a writer,\u0026rdquo; and believing in idea that \u0026ldquo;the author is dead.\u0026rdquo; Maybe this is sound advice, just because: I\u0026rsquo;m not sure.\nInterestingly these two areas also represent the areas that writers often find work talking about/writing columns about. The best non-fiction writing that I\u0026rsquo;ve read from fiction writers are often essays that they write about what they interested in (and also write fiction about,) and while I don\u0026rsquo;t have experience at fiction writing workshops process of one sort or another is a big part of what happens at workshops, I\u0026rsquo;d expect.\nI think part of the issue is that the mechanics of stories, is something that we both know a lot about intellectually, and something that we have to do very instinctively. I know what makes characters work, what holds plots together, I can talk a lot about how to make stories and characters better, but when I\u0026rsquo;m \u0026ldquo;creating,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s all gut instinct and I have to go back and edit (even outlines) into shape. My current goal, is not to \u0026ldquo;learn more about writing,\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;hone my instincts\u0026rdquo; (or \u0026ldquo;feel better\u0026rdquo;) about writing. Maybe the instinctive writing approach means that (at least of our own writing) our ability to explain what\u0026rsquo;s happening becomes a bit\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure. All very interesting. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/meta-writing/","summary":"At the risk of sounding vague (or overly polite) I had the chance to read/hear a few writers describe the mechanics of their work recently. To clarify, by writers I mean \u0026ldquo;fiction writers,\u0026rdquo; and by mechanics, I mean how the story happens (character, plot, narrative, conflict, development) rather than things about process (how writing happens) or business (how to live/publish). This was, as you might imagine, kind of awkward because the people who write the stories aren\u0026rsquo;t the best judges of what actually happens.\nThere are lots of reasons for this: readers are complex and contextually constrained (as are authours), and creators are too close to the story and the characters to really see have a productive perspective on what we\u0026rsquo;re writing. We can talk about what we meant to write, how we intended for a story to work, but while short measures of this kind of analysis aren\u0026rsquo;t harmful, longer amounts of this kind of talking is pretty unproductive because it detracts from the reader\u0026rsquo;s freedom and the ability of the text to stand on its own.","title":"meta writing"},{"content":"I wrote an article for my friend Melissa Barton about how to use computers/technology more successfully and more effectively, and it went live over the weekend. I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with it, and it represents all of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve been working through here, except tuned for a more general audience. It\u0026rsquo;s also under my given name (gasp!) as if the tycho thing wasn\u0026rsquo;t confusing enough as it is.\nEmacs is great, and I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan, but it\u0026rsquo;s not for everyone, and for those audences, thinking about what we learn from \u0026ldquo;advanced useage\u0026rdquo; and then workind to apply that to more general use can be quite powerful. This is a different take on the \u0026ldquo;how to attract general audences,\u0026rdquo; process. I guess I\u0026rsquo;m mostly arguing that rather than make software/hardware more \u0026ldquo;friendly,\u0026rdquo; better to (also) educate users to be more gruff?\nIn any case, that\u0026rsquo;s up. I\u0026rsquo;m also posting an extra tychoish essay on Wednesday because it didn\u0026rsquo;t get posted (as I would have hoped) due to my error a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for that. Also, maybe new Critical Futures this week?\ncheers, ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/announcements-geek-stuff-guest-blogging/","summary":"I wrote an article for my friend Melissa Barton about how to use computers/technology more successfully and more effectively, and it went live over the weekend. I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with it, and it represents all of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve been working through here, except tuned for a more general audience. It\u0026rsquo;s also under my given name (gasp!) as if the tycho thing wasn\u0026rsquo;t confusing enough as it is.\nEmacs is great, and I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan, but it\u0026rsquo;s not for everyone, and for those audences, thinking about what we learn from \u0026ldquo;advanced useage\u0026rdquo; and then workind to apply that to more general use can be quite powerful. This is a different take on the \u0026ldquo;how to attract general audences,\u0026rdquo; process. I guess I\u0026rsquo;m mostly arguing that rather than make software/hardware more \u0026ldquo;friendly,\u0026rdquo; better to (also) educate users to be more gruff?\nIn any case, that\u0026rsquo;s up. I\u0026rsquo;m also posting an extra tychoish essay on Wednesday because it didn\u0026rsquo;t get posted (as I would have hoped) due to my error a few weeks ago.","title":"Announcements, geek stuff, guest blogging"},{"content":"Backstory: Chris is something of an Operating system junkie, and likes to play around with things. I think he\u0026rsquo;s weird, but whatever. Also, he bought a netbook several months ago, and after much persistence on my part (and some epic failures of Ubuntu instalations,) he finally installed Arch Linux, and it worked amazingly well. Here\u0026rsquo;s a funny (ok, mildly amusing?) conversation about his latest system plan with only minor editing for understandability and comedic value:\nChris: I was thinking that I\u0026rsquo;d move some stuff off of my second internal hard drive and install the alpha version of Ubuntu to see how it works.\ntycho: How it works? Like crap. It\u0026rsquo;s ubuntu, so it\u0026rsquo;s meant to be easy to install and usable, not fresh, robust, and hardened. Besides its an alpha, if you what stability just install Arch and get it done with.\nChris: [silence and pause]\ntycho: now that we resolved this quandary what\u0026rsquo;s next?\nChris: [sighs and laughs] Nothing, really. [pause] I\u0026rsquo;m downloading Arch now, asshole.\ntycho: [laughs] You\u0026rsquo;re welcome.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t actually use Arch, because Ubuntu has been simple and I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to have a problem with it, but I would use Arch if I needed it, and I (seem) to recommend it to all my friends who are really geeky and are having problems with debian/ubuntu.\nshrug\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-hard-gnulinux-truth/","summary":"Backstory: Chris is something of an Operating system junkie, and likes to play around with things. I think he\u0026rsquo;s weird, but whatever. Also, he bought a netbook several months ago, and after much persistence on my part (and some epic failures of Ubuntu instalations,) he finally installed Arch Linux, and it worked amazingly well. Here\u0026rsquo;s a funny (ok, mildly amusing?) conversation about his latest system plan with only minor editing for understandability and comedic value:\nChris: I was thinking that I\u0026rsquo;d move some stuff off of my second internal hard drive and install the alpha version of Ubuntu to see how it works.\ntycho: How it works? Like crap. It\u0026rsquo;s ubuntu, so it\u0026rsquo;s meant to be easy to install and usable, not fresh, robust, and hardened. Besides its an alpha, if you what stability just install Arch and get it done with.\nChris: [silence and pause]\ntycho: now that we resolved this quandary what\u0026rsquo;s next?","title":"The Hard (GNU/Linux) Truth"},{"content":"I watched the last episode of Battlestar Galatica, (I\u0026rsquo;d been behind several weeks) today, because I was tired of everyone else talking about it and staying away from reading things on the Internet because of it. This is a story that I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite fond of for quite a long time, and I was impressed with how well they wrapped it up. Really impressed. Good work indeed.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also--and I haven\u0026rsquo;t talked about this very much here, yet--been writing more seriously on my projects than I have in a good long while. It\u0026rsquo;s good to be back, and I\u0026rsquo;m often surprised at how important writing on my own projects (particularly fiction) is at keeping my spirits afloat.\nNow that the novel is on track again, I feel less overwhelmed at knocking through other projects. My knitting is in better shape, I\u0026rsquo;m blogging better, I worked on an academic project, and so forth. There\u0026rsquo;s still outstanding work, and I\u0026rsquo;m getting back into it, and that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing indeed.\nI\u0026rsquo;m busy, as always, and there\u0026rsquo;s too much to really go through it here, but, but! I feel inspired rather than daunted at the prospect. I hope you all have a good week as well.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/week-in-preview/","summary":"I watched the last episode of Battlestar Galatica, (I\u0026rsquo;d been behind several weeks) today, because I was tired of everyone else talking about it and staying away from reading things on the Internet because of it. This is a story that I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite fond of for quite a long time, and I was impressed with how well they wrapped it up. Really impressed. Good work indeed.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also--and I haven\u0026rsquo;t talked about this very much here, yet--been writing more seriously on my projects than I have in a good long while. It\u0026rsquo;s good to be back, and I\u0026rsquo;m often surprised at how important writing on my own projects (particularly fiction) is at keeping my spirits afloat.\nNow that the novel is on track again, I feel less overwhelmed at knocking through other projects. My knitting is in better shape, I\u0026rsquo;m blogging better, I worked on an academic project, and so forth.","title":"Week in Preview"},{"content":"So I was sorting through my org-mode files and I found a little snippet of code that I had lying around. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a problem with shell scripting for a while. I use bash a lot, and I\u0026rsquo;ve written a few functions, and procedural scripts that I\u0026rsquo;ve found useful in my travels, but anything that requires \u0026ldquo;logic,\u0026rdquo; often escapes me in tragic and epic ways.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the problem. I had a directory of notes that I had compiled for presentation in an ikiwiki blog for notes. As I wanted these notes to be in my org-mode system, I needed to take a directory of 60 or so files, and turn them into a single org file. As an additional bonus, I needed the files to be organized by date rather than by the alphabet. Also, as ikiwiki generated page titles from the filename, I needed to capture that information in the org-mode file. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I came up with\nfor i in `ls -t`; do echo -e \u0026quot;$i\u0026quot; \u0026gt;\u0026gt; ~/org/legacy_notes.org \u0026amp;\u0026amp; cat \u0026quot;$i\u0026quot; \u0026gt;\u0026gt; ~/org/legacy_notes.org ; done It works as a one liner, but it works. I think previous attempts have left out crucial semi-colons or the do and done statements. No clue. Baby steps folks.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-working-for-loop/","summary":"So I was sorting through my org-mode files and I found a little snippet of code that I had lying around. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a problem with shell scripting for a while. I use bash a lot, and I\u0026rsquo;ve written a few functions, and procedural scripts that I\u0026rsquo;ve found useful in my travels, but anything that requires \u0026ldquo;logic,\u0026rdquo; often escapes me in tragic and epic ways.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the problem. I had a directory of notes that I had compiled for presentation in an ikiwiki blog for notes. As I wanted these notes to be in my org-mode system, I needed to take a directory of 60 or so files, and turn them into a single org file. As an additional bonus, I needed the files to be organized by date rather than by the alphabet. Also, as ikiwiki generated page titles from the filename, I needed to capture that information in the org-mode file.","title":"a working for loop"},{"content":"So while I\u0026rsquo;m a bit (ha!) of a tea junkie, I must confess that my tea brewing/tea pot equipment is pretty minimal. I have (had) a couple of tea pots that were obtained at church rummage sales, and I bought a small pot for afternoon/testing purposes recently, but other than that: not so much. I recently discovered that my standard pot which is a great stonewear ceramic beast has a defect in the (internal) glaze which I think means that it\u0026rsquo;s ready for retirement.\nFormer roommates will remember my general disregard for cleaning tea cups and the like, on the general theory, that a rinse + hot water + acidic tea is really all the cleaning one needs. I, however draw the line at \u0026ldquo;cracked glaze and exposed porous stonewear.\u0026rdquo; I have another pot, but it was a whim rummage sale purchase, and it has a wire handle (hard to hold,) a small opening (hard to rinse) and it dribbles effusively. This basically means the only tea pot I have at the moment is an old glass one. Which would be nice, except it looses heat at a truly astounding rate. Tip: glass tea pots not good.\nThere are a few things that are different about my tea making habits now as opposed to previous eras. First, I use loose leaf and strain either with a hand strainer, preferably some sort of tea pot infuser, or a hand made tea bag. I also, rarely brew individual cups any more. So I think my needs are a bit different than they once were. So new tea pot, here I come.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/teapot-problem/","summary":"So while I\u0026rsquo;m a bit (ha!) of a tea junkie, I must confess that my tea brewing/tea pot equipment is pretty minimal. I have (had) a couple of tea pots that were obtained at church rummage sales, and I bought a small pot for afternoon/testing purposes recently, but other than that: not so much. I recently discovered that my standard pot which is a great stonewear ceramic beast has a defect in the (internal) glaze which I think means that it\u0026rsquo;s ready for retirement.\nFormer roommates will remember my general disregard for cleaning tea cups and the like, on the general theory, that a rinse + hot water + acidic tea is really all the cleaning one needs. I, however draw the line at \u0026ldquo;cracked glaze and exposed porous stonewear.\u0026rdquo; I have another pot, but it was a whim rummage sale purchase, and it has a wire handle (hard to hold,) a small opening (hard to rinse) and it dribbles effusively.","title":"teapot problem"},{"content":"I saw a meme, I from lesboprof, that listed 25 authors that were influential to her. It was fun for me to read, because there was some overlap with what my list would be and because she\u0026rsquo;s (presumably) a feminist-studies type as well. I thought I\u0026rsquo;d give it a stab, though in typical tychoish fashion, this is going to be really eclectic. Also, because it\u0026rsquo;s a meme, please feel free to comment and join in.\n1. Samuel R. Delany - Delany was probably the single most cited author during my college career, and was my root back into science fiction after college. Good stuff, because it combines feminist/queer/race theory interests with science fiction.\n2. Kim Stanley Robinson - My \u0026ldquo;intro to college\u0026rdquo; class was built around Robinson\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Mars Trilogy.\u0026rdquo; While I put the books out of mind for many years, I\u0026rsquo;ve recently come back to them, and am surprised how much my own \u0026ldquo;Mars stories\u0026rdquo; draw on Robinson\u0026rsquo;s influence to varying degrees. His work is Masterful and I quite enjoy it.\n3. Gayle S. Rubin - Rubin\u0026rsquo;s essay \u0026ldquo;Thinking Sex,\u0026rdquo; really defined my interest in queer studies and queer theory, and remains terribly important to my world view.\n4. Melissa Scott - I read the \u0026ldquo;Silence Leigh\u0026rdquo; trillogy when I was in high school (twice!), and it rocked my world, seriously rocked my world. I\u0026rsquo;ve read two of her other books more recently, and was similarly influenced by them. Good stuff.\n5. Anne Lamott - Contemporary/mainstream fiction isn\u0026rsquo;t often my thing, nor are (particularly) memoirs; however, I find Anne Lamont\u0026rsquo;s fiction (and non-fiction) quite powerful. Someone got me Bird by Bird as a gift, and I ate it up (again, during high school). I\u0026rsquo;ve since read more of her work, and I\u0026rsquo;m particularly fond of All New People.\n6. Issac Asimov - I read the Foundation series twice in high school and it was amazing. There\u0026rsquo;s so much more Asimov out there, and while I\u0026rsquo;m not on a huge project to \u0026ldquo;read the SF canon,\u0026rdquo; every time I come across an Asimov story it often succeeds at being really awesome.\n7. Robert Heinlein - In high school I took a class where I had to read Like 12 books in 4 months (sophomore year.) It was intense and I swear the only book I finished reading for that class was Stranger in a Strange Land. It\u0026rsquo;s good. I\u0026rsquo;m not a particular Heinlein fanboy, and a lot of his material creeps me out, but\n8. Cherie Moraga - I have a copy of Cherrie Moraga\u0026rsquo;s Loving in the War Years next to my desk and it\u0026rsquo;s a book that I find incredibly powerful. Many, I think remember and cite Moraga\u0026rsquo;s work with Gloria Anzaldúa (This Bridge Called My Back) which is indeed powerful stuff, but her creative work hit me a couple of times during college, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m better for it\n9. Elizabeth Zimmerman - I knit the way I do because of Elizabeth, and I think about my knitting seriously because of Elizabeth.\nMeg Swansen - See above only more so. 11. Paul Connerton - I read this little book called How Societies Remember, in this nifty seminar I took durring my last semester on historiography, which was one of the very few classes I took in college \u0026ldquo;just cause I wanted to,\u0026rdquo; and it was a great thing indeed. This book was a collecting point for a lot of the cultural identity, cultural memory ideas that guided my thinking durring the first two attempts at graduate school (long story), and much to my surprise continue to affect my thoughts\n12. Orson Scott Card - I listened to an interview with OSC last week and he said that he recomended the \u0026ldquo;Speaker for the Dead\u0026rdquo; (post-Ender\u0026rsquo;s Game trillogy) for people over age 18. I was certianly much younger than that when I plowed through all of the (at the time) existing Ender Books. I think I was 14 or so when I read all of them. In any case, big effect.\n13. James Tiptree, Jr. - I named my cat (Kip) after a character in Brightness falls from the Air. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I need to say much more than that.\n14. Cory Doctorow - A huge force in contemporary science fiction, and despite the fact that I think our politics are at least mildly divergent (and as a result I find a lot of his more political fiction frustrating), he\u0026rsquo;s a great influence.\n15. Barbara Kingsolver - I\u0026rsquo;ve not read the complete bibliography, for sure, but I read a couple of her books in high school, and do quite enjoy her writing on a stylistic level.\n16. Nancy Kress - Amazing. Kress was on my radar before college, but I\u0026rsquo;ve really started to read her work since my return to SF. I quite enjoy her blog, and I learn something about writing short fiction every time I read one of her stories.\n17. Arthur C. Clarke - I worried about picking too many canon names. It\u0026rsquo;d be like a theatre type saying \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m really into Anouilh, Shakespeare and Johnson.\u0026rdquo; Frankly, however, I think it\u0026rsquo;s true that a lot of the--particularly science fiction--that really influenced me on this list were things that I read when I was in high school. I think it\u0026rsquo;s something more to do with \u0026ldquo;that stage,\u0026rdquo; but Clarke\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\n18. Armisted Maupin - The Tales of the City books are an amazing thing. I spent a week one summer, sitting in a chair, where I\u0026rsquo;d get a bottle of water, some crackers, and I\u0026rsquo;d just read book after book.\n19. Irving Yalom - I have of course mentioned on this site that I majored in psychology in college. Throughout most of this period, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t particularly interested in clinical work, despite the fact that all of my classmates were. In any case, the last semester I took a class on a clinical/treatment topic, and while all of my classmates who so wanted to help other people gave reports on depression, and anxiety, and personality disorders; I gave a report on Death, Dying, and Grief, through which I discovered Yalom, and I think as a result gave one of the more uplifting reports in the class. Changed my world.\n20. Judith Butler - Not much to say, except I spent a lot of time with Butler\u0026rsquo;s work in college, and like so much of the feminist and queer stuff that I read then, has really shaped my thinking. Butter, had a great impact for better or for worse on a lot of people, an I\u0026rsquo;m one of them.\n21. David Eddings - I seem to have a thing for \u0026ldquo;books I read in high school,\u0026rdquo; particularly long series. I read one of Edding\u0026rsquo;s major sagas and it was delightful. I also enjoyed one of his non-fantasy books as well, somewhat later. I\u0026rsquo;m not a big fantasy lover, and but I do like saga\u0026rsquo;s and Eddings tells a damn good story.\n22. Ken Macleod - If I\u0026rsquo;m only half as cool as Ken Macleod when I grow up, I\u0026rsquo;ll be one happy camper.\n23. F. Scott Fitzgerald - Ok, I must confess, I read The Great Gatsby once in high school, and I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that this is the Great American Novel.\n24. Theodor Holm Nelson - He wrote a book on hypertext that you probably haven\u0026rsquo;t heard about called Literary Machines, but it\u0026rsquo;s hugely inspiring in both it\u0026rsquo;s scope and vision.\n25. Lionel Bacon - He collected dance notes and music for Morris dancing. While it\u0026rsquo;s not the kind of thing that you read, it is the kind of thing that my team has at every practice just in case we need some sort of arbiter.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writers-that-changed-my-world/","summary":"I saw a meme, I from lesboprof, that listed 25 authors that were influential to her. It was fun for me to read, because there was some overlap with what my list would be and because she\u0026rsquo;s (presumably) a feminist-studies type as well. I thought I\u0026rsquo;d give it a stab, though in typical tychoish fashion, this is going to be really eclectic. Also, because it\u0026rsquo;s a meme, please feel free to comment and join in.\n1. Samuel R. Delany - Delany was probably the single most cited author during my college career, and was my root back into science fiction after college. Good stuff, because it combines feminist/queer/race theory interests with science fiction.\n2. Kim Stanley Robinson - My \u0026ldquo;intro to college\u0026rdquo; class was built around Robinson\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Mars Trilogy.\u0026rdquo; While I put the books out of mind for many years, I\u0026rsquo;ve recently come back to them, and am surprised how much my own \u0026ldquo;Mars stories\u0026rdquo; draw on Robinson\u0026rsquo;s influence to varying degrees.","title":"Writers that Changed My World"},{"content":"No secret, I\u0026rsquo;ve been stressed. Readers of the blog who are friends with my parents (Hi Angie!) have even told them \u0026ldquo;wow, [tycho] looks stressed.\u0026rdquo; One of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for a few weeks now, in part to manage this is to begin some sort of exercise regimen. There\u0026rsquo;s a park not far from where I live, and I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to going out for an hour in the late afternoon, when my brain is tired and I can\u0026rsquo;t really write anyway.\nAmazingly, it\u0026rsquo;s been a great thing. Exercise helps the mood, I had enough psychology to know that to be true, and one thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve lamented, since I stopped commuting, is that I haven\u0026rsquo;t really listened to podcasts in any concerted way. I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly behind as a result, and the walks, including doing good things for my mood and stamina, have been a good excuse to spend some item consuming media that I find very refreshing and informing.\nExercise is a tough things, I\u0026rsquo;m a skinny, reasonably active guy, but I tend towards short bursts, rather than concerted activity. Which is fine, but dance weekends are really tough on me, as I wear out too quickly. One really needs to be in shape in order to dance well, but I\u0026rsquo;ve found that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get in shape only by dancing. So making a point of going out is a good thing indeed, and I feel better. So there.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/exercise/","summary":"No secret, I\u0026rsquo;ve been stressed. Readers of the blog who are friends with my parents (Hi Angie!) have even told them \u0026ldquo;wow, [tycho] looks stressed.\u0026rdquo; One of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for a few weeks now, in part to manage this is to begin some sort of exercise regimen. There\u0026rsquo;s a park not far from where I live, and I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to going out for an hour in the late afternoon, when my brain is tired and I can\u0026rsquo;t really write anyway.\nAmazingly, it\u0026rsquo;s been a great thing. Exercise helps the mood, I had enough psychology to know that to be true, and one thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve lamented, since I stopped commuting, is that I haven\u0026rsquo;t really listened to podcasts in any concerted way. I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly behind as a result, and the walks, including doing good things for my mood and stamina, have been a good excuse to spend some item consuming media that I find very refreshing and informing.","title":"exercise"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;blah blah tycho says he\u0026rsquo;s not a programmer, blah blah.\u0026rdquo; I say stuff like this (more or less) quite a bit, right? But I know a lot about how computers work, a lot about how programs are constructed (at least in the abstract,) and while I\u0026rsquo;ve not (really) written code of any note I do read a bunch of code, and can almost always figure out how things work. So I suppose I should confess that I\u0026rsquo;m\u0026hellip; working on learning how to program (in my copious free time).\nI, of course, will keep you posted about this as it progresses, but for now I\u0026rsquo;ll settle to just explain the origin of this development: I started using emacs a few months ago, and I found the lisp-dialect that serves as emacs\u0026rsquo; extension language to be quite understandable. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s something about how emacs programs are written to be hacked on, and even poorly documented emacs-lisp is rather well documented. I read the beginning of an introduction to haskell, and I think it has something to do with the functional aspects of the language. In any case, something clicked, and so here I am.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lisp-ing-forward/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;blah blah tycho says he\u0026rsquo;s not a programmer, blah blah.\u0026rdquo; I say stuff like this (more or less) quite a bit, right? But I know a lot about how computers work, a lot about how programs are constructed (at least in the abstract,) and while I\u0026rsquo;ve not (really) written code of any note I do read a bunch of code, and can almost always figure out how things work. So I suppose I should confess that I\u0026rsquo;m\u0026hellip; working on learning how to program (in my copious free time).\nI, of course, will keep you posted about this as it progresses, but for now I\u0026rsquo;ll settle to just explain the origin of this development: I started using emacs a few months ago, and I found the lisp-dialect that serves as emacs\u0026rsquo; extension language to be quite understandable. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s something about how emacs programs are written to be hacked on, and even poorly documented emacs-lisp is rather well documented.","title":"lisp-ing forward"},{"content":"I mentioned the other day that I was looking to build a fact file, but that I wanted to follow up on this in a bit more length. As you know and/or have probably guessed, I\u0026rsquo;m a writer, and I consume a lot of information in the pursuit of this practice. That\u0026rsquo;s par for the course. The problem is figuring out a way to store collected information so that it\u0026rsquo;s useful later. Here\u0026rsquo;s a story:\nI have a story that imagines a future where there are colonies and outposts throughout our solar system (among other things). I found myself a few days ago plotting out some details and I realized that I might be imagining a future with not only far flug outposts but also a substantially different system of orbital mechanics. I know about Hohmann transfers and enough about gravity assists, that getting between planets in the solar system is complex. My hope is that by knowing a bit about these things, I can avoid rank absurdity. In any case, I found myself looking up the length orbits of Jupiter and Saturn around the sun.\nNow mostly this was just to get a sense of the distance, because unless I also posit free, lightweight, super-powerful propulsion systems, a trip between Jupiter and Saturn is going to take a number of years (say, 5-15; and even with posted amazing-drive, we\u0026rsquo;re probably still talking several years,) and no matter how fast/what kind of propulsion system you use, there are going to be a very limited \u0026ldquo;windows\u0026rdquo; for transport. If you miss the buss from Jupiter to Saturn, it could be 10 or 20 years before you could get off world. Not to mention the huge impact this would have on the course of cultural development on these colonies.\nBut having said that, this detail about the orbital lengths (though burned into my memory at this point), isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that I track very well, and what about the next time I have a question like this? Or what about a news story that I come across, or the abstract of a scientific paper that catches my interest? This detail about orbits of the outer planets was really just the straw that broke the camels back.\nIt was clear that I needed a system for storing information, facts, notes for later retrieval. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t sure what that system would look like, or what I would need from it, but I was sure that something was better than the \u0026ldquo;read and hope\u0026rdquo; method I\u0026rsquo;ve been using.\nI did some brainstorming and came up with some basic requirements. I needed something pretty unstructured so that \u0026ldquo;records,\u0026rdquo; which were just links and a few words would be just as complete as records that had lengthy notes. I needed built in meta-data functionality to store categories, tags, and citation information (links, date, identifiers). Easy capture and editing is a must, and while I was, and am, willing to consider functionality outside of emacs, but emacs is preferred, and it would take a lot for me to want something that couldn\u0026rsquo;t be stored in plain text files.\nWhen other people (individuals) come to me with similar problems I almost always recommend private instances of Wordpress where people can post notes. This often is just the right thing. Conceptually it works like a notebook or journal in the physical world, but it has good meta-data support (categories, tags, dates), you can use it from anywhere (the web, the API), and it\u0026rsquo;s a mature system. This works great for a lot of people, but I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly happy with the web-interface, and I\u0026rsquo;d need to rely on search more than I think I\u0026rsquo;d like.\nI put out a call on identi.ca for help on this problem. There were suggestions of PlannerMode and various systems based on org-mode (which is what I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to use at this point.) I then had this \u0026ldquo;moment\u0026rdquo; issue about not wanting my \u0026ldquo;fact file\u0026rdquo; to be built on some sort of to-do list. Todo lists are great, I love todo-lists (perhaps too much?) Having my information management software be built around \u0026ldquo;tasks\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;projects\u0026rdquo; provides too much of the wrong kind of structure.\nI was frustrated, as you might imagine. After all I just wanted some sort of index-able note-card system, that I could use to store some basic information without fuss. I\u0026rsquo;ve settled down a bit and I\u0026rsquo;m using a format using a skeleton/org-remember template to store my fact file in an org-mode text file (data.org). The entries look something like this:\n* The title :a:list:of:tags: :PROPERTIES: :date: \u0026lt;2009-03-14 Sat\u0026gt; :cite-key: a-u/uid :link: http://tychoish.com :END: And then finally some notes text And the input is just an prompt-tab interface. I can also add more details to the properties, section. If that makes sense at a later date. So the creation of these records is pretty quick. I\u0026rsquo;ll get come code up when I have something a bit more clear. In the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;d like to continue to have a bit of a discussion about this information management problem. It\u0026rsquo;s a domain that is clearly very suited to technological enhancement, but at the same time there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of solutions on the ground. I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s where I come in, but feedback is most appreciated on interface questions, on alternate use cases and applications. I look forward to hearing from you\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fact-file-and-orbital-mechanics/","summary":"I mentioned the other day that I was looking to build a fact file, but that I wanted to follow up on this in a bit more length. As you know and/or have probably guessed, I\u0026rsquo;m a writer, and I consume a lot of information in the pursuit of this practice. That\u0026rsquo;s par for the course. The problem is figuring out a way to store collected information so that it\u0026rsquo;s useful later. Here\u0026rsquo;s a story:\nI have a story that imagines a future where there are colonies and outposts throughout our solar system (among other things). I found myself a few days ago plotting out some details and I realized that I might be imagining a future with not only far flug outposts but also a substantially different system of orbital mechanics. I know about Hohmann transfers and enough about gravity assists, that getting between planets in the solar system is complex.","title":"Fact File and Orbital Mechanics"},{"content":"One of the things that I find a lot when I\u0026rsquo;m seraching the internet for emacs things (or, in the case of my google alert, when emacs stuff on the web finds me.) Are people writing blog posts that are along the lines of, \u0026ldquo;so I was playing around with emacs weblogger mode\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Which is pretty much what this is.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been toying with the idea of switching to a git-based blogging platform/site generator, that would be much more slim than my current tool, which (though I love it, and recomend it to other people regularly) doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to fit my workflow particularly well. Since leaving the (wonderful) TextMate blogging bundle behind, I\u0026rsquo;ve been in search of a blogging tool\u0026hellip; and, well, I\u0026rsquo;m still looking.\nWhen I find it, I assure you that you\u0026rsquo;ll be the first to know.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/emacs-blogging-me-too-forward-directions/","summary":"One of the things that I find a lot when I\u0026rsquo;m seraching the internet for emacs things (or, in the case of my google alert, when emacs stuff on the web finds me.) Are people writing blog posts that are along the lines of, \u0026ldquo;so I was playing around with emacs weblogger mode\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Which is pretty much what this is.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been toying with the idea of switching to a git-based blogging platform/site generator, that would be much more slim than my current tool, which (though I love it, and recomend it to other people regularly) doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to fit my workflow particularly well. Since leaving the (wonderful) TextMate blogging bundle behind, I\u0026rsquo;ve been in search of a blogging tool\u0026hellip; and, well, I\u0026rsquo;m still looking.\nWhen I find it, I assure you that you\u0026rsquo;ll be the first to know.","title":"emacs blogging? me too? forward directions..."},{"content":"A few months ago I got a Happy Hacking Keyboard because, hey, I\u0026rsquo;m a writer and a GNU/Linux guy, and I use almost entirely keyboard driven software/desktop environment a good keyboard seems like a reasonable investment..\nSo after a few months, what do I think? The keyboard is great. I don\u0026rsquo;t miss the keys, I like having everything in reach, I like being able to have my tea close and not have to move as far for the mouse when I need it. Additionally, and you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t believe how true this is, but the keys feel so nice to type on. It\u0026rsquo;s nosier, the response is good (not buckling springs good, but quite nice), and I defiantly feel the difference between it and other computers (let alone laptops; I tried to type on a MacBook the other day, and it was quite nearly painful.) If anyone is looking for a new keyboard, this is defiantly one to consider, and if size is an issue, then I (probably) wouldn\u0026rsquo;t consider anything else.\nKeep on typing!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/keyboard-review/","summary":"A few months ago I got a Happy Hacking Keyboard because, hey, I\u0026rsquo;m a writer and a GNU/Linux guy, and I use almost entirely keyboard driven software/desktop environment a good keyboard seems like a reasonable investment..\nSo after a few months, what do I think? The keyboard is great. I don\u0026rsquo;t miss the keys, I like having everything in reach, I like being able to have my tea close and not have to move as far for the mouse when I need it. Additionally, and you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t believe how true this is, but the keys feel so nice to type on. It\u0026rsquo;s nosier, the response is good (not buckling springs good, but quite nice), and I defiantly feel the difference between it and other computers (let alone laptops; I tried to type on a MacBook the other day, and it was quite nearly painful.) If anyone is looking for a new keyboard, this is defiantly one to consider, and if size is an issue, then I (probably) wouldn\u0026rsquo;t consider anything else.","title":"keyboard review"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been tweaking the site for a few weeks off and on. Busy schedule and what not. A while back I made a list of things that needed to change: updated links, clearer sidebar, better system for the \u0026ldquo;mini blog\u0026rdquo; (coda), and different interior page designs, and every few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve gone through and changed something, until now, when I think I\u0026rsquo;ve done enough to warrant a small post about these changes.\nIn the right column I took all the menus and put them in little \u0026ldquo;JavaScript\u0026rdquo; toggles, so that they take up much less room, but when you click on one of the links in the \u0026ldquo;menu box\u0026rdquo; above the menus expand for your viewing pleasure. I also did some cleaning up of the links list, and have expanded the list of sites that I\u0026rsquo;m linking to. I like giving the \u0026ldquo;real content,\u0026rdquo; a lot more attention, while still keeping all the \u0026ldquo;sidebar\u0026rdquo; content accessible when possible.\nThe second big part of this revamp was to create a more customized \u0026ldquo;home page\u0026rdquo; for the site that displayed content productively and clearly, without and endless overload of content that word-press can provide if you\u0026rsquo;re a) wordy like me; b) not careful. Basically I now have a bunch of custom \u0026ldquo;loops/queries\u0026rdquo; to pull the right kind of content onto the home page, and I can append \u0026ldquo;recent articles\u0026rdquo; lists, to provide access to the content without displaying all of it. On the essays, I even use a toggle script for a couple of entries for some added punch.\nThe final piece--this last weekends work--has been to change the \u0026ldquo;interior\u0026rdquo; page so that when you go to see a specific article the page is much less cluttered. I\u0026rsquo;ve also started using disqus for comments, and with some CSS magic I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten pretty satisfied with how this works. I really like having unique interior pages.\nIf something doesn\u0026rsquo;t work on your browser, or you have additional suggestions, I\u0026rsquo;m all ears. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/site-revisions/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been tweaking the site for a few weeks off and on. Busy schedule and what not. A while back I made a list of things that needed to change: updated links, clearer sidebar, better system for the \u0026ldquo;mini blog\u0026rdquo; (coda), and different interior page designs, and every few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve gone through and changed something, until now, when I think I\u0026rsquo;ve done enough to warrant a small post about these changes.\nIn the right column I took all the menus and put them in little \u0026ldquo;JavaScript\u0026rdquo; toggles, so that they take up much less room, but when you click on one of the links in the \u0026ldquo;menu box\u0026rdquo; above the menus expand for your viewing pleasure. I also did some cleaning up of the links list, and have expanded the list of sites that I\u0026rsquo;m linking to. I like giving the \u0026ldquo;real content,\u0026rdquo; a lot more attention, while still keeping all the \u0026ldquo;sidebar\u0026rdquo; content accessible when possible.","title":"Site Revisions"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m working on a longer post on the topic, but the past few days have seen me spend a bit of extra attention trying to develop some way of doing a \u0026ldquo;fact file\u0026rdquo; inside of emacs. Basically what I need is some way of storing information (links, quotes, text) along with bibliogrpahic information (where I got it, when I accessed it) and some sort of meta-data (tags, categories, search index) so that I can find things again. Largely, this data isn\u0026rsquo;t for any specific project, but it is a way to record general notes on the information that I consume in an effort to make that data more useable in the future.\nAs I firm up the solution, I\u0026rsquo;ll write more about it, but I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered something about the software targeted at this domain (generally, \u0026ldquo;personal information management,\u0026rdquo;) that\u0026rsquo;s worth sharing: there are a lot of notebooks and databases around, but they\u0026rsquo;re all very much alike: anything that\u0026rsquo;s structured as a database is generally desgined to store addresses, contact information and other \u0026ldquo;CRM\u0026rdquo; data, which is nice, but not what I\u0026rsquo;m going for at all. There are also a lot of notebook applications that are modeled on wikis (too unstructured) or outliners (ok, but hierarchical). Interestingly, it seems every kind of personal information management package that isn\u0026rsquo;t an address book (for emacs, but I think this is to some degree generalizable) has grown to a point where it can manage and extrapolate todo-lists from your notes.\nOnce upon a time, emacs itself was critiqued (and still is) because it has the ability to send and recieve email, and that this feature (email sending) was a sign of \u0026ldquo;feature bloat,\u0026rdquo; becasue after all, sending email with a text editor. That\u0026rsquo;s a bit a field. I\u0026rsquo;ll let you decide how history has dealt with the email issue. I in the mean time am going to write, and figure out some way of doing a better job with this information.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/todo-list-bloat/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m working on a longer post on the topic, but the past few days have seen me spend a bit of extra attention trying to develop some way of doing a \u0026ldquo;fact file\u0026rdquo; inside of emacs. Basically what I need is some way of storing information (links, quotes, text) along with bibliogrpahic information (where I got it, when I accessed it) and some sort of meta-data (tags, categories, search index) so that I can find things again. Largely, this data isn\u0026rsquo;t for any specific project, but it is a way to record general notes on the information that I consume in an effort to make that data more useable in the future.\nAs I firm up the solution, I\u0026rsquo;ll write more about it, but I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered something about the software targeted at this domain (generally, \u0026ldquo;personal information management,\u0026rdquo;) that\u0026rsquo;s worth sharing: there are a lot of notebooks and databases around, but they\u0026rsquo;re all very much alike: anything that\u0026rsquo;s structured as a database is generally desgined to store addresses, contact information and other \u0026ldquo;CRM\u0026rdquo; data, which is nice, but not what I\u0026rsquo;m going for at all.","title":"Todo List Bloat"},{"content":"I knew I said that I\u0026rsquo;d post coda things now that I\u0026rsquo;m going to bi-weekly essays, and today would be the first day of the new order and I\u0026rsquo;ve failed. Alas. Today was spent going glaring at my outline and waiting in doctor\u0026rsquo;s waiting rooms. I did read a really great article from Kristine Kathryn Rusch about recessions, short fiction, and it was pretty inspiring. Go read, and then read some more. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had some interesting twitter and identi.ca conversations about git and emacs, which keeps me entertained at least. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been trying out new RSS readers, as I\u0026rsquo;d really like something that ran locally. Canto seems to be leading the pack, but I have so many feeds at the moment that switching seems onerous, and I need something that I can sync between multiple machines, so the whole switch process gives me shivers. Maybe tomorrow. In the mean time, I think I\u0026rsquo;m ready to get back to writing actual fiction (forward progress) in a day or two, if I can get through one or two more blasted sections of this re-outline; which despite the pain, has been really good for my thinking about the book.\nIf you were wondering, that really is what it\u0026rsquo;s like to be in my head. And you thought that my writing was scatter brained.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/from-the-trenches/","summary":"I knew I said that I\u0026rsquo;d post coda things now that I\u0026rsquo;m going to bi-weekly essays, and today would be the first day of the new order and I\u0026rsquo;ve failed. Alas. Today was spent going glaring at my outline and waiting in doctor\u0026rsquo;s waiting rooms. I did read a really great article from Kristine Kathryn Rusch about recessions, short fiction, and it was pretty inspiring. Go read, and then read some more. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had some interesting twitter and identi.ca conversations about git and emacs, which keeps me entertained at least. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been trying out new RSS readers, as I\u0026rsquo;d really like something that ran locally. Canto seems to be leading the pack, but I have so many feeds at the moment that switching seems onerous, and I need something that I can sync between multiple machines, so the whole switch process gives me shivers. Maybe tomorrow. In the mean time, I think I\u0026rsquo;m ready to get back to writing actual fiction (forward progress) in a day or two, if I can get through one or two more blasted sections of this re-outline; which despite the pain, has been really good for my thinking about the book.","title":"from the trenches"},{"content":"Before I started to write this article I heard two pieces of news. First, that the economy of Latvia had failed as part of the ongoing depression. Second, that the American Government was going to provide subsidies to hedge funds (!) to promote a revival of the financial services industry. The mind boggles, to very different degrees at both of these stories. Like this whole depression, it seems clear that the core issue is that economies based on inauthentic exchange of value are prone to failure: the act of moving money from hither to thither doesn\u0026rsquo;t create value, even though paper values rise. That\u0026rsquo;s a bubble.\nThere are a lot of these, of course, the bubble under my lens today is the advertising bubble.\nIt seems to me that advertising, is really minimally effective, or accidentally effective at any rate. Our world is submerged in advertising, and yet we spend a great deal of time ignoring it: we use DVRs to skip commercials, we install ad-blocking plug-ins on our web-browsers, we instinctively tune out advertisements and have grown so acclimated to the presence of advertising that we ignore ads. If advertising is effective it is only effective incidentally.\nAnd yet, we\u0026rsquo;ve built (albeit faltering) economies around advertising. The first dot-com burst was due largely to the fact that advertising revenue couldn\u0026rsquo;t support dot-com business model. The Web-2.0 bubble hasn\u0026rsquo;t been entirely advertising driven, but that\u0026rsquo;s a huge part of the equation (eg. google), and particularly for content (rather than service) driven websites.\nThe thing is that advertising seems like a great way to support the content industry (such as it is): we have practices to separate it from editorial content, it provides a revenue stream, it\u0026rsquo;s easily integrated into our designs, we know how to buy and sell it. But because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really work (at anything beyond generally raising the profile of a logo, possibly), and advertising money dries up when the economy dries up: so it\u0026rsquo;s not exactly a robust business model.\nThe problem, is that there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of good models for content-based services to operate under. Subscriptions don\u0026rsquo;t often work because the threshold to commitment is high, and unless you already have an audience, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to convince people to pay subscription fees. Micropayments, and tip jars where you expect a lot of people to give a very little in support of your site, often suffer from the same problems as subscription models in practice.\nThe solution?\nWell there isn\u0026rsquo;t one, exactly, so I\u0026rsquo;m really excited to see what happens in the next couple of years. My gut instinct is that the following two factors are important:\n1. Content on the Internet should be a hook into some other revenue generating scheme. Consult, coach, be an academic, publish books, sell relevant stuff, and so forth. This works, it can certainly be overdone, or done poorly, but blogging is a great way to prove to the world (and yourself) that you know what you\u0026rsquo;re talking about, and that you\u0026rsquo;re an interesting, creative, and committed thinker and worker, worthy of their investment in other contexts.\n2. There should be less content on the Internet. Part of the problem is that since everyone can have their own website, in most cases everyone does, and while this is great for the democracy of the web, it means that there\u0026rsquo;s way more competition (for eyeballs, for advertising money) than there needs to be. The end result is that audience is way too divided. The solution: group blogs and more curated content. It\u0026rsquo;s still possible for people to present individual streams of content, and use personal sites for profiles, but in the age of the niche and the post-advertising age, working in groups is the way. I\u0026rsquo;m convinced.\nMore thoughts on this, particularly the second point to follow, of course.\nOnward and Outward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-advertising-bubble/","summary":"Before I started to write this article I heard two pieces of news. First, that the economy of Latvia had failed as part of the ongoing depression. Second, that the American Government was going to provide subsidies to hedge funds (!) to promote a revival of the financial services industry. The mind boggles, to very different degrees at both of these stories. Like this whole depression, it seems clear that the core issue is that economies based on inauthentic exchange of value are prone to failure: the act of moving money from hither to thither doesn\u0026rsquo;t create value, even though paper values rise. That\u0026rsquo;s a bubble.\nThere are a lot of these, of course, the bubble under my lens today is the advertising bubble.\nIt seems to me that advertising, is really minimally effective, or accidentally effective at any rate. Our world is submerged in advertising, and yet we spend a great deal of time ignoring it: we use DVRs to skip commercials, we install ad-blocking plug-ins on our web-browsers, we instinctively tune out advertisements and have grown so acclimated to the presence of advertising that we ignore ads.","title":"The Advertising Bubble"},{"content":"Dear Readers,\nI\u0026rsquo;m both really excited and really scared of this change that I\u0026rsquo;m going to announce in this post. From my journal entry, you can probably tell that I\u0026rsquo;ve been busy and having something of a rough time. I\u0026rsquo;m coping, and I\u0026rsquo;m not writing this as a plea of any sort, just it\u0026rsquo;s been\u0026hellip; interesting. I\u0026rsquo;ve been sort of distracted, and running back and forth between my home town and where my grandmother is (3.5 hours away) a lot, and a thousand other things.\nOne thing, of note is that today (by your clock) is the 9th Yarzeit of my grandfather\u0026rsquo;s death, which is hitting me a bit harder than it has in years past. Yeah. Weird. I don\u0026rsquo;t know what else to say.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve done some tweaking to the site including some cool JavaScript visibility toggles. I\u0026rsquo;m still using Wordpress, because I\u0026rsquo;m still making pretty heavy use of the post scheduling, and there are other projects that demand my attention. Someday soon. My intention with the design changes is to make the content a bit more prominent and minimize menus as much as possible. Because content is important and menus are boring. (Really, I get paid to help people with the internet. Amazing.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m also going to change my publishing schedule.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to post essays, in the form that you\u0026rsquo;ve grown accustomed to on Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s and Thursdays, and then, try and post something to coda once or twice a day on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday\u0026rsquo;s. I\u0026rsquo;m reading a lot of other blogs, and I feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten worse about referencing some of the really cool stuff I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading. And I\u0026rsquo;d like to concentrate on writing for other projects, getting Critical Futures (also redesigned) back on it\u0026rsquo;s feet. If you read the site via the feed coda posts and essay posts all look the same. Notifications for all posts make it onto twitter and identi.ca, and I bet that despite the change the amount of content in general is going to be about the same. It\u0026rsquo;s just a different mindset, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s what I need the most at the moment. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how it works.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also, in recent times taken to modifying the way the home page renders, so that there are only a few entries on the home page, and lists of \u0026ldquo;recent entries,\u0026rdquo; in both essay and coda categories. I might do a bit more tweaking here, but the general template with \u0026ldquo;less stuff on any given page\u0026rdquo; and links to other content, satisfies my desire for minimalism and a wealth of content. Note to self: write a post about the \u0026ldquo;blog\u0026rdquo; trope and the amount of content on pages.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about all I have for you this time. Thanks for reading, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be back tomorrow with some sort of an essay.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pace-changing/","summary":"Dear Readers,\nI\u0026rsquo;m both really excited and really scared of this change that I\u0026rsquo;m going to announce in this post. From my journal entry, you can probably tell that I\u0026rsquo;ve been busy and having something of a rough time. I\u0026rsquo;m coping, and I\u0026rsquo;m not writing this as a plea of any sort, just it\u0026rsquo;s been\u0026hellip; interesting. I\u0026rsquo;ve been sort of distracted, and running back and forth between my home town and where my grandmother is (3.5 hours away) a lot, and a thousand other things.\nOne thing, of note is that today (by your clock) is the 9th Yarzeit of my grandfather\u0026rsquo;s death, which is hitting me a bit harder than it has in years past. Yeah. Weird. I don\u0026rsquo;t know what else to say.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve done some tweaking to the site including some cool JavaScript visibility toggles. I\u0026rsquo;m still using Wordpress, because I\u0026rsquo;m still making pretty heavy use of the post scheduling, and there are other projects that demand my attention.","title":"Pace Changing"},{"content":"Lets put this in the category of \u0026ldquo;tycho writing about software development in an attempt to draw a conclusion beyond software development.\u0026rdquo; Often I find this to be an annoying impulse as, software can be meaningful in and of itself and it\u0026rsquo;s practices aren\u0026rsquo;t always incredibly relevant. On the other hand, most of my work is (at least theoretically) not software, so I find myself doing this kind of thing more than I\u0026rsquo;d really like. So be it.\nAgile Development refers to a set of practices that encourages developers to review their progress regularly, to write code in testable units, to consult with the client regularly to allow the client to lead the design process to reflect the reality that requirements, contexts, and possibilities change as a result of the ongoing development process. Extreme Programing (XP), is probably the most famous subset of Agile Development, and I think both are interesting (and popular) because they promote a kind of flexibility and respond to (and draws from) the creative impulse. XP takes the iterative/test driven Agile philosophy and does \u0026ldquo;wacky\u0026rdquo; things like \u0026ldquo;pair programming\u0026rdquo; where two developers take turns typing and monitoring the coding process. I\u0026rsquo;ve of course, not really, worked in these situations, but I am fascinated by the possibilities.\nI often think about the implications of these kinds of methodologies on the work I do (writing). I have yet to be convinced that this is an entirely productive impulse, but that never stops me.\nThe key feature of Agile development--to my mind--is that it\u0026rsquo;s built around multiple iterations. Rather than concentrating on getting all of the details right, the goal is to get something working, and then expand/refactor/revise and get review on all these iterations, so that through successive iteration you have a solid, relevant, and sturdy result. Once you have iterations, getting customer review is easier (because there\u0026rsquo;s something to evaluate), testing is easier, collaboration is easier.\nWriters already have a sense of drafts, and as such this is the way we always work. In another sense, we don\u0026rsquo;t seek feedback on most drafts, and so while we might revise in a couple of \u0026ldquo;lumps\u0026rdquo; we editorial collaboration is pretty minimal during the writing process. That\u0026rsquo;s not a bad thing, just a commentary on the analogy. Writing collaboratively is also damned hard, and so collaborations are more often based on structural divisions (eg. \u0026ldquo;you write parts one, four, five, and seven; and I\u0026rsquo;ll write two, three, six, and eight,\u0026rdquo;) or in larger groups, require dedicated editorial nodes/contributors to organize logistics.\nTrue story: I wrote an academic paper with someones (we lived next door to each other at the time) and as I remember, we tended to do something very much like \u0026ldquo;pair programming,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;d drive (type) and she\u0026rsquo;d navigate (read over my shoulder,) or she\u0026rsquo;d type and I\u0026rsquo;d pace, though I think I tended toward the typing roll for any number of reasons. It worked, but we had (and have) such different approaches to writing, thinking about that sort of boggles.\nIn another sense, posting rough drafts of works on the Internet (critical futures; Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s Podcast; sam starbuck\u0026rsquo;s projects; etc.) is another way to get the kind of on going feedback that features so prominently in the Agile/XP methodologies.\nThe truth is that I had expected to talk about how programming and writing are fundamentally different, and how while Agile and XP are really powerful ways to think about the creation of programs, the creation of novels, stories, and essays can\u0026rsquo;t work that way.\nWhile I was able to find some parallels, and examples to the contrary, there are so many features of the way that I write, the way that I create, that run quite counter to the \u0026ldquo;agile way:\u0026rdquo;\nI don\u0026rsquo;t do iterative drafting very well. I write something, I run through it twice, someone else gives feedback, I run through it once more, and it\u0026rsquo;s either good enough to do something with at that point, or I abandon it. We mysticsize the creative process, particularly for \u0026ldquo;artistic\u0026rdquo; creation. I don\u0026rsquo;t particularly think of myself as an artist, but I think regardless, because we\u0026rsquo;re not very good at articulating our creative process (and generally unwilling to change the way we work, much), there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of willingness to change how we write. Collaboration is a challenge because of the aforementioned mysticism, and because individuals are capable of (in most cases) writing the long-forms by themselves (novels, screenplays) collaboration isn\u0026rsquo;t a vital necessity. The counter-example would be what happens in the writing rooms of television shows, I suppose, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t worked in these situations. Not that I\u0026rsquo;d be opposed, if someone wanted to hire me to do that ;). Writers make their money (at least as we\u0026rsquo;re taught to think) by selling publication rights. Iterative work requires frequent publication, which discourages working in this way. Obviously there are some other business models, and other kinds of writing, but generally speaking\u0026hellip; Writing this has inspired me to move more in the direction of posting to Critical Futures again, and to work harder on collaboration projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve been stuck in my own writing, as life and an iterative hump have combined to really take me out of the game for a while. While I doubt any change in methodology could really make me slightly less linear, it is helpful to think about process in new and different ways. In point of fact, everyone works eclectically anyway, but just thinking about how we/I work has some worth. That much I\u0026rsquo;m sure.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/agile-writing/","summary":"Lets put this in the category of \u0026ldquo;tycho writing about software development in an attempt to draw a conclusion beyond software development.\u0026rdquo; Often I find this to be an annoying impulse as, software can be meaningful in and of itself and it\u0026rsquo;s practices aren\u0026rsquo;t always incredibly relevant. On the other hand, most of my work is (at least theoretically) not software, so I find myself doing this kind of thing more than I\u0026rsquo;d really like. So be it.\nAgile Development refers to a set of practices that encourages developers to review their progress regularly, to write code in testable units, to consult with the client regularly to allow the client to lead the design process to reflect the reality that requirements, contexts, and possibilities change as a result of the ongoing development process. Extreme Programing (XP), is probably the most famous subset of Agile Development, and I think both are interesting (and popular) because they promote a kind of flexibility and respond to (and draws from) the creative impulse.","title":"Agile Writing"},{"content":"So I get a Google alert in my RSS reader for \u0026ldquo;emacs,\u0026rdquo; this way when anyone mentions that operating system text editor on the Internet, I know.\nI did it, initially, as a gimmick. The interesting thing, is that it\u0026rsquo;s been really interesting. In the grand scheme of things, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty new to emacs so I\u0026rsquo;m like a sponge for new information. I\u0026rsquo;ve learned, chiefly, about emacs-fu, which is a delightful little blog.\nPerhaps more interesting is the fact that fully half of the sites that pop up on the emacs alert are sites that I\u0026rsquo;m already familiar with, or worse (better?) things that I\u0026rsquo;ve written. This leads me to think that the active discussion/community regarding emacs is actually pretty small, in a day to day sort of way.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s possible that most people who use emacs don\u0026rsquo;t feel the need to really talk about it, but given how vehemently many people feel about emacs that doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem terribly likely. It\u0026rsquo;s also possible that emacs\u0026rsquo; niche is shrinking in the face of competition from the Java IDEs, TextMate, and Firefox.\nAnother theory is that most of the conversation regarding emacs happens on the emacswiki, and that the sort of \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s a protip, about emacs,\u0026rdquo; is too much of a niche, and not the kind of thing that\u0026rsquo;s really appreciated, so the blogging happens here and there. Or\u0026hellip; no one\u0026rsquo;s doing search engine gaming/hacking (SEG? SEH?) on emacs, so the alert isn\u0026rsquo;t clogged up with crap from dweebs and industry.\nIn whatever case, it\u0026rsquo;s interesting. Or interesting enough.\nOnward and Upward!\n(ps. sorry for the short post and the weird schedule this week. Next week should be better. --ty)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-emacs-alert/","summary":"So I get a Google alert in my RSS reader for \u0026ldquo;emacs,\u0026rdquo; this way when anyone mentions that operating system text editor on the Internet, I know.\nI did it, initially, as a gimmick. The interesting thing, is that it\u0026rsquo;s been really interesting. In the grand scheme of things, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty new to emacs so I\u0026rsquo;m like a sponge for new information. I\u0026rsquo;ve learned, chiefly, about emacs-fu, which is a delightful little blog.\nPerhaps more interesting is the fact that fully half of the sites that pop up on the emacs alert are sites that I\u0026rsquo;m already familiar with, or worse (better?) things that I\u0026rsquo;ve written. This leads me to think that the active discussion/community regarding emacs is actually pretty small, in a day to day sort of way.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s possible that most people who use emacs don\u0026rsquo;t feel the need to really talk about it, but given how vehemently many people feel about emacs that doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem terribly likely.","title":"The Emacs Alert"},{"content":"I recently read the anti-web manifesto, which I found refreshing. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t read it, go do so. If your too lazy to read it, the gist is that we\u0026rsquo;re trying to get the web to do too much (ie. run applications, pixel-perfect layouts) and that quality browsers can\u0026rsquo;t exist, because what we use the web for these days is beyond the scope of what the web was intended to do. The document is also refreshingly snarky, in the long tradition of both hacker writing and the genre of manifestos in general, but don\u0026rsquo;t let that offend.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been known to say, \u0026ldquo;I hate the web,\u0026rdquo; which is an ironic thing to say given my line of work, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s mostly true. To be fair, I don\u0026rsquo;t hate the web, I just hate what it\u0026rsquo;s become: the only way to access what happens on the Internet. It\u0026rsquo;s great for publishing and accessing content, but for applications? Somewhat less great.\nThe Manifesto centers on the notion that the perfect web-browser is impossible to implement: Browsers have to implement inefficient scripting languages, and multiple implementations of the various web standards (because you have to implements both \u0026ldquo;how it should be done,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;how the old, broken implementations that everyone wrote pages to, did it,\u0026rdquo; with the end result being that browsers themselves suck. And it\u0026rsquo;s not a case of just writing the perfect browser because, current expectations of the technology is flawed.\nThe course of action (theses?) are to:\nEliminate CSS; use a little basic HTML formatting instead. Let the text stay in its natural format. Only basic font faces ([sans]serif, monospace), relative sizes to be supported. Eliminate scripting. Separate information from empty multimedia content: use Flash for the latter. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I agree with this solution. I think HTML 5 will take care of the multimedia content, and I think flash should be avoided. I think scripting should be the first causality of the post-web Internet. I don\u0026rsquo;t see CSS as a problem, (the author sees it as a symptom of design orientation in website creation), though I\u0026rsquo;d concede that it\u0026rsquo;s used improperly most of the time.\nGiven this, I think four bullet points from tycho regarding \u0026ldquo;The \u0026lsquo;Post-Web\u0026rsquo; Web\u0026rdquo; are in order:\nEliminate JavaScript and all scripting in web-environments. JavaScript is the table of the \u0026lsquo;aughts and \u0026rsquo;teens. Develop/concentrate efforts on alternate (ie. non HTTP) protocols to facilitate the movement of dynamic information across the Internet, including well implemented clients. Develop robust/lightweight cross platform frameworks for developing applications on the desktop. Where\u0026rsquo;s GTK-on-Rails? Write a HTTP server that provides navigational meta-data automatically with pages, and a browser with the ability to construct site navigation based on this information. This way the architecture of the site depends on the file layout and a configured file, but is generated locally. Basically gopher, except designed in the casual manner of the \u0026lsquo;aughts. Any takers?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/scripting-on-the-internet/","summary":"I recently read the anti-web manifesto, which I found refreshing. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t read it, go do so. If your too lazy to read it, the gist is that we\u0026rsquo;re trying to get the web to do too much (ie. run applications, pixel-perfect layouts) and that quality browsers can\u0026rsquo;t exist, because what we use the web for these days is beyond the scope of what the web was intended to do. The document is also refreshingly snarky, in the long tradition of both hacker writing and the genre of manifestos in general, but don\u0026rsquo;t let that offend.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been known to say, \u0026ldquo;I hate the web,\u0026rdquo; which is an ironic thing to say given my line of work, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s mostly true. To be fair, I don\u0026rsquo;t hate the web, I just hate what it\u0026rsquo;s become: the only way to access what happens on the Internet. It\u0026rsquo;s great for publishing and accessing content, but for applications?","title":"Scripting on the Internet"},{"content":"Ok, I\u0026rsquo;ve not done a \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; post n a while, and I think one is long due. It\u0026rsquo;s been a wild week (or two) in the life of tycho, and I think without the opportunity to parse through some recent events:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ve been ferrying back between home and my grandmother\u0026rsquo;s about twice a week for, what seems like a few weeks. Everything is fine, and she\u0026rsquo;s doing very well (and reading the blog again! everyone say hi!), but it\u0026rsquo;s jarring if nothing else. I think I\u0026rsquo;m home for the better part of a week this time, and I\u0026rsquo;m slipping back into getting things done. Though, being home (and ready to leave) isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly restful, particularly when so many things need doing at home. So many things.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;ve not been writing very much. All the unsettledness seems to mean that I\u0026rsquo;m a total mess. I\u0026rsquo;ve written (and semi-abandoned) lots of blog posts, which never take that much concentration usually. I\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of reoutlining the novel project and have been on hiatus with that as a result. I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that a couple of hours should be able to get me back on to track with that, and jump starting that project will help revive my flagging conentration/focus.\n3. I finished the shawl for my grandmother (I might have mentioned that) and have started working on another shawl. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of lace in my future, but I do want to knit sweaters more/again. The good news is that I\u0026rsquo;m actually knitting stuff. So \u0026ldquo;woot!\u0026rdquo; for a project that isn\u0026rsquo;t really going by the wayside.\n4. I\u0026rsquo;m not, as I thought, going to Drupal Con. Given all of my travels and responsibilities here, it just wasn\u0026rsquo;t feasible. I\u0026rsquo;m disappointed, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure it was the right thing, as taking one of the balls out of the air lead to no small amount of relief.\n5. I\u0026rsquo;m finally reading at a pace that I find acceptable. I\u0026rsquo;ll write a post about this at some point, but I\u0026rsquo;ve finally managed to figure out a way to prioritize reading in a way that lets me get it done. My pile hasn\u0026rsquo;t started to dwindle very much, but I can imagine that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to make progress. I\u0026rsquo;m also finally into new territory with the Robinson \u0026ldquo;Mars books\u0026rdquo; and am enjoying it. There\u0026rsquo;s something very similar about the way we approach a story that I really like, and a lot of things that he (not surprisingly) pulls off much more effectively than I am. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\n6. While I switched to brewing tea loosely many months ago, these days I\u0026rsquo;m not using any fancy brew pots, opting for more traditional infusers and strainers, which seem easier to manage. I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that I need some sort of thermos (as my 16 oz. travel mug isn\u0026rsquo;t enough for a morning out.) and I\u0026rsquo;d like to get a 40 oz tea pot with a built in strainer/doodad, but I\u0026rsquo;m good for now unless I see a deal that can\u0026rsquo;t be missed.\n7. Battlestar Galactica continues to boggle my mind in a good way. I continue to be really impressed with how the story progresses, the kind of science fiction that they\u0026rsquo;re doing, and the quality of everything. I\u0026rsquo;m, typically, a bit sad about the end, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been hording and watching in 2-3 episode chunks, but I think in the long run it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that the show is going out on such a good note, and I think seeing (parts?) of the production team go in to do different things will be much more powerful than getting another couple of seasons of BSG as we know it now. As much as I hate to admit that.\n8. I did some things along the lines of reconfiguring my blackberry, to reprogram some of the buttons along the side, and I\u0026rsquo;ve started to use a private emaill address that I set up to take notes on the fly. I should probably begin to figure out how to do some sort of procmail filtering something or other to get these notes into something in my org-mode files. Later. In general, I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with how the phone is working out, even if I still need to get the music/ring tone situation sorted out, but I\u0026rsquo;m lazy.\n9. I\u0026rsquo;ve been, as I can, going for long-ish walks every day. I\u0026rsquo;ll write about this, eventually, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s been really good for clearing my mind and working. It\u0026rsquo;ll also be nice to be in a little better shape before the dancing season really picks up: stamina and all. If I can convince myself that this is a habit worth keeping, and I buy tennis shoes (for the first time in\u0026hellip; ten or 12 years, yay for boots and clogs.) I\u0026rsquo;m considering joining a gym, in hopes of being able to do weight stuff and being able to do lower impact aerobic stuff. As a skinny geek, whose been moderately active (dancing) heretofore, this whole exercise thing is quite strange and intimidating. There\u0026rsquo;s all kind of stuff that I don\u0026rsquo;t know at all. Very strange.\n10. I\u0026rsquo;m rejigging my family\u0026rsquo;s computers this week. I tried to explain what needs to be done, but failed. Basically what I need to do centers around: copying a lot of stuff off of a computer, getting ipod syncing working with linux, and then figuring out a creative solution for getting either getting the audio signal from the office, to the living room without wires, or getting the network to a computer that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have wireless. Additional challenges include: remote control of the jukebox machine player using laptops/cellphones (proto home automation), and possibilities for podcast fetching that don\u0026rsquo;t necessarily involve the ipod software (thinking about using my phone for this). Thoughts on any of these issues would be great.\nSorry for the eccentricity of this post, and my posting this week, I\u0026rsquo;m almost back on track.\nOutward and Onward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/journal-entry/","summary":"Ok, I\u0026rsquo;ve not done a \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; post n a while, and I think one is long due. It\u0026rsquo;s been a wild week (or two) in the life of tycho, and I think without the opportunity to parse through some recent events:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ve been ferrying back between home and my grandmother\u0026rsquo;s about twice a week for, what seems like a few weeks. Everything is fine, and she\u0026rsquo;s doing very well (and reading the blog again! everyone say hi!), but it\u0026rsquo;s jarring if nothing else. I think I\u0026rsquo;m home for the better part of a week this time, and I\u0026rsquo;m slipping back into getting things done. Though, being home (and ready to leave) isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly restful, particularly when so many things need doing at home. So many things.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;ve not been writing very much. All the unsettledness seems to mean that I\u0026rsquo;m a total mess. I\u0026rsquo;ve written (and semi-abandoned) lots of blog posts, which never take that much concentration usually.","title":"Journal Entry"},{"content":"Wordpress is great software, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been a user for many years. Many years. It used to be called \u0026ldquo;b2\u0026rdquo; and I used it then as well. There are a lot of more powerful content management systems, a lot of systems that are much more flexible than wordpress these days, and often I get the feeling that other platforms attempt to define themselves in contrast to wordpress. In the larger sense, this post is an attempt to resist this temptation while also exploring the limitations of wordpress.\nWordpress is a pure blogging engine: it provides interfaces for writers to publish weblogs (blogs), manage content (to some degree) and generate pages based on templates. Before wordpress, blogging was done either by hand edited text files, or by systems that complied static HTML from some sort of database.1 Wordpress is an improvement because it\u0026rsquo;s easy to install, it\u0026rsquo;s reliable, and pages generate dynamically on viewing, rather than just when the site owner hits \u0026ldquo;save\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;rebuild.\u0026rdquo; In the end, we discovered that systems where managing \u0026ldquo;websites\u0026rdquo; was divorced from (even simple) server management had a great democratizing effect on content, and that\u0026rsquo;s sort of the core of wordpress.\nBecause wordpress is designed to be a blogging platform, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be as flexible as other generalized content management systems. Flexibility comes at the cost of complexity, and developers decided that in some cases, less was, in fact, more. There are a lot of things that you could do with b2 (albeit with some hacking) because the site generation/templating system was much less rigid, at the same time, it was much easier to get sites with broken links, and bad pages, particularly as you changed from theme to theme. That\u0026rsquo;s bad, and it seems pretty reasonable to me to want to avoid that.\nThe end result is a program that does almost everything you could want it to do as long as you only want a blog, if you try and stretch it too far it simply won\u0026rsquo;t work. Well it will work, but the advantage of using Wordpress to manage a website that isn\u0026rsquo;t a blog (or very similar to one) disappears quickly when you have to impose informal limitations on how you enter content in the system to generate well formated pages. It\u0026rsquo;s a slippery slope, and you\u0026rsquo;d be surprised how quickly a site goes from being a standard Wordpress site, to requiring customized themes, specialized content entry patterns. And pretty soon, a lot of the things that make Wordpress \u0026ldquo;simple\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;essay,\u0026rdquo; aren\u0026rsquo;t really available to your new site. That\u0026rsquo;s the limitation of Wordpress.\nKnowing where the line is, is often the largest challenge in Wordpress development, and being able to say, \u0026ldquo;you know, this is the kind of site that you really want to be building with Django, or Drupal, or Rails, or Expression Engine,\u0026rdquo; Or even saying \u0026ldquo;you know this is the kind of site that we could probably do more effectively using flat files and PHP includes. Wordpress is great, and in the cases where it\u0026rsquo;s well suited to the task at hand, it\u0026rsquo;s the ideal solution. In other situations? Less so.\nOnward and Upward!\nInterestingly, this whole \u0026ldquo;static site compiling\u0026rdquo; is making a come back, because it turns out that dynamic page generation doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale as well as we thought it would five or six years ago. So we have static site compilers and complex caching tools. What comes around, goes around I guess.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wordpress-limitations/","summary":"Wordpress is great software, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been a user for many years. Many years. It used to be called \u0026ldquo;b2\u0026rdquo; and I used it then as well. There are a lot of more powerful content management systems, a lot of systems that are much more flexible than wordpress these days, and often I get the feeling that other platforms attempt to define themselves in contrast to wordpress. In the larger sense, this post is an attempt to resist this temptation while also exploring the limitations of wordpress.\nWordpress is a pure blogging engine: it provides interfaces for writers to publish weblogs (blogs), manage content (to some degree) and generate pages based on templates. Before wordpress, blogging was done either by hand edited text files, or by systems that complied static HTML from some sort of database.1 Wordpress is an improvement because it\u0026rsquo;s easy to install, it\u0026rsquo;s reliable, and pages generate dynamically on viewing, rather than just when the site owner hits \u0026ldquo;save\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;rebuild.","title":"Wordpress Limitations"},{"content":"A few weeks ago, a friend told me about this IDE (integrated development environment) called PIDA, and while I\u0026rsquo;m nothing more than a casual programmer, my interest was immediately piqued.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll call it part of my interest in how programmers work. The truth is, as a text-editor junkie, my impulse is to say \u0026ldquo;meh, IDEs are passe,\u0026rdquo; but I think that\u0026rsquo;s probably unfair, and in my writing IDE post I think I recognized--by analogy--their worth. In any-case there\u0026rsquo;s something sort of nifty about PIDA: rather than recreate tools, it just makes use of what\u0026rsquo;s already there: the editor is emacs (or vim), the version control system is whatever you want (and already use). PIDA just brings all these things together in a nifty little package.\nOn the one hand, it\u0026rsquo;s not a really big deal. Cobbling together working software from a bunch of different existing tools isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly new. This is sort of the basis of unix-like computing, and further more it tracks the ways most people/geeks actually use computers: by finding the best tools for all of the jobs they have to do and then using them. This way of interacting seems to hold true for command-line and graphical users, I think. So rather than recreate the wheel, PIDA just uses all the existing wheels. The saddest part is that we don\u0026rsquo;t see more things like this in the graphical application world.\nThe end result of this mode of application development is that we\u0026rsquo;re given/build powerful tools that function in familiar ways and that are more powerful as a result of their integrations.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s about it.\nI initially thought that this was going to be a really long and really blathering post about integrated tools, and the power of open source/free software to allow tools to be combined rather than be forced to compete. While these are indeed important issues, they\u0026rsquo;re pretty self explanatory, and IDEs like PIDA provide a great example of how this can be the case, so much so that I find myself saying \u0026ldquo;why aren\u0026rsquo;t there more programs like this?\u0026rdquo;\nWhy not indeed?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pida/","summary":"A few weeks ago, a friend told me about this IDE (integrated development environment) called PIDA, and while I\u0026rsquo;m nothing more than a casual programmer, my interest was immediately piqued.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll call it part of my interest in how programmers work. The truth is, as a text-editor junkie, my impulse is to say \u0026ldquo;meh, IDEs are passe,\u0026rdquo; but I think that\u0026rsquo;s probably unfair, and in my writing IDE post I think I recognized--by analogy--their worth. In any-case there\u0026rsquo;s something sort of nifty about PIDA: rather than recreate tools, it just makes use of what\u0026rsquo;s already there: the editor is emacs (or vim), the version control system is whatever you want (and already use). PIDA just brings all these things together in a nifty little package.\nOn the one hand, it\u0026rsquo;s not a really big deal. Cobbling together working software from a bunch of different existing tools isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly new. This is sort of the basis of unix-like computing, and further more it tracks the ways most people/geeks actually use computers: by finding the best tools for all of the jobs they have to do and then using them.","title":"PIDA"},{"content":"I wrote in my post on the one true system about the informal systems that we use to interface the way we interact with knowledge and information in the \u0026ldquo;real world\u0026rdquo; with the way we represent that information on our computers. Exploring these systems lay at the core of the cyborg question, but today\u0026rsquo;s essay1 is more about how our logic systems adapt as we use computers and as the kinds of information we need to store change and grow.\nAs near as I can tell there are a few kinds of \u0026ldquo;systems review\u0026rdquo; that we tend to do. Theoretically if you develop a system that\u0026rsquo;s flexible and that accounts for all of your future information needs, then you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have to modify your system very much. Theoretically this is a good thing: better to spend time \u0026ldquo;doing things,\u0026rdquo; rather than thinking about \u0026ldquo;how you\u0026rsquo;re going to do things.\u0026rdquo;\nThe sad truth is that this doesn\u0026rsquo;t work out very well pragmatically: we change our work habits, and our information changes, and our projects change, and our informal logic for interacting with our computers fails to address the problems, and eventually everything spirals out of control. This is pretty abstract, but every time you see someone with hundreds of icons stacked on your (or someone else\u0026rsquo;s) desktop, or you find yourself with hundreds of unsorted (and unread!) email messages, or you have to hunt through half a dozen places for a PDF you are witnessing the symptoms of a flawed system.\nThe only way to address this is to review your \u0026ldquo;systems,\u0026rdquo; and make sure that you capture any problem before information spirals out of control:\nHave an overflow bin, but only one overflow bin. This is important, but counter intuitive. By overflow bin, I mean something where unfile-able items are placed. This hopefully alleviates the tension to file away information that hasn\u0026rsquo;t been fully processed, or that doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit into your system, or might be ambiguously filed2.\nDo major reviews of your system only infrequently. By major review, I mean, think about how you use your information, what has worked, and what hasn\u0026rsquo;t, and then use this as a model for revising your system. Don\u0026rsquo;t do it regularly, even if you know that something isn\u0026rsquo;t working. Think of this as something that you do only about twice as often as you get a new computer. As part of this major review process:\nKeep a regular journal when you aren\u0026rsquo;t in the process of updating procedures. Track about what works and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t. Often I\u0026rsquo;ve found that I have ideas about how things should change, but the changes aren\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that I could reasonably change during normal work. These insights/problems are useful, eventually even if they aren\u0026rsquo;t always immediately relevant. So record them for later.\nDo Minor reviews regularly. Look in the \u0026ldquo;overflow bin\u0026rdquo; from item one and see what\u0026rsquo;s falling through the cracks, file things that do need to be filed. The GTD folks call this a \u0026ldquo;weekly review,\u0026rdquo; and while GTD-task processing is only part of \u0026ldquo;the system.\u0026rdquo;3 It depends on what kind of information you\u0026rsquo;re managing, but staying on top of and in touch with your \u0026ldquo;stuff\u0026rdquo; is important.\nBe sure to \u0026ldquo;touch\u0026rdquo; your information regularly. While I\u0026rsquo;m in favor of keeping information even when it\u0026rsquo;s not apparently useful (you never know), I also agree with the idea that information is only really useful if you use it. I\u0026rsquo;ve often found myself falling into the trap where I\u0026rsquo;ll stockpile stuff \u0026ldquo;to read later,\u0026rdquo; which of course rarely happens. Avoid this and browse from time to time.\nI mean in the end, I\u0026rsquo;m just a guy who writes more than he should, and has a pile of digital information that\u0026rsquo;s probably a bit too big, but this is how I do things, and I think the lessons I\u0026rsquo;ve learned (and continue to learn) may be helpful to some of you. Reviewing and thinking about systems before hand is, if nothing else, instructive.\nOnward and Upward!\nI use the word \u0026ldquo;essay\u0026rdquo; under the terms of its slightly less common meaning \u0026ldquo;to make an attempt,\u0026rdquo; rather than the terms that describe a genre of writing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBorrowing from the Python programing language motto, somewhat, \u0026ldquo;Every bit of information in your system should have one, and ideally only one, obvious location.\u0026rdquo; Now of course, we can categorize information on many different axises, so the key isn\u0026rsquo;t to pound data/information it\u0026rsquo;s to build your system around a consistent axis.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe system, for me, represents everything from the way we store bookmarks on line, to notes that we collect as we work, to tasks and other time-sensitive data, to the way that we store resources like PDFs and papers. Though we don\u0026rsquo;t have \u0026ldquo;one\u0026rdquo; system for all these things, and we\u0026rsquo;re not likely to revise them all at the same time, on some conceptual level it\u0026rsquo;s all the same thing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/systems-review/","summary":"I wrote in my post on the one true system about the informal systems that we use to interface the way we interact with knowledge and information in the \u0026ldquo;real world\u0026rdquo; with the way we represent that information on our computers. Exploring these systems lay at the core of the cyborg question, but today\u0026rsquo;s essay1 is more about how our logic systems adapt as we use computers and as the kinds of information we need to store change and grow.\nAs near as I can tell there are a few kinds of \u0026ldquo;systems review\u0026rdquo; that we tend to do. Theoretically if you develop a system that\u0026rsquo;s flexible and that accounts for all of your future information needs, then you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have to modify your system very much. Theoretically this is a good thing: better to spend time \u0026ldquo;doing things,\u0026rdquo; rather than thinking about \u0026ldquo;how you\u0026rsquo;re going to do things.\u0026rdquo;\nThe sad truth is that this doesn\u0026rsquo;t work out very well pragmatically: we change our work habits, and our information changes, and our projects change, and our informal logic for interacting with our computers fails to address the problems, and eventually everything spirals out of control.","title":"Systems Review"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s this idea in linguistic/cognitive anthropology that the limitations of linguistic possibility limit what the bounds of what we\u0026rsquo;re able to think about. If we lack words for a given thing or a concept, it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to even conceive what it is. I\u0026rsquo;ll get to the strengths and limits of the hypothesis in a bit, but lets just say the reception of these ideas (i.e. \u0026ldquo;linguistic relativism\u0026rdquo;) is somewhat mixed. Nevertheless it\u0026rsquo;s had a great impact on me and the kinds of ideas I deal in.\nFor instance, though I\u0026rsquo;m not an active programmer, I talk to programmers a bunch I tweak code from time to time, and I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to learn programming enough times that I sort of get the basics of enough stuff to know what\u0026rsquo;s going on, and if there\u0026rsquo;s one theme to my interests in open source and software development, it\u0026rsquo;s looking at the software and tools that developers us, in part for issues related to linguistic relativism. Basically, if the people who develop programming languages, and software itself don\u0026rsquo;t provide for possibilities, developers and users won\u0026rsquo;t be able to think about things downstream. Or at least that\u0026rsquo;s the theory.*\nThe problem with linguistic relativism in general, is that it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to test, and we get into causality issues. \u0026ldquo;Describe this thing that you don\u0026rsquo;t know about!\u0026rdquo; is a bad interview tactic and we run into the questions like: Is it really language that limits knowability or is some other combination of typical experiences that limits both knowability and language? I\u0026rsquo;ve read far too many a number of papers from a couple of different scholars, and I almost always end up in the \u0026ldquo;relativist camp,\u0026rdquo; but that might be a personality feature.\nIn computer science, I suppose it is also not quite so cut and dry. Questions like \u0026ldquo;Does the advancement of things like hardware limit technical possibility more than programing languages and tools?\u0026rdquo; come up, but I think for the most part it is more cut and dry: Erlang\u0026rsquo;s concurrency model makes thins possible, and makes programmers think in ways that they\u0026rsquo;re not prone to thinking about them otherwise. Git\u0026rsquo;s method promoting collaboration requires people to think differently about authorship and collaboration. Maybe. I mean it makes sense to me.\nThese low-level tools shape what\u0026rsquo;s possible on the higher level not simply in that a programing language implements features that are then used to build higher level applications, but if you teach someone to program in emacs-lisp (say) they\u0026rsquo;ll think about building software in a very different way from the folks who learn how to program Java. Or Perl. Or PHP.\nAnd those differences work down the software food chain: what programmers are able to code, limits the software that people like you and me use on a day to day basis. That\u0026rsquo;s terribly important.\nI think the impulse when talking about open source and free software is to talk about subjects that are (more) digestible to non-technical users, and provide examples of software projects that are more easily understood (e.g. firefox and open office rather than gcc and the Linux kernel, say.) This strikes me as the wrong impulse, when we could focus on talking about more technical projects and then use abstractions and metaphors to get to a more general audience if needed. I\u0026rsquo;m not saying I\u0026rsquo;ve mastered this, but I\u0026rsquo;m trying, and I think we\u0026rsquo;ll ultimately learn a lot more this way. Or so I hope. There is always much to learn.\nOnward and Upward!\n* In a previous era/maturity state I would have been somewhat guarded about that subject which I think is going to be a major theme in oh the rest of my life. But, this is open source and knowledge wants to be free and all that. Actually, less altruistically, I\u0026rsquo;m much more worried that it\u0026rsquo;s a lackluster research question than I am that someone is going to \u0026ldquo;snipe it from me,\u0026rdquo; and suggestions and challenges I think would be really productive.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sapir-whorf-hypothesis-and-computer-programing/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s this idea in linguistic/cognitive anthropology that the limitations of linguistic possibility limit what the bounds of what we\u0026rsquo;re able to think about. If we lack words for a given thing or a concept, it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to even conceive what it is. I\u0026rsquo;ll get to the strengths and limits of the hypothesis in a bit, but lets just say the reception of these ideas (i.e. \u0026ldquo;linguistic relativism\u0026rdquo;) is somewhat mixed. Nevertheless it\u0026rsquo;s had a great impact on me and the kinds of ideas I deal in.\nFor instance, though I\u0026rsquo;m not an active programmer, I talk to programmers a bunch I tweak code from time to time, and I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to learn programming enough times that I sort of get the basics of enough stuff to know what\u0026rsquo;s going on, and if there\u0026rsquo;s one theme to my interests in open source and software development, it\u0026rsquo;s looking at the software and tools that developers us, in part for issues related to linguistic relativism.","title":"Sapir Whorf Hypothesis and Computer Programing"},{"content":"During my middle year of college, I took a class on gender and literature where we had to write a series (10? 12?) of \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; entries. The assignment was to write 250-300 (hard boundaries) words due by midnight on Friday during most of the weeks of the semester. And there were other rules regarding the speed or frequency you could turn them in that I don\u0026rsquo;t remember, but there were notably few restrictions on what they could be about.\nA few interesting things happened. One is, that though we could write all of them in a weekend, we never did. My roommate(s) and I would write them while everyone was drinking on Friday night. We got pretty heroic about how close we\u0026rsquo;d cut these to the deadline. There was even a night when I was driving a friend to the airport (3-4 hours in the car) and I argued for an extension through an intermediary whilst driving quite assertively on I-90. Another is that we all got very good at editing our writing to a limited number of words, and it\u0026rsquo;s a good skill to have. But the most important thing is that all my classmates wrote about the texts we were reading. I wrote about, g-d knows what. Not the things we were reading, except in loose tangential ways.\nA roommate asked about if this was, an acceptable thing to do, and I wrote the professor somewhat worried that maybe my journal entries had strayed too far afield. In fairness, the professor\u0026rsquo;s lectures had a similar tendency to stray, as near as I could tell, but it seemed like the thing to do.\nThe response was something along the lines of \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t worry [tycho,] I quite enjoy your widely synthetic entries. You\u0026rsquo;ve received credit for all that you\u0026rsquo;ve submitted.\u0026rdquo;\nNeedless to say \u0026ldquo;widely synthetic,\u0026rdquo; became my new slogan.1\nI think my blagging style developed in that class, such as it is, which is all sorts of scary.\nI started writing this post with the intention of discussing the Sapir-Worf and programing languages. Which I think certainly qualifies as being \u0026ldquo;widely synthetic,\u0026rdquo; hence the story, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ll have to save that for next time.\nTake care of yourselves, dearest readers.\nThat same semester I took another feminist/queer literature class from the college\u0026rsquo;s resident poet, who wrote in the margin of a paper I wrote that my phrasing was \u0026ldquo;awkward, but endearingly colloquial,\u0026rdquo; which was the slogan of this blog for quite a long time. That was one of those semesters that just stays with you, I guess.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/widely-synthetic/","summary":"During my middle year of college, I took a class on gender and literature where we had to write a series (10? 12?) of \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; entries. The assignment was to write 250-300 (hard boundaries) words due by midnight on Friday during most of the weeks of the semester. And there were other rules regarding the speed or frequency you could turn them in that I don\u0026rsquo;t remember, but there were notably few restrictions on what they could be about.\nA few interesting things happened. One is, that though we could write all of them in a weekend, we never did. My roommate(s) and I would write them while everyone was drinking on Friday night. We got pretty heroic about how close we\u0026rsquo;d cut these to the deadline. There was even a night when I was driving a friend to the airport (3-4 hours in the car) and I argued for an extension through an intermediary whilst driving quite assertively on I-90.","title":"widely synthetic"},{"content":"My blog reading eyes/ears tend to perk up when I see someone writing about git as this piece of software fascinates me in a potentially unhealthy sort of way. I read a post the other day that talked a bunch about git, and centralized SCM tools like SVN and CVS, as well as the other distributed SCM bazaar. If that last sentence was greek to you, don\u0026rsquo;t worry, I\u0026rsquo;m heading into a pretty general discussion. Here\u0026rsquo;s the background:\nVersion control or source control management systems (VCS/SCM), are tools that programmers use to store the code of a program or project as they develop it. These tools store versions of a code base which has a lot of benefits: programmers can work concurrently on a project and distribute their changes regularly to avoid duplicating efforts or working on divergent editions code. SCMs also save your history incase you change something that you didn\u0026rsquo;t intended to you can go back to known working states, or \u0026ldquo;revive\u0026rdquo; older features that you\u0026rsquo;d deleted. SCMs are It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing, and I\u0026rsquo;d wager that most programmers use some sort of system to track this task.1\nThe basic unit of any version control system is the \u0026ldquo;commit,\u0026rdquo; which represents a collection or set of changes that a given developer chooses to \u0026ldquo;check in\u0026rdquo; to the system. There are two basic models of VCS/SCM: the centralized client/server system and the distributed system. Centralization means that the history is stored on a server or centralized machine, and a group of developers all send and pull changes from that central \u0026ldquo;repository.\u0026rdquo; Distributed systems give every developer in a project a copy of the full history, and give them the capability of sending or pulling changes from any other developer in a system.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a lot of topics about the various merits of both distributed and centralized version control systems, and a lot of this discussion ends up being hashed over technological features like speed and the various ease of various operations or over process features that relate to what a system allows or promotes in terms of workflow. While these discussions are interesting they\u0026rsquo;re too close to the actual programs to see something that I think is pretty interesting.\nIn centralized systems, \u0026ldquo;the commit\u0026rdquo; is something that serves the project\u0026rsquo;s management. If done right (so the theory goes), in a centralized system, only a select few have access to submit changes, as the central server\u0026rsquo;s only way of reconciling diverging versions of a code-base is to accept the first submitted change (poor solution) and the more developers you have the greater the chance of having version collisions. As a result there\u0026rsquo;s a lot less committing that happens. In big projects, you still have to mail patches around because only a few people can commit changes and in smaller teams, people are more likely to \u0026ldquo;put off committing\u0026rdquo; because frequent commits of incremental changes are more likely to confuse teammates, and committing amounts to publication.\nIn distributed systems, since the total \u0026ldquo;repository\u0026rdquo; is stored locally, committing changes to your repository and publishing changes with collaborators are separate options. As a result, there\u0026rsquo;s less incentive for developers to avoid creating commits for incremental changes. Rather than have commits mark complete working states with a lot of changes in every individual commit, commits mark points of experimentation in the distributed system.\nThis difference, is really critical. Commits in a centralized system serve the person who \u0026ldquo;owns\u0026rdquo; the repository, whereas in the distributed system they serve the developer. There are other aspects of these programs which affect the way developers relate to their code, but I think on some fundamental level this is really important.\nAlso, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to make the argument that \u0026ldquo;bottom up distribution = good and top down centralization = bad,\u0026rdquo; as I think it\u0026rsquo;s more complicated than that. It\u0026rsquo;s also possible to use distributed technology in centralized workflows, and if you use centralized systems with the right team, the top-down limitation isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly noticeable. But as a starting point, it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting analysis.\nSo common are they, that I was surprised to learn that the Linux Kernel (is a massive project) spent many many years without any formal system to manage these functions. They used \u0026ldquo;tar balls and patches, for years\u0026rdquo; which is amazing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/committing-from-the-bottom-up/","summary":"My blog reading eyes/ears tend to perk up when I see someone writing about git as this piece of software fascinates me in a potentially unhealthy sort of way. I read a post the other day that talked a bunch about git, and centralized SCM tools like SVN and CVS, as well as the other distributed SCM bazaar. If that last sentence was greek to you, don\u0026rsquo;t worry, I\u0026rsquo;m heading into a pretty general discussion. Here\u0026rsquo;s the background:\nVersion control or source control management systems (VCS/SCM), are tools that programmers use to store the code of a program or project as they develop it. These tools store versions of a code base which has a lot of benefits: programmers can work concurrently on a project and distribute their changes regularly to avoid duplicating efforts or working on divergent editions code. SCMs also save your history incase you change something that you didn\u0026rsquo;t intended to you can go back to known working states, or \u0026ldquo;revive\u0026rdquo; older features that you\u0026rsquo;d deleted.","title":"Comitting From the Bottom Up"},{"content":"I promised that I\u0026rsquo;d post some of the stuff from my .emacs file that makes my org-mode system work. Here we are.\nThere are some basic settings that I use on all major modes that I use in emacs. Basically, I want to attach the spell checker (the minor modes, flyspell-mode and auto-fill-mode). These lines do this:\n(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill) (add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode) I also, attached \u0026ldquo;.org\u0026rdquo; as the file extension to org-mode. This setting is good for this kind of thing:\n(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '(\u0026quot;\\\\.org\u0026quot; . org-mode)auto-mode-alist)) The following are a list of basic org-mode related settings that I\u0026rsquo;ve found helpful. In some sequence, I keep org-mode files in the ~/org/ directory, with codex.org being my general catch-all file. I like my agenda views to include todos, even if they\u0026rsquo;re not date-specific (this is a great boon) I\u0026rsquo;ve included the diary in the agenda views for grins, though I\u0026rsquo;m not yet smart enough to really make the most of that one.\nThe odd-levels-only, and hide-leading-stars are aesthetic settings only, and can be changed/converted from at any point, but I like them\nThe org-todo-keywords setting allows you to specify alternate todo-statuses. I\u0026rsquo;ve found that this sorting is a useful and allows me to visually sort out things I need to write, versus chores and other more clerical tasks. The pipe seperates finished statuses from open statuses. I debated for a long time about weather \u0026ldquo;differed\u0026rdquo; should be \u0026ldquo;done\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;not done,\u0026rdquo; but decided that with \u0026ldquo;pending,\u0026rdquo; I was safe to use \u0026ldquo;differed\u0026rdquo; tasks for \u0026ldquo;not my problem any more\u0026rdquo; items.\n(setq org-directory \u0026quot;~/org/\u0026quot;) (setq org-default-notes-file (concat org-directory \u0026quot;/codex.org\u0026quot;)) (setq org-agenda-include-all-todo t) (setq org-agenda-include-diary t) (setq org-hide-leading-stars t) (setq org-odd-levels-only t) (setq org-todo-keywords '((sequence \u0026quot;TODO\u0026quot; \u0026quot;WRITE\u0026quot; \u0026quot;REVIEW\u0026quot; \u0026quot;PENDING\u0026quot; \u0026quot;|\u0026quot; \u0026quot;DIFFERED\u0026quot; \u0026quot;DELEGATED\u0026quot; \u0026quot;DONE\u0026quot;))) The next bit, is something that I got from Jack. It creates an org-mode file with time-stamp headlines which you can use to create a journal file to record daily activities.\nThe first block sets up which file the journal should be in, and the second sets up entry. My main complaint with this is that I\u0026rsquo;m not very habitual about using it.\n(defvar org-journal-file \u0026quot;~/org/journal.org\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Path to OrgMode journal file.\u0026quot;) (defvar org-journal-date-format \u0026quot;%Y-%m-%d\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Date format string for journal headings.\u0026quot;) (defun org-journal-entry () \u0026quot;Create a new diary entry for today or append to an existing one.\u0026quot; (interactive) (switch-to-buffer (find-file org-journal-file)) (widen) (let ((today (format-time-string org-journal-date-format))) (beginning-of-buffer) (unless (org-goto-local-search-headings today nil t) ((lambda () (org-insert-heading) (insert today) (insert \u0026quot;\\n\\n \\n\u0026quot;)))) (beginning-of-buffer) (org-show-entry) (org-narrow-to-subtree) (end-of-buffer) (backward-char 2) (unless (= (current-column) 2) (insert \u0026quot;\\n\\n \u0026quot;)))) The integration between remember-mode functionality and org-mode is one of those things that just makes org-mode amazing and awe inspiring. The sad part is that it takes some setup to make it work right and therefore doesn\u0026rsquo;t work straight out of the hook.\nI\u0026rsquo;d explain the template syntax better if I understood it a bit better. I should look into that.\n(require 'remember) (setq remember-annotation-functions '(org-remember-annotation)) (setq remember-handler-functions '(org-remember-handler)) (add-hook 'remember-mode-hook 'org-remember-apply-template) (setq org-remember-templates '((\u0026quot;todo\u0026quot; ?t \u0026quot;* TODO %?\\n %i\\n %a\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/codex.org\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Tasks\u0026quot;) (\u0026quot;notes\u0026quot; ?n \u0026quot;* %?\\n %i\\n %a\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/codex.org\u0026quot; \u0026quot;Inbox and Notes\u0026quot;) (\u0026quot;blog\u0026quot; ?b \u0026quot;* %U %?\\n\\n %i\\n %a\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/blog.org\u0026quot;) (\u0026quot;technology\u0026quot; ?s \u0026quot;* %U %?\\n\\n %i\\n %a\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/technology.org\u0026quot;) (\u0026quot;fiction\u0026quot; ?f \u0026quot;* %U %?\\n\\n %i\\n %a\u0026quot; \u0026quot;~/org/fiction.org\u0026quot;)) Finally, key bindings that make org-mode functionality accessible whenever I need it in emacs. I should do things to have raise emacsclient windows from other applications, but I\u0026rsquo;ll deal with that later. There aren\u0026rsquo;t that many, and I put org-mode stuff under control-c (C-c).\n(global-set-key \u0026quot;\\C-ca\u0026quot; 'org-agenda) (global-set-key \u0026quot;\\C-cr\u0026quot; 'org-remember) (global-set-key \u0026quot;\\C-cj\u0026quot; 'org-journal-entry) And that\u0026rsquo;s it. If you use org-mode, what\u0026rsquo;s the killer snippet that I\u0026rsquo;ve forgotten? If you don\u0026rsquo;t use org-mode but are curious, what should I talk about next. If you\u0026rsquo;re still not clear what org-mode is, ask, as I should work on getting better at explaining.\nThanks for reading. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/org-mode-snippets/","summary":"I promised that I\u0026rsquo;d post some of the stuff from my .emacs file that makes my org-mode system work. Here we are.\nThere are some basic settings that I use on all major modes that I use in emacs. Basically, I want to attach the spell checker (the minor modes, flyspell-mode and auto-fill-mode). These lines do this:\n(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill) (add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode) I also, attached \u0026ldquo;.org\u0026rdquo; as the file extension to org-mode. This setting is good for this kind of thing:\n(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '(\u0026quot;\\\\.org\u0026quot; . org-mode)auto-mode-alist)) The following are a list of basic org-mode related settings that I\u0026rsquo;ve found helpful. In some sequence, I keep org-mode files in the ~/org/ directory, with codex.org being my general catch-all file. I like my agenda views to include todos, even if they\u0026rsquo;re not date-specific (this is a great boon) I\u0026rsquo;ve included the diary in the agenda views for grins, though I\u0026rsquo;m not yet smart enough to really make the most of that one.","title":"org-mode snippets"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been posting about cyborg systems on tychoish, about the informal logical systems we use to interface our lives/reality/thoughts/work into digital systems to organize what we accomplish with our computers. It\u0026rsquo;s a topic of some interesting to me, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to provide a simple piece of advice in this post:\nTry your damnedest to only use one system. For as much of your data as you possibly can.\nThis might be an odd piece of advice, you say, coming from someone who proudly supports the Unix philosophy of \u0026ldquo;use tools that do one thing well.\u0026rdquo; I think, however, that the question of tools and systems are fundamentally different. Having tools that do lots of things (poorly) means that you have ineffective tools. Having more than one system to organize your data means that things get lost.\nJoseph Spiros, a friend of mine from way back, wrote an essay that I think serves as a pretty good introduction to some of these ideas. Read Prelude to Haven and come back when you\u0026rsquo;re done.\nBack?\nGreat. Lets continue.\nHaving one system that houses everything is a great boon to our representation. If you know, from the very beginning, what kind of data you\u0026rsquo;re going to be dealing with, and develop some sort of organizational system based on this knowledge then it\u0026rsquo;s really hard for files to get lost, for things to be double classified and without reference. Basically, for any given thing, there should be only one given place that you should have to look for this.\nThis is of course pretty difficult to do. So maybe I don\u0026rsquo;t mean \u0026ldquo;only have one system for everything\u0026rdquo; but, rather \u0026ldquo;have one system for any given thing.\u0026rdquo; More concretely:\nOnly have one email account. If you get mail at more than one address, use a client that allows you to view/send email from more than one address (eg. gmail) or forward multiple accounts to one address. This way, if you\u0026rsquo;re looking for an email there\u0026rsquo;s only one bucket to look in. Organize data by either projects, subjects, or kind, but not more than one of these categories. Projects would be spheres of your work that form a body onto themselves: if you wrote books, a project would be a book and you\u0026rsquo;d collect notes, drafts, and versions related to a book in one \u0026ldquo;pile\u0026rdquo;1. Subjects can get dicey (as they require you to sort your data into a given number of subject-based piles and then be able to recall that sorting again. Kind-based organizations require you to keep all your notes in one pile, drafts in another, final copies in another which can grow unwieldy depending on subject, but greatly decreases the chance of misfiling. For data manipulation standardize your practices on specific tools: tasks go in one place, project files go in another, references in another, and so forth. If you track two todo-lists that don\u0026rsquo;t synchronize with each other, then the chance of loosing track on some things in one when they should have gone in the other system. One \u0026ldquo;OK\u0026rdquo; system is superior to 2 or more excellent systems. Use search tools to your advantage, but avoid the google-method of relying search to be smarter than the index of files. Search is good, and there are a lot of times when searching for something is helpful (lost files, finding a specific quote), but often times they take a lot of system resources to build a gross index that likely doesn\u0026rsquo;t contain the kind of information your looking for. And that\u0026rsquo;s it. One more step on the road to a better, more fulfilling cyborg experience.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve deliberately avoided using terms like \u0026ldquo;folders,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;categories,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;tags,\u0026rdquo; as these abstractions aren\u0026rsquo;t in and of themselves useful metaphors.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/one-true-system/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been posting about cyborg systems on tychoish, about the informal logical systems we use to interface our lives/reality/thoughts/work into digital systems to organize what we accomplish with our computers. It\u0026rsquo;s a topic of some interesting to me, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to provide a simple piece of advice in this post:\nTry your damnedest to only use one system. For as much of your data as you possibly can.\nThis might be an odd piece of advice, you say, coming from someone who proudly supports the Unix philosophy of \u0026ldquo;use tools that do one thing well.\u0026rdquo; I think, however, that the question of tools and systems are fundamentally different. Having tools that do lots of things (poorly) means that you have ineffective tools. Having more than one system to organize your data means that things get lost.\nJoseph Spiros, a friend of mine from way back, wrote an essay that I think serves as a pretty good introduction to some of these ideas.","title":"One True System"},{"content":"In the last six months or year (or two years) I\u0026rsquo;ve written a lot here, about technology open source software and related topics. In a way this was a new thing for me. I majored in Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies and Psychology in college. I wrote about gender and queerness, and knitting for many years. My big thing (or one of them, at any rate) is science fiction literarture, where I\u0026rsquo;m interested in very historical/\u0026ldquo;soft\u0026rdquo; sub genres. While some SF writers feel ghettoized by the \u0026ldquo;hard\u0026rdquo;/\u0026ldquo;soft\u0026rdquo; boundary in the genre, I love the fact that there\u0026rsquo;s (a very popular) field of science fiction that isn\u0026rsquo;t based on firm understandings of existing science/technology and tightly formed elaboration thereon. I love being non-technical on some level. Despite my current technological musings, this is very much a past that I must contend with.\nBut I digress.\nBefore all of this hippy-drippy stuff, I wrote a lot about technology. Back in 1999/2000/2001 I was reasonably active in the discourse surrounding mobile technology. Indeed through this I discovered blogging itself. There are a couple of subtitles to this that I think are appropriate: first, the state of mobile technology about 10 years ago was much different than it is today. Much different. Laptops were significantly bigger and less portable, cellphones were much less \u0026ldquo;smart,\u0026rdquo; and disconnected PDAs were the light of the times.\nBut sooner rather than later, I broke down, bought a nice fountain pen and just kept a notebook when I was away from my computer. It worked. Eventually I got a cellphone, but I always tended toward the \u0026ldquo;dumb\u0026rdquo;-phone type that were incredibly simple. They worked. The paper worked. When I went away to college I got a 12 inch iBook (as my only computer) and it was great. Small laptops with wireless and long battery life seem to be a great solution to the \u0026ldquo;mobile technology\u0026rdquo; problem, and as--at the time--it seemed like my life/work was trending around in a different direction, I stared writing about different things, which when you think about it is all for the best.\nFor the intervening years, I\u0026rsquo;ve been sort of cool toward a lot of gadgetry. Laptops are small enough and powerful enough and frankly cheap enough (considering) to account for a huge percentage of digital mobility, that the remaining need is actually pretty small. And it was my experience that mobile technology wasn\u0026rsquo;t there, for the in between spaces yet. Recording bits of minutia in a usable way on a PDA was never quite as quick and seamless as doing it either on a computer or with paper.\nEventually I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back into writing about technology, but by this time it was a different kind of technology: unix/linux stuff, cyborg stuff, tools for writing, usage methodologies, and organization stuff. The technology itself (for me) has taken a backseat to the ways we use technology.\nBut in the mean time the mobile technology has mostly caught up. At least somewhat. Cellphones became a lot smarter, the data transmission got cheaper (and unlimited), syncing tools through google and mobile me (if that\u0026rsquo;s your style) make the experience much more coherent. In a lot of ways, the fact that cellphones and connected devices can--independently of host computers--interact with the internet has made them infinitely more useful. And the fact that, at least in my case, do this via protocols that we\u0026rsquo;re already familiar with (REST API\u0026rsquo;s or email) makes this even more attractive.\nI also think, at least in some cases, that a lot of this \u0026ldquo;web 2.0 stuff\u0026rdquo; makes the most sense in the context of mobile devices. While I don\u0026rsquo;t often think about twittering, or dicking around on facebook when I\u0026rsquo;m sitting somewhere with just my Blackberry, the applications that connect with these web 2.0 services on phones are really clever. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s that limited functionality apps make more sense on phones/PDAs than they do on desktop computers, but that could just be me. In the end, I\u0026rsquo;m still dubious of all this \u0026ldquo;web stuff,\u0026rdquo; but I think it at least makes sense now.\nSo there.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mobile-technology/","summary":"In the last six months or year (or two years) I\u0026rsquo;ve written a lot here, about technology open source software and related topics. In a way this was a new thing for me. I majored in Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies and Psychology in college. I wrote about gender and queerness, and knitting for many years. My big thing (or one of them, at any rate) is science fiction literarture, where I\u0026rsquo;m interested in very historical/\u0026ldquo;soft\u0026rdquo; sub genres. While some SF writers feel ghettoized by the \u0026ldquo;hard\u0026rdquo;/\u0026ldquo;soft\u0026rdquo; boundary in the genre, I love the fact that there\u0026rsquo;s (a very popular) field of science fiction that isn\u0026rsquo;t based on firm understandings of existing science/technology and tightly formed elaboration thereon. I love being non-technical on some level. Despite my current technological musings, this is very much a past that I must contend with.\nBut I digress.\nBefore all of this hippy-drippy stuff, I wrote a lot about technology.","title":"Mobile Technology 2.0"},{"content":"Before I made the switch to linux, my only computer was a single macbook. Great machine, and in addition to not being able to (really) use Awesome, I was pretty frustrated by the lack of screen space. I was (and do) need to filter through lots of different kinds of documents and I felt like I was spending half my time sorting through any of the several dozen (!) windows that I kept open. As a result one of my chief requirements for the new system was having the ability to run a 2 monitor (dual head) setup.[^DH] I was even willing to sacrifice1 some raw power for this.\nSo here I was with a dual head setup, and a sort of lackluster idea of how to use all this new space, aside from the visceral knowledge that needed more room. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried a few things to try and use the space, but I continue to feel as if I haven\u0026rsquo;t found the right way to use this space.\nI should preface this by saying a word about my window management software: it revolves around the notion of \u0026ldquo;tags,\u0026rdquo; which are similar to virtual desktops, so while I only look at 1-5 windows on each monitor there are many more than 5 windows open and running at anyone time.\nMy first attempt was to create task-centric virtual desktops, so that there were tags for windows that had to do with work, tags that had to do with fiction writing, tags for browsing the web, tags for chatting, tags for interacting with the system and so forth. This was an epic failure, as the joys of a multi-tasking operating system are that they allow you to have a number of different processes running in parallel, and if you have you window manager setup to constrain your to one task per screen then you\u0026rsquo;ve basically shackled your computer into only being able to do two things at once. Which is both distracting (as you end up hiding needed windows, or disregarding the established tagging systems. I also found that in an attempt to use both windows, I ended up using the middle half of each monitor more than I used the outer half.\nMy second attempt was to have a primary/secondary monitor setup, with my keyboard in front of the left screen which had most \u0026ldquo;action\u0026rdquo; related tasks (writing, email, etc.) and the right screen was for reference materials (web, chat, pdfs, etc,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve tried both organizing tags based on task/sphere, and also based on window type (so that \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; happened in more ad-hoc spaces). Neither works particularly well.\nMy current attempt is still largely based on the main/reference mode of operation, except I\u0026rsquo;ve made things a bunch less rigid, and mixed things up a bit to see if this makes things a bit easier to work with. I have background processes on the left monitors: email, web, file management on the left; org-mode files, and chat on the right. And then, I have writing spaces and adhoc workspaces on the left, with work and some project-specific workspaces on the right.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is the best thing. There\u0026rsquo;s a dynamic workspace/window tagging library, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really tried it out, and I want to test things out on the laptop (one screen) first.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s got to be a better way of doing this. On one level this is a problem of riches, (how do I use all this space I have), but on another it\u0026rsquo;s a much more simple problem that addresses focus and the way that we present/organize information on our screens Thoughts?\nOnward and Upward?\nIt turns out that monitors these days cost a quarter of what they cost 5 years ago. In point of fact I was able to get both monitors and a new computer for what a single LCD cost the last time I had a desktop computer. Imagine that.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dual-head/","summary":"Before I made the switch to linux, my only computer was a single macbook. Great machine, and in addition to not being able to (really) use Awesome, I was pretty frustrated by the lack of screen space. I was (and do) need to filter through lots of different kinds of documents and I felt like I was spending half my time sorting through any of the several dozen (!) windows that I kept open. As a result one of my chief requirements for the new system was having the ability to run a 2 monitor (dual head) setup.[^DH] I was even willing to sacrifice1 some raw power for this.\nSo here I was with a dual head setup, and a sort of lackluster idea of how to use all this new space, aside from the visceral knowledge that needed more room. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried a few things to try and use the space, but I continue to feel as if I haven\u0026rsquo;t found the right way to use this space.","title":"Dual Head Setup"},{"content":"The last time I talked about org-mode, I covered a number of my \u0026ldquo;beginner mistakes,\u0026rdquo;, this time I think it\u0026rsquo;d be a bit more productive to explain how I\u0026rsquo;m actually using org-mode. For those of you playing at home this is one of those systems I talked about.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to try and avoid including bits of code/lisp in this post, as I don\u0026rsquo;t want to confuse \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;m doing,\u0026rdquo; with \u0026ldquo;how I\u0026rsquo;m doing it.\u0026rdquo; We\u0026rsquo;ll get to that point in time, and there\u0026rsquo;s plenty to talk about.\nAt the moment the features of org-mode that I use the most are:\norg-agenda-mode checkboxes org-remember-mode and org-mode outlines I also store org-mode files in a git repository that lives in my home folder of all machines that I use with any regularity. I\u0026rsquo;m running emacs-23 (ubuntu package: emacs-snapshot), generally in server-mode, with two frames open, one has \u0026ldquo;the thing I\u0026rsquo;m writing\u0026rdquo; and the other has the org-mode-agenda and some org-mode file in the other window.1\nSystem Layout At the moment I have 9 org-mode files:\n1. A file the novel project, that contains background notes, and outline of the story, as well as project management stuff.\n2. A file that contains notes for blog posts. This is mostly organizational, and I just add ideas as I have them and check them off and archive them when I\u0026rsquo;m done.\n3. A general \u0026ldquo;codex\u0026rdquo; file, that I dump links. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a file like this for a number of years, and I generally find that having a catchall like this is productive.\n4. A general fiction file, for project management issues related to the fiction projects that aren\u0026rsquo;t the novel. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably split this up as needed in the future.\n5. I have two files to manage web development/design projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on for myself.\n6. One file to manage my academic/research project. Includes notes/content as well as todo items.\n7. A \u0026ldquo;technology\u0026rdquo; file that contains lists of tweaks and other technological projects that I need to undertake (like switching to OpenDNS).\nA file for work projects and notes A journal file, for tracking activities and accomplishments. Org-Mode Features The features that I use:\nOutlines and Checkboxes This is a no brainier, but it makes sense. Org-mode is at it\u0026rsquo;s core an outlining program, but I think it is important to underscore this. It\u0026rsquo;s an outlining program. use it to create outlines. All of the talk and videos that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen explaining and demonstrating org-mode talk about the cool agenda functionality, or the table feature (which are great tools) but this washes over the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s an outlining program.\nWhy am I stressing this? Because the agenda commands and all the other functionality actually works better when you have a bunch of files with outlines in them. When you have outlines to deal with, you can tag the items that are truly \u0026ldquo;actionable\u0026rdquo; with \u0026ldquo;TODO\u0026rdquo; (or other action words) and include them with your agenda items. Or if an item/heading on your outline is time sensitive you can use the org calendar system to toggle deadlines/schedule points. And lists below headings can have checkboxes, which is a great boon, as well. But, if you work backwards and attempt to anticipate what agenda is going to do, then you\u0026rsquo;re loosing some of it\u0026rsquo;s functionality.\nBrainstorm. Write notes. Add TODO flags to items that require attention. Add deadlines or schedule points if they\u0026rsquo;re time sensitive. But don\u0026rsquo;t organize the outlines for anything other than their utility as a reference document. Org-mode does the rest with\u0026hellip;.\nAgenda The org-agenda mode is the glue that makes the whole system work, as it aggregates items together from all your org-mode files. I\u0026rsquo;ve set mine up so that it displays a weekly agenda with all open TODO items. This way I can see everything that needs action, without needing to add deadlines to tasks which didn\u0026rsquo;t have deadlines so much as \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t forget me\u0026rdquo; status.\u0026quot;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s all sorts of stuff that one can do with Agenda to generate views that filter based on tags or some such, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not gotten there. It\u0026rsquo;s really flexible.\nRemember Remember is a feature that originated independently, but has been enhanced to work with org-mode. Basically you trigger it with a key-binding and it pops up a temporary window which allows you to select a template and then add notes and other items, trigger save, and it disappears and writes to the relevant org-mode file.\nOne of the great pains of digital systems for note taking and organization is that if you have an idea, it is often hard for us to find a way to record these notes quickly before the moment leaves us. Remember changes that, and it\u0026rsquo;s great.\nNext time? Code. Cheers!\nThis terminology is going to drive me crazy. Basically, in the emacs world, \u0026ldquo;frame\u0026rdquo; refers to what most computer users would call a window. Ironically, in the awesome window manager world, windows are called \u0026ldquo;clients.\u0026rdquo; As if this weren\u0026rsquo;t enough, a \u0026ldquo;window\u0026rdquo; in the emacs world refers to any given division of a frame.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/org-system/","summary":"The last time I talked about org-mode, I covered a number of my \u0026ldquo;beginner mistakes,\u0026rdquo;, this time I think it\u0026rsquo;d be a bit more productive to explain how I\u0026rsquo;m actually using org-mode. For those of you playing at home this is one of those systems I talked about.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to try and avoid including bits of code/lisp in this post, as I don\u0026rsquo;t want to confuse \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;m doing,\u0026rdquo; with \u0026ldquo;how I\u0026rsquo;m doing it.\u0026rdquo; We\u0026rsquo;ll get to that point in time, and there\u0026rsquo;s plenty to talk about.\nAt the moment the features of org-mode that I use the most are:\norg-agenda-mode checkboxes org-remember-mode and org-mode outlines I also store org-mode files in a git repository that lives in my home folder of all machines that I use with any regularity. I\u0026rsquo;m running emacs-23 (ubuntu package: emacs-snapshot), generally in server-mode, with two frames open, one has \u0026ldquo;the thing I\u0026rsquo;m writing\u0026rdquo; and the other has the org-mode-agenda and some org-mode file in the other window.","title":"org system"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not posted very much about the cats in a week, and I want to remedy this. As you probably know I got two kittens at the end of May. I\u0026rsquo;d been vaguely looking for cats for a while, what with \u0026ldquo;reality\u0026rdquo; setting in around me. A friend adopted a cat who had a litter of kittens somewhat unexpectedly, and I said that I would take one. Well turns out that there was a remaining kitten that had been unclaimed, and my family has generally enjoyed getting kittens in sets before. So it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a hard sell.\nThese cats have been something of a journey. We spent the second night that we had them at the emergency vet because Merlin was lethargic and crying a lot. This was bad. Turns out the poor thing was constipated and had a slight fever and maybe a little dehydrated. So the vet gave him a little bit of fluids and I talked them into giving us syringes so that we could shoot water into his mouth. Turns out he hadn\u0026rsquo;t really grasped drinking. In the subsequent months we have noticed a general unburdened intelligence in this animal, despite his very pleasant demeanor.\nThe pecking order of the cats has been pretty fun to observe. It seems that Kip, the shrimper kitten has sort of established himself at the top. This happened with the last kittens too. Very strange, though last time, the alpha kitten was also the most personable. While Kip is friendly and relaxed, Merlin is clearly the more affectionate cat. Merlin\u0026rsquo;s response to being picked up or held is basically to go completely limp. Which makes carrying him around interesting. He\u0026rsquo;s a bit bigger, but feels much more heavy as he makes himself all dead weight.\nThey\u0026rsquo;re now 9-10 months old, so we think that they\u0026rsquo;re mostly done growing. Merlin is 13-14 pounds, and Kip is probably 10ish pounds. The other large cat in the house--Nash--is 20 pounds. We were, for a while, concerned that we were going to end up with another couple 20ish pound cats. Which isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, so much as an overwhelming thing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve never really had a cat that is as well adjusted as these. All previous cats have been shelter cats, because that\u0026rsquo;s just been what makes sense. And since these were from a friend\u0026rsquo;s cat, and she let them stay for as long as they needed to. They\u0026rsquo;re very well adjusted, and very affectionate, and nothing really bothers them, which is nice. We\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of neurotic cats over the years.\nWhile I really enjoy having kittens around, there is a point where the constant playing and activity can be tiring. I look forward to the day when I can wear headphones in the house without risking that the cats will chew them to shreds, and the day that sight of my toes underneath the covers doesn\u0026rsquo;t raise the \u0026ldquo;attack,\u0026rdquo; instinct. I mean, for now it\u0026rsquo;s great, but I enjoy headphones and my toes.\nThe only other thing of note is the fetching thing. Merlin first, and Kip to a lesser degree, adore playing fetch. Merlin will find some toy, carry it to you in his mouth drop it and then bat toward you. And then he sits and watches you until you throw it, at which point he\u0026rsquo;ll tare after it, play with it for a moment and then bring it back. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.\nThis is cute, and a fun trick, it is however, a bit of the problem when I\u0026rsquo;m on the phone with coworkers and clients.\nBut that goes with the territory. And it\u0026rsquo;s good territory after all.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cat-update/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not posted very much about the cats in a week, and I want to remedy this. As you probably know I got two kittens at the end of May. I\u0026rsquo;d been vaguely looking for cats for a while, what with \u0026ldquo;reality\u0026rdquo; setting in around me. A friend adopted a cat who had a litter of kittens somewhat unexpectedly, and I said that I would take one. Well turns out that there was a remaining kitten that had been unclaimed, and my family has generally enjoyed getting kittens in sets before. So it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a hard sell.\nThese cats have been something of a journey. We spent the second night that we had them at the emergency vet because Merlin was lethargic and crying a lot. This was bad. Turns out the poor thing was constipated and had a slight fever and maybe a little dehydrated. So the vet gave him a little bit of fluids and I talked them into giving us syringes so that we could shoot water into his mouth.","title":"cat update"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of outlines. I wrote this post about tightening outlines about my approach to making outlines better that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using most recently. This post, in turn is more about execution.\nThe issue, that I think causes a lot of people to be less into outlines, is the fact that outlines sort of dreary to write from. Which is to say, that the cool thing about writing (for me at least) is the feeling I get when I immerse myself in a world and characters\u0026rsquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m able to record the feeling of that experience. When it works that\u0026rsquo;s really satisfying, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s required for \u0026ldquo;being a writer,\u0026rdquo; it is certainly nice when it happens.\nI suspect I\u0026rsquo;m not alone in finding this aspect of writing to be pleasurable and the thing about it is, of course, that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to both \u0026ldquo;slipstream\u0026rdquo; into the writing world and also follow your outline. The end result is that while I\u0026rsquo;m pretty rigorous about creating my outlines I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly rigorous about following my outlines.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t, as far as I\u0026rsquo;m concerned, a bad thing. For a couple of reasons.\n1. The act of creating an outline is useful onto itself. It walks you through the story once so you know what\u0026rsquo;s going on, and you can figure out or avoid writing yourself into corners. Also the more familiar you are with the whole story when you start writing at the beginning, the less likely you are to have a story that takes a few chapters to \u0026ldquo;get off the ground.\u0026rdquo;\n2. If you review your outline sporadically while you\u0026rsquo;re writing, you\u0026rsquo;ll probably be able to recall the important memories of \u0026ldquo;what you were thinking when you wrote that part of the outline, and then and be able to get to that part of the story, and write from there. You needed follow what you said in the outline very closely--lots of great ideas come up when you write, but having a road map makes it harder to get lost.\nOk, that\u0026rsquo;s what I keep telling myself. The truth is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been toiling in chapters 4 and 5 of this novel for a few weeks now, and my outline isn\u0026rsquo;t doing me a lot of good. And at least on number two above, I\u0026rsquo;ve not been very good at keeping up with my outline.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not even sure how to articulate my issue with the story at this point. Part of the issue, is that I juggled some scenes around in chapter three that required pushing a few other things back, and having been thrown off the rails, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to figure out the pacing of what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do right now. I think that gets it pretty closely.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time this week, taking a bit of a breather from working on the actual text, and working on doing a little more outlining, and work on other projects, so I feel a little bit less like I\u0026rsquo;m grasping around in the dark.\nBecause I\u0026rsquo;m nothing if not reasonable.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tightening-outlines-2/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of outlines. I wrote this post about tightening outlines about my approach to making outlines better that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using most recently. This post, in turn is more about execution.\nThe issue, that I think causes a lot of people to be less into outlines, is the fact that outlines sort of dreary to write from. Which is to say, that the cool thing about writing (for me at least) is the feeling I get when I immerse myself in a world and characters\u0026rsquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m able to record the feeling of that experience. When it works that\u0026rsquo;s really satisfying, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s required for \u0026ldquo;being a writer,\u0026rdquo; it is certainly nice when it happens.\nI suspect I\u0026rsquo;m not alone in finding this aspect of writing to be pleasurable and the thing about it is, of course, that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to both \u0026ldquo;slipstream\u0026rdquo; into the writing world and also follow your outline.","title":"tightening outlines #2"},{"content":"Systems. This is an extension of exploratory writings about information management, and related ideas. When I talk about \u0026ldquo;systems,\u0026rdquo; I mean whatever technological or intellectual methods we use to store information and get work done. If you use Microsoft Outlook and Word with an Access database for citation management, that\u0026rsquo;s a system, what I\u0026rsquo;ve hacked together for myself with git, BibTeX, emacs, LaTeX, org-mode, and Markdown is a system. There are others.\nMany are pretty bad, as computer tools are designed with a task in mind, and the truth of the matter is that what most of us need isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly what they do. With a few exceptions. Like a lot of people use Excel but most of us use to make lists of tabular data, but few of us use it to store numbers, let alone do any sort of calculations with that data.1 And lets not get started talking about Microsoft Word2 or any of the myriad of task management organizational software packages.\nSo when I say \u0026ldquo;the system\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m really talking about that magic step between the world your trying to represent in some sort of software application. And we all do some crazy stuff here, like scheduling appointments to manage tasks, or using a system of filters and secret email addresses to take notes. Not that I\u0026rsquo;ve done either of those things. Ahem\nThis set of practices and informal logical rules are interesting, not intrinsically but insofar as they are at the heart of the human-computer (cyborg?) interaction. While this isn\u0026rsquo;t specifically a problem of open source/free software/hacking, thinking about cyborg-issues dovetail with the software-freedom ethic of knowing your technology: so it makes sense.\nPlaying around with different systems, is one of those things I do, and have done for a while, but it\u0026rsquo;s something that I try to avoid. Because it takes a lot of time, it gets in the way of getting things done, and while I derive some perverse pleasure in it, I like to keep from being quite so meta. But the sad truth is that as we learn about new tools, as technology develops, as our projects develop, as we learn more about ourselves and our work-flows systems need to change.\nSometimes this is as simple as moving some files around (changing the informal logic) or getting a new system and importing data. Sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s more intense.\nMy blogging about org-mode recently, is as part of one of these system changes. I\u0026rsquo;d been using a private wiki for most of the last year, and while I really liked the system, it got to be non-trivial to adapt he system (my internal representation the organization of the files) to add content to the wiki in a way that made sense. Maybe other people are a bit better at this than I am, but after many weeks of just not touching the files, I realized that I needed a better system. So I\u0026rsquo;m trying something else. It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing. Not to happen casually, though. The good thing that happens when you do a \u0026ldquo;system review,\u0026rdquo; is you get a chance to clear out cruft bad or antiquated logic from your system, and that\u0026rsquo;s almost always a good thing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nI\u0026rsquo;m speaking generally rather than specifically. I know lots of people use excel for what it was intended for, and maybe you\u0026rsquo;ve worked with different people than I have, but I\u0026rsquo;d say the vast majority of the spreadsheets that I deal with mostly have text in them.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a document preparation tool. For laying out shorter documents. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of (good) support for structured writing, and it provides functionality for displaying and formatting your text, but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of limited along the lines of things that help writing (search capabilities, notes management, block folding, and so forth)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-the-system/","summary":"Systems. This is an extension of exploratory writings about information management, and related ideas. When I talk about \u0026ldquo;systems,\u0026rdquo; I mean whatever technological or intellectual methods we use to store information and get work done. If you use Microsoft Outlook and Word with an Access database for citation management, that\u0026rsquo;s a system, what I\u0026rsquo;ve hacked together for myself with git, BibTeX, emacs, LaTeX, org-mode, and Markdown is a system. There are others.\nMany are pretty bad, as computer tools are designed with a task in mind, and the truth of the matter is that what most of us need isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly what they do. With a few exceptions. Like a lot of people use Excel but most of us use to make lists of tabular data, but few of us use it to store numbers, let alone do any sort of calculations with that data.1 And lets not get started talking about Microsoft Word2 or any of the myriad of task management organizational software packages.","title":"of the system"},{"content":"My post about information buckets got me thinking, thanks to some other things that have filtered through my awareness in the last few weeks, about integrated development environments.\nSee, a couple years ago, I used everything buckets like mad, they were the application of the future, the software that seemed to just scratch every itch. I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I used them as general databases for everything but I did all of my writing and research-related tasks in them, and it was great.\nThe articles I read where there, along with the notes that I made, along with citation information, along with the final paper. Along with all of my previous papers and articles. I never had to go look for things again, it was all there.\nThis is similar to an IDE, or integrated development environment, which is a class of applications that have some measure of popularity amongst computer programmers. IDE\u0026rsquo;s generally (and I\u0026rsquo;m not clear on this, as I\u0026rsquo;ve never used one) provide tools for managing large projects and integrate with code-compilers, debugging tools, version control tools, multi-file project managers, and code browsers which allow you to find related parts of code across an entire project without scrolling through a lot of files. I think there\u0026rsquo;s probably some debate on weather these are good things for programmers (objections would include that they make for lazy/poor practices, and that IDE components do lots of things poorly) but generally I suspect they are good things. And as it turns out most of our beloved text-editors have a lot of IDE-like functionality anyway.\nIn a way, the information bucket provides an IDE-like environment for the information worker or writer. And that\u0026rsquo;s sort of a cool way of looking at this. Indeed, I think writers need better integrated environments, there are a lot of tools that I think we could benefit from. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on these posts, I\u0026rsquo;ve also been working on posts about the emacs org-mode, and while they\u0026rsquo;re ultimately not directly connected, I think something like org-mode is a great boon to writers and information workers. Integrated systems that manage citations, references, and notes are essential, as well as other helpful features that might include managing output, structure, and version control.\nI hack most of these features together in emacs with some help from LaTeX, git, and BibTeX, but I recognize that this isn\u0026rsquo;t ideal or for everyone. There are other applications that aren\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;information buckets,\u0026rdquo; but provide writing environments that aren\u0026rsquo;t hacked from programing tools (emacs) or desktop publishing tools (MS Word). For example: Scrivener that provides a clever way to write longer form documents with structure, and Celtex that provides all sorts of screenplay writing tools (outlines, storyboards, character databases) and script management tools. Celtex even calls itself an \u0026ldquo;Integrated Media Pre-production\u0026rdquo; tool.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that these are the ideal tools for this task. Any of them. I\u0026rsquo;m partial to my solution, but I end up having to do a lot of informal organization to make it all stick together. So I wonder, what kind of software do other writers to keep all their ducks in a row?\nMore later. Of course.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/integrated-writing-environment/","summary":"My post about information buckets got me thinking, thanks to some other things that have filtered through my awareness in the last few weeks, about integrated development environments.\nSee, a couple years ago, I used everything buckets like mad, they were the application of the future, the software that seemed to just scratch every itch. I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I used them as general databases for everything but I did all of my writing and research-related tasks in them, and it was great.\nThe articles I read where there, along with the notes that I made, along with citation information, along with the final paper. Along with all of my previous papers and articles. I never had to go look for things again, it was all there.\nThis is similar to an IDE, or integrated development environment, which is a class of applications that have some measure of popularity amongst computer programmers.","title":"Integrated Writing Environment"},{"content":"It takes me a while to adapt to new things with the computer. While I pick things up pretty quickly, I\u0026rsquo;m aware that it takes a while for me to adapt to new ways of working with the computer. I like to settle into a system before I start changing the key bindings or writing scripts (which I always think will be more successful than they are). This seems reasonable, and is generally something that I\u0026rsquo;d recommend to other people looking to learn \u0026ldquo;cool new stuff.\u0026rdquo; Go slow.\nIn light of this realization this post will be a review of some of my more recent adventures with org-mode. For the uninitiated, org-mode is really a subsystem of the emacs text editor.1 It\u0026rsquo;s really powerful, and has a lot of disparate features that combine to do something really kind of magical. On one level, org-mode is just an outlining program: it provides some shortcuts and interfaces that make writing structured text really productive and pleasurable (e.g. easy navigation, block folding). On another level, org-mode is a fully featured calendaring and task/project management tool. The brilliance, is that it isn\u0026rsquo;t just and outliner or a task manager, but it provides accessory tools (like a great calendar, and even a table/spreadsheet functionality) that integrate the environment.\nI found about this two months ago, and I\u0026rsquo;ve slowly started to ease into using it. This past week, however, I think I crossed some sort of boundary, because I started using org-mode for most of my note-taking and project planning/organization work. And now that I\u0026rsquo;m here, I think a small series of blog posts is in order.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll start, I think with \u0026ldquo;mistakes I made,\u0026rdquo; as I couldn\u0026rsquo;t hope to explain everything the system does, and explaining how I\u0026rsquo;m working right now isn\u0026rsquo;t nearly as interesting.\nMy first approach was to keep an org-mode file in all of my project directories, so that the .org file would be close to the files where the actual work was going on.\nWrong.\nTurns out, keeping all your org-mode files together seems to work a lot better. Org\u0026rsquo;s calendar/project planning features work by generating \u0026ldquo;agenda views\u0026rdquo; of todo items and time-specified events. While the system could pull from a half dozen different project directories. Keeping things centralized means that you can add new files willy-nilly, it makes it easy to keep things synchronized between machines.\nMy second approach was to keep one org-mode file and divide projects using the hierarchical nature of the file to keep things straight.\nWrong.\nTurns out, that while we can represent all of our projects hierarchically2 beyond a certain level it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense to implement \u0026ldquo;categories\u0026rdquo; or project headings in this way. Org-mode provides a tagging infrastructure and the aforementioned agenda tool to tie together files, so while you can go overboard in creating new org files, you\u0026rsquo;re probably not incredibly likely to for a while. Use outline hierarchies to represent information, use files and tags to categorize and sort your headlines.\nWhen I discovered the agenda capabilities, I made todo items out everything and started giving all of my tasks dates so that they\u0026rsquo;d be sorted into the agenda view.\nWrong.\nTurns out, you can get agenda to generate a list of undated todo items before the agenda view, and that--at least for the way I work--setting soft deadlines and scheduling tasks just confuses the point rather than facilitating action. Org-mode also has a system for task priorities--which I haven\u0026rsquo;t felt the need for--but I think the larger lesson here is don\u0026rsquo;t attach arbitrary information to items in your org-mode files. Let the agenda mode do it\u0026rsquo;s work, and you do yours, and it\u0026rsquo;ll work out.\nI started my ~/org/ directory3 by creating .org files for all of the major projects in my life. Fiction writing, day-job, the blog, academic work, so that I\u0026rsquo;d be able to collect similar kinds of notes and todo-lists together in files.\nWrong.\nTurns out, that while some of the setting up big sphere-based org-mode files is unavoidable, the truth is that given the power of the agenda filter, putting a lot of information that is only casually connected in the same file doesn\u0026rsquo;t make much sense when tagging can provide needed meta-data. There\u0026rsquo;s a happy medium between \u0026ldquo;dividing things too much to the point where there\u0026rsquo;s too much \u0026lsquo;system\u0026rsquo; to manage,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;not dividing enough so that you have to build informal systems in the outline which complicates the organization.\u0026rdquo; In my experience \u0026ldquo;too much division\u0026rdquo; is much harder to reach, and \u0026ldquo;not dividing enough,\u0026rdquo; is quite easy.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be blogging more about org-mode in the coming days and weeks. Stay tuned :)\nOnward and Upward!\nThere\u0026rsquo;s this joke about emacs, that \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s a good operating system, but it lacks a good text editor.\u0026rdquo; I think the truth is that, emacs is an ok (but not exceptional) text editor, but it opens so many other possibilities for interacting with text in amazingly productive ways, that it\u0026rsquo;s managed to garner the loyalty of people like me.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not positive of this, but emacs itself might owe it\u0026rsquo;s existence to this kind of work, as it\u0026rsquo;s built around an lisp interpreter, which is a language used by AI researchers in the 60s because it could reflect the way we think. Or so the theory goes.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nReally, it\u0026rsquo;s not a directory, as much as it is a git repository. And this is I think this is a point where text-file geeks will say oh! dude! that\u0026rsquo;s cool, because really org-mode provides interfaces to parse together text files, which you can: take everywhere, version and sore easily, save forever, and hell branch if you need to. A calendar. Dude!\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/org-mode/","summary":"It takes me a while to adapt to new things with the computer. While I pick things up pretty quickly, I\u0026rsquo;m aware that it takes a while for me to adapt to new ways of working with the computer. I like to settle into a system before I start changing the key bindings or writing scripts (which I always think will be more successful than they are). This seems reasonable, and is generally something that I\u0026rsquo;d recommend to other people looking to learn \u0026ldquo;cool new stuff.\u0026rdquo; Go slow.\nIn light of this realization this post will be a review of some of my more recent adventures with org-mode. For the uninitiated, org-mode is really a subsystem of the emacs text editor.1 It\u0026rsquo;s really powerful, and has a lot of disparate features that combine to do something really kind of magical. On one level, org-mode is just an outlining program: it provides some shortcuts and interfaces that make writing structured text really productive and pleasurable (e.","title":"org mode"},{"content":"Alex wrote this article about \u0026ldquo;everything buckets\u0026rdquo; that got me thinking. And you know how dangerous this can be.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about \u0026ldquo;everything buckets,\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;information buckets,\u0026rdquo; and I think this term is a little more apt, given how these systems work. Basically the \u0026ldquo;everything\u0026rdquo; bucket, is a program that provides a database interface on top of our files in the effort of keeping us better organized. Features common to the information bucket, genre of programs are meta data and tagging interfaces, easier/integrated editing environments, more advanced search abilities, and easier input features. All wrapped up in one nifty package.\nAlex\u0026rsquo;s article makes a rather important critique of these programs, and one with which I mostly agree. He argues that the \u0026ldquo;buckets\u0026rdquo; themselves are non-free/closed source (bad for your data,) and that they abstract the organizational problems of organizing files rather than actually resolve those problems. Alex suggests that the best way to deal with this is to give up learn how to organize files on the file system itself and use better tools to store data.\nPragmatically I agree with him: I use structured formats to store most of my data, and have a simple but effective means for storing my data. It works, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure if you spend enough time talking about information management stuff with me, you\u0026rsquo;ll hear more than you ever wanted to know about how I store and use information.\nBut the \u0026ldquo;information bucket\u0026rdquo; approach has a lot going in it\u0026rsquo;s favor, and my approach isn\u0026rsquo;t a really broad solution. Here\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s good about this approach:\n1. If you store your data in one bucket then there\u0026rsquo;s only one place that your data could be, which makes it much easier to find any given thing when you\u0026rsquo;re trying to look for something that you just know you saved somewhere.\n2. If we\u0026rsquo;re left to our own devices to develop structured data a couple of things happen. First is that we don\u0026rsquo;t give it enough structure, so we end up with a few hundred files in a directory and no good way to make heads or tails of them. Then, to compensate for this, we create folders has a way of bookmarking specific bits of data, and end up with (potentially) too much structure that doesn\u0026rsquo;t convey productive information.\nI agree that the OS X information bucket isn\u0026rsquo;t an ideal solution to this problem, but I think there is a substantive problem here that need some sort of unified solution. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what that unified solution is, or even if there\u0026rsquo;s going to be a one-size-fits-all response for all users. But I think it\u0026rsquo;s a question that we need to begin to think about.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/information-buckets/","summary":"Alex wrote this article about \u0026ldquo;everything buckets\u0026rdquo; that got me thinking. And you know how dangerous this can be.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about \u0026ldquo;everything buckets,\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;information buckets,\u0026rdquo; and I think this term is a little more apt, given how these systems work. Basically the \u0026ldquo;everything\u0026rdquo; bucket, is a program that provides a database interface on top of our files in the effort of keeping us better organized. Features common to the information bucket, genre of programs are meta data and tagging interfaces, easier/integrated editing environments, more advanced search abilities, and easier input features. All wrapped up in one nifty package.\nAlex\u0026rsquo;s article makes a rather important critique of these programs, and one with which I mostly agree. He argues that the \u0026ldquo;buckets\u0026rdquo; themselves are non-free/closed source (bad for your data,) and that they abstract the organizational problems of organizing files rather than actually resolve those problems. Alex suggests that the best way to deal with this is to give up learn how to organize files on the file system itself and use better tools to store data.","title":"information buckets"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always rather enjoyed this post that I wrote about instant messaging programs. My issue is that I use IM a lot. A lot. I communicate with colleagues, friends, and frankly, if you want to get a hold of me, IM is often the best way to do this, and frankly for a lot of communications I prefer it to the phone.\nNevertheless, IM clients, on the whole, are mostly pretty bad. Right? They distract, they filter information poorly, they take up a lot of room on the screen, and are as a class pretty inconsistent. This is probably because no one really expected people to use instant messaging technologies in a serious way.\nBut here we are.\nThe leading IM client, really, for people who rely on this kind of thing is Pidgin (and the other libpurple based clients), which make it possible to connect to lots of different services at the same time but only have one roster/buddy list. It\u0026rsquo;s a good solution to the \u0026ldquo;multiple networks/accounts\u0026rdquo; problem, but the truth is the quality of the implementation varies, and the user interface is\u0026hellip; awkward and rigid1.\nThere is, however, this program called mcabber that provides the ability to connect to one xmpp account, in a terminal-based (ncurses?) environment. It\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, nothing is, but its a lot better than the other options.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;ve not been able to switch to using only it for my IMing needs for a couple of reasons, mostly related to my xmpp server/provider, but I have used it exclusively for a number of days and the experience is pretty good. Reasons I like it:\nEverything lives in one window, and chat windows have equal footing, like buffers in emacs, say. That\u0026rsquo;s really nifty.\nThe key shortcuts are really simple, and quite intuitive. Thats key in a terminal application\nI can run it in screen, and pull the screen over ssh to my laptop when I\u0026rsquo;m not in front of my computer. Though xmpp is generally really great about multiple connections, sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s best to not have to deal with that fussing.\nI like that it supports PGP encryption, though I don\u0026rsquo;t have anyone with whom I can encrypt conversations with, but that always seems to be a minor detail.\nThough, this isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it\u0026rsquo;s all good. There are some problems that I\u0026rsquo;ve had. Though to be fair, my complaints here are much fewer than with most other XMPP clients, so that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing, right? Complaints:\nNo support for service discovery. Which means you have to install psi--basically--if you\u0026rsquo;re serious about getting the most out of XMPP. This is\u0026hellip; unfortunate.\nIt takes a lot of work to get configured and get key bindings set up. I\u0026rsquo;m mostly of the opinion that it\u0026rsquo;s always best to give users a set of key bindings to start with and then let them customize as needed, and the default screen layout isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly useful or economical (put the status window at the top, and make it smaller, for starters).\nIt doesn\u0026rsquo;t support multiple connections/user-ids. This is a biggie, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t (really) object to the fact that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t support other protocols, I think the reality is that most users probably have and need to use more than one identity at once, so that\u0026rsquo;s a noticeable hole.\nI\u0026rsquo;d also like an easy interface for producing system notifications give me a setting option to pile messages (username, excerpt of x characters, time) to a pipe (|) and I\u0026rsquo;d be very happy indeed.\nI couldn\u0026rsquo;t decide if the fact that there was only one \u0026ldquo;text entry field\u0026rdquo; (mini-buffer) for all outgoing message buffers. Which meant that, particularly with scroll back, that it was easy to cross contexts unintentionally.\nMy last complaint isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a complaint about the software itself as it is a complaint about the instant messaging space in general. Basically, I think there has to be a way to filter this kind of communication. Ways to setup client-independent rules regarding statuses, auto-responders, and notification level. I\u0026rsquo;ve said that this should be \u0026ldquo;along lines of procmail,\u0026rdquo; but I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know what, even that, would look like. But someday, it\u0026rsquo;s coming, and I for one can\u0026rsquo;t wait.\nBut all in all. It\u0026rsquo;s a great program and you should check mcabber out, if you\u0026rsquo;re intense about jabber/xmpp and instant messaging (and living in the console).\nSo there was a pretty notorious fork-threat in the Pidgin project a while back over a sort of deterministic user interface decision, which I return to every now and then as an example of both intra FOSS project politics gone awry, and user interface design gone awry. I\u0026rsquo;m not dredging up the flame war, because the truth is I really hate GUI applications writ-large, so on some level its nothing specific.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mcabber-and-im/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always rather enjoyed this post that I wrote about instant messaging programs. My issue is that I use IM a lot. A lot. I communicate with colleagues, friends, and frankly, if you want to get a hold of me, IM is often the best way to do this, and frankly for a lot of communications I prefer it to the phone.\nNevertheless, IM clients, on the whole, are mostly pretty bad. Right? They distract, they filter information poorly, they take up a lot of room on the screen, and are as a class pretty inconsistent. This is probably because no one really expected people to use instant messaging technologies in a serious way.\nBut here we are.\nThe leading IM client, really, for people who rely on this kind of thing is Pidgin (and the other libpurple based clients), which make it possible to connect to lots of different services at the same time but only have one roster/buddy list.","title":"mcabber and IM"},{"content":"Free software and open source users/developers are a sort of evangelical bunch. I think a lot of this is because hackers what other people to use the software that they spend their time working on, and of course some of this is because of the ethical systems that pervade the free software movement. And of course we want to both expand the user base of certain pieces of software within the open source world (eg. getting vim users to use emacs) as well as getting people using proprietary systems (like Windows/OS X/Microsoft Office) to use free/open systems (like Linux/BSD/emacs).\nThe biggest challenge in the second project is usability, and I think both prospective users and developers (and people like me) often wonder \u0026ldquo;Is open source usable for non-technical users?\u0026rdquo; This is a question that I don\u0026rsquo;t have an answer for. On the one hand, yes, GNOME--for instance--is really usable. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly innovative software, nor is it clever in the way that OS X sometimes is, but it is on the whole very functional.\nVery often open source, in its entirety, is judged on the basis of its usability, which strikes me as pretty ironic, as I\u0026rsquo;d wager most open source projects--and without a doubt the most influential ones--are not \u0026ldquo;user applications.\u0026rdquo; In terms of importance, the kernels, the programing languages, the libraries, the servers, and the frameworks are way more successful, powerful, and robust than programs like \u0026ldquo;Open Office,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;GNOME,\u0026rdquo; or even--frankly--\u0026ldquo;Firefox.\u0026rdquo;\nI suspect this is the case because lower level stuff is either to get right, and because hackers end up working with computers on a very low level, so it makes sense that the itches they\u0026rsquo;re scratching with open source would work on a lower level. And the \u0026ldquo;cause of free software,\u0026rdquo; is more directly served by these lower level projects: open source depends on users recognizing the value of hacking on code, which is more likely to be realized in low level projects.\nWhich makes the project of evangelizing non-technical users more difficult, because the argument isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly \u0026ldquo;switch programs to (potentially) better ones,\u0026rdquo; but rather \u0026ldquo;become more involved the technology you use,\u0026rdquo; which is a much different argument. And I think the \u0026ldquo;usability\u0026rdquo; question often serves as point of mystification in this much different argument.\nMy original intent with this post to explore how some of the biggest open source user-applications were in fact sponsored by really big companies (in whole or in part). Novell puts some considerable resources into GNOME and KDE; Sun obviously backs Open Office; Firefox and Mozilla grew out of Netscape/AOL and get a lot of money from Google.\nMore than anything, I wonder what to make of this. Certainly there is also backing for lower level projects: Sun and Java/mySQL; countless companies and kernel development; 37 Signals and Ruby-on-Rails; and so forth, but it feels more substantial for user applications, somehow.\nI wouldn\u0026rsquo;t go so far as to suggest that corporations are attempting to re-mystify technology in open source. I think it\u0026rsquo;s much more likely that business know that having viable desktop environments will be advantageous to them in the long run, and that since hackers are less likely (on the whole) to work in the user-application space key contributions of corporate-backed developers are more noticeable.\nBut maybe there\u0026rsquo;s something else there too. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure, isn\u0026rsquo;t the world grand?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-userland/","summary":"Free software and open source users/developers are a sort of evangelical bunch. I think a lot of this is because hackers what other people to use the software that they spend their time working on, and of course some of this is because of the ethical systems that pervade the free software movement. And of course we want to both expand the user base of certain pieces of software within the open source world (eg. getting vim users to use emacs) as well as getting people using proprietary systems (like Windows/OS X/Microsoft Office) to use free/open systems (like Linux/BSD/emacs).\nThe biggest challenge in the second project is usability, and I think both prospective users and developers (and people like me) often wonder \u0026ldquo;Is open source usable for non-technical users?\u0026rdquo; This is a question that I don\u0026rsquo;t have an answer for. On the one hand, yes, GNOME--for instance--is really usable. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly innovative software, nor is it clever in the way that OS X sometimes is, but it is on the whole very functional.","title":"Open Source Userland"},{"content":"So soon, probably during the end of this post or somewhere in tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s post, I\u0026rsquo;m going to pass the half-million word mark on tychoish.com. This is a bit inflated because I incorporated the posts from tealart a couple of years ago, and some of that material includes quotes and links that I don\u0026rsquo;t think should count toward the site\u0026rsquo;s word count odometer. But there you have it, and in any case this is a milestone, that\u0026rsquo;s worth commemorating.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a quote out there along the lines of \u0026ldquo;everyone has a million words of crap in them before they get to the good stuff.\u0026rdquo; If we count the writing I do here, this means I\u0026rsquo;m getting close. If we count blog posts and academic writing, I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably well into the \u0026ldquo;good stuff.\u0026rdquo; I suppose some of that is up to you.\nI wrote a \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo;-type post about myself and what I was up to beyond what I blog about here (and a few of my posts since then have veered in that direction, alas). While these used to be the \u0026ldquo;easy posts\u0026rdquo; that I would just sort of blather out a year ago,1 I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like I miss them.\nI\u0026rsquo;m doing well. I have a lot on my plate, and a lot of \u0026ldquo;loose ends\u0026rdquo; floating around that are causing some stress, but I really can\u0026rsquo;t complain. Just for grins the things I\u0026rsquo;m working on right now:\nFiction Writing\nStation Keeping, Season 2 (about 5 thousand more words to go).\nThe Novel, (half done, 4-5 more months till first draft; leaving 3 months for rewrites, and a podcast launch in August.)\nTrailing Edge. (Hibernating. 3k more words, and then scores of edits).\nOpen Source Research\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on turning the research project that\u0026rsquo;s been sort of sputtering along into something more coherent on a number of different levels. I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to announce this exactly but it involves:\nWriting lots of emails. Lots of emails. Turn a fairly linear paper into a wiki. Collect a more complete bibliography file. Website things Get Critical Futures back on track. Tychoish.com Redesign project. Not to mention writing for the site like I do.\nSomething for the open source project described above.\nLife things\nI probably have half a dozen small/midsized trips this year. Knitting things, dancing things, work things, science fiction things. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot of stress there.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to be moving this summer.\nFor someone who views himself as being a shut-in mostly, I do a lot of stuff \u0026ldquo;out:\u0026rdquo; dancing 3 times a week, singing from time to time, and so forth.\nKnitting things\nThe grandmother shawl, plus two other lace shawls in progress.\nMy Starmore cable sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m 20% done with it. That\u0026rsquo;s not very much.\nThe color-work sweater that just needs another sleeve.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on my plate. I really need to start knocking this stuff out.\nWill this blog be around in another half million words? I figure that that means that I\u0026rsquo;d have to keep up doing this for another three or three and a half years, at my current rate. It could happen. It could definitely happen.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you on the other side.\nIt was a dark time. I\u0026rsquo;m better now. Mostly.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/half-million/","summary":"So soon, probably during the end of this post or somewhere in tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s post, I\u0026rsquo;m going to pass the half-million word mark on tychoish.com. This is a bit inflated because I incorporated the posts from tealart a couple of years ago, and some of that material includes quotes and links that I don\u0026rsquo;t think should count toward the site\u0026rsquo;s word count odometer. But there you have it, and in any case this is a milestone, that\u0026rsquo;s worth commemorating.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a quote out there along the lines of \u0026ldquo;everyone has a million words of crap in them before they get to the good stuff.\u0026rdquo; If we count the writing I do here, this means I\u0026rsquo;m getting close. If we count blog posts and academic writing, I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably well into the \u0026ldquo;good stuff.\u0026rdquo; I suppose some of that is up to you.\nI wrote a \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo;-type post about myself and what I was up to beyond what I blog about here (and a few of my posts since then have veered in that direction, alas).","title":"Half Million"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always been a really big fan of outlining and structured writing, particularly for long form stuff. I suspect anyone who has ever argued with me about writing, or written in collaboration with me is probably nodding in understanding (or yelling \u0026ldquo;that\u0026rsquo;s an understatement\u0026rdquo; and flipping the bird to the monitor). This probably explains my interest in things like LaTeX and Markdown, and the reason that wiki\u0026rsquo;s have been frustrating for me, and the reason that I can pull my distractable attention span together enough to be able write long form projects. I mean, I even managed that as a teenager, which continues to impress me at least.\nI like outlining because it allows me the opportunity to separate conceptual activity from implementation activity to a great extent. I can write an outline, figure out what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen, what I need to tell, where I\u0026rsquo;m headed in an argument/plot, and then when I go to write, I don\u0026rsquo;t have to figure out really core/low-level aspects of the story/essay as I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out how to move the characters around. Writing diologue and \u0026ldquo;people,\u0026rdquo; in their world is a very different task from, figuring out the fate of that world, and a character\u0026rsquo;s thoroughly. Or an illustrative motif in an essay. Outlining helps me to isolate and deal with these problems in different contexts, as well as provide continuity between writing sessions for particularly long work.\nOne of the biggest challenges (and successes) of the project that I\u0026rsquo;m working on at the moment was \u0026ldquo;making enough happen\u0026rdquo; in the story. I got an outline, that told a story that was too big for a short story, and yet didn\u0026rsquo;t provide the \u0026ldquo;body,\u0026rdquo; and rich environment that makes novels so enjoyable. So I wrote this draft of an outline, and then I spent the better part of a week thinking about \u0026ldquo;ok, now what can I add?\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;If I add this B-plot how will it triangulate and complicate the lives of the other characters.\u0026rdquo; And I kept adding scenes, details, and turns that would make life hell for the characters.\nIn previous attempts (to varying degree\u0026rsquo;s) I\u0026rsquo;ve said something like \u0026ldquo;I need to tell a story about \u0026ldquo;Telepaths who immigrating to Mars,\u0026rdquo; and then I write the outline, and as I wrote the stories there was never enough there, characters distraught-ness was out of phase with what was happening (my criticism, other people don\u0026rsquo;t seem to have this response, as much). So this time--so far--I\u0026rsquo;ve been really pleased with the way that the \u0026ldquo;tighter, more packed\u0026rdquo; outline has really helped the way that the writing of the story has progressed. You\u0026rsquo;ll be able to judge for yourself in time, but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of cool. What follows are a collection of the lesson\u0026rsquo;s learned from this outlining process:\nWrite a full outline, before you go back and add stuff. The initial concept, and layout of the story is valuable, even if you should probably be resistant to just \u0026ldquo;going with it.\u0026rdquo; Even if you feel the \u0026ldquo;burring impulse of creation,\u0026rdquo; outline anyway. For novels and long works, sustaining that impulse over many months is difficult. There are lots of different ways to outline (free writing, various levels of structured lists, note cards, etc.) something is bound to suit your style. While conventional wisdom holds that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t edit works in process (as this breaks flow and rhythm), once you have an outline completed. Edit a lot. Not for polish, but imagine the story, and play around with the order of chapters/key scenes. Push as much of the action into the shortest amount of space you can. See what you can do to pump up the action in other parts of the book. Add stuff. Add a lot of stuff. You\u0026rsquo;ll be able cut later, tighten things up later, having material of \u0026ldquo;things that could happen,\u0026rdquo; and having gone through the experience of playing with your story will help you, even if you say \u0026ldquo;nah, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to write that scene,\u0026rdquo; when you\u0026rsquo;re writing, or you feel that a scene you had in your outline won\u0026rsquo;t really work anymore. Cutting is easier later than adding more material Three is a really great number for stories. We\u0026rsquo;re all used to \u0026ldquo;good guy\u0026rdquo; versus \u0026ldquo;bad guy\u0026rdquo; plot dynamics, and the \u0026ldquo;bi-polar\u0026rdquo; approach to story telling, while familiar becomes boring really quick. Adding \u0026ldquo;thirds\u0026rdquo; to stories makes things much more complex, and much more dynamic. Third plotlines, third characters, third-major settings, and so forth. Or at least play with the idea. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tightening-outlines/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always been a really big fan of outlining and structured writing, particularly for long form stuff. I suspect anyone who has ever argued with me about writing, or written in collaboration with me is probably nodding in understanding (or yelling \u0026ldquo;that\u0026rsquo;s an understatement\u0026rdquo; and flipping the bird to the monitor). This probably explains my interest in things like LaTeX and Markdown, and the reason that wiki\u0026rsquo;s have been frustrating for me, and the reason that I can pull my distractable attention span together enough to be able write long form projects. I mean, I even managed that as a teenager, which continues to impress me at least.\nI like outlining because it allows me the opportunity to separate conceptual activity from implementation activity to a great extent. I can write an outline, figure out what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen, what I need to tell, where I\u0026rsquo;m headed in an argument/plot, and then when I go to write, I don\u0026rsquo;t have to figure out really core/low-level aspects of the story/essay as I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out how to move the characters around.","title":"Tightening Outlines"},{"content":"I had an odd experience as a writer a few weeks ago. I found myself writing \u0026ldquo;copy\u0026rdquo; rather than my more comfortable \u0026ldquo;blog post,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;essay,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;fiction story\u0026rdquo; and I learned a great deal from the experience. Mostly, \u0026ldquo;never be a copy writer if you can help it,\u0026rdquo; but I learned something about my other writing in the process: basically I write conversations.\nThis makes sense on a number of levels. First, it explains why I enjoy blogging as much as I do, and why I write for the blog in the way I do. Blogging is a conversation, I write stuff, you think about it, you comment. Repeat. Or I read something, and I respond with my \u0026ldquo;part\u0026rdquo; of the conversation. Secondly, I\u0026rsquo;ve occasionally been told by recipients of particularly quick emails that I \u0026ldquo;write just like I talk,\u0026rdquo; which makes sense given how I type, and how \u0026ldquo;natural\u0026rdquo; that is as a communications medium for me. Third and finally, people who\u0026rsquo;ve read my fiction, routinely comment on the dialog.1\nThis may also be why \u0026ldquo;being a writer\u0026rdquo; (professionally, creatively) has been a struggle. On some level the writing, even the fiction, is a means to an end. Banging words out on the keyboard for the blog is a means to have a conversation with you, dearest readers; writing fiction is a means to explore ideas and conversations that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t begin to articulate except through fantasy (on some level.)\nWhen I tried to write knitting patterns, I wrote these essays that were basically me standing up with a finished sweater saying \u0026ldquo;so if you want to make this, start here, and then do this \u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; and so forth through the entire sweater. On one hand they were stories, on another it was just me talking.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know what this means about me, what I write, or how I write. Frankly, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I\u0026rsquo;d like to know much more, but you can draw your own conclusions.\nOnward and Upward!\nI suppose the lingering forth item would be that my first attempt at graduate school was methodologically focused on narratives and \u0026ldquo;small stories,\u0026rdquo; in conversations as a means to understand \u0026ldquo;the individual in context\u0026rdquo; as it were. But that\u0026rsquo;s neither here nor there.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/conversations/","summary":"I had an odd experience as a writer a few weeks ago. I found myself writing \u0026ldquo;copy\u0026rdquo; rather than my more comfortable \u0026ldquo;blog post,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;essay,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;fiction story\u0026rdquo; and I learned a great deal from the experience. Mostly, \u0026ldquo;never be a copy writer if you can help it,\u0026rdquo; but I learned something about my other writing in the process: basically I write conversations.\nThis makes sense on a number of levels. First, it explains why I enjoy blogging as much as I do, and why I write for the blog in the way I do. Blogging is a conversation, I write stuff, you think about it, you comment. Repeat. Or I read something, and I respond with my \u0026ldquo;part\u0026rdquo; of the conversation. Secondly, I\u0026rsquo;ve occasionally been told by recipients of particularly quick emails that I \u0026ldquo;write just like I talk,\u0026rdquo; which makes sense given how I type, and how \u0026ldquo;natural\u0026rdquo; that is as a communications medium for me.","title":"Conversations"},{"content":"When I took a break from Critical Futures near the end of last year, I had intended to begin with the new year with renewed energy and vigor, but when the new year rolled around, I found myself somewhat lacking in vigor. So I\u0026rsquo;ve waited, and I kept waiting. And now, its the end of January, and I still haven\u0026rsquo;t restarted, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to talk for a moment about that.\nA big part of this is the fact that holiday vacations (such as they are post school) are never quite as long as you ever expect them to be. So I didn\u0026rsquo;t get that massive fiction writing binge that I was expecting and hoping for. And I also didn\u0026rsquo;t get that website redesign binge that I was hoping for. Alas. So I\u0026rsquo;ve needed more time, if not to do things, then to let projects breath. So my one or two week vacation turned into a month or more.\nSecondly, my \u0026ldquo;write more resolution\u0026rdquo; (such as it is) that I talked about in this post, is a practice that\u0026rsquo;s a little more than a week old at this point. that\u0026rsquo;s not a problem, but preparing content for posting when I\u0026rsquo;m not actively writing on a project very much feels draining. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m aware that my \u0026ldquo;supply\u0026rdquo; of fiction is going to run out, well. Sooner than I\u0026rsquo;ll be ready to resupply it, particularly since the novel I\u0026rsquo;m working on now, isn\u0026rsquo;t really a Critical Futures project. Well, it is, kind of.\nSo with that in mind, what lies in wait for Critical Futures?\nWell\u0026hellip;\nRecently I\u0026rsquo;ve started working more on the ending to Station Keeping\u0026rsquo;s second \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m not keeping a special eye on it, but I\u0026rsquo;m probably half way done with the second season (which is all new). That\u0026rsquo;s helped my morale a good deal. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to see some real progress on the new novel project (yay for being less stuck), which is a help. While it\u0026rsquo;s a long way off still, knowing that this is going to end up as a podcast (and that this podcast will be a part of Critical Futures) that\u0026rsquo;s been inspiring for my feelings of writerliness. Putting my \u0026ldquo;job\u0026rdquo; as a writer above my \u0026ldquo;job\u0026rdquo; as an editor/publisher was something that I really had to do in order to make it worthwhile.\nSo the plan? I\u0026rsquo;m going to post fiction less regularly. The pieces might be slightly longer (but probably not much). I\u0026rsquo;ll probably alternate Tuesday/Thursday weeks with Monday/Wednesday weeks. When the podcast starts, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably do a pod-cast episode and a piece of fiction a week. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to change the design of the site, much, but I think some tweaks are in order, and I need to add/update some of the static pages on the site.\nIf anyone has suggestions, quirky science fiction that they\u0026rsquo;d like to submit to Critical Futures, or wants to help out (with designs or the like), I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear from you.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-future-of-critical-futures/","summary":"When I took a break from Critical Futures near the end of last year, I had intended to begin with the new year with renewed energy and vigor, but when the new year rolled around, I found myself somewhat lacking in vigor. So I\u0026rsquo;ve waited, and I kept waiting. And now, its the end of January, and I still haven\u0026rsquo;t restarted, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to talk for a moment about that.\nA big part of this is the fact that holiday vacations (such as they are post school) are never quite as long as you ever expect them to be. So I didn\u0026rsquo;t get that massive fiction writing binge that I was expecting and hoping for. And I also didn\u0026rsquo;t get that website redesign binge that I was hoping for. Alas. So I\u0026rsquo;ve needed more time, if not to do things, then to let projects breath. So my one or two week vacation turned into a month or more.","title":"The Future of Critical Futures"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned that I\u0026rsquo;m in the process of doing a somewhat lengthy \u0026ldquo;blog redesign\u0026rdquo; project of tychoish.com. The astute among you, who don\u0026rsquo;t visit via RSS, will probably notice at least a little bit of a change recently, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s more in mind. While I resist the temptation to write lists in my posts, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to give in just this once. ;)\nWhat I hope to accomplish in this redesign. I want to have a home page that\u0026rsquo;s more dynamic. I think the fact that the landing page looks the same as every other page on the site is a sore spot for me. I want to go for a site that has:\nA list of recent essays The most recent essay Excerpts from a couple (2) other recent entries Links to other Blogs Several (3-5) recent coda posts. In general, I think that the landing page should provide a good gateway to what\u0026rsquo;s happening on the site, it should be dynamic and simple. It should load fast, and it should be more \u0026ldquo;clean.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m also considering digging up some AJAX bits so that I can have a couple of design widths (so that I can avoid variable width designs) and also have a dynamic browser for, say the excerpts of recent posts, and the coda posts.\nI also want tychoish to be less of a blog, and more of a host to different/additional kinds of activity. Like I\u0026rsquo;ll probably host a wiki here for the research I\u0026rsquo;m working on with open source, and I think it would be fun to make some conceptual space on the site for something other than just another blog, and see what happens. Given the shape that my \u0026ldquo;career\u0026rdquo; is headed, I think this has some pretty interesting possibilities.\nHow I plan to accomplish this redesign. Slowly.\nThe first order of business, is to start to play with the templates and design before I switch to some new system. I think trying to juggle a smooth transition with two balls in the air is just an invitation for me to screw things up royally.\nThe basic template for blog pages, will probably linger for a while longer than the front page, and that\u0026rsquo;s fine. I\u0026rsquo;m kind of fond of the site. It\u0026rsquo;s functional, it\u0026rsquo;s simplistic and very \u0026ldquo;old school,\u0026rdquo; which suits me just fine.\nSteps towards implementation:\n1. Write additional CSS classes to describe a new layout. Including rounded corners. (Grrr.) 2. Create JavaScript enhancements that make the site pop a bit, while also making the vast quantity of text more digestible. 3. Create template files for wordpress to facilitate the export to the new system. 4. Create staging area(s). For testing purposes. 5. Move to a host that gives more administrative rights. 6. Profit?\nWhy this is a good thing. My hope is to make my blogging system/environment much more modular, so that I can add and modify it more easily. The CMS\u0026rsquo;s I was using 5 years ago where much more along these lines, and while I didn\u0026rsquo;t know what I was doing very much I did appreciate that level of control.\nTo say \u0026ldquo;I want a more modular and dynamic\u0026rdquo; website sounds a bit trite, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s the most true. If the site\u0026rsquo;s more modular, that is, if template organization and content display (which are the same thing with WordPress) are less connected, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to have all the benefits of \u0026ldquo;dynamically generated pages\u0026rdquo; without the overhead of the database system. And if that\u0026rsquo;s the case, then my relationship to the content of the site isn\u0026rsquo;t via a constrained text field in one system, which I think will be a good thing, indeed.\nOr I hope, at least.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/blog-redesign/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned that I\u0026rsquo;m in the process of doing a somewhat lengthy \u0026ldquo;blog redesign\u0026rdquo; project of tychoish.com. The astute among you, who don\u0026rsquo;t visit via RSS, will probably notice at least a little bit of a change recently, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s more in mind. While I resist the temptation to write lists in my posts, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to give in just this once. ;)\nWhat I hope to accomplish in this redesign. I want to have a home page that\u0026rsquo;s more dynamic. I think the fact that the landing page looks the same as every other page on the site is a sore spot for me. I want to go for a site that has:\nA list of recent essays The most recent essay Excerpts from a couple (2) other recent entries Links to other Blogs Several (3-5) recent coda posts. In general, I think that the landing page should provide a good gateway to what\u0026rsquo;s happening on the site, it should be dynamic and simple.","title":"Blog Redesign"},{"content":"Last week as I was wrapping up a project, I found myself reading an article by Gabriella Coleman1 about ethical systems and free software/open source development communities (pdf link). It\u0026rsquo;s a great article that helped me connect a few desperate projects, and I think it also provides a very useful foothold into talking about the ideologies of free software without getting encumbered by free software\u0026rsquo;s internal ideological \u0026ldquo;drama.\u0026rdquo; In turn:\nBefore I got absorbed into open source and free software stuff, I was interested in issues around the construction of individual\u0026rsquo;s identity in reference to group-based cultural scripts about identity. For example how \u0026ldquo;gay men\u0026rdquo; think of themselves in relation to gender/sexuality/race, and how they made sense of the social constructed-ness of these categories. But the underlying structural question applies to all sorts of people and groups (\u0026ldquo;people who knit\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;communities of knitters;\u0026rdquo; immigrants/refugees and \u0026ldquo;Americans\u0026rdquo;/national identities; etc). There were a lot of reasons why that didn\u0026rsquo;t work out (on top of some stuff about my background): the biggest one is that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a good field2 to do this kind of work. In retrospect, It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that it didn\u0026rsquo;t work out for these and many other reasons.\nNevertheless, even as I\u0026rsquo;ve been \u0026ldquo;reinventing\u0026rdquo; myself and my interests in the last year I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that my interests in open source development and free software, have a strong parallel, as I\u0026rsquo;m interested in collaboration and shared creation in the context of open source projects. This time I have a bit more going for me, of course.\nSo how does this connect? Well, I read a bunch of literature the first time around on \u0026ldquo;moral development,\u0026rdquo; and it turns out (I would have never guessed this before) that there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of very cool recent work on how social factors (like communities and group membership) contribute to the development of moral systems, that isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;Kohlberg-esque\u0026rdquo; (and thus decontextualized in harmful ways). Before someone pushed me to read these articles, I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I would have sought out the connection between \u0026ldquo;ethics\u0026rdquo; (moral systems) and group identities, but it\u0026rsquo;s there. Reading this article addressed ethics of free software communities strengthen these connection for me, and I think is a great starting point for thinking about free software projects as a entities onto themselves. I have some more thinking to do here, of course, but there are some cool possibilities.\nSo about ethics and software freedom, anyway.\nThe article explores the ways that the Debian Project is not only rooted in a strong \u0026ldquo;software freedom\u0026rdquo; ethical tradition (the DFSG, the close alliance with the FSF3) but also--as the article explores--promotes and develops this ethic in amongst its many developers. That while Debian attracts a certain predisposition toward free software and open source, participation in this project reinforces a shared set of ethical perspectives. We talk about \u0026ldquo;copyleft\u0026rdquo; licenses in free software as being \u0026ldquo;viral\u0026rdquo; because the mandate that derivative works be distributed under their terms (and thus spread in \u0026ldquo;viral ways,) but really they\u0026rsquo;re also viral in the way that they shape the ethical systems of developers who use them.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s kind of awesome. It\u0026rsquo;s also, I suppose not ground breaking (I think you can see echos of this in some of rms\u0026rsquo; essays, for instance) but it does let you (or me) talk about the ideologies of free software without participating in the (different, but connected) ideological debates of free software. Which is a good thing indeed.\nOnward and Upward!\nI have a somewhat sorted history of linking to people and then musing on whatever it is they wrote on this blog, only to discover a comment the next day from the original authors. So as a somewhat preemptive measure: Hello, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ll write a somewhat less public letter of introduction soon. Thanks for reading.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMy background has been in (developmental) psychology, and while this is a lovely field that I have a lot of fondness and respect for, the study of individual/cultural boundary pushes on an interdisciplinary space, or null void really.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nDebian Free Software Guidelines (the code by which software licenses are deemed \u0026ldquo;appropriate\u0026rdquo; for inclusion in the Debian project) and the Free Software Foundation (originators of the GNU GPL, and a great many other things) in turn.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ethics-of-free-software/","summary":"Last week as I was wrapping up a project, I found myself reading an article by Gabriella Coleman1 about ethical systems and free software/open source development communities (pdf link). It\u0026rsquo;s a great article that helped me connect a few desperate projects, and I think it also provides a very useful foothold into talking about the ideologies of free software without getting encumbered by free software\u0026rsquo;s internal ideological \u0026ldquo;drama.\u0026rdquo; In turn:\nBefore I got absorbed into open source and free software stuff, I was interested in issues around the construction of individual\u0026rsquo;s identity in reference to group-based cultural scripts about identity. For example how \u0026ldquo;gay men\u0026rdquo; think of themselves in relation to gender/sexuality/race, and how they made sense of the social constructed-ness of these categories. But the underlying structural question applies to all sorts of people and groups (\u0026ldquo;people who knit\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;communities of knitters;\u0026rdquo; immigrants/refugees and \u0026ldquo;Americans\u0026rdquo;/national identities; etc). There were a lot of reasons why that didn\u0026rsquo;t work out (on top of some stuff about my background): the biggest one is that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a good field2 to do this kind of work.","title":"Ethics of Free Software"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve written about current projects on this blog, and I think every knitting project that I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about thus far I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet finished. In a year or more. Rather than disappoint, I have another post about a new knitting project, but it comes with a bit of a story. Sorry to the members of the queer-knit-list, as this will be something of an old story.\nIn the summer of 2005 I lived in Kansas City with my grandmother. It was after my first year in college, and it was a great experience. I got a job in a yarn store, I knit a lot, and it was a great experience. I\u0026rsquo;m an only grandchild on that side of the family, and I think it was a really good experience. That spring-into summer I was really big into knitting shawls, and I think from that April-to-August I think I made 5 fairly large Pi Shawls. (I think I also made two or three sweaters during this period as well, it was intense). One of the Pi shawls I made was a red one out of sport-weight alpaca, and my grandmother took to it like a fish to water.\nI should comment on the shawl before I go any further. It\u0026rsquo;s bright red. Really bright read. I think \u0026ldquo;stop-sign\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;fire-truck\u0026rdquo; begins to capture it. It\u0026rsquo;s also fairly heavy as a shawl. While fingering weight makes a nice shawl, I\u0026rsquo;m often of the opinion that sport weight is a bit too heavy for shawls. Something about drape or heft. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. To complicate matters, I attempted to do a knit and purl pattern (don\u0026rsquo;t ask). Words to the wise: texture in alpaca doesn\u0026rsquo;t work because the fabric is too limp, and furthermore texture in shawls that are knitted loosely doesn\u0026rsquo;t work. I also attempted at some point to do big lace-diamonds, which I can\u0026rsquo;t explain or justify. The biggest error, however, is the fact that I ran out of yarn before the shawl was done, and rather than pick out the cast off, I pulled out the previous few rounds and used that yarn to finish off the bind off. So there\u0026rsquo;s kind of a notch missing out of one part of the shawl.\nSo it\u0026rsquo;s an odd object.\nThe second part speaks to my grandmother. Her style for many years has been to wear jackets and shirts with nice patterns in the blue-purple spectrum over black slacks. In short, not very \u0026ldquo;grandmotherly,\u0026rdquo; for years and years. A year ago, I spent a couple of weeks with her, after she had a knee problem (fractured knee cap!) and she was wearing a brace and she dug out a skirt because her pants wouldn\u0026rsquo;t fit over the knee brace, and it was clear that the skirt was at least as awkward as the knee brace for her. As I think about it I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would be unreasonable to suggest that she doesn\u0026rsquo;t own any (other) objects of red clothing.\nSo she took this shawl with her every where. To the movies, to restaurants, on vacation. Because like any good shawl, it was just the right thing to provide easy and accessible warmth. Everywhere.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve not blogged a lot about this, but it\u0026rsquo;s been a tough year for her (and us as well). The aforementioned broken knee cap, were the last straw for those knees, and she decided that it was finally the right time to do knee replacements--having previously decided that she was too busy to take the time to get her knees replaced. Knee replacements are hard, and this was complicated by the need to do a repair on the second one (which was even harder to recover from, for a lot of reasons). I\u0026rsquo;ve been back and forth between the city she lives in and the city I live in at least 5 times this year (and my father has done the trip about as much). Thankfully things are looking up, and she\u0026rsquo;s set to go back home (from rehab) right as rain in a bit less than a month.\nI decided a couple of weeks ago, that I really ought to make an updated shawl for her. I chose alpaca, this time in light and dark gray that I had in the stash, and rather than do a pattern, I\u0026rsquo;m just knitting it plain, with a stripe of light gray before the end. I\u0026rsquo;m even doing increases via the \u0026ldquo;make one by knitting into the front and back of the stitch\u0026rdquo; method, rather than yarn overs (so that there\u0026rsquo;s really no open work in the shawl). And I\u0026rsquo;ve been planning so this time\nI showed her the work in progress a few weeks ago when I went for a visit and she seemed quite impressed. So I trust the final product will go over well. The knitting has been really pretty quick. I worked pretty steady the first week, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty consistent about it the past few weeks, but not quite as steady. I expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll be done in another couple of weeks. And of course, I\u0026rsquo;ll post pictures. Right now it looks kinda like a gray sack/awkward beret. I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you, for now. But we\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-a-shawl/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve written about current projects on this blog, and I think every knitting project that I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about thus far I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet finished. In a year or more. Rather than disappoint, I have another post about a new knitting project, but it comes with a bit of a story. Sorry to the members of the queer-knit-list, as this will be something of an old story.\nIn the summer of 2005 I lived in Kansas City with my grandmother. It was after my first year in college, and it was a great experience. I got a job in a yarn store, I knit a lot, and it was a great experience. I\u0026rsquo;m an only grandchild on that side of the family, and I think it was a really good experience. That spring-into summer I was really big into knitting shawls, and I think from that April-to-August I think I made 5 fairly large Pi Shawls.","title":"Knitting a Shawl"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s only comparatively recently that I\u0026rsquo;ve returned to the world of being a desktop computer user. I built my own computer when I was in high school, and it died after 3 years (or so), and I replaced that with an Mac laptop, which I updated a couple of times, but until this last fall, that was my window onto the Internet and my main academic/scholarly tool for a long time. This \u0026ldquo;laptop only\u0026rdquo; modality, is I think pretty common among a layer of contemporary computer users. Students, Internet-industry professionals (start-ups, programmers/hackers of a certain breed, etc.) are all prone to this kind of setup. And the truth is, that given today\u0026rsquo;s technology, just about any laptop will pretty much whatever anyone needs from it. There are some limitations on the high end, but not many.\nIndeed the reason that I moved to a desktop was the realization that I do about 60% of my computering in the study, at my desk. I also found myself needing a lot more screen space1 than any laptop that I\u0026rsquo;d like to carry on my back could provide. It is also nice to be able to have a computer that\u0026rsquo;s always on (downloading, file server stuff, etc.) and always connected to the Internet. Nevertheless, I still have a laptop and I find that I use it a lot. I tend to write in the morning in the living room, I reflexively (though I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten better at leaving it at home) take the laptop with me when I leave the house.\nI used to think that having more than one machine was a bit of a hassle, and I suppose it is, but I\u0026rsquo;m sort of interested in thinking about how folks--particularly people who also have a desktop--use laptops. My laptop, despite being really half as powerful as the desktop, is configured the same way my desktop is, it has all of the same software, and nearly all of the same data. This seems like an ideal situation from a workflow perspective, but I can respect that there are other approaches.\nI end up using the laptop as a \u0026ldquo;change of pace,\u0026rdquo; and as a \u0026ldquo;more focused\u0026rdquo; situation when I need to hunker down and write more seriously.\nI intended this post to be less about general workflow stuff and more about my experiences with replacing my Macbook with the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X41t of which I\u0026rsquo;ve become quite enamored. Particularly, with respect to its \u0026ldquo;tablet,\u0026rdquo; feature.\nA few weeks ago I started to use the Macbook again incidentally, and my conclusion from this experience is that, while I have a lot of respect for OS X and the mac platform, it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I want to use myself in any kind of day to day way. So I\u0026rsquo;m back using the thinkpad, and I\u0026rsquo;m tracking around for a second one (long story) so that I can sell the macbook without hurting the family\u0026rsquo;s ecology2 of computers. And it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing. In a sort of minimalistic and technologically frugal sort of way, this machine does everything I need of a laptop, which is kind of cool\nWhen I got the laptop, I was really excited about the prospect of having a tablet-formed machine. I could annotate PDFs effectively, I could read ebooks more comfortably in bed or on the couch. Turns out to not quite be the case.\nBasically the implementation of the tablet part of the computer is perfect: the hinge is great, the texture of the screen is great, it just works--even on Linux. The problem? I don\u0026rsquo;t have a hell of a lot of use for a computer without a keyboard. I like the experience of being able to turn it into a tablet to be able to concentrate a little bit better at the document at hand. That\u0026rsquo;s useful. But the truth is I use it, maybe once a week if that.\nDoes anyone else have a tablet and if so, how much do you use it as such, or is there something really cool about tablets that I\u0026rsquo;ve totally missed?\nOnward and Upward!\nI have something like 40 diagonal inches these days, on my main machine which is probably a bit of overkill. My issue on the Macbook screen was that I could have 30 windows open just fine (with Expose, which is really, a godsend) as long as I was working on a constrained number of projects. When I started having a bunch of \u0026ldquo;work things\u0026rdquo; on top of my usual cluster \u0026ldquo;tycho things,\u0026rdquo; what had been pretty efficient became me spending forever finding the right text editor window. Magically the Awesome window manager that I use, manages to provide a lot more \u0026ldquo;conceptual\u0026rdquo; space for doing work, while also cutting down on distractions, without exactly tying conceptual space to physical space. Nifty stuff, really.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhen I got the thinkpad, I had intended to use it for a few weeks and then give it to my father, who\u0026rsquo;d been relegated to the oldest computer in the family computer ecology (an ibook). This was insurance against unanticipated systems failure (the last time a computer in died, there was\u0026hellip; significant strife.) But, it turns out that the ibook has discovered a second life as the stereo system\u0026rsquo;s Brain, and as I have the thinkpad\u0026hellip; You can see where this is going.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-laptoping/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s only comparatively recently that I\u0026rsquo;ve returned to the world of being a desktop computer user. I built my own computer when I was in high school, and it died after 3 years (or so), and I replaced that with an Mac laptop, which I updated a couple of times, but until this last fall, that was my window onto the Internet and my main academic/scholarly tool for a long time. This \u0026ldquo;laptop only\u0026rdquo; modality, is I think pretty common among a layer of contemporary computer users. Students, Internet-industry professionals (start-ups, programmers/hackers of a certain breed, etc.) are all prone to this kind of setup. And the truth is, that given today\u0026rsquo;s technology, just about any laptop will pretty much whatever anyone needs from it. There are some limitations on the high end, but not many.\nIndeed the reason that I moved to a desktop was the realization that I do about 60% of my computering in the study, at my desk.","title":"On Laptoping"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been sort of coy about the details (because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to jinx anything and there aren\u0026rsquo;t many details out there), but I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that the novel I\u0026rsquo;m working on will probably appear as a podcast sometime late in the year. Scott Farquhar will do the reading and it\u0026rsquo;ll be over on Critical Futures (and other places?) I\u0026rsquo;m excited about this, as I think it means a higher profile for my work, I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to do a podcast for a long time, and it gives me something to \u0026ldquo;work towards\u0026rdquo; for this project, which had heretofore been a \u0026ldquo;so I\u0026rsquo;m writing another novel for myself because that\u0026rsquo;s what I do,\u0026rdquo; and that purpose is really good for my process.\nThis post, however, is a writing-meets-technology post. I store all of my projects in git repositories. This is good, because it lets me track changes and revisions, back up and synchronize files between machines, and because I thought it might be fun to use git to collaborate with editors/provide history/source for the novel once it\u0026rsquo;s more \u0026ldquo;done,\u0026rdquo; or at least, as a fairly linear writer, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to a point where its clear that I have an intended shape for the story.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m an avid git proponent, and fascinated by the prospects contained in the software on a conceptual level, I don\u0026rsquo;t do a lot of \u0026ldquo;distributed workflow,\u0026rdquo; stuff myself on a day to day basis. Yet. So stuff about publishing branches, and even having more than one developer working at the same time in the system is a bit foreign to me because I haven\u0026rsquo;t had to use it ever.\nSo it\u0026rsquo;s taken some getting used to, and I was tempted through the whole process to cave and get a git-hub account (with private collaborators) because I think the web-based interface for forking repositories is basically what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do inside of one repository with (semi) public branches. Here\u0026rsquo;s the setup:\nI have a bare repository on the server that I use as a centralized dumping ground for a lot stuff. While strictly speaking this isn\u0026rsquo;t required it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a backup, a single place to collect data, and I have git-web setup on the server so I can git a birds-eye view of the repository if I get confused. I do all of my work in the master branch. I tag important commits if there\u0026rsquo;s something unique that I delete out of later commits. And basically that\u0026rsquo;s about all I\u0026rsquo;ve done in the fiction projects.\nNow, what I want to do is let Scott clone my repository and have a branch where he can edit, create files, leave notes, and so forth without affecting what I\u0026rsquo;m working on. Because I\u0026rsquo;m still writing pretty intensely, this also lets Scott (and potentially others,) get my changes as I push them onto the server, rather than having to exchange emails and all of that. Then when I\u0026rsquo;m ready to edit, I make my own editing branch based the latest from \u0026ldquo;master\u0026rdquo; merge/review Scott\u0026rsquo;s edits, and then go through and edit myself once, and then when it\u0026rsquo;s golden, I merge my editing branch back into master, and hopefully there\u0026rsquo;s a book. There\u0026rsquo;s also, something cool and performance about publishing not only the text of the book, but the development of that text.\nI can understand not wanting to let \u0026ldquo;previous and unfinished drafts\u0026rdquo; out into the wild, but there\u0026rsquo;s something about the way that distributed version control systems don\u0026rsquo;t just produce \u0026ldquo;previous drafts,\u0026rdquo; but all previous drafts, which can as a group convey a certain kind of story onto themselves. I mean, I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly likely to go read through a total revision history, but I think knowing its there is pretty interesting, and being able to see key moments, drafts, and the editing process at work, is something that has a lot of merit.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;ll do this exactly the same way again in the future (paying for git hub seems like its worthwhile now that I know how to do it myself), but we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it goes and I\u0026rsquo;ll be sure to post a review of how the process goes, and at some point, you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to see for yourself.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-collaboration/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been sort of coy about the details (because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to jinx anything and there aren\u0026rsquo;t many details out there), but I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that the novel I\u0026rsquo;m working on will probably appear as a podcast sometime late in the year. Scott Farquhar will do the reading and it\u0026rsquo;ll be over on Critical Futures (and other places?) I\u0026rsquo;m excited about this, as I think it means a higher profile for my work, I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to do a podcast for a long time, and it gives me something to \u0026ldquo;work towards\u0026rdquo; for this project, which had heretofore been a \u0026ldquo;so I\u0026rsquo;m writing another novel for myself because that\u0026rsquo;s what I do,\u0026rdquo; and that purpose is really good for my process.\nThis post, however, is a writing-meets-technology post. I store all of my projects in git repositories. This is good, because it lets me track changes and revisions, back up and synchronize files between machines, and because I thought it might be fun to use git to collaborate with editors/provide history/source for the novel once it\u0026rsquo;s more \u0026ldquo;done,\u0026rdquo; or at least, as a fairly linear writer, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to a point where its clear that I have an intended shape for the story.","title":"git Collaboration"},{"content":"This fall I visited with a bunch of my friends from college for the first time since I, you know, graduated from college. In a move that surprised just about everyone, of my core-friend group from college, I\u0026rsquo;m the only one who\u0026rsquo;s not in graduate school right now. One thing I realized, however, is that I haven\u0026rsquo;t exactly dropped off the face of the academic-earth. Every semester since graduation (until this one), I\u0026rsquo;ve been enrolled in classes and have accumulated a number of credit hours because it was fun, because I felt like I wasn\u0026rsquo;t done with school.\nOn Sunday I sent in a paper for the last of these projects. I did something last semester with a philosopher professor (and friend, really) on free software and open source development methodologies and processes, though the project was at least vaguely anthropological. Part of my plan with doing this last project was to get a little bit of \u0026ldquo;open source\u0026rdquo; and not-psychology not-women\u0026rsquo;s studies on the record; the second part of the plan was to delay the student loan people until I\u0026rsquo;d collected enough dough to be debt free when the grace period finally wears off. With both of these goals firmly accomplished, I\u0026rsquo;m entering what will probably be about 2 years of not applying to graduate school, so graduate school would start in the fall of 2012. But I might do a trial application to two places a year earlier. Anyway\u0026hellip;\nThis chance for a break is a really good thing. My previous attempts at academia have all been for the wrong thing, which hurts. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been really young (spring birthday, college in three years) which doesn\u0026rsquo;t help either. So spending the next few years learning stuff outside of school, becoming more of a historian/anthropologist, writing a few novels, letting tychoish.com break the million word mark, working in an awesome job, saving money to do things like go to a residential writing workshop (giving in, I know), and contributing to open source projects. It\u0026rsquo;ll be good for the soul.\nOne thing I realized before I started the project that I just finished, was that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t written anything academic-like in years. I mean really sat down and wrote something new. By the time I got done with school I was settling into a rut and I had enough of a background in what I needed to write--for academic things--that I was really stuck. So this past fall when I started to set down the goals for the project, although I wanted to spend most of my time doing background work (reading the literature, and \u0026rsquo;living/working\u0026rsquo; in open source worlds), in the back of my mind I had the notion that this research (such as it is) that I\u0026rsquo;m doing now will turn into a paper sometime down the road.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s on my mind, as a project for my \u0026ldquo;not in school\u0026rdquo; period. While it\u0026rsquo;s clearly a long way off and I have a lot of work to do to get to the point where I might have an essay of any useful depth, it\u0026rsquo;s terribly interesting to think about doing scholarly work outside of the confines of academic schedules. I\u0026rsquo;ve never really had the opportunity to write a single piece of intellectual work that I could work on for more than four months from inception to typesetting.1 Graduate programs expect students to have research experience and undergraduate curriculum are designed to provide students with research experience, and yet sustained attention to a research project is something that\u0026rsquo;s really hard to schedule/arrange before graduation.\nEvery day\u0026rsquo;s an adventure after all\u0026hellip;\nI wrote that sentence without considering fiction writing, which is just interesting. Which often take much longer than that. In anycase\u0026hellip;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ak-ah-dee-me-uhhh/","summary":"This fall I visited with a bunch of my friends from college for the first time since I, you know, graduated from college. In a move that surprised just about everyone, of my core-friend group from college, I\u0026rsquo;m the only one who\u0026rsquo;s not in graduate school right now. One thing I realized, however, is that I haven\u0026rsquo;t exactly dropped off the face of the academic-earth. Every semester since graduation (until this one), I\u0026rsquo;ve been enrolled in classes and have accumulated a number of credit hours because it was fun, because I felt like I wasn\u0026rsquo;t done with school.\nOn Sunday I sent in a paper for the last of these projects. I did something last semester with a philosopher professor (and friend, really) on free software and open source development methodologies and processes, though the project was at least vaguely anthropological. Part of my plan with doing this last project was to get a little bit of \u0026ldquo;open source\u0026rdquo; and not-psychology not-women\u0026rsquo;s studies on the record; the second part of the plan was to delay the student loan people until I\u0026rsquo;d collected enough dough to be debt free when the grace period finally wears off.","title":"ak! ah, dee me uhhh"},{"content":"I have a tendency toward binge writing, it\u0026rsquo;s true. Also, as a \u0026ldquo;professional writer,\u0026rdquo; (of sorts, saying that still makes me giggle) I write a lot. Even on days when I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty lackluster, I probably write a total of 2,500 to 3,000 words a day, and on days when I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better I suspect the total gets closer to 5,000. It\u0026rsquo;s not all productive work, always, and it\u0026rsquo;s certainly not all fiction words,1 but one of my guiding philosophies as a writer is to \u0026ldquo;keep words flowing.\u0026rdquo;\nThis is to say, that the act of continually committing words to proverbial paper is more important than the words that you write. Writing, for me, is an experimental act. I try a bunch of shit out and hope that I can look back at what I\u0026rsquo;ve done and decide what works and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t in retrospect. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to experiment without data, and hard to let the editing process do it\u0026rsquo;s job without content. Also, I take the opinion that \u0026ldquo;getting momentum\u0026rdquo; is the hardest part of any productive/effective process. Once you\u0026rsquo;ve got a head of steam, creative work is easier. Long(er) time readers of this site will certainly recognize this approach.\nSo I write a lot, and as I settle into a work rhythm and come to grips with the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m unconditionally an adult (not, student-adult, not adult-like but just another 20-something guy who writes a lot,) I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to figure out how to regulate fiction projects and fiction writing as part of the \u0026ldquo;what I do.\u0026rdquo; How to balance fiction writing with other projects, how to carve time out for fiction2, how to nurture that process, and other stuff related being a fiction writer.3\nWhen I was writing fiction in high school, I had a pretty religious \u0026ldquo;thousand words a week,\u0026rdquo; rule that I almost always accomplished, and since then I\u0026rsquo;ve generally stuck to the \u0026ldquo;thousand words a day,\u0026rdquo; when there aren\u0026rsquo;t other major commitments, and no less than a thousand words a week when writing time has a major conflict (like day jobs, or school). For the last 4-6 months I\u0026rsquo;ve taken the same approach, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve been moderately successful, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I\u0026rsquo;ve been successful enough. There are entire weeks when I haven\u0026rsquo;t written very much if anything, and even though I have time, I don\u0026rsquo;t often use the time particularly effectively.\nMaybe it\u0026rsquo;s a result of being too flexible, but I often find myself falling into the following trap: I\u0026rsquo;ll have a few hours, and a number of things to do, ongoing projects for work, a few personal projects of some importance, and fiction, and I\u0026rsquo;ll realize that I don\u0026rsquo;t have enough time to be able to write 1,000 words of fiction, so I just spend the time on other projects. Which is kind of backwards logic, I have the time, but because I don\u0026rsquo;t have \u0026ldquo;the ideal amount\u0026rdquo; of time, I forgo it entirely.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s kind of dumb. The past few days, rather than just set a somewhat idealistic goal of what I want to get done, I\u0026rsquo;ve set a range, and a hard \u0026ldquo;maximum goal.\u0026rdquo; So rather than \u0026ldquo;try and write 1,000 words,\u0026rdquo; the goal has become to \u0026ldquo;write a page or two and never more than 600 words (on one project).\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it\u0026rsquo;s working, but less than 600 words is manageable, it\u0026rsquo;s enough finish a novel or two in a year, and I suspect that my weekly word averages will be a bit higher, though I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly good about tracking word counts (and I should be).\nSo, it seems like, I\u0026rsquo;m trending away from being a binge writer, at least from fiction. Which is a really weird mode for me. I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly in the business of giving writing advice, but if you think this kind of advice would be good for you, then please consider it, otherwise, that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m up to.\nOnward and Upward!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve done 3-5k of fiction words in a day, but only once: the winter/holiday break of my junior of high school, I wrote something absurd, like 25,000 words in a novel. I\u0026rsquo;ve never managed to duplicate that and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;d want to, really.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nOne of the biggest challenges for \u0026ldquo;wannabe writers\u0026rdquo; (an identity that I gladly claim) is \u0026ldquo;finding time to write,\u0026rdquo; amidst all of the challenges of life: chores, relationships, employment, family, sleep, and so forth. I concur with the theory that if you want and need to write, you can almost always find a way to make time to write. Nevertheless there are many time related challenges for writing: finding sustained time to dedicate to fiction, finding a way to efficiently do everything else that needs doing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always found my relationship to the identity of \u0026ldquo;being a (fiction) writer\u0026rdquo; somewhat difficult. I don\u0026rsquo;t have formal training as a writer (outside of general liberal arts background, and a very, loose-y goose-y writing education in college which consisted mostly of feminist history and political science classes, and I actively avoided creative writing and English classes. Anymore, I feel my science fiction writing to be an outgrowth and alternative expression of academic and scholarly interest\u0026rsquo;s/projects, which I think further complicates this.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-binge-writing/","summary":"I have a tendency toward binge writing, it\u0026rsquo;s true. Also, as a \u0026ldquo;professional writer,\u0026rdquo; (of sorts, saying that still makes me giggle) I write a lot. Even on days when I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty lackluster, I probably write a total of 2,500 to 3,000 words a day, and on days when I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better I suspect the total gets closer to 5,000. It\u0026rsquo;s not all productive work, always, and it\u0026rsquo;s certainly not all fiction words,1 but one of my guiding philosophies as a writer is to \u0026ldquo;keep words flowing.\u0026rdquo;\nThis is to say, that the act of continually committing words to proverbial paper is more important than the words that you write. Writing, for me, is an experimental act. I try a bunch of shit out and hope that I can look back at what I\u0026rsquo;ve done and decide what works and what doesn\u0026rsquo;t in retrospect. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to experiment without data, and hard to let the editing process do it\u0026rsquo;s job without content.","title":"On Binge Writing"},{"content":"Wow, that\u0026rsquo;s a title for a much more interesting post than the one I\u0026rsquo;m planning to write. Sorry folks. This post is more about the devices and technology that we use to get information out of our heads and onto paper or into computers. Last week, I was reading the Internet as I\u0026rsquo;m wont to do, and I was delving into an area that I think of as the \u0026ldquo;ubergeek\u0026rdquo; section. There\u0026rsquo;s a class of personal sites maintained by hacker-types that hosts all kinds of cool crap: information about clever scripts that they\u0026rsquo;ve cooked up, links to side projects, pictures of their gear, often a blog of some sort--but always pretty low key. Anyway, I discovered a cache of pictures of people\u0026rsquo;s very hardcore keyboard setups, and I was pretty smitten.\nSee I\u0026rsquo;m an input geek. And this is a long standing thing.\nMy holiday present to myself, you see, was a new nib for my fountain pen. I don\u0026rsquo;t write long hand very much anymore, but I\u0026rsquo;ve always been a pen geek, and the nib for the pen that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for years was a \u0026ldquo;fine,\u0026rdquo; and it just didn\u0026rsquo;t work for me very well (I\u0026rsquo;m a lefty). Also, it\u0026rsquo;s a Japanese made pen (Namiki/Pilot) and apparently Japanese nibs run smaller than western nibs. So it was really an extra fine. I\u0026rsquo;ve been saying to myself that I needed to do this, and I finally gave in, and it\u0026rsquo;s been nice. While I do a lot of note taking and writing on the computer I like the portability and sociability of writing in a notebook (you can write notes on paper and not have a barrier between you and the people you\u0026rsquo;re sitting with.) It\u0026rsquo;s also nice, from time to time, to be able to change paces if for some reason the computer becomes too distracting or formal. So I\u0026rsquo;ll probably always keep a notebook.1\nNow to be fair, while I\u0026rsquo;m a pen geek, the only kind of fountain pens I\u0026rsquo;ve ever owned have been Namiki Vanashing Points. These are really nifty \u0026ldquo;modern\u0026rdquo; pens that don\u0026rsquo;t have caps, but rather have a really swell tactile clicking mechanism that retracts the nib into the pen body. So that\u0026rsquo;s really cool. Also cool is the fact that as a result the \u0026ldquo;clip\u0026rdquo; is fixed on the pen so that it can hang in your pocket with the nib facing up (as conventional pen cap-based clips are) but when you start to write with it, the clip is on the bottom of the pen. Which seems backwards to the uninitiated. And it is, I\u0026rsquo;m not aware of any other pen that has this \u0026ldquo;feature,\u0026rdquo; and that\u0026rsquo;s part of the appeal. Also it has a gold nib and writes so amazingly cool. Particularly with my favorite ink from Private Reserve in the color \u0026ldquo;Midnight Blues.\u0026rdquo; Anyway. Yes. Huge Pen geek.\nBack to computers. Getting smitten with a new keyboard, didn\u0026rsquo;t feel all that out of place. I\u0026rsquo;m currently using the basic Dell keyboard that came with my desktop, and have tended to use the keyboards that come with my computer. While the current keyboard is sufficient and works well, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing particularly inspiring or pleasurable about it, and I think I prefer the keyboard that I got when I began high school. I still have it, of course, though it\u0026rsquo;s PS/2 and I don\u0026rsquo;t use it.\nI think my lack of particularly attachment to keyboards recently is due to the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve been a laptop only user for so long. When my PowerBook G4 died (for me, my mother used it for several months), the sign of death was the fact that the keyboard stopped functioning. Similarly, while there are a number of reasons that I prefer the (older, smaller, less powerful) thinkpad to the (bigger, faster, more powerful) macbook is the fact that the thinkpad has a much better feeling keyboard.\nSo what am I going to do? Get a Happy Hacking Lite 2 in Black. In fact, depending on my will power, by the time you read this, I probably will already have it.\nAnyone else out there an input geek? Got a killer keyboard setup?\nOnward and Upward!\nIn almost every other case I\u0026rsquo;m basically opposed to paper on moral grounds, mostly because paper, if unattached, seems as if it wants to be lost. Notebooks, being many sheets of paper bound together don\u0026rsquo;t seem to have this problem, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of them as a result. Books good. Loose paper bad. I\u0026rsquo;m sticking with it.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/input-fetishes-and-tool-quality/","summary":"Wow, that\u0026rsquo;s a title for a much more interesting post than the one I\u0026rsquo;m planning to write. Sorry folks. This post is more about the devices and technology that we use to get information out of our heads and onto paper or into computers. Last week, I was reading the Internet as I\u0026rsquo;m wont to do, and I was delving into an area that I think of as the \u0026ldquo;ubergeek\u0026rdquo; section. There\u0026rsquo;s a class of personal sites maintained by hacker-types that hosts all kinds of cool crap: information about clever scripts that they\u0026rsquo;ve cooked up, links to side projects, pictures of their gear, often a blog of some sort--but always pretty low key. Anyway, I discovered a cache of pictures of people\u0026rsquo;s very hardcore keyboard setups, and I was pretty smitten.\nSee I\u0026rsquo;m an input geek. And this is a long standing thing.\nMy holiday present to myself, you see, was a new nib for my fountain pen.","title":"Input Fetishes and Tool Quality"},{"content":"I think of this article about productivity and standards of living in the same train of thought that my best of post, even though I certainly didn\u0026rsquo;t write it myself. The basic idea is that given our current levels of productivity we could have a 1948 standard of living by working only half of what we work now. The comparison between productivity and standards of living is, I think an interesting and useful way to think about work, and creative output. I\u0026rsquo;ve written from time to time on the subject of making a living from/while being an artist, and I think I keep returning to that essay because it connects with something similar in my mind.\nWhile the productivity vs. standards of living comparison leads rather neatly into an anti-modern \u0026ldquo;living more simply\u0026rdquo; conclusion, I\u0026rsquo;m hesitant to subscribe quickly to a conclusion that seems so naive. Quite often the \u0026ldquo;living more simply,\u0026rdquo; (which includes organics, \u0026ldquo;green\u0026rdquo;/sustainable production, and so forth) would seem to require a certain amount of wealth to be able to sustain, and takes a very micro-scale solution to a macro-scale problem.\nAt the same time I can respect the pleasure of living a more simple life--and certainly the way my digital life continues to develop has been along a path of greater simplicity--and I expect that as I continue to sort out my \u0026ldquo;lifestyle,\u0026rdquo; for the near future thinking about the differences between \u0026ldquo;needs\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;wants.\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t think living more simply, or being more conscious of excess is the same thing as living minimally, or practicing self-sacrifice in the name of some greater good.\nAt least for me, the discussion of \u0026ldquo;being effective,\u0026rdquo; at the things that really matter to me (writing this blog, being a good friend, writing better fiction, being a productive employee, dancing, knitting, and so forth), is intertwined with thinking about my professional life and career--and issues of productivity there--and is intertwined with an evaluation of material needs. It\u0026rsquo;s very much a holistic effort, and I think thinking about all these things together can help us be more effective and derive more pleasure from the things that we do. I think this is the case for me.\nHave a good weekend, and I look forward in seeing if you have anything to add here.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/standards-of-living/","summary":"I think of this article about productivity and standards of living in the same train of thought that my best of post, even though I certainly didn\u0026rsquo;t write it myself. The basic idea is that given our current levels of productivity we could have a 1948 standard of living by working only half of what we work now. The comparison between productivity and standards of living is, I think an interesting and useful way to think about work, and creative output. I\u0026rsquo;ve written from time to time on the subject of making a living from/while being an artist, and I think I keep returning to that essay because it connects with something similar in my mind.\nWhile the productivity vs. standards of living comparison leads rather neatly into an anti-modern \u0026ldquo;living more simply\u0026rdquo; conclusion, I\u0026rsquo;m hesitant to subscribe quickly to a conclusion that seems so naive. Quite often the \u0026ldquo;living more simply,\u0026rdquo; (which includes organics, \u0026ldquo;green\u0026rdquo;/sustainable production, and so forth) would seem to require a certain amount of wealth to be able to sustain, and takes a very micro-scale solution to a macro-scale problem.","title":"Standards of Living"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to put together a \u0026ldquo;best of\u0026rdquo; roll call of my posts here in the last couple of weeks/months. I write a lot of stuff for tychoish.com, tens of thousands of words a year, and while I enjoy the practice and what I write often helps me pull together ideas and thoughts in a way that I don\u0026rsquo;t really get to do in any other form, most of the posts are ephemeral even for me. There are some posts that tend to stick with me for a long time afterwords and serve as the beginning of much longer trains of thought. This post presents a collection of five of these posts for your perusal.\nMutt of IM So I\u0026rsquo;m 22, right. I actually don\u0026rsquo;t talk about my age much on the blog but there it is. As a member of my generation, and as someone who doesn\u0026rsquo;t much care for talking on the phone, I use instant messaging a lot. It\u0026rsquo;s convenient, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to parallelize conversations with other projects and with other conversations, and IM allows links and other data to be exchanged. The only real problem is that IM software is almost universally sub par.\nUpdate: I\u0026rsquo;ve basically switched to using mcabber, an ncurses console jabber client in combination with transports for AIM and MSN. This means I\u0026rsquo;m not on yahoo (alas) but it works, and I rather like it, though it took some substantial customization.\nLink: The Mutt of IM\nSEO Non-Sense I wrote this post after hearing someone talk about search engine optimization as a given part of the content creation process. Which struck me at the time, as being the wrong way to respond to anyone who was interested in \u0026ldquo;starting blogging,\u0026rdquo; while organic search-engine hits are important, certainly, promoting content on the Internet has more to do with generating high-quality and innovative content that relies on personal connections and word of mouth tools. This was then as is still the case, and I think its important to challenge anyone who promotes the idea that there are ways to quickly hit it big on the internet.\nLink: SEO Nonsense\nGit Mail So I have this really geeky way of downloading my email. Basically I store all of my email and associated configuration files in a git repository, and I have a server that receives email, filters it through procmail, and stores it in the git repository. Why is this good? I get to cut out the worst part of email technology: the downloading protocols (IMAP and POP). Furthermore, I get to use my own encryption (SSH) to secure the transfer, and I can synchronize my mailbox between computers without bothering with IMAP and the various conflicting implementations of that protocol. I\u0026rsquo;m linking to the third series in this article because it includes the code and implementation of the version that I currently use. I didn\u0026rsquo;t mention this in that article, but I have also started to keep my procmail filters and mutt configuration files in the same repository so that all mail-related data and settings are stored together.\nLink: Git Mail\nOpen Source Work This was one of my earlier writings about the open source world, and is I think a close conspirator of the next essay on this list. I think there\u0026rsquo;s something to be said for taking a materialist approach to studying the open source world, and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in doing more with this, though I must admit that I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet. This definitely falls into the \u0026ldquo;posts which represent key moments in my thinking.\nLink: Open Source Work\nThere\u0026rsquo;s No Economic There, There. Written during the heart of the first phase of the 2007/2008-20__ recession, this piece was probably the most \u0026ldquo;political\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve been on the blog in recent years, and just outlines the problems with economies based on the exchange of credit rather than the exchange of material, and it was an important post for me.\nLink: Is there any there, there?\nThe Big Push I wrote a \u0026ldquo;introduction to push and pull technology,\u0026rdquo; a while back that started to dig deeper into usage habits and internet technology, as being something more than just an exploration of web pages. While websites are indeed quite powerful, things like the iPhone and the explosion of interest in XMPP in the last year has illustrated to me at least, the importance of thinking about the internet as being more than just a collection of web pages, and this article is a marker of my thoughts on the subject.\nLink: The Big Push\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/best-of/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to put together a \u0026ldquo;best of\u0026rdquo; roll call of my posts here in the last couple of weeks/months. I write a lot of stuff for tychoish.com, tens of thousands of words a year, and while I enjoy the practice and what I write often helps me pull together ideas and thoughts in a way that I don\u0026rsquo;t really get to do in any other form, most of the posts are ephemeral even for me. There are some posts that tend to stick with me for a long time afterwords and serve as the beginning of much longer trains of thought. This post presents a collection of five of these posts for your perusal.\nMutt of IM So I\u0026rsquo;m 22, right. I actually don\u0026rsquo;t talk about my age much on the blog but there it is. As a member of my generation, and as someone who doesn\u0026rsquo;t much care for talking on the phone, I use instant messaging a lot.","title":"Best of tychoish Posts"},{"content":"I was talking about the recent events in the US \u0026ldquo;economy\u0026rdquo; and my latest fiction writing project the other day, and while the connection between the two seemed more direct in the moment and doesn\u0026rsquo;t bear repeating I found that I uttered the following statement:\n\u0026ldquo;You know, there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of materialist space opera/science fiction out there.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd as soon as I had spoken the words, I knew that I had to be wrong. Or at least I hoped I was.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s understandable that science fiction often isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly materialist. I suspect many SF writers are attracted to the genre because SF is a great platform for exploring new (and old) ideas, in a setting that\u0026rsquo;s just enough different from our contemporary setting to make us think. While the spaceships and aliens certainly helped draw me in when I was a kid, the ideas are what have kept me as a bigger kid/adult.\nAnd let\u0026rsquo;s be honest dealing with ideas about material is difficult in the space opera type setting. To assume that goods--food, clothing, fuel, technology-- will continue to be scarce in universes that have faster than light travel, and amazingly decked-out space ships, can be a bit tough to swallow. Similarly, with that kind of technology, might we just assume that no one has to work in the factories or the mines, and really that does seem to be the more logical assumption.\nOften, even stories that have economic themes, or plots (about trade or political intrigue) aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly grounded in a material understanding of economics. By which I mean, we don\u0026rsquo;t often read stories that deal with how capital is created (labor,) transported, or consumed. If stories even have some sort of in-world money, we so rarely see where the value that currency comes from. Right?\nI suppose I should clarify that my thought process started with space opera and expanded outward from there. Clearly Space Opera is probably the most prone to these sorts of non-materialist stories, but other areas of the genre suffer to varying degrees.\nMy next project was to think of stories and novels that we\u0026rsquo;re materialist in some way. So here\u0026rsquo;s what I came up with:\nEmpire Star by Samuel Delany turns on a very materialist plot. The story would be hard to summarize, and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to spoil it, for anyone who hasn\u0026rsquo;t read it, but in a way, it\u0026rsquo;s all about the alienation of labor and rebuilding capital after a war. In contrast, Babel-17 (also Delany) isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly materialist at all: while there is a war that certainly has effects on capital, labor, and trade that\u0026rsquo;s not particularly relevant to the story, except in the abstract. I mention them in the same breath because, Empire Star is the companion to Babel-17, and they were published together (and their both great, if very different, stories). Empire Star, is a novella and gets anthologized with some regularity as it is both awesome and a great early example of the Space Opera revival.\n\u0026ldquo;Who\u0026rsquo;s Afraid of Wolf 359?\u0026rdquo; by Ken MacLeod, was my second idea. The story was published in 2007 in the Stranham/Dozis The New Space Opera anthology, and was also on Escape Pod this year. The story tracks the redevelopment of a fallen colony and in doing so manages to trace the economic development of the galactic civilization. Though I would expect nothing less from MacLeod.\nThere has to be more. I\u0026rsquo;m sure of it, I\u0026rsquo;d like to use the comments of this post to collect other examples of materialist science fiction, Space Opera or otherwise, and I/we can collect the results and add it to the Feminist SF Wiki, or as a follow up post.\nCheers,\ntycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/materialist-sf/","summary":"I was talking about the recent events in the US \u0026ldquo;economy\u0026rdquo; and my latest fiction writing project the other day, and while the connection between the two seemed more direct in the moment and doesn\u0026rsquo;t bear repeating I found that I uttered the following statement:\n\u0026ldquo;You know, there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of materialist space opera/science fiction out there.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd as soon as I had spoken the words, I knew that I had to be wrong. Or at least I hoped I was.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s understandable that science fiction often isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly materialist. I suspect many SF writers are attracted to the genre because SF is a great platform for exploring new (and old) ideas, in a setting that\u0026rsquo;s just enough different from our contemporary setting to make us think. While the spaceships and aliens certainly helped draw me in when I was a kid, the ideas are what have kept me as a bigger kid/adult.","title":"Materialist SF"},{"content":"This is a \u0026ldquo;isn\u0026rsquo;t this really old piece of software pretty darn cool,\u0026rdquo; kind of a post. GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer, that dates probably from the eighties or there abouts, and it provides a sort of text-based windowing environment inside of a command line. Sort of.\nBefore I started using it, I read statements like that and had no clue what Screen really did. I think a brief (and basic) overview of how screen works might be worth something. Basically, you start a screen instance in a terminal window, and you\u0026rsquo;re brought to a blank terminal window. The commands are, by default all bound to Control-A (c-a), and subsets of that. So you have a terminal open that you can run console applications, or other shell commands. You can also hit c-a c-c to open a second \u0026ldquo;window\u0026rdquo; in the same terminal emulator, and c-a c-a swaps between the present and most recent window, while c-a c-\u0026quot; presents a list of open windows. All of this runs within one instance of a terminal window, so you don\u0026rsquo;t have to resort to tabs, awkward key bindings, any of it. Everything is there.\nThere are a lot of additional features, most of which I don\u0026rsquo;t use--I must admit, but the truth is the basic idea of taking a terminal window--which is by nature a single-purpose and single-task--and make it possible to perform many different tasks inside of one window isn\u0026rsquo;t a great technological or user feature in 2008, but there are a few nifty things that make it incredibly useful.\nFirst, screen instances run as daemons (actually, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure this is the correct term, but nevertheless) so that you can detach a screen instance from the terminal it\u0026rsquo;s running in, and reattach it later. We can imagine this to be useful in a number of instances. First, if you\u0026rsquo;re working over SSH, you can not only have multiple tasks running over a single connection (multiplexed) but if the connection drops, or you need to move computers\u0026hellip; your state is saved. Similarly, if you switch terminal emulators (xterm and urxvt, or gnome-terminal) you can save where you are. Screen makes it possible to log-in and of your system without loosing where you were. Commands that are useful in these workflows are: screen -ls to list existing screen instances, screen -r ## to reattach a detached screen (if there\u0026rsquo;s more than one detached screen then specifying a unique PID number or fragment will let you pick between multiple \u0026ldquo;screens,\u0026rdquo;). You can also specify a -D flag to detach the screen, and -RR to \u0026ldquo;force detach/reattach,\u0026rdquo; though I often run screen -DRR just for good measure.\nBasically the upshot of this functionality is that all of my terminal applications and work can be disassociated from a specific session or terminal emulator. While this might be my own particular oddity, there\u0026rsquo;s something that I rather enjoy about the independence of being able to separate the processes, from environments either physical (what hardware I use, given SSH) or from specific environments on the hardware that\u0026rsquo;s in front of me (which has certain stability and security features that are appealing.\nIn the past few months I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to running several network connected console apps (the mcabber jabber client, and irssi, the IRC client) in screen instances so that if I needed to restart X for some reason, I could without popping on and offline. More recently I\u0026rsquo;ve been using it to cut down on the number of terminal applications I have running at any given time, as the terminal emulators are rather bulky programs in comparison to screen and the shell interpreter.\nThat old technology, it\u0026rsquo;s worth something. I know there are other screen folks out there, there must be. What--to you--is the \u0026ldquo;killer feature that I left out?\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gnu-screen/","summary":"This is a \u0026ldquo;isn\u0026rsquo;t this really old piece of software pretty darn cool,\u0026rdquo; kind of a post. GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer, that dates probably from the eighties or there abouts, and it provides a sort of text-based windowing environment inside of a command line. Sort of.\nBefore I started using it, I read statements like that and had no clue what Screen really did. I think a brief (and basic) overview of how screen works might be worth something. Basically, you start a screen instance in a terminal window, and you\u0026rsquo;re brought to a blank terminal window. The commands are, by default all bound to Control-A (c-a), and subsets of that. So you have a terminal open that you can run console applications, or other shell commands. You can also hit c-a c-c to open a second \u0026ldquo;window\u0026rdquo; in the same terminal emulator, and c-a c-a swaps between the present and most recent window, while c-a c-\u0026quot; presents a list of open windows.","title":"GNU Screen"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not been writing very much or very regularly in the new year, unfortunately. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of obligations at work, and I went to visit my grandmother last weekend, which took a lot of time (both whilst there, but also in preparation). And lets not talk about Critical Futures, which is a full length post onto itself at this point. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some work on the new novel, which I have managed to put the finishing touches on the first third. I\u0026rsquo;m working on getting things together--as preemptive as this might be--for a podcast publication sometime later this year. The progress on the story continues, and I like everything about the story. So there. Anyway. I thought it would be fun to mark the \u0026ldquo;one third done\u0026rdquo; milestone. Here\u0026rsquo;s to the next third!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/novel-progress/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve not been writing very much or very regularly in the new year, unfortunately. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of obligations at work, and I went to visit my grandmother last weekend, which took a lot of time (both whilst there, but also in preparation). And lets not talk about Critical Futures, which is a full length post onto itself at this point. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some work on the new novel, which I have managed to put the finishing touches on the first third. I\u0026rsquo;m working on getting things together--as preemptive as this might be--for a podcast publication sometime later this year. The progress on the story continues, and I like everything about the story. So there. Anyway. I thought it would be fun to mark the \u0026ldquo;one third done\u0026rdquo; milestone. Here\u0026rsquo;s to the next third!","title":"novel progress"},{"content":"Blogs are really awesome, and blogs are also really powerful tools for publishing and communication, and more than anything represent the world wide web \u0026ldquo;coming into its own.\u0026rdquo; In recognition of this, it seems that everyone whose interested in the internet is out there trying to \u0026ldquo;crack\u0026rdquo; blogging and understand what makes for a really great blog, and if you listen to them, they\u0026rsquo;ll tell you about how successful blogging requires a solid niche focus, dynamic content (including videos, audio, and pictures), strong clear headlines with interesting hooks, regular posting, and keyword optimized content.\nOr something.\nActually all those suggestions above sound pretty clever, but to be honest, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that those suggestions are really particularly likely to lead someone who \u0026ldquo;wants to be a more successful blogger,\u0026rdquo; to actually, you know, be a more successful blogger. So because I\u0026rsquo;m one of those folks who\u0026rsquo;s interested in the internet and I\u0026rsquo;m trying to \u0026ldquo;crack\u0026rdquo; blogging, I\u0026rsquo;ll offer a short list of three things that I think make a big difference in \u0026ldquo;blogging success.\u0026rdquo; Whatever that means.\n1. Location matters: I\u0026rsquo;d wager that the most successful blogs in America are written by people who live in New York City or San Fransisco, with a small but respectable minority of successful blogs being generated out of: Washington DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles. I theorize that real life social networking remains very powerful on the internet. People read blogs of people who they know, and the blogs that they learn about from their friends, and all this happens in \u0026ldquo;meatspace.\u0026rdquo; If you don\u0026rsquo;t live in one of these cities, either move there, attend events in that city, or be very active in a relevant local community.\n2. Relationships, are more important than audience: Remember how in high school composition class the teacher was always going on about how you should \u0026ldquo;be mindful of your audience.\u0026rdquo; Well you should, but you should be more mindful of your relationship with your audience as a blogger than you\u0026rsquo;re likely to be in any other forum. Blogging is about conversations, about saying \u0026ldquo;hey friends, what do you think would happen if\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Work on building your relationships with people who read your blog or who might read your blog, and that is likely the greatest single impact on your readership.\n3. Volume is more important than brilliance: Fundamentally blogging is an experimental medium. It\u0026rsquo;s more important that you post every day and maybe get a post every week or two that you think is brilliant and clever, than post one brilliant and clever thing every week or two. There are of course exceptions to this, but as long as you\u0026rsquo;re trying to be brilliant it\u0026rsquo;ll work. Every post can\u0026rsquo;t be a home run. The corollary to this is that, if your only effort toward being a more successful blogger is posting regularly, that alone isn\u0026rsquo;t the key to success, but regular posting is part of almost every successful blog.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s what I have for you. Thoughts?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/3-odd-properties-of-blogging/","summary":"Blogs are really awesome, and blogs are also really powerful tools for publishing and communication, and more than anything represent the world wide web \u0026ldquo;coming into its own.\u0026rdquo; In recognition of this, it seems that everyone whose interested in the internet is out there trying to \u0026ldquo;crack\u0026rdquo; blogging and understand what makes for a really great blog, and if you listen to them, they\u0026rsquo;ll tell you about how successful blogging requires a solid niche focus, dynamic content (including videos, audio, and pictures), strong clear headlines with interesting hooks, regular posting, and keyword optimized content.\nOr something.\nActually all those suggestions above sound pretty clever, but to be honest, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that those suggestions are really particularly likely to lead someone who \u0026ldquo;wants to be a more successful blogger,\u0026rdquo; to actually, you know, be a more successful blogger. So because I\u0026rsquo;m one of those folks who\u0026rsquo;s interested in the internet and I\u0026rsquo;m trying to \u0026ldquo;crack\u0026rdquo; blogging, I\u0026rsquo;ll offer a short list of three things that I think make a big difference in \u0026ldquo;blogging success.","title":"3 Odd Properties of Blogging"},{"content":"I have a lot of digital stuff certainly more than any of my computers have storage space for at this point, though to be fair we\u0026rsquo;re talking about 500 gigabytes of various collections (music, video, backups, documents). Particularly given the price disks by the present moment in time, we\u0026rsquo;re not talking about anything too absurd. During my recent computer juggling interlude, I realized that hard drive space wasn\u0026rsquo;t nearly the issue I used to think it was, and I suspect my situation isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly unique for lots of geeks, and space crunches are not often a technological problem, but rather a user problem.\nDuring numerous conversations with other geeks, it\u0026rsquo;s become clear that while we all have massive collections of files that take up lots of space (on the order of hundreds of gigabytes) most of use only a percentage of that space for about 98% of our computing. Everyone seems to have ahem come into large collections of files: copies of ahem our DVD collections, recordings of television shows, music collections and the like. All these things take up a lot of space. The files that we use day in and day out? Much less. Even if you count my email, the full backup of my blog, my personal wiki, and everything else, we\u0026rsquo;re talking under half of a gigabyte, give or take.\nSo what gives?\nThere are a couple of mediating factors that bear consideration:\nFirst the emergence of the \u0026ldquo;netbook\u0026rdquo; Recognizes this fact. Netbooks have hard drives which float between 4 and 16 gigabytes. It\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of space, but it\u0026rsquo;s enough that as long as you\u0026rsquo;re just working with emal, and a selection of documents that it\u0026rsquo;s enough to keep you busy for a few days, if not months (I mean really now folks). We\u0026rsquo;re also at a point where storage is getting more available and cheaper faster than our collections can grow.\nThe second factor that leads to this is the fact that \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; (videos and music) don\u0026rsquo;t have particularly reliable distribution channels. If a TV show uh, appears on your hard drive, the chance of it appearing again is often tedious, and pretty slim. So our inclination is to save it. This ties into all sorts of really multifaceted issues about data ownership, copyright, and digital distribution, but it\u0026rsquo;s also partially a user issue.\nA few months ago, I was convinced that given fears about backups, backup reliability, and verification, and the dropping price of storage online, either through Amazon S3, or hell even something like Dreamhost (not in a web accessible folder) would probably have been as effective as having disks yourself. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure this is still the case, particularly with how cheep disks are (which makes redundancy easier). Also I think there\u0026rsquo;s a point between one and two terabytes where even the worst digital pack-rats recognize that such archives are reasonably pointless.\nI guess in light of this, I guess the lingering questions are: do you have a big digital collection? How big? And do you have any particular strategy for dealing with these files?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/digital-collections/","summary":"I have a lot of digital stuff certainly more than any of my computers have storage space for at this point, though to be fair we\u0026rsquo;re talking about 500 gigabytes of various collections (music, video, backups, documents). Particularly given the price disks by the present moment in time, we\u0026rsquo;re not talking about anything too absurd. During my recent computer juggling interlude, I realized that hard drive space wasn\u0026rsquo;t nearly the issue I used to think it was, and I suspect my situation isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly unique for lots of geeks, and space crunches are not often a technological problem, but rather a user problem.\nDuring numerous conversations with other geeks, it\u0026rsquo;s become clear that while we all have massive collections of files that take up lots of space (on the order of hundreds of gigabytes) most of use only a percentage of that space for about 98% of our computing. Everyone seems to have ahem come into large collections of files: copies of ahem our DVD collections, recordings of television shows, music collections and the like.","title":"Digital Collections"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing recently here about open source and free software, and what happens to the practices and ideologies of these projects when they \u0026ldquo;jump species\u0026rdquo; and start affecting the world outside of open source. This is, I suppose, part of a larger response/digestion of Christopher Kelty\u0026rsquo;s *Two Bits* monograph.\nHaving said that, this post isn\u0026rsquo;t a response per se but rather a catalog of all the various kinds of software and non-software projects that are connected in some way to open source and free software. I hope that such a catalog will be helpful in thinking more concretely about these issues. Without further ado:\nOpen Network Services I\u0026rsquo;m using this as a banner for service-based software that derives inspiration from the free software movement, but is based on network services (web sites, web applications, and so forth). The AGPL is a free software approach to dealing with the code, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that well executed open network services is something that can--exactly--be conveyed with a liscence. Examples: identi.ca and gitorious.\nStandard Network Protocols (e.g. IETF) I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have been particularly inclined this on my own but from Kelty\u0026rsquo;s (2008) book Two Bits I realized that it fits. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is responsible for defining and maintaining the standards that make the Internet go, so that Linux developers and Apple developers and Blackberry developers can all write software that can \u0026ldquo;talk\u0026rdquo; to each other via the network. It\u0026rsquo;s not open source, exactly, but the most successful standards will be the ones that are most accessible and that a community feels at least partly responsible for (ie. has input from), which is in the end a lot like open source.\nCreative Commons Though Creative Commons (CC) is in some ways the most obvious umbrella of non-software free software projects, I am almost a bit hesitant to include it here. Though I don\u0026rsquo;t have a very clear idea of the history, it seems like CC takes a \u0026ldquo;copyleft\u0026rdquo; (like GNU GPL) approach to \u0026ldquo;hack\u0026rdquo; a very different problem. Where free software \u0026ldquo;hacks\u0026rdquo; an understanding of the collaborative nature of software and the ability to tweak software into copyright law, CC \u0026ldquo;hacks\u0026rdquo; an understanding of digital distribution and post-scarcity digital reality into copyright law. Similar, particularly on first blanch, but underneath? Maybe not as much.\nUn-conferences/BarCamps These conferences are intended to be very adhoc and tend to provide very open access to organizational information and participation. While these conferences aren\u0026rsquo;t anarchist in the contemporary sense, they practice openness in a way that resonates at least a little with the free software/open source movement.\nNot-For Profits/Community Organizations I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of things like BucketWorks. While NFPs aren\u0026rsquo;t a new things, I think increasingly they\u0026rsquo;ll be connected with the logic of open source. There are a lot of \u0026ldquo;businesses\u0026rdquo; that I think will never be capable of generating a huge return, (coffee shops, yarn stores, book stores,) that I think will be more likely to operate in an \u0026ldquo;open source\u0026rdquo; manner, lead by communities, with \u0026ldquo;business\u0026rdquo; decisions being made by the community of users.\nWiki Projects While I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if wiki projects, like wikipedia and wikitravel are truly the non-software equivelents to open source/free software; their collaborative nature is familiar. There\u0026rsquo;s something about Wikis that inspire their editors and contributors to be \u0026ldquo;exhaustive\u0026rdquo; in a way that I don\u0026rsquo;t think shares much with open source and it\u0026rsquo;s centralization on Unix-like systems.\nFree Culture Really this is another huge category, to my mind it represents the \u0026ldquo;activist\u0026rdquo; types who \u0026ldquo;port\u0026rdquo; some of the ideas about software freedom to other domains, like music, or art, or writing. Tends to be explicitly ideological rather than keep the implicit/quasi-agnosticism that free software itself often has.\nCrypto-anarchists/Security Researchers Having top-to-bottom control over the software you run on your computer would seem to appeal to the paranoid and cryptographically informed set. There\u0026rsquo;s obviously a lot of overlap with the typical software freedom hacker here, but I think the reason for using open source software (and other related tools) is distinct.\nRevolutionaries I include this because I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to note an important distinction. While I think many \u0026ldquo;software freedom\u0026rdquo; people would argue that leftists/radicals/revolutionaries would use free software because it might embody the freedom that their fighting for, I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably more realistic to expect that said revolutionaries would use open source tools because it is more available and powerful. Not that this argument is of consequence. I include \u0026ldquo;revolutionaries\u0026rdquo; in this list because it\u0026rsquo;s different from other rationale.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/catalog-of-foss/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing recently here about open source and free software, and what happens to the practices and ideologies of these projects when they \u0026ldquo;jump species\u0026rdquo; and start affecting the world outside of open source. This is, I suppose, part of a larger response/digestion of Christopher Kelty\u0026rsquo;s *Two Bits* monograph.\nHaving said that, this post isn\u0026rsquo;t a response per se but rather a catalog of all the various kinds of software and non-software projects that are connected in some way to open source and free software. I hope that such a catalog will be helpful in thinking more concretely about these issues. Without further ado:\nOpen Network Services I\u0026rsquo;m using this as a banner for service-based software that derives inspiration from the free software movement, but is based on network services (web sites, web applications, and so forth). The AGPL is a free software approach to dealing with the code, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that well executed open network services is something that can--exactly--be conveyed with a liscence.","title":"A Catalog of Open Source and Free Culture"},{"content":"When I was writing about the redesign of tychoish.com, I mentioned that I needed to write an essay here about \u0026ldquo;monolithic vs. micro (kernel) approaches to content management.\u0026rdquo; Referencing an old (and mostly settled) debate in operating system design1, think it might be productive to bring some of these systems design perspectives to the problem of content management systems for websites.\nThe analogy is imperfect for a lot of reasons, because it can operate on two basic levels. The most direct level would be the software itself. Is the content management system (CMS; software) modular. If the database driver doesn\u0026rsquo;t work with the system you want to use can you change it? If you don\u0026rsquo;t like the template engine is it a simple matter to replace it? If you need additional functionality can you drop in modules or plug-ins to provide these features?\nIn truth most systems are at least a little hybrid/microkernel-ish in their approach. Wordpress is pretty monolithic on the whole, but it provides a lot of access via the plugin system. While Drupal is very modular/microkernel, it still has a lot of functionality in the core system (and de facto core modules) that shape the way that most Drupal sites are developed. b2 and greymatter were almost entirely monolithic. I guess MediaWiki has some modularity, but it strikes me as a pretty monolithic system. And so forth.\nThe less direct level, would be the relationship between what the content management system can provide and the website as a whole. Does the content management system handle all of the content internally, or does the system only handle one aspect of content, like a blog or a wiki? For the record I don\u0026rsquo;t think interactions/relationships between these two levels are particularly important.\nTychoish.com and Critical Futures are both very monolithic sites--maybe a better term for this is monolithic architecture. This is to say that the entire content of the site is stored in the database and managed by the system. Monolithic architectures seem to be the preference these days: Drupal prefers these kinds of designs, and I think for a lot of sites, \u0026ldquo;single system\u0026rdquo; has some appeal, particularly if there\u0026rsquo;s a large editorial staff, or a desire to avoid editorial bottlenecks, as single systems make this a bit easier.\nAt the same time--though unpopular--I\u0026rsquo;d like to suggest that monolithic architecture might not be the best solution for all sites across the board. Why? Because it leads to more complex and abstracted tools which are harder for people to customize, and it makes it more likely that people will be forced into using a tool that almost does what they need that works with their chosen platform, rather than a tool that really does what they need but doesn\u0026rsquo;t work with their platform. Also monolithic architectures lead to a very non-UNIX-ish approach to software tools, when that might be more appropriate.\nTo be clear, I think there are a lot of situations and individuals/organizations that do benefit from very monolithic site architectures (and users that benefit from monolithic tools), but it\u0026rsquo;s a decision that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be made lightly, nor should people who build websites (myself included) assume that \u0026ldquo;the more content you put in a system\u0026rdquo; the better the system is.\nThoughts?\nCheers!\nAs I understand it, the debate is: micro kernels have sophisticated and elegant designs, that are highly modular and flexible, but suffer from poor performance (increased communications overhead) and more places where fault can occur (as there are more \u0026ldquo;places\u0026rdquo;). In contrast, monolithic kernels are \u0026ldquo;old school\u0026rdquo; and not innately flexible or modular, but they\u0026rsquo;re fast, and once sufficiently developed, they either work well or they don\u0026rsquo;t work at all. The design difference is that monolithic kernels provide all sorts of services (networking, file systems, display drivers) themselves in their own \u0026ldquo;space,\u0026rdquo; while micro-kernels just handle the lowest level internally and rely on other programs to do things like networking, and file systems, and device drivers. As I understand it.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/monolithic-content-management/","summary":"When I was writing about the redesign of tychoish.com, I mentioned that I needed to write an essay here about \u0026ldquo;monolithic vs. micro (kernel) approaches to content management.\u0026rdquo; Referencing an old (and mostly settled) debate in operating system design1, think it might be productive to bring some of these systems design perspectives to the problem of content management systems for websites.\nThe analogy is imperfect for a lot of reasons, because it can operate on two basic levels. The most direct level would be the software itself. Is the content management system (CMS; software) modular. If the database driver doesn\u0026rsquo;t work with the system you want to use can you change it? If you don\u0026rsquo;t like the template engine is it a simple matter to replace it? If you need additional functionality can you drop in modules or plug-ins to provide these features?\nIn truth most systems are at least a little hybrid/microkernel-ish in their approach.","title":"Monolithic Content Management"},{"content":"So after a lot of teeth gnashing over the past few weeks about what to do with my macbook since I\u0026rsquo;ve basically abandoned OS X for Linux1, I realized that I could probably just install Ubuntu on this hardware and be done with it.\nSo really pretty much as soon as I had the thought I began backing things up and starting the install process. While my backup wasn\u0026rsquo;t perfect (forgot the applications folder, which is pretty replaceable; and dropping in ~/Library and /Library is pretty ineffective, so there\u0026rsquo;s some work there) the whole process was pretty quick. I assume that part of this is that I\u0026rsquo;m getting better at getting \u0026ldquo;my\u0026rdquo; Ubuntu installation rolled up, and I could copy over my config files over the network which make it even quicker.\nThere were a couple of things that are somewhat less than ideal. First hibernation doesn\u0026rsquo;t work right, but that\u0026rsquo;s ok, I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;d use that very much anyway. Secondly right clicking is a pain that I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet managed to resolve, and while the touchpad works it\u0026rsquo;s too sensitive, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t figured how to crank that down. I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get right click emulated with three finger taps, which is functional if not ideal. I\u0026rsquo;ve also discovered how to turn off the touch pad with a shell command. Because the Awesome Window Manager requires the mouse very minimally this actually works well and makes me a bit more efficient.\nAfter not using the Macbook for several weeks and coming back to it, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized a few things. First the screen looks really good. The think pad has a digitizer and a significantly lower pixel density, and the monitors for my desktop both have lower pixel density and don\u0026rsquo;t have the glossy screen.2 The second thing is that the build quality on the Macbook is noticeably inferior to the Thickpad. There are little case squeaks and flexes that I dismissed initially,\nJack asked about external monitors (for projectors) and I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything to report on that front. I still have OS X installed and usable if it\u0026rsquo;s a pressing need, but I don\u0026rsquo;t even have the video converter for the new macbooks so I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly worried. There are probably other things that I\u0026rsquo;ve also not had occasion to\nWhile I intended to just get the linux box for the desktop and keep the macbook, I quickly came to the realization that switching between modalities wasn\u0026rsquo;t terribly effective for the way that I worked, and after spending a week on the road using just my MacBook, I felt as if OS X was more distracting than it was useful. No matter how much I adored TextMate.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI hated the glossy screen at first because of the way that it collects finger prints and dirt, but by gum it looks really pretty. The desktops, by contrast are huge, which is nice, but sometimes when I\u0026rsquo;m writing something more focused, all the extra space can be distracting.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/macbook-ubuntu/","summary":"So after a lot of teeth gnashing over the past few weeks about what to do with my macbook since I\u0026rsquo;ve basically abandoned OS X for Linux1, I realized that I could probably just install Ubuntu on this hardware and be done with it.\nSo really pretty much as soon as I had the thought I began backing things up and starting the install process. While my backup wasn\u0026rsquo;t perfect (forgot the applications folder, which is pretty replaceable; and dropping in ~/Library and /Library is pretty ineffective, so there\u0026rsquo;s some work there) the whole process was pretty quick. I assume that part of this is that I\u0026rsquo;m getting better at getting \u0026ldquo;my\u0026rdquo; Ubuntu installation rolled up, and I could copy over my config files over the network which make it even quicker.\nThere were a couple of things that are somewhat less than ideal. First hibernation doesn\u0026rsquo;t work right, but that\u0026rsquo;s ok, I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;d use that very much anyway.","title":"Macbook Ubuntu"},{"content":"So this is totally a \u0026ldquo;just for fun\u0026rdquo; post. As you might have noticed from all the blogging I\u0026rsquo;ve done about rearranging computers, switching to Linux and getting a new phone, the second half of 2008 has had a lot of computer acquisitions and changes. I try to thematically name computers/partitions and hard drives, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been through a couple of naming schemes, but I have a new one that I kind of like: Great names in western philosophy.\nNow technically, the best name schemes for networked computers are groups of related nouns. So in a big network, you\u0026rsquo;d have printers named after flowers (violet, daisy, petunia) and laptops named after sheep (merino, finn, coopworth, jacob) and desktops named after crops (corn, wheat, soybean, tobacco) say. Actually these are pretty bad choices, but choosing common, inoffensive, and generic nouns is probably idea. This way, if you\u0026rsquo;re browsing a network you can tell what things are pretty quickly, and you won\u0026rsquo;t run out of names and have to have more than one system.\nSo knowing that drawing every name from the same pool is probably the wrong thing to do, here\u0026rsquo;s the list of my little collection.\nLeibniz: the desktop Spinoza: cellphone/blackberry Hegel: the ThinkPad Levi-Strauss: the wireless access point. Deleuze: the linux partition of the macbook Guatteri: the OS X partition of the macbook My knowledge of modern and 19th century philosophy is way more limited and touch and go than my knowledge of 20th century. You could of course make the argument that Levi-Strauss was more of an anthropologist than a philosopher, but I tend to cast a pretty big net, and think that Clifford Gertz would even qualify for the list too. I suppose that I could have made had laptops be German philosophers, and desktop be French philosophers; or I could have divided it up by centuries. Anyway, it\u0026rsquo;s fun, and here\u0026rsquo;s a list of possible names for future gear:\nGertz Derrida Spivak Marx/Engels Ricoeur Foucault Kierkegaard You\u0026rsquo;ll notice that I didn\u0026rsquo;t include Nietzsche on the list. I think it\u0026rsquo;s poor planning to name a computer (or anything) after someone whose known for being crazy. I include Foucault out of personal fondness, but have avoided other neo-Marxists, though I suppose that would open things up to Gramsci and Althusser (if he hadn\u0026rsquo;t gone crazy) or Merleau-Ponty (but I never spell that one right on the first go).\nOther suggestions of favorite philosophers are of course welcome.\nDo you have a naming scheme? If so, what is it?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/philisopher-kings/","summary":"So this is totally a \u0026ldquo;just for fun\u0026rdquo; post. As you might have noticed from all the blogging I\u0026rsquo;ve done about rearranging computers, switching to Linux and getting a new phone, the second half of 2008 has had a lot of computer acquisitions and changes. I try to thematically name computers/partitions and hard drives, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been through a couple of naming schemes, but I have a new one that I kind of like: Great names in western philosophy.\nNow technically, the best name schemes for networked computers are groups of related nouns. So in a big network, you\u0026rsquo;d have printers named after flowers (violet, daisy, petunia) and laptops named after sheep (merino, finn, coopworth, jacob) and desktops named after crops (corn, wheat, soybean, tobacco) say. Actually these are pretty bad choices, but choosing common, inoffensive, and generic nouns is probably idea. This way, if you\u0026rsquo;re browsing a network you can tell what things are pretty quickly, and you won\u0026rsquo;t run out of names and have to have more than one system.","title":"Philosopher Kings"},{"content":"I have a semi-long standing tradition of doing a little refresh of my blog/website during the week before new years. Obviously I didn\u0026rsquo;t make it this time, but I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that it\u0026rsquo;s about time for me to do something different anyway. And because I have to think through everything beforehand on the blog, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d collect a few thoughts here.\nWhen I started tychoish.com, I was running a site at tealart.com1 which was supposed to be a big umbrella site for a lot of projects, and I started tychoish as a place to collect regular thoughts and blog in a more \u0026ldquo;bloggy\u0026rdquo; sort of way. I felt at the time that TealArt (TA) had become too much of a magazine, and not light hearted enough.\nWhen I gave up on TA, as it were, I was displeased with where the site was going and I felt like I needed a fresh start. I got that, and for all it\u0026rsquo;s ups and downs, I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with were tychoish has taken me. So this redesign isn\u0026rsquo;t about needing to fix something that\u0026rsquo;s broke, as much as it is to provide the opportunity to expand and explore additional options.\nI am, admittedly a bit worried about expanding the focus of tychoish so that I open myself up to the \u0026ldquo;scope\u0026rdquo; problems that I had with TA. Nonetheless I\u0026rsquo;m not thinking about fundamentally changing what I do or what I write about, but more some look-and-feel modifications that would take this site from being \u0026ldquo;just another blog\u0026rdquo; to a \u0026ldquo;big tent\u0026rdquo; that would cover a lot of personal projects.\nBecause I\u0026rsquo;m a geek and my day job deals a lot with content management strategies, I\u0026rsquo;ll start first with the way I envision the new landing or \u0026ldquo;front page\u0026rdquo; and then think about the technological solutions that I envision for this purpose.\nRather than have tychoish.com point to a blog, I think a sort of dynamic page that presents some content and links to other sub-sites (and more content), and has a layout that\u0026rsquo;s different from other pages of the site is the way to go. I want to have the most recent \u0026ldquo;esssay\u0026rdquo; (my typical blog posts) an excerpt from the next essay, and then a list of links to the next 5 or so posts. I also want to have a few posts from the coda sub-blog, (longer forum microblogging and more \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo;-type posts).\nI\u0026rsquo;m also thinking that it would be nice to include archive navigation, search, and other information that\u0026rsquo;s now in the upper-right of the site, in the bottom, in a \u0026ldquo;hemmingway style\u0026rdquo; footer. I think that I could probably also link to and pull in content from other parts of the site, that represent projects that don\u0026rsquo;t quite exist yet. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on the foundations of a wiki-project that would be a resource collection for scholarship on open source stuff, and I think it would be good to pull in links to critical futures, and other projects. The blog would still live here, but other projects would as well.\nDeeper in the site, the pages might look reasonably similar to the way that they do now, but those pages are mostly shorter anyway. One of my fears is that the entry page has too much content and not enough context, and I think by re-flowing the layout the site might make more sense. While the \u0026ldquo;wordpress-esque\u0026rdquo; look gives sites context, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s the right context for tychoish. More deliberation and feedback on this is encouraged.\nAs for the backend, I\u0026rsquo;m toying with giving up Wordpress. While I\u0026rsquo;ve used wordpress for four years now (and I used b2/wordpress for a couple years about six or seven years ago; after using a custom CMS that Amy wrote for a couple of years), I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that it\u0026rsquo;s not quite right for what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I need to write a post about monolithic and microkernel approaches to web-content management, I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that tychoish isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a site that needs a unified content management system, but rather a site that needs to be able to flexibly pull together content from a lot of different, but related, sources. I\u0026rsquo;m not talking about aggregation in the way that \u0026ldquo;tumblelogging\u0026rdquo; pulls together diverse connect, but more like I don\u0026rsquo;t need one content management system that can generate my entire website. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty technologically adept after all, and I don\u0026rsquo;t need a piece of software designed to \u0026ldquo;make my life easier\u0026rdquo; that doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite conform to the way that I work.\nSo I mentioned last week that I was thinking about using a tool called \u0026ldquo;Jekyll\u0026rdquo; to power the essay section. I\u0026rsquo;m still following that train of thought, albeit slowly. Given that wordpress can import from RSS, I feel pretty safe that I won\u0026rsquo;t be locked into anything. Truthfully the main thing I need to think about hacking in is possible support for multiple authors (easy, I just need to do some reading) and figuring out a way to draft posts (easy, just have a local branch, I think), and cue up posts for timed release (harder.) I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to use post scheduling a fair bit in the last couple of months, and I could be convinced to not schedule posts except for times when I want there to be content and I\u0026rsquo;m not home.\nCritical Futures will stay with Wordpress because while I think I can handle a much more ad-hoc website, if Critical Futures ever gets another editor I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want \u0026ldquo;massive UNIX chops\u0026rdquo; to be a required skill.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s a list of things that I need to do:\nDo some editing of the categories on my current wordpress directory Start using disqus comments with the current tychoish.com wordpress site, as that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;d be using in the new site. Explore Jekyll\u0026rsquo;s wordpress importing feature, and potentially write my own wordpress theme to handle the export (with wget). Because I need some way to maintain the category data. Conversely, figure out how to get an RSS import into jekyll. Just have to see what\u0026rsquo;s easies. Design a new landing page and hack around with CSS, because I\u0026rsquo;m my own design team. Cobble together something reliable that can aggregate RSS feeds from various parts of the site. Such a tool certainly exists, I just have to find it and get used to it. Possibly move to a different webhost. Long story. Implement the new landing page. I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to use PHP to pull together content (includes and what not), because that should be peppy enough without needing a database, and even though the backend would be ruby, PHP seems uniquely suited to handling the display-related functions. And I\u0026rsquo;m used to it. So there Thoughts? Feedback? Cheerleading and/or other generous offers of support?\nOnward and Upward!\nThe domain now points to tychoish, and all of the tealart archives are imported in tychoish. Hence the long archives, and the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve only been using the tychoish.com domain for about 18 months. My pre-tychoish projects were all supposed to be collaborative projects, but it never quite worked out, as I was young, foolish, and the projects were all very general.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/blog-refresh/","summary":"I have a semi-long standing tradition of doing a little refresh of my blog/website during the week before new years. Obviously I didn\u0026rsquo;t make it this time, but I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that it\u0026rsquo;s about time for me to do something different anyway. And because I have to think through everything beforehand on the blog, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d collect a few thoughts here.\nWhen I started tychoish.com, I was running a site at tealart.com1 which was supposed to be a big umbrella site for a lot of projects, and I started tychoish as a place to collect regular thoughts and blog in a more \u0026ldquo;bloggy\u0026rdquo; sort of way. I felt at the time that TealArt (TA) had become too much of a magazine, and not light hearted enough.\nWhen I gave up on TA, as it were, I was displeased with where the site was going and I felt like I needed a fresh start.","title":"Blog Refresh"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing you all today from OS X for the first time in months. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m writing another journal entry in honor of the weekend-like quality that the holiday has, and I\u0026rsquo;m writing it right before I post it rather than in my usual bi/tri-monthly binge writing style. Very strange.\nJust to comment on the experience of the new/old environment, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of distraught by how uncomfortable it feels I mean OS X is pretty, and it does a better job with the hardware than Ubuntu (more on this later) but I\u0026rsquo;m just not used to it any more, and even though I really like TextMate\u0026hellip; meh.1\nI rang in the new year by wrapping up a scene in the novel that had been nagging at me for several weeks. It\u0026rsquo;s the longest single \u0026ldquo;chunk\u0026rdquo; of writing in the project thus far, and the oddest, but I like it a lot. It represents, I think, a number of developments for me as a writer. First it\u0026rsquo;s a big plot twist, and it\u0026rsquo;s action, two things that I\u0026rsquo;ve felt I\u0026rsquo;ve not been able to capture correctly thus far. I\u0026rsquo;m just over the 19k word mark, and the next scene promises to be fun. By my estimates this is about a third of the story, which feels about right in terms of the plot right now.\nA lot of people seem to be writing blog posts and journal posts on their review of the past year and their thoughts for the future year. This year has had it\u0026rsquo;s trials (the ongoing grandparental health issue; the not getting into graduate school take 2; the lack of knitting) and its high points (a new job that I adore, linux and a new academic direction, more writing, still being alive.) And I expect that the new year will have more of both: though certainly I\u0026rsquo;m working towards more high points and fewer trials.\nMy resolution last year was to keep a list of books and fiction that I read. I was pretty successful at this, though certainly I haven\u0026rsquo;t figured out the hack to carve out time for me to read fiction in the sort of concerted way that I feel I need to be reading fiction. But I\u0026rsquo;ll continue to keep the list, that\u0026rsquo;s been fun.\nThis years resolution is more complex, I suppose, and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to spell it all out here. This year promises to hold a number of big changes: a move, some trips, more awesomeness in the job, some new big project, and so forth. If nothing else, I think my overall approach at the moment is to work on getting closure with old projects before starting with new projects. Seems like a plan. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if that\u0026rsquo;s a resolution though.\nIn any case, be warm (or cool) and well in the new year and I\u0026rsquo;ll be back with our regularly scheduled programing very shortly.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent some time getting OS X set up on the macbook because I think I\u0026rsquo;m admitting that Ubuntu isn\u0026rsquo;t right for this hardware. While it mostly does a pretty good job it falls apart in a couple of important places. The biggest issue is that the trackpad is supported poorly. It works, but I can\u0026rsquo;t get it to turn down the sensitivity to a useable level--which is minor, because I can get it to turn off and I don\u0026rsquo;t need it most of the time--but more importantly the suspend/hibernate/wake reliability is sub-usable. Mostly it works fine, but sometimes the mouse doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, or clicks erratically, or responds to input erratically and restarting X doesn\u0026rsquo;t work. I\u0026rsquo;m, at this point, blaming it on Ubuntu\u0026rsquo;s hardware abstraction layer, and I\u0026rsquo;ve resolved to use OS X for a while and then I\u0026rsquo;ll give Arch Linux a try. In the mean time\u0026hellip; I have one working portable system (OS X) and a working desktop system, of course. So all is well in technology land.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/happy-new-years/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing you all today from OS X for the first time in months. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m writing another journal entry in honor of the weekend-like quality that the holiday has, and I\u0026rsquo;m writing it right before I post it rather than in my usual bi/tri-monthly binge writing style. Very strange.\nJust to comment on the experience of the new/old environment, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of distraught by how uncomfortable it feels I mean OS X is pretty, and it does a better job with the hardware than Ubuntu (more on this later) but I\u0026rsquo;m just not used to it any more, and even though I really like TextMate\u0026hellip; meh.1\nI rang in the new year by wrapping up a scene in the novel that had been nagging at me for several weeks. It\u0026rsquo;s the longest single \u0026ldquo;chunk\u0026rdquo; of writing in the project thus far, and the oddest, but I like it a lot.","title":"Happy New Years"},{"content":"So I know that I talked earlier in the month about starting to knit a new sweater. I cast on after thanksgiving: it was a cabled sweater, my first, ambitiously chosen from Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Aran Knitting\u0026rdquo; book. While I worked on it over that long weekend, I hadn\u0026rsquo;t worked on it much since then. What I realized rather quickly, is not just that it was complex, but rather there was literally something different happening on every fracking stich. The design in question, for those familiar with Starmore, was \u0026ldquo;Irish Moss,\u0026rdquo; which is knit with lots of twisted stitches.\nI was forced to admit defeat, not because I was incapable, I got an inch or two done, but because it was attention intensive that had no real interest in knitting on it. So I didn\u0026rsquo;t knit on it, and eventually I had to come to grips with the fact that I needed to plan to do something else. So, being the determined sap that I am, I went through that collection, and decided to cast on for Na Cragga a slightly simpler (and more iconic) Starmore design.\nI cast on last weekend, and have found a great joy in the pattern. The cables are all simple 2x2 and 3x3 cables all combined to great effect. I\u0026rsquo;m still at the beginning, so rather than show you all a shrimpy picture of a set of circular needles and some knitting hanging off of it, I\u0026rsquo;ll talk a little bit of the project because my modifications are not insignificant.\nThe sweater designed as written is a very standard Aran design. Simple boxy constructed of flat pieces, shoulder straps (extending from the collar to the top of the sleeve to join the front and back of the body), and a crew neck color.\nSo I basically kept the cable patterns and ditched most of the rest of the pattern.\nI\u0026rsquo;m knitting it out of a DK/Worsted weight wool, rather than the worsted/aran she calls for, and I dropped the \u0026ldquo;filler pattern at the sides (because I\u0026rsquo;m skinny). I might need to add some stitches in as I go along if I\u0026rsquo;ve over compensated for the fact that the book came out in the 80s and all the sweaters have 8 to 10 inches of ease. I did a swatch over plain stocking stitch and got 6 stitches to the inch (and a nice fabric) and my math suggests that given how many stitches I cast on (260ish, see why the \u0026ldquo;ish\u0026rdquo; later on) this could either be big enough erring on the large side, or a bit too small for the whole sweater but fine if it\u0026rsquo;s the bottom hem. Some tapered shaping might be nice, so I\u0026rsquo;m not worried about this.\nI also added a 9-stitch braid cable at either side of the sweater. This is to counteract the massive amount of subtracting that I did, and because I\u0026rsquo;ve been really intrigued by such cables. And it\u0026rsquo;s my sweater. I however counted this wrong, thinking that I needed purl stitches for the border, and thus cast on initially for 262 stitches. There were some other issues with counting in the first round that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten nailed out now, but it leaves me realizing that I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know how many stitches are on the sweater and given that the patterns seem symmetrical and everything is working out.\nThe astute among you have probably realized that I\u0026rsquo;m knitting this in the round, rather than in pieces. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably steak it because the wool is right for steeking, and I really despise turning my work. (Steeking = knitting a tube and then cutting it open to get armholes/neck openings/cardigans). So that\u0026rsquo;s another modification.\nRather than knit a ribbing, I cast on (actually my mother cast on for me :-o) provisionally, and started knitting the pattern immediately. I expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll knit a turned hem and facing after the fact, as I think something will be needed to hold to bottom of the sweater \u0026ldquo;together\u0026rdquo; and I think a hem might be just right\nAnd given that I\u0026rsquo;m only a few inches into the sweater, I think that\u0026rsquo;s pretty good.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll probably set in the sleeves a bit, by at least 9 stitches (more if I increase on either side of the armhole) and potentially a bit more that even, depending on how things are looking by that time.\nAnd, because I\u0026rsquo;m me, and this is how I am, I\u0026rsquo;ll knit some sort of slit open neck, for a little bit of extra ventilation wearablity. This means setting the middle cable aside as I near the neck, and then knitting little plackets, probably in garter stitch. Conversely, I\u0026rsquo;m considering some sort of braid cable, worked horizontally around the collar, that would meet in the back and miter with short rows. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how ballsy I\u0026quot;m feeling when I get to that point.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also planning to knit the sleeves off the shoulders rather than up from the cuff. For starters, I can make that fit much more easily, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that the upsidedownness will bug me at all, and I suspect other people won\u0026rsquo;t notice either.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted as this project progresses.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/na-cragga-sweater-update/","summary":"So I know that I talked earlier in the month about starting to knit a new sweater. I cast on after thanksgiving: it was a cabled sweater, my first, ambitiously chosen from Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Aran Knitting\u0026rdquo; book. While I worked on it over that long weekend, I hadn\u0026rsquo;t worked on it much since then. What I realized rather quickly, is not just that it was complex, but rather there was literally something different happening on every fracking stich. The design in question, for those familiar with Starmore, was \u0026ldquo;Irish Moss,\u0026rdquo; which is knit with lots of twisted stitches.\nI was forced to admit defeat, not because I was incapable, I got an inch or two done, but because it was attention intensive that had no real interest in knitting on it. So I didn\u0026rsquo;t knit on it, and eventually I had to come to grips with the fact that I needed to plan to do something else.","title":"Na Cragga, Sweater Update"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not a programmer, really. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m a huge geek, and I understand some pretty heavy computer-science related problems, but coding isn\u0026rsquo;t what I do. This is true of a lot of computer users these days, and it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be such a big deal if I weren\u0026rsquo;t such a huge geek about open source software. I suspect that most of the users of open source software these days aren\u0026rsquo;t that different than me in this respect--though many are programmers, in most cases they probably don\u0026rsquo;t make active use of the source code of the software they use.1\nThis realization probably sounds familiar to some, as I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to pull apart the contemporary modifications for open source software. One obvious answer to this question is, \u0026ldquo;freedom:\u0026rdquo; that open source software provides its users an non-tangible freedom and power over their interactions with technology. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted about why I think this is imprecise and while I need to spend time developing this argument further, there\u0026rsquo;s some merit.\nAnother possibility is that open source represents a rethinking of intellectual property that is appealing, and that \u0026ldquo;free software\u0026rdquo; is an adjunct of a \u0026ldquo;free culture\u0026rdquo; movement. While this is an interesting theory and a good story, certainly there are parallels, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s the case. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if free culture movements (like wikipedia and creative commons) and free/open source software grow out of the same kinds of historical moments, or share anything more than inspirations and morphology. More pondering is required.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always seen Creative Commons as a sort of \u0026ldquo;legal activism,\u0026rdquo; to provide mechanisms to push laws to reflect the realities of copyright in digital spaces. Creative Commons isn\u0026rsquo;t a technological advancement, but rather a formal account for extant practices. That is, consumers of a CC license aren\u0026rsquo;t able to do anything (except potentially access) with a covered work that they couldn\u0026rsquo;t do with a conventionally protected work.\nThe same is not true of nearly all open source software. A free/open source software license makes certain rights available to the users of that software that they\u0026rsquo;d never have otherwise. Always. Even though we don\u0026rsquo;t often take advantage of this accessible source code, it strikes me that \u0026ldquo;intellectual property reform\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t really cover why people are either contributing to open source or using open source. Additionally, there are relatively few--that I\u0026rsquo;m aware of--Creative Commons projects/works that are themselves collaborative, which presents another contrast between these two modes. While most FOSS projects originate with a single author, all successes create communities. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the same life cycle exists in \u0026ldquo;free culture\u0026rdquo; works.\nOpen source is successful in a way that \u0026ldquo;closed source/encumbered freeware\u0026rdquo; has never really been, outside of some moment-to-moment bubbles. I think this point about \u0026ldquo;community,\u0026rdquo; and the mode of authorship is a huge part of what makes open source attractive and vibrant moving forward. Not the only reason, of course, but a key contributor. Works with creative commons licenses are \u0026ldquo;X by Author, released under CC license,\u0026rdquo; whereas open source projects eventually become \u0026ldquo;X is GPL\u0026rsquo;ed,\u0026rdquo; even if key original authors are well known as Linus is for Linux or Dries is for Drupal.\nThis is important. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure yet how, but that\u0026rsquo;s what makes this whole \u0026lsquo;blog thing interesting. There are other arguments too, but this is a start.\nThoughts?\nThe truth is that as programs become more complex, code bases grow older, and the lion\u0026rsquo;s share of the current generation of programmers has grown up on pretty high level languages and problem spaces, even among the technically sophisticated there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of people who are standing around ready to hack on a project with several thousand lines of C code.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/code-importance/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not a programmer, really. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m a huge geek, and I understand some pretty heavy computer-science related problems, but coding isn\u0026rsquo;t what I do. This is true of a lot of computer users these days, and it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be such a big deal if I weren\u0026rsquo;t such a huge geek about open source software. I suspect that most of the users of open source software these days aren\u0026rsquo;t that different than me in this respect--though many are programmers, in most cases they probably don\u0026rsquo;t make active use of the source code of the software they use.1\nThis realization probably sounds familiar to some, as I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to pull apart the contemporary modifications for open source software. One obvious answer to this question is, \u0026ldquo;freedom:\u0026rdquo; that open source software provides its users an non-tangible freedom and power over their interactions with technology. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted about why I think this is imprecise and while I need to spend time developing this argument further, there\u0026rsquo;s some merit.","title":"Code Importance"},{"content":"I love Nancy Kress\u0026rsquo; blog. Just saying. If you don\u0026rsquo;t read it, start. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nShe wrote the other day about her approach to developing SF stories and I wanted to explore her little hint in more depth here. First, a quote from the conclusion:\nThe larger point here is that, in my view, SF should be more than its \u0026ldquo;idea.\u0026rdquo; I am not writing about a \u0026ldquo;galactic empire\u0026rdquo; or about aliens who \u0026ldquo;lord\u0026rdquo; anything over humans. It may be that my story fails on these other literary dimensions -- character, emotion, human insight, moral implication -- as well.\nOf course she\u0026rsquo;s correct. The best SF stories deal with a lot of literary dimensions, many conventional--emotions, character development, morality, and insight--and many less conventional--aliens, technology, and space. At the same time, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s quite fair to dismiss \u0026ldquo;the idea\u0026rdquo; (the science fictional aspects) as being sort of secondary. While I can appreciate that our main goals for writing science fiction isn\u0026rsquo;t to deal with things like spaceships and alien worlds, the boundaries between the aspects of any given science fiction story that are \u0026ldquo;the literary core\u0026rdquo; and the literary features that are just background, are difficult to draw.\nOn the one hand the combination of a traditional literary core and \u0026ldquo;the extra stuff,\u0026rdquo; is what makes SF so special. While space ships can be distracting, these and other aspects of a story create all sorts of situations that make the \u0026ldquo;core literary\u0026rdquo; material possible or interesting. Or at least that\u0026rsquo;s how it\u0026rsquo;s supposed to work. Also, there are defiantly SF stories, I think, that are more about the ideas and \u0026ldquo;the world\u0026rdquo; rather than something about characters, or humanity, or traditional literary ideas. William Gibson\u0026rsquo;s work always feels this way to me, for instance.\nWhile I think I end up writing very character-based SF, and my tastes tend much closer to the literary parts of the genre, my interest in science fiction grows largely out of my love for the ideas of science fiction, both as a reader and as a writer. Not because I like reading about \u0026ldquo;cool stuff,\u0026rdquo; though I do, but because I respect the way that the idea gives rise to the more standard literary features.\nMaybe this is part of what defines SF for me, and why I don\u0026rsquo;t often stray into fantasy. Also, to be clear, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that Nancy Kress' statement is particularly in conflict with mine: I find her stories to excel at using conceptual material to generate powerful literary stories. For whatever that means.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ideas-in-science-fiction/","summary":"I love Nancy Kress\u0026rsquo; blog. Just saying. If you don\u0026rsquo;t read it, start. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nShe wrote the other day about her approach to developing SF stories and I wanted to explore her little hint in more depth here. First, a quote from the conclusion:\nThe larger point here is that, in my view, SF should be more than its \u0026ldquo;idea.\u0026rdquo; I am not writing about a \u0026ldquo;galactic empire\u0026rdquo; or about aliens who \u0026ldquo;lord\u0026rdquo; anything over humans. It may be that my story fails on these other literary dimensions -- character, emotion, human insight, moral implication -- as well.\nOf course she\u0026rsquo;s correct. The best SF stories deal with a lot of literary dimensions, many conventional--emotions, character development, morality, and insight--and many less conventional--aliens, technology, and space. At the same time, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s quite fair to dismiss \u0026ldquo;the idea\u0026rdquo; (the science fictional aspects) as being sort of secondary.","title":"Ideas in Science Fiction"},{"content":"After a long time toiling with the ThinkPad that I got (as my primary laptop) a few months back. I decided to rearrange my laptop usage. Not that the ThinkPad is a bad machine, but I felt bad because my MacBook was langishing, and I very much missed having a machine with a usable battery life. While I thought about trading the macbook for a PC laptop, it finally dawned on me that I could just linuxify it and be done with it. I have the hardware, and while it isn\u0026rsquo;t pro-grade like the thinkpad, it\u0026rsquo;s contemporary. It also means that my initial intention with the thinkpad--as a spare to keep peace among the family when one of my parent\u0026rsquo;s older macs dies--is finally fulfilled, without my need to give away the macbook. Win win. I installed dual boot with OS X, which seems like it might be useful. The hard-drive is certainly big enough--and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to be keeping anything mission critical on it anyway. In honor of this, I\u0026rsquo;ve rechristened it \u0026ldquo;Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rdquo; (deleuze=linux; guatteri=os x) as an addition to my family of continental philosopher named electronic devices. I have the linux system set up, next up: getting the right click emulation to work right/at all, figuring out how to partition the shared space (a thousand plateaus, heh,) setting up the OS X part, and afixing the ordered tux stickers to the top of the laptop.\nIf anyone has experience with linux and macbooks, and can help with the right click issue, that would rock something fierce.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/macbook-linux/","summary":"After a long time toiling with the ThinkPad that I got (as my primary laptop) a few months back. I decided to rearrange my laptop usage. Not that the ThinkPad is a bad machine, but I felt bad because my MacBook was langishing, and I very much missed having a machine with a usable battery life. While I thought about trading the macbook for a PC laptop, it finally dawned on me that I could just linuxify it and be done with it. I have the hardware, and while it isn\u0026rsquo;t pro-grade like the thinkpad, it\u0026rsquo;s contemporary. It also means that my initial intention with the thinkpad--as a spare to keep peace among the family when one of my parent\u0026rsquo;s older macs dies--is finally fulfilled, without my need to give away the macbook. Win win. I installed dual boot with OS X, which seems like it might be useful. The hard-drive is certainly big enough--and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to be keeping anything mission critical on it anyway.","title":"macbook linux: deleuze and guatteri"},{"content":"This post is very much in my vein of \u0026ldquo;tycho talks about what its like to be a geek that doesn\u0026rsquo;t really programmer,\u0026rdquo; posts. Because I don\u0026rsquo;t really fancy myself much of a programmer, I often have a hard time explaining the kinds of things that I do out side of saying \u0026ldquo;I write fiction,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I work with web developers,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I help people with websites,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I write blogs about technology,\u0026rdquo; which while factual in the strictest sense, is not a particularly honest capture of \u0026ldquo;what I do.\u0026rdquo; Or what I think of as my secret superpower.\n\u0026ldquo;Secret superpower?\u0026rdquo; you ask? Well, we all have something that we kickass at, some skill set that makes us valuable at our jobs. It\u0026rsquo;s not a fixed thing, of course, it can change as we learn and grow, not to mention as our responsibilities change. But it\u0026rsquo;s there.\nAt various points, I\u0026rsquo;ve counted \u0026ldquo;leading kickass meetings,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;knitting kickass sweaters,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;doing kickass research,\u0026rdquo; as my superpower, but these days I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably \u0026ldquo;translating geek talk into more general purpose information. So I write blog posts about technology, and I edit notes that other people write, and I write documentations and training documents. Right? Pretty useful superpower? I think so, and it seems like other people think so as well.\nAnd more than just success doing the kind of work that I find myself doing right now, my ongoing academic projects tap into a similar superpower. I\u0026rsquo;m trying, on some level, to figure out what--if anything--is so unique about open source development practices, and how do these practices effect the way that the rest of us interact with technology. Or something that stems from that.\nIn the strictest sense possible, I don\u0026rsquo;t need to be able to be a programmer to kickass writer/editor/academic/consultant but given the frequency with which I find myself in a circle with a bunch of other programmers I often have the sense that I don\u0026rsquo;t belong.\nMaybe this is just impostor syndrome-type stuff and I\u0026rsquo;ll get over it as I get my barring. But here\u0026rsquo;s the counter example:\nThere are times when I really feel like a programmer. I have this incredibly geeky, (and as near as I can tell, reasonably original,) way of downloading my email, that is amazingly useful and powerful. Built on-top of existing tools, I totally hacked it together myself with like 13-26 lines of shell script.\nAnd, while I don\u0026rsquo;t do it very much, I do end up building some small number of Wordpress websites every year, and by now I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that from that I know enough PHP and Wordpress-isms to not be a complete idiot.\nAnd maybe the taste of knowing what it\u0026rsquo;s like to program, to write code that works, is why not being a programmer (superpower or not) is something that I\u0026rsquo;m sensitive about. Who knows?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-not-being-a-programer/","summary":"This post is very much in my vein of \u0026ldquo;tycho talks about what its like to be a geek that doesn\u0026rsquo;t really programmer,\u0026rdquo; posts. Because I don\u0026rsquo;t really fancy myself much of a programmer, I often have a hard time explaining the kinds of things that I do out side of saying \u0026ldquo;I write fiction,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I work with web developers,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I help people with websites,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I write blogs about technology,\u0026rdquo; which while factual in the strictest sense, is not a particularly honest capture of \u0026ldquo;what I do.\u0026rdquo; Or what I think of as my secret superpower.\n\u0026ldquo;Secret superpower?\u0026rdquo; you ask? Well, we all have something that we kickass at, some skill set that makes us valuable at our jobs. It\u0026rsquo;s not a fixed thing, of course, it can change as we learn and grow, not to mention as our responsibilities change. But it\u0026rsquo;s there.\nAt various points, I\u0026rsquo;ve counted \u0026ldquo;leading kickass meetings,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;knitting kickass sweaters,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;doing kickass research,\u0026rdquo; as my superpower, but these days I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably \u0026ldquo;translating geek talk into more general purpose information.","title":"On Not Being a Programer"},{"content":"I hear that some of you are celebrating today. If that\u0026rsquo;s the case, good holiday to you, dear readers. If that\u0026rsquo;s not the case, I hope you\u0026rsquo;re not too befuddled by this very strange Thursday we seem to be having.\nI guess in some respects I\u0026rsquo;m celebrating. Though I often leave, the fact that no one else is working changes the way the day feels. And I\u0026rsquo;m writing today\u0026rsquo;s blog post/letter this morning after having a nice fish-brunch (it\u0026rsquo;s a family ritual/jewish thing) with the family. We\u0026rsquo;re going to go get food at an Indian buffet that\u0026rsquo;s near by. I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to it. But other than that it\u0026rsquo;ll probably be a normal day. I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing, and maybe doing some work. But for now I\u0026rsquo;m just going to write a letter to you all.\nLets see, there have been a lot of little projects that have taken up a lot of my time and brain power. I\u0026rsquo;ll outline them to show what I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on and to see if anyone has suggestions:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on switching to a different terminal emulator (urxvt from gnome-terminal) and I have yet to get the colors right, which is a barrier. A terminal with hard to read colors is totally useful. Also, I haven\u0026rsquo;t quite figured out how to get copying and pasting from other apps to uxrvt to work, but I figure I can just read the documentation again, and that should be apparent. The reason for doing this? Gnome-terminal, though easy to configure, is pretty heavy weight, when there\u0026rsquo;s no real reason for that. If I were running one or two instances, that\u0026rsquo;d be fine, but I need to have at least 4 instances (mail, irc, IM, actual terminal things) and sometimes that grows to even larger numbers. So lightweightness is desirable. I\u0026rsquo;m starting to switch to using jabber/XMPP for all of my IM needs. The good news is that this attempt works way better than my previous attempts. The AIM transport (which seems to be the de facto IM standard in my network) works like a charm most of the time. I\u0026rsquo;m not deleting pidgin for emergencies, but I\u0026rsquo;m pleased. The client that I\u0026rsquo;m using, mcabber works quite well. I\u0026rsquo;m having two odd problems. First, I find that I\u0026rsquo;m having trouble adding Google Gtalk users to my roster. It seems like it might be a DNS glitch with dreamhost, but I can\u0026rsquo;t get it nailed out. Secondly, I seem to have done something so that I can only connect to my account using mcabber, which isn\u0026rsquo;t a problem in the short term, but it could be annoying/deal breaking in the long term. At some point I\u0026rsquo;ll probably switch to running my own XMPP server (when I move off of dreamhost) but in the mean time it would be nice to have this fixed. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of switching away from Wordpress to a blogging platform called Jekyll. This tool would conform more to my workflow (easier posting), it would be fun to have a blogging platform that I could conceptually hack on myself. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been using Wordpress in its current iteration for three or four years, I\u0026rsquo;ve used a lot of different CMSs to power the Teal Art/tychoish website. Greymatter (back in the day), b2 (the predecessor for wordpress), and a custom CMS that a friend wrote in 2001-2002. And I\u0026rsquo;ve toyed with Drupal and Moveable Type, of course. While the current setup works--I think it\u0026rsquo;s not entirely ideal. I\u0026rsquo;ll need to blog about this a bit more before. And the conversion process promises to be somewhat complex. There\u0026rsquo;s always something interesting going on. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of using bootcamp and installing Linux on my mac-book, and going back to using that hardware more full time. It\u0026rsquo;s good hardware, I already have it, and it might be fun to use another installation opportunity to play with Arch Linux (though I\u0026rsquo;ll probably wimp out and install ubuntu again). What I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered, I think, is that while I have a lot of respect for and history with Macs and OS X, a linux/awesome platform is--at the moment the system that I feel most comfortable \u0026ldquo;living in,\u0026rdquo; and most productive working in. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to my day, and enjoy yours too. Remember today means, 10.5 months without Christmas Music in public. That\u0026rsquo;s something I think we can all celebrate.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/holiday-on-my-day-of/","summary":"I hear that some of you are celebrating today. If that\u0026rsquo;s the case, good holiday to you, dear readers. If that\u0026rsquo;s not the case, I hope you\u0026rsquo;re not too befuddled by this very strange Thursday we seem to be having.\nI guess in some respects I\u0026rsquo;m celebrating. Though I often leave, the fact that no one else is working changes the way the day feels. And I\u0026rsquo;m writing today\u0026rsquo;s blog post/letter this morning after having a nice fish-brunch (it\u0026rsquo;s a family ritual/jewish thing) with the family. We\u0026rsquo;re going to go get food at an Indian buffet that\u0026rsquo;s near by. I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to it. But other than that it\u0026rsquo;ll probably be a normal day. I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing, and maybe doing some work. But for now I\u0026rsquo;m just going to write a letter to you all.\nLets see, there have been a lot of little projects that have taken up a lot of my time and brain power.","title":"Is Somebody Having a Holiday on My Day Off?"},{"content":"Just about everyone who spends any time studying open source is familiar with Eric S. Raymond\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;[The Cathedral and the Bazaar] (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain).\u0026rdquo; So familiar that both are generally known by abbreviations: esr and CatB respectively.\nTo recap, it was a ground breaking essay written in the mid nineties that really drew attention to how novel the development of the Linux Kernel really was, and outlined a number of powerful \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; development practices that--because of the Internet--changed the way that the open source was able to function. It\u0026rsquo;s a powerful essay, and my own interest in the direction that open source takes, stems directly from the ideas that esr presents here.\nThe biggest problem with the CatB argument is that it\u0026rsquo;s wrong.\nStrictly speaking, not wrong, so much as a bit logically fuzzy. What I mean, is that the argument tends to be a bit too idealistic and a bit too broad. So that, when working in its legacy it becomes (more) difficult to reject some of the assumptions that esr takes for granted.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t really a fatal problem: movements need documents and essays that are powerful and idealistic, and I think insofar as CatB encouraged the free software and open source movement to adopt more distributed and \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; practices, it was wildly successful.\nAs the foundation of an intellectual study\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s less good. I do think that it would be useful--for me, for other people--to think about the nuisances that esr avoided, and thinking about ways that we can build upon those arguments.\n1. Examine the role of \u0026ldquo;commiter\u0026rdquo; rights, or \u0026ldquo;core\u0026rdquo; teams on the development process. While these \u0026ldquo;institutions\u0026rdquo; might not have the same sort of effect that outright \u0026ldquo;cathedral building,\u0026rdquo; has on an open source project, but all projects have this sort of top-down organizing influence, and it\u0026rsquo;s important to consider.\n2. Consider \u0026ldquo;distribution,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;federation,\u0026rdquo; of both ownership and process, in open source. This means think about source management strategies (I think git is really important here) and the role of having a code base that\u0026rsquo;s owned by one person/company/institution (a la GNU, Mozilla, and so forth) and the effect that having ownership be distributed (like the Kernel and many smaller projects.)\n3. Think about modular design and extensibility. I had a conversation with Dan in the comments of my essay on innovation, and he brought up extensibility, which is worth bringing up again in a new context. Though its not a new idea, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to write software so that nearly all of the customizations that a user might want to do are possible through an add-on system. Emacs has emacs-lisp, TextMate exposes the shell in the editor (and the bundles make TextMate very open-source like), firefox has extensions, Drupal has modules. I think these kinds of designs have a big impact on the kind of involvement an open source community is likely to develop.\nHave I missed anything?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-cathedral-and-the-bazaar-today/","summary":"Just about everyone who spends any time studying open source is familiar with Eric S. Raymond\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;[The Cathedral and the Bazaar] (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain).\u0026rdquo; So familiar that both are generally known by abbreviations: esr and CatB respectively.\nTo recap, it was a ground breaking essay written in the mid nineties that really drew attention to how novel the development of the Linux Kernel really was, and outlined a number of powerful \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; development practices that--because of the Internet--changed the way that the open source was able to function. It\u0026rsquo;s a powerful essay, and my own interest in the direction that open source takes, stems directly from the ideas that esr presents here.\nThe biggest problem with the CatB argument is that it\u0026rsquo;s wrong.\nStrictly speaking, not wrong, so much as a bit logically fuzzy. What I mean, is that the argument tends to be a bit too idealistic and a bit too broad.","title":"The Cathedral and the Bazaar Today"},{"content":"So rather than approach my knitting posts for tychoish like a guilty journal (eg. I haven\u0026rsquo;t knit in a week, but I did yesterday and it\u0026rsquo;s cool, here\u0026rsquo;s my progress,) I\u0026rsquo;m going to just talk about projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on and knitting ideas that I have. Because I have a lot of them, and I think maybe approaching knitting topics in a more granular way might be fun. And it\u0026rsquo;ll give all the techie folks a sense of how all my--rapidly decreasing--knitting readership feel most of the time.\nLets start with the yarn. I went to the loopy ewe last Friday. Actually, I went out to the same building that the Loopy Ewe is in to help my mother buy a file cabinet that she found on craig\u0026rsquo;s list that a collapsing financial services agency was selling. So we stopped by and saw Sheri and Donna and Stacy, and I bought some fiber and a skein of yarn. The fiber is squirreled away in the fiber stash, but I have a picture to show you:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s Noro Silk Garden Sock yarn. Sorry for the blury picture, I took it with my new phone. There\u0026rsquo;ll be more pictures in the future, because the phone can upload things right to flickr. That\u0026rsquo;s a killer feature. Anyway, knitting\u0026hellip;\nA word first about the color. There\u0026rsquo;s green in this ball, but its hidden in the middle. This means that its almost exactly the same color as the last Noro that I knit with (also silk garden). R got/gave me two skeins of the worsted variant (when that\u0026rsquo;s all there was) and I made a scarf that I still have and wear. Anyway, I am nothing if not consistent and predictable.\nSo it\u0026rsquo;s sock yarn, which is to say, that unlike most Noro it\u0026rsquo;s pretty fine and manageable. At some point in the past few years I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to a point where I don\u0026rsquo;t really like to knit with thick yarn. My loss I suppose.\nAnyway, while some people, including Joe have reported that it makes passable socks, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to make socks with this. For starters I don\u0026rsquo;t really like to wear thin wool socks, let alone make them. And what\u0026rsquo;s more I\u0026rsquo;m unconvinced that the singles structure of this yarn would hold up for socks. You may have had different experiences, but I\u0026rsquo;ve made up my mind.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a cowl with this. My mother has made a couple of these this winter so far, and I really like what she\u0026rsquo;s done, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to attempt to replicate what she\u0026rsquo;s done in a way that is a bit more boy-like. Or at least, isn\u0026rsquo;t lacy. I can deal with something that\u0026rsquo;s not very boy-like if I\u0026rsquo;m warm, but the lace thing never really appealed. Also I remember really liking the shape of the Ice Queen from last years knitty. It\u0026rsquo;s a cowl (which is to say a tube) but it flares out at one end to cover the back of the neck a bit better particularly if it\u0026rsquo;s also pulled over the ears. Brilliant if you ask me. Also, even if you omit the beads and the lace (or just minimize the lace) I don\u0026rsquo;t think that it would be good for me. Even if I like the idea.\nThe specifics? Nothing too concrete, but I\u0026rsquo;m thinking entrelac, with the same sort of tappered look. I\u0026rsquo;d start at the small end and work better near the end. Thats probably not the best way to make use of the yarn, but I think figuring out the pattern will be easier if it grows rather than shrinks.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll start with a few rows of rolled reverse stocking stitch and then just play it by ear. Probably just knit 10-13ish inches at the smaller size (21/22 inches around) and then increase over several \u0026ldquo;courses\u0026rdquo; of enterlac slowly so that it flares just right. Actually as I write this, I\u0026rsquo;ve convinced myself that starting at the small end is very much the wrong way todo this.\nAm I crazy? Probably. I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and get a few other projects more underway and finished before I give this a go. Knitters, you have any thoughts on this? Talk to you soon!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-cowl-knittting/","summary":"So rather than approach my knitting posts for tychoish like a guilty journal (eg. I haven\u0026rsquo;t knit in a week, but I did yesterday and it\u0026rsquo;s cool, here\u0026rsquo;s my progress,) I\u0026rsquo;m going to just talk about projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on and knitting ideas that I have. Because I have a lot of them, and I think maybe approaching knitting topics in a more granular way might be fun. And it\u0026rsquo;ll give all the techie folks a sense of how all my--rapidly decreasing--knitting readership feel most of the time.\nLets start with the yarn. I went to the loopy ewe last Friday. Actually, I went out to the same building that the Loopy Ewe is in to help my mother buy a file cabinet that she found on craig\u0026rsquo;s list that a collapsing financial services agency was selling. So we stopped by and saw Sheri and Donna and Stacy, and I bought some fiber and a skein of yarn.","title":"A Cowl--(Knittting)"},{"content":"Ok, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t done a journal upate in a long time, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s high time that I posted an update about my projects and stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s my blog after all.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot, which is a good thing. Also I think some pretty cool things are happening with my job. While work can be stressful by virtue of shear volume, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about how things are going. I\u0026rsquo;m also getting better at managing the \u0026ldquo;working for a virtual company,\u0026rdquo; thing: it\u0026rsquo;s taken me a while to figure out the right way to manage things so that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel like I\u0026rsquo;m working constantly, or conversely feel like I\u0026rsquo;m never getting anything done. I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I have the answer, but I\u0026rsquo;ve started to figure out ways of both working, and making progress on projects that are important to me. Evidence of this: I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten knitting and writing done recently.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on an academic project--some of the conceptual \u0026ldquo;thinking\u0026rdquo; work for this has appeared on the blog in the past few months. I\u0026rsquo;m laying the groundwork for an application to history/anthropology/library school to study free software/open source development mythologies and communities. The project will wrap up in the next couple of weeks, and then I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend a couple of months preparing and launching a website/wiki on the subject and initiating correspondences with a few key people in the field. I haven\u0026rsquo;t totally ruled out applying for a couple Ph.D. programs in Fall 09/Winter 10 to begin in Fall \u0026lsquo;10 as a trial run, but I\u0026rsquo;m thinking waiting another year is more likely. By then, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be ready.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some knitting. Small stuff, socks and hats and stuff, just because I need something with that kind of pace. Also, while I\u0026rsquo;ve never been a big yarn buyer, my off an on break from knitting hasn\u0026rsquo;t entirely put and end to my yarn buying. Also I might have bought a skein of Noro Silk Garden sock yarn that I really want to make into a neck cowl/covering/tube. There will probably some enterlac involved as well. I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to sweaters soon. But I\u0026rsquo;m not in a rush.\nMy technological purchases acquisitions over the past few months (the new laptop, the linux desktop, the fancy cellphone) are continuing to serve me quite well. I miss the amazing battery life and sleep/wake features of the macbook (which my father has taken as his own), I have to say that I think I work much better on the linux machines. I can focus more easily, because there\u0026rsquo;s less operational overhead (fancy graphics etc.) even the older hardware really keeps up with what I want to do. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about selling/trading the macbook away for something like a dell m1330 (or cash to buy another thinkpad)--for the father, as a way of ameliorating my losses. But other than that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with the way my stable of technology has improved the way I work.\nIn a similar vein, my switch to emacs from vim (and TextMate on the Mac) continues to do well. I\u0026rsquo;m doing much of my writing in emacs, though there are things that I do in other editors. I edit email vim, because that makes sense, and it works well, though I imagine that I\u0026rsquo;d switch to emacs for that at some point in the future. There are some things where I\u0026rsquo;ll confess to really liking Gedit\u0026rsquo;s tabbed interface (mostly for instances where I need to copy and paste a lot of content from an editor into a web browser. The right tool for the right job, and all that. I\u0026rsquo;ve never thought of myself as a multi-editor kind of guy--and emacs doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to provoke this kind of response--but it\u0026rsquo;s not a bad thing.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how much holiday-related time off I\u0026rsquo;m going to take this week. Being neither Christian, nor a particularly observant Jew, I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll make any formal blog vacation. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m well aware that with a great number of you all in blog land on \u0026ldquo;holiday schedule,\u0026rdquo; it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense for me to slavishly stick to my blog schedule. Also, I need a bit of a break for Critical Futures, to recharge and reevaluate so that I can make the best of the new year over there. So, stay tuned and have a good holiday.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/keeping-time-with-tycho/","summary":"Ok, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t done a journal upate in a long time, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s high time that I posted an update about my projects and stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s my blog after all.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot, which is a good thing. Also I think some pretty cool things are happening with my job. While work can be stressful by virtue of shear volume, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about how things are going. I\u0026rsquo;m also getting better at managing the \u0026ldquo;working for a virtual company,\u0026rdquo; thing: it\u0026rsquo;s taken me a while to figure out the right way to manage things so that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel like I\u0026rsquo;m working constantly, or conversely feel like I\u0026rsquo;m never getting anything done. I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I have the answer, but I\u0026rsquo;ve started to figure out ways of both working, and making progress on projects that are important to me. Evidence of this: I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten knitting and writing done recently.","title":"Keeping Time with tycho"},{"content":"I did some blog writing for the upcoming week today. It was good, I managed to pull off nearly two weeks the last time I sat down and seriously wrote for the blog, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t had the chance to really sort through thoughts like this in a long time. It\u0026rsquo;s amazing how much writing blog posts provides me the space to work through things that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about. It\u0026rsquo;s also amazing to me how much I\u0026rsquo;ve grown to depend and expect this space as part of my life, and how scattered my thinking is without this blog. It\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting in another ten years to see how this changes. In any case the real point of this little post is to say that I ran a word count of my efforts today and came up with a total around 3,800 words (turns out, this weeks is a light week). I remember in high school and college thinking that this was a lot of words. And it is, and indeed it\u0026rsquo;s easier to write things conversationally for the blog than it is to write logically structured essays or fiction. But still. Evidence, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that writing effectively is more about establishing habits rather than anything mystical.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-days-work/","summary":"I did some blog writing for the upcoming week today. It was good, I managed to pull off nearly two weeks the last time I sat down and seriously wrote for the blog, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t had the chance to really sort through thoughts like this in a long time. It\u0026rsquo;s amazing how much writing blog posts provides me the space to work through things that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about. It\u0026rsquo;s also amazing to me how much I\u0026rsquo;ve grown to depend and expect this space as part of my life, and how scattered my thinking is without this blog. It\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting in another ten years to see how this changes. In any case the real point of this little post is to say that I ran a word count of my efforts today and came up with a total around 3,800 words (turns out, this weeks is a light week). I remember in high school and college thinking that this was a lot of words.","title":"A Day's Work"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve for some number of months started to recognize a division between what I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking of as \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;old\u0026rdquo; guard geeks in the open source world. The old guard have been the linux and hardware hacker-type people who are prone to say \u0026ldquo;GNU/Linux\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;free software\u0026rdquo; or conversely be interested in BSD. These are people who care about plain text files and get really invested text editors and data formats and stuff like that. Think sys-admin. The new guard, by contrast, are web programmer types. The Rails and Drupal folks, the web 2.0 crowd. More jokingly, I might call this the \u0026ldquo;Perl versus PHP\u0026rdquo; dynamic, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a particularly productive comparison or breakdown.\nLike all false dichotomies this one has limited descriptive power as everyone, even the old school geeks use the Internet. Linux exists today because of the way that Internet supported its development. None the less I think that thinking about these new and old world geeks (as it were) as having different interests is productive insofar as it allows us to better understand the way that the open source is changing in the coming years.\nPart of me thinks that this has something to do with the effects of \u0026ldquo;open source\u0026rdquo; versus \u0026ldquo;free software\u0026rdquo; debate. I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that Drupal developers almost never say \u0026ldquo;free software,\u0026rdquo; even though it\u0026rsquo;s a GPLv2/3 project. I say open source rather than free software, even though I\u0026rsquo;m generally a proponent of copyleft. I\u0026rsquo;ve outlined my thoughts on the subject before in an essay on software freedom, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that people have different reasons for this. In any case, judging by the prevalence of Apple laptops, it seems like the whole \u0026ldquo;we need an open source/free software stack from top to bottom,\u0026rdquo; impulse isn\u0026rsquo;t as strong that underlies a lot of the free software argument.\nAnother part of this shift might be the fact that proprietary operating systems are much better today than they were twenty years ago. OS X is really stable (thanks to open source) and works great (of course) with Apple hardware,1 and despite the vast unpopularity of Windows Vista and my general disdain of the OS, technologically the NT kernel OSes starting with version 5 (so windows 2000 and XP and even Vista) have probably been pretty good. Or good enough at any rate.\nAnd there\u0026rsquo;s, of course, the whole web 2.0 \u0026rsquo;thing. In a lot of ways the operating system question becomes less relevant as everything becomes cloud-based anyway, and \u0026ldquo;freedom\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;openness\u0026rdquo; is always difficult to judge in terms of network-based services and applications. There\u0026rsquo;s the AGPL, but that not withstanding I\u0026rsquo;m not sure there\u0026rsquo;s a good one size fits all (hell, I\u0026rsquo;d even take 2-3 sizes fits all) solution to software freedom, user rights, and privacy and security for network services.\nLike I said at the beginning, I don\u0026rsquo;t think the new geek/old geek (particularly with regard to open source) is totally productive, but it\u0026rsquo;s a useful starting place for a conversation that I\u0026rsquo;m very interested in. If you have feedback, of course\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\nThis might seem obvious, but I think one of the reasons that Apple\u0026rsquo;s laptops are so successful is that by controlling the hardware as they can, they can get great battery performance and the best sleep/wake functionality around.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-geeks/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve for some number of months started to recognize a division between what I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking of as \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;old\u0026rdquo; guard geeks in the open source world. The old guard have been the linux and hardware hacker-type people who are prone to say \u0026ldquo;GNU/Linux\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;free software\u0026rdquo; or conversely be interested in BSD. These are people who care about plain text files and get really invested text editors and data formats and stuff like that. Think sys-admin. The new guard, by contrast, are web programmer types. The Rails and Drupal folks, the web 2.0 crowd. More jokingly, I might call this the \u0026ldquo;Perl versus PHP\u0026rdquo; dynamic, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a particularly productive comparison or breakdown.\nLike all false dichotomies this one has limited descriptive power as everyone, even the old school geeks use the Internet. Linux exists today because of the way that Internet supported its development. None the less I think that thinking about these new and old world geeks (as it were) as having different interests is productive insofar as it allows us to better understand the way that the open source is changing in the coming years.","title":"New Geeks"},{"content":"Two of the most interesting/innovating/exciting open source projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve watched in the last little while are \u0026ldquo;git,\u0026rdquo; the distributed source control management tool, and \u0026ldquo;Awesome,\u0026rdquo; a very\u0026hellip; niche window management program for Linux. When most people think about open source they probably think about something like the GNOME, or Firefox, or to a lesser extent Pidgin. These second group of programs are the big projects that lots of people pat attention to, projects that are targeted at non-developer users.\nThey also kind of suck.\nI mean, I use parts of all of these programs, and I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to diminish what exceptional accomplishments these projects represent, but they\u0026rsquo;re all boring and stale, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that they\u0026rsquo;re particularly innovative. Read the bottom post on this page for more on this. Has GNOME ever developed a feature that Apple and Microsoft has rushed to catch up with? Has Firefox, (since tabbed browsing) done anything other than play catch-up with Opera and WebKit/Safari/Chrome? And Pidgin is designed to be a copycat.\nWhen I said, \u0026ldquo;they suck\u0026rdquo; I guess what I meant is that they\u0026rsquo;re not particularly innovative, they\u0026rsquo;re great pieces of software, but they\u0026rsquo;re not game changing. Now before anyone says, \u0026ldquo;ha! that\u0026rsquo;s the downfall of open source, lets dig a little deeper into Awesome and git,\u0026rdquo; which I think are different.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;d used SCMs before git, and was already a pretty big open source advocate, when I learned about git, and started to really \u0026ldquo;grok\u0026rdquo; the program, I said to myself, \u0026ldquo;this is something that\u0026rsquo;s really revolutionary.\u0026rdquo; Git is a program which stores changes (\u0026ldquo;revisions\u0026rdquo;) of a group of files (a directory \u0026ldquo;tree\u0026rdquo;); the revolutionary part is that it makes merging different and divergent \u0026ldquo;change histories\u0026rdquo; almost trivial. With merging histories easy, it becomes easy to have many different development branches. This makes it easy to have people working in parallel on a project, and for developers to experiment without fear of ruining things. Because you can always revert to a previous revision. It also helps that the system is designed to allow people to work offline, and give everyone a full history of the revision. Also it\u0026rsquo;s fast so all of these operations, which can be rather complex, are blindingly fast.\nMaybe there\u0026rsquo;s nothing stunningly original in git, but pragmatically git can and has made a huge impact on work-flows, and I think could really impact the way people work--not just programmers but anyone whose doing something in a plain-text format. It\u0026rsquo;s already change the way I write and work, and I\u0026rsquo;m just using a fraction of what it can do.\nAnd awesome? Again, the idea of a tiling window manager isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly new, there are even a number of different contemporary options, but I can\u0026rsquo;t help but think that given some recent trends among so called \u0026ldquo;power users\u0026rdquo; (hot key usage, a renewed interest in command line interfaces,) that there\u0026rsquo;s something sort of innovative and different about Awesome.\nWhat strikes me a innovative about these two programs is that unlike the first group they\u0026rsquo;re all written explicitly for other programmers and ubergeeks, whereas GNOME and Firefox and Pidgin are written for \u0026ldquo;entry-level users.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m not discouraging the production of open source software targeted at less technical users, but I think that heretofore no one has been really clear about what \u0026ldquo;usability\u0026rdquo; really means. What we\u0026rsquo;ve gotten has been software that\u0026rsquo;s designed to operate \u0026ldquo;as expected,\u0026rdquo; which while often sufficient for usable, is never sufficient for innovative.\nSo where does innovation happen? In projects that people do for fun and for themselves, because if you write a program, like Awesome, mostly for yourself and if you\u0026rsquo;re friends you don\u0026rsquo;t have to worry about having a UI or configuration interface that\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;easy to understand,\u0026rdquo; you\u0026rsquo;re more free to develop innovative features. Also I think innovation can also happen in projects where developers have a budget to be able to afford a close working relationship with usability labs so that the developers and designers can innovate and still end up with an easy/intuitive interface.\nAlso, I think the web provides the option for some innovation as web-based software is easier to develop rapidly than desktop software, so interface and feature changes are \u0026ldquo;less expensive\u0026rdquo; comparatively.\nIn any case, I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to think about where innovation happens and what in open source serves to encourage or discourage innovation. Thoughts are, as always, very welcome.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/where-innovation-happens-part-one/","summary":"Two of the most interesting/innovating/exciting open source projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve watched in the last little while are \u0026ldquo;git,\u0026rdquo; the distributed source control management tool, and \u0026ldquo;Awesome,\u0026rdquo; a very\u0026hellip; niche window management program for Linux. When most people think about open source they probably think about something like the GNOME, or Firefox, or to a lesser extent Pidgin. These second group of programs are the big projects that lots of people pat attention to, projects that are targeted at non-developer users.\nThey also kind of suck.\nI mean, I use parts of all of these programs, and I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to diminish what exceptional accomplishments these projects represent, but they\u0026rsquo;re all boring and stale, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that they\u0026rsquo;re particularly innovative. Read the bottom post on this page for more on this. Has GNOME ever developed a feature that Apple and Microsoft has rushed to catch up with? Has Firefox, (since tabbed browsing) done anything other than play catch-up with Opera and WebKit/Safari/Chrome?","title":"Where Innovation Happens, Part One"},{"content":"For the past few years I\u0026rsquo;ve had a productivity tag to organize/centralize all of the thinking and writing I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing on topics related to how we work. User experience stuff and technology, work-flow management and design, \u0026ldquo;life hacks,\u0026rdquo; stuff about the processes of writing, and so forth.\nThe truth is that the \u0026ldquo;productivity\u0026rdquo; blogging niche is pretty big. LifeHacker, 43Folders, and many other smaller blogs seem to address these issues with a greater attention to detail than I am able to muster. Also while I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting, and useful to deliberate on these issues, there\u0026rsquo;s little--if any--intrinsic interest in this kind of thing. Outside of the human factors engineering aspects, which I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably the only one who geeks out on that stuff.\nMy other issue with doing \u0026ldquo;productivity\u0026rdquo; blogging, is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really feel like we need to be any more productive. This article about the relationship between productivity and standards of living, has weighed on my mind a lot in the past couple of months. The challenge shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be how we can be \u0026ldquo;more productive,\u0026rdquo; because we\u0026rsquo;re already pretty damn productive, but rather how can we be more effective at accomplishing the things that we want to do.\nThis is a problem that writers or \u0026ldquo;wanna be writers\u0026rdquo; seem to have most often. After a certain point the issue isn\u0026rsquo;t that we don\u0026rsquo;t have time (a problem that can be solved with priorities and being more productive in our other tasks), or skill based (writing is tough, but it\u0026rsquo;s also a learning process and after a while one starts to get it) but rather how to use the time that we have to write effectively on the projects that are important to us. I suspect other types of creative folk experience this in different ways.\nWhere as productivity seems to focus around the conversion from raw time to whatever the output is, I think effectivity is more about how enviroment, stress management, sleep management, and project planning combine and interact to make it easier for creative types to \u0026ldquo;do their work.\u0026rdquo; A lot of the lifehacks that are popular these days, focus on how to get more functionality out of your computer, or how to multi-task more efficently, or organize your todo lists better. And so forth.\nIn contrast, I think \u0026ldquo;Effectivness-based lifehacks,\u0026rdquo; would revolve around how to manage your sleep more effectively, or how to order your routine so that you have enough \u0026ldquo;down time\u0026rdquo; to recharge so that you can be effective durring your \u0026ldquo;up time.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not proposing anything new that I don\u0026rsquo;t think happens already, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s a big distinction between these approaches to personal organization and workflow, and I\u0026rsquo;m throwing my hat in the pile behind a focus on effective rather than productive behaviors.\nSo there.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/productivity-blogging-and-effectiveness/","summary":"For the past few years I\u0026rsquo;ve had a productivity tag to organize/centralize all of the thinking and writing I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing on topics related to how we work. User experience stuff and technology, work-flow management and design, \u0026ldquo;life hacks,\u0026rdquo; stuff about the processes of writing, and so forth.\nThe truth is that the \u0026ldquo;productivity\u0026rdquo; blogging niche is pretty big. LifeHacker, 43Folders, and many other smaller blogs seem to address these issues with a greater attention to detail than I am able to muster. Also while I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting, and useful to deliberate on these issues, there\u0026rsquo;s little--if any--intrinsic interest in this kind of thing. Outside of the human factors engineering aspects, which I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably the only one who geeks out on that stuff.\nMy other issue with doing \u0026ldquo;productivity\u0026rdquo; blogging, is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really feel like we need to be any more productive. This article about the relationship between productivity and standards of living, has weighed on my mind a lot in the past couple of months.","title":"Productivity Blogging and Effectiveness"},{"content":"I got a new alarm clock this week. Well new to me, at any rate. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those nifty ones that can wake you up with music from an iPod (and charge it all at the same time). Truth is that, I\u0026rsquo;ve not even had a clock in my bedroom for a number of months: I tend to wake pretty early on my own/with cats, my coworkers aren\u0026rsquo;t in my timezone anyway, and I unplugged my old alarm clock because I needed the outlet, and never got around to plugging it back in.\nThe experience of waking up to the alarm clock has been overwhelmingly positive. I tend to get up regularly and earlier first and foremost. This is a good thing, because I think I was slipping into the habit of sleeping too much. And too much sleep--counter intuitively--can wreak havoc on my energy levels and mood, so I\u0026rsquo;ve just felt better all around. It makes sense that too much sleep can lead to decreased mood/energy--your body gets used to sleeping more, and so it gets to need sleep so you get tiered more--but your millage may vary.\nThe second great thing about this alarm clock, and the waking up to music, rather than a buzzer is that I\u0026rsquo;ve found that I wake up more \u0026ldquo;gently,\u0026rdquo; that is, rather than being jarred awake by a buzzer, the music comes on, and I drift towards wakefullness, I listen to a song or two (if I like it) while I think about what the day holds and muster the strength to get up. And then I\u0026rsquo;m up. I\u0026rsquo;ve found that when I get up, I\u0026rsquo;m not groggy, and I\u0026rsquo;m generally ready to get started at the things that I need to do.\nHow cool is that?\nI think this whole \u0026ldquo;sleep management\u0026rdquo; thing is worth something. Sleep is important, and having an unadjusted sleep schedule is never fun, but I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that sleeping the \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo; ammount is something that I have to pay attention to. Maybe this is a product of our sleep rythms being a little more than a day long, but who knows. My general sleep-related goals are:\nSleep a little less than I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to. Not by a lot, but 90 minutes or less seems to leave me feeling better. If I feel like I need to take a nap, I almost always try to do it for sometime between 1-3 in the afternoon, which is when I\u0026rsquo;m the least productive/creative anyway. This alarm clock, and \u0026ldquo;waking up softly\u0026rdquo; seems to be helpful. With the choice between being up in the morning and being up late at night, I always chose the former. If I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m having trouble falling asleep, I ususally get up and read or do something else. The end result isn\u0026rsquo;t that I get more sleep, and though tired I feel better the next day. I also try and time caffine intake so that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t muck up my sleep schedule, though the truth is that I can sleep through a caffiene buzz if I\u0026rsquo;m tired enough. I tend to think of caffiene as a having a \u0026ldquo;focusing\u0026rdquo; rather than an \u0026ldquo;alertness\u0026rdquo; effect. But that\u0026rsquo;s just me. Anyone else think about their sleep like this? Generally? It has a big effect on how I work and how I approach work, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably a little bit wierd. Anyway\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/alarm-clock-and-sleep-management/","summary":"I got a new alarm clock this week. Well new to me, at any rate. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those nifty ones that can wake you up with music from an iPod (and charge it all at the same time). Truth is that, I\u0026rsquo;ve not even had a clock in my bedroom for a number of months: I tend to wake pretty early on my own/with cats, my coworkers aren\u0026rsquo;t in my timezone anyway, and I unplugged my old alarm clock because I needed the outlet, and never got around to plugging it back in.\nThe experience of waking up to the alarm clock has been overwhelmingly positive. I tend to get up regularly and earlier first and foremost. This is a good thing, because I think I was slipping into the habit of sleeping too much. And too much sleep--counter intuitively--can wreak havoc on my energy levels and mood, so I\u0026rsquo;ve just felt better all around.","title":"Alarm Clock and Sleep Management"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a little bit about emergence/systems theory and open source, as promised in my `change process \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/posts/theories-of-change\u0026gt;`_ post a while back.\nI was reading this article about linux and complexity theory last week, which I think is a pretty good frame for any discussion of open source and linux from a systems approach. There are a few things that I had issue with. First, the article is 3+ years old, and so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have the benefit of seeing what\u0026rsquo;s happened with ubuntu linux, netbooks, the AGPL, rails and web 2.0, let alone things like Drupal and the last two major iterations of Firefox, which for all their assorted faults have really changed the face of open source.\nSecondly, the empirical study focuses on the kernel development, and takes the kernel to represent the entire Linux eco-system, which I think it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do very well. Kernel development is really high level, really niche, and despite its size, represents so little of what people think about when they talk about \u0026ldquo;Linux.\u0026rdquo; GNOME, KDE, the GNU Toolchain, X11, pyton/ruby/perl, let alone the superstrucutral elements that projects like Debian, Gentoo and Arch represent are really more important than the Kernel. Debian and Gentoo more or less work with various BSD kernels and given enough money--to inspire interest and caring--full BSD based releases wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be technologically difficult. The dominance of the Linux Kernel in the free-operating system space is--I think largely the result of momentum and the fact that the kernel is damn good and that there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of a need for another kernel option.\nIn any case, the paper is in a lot of ways a 21st century review of Eric S. Raymond\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Cathedral and the Bazaar\u0026rdquo; paper. Raymond\u0026rsquo;s argument is taken as a statement in favor of bottom up organization (Linux, and the bazaar) in open source projects, and the author uses this insight to explore kernel development with some good-old systems theory.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s very true that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a monolithic organization in the Kernel development, it\u0026rsquo;s not exactly a free for all. Linus (or whoever is at the top of the project) provides a measure of top-down structure. This makes it easier for contributions to bubble from the bottom up. I think it\u0026rsquo;s no mistake that many open source projects have \u0026ldquo;dictator\u0026rdquo;-type leaders that are pretty consistent.\nThis says nothing of the barriers to entry for most kinds of development in the open source world, aren\u0026rsquo;t trivial (commit access projects that use non-distributed version control; eg. Drupal), let alone the burden of engineering knowledge for Kernel-level development, and other lower level projects. These--largely--informal standards none the less, constrain what happens on the kernel development.\nEven if a lot of the day to day work on the kernel isn\u0026rsquo;t done by Linus himself, his presence, and the importance of his branch/tree gives structure. Particularly before the advent of git, but even now. And I\u0026rsquo;m not saying that this is a bad thing--quite the contrary, top down forces are often a good thing--but I do think that overly romantic depictions of open source development as being bottom-up/anarchical aren\u0026rsquo;t productive.\nDoest his mean that Linux is a Cathedral? Or that it\u0026rsquo;s headed that way? Not at all. But I don\u0026rsquo;t think that the Bazaar is necessarily as bottom-up as Raymond (and those that have followed) thought it was. Open source is also much more commercial now than it was ten or twenty years ago, that can\u0026rsquo;t not have an impact.\nJust thoughts\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/linux-emergence/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a little bit about emergence/systems theory and open source, as promised in my `change process \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/posts/theories-of-change\u0026gt;`_ post a while back.\nI was reading this article about linux and complexity theory last week, which I think is a pretty good frame for any discussion of open source and linux from a systems approach. There are a few things that I had issue with. First, the article is 3+ years old, and so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have the benefit of seeing what\u0026rsquo;s happened with ubuntu linux, netbooks, the AGPL, rails and web 2.0, let alone things like Drupal and the last two major iterations of Firefox, which for all their assorted faults have really changed the face of open source.\nSecondly, the empirical study focuses on the kernel development, and takes the kernel to represent the entire Linux eco-system, which I think it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do very well. Kernel development is really high level, really niche, and despite its size, represents so little of what people think about when they talk about \u0026ldquo;Linux.","title":"Linux Emergence"},{"content":"All of the outlines for the novel length projects I start, have a space at about the three-quarters point that says \u0026ldquo;overflow area to catch up before the end\u0026rdquo;. I always have a couple of scenes that float between chapters, and having a place before the end where I can sort of take a deep breath and get things lined up perfectly for the climax and end is a good thing. Anyway, this isn\u0026rsquo;t really a writing post, but the current project has one of these areas, and I\u0026rsquo;m so going to need it. In part because of chapters like the one I\u0026rsquo;m writing now. It\u0026rsquo;s full of great stuff, that needs to be in this book, and I love the way it feels to write it. At the same time None of it was in the outline. All this by way of saying that after a few weeks of not really \u0026ldquo;having any fiction in me\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve returned with a vengeance to this novel, and I\u0026rsquo;m having a lot of fun with it. Great stuff.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/book-progress/","summary":"All of the outlines for the novel length projects I start, have a space at about the three-quarters point that says \u0026ldquo;overflow area to catch up before the end\u0026rdquo;. I always have a couple of scenes that float between chapters, and having a place before the end where I can sort of take a deep breath and get things lined up perfectly for the climax and end is a good thing. Anyway, this isn\u0026rsquo;t really a writing post, but the current project has one of these areas, and I\u0026rsquo;m so going to need it. In part because of chapters like the one I\u0026rsquo;m writing now. It\u0026rsquo;s full of great stuff, that needs to be in this book, and I love the way it feels to write it. At the same time None of it was in the outline. All this by way of saying that after a few weeks of not really \u0026ldquo;having any fiction in me\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve returned with a vengeance to this novel, and I\u0026rsquo;m having a lot of fun with it.","title":"book progress"},{"content":"The Linux switch continues pretty well. There\u0026rsquo;s not a lot new to report, except that I\u0026rsquo;ve not really used my mac very much in a week, and while I could easily set things back up and roll right along with it, there\u0026rsquo;d be a lot of stuff to sync with when I get back to it, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have any really compelling reason to do that for day-to-day tasks. Lets go through and see how things have shaken out:\nRSS Reading I\u0026rsquo;ve basically just given in and started using Google Reader. I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is the final resolution to this problem, but it works quite well and I\u0026rsquo;m happy with it for the time being. I think newsbeuter works with bloglines, and that might be the best solution but I haven\u0026rsquo;t made the jump yet. After years of syncing with the newsgator service and NetNewsWire on my mac, downloading on my own seems much less ideal. But google isn\u0026rsquo;t evil\u0026hellip; yet, and so I\u0026rsquo;m very glad for reader.\nTextMate and Text Editing This was one of my largest concerns when I thought about switching. I was really attached to TextMate, and it was comfortable and very mac-y. While I had some trouble when I was using vim the, TextMate to emacs transition is pretty smooth, though I have a lot of emacs-ground to cover, all of my basic text-editing tasks are taken care of.\nWhat I learned in this process, is that my text-editing requirements, which I thought were pretty intense, are actually reasonably simplistic. I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet mastered really powerful find-and-replaces in emacs (I tend to use vim for this, though I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to give this up at some point), or multiple file find-and-replaces (my gut says that I should be able to use sed but, I\u0026rsquo;ve never had much luck with sed.\nLearning this about my process has been helpful, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m able to concentrate better in my Linux environment than I am in OS X any more. Powerful lessons.\nIM Clients Interestingly, the more I used Pidgin, the more I realized that the inconsistencies in the way the buddy list was maintained, and that I didn\u0026rsquo;t like in Pidgin existed in Adium as well. I just hadn\u0026rsquo;t noticed them: this is a great testament to the UI design of Adium. In the end, Pidgin works pretty well and I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably pleased with it. As near as I can tell I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of options because I need the kind of multi-account/multi-protocol support that libpurple-based IM clients have.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried running BitlBee locally, but I found the buddylist/roster hard to track in irssi (my IRC client of choice), who knows. If I ever switch from Pidgin, something like mcabber (if I can convince enough of my friends to reliably be accessible via XMPP), or BitlBee. But for the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably happy about this.\nWeb Development Right after I got my Linux machine, I started work on a new web-development project for a friend, and I realized that all the things I was used to using (FTP clients, etc) weren\u0026rsquo;t setup on the linux machine. And my web developent style tends to be pretty chaotic/frenzied and \u0026ldquo;test driven\u0026rdquo; (ie: \u0026ldquo;hey, lets see what this does! (pause) crap! what about this? (pause) crap! etc.\u0026rdquo;) so I thought it would be a royal mess.\nTurns out it wasn\u0026rsquo;t. I started using gFTP which is nice. For my own servers I use some SCP based shortcuts I\u0026rsquo;ve written up for myself and I SSH into the server and edit things directly there, but for some things on this project having something graphical was a very good thing. It seemed to work. I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining.\nBlog Posting So I haven\u0026rsquo;t found a really good XML-RPC client for blog posting on Linux to make up for the TextMate blogging bundle and MarsEdit options. While I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about trying out some of the blog posting software for gnome (to revive the \u0026ldquo;coda\u0026rdquo; sub-blog). I\u0026rsquo;ve switched to posting using the web interface.\nThis is good, because I can automate blog posting much easier, and it means my work schedule in the morning doesn\u0026rsquo;t revolve around getting things posted. And the truth is that the WordPress interface is pretty good. So in someways maybe it\u0026rsquo;s good that I\u0026rsquo;m doing things this way.\nMusic Syncing Yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m still doing this on the mac, such as I sync my iPod mostly I just listen to music on my ipod, and tend to sync about every other time I go out of town. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about switching to listening to Podcasts on my phone, and if I do that it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a huge issue to move the music to the Linux box after the initial import. But I\u0026rsquo;m in no particular rush, given how often I sync my iPod, so this might linger for a while.\nDoes this mean that I\u0026rsquo;m an ex-mac user?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ex-mac/","summary":"The Linux switch continues pretty well. There\u0026rsquo;s not a lot new to report, except that I\u0026rsquo;ve not really used my mac very much in a week, and while I could easily set things back up and roll right along with it, there\u0026rsquo;d be a lot of stuff to sync with when I get back to it, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have any really compelling reason to do that for day-to-day tasks. Lets go through and see how things have shaken out:\nRSS Reading I\u0026rsquo;ve basically just given in and started using Google Reader. I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is the final resolution to this problem, but it works quite well and I\u0026rsquo;m happy with it for the time being. I think newsbeuter works with bloglines, and that might be the best solution but I haven\u0026rsquo;t made the jump yet. After years of syncing with the newsgator service and NetNewsWire on my mac, downloading on my own seems much less ideal.","title":"Ex-Mac"},{"content":"I just upgraded tychoish today to the new, \u0026ldquo;WordPress 2.7\u0026rdquo; which has a great new user interface that I really like. We\u0026rsquo;re finally getting back to b2/cafelog and wordpress 1.5 ground. Heh. Anyway. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be reviving this little mini-blog on the right hand side of the site. The rule this time? All posts written off the cuff and nothing with paragraph breaks. Sounds like a plan? I thought so.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/codas-back/","summary":"I just upgraded tychoish today to the new, \u0026ldquo;WordPress 2.7\u0026rdquo; which has a great new user interface that I really like. We\u0026rsquo;re finally getting back to b2/cafelog and wordpress 1.5 ground. Heh. Anyway. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be reviving this little mini-blog on the right hand side of the site. The rule this time? All posts written off the cuff and nothing with paragraph breaks. Sounds like a plan? I thought so.","title":"Coda's Back!"},{"content":"Things change. People change. Societies change. You might not be able to get social scientists and cultural theorists to agree on very much, but the fact that change happens is pretty easy to stomach. The difficulty come in when we start to think about how things change. What follows is a review of the competing approaches to what I\u0026rsquo;m calling \u0026ldquo;theories of change,\u0026rdquo; I hope this helps me (and you!) organize some thoughts.\nThere are, near as I can tell, three major schools of thought that attempt to explain \u0026ldquo;how things change:\u0026rdquo; evolution, complexity/emergence (chaos), and development. In turn:\nEvolution Derived of course from biology, there\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of evidence that biological systems have evolved and continue to evolve. Evolution is predicated on the assumption that the most adaptive variations in a given population will propagate themselves more than less adaptive variations, which will propagate themselves less. Evolution is a very \u0026ldquo;big picture\u0026rdquo; process, and--at least in the biological sense--refers to change and adaption on the scale of the population on the whole.\nThere are a few things that more casual applications of the theory seem to forget that I think are key:\nEvolution values adaptability and diversity over just about everything else, adaptable individuals and diverse populations are more resilient to shorter term changes in the environment, so evolutionary analysis that\u0026rsquo;s grounded in survivability in a particular situation are relatively week. Evolution takes a long time. Many generations. Many many generations. So many that it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to think about evolution \u0026ldquo;happening\u0026rdquo; given the way that we think about time. In many ways, its easier to think about continents moving around than it is to think about the way populations evolve. There\u0026rsquo;s little good evidence that evolution occurs in non-biological systems. We use evolution as an analogy for many change-processes, but as a mechanism, outside of biology its limited. Complexity I really like complexity or emergence theory, but I\u0026rsquo;m not a math guy, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a very good grasp of it. The basic idea is that in the right conditions, systems of independent \u0026ldquo;actors\u0026rdquo; that interact with each other will given time develop some sort of organization, and that these \u0026ldquo;systems\u0026rdquo; (as actors) combine to form higher level systems. And so forth.\nSo for example, humanity can be seen as an example of emergent complexity: our bodies are made up of molecules that interact with each other to form sub-cellular structures and cells (actors), which make up tissues and then organs (systems), which make up our bodies. Our bodies (and selves) are actors in social systems\u0026hellip; and so forth. I\u0026rsquo;ve left a lot out. Obviously evolution is an example of a complexity theory, but complexity theories have been used (successfully, I\u0026rsquo;d argue) to explain how systems work and form in non-population scale biological systems and non-biological systems, and also on time scales that are shorter than anything evolution could work with.\nThe organization of photographs in tags on flickr is largely emergent (as are google\u0026rsquo;s search results), and intelligence is often described as being emergent. There are more, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry if I don\u0026rsquo;t have really good examples of this.\nDevelopment I use the idea of development to help describe smaller scale adaptations and adjustments over time. I studied a lot of Developmental Psychology for a while in there, and I think a concept of development is really important to thinking about the ways people change, and grow. Just as we know that evolution happens to populations over time, we know that humans (and other animals) are continuously developing throughout their existences.\nHuman development has two major divisions: the intrinsic biological processes and the process of adapting to different contexts. The biological stuff is pretty limited: it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to walk or develop speech before a certain age because the vocal/skeletal musculature isn\u0026rsquo;t developed enough. Stuff on that scale. These sorts of biological/physical limitations are developmentally relevant mostly because they limit the possibility for external experience.\nThe adaptation to context part of development is grounded in learning theory (cognitive/behavioral psychology), and helps explain how individuals interact and change with regard to their world, and it all depends on experience. What language a child learns depends on what language they\u0026rsquo;re exposed to. Our sensitivity to heat and cold, is largely dependent on where we live. The way we cope with stress depends on the outcomes of past stressful experiences, and how we witness other people cope with stress.\nDevelopment describes how individuals (actors/systems) are shaped and changed by experience. It\u0026rsquo;s something that happens over time, at varying rates and is dependent on context. Non living things can be thought of as \u0026ldquo;developing.\u0026rdquo; Institutions, intellectual projects, science and technologies, and so forth.\nRight and? That\u0026rsquo;s what I have. It\u0026rsquo;s really easy to just say \u0026ldquo;evolve\u0026rdquo; when we mean change, and similarly easy to recognize \u0026ldquo;stuff changes,\u0026rdquo; when the really interesting and powerful part is to understand the mechanisms that produce change. The processes of change differ depending on what is changing, which is only fitting. I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and get a little bit clearer on complexity theory, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably follow this post up in the coming future.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/theories-of-change/","summary":"Things change. People change. Societies change. You might not be able to get social scientists and cultural theorists to agree on very much, but the fact that change happens is pretty easy to stomach. The difficulty come in when we start to think about how things change. What follows is a review of the competing approaches to what I\u0026rsquo;m calling \u0026ldquo;theories of change,\u0026rdquo; I hope this helps me (and you!) organize some thoughts.\nThere are, near as I can tell, three major schools of thought that attempt to explain \u0026ldquo;how things change:\u0026rdquo; evolution, complexity/emergence (chaos), and development. In turn:\nEvolution Derived of course from biology, there\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of evidence that biological systems have evolved and continue to evolve. Evolution is predicated on the assumption that the most adaptive variations in a given population will propagate themselves more than less adaptive variations, which will propagate themselves less. Evolution is a very \u0026ldquo;big picture\u0026rdquo; process, and--at least in the biological sense--refers to change and adaption on the scale of the population on the whole.","title":"Theories of Change"},{"content":"Lets start with the facts: I got a blackberry at the end of last week. It\u0026rsquo;s one of the new \u0026ldquo;BlackBerry Bold\u0026rdquo; devices. Which means GSM/HSDPA/etc from ATT. Which is a great improvement from the sucky (but surprisingly functional) flip phone that I\u0026rsquo;ve had for the last 2.5-3 years from Sprint. This is the first phone that I\u0026rsquo;ve had that has: an Internet connection, a messaging plan, and a reliable connection (sorry sprint). Though it\u0026rsquo;s not the first time that I\u0026rsquo;ve had a PDA-class device. There\u0026rsquo;s a story\u0026hellip;\nWhen I was in high school I did some writing for the interent on mobile technology (PDAs and so forth) right before \u0026ldquo;smartphones\u0026rdquo; came on the scene. I had a couple of the earliest PocketPCs and a PalmOS device, and I did some writing for a number of websites that covered this sort of thing. Because it seemed like the thing to do, and even back then (when I was still using Windows, egad) I was a pretty simplistic \u0026ldquo;read things and write things\u0026rdquo; kind of computer user, so these kinds of things made more sense than a laptop (given the state of technology, circa 2000-2002). Laptops got better and cheaper, I discovered Apple computers, and PDAs moved into cellphones, and I always had nice enough cellphones, but not particularly flashy cellphones. They did their job, and I was happy.\nBut then I got a job that requires me to be on the phone a fair piece, and reachable in a way that I haven\u0026rsquo;t previously needed to be. And cellphones and data technology have improved and gotten a lot more reasonable and ubiquitous. And so there I was, looking at \u0026ldquo;smartphones\u0026rdquo; with only a little deja vu. I\u0026rsquo;ve written here about the iphone, and how I was leaning away from it. The near-completeness of my switch to Linux made an iPhone an even less attractive option, and so here I am with a blackberry. My response: incredibly positive. Let me go over (in list format) what I\u0026rsquo;ve done, and how my \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; works:\nI\u0026rsquo;m using a lot of these web 2.0 apps in a way that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t previously. Google Calendar1 and Gmail-contacts sync with my phone via the Google BlackBerry Sync, which works great. My email arrives on the BlackBerry via one of two means: someone sends something to my work email (which Blackberry accesses via IMAP) or someone sends me a message through one of my personal addresses and said message passes through a rather complex gmail-filter. I\u0026rsquo;m still tweaking the gmail filter every now and then, but it\u0026rsquo;s it works. The blackberry got me really using Remember the Milk, in concert with BBrtm and Tasque on the desktop (which is in Ubuntu Intrepid). The blackberry app is sub par, but functional. I hear the official blackberry app is less functional, and you have to pay for pro-service (25 bucks a year) which I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to, but I\u0026rsquo;ll need to think about it. Having the offline apps make this a really great service, and I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan now. I of course, have AIM and Gtalk, set up though I haven\u0026rsquo;t used it much. And I have various SMS and MMS-based services set up (you tube uploading, twitter, identi.ca) set up, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t turned on the \u0026ldquo;getting messages\u0026rdquo; part of that yet. I have the opera mini web browser installed and like it a great deal, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t done a lot of browsing yet, but that\u0026rsquo;s not surprising: I don\u0026rsquo;t browse the internet much on my desktop. I have various other things that seem logical to get installed: google maps, the facebook app, flickr upload tool, the google search tool, the gmail app, but haven\u0026rsquo;t dug into that very much. But I suspect these things will be nice to have. For writing and note taking in the wild I have a secret email address that routes itself into a \u0026ldquo;notes\u0026rdquo; folder (I\u0026rsquo;ve used it before with Jott and I\u0026rsquo;m just sending myself emails and that seems to work just fine. Everything else seems a bit borring. Left on my list of phone-related things that I\u0026rsquo;d like to see happen or have left to do:\nCome to some peace about my RSS reading habits, so I can catch up on things on the phone. Some sort of e-text reading software would be great. Particularly if there were a good way to get PDFs to appear right on the device. The screen\u0026rsquo;s is very readable, and it just makes sense. Even though one of my reasons for getting this and not and iphone was that I already had an iPod that I liked a lot, I have the perverse desire to listen to podcasts and maybe music on this thing. But I need to declare bankruptcy on podcast listening first and find some way to clean up the pieces there. In that direction, I think the Jabra bluetooth headset/controler looks like something worthwhile. As would a buttload of MicroSD storage space. I\u0026rsquo;m using the stock leather holster at the moment for a case, and it\u0026rsquo;s quite good, but I imagine that something else might be good. I need to spend some time getting, making, and customizing ring tones, which is something that I\u0026rsquo;ve never done before, but I feel needs to be accomplished. That\u0026rsquo;s all the news that\u0026rsquo;s fit to sing\u0026hellip;.\nOnward and Upward!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also given in and started to use Sunbird with google calendar for my desktop calendaring. It\u0026rsquo;s sub-optimal, but it works.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/blackberry/","summary":"Lets start with the facts: I got a blackberry at the end of last week. It\u0026rsquo;s one of the new \u0026ldquo;BlackBerry Bold\u0026rdquo; devices. Which means GSM/HSDPA/etc from ATT. Which is a great improvement from the sucky (but surprisingly functional) flip phone that I\u0026rsquo;ve had for the last 2.5-3 years from Sprint. This is the first phone that I\u0026rsquo;ve had that has: an Internet connection, a messaging plan, and a reliable connection (sorry sprint). Though it\u0026rsquo;s not the first time that I\u0026rsquo;ve had a PDA-class device. There\u0026rsquo;s a story\u0026hellip;\nWhen I was in high school I did some writing for the interent on mobile technology (PDAs and so forth) right before \u0026ldquo;smartphones\u0026rdquo; came on the scene. I had a couple of the earliest PocketPCs and a PalmOS device, and I did some writing for a number of websites that covered this sort of thing. Because it seemed like the thing to do, and even back then (when I was still using Windows, egad) I was a pretty simplistic \u0026ldquo;read things and write things\u0026rdquo; kind of computer user, so these kinds of things made more sense than a laptop (given the state of technology, circa 2000-2002).","title":"Blackberry"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m knitting again!\nI seem to do these posts every now and then. In any case, one of my mom\u0026rsquo;s friends from knitting camp came for a post-thanksgiving visit, and really kick started my winter knitting projects. I\u0026rsquo;d been lagging on some older projects for far too long, and having an excuse to sit around and knit was a really good thing. I got to the end of the first sleeve avove the cuff of the latvian dreaming sweater, and started a new sweater. That new sweater is what I\u0026rsquo;m here to talk about today. I\u0026rsquo;ll cover the other knitting progress in the coming weeks.\nSo I, uh, started a new sweater. With cables.\nI should point out here that I\u0026rsquo;ve never made a cabled sweater before. Rather than design something simple, I flipped through some knitting patterns, and chose of all things, \u0026ldquo;Irish Moss\u0026rdquo; from Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Aran Knitting.\nFor those non-knitters out there, this is a pretty rare book, long out of print and very highly valued. The designs, though a bit dated, are very easy to adapt into classic masterpieces, and they\u0026rsquo;re not exactly \u0026ldquo;entry level sweaters.\u0026rdquo;\nTypical.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve knit several Starmores before, but thusfar I\u0026rsquo;ve only done colorwork sweaters from her.\nI also changed a few things about this sweater.\nAlso typical.\nMy modifications, I think are pretty straightforward, but none the less significant. They are:\nI\u0026rsquo;m knitting it in the round when the pattern called for a sweater knit in pieces. I omitted the ribbing, as the entire sweater is knit in a twisted stitch-ribbing (with cables) basically. So the ribbing was only decorative, and I like the way it looks when cable patterns start at the very bottom edge of the sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to knock off most of the filer stitches at the sides of the sweater, because I\u0026rsquo;m going for a 38-40 inch sweater not a 42-46 inch sweater. I think knocking off 18 stitches from the front and back was a little much (which is what I did at the bottom edge.) but I think a sweater with a little bit of tapering will be a good thing, so I\u0026rsquo;ll begin to increase after I have 2 inches completed, once I have a good idea of actual gage. I\u0026rsquo;m going to slit the neck open, and set in the sleeve to about shoulder width, but that depends on how many stitches I increase on the sides, and how the pattern looks. If I don\u0026rsquo;t increase enough to make it work, I\u0026rsquo;ll just make a gusset. I\u0026rsquo;ll slit the neck open to mid-chest, as I do on most of my sweaters so that the crew neck isn\u0026rsquo;t as restricting. The pattern seems like it will support this. I\u0026rsquo;ll knit the sleeves and saddles from the shoulder/collar down. That always seems to work well. Again, that\u0026rsquo;s in a while. And so forth. I\u0026rsquo;m semi-weened from the cable needle, but I keep it around just in case.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s about it. Unless you want the technical specs.\nYarn: Schoolhouse Press Quebecois\nNeedles: Addi Lace 3.0mm (US Size 2/2.5)\nColor: Grey\nGauge: About 6 stitches to the inch in St. St. Or something close, I didn\u0026rsquo;t check closely, but it looks to be about right. There are ~238 stitches at the moment, so that seems to be about right given everything.\nOk that\u0026rsquo;s it, for real. More later. I might actually take pictures of this one. Imagine that.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-cables-with-alice/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m knitting again!\nI seem to do these posts every now and then. In any case, one of my mom\u0026rsquo;s friends from knitting camp came for a post-thanksgiving visit, and really kick started my winter knitting projects. I\u0026rsquo;d been lagging on some older projects for far too long, and having an excuse to sit around and knit was a really good thing. I got to the end of the first sleeve avove the cuff of the latvian dreaming sweater, and started a new sweater. That new sweater is what I\u0026rsquo;m here to talk about today. I\u0026rsquo;ll cover the other knitting progress in the coming weeks.\nSo I, uh, started a new sweater. With cables.\nI should point out here that I\u0026rsquo;ve never made a cabled sweater before. Rather than design something simple, I flipped through some knitting patterns, and chose of all things, \u0026ldquo;Irish Moss\u0026rdquo; from Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Aran Knitting.","title":"Knitting Cables With Alice"},{"content":"We tend to tell (and think of) our histories as progress narratives. That is \u0026ldquo;things sucked, we changed them and now they\u0026rsquo;re getting better.\u0026rdquo; Taken to the next level, progress narratives force us to think about the future in terms of \u0026ldquo;how much better things are going to be,\u0026rdquo; as a required part of the progress narrative itself. On the one hand, there have been a number of rather dark moments in our past; on the other, in a lot of ways the present is really as much of an elaboration on the past as it is a progression. Because the present isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly rosy.\nThis is, you might think, an odd perspective for a science fiction writer. SF is supposed to be forward looking, and optomistic, right? Well, maybe that\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;critical\u0026rdquo; part in \u0026ldquo;critical futures.\u0026rdquo;\nWith that in mind, I\u0026rsquo;m very wary and hesitant to accept progress narratives as being particularly indicative of an actual developmental process. But they\u0026rsquo;re all around us, history, political development, medical advancement, and particularly technology are all formed as progress narratives. While there\u0026rsquo;s nothing wrong per se with this approach, it constrains imagination about the future and the past. That\u0026rsquo;s not a good thing.\nSince information technology/computers are a relatively recent development in history, and are in such a rapid state of development, it\u0026rsquo;s particularly hard to avoid the technological progress narrative. And it\u0026rsquo;s true, from one perspective that technology is getting faster and more powerful with every passing year. On the other, with OS X and Ubuntu gaining at least a little bit of the operating system market (let alone the linuxen in mobile devices and netbooks), it looks like we\u0026rsquo;re headed towards a greater adoption of Unix-like systems. Which despite an ongoing evolution, are remarkably similar to the kinds of systems that were the height of new technology 40 years ago. And indeed a great deal of the ongoing evolution in Unix-like systems is in response to new kinds of hardware (wireless, cameras, etc.) rather than anything paradigmatic.\nAnother issue in technology is the possible confusion of development with progress. It\u0026rsquo;s very true that processors are getting faster, hard drives are getting bigger, and everything is getting cheaper. But is this progress?\nWhile faster processors are better, when I bought my desktop computer about a month ago I opted to save a hundred dollars by going with a slightly slower processor. I haven\u0026rsquo;t noticed, and while I\u0026rsquo;m not doing anything that might require extra performance (video editing, or even sound editing, say) most people aren\u0026rsquo;t either. Same story with storage: the only real way to fill up a 500 GB or 1 TB drive is to take a lot of high-res pictures or collect video (which is hard to do legally). Even Vista--noted by some for its bloat--only takes up 15 or so gigs. The biggest technological issue for storage is power-consumption and redundancy, which aren\u0026rsquo;t exactly the makings for a good progress narrative.\nNetbooks also represent the failure of the technological progress narrative as they aren\u0026rsquo;t so much bigger/better/faster as they are a recomercialized version of the very best of laptop technology circa 1998. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that the march of technology hasn\u0026rsquo;t made netbooks possible, because that\u0026rsquo;s a terribly flawed perspective. Rather, the fact that many people have realized that a good deal of their computing tasks need not be accomplished by the bigger/better/faster hardware. In my case, editing text files is never going to get more difficult, or take more resources.\nMy past, and even pretty recent attempts at thinking about technology, focused on \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s next,\u0026rdquo; but I think right now that\u0026rsquo;s largely irrelevant. What\u0026rsquo;s happening now is by far much more interesting, don\u0026rsquo;t you think?\nOnward and (ironically) Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technical-progress/","summary":"We tend to tell (and think of) our histories as progress narratives. That is \u0026ldquo;things sucked, we changed them and now they\u0026rsquo;re getting better.\u0026rdquo; Taken to the next level, progress narratives force us to think about the future in terms of \u0026ldquo;how much better things are going to be,\u0026rdquo; as a required part of the progress narrative itself. On the one hand, there have been a number of rather dark moments in our past; on the other, in a lot of ways the present is really as much of an elaboration on the past as it is a progression. Because the present isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly rosy.\nThis is, you might think, an odd perspective for a science fiction writer. SF is supposed to be forward looking, and optomistic, right? Well, maybe that\u0026rsquo;s the \u0026ldquo;critical\u0026rdquo; part in \u0026ldquo;critical futures.\u0026rdquo;\nWith that in mind, I\u0026rsquo;m very wary and hesitant to accept progress narratives as being particularly indicative of an actual developmental process.","title":"Technical Progress"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using my new computer a fair piece yesterday and today, and I\u0026rsquo;ve even gotten my dad using the computer recently (long story) and it\u0026rsquo;s going really well, and the speed that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get it setup and adjusted has been really amazing. (Is there anyone else in St. Louis MO, USA who wants to switch to linux and needs a little bit of encouragement?)\nI\u0026rsquo;m also remarkably close to getting all the way switched to linux. I still haven\u0026rsquo;t messed with my RSS feeds (still mac only on that, but that\u0026rsquo;s a user-issue as much as a technological one) and I need to bite the bullet and get XAMPP set up on my desktop, and get something set up to be able to share files on the network.\nBut I digress, this post is really about the whole \u0026ldquo;tablet computer\u0026rdquo; thing, which was supposedly going to be \u0026ldquo;the next new thing\u0026rdquo; five or so years ago. Clearly this was not the case. First of all tablets (especially convertible tablets) are hard to get right from an engineering perspective: more stress points and screens with digitizers don\u0026rsquo;t often look right. Secondly, there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot that tablets are better for than conventional laptops.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re still better at typing than we are at writing long hand, and applications and user interfaces aren\u0026rsquo;t really designed around a tablet-like interaction metaphor. It took apple designing a phone in 2007 for people to realize that we might need an interaction paradigm where you would have more than one pointer at a time (so called \u0026ldquo;multi-touch\u0026rdquo;).\nI backed into this tablet thing. I realized that ThinkPad hardware was probably the best laptop hardware for linuxification, and I knew they had a 12 inch tablet. Since I\u0026rsquo;d been jonesing for a 12 inch laptop, more or less since I gave up my 12 inch ibook 5 years ago, the x41/x61 tablet seemed like the coolest thing around. When I found a great deal on one of the x41t\u0026rsquo;s, the rest is history.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s most surprising is how much I like it.\nI got the digitizer working in pretty short order and xournal not long after that. I\u0026rsquo;m struck by a few things. First, the \u0026ldquo;writing\u0026rdquo; experience is quite good. I\u0026rsquo;m sort of prissy about writing long hand, and have been using fountain pens and moleskines for years, so this is no small endorsement. Secondly, for somethings like reading PDFs and some note taking, this could in time totally replace my use of paper notebooks. Aside from the whole \u0026ldquo;needing power\u0026rdquo; issue.\nWould I get another tablet? Probably, though I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be inclined to pay a great \u0026ldquo;tax\u0026rdquo; for this feature, and the fact that this is a tablet is really nice, but not in the top few reasons why I like this computer (size, and lightness, the lack of a touch pad, and it\u0026rsquo;s linux-compatibility.) So go figure.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s nifty, but I don\u0026rsquo;t expect things to rush towards tablets quite yet.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tablet-modality/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been using my new computer a fair piece yesterday and today, and I\u0026rsquo;ve even gotten my dad using the computer recently (long story) and it\u0026rsquo;s going really well, and the speed that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get it setup and adjusted has been really amazing. (Is there anyone else in St. Louis MO, USA who wants to switch to linux and needs a little bit of encouragement?)\nI\u0026rsquo;m also remarkably close to getting all the way switched to linux. I still haven\u0026rsquo;t messed with my RSS feeds (still mac only on that, but that\u0026rsquo;s a user-issue as much as a technological one) and I need to bite the bullet and get XAMPP set up on my desktop, and get something set up to be able to share files on the network.\nBut I digress, this post is really about the whole \u0026ldquo;tablet computer\u0026rdquo; thing, which was supposedly going to be \u0026ldquo;the next new thing\u0026rdquo; five or so years ago.","title":"Tablet Modality"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written here a little about the problems I have with the options for user interfaces in linux, and while for me Awesome goes a long way toward s fixing these issues, particularly/even on smaller screens, but I continue to think that paying more attention to user interface issues will be a very good thing for the platform. This new laptop is the second linux install I\u0026rsquo;ve done recently (third if you count the VM on my mac, and fourth if you count the multiple attempts it took me to get my desktop to working order) and the expereince has--I hoped granted me some useful perspective on some UI concerns. And since this is my blog\u0026hellip; I bet you can see where this is going.\nWhile I think as far as non-tiling window managers go, OS X/quartz/aqua still is the leader of the pack, I\u0026rsquo;m not longer as appaled by everything that is GNOME, but it took me a while to realize this (which is a huge barrier for new users, and a big problem, but not a problem I\u0026rsquo;m quite equipt to suggest.) If you\u0026rsquo;re new to gnome, and geeling a little offput by it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;clunkyness,\u0026rdquo; here are some suggestions to make things a little less painful (espically if you\u0026rsquo;re the Awesome type).\nTweak and change the system fonts. As near as I can tell sub-pixel rendering is turnned off in GNOME by default (it\u0026rsquo;s on in KDE), which is what makes fonts look smooth and pretty. Turning this on, and making the fonts smaller, made a world of difference for me. Adding in good fonts for screen reading (like the forbidden MS Verdana font, and the Google Andriod Fonts) really added something to the experience. I think it\u0026rsquo;s easy to forget how much a really good, really readable font can affect the way we interact with a computer. First order of business. Do something about the GNOME panel. The GNOME pannel (that would be all the status bars and such) by default takes a huge amount of screen space (particularly on smaller screens). For starters, I turn off \u0026ldquo;auto-expand\u0026rdquo; and move the top panel into the right or left corner, though there might be some advantage to moving it to the bottom left-or right corners, as we tend to have more horizontal space on our screens than vertical, but that depends a lot on your personal prefrence. My second move is to ditch the bottom pannel, and move things like the \u0026ldquo;multi-desktop\u0026rdquo; chooser, and a drop down list of open windows to the top pannel. Move things that you use every day to the pannel and take away things that you don\u0026rsquo;t need to see. One of the reasons that I like OS X so much is that it does a pretty good job of focusing the UI on \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; inside the window, rather than the UI of the window/system itself. GNOME can do this too, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t automatically. This is an elaboration of the earlier too points, but tweak the theme settings, which--at least in Ubunut--are cartoonish by default. I\u0026rsquo;ve found that the \u0026ldquo;Mist\u0026rdquo; interface buttons tend to take up a little less room, but try your hand at desiging something new. My M.O. of late has revolved around \u0026ldquo;making everything smaller\u0026rdquo; because I don\u0026rsquo;t like UI bloat, but no matter what your goals are, I think everyone needs to spend some time customizing the finer aspects of their UI. It\u0026rsquo;s a start in the right dirrection at any rate.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/linux-ui-tweaking/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written here a little about the problems I have with the options for user interfaces in linux, and while for me Awesome goes a long way toward s fixing these issues, particularly/even on smaller screens, but I continue to think that paying more attention to user interface issues will be a very good thing for the platform. This new laptop is the second linux install I\u0026rsquo;ve done recently (third if you count the VM on my mac, and fourth if you count the multiple attempts it took me to get my desktop to working order) and the expereince has--I hoped granted me some useful perspective on some UI concerns. And since this is my blog\u0026hellip; I bet you can see where this is going.\nWhile I think as far as non-tiling window managers go, OS X/quartz/aqua still is the leader of the pack, I\u0026rsquo;m not longer as appaled by everything that is GNOME, but it took me a while to realize this (which is a huge barrier for new users, and a big problem, but not a problem I\u0026rsquo;m quite equipt to suggest.","title":"Linux UI Tweaking"},{"content":"This is a post that reflects on international character of the community around the `Awesome Window Manager \u0026lt;http://awesome.naquadah.org\u0026gt;`_, though it takes a while to get to that. There\u0026rsquo;s this theory of blog post writing that says you should write like newspaper articles and front load your arguments. Save this editorial note, this post is an epic failure at this formula. Apologies.\nIt will come as a surprise to no one that I am not only an avid user of open source software but also a keen observer of the open source community. Communities, particularly digital communities, seem to be my thing, and participating and watching various parts of the open source community has reminded me a lot about what I liked most about the Internet back when I started my travels in cyberspace and (slightly) more recently when I started blogging.\nI\u0026rsquo;m yet sure if the argument that \u0026ldquo;open source is qualitatively different from other sorts of cyberspace communities\u0026rdquo; holds water. Unlike the communities that form around collees (eg. facebook), special interests (eg. blogs, podcasts, and discussion forums), or around established \u0026ldquo;real world\u0026rdquo; connections (eg. email, instant messaging) open source communities form in order to produce something reasonably concrete and specific. But other communites online form around shared goals (eg. many communities on livejournal), and certianly open source hackers weren\u0026rsquo;t the first to use technology to collaborate. And open source communites use all the same internet technologies (IRC, listservs, newsgroups) that we\u0026rsquo;ve been using for years, so there\u0026rsquo;s nothing particularly novel about the communities.\nBut I digress.\nWhile the Internet is techincally world wide, and does allow for information to be exchanged globally, communities on the internet are often pretty localized. Even if a community isn\u0026rsquo;t rooted in real-world connections (and many are, more than we might initally expect) they\u0026rsquo;re often constrained by language and time-zones to a great degree.\nThe community around the Awesome Window Manager provides a great counter example to this. JD, the original/primary author/leader is in France, and I\u0026rsquo;ve interacted with people in the Awesome list and chat room are from all over the world. While I know of a few Awesome users in the United States my impression is that the core of the user base isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly American, though some further research into this might be in order. Interestingly most of the conversations and documentation happens in English.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of idea about why this is the case exactly. My current working theory is that the kind of advanced user that Awesome attracts, is more likely to use Linux/BSD outside of the US (Apple being less prevelent outside of the US, and interntaionalization and what not driving people to Linux in the non-english speaking world.) But that\u0026rsquo;s just one idea.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/awesome-internationalization/","summary":"This is a post that reflects on international character of the community around the `Awesome Window Manager \u0026lt;http://awesome.naquadah.org\u0026gt;`_, though it takes a while to get to that. There\u0026rsquo;s this theory of blog post writing that says you should write like newspaper articles and front load your arguments. Save this editorial note, this post is an epic failure at this formula. Apologies.\nIt will come as a surprise to no one that I am not only an avid user of open source software but also a keen observer of the open source community. Communities, particularly digital communities, seem to be my thing, and participating and watching various parts of the open source community has reminded me a lot about what I liked most about the Internet back when I started my travels in cyberspace and (slightly) more recently when I started blogging.\nI\u0026rsquo;m yet sure if the argument that \u0026ldquo;open source is qualitatively different from other sorts of cyberspace communities\u0026rdquo; holds water.","title":"Awesome Internationalization"},{"content":"Ok, so I know it isn\u0026rsquo;t November anymore, and I should shut up about writing already, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good change of pace, and I have one little point to make/explore that makes sense to talk about post-nano. It\u0026rsquo;s about the habit of writing. And I think it can be applied to all sorts of creative work.\nA lot of people think that NaNo is all about \u0026ldquo;a big push,\u0026rdquo; and getting past the internal editor and so forth, but even more importantly it teaches a valuable lesson about the power of momentum. The begging is the hardest part. Writing the first 10-20 thousand words, is really hard work and takes time to get used to the characters and the situations and what it takes to sit down every damn day and write a lot of fiction. Once you learn what it feels like, once you\u0026rsquo;re situated, things get easier. It\u0026rsquo;s easier to figure out what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen next, and it\u0026rsquo;s easier to sit down and write.\nUltimately, knowing how to push yourself and get in the habit is the best part of NaNo, and other than the rhetorical objectives, it\u0026rsquo;s probably my only real \u0026ldquo;writing hack\u0026rdquo; and gives me the feeling that means that I say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a writer\u0026rdquo; when someone asks me what I do.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t want to endorse procrastination, I\u0026rsquo;m of the opinion that the \u0026ldquo;writing habit\u0026rdquo; is something that needs a lot of nurturing and help. Having something like a blog that can help you \u0026ldquo;warm up,\u0026rdquo; or a journal, or a lively email correspondence, can sometimes help get things moving, and though it seems counter productive really help fill in the gaps between larger projects. There\u0026rsquo;s such thing as \u0026ldquo;too much\u0026rdquo; odds and ends writing, but if you can get your mind moving and used to writing two to three thousand words a day, it becomes easier and easer for a greater and greater portion of these words to end up being on a fiction project.\nA while back my motto was that the key to creative success, if it exists, lays somewhere in the confluence of \u0026ldquo;persistence\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;experimentation.\u0026rdquo; Basically you have to try lots of different things, and keep trying lots of things because eventually something will stick. While I still think it\u0026rsquo;s true on the level of \u0026ldquo;careers\u0026rdquo; on a developmental scale, I now think that\u0026rsquo;s its also true on a day to day level with regards to the process of creation. Writing good content (or knitting good sweaters, or recording good audio) isn\u0026rsquo;t dependent on a ritual or a specific setting, or divine inspiration; but it is dependent on writing lots of content (good and bad.)\nNaNo\u0026rsquo;s over. Congratulations to those who attempted and those who won. I hope you have something that you\u0026rsquo;re proud of and that you learned from. I\u0026rsquo;d also encourage you to not stop yet. Edit what you have, get a good sample together. Start a new project. Keep writing.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bandwagon-habit/","summary":"Ok, so I know it isn\u0026rsquo;t November anymore, and I should shut up about writing already, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good change of pace, and I have one little point to make/explore that makes sense to talk about post-nano. It\u0026rsquo;s about the habit of writing. And I think it can be applied to all sorts of creative work.\nA lot of people think that NaNo is all about \u0026ldquo;a big push,\u0026rdquo; and getting past the internal editor and so forth, but even more importantly it teaches a valuable lesson about the power of momentum. The begging is the hardest part. Writing the first 10-20 thousand words, is really hard work and takes time to get used to the characters and the situations and what it takes to sit down every damn day and write a lot of fiction. Once you learn what it feels like, once you\u0026rsquo;re situated, things get easier. It\u0026rsquo;s easier to figure out what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen next, and it\u0026rsquo;s easier to sit down and write.","title":"Bandwagon and Habits"},{"content":"So, after all my talk the other week about netbooks and such things, I broke down and got a new computer. Which wasn\u0026rsquo;t exactly needful, but it\u0026rsquo;s quite nice, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll feature rather heavily in m posts this week. Sorry if this is too far afield for some. I hope suspect that it\u0026rsquo;ll make sense in the end.\nRather than wait until one of the other computers in the house died, (which would call forth my macbook in as part of the obsolescence cycle), I got a used ThinkPad x41 tablet on ebay (from a local vendor). This is probably about 3 years old, but in it\u0026rsquo;s day it was a damn nice computer and although it\u0026rsquo;s a bit puny in many regards its former glory shines through. It has a gig of ram, the construction is sturdy, and it has a lot of the features that are common place now like bluetooth and an SD card slot. So it\u0026rsquo;s good hardware.\nAnd it\u0026rsquo;s tiny. There\u0026rsquo;s something about a 12 inch laptop that\u0026rsquo;s just the right size. You can fit two standard withds of text next to each other on the screen, the keyboard is fullsized without sacraficing very much, and just like a netbook, any hit in performance is compensated for by the fact that your tasks are likely to be pretty minimal.\nOne thing that I realized while I was away a couple weeks ago, was that there\u0026rsquo;s something really good about the Awesome Window Manager and the way that it tends to focus my attention and keep me from checking LiveJournal constantly. Which I\u0026rsquo;m very prone to doing when I\u0026rsquo;m using the Mac. So it made some sense to me to work on having a laptop that I could be more productive on. And it helps that this model has some other features that I think are nifty. Like it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a touch pad (opting for the \u0026ldquo;nipple\u0026rdquo; button between the \u0026lsquo;g\u0026rsquo; and \u0026lsquo;h\u0026rsquo; keys) and it\u0026rsquo;s a Tablet, which makes it ideal for reading things\nOne thing that I had been really worried about before hand was the ease of getting linux onto this system. Laptops are fineky, or they can be and on a laptop, if the hardware you have isn\u0026rsquo;t supported, there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of recourse. And it would kind of suck to have a laptop with a video card that was unsupported, or a wireless card, say. Thankfully, I was able to crib off of someone else in this case, as I knew that Emperor Linux had sold this computer in the past with linux preinstalled and they were able to get all the hardware to work. So I figured I was fairly safe.\nWhat I didn\u0026rsquo;t expect is for the instalation to go so well. I downloaded a utility that would make an install-stick (as this machine doesn\u0026rsquo;t have an optical drive) on my desktop, and that took some time, but but the instaliation itself maybe took half an hour. And then it just worked. There was a lot of messing around to be done, tweaking to Awesome for the smaller screen, and it took me some time to get all my data downloaded and setup, but not particularly long. And now it all works. Just like that.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not perfect: the battery only has about 90 minutes on it at best, I can\u0026rsquo;t get the tablet to work when the screen\u0026rsquo;s upside down in tablet mode, there\u0026rsquo;s an accelerometor that should reorient the screen, but that might just take some elbow greese. The biggest problem, frankly, was remapping the keyboard so that it was both comfortable for tycho useage (ie. getting rid of the Caps_Lock key and making it another Control Key) and making the keyboard suitable for awesome (ie. taking the normal control keys and making them \u0026ldquo;mod4\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Windows\u0026rdquo; keys for all the custom keybindings). That\u0026rsquo;ll also take a litle bit of work to get right, as a few things appear to be wonky. Who knows.\nAnyway, what I really need is a suitable sticker to cover up the IBM logos. Which, unlike an Apple logo, isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that one might show off with pride. Suggestions?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tablet-adventure/","summary":"So, after all my talk the other week about netbooks and such things, I broke down and got a new computer. Which wasn\u0026rsquo;t exactly needful, but it\u0026rsquo;s quite nice, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll feature rather heavily in m posts this week. Sorry if this is too far afield for some. I hope suspect that it\u0026rsquo;ll make sense in the end.\nRather than wait until one of the other computers in the house died, (which would call forth my macbook in as part of the obsolescence cycle), I got a used ThinkPad x41 tablet on ebay (from a local vendor). This is probably about 3 years old, but in it\u0026rsquo;s day it was a damn nice computer and although it\u0026rsquo;s a bit puny in many regards its former glory shines through. It has a gig of ram, the construction is sturdy, and it has a lot of the features that are common place now like bluetooth and an SD card slot.","title":"Tablet Adventure"},{"content":"In lieu of an actual essay on this quasi-holiday, I have a funny exchange from earlier in the week. Continue to have a good holiday, and I\u0026rsquo;ll see you on Monday.\ntycho: so I was thinking about getting an old(er) ThinkPad x41 tablet and linuxifying it, so I\u0026rsquo;d have a linux portable and we\u0026rsquo;d have another computer around here because most of the computers in the house are older and the last time an old computer went south, there was major familial strife.\nchris: ah which is the x41\ntycho: [passes a link]\nchris: you really do obsess over some of the strangest hardware. It\u0026rsquo;s kinda slow and old.\ntycho: it runs emacs and stuff, it should do fine.\nchris: trufax. I forget little you demand of your computers. Why would you want a tablet though?\ntycho: reading stuff.\nchris: I just don\u0026rsquo;t see the point of sacrificing performance for a nebulously useful tablet functionality.\ntycho: Well, why are you looking at net books constantly?\nchris: reading stuff.\n[silence]\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reading-stuff/","summary":"In lieu of an actual essay on this quasi-holiday, I have a funny exchange from earlier in the week. Continue to have a good holiday, and I\u0026rsquo;ll see you on Monday.\ntycho: so I was thinking about getting an old(er) ThinkPad x41 tablet and linuxifying it, so I\u0026rsquo;d have a linux portable and we\u0026rsquo;d have another computer around here because most of the computers in the house are older and the last time an old computer went south, there was major familial strife.\nchris: ah which is the x41\ntycho: [passes a link]\nchris: you really do obsess over some of the strangest hardware. It\u0026rsquo;s kinda slow and old.\ntycho: it runs emacs and stuff, it should do fine.\nchris: trufax. I forget little you demand of your computers. Why would you want a tablet though?\ntycho: reading stuff.\nchris: I just don\u0026rsquo;t see the point of sacrificing performance for a nebulously useful tablet functionality.","title":"Reading Stuff"},{"content":"So it\u0026rsquo;s Thanksgiving today. (So good holiday to you all in blog land!) And in honor of the holiday, my post today will be brief, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be taking the day off of Critical Futures as well.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t really have to say much about the holiday itself, as the big holiday\u0026rsquo;s go, it\u0026rsquo;s probably my favorite. Though I think I speak for many of my fellow non-Christians when I say, the one where the big bunny bringing children chicken eggs always makes me smile.\nIn any case, what I like most about the holiday is the long weekend. I don\u0026rsquo;t care much for the food, in fact for a couple of years in college I made a point of getting Indian food for thanksgiving. Which was amazing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always welcomed the holiday because it\u0026rsquo;s a nice long weekend in what is often a trying part of the year. There aren\u0026rsquo;t many holidays which provide a four day holiday, except for Christmas in some years. This is a shame, I think on the whole we work too much.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been mulling over this article about our work week and the relationships between productivity and standards of living, and how that tracks against the amount of time we spend at work.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with that thought, and enjoy your break!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/thanksgiving-2/","summary":"So it\u0026rsquo;s Thanksgiving today. (So good holiday to you all in blog land!) And in honor of the holiday, my post today will be brief, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be taking the day off of Critical Futures as well.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t really have to say much about the holiday itself, as the big holiday\u0026rsquo;s go, it\u0026rsquo;s probably my favorite. Though I think I speak for many of my fellow non-Christians when I say, the one where the big bunny bringing children chicken eggs always makes me smile.\nIn any case, what I like most about the holiday is the long weekend. I don\u0026rsquo;t care much for the food, in fact for a couple of years in college I made a point of getting Indian food for thanksgiving. Which was amazing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always welcomed the holiday because it\u0026rsquo;s a nice long weekend in what is often a trying part of the year. There aren\u0026rsquo;t many holidays which provide a four day holiday, except for Christmas in some years.","title":"Thanksgiving"},{"content":"Ok, so you (and by you, I mean jack) will be happy to hear, that I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly settled on being an emacs user. I mean, I\u0026rsquo;m not killer good at it, but this evening as I moved back to my Mac exclusively for a few days (I\u0026rsquo;m writing this during a quick jaunt out of town and my mac is the laptop) I downloaded a GUI version of emacs, because\u0026hellip; well, I think the less that\u0026rsquo;s said the better.\nThis is strange for me, because for a long time, I thought that moving to linux would be all about an adaptation to vi(m)--for those of you playing along at home, vim is the \u0026ldquo;competing\u0026rdquo; text editor to emacs. Emacs was always that overly complicated editor that did too much, and vim\u0026rsquo;s modal1 design is kinda brilliant, and I was taken.\nBut as I\u0026rsquo;ve said before, vim is great, but it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect for what I\u0026rsquo;m doing. My MO in TextMate has been to use it to do as many things as I can. Which is more inline with the way that people tend to use emacs. So I switched (haven\u0026rsquo;t started to use it for writing emails, yet), and it\u0026rsquo;s mostly pretty great, but it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get used to.\nI was going to say \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s just a bit weird,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;things seem hard to find,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;functionality isn\u0026rsquo;t as standardized as it is in TextMate,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is really true. I mean, there are some clear differences between emacs and TextMate, but TextMate is very clearly influenced2 by emacs, so it\u0026rsquo;s not that alien. And the M-x command line makes things really easy to find, so that\u0026rsquo;s not an issue. So maybe my only complaint is that the various modes for emacs aren\u0026rsquo;t as consistent as the languages/bundles for TextMate. This might be the case, but it also might be the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t edit many different kinds of text, so I\u0026rsquo;m not a great judge of this.\nSo while I\u0026rsquo;m on this subject, let me make a list of the kinds of text files that I edit. Because it\u0026rsquo;s my blog, and I can:\nMarkdown Documents: I use markdown formating a lot (with longlines and flyspell minor modes in emacs). These documents tend to range from about 1,200 to 4,000 words, and I write them for work (technicalish documents) and also my fiction is all written in these kinds of files. Blog posts. Also in markdown these are shorter, but in TextMate at least these have email style headers that interface with the blog-posting client. In emacs, I\u0026rsquo;ve been using these headers (as I don\u0026rsquo;t like the blogging mode very much. Screen Plays. There\u0026rsquo;s a great mode in emacs for screenplays that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have some of the nifty completions that the TextMate counterpart has, but I think overall the interface is better. Occasional PHP/css/html files. I do websites, this is a necessary thing, and this is the most \u0026ldquo;programer\u0026rdquo; thing that I do. Even really sucky text editors do this pretty well. I might also from time to time edit shell scripts and hopefully do some python stuff in the future, but again, not a big issue. Outlining/Journaling. I\u0026rsquo;m not a big \u0026ldquo;one giant text file\u0026rdquo; kind of guy, but doing some kind of structured document outside of basic markdown formated text is nice. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using a \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; bundle for TextMate for this, and there are a few others. Editing LaTeX documents. I haven\u0026rsquo;t done a lot of this recently, but one of my \u0026ldquo;things\u0026rdquo; is using LaTeX to do all of my \u0026ldquo;production\u0026rdquo; document editing. For most things I tend to write in markdown and then translate to LaTeX for production, but I have a couple of LaTeX documents and templates that I just do in LaTeX. I need to explore this more, but I\u0026rsquo;ve touched on it a bit, and I\u0026rsquo;m a fan so far. Are there other emacs modes that I should be checking out that I\u0026rsquo;m not, seemingly, aware of? Thanks in advance!\nSo the basic idea in vi/vim is that the editor has two basic modes: the \u0026ldquo;normal\u0026rdquo; mode allows you to use all the keys to communicate with the editor itself, while the \u0026ldquo;insert\u0026rdquo; mode allows you to insert text, and the end result is that the interaction with the program is very ergonomic. It\u0026rsquo;s also incredibly frustrating for writing prose but amazing for editing jobs of almost any length, because navigation is really simple.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe key bindings are mostly the same, and follow very similar patterns. I\u0026rsquo;d say that the biggest difference (other than open source/closed source) is that TextMate doesn\u0026rsquo;t lock you into (e)lisp and doesn\u0026rsquo;t favor a particular scripting language. Which someone else (whose more of a programer) could debate more clearly. To be honest, (e)lisp syntax doesn\u0026rsquo;t bug me nearly as much as ruby, and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of ruby-bias in the TextMate community.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/emacsen/","summary":"Ok, so you (and by you, I mean jack) will be happy to hear, that I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly settled on being an emacs user. I mean, I\u0026rsquo;m not killer good at it, but this evening as I moved back to my Mac exclusively for a few days (I\u0026rsquo;m writing this during a quick jaunt out of town and my mac is the laptop) I downloaded a GUI version of emacs, because\u0026hellip; well, I think the less that\u0026rsquo;s said the better.\nThis is strange for me, because for a long time, I thought that moving to linux would be all about an adaptation to vi(m)--for those of you playing along at home, vim is the \u0026ldquo;competing\u0026rdquo; text editor to emacs. Emacs was always that overly complicated editor that did too much, and vim\u0026rsquo;s modal1 design is kinda brilliant, and I was taken.\nBut as I\u0026rsquo;ve said before, vim is great, but it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect for what I\u0026rsquo;m doing.","title":"Emacsen"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had one hell of a week, and at least somewhat understandably, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing very much this past week. Which is really odd for me because I\u0026rsquo;m always writing. While the cause of this vacation from writing was acute and understandable, this has led me to think about the role of my writing in my day to day life, and while it\u0026rsquo;s depressing to write about not writing while NaNoWriMo is on, I think it\u0026rsquo;s worthy fodder for the blog.\nWhen I decided to set aside academe for a while the desire to write flooded back, and in a lot of ways, the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably productive in writing fiction has made the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m not in school much easier for me. At this point in my life, school (and research) is about playing with novel ideas and methodologies, and while on the surface the social sciences and science fiction writing are dissimilar, the truth is that the fiction writing and the social science work draws from the same well. As it were.\nSimilarly, now that I\u0026rsquo;m not in school, this blog is an outlet for the kinds of things that might have percolated out in classroom discussions and writing assignments, and keeping this blog flowing is really meaningful and helpful. Truth be told, if I don\u0026rsquo;t have a chance to write in the blog at least once a week, I find that my thinking becomes somewhat disjointed and disorganized, and I have have a harder time keeping track of projects and ideas. Now I\u0026rsquo;m not saying \u0026ldquo;if you\u0026rsquo;re having trouble with your thinking, blogging will help,\u0026rdquo; but rather that my thinking and blogging have become linked and interconnected.\nSo the end result is that without my usual writing has left me feeling sort of distracted and at loose ends.\nThankfully, this past weekend I was able to carve a little bit of time out for myself and get some work done. This is good for the bottom line as I was able to do some day-job work, and good for the soul because I was able to get organized and clear my mind. One of the good things about my current situation, is that because my day-job is writing related in one very real sense even if I don\u0026rsquo;t write a page of fiction on a given day I\u0026rsquo;m still a writer. Weird.\nAnyway, good luck to anyone out there doing NaNo, I\u0026rsquo;ll try and post one more writing related post this month, and then I\u0026rsquo;ll just write, and resist the temptation to wax philosophical.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/not-writing/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had one hell of a week, and at least somewhat understandably, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing very much this past week. Which is really odd for me because I\u0026rsquo;m always writing. While the cause of this vacation from writing was acute and understandable, this has led me to think about the role of my writing in my day to day life, and while it\u0026rsquo;s depressing to write about not writing while NaNoWriMo is on, I think it\u0026rsquo;s worthy fodder for the blog.\nWhen I decided to set aside academe for a while the desire to write flooded back, and in a lot of ways, the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably productive in writing fiction has made the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m not in school much easier for me. At this point in my life, school (and research) is about playing with novel ideas and methodologies, and while on the surface the social sciences and science fiction writing are dissimilar, the truth is that the fiction writing and the social science work draws from the same well.","title":"Not Writing"},{"content":"If there is anything that technologists will remember about 2008--other than the possible impending economic collapse--is that it\u0026rsquo;s the year of the netbook.1 I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the first person to say that there\u0026rsquo;s very little new about the netbook, but it\u0026rsquo;s also true that there have been a number of advancements in the web and in browsers, and in wifi availability have given this development the critical mass that it needs to really catch on. And it is.\nBefore I get to the pragmatic stuff about netbook usage, on the theoretical level I think netbooks present an interesting and expansive possibility for Linux-based systems. It\u0026rsquo;s weird since Linux is really designed to be server software, but it works really well for a device like a net book, but I think the modularity and adaptability of the platform is a huge strength in this area.\nBut I do have two pragmatic questions about netbooks:\nFirst off, What\u0026rsquo;s the best netbook for older users? I have someone in mind who\u0026rsquo;s lamented after my laptops for a while. I\u0026rsquo;m actually leaning towards the OLPC X-0 which is more than a year old now, but it\u0026rsquo;s durable, nifty and functional. The Acer One seems to be the default recommendation otherwise, even if the HP mininotes are the ones that I personally like the best.\nSecondly, are we to a point that one of these notebooks could replace my laptop? Day-to-day I use my laptop in a very netbookish manner, but I need to be able use it as my primary computer for a couple weeks. Even though I got a new computer this summer, it\u0026rsquo;s clear that my laptop is going to be needed to feed the family\u0026rsquo;s obsolescence cycle sooner rather than later and while I\u0026rsquo;m leaning toward a Lenovo 12 inch ThinkPad/tablet, it is an open debate.\nOn the one hand, a netbook would be nice and small and portable, and it certainly would do everything that I needed it to do, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know how comfortable it would be to use for long stretches, and having something that could be a tablet from time to time would be quite good. At the same time, the price can\u0026rsquo;t quite be beat.\nThoughts? Debate?\nNetbooks, are generally small (under 12 inches diagonal) laptop computers that are intended to sacrifice speed and power for smaller size, lower price, and more portability. This might seem like a lousy trade, but the truth is that we\u0026rsquo;ve reached a point where most users--even, or especially, power users--don\u0026rsquo;t need super charged computers for their day-to-day use, and as a result a small, light cheap computer that\u0026rsquo;s pretty good for most things.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/netbooks/","summary":"If there is anything that technologists will remember about 2008--other than the possible impending economic collapse--is that it\u0026rsquo;s the year of the netbook.1 I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the first person to say that there\u0026rsquo;s very little new about the netbook, but it\u0026rsquo;s also true that there have been a number of advancements in the web and in browsers, and in wifi availability have given this development the critical mass that it needs to really catch on. And it is.\nBefore I get to the pragmatic stuff about netbook usage, on the theoretical level I think netbooks present an interesting and expansive possibility for Linux-based systems. It\u0026rsquo;s weird since Linux is really designed to be server software, but it works really well for a device like a net book, but I think the modularity and adaptability of the platform is a huge strength in this area.\nBut I do have two pragmatic questions about netbooks:","title":"Netbooks"},{"content":"Over the past week or two, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a number of side projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve started to realize as a new and interesting project in and of themselves.\nThe first project is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on (re)designing a website with/for my friend Scott, who is a composer/voice actor/podcaster type. While he has a lot of HTML skills he\u0026rsquo;s never done any of the--even very elementary--web-programging (a la the PHP code/templates that wordpress uses) that one needs to do to have nifty dynamic websites.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been working with him to use wordpress to build a basic portfolio site and blog. It\u0026rsquo;s a pretty straightforward kind of a site, but you have to know wordpress pretty well to know how to design a theme so that all of the right content ends up in the right place. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using wordpress, more or less since the beginning so it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at.\nThe second project has been to design and implement a version of the tychoish.com theme for a new wordpress installation that I can deploy for various members of my family who want to use wordpress as a note taking platform. While I use a wiki (with a blogging plugin) for this task personally, the editing interface for wordpress along with its metadata system (tagging and categories) makes for a really ideal notebook-solution. There are other features like comments for annotations and revision tracking for storing document history that have been really helpful, and make this a really good solution.\nAnd of course the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m building these sites around wordpress makes a couple of things possible. First, it\u0026rsquo;s open source so we can run these notebooks and portfolio sites on our own (or rented) hardware, and the data is easily exportable into a lot of very useful formats if we ever want to change. Second, the software isn\u0026rsquo;t very resource intensive to run, particularly for lower volume sites like these, so it can run almost anywhere.\nThe truth is, that the biggest part of both of these projects was talking to the people who would be using the software to figure out what they already did with their existing websites/notebooks, and then figuring out how to do the same thing with the new solution, and finally also learning enough about what they wanted to do to be able to figure out with they might do that they couldn\u0026rsquo;t do before.\nI guess that makes me something of a consultant.\nWeird.\nEven more wierd is the feeling that I actually like doing this. And I find it ties together a lot of things that I do. My \u0026ldquo;day-job,\u0026rdquo; does similar sorts of things (for different kinds of \u0026ldquo;clients\u0026rdquo; with different sorts of problems), and what I\u0026rsquo;ve done thusfar is very much inline with my musings here about open source and productivity, which is kinda cool.\nIn a weird way, this is very much inline with my initial forays into the web-world which seemed to center around organizing creative types (in the largest sense) on the internet. This was nearly 10 years ago, but the threads are there. That\u0026rsquo;s something that I\u0026rsquo;ve realized as I\u0026rsquo;ve started new projects and new directions recently: even when I think they\u0026rsquo;re new and novel, I realize that they resonate with things I was working on and thinking about during high school.\nGo figure.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/consultant-tycho/","summary":"Over the past week or two, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a number of side projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve started to realize as a new and interesting project in and of themselves.\nThe first project is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on (re)designing a website with/for my friend Scott, who is a composer/voice actor/podcaster type. While he has a lot of HTML skills he\u0026rsquo;s never done any of the--even very elementary--web-programging (a la the PHP code/templates that wordpress uses) that one needs to do to have nifty dynamic websites.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been working with him to use wordpress to build a basic portfolio site and blog. It\u0026rsquo;s a pretty straightforward kind of a site, but you have to know wordpress pretty well to know how to design a theme so that all of the right content ends up in the right place. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using wordpress, more or less since the beginning so it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at.","title":"consultant tycho"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m finally getting my list of things to do with linux that I\u0026rsquo;ve heretofore done with OS X down to only a few items. I need to set up xampp for the web development work I use and for hosting my local wiki, and I need to sort out something with RSS reading (which isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a technological problem as it is a fact that I\u0026rsquo;m majorly behind and disorganized on RSS). Everything else is either a matter of linux programs being a little rough around the edges (pidgin? really?) or additional things that I never could do with my laptop (eg. fileservering for the house, dyndns, etc.)\nAt the moment, however, my biggest \u0026ldquo;linux transition\u0026rdquo; thought is a workflow issue. Basically I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about how I\u0026rsquo;m incorporating both a dual monitor setup and a laptop into my workflow. Because of the way that Awesome works there\u0026rsquo;s a sense in which both of my monitors really can function as two different computers. Not to mention the fact that I also have this really rather awesome (and capable) laptop.\nMy first approach to using two monitors was to put them right next to each other, and I arranged my windows such that I put half of all the tasks on each screen an what I found, was that I used the \u0026ldquo;middle\u0026rdquo; half of both screens\u0026quot; almost exclusively, rather than balancing my computing evenly across both screens.\nSo my second strategy has been to position the screens so that I have a primary screen dead in front of my keyboard, and then a secondary screen on my right at a forty five degree angle. The primary screen has things like writing projects (work, fiction, blogging, research) and my email and IM client on the main screen. Then \u0026ldquo;refrence\u0026rdquo; things on the second screen, so like the web browser lives there, my notebook (also a web-browser, but to a local site), IRC and microblogging, and the Calendar app all love over there. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is totally ideal yet, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good start.\nAs an aside, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear how people with more than one monitor make use of all the extra screen space. Particularly Awesome users.\nMy second issue/question is that my desk is too small to hold both the new monitors and the laptop, so I tend to have the laptop stacked off to the side and take it down when I want to go in the other room or do something that\u0026rsquo;s still mac-centric. I wonder how people who have two distinct computers (laptops and desktops) deal with and make use of having two computers. The data synchronization isn\u0026rsquo;t an issue, I think I have that pretty well sorted out, it\u0026rsquo;s the work-flow issue. Particularly in a couple of weeks when the computers are functionally equivalent.\nThoughts? Suggestions? I can\u0026rsquo;t fathom that this is something that people, far smarter and more creative than I, haven\u0026rsquo;t already solved. I can\u0026rsquo;t wait to hear it!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/n-plus-one/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m finally getting my list of things to do with linux that I\u0026rsquo;ve heretofore done with OS X down to only a few items. I need to set up xampp for the web development work I use and for hosting my local wiki, and I need to sort out something with RSS reading (which isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a technological problem as it is a fact that I\u0026rsquo;m majorly behind and disorganized on RSS). Everything else is either a matter of linux programs being a little rough around the edges (pidgin? really?) or additional things that I never could do with my laptop (eg. fileservering for the house, dyndns, etc.)\nAt the moment, however, my biggest \u0026ldquo;linux transition\u0026rdquo; thought is a workflow issue. Basically I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about how I\u0026rsquo;m incorporating both a dual monitor setup and a laptop into my workflow. Because of the way that Awesome works there\u0026rsquo;s a sense in which both of my monitors really can function as two different computers.","title":"N Plus One"},{"content":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t written one of these journal posts in a long time and I think it\u0026rsquo;s long overdue.\nOn the whole I think things in the land of tycho have been really good of late. I\u0026rsquo;m writing, I\u0026rsquo;m learning and settling into a new computer and text editor, I\u0026rsquo;m working (perhaps not enough, but nonetheless), I\u0026rsquo;m working on an exciting academic project, life is good.\nBut having said that it\u0026rsquo;s been one hell of a week(end).\nMy grandmother, who has been a mostly faithful reader of this site for many years except recently when her recovery from knee-replacements has kept her away from her computer, recently came down with a rather nasty gut bug. So my father and I rushed across the state and spent a rather long time fighting with various medical red tape to get her admitted to the hospital and then to begin shepherd her through various thises and thats. The end result: she\u0026rsquo;s healing quite well, and doing pretty well.\nFor a while there she was the only patient conscious in the ICU but a few others have started to wake up. But at the moment of this writing I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure she\u0026rsquo;s the only patient doing a crossword puzzle in the ICU. Truth be told, we\u0026rsquo;re mostly just waiting for a single room to open up on another floor (because of the gut bug, they have to keep her in semi-isolation, and I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time wearing gowns to keep everyone else safe).\nSo this has been an adventure. And it\u0026rsquo;s not over yet. But at least I have a good laptop and the wireless at the hospital is top notch. Oddly I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to connect to IRC (I think the hospital is blocking 6667). Wierd.\nThe one thing that is the most striking is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been, since Saturday really tired. Yesterday I took a nap in the afternoon with my boots on and still slept a full night. I\u0026rsquo;m making a point of writiting at the hospital while I\u0026rsquo;m just hanging out rather than waiting till I go home at the end of the day. Lets hope this helps.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/so-tired/","summary":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t written one of these journal posts in a long time and I think it\u0026rsquo;s long overdue.\nOn the whole I think things in the land of tycho have been really good of late. I\u0026rsquo;m writing, I\u0026rsquo;m learning and settling into a new computer and text editor, I\u0026rsquo;m working (perhaps not enough, but nonetheless), I\u0026rsquo;m working on an exciting academic project, life is good.\nBut having said that it\u0026rsquo;s been one hell of a week(end).\nMy grandmother, who has been a mostly faithful reader of this site for many years except recently when her recovery from knee-replacements has kept her away from her computer, recently came down with a rather nasty gut bug. So my father and I rushed across the state and spent a rather long time fighting with various medical red tape to get her admitted to the hospital and then to begin shepherd her through various thises and thats.","title":"So. Tired."},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another post in my NaNoWriMo series. This one is about working on new and old projects, project energy, and how projects \u0026ldquo;end.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not particularly of the mind that stories are ever really \u0026ldquo;done\u0026rdquo; as much as they are abandoned. I have an old writing friend who rewrites and re-imagines his stories every so often, and if you listen to him talk you\u0026rsquo;d think he\u0026rsquo;s spent the better part of the last decade revising the same couple of texts. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t read the latest iterations and am purely speculating here, I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;d call each of these iterations independent stories/projects. Because I like that kind of accounting. And we all tend toward the same basic characters and story structures anyway, besides it\u0026rsquo;s not like you can actually write a rip-off of yourself.\nAnd the truth is, that\u0026rsquo;s more or less what I do. A lot. Station Keeping is a loose rip-off (adaptation?) of what would have been my second novel that I wrote about some tens of thousands of words on before and during my senior year of high school. The novel fell apart, I liked the story, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t have any way of rescuing it as such, and I was busy, and by the time I could get back into it, I needed to be working on a project more like Station Keeping and less like a lame high-school student\u0026rsquo;s second novel.\nKnowing Mars has a similar history. Right before the home stretch of the first novel (see above) I took a week of writing time to put together a prologue. I took the \u0026ldquo;Matthew Connor\u0026rdquo; character (named, unsurprisingly \u0026ldquo;Matthew Connor,\u0026rdquo; why? because you can\u0026rsquo;t rip-off yourself) fast forwarded him fifty years or so, and had him as an old man relate the history of telepathy in his world. Sound familiar? Anyway, the story from that novel was dumb by that week of playing around reads the world like a series of novella length stories. I stole a lot more from that novel for Knowing Mars, and it manages to neither be an extension nor a retelling of the earlier story, but it\u0026rsquo;s still a rip-off.\nProjects don\u0026rsquo;t disappear, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that they end, so much as they go away for a while and with luck come back a little more wise and rich.\nBut projects do occasionally conclude. And projects like Station Keeping--because of it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo;-based structure--conclude more often than others. I\u0026rsquo;m taking a break to let the first three chapters of the new novel project sink in, and spending some time with other important projects like Trailing Edge and Station Keeping. It\u0026rsquo;s good to visit the \u0026ldquo;old friends,\u0026rdquo; and I think it\u0026rsquo;s important that stories--particularly semi-published ones--get to a point where it\u0026rsquo;s acceptable to abandon them.\nIt turns out, that Trailing Edge, which I thought was just a different perspective on a similar sort of universe to a story that I abandoned last spring, is really more like a prequel to that story, and I think there are parts that I wrote last spring that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to drop in largely unaffected into the \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; story. In the end, while I think it\u0026rsquo;s been a fun trip and a good experiment for Critical Futures, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably hack it down to short story length, (it\u0026rsquo;s going to end up in the novelette range) and rewrite it so that I can (try to) sell it to the old media. Plans subject to change and the interference of reality, of course.\nOn the theme of \u0026ldquo;projects ending up somewhere you didn\u0026rsquo;t expect,\u0026rdquo; Station Keeping--after 16 \u0026ldquo;Episodes\u0026rdquo; (well 15, really) of normal \u0026ldquo;column like\u0026rdquo; stories, for the remaining eight episodes of the second season I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing in the form of a screen play. Because screen plays are fun to write, pretty easy to read, and because Station Keeping serves as a regular \u0026ldquo;break\u0026rdquo; from the larger stories that I post on Critical Futures having a screen play is an even better \u0026ldquo;break\u0026rdquo; format. I was planning on doing season 3 as a screenplay and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be fun to just\u0026hellip; start a little early.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on in terms of fiction recently. So there.\nOnward and Upward!\nps. I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting that by breaking my \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t post about writing rule\u0026rdquo; in honor of NaNo, I\u0026rsquo;ve also taken to inadvertently breaking my \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t post endlessly about your projects,\u0026rdquo; rule. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;m on it now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/stationed-conclusions/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another post in my NaNoWriMo series. This one is about working on new and old projects, project energy, and how projects \u0026ldquo;end.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not particularly of the mind that stories are ever really \u0026ldquo;done\u0026rdquo; as much as they are abandoned. I have an old writing friend who rewrites and re-imagines his stories every so often, and if you listen to him talk you\u0026rsquo;d think he\u0026rsquo;s spent the better part of the last decade revising the same couple of texts. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t read the latest iterations and am purely speculating here, I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;d call each of these iterations independent stories/projects. Because I like that kind of accounting. And we all tend toward the same basic characters and story structures anyway, besides it\u0026rsquo;s not like you can actually write a rip-off of yourself.\nAnd the truth is, that\u0026rsquo;s more or less what I do. A lot. Station Keeping is a loose rip-off (adaptation?","title":"Stationed Conclusions"},{"content":"Chris and I were talking about our Linux usage the other day, and we both came to the conclusion that for better or for worse our main production machines were Linux machines. He still has a Vista machine and I still have my MacBook, but our main desktop machines are Ubuntu boxes. I\u0026rsquo;ve been rolling over a few questions: around what it means for an operating system to be suitable for production, and what it means that Chris and I are both using Linux systems for our day-to-day heavy lifting. Then, in order:\nProduction Given the nature of my work (both vocational and avocational), I use and rely on computers extensively. While I\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot of things to backup my computer in the last few months and days, I cannot abide by a system that won\u0026rsquo;t do what I need it to when I need it. While most computers are pretty reliable these days, the understanding that a computer is going to be there and ready with the programs and the data is as much a matter of trust as it is technical capability. Users need to be able to trust their production systems to keep their data, to run as expected, and to not fail them.\nAnother factor is user-comfort. While I\u0026rsquo;m not 100% comfortable with my new computer yet, I know that this is something that comes with time, as we use a system more, we all learn quicker ways of accomplishing common tasks, and it becomes easier to perform our most important computing tasks, and the \u0026ldquo;price\u0026rdquo; of converting a project from your mind/speech/analog source goes way down. That\u0026rsquo;s a good thing.\nA lot of my own musing on this site about productivity and technical usage, could be classified as being about making systems and users more production ready. While I think hacking on technology is really interesting, and technological development is really important, at the same time doing things with technology, is always the more important thing.\nLinux Chris and I are pretty technical users, admittedly, but I think we also have a pretty low tolerance for stuff that just doesn\u0026rsquo;t work. Which says something really fundamental about the status of Linux in 2008. While there are rough spots, the applications are pretty much right where they need to be. For instance, even before I began to seriously consider getting a Linux desktop set up for my own purposes, the vast majority of the software that I use on OS X has very viable Linux ports. While the general usability of Linux-based systems have gotten much better in the last couple of years (thanks Ubuntu), the ecosystem is very vibrant, and that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly important.\nHaving said that I think we\u0026rsquo;re probably still a few years away from seeing an Ubuntu/Linux Mint that\u0026rsquo;s ready for the general public. There are a few things that need to happen before that, such as:\nHardware makers need to continue to make and build computers with Linixes pre-installed. Ubuntu\u0026rsquo;s installer isn\u0026rsquo;t more painful than windows\u0026rsquo; or OS X\u0026rsquo;s, and convincing average users to switch for ideological reasons after they\u0026rsquo;ve just bought a new computer is difficult. Also, given hardware compatibility issues, having companies like Dell and HP make sure that there\u0026rsquo;s support in the OS for the hardware is a great service. The interface needs to get a lot better. This is \u0026ldquo;just wait and see\u0026rdquo; issue mostly, but I think GNOME needs work, and without a really good and fun UI, Linux is sunk. X11, the primary graphics/interaction layer for all (?) unix/unix-like operating system GUIs (other than OS X) needs some work. Dual monitor support is lackluster, support for laptop displays is tenuous, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t think we should throw all of X way, a lot of the UI problems are rooted in X\u0026rsquo;s limitations. Of all the parts of the UI in most Linux systems, X is the weakest link. While this is a pretty low level concern, making X better will make the whole experience better. And that\u0026rsquo;s what counts. I may be able to get really impressive system up-times, but unless I can get impressive up-times for X, the former isn\u0026rsquo;t worth much. End User distributions (Ubuntu, etc) and bare-bones distributions (Arch, Gentoo, etc.) need to become even more distinct. Ubuntu should probably attempt to use a more \u0026ldquo;rolling release\u0026rdquo; approach to package inclusion and should attempt to cover up command line access the same way that OS X does, say, and the bare-bones distributions should probably avoid delusions that they\u0026rsquo;re going to capture the end user market, and focus at being even more awesome bare bones distributions. The great thing about Linux distributions is that they don\u0026rsquo;t really compete with each other and while the geeks might know this, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure the general public does in the same way. That\u0026rsquo;s what I have for now, do any of you have ideas about what more Linux needs before it\u0026rsquo;s production ready for the general use user?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/production-ready/","summary":"Chris and I were talking about our Linux usage the other day, and we both came to the conclusion that for better or for worse our main production machines were Linux machines. He still has a Vista machine and I still have my MacBook, but our main desktop machines are Ubuntu boxes. I\u0026rsquo;ve been rolling over a few questions: around what it means for an operating system to be suitable for production, and what it means that Chris and I are both using Linux systems for our day-to-day heavy lifting. Then, in order:\nProduction Given the nature of my work (both vocational and avocational), I use and rely on computers extensively. While I\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot of things to backup my computer in the last few months and days, I cannot abide by a system that won\u0026rsquo;t do what I need it to when I need it. While most computers are pretty reliable these days, the understanding that a computer is going to be there and ready with the programs and the data is as much a matter of trust as it is technical capability.","title":"Production Ready"},{"content":"There are two schools of thought on why software developers should release their projects as free/open source software. There\u0026rsquo;s the thought that open source equals software freedom from large companies who might seek undo influence over your computing; then there\u0026rsquo;s the opinion that open source equals the freedom to tinker and use your software as you see fit.1\nWhich is a really interesting argument, I suppose, if you\u0026rsquo;re living in the 1980s (or before really.) In the earlier days of computing and open source, having unencumbered access to source code meant something very different. Most computer users \u0026lsquo;back in the day\u0026rsquo; had a stronger programing background, and computer systems (software and hardware) were less reliable and required more tinkering. Open access to source code had a functional meaning that was fundamentally different from what it means today.\nToday, most computer users and users of open source software don\u0026rsquo;t have a particularly strong background in program. My desktop, with the exception of a few encumbered media codecs, and a closed source video driver, is all open source. While I write shell scripts that do cool things, and I can dabble in PHP when needed, I\u0026rsquo;ve never tinkered with an C code, and never really done anything that could be rightly considered a \u0026ldquo;program.\u0026rdquo; And this says nothing of all the people who use open source programs like Firefox, Open Office, and Pidgin.\nWhile I am a fierce proponent of open source (as traditionally defined) in a strictly pragmatic sense, the fact that I can download the source code of software is largely irrelevant to me on a day to day level. This is to say that the \u0026ldquo;source\u0026rdquo; in \u0026ldquo;open source\u0026rdquo; is as much a symbolic identifier as it is a meaningful technological feature.\nSo what does open source symbolize and signify in the contemporary moment? This is a huge question that I think we requires a non-significant amount of attention. Is open source really about larger freedoms in our society? Is open source software about smaller/more concrete freedoms in terms of flexible and customizable systems? Is open source just the only viable way to practice the UNIX philosophy of small modular tools, rather than large monolithic tools?\nThere are also other angles that we can run with this question. Is open source the only way to gain a large enough user base (cite prevalence of LAM(P/P/P/R/J) stack vs. Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s server technologies?) Given current economic instabilities, might open source be a more viable way of generating wealth and participating in an authentic economy?\nI expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be tossing this question around, in various ways for years to come, but you have to start somewhere.\nOnward and Upward!\nThe conventional wisdom is that this divide is represented by the division between the Free Software Foundation (in the freedom from corner) and the BSD/Apache Software Foundation (in the freedom to corner). This is of course simplifies the position of both of these institutions in the community, as both BSD folks and FSF folks advocate the \u0026ldquo;opposite\u0026rdquo; argument. For example, RMS\u0026rsquo; pro-hacker arguments are very much \u0026ldquo;freedom to\u0026rdquo; and I think the inspiration for BSD-style projects is often very much a \u0026ldquo;freedom from\u0026rdquo; kind of proposition.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/freedom-in-source/","summary":"There are two schools of thought on why software developers should release their projects as free/open source software. There\u0026rsquo;s the thought that open source equals software freedom from large companies who might seek undo influence over your computing; then there\u0026rsquo;s the opinion that open source equals the freedom to tinker and use your software as you see fit.1\nWhich is a really interesting argument, I suppose, if you\u0026rsquo;re living in the 1980s (or before really.) In the earlier days of computing and open source, having unencumbered access to source code meant something very different. Most computer users \u0026lsquo;back in the day\u0026rsquo; had a stronger programing background, and computer systems (software and hardware) were less reliable and required more tinkering. Open access to source code had a functional meaning that was fundamentally different from what it means today.\nToday, most computer users and users of open source software don\u0026rsquo;t have a particularly strong background in program.","title":"Freedom in Source"},{"content":"So in the past couple of weeks we\u0026rsquo;ve seen the proliferation of a couple new \u0026ldquo;real time services,\u0026rdquo; for various kinds of data. Enjit brings real time data from friendfeed (which itself aggregates a lot of data pretty close to real time), and then there\u0026rsquo;s tweet.im which finally brings something approaching real time twitter interaction back to those of us who have been begging for a real time/xmpp twitter interface for a while.\nThough to be honest, I think that the lag is a bit more than 30 seconds, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to quibble for now. Actually I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced that this redeems twitter, given the number of other features that they\u0026rsquo;ve turned off (can\u0026rsquo;t delete posts anymore, can\u0026rsquo;t elect to not receive updates from people you follow, not to mention track) but it\u0026rsquo;s a start. When they get Oauth and Open Micro Blogging implemented,1 I won\u0026rsquo;t worry. But in the mean time, there are people on twitter that I want to be able to talk to, and this is a much appreciated move.\nIn any case, what this week has taught us is that real time services are here, and that companies and developers are beginning to realize this and provide services based on that. The man said \u0026ldquo;you don\u0026rsquo;t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing,\u0026rdquo; and I don\u0026rsquo;t think you need an ubergeek to know that realtime is on the way.\nWhich means, its my turn--as a resident uberworkflow/user interest geek--to parse out what this means. You might think that this means that there are geeks who are wanting as much data as possible as quickly as possible. But I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s the case. Really i think it\u0026rsquo;s about, having as much control over that data as possible.\nKen Sheppardson, one of the folks behind enjit, talked about wanting to have was all about consuming as much data as he could. said \u0026quot; I only want a notice every hour or so when somebody\u0026rsquo;s talking about something I care about, but I want it in time to participate.\u0026quot; (Edit Note: I totally flubbed up the reference and introduction to this section and have edited to make me seem like less of a dip. Apologies.)\nThe secret is that real time means push, and the truth is I think that I read less content and spend less time reading content that comes at me real time, than I do reading the same content that I have to check on in a special client or on a web page. Why?\nBecause the time/energy spent on checking disappears. So if twitter is coming at me in an IM, I can trust that there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to visit twitter.com, unless it\u0026rsquo;s to look at someone new to follow. And it\u0026rsquo;s easy to tell if I\u0026rsquo;ve seen something before, and avoid reading the same content that people blast all over the internet again and again. (Ping.fm, how I hate you). And when you get your data real-time, it\u0026rsquo;s easier to make filtering decisions, which is a good thing.\nConverging these data streams in real time/xmpp (ff, twitter, laconica, etc.) means that your data comes to you, not that you get more of it. So from a usage/workflow perspective, I think this is wonderful.\nSo you\u0026rsquo;re probably thinking, how then would twitter make money. I\u0026rsquo;m not, for the record making this argument out of some idiomatic Open Culture position, though I\u0026rsquo;m sympathetic. Rather, I think that Oauth and OMB are features that twitter\u0026rsquo;s userbase might value. I\u0026rsquo;d, totally be willing to pay nominal fees for services, like IM and track, and text messaging, and the ability to filter that stream? Totally worth a few bucks a month. And twitter could totally have special features (like their election coverage) be ad supported (which would be the most logical solution anyway) and that might be really effective. So the next person to say \u0026ldquo;but twitter has to make money somehow, they can\u0026rsquo;t give everything away for free,\u0026rdquo; gets branded an uncreative apologist.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-real-time/","summary":"So in the past couple of weeks we\u0026rsquo;ve seen the proliferation of a couple new \u0026ldquo;real time services,\u0026rdquo; for various kinds of data. Enjit brings real time data from friendfeed (which itself aggregates a lot of data pretty close to real time), and then there\u0026rsquo;s tweet.im which finally brings something approaching real time twitter interaction back to those of us who have been begging for a real time/xmpp twitter interface for a while.\nThough to be honest, I think that the lag is a bit more than 30 seconds, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to quibble for now. Actually I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced that this redeems twitter, given the number of other features that they\u0026rsquo;ve turned off (can\u0026rsquo;t delete posts anymore, can\u0026rsquo;t elect to not receive updates from people you follow, not to mention track) but it\u0026rsquo;s a start. When they get Oauth and Open Micro Blogging implemented,1 I won\u0026rsquo;t worry.","title":"In Real Time"},{"content":"Insofar as it\u0026rsquo;s been a loose series, this post is a continuation of my thoughts on wikis and hypertext. My leading question is \u0026ldquo;Are wiki\u0026rsquo;s ever completed?\u0026rdquo; And \u0026ldquo;If so, how do we know and decide?\u0026rdquo;\nThis is a question that I find myself wondering about a fair deal, and I think the answer--which I haven\u0026rsquo;t come to a firm conclusion on--has a to do with the potentials of the wiki medium.\nI should jump in and say that, while wikipedia is a great reference, a great tool, and an important project, because it\u0026rsquo;s the example of \u0026ldquo;what a wiki is\u0026rdquo; it has shaped how we think of the medium in a way that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure is particularly useful. The biggest wikia projects are encyclopedic studies of Star Wars and Star Trek, and while their material isn\u0026rsquo;t quite suitable for wikipedia it is certainly in the same vein and tone.\nThe encyclopedia form has been revitalized by the wiki, by decentralizing the review process, democratizing (more or less) the focus and the creation of articles, but most importantly by removing the \u0026ldquo;space limitation\u0026rdquo; on content. Nevertheless I continue to be convinced that wikis as a forum are capable of so much more.\nOn the one hand, big projects, like the kind that might be recorded in a wiki, are never really completed as much as they are eventually abandoned. That sounds pessimistic, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s ultimately productive: eventually a project has done what it needs to do, and what with perfection being unattainable, the productive thing to do is move on. The decision of when to do that is perhaps one of the most important decisions that a creator/artist can make about a work.\nBut who makes that kind of decision about a wiki? Is there a point where people just abandon a wiki? While wiki\u0026rsquo;s are collaborative, that\u0026rsquo;s not to say that they don\u0026rsquo;t have leadership (wikipeida\u0026rsquo;s leadership organization is epic, for example,) but who makes these kinds of decisions?\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m prone taking an entire wiki as a single document, the fact that a wiki is really a network of tightly connected texts surely has baring on the answer to the question.\nSoftware projects use the concept of \u0026ldquo;stable releases\u0026rdquo; and a \u0026ldquo;release cycle\u0026rdquo; to ensure that a project can both continue to develop, and exist as finished cycles. The debian project has it\u0026rsquo;s own procedure for encouraging ongoing development of their system/packages and creating rock solid stable systems.\nAdditionally, while most wiki\u0026rsquo;s have semi sophisticated version control systems, they for the most part don\u0026rsquo;t have a concept of \u0026ldquo;branches,\u0026rdquo; which might be helpful for implementing a stable wiki/wiki branch system. Even ikiwiki, which can use systems like git to store history, doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a good display system for switching between branches/revisions.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure--of course--if there are really good answers to these questions. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t begun to post any of them, there are a number of projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with in my mind (and locally on my own computer) that are wikis, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been hesitant to let them go into the wild in part because of issues like the one discussed above. And above all, if the wiki format is going to grow away from and independently of the encyclopedia format, I think we need to begin discussing questions like that.\nSo there. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wiki-completion/","summary":"Insofar as it\u0026rsquo;s been a loose series, this post is a continuation of my thoughts on wikis and hypertext. My leading question is \u0026ldquo;Are wiki\u0026rsquo;s ever completed?\u0026rdquo; And \u0026ldquo;If so, how do we know and decide?\u0026rdquo;\nThis is a question that I find myself wondering about a fair deal, and I think the answer--which I haven\u0026rsquo;t come to a firm conclusion on--has a to do with the potentials of the wiki medium.\nI should jump in and say that, while wikipedia is a great reference, a great tool, and an important project, because it\u0026rsquo;s the example of \u0026ldquo;what a wiki is\u0026rdquo; it has shaped how we think of the medium in a way that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure is particularly useful. The biggest wikia projects are encyclopedic studies of Star Wars and Star Trek, and while their material isn\u0026rsquo;t quite suitable for wikipedia it is certainly in the same vein and tone.","title":"Wiki Completion"},{"content":"So I said I would, in honor of NaNoWriMo, write about writing on tychoish a bit during the month of November. So here I am. I thought for the first in this occasional series, I\u0026rsquo;d touch on the project that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on a long novel/novella that fits loosely into my interest series of \u0026ldquo;historiographical science fiction\u0026rdquo; stories that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while now. It\u0026rsquo;s a totally new world, and deals with a couple of different groups of characters active in the same--singular--moment of time, but who all have a very different historical perspective and lineage.\nSome of the characters live on a human populated outpost dozens of light years away from Earth (and have lived on this world for generations), other characters have never left the Earth system, the main characters belong to the space faring class, and have spent most of their adult lives going between worlds (and due to relativity) which makes them hundreds upon hundreds of years \u0026ldquo;older\u0026rdquo; than everyone else.\nIt also has elements of military SF and political drama, the story is all about living on the cusp of great social change which I thinks is pretty relevant. In all I\u0026rsquo;m pleased.\nA lot of people say that ideas for novels are cheap and bountiful, and that writing a novel isn\u0026rsquo;t as much about having a good idea as it is about having the stick-to-itness to finish writing a (pragmatically) 80-100 thousand word document. Indeed NaNoWriMo is founded on this kind of idea. While I don\u0026rsquo;t disagree that stubbornness is a much needed skill in a novelist, nor do I disagree that ideas a bountiful, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that good ideas are a dime a dozen, nor do I think that flawed conceptual work can be entirely compensated by a skilled execution (or inversely that briliant conceptual work can hide less than perfect execution). These are two factors which have a sliding and dynamic relationship, and that\u0026rsquo;s part of the reason why fiction writing is an art and not a science.\nSo with that out of the way, allow me the indulgence of a little introspection. My previous stories have been interest enough, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that my execution has improved in the last six years, but my largest regret as I go over my older stories is that there is often some huge conceptual failure. The tensions are too simple. The characters don\u0026rsquo;t feel/read as being distinct enough. The plots are simplistic and a bit improbable, and there\u0026rsquo;s a point in a story where I always seem to loose the forward drive--not in writing momentum, but in the plot--where the characters are sort of looking at each other saying \u0026ldquo;hrm, what next,\u0026rdquo; and that\u0026rsquo;s bad.\nFor this project, I took the position to focus on these conceptual issues. Not because I\u0026rsquo;m satisfied with my technical ability at writing fiction, but because that\u0026rsquo;s something that I can a) fix later, and b) will improve gradually with time, as long as I\u0026rsquo;m attentive to that development.\nThe last time I planned out a novel, I concentrated on getting the \u0026ldquo;what happens next and next and next\u0026rdquo; details of the plot worked out. I have a stack of note cards in my desk drawer that outline all of the scenes (settings, present characters, plot goals, etc.) and as I began to write the story, I realized that I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a clue who the characters were, or any sort of deep understanding of the world outside of what the characters were doing. That was a problem.\nThis time, I opened up a new page in my personal wiki and I just started writing. Not the story, but stuff about the story, the major characters, the big political groups and institutions that I\u0026rsquo;d be dealing with, stuff about the technology as it related to the plot and the customs of the worlds I knew I\u0026rsquo;d be dealing with. And after a few weeks and several thousand words, I realized that I needed more not just more details so that I could write a stronger outline, but more things going on, more tension.\nAbout this time I listened something Cory Doctoorw said in an interview about how the key to dramatic tension was \u0026ldquo;making it more difficult for the key characters to get what they wanted on every page, and as long as that happens, you\u0026rsquo;re doing your job.\u0026rdquo; Which you can\u0026rsquo;t do unless your story is very short (which presents its own dramatic challenges), or you have a lot going on in your story. Given the advances of digital technology, we (or I) can sometimes lose track of the fact that even though novels are long, their length needs to be worthwhile and justified.\nSo I added stuff until it felt full, and I was excited to start. Not just because new projects are exciting to start, but because there was so much going on. And in the end? my notes directory has almost 7,000 words, which is about half what the story itself has these days.\nOh and you\u0026rsquo;re wondering about the title? When I started the story I thought it was going to begin in medias res with a warship in siege of a colony world, and it would be about the Siege, hence the title of this post, and the working title of \u0026ldquo;The Siege of Al-Edarian,\u0026rdquo; but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t begin in the middle of that story, and there isn\u0026rsquo;t really a Siege any more. So I need a new title. There are worse things to be in need of, though.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-siege/","summary":"So I said I would, in honor of NaNoWriMo, write about writing on tychoish a bit during the month of November. So here I am. I thought for the first in this occasional series, I\u0026rsquo;d touch on the project that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on a long novel/novella that fits loosely into my interest series of \u0026ldquo;historiographical science fiction\u0026rdquo; stories that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while now. It\u0026rsquo;s a totally new world, and deals with a couple of different groups of characters active in the same--singular--moment of time, but who all have a very different historical perspective and lineage.\nSome of the characters live on a human populated outpost dozens of light years away from Earth (and have lived on this world for generations), other characters have never left the Earth system, the main characters belong to the space faring class, and have spent most of their adult lives going between worlds (and due to relativity) which makes them hundreds upon hundreds of years \u0026ldquo;older\u0026rdquo; than everyone else.","title":"The Siege"},{"content":"So here\u0026rsquo;s another report on my Linux usage:\nFor some unknown reason I tried to upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) last weekend. Which failed epically. So I reinstalled, which has gone\u0026hellip; less well?\nExplaining the problems I\u0026rsquo;m having are incredibly complicated. Everything works well, except the dual monitor support, which is just bothersome. I have a work around that seems to work pretty well, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if pretty well = production ready. When I\u0026rsquo;m using it, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to running all of my important windows in screen, so that if the X server panics and I have to kill it, I can pick up right where I left off with everything. I think I mostly have the problem kicked, but I\u0026rsquo;m not quite to the point where I trust it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also traced down about 80% of the problem, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have quite enough to file a bug report.\nAnd the truth is that I\u0026rsquo;m adjusting pretty well to the linux world. Emacs is a giant ball of confusing, but that\u0026rsquo;s to be expected, and I have it rigged to read my normal text file format and do all the right highlighting. The scope of what my fingers know how to do is pretty limited, but it\u0026rsquo;s a start, and I\u0026rsquo;m purposely going slow so that I can learn things the right way. The last time I mentioned something about emacs on the blog, Jack emailed me something about emacsclient and emacs server mode, which I haven\u0026rsquo;t totally absorbed yet.\nMy current conclusion is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to find some sort of new way of managing and interacting with my text editors. Rather than have a bunch of different instances of the editor open (as I might do with vim or TextMate) I\u0026rsquo;ll probably figure out some way to work with two instances of emacs open, one for each screen and just move things between them. This is subject to change.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the rundown:\nOther advances made recently: I have figured out a cool way to implement multiple mail profiles using mutt. I have a lot of different email addresses/identities that I need to send email from (real life contacts, professional contacts, work contacts, etc.) and being able to automatically switch? A divine thing. Advances yet to be made: I need to figure out/use a news reader on the new computer. This requires segmenting my current OPML file into \u0026ldquo;laptop reading\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;desktop reading.\u0026rdquo; I need to figure out some web-browsing solution, that really works. Vimperator seems to be the Awesome default, and while it\u0026rsquo;s the best Firefox around it\u0026rsquo;s still firefox, and FF doesn\u0026rsquo;t impress me on a personal level. (I use a browser incidentally, and mostly for viewing static pages, not as an application platform.) Still don\u0026rsquo;t have my calendars in a place where I can start accessing them on linux. I\u0026rsquo;m still using the laptop to serve my personal wiki/notebook(s), though I have a clone of the repository on the linux machine, which is really the inverse of how it should work. And a thousand other things\u0026hellip; The truth is I think it\u0026rsquo;s all going pretty well. I will of course keep you up to date\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deep-computing/","summary":"So here\u0026rsquo;s another report on my Linux usage:\nFor some unknown reason I tried to upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) last weekend. Which failed epically. So I reinstalled, which has gone\u0026hellip; less well?\nExplaining the problems I\u0026rsquo;m having are incredibly complicated. Everything works well, except the dual monitor support, which is just bothersome. I have a work around that seems to work pretty well, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if pretty well = production ready. When I\u0026rsquo;m using it, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to running all of my important windows in screen, so that if the X server panics and I have to kill it, I can pick up right where I left off with everything. I think I mostly have the problem kicked, but I\u0026rsquo;m not quite to the point where I trust it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also traced down about 80% of the problem, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have quite enough to file a bug report.","title":"Deep Computing"},{"content":"OS X has been a really innovative force in personal computing. It\u0026rsquo;s highly usable, lots of different kinds of users are able to work with it. It\u0026rsquo;s compatible with lots of different standards, and it provides a lot of tools to developers that make even the sucky third party software pretty nice. I think if you look at Windows Vista, and the latest versions of KDE and GNOME and some of the other open source user interfaces, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty easy to see some resonances of OS X.\nMore importantly, probably, it proved that Unix and Unix-like operating systems were viable and usable for desktop use cases. While we\u0026rsquo;ve been able to run BSD and Linux on home computers for years, I don\u0026rsquo;t think we\u0026rsquo;ve thought of Linux as being something that anyone could run without needing a lot of technical background.\nUbuntu Linux followed this trend, pretty persuasively. Ubuntu makes desktop unix-like experience possible. Which is a really big thing. Chris and I are both using Ubuntu these days for our primary desktop computers, and it\u0026rsquo;s been really interesting to compare notes. One thing that we keep coming back to, is that despite the fact that the core of the OS is great, the user interface (UI) is tragic. OS X proves that it\u0026rsquo;s not only theoretically possible to have a nice UI, but it\u0026rsquo;s possible to do that on a unix-like system.\nAs an aside, I\u0026rsquo;d bet good money that Apple has an in house version of Aqua/Cocoa/Carbon/CoreServices (all the UI and application frameworks that make OS X, OS X) running on the Linux Kernel. Betcha.\nAnd by tragic, I don\u0026rsquo;t mean that GNOME and KDE are unusable, but they\u0026rsquo;re flawed. GNOME doesn\u0026rsquo;t use space efficiently, it\u0026rsquo;s applications are functional but not exceptional (and because of the way the GNOME project is there aren\u0026rsquo;t many \u0026rsquo;third party\u0026rsquo; alternatives), and it feels sort of behind the curve. It works, and it does everything that you might want in a graphical user interface (GUI) but it\u0026rsquo;s not exceptional.\nThankfully KDE fails for completely different reasons. It\u0026rsquo;s attractive and usable where GNOME isn\u0026rsquo;t, and the interface is unique and exceptional where GNOME feels stale and aged. But the applications aren\u0026rsquo;t nearly as compelling, and it suffers from having an interface/look that\u0026rsquo;s too flexible, such that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty easy to get a setup that looks like crap. Not to mention the fact that the kind of rich GUIs that KDE emblimizes don\u0026rsquo;t mesh particularly well with the mostly hacker audience that Linux (and it) attracts. But that\u0026rsquo;s a larger critique of the GUI paradigm, which isn\u0026rsquo;t quite on topic.\nSo where does this leave us?\nI\u0026rsquo;d say the biggest shortcoming of linux systems is the window management options. I like Awesome and I think there are a bunch of people who might really like it--but it\u0026rsquo;s not for everyone, and I\u0026rsquo;m admittedly not up to date with enough of the other options to provide a really clear analysis, but I know that this is the the next big issue for open source operating systems.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I know enough\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/window-management/","summary":"OS X has been a really innovative force in personal computing. It\u0026rsquo;s highly usable, lots of different kinds of users are able to work with it. It\u0026rsquo;s compatible with lots of different standards, and it provides a lot of tools to developers that make even the sucky third party software pretty nice. I think if you look at Windows Vista, and the latest versions of KDE and GNOME and some of the other open source user interfaces, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty easy to see some resonances of OS X.\nMore importantly, probably, it proved that Unix and Unix-like operating systems were viable and usable for desktop use cases. While we\u0026rsquo;ve been able to run BSD and Linux on home computers for years, I don\u0026rsquo;t think we\u0026rsquo;ve thought of Linux as being something that anyone could run without needing a lot of technical background.\nUbuntu Linux followed this trend, pretty persuasively. Ubuntu makes desktop unix-like experience possible.","title":"Window Management"},{"content":"I learned the other day that some (a lot?) of the big box retail corporations--Costco/Sams/etc.--don\u0026rsquo;t turn a profit by selling things to people.\nThis shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be particularly large surprise, they sell goods at prices that undercut all of the competition, and probably aren\u0026rsquo;t that much above the core cost of the goods (if that).\nAnd yet the companies are profitable. How? My understanding is that they take their gross income and invest it in short term things--bonds, stocks, and the like--which generates enough income that the entire operation can turn a profit. In the mean time, to make sure that the trains run on time (ie. that they make payroll, keep the lights on at the retail locations, etc.) they borrow against their non-liquid assets, which are busy earning the profit.\nDepending how widespread this is (and I\u0026rsquo;d be inclined to think that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty rampant) we can explain a couple of phenomena with this understanding. First off, it explains why the market tends to move as a whole. Not because investors panic when they see the number dropping on the trading floor, but because they know that if company B doesn\u0026rsquo;t perform at a certain level company A can\u0026rsquo;t perform either.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s pretty straightforward.\nThe more disturbing realization is that the entire basis of our economy isn\u0026rsquo;t about the exchange of money for goods and services, but rather the exchange of money for other money. The hope being that by exchanging money a lot, it will somehow turn into more money. Which given the legal fictions of the banking industry, it does. More or less. Until it doesn\u0026rsquo;t. Enter the present.\nIn the banking industry--the one that was recently bailed out by the federal government--we know this. Banks make money by charging interest on certain kind of transactions, and while this is kind of creepy and odd when you think about it, it\u0026rsquo;s not surprising. The exchange of material goods, on the other hand is completely absurd and troubling.\nThe conventional wisdom for the last hundred years, or so, is that big corporations are able to be more successful because of economies of scale and standardization, the largest lesson that I\u0026rsquo;m taking away from this right now is that while big corporations might be more efficient, they might not--in a concrete sense--be more successful/profitable. Outside of the profits made by ridding the money-holding-financial game.\nOne of the reasons why I\u0026rsquo;m interested in open source software is because it proposes and requires a very different sort of \u0026ldquo;economic\u0026rdquo; (in the generous sense) perspective. Open source is very business centered, but the exchange of money is all centered around wealth-for-services, rather than wealth-for-money-holding, say. These kinds of alternate (and it\u0026rsquo;s sad that it\u0026rsquo;s the alternate) means of generating and distributing wealth are the inevitable conclusion to the current economic crisis. It\u0026rsquo;s unclear how long the current system will linger and limp, but eventually something better/different will emerge.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of subject matter that I typically write about on tychoish, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want you to worry that I\u0026rsquo;m going to turn into some sort of political blog. Except insofar as I\u0026rsquo;ve always had a (lower case p) political side focus, I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to think through these kinds of issues to try and figure out what\u0026rsquo;s going on. While I think change is afoot, and a more authentic economy is on the horizon, this is a systemic change that will not come easily.1\nOnward and cautiously Upward!\nThere is a minor movement in some circles of people who are attempting to reduce their ecological footprint, buying locally produced goods, opting toward organic foods, and so forth. While there are a lot of reasons to do this--quality/freshness, etc--this kind of \u0026ldquo;individualistic economic activism\u0026rdquo; requires an absurd amount of privilege (money/time) and access to economic resources. While this economy is more authentic in some ways, it\u0026rsquo;s not independent or self-sufficient and that\u0026rsquo;s totally crucial here.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/is-there-any-there-there/","summary":"I learned the other day that some (a lot?) of the big box retail corporations--Costco/Sams/etc.--don\u0026rsquo;t turn a profit by selling things to people.\nThis shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be particularly large surprise, they sell goods at prices that undercut all of the competition, and probably aren\u0026rsquo;t that much above the core cost of the goods (if that).\nAnd yet the companies are profitable. How? My understanding is that they take their gross income and invest it in short term things--bonds, stocks, and the like--which generates enough income that the entire operation can turn a profit. In the mean time, to make sure that the trains run on time (ie. that they make payroll, keep the lights on at the retail locations, etc.) they borrow against their non-liquid assets, which are busy earning the profit.\nDepending how widespread this is (and I\u0026rsquo;d be inclined to think that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty rampant) we can explain a couple of phenomena with this understanding.","title":"Is there any there there?"},{"content":"Have you ever noticed how email exchanges where it\u0026rsquo;s just you writing back with a friend or two always seems to peter out after about 3 volleys? And how online discussions seem to go on and on? And how a lot of virtual communities--particularly the really active ones--are full of drivel?\nYeah, me too. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a particularly good answer for it either. I think the sociological/psychological reasons are pretty straight forward: the conversations linger because the medium is time-shifted, each party of the conversation has to contribute less resources to keeping the discussion going. This is why flame wars are/were such a big issue on listservs and usenet, or at least part of the reason.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that flame wars aren\u0026rsquo;t still an issue on the internet, or that usenet/listservs aren\u0026rsquo;t still important, but I think a lot of the discussions that happen on the interent happen elsewhere these days. Usenet and group email, are still prevalent, but I think the inhabitants of both tend to be hacker types or old timers (and more likely both), and these are two groups who are on the whole pretty adept at how these kinds of communications work.\nIn the last five to ten years communications on the interent have really changed. We\u0026rsquo;ve gone from very structured mediums that come with built in threading, topically segregated conversation, with some semblance of push functionality and even web-based discussion forums, to unstructured and chaotic mediums like blogs, blog comments, and wikis.\nWhile I am a bit nostalgic, the truth is that these changes have enhanced the ways that we can collaborate and really democratized the internet, and this is unequivocally a good thing. At the same time, as I visit really active conversations in threads or prolific ravelry, my brain hurts. There\u0026rsquo;s too much to follow, too much noise not enough signal, and the strict chronological display changes the way that people read and respond non-productively (and probably is the root of most of my complaints).\nThere have been a number of \u0026ldquo;hacks\u0026rdquo; that various communities have deployed to help keep conversations together. Threading blog comments, or including comment numbers makes the comments on a given post easier to read help, but they don\u0026rsquo;t change the fact that conversations on the new internet are really hard to organize and orchestrate, and after a certain point, enter.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want to be a hipster and say \u0026ldquo;no one has genuine conversations on the internet anymore,\u0026rdquo; but I think its really clear that the kinds of conversations that happen online (these days) are very constrained by the kinds of technology that are used to convey those conversations both in terms of how conversations develop, but also in terms of who can and does participate in those conversations. While this is in and of itself not a particularly striking revelation, I think it\u0026rsquo;s also clear that we--as citizens of the internet--cannot just say \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s the internet anyone can access it,\u0026rdquo; and let it go at that.\nSorry if this is a bit disjointed, hopefully I\u0026rsquo;ll figure more things out in a bit.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/long-threads/","summary":"Have you ever noticed how email exchanges where it\u0026rsquo;s just you writing back with a friend or two always seems to peter out after about 3 volleys? And how online discussions seem to go on and on? And how a lot of virtual communities--particularly the really active ones--are full of drivel?\nYeah, me too. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a particularly good answer for it either. I think the sociological/psychological reasons are pretty straight forward: the conversations linger because the medium is time-shifted, each party of the conversation has to contribute less resources to keeping the discussion going. This is why flame wars are/were such a big issue on listservs and usenet, or at least part of the reason.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that flame wars aren\u0026rsquo;t still an issue on the internet, or that usenet/listservs aren\u0026rsquo;t still important, but I think a lot of the discussions that happen on the interent happen elsewhere these days.","title":"Long Threads"},{"content":"When going to graduate school became \u0026ldquo;someday later\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;someday soon,\u0026rdquo; one of the things I promised myself that I\u0026rsquo;d do is dedicate more of my time to fiction writing, which I always seemed to cast aside in favor of more seemingly important academic goals. Well not any more. So I have this fiction blog, which I talk about (not nearly?) enough called Critical Futures which is part of my ongoing struggle/effort to write and edit my fiction. And I\u0026rsquo;m writing another novel-ish project that will probably--but no promises--end up on CF in several months.\nWhen people ask me \u0026ldquo;what do you do,\u0026rdquo; I say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a writer,\u0026rdquo; which is true, not just because I\u0026rsquo;ve got a novel going on in my head (and who doesn\u0026rsquo;t?) but because my day-job is also as a writer, so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel so fake, but when I say \u0026ldquo;a writer,\u0026rdquo; I almost always think of space ships and distant outposts of human civilization, and not web technology. Not that I dislike the internet or the software that makes it go, but because the space ships are probably the most important/meaningful (to me) things things that I write.\nIn November, answering \u0026ldquo;What do you do?\u0026rdquo; (write.) \u0026ldquo;What are you writing?\u0026rdquo; (a novel) seems much less remarkable because of NaNoWriMo.\nIn the past I\u0026rsquo;ve been bitter about NaNo, sometimes because I\u0026rsquo;ve not been in a place where I can get started, or because I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s teaches the wrong lesson about novel-length writing, or whatever. This year, I\u0026rsquo;m bitter. To each their own, I say. I\u0026rsquo;m not participating because I have a project at a crucial stage, I feel like the biggest objective of NaNoWriMo isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;get a lot of writing done,\u0026rdquo; but rather \u0026ldquo;prove that almost everyone is capable of sitting down and writing a book length thing, if they can get through the crap.\u0026rdquo; And I know this. I also know that I can write at NaNo-like speeds should I need to.\nBut.\nI am going to, for the month of November, take a brief reprieve from my \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t write about your writing on your blog\u0026rdquo; rule, and for the benefit of NaNoWriMo spirit write a little bit about a few writing related topics. I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing other things as well like linux and open source and knitting, but I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be cool to reflect a bit on Critical Futures and my current project, and some stuff about my writing process. Because that\u0026rsquo;s what I have.\nHow many of you out there are doing NaNo? For the first time? If you write novels in some other way?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/novel-writing-in-november/","summary":"When going to graduate school became \u0026ldquo;someday later\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;someday soon,\u0026rdquo; one of the things I promised myself that I\u0026rsquo;d do is dedicate more of my time to fiction writing, which I always seemed to cast aside in favor of more seemingly important academic goals. Well not any more. So I have this fiction blog, which I talk about (not nearly?) enough called Critical Futures which is part of my ongoing struggle/effort to write and edit my fiction. And I\u0026rsquo;m writing another novel-ish project that will probably--but no promises--end up on CF in several months.\nWhen people ask me \u0026ldquo;what do you do,\u0026rdquo; I say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a writer,\u0026rdquo; which is true, not just because I\u0026rsquo;ve got a novel going on in my head (and who doesn\u0026rsquo;t?) but because my day-job is also as a writer, so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel so fake, but when I say \u0026ldquo;a writer,\u0026rdquo; I almost always think of space ships and distant outposts of human civilization, and not web technology.","title":"Novel Writing in November"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been switching to linux right? Right. Well the machine has arrived, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get most of the required things set up the way that I need them. The awesome window manager, my ususal compliment of software, copying over config files and what not. It\u0026rsquo;s not hard, and the only thing that gave me a hickup was using Xrandr, and that was pretty quickly solved.\nI wrote about my editor issues last week, which are progressing slowly. I think I need. I\u0026rsquo;ve started to use a lot of console emacs for more day-to-day stuff like writing blog posts and takin notes for work. Probably by the time this posts, I\u0026rsquo;ll have relented and started to use the GUI version for some things.\nBut, contrary to popular beleif, there\u0026rsquo;s more to using linux than just text editors. Though it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like it very much. Particularly when you write a crap ton. Let me review the kinds of things that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, and what I have left to do:\nI\u0026rsquo;m using the vimperator plugin for Firefox, which makes the browser behave a lot more like vim. Which makes sense in a browser, somehow. It basically means that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to use the mouse very much, except when I want to, and that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing, given how awesome works. Awesome works great with both monitors as I expected. In a way, it\u0026rsquo;s not so much that I got a new computer, as it is that I got two new computers. And they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;both\u0026rdquo; really peppy. It does mean that my desk is way too small for everything I need to do with it. The linux, the Mac. I got a stack of paper to read yesterday, and I tried to set it on the corner of my desk and it was commical how little flexabile room I have on my desk. I\u0026rsquo;m anticipating a move pretty soon, so I don\u0026rsquo;t want to get new furnature quite yet. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using the \u0026ldquo;terminator\u0026rdquo; program for terminal emulation, and it\u0026rsquo;s delightfully simple. Wheras with most terminals I think \u0026ldquo;wow this sucks,\u0026rdquo; with terminator, I\u0026rsquo;m only a little grumpy that the copy and past commands are bound to non-standard key combinations. I still think pidigin stucks, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been over this before, but the more I use it, the more I can recognize flaws with Adium, so it\u0026rsquo;s very much a \u0026ldquo;you can\u0026rsquo;t go home again,\u0026rdquo; situation. Pidgin is an instant messaging client, and Adium is based on the same core software, but packaged for OS X. It took me way too long to figure out how to turn on the font smoothing so that everything doesn\u0026rsquo;t look like crap. Which it did, but it meant some config file editing, because all of the gnome-settings functionality won\u0026rsquo;t work because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t like the dual monitor set up. I don\u0026rsquo;t mind, because I\u0026rsquo;m only using bits and pieces of gnome as it is, but it\u0026rsquo;s worrying. I love this computer and this interface, and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t like to work in some other way. But I\u0026rsquo;m acutely aware that except in very controlled situations, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t trust it to non-specialized users. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably continue to write lists like these, as much for your edification (and mine!) as for record keeping. Thanks for reading!\n(I wrote this entry in emacs, and I think it has me sold, particularly if I can get all of the important modes to come on by default, which I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet. I\u0026rsquo;m also running in console mode and I\u0026rsquo;m getting this weird \u0026ldquo;echo\u0026rdquo; cursors which hang on the screen in an annoying way that I can\u0026rsquo;t predict. running \u0026ldquo;M-x redraw-screen\u0026rdquo; cleans things up, and if nothing else running that every so often in an automated way would probably clear things up, unless this sounds familiar to anyone?)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/linuxing/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been switching to linux right? Right. Well the machine has arrived, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get most of the required things set up the way that I need them. The awesome window manager, my ususal compliment of software, copying over config files and what not. It\u0026rsquo;s not hard, and the only thing that gave me a hickup was using Xrandr, and that was pretty quickly solved.\nI wrote about my editor issues last week, which are progressing slowly. I think I need. I\u0026rsquo;ve started to use a lot of console emacs for more day-to-day stuff like writing blog posts and takin notes for work. Probably by the time this posts, I\u0026rsquo;ll have relented and started to use the GUI version for some things.\nBut, contrary to popular beleif, there\u0026rsquo;s more to using linux than just text editors. Though it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like it very much. Particularly when you write a crap ton.","title":"Linuxing"},{"content":"When I got the Linux rig, I was pretty sure that I was going to live in vim--probably mostly the console version--while I work on weaning myself off of my TextMate dependency. It\u0026rsquo;s not that I don\u0026rsquo;t love TextMate, or that I can\u0026rsquo;t afford it, but I think Linux/open source is where I\u0026rsquo;m headed, and in the short term I think I\u0026rsquo;d like one editor for both platforms, and that means open source. The problem? Vim is great, but I find it sort of tedious for day to day editing\u0026hellip;\nThis is probably the result of the fact that most of my personal text processing (like 80%) is prose of one form or another, with the remainder being very limited code-related things. Vim is great if most of what you\u0026rsquo;re doing is jumping around in a file, re-factoring code, and hunting for little bugs to tweak. It\u0026rsquo;s not so good if you\u0026rsquo;re writing a novel or a story and you only put carriage returns after each paragraph. I like vim a lot for short editing tasks, for writing email, for proof reading a document. For heavy duty lifting? I\u0026rsquo;m not yet decided.\nI should introduce another character/factor into this story: my editing habit. Basically rather than grouping similar files into one window/buffer and toggling between various files, I really like having a bunch of different windows open. A bunch might understate it. At this moment I have 4/5 TextMate windows open, and I should probably have at least 7 (if I were more on top of my tasks) and more like 10-15 wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be out of the norm.\nConsole vim works great with this usage paradigm, open a bunch of terminal windows, open them to the documents that they need to edit, and tag the terminals properly in Awesome, and I\u0026rsquo;m good go, except we run into problem 1 (editing prose in vim is bothersome). I\u0026rsquo;ve tried (and quite like) a GUI vim called \u0026ldquo;Cream\u0026rdquo; that totally fixes problem 1, but utterly fails at problem 2 (the usage paradigm).\nSo this leaves me? Using a hodge podge of solutions. I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to using gedit--of all things--for most prose writing. Gedit is the Gnome editor, and if you customize it right, it\u0026rsquo;s reasonably functional. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to hack Markdown support into it (and I haven\u0026rsquo;t bothered with vim, so I must not be to keen upon it), and it won\u0026rsquo;t post blog entries like TextMate, but it\u0026rsquo;s decent, and I can have a number of different container windows, so I don\u0026rsquo;t end up with a window with 20 different tabs open that I can\u0026rsquo;t find anything in, and I use vim for anything that it seems like I can get away with.\nJack has been pestering me to convert to emacs for a while now, and after all this fuss, it\u0026rsquo;s tempting. Emacs can handle blog posting, it\u0026rsquo;s fundamentally a bit more like TextMate,1 with \u0026ldquo;longlines-mode\u0026rdquo; it seems to handle prose pretty well, and the quirky things that I like about TextMate like its Screenwriting Bundle and LaTeX support seem to be handled a bit better in emacs. The multi-window usage paradigm is counter to the general emacs way of thinking, so that might be an issue. But the largest problem by far, is that to a newbie2 like me it\u0026rsquo;s like an alien world. Surprisingly enough, (e)lisp code is pretty easy to read, and the key commands are pretty easy to deal with.3 So who know, I might make the switch yet.\nStranger things have happened.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s like we\u0026rsquo;re not so much reliving the editor wars, as seeing resonances/shockwaves from them. For instance the key bindings have a lot of emacs in them, while Google Reader definitely seems like it was made by vim users. I think we should start a game of trying to figure out which apps and environments were inspired by which editor.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI somehow manage to be both a huge advanced geek, (I live in terminals, I bought a linux desktop to run a tiling window manager, I almost live in text editors, etc.) And also I\u0026rsquo;m not a programer, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have any background in that sort of thing, so the most rudimentary of coding things can confuse me terribly. It\u0026rsquo;s a weird boundary to walk, and I should probably expand on it later.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had my caps-lock key mapped to \u0026ldquo;control\u0026rdquo; for years now. I think I should probably--for maximum emacs foo--remap my right shift key to alt, but I\u0026rsquo;m withholding judgement for the moment.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/editor-crisis/","summary":"When I got the Linux rig, I was pretty sure that I was going to live in vim--probably mostly the console version--while I work on weaning myself off of my TextMate dependency. It\u0026rsquo;s not that I don\u0026rsquo;t love TextMate, or that I can\u0026rsquo;t afford it, but I think Linux/open source is where I\u0026rsquo;m headed, and in the short term I think I\u0026rsquo;d like one editor for both platforms, and that means open source. The problem? Vim is great, but I find it sort of tedious for day to day editing\u0026hellip;\nThis is probably the result of the fact that most of my personal text processing (like 80%) is prose of one form or another, with the remainder being very limited code-related things. Vim is great if most of what you\u0026rsquo;re doing is jumping around in a file, re-factoring code, and hunting for little bugs to tweak. It\u0026rsquo;s not so good if you\u0026rsquo;re writing a novel or a story and you only put carriage returns after each paragraph.","title":"Editor Crisis"},{"content":"I had occasion to confess my undying appreciation for xml-rpc this weekend at Drupal Camp Chicago. I might have been a little more expressive. I also might have explained this appreciation as being a product of my general disdain for web-based interfaces. Which we have to admit is kind of awkward at a conference of web-based developers.\nClearly I was being a little over the top, but it\u0026rsquo;s more or less true. I\u0026rsquo;ve come to ways of using the internet and digital data that means I spend as little time in a web browser as I have to. While the obvious--and predominant--reason for this is generally that I think most browsers are utter failures, there\u0026rsquo;s another reason that I\u0026rsquo;ve not written about explicitly: browsers lead to inefficient data consumption methods.\nBrowsers, with the exception of some very subtle trickery are an entirely \u0026ldquo;pull\u0026rdquo; based technology. That is to say, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing in your web-browser that comes to you and says \u0026ldquo;hey there\u0026rsquo;s something new out there for you, come look.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s as if the entire web is out there, just waiting for us to check it out and see if something new has changed.\nThis is a huge issue with the internet, particularly as data begins to migrate from our own computers to the internet--by way of web-based applications. Web programmers/content creators have a couple of ways of counteracting this problem. First, they can do little programing hacks to make the content rearrange itself even if there\u0026rsquo;s little if any new content, so it looks like it changes. Adding \u0026ldquo;interesting dynamic\u0026rdquo; content is a sort of \u0026ldquo;user hack\u0026rdquo; that gets people to check back more often with a website, and is pretty low tech solution to the problem, and sites like facebook and twitter are really good at this.\nThe truth is, that if you have a pull technology, where users have to check to see if there\u0026rsquo;s anything new, the only way to make it work like a \u0026ldquo;push\u0026rdquo; technology (one that notifies you when there\u0026rsquo;s new content), is to check it again and again and again. If it\u0026rsquo;s automatic the frequency is high enough it almost looks like a push. This is how most twitter-apps work, for instance. This is also how most email clients work. Though email is a push (because other people push email to your server) in most cases you have to pull email yourself, but that moves us more from the \u0026ldquo;usability effects\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;technological semantics,\u0026rdquo; and I digress.\nWhile this might seem like a really minor complaint about how we access technology it has a profound impact on the communities that we form on the internet and how we use technology on \u0026ldquo;web applications.\u0026rdquo; Here are a few of examples:\n\u0026ldquo;Critical mass\u0026rdquo; for online communities that are push-based (twitter, IRC channels, listservs) are much smaller than for pull-based communities (web forums, blogs). An IRC channel seems active if there are 25 people in the room and 5 people really active. A listserv with 200 subscribers is lively and bustling. A blog needs thousands of regular readers before comment threads start to seem lively, and most \u0026ldquo;successful\u0026rdquo; websites have tens of thousands of regular visitors. Pull based applications must be both \u0026ldquo;useful\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;compelling,\u0026rdquo; and I often find that the later interferes with the former. This is mostly a personal preference issue, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to think that my concerns are rooted in efficiency rather than curmudgeonliness. Data that we have to go out and look for means that we spend our time on the computer looking for new data rather than consuming data. I, begrudgingly, spend a lot of my internet time for instance reloading my LiveJournal friends page, because there\u0026rsquo;s no way for me get that feed all rolled up and pushed to me (even semi-pushed, like RSS.) I feel the same way about twitter, frankly. The astute among you will realize that RSS works over pull technology, and I accept this but I think that the interaction paradigm for RSS is more like push based services. Because while your RSS reader has to pull from a lot of feeds every time you check for updates, you probably only see \u0026ldquo;unread articles,\u0026rdquo; if there are new items in your feed reader. So maybe the push/pull--while rooted in a technological division--also represents an independent interaction paradigm.\nMaybe it\u0026rsquo;s not that I don\u0026rsquo;t like web-technologies (because I so clearly do), but rather that I want them to suck a lot less? It\u0026rsquo;s not so much that the applications are \u0026ldquo;in the cloud,\u0026rdquo; but that the ways we interact with them (like browser based interfaces versus desktop apps built around XML-RPC) are flawed.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-big-push/","summary":"I had occasion to confess my undying appreciation for xml-rpc this weekend at Drupal Camp Chicago. I might have been a little more expressive. I also might have explained this appreciation as being a product of my general disdain for web-based interfaces. Which we have to admit is kind of awkward at a conference of web-based developers.\nClearly I was being a little over the top, but it\u0026rsquo;s more or less true. I\u0026rsquo;ve come to ways of using the internet and digital data that means I spend as little time in a web browser as I have to. While the obvious--and predominant--reason for this is generally that I think most browsers are utter failures, there\u0026rsquo;s another reason that I\u0026rsquo;ve not written about explicitly: browsers lead to inefficient data consumption methods.\nBrowsers, with the exception of some very subtle trickery are an entirely \u0026ldquo;pull\u0026rdquo; based technology. That is to say, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing in your web-browser that comes to you and says \u0026ldquo;hey there\u0026rsquo;s something new out there for you, come look.","title":"The Big Push"},{"content":"I went to Drupal Camp Chicago last week for work, and while a lot of what I did was work related--learning about Drupal and what the really hard core folks are doing with it--the camp was an emersive experience, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t help but make a few casual observations about geeks in general. They\u0026rsquo;re documented and explored below, and I\u0026rsquo;ll have a more technical/theoretical reflection of the experience tomorrow or the next day.\nThis was my first \u0026ldquo;BarCamp\u0026rdquo;/unconference, and I really liked the way it felt. There was a lot of knowledge being shared, there was a lot of collaboration, and there was a lot of energy in the room. I go to Morris Dance Ales, and Knitting Camp for the same reason, really. Intense interest and activity around a shared sub-cultural identity/activity, is a really powerful and invigorating thing. This is probably the same reason that \u0026ldquo;(gay) men\u0026rsquo;s gatherings,\u0026rdquo; science fiction conventions, and the \u0026ldquo;Michigan Womyn\u0026rsquo;s Music Festival\u0026rdquo; are so appealing to so many people. (I dare anyone to find something else on the internet that lists all of these things in such close proximity).\nOne thing that the conference had that I think made it particularly interesting is that there was always a \u0026ldquo;back channel\u0026rdquo; on an IRC network for the whole conference. While there were downsides to this (correlating peoples handles with their faces was difficult), this was incredibly fascinating. It also made the sessions go off better: people who were confused were able to ask questions of the room, it kept the background noise down which was better for participants, and since there was only one room for the whole conference it gave me a sense of what was going on at the conference as a whole.\nSomeone pretty early on said something like \u0026ldquo;this is literally the subtext of the room,\u0026rdquo; and they were right. I\u0026rsquo;m a fan of creating/organizing IRC/Jabber (XMPP) MUCs back channels for various conversations. We use one at work during conference calls to pass links/notes between our side (to keep down the number of voices/unmuted lines), and we had one for the Open Microbloging Meeting which made that really productive. It\u0026rsquo;s a cool idea.\nThe other great thing is that I got to watch other really geeky people use their computers. While I\u0026rsquo;m not a UI (user interface) designer, UI/UE (experience) is something that I\u0026rsquo;m very interested in and have an opinion or two about. One thing I noticed was that there were more Macs in the room than you might expect. Part of this has to do with the fact that the market share for non-enterprise laptops is something that Apple has basically clobbered, I\u0026rsquo;m sure. Mac laptops are also more popular among the young hacker crowd (which drupal developers are.) There were some PCs, and more than a few people running ubuntu on laptops, which I don\u0026rsquo;t have the guts for right now, thats for sure.\nIn terms of actual usage, there actually wasn\u0026rsquo;t as much of the \u0026ldquo;hardcore hacker\u0026rdquo; stuff that you\u0026rsquo;d expect. I didn\u0026rsquo;t see a lot of terminal usage (except for the woman who had tsch visors and wrote a pretty complex SQL query by hand on the projector. to answer a question after her talk.) I saw a lot of people who used the gmail web app. Virtually all of the non-mac people used Zend Studio or Eclipse, though I know I wasn\u0026rsquo;t the only TextMate user in the room. The most surprising thing, was the shear number of people who I saw using gmail and Firefox. Gmail is ok I guess, but it isn\u0026rsquo;t brilliant and it isn\u0026rsquo;t mutt, and surely I\u0026rsquo;m not the only one with a gripe about firefox.\nSorry for such an odd analysis of Drupal Camp Chicago 2008. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be working on some more\u0026hellip; Drupalish for work, but while I\u0026rsquo;m a huge geek--no surprise there--I always seem to be more interested in watching the room than in watching the speaker.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/geek-camp/","summary":"I went to Drupal Camp Chicago last week for work, and while a lot of what I did was work related--learning about Drupal and what the really hard core folks are doing with it--the camp was an emersive experience, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t help but make a few casual observations about geeks in general. They\u0026rsquo;re documented and explored below, and I\u0026rsquo;ll have a more technical/theoretical reflection of the experience tomorrow or the next day.\nThis was my first \u0026ldquo;BarCamp\u0026rdquo;/unconference, and I really liked the way it felt. There was a lot of knowledge being shared, there was a lot of collaboration, and there was a lot of energy in the room. I go to Morris Dance Ales, and Knitting Camp for the same reason, really. Intense interest and activity around a shared sub-cultural identity/activity, is a really powerful and invigorating thing. This is probably the same reason that \u0026ldquo;(gay) men\u0026rsquo;s gatherings,\u0026rdquo; science fiction conventions, and the \u0026ldquo;Michigan Womyn\u0026rsquo;s Music Festival\u0026rdquo; are so appealing to so many people.","title":"Geek Camp"},{"content":"So this is a knitting blog?1 Right! A knitting blog. And I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting some interesting things. In my last post about knitting, I mentioned getting unstuck. Though I\u0026rsquo;m entering a slow patch, it\u0026rsquo;s clear to me that this is just a time management issue (and sleeve island issue) and not a real block. Here\u0026rsquo;s where I am:\nI knit the collar and started the first sleeve for the Latvian Dreaming sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m a that point about 4 inches into a sleeve where time seems like it stops. For the non knitters, allow me to describe the anatomy of the process of knitting a sleeve for a sweater.\nThe top of the sleeve where it hits the shoulder goes very quickly. This is ironic because the sleeve is it\u0026rsquo;s largest at this point. I think it goes quickly because you are either near the beginning (if you start at the shoulders,) and anything new seems to go just a little faster. Conversely if you start at the cuff. the top of the sleeve goes fast because it means that you are almost done.\nThe cuff of the sleeve and the last 4-6 inches go reasonably quickly. For the opposite reasons as the top of the sleeve, but the ideas the same. It\u0026rsquo;s either near the end or the beginning which equals a larger compulsion or interest in the knitting.\nThere are about 4 inches near the top of the sleeve which take forever, because the knitting never seems to grow no matter how much you knit and or measure. This is, I think a product of the fact that sleeves are a much larger proposition than anyone expects and there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of knitting to be done in a sleeve. I think this feeling is properly thought of as \u0026ldquo;sleeve hell,\u0026rdquo; but you can call it whatever you want.\nThe remaining 6-8 or so inches go slowly, but not too slowly and in that can be pretty therapeutic, once you realize that you are making progress and that you may actually like the sweater you\u0026rsquo;re knitting.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s where I am, anyone have any other theories?\nThe truth is that I think more knitters comment on my geeky posts than comment on my knitting posts. I\u0026rsquo;m--perhaps improperly--taking this as encouragement to keep doing what I\u0026rsquo;m doing, but I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about my knitting, for my own record keeping.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sleeve-hell/","summary":"So this is a knitting blog?1 Right! A knitting blog. And I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting some interesting things. In my last post about knitting, I mentioned getting unstuck. Though I\u0026rsquo;m entering a slow patch, it\u0026rsquo;s clear to me that this is just a time management issue (and sleeve island issue) and not a real block. Here\u0026rsquo;s where I am:\nI knit the collar and started the first sleeve for the Latvian Dreaming sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m a that point about 4 inches into a sleeve where time seems like it stops. For the non knitters, allow me to describe the anatomy of the process of knitting a sleeve for a sweater.\nThe top of the sleeve where it hits the shoulder goes very quickly. This is ironic because the sleeve is it\u0026rsquo;s largest at this point. I think it goes quickly because you are either near the beginning (if you start at the shoulders,) and anything new seems to go just a little faster.","title":"Sleeve Hell"},{"content":"In my post about calendar programs a number of great readers suggested that I should try \u0026ldquo;Lightning\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Sunbird\u0026rdquo; which are part of the Mozilla Calendar Project. Calendars from the people who bring us Firefox and Thunderbird.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t include these programs in my initial review for a couple of reasons. The first, is that I downloaded an early beta of Sunbird, and was (unsurprisingly) rough, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t see that there was anything particularly earth-shattering. The second is that I find the Mozilla applications to be remarkably awkward and borderline unusable.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to to download and test Sunbird, in an attempt to be complete and because I suspect that the quality of the application has improved in the past couple of years. I don\u0026rsquo;t use Thunderbird because of my aversion to Mozilla and XUL (and mutt sucks less), which nixed the lightening option.\nAnd now on to the interesting part, why I hate Mozilla apps. They all suck. Which is to say that they all look the same, and have this shrink-wrap feel that feels awkward in almost every operating system/environment. This means that everything looks ugly and functionality is never where you\u0026rsquo;d expect it to be. This might be a good thing if you use a bunch of different operating systems, and want your apps to be consistent cross-platform, but generally I think this is heavy handed and it means that your \u0026ldquo;cross platform\u0026rdquo; apps don\u0026rsquo;t work like any of the other \u0026ldquo;platform apps.\u0026rdquo;\nNow of course web browsers and email clients are pretty straightforward and there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot learning curve, but I think usability and ergonomics in contemporary desktop computing comes down to seconds of frustration and confusion, and not upfront learning curves. At least for me.\nTo be fair I use Firefox without complaint on my linux environments and I think they work great for that, and I think the real test of Sunbird will be how well the experience is on a linux system. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if this is a product of the fact that everything seems a little disjointed about user interface on linux. In this direction I find it particularly annoying that Mozilla apps don\u0026rsquo;t work with the \u0026ldquo;Services\u0026rdquo; menu on OS X.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve found this annoyance factor with any Mozilla product I\u0026rsquo;ve used in recent years. I\u0026rsquo;ve always blamed it on XUL (the Mozilla interface design methodology), and the idea that Mozilla seems to place a greater emphasis quantity of users than specific quality. Am I the only one who feels this way? Do other people really like the Mozilla apps\u0026rsquo; user interface? Why?/Why not?\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mozilla-of-all-trades-master-of-_____/","summary":"In my post about calendar programs a number of great readers suggested that I should try \u0026ldquo;Lightning\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Sunbird\u0026rdquo; which are part of the Mozilla Calendar Project. Calendars from the people who bring us Firefox and Thunderbird.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t include these programs in my initial review for a couple of reasons. The first, is that I downloaded an early beta of Sunbird, and was (unsurprisingly) rough, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t see that there was anything particularly earth-shattering. The second is that I find the Mozilla applications to be remarkably awkward and borderline unusable.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to to download and test Sunbird, in an attempt to be complete and because I suspect that the quality of the application has improved in the past couple of years. I don\u0026rsquo;t use Thunderbird because of my aversion to Mozilla and XUL (and mutt sucks less), which nixed the lightening option.\nAnd now on to the interesting part, why I hate Mozilla apps.","title":"Mozilla of All Trades"},{"content":"This is part three, in my ongoing series on the Awesome window manager. For an introduction to what Awesome is, read part one, and for some of my complaints/gripes about Awesome. This post is more a collection of \u0026ldquo;things that should be done about awesome.\u0026rdquo;\nIn a lot of ways this post brings up a number of points that aren\u0026rsquo;t necessarily specific to Awesome, but rather provide a good (start) to and an idea of what people who aren\u0026rsquo;t programers can contribute to open source projects.\nUser Guides/Documentation Most open source projects need help writing documentation, so anyone whose good at understanding technical concepts (or figuring them out, which is, I think a good chunk of my remaining readership,) can probably write pretty good documentation. Perhaps most difficult in open source projects is editing old documentation to reflect changes and revisions/expansion. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in doing this, you can basically take your pick of any open source project and go to town. Everyone needs help with documentation just about, and to publish a GNU GFDL/BSD-Style manual isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing you need to get approval for.\nThe truth is that programs like Awesome don\u0026rsquo;t need formal documentation. The man pages are pretty complete with all the formal functions/features pretty well documented. The problem is that the initial learning curve is pretty tough, and the man pages can be pretty unsympathetic. The truth of the matter is that a lot of times what isn\u0026rsquo;t needed as much as formal documentation, but rather shorter more accessible documents that explain key features and help new users get acclimated to the system. Let\u0026rsquo;s call them \u0026ldquo;user guides,\u0026rdquo; and Awesome needs them.\nMore Configuration Files Configuration files in unix/linux programs are almost always these really simple, straightforward lists of various settings and key-bindings. In awesome, you have to describe and create the interface in the configuration file, so configuration is non-trivial. While I think there are various merits to this kind of setup, like it allows more flexibility and the user base is pretty high level so super-usability isn\u0026rsquo;t a big concern, the down side is that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to know where to start.\nTo this end, I think it would be really great if there were (even more) different and well commented example configuration files so that interested users could \u0026ldquo;try out\u0026rdquo; a number of different settings, and have a basis for starting to modify their own config files. I proposed in a previous entry that I thought a more modular/segmented approach to the config file might be good to separate widgets, key bindings, and hooks/etc. into separate files, and while this might be a good idea, I think having examples around would make this easier.\nSpecial Use Case Reports Aside from the initial learning curve, I\u0026rsquo;d say the biggest problem with Awesome is the name. Odd complaint you say? Well it makes it really hard for google to index information about Awesome. So it\u0026rsquo;s hard for users like you and me to find blog posts about how to do cool things with awesome. Outside of the Awesome Wiki, its hard to figure out what cool things folks are doing with Awesome, or even how most awesome users are overcoming every-day-use challenges.\nI\u0026rsquo;m calling these sorts of things \u0026ldquo;special use case reports,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s really just blogging. I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear and be able to collect discussions and blog posts from other Awesome users about what they\u0026rsquo;re doing with the software. I think the collection of this knowledge would be a great resource.\nThoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/awesome-projects/","summary":"This is part three, in my ongoing series on the Awesome window manager. For an introduction to what Awesome is, read part one, and for some of my complaints/gripes about Awesome. This post is more a collection of \u0026ldquo;things that should be done about awesome.\u0026rdquo;\nIn a lot of ways this post brings up a number of points that aren\u0026rsquo;t necessarily specific to Awesome, but rather provide a good (start) to and an idea of what people who aren\u0026rsquo;t programers can contribute to open source projects.\nUser Guides/Documentation Most open source projects need help writing documentation, so anyone whose good at understanding technical concepts (or figuring them out, which is, I think a good chunk of my remaining readership,) can probably write pretty good documentation. Perhaps most difficult in open source projects is editing old documentation to reflect changes and revisions/expansion. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in doing this, you can basically take your pick of any open source project and go to town.","title":"Awesome Projects"},{"content":"This is a continuation of my earlier post on the awesome window manager read there for the background. I\u0026rsquo;m going to focus on some of the challenges that I\u0026rsquo;ve had trying to use Awesome.\nApplications made for Awesome The truth is that most (linux) applications work pretty well with awesome, so linux users won\u0026rsquo;t need to find new programs. GNOME and KDE apps all work fine. Having said that there are some applications which are more suited to the \u0026ldquo;Awesome\u0026rdquo; environment. Generally anything that runs in the terminal is fair game. That means mutt for email, vimperator for firefox, mcabber for jabber (but there are some issues here). Terminator is my favorite terminal/console program. Irssi for IRC. Vim as a texteditor.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a good place to start as any, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure that there are other apps out there that I\u0026rsquo;m missing. Your thoughts and suggestions of cool command line apps is always appreciated. Non-Awesome apps that I find myself using with awesome include Cream, and Pidgin.\nThe Scripting is Hard. This is mostly a whine, and something that I can get over. Ideally once I get this to work, I can save this Lua file and make awesome work wherever I need to in no time flat, but it\u0026rsquo;s a lot to get the brain around. I think it might help if there were more examples of Awesome configuration files to ease the tradition. Furthermore, I think it might also be helpful if there was a structure for multiple config files, or an allowance for \u0026ldquo;sourced\u0026rdquo; files (a la mutt/vim/bash). Basically I think it\u0026rsquo;d be cool to have a \u0026ldquo;widgets\u0026rdquo; file and a \u0026ldquo;tag file\u0026rdquo; and a key-binding file. Or at least have the option of such. This would make tweaking the config file much easier, and give some structure to a chaotic system.\nNotifications I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of growl, the notification framework for OS X. which makes it easy to get notifications if you have a lot of windows open, have things running in the background, or need to track things running in the background. I haven\u0026rsquo;t found an equivalent solution, though I\u0026rsquo;m sure something exists.\nThings I haven\u0026rsquo;t figured out yet: I want to be able to assign firefox to only open in (multiple) selected tags, but not in others, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to make this work. Some sort of menu of currently running applications that would let users select a running application/client and jump to the appropriate tag. That would be awesome. Using this configuration file, I can\u0026rsquo;t get the pidgin (or any other) system tray icons to pop up. Weird. The truth is that Awesome pretty much does what you want it to do, and there aren\u0026rsquo;t any real serious bugs or oversights. Part of this is Awesome\u0026rsquo;s success at having a very clear and limited scope, and part of this is the fact that just about everything that Awesome doesn\u0026rsquo;t do, you can use the existing tools from GNOME or KDE (the more typical open source desktop environments.) But I think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to at least make note of the frustrations, if nothing else so that people newer to awesome than I don\u0026rsquo;t feel so lost. It\u0026rsquo;s normal, and I think (hope?) it\u0026rsquo;ll get better.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/awesome-problems/","summary":"This is a continuation of my earlier post on the awesome window manager read there for the background. I\u0026rsquo;m going to focus on some of the challenges that I\u0026rsquo;ve had trying to use Awesome.\nApplications made for Awesome The truth is that most (linux) applications work pretty well with awesome, so linux users won\u0026rsquo;t need to find new programs. GNOME and KDE apps all work fine. Having said that there are some applications which are more suited to the \u0026ldquo;Awesome\u0026rdquo; environment. Generally anything that runs in the terminal is fair game. That means mutt for email, vimperator for firefox, mcabber for jabber (but there are some issues here). Terminator is my favorite terminal/console program. Irssi for IRC. Vim as a texteditor.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a good place to start as any, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure that there are other apps out there that I\u0026rsquo;m missing. Your thoughts and suggestions of cool command line apps is always appreciated.","title":"Awesome Problems"},{"content":"So despite being a huge geek and pretty technically savvy, I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a gadget person. I have a cellphone--but who doesn\u0026rsquo;t these days, and mine\u0026rsquo;s 3 years old and seems to only barely have an address book--and an iPod, but it\u0026rsquo;s old reliable and not sexy. The iPod touch that I got as part of a promotion when I got my new computer sits unused most of the time.\nThe thing is, that my cell phone contract is (blessedly) up in March and I\u0026rsquo;m beginning the long slow slug towards deciding what kind of phone I should get. I\u0026rsquo;m slow on the decision making process, and I thought it\u0026rsquo;d be a good idea to get started now. It\u0026rsquo;s of particular interest because my phone usage has changed dramatically recently. I\u0026rsquo;ve gone from using it a few times a month to being on the phone for an hour or two most days (and sometimes more.) And since I even have a calendar now, I think something more robust is in order. Basically this boils down to iPhone or BlackBerry (or Google Andriod). Admittedly this doesn\u0026rsquo;t really cut out any option other than the OpenMoko (which is ironically more expensive and I don\u0026rsquo;t think quite production ready.) We\u0026rsquo;ll start with the iPhone, vis a vis the ipod touch:\nWhile I was initially optimistic that the iPod touch would become more useful as applications matured, and people (myself included) developed workflows that incorporated the device. As it turns out, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this has really happened. Applications seem to be: well intentioned but missing the extra-zing that would make them really amazing, or they feel like some Suit said \u0026ldquo;iPhone app, we need one of those,\u0026rdquo; and thus they place more emphasis on the existing than on the being useful. And I\u0026rsquo;m not going to lie, I haven\u0026rsquo;t really adjusted to the virtual keyboard. It\u0026rsquo;s functional, but I think only barely. So while the iPhone is very sexy, and the obvious choice, its not automatic.\nAnother anti-iPhone factor is that I\u0026rsquo;m generally avoidant about syncing my iPods and tend to go months without syncing them, and I fear that this might really cripple the the utility Particularly in a couple of months when my iTunes library once again outgrows my hard drive. Oh, and did I mention that I already have an iPod?\nRight.\nAt the same time I\u0026rsquo;m pretty impressed with the upcoming BlackBerry Bold Hardware keyboard, an established platform, good hardware? Blackberry\u0026rsquo;s can manage background processes, and they have good XMPP/Jabber/IM email support, which is, most of what I\u0026rsquo;d want to use an internet capable phone anyway.\nI hadn\u0026rsquo;t really considered the Google Android phones a viable player, and I think largely they aren\u0026rsquo;t. I don\u0026rsquo;t suspect the hardware will be there by March or April of 09, and while I like a lot of the idea (from what I\u0026rsquo;ve seen) of Android, the truth is that I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen much. Maybe this is because I don\u0026rsquo;t follow these things, but I think if I\u0026rsquo;m worried about the ipod for not being developed enough, then that\u0026rsquo;s going to be an even bigger barrier for Android.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a long time between then and now, so this could all change. Clearly I\u0026rsquo;m leaning BlackBerry, but I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you all are using.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ipod-touch-2phone/","summary":"So despite being a huge geek and pretty technically savvy, I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a gadget person. I have a cellphone--but who doesn\u0026rsquo;t these days, and mine\u0026rsquo;s 3 years old and seems to only barely have an address book--and an iPod, but it\u0026rsquo;s old reliable and not sexy. The iPod touch that I got as part of a promotion when I got my new computer sits unused most of the time.\nThe thing is, that my cell phone contract is (blessedly) up in March and I\u0026rsquo;m beginning the long slow slug towards deciding what kind of phone I should get. I\u0026rsquo;m slow on the decision making process, and I thought it\u0026rsquo;d be a good idea to get started now. It\u0026rsquo;s of particular interest because my phone usage has changed dramatically recently. I\u0026rsquo;ve gone from using it a few times a month to being on the phone for an hour or two most days (and sometimes more.","title":"iPod Touch #2/Phone"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been meaning to write a post about awesome for some time now, but I always seem to have a problem figuring out how to approach awesome. In part because I feel like an utter newbie, and in part because it presents such a radically different way of thinking about computer interaction that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a good way of explaining it or my issue. Not only does this make it difficult for me to figure out what I need to do, but it\u0026rsquo; makes it difficult to contribute to the project by working on the wiki (which I think needs to be done.) So I\u0026rsquo;m going to just start at the beginning. Expect that this will be an ongoing series.\nWhat is Awesome Awesome is a piece of software for operating systems running the X11 window server (Unix/BSD/Linux)1 that controls and determines how different clients (windows in the parlance of most systems) are displayed and allowed to interact. Unlike most other window mangers, Awesome tiles windows, so that the entire screen is used. No space is wasted.\nWhy is Tiling Good? Using all available space with tiling seems like a good idea--or at least not objectionable--until you realize that if all windows are \u0026ldquo;tiled\u0026rdquo; until all space is taken up, you\u0026rsquo;ll probably realize that, depending on your monitor size, as soon you hit 4 or five open windows, everything gets too squished for words. And you can\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;minimize windows\u0026rdquo; in the conventional sense using awesome, so what gives? Tags.\nTags equate, roughly, with virtual desktops, as provided with OS X\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Spaces\u0026rdquo; or the virtual desktops that KDE or GNOME have. Virtual desktops/tags \u0026ldquo;multiplex\u0026rdquo; the desktop enviroment so that rather than having to cram all your windows into one \u0026ldquo;screen\u0026rdquo; you can cycle between different virtual \u0026ldquo;slates\u0026rdquo; of windows. Go to an Apple store and get someone to show you a demonstration of \u0026ldquo;Spaces\u0026rdquo; if you\u0026rsquo;re still confused (or find a video of it on you tube.) It might be the kind of thing that you have to see to understand.\nIn any case, awesome allows for a really large number of tags. And each screen has it\u0026rsquo;s own set of tags. Typically you have 9 tags per screen, but it\u0026rsquo;d be possible to have more. And there are all sorts of things you can do to tags, like assign certain applications to only open on certain tags, assign certain window tiling patterns to certain tags.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s all? I hinted to this in the last section but the environment and interaction in awesome is entirely scripted in Lua. While Lua presents yet another scripting language that I don\u0026rsquo;t know, it\u0026rsquo;s clear even to me that there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of flexibility in this approach. While you sacrifice something by not being able to dynamically adjust the settings, the extra control over shaping your interactions between the window manager is really cool.\nWhat makes this even more cool, however, is the fact that any action, can be bound to a key command or group of key commands. Any window management task. Which means that the only need for a mouse are for very clearly \u0026ldquo;mouse related\u0026rdquo; application specific tasks. Which means that you don\u0026rsquo;t need to use the mouse for very much. Less mouse use means better ergonomics and better user efficiency. Also, awesome is very \u0026ldquo;lightweight,\u0026rdquo; and runs very fast because from a computing perspective it\u0026rsquo;s very minimal. This is a good thing.\nOk, that\u0026rsquo;s all I have for now. There\u0026rsquo;s more, so stay tuned.\nThere is a package in MacPorts, but I can\u0026rsquo;t get it to install, and since OS X doesn\u0026rsquo;t really use X, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how it would work, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure it would work with GUN-Darwin.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/awesome-thoughts/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been meaning to write a post about awesome for some time now, but I always seem to have a problem figuring out how to approach awesome. In part because I feel like an utter newbie, and in part because it presents such a radically different way of thinking about computer interaction that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a good way of explaining it or my issue. Not only does this make it difficult for me to figure out what I need to do, but it\u0026rsquo; makes it difficult to contribute to the project by working on the wiki (which I think needs to be done.) So I\u0026rsquo;m going to just start at the beginning. Expect that this will be an ongoing series.\nWhat is Awesome Awesome is a piece of software for operating systems running the X11 window server (Unix/BSD/Linux)1 that controls and determines how different clients (windows in the parlance of most systems) are displayed and allowed to interact.","title":"Awesome Thoughts"},{"content":"So I, um, bought a computer last Friday.\nPeople who followed the lead up to the purchase of my current computer--which took six months, or a year depending on who you ask--will be surprised that this happened so quickly.\nFor a while now I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to have a computer that would be able to always be on so that I could download big files when I needed to without needing to fuss with making sure that my laptop could be on all night, or similar such concerns. I wanted to have a computer that I could add cheap drives to as needed. I want to be able to have a computer connected to a couple of IRC channels without needing to worry about my computer dropping on and off-line constantly (which is a politeness that I worry about.)\nThe thing is that it never seemed feasible. Macs are expensive computers, and this wasn\u0026rsquo;t a premium sort of use case. For many years of my life I was really mobile and having a desktop computer never made much sense. Now that this new job has started to settle down, and as I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten more into linux, it\u0026rsquo;s becoming more and more clear that having a desktop computer with lots of screen space is going to be really valuable to me in this next stage anyway, and the truth is that I spend a good deal of my computing time (with my laptop) at my desk, so a desktop made a lot of sense.\nAnd with this growing interest in open source technology/community/history it makes a lot of sense to gather some greater familiarity with the environment. So between the new usage profile, the fact that the hardware isn\u0026rsquo;t nearly as expensive in practice, and the fact that having a linux box would be a good ethnographic experience, I just hunkered down and bought it, after only a few weeks of dithering on the subject. I even splurged and got a second monitor so that I could run dual monitors, even so it cost less than the souped up MiniMac (which is sans monitor). I\u0026rsquo;m psyched.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you the unboxing photos, I think its highly likely that I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing about my experiences with this new computer as I settle in. Stay tuned\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/linux-update/","summary":"So I, um, bought a computer last Friday.\nPeople who followed the lead up to the purchase of my current computer--which took six months, or a year depending on who you ask--will be surprised that this happened so quickly.\nFor a while now I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to have a computer that would be able to always be on so that I could download big files when I needed to without needing to fuss with making sure that my laptop could be on all night, or similar such concerns. I wanted to have a computer that I could add cheap drives to as needed. I want to be able to have a computer connected to a couple of IRC channels without needing to worry about my computer dropping on and off-line constantly (which is a politeness that I worry about.)\nThe thing is that it never seemed feasible. Macs are expensive computers, and this wasn\u0026rsquo;t a premium sort of use case.","title":"Linux Update"},{"content":"I remember once in high school (lets call this 2003/04) I bought an 8.5x11 paper calendar. This was after the age of PDAs (indeed I think I had a PDA at that point), and damned if it wasn\u0026rsquo;t the best calendaring experience I\u0026rsquo;d ever had. I kept track of things, I knew what was going on beyond the obvious, it was pretty good.\nOther than that, I\u0026rsquo;ve not really (until now) used a calendar in my day to day work. I have a good memory, and pretty simple commitments, so it\u0026rsquo;s never been a big deal, and most calendaring tools kind of suck. Actually, really suck.\nNow mostly, I could care less, except I have this job now, and the scheduling is really complex. I have meetings with clients, I have intra-office meetings, there are things I have to schedule with other people. It\u0026rsquo;s intense. So I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to figure out what to use, how to connect with other calendars, and generally how to make it all work. I\u0026rsquo;ll tell you what my uneasy solution has been, but I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you use.\nChandler The Chandler Project is a really pretty darn interesting open source program. It\u0026rsquo;s written all in python, it\u0026rsquo;s designed for collaboration and uses all the open standards. It has a really interesting and useful tagging system. It has a feature-loaded (and not annoying!) web interface that compliments the desktop experience.\nAnd despite this it\u0026rsquo;s kludgey. It\u0026rsquo;s not peppy, it uses it\u0026rsquo;s own paradigm, and like all multi-platform software, it ends up looking just a bit foreign on all OSes (though I\u0026rsquo;ve not worked very much with it on linux, so to be fair, it might seem less out of place.)\nStill, Chandler has become my \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo; Calendar Application. There\u0026rsquo;s something nice about the way that it syncs to Chandler Hub, and all the cool things I mentioned above. And I like it\u0026rsquo;s dashboard a lot. When I started doing this job, I went from being able to handle a month\u0026rsquo;s appointments on an index card (or equivalent) to having to having to keep track of tasks and meetings in at least 3 time zones, and Chandler gives me enough flexibility and power to be able to do this without getting in the way.\nICS format I think the last time I tried to use calendars on the computer, it was before people were seriously using a standard format. So you\u0026rsquo;d spend a lot of time putting your data into one program, only to have it die a horrible death, or discover something even better and then be stuck in your old program. Not so any more the .ics format is used by (nearly) all programs and by google calender so you can subscribe and sync calendars to your hearts content and it will all work. In all of your programs. Which means, you don\u0026rsquo;t need to chose the ideal calendar program, as long as it supports .ics files.\niCal I\u0026rsquo;ve had a pretty tortured relationship with iCal, Apple\u0026rsquo;s stock Calendar program. In previous versions of the OS it used to be really crappy. And while it\u0026rsquo;s much better now, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing special about it, and it\u0026rsquo;s just a bit too hard to use it to enter events, and it\u0026rsquo;s task management is farcical.\nHaving said that it looks really good. Before you laugh at me and call me an apple fanboy allow me to be clear: data visualization is 60%-75% of a good calendar program (with the rest being performance and data entry/manipulation). The whole point is to be able to see what\u0026rsquo;s going on throughout your day/week at a glance. Good visuals are key.\nThe great thing, is that with Chandler Hub / Google Calendars and the .ics format, you can use both programs and still keep all your data together pretty seamlessly\nIdeals Like I mentioned earlier, I\u0026rsquo;m open to hear what other people use. At least for the moment I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably happy with what I have. It might be nice to have better command line access to be able to quickly review upcoming appointments and enter new tasks, but that\u0026rsquo;s mostly a pipe dream. Is there something I should be looking for that I don\u0026rsquo;t know? Other cool OSS projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve missed?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/calendar-ing/","summary":"I remember once in high school (lets call this 2003/04) I bought an 8.5x11 paper calendar. This was after the age of PDAs (indeed I think I had a PDA at that point), and damned if it wasn\u0026rsquo;t the best calendaring experience I\u0026rsquo;d ever had. I kept track of things, I knew what was going on beyond the obvious, it was pretty good.\nOther than that, I\u0026rsquo;ve not really (until now) used a calendar in my day to day work. I have a good memory, and pretty simple commitments, so it\u0026rsquo;s never been a big deal, and most calendaring tools kind of suck. Actually, really suck.\nNow mostly, I could care less, except I have this job now, and the scheduling is really complex. I have meetings with clients, I have intra-office meetings, there are things I have to schedule with other people. It\u0026rsquo;s intense. So I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to figure out what to use, how to connect with other calendars, and generally how to make it all work.","title":"Calendar-ing"},{"content":"So, I was tooling around the internet (it\u0026rsquo;s my job!) and I came across yet another website that wanted me to \u0026ldquo;create an account\u0026rdquo; in order to do something that I wanted to do. And so I did. I mean, this is what we all do on the internet, right?\nAnd then it struck me--a bit late--that this was patently absurd. It\u0026rsquo;s already a little odd/annoying that seemingly every website on the internet forces us to create and manage a new account/identity, let alone multiple identities on the same service. I mean no one has more than one twitter account, right? And nearly every account that we make with every service has it\u0026rsquo;s own \u0026ldquo;identity\u0026rdquo; and password.\nWhich means, practically, that we all have (at best) two or three passwords which are mildly to moderately secure, and we use those over and over again, and rarely change. Which is not secure at all. But it\u0026rsquo;s also a problem if we use passwords that are really secure and then can\u0026rsquo;t remember them. Solutions like 1password are great, and help those who want to be really secure with this problem, but this really just treats the symptom, and not the problem that a user-generated password is the way to find security. And while passwords are better than no passwords, there are better ways.\nThere are, as I see it, two solutions to provide better user security on the internet:\nOpen ID. This is a protocol by which users can create an access an account on site A by signing into and verifying their identity with site B. It works, and it means that we end up signing into fewer sites and have fewer versions of our passwords in circulation. This works best I\u0026rsquo;m convinced, if we use big openID providers like Flickr, Blogger, and LiveJournal, and then delegate that openID to a third party website (a domain that you own, say), so that if your account ever gets compromised/abandoned, all the sites which depend on that openID aren\u0026rsquo;t compromised/abandoned as well. You wonder how this identity can be trusted? This is really an existential concern more than a pragmatic one because OpenID is no less legit than providing your (fake) name and (freely available) gmail email address. Public Key encryption. Using PGP/GPG the internet should develop some sort of handshake for the web where by, we sign up for sites, upload a public key, and then when we want to sign in the server generates a dynamic string and encrypts it with our public keys and sends it to us. Our computers then ask for our key pass-phrase (or not), decrypt the string, and send it back. The server compares what we send to what they sent, sees that it works, and then lets it in. This is really secure, particularly if the handshake happens over SSL. This is relatively simple from a computer science perspective. All that really needs to be done is) write something sexy that makes the UI work, and then get Google or someone to start using it. Everyone else will follow. It\u0026rsquo;s subject to man in the middle attacks, but then, everything is, and unlike a password that you only have to \u0026ldquo;hear\u0026rdquo; once in order to steal, guessing someone\u0026rsquo;s private key, based on only a few encrypt/decrypted strings is computationally (I understand) damn hard. Who\u0026rsquo;s with me?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-are-we-still-using-passwords/","summary":"So, I was tooling around the internet (it\u0026rsquo;s my job!) and I came across yet another website that wanted me to \u0026ldquo;create an account\u0026rdquo; in order to do something that I wanted to do. And so I did. I mean, this is what we all do on the internet, right?\nAnd then it struck me--a bit late--that this was patently absurd. It\u0026rsquo;s already a little odd/annoying that seemingly every website on the internet forces us to create and manage a new account/identity, let alone multiple identities on the same service. I mean no one has more than one twitter account, right? And nearly every account that we make with every service has it\u0026rsquo;s own \u0026ldquo;identity\u0026rdquo; and password.\nWhich means, practically, that we all have (at best) two or three passwords which are mildly to moderately secure, and we use those over and over again, and rarely change. Which is not secure at all.","title":"Why Are we Still Using Passwords?"},{"content":"Most of the time when something new happens on the internet, I\u0026rsquo;m hopelessly behind the curve. I only really figured out wikis a few months ago, and I was a bit too young to get blogging out of the gate. And I was late to live journal and even then it took me years to figure out why that was so cool.\nBut microblogging? I was totally there, I mean I wasn\u0026rsquo;t there at the very beginning, but from the moment that there was any amount of steam behind twitter, I got it. Which is really cool, at least I think it is. Basically micro-blogging is a short, 140 character, \u0026ldquo;blog/messaging service\u0026rdquo; which combines the best parts of group chat and\nAnd as you might know from your own experience or from my previous posts, I\u0026rsquo;ve tried a lot of services and have a few opinions about what makes a service better or worse. I can hear you saying, \u0026ldquo;What tycho opinionated?\u0026rdquo; but suspend your shock, and hang with me.\nTwitter Twitter\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;killer feature\u0026rdquo; is the fact that there are so many users, and that it focuses on ease of usability, so people \u0026ldquo;get it\u0026rdquo; pretty quickly. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of power in the size of the community, and the fact that the crowd is no longer \u0026ldquo;just geeks.\u0026rdquo; The cons are that they don\u0026rsquo;t have IM access (which isn\u0026rsquo;t good) and that it\u0026rsquo;s all \u0026ldquo;too simple\u0026rdquo; so that it can be hard to track conversations and ideas and/or to have enough granular control over conversations.\nJiaku Jaiku started in Finland, and bought by google, innovated in two big ways. First, it combined the lifestreeming (a la whoisi and friendfeed) with microblogging. Secondly, it has threaded comments, which make a lot of sense, and provide a helpful way to get around the 140 character limit. There are also \u0026ldquo;channels\u0026rdquo; which users can join and form to create (almost) ad-hoc groups based on topics and events to keep discussion of events out of \u0026ldquo;general feed.\u0026rdquo;\nPlurk I have less experience with plurk than the other services. The features of this one seem to be: an innovative display (which I hate) and a greater focus on conversational threads, but I think the Jaiku solution is better, frankly. Also there\u0026rsquo;s this \u0026ldquo;karma\u0026rdquo; system which I think is clearly a cheap ploy to get people invested in their Plurk activity, but it\u0026rsquo;s too transparent and makes me feel like I\u0026rsquo;m in a game theory experiment which isn\u0026rsquo;t cool at all.\nFacebook Largely irrelevant, to my mind, but facebook has had \u0026ldquo;status\u0026rdquo; for a long time, and this is basically a microblogging feature. It now has comments, and isn\u0026rsquo;t prefixed by \u0026ldquo;is\u0026rdquo; (though for a while, there was some humor in how people used or didn\u0026rsquo;t use the leading to be conjugation.) I think as a serious microblogging competitor, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really pan out.\nPownce Pownce, is nifty, and as of today, has file sharing abilities that other services don\u0026rsquo;t have. That\u0026rsquo;s cool. Pownce is also the only one that I know of that has abandoned the 140 character limit, which I\u0026rsquo;d throw my hat behind. It also has threaded conversations, but I think jaiku\u0026rsquo;s implementation is a bit better. There\u0026rsquo;s IM but it\u0026rsquo;s not incredibly intuitive. It\u0026rsquo;s been a while, which brings me to the major down side is that despite having a semi-compelling feature set, the community has never been that large or active, or grown beyond the usual core of early adopters (etc.) that I\u0026rsquo;ve grown used to seeing everywhere. If we\u0026rsquo;re just talking about features though, I think pownce has a lot going for it, unfortunately this isn\u0026rsquo;t a features game.\nIdenti.ca Clearly this is where I am right now. Fundamentally, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if the laconica software solves (m)any of the problems with twitter. For the moment it uses a CMS rather than a messaging model, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have threaded conversations (really), the graphic design/theme needs a good once over, and there isn\u0026rsquo;t that huge community that twitter has going for it. The people who use identi.ca tend to be really into it, and that makes up for the relatively small size. It helps that there\u0026rsquo;s a real-time push-based IM/xmpp connection, and the scaling problem is solved by making growth a horizontal (federation) rather than a vertical (architecture/infrastructure) problem.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s the major players, at least of the open networks (not counting yammer, say) and of the sites that I\u0026rsquo;ve had any real interaction with. The most interesting thing about this is that it\u0026rsquo;s all going to be different in six months or a year, and it\u0026rsquo;s cool to be here now to watch as things unwind.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/micro-blogging-review/","summary":"Most of the time when something new happens on the internet, I\u0026rsquo;m hopelessly behind the curve. I only really figured out wikis a few months ago, and I was a bit too young to get blogging out of the gate. And I was late to live journal and even then it took me years to figure out why that was so cool.\nBut microblogging? I was totally there, I mean I wasn\u0026rsquo;t there at the very beginning, but from the moment that there was any amount of steam behind twitter, I got it. Which is really cool, at least I think it is. Basically micro-blogging is a short, 140 character, \u0026ldquo;blog/messaging service\u0026rdquo; which combines the best parts of group chat and\nAnd as you might know from your own experience or from my previous posts, I\u0026rsquo;ve tried a lot of services and have a few opinions about what makes a service better or worse.","title":"Micro Blogging Review"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve posted a bit a while back about Jabber and my trials with finding a good client, and how I think that jabber is the key to making microblogging really work. As I\u0026rsquo;ve been dealing with these issues/ideas in greater detail, I\u0026rsquo;ve had some more thoughts on the subject that I think I\u0026rsquo;ll collect here.\nFirst off, a subtitle and introduction to XMPP:\nThe easiest way to understand XMPP (or jabber, which I\u0026rsquo;ll use semi-interchangeably) is that it\u0026rsquo;s like email: everyone can run their own server, there\u0026rsquo;s a specified message metadata (like a header) that makes it possible for lots of servers to talk to each other. Non-jabber IM systems have a central server, which everyone authenticates with and that receives and distributes all messages/statuses between users. So why is distributed good? It solves a lot of scale issues, if most individual servers only need to handle the traffic for a very limited number of users, scaling becomes a horizontal (more servers) rather than a vertical problem (bigger servers.) Also distributed in this case means more individual control over computer usage without sacrificing potentially huge (or at least dunbar\u0026rsquo;s number sized) social networks.\nWhile this is all very interesting truth be told, this stuff has been around for a decade or more, and for a long time jabber has been the kind of thing that you used a little and then went back to AIM because the clients all sucked, no one really understood or used it, and frankly AIM worked better. In the last year or two things have really started to come together, I think, and XMPP is starting to seem really cool, and really powerful. Truth be told, I think this has a lot to do with critical mass, and the fact that google\u0026rsquo;s IM platform (Gtalk) is XMPP/Jabber based and interoperable, and so there are a lot more people who are now jabber capable.\nI think it also has to do with the fact that jabber gives web based software developers a way to offer push based access without resorting to polling APIs which doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale well and gets ugly pretty fast.\nThe breakthrough moment for me--or moments--have to do with multi-user chats. Now the internet has been doing group chats longer, I think, that we\u0026rsquo;ve been doing one-on-one chats, but IRC--the typical mode--is also centralized, or it\u0026rsquo;s distributed, in the sense that there are lots of servers, but the servers aren\u0026rsquo;t interoperable, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale well at all, and it requires IRC specific software that most people tend to just use (anymore), and that means multi-person conversations aren\u0026rsquo;t incredibly common-place.\nWhile XMPP multi-user-chats or \u0026ldquo;MUCs\u0026rdquo; aren\u0026rsquo;t too common yet, and (probably) have a host of problems which I\u0026rsquo;m totally incapable of addressing, I think there are a number of reasons that MUCs are really cool and already beat out IRC in a number of ways. The two biggest \u0026ldquo;pros\u0026rdquo; are the fact that users only have to sign into one thing, with an account that most folks already have,1 and that since servers are interoperable, you don\u0026rsquo;t have to manage a bunch of different connections with centralized servers.2 I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that the scaling problems of both IRC and XMPP (as technologies,) are nothing in compared to the scaling problems of human-text-based conversations.\nAnd as if that wasn\u0026rsquo;t enough friend of the blog is putting together the web-based front end/xmpp group chat service that might just make this all make sense to everyday users. While I might not be a big fan of the web-based service for day-to-day computing, there are times when it makes a lot of sense (particularly for capturing new users).\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be more thoughts, as there always are, but I think that does it for now. I try and sprinkle the really-geeky posts in with the more accessible posts because I think it helps me to understand things more clearly, and because I know the geek-quotient varies a good deal. If any of you want more details or have a particular interest in pushing me in one direction or another, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear it.\nOnward and Upward!\nI hate the \u0026ldquo;to do this really cool thing you need to fill out a membership application,\u0026rdquo; mentality that a lot of cool things on the internet have. Particularly since google gives away jabber IDs with all their accounts, this becomes even more awesome.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe argument in favor of centralized servers is that they simplify the message/data routing problem, so that individual clients needn\u0026rsquo;t be able to find each-other as long as each client can find the server. The problem is that we use programs like adium/pidgin or colloquy that allow us to connect to a bunch of different servers all at once. Which is clearly not advantageous, or ideal. Most of the time I\u0026rsquo;m connected to at least 4 different IM services, and at least a few IRC networks (freenode/oftc/undernet are most regular in that order, but ircnet/xkcd/sff/wyldryde are all on my list), which really, when you think about is kind of outlandish.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-jabberxmpp/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve posted a bit a while back about Jabber and my trials with finding a good client, and how I think that jabber is the key to making microblogging really work. As I\u0026rsquo;ve been dealing with these issues/ideas in greater detail, I\u0026rsquo;ve had some more thoughts on the subject that I think I\u0026rsquo;ll collect here.\nFirst off, a subtitle and introduction to XMPP:\nThe easiest way to understand XMPP (or jabber, which I\u0026rsquo;ll use semi-interchangeably) is that it\u0026rsquo;s like email: everyone can run their own server, there\u0026rsquo;s a specified message metadata (like a header) that makes it possible for lots of servers to talk to each other. Non-jabber IM systems have a central server, which everyone authenticates with and that receives and distributes all messages/statuses between users. So why is distributed good? It solves a lot of scale issues, if most individual servers only need to handle the traffic for a very limited number of users, scaling becomes a horizontal (more servers) rather than a vertical problem (bigger servers.","title":"On Jabber/XMPP"},{"content":"Dear Readers,\nI\u0026rsquo;m--or my alter-ego[^two name]--is going to be at Drupal Camp Chicago on the 24th and 25th of October, baring an unforeseen catastrophe.\nSo this presents several possibilities:\n1. You are already going to Drupal Camp Chicago and want to hang out with me or talk me into presenting something with you. To this, I say rock on.\n2. You are or will happen to be in Chicago that weekend and don\u0026rsquo;t give a rats ass about drupal, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be (hopefully) meeting friends from school on Saturday after the conference and I\u0026rsquo;d love to have blog people there too.\nIn addition I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of proposing a session on Open MicroBlogging and drupal, which I think might be really fun. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in contributing to this, I\u0026rsquo;d love help/co-conspirators. And I\u0026rsquo;m just a guy who thinks this shit is cool.\nI\u0026rsquo;m cross posting this but lets try and coordinate meet-ups and whatnot in the comments thread of the tychoish.com post. You can always email or jabber/xmpp me at garen@tychoish.com Rock On.\n[^two name]: I so need to figure out how to have two buttons made/get some sort of official \u0026ldquo;tycho garen\u0026rdquo; name tag. Ideas?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/drupal-camp-chicago/","summary":"Dear Readers,\nI\u0026rsquo;m--or my alter-ego[^two name]--is going to be at Drupal Camp Chicago on the 24th and 25th of October, baring an unforeseen catastrophe.\nSo this presents several possibilities:\n1. You are already going to Drupal Camp Chicago and want to hang out with me or talk me into presenting something with you. To this, I say rock on.\n2. You are or will happen to be in Chicago that weekend and don\u0026rsquo;t give a rats ass about drupal, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be (hopefully) meeting friends from school on Saturday after the conference and I\u0026rsquo;d love to have blog people there too.\nIn addition I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of proposing a session on Open MicroBlogging and drupal, which I think might be really fun. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in contributing to this, I\u0026rsquo;d love help/co-conspirators. And I\u0026rsquo;m just a guy who thinks this shit is cool.\nI\u0026rsquo;m cross posting this but lets try and coordinate meet-ups and whatnot in the comments thread of the tychoish.","title":"Drupal Camp Chicago"},{"content":"I posted a while ago about redoing my assbackards email downloading system. I finally did it. And it works great (and runs a bunch faster). The main sacrifice is that I now have to store two copies of my email directory on my server, but disk space is cheap and git is really effective at saving disk space/transfer speed, so it\u0026rsquo;s not a really big deal.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also much more straightforward, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to post the two (2!) simple shell scripts that I\u0026rsquo;m using along with a couple of recommendations/hints if you want to try this at home. I do recommend that anyone who does this should be familiar with git before attempting this. Sound good?\nGreat! Here goes.\nYou need:\nA repository on your server where your email will \u0026ldquo;land.\u0026rdquo; This should be a git repository that\u0026rsquo;s origin is: A bare repository that is also on your server. These directories should not be web accessible, and indeed, technically need not be on the same server even, though they need to be always-on servers at static locations, so that you can clone repositories on: A repository on your personal computer(s). Inside of the repository is a great place to keep your scripts (and indeed all settings for mail-related programs.) The two scripts you need are:\nsyncserver:\n#!/usr/bin/env bash # Get situated cd /path/to/mail/ # Pull Changes from the centralized (canonical) repository /path/togit pull origin \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 # Add in the new mail and push to the central repository /path/to/git add . /path/to/git commit -a -q -m \\ \u0026quot;server: mail drop commit, pre-push to central\u0026quot; /path/to/git push origin \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 syncmail:\n#!/usr/bin/env bash # Do things on the server synced ssh USERNAME@DOMAIN.TLD sh /path/to/mail/syncserver \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 # Do things locally to get changes upstreem to central ## Get Situated: cd /path/to/mail/ ## Pull new mail down, ## everyting after the | is to produce a mail notifciation ## using growl on OS X /path/to/git pull origin | /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -n mutt -a Mail.app -t \u0026quot;tycho garen (or maybe sam)'s mail status:\u0026quot; \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 ## Getting setup and then pushing any changes upstream /path/to/git add . for i in `git ls-files -d`; do /usr/local/git/bin/git rm --quiet $i; done /path/to/git commit -a -q -m \u0026quot;mail changes from NAME_OF_COMPUTER\u0026quot; /path/to/git push \u0026gt;/dev/null 2\u0026gt;\u0026amp;1 Feel free, of course to change the commit messages and take out the comments. Other thoughts on usage:\nHave public key sign-ins enabled on any machine that you use regularly. It\u0026rsquo;s more secure, faster. By all means, run \u0026ldquo;syncmail\u0026rdquo; in a launchd daemon/crontab. I\u0026rsquo;ve used absolute paths, starting with a \u0026ldquo;/\u0026rdquo; so that the shell doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to look for relative paths in order to run, which probably only gives me a marginal speed advantage, but you\u0026rsquo;ll want to figure out where your executables are and then put the right locations in. It\u0026rsquo;s a short script. While eventually, you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to tweak the syncserver file and after two runs, the changes will propagate, you have to put the file there manually (or run the pull yourself.) If you need to download mail from more than one source, you can run fetchmail at the beginning of syncmail This almost makes sense, finally. The only thing that I\u0026rsquo;m still trying to figure out is if I were to get, say an iPhone or a BlackBerry into this system. IMAP into my existing gmail account would be ok but not desirable for a number of reasons. I suppose I could forward email from my server/computer to a \u0026ldquo;mobile\u0026rdquo; account, but that would be like having an email cadet branch and there wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be syncing, which seems bad. On the other hand, it means I could pull out only the stuff I really need. It\u0026rsquo;s a ways off, but it\u0026rsquo;s pretty complicated.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-mail-3/","summary":"I posted a while ago about redoing my assbackards email downloading system. I finally did it. And it works great (and runs a bunch faster). The main sacrifice is that I now have to store two copies of my email directory on my server, but disk space is cheap and git is really effective at saving disk space/transfer speed, so it\u0026rsquo;s not a really big deal.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also much more straightforward, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to post the two (2!) simple shell scripts that I\u0026rsquo;m using along with a couple of recommendations/hints if you want to try this at home. I do recommend that anyone who does this should be familiar with git before attempting this. Sound good?\nGreat! Here goes.\nYou need:\nA repository on your server where your email will \u0026ldquo;land.\u0026rdquo; This should be a git repository that\u0026rsquo;s origin is: A bare repository that is also on your server. These directories should not be web accessible, and indeed, technically need not be on the same server even, though they need to be always-on servers at static locations, so that you can clone repositories on: A repository on your personal computer(s).","title":"Git Mail #3"},{"content":"In my fair city this week and last there\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of Scottish music. There\u0026rsquo;s a woman who\u0026rsquo;s been active in the local Scottish community (who knew?) for years, and she\u0026rsquo;s a retired music teacher and she does a program each year where she brings in top notch Scottish musicians to teach in local schools. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool, and it means that a lot of great Scottish musicians do concerts here. Anyway, this is a much more macro entry into this story than you really need, but it\u0026rsquo;s my blog and it seems fitting.\nAnyway, Ed Miller, an amazing folklorist and singer did a concert and sang \u0026ldquo;A Bottle of the Best\u0026rdquo; which some googleing has revealed is written by Jack Foley. It\u0026rsquo;s a perfectly good song, and one that I\u0026rsquo;d heard dozens of times before, but it wasn\u0026rsquo;t something that had really stuck with me as you might it expect. It does, however, have the following \u0026ldquo;make fun of the English\u0026rdquo; verse:\nAnd the English like their ale warm and flat, straight oot the pail They aye slitter wi\u0026rsquo; their bitter; it would slaughter Jack the Ripper, And they sip their cider rough, they huff and puff and sniff and snuff, And as if that\u0026rsquo;s no\u0026rsquo; enough, they start tae sing.\nWhen Jones\u0026rsquo; Ale Was new, or John Barleycorn\u0026rsquo;s fine brew Fathom the Bowl, the Barley Mow, Bring us a Barrel, just a few But their songs are far surpassed by the tinkle in the glass When you\u0026rsquo;ve broken oot a bottle of the best.\nWhich is, on the face of it, not a particularly clever verse as these things go, but he was able to sing it in a way that perfectly captured a very English way of singing. It was hilarious, or at least I thought so, because while it\u0026rsquo;s a fine verse, the musical pun really made it.\nIt helps that I really like that kind of singing. There\u0026rsquo;s something really cool about standing around in a doorway with friends or strangers singing a song, and it\u0026rsquo;s not so much about the redeeming musical value--I happen to like it, but it\u0026rsquo;s admittedly an odd taste--as it is about the value to the community/spiritual1 sense.\nAnd maybe I\u0026rsquo;ve answered it, but the question I\u0026rsquo;m left with is, what makes those sorts of songs so awesome? And really, is there a quintessentially English way of singing? While we\u0026rsquo;re at it am I the only one who finds this entertaining?\nI should post a rant about this at some point, but you hear a lot of people these reformed days saying, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not religious but I\u0026rsquo;m spiritual,\u0026rdquo; and while I support a flight from religion, I think this is an incredibly dumb thing to say. Spirituality as understood by all religions isn\u0026rsquo;t about G-d nearly as much as it is about a historical lineage and set of ritualized practices. It turns out what people are saying when they say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m spiritual,\u0026rdquo; is \u0026ldquo;I have a moral system.\u0026rdquo; Which is a nice thing to say, but also doesn\u0026rsquo;t (I think) have nearly as much to do with G-d as it does with being a human without a pervasive developmental/organic psychological condition and having an intact brain with a frontal lobe. But that\u0026rsquo;s just me.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/english-songsters/","summary":"In my fair city this week and last there\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of Scottish music. There\u0026rsquo;s a woman who\u0026rsquo;s been active in the local Scottish community (who knew?) for years, and she\u0026rsquo;s a retired music teacher and she does a program each year where she brings in top notch Scottish musicians to teach in local schools. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool, and it means that a lot of great Scottish musicians do concerts here. Anyway, this is a much more macro entry into this story than you really need, but it\u0026rsquo;s my blog and it seems fitting.\nAnyway, Ed Miller, an amazing folklorist and singer did a concert and sang \u0026ldquo;A Bottle of the Best\u0026rdquo; which some googleing has revealed is written by Jack Foley. It\u0026rsquo;s a perfectly good song, and one that I\u0026rsquo;d heard dozens of times before, but it wasn\u0026rsquo;t something that had really stuck with me as you might it expect.","title":"English Songsters"},{"content":"One of the things that \u0026ldquo;gave\u0026rdquo; in a great life-shakedown of 2008, was my interest/intention to design/publish knitting patterns. I design a lot of my own sweaters and things, I enjoy the technical and creative aspects of knitting, and I really enjoy the meditative aspects of knitting. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve worked in a number of different yarn stores, taught knitting classes and lessons, and tried to write patterns, and each engagement with the \u0026ldquo;business\u0026rdquo; side of the craft, leaves me feeling drained and weary of wool.\nAnd so in the shakedown, I decided that while I probably have more knitting skill/experience and knowledge than I have of just about anything else, I don\u0026rsquo;t have the interest or the energy to make a go of it. Or maybe more clearly, doing the things I\u0026rsquo;d need to do to become a full-time knitter would make knitting less fun in all the other ways that I find relaxing.\nAs I more fully return to knitting I\u0026rsquo;ve had to revisit this decision a fair piece. I ask myself do I want to try to teach again? Do I want to apply to give workshops at Folk schools and craft centers, let alone yarn stores?1 And I think the answer is, mostly not. I do a lot of things very seriously, and I don\u0026rsquo;t know that it\u0026rsquo;s worth my time and energy to work on knitting more seriously, given that I want to do other things and, blah blah blah.\nBut, and you knew there was a but coming, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I want to just give it up. Not knitting, but knitting seriously, and writing about knitting, and all of that. Part of this reflection are thoughts about my niche, and my role in the discourse of knitting.2 Which is maybe what I should have thought about when I was trying to figure out how to teach knitting, or write patterns a couple of years ago.\nUnlike a lot of popular knit bloggers, I\u0026rsquo;m not big on taking pictures of my knitting, in progress, and my knitting tastes don\u0026rsquo;t tend to suit \u0026ldquo;knitblogging\u0026rdquo; very well. I knit big projects in fine yarn and so I finish something very infrequently. And as a designer, I tend to knit for myself and I tend towards non-typical construction techniques.3 Also I\u0026rsquo;m not nearly as [funny][harlot] and/or [polished][franklin] (let alone accomplished). So figuring out where I fit into this, or what my niche is is something of a personal challenge.\nThe last--and pretty key--piece of this personal puzzle is what I get out of the \u0026ldquo;knitting discourse,\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t subscribe to the magazines, I don\u0026rsquo;t really follow patterns except tangentially and as inspiration, I haven\u0026rsquo;t made a Clapotis, I\u0026rsquo;ve never taken a knitting class (aside from Knitting Camp), and I tend to buy really boring yarn.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about writing knitting patterns more as essays, and less as instructional documents. I enjoy writing essays, and I really like writing about knitting, and I like reading about other people\u0026rsquo;s knitting, and I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly interested in writing touchy-feely essay about how knitting soothes my soul or makes me feel closer to other people. But patterns as a story? Patterns that attempt to communicate not just the object, but also the design process, and the state of mind of the knitter during knitting? Am I the only person who would find this interesting?4\nOnward and Upward!\nMaybe this is the result of the clash between my growing stash and my normal frugality, or the result of my spinning hobby/habit, but in the last couple of years, I\u0026rsquo;ve become less and less interested in the act of buying yarn. I like yarn, and I like all sorts of yarn makers and yarn shops, but I don\u0026rsquo;t find commerce to be a relaxing part of the knitting experience. Which isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, it\u0026rsquo;s just a cause of my trepidation.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I\u0026rsquo;ve lapsed into academic-ese, but in this instance I mean the contemporary knitting world. The big knitting magazines, Raverly, real-world knitting groups, my knitting list, knit shops, podcasts, and so forth. Basically the knitworld.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe only real problem with this is that the designs that make a career (Kate Gilbert\u0026rsquo;s Clapotis or Cookie A.\u0026rsquo;s Monkey Socks, for instance) tend to not be sweaters/men\u0026rsquo;s designs, and while there need to be more men\u0026rsquo;s designs, I think the reason that there aren\u0026rsquo;t is pretty market driven. [franklin]:http://the-panopticon.blogspot.com/ [harlot]:http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;m serious about this question folks. Would you be interested in reading a knitting pattern like this?\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/patterns-as-stories/","summary":"One of the things that \u0026ldquo;gave\u0026rdquo; in a great life-shakedown of 2008, was my interest/intention to design/publish knitting patterns. I design a lot of my own sweaters and things, I enjoy the technical and creative aspects of knitting, and I really enjoy the meditative aspects of knitting. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve worked in a number of different yarn stores, taught knitting classes and lessons, and tried to write patterns, and each engagement with the \u0026ldquo;business\u0026rdquo; side of the craft, leaves me feeling drained and weary of wool.\nAnd so in the shakedown, I decided that while I probably have more knitting skill/experience and knowledge than I have of just about anything else, I don\u0026rsquo;t have the interest or the energy to make a go of it. Or maybe more clearly, doing the things I\u0026rsquo;d need to do to become a full-time knitter would make knitting less fun in all the other ways that I find relaxing.","title":"Patterns as Stories"},{"content":"Hey folks,\nJust a quick note. I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a two day break from posting stories to Critical Futures at the end of this week.\nThe reasons for this are twofold. First and probably most importantly, I need a break. In the last three months, I\u0026rsquo;ve posted about 28,000 words of fiction (nearly all of it my own) and even though much of it has been old content that I\u0026rsquo;ve been editing and revising as we go, it still takes a lot of time. And because, I\u0026rsquo;m my own boss, and can do these things, I\u0026rsquo;m giving myself a break. These are the perks of \u0026ldquo;going it alone,\u0026rdquo; and besides, we\u0026rsquo;re only talking about two days.\nThe second reason is that I\u0026rsquo;ve just finished posting the third chapter of Knowing Mars, the novella that I finished a year ago, and that forms the core of the first six months--or so-- of Critical Futures posting. Given the milestone, I think I want to release the first three chapters as PDF files so that people new to the game can catch up. This will form the core of next weeks posts, and it\u0026rsquo;ll take a bit of extra time to prep. This means my break is effectively a little bit longer, you get special content, and we\u0026rsquo;re all happy.\nI\u0026rsquo;m starting to talk to other people about writing/sending stories to Critical Futures, which is something that in my more overwhelmed moments seems really good. If you have nifty SFnal work that you\u0026rsquo;re tired of sitting on and want to see what it looks like in \u0026ldquo;print,\u0026rdquo; consider submitting. I enjoy doing editorial work (and I\u0026rsquo;m at least half decent at it, my alter-ego makes a living doing something similar,) and I think Critical Futures is the ideal space for some pretty nifty writing. Get in touch and we can talk in greater detail about this. I see great things happening.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-needed-break/","summary":"Hey folks,\nJust a quick note. I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a two day break from posting stories to Critical Futures at the end of this week.\nThe reasons for this are twofold. First and probably most importantly, I need a break. In the last three months, I\u0026rsquo;ve posted about 28,000 words of fiction (nearly all of it my own) and even though much of it has been old content that I\u0026rsquo;ve been editing and revising as we go, it still takes a lot of time. And because, I\u0026rsquo;m my own boss, and can do these things, I\u0026rsquo;m giving myself a break. These are the perks of \u0026ldquo;going it alone,\u0026rdquo; and besides, we\u0026rsquo;re only talking about two days.\nThe second reason is that I\u0026rsquo;ve just finished posting the third chapter of Knowing Mars, the novella that I finished a year ago, and that forms the core of the first six months--or so-- of Critical Futures posting.","title":"A Needed Break"},{"content":"So it turns out that the old laptop that I spent lots of time in the late spring fretting about updating finally gave up the ghost last week. Now the astute among you will remember that I bought a new laptop mid-summer, and you maybe wondering why I\u0026rsquo;m mentioning this.\nEven though the keyboard was worn out (hence my reason for upgrading), with an external keyboard that we had lying around it worked fine, so I passed it down to my mother who was in need of a newer computer for routine home tasks, where it continued to function abely.\nAnd then it broke.\nWhich caused all manner of strife around here, as we\u0026rsquo;re all pretty set in our computer usage habits and it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to share computers with people, no matter how much you like them. And while the loss of this computer brought the net number of computers to equal the number of people in the house, one of the computers is a 12\u0026quot; iBook from mid-2004 which is slow and small, and uncomfortable for anything other than casusal use.\nSo we tussled with a number of different possible solutions which were all uniquely unsuitable. Eventually we came to the following solution:\nMy father, who has heretofore been running on both a 2005 era mini-mac (primarily) and with the recent addition of the ibook, will switch to the ibook exclusively. The ibook does a suitable job at powering his external monitor, and if we put his itunes library on an external drive (which we should have done a long time ago anyway) the hard disk size isn\u0026rsquo;t an issue. Mom gets the Mini, with a as of yet unpurchased monitor, and I blessedly can keep out of the whole mess.\nThe truth is that this has me thinking about my computer useage. I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that while I\u0026rsquo;m probably the most \u0026ldquo;power-user\u0026rdquo; in the house, I\u0026rsquo;m not doing anything particularly resource intensive: text editor, terminal emulator, mutt, IM program, news reader, web browser, pdf viewer, calander/pim tool, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it. I used the 12\u0026quot; iBook myself for a week or two, and while it\u0026rsquo;s still a bit underpowered for my purposes, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t that underpowered--it\u0026rsquo;s major offense is that the screen is pretty low-res.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m probably going to get a linux desktop in the next few weeks (sooner, I guess, now that we\u0026rsquo;re going to be making an order for one monitor, I might as well buy the monitors for my set up), I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about my own computer usage habits and needs. If I have a desktop computer, do I need as much umph in my laptop? Could I get buy with something like this fit my mobile needs more clearly (smaller, capiable, linux-y)? I think that if you asked me tomorrow, I\u0026rsquo;d probably say \u0026ldquo;not yet,\u0026rdquo; but in a couple of years? I\u0026rsquo;m not sure.\nOnce upon a time, the major concern when buying computers was finding a machine that had enough resources to serve your needs for the next 2-4 years. These days, just about any computer you buy is fast enough and has enough storage space. There are lots of ways in which this is a good thing, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s most interesting/important in the sense that it forces computer buyers to get computers on the basis of the needs of the workflow rather than on some negotiation between budget and feature list. And that, I think, is a really good thing for technology.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technical-hardware-update/","summary":"So it turns out that the old laptop that I spent lots of time in the late spring fretting about updating finally gave up the ghost last week. Now the astute among you will remember that I bought a new laptop mid-summer, and you maybe wondering why I\u0026rsquo;m mentioning this.\nEven though the keyboard was worn out (hence my reason for upgrading), with an external keyboard that we had lying around it worked fine, so I passed it down to my mother who was in need of a newer computer for routine home tasks, where it continued to function abely.\nAnd then it broke.\nWhich caused all manner of strife around here, as we\u0026rsquo;re all pretty set in our computer usage habits and it\u0026rsquo;s really hard to share computers with people, no matter how much you like them. And while the loss of this computer brought the net number of computers to equal the number of people in the house, one of the computers is a 12\u0026quot; iBook from mid-2004 which is slow and small, and uncomfortable for anything other than casusal use.","title":"Technical Hardware Update"},{"content":"rms, Mr. GNU Project himself, recently interviewed with the Guardian and came out against \u0026ldquo;cloud computing.\u0026rdquo; While there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a great \u0026ldquo;splash\u0026rdquo; on the blogs I read--no one was surprised, a lot of people disagreed respectfully, and we all went along our ways--but I think he raises an important point that we/I should discuss.\nrms\u0026rsquo; argument is that \u0026ldquo;cloud computing\u0026rdquo; services, like gmail, twitter, livejournal lock people into their services and force computer users to give up control of their computing and data, and that this is as bad or worse than using proprietary software.\nI too have been a pretty big opponent of some \u0026ldquo;cloud computing\u0026rdquo; developments, not simply because they restrict freedom in the sense that rms is speaking of, but also because in a lot of cases, it\u0026rsquo;s not a very good or user friendly environment for a lot of tasks. And I\u0026rsquo;m pretty stubborn about not trusting my data to a format that I\u0026rsquo;m not positive I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to export into an open and useable format.\nAs it turns out there are a number of cloud services which are \u0026ldquo;more open,\u0026rdquo; than others. That allow users lots of very standard/open access to their data. It\u0026rsquo;s not the same as open source, of course, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to suggest that all \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; services aren\u0026rsquo;t created equal. Here\u0026rsquo;s a brief review:\n1. GMail provides full pop and IMAP access to their accounts. They also make it easy for you to use your gmail account to send \u0026ldquo;from\u0026rdquo; other accounts. While you get more freedom from hosting your email on a server you control, gmail isn\u0026rsquo;t less free (in my estimation) than using the email address supplied by your ISP or employer. 2. Gcal similarly exports to ical format, which is the default calendar standard format, among others. 3. Most \u0026ldquo;cloud\u0026rdquo; news readers export OMPL files of all the feeds, similarly the \u0026ldquo;make RSS feeds of everything,\u0026rdquo; mentality of web 2.0 means that a lot of data is pretty open to access.\nThere are of course some web-apps where data is opaque and not easily/openly exportable. Twitter is a great example of this, and I\u0026rsquo;m blanking on a more extensive list, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure that you, dear readers, can come up with many more examples.\nI think what this means in the end is that the problem of freedom in software in the age of service-based computing rests more on user education than on a legalistic mechanisms (like copyleft) or open source code. Not that the later isn\u0026rsquo;t important, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth considering.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cloud-computing/","summary":"rms, Mr. GNU Project himself, recently interviewed with the Guardian and came out against \u0026ldquo;cloud computing.\u0026rdquo; While there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a great \u0026ldquo;splash\u0026rdquo; on the blogs I read--no one was surprised, a lot of people disagreed respectfully, and we all went along our ways--but I think he raises an important point that we/I should discuss.\nrms\u0026rsquo; argument is that \u0026ldquo;cloud computing\u0026rdquo; services, like gmail, twitter, livejournal lock people into their services and force computer users to give up control of their computing and data, and that this is as bad or worse than using proprietary software.\nI too have been a pretty big opponent of some \u0026ldquo;cloud computing\u0026rdquo; developments, not simply because they restrict freedom in the sense that rms is speaking of, but also because in a lot of cases, it\u0026rsquo;s not a very good or user friendly environment for a lot of tasks. And I\u0026rsquo;m pretty stubborn about not trusting my data to a format that I\u0026rsquo;m not positive I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to export into an open and useable format.","title":"Cloud Computing"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about how close I am to getting back on the knitting game for weeks and weeks. While for the past two months I\u0026rsquo;ve knitted more than I had in the previous two or three months, until this last week, I still hadn\u0026rsquo;t been knitting much.\nAnd then, this last week, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what happened, but I got enough momentum on my projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to make some real progress on projects, and with that progress my interest and enthusiasm has grown pretty significantly.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have pictures or anything instructive yet, but I\u0026rsquo;m paying attention to projects again, and thinking about what\u0026rsquo;s going to be my next project. I\u0026rsquo;ll post the highlights and blog over the next several days/week about more specific details.\n1. I was knitting a teal sweater, using a possum/merino yarn that I despise. Despite finishing (and steaking the neck opening,) I\u0026rsquo;m tossing it in the frog/sell pile. The yarn sheds, it looks like there are multiple dye/carding lots, and it\u0026rsquo;s a really fuzzy yarn, to the point that knitting it made me sneeze, and it shed, and it was too warm to sit under and knit, let alone wear. Anyway, I think this is well reasoned, and having it off of my plate makes me feel incredibly good.\n2. I finished the \u0026ldquo;Grey Sweater of Doom,\u0026rdquo; or what I was fondly calling \u0026ldquo;that god damned sweater,\u0026rdquo; by the end. This is a sweater that I cast on in the fall of 2005, and have been slowly working on, off and on since then. The sweater is knit with a fingering weight lambswool and alpaca. It\u0026rsquo;s mostly plain but there are some small cable accents. In a feat that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty proud of, I was able to make a perfectly fitted sweater without swatching,1 and since I knit off a cone, with wool there were only 2 extra ends to weave in, in addition to the normal edge ends (that is there were 6 ends total, but 4 of them are conceptually unavoidable.) I\u0026rsquo;m proud of this one, and even though it took forever, I want to make another one kind of like it.\n3. The Latvian Dreaming Sweater. I have finished the body of this sweater, so all that remains is the collar and the sleeves. This is a project that where I\u0026rsquo;m conceptually giving away the pattern as I knit it. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit behind, and have to write some instructions for the shoulders. But this is a part of the pattern where there are a lot of options, so there\u0026rsquo;ll be a number of posts about this in the next few weeks.\n4. A pair of socks. About a year ago I visited Sheri at the Loopy Ewe and bought a skein of yarn, because it was amazing looking, despite the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t really knit normal socks very often. So this skein lingered in the stash, rolled up into a ball: apparently I got pretty close a while back to casting on, but chickened out. Then on Saturday I picked it up and cast on 64 stitches for a sock. It\u0026rsquo;s going well, and I already have 3-4 inches done.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have right now. How has your knitting been going.\nFor the non-knitters, swatches are samples that you knit to help figure out how many stitches/knitting you need in a project. Also, while I don\u0026rsquo;t usually don\u0026rsquo;t swatch, in this case, the sweater is constructed in such a way that you don\u0026rsquo;t need to know your gauge. This is pretty cool, I think.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-movement/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about how close I am to getting back on the knitting game for weeks and weeks. While for the past two months I\u0026rsquo;ve knitted more than I had in the previous two or three months, until this last week, I still hadn\u0026rsquo;t been knitting much.\nAnd then, this last week, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what happened, but I got enough momentum on my projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to make some real progress on projects, and with that progress my interest and enthusiasm has grown pretty significantly.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have pictures or anything instructive yet, but I\u0026rsquo;m paying attention to projects again, and thinking about what\u0026rsquo;s going to be my next project. I\u0026rsquo;ll post the highlights and blog over the next several days/week about more specific details.\n1. I was knitting a teal sweater, using a possum/merino yarn that I despise. Despite finishing (and steaking the neck opening,) I\u0026rsquo;m tossing it in the frog/sell pile.","title":"Knitting Movement"},{"content":"Yesterday I posted a note about what I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading and about Melissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s The Jazz, and in it I realized that I talked about William Gibson\u0026rsquo;s Neuromancer in comparison to Melissa\u0026rsquo;s book and I didn\u0026rsquo;t get into my thoughts on the Gibson.\nWhich is awkward, because it\u0026rsquo;s such an important book and I didn\u0026rsquo;t like it very much. Although Gibson writes very beautiful prose, I had a hard time maintaining interest in the book. Maybe this is a feature of the cyberpunk sub-genre\u0026rsquo;s difficulty aging--but that seems too simple. While I think the more rigorously derived from the future a piece of SF is, the harder it ages1\nI asked Chris, \u0026ldquo;Isn\u0026rsquo;t this supposed to rock world, I feel very unrocked,\u0026rdquo; and he said (ever helpfully) that \u0026ldquo;maybe my world was already rocked.\u0026rdquo; Which it might be, I think this is another angle on the \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s past it\u0026rsquo;s moment.\u0026rdquo; And unlike some cyberpunk which engages issues of identity, the meaning of \u0026ldquo;reality,\u0026rdquo; government intervention in people\u0026rsquo;s lives, and other interesting issues, the major argument in Neuromancer amounted to \u0026ldquo;Duuudes cyberspace, it\u0026rsquo;s like drugs\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nI joke, but there was a lot of drug use in the book, and while it gave Gibson the space to write some really trippy scenes, which really were beautiful, beyond that I was unimpressed. And probably as a result I didn\u0026rsquo;t find myself not particularly invested in the characters.\nI\u0026rsquo;d be interested in hearing what your thoughts are on the book, it\u0026rsquo;s role in the science fiction canon, and about cyberpunk in general. I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you have to say.\nThanks for reading.\nOnward and Upward!\nI think this is an observer problem, because if you set a book 100 years in the future, and 5 years later it becomes clear that it\u0026rsquo;s not going to happen that way, everyone notices. If you set things 1000 years in the future it\u0026rsquo;s easier for people to get that it\u0026rsquo;s all allegory, anyway. Nevertheless I think this is a challenge of SF that tries to be less fantastic.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/neuromancer/","summary":"Yesterday I posted a note about what I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading and about Melissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s The Jazz, and in it I realized that I talked about William Gibson\u0026rsquo;s Neuromancer in comparison to Melissa\u0026rsquo;s book and I didn\u0026rsquo;t get into my thoughts on the Gibson.\nWhich is awkward, because it\u0026rsquo;s such an important book and I didn\u0026rsquo;t like it very much. Although Gibson writes very beautiful prose, I had a hard time maintaining interest in the book. Maybe this is a feature of the cyberpunk sub-genre\u0026rsquo;s difficulty aging--but that seems too simple. While I think the more rigorously derived from the future a piece of SF is, the harder it ages1\nI asked Chris, \u0026ldquo;Isn\u0026rsquo;t this supposed to rock world, I feel very unrocked,\u0026rdquo; and he said (ever helpfully) that \u0026ldquo;maybe my world was already rocked.\u0026rdquo; Which it might be, I think this is another angle on the \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s past it\u0026rsquo;s moment.\u0026rdquo; And unlike some cyberpunk which engages issues of identity, the meaning of \u0026ldquo;reality,\u0026rdquo; government intervention in people\u0026rsquo;s lives, and other interesting issues, the major argument in Neuromancer amounted to \u0026ldquo;Duuudes cyberspace, it\u0026rsquo;s like drugs\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;","title":"Neuromancer"},{"content":"My New Year\u0026rsquo;s resolution was to make a list of all the things (particularly fiction) that I read. Not to read more, but just to keep track of it. Part of my insecurity as a writer is the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t feel particularly well read, in light of all the books that I want to read this is a particularly stark problem.\nJust keeping a text file with everything on the list, seemed (and is) a great way to keep track of things and provide a clearer record of what happens.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve mostly kept up with this, I deleted the file for a while (thanks to git I was able to rescue it, and I\u0026rsquo;m back in business,) but it\u0026rsquo;s all up to date. Also throughout the year, I\u0026rsquo;ve kept writing little notes about what I\u0026rsquo;ve finished reading, with some rough thoughts. It\u0026rsquo;s my blog after all.\nI finished--a few weeks ago--Melissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s The Jazz, which I really enjoyed reading. Melissa is a contact from another context1, which makes reading her work even more fun. Reading this book lead me to do some thinking about the state of the cyberpunk sub-genre.\nI liked the book, the characters, and more importantly how it was able to take the \u0026ldquo;cyberpunk\u0026rdquo; sub-genre in a much more contemporary feeling story. While cyberpunk stories are great fun, the fact that by, say 1993, it was clear that the early cyberpunk (which set the mold for the genre) misunderstood the internet in all but the most fundamental ways. The Jazz, fixes this problem deftly.2 At the same time, however, it brings a couple other problems with the genre to bare.\nWhen I finished the book I was left with the feeling that the ending was a little bit flat, or it felt a little rushed, or something. And then I remembered that I felt the same way about Neuromancer (Gibson), and even \u0026ldquo;Trouble and Her Friends,\u0026rdquo; Scott\u0026rsquo;s probably most oft recommended book (at least by me). And then it struck me, that the biggest flaw with cyberpunk is that the action and dramatic tension derive from the mythology of the cyberpunk setting.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s science fiction, you say. And, indeed, it is. But here\u0026rsquo;s a SF secret, I think in most/the best cases the SFnal elements of a story don\u0026rsquo;t provide dramatic tension but just set up. Lets take a couple of examples: In John Scalzi\u0026rsquo;s `Old Man\u0026rsquo;s War \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Old-Mans-War-John-Scalzi/dp/0765315246/tychoish-20\u0026gt;`_ the tension comes from a very conventional war, from mystery about what happens to the main character\u0026rsquo;s wife, from the main characters friendships, and so forth. The fact that it\u0026rsquo;s a space opera and they have computers implanted in the heads is\u0026hellip; background, and a device to put the characters in the right situations. In say Neuromancer, without the mythology (cyberspace, AIs, etc.) the characters would have been high the entire story rather than just most of it.\nThe end result is that the resolutions to the conflicts are very unsatisfying because there\u0026rsquo;s something that feels totally contrived in the cyberpunk story. In Neurmancer I disliked the characters and the plot/setting, and the \u0026ldquo;hard to pin down\u0026rdquo; feeling about the ending was too wrapped up in this, while in The Jazz, I loved the characters and the story, and I learned something pretty important about cyberpunk and dramatic tension. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve read more things recently, but I\u0026rsquo;ve run out of room in this post, so I\u0026rsquo;ll get to some of the other ones later.\nOnward and Upward!\nComplete with a \u0026ldquo;holy shit! you\u0026rsquo;re that Melissa Scott,\u0026rdquo; moment which I think I was able to mostly keep to myself.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it got everything right, but it got things like spam more or less right, as well as the sort of interesting identity-based concerns of the internet. I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in how effective fiction is at predicting the future, but there are times when a poor conception of the future reflects a poor understanding of the present. Which a 98-00 era traditional cyberpunk story would have been. This wasn\u0026rsquo;t that, and I really enjoyed that.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/all-the-jazz-thats-fit-to-print/","summary":"My New Year\u0026rsquo;s resolution was to make a list of all the things (particularly fiction) that I read. Not to read more, but just to keep track of it. Part of my insecurity as a writer is the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t feel particularly well read, in light of all the books that I want to read this is a particularly stark problem.\nJust keeping a text file with everything on the list, seemed (and is) a great way to keep track of things and provide a clearer record of what happens.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve mostly kept up with this, I deleted the file for a while (thanks to git I was able to rescue it, and I\u0026rsquo;m back in business,) but it\u0026rsquo;s all up to date. Also throughout the year, I\u0026rsquo;ve kept writing little notes about what I\u0026rsquo;ve finished reading, with some rough thoughts. It\u0026rsquo;s my blog after all.\nI finished--a few weeks ago--Melissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s The Jazz, which I really enjoyed reading.","title":"All the Jazz That's Fit to Print"},{"content":"tycho: So I like what I\u0026rsquo;m doing, but I think in a few years I\u0026rsquo;m going to start thinking about how to go back to school to do science studies work or anthropology.\nBen: Ah, that\u0026rsquo;s cool, so what do you really want to do? [implied: with your life]\ntycho: [Laughs] Really? Marry a couple of doctors and write and edit science fiction, I think would be pretty nice.\nBen: uh\u0026hellip;\npause\nBen: Did you hear about Paul Newman?\ntycho: Anyway, so I was chatting about work/career stuff with this guy and I mentioned my eventual plan to go back and do anthropology/science studies grad school, and he was like \u0026ldquo;so what do you really want to do,\u0026rdquo; and I said \u0026ldquo;marry a couple of doctors, and write and edit science fiction full time,\u0026rdquo; which is the best possible answer to this question I think. Given that no one really knows what they want to be when they grow up. And if you\u0026rsquo;re basically talking about winning the lottery, you might as well aim high.\nScott: Not a bad plan\u0026hellip; Let me know if the doctors want a 4th in the mix!\npause, and tycho smiles\ntycho: wait, I think you just proposed to me. [laughs]\nScott: Well\u0026hellip; technically I proposed to the hypothetical other two\u0026hellip; you\u0026rsquo;re just along for the ride\u0026hellip;. ahem\ntycho: Right, and fair enough, really. But you wanted to be #4, and I\u0026rsquo;d be #3 and which gives me some sort of veto power or hypothetical precedence in the hypothetical decision making. [pauses] it\u0026rsquo;s not every day that you get accidentally proposed to\u0026hellip;\nScott: Ooops\n[pauses]\ntycho: I\u0026rsquo;m so blogging this.\nScott: facepalm\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-modest-proposal/","summary":"tycho: So I like what I\u0026rsquo;m doing, but I think in a few years I\u0026rsquo;m going to start thinking about how to go back to school to do science studies work or anthropology.\nBen: Ah, that\u0026rsquo;s cool, so what do you really want to do? [implied: with your life]\ntycho: [Laughs] Really? Marry a couple of doctors and write and edit science fiction, I think would be pretty nice.\nBen: uh\u0026hellip;\npause\nBen: Did you hear about Paul Newman?\ntycho: Anyway, so I was chatting about work/career stuff with this guy and I mentioned my eventual plan to go back and do anthropology/science studies grad school, and he was like \u0026ldquo;so what do you really want to do,\u0026rdquo; and I said \u0026ldquo;marry a couple of doctors, and write and edit science fiction full time,\u0026rdquo; which is the best possible answer to this question I think. Given that no one really knows what they want to be when they grow up.","title":"A Modest Proposal"},{"content":"So I may have my beef with with the software as freedom,1 none the less I think we can learn some pretty interesting things about freedom and politics from thinking about what open source means. In this vein recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking more about the economics of open source, and as I\u0026rsquo;m prone to an interest in creative business models that find interesting ways to generate income in unique and special ways. Here\u0026rsquo;s some thoughts on the \u0026ldquo;politics/economy of work in open source.\u0026rdquo;\nOn some deep level open source software resists the traditional scarcity economic model. There is no property, intellectual or otherwise, that you can exchange for money in a way resembling the normal way. With that option off of the table the open source community has to come up with other ways of doing business, and because scarcity (in another sense) is the mother of creativity, what folks in the open source world do to make a living is pretty interesting.\nThere are a few of major ways that people in the open source community make money:\n1. Software-as-Service: Rather than sell people software, companies sell service agreements. This is nifty, because it lets groups of people get support for open source, it\u0026rsquo;s cheaper for users than buying software and service contracts, and also it means that service based businesses are smaller, because it\u0026rsquo;s more efficient to run a smaller company, and because anyone with the right skills can provide the services and not just the copyright holder for the OS. So customers get a more tailored experiences. The con, is that the better software is, the less people need support for it.\n2. Custom programing. Basically individual programers consult with users to develop custom solutions around people\u0026rsquo;s needs, using open source tools. Ideally some of what people write gets contributed back into the repositories (as libraries/tools), and this is particularly suited to very modular/adpatable projects like drupal or debian\n3. Certification. A company/programer reviews the components and develops an independent release of an open source product that they\u0026rsquo;ve certified. The best example of this is the RedHat certified linux versus Fedora Core. Which is mostly useful in the \u0026ldquo;enterprise world.\u0026rdquo;\n4. Service Software. This is a mashup of other models, and I think it better to lead with examples: Wikimedia/Wikipedia/Wikia and DabbleDB andsmalltalk/seaside. Basically, a company uses an open source product to develop a service which generates income via subscriptions, advertising, and donations, which supports developers who contribute to the core project.\nThe most interesting effect that all of these models (but most clearly in the first two) have is that money isn\u0026rsquo;t being exchanged for \u0026ldquo;a thing,\u0026rdquo; but rather for work.\nWhich when you think about it, after we remove a few layers of mystification around \u0026ldquo;intellectual property,\u0026rdquo; the only thing that\u0026rsquo;s truly scarce is labor. Folks in the open source movement have had to realize this, and I think the ripple effect of this could be really profound. More important than even the \u0026ldquo;open access\u0026rdquo; to source code.\nTwenty years ago (or more) having open source code was really rather important, but even then and more so now, open source code wasn\u0026rsquo;t a great benefit to most users. The number of linux users who\u0026rsquo;ve ever looked at the kernel source is probably pretty small. Thus I think it\u0026rsquo;s not a stretch to say that the ideology of open source (as opposed to free software) is as much about pushing further a different way of thinking about work and \u0026ldquo;ownership,\u0026rdquo; as it is about \u0026ldquo;freedom\u0026rdquo; or some more specific technological goal.\nThoughts? Reactions?\nMy father neatly summarized my critique as one against \u0026ldquo;lifestyle politics,\u0026rdquo; which is apt. I think the problem in this case--like many--is one where personal beliefs and actions are in themselves thought to have a concrete impact on a larger political/economic situation, when I think politics happens at the next stage where you take your personal experiences and situations and work to influence/empower others. That is, if you just use free software (and refuse to use non-free software), you will do nothing to undermine the commercialized software industry, but if you use free software and you contribute back to the projects, and you help other people use free software, and you use free software to contribute to other efforts/projects things that is (potentially) a powerful political act. Potentially.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-work/","summary":"So I may have my beef with with the software as freedom,1 none the less I think we can learn some pretty interesting things about freedom and politics from thinking about what open source means. In this vein recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking more about the economics of open source, and as I\u0026rsquo;m prone to an interest in creative business models that find interesting ways to generate income in unique and special ways. Here\u0026rsquo;s some thoughts on the \u0026ldquo;politics/economy of work in open source.\u0026rdquo;\nOn some deep level open source software resists the traditional scarcity economic model. There is no property, intellectual or otherwise, that you can exchange for money in a way resembling the normal way. With that option off of the table the open source community has to come up with other ways of doing business, and because scarcity (in another sense) is the mother of creativity, what folks in the open source world do to make a living is pretty interesting.","title":"Open Source Work"},{"content":"I read the following phrase on my travels this past week: \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;ll just have to wait till the SEO does it\u0026rsquo;s thing.\u0026rdquo; This is sort of a typical phrase that gets throw around on the \u0026ldquo;commercial internet,\u0026rdquo; and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t out of place. Indeed, I think all the readers of the article probably understood what the author was trying to convey. But it struck me as sort of odd. Here\u0026rsquo;s why:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a completely empty statement. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the collection of techniques that are used to \u0026ldquo;raise\u0026rdquo; a given web page\u0026rsquo;s ranking in search results. Because there isn\u0026rsquo;t a hell of a lot of competition in this market, basically this amounts to trying to \u0026ldquo;game\u0026rdquo; Google.\nWhich\u0026hellip; is sort of a loosing proposition. Google\u0026rsquo;s algorithms (or the key components) are top secret, and what we do know about how google arranges searches is that the more pages link to a given page, the more favorably Google\u0026rsquo;s algorithm\u0026rsquo;s view that pages, this lets Google\u0026rsquo;s search results reflect a sort of emergent semantic organization of the world wide web. This means that when we search google, more often than not, we\u0026rsquo;re mostly searching the most interreferential pages on the internet.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s true that there are a lot of sites that don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of \u0026ldquo;juice\u0026rdquo; in Google, and that\u0026rsquo;s really frustrating for people who create websites, but Google\u0026rsquo;s domination of the internet-search marketplace is due largely to the quality of results that this reference-based system plays.\nAnd in light of this, I hope it\u0026rsquo;s pretty obvious that SEO is mostly a crock of shit. You can\u0026rsquo;t game Google, and more to the point you don\u0026rsquo;t want to. Though I think the prevalence of SEO an interesting admission for the \u0026ldquo;commercial internet\u0026rdquo; that traditional advertising-based marketing models has utterly failed on the internet.\nTo my mind the ideological parent of SEO was \u0026ldquo;search engine submission\u0026rdquo; services, which would purportedly \u0026ldquo;submit\u0026rdquo; your website to search engines so that people could find your site. For a fee, usually. Clearly this didn\u0026rsquo;t work, because the return was so diffuse, and because no one really wants to use a search tool where the results are based on \u0026ldquo;submissions\u0026rdquo; which are paid for by the content producers. There\u0026rsquo;s a reason why most of us use Google and not AltaVista, AskJeeves, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, and so forth.\nNow having said that there are some things that you can do to encourage your site\u0026rsquo;s ranking in google (ie. get people to link to you on their sites,) I\u0026rsquo;d call this \u0026ldquo;good writing,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;effective communication,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;best practices,\u0026rdquo; not \u0026ldquo;SEO\u0026rdquo; but you know whatever works. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I think really works.\n1. Be interesting, and have something to say. No one wants to read a website that\u0026rsquo;s boring. That\u0026rsquo;s why my readership is so low ;) but if you can\u0026rsquo;t make the attempt, no amount of good mojo is going to help your site.\n2. Post regularly. Really regularly. This resonates with this idea, the way to get good at doing 1., and make sure that people keep reading your site (and linking to you) is to provide dynamic and fresh content.\n3. If you\u0026rsquo;re a company, write not only about what you do and your clients, but also about what your clients are interested in. This might mean talking about and linking to your competitors, don\u0026rsquo;t worry, rising tides raise all boats.\n4. Participate in real life conversations. Most people learn about new websites via word of mouth connections formed in unusual contexts. There\u0026rsquo;s a reason why most of the leaders of the independent web (bloggers) are either: in New York City, San Francisco, or have been going to SXSWi since the beginning. (There\u0026rsquo;s also a minority of L.A. based bloggers). Talk to people, talk about your work, and talk to the other people who are creating content.\n5. Write emails. This is the second stage of what starts in 4. Digital networking connections rest mostly on one-on-one email correspondences, and listserv conversations, despite all sorts of next wave technology like twitter, facebook, and linked in. Getting really good at writing quick, meaningful emails and staying on top of your correspondence is requisite.\n6. Top load your content and titles. This falls under the category of good practice, and it mirrors the way newspaper columns are structured. Give as much information away as soon as possible, put all the details at the end, and write in a style that\u0026rsquo;s simple and designed to be easily and quickly read. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot out on the internet, and the the less time you take to make a specific point/joke/insight, the better.\n7. Provide full RSS feeds, and don\u0026rsquo;t put things behind \u0026ldquo;cut/fold\u0026rdquo; tags so that people have to click through to \u0026ldquo;read more.\u0026rdquo; The former is good sense, and represents reaching out to other content producers (the people who read your site,) and the later is just good sense.1 Other content producers are the people who have the real power over your search engine ranking, and making your content accessible is the first step in getting the content read.\n8. Use a site design which maximizes readability and visibility, so that people can--you know--read your content, rather than marvel at your superior design capabilities.\nBasically write a good site, network well, and don\u0026rsquo;t waste your time on snake oil and chants. /end.\nThe exception to this rule is live journal, as many people read LJ via the \u0026ldquo;Friend\u0026rsquo;s Page\u0026rdquo; which induces a slightly different community standard. In general though, it provides yet another obstacle between a reader who would might read your, and in general your design/style should work to be more inclusive.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/seo-nonsense/","summary":"I read the following phrase on my travels this past week: \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;ll just have to wait till the SEO does it\u0026rsquo;s thing.\u0026rdquo; This is sort of a typical phrase that gets throw around on the \u0026ldquo;commercial internet,\u0026rdquo; and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t out of place. Indeed, I think all the readers of the article probably understood what the author was trying to convey. But it struck me as sort of odd. Here\u0026rsquo;s why:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a completely empty statement. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the collection of techniques that are used to \u0026ldquo;raise\u0026rdquo; a given web page\u0026rsquo;s ranking in search results. Because there isn\u0026rsquo;t a hell of a lot of competition in this market, basically this amounts to trying to \u0026ldquo;game\u0026rdquo; Google.\nWhich\u0026hellip; is sort of a loosing proposition. Google\u0026rsquo;s algorithms (or the key components) are top secret, and what we do know about how google arranges searches is that the more pages link to a given page, the more favorably Google\u0026rsquo;s algorithm\u0026rsquo;s view that pages, this lets Google\u0026rsquo;s search results reflect a sort of emergent semantic organization of the world wide web.","title":"SEO Nonsense"},{"content":"Ok, I have two things to ask/pose/announce, which only seems fitting after writing something about how blog posts should be more singularly focused. Figures.\nPart One: Switching to Linux\nSo, I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned \u0026ldquo;the great linux switching of 2008\u0026rdquo; a few times, but never really explained it. Here\u0026rsquo;s a proper exploration:\nI\u0026rsquo;m finally begining to feel the pinch of not having a desktop computer. Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I really love my laptop, and will likely still use it a lot. My issue, is that I want more screen space than I\u0026rsquo;m really willing to pay for in a laptop (and a better keyboard), and I want to be able to dig a little deeper into the open source world for various reasons. And I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that the cost of building a multi-screen desktop isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be particularly prohibitive. So it seems like the right thing to do.\nI started out the linux journey running ubuntu (hardy) and it was ok, but not great. Then I spent most of the week plaiyng around with gentoo linux and toying with the idea of other distrobutions like ArchLinux, say. And the end result was that while ubuntu was frustrating from time to time, it would work. I mean really work. So having learned my lesson--which I think is the most valuable product important re: the linux community of this process--I\u0026rsquo;m back to using ubuntu, and it\u0026rsquo;s working better than ever.\nPart Two: Editor Dependence\nAs part of the \u0026ldquo;Great Linux Switch of \u0026lsquo;08,\u0026rdquo;1 I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending a lot of time working in a virtual machine instalation of linux (first ubuntu, now gentoo) to practice the setup and get a slate of configuration files all ready for the machine when I finally order the real hardware. Going into this, I knew that the hardest part of the transition to linux was going to be the text editor part. Which wasn\u0026rsquo;t insignifigant given that, I write a lot of text and I\u0026rsquo;m a devotee of the OS X only \u0026ldquo;TextMate.\u0026rdquo;\nIn my linux useage I\u0026rsquo;ve been using vim a lot, and I\u0026rsquo;ve written about my vim trials for some time here, in various ways. Including, my comment to twitter that \u0026ldquo;vim isn\u0026rsquo;t something that people ever learn, as much as give up on.\u0026rdquo; Having said that, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve got mostly got a hang of it it. I need to get highlighting for Markdown and a few other things nailed out. And there are a lot of things that I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know how to do, but I\u0026rsquo;m getting there. The other thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve recognized myself doing is using more than one editor, or at least multiple variants of .\nI mean, we use plain text files because they\u0026rsquo;re standard and just about every editor can read them. Isn\u0026rsquo;t it ironic then, that I/we grow so dependent on specific programs? Despite irony, it\u0026rsquo;s true for pretty good reasons.2 In anycase, for a lot of drafting and blogging writing, I\u0026rsquo;ve been using cream, a modern interface/configuration of vim that basically acts like you\u0026rsquo;d expect an editor written in the last twenty-thirty years to act.3 And I\u0026rsquo;ve even been using standard gui-vim (gvim) for some things, and it\u0026rsquo;s not all bad.\nHaving reported this, I can\u0026rsquo;t decide if:\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t found the linux editing enviroment nirvana. I\u0026rsquo;m maturing in my geekyness/editor use and am become more in touch with/accepting of mostly standard configurations. What do you all use/like? Thoughts\nPossible Tagline: More interesting than the election, and potentially less disheartening.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\ncomofort with enviroment leads to more efficency/pleasure.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nVim is decended relatively directly from vi which was written in the late sixties, as one of the first (vi)sual editors. The basic idea is that the editing experience is modal. In \u0026ldquo;normal mode\u0026rdquo; you move the cursor around your documents, copy (\u0026ldquo;yank\u0026rdquo;) and paste (\u0026ldquo;put\u0026rdquo;) text, delete text, and issue commands to the editor (save, etc). In \u0026ldquo;insert mode\u0026rdquo; when you type the characters are entered into your document (which would be \u0026ldquo;normal\u0026rdquo; for the rest of us, right?) Anyway, this lets you make the most of your keyboard, and saves your pinkies from over use on the control/meta keys and directional/arrow keys, and the end result is an editor that\u0026rsquo;s very powerful and very useful, once you give up and submit to thinking in it\u0026rsquo;s way\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/linux-switching-and-editors/","summary":"Ok, I have two things to ask/pose/announce, which only seems fitting after writing something about how blog posts should be more singularly focused. Figures.\nPart One: Switching to Linux\nSo, I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned \u0026ldquo;the great linux switching of 2008\u0026rdquo; a few times, but never really explained it. Here\u0026rsquo;s a proper exploration:\nI\u0026rsquo;m finally begining to feel the pinch of not having a desktop computer. Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I really love my laptop, and will likely still use it a lot. My issue, is that I want more screen space than I\u0026rsquo;m really willing to pay for in a laptop (and a better keyboard), and I want to be able to dig a little deeper into the open source world for various reasons. And I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that the cost of building a multi-screen desktop isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be particularly prohibitive. So it seems like the right thing to do.\nI started out the linux journey running ubuntu (hardy) and it was ok, but not great.","title":"Linux Switching and Editors"},{"content":"This is the first post I\u0026rsquo;ve written in a long time that wasn\u0026rsquo;t about open source/technology stuff. Not that I\u0026rsquo;m not still fascinating (or cranking out blog entries about that,) but it\u0026rsquo;s fun to tred on other ground for a while. This post grows out of some very abstract thinking I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing inrelation work about the nature of blogging.\nFirst off there\u0026rsquo;s the divide between journaling and blogging. Though the distinction is pretty clear cut, in practice the lines blur. Journaling include posts/blogs that recount your own experiences and events, more or less as they happen. Blogging in contrast are posts that explore ideas and events around the author(s) expereince. And blogs are chronological so they look like journals and sometimes include \u0026ldquo;personal notes\u0026rdquo; posts, while journals will sometimes/often include the authors thoughts on a subject outside of the authors experience. So it\u0026rsquo;s a muddy playing field from the get go, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to think about what makes a successful blog, because it\u0026rsquo;s more of what I have been doing here , and it may be easierer to quantify than what makes an successful journal.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to put out 4 general theories for your consideration about \u0026ldquo;blogging that works:\u0026rdquo;1\nPosts should generally explore ideas, concepts, events, and other texts. But mostly ideas. Posts should explore one idea/concept, and only one idea/concept. If you want to write more complex essays, figure out a way to write articles for a more tratditionally formated publication (such things exist on the web). Blogs are highly referential texts. Blogs which don\u0026rsquo;t include links to other blogs, and/or don\u0026rsquo;t include quoted text I think miss some of the point of what makes the web so great. Blog posts need to be short. (Guilty as charged!) Blogs are meant to be read in concert with other blogs, and time is scarce. Also attention is scarce. And really if you\u0026rsquo;re only talking about one idea, getting it into ~400 words is hard, but it\u0026rsquo;s something to aim for. That\u0026rsquo;s what I have. Any ideas on your end? Speaking of under 400 words, I\u0026rsquo;ll be done now, with none to spare!\nIn some perverse way I guess this is a \u0026ldquo;X tips for Better Blogging\u0026rdquo; post, but I don\u0026rsquo;t care if you digg it or not.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/blogging-about-ideas/","summary":"This is the first post I\u0026rsquo;ve written in a long time that wasn\u0026rsquo;t about open source/technology stuff. Not that I\u0026rsquo;m not still fascinating (or cranking out blog entries about that,) but it\u0026rsquo;s fun to tred on other ground for a while. This post grows out of some very abstract thinking I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing inrelation work about the nature of blogging.\nFirst off there\u0026rsquo;s the divide between journaling and blogging. Though the distinction is pretty clear cut, in practice the lines blur. Journaling include posts/blogs that recount your own experiences and events, more or less as they happen. Blogging in contrast are posts that explore ideas and events around the author(s) expereince. And blogs are chronological so they look like journals and sometimes include \u0026ldquo;personal notes\u0026rdquo; posts, while journals will sometimes/often include the authors thoughts on a subject outside of the authors experience. So it\u0026rsquo;s a muddy playing field from the get go, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to think about what makes a successful blog, because it\u0026rsquo;s more of what I have been doing here , and it may be easierer to quantify than what makes an successful journal.","title":"Blogging about Ideas"},{"content":"Ok, this is going to be a quick post, I swear.\nTruth is I do most of my blogging in TextMate using the amazing blogging bundle. Basically it means that if I use the right template (which looks a lot like an email header, really), I can hit three keys and a few seconds later the post appears here on tychoish.\nRight.\nAs part of tycho\u0026rsquo;s great march torwards linux, I\u0026rsquo;m looking for something to fill this niche in my workflow.\nSo basically does anyone know of/know how hard it would be to write a script that takes posts written in a specific format (to specify title, categories, tags, etc) and send them via xml-rpc to a given blog.\nCommand line only is fine/preferable, and really I think the blogging.rb file in the TextMate bundle would probably make for a good core to write a script around, and I\u0026rsquo;m mostly interested in being able to send posts, editing as I archive posts on my machine, and I don\u0026rsquo;t mind the web interface for editing. Getting the sending done would be mighty nice.\nThis might make more sense if you\u0026rsquo;ve used the blogging bundle, as I think about it. Basically, the files when you pust get a Post: id field, which if you post a file with that ID a second time, is treated as an edit.\nSo in short:\nSimple text-based file format. Easy, non-editor specific posting commands. Multiple Blog support (again the TM bundle does this.) Yeah, that\u0026rsquo;s about it. Thoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/command-line-blog/","summary":"Ok, this is going to be a quick post, I swear.\nTruth is I do most of my blogging in TextMate using the amazing blogging bundle. Basically it means that if I use the right template (which looks a lot like an email header, really), I can hit three keys and a few seconds later the post appears here on tychoish.\nRight.\nAs part of tycho\u0026rsquo;s great march torwards linux, I\u0026rsquo;m looking for something to fill this niche in my workflow.\nSo basically does anyone know of/know how hard it would be to write a script that takes posts written in a specific format (to specify title, categories, tags, etc) and send them via xml-rpc to a given blog.\nCommand line only is fine/preferable, and really I think the blogging.rb file in the TextMate bundle would probably make for a good core to write a script around, and I\u0026rsquo;m mostly interested in being able to send posts, editing as I archive posts on my machine, and I don\u0026rsquo;t mind the web interface for editing.","title":"Command Line Blog"},{"content":"Ok, so I really want to like Gentoo Linux. Really, rather a lot. And I even wrote a post about how awesome VMs were. But here\u0026rsquo;s the issue of the hour.\nI wanted to try gentoo, because I was kind of sick of having to fight with ubuntu/debian to get at more contemporary packages. Having a distribution that\u0026rsquo;s really picky about these things when I\u0026rsquo;m not running a server, and capiable of deciding if I want to install something is\u0026hellip; anoying. Espically when I\u0026rsquo;m likely to install it myself, the \u0026ldquo;stability feature\u0026rdquo; seems downright painful.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m in the process of testing things out so it seems fair to give one of the \u0026ldquo;rolling\u0026rdquo; release cylce distributions a test drive. Ok, so here\u0026rsquo;s what happened.\nThere aren\u0026rsquo;t--that I can find--VMs with pre-built Gentoo desktop installations in abundence like there are for ubuntu. Which means I have to install it from scratch. Except that that\u0026rsquo;s really finkey and I\u0026rsquo;ve thusfar screwed up in a couple instalations. Once by not reading the instructions correctly and setting some weird keyboard layout that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t recover from, and this second time because the network wouldn\u0026rsquo;t connect in the virtual machine so there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a display manager aside from xdm, and while I\u0026rsquo;m good with the shell, I\u0026rsquo;m not that good with it.\nI think I should attempt to get a good solid install into the VM before I order hardware for real, but this last issue seems to be more an issue of \u0026ldquo;tycho fighting with the vm engine\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;tycho fighting with linux\u0026rdquo; so that\u0026rsquo;s helpful, at least a little.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gentoovms-suck/","summary":"Ok, so I really want to like Gentoo Linux. Really, rather a lot. And I even wrote a post about how awesome VMs were. But here\u0026rsquo;s the issue of the hour.\nI wanted to try gentoo, because I was kind of sick of having to fight with ubuntu/debian to get at more contemporary packages. Having a distribution that\u0026rsquo;s really picky about these things when I\u0026rsquo;m not running a server, and capiable of deciding if I want to install something is\u0026hellip; anoying. Espically when I\u0026rsquo;m likely to install it myself, the \u0026ldquo;stability feature\u0026rdquo; seems downright painful.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m in the process of testing things out so it seems fair to give one of the \u0026ldquo;rolling\u0026rdquo; release cylce distributions a test drive. Ok, so here\u0026rsquo;s what happened.\nThere aren\u0026rsquo;t--that I can find--VMs with pre-built Gentoo desktop installations in abundence like there are for ubuntu. Which means I have to install it from scratch.","title":"gentoo/vms suck"},{"content":"Last month I told you all about this funky new way way I\u0026rsquo;ve been downloading email, using the git version control system, rather than traditional POP or IMAP. I wanted to write a post with an update to how this system works and how I\u0026rsquo;ve changed the system and how I think I will change the system.\nEverything I said in the last post is still most true to be honest, though I did tweak it a bit in response to the comments, to make sure there aren\u0026rsquo;t performance related issues. It\u0026rsquo;s not perfect. Here\u0026rsquo;s the biggest problem:\nIn git, pushing to a non-bare repository is tedious, and potentially troublesome. Pushing to bare repositories are in contrast, much simplier. Indeed most of my stress--and the complication--in the initial solution was bound up in this fact. Bare repositories are basically the versioned database parts of a git repository without the files, which is ideal for a server where you\u0026rsquo;re pushing commits/data to. The reason why pushing to non-bare repoistories is hard is becasue when you push to a non-bare the files aren\u0026rsquo;t updated (on the theory that someone might be using them, and there might be uncommited changes.)\nThe reason why I\u0026rsquo;d need to do this? The \u0026ldquo;origin\u0026rdquo; repository, which in all other situations would be a bare repository, needs to have an \u0026ldquo;index\u0026rdquo; (files) becasue all of the mail lands on the server (as files) in the origin repository.\nThe obvious solution to this is to keep a second remote repository, and this how ikiwki solves the problem for ikiwiki wiki\u0026rsquo;s stored in git repositories. So here\u0026rsquo;s a description of how this new system would work:\n1. Email arrives on the server and procmail begins to filer it delivering it to: 2. ..a git repository called ~/mail which is a clone of ~/domain.com/git/mail.git/. 3. I keep a clone of domain.com/git/mail.git/ on all of my computers/workstations/shell accounts.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how the sync sequence goes. Though I could probably wire something up with git hooks (is there even a pre-pull hook?), I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that that gains us anything in particular for this setup, so I\u0026rsquo;ll just assume that v.2 of git-mail will work the same as v.1, and live in a shell script that:\nPull from domain.com/git/mail.git/ Commit all local changes. (involves removing deleted files and adding new files, git\u0026rsquo;ll handle the renames impicitly). Push local changes to domain.com/git/mail.git/ ssh into the server. and have ~/mail/ pull from ~/domain.com/git/mail.git/ commit all changes push to~/domain.com/git/mail.git/ Pull from domain.com/git/mail.git/ Basically the idea is:\nAlways pull from the bare/\u0026ldquo;root\u0026rdquo;/centralized repository, commit any local changes and then push to the local repository. Even though this system, like most git systems, in truth, have a centralized repository, all of the \u0026ldquo;children\u0026rdquo; repositories are equivelent, even though one repository is special because it\u0026rsquo;s where new data enters the system. This, as my previous attempt has shown, isn\u0026rsquo;t strictly speaking, necessary, but it does make things better. Given all this, if I needed to start using fetchmail locally for some reason to check a pop account, I could without needing to worry about syncing problems. It makes sense for mail to \u0026ldquo;enter\u0026rdquo; on the server/centralized for semi-obvious reasons, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a requirement by any means. The problem is that you have to keep two copies of all your mail folders plus the history (which becasue of delta storage and compression isn\u0026rsquo;t as much as you\u0026rsquo;d think) on your server, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t tested things, so I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how it fares on the time. On the one hand there\u0026rsquo;s more disk time involved in the new setup, on the second hand there\u0026rsquo;s more chatter between the machines in the old setup, so I don\u0026rsquo;t know how it works interms of speed, but from where I\u0026rsquo;m sitting, it cannot be worse than IMAP. Can\u0026rsquo;t be.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rethinking-git-mail/","summary":"Last month I told you all about this funky new way way I\u0026rsquo;ve been downloading email, using the git version control system, rather than traditional POP or IMAP. I wanted to write a post with an update to how this system works and how I\u0026rsquo;ve changed the system and how I think I will change the system.\nEverything I said in the last post is still most true to be honest, though I did tweak it a bit in response to the comments, to make sure there aren\u0026rsquo;t performance related issues. It\u0026rsquo;s not perfect. Here\u0026rsquo;s the biggest problem:\nIn git, pushing to a non-bare repository is tedious, and potentially troublesome. Pushing to bare repositories are in contrast, much simplier. Indeed most of my stress--and the complication--in the initial solution was bound up in this fact. Bare repositories are basically the versioned database parts of a git repository without the files, which is ideal for a server where you\u0026rsquo;re pushing commits/data to.","title":"Rethinking git-mail"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m still writing, even though I\u0026rsquo;ve been in a very clear Critical Futures kick of posting lots of old material. I think I might post another one of the Trailing Edge stories soon, just to switch things up, after another Knowing Mars story. But that\u0026rsquo;s beside the point. So I\u0026rsquo;m writing this new story. It\u0026rsquo;s good fun, and there are lots of things about this story that I absoutly adore. The theory is interesting, the characters are a hoge podge of old favorites (sort of), the setting is great fun, and I really like the shape of the plot.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not writing about it on the blog because I think it\u0026rsquo;s too introspective, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to overthink things, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure it\u0026rsquo;s going to end up on Critical Futures, and so forth. But I wrote a sentence which makes me smile, so I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post it here.\nSuch strict adhearance to parlaimentray rules wasn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly common and tended to irritate the old timers, who were firmly of the opinion that procedure was to be used as a precision instrument, not a blunt object.\nI have something of a fascination with parlimentary systems and procedures, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s sort of an interesting setting for part of a story. You have the sense that something \u0026ldquo;important\u0026rdquo; is happening (even if it\u0026rsquo;s not,) you have a bunch of smart folks who we can imagine might be prone to saying sort of witty things to/at eachother, there\u0026rsquo;s conflict, and there\u0026rsquo;s a great likleyhood that absurd things can happen.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;ve been dragging on this scene, which I know will be fun to write once it gets going. But it hasn\u0026rsquo;t yet. In due time. In due time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-reports/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m still writing, even though I\u0026rsquo;ve been in a very clear Critical Futures kick of posting lots of old material. I think I might post another one of the Trailing Edge stories soon, just to switch things up, after another Knowing Mars story. But that\u0026rsquo;s beside the point. So I\u0026rsquo;m writing this new story. It\u0026rsquo;s good fun, and there are lots of things about this story that I absoutly adore. The theory is interesting, the characters are a hoge podge of old favorites (sort of), the setting is great fun, and I really like the shape of the plot.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not writing about it on the blog because I think it\u0026rsquo;s too introspective, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to overthink things, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure it\u0026rsquo;s going to end up on Critical Futures, and so forth. But I wrote a sentence which makes me smile, so I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post it here.","title":"writing reports"},{"content":"So I have a new quandry. I have one computer (a nice, pretty new MacBook Black, that does everything I want and then some.) and I have two lives. No not like that, but my computer is both the place where my paying work gets done, and it\u0026rsquo;s the site of much of my creative output happens. Now, keeping work and play separate is a challenge for many people, even when who have different tools, but it\u0026rsquo;s a particular challenge in my enviroment.\nMy biggest concern is that if I\u0026rsquo;m constantly aware of what\u0026rsquo;s happening in my work email box, I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m always working, and it makes it hard to concentrate on writing these blog posts. And the inverse is true too: if I get a message to a non-work related listserv it\u0026rsquo;s hard to let that linger when I\u0026rsquo;m working.\nNow arguably the solution to this would be to have two different email accounts and systems. Except that I use mutt, and procmail and my favorite text editor to write email and I really would have a hard time abiding by another solution. Also adding the need to check another email box wouldn\u0026rsquo;t really fix my problem, because there\u0026rsquo;s a chance that I could miss something crucial in real life if I unplugged from one email or the other. So the two accounts solution is basically out of the question.\nI just need a simple way to control my \u0026ldquo;context\u0026rdquo; (in the Getting Things Done terminology) vis a vis my email box. So here\u0026rsquo;s what I cooked up. I should disclaim that I use the mutt-ng build of mutt which includes a sidebar in the mutt interface.\nBasically what you need to do is have two different .muttrc files (where your settings live), one for \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; and one for \u0026ldquo;play\u0026rdquo; (I called it \u0026ldquo;standard\u0026rdquo;) But rather than have two possibly divergent files, here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve done.\nSplit your .muttrc into two parts. The first includes everything that includes refrences to mailboxs. Those lines look like this: mailboxes =\u0026lt;mailboxname. In a second file put everything esle.\nName the everthing else file .muttrc_core and put it either in your mail folder or in your home dirrectory. Duplicate the mailbox folder so there are two copies, and edit each one to suit. You probably want your drafts/sent/inbox folders in both contexts, but not your work mailboxes or your hobby listservs. Lets name the files, .mailboxes_work and .mailbox_standard, and put them in the same place as the \u0026ldquo;core\u0026rdquo; file.\nNow here comes the trickery. In $HOME/.muttrc put the following:\n# All the good Mutt settings source /path/to/.muttrc_core # which mailboxeses to list in the sidebar source /path/to/.mailboxes_standard And in a file named .muttrc_work\n# All the good Mutt settings source /path/to/.muttrc_core # which mailboxeses to list in the sidebar source /path/to/.mailboxes_work Now, the trickery, open up your .bash_profile or .bashrc (which ever you use\u0026hellip;)\nalias muttw='mutt -F /path/to/.muttrc_work' And you\u0026rsquo;re done. Now you have to intentionally open up your work email, so you don\u0026rsquo;t feel like you\u0026rsquo;re always on call, but you get the delightfullness of only having to worry about one email account, particularly if you\u0026rsquo;re good about choosing which email boxes go in which folders, and about using procmail to filter out most of your email in the right ways.\nYou might also imagine how you could use a similar fix to control how you address email based on work/home context, or even estabilish different commands for various key bindings based on context, and the best part is that al all of your core settings stay the same and are centrally located in one place. How nifty is that?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/work-mode-for-mutt/","summary":"So I have a new quandry. I have one computer (a nice, pretty new MacBook Black, that does everything I want and then some.) and I have two lives. No not like that, but my computer is both the place where my paying work gets done, and it\u0026rsquo;s the site of much of my creative output happens. Now, keeping work and play separate is a challenge for many people, even when who have different tools, but it\u0026rsquo;s a particular challenge in my enviroment.\nMy biggest concern is that if I\u0026rsquo;m constantly aware of what\u0026rsquo;s happening in my work email box, I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m always working, and it makes it hard to concentrate on writing these blog posts. And the inverse is true too: if I get a message to a non-work related listserv it\u0026rsquo;s hard to let that linger when I\u0026rsquo;m working.\nNow arguably the solution to this would be to have two different email accounts and systems.","title":"Work Mode for Mutt"},{"content":"In my post/rant about IM clients, I mentioned that I was running a Ubuntu instalation in a VM instance on my MacBook. I am in fact, not crazy, and I\u0026rsquo;d even go so far as to recomend this experience for most other people. Here\u0026rsquo;s why:\nFirst off, virtual machines let you save state in snapshots. So, as a general practice make a backup snapshot when you get your computer set up (which you save for safe keeping), and then again at regular intervals (every week, say), and then a third one just in case before you change any setting that might screw things up. That way, if things get really bad, you have a known good setup, something working that\u0026rsquo;s no more than 7 days out of date, and protection against botching your system in an upgrade. This isn\u0026rsquo;t as backing up your data, (which you should also do) but it\u0026rsquo;s important to do anyway.\nThe second great thing about virtual machines is that they let you sandbox the operating system. But you like your operating system sans sand? Me too. Conventually we run our operating systems \u0026ldquo;on the metal\u0026rdquo; and our operating system is in charge managing all the hardware interactions, but in virtualized instances the VM software does all this for you, and the \u0026ldquo;guest\u0026rdquo; operating system runs in an isolated enviroment. What this means is that you can move a virtual machine from one computer to another (mine\u0026rsquo;s 6.3 gigabytes, I could put it on a flash stick!) without any problems. Also, if you have some sort of driver problem on your host operating system, the VM isn\u0026rsquo;t subject to that, and you won\u0026rsquo;t get intsability from crapy drivers (exactly). And if you\u0026rsquo;re using the VM for testing and you manage to screw up something crucial the VM is the only thing that crashes.\nNot to mention that you can generally start, stop, and pause virtual machines at will, so say you\u0026rsquo;re working on things in a virtualized linux, but need to run OS X system updates, you can puase your work in the VM update the system, restart and then unpause the VM and be right where you stoped.\nSweet!\nVMs have become more popular/prevelent in the last several years as Macs have started running on the same x86/\u0026ldquo;intel\u0026rdquo; hardware that PCs have been running on for years. If Macintosh hardware is just pretty looking PCs with only one mouse button, it makes it easy (and tempting) to want to virtualize OSes on desktops, particularly as for people switching from Windows to OS X, who either need to use their existing software or who just want something familar near by. And the great news is that since virtualization has been used for years in servers, the programers are pretty good at writing the software.\nSo it seems to me, that VMs might be the way that we all interact with our desktop computers in a few years. There are a lot of useability/backup benefits, not to mention the portability ability, and it could also improve operation, depending on who gets stuck with managing the metal/hardware. I think the possibilities are pretty endless.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/vms-for-all/","summary":"In my post/rant about IM clients, I mentioned that I was running a Ubuntu instalation in a VM instance on my MacBook. I am in fact, not crazy, and I\u0026rsquo;d even go so far as to recomend this experience for most other people. Here\u0026rsquo;s why:\nFirst off, virtual machines let you save state in snapshots. So, as a general practice make a backup snapshot when you get your computer set up (which you save for safe keeping), and then again at regular intervals (every week, say), and then a third one just in case before you change any setting that might screw things up. That way, if things get really bad, you have a known good setup, something working that\u0026rsquo;s no more than 7 days out of date, and protection against botching your system in an upgrade. This isn\u0026rsquo;t as backing up your data, (which you should also do) but it\u0026rsquo;s important to do anyway.","title":"VMs For All"},{"content":"Economics heretofore1 has been based upon scarcity. I mean this is a pretty plain idea. We pay for computer hardware, because there\u0026rsquo;s presumably more pieces of computer hardware than there are people who want it. And the Apple Store/NewEgg takes our money because money isn\u0026rsquo;t limitless. Supply and demand. Pretty basic.\nSo this doesn\u0026rsquo;t hold true on the internet, and of software in general. How come you ask? But you just paid thousands of dollars for the latest Adobe package? Lets take a little trip together, shall we?\nUnlike physical things--which are often scarce--or data stored on magnetic media (eg. VHS, Beta, 3/4\u0026quot; or Umatic,2 Cassette)--which degrade over time and over generation successive copies--data on the internet doesn\u0026rsquo;t cost anything to copy and transfer, and all copies are pristine.\nI mean it\u0026rsquo;s true that internet connections cost something, but the costs are fixed, and generally not related to load. The cost to your ISP when you transfer 6 gb a month is just about the same as the cost if you transfer 12 gb. And storage costs something, its true, but it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly remarkable the speed at which this is decreasing. So computing has some scarcity that\u0026rsquo;s true, but the cost of computing is fixed relative to the amount of data you you consume/copy, assuming that your data collection never outgrows available storage. Which it might, in which case, there\u0026rsquo;s some additional cost there, but only if you\u0026rsquo;re archiving data.\nAnd yet the economy of the internet is dependent upon us paying, in some way, for data. iTunes is all about paying for data, the DRM imposes a false scarcity, shareware/demo software imposes scarcity, websites that distribute content on a subscription model (largely) impose false scarcity on the market.\nWhich is fine, on some level. I mean on the larger level it sucks, because there are people who who give good money (and time, etc) for what amounts to elaborate fiction. But if we abstract things a bit, we\u0026rsquo;re simply compensating artists for their time in exchange for music, or programers for their software. But if that\u0026rsquo;s the case, aren\u0026rsquo;t there better, more straightforward ways of doing this? Ways that don\u0026rsquo;t commoditize non-commodities?\nThe larger point is, I guess, if we\u0026rsquo;re trying to make a living in a world that\u0026rsquo;s halfway between a traditional and a post-scarcity economy, there pretty much has to be a better solution than to pretend that post-scarcity isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;real.\u0026rdquo; I mean, it certainly couldn\u0026rsquo;t hurt. Here\u0026rsquo;s one idea:\nEveryone, as part of their internet service pays some fixed quantity of money every month, and as they amble on through digital life, they give tips to various content producers, and at the end of the month, the ISP (or whoever) divides up the amount and distributes the money.\nOn the one hand dividing everyone\u0026rsquo;s 10-20 bucks a month, seems like it would add to not a lot very fast, but, the internet is pretty big, and there are a lot of people around so it\u0026rsquo;d add up. Also, if this could be implemented to effectively legalize bit torrent across the board and people stopped paying for cable TV hook ups in-favor or big internet pipes? That\u0026rsquo;s a lot of money. And it would add up.\nThere are lots of problems with implementation (How do you get the cable companies to let go? How do you process the money, how do you make the system interoperable? etc.) But it\u0026rsquo;s different. It addresses the need, and it benefits creators and consumers, and it attempts to democratize the payment process while still rewarding quality content.\nThoughts? Ideas? Go for it!\nOnward and Upward!\nI love distilling the entire history of the largest class of human interaction into two words.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nCan you tell I once worked in a Film/Media Archive?\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-scarcity/","summary":"Economics heretofore1 has been based upon scarcity. I mean this is a pretty plain idea. We pay for computer hardware, because there\u0026rsquo;s presumably more pieces of computer hardware than there are people who want it. And the Apple Store/NewEgg takes our money because money isn\u0026rsquo;t limitless. Supply and demand. Pretty basic.\nSo this doesn\u0026rsquo;t hold true on the internet, and of software in general. How come you ask? But you just paid thousands of dollars for the latest Adobe package? Lets take a little trip together, shall we?\nUnlike physical things--which are often scarce--or data stored on magnetic media (eg. VHS, Beta, 3/4\u0026quot; or Umatic,2 Cassette)--which degrade over time and over generation successive copies--data on the internet doesn\u0026rsquo;t cost anything to copy and transfer, and all copies are pristine.\nI mean it\u0026rsquo;s true that internet connections cost something, but the costs are fixed, and generally not related to load. The cost to your ISP when you transfer 6 gb a month is just about the same as the cost if you transfer 12 gb.","title":"On Scarcity"},{"content":"On Blogging about Interesting Things\nMerlin Mann posted this thing on his site, 43Folders a few days ago in his ongoing series about his blog\u0026rsquo;s midlife crisis (which apparently happens after four years.) Merlin\u0026rsquo;s disgusted with the \u0026ldquo;blogging to get attention,\u0026rdquo; and the sort of digerati/problogger blogging tone that the form has taken in the last 5 years or so. His solution, more or less, is more along the lines of my own recent transition in my own blogging, which as basically been to turn tychoish into a ongoing monologue about the things I\u0026rsquo;m interested in, and less of a monologue about me.\nNow there are exceptions to this, hence the coda blog, but for the most part this has kept me thinking and working, and processing things out there in the world. When I need to process about myself, I have friends and family. The end result: good things, and I look forward to what Merlin comes up with in the future. On tychoish, you can mostly expect me to talk about the same old things: open source software, trends in computer usage, amazing knitting things, with the appropriate dash of literary criticism, and historical doodad. My triad of fair-game topics are still \u0026ldquo;technology, science fiction, and knitting\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;m being a little firmer in how I police that boundary.\nHaving said that\u0026hellip;. Here\u0026rsquo;s some introspective shit that\u0026rsquo;s been piling up on my list of things to blog about, I figure if I have to blog about it, I might as well put it in one place:\n1. I--or my alter-ego, depending on how you look at it--have started a new job this week. if you\u0026rsquo;d told me about when I graduated from college, I would have laughed at you, but a lot as changed in these past year, and it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly awesome and pushes me in a direction which I\u0026rsquo;m really eager to travel in.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;ve started writing a new novel. It\u0026rsquo;s a great concept, the characters are fun to write and almost instantly came into themselves which is incredibly good. I finished the first chapter, and I started the second after taking a day off, and I\u0026rsquo;m making good progress, and it\u0026rsquo;s not like pulling teeth, at all. I like that this happens right after I have a bad couple of weeks where words come very difficultly, something snaps into place and things just work.\n3. I got a new desk chair. This is a very very good thing. I am long torso-ed and finding suitable chairs is difficult.\nI gotta make time for knitting. 5. The story I\u0026rsquo;m posting tomorrow on Critical Futures isn\u0026rsquo;t written by me. How cool is that?\nAlso I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that these coda posts, which were supposed to be short and effemeral, have been anything but. Gotta work on that.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/progress-report/","summary":"On Blogging about Interesting Things\nMerlin Mann posted this thing on his site, 43Folders a few days ago in his ongoing series about his blog\u0026rsquo;s midlife crisis (which apparently happens after four years.) Merlin\u0026rsquo;s disgusted with the \u0026ldquo;blogging to get attention,\u0026rdquo; and the sort of digerati/problogger blogging tone that the form has taken in the last 5 years or so. His solution, more or less, is more along the lines of my own recent transition in my own blogging, which as basically been to turn tychoish into a ongoing monologue about the things I\u0026rsquo;m interested in, and less of a monologue about me.\nNow there are exceptions to this, hence the coda blog, but for the most part this has kept me thinking and working, and processing things out there in the world. When I need to process about myself, I have friends and family. The end result: good things, and I look forward to what Merlin comes up with in the future.","title":"Progress Report"},{"content":"You all probably know that I\u0026rsquo;m working strengthing my linux/bash chops so that I can build a much needed desktop computer (after going on 6 years of being laptop only, it\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to have something a\u0026hellip; bit bigger.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that I don\u0026rsquo;t like OS X, or Apple, it\u0026rsquo;s that\u0026hellip; I like awesome. And I want larger/more screens. And other than fluid.app, and TextMate, (and adium in a way) I basically live in linux world, with a different desktop enviroment. Also, a really swell desktop setup for a linux box that would do most of what I need would run me, oh, about half the price of an iMac, or less.\nSo I have a virtual machine instance of Ubuntu running on my laptop, as part of an effort to get used to everything ahead of time. With VM tools beeing as cheap and fast as they are today, I think a lot of people could really benefit from using VMs more. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying apps out and using it to get (more) comfortable with vim and working on solving all of the problems that I\u0026rsquo;m likely to run into now rather than later. I\u0026rsquo;ll be reporting on this more in the future, for sure.\nWhile most things have gone pretty seamless, the one program that I use that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to even come close to replacing is Adium. Here\u0026rsquo;s the thing. Adium is a OS X-ification of a linux program called \u0026ldquo;pidgin\u0026rdquo; which, despite boasting a near identical feature set is considerably less\u0026hellip;something. While it\u0026rsquo;s polished and totally operational, it\u0026rsquo;s not\u0026hellip; coherant and maybe it\u0026rsquo;s only really noticeable in light of using Adium. The problem is that every other IM client for linux is worse. There\u0026rsquo;s a command line version of pidgin called finch which looks like it\u0026rsquo;s trying really hard to be a GUI rather than really letting the simplicty of the command line give rise to a clearer interface model. There\u0026rsquo;s a great jabber/xmpp client called mcabber, but jabber adoption is still really low, and while there are interoperability measures with other protocols, the truth is that most of my contacts are on other systems, and the interoperability transports aren\u0026rsquo;t incredibly reliable. If someone knows of something that I\u0026rsquo;ve missed I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what people use (and like).\nSo I was bemoning this (the end of this story is that I\u0026rsquo;m figuring out a way to live with pidgin), with chris and he said of jabber, \u0026ldquo;It--like IMAP--is a great idea and a good protocol, the implementations are universally horrible.\u0026rdquo; (or something like that) and he\u0026rsquo;s right, and I think this goes for most IM clients. They all, to use a technical term, suck.1 Chris\u0026rsquo; comparison to IMAP and mail clients reminded me of the slogan of my favorite email client, mutt.\n\u0026ldquo;All email clients suck, mutt just sucks less.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd it does. I save hours every week using mutt, and I\u0026rsquo;m no where near a power user (yet.) So the question on my mind is, \u0026ldquo;where\u0026rsquo;s the mutt of IM clients?\u0026rdquo; Here\u0026rsquo;s what I think it would look like:\nIt would need to connect to AIM, Yahoo and Jabber. This is my personal prefrence. MSN is pretty irrelevant to me, an ICQ these days is AIM. Multiple connections would be good. I think the interface should draw on the mutt with sidebar model. IMs needn\u0026rsquo;t fill a whole window, and the sidebar works really well. It needs to have some understanding of a tabbed interface. While I understand that many people (and to some degree, myself included) don\u0026rsquo;t actively particpate in more than one chat at a time, I often have more than one window open at a time. Conversations go dormant, people step out, you have to ask a quick question, there bots on the IM network feeding you (useless) information. Tabs are necessary. It\u0026rsquo;d be better if the program was able to consistently manage and sync the contact/buddy list, and handle meta-contacts, than be able to do file transfers, or mutli-user chats. Granular access controls. The networks I believe, allow you to set yourself invisible to certian people, and it would be really great to be able to write rules about which buddies got what kind of status/visibility settings. The key to \u0026ldquo;the mutt of\u0026rdquo; anything is the ability to take whatever you do, and bind it to a particular key command. So I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to have \u0026ldquo;IM Chris\u0026rdquo; bound to something, or be able to set various screen names visible or invisible depending on my context or trigger different complex visibility rules. I think there\u0026rsquo;s possibility. Thoughts? How do you manage your IM?2\nEven my beloved Adium, which operates as expected in most respects is compleatly inconsistent in how it stories and syncs the buddy list to the server. Or doesn\u0026rsquo;t depending on the weather. Highly annoying.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBefore anyone gets high-and-mighty about IM being a waste of time and attention, I generally use IM as a phone replacement because I can multi-task it, and becasue it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have voicemail, and because it\u0026rsquo;s almost always less awkward. Just saying. n\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-mutt-of-im/","summary":"You all probably know that I\u0026rsquo;m working strengthing my linux/bash chops so that I can build a much needed desktop computer (after going on 6 years of being laptop only, it\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to have something a\u0026hellip; bit bigger.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not that I don\u0026rsquo;t like OS X, or Apple, it\u0026rsquo;s that\u0026hellip; I like awesome. And I want larger/more screens. And other than fluid.app, and TextMate, (and adium in a way) I basically live in linux world, with a different desktop enviroment. Also, a really swell desktop setup for a linux box that would do most of what I need would run me, oh, about half the price of an iMac, or less.\nSo I have a virtual machine instance of Ubuntu running on my laptop, as part of an effort to get used to everything ahead of time. With VM tools beeing as cheap and fast as they are today, I think a lot of people could really benefit from using VMs more.","title":"The Mutt of IM"},{"content":"In my post on Open ID I said that I\u0026rsquo;d continue that train of thought with a post about federation, so here we are. This post starts, however, a bit before that one ends, somewhere a little different. Stick with me though:\nThe greatest thing about Unix-like operating systems (at least conceptually, to me) is the concept of the pipe. This isn\u0026rsquo;t new of course, but the pipe is the tool by which the output of the small widget like unix programs can be \u0026ldquo;piped\u0026rdquo; into another application. The pipe works on anything in a plain text format (basically) and takes what would otherwise be a really fragmented computing enviroment and turns it into something where the data, the text, the product of your computing output, is the central focus of your computing activities. As it should be.\nFast forward 30 years, and we have the internet. Where data doesn\u0026rsquo;t flow through pipes (unless you\u0026rsquo;re Ted Stevens), but mostly stays in whatever silo it gets entered in. This isn\u0026rsquo;t strictly true, there are ways to import and export data when they\u0026rsquo;re stored in a database somewhere in the cloud. but on the whole once you commit to storing your data in one place/way the relative price1 of moving from one system to another is quite high.\nThe concept of federation solves the problem of data interchange for the internet in the same way that the pipe solved a very similar problem for UNIX. Or at least it tries to. Unsurprisingly the problem for UNIX developers was a conceptual and engineering problem, for the developers and participants in the internet the problem is one of community norms, but the need for interoperability and openly accessible data is the same.\nIn UNIX the solution to this problem grew out of an understanding that software worked best when it only did one thing, and that it was easier to develop/use/maintain a lot of different pieces of distinct software well than it was to write single pieces of software that did a lot of different things well.\nThis is unequivocally true. And I think it\u0026rsquo;s also true of the Internet. It\u0026rsquo;s easier to maintain and develop smaller websites with less traffic and less data and a smaller staff, and a smaller community, than it is to maintain and cope with huge websites with massive amounts of traffic. The problem is that websites don\u0026rsquo;t have pipes--really--and if they do, it has to be hacked (in sense of computing by trial and error, rather than intrusion) by specialists. And to be fair, RSS and some other XML formats are becoming de facto standards which allow some limited piping, and OpenID is a good first step towards interoperability, but there is a great deal of work left to be done.\nIt seems to me, that data doesn\u0026rsquo;t flow on the internet because success of a website, seems to be measured in a very strictly quantitative basis. The more users, the more visits, the more hits you have, theoretically the more successful you are; and if this is the case then website producers and web-software developers would seem to have a vested interest in keeping users using a site, even if this potentially holding users\u0026rsquo; data hostage. But what if websites didn\u0026rsquo;t need to be huge? What if rather than marketing a website in terms of number of features and size, websites said \u0026ldquo;give us your time and money, and we\u0026rsquo;ll give you full access to your data, the ability to connect your data to the data on other similar sites, and allow you to participate in our very specific community?\u0026rdquo; It would be a different world, indeed.\nThe thing is that, all of these more-focused websites probably would be a lot smaller than most of the big websites today. I\u0026rsquo;m fine with that, but it means rethinking the economics and business model for the web. The question isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;can we figure out a way to get push-based, interoperable technology running on a large scale, but rather, is there a way for the vast majority of websites to be run by (and support the salary of) very small teams of, 5-10 (+/-) people? Not just \u0026ldquo;until it gets bigger, or bought by google/yahoo\u0026rdquo; but, forever?\nI look forward to playing with numbers and theorizing systems with people in the comments, but most of all I\u0026rsquo;m interested in what you all think.\nNot necessarily in terms of monetary cost, but in terms of time, energy, and programing knowhow.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-federation/","summary":"In my post on Open ID I said that I\u0026rsquo;d continue that train of thought with a post about federation, so here we are. This post starts, however, a bit before that one ends, somewhere a little different. Stick with me though:\nThe greatest thing about Unix-like operating systems (at least conceptually, to me) is the concept of the pipe. This isn\u0026rsquo;t new of course, but the pipe is the tool by which the output of the small widget like unix programs can be \u0026ldquo;piped\u0026rdquo; into another application. The pipe works on anything in a plain text format (basically) and takes what would otherwise be a really fragmented computing enviroment and turns it into something where the data, the text, the product of your computing output, is the central focus of your computing activities. As it should be.\nFast forward 30 years, and we have the internet. Where data doesn\u0026rsquo;t flow through pipes (unless you\u0026rsquo;re Ted Stevens), but mostly stays in whatever silo it gets entered in.","title":"On Federation"},{"content":"Weeks ago I was talking with a coworker about internet communities and web development, and other related topics, and our various experiences with \u0026ldquo;community websites.\u0026rdquo; One of my largest complaints/points in this conversation was about how \u0026ldquo;community sites\u0026rdquo; always feel like walled communities in a way, and that while I\u0026rsquo;m often vaguely interested in any number of particular community sites at this point, I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in joining yet another website, and \u0026ldquo;keeping up\u0026rdquo; and particpating in these pull based communities is, difficult.\nNow before you call me jaded, I\u0026rsquo;ll cop to it, and I\u0026rsquo;ll clarify that I\u0026rsquo;m a really intense consumer of internet content, and I\u0026rsquo;m also really controlling about the format that I get my data in, so I don\u0026rsquo;t think my experiences are particularly typical. Resume argument\u0026hellip;\nThe obvious solution to this problem that I mentioned is Open ID which is a service where one website accepts the authentication credentials of another website.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s how it works. I sign in to an OpenID provider (I mostly use live journal for this purpose, but any will work), I take my LJ address and go to a site which accepts OpenID logins (like identi.ca), and the site which accepts openID, asks LJ (etc.) \u0026ldquo;is this really tycho,\u0026rdquo; at which point LJ makes sure I\u0026rsquo;m logged in and asks me \u0026ldquo;do you really want me to do this?\u0026rdquo; I say yes, and then I\u0026rsquo;m logged in. No passwords to be compromized, no passwords to forget. no fuss. It just works.\nThere are a couple of other nice features, first that you can mask your login with a different URL. My Open ID url is this website, but the provider/verifier of my identity is live journal, and this works because of a tag that\u0026rsquo;s in the HTML of tychoish.com. In addition to being pretty, if I at some point decide that I want a different LJ account or a totally different Open ID provider, I can change the URL in question in the HTML of tychoish.com, and everything still works.\nSecondly, you can run your own Open ID server. Unlike other systems which unify identity management online, OpenID doesn\u0026rsquo;t depend on one company providing authority, or security, which is nice, because there\u0026rsquo;s no one target to hack, as there would be if a company like Google or Microsoft the unified decentralized server.\nOpen ID is of course open to the same kinds of problems around identity squatting and theft that having lots of logins can have, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t create any new problem or security risk, and there are ways that having fewer passwords, and fewer accounts could actually be more secure.\nBut online communities? How does that fit in. Well simple. Open ID makes signing up for communities a lot easier. It\u0026rsquo;s the first step in opening up our participation in multiple online communities to a more federated environment, and I think it could conceptually make it more possible for a lot of smaller niche websites to coexist in a larger internet ecology.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to post more on the subject of the ecosystems of internet communities and federation later this week, but lets return to my conversation with the coworker where I said something like: \u0026ldquo;you know, if only people would actually use OpenID?\u0026rdquo;\nAnd he said, \u0026ldquo;Yeah, good luck with that one.\u0026rdquo;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-id/","summary":"Weeks ago I was talking with a coworker about internet communities and web development, and other related topics, and our various experiences with \u0026ldquo;community websites.\u0026rdquo; One of my largest complaints/points in this conversation was about how \u0026ldquo;community sites\u0026rdquo; always feel like walled communities in a way, and that while I\u0026rsquo;m often vaguely interested in any number of particular community sites at this point, I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in joining yet another website, and \u0026ldquo;keeping up\u0026rdquo; and particpating in these pull based communities is, difficult.\nNow before you call me jaded, I\u0026rsquo;ll cop to it, and I\u0026rsquo;ll clarify that I\u0026rsquo;m a really intense consumer of internet content, and I\u0026rsquo;m also really controlling about the format that I get my data in, so I don\u0026rsquo;t think my experiences are particularly typical. Resume argument\u0026hellip;\nThe obvious solution to this problem that I mentioned is Open ID which is a service where one website accepts the authentication credentials of another website.","title":"Open ID"},{"content":"(some liberties taken with this transcript)\ncaroline: the outright lying makes politics fun again.\ntycho: No, I think I\u0026rsquo;m still bitter.\ncaroline: Haha, Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I\u0026rsquo;m so angry I think my brain is compressing.\ntycho: sigh yeah.\ncaroline: But at this point I accept that half of America is backwards and nuts.\ntycho: Oh, it\u0026rsquo;s more like 75%. Minimum.\ncaroline: 99%\ntycho: 90%\ncaroline: 140%\ntycho: ERROR\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/percentage-error/","summary":"(some liberties taken with this transcript)\ncaroline: the outright lying makes politics fun again.\ntycho: No, I think I\u0026rsquo;m still bitter.\ncaroline: Haha, Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I\u0026rsquo;m so angry I think my brain is compressing.\ntycho: sigh yeah.\ncaroline: But at this point I accept that half of America is backwards and nuts.\ntycho: Oh, it\u0026rsquo;s more like 75%. Minimum.\ncaroline: 99%\ntycho: 90%\ncaroline: 140%\ntycho: ERROR","title":"Percentage Error"},{"content":"I make a point of staying on top of trends in technology. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of my \u0026ldquo;thing\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s more fun than say, the hair colors and marital statuses of the rich and famous.\nSo like most geeks, I\u0026rsquo;ve been hearing more and more about \u0026ldquo;cloud computing,\u0026rdquo; which is supposedly an evolution of Web 2.0 technologies (Web 2.1? 2.5?) and this whole \u0026ldquo;internet thing,\u0026rdquo; where software and data is something that runs on a server somewhere else, and your computer (via your browser) is a window on the \u0026ldquo;cloud.\u0026rdquo; Let me back up:\nLets start of with the model traditional personal computing. People have computers, they run software, and they store data. If they have network connection, the network is primarily a tool for pulling new data to be stored and processed using the software and hardware that\u0026rsquo;s sitting on the users desk.\nWhere as on the desktop you might use a program like Word or Open Office, \u0026ldquo;in the cloud\u0026rdquo; a program like \u0026ldquo;Google Documents,\u0026rdquo; is probably the app of choice. And web/cloud apps have been replacing desktop email clients for years.\nAnd this is important and noteworthy because it\u0026rsquo;s a fundamental change in the way that we use computers, and largely we are all accustomed to this mode of operation. The interesting thing, is that the underlying technologies that support cloud computer: mySQL, PHP, python, ruby-on-rails, and even AJAX are really nothing particularly new. I suspect that the largest contributing factor to the emergence of cloud computing is the fact that network connectivity in the last year or two has improved dramatically.\nHaving a connection to the internet isn\u0026rsquo;t something that you do for a few moments or even hours a day anymore, but is practically a requisite part of computer usage: the \u0026ldquo;internet\u0026rdquo; is always on. And networks are pretty darn fast for most things.\nThe geeky and historically astute among you, given the title, can probably see where this is going\u0026hellip;\nThe personal computing modality (run applications and store data locally) came about when computing power and storage finally got to be small enough (it could fit on your desk!) and powerful enough (whole kilobytes!) that it became reasonable for non-specialists to run and operate them.\nBefore this, computers were pretty large, too powerful by the standards of the day for one person to run themselves, very expensive and very finicky to run, so they ran in secure/controlled locations operated by specialists, and users had \u0026ldquo;dumb terminals,\u0026rdquo; which included some sort of connectivity interface (RJ-11 or coax likely), a monitor a keyboard, and a chip board that was just enough to tie it all together and send the single back to the real computer where all the processors and data lived.1\nAnd then computers got smaller and faster than the network connections could keep up with. Hence desktop computing. I\u0026rsquo;m just saying that things cycle through a bit, and everything that\u0026rsquo;s old is new again.\nThinking about cloud computing as an old modality rather than as a new modality makes it a much more exciting problem, because a lot of the nitty gritty problems/interface questions were solved in the 70s. For instance, X11, the windowing system that most *NIX systems use, is designed to run this way and in fact sort of acts as if instances where windows appear on a screen attached to the computers running the applications is an interesting coincidence. Which is pretty logical and makes a lot of very cool things possible, but is admittedly kind of backward in the contemporary perspective.\nAnyway, cool stuff. Have a good weekend, and if you have any thoughts on this subject, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear them.\nIn fairness these connections were, I believe almost always over intranets, rather than over some sort of public internet, though as I think about it, there were probably some leftovers of this in the BBS-days, with regards to terminals and what not.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dumb-terminals/","summary":"I make a point of staying on top of trends in technology. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of my \u0026ldquo;thing\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s more fun than say, the hair colors and marital statuses of the rich and famous.\nSo like most geeks, I\u0026rsquo;ve been hearing more and more about \u0026ldquo;cloud computing,\u0026rdquo; which is supposedly an evolution of Web 2.0 technologies (Web 2.1? 2.5?) and this whole \u0026ldquo;internet thing,\u0026rdquo; where software and data is something that runs on a server somewhere else, and your computer (via your browser) is a window on the \u0026ldquo;cloud.\u0026rdquo; Let me back up:\nLets start of with the model traditional personal computing. People have computers, they run software, and they store data. If they have network connection, the network is primarily a tool for pulling new data to be stored and processed using the software and hardware that\u0026rsquo;s sitting on the users desk.\nWhere as on the desktop you might use a program like Word or Open Office, \u0026ldquo;in the cloud\u0026rdquo; a program like \u0026ldquo;Google Documents,\u0026rdquo; is probably the app of choice.","title":"Dumb Terminals"},{"content":"(my friend, sadia asked me a question on twitter that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t answer in 140 characters, so escalated it to email, and she said that I should post it to the blog, and who am I to refuse a request like that?)\nI really like the open-source/federated microblogging site \u0026ldquo;identi.ca\u0026rdquo; which runs on the laconica platform. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff, but the user base isn\u0026rsquo;t quite there (either on the site, or in the federated network.)\nBasically the killer feature of microblogging, for me, is integration with a jabber/xmpp client, and pretty fine tuned control over who gets in your \u0026ldquo;stream/feed\u0026rdquo; Everything is nice, but fluffy (search, threaded comments, etc.) Jabber is great because it\u0026rsquo;s so interoperable, and because jabber apps, like adium are killer robust and integrate well into the system, were as Adobe Air twitter apps (and even twitterific) don\u0026rsquo;t so much. In some respects, it also boils down to the difference between pull (which is the typical solution, and not ideal) and push (which twitter can\u0026rsquo;t cope with any more).\nI have the attention/time to spare into this, if I can have a lot of control over what I see, and it\u0026rsquo;s pushed to me live rather than via large regular pulls, it\u0026rsquo;s easier to deal with. The end result is that while all the people I\u0026rsquo;m interested in reading/talking to are on the twitter, I have little tolerance for the site/service itself, particularly when I know that every other site does it a little better, and most can supply jabber feeds. This is a scaling problem, but Ev has cash, and the solution might be disruptive, but it\u0026rsquo;s not conceptually difficult.\nThe thing is that, I think twitter is afraid that if they do anything drastic, and if there\u0026rsquo;s any more downtime in a major way, that everyone will jump ship. And they\u0026rsquo;re probably right. Which would be good for us, but not for them.\nYou also asked if microblogging was an addiction or curiosity, and I think I try all the new services out out of curiosity, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s a particular addiction, aside from the general internet. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of ironic, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to spend my internet time communicating people rather than reading the big portals. Hence the email lists, my \u0026ldquo;always on IM\u0026rdquo; M.O., ravelry, the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t really read the A-List blogs much, etc.\nI was a big IRC user back in the day, and in a lot of ways I see twitter (et al) as an evolution of the IRC impulse, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t think \u0026ldquo;going back\u0026rdquo; to IRC is the way to go (because frankly Jabber/xmpp is really a \u0026ldquo;better IRC\u0026rdquo; anyway,) so if it is an addiction, it\u0026rsquo;s not a particularly new one.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sadiavt-microblogging/","summary":"(my friend, sadia asked me a question on twitter that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t answer in 140 characters, so escalated it to email, and she said that I should post it to the blog, and who am I to refuse a request like that?)\nI really like the open-source/federated microblogging site \u0026ldquo;identi.ca\u0026rdquo; which runs on the laconica platform. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff, but the user base isn\u0026rsquo;t quite there (either on the site, or in the federated network.)\nBasically the killer feature of microblogging, for me, is integration with a jabber/xmpp client, and pretty fine tuned control over who gets in your \u0026ldquo;stream/feed\u0026rdquo; Everything is nice, but fluffy (search, threaded comments, etc.) Jabber is great because it\u0026rsquo;s so interoperable, and because jabber apps, like adium are killer robust and integrate well into the system, were as Adobe Air twitter apps (and even twitterific) don\u0026rsquo;t so much. In some respects, it also boils down to the difference between pull (which is the typical solution, and not ideal) and push (which twitter can\u0026rsquo;t cope with any more).","title":"@sadiavt, microblogging"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written about how much I hate hate web-based applications on this site so much that I don\u0026rsquo;t even want to begin to hunt through the archives to find a representative sample of entries on the topic. But let me summarize.\nBrowsers, on the whole, well, suck. They hog system resources and they crash a lot, and they have the most ass-backwards feature model I can think of. \u0026ldquo;My browser lets you install plugins so that you can make it do all the things that I didn\u0026rsquo;t code into it.\u0026rdquo;1, also did I mention that they crash a lot?2\nOn a more conceptual level: as a class of applications they are inconsistent in their implementation of any number or combination of 3 major different standards (and minor ones I\u0026rsquo;m sure, but I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.) They\u0026rsquo;re slow. For most things they require a live internet connection (which is one hell of a dependency for a program if you ask me,) and oh yeah there\u0026rsquo;s like an anti-HIG, so nothing\u0026rsquo;s consistent and there\u0026rsquo;s a huge learning curve where there needn\u0026rsquo;t be.\nSo with that critique under our belts, it should be said that there are some things which do work best in browsers or browser-like interfaces. Basically programs that rely on the many-interlinked pages mode of the web, or programs that need to visualize data as it changes in real time. Wikis, are a great example of this and they don\u0026rsquo;t really work inside of desktop apps anyway. I mean, I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to the internet, or the web, but I want my applications and my work to happen in different kinds of software/environments as a general rule. And the truth of the matter is that there are times when web-based applications are worth using.\nEnter site specific browsers (SSB) like Fluid.app3. Here\u0026rsquo;s the problem: you have a few web apps that you use a lot, you want your apps to be sandboxed4 but can\u0026rsquo;t/won\u0026rsquo;t use google chrome, and you don\u0026rsquo;t really need or want all of the browser-centric interface crap. SSBs basically raise a website to the level of an application just like all your other applications. And it\u0026rsquo;s sandboxed. Besides finding alternatives to web-based applications, this is totally the best option around. Fluid has a lot of nifty features like control over what kind of URLs it\u0026rsquo;ll open or send to your browser, and what it does when you \u0026ldquo;close\u0026rdquo; a window, and special/custom key commands, and so forth.\nWhat this means in practice: All of the websites that I used to habitually keep open in my browser? They have their own \u0026ldquo;apps,\u0026rdquo; now, and I sometimes (shh!) close my web browser (which helps the browser run better, which is crazy when you think about it.) It also means that I can use tabs more efficiently, and reference documents don\u0026rsquo;t get lost. It\u0026rsquo;s a great thing. Try it out, it\u0026rsquo;s all free in some sense.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the tycho-style second hack, particularly for laptop users: install a web-server and run as much of the the web-based software as you can locally. Need access to a personal wiki? Run it locally, and then you always have access to it, even when the wireless flakes out. I mean clearly if you want to have a \u0026ldquo;live journal app\u0026rdquo;/SSB, this won\u0026rsquo;t work, but in some cases it strikes me as both possible and highly preferable.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s it, though I can\u0026rsquo;t deside of SSBs are stopgaps until the web 4.0 or 5.0, where the revolution is about great syncing and sturdy clients that run on your local machines and on your virtualized cloud computers.\nOh and, DNIs while we\u0026rsquo;re at it. That\u0026rsquo;d be awesome, well the open-source second generation DNIs. No one\u0026rsquo;s putting proprietary 1.0 or beta grade hardware in my head, thankyouverymuch.\nAdmittedly I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to the plugin model, and there are a lot of Firefox plugins that I lust after, but the truth is that Firefox--because of plugins--runs interminably slower than it really should, which brings us back to the notion of, if the browser could do it from the beginning without the plugins\u0026hellip;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nSo much that most good browsers now have a \u0026ldquo;when I crash, I\u0026rsquo;ll save your state as best I can, so you only have to wait a long time and almost be back where you were before I panicked.\u0026rdquo; Remember how many years it took them to think of that? Imagine if other programing environments or operating systems did that. Google Chrome fixes this by sand-boxing each web page instance, (good going), but really now. Geeze. Also a word here about Chrome: I can\u0026rsquo;t wait to be able to use it when they release it for OS X (and Linux). The sand-boxing is cool, the speedyness, the good UI (Did Alcor have something to do with that?), the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s likely to be about as open source as Mozilla/WebKit in the end? A win. But anyway, If browsers are what amounts to a runtime, or programing environment, then they are in no way stable enough. If they\u0026rsquo;re just remote file viewers, it\u0026rsquo;d be fine, but they\u0026rsquo;re not. Not anymore.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI like this one, it\u0026rsquo;s free as in beer, but not speech, and is mostly a wrapper around WebKit/safari, which is\u0026hellip; free-ish. Again, not with the caring. If you\u0026rsquo;re not a Mac user, check out Mozillia Prisim, which is a firefox offshoot/plugin that does a very similar thing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWow, this is going to be the post with all the footnotes. I also realized that I\u0026rsquo;ve used this term a lot without subtitling it properly. Ideally applications don\u0026rsquo;t crash, but if/when they do, you don\u0026rsquo;t want them to crash your entire system. And this is true of different programs, largely, but if an application is host to another group of applications/processes (like multiple windows/tabs, for instance,) you don\u0026rsquo;t want what you do in window 2 tab 14 to affect (ie. end) what\u0026rsquo;s happening in window 3 tab 6, or any other tab/window. Except that in the browser world, this happens all the time.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ssb-ftw/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written about how much I hate hate web-based applications on this site so much that I don\u0026rsquo;t even want to begin to hunt through the archives to find a representative sample of entries on the topic. But let me summarize.\nBrowsers, on the whole, well, suck. They hog system resources and they crash a lot, and they have the most ass-backwards feature model I can think of. \u0026ldquo;My browser lets you install plugins so that you can make it do all the things that I didn\u0026rsquo;t code into it.\u0026rdquo;1, also did I mention that they crash a lot?2\nOn a more conceptual level: as a class of applications they are inconsistent in their implementation of any number or combination of 3 major different standards (and minor ones I\u0026rsquo;m sure, but I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.) They\u0026rsquo;re slow. For most things they require a live internet connection (which is one hell of a dependency for a program if you ask me,) and oh yeah there\u0026rsquo;s like an anti-HIG, so nothing\u0026rsquo;s consistent and there\u0026rsquo;s a huge learning curve where there needn\u0026rsquo;t be.","title":"Site Specific Browsers For the Win (eg, SSBFTW)"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written before about why I use a pseudonym and about the importance of naming, but there one aspect of this whole \u0026ldquo;being tycho\u0026rdquo; thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve never really articulated, mostly because I think they\u0026rsquo;re hard to explain.\nAnd then the entry sat in an open window on my desktop for the better part of a week.\nLet this be a lesson to you. Don\u0026rsquo;t write the introduction to a paragraph that ends with \u0026ldquo;hard to explain\u0026rdquo; and then let the post fester for 5 days.\nLuckily to save my ass, someone on my knit list (JoVE) posted something to the queer knit list I moderate, about how she was always surprised when people didn\u0026rsquo;t realize that she was a she, even though she intentionally uses a gender neutral handle/nickname/name.\nAnd then, I wrote this post, in response to the email. I knew it was sitting around waiting to come out. First to contextualize: all of the previous list moderators had gone by \u0026ldquo;list mom\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;list dad\u0026rdquo; and being even younger then than I am now, I was sort of weirded out by the concept.\nAlso I\u0026rsquo;ve done some but not a lot of editing the below, just to clear things up a bit.\nWhen I started taking care of the list, re the listdad stuff for previously covered reasons (age mostly, I think) and I think you (JoVE) were the one who reminded folks that Sam was a gender-ambiguous name (and I think this was at a time when there were more Samantha\u0026rsquo;s on the list anyway,) which I\u0026rsquo;m sort of vaguely aware when I introduce myself online, but I forget too.\n(For the record, while I\u0026rsquo;m not intensely invested in masculinity, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty comfortable with my maleness.) I also think that I probably give off more vibe as \u0026ldquo;Jewish\u0026rdquo; than \u0026ldquo;Gay,\u0026rdquo; which means that the goyem either think I\u0026rsquo;m ethnic or gay, and and the jews don\u0026rsquo;t seem to notice (unless they\u0026rsquo;re queer.) But then I\u0026rsquo;m convinced that, at least in America the gay male stereotype is lifted pretty indiscriminately from the jewish stereotype, so fair is fair.\nIn the last year and some change I\u0026rsquo;ve been using a pseudonym that is less jewish and more male (and fewer letters! woot!) than my given name, and it\u0026rsquo;s sort of an interesting drag to pull off (and I still usually dash out my g-ds, which I think is endearing and a bit ironic/weird, and it might negate the drag a bit, but, whatever.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always seen my use of a pseudonym--at least in part--as paying homage to a tradition of women (and jews) using pseudonyms to gain entry into the publishing world. But in fairness there\u0026rsquo;s probably a level of \u0026ldquo;guy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man,\u0026rdquo; that gets lost in the translation. Thankfully, the other part--keeping my given name out of google for privacy concerns--works just fine.\nAnd there you have it. Thanks for reading, more non-introspective (extrospective?) posts soon.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-pseudonymity/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written before about why I use a pseudonym and about the importance of naming, but there one aspect of this whole \u0026ldquo;being tycho\u0026rdquo; thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve never really articulated, mostly because I think they\u0026rsquo;re hard to explain.\nAnd then the entry sat in an open window on my desktop for the better part of a week.\nLet this be a lesson to you. Don\u0026rsquo;t write the introduction to a paragraph that ends with \u0026ldquo;hard to explain\u0026rdquo; and then let the post fester for 5 days.\nLuckily to save my ass, someone on my knit list (JoVE) posted something to the queer knit list I moderate, about how she was always surprised when people didn\u0026rsquo;t realize that she was a she, even though she intentionally uses a gender neutral handle/nickname/name.\nAnd then, I wrote this post, in response to the email. I knew it was sitting around waiting to come out.","title":"On Pseudonymity"},{"content":"Aside from doing semi-perverse things with my email retrieval system, one of my most recent technical/digital obsessions has been with a X11-based window manager called awesome. It\u0026rsquo;s a tiling window manager, and it\u0026rsquo;s designed to decrease reliance on the mouse for most computer interaction/system navigation purposes.\nUnless you\u0026rsquo;re in the choir, your first question is probably \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s a tiling window manager?\u0026rdquo; Basically the idea is that awesome takes your entire screen and divides all of it into windows that are a lot like the windows that OS X, Windows, GNOME, and KDE users are the same. Awesome also has the possibility for what it calls \u0026ldquo;tags,\u0026rdquo; but which are akin to virtual desktops (and I think of as slates) which make it possible to have a great number of windows open and accessible which maximizes screen efficiency and multi-tasking while minimizing distractions and squinting.\nThe second question you might have, given the prevalence of the mouse-pointer paradigm in computing lo these 30 years, why would you want a system that\u0026rsquo;s not dependent on the mouse? Long time readers of the \u0026lsquo;blag might remember some blogging I did earlier this year about the second coming of the command line interface. The basic idea is that the more you can avoid switching between the mouse and the keyboard, the more efficient you can be. Keystrokes take fractions of seconds, mouse clicks take many seconds, and this adds up. The more complex idea is that text-based environments tend to be more scriptable than GUIs and coded more efficiently with less mess in between you and your data/task. After all, coding visual effects into your text/word processing application is probably a sign that someone is doing their job horribly wrong.\nOne of my largest complaints about using GNOME is that it\u0026rsquo;s terribly inefficient with regards to how it uses screen space. Maybe this is the symptom of using a laptop and not having a lot of space to go around, but most applications don\u0026rsquo;t need a menu bar at they top of every window, and a status bar at the bottom of every window, and a nice 5 pixel border. I want to use my computer to read and write words, not look at window padding (I suppose I should gripe about GNOME at some point, this is an entry onto itself.) Awesome fixes this problem.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not jumping in to Awesome full time, but I am starting to use it more and learn about it\u0026rsquo;s subtleties, and hopefully I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to contribute to the documentation of the project (it needs something at any rate). For a long time I\u0026rsquo;ve flirted with Linux, but haven\u0026rsquo;t ever really felt that it offered something that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t get with OS X, and this changes that pretty significantly.\nOne of the things that I need to do first is explore Linux equivalents to my remaining OS X-only apps. The most crucial is the news reader, I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of NetNewsWire, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never used a news reader which can top it. As it turns out, between vim and Cream, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty set in the text editor department (though I need to port over the most important of my scripts and snippets to vim), and although Adium is a port of Pidgin, using Pidgin is painful by comparison, particularly in awesome.\nBut I have time. I\u0026rsquo;m doing this becasue it\u0026rsquo;s interesting interested and weirdly enough, it\u0026rsquo;s kind of fun.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s my story and I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to it, I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting more on the subject as I learn more.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/awesome-window-manager/","summary":"Aside from doing semi-perverse things with my email retrieval system, one of my most recent technical/digital obsessions has been with a X11-based window manager called awesome. It\u0026rsquo;s a tiling window manager, and it\u0026rsquo;s designed to decrease reliance on the mouse for most computer interaction/system navigation purposes.\nUnless you\u0026rsquo;re in the choir, your first question is probably \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s a tiling window manager?\u0026rdquo; Basically the idea is that awesome takes your entire screen and divides all of it into windows that are a lot like the windows that OS X, Windows, GNOME, and KDE users are the same. Awesome also has the possibility for what it calls \u0026ldquo;tags,\u0026rdquo; but which are akin to virtual desktops (and I think of as slates) which make it possible to have a great number of windows open and accessible which maximizes screen efficiency and multi-tasking while minimizing distractions and squinting.\nThe second question you might have, given the prevalence of the mouse-pointer paradigm in computing lo these 30 years, why would you want a system that\u0026rsquo;s not dependent on the mouse?","title":"Awesome Window Manager"},{"content":"Today was the first day that my regular blog post/essay didn\u0026rsquo;t get crossposted to my livejournal. This is one of the cool things that I can do now that I\u0026rsquo;ve redone tychoish.com. So LJ-land if you want to read about a really cool linux/open source thing click the above link.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying around with identi.ca which is the flagship of an open source federated twitter clone called laconica. (You can join/follow my \u0026ldquo;dents\u0026rdquo; here if you use any Laconica site.)\nNow I\u0026rsquo;m a really big fan of the twitter except that my prefered method of interacting with twitter is via the IM/jabber interface, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t worked for months. While I\u0026rsquo;d love to jump ships to another platform (like identi.ca or jaiku), twitter has too many people that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t jump ship with me. So until Laconica can import tweets a little better, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in a couple of different worlds for a while. Anyway\u0026hellip;\nI listened to an interview with the author the other day, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing some blog posts on this subject very soon, but its mightily cool, conceptually (because it gives everyone a lot of control over their microblogging life.)\nA while back I wrote a post--after identi.ca started up, actually--about how microblogging needed to be thought of as an evolution of IRC and IM rather than an evolution of blogging. Not so much in terms of database structure (though I hear that would help,) but in terms of user interface and interaction.\nI still think this is the case. Just FYI. And I still want to use something that really works. And better access control would be good.\nOk, blathering over.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/micro-jabbering/","summary":"Today was the first day that my regular blog post/essay didn\u0026rsquo;t get crossposted to my livejournal. This is one of the cool things that I can do now that I\u0026rsquo;ve redone tychoish.com. So LJ-land if you want to read about a really cool linux/open source thing click the above link.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying around with identi.ca which is the flagship of an open source federated twitter clone called laconica. (You can join/follow my \u0026ldquo;dents\u0026rdquo; here if you use any Laconica site.)\nNow I\u0026rsquo;m a really big fan of the twitter except that my prefered method of interacting with twitter is via the IM/jabber interface, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t worked for months. While I\u0026rsquo;d love to jump ships to another platform (like identi.ca or jaiku), twitter has too many people that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t jump ship with me. So until Laconica can import tweets a little better, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in a couple of different worlds for a while.","title":"Micro Jabbering"},{"content":"So, while it might seem like all I do on the interent is write wordy personal narratives or lengthy informal essays, I do in fact visit other websites and participate in other discussions. Here are a few recent tycho sightings and other bits of news (related to this site):\nMost obviously, we have a new design and a new sub-blog, coda. I initially described it as a long-form twitter site. And it is. Right now there\u0026rsquo;s a syndication feed for coda (and a separate one for just the essays), if this is more your speed. I\u0026rsquo;m not 100% happy with all of the display options, but this is a good start. I\u0026rsquo;d really like to know what you think, or if you find any bugs. At the moment I know about the archiving of the coda entries, and the inclusion some pages at the bottom of the coda display on some views. I\u0026rsquo;m also just assuming that it works on IE, because I don\u0026rsquo;t have access to this browser, help (screenshots?) would be much appreciated. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on updating and cleaning up the static pages of this site to make tychoish.com a little bit more of a website and a little bit less of a plain old blog. This includes a contact page and a page about open source. I also wrote up a \u0026ldquo;support *critical futures*\u0026rdquo; page. Working on more\u0026hellip; In Rewriting the Bases, Caroline (who calls/links to me as sam because she\u0026rsquo;s that good of a friend) outlines a mostly sarcastic commentary I made on gay male sexuality. I was mostly kidding, but I think it was sort of entertaining. Unfortunately, Caroline has used this as ammunition against my cynicism, making the claim that I do have a heart. Bah! ;) There\u0026rsquo;s been a lot of ongoing debate in the SF blogosphere, about media-tie-in fiction. Like Star Wars and Star Trek books, which I remember fondly, but haven\u0026rsquo;t mustered the will or the time to really get into recently (in part I think, because there\u0026rsquo;s more lower grade stuff/stuff that isn\u0026rsquo;t indented for the audience group I belong to now.) In any case, I commented on this at jonathan Strahan\u0026rsquo;s blog and on the sf signal mind meld. I\u0026rsquo;ve started posting a lot of the writing related stuff that I used to post here, over on my sf writing list, which is 8 years old now. Wow! Anyway, its generally sort of an interesting thing, and if you\u0026rsquo;re prone to writing SF I\u0026rsquo;ve also started a more concerted effort to return to and become active in the ravelry community. I\u0026rsquo;d lapsed for a while for a lot of reasons in addition to the great knitting malaise of 08, but also because I wasn\u0026rsquo;t (and am still not) keeping my projects updated, and I don\u0026rsquo;t much knit other people\u0026rsquo;s patterns, and I\u0026rsquo;m boring/not hip enough in someways, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great community, and it\u0026rsquo;s good for me (and the blog) when I\u0026rsquo;m more active, so\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m back. More news as it develops.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/elsewhere/","summary":"So, while it might seem like all I do on the interent is write wordy personal narratives or lengthy informal essays, I do in fact visit other websites and participate in other discussions. Here are a few recent tycho sightings and other bits of news (related to this site):\nMost obviously, we have a new design and a new sub-blog, coda. I initially described it as a long-form twitter site. And it is. Right now there\u0026rsquo;s a syndication feed for coda (and a separate one for just the essays), if this is more your speed. I\u0026rsquo;m not 100% happy with all of the display options, but this is a good start. I\u0026rsquo;d really like to know what you think, or if you find any bugs. At the moment I know about the archiving of the coda entries, and the inclusion some pages at the bottom of the coda display on some views.","title":"Elsewhere"},{"content":"I generally am not a fan hand lotions as they tend to make my hands feel all greasy, and I\u0026rsquo;d prefer chapped hands to feeling oily.\nI discovered Udder Cream the other day. I guess we\u0026rsquo;ve had a tub of it around for a while, but given my aforementioned aversion, I\u0026rsquo;ve not been keen on trying it. I did, and I like it, as it\u0026rsquo;s sort of \u0026ldquo;fast acting,\u0026rdquo; and not particularly oily.\nI will admit that having hands that are neither oily nor dry is a sort of odd sensation, but not unwelcome. I do have a two observations however:\nThe tub has splotches on it and looks like a cow. This is endearing.\nDespite the fact that this stuff is commonly sold in stores like Target, the instructions are all about applying it to your cow, and how you should wash \u0026ldquo;udder and teat parts\u0026rdquo; before milking first and then moisturize their udders/teats, so as to avoid contaminating the milk.\nThanks Udder Cream for that advice.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/udder-cream/","summary":"I generally am not a fan hand lotions as they tend to make my hands feel all greasy, and I\u0026rsquo;d prefer chapped hands to feeling oily.\nI discovered Udder Cream the other day. I guess we\u0026rsquo;ve had a tub of it around for a while, but given my aforementioned aversion, I\u0026rsquo;ve not been keen on trying it. I did, and I like it, as it\u0026rsquo;s sort of \u0026ldquo;fast acting,\u0026rdquo; and not particularly oily.\nI will admit that having hands that are neither oily nor dry is a sort of odd sensation, but not unwelcome. I do have a two observations however:\nThe tub has splotches on it and looks like a cow. This is endearing.\nDespite the fact that this stuff is commonly sold in stores like Target, the instructions are all about applying it to your cow, and how you should wash \u0026ldquo;udder and teat parts\u0026rdquo; before milking first and then moisturize their udders/teats, so as to avoid contaminating the milk.","title":"Udder Cream"},{"content":"We, as a family, talk to the cats in Chez Garen. Not a lot, and not seriously, but it seems like the thing to do. Maybe we just have loud mewing cats, but it\u0026rsquo;s awkward after a point to not talk to them, and they out number us and can exact retribution on our sleep schedules, so we\u0026rsquo;re just playing it safe.\nMost of my conversations with them are along the lines of \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;re pretty fuzzy there, kip/merlin/montana/nash,\u0026rdquo; but other members of the household who shall remain nameless have been known to have much longer and more involved conversations with the family pets.\nRight. Earlier today, I heard from my perch in my office, someone say:\n\u0026ldquo;Come to the light, Kip!\u0026rdquo;\nPresumably said person was trying to get the cat to follow them out of the room, or come up from the basement.\nNot being able to help myself, I said (in a cartoonish voice meant to imitate the cat/lolcats,) \u0026ldquo;Nooo George Fox, I likes the dark.\u0026rdquo;\nQuaker puns are highly under appreciated in today\u0026rsquo;s world.\nI think we have our work cut out for us.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/come-to-the-light/","summary":"We, as a family, talk to the cats in Chez Garen. Not a lot, and not seriously, but it seems like the thing to do. Maybe we just have loud mewing cats, but it\u0026rsquo;s awkward after a point to not talk to them, and they out number us and can exact retribution on our sleep schedules, so we\u0026rsquo;re just playing it safe.\nMost of my conversations with them are along the lines of \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;re pretty fuzzy there, kip/merlin/montana/nash,\u0026rdquo; but other members of the household who shall remain nameless have been known to have much longer and more involved conversations with the family pets.\nRight. Earlier today, I heard from my perch in my office, someone say:\n\u0026ldquo;Come to the light, Kip!\u0026rdquo;\nPresumably said person was trying to get the cat to follow them out of the room, or come up from the basement.\nNot being able to help myself, I said (in a cartoonish voice meant to imitate the cat/lolcats,) \u0026ldquo;Nooo George Fox, I likes the dark.","title":"Come to the Light"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m editing a story for `Critical Futures \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/\u0026gt;`_ this week, and I\u0026rsquo;m re-encountering an old problem with this novella.\nThere are some characters without specified genders, it\u0026rsquo;s important to their characterization, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty wed to it, though I did slip up and use some he/she in the first drafts, which I\u0026rsquo;ve since edited out.\nInterestingly, or maybe not, the real effect of doing this is that the characters don\u0026rsquo;t really relate to each other\u0026rsquo;s bodies. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m just a n00b, but I from a theoretical place it makes sense.\nIn any case it\u0026rsquo;s really interesting, and also damn frustrating.\nThat is all.\nPeriscope down.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gender-and-bodies/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m editing a story for `Critical Futures \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/\u0026gt;`_ this week, and I\u0026rsquo;m re-encountering an old problem with this novella.\nThere are some characters without specified genders, it\u0026rsquo;s important to their characterization, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty wed to it, though I did slip up and use some he/she in the first drafts, which I\u0026rsquo;ve since edited out.\nInterestingly, or maybe not, the real effect of doing this is that the characters don\u0026rsquo;t really relate to each other\u0026rsquo;s bodies. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m just a n00b, but I from a theoretical place it makes sense.\nIn any case it\u0026rsquo;s really interesting, and also damn frustrating.\nThat is all.\nPeriscope down.","title":"Gender and Bodies"},{"content":"I just finished spinning the Corriedale Cross (basic plain wool) that I\u0026rsquo;ve been spinning for months. I had 2 pounds (900 grams) which is my standard amount, and I have 9 skeins. I think I was less that pleased with two of them, but they\u0026rsquo;re fine, and all the other ones are great.\nI started spinning some dark brown blue faced leicester (this stuff, in fact).\nWow, in a word.\nIt spins like butter. Only better, because it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting color the picture doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite capture it (and it\u0026rsquo;s reasonably priced to boot!)\nI\u0026rsquo;m going for a lighter and loftier aran weight (as opposed to a more tightly spun Guernsey-style yarn.) Very pleased.\nIn other news, as of Monday, after a week of scaling back on the caffeine in an attempt to de/resensitize my body to the stuff, I\u0026rsquo;m going back full bore, because I can\u0026rsquo;t live on 16oz of tea a day. I might not get a headache but I\u0026rsquo;m too scattered and I drag too much midday without more. Hopefully I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to scale up in a healthful/productive manner.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spinning-progress/","summary":"I just finished spinning the Corriedale Cross (basic plain wool) that I\u0026rsquo;ve been spinning for months. I had 2 pounds (900 grams) which is my standard amount, and I have 9 skeins. I think I was less that pleased with two of them, but they\u0026rsquo;re fine, and all the other ones are great.\nI started spinning some dark brown blue faced leicester (this stuff, in fact).\nWow, in a word.\nIt spins like butter. Only better, because it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting color the picture doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite capture it (and it\u0026rsquo;s reasonably priced to boot!)\nI\u0026rsquo;m going for a lighter and loftier aran weight (as opposed to a more tightly spun Guernsey-style yarn.) Very pleased.\nIn other news, as of Monday, after a week of scaling back on the caffeine in an attempt to de/resensitize my body to the stuff, I\u0026rsquo;m going back full bore, because I can\u0026rsquo;t live on 16oz of tea a day.","title":"Spinning Progress"},{"content":"One of the best things that happened to me during college was that I discovered and got involved in the Women\u0026rsquo;s and Gender Studies program at my school. Though I went to college very interested in gender and sexuality stuff I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I ever really intended to come out of the experience with a second major in Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies, but I did, and I think it was a really great thing.\nMaking sense of that experience, since graduation has been more difficult, as I\u0026rsquo;m probably not directly going to go work \u0026ldquo;in the field\u0026rdquo; (if there is even a thing there,) and I find my academic interests1 taking me elsewhere.\nThe thing that the bright eyed 18-year old tycho found so intriguing about women\u0026rsquo;s studies is that on the first (or second) day of the first class, the professor handed us a packet of readings photo-copied from her books. And the readings weren\u0026rsquo;t just \u0026ldquo;clever parsing of the literature in a forum even undergraduates could handle,\u0026rdquo; but the key (or parts of the key) documents themselves. From the beginning I felt like a participant in a larger discussion, which is something that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get from my other classes.\nWhile in the end I learned that participating in these discourses is something that you sort of have to fight your way into, I also came to the conclusion that I didn\u0026rsquo;t much want to be involved in a field that didn\u0026rsquo;t value thought and participation of its students. And so I dove into Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies and I don\u0026rsquo;t regret it for an instant.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to buy into the software-is-freedom argument,2 I think there is something very freeing about open source in the same way that I found Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies so academically freeing. The invitation to participate in the software development progress that open source represents is really powerful and even if you\u0026rsquo;re not a programer in the traditional sense, the invitation to participate in a serious discussion about the shape of the tools that we use is pretty powerful.\nAt least I think so.\nOne of the conclusions that a historian friend and I came to is that Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies is prone--particularly in the higher levels--to becoming a method and a perspective rather than a particular or unitary subject. This translates rather poorly once it gets out of your head, but is useful in maintaining a measure of intrapersnal coherence.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe idea that open-source software is good and we need it because it is our freedom from corporations and government strikes me as missing the larger picture. Open source is good (and we need it) because it results in higher quality software and because it\u0026rsquo;s more useful. Having said that, I think that revolutionaries are pretty likely to use Linux or BSD because it is accessible and legal, not because there\u0026rsquo;s something intrinsically freeing about having accessible source code. As a slogan I think there\u0026rsquo;s something to the notion that \u0026ldquo;you can\u0026rsquo;t code your way to freedom.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-and-womens-studies/","summary":"One of the best things that happened to me during college was that I discovered and got involved in the Women\u0026rsquo;s and Gender Studies program at my school. Though I went to college very interested in gender and sexuality stuff I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I ever really intended to come out of the experience with a second major in Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies, but I did, and I think it was a really great thing.\nMaking sense of that experience, since graduation has been more difficult, as I\u0026rsquo;m probably not directly going to go work \u0026ldquo;in the field\u0026rdquo; (if there is even a thing there,) and I find my academic interests1 taking me elsewhere.\nThe thing that the bright eyed 18-year old tycho found so intriguing about women\u0026rsquo;s studies is that on the first (or second) day of the first class, the professor handed us a packet of readings photo-copied from her books.","title":"Open Source and Women's Studies"},{"content":"Sometimes the biggest jobs are the easiest. Last night I got inspired to make a sort of major change to my website: give up the \u0026ldquo;plain old blog\u0026rdquo; look and build a more intense \u0026ldquo;full featured-type\u0026rdquo; site. I thought this would be a good afternoon project for the weekend, so I made a list, mocked something up, and went to bed.\nAnd then I got up this morning and in several hours, I was able to concoct what you see here. It\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;beta\u0026rdquo; in the tradition of web 2.0 (rough around the edges, but fully deployed.). I\u0026rsquo;m still not quite sure what wordpress is thinking on the tag archive pages, but maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll figure something out.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the larger plan: The regular daily blog posts, which I\u0026rsquo;m now calling \u0026ldquo;essays\u0026rdquo; in sense of \u0026ldquo;an attempt,\u0026rdquo; not a particular forum. The new kind of post will be shorter, more \u0026ldquo;bloggy\u0026rdquo; somewhere between the rest of the world\u0026rsquo;s typical blog post, and a twitter.\nThere are also new \u0026ldquo;static\u0026rdquo; pages, and separate syndication feeds if you want to have a little bit more control over how tychoish is syndicated for you.\nAlso, to readers in livejournal land, if you want all of everything, subscribe to the old tealart syndication feed. Otherwise my livejournal (which had previously just been cross posting all entries will now have a more cherry-picked selection of entries.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ll have a more coherent post together on monday. I swear :)\nOtherwise tell me what you think.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/welcome-to-coda/","summary":"Sometimes the biggest jobs are the easiest. Last night I got inspired to make a sort of major change to my website: give up the \u0026ldquo;plain old blog\u0026rdquo; look and build a more intense \u0026ldquo;full featured-type\u0026rdquo; site. I thought this would be a good afternoon project for the weekend, so I made a list, mocked something up, and went to bed.\nAnd then I got up this morning and in several hours, I was able to concoct what you see here. It\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;beta\u0026rdquo; in the tradition of web 2.0 (rough around the edges, but fully deployed.). I\u0026rsquo;m still not quite sure what wordpress is thinking on the tag archive pages, but maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll figure something out.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the larger plan: The regular daily blog posts, which I\u0026rsquo;m now calling \u0026ldquo;essays\u0026rdquo; in sense of \u0026ldquo;an attempt,\u0026rdquo; not a particular forum. The new kind of post will be shorter, more \u0026ldquo;bloggy\u0026rdquo; somewhere between the rest of the world\u0026rsquo;s typical blog post, and a twitter.","title":"Welcome to Coda"},{"content":"So, once upon a time I had an idea for a knitting column were I\u0026rsquo;d write about a sweater, giving a brief description of a style, relevant techniques, and a construction method, but no pattern per se. Because I don\u0026rsquo;t follow patterns so much as elaborate on ideas, and I think it would be fun to read and a good inspiration for people who are comfortable making sweaters but what more ideas/fodder for the design process, which seems particularly relevant as many people who have started knitting in the last few years are becoming more and more proficient.\nNeedless to say, no one else thought that this was a great idea, and I dropped it for other projects.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back to knitting recently after a few months of slow knitting progress, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think about what I\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting next (In part because I\u0026rsquo;m going to have three sweaters that I will probably finish at about the same time,) and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d resurrect the idea for the old column, though because this is at least theoretically a list of my future projects I don\u0026rsquo;t think that all of these designs are going to be completely original. Also, just sweaters. Here goes nothing:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve made a version of Henry VIII and I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to make another. The main problem with my existing sweater is that the yarn pills, and I followed the pattern too closely and in doing so neglected to make a number of customizations that I like to make for sweaters. Like I\u0026rsquo;d like to have some sort of open/v neck, and I tend to like a deeper yoke, shoulder section, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t met a Starmore sleeve that wasn\u0026rsquo;t 5 inches too short. So it would be nice to knit the sweater again (because it was fun) but to modify it. While the two color look works, it might be fun to have black in the foreground, and a couple of different grays in the background. I have recently gotten re-engaged in this fingering weight sweater that has some light cable work/accents, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about starting another such sweater, I have some my eyes on some blue-grey shetland, and I think it might be fun to do a sweater with some more complex cable work. In order to forestall making any great plans (at all) about this sweater, I began by knitting a(n about) three inch strip around middle section of the sweater and then picking up and knitting the body down (and up) from this strip. I never did a gauge swatch, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I ever really counted the number of stitches. I really like how some cabled sweaters start at the bottom hem without any ribbing, and similarly I like sweaters where some (but not all) of the cables are continued down into the ribbing. I think it\u0026rsquo;s a cool look, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to take some of my color work designing habits/notions into designing a cabled sweater, and see how it goes. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking something with a few wider panels with a nine stitch braid cable running between the panels. I have a load of DK weight Navy yarn that I think would make for a great Gansey style sweater, with simple cables and texture patterns on the yoke and a fun shoulder strap. Most of my colorwork projects of the last few years have been escalating in terms of the size of the repeat (both in rows and in stitches,) and I think it might be fun to go back and do a sweater with a larger number of smaller repeats, potentially where the patterns didn\u0026rsquo;t all synchronize after every repeat. Because that\u0026rsquo;s the kind of knitting that screams \u0026ldquo;fun\u0026rdquo; to me at the moment. Actually I think my next project will be a medium/heavy weight jacket made from my own handspun, in a garter stitch design that I plan to\u0026hellip; elaborate from something that will hopefully be appearing in Wool Gathering sometime this year. The pattern is for a vest, but I\u0026rsquo;d put sleeves on it, and probably do the yoke/shoulders in a totally different way, but that\u0026rsquo;s the method to my madness. And so forth\u0026hellip;\nAnyone else have a sweater nagging inside of them? One of these something you want more elaboration on?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/future-knitting-project-ideas/","summary":"So, once upon a time I had an idea for a knitting column were I\u0026rsquo;d write about a sweater, giving a brief description of a style, relevant techniques, and a construction method, but no pattern per se. Because I don\u0026rsquo;t follow patterns so much as elaborate on ideas, and I think it would be fun to read and a good inspiration for people who are comfortable making sweaters but what more ideas/fodder for the design process, which seems particularly relevant as many people who have started knitting in the last few years are becoming more and more proficient.\nNeedless to say, no one else thought that this was a great idea, and I dropped it for other projects.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back to knitting recently after a few months of slow knitting progress, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think about what I\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting next (In part because I\u0026rsquo;m going to have three sweaters that I will probably finish at about the same time,) and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d resurrect the idea for the old column, though because this is at least theoretically a list of my future projects I don\u0026rsquo;t think that all of these designs are going to be completely original.","title":"Future Knitting Project Ideas"},{"content":"Subtitle: Or, Why Open Source isn\u0026rsquo;t about Freedom.\nThere is a major segment of the open source/free software movement that believes that open source is important because having non-proprietary software is a key to individual liberation and freedom.\nWhile this \u0026ldquo;camp\u0026rdquo; has done a lot for the open source movement, and in some respects they\u0026rsquo;re right: an educated user can deal with his own bugs, tweak the code, and verify that the software is secure. Also free software makes it possible for everyone, not just the very wealthy, from using very powerful tools. Money is still an issue around hardware, but free software helps. These features of free software are indeed powerful and likely make the undertaking worthwhile in its own right. So I don\u0026rsquo;t want to dismiss the political importance of this idea or faction but I\u0026rsquo;d like to offer another theory of why open source is so powerful and important.\nThe marker of a successful proprietary piece of software and a successful open source program are completely different.\nProprietary software is successful if people1 buy it. And when people buy anything really, for the most part they do a cost-benefit analysis, usually between features and cost. Does this do what I need it to? Will I have to buy something else to finish the task at hand? In this environment the most successful programs will be the best programs that do the most for the least amount of money.\nSo I guess I\u0026rsquo;m being an armchair economist in this, but I think that it makes a lot of sense for both developers and purchasers to keep the overall number of discrete programs down. Why develop and support (and buy on the other end) an address book program, a mail reading program, a mail composing program, a calendar program, a task manager when you could just get Outlook? Hell, why buy business/office software a la carte when you can get it as a suite?\nOpen source doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to operate like that,2 especially historically a good piece of open source software did one thing well. There are a lot of reasons for this. Unix works best when everything is a modular widget widgets, but getting a bunch of hackers to agree on how to accomplish more than one thing is sufficiently non-trivial to have had a great impact on the methods of the movement. Perhaps most importantly, there\u0026rsquo;s no need for any single piece of software to do everything because open source software doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist in a vacuum.\nAnd this is the strength of the model. You could never market on or sell application on a large that did one thing really well, but if you asked it to do something else related, the developer would say \u0026ldquo;not my problem.\u0026rdquo;\nThe classic example is mutt, and email client that just reads email, while recently (after much \u0026ldquo;not my job\u0026rdquo; protesting,) mutt has added support for connecting to the servers that send and receive email, it historically hasn\u0026rsquo;t and I suspect most users still don\u0026rsquo;t use these features. Imagine if Outlook said \u0026ldquo;nope, sending email is someone else\u0026rsquo;s problem, I\u0026rsquo;m just a mail reader.\u0026rdquo; Mutt succeeds because it\u0026rsquo;s really good at reading email, but also because there are a lot of really great tools for doing other email related tasks. Fetchmail is a great and reliable program, but it only downloads email, and for sending email I\u0026rsquo;ve never had a problem with MSMTP, but I think there are a number of popular mail-sending options.\nSo you get that open source makes a more widget or ecosystem based computing environment viable and stable, but are still wondering why this is a good thing? Because it sounds that this kind of open source just makes things more complex? Right. Here\u0026rsquo;s why I think the ecosystem is the way to go:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s easier to build programs that only do one thing. A program either is really good at downloading your email or it isn\u0026rsquo;t, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty easy to tell if that\u0026rsquo;s the case. More complex programs, can\u0026rsquo;t be as reliable as consistent. This system is more responsive to technological development. If there\u0026rsquo;s a new revolution in email downloading, it\u0026rsquo;s easy enough to take fetchmail out of the picture and put some other widget in place that works better. Non-modular systems put you at the whim of someone else. Your data is (more likely) to be accessible and open. The real reason that open source hackers are interested in open standards and formats is, if we rely on an ecosystem of widgets our data has to be readable by all of the different widgets. The only way to ensure that this is the case is to use open and standard data formats. This is good for the user and good for the programer as a creative constraint. This model more closely reflects the way we actually think. Our minds are made up of a bunch of smaller abilities. The ability to recognize written words, the ability to parse those words for sounds and meaning, the ability to take what we read and relate it to things that we\u0026rsquo;ve seen and read in other contexts. In both the software and cognition the really cool things happen with novel collections of different ideas and tools. But wait you say, OpenOffice and Ubuntu Linux aren\u0026rsquo;t widgets and they have very high feature counts. This is very true, and to be honest projects like GNOME/KDE and open office mystify me because they fail so amazingly, they\u0026rsquo;re too disjointed to really compete with desktop environments from proprietary makers and try to do too many things to really work ideally on their own.3\nIn the case of Ubuntu--like all linux distributions--the \u0026ldquo;product,\u0026rdquo; is a specific and tailored collection of widgets. And this is a pretty good open source business model: take a bunch of tools, customize them, make sure they install and work together, and then package them as some sort of suite. While I think that this software ecosystem thing is pretty cool, it\u0026rsquo;s not easy to get started with, and unless users really know what they\u0026rsquo;re doing it requires more than a bit of fidgeting. Distributions solve this problem and make a space for individuals and groups to monetize this \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; software. Which is of course good for (almost) everyone involved.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve been going on for way too long. I\u0026rsquo;m not--by a long shot--done thinking (and writing) about these issues, so expect a continuation of this soon.\nOnward and Upward!\nIn the case of software, I think people should be understood as cooperate IT devisions, more than individuals\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThere are clearly a lot of exceptions, particularly in this particularly moment, where we\u0026rsquo;re seeing projects that in this respect look more like proprietary software. This is I think in part intentional as a means of competing with proprietary software. And I\u0026rsquo;m building to the other \u0026ldquo;in part.\u0026rdquo; So lets wait for it, shall we?\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nClearly this is just my opinion. Every so often I want to try and like GNOME, but I always find it to be a less then pleasurable experience. The GUIs don\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of sense unless you know what the shell commands that they\u0026rsquo;re wrapping are, to say nothing of the really poor use of space (that\u0026rsquo;s tangential, but probably my largest gripe with GNOME). Interestingly I started using a different window manager (awesome), which accesses gtk, and I was very surprised to find that some of the gnome apps were actually pretty decent. Who knew!\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-freedom/","summary":"Subtitle: Or, Why Open Source isn\u0026rsquo;t about Freedom.\nThere is a major segment of the open source/free software movement that believes that open source is important because having non-proprietary software is a key to individual liberation and freedom.\nWhile this \u0026ldquo;camp\u0026rdquo; has done a lot for the open source movement, and in some respects they\u0026rsquo;re right: an educated user can deal with his own bugs, tweak the code, and verify that the software is secure. Also free software makes it possible for everyone, not just the very wealthy, from using very powerful tools. Money is still an issue around hardware, but free software helps. These features of free software are indeed powerful and likely make the undertaking worthwhile in its own right. So I don\u0026rsquo;t want to dismiss the political importance of this idea or faction but I\u0026rsquo;d like to offer another theory of why open source is so powerful and important.","title":"You Can't Hack your Way to Freedom"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve hinted in the last couple of weeks that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting more. While usually the summer heat doesn\u0026rsquo;t deter me from knitting very much, between the extra-time writing, working a lot, and the heat I hadn\u0026rsquo;t knit much since the spring. While I\u0026rsquo;ve certainly been more obsessed with knitting in the past, I think I\u0026rsquo;m back.\nThough I stopped/slowed my knitting progress for several months, I still had unfinished projects and stash/project plans. So maybe it wasn\u0026rsquo;t so much that I stopped knitting as it was that the bottom fell out of my productivity. In any case,as I return, my primary project has/is to finish all of my outstanding projects. They are:\n1. The gray sweater. I figure I started it in late 2005, and have been working on it sporadically since then. It\u0026rsquo;s fingering weight, and I\u0026rsquo;m knitting it with US 1 needles. It\u0026rsquo;s slow going, and mostly stocking stitch, though there are some cable accents, including a cable running from the collar to the cuff (via shoulder strap.) I\u0026rsquo;m done with everything except the sleeves and I\u0026rsquo;m making progress on the first sleeve. I expect to finish this in the next month-six weeks. 2. In preparation for knitting camp I started knitting a sweater. I had planned for it to be an EPS system yoke sweater, and that it would be something that I could knit at camp. Turns out that I knit other things while I was at camp, and after camp I was largely uninterested in knitting a yoke style sweater. So I ripped out a couple of inches of yoke and started knitting a sweater with shaped armholes. I\u0026rsquo;ve finished the body, but I need to knit the collar. Also the sleeves, and I\u0026rsquo;m totally undecided about how to shape the upper sleeve. I don\u0026rsquo;t really like capped sleeves, but I think I need to do something, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see. 3. The Latvian Dreaming sweater, which I\u0026rsquo;m almost to the shoulders, which I don\u0026rsquo;t have a plan for. I\u0026rsquo;m waiting in part till I\u0026rsquo;m done with plain yoke sweater before I figure out what I\u0026rsquo;m doing on this sweater.\n(And, cough two shawls, but they don\u0026rsquo;t count.)\nWhat are you working on?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-update-2/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve hinted in the last couple of weeks that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting more. While usually the summer heat doesn\u0026rsquo;t deter me from knitting very much, between the extra-time writing, working a lot, and the heat I hadn\u0026rsquo;t knit much since the spring. While I\u0026rsquo;ve certainly been more obsessed with knitting in the past, I think I\u0026rsquo;m back.\nThough I stopped/slowed my knitting progress for several months, I still had unfinished projects and stash/project plans. So maybe it wasn\u0026rsquo;t so much that I stopped knitting as it was that the bottom fell out of my productivity. In any case,as I return, my primary project has/is to finish all of my outstanding projects. They are:\n1. The gray sweater. I figure I started it in late 2005, and have been working on it sporadically since then. It\u0026rsquo;s fingering weight, and I\u0026rsquo;m knitting it with US 1 needles. It\u0026rsquo;s slow going, and mostly stocking stitch, though there are some cable accents, including a cable running from the collar to the cuff (via shoulder strap.","title":"Knitting Update"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;So basically, what I\u0026rsquo;m doing is, sorting the email on the server in a git repository, and then pushing and pulling to that as needed, or just working their over ssh.\u0026rdquo; I explained\n\u0026ldquo;So what you\u0026rsquo;re saying, is that you\u0026rsquo;ve basically reinvented IMAP,\u0026rdquo; Chris said.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, pretty much, except that this works,\u0026rdquo; I said.\n\u0026ldquo;If you say so.\u0026rdquo;\nI do say so. So this is what it comes down to:\nIMAP got one thing right: we need a way of accessing our email that works on public computers, is machine independent, that works offline and online, and that keeps all these mail reading environments synchronized.\nThe problem is that IMAP is incredibly flakey and inconsistent. Messages that you\u0026rsquo;ve read suddenly become unread, messages that you\u0026rsquo;ve moved suddenly pop back into your inbox, it\u0026rsquo;s slow, and if you don\u0026rsquo;t have the right mail client and a server that\u0026rsquo;s tweaked in the right way, it might not really work at all.\nIf IMAP worked as well as it could, we\u0026rsquo;d all use it because, ideally it\u0026rsquo;s the best way to manage email. Everything is stored remotely but cached locally for offline use and backup, you can use multiple machines without worry. Instead I suspect most people who need these features use webmail if they need multi-machine email accounts,[^webmail] and that\u0026rsquo;s great, if it works for you. Gmail and the like are great pieces of software, I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to begrudge webmail, I just don\u0026rsquo;t enjoy the experience of the browser, and seek to avoid it except for browsing.\nSo while I\u0026rsquo;d given up on email that synced really well in the last couple of months (preferring to use mutt and procmail locally,) I still longed for this kind of email set up.\nSo I thought a bit and figured some things out, and here\u0026rsquo;s what I came up with. (A step by step explanation of how I get email):\n1. A bunch of email addresses (for different contexts) are forwarded to a gmail account, which despamifies my email, and uses it\u0026rsquo;s own filters to sort and forward mail (using +address aliases) to a secret email account on the web server.\n2. The webserver uses procmail to sort and deliver the email into a non-public (obviously) folder/git repository.\n3. I have a series of scripts to manage the git/mail interaction depending on if I\u0026rsquo;m on an SSH connection or not, mostly this is straightforward, but here\u0026rsquo;s how the sync works (commands from the local perspective in parenthesis):\nvia ssh I add and commit any new mail that may have arrived since the last sync to the repository on the server: :\nssh \u0026lt;foo\u0026gt; git add * \u0026amp;\u0026amp; git commit Locally I commit any change that\u0026rsquo;s been made to my mail directory since the last sync, and pull down the new mail from the server: :\ngit add * \u0026amp;\u0026amp; git commit \u0026amp;\u0026amp; git pull Push my changes up, and everything merges and the repositories look the same now. and I reset the index of the remote server so to reflect the changes:1 :\nssh \u0026lt;foo\u0026gt; git push \u0026amp;\u0026amp; ssh \u0026lt;foo\u0026gt; git reset --hard Rejoice.2\nSet up a cronjob or a launchd daemon to do this automatically every, say 15 minutes, and then you get the illusion of having \u0026ldquo;push\u0026rdquo; email.\nIf you get growl to notify you of the results of the pull (end of step 2) you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to see whether there\u0026rsquo;s new mail or not.\nI think you could probably set much of this up in post-commit/post-push hooks. And I think it goes without saying that if there are more than one \u0026ldquo;client\u0026rdquo; repository in play, you\u0026rsquo;ll want to pull changes more often than you sync.\nSo why would I (and you?) want to do this? Easy:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s quick. Git is fast, by design, and since email files have a lot of redundancy in the headers and what not, git can save a lot of space in the \u0026ldquo;tube\u0026rdquo; and speed up your email downloads.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s robust and flexible. If my server stooped working for some reason, I could set up another, or simply start using fetch-mail again. If the server went back up, I just push the changes up, and I\u0026rsquo;m back in business.\nGit handles renames implicitly, and this is a really cool feature that I don\u0026rsquo;t think gets quite enough mention. Basically if I move or rename a file, and add the new file to git, (git add * does this) git realizes that I\u0026rsquo;ve moved the file. so as files move and get named other things, git realizes that it\u0026rsquo;s happened, deals with it and moves on.\nUnderstandably, if you delete a file locally git won\u0026rsquo;t delete it from the repository \u0026ldquo;head\u0026rdquo; unless you tell it to. This bash script takes care of that: :\nfor i in `git status | grep deleted`; do git rm --quiet $i; done It\u0026rsquo;s secure, or at least is if you do it right. All the email gets downloaded over SSH, so no clear text passwords (if you\u0026rsquo;re using public key authentication) and encrypted data transmission.\nOh yeah, and it\u0026rsquo;s not flakey like IMAP. Totally worthwhile.\nIf there is some sort of syncing problem, you know where it is, as opposed to IMAP making an executive decision without telling you and un-sorting all your email.\nAny questions?\nOnward and Upward!\nGit is really good at merging, and because it can track renaming implicitly, it does pretty well in this situation. There are some things you can do to basically ensure that you never have a conflicted merge (because after all, you\u0026rsquo;re never really editing these files, and so rarely concurrently. for the most part). Remember after pushing to the server, always reset it\u0026rsquo;s index. Under normal conditions we\u0026rsquo;d not push to a repository that had an index, so this usually isn\u0026rsquo;t an issue, but here where it\u0026rsquo;s important that the server\u0026rsquo;s repository have files, keeping that index \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo; means you won\u0026rsquo;t undo your changes in successive commits.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMy first instinct was to focus on pushing changes up early, and it turns out that this is the wrong thing to do, as it means potentially that the state of the upstream repository could be wonky when you want to pull. Pulling before you push, locally, prevents having more than one kind of change in any one commit, and makes the whole situation a bit more error proof.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-mail/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;So basically, what I\u0026rsquo;m doing is, sorting the email on the server in a git repository, and then pushing and pulling to that as needed, or just working their over ssh.\u0026rdquo; I explained\n\u0026ldquo;So what you\u0026rsquo;re saying, is that you\u0026rsquo;ve basically reinvented IMAP,\u0026rdquo; Chris said.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, pretty much, except that this works,\u0026rdquo; I said.\n\u0026ldquo;If you say so.\u0026rdquo;\nI do say so. So this is what it comes down to:\nIMAP got one thing right: we need a way of accessing our email that works on public computers, is machine independent, that works offline and online, and that keeps all these mail reading environments synchronized.\nThe problem is that IMAP is incredibly flakey and inconsistent. Messages that you\u0026rsquo;ve read suddenly become unread, messages that you\u0026rsquo;ve moved suddenly pop back into your inbox, it\u0026rsquo;s slow, and if you don\u0026rsquo;t have the right mail client and a server that\u0026rsquo;s tweaked in the right way, it might not really work at all.","title":"Git Mail"},{"content":"Sorry about the posting confusion this week. I\u0026rsquo;ll be out on Monday here and on Critical Futures, but everything will be back to normal on Tuesday.\nThis is a post that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s done but I\u0026rsquo;m fresh out of ideas for more book recommendations. But then, this is a blog, and there\u0026rsquo;s a comment form for a reason, so if I\u0026rsquo;ve been remiss and forgotten something important, please do remind me. Enjoy!\nI have perpetual fears about not being well read enough. I think this is mostly an existential problem, as I read a bunch, and I\u0026rsquo;ve read a lot of stuff in my day. But there\u0026rsquo;s always more, particularly as I think about shifting my academic/intellectual specialty. In any case, I found myself a few weeks ago recommending a science fiction novel that I had read,1 and I thought it might be good to post a list of recommendations. Not just \u0026ldquo;books I like,\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;books I\u0026rsquo;d tell you to read if you were looking for something specific.\u0026rdquo;\nFor people who like military SF and some people who like Heinlein, John Scalzi\u0026rsquo;s Old Man\u0026rsquo;s War is a great deal of fun.\nFor a great novella/tightly wound plot, Samuel R. Delany\u0026rsquo;s Empire Star and for lingustic sf, the other half of the book, Babel-17. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan. For anyone interested in urban systems and community, Times Square Red/Times Square Blue Amazon is a great read, and is incidentally the most cited source of my college career.\nFor a very smart, but also very comforting and enjoyable space opera trilogy, Melissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s Five-Twelfths of Heaven Trilogy can\u0026rsquo;t be beat. Her Trouble and her Friends is also a great example of what cyberpunk can be when it\u0026rsquo;s not trying too hard to be the next New Thing.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t find myself in a position to recommend mainstream fiction very much, but I am a big fan of Anne Lamott\u0026rsquo;s All New People, and Barbara Kingsolver\u0026rsquo;s Prodigal Summer, which are both clever and fun, and are unabashedly delightful.\nBooks about writing? Five or more years ago, I would have had a list of books about writing, but as a genre I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly convinced of their worth/utility or frankly interesting-ness. Anne Lamott\u0026rsquo;s Bird by Bird, is simply amazing, though not particularly for the specific writing related hints. I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought that Stephen King\u0026rsquo;s writing book is pompous and sort of unfocused, but admittedly I couldn\u0026rsquo;t even force myself to finish it.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what come to mind, do you all have any good recommendations?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not above recommending a book on reputation alone, though I try to disclose this.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/book-recommendations/","summary":"Sorry about the posting confusion this week. I\u0026rsquo;ll be out on Monday here and on Critical Futures, but everything will be back to normal on Tuesday.\nThis is a post that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s done but I\u0026rsquo;m fresh out of ideas for more book recommendations. But then, this is a blog, and there\u0026rsquo;s a comment form for a reason, so if I\u0026rsquo;ve been remiss and forgotten something important, please do remind me. Enjoy!\nI have perpetual fears about not being well read enough. I think this is mostly an existential problem, as I read a bunch, and I\u0026rsquo;ve read a lot of stuff in my day. But there\u0026rsquo;s always more, particularly as I think about shifting my academic/intellectual specialty. In any case, I found myself a few weeks ago recommending a science fiction novel that I had read,1 and I thought it might be good to post a list of recommendations.","title":"Book Recommendations"},{"content":"Ed: I so I totally meant to post this on Monday instead of `this post \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/posts/upcoming/\u0026gt;`_, but the wires got crossed, and Monday\u0026rsquo;s post got out early. Sorry. --ty\nThe one thing that really undermines my argument against preemptive rewriting is the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m a compulsive outliner, at least for some things.\nSince I\u0026rsquo;m currently in the \u0026ldquo;planning a new story/project\u0026rdquo; phase1 I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the outlining process a bit.\nThe difference between blogging and writing is that in a blog post I maybe scribble something on a paper ahead of time, but the rhetorical thread comes out of my fingers and on to your screens pretty much straight through.2 Blogging is very much like the research process of fiction writing, in that it\u0026rsquo;s a process of taking an idea and figuring out what it means, and a lot of the possibilities in whatever thing or situation (blog and fiction respectively). In blogging, you pray someone\u0026rsquo;s interested or you\u0026rsquo;ve written something that gets folks irked enough to respond, in fiction you take all this thought work and then write about only the things that really need writing about.\nAnd then I realized the other day, that I write the outlines of my stories--indeed my entire personal wiki notepad--to you, dear blog readers. At some point years ago I got a pretty good idea of who \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rdquo; are, and as a result generally my blog posts are all addressed to the same positional reader (even though that reader/group has changed a bit, and my conception of \u0026ldquo;the reader\u0026rdquo; has always been pure fantasy on my part.) Even though I\u0026rsquo;m the only one that reads this document, all the parts are written to the same person. It\u0026rsquo;s all very strange.\nBut I digress. Research.\nI think the sort of stock advice to the new writer doing research is \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t get too caught up in planning, writing is about writing, not planning to write,\u0026rdquo; and while I do think that the reminder to always keep the writing in mind, at the same time, there\u0026rsquo;s something really important and intense about the planning process that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be ignored. It\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work, there are a lot of words that go into getting a story to the point where you can even think about starting to write in ernest. In the end I think it\u0026rsquo;s not so much about what you outline or what you read up on, as the act of doing it. The time spent in your head thinking about this world, and this idea.\nSpeaking of thought work, I have some to do.\nOnward and Upward!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s true that I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly finished with any of the existing stories/projects, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that my slate of open projects are: Station Keeping (which is always ongoing, and I\u0026rsquo;m 8 episodes away from being done with the second season), Trailing Edge (which I thought was going to be a novel-scope project, but I was so wrong, and it turns out that I\u0026rsquo;m close to being done and taking a break), and I have another Knowing Mars story or two that I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in writing just yet. And since I\u0026rsquo;m my own writing boss, I can work on a new story.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI write non-time sensitive entries in batches and post them later, mostly because I want to get blog posts going live up in the morning, and don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to cram to get them done every night, and I like this rhythm, but the it\u0026rsquo;s still very off the cuff, and minimally edited. But you knew that.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-and-research/","summary":"Ed: I so I totally meant to post this on Monday instead of `this post \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/posts/upcoming/\u0026gt;`_, but the wires got crossed, and Monday\u0026rsquo;s post got out early. Sorry. --ty\nThe one thing that really undermines my argument against preemptive rewriting is the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m a compulsive outliner, at least for some things.\nSince I\u0026rsquo;m currently in the \u0026ldquo;planning a new story/project\u0026rdquo; phase1 I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the outlining process a bit.\nThe difference between blogging and writing is that in a blog post I maybe scribble something on a paper ahead of time, but the rhetorical thread comes out of my fingers and on to your screens pretty much straight through.2 Blogging is very much like the research process of fiction writing, in that it\u0026rsquo;s a process of taking an idea and figuring out what it means, and a lot of the possibilities in whatever thing or situation (blog and fiction respectively).","title":"Writing and Research"},{"content":"10 pearls of collected wisdom for the aspiring terminal/console/command line user. This assumes UNIX but little actual command line experience.\n1. Customize your your .bash_profile or .bashrc files and continue to tweak this file as you learn more about how you use the shell. I even have a line in my profile that makes it easier for me to edit this page.\n2. Never open files unless you have too. tools like less, more, cat, and grep should be enough to keep you going for most routine checks.\n3. Having said that, getting to know your text editor really well should be on the top of your list of things to do. There\u0026rsquo;s something to be said for learning how to use vim, though I can understand if you might want to use something a little less sharp around the edges.\n4. It\u0026rsquo;s good to be able to hack your way through bash/shell scripting and at least one other general purpose scripting/programing language. Like Perl or Python, but Ruby and PHP would work. Power users don\u0026rsquo;t necessarily need to be able to write brilliant programs, they just need to figure out how to glue other programs together.\n5. Familiarize yourself with your operating system\u0026rsquo;s package manager, or get macports if you\u0026rsquo;re on a mac. Or get an operating system with a better package manager. To my tastes this means means getting a debian-based linux distribution, but there are others if this won\u0026rsquo;t work for you. These package installers make it so much easier to install software and have it work because other people do the testing. Compiling things on your own is ok, but package mangers are better. Learning how to use the cpan shell and ruby gems falls under this imperative.\n6. Do first and script second. While you may be tempted to write nifty little scripts for all the things you think you\u0026rsquo;re going to do, don\u0026rsquo;t. Work first and figure out what your habits are and then write the scripts/macros/short cuts that will best serve you. That way you\u0026rsquo;ll use them.\n7. Figure out how to schedule tasks/automate background tasks. If there\u0026rsquo;s an internet connection, and probably even if there isn\u0026rsquo;t, my computer checks my email every 8 minutes or so. Because I have a little \u0026ldquo;check email and tell tycho if there\u0026rsquo;s anything new\u0026rdquo; script set to run in a launchd deamon. You could use cron if you\u0026rsquo;re not using a mac, but the general idea is that if there are things that you know need to be done, regularly, you just tell the computer to do them, and then you don\u0026rsquo;t have to worry about it.\n8. Read the manuals and google for help, but also relax. The terminal lets you do a lot of new things, and it saves you a lot of time. It\u0026rsquo;s also hard to learn and a lot of die-hard terminal users are also, to be blunt, assholes. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to recount the number of times that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen people rant on about proper forum, and how new folk ask too many questions. This is dumb, new people always ask questions, and the truth is that some things aren\u0026rsquo;t well documented. Also a lot of terminal assholeishness comes from a period of time, when certain operations took a lot of CPU power, and CPU power was more at a premium than it is today. Most contemporary computers, even ones that are a few years old, run so fast that even inefficient terminal applications still run incredibly fast on modern hardware, and can outperform the best GUIs. You\u0026rsquo;ll learn later.\n9. Remember the Unix Philosophy. Basically that programs should do one thing well, and not complicate themselves with doing more than one thing. If you know that this is how things can and should work and you can learn how to work with this, then you\u0026rsquo;re in good shape. (It\u0026rsquo;s also ok to bend it a little bit, from time to time.) Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re an oddball like me--and using the command line for something, like writing fiction--slowly get a sense of what existing tools do, and figure out if its useful to you. Also know that just because something\u0026rsquo;s cool it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be useful for you.\n10. Customize the appearance of your console window. Apple stocks everything with an ugly black text on white background thing, which makes my head hurt from the squinting. Readably sized fonts, good coding fonts, anti-assailing, colorizing your prompt, light text on dark backgrounds, and some transparency all make the terminal more functional and elegant.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/10-shell-tips/","summary":"10 pearls of collected wisdom for the aspiring terminal/console/command line user. This assumes UNIX but little actual command line experience.\n1. Customize your your .bash_profile or .bashrc files and continue to tweak this file as you learn more about how you use the shell. I even have a line in my profile that makes it easier for me to edit this page.\n2. Never open files unless you have too. tools like less, more, cat, and grep should be enough to keep you going for most routine checks.\n3. Having said that, getting to know your text editor really well should be on the top of your list of things to do. There\u0026rsquo;s something to be said for learning how to use vim, though I can understand if you might want to use something a little less sharp around the edges.\n4. It\u0026rsquo;s good to be able to hack your way through bash/shell scripting and at least one other general purpose scripting/programing language.","title":"10 Shell Tips"},{"content":"I just wanted to pop in out of lecture mode (sigh) and give a brief sort of \u0026ldquo;meta report,\u0026rdquo; of what I\u0026rsquo;m working on, where I am in life, and what my plans are for the blog are in the next little bit.\nFirst off, as next Monday is a national holiday (whew) and I\u0026rsquo;m going to be out of town doing family stuff for the long weekend, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to have a `Critical Futures \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/\u0026gt;`_ post on monday. The current story, \u0026ldquo;Visa Riots\u0026rdquo; (in Trailing Edge) will run through Wednesday (6 parts) and then I\u0026rsquo;ll have a little two part Station Keeping story so we\u0026rsquo;ll be able to start September with a new section of something fun.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been hard at work planning a new novel, writing more Station Keeping. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been working a lot, but my current employment situation is going to be changing significantly in September (I\u0026rsquo;m in a \u0026ldquo;hurry up and wait,\u0026rdquo; situation, but I remain optimistic.) In any case, the next job will be more flexible, whatever it is, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty confident that the impending changes in my life that happen this fall will be exciting and productive.\nIn terms of the blog, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that unless something seems really important I\u0026rsquo;m not going to talk about things I\u0026rsquo;m writing and the writing process. I might still post book reviews and thoughts on reading, but I\u0026rsquo;ll probably tone that down as well. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s been helpful to my process and workflow to spend time reflecting on these sorts of things, and I\u0026rsquo;d rather spend my blogging time talking about other things, like\u0026hellip;\nKnitting and technology. I\u0026rsquo;m starting to knit more again, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty aware that you all in blogland are--at least for the moment--primarily knitters. So, I think blogging about knitting will be helpful and fun.\nIn terms of technology, I\u0026rsquo;ve been through a couple of phases about my writing about technology for this blog, and I\u0026rsquo;ve not been incredibly happy with my previous modes. I think writing about material technology gadgets/hardware, endorses consumerism in a way that I don\u0026rsquo;t thinks interesting or fun. And while I remain interested in productivity and technology, writing about being productive isn\u0026rsquo;t productive (ie. productivity porn) and in my experience always gets hung up on fadish systems or tools, and that\u0026rsquo;s not interesting. So I\u0026rsquo;ll probably continue to blog about producivity, but much less than I have been.\nI\u0026rsquo;m interested in writing more about open source stuff. My post about drupal was a lot of fun, and I\u0026rsquo;ve had some other thoughts which will (hopefully) germinate into full grown posts in the next couple of weeks.\nI understand that the geeks might not get the knitting and the knitters might not get the tech stuff but stay tuned in any case, I\u0026rsquo;m a generalist in both camps, and I promise to be enthusiastic.\nAlso I have a little script to ease in the posting of links and other miscellany that I find along my travels through cyberspace, I just have to get better at using it. That should help even out any over specialization that I might be prone to.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on my plate and mind. What\u0026rsquo;s on yours?\nOn/up!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/upcoming/","summary":"I just wanted to pop in out of lecture mode (sigh) and give a brief sort of \u0026ldquo;meta report,\u0026rdquo; of what I\u0026rsquo;m working on, where I am in life, and what my plans are for the blog are in the next little bit.\nFirst off, as next Monday is a national holiday (whew) and I\u0026rsquo;m going to be out of town doing family stuff for the long weekend, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to have a `Critical Futures \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/\u0026gt;`_ post on monday. The current story, \u0026ldquo;Visa Riots\u0026rdquo; (in Trailing Edge) will run through Wednesday (6 parts) and then I\u0026rsquo;ll have a little two part Station Keeping story so we\u0026rsquo;ll be able to start September with a new section of something fun.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been hard at work planning a new novel, writing more Station Keeping. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been working a lot, but my current employment situation is going to be changing significantly in September (I\u0026rsquo;m in a \u0026ldquo;hurry up and wait,\u0026rdquo; situation, but I remain optimistic.","title":"Upcoming"},{"content":"I read Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s recent story on the new tor.com site, \u0026ldquo;The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away.\u0026rdquo; and it left a funny taste in my mouth.\nThe story is well told, and I read a lot of Cory\u0026rsquo;s stories and listen to his podcast and so forth, and as a result I\u0026rsquo;m pretty familiar with the kinds of issues that he\u0026rsquo;s writing about, because I\u0026rsquo;ve heard him talk about a lot. Which is fine, just back drop. Anyway, this is a story about a future police state where dissidents go missing all the time, where everyone\u0026rsquo;s spying on everyone else, and where habeas corpus and due process are suspended/withdrawn.\nYou may choose to call this the logical extreme of the \u0026ldquo;post 9/11\u0026rdquo;/war on terror policy that\u0026rsquo;s given us the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security. I think that\u0026rsquo;s pretty clearly the intention of the story.\nYou may also choose to think of this story as depicting fascism. Which it does, basically. I think this is a pretty dangerous, move and though I was initially struck by a few other jarring aspects of the story, when I thought about it more, I realized that the combination of \u0026ldquo;the logical extreme of post-9/11 fear\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;fascism,\u0026rdquo; was pretty troubling.\nI should interject and this is a bit of a spoiler that the story has a dark ending where, the character is given the choice to either go back to his old life as a double agent or get sent back to the gulag. And he\u0026rsquo;s going to go back as a double agent, but he doesn\u0026rsquo;t and before he can tell anyone what\u0026rsquo;s up he gets taken back by the police and it ends.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the thing, fascism has never appeared without the assistance of some sort of violent extra-legal action. Hitler had the SS and he bombed the parliament. Franco overthrew the government in a war. Mussolini had a personal police force with which to wreak havoc. We could think of other examples, but really I don\u0026rsquo;t think that this is a terribly original process. I think it\u0026rsquo;s fairly safe to say that fascism isn\u0026rsquo;t the result of slowly eroding the liberty of a fearful population until people wake up one morning and realize that they\u0026rsquo;re slaves, but rather a process of creating fear and then grabbing power for a falsely relieved population.\nI know that this is a cautionary tale and that this story takes a current phenomena to a logical extreme to inspire us to get upset about the little erosion of civil liberties. The thing is that false consciousness (and fascism as an extension) isn\u0026rsquo;t something that you have to slowly lull people into, it\u0026rsquo;s something that\u0026rsquo;s always already active in the political sensibilities of a people. Better, I think to get mad about surveillance and an erosion of privacy not out of grief for a lost freedom, but because oppression and societal norms needn\u0026rsquo;t be fascist to impinge upon the quality of our lives or do harm. And always be vigilant in the crusade against false consciousness and fascism, but don\u0026rsquo;t become confused into thinking that the vestiges of fascism are it\u0026rsquo;s cause or sole offense.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-things-that-make-me-weak-and-strange/","summary":"I read Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s recent story on the new tor.com site, \u0026ldquo;The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away.\u0026rdquo; and it left a funny taste in my mouth.\nThe story is well told, and I read a lot of Cory\u0026rsquo;s stories and listen to his podcast and so forth, and as a result I\u0026rsquo;m pretty familiar with the kinds of issues that he\u0026rsquo;s writing about, because I\u0026rsquo;ve heard him talk about a lot. Which is fine, just back drop. Anyway, this is a story about a future police state where dissidents go missing all the time, where everyone\u0026rsquo;s spying on everyone else, and where habeas corpus and due process are suspended/withdrawn.\nYou may choose to call this the logical extreme of the \u0026ldquo;post 9/11\u0026rdquo;/war on terror policy that\u0026rsquo;s given us the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security. I think that\u0026rsquo;s pretty clearly the intention of the story.","title":"The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange"},{"content":"On a recent I Should Be Writing episode Mur Lafferty got a question about writing gay characters. One of the replies to that response (so we\u0026rsquo;re a couple degree\u0026rsquo;s out,) made a suggestion along the lines of \u0026ldquo;write characters who are interesting first and gay second,\u0026rdquo; I think the actual wording used the phrase \u0026ldquo;just happen to be gay.\u0026rdquo; Mur handled this deftly, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to add some more to this.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the biggest problem in my mind. The experience of being gay isn\u0026rsquo;t--for the most part--something that queer folks \u0026ldquo;just happen to have/be,\u0026rdquo; and to write about queer/gay characters in this way, I think fundamentally misunderstands the experience.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I could add anything to underscore that, or illuminate that further. No matter how enlightened these times are, being gay marks you as being different and positions you in opposition to normative culture. Living and loving in this condition has a profound effect on us. I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining, and I think being different has pretty good effects, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that this makes the social situation less relevant.\nPart of the benefit of existing within a normative culture is the ability to think about sexuality as just happening rather than being a hard fought battle. And as more people start coming out (at younger and younger ages), as marriage rights are won, as non-descrimination rights are slowly gained,1 it\u0026rsquo;s easy to say \u0026ldquo;gay folks are just normal folk,\u0026rdquo; but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s the case at all.\nThe truth is that I mostly don\u0026rsquo;t write gay characters as such. I\u0026rsquo;ve been interested in other things, and/or interested in dealing with issues of sexuality in different ways. But in Station Keeping, I have a gay character. Part of the deal about SK is that it\u0026rsquo;s set way in the future. Call it 10,000 years. (I wanted to be able to tell a 19th/20th century geopolitical crisis story, and have it not be a techno-thriller.) Anyway, so in this backdrop there\u0026rsquo;s a gay couple.\nAnd even the diehard cynic in me has to admit that in the next 8-10 thousand years, that this pesky business about being extranormative is going to have to settle down, and people really won\u0026rsquo;t ever swallow hard or bat an eyebrow over queer folk. And I tell you that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly difficult to conceptualize, and so much not like what I think writing gay characters typically is like. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a question of writerly skill, but I can\u0026rsquo;t imagine being able to nail this kind of dynamic in a contemporary or even near future world.\nBut maybe that\u0026rsquo;s just me. Thoughts?\nOnward and Upward!\nThe fact that marriage rights seem to come before (and in front of) non-discrimination protections just seems like a farce to me.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-gay-characters/","summary":"On a recent I Should Be Writing episode Mur Lafferty got a question about writing gay characters. One of the replies to that response (so we\u0026rsquo;re a couple degree\u0026rsquo;s out,) made a suggestion along the lines of \u0026ldquo;write characters who are interesting first and gay second,\u0026rdquo; I think the actual wording used the phrase \u0026ldquo;just happen to be gay.\u0026rdquo; Mur handled this deftly, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to add some more to this.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the biggest problem in my mind. The experience of being gay isn\u0026rsquo;t--for the most part--something that queer folks \u0026ldquo;just happen to have/be,\u0026rdquo; and to write about queer/gay characters in this way, I think fundamentally misunderstands the experience.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I could add anything to underscore that, or illuminate that further. No matter how enlightened these times are, being gay marks you as being different and positions you in opposition to normative culture. Living and loving in this condition has a profound effect on us.","title":"Writing Gay Characters"},{"content":"Just because you can, doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean you should. I caught wind of this twitter the other day that encapsulated perfectly the kind of fear I have about getting cornered (by someone else, or my intention) into making a \u0026ldquo;community site\u0026rdquo; that seems to beg for drupal.\nFor the not-as-geeky among you, feel free to skip to the end where I hope to extrapolate on the larger lessons about audience and technology users.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s get into it, shall we:\nDrupal is great software. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of developer energy, there are a lot of tools, and by god this is a program that can do everything. You want to host a community of bloggers? Done. You want a discussion forum? Done. You want wikis and/or collaborative tools that you can use to write structured documents? Done. You want to tie into other popular services? Done. You want to create custom content views and insulate certain kinds of content with very granular access menus? Done.\nAnd so forth. Oh, and by the way it\u0026rsquo;s free software/open source software to boot. Who can argue with that? Certainly not me. Though I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t consider myself a drupal master, and I don\u0026rsquo;t use it on any of my sites, I\u0026rsquo;ve played around with it a bit, and while I liked what I saw, there were a couple of major problems for me.\nThe administrative interface was complicated and non-intuitive.\nTo be fair, I really don\u0026rsquo;t like to interact with programs through a web browser, and it seems to me that all I was doing with drupal was clicking through page after page to try and find the one bit that I needed to flip, but I\u0026rsquo;m hypersensative to these things. The cause of this, as near as I could tell was the fact that the admin interface and the front end of the site are differentiated by the users access level not anything in the interface. This is confusing and not, I think good form, visitors to the websites and admins need different things.\nDrupal sites reek of drupal.\nMost web programing frameworks reek of themesleves, so this doesn\u0026rsquo;t set Drupal apart, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly bad in the case of Drupal. What do I mean like reek? Well, it\u0026rsquo;s that feeling of \u0026ldquo;oh they\u0026rsquo;re running drupal/rails/etc,\u0026rdquo; here that you get 7 seconds after clicking on your first link (if not sooner). While this isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, and I suspect most users don\u0026rsquo;t notice this very much, but I think if most independent site runners have sites that seem to work the same, the reader will be left with the impression that the sites are the same. We must think about total experience.\nThe level of programing know-how needed for setup is non-trivial\nWhile I think Wordpress, which I use a lot and rather like, has gone too far in the other direction,1 the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s so much more complicated to get drupal from the box to production, means that people who want to start a site now need to break momentum to do programing (or hire someone.) The truth is that I think the know how needed to really use drupal, is like 10% less than the know how needed to build something in Django. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m overplaying it, but not too much.\nTo be fair, I\u0026rsquo;ve not used the 6.x series of Drupal, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s a few broader lessons about creating a product/content and audience, that comes from that nagging dread that drupal seems to create:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not clear that drupal knows weather it wants to be a web framework or a CMS. Know what you\u0026rsquo;re trying to do, and be clear about it. Different tools for different jobs, rather than one swiss-army knife. It\u0026rsquo;s good to have related project that are integrated, of course but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that you need to only have one program for everything in your project.2 Create low barriers to entry. I didn\u0026rsquo;t stay with drupal because after a weeks of tinkering with it, I still didn\u0026rsquo;t like what I was seeing, so First impressions count. Onward and Upward!\nthere are templating features and capabilities that were around in b2/cafelog that have been abstracted and removed, and while I understand the rationale, I still miss them.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;m such a unix dweeb, so your milage may vary.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-drupal-and-product-design/","summary":"Just because you can, doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean you should. I caught wind of this twitter the other day that encapsulated perfectly the kind of fear I have about getting cornered (by someone else, or my intention) into making a \u0026ldquo;community site\u0026rdquo; that seems to beg for drupal.\nFor the not-as-geeky among you, feel free to skip to the end where I hope to extrapolate on the larger lessons about audience and technology users.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s get into it, shall we:\nDrupal is great software. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of developer energy, there are a lot of tools, and by god this is a program that can do everything. You want to host a community of bloggers? Done. You want a discussion forum? Done. You want wikis and/or collaborative tools that you can use to write structured documents? Done. You want to tie into other popular services? Done. You want to create custom content views and insulate certain kinds of content with very granular access menus?","title":"On Drupal and Product Design"},{"content":"I present you with something I discovered whilst working on my current project at work:\nSection 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution barred from office anyone who had violated their oath to protect the Constitution by serving in the Confederacy. That prohibition included Davis. In 1978, pursuant to authority granted to Congress under the same section of the Amendment, Congress posthumously removed the ban on Davis with a two-thirds vote of each house and President Jimmy Carter signed it. These actions were spearheaded by Congressman Trent Lott of Mississippi. Congress had previously taken similar action on behalf of Robert E. Lee.\nFrom the wikipedia article on Jefferson Davis.\nThis is absurd. As a gesture, it sends a totally of backward political message--but I think getting hung up the political significance of this specific act of congress in the 70s, there\u0026rsquo;s something larger at play that I think we need to spend a moment on:\nIn the 1970s, both houses of Congress and the President (of different parties) passed a law that allowed someone who had beendead* for 89 years to run for office.*\nThe conclusion?\nTrent Lott knew about and was making legal preparations for zombies.\nThere is no other rational explanation.\nUpon further reflection, as the resident of a state who has elected a dead person to federal office, I think I can safely grant my support to any dead candidate seeking office. As long as we can be assured that they stay dead.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/american-history/","summary":"I present you with something I discovered whilst working on my current project at work:\nSection 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution barred from office anyone who had violated their oath to protect the Constitution by serving in the Confederacy. That prohibition included Davis. In 1978, pursuant to authority granted to Congress under the same section of the Amendment, Congress posthumously removed the ban on Davis with a two-thirds vote of each house and President Jimmy Carter signed it. These actions were spearheaded by Congressman Trent Lott of Mississippi. Congress had previously taken similar action on behalf of Robert E. Lee.\nFrom the wikipedia article on Jefferson Davis.\nThis is absurd. As a gesture, it sends a totally of backward political message--but I think getting hung up the political significance of this specific act of congress in the 70s, there\u0026rsquo;s something larger at play that I think we need to spend a moment on:","title":"American History"},{"content":"In my last post about the latvian dreaming project (rav-link), I explained how to get from the cast on, to the gussets. Given that I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten past this, I have another post in this series for you.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re doing this shoulders the way I am (dropped), with square armholes with underarm gussets, do what I\u0026rsquo;m doing. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in doing something with shaped armholes or a yoke, I can write something up along those lines (and probably will,) but some prodding on your part might be in order. Anyway, here\u0026rsquo;s how I\u0026rsquo;m knitting this:\nOnce your gusset measures three inches, and your sweater is long enough, place all the gusset stitches on a thread/holder of some kind. and cast on 11 stitches for the steak in the following sequence. D L D L L D L L D L D. You\u0026rsquo;ll keep the dark/background stitches (D) at the begining and end as well as the center 3 stitches in the same color. Alternate the other six stitches in sucessive rows so that the steek looks like:\nDL D L LDL L D LD DD L D LDL D L DD DL D L LDL L D LD DD L D LDL D L DD DL D L LDL L D LD DD L D LDL D L DD When you\u0026rsquo;re done the dark/background stitches on the side will be the stitches that you pick up, and the center dark stitch will be the stitch that you cut. I\u0026rsquo;ve never had one of these steeks ravel, but if you have a prefered steek, do that, by all means.\nKnit for three inches, or to wherever you want the apex of the V neck to start. I knit three inches, but I like deep yokes and high v-necks, so it\u0026rsquo;s up to you.\nPut the center front stitch on a thread/safety pin. Cast on another steek as above. Decrease on either side of the steek on the next and every alternating row until\u0026hellip;\nWell that\u0026rsquo;s the question, isn\u0026rsquo;t it? All the instructions that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen suggest that v-necks should be 20% of K or 64 stitches around, That works out to 34 stitches across the front, or 16 pairs of decreases.\nTo check your numbers, know that neck openings should almost always be between 14-16 inches, or 7-8 inches across the front. Do the percentage system, see what it comes out to, and then check, and then get as close to one of those numbers as you can.\nOnce you decrease your chosen number of stitches (because even I am not bold enough to say, \u0026ldquo;the right number\u0026rdquo;), stop decreasing, and knit until the armhole is deep enough. (Armholes should be, I think around 9-10 inches, but check).\nI have a few more tricks up my sleeve (ha!) regarding the collar (a weird place for them I know.) Including shoulder straps and round/crew necks. Anyone interested?\nIf you have questions please do ask! I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, and I\u0026rsquo;ll get pictures of my progress up\u0026hellip; soonish.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/v-neck-shaping/","summary":"In my last post about the latvian dreaming project (rav-link), I explained how to get from the cast on, to the gussets. Given that I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten past this, I have another post in this series for you.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re doing this shoulders the way I am (dropped), with square armholes with underarm gussets, do what I\u0026rsquo;m doing. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in doing something with shaped armholes or a yoke, I can write something up along those lines (and probably will,) but some prodding on your part might be in order. Anyway, here\u0026rsquo;s how I\u0026rsquo;m knitting this:\nOnce your gusset measures three inches, and your sweater is long enough, place all the gusset stitches on a thread/holder of some kind. and cast on 11 stitches for the steak in the following sequence. D L D L L D L L D L D. You\u0026rsquo;ll keep the dark/background stitches (D) at the begining and end as well as the center 3 stitches in the same color.","title":"V-Neck Shaping"},{"content":"In debates between writers who outline voraciously and writers who \u0026ldquo;just write\u0026rdquo; and think that outlining kills the energy of a project, I usually come down on the side of the outliners. If I make an outline, even if I don\u0026rsquo;t hold myself to it closely, I tend to be more focused and run into fewer snags than if I fly by the seat of my pants. Except\u0026hellip;\nExcept that I\u0026rsquo;m horrible about outlining characters and to a lesser extent settings. I swear if any of my stories were ever performed on stage, it\u0026rsquo;d be a clear stage except for a background mural vaguely reminiscent of space. And while I tend to have a pretty clear idea of what\u0026rsquo;s going on in terms of \u0026ldquo;what happens next\u0026rdquo; I fly by the seat of my pants every inch of the way in terms of characters.\nThe good news is that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good with character representation and dialogue (that psychology major paying off after all?), so I can fake it well. The bad news is that I don\u0026rsquo;t often don\u0026rsquo;t realize that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what I\u0026rsquo;m doing until embarrassingly late in the game.\nAs I was thinking about this last weekend (and forcing myself to write character sketches,) I realized a few things:\n1. I suspect that most people who \u0026ldquo;fly by the seat of their pants\u0026rdquo; probably do some character development, and that just as I have given myself personal dispensation for not making notes about characters, I think that they probably do the same for making these notes. It\u0026rsquo;s interesting at any rate. 2. It\u0026rsquo;s really helpful to make notes about characters to help keep them consistent over the course of a writing project. Duh. 3. My tendency is to make characters too realistic. Characters in stories need to be in great danger, they need to have problems that they can\u0026rsquo;t think their way out of, and they need to be faced with situations that might radically change the face their world, if not the world itself. The truth is that most of our problems are things we can think our way out of (that would be the downside of the psychology major) and we pass through our lives with only routine levels of danger, and almost all of the situations we experience are alone unlikely to change the world.\nAnyway I have some characters to go sketch out\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/story-development-process/","summary":"In debates between writers who outline voraciously and writers who \u0026ldquo;just write\u0026rdquo; and think that outlining kills the energy of a project, I usually come down on the side of the outliners. If I make an outline, even if I don\u0026rsquo;t hold myself to it closely, I tend to be more focused and run into fewer snags than if I fly by the seat of my pants. Except\u0026hellip;\nExcept that I\u0026rsquo;m horrible about outlining characters and to a lesser extent settings. I swear if any of my stories were ever performed on stage, it\u0026rsquo;d be a clear stage except for a background mural vaguely reminiscent of space. And while I tend to have a pretty clear idea of what\u0026rsquo;s going on in terms of \u0026ldquo;what happens next\u0026rdquo; I fly by the seat of my pants every inch of the way in terms of characters.\nThe good news is that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good with character representation and dialogue (that psychology major paying off after all?","title":"Story Development Process"},{"content":"I got my hair cut last friday and while I was waiting for my turn in the chair, I did a little writing with my ipod touch, which was an experience onto itself.1 But this is a post about what I wrote, not how I wrote it\u0026hellip;\nIn recognition of my need to work on a new story I began to work on developing a new story. For the past year or so I\u0026rsquo;ve been working in a much \u0026ldquo;harder\u0026rdquo; context than I might otherwise be prone to. No FTL, no aliens, and if we ignore station keeping, no alien worlds, no terraforming, and nothing more than say 500 years in the future. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly rigorous from a technical perspective, and while I have a rough grasp of Hohmann Transfer Orbits and Lagrangian points I don\u0026rsquo;t exactly do the math to check if there\u0026rsquo;d be a fuel efficient launch window arriving on Mars in \u0026ldquo;late 2542.\u0026rdquo;\nAlso at issue is the experience of my first-highschool-era novel which was very FTL/military/alien worlds/terraforming/etc and as I went back I found all that absurd.\nSo I figure, I have a fiction blog, I could write something short, play with a world briefly with hyperspace and aliens and what not, and if it sucks, it\u0026rsquo;d be over soon enough. So I sat down, and began to write some notes for the world and for the character that I want to (re)use.\nGuess what?\nNo FTL. Alien worlds and terraforming, and outlandish technology on the interstellar ships, but no FTL.\nIt seems that no matter what I do I really want to write stories about isolated populations of people, because that\u0026rsquo;s where cool things surrounding group identities/histories develop, and if people can hop on a ship and be \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo; in a week or two, the creation of new worlds doesn\u0026rsquo;t provide a cultural situation that is fundamentally unique from our current globalized world.\nSigh.\nThoughts?\nOnward and Upward!\nSo it went well. I\u0026rsquo;m clearly not very fast with the keyboard, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I\u0026rsquo;m missing something by not having hardware keys, but once I learned to just \u0026ldquo;go with it,\u0026rdquo; rather than worry about accuracy, I think I got more accurate, because the corrections were spot on. It\u0026rsquo;s smart. Here\u0026rsquo;s the thing that sucks. There\u0026rsquo;s no good text editing program. I\u0026rsquo;m using Endnote which has good syncing but but it\u0026rsquo;s a bit\u0026hellip; rough. I think in the future, if I try and break from my \u0026ldquo;take notes in one giant text file,\u0026rdquo; it might work a little better. Alan, it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too much to ask for for an ipod textmate? maybe with git hooked up as a plugin? Thought so. Anyway.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/somewhat-sublight/","summary":"I got my hair cut last friday and while I was waiting for my turn in the chair, I did a little writing with my ipod touch, which was an experience onto itself.1 But this is a post about what I wrote, not how I wrote it\u0026hellip;\nIn recognition of my need to work on a new story I began to work on developing a new story. For the past year or so I\u0026rsquo;ve been working in a much \u0026ldquo;harder\u0026rdquo; context than I might otherwise be prone to. No FTL, no aliens, and if we ignore station keeping, no alien worlds, no terraforming, and nothing more than say 500 years in the future. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly rigorous from a technical perspective, and while I have a rough grasp of Hohmann Transfer Orbits and Lagrangian points I don\u0026rsquo;t exactly do the math to check if there\u0026rsquo;d be a fuel efficient launch window arriving on Mars in \u0026ldquo;late 2542.","title":"somewhat sublight"},{"content":"Though I\u0026rsquo;ve never asked directly about this, I have sort of hinted around the edges and thought about it a bit, so I figure, it\u0026rsquo;s worth bringing up. Here\u0026rsquo;s the question:\nYou install a new wiki somewhere, and you have a blank \u0026ldquo;welcome to your wiki page.\u0026rdquo; How do you go about editing these pages and developing a wiki from there?\nThe idea behind a wiki is that it provides a quick way to edit and create web pages, without needing to know very much about HTML and associated technologies. Right?\nIn addition to radically de-centering authorship, wikis also have profound effects on the structure and organization of websites/documents. While much attention has been paid to the former on a social and software level,1 I think the latter has been mostly ignored.\nI think the tendency is to think of the organization of data within a wiki as being largely emergent phenomena. I think this is more true when there are a lot of people starting a wiki and when the size/growth of the wiki is appropriate for the community size.\nThe truth is that I think this kind of approach ignores this huge data management problem because it\u0026rsquo;s not an issue for 10% of wikis/documents/collections. I mean, if you throw up a wiki you can\u0026rsquo;t just let it go the way that Ward Cunningham did for the first wiki (because the people who would contribute and the internet would come to the wiki from a much different place), and sites like wikipedia have a lot of very intentional structure. And while I like the idea of emergent structure, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it actually works in practice.2\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m not sure the question ofwhat is in the wiki matters a lot for the organization, because I\u0026rsquo;m more interested in how much and what kind of structure people create when they\u0026rsquo;re editing in this kind of document, rather than specifics about naming schemes or the rationale behind a classification system. I guess, if I had to break this question down further I\u0026rsquo;d be interested in:\nWhat kind of metadata (categories, tags) do you use? How hierarchical is your document. Too much hierarchy and pages get lost at the end of trees, not enough and you have a mess of files and no way to tell them apart. Do you use natural phrase WikiWord titles for pages, or do you have a less natural naming scheme? How much do you use talk/discussion/commentary pages? CamelCase Wiki words or not? What kind of search tools do you use? Does this help? Your thoughts are much appreciated.\nOnward and Upward!\nParticularly in terms of administrative tools/responsibilities, social norms, and spam control which can be shaped and influenced by the engineering.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nParticularly when the contributor base is on the small side\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wiki-questions/","summary":"Though I\u0026rsquo;ve never asked directly about this, I have sort of hinted around the edges and thought about it a bit, so I figure, it\u0026rsquo;s worth bringing up. Here\u0026rsquo;s the question:\nYou install a new wiki somewhere, and you have a blank \u0026ldquo;welcome to your wiki page.\u0026rdquo; How do you go about editing these pages and developing a wiki from there?\nThe idea behind a wiki is that it provides a quick way to edit and create web pages, without needing to know very much about HTML and associated technologies. Right?\nIn addition to radically de-centering authorship, wikis also have profound effects on the structure and organization of websites/documents. While much attention has been paid to the former on a social and software level,1 I think the latter has been mostly ignored.\nI think the tendency is to think of the organization of data within a wiki as being largely emergent phenomena.","title":"Wiki Questions"},{"content":"I have never really considered myself a short story person. I\u0026rsquo;m not really very good at writing on that scale, and for most of my life I\u0026rsquo;ve never been particularly good at reading that literature.\nIn a lot of ways, I think 2008 will be/is the year that I decide if I can make a go of this \u0026ldquo;writing\u0026rdquo; thing. I mean I think it\u0026rsquo;ll take longer than a year to decide if I\u0026rsquo;ve been successful at this writing thing, but I think in a year and some change I can decide if it\u0026rsquo;s something I want to do.\nSo you might think, given this that I would have made some sort of new years resolution to write a certain number of words every day or week, or to write a novel, or something. Instead, I resolved to keep a record of my reading, and by doing so I hoped that I would read more (though technically I didn\u0026rsquo;t actually resolve to read more.) Which makes sense, at least to me. It\u0026rsquo;s important to read, to be familiar with the literature of discourses you hope to participate, and after a very eccentric introduction to science fiction and fiction in general, not to mention several years of hiatus from the genre, I thought it would be good to spend some attention to this shortcoming.\nAnd then there\u0026rsquo;s the issue that I really don\u0026rsquo;t grok short fiction very well. Or it is, at least not something that I\u0026rsquo;m drawn to. I like stories that draw me into their world, that ask me to think about an idea not simply in a \u0026ldquo;isn\u0026rsquo;t this interesting,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;imagine the implications of this situation,\u0026rdquo; but rather think about all of the possibilities that grow out of the journey/story of the characters in this setting.\nSo I bought Dozois/Stratham anthology `The New Space Opera \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/New-Space-Opera-Gardner-Dozois/dp/0060846755/tychoish-20\u0026gt;`_ earlier this year and have read many of these stories, and I\u0026rsquo;m almost entirely caught up on Escape Pod, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading 365Tomorrows, and I have a stack of old SF magazines that I\u0026rsquo;ve been picking my way though.\nAnd I still don\u0026rsquo;t get it.\nI mean, I can appreciate a story, and I can almost write a short story,1 and I feel better about being able to speak intelgently about short stories (what people are doing, the mechanics, and so forth), but I don\u0026rsquo;t get it. I\u0026rsquo;m going to keep reading short stories of course, but I think at this point, I\u0026rsquo;m going to stop guilting myself into reading more of them.\nSo there!\nOnward and Upward!\nOne of my problems is that I often forget that short stories don\u0026rsquo;t have to be super short--I sometimes just assume that short stories have to be 2000 words or less--for example, it\u0026rsquo;s not unusual for a short story to be about 6,000 words.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/short-fiction-goals/","summary":"I have never really considered myself a short story person. I\u0026rsquo;m not really very good at writing on that scale, and for most of my life I\u0026rsquo;ve never been particularly good at reading that literature.\nIn a lot of ways, I think 2008 will be/is the year that I decide if I can make a go of this \u0026ldquo;writing\u0026rdquo; thing. I mean I think it\u0026rsquo;ll take longer than a year to decide if I\u0026rsquo;ve been successful at this writing thing, but I think in a year and some change I can decide if it\u0026rsquo;s something I want to do.\nSo you might think, given this that I would have made some sort of new years resolution to write a certain number of words every day or week, or to write a novel, or something. Instead, I resolved to keep a record of my reading, and by doing so I hoped that I would read more (though technically I didn\u0026rsquo;t actually resolve to read more.","title":"Short Fiction Goals"},{"content":"Surprisingly my last post about git was more well received than I really thought. I promised that I\u0026rsquo;d collect some of the resources that I found useful when switching to git in a separate post. While this has lingered on my todo list for some time, I\u0026rsquo;m only now getting around to writing it. Hey, I just write about productivity, I never claimed to be any good at it.\nI should also disclaim that I am, by no means, in full command of git. I mean, I use it a lot and greatly enjoy my experiences with git, but there are tons of features that I don\u0026rsquo;t use that I\u0026rsquo;m clueless about. Just saying.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re interested in git, try it! At the core, git does something that I think just about everyone who creates something with a computer can use: it provides a way to backup, store, and organize versions of your files. If you use git, or any version control software, even if you don\u0026rsquo;t write code, even if your only collaborators are yourself working on different machines, you never have to worry where your data is or what happened to that version of the story you were writing three weeks ago that you deleted because you thought that the character was coming off to strong. It\u0026rsquo;s just there, and being able to really trust your computer with your data is an awesome thing. Really.\nAnyway. Resources. Git.\nLinus On Git: Linus Torvalds, better known for writing this little thing called the Linux Kernel, wrote git. Here he is talking to google engineers about git, and I think here better than just about anyone else, you can really get a good idea of what it is that git does. There are other videos of talks about git, of course, google will reveal those to you, but for the most basic understanding of how git works (which isn\u0026rsquo;t essential, but it helps things make sense if they seem a little ass backwards at the onset), this one can\u0026rsquo;t be beat.\nDream Hosting Git. I use dreamhost for hosting this site, and I push copies of my repositories to bare repositories in a nonpublic directory on my account for backup and remote access. This makes for a much better backup plan, and with git-web everything is pretty swell, but that post outlines all the stuff that needs to be done in order to make it all work in terms of pointing origins and what not so that the pushes all work.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve used svn before (and you\u0026rsquo;ve compiled git with svn support) this blog post explains how to import your commit history to git. It\u0026rsquo;s not something that you\u0026rsquo;re likely to need to do a lot but it\u0026rsquo;s good to know how to do.\nOne of the great things about git is that it theoretically it allows for decentralized collaboration. If you have a git repository, even if it\u0026rsquo;s not one that you started, you and a friend can push and pull with each other without needing a server. This blog post explains how to do this without mucking up with security holes and the like.\nFinally, I found this just a few days ago, but ticgit is a cool python doodad that lets you store a ticketing system (as in for bug tracking and feature requests), inside of a branch in git. Which though not really a replacement for something full fledged like trac, might be good to keep track of your own goals. I can imagine how this might be useful for todo management, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t used it yet. Someday.\nHope this helps and if you have any good links or resources I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear about them.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/git-resources/","summary":"Surprisingly my last post about git was more well received than I really thought. I promised that I\u0026rsquo;d collect some of the resources that I found useful when switching to git in a separate post. While this has lingered on my todo list for some time, I\u0026rsquo;m only now getting around to writing it. Hey, I just write about productivity, I never claimed to be any good at it.\nI should also disclaim that I am, by no means, in full command of git. I mean, I use it a lot and greatly enjoy my experiences with git, but there are tons of features that I don\u0026rsquo;t use that I\u0026rsquo;m clueless about. Just saying.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re interested in git, try it! At the core, git does something that I think just about everyone who creates something with a computer can use: it provides a way to backup, store, and organize versions of your files.","title":"Git Resources"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m sure in a year or two I\u0026rsquo;m going to look back on this summer and say \u0026ldquo;that was the in-between summer,\u0026rdquo; and shudder. Indeed this past year has been a series of \u0026ldquo;hurry up and wait,\u0026rdquo; games, but that aside, as I\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling to write more effectively this past week, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that my writing problem--such as it is--and my life problem--such as it is--are really the same. I\u0026rsquo;m in-between big things and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to keep things moving. This entry is an exploration of this.\nThe writing first, on the assumption that you\u0026rsquo;re much more interested in that anyway:\nI\u0026rsquo;m I don\u0026rsquo;t know where I got the idea that trailing edge was going to be something really long term, but it\u0026rsquo;s becoming clear to me, that while I have a few weeks worth of posts that aren\u0026rsquo;t edited and posted yet, it looks like this piece will turn out to be a novelette/novella. And strangely I\u0026rsquo;m ok with that. In fact, I think this is a good thing, as it means that I have something of a concrete plot, a goal and a plan, and one of my larger concerns/worries at the moment is that I feel like I have weak/cerebral plots.1\nThe problem with this is that the idea that this was a long term project was one that I was pretty fond of, and it means that I have to think about starting a new project sooner than I had planned. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to go back and write a prequel to Knowing Mars that I sketched out and then put on the back burner, (because it\u0026rsquo;s a cool story, and because someone asked for it.) And I want to work on getting more Station Keeping nailed out. I have about half to three quarters of the second (new!) season of station keeping to write. The third season, I plan to write as a single script2, possibly in conjunction with script frenzy, and that\u0026rsquo;s what I want to write more, but I need to get everything setup for that first.\nBut these are all shorter term projects (which is odd, given that I don\u0026rsquo;t think of myself as being incredibly useful or coherent with fiction under 25k words.). And not only that, but they\u0026rsquo;re old shorter term projects. While Trailing Edge is new (though connected to previous projects) and the KM prequel is newish, it\u0026rsquo;s an elaboration on something old. Station Keeping, is basically something I came up with during my junior/senior year of high school. Knowing Mars itself is reasonably new, but it grew out of an outline (that I didn\u0026rsquo;t realize was an outline at the time) that I wrote even earlier. Though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what form it will take, I\u0026rsquo;m itching to work on something new. For some reason I\u0026rsquo;ve been completely enraptured by concept ships and I have a couple of ideas that might work in a gritty space-opera-style world.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s all a ways off, and it\u0026rsquo;s not the doing as much as the amorphous uncertainty that surrounds the future of my writing projects. I said at the onset that this was both a post about writing uncertainty (as above) but also personal uncertainty. And I have enough of that too: my current work contract is up, and while I\u0026rsquo;m employable enough and I have a few prospects nothing is nailed down. Same about school: it\u0026rsquo;s becoming increasingly clear to me that when I go back to school it needs to be for something else. For the sake of not being overly confessional, I\u0026rsquo;ll spare the details, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s at least passingly interesting that the feeling of being snagged by the in between works in parallel for the \u0026ldquo;life stuff\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;writing stuff.\u0026rdquo;\nKnowing is half the journey. Onward and Upward!\nH.S.: I think/hope that we can laugh at the absurdity of this.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nNote to self, write something about writing/reading scripts. This is totally the \u0026ldquo;see tycho\u0026rsquo;s process work\u0026rdquo; in real time entry. Be afraid.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-between-ness/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m sure in a year or two I\u0026rsquo;m going to look back on this summer and say \u0026ldquo;that was the in-between summer,\u0026rdquo; and shudder. Indeed this past year has been a series of \u0026ldquo;hurry up and wait,\u0026rdquo; games, but that aside, as I\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling to write more effectively this past week, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that my writing problem--such as it is--and my life problem--such as it is--are really the same. I\u0026rsquo;m in-between big things and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to keep things moving. This entry is an exploration of this.\nThe writing first, on the assumption that you\u0026rsquo;re much more interested in that anyway:\nI\u0026rsquo;m I don\u0026rsquo;t know where I got the idea that trailing edge was going to be something really long term, but it\u0026rsquo;s becoming clear to me, that while I have a few weeks worth of posts that aren\u0026rsquo;t edited and posted yet, it looks like this piece will turn out to be a novelette/novella.","title":"in-between-ness"},{"content":"I rewrote the about page for tychoish this weekend. Because it was about damn time, really, and though this one doesn\u0026rsquo;t cover much new ground the format isn\u0026rsquo;t so\u0026hellip; ass-y. And because it\u0026rsquo;s a slow blogging week, it\u0026rsquo;s also a post. Have a good day, check out `today\u0026rsquo;s critical futures story \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/\u0026gt;`_, and I\u0026rsquo;ll catch you around tomorrow.--ty\nThis place is mine, I\u0026rsquo;m your host tycho garen. I\u0026rsquo;m just your average geeky, male knitter, who write science fiction, and posts to his \u0026lsquo;blog about things like writing, current knitting, technology, academia, and other shiny topics that catch my attention.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging for a long time, the archive goes back to 2003 (but I don\u0026rsquo;t think you should read those anyway) and I\u0026rsquo;ve found residual evidence of my online presence going back to early 2001, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that I was doing this kind of thing since mid \u0026lsquo;99 give or take a little, but I\u0026rsquo;m almost glad that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a firm record of that early stuff. Once upon a time I collaborated on sites with Chris Knittel, but in 2007 we decided to divide up the archive and start posting independently. Hence tychoish.com.\nIn truth during the first (many years) I posted infrequently, but since the spring of 2007, I\u0026rsquo;ve made a point of posting something at least once a day. When I started tychoish, I thought that it would be like my paper notebook--a random collection of thoughts, lists, and raw ideas--only digital. Which meant that I might actually go back and use it more than once, and it might be a cool discussion starter, since I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot to hide. Also, about this time tumblelogs became popluar (again), and I thought \u0026ldquo;nifty! want.\u0026rdquo; And seeing that I tend to post several hundred words of rough prose every day, you can see how well that idea went.\nWith the rhythm of daily posting pretty much under my belt, and a rather substantial reevaluation of the role of fiction writing in my life, in July of 2007 I launched a new website called `Critical Futures \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/\u0026gt;`_. I\u0026rsquo;ve been interested in hypertext and the future of prose and fiction on the internet for a long time, and CF is a blog where I post manageable snippets of stories every day of the week. Eventually, I hope that CF will be a paying market and there\u0026rsquo;ll work from other similarly minded SF writers, but for the moment it\u0026rsquo;s a fun experiment and great motivation to write and edit (somewhat) my work regularly.\nAnd before you ask, tycho garen isn\u0026rsquo;t really my name. I mean, it is in a sense, it\u0026rsquo;s just not what people in real life call me, nor is it what\u0026rsquo;s on my birth certificate. I like it for both of these reasons, and because it references some of my early writing, it allows me some measure of privacy or separation between my cyber- and meat-space identities, and it helps that it is an unequivocally cool name. I don\u0026rsquo;t capitalize it (nor my given name much) because names are as much adjectives as they are proper nouns, and particularly since tycho isn\u0026rsquo;t an official name, it seems even sillier to capitalize it.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s me. My email is all over this site, and my username on most major websites/communications services is \u0026ldquo;tychoish,\u0026rdquo; if you want to get a hold of me, you know how. I love hearing from readers and fellow bloggers.\nIf I left something out, don\u0026rsquo;t be afraid to ask.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-about-page/","summary":"I rewrote the about page for tychoish this weekend. Because it was about damn time, really, and though this one doesn\u0026rsquo;t cover much new ground the format isn\u0026rsquo;t so\u0026hellip; ass-y. And because it\u0026rsquo;s a slow blogging week, it\u0026rsquo;s also a post. Have a good day, check out `today\u0026rsquo;s critical futures story \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com/\u0026gt;`_, and I\u0026rsquo;ll catch you around tomorrow.--ty\nThis place is mine, I\u0026rsquo;m your host tycho garen. I\u0026rsquo;m just your average geeky, male knitter, who write science fiction, and posts to his \u0026lsquo;blog about things like writing, current knitting, technology, academia, and other shiny topics that catch my attention.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging for a long time, the archive goes back to 2003 (but I don\u0026rsquo;t think you should read those anyway) and I\u0026rsquo;ve found residual evidence of my online presence going back to early 2001, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that I was doing this kind of thing since mid \u0026lsquo;99 give or take a little, but I\u0026rsquo;m almost glad that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a firm record of that early stuff.","title":"New About Page"},{"content":"Knitting camp got me back into the knitting, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t written about it in so long that I think it\u0026rsquo;s only fitting that I write a little bit about my current projects. Here they are:\nLatvian Dreaming:\nThis is the project that I am, at least theoretically, leading a follow-the-leader knit-a-long on. But it\u0026rsquo;s the summer, and few people are actually follwoing along. Also, I\u0026rsquo;ve only written instructions until the underarm point, which I just surpassed this past weekend, so I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting the next step soon. I want to put a v-neck on this sweater, and I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet really done a v-neck successfully, so I want to test some things out before I commit to something on this sweater. The good news for all of you who want to knit this sweater is that this is still my primary project and that I am \u0026ldquo;unstuck\u0026rdquo; and making progress.\nA plain V-Neck/Raglan Sweater:\nFor knitting camp this year I started a plain raglan sweater to knit on while I was at camp. Needless to say, not only did I not knit on this sweater, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t even take it out of the bag. It was a good thing that got be back in the mood for knitting, but it did cause me to break my \u0026ldquo;one sweater at a time rule,\u0026rdquo; and is thus a little bit distressing for this reason. It\u0026rsquo;s also destressing because I\u0026rsquo;m allergic to the yarn (a merino possum blend) which makes me sneeze and feel as if my face was attacked by a fuzzy monster. Furthermore it doesn\u0026rsquo;t help that the yarn, which is a discontinued Cherry Tree Hill, has an inconsistent level of fuzziness, sort of like a dye-lot issue, except with more sneezing. Further distressing elements of this design: I have the sleeves left to knit at the end; the yoke shaping is always mysterious and magical when it is in progress, and I\u0026rsquo;m using this to figure out how to do the v-neck on the latvian dreaming pullover.\nThe Never Ending Movie Sweater\nThree years ago I, on a whim, bought a 1.5 pound cone of fingering/jumper weight alpaca lambswool. I didn\u0026rsquo;t do much with it for a while, but that winter I started making a cabled strip that was about 30 stitches wide on US 1 needles. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t sure what it was going to be, and in fits and starts I\u0026rsquo;ve turned it into a sweater. The strip was continued to form a ring, which I picked stitches up around and knit the body of a sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s mostly plain, and I call it my \u0026ldquo;movie sweater\u0026rdquo; because two summers ago, I lived with someone who really enjoyed going to movies. While I also enjoy going to see movies, I like having knitting, and there was enough endless stocking stitch in the round that I could do it in the dark. At knitting camp I finished the second shoulder strap. Now all that\u0026rsquo;s left is knitting the plackets and collar (with lots of cables on them), and then the sleeves. On US 1s. I think because this has lingered for so long as a side project, that I\u0026rsquo;ve never really felt like I needed to finish, I have remarkably little stress/angst/worry over this project. Also, a fingering weight sweater? How cool is that.\nLace Shawls\nI have a couple of lace shawls floating around the house that I started at various times because I had the yarn, and/or I needed to figure out something. They\u0026rsquo;re low-stress and non-teleological (like the movie sweater, and unlike the other two sweaters) and it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting change of pace from all the colorwork that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing the past couple of years. I\u0026rsquo;ve not knit lace in years, and I\u0026rsquo;ve finally given away all of the shawls that I knit during my last lace kick, so it\u0026rsquo;s time to create another little stash of these shawls.\nI think the 2008-2009 knitting season will be marked by a branching out. While I think I have a couple of colorwork sweaters in the plan, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting from handspun stash and there will be a couple of cabled sweaters. Though I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll write about my knitting again before I get to that point.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m working on at the moment.\nWhat about you?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-report/","summary":"Knitting camp got me back into the knitting, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t written about it in so long that I think it\u0026rsquo;s only fitting that I write a little bit about my current projects. Here they are:\nLatvian Dreaming:\nThis is the project that I am, at least theoretically, leading a follow-the-leader knit-a-long on. But it\u0026rsquo;s the summer, and few people are actually follwoing along. Also, I\u0026rsquo;ve only written instructions until the underarm point, which I just surpassed this past weekend, so I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting the next step soon. I want to put a v-neck on this sweater, and I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet really done a v-neck successfully, so I want to test some things out before I commit to something on this sweater. The good news for all of you who want to knit this sweater is that this is still my primary project and that I am \u0026ldquo;unstuck\u0026rdquo; and making progress.","title":"Knitting Report"},{"content":"I have amazon kindle envy, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to lie. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about the kindle before, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think my opinion has changed that much: it\u0026rsquo;s a great idea, and with some changes it could be really amazing. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to get one of course: between the ugly, the price tag, the price scheme for the books, and the DRM there doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be much reason. I still have envy.\nThis abated this past week when I figured out the iPod Touch. When I got my new computer lo these many weeks ago, I got an ipod touch, because apple was/is running a promotion for student types (which I still qualify as). 100 Bucks for 16 gbs of flash memory, is a pretty good deal, all things considered. But I had no clue how to use it. *This is a common problem with new technology/devices, it looks great and we can feel that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be useful but until it we fit it into our workflow, it\u0026rsquo;s virtually useless.\nBasically when I got this ipod,1 I fooled around with it for a while, set it up to sync a bunch of stuff included my \u0026ldquo;oft listening/hits\u0026rdquo; playlists, a bunch of podcasts and videos, and sort of left it at that.\nNow I have an older 80gb ipod, that I typically use constantly. It has all my music that I care to listen to, enough podcasts to keep me busy for months, and I really like it. I didn\u0026rsquo;t and still don\u0026rsquo;t really need another iPod, so this thing didn\u0026rsquo;t do me a lot of good.\nAnd then I got the 2.0 firmware, and a program called stanza, and evernote (though to be fair, I mostly just look at evernote) I took almost all of the music off, and suddenly I have a really amazing device that serves a pretty useful niche, and now I don\u0026rsquo;t have kindle envy any more.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s what I love about the touch:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s incredibly tiny. The screen is big, but it\u0026rsquo;s in a super thin package. Back in the day I had PDAs which were bulky and huge and just as hard to get data into, but they weren\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;slip into the back pocket\u0026rdquo; kind of things. I could have a stack of five ipod touches for the size of one Palm 3. It\u0026rsquo;s incredibly sturdy. PDAs of old were plastic affairs, with finicky touch screens. This thing has a metal back and it feels sturdy, which means a lot. The software is robust. I think users can really respect and enjoy the fact that the software that runs on this platform is basically the same as the software that runs on Mac desktop. The developers know how to write the programs already, and the programs work and feel like the best desktop apps from the get go. All the best apps have syncing built in, and are focused around moving your data from ipod to the cloud to your computer. This is cool because it\u0026rsquo;s not the kind of thing where you sync the whole system and hope for the best, a la windows mobile and active sync, but you have a lot of control over what syncs and when. With the built in WiFi, it\u0026rsquo;s fast and independent. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that. The ebook reading program has great library support a good (mac only) converter, and the interface is nearly perfect (if a bit slow). What I don\u0026rsquo;t like:\nIt doesn\u0026rsquo;t have bluetooth. I\u0026rsquo;d love to be able to do away with the sync cable, and be able to selectively sync things over the air. This also opens up the possibility for more sophisticated input methods.\nThe ebook reader seems to have to recomplie/reflow the entire book every time you change the orientation of the device, or load a new book. This is painfully slow, and pretty unnecessary.\nCut and Paste.\nI want there to be a text editor that uses a git repo as a file system. This is a pipe dream, I suppose.\nI guess the biggest thing that I learned is that as an ipod this thing kind of sucks. Most of the time when I\u0026rsquo;m using an ipod I want the ability to change the volume/track without looking, which is damn hard with the touch. The solution? Don\u0026rsquo;t put music on this device. Also, I think having more music on an ipod makes the \u0026ldquo;random\u0026rdquo; work better. The end result is that I sync the touch every day or two and I almost never sync the big ipod, and it all works great. I can imagine, if I had an iphone and a live connection all the time, that I would never really sync it to a computer.\nThoughts? Does anyone else have one of these? I realize that stanza makes a pretty weird killer app, so does anyone else have something better?\nOnward and Upward!\nI should point out that I got the ipod touch before the 2.0 firmware was available so that might have hindered my process a bit.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ipod-touch-review/","summary":"I have amazon kindle envy, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to lie. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about the kindle before, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think my opinion has changed that much: it\u0026rsquo;s a great idea, and with some changes it could be really amazing. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to get one of course: between the ugly, the price tag, the price scheme for the books, and the DRM there doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be much reason. I still have envy.\nThis abated this past week when I figured out the iPod Touch. When I got my new computer lo these many weeks ago, I got an ipod touch, because apple was/is running a promotion for student types (which I still qualify as). 100 Bucks for 16 gbs of flash memory, is a pretty good deal, all things considered. But I had no clue how to use it. *This is a common problem with new technology/devices, it looks great and we can feel that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be useful but until it we fit it into our workflow, it\u0026rsquo;s virtually useless.","title":"iPod Touch Review"},{"content":"I spent a lot of my recent Saturday spinning. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to finally have such a long period of time where I don\u0026rsquo;t have to do anything. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I did:\nI finished spinning the shetland roving that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a couple of months. This was the first big batch of wool that I bought after my return to spinning this spring. I got 2 pounds (which is my standard order size) of a lovely grey and I spun a DK-ish weight 3-ply yarn.\nSince I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back to spinning I\u0026rsquo;ve been spinning a lot of 3 ply. Since I intended to knit from my handspun stash in the coming months, and I like the way that 3-ply comes out, I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s worth the extra effort. I\u0026rsquo;m also trying to spin more of the kinds of yarn that I\u0026rsquo;m likely to knit with, that is yarn in the neighborhood of worsted-weight yarn. While I knit a lot at finer gauges, I often have pretty good reason to use machined yarns for those tasks, but I think having a stash of heavier handspun yarns is sort of the way to go.\nI also started and spun the first skein of my next spinning project. I bought some Corriedale-Cross (2 lbs) at the Yarn Barn in April, and I\u0026rsquo;m spinning that into a more worsted 3ply. It\u0026rsquo;s a harder wearing wool, but there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of crimp and it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly rough. It has the other advantage of being incredibly inexpensive, considering how nice it is and given my intentions for this project (keep reading) it\u0026rsquo;s perfect.\nI want to knit a guernsey-style sweater (thought it might have more cable work, if I get intense about it,) and I want to have a sort of firmly spun, rugged wool for this sweater, and I\u0026rsquo;m afraid that merino would be too soft. I also have two pounds of merino for the next project. More on that as it develops. But yes, spinning continues apace!\nAlso, I think that it\u0026rsquo;s going to work out that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be spending the fall knitting sleeves to sweaters again. These things happen. But the next sweater that I cast on will probably be something from my handspun. Incidentally, I\u0026rsquo;m predict a cable phase soon.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/around-we-go-spinning-report/","summary":"I spent a lot of my recent Saturday spinning. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to finally have such a long period of time where I don\u0026rsquo;t have to do anything. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I did:\nI finished spinning the shetland roving that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a couple of months. This was the first big batch of wool that I bought after my return to spinning this spring. I got 2 pounds (which is my standard order size) of a lovely grey and I spun a DK-ish weight 3-ply yarn.\nSince I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back to spinning I\u0026rsquo;ve been spinning a lot of 3 ply. Since I intended to knit from my handspun stash in the coming months, and I like the way that 3-ply comes out, I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s worth the extra effort. I\u0026rsquo;m also trying to spin more of the kinds of yarn that I\u0026rsquo;m likely to knit with, that is yarn in the neighborhood of worsted-weight yarn.","title":"Around We Go (spinning report)"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t hate all writing advice but I am a bit choosy, and I tire often of too much navel gazing in this area. Also, a little bit of advice goes a long way.\nIn that vein there are a couple of ideas about writing for \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; writers that have been floating across my mind recently. And I\u0026rsquo;ve stolen this all from various podcasts and essays and books, so while I\u0026rsquo;ve curated this collection, I am not responsible for its production.\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t have to write. There are more effective ways to make a living, there are more social things you could be doing with your time, so if your writing is making you miserable, then don\u0026rsquo;t do it. It\u0026rsquo;s ok. We\u0026rsquo;re horrible judges of the comparative quality of our own work, particularly in the moment. What feels good and what feels bad when we\u0026rsquo;re writing something, isn\u0026rsquo;t always a very good indicator of quality. Crap gets published all the time. Not submitting things for publication because you think it\u0026rsquo;s crap is probably an elaborate self-deceiving procrastination ruse. Beginnings matter a lot, probably more than any other singular part. If nothing else, beginnings need to be punchy. You certainly don\u0026rsquo;t have more than a page in which to suck people in, in general, and beginnings which drag lead no where good. Cleverness and ingenuity are not substitutes for emotional content. Big projects are made manageable by subdividing them into smaller more manageable pieces. One need not formally outline, or systematically do some sort of pre-writing, but sitting down in front of your computer or notebook with a blank page/window open without the experience of working through what you plan to write--even if it\u0026rsquo;s only in your head--you\u0026rsquo;re probably going to frustrate yourself. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pithy-writing-advice/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t hate all writing advice but I am a bit choosy, and I tire often of too much navel gazing in this area. Also, a little bit of advice goes a long way.\nIn that vein there are a couple of ideas about writing for \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; writers that have been floating across my mind recently. And I\u0026rsquo;ve stolen this all from various podcasts and essays and books, so while I\u0026rsquo;ve curated this collection, I am not responsible for its production.\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t have to write. There are more effective ways to make a living, there are more social things you could be doing with your time, so if your writing is making you miserable, then don\u0026rsquo;t do it. It\u0026rsquo;s ok. We\u0026rsquo;re horrible judges of the comparative quality of our own work, particularly in the moment. What feels good and what feels bad when we\u0026rsquo;re writing something, isn\u0026rsquo;t always a very good indicator of quality.","title":"Pithy Writing Advice"},{"content":"I have never, really, taken a creative writing class.\nWhen I talk to people about writing, I think people always assume that I studied creative writing, or that the whole graduate school thing was about writing programs or some such.\nAnd while I respect and a number of people who are involved in the discipline of \u0026ldquo;creative writing,\u0026rdquo; I am not terribly enticed either by the possibilities of the field as a dialogue, or by the utility of the training for myself.\nThis might be a personal short coming, as I have always (since I was a teenager) been pretty resistant to \u0026ldquo;formal writing education,\u0026rdquo; and it might be a genre thing (science fiction doesn\u0026rsquo;t fare terribly well in CW programs on the whole, often relegated to \u0026ldquo;children\u0026rsquo;s and popular literature\u0026rdquo; tracks, if not totally spurned.) In any case this was highlighted by an article I read last week that suggested, what I thought was an utterly flawed writing methodology.\nThe basic idea was that as a general practice, you rewrite everything, on the theory that you basically can never get something right the first time, no matter how much time and effort you spend on it, and that the second time you sit down with a piece that you\u0026rsquo;ve written, only then can you really get it right.\nNow, the technicality is that she\u0026rsquo;s probably right on some level. Ground up rewrite\u0026rsquo;s shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be feared, and there are a lot of times when this can fix something that\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;stuck.\u0026rdquo; For example, I\u0026rsquo;m told that Tolkein sat down and wrote the Lord of the Rings, (the whole thing, not just specific books) until he got stuck. And then he started over from the beginning. The entire trilogy, every time he got stuck, until finally Frodo et al got to sail into the sunset. That might be extreme.\nThe problem is, I think, that we are incredibly inaccurate judges of our own work. This is why we have editors and readers, and that interaction is so valuable. So yeah, if someone says \u0026ldquo;this doesn\u0026rsquo;t work,\u0026rdquo; sure, rewrite rather than try and salvage, if that\u0026rsquo;s your speed. But as a rule? I\u0026rsquo;m suspicious of such unequivocal methodological imperatives.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve heard Cory Doctorow say something to the effect of, \u0026ldquo;some days you write and it feels divinely inspired and the words just flow out, and other days it\u0026rsquo;s like pulling elephant teeth, but two weeks later, when you\u0026rsquo;re reading over the back you can\u0026rsquo;t tell the difference.\u0026rdquo; This is, I think why editors of all sorts are so valuable. And, since on the day-to-day level it\u0026rsquo;s probably crap shoot anyway, the key is to try and try often. If you think that first drafts are always to be thrown out, even after editing them as the article suggests you may do, then--time being finite--you write less, but I doubt that you write twice as well. And I am unabashedly of the mind that practicing productivity and developing good habits and experiences is more important than developing perfectionism. Your milage might vary.\nAnd then it struck me--after the outrage passed--that this came from a writer. Someone who is professionally obligated to be invested more in the precession of words on the page than of the ideas that they represent.1 Which is, the core, I guess, of my personal unease with creative writing: I\u0026rsquo;m way more interested in studying the ideas, the people, the history of what I write about than the words on the page, again this arcs back to what ira said the way to get good at something is to do it, and do it often, and not always \u0026ldquo;getting it right.\u0026rdquo; And maybe if an academic program is the way to motivate you to write a lot, then that\u0026rsquo;s great2 but having a blog might achieve a similar goal.\nI\u0026rsquo;m exactly not making a case for sloppy prose--except maybe I am. My preference is strong characters, plot, and/or conceptual work over pretty, or even sharp language. Always. And I think people who are in the process of figuring out how they write and write best, are much more likely in need of figuring out how to do the conceptual work, not the mechanics, which comes with practice, and is, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced a numbers game, \u0026ldquo;the million words of crap,\u0026rdquo; and all that. If nothing else mandatory rewriting, confuses the conceptual development that I think grows from working with a lot of different ideas/stories; and the technical development that grows from attention, editing (rewriting), and time.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nit\u0026rsquo;s also a route to a job that you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily be able to get otherwise, but that\u0026rsquo;s another story that I\u0026rsquo;m not interested in telling.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/un-creative-writing/","summary":"I have never, really, taken a creative writing class.\nWhen I talk to people about writing, I think people always assume that I studied creative writing, or that the whole graduate school thing was about writing programs or some such.\nAnd while I respect and a number of people who are involved in the discipline of \u0026ldquo;creative writing,\u0026rdquo; I am not terribly enticed either by the possibilities of the field as a dialogue, or by the utility of the training for myself.\nThis might be a personal short coming, as I have always (since I was a teenager) been pretty resistant to \u0026ldquo;formal writing education,\u0026rdquo; and it might be a genre thing (science fiction doesn\u0026rsquo;t fare terribly well in CW programs on the whole, often relegated to \u0026ldquo;children\u0026rsquo;s and popular literature\u0026rdquo; tracks, if not totally spurned.) In any case this was highlighted by an article I read last week that suggested, what I thought was an utterly flawed writing methodology.","title":"un-creative writing"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m sorry for not posting when I got home or twittering from the road, but I seem to have survived the ordeal of the drive. I did the drive, which is about 520 miles, in almost exactly eight hours. Which means I averaged did the speed limit ;) In any case, I think that was pretty good. In any case, by the time I got home, I was in no shape to do anything except sleep and knit. So I didn\u0026rsquo;t get an entry posted yesterday.\nI seem to have gotten unstuck in my knitting by the weekend. Latvian Dreaming has progressed into the gussets, and I expect to start the armholes by this weekend. I hope to post instructions for starting the armholes next week, and the neck shaping options somewhat after that. Also, pictures?\nI bought some yarn at camp, mostly schoolhouse press\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Quebecois,\u0026rdquo; enough for two sweaters (in charcoal and navy), and most of the yarn needed for a handdyed and black pullover from Jocelyn\u0026rsquo;s Fiber Farm. Counting my handspun, I do believe that I have what might be known as a stash, at the moment.\nI also must confess to having three sweaters in progress/need of finishing. I have the fingering weight grey sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for years that needs a collar and sleeves (I knit the last saddle/strap at camp), I have the latvian sweater mentioned above, and I have this raglan yoke sweater that I started to knit at camp (but didn\u0026rsquo;t). And five sweaters worth of yarn stashed. I need to keep knitting.\nI also got a lot of (friendly) encouragement to work on knitting designing at camp. While I\u0026rsquo;m wary of this, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to start another project until I get (more) settled in the routine of daily blogging and regular fiction production for `Critical Futures \u0026lt;http://criticalfutures.com\u0026gt;`_. I sort of thought that the next thing would be a podcast, but maybe it\u0026rsquo;ll be working up and publishing a couple of knitting patterns instead. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to add any new commitments before, say Labor day.\nOther misc. thoughts:\nI recommended John Scalzi Old Man\u0026rsquo;s War to someone at camp. I like when geek threads cross. A friend from camp said that he (this narrows down the field of possibility a bit) enjoyed knitting the edging of shawls more than the shawl centers. Given that I feel exactly the opposite, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about coming up with some sort of barter agreement. Just the thought of this makes me want to get back into lace knitting, and I have two shawls in progress, and a plan for a third one. We shall see. I will be knitting more. This is a good thing. I have my mojo back. That\u0026rsquo;s all that\u0026rsquo;s on my mind right now. The rest of the week\u0026rsquo;s posts won\u0026rsquo;t be as consistent as you\u0026rsquo;ve grown accustomed to, but there\u0026rsquo;ll be posts, and when things get settled everything will return to normal.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/camp-report-4-final/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m sorry for not posting when I got home or twittering from the road, but I seem to have survived the ordeal of the drive. I did the drive, which is about 520 miles, in almost exactly eight hours. Which means I averaged did the speed limit ;) In any case, I think that was pretty good. In any case, by the time I got home, I was in no shape to do anything except sleep and knit. So I didn\u0026rsquo;t get an entry posted yesterday.\nI seem to have gotten unstuck in my knitting by the weekend. Latvian Dreaming has progressed into the gussets, and I expect to start the armholes by this weekend. I hope to post instructions for starting the armholes next week, and the neck shaping options somewhat after that. Also, pictures?\nI bought some yarn at camp, mostly schoolhouse press\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Quebecois,\u0026rdquo; enough for two sweaters (in charcoal and navy), and most of the yarn needed for a handdyed and black pullover from Jocelyn\u0026rsquo;s Fiber Farm.","title":"Camp Report #4 (final)"},{"content":"1. Franklin tried on my tychoish henry viii sweater.\nI need to take such better pictures of my knitting. 2. I did pretty well in the contest, I got some hemp/wool yarn. The shawl I raffled off to support camp scholarships, did pretty well, and it went to Carol Anderson of Cottage Creations who is a great deal of fun. 3. There were great dirty jokes at the end of class. I think someone needs to introduce a skit night. 4. I\u0026rsquo;ve actually gotten some knitting done, and no longer feel so hopeless about my project and my knitting. So I think, I\u0026rsquo;m back. 5. I should expound upon this further in the coming weeks, but I\u0026rsquo;m still thinking about the various merits of knitting work and not knitting work. 6. I bought long inox knitting needles. There will be gansey knitting.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all for now. I have a long drive tomorrow, so there might be something that jott will transcribe for me at the end of the day, but regular posting will resume after that.\nOh, and I have a lot of knitting to do between now and then.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/camp-report-3/","summary":"1. Franklin tried on my tychoish henry viii sweater.\nI need to take such better pictures of my knitting. 2. I did pretty well in the contest, I got some hemp/wool yarn. The shawl I raffled off to support camp scholarships, did pretty well, and it went to Carol Anderson of Cottage Creations who is a great deal of fun. 3. There were great dirty jokes at the end of class. I think someone needs to introduce a skit night. 4. I\u0026rsquo;ve actually gotten some knitting done, and no longer feel so hopeless about my project and my knitting. So I think, I\u0026rsquo;m back. 5. I should expound upon this further in the coming weeks, but I\u0026rsquo;m still thinking about the various merits of knitting work and not knitting work. 6. I bought long inox knitting needles. There will be gansey knitting.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all for now. I have a long drive tomorrow, so there might be something that jott will transcribe for me at the end of the day, but regular posting will resume after that.","title":"Camp Report 3"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot to report.\nI knit a lot, that was really good. The party promises to be great tonight.\nI got my 1000 Knitters Project portrait taken today. I\u0026rsquo;m somewhere in the 900s, and I\u0026rsquo;m within 20 of people like Meg (and Cully!) Swansen, Medrith Glover, and Emily-freaking-Ocker. How cool is that.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also going to be in the project as tycho garen, rather than my real name. That felt like a big decision, but meh.\nI got yarn, including an order that I put in more than a year ago. So much cool stuff to knit, I swear. I\u0026rsquo;m probably in stock with yarn for the rest of the year. And a fun year it will be indeed.\nI thought that I\u0026rsquo;d be more reflective, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get this out earlier. Anyway, back to the festivities.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/camp-report-two/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot to report.\nI knit a lot, that was really good. The party promises to be great tonight.\nI got my 1000 Knitters Project portrait taken today. I\u0026rsquo;m somewhere in the 900s, and I\u0026rsquo;m within 20 of people like Meg (and Cully!) Swansen, Medrith Glover, and Emily-freaking-Ocker. How cool is that.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also going to be in the project as tycho garen, rather than my real name. That felt like a big decision, but meh.\nI got yarn, including an order that I put in more than a year ago. So much cool stuff to knit, I swear. I\u0026rsquo;m probably in stock with yarn for the rest of the year. And a fun year it will be indeed.\nI thought that I\u0026rsquo;d be more reflective, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get this out earlier. Anyway, back to the festivities.","title":"Camp Report #2"},{"content":"Knitting camp. Where to start.\nThis is an analogy that will only make sense to the morris dancers in the audience, but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of like an ale, with more yarn and less dancing (of course) and much less singing. It\u0026rsquo;s the lack of singing that I find most disconcerting actually.\nThis is the session that has history, out of all the sessions of this camp. There are a few people who have been coming for 35 years, and many people who have been coming for way more than 20 years. And that history is something that\u0026rsquo;s really important to a lot of people, and it\u0026rsquo;s cool to see that and be a part of it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting on the latvian dreaming, mostly and I have two other projects lurking around that I will probably work on today. A lot of people come to camp and start new projects and I think that I\u0026rsquo;m unlikely to do that, because I need closure on my current projects and, I don\u0026rsquo;t have fully formed ideas of what I want to do next, anyway.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried four times to write a paragraph here and I have too much flying through my head to make sense of that so here goes a list:\nThere are so many famous and amazing knitters here. I\u0026rsquo;m a little star struck, actually. And a couple of times had lengthy discussions with them before I realized that I was talking to someone who\u0026rsquo;s name I had recognized in a book. And then, somewhat after the fact I learned that cookie a was \u0026ldquo;camp newbie sitting across the table from me.\u0026rdquo; Sigh. On top of all the other interesting discussions last night we had an interesting conversation about social dynamics on the internet and the knitternet. At 9pm last night, I got a pot of hot water and had a caffeine party. It was good stuff. Unlike a Morris Dance Ale, it\u0026rsquo;s all over by midnight, which means it\u0026rsquo;s possible to get an at least passable sleep in, but I needed the extra kick to stay up for that. Because: The drive was intense. Not bad, but long and I really pushed pretty hard. I\u0026rsquo;ll post about the podcasts and other listening materials I went through later\u0026hellip; Anyway I have so much to knit. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go take a shower and then go down and get started with the day.\nOnward and Upward!\n(ps. Just a program note/reminder: There\u0026rsquo;s a new critical futures story today. CF, is my daily (science fiction) story blog. I\u0026rsquo;ll blog over the weekend here, and cf will return, as usual on Monday.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/camp-report-1/","summary":"Knitting camp. Where to start.\nThis is an analogy that will only make sense to the morris dancers in the audience, but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of like an ale, with more yarn and less dancing (of course) and much less singing. It\u0026rsquo;s the lack of singing that I find most disconcerting actually.\nThis is the session that has history, out of all the sessions of this camp. There are a few people who have been coming for 35 years, and many people who have been coming for way more than 20 years. And that history is something that\u0026rsquo;s really important to a lot of people, and it\u0026rsquo;s cool to see that and be a part of it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting on the latvian dreaming, mostly and I have two other projects lurking around that I will probably work on today. A lot of people come to camp and start new projects and I think that I\u0026rsquo;m unlikely to do that, because I need closure on my current projects and, I don\u0026rsquo;t have fully formed ideas of what I want to do next, anyway.","title":"Camp Report #1"},{"content":"Email is a beast. While I would say that I don\u0026rsquo;t--at the moment--get a huge amount of email, I get enough that if I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a system in place for dealing with the email, it would be completely useless. I\u0026rsquo;ve not written about it here, but I have spent some time over the past few weeks working out how to replace a good but faltering system with a much more robust set up. Here\u0026rsquo;s the story:\n(Warning, this is really nerdy)\nFirst off this kind of really robust email solution isn\u0026rsquo;t for everyone, and there are a couple of unique factors in my setup that require the extra effort of this system. First of all, I need something that works because I hate the phone. If someone wants to get a hold of me, I\u0026rsquo;d much rather they write an email than call. If I don\u0026rsquo;t respond to email, people might call, or if I\u0026rsquo;m feeling overwhelmed by email, I might tell them to call. Both should be avoided. There are also a score of other reasons: I moderate a pretty high volume listserv, I need to send email from several different addresses and names/identities, and I have some pretty specific filtering needs, not to mention the fact that I have a number of pretty old email addresses that require a really powerful spam filter. I\u0026rsquo;m going to cover both what I used to do, and what I do now.\nI *used to*: Collect a number of different email addresses into one gmail account and then check that email with either POP3 or IMAP. Gmail with IMAP was and is a great thing. With it, I could do a lot of in gmail-filtering and then have all of that just show up in my mail program. The problem is that there aren\u0026rsquo;t really good offline imap clients. Things don\u0026rsquo;t sync right. Mail.app can\u0026rsquo;t efficiently cope with new mail that doesn\u0026rsquo;t arrive in the inbox. You have to screw around with mail.app to get the multiple email identities to work. Mail.app wasn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly stable (though it has, to be fair gotten more stable.) Also mail.app\u0026rsquo;s filtering doesn\u0026rsquo;t work splendidly with IMAP.\nHaving an email program that works consistently and effectively is the key to keeping it under control.\nA lot of my problems with this set up could surely be solved by using POP rather than IMAP, but after a year or so with IMAP (and gmail) I feel like the combination of the back up and having this account be useable and web-accessible is really ideal. I promised a post here on backup, and while I also can\u0026rsquo;t get into this here, I\u0026rsquo;m through with having my own machine be the only copy of important emails.\nSo what to do?\nFilter the hell out of my gmail account so that everything lands pretty much where it would need to so I can find it several months from now. Somewhere on this page is a list of all the funky boolean operators that gmail allows.\nForward email out in chunks (so the lists get forwarded to one place, all of my frequent blog-related correspondents to another, moderation) to different addresses on my web-server that include 15 character random strings).\nThis is actually a really sneaky way of passing gmail\u0026rsquo;s filtering downstream, and is otherwise a red hearing. I think however, that I could have probably eliminated the number of email addresses at play here by using \u0026ldquo;plus addresses\u0026rdquo; and eliminate the next, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a huge deal.\nFunnel all these things the forwarded email to a holding email address that automatically deletes everything after a week. This is a short term backup, if I accidentally delete something or whatever.\nRather than use gmail\u0026rsquo;s built in forwarding, I made a filter that searches for another, longer random string in all the email. If it doesn\u0026rsquo;t find this (which I suspect it never will,) it forwards to my \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo; email address. Again this isn\u0026rsquo;t a public email address.\nTime out, so what we have here. is gmail sorting forwarding two copies of each email to two different addresses, at once. All the email is sent to one address, and the second address depends on how gmail is filtering the email.\nSet up procmail locally to filter based on the random character string from the second step.\nDo some additional procmail filtering (which I think, as I figure it out, I\u0026rsquo;ll start to do more here, with and use geektool\nRead messages with mutt, because it sucks less than anything else\nWrite messages with textmate\nSend mail using msmtp\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s about it. The getting it setup was the really hard part now all I have to do is use it, and everything lands where it should. I think functionally this is pretty damn good. It might be preferable to get something that isn\u0026rsquo;t in situations when I don\u0026rsquo;t have my laptop with me oraccesable. I read something about using something like rsync to handle mail box delivery. Might git work as well? I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. But that\u0026rsquo;s another battle for another day.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-email-filtering/","summary":"Email is a beast. While I would say that I don\u0026rsquo;t--at the moment--get a huge amount of email, I get enough that if I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a system in place for dealing with the email, it would be completely useless. I\u0026rsquo;ve not written about it here, but I have spent some time over the past few weeks working out how to replace a good but faltering system with a much more robust set up. Here\u0026rsquo;s the story:\n(Warning, this is really nerdy)\nFirst off this kind of really robust email solution isn\u0026rsquo;t for everyone, and there are a couple of unique factors in my setup that require the extra effort of this system. First of all, I need something that works because I hate the phone. If someone wants to get a hold of me, I\u0026rsquo;d much rather they write an email than call. If I don\u0026rsquo;t respond to email, people might call, or if I\u0026rsquo;m feeling overwhelmed by email, I might tell them to call.","title":"Of Email Filtering"},{"content":"Hey friends!\nSo I might have mentioned that I\u0026rsquo;m going to knitting camp at the end of the week. A long drive on Thursday leaving far to early in the morning. Followed by four whole days of intensive knitting, and then a drive back. As a result the blog schedule will be a bit--disrupted. Last year when I was at camp I posted a fair piece, and I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll want to opportunity to recount camp stories a bit as they happen.\nAt the same time, I probably won\u0026rsquo;t have the time to do my usual writing cram over the weekend to make sure that there are fun and interesting posts for you during the week. So here\u0026rsquo;s the deal:\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be new stories posted every weekday for the next two weeks. This won\u0026rsquo;t change, fear not. - I\u0026rsquo;ll post new things here, through the weekend. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably take a brief tychoish vacation for a couple of days next week, I think there\u0026rsquo;ll be three posts, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure when they\u0026rsquo;ll hit yet. It\u0026rsquo;s a blog, after all. Don\u0026rsquo;t be worried. Because I doubt that administrivia is what you all came here to read, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll pass along some links and thoughts and questions that you might enjoy.\nThe cats are still nibbling toes. This remains not cute, though they haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten this memo yet. Though I\u0026rsquo;m only really interested in talking about electoral politics in the historical sense, or as a venue for placing friendly bets,1 but I\u0026rsquo;m not going to lie this is funny. \u0026ldquo;This is theinternet!\u0026rdquo; heh. Actually I\u0026rsquo;m more worried that someone has cracked Randall\u0026rsquo;s secret sauce A git-wiki that really rocks. It\u0026rsquo;s still early on development, and it\u0026rsquo;s lacking some features that would make it useable for me at the moment, but I can totally see a place for such a thing for some future projects. The ruby guys are totally awesome, and I like a lot of ruby projects, and I think that in some ways ruby is going to be the \u0026ldquo;next php,\u0026rdquo; even I have a soft spot in my heart2 for Python, but I said to chris the other day that \u0026ldquo;ruby is the visual basic of our generation.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of starting to hard wrap columns in my text files, because it would make running diffs and file histories easier, grepping is easier, it makes the text more spatially consistent, it would make using vim easier, and so forth but I seem to really enjoy changing the window size a lot, and he is probably right, there\u0026rsquo;s very little practical value, and hitting ^Q for a vestige seems ill advised. That doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean I won\u0026rsquo;t try it, you read my post about my email after all. I just finished reading \u0026ldquo;Star Surgeon podiobooks,\u0026rdquo; a delightfully quirky public domain science fiction novel by Alan E. Norse, and read by my friend Scott Farquhar of Promethesus Radio Theatre, which was delightful even if it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a fine example of tightly structured prose. Scott\u0026rsquo;s next book is \u0026ldquo;Black Star Passes\u0026rdquo; by John W. Campbell, which I intend to start while I\u0026rsquo;m driving to camp. I have, for months been trying to figure out what the bet is for the various party\u0026rsquo;s VP candidate. It\u0026rsquo;s a fun game, because its not an ideological discussion, but it\u0026rsquo;s almost always very historically grounded. It also calls attention to the deeply farcical nature of the entire performance.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nand brain, as well, actually, because damned if I can really make it do anything--that\u0026rsquo;s not true, but it feels like it sometimes--but I do love the concept of and rationale for python.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-plan/","summary":"Hey friends!\nSo I might have mentioned that I\u0026rsquo;m going to knitting camp at the end of the week. A long drive on Thursday leaving far to early in the morning. Followed by four whole days of intensive knitting, and then a drive back. As a result the blog schedule will be a bit--disrupted. Last year when I was at camp I posted a fair piece, and I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll want to opportunity to recount camp stories a bit as they happen.\nAt the same time, I probably won\u0026rsquo;t have the time to do my usual writing cram over the weekend to make sure that there are fun and interesting posts for you during the week. So here\u0026rsquo;s the deal:\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be new stories posted every weekday for the next two weeks. This won\u0026rsquo;t change, fear not. - I\u0026rsquo;ll post new things here, through the weekend. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably take a brief tychoish vacation for a couple of days next week, I think there\u0026rsquo;ll be three posts, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure when they\u0026rsquo;ll hit yet.","title":"The Plan"},{"content":"This post grows out of a sort of smoldering rant that I\u0026rsquo;ve been having for a while now. As I sit here at one of these synthetic moments when I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out how past interests and experiences build up to the future--how do the things that I loved so much in college affect life/me now?--the purpose of social/literary theory (\u0026ldquo;philosophy with a cause,\u0026rdquo;) is one of these things.\nThe internet loves polemics, and so \u0026rsquo;theory has a venue here, but I\u0026rsquo;ve read a lot of blog posts and emails from people who seem to yield theory and critique like a baseball bat, rather than a toothbrush,1 so it\u0026rsquo;s been even more on my mind.\nWhat is critique? What separates \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo; critique from \u0026ldquo;bad\u0026rdquo; critique, and what end does it serve?\nI think if any of you are presently reading Stephen Greenblat or Elaine Scary--for instance--you might have a pretty good answer for this. But what about the internet? There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of critical work that\u0026rsquo;s out there on the internet, a lot of people working outside of the academy who contribute to a discourse that attempts to analyze the world and our culture, often with various kinds of political goals. This is also critique.\nNow I don\u0026rsquo;t want to seem like (too much of) an ass, I read a lot of crap on the internet that, to my mind seems like either really bad critique or (more likely) critique that fails to really capture the spirit of what I think the critical mode is.\nFeel free (and encouraged) to disagree, but lets do a little bit of brainstorming on what makes good critique or bad critique:\nCritique is synthetic. Critique really needs to draw together multiple perspectives and sources. You can\u0026rsquo;t critique something without consulting previous critical literature (this is why theory is necessary, without it, we are contextually adrift), without consulting similar and dissimilar works. Critique is the mode through which all of these perspectives come together. Critique is often positive. It\u0026rsquo;s very easy to assume that the purpose of critique is to go through some abominable text2 and tear it to shreds, and often this is enjoyable, but it is not productive. \u0026ldquo;Bad\u0026rdquo; and otherwise objectionable content will either stand or fail on it\u0026rsquo;s own, and taking a positive approach to critique means, I think that critique can be more politically productive, because, critiques can say \u0026ldquo;this good thing is good,\u0026rdquo; which is more instructive to consumers and producers of content. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that critique has to be unequivocally positive--far from it--but if there isn\u0026rsquo;t a substantial positive outlook, the critique suffers. Critique doesn\u0026rsquo;t pass judgement; critique that passes judgment is called \u0026ldquo;review\u0026rdquo; and I think \u0026ldquo;review\u0026rdquo; has a different role and mold. It\u0026rsquo;s unfortunate that people who produce in both modes are called \u0026ldquo;critics.\u0026rdquo; Critique is contextual: This is sort of an adjunct statement to the first, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to realize that critique that doesn\u0026rsquo;t contextualize both the works in question, and the moment of critique is useless. This is also, potentially controversial, but I don\u0026rsquo;t suspect we have very many New Critics in the audience. Texts and critics don\u0026rsquo;t exist in a vacuum, and criticism can\u0026rsquo;t either. From this principal springs a couple of subsidiary values: Paradoxically, readers of criticism need not be familiar with the texts your addressing, though they are likely familiar with the larger body of work that the texts belong to. Critics can\u0026rsquo;t hold individual works accountable for \u0026ldquo;their times,\u0026rdquo; nor can critics rise above the constraints of their times in criticism. Attempts to violate these rules are almost always tragic. Critique has an agenda: People don\u0026rsquo;t create texts or critique those texts without an agenda. Period. Critique has data, that is to say \u0026ldquo;texts.\u0026rdquo; One cannot critique abstract objects, or at least I doubt that it could do that very well. Particularly when specific texts are at the heart the critics' work. For instance you can\u0026rsquo;t critique victorian gender norms, but you can critique the ways that legislation, and fashion standards vis a vis a sewing manual shaped gender norms during a period. You can\u0026rsquo;t critique a political campaign, but you can critique the marketing strategy vis a vis the advertising of various candidates. Often the more specific the data is the better. Often it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get all the data surrounding contemporary texts and phenomena. This requires special considerations. Critique is a pathway to understanding: Looking for and elucidating mechanisms behind particular literary/artistic/cultural phenomena is one of the most powerful and important goals of critique. That\u0026rsquo;s enough for now, but I\u0026rsquo;m interested in seeing what you all have to contribute\u0026hellip;\nThis is to say, that critique is a tool for getting the grit off of a surface of something that\u0026rsquo;s obscured, generally for the purpose of making it look bright and nice. It\u0026rsquo;s delicate, and precise, and has important effects, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t change things fast. Baseball bats hit and break things, they hurt people and evoke strong reaction when swung in public spaces.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI use text in the broadest sense possible.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-the-purpose-and-utility-of-critique-and-politics/","summary":"This post grows out of a sort of smoldering rant that I\u0026rsquo;ve been having for a while now. As I sit here at one of these synthetic moments when I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out how past interests and experiences build up to the future--how do the things that I loved so much in college affect life/me now?--the purpose of social/literary theory (\u0026ldquo;philosophy with a cause,\u0026rdquo;) is one of these things.\nThe internet loves polemics, and so \u0026rsquo;theory has a venue here, but I\u0026rsquo;ve read a lot of blog posts and emails from people who seem to yield theory and critique like a baseball bat, rather than a toothbrush,1 so it\u0026rsquo;s been even more on my mind.\nWhat is critique? What separates \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo; critique from \u0026ldquo;bad\u0026rdquo; critique, and what end does it serve?\nI think if any of you are presently reading Stephen Greenblat or Elaine Scary--for instance--you might have a pretty good answer for this.","title":"On the Purpose and Utility of Critique and Politics"},{"content":"So I have a confession to make. I\u0026rsquo;m not writing longhand very much at all. Actually its insignificant the amount that I\u0026rsquo;m writing things out longhand any more. I was struck by this fact the other day, when, after a day where I felt like I didn\u0026rsquo;t get anything done, I opened a notebook and did some project planning/review on a sheet of paper. And I realized that my fountain pen was empty.\nThe interesting thing, I think is that I\u0026rsquo;m sort of a pen nut, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always loved having cool pens that made the act of writing a pleasure. So much so that since high school I\u0026rsquo;ve always had a Namiki Vanishing Point Fountain Pen around. These are heaty, but very usable fountain pens, that use a retracting nib (awesome!) and the grind on Pilot/Namiki nibs is great1. I love writing by hand, and for a long time I\u0026rsquo;ve felt that I do my best planning and rough work long hand.\nThere two big reasons that I think this has worked so well for me. First of all, I have a great spatial memory, and having notes that are fixed on a page makes them easy to remember, particularly if they\u0026rsquo;re arranged sequentially, reading through the past archive can be a really power contextual memory aide. I haven\u0026rsquo;t tried it in a while, but I can take a notebook from the past, and flip through the pages and sometimes recall all sorts of stuff about the moment in my life that I was writing those notes2.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s a conflict here. I\u0026rsquo;m a geek so it makes sense to a digital system to keep track of these notes. After all, it\u0026rsquo;s just text. There are a score of reasons why this makes sense: digital text is searchable, it\u0026rsquo;s more enduring, its easier to read, there are search tools, and I type considerably faster than I can write long hand. But, there are of course downsides: digital text isn\u0026rsquo;t as portable for on the fly creation, the semantic/spacial \u0026ldquo;features\u0026rdquo; of notebooks are basically lost, and the truth is that search is only really useful if you\u0026rsquo;re looking \u0026ldquo;for\u0026rdquo; something, rather than browsing through3 taking system, because in order for search to be useable you need to be looking \u0026ldquo;for something\u0026rdquo; where as, if you\u0026rsquo;re looking at a notebook, it\u0026rsquo;s all browse and no search. Clearly there\u0026rsquo;s a place for search, but loosing \u0026ldquo;browsing cabibility,\u0026rdquo; is a huge downgrade.\nAt some point, about a year ago--as this was the inspiration for tychoish.com--I thought hey, \u0026ldquo;maybe a \u0026ldquo;blog\u0026rdquo; notebook could give linear context,\u0026rdquo; and still be digital. Well tychoish.com didn\u0026rsquo;t work out so well for this, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been using ikiwiki, which is mostly a wiki, but it has some useful blogging capabilities. Unfortunately, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a hard time getting it to work since I upgraded my computer, and switched to git.4\nAnd the end result is, that without really trying to, exactly, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to the point where I\u0026rsquo;m not writing anything out, really, and I have, sort of, all the bases covered. I have a computer that is more portable than the last one. I have a flash drive with a couple of good ssh clients on it, I have web access to my repositories. It\u0026rsquo;s all there, and it\u0026rsquo;s all accessible (to me), and that\u0026rsquo;s something that I can already tell has been a good thing for my workflow. At the same time, as my little project planning session a few days ago with the notebook illustrated, there are times when the change of venue/context is enough to get things rolling if they\u0026rsquo;re stalled.\nThe moral? Digital is good, particularly once you find the right solution, but maybe it isn\u0026rsquo;t quite time to throw away all the notebooks. Also I write this I realize that I should probably write a post about backup, but that\u0026rsquo;s for another day.\nOnward and Upward!\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s a bit of specialized knowledge that doesn\u0026rsquo;t get out very much: Apparently Pilot/Namiki (who also, incidentally make the nibs for Cross pens, or used to at any rate) run about a half size smaller than other makers. I think this is the difference between German/European and Japanese/Asian pen makers (which I think is true,) and might be related to the difference in absorbency of velum/high-rag content paper, versus rice paper, but that\u0026rsquo;s just me talking out of my ass.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nInterestingly, this has always been the most successful when I have used the least structured note taking methods, and don\u0026rsquo;t divide my notetaking into too many piles. Having one big box to put things in, means that the semantic connections between all the bits of information remain intact.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;m tycho of the footnotes today. Anyway, as an aside I\u0026rsquo;d wager that the \u0026ldquo;browsability\u0026rdquo; of wikis is perhaps the undervalued key to their success (and also a reason why many wiki\u0026rsquo;s fail). You can, as I often do, just bounce around a topic or category in wikipedia and learn a great deal, whereas with the rest of the internet, you\u0026rsquo;re less likely to get more than one or two degrees away from a google search.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really ironic, because new hardware/software, and a more capable database, should make the software work better not worse, but it\u0026rsquo;s clearly an install issue related to the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m in a pretty non standard environment. It\u0026rsquo;s a great program, and it\u0026rsquo;s even better if you\u0026rsquo;re using a debian-flavor and don\u0026rsquo;t have to fight it to install. Seriously this is another aside, but if I could get OS X apps and interfaces with a debian core/apt-get that really worked consistently, I would never look back.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/long-hands/","summary":"So I have a confession to make. I\u0026rsquo;m not writing longhand very much at all. Actually its insignificant the amount that I\u0026rsquo;m writing things out longhand any more. I was struck by this fact the other day, when, after a day where I felt like I didn\u0026rsquo;t get anything done, I opened a notebook and did some project planning/review on a sheet of paper. And I realized that my fountain pen was empty.\nThe interesting thing, I think is that I\u0026rsquo;m sort of a pen nut, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always loved having cool pens that made the act of writing a pleasure. So much so that since high school I\u0026rsquo;ve always had a Namiki Vanishing Point Fountain Pen around. These are heaty, but very usable fountain pens, that use a retracting nib (awesome!) and the grind on Pilot/Namiki nibs is great1. I love writing by hand, and for a long time I\u0026rsquo;ve felt that I do my best planning and rough work long hand.","title":"Long Hands"},{"content":"Backstory: For the past year I\u0026rsquo;ve been using source control management software to manage and version all of my text files (which is where I do all of my writing, and most of my \u0026ldquo;real work.\u0026rdquo;) I started out using subversion, which is a good piece of software under some circumstances. This post is about my transition to a different system, that system, and a look at how my production is impacted by this switch. Only more interesting. ;)\nBasically here\u0026rsquo;s how subversion works: it has a database, that collects file names and the content of the files, and then every time you tell it to, it takes a snapshot of your files, and stores in the database the difference between the current version and the previous version. Sounds great? It is, but here\u0026rsquo;s the problem: suppose you have two people working on the files at once, so the snapshots that both of them are sending back to the database become less and less alike as time goes on. Secondly, it relies on file names, rather than file content to distinguish between files.\nSo problems spring up when you have more than one copy in play, and when you have file names that can change, and while the program compensates for these problems, they are core problems which cannot be remedied. In truth, I think subversion is a great tool for people with one computer who are editing/refactoring code or text, but not particularly for people who are in the process of generating new code or text.\nEnter stage left, git. Which rather than revising subversion or another system despite it\u0026rsquo;s flaws, attempts to solve the problem of tracking the history/changes of a given project in a completely different way. The system, is built around the idea of combining divergent codes/texts into a single whole, so the whole system is built around easily merging different copies of a given project, rather than storing the one true canonical version of a text.\nThis means, that you can build experimental branches, tell the program that \u0026ldquo;now I\u0026rsquo;m going to see what happens to the novel if I turn this character\u0026rsquo;s face blue,\u0026rdquo; and edit/write with that idea for a while without affecting the \u0026ldquo;main strand\u0026rdquo; of your story. This means you can have working copies of your novel on 3 different machines, at the same time, and painlessly merge them together at whim, and it just works. Also as an added benefit git is faster by several orders of magnitude, which means it\u0026rsquo;s completely viable to regularly and automatically back up using git over a network. This alone is an amazing feature.\nThe down side is that, whereas subversion, uses a very centralized and linear model that is easily grokable by most people, git works in a very different way that\u0026rsquo;s hard to grasp at first. Thankfully, these days at least, the documentation is much better. I watched a talk by the creator of the software, who also wrote something called Linux, you might have heard about it, where he was introduced as having written a piece of software \u0026ldquo;so complex only he could understand it.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s not very hard from the truth. Its a wonderful tool, and I like that it pushes me to think about my progress and work in a different, and productive way. All this by way of saying, some software--subversion, the world wide web, and windows, and os x--works in very predictable ways that fit with the way you think about information and data and ultimately the world. And then there\u0026rsquo;s software that requires a different perspective, that isn\u0026rsquo;t intuitive, but works in the most effective way to accomplish a given kind of task (like collaboration, or backup, in the case of git), or like efficient reading of websites (like say, RSS). And these paradigm shifting programs, are I think, terribly fascinating, both as a computer user, and I think also as a science fiction writer\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ll gather some resources that I\u0026rsquo;ve found useful regarding git, and post them up here soon.\nIn the mean time, think well!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/getting-git/","summary":"Backstory: For the past year I\u0026rsquo;ve been using source control management software to manage and version all of my text files (which is where I do all of my writing, and most of my \u0026ldquo;real work.\u0026rdquo;) I started out using subversion, which is a good piece of software under some circumstances. This post is about my transition to a different system, that system, and a look at how my production is impacted by this switch. Only more interesting. ;)\nBasically here\u0026rsquo;s how subversion works: it has a database, that collects file names and the content of the files, and then every time you tell it to, it takes a snapshot of your files, and stores in the database the difference between the current version and the previous version. Sounds great? It is, but here\u0026rsquo;s the problem: suppose you have two people working on the files at once, so the snapshots that both of them are sending back to the database become less and less alike as time goes on.","title":"Getting git"},{"content":"A couple of weeks ago (wow, it\u0026rsquo;s been a couple of weeks!), a new twitter-like service called identi.ca started up. It\u0026rsquo;s open source, and incorporates a lot of \u0026ldquo;duh\u0026rdquo; features that twitter doesn\u0026rsquo;t yet have, so I\u0026rsquo;m a fan in general, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s doomed to fail ultimately because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have the community that twitter has--yet, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that it will, ever.\nWith another new 140-character micro blogging service I had a series of conversations with bear about these kids of sites, the social niche that they occupy and the technology that\u0026rsquo;s behind them.\nI should start by saying that I really like twitter, and I think that the ultra-short form totally has a niche. I think the problem with identica, which it inherited from twitter, is that their social plan is out of sync with their technological plan.1\nTwitter has, of course, been plagued by horrible scaling problems. I think initially twitter expected everyone to actually answer the framing question \u0026ldquo;What are you doing?\u0026rdquo; So that each individual\u0026rsquo;s stream would be like a more or less isolated \u0026ldquo;microblog.\u0026rdquo; And their software was developed in this direction.\nAnd then \u0026ldquo;the community,\u0026rdquo; happened, and it turns out that what people really want from their twitter-like services is not a place where they can record \u0026ldquo;what they\u0026rsquo;re doing,\u0026rdquo; but talk publicly with a group of friends.\nEnter the \u0026ldquo;fail whale:\u0026rdquo; the problem with this usage model is that people check it much more regularly, they update more regularly, and with the site not really built for this kind of usage, there are a lot of error messages, lost messages, and the like. While it\u0026rsquo;s taken twitter a while to sort this out--and they are getting better--the problem remains that twitters users and twitters initial designers have/had two very different sites in mind. And because of the problems that twitter\u0026rsquo;s had (and because of it\u0026rsquo;s great success) there have been a lot of sites that basically duplicates twitters functionality.\nThis is all fine and good except that the fact that twitter is the wrong thing to copy. My conclusion from the post-identi.ca-launch discussion was that, \u0026ldquo;the next twitter-like service to make it isn\u0026rsquo;t going to get twitter right, for once and for all; but rather, the next twitter \u0026lsquo;killer\u0026rsquo; will get IRC right, at last.\u0026rdquo;\nIRC is the original internet chat platform. It\u0026rsquo;s not without it\u0026rsquo;s problems, both social and technical. Basically you have to have a live connection to use IRC, there\u0026rsquo;s no \u0026ldquo;offline.\u0026rdquo; It also doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale much more effectively than twitter, and there\u0026rsquo;s no way to filter/organize the community on IRC except through really route tools[^socirc]. The really interesting thing is that people are more prone to using twitter like IRC, and less like blogger or live journal (which you have to imagine is what they thought that it would be like.) [^socirc]: The issue is that if a channel on IRC gets overridden with spam, or annoying people, or just volume, the only option is to start kicking people out, or to start a new channel, which can be sort of draconian.\nSo what would \u0026ldquo;a better IRC be?\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t know, I\u0026rsquo;m just a guy, right, but here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;d like to see:\n1. Integration with the web in a way that doesn\u0026rsquo;t suck. There have always been webapplets for IRC, but they have always sucked. This can\u0026rsquo;t continue. 2. You shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have to be online to record a conversation. 3. Unlike twitter, the offline apps need to be as good if not better than the web site. 4. Arbitrary rooms, \u0026ldquo;moments\u0026rdquo; and streams need to be constructed on the fly by users. The randomness of twitter is something new, that--now that we know it\u0026rsquo;s there--is something we want. 5. Everyone should be able to intuitively construct filtering mechanisms. 6. Chat \u0026ldquo;moments\u0026rdquo; and cork-board \u0026ldquo;moments\u0026rdquo; should both be possible to construct, but 7. No one should have to think about the infrastructure (this is a problem for both IRC and twitter.) 8. Identity needs to be managed coherently. Jabber/XMPP seems like an ideal tool for this project. 9. Also identitiy management and community organization seems like the \u0026ldquo;niche\u0026rdquo; for private enterprise to fill, rather than infrastructure, which I think can be decentralized. 10. Threaded conversations. It\u0026rsquo;s a must.\nAnyone have anything to add to this?\nOnward and Upward!\nIn a way, I suspect this qualifies as \u0026ldquo;writing a job for yourself,\u0026rdquo; in to your analysis. My secret superpower, it seems is to look at what people are doing, and then talk to the engineers about the social realities. Any web 2.x people who want this, be in touch ;)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/doing-irc-right/","summary":"A couple of weeks ago (wow, it\u0026rsquo;s been a couple of weeks!), a new twitter-like service called identi.ca started up. It\u0026rsquo;s open source, and incorporates a lot of \u0026ldquo;duh\u0026rdquo; features that twitter doesn\u0026rsquo;t yet have, so I\u0026rsquo;m a fan in general, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s doomed to fail ultimately because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have the community that twitter has--yet, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that it will, ever.\nWith another new 140-character micro blogging service I had a series of conversations with bear about these kids of sites, the social niche that they occupy and the technology that\u0026rsquo;s behind them.\nI should start by saying that I really like twitter, and I think that the ultra-short form totally has a niche. I think the problem with identica, which it inherited from twitter, is that their social plan is out of sync with their technological plan.1\nTwitter has, of course, been plagued by horrible scaling problems.","title":"Doing IRC right"},{"content":"Trailing Edge, the story that I\u0026rsquo;m writing (and that I posted the first part of on Monday to kick of Critical Futures) is at least nominally a space opera.1 It\u0026rsquo;s funny then, that after about a month of active writing on the project, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun writing the first part of the story that occurs in space. and I\u0026rsquo;ve written a respectable amount in this world so far.\nNow it\u0026rsquo;ll be a while before this gets to CF, as I have a lot of stuff that I want to get to first, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and post a number of different stories. So I\u0026rsquo;m not going to spoil anything, but in honor of this, I\u0026rsquo;m just going to talk about space opera, and why I like it, and why I write it.\nBasically, I like space opera because it takes an optimistic view of the future. Either we blow ourselves up on Earth, or we leave and see what\u0026rsquo;s out there. On a fundamental level those are the options. This is why, I think, science fiction writers and futurists (not necessarily overlapping categories) are so interested in maintaining and supporting an active space program, even when it seems to contradict their other political positions: the alternative is too frightening.\nGiven this, you can bicker about the details of what\u0026rsquo;s going to logically happen in the next 20 to 50 years, and you can write dystopias of various stripes. Everything else, is space opera of some flavor or another, and I guess that\u0026rsquo;s the core that I write too.\nNow Trailing Edge is sort of weird space opera, I will grant you that, but I always find myself entertained by stories that are \u0026ldquo;about/set in a particular place\u0026rdquo; that take way to long to get to that place. Like in the Knowing Mars Story it took a long time for the narrator to actually get to Mars, in the story. Sort of, it\u0026rsquo;s complicated, and you\u0026rsquo;ll see in time, but it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting problem.\nI guess the ultimate question that I\u0026rsquo;m asking is a follow up to this post, but does genre and sub-genre fiction need signposts early on to tell you that \u0026ldquo;this is going to be space opera,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;this is going to be cyberpunk,\u0026rdquo; or can you do genre more subtly? I guess this is in part a technical question and in part a taste one.\nSo, don\u0026rsquo;t delay. What do you think?\nIt\u0026rsquo;s set in a distant future, space travel is technologically commonplace, I\u0026rsquo;m not writing something that adheres to any of the hard-sf ides about \u0026ldquo;strict extrapolation,\u0026rdquo; though it is indeed I think it has a much more \u0026ldquo;realistic edge,\u0026rdquo; which I assure has literary rather than technological/polemical inspiration.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/look-up/","summary":"Trailing Edge, the story that I\u0026rsquo;m writing (and that I posted the first part of on Monday to kick of Critical Futures) is at least nominally a space opera.1 It\u0026rsquo;s funny then, that after about a month of active writing on the project, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun writing the first part of the story that occurs in space. and I\u0026rsquo;ve written a respectable amount in this world so far.\nNow it\u0026rsquo;ll be a while before this gets to CF, as I have a lot of stuff that I want to get to first, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and post a number of different stories. So I\u0026rsquo;m not going to spoil anything, but in honor of this, I\u0026rsquo;m just going to talk about space opera, and why I like it, and why I write it.\nBasically, I like space opera because it takes an optimistic view of the future. Either we blow ourselves up on Earth, or we leave and see what\u0026rsquo;s out there.","title":"Look Up"},{"content":"As I am, apparently, entering into a new blogging niche, I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to get the word out about Critical Futures and looking around at the field. Here\u0026rsquo;s a link dump with what I\u0026rsquo;ve found, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested.\nSpace Haggis - Great name and it has an interactive element which I think is really clever, though it\u0026rsquo;s not my piece of cake, I can totally see why this project is so popular. BlogFiction Blog - Good meta site/community. Good resource. Sound of the Void - Fairly straightforward \u0026ldquo;blog-novel,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s there. flogalicious given my readership, I think the term \u0026ldquo;flog\u0026rdquo; for fiction blog is likely to cause more confusion than it\u0026rsquo;s worth, but this is a great directory, though I\u0026rsquo;d love to be able to offer some advice for folks as they write their blurbs. fiction volante - Though it\u0026rsquo;s almost over, the concept is really cool, and my hat\u0026rsquo;s off to the author for a successful year. Horton\u0026rsquo;s Folly - This blog is more of a fictional blog, that is, not a blog of someone\u0026rsquo;s fiction project, but rather a blog by a fictional character. Interesting idea, and I do like the way that it toys with identity, and narration. I\u0026rsquo;m clearly pretty fond of this kind of play. A Change and Weather this is another single project blog, fantasy (there seems to be an abundance of fantasy in the blog fiction world,) and it looks pretty nifty. The Wikipedia article is also a great resource, though I think it\u0026rsquo;s not a particularly good exemplar of wikipedia. ETA: tor.com - I just got my beta invite from the new tor website. It\u0026rsquo;s very nice. I\u0026rsquo;m excited. In some respects this is just a traditional formed venue online, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it works out, but the truth is that there aren\u0026rsquo;t many of these types of publications either, so it\u0026rsquo;s welcome. There\u0026rsquo;s also a multitude of original (and otherwise) fiction on livejournal, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to pretend to catalogue that in anyway. Do people have other favorites?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/blog-fiction-resources/","summary":"As I am, apparently, entering into a new blogging niche, I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to get the word out about Critical Futures and looking around at the field. Here\u0026rsquo;s a link dump with what I\u0026rsquo;ve found, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested.\nSpace Haggis - Great name and it has an interactive element which I think is really clever, though it\u0026rsquo;s not my piece of cake, I can totally see why this project is so popular. BlogFiction Blog - Good meta site/community. Good resource. Sound of the Void - Fairly straightforward \u0026ldquo;blog-novel,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s there. flogalicious given my readership, I think the term \u0026ldquo;flog\u0026rdquo; for fiction blog is likely to cause more confusion than it\u0026rsquo;s worth, but this is a great directory, though I\u0026rsquo;d love to be able to offer some advice for folks as they write their blurbs. fiction volante - Though it\u0026rsquo;s almost over, the concept is really cool, and my hat\u0026rsquo;s off to the author for a successful year.","title":"Blog Fiction Resources"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s a Catholic church not very far from our house, that has a very good rummage sale every year. Actually there are, I think at least three Catholic churches that are closer, but thats a geographical quirk, and is neither here nor there.\nSo, of course, we went.\nWe have the theory, that for the best rummage sale experience, go to rummage sales in neighborhoods where the mean household income is greater than your household income. As crap is relative, this has proven to be a good rule of thumb.\nThe corollary to this rule is that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t go to sales in places that are too much better of than your neighborhood, as the likelihood of those people overpricing their crap relative to your means is too high.\nAnyway, in accordance with these rules, we have always been fond of this sale, and this year didn\u0026rsquo;t disapoint. Here are the highlights.\nWorsted Weight Wool in good shape from the 50s and 60s. I\u0026rsquo;m going to make socks and hats. About ten old science fiction magazines. I going to start with a F\u0026amp;SF from October 1978 that has a Thomas M. Disch story in it, though most of what I picked up are from the last 10-12 years. Including some older Cory Doctorow stuff that I think will be interesting to read. A basket for holding spinning stuff while I\u0026rsquo;m spinning. A couple books and maybe some other stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m forgetting, but odds and ends. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with this, on the whole. Reading the fiction will be a lot of fun. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better with the reading, but I think supporting the magazines more, and reading that material is something that I hope will be good for me as a writer. I\u0026rsquo;ll report on it here of course.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-find/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s a Catholic church not very far from our house, that has a very good rummage sale every year. Actually there are, I think at least three Catholic churches that are closer, but thats a geographical quirk, and is neither here nor there.\nSo, of course, we went.\nWe have the theory, that for the best rummage sale experience, go to rummage sales in neighborhoods where the mean household income is greater than your household income. As crap is relative, this has proven to be a good rule of thumb.\nThe corollary to this rule is that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t go to sales in places that are too much better of than your neighborhood, as the likelihood of those people overpricing their crap relative to your means is too high.\nAnyway, in accordance with these rules, we have always been fond of this sale, and this year didn\u0026rsquo;t disapoint. Here are the highlights.","title":"A Find"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to write a lot about the music that I listen to/participate in, I have sort of obscure tastes by contemporary standards, and have been known to go on somewhat eccentrically. In any case, I wanted to write briefly about two different kinds of \u0026ldquo;good music:\u0026rdquo; the great song, and the \u0026ldquo;desert island album.\u0026rdquo;\nGreat songs are songs that I love to listen to on endless repeat. I\u0026rsquo;ve spent, literally days listening to a single song, they\u0026rsquo;re songs that I know most of the lyrics to (though interestingly the songs I like to sing with other people aren\u0026rsquo;t always the same \u0026ldquo;great songs.\u0026rdquo;) Here\u0026rsquo;s a tentative list, in no particular order:\nLouis Killen\u0026rsquo;s singing of \u0026ldquo;The Leaving of Liverpool.\u0026rdquo; Finest Kind\u0026rsquo;s singing of \u0026ldquo;The Rose in June\u0026rdquo; (My dad, by contrast hates this song because it\u0026rsquo;s too religious and it \u0026ldquo;takes him too long to drown,\u0026rdquo; I think it\u0026rsquo;s a good song in any case.) Martin Simpson\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Love Never Dies,\u0026rdquo; from the Righteousness and Humidity Album. Joni Mitchell\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Case of You\u0026rdquo; (though \u0026ldquo;For Free\u0026rdquo; is a close second). Richard Thompson\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Andalus/Radio Marrakesh\u0026rdquo; (The first tune on this list, and though I like a lot of tunes, this one is amazing.) Rufus Wainwright\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Hallelujah\u0026rdquo; (with due respects to Jeff Buckely, actually it\u0026rsquo;s a tie, and Wainright, very rightly cribs from Bukley.) This song shares a brain cell with Josh Ritter\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Harrisburg,\u0026rdquo; thanks to an old roommate, and I think I might like this song more, but in any case. Michelle Shocked\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Come a Long Way,\u0026rdquo; The Kippling/Bellamy (by anyone) \u0026ldquo;A Pilgrim\u0026rsquo;s Way\u0026rdquo; Desert Island Albums are something completely different, Judy and some other people started playing around with the question \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s the album you\u0026rsquo;d take to a desert island, if you could only take 1?\u0026rdquo; I think we decided that it couldn\u0026rsquo;t be done in less than three, but never the less, there are some albums which are just divine as complete entities in themselves, and this doesn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily overlap with the great song category very much. Here\u0026rsquo;s a tentative list of my desert island albums (order not important):\nNic Jones\u0026rsquo; The Noah\u0026rsquo;s Arc Trap (this is Judy\u0026rsquo;s suggestion, and I agree completely.) Eliza Carthy\u0026rsquo;s Rough Music (It\u0026rsquo;s her latest) Jethro Tull\u0026rsquo;s Thick as A Brick Bruce Springsteen\u0026rsquo;s Born to Run Martin Simpson\u0026rsquo;s The Bramble Briar Brian McNeil\u0026rsquo;s Back of the North Wind Fairport Convention\u0026rsquo;s What we did on our Holidays I think the former category is more subjective than the later, albeit only slightly. Do you have any good suggestions that I might have left off.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/good-music/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to write a lot about the music that I listen to/participate in, I have sort of obscure tastes by contemporary standards, and have been known to go on somewhat eccentrically. In any case, I wanted to write briefly about two different kinds of \u0026ldquo;good music:\u0026rdquo; the great song, and the \u0026ldquo;desert island album.\u0026rdquo;\nGreat songs are songs that I love to listen to on endless repeat. I\u0026rsquo;ve spent, literally days listening to a single song, they\u0026rsquo;re songs that I know most of the lyrics to (though interestingly the songs I like to sing with other people aren\u0026rsquo;t always the same \u0026ldquo;great songs.\u0026rdquo;) Here\u0026rsquo;s a tentative list, in no particular order:\nLouis Killen\u0026rsquo;s singing of \u0026ldquo;The Leaving of Liverpool.\u0026rdquo; Finest Kind\u0026rsquo;s singing of \u0026ldquo;The Rose in June\u0026rdquo; (My dad, by contrast hates this song because it\u0026rsquo;s too religious and it \u0026ldquo;takes him too long to drown,\u0026rdquo; I think it\u0026rsquo;s a good song in any case.","title":"Good Music"},{"content":"My past several posts about knitting and fiber arts have all been along the lines of \u0026ldquo;I haven\u0026rsquo;t been knitting much and I\u0026rsquo;d like to more,\u0026rdquo; but this post reports some success.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on things. I don\u0026rsquo;t yet really have a niche in my life for knitting, still--before, there were things that I always knit during, and now I either don\u0026rsquo;t do those things, or have gotten out of the habit of knitting during them--but I spun and knit a lot this past weekend: and I got other things done as well. Successes all around!\nFor starters I spun an entire skein of yarn, and it came out pretty well, or at least better than my last skein came out. I think on the last one I had forgotten that I had been plying using the \u0026ldquo;scotch tension\u0026rdquo; of my wheel. While I absolutely adore the double drive for spinning singles, but I apparently like to ply at really high tension. Having remembered this fact, spinning is going well. I have about 250 more grams of this current project to spin, though I did give my mother 100 grams of the project because I think it unlikely that a sweater to fit me would weight all of 2 pounds.1\nAfter I get done with this project, my mother and I are going to try a tandem spinning project. I have 2 pounds of Corriedale-cross (the cheap but sturdy wool undyed from the Yarn Barn), and we\u0026rsquo;re going to set our wheels to the closest ratio we can, and we\u0026rsquo;re going to both go for a sort of semi-worsted sport/dk 3 ply. It\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting, and I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted as it develops. We won\u0026rsquo;t start until I get done with the current project (which I estimate will be in a couple of weeks.)\nIn terms of the knitting, I\u0026rsquo;ve made progress on the sweater. I finished the second skein\u0026rsquo;s worth of the body, and it\u0026rsquo;s about 8 inches long by now. And I started the first sleeve, which after a false start (too many stitches, I was just guessing,) it\u0026rsquo;s coming out fine.\nAs I had hoped, working on the plain sweater has revived my interest in two-color knitting. I knit a couple of rounds on it. The yarn is-- I think I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned, heh--very fine, and the kittens have on several occasions managed to attack the yarn between the ball and the sweater and sever one or both strands. Thankfully this yarn splices really well. so it\u0026rsquo;s not an issue, but it is sort of annoying. I also got full look at it laid out on my desk and I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I have more done than I thought. Still not \u0026ldquo;enough,\u0026rdquo; but a fair piece. It\u0026rsquo;s worth something.\nAnyway, it\u0026rsquo;s good to be knitting again. Really good. Knitting is something that I really do enjoy (obviously) even though I\u0026rsquo;ve been off of it lately, and it\u0026rsquo;s something that I think I do really well, or at least, I don\u0026rsquo;t ever find myself questioning my ability to knit, in the way that I find myself constantly questioning my ability to write, or tell stories, or do research, or write code/use technology. That\u0026rsquo;s a nice feeling. I\u0026rsquo;ll have to write about that as I ponder this more.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s good to be back, at any rate.\nI know, it\u0026rsquo;s odd that I seem to buy pounds in \u0026ldquo;old money\u0026rdquo; and think about skeins and progress in grams. I have no explanation.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/return-to-knitting/","summary":"My past several posts about knitting and fiber arts have all been along the lines of \u0026ldquo;I haven\u0026rsquo;t been knitting much and I\u0026rsquo;d like to more,\u0026rdquo; but this post reports some success.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on things. I don\u0026rsquo;t yet really have a niche in my life for knitting, still--before, there were things that I always knit during, and now I either don\u0026rsquo;t do those things, or have gotten out of the habit of knitting during them--but I spun and knit a lot this past weekend: and I got other things done as well. Successes all around!\nFor starters I spun an entire skein of yarn, and it came out pretty well, or at least better than my last skein came out. I think on the last one I had forgotten that I had been plying using the \u0026ldquo;scotch tension\u0026rdquo; of my wheel. While I absolutely adore the double drive for spinning singles, but I apparently like to ply at really high tension.","title":"Return to Knitting"},{"content":" Via: 43Folders and Mur\nSo this video popped up a couple of times in my news reader today, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good enough to repost with some additional comments. It\u0026rsquo;s a video with Ira Glass talking about how creative people who are getting started doing something now need to give themselves permission to make crap and that the most important thing is to keep doing it, because the only way to learn is to make a lot of crap.\nThis has become a virtual mantra for me, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good to have people remind us of this from time to time. This is why I\u0026rsquo;m starting a fiction blog. That\u0026rsquo;s why I write blog entries every day.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s true of knitting, as well. I have scores of horrible sweaters, and while most of my sweaters work now (and the ones that don\u0026rsquo;t are ill conceived from the beginning,) that\u0026rsquo;s a technical skill that I worked pretty hard for. So I\u0026rsquo;d say, not only does Ira Glass have it correct1 for things like writing and audio/video production, but I think that he succeeded in expressing it in a way that\u0026rsquo;s applicable to everyone that makes something.\nToday I edited the first sequence of the novella I wrote nearly a year ago. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been dreading this for a long time, I think it went off really well. I added a line that a test reader (whose unfamiliar with the work) really liked, I tweaked some things in a way that tie this scene (which I went back and added later) into the story more closely.\nI made this one sequence better in fairly concrete ways, and I think every previous time that I\u0026rsquo;d tried to do this before I hadn\u0026rsquo;t been good enough to make it better. But a year later, I am enough better than I was that I was able to do this one thing better. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve \u0026ldquo;made it\u0026rdquo; or anything, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have some sort of verification of improvement.\nThis scene that I talk about will be part of critical futures at some early point in that sites\u0026rsquo; development. Maybe a week from today?\nStay tuned.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve sort of been thinking about this as a maxim of \u0026ldquo;success on the internet,\u0026rdquo; because I think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly true from an online/independent business perspective, given that online ventures have trivial costs, aside from \u0026ldquo;time making crap.\u0026rdquo; But I think the video makes the point that this is true in all sorts of contexts where creative proficiency is the goal. So then, it\u0026rsquo;s more a maxim of \u0026ldquo;success in creativity.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ira-glass-on-creativity/","summary":"Via: 43Folders and Mur\nSo this video popped up a couple of times in my news reader today, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good enough to repost with some additional comments. It\u0026rsquo;s a video with Ira Glass talking about how creative people who are getting started doing something now need to give themselves permission to make crap and that the most important thing is to keep doing it, because the only way to learn is to make a lot of crap.\nThis has become a virtual mantra for me, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good to have people remind us of this from time to time. This is why I\u0026rsquo;m starting a fiction blog. That\u0026rsquo;s why I write blog entries every day.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s true of knitting, as well. I have scores of horrible sweaters, and while most of my sweaters work now (and the ones that don\u0026rsquo;t are ill conceived from the beginning,) that\u0026rsquo;s a technical skill that I worked pretty hard for.","title":"Ira Glass on Creativity"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m planning on writing (and revisiting to post) for the new site, Critical Futures which launches on Monday and that I wrote about here. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go from the stories that I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about least to the stories that you\u0026rsquo;re most familiar with, and I\u0026rsquo;ll include a little bit of background with each story/series.\nTrailing Edge, is just a working title for a nexus of stories in a future world that\u0026rsquo;s been left behind. Humans have been moving out, continuously for hundreds of years and this has had a huge effect on the people and worlds left in the wake of these great journeys. This is the anti-epic story of those people and worlds. So this is an interesting story, I tried writing a story (which I might post, and that I\u0026rsquo;ve blogged about extensively) that I was calling Breakout about what happens on the \u0026ldquo;Leading Edge\u0026rdquo; of this \u0026ldquo;progress,\u0026rdquo; and it was during a rough space inside my own head, and the story didn\u0026rsquo;t really want to be in novel form, so I tried writing it has a hypertext, and that didn\u0026rsquo;t work either, so I just let go. And then, I realized that maybe the more interesting part of this world would be the \u0026ldquo;other side.\u0026rdquo; And while the original story had merits, and I might return to it in some form, it\u0026rsquo;s not calling to me in the same way. So I started writing this story, and I was thinking about the new site at the same time, so as a result the story really fits this new structure. The stories have a loose versioning system (so far I have \u0026ldquo;Episodes\u0026rdquo; 1, 2, 2.1, and 2.2, and 3 in progress or completed), and I write a page in one part or a page in another part, pretty regularly, and it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. Like the Mars story, I particularly enjoy how the narrative is multi-modal, that there are different types of stories, different forms that I get to explore. And the concept is pretty fun. It\u0026rsquo;s a story written for the media: I talk about a handful of things on tychoish, productivity, technology, knitting/spinning, science fiction/writing, and in a way all of these are telling a reasonably consistent story of me and what I\u0026rsquo;m interested in. Critical Futures is sort of the same, except that rather than technology and knitting, there\u0026rsquo;ll be a couple of stories. And within those stories--as within my discussion of, say, technology--there\u0026rsquo;ll be a number of different threads to the story. And I\u0026rsquo;ll write it as I go, and the experience of writing fiction this way, is really appealing and compelling. Hopefully you\u0026rsquo;ll feel similarly. Knowing Mars, this is the novella I wrote last fall about a group of human telepaths who are forced to leave Earth in order to keep the secret of their ability safe\u0026hellip; for a while. Interestingly, since I\u0026rsquo;m getting in the habit of explaining the origins of the stories, this story descended from a novel that I wrote while I was in high school. This isn\u0026rsquo;t part of that story, but rather an elaboration of the first six pages of the prologue (which really didn\u0026rsquo;t work). It\u0026rsquo;s clearly a sort of quirky coming out tale, and it\u0026rsquo;s a fun story. It\u0026rsquo;s a universe that I\u0026rsquo;ve got worked out, and I expect that there\u0026rsquo;ll be more related stories. (I have one plotted out, mostly that I just have to write, and another that isn\u0026rsquo;t coherent in my mind, yet.) By the way there are about 30,000 words in this story, and one of the biggest goals of this new site is to provide inspiration to plow through and get the final edits done. Station Keeping, the story that I (and others) wrote last year, as a sort of precursor to the current project. It\u0026rsquo;s a far future space opera, where \u0026ldquo;progress\u0026rdquo; has slowed to a crawl because of the relativistic effects of travel, and the eons old social and political institutions that hold humans together are beginning to crumble. These stories explore the lives of the crew and residents of a space station above a critical world in the budding new order. I think of it sort of told in the style of a TV show. Indeed I intended to post a series of episodes as a teleplay, because you know, I can. 12 episodes and about 10,000 words of this are old material, and then I\u0026rsquo;ve written 4 more that haven\u0026rsquo;t been posted anywhere and I have plans at the moment for 36-40 episodes (of uncertain total length). This is the remaining of a novel that I started writing but that sort of fell apart on me when I was a teenager. The characters and the setting were great, but the story is really a loose serial and not novel-like so it\u0026rsquo;s understandable that it didn\u0026rsquo;t work out. Its much more fun in this form. And you know, odds and ends. I haven\u0026rsquo;t given a lot of to the pacing. I know I have enough content, and I do think that with a little inspiration I can write enough, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it goes. I also have an inkling of some other folks that might contribute some stuff from time to time, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see. Stay tuned.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/critical-stories/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m planning on writing (and revisiting to post) for the new site, Critical Futures which launches on Monday and that I wrote about here. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go from the stories that I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about least to the stories that you\u0026rsquo;re most familiar with, and I\u0026rsquo;ll include a little bit of background with each story/series.\nTrailing Edge, is just a working title for a nexus of stories in a future world that\u0026rsquo;s been left behind. Humans have been moving out, continuously for hundreds of years and this has had a huge effect on the people and worlds left in the wake of these great journeys. This is the anti-epic story of those people and worlds. So this is an interesting story, I tried writing a story (which I might post, and that I\u0026rsquo;ve blogged about extensively) that I was calling Breakout about what happens on the \u0026ldquo;Leading Edge\u0026rdquo; of this \u0026ldquo;progress,\u0026rdquo; and it was during a rough space inside my own head, and the story didn\u0026rsquo;t really want to be in novel form, so I tried writing it has a hypertext, and that didn\u0026rsquo;t work either, so I just let go.","title":"Critical Stories"},{"content":"I only learned early this morning that Tom Disch had killed himself July 4 in his New York City apartment\u0026hellip;.\nSuicide is always, I think, something of a mystery. Even when someone is in poor health, in bereavement, feeling isolated, we still say Why? How could he end his life, be so sure that nothing would improve? Things always change over time. Tom was only 68.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know the answers to those questions for Tom Disch. I only know that the SF field has lost a major talent, one of our own.\nFrom: Nancy Kress\u0026rsquo; Blog\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t really know his work, but he\u0026rsquo;s been on my list of things to read for some time. My internal database on him pegs him as the sort of \u0026ldquo;less pornographic Delany, with a greater tendency toward \u0026lsquo;dark material.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; That\u0026rsquo;s woefully insufficient. I\u0026rsquo;ll get on remedying this file.\nI do remember that I\u0026rsquo;ve been nagging H. to read his stuff because I think she\u0026rsquo;d like it. I\u0026rsquo;m oddly struck by this, because although I didn\u0026rsquo;t know him, and haven\u0026rsquo;t been as familiar with his work as I\u0026rsquo;d like to be, I completely concur with Nancy Kress\u0026rsquo; final sentiment.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/thomas-disch/","summary":"I only learned early this morning that Tom Disch had killed himself July 4 in his New York City apartment\u0026hellip;.\nSuicide is always, I think, something of a mystery. Even when someone is in poor health, in bereavement, feeling isolated, we still say Why? How could he end his life, be so sure that nothing would improve? Things always change over time. Tom was only 68.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know the answers to those questions for Tom Disch. I only know that the SF field has lost a major talent, one of our own.\nFrom: Nancy Kress\u0026rsquo; Blog\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t really know his work, but he\u0026rsquo;s been on my list of things to read for some time. My internal database on him pegs him as the sort of \u0026ldquo;less pornographic Delany, with a greater tendency toward \u0026lsquo;dark material.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; That\u0026rsquo;s woefully insufficient. I\u0026rsquo;ll get on remedying this file.\nI do remember that I\u0026rsquo;ve been nagging H.","title":"Thomas Disch"},{"content":"On Monday, that is next Monday (there! a firm week from now--if slightly relative--commitment) I\u0026rsquo;m going to start a posting to a new blog. This isn\u0026rsquo;t breaking news to readers of this site as I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about this with some of you for weeks, and mentioning it sporadically on the blog. Let me tell you about the site, and what I intend for it.\nThe site will be called Critical Futures, and it will be a fiction blog where I (and possibly others) will post a new piece of science fiction every day. Not necessarily, as 365 Tomorrows posts an new independent story every day, but rather a new section or part of an ongoing story. I mean sometimes I might fit a whole story into a single post, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a goal that I\u0026rsquo;m aiming for as a writer.\nETA: The site isn\u0026rsquo;t, of course, up yet, but you can read the about page if you want a sneak preview. Remember next Monday.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve really grown to be fond of the regular blogging rhythm, and I think it would be nice to expand that habit into fiction writing. So the prospect of having a regular commitment to write and polish fiction for publication, will be a good thing. Kind of like the 365 projects, only different.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking for a long time about a few things for a while: how blogging as a medium has potential for story telling, about how I want to write a story intended for online distribution. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to do it. Now. Because there\u0026rsquo;s no time like the present, and because I think that the most important thing for me to do right now is to just get content out there, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m at a point where I\u0026rsquo;d rather write toward a digital rather than a print audience. All the stars seemed to align, and in these cases I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to seize the moment and get stuff out there. So that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m doing.\nSo stay tuned. I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting little mini-entries here to announce the stories when they start to go up, and I have an entry for tomorrow that will cover/overview the story projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the site. I\u0026rsquo;m really excited about this.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/critical-futures/","summary":"On Monday, that is next Monday (there! a firm week from now--if slightly relative--commitment) I\u0026rsquo;m going to start a posting to a new blog. This isn\u0026rsquo;t breaking news to readers of this site as I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about this with some of you for weeks, and mentioning it sporadically on the blog. Let me tell you about the site, and what I intend for it.\nThe site will be called Critical Futures, and it will be a fiction blog where I (and possibly others) will post a new piece of science fiction every day. Not necessarily, as 365 Tomorrows posts an new independent story every day, but rather a new section or part of an ongoing story. I mean sometimes I might fit a whole story into a single post, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a goal that I\u0026rsquo;m aiming for as a writer.\nETA: The site isn\u0026rsquo;t, of course, up yet, but you can read the about page if you want a sneak preview.","title":"Critical Futures"},{"content":"I penned, recently the following (compound?) clause in one of my projects: \u0026ldquo;my research program for the last 30 or more years.\u0026rdquo;\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll see what that\u0026rsquo;s in reference to in a while, ultimately it\u0026rsquo;s minor and my aim with this passage is to cement the \u0026ldquo;book within a book\u0026rdquo; feeling that I\u0026rsquo;m so fond of. But it also indicates that this character, who is older, but still very able bodied (the narration is the result of him taking a rather lengthy intra-solar system journey alone) I has had an active academic/intellectual career focused on one subject for at least 30 years. In point of fact, he\u0026rsquo;s probably even a bit older than that. Having characters that are older than they appear or would be in our contemporary world is something that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty fond of. And it\u0026rsquo;s science fiction, so having a character that\u0026rsquo;s pushing 200 is something that isn\u0026rsquo;t patently absurd.\nThis got me thinking to other things, namely, about the genre tropes that I am fond of using in my stories. So here\u0026rsquo;s a partial list:\nSpace Opera. I like space opera because it\u0026rsquo;s fun and enjoyable, because I know that readers \u0026ldquo;get it,\u0026rdquo; but probably most importantly because it makes it possible to talk about political ideas and have interesting plots that aren\u0026rsquo;t over complicated or grafted onto popular/contemporary notions of politics and history. Within space opera it\u0026rsquo;s also possible to complicate plots in productive ways using various technological phenomena which might make stories difficult to tell in contemporary worlds? You need characters to be out of touch for a chapter? Relativity or a solar flare clears that up, sending your main character to the woods without a cellphone for the weekend, is kind of hackneyed. Globalization is changing the way that just about every group people on the planet interact with each other, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s very true that this process is only going to continue, and there are situations common to space opera where it becomes possible to talk about cultural difference and divergence rather than convergence. I like to use telepathy and telepaths as a way of talking about privacy, and subjugated classes of people (on the assumption that if there are human telepaths, there are probably also humon-non telepaths.) I think relativistic time-travel effects are incredibly fascinating, and the Station Keeping stories are--at least in part--an exploration of what happens when these sorts of effects are normalized in a society. I totally have a soft spot for cyberpunk style virtual reality interfaces and direct neural interfaces, even though I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that either of these are technologies that are likely to come to pass. VR makes it possible to toy with the mechanics of reality, and it makes it possible to have awesome battles/confrontations without needing to be contrived about it. Now I think I should probably make a list of tropes that I don\u0026rsquo;t really get. Like super heros. Hmmm\u0026hellip;.\nWhat are your favorite tropes? Have I forgotten a big one that you really like? Are the tropes that you just don\u0026rsquo;t get?\nI look forward to hearing your responses.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/my-favorite-genre-tropes/","summary":"I penned, recently the following (compound?) clause in one of my projects: \u0026ldquo;my research program for the last 30 or more years.\u0026rdquo;\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll see what that\u0026rsquo;s in reference to in a while, ultimately it\u0026rsquo;s minor and my aim with this passage is to cement the \u0026ldquo;book within a book\u0026rdquo; feeling that I\u0026rsquo;m so fond of. But it also indicates that this character, who is older, but still very able bodied (the narration is the result of him taking a rather lengthy intra-solar system journey alone) I has had an active academic/intellectual career focused on one subject for at least 30 years. In point of fact, he\u0026rsquo;s probably even a bit older than that. Having characters that are older than they appear or would be in our contemporary world is something that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty fond of. And it\u0026rsquo;s science fiction, so having a character that\u0026rsquo;s pushing 200 is something that isn\u0026rsquo;t patently absurd.","title":"My Favorite Genre Tropes"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;d like to talk a bit about what I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with in terms of data management/research organizational tools. So in my last post on this subject I mentioned that I had hacked together a shell script that did a lot of what I needed. Rather than look for the \u0026ldquo;one right\u0026rdquo; OS X tool (which I don\u0026rsquo;t think really exists at this point,) I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on collecting extant tools and programs and figuring some way of making something that would really continue to work into the future and that would be more tailored to my particular workflow.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to outline and present what I\u0026rsquo;m doing for the public betterment anyone else looking for something like this. Also I hope that people with a similar sort of need/workflow might be able to contribute tools or offer enhancements.\nLet me outline the pieces of the puzzle, first:\nOS X/UNIX shell.1 Having access to all of these great unix tools makes it reasonably easy to write scripts to automate the key parts of this workflow. Also, as most of my system reilies on Apache (which comes installed on OS X) and web servers, having this kind of low level access to the system is great. ikiwiki. So this is a great little program that takes a directory of text files, and turns them into a wiki/website via a markdown interpreter. It also connects and automates through subversion, an open source version management tool (it can also use git and others if that\u0026rsquo;s more your speed.) This part of the project is probably the geekiest and most difficult part to get working, particularly if you don\u0026rsquo;t have access a good package installer. But it\u0026rsquo;s possible and totally worth it. Several bash/shell scripts that I have written to insert data and clips into the wiki. One script that, with a command in the form of, clip [FileName] [Space delinated tags] will create a page in a research clipping section of the wiki with the contents of the clipboard, and the proper notation for tag organization and the date of collection. The script then opens the file in the text editor. I wish it could capture, more automatically the citation information (author/url) but I think this would require the browser to expose more information than it currently does. But it\u0026rsquo;s pretty good. One script that create new \u0026ldquo;tag indexes,\u0026rdquo; which makes it easier to see all the pages tagged with specific labels. If I were more clever I could probably tie the scripts together so that whenever I added a new tag that didn\u0026rsquo;t already exist that it would generate the new tag page. Except that this wouldn\u0026rsquo;t cover all instances of new tag pages, so it\u0026rsquo;s ok to have separate tag pages. This also helps control \u0026ldquo;tag sprawl,\u0026rdquo; and prevent metadata from getting out of control. A set very quick functions that let me append text any text file, as well as a quick command to append lines to the end of a general \u0026ldquo;inbox\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;codex.txt\u0026rdquo; file for quick thoughts, notes, todos, and tasks. This is outside of the wiki and not a new tool, but it works. Fluid - This is a really nifty program that uses OS X tools to build \u0026ldquo;programs\u0026rdquo; built around single, site specific websites. Basically this is the ideal bridge between \u0026ldquo;web apps\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;desktop apps,\u0026rdquo; particularly once Google Gears begins to work with this kind of app2 amazing things are going to happen. Since I\u0026rsquo;m running the wiki locally, this is moot. There are other non-mac options like Mozilla Prisim, though I don\u0026rsquo;t have experience with it. This makes the wiki more useable and open I think. Here\u0026rsquo;s a file with the relevant scripts and ikiwiki templates that I\u0026rsquo;m using. It\u0026rsquo;s rough and kludgy, but if people are interested or willing to contribute (feedback, knowhow, etc.), I\u0026rsquo;d certainly be willing to work on making this more polished and accessible.\nETA: I just discovered bsag\u0026rsquo;s textmate plugin, which might be a little more prime-time ready than my script, but I think with ikiwiki\u0026rsquo;s tagging function and potentially a recourse to spotlight/etc indexing, my solution works better for me. But, bsag is awesome and the text mate bundle is totally way more hard core than my kludge.\nIf you use a windows machine, or don\u0026rsquo;t have easy access to a shell, my recommendation is that rather than fight windows to try and get all these things installed and working, I would see about getting server space somewhere where you\u0026rsquo;d get hosting that would include shell/ssh access in a UNIX environment. Probably the cost is pretty low, and you could use an account like this to back up data, host your email, and so forth.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written here before a couple of times about how much I really dislike the experience of using online/web applications. Programs like this really solve this complaint. My major complaint is still the fact that there aren\u0026rsquo;t good offline options for web apps, which is why I mention Gears. This is mooted by the fact that in this instance we\u0026rsquo;re/I\u0026rsquo;m running the server locally, so even without a connection the wiki is accessible.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pieces-of-the-data-puzzle/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;d like to talk a bit about what I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with in terms of data management/research organizational tools. So in my last post on this subject I mentioned that I had hacked together a shell script that did a lot of what I needed. Rather than look for the \u0026ldquo;one right\u0026rdquo; OS X tool (which I don\u0026rsquo;t think really exists at this point,) I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on collecting extant tools and programs and figuring some way of making something that would really continue to work into the future and that would be more tailored to my particular workflow.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to outline and present what I\u0026rsquo;m doing for the public betterment anyone else looking for something like this. Also I hope that people with a similar sort of need/workflow might be able to contribute tools or offer enhancements.\nLet me outline the pieces of the puzzle, first:\nOS X/UNIX shell.1 Having access to all of these great unix tools makes it reasonably easy to write scripts to automate the key parts of this workflow.","title":"Pieces of the Data Puzzle"},{"content":"So this is supposed to be, at least in part, a knitting blog. My apologies for not writing about my knitting much of late. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about knitting a bit and finally starting to do some knitting again. But I have a confession to make: I\u0026rsquo;ve started on a new project.\nI\u0026rsquo;m knitting a new sweater out of some stash yarn. It\u0026rsquo;s just going to be a teal (big surprise) pullover with plain knitting. I want to do an EPS-style raglan pullover when I\u0026rsquo;m at knitting camp this year, and I thought it would be good to get started on that. I have about 5 inches done, and it\u0026rsquo;s my intention to get the body and the sleeves to the underarm, and maybe do a little bit of the yoke before my camp at the end of July. I\u0026rsquo;m going slowly, but I seem to be able to make time to regularly work on this project. That\u0026rsquo;s a good thing.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s not much more to talk about there. I think, at least in part, my issue was that the knitting I was trying to concentrate on was the kind of knitting that needed a lot of sustained attention, in a global sense. I could pick it up for a few moments here and there, but if I wasn\u0026rsquo;t picking it up pretty regularly, the rhythm and energy behind the project faded away. And since I was trying to not divide my knitting energy between multiple projects, I pretty much stopped knitting. While the more complicated project, the Latvian Dreaming project is something that I want to continue to do in the future, it\u0026rsquo;s not working for me at this instant.\nSpeaking of getting back into the swing of things, I also did some spinning. Egad, I\u0026rsquo;m out of practice. I enjoyed it, but wow, I totally over-plyed the skein of yarn in question. It\u0026rsquo;s been long enough that I can\u0026rsquo;t quite remember how it was that I was plying the yarn. I might have done it with scotch tension (the plying not the spinning) rather than double drive, or it might have been a lazy-kate issue. Though I\u0026rsquo;m not discouraged enough to stop spinning, because I think I can find my mojo again, it did give me a little pause.\nI think I need to do something to get a little more control over spinning and knitting time, which probably means figuring out some way to balance other projects more effectively. How do you all--who aren\u0026rsquo;t students--manage to get knitting time, particularly if you work a lot, and/or have a number of freelance-ish projects, that can suck time in a major way?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-again/","summary":"So this is supposed to be, at least in part, a knitting blog. My apologies for not writing about my knitting much of late. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about knitting a bit and finally starting to do some knitting again. But I have a confession to make: I\u0026rsquo;ve started on a new project.\nI\u0026rsquo;m knitting a new sweater out of some stash yarn. It\u0026rsquo;s just going to be a teal (big surprise) pullover with plain knitting. I want to do an EPS-style raglan pullover when I\u0026rsquo;m at knitting camp this year, and I thought it would be good to get started on that. I have about 5 inches done, and it\u0026rsquo;s my intention to get the body and the sleeves to the underarm, and maybe do a little bit of the yoke before my camp at the end of July. I\u0026rsquo;m going slowly, but I seem to be able to make time to regularly work on this project.","title":"Knitting Again"},{"content":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted very much about the kittens of late. I\u0026rsquo;d like to report that they\u0026rsquo;re doing well. A friend (incidentally, the person who taught me how to knit, lo those many years ago) visited the kittens a couple of weeks ago, and upon the conclusion of her visit she said \u0026ldquo;I look forward to hearing about their\u0026hellip; career\u0026rsquo;s.\u0026rdquo; Frankly the thought of them having careers--particularly when I don\u0026rsquo;t really seem to--was a bit frightening.\nNevertheless the concept has stuck. So here is a report on the careers of Kip and Merlin:\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a picture:\nThis is from a period when they were lying together on my desk. Very cute. Note the ball winder in the background. Kip is in the foreground. They\u0026rsquo;ve taken to having rolling night time battles which occasionally interrupt my sleep as I become a substrate for these battles. Though they didn\u0026rsquo;t purr very much when they first came to us, now they\u0026rsquo;ll both purr pretty much any time you pick them up. I\u0026rsquo;m in favor of cats that purr. I\u0026rsquo;m starting to realize that my cat allergies are something that I need to pay a little more attention to managing, particularly given the long hard quality that these cats have. I think this will likely just turn into a more regular face and hand washing behavior. Kip and Merlin have longer hair than other cats we\u0026rsquo;ve had in recent years, though, when I was a small child we had a Mainecoon-type cat who had longer hair than these boys. And lets be fair, one of our big cats has medium-length fur which is particularly silky and not staticy (which means that its airborne more than it should be.) Kip has developed a fondness for a ball which he caries around and growls adorably over. Merlin has discovered two things. One, he can pull the mag cord out of my computer with ease when I\u0026rsquo;m sitting at my desk with my computer on my lap. This is ok, because I have one of the mag cord on my new computer, but it\u0026rsquo;s annoying. The second thing that he\u0026rsquo;s discovered is that he shouldn\u0026rsquo;t unplug the computer. So he grabs and runs. The grown up cats are starting to come around to the new cats. Their initial response was fright (Nash) and Curiosity-Followed by viciousness (Montana). Nash is still afraid but less so, and has engaged aged in some parallel play, while Montana has had some more positive interactions. I think if we didn\u0026rsquo;t have concerns about keeping food separate for a while I think they\u0026rsquo;d be ok to be fully integrated at this point. I should underscore that Nash is a huge 16 pound cat, and Montana is 10ish pounds. I think that element makes their reactions even more funny. Kip and Merlin both have very faint taby stripes in their gray sections. This is incredibly cute, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it comes across in any of the pictures. Kip has taken to waking me up in the night by running on me (less bothersome than you\u0026rsquo;d think) and chewing on my ears (more bothersome than you\u0026rsquo;d think). The first night, it was my toes--not ears--at 4:30, and he has moved on to ears at like 2:30. Though he can usually be chided successfully, it\u0026rsquo;s more disruptive of my sleep schedule and overall functioning than I might like. In summation: kittens are good. I approve. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted as their careers progress.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/still-kittens/","summary":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted very much about the kittens of late. I\u0026rsquo;d like to report that they\u0026rsquo;re doing well. A friend (incidentally, the person who taught me how to knit, lo those many years ago) visited the kittens a couple of weeks ago, and upon the conclusion of her visit she said \u0026ldquo;I look forward to hearing about their\u0026hellip; career\u0026rsquo;s.\u0026rdquo; Frankly the thought of them having careers--particularly when I don\u0026rsquo;t really seem to--was a bit frightening.\nNevertheless the concept has stuck. So here is a report on the careers of Kip and Merlin:\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a picture:\nThis is from a period when they were lying together on my desk. Very cute. Note the ball winder in the background. Kip is in the foreground. They\u0026rsquo;ve taken to having rolling night time battles which occasionally interrupt my sleep as I become a substrate for these battles. Though they didn\u0026rsquo;t purr very much when they first came to us, now they\u0026rsquo;ll both purr pretty much any time you pick them up.","title":"Still Kittens"},{"content":"This is a post that\u0026rsquo;s just meant to keep you all updated of projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about recently, but haven\u0026rsquo;t had time to write or talk about extensively about recently.\nI\u0026rsquo;m writing. Not as much as I\u0026rsquo;d like, but pretty regularly. I expect that come hell or high water I\u0026rsquo;m going to start the new fiction site the week of July 14th.\nI suspect in my next post to tychoish I will cross the 400,000 word mark for posts on this website (and tealart which proceeded it). Thats crazy, though my verbosity should come as a surprise to no one. Also, I think that July 1 is probably as good a marker as any for my first anniversary of blogging at tychoish.com. It\u0026rsquo;s been awesome, and I\u0026rsquo;m not stopping anytime soon.\nI\u0026rsquo;m making a formal effort to learn how to program in Python. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten the O\u0026rsquo;Reilly \u0026ldquo;Learning Python\u0026rdquo; book, and I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m at a point where I might actually be able to make a go of this.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve done a little programing in the past, mostly a little PHP (for the website) and some shell scripting for day to day stuff that I do around here. But I\u0026rsquo;ve never actually tried to learn something, opting to just tinker around instead. But I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get to a point where there are things that I need or want to learn how to program, and I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that python is probably the best/only language that I need to learn. It seems to combine both straightforwardness with flexibility, and does away with the aspects that I find most annoying about other languages (Perl, not straightforward, lots of modules; PHP, not incredibly useful outside of website programing; ruby, oy; C/C++/Objective-C too much overhead; anything else, too marginal). So I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to it and enjoying it mightily.\nHaving some moderate level of proficiency in a real programing language will--with luck--be helpful in the job search.\nAnother high level project for me at the present is my job search for the intermediate term. I think I want to go to graduate school at some point, but I\u0026rsquo;m more interested in doing something in the interim that might flow into graduate school eventually, and something that isn\u0026rsquo;t just marking time. More than anything it\u0026rsquo;s weird to go from having things so thought out and certain-seeming, to not throughout at all. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is a bad thing, it\u0026rsquo;s just wierd\nNow for a couple points of geekery:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve changed the color scheme for my terminal window, and as a result have found myself using vim more often. It\u0026rsquo;s teal, which is better than the navy that it was before. Easier to read, and it\u0026rsquo;s sort of fresh and inspiring. Oddly. I like vim a lot, though I must say that I need to spend some time learning emacs key bindings, because I don\u0026rsquo;t know them and Cocoa on the mac uses them, so not knowing them is a hinderance. All the cool kids are doing it, and I\u0026rsquo;m nothing if not a joiner. (Ha!) A few weeks ago I completely hosed the installation of ruby on my computer. Lets not talk about it. I have something marginal working but I should probably do a reinstall of the operating system, but I\u0026rsquo;m resistant.\nI think on the whole I\u0026rsquo;m doing pretty good, I\u0026rsquo;ll (of course) be in touch.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/news-of-the-tycho/","summary":"This is a post that\u0026rsquo;s just meant to keep you all updated of projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about recently, but haven\u0026rsquo;t had time to write or talk about extensively about recently.\nI\u0026rsquo;m writing. Not as much as I\u0026rsquo;d like, but pretty regularly. I expect that come hell or high water I\u0026rsquo;m going to start the new fiction site the week of July 14th.\nI suspect in my next post to tychoish I will cross the 400,000 word mark for posts on this website (and tealart which proceeded it). Thats crazy, though my verbosity should come as a surprise to no one. Also, I think that July 1 is probably as good a marker as any for my first anniversary of blogging at tychoish.com. It\u0026rsquo;s been awesome, and I\u0026rsquo;m not stopping anytime soon.\nI\u0026rsquo;m making a formal effort to learn how to program in Python. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten the O\u0026rsquo;Reilly \u0026ldquo;Learning Python\u0026rdquo; book, and I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m at a point where I might actually be able to make a go of this.","title":"news of the tycho"},{"content":"So part of my job deals with listening to interviews conducted as part of a documentary about the civil rights movement. So as a result I get to hear all sorts of people talk about the civil rights movement, with a bunch of different perspectives. From people who knew and worked with Martin Luther King personally, to liberal (and radical) white activists, to community leaders and so forth.\nI also apologize for the political digression, I usually try to avoid discussions of current politics, because they are difficult, and so often fail to address the important issues that are at play in our world. As an aside, thats why I write fiction. But with this as a backdrop, I was posed with a question that I think bears a little bit of collective pondering.\nI was listening to an interview with a former member of Lyndon Johnson\u0026rsquo;s administration, who was largely saying, \u0026ldquo;look at all the wonderful things we did,\u0026rdquo; and I have little tolerance for this, because it\u0026rsquo;s clear that this is really just posturing. I mentioned this to someone I work with and they said, (as many liberals these days say,) \u0026ldquo;yeah, and he was probably better than what we have now.\u0026rdquo;\nOf course, being the ornery sort that I am, I\u0026rsquo;m wondering if this is really the case.\nJohnson started (or escalated) a war that was a farce, and lost control of the political situation to such an extent that he deployed federal troops to put down riots in \u0026lsquo;66 and \u0026lsquo;67. Let Johnson also not avoid responsibility for J. Edgar Hoover\u0026rsquo;s behavior in the 60s. There are also plenty of reports that Johnson, was as a person, something of a creep (though we don\u0026rsquo;t have a good comparison on this point) I think it\u0026rsquo;s not worth ignoring.\nAnd while Johnson is credited with passing the civil rights act and the voting rights act (and what has Bush done that\u0026rsquo;s that good?), I\u0026rsquo;d argue that the civil rights acts are hardly an example of timely and forward thinking/progressive government. Not that I think they\u0026rsquo;re bad, just that they were \u0026ldquo;as little and as late as possible.\u0026rdquo;\nSo what do you think?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/johnson-or-bush/","summary":"So part of my job deals with listening to interviews conducted as part of a documentary about the civil rights movement. So as a result I get to hear all sorts of people talk about the civil rights movement, with a bunch of different perspectives. From people who knew and worked with Martin Luther King personally, to liberal (and radical) white activists, to community leaders and so forth.\nI also apologize for the political digression, I usually try to avoid discussions of current politics, because they are difficult, and so often fail to address the important issues that are at play in our world. As an aside, thats why I write fiction. But with this as a backdrop, I was posed with a question that I think bears a little bit of collective pondering.\nI was listening to an interview with a former member of Lyndon Johnson\u0026rsquo;s administration, who was largely saying, \u0026ldquo;look at all the wonderful things we did,\u0026rdquo; and I have little tolerance for this, because it\u0026rsquo;s clear that this is really just posturing.","title":"Johnson or Bush?"},{"content":"So these Creative Commons Licenses are pretty popular with the kids today. And they are. Creative commons is a great way to compensate for some of the short fallings of the contemporary copyright system that tends to privilege corporations rather than individual content creators. I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan, and I often find myself talking about the goodness that is CC in the world, so this is not a critique of the copyleft movement or anything, but rather a critique of the mood that a specific kind of Creative Commons license.\nLets back up. The basic idea of a creative commons license is to grant permissions to do things like distribute/share or create derivative works (e.g., video adaptations, audio books, fan fiction, and so forth.) which under a standard copyright would be infringing behavior and technically illegal. In some situations this seems perfectly absurd, after all if someone likes your work enough to put creative energy into a related project, they\u0026rsquo;re probably not the kind of people you want to sue. Creative Commons licenses amend this situation by explicitly allowing behavior that doesn\u0026rsquo;t harm the creators business model.1 The hope is that by explicitly allowing certain kinds of usage, \u0026ldquo;the commons\u0026rdquo; benefits, and possibly as a secondary effect the original creator benefits even more (by gaining greater attention and then selling more of whatever it is that they sell.)\nCreative Commons gives you lots of options in terms of licensing, so that you can customize whatever you want. You can allow commercial usage (like the GNU-GPL and the GFDL which wikipedia uses)2, you can choose to allow derivative works (or not) or as long as the derivatives are distributed under a compatible licensee (\u0026ldquo;Share Alike;\u0026rdquo; this is akin to the \u0026ldquo;viral\u0026rdquo; aspect of the GPL), and you can choose to require attribution with all future distributions or allow people to distribute without attribution. Or any combination of the above.\nOne combination that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a lot of recently forbids commercial use, forbids derivative works, and allows redistribution with attribution. This is probably the most restrictive CC option around, and it seems to be the default. This isn\u0026rsquo;t in and of itself a bad thing, this is a great license for anthologies where the producer of the specific work might not have total control over all the works--for instance--or other works where it\u0026rsquo;s really crucial for the body of work remain together as a unit. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it makes a particularly good general purpose license. In effect what it says is \u0026ldquo;I own it, and if you want to do my marketing work for me, thanks--not that you would have asked anyway, and not that I would have complained elswise--sorry if you want to do anything more\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; While it\u0026rsquo;s a step in the right direction, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the gift to the commons is very great.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;d be more comfortable if the derivative-attribution were more default for more people, with or without the share-alike. It just strikes me that the really exciting thing about CC is the clauses allowing derivative works. Particularly with attribution and no-commercial clauses, the derivative works do nothing to hurt the original creator that I can possibly fathom, and are often a boon to the original creators. Most importantly, it seems that the opportunity to inspire new work and/or act as a substrate for new work is a huge gift to the commons.\nSo I guess what I\u0026rsquo;m objecting to is the sort of feeling of being put-upon as the the only benefit of the license is doing a favor for the creator. Which hardly seems fair, particularly if the creator is also selling the content in some capacity. Creative Commons, at the core--at least for me--is about creating a more cooperative/collaborative relationship between creators and consumers, and the no-derivatives license seems to run counter to that.\nJust my gut feeling, I apologize if it\u0026rsquo;s a little raw. I think in fairness I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely sure that the ramifications of this work are always very thought out, that people assume a connection between commercial use and derivatives, or something, so I don\u0026rsquo;t think a lot of creators are always making this decision based on all the facts, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s paramount that when people use Creative Commons and other free licences that they think about all of the ramifications.\nSo lets take television shows. The business model for TV is get revenue from advertisements during original airing, to sell DVDs, and to sell syndication rights eventually. Though technically illegal fan fiction, as a derivative work, people writing fic doesn\u0026rsquo;t really intersect with the TV business. This is the kind of situation that begs for some sort of CC-like licensing scheme. Same thing goes for people who design knitting stitch patterns. They make their money selling swatches to design houses, and compendiums of stitches. Allowing individuals to design sweaters using their stitches wouldn\u0026rsquo;t hurt their business at all. This is a situation that begs for something less restrictive. I\u0026rsquo;m sure we can imagine many more such examples if we put our heads together.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nSo I think people who don\u0026rsquo;t write software--not that I do, but I can see the argument so bear with me--often scowl at the notion of allowing commercial use. After all, the instinct to say \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t want other people to make money off of my hard work [particularly if I\u0026rsquo;m not because I\u0026rsquo;m giving it away for free],\u0026rdquo; is really strong. To this I would answer: if you\u0026rsquo;re working on something where the copyright is held by a group, or shared by a number of different people, in situations where a sole creator could license the work commercially, a fragmented collective creator can\u0026rsquo;t change liscenced with any ease (if at all.) So in these group situations if you don\u0026rsquo;t allow commercial use, you\u0026rsquo;re stuck with a work that cannot ever generate income.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/against-the-no-derivatives-license/","summary":"So these Creative Commons Licenses are pretty popular with the kids today. And they are. Creative commons is a great way to compensate for some of the short fallings of the contemporary copyright system that tends to privilege corporations rather than individual content creators. I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan, and I often find myself talking about the goodness that is CC in the world, so this is not a critique of the copyleft movement or anything, but rather a critique of the mood that a specific kind of Creative Commons license.\nLets back up. The basic idea of a creative commons license is to grant permissions to do things like distribute/share or create derivative works (e.g., video adaptations, audio books, fan fiction, and so forth.) which under a standard copyright would be infringing behavior and technically illegal. In some situations this seems perfectly absurd, after all if someone likes your work enough to put creative energy into a related project, they\u0026rsquo;re probably not the kind of people you want to sue.","title":"Against the No-Derivatives License"},{"content":"I was reading this article in review of the kindle and I had a couple of thoughts about digital distribution and media.1 Now of course, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that the Kindle is not the end all device for digital text, but I think it gets a lot of things right, and is a good development for technology. Some thoughts:\nReasons the Kindle is a Failure DRM. If you\u0026rsquo;re not allowing people full access to their files in open formats your not really selling the books. Period. This is a hugely ideological complaint, but here the impact: the prices are too high given that they\u0026rsquo;re not really selling you the book. Given the above, I think 5 dollars (half of what they charge you now) is probably the most they could reasonably charge for a book and likely something within a dollar of $2 USD is probably ideal. Mass Market paperbacks are 7 bucks, which is lower than the ten that an ebook. More on pricing. The device is overpriced and they nickel and dime you to death for service. Getting books/texts converted cost 10 cents. Certain RSS feeds cost recurring fees. I think either they have to subsidize the price of the device and then have a service contract (that includes credits for a given number of books, possibly tied to amazon prime?) or keep the price of the device high and really give the service away for free. The obligatory complaints about the objects design and interface. Reasons the (right) next \u0026ldquo;Kindle\u0026rdquo; could be amazing. If they fix the price/DRM/etc. problem, sales go up, total revenue goes up, it\u0026rsquo;s more successful. Given the always on internet, people buy a kindle book for different reasons then they buy a regular book: You buy a kindle book because you have time, you\u0026rsquo;ve read the first couple of sample chapters and you want to read more. You buy a dead tree book because you see it on the shelf and you think you might enjoy reading it later on. I have lots of print books in my collection that I\u0026rsquo;ve not read. I think you\u0026rsquo;re probably less likely to collect digital books in the same way. Digital distribution does away with overstock, and most distribution costs, which means the reasonable limitations on publication becomes editorial/production staff time, and available good manuscripts.2. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that there won\u0026rsquo;t be codices anymore, they just won\u0026rsquo;t be produced in the same way, and they won\u0026rsquo;t be bought and sold in the same way. If this or some sort of digital reading device becomes more ubiquitous (and cheaper and therefore more accessible to a greater segment of the population,) such a device could be the main way that we we do a lot of our reading of text, and I think it isn\u0026rsquo;t hard to imagine a revival of greater interest in book length forms as result of the proliferation of such a device. Just a few thoughts at any rate.\nAs an aside I think it\u0026rsquo;s fascinating the way that the author of that post connects (rightly I suspect) the marketing of Kindle to women (though the links are loose, I think chicklit/\u0026ldquo;pop fiction\u0026rdquo; is sort of the ideal material for this sort of device) rather than to the typical (male) geeky early adopter types. I think this is fascinating, but it\u0026rsquo;s not\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nA digression on the costs of traditional publishing: It probably costs 15 bucks to make a high quality hardcover that sells for 25 dollars; so that leaves 10 dollars between the seller (I think markup for books is 35% of the cover price) and the author/publisher so were talking about a few bucks at best. Mass market and trade paperbacks have even lower margins.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/digital-distrobution/","summary":"I was reading this article in review of the kindle and I had a couple of thoughts about digital distribution and media.1 Now of course, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that the Kindle is not the end all device for digital text, but I think it gets a lot of things right, and is a good development for technology. Some thoughts:\nReasons the Kindle is a Failure DRM. If you\u0026rsquo;re not allowing people full access to their files in open formats your not really selling the books. Period. This is a hugely ideological complaint, but here the impact: the prices are too high given that they\u0026rsquo;re not really selling you the book. Given the above, I think 5 dollars (half of what they charge you now) is probably the most they could reasonably charge for a book and likely something within a dollar of $2 USD is probably ideal. Mass Market paperbacks are 7 bucks, which is lower than the ten that an ebook.","title":"The Kindle and Digital Distribution"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another post in my general theme of \u0026ldquo;using a technology/comp-sci metaphor for creativity, new media and productivity\u0026rdquo; \u0026hellip; In the generous sense.\nFor the non technical: compilers are computer programs that take raw computer code and turn it into something binary that a computer can run. This makes it much easier to write programs, because compilers let programers abstract certain functionality1, and because compilers can do some consolidation and tuning as they run.\nWhile traditional compilers are used for the heavy duty code situations and applications written in C (and C++ and Objective-C, and so forth), when you think about it there are lots of situations where creators, in the digital world, are making something that is then processed by a computer script. In a way, web pages are like that, (though that happens every time their accessed rather than once.)\nThe wiki program that I use, ikiwiki, works in this way by taking a directory of files and turning into web pages that I can read in the browser. This is basically how the wonderful LaTeX typesetting engine works. Also, interestingly, I suspect this is how most pro-level video/audio editing apps like FinalCut work (make a lot of edits and then render something out. Edits are made as a series of instructions to XML file, which the program then renders or compiles.)\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s the benefit to this? Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with:\nIt makes it easier to write software that works with your data. Editing text is easy, particularly when that text is created either by you or by a program in a regular and expected way. Compiler modeled systems are less taxing generally on the system. Most of the time, what you\u0026rsquo;re doing with the computer is just editing a text file. That\u0026rsquo;s low power. Then when it comes time to compile it just has to crunch through some data. And then it\u0026rsquo;s done. In WYSIWYG and live editing, the computer has to be working constantly to get from you to what you see. Any repetitive task can be automated or template, and the chances are that there are a very limited repertoire of kinds of documents that you\u0026rsquo;re making. I write academic papers in APA format, (or did), formal letters, and full page knitting patterns. That\u0026rsquo;s about it. I have templates on hand that mean that I can push the same block of text into a template and get a perfectly formated document. I can push the same block of text between the wiki and the blog and it\u0026rsquo;ll compile (basically) the same way. It makes it more feasible to work in smaller files. I wrote a book in Word, and while I started writing the chapters in separate files, it quickly became apparent (and I think this holds true). If you\u0026rsquo;re using a program like Word, the best bet is to make really long files, and keep projects together in one file. On the other hand, if you\u0026rsquo;re working in plain text2 it\u0026rsquo;s trivial to mash-up a bunch of text files, and this makes it easier to edit and organize a project. So more than anything working in this way makes a lot of sense. Though I think to be fair there is a learning curve (but isn\u0026rsquo;t there always?). The question I\u0026rsquo;m asking myself (and you, dear reader) is other than the general improved efficiency and cleaner workflow, is there a bigger extrapolation or application of this that we (or I) could apply to another phase of the creative/productive process? Rather than just automating the presentation, is could someone take the model where some sort of raw file is \u0026ldquo;put together\u0026rdquo; later and have that assumption shape the way that they create content?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what that would look like, or even if it\u0026rsquo;s a good idea, but its something to think about.\nSo most computer programs don\u0026rsquo;t tell the hardware of a computer what to do, that takes a lot of time, forces programers to reinvent the wheel constantly, and is difficult to transport from one type of machine to another. So most programs really just tell other programs (like operating systems, databases, web-servers, and so forth) to do things. The further you get from the actual hardware (\u0026ldquo;the metal\u0026rdquo;) the more abstracted the program is. Right? This concludes your ill-informed computer science lesson of the day.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI suppose in a certain sense, I\u0026rsquo;m making an argument for using markup languages and text rather than more complex solutions, or compilers specifically, but I said that this was an \u0026ldquo;inspiration by technology\u0026rdquo; piece rather than something more specifically.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/compiler/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another post in my general theme of \u0026ldquo;using a technology/comp-sci metaphor for creativity, new media and productivity\u0026rdquo; \u0026hellip; In the generous sense.\nFor the non technical: compilers are computer programs that take raw computer code and turn it into something binary that a computer can run. This makes it much easier to write programs, because compilers let programers abstract certain functionality1, and because compilers can do some consolidation and tuning as they run.\nWhile traditional compilers are used for the heavy duty code situations and applications written in C (and C++ and Objective-C, and so forth), when you think about it there are lots of situations where creators, in the digital world, are making something that is then processed by a computer script. In a way, web pages are like that, (though that happens every time their accessed rather than once.)\nThe wiki program that I use, ikiwiki, works in this way by taking a directory of files and turning into web pages that I can read in the browser.","title":"Compiler Model"},{"content":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t written very much recently about my writing, and I like using this blog as an outlet to talk about this aspect of my life. I\u0026rsquo;ve been introspecting a lot (not on the blog, thank god) about the future, about what things are important to me at the moment, and I realized how ironic and strange it is that I consider writing to be so important, and am willing to dedicate so much effort, and mindspace to it.\nMore than anything, this post is an exploration of my goals and progress rather than a discussion of the issues that I\u0026rsquo;m dealing with.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot recently, of course. I\u0026rsquo;m working on getting content ready for the new site. My interest is more in getting a ritual/habit established rather than developing a backlog of content that can serve as a cushion when I begin to post content. At the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m writing this new series of vignettes (I have a dozen or so of them, by now, probably), I\u0026rsquo;m working on station keeping episodes (including the old ones, I have 16 written), and I have thirty-thousand words of the Mars novella written that just needs tweaking before it gets posted.\n(Just for context, I expect to be posting about 2000-3000 words of fiction a week on this site.)\nI think, particularly in the beginning I\u0026rsquo;m going to be posting every week day, though I think I might eventually move to Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting down the road if that seems to make more sense, particularly if I have ongoing serials because I think I\u0026rsquo;d rather have a new installment of each story every week, rather than a new week of each story every month. If that makes sense. I suppose it needn\u0026rsquo;t yet.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to lie, that I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to have some doubt in my world about my writing. I went to a concert the other day--traditional irish music--and the performers (who are quite well known) invited their children on stage for a few tunes, and it was adorable and kind of amazing to see these kids who clearly got music in a really important way and as I was watching (and enjoying the tunes) I couldn\u0026rsquo;t help but draw a connection between what these folks were doing and the kinds of thing I do. There were resonances between what I saw and what I felt I was doing, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m mostly responding to two factors: writings, as an endeavor is incredibly ephemeral, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;m not a complete neophyte, I still have a rather lengthy period of floundering about that I have to go through. Most \u0026ldquo;new/young writers\u0026rdquo; in science fiction have almost ten years on me. While neither of these factors are seriously (or acutely) discouraging, they do lurk and give pause from time to time.\nGiven that writing is slow and hard, and what\u0026rsquo;s more there are few markers by which to judge success. So is it still worth it? I\u0026rsquo;ve heard the following writer\u0026rsquo;s advice a bunch the past couple of weeks: \u0026ldquo;you don\u0026rsquo;t have to write.\u0026rdquo; And it makes a lot of sense, there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to suffer through writing unless you\u0026rsquo;re getting something out of it. You have to enjoy it, you have to get some pleasure out of some phase of the project. Something, anything. Because, after all there\u0026rsquo;s nothing in Maslow\u0026rsquo;s hierarchy that talks about writing.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m still here, and I\u0026rsquo;m still writing. I don\u0026rsquo;t have to, but by g-d I want to. So I am.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-progress/","summary":"I haven\u0026rsquo;t written very much recently about my writing, and I like using this blog as an outlet to talk about this aspect of my life. I\u0026rsquo;ve been introspecting a lot (not on the blog, thank god) about the future, about what things are important to me at the moment, and I realized how ironic and strange it is that I consider writing to be so important, and am willing to dedicate so much effort, and mindspace to it.\nMore than anything, this post is an exploration of my goals and progress rather than a discussion of the issues that I\u0026rsquo;m dealing with.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot recently, of course. I\u0026rsquo;m working on getting content ready for the new site. My interest is more in getting a ritual/habit established rather than developing a backlog of content that can serve as a cushion when I begin to post content. At the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m writing this new series of vignettes (I have a dozen or so of them, by now, probably), I\u0026rsquo;m working on station keeping episodes (including the old ones, I have 16 written), and I have thirty-thousand words of the Mars novella written that just needs tweaking before it gets posted.","title":"Writing Progress"},{"content":"So someone wrote a nifty little java aplet that makes really pretty tag-cloud like graphics from either your delicious tags or from a block of your text.\nSo I plugged in the text of the novella that I wrote last fall into the little window and got:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not very pretty, but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of cool. And a little embarrassing, but these things happen. I\u0026rsquo;ll definitely be making more of these.\nThanks amy for the link to this. I agree about putting these on shirts.\nHope your weekend is going well.\nOut of curiosity, I copy and pasted the text of Cory Doctorw\u0026rsquo;s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town into the same applet and got the following result.\n\u0026ldquo;Said\u0026rdquo; is probably the most frequently non-determiner-word in fiction, though I think I probably need to do something about my overuse of the word \u0026ldquo;probably.\u0026rdquo;\nsigh\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mars-tag-cloud/","summary":"So someone wrote a nifty little java aplet that makes really pretty tag-cloud like graphics from either your delicious tags or from a block of your text.\nSo I plugged in the text of the novella that I wrote last fall into the little window and got:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not very pretty, but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of cool. And a little embarrassing, but these things happen. I\u0026rsquo;ll definitely be making more of these.\nThanks amy for the link to this. I agree about putting these on shirts.\nHope your weekend is going well.\nOut of curiosity, I copy and pasted the text of Cory Doctorw\u0026rsquo;s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town into the same applet and got the following result.\n\u0026ldquo;Said\u0026rdquo; is probably the most frequently non-determiner-word in fiction, though I think I probably need to do something about my overuse of the word \u0026ldquo;probably.\u0026rdquo;\nsigh","title":"Mars Tag Cloud"},{"content":"Haven\u0026rsquo;t done a reading update in a while. But I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading. This weeks, reading update is very technologically involved. Keeping track of how much I\u0026rsquo;m reading is part of my New Years resolution (and reading more by-proxy) so this post falls into that vein.\nI read John Scalzi\u0026rsquo;s Old Man\u0026rsquo;s War in ebook last week. I\u0026rsquo;m not typically a Scalzi fanboy, and I think I became fully aware of him for the first time in the last year, as a result of listening to something PNH said somewhere. Sorry for the vague details. I really enjoyed the book, in any case, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably read the next few soon. I\u0026rsquo;ve always been sort of ambivalent about Scalzi\u0026rsquo;s online persona, not quite sure why; the fiction is pretty damn good.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also opened, but not really gotten into Tobias Buckell\u0026rsquo;s Crystal Rain, soon.\nMore interestingly, I think, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working through a backlog of Strange Horizon\u0026rsquo;s stories that I bookmarked a while ago on my iPod Touch (part of my recent computer upgrade) which is great for reading whilst eating or whatever. I really look forward to the next release of the software update in a few weeks, offline readers, better syncing and what not seems like a pretty good deal.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m reading a series of short stories about fantastic cities by Benjamin Rosenbaum, whose work I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of. These stories, are quite short--I\u0026rsquo;d be inclined to call them flash fiction--and they remind me of a more serious Alien\u0026rsquo;s You Will Meet. They\u0026rsquo;re both second person, they\u0026rsquo;re both short, they\u0026rsquo;re both cataloging an imaginary and an open-ended collection of objects. I\u0026rsquo;m on the fourth, I think, and I have to say that I really like the way that it melds the sort of alternate history/divided united states genre with a series of stories that at least appears to catalogue something that doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist--and thus explores a sense of wonder in the utterly banal. I had a roommate (Hi H.! I hope I described that well enough!) who was interested in something that, felt from where I was sitting pretty similar. And cool.\nWhat are you reading?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reading-updates/","summary":"Haven\u0026rsquo;t done a reading update in a while. But I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading. This weeks, reading update is very technologically involved. Keeping track of how much I\u0026rsquo;m reading is part of my New Years resolution (and reading more by-proxy) so this post falls into that vein.\nI read John Scalzi\u0026rsquo;s Old Man\u0026rsquo;s War in ebook last week. I\u0026rsquo;m not typically a Scalzi fanboy, and I think I became fully aware of him for the first time in the last year, as a result of listening to something PNH said somewhere. Sorry for the vague details. I really enjoyed the book, in any case, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably read the next few soon. I\u0026rsquo;ve always been sort of ambivalent about Scalzi\u0026rsquo;s online persona, not quite sure why; the fiction is pretty damn good.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also opened, but not really gotten into Tobias Buckell\u0026rsquo;s Crystal Rain, soon.\nMore interestingly, I think, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working through a backlog of Strange Horizon\u0026rsquo;s stories that I bookmarked a while ago on my iPod Touch (part of my recent computer upgrade) which is great for reading whilst eating or whatever.","title":"Reading Updates"},{"content":"As I continue to adjust to the new computer, I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that there\u0026rsquo;s something I want to be doing my computer that I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have the tools and/or cognitive capacity for.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve sometimes joked that I have no business having such a powerful computer because the truth is that 80% or more of my digital work is a dealing with text files, plain text files that are technologically the same as text files from 30 years ago. For this we don\u0026rsquo;t need a dual core processors, or 250 gigabyte hard drives.\nBut this is a digression. Probably the second biggest (in terms of import) collection of stuff I have on this computer is data and texts of one form or another. Lots of PDFs of academic articles and resources, lots of notes of my own creation, that sort of thing.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;ve tried almost all of the \u0026ldquo;personal database\u0026rdquo; managers over the past few years, I settled on using an interesting solution. That is programs like DEVONthink Pro, Mori, EagleFiler, that attempt to provide an additional layer of database management to all of the \u0026ldquo;things\u0026rdquo; in your digital life. They\u0026rsquo;re good programs, but the truth is that they all provide a common set of very OS X-y tools, and they\u0026rsquo;re all closed source, and they tend to obscure the organization of the data.1\nI use BibDesk to index all of the published documents that I have on my computer, BibDesk is a great program for managing citations and frankly I use it for a lot less then its capable.\nAnyway so there are a bunch of programs that do this kind of thing, and I used Devon Think at one point in the past, and I like it, but the database is proprietary and it\u0026rsquo;s having a problem with a file extension I use2.\nIn any case here are a list of features that I consider important for such a program and the task that I hope to accomplish with said features:\nWeb Cliping when I run across something on the internet that is important to a project I\u0026rsquo;m working on, I want to be able to capture it to the database for later reference. The clip should capture key bibliographic data (URL, time, title, etc.) and keep this exposed to me so I can easily incorporate the information into what I\u0026rsquo;m working on without needing to either have a connection to the internet or trace down the source for a second time. Mange multiple formats, including PDF, HTML, and plain text. Needs to rely on external editing/viewing programs. I really like the programs I use to edit files, and don\u0026rsquo;t really want to use some special wrapper on top of TextEdit. Needs to keep the data/files exposed to the directory structure, and keep synchronized with this. If I change a file name/title in the database it needs to propagate down the line. DTP will almost do this, if you index files, but it means keeping a finder open window. Something not Kludgey. As I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing this, I managed to hack together a shell script that does like eighty percent of what I need (in concert with ikiwiki, which I already use), but it\u0026rsquo;s ugly, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t do a very good job of capturing the citation information automatically. If someone knows how to get a url for the top most safari window into the shell as a variable, this will obviously be a lot easier, as it is, I think I can hack it. Is there some solution that people are using for this sort of task? Do you have recommendations? I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear them.\nSo, in part I\u0026rsquo;m predisposed to liking open source solutions, but in this case, it\u0026rsquo;s particularly crucial, because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to spend a lot of time working on organizing and managing the data in a database only to have that work obsoleted or destroyed when I want to move to another system/platform.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI have plain text files with different file extensions for organizational purposes and what not.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/data-management/","summary":"As I continue to adjust to the new computer, I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that there\u0026rsquo;s something I want to be doing my computer that I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have the tools and/or cognitive capacity for.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve sometimes joked that I have no business having such a powerful computer because the truth is that 80% or more of my digital work is a dealing with text files, plain text files that are technologically the same as text files from 30 years ago. For this we don\u0026rsquo;t need a dual core processors, or 250 gigabyte hard drives.\nBut this is a digression. Probably the second biggest (in terms of import) collection of stuff I have on this computer is data and texts of one form or another. Lots of PDFs of academic articles and resources, lots of notes of my own creation, that sort of thing.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;ve tried almost all of the \u0026ldquo;personal database\u0026rdquo; managers over the past few years, I settled on using an interesting solution.","title":"Data Management"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve not been talking very much about my knitting very much. While I have had a general malaise with my knitting in the past few weeks, I think I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get through it. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better managing the new work rhythm under control, the writing under control, I\u0026rsquo;m not dancing as much, and in light of this, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to pick up the knitting again.\nIn this spirit, I\u0026rsquo;ve written the next stage of the instructions for the sweater project\nI\u0026rsquo;m making slow progress on the Latvian Dreaming sweater, and despite much encouragement and temptation to start something new, I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to regain enthusiasm. This is an effect of sweater knitting that I think those of you who are knitting this sweater right now, or in the future from my perspective will likely realize. There\u0026rsquo;s a point in the middle of the body (that is the section of the sweater from the bottom hem to the underarms) that\u0026rsquo;s either a quarter or a third of that length (so 3-6 inches, or there aborts) that takes forever to knit, completely out of proportion with any other progress you may make on the sweater. This seems to be always the case.\nAnyway, once you have the pattern established--and there are instructions that come along with the chart--you have to knit the body. If you\u0026rsquo;re going to make a drop shouldered sweater using the conventional gansey construction style (that is with underarm gussets) you\u0026rsquo;ll want to stop this \u0026ldquo;long plow\u0026rdquo; 3 inches short of the underarm point. If you want to set in the sleeves (either with a set in/modified dropped shoulder, or some sort of seamless yoke shaping) continue to the underarm point uninterrupted.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to make my sweater 15-16 inches long at the underarms (with the gusset) so I\u0026rsquo;m going to start increasing for the gusset after 12-13 inches. I have a fairly long torso, and I wear my sweaters pretty long over my hips. Measure existing sweaters for a pointer in this dimension.\nTo begin a gusset, increase one stitch on either side of the first stitch on each side of the sweater (so a two stitches on either side of stitch \u0026ldquo;0\u0026rdquo; on the chart for a total of 4 stitches every round.) Do this every third round. For three inches.\nThis is one of those points in knitting where: 1) the number of stitches doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter and, 2) the color pattern doesn\u0026rsquo;t really matter. Just do something regular and you\u0026rsquo;ll be safe. Knit the stitches in stripes, or alternating stripes, or alternating stitches, or really anything. I would outline the gusset in black stitches, but anything beyond that, it purely up to you. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t mater, and frankly people aren\u0026rsquo;t going to see this part of the sweater. I sometimes improvise patterns in this space, but that\u0026rsquo;s purely for my own amusement. Feel free to do the same.\nWhat happens after the three inches comes in the next installment\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/latvain-dreaming-body-and-gussets/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve not been talking very much about my knitting very much. While I have had a general malaise with my knitting in the past few weeks, I think I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get through it. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better managing the new work rhythm under control, the writing under control, I\u0026rsquo;m not dancing as much, and in light of this, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to pick up the knitting again.\nIn this spirit, I\u0026rsquo;ve written the next stage of the instructions for the sweater project\nI\u0026rsquo;m making slow progress on the Latvian Dreaming sweater, and despite much encouragement and temptation to start something new, I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to regain enthusiasm. This is an effect of sweater knitting that I think those of you who are knitting this sweater right now, or in the future from my perspective will likely realize. There\u0026rsquo;s a point in the middle of the body (that is the section of the sweater from the bottom hem to the underarms) that\u0026rsquo;s either a quarter or a third of that length (so 3-6 inches, or there aborts) that takes forever to knit, completely out of proportion with any other progress you may make on the sweater.","title":"Latvain Dreaming Body and Gussets"},{"content":"Ok, no new video\u0026rsquo;s today, you can rest easy.\nThe kittens are doing well. I didn\u0026rsquo;t write about this as it was happening, but the grey cat--that we\u0026rsquo;ve taken to calling \u0026ldquo;Merlin,\u0026rdquo; had some trouble adjusting to life in our house. So we had a very harried vet visit last friday. He might have gotten a little infection and what not, but he was having some trouble staying hydrated and nourished. We think that he was probably still nursing, and was getting a lot of his liquid from that, and so with that removed it was like he didn\u0026rsquo;t think to drink on his own.\nSo we got a syringe and was feeding/dribbling water a few times a day for a few days, and made some watered wet-food as a way of getting him to drink and eat. I think on the whole he\u0026rsquo;s starting to figure it out for himself.\nFinn didn\u0026rsquo;t work as a name in retrospect, it was too similar to Kip, and we kept getting it mixed up, and he\u0026rsquo;s not very sheepish/sheep-like. So we\u0026rsquo;ve moved on to calling him Merlin. It\u0026rsquo;s a good name, and I think it works better.\nOther than that, they\u0026rsquo;re doing well, and they\u0026rsquo;re very fun. We\u0026rsquo;ve been slowly introducing them to the other cats in the household, and the kittens are clearly not afraid. The other cats while not friendly, are starting to adjust, or run away in fear. It\u0026rsquo;s quite a sight to see a 16 pound cat run away from a 9 week old kitten, but I think this is better than the big cat charging the little cat.\nI should take some real pictures of the cats, but you know how good I am at taking pictures on demand. Soon, I promise. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/kip-and-merlin/","summary":"Ok, no new video\u0026rsquo;s today, you can rest easy.\nThe kittens are doing well. I didn\u0026rsquo;t write about this as it was happening, but the grey cat--that we\u0026rsquo;ve taken to calling \u0026ldquo;Merlin,\u0026rdquo; had some trouble adjusting to life in our house. So we had a very harried vet visit last friday. He might have gotten a little infection and what not, but he was having some trouble staying hydrated and nourished. We think that he was probably still nursing, and was getting a lot of his liquid from that, and so with that removed it was like he didn\u0026rsquo;t think to drink on his own.\nSo we got a syringe and was feeding/dribbling water a few times a day for a few days, and made some watered wet-food as a way of getting him to drink and eat. I think on the whole he\u0026rsquo;s starting to figure it out for himself.","title":"Kip and Merlin"},{"content":"So I got a new computer last Monday, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t reflected upon this very much, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth reflecting on. So here goes.\nMy first reaction is to say: this was incredibly worth it, and I made the right decision. Both in terms of timing, and in terms of economy. While my old computer worked, in a certain sense, it had a number of limitations which this computer doesn\u0026rsquo;t have. The battery was basically shot, the operating system needed upgrading, the computer was dead. Getting all that up to snuff would have been 25% of the cost of the upgrade. And all of the main components which would be prone to sudden failure (screen, hard drive, internals) would have still been 3 years old.\nAnd there are some great perks to having a new computer. Its lighter, which is easier on the back. Its thiner which is easier on my wrists, it has a much larger hard drive which means I can keep my music collection onboard, at least for the next year or so, which solves my space problem. It can crunch through data faster. The camera lets me make stupid youtube videos of the cats.\nThe truth is, that 80% of what I do with my computer deals with a bunch of pretty small text files and a command line. I made a joke in a meeting this week defending my choice of ruby for a few scripts that I wrote a year ago on the grounds that while it\u0026rsquo;s a bit slower than the alternatives,1 I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a great need to load-ballance my laptop, and that really hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed.\nThe upgrade was really smooth, I ran the migration assistant, and so in some ways, I\u0026rsquo;m a little disappointed that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get more of a chance to install programs with better practices2, as the migration seemed to take care of this for me, but I think its testament to Apple that it feels like I\u0026rsquo;ve had this computer for much longer than just a week at this point.\nAlso, because Leopard, OS X 10.5, is a year old now, and I\u0026rsquo;m just really using it for the first time I have a few responses/reactions. First of all, I\u0026rsquo;m liking it. It\u0026rsquo;s not a ground breaking change, of course, but the updates to core programs like Mail.app, iCal, and preview are quite nice. Quite nice: useful I also really like the tabbed interface in Terminal. Terminal is basically where iTerm was for 10.4 except that the method of switching between tabs is a bit more asinine. But I\u0026rsquo;ll get over it.\nThe biggest change is spaces, the multi-desktop ability in Leopard. Linuxes have had this for years, and there was even an add on for 10.4 that would let you do this. I must admit that every previous attempt at using more than one desktop space has ended in failure. I just can\u0026rsquo;t seem to grok it, and at least this time around I\u0026rsquo;m more prone to just pile most things into one \u0026ldquo;space\u0026rdquo; and then use expose, (OS X\u0026rsquo;s little trick to get a birds eye view of all your windows at a glance. I\u0026rsquo;m really good at letting expose allow me to feel comfortable with 15+ open windows. Though, these days, I rarely get more than 10 open.\nExpose + Spaces is sort of cool, and I think I would probably be able to grok it better if spaces would have come out before expose. As it is, I\u0026rsquo;m not really using it, though when I start doing more (scientific) literature reviewing/perusing I can imagine how spaces would come in handy.\nAnd I think this is the lesson that I take from thinking about technology: more half the battle is getting your brain around the solution, the rest is just making the computer act as a suitable substrate for your activities. While there\u0026rsquo;s a little give and take, of course, the human interaction bit is crucial.\nOver and out.\nI think that speed is the consistent complaint about ruby in contrast to languages like perl and python. I\u0026rsquo;ve heard some stuff about how it treats classes like objects, or something, but not a huge problem for me, right now. While the speed issue might be true, it\u0026rsquo;s so not my concern right now.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nSorry, I seem to be turning into a librarian, more on this later.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/post-leopard-upgrade-reflections/","summary":"So I got a new computer last Monday, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t reflected upon this very much, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth reflecting on. So here goes.\nMy first reaction is to say: this was incredibly worth it, and I made the right decision. Both in terms of timing, and in terms of economy. While my old computer worked, in a certain sense, it had a number of limitations which this computer doesn\u0026rsquo;t have. The battery was basically shot, the operating system needed upgrading, the computer was dead. Getting all that up to snuff would have been 25% of the cost of the upgrade. And all of the main components which would be prone to sudden failure (screen, hard drive, internals) would have still been 3 years old.\nAnd there are some great perks to having a new computer. Its lighter, which is easier on the back. Its thiner which is easier on my wrists, it has a much larger hard drive which means I can keep my music collection onboard, at least for the next year or so, which solves my space problem.","title":"Post-Leopard Upgrade Reflections"},{"content":"I so am not a meme person, but I had a few moments and, you know, why not. I reserve the right to not play exactly by the rules\n\u0026ldquo;_The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they\u0026rsquo;ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.\nLet the person who tagged you know when you\u0026rsquo;ve posted your answer._\u0026rdquo;\nWhat was I doing 10 years ago?\nI was, being an awkward pre-teen. Getting ready for a year in school, which I am convinced no one really enjoys, and I was no exception. This is one of the side effects of being so young: questions like these are embarrassing. Though, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that there are a number of things that I still do that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for almost ten years. Like dancing is getting close, blogging is getting close.\nWhat are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):\nFinish writing an episode of Station Keeping. Knit. Play with kittens. Read fiction. Work. Snacks I enjoy:\nThese awesome peanut filled pretzel\u0026rsquo;s from Trader Joes. Graham Crackers. Feta Cheese. Other Cheeses. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:\nCreate endowments for a bunch of communities and institutions that I appreciate and enjoy in the world. Like the local folk music club, the queer youth group, etc. Start an independent science fiction book press. Places I have lived (in no order at all):\nNashville, TN. Southern Wisconsin. St. Louis, MO. Kansas City, KS Area Peeps I want to know more about:\nZach Dave (Ok, so I know you pretty well, play long) Chris (Ditto 2x) Ted and Keith Ken I\u0026rsquo;m totally breaking the rules and not going through the elaborate rituatual of telling people to play along. I think most of those people read the blog, and they\u0026rsquo;re all people who I really like and consider my \u0026ldquo;blogging friends,\u0026rdquo; but they\u0026rsquo;re people who don\u0026rsquo;t typically comment here. So I think you should read their sites if you don\u0026rsquo;t already.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/this-is-a-sign-of-how-much-i-like-you-joe/","summary":"I so am not a meme person, but I had a few moments and, you know, why not. I reserve the right to not play exactly by the rules\n\u0026ldquo;_The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they\u0026rsquo;ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.\nLet the person who tagged you know when you\u0026rsquo;ve posted your answer._\u0026rdquo;\nWhat was I doing 10 years ago?\nI was, being an awkward pre-teen. Getting ready for a year in school, which I am convinced no one really enjoys, and I was no exception. This is one of the side effects of being so young: questions like these are embarrassing. Though, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that there are a number of things that I still do that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for almost ten years.","title":"A Sign of How Much I Like you Joe"},{"content":"So here\u0026rsquo;s another cat video:\nThis is the problem with having both new technology and new cuteness in my life.\nAnd just as if I wasn\u0026rsquo;t being stereotypical enough, I have a meme to post later today. Hah.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/kip-and-finn-in-action/","summary":"So here\u0026rsquo;s another cat video:\nThis is the problem with having both new technology and new cuteness in my life.\nAnd just as if I wasn\u0026rsquo;t being stereotypical enough, I have a meme to post later today. Hah.","title":"Kip and Finn in Action"},{"content":"I recognize that this isn\u0026rsquo;t very interesting, but deal with it.\nA real post is forthcoming.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-video-of-my-cat/","summary":"I recognize that this isn\u0026rsquo;t very interesting, but deal with it.\nA real post is forthcoming.","title":"A Video of my Cat"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing a short story.\nNo really. I am.\nI have a checkered history with short form. Mostly I think my problem is that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a reflex for short integrated plots. I\u0026rsquo;m big picture enough, and have enough to say with/about master narratives that I can handle novel-sized plot with various tips and turns, but in the short form it\u0026rsquo;s harder to move all the pieces through a plot and still write something recognizable as fiction.\nThis is all very funny in a sense, because one of my enduring academic interests is how people construct and make sense of their \u0026ldquo;life history.\u0026rdquo; And yet, knowing a fair piece about this, writing stories is something that I\u0026rsquo;m forever tripping up on.\nThe truth is that, the kinds of stories that people actually tell about their lives, what really happens, and what would be interesting in the context of a story are all so radically different from each other as to be not recognizable as the same sort of thing. I remember once thinking \u0026ldquo;you know, getting a degree in psychology will help my writing as I learn about how people work;\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I believe it any more, but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of moot.\nEven though I struggle with it, I still continue to try to write shorter fiction. The best reason for this is the fact that short fiction can be more topical, more in the moment because from inception to publication can be a few months, where as getting a novel from inception to the reader in less than a year (or 3) is pretty fast. Not to mention that short work is easier to entice people to your work, participation in critique groups is easier, publication is easier.\nSo I keep trying.\nA bit about this specific story. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a series of linked stories and vignettes in a new setting that I haven\u0026rsquo;t exactly talked a lot about here. It is to be the first body of work that I\u0026rsquo;m writing specifically for the new fiction site. The world is fun, and writing the primary character is a lot of fun, but this piece explores something \u0026ldquo;earlier\u0026rdquo; and is narrated quite differently, so it\u0026rsquo;s good for me, but tough.\nThis writing stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s tough.\nOk, I\u0026rsquo;m done. Back to work and real writing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/short-fiction-trials/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing a short story.\nNo really. I am.\nI have a checkered history with short form. Mostly I think my problem is that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a reflex for short integrated plots. I\u0026rsquo;m big picture enough, and have enough to say with/about master narratives that I can handle novel-sized plot with various tips and turns, but in the short form it\u0026rsquo;s harder to move all the pieces through a plot and still write something recognizable as fiction.\nThis is all very funny in a sense, because one of my enduring academic interests is how people construct and make sense of their \u0026ldquo;life history.\u0026rdquo; And yet, knowing a fair piece about this, writing stories is something that I\u0026rsquo;m forever tripping up on.\nThe truth is that, the kinds of stories that people actually tell about their lives, what really happens, and what would be interesting in the context of a story are all so radically different from each other as to be not recognizable as the same sort of thing.","title":"Short Fiction Trials"},{"content":"Hah, so the new cats arrived today.\nOne is grey and splotchy (white belly, really just grey and white in a vaguely tuxedo cat with hints of tabby stripes. so really, we\u0026rsquo;re talking about a grey casual/pinstriped suited cat) named Kip. Kip after Kipruget Koroso in James Tiptree, Jr.\u0026rsquo;s Brightness Falls from the Air. Also I have a character in a number of my stories named Kyp, so it\u0026rsquo;s a name I\u0026rsquo;m fond of.\nThe other one is all grey, and we\u0026rsquo;re calling it \u0026ldquo;Finn\u0026rdquo; after the sheep.\nThey both have somewhat lengthy fur, their mother has long fur. I took some new pictures with photo booth. because I now have a computer with a camera and therefore have no excuses.\nBack to your regularly scheduled programing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-cats/","summary":"Hah, so the new cats arrived today.\nOne is grey and splotchy (white belly, really just grey and white in a vaguely tuxedo cat with hints of tabby stripes. so really, we\u0026rsquo;re talking about a grey casual/pinstriped suited cat) named Kip. Kip after Kipruget Koroso in James Tiptree, Jr.\u0026rsquo;s Brightness Falls from the Air. Also I have a character in a number of my stories named Kyp, so it\u0026rsquo;s a name I\u0026rsquo;m fond of.\nThe other one is all grey, and we\u0026rsquo;re calling it \u0026ldquo;Finn\u0026rdquo; after the sheep.\nThey both have somewhat lengthy fur, their mother has long fur. I took some new pictures with photo booth. because I now have a computer with a camera and therefore have no excuses.\nBack to your regularly scheduled programing.","title":"New Cats"},{"content":"Every time--it seems--that someone suggests or comments on the future of the digital text (ebooks), someone always says one of the two following things:\n1. People don\u0026rsquo;t like to read words off of screens, the quality/experience is bad and in truth people would prefer to read words off of paper.\n2. The codex is--by design and use--an important carrier of information that can\u0026rsquo;t be replaced by digital technology.\nDespite the apparent similarity, I think one of these things (and only one) is true: the second. Lets explore.\nFor starters, if you really think about it, we all read hundreds of thousands of words off of screens every year (and in some cases, every month or every week). We don\u0026rsquo;t mind reading off of screens, and particularly with anti-aliasing and flat screens, in many cases it\u0026rsquo;s easier to read off of screens because readers have more control over the display of text, and yet people don\u0026rsquo;t really read books off of screens.\nThe standing argument as to why monographs and novels have never found success, is that there are two many distracting things you can be doing on the computer. Why read a book when you can check your email for the 20th time this hour? This is, I think, why the codex is probably here to stay. And because giving books a physicality is commercially worthwhile, and because we respond to the form.\nHaving said that, I read a book off of my laptop screen this past weekend, and I have to say that I rather enjoyed the experience. So here are some thoughts on the experience:\nThe book came to me in PDF format, from a publisher. So the \u0026ldquo;pages\u0026rdquo; looked like conventional book pages. There were page numbers and so I was able to locate the text in space on a page, very much like I would a \u0026ldquo;regular book.\u0026rdquo; This spatial experience is often forgotten in digital texts, and I think that layer of information helps our minds make sense of longer texts. Also, because I knew the page numbers of the individual pages, and the total number of pages in the document, I was able to calculate my progress, again, helpful in assimilating the data in the text file.\nI could read the words comfortably on the screen while viewing the entire page on the screen. Being able to see a snapshot of a page helps me in locating the text in space, which makes reading easier. More importantly, it allowed me to only scroll when I needed to change the page. This is really important to a successful reading experience, in my view.\nThe final piece of the puzzle is probably approaching an ebook like you would any other text on a computer screen, rather than approaching an ebook like you would a pbook. I read paper books, for the most part, in bed at night. I read things on the computer sitting at my desk. I read the ebook, mostly sitting at my desk. I also tend to read pbooks in longer stretches, reading several thousand words at a time, where as I probably never read more than 1,000 words at a time on a screen without taking a break. You might have a very different method for reading, and that\u0026rsquo;s fine, but by cycling a novel in with my regular livejournal-blog-email-twitter reading cycle I was able to read a novel in a weekend; whereas it almost always takes me several weeks (if I\u0026rsquo;m lucky) to finish a novel.\nThe end result? I\u0026rsquo;ve started reading another ebook, because it seems worthwhile.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/screen-reading/","summary":"Every time--it seems--that someone suggests or comments on the future of the digital text (ebooks), someone always says one of the two following things:\n1. People don\u0026rsquo;t like to read words off of screens, the quality/experience is bad and in truth people would prefer to read words off of paper.\n2. The codex is--by design and use--an important carrier of information that can\u0026rsquo;t be replaced by digital technology.\nDespite the apparent similarity, I think one of these things (and only one) is true: the second. Lets explore.\nFor starters, if you really think about it, we all read hundreds of thousands of words off of screens every year (and in some cases, every month or every week). We don\u0026rsquo;t mind reading off of screens, and particularly with anti-aliasing and flat screens, in many cases it\u0026rsquo;s easier to read off of screens because readers have more control over the display of text, and yet people don\u0026rsquo;t really read books off of screens.","title":"Screen Reading"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s considered poor taste to talk about your numbers if you\u0026rsquo;re a blogger or pod-caster, so while I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about mine, I\u0026rsquo;m going to offer some rough data points and talk about other people\u0026rsquo;s numbers.\nA high quality, and reasonably high circulation, but pretty average science fiction magazine has an audience of about 10,000 per issue.\nI think the top end of academic literary magazines have audiences of about 5,000 with most of them closer to 1k or 2k.\nThe minimum bar joining the federated media ad network is (or was) 250,000 page views a month. Figure that 250k page views, works out to an audience of at least 100k but probably less than 200, depending on a lot of factors.\nThe average, but established, mid-list podcast gets about 4k subscribers.\nI think TWiT podcasts (mostly weekly) get several hundred thousand subscribers/downloads, but not more than say, half a million.\nI heard a while back that boing boing got 3 million visits a month. Its probably more now.\nThe New York Times has a daily circulation of 1 million, while the chicago tribune has a daily circulation of a bit more than half a million. The Wisconsin State Journal (the Madison, WI paper), has a daily circulation of just under a hundred thousand.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve heard Cory Doctorow and PNH say that the break even point for a book from Tor is 4,000 hardcovers.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also heard it said that about 1% of podcast/blog readers can be expected to buy stuff/donate/give feedback. In my experience this is probably true. I think, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t scale well for more popular blogs, so that more than 1% of Stephanie\u0026rsquo;s readers comment and buy her books and donate to knitter\u0026rsquo;s without borders. But it\u0026rsquo;s still probably not more than 10%.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what any of this means, and clearly four thousand people buying a hardcover book is different than buying a daily newspaper, or subscribing to a monthly journal, or just subscribing to a free podcast or visiting a website. But having some kind of concrete set of numbers is helpful and reassuring when I\u0026rsquo;m thinking \u0026ldquo;is it worth while.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/metrics-and-new-media/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s considered poor taste to talk about your numbers if you\u0026rsquo;re a blogger or pod-caster, so while I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about mine, I\u0026rsquo;m going to offer some rough data points and talk about other people\u0026rsquo;s numbers.\nA high quality, and reasonably high circulation, but pretty average science fiction magazine has an audience of about 10,000 per issue.\nI think the top end of academic literary magazines have audiences of about 5,000 with most of them closer to 1k or 2k.\nThe minimum bar joining the federated media ad network is (or was) 250,000 page views a month. Figure that 250k page views, works out to an audience of at least 100k but probably less than 200, depending on a lot of factors.\nThe average, but established, mid-list podcast gets about 4k subscribers.\nI think TWiT podcasts (mostly weekly) get several hundred thousand subscribers/downloads, but not more than say, half a million.","title":"Metrics and New Media"},{"content":"There are technologies that seem to evoke \u0026ldquo;the future,\u0026rdquo; that when we see them, we think \u0026ldquo;wow that has the future written all over it.\u0026rdquo; The flying car is like that. VR computer interfaces are like that. And because they represent the future SF writers--like myself--use these tropes to tell our readers \u0026ldquo;hey look, this is the future.\u0026rdquo; And I think as a result, we sort of think that these kinds of technologies are familiar and within within reach and/or seem like something something that would productively enhance our lives.\nBut a flying car? More complex, more energy, more dangerous (if you think there are a lot of bad drivers with one axis of control, imagine what adding another would do) and it probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be appreciably faster for most tasks. They\u0026rsquo;re cool, but as a technology, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t solve an extant problem in our world.\nSame with virtual reality systems. It would require lots of energy (both in terms of CPU cycles, but more importantly in terms of programer and sysop time,) and while it might present some interesting entertainment/social/data visualization opportunities it represents a rather ineffective way to interact with a computer. The enduring (and growing) success of unix-stlye operating systems (which use simple text, and frequently a command line) to communicate with the user is testament to this fact. Until you can figure out a way to get data into someone\u0026rsquo;s head faster then reading, or out of someone\u0026rsquo;s head than typing, any sort of virtual reality system is basically useless.\nIn a similar sort of vein, contemporary technology users, myself among them, look eagerly at tablet-style devices as heralding the next wave of computing: much like avid futurists might look toward flying cars or virtual reality. They\u0026rsquo;re portable, they\u0026rsquo;re powerful, they\u0026rsquo;re pretty, and ultimately, they\u0026rsquo;re ineffective for general use, because in the end, while tablet computers are great for absorbing data quickly, they are much less effective when you need to get more data into them. So we\u0026rsquo;ll have tablet computers of some kind, in the next few years--basically we already do, but it\u0026rsquo;s not the next big thing in computing, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure, and yet, I think we latch onto things like tablets because it seems like the next place for technological development. But it isn\u0026rsquo;t really.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wheres-my-flying-cartablet-computer/","summary":"There are technologies that seem to evoke \u0026ldquo;the future,\u0026rdquo; that when we see them, we think \u0026ldquo;wow that has the future written all over it.\u0026rdquo; The flying car is like that. VR computer interfaces are like that. And because they represent the future SF writers--like myself--use these tropes to tell our readers \u0026ldquo;hey look, this is the future.\u0026rdquo; And I think as a result, we sort of think that these kinds of technologies are familiar and within within reach and/or seem like something something that would productively enhance our lives.\nBut a flying car? More complex, more energy, more dangerous (if you think there are a lot of bad drivers with one axis of control, imagine what adding another would do) and it probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be appreciably faster for most tasks. They\u0026rsquo;re cool, but as a technology, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t solve an extant problem in our world.\nSame with virtual reality systems.","title":"Where's My Flying Car/Tablet Computer"},{"content":"Later today, Steve Jobs is giving some sort of key note at Apple\u0026rsquo;s developer convention.\nJust in time I say. There\u0026rsquo;s a long story here.\nAbout a week ago (you haven\u0026rsquo;t heard this, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been very nose to the grindstone all week), a number of keys started coming off the keyboard. I deployed my usual \u0026ldquo;swap high traffic keys for low traffic keys\u0026rdquo; routine, but then the tab key went on the fritz, and a day later several keys (f, r, g, 4) gave up the ghost entirely.\nExternal keyboards work, but I tend to be pretty mobile, and it turns out that I really do take my computer with me just about everywhere. So this keyboard problem was a bigger issue than it might seem.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve been reading tychoish for more than a few weeks, you\u0026rsquo;ve probably realized that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close to getting a new computer. The old one is 3 years old, and I find myself butting up against its limitations more than I\u0026rsquo;d really care to. So I think at this point it\u0026rsquo;s just a matter of time before I do the upgrade. I\u0026rsquo;m half waiting to see if Apple puts out a new machine at WWDC, but I kind of doubt that they will.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s just not a lot of room for change in the laptops. I think there\u0026rsquo;ll be something exciting: it\u0026rsquo;s been a while since Apple\u0026rsquo;s done something unexpected which is atypical, but I suspect it won\u0026rsquo;t be with the laptops. There are other reasons why I think the laptops will stay as they are: the summer student promotion (which I\u0026rsquo;m so taking advantage of) and the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s been 3 month since the last rev, and they typically rev every 6 months, and the fact that there aren\u0026rsquo;t any new technologies that make any amount of marketing sense to include at this point. But that\u0026rsquo;s not the point of unexpected, I guess.\nIn the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;m back to using a computer that was the computer I took with me to college that my mother has been using for the past couple of years. We finally upgraded it to Tiger and the funny thing is that it\u0026rsquo;s running great. A bit slower than I\u0026rsquo;m used to, (I think, however, that\u0026rsquo;s mostly ram) and it\u0026rsquo;s not completely comfortable yet, but it\u0026rsquo;s ok. After a week of fighting with a sick computer it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have something that works.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;ve made another realization. This computer, is one of the 12 inch ibooks. It\u0026rsquo;s tiny, and probably about as powerful as computers like the Asus EEE PC. And it has about 4 hours of battery life, which is kind of amazing. Seriously, Apple could start selling these exact machines today, and I doubt they could keep them in stock.\nAnyway, I should be able to keep a pretty regular posting schedule up but if if I miss, lets blame it on the technology, shall we?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/keyboard-revolt/","summary":"Later today, Steve Jobs is giving some sort of key note at Apple\u0026rsquo;s developer convention.\nJust in time I say. There\u0026rsquo;s a long story here.\nAbout a week ago (you haven\u0026rsquo;t heard this, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been very nose to the grindstone all week), a number of keys started coming off the keyboard. I deployed my usual \u0026ldquo;swap high traffic keys for low traffic keys\u0026rdquo; routine, but then the tab key went on the fritz, and a day later several keys (f, r, g, 4) gave up the ghost entirely.\nExternal keyboards work, but I tend to be pretty mobile, and it turns out that I really do take my computer with me just about everywhere. So this keyboard problem was a bigger issue than it might seem.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve been reading tychoish for more than a few weeks, you\u0026rsquo;ve probably realized that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close to getting a new computer. The old one is 3 years old, and I find myself butting up against its limitations more than I\u0026rsquo;d really care to.","title":"Keyboard Revolt"},{"content":"I interrupt your regularly scheduled programing for a couple of announcements. First off, I bought a computer this evening. This is a Good Thing, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to be getting settled in. There will still be morning blog posts. Don\u0026rsquo;t fear. Secondly I have a cute/interesting story about science fiction writing.\nSo I wrote this short story last week that I\u0026rsquo;m putting the finishing touches on.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s cool to work on a fiction piece and then see the end or the possible end in sight, rather than the work of enduring faith that novel or even novella writing takes.\nFirst a bit about the story: it\u0026rsquo;s rather straightforward. Some characters experience something and are changed by it. It\u0026rsquo;s futuristic, but the differences are mostly geographical and social (which is really more of my speed.)\nThe first reviewers response: \u0026ldquo;I liked how the characters merged into one entity and then split apart, I thought you slipped into first person for a second, but then I realized it was intentional, good going.\u0026rdquo;\nNope. I really did just slip into first person. The story started out as a first person story, and then I realized that given the character\u0026rsquo;s state of mind throughout the story, it was absurd to have the character narrate the story in past tense. And present tense is annoying.\nAnd because I\u0026rsquo;m the writer and I can do these things, I changed it, save the middle of one well placed paragraph. And only in science fiction would that be seen as a literary device. Fear not, I\u0026rsquo;ve corrected the mistake, and who knows, probably squashed any chance this story had at being worthwhile.\nAnyway, I have file transfers to attend to. Be well friends.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reasons-why-i-love-science-fiction/","summary":"I interrupt your regularly scheduled programing for a couple of announcements. First off, I bought a computer this evening. This is a Good Thing, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to be getting settled in. There will still be morning blog posts. Don\u0026rsquo;t fear. Secondly I have a cute/interesting story about science fiction writing.\nSo I wrote this short story last week that I\u0026rsquo;m putting the finishing touches on.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s cool to work on a fiction piece and then see the end or the possible end in sight, rather than the work of enduring faith that novel or even novella writing takes.\nFirst a bit about the story: it\u0026rsquo;s rather straightforward. Some characters experience something and are changed by it. It\u0026rsquo;s futuristic, but the differences are mostly geographical and social (which is really more of my speed.)\nThe first reviewers response: \u0026ldquo;I liked how the characters merged into one entity and then split apart, I thought you slipped into first person for a second, but then I realized it was intentional, good going.","title":"Reasons Why I Love Science Fiction"},{"content":"A year ago, I read a book on the history of academic women\u0026rsquo;s studies called: \u0026ldquo;When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies in America,\u0026rdquo; by Marilyn J. Boxer. While I\u0026rsquo;m sure some of my classmates would describe the book as staid and boring, I thought it was bearable at the least. I\u0026rsquo;m sure they\u0026rsquo;ll all comment if I miss the mark on this one, but I thought that it was pretty complete and accurate.\nI got the feeling that despite the fact that history is largely an interpretive endeavor and therefore not apt for judgement of \u0026ldquo;true\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;false,\u0026rdquo; but I remember from this book getting the sense that she reported a series of events that, in fact, really did happen, pretty much the way she said it.\nNow, to be fair, maybe the reason I felt this way is that she was telling a narrative that I was familiar with, and could then--and particularly now--supplement as needed. But I think there might be something more.\nBoxer (and there are other historians who do this; we\u0026rsquo;ll get there in a second) accomplishes this because, rather than angst and attempt to eliminate her bias\u0026rsquo; it\u0026rsquo;s just out there. These histories are effective because the writer is very through and on top of that reader always knows where the author stands. At the same time\nI was talking with my parents about this, and they immediately citied Trotsky\u0026rsquo;s History of the Russian Revolution as a similar sort of thing, which--though I am much less familar--I think is a much less insular example of this same kind of sub-genere.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s a cool kind of writing/book, and I tend to think of my historian characters as fitting into this model (this is how this connects up with the previous post), but I\u0026rsquo;m interested in hearing what the rest of you with an interest or expertise in history have to say about this.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-real-history/","summary":"A year ago, I read a book on the history of academic women\u0026rsquo;s studies called: \u0026ldquo;When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies in America,\u0026rdquo; by Marilyn J. Boxer. While I\u0026rsquo;m sure some of my classmates would describe the book as staid and boring, I thought it was bearable at the least. I\u0026rsquo;m sure they\u0026rsquo;ll all comment if I miss the mark on this one, but I thought that it was pretty complete and accurate.\nI got the feeling that despite the fact that history is largely an interpretive endeavor and therefore not apt for judgement of \u0026ldquo;true\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;false,\u0026rdquo; but I remember from this book getting the sense that she reported a series of events that, in fact, really did happen, pretty much the way she said it.\nNow, to be fair, maybe the reason I felt this way is that she was telling a narrative that I was familiar with, and could then--and particularly now--supplement as needed.","title":"The Real History"},{"content":"I opened a popular and literary work that\u0026rsquo;d I\u0026rsquo;d call science fiction but critics would call \u0026ldquo;magical realism,\u0026rdquo; and before I got done with the prologue, all I could see was the work of an overly earnest writer that was trying very hard to not be seen as too trophy, writing a book that stared herself as the main character and an elusive non-traditional boyfriend.\nYawn.\nNow I\u0026rsquo;ll probably give the book a second chance but it provoked some thought about my own writing, and story telling styles and habits.\nFirst of all, I don\u0026rsquo;t really put myself into my stories in specific ways. I don\u0026rsquo;t have legions of characters that are intense, but quirky, young writer/student types: nothing that you could look at and say, \u0026ldquo;ah, that one\u0026rsquo;s clearly tycho.\u0026rdquo; At the same time, there\u0026rsquo;s a little bit of me in all the character\u0026rsquo;s I write, but that seems utterly natural.\nThis culminated in a series of thoughts about the differences between \u0026ldquo;professional/academic creative writers\u0026rdquo; and whatever it is that I do. As I think about \u0026ldquo;what comes next in my life,\u0026rdquo; and I try to sort out the role that fiction writing plays in that life, I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about the differences between these two pursuits, and goals. I\u0026rsquo;m not even sure that I\u0026rsquo;m coherent about this enough to explain all of the contrasting points in my mind right now, let alone come to some satisfying conclusion.\nIn a lot of ways, I sort of see my fiction writing as being very similar to my essay writing, except I\u0026rsquo;m writing a essays on places and times that don\u0026rsquo;t and can\u0026rsquo;t exist. Maybe this isn\u0026rsquo;t a genre thing, though, I don\u0026rsquo;t know.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m a bit more keen on this though, I often approach my work/ideas as a historian, and I\u0026rsquo;ve joked that if there\u0026rsquo;s one field that I\u0026rsquo;m really \u0026ldquo;SFing up,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s history and historiography not physics and cosmology.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/characters-and-tropes/","summary":"I opened a popular and literary work that\u0026rsquo;d I\u0026rsquo;d call science fiction but critics would call \u0026ldquo;magical realism,\u0026rdquo; and before I got done with the prologue, all I could see was the work of an overly earnest writer that was trying very hard to not be seen as too trophy, writing a book that stared herself as the main character and an elusive non-traditional boyfriend.\nYawn.\nNow I\u0026rsquo;ll probably give the book a second chance but it provoked some thought about my own writing, and story telling styles and habits.\nFirst of all, I don\u0026rsquo;t really put myself into my stories in specific ways. I don\u0026rsquo;t have legions of characters that are intense, but quirky, young writer/student types: nothing that you could look at and say, \u0026ldquo;ah, that one\u0026rsquo;s clearly tycho.\u0026rdquo; At the same time, there\u0026rsquo;s a little bit of me in all the character\u0026rsquo;s I write, but that seems utterly natural.","title":"Characters and Tropes"},{"content":"One of the things that I enjoy reading so much on other people\u0026rsquo;s blogs are the hilarious (and weird) stories people have about their jobs. Sam Starbuck is particularly good at this. On the other hand, I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to contribute to this body of literature. So here\u0026rsquo;s some commentary on the genre\nWork is fascinating, and something that we aren\u0026rsquo;t prone to talk very much about it. In part because it is work, and work, is by definition a drag. In most cases we don\u0026rsquo;t work because we enjoy it, we work because we have to. Even if our careers are something that is important to our sense of who we are, even if our jobs are fundamentally something that we enjoy, work is alienating, and a drag.\nTo be fair, a lot of jobs don\u0026rsquo;t begin as alienating enterprises, but I think in time they become that, becuase there is a fundamental conflict of interest between the worker and the institutions (however small) that employ them. Employers demand/need individuals to contribute intellectual/bodily efforts, and while money helps the compensation, the economic conversion between labor and money is psychically difficult, particularly in light of it\u0026rsquo;s variability. Ok, enough theory.\nAnd yet, we spend the majority of our lives at work, working. This creates something of a paradoxical situation, but thankfully (in addition being able to eat as a result of work) some people are able to write pretty interesting stories. And their are entire genres of blogs (academic blogs, doctor/nurse blogs, etc) that are dedicated to people\u0026rsquo;s work lives. Good stuff.\nSo my work. I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned that I\u0026rsquo;m basically working a 9-5 gig at least through the end of the summer, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking for something more long term. I have a job interview next week (wish me luck,) for something that would be really great. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to jinx anything, so I\u0026rsquo;ll say more when I know it.\nAs for the mean time, there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of great stories. Most of the really funny things in my day have to do with transcriptions errors from olds transcripts of 20 year old interviews. The number of ways people misheard and miswrote \u0026ldquo;Kwame Nkrumah\u0026rdquo; is really amazing. But it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make for good story telling.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/other-daily-grind/","summary":"One of the things that I enjoy reading so much on other people\u0026rsquo;s blogs are the hilarious (and weird) stories people have about their jobs. Sam Starbuck is particularly good at this. On the other hand, I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to contribute to this body of literature. So here\u0026rsquo;s some commentary on the genre\nWork is fascinating, and something that we aren\u0026rsquo;t prone to talk very much about it. In part because it is work, and work, is by definition a drag. In most cases we don\u0026rsquo;t work because we enjoy it, we work because we have to. Even if our careers are something that is important to our sense of who we are, even if our jobs are fundamentally something that we enjoy, work is alienating, and a drag.\nTo be fair, a lot of jobs don\u0026rsquo;t begin as alienating enterprises, but I think in time they become that, becuase there is a fundamental conflict of interest between the worker and the institutions (however small) that employ them.","title":"Other Daily Grind"},{"content":"I finished, at last, The Left Hand of Darkness, the canonical novel by Urusla K. LeGuin.\nEven though I\u0026rsquo;m not in school any more and thus don\u0026rsquo;t have that as an excuse, I\u0026rsquo;m still a tragically slow reader, this is one thing among many which I hope to get much better at.\nAnyway, the book. I loved it. Both because the story was good, and because the gender thing was clever and neat (at least for 300 pages), and probably most importantly because it is such a clever example of ethnography. I like the way that it is able to evoke that genre and style so effectively.\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s next on the reading list?\nMelissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s The Jazz.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve often thought about (sometimes even here on tychoish) about cyberpunk, and sort of the next thing in this \u0026ldquo;intellectual tradition,\u0026rdquo; and I think about people like Cory Doctorow, or what William Gibson has done in the last ten years, and I\u0026rsquo;m underwhelmed. The wonder, the adventure (which is often exchanged for \u0026rsquo;thril[ler]\u0026rsquo;), and the way that the genre initially dealt with class are all gone.\nAnd then I read the first 25 pages of The Jazz, and I realized that cyberpunk is in fact, not dead. Not impossible in the post 2001 world.\nAnd I am happy.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-left-hand-of-reading-report/","summary":"I finished, at last, The Left Hand of Darkness, the canonical novel by Urusla K. LeGuin.\nEven though I\u0026rsquo;m not in school any more and thus don\u0026rsquo;t have that as an excuse, I\u0026rsquo;m still a tragically slow reader, this is one thing among many which I hope to get much better at.\nAnyway, the book. I loved it. Both because the story was good, and because the gender thing was clever and neat (at least for 300 pages), and probably most importantly because it is such a clever example of ethnography. I like the way that it is able to evoke that genre and style so effectively.\nSo what\u0026rsquo;s next on the reading list?\nMelissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s The Jazz.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve often thought about (sometimes even here on tychoish) about cyberpunk, and sort of the next thing in this \u0026ldquo;intellectual tradition,\u0026rdquo; and I think about people like Cory Doctorow, or what William Gibson has done in the last ten years, and I\u0026rsquo;m underwhelmed.","title":"The Left Hand of Reading Report"},{"content":"So I have a confession to make.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting very much.\nThe writing, the work, and the weekend of morris dancing has left me with not a lot of time for knitting.\nAlso, after a very cool spring, summer has invaded my world with a vengeance.\nThese are all excuses I know.\nBut you have to admit that it is a lot to cope with in a week.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to charge the batteries and take some pictures of the Latvian dreaming sweater, and hopefully get back into it. I know I\u0026rsquo;ve made promises about not knitting more than one project at the same time (particularly to avoid sleeves), but I\u0026rsquo;ve started to get pretty annoyed at the yarn, and you know how the knitting malaise goes. And it might be nice to knit something plain. How wierd does this sound.\nAt the same time, writing (not even posting it yet!) has caused me enough guilt to get my knitting out again. So that\u0026rsquo;s good. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-malaise/","summary":"So I have a confession to make.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting very much.\nThe writing, the work, and the weekend of morris dancing has left me with not a lot of time for knitting.\nAlso, after a very cool spring, summer has invaded my world with a vengeance.\nThese are all excuses I know.\nBut you have to admit that it is a lot to cope with in a week.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to charge the batteries and take some pictures of the Latvian dreaming sweater, and hopefully get back into it. I know I\u0026rsquo;ve made promises about not knitting more than one project at the same time (particularly to avoid sleeves), but I\u0026rsquo;ve started to get pretty annoyed at the yarn, and you know how the knitting malaise goes. And it might be nice to knit something plain. How wierd does this sound.\nAt the same time, writing (not even posting it yet!","title":"Knitting Malaise"},{"content":"I had, until a few moments ago, recently been very keen on trying to make my computer last as long as possible. It does what I need to to, I can\u0026rsquo;t really complain, and new computers are a lot of money, particularly when apple is on the cusp of new models.\nAnd then my \u0026ldquo;r\u0026rdquo; key and the \u0026ldquo;tab\u0026rdquo; key flew off my keyboard.\nI take this as a sign from the gods. I\u0026rsquo;m going to wait till I find a job and/or there are good new laptops from apple, because while I\u0026rsquo;m more partial to getting a linux laptop than I have been in the past, I think I\u0026rsquo;d be much more pleased by either: getting something like the Asus EEE PC (rumor has that there\u0026rsquo;s going to be a new faster one in a few weeks) and/or something in the cloud that I could SSH into1\nAnyway. I looked at the Apple website for the first time in months and I realized something: The MacBook Pros, are finally worth the extra price again. If you assume that the difference between a 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6 ghz Core 2 Duo processor is basically academic (which I think it likely), for about 500 dollars you get: a much nicer screen (quality), a bigger screen, more powerful graphics, a firewire 800 port. I mean, these are the historic differences between the models, but usually the difference in price is more like 1000 dollars.\nBut this post is supposed to be about what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of doing. I recognize that you can get replacement keys for about 9 bucks a pop, but upgrading is pretty inevitable, and desirable at this point.\nGiven this, my upgrade scheme/options are:\n1. Wait till after the next major revision of the macbook (con: white/black) or the macbook pro and get it. And then continue as I have for the past few years to use it as my main/sole computer. Not a bad option. I\u0026rsquo;d probably lean toward the pro, if this were the case. 2. Get an iMac and either a MacBook con or an Assus EEE pc. This puts the focus on my at home computing, and while I\u0026rsquo;d still be mobile, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be as at the drop of the hat mobile. 3. Get a macbook pro and figure out some way to organize for some sort of server-type at-home computer that could grind through the stuff that isn\u0026rsquo;t laptop suitable: media center stuff and the like.\nTwo is a radical departure from my established usage patterns, and thus sort of unlikely. And even though my keys are beginning to strike wholesale, I\u0026rsquo;m probably still going to wait until august or november before I upgrade for real.\nAnyway, there\u0026rsquo;s a weekend brain dump. I\u0026rsquo;ll see you later, and around.\nParticularly as I tend to be a more multi-box computer user, it\u0026rsquo;s beginning to make the most sense for me to have all of \u0026ldquo;my digital stuff\u0026rdquo; somewhere \u0026ldquo;out there\u0026rdquo; in internet land, and then connect to this from, what amounts to dumb terminals throughout my day. We\u0026rsquo;ll see. And in cases like that, the computer that I use to log into this is largely irrelevant.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-technology-note/","summary":"I had, until a few moments ago, recently been very keen on trying to make my computer last as long as possible. It does what I need to to, I can\u0026rsquo;t really complain, and new computers are a lot of money, particularly when apple is on the cusp of new models.\nAnd then my \u0026ldquo;r\u0026rdquo; key and the \u0026ldquo;tab\u0026rdquo; key flew off my keyboard.\nI take this as a sign from the gods. I\u0026rsquo;m going to wait till I find a job and/or there are good new laptops from apple, because while I\u0026rsquo;m more partial to getting a linux laptop than I have been in the past, I think I\u0026rsquo;d be much more pleased by either: getting something like the Asus EEE PC (rumor has that there\u0026rsquo;s going to be a new faster one in a few weeks) and/or something in the cloud that I could SSH into1\nAnyway. I looked at the Apple website for the first time in months and I realized something: The MacBook Pros, are finally worth the extra price again.","title":"A Technology Note"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another post in the vein of \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about this new site and why I\u0026rsquo;m interested in doing it.\u0026rdquo; Another excerps from the interview I did with myself.\nI hear that ideas are thick on the ground, and follow through isn\u0026rsquo;t. To the point that I\u0026rsquo;ve heard people talk about follow through as *the* quality of a writer. What are your thoughts on this?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve stumbled across people (mostly Mur, I guess talk about how ideas (for stories, but all kinds of creative ideas) are thick on the ground, but that the real magic of being a writer is \u0026ldquo;follow through:\u0026rdquo; getting ideas into words. Everyone who reads has ideas, pretty much, and it\u0026rsquo;s easy to say \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be cool to write a story with telepathic goblin-zombies fighting post-singular AIs around titan looking for the ruins of an ancient civilization there, except it\u0026rsquo;s not on Titan, because Earth got too hot after the sun turned into a red dwarf\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; and somewhat harder to actually write the story. Or at least it requires a greater time commitment.\nAnd for some reason, the proposition that ideas are thick on the ground and that all ideas are equal save the energy put into the execution, is, I think, not entirely true.\nI for one, am not particularly good coming up with ideas. Aside from just being silly and pulling out \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be nifty if\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; scenarios, in the entire time I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing, which for the purposes of this question is years and years, I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with like three setups/worlds for stories and like four plots. I might be minimizing slightly, but not much. I almost never come up with new ideas, unless I say to myself \u0026ldquo;ok, self it\u0026rsquo;s time to come up with something new,\u0026rdquo; and even then I get something even vaguely useable.\nAt the same time I think follow through is incredibly important, so I think the main thrust of the argument is solid, even if it does leave me with a sort of bad taste in my mouth.\nOn(ward and) Up(ward)!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ideas-are-cheap/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another post in the vein of \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about this new site and why I\u0026rsquo;m interested in doing it.\u0026rdquo; Another excerps from the interview I did with myself.\nI hear that ideas are thick on the ground, and follow through isn\u0026rsquo;t. To the point that I\u0026rsquo;ve heard people talk about follow through as *the* quality of a writer. What are your thoughts on this?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve stumbled across people (mostly Mur, I guess talk about how ideas (for stories, but all kinds of creative ideas) are thick on the ground, but that the real magic of being a writer is \u0026ldquo;follow through:\u0026rdquo; getting ideas into words. Everyone who reads has ideas, pretty much, and it\u0026rsquo;s easy to say \u0026ldquo;wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it be cool to write a story with telepathic goblin-zombies fighting post-singular AIs around titan looking for the ruins of an ancient civilization there, except it\u0026rsquo;s not on Titan, because Earth got too hot after the sun turned into a red dwarf\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; and somewhat harder to actually write the story.","title":"Ideas are Cheap?"},{"content":"I present you a question from an interview I did with myself about the more personal angle of why I\u0026rsquo;m starting a new site rather than work with some other project or seek traditional publishing.\nWhy is it important for you to be working and publishing independently?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been writing fiction pretty much in a vacuum for, well, a long time, on the assumption that maybe if I edit hard enough and keep trying, maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to submit something eventually and get published. Which might have been true, had I had some more effective way to \u0026ldquo;beta\u0026rdquo; my work, been not sixteen when I wrote the first book, if the publishing industry were in a different place. Etc.\nNow it sounds like I\u0026rsquo;m making excuses, and maybe I am, but it strikes me that even if god flew down and handed me the best book deal in the world, I\u0026rsquo;d probably still have to have a day job. I even sort of want a day job of some kind (I like the structure, and pace, given a lot of circumstances in my life at the moment.) While having some sort of publishing sponsor would likely get me editorial support (g-d, how I yearn for thee) a bigger audience, it\u0026rsquo;s an iffy proposition and so the debate ends up being: do I start regularly publishing my own work (like I intend to do with this new site that I\u0026rsquo;m cooking up) or do I continue to work in isolation with faith that it\u0026rsquo;ll probably work out in the end?\nI think making (science) fiction prose work online is probably the next big thing, which is to say that it\u0026rsquo;s already underway. 365Tomorrows, EscapePod, Tor.Com not to mention Podiobooks are all forays into this sphere (as it were) and as exciting as all of these ventures are, there is something totally invigorating about doing this on my own.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not saying that I don\u0026rsquo;t want support, nor am I saying that I\u0026rsquo;m conceiving this new site as something that will be excessively me--quite the contrary, if it were just me, I could probably orchestrate it entirely out of tychoish. But I very much treasure the possibility and opportunity to give this a go on my own terms.\nFor those of you keeping score at home, I\u0026rsquo;m chugging along for a mid/late June launch. I\u0026rsquo;m probably about half to a third of the way done with the logistical work, and I want to get a stronger habit formed before I start, but it\u0026rsquo;s very real and coming quite soon.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-podium-of-ones-own/","summary":"I present you a question from an interview I did with myself about the more personal angle of why I\u0026rsquo;m starting a new site rather than work with some other project or seek traditional publishing.\nWhy is it important for you to be working and publishing independently?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been writing fiction pretty much in a vacuum for, well, a long time, on the assumption that maybe if I edit hard enough and keep trying, maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to submit something eventually and get published. Which might have been true, had I had some more effective way to \u0026ldquo;beta\u0026rdquo; my work, been not sixteen when I wrote the first book, if the publishing industry were in a different place. Etc.\nNow it sounds like I\u0026rsquo;m making excuses, and maybe I am, but it strikes me that even if god flew down and handed me the best book deal in the world, I\u0026rsquo;d probably still have to have a day job.","title":"A Podium Of One's Own"},{"content":"I said I\u0026rsquo;d write a post about why this ale was amazing, and why I love these gatherings. Some of the readers of this site are also morris dancers and so will \u0026ldquo;get\u0026rdquo; some of the things that I talk about. If you have another \u0026ldquo;thing,\u0026rdquo; just unfocused your minds eye, and extrapolate these memories to your favorite annual gathering. I just got back and read posts about the Men\u0026rsquo;s Spring Knitting Retreat, which I know a number of you all were at, and I think these were similar sorts of events.1\nThis post is just a series of anecdotes of events and connections, with minimal amount of musing.\nThere were a lot of people in my general age cohort: 18 to 27. We were the heart of the after 3 am dancing, and that was generally a lot of fun. One person is, though a friend from a morris dancing context, someone who I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a not-insignifigant amount of time with outside of dance. All this makes dancing so much more fun. I remember once when he came to visit me at college (where I didn\u0026rsquo;t dance much, and didn\u0026rsquo;t talk much about dancing except in)\nI remember one time sitting around with these folks and just talking about normal people things, and thinking, \u0026ldquo;I like you all a lot.\u0026rdquo; And it was good. We had sort of congregated on a massage table that someone had set up in the corner of the dining room and were helping each other stretch and it was very nice.\nThese gatherings aren\u0026rsquo;t the kind of thing that\u0026rsquo;s sustainable long term, like it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work if it were longer than three days every year, but that\u0026rsquo;s ok too. It\u0026rsquo;s a situation where lots of sort of transcendent experiences are primed to happen, and too much of it, and you don\u0026rsquo;t realize how special it is.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been to the past seven of these gatherings (which have been going on for 27 years I think), my mother has missed two of them--including (most importantly for this story,) the last one. I should also subtitle that my emergency-back-up-mom (Hi Judy!) goes to these as well, and we\u0026rsquo;re all on the same team, etc. etc.\nOn the first night I asked someone to go get my mother (who was in the women\u0026rsquo;s buck room) and she went looking for Judy. Which embarrassed her terribly, but the rest of us found very funny. And it happened to my mom a couple of times, where she\u0026rsquo;d say \u0026ldquo;my son does so and so,\u0026rdquo; and they\u0026rsquo;d ask \u0026ldquo;who\u0026rsquo;s your son?\u0026rdquo; and she\u0026rsquo;d say \u0026ldquo;tycho,\u0026rdquo; and they\u0026rsquo;d be surprised, because they clearly thought that my mom was Judy. It happened in reverse a couple times as well, which I was equally amused about.\nSteven\u0026rsquo;s Joy of Six+: I got to watch this absurd but truly amazing moment of dance.\nThis typifies one of the things that I so adore about this weekend: it\u0026rsquo;s so clearly about having fun and dancing for other dancers.\nLike getting the opportunity to dances that my team doesn\u0026rsquo;t do, for fun. While people were concerned about \u0026ldquo;getting it right,\u0026rdquo; it was never as if you were being judged for getting something wrong.\nLike, when Steven\u0026rsquo;s team did splitters and turned their baseball caps backwards/to the side so that the bills wouldn\u0026rsquo;t interact as they leaped toward each other, everyone knew what that took.\nA woman at some point had her knitting out and I was admiring it and this guy who is a great dancer, with a lot of experience and reputation was sitting near by and asked if I was getting a lesson, and I said, \u0026ldquo;oh no, [pause] in fact, I\u0026rsquo;m a way better knitter than I am a morris dancer.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;And you\u0026rsquo;re a pretty good morris dancer,\u0026rdquo; he said. (This meant a lot to me.)\nI shrugged. I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair assessment. My mother agreed with my judgement of these things.\nThere were a couple of \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; people that I adopted and encouraged, and it felt really good to play this role. There were a couple of girls that I would push to get into dances, even if they didn\u0026rsquo;t know them, and I think they got up and did dances (and enjoyed them) that they wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have done without encouragement. That\u0026rsquo;s a good thing.\nTwo years ago, I had a minor dehydration issue. It was really hot, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t drink enough fast enough, and I\u0026rsquo;m skinny and a sweat-er, and it was hard to keep up, and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t paying attention. So I was pretty vigilant this time, and ended up drinking 5-6+ liters of water a day, which was almost enough. I only had a few hours where I fell behind.\nThere was a new person who started to look a little wilty, and I asked her if she was drinking water, and she said something, and I knew it wasn\u0026rsquo;t enough, and I was like \u0026ldquo;if you\u0026rsquo;re not peeing regularly, you\u0026rsquo;re not hydrating enough,\u0026rdquo; (good rule of thumb, by the way) and it was just a funny moment, but helpful.\nAlso, late at night, one of the dancing powerhouses (to my mind) looked all red and distracted during the lead up to a dance, and I leaned over to a friend and said, \u0026ldquo;B. looks dehydrated to you right?\u0026rdquo; The friend agreed and after the dance was over we called him over to us, and were like. \u0026ldquo;Drink water. Now. Don\u0026rsquo;t pass go.\u0026rdquo; It helped, he\u0026rsquo;s fine, and he even reported on it thankfully to my mother.\nPart of the reason why these weekends work so well is the pervasive feeling that everyone has your back. It was nice to be on the giving end of that for once.\nEven though the weekend is about dance, there are lots of great singers and lots of opportunities to sing. There\u0026rsquo;s a regular late night singing, which is sometimes fun, but there are also little ad-hoc moments where singing happens. Places where people congregate in a corner under a low ceiling, and sing favorite songs in folksy harmonies.\nThere were a couple of moments that stand out:\nUnderneath the great hall of the Nebraska state capital, there\u0026rsquo;s a low dome and everything is marble. We sang \u0026ldquo;Let Peace Prevail,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;We are a People,\u0026rdquo; by Robert W. Service (and Steven) set to music by David Perry, and a couple of other songs that were vaguely protest songs that I don\u0026rsquo;t remember. I got to see a number In the corner outside the dorm rooms, we sang \u0026ldquo;Rolling Home,\u0026rdquo; and something else that I also don\u0026rsquo;t remember. I was in the middle of this little cluster standing next to two basses, and it was divine. At the Sunday morning shape-note sing, I sang a song, and I got it. I don\u0026rsquo;t shape note much, and I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly good at it (circle = sol, square = la, triangle = fa, diamond = mi? Right?), but for the first time I sang and got it, and I could see and hear all the parts and how they worked. There\u0026rsquo;s this song that I think of as being sort of schizoid, in that the chorus sounds like it\u0026rsquo;s from different songs and the verses don\u0026rsquo;t really jive, but the most recognizable line is \u0026ldquo;let union be in all our hearts / let all our hearts beat on as one,\u0026rdquo; and we sang it once and I it was just right. Good moments.\nOne of our stops \u0026ldquo;on tour\u0026rdquo; sunday afternoon was at a museum, where we were basically dancing for ourselves, and somehow, I got to do a dance with a team that I absolutely adore. It\u0026rsquo;s also to the tune that Peter Bellamy set Kipling\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;A Pilgram\u0026rsquo;s Way,\u0026rdquo; (and thus the dance is appropriatly titled \u0026ldquo;The People\u0026rsquo;s Dance\u0026rdquo;) and it was a great pleasure and an honor to be able to do that.\nAt these ales--if anyone who doesn\u0026rsquo;t go is still reading--there are a list of dances provided and taught ahead of time that the group can do as a whole (Mass/ed Dances). Most of these are accessible dances picked from a limited repertoire, but most years there\u0026rsquo;s a more piquant dance, in the mix, which can be a lot of fun. This year it was, probably, my favoritest dance of all, one called \u0026ldquo;Queen\u0026rsquo;s Delight.\u0026rdquo;\nEarlier in the afternoon, I had danced it with an amazing dancer from the women\u0026rsquo;s team in the twin cities, on a little stage like platform, and long story short, she misjudged, on the last and climatic portion of the dance, and almost fell of the stage. Luckily she wasn\u0026rsquo;t hurt (there was a doctor in the set, who took over her position and finished up the dance for her). though she had a broken bell pad and a nasty bruise, and that afternoon when they called the dance again, I was standing next to her and said \u0026ldquo;we need to finish this right.\u0026rdquo;\nEnd result: I was thrown into this set with hotshot dancers. And it went off perfectly. Well maybe not perfectly, but all mistakes were recovered, and it was almost zone-like. At the end one of the people in the set--who is amazing--said \u0026ldquo;best dance/set at the ale,\u0026rdquo; and that felt really good. It was so much fun.\nLast year, as a commentary on a pub-stop where the only dancing area was behind a pool table in an area not suitable for real morris dancing, I instigated a skit where we did (I should say that morris dancing is most frequently done in sets of 6) a single set of a dance with 12 people dancing six positions, two layers deep.\nI threw around the idea of putting on the same skit only for 18 people (3 layers deep,) but we tried it at a pub with 14-16 people, or so and it totally wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have worked out.\nBut, the notion of doing dances this way, with \u0026ldquo;shadows\u0026rdquo; totally did catch on, and we tried a lot of dances this way at night, and it was a lot of fun. Durring one dance my shadow, lost me as I surged through a hey, and I heard him from the other side of the room say \u0026ldquo;hey, where\u0026rsquo;d you go,\u0026rdquo; and then saw him run out of the corner of my eye, around the outside of the set to catch up with me. It was funny, trust me.\nThe truth is that it\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work to shadow someone. Because you have to go the long way around curves to end up at the other side behind them, and you have to move fast.\nThere is also a class of figures where, facing across from someone, you pass by one shoulder, slide to the left or right behind them, and pass back to your original spot on the other side. We call this \u0026ldquo;back to back,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s the same basic thing as a \u0026ldquo;do si do\u0026rdquo; in contra dance (do si do, is apparently a corruption of the french for back-to-back, so yeah, same thing). Anyway, when there are shadows this figure with 4-6 people involved, is hilarious.\nStrangely it all seems to work out just fine.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all that I can think of right now. I\u0026rsquo;ll return to normal posting and working on things tomorrow. Thank you for your patience.\nOnward and Upward!\nI\u0026rsquo;m totally at the knitting retreat next year as long as: a) it\u0026rsquo;s not on memorial day; b) not the week after I start a new job and the day before my birthday.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reasons-why-the-ale-was-amazing/","summary":"I said I\u0026rsquo;d write a post about why this ale was amazing, and why I love these gatherings. Some of the readers of this site are also morris dancers and so will \u0026ldquo;get\u0026rdquo; some of the things that I talk about. If you have another \u0026ldquo;thing,\u0026rdquo; just unfocused your minds eye, and extrapolate these memories to your favorite annual gathering. I just got back and read posts about the Men\u0026rsquo;s Spring Knitting Retreat, which I know a number of you all were at, and I think these were similar sorts of events.1\nThis post is just a series of anecdotes of events and connections, with minimal amount of musing.\nThere were a lot of people in my general age cohort: 18 to 27. We were the heart of the after 3 am dancing, and that was generally a lot of fun. One person is, though a friend from a morris dancing context, someone who I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a not-insignifigant amount of time with outside of dance.","title":"Reasons Why the Ale Was Amazing"},{"content":"I have returned from a really quite amazing morris dance ale, that is an annual gathering of morris dancers that I\u0026rsquo;ve been going to every year for the past 7 years. Wow.\nI think I survived this one in better shape that I have the past few ones. I\u0026rsquo;m in slightly better shape. I\u0026rsquo;m utterly comfortable in these situations. The organization of the event was a) not my responsibility, and b) amazing. Everything worked and worked perfectly, and I had a blast.\nHaving said that, I don\u0026rsquo;t have much of a voice left from too much singing, but also probably most importantly calling dances, and I have a bum knee.1\nI also have a lot of really great stories, snippets, and memories that I want to collect in a longer post, as I remember and collect them. Keep your eyes peeled.\nI also got a call back about what would be an ideal job. Day long interview next week. Rock. More details as they prevail. I\u0026rsquo;ve got slacks and a good jacket. I\u0026rsquo;m debating a tie. This would be really good.\nStay tuned. Regular posting resumes soon.\nIn an effort to spare some of the details, we were practicing last wednesday and another dancer dogged left as I was trying to pass her by the left. End I fell on my knee. It didn\u0026rsquo;t hurt too bad at the time, and was just a nag by friday. I mostly danced without knee braces this year--which I attribute to newer shoes and orthotics--but this injury related issue continues to linger, of course complicated by the many hours of exuberant dancing. But I\u0026rsquo;m icing and wearing a knee brace and I think in a few days it should be healed.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/further-recovery/","summary":"I have returned from a really quite amazing morris dance ale, that is an annual gathering of morris dancers that I\u0026rsquo;ve been going to every year for the past 7 years. Wow.\nI think I survived this one in better shape that I have the past few ones. I\u0026rsquo;m in slightly better shape. I\u0026rsquo;m utterly comfortable in these situations. The organization of the event was a) not my responsibility, and b) amazing. Everything worked and worked perfectly, and I had a blast.\nHaving said that, I don\u0026rsquo;t have much of a voice left from too much singing, but also probably most importantly calling dances, and I have a bum knee.1\nI also have a lot of really great stories, snippets, and memories that I want to collect in a longer post, as I remember and collect them. Keep your eyes peeled.\nI also got a call back about what would be an ideal job.","title":"Further Recovery"},{"content":"I just wanted to post a little note.\nFirst of all I want to thank you all for the birthday notes. It\u0026rsquo;s great to hear from you, and it was great to hear from so many of you. Thanks.\nI\u0026rsquo;m out of town, and likely completely out of touch starting tomorrow morning blindingly early until Monday afternoon/evening. I\u0026rsquo;ll be at this, and it\u0026rsquo;s an event that I never take a computer to, so I won\u0026rsquo;t have anything meaningful to say to you until then.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll probably be harping on this for a while, but I put out a call on the twitter (with an offer of a beer, in compensation) for \u0026ldquo;Virginia Woolf Steampunk\u0026rdquo; stories. This is either for deritive Woolf fiction with a steam punk flare; or with better luck, Woolf as the heroine of a steampunk story. My friend Sam Tung posted the first, on facebook, I think though it was close, but Miss Violet had a good one as well.\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to hear more of these stories folks\u0026hellip; Keep them coming. Maybe we can do a collection?\nAnyway\u0026hellip; Have a good memorial day, and even though I plan to have a blast at my thing, I\u0026rsquo;ll confess to being a little jealous of the folks who are going to WisCon and Balticon. Enjoy, and I want full reports folks.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-program-note/","summary":"I just wanted to post a little note.\nFirst of all I want to thank you all for the birthday notes. It\u0026rsquo;s great to hear from you, and it was great to hear from so many of you. Thanks.\nI\u0026rsquo;m out of town, and likely completely out of touch starting tomorrow morning blindingly early until Monday afternoon/evening. I\u0026rsquo;ll be at this, and it\u0026rsquo;s an event that I never take a computer to, so I won\u0026rsquo;t have anything meaningful to say to you until then.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll probably be harping on this for a while, but I put out a call on the twitter (with an offer of a beer, in compensation) for \u0026ldquo;Virginia Woolf Steampunk\u0026rdquo; stories. This is either for deritive Woolf fiction with a steam punk flare; or with better luck, Woolf as the heroine of a steampunk story. My friend Sam Tung posted the first, on facebook, I think though it was close, but Miss Violet had a good one as well.","title":"A Program Note"},{"content":"Overheard this past week:\n\u0026ldquo;I think because queers (guys specifically) mostly don\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to be teenagers--with the flirting and the sex experimentation and what not--when they\u0026rsquo;re actually teenagers, we spend a lot of time after we\u0026rsquo;re teenagers fumbling through our love lives acting like teenagers even though we know it\u0026rsquo;s not right, because we have to get it out someway,\u0026rdquo; I declared. My discussions with C. about of our romantic woes often began with broad decelerations about sociological phenomena.\nStrangely this was comforting.\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s a queer, thing--I sort of feel like I\u0026rsquo;m in the same place. I think that\u0026rsquo;s how everyone who was nonsexual in high school deals with their twenties,\u0026rdquo; she asserted. C. is often right about these things, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have to like it. I propose some theory of the nature of queer life, and she asserts that it\u0026rsquo;s more universal; almost always true, but far less exciting/original that way.\n\u0026ldquo;Remember how I used to call you \u0026lsquo;almost queer,\u0026rsquo; and you used to laugh at me for being absurd?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yes.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;This is what I meant.\u0026rdquo; I stare, but there\u0026rsquo;s probably a twinkle in my eye. She laughs, and I feel relieved, Making C. laugh is something I donate a lot of energy to.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s like we all have teenager to get out of our systems--\u0026rdquo; C. begins.\n\u0026ldquo;--and it takes forever because we know we should be beyond it by now.\u0026rdquo; I finish.\n\u0026ldquo;Imagine how awesome we\u0026rsquo;d be now if we got laid in high school.\u0026rdquo; C laments.\nNow I\u0026rsquo;m laughing, \u0026ldquo;I think it probably has less to do with the sex and more to do more with the flirting and crushing and all that good old trial and error romance stuff that folks do when they\u0026rsquo;re young.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Probably.\u0026rdquo; C. says after a moment. \u0026ldquo;So, speaking of what did our mututal crush say to you this time.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The usual,\u0026rdquo; I say, and roll my eyes. \u0026ldquo;G-d, I wonder how did I seem so together when we were in college,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Eh, it\u0026rsquo;s not him is it?\u0026rdquo; C. is uncanny.\n\u0026ldquo;Ok you can stop being psychic now.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I wonder why there are entire journals devoted to queer studies sometimes. Actually come to think about it, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of writing a paper on this subject. I like how even in my absence from academe, where I\u0026rsquo;m trying to relax and refresh as much as possible so I can build new connections and foundations when I get back to it in a few months/weeks, everything still seems to be connected.\nAlso while this conversation reflects--more or less--an actual conversation, it\u0026rsquo;s a format (albiet with more science fictional elements) that I\u0026rsquo;m playing with for a new project that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably launch sometime this summer. Does the ultra short, potentially serial, format appeal?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-sexual-experience/","summary":"Overheard this past week:\n\u0026ldquo;I think because queers (guys specifically) mostly don\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to be teenagers--with the flirting and the sex experimentation and what not--when they\u0026rsquo;re actually teenagers, we spend a lot of time after we\u0026rsquo;re teenagers fumbling through our love lives acting like teenagers even though we know it\u0026rsquo;s not right, because we have to get it out someway,\u0026rdquo; I declared. My discussions with C. about of our romantic woes often began with broad decelerations about sociological phenomena.\nStrangely this was comforting.\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s a queer, thing--I sort of feel like I\u0026rsquo;m in the same place. I think that\u0026rsquo;s how everyone who was nonsexual in high school deals with their twenties,\u0026rdquo; she asserted. C. is often right about these things, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have to like it. I propose some theory of the nature of queer life, and she asserts that it\u0026rsquo;s more universal; almost always true, but far less exciting/original that way.","title":"On Sexual Experience"},{"content":"I mentioned last week that I had been thinking about getting a new set of headphones for my birthday, but I managed to fix the cord on my old headphones in a spectacular sort of way, and came to the conclusion that I only have one head, and didn\u0026rsquo;t need two sets of headphones.\nI have a similar sort of story from a few days ago\u0026hellip;\nThe astute among you will notice that I\u0026rsquo;ve been at least a little interested in getting my act together to do a podcast for a while. I\u0026rsquo;ve done radio before, I\u0026rsquo;ve done some sound engineering, and it would be cool to bring these experiences together with my internet/blogging/reading fascination. I think it would let me interact with a larger/different audience, and it just seems like fun. I\u0026rsquo;ve also avoided doing a podcast for a long time because I\u0026rsquo;ve always felt that my poor old computer was too overburdened and the cheapish USB mics that been able to try out all sucked to my ear1 I\u0026rsquo;d and a litany of other excuses.\nAnyway, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d solved my problems with the discovery of this a pretty nifty digital audio recorder, with good mics, which makes up for what it lacks in ruggedness with versatility, and economy. I figured that if I didn\u0026rsquo;t really need to do anything other than upload the file with my computer it could handle it.\nI should interject that at the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m most interested in doing a podcast in the school of cory doctorow, which is \u0026ldquo;turn on a mic, and record for 20 to 40 minutes and then post it on the internet.\u0026rdquo; Anyway, I thought a portable recorder would be the ideal situation for this sort of problem\u0026hellip;\nOn a whim I hooked up the USB mic--that I had tried and failed to use for years--to the computer and\u0026hellip;. Hot damn. It worked. Really well. This my friends, is why accepting for wool, books and tea, I don\u0026rsquo;t really get much new stuff. I always manage to make the old stuff work. Even if I do like toys.\nSo nix the portable option, I\u0026rsquo;ll--when I have time--and it\u0026rsquo;ll be a few weeks, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably begin putting together a podcast\u0026hellip; Nothing formal, and at the moment it\u0026rsquo;s a second string project, but it\u0026rsquo;s on my mind, maybe it could be on yours as well.\nIn high school I was taught how to do sound engineering stuff at the local folk club, and I did it for a couple of years, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t really gotten back into it. But I do think in the end, it\u0026rsquo;s a bad idea to teach the people in front of the microphone what happens on the other side of the screen, because in most cases people who are talking or making music don\u0026rsquo;t know enough to notice a lot of really minor effects of the technology. And learning about these things just leads to neurotic behavior. For instance, I often think that fiddles sound wrong in concerts/dances and it makes my skin crawl.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/grudgingly-successful/","summary":"I mentioned last week that I had been thinking about getting a new set of headphones for my birthday, but I managed to fix the cord on my old headphones in a spectacular sort of way, and came to the conclusion that I only have one head, and didn\u0026rsquo;t need two sets of headphones.\nI have a similar sort of story from a few days ago\u0026hellip;\nThe astute among you will notice that I\u0026rsquo;ve been at least a little interested in getting my act together to do a podcast for a while. I\u0026rsquo;ve done radio before, I\u0026rsquo;ve done some sound engineering, and it would be cool to bring these experiences together with my internet/blogging/reading fascination. I think it would let me interact with a larger/different audience, and it just seems like fun. I\u0026rsquo;ve also avoided doing a podcast for a long time because I\u0026rsquo;ve always felt that my poor old computer was too overburdened and the cheapish USB mics that been able to try out all sucked to my ear1 I\u0026rsquo;d and a litany of other excuses.","title":"Grudgingly Successful"},{"content":"So there\u0026rsquo;s this book of knitting patterns called \u0026ldquo;classic knits for real women\u0026rdquo;\nI am naturally hesitant to get behind a book that\u0026rsquo;s pres\u0026lt;\u0026gt;upposes some notion of \u0026ldquo;real womanhood,\u0026rdquo; right? but this book has middle aged women on the cover which bodes well (white, admittedly, though it\u0026rsquo;s a British publication from a pretty rurally located company).1\nAnd the designs look to be simple, non-fashion designs, with a traditional edge, with good yarn, and what not: I think they\u0026rsquo;re using \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; in contrast to \u0026ldquo;couture fashion model,\u0026rdquo; which is a heart warming development.\nOn the one hand, the language kind of sucks, and on the other, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking rock on sweaters that people can wear.\nThoughts?\nSo it\u0026rsquo;s a global world, and there\u0026rsquo;s no excuse, but the company is HQ\u0026rsquo;d in Holmfirth or some such, in the north of England, So I\u0026rsquo;m prone to give them a little more leeway than I would otherwise.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-for-real-women/","summary":"So there\u0026rsquo;s this book of knitting patterns called \u0026ldquo;classic knits for real women\u0026rdquo;\nI am naturally hesitant to get behind a book that\u0026rsquo;s pres\u0026lt;\u0026gt;upposes some notion of \u0026ldquo;real womanhood,\u0026rdquo; right? but this book has middle aged women on the cover which bodes well (white, admittedly, though it\u0026rsquo;s a British publication from a pretty rurally located company).1\nAnd the designs look to be simple, non-fashion designs, with a traditional edge, with good yarn, and what not: I think they\u0026rsquo;re using \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; in contrast to \u0026ldquo;couture fashion model,\u0026rdquo; which is a heart warming development.\nOn the one hand, the language kind of sucks, and on the other, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking rock on sweaters that people can wear.\nThoughts?\nSo it\u0026rsquo;s a global world, and there\u0026rsquo;s no excuse, but the company is HQ\u0026rsquo;d in Holmfirth or some such, in the north of England, So I\u0026rsquo;m prone to give them a little more leeway than I would otherwise.","title":"Knitting for *Real Women*"},{"content":"Hah. Today is my birthday. I seem to have made it through another year.\nAs an interesting side point, I think I got through 21 without using the privilege to buy buy alcohol at all, though I was carded to get into music venues and the like a few times. Just kinda funny.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been a tough year, I\u0026rsquo;d say on the whole. The graduate school rejection--to mention nothing of the utterly painful application process. Some frustrating and long-lived knitting projects. Employment has been erratic and frustrating. The blog has been really fun, and while I did get back into writing this year, but I think both suffered as I was dealing with school crap. Having said that things are starting to look up.\nBut the great thing is that things are feeling more and more together. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a little, basically whenever I can get a free moment for the past week. I have a job at least till the end of August, and I have a long range plan that looks like it might just work. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that.\nI think \u0026ldquo;Onward and Upward!\u0026rdquo; is particularly fitting in this circumstance.\nFor a long time I\u0026rsquo;ve dedicated a certain degree of energy in trying to looking older, because it\u0026rsquo;s useful, because it\u0026rsquo;s fun to pass, because I could. I suspect that uncovering all of the reasoning behind that one is beyond the scope of this entry. In any case.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve realized, both by watching people out in the world, and by looking at the mirror, that for the first time in a long time, I basically look as old as I feel. I think. Actually as I type that I\u0026rsquo;m a little worried that I think I\u0026rsquo;m a bit younger than I am, because when I see people that I don\u0026rsquo;t know who are probably about my age in their natural habitat, I almost always feel younger.\nIn any case, I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a good year. It better be.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/another-one/","summary":"Hah. Today is my birthday. I seem to have made it through another year.\nAs an interesting side point, I think I got through 21 without using the privilege to buy buy alcohol at all, though I was carded to get into music venues and the like a few times. Just kinda funny.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been a tough year, I\u0026rsquo;d say on the whole. The graduate school rejection--to mention nothing of the utterly painful application process. Some frustrating and long-lived knitting projects. Employment has been erratic and frustrating. The blog has been really fun, and while I did get back into writing this year, but I think both suffered as I was dealing with school crap. Having said that things are starting to look up.\nBut the great thing is that things are feeling more and more together. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a little, basically whenever I can get a free moment for the past week.","title":"Another One"},{"content":"Hey everyone,\nI hope this weekend finds you well. I\u0026rsquo;m still in the middle of the crazy busy period of my life. I suppose this is it\u0026rsquo;s way of finding balance. I haven\u0026rsquo;t written a journal post in a while so here goes\u0026hellip;\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot. Full time gainful employment, plus maybe as much as 8 hours at the yarn store (teaching and regular work). Also since there\u0026rsquo;s a big morris dancing gathering in a week I\u0026rsquo;ve been dancing one sort or another 4 times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday). It\u0026rsquo;s both really invigorating and tiring, and I hope that I can keep energy up.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;ve applied for a job that would keep me here (not a bad thing, particularly given the job) and I really want it, though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what my chances are. I\u0026rsquo;ve resolved to not pay much attention to job searching for at least two more weeks and any academic thing other than existing projects and possibly literature reading for at least another month.\n3. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty resolved at the moment to work on this new fiction site/blog that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about. I\u0026rsquo;ve begun sketching out plans, organizational details, thinking about names, and of course, doing some fiction writing. I\u0026rsquo;m sketching out a story set in a sort of \u0026ldquo;rear frontier\u0026rdquo; colony world. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of existential and dark and space opera-y in a very tychoish way. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be awesome, both the site (which will have all sorts of stuff on it,) and the story. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about names and I have a good one, so with a little more time in development, I\u0026rsquo;m excited. That\u0026rsquo;s all.\n4. Defiantly getting a new cat sometime the week after next. Maybe two. Probably two, actually. Cats are cool. Kittens are really cool.\n5. I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting all of about a row and a half a day on the sweater, it\u0026rsquo;s coming along. Pictures soon for sure, but it\u0026rsquo;s slow going, and at this point in my life where I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing more, and thinking about that, the knitting seems to take a back seat, which isn\u0026rsquo;t ideal, but it\u0026rsquo;s something that needs to be addressed.\nKeeping busy is a good thing, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced. I think at this very instant, I\u0026rsquo;m a touch too busy, bit I know that this too will sort itself out--as all things do--and I\u0026rsquo;ll be in a good place.\nThanks for reading, and of course stay tuned.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/remembrance-of-lost-weeks/","summary":"Hey everyone,\nI hope this weekend finds you well. I\u0026rsquo;m still in the middle of the crazy busy period of my life. I suppose this is it\u0026rsquo;s way of finding balance. I haven\u0026rsquo;t written a journal post in a while so here goes\u0026hellip;\n1. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot. Full time gainful employment, plus maybe as much as 8 hours at the yarn store (teaching and regular work). Also since there\u0026rsquo;s a big morris dancing gathering in a week I\u0026rsquo;ve been dancing one sort or another 4 times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday). It\u0026rsquo;s both really invigorating and tiring, and I hope that I can keep energy up.\n2. I\u0026rsquo;ve applied for a job that would keep me here (not a bad thing, particularly given the job) and I really want it, though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what my chances are. I\u0026rsquo;ve resolved to not pay much attention to job searching for at least two more weeks and any academic thing other than existing projects and possibly literature reading for at least another month.","title":"remembrance of lost weeks"},{"content":"With a title like the \u0026ldquo;Daily Grind,\u0026rdquo; I suspect you\u0026rsquo;re expecting a post about how I\u0026rsquo;m acclimating to my new 9-5 job. Wrong. I think this one is more about publishing schedules in new media, but, it\u0026rsquo;s probably a lot more connected than I want to think about.\nI suppose first off, I should cop to the fact that I am totally guilty--when I know I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in crunch time--of writing entries in runs of six or so, and then posting them out one by one, so that the blog maintains a daily publication schedule, and I can put energy when it needs to go.\nSecond off, I should note that I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to Jared Axelrod\u0026rsquo;s\u0026rsquo;s now daily (or almost compleatly daily, at least of ep ~60-70 where I am now) podcast \u0026ldquo;The Voice of Free Planet X.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to VoFPX for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always liked it (so if you don\u0026rsquo;t listen to it, you should it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff), but Jared\u0026rsquo;s said something interesting recently--by my frame--that I want to reflect upon.\nJared reported having some trouble keeping a weekly posting schedule, because it was something that you could put off if things got tight and still--more or less--keep your schedule. In contrast, you can\u0026rsquo;t really put off something that is supposed to happen daily more than a few hours or else you don\u0026rsquo;t meet the deadline. I\u0026rsquo;d also add that in a lot of cases as creators we say--at least to our selves--if it comes out weekly it has to represent a weeks worth of work, whereas if it comes out daily it represents--in most cases--proportionally less work, and just has to exist.\nAnd the truth about writing, and creating--particularly on the internet--is that success is pretty random. Having a story, or a site, podcast, or a video that \u0026ldquo;works\u0026rdquo; and becomes popular is not the effect of some transcendental skill, and even a not incredibly strongly correlation to skill; but rather a function of the quantity of output. You got to keep putting things out, keep making things, and the more you make the more likely something is to really \u0026ldquo;make it.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen blogs first started, everyone praised them because they made publishing online really easy. You wrote something and hit post. That was it. For the most part blogs (and other related media) succeed as we hit the post button more. And this corresponds to our reading style. It takes just as long to read a blog post with meticulously crafted prose as it does to read one that was written in the morning on half a cup of coffee. And the chances are, that posting frequently will lead to more success (where success equals audience size) because people will check regularly updated sites more often than sites that update less frequently.\nAs a result of this I\u0026rsquo;ve made the observation on a number of occasions, that while a firm and regular posting schedule will cement and stabilize a your audience/readership of plus or minus a few percent, you can\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;jump\u0026rdquo; levels simply by increasing volume of content generation.\nSo I guess there are a couple of threads to this argument the \u0026ldquo;schedules are good for audiences\u0026rdquo; and the \u0026ldquo;schedules are good for creation.\u0026rdquo; Having trounced the former sufficiently, lets move on to the later.\nI think clearly we all work at different speeds, and we do different things, I think I do better with this kind of scheduling. It\u0026rsquo;s helped the blogging, for me, and projects like 365 Tomorrows, and Thing a Week, j.r. blackwell\u0026rsquo;s photos and so forth, all seem to be creative successes (and I suspect distribution-increasing successes as well.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s just a hair brained idea at the moment, but I think it might be fun to start a project like this for the fiction writing that I\u0026rsquo;m not doing at the moment. A daily routine would have the effect of a) getting things out there. b) inspiring an increase in productivity, and writerly practice. Also, I think I\u0026rsquo;m likely as busy at the moment as I\u0026rsquo;m likely to be at any time in the next couple of years, and I think I feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve \u0026ldquo;got\u0026rdquo; the blogging rhythm down, and it\u0026rsquo;s time to add a new project. Just a thought, and I\u0026rsquo;m making no promises, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure. More musings in the future.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/daily-grind/","summary":"With a title like the \u0026ldquo;Daily Grind,\u0026rdquo; I suspect you\u0026rsquo;re expecting a post about how I\u0026rsquo;m acclimating to my new 9-5 job. Wrong. I think this one is more about publishing schedules in new media, but, it\u0026rsquo;s probably a lot more connected than I want to think about.\nI suppose first off, I should cop to the fact that I am totally guilty--when I know I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in crunch time--of writing entries in runs of six or so, and then posting them out one by one, so that the blog maintains a daily publication schedule, and I can put energy when it needs to go.\nSecond off, I should note that I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to Jared Axelrod\u0026rsquo;s\u0026rsquo;s now daily (or almost compleatly daily, at least of ep ~60-70 where I am now) podcast \u0026ldquo;The Voice of Free Planet X.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to VoFPX for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;ve always liked it (so if you don\u0026rsquo;t listen to it, you should it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff), but Jared\u0026rsquo;s said something interesting recently--by my frame--that I want to reflect upon.","title":"Daily Grind"},{"content":"I said that I\u0026rsquo;d write a post about headphones, given my latest headphone recovery project. I have a few thoughts about this so here goes\u0026hellip;\nI think having a good set of reasonably isolating headphones is one of the most important pieces of technology that an aspiring writer should have. Not ear buds, I\u0026rsquo;m talking big, over the ear headphones that block out most of the background noise. \u0026ldquo;Active Noise Canceling\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t required (though mine have it, I don\u0026rsquo;t often turn it on). And since you\u0026rsquo;re likely to wear them a bunch, headphones that are comfortable have reasonably good sound quality.\nA good set of headphones is to my mind, crucial for most group living situations, like dorms--particularly where there isn\u0026rsquo;t shared music interests. Even if music selection isn\u0026rsquo;t an interest, having headphones allows independent sleeping schedules and at least let me set up a more distraction free writing and studying environment.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s kind of like the perfect personal office. And putting the headphones on can act as a personal marker to separate \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;play\u0026rdquo; times (particularly relevant for me as a writer, as \u0026ldquo;dicking around on wikipedia\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;writing,\u0026rdquo; are not otherwise substantially contextually discrete activities.) Though I write whilst listening to music (I basically listen to music constantly) I do sometimes just use the headphones as sort of dorky earplugs, I\u0026rsquo;ll confess: just to get the isolating and ritual effects.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s possible to get the headphone effect with \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; isolation, and it\u0026rsquo;s possible to establish rituals using other objects/habits, but it\u0026rsquo;s harder. And you can\u0026rsquo;t really argue with success.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/headphones/","summary":"I said that I\u0026rsquo;d write a post about headphones, given my latest headphone recovery project. I have a few thoughts about this so here goes\u0026hellip;\nI think having a good set of reasonably isolating headphones is one of the most important pieces of technology that an aspiring writer should have. Not ear buds, I\u0026rsquo;m talking big, over the ear headphones that block out most of the background noise. \u0026ldquo;Active Noise Canceling\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t required (though mine have it, I don\u0026rsquo;t often turn it on). And since you\u0026rsquo;re likely to wear them a bunch, headphones that are comfortable have reasonably good sound quality.\nA good set of headphones is to my mind, crucial for most group living situations, like dorms--particularly where there isn\u0026rsquo;t shared music interests. Even if music selection isn\u0026rsquo;t an interest, having headphones allows independent sleeping schedules and at least let me set up a more distraction free writing and studying environment.","title":"Headphones"},{"content":"So we\u0026rsquo;re in a sort of \u0026ldquo;long stretch\u0026rdquo; part of the Latvian-Dreaming sweater. But I just wanted to post something to remind you that you can start this any time and that I haven\u0026rsquo;t forgotten about the project (it is in fact, basically my own project at the moment).\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the plan:\nThe project materials (PDF chart, excel file with a more modifiable copy of the chart, a read me file explaining how to read the chart) are located here. Download them now! Obtain yarn. Fingering weight to DK, in two colors. You\u0026rsquo;ll probably need a chunk more of the background/darker color. I\u0026rsquo;m bad at predicting this. I got about 1425 yards of each color, but I had the end of a skein leftover from a previous project of the background color. I think this should be enough, and I anticipate significant leftovers. This also depends a lot on factors like your gauge and any resizing. Determine your gauge and the number of stitches that you need to get a sweater that you fits you. Hope that your number is close to 340. If it\u0026rsquo;s a bit smaller, don\u0026rsquo;t sweat it, if it\u0026rsquo;s a bit bigger, add a couple of stitches at each underarm before stitch 1 on the chart. If it\u0026rsquo;s more or more than a few stitches less, read this. If you want a ribbing cast on 320 and knit in two color ribbing for a couple of inches, then knit a row in the background color and increase to 340 like so. And/or adjust. If you don\u0026rsquo;t want a ribbing, or want to think about about it yet, provisionally cast on 340 (or however many number of stitches you need) and begin knitting the pattern in the next row. Ignore anything I said previously about 344 stitches. My fault. After you\u0026rsquo;ve increased, begin knitting the pattern, following the chart, and the instructions for chart knitting included with the chart. You\u0026rsquo;ll be doing this for a long time. Ask any questions you still have. (Before you ask about making a cardigan, read this.) Keep knitting. Other than follow the chart, I\u0026rsquo;m not doing anything until the sweater is 12 inches long. This is 3 inches from the underarm point. I\u0026rsquo;ll get to what happens here in an upcoming post. Knit in good health!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/latvian-dreaming-status-1/","summary":"So we\u0026rsquo;re in a sort of \u0026ldquo;long stretch\u0026rdquo; part of the Latvian-Dreaming sweater. But I just wanted to post something to remind you that you can start this any time and that I haven\u0026rsquo;t forgotten about the project (it is in fact, basically my own project at the moment).\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the plan:\nThe project materials (PDF chart, excel file with a more modifiable copy of the chart, a read me file explaining how to read the chart) are located here. Download them now! Obtain yarn. Fingering weight to DK, in two colors. You\u0026rsquo;ll probably need a chunk more of the background/darker color. I\u0026rsquo;m bad at predicting this. I got about 1425 yards of each color, but I had the end of a skein leftover from a previous project of the background color. I think this should be enough, and I anticipate significant leftovers. This also depends a lot on factors like your gauge and any resizing.","title":"Latvian Dreaming Status 1"},{"content":"I should preface this review by saying that I\u0026rsquo;m not a huge fan of Earl Grey tea. The flavoring can be overpowering, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get the tea to brew strong enough, to compensate for the really powerful flavor. At the same time, as a class of teas, I think bergamot-flavor works better with tea than many others. Though I\u0026rsquo;m fond of vanilla flavored black teas, I will admit that they don\u0026rsquo;t always work well.\nSo, having said that. English Tea No. 1, is bergamot-flavored but, the base is comparatively strong. So we end up with a rich, strong tea with what is really just a hint of bergamot. The tea also takes milk better than other Earl Grey-type teas, which I consider a plus.\nThis is a winner, without question.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also conveniently packaged (I was able to get foil wrapped bags) in a form that brews a good, large cup. In point of fact most of the remaining tea bags I have have found their way into my tea stash in my book bag, and are my choice \u0026ldquo;road tea.\u0026rdquo; Though I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ve even begun to horde them in my own way, which is high recommendation indeed.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tea-review-ahmad-english-tea-no-1/","summary":"I should preface this review by saying that I\u0026rsquo;m not a huge fan of Earl Grey tea. The flavoring can be overpowering, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get the tea to brew strong enough, to compensate for the really powerful flavor. At the same time, as a class of teas, I think bergamot-flavor works better with tea than many others. Though I\u0026rsquo;m fond of vanilla flavored black teas, I will admit that they don\u0026rsquo;t always work well.\nSo, having said that. English Tea No. 1, is bergamot-flavored but, the base is comparatively strong. So we end up with a rich, strong tea with what is really just a hint of bergamot. The tea also takes milk better than other Earl Grey-type teas, which I consider a plus.\nThis is a winner, without question.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also conveniently packaged (I was able to get foil wrapped bags) in a form that brews a good, large cup.","title":"Tea Review: Ahmad English Tea No. 1"},{"content":"As part of the \u0026ldquo;putting things in order,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m doing some very rough budgeting and prioritizing of expenses and projects in my world. I\u0026rsquo;m looking for jobs and trying to figure out my needs and what not. Turns out this is hard stuff.\nThis is in part difficult because I\u0026rsquo;m a pretty frugal person, I\u0026rsquo;m low key, I get a lot of clothes second hand (there are some great local second hand shops). And when you think about knitting as an entertainment (which it is) the dollars to hours ratio is pretty good. Same with spinning, only potentially more so. Same with books and reading. And writing is, well free. And while I\u0026rsquo;m pretty up to date with what\u0026rsquo;s happening with technology, I have a 3+ year old computer, a 3 year old cell phone, a somewhat newer iPod (that I totally use constantly). Embarrassingly I don\u0026rsquo;t even have my own digital camera, and don\u0026rsquo;t seemed too inclined to get one, (I have a 20 year old film camera that I don\u0026rsquo;t use much though!) You get the picture.\nAs a sort of thought experiment, I made a list of \u0026ldquo;things I would buy if money were no object.\u0026rdquo; Not extravagances exactly, but all of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve said in the last couple of years \u0026ldquo;you know it\u0026rsquo;d be nice if I had X.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m not going to list these things because that would be absurd, but it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to see what I listed. A surpassing number of things were I\u0026rsquo;d estimate 20 dollars or less, and at least 80% of the list were things that were 100 dollars or less. And most of these things are piddly like (a desk chair which is two inches taller--which I suspect doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist--and leans back a little, or a sippy-lid for a nalgene bottle.) These are things, that I mostly need to just drag myself to the store to get done--complicated only by the fact that I sort of hate shopping.\nI think this would make me a lousy lottery winner. It\u0026rsquo;s really hard to spend a few million dollars on things under 100 dollars. Reminds me of Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s story Other People\u0026rsquo;s Money (podcast here) a little.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll write more about headphones in another post, but my writing headphones have been ill for the past six months or more. Their detatchable cord had been chewed by a certain long dog and while this didn\u0026rsquo;t ruin the cord, it did hasten it\u0026rsquo;s demise. As I said the cord was detachable, which lead me to believe that it was also replaceable. Unfortunately, the manufacturer used a non-standard attachment size--not the connector which was perfectly standard, but the end was a bit smaller than the generic cords.\nSo I had this very nice set of headphones, and no way to reliably plug them in, and I had given up on them, and had convinced myself to ask for them as a birthday gift (Next Monday). As I started to do some research looking for the right replacement pair I became confused and disgruntled (reading the musing of audiophiles often does this to me). So in frustration I was finally driven to take a blade to one of the ends of a mini-stereo cord. and\u0026hellip; Lo and behold, I was able to make it fit without compromising function.\nErgo. Good as new headphones. In fact, better than new headphones, as the cord I have now is thicker and not broken and therefore more conductive, so the sound is noticeably better. I\u0026rsquo;m happy. On the downside I don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what I want for my birthday now. Sigh.\nI hope you\u0026rsquo;re having a good day. My presence here will be sporadic over the next several days, but I think I should be able to keep in touch.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/frugality/","summary":"As part of the \u0026ldquo;putting things in order,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m doing some very rough budgeting and prioritizing of expenses and projects in my world. I\u0026rsquo;m looking for jobs and trying to figure out my needs and what not. Turns out this is hard stuff.\nThis is in part difficult because I\u0026rsquo;m a pretty frugal person, I\u0026rsquo;m low key, I get a lot of clothes second hand (there are some great local second hand shops). And when you think about knitting as an entertainment (which it is) the dollars to hours ratio is pretty good. Same with spinning, only potentially more so. Same with books and reading. And writing is, well free. And while I\u0026rsquo;m pretty up to date with what\u0026rsquo;s happening with technology, I have a 3+ year old computer, a 3 year old cell phone, a somewhat newer iPod (that I totally use constantly). Embarrassingly I don\u0026rsquo;t even have my own digital camera, and don\u0026rsquo;t seemed too inclined to get one, (I have a 20 year old film camera that I don\u0026rsquo;t use much though!","title":"Frugality"},{"content":"Egad, I\u0026rsquo;ve not gone this long without posting in a long time.\nI\u0026rsquo;m well, worry not kind readers. I\u0026rsquo;ve been dealing with family stuff, and some sort of lingering cold for the past week and haven\u0026rsquo;t had enough time all in one place to get much knitting or spinning done, let alone writing.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also aware that I\u0026rsquo;m starting a summer work contract for the second year in a row with the same place. And about the time I started last year, I started this website. Even though I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging a long time, and I\u0026rsquo;ve folded in old archives into this site, in a very real way, we\u0026rsquo;re pretty close to an anniversary. Not quite yet, because a year ago (almost exactly) I was busy graduating from college. And I started the job sometime in mid/late june. But anyway. Yes.\nAlso my birthday is in a week. I\u0026rsquo;ve not prepared myself from this. Yes\nI can safely report:\nI have seen my new cat-to-be-probably. It\u0026rsquo;s fuzzy. And splotchy. The\n: mama-cat is long haired, but it\u0026rsquo;s unclear if the kitten will be as well. Very cute. Very social. Too soon to tell much more. Three more weeks till he comes home.\nI\u0026rsquo;m teaching a lot of knitting and what not in the next few weeks.\n: Egad.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve knit about 7 inches (including ribbing) of the Latvian Dreaming\n: Sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s slow going. I\u0026rsquo;ve not been able to concentrate on it very much.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to a lot of podcasts of late and have found this\n: to be productive.\nI really need to clean my office. That\u0026rsquo;s the project for tomorrow.\nThe morris dance ale is soon, I am excited.\nExcitement.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be more coherent later, likely as not.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/yep-still-alive-anniversaries/","summary":"Egad, I\u0026rsquo;ve not gone this long without posting in a long time.\nI\u0026rsquo;m well, worry not kind readers. I\u0026rsquo;ve been dealing with family stuff, and some sort of lingering cold for the past week and haven\u0026rsquo;t had enough time all in one place to get much knitting or spinning done, let alone writing.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also aware that I\u0026rsquo;m starting a summer work contract for the second year in a row with the same place. And about the time I started last year, I started this website. Even though I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging a long time, and I\u0026rsquo;ve folded in old archives into this site, in a very real way, we\u0026rsquo;re pretty close to an anniversary. Not quite yet, because a year ago (almost exactly) I was busy graduating from college. And I started the job sometime in mid/late june. But anyway. Yes.\nAlso my birthday is in a week. I\u0026rsquo;ve not prepared myself from this.","title":"Yep, Still Alive--Anniversaries"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned before that a lot of my neuroses surrounding productivity and creativity get enacted around the organization of my files on the computer, right?\nWell they do.\nI spend, probably way too much time thinking and considering the schemes that I name my files, their organization in relation to each other, their internal organization, the way their backed up. And so forth. The good thing is that I\u0026rsquo;m usually pretty happy with the way things are organized, and I tend to establish pretty flexible systems, but when I\u0026rsquo;m coming back to a couple projects after some time off or I\u0026rsquo;m restarting work on a project (at the beginning of a semester, say) I\u0026rsquo;m prone to clean house--as it were.\nAs the anxiety surrounding my past couple of months dragged on, and as that was wrapped up in a bunch of concerns about the state of my projects, I rearranged and reorganized things a few times, and for completely different reasons, got a lot of nothing done. Long story short, while I don\u0026rsquo;t like the way that the files were back in January, I also don\u0026rsquo;t like the way they are now.\nThe eternal debate is between putting a bunch of stuff (files/ideas) in a few baskets (folders/files) or putting a lot of little groups of stuff in a lot of baskets (folders/files). The bigger the baskets the more complex naming schemes have to be to keep the piles separate, but the chance that any one thing is in a specific basket is pretty high. So if there\u0026rsquo;s folders for \u0026ldquo;archives\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;current\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;output,\u0026rdquo; and you\u0026rsquo;re looking for an old file that you haven\u0026rsquo;t touched in a few weeks, it\u0026rsquo;s probably pretty likely that it\u0026rsquo;s in the archives folder. And what you\u0026rsquo;re working on is in current. But if you have a lot of little files, say you\u0026rsquo;re writing an essay, a knitting pattern, and a play, and all have several files, you need a pretty complex naming scheme to keep things together. And you have to have this scheme in place early, because otherwise, it\u0026rsquo;s a mess. In contrast, if you have 6 (or three) different folders (with their own subfolders) for different projects it becomes much easier to ignore a file/project if you think \u0026ldquo;ah, I\u0026rsquo;m not feeling very dramaturgical today.\u0026rdquo; So I hope that sets the stage.\nOnce upon a time, rather than having files and directories like I do now, I would use programs like Voodoopad which is a great piece of software, and I used it quite successfully for a long time. The end result was that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t really using it like you\u0026rsquo;re supposed to, and it magnified this problem, because moving pages around in the VP was more difficult than moving the files around. And all the other wiki programs seemed less suitable (I really hate web apps, don\u0026rsquo;t get me started.) But as I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing here recently, I think I\u0026rsquo;m ready for that kind of approach again.\nSo I think I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered the best of both worlds: ikiwiki. This is a program that reads files in the format that I like most (plain text, markdown) and then turns it into a blog. It basically works off of a flat file system except(!) it uses a couple of nifty CGI wrappers (on the webserver and as a post-commit hook) to use a versioning system like Subversion or Git, to keep track of everything. Works like a dream, and there are tons of plugins that work pretty well. I have it installed on my own machine, but I expect that once Joe and I get some stuff nailed down, I\u0026rsquo;ll have a copy of it running here for some community editing and more of my rough thoughts.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s hoping it all works out, I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/quickly-wiking-again/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned before that a lot of my neuroses surrounding productivity and creativity get enacted around the organization of my files on the computer, right?\nWell they do.\nI spend, probably way too much time thinking and considering the schemes that I name my files, their organization in relation to each other, their internal organization, the way their backed up. And so forth. The good thing is that I\u0026rsquo;m usually pretty happy with the way things are organized, and I tend to establish pretty flexible systems, but when I\u0026rsquo;m coming back to a couple projects after some time off or I\u0026rsquo;m restarting work on a project (at the beginning of a semester, say) I\u0026rsquo;m prone to clean house--as it were.\nAs the anxiety surrounding my past couple of months dragged on, and as that was wrapped up in a bunch of concerns about the state of my projects, I rearranged and reorganized things a few times, and for completely different reasons, got a lot of nothing done.","title":"Quickly Wiking Again"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good new post for tychoish today, it\u0026rsquo;s been eventful, and I seem to have about half a spare brain cell.\nI did however manage to get posts up for a couple of guest blogging things:\nA post on Zimmermania, with a finished picture of a sweater that I worked on a while back (I\u0026rsquo;m behind on sweater posting, it\u0026rsquo;s true)\u0026hellip; A post on the Feminist Science Fiction Blog about \u0026ldquo;the singularity\u0026rdquo; and possible theoretical interactions with feminist ideas. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of rambling, but a good start. I\u0026rsquo;ll be back plenty soon enough, you just wait and see.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/guesting-around/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good new post for tychoish today, it\u0026rsquo;s been eventful, and I seem to have about half a spare brain cell.\nI did however manage to get posts up for a couple of guest blogging things:\nA post on Zimmermania, with a finished picture of a sweater that I worked on a while back (I\u0026rsquo;m behind on sweater posting, it\u0026rsquo;s true)\u0026hellip; A post on the Feminist Science Fiction Blog about \u0026ldquo;the singularity\u0026rdquo; and possible theoretical interactions with feminist ideas. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of rambling, but a good start. I\u0026rsquo;ll be back plenty soon enough, you just wait and see.","title":"Guesting Around"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another informational piece for people interested in knitting the Latvian Dreaming sweater.\nAfter the cardigan modification, the most requested mod to this sweater is \u0026ldquo;how can I increase the stitch count,\u0026rdquo; for people who want to knit the sweater at small gauges (8 stitches to the inch) but need larger sizes. Since I\u0026rsquo;m awkwardly small I made a point of knitting this at a particularly small gauge (9.5 stitches per inch) to help make the pattern more accessible for the more normally-sized.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s only so much that one can do with guage, particularly if you come into a project with a yarn picked out and a comfortable gauge established. This is further complicated by an important design principal that we are all wise to follow: keep the patterns centered. That is, make sure that the design is symmetrical on all sides. In practical terms this means that for every stitch you add or subtract to the chart, you have to add or subtract 4 to the total stitch count. As the repeats have 16 stitches, adding even half a repeat to the pattern means adding 32 stitches total.\nNote: there\u0026rsquo;s already one stitch in background color that isnot* included in the chart before stitch number 1 on both sides.*\nBut don\u0026rsquo;t fear, armed with a clear notion of your gauge and your desired size, we can tweak the stitch count to something more useable. Here are a few of these strategies:\nPut in stripes in the side panels. If you add stitches under either underarm you only need to add two stitches, and if you keep them in alternating colors the floats will be secured, and all will be well. You can add anywhere from 1 to 5 or 6 (2 to 10 or 12 total) stitches to the number of stitches. This option can be combined for fine tuning with any of the other options. As a side stripe, add stitches 9 to 16 from the chart to the beginning of both sides. You can drop the uncharted background stitch or add a second stitch on the other side of the panel This will allow the first pattern to balance on the side more clearly. This will bring the total number of stitches to: 356 (if you add the second border stitch) or 352 (if you omit border stitches). If you take out border stitches there will be a jog at the beginning of the round. Replace the uncharted side stitch with stitches 24 through 44. This brings the total number of stitches to 378. If you need to size (either as part of fine tuning or as part of making it smaller) down stitch 24 and 44 on the chart can be dropped without much error, and (this brings the stitch count down to 336). If you\u0026rsquo;re after 338 stitches, dropping stitch 44 on the chart shouldn\u0026rsquo;t disrupt anything (actually, I sort of wish that I\u0026rsquo;d done this, because I think it would look better). If you need to resize the pattern in a more massive way. then by all means add a repeat of stitches 45 through 60 on the chart before stitch 45, though this will bring the stitch count up to 404. Similarly you could consider adding a repeat of stitches 57-60 from the chart before stitch 45. This would bring the stitch count to 356. You may consider adding a half repeat of stitches 53 through 60 on the chart before stitch 45, though if you do this, I might recommend beginning the sweater/repeat on row 9, rather than row 1. Consider adding stitches or even additional patterns between stitch 24 and 25 and/or stitch 43 and 44. Remember that each stitch you add at one of these points accounts for a change in 4 total stitches. Buy Joyce\u0026rsquo;s Book for many great ideas for additional patterns. My design intention with this is to have the main interlocking pattern of stitches 45-85 cover the majority of the center of the design. I\u0026rsquo;ve been hesitant to suggest major modifications to the first pattern repeat, though you may feel more than welcome to toy around in this space if you want to add repeats. I included the Microsoft Excel file that I used to mock up the charts with the project materials and I encourage you to experiment (and share) your modifications.\nI hope this helps you reach a pattern that fits you better.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/strategies-for-upsizing/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another informational piece for people interested in knitting the Latvian Dreaming sweater.\nAfter the cardigan modification, the most requested mod to this sweater is \u0026ldquo;how can I increase the stitch count,\u0026rdquo; for people who want to knit the sweater at small gauges (8 stitches to the inch) but need larger sizes. Since I\u0026rsquo;m awkwardly small I made a point of knitting this at a particularly small gauge (9.5 stitches per inch) to help make the pattern more accessible for the more normally-sized.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s only so much that one can do with guage, particularly if you come into a project with a yarn picked out and a comfortable gauge established. This is further complicated by an important design principal that we are all wise to follow: keep the patterns centered. That is, make sure that the design is symmetrical on all sides. In practical terms this means that for every stitch you add or subtract to the chart, you have to add or subtract 4 to the total stitch count.","title":"Strategies for Upsizing"},{"content":"I survived the wedding. Though my ailment seems to be coalescing, hence the title.\nThe truth was that it was a nice, if by the book, sort of event, the ceremony was brief, the party didn\u0026rsquo;t drag on, and it was a pretty small gathering.\nI still hate weddings. And I developed a number of principals for better weddings:\nIf you can\u0026rsquo;t combine the ceremony with the toasts at the reception, there\u0026rsquo;s a problem. Weddings are social events, and the major function of a wedding is for a community to celebrate and \u0026ldquo;bless\u0026rdquo; a partnership. The toasts at the reception seem like the ideal place for this. I suggested at first that we find a way to integrate eating into the service, but the minister on hand noted that the goyem called this \u0026ldquo;communion,\u0026rdquo; and I suddenly felt less creative, so we\u0026rsquo;re back to the first option. Ministers are unnecessary, except in cases where the officiant is basically part of the wedding party, a mutual friend or one of the attendants if there were an odd number of bridesmaids or some-such. I mean, I think that it\u0026rsquo;s not too radical to suggest that if people really want to get married, they should be capable of doing it themselves, at least ceremonially. Wear jeans. Duh. Gotta have morris dancers. I could blather on here about how the marriage laws are antiquated in many ways (they are), or how there needs to be a cultural re-imagining of marriage (there does), but I think I won\u0026rsquo;t. It\u0026rsquo;s a sort of tired topic, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what reenacting this debate would do here.\nAnd the truth is, that on some greater level even if I think marriage--particularly the rituals associated with it--is foolish, I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly opposed to specific marriages, particularly if they\u0026rsquo;re grounded in independent and freethinking.\nBut weddings still suck.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-sickness/","summary":"I survived the wedding. Though my ailment seems to be coalescing, hence the title.\nThe truth was that it was a nice, if by the book, sort of event, the ceremony was brief, the party didn\u0026rsquo;t drag on, and it was a pretty small gathering.\nI still hate weddings. And I developed a number of principals for better weddings:\nIf you can\u0026rsquo;t combine the ceremony with the toasts at the reception, there\u0026rsquo;s a problem. Weddings are social events, and the major function of a wedding is for a community to celebrate and \u0026ldquo;bless\u0026rdquo; a partnership. The toasts at the reception seem like the ideal place for this. I suggested at first that we find a way to integrate eating into the service, but the minister on hand noted that the goyem called this \u0026ldquo;communion,\u0026rdquo; and I suddenly felt less creative, so we\u0026rsquo;re back to the first option. Ministers are unnecessary, except in cases where the officiant is basically part of the wedding party, a mutual friend or one of the attendants if there were an odd number of bridesmaids or some-such.","title":"In Sickness"},{"content":"This is a tea review that I should have written a long time ago, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been putting it off, for one reason or another. And then I realized that the box was almost empty. I guess I like it.\nThe tea is Taylors and Harrogate\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Yorkshire Tea.\u0026rdquo; I think they make a \u0026ldquo;Yorkshire Gold\u0026rdquo; blend which may be different. I got this in bags; but you might find it in some other form. This past time was also the second time that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten it, again, another good sign.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also, with this tea, learned a powerful lesson. Brew strong and add milk. This stuff is sturdy enough (as most English style black teas) that it requires milk no matter what, which means brew it as strong as you can, and then add milk (rather than try and find the sweet spot where you can manage it without milk, because you\u0026rsquo;re too lazy to add milk. The result is pretty invariably a good cup.\nParticularly so with this. It\u0026rsquo;s strong, there\u0026rsquo;s lots of flavor, \u0026ldquo;robust\u0026rdquo; I guess they call it, but there\u0026rsquo;s no bite (so \u0026ldquo;smooth.\u0026rdquo;) I don\u0026rsquo;t really have the proper linguistic tools for discussing this, with \u0026ldquo;notes\u0026rdquo; and what not, which I always found foolish anyway. There are a lot of teas that are pretty good but there\u0026rsquo;s an element of the taste that just feels a bit off, and that\u0026rsquo;s delightfully not the case here. On the upside\nI think the next up is the same company\u0026rsquo;s english breakfast tea. I\u0026rsquo;m excited about this. Really I am.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tea-review-yorkshire-tea/","summary":"This is a tea review that I should have written a long time ago, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been putting it off, for one reason or another. And then I realized that the box was almost empty. I guess I like it.\nThe tea is Taylors and Harrogate\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Yorkshire Tea.\u0026rdquo; I think they make a \u0026ldquo;Yorkshire Gold\u0026rdquo; blend which may be different. I got this in bags; but you might find it in some other form. This past time was also the second time that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten it, again, another good sign.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also, with this tea, learned a powerful lesson. Brew strong and add milk. This stuff is sturdy enough (as most English style black teas) that it requires milk no matter what, which means brew it as strong as you can, and then add milk (rather than try and find the sweet spot where you can manage it without milk, because you\u0026rsquo;re too lazy to add milk.","title":"Tea Review: Yorkshire Tea"},{"content":"So I have finally finished with the ribbing of my sweater.\nI knitted 20 rounds of ribbing, which is likely more than you\u0026rsquo;ll need, becuase I\u0026rsquo;m knitting with such fine yarn. Actually, I think 16-18 would have been enough, but 20 seemed like a good number. I think the target depth for ribbings is like 2-2.5 inches. Mine is 2.75, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ll live.\nAnd then I increased. Remember I cast on 320, except I need the sweater to be 344 for the size/pattern. Right? Here\u0026rsquo;s the instruction that I recommend to you:\n* Knit 16 Repeat from * 10 times.\nThe astute among you will notice that this means that the sweater will have not 344 but 340 stitches.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s correct. I seem to have made some sort of crucial error in the chart as it turns out the key number for this sweater is 342. In the old chart, I had an extra stitch around 42-43. And I increased up to 344 started the chart and then knit two rounds before I realized that the pattern didn\u0026rsquo;t work. Stitches are small and it turns out that an increase here and a decrease there don\u0026rsquo;t really matter that much.\nI have amended the chart, and revision 2 is here: http://www.lulu.com/content/2470929 for those that have run into an error. I\u0026rsquo;m slowly going back and changing old links\u0026hellip; This is the reason why I\u0026rsquo;ve got a head start. Once the pattern emerges, I\u0026rsquo;ll have pictures for you. (And I want to see your pictures/sweaters as well!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/progress-and-increasing/","summary":"So I have finally finished with the ribbing of my sweater.\nI knitted 20 rounds of ribbing, which is likely more than you\u0026rsquo;ll need, becuase I\u0026rsquo;m knitting with such fine yarn. Actually, I think 16-18 would have been enough, but 20 seemed like a good number. I think the target depth for ribbings is like 2-2.5 inches. Mine is 2.75, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ll live.\nAnd then I increased. Remember I cast on 320, except I need the sweater to be 344 for the size/pattern. Right? Here\u0026rsquo;s the instruction that I recommend to you:\n* Knit 16 Repeat from * 10 times.\nThe astute among you will notice that this means that the sweater will have not 344 but 340 stitches.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s correct. I seem to have made some sort of crucial error in the chart as it turns out the key number for this sweater is 342. In the old chart, I had an extra stitch around 42-43.","title":"Progress and Increasing"},{"content":"So I was having a discussion with an old writing friend and we were discussing our futures which are both pretty much in the air.\nShe consoled by saying something like; \u0026ldquo;well some time off to get some grounding will probably help you more than sitting in rooms and talking about dead authors,\u0026rdquo; clearly misremembering that aspirations to publish science fiction aside, I\u0026rsquo;m a social scientist at heart.\nAn honest mistake, particularly given context.\nI remembered then a similar mistake when people--particularly from a knitting context--are almost always in shock when I report that I am in fact not going to art school nor do I have a particular interest in going.\nBoth of these, are I think, likely to get a laugh out of people that know me well.\nI think that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s most difficult about this whole stage of life where I\u0026rsquo;m sort of back to square one trying to figure things out is that what I want to do in the short term, and what I want to do in the long term, and what my strongest skills are, are all wildly divergent.\nAnd then I remember that my problem isn\u0026rsquo;t that I don\u0026rsquo;t have any options, it\u0026rsquo;s that I have too many options. Which is hardly a problem at all.\nThe thing is that does nothing to make it better just a little less scary, so I\u0026rsquo;ll take it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/your-field-is/","summary":"So I was having a discussion with an old writing friend and we were discussing our futures which are both pretty much in the air.\nShe consoled by saying something like; \u0026ldquo;well some time off to get some grounding will probably help you more than sitting in rooms and talking about dead authors,\u0026rdquo; clearly misremembering that aspirations to publish science fiction aside, I\u0026rsquo;m a social scientist at heart.\nAn honest mistake, particularly given context.\nI remembered then a similar mistake when people--particularly from a knitting context--are almost always in shock when I report that I am in fact not going to art school nor do I have a particular interest in going.\nBoth of these, are I think, likely to get a laugh out of people that know me well.\nI think that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s most difficult about this whole stage of life where I\u0026rsquo;m sort of back to square one trying to figure things out is that what I want to do in the short term, and what I want to do in the long term, and what my strongest skills are, are all wildly divergent.","title":"Your field is..."},{"content":"Here is today\u0026rsquo;s entry/breadcrumb of the pattern for the latvian dreaming sweater. IF you want to make the sweater into a cardigan, here\u0026rsquo;s the scoop:\nSome of you have asked for or expressed interest in doing this sweater as a cardigan. My last three sweaters have been cardigans, and I\u0026rsquo;m ready for a change, but these kinds of sweaters make a lot of sense to a lot of people, so don\u0026rsquo;t be discouraged, you can make this sweater as a cardigan.\nThe main difference here is that you need an extra stitch so that the patterns mirror properly. So that\u0026rsquo;s 345 stitches. There also need to be steeks. I think cardigans work better without ribbing, or if you\u0026rsquo;re going to do ribbing, why not wait till the end: this has to do with steeks and getting all of the end in the right place. So you don\u0026rsquo;t have to, but lets just assume that you do:\nCast on provisionally for 345 stitches, join in the contrasting color, and then using the long tail method cast on an odd number of stitches for a steek, I\u0026rsquo;m partial to 11 or 13. The first, last, and middle stitches should be in the background color, and the stitches on either side of the middle stitch should be in the foreground color. All other stitches should alternate fore and background colors.\nYou need the extra stitch because I suspect that you want both front edges to look the same. In a pullover you only want one middle/\u0026ldquo;turning\u0026rdquo; stitch, to make the pattern work. In a cardigan you want the middle stitch to be on both the left and right front. You could have the middle stitch on neither the left nor the right, but that seems silly, as typically you want the front of a sweater to be a bit wider than the back (it\u0026rsquo;s one of those anatomical things), and while 1/8th or less of an inch shouldn\u0026rsquo;t matter much, I seem to care about these things.\nThen with both colors begin knitting the mirror side of the chart. Establish the pattern on the back the same as you would for a pullover, and end with one repeat of the normal side of the chart. Then continue reading from the chart, flipping back and forth as necessary.\nHope that helps!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cardigan-modifications/","summary":"Here is today\u0026rsquo;s entry/breadcrumb of the pattern for the latvian dreaming sweater. IF you want to make the sweater into a cardigan, here\u0026rsquo;s the scoop:\nSome of you have asked for or expressed interest in doing this sweater as a cardigan. My last three sweaters have been cardigans, and I\u0026rsquo;m ready for a change, but these kinds of sweaters make a lot of sense to a lot of people, so don\u0026rsquo;t be discouraged, you can make this sweater as a cardigan.\nThe main difference here is that you need an extra stitch so that the patterns mirror properly. So that\u0026rsquo;s 345 stitches. There also need to be steeks. I think cardigans work better without ribbing, or if you\u0026rsquo;re going to do ribbing, why not wait till the end: this has to do with steeks and getting all of the end in the right place. So you don\u0026rsquo;t have to, but lets just assume that you do:","title":"Cardigan Modifications"},{"content":"Eek, this post is a few days old as it managed to escape posting for a while. but I hope still relevant to most of you. Just don\u0026rsquo;t be surprised in a few days when it seems like I\u0026rsquo;ve made a huge amount of progress. I\u0026rsquo;m not that quick.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been meaning to write a post about spinning for some time now, and although I wasn\u0026rsquo;t able to take spinning with me this weekend, I\u0026rsquo;ve still been spinning. This is a good thing.\nI still have to spend some time with a niddy nody and my BFL, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been avoiding it. In part because winding 7 skeins doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound like fun, but also, this is undyed white fiber and I\u0026rsquo;d kind of like to have a sense of what I\u0026rsquo;m going to do with it before I skein it up. I guess the most likely thing is to run a big dye pot for an afternoon and see if I can get all of the yarn to be variations on a single color. I don\u0026rsquo;t really want hand painted yarn or anything, but kettle dyed something might be fun.\nMy current spinning project is this blue hand-dyed roving that I\u0026rsquo;m making 3-ply from. I\u0026rsquo;m spinning up the singles for the last ply. and I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be pretty cool. I hope to be done with this yarn by tomorrow afternoon. I\u0026rsquo;m really close. There\u0026rsquo;s about 8 ounces of fiber here, and it\u0026rsquo;s merino, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s something \u0026ldquo;off\u0026rdquo; with the fiber quality. It\u0026rsquo;s really soft, and the dye job is pretty good, but it\u0026rsquo;s like the fiber is too dry. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to put some baby oil or hair conditioner in the rinse bath of the yarn and see if that helps make the yarn a bit more sturdy and less dry seeming.\nSince my return to spinning, I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to think very carefully about what I\u0026rsquo;m spinning and what that yarn is going to end up being. Even if it\u0026rsquo;s stuff I\u0026rsquo;m not going to keep, I think one of the things that makes spinning more effective is spinning yarn for a project rather than just spinning a pretty roving because it\u0026rsquo;s pretty. Having said that, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty clueless as to what this yarn is going to become. Socks and a hat? For Sale on Etsy or some such? I might keep it around as stash. We shall see.\nMy next spinning project is sitting on the other side of my office: 2 lbs. of grey shetland, that I want to spin 3ply DK weight yarn from, I think with the intention of making a pretty traditional cabled gansey. I\u0026rsquo;d probably knit it tightly, but not tightly. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;m getting ahead of myself1 the fiber is really nice. I got it from Copper Moose and the service (and price!) were really great, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to getting into this spinning. Natural grey fibers are so much fun.\nI think after that, I\u0026rsquo;m going to try for some darkly colored BFL, which is a bit harder to find, but I think might be akin to nirvana.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten around to making the hybrid double drive, or the extra drive bands. These things happen, of course.\nOnward and Upward!\nJust call me Tristram Shandy, would you?\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spinning-news/","summary":"Eek, this post is a few days old as it managed to escape posting for a while. but I hope still relevant to most of you. Just don\u0026rsquo;t be surprised in a few days when it seems like I\u0026rsquo;ve made a huge amount of progress. I\u0026rsquo;m not that quick.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been meaning to write a post about spinning for some time now, and although I wasn\u0026rsquo;t able to take spinning with me this weekend, I\u0026rsquo;ve still been spinning. This is a good thing.\nI still have to spend some time with a niddy nody and my BFL, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been avoiding it. In part because winding 7 skeins doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound like fun, but also, this is undyed white fiber and I\u0026rsquo;d kind of like to have a sense of what I\u0026rsquo;m going to do with it before I skein it up. I guess the most likely thing is to run a big dye pot for an afternoon and see if I can get all of the yarn to be variations on a single color.","title":"Spinning News"},{"content":"Ok I\u0026rsquo;m finally going to clear this business up about the 320/340/342/344 stitch count on the latvian dreaming sweater project\nI said to cast on, 320 stitches, the charts cover 342 stitches, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been saying that you need 344 stitches. What gives?\nWell, I want to avoid having the bottom edge of the sweater flare out. Casting on fewer stitches keeps this from happening. Elizabeth Zimmermann recommends casting on 90% of K (or 344), and that would give us something like 310 or 309. Meh. For starters I know that 320 is divisible by 4. Also, in laziness, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to cast on 320 stitches, because it\u0026rsquo;s divisible by 80 and therefore also easy to increase evenly across, because it\u0026rsquo;s so evenly divisible. The dirty secret of making KnittingMath easy for you and yours is choosing good numbers.\nSecondly, I don\u0026rsquo;t want the lower edge of the sweater to pull in as much as I want it to not flare. Often people suggest casting on with a smaller needle and not having one at hand (and not much liking my US 0s anyway,) I\u0026rsquo;m just casting on fewer stitches. Feel free to modify this point if you like.\nI should also admit that in the first draft of the pattern (the key number was 340, good thing that draft never saw the light of day: I didn\u0026rsquo;t realize that I needed 4 extra stitches for borders and turning stitches,) so I thought increasing 10 stitches on the front and the back would be really easy. But no matter, it\u0026rsquo;ll still work out.\nThat answer your question?\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to see pictures and hear reports of your projects as they develop. Also, if you make any cool modifications I\u0026rsquo;d totally like to hear about them too. I know that I\u0026rsquo;m still ahead of the gang with the knitting on this one, so I hope that by dragging out the cast-on and the bottom rib, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to let at least a few of you get your yarn and get caught up. It\u0026rsquo;s also let me get done with my last sweater, but next up we\u0026rsquo;re going to increase so we can begin the color pattern.\nI see math in my future.\nKnit in good health! I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch. You be too.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/casting-on-fewer-stitches/","summary":"Ok I\u0026rsquo;m finally going to clear this business up about the 320/340/342/344 stitch count on the latvian dreaming sweater project\nI said to cast on, 320 stitches, the charts cover 342 stitches, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been saying that you need 344 stitches. What gives?\nWell, I want to avoid having the bottom edge of the sweater flare out. Casting on fewer stitches keeps this from happening. Elizabeth Zimmermann recommends casting on 90% of K (or 344), and that would give us something like 310 or 309. Meh. For starters I know that 320 is divisible by 4. Also, in laziness, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to cast on 320 stitches, because it\u0026rsquo;s divisible by 80 and therefore also easy to increase evenly across, because it\u0026rsquo;s so evenly divisible. The dirty secret of making KnittingMath easy for you and yours is choosing good numbers.\nSecondly, I don\u0026rsquo;t want the lower edge of the sweater to pull in as much as I want it to not flare.","title":"Casting on Fewer Stitches"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been a bit off the fiber arts these past few days. For starters, I discovered a stain on my Latvian Mitten sweater which is all but finished. (I just have to sew down the hem.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a tea stain, which are particularly brutal to get off. My last sweater that I made with this yarn currently suffers from a few more honestly derived tea stains. There\u0026rsquo;s also something about this yarn, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced, No other seems to stain so easily. Is there something about superwash? In any case, though I think the stain has mostly come up (salt, who\u0026rsquo;d thought?) and it\u0026rsquo;s on the back of the sweater sort of under the arm, so again, not a big deal, that whole mess has put me off knitting just a bit. I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to it in time. I want to get the hem sewn down by the weekend, which shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a problem.\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be more latvian dreaming stuff soon. I promise. How are people doing on this one?\nI also finished this little spinning project I\u0026rsquo;d been working on for a great while. It\u0026rsquo;s 3ply merino DKish weight yarn. Light blue marl. I\u0026rsquo;m loving it, though I don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what I\u0026rsquo;m going to do with it. This of course means that I\u0026rsquo;ve already started spinning up my shetland roving which I\u0026rsquo;m hoping to turn into three-ply of a similar weight as well. It\u0026rsquo;s nice fiber, unlike anything else I\u0026rsquo;ve ever spun, but it\u0026rsquo;s going well. One thought is that I could use the blue merino at least in part for hems. Which seems like a foolish waist of hand spun. I\u0026rsquo;ve made a rule that handspun (once it\u0026rsquo;s spun) doesn\u0026rsquo;t count as stash, so it could sit around for a while.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and spin 100 gram skeins of yarn, by measuring off 3 33ish gram lengths of roving and spinning one on to each bobbin and then plying. I think this will give me reasonably sized skeins, it\u0026rsquo;ll break up the spinning in an interesting way, and I\u0026rsquo;m less likely to have leftovers of any quantity (I know this isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge issue, but I\u0026rsquo;m a bit neurotic.) This decision made me really rather happy. I also decided that I\u0026rsquo;d not use the lazy kate that came with my wheel except for holding bobbins when plying. All other bobbin holding will be done by the basket that I use to hold my fiber as I\u0026rsquo;m spinning. Somehow these decisions were incredibly liberating, and I think that realization is kind of worrying. Anyway, I think I should end this before it degenerates any further.\nOnward and Upward.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-stains-and-yarn/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been a bit off the fiber arts these past few days. For starters, I discovered a stain on my Latvian Mitten sweater which is all but finished. (I just have to sew down the hem.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a tea stain, which are particularly brutal to get off. My last sweater that I made with this yarn currently suffers from a few more honestly derived tea stains. There\u0026rsquo;s also something about this yarn, I\u0026rsquo;m convinced, No other seems to stain so easily. Is there something about superwash? In any case, though I think the stain has mostly come up (salt, who\u0026rsquo;d thought?) and it\u0026rsquo;s on the back of the sweater sort of under the arm, so again, not a big deal, that whole mess has put me off knitting just a bit. I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to it in time. I want to get the hem sewn down by the weekend, which shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a problem.","title":"Of Stains and Yarn"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve probably beaten the discussion about linear and non-linear writing methods, wikis, and the computer programing metaphor to the ground and you\u0026rsquo;re all probably tragically bored with this, particularly if you\u0026rsquo;re here for the next crumb of the pattern for the latvian dreaming, but no matter, here we are. I listened to the interview with ward cunningham recently, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about these things for a while so it surfaces yet again.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve said a few times that I have a hard time \u0026ldquo;writing non-linearly,\u0026rdquo; that I feel as if I\u0026rsquo;m too story/narrative focused to really be effective in writing stories and essays in a modular or nonlinear sort of way. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had a hard time working on using wiki-like software as a personal notebook because alone I don\u0026rsquo;t tend develop ideas and thoughts in the right sort of way to make these systems useful for any meaningful length of time. In fact I think I started this blog (almost a year ago) because I thought that the blog was a format for notebook that mirrored the way that I often thought about things (and indeed my paper notebooks are very blog-like).\nBut I wanted to cover new ground in this entry. I\u0026rsquo;ve been turning over a couple of new ideas in the past few days. First is the notion of \u0026ldquo;refactoring\u0026rdquo; in agile/extreme programing. Basically, this is the notion that when writing code, if you\u0026rsquo;re not writing linearly, it\u0026rsquo;s important to go through the code and \u0026ldquo;refactor\u0026rdquo; or reevaluate older code to make it more efficient and work better as the larger program changes and develops. Cunningham said (and it\u0026rsquo;s true) that once you\u0026rsquo;ve written it once, going back and moving chunks (scenes/objects) around so that they make more sense. I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought about editing in terms of passes, and because I\u0026rsquo;ve never really written modularly, I don\u0026rsquo;t really edit modularly (which is, near as I can tell the only way to do it.)1\nThe second concept, this comes from wiki \u0026ldquo;theory\u0026rdquo; for lack of a better term is the notion that nonlinear documents (like wikis) grow and develop structure as they need it. Cunningham, on the podcast said, \u0026ldquo;wikis always seem to be as big as they need to be,\u0026rdquo;2 and while I don\u0026rsquo;t know nearly enough about chaos theory to be fully articulate about this, I think that this is a very bottom-up or \u0026ldquo;chaotic\u0026rdquo; system that asserts itself over the larger document is pretty powerful and useful, if you\u0026rsquo;re not fighting it. In my experience wiki\u0026rsquo;s that I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to build have all fallen down as I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to create structure before creating content, or anticipate my organizational thinking ahead of time. The lesson? Let organizational systems develop organically, even if you don\u0026rsquo;t trust this, and adjust later rather than forcing a system that probably will cause collapse which is in the end more work for less payoff than the first option.\nI think both of these lessons (refactor early and often, let nonlinear documents structure themselves) are ones that I can take to both my writing and digital note taking projects in the future. Maybe these were things that you all had figured out already, alas, maybe this is why this is my blog and not yours!\nJust saying.\nOnward and Upward!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve read my fair share of books about writing, and many of them clearly say that you should focus on getting something written, because there\u0026rsquo;s time enough in the world for editing. I\u0026rsquo;m not rejecting the notion that burying yourself in editing too soon is good practice, but an unwritten manuscript is only slightly less likely to get you a book contract than an unedited one.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nTo be fair, Cunningham spoke a little bit to the complex dynamic between community size, total number of pages, and community age. That for a while wiki communities need to focus on growing so that there is some \u0026ldquo;there there,\u0026rdquo; but after a while the community/writer needs to attend to deleting and editing the content on old pages, so that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t get stale.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/refactoring-and-linear-production/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve probably beaten the discussion about linear and non-linear writing methods, wikis, and the computer programing metaphor to the ground and you\u0026rsquo;re all probably tragically bored with this, particularly if you\u0026rsquo;re here for the next crumb of the pattern for the latvian dreaming, but no matter, here we are. I listened to the interview with ward cunningham recently, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about these things for a while so it surfaces yet again.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve said a few times that I have a hard time \u0026ldquo;writing non-linearly,\u0026rdquo; that I feel as if I\u0026rsquo;m too story/narrative focused to really be effective in writing stories and essays in a modular or nonlinear sort of way. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had a hard time working on using wiki-like software as a personal notebook because alone I don\u0026rsquo;t tend develop ideas and thoughts in the right sort of way to make these systems useful for any meaningful length of time.","title":"Refactoring and Linear Production"},{"content":"So at the end of the entry on friday--in short--I said to cast on 320 stitches, using an elastic method in your background color, join being careful not to twist, and knit 2.5 (ish) inches in K2 P2 bi-color (corrugated) ribbing. This time around I\u0026rsquo;m purling in the background color and knitting in the foreground or contrasting color.\nBut wait, you ask, \u0026ldquo;you said the key number of stitches was 344?\u0026rdquo; Yep it is. And then you ask, \u0026ldquo;Why cast on fewer stitches? and why did you choose corrugated ribbing? and while we\u0026rsquo;re at it, I think I want to have a hemmed edge or make a cardigan and not a pullover!\u0026rdquo;\nIn response: Hang on, I say. This week we\u0026rsquo;re going to cover all these issues. Starting today with why I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen this ribbing and why I decided to do this. Tomorrow we\u0026rsquo;ll cover the stitch count issue.\nA lot of my sweaters of late have had provisional cast ons, followed by turned hems. I\u0026rsquo;m putting ribbing on this one, because it\u0026rsquo;s been a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve done a sweater with a ribbing, so this seemed like it would be the case. Also, for some reason that I can\u0026rsquo;t explain I\u0026rsquo;d never done the \u0026ldquo;cast on in the color your going to purl in\u0026rdquo; trick, even though it is in retrospect pretty obvious. By doing it this way, you\u0026rsquo;re not purling into stitches of a different color, and this keeps the ribs more \u0026ldquo;clean looking.\u0026rdquo;\nAlso, I think that this pattern is very small scale, and a little bit of a different texture seemed like a good idea.\nIf you want to put a hem on this one just cast on 344 (provisionally) with a crochet chain and the background and start into the pattern on the next row. You could knit the facing first, but I\u0026rsquo;ve always found that hems sew down better when done last.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-bottom-edge/","summary":"So at the end of the entry on friday--in short--I said to cast on 320 stitches, using an elastic method in your background color, join being careful not to twist, and knit 2.5 (ish) inches in K2 P2 bi-color (corrugated) ribbing. This time around I\u0026rsquo;m purling in the background color and knitting in the foreground or contrasting color.\nBut wait, you ask, \u0026ldquo;you said the key number of stitches was 344?\u0026rdquo; Yep it is. And then you ask, \u0026ldquo;Why cast on fewer stitches? and why did you choose corrugated ribbing? and while we\u0026rsquo;re at it, I think I want to have a hemmed edge or make a cardigan and not a pullover!\u0026rdquo;\nIn response: Hang on, I say. This week we\u0026rsquo;re going to cover all these issues. Starting today with why I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen this ribbing and why I decided to do this. Tomorrow we\u0026rsquo;ll cover the stitch count issue.\nA lot of my sweaters of late have had provisional cast ons, followed by turned hems.","title":"The Bottom Edge"},{"content":"Ok, it\u0026rsquo;s been a quiet weekend, as I half predicted. I did get some writing done and other work done, but nothing is quite ready for prime time yet. I fear that I\u0026rsquo;ll be done with six entries all at the same time tomorrow afternoon, and that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t do at all. And I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted a general \u0026ldquo;how\u0026rsquo;s the tycho doing\u0026rdquo; report in a while, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing these things here much.\nI know that the post of the beginning of the latvian dreaming sweater might have happened a little fast, so I\u0026rsquo;m going have a series of quick posts that explain my reasoning here. Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in doing a cardigan, I\u0026rsquo;ll cover that as well.\nSo here goes on the report, as much for archival purposes as anything\nMy grandmother had her right knee replaced a couple weeks ago (those of you who were playing along at home will remember that she broke a knee cap in January; that was the left one, which seems to be quite alright at the moment). My father and I--despite cold symptoms (his) one working voice (mine) and minimal preparation (ours)--trekked across the state to visit her in rehab. Turns out she\u0026rsquo;s doing great, but it was a really good thing that we were able to visit and help her out a little.\nThen this weekend my entire family has to go to a wedding. Feh. I hate weddings, a lot. Though the couple in question lives locally, they\u0026rsquo;ve decided to have their party half way across the state. And we live in the midwest, so that\u0026rsquo;s a schlep. And since my father is going to be the best man (ugg) we can\u0026rsquo;t exactly swoop in for the ceremony grab a nosh at the reception and swoop out. Two nights we have to be there. Have I mentioned that while I think I live in a pretty nifty little city, the rest of the state is\u0026hellip; somewhat less interesting. Mom and I are brining our spinning wheels, and are going to sit around in some yarn fiber store and cuss. If I post some rant against weddings and marriage, don\u0026rsquo;t take it personally.\nOn Thursday morning it\u0026rsquo;s May day, which means I have to get up at the crack of dawn, put on my morris dancing gear and dance the sun up. If the sun doesn\u0026rsquo;t rise, blame me, in other words. If you\u0026rsquo;re in St. Louis, email me for directions!\nThen, from the wedding I\u0026rsquo;m going back to stay with my grandmother so I can help ease the transition back from rehab. That\u0026rsquo;s another week, though I hope that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get settled this time.\nI have to rush back here on that friday, because I think I have to work and teach a knitting class that weekend. And then. As if that weren\u0026rsquo;t enough, I start my summer job that Monday. Which means I have a lot of things to take care of before that happens. The job is cool, it\u0026rsquo;s a shame that it isn\u0026rsquo;t more long term. My main focus of this summer--other than writing another novella and knitting 3 sweaters--is going to be finding a job for the fall and beyond. No pressure.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the state of the tycho. I think I need another cup of tea.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/up-and-coming/","summary":"Ok, it\u0026rsquo;s been a quiet weekend, as I half predicted. I did get some writing done and other work done, but nothing is quite ready for prime time yet. I fear that I\u0026rsquo;ll be done with six entries all at the same time tomorrow afternoon, and that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t do at all. And I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted a general \u0026ldquo;how\u0026rsquo;s the tycho doing\u0026rdquo; report in a while, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing these things here much.\nI know that the post of the beginning of the latvian dreaming sweater might have happened a little fast, so I\u0026rsquo;m going have a series of quick posts that explain my reasoning here. Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in doing a cardigan, I\u0026rsquo;ll cover that as well.\nSo here goes on the report, as much for archival purposes as anything\nMy grandmother had her right knee replaced a couple weeks ago (those of you who were playing along at home will remember that she broke a knee cap in January; that was the left one, which seems to be quite alright at the moment).","title":"Up and Coming"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about this project for a few days, and thinking about something like it for much longer. And I think, enough fooling around, I might as well post the \u0026ldquo;getting started\u0026rdquo; entry. You need not get started this instance (but you should! peer pressure!), but just in case you were ready for it, here it is. A proper introduction and the first little chunk of the pattern\u0026hellip;\nI want to knit a sweater with you. It\u0026rsquo;s a big project, probably best suited to winter knitting, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never let something as predictable as the weather get in my way for such things. I might need a fan for knitting the sleeves and the end of the body as summer approaches, but I happen to have one or two around for that possibility.\nThis sweater is like many of my others, two color, stranded all the way across, simple vertical lines, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking a simple drop shouldered look. Maybe shoulder straps. I\u0026rsquo;ll decide later.\nI know that I\u0026rsquo;ve already started, don\u0026rsquo;t feel behind! feel glad that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be ahead of you, I\u0026rsquo;m here to make your mistakes for you. I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting regularly about my progress and my design decisions, and when I\u0026rsquo;m done maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll make a \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; pattern of it.\nThe charts I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen and modified (a bit) are from Joyce Williams' Latvian Dreams: Knitting from Weaving Charts. (2000; Schoolhouse Press); which is an amazing book that I highly recommend. Amazing stuff. I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen a few of these charts that are small enough to memorize and arranged them so that there\u0026rsquo;s a vertical line. They all even repeat every 16 rounds. Better yet, because they\u0026rsquo;re weaving charts, the top half (rows ~10-16) are the same as the bottom half (rows ~2-8), which makes it even easier to memorize.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the download link for the pattern materials packet. And please do note that there\u0026rsquo;s a pattern on ravelry.\nComing up below the fold: a description of what\u0026rsquo;s going on at the beginning of the sweater (sizing, yarn choice, casting on) for those of you who want to get started right away\u0026hellip; Tallk of options like hemmed edges and cardigans come later, particularly if there\u0026rsquo;s interest.\nI\u0026rsquo;m designing this sweater to knit at about 9.5 stitches per inch. I\u0026rsquo;m small, so this probably works to your benefit. You can use a heavier yarn and a larger gauge and we\u0026rsquo;ll both be able to use the same numbers/proportions because of this. The key number of stitches is 340 344, that\u0026rsquo;s the number of stitches around the body. Divide this number by your gauge to get the size of your garment, and adjust your gauge as need be. If this puts you at a gauge that you\u0026rsquo;re uncomfortable with, I\u0026rsquo;m including the excel file that I used to design this with the chart, and that should help you out if you need to add or subtract some stitches. If you ask, and I have time, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be willing to help you resize the charts a bit.\nThat brings us to yarn choice. You probably have yarn in your stash that\u0026rsquo;s suitable for this kind of project. Those ball of Kauni yarn that you thought was a good idea? That little stash of black and grey shetland yarn? Something like that. We\u0026rsquo;re going for fingering weight, likely, unless you need something thicker either for temperature or for size reasons. I\u0026rsquo;m partial to shetland yarn, as it\u0026rsquo;s sturdy, steeks well (they\u0026rsquo;re coming, don\u0026rsquo;t worry) and never really pill. Good qualities in a yarn. I\u0026rsquo;m however, using a weaving yarn, \u0026ldquo;Domy Heather\u0026rdquo; from Old Mill Yarns, which accounts at least partially for the gauge. I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen \u0026ldquo;Lava\u0026rdquo; (black) and Slate (Dark Gray Blue). I\u0026rsquo;m using a 3mm needle. You\u0026rsquo;ll need two yarns that contrast. I prefer to do stranded work in only two colors, as it accents the vertical lines and makes the design more apparent. You might not like these features and feel more comfortable introducing more colors. Which is totally fine with me, just don\u0026rsquo;t ask me for advice on this one.\nWhen in doubt go with natural and heathered colors. I included some more information about the yarn choices.\nSo the instructions, proper:\nCast on 320 stitches using the darker color. Preferably using the Elastic Long tail or german twisted method of casting on. You could use a smaller needle for the ribbing, my smaller needle was busy in another project, so I didn\u0026rsquo;t.\nKnit at least 2 inches, but not more than 3 inches of two color \u0026ldquo;corrugated ribbing.\u0026rdquo; Knit 2 stitches with the (lighter) contrasting color, Purl 2 stitches with the (darker; the one you cast on with) main color. Repeat. Endlessly.\nIf you want to get into the pattern immediately, cast on provisionally in the darker color, and begin knitting from the chart. You could even cast on 344 stitches \u0026ldquo;for real\u0026rdquo; and use Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Purl When you can/want to\u0026rdquo; method covered in her books.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be back in a few days with what happens next. When I get there.\nI look forward to knitting this with you.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/latvian-dreaming/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about this project for a few days, and thinking about something like it for much longer. And I think, enough fooling around, I might as well post the \u0026ldquo;getting started\u0026rdquo; entry. You need not get started this instance (but you should! peer pressure!), but just in case you were ready for it, here it is. A proper introduction and the first little chunk of the pattern\u0026hellip;\nI want to knit a sweater with you. It\u0026rsquo;s a big project, probably best suited to winter knitting, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never let something as predictable as the weather get in my way for such things. I might need a fan for knitting the sleeves and the end of the body as summer approaches, but I happen to have one or two around for that possibility.\nThis sweater is like many of my others, two color, stranded all the way across, simple vertical lines, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking a simple drop shouldered look.","title":"Latvian Dreaming"},{"content":"I was listening to FLOSS Weekly this week as I was running about, and there was a bit in one of the episodes about leadership and organization of open source projects.\nNot being much of a programer at all--but being very interested in, for lack of a better term, the anthropology1 of open source projects--this sparked a larger interest. Lets back up for a moment.\nSome of the larger (and apparently smaller ones as well?) open source projects like Perl, Python, and the Linux Kernel are lead by sort of \u0026ldquo;benevolent dictator,\u0026rdquo; types who guide development, make decisions about release dates, provide vision, and are generally responsible for some major part of the code.2 These are typically the people that started the project, though I think there are some second/next generation leaders of projects, (Matt Mullenweg of WordPress3 for one.)\nAnd this is interesting, because we generally think of open source as being this incredibly democratic space where users and developers can all sit on the same level and say \u0026ldquo;this is what I think,\u0026rdquo; and have their voices heard.4 Right? I mean isn\u0026rsquo;t being able to shape the direction and tools of your (technological) experience, sort of what democracy (in this sphere) is about?\nOf course it is. Democracy isn\u0026rsquo;t about voting and contentious power struggles with small margins, democracy is about a group of people making it possible for different perspective to be heard. So to put it in parliamentary terms: it\u0026rsquo;s the debate/discussion, not the vote that matters.\nAnd here you thought I was going to post something about the current american political debacle? Pass. Not because I don\u0026rsquo;t have opinions (I do,) or because it\u0026rsquo;s not fascinating (it is,) but because there\u0026rsquo;s absolutely nothing to say. That kind of \u0026ldquo;democracy,\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t by this definition particularly democratic and doesn\u0026rsquo;t have as much impact on the way we live our lives as the other kinds of \u0026ldquo;micro-political\u0026rdquo; democracies that we are constantly participating in. Many kinds of work environments are democratic in this way, after a fashion, and many other small groups, like dancing, craft-related, not for profits, grassroots organizations, have strong (and potentially static) leadership and vibrant discussion, which nets a very democratic result.\nI think this is a continuation of some of my earlier postings on open source, but I think will also be part of a new (irregular) series of posts on leadership, because there\u0026rsquo;s so much to talk about and so little room (and time.)\nI think the major ideas that are running through my head are:\nthe difference between power and leadership how democracies scale up and scale down to different group sizes. the symbols associated with democracy, and the power of those symbols (maybe this could develop into a post for the theory blog, nu?) I really enjoy thinking (and talking!) about these sorts of political notions, but I\u0026rsquo;m always disappointed by the shape that most \u0026ldquo;political discussions\u0026rdquo; take. So here\u0026rsquo;s my attempt to take back the night and start a more frank (and productive discussion.) What\u0026rsquo;s leadership to you, and what kinds of successes and failures do you all see in your own microdemocraies?5\nSo, anyway, think about that, I look forward to hearing from you, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be more knitting content soon; I promise.\nI suppose this could be the sociology of open source, I\u0026rsquo;m uncommitted, particularly at the moment, on the subject. I\u0026rsquo;m just interested--idly mostly--in how these communities organize and motivate themselves. With some exceptions this kind of organizational structure isn\u0026rsquo;t really supposed to work, but is so clearly does. It\u0026rsquo;s not my thing, but it\u0026rsquo;s interesting.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThey said that these were all \u0026ldquo;first name people,\u0026rdquo; as they\u0026rsquo;re really well known, and generally pretty well liked in the community, and thus refered to only by their first names. eg, \u0026ldquo;Lary,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Guido,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Linus.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nHe\u0026rsquo;d be a good one for FLOSS Weekly. Hrm.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI think your chances of being able to get mysql to add/support a new feature that you want (even if you have to write it yourself) is light years beyond the chances of getting Oracle, for instance, to add the new feature.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nSo, one thing that I want to squash immediately is a discussion of interpersonal drama, which though often political in content, particularly in numerically small groups is not particularly political in nature. For instance, the rumor is that there\u0026rsquo;s generally a lot of \u0026ldquo;kernel politics,\u0026rdquo; and drama in the linux kernel development (and other sorts of drama in other parts of the linux world,) and while this might be a product of these communities growing too large or of weak(er) leadership than is required, it\u0026rsquo;s probably the case that this kind of drama is a byproduct of \u0026ldquo;community\u0026rdquo; rathe than the byproduct of any particular organization.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/leadership-and-democracy/","summary":"I was listening to FLOSS Weekly this week as I was running about, and there was a bit in one of the episodes about leadership and organization of open source projects.\nNot being much of a programer at all--but being very interested in, for lack of a better term, the anthropology1 of open source projects--this sparked a larger interest. Lets back up for a moment.\nSome of the larger (and apparently smaller ones as well?) open source projects like Perl, Python, and the Linux Kernel are lead by sort of \u0026ldquo;benevolent dictator,\u0026rdquo; types who guide development, make decisions about release dates, provide vision, and are generally responsible for some major part of the code.2 These are typically the people that started the project, though I think there are some second/next generation leaders of projects, (Matt Mullenweg of WordPress3 for one.)\nAnd this is interesting, because we generally think of open source as being this incredibly democratic space where users and developers can all sit on the same level and say \u0026ldquo;this is what I think,\u0026rdquo; and have their voices heard.","title":"Leadership and Democracy"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m off in a few to go visit with my grandmother who has recent had a knee replacement. (Indeed this means that the blog has been down one reader for a few weeks--rehab centers not having wifi and all--and likely will for another week and some change.) While there is high speed internet (how do you think said grandmother reads the blog,) my posting time might be a little bit sparse.1\nMy goal is to post the first bread crumb of the latvian dreaming tonight.\nI did want to share a couple of links that I\u0026rsquo;ve been collecting over the past few days and weeks.\nsockpr0n\u0026rsquo;s schacht matchless This blog posting has some useful info on \u0026ldquo;hybrid\u0026rdquo; double drive setup, where you can do double drive with two separate bands rather than one band. This means you can have a finer degree of control over tension like you would with a break band, except with the evenness of double drive. Rock. On. y knit - I started listening to this as I was spinning with my mother this morning before getting ready to go. It\u0026rsquo;s great. Perfect length, great guys (hi mike!), nice insight. I\u0026rsquo;m generally pretty nonplussed towards the Stitch and Bitch stuff (the \u0026ldquo;consumer feminism\u0026rdquo; wigs me out, as does the hipster stuff.) but hearing Debbie Stoller talk makes me like her more, even if the aura isn\u0026rsquo;t something I\u0026quot;m into. I suspect I\u0026rsquo;m the last person to be getting into this (I\u0026rsquo;m generally 3 months behind on getting into new podcasts, at least), but if you\u0026rsquo;re not listening to this one, work on it. Tea Gadget - I got an email from the marketing department of this company, that makes this portable loose leaf tea brewing thing. I think the website might be an interesting place to start a semiotic study of advertising, and the contraption looks interesting. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it\u0026rsquo;s right for me, but you might be different. I think getting this email either means that I\u0026rsquo;ve arrived, or I\u0026rsquo;m officially passed my prime. Anyway. Looks like that\u0026rsquo;s all the news that\u0026rsquo;s fit to sing.\nBrownie points to the first person to figure that one out. That isn\u0026rsquo;t family. ;)\nOnward and Upward!\nWhich of course means that I\u0026rsquo;ll have lots of time to write and post 6 entries this weekend. These things have been known to happen.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/linkdump-and-program-notes/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m off in a few to go visit with my grandmother who has recent had a knee replacement. (Indeed this means that the blog has been down one reader for a few weeks--rehab centers not having wifi and all--and likely will for another week and some change.) While there is high speed internet (how do you think said grandmother reads the blog,) my posting time might be a little bit sparse.1\nMy goal is to post the first bread crumb of the latvian dreaming tonight.\nI did want to share a couple of links that I\u0026rsquo;ve been collecting over the past few days and weeks.\nsockpr0n\u0026rsquo;s schacht matchless This blog posting has some useful info on \u0026ldquo;hybrid\u0026rdquo; double drive setup, where you can do double drive with two separate bands rather than one band. This means you can have a finer degree of control over tension like you would with a break band, except with the evenness of double drive.","title":"Linkdump and Program Notes"},{"content":"Ok, so I realized that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly clear in my first post. I\u0026rsquo;ve since written a \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s what you have to do to get started post, but I think that in my eagerness to get started (and for you to get started,) there\u0026rsquo;s some prep work that needs to be taken care before folks can start. So I might as well get that out of the way before I dive in.\nAnd besides you all need time to get things in order.\nOther than the beginning cast on directions, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll post a little bit here and there about other things that might be important to touch upon. Like things to consider for making a cardigan version, or tips for resizing, stuff about the design process, fitting, and so forth. I want to pace the project out so that I don\u0026rsquo;t overload you all with information that you won\u0026rsquo;t need for many weeks, but also, as there are large stretches of time when the main direction will be \u0026ldquo;knit on in pattern,\u0026rdquo; for a long time, I want to make sure there\u0026rsquo;s stuff to post. Remembering of course that my writing of the pattern depends at least a little on my knitting speed.\nIf there\u0026rsquo;s a question or issue you want me to cover be in touch about that and I\u0026rsquo;ll do my best to fit it in.\nHere are some answers to the questions and issues that have come up (below the fold):\nThere are a lot of yarn options that will work, and I encourage you to resort to your stash if possible. There\u0026rsquo;s more on this coming, but just some options. Harrisville Designs Shetland (2/8) (it\u0026rsquo;s 17 dollars--discountable--a cone at webs, though there are other vendors) Domy Heather -this is what I\u0026rsquo;m using. It\u0026rsquo;s smaller gauge than most other yarns suitable for this project (sort of in the \u0026ldquo;light fingering weight\u0026rdquo; category) so that will effect sizing, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great softer, but still hearty wool. Jamieson\u0026rsquo;s Spindrift and Jameison\u0026rsquo;s and Smith Jumper Weight. Good two ply yarn, great for this kind of garment. More colors than HD, and the sheep grew up on Scottish soil, if that matters to you. (Jamieson\u0026rsquo;s also makes a 3ply DK weight yarn that\u0026rsquo;s great if you want something a little thicker.) A user on ravelry suggested Ruama finullgarn, which is a sturdy fingering-ish weight yarn that looks like it would be great for this kind of sweater. Since this is a Latvian pattern, I think the scandinavian/baltic yarns fit a bit better than the shetland yarns I\u0026rsquo;m prone to. But it\u0026rsquo;s another good option. She also carries some other scandinavian yarns of various weights which might work well for you I ballpark-ed 2800ish yards, as a yarn requirement, but really weight is a more effective measurement. Figure how much by weight you think a light-medium weight sweater should weigh (experiment with a scale), and calculate backwards from here. A little bit more than half of this weight should be the background color (darker) and a little bit less than half should be foreground. I usually buy way more than I need, even though dye lot is usually not a huge issue with such large-run yarns, and in color work it\u0026rsquo;s even less noticeable. The key number is 344, which you should divide by your gauge to get the expected size. If you can modify your gauge at all, and really do need to resize, figure out by how many stitches. If you think you can do this adjustment to the pattern then have fun, if you need help, contact me sooner rather than later. There is no start date. You can start whenever you want. I mentioned this is going to be a sweater, right? Pullover too. You can make it into a cardigan, but we\u0026rsquo;ll get into that later. My sweater will use two colors. I\u0026rsquo;m color blind, and very much a boy in terms of dress, so I like the simple/plain (drab? I\u0026rsquo;ll accept that.) If you want to do a more complex shading, please feel free, and please do share it with the rest of us, but it\u0026rsquo;s not something I feel able to design much less support (write about). Tell your friends and share the love. For real it means a lot to me! Check the comment threads, they\u0026rsquo;re generally informative. Be in touch with me about when you start and about your progress, as much as for my own edification as anything, but I\u0026rsquo;d love to be able to post a shout out to you all, and keep track of your progress and experiences with the rest of the project materials. I\u0026rsquo;m an archivist like that. Thanks for your support and I look forward to knitting with you!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweater-project-clarifications/","summary":"Ok, so I realized that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly clear in my first post. I\u0026rsquo;ve since written a \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s what you have to do to get started post, but I think that in my eagerness to get started (and for you to get started,) there\u0026rsquo;s some prep work that needs to be taken care before folks can start. So I might as well get that out of the way before I dive in.\nAnd besides you all need time to get things in order.\nOther than the beginning cast on directions, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll post a little bit here and there about other things that might be important to touch upon. Like things to consider for making a cardigan version, or tips for resizing, stuff about the design process, fitting, and so forth. I want to pace the project out so that I don\u0026rsquo;t overload you all with information that you won\u0026rsquo;t need for many weeks, but also, as there are large stretches of time when the main direction will be \u0026ldquo;knit on in pattern,\u0026rdquo; for a long time, I want to make sure there\u0026rsquo;s stuff to post.","title":"Sweater Project Clarifications"},{"content":"So, it is no surprise to those that know me to hear this admission: \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a tea nut.\u0026rdquo; I mean, I sure drink a lot of tea, and I spend a lot of time thinking about tea consumption and the perfect cup of tea. I also think that by recognizing addictive tendencies in my personality and directing them toward productive things, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of preempting a lot of other problems down the road.\nBut I should point out that I\u0026rsquo;m not a very foo fooy kind of tea drinker. I don\u0026rsquo;t like teas that have interesting flavors, or colors, I will never rinse tea leaves before I brew tea with them, I will never contemplate the peak number of brewings that for the best taste. I so don\u0026rsquo;t fit in with the tea blogger crowd. Sigh.\nOn the other hand, I was so fixed on a particular brand of tea during college that I always bought a dozen boxes (of 20 tea bags) back and forth, because no stores in the part of wisconsin that I was in carried this particular brand.\nPeople on campus--that I didn\u0026rsquo;t know--could connect me and the labels on the tea bags if left one on a table or counter. I also had a huge 54 ounce \u0026ldquo;bubba keg\u0026rdquo; that I could make tea in, so that I could make it through 2 hour classes without running out, as I had gotten prone to doing with my two 16 ounce tea mugs.\nWhich brings me to the next part of this entry\u0026hellip;\nLike any addiction to tools and objects that I associate with tea drinking are things that I focus on getting just right. After all the ritual is important. A nice, sturdy teapot that I got at the rummage sale at a church where some high school friends\u0026rsquo; mother is the rector. A large 16+ounce handmade tea mug that a former student got my dad (sorry!). Teal Tumbler mugs for traveling that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten at Barnes and Nobel, that are so associated with me that a professor once worked the color of my mug into a lecture.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned before, I\u0026rsquo;m in the process of trying to use more loose tea (economy, variety, quality, snobbery, environmental concerns) and fewer tea bags. So I got this Teavana tea brewer, which is a thing of pure genius. I also--and I think I mentioned this on the blog before, but I was a bit scattered at that point--a french press for a nalgene bottle.\nMy first attempt at the nalgene tea press thing, was an utter failure, but the second try yielded amazing results. It was easy to use, it cleaned up well. There was no grit, or escape leaves, it was perfect. I also can\u0026rsquo;t drink it all before it goes cold, which is quite alright with me, on principal. I think my plan will be to make a pot of tea either with the Teavana contraption or with tea bags (depending on supply) and then fill the nalgene after I\u0026rsquo;m done with my morning cup. If I have the tea press thing in my book bag and a container of leaves, I can make a second bottle later in the day if I run out with the press, and then wash it out at home. I think washing it out on the road would be tough, but I think the chance that I\u0026rsquo;d be gone for that long is unlikely. It\u0026rsquo;s brilliance.\nMy other tea-accessory feat of late, is from the container store: They sell these nifty air tight glass jars in small and medium sizes, which is great for storing tea in the house. they also have plastic ones which are great for on the go. I\u0026rsquo;m a fan. Also a lot of the imported tea bags that I\u0026rsquo;ve been drinking more recently, also aren\u0026rsquo;t individually packed so once you open the box you need something like this anyway (which decreases the benefit of the tea bag in my view.) Anyway, that store is amazing. And I like being able to choose from a selection rather than feel pressured into drinking a particular kind because that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s open.\nMaybe I think about these things too much. In any case, I have a couple of varieties that I\u0026rsquo;ve tried but haven\u0026rsquo;t had much of a chance to write about yet. That\u0026rsquo;s coming soon, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to let the knitting content consume the site whole. There\u0026rsquo;ll be more of that as well. In the mean time\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n(ps. It\u0026rsquo;s great to get all the comments and emails from you, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I\u0026rsquo;m so bad about commenting on your blogs, I really do read them. Don\u0026rsquo;t stop!)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tea-accessories/","summary":"So, it is no surprise to those that know me to hear this admission: \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m a tea nut.\u0026rdquo; I mean, I sure drink a lot of tea, and I spend a lot of time thinking about tea consumption and the perfect cup of tea. I also think that by recognizing addictive tendencies in my personality and directing them toward productive things, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of preempting a lot of other problems down the road.\nBut I should point out that I\u0026rsquo;m not a very foo fooy kind of tea drinker. I don\u0026rsquo;t like teas that have interesting flavors, or colors, I will never rinse tea leaves before I brew tea with them, I will never contemplate the peak number of brewings that for the best taste. I so don\u0026rsquo;t fit in with the tea blogger crowd. Sigh.\nOn the other hand, I was so fixed on a particular brand of tea during college that I always bought a dozen boxes (of 20 tea bags) back and forth, because no stores in the part of wisconsin that I was in carried this particular brand.","title":"Tea Accessories"},{"content":"Hey folks,\nLast night I despite not having finished my previous sweater (the hem, it pains me) I sat down and figured out the design for my next sweater.\nAnyway. I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to host a knit-a-long for a long time, and I figure there\u0026rsquo;s no time like the present right?\nSo assuming you\u0026rsquo;re up for it, I\u0026rsquo;ll get some files together later today/tomorrow with the charts and we can get started.\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll need about 1200 yards/12oz - ish each of two (contrasting) colors of jumper-weight (fingering) yarn, with full disclosure that prediction is rough.\nBecause while I\u0026rsquo;ve knit many sweaters like this, I\u0026rsquo;ve never made this sweater yet. So it\u0026rsquo;ll be an adventure for you. I have an inch done, so I should be a little bit ahead of you, intrepidly figuring out any of the errors in the pattern before you get there. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of like the fearless fair isle project that Wendy did several years ago, only more, well, tychoish.\nAnybody game? Tell your friends and stay tuned!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/anyone-up-for-a-sweater-knit-along/","summary":"Hey folks,\nLast night I despite not having finished my previous sweater (the hem, it pains me) I sat down and figured out the design for my next sweater.\nAnyway. I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to host a knit-a-long for a long time, and I figure there\u0026rsquo;s no time like the present right?\nSo assuming you\u0026rsquo;re up for it, I\u0026rsquo;ll get some files together later today/tomorrow with the charts and we can get started.\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll need about 1200 yards/12oz - ish each of two (contrasting) colors of jumper-weight (fingering) yarn, with full disclosure that prediction is rough.\nBecause while I\u0026rsquo;ve knit many sweaters like this, I\u0026rsquo;ve never made this sweater yet. So it\u0026rsquo;ll be an adventure for you. I have an inch done, so I should be a little bit ahead of you, intrepidly figuring out any of the errors in the pattern before you get there. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of like the fearless fair isle project that Wendy did several years ago, only more, well, tychoish.","title":"Anyone up for a Sweater Knit Along?"},{"content":"So it seems, that there might be a little interest in this knit along.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to post the first little bit of the pattern/project description in a little while. In the mean time, I have a few links to share with you.\n1. I created a pattern on ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/latvian-dreaming. Add it to your queue, \u0026ldquo;cast on\u0026rdquo; for the project. Use it for reference. If you\u0026rsquo;re not on ravelry, I highly recommend joining. 2. Also on ravelry, I made a \u0026ldquo;tychoish knitting\u0026rdquo; group. Even if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to do this project, I\u0026rsquo;m sure there\u0026rsquo;ll be other things that this group will get used for. Here\u0026rsquo;s the url: http://www.ravelry.com/groups/tychoish-knitting. 3. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted a zip file with the first version of the resource files. This includes the excel file, a couple of PDFs and text and HTML versions of a rough Readme file. It\u0026rsquo;s located on Lulu and you can get to it here: http://www.lulu.com/content/2470929.\nOk, that\u0026rsquo;s all for now. I want to find something non-knitting related, to try and keep the site at least a little balanced. Maybe a loosing cause? I sense a post about tea coming in the near future.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knit-along-links/","summary":"So it seems, that there might be a little interest in this knit along.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to post the first little bit of the pattern/project description in a little while. In the mean time, I have a few links to share with you.\n1. I created a pattern on ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/latvian-dreaming. Add it to your queue, \u0026ldquo;cast on\u0026rdquo; for the project. Use it for reference. If you\u0026rsquo;re not on ravelry, I highly recommend joining. 2. Also on ravelry, I made a \u0026ldquo;tychoish knitting\u0026rdquo; group. Even if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to do this project, I\u0026rsquo;m sure there\u0026rsquo;ll be other things that this group will get used for. Here\u0026rsquo;s the url: http://www.ravelry.com/groups/tychoish-knitting. 3. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted a zip file with the first version of the resource files. This includes the excel file, a couple of PDFs and text and HTML versions of a rough Readme file. It\u0026rsquo;s located on Lulu and you can get to it here: http://www.","title":"Knit Along Links"},{"content":"At various points in this graduate school application season I think I was able to be mildly productive on other projects, but the last few weeks have been difficult, to say the least.\nAnd then there weren\u0026rsquo;t so many unknown variable outside of my control. Actually this happened rather immediately. You can\u0026rsquo;t plan the unknown, really, so in a lot of ways this is a better problem to have, but it\u0026rsquo;s not without challenges.\nOne thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve realized is that after being mildly productive but not otherwise particularly busy for what seemed like years, but was probably only about 6 weeks, I\u0026rsquo;m dog tired.\nPart of this is that I slept really poorly Sunday night and it\u0026rsquo;s taking a while to whack my sleep schedule back into shape. Part of the problem is that with the added emotional stress and the new anxiety of having to figure out what I\u0026rsquo;m going to do with my life after august, I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to limit my caffeine intake so that the stim don\u0026rsquo;t provoke something my body/mind can\u0026rsquo;t deal with, and make things worse.1\nThe other ting, is that the six weeks or so of anxiety has left me tired, which is counter intuitive, because I feel like I should be able to get up and get going in the right direction, but it\u0026rsquo;s apparently harder than that. And it\u0026rsquo;s only been two days at this point, so some adjustment is necessary. And also, I think because I\u0026rsquo;ve been so largely unproductive recently, all of the \u0026ldquo;structures of productivity,\u0026rdquo; (list making, time budgeting aren\u0026rsquo;t as immediately habitual as it used to be.) But I think realizing this will make it easier to attend to these things in the future.\nAlso, and this is really minor, but my knitting projects at the moment are very annoying. The hem facing from hell, and the sweater that I haven\u0026rsquo;t designed yet. Soon this will sort itself out and I\u0026rsquo;ll be back to knitting happy things. Spinning is slowing as well, but I did some more of it today, and that\u0026rsquo;s good.\nOn the upside I\u0026rsquo;m very on top of my email correspondence.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s on the schedule from here? I start the full time summer job in a few weeks, but I have big family obligations for the next couple of weekends, so I think my time is pretty well accounted for. In the mean time I need to get the productivity structures built up, so that I\u0026rsquo;m better at using time to get knitting and writing done once my time is more crunched.\nThe truth is, though, that I often work better when time is crunched, so that\u0026rsquo;s not a bad thing. I\u0026rsquo;m also sending out emails about doing web contract webdesign and other technical work, as I\u0026rsquo;m slowly in search of a job/career/reliable income source for post-August. I got a rather immediate callback. The pay is a bit sucky (but not bad), and if I can do it remotely (shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be an issue) it would be more than ok.\nAnyway, enough blathering. Thanks for reading, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\nI just realized that this is sort of what the caffine/stim junky equivalent of drinking is. If your normal chemical state is a bit above middle, having 20-25% of your normal intake is sort of equivalent to consuming a depressant. Or at least has a bit of a numbing effect. In any case, I don\u0026rsquo;t want you all to think that I\u0026rsquo;m a huge druggie, I just drink a lot of tea and think fairly seriously about my overall body chemistry. I woke up with a caffeine headache today, for instance, because I had maybe one cup yesterday early in the day, and it takes about a day since your last cup for the headache to come. I have to be better about this.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/procrastination/","summary":"At various points in this graduate school application season I think I was able to be mildly productive on other projects, but the last few weeks have been difficult, to say the least.\nAnd then there weren\u0026rsquo;t so many unknown variable outside of my control. Actually this happened rather immediately. You can\u0026rsquo;t plan the unknown, really, so in a lot of ways this is a better problem to have, but it\u0026rsquo;s not without challenges.\nOne thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve realized is that after being mildly productive but not otherwise particularly busy for what seemed like years, but was probably only about 6 weeks, I\u0026rsquo;m dog tired.\nPart of this is that I slept really poorly Sunday night and it\u0026rsquo;s taking a while to whack my sleep schedule back into shape. Part of the problem is that with the added emotional stress and the new anxiety of having to figure out what I\u0026rsquo;m going to do with my life after august, I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to limit my caffeine intake so that the stim don\u0026rsquo;t provoke something my body/mind can\u0026rsquo;t deal with, and make things worse.","title":"procrastination"},{"content":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t sleep well, but I used the extra little awakeness to write emails, which I\u0026rsquo;ve been avoiding, but need to be written. I\u0026rsquo;m coping, and I\u0026rsquo;m all sorts of cranky--some of which comes out in this entry--but these things pass as well. I\u0026rsquo;m doing well enough to avoid laundry, so that\u0026rsquo;s a good sign.\nAnyway, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been browsing about on ravelry and live journal recently for lack of other procrastinating to do (like the past week or so) and I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to develop a new \u0026ldquo;type\u0026rdquo; of internet citizen. A type particularly prevalent on LJ and the rav':\n*The Overwhelmingly Creative:*\nThese are, generally older (I\u0026rsquo;ve never seen an overwhelmingly creativity person under 35, I think younger people can blame most of these characteristics on too much neural plasticity, or something), folks who dabble in a lot of creative endeavors, but don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of output. They talk about how creative and/or artistic they are in their profiles or other \u0026ldquo;about me,\u0026rdquo; spaces, but the cursory glimpse of their journals/portfolio doesn\u0026rsquo;t reveal a particularly unusual amount (or kind) of production. They often discuss their aptitude or success at a wide range of wildly dissimilar crafts/activities (eg. metalsmithing, painting, tai chi, felting, dog grooming, and collage). Again, allow me to stress the overprotection, the dabbling, and the poor/unrealistic self concept.\nAnd generally I could care less. I think Marilyn, bless her heart (heh), would call these folks \u0026ldquo;knitdweebs,\u0026rdquo; and thats part of the issue, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s more.\nSo this \u0026ldquo;type\u0026rdquo; fabrication is mostly in jest, but it has brought up a number of more serious concerns:\nCraft, largely because of it\u0026rsquo;s association with women, is devalued, and crafters as a result. Also the latest commercial revival hasn\u0026rsquo;t helped: Stitch and Bitch, and the Discovery Channel daytime programing all reinscribe craft on women-ness and while this is sells product, recruits new knitters, and is empowering and feels great, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s the best thing to elevate the craft. More knitter\u0026rsquo;s doesn\u0026rsquo;t equal more power/respect for the craft of knitting. Arguably, a smaller proportion of the population knits today than did 40 or 80 years ago, so I don\u0026rsquo;t think making knitting \u0026ldquo;bigger\u0026rdquo; is the same as getting power/respect. Not that it\u0026rsquo;s a bad thing that new people knit and that the craft grows, but that if you want to talk about changing the craft in any meaningful way, you have to do more. I do a lot of things that others consider to be creative: I write, I knit and spin, I dance, etc. People sometimes, particularly in knitting contexts, ask if I\u0026rsquo;m (was, trying to be) in graduate school for art, right after they\u0026rsquo;re awed by the creativity of my sweaters, or something. Which always strikes me as weird. I mean, I love the compliment, but I think is misguided. Creativity is a situational response to constraint, not some characteralogical feature. I do all of the \u0026ldquo;creative\u0026rdquo; things I do because I enjoy the technical experience and exercise of knitting and spinning and dancing (I write because I have something that I want to say.) Creativity happens when I (or anyone) has to figure out how to convey a series of fictional events in a coherant manner, or when you have to figure out how to fit a sweater over a shoulder without puckering or stretching and still maintaining the pattern. Hell, creativity is figuring out how to efficiently get from South St. Louis City to an inner suburb in the north/west county (Creve Coeur) allowing for the fact that the city has no really good North-South roads, and the major East-West artery closed for most of the next decade for construction. We all do this, the same as anyone else. Our choices about what we spend our time doing, is largely unrelated as far as I\u0026rsquo;m concerned.\nI wonder and worry that there might be trouble in these thoughts notions. That my dismissal of creativity might be connected to the fact that I participate in largely feminized crafts (spinning, knitting), or otherwise undervalued genres (folk/morris dance, science fiction.) \u0026lsquo;Cold be. I hope not, but the thought has crossed my mind.\nThoughts?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/misguided-creativity/","summary":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t sleep well, but I used the extra little awakeness to write emails, which I\u0026rsquo;ve been avoiding, but need to be written. I\u0026rsquo;m coping, and I\u0026rsquo;m all sorts of cranky--some of which comes out in this entry--but these things pass as well. I\u0026rsquo;m doing well enough to avoid laundry, so that\u0026rsquo;s a good sign.\nAnyway, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been browsing about on ravelry and live journal recently for lack of other procrastinating to do (like the past week or so) and I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to develop a new \u0026ldquo;type\u0026rdquo; of internet citizen. A type particularly prevalent on LJ and the rav':\n*The Overwhelmingly Creative:*\nThese are, generally older (I\u0026rsquo;ve never seen an overwhelmingly creativity person under 35, I think younger people can blame most of these characteristics on too much neural plasticity, or something), folks who dabble in a lot of creative endeavors, but don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of output. They talk about how creative and/or artistic they are in their profiles or other \u0026ldquo;about me,\u0026rdquo; spaces, but the cursory glimpse of their journals/portfolio doesn\u0026rsquo;t reveal a particularly unusual amount (or kind) of production.","title":"Misguided Creativity"},{"content":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t get in to graduate school this time.\nFeh.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to start putting out feelers for another try, but maybe not next year I need a break from this applying thing, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to be beating a dead horse or anything. And looking for (another) job. I\u0026rsquo;m good income wise until the end of august, if need be, but I think it would be good to find something solid and suited that I could do while I retool.\nAlso, this research project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this semester is something that I could continue to work on for a while, and something that I think could easily lead to me into interesting next steps.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s good to keep busy and this helps, but the truth is that this sucks royally. Just saying.\nBut there are worse things in the world than working and focusing on writing and knitting and spinning, and I look forward to sharing those moments and experiences with you here. And also sharing other things here because really those sorts of thoughts are much more interesting for both of us than the endless introspection.\nBe in touch would you? I will be too.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/didnt-get-in/","summary":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t get in to graduate school this time.\nFeh.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to start putting out feelers for another try, but maybe not next year I need a break from this applying thing, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to be beating a dead horse or anything. And looking for (another) job. I\u0026rsquo;m good income wise until the end of august, if need be, but I think it would be good to find something solid and suited that I could do while I retool.\nAlso, this research project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this semester is something that I could continue to work on for a while, and something that I think could easily lead to me into interesting next steps.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s good to keep busy and this helps, but the truth is that this sucks royally. Just saying.\nBut there are worse things in the world than working and focusing on writing and knitting and spinning, and I look forward to sharing those moments and experiences with you here.","title":"didn't get in"},{"content":"I caved yesterday and bought roving. Hand dyed roving at that. This entry is about various developments in my slate of projects.\nGiven that I had, basically none of my own fiber in the house1, and that I get a hefty discount on stuff at the yarn shop I\u0026rsquo;ve been working at, and the fact that this fiber has been sitting on the shelf staring me down for weeks, and so I got it. The color name is Blueberries and Cream, it\u0026rsquo;s Merino, I got 8 ounces. Wait, I\u0026rsquo;ve found a picture that I\u0026rsquo;m stealing from the companies website\nI think the blues are a little bit brighter in real life, but that\u0026rsquo;s pretty clearly a flash effect.\nAnyway this morning I spun the first third of the roving. My plan is to have a DK/Sprt weight 3 ply. The first strand I\u0026rsquo;m broke the colors up pretty well and spun them in the order that they came on the roving. The next strand I\u0026rsquo;m going to intentionally mix up the colors, and the third strand I\u0026rsquo;m going to figure something else to do, I might break up the fiber and then spin a regular sequence, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nMy hope is that I\u0026rsquo;ll be finishing up the plying right as my shetland roving arrives. I hope the spin that the same way as this (3ply DK/Sport weight,) even though it\u0026rsquo;s all one color.\nAlso, I\u0026rsquo;ve finally reached the point in the Latvian mitten Sweater where I have to unzip the provisional cast-on and knit the hem facing. Ugg. This is a two-or-so inch long piece of fabric that is\u0026hellip; 110 inches wide. It has to go up and down the cardigan opening, around the neck opening, and all the way around the bottom edge of the sweater. This is the third sweater where I\u0026rsquo;ve had to do this massively annoying procedure to this year. And while I\u0026rsquo;ve been leaning towards not doing cardigans for a while, I\u0026rsquo;m swearing them off for the next several garments.\nBut because the knitting is so tedious, and so large (because of course the whole damn thing has to fit in your bookbag/lap, it\u0026rsquo;s not really feasible to work on this \u0026ldquo;here and there\u0026rdquo; like you might with most knitting. Anyway, because of this, I\u0026rsquo;ve cast on for the ribbing of my next sweater.\nI reason that this is acceptable because:\nI hate knitting corrugated ribbing. I haven\u0026rsquo;t chosen the charts/pattern for the body of the sweater, just the stitch count. If I cast on now, I won\u0026rsquo;t be tempted to turn the border into some sort of provisional cast-on that will require unzipping/hemming later. Judge for yourself. I have, what probably amounts to about a pound of roving, part of it is a dyed-black merino, and the other part is a merino/tencel (blue) that I was spinning a year ago when I took a break from spinning. It\u0026rsquo;s a two ply bulky, and it\u0026rsquo;s hibernating because I have no clue what I want to do with the yarn anymore, and I have a lot of this fiber already spun, and I can\u0026rsquo;t decide what to do with it. So it doesn\u0026rsquo;t count.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/project-shift/","summary":"I caved yesterday and bought roving. Hand dyed roving at that. This entry is about various developments in my slate of projects.\nGiven that I had, basically none of my own fiber in the house1, and that I get a hefty discount on stuff at the yarn shop I\u0026rsquo;ve been working at, and the fact that this fiber has been sitting on the shelf staring me down for weeks, and so I got it. The color name is Blueberries and Cream, it\u0026rsquo;s Merino, I got 8 ounces. Wait, I\u0026rsquo;ve found a picture that I\u0026rsquo;m stealing from the companies website\nI think the blues are a little bit brighter in real life, but that\u0026rsquo;s pretty clearly a flash effect.\nAnyway this morning I spun the first third of the roving. My plan is to have a DK/Sprt weight 3 ply. The first strand I\u0026rsquo;m broke the colors up pretty well and spun them in the order that they came on the roving.","title":"project shift"},{"content":"I started a tag for spinning related posts that I hope to use as having a wheel of my own (again) means that I\u0026rsquo;m spinning more.\nI finished the last little bit of the BFL. Well almost. I still have about 80 grams of the stuff set aside with a drop spindle, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think I need to spin it up like the other to make anything. But I might.\nI was going to do this Mohair/Alpaca/Finn thing, but I\u0026rsquo;ve since decided against it. Alpaca is nice, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that I particularly like to knit with. I\u0026rsquo;m very into wool, and I know myself well enough to realize that I don\u0026rsquo;t really know how to spin alpaca, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have enough desire to want to learn how to do that at the moment.\nIf I move north and need gear that warm, or lace goes into style for men, maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll reconsider.\nIn other news, though people on ravelry have been helpful with my double drive plying issue, I think this boils down to the fact that this yarn that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working with is very lofty, particularly when plied, and double drive though very even (and good for it) doesn\u0026rsquo;t provide as much tension for plying as the breakband method does.\nThough if anyone has the Alden Amos book at hand and wants to share his imparted wisdom, I\u0026rsquo;d be ok with that, if I\u0026rsquo;m missing something.\nSo next up, seeing that the alpaca blend thing is a no go, is going to be the Grey Shetland that I just ordered. It should be here soon enough, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ll take the opportunity of the break to finish the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on (just a hem), some writing responsibilities, starting the next sweater (woot!). There\u0026rsquo;s also some hand painted roving at the yarn store that might come home with me. If it\u0026rsquo;s still in the shop.\nIn the past several years, most of my spinning has focused on making various two ply yarns, and I think what to focus on spinning conventional three-ply for the next little bit.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also decided that, while I\u0026rsquo;m uninterested in spinning bulky novelty yarns; unlike a lot of spinners, I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in spinning fingering and lace weight (sorry Ted! I\u0026rsquo;m not worthy!) mostly because while I knit with a lot of fingering weight (jumper weight shetland mostly), it seems to me that this is the kind of yarn that I would never want to spin for myself, whereas things in the Sport/DK/Worsted range is stuff where my allegiance to the machine spun fiber is much less strong. A place where the economy works out a bit better for me.\nAnd three ply seems like it will be fun.\nBut until I get more fiber, we\u0026rsquo;ll have to wait and see, and move on to other topics of interest.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spinning-tag/","summary":"I started a tag for spinning related posts that I hope to use as having a wheel of my own (again) means that I\u0026rsquo;m spinning more.\nI finished the last little bit of the BFL. Well almost. I still have about 80 grams of the stuff set aside with a drop spindle, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think I need to spin it up like the other to make anything. But I might.\nI was going to do this Mohair/Alpaca/Finn thing, but I\u0026rsquo;ve since decided against it. Alpaca is nice, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that I particularly like to knit with. I\u0026rsquo;m very into wool, and I know myself well enough to realize that I don\u0026rsquo;t really know how to spin alpaca, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have enough desire to want to learn how to do that at the moment.\nIf I move north and need gear that warm, or lace goes into style for men, maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll reconsider.","title":"Spinning Tag"},{"content":"Perhaps no news is good news? After the bulk of a week in one kind of a haze or another, I\u0026rsquo;m just working on getting on with my life, at least for the present. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be spinning a lot in the future, no matter if I get into graduate school or not. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting and writing knitting patterns. There are the 14 sweaters to knit. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to stop this blog or stop drinking tea. In a few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ll be working full time until August 31st. I have another novella or ten to write.\nLife continues.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also realized that the organization of this school is somewhat\u0026hellip; arcane and odd. For instance I submitted my application on paper (because there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a digital option), and the whole thing is administered by the department rather than a graduate school proper. It takes them a little while longer to get to things. I can cope with this. And I just have to be the faster zebra, so I\u0026rsquo;m resting comfortably in the belief (delusion?) that no news is good news.\nAnyway. I got the new spinning wheel on Tuesday, as I mentioned and I\u0026rsquo;ve been spinning a lot. I plyed about 80 grams (my standard skein size) Tuesday evening, and then spun and plied two bobbins of singles on Wednesday (190 grams), and spun two more bobbins yesterday, though I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to ply it all last night.\nMy current spinning project has been some amazingly lofty and soft Blue faced Leicester (BFL, commonly pronounced biffel) that I got over the holidays at The Yarn Barn in Kansas City. I have probably 60 grams set aside for a drop spindle project for when my hands hurt too much to knit, and i don\u0026rsquo;t want to sit in front of a wheel (or couldn\u0026rsquo;t before I got the new wheel, and about 82 grams left for wheel spinning (I\u0026rsquo;ve been making sport-ish weight two ply). Of about two pounds that I bought.\nThe next spinning project is going to be three ply, two of which will be a brown mohair/alpaca (30/70?) blend, and the third ply will be white finnsheep wool. Someone can do the weighted percentages. 33% wool, 47% Alpaca, 20% mohair? Something like that\u0026hellip;\nAfter that I have my eye on some grey shetland from copper moose (an online spinning company) that I might buy a couple of pounds to spin a 3 ply DK weight for a sweater. A sweater like Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s St. Brigid? Something.\nAnyway, I have blog posts about knitting developments, tea developments, and writing developments, so I\u0026rsquo;ll leave this post here, and go do some spinning before I get back to more writing thing.\nBe well, and I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted as I learn more, for sure.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/moving-forward-2/","summary":"Perhaps no news is good news? After the bulk of a week in one kind of a haze or another, I\u0026rsquo;m just working on getting on with my life, at least for the present. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be spinning a lot in the future, no matter if I get into graduate school or not. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting and writing knitting patterns. There are the 14 sweaters to knit. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to stop this blog or stop drinking tea. In a few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ll be working full time until August 31st. I have another novella or ten to write.\nLife continues.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also realized that the organization of this school is somewhat\u0026hellip; arcane and odd. For instance I submitted my application on paper (because there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a digital option), and the whole thing is administered by the department rather than a graduate school proper. It takes them a little while longer to get to things.","title":"Moving Forward"},{"content":"still no news.\nI have myself convinced that if I don\u0026rsquo;t get a rejection slip by 1pm in the time zone that the school I\u0026rsquo;m waiting on, my chances of getting in go up, and continue to go up with every successive half business day, on the theory that as long as I\u0026rsquo;m in play, my chances go up: other people on the wait list ahead of me are more likely to have made alternate plans as time goes on, and so forth.\nThis is all speculation, of course, but if it makes me feel better, I\u0026rsquo;m taking it. I\u0026rsquo;m about as frayed as I ever get, though I think I\u0026rsquo;m almost faking it pretty well. Almost.\nMy first trial run with the nalgene french press when poorly, though I totally blame operator error, and I\u0026rsquo;ll give it another try.\nllThe new spinning wheel is, simply put, amazing. I spun 3.75 ozs of singles this morning, still the BFL that I\u0026rsquo;ve been chipping away at for months, and I\u0026rsquo;m working on the second bobbin. My mom reminded me that we got 8 oz of spinning fiber (alpaca wool? alpaca wool, silk? brown? I think.) for christmas, and I might take my share of this when I\u0026rsquo;m done with the BFL. Which will probably be in the next week or two. After that, I want to make an order from R.H. Lindsey, to get some corriedale and merino and maybe some other this and that, though I\u0026rsquo;m intrigued, they have uncarded grey merino loose wool that might be fun. And if I got a flick carder, the processing might not be such a bother. And its grey, which I\u0026rsquo;m fond of. Anyway, it rocks.\nOk, I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, of course.\nlove, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/double-drive/","summary":"still no news.\nI have myself convinced that if I don\u0026rsquo;t get a rejection slip by 1pm in the time zone that the school I\u0026rsquo;m waiting on, my chances of getting in go up, and continue to go up with every successive half business day, on the theory that as long as I\u0026rsquo;m in play, my chances go up: other people on the wait list ahead of me are more likely to have made alternate plans as time goes on, and so forth.\nThis is all speculation, of course, but if it makes me feel better, I\u0026rsquo;m taking it. I\u0026rsquo;m about as frayed as I ever get, though I think I\u0026rsquo;m almost faking it pretty well. Almost.\nMy first trial run with the nalgene french press when poorly, though I totally blame operator error, and I\u0026rsquo;ll give it another try.\nllThe new spinning wheel is, simply put, amazing. I spun 3.","title":"double drive"},{"content":"no grad school news.\nlots of knitting and coding interviews, almost done with sweater.\nsleeping well, and upbeat, possibly with reason (speculative), so it could all come crashing down.\nhaving day out. academic stuff, errands. Tea.\nMore knitting. the sweater looks really good, but I think without hem/zipper it\u0026rsquo;s going to look like crap so I\u0026rsquo;m reminding myself to withold judgement for a while.\nOk, for real. Sigh.\nThink good thoughts, I could hear at any point in the next little bit. really. I think delusion is the only way people live through these kinds things.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/quickie/","summary":"no grad school news.\nlots of knitting and coding interviews, almost done with sweater.\nsleeping well, and upbeat, possibly with reason (speculative), so it could all come crashing down.\nhaving day out. academic stuff, errands. Tea.\nMore knitting. the sweater looks really good, but I think without hem/zipper it\u0026rsquo;s going to look like crap so I\u0026rsquo;m reminding myself to withold judgement for a while.\nOk, for real. Sigh.\nThink good thoughts, I could hear at any point in the next little bit. really. I think delusion is the only way people live through these kinds things.\nOnward and Upward!","title":"quickie"},{"content":"still no news about grad school.\nthe longer I \u0026ldquo;stay in play,\u0026rdquo; the better, probably, though I am looking forward to this whole drama being over.\nmy dad said the other day, that \u0026ldquo;zebras don\u0026rsquo;t need to run faster than lions to stay alive, they just need to run faster than other zebras,\u0026rdquo;\nwhich is both funny, and true. at any point, I could be the slow zebra, but the chances are that there are slower zebras out there, and the longer I\u0026rsquo;m in play, the better.\nand it\u0026rsquo;s funny. funny is good.\nmy spinning wheel came today. but I went for a kind of brisk walk after being out and running around a lot today, and I\u0026rsquo;m just knackered. more news on this forthcoming.\nalso, I got a new nalgen bottle and a a french press type thing for making tea in it. I haven\u0026rsquo;t quite mastered the insertion/removal thing with grace but some day I will have it. I also got a couple more varieties of black tea, including one with vanilla and thus I suspect to have enough tea to get me through the beginning of 2009, unless I get into graduate school, in which case, the end of october, max.\nI think what you\u0026rsquo;re witnessing is the live bloging of angst, and so I\u0026rsquo;m going to go and do something else entirely.\nlove, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/stuff/","summary":"still no news about grad school.\nthe longer I \u0026ldquo;stay in play,\u0026rdquo; the better, probably, though I am looking forward to this whole drama being over.\nmy dad said the other day, that \u0026ldquo;zebras don\u0026rsquo;t need to run faster than lions to stay alive, they just need to run faster than other zebras,\u0026rdquo;\nwhich is both funny, and true. at any point, I could be the slow zebra, but the chances are that there are slower zebras out there, and the longer I\u0026rsquo;m in play, the better.\nand it\u0026rsquo;s funny. funny is good.\nmy spinning wheel came today. but I went for a kind of brisk walk after being out and running around a lot today, and I\u0026rsquo;m just knackered. more news on this forthcoming.\nalso, I got a new nalgen bottle and a a french press type thing for making tea in it. I haven\u0026rsquo;t quite mastered the insertion/removal thing with grace but some day I will have it.","title":"stuff"},{"content":"So this is the week. Hopefully. I\u0026rsquo;m getting palpitations just thinking about it. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted if I get in.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not what happens so much as it is that it\u0026rsquo;s happening. Not that I don\u0026rsquo;t have strong feelings/prefrences, I do, it\u0026rsquo;s just stressful.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I will, g-d willing, and I get in, I\u0026rsquo;m going to start on a celebratory road trip in about a week, as it\u0026rsquo;s the only good stretch of time when I don\u0026rsquo;t have commitments that I need to be here for. In the next couple of months I have: May Day dancing, work commitments at the yarn store, morris dancing, teaching commitments, and then my summer job starts in late May. So it\u0026rsquo;s now or never.\nPossible stops (and rough order) include:\nChampaign-Urbana, IL Nashville, TN Chapel Hill, NC Harrisburg, PN Philadelphia, PN Boston Area, MN Chicago, IL And I just need to get back here by sunrise on May 1st. Well, enough time before sunrise to find/clean put on morris kit before sunrise. Which, might be as little as 60-90 minutes, and as much as several hours.\nI also listed the places in a rough order, so that I don\u0026rsquo;t have more than 8-10 hours at any one point. Except for Boston to Chicago. Maybe back to Philadelphia/Harrisburg to take the edge off that. Also, you figure with a state as big as Ohio, I have to have some friend there, but alas. We\u0026rsquo;ll see. If you\u0026rsquo;re in one of those places or in between one of those places, keep in touch/watch this blog\u0026hellip;.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s fun to plan these things, it takes the edge off, if I don\u0026rsquo;t get in I\u0026rsquo;ll probably take a similar road trip at the end of the summer in between jobs/movements in my life. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted, of course.\nBrief rundown of other news:\nI taught a really cool knitting class this morning. It was more of a workshop, and since I\u0026rsquo;m local we\u0026rsquo;re spreading it out over three months, so people have an opportunity to get a big project done. I\u0026rsquo;m liking it. I\u0026rsquo;ll write more about this. I\u0026rsquo;m beginning stage one of a big academic project tonight, which is why my posting today is more reflexive and brief than usual. Aside from all the busy. I went to a chamber music concert that a friend played in. It was fun, I got a lot of knitting done. In fact, I had a slight knitting mishap yesterday and had to rip back about 3 inches of knitting, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally regrouped. I\u0026rsquo;ll write more about this later. Ok, I have to run.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/progresspossibilities/","summary":"So this is the week. Hopefully. I\u0026rsquo;m getting palpitations just thinking about it. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted if I get in.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not what happens so much as it is that it\u0026rsquo;s happening. Not that I don\u0026rsquo;t have strong feelings/prefrences, I do, it\u0026rsquo;s just stressful.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I will, g-d willing, and I get in, I\u0026rsquo;m going to start on a celebratory road trip in about a week, as it\u0026rsquo;s the only good stretch of time when I don\u0026rsquo;t have commitments that I need to be here for. In the next couple of months I have: May Day dancing, work commitments at the yarn store, morris dancing, teaching commitments, and then my summer job starts in late May. So it\u0026rsquo;s now or never.\nPossible stops (and rough order) include:\nChampaign-Urbana, IL Nashville, TN Chapel Hill, NC Harrisburg, PN Philadelphia, PN Boston Area, MN Chicago, IL And I just need to get back here by sunrise on May 1st.","title":"Progress/Possibilities"},{"content":"So, I apparently have turned into a lazy blogger. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what to say about this. I have, probably four more days on the waitlist maybe 5 or 6 which means I\u0026rsquo;ve been on the list for 28+ days. My heart races just thinking about it.\nKnitting is going well. I\u0026rsquo;m 4-5 inches into the yoke, so probably at least half done with this section, but each round has fewer and fewer stitches. I\u0026rsquo;m decreasing what amounts to 8 stitches every three rounds, and though all of Elizabeth Zimmerman\u0026rsquo;s Seamless Yoke Style sweater \u0026ldquo;structures\u0026rdquo; work with colorwork designs, you have to monkey with the decrease rates because the vertical to horizontal gauge is different in stranded work (stitches are more narrow). Keep this in mind.\nMy mother and I went shopping this morning. I found a book bag at REI (my old one is getting ratty, and broken) and I ordered it online as soon as I got home. We also went to \u0026ldquo;The Container Store\u0026rdquo; and I got a couple of little glass (and plastic) airtight jars to hold loose tea, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite like them, so I\u0026rsquo;ll have to go back to get a couple more at some point. We also got--and this was the reason for the trip--bathroom/shower accessories, of which we were in great need of.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working through my tea bag stash in an effort to move to loose leaf tea more full time. I have two experimental varieties of tea bags (and one known quantity) left hanging around that will probably take a while to get through, but I want to have less stuff in stock before I go forth and buy more lose tea\u0026hellip;\nAnd speaking of tea buying, I want to get one of those strainer/french press things that you can get to use in a nalgene for when I\u0026rsquo;m on the road in the future\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, back to the knitting, I must get this done soon, because I want to move on to the next thing, and I\u0026rsquo;m so close!\nStay well!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/consumerism-and-tea/","summary":"So, I apparently have turned into a lazy blogger. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what to say about this. I have, probably four more days on the waitlist maybe 5 or 6 which means I\u0026rsquo;ve been on the list for 28+ days. My heart races just thinking about it.\nKnitting is going well. I\u0026rsquo;m 4-5 inches into the yoke, so probably at least half done with this section, but each round has fewer and fewer stitches. I\u0026rsquo;m decreasing what amounts to 8 stitches every three rounds, and though all of Elizabeth Zimmerman\u0026rsquo;s Seamless Yoke Style sweater \u0026ldquo;structures\u0026rdquo; work with colorwork designs, you have to monkey with the decrease rates because the vertical to horizontal gauge is different in stranded work (stitches are more narrow). Keep this in mind.\nMy mother and I went shopping this morning. I found a book bag at REI (my old one is getting ratty, and broken) and I ordered it online as soon as I got home.","title":"consumerism and tea"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, well g-d only knows what today, but apparently it didn\u0026rsquo;t involve blogging. I have gotten things done, and I\u0026rsquo;m probably half to 3/4s of the way done with my document for my class on sunday, and making progress on my sweater.\nThese are good things.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t talked much about it here, but I suspect that most of you are aware that I twitter. That is that I post things to my twitter page throughout my day. Links, thoughts, notifications of new blog entries (ok, that\u0026rsquo;s automatic, but still). It\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of fun, once you get into it, and I heartily recommend it!\nAnyway, one of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing of late, is when a lyric of a song strikes my ear/fancy, I\u0026rsquo;ll post a snippet of it on twitter. Usually I don\u0026rsquo;t go for the most recongizeable lyric, like I\u0026rsquo;ve posted bits of \u0026ldquo;The Times they are A-Changing\u0026rdquo; that aren\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;come gather around children\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;the times they are a-changing,\u0026rdquo; and other such.\nAnd it\u0026rsquo;s sort of cool when people twitter back the name of the song or the next lyric, or something, it\u0026rsquo;s sort of like a sing along.\nRecently I\u0026rsquo;ve been twittering parts of the 69 Love Songs collection by \u0026ldquo;The Magnetic Fields,\u0026rdquo; which I think is full of great little lyrics like \u0026ldquo;Papa was a rodeo, mama was a rock and roll band,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Like the Moon needs poetry, you need me\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Not for all the tea in China Not if I could sing like a bird Not for all North Carolina.\u0026rdquo; And it\u0026rsquo;s so delightful that an obviously quirky band like The Magnetic Fields is so well known that people can generate the next lines and what not from memory.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve put the iPod back onto random, so who knows what\u0026rsquo;s going to stick in the next few days but I\u0026rsquo;d like to continue to do this kind of thing, and it would be great to have little sing-a-longs with you too.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/twitter-sing-alongs/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, well g-d only knows what today, but apparently it didn\u0026rsquo;t involve blogging. I have gotten things done, and I\u0026rsquo;m probably half to 3/4s of the way done with my document for my class on sunday, and making progress on my sweater.\nThese are good things.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t talked much about it here, but I suspect that most of you are aware that I twitter. That is that I post things to my twitter page throughout my day. Links, thoughts, notifications of new blog entries (ok, that\u0026rsquo;s automatic, but still). It\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of fun, once you get into it, and I heartily recommend it!\nAnyway, one of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing of late, is when a lyric of a song strikes my ear/fancy, I\u0026rsquo;ll post a snippet of it on twitter. Usually I don\u0026rsquo;t go for the most recongizeable lyric, like I\u0026rsquo;ve posted bits of \u0026ldquo;The Times they are A-Changing\u0026rdquo; that aren\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;come gather around children\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;the times they are a-changing,\u0026rdquo; and other such.","title":"Twitter Sing Alongs"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Hey look at that!\u0026rdquo; he cried out, far too excited for the cereal aisle, if you asked me.\nBut no one ever did. \u0026ldquo;What.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;They have cranberry chocolate cereal! And it has flax in it!\u0026rdquo; Again, too excited.\n\u0026ldquo;Ew? That\u0026rsquo;s gross.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;No we\u0026rsquo;re getting it, we have to!\u0026rdquo; There were already too many exclamation points in this conversation, but it wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite over. \u0026ldquo;It even has flax seed!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Still gross.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Still getting it.\u0026rdquo; He said, and placed it firmly in the cart.\n\u0026ldquo;Whatever, I\u0026rsquo;m getting Cheerios,\u0026rdquo; I say. I put the palatable cereal in the cart, and pray that after thinking of the alternative for all of 3 minutes, that I\u0026rsquo;ll have an appetite for them by the next morning.\nThe next morning, we each have our own cereal.\nThe following morning, we both have Cheerios. No one is surprised.\nThree days latter. There is most of a box of Cranberry Chocolate Cereal (with Flax Seed!) in the pantry. There is one bowl\u0026rsquo;s worth of Cheerios left.\nI think we can all see where this is going.\nAnd I don\u0026rsquo;t need to explain why I had graham crackers for breakfast.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cranberry-choclate-cereal/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;Hey look at that!\u0026rdquo; he cried out, far too excited for the cereal aisle, if you asked me.\nBut no one ever did. \u0026ldquo;What.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;They have cranberry chocolate cereal! And it has flax in it!\u0026rdquo; Again, too excited.\n\u0026ldquo;Ew? That\u0026rsquo;s gross.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;No we\u0026rsquo;re getting it, we have to!\u0026rdquo; There were already too many exclamation points in this conversation, but it wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite over. \u0026ldquo;It even has flax seed!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Still gross.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Still getting it.\u0026rdquo; He said, and placed it firmly in the cart.\n\u0026ldquo;Whatever, I\u0026rsquo;m getting Cheerios,\u0026rdquo; I say. I put the palatable cereal in the cart, and pray that after thinking of the alternative for all of 3 minutes, that I\u0026rsquo;ll have an appetite for them by the next morning.\nThe next morning, we each have our own cereal.\nThe following morning, we both have Cheerios. No one is surprised.\nThree days latter. There is most of a box of Cranberry Chocolate Cereal (with Flax Seed!","title":"Cranberry Choclate Cereal"},{"content":"So I promised another tea review, and given that I\u0026rsquo;ve had about half of the box so far, I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair that I start.\nAfter I posted my last review, a few people--mostly relatives--made a great deal of fun of me for such a geeky focus on a cup of tea. And having said that, I took the opportunity to look a little more thoroughly at the tea blogging community.\nWow, there was a fully developed niche that I have no exposure to. I\u0026rsquo;ve been on this \u0026ldquo;internet thing\u0026rdquo; for so long that I still think of fully deployed niche blogs as being sort of \u0026ldquo;new,\u0026rdquo; which I think explains some of my awed response.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;m not that much of a tea dweeb, most of the teas that I\u0026rsquo;m reviewing come in bag form, and I\u0026rsquo;m not experimenting to find the proper brewing nirvana for each tea variety, I\u0026rsquo;m just drinking the tea as I normally would and seeing how it goes.\nThe tea this time is Pickwick English Tea Blend. It\u0026rsquo;s a dutch tea, or at least the packaging is all dutch. The tea-bags are pretty big it seems, and there is no individual wrapping, though the bags all have strings and grip-tab things. This packaging is sort of annoying, it\u0026rsquo;s sort of \u0026ldquo;half way there,\u0026rdquo; and makes it difficult to use effectively.\nThe tea is pretty strong, I think this is a function of the bags being bigger: I get a really strong 16-18oz cup of tea from one bag, which is a function of bag size, I think. It almost always needs milk, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a harsh tea, despite it\u0026rsquo;s strength.\nIn term of flavor, it\u0026rsquo;s interesting deep, rich, which is delightful of course, but there\u0026rsquo;s a hint of something wooden or smokey--a little bitter behind the flavor, which is a good move. I think tea needs something back there to make it unique and to differentiate it from other teas.\nIf I weren\u0026rsquo;t looking to switch to loose leaf teas, for most of my day-to-day tea drinking, I\u0026rsquo;d probably get this one again in a heart beat. Since the packaging sucks, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking to use the loose stuff, maybe not so much. But if you really like strong dark tea, without any flavor crap this is really great stuff.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pickwick-english-tea-blend/","summary":"So I promised another tea review, and given that I\u0026rsquo;ve had about half of the box so far, I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair that I start.\nAfter I posted my last review, a few people--mostly relatives--made a great deal of fun of me for such a geeky focus on a cup of tea. And having said that, I took the opportunity to look a little more thoroughly at the tea blogging community.\nWow, there was a fully developed niche that I have no exposure to. I\u0026rsquo;ve been on this \u0026ldquo;internet thing\u0026rdquo; for so long that I still think of fully deployed niche blogs as being sort of \u0026ldquo;new,\u0026rdquo; which I think explains some of my awed response.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;m not that much of a tea dweeb, most of the teas that I\u0026rsquo;m reviewing come in bag form, and I\u0026rsquo;m not experimenting to find the proper brewing nirvana for each tea variety, I\u0026rsquo;m just drinking the tea as I normally would and seeing how it goes.","title":"Pickwick English Tea Blend"},{"content":"So there\u0026rsquo;s this English May Carol (from the village of Padstow in Cornwall. The song is commonly known as \u0026ldquo;The Padstow May Carol\u0026rdquo; or simply Padstow.) The refrain begins with the words \u0026ldquo;Unite and Unite.\u0026rdquo; Hell, here\u0026rsquo;s the chorus:\nUnite and unite and let us all unite For summer is a-comming today And wither we are going, we will all unite In the merry morning of May\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m knitting this sweater, which is modeled on Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s Saddle Shouldered Aran Cardigan, except that it\u0026rsquo;s color-work.\nAnd there\u0026rsquo;s a point in all of these EZ style sweaters where the instructions say \u0026ldquo;unite the body and sleeves on one needle,\u0026rdquo; but the word \u0026ldquo;unite\u0026rdquo; is always in caps or bold, or some such.\nSo I always sing this part of the instruction to the tune of this song.\nSo what if it\u0026rsquo;s a little weird.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;m (apparently) doing better at taking pictures of my knitting as I do it. So cause for celebration.\nAt this point I\u0026rsquo;ve knit the first inch-or-so of about 10 inches on the shoulders. The thing about yoke sweaters, is that if you decrease in a particular way you can get all manner of clever sweater shapes.\nI\u0026rsquo;m just going to do a set in sleeve, and then end with saddles. across the shoulders and into the collar. We\u0026rsquo;ll see when I get there. I\u0026rsquo;m taking pretty good notes this time, so we\u0026rsquo;ll be able to reproduce this with ease.\nI have to finish writing up the document for my class, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m just going to knit tonight.\nKnit in good health,\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/unite-and-unite/","summary":"So there\u0026rsquo;s this English May Carol (from the village of Padstow in Cornwall. The song is commonly known as \u0026ldquo;The Padstow May Carol\u0026rdquo; or simply Padstow.) The refrain begins with the words \u0026ldquo;Unite and Unite.\u0026rdquo; Hell, here\u0026rsquo;s the chorus:\nUnite and unite and let us all unite For summer is a-comming today And wither we are going, we will all unite In the merry morning of May\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m knitting this sweater, which is modeled on Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s Saddle Shouldered Aran Cardigan, except that it\u0026rsquo;s color-work.\nAnd there\u0026rsquo;s a point in all of these EZ style sweaters where the instructions say \u0026ldquo;unite the body and sleeves on one needle,\u0026rdquo; but the word \u0026ldquo;unite\u0026rdquo; is always in caps or bold, or some such.\nSo I always sing this part of the instruction to the tune of this song.\nSo what if it\u0026rsquo;s a little weird.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;m (apparently) doing better at taking pictures of my knitting as I do it.","title":"Unite and Unite"},{"content":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to the part of the sweater where you can \u0026ldquo;unite\u0026rdquo; the sleeves and the body last night--for this I blame dancing--but I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly close. Tonight maybe. I\u0026rsquo;ve been planning out how to do the neck/shoulders, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to pull something clever. Damn.\nI have to work today, so while I had grand plans to blog on a number of varied subjects, that might not happen, though it depends on when I start. I\u0026rsquo;m working on another tea review, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing up the hand outs to a knitting class that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be teaching starting this weekend. Eek.\nMostly though, I\u0026rsquo;m just anxious like, which gets in the way of getting things done. On the upside, I have one week left on the wait-list, give or take a day or two. This is exciting, and it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to be able to put this behind me.\nI\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at alternately being excited about the possibility of getting in, and all of the possibilities that being able to take some more time off would afford (changing field, the opportunity to travel and teach knitting classes) writing, making a more than honest living doing computer stuff, and so forth.\nI\u0026rsquo;m really not good at being able to hold all of those conflicting excitements in at the same time, which is I suppose, not that surprising, and why anxiety is considered something to be conquered and not enjoyed.\nSoon though.\nOk, I\u0026rsquo;m off for now, if I have time, I\u0026rsquo;ll be back. Otherwise, don\u0026rsquo;t do anything I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-do-anxious-people-have-time-for-anything/","summary":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to the part of the sweater where you can \u0026ldquo;unite\u0026rdquo; the sleeves and the body last night--for this I blame dancing--but I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly close. Tonight maybe. I\u0026rsquo;ve been planning out how to do the neck/shoulders, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to pull something clever. Damn.\nI have to work today, so while I had grand plans to blog on a number of varied subjects, that might not happen, though it depends on when I start. I\u0026rsquo;m working on another tea review, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing up the hand outs to a knitting class that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be teaching starting this weekend. Eek.\nMostly though, I\u0026rsquo;m just anxious like, which gets in the way of getting things done. On the upside, I have one week left on the wait-list, give or take a day or two. This is exciting, and it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to be able to put this behind me.","title":"how do anxious people have time for anything"},{"content":"So I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten into reading The Left Hand of Darkness, so I think this attempt at reading it will be successful. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted my feminist sf post about difference, spurred on by starting to read this book (again).\nThe post ponders the ways that feminist SF approaches and resolves issues surrounding \u0026ldquo;difference,\u0026rdquo; does feminist (or) SF say, \u0026ldquo;look here are people that are different,\u0026rdquo; and then look at all the ways that difference leads to disparity (as cyberpunk and other dystopias tend to,) or the way that differences (between, say men and women) pale in comparison to the differences between aliens and human, (Which strikes me as a little assimilationist). I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the \u0026ldquo;answer\u0026rdquo; is, but if we had answers, we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have a blog\u0026hellip;\nIn other media consumption news, while I posted my thoughts on BSG and torchwood, I\u0026rsquo;m also more slowly working my way through Jeremiah, a show written by JMS, the same guy who write Babylon 5. While I like the concept, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s a fun show, I\u0026rsquo;m ten episodes in, and the pacing of the story feels \u0026ldquo;off.\u0026rdquo; The episodic story lines aren\u0026rsquo;t that gripping, and the story arch moves too slowly. As I think about it, Babylon 5 was probably the same way, but there are seemingly more space opera stories than there are, post-apocalyptic dystopian stories.\nIn the end this means that I\u0026rsquo;ve had a hard time mustering the proper entertainment materials to get me through the dark tunnel part of this knitting. Surely there are NCIS episodes or some such that I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen. I\u0026rsquo;ll post more about the sweater later. TV recommendations are most welcome.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/media-consumption/","summary":"So I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally gotten into reading The Left Hand of Darkness, so I think this attempt at reading it will be successful. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted my feminist sf post about difference, spurred on by starting to read this book (again).\nThe post ponders the ways that feminist SF approaches and resolves issues surrounding \u0026ldquo;difference,\u0026rdquo; does feminist (or) SF say, \u0026ldquo;look here are people that are different,\u0026rdquo; and then look at all the ways that difference leads to disparity (as cyberpunk and other dystopias tend to,) or the way that differences (between, say men and women) pale in comparison to the differences between aliens and human, (Which strikes me as a little assimilationist). I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the \u0026ldquo;answer\u0026rdquo; is, but if we had answers, we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have a blog\u0026hellip;\nIn other media consumption news, while I posted my thoughts on BSG and torchwood, I\u0026rsquo;m also more slowly working my way through Jeremiah, a show written by JMS, the same guy who write Babylon 5.","title":"media consumption"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a little bit of knitting today.\nCurrent projection indicates that by the end of the current repeat, I will be at the underarm point of the sweater. If I book it, and find something good to entertain me while I work on it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m almost 60% through the yarn that I have to finish this project, and I hope that I finish before I run out of yarn, but I suspect that the yoke, \u0026ldquo;button band\u0026rdquo; and hem had better be less than 40% of the knitting that I have to do.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s chugging along. I\u0026rsquo;ve already started thinking of the next design, which I think will be more textural and less blocky. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting it with much more fine yarn, but my goal is to knit something that\u0026rsquo;s much more fitted than I\u0026rsquo;m accustomed to, probably v-neck. After that, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking a plain, drapey/soft raglan sweater with rolled hems, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what kind of neck I\u0026rsquo;m going to use. Probably a lose crew neck.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve put the shawl away for the time being. This is probably good for my (knitting) health.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mitten-sweater-progress/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a little bit of knitting today.\nCurrent projection indicates that by the end of the current repeat, I will be at the underarm point of the sweater. If I book it, and find something good to entertain me while I work on it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m almost 60% through the yarn that I have to finish this project, and I hope that I finish before I run out of yarn, but I suspect that the yoke, \u0026ldquo;button band\u0026rdquo; and hem had better be less than 40% of the knitting that I have to do.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s chugging along. I\u0026rsquo;ve already started thinking of the next design, which I think will be more textural and less blocky. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be knitting it with much more fine yarn, but my goal is to knit something that\u0026rsquo;s much more fitted than I\u0026rsquo;m accustomed to, probably v-neck. After that, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking a plain, drapey/soft raglan sweater with rolled hems, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what kind of neck I\u0026rsquo;m going to use.","title":"Mitten (sweater) Progress"},{"content":"So I/we\u0026rsquo;ve been trying for the past few months to get a new cat.\nA dancing friend\u0026rsquo;s daughter\u0026rsquo;s (siamese) cat had kittens, and we were already to take one of those kittens that hadn\u0026rsquo;t found a home, but it turns out that they had. No new cat.\nThen a friend of a friend found a cat, and given the previous experience we decided to be very affirmative and officially put dibs on the cat (given that the chance of cat psychosis was probably pretty low) and I even made an appointment with the vet (that has cared for the family\u0026rsquo;s animals for 25+ years).\nAnd then the friend of a friend decided to keep the cat in spite of one of her family member\u0026rsquo;s allergy.\nSo we were 0 for 2, in the cat getting. And admittedly, we weren\u0026rsquo;t trying that hard.\nBut then over weekend a friend\u0026rsquo;s (the friend through which we were connected to cat number 2) new cat--an adopted stray--much to everyone\u0026rsquo;s surprise, had a (small) litter of kittens.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve put dibs on one of the cats. With luck this one will work out.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/third-times-the-charm/","summary":"So I/we\u0026rsquo;ve been trying for the past few months to get a new cat.\nA dancing friend\u0026rsquo;s daughter\u0026rsquo;s (siamese) cat had kittens, and we were already to take one of those kittens that hadn\u0026rsquo;t found a home, but it turns out that they had. No new cat.\nThen a friend of a friend found a cat, and given the previous experience we decided to be very affirmative and officially put dibs on the cat (given that the chance of cat psychosis was probably pretty low) and I even made an appointment with the vet (that has cared for the family\u0026rsquo;s animals for 25+ years).\nAnd then the friend of a friend decided to keep the cat in spite of one of her family member\u0026rsquo;s allergy.\nSo we were 0 for 2, in the cat getting. And admittedly, we weren\u0026rsquo;t trying that hard.\nBut then over weekend a friend\u0026rsquo;s (the friend through which we were connected to cat number 2) new cat--an adopted stray--much to everyone\u0026rsquo;s surprise, had a (small) litter of kittens.","title":"third time's the charm"},{"content":"So, I have something rather embarrassing to report, but I think the blogging medium is generally pretty well suited to this kind of thing.\nSo I was spinning--we had a friend over to teach spinning to--and I needed to get my spinning off of a bobbin, and well, as I was winding off, the singles broke (not entirely uncommon) and for the first time since the second month that I was spinning, I completely lost the end, and had to cut the spinning off the bobbin.\nThankfully, I only lost about 12 grams of fiber, but it is still somewhat embarrassing.\nI generally consider myself to be a fairly adept spinner, I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing it for a while, and I thought that I was done with this kind of thing. Apparently not so much.\nsigh\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spinning-mishap/","summary":"So, I have something rather embarrassing to report, but I think the blogging medium is generally pretty well suited to this kind of thing.\nSo I was spinning--we had a friend over to teach spinning to--and I needed to get my spinning off of a bobbin, and well, as I was winding off, the singles broke (not entirely uncommon) and for the first time since the second month that I was spinning, I completely lost the end, and had to cut the spinning off the bobbin.\nThankfully, I only lost about 12 grams of fiber, but it is still somewhat embarrassing.\nI generally consider myself to be a fairly adept spinner, I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing it for a while, and I thought that I was done with this kind of thing. Apparently not so much.\nsigh","title":"Spinning Mishap"},{"content":"I just watched the season finale of Torchwood, and the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, season 4.\nOh. My. G-d.\nTorchwood was amazing. I felt Ianto could have been less catatonic in the last moment, but it was really nice. James Masters was perfect. The last few torchwood eps were really poorly written--in my view--but this one was good.\nAnd Battlestar. Oh BSG. This was an episode that basically said \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;re back,\u0026rdquo; but nothing happened, which was frustrating. But the last episode in season 3 was so incredibly powerful, so it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly surprising that the emotional energy wasn\u0026rsquo;t as strong, particularly since we\u0026rsquo;ve all had so long for the tension to build.\nOk, I\u0026rsquo;m done being a fan, your more usual tychoish will return tomorrow. While generally I think spoilers are a bad thing to post without warning on the internet, I think the comments to this entry should be fair game for spoilers if anyone has them\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/television/","summary":"I just watched the season finale of Torchwood, and the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, season 4.\nOh. My. G-d.\nTorchwood was amazing. I felt Ianto could have been less catatonic in the last moment, but it was really nice. James Masters was perfect. The last few torchwood eps were really poorly written--in my view--but this one was good.\nAnd Battlestar. Oh BSG. This was an episode that basically said \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;re back,\u0026rdquo; but nothing happened, which was frustrating. But the last episode in season 3 was so incredibly powerful, so it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly surprising that the emotional energy wasn\u0026rsquo;t as strong, particularly since we\u0026rsquo;ve all had so long for the tension to build.\nOk, I\u0026rsquo;m done being a fan, your more usual tychoish will return tomorrow. While generally I think spoilers are a bad thing to post without warning on the internet, I think the comments to this entry should be fair game for spoilers if anyone has them\u0026hellip;","title":"television"},{"content":"I just got an email from my prospective advisor at the school I\u0026rsquo;m on the wait-list for today.\nDays on the waitlist: 26-ish (One week and 2 days till, the rough end).\nAnyway, apparently the department sent out rejections a few days ago, and I got sent one *except it was in error*\nI havenot* been rejected.*\n(Yet.)\nThe interesting bits of information that I was able to glean from this email are:\nhe said and I quote \u0026ldquo;--At this point, we still have to wait for everyone who has received their offers to \u0026lsquo;make up their minds\u0026rsquo;. So - please hang in\u0026rdquo; he said \u0026ldquo;everyone\u0026rdquo; (which means that many or all of the people they gave offers to haven\u0026rsquo;t confirmed with them. As we\u0026rsquo;re almost a week out from the deadline, this uncertainty on their part is probably good. It\u0026rsquo;s not a done deal yet, and because of the ranking of this school, it probably means that people are jockeying for better slots, or aren\u0026rsquo;t bothering to officially decline offers. I know that at worst there are be 8 people in front of me (including people who got offers). I suspect that there are 4-6 slots in this program. So I\u0026rsquo;m person 5(6 or 7)-9, and given how long this is dragging on, the better my chances are.. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/waitlist-update/","summary":"I just got an email from my prospective advisor at the school I\u0026rsquo;m on the wait-list for today.\nDays on the waitlist: 26-ish (One week and 2 days till, the rough end).\nAnyway, apparently the department sent out rejections a few days ago, and I got sent one *except it was in error*\nI havenot* been rejected.*\n(Yet.)\nThe interesting bits of information that I was able to glean from this email are:\nhe said and I quote \u0026ldquo;--At this point, we still have to wait for everyone who has received their offers to \u0026lsquo;make up their minds\u0026rsquo;. So - please hang in\u0026rdquo; he said \u0026ldquo;everyone\u0026rdquo; (which means that many or all of the people they gave offers to haven\u0026rsquo;t confirmed with them. As we\u0026rsquo;re almost a week out from the deadline, this uncertainty on their part is probably good. It\u0026rsquo;s not a done deal yet, and because of the ranking of this school, it probably means that people are jockeying for better slots, or aren\u0026rsquo;t bothering to officially decline offers.","title":"waitlist update"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m writing a book where many of the characters are basically CIA agents. Which has meant that I have needed to spend some time thinking more seriously about intelligence and counterintelligence operations.\nThen, an event in my real life inspired the following realization/observation:\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re gathering intelligence and you discover something you don\u0026rsquo;t like, because you\u0026rsquo;re spying, you can\u0026rsquo;t really be upset when you unearth this information.\nScouts honor, or something.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spies/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m writing a book where many of the characters are basically CIA agents. Which has meant that I have needed to spend some time thinking more seriously about intelligence and counterintelligence operations.\nThen, an event in my real life inspired the following realization/observation:\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re gathering intelligence and you discover something you don\u0026rsquo;t like, because you\u0026rsquo;re spying, you can\u0026rsquo;t really be upset when you unearth this information.\nScouts honor, or something.","title":"Spies"},{"content":"So, yesterday at the mall, we stopped in the Tevana store. Because you know, I\u0026rsquo;m a tea drinker, and it seemed like the place to go.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a cool store, as these kinds of obnoxious commercially \u0026ldquo;oriental\u0026rdquo; things are. And I made a purchase, sort of on a whim, of tea things. I also made a few observations about myself and my caffeine habit.\nThe most important thing is that I\u0026rsquo;m not a terribly sophisticated tea drinker. I\u0026rsquo;m never going to keep a thermometer on my kettle so that I can make sure to steep the tea in water that\u0026rsquo;s 195 degrees. I am never (on this blog or elsewhere) debate the various merits of drinking tea steeped at 195 or 175 degrees (F). I\u0026rsquo;m also never going to rinse tea leaves.\nI also want dark hearty tea, and I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in rich or interesting flavors, or a diverse tea selection to match my mood.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to make loose leaf tea. In part because of economy, in part because it\u0026rsquo;s easier to make blends and control the strength of the tea.\nSo I got a little tea brewer thing from this sore, which is brilliance. In November we got an Aeropress, for the coffee drinker in the family, and it was brilliant. I sort of feel like this tea maker thing, is brilliant, only more my speed.\nAnyway. End Geek. I have to work today, and we\u0026rsquo;re having a friend over to spin this evening, which is pretty cool. But it means I have a lot of not tycho things to do, and that I\u0026rsquo;ll be pretty sparse today. Other tycho news: I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen the latest BSG or Torchwood, and I almost have a copy of the former. I have a Feminist SF post ready to go monday morning, and I just realized that in a week I have to teach a what amounts to a knitting design master class at the yarn store.\nSo I should get on that. I hope you have enjoyably productive days.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tea-fetish/","summary":"So, yesterday at the mall, we stopped in the Tevana store. Because you know, I\u0026rsquo;m a tea drinker, and it seemed like the place to go.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a cool store, as these kinds of obnoxious commercially \u0026ldquo;oriental\u0026rdquo; things are. And I made a purchase, sort of on a whim, of tea things. I also made a few observations about myself and my caffeine habit.\nThe most important thing is that I\u0026rsquo;m not a terribly sophisticated tea drinker. I\u0026rsquo;m never going to keep a thermometer on my kettle so that I can make sure to steep the tea in water that\u0026rsquo;s 195 degrees. I am never (on this blog or elsewhere) debate the various merits of drinking tea steeped at 195 or 175 degrees (F). I\u0026rsquo;m also never going to rinse tea leaves.\nI also want dark hearty tea, and I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in rich or interesting flavors, or a diverse tea selection to match my mood.","title":"Tea Fetish"},{"content":"In a bit under a month, we--my parents and I--have to go to a wedding. Actually, my father is the best man, but thankfully we like the folks getting married, so it\u0026rsquo;s not too bad. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m generally of the opinion that weddings suck, and are to be avoided at all costs.\nThe side effect of this world view is that, I don\u0026rsquo;t really own clothes that are fancy enough to wear in these situations. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m a fairly conservative dresser and my normal wardrobe is pretty versatile, so usually I can skate by as long as I don\u0026rsquo;t need to wear a tie1. But this wedding thwarted me.\nIt also--and more importantly--thwarted my mother, who again doesn\u0026rsquo;t (or didn\u0026rsquo;t) really have anything dressy/formal enough, for similar sorts of reasons.\nSo we went shopping.\nIn a mall.\n(Everyone gasp at once here)\nDear lord. That was tiring, and depressing, and stressful. And, being sort of thrifty to begin with2, appalling the price of clothing.\nAnd to think, some people go to malls for fun. As recreation.\nDear lord.\nIn other news, I have a brief story to recount. We were driving (on the way to the mall) and my mother, on the prowl for a diet coke, made an abrupt right turn from the left lane. into a gas station parking lot.\n\u0026ldquo;Jesus,\u0026rdquo; I screamed reaching for the door jam in hopes that, that might protect me somewhat for the painful death that--at the moment--I felt was imminent.\nIncidentally, I also wondered why on earth that particularly deity seemed like the appropriate one to invoke in this situation.\nAnd then I made another realization.\nThis was, by far, not the first time as a passenger in a car where I felt that my life was endangered by a driver in pursuit of a diet soft drink.\nAnd suddenly I was a little nostalgic.\nAt least once I started breathing again.\nNot that I\u0026rsquo;m wearing a tie this time, but my old sports coat that I got from a thrift shop for my high school prom for 2 dollars, is--though nice--perhaps no longer in suitable shape for this occasion.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI for instance, get most of my jeans on ebay, where, armed with my size can usually spend 30 dollars every couple of years and always have enough pants. It\u0026rsquo;s a source of pride on my part.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/meanwhile-in-the-real-world/","summary":"In a bit under a month, we--my parents and I--have to go to a wedding. Actually, my father is the best man, but thankfully we like the folks getting married, so it\u0026rsquo;s not too bad. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m generally of the opinion that weddings suck, and are to be avoided at all costs.\nThe side effect of this world view is that, I don\u0026rsquo;t really own clothes that are fancy enough to wear in these situations. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m a fairly conservative dresser and my normal wardrobe is pretty versatile, so usually I can skate by as long as I don\u0026rsquo;t need to wear a tie1. But this wedding thwarted me.\nIt also--and more importantly--thwarted my mother, who again doesn\u0026rsquo;t (or didn\u0026rsquo;t) really have anything dressy/formal enough, for similar sorts of reasons.\nSo we went shopping.\nIn a mall.\n(Everyone gasp at once here)","title":"meanwhile, in the real world"},{"content":"I seem to be getting really efficent when it comes to reading all of my usual \u0026ldquo;reads,\u0026rdquo; Like, I can get through my eighty feeds and my LJ friends page, and other internet checking in twenty minutes or so. I check both throughout the day, ususally, so it\u0026rsquo;s not like thats the only time I spend on the interent (ha!) but it means that I don\u0026rsquo;t have as much time to get the brain rolling in the morning as I used to.\nA couple of points. While I\u0026rsquo;m sticking with Mars Edit, for this post too, I\u0026rsquo;m not quite sure that I\u0026rsquo;m ready to jump ship back from my TextMate blogging bundle and subversion bundle that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for many months now. I really like keeping the subversion archive as it works with all of my other work/backup etc. At the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s totally overkill and it\u0026rsquo;s not like, in the last six months, I\u0026rsquo;ve ever really gone in and done anything with the backups that I\u0026rsquo;m keeping in subversion, and it would make my checkout quicker if I didn\u0026rsquo;t have so many blogging files.\nBut as I was thinking about this I discovered soemthing interesting that I want to share with you: since I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing my entries this way, I\u0026rsquo;ve amassed nearly two megabytes of text files containing blog entries. And I should point out that I\u0026rsquo;m closing in on four hundred thousand words blogged in the last two years.\nGood g-d folks. That\u0026rsquo;s absurd.\nSpeaking of absurdity, I have today off, so there will be knitting and there will be writing about it. And other things too.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-internet-run-dry/","summary":"I seem to be getting really efficent when it comes to reading all of my usual \u0026ldquo;reads,\u0026rdquo; Like, I can get through my eighty feeds and my LJ friends page, and other internet checking in twenty minutes or so. I check both throughout the day, ususally, so it\u0026rsquo;s not like thats the only time I spend on the interent (ha!) but it means that I don\u0026rsquo;t have as much time to get the brain rolling in the morning as I used to.\nA couple of points. While I\u0026rsquo;m sticking with Mars Edit, for this post too, I\u0026rsquo;m not quite sure that I\u0026rsquo;m ready to jump ship back from my TextMate blogging bundle and subversion bundle that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for many months now. I really like keeping the subversion archive as it works with all of my other work/backup etc. At the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s totally overkill and it\u0026rsquo;s not like, in the last six months, I\u0026rsquo;ve ever really gone in and done anything with the backups that I\u0026rsquo;m keeping in subversion, and it would make my checkout quicker if I didn\u0026rsquo;t have so many blogging files.","title":"the internet run dry"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m still waiting on hearing back from a few people about the copyright issues that might be involved in publishing/selling this pattern, and in the mean time I was looking more carefully over the pictures of this shawl and made a startling realization.\nThe pattern I thought I used was very clearly not the right pattern. See, I donated the original to a good cause, and while I have really good pictures, I knit it the first time in July of 2005, so it\u0026rsquo;s not very fresh for me.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a good thing I\u0026rsquo;m good at looking at knitting and forensically reconstructing what happened and how it worked.\nWhich leads me to the second realization: I have no notion in the world of how I arrived at this stitch pattern, because it looks like no chart I have on file or have ever seen. Ever.\nI think I was attempting to do snowdrop lace, a shetland lace pattern that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty fond of--as these things go--and failed. I think it\u0026rsquo;s quite likely that I did the middle section late at night, and just miss remembered. Thankfully, it looks really cool, and I was able to come pretty damn close to recreating it.\nThe end result is that I\u0026rsquo;m making another giant blue tencel shawl using the same pattern. See, I had more than half of the yarn left over from the last time that I tried to make this shawl (best 20 dollars I ever spent on yarn). I think I\u0026rsquo;ll get to the last pattern and then set it aside for the summer. I think this will probably count as one of my \u0026ldquo;sweaters\u0026rdquo; for the 14 sweater project.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking, as a joke, I might block it in the middle of the night at camp, again, as I blocked the same shawl with the same yarn at camp last year. But probably not. Just a joke.\nIn other news I was hoping that the picture that I posted yesterday would let you all see the difference between my colorwork-blocked, and unblocked, but you can\u0026rsquo;t really see it. This sweater was rolling a lot (because I haven\u0026rsquo;t put the hem facing on it) so I steamed it out, which made the stitches look all even, on the bottom half, and as I\u0026rsquo;ve knit more, its become really apparent where I was in the project when I did that.\nPeople often say \u0026ldquo;wow your colorwork looks really even, mine always looks like crap.\u0026rdquo; The answer to this problem is steam. My colorwork looks all funky and weird until I block it. Which is when it starts to look normal.\nAnyway\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n(ps. Days on the Wailist: 26, though I have another 2 weeks at the absolute outside. Egad. Eek. Sigh.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reverse-knitting-engineering/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m still waiting on hearing back from a few people about the copyright issues that might be involved in publishing/selling this pattern, and in the mean time I was looking more carefully over the pictures of this shawl and made a startling realization.\nThe pattern I thought I used was very clearly not the right pattern. See, I donated the original to a good cause, and while I have really good pictures, I knit it the first time in July of 2005, so it\u0026rsquo;s not very fresh for me.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a good thing I\u0026rsquo;m good at looking at knitting and forensically reconstructing what happened and how it worked.\nWhich leads me to the second realization: I have no notion in the world of how I arrived at this stitch pattern, because it looks like no chart I have on file or have ever seen. Ever.\nI think I was attempting to do snowdrop lace, a shetland lace pattern that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty fond of--as these things go--and failed.","title":"Reverse Knitting Engineering"},{"content":"Wow.\nToday just sort of happened, and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of glad that I was around to realize it. I had thought that it was going to be a short and easy day, and I was almost double booked a couple of times, but all seems to have worked itself out. There would have been an afternoon post, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t have much of an afternoon to myself. These things happen.\nI\u0026rsquo;m feeling better, which is kind of amazing. I might post more about this tomorrow, but perhaps not. Onto a real post though,\nKnitting on the shawl proceeds productively. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit more of the work on the beginnings of this shawl. While I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;ve nailed what I did before exactly I\u0026rsquo;m damn near close enough. I think. Also knitting on the shawl has allowed me to work on getting over the \u0026ldquo;hump\u0026rdquo; of the sweater.1\nI think it has something to do with the fact that the shawl is so bright that it makes the colors of the sweater appear more interesting and subtle. Also, I think there\u0026rsquo;s something about using bigger needles/finer yarn which affects/improves my ergonomic situation.\nAlso as a side note, I\u0026rsquo;m posting this from Mars Edit which has gotten a make over since the last time that I used it seriously. It\u0026rsquo;s looking sharp.\nOk, you get to bed, I will too, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be more interesting stuff in the morning.\nOnward and Upward!\nYou know, that part of a sweater a few inches on either side of \u0026ldquo;half way to the underarms\u0026rdquo; from the bottom hem, always takes the longest.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/woosh/","summary":"Wow.\nToday just sort of happened, and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of glad that I was around to realize it. I had thought that it was going to be a short and easy day, and I was almost double booked a couple of times, but all seems to have worked itself out. There would have been an afternoon post, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t have much of an afternoon to myself. These things happen.\nI\u0026rsquo;m feeling better, which is kind of amazing. I might post more about this tomorrow, but perhaps not. Onto a real post though,\nKnitting on the shawl proceeds productively. I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit more of the work on the beginnings of this shawl. While I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;ve nailed what I did before exactly I\u0026rsquo;m damn near close enough. I think. Also knitting on the shawl has allowed me to work on getting over the \u0026ldquo;hump\u0026rdquo; of the sweater.","title":"woosh"},{"content":"My shawl pattern mentioned here is basically drafted. I need to finish figuring out who took that picture, and I need to make sure that you can publish pi shawl patterns (and use those lace patterns) without running amok with the people who I took borrowed from. I mean technically, there\u0026rsquo;s 10% difference between what I\u0026rsquo;m doing and what other people have published. But the truth is that I\u0026rsquo;d much rather spend little time emailing Schoolhouse Press and Cheryl Oberle to make sure that I\u0026rsquo;m not crossing some boundary.\nSpeaking of copyright, I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending a lot of time recently in the Ravelry \u0026ldquo;Designers Forums,\u0026rdquo; talking about copyright and copyleft, and pattern production. This has been helpful as I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing an thinking about my own patterns. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of--very legitimate--concern for copyright in this community, but I worry that there\u0026rsquo;s too much fear going around in a way that has the potential to antagonize the audience, and even stifle the creative process.1\nSo if you\u0026rsquo;re on ravelry, check out the copyleft thread to see what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to. It\u0026rsquo;s become part of my morning routine, which is part of the reason that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been blogging quite as much as I might like.\nIn other news, I did some really important planning work on a fiction project. Looks like I\u0026rsquo;m writing a story cycle. Who knew? I\u0026rsquo;m currently planning/developing on a short adventure story several years before the beginning of the novella I wrote last year. And even if I don\u0026rsquo;t get that done, this work will be very helpful in making that novella more sensical. Which felt good. Writing is good stuff, and the more I concentrate on the writing the less I can concentrate on things that I have minimal control over. End introspection.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be back throughout the day, be well.\nOnward and Upward!\nSome designers were even talking about how they avoided reading other people\u0026rsquo;s patterns when they were desiring lest they be \u0026ldquo;too\u0026rdquo; influenced by prior art. While you don\u0026rsquo;t want to copy prior art, knowing it\u0026rsquo;s there, being connected to the current trends and techniques and finding inspiration in the work of your peers isn\u0026rsquo;t dangerous, it\u0026rsquo;s simply intelligent.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/copying-left/","summary":"My shawl pattern mentioned here is basically drafted. I need to finish figuring out who took that picture, and I need to make sure that you can publish pi shawl patterns (and use those lace patterns) without running amok with the people who I took borrowed from. I mean technically, there\u0026rsquo;s 10% difference between what I\u0026rsquo;m doing and what other people have published. But the truth is that I\u0026rsquo;d much rather spend little time emailing Schoolhouse Press and Cheryl Oberle to make sure that I\u0026rsquo;m not crossing some boundary.\nSpeaking of copyright, I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending a lot of time recently in the Ravelry \u0026ldquo;Designers Forums,\u0026rdquo; talking about copyright and copyleft, and pattern production. This has been helpful as I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing an thinking about my own patterns. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of--very legitimate--concern for copyright in this community, but I worry that there\u0026rsquo;s too much fear going around in a way that has the potential to antagonize the audience, and even stifle the creative process.","title":"Copying Left"},{"content":"Ok, I promised, and here it is: pictures of my current work in progress. This is the first new thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on months and months, so I feel like pictures are completely warented.\nNote, pictures are intended as utilitarian methods of communication, and not, art. In the end, we can\u0026rsquo;t all be Jared, now can we?\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the great latvian mitten sweater of 2008. Body first.\nNow I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close to being done, despite the fact that I have to knit two more full repeats of the \u0026ldquo;hash\u0026rdquo; motif before I can attach the sleeves and begin the yoke. (I mentioned that this is going to be a saddle shouldered cardigan done in an EZ/Meg Swansen style? Right?)\nIn part because, I\u0026rsquo;ve already knit sleeves (which is really more exciting than I want to talk about.) See them here:\nNow you probably knew that if you\u0026rsquo;ve been reading the blog, but I just wanted to reiterate this. The last 5 days have been pretty slow going on this project, but I think that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be able to join the sleeves and the body by saturday. I hope.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll clean up some of the other pictures and get them out to you over the next few days/week. I know how out of character this is for me. I ask that you neither be too surprised nor grow too accustomed to this.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mitten-sweater-2/","summary":"Ok, I promised, and here it is: pictures of my current work in progress. This is the first new thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on months and months, so I feel like pictures are completely warented.\nNote, pictures are intended as utilitarian methods of communication, and not, art. In the end, we can\u0026rsquo;t all be Jared, now can we?\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the great latvian mitten sweater of 2008. Body first.\nNow I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close to being done, despite the fact that I have to knit two more full repeats of the \u0026ldquo;hash\u0026rdquo; motif before I can attach the sleeves and begin the yoke. (I mentioned that this is going to be a saddle shouldered cardigan done in an EZ/Meg Swansen style? Right?)\nIn part because, I\u0026rsquo;ve already knit sleeves (which is really more exciting than I want to talk about.) See them here:\nNow you probably knew that if you\u0026rsquo;ve been reading the blog, but I just wanted to reiterate this.","title":"Mitten Sweater"},{"content":"One of the things I said when I closed TealArt for the first time, and that I\u0026rsquo;m reafirming now that I\u0026rsquo;ve closed it for real, was that I would spend more time contributing to other blogs. Because, other group blogs are important to support, and I think in this way, it becomes easier to support all of my various very niche interests, without letting tychoish become overly burdened with any one kind of rambling.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned before I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of blogging for the feminist science fiction blog which is a great deal of fun, I\u0026rsquo;m planning out and writing a post for that this morning, which I\u0026rsquo;m sure that you\u0026rsquo;ll see in due time.\nThe development worth noting in a blog post is the fact that finally coerced asked a friend of mine to add me to a blog he started a bit ago called Theory Schmucks which is sort of a pop culture meets undergrad cultural studies classes meets political blogging. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I quite fit the mold for this blog, but the co-bloggers are friends, and if there was ever a place to stir up shit, that\u0026rsquo;s it. And it could hardly be less successful/exciting than my last attempt at theory blogging.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll post notes about new posts as I get them up, just announcing them by way of saying \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m working on.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m also a semi-regular on the Zimmermania blot, but I generally only post big project reports over there.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-humble-guest/","summary":"One of the things I said when I closed TealArt for the first time, and that I\u0026rsquo;m reafirming now that I\u0026rsquo;ve closed it for real, was that I would spend more time contributing to other blogs. Because, other group blogs are important to support, and I think in this way, it becomes easier to support all of my various very niche interests, without letting tychoish become overly burdened with any one kind of rambling.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned before I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of blogging for the feminist science fiction blog which is a great deal of fun, I\u0026rsquo;m planning out and writing a post for that this morning, which I\u0026rsquo;m sure that you\u0026rsquo;ll see in due time.\nThe development worth noting in a blog post is the fact that finally coerced asked a friend of mine to add me to a blog he started a bit ago called Theory Schmucks which is sort of a pop culture meets undergrad cultural studies classes meets political blogging.","title":"a humble guest"},{"content":"So, folks, in an effort to provide a service to the community rather than simply nattering on about my neuroses, I thought that I would provide a list vim resources that you might all find helpful on your own journeys with vim.\nJust a refresher: VIM is a super old school, super powerful text editor that I\u0026rsquo;m in a battle to learn. For people who live and breath text, this is sort of the ergonomic \u0026ldquo;leather man tool\u0026rdquo; to end all such tools.\nThese are just documentation sources, not GUI layers and what not, which I also recommend you look into if you\u0026rsquo;re going to be a serious VIM user. VIM works pretty well in a command line (its native environment) but the GUI is most helpful in letting VIM interact with your other applications, as it almost certainly will need to. Cream for VIM works great for linux, I\u0026rsquo;ve not tested it for windows (but I suspect that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty good), and its downright sucky for Mac. MacVim is remarkably good, but needs some performance enhancing before I think it\u0026rsquo;s really viable, particularly on older machines. The issue with this is that the more official gvim package is written in an outdated environment for OS X, but is generally acceptable for windows and linux, so it\u0026rsquo;s fine. Anyway. onto the resource.\ndotfiles - Dotfiles is a collection of users\u0026rsquo; unix preferences and setting files. It\u0026rsquo;s really useful if you\u0026rsquo;re getting into seriously using the shell (.bashrc/.bash_profile, .zshrc, etc.) or other unix-ish tools like Mutt and vim to see what most people are doing to customize the program. Most of these programs seem painfully difficult only because everyone who uses them has customized them to within an inch of their lives. vim tips - A great wikia wiki (the private/for profit wiki hosting project by the people who do wikipedia.) It collects little bits of nagging \u0026ldquo;how on earth do you do x\u0026rdquo; and usually there\u0026rsquo;s an answer. vi editor 101 - This is the website guide that has all of the vim answers. All of them. It\u0026rsquo;s not cleverly or usefully organized so you have to grep through it, but other wise it\u0026rsquo;s quite useful. Editing in vim - This is the cheat sheet/guide that I find myself turning to more than any other when I forget how to do something that I should know reflexively. And the page is well designed and well laid out. vim for textmate fans If you, like me, have experience with the amazing TextMate editor, and want some help making the vim transition this is a good place to start, and even if your not there are a couple of vim tips that I think many will enjoy. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/vim-resources/","summary":"So, folks, in an effort to provide a service to the community rather than simply nattering on about my neuroses, I thought that I would provide a list vim resources that you might all find helpful on your own journeys with vim.\nJust a refresher: VIM is a super old school, super powerful text editor that I\u0026rsquo;m in a battle to learn. For people who live and breath text, this is sort of the ergonomic \u0026ldquo;leather man tool\u0026rdquo; to end all such tools.\nThese are just documentation sources, not GUI layers and what not, which I also recommend you look into if you\u0026rsquo;re going to be a serious VIM user. VIM works pretty well in a command line (its native environment) but the GUI is most helpful in letting VIM interact with your other applications, as it almost certainly will need to. Cream for VIM works great for linux, I\u0026rsquo;ve not tested it for windows (but I suspect that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty good), and its downright sucky for Mac.","title":"Vim Resources"},{"content":"Contrary to your first impressions, this post is generally not about computers. Ok, a little bit.\nI went to the computer store this afternoon. I got a computer from a friend who had upgraded and moved away and claimed that this old box was too old and slow to be of much use.\nWell it turns out that this computer is actually about as powerful as my current machine, and I figured that I could get linux or some such working on it with minimal fuss, and it would be good to have a machine around that could manage torrents while I was away with the laptop, and host more regular backups, and so forth. In short order I got Ubuntu, but quickly realized that I would need a monitor1, a wireless card, a bit more ram, and so forth.\nSo after a bit of hemming and hawing I finally went into the computer store today. There\u0026rsquo;s this local independent computer store in town that has used gear and what not, which is great if you\u0026rsquo;re in the market for something specific and don\u0026rsquo;t need the fuss of comp USA or some such. We\u0026rsquo;ve been going there for years and years and it seemed like the ideal place for this kind of task.\nI got there and this very young looking (I wonder at what point we start identifying the people who help us in stores as \u0026ldquo;young looking\u0026rdquo;) guy came up to help me. Short. Thin. Emo. Obviously knew what he was doing. And so I let myself be the customer for once. \u0026ldquo;Yeah, I need this,\u0026rdquo; and he was able to do it, pretty much without a hitch.\nI told him what I needed, he got the wireless card (last one) told me that flat panel monitors where in high demand and didn\u0026rsquo;t last long on the shelf, but quoted me an acceptable price. I looked at the CRT monitors, but didn\u0026rsquo;t get one. He husseled about trying to look for the right kind of ram, but didn\u0026rsquo;t find any.\nIt was at this point that I realized that this fellow was me. Sort of. I mean, I have a better fashion sense (gawd, the emo.) and taste in operating systems (he was using vista!), but other than that, here I was. It also struck me, that at this precise moment I was very not queer. Geeks are already a bit off of norm, and in casual interaction, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t come up/make itself apparent. Which is all together an odd feeling.\nAnyway, so I brought the computer in, he put in the card and took out the modem, which was convenient, and then I left. We made small talk about operating systems, I was like, 10.4 it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. He said something about the Air, I shrugged, and then left.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t get the wireless to work off the bat, and I\u0026rsquo;m currently reinstalling the OS (last time when I installed, I was able to disabuse it of the notion that I had a turkish keyboard, which complicated the login process.) With luck, I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get the wireless to work after this is done. There seems to be confirmation of this wireless card working with Ubuntu, but we shall see.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m going to tinker more, and knit some this afternoon. I\u0026rsquo;ve not been doing enough knitting, or writing for that matter.\nOnward and Upward!\nWe do have an extra monitor in the house but is of the 15\u0026quot; CRT variety, and about 12 years old. Some better option needs to be derived.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fitting-in/","summary":"Contrary to your first impressions, this post is generally not about computers. Ok, a little bit.\nI went to the computer store this afternoon. I got a computer from a friend who had upgraded and moved away and claimed that this old box was too old and slow to be of much use.\nWell it turns out that this computer is actually about as powerful as my current machine, and I figured that I could get linux or some such working on it with minimal fuss, and it would be good to have a machine around that could manage torrents while I was away with the laptop, and host more regular backups, and so forth. In short order I got Ubuntu, but quickly realized that I would need a monitor1, a wireless card, a bit more ram, and so forth.\nSo after a bit of hemming and hawing I finally went into the computer store today.","title":"fitting in"},{"content":"Ok, you all have spoken and I\u0026rsquo;ve changed the tagline to \u0026ldquo;now without a net,\u0026rdquo; which I like because of the \u0026ldquo;stunt/sport\u0026rdquo;1 reference/tone. So we\u0026rsquo;ll see how long this one lasts.\nThough I\u0026rsquo;m about to provide a quick status update on the state of the tycho, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking bout imposing a limit here: I\u0026rsquo;ll try and keep the \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s going on with me,\u0026rdquo; journal entries down to one or two a week, unless something big happens. Creative constraint and all that.\nAlso, you all seem to like when I post about things that aren\u0026rsquo;t me.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the update:\nDays on the Waitlist: 20\nI have committed to a job for the summer, which will be good particularly if I get in off this wait list. If I don\u0026rsquo;t, I\u0026rsquo;m going to still have the summer job, but I\u0026rsquo;ll be working to get a job elsewhere as well, and I\u0026rsquo;m still looking around, of course.\nOn to the real topic of the post: my knitting.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on the body of the sweater. The batteries are charged so it\u0026rsquo;s not inconceivable that I\u0026rsquo;ll take some pictures this afternoon. There\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of progress. It\u0026rsquo;s now 7 inches, which is way behind where I\u0026rsquo;d like to be, but it does mean that I\u0026rsquo;m almost half way to the under arm point on this sweater. Ho-Hum.\nThis is why I think I\u0026rsquo;m such a bad knitting blogger, in the end, I work on long projects and get really excited if I get more than an inch done a day. Though I have to say that Joe is doing really good blogging job, despite the fact that he\u0026rsquo;s been working on the same lace tea cloth for weeks. I clearly have much left to learn.\nI sent the pi shawl pattern to Zach for review and commentary, and I did some tweaking of my basic toe-up sock pattern/instruction handout. It\u0026rsquo;s a really in-depth narrative-ish description of how to knit socks thats intended as a pedagogical device, rather than a \u0026ldquo;design,\u0026rdquo; per se. I\u0026rsquo;m planning to release it under a pretty permissive creative commons licensee so that teachers and shop owners can use/distribute the pattern (with attribution) for free.2\nIf anyone wants to look at either of these (particularly the pi shawl,) I\u0026rsquo;m not looking for test knitters, just eyeballs, that would be great.\nOk, I\u0026rsquo;m off. I\u0026rsquo;m going to a used computer store with this referb computer that I\u0026rsquo;m working on, to see if I can get additional ram, a wireless card, and maybe a less sucky monitor, and other stuff.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\nI picture this in reference to tightrope/trapeze acts, where the performers don\u0026rsquo;t have a safety net, though, H., a poet friend remembered the comment, \u0026ldquo;free verse is like playing tennis without a net,\u0026rdquo; which is funny, and worth referencing. And neither is without oblique references.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nAs in speech and beer.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/now-without-a-net/","summary":"Ok, you all have spoken and I\u0026rsquo;ve changed the tagline to \u0026ldquo;now without a net,\u0026rdquo; which I like because of the \u0026ldquo;stunt/sport\u0026rdquo;1 reference/tone. So we\u0026rsquo;ll see how long this one lasts.\nThough I\u0026rsquo;m about to provide a quick status update on the state of the tycho, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking bout imposing a limit here: I\u0026rsquo;ll try and keep the \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s going on with me,\u0026rdquo; journal entries down to one or two a week, unless something big happens. Creative constraint and all that.\nAlso, you all seem to like when I post about things that aren\u0026rsquo;t me.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the update:\nDays on the Waitlist: 20\nI have committed to a job for the summer, which will be good particularly if I get in off this wait list. If I don\u0026rsquo;t, I\u0026rsquo;m going to still have the summer job, but I\u0026rsquo;ll be working to get a job elsewhere as well, and I\u0026rsquo;m still looking around, of course.","title":"Now, Without a Net"},{"content":"This post is mostly about things I\u0026rsquo;ve read/am reading, but I have a few administrative issues to get out of the way first.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still up in the air about the new name or tagline for tychoish. I learned that I was misremembering the \u0026ldquo;early days of a better nation quote,\u0026rdquo; which make it difficult to serve as a new blog title. \u0026ldquo;Work as if you were living--\u0026rdquo; is kinda dumb, even if you modify it to \u0026ldquo;think\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;write.\u0026rdquo; And I think \u0026ldquo;innovated, bordering on the avate garde,\u0026rdquo; is perhaps a smidge to close to pornography for my tastes. Regarding the use of the pen name/pseudonym, I realized in a comment exchange on LiveJournal1 that the reason I was a bit angsty about this is that knitting is something that I already do \u0026ldquo;as [given name],\u0026rdquo; and because of this and because there is--as far as I know--not a huge precedent of knitters using pen names I got bit tetchy about it. Now that I\u0026rsquo;ve realized these things I feel fine about the situation.\nBut anyway, that said\u0026hellip;\nBack to reading: In a fit of insomnia, I finished reading Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Empire Star,\u0026rdquo; the novella that\u0026rsquo;s related to Babel-17, that I read last year (Bable-17 is the closest thing there is to the \u0026ldquo;Science Fiction of Lingustics\u0026rdquo; and is quite amazing2). I\u0026rsquo;ve seen this novella anthologized a number of times in \u0026ldquo;new space opera\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;SF classics\u0026rdquo; collections, and it\u0026rsquo;s absolutely amazing.\nThe plot is very complex and circularly, and perfectly simple all at the same time. The use of the narrator is risky as hell from my perspective, but it works perfectly. It\u0026rsquo;s also, not surprisingly, an incredibly self-aware text. It predicts when the story is going to become interesting and turn, it\u0026rsquo;s self-referential, and the responses to \u0026ldquo;Empire Star\u0026rdquo; in Babel-17 are perfect.\nGood stuff.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure what my next novel to read is going to be. I have Delany\u0026rsquo;s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand on the shelf, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to read that at some point, but I think giving my brain a while to rest might be good. I\u0026rsquo;m also considering reading Alfred Bester\u0026rsquo;s The Demolished Man, because I write telepath stories, am interested/entertained by procedurals, and because I haven\u0026rsquo;t, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know how that\u0026rsquo;s going to go over.\nI also got the Left-Hand of Darkness, which I\u0026rsquo;ve always wanted to read (and even started a few times,) but something always manages to come up, so maybe I should dive in to this.\nI feel somewhat guilty by the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m not really getting into the Tiptree (The Stary Rift,) but I think it\u0026rsquo;s no use to guilt myself into what is ostensibly pleasure reading.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also beginning to listen to James Patrick Kelly\u0026rsquo;s reading of Look into The Sun,3 on his podcast \u0026ldquo;Free Reads\u0026rdquo;4, which proves to be interesting and fun. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to knit while listening to podcasts, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been behind on my knitting of late.\nAnyway, that\u0026rsquo;s all I have on that. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\nI (automatically) cross-post the content of this blog to a similarly titled live journal, and the comments over there are open, so sometimes discussions pop up over there. This is perhaps not ideal from the reader\u0026rsquo;s perspective, but I have opted to encourage more commenting at the possible risk of fragmenting a discussion.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nActually, now that I think about it, Janet Kagen\u0026rsquo;s original series Star Trek novel \u0026ldquo;Uhura\u0026rsquo;s Song\u0026rdquo; is also, kind of, lingustic SF. Uhura\u0026rsquo;s Song is, I\u0026rsquo;d argue, the best piece of liscenced science fiction ever, and of at least minor importance to the field feminist science fiction.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhich, is linked, thanks to my sleep deprived mind, to the title of a morris tune called \u0026ldquo;Jump at the Sun.\u0026rdquo; Sigh.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nGiven the above connection to the morris tune, you\u0026rsquo;ll, I\u0026rsquo;m sure, be pleased to know that I did not almost type \u0026ldquo;Free Reeds,\u0026rdquo; though I am forced to wonder how many accordion podcasts there are in the world.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dont-get-it-right-get-it-read/","summary":"This post is mostly about things I\u0026rsquo;ve read/am reading, but I have a few administrative issues to get out of the way first.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still up in the air about the new name or tagline for tychoish. I learned that I was misremembering the \u0026ldquo;early days of a better nation quote,\u0026rdquo; which make it difficult to serve as a new blog title. \u0026ldquo;Work as if you were living--\u0026rdquo; is kinda dumb, even if you modify it to \u0026ldquo;think\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;write.\u0026rdquo; And I think \u0026ldquo;innovated, bordering on the avate garde,\u0026rdquo; is perhaps a smidge to close to pornography for my tastes. Regarding the use of the pen name/pseudonym, I realized in a comment exchange on LiveJournal1 that the reason I was a bit angsty about this is that knitting is something that I already do \u0026ldquo;as [given name],\u0026rdquo; and because of this and because there is--as far as I know--not a huge precedent of knitters using pen names I got bit tetchy about it.","title":"Don't Get it Right, Get it Read"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s the running list of things I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about for tag lines. I\u0026rsquo;ve changed it to \u0026ldquo;tychoish, think as if you lived--\u0026rdquo; but this is only temporary, unless people like it.\nI really like the comma in this one, really like the comma.\nI\u0026rsquo;m even going to put them in the right font/size.\nI hope you don\u0026rsquo;t mind the visual oddity.\nthe life and times of tycho garen the old one, for typographical comparison.\ntychoish, think as if you live----------------------------------\n(with an explanation of the \u0026ldquo;early days of a better nation\u0026rdquo;) -- in the /about/ page.\ntychoish, the history of a future diaspora a bit long, a bit too oblique, but franklin has shown that niche bloggers can have totally random blog titles drawn from the academic ethos, without causing much harm.\ntycho garen on multiplexity (minor reference to Empire Star, which I just finished reading.)\ntychoish, a log of the future past tychoish, a log of the present future (variations on a common theme) I like using \u0026ldquo;log,\u0026rdquo; though my gut wants it to say \u0026ldquo;history\u0026rdquo;\ntychoish: from another time and place (reference to a dave van ronk song that Judy played on the radio this morning).\ntychoish, now without a net ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tag-lines/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s the running list of things I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about for tag lines. I\u0026rsquo;ve changed it to \u0026ldquo;tychoish, think as if you lived--\u0026rdquo; but this is only temporary, unless people like it.\nI really like the comma in this one, really like the comma.\nI\u0026rsquo;m even going to put them in the right font/size.\nI hope you don\u0026rsquo;t mind the visual oddity.\nthe life and times of tycho garen the old one, for typographical comparison.\ntychoish, think as if you live----------------------------------\n(with an explanation of the \u0026ldquo;early days of a better nation\u0026rdquo;) -- in the /about/ page.\ntychoish, the history of a future diaspora a bit long, a bit too oblique, but franklin has shown that niche bloggers can have totally random blog titles drawn from the academic ethos, without causing much harm.\ntycho garen on multiplexity (minor reference to Empire Star, which I just finished reading.)\ntychoish, a log of the future past tychoish, a log of the present future (variations on a common theme) I like using \u0026ldquo;log,\u0026rdquo; though my gut wants it to say \u0026ldquo;history\u0026rdquo;","title":"Tag Lines"},{"content":"Judy wrote a post today about identity and how we change ourselves to fit what we\u0026rsquo;re doing at any particular moment. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about something reasonably similar for a few days and I\u0026rsquo;ve meant to write about it more extensively and clearly here. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to now. At the moment my interest is pretty specifically focused on how the act of naming serves to concretize identity and meaning, basically \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s in a name,\u0026rdquo; to be overly trite.\nBy giving something a name, we make it seem comprehensible as something unique, and there\u0026rsquo;s an expectation that people can understand what something is going to be based on the name. If I give you the title of this blog (and your familiar with the site) you\u0026rsquo;re probably going to know what the posts are going to be like--and mostly you\u0026rsquo;d be right. Just as, if I told you that a site is a \u0026ldquo;blog\u0026rdquo; you know (or think you know) something about it\u0026rsquo;s organization and layout.\nI think the theorists would say that \u0026ldquo;naming is performative,\u0026rdquo; but I think the invocation of J.L. Austen is totally unnecessary, and probably pretty confusing in the long run. Basically this means that the act of attaching a name to something is as a result of its utterance, meaningful. At the same time, a little sign-posting doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem uncalled for.\nOn some level, that\u0026rsquo;s what the term \u0026ldquo;queer\u0026rdquo; is about (trying to establish a different way of thinking about sexual and gendered difference) and because of this and because of the importance of performativity to \u0026ldquo;queer\u0026rdquo; that I consider naming to be a queer issue.\nSo why am I writing this, you wonder? In part because I feel like this blog needs a new name, and in part because I\u0026rsquo;m considering my pen name more thoroughly as I embark more seriously upon a knitting career.\nFirst, the blog: The current name \u0026ldquo;the life and opinions of tycho garen,\u0026rdquo; is a bit stale, and I think provokes a style of blogging that\u0026rsquo;s more like a journal, a style that I\u0026rsquo;ve been fully complicit in enacting. And while I do take pleasure in the allusion to Lawrence Stern\u0026rsquo;s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that my karma needs that kind of spiritual connection at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;d also like to push this site back in the direction of the blog over the journal.\nI used names for TealArt (r.i.p.) that were reminiscent of newspaper titles (e.g. \u0026ldquo;The Times of TealArt\u0026rdquo;), but I think I need something different. This blog/site will still be called tychoish, but I think some better title is much needed and I\u0026rsquo;m looking for suggestions.\nMaybe I should see if I could cycle through a list of titles (for up at the top), there are a number that I think might work well. Maybe what I\u0026rsquo;m looking for is more of a tag line. Things that have been floating through my mind:\ninnovative bordering on the avante garde (from torchwood, Ianto\u0026rsquo;s reference to Jack\u0026rsquo;s sexual prowess.) awkward, but endearingly colloquial (An actual comment a prof. wrote on a paper, a long running joke, and I used it on TealArt for a long time. perhaps too journal-ish) tychoish from the past future (I like phrases that mash up \u0026ldquo;future\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;past\u0026rdquo; because they create a sense of history.) work and live as if-- (the less famous first half of the Alisdar Gray quote that ends \u0026ldquo;--you live in the early days of a better nation,\u0026rdquo; which Ken MacLeod has already used for a blog title) That\u0026rsquo;s all I have for right now, suggestions are welcome.\nNow on to the more serious part: the name.\nTo which I guess I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot to say, except that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. Here\u0026rsquo;s some pro/con analysis, but I hope you give suggestions.\nPros to using pen name *tycho garen*:\nThe name is entirely my own. I chose it, I have shaped it myself, without connection or reliance on other people. There is no \u0026ldquo;garen family\u0026rdquo; tradition, nothing. Just me. It\u0026rsquo;s what this blog has always and will continue to be authored under (even if TealArt was originally authored by my given name). There\u0026rsquo;s a marketing advantage here. Pseudonyms paradoxically draw attention to the identity and role of the author, in a way that is rather cool. It\u0026rsquo;s more difficult to mispronounce than my given last name. The silent H is a bit of a blip, but I have an 8 letter last name that\u0026rsquo;s typographically complex (-nm- letter pair,) and an english spelling anomaly (-ei- sequence.) \u0026ldquo;garen,\u0026rdquo; is a loose homage to my maternal grandfather (his first name began with G, and in the tradition of jewish naming, that and intention are enough), which feels nice. I feel more comfortable being a non-capitalizer with a pseudonym It allows me to isolate my professional (academic or otherwise) production from everything else, and offer some differentiation for the purpose of google. Cons to using pen name *tycho garen*:\nI think it would be difficult to change later if I had second thoughts. Might be more difficult to use it to do business. In this vein it might cause confusion, which is bad from a marketing perspective. Many people know me by the given name, as they should, particularly in the context of knitting (knitting camp, various other things.) It is hard to mix it up, to do some things with one name and some things with other names. I debate weather it\u0026rsquo;s the same or different as writing under a modified version of their given names: JMS goes by Joe but is credited J. Michael Strazinsky, J. C. \u0026ldquo;Chris\u0026rdquo; Hutchins and so forth. tycho is less (potentially) ambiguously gendered than \u0026ldquo;Sam,\u0026rdquo; and significantly less common, though Sam is a pretty uncommon for men in my generation. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking I\u0026rsquo;m going to go with it for the publishing (to the fam, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to change my name or anything, just a pen name, to be clear), but I don\u0026rsquo;t know. I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll get it sorted out.\nAny feedback you can offer with regards to either the name of the blog or the pen name debacle, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear from you a lot.\nCheers, tycho\n(ps. Onward and Upward!)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/naming/","summary":"Judy wrote a post today about identity and how we change ourselves to fit what we\u0026rsquo;re doing at any particular moment. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about something reasonably similar for a few days and I\u0026rsquo;ve meant to write about it more extensively and clearly here. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to now. At the moment my interest is pretty specifically focused on how the act of naming serves to concretize identity and meaning, basically \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s in a name,\u0026rdquo; to be overly trite.\nBy giving something a name, we make it seem comprehensible as something unique, and there\u0026rsquo;s an expectation that people can understand what something is going to be based on the name. If I give you the title of this blog (and your familiar with the site) you\u0026rsquo;re probably going to know what the posts are going to be like--and mostly you\u0026rsquo;d be right. Just as, if I told you that a site is a \u0026ldquo;blog\u0026rdquo; you know (or think you know) something about it\u0026rsquo;s organization and layout.","title":"Naming"},{"content":"As I promised earlier, here is the draft of the \u0026ldquo;terms\u0026rdquo; that I want to include as part of my pattern for the shawl. It seems reasonable, and it seems to reflect my interests in both promoting freedom and the open exchange of ideas, but more importantly in making it completely clear that I\u0026rsquo;m not writing this pattern out of philanthropy.\nThe truth is that by refusing to restrict downloads giving away copies of this pattern means that more and more people will be able to see the pattern and this blog (which is, in the long term, good for me and my pocketbook). The basic idea is that, only a certain percentage of people are going to pay anyway, and with luck by unrestricting the download, more people will see the pattern, and therefore a great number of people will pay. I think/hope the economics work out, but we\u0026rsquo;ll just have to wait and see.\nIn any case, below the fold, you\u0026rsquo;ll see a copy of the draft of the statement of this idea. Please give feedback and commentary either in the comments or via email. I look forward to hearing form you.\nThe rights to this pattern are entirely the property of the author; except in the instance of this copy, in which you the knitter hold (quite literally.) Very likely, you downloaded this pattern after paying for it, in which case I thank you. But it\u0026rsquo;s also possible that you have the pattern downloaded the pattern from free from my own website, or after receiving a copy from a friend or acquaintance.\nThis is alright. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s fair to expect that you buy patterns sight unseen, and I think that spreading copies of this pattern to your friends and fellow knitters is without question a good thing for this pattern and my design career: tell people about this pattern.\nAt the same time, this pattern is not free. If you decide to knit this pattern or value it\u0026rsquo;s contribution to the knitting community, I request that you pay for the pattern, and you can find instructions for this at http://tychoish.com/knitting/. If the price is a barrier to you, or would like to contribute more to support future designs, there are options at http://tychoish.com/knitting/ and you should feel free to contact me by email at garen@tychoish.com.\nThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.\nThis means that under no condition should you derive profit from the sale of this pattern or take credit for the pattern. I would also ask that if you share the pattern that you only distribute this pattern in full, including all charts and instruction. I would, however, be delighted if you, after (buying) and knitting this pattern decided to design your own eclectic pi shawl.\nNote: This will appear as a PDF file that I expect people to print out, hence the literal display of URLs. And by the time this launches, the tychoish.com/knitting/ page will, of course, be configured to contain links to pages that discuss donations and the store.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pattern-terms/","summary":"As I promised earlier, here is the draft of the \u0026ldquo;terms\u0026rdquo; that I want to include as part of my pattern for the shawl. It seems reasonable, and it seems to reflect my interests in both promoting freedom and the open exchange of ideas, but more importantly in making it completely clear that I\u0026rsquo;m not writing this pattern out of philanthropy.\nThe truth is that by refusing to restrict downloads giving away copies of this pattern means that more and more people will be able to see the pattern and this blog (which is, in the long term, good for me and my pocketbook). The basic idea is that, only a certain percentage of people are going to pay anyway, and with luck by unrestricting the download, more people will see the pattern, and therefore a great number of people will pay. I think/hope the economics work out, but we\u0026rsquo;ll just have to wait and see.","title":"Pattern Terms"},{"content":"It was my intention today to work on further invoking good karma to collect upon myself to the end of summoning good news from graduate school. Oh, by the way\u0026hellip;\nDays on the Waitlist: 17\n\u0026hellip;anyway, so in this direction, I finally pulled the plug on TealArt. Which was waiting to happen, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good that I just got it done with and I\u0026rsquo;m on to doing things that I think are going to be really productive in my life. Though its sad to let it go, tychoish is where it\u0026rsquo;s at for me, and to be cliched: taking irons off the fire is a good thing right now.\nAnother part of list of \u0026ldquo;things I\u0026rsquo;m changing,\u0026rdquo; is I\u0026rsquo;m going to re-title this blog to be less journalish and more blogish, and hopefully begin to start (continue?) to push my posts in that direction. If someone has a good pithy blog title, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear it. I have to throw away a bunch of crap that I\u0026rsquo;ve collected, and I\u0026rsquo;m also still in search of some symbolic rite, but I\u0026rsquo;m working in the right direction.\nIn other news:\nI wrote an entire knitting pattern for this shawl today:\nI need to find out who took that picture, though, because I don\u0026rsquo;t have that info on my records, it was someone who went to Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s Knitting Camp 1 last year, someone who might be reading the blog right now. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of important that I find out, because I don\u0026rsquo;t have the shawl any more, and I want to use the picture in the pattern.\nAnyway, the deal with this pattern, and it\u0026rsquo;s going to be an experiment in pattern publication. I\u0026rsquo;m going to post, probably tomorrow, the terms/description of the licensee that I\u0026rsquo;m including at the end of the pattern tomorrow for your feedback. I\u0026rsquo;m looking for the proper middle ground between \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m going to be stingy and try and prevent people from copying this file,\u0026rdquo; (which seems to be futile anyway), and \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m giving it all away for free.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m also concerned that if I cripple the distribution system somehow to make it more \u0026ldquo;secure\u0026rdquo; (by only selling print copies, or limiting downloads,) that I\u0026rsquo;ll prevent my best method for advertising.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ll get that copy to you tomorrow and you can tell me what you think.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about all the news I have.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/karma-call/","summary":"It was my intention today to work on further invoking good karma to collect upon myself to the end of summoning good news from graduate school. Oh, by the way\u0026hellip;\nDays on the Waitlist: 17\n\u0026hellip;anyway, so in this direction, I finally pulled the plug on TealArt. Which was waiting to happen, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good that I just got it done with and I\u0026rsquo;m on to doing things that I think are going to be really productive in my life. Though its sad to let it go, tychoish is where it\u0026rsquo;s at for me, and to be cliched: taking irons off the fire is a good thing right now.\nAnother part of list of \u0026ldquo;things I\u0026rsquo;m changing,\u0026rdquo; is I\u0026rsquo;m going to re-title this blog to be less journalish and more blogish, and hopefully begin to start (continue?) to push my posts in that direction. If someone has a good pithy blog title, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear it.","title":"karma call"},{"content":"Dear friends,\nToday has been a good day. Things regarding the dance experience have continued to improve, such that over tea this afternoon we realized that, the way things have turned out was the best possible thing that could have happened.\nSo good, in fact, that these kinds of things don\u0026rsquo;t happen outside of movies. Except they have.\nThe truth is, that this whole mess has been nagging at us for a year, maybe a year and a half. And though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure we have \u0026ldquo;closure,\u0026rdquo; we have resolution. This is good enough, and it\u0026rsquo;s as if a great weight has been lifted from our shoulders. A weight that we didn\u0026rsquo;t know we had.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s hard on you when your stress release mechanism, and one of your outlets for physical activity become cooped by angst and stress, and it\u0026rsquo;s been so long.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m happy.\nOne of the things that we did a few weeks ago, was that we held a ritual burning of some objects that were symbolic of some of the more stressful parts of the recent past.\nAnd now there\u0026rsquo;s resolution.\nSo we think (and I support this) that I need to have some sort of positively focused ritual to encourage a positive outcome to this graduate school application. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about what I can do, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. Seems like the place to start is with some serious cleaning and reorganization of my crap. I have clothes to donate, paper to recycle, and so forth. Cleansing seems like a good place to start.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also considering ditching tealart as a project because I think I can run everything that I could possibly ever want to do off of tychoish.com, and I\u0026rsquo;d rather not further divide my time/energy. Maybe. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. Unless I can find a good executive editor. But I have to keep it around for email purposes for a year or two anyway, so I don\u0026rsquo;t know. It\u0026rsquo;s just a thought.\nIf anyone has a good suggestion for a ritual some such, I\u0026rsquo;d be willing to hear it.\nIn other news, I replied to a lot of email messages on ravelry, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I took so long to do this, but it felt really good to get all these messages out to people who had written really kind notes. Also I got more than a little bit of encouragement to work on getting my patterns written and ready for sale and distribution. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing to encourage you to be creative and productive than people asking for ways to give you money. This is the problem to have. So the end result is that I have a lot of work to do and I\u0026rsquo;m very much looking forward to the opportunity to do it.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what I have right now. I\u0026rsquo;ll be back tomorrow, in a less reflective sort of way. Be well everyone, that\u0026rsquo;s an order.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/not-dead/","summary":"Dear friends,\nToday has been a good day. Things regarding the dance experience have continued to improve, such that over tea this afternoon we realized that, the way things have turned out was the best possible thing that could have happened.\nSo good, in fact, that these kinds of things don\u0026rsquo;t happen outside of movies. Except they have.\nThe truth is, that this whole mess has been nagging at us for a year, maybe a year and a half. And though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure we have \u0026ldquo;closure,\u0026rdquo; we have resolution. This is good enough, and it\u0026rsquo;s as if a great weight has been lifted from our shoulders. A weight that we didn\u0026rsquo;t know we had.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s hard on you when your stress release mechanism, and one of your outlets for physical activity become cooped by angst and stress, and it\u0026rsquo;s been so long.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m happy.\nOne of the things that we did a few weeks ago, was that we held a ritual burning of some objects that were symbolic of some of the more stressful parts of the recent past.","title":"not dead"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m back to trying to learn how to work with vim more seriously, and I think with a more seriously modified .vimrc file. Thank g-d for dotfiles. I did realize that I don\u0026rsquo;t need to remap a key to escape system wide, as long as it works in vim at the right place, and it turns out (of course) that getting this to happen is a synch).\nAs this is a fairly geeky post, I\u0026rsquo;m going to put the bulk of it below the fold\u0026hellip;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a long story but the short of it is: I don\u0026rsquo;t have it down yet, and I think there are a number of things that I have yet to learn how to do properly that I can do with out any fuss in TextMate. Vim can do them, it\u0026rsquo;s just a matter of teaching me how to do them. I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to get things like blog posting from within the editor (I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet braved installing the ruby script-able vim yet). There\u0026rsquo;s still a bunch of things that TM does that I haven\u0026rsquo;t figured out yet. Like the auto-paired characters (in TM, if you type a single quote (\u0026quot;) it automatically puts the other one. This also works around selected text. There\u0026rsquo;s got to be something in vim for this, I just haven\u0026rsquo;t found it), and the hyperlink helper, would also be nice to duplicate.\nWhy am I doing this? Good question. Using vim feels more efficient. It\u0026rsquo;s good to stretch the brain, and at some point I\u0026rsquo;ll have it figured out. In addition to self betterment, I\u0026rsquo;m learning this because I have a new-to-me computer that I\u0026rsquo;m going to start using more consistently, and it\u0026rsquo;s not a mac, so having something that\u0026rsquo;s more cross platform appeals. Also, with the replacement of my previously dysfunctional \u0026ldquo;t\u0026rdquo; key, I\u0026rsquo;ve become more bonded to the ongoing maintenance of this computer. It\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m stubborn.\nChris, who knows me way too well, said that \u0026ldquo;switching to linux will be good for you, but you\u0026rsquo;ll like it for a few months, and then hate it for a few, and after that you\u0026rsquo;ll be golden.\u0026rdquo; Depressingly, my mother, upon hearing this, concurred totally. Becoming comfortable in vim is the first step in this transition. And if I can make this jump, to my satisfaction, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of linux hardware out there thats way more interesting and affordable than equivalent mac hardware. Tablets, 12 inch laptops, computers without CD drives.\nThough, this whole thing is clearly going through fits and starts, because I\u0026rsquo;ve broken down and gone back to TextMate. But eventually. I\u0026rsquo;ll post a list of things to master at some point.\nAnyway, enough for now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tech-stubbornness/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m back to trying to learn how to work with vim more seriously, and I think with a more seriously modified .vimrc file. Thank g-d for dotfiles. I did realize that I don\u0026rsquo;t need to remap a key to escape system wide, as long as it works in vim at the right place, and it turns out (of course) that getting this to happen is a synch).\nAs this is a fairly geeky post, I\u0026rsquo;m going to put the bulk of it below the fold\u0026hellip;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a long story but the short of it is: I don\u0026rsquo;t have it down yet, and I think there are a number of things that I have yet to learn how to do properly that I can do with out any fuss in TextMate. Vim can do them, it\u0026rsquo;s just a matter of teaching me how to do them. I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to get things like blog posting from within the editor (I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet braved installing the ruby script-able vim yet).","title":"Tech Stubbornness"},{"content":"Update: I wrote this entry yesterday morning, and in the last day, a few things have happened that have tempered my enthusiasm a bit. But not much. Which is glorious.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve realized that, while I spend a lot of my \u0026ldquo;real life\u0026rdquo; socializing time involved in various dance activities, I don\u0026rsquo;t actually write about them in this journal. And it was something that, while I was in school, I mostly didn\u0026rsquo;t think about much. But god, I dance a lot, and it\u0026rsquo;s a huge part of \u0026ldquo;who I am\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;what I do.\u0026rdquo;\nOne of the things, and perhaps the only really concrete thing, that has made this past, of being back in the town that I grew up in, is that the dance community that I\u0026rsquo;ve been involved in has been, well, sick, for far too long. Maybe it has something to do with personalities (actually, probably); maybe it has something to do with the anarchistic tendency of dance groups/organization (not an ideological point, but a reference that dance and other folk groups resist structure, and so organization and management must be, just a wee bit, heavy handed and always deft.) In any case, it\u0026rsquo;s been stressful to have ones source of community and pleasure co-opted by angst. I have enough of that in my life.\nI mean, really now, I have enough angst on tychoish, do I really need something else to complain about regularly? I think not.\nBut a couple of things are looking up. For starters, there are a couple of positive things happening to the various dramatis personae of the dance groups that I\u0026rsquo;m apart of. I use the word positive in two senses, first that I think the situation might improve as a result, but more significantly that no one has quit dancing (which has been a secret desire of mine for some time), but rather that additional people are (re)joining the community in a way that I think is wholly positive.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m happy. I also have an interesting anecdote to share.\nIn border morris practice, we were starting to learn/write a new dance. This seems to be par for the course, as there isn\u0026rsquo;t the same sort of organized repertory in border that there is in cotswold morris. Furthermore, we are a team of unique size, and body type, so it\u0026rsquo;s useful to tinker with dances a little bit until the dances fit better. I should also point out that the border team is reasonably unique in that, the core of us has been dancing together for years.\nAnyway, we were learning a new dance, and I rather quickly decided to suggest a change for a sequence so that the chorus (the distinctive figure in the dance) wasn\u0026rsquo;t so static, basically by changing the orientation of the set for a moment. It worked. But it required us to rethink procedure: \u0026ldquo;Who goes first?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Who has priority in this new situation,\u0026rdquo;\nThis is in and of itself not an incredibly difficult problem: often in a morris dance, you have options, and part of the job of organizing a team\u0026rsquo;s style is making decisions about these options. For example, dances start on the left foot or the \u0026ldquo;outside foot\u0026rdquo; (the foot furthest from the center of the set, or your partner depending on the situation). Or in the case of the problem above: if you turn the set around, who starts the figure?\nThe interesting thing, is that there was no central decree, in this situation, we all new the answer, once we stopped to think about it. Because we had morris precedent, we just had to recall it and figure out how to apply it in this situation. Except, we just did it, no argument, no explanation necessary.\nIt was one of those situations that seems perfectly normal in the moment, but that you realize immediately as being completely absurd. It\u0026rsquo;s these moments, and a few others, that help us to feel as if we belong to a community, and are delightful to experience. And those are the moments that I\u0026rsquo;d miss most if I stopped dancing.\nEven if the drama lingers--which it surely will as \u0026ldquo;the good guys\u0026rdquo; don\u0026rsquo;t have any balls left in play, and \u0026ldquo;the bad guys\u0026rdquo; have no interest in resolving it--I take great pleasure in having the ability to dance and have fun dancing. So there.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/which-way-is-up/","summary":"Update: I wrote this entry yesterday morning, and in the last day, a few things have happened that have tempered my enthusiasm a bit. But not much. Which is glorious.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve realized that, while I spend a lot of my \u0026ldquo;real life\u0026rdquo; socializing time involved in various dance activities, I don\u0026rsquo;t actually write about them in this journal. And it was something that, while I was in school, I mostly didn\u0026rsquo;t think about much. But god, I dance a lot, and it\u0026rsquo;s a huge part of \u0026ldquo;who I am\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;what I do.\u0026rdquo;\nOne of the things, and perhaps the only really concrete thing, that has made this past, of being back in the town that I grew up in, is that the dance community that I\u0026rsquo;ve been involved in has been, well, sick, for far too long. Maybe it has something to do with personalities (actually, probably); maybe it has something to do with the anarchistic tendency of dance groups/organization (not an ideological point, but a reference that dance and other folk groups resist structure, and so organization and management must be, just a wee bit, heavy handed and always deft.","title":"Which Way is Up?"},{"content":"I got an email today from someone, who, having seen my posting on the tealArt knitting blog regarding my intentions to write patterns, and pictures of some of my designs on ravelry, encouraged me to write patters because she really liked what she saw and wanted to knit some of my stranded patterns.\nThis was amazing. And I feel when people are, basically, asking to give you money that you should really go with that, because its a sign.\nThis is something that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about for some time, and I did need the encouragement. But I am at a bit of a loss, about how to orchestrate it.\nThe truth is that selling digital wares is a somewhat difficult proposition: you\u0026rsquo;re selling an idea, not a physicality, and digital documents are infinitely copyable, so how do you both not give everything away for free, and not turn into an obnoxious capitalist about the whole scheme.\nI think a tip jar-type model is probably the easiest/most likely solution, but it is difficult to ponder correctly. And I want to have something that will last long term, and not blow away in a few months when fads change.\nSo my first instinct was to write Cory Doctorow, about the technological angle of the document distribution, because this sort of model seems to be right up his alley. And I think knitting patterns are enough different from fiction that the models are different enough that it might be interesting thing to explore.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I have a good solution, yet, so your input is of course appreciated, but I\u0026rsquo;ll repost the relevant parts here, below the fold, because I can.\nI have a question quandary that I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to offer some insight on at your connivence.\nI do a fair bit of design work for hand knitting, and I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a few requests to write up and offer some patterns, but I think on a conceptual level these \u0026ldquo;things\u0026rdquo; could be short stories, or essays, or bits of software programs.\nThis seems like a generally enviable position, but I\u0026rsquo;m at a bit of a loss. I have a number of patterns that are/will be for free/creative commons downloads. But I have a number big/intense patterns patterns for sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure will work well in this model. So I guess the crux of my question, is do you know of any good solution/service that will allow variable pricing/donation models, for electronic document delivery that don\u0026rsquo;t suck and/or don\u0026rsquo;t make me seem like an obnoxious capitalist?\nSome thoughts about knitting patterns in contrast to other electronic text solutions:\nThe digital copies can sufficiently/completely replace the physical/paper copies (They\u0026rsquo;re short, so it\u0026rsquo;s feasible to print them). Digital copies are preferable. Many knitters photo copy patterns from traditionally issued books because it is easier to cary around a few sheets in a page protector than a whole books. If you can get all the patterns that you want from a book, there\u0026rsquo;s little incentive to buy the book, for many. Many knitters will only buy a book if X number of patterns seem like things they would want to knit. Delightfully, knitters are pretty willing, on the whole to pay for things (there\u0026rsquo;s disposable income there) and have adapted pretty well to the internet, so I think that if I can give people a way to pay for the documents, many will, without needing some sort of tight fingered system. But I\u0026rsquo;m largely unaware of what kind of options are out there.\nAny insight is much appreciated.\nCheers, tycho\nHe suggested the Lulu.com document delivery system that lets you both give away things for free and charge for them. Which seems like a good place to start, though I wrote the following clarification/response.\nI\u0026rsquo;d sort of like to do something more along the lines of another sky press http://www.anothersky.org/, so that it presents folks with a \u0026ldquo;buy now for ____\u0026rdquo; box with some reasonable value in it, with an explanation that you could set it to zero, and you could get it for free\u0026hellip; So that the downloading experience is structured around the expectation of \u0026ldquo;not-free\u0026rdquo; but is still freely available.\nI fear having to home bake something, which would take too much time away from doing other things, like writing, but it might not be that hard.\nThanks, cheers\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-business/","summary":"I got an email today from someone, who, having seen my posting on the tealArt knitting blog regarding my intentions to write patterns, and pictures of some of my designs on ravelry, encouraged me to write patters because she really liked what she saw and wanted to knit some of my stranded patterns.\nThis was amazing. And I feel when people are, basically, asking to give you money that you should really go with that, because its a sign.\nThis is something that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about for some time, and I did need the encouragement. But I am at a bit of a loss, about how to orchestrate it.\nThe truth is that selling digital wares is a somewhat difficult proposition: you\u0026rsquo;re selling an idea, not a physicality, and digital documents are infinitely copyable, so how do you both not give everything away for free, and not turn into an obnoxious capitalist about the whole scheme.","title":"knitting business"},{"content":"I have finally established the knitting of the body of my new sweater, and it progresses slowly. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been knitting on something that wasn\u0026rsquo;t a sleeve or a sock, since late November, so I forget how different the pace feels for sweater bodies.\nI knit about 2 inches on the sleeve yesterday, and another inch or so today (so far; I have yet to watch the Torchwood that I have in store. There will be more knitting).\nBy my calculations, if I knit just two inches a day, I\u0026rsquo;ll easily get to the underarm of the sweater in a bit more than a week. Which is quite exciting. The yoke section might take a week because it is a fiddly bit of knitting, and then a few days for the finishing, so this sweater seems pretty much on pace, baring something unexpected.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a fun pattern to knit and I\u0026rsquo;m really enjoying the sweater, though I\u0026rsquo;m worried that my gauge has changed, but it\u0026rsquo;s really quite possible that it hasn\u0026rsquo;t, so I\u0026rsquo;m not going to worry about it.\nThe next sweater is going to be a raglan-shouldered pullover, knit in what I hope will be a drape-y fabric, out of a merino-possum yarn that\u0026rsquo;s been in the family stash for a long time. Why yes it is, teal. I haven\u0026rsquo;t made a determination about the construction direction.\nMy thought is that I\u0026rsquo;ll cast on provisionally somewhere in the middle of the sweater, do the busy part around the shoulder, and then knit the sleeves and body from the shoulder to the lower hems after I\u0026rsquo;m sure that I\u0026rsquo;m able to do the math. I\u0026rsquo;d like to have a neat v-neck, and I\u0026rsquo;m willing to steek, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to get it to all add up right in the end.\nI must ponder further.\nMy search for the right kind of surgical steel (316L) continues with limited success. The smallest rods you can get are between a US size 3 and 4, which is way too big for what I\u0026rsquo;m looking for. It turns out that you can get straight \u0026ldquo;spring wire\u0026rdquo; that\u0026rsquo;s smaller than a US 0, but nothing for the US size 2.5 (3.0mm) and US 1.5 (2.5mm) that I find useful let alone other sizes in the 2.0mm to 3.0mm range. Sigh.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s real work to be done, knitting pattern development, and job applications. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch?\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-goal-schedule/","summary":"I have finally established the knitting of the body of my new sweater, and it progresses slowly. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been knitting on something that wasn\u0026rsquo;t a sleeve or a sock, since late November, so I forget how different the pace feels for sweater bodies.\nI knit about 2 inches on the sleeve yesterday, and another inch or so today (so far; I have yet to watch the Torchwood that I have in store. There will be more knitting).\nBy my calculations, if I knit just two inches a day, I\u0026rsquo;ll easily get to the underarm of the sweater in a bit more than a week. Which is quite exciting. The yoke section might take a week because it is a fiddly bit of knitting, and then a few days for the finishing, so this sweater seems pretty much on pace, baring something unexpected.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a fun pattern to knit and I\u0026rsquo;m really enjoying the sweater, though I\u0026rsquo;m worried that my gauge has changed, but it\u0026rsquo;s really quite possible that it hasn\u0026rsquo;t, so I\u0026rsquo;m not going to worry about it.","title":"Knitting Goal Schedule"},{"content":"This is going to be a knitting post. But first a quick interlude:\nDays on the Waitlist: 13\nI also applied for two jobs. One a help desk job that will likely pay really well, but despite its mind numbingness, might be the right mix of work that I might enjoy quite well. The second is a web designer/developer job with a company that I think would be a blast to work for. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping. I really want to get into graduate school, and I think if I don\u0026rsquo;t hear by the middle of the week, the chance of me hearing before, say April 10th (and more likely the 15th) is pretty low. If I hear before the 15th, the news is good, if I hear on the 16th I think my chances are 50/50 and any point after that: remote.\nBut this is a knitting post.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to take a few moments out of my travels today and stop by a hardware store and see if I can get 316(L) steel rods in size appropriate to knitting needles. Yes. I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a knitting guage and some knitting needles into Home Depot (which my mother and I call Home Despot). I\u0026rsquo;ll report on how this goes. I\u0026rsquo;d like to get some 3mm (14 guage?) to make US 2.5 sock and gansey needles, as well as some smaller for grins.\nUpdate: I found some steel rods, that were 3 mm, and some brass rods that were a little bigger, but so much nicer. Not surprisingly, no surgical steel. Your collective insight and wisdom is much appreciated, of course.\nAlso, I realized after talking to my mother that a member our logical family is a cabinet maker and would probably be able to help me figure out how to make a knitting sheath. This is also quite exciting.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also finished both sleeves of my sweater and have cast on for the body of the sweater which progresses with minimal speed, but at this point that\u0026rsquo;s more than ok.\nAnyway, Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-start/","summary":"This is going to be a knitting post. But first a quick interlude:\nDays on the Waitlist: 13\nI also applied for two jobs. One a help desk job that will likely pay really well, but despite its mind numbingness, might be the right mix of work that I might enjoy quite well. The second is a web designer/developer job with a company that I think would be a blast to work for. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping. I really want to get into graduate school, and I think if I don\u0026rsquo;t hear by the middle of the week, the chance of me hearing before, say April 10th (and more likely the 15th) is pretty low. If I hear before the 15th, the news is good, if I hear on the 16th I think my chances are 50/50 and any point after that: remote.\nBut this is a knitting post.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to take a few moments out of my travels today and stop by a hardware store and see if I can get 316(L) steel rods in size appropriate to knitting needles.","title":"A Start"},{"content":"Ok, I was crusing around raverly avoiding my writing and sipping my tea, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found something `amazing \u0026lt;http://gansey.blogspot.com/\u0026gt;`_\nThis blog, called \u0026ldquo;A Fisherman Knits\u0026rdquo; is a guy (Aaron) whose really interested in traditional fisherman\u0026rsquo;s sweaters (ganseys or guernsey) and his blog is brilliance as it reports on various attempts to knit these really stellar garments, and its all very systematic and brilliant.\nHe knits using long double points that he makes himself (I must learn how to do this. there\u0026rsquo;s a pair of steel 5/5.25 inch needles in my future for socks, and maybe some 12 inch needles for a sweater) and I think there\u0026rsquo;s wisdom in this method.\nAlso interestingly he reports that he can wear these sweaters when it\u0026rsquo;s in the mid 60s comfortably (!) I always feel like my sweaters are too warm if it\u0026rsquo;s in the high fifties, so that\u0026rsquo;s something that i have to investigate.\nAnyway, go forth and read.\nPeriscope down!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fishermans-sweaters-blog/","summary":"Ok, I was crusing around raverly avoiding my writing and sipping my tea, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found something `amazing \u0026lt;http://gansey.blogspot.com/\u0026gt;`_\nThis blog, called \u0026ldquo;A Fisherman Knits\u0026rdquo; is a guy (Aaron) whose really interested in traditional fisherman\u0026rsquo;s sweaters (ganseys or guernsey) and his blog is brilliance as it reports on various attempts to knit these really stellar garments, and its all very systematic and brilliant.\nHe knits using long double points that he makes himself (I must learn how to do this. there\u0026rsquo;s a pair of steel 5/5.25 inch needles in my future for socks, and maybe some 12 inch needles for a sweater) and I think there\u0026rsquo;s wisdom in this method.\nAlso interestingly he reports that he can wear these sweaters when it\u0026rsquo;s in the mid 60s comfortably (!) I always feel like my sweaters are too warm if it\u0026rsquo;s in the high fifties, so that\u0026rsquo;s something that i have to investigate.","title":"Fisherman's Sweaters Blog"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a lot. I still don\u0026rsquo;t have pictures, but I do have stories. I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have 1000 words of stories, but these few hundred will probably come close.\nI finished sewing up the hem and the sweater is blocking downstairs. There\u0026rsquo;s a little bit of the hem which I\u0026rsquo;m a little disappointed with, but these things happen, and I\u0026rsquo;m not that worried that it will negatively affect much. I\u0026rsquo;m still undecided about closure. I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably due with out for any wearing that it gets this year, and make a mega-order of zippers in about a month if I can\u0026rsquo;t find a source of good zippers locally. This sweater feels like it would proably work alright with some simple black bobble-esque buttons, so I might make little I-cord button hole tabs if it came to that.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s still damp so we\u0026rsquo;ll have to wait a while to get good pictures.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been a knitting fiend of late, working on the sleeves of my sweater, which I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on seriously for almost a week, and will finish the end of the second sleeve this evening in all likely hood. I can\u0026rsquo;t wait to start knitting on the body of a sweater again, particularly given that when I\u0026rsquo;m done with the body of this sweater, I\u0026rsquo;m done with it, because the sleeves are already done.\nThe problems with my knitting queue are done. Done! I can resume my normal, if a bit obsessive, knitting life, without having to drag myself through projects that I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to work on, and I can look forward to the next project with hope and anticipation without guilt.\nSpeaking of my queue, just like my mother\u0026rsquo;s self imposed goal/project of knitting ten pairs of socks before memorial day, I\u0026rsquo;m setting a goal of knitting 14 Sweaters by December 31st 2009. Which is a little bit less than a sweater every six weeks. On average.\nWhich is about my common rate of progress, assuming I\u0026rsquo;m not knitting huge sweaters at fine gauges like I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing this year. I do a stranded sweater that fits me at like 8 stitches to the inch, in six weeks, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll just be making stranded sweaters either. So all should work out. This goal, like my moms goal, is really not a rush, but more like an excuse to spend my time (and knitting budget) on projects that I genuinely want to work on. I love making sweaters, and would be happy to just keep knitting sweaters and nothing else. Here are some other ground rules that I\u0026rsquo;m considering as part of my challenge:\nSweaters started before the goal was established count when they\u0026rsquo;re finished. So the sweater I\u0026rsquo;m working on now, and the fine gauge gray sweater count when they\u0026rsquo;re finished, even though some percentage of the knitting occurred before I\u0026rsquo;ve started. The next 144 rounds of the Pi shawl I\u0026rsquo;m working on on size zero\u0026rsquo;s would count as a sweater, and if it\u0026rsquo;s not done at that point, the remainder of the shawl will also count as it\u0026rsquo;s own sweater. I don\u0026rsquo;t expect to be working on this, however. At least three quarters of the sweaters I make should be my own designs and/or things that I could publish as my own. Preferably more. Sounds fun.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also worked out what yarn/kinds of patterns I intend to make for the next eight sweaters I want to make. Which is also incredibly exciting, I have stash yarn enough for two sweaters, and i think I have leftovers enough so that I can knit 3 sweaters only buying 4 cones of yarn (the last two sweaters I\u0026rsquo;ve made I\u0026rsquo;ve bought 4 cones each, which while necessary, has contributed to my leftover shelf greatly.) Also surprisingly, I have, on my list, five yarns/sweaters that I want to make that are medium weight single color patters/designs/ideas. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that it\u0026rsquo;s about time for me to suck it up and knit cable work.\nAnyway, hope you\u0026rsquo;re having a good goyeshe yantif, I should go knit/write, I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/loose-ends/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a lot. I still don\u0026rsquo;t have pictures, but I do have stories. I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have 1000 words of stories, but these few hundred will probably come close.\nI finished sewing up the hem and the sweater is blocking downstairs. There\u0026rsquo;s a little bit of the hem which I\u0026rsquo;m a little disappointed with, but these things happen, and I\u0026rsquo;m not that worried that it will negatively affect much. I\u0026rsquo;m still undecided about closure. I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably due with out for any wearing that it gets this year, and make a mega-order of zippers in about a month if I can\u0026rsquo;t find a source of good zippers locally. This sweater feels like it would proably work alright with some simple black bobble-esque buttons, so I might make little I-cord button hole tabs if it came to that.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s still damp so we\u0026rsquo;ll have to wait a while to get good pictures.","title":"loose ends"},{"content":"Today has been a knitting day, that\u0026rsquo;s pretty undeniable, and I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a lot of knitting done, so that feels good, and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t suggest that I\u0026rsquo;m all the way to being \u0026ldquo;back in the writing saddle,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;m feeling less dyer about things, so that\u0026rsquo;s good.\nPart of getting back on the writing saddle for me is to get back into the reading saddle. Read more (or any) fiction; listen to things. Consume media that isn\u0026rsquo;t simply guilty pleasure (like I think I need to watch more feature length movies and fewer procedurals.) It\u0026rsquo;s all gist for the mill, and I need more of it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling with the James Tiptree book The Starry Rift, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t really grabbed me in a big way, certainly not nearly as much as her earlier (slightly) and much greater Brightness falls from the Air, to which Rift is at least tangentially connected. It\u0026rsquo;s good, but I\u0026rsquo;ve found it hard to get involved in. I was really involved in the first story, but it ended, and the second story is taking almost as long as the first to get into. Also my copy of the book was damaged in an incident with a plant, which has made reading slightly more difficult. I think this is part of my general inability to grok for shorter forms.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m not reading that, becuase I figure life\u0026rsquo;s too short and if I could be reading something it\u0026rsquo;s probably better than reading nothing at all, so instead I\u0026rsquo;m reading Empire Star a--from all accounts--whimsical adventure novella by Samuel Delany, which I think might be the right thing at the moment.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also listening to, somewhat obsessively (hence the knitting) Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s reading of Bruce Sterling\u0026rsquo;s *The Hacker Crackdown*. It\u0026rsquo;s over so I can listen to this basically straight through. Which is a lot of fun. This might be bridging on creepy, but I really enjoy hearing Cory talk, and really, by now I mostly know most of his shticks, and I still listen to them. And it helps that even if I disagree or am frustrated by his approach from time to time, it\u0026rsquo;s always\u0026hellip; stimulating. And that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing, particularly when I\u0026rsquo;m trying to find my saddle.\nMy other, more erstwhile, project of the moment, and the topic that this entry owes its title, is my process of developing the \u0026ldquo;bad guy\u0026rdquo; character my Mars Stor(ies), who I\u0026rsquo;ve felt is a little bit too unfocused for too long. Writing, just notes at the moment, about his past and secrets is helpful for being able to more fully actualize him in my mind. What I\u0026rsquo;m realizing after the fact, is that I mushed together two antagonists from my high school novel, in a way that totally didn\u0026rsquo;t work in my mind.\nThis hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a huge issue until now, because in the earlier story, he was pretty far removed from most of the events and we never see things from his perspective. But now I\u0026rsquo;m teasing out a story that\u0026rsquo;s going to give us a little bit of his origin story, and, well I need to have this figured out. Mostly my problem is that I have a hard time making him come off as being evil enough, rather than just slimy, and short tempered. It\u0026rsquo;s an ongoing project.\nWith Breakout in cold storage, I\u0026rsquo;m turning back to the Mars stories to see if I can just get something short (novelette length?) written and out. I\u0026rsquo;m also going to spend some time with Station Keeping as a spring/summer project, once I\u0026rsquo;m back in the saddle. But I\u0026rsquo;m also trying to think about other universe\u0026rsquo;s/worlds/settings situations. My Mars stories are great fun, and I like the characters and some of the other things that I\u0026rsquo;m doing, but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to get stuck either. So while I don\u0026rsquo;t think it wise to actually do anything about that right now; branching out is something that\u0026rsquo;s very much on the horizon.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bad-guys/","summary":"Today has been a knitting day, that\u0026rsquo;s pretty undeniable, and I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a lot of knitting done, so that feels good, and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t suggest that I\u0026rsquo;m all the way to being \u0026ldquo;back in the writing saddle,\u0026rdquo; but I\u0026rsquo;m feeling less dyer about things, so that\u0026rsquo;s good.\nPart of getting back on the writing saddle for me is to get back into the reading saddle. Read more (or any) fiction; listen to things. Consume media that isn\u0026rsquo;t simply guilty pleasure (like I think I need to watch more feature length movies and fewer procedurals.) It\u0026rsquo;s all gist for the mill, and I need more of it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling with the James Tiptree book The Starry Rift, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t really grabbed me in a big way, certainly not nearly as much as her earlier (slightly) and much greater Brightness falls from the Air, to which Rift is at least tangentially connected.","title":"bad guys"},{"content":"Note: I tried to post this earlier today, but was thwarted by something or other. I\u0026rsquo;m off to write one last entry today, which you\u0026rsquo;ll probably read in much quicker succession than I expected you would anyway. Enjoy.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m making a mitten sweater. Which is to say that, I\u0026rsquo;m using a Latvian Mitten Pattern for a sweater.\nI\u0026rsquo;m doing a couple of things that are not particularly typical for me:\nI\u0026rsquo;m using a sport weight merino yarn. Not only this, it\u0026rsquo;s a generally available sport weight merino yarn. Made by Louet. I typically make stranded sweaters out of fingering weight yarn, and I typically use yarns that aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly commonly available. Weaving yarns, mostly. I\u0026rsquo;m knitting (most) of the sleeves before I start on the body. This is because I\u0026rsquo;m making an EPS-style sweater. That is, Elizabeth (Zimmerman\u0026rsquo;s) Percentage System, and it\u0026rsquo;s a nifty/brilliant way of making sweaters in one piece. The one I\u0026rsquo;m aiming for is the a saddle shouldered sweater. it\u0026rsquo;s going to be (another) cardigan, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be nifty. I have the first sleeve done, and have about 4 inches done on the second sleeve. My goal is to get the second sleeve off of the double pointed needles before I start the body. I\u0026rsquo;d say that about a quarter of my sweaters are EPS sweaters, but I almost always cheat and knit the sleeves from the shoulder down, by provisionally casting on the sleeve stitches, because I had an aversion to knitting sleeves, but I\u0026rsquo;m working on getting over it. And it\u0026rsquo;s fun knitting. I\u0026rsquo;ll get pictures at some point.\nIn other knitting news, I\u0026rsquo;m sewing down the hem\u0026rsquo;s on the morocco sweater. I have the neck, the bottom, and most of one sleeve. I\u0026rsquo;m not in a rush, and I have to remember to not judge this sweater until after the wet block, because I fear that the sewing job looks a little sloppy, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be fine in the end. So close.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m off. I think I have enough writing to write about that I\u0026rsquo;ll have another post to day. Fathom that.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mitten-sweater/","summary":"Note: I tried to post this earlier today, but was thwarted by something or other. I\u0026rsquo;m off to write one last entry today, which you\u0026rsquo;ll probably read in much quicker succession than I expected you would anyway. Enjoy.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m making a mitten sweater. Which is to say that, I\u0026rsquo;m using a Latvian Mitten Pattern for a sweater.\nI\u0026rsquo;m doing a couple of things that are not particularly typical for me:\nI\u0026rsquo;m using a sport weight merino yarn. Not only this, it\u0026rsquo;s a generally available sport weight merino yarn. Made by Louet. I typically make stranded sweaters out of fingering weight yarn, and I typically use yarns that aren\u0026rsquo;t particularly commonly available. Weaving yarns, mostly. I\u0026rsquo;m knitting (most) of the sleeves before I start on the body. This is because I\u0026rsquo;m making an EPS-style sweater. That is, Elizabeth (Zimmerman\u0026rsquo;s) Percentage System, and it\u0026rsquo;s a nifty/brilliant way of making sweaters in one piece.","title":"Mitten Sweater"},{"content":"Days on the Waitlist: 10\nI said the other day to a friend that \u0026ldquo;I thought I had my voice back.\u0026rdquo; This realization, and the opportunity to articulate it was incredibly powerful for me. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t completely returned to normal, I\u0026rsquo;m getting there, which is kind of nifty, not going to lie.\nYesterday I wrote the begining of a 2,000 word essay/concept paper for a structured hypertext system that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get Chris to collaborate with me on. This was the other result of this conversation, and even if nothing comes of this project, I\u0026rsquo;m pleased that I was able to write something like this. It was the closest I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to writing a real academic-ish essay in months.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, it needs a good once over, and I realize that the ending is lacking, but it\u0026rsquo;s something. That felt really good.\nI also, went through the rest of the first chapter of Knowing Mars, the novella from last fall, and have some better ideas about how to procede with this project. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been stalled for a while, because I know that I need to further develop the antagonist, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been attempting to do this edit by hand with a pen and a print out, which is less than desirable, I think.\nIn any case, I need to get a draft of this project done that I can be happy with so that something can be done with it. This weighs heavily on me, and on my list of current projects as I think about the near future. I think having a written project that I can be happy with will let me feel much more secure about whatever happens with the waitlist.\nAnd I need to keep writing, of course. It\u0026rsquo;s hard as hell to write when you feel like crap and--at least for me--it helps like the world to do so. Alas.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m going to get going, but thanks for listening.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/empiricism/","summary":"Days on the Waitlist: 10\nI said the other day to a friend that \u0026ldquo;I thought I had my voice back.\u0026rdquo; This realization, and the opportunity to articulate it was incredibly powerful for me. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t completely returned to normal, I\u0026rsquo;m getting there, which is kind of nifty, not going to lie.\nYesterday I wrote the begining of a 2,000 word essay/concept paper for a structured hypertext system that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get Chris to collaborate with me on. This was the other result of this conversation, and even if nothing comes of this project, I\u0026rsquo;m pleased that I was able to write something like this. It was the closest I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to writing a real academic-ish essay in months.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, it needs a good once over, and I realize that the ending is lacking, but it\u0026rsquo;s something. That felt really good.\nI also, went through the rest of the first chapter of Knowing Mars, the novella from last fall, and have some better ideas about how to procede with this project.","title":"empiricism"},{"content":"So, one of the things that I did today, was write a little shell function that will append text to the end of a file from the command line. I\u0026rsquo;m sharing it with you all because that seems like the thing to do, and I find it useful.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sure there are more effective ways to accomplish this, but this works. To be fair, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing here that will protect you from yourself, but it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be able to do much damage. I keep it in my .bash_profile, but that\u0026rsquo;s probably not the smartest thing in the world. Have fun.\nap() { file=$1; shift note=$*; echo -e \u0026#39;\\n- \u0026#39;\u0026#34;$note\u0026#34; \u0026gt;\u0026gt; $file } Then to use the function, once it\u0026rsquo;s been loaded is, at the prompt:\n$ ap filename.txt stuff that you want to append to the file\nA couple of notes: You have to type in the full filename, thankfully we have tab completion. If you want to prepend, I think you just change the direction of the pointy brackets from \u0026gt;\u0026gt; to \u0026lt;\u0026lt;. Also I have it set up to add all notes as if they are a bullet point (in markdown hence the \u0026ldquo;-\u0026rdquo;).\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/append-function/","summary":"So, one of the things that I did today, was write a little shell function that will append text to the end of a file from the command line. I\u0026rsquo;m sharing it with you all because that seems like the thing to do, and I find it useful.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sure there are more effective ways to accomplish this, but this works. To be fair, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing here that will protect you from yourself, but it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be able to do much damage. I keep it in my .bash_profile, but that\u0026rsquo;s probably not the smartest thing in the world. Have fun.\nap() { file=$1; shift note=$*; echo -e \u0026#39;\\n- \u0026#39;\u0026#34;$note\u0026#34; \u0026gt;\u0026gt; $file } Then to use the function, once it\u0026rsquo;s been loaded is, at the prompt:\n$ ap filename.txt stuff that you want to append to the file\nA couple of notes: You have to type in the full filename, thankfully we have tab completion.","title":"append function"},{"content":"Chris and I had a discussion about LiveJournal last night, that lead in some interesting directions.\nThough the discussion was started by the impending (21st March 2008) day long boycott of the site (which I\u0026rsquo;m not commenting on, and neither know enough about to pass judgment, nor am particularly moved by the whole deal), but quickly moved on to a contemplation of LJ, and you know, the internet as a whole.\nI wrote this entry yesterday but didn\u0026rsquo;t post it. It\u0026rsquo;s since come to my attention that the rhetoric of the strike errs towards anti-semitism, which is a bit troubling. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve technically read my friends page since midnight GMT yesterday, and this post will get pushed to LJ, so I guess that I\u0026rsquo;m not participating.\nI\u0026rsquo;d also say that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t strike me that anything is particularly different this time around. When I joined LJ the first time (with my old handle as the username), you had to be invited/have a code from an existing user, there weren\u0026rsquo;t free accounts. Frankly I think that\u0026rsquo;s part of the reason that the LJ community is what it is. As for the censorship stuff, that\u0026rsquo;s not particularly new and though distasteful, a completely enforceable part of the terms of service. Anyway, on with the entry\u0026hellip;\nWhat we recognized was that LJ is basically the only consistently successful social networking site on the internet, ever. Furthermore later social networking sites, like facebook and myspace, have started to look more and more like LJ as time goes on. The facebook \u0026ldquo;feed\u0026rdquo; is a lot like the LJ friend\u0026rsquo;s page, the facebook profile and the LJ userinfo page are remarkably similar. And so forth.\nThe surprising thing is that LJ, though developed and changed over the years, is pretty much the same thing that it\u0026rsquo;s always been, and that\u0026rsquo;s sort of cool.\nI attribute the success of LJ to two things: the friends page, and the granularity of security that \u0026ldquo;friend\u0026rsquo;s locking\u0026rdquo; provides. The diverse and dedicated (and not unsizeable) userbase seals the deal.\nWhile I adore Wordpress, and think that it\u0026rsquo;s great software, the truth is that WordPress.com and blogger that preceded it, really can\u0026rsquo;t hold a candle to LJ because though there are \u0026ldquo;community features\u0026rdquo; (comments, blogrolls, rss feeds) the \u0026ldquo;blog,\u0026rdquo; they don\u0026rsquo;t have the friend\u0026rsquo;s page.1\nAnd admittedly, today, we have things like Google Reader and other RSS services, and Open ID that go a long way to replicate the \u0026ldquo;f-list\u0026rdquo; experience, but it isn\u0026rsquo;t the same, and it isn\u0026rsquo;t automatic. Often, in this whole cyberspace adventure, I think independence is the way to go, but I really think that in the case of LJ, there\u0026rsquo;s no way to do the community aspect of blogging or social networking as successful in an independent sort of way2.\nOur conversation ended with Chris\u0026rsquo; recolection that he thought--years ago--that we should have tried to replicate the LJ phenomena and improve upon it somehow. He/we was/were always unclear of the details. The conversation then moved on to a discussion of programing languages and methods and projects, both historical and future. I will no doubt continue to blog/write about where this train of thought is taking us, but I think the observations about LJ and what constitutes success in terms of software and cyber/social phenomena will prove useful in the future.\nOnward and Upward!\nI think/fear that \u0026ldquo;blogs\u0026rdquo; are seen as too much as sole proprietorships, in a way. Blog publishing is mostly akin to magazine publishing or newspaper publishing, and I think that LJ is a much closer approximation of say Usenet, or the BBS, than any traditional publishing venture. Simply put, bloggers have an audience, online journalers have a community.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll note that there\u0026rsquo;s no real independent/autonomous social networking, the beauty of these sites is that they throw all of the data into a single database and run with it. You can\u0026rsquo;t do that on an island.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/audience-and-community/","summary":"Chris and I had a discussion about LiveJournal last night, that lead in some interesting directions.\nThough the discussion was started by the impending (21st March 2008) day long boycott of the site (which I\u0026rsquo;m not commenting on, and neither know enough about to pass judgment, nor am particularly moved by the whole deal), but quickly moved on to a contemplation of LJ, and you know, the internet as a whole.\nI wrote this entry yesterday but didn\u0026rsquo;t post it. It\u0026rsquo;s since come to my attention that the rhetoric of the strike errs towards anti-semitism, which is a bit troubling. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve technically read my friends page since midnight GMT yesterday, and this post will get pushed to LJ, so I guess that I\u0026rsquo;m not participating.\nI\u0026rsquo;d also say that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t strike me that anything is particularly different this time around. When I joined LJ the first time (with my old handle as the username), you had to be invited/have a code from an existing user, there weren\u0026rsquo;t free accounts.","title":"audience and community"},{"content":"Like it or not, my creative process is incredibly technological. I write, organize and manage my thoughts and productivity with my computer. This entry is about some of my recent frustrations and experimentations with my \u0026ldquo;system,\u0026rdquo; and process.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s an example: The technology and creativity are so related for me, that I had a minor crisis of faith, leading to a somewhat startling minor existential panic as I was trying to fall asleep last night in response to one of the keys on my keyboard falling off.\nNo doubt the anxiety and stress of the past few months have complicated everything in my life in ways that I\u0026rsquo;m still fighting to recognize, but setting this aside for the moment, I want to take this opportunity to review some of my thoughts.\nWith the discovery of MacVim I\u0026rsquo;ve once again renewed my interest in learning how to use vim, a very old school and powerful text editor. This document has been particularly useful in helping me attempt this feat, though I continue to feel way behind the curve.\nA quick note. vim, descended from the unix vi editor, makes editing text really simple, and outshines almost every other editor in a sort of brute force sort of way. One of the things that makes it so powerful is that it\u0026rsquo;s bimodal (basically, sort of). In one mode--\u0026ldquo;INSERT\u0026rdquo; mode--most like what anyone who started using computers after, say 1982, allows you to type and edit text directly. You type, and the characters you enter appear on the screen. The other mode, \u0026ldquo;COMMAND,\u0026rdquo; allows you to interact with the program, and your key strokes tell the program to do something. This means the keyboard is much more effectively used. For instance, \u0026ldquo;h,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;j,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;k,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;l\u0026rdquo; move the cursor around in command mode, which highly maximizes the economy of movement of fingers, particularly for touch typists. And, to get the most out of vim, the idea is to spend as much time in command mode, and as little time in insert mode as possible.\nAnd frankly, my brain is having some trouble groking this. I think part of the problem is that while I work almost exclusively in plain text, a very very small percentage of what I produce/edit is actually computer code: most of it is prose, files ranging from a few hundred to several thousand words, in average sized paragraphs. Which is fine, the issue being that that vim seems to be better organized around editing rather than the (sometimes) spontaneous generation of new content. So the end result of this line of thinking is that, despite really wanting to feel proficient with vim, it might not be particularly suited to what I want to do. Which I\u0026rsquo;m kind of disappointed by. But I\u0026rsquo;m going to try a a little more, I think, because I feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten further this time than I ever have before.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s part one. Part two is that I think I need to work a little harder on setting up some templates to aid in organization. When I open a blank file to write a blog post I have a snippet that I can insert that will set up the headers of the post so a I can tag the entry title it, and start writing in a couple of seconds, and I like how the templates, however spare, get things rolling a little. So I think that I need to work on building more of them, no matter what editor I use. Thankfully this is pretty straightforward to fix once I figure out what kinds of templates and boiler plates I can start using.\nOne thing that I have done that I think is interesting, is that I\u0026rsquo;ve started to use my right pinky more. I\u0026rsquo;m left handed, and I realized not too long ago that I basically did all of my function (shift, command, control) key pressing with my left pinky. Like technically I think if you capitalize letters that fall under the left hand, you\u0026rsquo;re supposed to use the right shift key, but the truth is that I basically never do this (and probably slow my typing speed something fierce for it.) I also don\u0026rsquo;t really use my right thumb on the space bar and use my right index finger for the backspace (but not the return key.) Anyway I\u0026rsquo;ve caught myself use the command key with my right pinky a few times. Which is exciting, because I think it makes me, in some minor way, more efficient, and this is a good thing.\nAnother area that I\u0026rsquo;m working on improving a bit is with outlining and planing and whatnot. Over the past year or so I\u0026rsquo;ve made a move from being basically paper free, to doing brainstorming, and project planning on paper. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, but it does mean that, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten out of the habit--as hard as it might be for readers of this blog to fathom--of writing spontaneously at the keyboard. So I think taking notes might help with this whole process. Part of \u0026ldquo;working\u0026rdquo; on this, is a habitual thing--just getting in the habit of writing this way--but another part, not to be ignored, is getting a template for the files, and a naming scheme for collecting and organizing these thoughts. For instance, my reflex is to just type things in markdown, which has its advantages, but the truth is that I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly likely to use anything other than markdown syntax highlighting, so I need to look into other possible formats that might work better in plain text format.\nI think that\u0026rsquo;s about all I can stand to put here, I\u0026rsquo;ll have a cut earlier in the entry, just so that it\u0026rsquo;s not absurd/outrageous, unless you\u0026rsquo;re feeling really geeky. But then, you\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to this point, so you probably were feeling that geeky. Thanks.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/munging-text/","summary":"Like it or not, my creative process is incredibly technological. I write, organize and manage my thoughts and productivity with my computer. This entry is about some of my recent frustrations and experimentations with my \u0026ldquo;system,\u0026rdquo; and process.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s an example: The technology and creativity are so related for me, that I had a minor crisis of faith, leading to a somewhat startling minor existential panic as I was trying to fall asleep last night in response to one of the keys on my keyboard falling off.\nNo doubt the anxiety and stress of the past few months have complicated everything in my life in ways that I\u0026rsquo;m still fighting to recognize, but setting this aside for the moment, I want to take this opportunity to review some of my thoughts.\nWith the discovery of MacVim I\u0026rsquo;ve once again renewed my interest in learning how to use vim, a very old school and powerful text editor.","title":"munging text"},{"content":"Days on the Waitlist: 8\nI think we\u0026rsquo;re past \u0026ldquo;this is driving me crazy\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;this has driven me totally crazy.\u0026rdquo; At least I\u0026rsquo;m in good company, and at least I know that this is a finite sort of thing and I\u0026rsquo;ll get over it. So having had this realization (of which I\u0026rsquo;m sure my dwindling readership is acutely aware), lets move on to more interesting topics.\nMorocco Sweater Progress: Knitting Complete(!); Finishing Remains.\nSo I might not technically be done with this sweater there is about three yards of hem facing to sew down and countless ends to weave in (though there could be more, and many of them will get tucked into the hem facing.) There remains the problem of how to fasten the cardigan front, I\u0026rsquo;m wavering between making button tabs and buying buttons, or compounding my zipper order even further. In any case, I might spend a few minutes pressing/steaming the hem into place, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m mostly letting this one sit for a while and giving my hands a break.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve started working, in earnest on another sweater.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been so long since I\u0026rsquo;ve done this, it\u0026rsquo;s amzing how exciting and fun this is.\nTo be fair, I started on this design when I ran out of yarn on the last sleeve of the last sweater, and it took a number of tries to find the thing that was \u0026ldquo;right,\u0026rdquo; but once I did it\u0026rsquo;s become really engaging.\nI\u0026rsquo;m making a saddle-shouldered-giant-latvian-mitten-cardigan. Basically I really liked the saddled shouldered aran cardigan that my mother made this winter, and I wanted to do something similar, except you know, more tychoish with color work and the like. This is different from a lot of sweaters I\u0026rsquo;ve made in the last three years, because I\u0026rsquo;m knitting the sleeve starting at the cuff, rather than the shoulder, because I want to stretch myself a little, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been so devoted to \u0026ldquo;top-down\u0026rdquo; sleeve knitting, that I want to see what the other side is like, for once.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m about half way done with the first sleeve, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably get my act together to post pictures pretty soon (what with a new sweater.) and it\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of fun. It\u0026rsquo;s also going quickly, because whereas the last sweater was knit with what amounts to lace weight yarn, and this sweater is knit with what amounts to sport weight yarn (sport is the heaviest weight of lightweight yarn) and while many people would probably think that I\u0026rsquo;m still knitting really fine yarn, it is relatively speaking pretty thick.\nAnd it\u0026rsquo;s just fun to be knitting something different. Refreshing even.\nAnyway, things to do.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-knitting-project/","summary":"Days on the Waitlist: 8\nI think we\u0026rsquo;re past \u0026ldquo;this is driving me crazy\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;this has driven me totally crazy.\u0026rdquo; At least I\u0026rsquo;m in good company, and at least I know that this is a finite sort of thing and I\u0026rsquo;ll get over it. So having had this realization (of which I\u0026rsquo;m sure my dwindling readership is acutely aware), lets move on to more interesting topics.\nMorocco Sweater Progress: Knitting Complete(!); Finishing Remains.\nSo I might not technically be done with this sweater there is about three yards of hem facing to sew down and countless ends to weave in (though there could be more, and many of them will get tucked into the hem facing.) There remains the problem of how to fasten the cardigan front, I\u0026rsquo;m wavering between making button tabs and buying buttons, or compounding my zipper order even further. In any case, I might spend a few minutes pressing/steaming the hem into place, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m mostly letting this one sit for a while and giving my hands a break.","title":"New Knitting Project"},{"content":"First off, a couple of status reports\nDays on the Waitlist: 7\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to report my current state of mind. I\u0026rsquo;ve been rejected from graduate schools long enough and consistently enough that I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly optimistic feeling, even if I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably optimistic thinking. It could be over tomorrow, or it could take another four weeks. I\u0026rsquo;m working on job search things, which is daunting, but reassuring. Nothing I\u0026rsquo;m really looking at would further a career in academia, which is disappointing. Oh angst.\nSweater Status: Binding off the Hem\nI\u0026rsquo;ll probably finish all knitting on this sweater this evening, and wait a few days before I start blocking and sewing things up. Or I could start on that tomorrow. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close, and that feels good. I\u0026rsquo;m so close. That\u0026rsquo;s kind of cool.\nNew Computer Status Not ordered!\nI got really close to ordering a new computer today: the \u0026ldquo;T\u0026rdquo; key on my laptop broke (it falls off every other time I press t). I think the problem is with the molding/wear on the catch on the upper right hand corner of the key. I was overly distraught by this: the \u0026ldquo;T\u0026rdquo; key gets a lot of use, and this basically rendered my computer non-mobile, which is something that I\u0026rsquo;ve come to really enjoy about having a laptop. Well I discovered a couple of things. First: you can order new keys on ebay for under ten bucks (which I\u0026rsquo;ve done), and secondly that I use the \u0026ldquo;Q\u0026rdquo; key significantly less than the \u0026ldquo;T\u0026rdquo; key, so in the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve swapped them out and that helps some. It\u0026rsquo;s of course not ideal, but it renders the computer useful for a while longer.\nI\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that I\u0026rsquo;ll just hold off on getting a new computer till the next rev of the macbook line, because this isn\u0026rsquo;t a necessity, and I derive some perverse pleasure from keeping this computer working and running slim. I\u0026rsquo;ll never produce a podcast with it, but, such things are overrated anyway, and I was a long way off from doing that anyway. I\u0026rsquo;ve probably just jinxed it, so I\u0026rsquo;m backing up the essentials offsite as I write this\nI installed the normal old Ubuntu (GNOME) on the extra machine and it looks like it\u0026rsquo;s running well. I haven\u0026rsquo;t put it through the rounds, but it\u0026rsquo;s in good shape. I need to find a good monitor to use with it (the one I have is 10 years old and a 15\u0026quot; CRT). I haven\u0026rsquo;t hooked it up to a network, nor have I tested it with the internet, but I\u0026rsquo;m optimistic. I also managed to get through the install routine with the keyboard accidentally set on a turkish layout, which is a testament to it\u0026rsquo;s ease, I suspect.\nBecause I\u0026rsquo;m still using OS X 10.4 and don\u0026rsquo;t have the nifty new terminal with tabs, I switched today to \u0026ldquo;iTerm\u0026rdquo; which is a nifty terminal program that I think will help me stay a little more organized and what not. I also had a couple of VIM related breakthroughs: I discovered MacVim a decent (heh!) port/install of VIM to OS X that\u0026rsquo;s more native and less crappy which gVIM always has been in my estimation. There\u0026rsquo;s a windows linux program called \u0026ldquo;Cream\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought is pretty nifty, but it really doesn\u0026rsquo;t work at all with OS X (I\u0026rsquo;ve tried. A lot,) but from what I can tell this MacVim does most of the things that I\u0026rsquo;d want from cream. I also upgraded the system vim to the latest version, rather than the 6.2 (or whatever) that OS X seems to come with (about time). So I think I\u0026rsquo;m making at least a little progress in VIM learning.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all the geek news that isn\u0026rsquo;t, there hasn\u0026rsquo;t been much else to report, other than angst and resume writing.\nStay well. That\u0026rsquo;s an order.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ad-hoc-solutions/","summary":"First off, a couple of status reports\nDays on the Waitlist: 7\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to report my current state of mind. I\u0026rsquo;ve been rejected from graduate schools long enough and consistently enough that I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly optimistic feeling, even if I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably optimistic thinking. It could be over tomorrow, or it could take another four weeks. I\u0026rsquo;m working on job search things, which is daunting, but reassuring. Nothing I\u0026rsquo;m really looking at would further a career in academia, which is disappointing. Oh angst.\nSweater Status: Binding off the Hem\nI\u0026rsquo;ll probably finish all knitting on this sweater this evening, and wait a few days before I start blocking and sewing things up. Or I could start on that tomorrow. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close, and that feels good. I\u0026rsquo;m so close. That\u0026rsquo;s kind of cool.\nNew Computer Status Not ordered!\nI got really close to ordering a new computer today: the \u0026ldquo;T\u0026rdquo; key on my laptop broke (it falls off every other time I press t).","title":"Ad Hoc Solutions"},{"content":"This is the post I promised a few days ago about my linux/BSD/etc. quandary.\nI have an old computer that is a handmedown from some friends who moved out of town and had (good for them!) bought an iMac. It\u0026rsquo;s 2001 vintage PC, branded HP. Say, 512 megs of ram, and a 1.8 ghz Pentium 4. In fact, it\u0026rsquo;s a pretty spiffy machine, for it\u0026rsquo;s day. I often think of PCs as being uniformly lackluster, but the truth is that I never had an overcharged machine. For instance, this PC has firewire. Firewire! I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that they\u0026rsquo;re putting firewire in PCs these days.\nIn any case, while the computer isn\u0026rsquo;t ultra spiffy by today\u0026rsquo;s standards, it\u0026rsquo;s not bad. Well, it\u0026rsquo;s not bad aside from the fact that Windows has\u0026hellip; done what Windows does best: break, and crumble under the pressure of every day use. I mean the people I know (ok person) I know that uses windows with any consistency reinstalls the operating system with a degree of regularity that I find almost maddening (Hi C.!).\nAnyway, I think if I install a more\u0026hellip; lightweight operating system, something unix-y. And this post is half, me thinking out loud, and half me asking you all for help and opinions on the subject.\nI might be able to put this computer to serious work doing something around here. One distinct possibility is that I\u0026rsquo;ll get it ready for my mother to use as her home computer, running mostly web things--email, surfing, IM--and what not. Also being able to run a few things in Wine might help her workflow out. That strikes me as being the perfect use for a straight up ubuntu install. I\u0026rsquo;ve also thought about Xubuntu, because it seems like it\u0026rsquo;s pretty suited to this kind of thing (reviving an older computer that doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to do any serious heavy lifting.)\nThe second thing I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of doing with this computer is to find some way of getting it to work (including boot up and all) without needing a keyboard/video/etc. So basically a server set up. I figure it would be the most efficient to be able to access it over the network from the computer that I actually use on a day to day basis. Mostly I\u0026rsquo;d use it for things like file serving, and backup, but maybe bit torrent and the like as well. Ubuntu would probably work ok for this (and I did grab a copy of the server version as well, if I want to try this. I also thought that trying to run FreeBSD might be sort of fun. I mean: a shell is a shell (I hear freeBSD doesn\u0026rsquo;t come stock with bash, sigh.) and you know that might be fun. And if I don\u0026rsquo;t get into graduate school, having unix experience, might be productive.\nSo I guess, your thoughts on Ubuntu flavors, or I suppose other linux distributions, and also, on FreeBSD if anyone out there in Internet land has experience, it would be great to hear from you on that.\nTalk to you soon!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/beasties/","summary":"This is the post I promised a few days ago about my linux/BSD/etc. quandary.\nI have an old computer that is a handmedown from some friends who moved out of town and had (good for them!) bought an iMac. It\u0026rsquo;s 2001 vintage PC, branded HP. Say, 512 megs of ram, and a 1.8 ghz Pentium 4. In fact, it\u0026rsquo;s a pretty spiffy machine, for it\u0026rsquo;s day. I often think of PCs as being uniformly lackluster, but the truth is that I never had an overcharged machine. For instance, this PC has firewire. Firewire! I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that they\u0026rsquo;re putting firewire in PCs these days.\nIn any case, while the computer isn\u0026rsquo;t ultra spiffy by today\u0026rsquo;s standards, it\u0026rsquo;s not bad. Well, it\u0026rsquo;s not bad aside from the fact that Windows has\u0026hellip; done what Windows does best: break, and crumble under the pressure of every day use. I mean the people I know (ok person) I know that uses windows with any consistency reinstalls the operating system with a degree of regularity that I find almost maddening (Hi C.","title":"beasties"},{"content":"I have amazing friends. Many of you read this \u0026lsquo;blog. Sorry if I\u0026rsquo;m ripping you off, but comedy, is well, good to find. Thank you all for saying memorable things, and sorry if I\u0026rsquo;ve changed your words too much.\nN: I am tired and cranky and don\u0026rsquo;t want to think about gender anymore today. pause Or math.\nG: Men, on average, have more upper body strength\u0026hellip; It\u0026rsquo;s helpful in settling primitive disputes, well primitively.\n(P is a friend who plays frisbee with great dedication. The following stems from a description of something from a frisbee game.)\nT: What?\nP: See, I lay out, they lay out in front of, next to, behind, under, or over me.\nT: Ok.\nP: Then, we collide, and one of us comes up with it or the defense\nT: If you say so.\nP: Right, and then we help each other out, groan\npause\nP: I mean up, help each other up.\npause\nT: That was the best freudian slip I\u0026rsquo;ve seen in a while.\nP Laughs.\nT: I thought you liked frisbee because it was homoerotic, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t know that you knew that.\nThanks folks!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/overheard-quotes/","summary":"I have amazing friends. Many of you read this \u0026lsquo;blog. Sorry if I\u0026rsquo;m ripping you off, but comedy, is well, good to find. Thank you all for saying memorable things, and sorry if I\u0026rsquo;ve changed your words too much.\nN: I am tired and cranky and don\u0026rsquo;t want to think about gender anymore today. pause Or math.\nG: Men, on average, have more upper body strength\u0026hellip; It\u0026rsquo;s helpful in settling primitive disputes, well primitively.\n(P is a friend who plays frisbee with great dedication. The following stems from a description of something from a frisbee game.)\nT: What?\nP: See, I lay out, they lay out in front of, next to, behind, under, or over me.\nT: Ok.\nP: Then, we collide, and one of us comes up with it or the defense\nT: If you say so.\nP: Right, and then we help each other out, groan\npause\nP: I mean up, help each other up.","title":"Overheard, Quotes"},{"content":"Days on the Waitlist: 6\nSweater Progress: Sleeves: complete. Collar: complete. Hem facing: f-ing never ending.\nI\u0026rsquo;m listening to Bruce Springsteen\u0026rsquo;s album \u0026ldquo;Born to Run\u0026rdquo; with some obsession today. A dancing friend, whose living in someone else\u0026rsquo;s house this semester (and therefore with someone else\u0026rsquo;s record collection) said that she\u0026rsquo;d been listening to Springsteen lately, which she hadn\u0026rsquo;t really listened too much previously.\nShe described it as being \u0026ldquo;angry and about prison and fights and ugliness. But it was much more melodic than she\u0026rsquo;d expected.\u0026rdquo; Which I think is the perfect description of his music, particularly of \u0026ldquo;Born to Run\u0026rdquo; that I am so fond of. I think the way that his lyrics are so gritty and the way that this contrasts with the way that the melodies are so rich is what makes his music so appealing.\nI said--somewhat flippantly--that there\u0026rsquo;s something about this aesthetic that people like William Gibson aspire to create: a wondrous, fantastic image steeped in a very gritty hard fought sense of \u0026ldquo;reality.\u0026rdquo; And frankly, Bruce does it better than anything that I\u0026rsquo;ve ever seen of Gibson\u0026rsquo;s. But I am willing to stand corrected.\nAnd though I enjoy this music, and frankly the attempt to ground fiction in an non-utopian setting, despite my protests against \u0026ldquo;hipster dystopianism\u0026rdquo; (Gibson, Doctorow, Sterling, etc.). I am even more admit in the position that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to write fiction that is high quality and highly interesting that participates in the discourse of cultural critique that isn\u0026rsquo;t an aesthetic homage to grit and dystopia.\nLeave it to Springsteen, really.\nActually, perhaps part of the reason that I dislike fiction which embraces the point of view that in order to be \u0026ldquo;fresh\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;engaging\u0026rdquo; you have write stories about gritty reality and the dark underbelly of society is that this perspective has only the most superficial understandings of class. This is, I think the result of the \u0026ldquo;punk\u0026rdquo; part of the cyberpunk equation.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve heard a couple of times that cyberpunk \u0026ldquo;failed\u0026rdquo; in part because technology didn\u0026rsquo;t develop in the way that everyone in the eighties thought that it would, but more than that, because the cyberpunk movement failed to attract \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; punks. Geeks in the eighties and nineties turned into dot-com yuppies, not cyberpunks.\nRegardless of who was attracted to the literature, cyberpunk relies heavily on the image of the \u0026lsquo;punk. Poor, outcast, and non-conforming, the hero of the cyberpunk drama is able to wield a collection of skills in a virtual world to combat large unregulated megacorporations in their bid to do evil. The virtual world becomes a space to level out difference where the battle becomes about skills and ingenuity, not resources.\nWhich makes for a great story, the problem with this is that being a punk is a luxury, and although at the time of the story the cyberpunk characters are on the fringes of society, there\u0026rsquo;s the distinct feeling that despite their current situation, their class identity/background is much more middle/upper class. Because being a cyberpunk requires time, and skills, and money that is hard to come by if you\u0026rsquo;re poor.\nAnd Springsteen is able to write these songs that capture class in a more realistic way, that captures the gritty reality without become enrapt by \u0026ldquo;punk\u0026rdquo;-ness. And it\u0026rsquo;s enjoyable.\nOk rant over. Or something. I hope that made sense.\nOther news:\nI hooked up a new external keyboard to my computer. Wow. It\u0026rsquo;s really nice, and I can type pretty damn well. It\u0026rsquo;s a windows keyboard so it\u0026rsquo;s taking a few moments to learn where all the apple specific keys map to. But it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a keyboard with full key return that doesn\u0026rsquo;t stick funny. My laptop keyboard is in bad shape. I should just order the new computer, but it\u0026rsquo;s a lot of change to drop at once, particularly when things are so uncertain. I have begun sending out feelers for summer and current employment. The waitlist thing continues to be difficult and unchanging, so I\u0026rsquo;m not writing very much about it. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to find the right balance between: celebrating the distinct possibility that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be a graduate student next year, the possibility that I will need to seriously reconsider my purpose and position in the world as I try and figure out \u0026ldquo;what next,\u0026rdquo; and planning for the present so that I\u0026rsquo;m not stuck perpetually waiting for \u0026ldquo;what happens next.\u0026rdquo; But it\u0026rsquo;s damn hard. Knitting: I need to spend some time knocking out this sweater. Really. It\u0026rsquo;s close, but I fear that if I go full boar, I\u0026rsquo;m going to wreck my wrist, and that\u0026rsquo;s not desirable at all. And I hereby promise to not pass judgment or moan over this sweater until it\u0026rsquo;s fully blocked. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/born-to-run/","summary":"Days on the Waitlist: 6\nSweater Progress: Sleeves: complete. Collar: complete. Hem facing: f-ing never ending.\nI\u0026rsquo;m listening to Bruce Springsteen\u0026rsquo;s album \u0026ldquo;Born to Run\u0026rdquo; with some obsession today. A dancing friend, whose living in someone else\u0026rsquo;s house this semester (and therefore with someone else\u0026rsquo;s record collection) said that she\u0026rsquo;d been listening to Springsteen lately, which she hadn\u0026rsquo;t really listened too much previously.\nShe described it as being \u0026ldquo;angry and about prison and fights and ugliness. But it was much more melodic than she\u0026rsquo;d expected.\u0026rdquo; Which I think is the perfect description of his music, particularly of \u0026ldquo;Born to Run\u0026rdquo; that I am so fond of. I think the way that his lyrics are so gritty and the way that this contrasts with the way that the melodies are so rich is what makes his music so appealing.\nI said--somewhat flippantly--that there\u0026rsquo;s something about this aesthetic that people like William Gibson aspire to create: a wondrous, fantastic image steeped in a very gritty hard fought sense of \u0026ldquo;reality.","title":"born to run"},{"content":"I mentioned the other day that after the morris dance gig on Sunday that I got six varieties of (likely) imported British teas at a local international food market. Because it seems in character I thought that I\u0026rsquo;d post a few thoughts about the first tea that I\u0026rsquo;ve picked up.\nMy baseline tea is the Trader Joe\u0026rsquo;s english breakfast tea. It\u0026rsquo;s a really really good tea, I\u0026rsquo;ve given it to other tea drinkers in a sort of blind test and everyone\u0026rsquo;s been really pleased with it. Strong, with just the right amount of bitter. I tend to brew really big cups (my old mug was 16 oz, my current house mug is a bit more.) and somehow the Trader Joe\u0026rsquo;s tea was always just strong enough.\nThe issue, and the reason that over the past few months I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking for a different brand is that TJ\u0026rsquo;s changed the packaging. While this means that the tea now costs less by some significant fraction, the tea bags are now individually wrapped in paper. The plastic of their former wrapping, while probably environmentally less friendly made the tea bags more durable as I traveled, and I think the tea tasted more fresh. I still get the TJ\u0026rsquo;s tea, but I\u0026rsquo;m on the lookout. And it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a little variation. Which brings us to the current tea.\nAhmad Tea\u0026rsquo;s English Breakfast\nSo it turns out I\u0026rsquo;m completely unable to predict what the packaging of a tea will be by shaking the box. This is in (very) little round tea-bags, and not only are they not individually wrapped but there was no internal packaging to seal the tea bags. So much on that account.\nThe tea is more bitter than I\u0026rsquo;m used to or would typically prefer. It\u0026rsquo;s the ideal tea, in my mind, to drink with milk. While I do take milk from time to time, I tend to just drink it black more than not: it\u0026rsquo;s easier, you can taste it better, and I heard somewhere that any of the typically restorative qualities of tea (antioxidants etc.) are negated by milk; this explains why the British don\u0026rsquo;t typically see the benefits of tea, while easterners do. Having said that, while the tea was good in other respects I can\u0026rsquo;t say that I found it particularly exceptional or unique. Good, solid, but not unique.\nPractically, when I brewed a large cup with one tea bag, it tasted pretty weak. With two bags, it was too strong and while I did drink it, I think in the future I\u0026rsquo;ll take milk with this tea. I\u0026rsquo;ll make a pot in the morning and see if I can get a better balance. The pot brews about 3 cups, so I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that 4-5 tea bags might be the sweet spot.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll see how future experimentation plays out, and I got two additional varieties: their \u0026ldquo;english afternoon tea\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;english no. 1\u0026rdquo; tea, so I will be interesting in doing some compmparisons over the next few days.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tea-review-ahmad-teas-english-breakfast/","summary":"I mentioned the other day that after the morris dance gig on Sunday that I got six varieties of (likely) imported British teas at a local international food market. Because it seems in character I thought that I\u0026rsquo;d post a few thoughts about the first tea that I\u0026rsquo;ve picked up.\nMy baseline tea is the Trader Joe\u0026rsquo;s english breakfast tea. It\u0026rsquo;s a really really good tea, I\u0026rsquo;ve given it to other tea drinkers in a sort of blind test and everyone\u0026rsquo;s been really pleased with it. Strong, with just the right amount of bitter. I tend to brew really big cups (my old mug was 16 oz, my current house mug is a bit more.) and somehow the Trader Joe\u0026rsquo;s tea was always just strong enough.\nThe issue, and the reason that over the past few months I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking for a different brand is that TJ\u0026rsquo;s changed the packaging. While this means that the tea now costs less by some significant fraction, the tea bags are now individually wrapped in paper.","title":"Tea Review: Ahmad Tea's English Breakfast"},{"content":"For a weekend that was, for the most part, pretty quiet, on Sunday evening it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like it was that relaxed. And, what\u0026rsquo;s more distressing, is that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to write a blog post at all this weekend. Eek.\nI have a post about tech stuff coming up (I have an old computer that I\u0026rsquo;m rescuing and I have some thinking/wondering/planning to do before I can get that going.) But I won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with the details and the wandering. In the mean time I thought I\u0026rsquo;d run down through some things:\nI\u0026rsquo;m still on the waitlist. That means\u0026hellip;\nDays on the Waitlist: 5\n\u0026hellip;and it\u0026rsquo;s a very scary place. In truth it could be as many as 30 more days. TheBoy made his decision on the night of April 15th last year, so it really might be that long before I hear anything more.\nAnd that sucks. I could be a graduate student next year, that\u0026rsquo;s a pretty strong reality. I could also not, which is much more difficult to cope with, and will require a much stronger reevaluation of my life goals and plans. It\u0026rsquo;s so scary in part because it means that I either won\u0026rsquo;t have a job/career in academe or that my path to getting a job will require a significant repositioning. Fucking scary, guys. Fucking scary.\nIn terms of the knitting, I\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of a hellish hem facing for the current sweater. All other knitting is done, and I think I was able to predict my progress pretty well. (Or more optimistically, I was able to achieve my knitting goals.) I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to being done with this sweater, and being able to focus on new projects with my undivided knitting attention.\nFurther \u0026ldquo;notes of random\u0026rdquo;: We had a morris dance gig (referenced in the title of this post) and the drawstring of my pants broke before the gig. Thankfully, I was, as always, wearing a pair of gym shorts underneath these pants and was able to pin the pants to the shorts and all was well. Thought I like these pants (their linen!) and I want to put a new drawstring in them. Also after the gig we stopped at a international food market, and I was able to replenish the tea supply with a half dozen varieties of good dark British teas. So at least my caffeine habit is satiated.\nAnyway, I think I better let things go at that. My \u0026ldquo;T\u0026rdquo; key is threatening to come off, and this irritates me, and I should probably get on to do other things for a while. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch. You be too.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/huntsmans-hornpipe/","summary":"For a weekend that was, for the most part, pretty quiet, on Sunday evening it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like it was that relaxed. And, what\u0026rsquo;s more distressing, is that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to write a blog post at all this weekend. Eek.\nI have a post about tech stuff coming up (I have an old computer that I\u0026rsquo;m rescuing and I have some thinking/wondering/planning to do before I can get that going.) But I won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with the details and the wandering. In the mean time I thought I\u0026rsquo;d run down through some things:\nI\u0026rsquo;m still on the waitlist. That means\u0026hellip;\nDays on the Waitlist: 5\n\u0026hellip;and it\u0026rsquo;s a very scary place. In truth it could be as many as 30 more days. TheBoy made his decision on the night of April 15th last year, so it really might be that long before I hear anything more.\nAnd that sucks.","title":"Huntsman's Hornpipe"},{"content":"Days on the waitlist: 3\nCurrent Sleeve Progress: 67 pattern rows to go.\nI\u0026rsquo;m preparing for a restart of my computer, which I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve done at all in at least a month. Actually, it\u0026rsquo;s probably been more like two.\nThis is one of the problems of having a computer that, \u0026ldquo;just works, damnit,\u0026rdquo; you completely forget to do things like restart the system, because you don\u0026rsquo;t really need to. Really you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t need to even restart occasionally, but apparently OS X clears out some cache\u0026rsquo;s and does some other things during the shutdown and login processes that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do at other times.\nHopefully a restart will make things run a little more smoothly.\nSometime in the next month, I\u0026rsquo;ll hear from grad school, and if I get in, I\u0026rsquo;ll order a new computer instantly. If I don\u0026rsquo;t, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to postpone purchasing for at least six months, because my current computer still works, and my main argument for getting the new computer now rather than in august, is I\u0026rsquo;d rather do the transition now, rather than right as I\u0026rsquo;m getting started with school.\nMakes sense. Even if I don\u0026rsquo;t like it. On the other hand I have a couple of keys that feel like they\u0026rsquo;re about to break, and that might be the final straw.\nIn other news:\nSleeve knitting occupies most of my attention. There appears to have been some minor blunder, but I think I have squashed it. I have a lot left to do with this sweater--the rest of the sleeve, the collar, and a hem facing from hell: 120 inches or so--and then the usual finishing. It\u0026rsquo;ll probably take most of the rest of today and the rest of the weekend. I spent some time doing some planning in my paper notebooks. This is a good sign. I often say that I have to have a certain amount of material in the hopper before I can really be productive with my writing, and needless to say, I\u0026rsquo;ve been behind on that. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been reading my news-reader all week. I\u0026rsquo;m behind, but not too bad. I think I need to reassert this habit as part of a routine. I\u0026rsquo;m running out of good television to watch while I knit. I\u0026rsquo;m currently watching Jeremiah, but it\u0026rsquo;s not grabbing me, so I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to start listening to podcasts and hope for something new. My latest post at the feminist science fiction blog is up. For your enjoyment and edification. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/restart/","summary":"Days on the waitlist: 3\nCurrent Sleeve Progress: 67 pattern rows to go.\nI\u0026rsquo;m preparing for a restart of my computer, which I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve done at all in at least a month. Actually, it\u0026rsquo;s probably been more like two.\nThis is one of the problems of having a computer that, \u0026ldquo;just works, damnit,\u0026rdquo; you completely forget to do things like restart the system, because you don\u0026rsquo;t really need to. Really you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t need to even restart occasionally, but apparently OS X clears out some cache\u0026rsquo;s and does some other things during the shutdown and login processes that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do at other times.\nHopefully a restart will make things run a little more smoothly.\nSometime in the next month, I\u0026rsquo;ll hear from grad school, and if I get in, I\u0026rsquo;ll order a new computer instantly. If I don\u0026rsquo;t, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to postpone purchasing for at least six months, because my current computer still works, and my main argument for getting the new computer now rather than in august, is I\u0026rsquo;d rather do the transition now, rather than right as I\u0026rsquo;m getting started with school.","title":"restart"},{"content":"Days on the waitlist: 2\nCurrent Knitting Progress: Over the half way mark on the sleeve.\nI have from time to time suggested that there is a parallel between knitting sweaters and writing novels: they\u0026rsquo;re substantive projects, they are in many ways the perfection of their respective crafts, and it is is my hope that both are able to stand on their own discrete merits. Also, both sweaters and novels--at least in the way that I practice both--are very much the product of several hundred years of traditional development that saw dramatic revision and modernization throughout the 20th century.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s at this point that I should probably draw an uncomfortable comparison between Elizabeth Zimmerman and someone like Toni Morrison or Kurt Vonnegut, but lets just pass that by.\nIn any case, finishing this sweater, at the moment, feels a lot like finishing a novel project. In this case, it\u0026rsquo;s taken about as long, and though there are many things that are likely more deserving of my time, I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward\nConveniently, or not so, I\u0026rsquo;m battling some sort of perverse left-wrist pain. I think it\u0026rsquo;s computer related, but it\u0026rsquo;s bazaar. It\u0026rsquo;s off-center (pinky side) of the wrist and it\u0026rsquo;s sort of dull. Which is, as far as I can tell, very much not carpal tunnel which is centered and a sharp pain. I think it\u0026rsquo;s computer related (that\u0026rsquo;s why this post comes out so late in the day), knitting stress/pain manifests in the other wrist and is more typically carpal tunnel feeling, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. Sigh In any case, after some convincing, ibuprofen and ice seem to have knocked it out mostly.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that my spinning wheel is slated to arrive in two weeks, or so. I\u0026rsquo;m excited.\nIf my wrist holds up, I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/counting/","summary":"Days on the waitlist: 2\nCurrent Knitting Progress: Over the half way mark on the sleeve.\nI have from time to time suggested that there is a parallel between knitting sweaters and writing novels: they\u0026rsquo;re substantive projects, they are in many ways the perfection of their respective crafts, and it is is my hope that both are able to stand on their own discrete merits. Also, both sweaters and novels--at least in the way that I practice both--are very much the product of several hundred years of traditional development that saw dramatic revision and modernization throughout the 20th century.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s at this point that I should probably draw an uncomfortable comparison between Elizabeth Zimmerman and someone like Toni Morrison or Kurt Vonnegut, but lets just pass that by.\nIn any case, finishing this sweater, at the moment, feels a lot like finishing a novel project. In this case, it\u0026rsquo;s taken about as long, and though there are many things that are likely more deserving of my time, I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward","title":"counting"},{"content":"Days on the waitlist: 1\nAs it turns out the woman who found the cat has decided to keep it. So no cat. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably scope out the animal shelters just to see, but I think this means I\u0026rsquo;ll wait on the cat till I move out on my own. Hopefully the fall. That\u0026rsquo;ll make things easier I think. In any case this is the second time that we\u0026rsquo;ve almost gotten a cat but had it fall through. (A dancing-friend\u0026rsquo;s daughter\u0026rsquo;s (siamese) cat had kittens in the late summer, and we wanted one, but it didn\u0026rsquo;t work out).\nThese things happen.\nNot much else in the way of news.\nKnitting Department I got my extra skein of yarn in the mail for this sweater, so though I\u0026rsquo;m not making a lot of progress there (it\u0026rsquo;s so fine) I really want to get this sweater knocked out. It\u0026rsquo;s been too long, and I need closure. There will be pictures. My goal is the end of the weekend for the sleeve, and this time next week with the hem and business.\nTelevision and Knitting Department I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching the second season of Boston Legal during my knitting, which I do so enjoy. I think I have Blake\u0026rsquo;s 7 and Jeremiah on my computer to watch, but I\u0026rsquo;ve found the pacing on the former to be frightful and the second one to be\u0026hellip; difficult, at the moment. We\u0026rsquo;ll see what I try next. I think there\u0026rsquo;ll be torchwood to watch tomorrow.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be around. See you\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/outcome/","summary":"Days on the waitlist: 1\nAs it turns out the woman who found the cat has decided to keep it. So no cat. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably scope out the animal shelters just to see, but I think this means I\u0026rsquo;ll wait on the cat till I move out on my own. Hopefully the fall. That\u0026rsquo;ll make things easier I think. In any case this is the second time that we\u0026rsquo;ve almost gotten a cat but had it fall through. (A dancing-friend\u0026rsquo;s daughter\u0026rsquo;s (siamese) cat had kittens in the late summer, and we wanted one, but it didn\u0026rsquo;t work out).\nThese things happen.\nNot much else in the way of news.\nKnitting Department I got my extra skein of yarn in the mail for this sweater, so though I\u0026rsquo;m not making a lot of progress there (it\u0026rsquo;s so fine) I really want to get this sweater knocked out. It\u0026rsquo;s been too long, and I need closure.","title":"outcome"},{"content":"Dear Readers,\nEach of the past four days, I feel better than the last. Unfortunately, I still feel on average, like crap, so while I\u0026rsquo;m a ways away from feeling on top of my game, I think positive progress is a good thing.\nWhereas the anger and hurt and what not had been pretty incapacitating for the past couple of days, I felt productively angry for the first time in a while, and this is good. Resiliency is a great thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about, if it comes to it, trying again with feminist studies programs, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m too disillusioned and career prospects are way too dire. But the wait isn\u0026rsquo;t over.\nI spent most of the last couple of days figuring out the pattern for this new sweater. I played with, probably a dozen different ideas on the computer, and actually tried knitting 4 things. This means, that I, tycho garen, actually made a swatch. It was a shock to me too. We\u0026rsquo;ll ignore for the moment\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll also ignore the fact that the decision that I have arrived at was in fact the first design that I eyeballed and decided against. This leads me to my first maxim of knitting: trust your first instinct, always. If you do this, swatching is irrelevant, if you doubt yourself, you must swatch endlessly.\nI jest, but it does seem to hold true for me.\nMy second rule, I think, is that cuffs of sleeves, in cases where you want a snug, comfortable cuff, should be knit as the beginning of a typical sock in that yarn. I don\u0026rsquo;t think that this is the right way to figure this out, but it does seem to work. I think my main grief with Elizabeth Zimmerman style sweaters (aside from the fact that the shaping/styling is mostly out of date by no, which is fine, but it means that you have to hack the system pretty consistently) is that sleeve dimensions don\u0026rsquo;t vary as much as body circumference dimensions vary.\nIn other news\u0026hellip; A friend of a friend found a kitten the other night, and it looks like we\u0026rsquo;re going to get it tomorrow. It\u0026rsquo;s not an absolute baby (looks more like it\u0026rsquo;s 5-ish months old) but it appears to be sweet. I have to work today, but it looks like tomorrow is going to be spent gathering additional cat supplies and figuring out quarantine. I already have a vet appointment.\nAnyway. Hope you\u0026rsquo;re doing well too.\nCheers,\ntycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/anger-productively/","summary":"Dear Readers,\nEach of the past four days, I feel better than the last. Unfortunately, I still feel on average, like crap, so while I\u0026rsquo;m a ways away from feeling on top of my game, I think positive progress is a good thing.\nWhereas the anger and hurt and what not had been pretty incapacitating for the past couple of days, I felt productively angry for the first time in a while, and this is good. Resiliency is a great thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about, if it comes to it, trying again with feminist studies programs, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m too disillusioned and career prospects are way too dire. But the wait isn\u0026rsquo;t over.\nI spent most of the last couple of days figuring out the pattern for this new sweater. I played with, probably a dozen different ideas on the computer, and actually tried knitting 4 things. This means, that I, tycho garen, actually made a swatch.","title":"anger, productively"},{"content":"Waitlisted at last school. It could be a month and change before I know for sure. I feel pretty good about it, but it\u0026rsquo;s of course a crapshoot. but then it has always been a crapshoot.\nSo, who knows.\nsigh\nBy g-d this had better come through.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/breaking-news/","summary":"Waitlisted at last school. It could be a month and change before I know for sure. I feel pretty good about it, but it\u0026rsquo;s of course a crapshoot. but then it has always been a crapshoot.\nSo, who knows.\nsigh\nBy g-d this had better come through.","title":"breaking news"},{"content":"Hey folks.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m off to run errands and do things today, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to generate some cat names, so that I/we have something good to choose from when I meet the cat, if this indeed works out. And I want your help. Here are some notes:\nCan\u0026rsquo;t reuse a name that we\u0026rsquo;ve already used/had/have on an animal in this household/family (Mouse, Fred/Phred, Ribbon, Crosby, Nash, and Montana are out). We generally try and avoid giving people names to animals on the occasion that we might come across someone with the same name in our day to day life, so no Johns, Jims, Stuarts, Chris\u0026rsquo;, Brians and so forth. This is a boy cat. I prefer cross gender pet names that are absurd--eg. girl dogs names Rodney, boy cats named Alice--to more subtle example of this naming genre--eg. boy cats named Rydra (the protaganist of Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s novel Babel-17) Naming after minor celebrities/passing fads is probably something that I\u0026rsquo;d like to avoid. Thus, there should be ample argument with the suggestion to name a cat something like Ianto or Starbuck. Naming after living folk/academic idols that I might--even conceptually--cross paths with at some point even if I think they\u0026rsquo;re really awesome and way too famous for me. I consider naming anything living or otherwise after a character in a book/story (but not a person) whose dies tragically, to be bad luck, generally, and avoid it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about something sort geeky/literary/sf-y/queer. Authors, nicknames, good characters from books, Here are the ideas that I\u0026rsquo;ve had so far.\nKip (after one of the main characters in Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree, also I just realized in my novella from earlier this year, though I spelled that Kyp.) I think this is leading. Has diminutive possibilities of \u0026ldquo;Kipster\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Kiptron\u0026rdquo;. Heh. Pace (from Brightness, very minor character) Delany or Tip(tree), though conflict with number 5, on the former. Trouble (after leading character in Melissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s Trouble and her Friends, though I think Melissa actually had a cat named this, and as she\u0026rsquo;s a contact in the extended social network, I think that would be potentially creepy. Also possible jinx regarding \u0026ldquo;trait\u0026rdquo; names, and minor boy/girl ironies unintended.) Saphir or Whorf (after the saphir-whorf hypothesis.) Though the latter has possible confusion with a certain Klingon silent-h) and the former isn\u0026rsquo;t as worth commemorating. Other (dead) good anthropologists/social scientists? Gertz is hard to name for: and No cats named Clif, I think. Any post-structuralists worth naming after that aren\u0026rsquo;t asinine? Deleuze, for instance, is probably a no go. Please do elaborate. Other writers/characters I should think of?\nVote early and often!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cat-names/","summary":"Hey folks.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m off to run errands and do things today, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to generate some cat names, so that I/we have something good to choose from when I meet the cat, if this indeed works out. And I want your help. Here are some notes:\nCan\u0026rsquo;t reuse a name that we\u0026rsquo;ve already used/had/have on an animal in this household/family (Mouse, Fred/Phred, Ribbon, Crosby, Nash, and Montana are out). We generally try and avoid giving people names to animals on the occasion that we might come across someone with the same name in our day to day life, so no Johns, Jims, Stuarts, Chris\u0026rsquo;, Brians and so forth. This is a boy cat. I prefer cross gender pet names that are absurd--eg. girl dogs names Rodney, boy cats named Alice--to more subtle example of this naming genre--eg. boy cats named Rydra (the protaganist of Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s novel Babel-17) Naming after minor celebrities/passing fads is probably something that I\u0026rsquo;d like to avoid.","title":"cat names"},{"content":"In addition to getting word of the rejection from WesternState, I also got a form letter rejection from TopChoiceSchool this weekend. The total result: \u0026ldquo;wow, lets not have a weekend like that for a while, alright folks?\u0026rdquo;\nI think that the rejection from WesternState hurt so much, in part because I had an extensive interview with them and it seemed so certain. As a result, where most rejections are easily interpreted as \u0026ldquo;not enough room, and there are other people who are better suited,\u0026rdquo; this one was very much felt like, \u0026ldquo;sorry, you\u0026rsquo;re not right for this kind of program and we wish you well.\u0026rdquo; I didn\u0026rsquo;t loose a competition to other people, so much as I failed to impress.\nThe issue is that--and this shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be surprising to anyone--I\u0026rsquo;m not a very quantitatively minded fellow. But I\u0026rsquo;m interested in issues that are best addressed by a very quant-ish discipline. But I\u0026rsquo;m really not opposed to quant work, and in fact sort of enjoy it. The issue in the rejection was that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t a good fit for a \u0026ldquo;traditional quantitative program.\u0026rdquo; Frankly I think I was probably too queer for them, though that\u0026rsquo;s difficult to suss out.\nThough this has all left me pretty angry, the truth is that I was never very wild about the prospect of WesternState, so while rejection--particularly this one--sucks, it\u0026rsquo;s probably not the worst thing in the world. What it does mean, is that I\u0026rsquo;m more precariously concentrating on my one remaining program, which is probably a pretty good option for me (and it\u0026rsquo;s very qualitative and post-structuralist which makes me quite happy.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m also percolating on other options, of course, nothing quite concrete yet. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about spending some time trying to do something like tech-writing, or systems administration, or user interface research/design in a city nearer to a group of friends (philly?). If I apply again (in maybe 2 years?) I\u0026rsquo;ll probably try for feminist studies, and there\u0026rsquo;s an anthropologist at NYU that would be really great to work with. Who knows. Hopefully this will be moot in a few days.\nI have a couple of quick news items, in case I don\u0026rsquo;t get around to posting again.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started a new sweater. Well, just the first sleeve, for entertainment until the yarn necessary to finish the last sleeve of my sweater. But I\u0026rsquo;ve done all the pattern development and centering and what not, and I must say that I really like it. When ordered the extra skein for the in-progres sweater, I bought yarn for a new sweater, and it is my intention to knit this sweater as a sort of performance piece with you all. I\u0026rsquo;ll post the chart, instructions on getting the yarn, and doing substitution, and then I\u0026rsquo;ll write instructions and design process stuff as it happens, and we can all fallow along. My \u0026ldquo;s\u0026rdquo; key on the computer is on the fritz. It\u0026rsquo;s not too bad, but minnorly annoying. Anyway, Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fall-back/","summary":"In addition to getting word of the rejection from WesternState, I also got a form letter rejection from TopChoiceSchool this weekend. The total result: \u0026ldquo;wow, lets not have a weekend like that for a while, alright folks?\u0026rdquo;\nI think that the rejection from WesternState hurt so much, in part because I had an extensive interview with them and it seemed so certain. As a result, where most rejections are easily interpreted as \u0026ldquo;not enough room, and there are other people who are better suited,\u0026rdquo; this one was very much felt like, \u0026ldquo;sorry, you\u0026rsquo;re not right for this kind of program and we wish you well.\u0026rdquo; I didn\u0026rsquo;t loose a competition to other people, so much as I failed to impress.\nThe issue is that--and this shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be surprising to anyone--I\u0026rsquo;m not a very quantitatively minded fellow. But I\u0026rsquo;m interested in issues that are best addressed by a very quant-ish discipline. But I\u0026rsquo;m really not opposed to quant work, and in fact sort of enjoy it.","title":"fall back"},{"content":"A lot of writers keep blogs, and I take \u0026ldquo;writer\u0026rdquo; to mean, people whose output (creative and/or professional) is text in cases where the writing is an end to itself. Everyone writes--that\u0026rsquo;s a symptom of an information world--but there is a difference between journalists, novelist, and the epidemiologist: everyone trades in words, but for a lot of people who all work in words, the writing is a communicative medium and often not meant to be read in any orderly way. Which is fine, I\u0026rsquo;m just trying to be concrete.\nAnyway, \u0026ldquo;the writer\u0026rsquo;s blog\u0026rdquo; is pretty common, and I think this is really cool. The thing about blogs is that it\u0026rsquo;s largely the \u0026ldquo;people\u0026rsquo;s medium,\u0026rdquo; so having the same people\u0026rsquo;s names in your feed reader and bookshelf makes writers more accessible, more human, less distant and very much \u0026ldquo;alive.\u0026rdquo;1 This is a good thing.\nAt the same time, an embarrassing proportion of writer\u0026rsquo;s blogs are about writing, about particular writer\u0026rsquo;s experiences with the business of writing, experiences with the practice and craft of writing. Now this isn\u0026rsquo;t surprising, as blogs and journals are outlets for half formed ideas, thoughts, and worries. Frankly, I\u0026rsquo;m a total hack at this whole \u0026ldquo;writing\u0026rdquo; thing, and I do this a lot. At the same time, surely, there\u0026rsquo;s a better use of \u0026lsquo;blog readers (and writers) time.\nWriters, who I respect and value, give advice that\u0026rsquo;s often wildly contradictory: \u0026ldquo;to be successful you have to have good follow through and finish everything you start,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t be afraid to let a project go if you think it\u0026rsquo;s not going well,\u0026rdquo; or more comically \u0026ldquo;write what you know,\u0026rdquo; paired with \u0026ldquo;write something exciting, because no one wants to read about your middle class angst.\u0026rdquo; I think you probably get the point.\nBecause, the secret of writing, of being a writer, is that no one has a clue as to how they/we do it: every piece of advice that I\u0026rsquo;ve heard--other than, I guess, \u0026ldquo;write more\u0026rdquo;--is ultimately superstition.\nAs I start to work on figuring out what projects I\u0026rsquo;m working on in light of the impending changes in my life, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about what it means to be a writer, in a non-full time capacity. Or, similarly what it means to be a guy with scholarly interests outside of the academy. This is sort of bleak, I think March may really be getting to me after all.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to leave it there.\nContra to the proclamation that \u0026ldquo;the author is dead.\u0026rdquo; While I really like the implications of reader response theory (particularly since my own work in the social sciences approaches actual conversations in much the same way that reader response theorist approach the \u0026ldquo;literary\u0026rdquo; text,) as literature becomes more interactive, particularly in a popular context, I think some assumptions need to be reexamined. I mean, John Milton\u0026rsquo;s authorial intent, is indeed largely irrelevant to contemporary readings, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure the same thing can be said of people like Cory Doctorow, for instance.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-writing/","summary":"A lot of writers keep blogs, and I take \u0026ldquo;writer\u0026rdquo; to mean, people whose output (creative and/or professional) is text in cases where the writing is an end to itself. Everyone writes--that\u0026rsquo;s a symptom of an information world--but there is a difference between journalists, novelist, and the epidemiologist: everyone trades in words, but for a lot of people who all work in words, the writing is a communicative medium and often not meant to be read in any orderly way. Which is fine, I\u0026rsquo;m just trying to be concrete.\nAnyway, \u0026ldquo;the writer\u0026rsquo;s blog\u0026rdquo; is pretty common, and I think this is really cool. The thing about blogs is that it\u0026rsquo;s largely the \u0026ldquo;people\u0026rsquo;s medium,\u0026rdquo; so having the same people\u0026rsquo;s names in your feed reader and bookshelf makes writers more accessible, more human, less distant and very much \u0026ldquo;alive.\u0026rdquo;1 This is a good thing.\nAt the same time, an embarrassing proportion of writer\u0026rsquo;s blogs are about writing, about particular writer\u0026rsquo;s experiences with the business of writing, experiences with the practice and craft of writing.","title":"writing writing"},{"content":"Hey folks,\nToday, 8 March 2008, for one hour I\u0026rsquo;m going to be doing the local Eastern European/etc folk music show on our community radio station while the host is returning from a shape note singing convention.\nMy \u0026ldquo;concept\u0026rdquo; for this show is the play some Scandinavian and Scandi-inspired tunes, followed by a series of tunes that covers the dialogue between anglo and irish folk music and chamber music.\nEnjoy\nName - Artist - Album - Label (Where Known) Se På Tv - Swåp - Du Da - Northside Erik Bohlin\u0026rsquo;s brudpolska - Väsen - Linnæus Väsen - Northside Anton and Erik\u0026rsquo;s - 422 - New Numbers - Self Luringens polska - Väsen - Linnæus Väsen - Northside Blomstertid - Frifot - Sluring - Northside Glasena Klingar - Boiled In Lead - Orb - Omnium Jeg Lagde Meg Sa Silde - Caliban - Caliban - Self Gycklarpolskan Av Peter Erson - Barry Phillips - Cello Holborne Suite - Brass Monkey - Going \u0026amp; Staying - Topic Records O\u0026rsquo;Carolan\u0026rsquo;s Farewell To Music - Tr\u0026rsquo;ona N\u0026rsquo; Dhomhnaill - Tr\u0026rsquo;ona -Green Linnet Festus Burke - Barry Dransfield - Be Your Own Man - O\u0026rsquo;Carolan\u0026rsquo;s Concerto - Robin and Barry Dransfield - Up to Now Miss Wharton Duff/The Mare - Cuffe, Tony - When First I Went To Caledonia - Green Linnet Carolan\u0026rsquo;s Draught - Arty McGlynn - McGlynn\u0026rsquo;s Fancy - Planxty Llanthony, Loftus Jones - John Renbourn - Traveller\u0026rsquo;s Prayer - Shanachie ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/from-the-hills/","summary":"Hey folks,\nToday, 8 March 2008, for one hour I\u0026rsquo;m going to be doing the local Eastern European/etc folk music show on our community radio station while the host is returning from a shape note singing convention.\nMy \u0026ldquo;concept\u0026rdquo; for this show is the play some Scandinavian and Scandi-inspired tunes, followed by a series of tunes that covers the dialogue between anglo and irish folk music and chamber music.\nEnjoy\nName - Artist - Album - Label (Where Known) Se På Tv - Swåp - Du Da - Northside Erik Bohlin\u0026rsquo;s brudpolska - Väsen - Linnæus Väsen - Northside Anton and Erik\u0026rsquo;s - 422 - New Numbers - Self Luringens polska - Väsen - Linnæus Väsen - Northside Blomstertid - Frifot - Sluring - Northside Glasena Klingar - Boiled In Lead - Orb - Omnium Jeg Lagde Meg Sa Silde - Caliban - Caliban - Self Gycklarpolskan Av Peter Erson - Barry Phillips - Cello Holborne Suite - Brass Monkey - Going \u0026amp; Staying - Topic Records O\u0026rsquo;Carolan\u0026rsquo;s Farewell To Music - Tr\u0026rsquo;ona N\u0026rsquo; Dhomhnaill - Tr\u0026rsquo;ona -Green Linnet Festus Burke - Barry Dransfield - Be Your Own Man - O\u0026rsquo;Carolan\u0026rsquo;s Concerto - Robin and Barry Dransfield - Up to Now Miss Wharton Duff/The Mare - Cuffe, Tony - When First I Went To Caledonia - Green Linnet Carolan\u0026rsquo;s Draught - Arty McGlynn - McGlynn\u0026rsquo;s Fancy - Planxty Llanthony, Loftus Jones - John Renbourn - Traveller\u0026rsquo;s Prayer - Shanachie ","title":"from the hills"},{"content":"I heard back from WesternState Flagship University today.\nNo go.\nWhich is disheartening, mostly because I thought my chances were so good to begin with.\nOn the up side, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t particularly looking forward to being in WesternState so perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. Though I was really looking forward to the career possibilities that this program provided. So, yeah, a little hurt and angry, as well, frankly.\nI\u0026rsquo;m beginning to think about contingency plans--of which I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything particularly good--even though I still have two, technically three, applications still outstanding. The two main ones are, pretty much up in the air, which is sort of crazy.\nAnyway, I have to program for a radio show that I\u0026rsquo;m doing this afternoon, and I want to knit, and tonight is the my grandfather\u0026rsquo;s yahrzeit, which I think often makes this time in march more stressful than it would otherwise be.\nSo, I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch. You be too.\nYours in struggle, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/news/","summary":"I heard back from WesternState Flagship University today.\nNo go.\nWhich is disheartening, mostly because I thought my chances were so good to begin with.\nOn the up side, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t particularly looking forward to being in WesternState so perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. Though I was really looking forward to the career possibilities that this program provided. So, yeah, a little hurt and angry, as well, frankly.\nI\u0026rsquo;m beginning to think about contingency plans--of which I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything particularly good--even though I still have two, technically three, applications still outstanding. The two main ones are, pretty much up in the air, which is sort of crazy.\nAnyway, I have to program for a radio show that I\u0026rsquo;m doing this afternoon, and I want to knit, and tonight is the my grandfather\u0026rsquo;s yahrzeit, which I think often makes this time in march more stressful than it would otherwise be.","title":"news"},{"content":" Correspondence and status update is sent. Still no news. Better luck next week? I finished the first sleeve of this g-d-forsaken sweater. I made sure to start the next one immediately. This is good. Notes on knitting: I ordered more yarn, which is needed for finishing this sleeve. I also ordered yarn, enough for a second sweater. Sigh. This yarn is more fine than my usual stardard, but it\u0026rsquo;s really soft, and it has drape in a way that I\u0026rsquo;m totally ok with. I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to host a knit a long with this yarn, and a sweater that I hope to design and work on this summer. This means that I will have three sweaters worth of yarn more than I have sweaters, plus a bunch of left overs. I think this is a stash. Greater numbers of shorter blog post seem to be the way to go. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten the second part down, (this time), here\u0026rsquo; to working on the first part, I guess.\nBack to the knitting.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/still-progress/","summary":"Correspondence and status update is sent. Still no news. Better luck next week? I finished the first sleeve of this g-d-forsaken sweater. I made sure to start the next one immediately. This is good. Notes on knitting: I ordered more yarn, which is needed for finishing this sleeve. I also ordered yarn, enough for a second sweater. Sigh. This yarn is more fine than my usual stardard, but it\u0026rsquo;s really soft, and it has drape in a way that I\u0026rsquo;m totally ok with. I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to host a knit a long with this yarn, and a sweater that I hope to design and work on this summer. This means that I will have three sweaters worth of yarn more than I have sweaters, plus a bunch of left overs. I think this is a stash. Greater numbers of shorter blog post seem to be the way to go.","title":"still progress"},{"content":" Still no news. There could be a call tonight, I suppose. I told myself that I was going to write an email to ping them, and at least see what was going on, but it\u0026rsquo;s not like they\u0026rsquo;re going to forget to admit people, so I\u0026rsquo;m--at least for now--going with the stoic approach. My sleeve from hell has done some progressing. I have 50 some rounds left, and there are only 80-ish stitches left, which is a good thing indeed. The title of this post refers to the fact that I just switched to double pointed needles (dpns) on the sleeve. And then there is, you know, the second sleeve. I was going to put a cuff on this one, but it\u0026rsquo;s not needed at all, so that\u0026rsquo;s nice. I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching Criminal Minds, a trashy CBS procedural. I swear to you, if they made a space opera procedural (as opposed to a space opera adventure show), I think it would be amazing. I should write more about my love for procedurals. Also, re: Criminal Minds I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining about Thomas Gibson. Heh. Predictable. I\u0026rsquo;m so predictable. I\u0026rsquo;m taking a break before I watch the last Tales of the City videos. It\u0026rsquo;s good for me, but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of cathartic, and that isn\u0026rsquo;t particularly pleasant. In a turn that I\u0026rsquo;m sure will surprise no one, giving myself a chill out period before I make the computer order has tempered my perceived need. On the other hand I\u0026rsquo;ve just been refreshing three tabs in safari and watching tv with the computer this week. I still might order when I get word from grad programs, because I\u0026rsquo;d rather make the transition now, when I\u0026rsquo;m not doing any sort of production work, rather than in August or November when there will be other things going on in my life. I finished a pair of socks and was able to graft the socks with some skill. Though I without doubt knit an extra round on the second sock at the toe. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it will change things, so I\u0026rsquo;ll probably leave it, but you know, I might. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably not work on socks intently until/if I run out of yarn on this sweater and have to wait for an extra skein to arrive. I\u0026rsquo;ve started to think about my next sweater, I\u0026rsquo;m excited. Details forthcoming, maybe. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about writing, even if I\u0026rsquo;m not actually coherent enough to do it, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to even think about that recently, so that\u0026rsquo;s fun. Really fun. There\u0026rsquo;s a new Torchwood. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be really pissed in three weeks when they run out of episodes for this season and I have to wait till January 2009 for more. Sigh. Right now I\u0026rsquo;m happy. I have to work today. I\u0026rsquo;m down to working about four days a month in addition to teaching a couple of classes. But I don\u0026rsquo;t have to go in for a while. Be in touch!\n--ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dpns/","summary":"Still no news. There could be a call tonight, I suppose. I told myself that I was going to write an email to ping them, and at least see what was going on, but it\u0026rsquo;s not like they\u0026rsquo;re going to forget to admit people, so I\u0026rsquo;m--at least for now--going with the stoic approach. My sleeve from hell has done some progressing. I have 50 some rounds left, and there are only 80-ish stitches left, which is a good thing indeed. The title of this post refers to the fact that I just switched to double pointed needles (dpns) on the sleeve. And then there is, you know, the second sleeve. I was going to put a cuff on this one, but it\u0026rsquo;s not needed at all, so that\u0026rsquo;s nice. I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching Criminal Minds, a trashy CBS procedural. I swear to you, if they made a space opera procedural (as opposed to a space opera adventure show), I think it would be amazing.","title":"dpns"},{"content":"I still haven\u0026rsquo;t heard anything. I really do get palpitations everytime the phone rings. I\u0026rsquo;ll post something the instant that I get word. Sorry that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a post yesterday.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching the Tales of the City mini-series\u0026rsquo;. (And kniting on a never ending sleeve.)\nI really like the Tales\u0026rsquo; story. I\u0026rsquo;ve only read the books once, in short order. I\u0026rsquo;d read them again except there are six--seven now--and well, when you pick one up, you basically have to finish it. My mother reports the same problem: apparently she started reading one when I was little, and lost a day.\nI remember sitting down with a stack of them next to a chair when I was staying with my grandmother when I was probably fifteen, and I read all six books in like 4 or five days, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I moved much.\nThe television show is similar.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something about the pacing that I think is really appealing. I mean the characters are perfectly constructed, but I think fundamentally, my love of the stories has to do with the pacing, which comes from it\u0026rsquo;s origins as a newspaper serial. So each of the chapters/interludes is around 1000 words (800-ish?) and is so complete and rich. There\u0026rsquo;s something so perfect about these books for me.\nThe first time I watched these events unfold, I of course didn\u0026rsquo;t know what was going to happen, so I fell for a character that ends up being an ass, I got wrapped up in (one of) the great love stories, which ends in the most tragic way. Or, not really, but it feels like that. And in a certain way, it feels hard to watch friends make the same mistakes all over again.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m well, and with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll still have my mind when this is over.\nRegards, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fielding-tales-of-the-city/","summary":"I still haven\u0026rsquo;t heard anything. I really do get palpitations everytime the phone rings. I\u0026rsquo;ll post something the instant that I get word. Sorry that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a post yesterday.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching the Tales of the City mini-series\u0026rsquo;. (And kniting on a never ending sleeve.)\nI really like the Tales\u0026rsquo; story. I\u0026rsquo;ve only read the books once, in short order. I\u0026rsquo;d read them again except there are six--seven now--and well, when you pick one up, you basically have to finish it. My mother reports the same problem: apparently she started reading one when I was little, and lost a day.\nI remember sitting down with a stack of them next to a chair when I was staying with my grandmother when I was probably fifteen, and I read all six books in like 4 or five days, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I moved much.\nThe television show is similar.","title":"fielding tales of the city"},{"content":" I plyed a ball of spindled yarn. 7 more grams. No clue on yardage. I\u0026rsquo;m eight rounds away from being half way done with the bulk (but not all) of this sleeve. In reality, this means that the sleeve is like 8 inches long, but saying it in other ways is less depressing. I have been asked to do an essoteric folk music show on KDHX this Saturday for an hour. This is kind of funny in an annoying sort of way. I blocked the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been whining about for a long time. The blocking fixes most of my concerns and I think about 10 minutes with a steam iron and I can fix the remaining concern. (I paid too much attention to the shoulders and the sleeves aren\u0026rsquo;t right as a result.) But it\u0026rsquo;s good. The code name for this sweater on the blog is \u0026ldquo;Turkish Tile.\u0026rdquo; I suspect that my fate at one of my schools is being decided as I write this, and I should have formal news by Wednesday I suspect. Eek. I\u0026rsquo;m of distracted mindset as a result of this, but because I\u0026rsquo;m so helpless to do anything, its all very \u0026ldquo;free floating.\u0026rdquo; There\u0026rsquo;s a reason I\u0026rsquo;m not really trying to write a coherent post this morning. I\u0026rsquo;m slowly easing my way back into the ravelry community, because\u0026rsquo;ve been absent from those forums for a while. That\u0026rsquo;s nice. I have errands to do this morning: get a zipper get copies of keys made I\u0026rsquo;m going to go dancing tonight, third night in a row. Oy. I really like dance, lets not get this confused, but as a social outlet, it sucks (particularly for someone my age, particularly when people are stupid), and while the activity rocks it\u0026rsquo;s all centered around social interaction. Now, to be fair, Morris dance is better than other things (under some conditions, and yesterday was great), but, wow. I\u0026rsquo;m not really complaining, just, balking at the absurdity, really. I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching Enterprise, still, I think I have eight episodes left. I can\u0026rsquo;t decide if it\u0026rsquo;s really bad or if it\u0026rsquo;s using irony effectively. Like, there was an episode arc with Orion \u0026ldquo;Slave Girls,\u0026rdquo; which tied into an original series episode that was basically an excuse to have almost naked women painted green. This episode wasn\u0026rsquo;t much different, though we learn at the end that the Orion \u0026ldquo;Slave Girls\u0026rdquo; were basically commandos, and that they were \u0026ldquo;in charge\u0026rdquo; of the Orion culture. Which, I\u0026rsquo;ll accept as a good faith effort on the part of the writers to right a trek-wrong, even if it was sort of poorly handled, and felt like an afterthought. To a large extent, the same thing goes for the Mirror Universe stuff (a woman ends up in power at the end of the arc, despite the fact that the whole arc feels like an excuse to see the actress\u0026rsquo; mid-sections), though I would say that all of the previous interest in Mirror Universe stuff comes from seeing \u0026ldquo;our\u0026rdquo; characters interact with their \u0026ldquo;evil\u0026rdquo; counterparts, and that\u0026rsquo;s basically missing from enterprise. I think my next television series watching project is going to be something more interesting. I have \u0026ldquo;tales of the city\u0026rdquo; DVDs to watch, and that\u0026rsquo;s next. After that, shrug. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things/","summary":"I plyed a ball of spindled yarn. 7 more grams. No clue on yardage. I\u0026rsquo;m eight rounds away from being half way done with the bulk (but not all) of this sleeve. In reality, this means that the sleeve is like 8 inches long, but saying it in other ways is less depressing. I have been asked to do an essoteric folk music show on KDHX this Saturday for an hour. This is kind of funny in an annoying sort of way. I blocked the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been whining about for a long time. The blocking fixes most of my concerns and I think about 10 minutes with a steam iron and I can fix the remaining concern. (I paid too much attention to the shoulders and the sleeves aren\u0026rsquo;t right as a result.) But it\u0026rsquo;s good. The code name for this sweater on the blog is \u0026ldquo;Turkish Tile.","title":"things"},{"content":"I should hear from graduate school this week. Wow.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting my on the sleeve pretty intently for the last couple of days. Not working on the sock. I have two pattern repeats done, of six, before the final 74 row pattern repeat. In other words, I\u0026rsquo;m nowhere near done, but I\u0026rsquo;m making progress, and this first little bit is always difficult because there are so many stitches. I\u0026rsquo;ve already decreased, for instance, 42 stitches. My hope is to get another 12-20 stitches decreased today.\nSlowly but surely.\nI also thought my way though my next knitting pattern. While I had been thinking that I would knit a drop shouldered v-neck pull-over, because I wanted to knit something that I thought I could reliably wear, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;m going to knit a zipper cardigan, in a recreation/alteration of a sweater that I made about a year ago. And I thought that I\u0026rsquo;d do it after Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Saddle Shoulder Aran Cardigan,\u0026rdquo; except, you know, in color work. It means doing the sleeves from the cuff, upwards.\nI\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to this, and I think that having a more concrete design goal in mind makes finishing up this project more enticing.\nAnd I want to get through some of my spinning in the next couple of days/weeks, I did a little wheel spinning today, and I have some drop spindle to wind off, and there are errands, and what not. Oh, I set the twist in a couple skeins that I spun earlier this season, and they are quite nice, in their own way.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s most of the news that\u0026rsquo;s fit to sing.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/moments/","summary":"I should hear from graduate school this week. Wow.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting my on the sleeve pretty intently for the last couple of days. Not working on the sock. I have two pattern repeats done, of six, before the final 74 row pattern repeat. In other words, I\u0026rsquo;m nowhere near done, but I\u0026rsquo;m making progress, and this first little bit is always difficult because there are so many stitches. I\u0026rsquo;ve already decreased, for instance, 42 stitches. My hope is to get another 12-20 stitches decreased today.\nSlowly but surely.\nI also thought my way though my next knitting pattern. While I had been thinking that I would knit a drop shouldered v-neck pull-over, because I wanted to knit something that I thought I could reliably wear, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;m going to knit a zipper cardigan, in a recreation/alteration of a sweater that I made about a year ago. And I thought that I\u0026rsquo;d do it after Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Saddle Shoulder Aran Cardigan,\u0026rdquo; except, you know, in color work.","title":"Moments"},{"content":"I really need to be better and titling these posts.\nI spent this morning catching up on my correspondece, mostly which needed to be done, and it was good to write with some readers. I hear some people (and others, to be fair) complain about being overwhelmed by reader email, and my only response is to feel deeply jealous. Not my best emotive moment, but it\u0026rsquo;s there.\nOnly a few more days till I get word about graduate school from the leading option at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;m almost a-fluter with nervous energy, but it\u0026rsquo;s not entirely unenjoyable. Want. So. Much.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been focusing on knitting and writing about knitting, because that seems to be reflexive at this point, and I think I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m in the right psychic space to write fiction that I\u0026rsquo;d be happy with at this point, so I think it\u0026rsquo;s legitimate to work on projects that I\u0026rsquo;m more likely to be happy with. Reasonable? Nu?\nRegarding my knitting, I have 3-4 inches done on take two of this sleeve, and I\u0026rsquo;ve done the first 15 of 73 decreases. There are more than 73 sets of decreases, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t read that far in the pattern (big armhole, small gauge). I think being done with this soon is going to be good for the way I feel about my knitting.\nRegarding my backlog of projects: I have the sleeves/hem/neck of the sweater I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on, plus the sleeves neck, and saddle of the perpetual gray sweater (which I don\u0026rsquo;t think really counts) and a pair of socks on the needles. I have a bit of a stash worked up (two sweaters, four pairs of socks), with some intense leftovers (I could spend 60 bucks on yarn and have enough for four sweaters, or something absurd, not to mention countless hats).\nI\u0026rsquo;m in pretty good shape.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m off to be a hipster in a coffee shop.\nta! Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/grind/","summary":"I really need to be better and titling these posts.\nI spent this morning catching up on my correspondece, mostly which needed to be done, and it was good to write with some readers. I hear some people (and others, to be fair) complain about being overwhelmed by reader email, and my only response is to feel deeply jealous. Not my best emotive moment, but it\u0026rsquo;s there.\nOnly a few more days till I get word about graduate school from the leading option at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;m almost a-fluter with nervous energy, but it\u0026rsquo;s not entirely unenjoyable. Want. So. Much.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been focusing on knitting and writing about knitting, because that seems to be reflexive at this point, and I think I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m in the right psychic space to write fiction that I\u0026rsquo;d be happy with at this point, so I think it\u0026rsquo;s legitimate to work on projects that I\u0026rsquo;m more likely to be happy with.","title":"Grind"},{"content":"My mother and I decided to set the twist in our stash of unset handspun. I had two skeins and she hand three, and they\u0026rsquo;re currently almost dry on the fence in the backyard. This inspired me to do a little blocking of the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dreading for some weeks.\nAnd you know, I let it soak for a long time, and I have it laid out on our blocking mat and, by gum, I actually kind of like this sweater now. I was able to sort of mold the neck line into a slightly more appealing shape, and with luck, it will be a good sweater. It\u0026rsquo;ll be a couple of days before it\u0026rsquo;s dry, and hopefully it\u0026rsquo;ll soften up a bit (as this yarn typically does.)\nIn other knitting related news, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun reknitting the sleeve that we ripped out yesterday. It was cathartic, but not as much as I would have liked. And I have a lot of knitting to do to catch up with myself. Sigh.\nIn other knitting news (look folks, a whole post with only one topic!) my mother has set a project goal with herself: she\u0026rsquo;s going to make ten pairs of socks before she starts on any more lace or sweater projects. Well, she\u0026rsquo;s already started the first two pairs of socks, so eight more to go, and she expects this little endeavor to take until June.\nBecause she\u0026rsquo;s recalcitrant and doesn\u0026rsquo;t have (or want) a blog of her own, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be posting entries with updates of her projects whenever she sends me pictures. Because, you know, I can, and it seems cool.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sort of making my own knitting goals. Finish the projects that are currently in progress. Knit from stash. Never have more than one sweater on the needles at once, or if you do, don\u0026rsquo;t have two color work or two plain sweaters in progress at the same time. Less interesting perhaps, but I think they\u0026rsquo;ll add a bit of much needed structure to my life.\nStructure here I come! Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/blocking/","summary":"My mother and I decided to set the twist in our stash of unset handspun. I had two skeins and she hand three, and they\u0026rsquo;re currently almost dry on the fence in the backyard. This inspired me to do a little blocking of the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dreading for some weeks.\nAnd you know, I let it soak for a long time, and I have it laid out on our blocking mat and, by gum, I actually kind of like this sweater now. I was able to sort of mold the neck line into a slightly more appealing shape, and with luck, it will be a good sweater. It\u0026rsquo;ll be a couple of days before it\u0026rsquo;s dry, and hopefully it\u0026rsquo;ll soften up a bit (as this yarn typically does.)\nIn other knitting related news, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun reknitting the sleeve that we ripped out yesterday. It was cathartic, but not as much as I would have liked.","title":"blocking"},{"content":"I still don\u0026rsquo;t know anything about graduate school.\nI still need to find more regular employment.\nI still need to do more work on tealart, and write in a more focused way.\nBut, I got into *`Knitting Camp \u0026lt;http://www.schoolhousepress.com/\u0026gt;`_* this year. And not only that, I got into camp 3. Which is super cool, because not only is my Camp Roomate/Buddy going to be there (obviously,) knitting mentor R, and others that I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to meeting. There are, by my count going to be 4 men-folk at this camp (counting myself), which seems pretty cool.\nI am, of course, quite excited.\nAlso, happy leap day. Lets ignore the fact that just yesterday, in a moment of brain-hiccup, I said, \u0026ldquo;good thing it\u0026rsquo;s not a leap year, because it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;06.\u0026rdquo;\nSigh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-update/","summary":"I still don\u0026rsquo;t know anything about graduate school.\nI still need to find more regular employment.\nI still need to do more work on tealart, and write in a more focused way.\nBut, I got into *`Knitting Camp \u0026lt;http://www.schoolhousepress.com/\u0026gt;`_* this year. And not only that, I got into camp 3. Which is super cool, because not only is my Camp Roomate/Buddy going to be there (obviously,) knitting mentor R, and others that I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to meeting. There are, by my count going to be 4 men-folk at this camp (counting myself), which seems pretty cool.\nI am, of course, quite excited.\nAlso, happy leap day. Lets ignore the fact that just yesterday, in a moment of brain-hiccup, I said, \u0026ldquo;good thing it\u0026rsquo;s not a leap year, because it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;06.\u0026rdquo;\nSigh.","title":"Knitting Update"},{"content":"In lieu of actually making a podcast, I\u0026rsquo;m going to list a few songs that I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to a lot on repeat over the past couple of weeks. Because you know, I can. In no particular order\nFiest - Mushaboom Linda Thompson - Versatile Heart Richard and Linda Thompson - Dimming of the Day Richard Thompson - One Door Opens Jorma Kaukonen - Stars in my Crown Linda Thompson - Katy Cruel Kitka - Subrali Sa Se Subrali Kitka - Pustono Ludo I Mlado Richard Thompson - The Old Changing Way La Bouttiine Souriane - Le Zigezon (The Sunspot Song) ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-new-playlist/","summary":"In lieu of actually making a podcast, I\u0026rsquo;m going to list a few songs that I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to a lot on repeat over the past couple of weeks. Because you know, I can. In no particular order\nFiest - Mushaboom Linda Thompson - Versatile Heart Richard and Linda Thompson - Dimming of the Day Richard Thompson - One Door Opens Jorma Kaukonen - Stars in my Crown Linda Thompson - Katy Cruel Kitka - Subrali Sa Se Subrali Kitka - Pustono Ludo I Mlado Richard Thompson - The Old Changing Way La Bouttiine Souriane - Le Zigezon (The Sunspot Song) ","title":"A New Playlist"},{"content":" My comptuer was anoying all morning. On the upside I now have a new torchwood episode to watch. Dose anyone else know if XTorrent is particularly unstable on PowerPCs? Because it\u0026rsquo;s comically bad on my computer. I know there are other programs that I could use, my logic in using this one isn\u0026rsquo;t good admittedly. Just wondering. I did some playing around with R last night. I like it. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if my failure to grok properly is the result of having a pretty elementary understanding of statistics, or the fact that I have a pretty elementary understanding of programing. Or the fact that, by all accounts the documentation seeems to be written by a non-native speaker, which might be complicating problems 1 and 2. But it\u0026rsquo;s very cool, and I sort of get it. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of running some sort of basic study this spring/summer on my own using some publicly available content as data. Like newsgroup postings or some such. With the hopes of being able to understand these tools in time for next year, and hopefully I\u0026rsquo;ll get something good out of it. My turn to looking at these statistics programs and what not, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back to reading about object oriented programing and smalltalk, as it\u0026rsquo;s at least a little relevant, which I enjoy because it inspires a way of logical thinking which I don\u0026rsquo;t get to spend very much time in. And that\u0026rsquo;s inspiring in it\u0026rsquo;s own way. Not much knitting or writing news, alas. Still haven\u0026rsquo;t written the sleeve, and I had work and dancing last night and I have something this morning before work, so not much opportunity there, and I\u0026rsquo;ve spent what time I have writing this note to you. ;) No grad school news. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/escape/","summary":"My comptuer was anoying all morning. On the upside I now have a new torchwood episode to watch. Dose anyone else know if XTorrent is particularly unstable on PowerPCs? Because it\u0026rsquo;s comically bad on my computer. I know there are other programs that I could use, my logic in using this one isn\u0026rsquo;t good admittedly. Just wondering. I did some playing around with R last night. I like it. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if my failure to grok properly is the result of having a pretty elementary understanding of statistics, or the fact that I have a pretty elementary understanding of programing. Or the fact that, by all accounts the documentation seeems to be written by a non-native speaker, which might be complicating problems 1 and 2. But it\u0026rsquo;s very cool, and I sort of get it. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of running some sort of basic study this spring/summer on my own using some publicly available content as data.","title":"Escape"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s been days since I wrote a journal entry. This reflex to blathering about my life is a sickness.\nOn the up side I\u0026rsquo;ve started writing more things that are, not this kind of entry on my own, so that\u0026rsquo;s an improvement. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m having a hard time conceptually holding together the argument for an essay for any length of time. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m just out of practice. Anyway, this concentration/focus/mental discipline issue is something I need to spend some time on.\nPerhaps it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that I\u0026rsquo;m not really successful at trying to write fiction at the moment; I think that I would really be displeased with the results.\nI wrote a knitting pattern yesterday. For a toe-up sock. This is my basic \u0026ldquo;easy/mindless\u0026rdquo; sock, and I really like the way that it turns out, so it\u0026rsquo;s good that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to write this sort of pattern out for the general good. I plan to do some layout/production work, and get it up on the tealArt site. Woot. There are other knitting related writing projects that I\u0026rsquo;d like to get more finished so I can queue them up.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also begun to make it possible for me to post entries to tychoish.com that won\u0026rsquo;t get cross-posed to my live-journal. I think some rants and what not are better kept off live-journal, and I think modularity is a good thing in this regard.\nI just did my taxes. That was both easy and impressively uninspiring all at the same time. Feh.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to wait till I hear (good news) from (a) graduate school(s) to make the new computer order. It\u0026rsquo;s reasonable, it\u0026rsquo;s not that long, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll regret anything. I\u0026rsquo;m really, surprisingly conflicted about this, because it feels like a luxury and not a need thing. Zoe--current computer--was a luxury as well: my mum needed a computer for work and it made sense at the time for her to take my 12\u0026quot; g4 iBook (which remains a very good/useable machine) and me to get the PowerBook. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t a necessary upgrade, but I had a really good justification.\nOk, I\u0026rsquo;m cutting the rest of the blather about the computer to below the fold, because, that just seems reasonable. There\u0026rsquo;s not much else for me to report, really. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch. You be too!\nThe truth is that I use a computer a lot. I\u0026rsquo;m a serious geek. But you knew that. While my other \u0026ldquo;hobbies\u0026rdquo; (reading, knitting) also require the expenditures of income, I\u0026rsquo;m really economical about them. I buy in bulk, I shop around, I don\u0026rsquo;t stash yarns, and for the last 4 months I\u0026rsquo;ve been working in a yarn store, so I get a mean discount which I will confess to not using very much (I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten, one sweater project and a skein of yarn that has made/will make 2 pairs of socks). So yeah. Frugal, and good at resisting temptation\u0026hellip;\nAnd the truth is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really buy other computer accessories. I may be a geek, but I\u0026rsquo;m not really a gadget person. In the time that I\u0026rsquo;ve had Zoe, I\u0026rsquo;ve spent ~175 dollars on an external hard drive. Period. So for the amount of use it gets, and the way that a(ny) computer facilitates, projects that are of prime importance to me (my work online, writing, etc.) having a more current tool wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a bad thing. So, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m being unreasonable. But then, you know reason and necessity aren\u0026rsquo;t exactly the same thing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/another-door/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s been days since I wrote a journal entry. This reflex to blathering about my life is a sickness.\nOn the up side I\u0026rsquo;ve started writing more things that are, not this kind of entry on my own, so that\u0026rsquo;s an improvement. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m having a hard time conceptually holding together the argument for an essay for any length of time. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m just out of practice. Anyway, this concentration/focus/mental discipline issue is something I need to spend some time on.\nPerhaps it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that I\u0026rsquo;m not really successful at trying to write fiction at the moment; I think that I would really be displeased with the results.\nI wrote a knitting pattern yesterday. For a toe-up sock. This is my basic \u0026ldquo;easy/mindless\u0026rdquo; sock, and I really like the way that it turns out, so it\u0026rsquo;s good that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to write this sort of pattern out for the general good.","title":"another door"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s an entry where I dither on about the pros and cons of upgrading the computer system.\nMostly it\u0026rsquo;s kind of boring, except if you want to know what runs through my head when ever I make a decision of any sort.\nIf that\u0026rsquo;s the case, I pity you.\nPro My computer is nearly 3 years old. In this time, apple has seriously revised the machines in nearly every possible way. Though most noticeably, the new processors substantially outperform the 1.67 G4 that I have a the moment My old computer isn\u0026rsquo;t completely dead and will serve it\u0026rsquo;s next owner pretty well. I\u0026rsquo;m still using tiger, (10.4) and I\u0026rsquo;d have to spend $129 dollars to upgrade this computer to the new operating system, which I think I\u0026rsquo;m about due for. This isn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly crucial\u0026hellip; but if my computer were going to be useable in a long term, rather than short term way, I\u0026rsquo;d want leopard and a new battery (the current one gets $120). Even though I\u0026rsquo;m cheap, and probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t spend the 240, this is a further justification, but then that\u0026rsquo;s what this list is about. They just released new revisions today, and are unlikely to do so again till August or September. The computer I could order tomorrow, is the same as the one I could get for the next six months or so, likely at the same price. I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I want to wait that long, in any case. If I get into graduate school, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I want to be moving and upgrading in the same month (if I waited till the next release,) and if I don\u0026rsquo;t, well, uncertainty. There are some things that I\u0026rsquo;ve stopped using, or avoid using because they are painfully slow to use in the current configuration. They include quicksilver, bit torrent, media (photo/sound) editing. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty quick to keep unused applications off, (My base stack is: Quicksilver, Adium, TextMate, Mail.app, Safari, NetNewsWire. Sometimes I have VLC or Preview open as well. That\u0026rsquo;s it, and that works ok, but it\u0026rsquo;s limited.) The new computer wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have a metal case and would therefore be better at picking up wireless signals. Grr. Ok, minor annoyance, and I have no problem picking up signals anywhere that I currently use the computer, but still, this is one of the many things that I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to upgrading. I\u0026rsquo;d be able to, with the new huge hard drive, be able to keep my music collection on my computer without crimping performance. By now, I have an 80+ gig iTunes Library, and a 100 gig hard drive. For a year, I\u0026rsquo;ve kept the iTunes library on an external hard drive. Con The old computer still works, and I really can\u0026rsquo;t imagine that there\u0026rsquo;s something new that I\u0026rsquo;d want to do with the computer that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t do with the current computer. It might not be as I plan to buy a second power cord this time around, but I have three that work with my current computer, so that\u0026rsquo;s a step down in terms of features. My income particularly given that I\u0026rsquo;m still waiting on The Word, is unsure. So spending 1300 dollars, given this, seems silly. The instant that I\u0026rsquo;m more sure, then this all makes a lot more sense. Making the order, now, without The Word, is probably not incredibly wise. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve had the money for a new machine set aside for many months, incase there was some sort of sudden failure of the present computer. It is already in the budget for this summer, (see #4 above; this is probably the crux of my argument.) ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pros-and-cons/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s an entry where I dither on about the pros and cons of upgrading the computer system.\nMostly it\u0026rsquo;s kind of boring, except if you want to know what runs through my head when ever I make a decision of any sort.\nIf that\u0026rsquo;s the case, I pity you.\nPro My computer is nearly 3 years old. In this time, apple has seriously revised the machines in nearly every possible way. Though most noticeably, the new processors substantially outperform the 1.67 G4 that I have a the moment My old computer isn\u0026rsquo;t completely dead and will serve it\u0026rsquo;s next owner pretty well. I\u0026rsquo;m still using tiger, (10.4) and I\u0026rsquo;d have to spend $129 dollars to upgrade this computer to the new operating system, which I think I\u0026rsquo;m about due for. This isn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly crucial\u0026hellip; but if my computer were going to be useable in a long term, rather than short term way, I\u0026rsquo;d want leopard and a new battery (the current one gets $120).","title":"Pros and Cons"},{"content":"Egad, I haven\u0026rsquo;t written one of these posts in forever.\nIt seems that apple released new laptops today. I promised myself that I would wait for the next revision before I got a new computer, my current one is old (a power pc generation mac) and I think it struggles to keep up. I\u0026rsquo;m still running the old OS (I have a \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t screw it up if it\u0026rsquo;s working\u0026rdquo; policy) and I think that it\u0026rsquo;s time. Computer\u0026rsquo;s wear out, and Zoe has been a virtual dream, but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to wear her completely into the ground. My father or grandmother is going to get custody next, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want them to get stuck with a computer that\u0026rsquo;s going to die immediately.\ntycho takes a break from writing this entry to look at the academic/research software in the `apple software directory \u0026lt;http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science/\u0026gt;`_.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s my updated apple prediction for the rest of the year: new iMacs at/around WWDC, iPods in August, MacPros and MacBook Air v.2 in August (or November) and new MacBook Con/Pros in November (maybe August?), so the big news at WWDC will be software related, likely as not.\nAs for me, I think the main decision left is, when do I make the order. Do I order it now, because, if I\u0026rsquo;m going to do it, I might as well make the order sooner rather than later (all things being equal, which they are,) or do I wait a little while. One thought is that I\u0026rsquo;ll wait till I get a grad school acceptance.1 On the other hand, even if fI didn\u0026rsquo;t get into graduate school, I\u0026rsquo;d still want the new computer, and now is probably the best time to buy for the next six months.\nIn preparation for this, I\u0026rsquo;m going to start making lists of things to ease the transition process. You may find these entertaining. Anyway, despite my lack of posting I have been writing things pretty seriously all morning. So I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to that.\nOnward and Upward!\nThough to be fair, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of operating like one is imminent which might be kind of dumb, at the same time, not without reason. The other celebratory thing would be to get my other (right) ear (lobe) pierced finally and get new left ear jewelry, which you know, I could do regardless of the computer.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-laptop/","summary":"Egad, I haven\u0026rsquo;t written one of these posts in forever.\nIt seems that apple released new laptops today. I promised myself that I would wait for the next revision before I got a new computer, my current one is old (a power pc generation mac) and I think it struggles to keep up. I\u0026rsquo;m still running the old OS (I have a \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t screw it up if it\u0026rsquo;s working\u0026rdquo; policy) and I think that it\u0026rsquo;s time. Computer\u0026rsquo;s wear out, and Zoe has been a virtual dream, but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to wear her completely into the ground. My father or grandmother is going to get custody next, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want them to get stuck with a computer that\u0026rsquo;s going to die immediately.\ntycho takes a break from writing this entry to look at the academic/research software in the `apple software directory \u0026lt;http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science/\u0026gt;`_.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s my updated apple prediction for the rest of the year: new iMacs at/around WWDC, iPods in August, MacPros and MacBook Air v.","title":"New Laptop"},{"content":"I mentioned in my last post that I took a break from writing to look at the academic/research software on the apple website. I opened a bunch of tabs (I\u0026rsquo;m looking for qualitative data analysis tools and the like,) and I found a few things that were pretty interesting, opened some tabs on the promise that I\u0026rsquo;d get back to evaluate these pieces of software.\nI did.\nMy response?\nMeh.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the issue: this is a pretty small market there are maybe a dozen programs that are designed to help social scientists with the things that they do. And they all perform very different tasks. Some will run cognitive psych experiments, there are statistics packages, there are data mining tools. You get the idea. There isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of competition.\nSo the end result, is that these places charge hundreds of dollars for a piece of software that is old, out of date,1 and for the most part very proprietary.\nSo there\u0026rsquo;s really nothing to be done. This isn\u0026rsquo;t software that I really need at the moment, so I\u0026rsquo;m not buying anything, but it\u0026rsquo;s really frustrating that not only are there not better options, but that there are no open source options. While I\u0026rsquo;m a big proponent of Open Software, there are a lot of cases where I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s entirely necessary. Or, at least in cases where there\u0026rsquo;s enough competition to support a number of viable options.\nHe said, looking at his list of running applications and realized that indeed, most of them were open source applications.\nSo maybe, then, open source is the way to spur development in areas too small for proprietary models to really work--such as they do. In any case, I do think that there\u0026rsquo;s a big difference between big open source projects like Linux or Mozillia and smaller projects like R-Project. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s just me but I think that having free/open software options for research is more crucial than having free/open operating systems. I\u0026rsquo;m so going to get filleted for that one, I understand that you can\u0026rsquo;t have the former without the later, but we can have this fight later, if people really want to have it. The short story is niche/not obviously profitable products/projects need to be open source (like server operating systems, like research software), and if apple is any indication user-level operating systems don\u0026rsquo;t.\nOk, Done ranting.\nAnd then I did some more serious googling. This, program, TAMS Analyzer for OS X came up, it\u0026rsquo;s GPL-ed and I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time playing with it to see what I can make it do. But it\u0026rsquo;s awesome looking. I\u0026rsquo;m putting tinkering wit this on the todo list.\nSo, I draw the distinction between old and out of date because its important. Some of these programs aren\u0026rsquo;t that old, but they\u0026rsquo;re coded in a paradigm that is, or they hard wire assumptions in a way that I think is probably not ideal. It feels like computing circa 1988-1992, even if the code has been ported to OS X.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-research/","summary":"I mentioned in my last post that I took a break from writing to look at the academic/research software on the apple website. I opened a bunch of tabs (I\u0026rsquo;m looking for qualitative data analysis tools and the like,) and I found a few things that were pretty interesting, opened some tabs on the promise that I\u0026rsquo;d get back to evaluate these pieces of software.\nI did.\nMy response?\nMeh.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the issue: this is a pretty small market there are maybe a dozen programs that are designed to help social scientists with the things that they do. And they all perform very different tasks. Some will run cognitive psych experiments, there are statistics packages, there are data mining tools. You get the idea. There isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of competition.\nSo the end result, is that these places charge hundreds of dollars for a piece of software that is old, out of date,1 and for the most part very proprietary.","title":"Open Source Research"},{"content":"I suppose I should explain my blog post titles more clearly. Usually I write my \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s whats up with tycho,\u0026rdquo; posts at the beginning of the day. Today I didn\u0026rsquo;t. So today, we\u0026rsquo;re doing it after words. Latin-ate-ly\nIn no particular order:\nI did work today on the new TealArt. I did everything that I could reasonably be expected to do given the results I was getting. I still don\u0026rsquo;t have the feed working correctly (it\u0026rsquo;s a permalink issue, support request is out,) and once that gets done, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to be very done with the site. I joked with dave that when I made it big, I\u0026rsquo;d higher a web-developer/designer, to make something a little more appropriate for the site. It won\u0026rsquo;t before a while, and I think what I have right now is plenty good, but\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be good for a while, and I can keep tinkering with it, but it\u0026rsquo;s good to not fixate on the little details at the expense of doing the work that\u0026rsquo;s important. My thought is that TealArt will eventually be a sort of \u0026ldquo;boutique blog network.\u0026rdquo; I hope to have a dozen or so blogs (maintained by groups of people,) on a series of semi-related topics. My thought is that the site would be a sort of \u0026ldquo;harpers meets women\u0026rsquo;s day from the late 70s\u0026rdquo; for geeks. We\u0026rsquo;d do fiction and columns (journals/blogs) and patterns/projects/resources, and see where it goes from there. This follows in the vein of tealart-as-magazine, and while I have to hone and polish, I think it\u0026rsquo;s a good start. The other thing that I did today with regards to tealart, was that I began planning out content. If it\u0026rsquo;s a magazine with a regular publishing schedule, it was helpful to think about copy that I need to generate, and this was a good move forward, for the important part of the site (ie. not the code). I didn\u0026rsquo;t write this post this morning because I was busy grafting the toe of a sock. This is the first time that I\u0026rsquo;ve ever managed to graft as sock and have it work out. I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying this sock making, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet ripped out the sleeve that needs ripping. So I\u0026rsquo;m not actively working on sweaters at the moment, though I will be again soon. I also have a desire to make a pair of gloves, again. This sock is knit cuff down. I haven\u0026rsquo;t done a sock like this, in probably two and a half years. They fit really well, and I like all of the nice ribbing. Not that you can\u0026rsquo;t make ribbed socks in the other direction, but the ribbing has to start later or look funny, thought this is really just an artifact of me being particular about the way my socks look. I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to Fiest\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Mushaboom,\u0026rdquo; which I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying more than I really care to admit. This reminds me that I need to sync my ipod with some desperation. I\u0026rsquo;m feeling, on the whole, more sane. Just a few more days. I\u0026rsquo;ve not worked more than a 10 hours in a week in far too long. (A month? Six weeks?) While this would have been a nice opportunity, given the craziness that this time of year seems to produce, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t as productive as I might have hoped. Such is life. Once I\u0026rsquo;m at a point where I have both sanity and certainty in my life, I can move the whole \u0026ldquo;deal with employment issues,\u0026rdquo; off the back burner and do something. In anycase, I have tomorrow off to begin to continue working on my projects, and begin to think about this. I got metioned by someone on ravelry in a really good context. I need to spiff things up on my profile there like no other. But I\u0026rsquo;ll have to just add that to the big todo list. Ok, that seems like enough for now. I have a few more hours of writing-related things on my list for today, so I\u0026rsquo;ll get on with that.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-posteri/","summary":"I suppose I should explain my blog post titles more clearly. Usually I write my \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s whats up with tycho,\u0026rdquo; posts at the beginning of the day. Today I didn\u0026rsquo;t. So today, we\u0026rsquo;re doing it after words. Latin-ate-ly\nIn no particular order:\nI did work today on the new TealArt. I did everything that I could reasonably be expected to do given the results I was getting. I still don\u0026rsquo;t have the feed working correctly (it\u0026rsquo;s a permalink issue, support request is out,) and once that gets done, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to be very done with the site. I joked with dave that when I made it big, I\u0026rsquo;d higher a web-developer/designer, to make something a little more appropriate for the site. It won\u0026rsquo;t before a while, and I think what I have right now is plenty good, but\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be good for a while, and I can keep tinkering with it, but it\u0026rsquo;s good to not fixate on the little details at the expense of doing the work that\u0026rsquo;s important.","title":"a posteri"},{"content":"R: So, I had a date, it was nice.\nT: Oh? Good for you! What\u0026rsquo;s his story?\nR: He\u0026rsquo;s a classmate. And he\u0026rsquo;s cute!\nT: Cute?\nR (picture link; has two guys on it): The one on the right.\nT: Um. Ours or theirs.\nR: Ours, dumbshit. That\u0026rsquo;s the only system that makes sense.\nT: I know, right? But the other guy is cuter, so I just wanted to make sure.\nR: Whatever, asshole.\npause\nT (looks at picture, again): Oh, that\u0026rsquo;s right you used to have a crush on me--\nR: heh. shutup.\nT: --which means, we have totally different standards for cute.\nR: you\u0026rsquo;re welcome.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/taste/","summary":"R: So, I had a date, it was nice.\nT: Oh? Good for you! What\u0026rsquo;s his story?\nR: He\u0026rsquo;s a classmate. And he\u0026rsquo;s cute!\nT: Cute?\nR (picture link; has two guys on it): The one on the right.\nT: Um. Ours or theirs.\nR: Ours, dumbshit. That\u0026rsquo;s the only system that makes sense.\nT: I know, right? But the other guy is cuter, so I just wanted to make sure.\nR: Whatever, asshole.\npause\nT (looks at picture, again): Oh, that\u0026rsquo;s right you used to have a crush on me--\nR: heh. shutup.\nT: --which means, we have totally different standards for cute.\nR: you\u0026rsquo;re welcome.","title":"taste"},{"content":"Ok, I have one more interview/call that I\u0026rsquo;m going to make right after I post this entry, but otherwise, I have to say that I think it went really well. And I think my chances are pretty good, all things considered. Nothing is for sure yet, but I\u0026rsquo;m encouraged.\nJust as a check in on \u0026ldquo;the current state of tycho,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;d say that I\u0026rsquo;m feeling a ton better. Still anxious a bit, but not really worried. Particularly. Which is good. I\u0026rsquo;m so close, and I really want some sort of closure in this area. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted, and I\u0026rsquo;ve posted some more detailed explanation in semi-accessible public spaces (face-book walls/lj comments/twitter), but I fear that this particular page is to heavily indexed, so I\u0026rsquo;m not going to go into detail here.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still sort of ornery about my knitting. I have a sweater that needs sleeves, and I really haven\u0026rsquo;t been pleased with how my knitting has turned out for most of the past year. Basically since I graduated from college, everything I\u0026rsquo;ve started blows. I haven\u0026rsquo;t had a winning sweater yet. Which sucks. So I\u0026rsquo;ve been reduced to knitting socks, (which also aren\u0026rsquo;t turning out well, but there\u0026rsquo;s less investment there.)\nI have a sweater that needs sleeves, and then I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a really simple, hard to screw up, pullover with some yarn that I just got. And I\u0026rsquo;m going to work on one project at a time. (Ok, so not one project at a time, really, but 1 main project, and a pair of socks, and a couple of long term projects in hibernation.) That\u0026rsquo;s where I am at the moment.\nIn other news, Now that things are starting to settle down, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and get closer to going to visit folk in nearby cities, because I haven\u0026rsquo;t and I should.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll try and post something non-ego centric today, I swear.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/restaging-conflicts/","summary":"Ok, I have one more interview/call that I\u0026rsquo;m going to make right after I post this entry, but otherwise, I have to say that I think it went really well. And I think my chances are pretty good, all things considered. Nothing is for sure yet, but I\u0026rsquo;m encouraged.\nJust as a check in on \u0026ldquo;the current state of tycho,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;d say that I\u0026rsquo;m feeling a ton better. Still anxious a bit, but not really worried. Particularly. Which is good. I\u0026rsquo;m so close, and I really want some sort of closure in this area. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted, and I\u0026rsquo;ve posted some more detailed explanation in semi-accessible public spaces (face-book walls/lj comments/twitter), but I fear that this particular page is to heavily indexed, so I\u0026rsquo;m not going to go into detail here.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still sort of ornery about my knitting. I have a sweater that needs sleeves, and I really haven\u0026rsquo;t been pleased with how my knitting has turned out for most of the past year.","title":"restaging conflicts"},{"content":"Ok, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to be really busy all day, and probably pretty brain dead after that. So no real post today.\nI\u0026rsquo;d write about my knitting, except that I think I screwed up another project. I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten any knitting to work out in a really long time, and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of fed up with it for the moment. So nothing there.\nAnyway, in lieu of an actual post. If you could all think of something clever to post in the comments, that would be really awesome. A joke, something funny that happened to you today, it all works. I\u0026rsquo;m going to look forward to hearing what you say. If this were in the plan (see the previous post), I would have come up with some sort of nifty contest or game we/you could play, but alas.\nSee you on the other side!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/leaves/","summary":"Ok, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to be really busy all day, and probably pretty brain dead after that. So no real post today.\nI\u0026rsquo;d write about my knitting, except that I think I screwed up another project. I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten any knitting to work out in a really long time, and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of fed up with it for the moment. So nothing there.\nAnyway, in lieu of an actual post. If you could all think of something clever to post in the comments, that would be really awesome. A joke, something funny that happened to you today, it all works. I\u0026rsquo;m going to look forward to hearing what you say. If this were in the plan (see the previous post), I would have come up with some sort of nifty contest or game we/you could play, but alas.\nSee you on the other side!","title":"Leaves"},{"content":"So. There\u0026rsquo;s an ice storm. And there aren\u0026rsquo;t flights going out of the airport, on any airline, that could get me where I want to go before mid-Saturday morning. Which would defeat the whole purpose of going. Given that I leave Saturday evening.\nSo here I am. What can be done over the phone will be, and everyone seems pretty encouraging, so I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly distraught over this.\nAnyway, Here\u0026rsquo;s my post from this morning/afternoon as I was sitting at the gate waiting for the plane to not show up!\nHey friends in blogland. (This is being posted after words, when free Internet is available.)\nExpect many short updates as I have time.\nI have arrived at the gate, and security was a huge non issue. No one balked at my fountain pen, which I wasn\u0026rsquo;t really expecting anyway. It took all of 30 minutes from dropping off-to the gate, including a bathroom break and walk. Not bad.\nI was however, on the verge of vomiting as we neared the airport. Now that all of the annoying airport things are coped with I\u0026rsquo;m ok. I do sort of wish that I had a longer battery leash. There\u0026rsquo;s a guy hogging the plug next to me. Sigh.\nIn my must occupy myself mood earlier I tracked down a video of danah boyd speaking on you tube. Here it is:\nI really like her and what she has to say, and I think in a lot of interesting ways, we over lap, or will, assuming the next few days goes over well. Which it will.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to go listen to escape pod and tor podcasts and have fun with that. Save the battery for when it really matters.\nWarmest regards,\ntycho\n(Onward and Upward!--literally ;))\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/first-and-last-trip-update/","summary":"So. There\u0026rsquo;s an ice storm. And there aren\u0026rsquo;t flights going out of the airport, on any airline, that could get me where I want to go before mid-Saturday morning. Which would defeat the whole purpose of going. Given that I leave Saturday evening.\nSo here I am. What can be done over the phone will be, and everyone seems pretty encouraging, so I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly distraught over this.\nAnyway, Here\u0026rsquo;s my post from this morning/afternoon as I was sitting at the gate waiting for the plane to not show up!\nHey friends in blogland. (This is being posted after words, when free Internet is available.)\nExpect many short updates as I have time.\nI have arrived at the gate, and security was a huge non issue. No one balked at my fountain pen, which I wasn\u0026rsquo;t really expecting anyway. It took all of 30 minutes from dropping off-to the gate, including a bathroom break and walk.","title":"First and Last Trip Update"},{"content":"Thoughts:\nFlight today. I hate airports. Airplanes are fine, flying is fine, I would rather drive than have to deal with airports, lines, security, and waiting. Unfortunately it\u0026rsquo;s no practical.\nI will post updates about my trip to this blog, with the necessary amount of abstraction, assuming I have Internet (which it looks like I will), This means those of you who read this blog (ie, judy, parents, etc) who know people who would be interested in seeing how the trip unfolds, feel free to forward these things on.\nI\u0026rsquo;m packed and basically ready to go. Yep.\nUm. I found my headphones, which will make ipod-listening possible. I was going to sync up, but ultimately decided that I was still far enough behind that, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t worth while.\nThe good news is my knitting-injured finger seems basically as good as new. Or as bad as it\u0026rsquo;s counterpart on my other hand.\nOk this is the sign that I need to post and get on with distracting my self for real (ooh, lets listen to the Buffy musical episode!)\ncheers,\ntycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-old-changing-way/","summary":"Thoughts:\nFlight today. I hate airports. Airplanes are fine, flying is fine, I would rather drive than have to deal with airports, lines, security, and waiting. Unfortunately it\u0026rsquo;s no practical.\nI will post updates about my trip to this blog, with the necessary amount of abstraction, assuming I have Internet (which it looks like I will), This means those of you who read this blog (ie, judy, parents, etc) who know people who would be interested in seeing how the trip unfolds, feel free to forward these things on.\nI\u0026rsquo;m packed and basically ready to go. Yep.\nUm. I found my headphones, which will make ipod-listening possible. I was going to sync up, but ultimately decided that I was still far enough behind that, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t worth while.\nThe good news is my knitting-injured finger seems basically as good as new. Or as bad as it\u0026rsquo;s counterpart on my other hand.","title":"The Old Changing Way"},{"content":"Life returns to normal. All is well. I have this trip in a few days (ie fly out tomorrow afternoon), and my life remains sort scattered. But that\u0026rsquo;s normal these days, but I\u0026rsquo;m coping pretty well.\nBy the time I got home yesterday, I was completely knackered. I have to work on building my tolerance up for mental activity late in the evening. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been working much (due to a confluence of factors largely outside of my control,) and while this isn\u0026rsquo;t ideal, with factors outside of my control--there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot I can do quite yet. Except work on being able to be productive in the evening.\nGiven that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t fathom the concept of really reading last night, I watched an episode of Star Trek: New Voyages while I sewed up. The last of the hem on the Turkish Tile sweater.\nGiven my last post on the feminist sf blog about Star Trek, you might think that I\u0026rsquo;m having an obsession of sorts, but the truth is that I\u0026rsquo;m not, really.\nBut about the sweater: I\u0026rsquo;ve been worried about this sweater for a long time. and it\u0026rsquo;s getting much better. I had to, I must admit, resort to sewing elastic into the collar to help it lay right, but it almost looks normal at this point. As I look at it, though, I think that the sweater still needs some serious attention around the collar area. Like there isn\u0026rsquo;t enough collar, by like an inch.\nIf this were a crew neck sweater, it would be a synch to add a fold down shirt collar (like those on oxford shirts) but since its more of a v-neck, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t seems terribly likely. I might just have to resort to making a matching scarf. Any thoughts that you may have about this would be really helpful, now that I have the defects corrected (with the elastic) I\u0026rsquo;m fresh out of ideas.\nI do intend to do a real wet blocking before I add anything on to this sweater. There is of course lots of time in the world. And since I\u0026rsquo;ve learned my lesson in this regard and I have another sweater that has a very similar construction, I know exactly what I have to do differently this time.\nAnyway, given that writing is slow in the evening, I should get on it while I still have brain cells around.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/marking-time-2/","summary":"Life returns to normal. All is well. I have this trip in a few days (ie fly out tomorrow afternoon), and my life remains sort scattered. But that\u0026rsquo;s normal these days, but I\u0026rsquo;m coping pretty well.\nBy the time I got home yesterday, I was completely knackered. I have to work on building my tolerance up for mental activity late in the evening. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been working much (due to a confluence of factors largely outside of my control,) and while this isn\u0026rsquo;t ideal, with factors outside of my control--there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot I can do quite yet. Except work on being able to be productive in the evening.\nGiven that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t fathom the concept of really reading last night, I watched an episode of Star Trek: New Voyages while I sewed up. The last of the hem on the Turkish Tile sweater.\nGiven my last post on the feminist sf blog about Star Trek, you might think that I\u0026rsquo;m having an obsession of sorts, but the truth is that I\u0026rsquo;m not, really.","title":"Marking Time"},{"content":"So--knock on wood--the good feelings remain with me. I have no sense of how I\u0026rsquo;ll be doing come Wednesday/Thursday morning, but for now I\u0026rsquo;m doing well. But I can\u0026rsquo;t argue with success\u0026hellip; much.\nI got nearly everything on my todo list done yesterday, and perhaps a bit more. Weird. Now I just need to be able to do that some more.\nI also did a little bit of reading in the Tiptree. I\u0026rsquo;m finally hooked on this novella. I\u0026rsquo;m reading The Starry Night which is a collection of three novellas/long short stories, and it\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of fun. Except that you have to \u0026ldquo;get into\u0026rdquo; the book, what amounts to three times. (I\u0026rsquo;m on the middle one.) I also read the beginning of \u0026ldquo;The Hose Beyond Your Sky,\u0026rdquo; by Benjamin Rosenbaum which I realized that I had heard on Escape Pod and I enjoyed it both times.\nThere was also some work that I did on TealArt. Including writing a SQL statement that worked really well, to provide the home page. There are a couple of little quirks still in the design that I want your feedback on:\nThe permalinks on the home page don\u0026rsquo;t work. On http://tychoish.com/blog/, and pages lower in that hierarchy the menu in the top corner has two links to http://tychoish.com, when logically the top link, should be to http://tychoish.com/blog. I think that the first issue should work itself out as there get to be more posts in the system (coming soon enough). And I think the second is a result of me using the blog with the ID #1, as the primary blog. A little tweaking should get me around this.\nBut, and here\u0026rsquo;s the interactive portion of the program (One of the things that was getting me down, before about how my blog entries were too\u0026hellip; static, was that I was no longer asking questions in my entries. This is amends to that.) So if I have to drop specific permalinks on the home page do you think that would be a really bad thing?\nI thoughts so.\nAnyway, I have writing things to do. And showering. Oh Showering. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to go. I\u0026rsquo;ll post another entry today, I promise.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/scattered/","summary":"So--knock on wood--the good feelings remain with me. I have no sense of how I\u0026rsquo;ll be doing come Wednesday/Thursday morning, but for now I\u0026rsquo;m doing well. But I can\u0026rsquo;t argue with success\u0026hellip; much.\nI got nearly everything on my todo list done yesterday, and perhaps a bit more. Weird. Now I just need to be able to do that some more.\nI also did a little bit of reading in the Tiptree. I\u0026rsquo;m finally hooked on this novella. I\u0026rsquo;m reading The Starry Night which is a collection of three novellas/long short stories, and it\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of fun. Except that you have to \u0026ldquo;get into\u0026rdquo; the book, what amounts to three times. (I\u0026rsquo;m on the middle one.) I also read the beginning of \u0026ldquo;The Hose Beyond Your Sky,\u0026rdquo; by Benjamin Rosenbaum which I realized that I had heard on Escape Pod and I enjoyed it both times.\nThere was also some work that I did on TealArt.","title":"Scattered"},{"content":"I read or heard somewhere that Tolkien, when he was writing the Lord of the Rings (which he, not surprisingly approached as a singular book, rather than three) he would start writing until he got stuck on something. And then, he would take it out and start again from the beginning. The end result being, by the time he got to the end: it was really done.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how true this is, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly a \u0026ldquo;recommended\u0026rdquo; method of writing, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s something meritous about this kind of approach, possibly on the shorter end of the spectrum.\nAfter all, most short stories are, well rather short, and from my experience, sometimes starting a-fresh might be more time-economical than trying to salvage some husk of your original work. It might also solve the problem of wooden characters in the first third of your piece (because it usually takes people too long to really get to know and expect characters.)\nI also know that this sort of \u0026ldquo;fresh start\u0026rdquo; mentality should of course be balanced with a strong impulse to finish things, and I think this is where my own short fiction gets tied up. I have three-four short fiction pieces lying around, and none of them have good endings. Or really any endings. It\u0026rsquo;s important to finish things, and so maybe the \u0026ldquo;start over if you get stuck\u0026rdquo; method would only serve to complicate this.\nWe should also mention that Tolkien had a tenured position at Oxford, he was in a position where success as a fiction writer didn\u0026rsquo;t (and really couldn\u0026rsquo;t) have been confused with prolific-ness.\nAnyway.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/starting-fresh/","summary":"I read or heard somewhere that Tolkien, when he was writing the Lord of the Rings (which he, not surprisingly approached as a singular book, rather than three) he would start writing until he got stuck on something. And then, he would take it out and start again from the beginning. The end result being, by the time he got to the end: it was really done.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how true this is, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly a \u0026ldquo;recommended\u0026rdquo; method of writing, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s something meritous about this kind of approach, possibly on the shorter end of the spectrum.\nAfter all, most short stories are, well rather short, and from my experience, sometimes starting a-fresh might be more time-economical than trying to salvage some husk of your original work. It might also solve the problem of wooden characters in the first third of your piece (because it usually takes people too long to really get to know and expect characters.","title":"Starting Fresh"},{"content":"Ok, here it is: the long awaited first piece from my little fiction project. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how well it will go over in this form, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth a shot. Many of the names and important words will be linked, in the final version, to pages that elaborate and explain characters. Also there are a couple of links that go nowhere in this page, will be linked to other stories and pieces. Including the \u0026ldquo;letter,\u0026rdquo; which is mentioned.\nThis snip, is set in the late 24th century, aboard an explorer/survey ship bound for a nearby star system at very fast (sub-light) speeds.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all below the fold\u0026hellip;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh hey, what brings you this way, Stu?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You know, I was just wrapped up in what I was doing and had to come over and check on you, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to get too excited and blow something up.\u0026rdquo; Stuart was grinning, expecting Frank to laugh at the joke. He didn\u0026rsquo;t.\n\u0026ldquo;Right,\u0026rdquo; Frank said. Distracted, he turned back and began to sift through another digital stack of files. \u0026ldquo;You know, if they didn\u0026rsquo;t write this system so you could make data piles, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have this problem.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s this \u0026rsquo;they\u0026rsquo; that you speak of. You wrote it--in spite of my warnings--didn\u0026rsquo;t you?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Tertiary, Stuart.\u0026rdquo; Frank sounded grumpy.\n\u0026ldquo;Whatever. I\u0026rsquo;m not kidding, you seem embarrassed or shaken. You alright?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, yeah, sorry, I was just going through my files and I found a letter to my sister that I wrote right before the mission started. Never sent it.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You don\u0026rsquo;t talk much of her. What\u0026rsquo;d it say?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Not important.\u0026rdquo; Frank was quick shut down that direction of conversation. \u0026ldquo;We were always really different. She had settled down on one of the Io outposts, she has a family and a job as a school teacher. We didn\u0026rsquo;t talk much. Ever really, I guess,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Io? Really? That takes guts these days. You grew up on Europa?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Mostly. Dad took us to Titan pretty regularly for a few years there, and there were, of course, school trips to the other Jovian outposts. I liked Titan and traveling more more than Kate ever did, and Io is hard, but home is home it seems: for some people at least.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I suppose it is,\u0026rdquo; Stuart said. \u0026ldquo;You going to send the letter now?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t think so, I mean, I don\u0026rsquo;t really know how it would go over with her, after this long, hell with how things were going when we left, who knows if Io still has an outpost? And what\u0026rsquo; she\u0026rsquo;d be pushing 60? by now?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;No way. She can\u0026rsquo;t be that much older than you, and we haven\u0026rsquo;t been gone that long,\u0026rdquo; Stuart said. \u0026ldquo;Did you even pay attention during the relativistic physics class during the training?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You know the answer to that one. If the number matters that much then you do the math. The truth is I forgot about it until now, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t bug me much. Maybe that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s getting to me. At any rate, no matter what year it is out there, if I did send it she\u0026rsquo;ll have had a lot more life between her and when I wrote it. If she got it.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Fine, fine I just don\u0026rsquo;t want you to regret it later Frank.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Thanks. I\u0026rsquo;m fairly content with what happened before we left, but sometimes its too easy to forget that were so far out and going so fast. When I do remember, it\u0026rsquo;s kind of jarring. Creapy that it can still happen. \u0026lsquo;Suppose it\u0026rsquo;s one of these things about being on an Explorer Ship that you just have to talk about, Right?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Right.\u0026rdquo; Stuart said. \u0026ldquo;We all know about that.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;So, hows that \u0026lsquo;project\u0026rsquo; of yours coming along?\u0026rdquo; Stuart asked, after a moment.\n\u0026ldquo;You know, slowly,\u0026rdquo; Frank said. \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m still not going to tell you about it yet, so don\u0026rsquo;t think you\u0026rsquo;re getting smarter or anything.\u0026rdquo;\nStuart sighed. \u0026ldquo;Whatever, everything on this ship is going slowly--\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;--except the ship,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;--so why should I expect you to be any different?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Because you don\u0026rsquo;t have any patience for waiting?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;d think I could have discovered this before we left?\u0026rdquo; Stuart asked.\n\u0026ldquo;What, and deprive me of a friend, for next twenty years?\u0026rdquo; Frank asked.\nStuart flinched.\n\u0026ldquo;Just go start you\u0026rsquo;re own surprise project, it\u0026rsquo;ll keep you busy, me entertained and remember that it\u0026rsquo;s the chance of a lifetime.\u0026rdquo; Frank\u0026rsquo;s words echoed the recruiting videos for the Explorer Corps that began airing right as they were leaving the system.\n\u0026ldquo;More like a chance for a lifetime,\u0026rdquo; Stuart quipped. \u0026ldquo;Maybe you\u0026rsquo;re right, though, I need to come up with something,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I will tell you some day, you know\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Of course,\u0026rdquo; Stuart said, \u0026ldquo;But I should jet, I\u0026rsquo;m still on duty after all, and so are you.\u0026rdquo; He stood up and made for the door \u0026ldquo;Catch you around,\u0026rdquo; he said before he walked out.\n\u0026ldquo;Weirdo,\u0026rdquo; Frank said under his breath. He was smiling again. \u0026ldquo;Back to the program.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/breakout-messages-lost/","summary":"Ok, here it is: the long awaited first piece from my little fiction project. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how well it will go over in this form, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth a shot. Many of the names and important words will be linked, in the final version, to pages that elaborate and explain characters. Also there are a couple of links that go nowhere in this page, will be linked to other stories and pieces. Including the \u0026ldquo;letter,\u0026rdquo; which is mentioned.\nThis snip, is set in the late 24th century, aboard an explorer/survey ship bound for a nearby star system at very fast (sub-light) speeds.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all below the fold\u0026hellip;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh hey, what brings you this way, Stu?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You know, I was just wrapped up in what I was doing and had to come over and check on you, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to get too excited and blow something up.\u0026rdquo; Stuart was grinning, expecting Frank to laugh at the joke.","title":"Breakout: Messages Lost"},{"content":"Hi friends. I hope that this Monday morning finds you well. I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better than I have in days, and even though I\u0026rsquo;ve been awake for almost forty minutes, I\u0026rsquo;ve already started to accomplish things. How cool is that.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t posted about my reading list lately, mostly because I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been reading. Well. I read a little in the Tiptree novel/novella series that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working through for a really long time: The Stary Rift. It\u0026rsquo;s good. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m at a low point in the story, but this one isn\u0026rsquo;t quite as good as Brightness Falls from The Air but it\u0026rsquo;s still good. Both books are set in the same world, and there\u0026rsquo;s this nifty framing story that presents all the plots as historicalized records, which I hardcore like.\nI also read a story by Greg van Eekhout \u0026ldquo;In the Late December,\u0026rdquo; which I quite enjoyed. I went through the Strange Horizon\u0026rsquo;s fiction archive and picked out all the stories by authors whose names I recognized. Mostly the folks who have made it on the Strange Horizon\u0026rsquo;s Podcast, but some others as well. Anyway. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to be working my way through those.\nI\u0026rsquo;m winding a bit of handspun off the spindle onto a nostopin (which takes for-bloody-ever, by the way). Though an end is in sight. I\u0026rsquo;m liking the spindle, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably about\u0026hellip; 4 times faster on the wheel, depending on weight. Which sounds bad but probably isn\u0026rsquo;t very.\nI posed, just before this, a little bit from this hypertext/novel *thing* that I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about, which is exciting and a little scary. Any thoughts you might have on it, would be very welcome.\nI think that\u0026rsquo;s all the news that isn\u0026rsquo;t. On the list for doing today:\nSome Email Correspondence Do some more readings. Upgrade various Wordpress installations. Work on the short story. And so forth. I\u0026rsquo;ll catch you all around.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reading-again/","summary":"Hi friends. I hope that this Monday morning finds you well. I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better than I have in days, and even though I\u0026rsquo;ve been awake for almost forty minutes, I\u0026rsquo;ve already started to accomplish things. How cool is that.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t posted about my reading list lately, mostly because I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been reading. Well. I read a little in the Tiptree novel/novella series that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working through for a really long time: The Stary Rift. It\u0026rsquo;s good. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m at a low point in the story, but this one isn\u0026rsquo;t quite as good as Brightness Falls from The Air but it\u0026rsquo;s still good. Both books are set in the same world, and there\u0026rsquo;s this nifty framing story that presents all the plots as historicalized records, which I hardcore like.\nI also read a story by Greg van Eekhout \u0026ldquo;In the Late December,\u0026rdquo; which I quite enjoyed. I went through the Strange Horizon\u0026rsquo;s fiction archive and picked out all the stories by authors whose names I recognized.","title":"Reading Again"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing a short story. It\u0026rsquo;s another descendent of Circle Games, and focuses on a a character\u0026rsquo;s reminiscence of her (limited) place in a key historical event. In some ways it\u0026rsquo;s a holocaust survival story, but this is one of those things that I\u0026rsquo;ve realized only after the fact.\nThe writing, thus far, has been all long hand, and this has helped me really get into the character--because it\u0026rsquo;s basically a journal entry. In some ways, I think I was able to be so successful at the novella, beacause the tone and structure was similar, at least in terms of it being built around journal entries.\nWhich I know you might be thinking: \u0026ldquo;but you\u0026rsquo;re a blogger, why are you writing fiction that in much the same mode that your blog is written in?\u0026rdquo; Ah, I say, but I think this is actually a pretty crucial part of my project.\nWithout giving too much away, as I\u0026rsquo;ve probably said, I\u0026rsquo;m tearing myself to shreds in an attempt to go to graduate school to study how people internalize and process history and historical narratives. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty good about focusing on this as a unifying theme for my fiction writing1, I\u0026rsquo;ve been less successful at recognizing the links between my academic fascination/methodological focus on individuals' in-the-moment production of these stories. By exploring journal forms and epistletory(?) modes, I think I\u0026rsquo;m able to bring things all together in a way that I really like.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to the new (2007) Linda Thompson Album Versatile Heart, and it\u0026rsquo;s really really good. The title cut is great. \u0026ldquo;Katy Cruel\u0026rdquo; is amazing (but it always is), and there\u0026rsquo;s something really divine about \u0026ldquo;Whiskey, Bob Copper, and Me.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m also geeking out on some old School Richard Thompson, particularly \u0026ldquo;The Dimming of the Day,\u0026rdquo; from Pour Down Like Silver, which all around great. I\u0026rsquo;m moving back to a more obsessive engagement with a few songs, which is something that the \u0026ldquo;random setting\u0026rdquo; on the ipod had beaten out of me And it\u0026rsquo;s comfortable.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m writing long hand, and I\u0026rsquo;m getting things done on TealArt, which is not yet perfect, but is damn close: I think it\u0026rsquo;s safe to say that I\u0026rsquo;m beyond my previous \u0026ldquo;block\u0026rdquo; on this project\u0026hellip;\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m back. Alert the news.\nOnward and Upward!\nOne of the reasons that Circle Games didn\u0026rsquo;t really work out the first time, is that the entire story is built around some ill-gotten notion of loyalty and social organization. While it\u0026rsquo;s not as bad as that description would suggest, I realized while I was writing--or shortly after--that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t really particularly interested in this subject on some larger scale. So it\u0026rsquo;s good that I have something new to focus my attention on.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/versatile-heart/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing a short story. It\u0026rsquo;s another descendent of Circle Games, and focuses on a a character\u0026rsquo;s reminiscence of her (limited) place in a key historical event. In some ways it\u0026rsquo;s a holocaust survival story, but this is one of those things that I\u0026rsquo;ve realized only after the fact.\nThe writing, thus far, has been all long hand, and this has helped me really get into the character--because it\u0026rsquo;s basically a journal entry. In some ways, I think I was able to be so successful at the novella, beacause the tone and structure was similar, at least in terms of it being built around journal entries.\nWhich I know you might be thinking: \u0026ldquo;but you\u0026rsquo;re a blogger, why are you writing fiction that in much the same mode that your blog is written in?\u0026rdquo; Ah, I say, but I think this is actually a pretty crucial part of my project.","title":"versatile heart"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve done a few things differently today, which leads me to think that I am on the road to some sort of recovery. Still stressed, and I think what at happened is that I\u0026rsquo;m finally realizing how little there is to do, and in light of this, I\u0026rsquo;m able to let go a little.\nIn any case I\u0026rsquo;ve done a few new and interesting things. I borrowed a very nice drop spindle from my mother. This means, despite my annoyance with knitting at the moment (and my hand pain/ache), I now have some sort of craft thing that I can do upstairs. Also, spindling is fun, if slow. Someone\u0026rsquo;s going to get a damn nice skein of lace weight at some point. Drop-spindling is something new for me, really (I\u0026rsquo;ve done it as a learning experience, but never--really--with the intention of making something), and I think I need new things in my life at the moment.\nI also finished spinning the singles for my second 80-90 gram skein of fingering/sport weight yarn on the spinning wheel. Good stuff. I bought 2 pounds of BFL at the Yarn Barn in December, and I\u0026rsquo;m hoping that I\u0026rsquo;ll spin through what I have by the time my wheel comes.\nAlso, I did some tweaking to tealArt, and I think I have the design almost nailed down. You\u0026rsquo;ll notice a few changes around the edges on tychoish, which unifies both sites. I\u0026rsquo;m still hoping that dave will design me a nice little 100 pixel wide banner for the top corner of tA. In any case, I feel like this project is back on the rails, and in control: which--like so many things--it hadn\u0026rsquo;t for quite some time.\nThe main thing to do now is get the main page of TealArt.com to work and function in a really cool way that will hopefully make the site function as a more cohesive whole. While I really like what I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to do with tychoish.com and I\u0026rsquo;m generally pleased with the response, I think long term I want to produce a site that isn\u0026rsquo;t so ego centric. There are things that I want to do with this internet-stuff that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to be all about me. Just saying.\nSo doing these things is pretty productive for me, and it\u0026rsquo;s a change of pace, which is what I think I need at the moment.\nAnyway, hunger strikes.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/different-modes/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve done a few things differently today, which leads me to think that I am on the road to some sort of recovery. Still stressed, and I think what at happened is that I\u0026rsquo;m finally realizing how little there is to do, and in light of this, I\u0026rsquo;m able to let go a little.\nIn any case I\u0026rsquo;ve done a few new and interesting things. I borrowed a very nice drop spindle from my mother. This means, despite my annoyance with knitting at the moment (and my hand pain/ache), I now have some sort of craft thing that I can do upstairs. Also, spindling is fun, if slow. Someone\u0026rsquo;s going to get a damn nice skein of lace weight at some point. Drop-spindling is something new for me, really (I\u0026rsquo;ve done it as a learning experience, but never--really--with the intention of making something), and I think I need new things in my life at the moment.","title":"different modes"},{"content":"Recent observations:\nI was listening to one of the Tor Podcasts, with Patrick Nelson Hayden and he said a couple of interesting things:\nMost science fiction magazines have readerships between 10 and 20k na month. The blog he runs with his wife and others, Making Light, which he described as a B-list blog, gets more than that.\nHe described the BoingBoing ad revenue as being something like 6-figures a month. Egad.\nThis has gotten me thinking about my own traffic (which is no where near that good. No where. For the record.) This is particularly relevant as I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about the TealArt revision process. The questions that I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over of late about what constitutes success, about audience development, and what constitutes quorum for \u0026ldquo;participatory culture\u0026rdquo; (ie, at what point is there enough momentum, for the force of the community to really be felt.)\nMy left index finger needs a break. Hardcore. I could probably sew up the hem on this sweater, but I\u0026rsquo;m laying off the knitting. My wrist doesn\u0026rsquo;t hurt that much, which means I can type. I think this is my body\u0026rsquo;s way of telling me that I need to reevaluate priorities and energies.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still really fucking worried in general about my interview at the end of the week. And not the \u0026ldquo;oh my god, I have 8 hours of interview this friday,\u0026rdquo; worry, more existential crap. Which makes me such an interesting blogger, I\u0026rsquo;m sure. I sure hope that there\u0026rsquo;s sanity waiting for me at the end of this process.\nThis illness which has been on the downswing since Thursday night/friday, is almost totally beat now. This is good.\nI spent some time last night perusing the John Barrowman videos on you tube. sigh I learned that he did a duet of \u0026ldquo;Night and Day\u0026rdquo; with Kevin Kline in the Cole Porter move, which I was finally able to it find on You Tube. Incredibly fun and homoerotic. This lead me down a rather deep rathole, but it was pretty enjoyable. While Night and Day is a fun song, most musicals are so not my thing. I fail as a queer guy in this regard. Not that this has proved to be a problem, but\u0026hellip;\nI officially check livejournal way more often than the people on my friends page update.\nOk, that\u0026rsquo;s all the news that\u0026rsquo;s fit to sing.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tenses/","summary":"Recent observations:\nI was listening to one of the Tor Podcasts, with Patrick Nelson Hayden and he said a couple of interesting things:\nMost science fiction magazines have readerships between 10 and 20k na month. The blog he runs with his wife and others, Making Light, which he described as a B-list blog, gets more than that.\nHe described the BoingBoing ad revenue as being something like 6-figures a month. Egad.\nThis has gotten me thinking about my own traffic (which is no where near that good. No where. For the record.) This is particularly relevant as I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about the TealArt revision process. The questions that I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over of late about what constitutes success, about audience development, and what constitutes quorum for \u0026ldquo;participatory culture\u0026rdquo; (ie, at what point is there enough momentum, for the force of the community to really be felt.)\nMy left index finger needs a break.","title":"tenses"},{"content":"I--after 3 hours of binding off a hem--am done with the knitting of the Turkish tile sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ve even sown up the hem across the back of the neck and the bottom edge (probably a large share of the sewing). This means that the sweater is almost done. Almost.\nWhile there are ways to knit hems into sweaters \u0026ldquo;as you go,\u0026rdquo; to avoid massive amounts of sewing later, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that the end result is slightly less desirable. At least as far as I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to accomplish it. So I don\u0026rsquo;t mind this sweater.\nI steamed the sweater a bit last night before going to bed, and I think this has helped my opinion of the sweater a great deal. It\u0026rsquo;s still not perfect, but I hope that by sewing down the hem I\u0026rsquo;ll start to feel better about the sweater. Here are my concerns:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a cardigan and I always screw up cardigans. they never seem to hang right somehow. \u0026hellip;this is compounded by the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t really think I look good in cardigans, and don\u0026rsquo;t have a real objection to pullovers. The back of the neck is shaped too low, and the shoulder shaping--that I felt very proud of when I was doing it--aggravates this problem. I think I have about two hours of sewing up left to do, and I want to sew clasps on, before I have time to doubt myself in this regard. I\u0026rsquo;m also thinking of adding a hood to this sweater, which might help correct this issue.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all for now. You know the drill.\n--ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/finishing/","summary":"I--after 3 hours of binding off a hem--am done with the knitting of the Turkish tile sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ve even sown up the hem across the back of the neck and the bottom edge (probably a large share of the sewing). This means that the sweater is almost done. Almost.\nWhile there are ways to knit hems into sweaters \u0026ldquo;as you go,\u0026rdquo; to avoid massive amounts of sewing later, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that the end result is slightly less desirable. At least as far as I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to accomplish it. So I don\u0026rsquo;t mind this sweater.\nI steamed the sweater a bit last night before going to bed, and I think this has helped my opinion of the sweater a great deal. It\u0026rsquo;s still not perfect, but I hope that by sewing down the hem I\u0026rsquo;ll start to feel better about the sweater. Here are my concerns:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a cardigan and I always screw up cardigans.","title":"finishing"},{"content":" I have 2 more rounds of this damned hem plus a bind off (yes I bind off hems using a stretchy bind-off.) By the time I post this I\u0026rsquo;ll have a new episode of torchwood to watch. Despite the last ep, being somewhat less than stellar. I remember a past where I would write blog posts about things. I need to start doing that again. I remember that I promised to post one of the more finished pieces of breakout. I will. soon. I was just listening to a podcast about publishing and new media. At the moment I get really excited about this sort of stuff. I want to spend a lot of time working on building TealArt into the kind of hub that I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in having. Part of me is actually sort of anxious about being so interested and inspired by this; because I\u0026rsquo;m feeling sort of \u0026ldquo;out of the loop\u0026rdquo; regarding academia at the moment\u0026hellip; Generally my anxiety level is lower than it has been, but I suppose the prototypical blogger thing to do today would be to post something sort of picturesque about theBoy (who hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a character on the blog lately.) But I am neither typical blogger, nor particularly typical in the way that I manage romance. Such is life. I still want a new computer. I\u0026rsquo;m still waiting till April or May. It\u0026rsquo;s been particularly trying today for some reason. LiveJournal is really cool. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about writing some sort of tychoish post on the subject, but haven\u0026rsquo;t really gotten around to it. LJ is, I think hard to fully grok, but I think it really acomplishes a lot of the things that were really cool about the very early Internet that I often lament like collaboration, small-town style community, and anonymous identity stuff. The premier journal for my field did a special issue on sexuality--the first since 95. I have so much stuff to claw through. Sigh. See you on the other side, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/observationing/","summary":"I have 2 more rounds of this damned hem plus a bind off (yes I bind off hems using a stretchy bind-off.) By the time I post this I\u0026rsquo;ll have a new episode of torchwood to watch. Despite the last ep, being somewhat less than stellar. I remember a past where I would write blog posts about things. I need to start doing that again. I remember that I promised to post one of the more finished pieces of breakout. I will. soon. I was just listening to a podcast about publishing and new media. At the moment I get really excited about this sort of stuff. I want to spend a lot of time working on building TealArt into the kind of hub that I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in having. Part of me is actually sort of anxious about being so interested and inspired by this; because I\u0026rsquo;m feeling sort of \u0026ldquo;out of the loop\u0026rdquo; regarding academia at the moment\u0026hellip; Generally my anxiety level is lower than it has been, but I suppose the prototypical blogger thing to do today would be to post something sort of picturesque about theBoy (who hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a character on the blog lately.","title":"Observationing"},{"content":"Hello everyone!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent most of the past couple of days being sick and knitting, well feverishly. I was totally planning to post an earlier draft of this post yesterday, but I spent all of yesterday vegging out. Better luck in the future, I guess.\nI finished the sweater/jacket/cardigan that I\u0026rsquo;ve been making recently (turkish tile,) save for the hem/border. The most notable fact about this is that I\u0026rsquo;ve acomplished this using just a touch over half of the total amount of yarn that I purchased, and I would have come in under half if the sweater hadn\u0026rsquo;t been a cardigan and/or if it hadn\u0026rsquo;t been more of a jacket.\nThis means that I have a lot of leftovers and can probably get away with buying less yarn in the future. It also means that my stash is very productive, because all my leftovers are useable. I think I could spend 60 bucks and have enough yarn for 3-4 sweaters. I\u0026rsquo;m excited about the prospect, and that\u0026rsquo;s most of what\u0026rsquo;s keeeping me sane throughout t he process of knitting the interminable hem.\nI thought I was clever when I decided to knit the hem in the round, without steeking (by knitting around the bottom, side, and neck edges all at once). While preferable to the other options, let me review that: this sweater is knit with fingering weight wool, the hem needs to be knit on size 0s, the front edges of this cardigan are about 30 inches long, and it\u0026rsquo;s about 40 inches around. I have a 60 inch circular needle. I am mighty, but god it\u0026rsquo;s boring. I\u0026rsquo;ve not done a count, but I figure that there are probably about 800-1000 stitches in play at the moment. A round takes about 30 minutes\nThough I\u0026rsquo;m worried a lot about how this sweater will turn out--a lot of this has to do with my constant fear about fucking up cardigans, compounded by the fact that the sweater hasn\u0026rsquo;t been blocked yet--I\u0026rsquo;ve resolved to withhold judgment until after blocking. I do think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to run out to the fabric store this afternoon or tomorrow to get some interfacing or grosgrain ribbon to sew into the hem to give the front edge some much needed stability.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reclamation/","summary":"Hello everyone!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent most of the past couple of days being sick and knitting, well feverishly. I was totally planning to post an earlier draft of this post yesterday, but I spent all of yesterday vegging out. Better luck in the future, I guess.\nI finished the sweater/jacket/cardigan that I\u0026rsquo;ve been making recently (turkish tile,) save for the hem/border. The most notable fact about this is that I\u0026rsquo;ve acomplished this using just a touch over half of the total amount of yarn that I purchased, and I would have come in under half if the sweater hadn\u0026rsquo;t been a cardigan and/or if it hadn\u0026rsquo;t been more of a jacket.\nThis means that I have a lot of leftovers and can probably get away with buying less yarn in the future. It also means that my stash is very productive, because all my leftovers are useable. I think I could spend 60 bucks and have enough yarn for 3-4 sweaters.","title":"Reclamation"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s a new day. New things are going to happen.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also getting some sort of bodily illness. It\u0026rsquo;s probably stress-related, because it\u0026rsquo;s way too early in the season for it to be at all allergy related. These things happen, and everyone around me is very much \u0026ldquo;ok, lets take a tactical approach to getting you better, and here\u0026rsquo;s what needs to happen,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of like, \u0026ldquo;meh, this too shall pass, this is why we have immune systems.\u0026rdquo; And it is. And it will.\nSleeve Update: I about have six more inches until I\u0026rsquo;m done. Those of you who are familiar with my knitting habits will probably be aware that I\u0026rsquo;ve made nearly every sleeve for the past several years from the top (shoulder) down (to the cuff.) This means that this is the quick(er) part of sleeve knitting. It might get tedious because I have to switch to double points. I should be done with this soon. Then I can start the hem/trim and then work on another sleeve for a different sweater.\nI realized that I have neglected my crit-group for a week, so I must put on the writing cap for a little while today. I\u0026rsquo;ve been out of the writing rhythm for long enough (a week? two?) that I need to sit down and do some serious planning/outlining and brainstorming. Which I think is going to be so interesting for you all. end irony.\nI also haven\u0026rsquo;t read non-academic anything in slightly longer. My approach on this is going to be, I think, a very bottom up sort of approach. Do some reading, do some planning, do some crit work, have finished sweater, and go from there.\nOk. I\u0026rsquo;m out. Have a good day. And I am still thinking about posting a bit of the breakout story that I have written thus far. Just for grins, but probably not today anyway.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-new-feeling/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s a new day. New things are going to happen.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also getting some sort of bodily illness. It\u0026rsquo;s probably stress-related, because it\u0026rsquo;s way too early in the season for it to be at all allergy related. These things happen, and everyone around me is very much \u0026ldquo;ok, lets take a tactical approach to getting you better, and here\u0026rsquo;s what needs to happen,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of like, \u0026ldquo;meh, this too shall pass, this is why we have immune systems.\u0026rdquo; And it is. And it will.\nSleeve Update: I about have six more inches until I\u0026rsquo;m done. Those of you who are familiar with my knitting habits will probably be aware that I\u0026rsquo;ve made nearly every sleeve for the past several years from the top (shoulder) down (to the cuff.) This means that this is the quick(er) part of sleeve knitting. It might get tedious because I have to switch to double points.","title":"A New Feeling"},{"content":"I have been remiss, I fear, in my blogging of late. Really any sort of real productivity. I finally, after about a week and a half, bit the bullet and got through the some emails that I needed to get through. Not\nOn the slate for this evening: a night of Richard Thompson. There\u0026rsquo;s a concert in town and I\u0026rsquo;m going to go to it. How cool is that.\nMy knitting continues apace, and I\u0026rsquo;ve really become quite interested in that project, which is nice. I may really want to be throwing myself full bore into my writing and knitting designing, and this knitting project is really neither: But, it is fun, and I think having it languish is really getting in the way of other projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve been feeling overloaded by my knitting of late, and getting that under control will I think increase the overall quality of my well being.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also finished watching the first two seasons of Star Trek Enterprise, which I never was able to sit through before (ie. when it was on the air). I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching it while I knit of late. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out something constructive that I can say. It\u0026rsquo;s not particularly bad, it\u0026rsquo;s also not particularly good. The reason that I was interested in doing this is that I learned, somewhat after the fact that the third season was one extended story, in 26 parts or something. I really enjoy this kind of story telling, and so because I have a compulsive streak about watching old TV series in order, if possible, I\u0026rsquo;ve watched the first two episodes.\nAt some point I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll have something more coherent to say about Enterprise. I\u0026rsquo;m still searching for whatever that is.\nNot much else on the mind, I must confess. I have to run out to a meeting now, but be well, and one of these days, things will return to normal around here.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/more-snow/","summary":"I have been remiss, I fear, in my blogging of late. Really any sort of real productivity. I finally, after about a week and a half, bit the bullet and got through the some emails that I needed to get through. Not\nOn the slate for this evening: a night of Richard Thompson. There\u0026rsquo;s a concert in town and I\u0026rsquo;m going to go to it. How cool is that.\nMy knitting continues apace, and I\u0026rsquo;ve really become quite interested in that project, which is nice. I may really want to be throwing myself full bore into my writing and knitting designing, and this knitting project is really neither: But, it is fun, and I think having it languish is really getting in the way of other projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve been feeling overloaded by my knitting of late, and getting that under control will I think increase the overall quality of my well being.","title":"More Snow"},{"content":"Curses!\nI have become enthrawled with my knitting, and other fiber persuits and haven\u0026rsquo;t done much else in the past two days.\nStrangely, I\u0026rsquo;m not overly saddened by this. Because:\nI finished a sleeve!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on two large sweaters for months, and I have lots of sleeves to knit, and it seemed that all I was doing was knitting sleeves which never seemed to grow, and were constant drag on my consciousness and mood.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s hard to explain that you\u0026rsquo;re feeling kind of down, because you have so many sleeves to knit. Alas.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve finished one sleeve, and done the hard part of the next sleeve. And it\u0026rsquo;s flying. I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll grow to hate this at some point, but for the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m liking it. This sweater still needs a mamoth border/trim, but that\u0026rsquo;s only six rounds (plus a few inches of hem,) at any rate that feels pretty close.\nAlso this weekend I spun an almost balanced 85 gram (3 oz) skein of bluefaced-leicester wool. 2-ply. The yardage is about 195 yards. I\u0026rsquo;m pleased. And in other handspun-news: I ripped out a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;d been making out of hand-spun that had languished for too long. I think that at some point in the future, possibly this summer, I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a tomten-inspired jacket, in seed stitch with this yarn.\nFor those of you playing along at home that means that my current list of in-progress knitting is:\nThe fine gauge grey sweater that needs: 2 sleeves, 1 collar (with plackets), and 1 shoulder saddle. The turkish tile sweater that I\u0026rsquo;m currently focusing on finishing. The Morocco sweater (that\u0026rsquo;s next up in the queue) that needs 1 sleeve ripped, a collar reknit, 2 sleeves knit, and a hem. 1 pair of plain worsted weight socks. (second sock) 1 first toe up stranded sock, that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of loyalty or interest in finishing. (first sock) 1 fingering weight sock, plain. (first sock) 1 lace pi shawl on US 0s (not incredibly serious about working on this till summer.) I\u0026rsquo;m having new ideas about sweaters that I want to make and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of stuck with a bunch of projects that very much reflect the kind of thing that I wanted to make last semester, and not so much with the direction that I want to work on in the future. This is likely always the case, but when I only work on one sweater at a time (and if I work on two, one is plain knitting and the other is pattern), it\u0026rsquo;s easier to finish a project before my tastes move on significantly.\nAnyway, I have a class to teach this evening, and some other things on my plate, but hopefully I\u0026rsquo;ll get some writing in.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/weekend-update-2/","summary":"Curses!\nI have become enthrawled with my knitting, and other fiber persuits and haven\u0026rsquo;t done much else in the past two days.\nStrangely, I\u0026rsquo;m not overly saddened by this. Because:\nI finished a sleeve!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on two large sweaters for months, and I have lots of sleeves to knit, and it seemed that all I was doing was knitting sleeves which never seemed to grow, and were constant drag on my consciousness and mood.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s hard to explain that you\u0026rsquo;re feeling kind of down, because you have so many sleeves to knit. Alas.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve finished one sleeve, and done the hard part of the next sleeve. And it\u0026rsquo;s flying. I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll grow to hate this at some point, but for the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m liking it. This sweater still needs a mamoth border/trim, but that\u0026rsquo;s only six rounds (plus a few inches of hem,) at any rate that feels pretty close.","title":"Weekend Update"},{"content":"While I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve been any more productive in the second half of the week as I was in the first half, I don\u0026rsquo;t feel as bad about that. Somehow.\nThings are continuing to progress without much news. A quick (I hope) run down:\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t really knit very much and I haven\u0026rsquo;t made a subversion commit in days which is a symbol of minimal acomplishment. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working which is cool. It\u0026rsquo;s becoming apparent that I need to start looking for a job, and current yarn store gig looks like it might switch to a one-day a week plus weekends, gig. A few things are pinned on graduate school acceptance. If it happens, g-d willing then I think I have a day job lined up for the summer. If it doesn\u0026rsquo;t, well, drawing board.\nIn other news, I think I\u0026rsquo;m nearing compleation on the sleeve that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a lot this week. I\u0026rsquo;m probably\u0026hellip; an inch and a half from being I can\u0026rsquo;t tell. When I hold it up to my body, it looks like 1.5 inches. When I lay it out on the floor against other sweaters I--variously--find that I need to need 4.5-6 more inches.This is complicated by the fact that the neck steek hasn\u0026rsquo;t been cut. and the sweater won\u0026rsquo;t lay right as a result.\nI\u0026rsquo;m worried if I have to knit more than say 2 more inches that the sleeve is going to be too narrow. Which is like my biggest fear in sweater knitting. My thought is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time this weekend (after the next inch and a half) knitting the hem and edge of the sweater so that I can try it on and settle this debate for once and for all.\nIn other news. Not much. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch this weekend, I promise.\nCheers, tycho\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/friday-night-dump/","summary":"While I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve been any more productive in the second half of the week as I was in the first half, I don\u0026rsquo;t feel as bad about that. Somehow.\nThings are continuing to progress without much news. A quick (I hope) run down:\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t really knit very much and I haven\u0026rsquo;t made a subversion commit in days which is a symbol of minimal acomplishment. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working which is cool. It\u0026rsquo;s becoming apparent that I need to start looking for a job, and current yarn store gig looks like it might switch to a one-day a week plus weekends, gig. A few things are pinned on graduate school acceptance. If it happens, g-d willing then I think I have a day job lined up for the summer. If it doesn\u0026rsquo;t, well, drawing board.\nIn other news, I think I\u0026rsquo;m nearing compleation on the sleeve that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a lot this week.","title":"Friday night dump"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of news to post. Maybe that\u0026rsquo;s a good sign. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better, I think.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a shame I spent all of my free time in the last few days feeling so crummy: at least I made some knitting progress. The good news is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be well groomed (haircut in a few), and fed (just finished breakfast), and I\u0026rsquo;ll have run an important errand before work. So rock on.\nI present you with a youTube gem:\nThis is a video of three men singing in a doorway, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it. The song is \u0026ldquo;Sally Free and Easy\u0026rdquo; which is a Cyril Tawney song, but my dad (and I seem to agree that it\u0026rsquo;s a very Bert Jansch sort of song.) Anyway, what\u0026rsquo;s remarkable is that the guy on the right is none other than the amazing \u0026ldquo;Nic Jones.\u0026rdquo; Nic Jones was/is an amazing guitar player and singer who stopped performing in the early (?) eighties after sustaining rather serious injuries in a car accident, this is made even more tragic by virtue of the fact that the bulk of--and arguably--his best albums1 have been held hostage by a record company determine to not rerelease them to CD.\nSigh.\nAnyway, it\u0026rsquo;s good to see him singing. It\u0026rsquo;s good to hear such a cool song. And it\u0026rsquo;s good to see that the kind of singing that I most enjoy (little groups of people singing in doorways) is alive and well. It\u0026rsquo;s something that can\u0026rsquo;t really be recorded, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to know that it\u0026rsquo;s still around.\nThe \u0026ldquo;Noah\u0026rsquo;s Arc Trap\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;From a Devil to A Stranger\u0026rdquo; from 1977 and \u0026lsquo;78, I believe. Amazing pieces of work. Amazing stuff.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sally-free-and-easy/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of news to post. Maybe that\u0026rsquo;s a good sign. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better, I think.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a shame I spent all of my free time in the last few days feeling so crummy: at least I made some knitting progress. The good news is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be well groomed (haircut in a few), and fed (just finished breakfast), and I\u0026rsquo;ll have run an important errand before work. So rock on.\nI present you with a youTube gem:\nThis is a video of three men singing in a doorway, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it. The song is \u0026ldquo;Sally Free and Easy\u0026rdquo; which is a Cyril Tawney song, but my dad (and I seem to agree that it\u0026rsquo;s a very Bert Jansch sort of song.) Anyway, what\u0026rsquo;s remarkable is that the guy on the right is none other than the amazing \u0026ldquo;Nic Jones.\u0026rdquo; Nic Jones was/is an amazing guitar player and singer who stopped performing in the early (?","title":"Sally Free and Easy"},{"content":"Note: I meant to post this yesterday, but neglected to hit the post button. Apparently. Here it is for archival purposes. I\u0026rsquo;ll have something more contemporary, in a little bit.--tg\nWell. I just wanted to post a quick little something, because it\u0026rsquo;s what I do, and I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have time for more.\nThis whole \u0026ldquo;hurry up and wait\u0026rdquo; for notifications from graduate schools I think is really getting to me. I\u0026rsquo;m having a hard time concentrating on anything particularly meaningful, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t had work in a while to structure my time. And one thing after another.\nThe end result: I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been able to concentrate on anything terribly complex in days. So, I\u0026rsquo;ve resolved myself to knitting, and spinning, consuming media (podcasts, television, etc.) and just waiting it out. Unlike many of anxiety producing things in our lives, this is something that I really truly have no control over.\nOn the upside, I\u0026rsquo;ve made great strides with my knitting, and I\u0026rsquo;m spinning BFL 2ply, which looks really nice, if a bit boring (but hopefully someone will dye the yarn once it\u0026rsquo;s yarn.) And I\u0026rsquo;m just chugging a long.\nI think my main project of the moment is getting the new tealArt site up and running. It\u0026rsquo;s mostly pretty good, but I do have some work left to do that I\u0026rsquo;m slowly clawing away at. Lets not be surprised if I have a number of sites that look a lot like tychoish.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also started to do some drafting long hand, and that seems to be the only way that I can get output managed at the moment. Though not ideal, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty good, and the truth is that writing with my pen--I\u0026rsquo;ll write something about it at some point when I\u0026rsquo;m in better shape--is a really pleasurable experience, and I\u0026rsquo;m having fun doing things a little different.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m still alive. Hope you are too. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wedndesdy-checkin/","summary":"Note: I meant to post this yesterday, but neglected to hit the post button. Apparently. Here it is for archival purposes. I\u0026rsquo;ll have something more contemporary, in a little bit.--tg\nWell. I just wanted to post a quick little something, because it\u0026rsquo;s what I do, and I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have time for more.\nThis whole \u0026ldquo;hurry up and wait\u0026rdquo; for notifications from graduate schools I think is really getting to me. I\u0026rsquo;m having a hard time concentrating on anything particularly meaningful, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t had work in a while to structure my time. And one thing after another.\nThe end result: I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been able to concentrate on anything terribly complex in days. So, I\u0026rsquo;ve resolved myself to knitting, and spinning, consuming media (podcasts, television, etc.) and just waiting it out. Unlike many of anxiety producing things in our lives, this is something that I really truly have no control over.","title":"Wedndesdy Checkin"},{"content":"Just the usual tycho garen journal post.\nI went dancing last night. My parents run an--actually pretty sizeable--dance group on mondays and I go from time to time, because the people don\u0026rsquo;t suck\nOk Rant about dance politics. There are dancers who read this so feel free to comment. Generally dance groups have pretty sucky interpersonal politics. Or at least all the ones I seem to have been a part of recently, do. There\u0026rsquo;s something about confusing the kinetic connection of dance with actual sentiment, that brings out the socially inept and emotionally stunted. Which is fine, if you don\u0026rsquo;t have to interact much outside of the dancing. But inevitably you do, and it all bleeds into each other, because dancing is intensely social. sigh Anyway. Clif notes versions, many groups that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in recently/and am still in, suck: this one doesn\u0026rsquo;t.\nI thought I failed at shocking my sleep schedule a bit. I got some good knitting done. My project is to move to a more 10:30-6:00 schedule. My body really wants 7 hours of sleep, and I have a hard time pulling myself up if I try and constrict it too much. A really hard time. The post title refers to the fact that was able to only sleep six hours\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m just going to go with the flow and go to bed earlier.\nI got a lot of knitting done last night. Which is good. Nothing completed, of course, but these things happen. Again, pictures wouldn\u0026rsquo;t communicate very much new, so sorry. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a sleeve and a sock.\nI also got some spinning done last night. I want to do some conventional three-plying because I suck at Navajo plying, but for now I\u0026rsquo;m just going to work on some two ply, until I get my wheel (which has been ordered). And, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing wrong with two ply, and I\u0026rsquo;m good at it. It\u0026rsquo;s good to be good at it.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing. Not even a lot of editing. Thanks, and welcome to all the people from the feminist science fiction blog.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know what to say about that other than \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about it.\u0026rdquo; And with luck, this too shall pass.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/now-six/","summary":"Just the usual tycho garen journal post.\nI went dancing last night. My parents run an--actually pretty sizeable--dance group on mondays and I go from time to time, because the people don\u0026rsquo;t suck\nOk Rant about dance politics. There are dancers who read this so feel free to comment. Generally dance groups have pretty sucky interpersonal politics. Or at least all the ones I seem to have been a part of recently, do. There\u0026rsquo;s something about confusing the kinetic connection of dance with actual sentiment, that brings out the socially inept and emotionally stunted. Which is fine, if you don\u0026rsquo;t have to interact much outside of the dancing. But inevitably you do, and it all bleeds into each other, because dancing is intensely social. sigh Anyway. Clif notes versions, many groups that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in recently/and am still in, suck: this one doesn\u0026rsquo;t.\nI thought I failed at shocking my sleep schedule a bit.","title":"Now, Six"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a journal entry. I\u0026rsquo;ve used headings to facilitate your moving through the topics if you really don\u0026rsquo;t want to hear about my attempts to sleep less, or the knitting, or whatever.\nSleep So, my body was really really intent upon the whole 11-7am sleeping schedule. Really intent. This maps pretty well onto when it gets really light in my room, and I\u0026rsquo;ve trained my body to wake up when it gets light out. I think if I\u0026rsquo;m going to zap my sleep schedule again, I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to use an afternoon nap. I really just want to sleep like an hour less, and shave that off the morning. Sigh. Well, we make do with what we\u0026rsquo;re given, right?\nKnitting This is why I don\u0026rsquo;t make a very good knit-blogger. I knit small things, and I often get cranky about my knitting.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still ripping out the sleeve, I haven\u0026rsquo;t started, but it\u0026rsquo;s there in a pile in the corner, and I\u0026rsquo;ve already moved on to knitting a sleeve on the tile sweater and the tedious part of that is done. So I just have to continue on knitting this sleeve for about 16 inches and then knit a short cuff.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I need to finish both of my sweaters in progress before I start another sweater. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to be focusing on knitting like gangbusters this week to try and finish the sleeve. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping.\nIf I decide that I need another project, I\u0026rsquo;m going to restrict myself to socks. I made a plain sock yesterday, mostly while watching live music. It was good. I have the next toe started.\nWriting Things transpiring as reported here regarding the editing process. My goal for this week is to avoid feeling stuck by this process. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to post a little snip today or tomorrow here. There\u0026rsquo;ll be a \u0026ldquo;breakout\u0026rdquo; tag if you\u0026rsquo;re interested.\nI think I am going to try some longhand writing, because that\u0026rsquo;s fun, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been doing enough of that.\nAcademia Academic things have been taking a lot of my brain cycles in the past few days. I\u0026rsquo;m waiting on the reply of an important email, which is stressful. This whole being stuck and thus prevented from making a decision--any decision--sucks. I look forward to returning to being a human being again.\nI read a number of articles this week in my field that were very very interesting, but sort of annoyingly quantitative. While I tend to walk in circles where I am the most quantitate person in the (metaphorical) room, I forget sometimes, how not quantative I am.\nI mean don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, inferential statistics have a lot of power for detecting small (but important) effects and relationships, and I do enjoy the way that good data can allow you to make relatively definitive, albeit narrow, statements of fact. \u0026ldquo;This is happening.\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;This doesn\u0026rsquo;t happen.\u0026rdquo;\nAt the same time, there are situations where this kind of approach cannot be particularly effective, particularly since there are lots of variables that social scientist can\u0026rsquo;t (and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to) manipulate experimentally, and in these situations, the quantative approach fails at being both definitive (because of procedure) and descriptive (because of epistemic values.) And it just makes me ornery.\nGreat. Another thing in my life to be angsty about.\nHave a good day. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch. I swear.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/morning-monday/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a journal entry. I\u0026rsquo;ve used headings to facilitate your moving through the topics if you really don\u0026rsquo;t want to hear about my attempts to sleep less, or the knitting, or whatever.\nSleep So, my body was really really intent upon the whole 11-7am sleeping schedule. Really intent. This maps pretty well onto when it gets really light in my room, and I\u0026rsquo;ve trained my body to wake up when it gets light out. I think if I\u0026rsquo;m going to zap my sleep schedule again, I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to use an afternoon nap. I really just want to sleep like an hour less, and shave that off the morning. Sigh. Well, we make do with what we\u0026rsquo;re given, right?\nKnitting This is why I don\u0026rsquo;t make a very good knit-blogger. I knit small things, and I often get cranky about my knitting.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still ripping out the sleeve, I haven\u0026rsquo;t started, but it\u0026rsquo;s there in a pile in the corner, and I\u0026rsquo;ve already moved on to knitting a sleeve on the tile sweater and the tedious part of that is done.","title":"Morning, Monday"},{"content":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t write yesterday. I didn\u0026rsquo;t even write a blog post (which you already know, but I was just underscoring.) But I did edit, and that was a victory. What follows is a reflection on what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to for the past few days, because. I haven\u0026rsquo;t done this in a few days and I feel out of touch.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I need to rip back, damn near the whole sleeve of the morocco sweater. This is because I have nearly enough length for the sleeve and I have 50 rows of the pattern left and the sleeve is still 7-8 inches wide (so 14-16 inches around.) For those playing along at home, I like my armholes to be between 9 and 10 inches long (so 18-20 inches around.) That\u0026rsquo;s not enough decreasing, and it\u0026rsquo;s not something I can just rip back a little to correct. To be fair, this is a jacket so the armholes have to be a little longer, which is why I didn\u0026rsquo;t catch the problem sooner.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t bring myself to rip it out quite yet, so I\u0026rsquo;ve moved on to knitting the turkish tile, which I\u0026rsquo;m really enjoying. I had a lot of \u0026ldquo;knitting back and forth in color-work short rows\u0026rdquo; to shape the top of the sleeves and the shoulders.\nWhile I think the \u0026ldquo;tile,\u0026rdquo; is a good sweater and I really liked the pattern, and it\u0026rsquo;ll fill a niche in my wardrobe, there are a couple of things that bug be a little bit about the pattern: I was hoping for something that looked a little bit darker, and I\u0026rsquo;m just not sure that I\u0026rsquo;m absolutly love this sweater the way I like some sweaters.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t had a sweater like that in a while, but these things happen, and it\u0026rsquo;s true that these sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;m working on will turn out. I just the the feeling that I\u0026rsquo;ve gone an entire year without knitting a sweater that I really really like.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m having an existential crisis and my knitting isn\u0026rsquo;t immune.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t get any writing done yesterday, but I was able to help a friend out with his computer (good!) and I got some editing done. I\u0026rsquo;ve both started a pile of hard copy edits on the novella that I\u0026rsquo;m progressing through steadily, and I have two sections/pages of the hypertext that I\u0026rsquo;m pleased with enough to sort of let go of for now. I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably post them here in the next few days, just because some publication is a good thing, and I need to start getting my fiction \u0026ldquo;out there\u0026rdquo; even if it is just on the \u0026lsquo;blog.\nThe suck-y thing about editing like this is that its really tiring work, and you don\u0026rsquo;t have very much to show for it. Like \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve just spent an hour annotating three pages and now, once I go through it again at the computer, which will take another significant portion of time,\u0026rdquo; then they maybe won\u0026rsquo;t suck as much. Because the editing process must be a sort of private affair, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to recognize this kind of work as part of \u0026ldquo;being productive.\u0026rdquo;\nOther than that there isn\u0026rsquo;t much. I think I need to zap my sleep schedule again tonight: my body has gotten too comfortable with the 11:30-7:45 routine, and that\u0026rsquo;s not where I\u0026rsquo;d like it. Though in the grad scheme of things that\u0026rsquo;s better than the 12:30-9:00 that I had been stuck in for weeks before. If I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to get in bed at 10 and read (or write longhand) for a bit before I go to bed, I\u0026rsquo;m going to try sleeping 3-6, in an effort to shock myself into something more reasonable. The knitting time will be nice, and I think if I went for a walk or something midday it might help reinforce things.\nMaybe I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about these things too much.\nTime to feign productivity.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/editing-hell/","summary":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t write yesterday. I didn\u0026rsquo;t even write a blog post (which you already know, but I was just underscoring.) But I did edit, and that was a victory. What follows is a reflection on what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to for the past few days, because. I haven\u0026rsquo;t done this in a few days and I feel out of touch.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I need to rip back, damn near the whole sleeve of the morocco sweater. This is because I have nearly enough length for the sleeve and I have 50 rows of the pattern left and the sleeve is still 7-8 inches wide (so 14-16 inches around.) For those playing along at home, I like my armholes to be between 9 and 10 inches long (so 18-20 inches around.) That\u0026rsquo;s not enough decreasing, and it\u0026rsquo;s not something I can just rip back a little to correct. To be fair, this is a jacket so the armholes have to be a little longer, which is why I didn\u0026rsquo;t catch the problem sooner.","title":"Editing Hell"},{"content":" Agile Authoring: Collaborative Writing with SVN It\u0026rsquo;s a good introduction to SVN that I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably pass on to the first person that wants to write a paper with me. Also, it has the most clear description of how merging/conflict resolution happens. I think if I were collaborating with people and I\u0026rsquo;d want to use git, though. unphotographable There\u0026rsquo;s something about this site, pictures that didn\u0026rsquo;t get taken are described in 150-300 words, that strikes me as so very Internet circa late 1990s in an endearing sort of way. Poet friends might be entertained or horrified. Cant decide which. feminist sf blog - I\u0026rsquo;m going to start blogging every now and then to this group blog on feminist science fiction. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading it for many many months, and I really like what this blog does, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to contributing. It also means that that I won\u0026rsquo;t post quite so obsessively here, but then you never know. tealArt micro - the microblogging thing that I wrote about a few days ago, is almost ironed out for prime time in the new system. Now I just need to get the rest of the site setup. Late Breaking news: Positive feedback from a graduate school program that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about. Nothing definitive. More news as it develops (slowly.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/links-for-feburary-first/","summary":"Agile Authoring: Collaborative Writing with SVN It\u0026rsquo;s a good introduction to SVN that I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably pass on to the first person that wants to write a paper with me. Also, it has the most clear description of how merging/conflict resolution happens. I think if I were collaborating with people and I\u0026rsquo;d want to use git, though. unphotographable There\u0026rsquo;s something about this site, pictures that didn\u0026rsquo;t get taken are described in 150-300 words, that strikes me as so very Internet circa late 1990s in an endearing sort of way. Poet friends might be entertained or horrified. Cant decide which. feminist sf blog - I\u0026rsquo;m going to start blogging every now and then to this group blog on feminist science fiction. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading it for many many months, and I really like what this blog does, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to contributing. It also means that that I won\u0026rsquo;t post quite so obsessively here, but then you never know.","title":"links for feburary first"},{"content":"I described what I\u0026rsquo;m doing with Breakout at the moment, as an attempt to write an \u0026ldquo;object oriented novel.\u0026rdquo; Which sounds a lot like some sort of quest in search of some mcguffin ring or orb or something, but in fact I\u0026rsquo;m trying to draw a connection to the object oriented mode of computer programing.\n\u0026ldquo;Ah? What\u0026rsquo;s that?\u0026rdquo; You ask?\nWell as I understand it, object orientation encourages programers to write and deal with code as a series of objects (and classes and methods, etc, but lets just call it a bunch of units objects), that each do something, or are something. So rather than writing a program that tells the computer to do a list of things (procedurally) you set up an environment and allow the computer to respond to things that the user does. Generally speaking. Does anyone with actual coding experience want to clarify this explanation? Because I\u0026rsquo;m not going to act like I\u0026rsquo;m some sort of authority on computer science, I\u0026rsquo;m just fascinated by different ways of thinking and problem solving.\nAnyway, why is object orientation good? It means that code is more modular and easier to find and reference particular things. Because rather than have to search/grep through a long list of ordered directions (that probably has a lot of overlap, because there are certain procedures that you\u0026rsquo;re likely to have to perform more than once in non-OO code\u0026hellip;) the objects are all sorted and ready to be referenced later when you need them.\nOk, so lets extend the metaphor to the novel and to fiction.\nOur classic form is basically a long, ordered list of information which is processed linearly. Thousands of paragraphs, dozens of chapters, and an ass load of words. It\u0026rsquo;s great, when it works, it\u0026rsquo;s easy to screw up, and there are some stories that work really great in this format and some that do not.\nWhile you can write novels in a more modular sense, it\u0026rsquo;s my sense that even if people jump around a lot in a story. They pretty much write from beginning to end in at least a loose sense anyway. There are of course exceptions. But the end product is very linear (people don\u0026rsquo;t really read book-length fiction out of order even if they were written out of order.)\nMy definition of a fiction-object is pretty loose, basically a unit of story/narrative/fiction-essay that conveys a piece of meaning in the context of the story. Objects1 tend to be between about 250 and 1250 words, with the sweet spot being about 750 words, which is conveniently, the perfect length for my average scene, and the attention span of most users of the Internet for reading (where this project will be read).\nWhat will make this a novel rather than a bunch of vinegettes/scenes/chunks, is the hyperlinking and inclusions that the html and a bit of PHP will allow, with a very thin layer of \u0026ldquo;guide\u0026rdquo; material to make the pages easy to navigate. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned this before on this blog, but the basic idea is that most of the document will be stories and \u0026ldquo;writings\u0026rdquo; by the characters, but there\u0026rsquo;ll also be a little content written as parody in an encyclopedic style that will help connect things.\nAnd what\u0026rsquo;s better is that this pace is really sort of ideal. I get to spread out editing and drafting because editing is what leads to the creation of new content (\u0026ldquo;If I fix this up, I\u0026rsquo;ll need to continue this plot, linked to this phrase\u0026rdquo;) and as readers of this blog know, I\u0026rsquo;m really good at 500-800 word pieces, so it\u0026rsquo;s a comfortable length, as long as I\u0026rsquo;m not expected to tell self contained stories within those bounds: and you don\u0026rsquo;t want any chunk to be self contained, because once it is totally encapsulated, people stop reading. I suppose this is where the analogy breaks down.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s a good idea. I\u0026rsquo;ll get a chunk out to you all in a few days, I hope.\nI guess I call them \u0026ldquo;chunks\u0026rdquo; in my mind, but then I\u0026rsquo;m clearly more of a cognitive scientist than a computer scientist, no debate there.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-object-oriented-novel/","summary":"I described what I\u0026rsquo;m doing with Breakout at the moment, as an attempt to write an \u0026ldquo;object oriented novel.\u0026rdquo; Which sounds a lot like some sort of quest in search of some mcguffin ring or orb or something, but in fact I\u0026rsquo;m trying to draw a connection to the object oriented mode of computer programing.\n\u0026ldquo;Ah? What\u0026rsquo;s that?\u0026rdquo; You ask?\nWell as I understand it, object orientation encourages programers to write and deal with code as a series of objects (and classes and methods, etc, but lets just call it a bunch of units objects), that each do something, or are something. So rather than writing a program that tells the computer to do a list of things (procedurally) you set up an environment and allow the computer to respond to things that the user does. Generally speaking. Does anyone with actual coding experience want to clarify this explanation? Because I\u0026rsquo;m not going to act like I\u0026rsquo;m some sort of authority on computer science, I\u0026rsquo;m just fascinated by different ways of thinking and problem solving.","title":"the object oriented novel"},{"content":"Ok, I have to post this little interstitial post because, mostly there\u0026rsquo;s this item on my \u0026ldquo;blogging todo list\u0026rdquo; that I keep ignoring, that I really want to mention, and I think if I weren\u0026rsquo;t so damn verbose, I would have gotten to it at some point in my last post about cosmic scale plots and story structure.\nI think part of the thing at play, at least for me, is that great big, cosmic stories, even if they don\u0026rsquo;t take too long to tell are sort of the stories of my heart. I love these sort of big picture stories, where we see whole epochs shift, and watch while characters rise and fall.\nThink about the epic SF written in response to the cold war that was the core of the SF canon (and largely still is, though I think their influence has wained in the last 15 years): Dune, Foundation, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc.\nAnyway. I think another result of being too tuned into the larger story, to being too enamored of the epic, is that it becomes very very easy to start your stories too soon. Rather than start at the beginning, as far as I can tell, it\u0026rsquo;s usually better to start when things start happening. The space between the provoking instance and the sequence events that make up the store is part of what creates mystery and intrigue in a novel. It seems to me.\nThis is of course compounded that novels, when we read them almost always have a prologue of some sort, and really successful epics often eventually have prequels. But we\u0026rsquo;ll note a couple of things, 1) These are written after the original story, 2) they almost always suck, particularly in comparison to the original story.\nAlso, if people wrote better hooks, I think I might have an easier time turning off the internal editor when I\u0026rsquo;m reading stories for my crit group. Because I really want to say \u0026ldquo;just chop off the beginning, nothing else matters as much.\u0026rdquo; But I don\u0026rsquo;t, and as a result end up sending fewer critiques.\nNot that I\u0026rsquo;m particularly good at this, yet, but it\u0026rsquo;s all about learning these things, isn\u0026rsquo;t it?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/addendum-cosmic/","summary":"Ok, I have to post this little interstitial post because, mostly there\u0026rsquo;s this item on my \u0026ldquo;blogging todo list\u0026rdquo; that I keep ignoring, that I really want to mention, and I think if I weren\u0026rsquo;t so damn verbose, I would have gotten to it at some point in my last post about cosmic scale plots and story structure.\nI think part of the thing at play, at least for me, is that great big, cosmic stories, even if they don\u0026rsquo;t take too long to tell are sort of the stories of my heart. I love these sort of big picture stories, where we see whole epochs shift, and watch while characters rise and fall.\nThink about the epic SF written in response to the cold war that was the core of the SF canon (and largely still is, though I think their influence has wained in the last 15 years): Dune, Foundation, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc.","title":"Addendum, cosmic"},{"content":"I was listening today to the Strange Horizon\u0026rsquo;s Podcast Interview with Tim Pratt and he said something about his writing that was quite interesting to me.\nHe was talking about his novels and some the early stories and I think he called them \u0026ldquo;fiercely linear,\u0026rdquo; that they took place over the course of a week or a couple of weeks, and that the path of the story was very straightforward, but that he was trying to go beyond his comfort zone and write stories that were less linear, that took longer in \u0026ldquo;story time.\u0026rdquo;\nWhile the whole interview was really nice, this line struck a particular chord in my mind. This is exactly the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to do for a long time, and something that I just have trouble groking.\nAnother Round, the story that is now Station Keeping, started out as a novel project built around a very non-linear story. Or, it was linear, but in a very stretched sort of way. Station Keeping (and AR) is all about this place--a sort of cultural battle ground--at a key moment in the development of human civilization. And the larger story takes several years to happen, because the conflict isn\u0026rsquo;t between characters, but rather between big ideologies.1\nNow there are a lot of reasons why I couldn\u0026rsquo;t hold the plot Another Round together four years ago (it works better as a serial, the character\u0026rsquo;s weren\u0026rsquo;t developed enough, or central enough), but a big reason was that I think I\u0026rsquo;m fiercely linear or something. I did really well with Circle Games2, which--not counting an epilogue--took like 3 weeks of story time, and the Mars story takes place over the course of about a year, if you account for travel time, but the narration covers maybe two weeks worth of story. It\u0026rsquo;s less linear, but the scope is probably similar.\nBreakout, kind of like Another Round, is a story on a much more cosmic scale. While it\u0026rsquo;s not nearly as politically angst ridden, the story is still pretty layered, and thats really complicated. Some day I\u0026rsquo;ll be up to the challenge of writing novels like that. Right now--particularly since I\u0026rsquo;m more interested in getting work out on the internet, I\u0026rsquo;m writing this hypertext, but some day, maybe, I\u0026rsquo;ll write stories like these.\nIn the mean time, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll work on devising stories with more concentrated plots, stretching the bounds of the \u0026ldquo;comfort zone of linearity\u0026rdquo; rather than attempting to break it without mercy at every opportunity.\nOne of these days I\u0026rsquo;ll learn something. I swear.\nOnward and Upward!\nI know that there aren\u0026rsquo;t really good copies of station keeping around for you to find. Sorry about that, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be releasing a PDF of the story so far before we get started with season 2. I promise. And for the record, I wrote an episode this week, so it will happen.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe first novel I wrote. Tragically crappy. But then at least it was good to get it out of the way earlier.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cosmic/","summary":"I was listening today to the Strange Horizon\u0026rsquo;s Podcast Interview with Tim Pratt and he said something about his writing that was quite interesting to me.\nHe was talking about his novels and some the early stories and I think he called them \u0026ldquo;fiercely linear,\u0026rdquo; that they took place over the course of a week or a couple of weeks, and that the path of the story was very straightforward, but that he was trying to go beyond his comfort zone and write stories that were less linear, that took longer in \u0026ldquo;story time.\u0026rdquo;\nWhile the whole interview was really nice, this line struck a particular chord in my mind. This is exactly the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to do for a long time, and something that I just have trouble groking.\nAnother Round, the story that is now Station Keeping, started out as a novel project built around a very non-linear story.","title":"Cosmic"},{"content":"Because I promised another post, and I must admit that I don\u0026rsquo;t have very much to talk about, here comes a list.\nSleep readjustment is going well, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased. I think I need to push myself a little bit more. I have the waking at 7/7:30 thing down pretty well, but I have been rolling over at 4:30 and going back to bed when I should really just get up then. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better with the stress level, distraction helps. All I can do is wait after all I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting much. I need to change that, but I feel like there are more important things to do, so I\u0026rsquo;m doing them I\u0026rsquo;ve switched to a book bag that almost always makes my spine feel (though not actually) feel like it\u0026rsquo;s falling apaprt after a week. I really like the bag, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t like me. This is usually a sign that I need a new book bag. I know what I want, and it\u0026rsquo;s been about a year since I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a new bag. I\u0026rsquo;m going to start trolling ebay,. The weather in homeCity is very schizoid it was in the 50s when I left for work, the low 40s when I got to work, and in the teens or below when I got home. I just want it to be nice and cold, and consistent. I\u0026rsquo;ve been stewing over this for a while, but I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;ll start to post little snippits of the breakout hypertext from time to time on tychoish. I have one or two that I think would work, but I need to work with them a little bit. Progress is slow because I\u0026rsquo;m mostly focusing on doing what amounts to editing the older stuff. I\u0026rsquo;m failing at my reading program, but as I get better at sleeping correctly, my hope is that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to write and work from 5-6 until whenever I have to leave the house, and then I\u0026rsquo;ll use the evening to read, spin and knit. I think we\u0026rsquo;re going to be placing the order for my new spinning wheel. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be ordering a number of extra ratios as well Sqee! For a morning getting this wordpress mu thing to work was pretty good. I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to do everything that I wanted to do and more using MU. It needs some work, and I have to set up the new sites, of course, but I like the possibilities that are opening up. This also makes doing things like podcasting will be really really straightforward once it happens. At some point tychoish will move back in with tealart, (and I hope as will chris\u0026rsquo; site, though that\u0026rsquo;s up to him,) nothing, would, I think, actually change from your perspective, but it makes me happy to be able to use one true system to run them all. I\u0026rsquo;d hate to see a list when I actually did have something to say. sigh\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/supplemental-list/","summary":"Because I promised another post, and I must admit that I don\u0026rsquo;t have very much to talk about, here comes a list.\nSleep readjustment is going well, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased. I think I need to push myself a little bit more. I have the waking at 7/7:30 thing down pretty well, but I have been rolling over at 4:30 and going back to bed when I should really just get up then. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better with the stress level, distraction helps. All I can do is wait after all I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting much. I need to change that, but I feel like there are more important things to do, so I\u0026rsquo;m doing them I\u0026rsquo;ve switched to a book bag that almost always makes my spine feel (though not actually) feel like it\u0026rsquo;s falling apaprt after a week. I really like the bag, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t like me. This is usually a sign that I need a new book bag.","title":"Supplemental List"},{"content":"Good Morning Friends.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to say that I got a lot of things done yesterday, and while I think I had, on the whole, a really good day, I do think that it was not nearly as productive as I might have liked. Alas. But things need to get done, and they don\u0026rsquo;t do themselves.\nI did, yesterday, finally get a real keyboard for use at my desk. My hands like this new set up a lot, its nice when the keys go down all the way. It has lead to a number of quick realizations: - The arrow keys are too far away. I finally understand the vim convention to use \u0026ldquo;h-j-k-l\u0026rdquo; keys as directional keys in command mode. - I use command enter as a personal command trigger, and it makes little sense on \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; keybaords. - Always, but particularly now, If I\u0026rsquo;m going to learn and use vim I need to find a good way to map the escape key to something closer. I was think F3 or F4, mostly because my caps-lock key is already \u0026ldquo;control.\u0026rdquo; Sigh. I\u0026rsquo;m a dweeb. - Actually I think I rarely use the right-shift key, I wonder if that could become escape? Key re-mapers, be in touch with me.\nI finished the first new scene for Breakout and did some more structural work. I have a system established for the missing part, and it\u0026rsquo;s going better. My task for the moment is to work on editing and going through what I\u0026rsquo;ve already written and try to integrate it into the hypertext. While I feel uncomfortable writing short works that stand on their own, I like writing the small bits. So progress here is good.\nI think that at some point in the next couple of weeks, I\u0026rsquo;ll begin posting little bits, here and there, of what I\u0026rsquo;m working on for Breakout. Just because I can.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been giving some thought to the development of my Internet projects. While I really like drupal, and I do want to do something new with TealArt, and I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve made some important progress, it\u0026rsquo;s going pretty slowly, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to realize (finally) that there\u0026rsquo;s too much recreation of the wheel.\nThe other thing that I realized in the past few days is that, since I started tychoish.com in June I\u0026rsquo;ve been averaging about 20,000 words a month. I don\u0026rsquo;t know, I think that\u0026rsquo;s rather a lot of words. While I really like writing these entries, and I think there\u0026rsquo;s something that I\u0026rsquo;m doing differently this time around, I think it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the worst thing in the world if I spent my 20k of blogging words a month writing things that were less drivel-y. Still blogging about the same, but if I blogged actual fiction or something\u0026hellip;\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m actually leaning towards ditching the drupal project and cooking something up using wordpress and the instance tychoish.com as the \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo; of my sites. I\u0026rsquo;ll need to stew on that for a whilew, but I think it might be able to resolve the conflict of these last three paragraphs with one solution, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see, of course.\nOk, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve blathered enough here. Have a great day, and I\u0026rsquo;ll catch you on the flip-side.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/keyboarding/","summary":"Good Morning Friends.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to say that I got a lot of things done yesterday, and while I think I had, on the whole, a really good day, I do think that it was not nearly as productive as I might have liked. Alas. But things need to get done, and they don\u0026rsquo;t do themselves.\nI did, yesterday, finally get a real keyboard for use at my desk. My hands like this new set up a lot, its nice when the keys go down all the way. It has lead to a number of quick realizations: - The arrow keys are too far away. I finally understand the vim convention to use \u0026ldquo;h-j-k-l\u0026rdquo; keys as directional keys in command mode. - I use command enter as a personal command trigger, and it makes little sense on \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; keybaords. - Always, but particularly now, If I\u0026rsquo;m going to learn and use vim I need to find a good way to map the escape key to something closer.","title":"Keyboarding"},{"content":"Update: I totally take this entire post back, I said, \u0026ldquo;oh, let me try this little thing out, and see what happens, and broke the whole thing, in a way that will take me awhile to fix, but will avoid running thousands of instances of wordpress. Sorry about this. Cheers, tycho\u0026rdquo;\nSecond Update: Ok, I have a working installation of WordPress MU installed on tealart, and everything seems to work pretty well. In fact, really quite well. Including the site that I talked about in this post. Redirects are in place but, check it out at http://tychoish.com/micro/, which is a good place for it.\nSo after much hemming and hawing about Drupal, I finally gave up on the sort of grandiose plan that I had been laboring under and just installed a new clean instance of wordpress, the same software that I used before, and continue to use on tychoish.com\nWhat changed? This \u0026ldquo;Prologue\u0026rdquo; Theme from some of the makers of wordpress.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a really cool idea. Basically, it\u0026rsquo;s a self-hosted twitter kind of site, except the posts can be a little longer, there are comments, and you can do it more as a performance piece with a group of other people.\nUsually I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a fan of the people who try and get software like wordpress to do things that it really wasn\u0026rsquo;t designed for. But for some reason I rather like this particular usage, and don\u0026rsquo;t mind the fact that what\u0026rsquo;s happening behind the scenes is semi-kludgy.\nActually what\u0026rsquo;s happening behind the scenes is even more kludgey because even the version hosted on wordpress.com doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a loop in it. Loops are the wordpress way of getting the template to run a number of times so that you get a web log of posts. What this means is, I cannot for devil, on stock version, get the template to show more than one post.\nThankfully I\u0026rsquo;m a WP genius in the real world and I was able to hack something together that works. For those of you who are playing around at home, it seems like the whole design is based on nested unordered lists. Which is kind of maddening for those of us who love using bulleted lists in our blog posts, but no matter.\nAnyway, so yes. There\u0026rsquo;s a new TealArt. It\u0026rsquo;s not \u0026ldquo;for real yet\u0026rdquo; as I need to find people who want to do this with me. I\u0026rsquo;m looking at you: vaugish, subjunctus, composerscott, and of course Chris and Dave). Anyone else who wants in and thinks they could post, should just leave a comment and a way for me to get a hold of you and I\u0026rsquo;ll get you set up. It\u0026rsquo;ll be fun. No really, it will.\nThe downside of this is that while my old plan for TA revision hinged around having a site that \u0026ldquo;did it all,\u0026rdquo; and would serve as a home for Station Keeping (which is still mostly homeless) and some knitting projects and patterns (which I can run out of what\u0026rsquo;s already around on tychoish.com pretty effectively.)\nMy thought for station-keeping at the moment is that I\u0026rsquo;ll throw another instance of Wordpress on tealart.com, probably at tealart.com/serial, and throw redirections site/duplications up at /hanm and /station-keeping. I need to stew on this for a little while.\nThis is a really lame journal entry, so I\u0026rsquo;ll try and post again. But there are things to be done.\nHope to hear from you soon!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-and-old-tealart/","summary":"Update: I totally take this entire post back, I said, \u0026ldquo;oh, let me try this little thing out, and see what happens, and broke the whole thing, in a way that will take me awhile to fix, but will avoid running thousands of instances of wordpress. Sorry about this. Cheers, tycho\u0026rdquo;\nSecond Update: Ok, I have a working installation of WordPress MU installed on tealart, and everything seems to work pretty well. In fact, really quite well. Including the site that I talked about in this post. Redirects are in place but, check it out at http://tychoish.com/micro/, which is a good place for it.\nSo after much hemming and hawing about Drupal, I finally gave up on the sort of grandiose plan that I had been laboring under and just installed a new clean instance of wordpress, the same software that I used before, and continue to use on tychoish.com","title":"New and Old TealArt"},{"content":"I had a good chat with a friend from school last night. It was good, C. was a person who I talked with pretty regularly and we knew each others friends okay, but we traveled in different circles and I don\u0026rsquo;t think we ever took a class together.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not true. We were in one class together for about 3 weeks until I realized that as philosophically minded as I was (and am), I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have the time, or wherewithal to take a philosophy class. Particularly an upper level philosophy class when I had no background in the kind of writing or other work that would be required. No, it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing I dropped that class, but it did mean that C. and I never took a class together. Nevermind, this digression is totally not relevant to any point I\u0026rsquo;m making.\nShe asked me, \u0026ldquo;how are you doing tychoish1?\u0026rdquo;\nI said: \u0026ldquo;Stressed, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sublimating it well.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich is true, if a little awkward. I think that\u0026rsquo;s what graduate school applications are all about. I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably amazing that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been more symptomatic earlier.\nI have no control over this process, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing I can do except read more, and wait. For like three weeks, while I slowly become unhinged waiting for something to give.\nUsual stress, if you\u0026rsquo;re on top of things can become inspiration to do other things: knit obsessively, write, and so forth. When you\u0026rsquo;re buried under coursework, even productive procrastination helps to assuage your sanity, say. But, this graduate school thing? Nothing.\nDoing other things mostly just underscores how extremely uncertain the future really is.\nOn the upside, between meetings and readings today, I have time to write. I also have two episodes of Torchwood to watch. Squee\nOnward and Upward!\nI find that I occasionally, for some people, I sometimes receive nickname of a similar-to-real-name named Lord of the Rings character, but I think that \u0026ldquo;tychoish,\u0026rdquo; conveys the proper level of familarity and oddness\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sublimation-error/","summary":"I had a good chat with a friend from school last night. It was good, C. was a person who I talked with pretty regularly and we knew each others friends okay, but we traveled in different circles and I don\u0026rsquo;t think we ever took a class together.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not true. We were in one class together for about 3 weeks until I realized that as philosophically minded as I was (and am), I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have the time, or wherewithal to take a philosophy class. Particularly an upper level philosophy class when I had no background in the kind of writing or other work that would be required. No, it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing I dropped that class, but it did mean that C. and I never took a class together. Nevermind, this digression is totally not relevant to any point I\u0026rsquo;m making.\nShe asked me, \u0026ldquo;how are you doing tychoish1?","title":"Sublimation Error"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking that I want to take pictures again, at least on a somewhat limited scale for the blog. I don\u0026rsquo;t have my own digital camera and don\u0026rsquo;t particularly want to get one at this point.\nI do have a really sweet old, manual everything, Nikon that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about using. This brings up the following question that I\u0026rsquo;d like to ask the crowd\u0026hellip;\nDoes anyone know of a good mail order photo processing service that will:\nDevelop film and send my negatives back to me. Scan the negatives and send me a digital copies of the images, either via the Internet, or by post on CD-ROM. Not send me prints, or make me pay for prints. I\u0026rsquo;m looking for digital scans of really high quality. I mean this is film we\u0026rsquo;re copying off of, and scanning technology is good and bits are cheap. So I think 10 megapixel+ images are pretty reasonable. TIFF or some other uncompressed file format is pretty much required. Do this for a competitive price. Service should provide mailers, and I think the total cost should be 5 bucks or less, I think 3-4 is the sweet spot. If there was a company that could do this with either black and white or color film, that would be amazing, but I suppose not strictly required. I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that my favorite B\u0026amp;W film of yore has been discontinued (Agfapan Pro/APX-100,) so it\u0026rsquo;s of minimal importance. If such a service exists that pictures are about 20 cents each, including film, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem too bad. Though you pay a lot for a digital camera up front, and given that I\u0026rsquo;m largely not interested in producing hard copies of photos, but I enjoy the experience of shooting to film, I think the economy is pretty much the same. Particularly since I have such an awesome camera already. Figure a good 10mp digital camera is several hundred dollars, I\u0026rsquo;d have to take 1500-2000 pictures before the price of the new camera would really outweigh the cost of processing. Which would take me several years, given my level of involvement. And then you have to figure and you have to figure that like all such technology, after a few years you (or I) might start thinking about an upgrade, which means that price might be a non-issue in the end.\nIf such a service exists.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/photography/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking that I want to take pictures again, at least on a somewhat limited scale for the blog. I don\u0026rsquo;t have my own digital camera and don\u0026rsquo;t particularly want to get one at this point.\nI do have a really sweet old, manual everything, Nikon that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about using. This brings up the following question that I\u0026rsquo;d like to ask the crowd\u0026hellip;\nDoes anyone know of a good mail order photo processing service that will:\nDevelop film and send my negatives back to me. Scan the negatives and send me a digital copies of the images, either via the Internet, or by post on CD-ROM. Not send me prints, or make me pay for prints. I\u0026rsquo;m looking for digital scans of really high quality. I mean this is film we\u0026rsquo;re copying off of, and scanning technology is good and bits are cheap. So I think 10 megapixel+ images are pretty reasonable.","title":"Photography"},{"content":"Some thoughts on the writing project.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve begun working on the Breakout hypertext, and I think all of my tedious regular expressions work actually made this work out pretty well. I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with the software, which is something--particularly given the digital nature of this project--that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be ignored. Technology and I need to be working with each other not against each other. And I think that\u0026rsquo;s the case.\nWhat I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about/working through at this point is a structural concern. My hope is that the sort of \u0026ldquo;first layer\u0026rdquo; of the document will be very encyclopedic, in a sort of lighthearted and friendly parody of wikipedia way. That structure, organized mostly around the ships, years/time periods, and characters is all set up and fairly straightforward. (Note, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly just thinking about the naming schemes at this point.)\nAnother layer of this project are what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of as supporting documents, things written in character\u0026rsquo;s own voices, or other things that are \u0026ldquo;in-world\u0026rdquo; texts. These are all associated with an encyclopedic article, and numbered sequentially, by order of creation. So I have an article for one of the key characters named \u0026ldquo;frank\u0026rdquo; and a supporting document named \u0026ldquo;frank001\u0026rdquo;1.\nThe next layer, that I don\u0026rsquo;t have figured out is the \u0026ldquo;fictionalized\u0026rdquo; story that I\u0026rsquo;m writing. I want the document to have a lot of little scenes linked into the supporting documents and to the encyclopedic \u0026ldquo;articles.\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t have any notion of how to name these things. Here are my concerns:\nIf I associate them with characters, how do I decide that X scene with 2 or 3 characters is associated with a particular character? Particularly, in a way that will make sense to me in 6 weeks and 6 years. If this is the case, how do I distinguish in the namespace between supporting documents and fictionalized narratives? How do I give short meaningful names that are distinct and thus identify scenes but that have some sort of systematic scheme. Furthermore how maintain some sort of order without forcing them into a sequential order. Again, using the namespace. So we can\u0026rsquo;t have scene001, scene002, and so forth. While I don\u0026rsquo;t need the pages to be strictly ordered to reflect the linear story lines, there needs to be some way to organize/grep through the page titles. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking using the location titles as a way to organize that and then use hidden dotfiles to keep track of the story and the files for my own notes, and then integrate links to the scenes from other pages, using my notes, once I have more meat, as it were, lying around to work with, and there\u0026rsquo;s a little bit of a Catch-22 here: you need data to play around and get a structure that makes sense, and it\u0026rsquo;s also hard to write without that structure. I might have answered my question this is the problem of being an extrovert and a blogger: If you start a question for the crowd, by the end of your post you\u0026rsquo;ve probably answered it. I would still like input if you have it ;).\nThese names are mostly for my purposes of keeping the morass in order, and not the way that people will be interacting with these documents. This is important because I already have 20+ pages just with the initial structure, not yet counting much of the text.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/story-modules/","summary":"Some thoughts on the writing project.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve begun working on the Breakout hypertext, and I think all of my tedious regular expressions work actually made this work out pretty well. I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with the software, which is something--particularly given the digital nature of this project--that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be ignored. Technology and I need to be working with each other not against each other. And I think that\u0026rsquo;s the case.\nWhat I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about/working through at this point is a structural concern. My hope is that the sort of \u0026ldquo;first layer\u0026rdquo; of the document will be very encyclopedic, in a sort of lighthearted and friendly parody of wikipedia way. That structure, organized mostly around the ships, years/time periods, and characters is all set up and fairly straightforward. (Note, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly just thinking about the naming schemes at this point.)\nAnother layer of this project are what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of as supporting documents, things written in character\u0026rsquo;s own voices, or other things that are \u0026ldquo;in-world\u0026rdquo; texts.","title":"Story Modules"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a basic report for today, with a more detailed list to follow:\nToday was a weird day. I spent my morning doing some programing/computer things. (Kludge firmly planted in fist), and then I helped a friend do some moving (more tomorrow.) I got a little bit of writing in and then there\u0026rsquo;s a dinner party and probably some knitting, and then bed. Sweater class tomorrow.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t sleep enough last night; I was too wired from the drive, I had that low level awareness that you need for drives, but I was bodily exhausted. So sleeping was hard. I decided on my trip, as I mentioned last night, that I have a new vision for Breakout, I have a Kludgey solution that will make this technically possible, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to it. Basically I\u0026rsquo;m going to do Breakout as a hypertext thingy. I guess in a way this means that there will never be a Breakout novel. Which is ok. It frees some energies up because I think I want to play with shorter forms for a while. I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to write another novella/novelette, and this will give me the chance to do that. The hypertext will let me write this story without having to fight it. I think a lot of fiction writing, in the traditional mode, is all about making that thing in your head get to other people in a common format. To use a computer metaphor, the Novel is like being restricted to communicate the content of your mind via the WiFi standard: you have to transmit your radio signal in a very precise sort of way. This hypertext, I hope, will be more like speaking, in contrast. My coding/programing thing, was just to make sure that I could script the deployment of this system in a way that I was comfortable scaling as the project grew from a few thousand words to several tens of thousands of words, and from a couple of dozen pages to many dozens of pages. Someday, I\u0026rsquo;ll write about that, because I think getting the content to work the way I want it, is probably actually pretty easy, and it might be good for other people to have this information. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to have any sort of release for a long time, I should disclaim, but I\u0026rsquo;m working on it in a new way. I haven\u0026rsquo;t done any work on the new TealArt site. And Breakout would probably be out at both TealArt and tychoish, in the end. I haven\u0026rsquo;t knit anything. I made a mistake, as I might have mentioned the other day, and haven\u0026rsquo;t brought myself to deal with it yet. My sock bag is still in the car, so I don\u0026rsquo;t really have anything else to work on, so with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll have fixed it by the end of the evening. Randal Schwartz, one of the hosts behind the open source podcast (FLOSS \u0026ldquo;Weekly\u0026rdquo;) I mentioned yesterday, saw the google juice and commented (woot! auto-notifiers, I suppose; not linking to it in this post for that reason I guess.) It\u0026rsquo;s not actually a weekly, which is fine by me, because I am all sorts of behind on my podcast listening. Ok, this entry is cooked, and so is, I think dinner. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to jet! Have a good weekend. I\u0026rsquo;ll be back tomorrow\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/brain-check/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a basic report for today, with a more detailed list to follow:\nToday was a weird day. I spent my morning doing some programing/computer things. (Kludge firmly planted in fist), and then I helped a friend do some moving (more tomorrow.) I got a little bit of writing in and then there\u0026rsquo;s a dinner party and probably some knitting, and then bed. Sweater class tomorrow.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t sleep enough last night; I was too wired from the drive, I had that low level awareness that you need for drives, but I was bodily exhausted. So sleeping was hard. I decided on my trip, as I mentioned last night, that I have a new vision for Breakout, I have a Kludgey solution that will make this technically possible, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to it. Basically I\u0026rsquo;m going to do Breakout as a hypertext thingy. I guess in a way this means that there will never be a Breakout novel.","title":"Brain Check"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m trying really hard to get back into the novel I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, off and on for a few months. I\u0026rsquo;m not really \u0026ldquo;getting into it,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m just not into it. While I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time developing it and a bit of time working on it, it\u0026rsquo;s been a morning and afternoon here and there. I\u0026rsquo;d like for something to happen with this project, but I need to take a step back and think about it. This entry is part of this \u0026ldquo;step back.\u0026rdquo;\nOne of my issues, is that this project deals with how histories are remembered. How do we think about what has happened before now, and how does this affect our development in the future. This is a key part of my academic interests, and I thought that it would be fun to--in my interim year--explore this idea from a fiction stand point.\nThe issue that I\u0026rsquo;m having--and I think that processing this will help as I move into graduate school--is that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure, exactly what I think about this. The story I\u0026rsquo;m trying to tell, or that I thought I was trying to tell, incorporates three distinct generations. The second happens 40 years after the first, and the third happens about 200 years after the second. There are different casts of characters in each period, clearly. What I\u0026rsquo;m hoping is that this set up will let us explore these memories in a controlled way that simply can\u0026rsquo;t be done in the laboratory.\nI should note that I\u0026rsquo;m being pretty open with this story, because the story isn\u0026rsquo;t built on suspense, in the way that say the Novella is. There are crises that the characters have to deal with, and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to talk about that, but in a lot of ways tychoish is my personal notebook, and this is an entry where I\u0026rsquo;m using it as such.\nOne of the problems that using fiction as a way to get around the constraints of the lab is that you have to have a notion of what would happen in the lab. And this is perhaps part of the reason why I need to be a researcher as well: I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure what would happen. I know that somethings happening, but I\u0026rsquo;m interested in an area that\u0026rsquo;s pretty unexplored and I take a vaguely quantitative/grounded theory kind of tact. And I guess I could come up with pretty specific predictions about the outcomes of a given situation if needed; but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this kind of knowing/theorizing is right for building a story.\nSo I think that I need to go back over what I\u0026rsquo;ve written and my outline for this project and make it more teleological and theoretically specific in a connected point of view. Thus far, I\u0026rsquo;ve been more concerned with making sure that the plot gets from A to B and less concerned with the embellishment (which is important during some stages of the planning, I think, as long as it\u0026rsquo;s balanced.) I also I had a compulsive motif thus far which I either need to punch up a lot, or change, because it\u0026rsquo;s too subtle and doesn\u0026rsquo;t hang \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo; at the moment.\nThe other problem--and this is the same problem that I had with Another Round--the abortive attempt at a second novel that I started right after I finished my oft-mentioned and supremely horrible first novel--is that I had a large story about a huge number of characters who weren\u0026rsquo;t in a position to really cary a plot on their own. AR became Station Keeping, which I think does work on some level in part because it\u0026rsquo;s not a novel, and in part because we\u0026rsquo;ve been able to correct some of the problems since it\u0026rsquo;s a total re-imagination, not a reprocessing of the original story (All of station keeping has been written for station keeping, even if there\u0026rsquo;s an old doc file on my computer that tells a similar story with similarly named characters.)\nNow, Breakout isn\u0026rsquo;t the same mistake. There are characters that can cary the story, the problem is that I think the story is still too cosmic in a lot of ways, so while taking a step back to think about where I am, in a lot of ways I need to get closer to the story and the characters, and while I need to have a better concept of the bigger picture, I need to focus less on the bigger picture.\nI think I have writing to do.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/carthorse/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m trying really hard to get back into the novel I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, off and on for a few months. I\u0026rsquo;m not really \u0026ldquo;getting into it,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m just not into it. While I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of time developing it and a bit of time working on it, it\u0026rsquo;s been a morning and afternoon here and there. I\u0026rsquo;d like for something to happen with this project, but I need to take a step back and think about it. This entry is part of this \u0026ldquo;step back.\u0026rdquo;\nOne of my issues, is that this project deals with how histories are remembered. How do we think about what has happened before now, and how does this affect our development in the future. This is a key part of my academic interests, and I thought that it would be fun to--in my interim year--explore this idea from a fiction stand point.","title":"Cart/Horse"},{"content":"Ha. Here\u0026rsquo;s a list because the fact that I can still use words is kind of amazing.\nI left and drive back across HomeState today. It was an uneventful drive.\nI listend to the 3 (!) Episodes of FLOSS weekly and 2 Episodes of Cast-On while I drove. This was really good. It\u0026rsquo;s surprising and good how much both of these podcasts really inspire and stretch the brain. Listening to the programers talk about programingy-things streatches my brain. I\u0026rsquo;m a geek, I know and have come to really enjoy the geekier bounds of everyday computer useage; but, I\u0026rsquo;m not a programer, and I don\u0026rsquo;t often think in that mode. So, the opportunity to stretch the brain a little, or a lot, is really great. Really great. And Cast-On is delightful, as always.\nI have a sneaky idea regarding Breakout, regarding my post earlier today about needing to really rethink it. I wrote that yesterday morning, which seems like it was much longer, but the time has been helpful. And we\u0026rsquo;ll see what happens. I\u0026rsquo;m excited now.\nI spent much of my morning working on some knitting. I got a lot done, which is good. I however made a crucial error on the final step, and now have to go back. Which will be tedious. I think I shall knit socks for a while. Sorry if, while I\u0026rsquo;m irritated with this sweater if I don\u0026rsquo;t wax rhapsodic about my knitting. It\u0026rsquo;s better this way.\nI checked out the always helpful MacRumors Buyers Guide which shows when all of the apple products were last released and what the release history is. Apple\u0026rsquo;s been pretty consistent with the computer that I\u0026rsquo;m looking to get: revs in late fall, and late spring for the past five years. I\u0026rsquo;m not desperate enough that I can\u0026rsquo;t wait till the next rev, so I think that\u0026rsquo;s the plan. I think it\u0026rsquo;s a fair bit that the next rev of the laptops will have:\nLED backlights Multi-Touch Trackpad gestures Better procs These are all things that I want, and I can wait a few months. This is just punditry but based on the buyers guide, there might be a late spring mac book pro, before WWDC. Might they release new laptops in February at whatever event the iPhone SDK is released at? Apple punditry is so addictive.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, with some seriousness, the 14th episode of Station Keeping. Astute readers will discover that season one only had 12 episodes. So work does continue. Ep 14 is a double length one. So posted over two days. This is probably the result of poor planing on my part. Because SK is basically a blog post, I don\u0026rsquo;t really think of it as \u0026ldquo;writing accomplishment,\u0026rdquo; which is a shame and probably something that I need to adjust. Sigh\nOh, and I finally have a nifty idea for a podcast, that I\u0026rsquo;m going to start work on pronto. I think I need as many good copies of the tune that Peter Bellamy set \u0026ldquo;The Pilgram\u0026rsquo;s Way,\u0026rdquo; to. I think I might need to barter with our favorite local box player.\nOk, my brain dies of tiredness.\nSee you on the flip side,\ntycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/drive-brain/","summary":"Ha. Here\u0026rsquo;s a list because the fact that I can still use words is kind of amazing.\nI left and drive back across HomeState today. It was an uneventful drive.\nI listend to the 3 (!) Episodes of FLOSS weekly and 2 Episodes of Cast-On while I drove. This was really good. It\u0026rsquo;s surprising and good how much both of these podcasts really inspire and stretch the brain. Listening to the programers talk about programingy-things streatches my brain. I\u0026rsquo;m a geek, I know and have come to really enjoy the geekier bounds of everyday computer useage; but, I\u0026rsquo;m not a programer, and I don\u0026rsquo;t often think in that mode. So, the opportunity to stretch the brain a little, or a lot, is really great. Really great. And Cast-On is delightful, as always.\nI have a sneaky idea regarding Breakout, regarding my post earlier today about needing to really rethink it. I wrote that yesterday morning, which seems like it was much longer, but the time has been helpful.","title":"Drive Brain"},{"content":"Ok, I don\u0026rsquo;t really have knitting for sale--at the moment--but I wanted to throw a question out to the knitters out there. I also sold a sweater this month, and wanted to rehash this experience for the rest of you out there.\nSo lets start with the sweater that I sold. This was a sweater that I knit pretty fast, out of really great yarn (Henry\u0026rsquo;s Attic Prime Alpaca Sport weight), in my usual two color style. It never fit, and was frankly way too warm for anything that I\u0026rsquo;d wear with regularity. It was a really well done sweater but I was never going to wear it. And it was too small for other male bodied people, and many women as well.\nIn fact, here\u0026rsquo;s a picture of it on a dress form at the yarn store:\nAnd it fit a friend, and she wanted it and was willing to pay me for it. And you know, given the fact that I was never going to use it\u0026hellip; I sold it to her. For a honest sum, but still significantly less than what I think would be a fair price.\nAnd you know it felt pretty good. Everyone always says that you can never get enough for knitted goods. And that\u0026rsquo;s true: not counting yarn, I figure most small sweaters would cost at least 500 dollars at minimum wage. Which would be hard to get in any market that I have a connection to. Having said that, if you\u0026rsquo;re producing at a comfortable speed, and knitting time also means TV time or Podcast time (as it does with me); then, getting a lower price isn\u0026rsquo;t that good.\nI often tell people in the yarn store that yarn purchases should be thought of as part of the entertainment budget not clothing/garb budget: this is because the economies of hand knitting don\u0026rsquo;t work out: If you\u0026rsquo;re cold: buy polar fleece and make a cup of tea. If you want something fun to do while you\u0026rsquo;re drinking your tea, buy yarn. This might be part of the reason that I don\u0026rsquo;t often give away my knitted things, because it\u0026rsquo;s not really about the thing for me. But never mind this, I think that getting paid a couple bucks an hour to have fun isn\u0026rsquo;t the worst thing in the world.\nNevertheless, I remain very hesitant to sell knitting. I like making sweaters, and while I think you could probably break even pretty easily on hand knit socks, it\u0026rsquo;s much harder to break even on the fine gauge stuff that I make (let\u0026rsquo;s also note, that my own wardrobe needs a few more sweaters knit at fine gauge, on top of what I\u0026rsquo;m working on/have planned for the current moment.) And of course, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to make something that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in into \u0026ldquo;work.\u0026rdquo; So I\u0026rsquo;m very keen to see what you all have to say on this\u0026hellip;.\nAnd whats more, I\u0026rsquo;m all sorts willing to sell hand spun yarn. It\u0026rsquo;s part of my desire to knit sweaters, but I really do like knitting with very machined yarns, and while spinning is great fun, I see it as an end to itself, so I never really think bout knitting for my own projects, though it might be fun to experiment with this. Also because knitters and weavers are likely to be the people buying your hand spun, it\u0026rsquo;s easier to get closer to a fair price. Maybe?\nOr am I full of hot air and I should look for a real job, and just knit for fun\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knits-for-sale/","summary":"Ok, I don\u0026rsquo;t really have knitting for sale--at the moment--but I wanted to throw a question out to the knitters out there. I also sold a sweater this month, and wanted to rehash this experience for the rest of you out there.\nSo lets start with the sweater that I sold. This was a sweater that I knit pretty fast, out of really great yarn (Henry\u0026rsquo;s Attic Prime Alpaca Sport weight), in my usual two color style. It never fit, and was frankly way too warm for anything that I\u0026rsquo;d wear with regularity. It was a really well done sweater but I was never going to wear it. And it was too small for other male bodied people, and many women as well.\nIn fact, here\u0026rsquo;s a picture of it on a dress form at the yarn store:\nAnd it fit a friend, and she wanted it and was willing to pay me for it.","title":"Knits For Sale"},{"content":"So as part of my scheme to be more productive I use a system of .tasks files that contain lists of things that need doing. because the file begins with a dot, they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;hidden,\u0026rdquo; because this is the designation for hidden files and folders in UNIX systems, of which OS X is one. The other nice thing is that I can keep my lists out of the way, but very connected to the project files that I\u0026rsquo;m working on, without much fuss.\nI have one of these lists in my blogging folder, with subjects that I\u0026rsquo;d like to cover at some point on the blog. Posts that need written, posts that are written and queued for posting. Posts that are in draft status.\nAnd I use a little program called \u0026ldquo;GeekTool\u0026rdquo; that displays the blogging todo list, among others, on my desktop, and I look at these files from time to time.\nIn the blogging \u0026ldquo;posts to write\u0026rdquo; section of the file there are eight or nine posts that I often think \u0026ldquo;you know I should write,\u0026rdquo; so I go and open a new text file, get everything ready to write a post. And I start writing.\nAnd I totally write about what I just finished reading, or my grating urge to get a new computer, or something funny I just saw and forget to muse for a while on impostor syndrome, or the problem with knitting sleeves.\nSigh.\nThis post wasn\u0026rsquo;t on that list either.\nSigh.\ntycho out.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/list-ignorance/","summary":"So as part of my scheme to be more productive I use a system of .tasks files that contain lists of things that need doing. because the file begins with a dot, they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;hidden,\u0026rdquo; because this is the designation for hidden files and folders in UNIX systems, of which OS X is one. The other nice thing is that I can keep my lists out of the way, but very connected to the project files that I\u0026rsquo;m working on, without much fuss.\nI have one of these lists in my blogging folder, with subjects that I\u0026rsquo;d like to cover at some point on the blog. Posts that need written, posts that are written and queued for posting. Posts that are in draft status.\nAnd I use a little program called \u0026ldquo;GeekTool\u0026rdquo; that displays the blogging todo list, among others, on my desktop, and I look at these files from time to time.","title":"List Ignorance"},{"content":"I really need to turn my \u0026ldquo;introspection\u0026rdquo; tag into a \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; tag. This is of course meaningless if you read tychoish on the LJ, but no matter. It\u0026rsquo;s on my mind.\nThings are continuing apace in tycho land.\nMy grandmother continues to hobble along reasonably well considering the truly impressive brace thing on her leg.\nI got a little bit of knitting done. I figure that I\u0026rsquo;m about 40 minuets of good knitting time away from finishing the part of the neck shaping that happens before the\nI realized another thing I\u0026rsquo;ve forgotten is the pattern for the last little bit of the first sleeve on the Morocco sweater. Alas. I might get to the back of the neck steek today, And I think I should be done with the body by the time I head home, if all goes well.\nThis means, that I will I\u0026rsquo;m once again several sleeves away from a couple of new sweaters. Sigh. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to do sleeves in their proper season, I think. But when I get done with these sleeves, I\u0026rsquo;ll only have one sweater\u0026rsquo;s worth of yarn left, and it\u0026rsquo;s a plain sweater: my next batch of yarn is on backorder. So if I do that, I\u0026rsquo;ll be working on socks and hats and the like for the rest of my stay (which isn\u0026rsquo;t that long, so we dont\u0026rsquo; have to worry about me being too prolific on non-sweater projects.)\nMy goal of getting through the yarn stash is doing pretty well then.\nBut this isn\u0026rsquo;t only a knitting update.\nI finished my critique for the week on the online writer\u0026rsquo;s workshop that I participate in. I need to get a short story out for them, because while I\u0026rsquo;m learning a lot from the experience of being a critic, the entire experience is lacking as it is. I find that a lot of stories have really poor openings. Some are cliched, but most just start too soon, and I hate the feeling of flogging deceased equines. But it\u0026rsquo;s good practice, and the better and faster I can be at reading these stories, the happier I\u0026rsquo;ll be.\nMy todo list struggles seem to be really working for the moment. One of the problems I have with digital todo lists is that it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to make them too long range, and even with a great GTD app like OmniFocus, it\u0026rsquo;s still hard to separate the things you\u0026rsquo;d like to get done this year, with the things that really need to get done tomorrow. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good answer, but I\u0026rsquo;m installing the todo.txt scripts again, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see what comes of it.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m going to get to doing things, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll find something to post later\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/more-caf-please/","summary":"I really need to turn my \u0026ldquo;introspection\u0026rdquo; tag into a \u0026ldquo;journal\u0026rdquo; tag. This is of course meaningless if you read tychoish on the LJ, but no matter. It\u0026rsquo;s on my mind.\nThings are continuing apace in tycho land.\nMy grandmother continues to hobble along reasonably well considering the truly impressive brace thing on her leg.\nI got a little bit of knitting done. I figure that I\u0026rsquo;m about 40 minuets of good knitting time away from finishing the part of the neck shaping that happens before the\nI realized another thing I\u0026rsquo;ve forgotten is the pattern for the last little bit of the first sleeve on the Morocco sweater. Alas. I might get to the back of the neck steek today, And I think I should be done with the body by the time I head home, if all goes well.\nThis means, that I will I\u0026rsquo;m once again several sleeves away from a couple of new sweaters.","title":"More Caf Please"},{"content":"Ok, I promised that I would blow through some of my sweater pictures on my computer, because they\u0026rsquo;re not doing anything for anyone where they are now. This time, I\u0026rsquo;m going to show my variant on Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Norway Sweater.\u0026rdquo; With this and the last one I seem to be in something of a nordic kick. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what that\u0026rsquo;s about.\nThis is from the Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweater Book. This is one of the few Starmore books that are still in print. It has two stranded sweaters, but most of the book is texture of some kind. Not my favorite But I made both of the color work sweaters, almost immediately. This is the second sweater that I made, despite it being the easier of the two.\nGo figure.\nStats: The black is Cascade 220 and the blue is Aracunia nature wool. Both claim to be worsted weight, but the later is more in the DK/sport range. I learned that after the fact. Knitted with size five.\nAlterations: I didn\u0026rsquo;t do much other than make the colors a bit more sedate than the original. I also simplified the sweater to make it less obnoxiously feminine. (The design calls for flower motifs to be tiediously embroidered on, and for a band of red flowers around the waist.) So I changed the ribbing, shortened the collar (This is the sweater where I got the 1.5 inch collar hight guideline. I love the collar on this: best crew neck I\u0026rsquo;ve done probably.)\nThe one down side to this sweater is that it\u0026rsquo;s amazingly long. Amazingly long. It goes half way to my knees. Seriously. So most coats don\u0026rsquo;t cover it all the way, so it\u0026rsquo;s hard to find times to wear it, frankly, and the pattern is hard to see, but I don\u0026rsquo;t mind that so much. And particularly with fashion looking a bit more like the 80s than I think anyone is comfortable with--deep down--it\u0026rsquo;s not so bad. Really though, if you were shorter than I, it would be a dress.\nEnough blabbing. Here are pictures. First from the front:\nAnd now from the Back:\nOh and you can see one of the other \u0026ldquo;features\u0026rdquo; of the nature wool in these pictures: Dye-lots are completely irrelevant every skein is different and noticeably so. Luckily it worked out alright this time, though I made one sweater with it once were I really had to play with it to get it to not look really bad\nAlso, sorry about the somewhat lackluster picture quality. I\u0026rsquo;d like to tell you that someone at the tychoish.com team was working on it, but alas, I think we\u0026rsquo;re lucky that there are any pictures whatsoever. It\u0026rsquo;s a shame you can\u0026rsquo;t get freelance photographers on Amazon Turk or something.\nSigh.\nMy current knitting is continuing pretty well. Nothing major to report. I\u0026rsquo;m almost to the beginning of the back of the neck steek on this sweater, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably work on socks and other such things rather than push to get it done--and this is admittedly a stupid reason--given that I left my cone of favorite waste yarn at home. Also, my needle has grown too short, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good solution to this issue yet.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/norway-sweater/","summary":"Ok, I promised that I would blow through some of my sweater pictures on my computer, because they\u0026rsquo;re not doing anything for anyone where they are now. This time, I\u0026rsquo;m going to show my variant on Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Norway Sweater.\u0026rdquo; With this and the last one I seem to be in something of a nordic kick. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what that\u0026rsquo;s about.\nThis is from the Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweater Book. This is one of the few Starmore books that are still in print. It has two stranded sweaters, but most of the book is texture of some kind. Not my favorite But I made both of the color work sweaters, almost immediately. This is the second sweater that I made, despite it being the easier of the two.\nGo figure.\nStats: The black is Cascade 220 and the blue is Aracunia nature wool. Both claim to be worsted weight, but the later is more in the DK/sport range.","title":"Norway Sweater"},{"content":"So the windows in the house here are positioned just right, so that there\u0026rsquo;s glare on my computer screen from about 9:15 to 3 in the afternoon. Joy. Getting a new computer would actually make this problem worse, I think. Given that the Macbook \u0026ldquo;con\u0026rdquo; has a glossy screen. Sigh.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been a fan of the notion that some of the best blogging fall in the category of \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s a funny little thing that happened just now.\u0026rdquo; A sort of macro view of \u0026ldquo;the moment.\u0026rdquo; And I tend to err on the side of the light and comical, rather than the dark and brooding, though it seems like the dark often attracts a larger community or something.\nThat stuff they told you about \u0026ldquo;opposites attracting,\u0026rdquo; is all lies. Particularly when it comes to \u0026ldquo;the crazies\u0026rdquo; on Internet forums.\nSo my grandmother (hi!) has a knee injury that has required an immobilizing splint, and likely will for a number of weeks. I would like to report the following anecdote in the column of \u0026ldquo;signs things will be ok:\u0026rdquo;\nThere is a walker in the house provided by a friend that seems to be used primarily as a foot rest (I had initially thought that she was using it for the unencumbered leg, alas not) also it sees use as a rack to hang things like blankets and lap-throws. And though it occasionally goes with her from point a, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to make it all the way to point b, as she decides that it would be more useful in a stationary position next to a chair, or that it should spend the night on the other side of the house from the bedroom.\nI had a conversation with Dave the other night about my thoughts on upgrading. I now think that the reasons to wait are: 1) the possibility that I would get a mac book pro following the release of the new ones at WWDC in June. 2) my financial outlook for the next six months might indicate that waiting several months would be useful. 3) there is no number 3. So I have to do some math, and I would like to think about these things for a little while, but I think the time is now.\nI read a little more in the Tiptree book last night. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;m going to avoid the television news this night and use that time for reading, and possibly some other time as well. I\u0026rsquo;m saying now, that it\u0026rsquo;s my goal to be done with this book by the time I leave on Friday.\nOne of my most productive list making strategies has been to make a new list in the notebook each night before I go to bed, with a new list of the things that I need to do. This way it contains a reasonable list of things that need doing, and I\u0026rsquo;m more likely to put chores and other things that take time and are important to do, but don\u0026rsquo;t typically get mentioned on todo lists. So I\u0026rsquo;m starting to do this on my computers \u0026ldquo;.tasks\u0026rdquo; files (I\u0026rsquo;d do them on paper except the pen--as previously mentioned--is out of ink, and this was good )\nI upgraded to Safari 3. Finally. Can\u0026rsquo;t, frankly, tell the difference. For the moment I\u0026rsquo;m using it as my primary browser. I try to keep from \u0026ldquo;living\u0026rdquo; in the browser as much as possible, and just for reading LJ and wikipedia, Safari is faster. We\u0026rsquo;ll see if it sticks.\nOk, that\u0026rsquo;s enough for this morning. Off to get things done, and maybe change out of these plaid trousers.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/glare/","summary":"So the windows in the house here are positioned just right, so that there\u0026rsquo;s glare on my computer screen from about 9:15 to 3 in the afternoon. Joy. Getting a new computer would actually make this problem worse, I think. Given that the Macbook \u0026ldquo;con\u0026rdquo; has a glossy screen. Sigh.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been a fan of the notion that some of the best blogging fall in the category of \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s a funny little thing that happened just now.\u0026rdquo; A sort of macro view of \u0026ldquo;the moment.\u0026rdquo; And I tend to err on the side of the light and comical, rather than the dark and brooding, though it seems like the dark often attracts a larger community or something.\nThat stuff they told you about \u0026ldquo;opposites attracting,\u0026rdquo; is all lies. Particularly when it comes to \u0026ldquo;the crazies\u0026rdquo; on Internet forums.\nSo my grandmother (hi!) has a knee injury that has required an immobilizing splint, and likely will for a number of weeks.","title":"Glare"},{"content":"1. The annotated version of the novella that I was hoping to get some editing of done during this trip. Sigh. 2. Ink cartridges for my Fountain Pen. Particularly unfortunate is the fact that I use a pen with a non-standard cartridge. Suck. 3. A razor. feh. 4. Waste yarn for setting stitches aside on. Grr.\nUpdate on 2: I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that there\u0026rsquo;s actually a pen store that carries ink in town, but it\u0026rsquo;s in a mall and I so do not want to waste any time in that venture, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things-ive-forgotten-to-pack/","summary":"1. The annotated version of the novella that I was hoping to get some editing of done during this trip. Sigh. 2. Ink cartridges for my Fountain Pen. Particularly unfortunate is the fact that I use a pen with a non-standard cartridge. Suck. 3. A razor. feh. 4. Waste yarn for setting stitches aside on. Grr.\nUpdate on 2: I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that there\u0026rsquo;s actually a pen store that carries ink in town, but it\u0026rsquo;s in a mall and I so do not want to waste any time in that venture, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see.","title":"Things I've Forgotten to pack"},{"content":"Hey folks!\nSorry for the lack of updates these past few days. A number of things have conspired against my efforts to blog, and that may continue to be the case for a little while, but with luck, not. In any case, here I am, now.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to leave in a few hours to go westward for a couple of days. I should return here Friday afternoon. My grandmother, a loyal tychoish.com reader, has a knee injury and needs some able bodied assistance and company, and I\u0026rsquo;m the family member that can get away the easiest. It\u0026rsquo;ll also be good for me to have a little time to gel away from St. Louis. I\u0026rsquo;ll have writing time, the chance to sleep in a room with windows (to further regulate the sleep cycle,) and it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to spend some time there.\nIn other fronts:\nI finishesd the first novella thing in James Tiptree\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Starry Rift.\u0026rdquo; It was nice. I can\u0026rsquo;t decide if the fact that their technology was based almost entirely on \u0026ldquo;cassette tapes\u0026rdquo; is a product of the novel/novella cycle being written in the Early/Mid Eighties, or the fact that these stories are set a long time before the \u0026ldquo;present\u0026rdquo; day relative to Brightness Falls from the Air and the framing story and she just wanted it to seem \u0026ldquo;old\u0026rdquo; I have 33 more rounds/rows to knit on the turkish tile sweater. The final 9 rows are short rows, for the shoulder shaping. Four rows before that, the back neck shaping begins which will remove about 40 stitches from active play (to set the back of the neck lower than the top of the shoulder edge.) I started a sock with cheap wool (good thing, that) using Elizabeth\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Sheepsfold\u0026rdquo; cable/pattern. It\u0026rsquo;s quite fun and it\u0026rsquo;s the first sock, I\u0026rsquo;ve actually knit that has any sort of pattern on it. Pretty damn nifty, if I do say so myself. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out what my plans are/were for knitting camp this year. My roommate (waves! I\u0026rsquo;ll write back very soon) wrote me and I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out what I want to do. I want to go this year, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll have letters from graduate schools before I have to commit to camp, which will be good. I want to go, I will probably go, but I\u0026rsquo;d like there to be more certainty in my life before I say \u0026ldquo;yes, and I\u0026rsquo;ll go to x camp.\u0026rdquo; I feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve made a breakthrough with the TealArt design. One of my big projects for t his week is working on getting the site to work the way I want it and then launch it. Then I\u0026rsquo;ll be in deep battle mode to get content polished and put up. I also need to figure out how to get paypal set up so I can have an appropriate tip jar and checkout system so that I can collect money for the knitting patterns I\u0026rsquo;m planning on putting together, and as a sidebar for the fiction projects. It\u0026rsquo;s hard not to think about the business of next-wave art/creativity/content. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that anything will come of it, but I know that it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile to try--particularly given the nature of the redesign and the basic idea that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get something if you\u0026rsquo;re not asking for it\u0026hellip; Ok, that\u0026rsquo;s enough for now. There might be more tonight, but probably not. I do have a couple more sweaters to talk about, so this week won\u0026rsquo;t be completely boring for you :)\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/change-up/","summary":"Hey folks!\nSorry for the lack of updates these past few days. A number of things have conspired against my efforts to blog, and that may continue to be the case for a little while, but with luck, not. In any case, here I am, now.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to leave in a few hours to go westward for a couple of days. I should return here Friday afternoon. My grandmother, a loyal tychoish.com reader, has a knee injury and needs some able bodied assistance and company, and I\u0026rsquo;m the family member that can get away the easiest. It\u0026rsquo;ll also be good for me to have a little time to gel away from St. Louis. I\u0026rsquo;ll have writing time, the chance to sleep in a room with windows (to further regulate the sleep cycle,) and it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to spend some time there.\nIn other fronts:\nI finishesd the first novella thing in James Tiptree\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Starry Rift.","title":"Change Up"},{"content":"My drive today was pretty darn uneventful. I listened to a lot of MacBreak Weekly (so excuse the very mac centric post that follows) and I actually think I\u0026rsquo;m caught up. My little car is amazing and peppy, despite its diminutive size, and while I am quite tired as a result of this drive, these things happen. And actually, beginning to want to think about bed by 9 pm, or thereabouts, is probably a good place to be given my desire to sort of readjust my sleep schedule.\nMy grandmother is doing pretty well. We had a good (early) dinner that I picked up on my way in, and sat around this evening. It\u0026rsquo;ll be good to be here for a few days, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nBefore I left today, my mother got her new iMac a bit earlier than she expected. Today. On a national holiday. I ask you, isn\u0026rsquo;t apple just amazing? I thought so. So I spent some time migrating all of her stuff from the old ibook to the new machine. But only really an hour. Aren\u0026rsquo;t Macs just amazing.\nThis leaves me feeling incredibly jealous, I must admit. I\u0026rsquo;m going to begin shifting all of our older computers to leopard as soon as she says the transition is complete. Well maybe all of them. I don\u0026rsquo;t know. I really want a new computer though. My resolution to wait continues, though it wears.\nMy current apple prediction is that there\u0026rsquo;ll be all new MacBook pros in June, and maybe new mac book consumer laptops (do we call them MacBook cons?) in August. I think the MacBook Air closes hope of a 12 inch laptop anytime in the near future. (TheBoy and many others are likely quite upset with this, news, and sort of so am I, but I frankly can\u0026rsquo;t see it happening.)\nGiven where I am now, I\u0026rsquo;m almost certainly looking at the macbook \u0026ldquo;con\u0026rdquo;. I can\u0026rsquo;t, frankly, think of a situation where it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be sufficient, the screen is big enough, and the Macbook Pros aren\u0026rsquo;t that much better in comparison. The thing about apple laptops is that, depending on when you buy a laptop the difference between the pro and the \u0026ldquo;con\u0026rdquo; is pretty variable. At some points in the cycle, the only difference other than the screen between the one and the other is a graphics card, and 200 megahertz (for a thousand dollars or more), and other times in the cycle the pro computers have higher pixel density or other screen differences, considerably faster drives, and nice really beefy graphics cards. The later was the case when I got Zoe. It\u0026rsquo;s not the case now.\nOn the one hand there\u0026rsquo;s no good reason that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t wait until August to upgrade, and I\u0026rsquo;m--awkwardly, on all fronts--at a point in my life where a \u0026ldquo;play each day by ear\u0026rdquo; attitude seems to be the most indicated approach to living. Maybe in celebration I\u0026rsquo;ll upgrade after I get an acceptance letter to one of my top schools (along with a long awaited road trip to visit friends, I think), maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll hold out until June and see what get announced then. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll go until August, because why the hell not?\nSigh. I do know that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be getting a spinning wheel sometime in the next 6-8 weeks or so, I think. I\u0026rsquo;ve sold a wheel that I\u0026rsquo;ve had for a long time, and been pretty incapable of ever using. This means that I only own one spinning wheel, and I have a few leads there. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to have one wheel that I can use consistently for a long time. Boy oh boy. I think spinning was something that I was looking forward to doing this week before the trip became an issue, but that\u0026rsquo;s ok, there are plenty of things that need attention anyway.\nSpeaking of which, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go attend. Sleep well and have a good week, I will continue to be in touch.\ntycho out!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/leopard-yearnings-update/","summary":"My drive today was pretty darn uneventful. I listened to a lot of MacBreak Weekly (so excuse the very mac centric post that follows) and I actually think I\u0026rsquo;m caught up. My little car is amazing and peppy, despite its diminutive size, and while I am quite tired as a result of this drive, these things happen. And actually, beginning to want to think about bed by 9 pm, or thereabouts, is probably a good place to be given my desire to sort of readjust my sleep schedule.\nMy grandmother is doing pretty well. We had a good (early) dinner that I picked up on my way in, and sat around this evening. It\u0026rsquo;ll be good to be here for a few days, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nBefore I left today, my mother got her new iMac a bit earlier than she expected. Today. On a national holiday. I ask you, isn\u0026rsquo;t apple just amazing?","title":"Leopard Yearnings, Update"},{"content":"Today\u0026rsquo;s entry starts with a discussion of my sleep habits, and goes from there. Hope that\u0026rsquo;s not too boring. That\u0026rsquo;s what this whole web log/online journal thing is really about, after all: gratuitous sharing of information.\nThe general malaise that I\u0026rsquo;ve been referencing for the past few weeks--and that I think I\u0026rsquo;m finally getting over--did a number on my sleep schedule. I think this is in part a sort of normal response sessional light differences, and the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything to do in the mornings, so I don\u0026rsquo;t absolutely have to get up in the morning. I should, in any case.\nThe sort of frustrating thing, was that while I had a few days with a semi-irregular sleep pattern, the past four nights have been eerily predictable. (Sleep at 12:30, awake at 9.) I even tried a couple of times to go to bed earlier, and spent an hour or more trying to fall asleep (generally if I don\u0026rsquo;t fall asleep in 20 mins, I get up and knit or read for a while until I\u0026rsquo;m tired enough to give it another go.)\nSo given that I had a long weekend. I thought that it might be good to shock my body back into a normal sleep schedule. So, no naps today. I also have a plan for adjusting my sleep schedule so that I can get into a 11-7, or 10:30-6:30 habit, and use the extra morning time to write and read and do things that I should do. I work really well in the morning, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m better at being tycho when I have that time. Even if I sleep the same amount, being awake at night is never as productive or happy-making for me.\nSo what did I do last night, while I was trying to trick my body into going into something more reasonable? I knit. A lot. And watched more Enterprise. The turkish tile is now a total of 20 inches long, which means I\u0026rsquo;m somewhere between 1.5 and 2 inches away from beginning the neck shaping. When the neck shaping start, I\u0026rsquo;ll have 35 rounds and 9 sets of short rows left on the body. The countdown begins.\nI also did some drupal tinkering. I got things set up pretty much the way I want them, I think. The goal now is to get the content into the system, and then make sure that it all works out right. Then we go live.\nExciting times.\nOnward and Upward!\ntycho out.\nps. someone mentioned a wordpress error regarding comment posting. I tried and wasn\u0026rsquo;t able to replicate any error, so if you\u0026rsquo;re using tychoish.com and get some sort of error, copy and paste it into an email, so I can attend to it. Reach me at garen@tychoish.com about errors or anything, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear from folks.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/readjustment/","summary":"Today\u0026rsquo;s entry starts with a discussion of my sleep habits, and goes from there. Hope that\u0026rsquo;s not too boring. That\u0026rsquo;s what this whole web log/online journal thing is really about, after all: gratuitous sharing of information.\nThe general malaise that I\u0026rsquo;ve been referencing for the past few weeks--and that I think I\u0026rsquo;m finally getting over--did a number on my sleep schedule. I think this is in part a sort of normal response sessional light differences, and the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything to do in the mornings, so I don\u0026rsquo;t absolutely have to get up in the morning. I should, in any case.\nThe sort of frustrating thing, was that while I had a few days with a semi-irregular sleep pattern, the past four nights have been eerily predictable. (Sleep at 12:30, awake at 9.) I even tried a couple of times to go to bed earlier, and spent an hour or more trying to fall asleep (generally if I don\u0026rsquo;t fall asleep in 20 mins, I get up and knit or read for a while until I\u0026rsquo;m tired enough to give it another go.","title":"Readjustment"},{"content":"So I have a bunch of knitting pictures that I\u0026rsquo;ve sort of been sitting on for a while. In part because I don\u0026rsquo;t take pictures very often, in part because the pictures are of poor quality, and in part because I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly fond of the sweaters that I have left. But lots of people always seem to like this sweater, so here it goes.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always called in my \u0026ldquo;Norge sweater,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s just a really really simple norwegian style sweater, with a few minor modifications. Here\u0026rsquo;s the basic shot..\nYarn is Classic Elite \u0026ldquo;Montera,\u0026rdquo; that I got on cones at Susan\u0026rsquo;s Fiber Shop. It looked like it was pretty old stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s single ply wool/llama mix, and frankly, not quite as soft knitted up as I wanted it to be. And a good deal heavier than you\u0026rsquo;d expect. The patterns came from the \u0026ldquo;Traditional Scandivaian Knitting\u0026rdquo; book, and the shape was/is my own.\nThough it\u0026rsquo;s probably the simplest sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve done that has color work in it, it was like my 2nd or 3rd color work sweater. I set in the armholes a little bit, and you can see that in the final. I also got to do short rows, which is nice.\nHere is a detail picture of the pattern:\nThings I learned from this pattern:\nDo cuffs in 2x2 rib, 1x1 is too elastic and doesn\u0026rsquo;t cuff enough. So it\u0026rsquo;s sort of limp. Shape the back of the neck on a sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s it can make or break a sweater. Never make a sweater collar longer than 1.5 inches, particularly in crew neck sweaters. When in doubt use the sleeves to build on and accent the body pattern. Simplify it perhaps, but never have it be totally different. Get used to using yarns designed for stranded knitting, like shetland, and don\u0026rsquo;t get all fancy on the process. Really. Works out better that way. Corollary: Accent patterns, don\u0026rsquo;t well. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweater-report-norge-pullover/","summary":"So I have a bunch of knitting pictures that I\u0026rsquo;ve sort of been sitting on for a while. In part because I don\u0026rsquo;t take pictures very often, in part because the pictures are of poor quality, and in part because I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly fond of the sweaters that I have left. But lots of people always seem to like this sweater, so here it goes.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always called in my \u0026ldquo;Norge sweater,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s just a really really simple norwegian style sweater, with a few minor modifications. Here\u0026rsquo;s the basic shot..\nYarn is Classic Elite \u0026ldquo;Montera,\u0026rdquo; that I got on cones at Susan\u0026rsquo;s Fiber Shop. It looked like it was pretty old stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s single ply wool/llama mix, and frankly, not quite as soft knitted up as I wanted it to be. And a good deal heavier than you\u0026rsquo;d expect. The patterns came from the \u0026ldquo;Traditional Scandivaian Knitting\u0026rdquo; book, and the shape was/is my own.","title":"Sweater Report: Norge Pullover"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ve ranted about this r/evolution debate in the past, but this post about Bruce Sterling\u0026rsquo;s new novella in F\u0026amp;SF fired up my feelings on the subject, so here it goes.\nFirst off, let me establish that I\u0026rsquo;m going to use the term evolution in an explicitly non-technical sense. I\u0026rsquo;m often annoyed that any sort of gradual change or adapatation is refered to as \u0026ldquo;evolution,\u0026rdquo; when in a technical sense, this isn\u0026rsquo;t even a good analogy to what\u0026rsquo;s happening. But that\u0026rsquo;s a different rant, for now I\u0026rsquo;m going submit to the dominant lexicon.\nSecondly, I haven\u0026rsquo;t read Sterling\u0026rsquo;s novella, and this isn\u0026rsquo;t a reaction as much to Sterling as it is to Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s gloss of the Novella. Just to be clear.\nFrom the blog post:\n\u0026ldquo;Sterling says of this story, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve been in an eight-year struggle to write \u0026lsquo;a kind of science fiction that could only be written in the 21st century.\u0026rsquo; With the possible exception of my forthcoming novel, this story is my best result from that effort.\u0026rdquo; I think he\u0026rsquo;s right -- about the story, anyway; I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen the novel yet.\u0026rdquo;\nThis seems to be a false premise. At least to me. The 21st century is an arbitrary unit, and while I think we do live in a very different world today than we did eight or ten years ago, that is always the case. Interestingly boingboing, gets a lot of milage out of looking back at forward looking bits of \u0026ldquo;culture\u0026rdquo; from the turn of the century, and the 20s-40s. These cultural artifacts seem as antiquated to us as \u0026ldquo;the kind of science fiction that could only be written in the 21st century,\u0026rdquo; will surely look in the next dozen years.\nWhich isn\u0026rsquo;t to say it\u0026rsquo;s the wrong thing to write, or bad, just that if you look at it the right way, \u0026ldquo;writing SF that could only be written in today\u0026rsquo;s world,\u0026rdquo; is exactly what every SF writer is (or should) always already (be) trying to write. And if you\u0026rsquo;ve been in eight year struggle to do this, maybe there some other issue that we should talk about. But then authors of cyberpunk are all about arguing that the present marks an revolutionary advancement from whatever went before.\nDoctorow goes on to say:\n\u0026ldquo;This is a genuinely 21st century piece of sf. It uses the slightly stilted, comic dialog form of great sf to unravel the social and technological implications of automated search, copying, governance and communications, with an enormous amount of compassion and heart. Sterling\u0026rsquo;s way of thinking about technology has often struck me as kind of stern, but years of living in Serbia appear to have given him a bit of a melancholy Slavic outlook that creeps into the story in a hundred little ways that tell you how much affection he really has for our poor tired human race.\u0026rdquo;\nI fear that this mode of writing utterly current SF is really based on some sort of ill gotten notion that if we write about the present we\u0026rsquo;ll be seen as being \u0026ldquo;more real,\u0026rdquo; than if we write about space ships and lasers. Which is all kinds of silly, and this sort of critical trend is dangerous, because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t promote a diversity of opinion and approach. This is sort of a reenactment of the downfall of cyberpunk all over again. Or maybe more correctly given that it\u0026rsquo;s being propagated--at least primarily--by Sterling and Gibson (and Doctorow, though he wasn\u0026rsquo;t publishing during the \u0026ldquo;high cyberpunk period\u0026rdquo;), part of the protracted decent of that movement.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I rather enjoy the concept of cyberpunk, and some of the post-cyberpunk imaginations in much the way that I enjoy space opera: as a platform for story telling that isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily true to what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen, but enjoyable and full of possibility nonetheless. At the same time I think the argument that cyberpunk is more real, and in touch with everyone\u0026rsquo;s lived realities, because it is gritty, and dark, and current is absurd.\nAnd I think this goes back to the r/evolutionary argument: do we understand history as a slow progression, or a series of distinct epochs?\nThe question is open of course, but I tend to believe that revolutions, of the intellectual/cultural/historical scope that cyberpunk seems to be responding to, don\u0026rsquo;t really happen. Other kinds of revolution? Maybe, and if/when they do, they\u0026rsquo;re never has temporally clear cut as anyone would like them to be.\nSorry guys\u0026hellip;\ntycho out.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/revolution/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ve ranted about this r/evolution debate in the past, but this post about Bruce Sterling\u0026rsquo;s new novella in F\u0026amp;SF fired up my feelings on the subject, so here it goes.\nFirst off, let me establish that I\u0026rsquo;m going to use the term evolution in an explicitly non-technical sense. I\u0026rsquo;m often annoyed that any sort of gradual change or adapatation is refered to as \u0026ldquo;evolution,\u0026rdquo; when in a technical sense, this isn\u0026rsquo;t even a good analogy to what\u0026rsquo;s happening. But that\u0026rsquo;s a different rant, for now I\u0026rsquo;m going submit to the dominant lexicon.\nSecondly, I haven\u0026rsquo;t read Sterling\u0026rsquo;s novella, and this isn\u0026rsquo;t a reaction as much to Sterling as it is to Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s gloss of the Novella. Just to be clear.\nFrom the blog post:\n\u0026ldquo;Sterling says of this story, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve been in an eight-year struggle to write \u0026lsquo;a kind of science fiction that could only be written in the 21st century.","title":"R/evolution"},{"content":"News from the malaise that I\u0026rsquo;ve been battling this week: I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get involved and interested in my knitting, to the point where I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to spend a few very restorative hours knitting. I also have made some good progress on the TealArt redesign, and some other planning related things. But this is a knitting post.\nI just have the last final motif of the first sleeve of the morocco jacket. It\u0026rsquo;s looking a little big, but then again, it\u0026rsquo;s a jacket, and I\u0026rsquo;m not really worried about it. It might work out yet.\nThe turkish tile sweater is about 2.5 inches into the yoke. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that in order for this to be the right size, I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to knit like, say 6-6.5 inches of the yoke before I begin the neck shaping, so that the armhole is wide enough. I\u0026rsquo;ve been over this before, but because there are going to be effectively 2 inches of sleeve decreased between the shoulder/neck join and the edge of the body (ie, the traditional point where drop-shouldered sleeves attach to the body), I think it\u0026rsquo;s important that I make the opening large enough.\nThough to be fair, I do have a persistant fear of making sleeves to narrow. I had a couple--ok, maybe more like 3--of my early sweaters that failed completely because the sleeves weren\u0026rsquo;t just right, due to errors like this. And particularly since these sweaters are meant as jackets\u0026hellip; I think all is well.\nCurrent knitting television: old episodes of Star Trek Enterprise. It\u0026rsquo;s trashy and the writing/acting makes me cringe, but the dog is cute and I think the time travel that wove throughout the entire series could be really cool. But I have a thought about the future of Trek:\nTrek makes good weekly television SF. I\u0026rsquo;d really like to see a new Trek series set a generation or two after the beginning of the next generation. And incorporate all of the things that has made previous trek shows great:\nInside jokes with the fans (Enterprise, has/had the potential to do this by setting up story elements that we would see ramifications of in the \u0026ldquo;future\u0026rdquo;) A war (Deep Space Nine) Racial/Ethnic Conflict (DS9 the bajorian/cardasian conflict.) A Rebellion (The Maquis; TNG/DS9/VOY) Time travel (TOS Movies/Voyager/ENT) A variable cast of characters (DS9; Worf entered DS9 late, Rom and Nog became more important, the Dax change over. the arc of Garak. Etc. Characters were also promoted, and developed, and there were more regular-cast aliens than previous series.) Dynamic Captains/leaders (DS9 mostly, but also Voyager.) Suspense and Exploration, a sense of wonder. That is, good \u0026ldquo;shows of the week\u0026rdquo; (TNG/Voyager). Connection to \u0026ldquo;real world\u0026rdquo; (TOS). Some comedic elements. (TOS movies). Political Intrigue (DS9; this was the first series to have an admiral make more than a handful of appearances. And there were glimpses of ongoing battles inside of the cardasians and klingons.) It might be an interesting exercise to see what people think makes good Trek. While I\u0026rsquo;m not a die hard fan, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve always found Trek to be pretty entertaining, particularly for knitting background, and I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a good deal of it.\nThoughts?\nI have other things to do. Cheers!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/switch-switch-switch/","summary":"News from the malaise that I\u0026rsquo;ve been battling this week: I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get involved and interested in my knitting, to the point where I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to spend a few very restorative hours knitting. I also have made some good progress on the TealArt redesign, and some other planning related things. But this is a knitting post.\nI just have the last final motif of the first sleeve of the morocco jacket. It\u0026rsquo;s looking a little big, but then again, it\u0026rsquo;s a jacket, and I\u0026rsquo;m not really worried about it. It might work out yet.\nThe turkish tile sweater is about 2.5 inches into the yoke. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that in order for this to be the right size, I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to knit like, say 6-6.5 inches of the yoke before I begin the neck shaping, so that the armhole is wide enough. I\u0026rsquo;ve been over this before, but because there are going to be effectively 2 inches of sleeve decreased between the shoulder/neck join and the edge of the body (ie, the traditional point where drop-shouldered sleeves attach to the body), I think it\u0026rsquo;s important that I make the opening large enough.","title":"Switch. Switch, Switch."},{"content":"I wanted to write something, a week in about my experiences with OmniFocus, so here it is.\nThe truth is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in a bit of a funk all week. Not writing, while I figure out I need to do with this story. But I\u0026rsquo;m also spending a more time this week knitting and sorting through things. I think some time to sit back and reflect on what\u0026rsquo;s going on before I dive into what ever comes next.\nGood plan? Right?\nRight.\nSo as part of this reflect and regrouping I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting more, reports of this appear on the blog, so I won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with this. I also reorganized my files, which very much needed to happen. And I\u0026rsquo;m using omnifocus.\nI want to say that I absoultly love this app. Everything about it just works the way you\u0026rsquo;d expect it to. There aren\u0026rsquo;t bugs, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty, and it all works with a really robust data framework, thingy.\nThe problem is that I don\u0026rsquo;t work very well with this program. I get a lot of things done, and that\u0026rsquo;s good but I\u0026rsquo;m not very good at doing my project planning in a way that works with the whole system. Which is something that I\u0026rsquo;m working on a little bit, but is still frustrating.\nSuch is life, I suppose.\nOh, and by the way I did a little bit of work with drupal last night. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;m making progress, but I have a better idea of what needs to happen.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/working-systems-decay/","summary":"I wanted to write something, a week in about my experiences with OmniFocus, so here it is.\nThe truth is that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in a bit of a funk all week. Not writing, while I figure out I need to do with this story. But I\u0026rsquo;m also spending a more time this week knitting and sorting through things. I think some time to sit back and reflect on what\u0026rsquo;s going on before I dive into what ever comes next.\nGood plan? Right?\nRight.\nSo as part of this reflect and regrouping I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting more, reports of this appear on the blog, so I won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with this. I also reorganized my files, which very much needed to happen. And I\u0026rsquo;m using omnifocus.\nI want to say that I absoultly love this app. Everything about it just works the way you\u0026rsquo;d expect it to. There aren\u0026rsquo;t bugs, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty, and it all works with a really robust data framework, thingy.","title":"working systems decay"},{"content":"Ha! So I was pretty much on the ball about apple\u0026rsquo;s releases yesterday. I think in general, it\u0026rsquo;s a good move, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t affect very much for me.\nMy one complaint is that, you can get the base level MacPro for less than the MacBookAir with the solid state drive. As Dave says, \u0026ldquo;that just seems wrong.\u0026rdquo; Part of the joy of the 12\u0026quot; ibooks and powerbooks is that they were cheaper than their 14\u0026quot; and 15\u0026quot; counterparts, and only a little bit under powered. It\u0026rsquo;s clear that while the other apple laptops could (and often do) function as people\u0026rsquo;s only/primary computer, these new ones, are meant as second or third computers for people who have an imac or a mac pro already.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to get a new computer for a few months, The consensus is that there\u0026rsquo;ll be new macbook pros sometime soon (WWDC?), and I think I want to wait and see what happens with that before I take the plunge. Particularly because my current computer, for good or ill still works.\nSpeaking of Zoe, I didn\u0026rsquo;t get her a new battery, which I should do at some point, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly lazy. My battery time is down to about 40 minutes, which isn\u0026rsquo;t too bad for coming up on 3 years.\nIn other news, I did some organizing of my subversion repository last night. I think I\u0026rsquo;m caught in some endless battle of file organization between the \u0026ldquo;one folder with lots of files and rely on search tools to find things\u0026rdquo; method and the \u0026ldquo;lots of specific folders\u0026rdquo; method. I\u0026rsquo;m back in the \u0026ldquo;have more folders\u0026rdquo; camp. For whatever that\u0026rsquo;s worth. It\u0026rsquo;s super nice that subversion keeps file history through renames and moves. I\u0026rsquo;m too nerotic for anything else.\nAnyway, I got up a bit late, and I have a bunch of little things I want to do before work today.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/in-the-air/","summary":"Ha! So I was pretty much on the ball about apple\u0026rsquo;s releases yesterday. I think in general, it\u0026rsquo;s a good move, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t affect very much for me.\nMy one complaint is that, you can get the base level MacPro for less than the MacBookAir with the solid state drive. As Dave says, \u0026ldquo;that just seems wrong.\u0026rdquo; Part of the joy of the 12\u0026quot; ibooks and powerbooks is that they were cheaper than their 14\u0026quot; and 15\u0026quot; counterparts, and only a little bit under powered. It\u0026rsquo;s clear that while the other apple laptops could (and often do) function as people\u0026rsquo;s only/primary computer, these new ones, are meant as second or third computers for people who have an imac or a mac pro already.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to get a new computer for a few months, The consensus is that there\u0026rsquo;ll be new macbook pros sometime soon (WWDC?), and I think I want to wait and see what happens with that before I take the plunge.","title":"In the Air"},{"content":"Ok, I got pictures of my first sweater class and I wanted to share this picture with you even though I look a little bit odd in the picture. Also I\u0026rsquo;d like to note that I do, often wear other sweaters at the shop, I just always seem to be wearing that one when my picture is taken.\nIn my knitting news, I decided that the gray \u0026ldquo;turkish tile\u0026rdquo; sweater was to the underarm point, so I\u0026rsquo;m casting on for the armhole steeks in this round. Exciting. The sweater will go much faster now, because I\u0026rsquo;m setting the sleeve in so far. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that if I stick with it the body of this sweater will be done in the next week or two, thought I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty unlikely that I will stick with it. The yoke of the sweater is knit over 114 fewer stitches than the body of the sweater. by the time I get to the shoulders there will be 108 stitches.\nSpeedy speedy.\nAnyway. On with the day.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knit-the-knits/","summary":"Ok, I got pictures of my first sweater class and I wanted to share this picture with you even though I look a little bit odd in the picture. Also I\u0026rsquo;d like to note that I do, often wear other sweaters at the shop, I just always seem to be wearing that one when my picture is taken.\nIn my knitting news, I decided that the gray \u0026ldquo;turkish tile\u0026rdquo; sweater was to the underarm point, so I\u0026rsquo;m casting on for the armhole steeks in this round. Exciting. The sweater will go much faster now, because I\u0026rsquo;m setting the sleeve in so far. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that if I stick with it the body of this sweater will be done in the next week or two, thought I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty unlikely that I will stick with it. The yoke of the sweater is knit over 114 fewer stitches than the body of the sweater.","title":"Knit the Knits"},{"content":"So I knit 2-2.5 inches on this sweater (turkish tile) last night. That\u0026rsquo;s a pretty good amount for one day, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty psyched about figuring out how this is going to go.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s going faster because I\u0026rsquo;m knitting over 114 fewer stitches, to set in the armholes to shoulder width. I like being able to have something that\u0026rsquo;s a bit more fitted than the drop shouldered sweater, which is by now, ubiquitous in my wardrobe.\nThis particular armhole shaping is soemthing that I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen (exactly) anywhere yet, so it\u0026rsquo;s kind of cool to be working on something new, having said that, this \u0026ldquo;garment framework,\u0026rdquo; will really only be useful in sweaters which have a pattern with a strong diagonal, because in other situations, there are sleeve shaping methods that would be more effective and aesthetic.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m having fun with this sweater, and it\u0026rsquo;s a good sweater.\nThe one problem that I\u0026rsquo;ve come to realize is that because the armholes are so deep, in order for this sweater to fit over other sweaters (which it should because it\u0026rsquo;s a jacket), the armholes need to be even deeper/longer than I thought, because my usual armhole measurements are based on sleeves that are 3 inches shorter, or there abouts. I don\u0026rsquo;t need to make them that much longer, but a little would be helpful.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on putting together a small color-work (2 color/stranded) sweater \u0026ldquo;master class.\u0026rdquo; Because I want to teach something like this, and because I\u0026rsquo;m really insistent that this is not a difficult technique, and I think anyone who wants to knit this knit this could do a sweater. But then my whole knitting MO is to sort of jump in head first and see what happens, and I think it would work. It\u0026rsquo;s something\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, I have a busy day\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/shifting-progress/","summary":"So I knit 2-2.5 inches on this sweater (turkish tile) last night. That\u0026rsquo;s a pretty good amount for one day, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty psyched about figuring out how this is going to go.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s going faster because I\u0026rsquo;m knitting over 114 fewer stitches, to set in the armholes to shoulder width. I like being able to have something that\u0026rsquo;s a bit more fitted than the drop shouldered sweater, which is by now, ubiquitous in my wardrobe.\nThis particular armhole shaping is soemthing that I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen (exactly) anywhere yet, so it\u0026rsquo;s kind of cool to be working on something new, having said that, this \u0026ldquo;garment framework,\u0026rdquo; will really only be useful in sweaters which have a pattern with a strong diagonal, because in other situations, there are sleeve shaping methods that would be more effective and aesthetic.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m having fun with this sweater, and it\u0026rsquo;s a good sweater.\nThe one problem that I\u0026rsquo;ve come to realize is that because the armholes are so deep, in order for this sweater to fit over other sweaters (which it should because it\u0026rsquo;s a jacket), the armholes need to be even deeper/longer than I thought, because my usual armhole measurements are based on sleeves that are 3 inches shorter, or there abouts.","title":"shifting progress"},{"content":"Ok, my topicality and tagging system hasn\u0026rsquo;t quite readjusted itself, but I have an entry worth posting here. Almost.\nI knit a bunch on the Turkish Tile sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m probably about a pattern repeat away from the beginning f the armholes, which means I\u0026rsquo;ve officially broken the back of the body. I am however, going to probably go back to the interminable sleeve knitting once I am to that point, because it\u0026rsquo;s the right thing to do.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t quite have the whole thing figured out, I must admit. I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking over jared\u0026rsquo;s tomten for inspiration. I want to have a hood on this for some perverse reason, but I can\u0026rsquo;t fathom a way to get it to come out correctly because of the requirement to keep this all in the pattern. Wait. I just did. If all the increasing and decreasing happens next to the steek it should work, though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I could increase enough fast enough, and find a way to get the rear-top of the hood to not be pointy, again while maintaining some semblance of the color pattern.\nMy current plan for the arms/shoulders is to set them in really deeply, a la the tomten and joyce\u0026rsquo;s olive branch sweater, and do Jennie Bajus\u0026rsquo; short row shaping in the round, and then continue that decrease down the top of the sleeve. With some short row stuff for 10-20 rows. Even if no one understands this knitting talk, I hope you are at the very least entertained\nNew Macs are going to be announced in like 20 minutes. Looks like the ultra small laptop is for real. Called the \u0026ldquo;air.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not yet sure how I feel about this. Questions that remain in my mind:\nIs it going to run real OS X and not some sort of embedded flavor (likely to be the real thing, but it\u0026rsquo;s a question.) Are we going all the way to flash hard drive and no optical drive, or is this really just a reinvention of the 12 inch ibook/powerbook? (I\u0026rsquo;m voting on the later; I think there\u0026rsquo;s a production capacity/supply issue with flash memory, and the small laptop is something apple succeeds with, so it\u0026rsquo;s been disheartening that they haven\u0026rsquo;t had something in this space for a while.) While I\u0026rsquo;m not in the market for a new computer for myself yet, (talk to me in a few months) I will be ordering an iMac for my mother when the apple store returns this afternoon/evening.\nCurrently I have a 15 inch PowerBook. And it\u0026rsquo;s my only computer, and I\u0026rsquo;m likely to be in a situation where my only computer is a laptop for the life of the next computer that I buy. I don\u0026rsquo; know that I want my entire digital life to be stuck on such a small screen, frankly. I think I could go to 13 inch, but probably not smaller. If the Macbook as we know now it is canceled, I\u0026rsquo;d consider buying one of the last ones, for this reason\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ll post a recap in a few hours when we know something serious.\nSo stay tuned\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dead-line/","summary":"Ok, my topicality and tagging system hasn\u0026rsquo;t quite readjusted itself, but I have an entry worth posting here. Almost.\nI knit a bunch on the Turkish Tile sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m probably about a pattern repeat away from the beginning f the armholes, which means I\u0026rsquo;ve officially broken the back of the body. I am however, going to probably go back to the interminable sleeve knitting once I am to that point, because it\u0026rsquo;s the right thing to do.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t quite have the whole thing figured out, I must admit. I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking over jared\u0026rsquo;s tomten for inspiration. I want to have a hood on this for some perverse reason, but I can\u0026rsquo;t fathom a way to get it to come out correctly because of the requirement to keep this all in the pattern. Wait. I just did. If all the increasing and decreasing happens next to the steek it should work, though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I could increase enough fast enough, and find a way to get the rear-top of the hood to not be pointy, again while maintaining some semblance of the color pattern.","title":"dead-line"},{"content":"Ok, I said a while ago, that I was going to run out of good titles for posts that weren\u0026rsquo;t essays any even the most informal sense, but rather journal entries in the most conventional sense. So here we have \u0026ldquo;cold feet\u0026rdquo; literally, the only thing on my mind. (Don\u0026rsquo;t worry, I\u0026rsquo;ve since put on wool socks.)\nI spent most of this weekend relaxing and unwinding. I didn\u0026rsquo;t get enough reading done, of course, but I think it was good to have some time to chill. I got some good knitting done, I watched some enjoyable television, mucked around with the computer productively, and worked a number of hours, and while I have been costing into the new week, I think I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty good about the world and my place in it.\nI am, apparently, going to reflect in this post on my current state of mind vis a vis technology. Because that makes sense. I mean I am a huge geek, but it\u0026rsquo;s clear to me that so much of what I do is constrained by my computer usage. Writing happens almost entirely with the computer, a lot of my knitting time happens while I\u0026rsquo;m watching TV on my computer, my academic articles and database is on my computer. You get the idea.\nThe rest of the post is below the fold, because I\u0026rsquo;m going to be humane, but you really should read it. ;)\nI\u0026rsquo;m still using Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) Despite what Andy/Chris says, I kind of would like to move to the new operating system, at some point. My mother is going to buy an iMac this week, after it\u0026rsquo;s clear what Steve announces tomorrow morning, and so with the extra computer in the mix, we\u0026rsquo;ll have a spare that we can use to shift data around on so that we can do clean installs on all of our machines which should be nice.\nI write here about productivity a fair bit, and I\u0026rsquo;ve certainly sussed a fair bit about organizational methodologies like GTD from places like 43 folders. I\u0026rsquo;ve never had a lot of problems that productivity geeks seem to address. I\u0026rsquo;m good at writing things down, I\u0026rsquo;m good at making the write kind of lists, I don\u0026rsquo;t have problems with things falling through the cracks, and generally I don\u0026rsquo;t spend too much time futzing with the system.\nSo usually, new programs and productivity doodads, seem really cool for about the length of time it takes me to write a blog post, and then I\u0026rsquo;ve moved on, back whatever it was that I was doing previously. Recently I got the distinct feeling that what I was doing earlier, basically project based text file lists, with no automation, wasn\u0026rsquo;t cutting it. This is in part because I\u0026rsquo;ve not been using it properly for a while, and perhaps more importantly because I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get busier, and I need something more robust. So I downloaded OmniFocus, which is the long awaited Killer GTD App from OmniGroup. It\u0026rsquo;s descended from a hodgepodge of apple scripts that I tried and abandoned a while ago called KinklessGTD, and I have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s really amazing. I mean I don\u0026rsquo;t quite grok everything, and my perennial problems with GTD of basically not using contexts and having projects that are too big and ongoing\u0026hellip; But I mean other than that.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s to early to tell, but I\u0026rsquo;m giving a preliminary thumbs up.\nPart of my frustration in this sphere is tied into my state of mind regarding the way my files are organized. While SVN, as I\u0026rsquo;ve written earlier has been a great tool that I\u0026rsquo;ve come to really enjoy using and depend on, it means that I\u0026rsquo;m disinclined to reorganize files, and rearrange how things are laid out. Which is bad because I think some part of my brain really thinks on a cork wall and wants to move files around just to see how it looks or suits my state of mind. This is something that isn\u0026rsquo;t productive, so I\u0026rsquo;m fighting it, but it is throwing me for loop and i need to figure something out here. Ah well. Time will tell.\nThe next post had better be more interesting. That\u0026rsquo;s all I\u0026rsquo;m saying\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cold-feet-literally/","summary":"Ok, I said a while ago, that I was going to run out of good titles for posts that weren\u0026rsquo;t essays any even the most informal sense, but rather journal entries in the most conventional sense. So here we have \u0026ldquo;cold feet\u0026rdquo; literally, the only thing on my mind. (Don\u0026rsquo;t worry, I\u0026rsquo;ve since put on wool socks.)\nI spent most of this weekend relaxing and unwinding. I didn\u0026rsquo;t get enough reading done, of course, but I think it was good to have some time to chill. I got some good knitting done, I watched some enjoyable television, mucked around with the computer productively, and worked a number of hours, and while I have been costing into the new week, I think I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty good about the world and my place in it.\nI am, apparently, going to reflect in this post on my current state of mind vis a vis technology.","title":"Cold Feet, Literally"},{"content":"I often ask myself what separates the \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; geeks, from the rest of us?\nOk, maybe not often, but sometimes.\nApropos of my conversation with ProspectiveAdvisor this morning I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the mis/remembered history of the \u0026ldquo;geek\u0026rdquo; identity. I mean at one point the geeks were the awkward and intense folks who were really good with technology and games (ok, I don\u0026rsquo;t understand that, but we\u0026rsquo;ll take it.) Being a geek wasn\u0026rsquo;t a cool thing, and being a geek wasn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;sexy.\u0026rdquo; Now at least in some circles, with the rise of the commercial Internet, I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair to suggest that in some context geek and hipster have sort of meshed in some perverse way. I mean computers have gotten easier to use, and this means that the boundaries of geek is wider.\nMy grandfather quit using computers when windows 3.1 came out because he thought it would open the BBSes to too many people and ruin the joy experience. While I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t make that argument in those terms (or draw that line in the sand) I think I\u0026rsquo;m commenting on a parallel phenomena.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m getting too far afield.\nSo now since, in a way, we\u0026rsquo;re all geeks, what separates normal geek from uber-geek. What sorts of usage things to the real geeks do that you and I don\u0026rsquo;t do as much?\nNear as I can tell, there are two major things:\nTemplates 2. Automate Which boils down to basically: your computer is great at doing repetitive tasks, so make it do them, rather than doing it yourself. I think this became most clear to me as I\u0026rsquo;ve made the transition to using LaTeX for any kind of document that needs to end up on paper. LaTeX really powerful, and really complex, but figuring out like 90% of what makes it go, is all in the header and footer, so all I have to do is get templates ready for my documents, and then drop in the text that I\u0026rsquo;m using. Simple.\nIn OS X, under file info (Command-I in finder) there\u0026rsquo;s a little box that says \u0026ldquo;Stationary Pad.\u0026rdquo; If you check that, every time you open that file, finder will make a copy of the file and then open that one. There are also ways to use templates inside of TextMate, Quicksilver, and so forth. Nifty. Ok, geek foo time saving skill number one. I have that.\nGeek foo skill number two, is automate. If you find yourself doing the same thing again and again, stop. Figure out a way to automate this. Most programs have a macro function, which I think is utterly misunderstood. I you have a series of find and replaces, you can just open up a test document, do the find and replaces, and save the macro so you can do it again and again. If you\u0026rsquo;re a perl genius you could probably write it out in your sleep, but then, where\u0026rsquo;s the fun in that?\nOk. Nifty.\nSo the question is, what\u0026rsquo;s number 3. There has to be another trick, that I\u0026rsquo;m missing. Something you can do that doesn\u0026rsquo;t require learning Lisp.\nSigh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/getting-mad-foo-skilz/","summary":"I often ask myself what separates the \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; geeks, from the rest of us?\nOk, maybe not often, but sometimes.\nApropos of my conversation with ProspectiveAdvisor this morning I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the mis/remembered history of the \u0026ldquo;geek\u0026rdquo; identity. I mean at one point the geeks were the awkward and intense folks who were really good with technology and games (ok, I don\u0026rsquo;t understand that, but we\u0026rsquo;ll take it.) Being a geek wasn\u0026rsquo;t a cool thing, and being a geek wasn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;sexy.\u0026rdquo; Now at least in some circles, with the rise of the commercial Internet, I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair to suggest that in some context geek and hipster have sort of meshed in some perverse way. I mean computers have gotten easier to use, and this means that the boundaries of geek is wider.\nMy grandfather quit using computers when windows 3.1 came out because he thought it would open the BBSes to too many people and ruin the joy experience.","title":"getting mad foo skilz"},{"content":"I had a lengthy conversation with a prospective graduate school advisor.\nIt went well.\nBecause I\u0026rsquo;ve been chewing over the same handful of ideas in the last few weeks about the parts of queer identity, I\u0026rsquo;ve become really comfortable with what\u0026rsquo;s been said in the field, and what my opinion is on all the key debates are. So this attitude which could be neatly summarized as \u0026ldquo;yep, done,\u0026rdquo; is perhaps not the most effective as I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about moving forward with academic work.\nThe thing is that it\u0026rsquo;s not a real feeling of \u0026ldquo;yep done,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s just that I\u0026rsquo;m feeling a bit stale, I\u0026rsquo;m feeling a bit abstract (again).\nThis is the problem of being a research oriented guy and not having anything even tangentially associated with data to work with or consider.\nBut I think the conversation helped both prepare me for this second phase of the application process, and helped me to sort of collect my thoughts. Good things. I\u0026rsquo;ll need luck, and thoughts, but I feel like I have purpose again!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/imp-os-ter/","summary":"I had a lengthy conversation with a prospective graduate school advisor.\nIt went well.\nBecause I\u0026rsquo;ve been chewing over the same handful of ideas in the last few weeks about the parts of queer identity, I\u0026rsquo;ve become really comfortable with what\u0026rsquo;s been said in the field, and what my opinion is on all the key debates are. So this attitude which could be neatly summarized as \u0026ldquo;yep, done,\u0026rdquo; is perhaps not the most effective as I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about moving forward with academic work.\nThe thing is that it\u0026rsquo;s not a real feeling of \u0026ldquo;yep done,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s just that I\u0026rsquo;m feeling a bit stale, I\u0026rsquo;m feeling a bit abstract (again).\nThis is the problem of being a research oriented guy and not having anything even tangentially associated with data to work with or consider.\nBut I think the conversation helped both prepare me for this second phase of the application process, and helped me to sort of collect my thoughts.","title":"imp - os - ter"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a list of \u0026ldquo;things I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about posting about, but haven\u0026rsquo;t\u0026rdquo; this weekend. I know it\u0026rsquo;s been slow around here, uncharacteristically slow, but all is well, and I\u0026rsquo;m actually feeling pretty good.\nCurrent frustrations with knitting projects Switches and cylces through my projects Greif about sleeves Greif about planning next sweater\u0026rsquo;s armhomes My huge knitting class which had 10 people in it. Thoughts on money and budgeting said money Thoughts on OmniFocus and changing my \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; around, and how this is a pretty habitual thing for me. Thoughts on selling sweaters and other knitted things. Thoughts on my failure to read things seriously Impostor syndrome and pseudonyms Macworld ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things-ive-thought-about-posting-but-havent/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a list of \u0026ldquo;things I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about posting about, but haven\u0026rsquo;t\u0026rdquo; this weekend. I know it\u0026rsquo;s been slow around here, uncharacteristically slow, but all is well, and I\u0026rsquo;m actually feeling pretty good.\nCurrent frustrations with knitting projects Switches and cylces through my projects Greif about sleeves Greif about planning next sweater\u0026rsquo;s armhomes My huge knitting class which had 10 people in it. Thoughts on money and budgeting said money Thoughts on OmniFocus and changing my \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; around, and how this is a pretty habitual thing for me. Thoughts on selling sweaters and other knitted things. Thoughts on my failure to read things seriously Impostor syndrome and pseudonyms Macworld ","title":"things I've thought about posting, but haven't"},{"content":"Sometimes I think I should be making vests more often. Aside from the fact that I can\u0026rsquo;t really fathom wanting to wear sweater vests, they seem like they\u0026rsquo;d be fun to knit. Perhaps when my collection of jackets, both knit and sport-coat-like grows, I\u0026rsquo;ll make a few sweater vests and see what happens.\nAt the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m stuck on a little bit of a sleeve incident. the Morocco sweater progresses. By my count I have about 120 more rounds of this sleeve. Because I knit sleeves from the top down, these rounds will go pretty quickly; but I\u0026rsquo;m not quite past the magic point where the sleeve seems to zoom on toward completion.\nI have dedicated myself to getting some of this sleeve done, and I\u0026rsquo;ve put a couple more hours into it, which has been a good for my state of mind. I think that once this sleeve is done, I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a break and work on other projects for a while. I think it\u0026rsquo;s very true that, while I\u0026rsquo;m generally a one project kind of guy, at least with this sweater, I need to alternate the sleeves that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. I did that this fall with some measure of success, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to switch between the projects that I\u0026rsquo;m already working on.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been giving some thought to the difference between knitting my own designs and knitting other people\u0026rsquo;s designs. I basically always knit my own designs, and have for years, but recently I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten more and more interested in knitting some other people\u0026rsquo;s designs. This morocco sweater, the Bauhaus pullover from interweave last year or so, Meg\u0026rsquo;s sweater from \u0026ldquo;Sweaters from Camp\u0026rdquo; and so forth. And truth is, in the grand scheme of things, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty low on design ideas myself. Thankfully I\u0026rsquo;m not in need of more sweaters, and my sensibility has moved into simpler and more understated recently, so I\u0026rsquo;m not having a huge problem with this, but it has been something I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about.\nOk, woot. I got most of a post out all on one topic. Ish. Close enough. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that there\u0026rsquo;s something \u0026ldquo;off\u0026rdquo; about my working system, and I need to address this, plus I have a job to do this afternoon, and errands to run, so\u0026hellip;\nOver and out, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sleeve-alternation/","summary":"Sometimes I think I should be making vests more often. Aside from the fact that I can\u0026rsquo;t really fathom wanting to wear sweater vests, they seem like they\u0026rsquo;d be fun to knit. Perhaps when my collection of jackets, both knit and sport-coat-like grows, I\u0026rsquo;ll make a few sweater vests and see what happens.\nAt the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m stuck on a little bit of a sleeve incident. the Morocco sweater progresses. By my count I have about 120 more rounds of this sleeve. Because I knit sleeves from the top down, these rounds will go pretty quickly; but I\u0026rsquo;m not quite past the magic point where the sleeve seems to zoom on toward completion.\nI have dedicated myself to getting some of this sleeve done, and I\u0026rsquo;ve put a couple more hours into it, which has been a good for my state of mind. I think that once this sleeve is done, I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a break and work on other projects for a while.","title":"Sleeve Alternation"},{"content":"Ken MacLeod, in an interview with io9 said:\nI decided that after writing the Engines of Light trilogy, then Newton\u0026rsquo;s Wake and Learning the World, I\u0026rsquo;d done everything I wanted to do, for the moment, in space opera; and meanwhile had accumulated a whole new decade\u0026rsquo;s worth of fury about the world as it is now and the way it\u0026rsquo;s going.\nThis kinda approach makes me sick.\nI sort of see--at least this kind of articulation--as a variant of an anti-intellectual thread that says, \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t waste your time thinking about the big issues because the present is so fucked up.\u0026rdquo; There are variants of this, for example feminists and queers who think that feminist queer theories is counterproductive (agreed that there is a point of diminishing return, as there is with most pursuits intellectual or other wise; however, that\u0026rsquo;s a very different sort of argument.)\nScience fiction is powerful because it makes abstract ideas and concepts approachable in a package that we\u0026rsquo;re able to interact with and make sense of. You can\u0026rsquo;t write a book about the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis set in 2007, but Delany did an amazing job at it in the late 1960s, and you bet your ass it was relevant to the precise moment in which it was written.\nI mean, there\u0026rsquo;s worth to stories set in reality-like present day, and I\u0026rsquo;m not condemning all non-spec fiction. I\u0026rsquo;m simply saying, if what you\u0026rsquo;re interested is expressing your furry about the present day in such blunt terms, don\u0026rsquo;t do it all over my genre.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fall-of-space-opera/","summary":"Ken MacLeod, in an interview with io9 said:\nI decided that after writing the Engines of Light trilogy, then Newton\u0026rsquo;s Wake and Learning the World, I\u0026rsquo;d done everything I wanted to do, for the moment, in space opera; and meanwhile had accumulated a whole new decade\u0026rsquo;s worth of fury about the world as it is now and the way it\u0026rsquo;s going.\nThis kinda approach makes me sick.\nI sort of see--at least this kind of articulation--as a variant of an anti-intellectual thread that says, \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t waste your time thinking about the big issues because the present is so fucked up.\u0026rdquo; There are variants of this, for example feminists and queers who think that feminist queer theories is counterproductive (agreed that there is a point of diminishing return, as there is with most pursuits intellectual or other wise; however, that\u0026rsquo;s a very different sort of argument.)\nScience fiction is powerful because it makes abstract ideas and concepts approachable in a package that we\u0026rsquo;re able to interact with and make sense of.","title":"Fall of Space Opera"},{"content":"\u0026hellip;because I am apparently incapable of forming coherent paragraphs, or posts that stay on one topic:\nThere are 6 official students in my sweater class. I\u0026rsquo;ve given two lessons to someone who promises to be a 7th (this person\u0026rsquo;s 2nd project promises to be a sweater. go her!) There is the possibility of a 8th, and possibly an 9th, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see. My parents are out eating which means that I\u0026rsquo;m not buying plane tickets to go to WesternState. I have to say that buying plane tickets and air flight freaks me the hell out. Not the actual act of flying, because that doesn\u0026rsquo;t bug me, but the planning associated with buying plane tickets. Ugg. I cleaned my office, which is a very good thing. Happiness! There\u0026rsquo;s more to do in my space, but\u0026hellip; Poor tea intake today. Suck I\u0026rsquo;m pretty certain that I\u0026rsquo;m going to drop this class. I\u0026rsquo;m kind of pissed about this because I totally was trying to do something like that, and largely still am. I\u0026rsquo;m not really pissed. I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to start thinking more seriously about work and job things. As part of this project, I think it would be good to set up a target income and budget and all of those good things. So I can look at finding freelance work to supplement the work at the knit shop. I just don\u0026rsquo;t know where to start, and abstracts of \u0026ldquo;a job, to make more money\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be helpful in either: a) actually finding a job or b) promoting my sanity. What\u0026rsquo;s the good of getting into grad school if I have a psychotic break while I\u0026rsquo;m waiting? I\u0026rsquo;m going to do some ipod syncing and movie syncing because think I need to concentrate a bit on my knitting. Knitting is important to me and I want to do more of this work. I feel like that song in Avenue Q (I\u0026rsquo;ve only heard the sound track) about not having a purpose. I\u0026rsquo;m too young for this kind of existential angst. Though, I think like maggie may I\u0026rsquo;ve been having a midlife crisis since my 12th birthday, or there abouts. tycho out.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/full-thoughts/","summary":"\u0026hellip;because I am apparently incapable of forming coherent paragraphs, or posts that stay on one topic:\nThere are 6 official students in my sweater class. I\u0026rsquo;ve given two lessons to someone who promises to be a 7th (this person\u0026rsquo;s 2nd project promises to be a sweater. go her!) There is the possibility of a 8th, and possibly an 9th, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see. My parents are out eating which means that I\u0026rsquo;m not buying plane tickets to go to WesternState. I have to say that buying plane tickets and air flight freaks me the hell out. Not the actual act of flying, because that doesn\u0026rsquo;t bug me, but the planning associated with buying plane tickets. Ugg. I cleaned my office, which is a very good thing. Happiness! There\u0026rsquo;s more to do in my space, but\u0026hellip; Poor tea intake today. Suck I\u0026rsquo;m pretty certain that I\u0026rsquo;m going to drop this class. I\u0026rsquo;m kind of pissed about this because I totally was trying to do something like that, and largely still am.","title":"full thoughts"},{"content":" I\u0026rsquo;m so tired of introspection. I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to just not think for a while. Def. Visiting WesternState in a while. Feeling good about my chances, hoping, of course, that I end up with chance to make a choice about grad school rather than being simply \u0026ldquo;stuck\u0026rdquo; with one school. Not that I didn\u0026rsquo;t apply all to schools that were a great fit, and that I\u0026rsquo;d be willing to attend\u0026hellip; but\u0026hellip; Pretty sure about dropping this class I\u0026rsquo;m in, if nothing else, because my gut is saying that. Gotta think harder about whats going on. I typed something off hand in this post that has me sort of down about the novel project. Not bad, but I\u0026rsquo;m going to use time this weekend to regroup. But I think that just goes to show you how much of an extrovert I am. I have plans to clean my office this weekend. I have plans to come up with some sort of schedule to budget time in the upcoming weeks. Including: job search time, email time, reading time, writing time, blogging time, and knitting time. I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a commitment to read both science fiction, and academic articles in my field, because I enjoy them, because it\u0026rsquo;s good for me to do that, because reading research articles, also I think informs my fiction writing. One of the reasons I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of dropping the class is that as I was sitting there, in addition to thinking \u0026ldquo;g-d I really don\u0026rsquo;t want to be here,\u0026rdquo; I was also thinking about how I could recycle one of my stock papers for this class, and that\u0026rsquo;s not productive for me or for anyone. This starts immediately. I never checked to see what my grades were from last semester. We\u0026rsquo;ll call them Schrodinger\u0026rsquo;s Grades. Not that I\u0026rsquo;m worried, more that I\u0026rsquo;m just meh. I got some knitting time to myself tonight. Feels good, need to get some resolution on my current project, and also get my lace piece, as crazy as it is, into a more comfortable place. If I find out that it isn\u0026rsquo;t ever really going to have a rhythm, this might become one of those long term, multi-year projects. Or I might save it for the summer. brain\u0026hellip; fiizzz\u0026hellip; zzzzzz\ntycho out.\nOnwar\u0026hellip;.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mgphhhh-words/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m so tired of introspection. I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to just not think for a while. Def. Visiting WesternState in a while. Feeling good about my chances, hoping, of course, that I end up with chance to make a choice about grad school rather than being simply \u0026ldquo;stuck\u0026rdquo; with one school. Not that I didn\u0026rsquo;t apply all to schools that were a great fit, and that I\u0026rsquo;d be willing to attend\u0026hellip; but\u0026hellip; Pretty sure about dropping this class I\u0026rsquo;m in, if nothing else, because my gut is saying that. Gotta think harder about whats going on. I typed something off hand in this post that has me sort of down about the novel project. Not bad, but I\u0026rsquo;m going to use time this weekend to regroup. But I think that just goes to show you how much of an extrovert I am. I have plans to clean my office this weekend.","title":"Mgphhhh Words..."},{"content":"Ok, I have a lot of email writing and fussing to-do. I collected a fair piece of information to inform my decision about this class. Sill avoiding making any sort of direct decision for a little while. I feel really bad about staying in the class, but I could do it if it turns out to be the right thing to do, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it would be, and that\u0026rsquo;s what I have to decide.\nI just made the most awesome pot of tea. In case you were wondering.\nOne thing I\u0026rsquo;ve realized about breakout (the story) that I\u0026rsquo;m working on is that I\u0026rsquo;m approaching it in a too granular sort of way. I\u0026rsquo;m too concerned about getting characters from point a. to point b. and I find myself re-reading a section that I\u0026rsquo;ve already written and saying \u0026ldquo;crap, I need to go back and add x bit.\u0026rdquo; While it\u0026rsquo;s really fun to write, I think this is a pretty fundamental problem, and I need to take a step back and think about it. Maybe start making revisions to what I have already, because the organization is pretty complex and I\u0026rsquo;d be remiss if I just continue on blithely.\nIn any case, I think it would be a very good thing to do to get a \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; job soon. I\u0026rsquo;d really like to find some sort of tech support-ish type gig. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of boning up on SQL and then trying for a job with the corp that leads the development of that project (big for-profit company in the open source world, if you know what I\u0026rsquo;m talking about you know who I mean, if you don\u0026rsquo;t, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter.) Or something. I don\u0026rsquo;t live in the right place to do that kind of stuff generally, but I\u0026rsquo;ve seen jobs with this company that are entry level and aren\u0026rsquo;t location specific, I think.\nOr something else. Who knows, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably end up doing something not at all computer related, but I figure I have three major marketable skills: my mean skills with a bash terminal (so computers), power knitting genius (hard to get enough paying knitting work, though if any of you know fashion designers in NY that need someone to do commission work and a reasonable rate\u0026hellip;), and mean social science mojo\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m working on being a scientist for next year, the knitting thing, is as above, so I figure it\u0026rsquo;s time to put the geek card out and see what\u0026rsquo;s out there.\nOk, I need to go see if I can resurrect my writing, somehow.\nOnward and Upward!\ntycho out.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/process/","summary":"Ok, I have a lot of email writing and fussing to-do. I collected a fair piece of information to inform my decision about this class. Sill avoiding making any sort of direct decision for a little while. I feel really bad about staying in the class, but I could do it if it turns out to be the right thing to do, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it would be, and that\u0026rsquo;s what I have to decide.\nI just made the most awesome pot of tea. In case you were wondering.\nOne thing I\u0026rsquo;ve realized about breakout (the story) that I\u0026rsquo;m working on is that I\u0026rsquo;m approaching it in a too granular sort of way. I\u0026rsquo;m too concerned about getting characters from point a. to point b. and I find myself re-reading a section that I\u0026rsquo;ve already written and saying \u0026ldquo;crap, I need to go back and add x bit.\u0026rdquo; While it\u0026rsquo;s really fun to write, I think this is a pretty fundamental problem, and I need to take a step back and think about it.","title":"process"},{"content":"Hey folks, in case you were really itching to make a knitted toy, say for the upcoming Knitty Couture toy knitting project, I\u0026rsquo;ve collected a whole mess of patterns and resources for your knitting pleasure.\nFron Knitty A Knitted Pumkin Sheldon, a really cute Turtle A Penguin A Dragon, Knitted Woody Bits Link Collections for Toy Knitting Mostly Free\nKnitting Pattern Central KnittingHelp.com\u0026rsquo;s free Toy Patterns A Toy Knit Along Blog (with links to patterns.) Other Toy Patterns From the Knitting Vault, not free, but reasonably priced.\nBaby Doll and Sack Pattern Crochet Snowman Small Crocheted \u0026ldquo;Petal Dolls\u0026rdquo; Crocheted Angel Bear Crocheted Baby Doll Books Knitted Toys Debbie Bliss Knitted Toys ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knit-toys/","summary":"Hey folks, in case you were really itching to make a knitted toy, say for the upcoming Knitty Couture toy knitting project, I\u0026rsquo;ve collected a whole mess of patterns and resources for your knitting pleasure.\nFron Knitty A Knitted Pumkin Sheldon, a really cute Turtle A Penguin A Dragon, Knitted Woody Bits Link Collections for Toy Knitting Mostly Free\nKnitting Pattern Central KnittingHelp.com\u0026rsquo;s free Toy Patterns A Toy Knit Along Blog (with links to patterns.) Other Toy Patterns From the Knitting Vault, not free, but reasonably priced.\nBaby Doll and Sack Pattern Crochet Snowman Small Crocheted \u0026ldquo;Petal Dolls\u0026rdquo; Crocheted Angel Bear Crocheted Baby Doll Books Knitted Toys Debbie Bliss Knitted Toys ","title":"Knit Toys"},{"content":"1. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I want to take the class I\u0026rsquo;m signed up for this term. I have 9 days to reflect on this. In not category, but I\u0026rsquo;m not going to rush 2. Good response from a real grad school. \u0026ldquo;Passed the first cut\u0026rdquo; (Also, I have to dig up college credit transcripts from things I took in high school, which blows.) There is a possible/very likely interview. Still not wild about the locale, but actually not discouraged. G., begged me not to go in an incredibly adorable exchange, though I can\u0026rsquo;t possibly contextualize it properly in the context of this post, so you\u0026rsquo;ll have to trust me. 3. I finished the third scene in the chapter I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on. Started the forth. THis sounds more impressive than \u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; words, so I\u0026rsquo;m running with that. Slow and steady, eh? 4. Yarn store work has been very busy and very not-knitting related. Which is par for the course, because there\u0026rsquo;s lots of stuff that needs doing: sock, labeling, yarn winding, pattern research, etc. And I don\u0026rsquo;t mind this, except that it leaves me sort of irritated feeling about my own knitting, which means I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been knitting much during my off times, and because I\u0026rsquo;m busy doing other things during the day, I don\u0026rsquo;t get much knitting done a all. 5. I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that working at knitting shops makes me a very introverted knitter. The last time I worked at a shop, a few summers ago, I spent a lot of my free time knitting alone to sort of recover, and thats the same sort of thing that I find myself wanting now. 6. I wore an older sweater and pair of socks that I knit a long long time ago. It was nice, and I remember how much I liked these things.\nOk, over and out. tycho must sleep sometime.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/notes-before-i-sleep/","summary":"1. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I want to take the class I\u0026rsquo;m signed up for this term. I have 9 days to reflect on this. In not category, but I\u0026rsquo;m not going to rush 2. Good response from a real grad school. \u0026ldquo;Passed the first cut\u0026rdquo; (Also, I have to dig up college credit transcripts from things I took in high school, which blows.) There is a possible/very likely interview. Still not wild about the locale, but actually not discouraged. G., begged me not to go in an incredibly adorable exchange, though I can\u0026rsquo;t possibly contextualize it properly in the context of this post, so you\u0026rsquo;ll have to trust me. 3. I finished the third scene in the chapter I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on. Started the forth. THis sounds more impressive than \u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo; words, so I\u0026rsquo;m running with that. Slow and steady, eh? 4. Yarn store work has been very busy and very not-knitting related.","title":"Notes Before I Sleep"},{"content":"It was craziness at the yarn store yesterday so there wasn\u0026rsquo;t much knitting, I think maybe I\u0026rsquo;ve knit a round on the sleeve yesterday. I spent my morning writing, and I got some good work done, not as much as I\u0026rsquo;d like, of course, but I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining at all. This post will be a sort of random collection of thoughts, sorry if you were looking for something more concrete.\nI did some reorganization and I have three short stories that I\u0026rsquo;ve begun in the last six months or so, and then abandoned, when they hadn\u0026rsquo;t worked out on the first try. I am however encouraged, by the fact that I heard a story on EscapePod that fell into a number of really--to my mind--horrible traps. The narrator was a writer, the tone of the narration was much like this post (he talked to the reader, the author signposted the main point, (one character said \u0026ldquo;do you know what the point is?\u0026rdquo; and the other said \u0026ldquo;yes, it\u0026rsquo;s ____\u0026rdquo;) and sort of rambled) and it was moralistic (the moral was a good one, but it still was beaten into the reader.) So dude, if famous people can pull shit like that off, we have it made.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want this to come off as a criticism of EP or Steve Eley (the editor), because the story worked, and while I didn\u0026rsquo;t enjoy it as much as some of the other ones, it was pretty good. I\u0026rsquo;m just saying, that, maybe I\u0026rsquo;m holding my stuff up to a standard that\u0026rsquo;s too high. I mean, I think generally that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing, but it means that I don\u0026rsquo;t finish stories, and I don\u0026rsquo;t submit them to readers and crit groups.\nOk, enough about writing. I saw theBoy last night. At one point after dinner we were sitting on the couch checking our email on the computer and I, had to check into ravlery, he asked \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s that,\u0026rdquo; and I described it, and gave a brief tour, which involved showing my project page. He was mostly nonplussed by the experience but saw something that caught his eye. When I went back to see what it was, it turns out that it was these:\nWhich I totally made for him. So woot! I of course left them at home, along with the real \u0026ldquo;boyfriend socks\u0026rdquo; which are heavier. But these things will all sort themselves out, and I\u0026rsquo;ll remember at some point.\nFor those of you that are curious, it\u0026rsquo;s socks that rock medium weight, my basic toe up sock, with a turned hem cuff. Knit on US 1.5s (2.5mm?). There\u0026rsquo;s some slight row-gauge difference between them because I unintentionally used metal needles on one sock and wood on another sock.\nHe was pleased.\nAlso in the good news category, I got an email from a professor back today saying that he\u0026rsquo;d gotten my application and that it \u0026ldquo;looked terrific,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s too early to tell of course, and really I\u0026rsquo;m sort of throwing my future on departmental politics. But I feel good. One thing I remember thinking last cycle that my chances weren\u0026rsquo;t really as low as the numbers (initially) make them out to be. I mean most schools let between 5 and 10 people in, and get applications for 250-300 (I\u0026rsquo;d guess) people. But the applicant pool doesn\u0026rsquo;t grow even arithmetically, because everyone\u0026rsquo;s applying to more than one school. So I\u0026rsquo;m applying for one slot out of a possible say, 25, and there are 500(?) applicants. Which seems like better than most nation wide job searches. Or not. I feel like I\u0026rsquo;ll know in the next 6-8 weeks.\nI have a class tonight. This should be interesting.\nWriting to do now.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/realize/","summary":"It was craziness at the yarn store yesterday so there wasn\u0026rsquo;t much knitting, I think maybe I\u0026rsquo;ve knit a round on the sleeve yesterday. I spent my morning writing, and I got some good work done, not as much as I\u0026rsquo;d like, of course, but I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining at all. This post will be a sort of random collection of thoughts, sorry if you were looking for something more concrete.\nI did some reorganization and I have three short stories that I\u0026rsquo;ve begun in the last six months or so, and then abandoned, when they hadn\u0026rsquo;t worked out on the first try. I am however encouraged, by the fact that I heard a story on EscapePod that fell into a number of really--to my mind--horrible traps. The narrator was a writer, the tone of the narration was much like this post (he talked to the reader, the author signposted the main point, (one character said \u0026ldquo;do you know what the point is?","title":"Realize"},{"content":"I think I need a new system for titling my \u0026ldquo;good morning tychoish\u0026rdquo; posts, because I\u0026rsquo;m so going to run out of novel titles. But not yet.\nYesterday was a slow day for some reason, yet to be determined, though I think I did get a bunch of things done, so maybe all wasn\u0026rsquo;t lost.\nIn review:\nI went to my parent\u0026rsquo;s dancing class, because they asked. I knitting a dozen rows on the sleeve of the morocco sweater. Wrote blog posts. Worked on a Station Keeping post. Planned the rest of the third chapter of breakout. Switched email clients to GyazMail. The fact that I revived station keeping after so long, is really a good thing in my book. I enjoy writing SK episodes. And I just need to get back into it more, the serial is something I want to play with for a while. I\u0026rsquo;m throwing around the idea of blogging a novel length project as I do it, but it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be for a while.\nThis, I think more than anything, proves that I\u0026rsquo;m a child of 90s, because left to my own devices I turn into a performance art junkie. \u0026ldquo;Yeah, that\u0026rsquo;s right, lets turn novel writing in to a performance piece.\u0026rdquo; Brilliant tycho, brilliant. Sigh.\nOn the email front, you all probably are pretty clear that I have something of a death feud with Apple\u0026rsquo;s Mail.app. Mostly that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty slow, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t handle IMAP in a way even approaching intelligibility. GyazMail does better on these counts, though I will admit that I do almost miss the Mail.app multiple account inbox method a bit.\nAnyway, I have writing and other things to do this morning, so time to get this post out.\nHave a great day!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/revival/","summary":"I think I need a new system for titling my \u0026ldquo;good morning tychoish\u0026rdquo; posts, because I\u0026rsquo;m so going to run out of novel titles. But not yet.\nYesterday was a slow day for some reason, yet to be determined, though I think I did get a bunch of things done, so maybe all wasn\u0026rsquo;t lost.\nIn review:\nI went to my parent\u0026rsquo;s dancing class, because they asked. I knitting a dozen rows on the sleeve of the morocco sweater. Wrote blog posts. Worked on a Station Keeping post. Planned the rest of the third chapter of breakout. Switched email clients to GyazMail. The fact that I revived station keeping after so long, is really a good thing in my book. I enjoy writing SK episodes. And I just need to get back into it more, the serial is something I want to play with for a while. I\u0026rsquo;m throwing around the idea of blogging a novel length project as I do it, but it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be for a while.","title":"Revival"},{"content":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note In the course of my morning a few things have come across my desk. I thought, given the nature of these communications that it would be best to convey them to you directly.\nDear Climate Change Theorists,\nIt\u0026rsquo;s come to my attention that it\u0026rsquo;s almost warm enough for short sleeves in January. While I appreciate a slight January thaw, it\u0026rsquo;s my thought that the 35-40 degrees would be sufficient. If there\u0026rsquo;s extra heat, consider another thaw in early March, but please 50s and higher is just uncalled for.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like my winter back.\nWarmest Regards,\ntycho\nDear Lace Knitting G-ds,\nI have successfully finished my latest lace piece onto a circular needle despite a brief interlude on 8\u0026quot; lace \u0026ldquo;pin\u0026rdquo; double points, thanks to your support and attention.\nI also was able knit about 10 rows, or 1,600 stitches last night, in one session, which is great improvement from my earlier accomplishments of under 500 stitches per session. Your graces have been most helpful in this matter.\nWith Reverence to your Holiness,\nt. garen\nDear Magi of Real Knitting,\nPlease do not fear, despite my recent experiences with lace knitting--which are as you know, is only for the purposes of a group knitting project--I am still dedicated to my current real knitting projects.\nI made progress last night on the Morocco, sweater sleeve that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. I\u0026rsquo;d figure I\u0026rsquo;m about halfway done by length of the sleeve, which means about 2/3s or so of the way done with the knitting. This is because, dearest Magi, you have deemed it appropriate for sleeves to get narrower near the cuff, and for this I remain your humblest servant.\nI look forward, with your kind permission, to continue and focus on knitting more sweaters in the new year.\nRespectfully,\ntycho garen\nDear Knitting Class,\nPlease attract at least two more students. I want this thing to be really full because it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a blast. Also, we\u0026rsquo;ve arranged to have both of us there every week, so we might as well. right?\nThanks,\nty\nDear Breakout,\nCan we have a meeting to discuss your current status and draft up a plan for your swift ascendency to novel status?\nBest,\nt.g.\nDear Novella,\nCould you get a job so we could afford a freelance editor?\nWhile you\u0026rsquo;re at it, if you can discover a market that might want to buy you?\nThanks.\nBegrudgingly yours,\ntycho\nMemo\nTo: Desk From: tycho garen Subject: Hygiene\nHop to and clean yourself already.\nDear My Next Tea Kettle,\nWhy haven\u0026rsquo;t we bought you yet?\nI look forward to meeting you, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/having-words/","summary":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note In the course of my morning a few things have come across my desk. I thought, given the nature of these communications that it would be best to convey them to you directly.\nDear Climate Change Theorists,\nIt\u0026rsquo;s come to my attention that it\u0026rsquo;s almost warm enough for short sleeves in January. While I appreciate a slight January thaw, it\u0026rsquo;s my thought that the 35-40 degrees would be sufficient. If there\u0026rsquo;s extra heat, consider another thaw in early March, but please 50s and higher is just uncalled for.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like my winter back.\nWarmest Regards,\ntycho\nDear Lace Knitting G-ds,\nI have successfully finished my latest lace piece onto a circular needle despite a brief interlude on 8\u0026quot; lace \u0026ldquo;pin\u0026rdquo; double points, thanks to your support and attention.\nI also was able knit about 10 rows, or 1,600 stitches last night, in one session, which is great improvement from my earlier accomplishments of under 500 stitches per session.","title":"having words"},{"content":"So as I said, I\u0026rsquo;m working pretty consistently on Morocco for the moment, but I have a picture to share with you.\nThis is the \u0026ldquo;Turkish Tile\u0026rdquo; Sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been telling you about.\nIn a quirky turn of fate, this picture looks pretty much exactly like the current version of the sweater, which I haven\u0026rsquo;t been giving a lot of attention to:\nThe plan is to have it be another long/medium length jacket. Hence the steek stitches.\nI plan for the hem/button band/collar to use black and the darker color, and resemble, slightly the diagonal line.\nThe armholes will be inset to sleeve length though I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know what my plan is there. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of using the shaping from Joyce (Williams)\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Olive Branch\u0026rdquo; pullover from the new Armenain Knitting book from Schoolhouse Press. But I might do it some other way that would be easier to manage given the color patterns. It\u0026rsquo;s just that that sweater looks so good on me. I\u0026rsquo;ll dig up pictures soon, I promise.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/im-not-knitting-this/","summary":"So as I said, I\u0026rsquo;m working pretty consistently on Morocco for the moment, but I have a picture to share with you.\nThis is the \u0026ldquo;Turkish Tile\u0026rdquo; Sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been telling you about.\nIn a quirky turn of fate, this picture looks pretty much exactly like the current version of the sweater, which I haven\u0026rsquo;t been giving a lot of attention to:\nThe plan is to have it be another long/medium length jacket. Hence the steek stitches.\nI plan for the hem/button band/collar to use black and the darker color, and resemble, slightly the diagonal line.\nThe armholes will be inset to sleeve length though I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know what my plan is there. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of using the shaping from Joyce (Williams)\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Olive Branch\u0026rdquo; pullover from the new Armenain Knitting book from Schoolhouse Press. But I might do it some other way that would be easier to manage given the color patterns.","title":"I'm Not Knitting This"},{"content":"Ok, I\u0026rsquo;ve stayed off the tech post topic for a while, and now I have a question.\nThis post follows, to my mind, an earlier one I made about subversion and using version control commits as a way to track productivity. Or at least that\u0026rsquo;s what I was thinking about. There\u0026rsquo;s also been a post about version control on 43 folders, the discussion of which has interested me a bit.\nThe truth is that I\u0026rsquo;m not a programer, and most of the stuff I do in side of subversion in my repository is not with anything that\u0026rsquo;s like code. Usually this doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, because in truth I\u0026rsquo;m using subversion (SVN) as a backup tool and means to, at least theoretically, work on a project from multiple machines, mostly. Not that I ever work from multiple machines, but it\u0026rsquo;s a comforting thought.\nHowever, as I start to do revisions and edits on projects, and I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten on a rhythm of doing SVN commits every couple hundred words as I write fiction, I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to track the changes I make on an atomic level.\nThankfully this is all built into SVN, and the svn diff command is quite handy. The issue is that, while I write everything in plain text files, I use soft line breaks. So while my writing wraps to the window I\u0026rsquo;m using, but when I save the file, the only line breaks are at the end of my--sometimes quite long--paragraphs.\nIn every day use, I find that this isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge problem, but if I\u0026rsquo;m using a diff tool, or in fact a great deal of command line tools that return results based on line, like say grep. So if I change a comma in one line/paragraph, that\u0026rsquo;s 500 characters long, (the comma that preceded this parenthetical was at character #257, for point of reference,) diff returns the whole paragraph not just the line. Breaking lines would give this command a greater usefullness in this situation.\nSo my main questions, I guess, are:\nHow long do I make lines, so that they\u0026rsquo;re a good standard length? How do I do this so that my files aren\u0026rsquo;t asinine to look at for the unanointed? I suppose conversely, if I\u0026rsquo;m crazy for thinking to do this, if you have a better idea for fixing this issue, I\u0026rsquo;m all ears. Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/line-length/","summary":"Ok, I\u0026rsquo;ve stayed off the tech post topic for a while, and now I have a question.\nThis post follows, to my mind, an earlier one I made about subversion and using version control commits as a way to track productivity. Or at least that\u0026rsquo;s what I was thinking about. There\u0026rsquo;s also been a post about version control on 43 folders, the discussion of which has interested me a bit.\nThe truth is that I\u0026rsquo;m not a programer, and most of the stuff I do in side of subversion in my repository is not with anything that\u0026rsquo;s like code. Usually this doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, because in truth I\u0026rsquo;m using subversion (SVN) as a backup tool and means to, at least theoretically, work on a project from multiple machines, mostly. Not that I ever work from multiple machines, but it\u0026rsquo;s a comforting thought.\nHowever, as I start to do revisions and edits on projects, and I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten on a rhythm of doing SVN commits every couple hundred words as I write fiction, I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to track the changes I make on an atomic level.","title":"Line Length"},{"content":"As I\u0026rsquo;ve progressed through my recent culling of feeds. (I used to subscribe to almost 500 RSS feeds, now I\u0026rsquo;m down to about 75, after getting bellow 50). I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the kinds of blogs that I read regularly, and that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in expending time reading.\nSeems to me that the crux of this argument boils down to:\nread the a-list and professional publications because this is the way to \u0026ldquo;stay on top of the news,\u0026rdquo; in a quick and efficient sort of way. avoid reading a list blogs and sites because you\u0026rsquo;re more likely to find new/interesting/unique reading, (and more of it) if you\u0026rsquo;re not busy keeping up to date with BoingBoing and slashdot, say. I\u0026rsquo;m going to post a copy of my OPML file (that is the export file from my news reader, that you can import to any news-reader around,) so you can see what I\u0026rsquo;m reading. I recommend all these sites. Here it is. It\u0026rsquo;s zipped, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t include this site\u0026rsquo;s feed, to which you should of course subscribe. The organization of the list is somewhat idiosyncratic, admittedly.\nI think this pondering this in part with the launch of io9. On the one hand I really like the concept, I think conceptually Gawker is a force of good, and the posts are good.1 On the other, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel very of the people.\nAnd clearly I go back and forth on this a lot. I read BoingBoing more or less, and I have typically listened to TWiT podcasts. So who knows. I don\u0026rsquo;t have an answer here.\nThough it\u0026rsquo;s quite true that while I enjoy reading SF and watching SF drama, and writing said, and I am a huge geek in my own way, I\u0026rsquo;m not typically a very good Science Fiction Fan. Not that I have a problem with this, but in a lot of ways io9 isn\u0026rsquo;t my type of site, I guess, which isn\u0026rsquo;t bad, it just is.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/big-fish-small-fish-rss-feeds/","summary":"As I\u0026rsquo;ve progressed through my recent culling of feeds. (I used to subscribe to almost 500 RSS feeds, now I\u0026rsquo;m down to about 75, after getting bellow 50). I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the kinds of blogs that I read regularly, and that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in expending time reading.\nSeems to me that the crux of this argument boils down to:\nread the a-list and professional publications because this is the way to \u0026ldquo;stay on top of the news,\u0026rdquo; in a quick and efficient sort of way. avoid reading a list blogs and sites because you\u0026rsquo;re more likely to find new/interesting/unique reading, (and more of it) if you\u0026rsquo;re not busy keeping up to date with BoingBoing and slashdot, say. I\u0026rsquo;m going to post a copy of my OPML file (that is the export file from my news reader, that you can import to any news-reader around,) so you can see what I\u0026rsquo;m reading.","title":"Big Fish, Small Fish: RSS feeds"},{"content":"I must admit that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of news for you. I was reading wikipedia last night, which is always dangerous. Means I don\u0026rsquo;t have a reading experience to talk with you about this morning. In lieu of this, I\u0026rsquo;ll point you to smg\u0026rsquo;s post about things she read in 2007.\nOn the other hand I know a lot more about the retirement policies and traditions of American jurists and (mostly commercial) aircraft than I used to.\nAlso I did some knitting last night that didn\u0026rsquo;t end in having to cut a recalcitrant project from the needles. Success I say.\nI have a knitting lesson to teach today, and then more very tycho-like things to do. I guess.\nTime for caf.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/its-the-little-things/","summary":"I must admit that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of news for you. I was reading wikipedia last night, which is always dangerous. Means I don\u0026rsquo;t have a reading experience to talk with you about this morning. In lieu of this, I\u0026rsquo;ll point you to smg\u0026rsquo;s post about things she read in 2007.\nOn the other hand I know a lot more about the retirement policies and traditions of American jurists and (mostly commercial) aircraft than I used to.\nAlso I did some knitting last night that didn\u0026rsquo;t end in having to cut a recalcitrant project from the needles. Success I say.\nI have a knitting lesson to teach today, and then more very tycho-like things to do. I guess.\nTime for caf.\nOnward and Upward!","title":"It's the Little Things"},{"content":"In an effort to continue to have a readership here at tychoish, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post some more knitting pictures from my backlog.\nI knit this jacket/coat, a bit more than a year ago. With Patons Classic Wool. It\u0026rsquo;s a 30 inch drop shouldered jacket, two color turkish patterning throughout. The specific pattern, the \u0026ldquo;Rose\u0026rdquo; or Gul pattern, is pretty common, and it was a blast to knit\u0026hellip; the first hundred times. Actually it was pretty fun to knit.\nIf I were going to knit it again, I\u0026rsquo;d do some more shaping to the shoulders. As it is they sag, and even though the sleeves aren\u0026rsquo;t really to big, they feel too big. Also, I\u0026rsquo;d round the front corners of the neck, and probably add some sort of hem.\nOh and I would recommend anyone attempting to duplicate this feat use yarn that won\u0026rsquo;t pill. Because that\u0026rsquo;s annoying.\nAnd I should mention that I managed to perfectly predict the resurgence of interest in larger/oversized garment shapes. I meant for it to be a coat to be worn over other sweaters and in that it was successful. And although the members of my family vary somewhat in our sizes and dimensions, we have all successfully worn the coat. So go figure.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a somewhat blurry picture. You can see that I\u0026rsquo;m wearing the sport sweater underneath with now problem:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve yet to break out any sort of outer garment other than this jacket though. So that\u0026rsquo;s something\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/coat/","summary":"In an effort to continue to have a readership here at tychoish, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post some more knitting pictures from my backlog.\nI knit this jacket/coat, a bit more than a year ago. With Patons Classic Wool. It\u0026rsquo;s a 30 inch drop shouldered jacket, two color turkish patterning throughout. The specific pattern, the \u0026ldquo;Rose\u0026rdquo; or Gul pattern, is pretty common, and it was a blast to knit\u0026hellip; the first hundred times. Actually it was pretty fun to knit.\nIf I were going to knit it again, I\u0026rsquo;d do some more shaping to the shoulders. As it is they sag, and even though the sleeves aren\u0026rsquo;t really to big, they feel too big. Also, I\u0026rsquo;d round the front corners of the neck, and probably add some sort of hem.\nOh and I would recommend anyone attempting to duplicate this feat use yarn that won\u0026rsquo;t pill. Because that\u0026rsquo;s annoying.\nAnd I should mention that I managed to perfectly predict the resurgence of interest in larger/oversized garment shapes.","title":"Coat"},{"content":" I finished watching Standoff, a canceled procedural from last year. There\u0026rsquo;s something sort of geeky and atypical about this show that I find really captivating. Anyway, apparently they made more episodes (18 in total) than I ever saw when it was airing. Also, it\u0026rsquo;s a show that I watched pretty religiously on Tuesday nights last fall with R. and so I have particularly fond memories of it. The boyfriend socks are to the ribbing, both of them, so I only have a little bit of ribbing and then they\u0026rsquo;re done. Did some tweaking of the tychoish design. basically what I did was make everything fixed width so that the design of the site doesn\u0026rsquo;t change if you resize your window. At Dave\u0026rsquo;s request/suggestion, which I think was helpful. It\u0026rsquo;ll be easy at this point to set up a second sidebar, if I ever decide I want more sidebar room. I\u0026rsquo;ve critiqued my first story for the group. I feel good about what I had to say, but still a bit unsure. I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better about writing short fiction and submitting it, though I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to muster the skill of reading though something that clearly opens on the wrong foot. Good practice for grading papers I suspect, but right now I don\u0026rsquo;t have it. I\u0026rsquo;m just going to do one story a week for a while. There\u0026rsquo;s a knitting guild meeting today, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to work at the store for a few hours. I had a knitting disaster last night: I started a shawl, and switched to circular needles too soon, and then couldn\u0026rsquo;t get the knitting off the needle. So I had to *cut it off. Going to try again soon hopefully with better luck. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking of ways to increase the color and what not of the posts here, but everything I try looks dumb. I\u0026rsquo;m stalled on the writing project for today with a part that\u0026rsquo;s going to call for some fast paced dialogs, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t found the right mindset yet, frustrating. I\u0026rsquo;m having some impostor syndrome stuff, related to the fact that I now have a lot of dedicated writing time. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about new project,s how to capitalize/monitize on and develop old projects and the like, and I feel like a giant hack. The upside of this, is I don\u0026rsquo;t have the brainpower to feel like an academic hack/impostor, or to angst about my grad school applications. It\u0026rsquo;s all out of my hands. The knitting/sweater class continues to grow. This is totally the project that I envisioned when I did my internship a year ago, and it\u0026rsquo;s fun to be able to actually make it work. When I\u0026rsquo;m in the shop today I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time with my coinstructor, and see if we can iron anything specific down about the class. While we had planned to alternate weeks, there might be enough people to treat it like two sections of the same class. Neat. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/review-today/","summary":"I finished watching Standoff, a canceled procedural from last year. There\u0026rsquo;s something sort of geeky and atypical about this show that I find really captivating. Anyway, apparently they made more episodes (18 in total) than I ever saw when it was airing. Also, it\u0026rsquo;s a show that I watched pretty religiously on Tuesday nights last fall with R. and so I have particularly fond memories of it. The boyfriend socks are to the ribbing, both of them, so I only have a little bit of ribbing and then they\u0026rsquo;re done. Did some tweaking of the tychoish design. basically what I did was make everything fixed width so that the design of the site doesn\u0026rsquo;t change if you resize your window. At Dave\u0026rsquo;s request/suggestion, which I think was helpful. It\u0026rsquo;ll be easy at this point to set up a second sidebar, if I ever decide I want more sidebar room. I\u0026rsquo;ve critiqued my first story for the group.","title":"Review Today"},{"content":"Because I\u0026rsquo;ve fallen into to this rhythm of writing about what I\u0026rsquo;ve read the previous day/night in the morning, I though I\u0026rsquo;d continue today.\nI\u0026rsquo;m reading Tiptree\u0026rsquo;s last novel/novella `The Starry Rift \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Starry-Rift-James-Tiptree-Jr/dp/031293744X\u0026gt;`_. I\u0026rsquo;d been idly reading it during cereal time, and in fact I bought it a year ago when I was buying my last bunch of text books and I thought that it would be good to read some classic SF. I read Brightness Falls from the Air this summer, and wanted to take a break before I read though all of the Tiptree. Because you know, you should horde the reading experience of books. (Not at all.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s fun, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t made all that much progress yet. A couple of things. It\u0026rsquo;s very much a product of the 80\u0026rsquo;s, though. The technology is based on \u0026ldquo;tapes\u0026rdquo; as a storage method. And in a way I see the main character as being a sort of hard core old space opera response to cyberpunk. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I\u0026rsquo;m articulating that correctly. The character has a sort of high-tech-rebel feel, except Tiptree doesn\u0026rsquo;t delight in the grunge and grit that so typifies cyberpunk/steampunk.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll point you to a nifty piece that I happened to comment on a lot yesterday, on the livejournal of Steve(n H.) Wilson, the writer and instigator behind Prometheous Radio Theatre. Good stuff on writing.\nWith that, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m going to have writing blogging today. There might be knitting blogging, but my plan for the day is to write, to knit, maybe go to the knitting guild meeting (gasp, I know!), and maybe maybe do some work on the new TealArt.\nOn this last point, I had a great talk with Amy, a \u0026rsquo;net friend from way way back, who I\u0026rsquo;ve adopted as my drupal mentor. The bad news is I still have a ways to go, the good news is that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been going about this in the wrong way, so with luck, there\u0026rsquo;ll be a new TealArt soon.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-rift/","summary":"Because I\u0026rsquo;ve fallen into to this rhythm of writing about what I\u0026rsquo;ve read the previous day/night in the morning, I though I\u0026rsquo;d continue today.\nI\u0026rsquo;m reading Tiptree\u0026rsquo;s last novel/novella `The Starry Rift \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Starry-Rift-James-Tiptree-Jr/dp/031293744X\u0026gt;`_. I\u0026rsquo;d been idly reading it during cereal time, and in fact I bought it a year ago when I was buying my last bunch of text books and I thought that it would be good to read some classic SF. I read Brightness Falls from the Air this summer, and wanted to take a break before I read though all of the Tiptree. Because you know, you should horde the reading experience of books. (Not at all.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s fun, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t made all that much progress yet. A couple of things. It\u0026rsquo;s very much a product of the 80\u0026rsquo;s, though. The technology is based on \u0026ldquo;tapes\u0026rdquo; as a storage method. And in a way I see the main character as being a sort of hard core old space opera response to cyberpunk.","title":"The Rift"},{"content":"I wrote less than 200 words yesterday, but I did a couple of important things with those words, so I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining.\nThey were:\nI broke the 10k mark on the new novel. Lets hope I can get the next 15 or even 20 k done in the next month. I started the third chapter, and did some associated outlining and note taking. These are really independent chapters, and sometimes starting a new one can be a bit tough. Good that its over. Also on the writing front, I read the novella that I mentioned yesterday last night, when I was too brain dead to do anything else. (Note to self: read more before bed.) The novella was Alastair Reynolds\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Minla\u0026rsquo;s Flowers,\u0026rdquo; and I quite enjoyed it. For those of you keeping track at home. In some ways the story was very much a \u0026ldquo;first contact/Prime Directive\u0026rdquo; tale about interference in lower cultures, and even though we have a succinct way of categorizing this story, it was fresh and added a good new perspective to the general model. And on top of that, the really rich \u0026ldquo;world\u0026rdquo; or setting was spectacular.\nThough I fear that this makes me sound like a horribly trite SF fan, there are a couple of more complex appreciations here.\nSomehow I always think that because short form works are, well short, that you have to strip away anything that\u0026rsquo;s not The Plot, and The Characters, but to be honest, I think by proportion this and the Wolf 359 story I read the other day, had more \u0026ldquo;setting\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;world\u0026rdquo; than the long form stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. There\u0026rsquo;s a huge historiographical component to this story, which I think is really cool, and makes me seem not so much like a freak in some of the stuff that I\u0026rsquo;d been playing with. But that said, I like the way that \u0026ldquo;cold storage\u0026rdquo; was used to make this happen, and how the short(er) work was able to both sand alone and work in a larger framework. I learned a lot. So I\u0026rsquo;m happy. Time to make tea and actually get some stuff done.\nTalk with you soon!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/frontier/","summary":"I wrote less than 200 words yesterday, but I did a couple of important things with those words, so I\u0026rsquo;m not complaining.\nThey were:\nI broke the 10k mark on the new novel. Lets hope I can get the next 15 or even 20 k done in the next month. I started the third chapter, and did some associated outlining and note taking. These are really independent chapters, and sometimes starting a new one can be a bit tough. Good that its over. Also on the writing front, I read the novella that I mentioned yesterday last night, when I was too brain dead to do anything else. (Note to self: read more before bed.) The novella was Alastair Reynolds\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Minla\u0026rsquo;s Flowers,\u0026rdquo; and I quite enjoyed it. For those of you keeping track at home. In some ways the story was very much a \u0026ldquo;first contact/Prime Directive\u0026rdquo; tale about interference in lower cultures, and even though we have a succinct way of categorizing this story, it was fresh and added a good new perspective to the general model.","title":"Frontier"},{"content":"In terms of knitting\u0026hellip;\nI also did my steeking demonstration, and one of the attendees offered to cut her own sweater, which meant that I didn\u0026rsquo;t have to do something crazy with the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on (ie. take the sleeve I am currently knitting off the needle and cut the other armhole.)\nAt t he moment I have no real knitting deadlines or \u0026ldquo;things I must get done.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a break on the morocco sweater for a while. Maybe.\nI want to knock out the pair of socks that I have in progress pretty soon. It\u0026rsquo;s a close deal, so I\u0026rsquo;ll probably get that done this week.\nBoring and really heavy. Nothing much worth noting.\nOne of the things that we\u0026rsquo;re doing at the shop coming up here is that we\u0026rsquo;re going to do a \u0026ldquo;my first sweater\u0026rdquo; class. Sweaters are big projects, daunting, and complicated-seeming. But the truth is that they\u0026rsquo;re not really that hard, and most people who know how to knit can probably make a sweater. So I\u0026rsquo;ve written an EZ inspired yoke sweater pattern, and in 4 bi-weekly sessions myself and one of my coworkers are going to help people through this sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be fun. If you\u0026rsquo;re in the area and want to make a sweater, here\u0026rsquo;s more info\nAlso at the shop, next thursday we\u0026rsquo;re starting a pi-shawl along. I haven\u0026rsquo;t knitted lace in a long time, and it might be fun to do that. In honor of the occasion I got, a 4.2 oz/3100 yarn skein of Tencel/Merino yarn. We\u0026rsquo;ll ignore the fact that I already have way way too much lace weight and nothing in mind for it. I have guilt about my stash, but the truth is that there isn\u0026rsquo;t much there.\nThat means, the things currently on my needles--and active--are:\nThe socks (see above). The Morocco Sweater. The Turkish Tile Sweater. A Turkish sock. So that\u0026rsquo;s not bad, and I know people who say that \u0026ldquo;socks don\u0026rsquo;t count,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of inclined to agree.\nOk, enough blathering, I\u0026rsquo;ll be off somewhere knitting now.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/relief/","summary":"In terms of knitting\u0026hellip;\nI also did my steeking demonstration, and one of the attendees offered to cut her own sweater, which meant that I didn\u0026rsquo;t have to do something crazy with the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on (ie. take the sleeve I am currently knitting off the needle and cut the other armhole.)\nAt t he moment I have no real knitting deadlines or \u0026ldquo;things I must get done.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a break on the morocco sweater for a while. Maybe.\nI want to knock out the pair of socks that I have in progress pretty soon. It\u0026rsquo;s a close deal, so I\u0026rsquo;ll probably get that done this week.\nBoring and really heavy. Nothing much worth noting.\nOne of the things that we\u0026rsquo;re doing at the shop coming up here is that we\u0026rsquo;re going to do a \u0026ldquo;my first sweater\u0026rdquo; class. Sweaters are big projects, daunting, and complicated-seeming.","title":"Relief"},{"content":"This post on writing has made it\u0026rsquo;s rounds on the SF writing blog circuit today John Scalzi\u0026quot; and Tobias Buckell; posted here, and here,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about it a bunch.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m posting it here, because I think its a good resource, and it\u0026rsquo;s interesting.\nAs a blogger myself, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I have anything substantive to add to this discussion other than to say it\u0026rsquo;s interesting and to ask you what you think\u0026hellip;\nThe other thing that\u0026rsquo;s been weighing on my mind with regards to revisions and copy, is the blog of deanna hoak, a SF-specializing copy-editor.\nCopy quality is something I worry about a lot. With reason, I mean you all read a bunch of pretty rough copy that I put out here. At the same time I think I\u0026rsquo;m generally better than I used to be, though you can of course come to your own conclusion.\nAt the same time I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at getting the structural level squared away, or at least being sensitive to this.\nshrug one word at a time, one day at a time.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/revisions/","summary":"This post on writing has made it\u0026rsquo;s rounds on the SF writing blog circuit today John Scalzi\u0026quot; and Tobias Buckell; posted here, and here,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about it a bunch.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m posting it here, because I think its a good resource, and it\u0026rsquo;s interesting.\nAs a blogger myself, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I have anything substantive to add to this discussion other than to say it\u0026rsquo;s interesting and to ask you what you think\u0026hellip;\nThe other thing that\u0026rsquo;s been weighing on my mind with regards to revisions and copy, is the blog of deanna hoak, a SF-specializing copy-editor.\nCopy quality is something I worry about a lot. With reason, I mean you all read a bunch of pretty rough copy that I put out here. At the same time I think I\u0026rsquo;m generally better than I used to be, though you can of course come to your own conclusion.","title":"Revisions"},{"content":"In the end, I think my last post begins to ask \u0026ldquo;at what point do we say \u0026lsquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve made progress on this project\u0026rsquo;,\u0026rdquo; is it when you\u0026rsquo;ve written a given number of words or pages? Is progress measured by units of meaning (ie. paragraphs, chapters, or sections)?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that there\u0026rsquo;s a great answer to this quandary, and I think that the social scientist inside of me gets a little too giddy at the prospect of thinking about the possibilities and challenges of various metrics.\nOne thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing recently is using subversion or SVN to manage basically all my files.\nSubversion is a program that, mostly programers, use to track and organize code incrementally as it develops. This is important because if a programer is working on fixing a problem, of connecting, say widget a to command b without needing script c, and then later decides that they liked script C better than anything they come up with, they have a back up of the earlier program. With a program like subversion, one or two commands and everything is back to the way it was.\nNow, if there are even two or three programers (\u0026ldquo;writers\u0026rdquo;) working on the same project, you can imagine how being able to track who has added what and when on a really atomic level, can be really powerful.\nOne of my problems with backup is that I would always backup files and then six months hence when I actually needed something that was backed-up, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have a clue where what I needed was. Or worse, I\u0026rsquo;d know what the file was called, but I\u0026rsquo;d have four versions of it, and none were the right version. SVN fixes this.\nBut this creates another possible marker of progress: the commit. Every-time you send in your files to the subversion repository it\u0026rsquo;s called a commit. Commits are all numbered (and dated, and tracked with a message describing what is contained in the commit). So in a vague way you can sort of see how much work is getting done by tracking the number of commits. It\u0026rsquo;s certainly not foolproof, but I have had weeks and weeks where I\u0026rsquo;ve done maybe 10 commits total, and weeks like today when I\u0026rsquo;m averaging like 4 commits a day. I dunno. I mean it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, but it does reflect my state of mind. I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to do a commit unless I think I\u0026rsquo;ve crossed some threshold of accomplishment.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s worth something.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll post more at some point about this system, because unlike previous data organization systems, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t ware out or go stale. I like that. But right now I\u0026rsquo;m going to go write something interesting or else you\u0026rsquo;re all going to run away in boredom, and we can\u0026rsquo;t be having that.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/markers-of-progress/","summary":"In the end, I think my last post begins to ask \u0026ldquo;at what point do we say \u0026lsquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve made progress on this project\u0026rsquo;,\u0026rdquo; is it when you\u0026rsquo;ve written a given number of words or pages? Is progress measured by units of meaning (ie. paragraphs, chapters, or sections)?\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure that there\u0026rsquo;s a great answer to this quandary, and I think that the social scientist inside of me gets a little too giddy at the prospect of thinking about the possibilities and challenges of various metrics.\nOne thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing recently is using subversion or SVN to manage basically all my files.\nSubversion is a program that, mostly programers, use to track and organize code incrementally as it develops. This is important because if a programer is working on fixing a problem, of connecting, say widget a to command b without needing script c, and then later decides that they liked script C better than anything they come up with, they have a back up of the earlier program.","title":"Markers of Progress"},{"content":"I read \u0026ldquo;Whose Afraid of Wolf 359?\u0026rdquo; by Ken MacLeod last night. I liked it.\nStories like this remind me that I don\u0026rsquo;t actually dislike short stories, and that I\u0026rsquo;m not really opposed to conceptual SF. I\u0026rsquo;m just--in part--not familiar enough with what I like. This is why my reading list was a good idea. Another part of this puzzle is that most of my exposure to shorter form works, hasn\u0026rsquo;t been to SF (hi H!), and while my grasp on the SF short story might be tenuous, my grasp on \u0026ldquo;Literary short form1\u0026rdquo; is virtually non existent.\nNext up from the same collection The New Space Opera (ed. Straham \u0026amp; Dozois) is a novella called \u0026ldquo;Minla\u0026rsquo;s Flowers,\u0026rdquo; By Alistar Reynolds. I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore the \u0026ldquo;short novel\u0026rdquo; form a bit. There isn\u0026rsquo;t much of a market for them, so they don\u0026rsquo;t turn up very often, but I\u0026rsquo;m interested. Anyway, after this one I might go back to the Tiptree for a while.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all background, what\u0026rsquo;s more prominently on my mind at the moment, is the quick little action scene that I\u0026rsquo;m gearing up to write.\nThis, like much of the action in the last project has a sort of vague cyberpunk aesthetic, in that it occurs in a sort of stylized \u0026ldquo;virtual reality\u0026rdquo; setting. I like this mode because it makes it possible to have action in side of situations that are pretty realistic. I mean, there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; action, in the sense that fiction writers depict, in our lives Truth is, without alcohol, there\u0026rsquo;s not much in the way of personal conflict and as we all know, tales of inebriation are never as interesting unless you\u0026rsquo;re a) there, and b) similarly inebriated.\nI also like the way that these kinds of scenes form \u0026ldquo;world within worlds,\u0026rdquo; and further layer the narration in a sort of clear non-abstruse sort of way. Ironically, but moving \u0026ldquo;action,\u0026rdquo; out of our character\u0026rsquo;s reality, the whole thing becomes more realistic for the reader, because the characters aren\u0026rsquo;t super spies with improbable missions and tools, but regular folks, with regular jobs, with a jack behind their ear. I mean, my current main character is totally a librarian, and it totally works. Or at least, give me a while and a room of my own, and it\u0026rsquo;ll totally work.\nAnyway, time for more tea. And work.\nOnward and Upward!\nThough clearly there\u0026rsquo;s something that seperates poetry from short stories and essays, lets for the sake of my blunt argument, treat them all as one.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/running-in-vr/","summary":"I read \u0026ldquo;Whose Afraid of Wolf 359?\u0026rdquo; by Ken MacLeod last night. I liked it.\nStories like this remind me that I don\u0026rsquo;t actually dislike short stories, and that I\u0026rsquo;m not really opposed to conceptual SF. I\u0026rsquo;m just--in part--not familiar enough with what I like. This is why my reading list was a good idea. Another part of this puzzle is that most of my exposure to shorter form works, hasn\u0026rsquo;t been to SF (hi H!), and while my grasp on the SF short story might be tenuous, my grasp on \u0026ldquo;Literary short form1\u0026rdquo; is virtually non existent.\nNext up from the same collection The New Space Opera (ed. Straham \u0026amp; Dozois) is a novella called \u0026ldquo;Minla\u0026rsquo;s Flowers,\u0026rdquo; By Alistar Reynolds. I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore the \u0026ldquo;short novel\u0026rdquo; form a bit. There isn\u0026rsquo;t much of a market for them, so they don\u0026rsquo;t turn up very often, but I\u0026rsquo;m interested. Anyway, after this one I might go back to the Tiptree for a while.","title":"Running in VR"},{"content":"A long time ago, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d start meme, were people would list five books that they\u0026rsquo;d read more than once. Sure the \u0026ldquo;list the five last books you\u0026rsquo;ve read\u0026rdquo; meme travels around a fair bit, but this is sort of an interesting turn. In most cases, you\u0026rsquo;re not likely to have read a book more than once unless you really liked it. But, sadly, I felt that my contribution wasn\u0026rsquo;t good enough, so I sat of the post forever.\nThen as part of my bah-humbag New Years post I mentioned starting a \u0026ldquo;read.txt\u0026rdquo; file to track my reading accomplishments. I put in the highlights of 2007, which read the world like the \u0026ldquo;The Best of Feminist and Queer Science Fiction,\u0026rdquo; but no matter, I will present for your download, a copy of this file:\nread.txt\nIt\u0026rsquo;s in Markdown format, and I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to granularly list short stories, because they\u0026rsquo;re distinct, I need all the encouragement in the world to read more of them, and I want to be able to keep track of which authors and what not I read.\nBelow the fold, I present to you the \u0026ldquo;books you\u0026rsquo;ve read twice meme\u0026rdquo; post. Do play along!\nSo we all read books, and we\u0026rsquo;ve all seen the \u0026ldquo;select books you\u0026rsquo;ve read from this list\u0026rdquo; form of meme, and while I\u0026rsquo;m not claiming that this is original, I think it\u0026rsquo;d be cool for people to post lists of books that they\u0026rsquo;ve read more than once. Because that\u0026rsquo;s an endorsement if there ever was one.\nTo make it a meme, I think it would be great to post, links via comments or trackbacks so that lea, so that we can all browse through these posts to see what books people geek out on.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also going to include a list of books I want to read a second time, but haven\u0026rsquo;t yet.\nEnder\u0026rsquo;s Game by Orson Scot Card Three-Fifths of Heaven (a trilogy) by Melissa Scott The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov Angles in America: The Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner I seem to have a thing for trilogies. Books that I want to read again, but haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten to:\nBastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Alison Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reading-and-rereading/","summary":"A long time ago, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d start meme, were people would list five books that they\u0026rsquo;d read more than once. Sure the \u0026ldquo;list the five last books you\u0026rsquo;ve read\u0026rdquo; meme travels around a fair bit, but this is sort of an interesting turn. In most cases, you\u0026rsquo;re not likely to have read a book more than once unless you really liked it. But, sadly, I felt that my contribution wasn\u0026rsquo;t good enough, so I sat of the post forever.\nThen as part of my bah-humbag New Years post I mentioned starting a \u0026ldquo;read.txt\u0026rdquo; file to track my reading accomplishments. I put in the highlights of 2007, which read the world like the \u0026ldquo;The Best of Feminist and Queer Science Fiction,\u0026rdquo; but no matter, I will present for your download, a copy of this file:\nread.txt\nIt\u0026rsquo;s in Markdown format, and I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to granularly list short stories, because they\u0026rsquo;re distinct, I need all the encouragement in the world to read more of them, and I want to be able to keep track of which authors and what not I read.","title":"Reading and Rereading"},{"content":"I wonder if it\u0026rsquo;s redundant for me to tag posts \u0026ldquo;knitting\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;writing.\u0026rdquo; I keep doing it.\nI feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty productive today, even though I worked a lot of the day, and have had chores to do. I have a little mini workshop on steeking that I\u0026rsquo;m giving tomorrow evening. That\u0026rsquo;ll be fun, but I had to write a handout this morning, which I think is pretty good.\nThough I\u0026rsquo;m no Stephanie--in terms of entertainment value--or Elizabeth--in terms of pure genius--I find writing about knitting to come very easy, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I have enough to offer in terms of content, I really would like to work on putting together some sort of collection of knitting patterns or something. I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know.\nNevertheless, knitting writing means less fiction writing, but I got some done. I\u0026rsquo;m basically done with chapter two. I need to spend some time tomorrow morning laying out and chewing through what goes into chapter 3 more clearly. Frustratingly, I\u0026rsquo;m only 140 some words away from the 10k mark. Having said that, it\u0026rsquo;s really good that the second chapter wasn\u0026rsquo;t any longer. My target for these first couple of chapters was 4500 words, and the first was 4750, and the second one is 5k. While you might be inclined to say \u0026ldquo;but you got writing done, that\u0026rsquo;s good,\u0026rdquo; in point of fact, no matter how many words you use in a chapter, each chapter contains about the same amount of story. That is, the point A at the beginning, and point B at the end of a chapter are the same no matter how many words it takes.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s what second drafts and editors are for.\nJoyce Williams, the knitter whose sweater I\u0026rsquo;m working on at the moment, is fond of saying if you\u0026rsquo;re knitting at a given gauge it will take you the same amount of time to knit a sweater on size 0 needles (most round toothpicks are about this size) or size 6s (about a pencil). The corollary is that, there is no way to knit a sweater at a gauge of 9 stitches to the inch with any speed at all.\nWhich is why there isn\u0026rsquo;t much about my knitting, except that I\u0026rsquo;m about half way to the middle of the forearm where the pattern changes. One stitch at a time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rhythm/","summary":"I wonder if it\u0026rsquo;s redundant for me to tag posts \u0026ldquo;knitting\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;writing.\u0026rdquo; I keep doing it.\nI feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty productive today, even though I worked a lot of the day, and have had chores to do. I have a little mini workshop on steeking that I\u0026rsquo;m giving tomorrow evening. That\u0026rsquo;ll be fun, but I had to write a handout this morning, which I think is pretty good.\nThough I\u0026rsquo;m no Stephanie--in terms of entertainment value--or Elizabeth--in terms of pure genius--I find writing about knitting to come very easy, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I have enough to offer in terms of content, I really would like to work on putting together some sort of collection of knitting patterns or something. I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know.\nNevertheless, knitting writing means less fiction writing, but I got some done. I\u0026rsquo;m basically done with chapter two. I need to spend some time tomorrow morning laying out and chewing through what goes into chapter 3 more clearly.","title":"Rhythm"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s some rambling thoughts on writing, learning, and sort of a \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing today,\u0026rdquo; post.\nMaybe this is a new years thing, but I\u0026rsquo;m re-upping myself at critters because, it seems like the thing to do. There\u0026rsquo;s no way in hell that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be able to go to Clarion or Viable Paradise this year or any time soon (frankly, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty up in the air about knitting camp, even), not that I\u0026rsquo;d want to, given that both seem really centered on short fiction. This is an aversion that I really have to get over, and maybe joining critters (for real; I started last year while I was busy graduating, and really couldn\u0026rsquo;t find time. Now is a bit different.) will help with that.\nI also found Nancy Kress\u0026rsquo; Blog today and was immediately struck by this post. A few thoughts:\nShe writes--or drafts--long hand. There are a number of great SF writers who do this. Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, come to mind. I\u0026rsquo;m in awe. She mentioned in another entry that she had had a number of stories published in Asimov\u0026rsquo;s and that she still liked a few of them. This is pleasing because, she doesn\u0026rsquo;t like some of her stories after the fact, which is sort of how I feel about all my short stories about half way through. If I could just learn to push the onset of this feeling back a month or two, I might be able to finish the story and get it out before the malaise sets in. Interestingly, even though I know it\u0026rsquo;s crap, I still kind of have a soft spot for the novel I wrote when I was 16/17 and the novella that I\u0026rsquo;m still revising. People can and do draft short stories in a day. Amazing. I wrote today. The little substory inset that I was working on for chapter two looks like it\u0026rsquo;s going to spill into chapter 3. I\u0026rsquo;m ok with that, because the spill will be pretty small and my projects always seem to grow between outline and draft. I\u0026rsquo;m worried because thus far, I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending a lot of time in a part of the story that isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;the core\u0026rdquo; of my initial plan.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the scoop, I\u0026rsquo;m telling a semi-parallel narrative, in three different settings. The earliest happens about 30 years before the primary story, which is ~100-200 years after the primary section of the story. I seem to have a thing for doing stories about historiography these days, so having some sort of temporal contrast is important to me (perhaps why I\u0026rsquo;m having trouble doing shorter work). Anyway, chapter two, with the exception of a brief interlude is set entirely in the earlier portion of the story. The first chapter was probably about half and half. The next chapter will probably be 1/3d early, 2/3ds late. While I think this part are really crucial, and pretty active, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that they\u0026rsquo;ll reflect the overall tone of the book. And given the power of early impressions\u0026hellip; I worry. My most current thought would be to find something that I could do that would be peppy, use the characters from the \u0026ldquo;third\u0026rdquo; phase, and frame the other two stories. But I want to have a more firm handle on that setting before I write about it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m probably a day away from crossing the 10k line, which in my mind signifies a change from an idle project to something that will probably turn into a novel. Given how long the chapters are, and how I expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll be pacing myself for the next two months, 10k increments will probably less of a big deal from here on out (knock on wood,) but this first one is big for me.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/critique/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s some rambling thoughts on writing, learning, and sort of a \u0026ldquo;what I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing today,\u0026rdquo; post.\nMaybe this is a new years thing, but I\u0026rsquo;m re-upping myself at critters because, it seems like the thing to do. There\u0026rsquo;s no way in hell that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be able to go to Clarion or Viable Paradise this year or any time soon (frankly, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty up in the air about knitting camp, even), not that I\u0026rsquo;d want to, given that both seem really centered on short fiction. This is an aversion that I really have to get over, and maybe joining critters (for real; I started last year while I was busy graduating, and really couldn\u0026rsquo;t find time. Now is a bit different.) will help with that.\nI also found Nancy Kress\u0026rsquo; Blog today and was immediately struck by this post. A few thoughts:\nShe writes--or drafts--long hand. There are a number of great SF writers who do this.","title":"Critique"},{"content":"Good Morning, and good new year to you all.\nI was greeted this morning with a broken tea pot in my office. Thankfully we have a spare, so a wonderful pot of strong english tea is brewing downstairs. I got a lot of new teas the other day at an international food mart.\nMy new years eve was pretty uneventful. I went to bed at 11:30, I woke up at a quarter to 8. That\u0026rsquo;s good. I got knitting done. I wrote 1200 words yesterday. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that.\nThere are a lot of new folks reading tychoish, thanks to my post over at zimmermania. While I do a lot of knitting and I talk about it a fair peice here I think as a knitting blogger I\u0026rsquo;m pretty bad at it. Except occastionally, on a day to day basis, my projects don\u0026rsquo;t change that much and would make for really boring pictures. I\u0026rsquo;m no WendyKnits, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure.\nSo I hope the rambling about my life and my writing is interesting. I implore you to read the site, and maybe even subscribe to the feed.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to go off in a moment and do some writing. I\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of the second chapter of Breakout, the novel project that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. The chapters for this one are a bit longer. I\u0026rsquo;ve worked through the story a half dozen times, probably, so I know how it\u0026rsquo;s all going to work out, but I\u0026rsquo;m at that stage--that I think is inevitable at the beginning of a project--where you\u0026rsquo;re not quite sure that it\u0026rsquo;s all going to actually come together in something coherent. In an academic paper, this is the first 500-1k words, in the novella it was 6k-9k, but it looks like in this project it\u0026rsquo;s not going to really come together until 10k-20k. Nerve wrecking, to say the least. Maybe this is part of the reason why I don\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;get\u0026rdquo; short stories: I feel like they need to come together in the first 200-300 words, and that\u0026rsquo;s not enough room for me to even get my barring.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ll be around today. Thanks for reading. Do drop me a line, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry if it sounds like I go off the deep end from time to time: I always come back, so just stick around and it\u0026rsquo;ll be worth your time.\nOnward and Upward!\nps. Somewhere in this post, I passed the 300,000 word mark in my presently archived blogging career. Woot.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/right-foot-start/","summary":"Good Morning, and good new year to you all.\nI was greeted this morning with a broken tea pot in my office. Thankfully we have a spare, so a wonderful pot of strong english tea is brewing downstairs. I got a lot of new teas the other day at an international food mart.\nMy new years eve was pretty uneventful. I went to bed at 11:30, I woke up at a quarter to 8. That\u0026rsquo;s good. I got knitting done. I wrote 1200 words yesterday. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that.\nThere are a lot of new folks reading tychoish, thanks to my post over at zimmermania. While I do a lot of knitting and I talk about it a fair peice here I think as a knitting blogger I\u0026rsquo;m pretty bad at it. Except occastionally, on a day to day basis, my projects don\u0026rsquo;t change that much and would make for really boring pictures.","title":"Right Foot Start"},{"content":"As my previous post probably indicates, I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading wikipedia recently about fairly elementary astronomical concepts and facts. While this is an enjoyable project all by itself, it\u0026rsquo;s clearly in service of the fiction I\u0026rsquo;m writing.\nI\u0026rsquo;d also take a moment to note that in the biggest web traffic I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten in a month or more due to a post I made on zimmermania, and the pictures I posted yesterday, I\u0026rsquo;m going to have a post about science fiction and near-Earth star systems. Sigh\nAnyway back to Wolf 424. All this is all well and good, but the truth is, I don\u0026rsquo;t write hard SF, and to say that I have a somewhat tenuous grasp on mathematics. Nevertheless, reading about stars which are pretty close on a cosmic scale, is something that I find really helpful and inspiring for my writing.\nI think because thinking about Barnard\u0026rsquo;s Star, or Wolf 424, Epsilon Eridani is about leaning into a sort of existential sense of wonder and amazement. I mean. Wolf 424 is moving--relative to the solar system--at hundreds of miles a second. I mean wow.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s what I think science fiction should, in an ideal world aim to communicate, I mean, among other things, of course. I made the point a few weeks ago that, space opera should attempt to make going Alpa Centuari, or Vega being substantively different than going to Montana or Nepal, even if the story is mundane, even if the boundaries of realism are pretty flexible.\nMy two cents at least.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-sense-of-wonder/","summary":"As my previous post probably indicates, I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading wikipedia recently about fairly elementary astronomical concepts and facts. While this is an enjoyable project all by itself, it\u0026rsquo;s clearly in service of the fiction I\u0026rsquo;m writing.\nI\u0026rsquo;d also take a moment to note that in the biggest web traffic I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten in a month or more due to a post I made on zimmermania, and the pictures I posted yesterday, I\u0026rsquo;m going to have a post about science fiction and near-Earth star systems. Sigh\nAnyway back to Wolf 424. All this is all well and good, but the truth is, I don\u0026rsquo;t write hard SF, and to say that I have a somewhat tenuous grasp on mathematics. Nevertheless, reading about stars which are pretty close on a cosmic scale, is something that I find really helpful and inspiring for my writing.\nI think because thinking about Barnard\u0026rsquo;s Star, or Wolf 424, Epsilon Eridani is about leaning into a sort of existential sense of wonder and amazement.","title":"A Sense of Wonder"},{"content":"I posted something along these lines to the writing list a few days ago, and I kept meaning to write some sort of bah humbag post about new years eves and new years resolutions (because thats my M.O. about holidays.) But then I realized that somehow it was already New Years Eve, and that I\u0026rsquo;d end up posting my non-resolution at the same time that everyone was posting theirs, so\u0026hellip; whatever. Here we are.\nTruth is I think the January 1 marker is a sort of lame beginning of the new year. I think August/September is a much better point in the year (at least in the northern hemisphere). I can\u0026rsquo;t decide if it\u0026rsquo;s the academic or the jew, but whichever, I tend to do most of the resolutioning then, and often pretty much ignore Janurary 1. Tonight, I\u0026rsquo;m siting at home doing the same thing I always do. But that\u0026rsquo;s the way I am.\nSo anyway, the resolution.\nThis year, I\u0026rsquo;m going to create a file called \u0026ldquo;read.txt\u0026rdquo; and list the books that I read as I read them. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading more in the last year, and this is a good thing, I still think that I need to read more. I hope that by tracking the books--just the titles and authors, too much work and I\u0026rsquo;ll loose interest--I\u0026rsquo;ll read more. What\u0026rsquo;s more, I think that I often read more than I think I do, I just never seem to remember it in the moment. Having a list will help this.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all. I want to write in the new year, but I\u0026rsquo;m doing that now, so no use to resolve to do it. So I\u0026rsquo;m done.\nSee you on the flip side.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-year/","summary":"I posted something along these lines to the writing list a few days ago, and I kept meaning to write some sort of bah humbag post about new years eves and new years resolutions (because thats my M.O. about holidays.) But then I realized that somehow it was already New Years Eve, and that I\u0026rsquo;d end up posting my non-resolution at the same time that everyone was posting theirs, so\u0026hellip; whatever. Here we are.\nTruth is I think the January 1 marker is a sort of lame beginning of the new year. I think August/September is a much better point in the year (at least in the northern hemisphere). I can\u0026rsquo;t decide if it\u0026rsquo;s the academic or the jew, but whichever, I tend to do most of the resolutioning then, and often pretty much ignore Janurary 1. Tonight, I\u0026rsquo;m siting at home doing the same thing I always do. But that\u0026rsquo;s the way I am.","title":"new year"},{"content":"From the Wikipedia page on Wolf 424\nDue to its proximity and fast motion towards the Sun, Wolf 424 will brighten by more than 2% over the course of the 21st century. In approximately 7700 years it will make its nearest approach at a distance of about 1 light year.\nSee ya in 9700.\nAnd here\u0026rsquo;s a picture for your records:\nA light year is pretty darn close, and astronomically, 7k years isn\u0026rsquo;t that long at all. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking someone needs to write a story.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about this some more, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized (with the help of wikipedia) that Wolf 242 is moving, relative to the speed of the Solar System, at 555km/s, which is almost 2 percent of light speed.1 Right? There has to be a story in this.\nAm I the only one to think that it\u0026rsquo;s really cool that google will calculate C, the speed of light, from the search bar?\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wolf-424/","summary":"From the Wikipedia page on Wolf 424\nDue to its proximity and fast motion towards the Sun, Wolf 424 will brighten by more than 2% over the course of the 21st century. In approximately 7700 years it will make its nearest approach at a distance of about 1 light year.\nSee ya in 9700.\nAnd here\u0026rsquo;s a picture for your records:\nA light year is pretty darn close, and astronomically, 7k years isn\u0026rsquo;t that long at all. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking someone needs to write a story.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about this some more, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized (with the help of wikipedia) that Wolf 242 is moving, relative to the speed of the Solar System, at 555km/s, which is almost 2 percent of light speed.1 Right? There has to be a story in this.\nAm I the only one to think that it\u0026rsquo;s really cool that google will calculate C, the speed of light, from the search bar?","title":"Wolf 424"},{"content":"So, I\u0026rsquo;m really bad at this whole \u0026ldquo;posting pictures\u0026rdquo; part of blogging. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good excuse, thought I will admit that if there was a good way to manage the Wordpress uploads via XML-RPC, in a standard easy to manage sort of way. Actually, if someone could give me a more clear way of naming and organizing pictures on the server, with points for the fewest steps, and/or greatest automation. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten off my duff and I\u0026rsquo;m ready to actually post some pictures.\nThese are all on my flickr and of course also on Ravelry, where I\u0026rsquo;m, not surprisingly known as tychoish. Today, we\u0026rsquo;re going to get pictures of the Morocco sweater in it\u0026rsquo;s current state. (Hence the title of the post). Lets remember that the name \u0026ldquo;Morocco\u0026rdquo; is a sort of inside joke, because although it looks Moorish, the pattern is taken from a Latvian weaving pattern. The design is from Joyce William\u0026rsquo;s Latvian Dreams, though I must admit that I have not yet really read the pattern, so much as copied the chart and inspected the picture in the book closely. I seem to enjoy it better that way.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a good picture of the bottom rear of the sweater. Note that the ugly green yarn and the curling will be gone when the sweater\u0026rsquo;s finished as I intend to undo the provisional cast on and knit a turned hem. I\u0026rsquo;ve even bought a 60\u0026quot; Size 0 needle:\n(It\u0026rsquo;s a jacket/cardigan, so the middle front is obstructed at the moment.) Here\u0026rsquo;s a closer view of the back of the sweater in total. It\u0026rsquo;s about 30-32\u0026quot; long from shoulder to lower edge.\nYou can probably see from that, how the sleeve\u0026rsquo;s are set it, and the armholes are shaped. I\u0026rsquo;m not doing it in one piece, but it\u0026rsquo;s cool none the less. Look at this:\nI picked up stitches holding two colors, continuing the patterns on their sides. Also the shaping is occurring the top/sides of the sleeves rather than at the bottom. Here\u0026rsquo;s a better shot of this from the top.\nI\u0026rsquo;m probably most proud of this. Look how the patterns meat from the shoulder. You can see the \u0026ldquo;seam,\u0026rdquo; and I think the half stitch discrepancy that grafting would have provided wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have been preferable in this situation. It looks good and it\u0026rsquo;ll look better when it\u0026rsquo;s blocked. Also the way it shifts direction without much fuss is pretty cool as well.\nBut as you can see I have a lot to go on this sleeve. Better get to it!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/casbah/","summary":"So, I\u0026rsquo;m really bad at this whole \u0026ldquo;posting pictures\u0026rdquo; part of blogging. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good excuse, thought I will admit that if there was a good way to manage the Wordpress uploads via XML-RPC, in a standard easy to manage sort of way. Actually, if someone could give me a more clear way of naming and organizing pictures on the server, with points for the fewest steps, and/or greatest automation. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten off my duff and I\u0026rsquo;m ready to actually post some pictures.\nThese are all on my flickr and of course also on Ravelry, where I\u0026rsquo;m, not surprisingly known as tychoish. Today, we\u0026rsquo;re going to get pictures of the Morocco sweater in it\u0026rsquo;s current state. (Hence the title of the post). Lets remember that the name \u0026ldquo;Morocco\u0026rdquo; is a sort of inside joke, because although it looks Moorish, the pattern is taken from a Latvian weaving pattern.","title":"Casbah"},{"content":"I think I may have mentioned a recent foray into spinning. I got some BFL, and attempted to do some navajo plying, and it ended miserably. Later tonight I\u0026rsquo;m going to spin up a sample in 2 ply and see how that goes. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m going to slow down the ratio, because I think I was over spinning the singles as well. This is hearty fiber, but it\u0026rsquo;s longer staple than merino and I don\u0026rsquo;t need to twist the hell out of it, I think. It\u0026rsquo;s damn nice, and pretty easy to get a hold of, so I really want this to work out. Heh.\nIn other knitting news, having procured the proper replacement needle, I\u0026rsquo;m back to knitting Morocco. The secondary sweater, code named \u0026ldquo;turkish tile\u0026rdquo; is about 15 inches long, give or take, and I\u0026rsquo;ve officially moved it into the other room and on hiatus. I need to work on this sleeve, and if I need distraction from that there are socks.\nYou hadn\u0026rsquo;t heard about the socks. Oh dear. Well, for reason\u0026rsquo;s I can\u0026rsquo;t quite comprehend, I have taken this sock back up, ripped out the heel flap which just wasn\u0026rsquo;t working out for either of us. We\u0026rsquo;re going to do some sneaky stuff with a thumb trick heel. You know where you knit across half of the stitches with waste yarn and then pick it out later and knit a toe (which is actually a short row shape heel. Wacky). And then of course both boyfriend socks, which I\u0026rsquo;m uncharacteristically knitting at the same time.\nI had a talk with the owner of the store about ordering/carrying a spinning wheel(s). We\u0026rsquo;re still not sure what the options are. We\u0026rsquo;re going to have some sort of relationship with this company, but we\u0026rsquo;re not sure if it\u0026rsquo;s going to be an ad-hoc or more ongoing sort of thing. I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time tomorrow afternoon working on prepping another spinning wheel for sale, and spinning. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to have my own wheel for real, again.\nAnyway, I have something of a deadline (steeking demonstration on the 3rd) and a lot of sleeve to knit before then. If I\u0026rsquo;m not writing fiction think I had better be knitting on this.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/back-and-forwards/","summary":"I think I may have mentioned a recent foray into spinning. I got some BFL, and attempted to do some navajo plying, and it ended miserably. Later tonight I\u0026rsquo;m going to spin up a sample in 2 ply and see how that goes. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m going to slow down the ratio, because I think I was over spinning the singles as well. This is hearty fiber, but it\u0026rsquo;s longer staple than merino and I don\u0026rsquo;t need to twist the hell out of it, I think. It\u0026rsquo;s damn nice, and pretty easy to get a hold of, so I really want this to work out. Heh.\nIn other knitting news, having procured the proper replacement needle, I\u0026rsquo;m back to knitting Morocco. The secondary sweater, code named \u0026ldquo;turkish tile\u0026rdquo; is about 15 inches long, give or take, and I\u0026rsquo;ve officially moved it into the other room and on hiatus. I need to work on this sleeve, and if I need distraction from that there are socks.","title":"back and forwards"},{"content":"Just some thoughts about the writing bandwagon and what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to of late.\nI had a pretty good writing day yesterday. Not stellar, but I got pretty close to the 1000 word mark, and generally that\u0026rsquo;s a pretty good thing. Some people, myself included, occasionally brag about 2k or even 2.5k days, and while those days can feel really good and really cathartic, it\u0026rsquo;s not sustainable (one of the reason\u0026rsquo;s I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of NaNoWriMo) and therefore not a good, realistic, or otherwise healthy goal. My thought is if you need to write more than 1k words a day (on a single project) for more than like 2 days on end, cut something out: switch your days off, alter your sleep schedule, reorganize your priorities. Something.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m preaching, I\u0026rsquo;d also say that while you need to touch big projects daily in order to keep them active in your mind, if you\u0026rsquo;re not writing something like 1000 words a week on a project, it\u0026rsquo;s probably fallow and you should reconsider your priorities and regroup. Clearly I\u0026rsquo;m being a little prescriptive, there are kinds of writing where this won\u0026rsquo;t hold up, or it holds up differently. Poets and some short fiction writers, journalists, academic writing all have different thresholds and what not, but I think the general line of even if you can\u0026rsquo;t write on a project you should give it consideration and thought every single day, and also be sure to make actual concrete process on that project regularly. Your millage may vary.\nToday, I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet done as well, though I suspect there\u0026rsquo;s time yet to get writing done, so I\u0026rsquo;m not yet final. When I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about this, though, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I tend to keep track of one word count. How much I\u0026rsquo;ve written in the one big project, not how much I write at all, or how other projects fare. Particularly if you count this blog post, but probably even if you don\u0026rsquo;t, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten way way past the 1k goal: I have a knitting pattern that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a few days that I finally knocked out. Surely that counts for something. ;)\nI made a post a couple days ago about boyfriends and how (mostly as a result of heteronormativity) that sometimes it can be hard to be a \u0026ldquo;single queer.\u0026rdquo; The parallel to this is writing and writers. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to be a writer if you\u0026rsquo;re not writing. I mean clearly there are a lot of things in the world that prevent people who write from getting writing done, but I\u0026rsquo;m certainly not one to make the point that writers write and authors talk about what they wrote, you can\u0026rsquo;t be a writer if you don\u0026rsquo;t write.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how well these models and the analogy hold up, but, maybe there\u0026rsquo;s something there. Anyway, I have things that need doing, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to get, but I just wanted to throw this out there.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/due-credit/","summary":"Just some thoughts about the writing bandwagon and what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to of late.\nI had a pretty good writing day yesterday. Not stellar, but I got pretty close to the 1000 word mark, and generally that\u0026rsquo;s a pretty good thing. Some people, myself included, occasionally brag about 2k or even 2.5k days, and while those days can feel really good and really cathartic, it\u0026rsquo;s not sustainable (one of the reason\u0026rsquo;s I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of NaNoWriMo) and therefore not a good, realistic, or otherwise healthy goal. My thought is if you need to write more than 1k words a day (on a single project) for more than like 2 days on end, cut something out: switch your days off, alter your sleep schedule, reorganize your priorities. Something.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m preaching, I\u0026rsquo;d also say that while you need to touch big projects daily in order to keep them active in your mind, if you\u0026rsquo;re not writing something like 1000 words a week on a project, it\u0026rsquo;s probably fallow and you should reconsider your priorities and regroup.","title":"due credit"},{"content":"I got some pretty encouraging feedback yesterday on station keeping, and that was quite good. I think SK exists in a somewhat fragmented sort of way in the tychoish.com archives, but I have a PDF file that I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting when I get TealArt relaunched.\nIn any case, that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of writing lately that I\u0026rsquo;ve either known is kind of crappy (eg. academic papers) or that needs to be very sharp and polished (eg. graduate school statements.) While this kind of writing has it\u0026rsquo;s place, it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I can do without having people looking over my shoulder and saying: \u0026ldquo;no really that\u0026rsquo;s not the word you mean to use.\u0026rdquo; Which isn\u0026rsquo;t at all like my fiction process, but the systems feedback into each other.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s a problem that my fiction is less polished than my statement of purpose. I mean, I want it to be clear and pretty clean, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like I need to be flashy in a structural/syntatic/lexical sort of way. Or at least not any more (and sometimes less), than I am in these entries.\nWhile I was out west, I got another review of the novella which told me that my little running list of changes in my head is pretty much exactly what my reader said I need to do to make it better (stage the ending better; clarify a couple of characters and dynamics). So I\u0026rsquo;m close. I\u0026rsquo;d like other reviewers to read (you know who you are!) but I\u0026rsquo;m also pretty ready to just whack this thing for good.\nAlso yesterday, I wrote a goodly amount on breakout (the novel), and I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I need to do something to pep up the beginning. The novella opens with an action sequence, my hope is that because it\u0026rsquo;s short, there needs to be something that says \u0026ldquo;keep reading me,\u0026rdquo; early on. In the context of the novella, it totally works, but it was something that I went back and added, when I realized that it started on a rather dry note.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking that the new one needs a similar trick at the start. I open with a light hearted scene, at the moment, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know if it\u0026rsquo;s has the feeling of plot movement that I might otherwise want. We\u0026rsquo;ll have to see, I guess. I the mean time this weekend will see more breakout writing and some serious time working on the new tealart site. And of course, you\u0026rsquo;ll hear from me over here.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tricks/","summary":"I got some pretty encouraging feedback yesterday on station keeping, and that was quite good. I think SK exists in a somewhat fragmented sort of way in the tychoish.com archives, but I have a PDF file that I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting when I get TealArt relaunched.\nIn any case, that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of writing lately that I\u0026rsquo;ve either known is kind of crappy (eg. academic papers) or that needs to be very sharp and polished (eg. graduate school statements.) While this kind of writing has it\u0026rsquo;s place, it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I can do without having people looking over my shoulder and saying: \u0026ldquo;no really that\u0026rsquo;s not the word you mean to use.\u0026rdquo; Which isn\u0026rsquo;t at all like my fiction process, but the systems feedback into each other.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s a problem that my fiction is less polished than my statement of purpose. I mean, I want it to be clear and pretty clean, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like I need to be flashy in a structural/syntatic/lexical sort of way.","title":"tricks"},{"content":"I write a lot on this site about what I\u0026rsquo;m doing in the world, and less about who I am, in some sort of larger sense. Or something.\nSo much so that despite writing about \u0026ldquo;queer things\u0026rdquo; with some regularity on the blog, I don\u0026rsquo;t much talk about queer stuff in a concrete sort of way. For instance, I don\u0026rsquo;t talk about being gay at all in my \u0026ldquo;about page.\u0026rdquo; Weird. At one point it was incredibly important to write those things.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve thought from time to time that I make a better \u0026ldquo;professional queer\u0026rdquo; than I do a \u0026ldquo;real queer,\u0026rdquo; even if thats a fraught distinction, It\u0026rsquo;s kind of true. At some point I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to figure out how to figure this out. For the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m going to postpone that transcendental realization.\nAnyway. About \u0026ldquo;boyfriends\u0026rdquo; and I suppose girlfriends as well, though I don\u0026rsquo;t want to universalize or project. I have a friend and blog reader (hi!) who is very interested and invested in having a boyfriend, and all that accompanies that, while I can totally understand the way that, particularly for queers, being attached confirms identity experience, this isn\u0026rsquo;t a project that I\u0026rsquo;ve ever been very interested in. \u0026ldquo;These things happen, particularly when you\u0026rsquo;re not looking for them,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve often said. And I\u0026rsquo;ve generally found that to be true, though not absolute.\nIn real life, I generally refer to TheBoy by his name or in an ironic nod to the 70s and 80s culture as my \u0026ldquo;friend\u0026rdquo; (given that I don\u0026rsquo;t talk about friends in my cohort very often, it\u0026rsquo;s not incredibly odd). I\u0026rsquo;ve often wondered how this kind of positioning affects the closet/not-closeted dynamic, and often conclude that I really don\u0026rsquo;t care. I enjoy the freedom and possibility that being vague allows (the boy has a potentially gender-neutral name in the diminutive/common form, indeed as do I,) though there are clear problems with this.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to build this transition, so I\u0026rsquo;m not going to try. The other piece of this puzzle in my mind is that I don\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;crush\u0026rdquo; particularly well, which has lead me to declare (somewhat falsely) that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a \u0026ldquo;type.\u0026rdquo; I can\u0026rsquo;t remember having a crush for more than a few days without them finding out (usually by virtue of me telling them about it.) TheBoy is an exception to this, but I was in high school for g-d sakes. It\u0026rsquo;s actually kind of funny, because I don\u0026rsquo;t think of myself as being particularly forthright about such things, but there\u0026rsquo;s data to challenge that. Weird.\nAnyway, there are going to be socks in a few days. And neurosis aside, warm feet are always a good thing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/boyfriends/","summary":"I write a lot on this site about what I\u0026rsquo;m doing in the world, and less about who I am, in some sort of larger sense. Or something.\nSo much so that despite writing about \u0026ldquo;queer things\u0026rdquo; with some regularity on the blog, I don\u0026rsquo;t much talk about queer stuff in a concrete sort of way. For instance, I don\u0026rsquo;t talk about being gay at all in my \u0026ldquo;about page.\u0026rdquo; Weird. At one point it was incredibly important to write those things.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve thought from time to time that I make a better \u0026ldquo;professional queer\u0026rdquo; than I do a \u0026ldquo;real queer,\u0026rdquo; even if thats a fraught distinction, It\u0026rsquo;s kind of true. At some point I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to figure out how to figure this out. For the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m going to postpone that transcendental realization.\nAnyway. About \u0026ldquo;boyfriends\u0026rdquo; and I suppose girlfriends as well, though I don\u0026rsquo;t want to universalize or project.","title":"boyfriends"},{"content":"One of the other things that spending time with the family over the holidays has shown me--indeed what this year between schools in the city that I grew up in has shown me--is that my audience is pretty darn close.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had blog entries quoted back to me a lot in real life. Though my situation, or my worries, are not quite like ernie\u0026rsquo;s, I understand where he\u0026rsquo;s coming from.\nWhen I was using livejournal more consistently apart from tychoish.com, it often felt more like a sort of public message system. Kind of like the whiteboard on your dorm room door, except that people would actually read it without trudging through the snow.\nMy entire online existence has been in some ways a struggle with and against my readership, because a rather size-able portion of the people that I know IRL read my site. In the end that\u0026rsquo;s probably a good thing: I don\u0026rsquo;t have to repeat myself in emails constantly and I almost always think several times about where something is going to end up before I post it. The down side is that I\u0026rsquo;m probably more gaurded and stilted than I would be if I didn\u0026rsquo;t know my readership personally.\nInterestingly I think this makes my use of the pen name, particularly interesting. Rather than protect the people I do know from discovering who I am online, as I suspect many--particularly academic--bloggers do, I\u0026rsquo;m trying to protect people I don\u0026rsquo;t know in real life, from finding out who I am. Though I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;m going to start shifting that.\nSome other time I\u0026rsquo;ll talk about the development of a readership, I guess. For now, there are better things that I should be doing. I suspect for you as well.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/readership/","summary":"One of the other things that spending time with the family over the holidays has shown me--indeed what this year between schools in the city that I grew up in has shown me--is that my audience is pretty darn close.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had blog entries quoted back to me a lot in real life. Though my situation, or my worries, are not quite like ernie\u0026rsquo;s, I understand where he\u0026rsquo;s coming from.\nWhen I was using livejournal more consistently apart from tychoish.com, it often felt more like a sort of public message system. Kind of like the whiteboard on your dorm room door, except that people would actually read it without trudging through the snow.\nMy entire online existence has been in some ways a struggle with and against my readership, because a rather size-able portion of the people that I know IRL read my site. In the end that\u0026rsquo;s probably a good thing: I don\u0026rsquo;t have to repeat myself in emails constantly and I almost always think several times about where something is going to end up before I post it.","title":"readership"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t really have much to say tonight, though I\u0026rsquo;ve had crap running through my head all day. We spent much of the day in the car driving back from points westward. It was a good visit, of course, but as always it\u0026rsquo;s good to be back home again. I have things to do tomorrow, which include chores, errands, and of course re-establishing the routine. Which will involve work on this site. Of course. In the interim. Here are some thoughts:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;m knitting a boyfriend sock. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a pattern, so much as an intent. I\u0026rsquo;m obsessing about this rather than other projects that I feel more loyal to right now. This also provoked some thought about boyfriends in general, which I might write up at some point. Also, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that even though I\u0026rsquo;m, well, pretty damn reflexive on tychoish.com, I\u0026rsquo;m also pretty walled off, about non-abstract queer stuff. I\u0026rsquo;ll have to write about that as well. I recognize that this puts a lot of baggage into one woolen object, but then, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I\u0026rsquo;m a strong believer in the idea that baggage should be consolidated.\n2. I bought yarn and fiber and things. I never procure new things in this way. Including several (!) thousand yards of lace-weight. Oh dear.\n3. I\u0026rsquo;m reading/starting a story at the moment called \u0026ldquo;Who\u0026rsquo;s afraid of Wolf 359?\u0026rdquo; by Ken MacLeod. I\u0026rsquo;m so incredibly in love with this title. This will be short story number 4. Of the previous three, I really liked 2 and really wasn\u0026rsquo;t feeling the third. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty good numbers, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make me much of a short story person.\n4. My new \u0026ldquo;turkish tile\u0026rdquo; sweater is about 14 inches long. 1.5 repeats away from the underarm decision point. Which means, I\u0026rsquo;m really in pretty good shape on this one.\n5. The sleeve isolation has been stymied by a broken needle, though a replacement will be procured tomorrow. I\u0026rsquo;m building up something of a queue.\n6. I now have two sweaters in progress and yarn for a third. Other than these, I have plans for a few more. That\u0026rsquo;s good news.\n7. I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close to beginning to sketch out the revisions to the final draft of the Mars novella. If you still have a copy that you haven\u0026rsquo;t read or given me feedback on, at least touch base with me. And once I have some steam in the fiction department moving back to the novel will be a blast.\n8. If I owe you an email, and you haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten it by the end of work on Friday. Be concerned and email me again.\nSleep now! Bye! Onward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/home-again/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t really have much to say tonight, though I\u0026rsquo;ve had crap running through my head all day. We spent much of the day in the car driving back from points westward. It was a good visit, of course, but as always it\u0026rsquo;s good to be back home again. I have things to do tomorrow, which include chores, errands, and of course re-establishing the routine. Which will involve work on this site. Of course. In the interim. Here are some thoughts:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;m knitting a boyfriend sock. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a pattern, so much as an intent. I\u0026rsquo;m obsessing about this rather than other projects that I feel more loyal to right now. This also provoked some thought about boyfriends in general, which I might write up at some point. Also, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that even though I\u0026rsquo;m, well, pretty damn reflexive on tychoish.com, I\u0026rsquo;m also pretty walled off, about non-abstract queer stuff.","title":"home again"},{"content":"I hope you all have been having a happy holiday. I\u0026rsquo;d apologize for not posting yesterday or the day before, but I suspect that you all had more interesting things to do, and at any rate you\u0026rsquo;re probably pretty busy with other things, and even if you don\u0026rsquo;t there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of Internet out there, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure you weren\u0026rsquo;t too bored.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent my time doing a fair bit of knitting, a fairer bit of television writing, and some general puttering about. First up, the knitting news:\nThe needle that I was using to knit the sleeve on broke, which is a fairly common experience with Knit Picks needles. I generally don\u0026rsquo;t mind, because up until the point where the needles fail, they work great. ands KP is absolutely fabulous about replacing broken needles. End result, I\u0026rsquo;ve placed that sleeve on a holder and I\u0026rsquo;ll wait until I can drop by the shop and pick up a real needle. In the mean time I have turned my main knitting focus to the turkish sweater I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on. I\u0026rsquo;m still pre-armhole, but it grows reliably. I\u0026rsquo;ve also started a gray sock. Because I\u0026rsquo;m a boy, and I have the yarn for a pair (and probably then some) so I figure, it\u0026rsquo;s worthwhile. And socks great to have around as long term projects for the times when you need a little bit of time. Next up, writing. On Sunday or Monday, I tried to write a short story. I had the idea that it might be cool to write a story where the first aliens to make to earth were, by some fluke, not that much more advanced than us.\nAnd I failed. As I often do when I attempt to write short pieces. I even outlined the entire story and how I thought it would all play out.\nThis is ok, in the end. Fiction shorter than 10k isn\u0026rsquo;t really my scene to read anyway, even though I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten less violently opposed recently. When I get back home and can reestablish a routine (and a desk) I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty good for the writing thing.\nI had a little bit of a conference with my grandmother (whose read the novella) and she pointed out a few things that I need to work on for the novella. The good thing is that she pointed out the elements that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working and tweaking since I finished the book. So I think I\u0026rsquo;m on the right track. And there\u0026rsquo;s time to fix it.\nOn the plan for today: knitting and a trip to the yarn barn--a nationally renown yarn store that\u0026rsquo;s only about 40 minutes away from where we are. Part of my holiday gifts was handed to me with the stern instruction to be frivolous. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to. And knitting of course, and television watching on my computer.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/post-happy-merry/","summary":"I hope you all have been having a happy holiday. I\u0026rsquo;d apologize for not posting yesterday or the day before, but I suspect that you all had more interesting things to do, and at any rate you\u0026rsquo;re probably pretty busy with other things, and even if you don\u0026rsquo;t there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of Internet out there, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure you weren\u0026rsquo;t too bored.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent my time doing a fair bit of knitting, a fairer bit of television writing, and some general puttering about. First up, the knitting news:\nThe needle that I was using to knit the sleeve on broke, which is a fairly common experience with Knit Picks needles. I generally don\u0026rsquo;t mind, because up until the point where the needles fail, they work great. ands KP is absolutely fabulous about replacing broken needles. End result, I\u0026rsquo;ve placed that sleeve on a holder and I\u0026rsquo;ll wait until I can drop by the shop and pick up a real needle.","title":"post-happy merry"},{"content":"Well, I posted something to twitter last night when I got in, but I realized that I omitted to post something here. The drive went well, mostly uneventful save the last 20 minutes, or so where it was a little snow/sleety. I remember an eight plus hour trip with R. across Wisconsin with worse weather in the dark, so particularly in comparison it wasn\u0026rsquo;t an issue.\nI hear that there\u0026rsquo;s a digital camera on this trip, so I\u0026rsquo;ll try and take pictures of my works in progress at some point this week.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting the sleeve of the Morocco jacket, and I have 8 or so rounds done. It\u0026rsquo;s top down (the sleeve) so it\u0026rsquo;ll get much faster as it progresses.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t really touched the \u0026ldquo;turkish tile\u0026rdquo; sweater that I\u0026rsquo;d been working on for the last week, mostly because I realizedzed that I\u0026rsquo;m scheduled to give a brief talk about steeking on the third of January, so I want to have this sleeve done or mostly done by that time. It might be a little push. Worst comes to worse, I\u0026rsquo;ll break this yarn, put what I have of the sleeve on waist yarn and knit the second sleeve and then go back.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a delightful little exchange with the woman who I worked with on my knitting project last spring (a year ago!). I found that she\u0026rsquo;s read the site from time to time (how cool?) and that she\u0026rsquo;s developed a (healthy) fixation on the \u0026ldquo;Knit 1 Crochet 2 Soxx Appeal,\u0026rdquo; which is a merino yarn with nylon and an elastic binder. For socks, and quite reasonably priced. I find socks out of sock weight yarn to be a pretty unpleasant experience. Sweaters out of sock weight yarn: kinda amazing. This is one of those questions that I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I really want the answer to. So I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about getting some of this yarn to make a sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a rather curious interest in doing a cable sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it will happen this year, but I have pretty good access to Rowan Wool Cotton (and maybe this K1C2 yarn?), and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a huge queue of color work sweaters to knit, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nMy attempts to write haven\u0026rsquo;t been quite as successful as I might have liked this morning, but I think I got a little bit of planning work done. I think the best plan is to not expect to get too much done (because it is a vacation after all). On the upside I finished another short story (my second) in the The New Space Opera book. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. This means I\u0026rsquo;ve read the Nancy Kress and the James Patrick Kelly stories, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about the Peter F. Hamilton next for no particular reason--other than the fact that I want to get a little more background in the british space opera resurgence, but this particular story is about angels (eh) and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about trying something else. Because you know they\u0026rsquo;re short stories and I can do whatever I want.\nSo there. More later.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/arrival/","summary":"Well, I posted something to twitter last night when I got in, but I realized that I omitted to post something here. The drive went well, mostly uneventful save the last 20 minutes, or so where it was a little snow/sleety. I remember an eight plus hour trip with R. across Wisconsin with worse weather in the dark, so particularly in comparison it wasn\u0026rsquo;t an issue.\nI hear that there\u0026rsquo;s a digital camera on this trip, so I\u0026rsquo;ll try and take pictures of my works in progress at some point this week.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting the sleeve of the Morocco jacket, and I have 8 or so rounds done. It\u0026rsquo;s top down (the sleeve) so it\u0026rsquo;ll get much faster as it progresses.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t really touched the \u0026ldquo;turkish tile\u0026rdquo; sweater that I\u0026rsquo;d been working on for the last week, mostly because I realizedzed that I\u0026rsquo;m scheduled to give a brief talk about steeking on the third of January, so I want to have this sleeve done or mostly done by that time.","title":"Arrival"},{"content":"So about this social networking thing\u0026hellip;.\nActually I have no idea of how to lead into this conversation. I\u0026rsquo;ve had accounts with all the the social networking sites, if not from each of their very beginnings, then from pretty early on in their respective developments. Each site--friendster, orkut, myspace, facebook, virb--has a different crowd, and in it\u0026rsquo;s own way that\u0026rsquo;s kind of interesting, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never felt that using one site necessarily precludes using another one. But over the last little while, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about this whole social network thing, particularly in light of ravlery Here are some thoughts:\nPeople join and use the social networking sites that their friends use. College students use facebook. Hipsters, musicians, and high school students (at least in the US) are more likely to use myspace, for example. This is why features don\u0026rsquo;t matter, it\u0026rsquo;s all about the crowd, and the truth is that most of these sites look and behave more or less like the others, and the features converge. I think there are a couple kinds of social networking sites: the ones that center around a profile (facebook, myspace friendster) and those that center around an activity (twitter, ravlry, livejournal, vox, viddlr[sic?], etc.) The latter ends up being much more successfull in the long term, because these sites and communities work their way into peoples lives. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of interesting that people and companies have managed to capitalize on the social aspect of the Internet that always used to exist on Usenet and IRC, and also create a niche for the profile-based sites. Though interestingly, I think these profile based sites sort of fill the role that the \u0026ldquo;personal homepage,\u0026rdquo; used to fill. That is before people realized that personal home-pages were kind of lame. Social networking sites that are about collecting friends are doomed to fail, because collecting friends is boring, and because at some point, everyone realizes that their threshold for \u0026ldquo;adding\u0026rdquo; new people to their \u0026ldquo;friends\u0026rdquo; is so low that it turns out it\u0026rsquo;s kind of creepy and then we walk away and try and forget it. The less control a company/website gives over someone, the better people will feel about that site. Truth I think if you could access livejournal over gopher or a command-line/terminal it would be pretty awesome. But seriously think about it. Many people have started saying that facebook has jumped the shark when they gave users control over how their profiles looked. So that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on my mind. It\u0026rsquo;s interesting I\u0026rsquo;m pretty religious about checking ravelry (and LJ) these days, and while I still keep an eye on facebook, I\u0026rsquo;m not as into it as I used to be. I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to see how these things develop mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve pretty much given up trying to figure out what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen next.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/social-network/","summary":"So about this social networking thing\u0026hellip;.\nActually I have no idea of how to lead into this conversation. I\u0026rsquo;ve had accounts with all the the social networking sites, if not from each of their very beginnings, then from pretty early on in their respective developments. Each site--friendster, orkut, myspace, facebook, virb--has a different crowd, and in it\u0026rsquo;s own way that\u0026rsquo;s kind of interesting, and I\u0026rsquo;ve never felt that using one site necessarily precludes using another one. But over the last little while, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about this whole social network thing, particularly in light of ravlery Here are some thoughts:\nPeople join and use the social networking sites that their friends use. College students use facebook. Hipsters, musicians, and high school students (at least in the US) are more likely to use myspace, for example. This is why features don\u0026rsquo;t matter, it\u0026rsquo;s all about the crowd, and the truth is that most of these sites look and behave more or less like the others, and the features converge.","title":"Social Network"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m still basking in the glory of having finished my graduate applications in one fell swoop yesterday and today. We\u0026rsquo;re driving off to points westward in the morning. Very early in the morning. So early in the morning that I should have already gotten through a sleep cycle.\nRather than experience this accomplishment with a frenetic high, the release of stress over this, has made me sort of worn out and tired. I took a long nap this afternoon and I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty tired all evening, to the point that I\u0026rsquo;m not quite able to judge if I\u0026rsquo;d be tired enough to sleep. So I haven\u0026rsquo;t.\nBut don\u0026rsquo;t fear, I\u0026rsquo;ve already recused myself from the early driving shift if I need to, but I might not. And I want to be able to go to bed at like 9:30 or 10 tomorrow so that I can get up at like 5:00 and write the following morning.\nJust incase we get snowed in, I\u0026rsquo;ll have enough podcasts and audio on my ipod to last me for the next 4 months. I discovered that the last time I synced my ipod was before labor day (the last time we made the trip for points westward). And while I listened to a lot of content, I certainly didn\u0026rsquo;t empty my stash out. If that\u0026rsquo;s not enough, I\u0026rsquo;m also brining a hard drive with video content, mostly because I\u0026rsquo;m being indecisive about what I want to bring with me, and I\u0026rsquo;m uncharacteristically low on on-computer video content to watch.\nOther than the application wrap up and some errands (so: oil change, bank, post office) and the aforementioned nap, I didn\u0026rsquo;t get a lot done today, which I think is totally acceptable. I did go through and reorganize a lot of the files that I work from day in and day out, and I refrehsed my todo lists, which was much needed. I also spent some time to draw up a very basic site plan for the new TealArt Web site. I\u0026rsquo;m closer than I thought, I think, but I still need to have a sit down with amy about drupal but I don\u0026rsquo;t think things are that far off. Good news.\nWell have a good day, I\u0026rsquo;ll post more when I\u0026rsquo;m settled.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/late/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m still basking in the glory of having finished my graduate applications in one fell swoop yesterday and today. We\u0026rsquo;re driving off to points westward in the morning. Very early in the morning. So early in the morning that I should have already gotten through a sleep cycle.\nRather than experience this accomplishment with a frenetic high, the release of stress over this, has made me sort of worn out and tired. I took a long nap this afternoon and I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty tired all evening, to the point that I\u0026rsquo;m not quite able to judge if I\u0026rsquo;d be tired enough to sleep. So I haven\u0026rsquo;t.\nBut don\u0026rsquo;t fear, I\u0026rsquo;ve already recused myself from the early driving shift if I need to, but I might not. And I want to be able to go to bed at like 9:30 or 10 tomorrow so that I can get up at like 5:00 and write the following morning.","title":"late"},{"content":"In about ten minutes I\u0026rsquo;m going to run out to get the oil in my car changed. I\u0026rsquo;m only going to take my ipod and knitting and a book and a cup of tea. Zoe has another engagement, as I have her downloading what will probably amount to the next 4 months of pod-casting listening. Seems I haven\u0026rsquo;t synced my ipod since Labor day, the last time that I went west to visit family.\nWhen the oil in sparky the wonder saturn is changed, I\u0026rsquo;m going to mail off the last of my graduate school applications. They\u0026rsquo;re all done and sealed up.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m experiencing some delightful cognitive dissonance reduction, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty upbeat about this. I started the process feeling pretty good, and I had a bit of a slump in the middle, and by now I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty good with it. I\u0026rsquo;ve had some good interactions with a couple of faculty that I have a lot of respect for, and while it\u0026rsquo;s always a crap shoot, and what not, I feel like I have a pretty good shot at a few of the schools I\u0026rsquo;ve applied to. Late February and early March is when I\u0026rsquo;ll start to hear.\nUntil then there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot that I can do. I have a research project that I will be working on in Janurary. I\u0026rsquo;m going to read more fiction, because it\u0026rsquo;s good for me. I\u0026rsquo;m going to write fiction as best I can for the next six weeks. Latter will happen later.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also come to realize that until I have a good idea of what kind of pages and presentations of data that I need to have, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to be able to make any real progress on the TealArt setup. Everything set except for the content and the plan, which is a good place to be in for this project, so maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll take a notebook with me and see what kind of planning I can get done while I\u0026rsquo;m out.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-the-first-day/","summary":"In about ten minutes I\u0026rsquo;m going to run out to get the oil in my car changed. I\u0026rsquo;m only going to take my ipod and knitting and a book and a cup of tea. Zoe has another engagement, as I have her downloading what will probably amount to the next 4 months of pod-casting listening. Seems I haven\u0026rsquo;t synced my ipod since Labor day, the last time that I went west to visit family.\nWhen the oil in sparky the wonder saturn is changed, I\u0026rsquo;m going to mail off the last of my graduate school applications. They\u0026rsquo;re all done and sealed up.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m experiencing some delightful cognitive dissonance reduction, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty upbeat about this. I started the process feeling pretty good, and I had a bit of a slump in the middle, and by now I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty good with it. I\u0026rsquo;ve had some good interactions with a couple of faculty that I have a lot of respect for, and while it\u0026rsquo;s always a crap shoot, and what not, I feel like I have a pretty good shot at a few of the schools I\u0026rsquo;ve applied to.","title":"On The First Day"},{"content":" Books Yarn Fountain Pens TextMate Ibprophen Note: This is reader participation day. I supply the five things, and you have to figure out what the list is.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-things-that-__________/","summary":"Books Yarn Fountain Pens TextMate Ibprophen Note: This is reader participation day. I supply the five things, and you have to figure out what the list is.","title":"5 Things that __________"},{"content":"Sorry that I\u0026rsquo;m low on creativity this morning.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve submitted two applications today, to IvySchool and SouthernPrivateResearchSchool, and I\u0026rsquo;m prep-ed to fill out the forms for the third and final (FormerGloryNorthesternSchool). I\u0026rsquo;m going to pick up some USPS mailer things on my way to work in a few, and get things sent out tomorrow morning/afternoon. Everything is in order and all that\u0026rsquo;s left is a bunch of busy work left to do. That\u0026rsquo;s not unimportant, and it\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of time, but I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to returning to human status again. Quite Happy.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to be working in the shop again today, so if you\u0026rsquo;re around, stop by. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be cutting a steek (ie, cut an armhole where previously there was none) on demand tonight, probably at about 6/6:15pm CST.\nIn the mean time, read this by Jared Axelrod, it looked cool when I clicked the link, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten around to reading it, but I hope to.\nHave a great day!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/status-report/","summary":"Sorry that I\u0026rsquo;m low on creativity this morning.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve submitted two applications today, to IvySchool and SouthernPrivateResearchSchool, and I\u0026rsquo;m prep-ed to fill out the forms for the third and final (FormerGloryNorthesternSchool). I\u0026rsquo;m going to pick up some USPS mailer things on my way to work in a few, and get things sent out tomorrow morning/afternoon. Everything is in order and all that\u0026rsquo;s left is a bunch of busy work left to do. That\u0026rsquo;s not unimportant, and it\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of time, but I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to returning to human status again. Quite Happy.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to be working in the shop again today, so if you\u0026rsquo;re around, stop by. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be cutting a steek (ie, cut an armhole where previously there was none) on demand tonight, probably at about 6/6:15pm CST.\nIn the mean time, read this by Jared Axelrod, it looked cool when I clicked the link, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten around to reading it, but I hope to.","title":"Status Report"},{"content":"I was talking to an old friend the other day about astronomy and stars and what not. He\u0026rsquo;s become interested in visual astronomy, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some reading about near earth astronomical phenomena for the fiction I\u0026rsquo;m writing.\nRecently I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I do a fair amount of my outlining and brainstorming in instant message windows. I suppose whatever works, but it is a bit odd. Sorry to all of my bored friends out there.\nAnyway, so I was talking about why the hell I decided to spend time looking at information about nearby stars, particularly, you know when you\u0026rsquo;re writing vaguely space-opera-ish stuff, and I realized that it was all about hyperspace.\nMostly that I don\u0026rsquo;t like the concept.\nIt seems that there should be some cost on traveling between great distances. Otherwise, from a story perspective it\u0026rsquo;s all one place. If you can get between one planet and another in a few hours, or even a day or two, and its reasonably economical, then is there a lot of difference between going to Epsilon Eridani (or something further) and Kansas?\nNot so much.\nAnd if that\u0026rsquo;s the case, it has all sorts of implications about population sizes, cultural transmission, and the like. Mostly that it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t change things all that much. If going to EE is like going to Kansas, then in our minds it might not be very much different than going to Kansas in our own minds, and thats, well boring (Nothing wrong with going to Kansas, and I will be in a week, nevertheless\u0026hellip;)\nSo for instance in Station Keeping, there has to be faster than light travel, but there are still relativistic effects. People spend lots of objective time traveling from place to place. Going out to the area of space that Hanm is in, if they\u0026rsquo;re from the core, basically means leaving everything behind. SK is the closest I get, but I really do think that putting some sort of narrative cost for all the wizz-bang of SF is a no-brainer. Circle Games, the precursor to the novella I\u0026rsquo;m finishing the edits on now (and some other future projects) had FTL, but that was the least of it\u0026rsquo;s problems. Eh.\nAnyway, omitting FTL has of scores of implications for population dynamics and cultural transmission, but it\u0026rsquo;s fairly clean cut. Without hypers-pace, I\u0026rsquo;m also dealing with social and emotional experiences that are very historically relevant, but not contemporarily (I\u0026rsquo;m playing with emigration as a sort of general theme in the novel). And not having hyperspace makes this much, much, easier, and frankly pretty cool.\nSo yes\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hyperspace/","summary":"I was talking to an old friend the other day about astronomy and stars and what not. He\u0026rsquo;s become interested in visual astronomy, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some reading about near earth astronomical phenomena for the fiction I\u0026rsquo;m writing.\nRecently I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I do a fair amount of my outlining and brainstorming in instant message windows. I suppose whatever works, but it is a bit odd. Sorry to all of my bored friends out there.\nAnyway, so I was talking about why the hell I decided to spend time looking at information about nearby stars, particularly, you know when you\u0026rsquo;re writing vaguely space-opera-ish stuff, and I realized that it was all about hyperspace.\nMostly that I don\u0026rsquo;t like the concept.\nIt seems that there should be some cost on traveling between great distances. Otherwise, from a story perspective it\u0026rsquo;s all one place. If you can get between one planet and another in a few hours, or even a day or two, and its reasonably economical, then is there a lot of difference between going to Epsilon Eridani (or something further) and Kansas?","title":"Hyperspace"},{"content":"I guess this is in the larger theme of posts about my blogging process, identity, and purpose.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s a Wednesday morning before christmas without a little bit of healthy existential angst?\nThough the merging of my old TealArt posts into tychoish muddies the water a bit, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to pass an important marker in my blogging soon.\nSometime later this week I\u0026rsquo;m going to pass the 900 post marker. Having 600ish of my TealArt posts helps this, but it\u0026rsquo;s noteworthy to point out that I\u0026rsquo;ve posted so much to tychoish in a bit less than 6 months. One of my big struggles with TealArt was finding the time and energy to post. Now I can hardly live without it. That\u0026rsquo;s the Journaling Instinct, I guess.\nI wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have posted about this except that I\u0026rsquo;m closing in on another milestone as well, and I figure, what the hell. What\u0026rsquo;s another odometer effect?1\nSometime a bit after post 900 (I guess a week or two but that\u0026rsquo;s just a guess), my weblog writings of the past 7 years will past the 300,000 word mark. Egads. I always was a bit wordy. And the funny thing is that there\u0026rsquo;s another year or two of data that was lost\u0026hellip;\nOne thing that dave and I have been talking about is how to jump levels in terms of another kind of milestone about readership.\nOne thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty conscious about with tychoish is regular posting. If I want to make a go of this, I figured, posting often is the key to making that work. If there\u0026rsquo;s never new content, who\u0026rsquo;s going to come back? It\u0026rsquo;s not like I don\u0026rsquo;t have things to say, it\u0026rsquo;s just a matter of getting it out there.\nOne thing that I\u0026rsquo;m seeing is that regular posting will get you to the top of your class, and allow you to make the most of what you already have, but if you want to jump levels you have to do something else. What that something else is, might be another issue.\nProbbly the best thing is to be on the cutting edge. If you\u0026rsquo;re the 1st whatever, it\u0026rsquo;s easier to make it than if you\u0026rsquo;re the 20th. But assuming for a moment that we don\u0026rsquo;t have time machines or ESP\u0026hellip;\nPart of it is having friends. Getting links from other blogs, even smaller ones drives traffic, and user participation (I guess to backtrack for a moment, I\u0026rsquo;m measuring blogging success as a function of comments and traffic). Another part is participating in forums and other blog comments which can help a lot. There has to be a strategy out there for choosing the right places to participate and get involved--from a game theory/social dynamics perspective--too big and no one will click on outbound links, to small and no one will see it. For instance, my inbound traffic from ravelry, has gone down slightly has ravelry has grown. I\u0026rsquo;m still loving raverly, mind you, but I think this is just how the world works.\nThe other strategy is to work on additional projects. For a while, because there were so few podcasts, doing a regular podcast would drive a lot of attention to your work, but in this vein collaborative blogs, guest blogging, twittering, youtube contributions (and so forth) are all ways that you can sort of draw attention to your blog, but aren\u0026rsquo;t connected to y our blog, I guess, if that makes sense.\nThis whole marketing thing is clearly not my thing, but I think I get the concepts on a pretty basic level, so it\u0026rsquo;s sort of fun to play with the ideas. And of course, I do want tychoish to make it. Even if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t it\u0026rsquo;s still a great deal of fun, so it\u0026rsquo;s not like I\u0026rsquo;m going to stop\u0026hellip; but, it\u0026rsquo;s worth a shot.\nOnward and Upward!\na milestone created not by some sort of intrinsic or important quality of a number, but the fact that all of the digits change.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/milestones/","summary":"I guess this is in the larger theme of posts about my blogging process, identity, and purpose.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s a Wednesday morning before christmas without a little bit of healthy existential angst?\nThough the merging of my old TealArt posts into tychoish muddies the water a bit, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to pass an important marker in my blogging soon.\nSometime later this week I\u0026rsquo;m going to pass the 900 post marker. Having 600ish of my TealArt posts helps this, but it\u0026rsquo;s noteworthy to point out that I\u0026rsquo;ve posted so much to tychoish in a bit less than 6 months. One of my big struggles with TealArt was finding the time and energy to post. Now I can hardly live without it. That\u0026rsquo;s the Journaling Instinct, I guess.\nI wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have posted about this except that I\u0026rsquo;m closing in on another milestone as well, and I figure, what the hell. What\u0026rsquo;s another odometer effect?","title":"Milestones"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about the subject of pseudonyms before here and my recent discussions with dave about blogging these days have sort of brought this subject up again. So here we are.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always thought that the idea of pen names, which I suppose is really want I\u0026rsquo;m talking about here, are pretty cool. Because of the way that draw attention to the role of the writer without necessarily drawing attention to a particular writer. As a scholar (to be) of identity production and development, I think the use pseudonyms is particularly fascinating: even if it would be difficult to envision a formal research project (in the empirical sense) that would look at pseudonyms.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also long enjoyed the Internet custom of using handles and nicknames to operate under. This is something that I think a bunch of early cyberpunk picked up on, and something that was true on the real Internet, at least for a while. People still use handles, but they\u0026rsquo;re less like a mask and more like a badge. As far as I can see; context matters, of course.\nFor a long time I was big on using my \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; name online for TealArt and for other projects. It\u0026rsquo;s a unique enough name and I had/have little to hide, so it seemed like a good idea. More recently I\u0026rsquo;ve become a little bit more concerned about controlling what turns up on google under my name. At this point, in the first ten, I only have one link, (at number 4) and it\u0026rsquo;s old enough that it won\u0026rsquo;t reflect poorly on me in the future. It\u0026rsquo;s old enough that in six to ten years when it really matters, people might not even think to connect me with that link.\nAnd so for these reasons I am using and continue to use a pseudonym. Also, my academic projects and my internet/fiction writing projects are pretty separate, at least in my mind. I mean that\u0026rsquo;s not true, the reason I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to get back into fiction writing is because I can draw on social science stuff on a conceptual level, but being successful as a blogger/sf writer and being successful as a social scientist, and quite possibly the former could impede on the later. As I get further into both the bogging project and the fiction writing, the more it seems to make sense that sort of stick to a pseudonym.\nChanging names is hard, particularly, when in a very real sense \u0026ldquo;marketing\u0026rdquo; is an issue, which is compounded by my additional project of a layer of anonymity. I mean choosing a pen name also draws attention to that (as this draws attention to), but I think that\u0026rsquo;s kind of cool.\nAnyway. tycho garen it is.\nSee y\u0026rsquo;all around.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pseudonym/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about the subject of pseudonyms before here and my recent discussions with dave about blogging these days have sort of brought this subject up again. So here we are.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always thought that the idea of pen names, which I suppose is really want I\u0026rsquo;m talking about here, are pretty cool. Because of the way that draw attention to the role of the writer without necessarily drawing attention to a particular writer. As a scholar (to be) of identity production and development, I think the use pseudonyms is particularly fascinating: even if it would be difficult to envision a formal research project (in the empirical sense) that would look at pseudonyms.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also long enjoyed the Internet custom of using handles and nicknames to operate under. This is something that I think a bunch of early cyberpunk picked up on, and something that was true on the real Internet, at least for a while.","title":"Pseudonym"},{"content":"My offer to steek one of the armholes of the Morocco jacket on demand while I\u0026rsquo;m at the shop remains open. If you\u0026rsquo;re local, I\u0026rsquo;ll be in the shop today, tomorrow and Thursday. Write me if you have a preference about when you\u0026rsquo;d like me to do it. Otherwise, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking Thursday evening.\nIn the mean time my Turkish Tile sweater, is is progressing with great pleasure. It\u0026rsquo;s such an engaging knit, and I\u0026rsquo;ve just hit what\u0026rsquo;s usually the black-hole period of the sweater, and I\u0026rsquo;m still entranced. It\u0026rsquo;s now about 8 inches long. I figure I\u0026rsquo;m not quite half way to the underarm, because I have a lot (a lot of yarn, and I want a jacket/coat).\nI know it\u0026rsquo;s a ways off but I\u0026rsquo;m still debating about how to do the sleeves/shoulders. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about now:\n1. Kangaroo pouch: set sleeves in to shoulder width at underarms, and decrease the \u0026ldquo;half gusset\u0026rdquo; very fast on the sleeves. No sleeve cap shaping 2. Kangaroo pouch modified: set in sleeves half way to shoulder width, and decrease to shoulder width over the next 2 or so inches (this is more traditional way of setting in sleeves). Decrease the half gusset more slowly. Again, no cap shaping. 3. Do it as a yoke sweater Elizabeth Zimmerman style, likely with sleeve caps/set in sleeves. This will require knitting the sleeves in the direction I don\u0026rsquo;t want to knit them (bottom up) and is much harder judge for course corrections while it\u0026rsquo;s in progress.\nThoughts?\nIn other knitting news: I\u0026rsquo;ve not started knitting a manly Ice Queen Knitty yet, though I very much want to. I\u0026rsquo;m not really making socks or anything else yet. I have been working tirelessly on the new TealArt Web site, mostly so I have a platform for distributing knitting patterns and organizing knitalongs.\nOnward and Upward!\nUpdate on 18 December 2007 at 11:17am CST: I just discovered that I\u0026rsquo;ve knitted the last several rows of this sweater on US size 3 needles rather than the typical 2.5. We\u0026rsquo;re talking a diameter difference of .25 mm, and I can\u0026rsquo;t yet tell if it\u0026rsquo;s an observable difference or not. Grr. Feel kind of dumb. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted on this.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tiles/","summary":"My offer to steek one of the armholes of the Morocco jacket on demand while I\u0026rsquo;m at the shop remains open. If you\u0026rsquo;re local, I\u0026rsquo;ll be in the shop today, tomorrow and Thursday. Write me if you have a preference about when you\u0026rsquo;d like me to do it. Otherwise, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking Thursday evening.\nIn the mean time my Turkish Tile sweater, is is progressing with great pleasure. It\u0026rsquo;s such an engaging knit, and I\u0026rsquo;ve just hit what\u0026rsquo;s usually the black-hole period of the sweater, and I\u0026rsquo;m still entranced. It\u0026rsquo;s now about 8 inches long. I figure I\u0026rsquo;m not quite half way to the underarm, because I have a lot (a lot of yarn, and I want a jacket/coat).\nI know it\u0026rsquo;s a ways off but I\u0026rsquo;m still debating about how to do the sleeves/shoulders. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about now:\n1. Kangaroo pouch: set sleeves in to shoulder width at underarms, and decrease the \u0026ldquo;half gusset\u0026rdquo; very fast on the sleeves.","title":"Tiles"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m of two minds about email which should be a surprise to absolutely none of you.\nOn the one hand, I love it. It\u0026rsquo;s great to be able to shot off quick notes and information to people without having to bother around with post offices, telephones, IM or some-such. It\u0026rsquo;s also great that in most cases email gives you leeway on response time so that you can decide how to prioritize your actions. Good plan, right? Right. I mean that leeway is often the rope we use to hang ourselves, but ignoring that for a moment, it\u0026rsquo;s good conceptually.\nOn the other hand, bleh. Right? I mean I have a couple of emails to write out today, that\u0026rsquo;s like my main task for today, and by god I don\u0026rsquo;t want to. There\u0026rsquo;s really nothing more stressful and really, frankly, emotionally draining than writing emails to prospective advisors for graduate school. Gah!\nIn other non-related news, it looks like the big gay college student conference (that\u0026rsquo;s unfortunately not the real colloquial term for that gathering,) is going to be in FlatCollegeTown at the end of February.\n/me ponders trip Have I mentioned recently that I really hate writing emails to prospective advisors?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hate-email/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m of two minds about email which should be a surprise to absolutely none of you.\nOn the one hand, I love it. It\u0026rsquo;s great to be able to shot off quick notes and information to people without having to bother around with post offices, telephones, IM or some-such. It\u0026rsquo;s also great that in most cases email gives you leeway on response time so that you can decide how to prioritize your actions. Good plan, right? Right. I mean that leeway is often the rope we use to hang ourselves, but ignoring that for a moment, it\u0026rsquo;s good conceptually.\nOn the other hand, bleh. Right? I mean I have a couple of emails to write out today, that\u0026rsquo;s like my main task for today, and by god I don\u0026rsquo;t want to. There\u0026rsquo;s really nothing more stressful and really, frankly, emotionally draining than writing emails to prospective advisors for graduate school. Gah!","title":"Hate Email"},{"content":"I have to say that the whole \u0026ldquo;podcasting thing\u0026rdquo; is something that I quite enjoy. I\u0026rsquo;ve done radio--for years in high school, and occasionally still--and while I worked with a loosey-goosey community/public access station, it\u0026rsquo;s something that had been a big part of me. It\u0026rsquo;s weird working in the yarn store, people I\u0026rsquo;ve never met recognize my voice from time to time, and I\u0026rsquo;m not used to that at all. And so at the very beginning, when I heard about podcasting, I thought, \u0026ldquo;yeah, I\u0026rsquo;ll take a pass. I mean, It\u0026rsquo;s a cool new technology, but sorting out the copyright rules independently for music, and then you have to edit, and gah--\u0026rdquo; so I\u0026rsquo;d never really thought about doing one myself.\nBut I think part of my problem is that with one brief exception, I\u0026rsquo;ve always done live radio, the thought of having to do serious audio editing kinda freaks me out. And I think there lies part of the problem. While the notion of podcasting sounds pretty cool, I\u0026rsquo;ve for too long thought about it too much like radio and not enough of it in it\u0026rsquo;s own regard. Thinking of podcasts as something more than just radio shows on the Internet, or as something that has the possibility of being more than just the Internet, is something that has been pretty helpful to me.\nPart of the TealArt redesign effort, which I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing more about in the coming days/weeks, is to support a possible podcast that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about doing for a while now. It\u0026rsquo;s still a ways off, but it\u0026rsquo;s something that I\u0026rsquo;d like to think about. But this is a post about podcasts I listen to, or at least it was supposed to be.\nThe thing is, I have a really big problem listening to podcasts when I\u0026rsquo;m doing something that involves text, and really I\u0026rsquo;ve pretty much always been this way. I listen to music constantly, but if I\u0026rsquo;m trying to read something more than a few sentences or write a like amount, and there\u0026rsquo;s television or radio or some-such, and I pretty much can\u0026rsquo;t do it.\nWhich means I listen to podcasts when I\u0026rsquo;m driving, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it. It also means that I want to listen to a lot of podcasts than I actually do. A little secret: I\u0026rsquo;ve not synched my ipod since the end of august. And I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to a bunch of them, and I\u0026rsquo;m still not out. I\u0026rsquo;ll sync up again this week, because I have a road trip at the end of the week.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the podcasts that come up near the top of my queue with a lot of frequency.\n2. Cast-On Podcast for Knitters - Brenda does an amazing podcast, frankly radio quality and then some, and while it tends to get metaphysical a tad more than I would under similar circumstances, it works great, and it\u0026rsquo;s a lot of fun. 3. Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s Craphound podcast - I think if I did a podcast, it\u0026rsquo;d be a lot like Cory\u0026rsquo;s, with a little bit of the Boing Boing Boing Podcast thrown in for good measure. Anyway, I like how the podcast is basically Cory and a microphone and various recorded things he\u0026rsquo;s done. Stories he\u0026rsquo;s working on, panels and lectures that he\u0026rsquo;s given, books and papers that he finds interesting, and so forth. Great stuff. 4. Jared Axelrod\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Voice of Free Planet X\u0026rdquo; This is an ironic one, that I absolutely love to death, and I can\u0026rsquo;t explain it. I don\u0026rsquo;t really enjoy short short fiction, and yet the fiction on VFPX is great. I\u0026rsquo;m not big into alt/indi music, but somehow the music is amazing. And while I really like Jared\u0026rsquo;s commentaries and updates, we\u0026rsquo;re definitely very different kinds of geeks. And yet, it works out in this amazing sort of way, and I think you should all go subscribe. 5. Prometheus Radio Theatre - Great radio drama science fiction stuff. I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan. Actually Scott of PRT reads this blog, --waves-- I think I\u0026rsquo;m basically caught up as far as the ones I have on my ipod at the moment, but I know there are more waiting for me. 6. Escape Pod I think it\u0026rsquo;s really cool that a podcast that\u0026rsquo;s only a bit more than two years old has one of the highest distributions of science fiction magazines. Period. Again, I\u0026rsquo;m not a huge short fiction fan, but I like hearing stories read to me way more than I seem to like reading them myself. 7. I should be Writing I really like Mur\u0026rsquo;s work and ISBW is good stuff. While I think it\u0026rsquo;s clearly possible to OD on writerly advice, and even though I\u0026rsquo;m young, and even though I\u0026rsquo;m really not that accomplished between the writing list and my own travels, I\u0026rsquo;m not feeling like I\u0026rsquo;ve missed a lot of the things Mur talks about, it\u0026rsquo;s good to hear it from time to time. 8. Lime and Violet Yep. Great stuff. Not to be missed. Again an ironic one because I\u0026rsquo;m not much of a sock knitter, and don\u0026rsquo;t really buy yarn recreationally, but they\u0026rsquo;re fun. 9. TWiT podcasts - Not going to lie, I like the TWiT stuff, many of it anyway. I think the roundtable format is pretty cool for podcasts and it lets me connect to a geek element that I frankly have a hard time reading in text. And they sound good and they\u0026rsquo;re interesting.\nThere are others, of course, but I think that should be enough for now.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/podcasts/","summary":"I have to say that the whole \u0026ldquo;podcasting thing\u0026rdquo; is something that I quite enjoy. I\u0026rsquo;ve done radio--for years in high school, and occasionally still--and while I worked with a loosey-goosey community/public access station, it\u0026rsquo;s something that had been a big part of me. It\u0026rsquo;s weird working in the yarn store, people I\u0026rsquo;ve never met recognize my voice from time to time, and I\u0026rsquo;m not used to that at all. And so at the very beginning, when I heard about podcasting, I thought, \u0026ldquo;yeah, I\u0026rsquo;ll take a pass. I mean, It\u0026rsquo;s a cool new technology, but sorting out the copyright rules independently for music, and then you have to edit, and gah--\u0026rdquo; so I\u0026rsquo;d never really thought about doing one myself.\nBut I think part of my problem is that with one brief exception, I\u0026rsquo;ve always done live radio, the thought of having to do serious audio editing kinda freaks me out.","title":"Podcasts"},{"content":"Hey folks I\u0026rsquo;m writing this entry actually sitting at my desk because I\u0026rsquo;m offloading about 35 gigs of crap onto my external storage. Which means I have to be connected by a cord. So I\u0026rsquo;m not sitting here with my feet on the desk and the computer on my lap. How lame is that?\nI think some days that I really just need to suck it up and buy an external/wireless keyboard. Non really inspire me, and I\u0026rsquo;m so incredibly used to laptop keyboards, that other keyboards feel awkward. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of actually getting one of the new apple keyboards, but I can\u0026rsquo;t quite stomach that either.\nI found a ruler and measured the new knitting project. I need to take a preliminary picture, but it\u0026rsquo;s 5 inches long now! And I only started on it Thursday night! It\u0026rsquo;s knit with slightly bulkier yarn than my last sweater. By comparison, this one has 335 stitches total; the last one has, nearly 400. Same needles.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m zipping along on it. I figure another week or two till the underarms, if I force myself to keep a moderate pace, and work on nothing else. The former will probably happen, but the later almost certainly wont\nI\u0026rsquo;d get started on the sleeves but I\u0026rsquo;ve promised to cut steeks on jacket as a sort of performance art thing at the shop. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in seeing a steek cut in person and you\u0026rsquo;re in St. Louis, drop me a line, or leave a comment and we\u0026rsquo;ll make a to do of it. The sleeves should go fast. The armholes are huge (it being a jacket and thus needing to fit over other things), so I can safely decrease two stitches every 3 rounds the whole way without worrying about anything. The pattern is also pretty straight forward. I look forward to being done with this project, but I\u0026rsquo;m not as close as I could be and there\u0026rsquo;s no particular reason to rush this.\nAlso, my mother made Ice Queen last week, and I really like the object. A cowl/hood/hat/wimple thing, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking for a way to sort of. ahem butch it up. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking if I do less conspicuous increases to get rid of the lace, and use a heavier yarn (like sock yarn,) and avoid the picot edges, it might be worth a go. It\u0026rsquo;s a quick little thing, and it might take a couple of tries, but there\u0026rsquo;s possibilities: I just have to fiddle.\nAnyway, the copying is done and I have hard drive space again, so I\u0026rsquo;m off to try and be more productive.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/brain-spaz-and-fiber/","summary":"Hey folks I\u0026rsquo;m writing this entry actually sitting at my desk because I\u0026rsquo;m offloading about 35 gigs of crap onto my external storage. Which means I have to be connected by a cord. So I\u0026rsquo;m not sitting here with my feet on the desk and the computer on my lap. How lame is that?\nI think some days that I really just need to suck it up and buy an external/wireless keyboard. Non really inspire me, and I\u0026rsquo;m so incredibly used to laptop keyboards, that other keyboards feel awkward. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of actually getting one of the new apple keyboards, but I can\u0026rsquo;t quite stomach that either.\nI found a ruler and measured the new knitting project. I need to take a preliminary picture, but it\u0026rsquo;s 5 inches long now! And I only started on it Thursday night! It\u0026rsquo;s knit with slightly bulkier yarn than my last sweater. By comparison, this one has 335 stitches total; the last one has, nearly 400.","title":"Brain Spaz and Fiber"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m wearing this sweater today, and I have to say that even though it\u0026rsquo;s a bit too big for me (both in shoulder length and in general dimensions), I really enjoy wearing it.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something about theses shetland sweaters that really can\u0026rsquo;t be topped. I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan. I think everyone should spend some time knitting with shetland. If my yarn store experience means anything, shetland is a hard sell. It\u0026rsquo;s not cheap, it\u0026rsquo;s not snazzy, it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly soft. But it\u0026rsquo;s really amazing, and the sweaters are so much fun to wear and to knit.\nParticularly in contrast to this other yarn that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting with. Speaking of the Morocco sweater: I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to the collar. Which is shaped, not at all in the shape that I intended for the collar to be shaped in, but it\u0026rsquo;s not unacceptable. I have to knit the collar, and put it on a holder before I move on to the sleeves. Since it now looks almost like a sweater, I\u0026rsquo;ll get a picture of it up sometime.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve started knitting a grey on grey sweater. Initially I said light and dark grey, but I think the colors are more like, charcoal and off white. So it\u0026rsquo;s lighter than I expected, so I\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of quick changing to the pattern to put a few more of the darker stitches in the repeat, but it\u0026rsquo;s fun to knit with the yarn again. And it\u0026rsquo;s going fast. In only a couple of hours of knitting time I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten like 12 rounds done. Not bad I say. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a jacket.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been in a jacket kick of late. The next sweater I have in the cue is going to be a pullover with a little v-neck, because I think it\u0026rsquo;s about time I did one of these sweaters. I\u0026rsquo;m knitting it with Louet Gems Merino. It\u0026rsquo;s a super-wash wool, and I\u0026rsquo;ve made a sweater out of this that I quite enjoy. I even ordered the yarn today, so that\u0026rsquo;ll be fun.\nOk, that\u0026rsquo;s all the knitting news I have. There\u0026rsquo;s work to be done, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I haven\u0026rsquo;t had better content here for you all recently. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking, so something good has to filter to the top soon. Right?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/turkish-knits/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m wearing this sweater today, and I have to say that even though it\u0026rsquo;s a bit too big for me (both in shoulder length and in general dimensions), I really enjoy wearing it.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something about theses shetland sweaters that really can\u0026rsquo;t be topped. I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan. I think everyone should spend some time knitting with shetland. If my yarn store experience means anything, shetland is a hard sell. It\u0026rsquo;s not cheap, it\u0026rsquo;s not snazzy, it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly soft. But it\u0026rsquo;s really amazing, and the sweaters are so much fun to wear and to knit.\nParticularly in contrast to this other yarn that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting with. Speaking of the Morocco sweater: I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to the collar. Which is shaped, not at all in the shape that I intended for the collar to be shaped in, but it\u0026rsquo;s not unacceptable. I have to knit the collar, and put it on a holder before I move on to the sleeves.","title":"Turkish Knits"},{"content":" Your Gmail inbox. Your recent Amazon purchases. Your currently running software applications. Your Xenga \u0026ldquo;blog.\u0026rdquo; Your Facebook Mini-Feed ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-things-you-dont-need-available-as-an-rss-feed/","summary":" Your Gmail inbox. Your recent Amazon purchases. Your currently running software applications. Your Xenga \u0026ldquo;blog.\u0026rdquo; Your Facebook Mini-Feed ","title":"5 Things you don't need available as an RSS feed"},{"content":"I feel really bad using this title on a post about knitting, rather than something academic (either in Gloria Anzaldúa\u0026rsquo;s sense; or in an Eriksonian inspired developmental sense.) But it is what it is.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on the home stretch of the Morocco sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be done with the knitting sometime today. I think it\u0026rsquo;s going well, I\u0026rsquo;m a bit worried that the neck is a bit long, but it\u0026rsquo;s a jacket, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that the neck will be too wide, so it should all be fine. I\u0026rsquo;m real close though. That\u0026rsquo;s exciting.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on getting set up for the next sweater and have the provisional cast on all set up and I\u0026rsquo;m going to get started in earnest in the next few days. I think it\u0026rsquo;s good to have the body of a sweater at least started when you\u0026rsquo;re working on the sleeves and collar and hem of another sweater. It prevents the nasty problem of \u0026ldquo;running out of knitting,\u0026rdquo; and also only having complicated knitting that requires tools, complexity, concentration.\nOther than that, work in the yarn store to do, and some paper writing, and not a lot else going on. I\u0026rsquo;m hoping that I can close out these applications pretty quickly next week. I think my sequence on this project is:\nWrite professors at two Northeastern Universities. Have GRE scores sent to one school. Fill out and complete application for Southern School, while waiting for response from the two professors. (Including my zipper paragraph for this school). Write zipper paragraph, and finish application for larger Northeastern School. Write zipper paragraph and finish appliaction for smaller more urban Northeastern School. Then I\u0026rsquo;ll be done, and I have a couple of weeks to get it all done, but I would of course like to get it all handled and done with speed so I can concentrate on things like:\nworking on the new tealart. writing on the novel. Well that\u0026rsquo;s all for now.\nOnward and Upward\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/borderlands/","summary":"I feel really bad using this title on a post about knitting, rather than something academic (either in Gloria Anzaldúa\u0026rsquo;s sense; or in an Eriksonian inspired developmental sense.) But it is what it is.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on the home stretch of the Morocco sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be done with the knitting sometime today. I think it\u0026rsquo;s going well, I\u0026rsquo;m a bit worried that the neck is a bit long, but it\u0026rsquo;s a jacket, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that the neck will be too wide, so it should all be fine. I\u0026rsquo;m real close though. That\u0026rsquo;s exciting.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working on getting set up for the next sweater and have the provisional cast on all set up and I\u0026rsquo;m going to get started in earnest in the next few days. I think it\u0026rsquo;s good to have the body of a sweater at least started when you\u0026rsquo;re working on the sleeves and collar and hem of another sweater.","title":"Borderlands"},{"content":"As you might know, for a good deal of my college career I was (one of) the ringleader(s) for our campus queer organization (indeed, between the queer group and the feminist co-op, there was only one semester where I wasn\u0026rsquo;t over involved.)\nAnyway, the queer group always had an end of semester bash called wine and cheese. Frankly I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how we got away with it, I think technically because it was always early in the evening and we had an invite list, rather than just opening the door, everyone just let it be. Anyway. So we had an invite list that we always generated before the party. It was made up of:\nPeople who participated in our events. Our friends who we wanted to party with. Professors and advisors who weren\u0026rsquo;t associated with the student-life folks (and thus wouldn\u0026rsquo;t report us.) Other clubs (like the feminist co-op) that we wanted to support alliances between. Queers in the community, who might not have come to our events but were at least tangentially supportive, that we wanted to reciprocate the support. People who had previously been part of our little ring-leading group. People we had crushes on/people we thought might be queer. Note that categories 5 and 7 had very little overlap, indeed category 6 had little overlap with any other category.\nI dunno, but that strikes me as being pretty darn funny, particularly in retrospect.\nBy the end of my time at AlmaMater I was pretty happy to be done, and I was more than ready to be done with the ring leading of the queer group. But now, I kinda miss that party, as odd as it always was.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/crushes/","summary":"As you might know, for a good deal of my college career I was (one of) the ringleader(s) for our campus queer organization (indeed, between the queer group and the feminist co-op, there was only one semester where I wasn\u0026rsquo;t over involved.)\nAnyway, the queer group always had an end of semester bash called wine and cheese. Frankly I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how we got away with it, I think technically because it was always early in the evening and we had an invite list, rather than just opening the door, everyone just let it be. Anyway. So we had an invite list that we always generated before the party. It was made up of:\nPeople who participated in our events. Our friends who we wanted to party with. Professors and advisors who weren\u0026rsquo;t associated with the student-life folks (and thus wouldn\u0026rsquo;t report us.) Other clubs (like the feminist co-op) that we wanted to support alliances between.","title":"Crushes"},{"content":"Ok, so. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to create a list, in some order of importance of features that I\u0026rsquo;d like in an email application. Note that I run OS X, and I\u0026rsquo;m not using Leopard yet, but I will be at some point. Suggestions are always welcome:\n1. This needs to be a program that runs on my computer, downloads the emails and then lets me view them. I cannot work with web mail, nor do I have any desire to. I\u0026rsquo;m off the grid just enough to want to be able to have access to my email without needing to be in a web browser, or a live connection. 2. Ability to use any editor software. Ok, I want to be able to compose email using the TextMate system. I\u0026rsquo;d also like to use vim/gvim if I should ever learn how to use one of those programs. 3. I need IMAP syncing support, and at least potentially the ability to receive mail from a couple of different sources. 4. Software needs to work fast. I get a lot of email, and need to be able to read and process it quickly. 5. I need to be able to deal with multiple folders of email. 6. I\u0026rsquo;d like to store emails in mbox format, or at least have easy export to mbox format, I\u0026rsquo;d like the files to at least potentially make sense independent of the reader, and I think Maildir is kinda lame. 7. I need to be able to install it and get it working without much fuss. I\u0026rsquo;m good with computers and I\u0026rsquo;m good with a command-line, but too much fuss and my brain can\u0026rsquo;t cope. 8. Software must tie in with the system address book system. It\u0026rsquo;s just easier that way, I think. Thoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/feature-requests-in-a-mail-application/","summary":"Ok, so. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to create a list, in some order of importance of features that I\u0026rsquo;d like in an email application. Note that I run OS X, and I\u0026rsquo;m not using Leopard yet, but I will be at some point. Suggestions are always welcome:\n1. This needs to be a program that runs on my computer, downloads the emails and then lets me view them. I cannot work with web mail, nor do I have any desire to. I\u0026rsquo;m off the grid just enough to want to be able to have access to my email without needing to be in a web browser, or a live connection. 2. Ability to use any editor software. Ok, I want to be able to compose email using the TextMate system. I\u0026rsquo;d also like to use vim/gvim if I should ever learn how to use one of those programs. 3. I need IMAP syncing support, and at least potentially the ability to receive mail from a couple of different sources.","title":"Feature Requests in a Mail Application"},{"content":"Hello folks!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s time for a general update about knitting and life and stuff around here in the household of garen. Heh.\nMy knitting is progressing well, and I feel bad about not really getting the chance to talk about my knitting here lately. While I have a number of projects in progress, I mostly just work on one project at a time and particularly lately I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on projects that take a lot of time. On the whole you probably don\u0026rsquo;t want me posting about my knitting more than once a week, at most.\nI\u0026rsquo;m within a row or two of the beginning of the shoulder pattern for this sweater. Initially I was going to do the shoulders as saddles casting on provisionally at the neck, and knitting (short rows) back and forth. The pattern just has you knit around, in the same pattern but bind off half way through the repeat to give the look of saddles. This is hard to describe, but I\u0026rsquo;ve decided not to modify this much, and just go with the flow. I am changing the shaping on the neck, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a big deal. I\u0026rsquo;m really close, and I have a pretty good plan about how I\u0026rsquo;m going to do the next pattern. I\u0026rsquo;m seeing diagonals. Marina would be proud.\nIn other news. I have to revise a paragraph, fill out a one page form, do some printing and then I\u0026rsquo;ll be done with another application. I really really like the people I\u0026rsquo;d get to study with, and I really don\u0026rsquo;t like the place. It\u0026rsquo;s also public school, so the funding isn\u0026rsquo;t as good, and also if I were trying to get a dual appointment job or something with a classification in interdisciplinary field, it might be tough given that pedigree. But I\u0026rsquo;ll take it if I can get it, the people are really swell there.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m up to. More later when there are more free brain cells. I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in a place to do interesting things and write fiction. Even though I have three schools left to apply for and a little bit of work left for this semester, I feel like all of the hard work has been done and there\u0026rsquo;s just a little bit more left to do. Which is good.\nAs I sit here our last chanukah candles are winding down. I hope you\u0026rsquo;ve all had a good holiday.\nOnward and Unpward\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/measurable-progress/","summary":"Hello folks!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s time for a general update about knitting and life and stuff around here in the household of garen. Heh.\nMy knitting is progressing well, and I feel bad about not really getting the chance to talk about my knitting here lately. While I have a number of projects in progress, I mostly just work on one project at a time and particularly lately I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on projects that take a lot of time. On the whole you probably don\u0026rsquo;t want me posting about my knitting more than once a week, at most.\nI\u0026rsquo;m within a row or two of the beginning of the shoulder pattern for this sweater. Initially I was going to do the shoulders as saddles casting on provisionally at the neck, and knitting (short rows) back and forth. The pattern just has you knit around, in the same pattern but bind off half way through the repeat to give the look of saddles.","title":"Measurable Progress"},{"content":"Dave (NSFW) and I have conversations from time to time about what makes blogs successful, the concept/extent of the a-list, and what we do wrong as bloggers, what we\u0026rsquo;re working on to boost our blogs, and so forth. We\u0026rsquo;ve been in this world for years and years, and it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to have a colleague, as it were, to bounce ideas off of and think about these things as I attempt to build this blog and and myself as a better blogger. This follows loosely from my post on the future of tealart.\nMy first, and even recent, attempts at blogging on TealArt have failed because I would blather on about something that interested me, and there wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be much of a point and it was sort of impersonal, and, well, the archive is full of these entries.\nMore recently I think I\u0026rsquo;ve fallen into better space with blogging. I blog about what\u0026rsquo;s going on in my life on a fairly regular basis. I talk about technology, and I mention my knitting stuff when I have news or thoughts about this. When I started tychoish, my goal was to use the blog, as an electronic version of the moleskine that I carry around.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried to organize my notebook carrying around habits in a number of ways, and predictably, I get back to a place where I just have one notebook at any given time, and I write in it as things happen. So my class notes, if I write them by hand are arranged by time, rather than by subject. And I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at remembering things in relation to what kind of notes are around it, so the chronological aspect of the notebook was pretty helpful. And I do novel and fiction planning as well as todo lists and other sorts of stuff long hand, so it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nSince I\u0026rsquo;d always had a problem with digitizing my notebook, and I would like to have some sort of digital notebook. I thought, oh a blog is like the perfect way to be the personal notebook.\nTurns out that this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly the case, and I still keep the paper because I don\u0026rsquo;t think you all are as interested in my lists and incoherent ramblings, and because I haven\u0026rsquo;t found the perfect way to display my archives for personal use.\nThe other thing that I think has changed for me recently is that I have for the first time have this instinct to \u0026ldquo;journal,\u0026rdquo; which I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve had before. I\u0026rsquo;ve come to expect and need this space to think about ideas, and reflect on experiences. And I think that--at least for now is a good marker of success.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/journaling-instinct/","summary":"Dave (NSFW) and I have conversations from time to time about what makes blogs successful, the concept/extent of the a-list, and what we do wrong as bloggers, what we\u0026rsquo;re working on to boost our blogs, and so forth. We\u0026rsquo;ve been in this world for years and years, and it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to have a colleague, as it were, to bounce ideas off of and think about these things as I attempt to build this blog and and myself as a better blogger. This follows loosely from my post on the future of tealart.\nMy first, and even recent, attempts at blogging on TealArt have failed because I would blather on about something that interested me, and there wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be much of a point and it was sort of impersonal, and, well, the archive is full of these entries.\nMore recently I think I\u0026rsquo;ve fallen into better space with blogging. I blog about what\u0026rsquo;s going on in my life on a fairly regular basis.","title":"Journaling Instinct"},{"content":"I have have a computer question for the crowd.\nI\u0026rsquo;m looking to lay out the design for my next sweater. Traditionally I have done these designs using Excel to lay out the grid and place the stitch pattern. It\u0026rsquo;s not ideal of course, but I have a copy of Excel and that\u0026rsquo;s worth something. Now Zoe is aging, and while I still have a copy of excel, I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to clog up the system to use it, and know there must be a better way to handle this. Any ideas? I don\u0026rsquo;t need fancy stitches like cables or any of that, just dots for contrasting colors. Cheap/free is preferable.\nAnother annoyance: Email. I really like email communication, but the software sucks. I like that my email is all IMAP-y right now but mail.app kinda sucks (crashes a lot, lots of overhead, syncs slow and inconsistently). I want to switch to mutt and some sort of mail-downloader combo (hopefully something that uses mbox rather than Maildir formats), and there\u0026rsquo;s a good tutorial here, but I\u0026rsquo;m not feeling particularly inclined to get to work on zoe, given the fact that I might only have her for another several months. On the other hand, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that these UNIX-y/command line type things are much easier the second time. And why suffer longer than necessary. I think moving the mail reading over to a command line thing might make my situation a little bit more tenable.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m whining about technology I\u0026rsquo;d like to say that I really wish you could move/copy a list of files around in a subversion repository/working copy using a wild card ie:\n$ svm move ./* ./archive/ Which won\u0026rsquo;t work. I think in the next version they\u0026rsquo;ll implement this, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know. This might be a reason to switch to git, but I have to say that the complete lack of GUI tools for git concerns. I\u0026rsquo;m good with a command-line, but if a project is of any size, with any number of folders, and very quickly, it\u0026rsquo;s good to have a picture.\nOk, I think this post is done.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/technology-annoyances/","summary":"I have have a computer question for the crowd.\nI\u0026rsquo;m looking to lay out the design for my next sweater. Traditionally I have done these designs using Excel to lay out the grid and place the stitch pattern. It\u0026rsquo;s not ideal of course, but I have a copy of Excel and that\u0026rsquo;s worth something. Now Zoe is aging, and while I still have a copy of excel, I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to clog up the system to use it, and know there must be a better way to handle this. Any ideas? I don\u0026rsquo;t need fancy stitches like cables or any of that, just dots for contrasting colors. Cheap/free is preferable.\nAnother annoyance: Email. I really like email communication, but the software sucks. I like that my email is all IMAP-y right now but mail.app kinda sucks (crashes a lot, lots of overhead, syncs slow and inconsistently). I want to switch to mutt and some sort of mail-downloader combo (hopefully something that uses mbox rather than Maildir formats), and there\u0026rsquo;s a good tutorial here, but I\u0026rsquo;m not feeling particularly inclined to get to work on zoe, given the fact that I might only have her for another several months.","title":"Technology Annoyances"},{"content":" Aquamacs xPad Smultron BBedit/TextWrangler TextMate What? You were expecting humor? Heh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-osx-text-editors/","summary":"Aquamacs xPad Smultron BBedit/TextWrangler TextMate What? You were expecting humor? Heh.","title":"5 Text Editors for OS X"},{"content":"tycho discussion of plans for tomorrow, turn to discussion of the weather: but it\u0026rsquo;s going to be fucking cold tomorrow, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to walk 4 blocks in the snow.\nC.E: It is going to be bad tomorrow?\ntycho: you were the one who was out there today, it was hell.\nC.E.: But I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be like 40, I hear.\ntycho outraged that the weather broke: What! G-d! What the hell kind of dumb ass weather is that?\nPause.\ntycho: You know, up north I\u0026rsquo;d always just dress in the morning for the weather the previous day, and it was almost always right, maybe it\u0026rsquo;d be a little bit iffy in October and April, but generally, I was ok. Here, since May, it\u0026rsquo;s like the weather is out there to fuck with you. Snow, followed by the fifties. Sixty degree weather alternating with 100 degree weather. I hope someone\u0026rsquo;s amused because I\u0026rsquo;m not!\nPause. tycho returns to reading his book.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cold/","summary":"tycho discussion of plans for tomorrow, turn to discussion of the weather: but it\u0026rsquo;s going to be fucking cold tomorrow, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to walk 4 blocks in the snow.\nC.E: It is going to be bad tomorrow?\ntycho: you were the one who was out there today, it was hell.\nC.E.: But I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be like 40, I hear.\ntycho outraged that the weather broke: What! G-d! What the hell kind of dumb ass weather is that?\nPause.\ntycho: You know, up north I\u0026rsquo;d always just dress in the morning for the weather the previous day, and it was almost always right, maybe it\u0026rsquo;d be a little bit iffy in October and April, but generally, I was ok. Here, since May, it\u0026rsquo;s like the weather is out there to fuck with you. Snow, followed by the fifties. Sixty degree weather alternating with 100 degree weather.","title":"Cold"},{"content":"So I posted the following snip-it to TealArt.com the other day:\nTealArt is a project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been running--with some great help--more or less for the last seven years or so. It\u0026rsquo;s been a great ride, even if I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what I was doing most of the time.\nBut recently I have felt like I\u0026rsquo;m getting a clue. Wacky, idea I know. TealArt isn\u0026rsquo;t going away though, but it is changing. All of our archives, or most of them have been imported into our current sites here and here. Links to the archives should still work, for a while, but eventually those will break as well.\nI\u0026rsquo;m in the (slow) process of a redesign that will bring out a new TealArt, for the future. It won\u0026rsquo;t be a blog, per se, we have those elsewhere. But there are projects that I think need a home separate from our blogs and TealArt seems like the place for those projects.\nThese are the projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about in various forums for months: station keeping and science fiction, group knit along projects, and knitting designs, maybe a podcast some day.\nThe thing is that to do this, we need a redesign. A totally new back end for the site. And I think a clean slate will do us good, so I\u0026rsquo;m taking everything down while I do the rebuilding, and I\u0026rsquo;ll see you back here in a few weeks with a whole new site and new updates.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you around in the mean time, and do be in touch. See you soon!\ntycho garen 8 December 2007\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been mentioning the great TealArt redesign of 07/08 for a while now, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s time to get this underway. But because I\u0026rsquo;m an extrovert and this is my blog I\u0026rsquo;m going to explain some of my thinking. on the subject. It\u0026rsquo;ll be below the fold, so you won\u0026rsquo;t have to read about it if you don\u0026rsquo;t want to, and I swear for all the knitters, that I\u0026rsquo;ll post about knitting soon.\nOk, so the main things that I want TealArt to do in the near future are: be a space to host station keeping, host knit-a-longs, and display/sell some of my knitting designs. All of my web-projects before tychoish have been about community, and I like that aspect of--at least my thinking about them, even if thats now how the reality works out.\nWhile I can\u0026rsquo;t blame all of the failure/faltering that I\u0026rsquo;ve experienced in the last 7+ years1 to the software we used, it has been a problem. Wordpress is great for powering blogs and I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably one of the best things around in terms of server-side web-apps, and it is very flexable, but I feel the more you stretch it to do things outside of its usual profile, it gets a bit\u0026hellip; kludge-y, and awkward. Community stuff and Multi-poster setups are difficult (I actually like the 1-10 system we had back in B2, more), and if you want to mash-up various kinds of outputs it can get tedious. And that\u0026rsquo;s fine. As I\u0026rsquo;ve blathered from time to time, having one piece off software that does everything isn\u0026rsquo;t always the best thing in the world, even if it feels like it sometimes.\nSo knowing that, and knowing that I want to have community features (discussion forums, user profiles, etc.) to support knitting projects and SK and maybe even a podcast. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about switching to using a cms called drupal which is a great project and there\u0026rsquo;s tons of power here, and the best thing is that it\u0026rsquo;s designed to do exactly what I want, I think.\nThe issue is that the learning curve is intense. Intensely intense. And I mostly know how to use and tweak wordpress in my sleep. And while I don\u0026rsquo;t much like having to tweak code, I\u0026rsquo;d rather instead to spend time knitting and writing, I\u0026rsquo;m starting to feel like knowing drupal is something that needs to happen. I have another non-tealart site that really needs drupal, and I think knowing something about the system will be quite quite helpful.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m jumping down the rabbit hole, slowly. I hope. Wish me luck. Unless I chicken out, if anyone knows something about drupal I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear from you.\nOnward and Upward!\n-- tycho\nLets remember for a moment that I was 13-14 when TealArt started. We\u0026rsquo;re allowed to make mistakes.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/long-live-tealart/","summary":"So I posted the following snip-it to TealArt.com the other day:\nTealArt is a project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been running--with some great help--more or less for the last seven years or so. It\u0026rsquo;s been a great ride, even if I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what I was doing most of the time.\nBut recently I have felt like I\u0026rsquo;m getting a clue. Wacky, idea I know. TealArt isn\u0026rsquo;t going away though, but it is changing. All of our archives, or most of them have been imported into our current sites here and here. Links to the archives should still work, for a while, but eventually those will break as well.\nI\u0026rsquo;m in the (slow) process of a redesign that will bring out a new TealArt, for the future. It won\u0026rsquo;t be a blog, per se, we have those elsewhere. But there are projects that I think need a home separate from our blogs and TealArt seems like the place for those projects.","title":"Long Live TealArt"},{"content":"I really like big projects, you know a big project that takes a long time to finish, like say a long knitted jacket on needles with a 2.5 millimeter diameter, or a novel. I think it\u0026rsquo;s a personality thing. I also really like the thrill of finishing big projects; I also really like the fact that projects like these can get done. It is possible to finish a sweater. It is possible to write a novel. There are a lot of things that we dedicate time to (often \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; things) that are never ending, and I think this is why the big-project thing is a useful adaptation: it makes it possible to obsess over a project, for a while, but then, eventually it\u0026rsquo;s done.\nI think this is part of the reason why I need to go to graduate school: it fits my temperament. It would, however, be impossible to communicate this with the admissions committee, but perhaps in person, I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to communicate it without coming off as creepy\nIn any case, while I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty productive this week, what with the big paper and the grad school application, all my other projects got moved to the back burner. So I find myself without a big primary project underway. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m (thinking about) juggling.\nthe redesign of the TealArt website Breakout, the novel project I\u0026rsquo;m working on design of the next sweater project more graduate school stuff station keeping, season 2 revise the Mars novella and think about publication (contingent). I figure I have 3 weeks before I need to have a new sweater design ready to go. Season 2 of station keeping depends on having the new TealArt website ready to go. The new TealArt is something that requires a ton of work, I think, but is something I desperately need to do in order to be able to host the knit along-s that I want to be able to host. And of course I want to write, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to do that for me in a while, so that\u0026rsquo;s up there. The novella edits are contingent upon getting feedback from readers. I have a really entertaining offer concerning the book publication, but again, contingent upon feedback.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m up to. Hows you?\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/big-projects/","summary":"I really like big projects, you know a big project that takes a long time to finish, like say a long knitted jacket on needles with a 2.5 millimeter diameter, or a novel. I think it\u0026rsquo;s a personality thing. I also really like the thrill of finishing big projects; I also really like the fact that projects like these can get done. It is possible to finish a sweater. It is possible to write a novel. There are a lot of things that we dedicate time to (often \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; things) that are never ending, and I think this is why the big-project thing is a useful adaptation: it makes it possible to obsess over a project, for a while, but then, eventually it\u0026rsquo;s done.\nI think this is part of the reason why I need to go to graduate school: it fits my temperament. It would, however, be impossible to communicate this with the admissions committee, but perhaps in person, I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to communicate it without coming off as creepy","title":"Big Projects"},{"content":"I submitted the first of my graduate school applications yesterday. The next four will be easier. I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with my statement of purpose, less happy with the writing sample (but I\u0026rsquo;m applying to be a social scientist, so most places don\u0026rsquo;t want a sample) but my sense is that the writing sample isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly important. And all I can do is be optimistic (which I think I have reason to be) and move forward. Though I\u0026rsquo;ve done the hardest work, I have to write a new zipper paragraph for each school, the applications themselves can be done in an hour, or less. So rock on.\nIn other news, I have one test and one paper left to complete in my work for this semester. The paper is written, save for some updates: I\u0026rsquo;m recycling with the professors consent a paper I wrote last year on clinical issues related to death and dying, so I need to make it less clinical and more developmental, but that\u0026rsquo;s a few hours of changes and not a lot of bother. The test is over the two parts of psycholingustics that find most interesting: language development and linguistic relativism. So that\u0026rsquo;s not too fearsome.\nIn terms of knitting, I\u0026rsquo;m working on the Morocco jacket. I\u0026rsquo;ve made it past the arm hole shaping, so the shoulders are fully set it, which means that it grows much faster length wise. There are 250 stitches + steeks as opposed to 400 stitches + steeks. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to do the shoulders in a more direct way, which I think more closely resembles the pattern as written. I\u0026rsquo;m currently leaning towards making the armholes a bit longer than I would on a normal sweater because as a jacket, I think it needs to fit over a normal sweater. And it\u0026rsquo;ll look more like the sweater in the book that way.\nFunny thing is that I\u0026rsquo;m mostly just knitting using the chart and the picture of the finished sweater, and going from there.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking it would be fun to have a sweater knit along where everyone was given a chart and some pictures of a finished sweater and then everyone went about copying it in their own way, and the knit-along community would support people with the basic elements of sweater construction. Might be fun.\nAnyway, I do have some things to get done, but sorry for the absence, and I promise that I won\u0026rsquo;t disappear for so long again. Though fellow bloggers, I must confess with some measure of guilt that I haven\u0026rsquo;t opened the news-reader in almost a week, so, I\u0026rsquo;m behind (unless you\u0026rsquo;re on LJ, LJ is sanctioned procrastination, and therefore doesn\u0026rsquo;t count. )\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/one-of-four/","summary":"I submitted the first of my graduate school applications yesterday. The next four will be easier. I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with my statement of purpose, less happy with the writing sample (but I\u0026rsquo;m applying to be a social scientist, so most places don\u0026rsquo;t want a sample) but my sense is that the writing sample isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly important. And all I can do is be optimistic (which I think I have reason to be) and move forward. Though I\u0026rsquo;ve done the hardest work, I have to write a new zipper paragraph for each school, the applications themselves can be done in an hour, or less. So rock on.\nIn other news, I have one test and one paper left to complete in my work for this semester. The paper is written, save for some updates: I\u0026rsquo;m recycling with the professors consent a paper I wrote last year on clinical issues related to death and dying, so I need to make it less clinical and more developmental, but that\u0026rsquo;s a few hours of changes and not a lot of bother.","title":"One of Four"},{"content":" Woody and firm Strong and Robust Meaty and full Fruity and delicate Sharp and satisfying ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-absurd-phases-used-in-the-descripton-of-tea-flavors/","summary":" Woody and firm Strong and Robust Meaty and full Fruity and delicate Sharp and satisfying ","title":"5 absurd phases used in the descripton of tea flavors."},{"content":" I\u0026rsquo;ll work on this in the morning! I\u0026rsquo;ve written twice this much in half this time before, this is easy? I drink too much caffeine, maybe I need to cut back. If I chew this tea bag, the caffeine will hit faster. I\u0026rsquo;ll do better next semester. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-lies-you-tell-yourself-at-the-end-of-a-semester/","summary":" I\u0026rsquo;ll work on this in the morning! I\u0026rsquo;ve written twice this much in half this time before, this is easy? I drink too much caffeine, maybe I need to cut back. If I chew this tea bag, the caffeine will hit faster. I\u0026rsquo;ll do better next semester. ","title":"5 lies you tell yourself at the end of a semester."},{"content":"Hello friends!\nI\u0026rsquo;m sorry I\u0026rsquo;ve been so bad about posting things lately! I even have backlogged pictures that are ready to post and backlogged fives lists that I haven\u0026rsquo;t thrown up because it slips my mind.\nI say, I better get into graduate school this time, if for no other reason that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I could take applying again and retain sanity. But we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nI have tomorrow off, from all obligations but I have to write about 7 very stressful academic pages (5 of which need to be perfect), and scores of emails and filling out forms, plus proofreading, possibly a phone call, some printing, revising my CV and making it look like a CV and not a resume again. Sigh.\nWe had a \u0026ldquo;cold snap,\u0026rdquo; which was just cold enough for me to wear one of my comfy sweaters without being actually cold. I hope I can move north (or a little bit higher up, even) again next year so that I don\u0026rsquo;t loose my cold tolerance.\nI had a great exchange with a potential grad school advisor who I think is really swell. I\u0026rsquo;m not elated about the prospect of moving to WesternCity, but the depressing thing is that even though this prof isn\u0026rsquo;t doing queer studies work, her research is theoretically very close to mine, closer than just about anyone else. That makes the decision sticky, but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to put the carriage before the horse, and I\u0026rsquo;m just going to say, that I liked our email exchange.\nOk, enough blathering. I\u0026rsquo;m well. don\u0026rsquo;t be mad if I\u0026rsquo;m a little spotty for the next couple of days.\nAlso, thanks to the purloined letter for the link and the kind words!\nOnce I have some time to my self, I am for sure going to get a little closer to doing some group knitting projects, I just have to live through the end of the year first. See you soon.\nOnward and upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/taking-cream/","summary":"Hello friends!\nI\u0026rsquo;m sorry I\u0026rsquo;ve been so bad about posting things lately! I even have backlogged pictures that are ready to post and backlogged fives lists that I haven\u0026rsquo;t thrown up because it slips my mind.\nI say, I better get into graduate school this time, if for no other reason that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I could take applying again and retain sanity. But we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nI have tomorrow off, from all obligations but I have to write about 7 very stressful academic pages (5 of which need to be perfect), and scores of emails and filling out forms, plus proofreading, possibly a phone call, some printing, revising my CV and making it look like a CV and not a resume again. Sigh.\nWe had a \u0026ldquo;cold snap,\u0026rdquo; which was just cold enough for me to wear one of my comfy sweaters without being actually cold. I hope I can move north (or a little bit higher up, even) again next year so that I don\u0026rsquo;t loose my cold tolerance.","title":"Taking Cream"},{"content":" In this direction I seek, to\u0026hellip; This project draws from both\u0026hellip; Multifaceted in my approach, I attempt to\u0026hellip; Drawing from Marx and Weber, What began as an absurd notion is now\u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-transitional-phrases-most-often-used-to-describe-your-academic-interests/","summary":" In this direction I seek, to\u0026hellip; This project draws from both\u0026hellip; Multifaceted in my approach, I attempt to\u0026hellip; Drawing from Marx and Weber, What began as an absurd notion is now\u0026hellip; ","title":"5 transitional phrases most often used to describe your academic interests."},{"content":"I never know what to call these check-in posts where I\u0026rsquo;m like \u0026ldquo;so here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m working on\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; bleh, sorry for the nonsensical titles.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been fairly buried in the academic writing and graduate school application writing. On the plate for tonight, I need to get, probably about a thousand words on my major paper for the semester, which will break the back of the draft. My concern is that it has to be perfect by friday afternoon, which is pushing things to the last minute, but on the account of this paper, that seems reasonable. But I\u0026rsquo;m not going to stress to much about this yet, and I\u0026rsquo;m in good shape. It\u0026rsquo;s just a little frantic making, I guess.\nThe blog will understandably be spare in the interim.\nIn terms of knitting news, I\u0026rsquo;ve not been doing very much: I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing with a sweater on my lap and I\u0026rsquo;ll knit a few little row-lets when ever I need a moment to think or plan for what\u0026rsquo;s next. The gray sweater is going slowly, I\u0026rsquo;m working on knitting the shoulder strap, and it\u0026rsquo;s going swimingly, aside from being kinda fiddly, it\u0026rsquo;s perfect for this kind of knitting.\nLast night while I was listening to something for class I got the Morocco sweater into shape so that I could knit it in class and this week in those moments that seem to need knitting. It\u0026rsquo;s going much faster now, that I\u0026rsquo;ve started setting in the sleeves, and it\u0026rsquo;s as engauging as always. It\u0026rsquo;s kind of amazing how enjoyable I find colorwork, even when it\u0026rsquo;s devilishly complex like this sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to casting on something else, but I\u0026rsquo;m being good and waiting till I have brain time and a sweater done.\nHope you all are well. Cheers!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/another-cup-of-tea/","summary":"I never know what to call these check-in posts where I\u0026rsquo;m like \u0026ldquo;so here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m working on\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; bleh, sorry for the nonsensical titles.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been fairly buried in the academic writing and graduate school application writing. On the plate for tonight, I need to get, probably about a thousand words on my major paper for the semester, which will break the back of the draft. My concern is that it has to be perfect by friday afternoon, which is pushing things to the last minute, but on the account of this paper, that seems reasonable. But I\u0026rsquo;m not going to stress to much about this yet, and I\u0026rsquo;m in good shape. It\u0026rsquo;s just a little frantic making, I guess.\nThe blog will understandably be spare in the interim.\nIn terms of knitting news, I\u0026rsquo;ve not been doing very much: I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing with a sweater on my lap and I\u0026rsquo;ll knit a few little row-lets when ever I need a moment to think or plan for what\u0026rsquo;s next.","title":"Another Cup of Tea"},{"content":"Act One: Personality tycho describes to professor one of the reasons why he didn\u0026rsquo;t get into graduate school last year: \u0026hellip; and I applied to personality programs as well \u0026hellip;\nprofessor: Oh that\u0026rsquo;s a bad idea, there are like no jobs in personality. (professor turns to computer and does a search on a higher-ed-jobs site to prove point).\nAct Two: Flats Time: 5:00 Correspondent K. calls and says, \u0026ldquo;I have a flat tire, so I might be a bit late, but everything\u0026rsquo;s ok.\u0026rdquo; Time: 5:15 Correspondent E. and tycho exchange car keys so that the household will be able to fufill all evening commitments in the event of \u0026ldquo;everything\u0026rdquo; not being ok. Time: 5:30 Correspondent K. calls and requests roadside assistance, not, as logic would suggest from the department of transportation or the american automobile association (AAA), but rather from Correspondent E; and unsurprisingly tycho. Time: 5:31 tycho, and Correspondent E. gather belongings and winter weather gear and rush out the door. Time: 5:45 Correspondent E successfully navigates to the site of the repair in progress. tycho notes that the car does not even look to be elevated. Time: 5:46 tycho and C.E. descend upon the scene and discover that the car is indeed jacked, but also find C.K. continuing to unscrew the hubcap. Time: 5:47 tycho and C.E. relieve C.K. of responsibility in this matter, and admire how shredded the tire became during the 3 mile drive, at no more than 25 mph. Time: 5:55 tycho drives away in the newly repaired car, while C.\u0026rsquo;s E. \u0026amp; K. continue on with evening as plan, only slightly colder than they had indented. Act Three: Thanks tycho walks into house at about 6:02pm\ncellphone rings obnoxiously. tycho answers: yes?\nCorrespondent K: Good, you\u0026rsquo;re home.\ntycho: silent stare\nCorrespondent K: I just wanted to make sure you made it home safe.\ntycho remains silent.\nCorrespondent K: you did something nice for me, I just wanted to check in on you.\ntycho wryly: And this is the thanks I get?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/episodes-in-oddity/","summary":"Act One: Personality tycho describes to professor one of the reasons why he didn\u0026rsquo;t get into graduate school last year: \u0026hellip; and I applied to personality programs as well \u0026hellip;\nprofessor: Oh that\u0026rsquo;s a bad idea, there are like no jobs in personality. (professor turns to computer and does a search on a higher-ed-jobs site to prove point).\nAct Two: Flats Time: 5:00 Correspondent K. calls and says, \u0026ldquo;I have a flat tire, so I might be a bit late, but everything\u0026rsquo;s ok.\u0026rdquo; Time: 5:15 Correspondent E. and tycho exchange car keys so that the household will be able to fufill all evening commitments in the event of \u0026ldquo;everything\u0026rdquo; not being ok. Time: 5:30 Correspondent K. calls and requests roadside assistance, not, as logic would suggest from the department of transportation or the american automobile association (AAA), but rather from Correspondent E; and unsurprisingly tycho. Time: 5:31 tycho, and Correspondent E.","title":"Episodes in Oddity"},{"content":"I hope you\u0026rsquo;re weekend is going well.\nI had a somewhat less than productive day yesterday, there were things that needed to be done, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t it always seems that those things are the same things that you need to be doing. But we can pass it off to the curse of modernity and move on, I guess.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot of my statement of purpose, which is getting very close to being done. Close but not there. None the less, I have a 2-3 page document that only needs polish and a few sentences here and there to tie everything together, and punch up things like research experience and what not.\nAt the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on outlining and starting my big final paper for this semester, which will also be my writing sample for a couple of schools. It\u0026rsquo;s scary that I\u0026rsquo;m not further along, but it\u0026rsquo;s a relatively short paper, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t have an actual version of this paper that I can cut and paste text from, this paper is about my interests, exactly (it proposes the project that I describe in my statement,) so I know it backwards and forwards and I just need to figure out how to get it out into words.\nThe cool thing: I get really excited and happy when I get to work on the material, which I think is a really good sign. Though I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing (obviously) a lot of fiction and informal writing (blog stuff) of late, the truth is that I kind of enjoy academic writing, and I think with a little time and energy, I\u0026rsquo;m not that bad at it. Now all I need is some time, some caffeine, and it\u0026rsquo;ll be ok.\nIn the knitting news, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve successfully bent space-time. I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting on the gray sweater of doom. Apparently I name sweaters {color} sweater of doom, when they\u0026rsquo;ve taken forever to knit. Anyway, I started this in, abut august of 2005, and have dabbled in it a bit for the past couple of years.\nWell, I picked it up for a change of pace, while I wait to get back to the color work when I have a better idea of how I want to do the shoulders and the brainpower (read above for info on where my brainpower is going).\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t actually expect to get so close to finishing the sweater, this has, for some time been my \u0026ldquo;movie knitting\u0026rdquo; because there\u0026rsquo;s so much plain knitting without thinking, that it\u0026rsquo;s often good for knitting whilst at the movies. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those projects that I don\u0026rsquo;t really think of as \u0026ldquo;counting\u0026rdquo; towards the number of projects I have on the needles. I spent next to nothing (maybe 15 bucks for the yarn,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve since bought, I think, a replacement needle because I considered this one to be something of a lost cause.\nBut what do you know, this project was the right thing for my brain at the moment, and perhaps I was further along on this project than I thought I was. Anyway, end result, I\u0026rsquo;m basically done knitting the body. Wacky I know. I decided late in the game to knit a single cable from the neck across the shoulder and down into the cuff. Because, you know, how much stocking stitch can you really cope with.\nI did some sort row shaping across the back of the shoulders, and just this morning I cast on the 8 stitches for the shoulder strap, and by god is this fun. My latest design feature that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for my next couple of sweaters is shoulder joins that have straps or saddles in them that then run down the sleeve. It adds to the flexibility, it gives you something to gently shape the sleeves downward, and makes it possible to avoid sleeve cap shaping which is awkward in knitting fabric. (It works, but really in a knitted fabric, the main goal is to get the shoulder set in far enough, the sleeve top will take care of itself, particularly if there\u0026rsquo;s some sort of strap/saddle.) And the straps allow you to keep the structure of the seam, while avoiding the inflexibility of a hard join.\nThe other nifty thing about this sweater is that I think, I have developed a way to--assuming you knit off of a cone as I have--to only need to weave in ends at the terminating ends (cuffs, bottom hem, collar). I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to cheat a little bit on the collar, but it\u0026rsquo;s a cool game to figure out how to get everything to even out without having to break the yarn.\nAnyway, be well, I should get back to real writing.\nOnward and upward!\nps. If I run bibtex/latex through TeXshop, rather than through the TextMate bundle, everything compiles fine. Still not sure why this is the case, but I don\u0026rsquo;t argue with success\u0026hellip; Much. I\u0026rsquo;d of course not have to use more text-editing programs than I have to, so if anyone has ideas, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear them.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/weekend-update/","summary":"I hope you\u0026rsquo;re weekend is going well.\nI had a somewhat less than productive day yesterday, there were things that needed to be done, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t it always seems that those things are the same things that you need to be doing. But we can pass it off to the curse of modernity and move on, I guess.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been working a lot of my statement of purpose, which is getting very close to being done. Close but not there. None the less, I have a 2-3 page document that only needs polish and a few sentences here and there to tie everything together, and punch up things like research experience and what not.\nAt the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on outlining and starting my big final paper for this semester, which will also be my writing sample for a couple of schools. It\u0026rsquo;s scary that I\u0026rsquo;m not further along, but it\u0026rsquo;s a relatively short paper, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t have an actual version of this paper that I can cut and paste text from, this paper is about my interests, exactly (it proposes the project that I describe in my statement,) so I know it backwards and forwards and I just need to figure out how to get it out into words.","title":"Weekend Update"},{"content":" Knitting Elbow Second Life Wrist WoW Throat Expose Ring-Finger iPod Thumb ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-epidemiological-relatives-of-emacs-pinky/","summary":" Knitting Elbow Second Life Wrist WoW Throat Expose Ring-Finger iPod Thumb ","title":"5 Epidemiological Relatives of emacs pinky"},{"content":" Socks Scarves Any Cozies Swatches Mobius Anything ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-things-im-not-knitting-now/","summary":" Socks Scarves Any Cozies Swatches Mobius Anything ","title":"5 things I'm not knitting now"},{"content":"So, I finished the cap that I was working on earlier evening. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I blogged about this, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been itching to knit hats for a while now (the old hats were 2+ years old, and hats wear out and get icky and lost faster than say, sweaters).\nIt\u0026rsquo;s nice. black, understated. It\u0026rsquo;ll get a lot of wear.\nI had been putting the Morocco sweater on hold until after the finals push was over, but with the hat over, I\u0026rsquo;m without knitting projects. November has been the month of finishing things: the socks, the hat, the two plain sweaters from this summer.\nThe end result of this, is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have anything to knit. There is of course the stranded sock that I was working on in July that is in desperate need of some ripping back, and it\u0026rsquo;s a sock, and I\u0026rsquo;m very much not in a sock mood.\nSo I think I\u0026rsquo;m going back to knitting on the sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s weird to not have projects underway. It\u0026rsquo;s been so long since I\u0026rsquo;ve cast anything on, for real. Weird.\nOh, Right! Joe, you\u0026rsquo;ll be happy about this. I have the grey sweater to knit. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to go pull that out of the pile and take it with me to class today. It\u0026rsquo;s good and mindless.\nActually, one thing I fear with the grey sweater is that if I work too much more on it, I\u0026rsquo;ll be in danger of being back in sleeve hell, and those sleeves, with their plain stocking stitch might just send me to the loony bin. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of running a cable or three down the top of the sleeve and making a shoulder strap out of it. Having said that, I haven\u0026rsquo;t actually knit a stitch on that since say, April, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t even looked at it since early June, so I\u0026rsquo;ll tell you later when I have have more\u0026hellip; empirical data.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/done-knitting/","summary":"So, I finished the cap that I was working on earlier evening. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I blogged about this, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been itching to knit hats for a while now (the old hats were 2+ years old, and hats wear out and get icky and lost faster than say, sweaters).\nIt\u0026rsquo;s nice. black, understated. It\u0026rsquo;ll get a lot of wear.\nI had been putting the Morocco sweater on hold until after the finals push was over, but with the hat over, I\u0026rsquo;m without knitting projects. November has been the month of finishing things: the socks, the hat, the two plain sweaters from this summer.\nThe end result of this, is that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have anything to knit. There is of course the stranded sock that I was working on in July that is in desperate need of some ripping back, and it\u0026rsquo;s a sock, and I\u0026rsquo;m very much not in a sock mood.","title":"Done Knitting"},{"content":"Today has been one of those days where nothing really seems to go right. The knitting is all fouled up, and I had\nMy knitting got caught on something and sprung a little catch. It\u0026rsquo;s actually kind of disappointing, and reveals that I have no clue as to how to graft or kitchner pieces of knitting together. I think it has something to do with knitting backwards and having the stitches mounted in the wrong dirrection. The best I can ever hope for is reverse stocking stitch grafting, and even that it\u0026rsquo;s sort of spotty.\nI\u0026rsquo;m so going to be that person in 30 years who comes in to a yarn shop and pays one of the gurus to graft stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of pathetic. I knit on the grey sweater today, and I find it intoxicatingly relaxing: How weird is that? Plain stocking stitch. On very small needles with very small yarn. I\u0026rsquo;d say, I probably have less than two inches to go until the neck shaping starts, and then less than 3 inches from there until the shoulder straps start. And like I said it\u0026rsquo;s intoxicating.\nBut enough about the knitting, perhaps the larger issue is that in my paper writing today I ran into a few issues with LaTeX when I went to compile everything, and I still don\u0026rsquo;t have a real clue what went wrong.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s what I can tell:\n1. I installed latex2rtf from MacPorts a few weeks ago, because it seemed lie a good tool for interfacing in the rest of the world. MacPorts, installed a different installation teTeX (or something), where I had previously been using the macTeX distribution, or maybe I was using something from Fink. UNIX nerds will probably disown me for having a really crappy set of paths and install locations. Sorry. It is coming back to bite me in the ass. 2. Whatever happened, all of the bibTeX stuff (thats the package that handles the bibliographic database and complies all the references and what not,) and it appears the APA formating style file is also gone, or at least not accessible to whatever TeX engine that I\u0026rsquo;m using. 3. This of course can be fixed by throwing the .cls file in the same directory as .tex file that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to compile. The same thing goes for the citation packages. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using the nat-bib, or at least I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been using the nat-bib citation package because it works a little more clearly and flexibly than apacite. Again, I got something that made really pretty APA manuscripts and I didn\u0026rsquo;t mess with it. Not sure what\u0026rsquo;s up with that. 4. My paper printed and for some reason jammed the cite-key in front of all the reference page items. To which I can only say \u0026ldquo;WTF?\u0026rdquo; Furthermore it errored (ok, ok, it produced an error) on line 214 of apa.cls (the bibliographynewpage flag/option or some such, monkeying with that code did nothing from what I could tell.\nI finally just gave in and let it be, but I\u0026rsquo;d really like to be able to have the ability to produce clear and straightforward documents. Really really like to be able to do that.\nAlso, my email isn\u0026rsquo;t healthy at all, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have the clue as to what caused this. Gmail released new features today (group chat, don\u0026rsquo;t you all get up at once now,) and if that\u0026rsquo;s the reason that it\u0026rsquo;s been all screwy, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be pissed. Very Pissed. Also very sorry if you\u0026rsquo;re trying to get a hold of me. If you try the email, and it isn\u0026rsquo;t working, leave a comment here, and I should see it pretty quick.\nTo add insult to injury AIM is being cranky, and since I use AIM the way most people use the phone, this adds an additional layer of frustration to the day.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to get a book at hope that I don\u0026rsquo;t run into a paper cut issue.\nOther work continues apace, I suppose. Sorry for posting the entries today out of order.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/failure/","summary":"Today has been one of those days where nothing really seems to go right. The knitting is all fouled up, and I had\nMy knitting got caught on something and sprung a little catch. It\u0026rsquo;s actually kind of disappointing, and reveals that I have no clue as to how to graft or kitchner pieces of knitting together. I think it has something to do with knitting backwards and having the stitches mounted in the wrong dirrection. The best I can ever hope for is reverse stocking stitch grafting, and even that it\u0026rsquo;s sort of spotty.\nI\u0026rsquo;m so going to be that person in 30 years who comes in to a yarn shop and pays one of the gurus to graft stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of pathetic. I knit on the grey sweater today, and I find it intoxicatingly relaxing: How weird is that? Plain stocking stitch. On very small needles with very small yarn.","title":"Failure"},{"content":"Having sworn of socks on anything other than DK/worsted weight yarn, I have a little bit of a sock yarn stash to burn off.\nOk I only have one skein.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really pretty and I bought it while visiting Sheri at the Loopy Ewe. a few months back. She\u0026rsquo;s supper cool by the way.\nBut the purchase was totally a moment of weakness.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s ~400 yards of sport weight. The label says it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Jubilee\u0026rdquo; from Misty Mountain Farm in color \u0026ldquo;Ocean Wave.\u0026rdquo;\nLeave it to me impulse buy, yet another skein of teal yarn.\nAnyway, so I have sock yarn to burn off.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking of making an enterlac style dubblemossa. These are the hats where they\u0026rsquo;re basically a long enclosed head-sized sausage, that you fold in on itself and it covers your ears. Usually they\u0026rsquo;re stranded. I want to do one with enterlac. the yarn\u0026rsquo;s soft and it will be awesome.\nNo more questions now, I\u0026rsquo;ll write a pattern at some point. Maybe.\nSo like any dutiful designer I did a guage swatch, mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve never knit with this yarn or anything like it. Super-wash can be a little funny, and after enacting the following scene a few times I thought it was a good idea\ntycho: So here (Tosses yarn) I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of making a hat. FellowKnitter catches: Oh this is pretty, what kinda hat. tycho: A sort of enterlac/watchclock/dubblemossa sort of thing. FellowKnitter looks quizzical tycho: So I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of casting on, about 128 stitches using US size 3 needles, how does that sound? FellowKnitter: That\u0026rsquo;s a lot, did you do a gauge swatch. tycho: No. I\u0026rsquo;m asking you. FellowKnitter: Don\u0026rsquo;t be a dumbshit, do a gauge swatch tycho: whatever, grumble.\nSo I did, and I got the very nice gauge of 8 stitches to the inch. Multiplied it by 22, after measuring my head (23.5 inches incase any of you want to make me a hat) and cast on (provisionally) 176 stitches. It was a pain in the ass.\nI knit two rows.\nI measured the gauge: 6 stitches to the inch.\nNow before you say, tycho, it\u0026rsquo;s only two rows over a provisional cast on, how can you be sure.\nThe texture of the knitting was completely different.\nWhen I took it off the needles, the (16 pound) cat could have stood inside of it.\nNow here\u0026rsquo;s for the irony. 6 stitches per inch times 22 inches equals. You guessed it 132. Which is damn close to my original suggestion.\nJust saying. Use your head and don\u0026rsquo;t succumb to peer pressure.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/never-swatch/","summary":"Having sworn of socks on anything other than DK/worsted weight yarn, I have a little bit of a sock yarn stash to burn off.\nOk I only have one skein.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really pretty and I bought it while visiting Sheri at the Loopy Ewe. a few months back. She\u0026rsquo;s supper cool by the way.\nBut the purchase was totally a moment of weakness.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s ~400 yards of sport weight. The label says it\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Jubilee\u0026rdquo; from Misty Mountain Farm in color \u0026ldquo;Ocean Wave.\u0026rdquo;\nLeave it to me impulse buy, yet another skein of teal yarn.\nAnyway, so I have sock yarn to burn off.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking of making an enterlac style dubblemossa. These are the hats where they\u0026rsquo;re basically a long enclosed head-sized sausage, that you fold in on itself and it covers your ears. Usually they\u0026rsquo;re stranded. I want to do one with enterlac. the yarn\u0026rsquo;s soft and it will be awesome.","title":"Never Swatch!"},{"content":"Lest you think this is yet another mac versus linux versus windows versus OS/2 Warp FreeBSD post, it\u0026rsquo;s really about moves to \u0026ldquo;Operating Systems,\u0026rdquo; that exist within programs, not operating systems in the classic sense.\nSo I posted a while back about how there seems to be an application development trend away from desktop operating systems and towards developing applications that can be used online in a web browser.\nBasically I thought that though exciting, a lot of these apps were slow, hard to use, and that truth be told most browsing software was flawed (slow, non-standardized,) and so forth. Despite the fact that there\u0026rsquo;s more bandwidth floating around and the fact that people have gotten better at writing server side and host side applications.\nAlso earlier I posted a, mostly comical, list of five things that you can do in emacs but probably shouldn\u0026rsquo;t. To subtitle this a little bit, emacs is one of the grand old text editors, written around a program language from the 50s (LISP), it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly powerful, customizable program, it\u0026rsquo;s free, and it\u0026rsquo;s a program that a lot of the people who write programs use. So even though, the best word I have to describe it is absurd, it gets a lot of attention. Anyway, long story short, people have written extensions (in LISP!) that gets emacs to do all sorts of things in addition to writing text/code. Like, there are scripts to check your email in emacs, games that you can play in emacs, scripts that fetch web pages in emacs, IRC clients that run inside of emacs, and so forth. If I were a huge enough dork, I think actually I could probably get some of the functionality of every program I\u0026rsquo;m running at this moment, as a script inside of emacs.\nI hope you\u0026rsquo;re seeing where this is going, at least a lot faster than I did. While I\u0026rsquo;m not a huge emacs dweeb, I have a certain sort of respect for working that way: once you learn your text editing system (and after all, most of what we do is edit text) you don\u0026rsquo;t want to move out of this environment. Particularly if there\u0026rsquo;s a learning curve as steep as emacs.\nInitially I thought that the shift towards using the web browser as a sort of lack luster runtime for \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; applications, was about lazy programers, and a sort of mass delusion, but really, I think it has more to do with people not wanting to leave their comfort zone, the application that they already spend a lot of time in, in the same way that urdweebs don\u0026rsquo;t want to leave emacs (or vim, and so forth.)\nAnyway, it\u0026rsquo;s cool that clicked, I\u0026rsquo;m back to figuring out how to install mutt on OS X so I can more automatically integrate my mail drafting into TextMate, and be done with Mail.app for once and for all. Maybe after I\u0026rsquo;m done with the semester. Heh.\nOnward and Upward\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/os-wars/","summary":"Lest you think this is yet another mac versus linux versus windows versus OS/2 Warp FreeBSD post, it\u0026rsquo;s really about moves to \u0026ldquo;Operating Systems,\u0026rdquo; that exist within programs, not operating systems in the classic sense.\nSo I posted a while back about how there seems to be an application development trend away from desktop operating systems and towards developing applications that can be used online in a web browser.\nBasically I thought that though exciting, a lot of these apps were slow, hard to use, and that truth be told most browsing software was flawed (slow, non-standardized,) and so forth. Despite the fact that there\u0026rsquo;s more bandwidth floating around and the fact that people have gotten better at writing server side and host side applications.\nAlso earlier I posted a, mostly comical, list of five things that you can do in emacs but probably shouldn\u0026rsquo;t. To subtitle this a little bit, emacs is one of the grand old text editors, written around a program language from the 50s (LISP), it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly powerful, customizable program, it\u0026rsquo;s free, and it\u0026rsquo;s a program that a lot of the people who write programs use.","title":"OS Wars"},{"content":"Overheard in a conversation between andy and myself in the not so recent past:\ntycho: I have a few things to say to you about your site andy: oh? tycho: 1: you don\u0026rsquo;t link to me. andy: patience tycho: 2: you\u0026rsquo;re archives and about pages don\u0026rsquo;t work.1 andy: whatever, shut up. I\u0026rsquo;ll get there. tycho: 3: that design was one we had back in the greymatter days. andy: heh, you know me\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m slow to get to things\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;d say\u0026hellip;\nwe have a long going joke about the years it seems to take us to write \u0026ldquo;about\u0026rdquo; pages. It\u0026rsquo;s comical. Inside joke I guess.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/slow-on-the-uptake/","summary":"Overheard in a conversation between andy and myself in the not so recent past:\ntycho: I have a few things to say to you about your site andy: oh? tycho: 1: you don\u0026rsquo;t link to me. andy: patience tycho: 2: you\u0026rsquo;re archives and about pages don\u0026rsquo;t work.1 andy: whatever, shut up. I\u0026rsquo;ll get there. tycho: 3: that design was one we had back in the greymatter days. andy: heh, you know me\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m slow to get to things\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;d say\u0026hellip;\nwe have a long going joke about the years it seems to take us to write \u0026ldquo;about\u0026rdquo; pages. It\u0026rsquo;s comical. Inside joke I guess.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;","title":"Slow on the Uptake"},{"content":" Add superfluous consonants, particularly X and Z. Add superfluous vowels, or overuse \u0026ldquo;y\u0026rdquo; as a vowel Append numbers to names Insert Mid-Word stops using the apostrophes. Name alien\u0026rsquo;s utterly mundane names like \u0026ldquo;Jim.\u0026rdquo; ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-conventions-for-naming-characters-in-sci-fi-stories/","summary":" Add superfluous consonants, particularly X and Z. Add superfluous vowels, or overuse \u0026ldquo;y\u0026rdquo; as a vowel Append numbers to names Insert Mid-Word stops using the apostrophes. Name alien\u0026rsquo;s utterly mundane names like \u0026ldquo;Jim.\u0026rdquo; ","title":"5 Conventions for Naming Characters in Sci-fi stories."},{"content":"Ok, so maybe this is a poorly titled entry, after all, at least theoretically we can smell stress. Perhaps my obscure allusion to \u0026ldquo;can\u0026rsquo;t you smell christmas\u0026rdquo; and the holiday season to the end of semester stress that is so typical to my life it seems is lost.\nActually it\u0026rsquo;s sort of weird. The school I\u0026rsquo;m at now, started a few weeks before my alma mater typically did (and does), so I\u0026rsquo;ve sort of been \u0026ldquo;off\u0026rdquo; rhythmically for a lot of the semester. It\u0026rsquo;s of course most profound now, when my body thinks there\u0026rsquo;s another two and a half/three weeks of classes, when there\u0026rsquo;s really just one and a half. And no Alliance wine and cheese party either!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s finally turning cold for real. I can wear sweaters without getting awkwardly hot midday when it unsuspectingly spikes from a low in the 30s to 65s. Insanity I tell you.\nI\u0026rsquo;m slowly writing new little blurbs to the new TealArt site, and I have an installation of the new CMS that works. Up next: more blurbs, and some design meshing. Nothing big, but it\u0026rsquo;ll probably take some time.\nI have two big papers (and two small ones) to write plus my statement of purpose. I have the core of the later done, but it still needs, as smurry so keenly pointed out, to have the soul sucked out of it. The small papers don\u0026rsquo;t worry me, and I\u0026rsquo;m choosing to view my bigger papers as re-workings of previous papers, though I think at least in one case, I\u0026rsquo;m so the only one who will see the connections. As it should be I suppose.\nKnitting continues abreast. I\u0026rsquo;m now 6 rounds (of 400 stitches) away from the underarm point on the Morocco sweater--I know I need to get newer pictures of this one up. This leaves me at a bit of a conundrum, with regards to how I\u0026rsquo;m going to proceed. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought for a number of weeks that I\u0026rsquo;d post a blog poll on the subject, but I think in the interim I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly made up my mind. So I\u0026rsquo;ll probably still ask for your opinion, but be warned that I might not listen.\nBecause moving onto the next stage will require some thinking only a few calculations, I suspect that much of my knitting between the end of the week and December 10th will consist of very simple projects, like hats and what not: I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I\u0026rsquo;ll have the brain energy for anything else.\nSpeaking of brain energy, I think I\u0026rsquo;m writing this on brain energy that\u0026rsquo;s already been allotted elsewhere, so I better run before an auditor comes along. Be well, and thanks for reading.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cant-you-smell-the-stress/","summary":"Ok, so maybe this is a poorly titled entry, after all, at least theoretically we can smell stress. Perhaps my obscure allusion to \u0026ldquo;can\u0026rsquo;t you smell christmas\u0026rdquo; and the holiday season to the end of semester stress that is so typical to my life it seems is lost.\nActually it\u0026rsquo;s sort of weird. The school I\u0026rsquo;m at now, started a few weeks before my alma mater typically did (and does), so I\u0026rsquo;ve sort of been \u0026ldquo;off\u0026rdquo; rhythmically for a lot of the semester. It\u0026rsquo;s of course most profound now, when my body thinks there\u0026rsquo;s another two and a half/three weeks of classes, when there\u0026rsquo;s really just one and a half. And no Alliance wine and cheese party either!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s finally turning cold for real. I can wear sweaters without getting awkwardly hot midday when it unsuspectingly spikes from a low in the 30s to 65s. Insanity I tell you.\nI\u0026rsquo;m slowly writing new little blurbs to the new TealArt site, and I have an installation of the new CMS that works.","title":"Can't you Smell the Stress"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another rambling \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s what I did today\u0026rdquo; post, lets see what comes out; but first a public service announcement. If you\u0026rsquo;ve tried to email me today using the tealart.com email address that I\u0026rsquo;ve used for years, I\u0026rsquo;ve had some problem with prompt delivery. This domain at gmail, seems pretty reliable, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure about this. If you\u0026rsquo;re trying to get a hold of me and I\u0026rsquo;m not answering your email, I\u0026rsquo;m not ignoring you.\nToday was a slow day in the yarn store. Swatch knitting transpired. I got to work with the Dream-in-Color \u0026ldquo;Smooshy\u0026rdquo; sock yarn, which is a great deal of fun. Another example of great/fun yarn that I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly likely to ever knit. I like heavier socks generally and for stranded sweaters you really can\u0026rsquo;t beat the shetland.\nI think the ticker is now at T-4 rows until the underarm point of this jacket that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. I\u0026rsquo;ve figured out how to set in the sleeves properly, I think, and I\u0026rsquo;ve worked through the shoulders enough times to feel, at least vaguely confident in myself, so I\u0026rsquo;m just going to go with it. Maybe this weekend if I have enough free time.\nNot that free time is very rich supply around here. Or, to be fair, as my title seems to communicate, \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; time when I have a brain, in which to work is pretty slim around here.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t written anything longhand in the notebook in a long time, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that this is a problem, but I don\u0026rsquo;t quite know how to go about getting this in order.\nDoing the knit-a-long for the sport sweater, is also something that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in working on, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t had a lot of time to get the infrastructure in place for that. I really want to \u0026ldquo;host it\u0026rdquo; using the new TealArt site, but that\u0026rsquo;s not done. I think, I\u0026rsquo;m just going to install a \u0026ldquo;fresh\u0026rdquo; version of Wordpress, because momentum is a powerful thing.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s where I am. Have a good evening folks, and if you see my brain somewhere, send please be a dear and send it back!\nOnward and upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/missing-one-brain-fair-condition/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another rambling \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s what I did today\u0026rdquo; post, lets see what comes out; but first a public service announcement. If you\u0026rsquo;ve tried to email me today using the tealart.com email address that I\u0026rsquo;ve used for years, I\u0026rsquo;ve had some problem with prompt delivery. This domain at gmail, seems pretty reliable, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure about this. If you\u0026rsquo;re trying to get a hold of me and I\u0026rsquo;m not answering your email, I\u0026rsquo;m not ignoring you.\nToday was a slow day in the yarn store. Swatch knitting transpired. I got to work with the Dream-in-Color \u0026ldquo;Smooshy\u0026rdquo; sock yarn, which is a great deal of fun. Another example of great/fun yarn that I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly likely to ever knit. I like heavier socks generally and for stranded sweaters you really can\u0026rsquo;t beat the shetland.\nI think the ticker is now at T-4 rows until the underarm point of this jacket that I\u0026rsquo;m working on.","title":"Missing: One Brain, Fair Condition."},{"content":"So, this is what I get for writing entries ahead of time. That was a TealArt practice that I need to let go of, I guess.\nThe last entry, which I posted just after midnight, was, stale before it even went live. I wrote it yesterday to describe my thoughts regarding the status of TealArt and tychoish, which as you can tell from the previous entry, I\u0026rsquo;ve felt for a while now, are at some sort of a crossroads. Something needed to change, and TealArt just wasn\u0026rsquo;t fun for me anymore, and wasn\u0026rsquo;t what I needed to be spending any time and energy on.\nSo so last night, I imported all my old archives from TealArt (chris' went to chris\u0026rsquo; new site) and basically everything is the way I want it.\nThere was a slight snafu that some of you are probably painfully aware of: I forgot to turn off my crossposting scripts so, most embarrassingly I sent out 300+ tweets in the span of about 10 minutes. The saddest thing is that I I couldn\u0026rsquo;t get it to stop for another ten (and I still had to revert to a backup and try it again anyway). Sorry for the confusion. Also, all of my tealart posts are now backlogged on live-journal, and will likely stay there henceforth. Some are probably double posted, but such is life, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really seem to care enough to go back and edit these things.\nAfter all that, I did realize that, even though I\u0026rsquo;m really keen on keeping the archives online, I really don\u0026rsquo;t want anyone to actually read these posts.\nAs for TealArt, moving forward, I\u0026rsquo;ve found a new CMS that I think will be perfect for the small, mostly static site that I hope to turn TealArt into in the next few weeks. I have a couple of projects--station keeping, some knitting patterns, maybe a podcast, maybe a science fiction collection, and so forth--that I think would be perfect for TealArt, but I think the structure of a blog, is something that won\u0026rsquo;t really fit the kind of projects that I would hope to work on here. So this new CMS, is a good move, I think. I\u0026rsquo;m not trying to be coy about my plans, I mostly don\u0026rsquo;t have any yet.\nAnyway, now that that\u0026rsquo;s out of the way, I think we\u0026rsquo;re ready to return to regularly scheduled programing around here.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tycho-garen-is-blogging/","summary":"So, this is what I get for writing entries ahead of time. That was a TealArt practice that I need to let go of, I guess.\nThe last entry, which I posted just after midnight, was, stale before it even went live. I wrote it yesterday to describe my thoughts regarding the status of TealArt and tychoish, which as you can tell from the previous entry, I\u0026rsquo;ve felt for a while now, are at some sort of a crossroads. Something needed to change, and TealArt just wasn\u0026rsquo;t fun for me anymore, and wasn\u0026rsquo;t what I needed to be spending any time and energy on.\nSo so last night, I imported all my old archives from TealArt (chris' went to chris\u0026rsquo; new site) and basically everything is the way I want it.\nThere was a slight snafu that some of you are probably painfully aware of: I forgot to turn off my crossposting scripts so, most embarrassingly I sent out 300+ tweets in the span of about 10 minutes.","title":"\ttycho garen is blogging"},{"content":"Since I spent some time last week upgrading and tweaking the tychoish.com design and back-end, I\u0026rsquo;ve been prone to thinking about my role/life as a blogger.\nIn late august and september, I did my little redesign of TealArt.com and put it on hiatus, because I liked what I was doing with tychoish, because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to write that site alone particularly when I wasn\u0026rsquo;t getting any sort of return, whatsoever. I thought I\u0026rsquo;d give the site till the end of the year, on hold and then see how I felt.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to, at some point, merge the sites back together, at least in the back-end (I think there\u0026rsquo;d be a way, with some very creative mySQL foo to do that without having it be excruciatingly apparent to the viewing public.) Initially, I wanted to pull tychoish into tealart, but now I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that the other way might be cleaner, and better looking forward. That\u0026rsquo;s a technical project that I don\u0026rsquo;t think we need to get into here.\nThe reason I\u0026rsquo;m considering merging the archives is that a site like tychoish is really the only kind of site that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in running by myself, alone, from a writing perspective. If it isn\u0026rsquo;t a tychoish post, I should probably try and find ways to post it elsewhere. Also, while tychoish is still slowly climbing to get to the traffic that TealArt had/has, it\u0026rsquo;s close and the traffic is \u0026ldquo;higher quality\u0026rdquo; (longer times on the site, lower bounce rates, etc.) So that seems to be a good way to do that.\nI mean I\u0026rsquo;m not going to stop using the tealart.com domain, probably ever, and I can think of a lot of cool projects that might be fun to run under the TealArt banner (knit alongs, station keeping season 2, a podcast type thing, and so forth), but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that I need a blog for that. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m still a ways off on this, but I think this is the direction that I\u0026rsquo;m headed in.\nThanks for listening.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tycho-garen-blogger/","summary":"Since I spent some time last week upgrading and tweaking the tychoish.com design and back-end, I\u0026rsquo;ve been prone to thinking about my role/life as a blogger.\nIn late august and september, I did my little redesign of TealArt.com and put it on hiatus, because I liked what I was doing with tychoish, because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to write that site alone particularly when I wasn\u0026rsquo;t getting any sort of return, whatsoever. I thought I\u0026rsquo;d give the site till the end of the year, on hold and then see how I felt.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to, at some point, merge the sites back together, at least in the back-end (I think there\u0026rsquo;d be a way, with some very creative mySQL foo to do that without having it be excruciatingly apparent to the viewing public.) Initially, I wanted to pull tychoish into tealart, but now I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that the other way might be cleaner, and better looking forward.","title":"\ttycho garen, blogger"},{"content":"1. Use the Tor Onion Router and/or public computers. 2. Use Pornomode.1 3. Understand the communities and functions of websites you\u0026rsquo;re using. 4. Develop an extensive knowledge of Boolean logic for google searching. 5. On the internet, no one knows your a dog: If you must give out personal details while stalking, lie as much as you can.\nThis is perhaps the funniest item on this list, but it\u0026rsquo;s dead serious. Most contemporary browsers have a \u0026ldquo;porn\u0026rdquo; mode where you can turn off all history logging/caching. Safari calls it \u0026ldquo;private mode,\u0026rdquo; you can call it what you want. It actually won\u0026rsquo;t help obscure your trail, but if you\u0026rsquo;re stalking someone on the internet, it only seems fair that you should act and feel like a guilty teenager while you\u0026rsquo;re doing it.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-ways-to-be-a-better-internet-stalker/","summary":"1. Use the Tor Onion Router and/or public computers. 2. Use Pornomode.1 3. Understand the communities and functions of websites you\u0026rsquo;re using. 4. Develop an extensive knowledge of Boolean logic for google searching. 5. On the internet, no one knows your a dog: If you must give out personal details while stalking, lie as much as you can.\nThis is perhaps the funniest item on this list, but it\u0026rsquo;s dead serious. Most contemporary browsers have a \u0026ldquo;porn\u0026rdquo; mode where you can turn off all history logging/caching. Safari calls it \u0026ldquo;private mode,\u0026rdquo; you can call it what you want. It actually won\u0026rsquo;t help obscure your trail, but if you\u0026rsquo;re stalking someone on the internet, it only seems fair that you should act and feel like a guilty teenager while you\u0026rsquo;re doing it.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;","title":"5 Ways to Be a Better Internet Stalker"},{"content":"So this entry is likely going to get me in trouble. Warning made.\nBackground: There\u0026rsquo;s a thread that\u0026rsquo;s now 100+ postings long on the queer group on Ravelry that debates the very old news website queer by choice. At the beginning of the thread I participated on the side of choice because: promoting agency is a good thing, because a insinuating that sexuality is a choice means that it becomes harder to deal with it as a pathology, because it lets queer be a flexible/mobile category that\u0026rsquo;s more inclusive. I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly ignored it.\nMore recently there\u0026rsquo;s been some coalescence in the thread that basically amounts to \u0026ldquo;you can choose your politics, but you can\u0026rsquo;t choose who you really are, dude.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich of course misunderstands the argument completely, and leaves us with, what amounts to a sort of strategic constructivism? Is that what we\u0026rsquo;d even call it? It\u0026rsquo;s pretty weird, at any rate.\nI\u0026rsquo;m trying to not get too into this stuff, as it is, in a sense \u0026ldquo;work stuff\u0026rdquo; so I don\u0026rsquo;t want to bore with the details, but, there\u0026rsquo;s a notion of \u0026ldquo;strategic essentialism,\u0026rdquo; in contemporary queer studies/identity, particularly around trans identities, mostly because its important to draw a line somewhere and throw up your hands in front of sophists and say \u0026ldquo;it might not be perfect, but lets just say that there\u0026rsquo;s something essential about gender, so we can proceed with a political action, or our lives.\u0026rdquo; I propose that what we\u0026rsquo;re seeing in this thread (and I suspect that this thread is not a particular anomaly,) is the opposite of this some how.\nThe problem is that the debate, in such circumstances degenerates into sophistry, which I never really like. Also, in the final analysis, I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to have some sort of understanding of a false consciousness, that we\u0026rsquo;re all enraptured by, when it comes to gender; so the dozens of people saying \u0026ldquo;Nah, I didn\u0026rsquo;t choose, you hippie,\u0026rdquo; are particularly infuriating. And I know how difficult it is to invoke false consciousness, but still people.\nAnyway, rant over, for now.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/queer-by-choice/","summary":"So this entry is likely going to get me in trouble. Warning made.\nBackground: There\u0026rsquo;s a thread that\u0026rsquo;s now 100+ postings long on the queer group on Ravelry that debates the very old news website queer by choice. At the beginning of the thread I participated on the side of choice because: promoting agency is a good thing, because a insinuating that sexuality is a choice means that it becomes harder to deal with it as a pathology, because it lets queer be a flexible/mobile category that\u0026rsquo;s more inclusive. I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly ignored it.\nMore recently there\u0026rsquo;s been some coalescence in the thread that basically amounts to \u0026ldquo;you can choose your politics, but you can\u0026rsquo;t choose who you really are, dude.\u0026rdquo;\nWhich of course misunderstands the argument completely, and leaves us with, what amounts to a sort of strategic constructivism? Is that what we\u0026rsquo;d even call it? It\u0026rsquo;s pretty weird, at any rate.","title":"\tQueer By Choice"},{"content":"Good Monday to you all!\nThe period of time between thanksgiving and the second week of January are designed to be a haze of sorts. Between the holiday morass that seems to have enveloped America, the traditional end of semester crunch, and my process of applying to graduate school, which is on going, it\u0026rsquo;s all ends up being a blur.\nMy goal for today is to make some headway on a paper that I think is due wednesday (it\u0026rsquo;s easy; a rant, that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while) and of course, write my statement of purpose for graduate school applications which needs to be good, so that I can send it out to a professor. It\u0026rsquo;s an important piece, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good that this statement is so important, at the same time it\u0026rsquo;s a hard document to write, and there are a lot of things that I have to balance: Interested and invested without looking jaded or to set in my ways, and I have to be excited by my prospective advisors research and still look like an individual, and so forth. Thankfully, my discipline isn\u0026rsquo;t known for it\u0026rsquo;s fine and delicate rhetoric, so that\u0026rsquo;s good, but it\u0026rsquo;s tough.\nSo in that spirit, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post a couple of little doodling that I came about over the last few days as I tried to think about getting a statement t a statement together. Nothing good, yet, but cool ideas, and half decent blog posts.\nSeems like a good day to post them. So, enjoy!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/academic-monday/","summary":"Good Monday to you all!\nThe period of time between thanksgiving and the second week of January are designed to be a haze of sorts. Between the holiday morass that seems to have enveloped America, the traditional end of semester crunch, and my process of applying to graduate school, which is on going, it\u0026rsquo;s all ends up being a blur.\nMy goal for today is to make some headway on a paper that I think is due wednesday (it\u0026rsquo;s easy; a rant, that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while) and of course, write my statement of purpose for graduate school applications which needs to be good, so that I can send it out to a professor. It\u0026rsquo;s an important piece, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good that this statement is so important, at the same time it\u0026rsquo;s a hard document to write, and there are a lot of things that I have to balance: Interested and invested without looking jaded or to set in my ways, and I have to be excited by my prospective advisors research and still look like an individual, and so forth.","title":"Academic Monday"},{"content":"Last year, when I was applying to graduate school, I spent a lot of energy looking for scholars who did work on the basic (as in basic science) phenomena that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in rather than scholars who did work in queer studies, and well, I\u0026rsquo;m applying for graduate school again, so I\u0026rsquo;ll let you decide how well that worked out.\nActually, there are a lot of reasons why I\u0026rsquo;m not in graduate school right now, some of which I think, with hindsight, I\u0026rsquo;d be able to fix, others were pretty unavoidable. But in any case, one of the things that added to my failure to get into graduate school was the fact that I was perpetually trying to convince prospective professors that it really did all fit together perfectly in the end.\nAs a result of this, and my desire to appear less scattered this time around I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about my project in terms of the very specific academic goals and less in terms of the cool things that make this subject personally interesting. The end result: I come off as really boring and stilted. Joy.\nI had a conversation a bit ago with a professor who was really interested in queer studies (as, it turns out, many of the people I\u0026rsquo;m interested in studying with this time around) and it caught me off guard to think that there was someone out there who saw this as the most interesting thing about me, not the least. I mean it\u0026rsquo;s pretty obvious, it just felt good.\nSometimes, in desperation, I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about switching to another field, because of the way that I\u0026rsquo;m so distant from my own, but sometimes I realize that even if I\u0026rsquo;m a little discontented, this is the stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m best at and when it \u0026ldquo;fits,\u0026rdquo; it really does fit.\nAnyway.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/queer-studies-in-development/","summary":"Last year, when I was applying to graduate school, I spent a lot of energy looking for scholars who did work on the basic (as in basic science) phenomena that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in rather than scholars who did work in queer studies, and well, I\u0026rsquo;m applying for graduate school again, so I\u0026rsquo;ll let you decide how well that worked out.\nActually, there are a lot of reasons why I\u0026rsquo;m not in graduate school right now, some of which I think, with hindsight, I\u0026rsquo;d be able to fix, others were pretty unavoidable. But in any case, one of the things that added to my failure to get into graduate school was the fact that I was perpetually trying to convince prospective professors that it really did all fit together perfectly in the end.\nAs a result of this, and my desire to appear less scattered this time around I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about my project in terms of the very specific academic goals and less in terms of the cool things that make this subject personally interesting.","title":"Queer Studies in Development"},{"content":" Flax Virgin Acrylic Corn Husks Dryer lint Steel Wool ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-things-you-should-never-spin-yarn-from/","summary":" Flax Virgin Acrylic Corn Husks Dryer lint Steel Wool ","title":"5 Things You Should Never Spin Yarn From"},{"content":"I finished the last lingering project from this summer on the Friday. I had started a number of sweaters in June so that I could have the right projects on the needles for camp. See, for camp they want you to be working on something small that you can try out all of the nifty things that they\u0026rsquo;re showing you. I, however, think making smaller sweaters is kinda dumb, because I am ornery like that.\nSo rather than have a baby sweater for camp, I decided to have, 3 me-sized sweaters in progress.\nUsually, the pace of a sweater sort of balances things out, and if you work on them successively rather than concurrently, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get bored. So making them all at the same time, was clearly a mistake that I won\u0026rsquo;t be repeating. It took me to thanksgiving to get all three sweaters from may and June finished up.\nThe good news, the green cardigan (my first venture with EZ\u0026rsquo;s seamless saddle shoulder shaping) seems to be an instant hit. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure it\u0026rsquo;s the best looking sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve made, or that it fits my father particularly well, but he seems to like it a bunch, and that\u0026rsquo;s what counts. It still needs to be blocked. And I have a couple of socks worth of yarn to cope with.\nAlso--and this is where the title of the post comes in--but I finished another pair of socks that rock socks (medium weight) that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dragging my feet on for a while. I think I started these in may as well alas. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a little black cap, as I am with out hats at the moment, and feeling like making a few hats, and I have little odds and ends of yarn that I need to knit up before I can more comfortably get more yarn.\nAlso, good news, my last real remaining spinning wheel has, I think found a buyer. Which means we\u0026rsquo;ll see how this goes, but, I think I might be able to buy the new wheel soon. I have a hank of yarn that is drying in the upstairs shower now (great place for setting twist!), and it\u0026rsquo;s quite nice. Quite nice. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what I\u0026rsquo;m going to do with it yet, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nAlso--third post-script paragraph, a new record perhaps?--I\u0026rsquo;m slowly getting the wheels started on selling a couple of my patterns and what not. I need to do some tweaking to the TealArt design, not to mention some more writing, before this is a reality, but it\u0026rsquo;s coming.\nAnyway, that\u0026rsquo;s all for now. Hope your long weekend has been long enough!\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/small-projects/","summary":"I finished the last lingering project from this summer on the Friday. I had started a number of sweaters in June so that I could have the right projects on the needles for camp. See, for camp they want you to be working on something small that you can try out all of the nifty things that they\u0026rsquo;re showing you. I, however, think making smaller sweaters is kinda dumb, because I am ornery like that.\nSo rather than have a baby sweater for camp, I decided to have, 3 me-sized sweaters in progress.\nUsually, the pace of a sweater sort of balances things out, and if you work on them successively rather than concurrently, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get bored. So making them all at the same time, was clearly a mistake that I won\u0026rsquo;t be repeating. It took me to thanksgiving to get all three sweaters from may and June finished up.","title":"Small Projects"},{"content":"So there\u0026rsquo;s this saying that floats around, and there might be science fiction lore that surrounds this, but it says, basically that every writer has about a million words of crap in them that they just have to get out. After you write the first million, the thought is that you\u0026rsquo;ve written a certain number of words, you\u0026rsquo;ve learned how to write, found your voice, learned what you\u0026rsquo;re interested in and gotten over your youth, which makes you prone to writing all manner of foolishness.\nNow it\u0026rsquo;s of course a rough estimate--your milage may vary--but I think being ok with the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m still learning, that it\u0026rsquo;s ok to not be perfect, because after, I\u0026rsquo;m still under my million words. If I\u0026rsquo;m still writing crap at 1,500,000 words I might get a little ticked, but where I am right now, it\u0026rsquo;s ok.\nI have an informal tally of my fiction writing at about 150k. I wrote a novel in high school that was 100k, I have this novella (32k), I have about 10k in station keeping, and about 20k in the the project that preceded station keeping, not to mention, a couple of assorted little projects that never panned out. It seems like a good number.\nI, on a whim, installed plugins that basically do a worcount on your wordpress (blog) postings and archives. In the past five years of TealArt, we have amassed a total of 269k words, 214k of which are mine. In four months of tychoish, I\u0026rsquo;ve written 69k words.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s time to readjust the crapo-meter a bit.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-million-words-of-crap/","summary":"So there\u0026rsquo;s this saying that floats around, and there might be science fiction lore that surrounds this, but it says, basically that every writer has about a million words of crap in them that they just have to get out. After you write the first million, the thought is that you\u0026rsquo;ve written a certain number of words, you\u0026rsquo;ve learned how to write, found your voice, learned what you\u0026rsquo;re interested in and gotten over your youth, which makes you prone to writing all manner of foolishness.\nNow it\u0026rsquo;s of course a rough estimate--your milage may vary--but I think being ok with the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m still learning, that it\u0026rsquo;s ok to not be perfect, because after, I\u0026rsquo;m still under my million words. If I\u0026rsquo;m still writing crap at 1,500,000 words I might get a little ticked, but where I am right now, it\u0026rsquo;s ok.\nI have an informal tally of my fiction writing at about 150k.","title":"A Million Words of Crap"},{"content":"I posted pictures yesterday of a sweater that I had just finished.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a jaunty little number, and I\u0026rsquo;m glad that I\u0026rsquo;ll have it in the pile, even if I do have to do a little bit of extreme blocking first. This is probably my best design to-date. Of course there are others that are good, certainly others that are more impressive feats of knitting engineering, but there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of other ones that look good as consistently, and regularly. It\u0026rsquo;s a good sweater, testified by the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve knit 3 versions of it by now, and am probably going to knit another version soon.\nThere are a couple of things that make this sweater so delightful to knit and wear. First it\u0026rsquo;s knit entirely in the round, so there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of thought involved, and while I certainly like complex projects, sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have something plain going on. Because it\u0026rsquo;s knit in the round there are a number of knitterly wisdom that\u0026rsquo;s incorporated into the design: gussets at the underarm, combined front and back neck shaping, a slit neck which regulates temperature for those in more hospitable climates, short rows that keep the back from riding up, and so forth. Secondly, as a design feature, the fact that the top of the shoulders and sleeves are a different color gives this sweater some of the appearance of having saddled sleeves, which ameliorates the problem of drop shoulders, and the problem of boring solid colored, without going crazy.\nI call it the sport sweater, mostly because I think that the split neck is kinda sport-like, and it emphasizes the fact that this is a casual, comfortable sweater, not a formal blouse or jacket-type sweater. I dunno, it seemed like the thing to call it. This sweater would be my submission into a book of \u0026ldquo;house sweaters,\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;ve thought of putting together for a while. I think it\u0026rsquo;d be cool to ask a bunch of designers to submit designs for the sweater that they find themselves reaching for when ever it gets a little drafty. I think we all have \u0026ldquo;that sweater,\u0026rdquo; and I think it\u0026rsquo;d be an interesting collection of \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; people sweaters (as opposed to most of the sweaters that make it in, say Vogue Knitting.)\nSo I wanted to post pictures of the other two sweaters in this series for reference, and because I finally have pictures of these sweaters.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the first iteration:\nand\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the remake version that I did two years ago, in attempt to get something that was a little bit more fitted, out of better yarn.\nand\nEnjoy. Working an unusual Saturday at the Yarn Store. Hoping I\u0026rsquo;m not too worn by the end of the day.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/other-sport-sweaters/","summary":"I posted pictures yesterday of a sweater that I had just finished.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a jaunty little number, and I\u0026rsquo;m glad that I\u0026rsquo;ll have it in the pile, even if I do have to do a little bit of extreme blocking first. This is probably my best design to-date. Of course there are others that are good, certainly others that are more impressive feats of knitting engineering, but there aren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of other ones that look good as consistently, and regularly. It\u0026rsquo;s a good sweater, testified by the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve knit 3 versions of it by now, and am probably going to knit another version soon.\nThere are a couple of things that make this sweater so delightful to knit and wear. First it\u0026rsquo;s knit entirely in the round, so there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of thought involved, and while I certainly like complex projects, sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have something plain going on.","title":"Other Sport Sweaters"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s black friday and while I\u0026rsquo;m not hopping or anything like that. I have gotten some things done that I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share with you. So I think a good old fashion list was in order:\nI did some updating to the tychoish.com theme. There\u0026rsquo;s now a tag cloud and tag support in the theme. I like how this is working. I don\u0026rsquo;t want the site to look too much like \u0026ldquo;yet another WordPress\u0026rdquo; blog, but it works, and I like the look of the site. I took a lot of pictures of knitted things today, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting pictures of these projects here and on raverly as this proceeds. I finished the first chapter of the novel, or at least a good first attempt at said. My current novel-related project it to work out more clearly how I\u0026rsquo;m going to procede. It\u0026rsquo;s steeping for the moment I was talking with dave last night about cool blogging things, and it inspired me to work on Station Keeping again. I have done the necessary editing to the file for the season one recap, so it all works great. I also wrote the first third or so of the next episode for Season 2. I think this beginning of January start date might be real. I forgot to take pictures of my current knitting. Oops, I\u0026rsquo;ll have to fix that. I finished a sleeve yesterday. I\u0026rsquo;m chugging along on the second and my last sleeve of this sweater. When it\u0026rsquo;s done, I feel like I should be able to cast on another sweater. ;) Here\u0026rsquo;s the picture of my red sport sweater that I (also) blocked right after dinner yesterday:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s big. Really big. I\u0026rsquo;m going to felt it, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided, because it\u0026rsquo;s too big length wise in every direction, and pretty good width wise. Some concern about the sleeves (of course), but it\u0026rsquo;s sort of silly looking, and I think a little bit of fulling will add some much needed stability.\nI wanted to get before pictures of it in any case. The first sweater that I made in this style (I got pictures of it, don\u0026rsquo;t worry) is also fueled for much the same reason, so I\u0026rsquo;m not concerned.\nAnyway, There you have it. Have a good day not shopping hopefully. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go do something utterly lazy.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/black-friday-list/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s black friday and while I\u0026rsquo;m not hopping or anything like that. I have gotten some things done that I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share with you. So I think a good old fashion list was in order:\nI did some updating to the tychoish.com theme. There\u0026rsquo;s now a tag cloud and tag support in the theme. I like how this is working. I don\u0026rsquo;t want the site to look too much like \u0026ldquo;yet another WordPress\u0026rdquo; blog, but it works, and I like the look of the site. I took a lot of pictures of knitted things today, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting pictures of these projects here and on raverly as this proceeds. I finished the first chapter of the novel, or at least a good first attempt at said. My current novel-related project it to work out more clearly how I\u0026rsquo;m going to procede. It\u0026rsquo;s steeping for the moment I was talking with dave last night about cool blogging things, and it inspired me to work on Station Keeping again.","title":"Black Friday List"},{"content":" Honeycomb Meaty Cable Twist Twisted Backwords Loop Brioche Mock Ribs ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/five-knit-stitches-you-dont-want-to-eat/","summary":" Honeycomb Meaty Cable Twist Twisted Backwords Loop Brioche Mock Ribs ","title":"Five Knit Stitches you don't want to Eat"},{"content":"So, Christina, wrote a comment (thanks christina!) regarding my little tirade on NaNoWriMo, that basically said, the project might allow (if I\u0026rsquo;m reading this right) for non or new writers to get a more clear understanding about what \u0026ldquo;being a writer\u0026rdquo; is, and maybe make it more accessible. But you can read the comment in more depth here.\nI replied (as I do try to do to many comments), and when I was done I found that I had basically written another blog post on the subject, and I think it moves the conversation around, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to post it. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in what you all think, though I suspect that the NaNo-ers are deep in trenched in their novels, and the remainder probably don\u0026rsquo;t care all that much. Anyway, here\u0026rsquo;s my little response:\nI really don\u0026rsquo;t have anything against NaNo, and think it\u0026rsquo;s a goods project. For many years now, I\u0026rsquo;ve been the leader of a small science fiction writers list on yahoogroups, and there\u0026rsquo;s a way in which these folks who very much want to be writers, are sometimes afraid of plowing through a novel, so having a project like NaNo makes a lot of sense, and can sort of light the right kind of fire under peoples asses. So it\u0026rsquo;s a great project for people who already write a lot, who haven\u0026rsquo;t made the jump to novel writing, but maybe have always wanted to.\nIn this respect, I think the NaSweKniMo (national sweater knitting month, which is the brain child of Shannon. Okey (I think), is a great project in the best sprit of NaNoWriMo. then again, I think sweater knitting leaves you less prone for burnout than novel writing, but maybe that\u0026rsquo;s just me.\nAnd maybe this is the price of success for NaNoWriMo, but in the past couple of years, there are people who do NaNo because it\u0026rsquo;s some cool social bonding ritual. There are write-ins, there are support groups, and it\u0026rsquo;s all focused on the word count. Which really so not what writing is about, at least to me. Writing is so often a solitary practice that means neglected social ties, nights of insomnia when you can\u0026rsquo;t get a story out of your mind, haggard pushes to deadlines, and a lot of time sitting around having arguments with yourself while scribing unintelligible notes on things that weren\u0026rsquo;t meant to be written on.\nI think that while this invokes a nativist-type epistemology that I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely comfortable with, it\u0026rsquo;s true: writers write, not because they want to, but because they can\u0026rsquo;t not write. I took several years off of fiction writing (the past four, or so,) but in that time managed to amass 200,000 words of writing for my blog, plus tons of stuff for classes, and I\u0026rsquo;m a better writer for it, so I think that still counts.\nAnyway, there you have it\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/no-nano-follow-up/","summary":"So, Christina, wrote a comment (thanks christina!) regarding my little tirade on NaNoWriMo, that basically said, the project might allow (if I\u0026rsquo;m reading this right) for non or new writers to get a more clear understanding about what \u0026ldquo;being a writer\u0026rdquo; is, and maybe make it more accessible. But you can read the comment in more depth here.\nI replied (as I do try to do to many comments), and when I was done I found that I had basically written another blog post on the subject, and I think it moves the conversation around, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to post it. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in what you all think, though I suspect that the NaNo-ers are deep in trenched in their novels, and the remainder probably don\u0026rsquo;t care all that much. Anyway, here\u0026rsquo;s my little response:\nI really don\u0026rsquo;t have anything against NaNo, and think it\u0026rsquo;s a goods project. For many years now, I\u0026rsquo;ve been the leader of a small science fiction writers list on yahoogroups, and there\u0026rsquo;s a way in which these folks who very much want to be writers, are sometimes afraid of plowing through a novel, so having a project like NaNo makes a lot of sense, and can sort of light the right kind of fire under peoples asses.","title":"No NaNo Follow Up"},{"content":"I write science fiction, and truth be told, and I think the space opera form has life in it yet. While my last story was set on Mars and didn\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of interplanetary travel, this project does. Mostly because I want to cover a long period of time in the stories that I\u0026rsquo;m writing now, so that we can see characters relate to histories. So I have characters on space ships.\nOne thing that I have yet to do, is create some sort of FTL (faster-than-light) construct in the stories, and while I\u0026rsquo;m not hyper vigilant about making sure that planets are actually going to be where they are in relation to each other when I say they are, I\u0026rsquo;ve built transit times into my plots and stuff like that, so that there\u0026rsquo;s at least some sense of a \u0026ldquo;price\u0026rdquo; for technologies that seem too good to be true. And I think in some ways this connects to some sort of notion of constrained creativity and particularly in fiction this is what makes stories interesting\nSo, in pursuit of making this work I occasionally find myself looking up orbital mechanics and interplanetary transit systems, to figure out how to get ships and planets to be in roughly the same place at the same time. There\u0026rsquo;s only a little bit of this, in the current book thankfully: most of the story takes place on ships bound out of the solar system and on Titan, Saturn\u0026rsquo;s largest moon. But at the moment I\u0026rsquo;m following a ship that\u0026rsquo;s making it\u0026rsquo;s way to Titan, with a brief detour to Mars. So I once again find myself trying to figure out Martian orbital dynamics and distances. Sigh.\nThis website about Martian Orbits is quite helpful.\nAlso, for those of you playing along at home, I think--think here--that an object that was .25 of a martian year behind mars in orbit would be about 17 light minutes away from Mars. This is between Mars and the L4 (or 5 if mars is ahead) Lagrarian points, which are, despite being farther away only 12 minutes away. (.25 of a year, is 45 degrees ahead/behind mars, the L4/5 points are 60 degrees ahead/behind. I\u0026rsquo;m figuring that the Mars Orbit, at 1.5 AU, to Earths 1 AU has a radius of 12 light minutes, or 134123326 miles.)\nThis ignores the fact that the orbits are all elliptical, and the effect of gravity on light/radio waves, which exists, surely, but not I think to a degree great enough to affect the truthfulness of a character that says \u0026ldquo;The message is about 20 minutes old.\u0026rdquo;\nI wonder if you can get a job doing something with rudimentary orbital mechanics with an undergraduate degree in psychology and no college level math. Sigh. Guess I better stick to writing.\nHope your turkey preparations are going well.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mars-orbit/","summary":"I write science fiction, and truth be told, and I think the space opera form has life in it yet. While my last story was set on Mars and didn\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of interplanetary travel, this project does. Mostly because I want to cover a long period of time in the stories that I\u0026rsquo;m writing now, so that we can see characters relate to histories. So I have characters on space ships.\nOne thing that I have yet to do, is create some sort of FTL (faster-than-light) construct in the stories, and while I\u0026rsquo;m not hyper vigilant about making sure that planets are actually going to be where they are in relation to each other when I say they are, I\u0026rsquo;ve built transit times into my plots and stuff like that, so that there\u0026rsquo;s at least some sense of a \u0026ldquo;price\u0026rdquo; for technologies that seem too good to be true.","title":"Mars Orbit"},{"content":"So today is a writing day, because, I say so. Though given how closely the 10th of December is coming (and my first graduate application due date), I will admit and allow that I might not get to spend the whole day writing what I want to write.\nThis is something worth being thankful for, I think. In honor of this, I\u0026rsquo;ll have good content up here that\u0026rsquo;s writing related, today I think. There should be enough stuff running through my head to keep us both entertained.\nI\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of writing a pretty quick scene that leads directly into the main story of the next chapter or so. My very modest goal is to finish this chapter and get a start on the second chapter. I\u0026rsquo;d also like to start on my statement for grad school: this is the hardest part, and I need to just suck it up and write it. Alas.\nIn terms of knitting, I think I\u0026rsquo;m basically to the cuff of one of the sleeves, and it\u0026rsquo;s been under a week since I started it, so that means, likely in about a week, I\u0026rsquo;m going to have no (0) sleeves to knit. Amazing really.\nI/we don\u0026rsquo;t have thanksgiving plans, it\u0026rsquo;s a nice long weekend but, my general response is pretty \u0026ldquo;meh\u0026rdquo; to the whole ordeal. The last two years R. and I, being the last people left on campus, went out for Indian food, which in retrospect sounds like a confused gesture of resistance but I assure it was just rather nice. This year, I think we\u0026rsquo;re going to have fish.\nSounds pretty good to me. Just saying.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/thanksgiving/","summary":"So today is a writing day, because, I say so. Though given how closely the 10th of December is coming (and my first graduate application due date), I will admit and allow that I might not get to spend the whole day writing what I want to write.\nThis is something worth being thankful for, I think. In honor of this, I\u0026rsquo;ll have good content up here that\u0026rsquo;s writing related, today I think. There should be enough stuff running through my head to keep us both entertained.\nI\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of writing a pretty quick scene that leads directly into the main story of the next chapter or so. My very modest goal is to finish this chapter and get a start on the second chapter. I\u0026rsquo;d also like to start on my statement for grad school: this is the hardest part, and I need to just suck it up and write it.","title":"Thanksgiving"},{"content":"1. Come on, a hobby that you need both hands for that you don\u0026rsquo;t need to look at? Foul! 2. What\u0026rsquo;s with the sharp sticks in the cat toy? 3. __________. 4. That\u0026rsquo;s a poor replacement for fur. 5. Finally, we have something in common.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-things-your-cat-thinks-about-your-knitting/","summary":"1. Come on, a hobby that you need both hands for that you don\u0026rsquo;t need to look at? Foul! 2. What\u0026rsquo;s with the sharp sticks in the cat toy? 3. __________. 4. That\u0026rsquo;s a poor replacement for fur. 5. Finally, we have something in common.","title":"5 things your cat thinks about your knitting."},{"content":"I think the hardest time to be a wannabe writer is November. But, you ask, November is when `NaNoWriMo \u0026lt;http://www.nanowrimo.org/\u0026gt;`_ is, isn\u0026rsquo;t that the best time to be a wannabe writer? Well maybe, and I think NaNo is a great project that is I think a really great thing, lets not misunderstand this comment, but it\u0026rsquo;s a really bad way to write a novel, particularly a first or second novel.\nNovels take time, novels are complex, and even if you can pound out 50k words in a month, you still have to edit those words, and while there\u0026rsquo;s a lot to be said for getting peoples asses in chairs to write, I think we do a better service to writers by creating support/structures/etc. around getting people into their chairs and writing, consistently for the other 11 months.\nAlso, pacing is a big part of my issue with NaNo, it is surely possible to write too much, and wear yourself out to the point that it takes a few days to recover. I think this probably has to do with the fact that many of us do a lot of pre-writing by rehearsal that we don\u0026rsquo;t realize, and if you write too much without giving your brain time to think, you have to replenish the reserves. So while you can push yourself for a day or a few days in the end progress is probably more steady. I suspect this goes for all sorts of things, in addition to fiction writing.\nSo, I\u0026rsquo;m not doing NaNo, but I am writing. And that\u0026rsquo;s good enough for me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/no-na-no-wri-mo/","summary":"I think the hardest time to be a wannabe writer is November. But, you ask, November is when `NaNoWriMo \u0026lt;http://www.nanowrimo.org/\u0026gt;`_ is, isn\u0026rsquo;t that the best time to be a wannabe writer? Well maybe, and I think NaNo is a great project that is I think a really great thing, lets not misunderstand this comment, but it\u0026rsquo;s a really bad way to write a novel, particularly a first or second novel.\nNovels take time, novels are complex, and even if you can pound out 50k words in a month, you still have to edit those words, and while there\u0026rsquo;s a lot to be said for getting peoples asses in chairs to write, I think we do a better service to writers by creating support/structures/etc. around getting people into their chairs and writing, consistently for the other 11 months.\nAlso, pacing is a big part of my issue with NaNo, it is surely possible to write too much, and wear yourself out to the point that it takes a few days to recover.","title":"no na-no-wri-mo"},{"content":" You really don\u0026rsquo;t like ubuntu. You think beige is the new black. You don\u0026rsquo;t have the balls for FreeBSD. You don\u0026rsquo;t have any concept of the value of your own time. You miss your 286\u0026rsquo;s boot disks. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/five-reasons-to-build-a-hackintosh/","summary":" You really don\u0026rsquo;t like ubuntu. You think beige is the new black. You don\u0026rsquo;t have the balls for FreeBSD. You don\u0026rsquo;t have any concept of the value of your own time. You miss your 286\u0026rsquo;s boot disks. ","title":"Five Reasons to Build a Hackintosh"},{"content":"Dear (Provider of Academic Article Databases),\nArticle databases are really one of the best things that has happened to academic research in the last, ten or fifteen years. It makes accessing research painless and efficient, and the more available research is, the more valuable it is. I don\u0026rsquo;t think anyone will disagree with this assertion.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how it works today, as best I can understand it. (Note this is a fairly psychology centric perspective.):\nThere are two classes of journals: those published by the APA and it\u0026rsquo;s partners and those published by for-profit academic presses like Springer and Klewer. The former are the big masthead journals and there are about 30 of them (Developmental Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, etc,) I suspect this is true of many disciplines: universities and professional organizations publish a number of journals (In Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies, Signs and differences, are published by Chicago and Hopkins respectively). Anyway, and then there are smaller for profit journals which tend to be less prestigious but can cater to specific niches and sub-fields. These journals are the ones that Google Scholar picks up on and they don\u0026rsquo;t tend to be archived in the same way that the NFP journals are.\nOk, background, stated. Generally what happens is that the professional organizations or universities create databases (APA and Psych Artcles; AAA, AnthroSource; Hopkins and Project Muse, for instance.) that index all the abstracts and sometimes full text are then licensee the database to a provider (CSA and Ebsco are two examples of this). Some of these databases contain FP journals, many do not. In humanities disciplines, all this content ends up in jstor after a few years anyway.\nSo it\u0026rsquo;s incredibly fragmented and the databases, are, to my mind, sort of poorly organized. The metadata is sort of weak, and the searches are straight boolean, so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t learn, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t see connections between what you search for and what you find is what you find, it\u0026rsquo;s very rigid, and very much not the way, we do things on the internet these days.\nNow I don\u0026rsquo;t need fancy ajax crap, lord knows, and frankly, I think some sort of desktop interface for the database, might be really quite effective and be really helpful for people who are actually doing research.\nSo I guess my suggestions to academic database providers--because this is a letter after all ;)--are as follows:\n1. Allow some sort of adaptive meta-data, potentially with some sort of user generated tagging system 2. Integrate/mashup content from multiple 3. Create some sort of more adaptive search capacity that has learning/adaptive algorithms. 4. Have better offline content. 5. Have better BibTeX support (because if you\u0026rsquo;re asking\u0026hellip;). 6. Perhaps a little ajax so that it it can do some predictive caching and the web pages work a little faster. 7. Allow me to paraphrase a lolcat for this: Y it so ugggglry, can has purrrty intarfaces now pls? Because why not.\nIn any case, It\u0026rsquo;d be nice, but I\u0026rsquo;m not holding my breath.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-letter-to-academic-database-providers/","summary":"Dear (Provider of Academic Article Databases),\nArticle databases are really one of the best things that has happened to academic research in the last, ten or fifteen years. It makes accessing research painless and efficient, and the more available research is, the more valuable it is. I don\u0026rsquo;t think anyone will disagree with this assertion.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how it works today, as best I can understand it. (Note this is a fairly psychology centric perspective.):\nThere are two classes of journals: those published by the APA and it\u0026rsquo;s partners and those published by for-profit academic presses like Springer and Klewer. The former are the big masthead journals and there are about 30 of them (Developmental Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, etc,) I suspect this is true of many disciplines: universities and professional organizations publish a number of journals (In Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies, Signs and differences, are published by Chicago and Hopkins respectively).","title":"Open Letter to Academic Database Providers"},{"content":"Though you probably won\u0026rsquo;t notice it I upgraded the software that runs this blog last night, as part of my perverse geeky mission of this past sunday, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally ironed out all of the kinks. The only evidence of this is the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve removed categories from the sidebar, largely because they don\u0026rsquo;t exist anymore. Wordpress\u0026rsquo; latest coup is that they have baked in support for tagging, which will let categories become a more useful tool. (Though I know why this is the case, I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you because the background on database queries isn\u0026rsquo;t something I think myself completely capable of.) All in all, its pretty minor, but I\u0026rsquo;m pleased.\nIn other news, I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve also gotten out of a little funk that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in for the past month or so, in terms of writing and other things. I probably just needed a little closure on the novella, to be done with the GRE, and some time to decompress, but doing the streamlining work that I did regarding how I organize and manage my projects on my computer probably helped jump-start things.\nI finished a scene yesterday in the novel, I\u0026rsquo;m at the 4k word park, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been actively working on the draft of this project for a hair over a month. So I guess my guideline of a thousand words per week holds true, even if I know for damn sure that I didn\u0026rsquo;t write a thousand words each of the last four weeks. My only other real observation at this point is that though I\u0026rsquo;ve outlined this whole thing out, and I know what the pacing is supposed to be like and all that, I\u0026rsquo;m being very\u0026hellip; impressionistic about the beginning. It\u0026rsquo;ll will work out, particularly since I\u0026rsquo;ve started writing on it again. My current goal that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably surpass is to have 5,000 words done by the time november (and NaNoWriMo) is over. That\u0026rsquo;s by my count 10% of the NaNo goal, and that\u0026rsquo;s fine by me: there will be nano\u0026rsquo; thoughts forthcoming in the next few days, I promise.\nAnyway\u0026hellip;\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/upgrades-and-funks/","summary":"Though you probably won\u0026rsquo;t notice it I upgraded the software that runs this blog last night, as part of my perverse geeky mission of this past sunday, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally ironed out all of the kinks. The only evidence of this is the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve removed categories from the sidebar, largely because they don\u0026rsquo;t exist anymore. Wordpress\u0026rsquo; latest coup is that they have baked in support for tagging, which will let categories become a more useful tool. (Though I know why this is the case, I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you because the background on database queries isn\u0026rsquo;t something I think myself completely capable of.) All in all, its pretty minor, but I\u0026rsquo;m pleased.\nIn other news, I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve also gotten out of a little funk that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in for the past month or so, in terms of writing and other things. I probably just needed a little closure on the novella, to be done with the GRE, and some time to decompress, but doing the streamlining work that I did regarding how I organize and manage my projects on my computer probably helped jump-start things.","title":"upgrades and funks"},{"content":" Podcast. Encrypt your Roommates hard drive. Read the Newspaper. Update your Facebook Profile. Play World of Warcraft. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-things-you-can-do-in-emacs-that-you-really-shouldnt/","summary":" Podcast. Encrypt your Roommates hard drive. Read the Newspaper. Update your Facebook Profile. Play World of Warcraft. ","title":"5 things you can do in emacs that you really shouldn't."},{"content":"One of the side benefits of finishing the novella edit effort this weekend was that it meant that I could now restart my computer without fear. (There was a file open that I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to loose my place in, a minor thing, but none the less).\nNow to the windows users out there, this might seem a bit odd, by I probably hadn\u0026rsquo;t rebooted Zoe--that\u0026rsquo;s the computer for those of you playing along at home--in at least a month, and maybe more like two or three. And I\u0026rsquo;m not even using the newest and bestest version of the operating system! But anyway\u0026hellip;\nI can tell that a new computer isn\u0026rsquo;t, in the grand scheme of things, that far off. Zoe is great, except that there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of stuff that I don\u0026rsquo;t do because Zoe doesn\u0026rsquo;t have the power to handle. Like pod-casting and any sort of video editing; and frankly image editing is something that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do as little of as possible, because it\u0026rsquo;s a bit of a strain. Although I have R.app, the open source SAS/statstics package, and even an old version of SPSS, I really can\u0026rsquo;t fathom a situation where I would want to run such a program for more than a moment or two. And though I would open Excel if I needed it, I\u0026rsquo;m trying not to need it.\nAnyway, so a new computer is something that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about. Because of my leading comment, we can imagine that I\u0026rsquo;m probably not likely to stop using a mac, and frankly I really love these laptops. But after 2 and a half years with a 15 inch pro-level computer, I\u0026rsquo;m not seeing the great benefit to going with the bigger machine this time around. As near as I can tell the Pro-line has: nicer screens (not just bigger ones, but nicer ones), a card slot which I\u0026rsquo;ve never used on my present computer (though, with EV-DO becoming cheaper/more available, it\u0026rsquo;s something to consider), a slightly faster processor (but not considerably), firewrire 800 (something I do actually use), better graphics (but again, sometimes I watch DVDs and youtube, I don\u0026rsquo;t need power graphics). In contrast the consumer line has: a better (but less familiar) keyboard, a cooler closure, it\u0026rsquo;s smaller and lighter, it\u0026rsquo;s a thousand dollars cheeper. The only thing I\u0026rsquo;d miss is the firewire 800, which isn\u0026rsquo;t really so big of a loss.\nThis leads me to the other computer related thought that I\u0026rsquo;ve had recently: There are a bunch of tasks that I do with my computer which, are by normal standards, insane. I run a bit torrent client, my subversion repository is locally hosted (I have a backup repo, never fear), I organize and manage a small herd of hard drives, also doing production work (image/video/sound), even web design work on a laptop, is kind of crazy. Buying a Mac desktop is really out of the question, but I\u0026rsquo;ve figured that a Ubuntu/Linux could probably do a pretty good job with this. I priced one of the Dell Ubuntu boxes for about 500, which seems really quite good by my standards. Not counting a monitor, but this is the kind of box that probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t get a lot of direct use: I\u0026rsquo;d probably just ssh/telnet in and mount the drives over the network. If it were stuck doing all the things that the laptop couldn\u0026rsquo;t/shouldn\u0026rsquo;t deal with, I think I\u0026rsquo;d be a happier camper. And, you\u0026rsquo;re (I\u0026rsquo;m) still under the price of the pro-level desktop.\nAnyway, that\u0026rsquo;s enough for me.\nOnward and Upword!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/computer-troubles/","summary":"One of the side benefits of finishing the novella edit effort this weekend was that it meant that I could now restart my computer without fear. (There was a file open that I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to loose my place in, a minor thing, but none the less).\nNow to the windows users out there, this might seem a bit odd, by I probably hadn\u0026rsquo;t rebooted Zoe--that\u0026rsquo;s the computer for those of you playing along at home--in at least a month, and maybe more like two or three. And I\u0026rsquo;m not even using the newest and bestest version of the operating system! But anyway\u0026hellip;\nI can tell that a new computer isn\u0026rsquo;t, in the grand scheme of things, that far off. Zoe is great, except that there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of stuff that I don\u0026rsquo;t do because Zoe doesn\u0026rsquo;t have the power to handle. Like pod-casting and any sort of video editing; and frankly image editing is something that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do as little of as possible, because it\u0026rsquo;s a bit of a strain.","title":"Computer Troubles(?)"},{"content":"I guess I didn\u0026rsquo;t have time to mention this the other day, but I finished reading Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. It was great, and I quite liked the way that it wrapped up.\nI posted earlier about how I had the perpetual feeling of not getting the story, but I think it totally worked out, and I will totally accept that I was pretty scatter brained while I was reading the book, and it took me too long, so it\u0026rsquo;s probably my fault. I enjoyed it none the less, and while I\u0026rsquo;m not going to start reading it for a second time (or frankly, reading \u0026ldquo;Empire Star,\u0026rdquo; the accompanying novella) quite yet, I will re-read this.\nFrom here, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time with the short story collection that I bought a while back. I\u0026rsquo;m usually not one for short stories, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important that I at least try. That sounds like the beginning of a doomed project, and perhaps it is. However:\n1. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to avoid starting to read a novel because I want to read this. 2. I don\u0026rsquo;t plan to read it sequentially. 3. I\u0026rsquo;m actually quite interested in most of these authors and their work, so I hope that curiosity is worth something.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/babel-18/","summary":"I guess I didn\u0026rsquo;t have time to mention this the other day, but I finished reading Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. It was great, and I quite liked the way that it wrapped up.\nI posted earlier about how I had the perpetual feeling of not getting the story, but I think it totally worked out, and I will totally accept that I was pretty scatter brained while I was reading the book, and it took me too long, so it\u0026rsquo;s probably my fault. I enjoyed it none the less, and while I\u0026rsquo;m not going to start reading it for a second time (or frankly, reading \u0026ldquo;Empire Star,\u0026rdquo; the accompanying novella) quite yet, I will re-read this.\nFrom here, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time with the short story collection that I bought a while back. I\u0026rsquo;m usually not one for short stories, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important that I at least try.","title":"Babel-18"},{"content":" Clapotis Jaywalker Socks Twinkle Sweaters Fingerless Gloves Novelty Yarn (In Fairness, my complaint about fingerless gloves is not that I don\u0026rsquo;t think they\u0026rsquo;re useful, just that I cannot imagine having the tolerance to make gloves and then not finish the fingers. In this case, it\u0026rsquo;s about the process not the product.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/five-knitting-memes-that-i-still-dont-get/","summary":"Clapotis Jaywalker Socks Twinkle Sweaters Fingerless Gloves Novelty Yarn (In Fairness, my complaint about fingerless gloves is not that I don\u0026rsquo;t think they\u0026rsquo;re useful, just that I cannot imagine having the tolerance to make gloves and then not finish the fingers. In this case, it\u0026rsquo;s about the process not the product.)","title":"Five Knitting Memes That I Still Don't Get"},{"content":"tycho: hey `andy \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/anduril\u0026gt;`_: sup tycho: not much andy: fun stuff andy: bought a 320Gb external seagate and trying to get all my mp3s transferred but its not cooperating tycho: :( tycho: I am downloading xcode tools so I can get mac ports to work so that I can upgrade ruby so that I can blog from textmate tycho: also, I was about an inch away from upgrading the tychoish wordpress, but cyberducky crashed, so I stopped\nPause.\ntycho: \u0026hellip; silence\u0026hellip; andy: lol\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/geek-speak/","summary":"tycho: hey `andy \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/anduril\u0026gt;`_: sup tycho: not much andy: fun stuff andy: bought a 320Gb external seagate and trying to get all my mp3s transferred but its not cooperating tycho: :( tycho: I am downloading xcode tools so I can get mac ports to work so that I can upgrade ruby so that I can blog from textmate tycho: also, I was about an inch away from upgrading the tychoish wordpress, but cyberducky crashed, so I stopped\nPause.\ntycho: \u0026hellip; silence\u0026hellip; andy: lol","title":"Geek Speak"},{"content":"And now for a comedic interlude.\nI love the drawing nonsensical graphs on index card meme. It needs to come back. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go look for for more.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bad-index-card-joke/","summary":"And now for a comedic interlude.\nI love the drawing nonsensical graphs on index card meme. It needs to come back. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go look for for more.","title":"Bad Index Card Joke"},{"content":"You heard it here first, with apologies to Merlin Mann.\nSeven of Nine Captain Jack Harkness Billy Keikeya Gabrielle, Warrior Princess II Ensign Ro Laren ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/five-characters-that-arent-the-last-cylon-on-bsg/","summary":"You heard it here first, with apologies to Merlin Mann.\nSeven of Nine Captain Jack Harkness Billy Keikeya Gabrielle, Warrior Princess II Ensign Ro Laren ","title":"Five Characters that Aren't the Last Cylon on BSG"},{"content":"Today is the first day that I\u0026rsquo;ve had in a long time without the GRE hanging over my head. Sure I have a lot to do, and that is daunting, but it\u0026rsquo;s not oppressive in the same way. I\u0026rsquo;m not claiming that this calm I feel is particularly real but things have lined up in the right way to give me a few days off\u0026hellip;\nLast night I finished reading the Samuel Delany book that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for, far too long. I have a pile of other things to read now, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and dive in to a short story collection and see how long it takes me to get fed up with that.\nHandspun News: In other news I finished spinning my fiber stash. Which may sound impressive, but I basically worked through everything that I had that I was going to spin two summers ago (I must confess to abandoning a pound of soy silk to R.\u0026rsquo;s much more impressive fiber stash.) And then I bought a mere 6 ounces of fiber (tencel merino none the less), which constituted my stash. Actually as I think about it, there\u0026rsquo;s a sweater out of my handspun that I\u0026rsquo;m making very slowly, that has some fiber in the project bag for when I run out of yarn again: so maybe I\u0026rsquo;m not quite completely out of handspun.\nAnyway, this morning I finished plying the last of this 6 ounces of tencel/merino that constituted the bulk of my fiber stash for most of the last year. I think the total yardage was in the end 415 yards. I have no clue what I\u0026rsquo;d do with it, yet.\nThis leaves me planning for my next spinning adventure. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of buying some white roving and spinning it up, and then finding someone (you know who you are! don\u0026rsquo;t worry, if this is in fact a real plan, it\u0026rsquo;s a long way off. Many moons.) to dye it in exchange for some percentage.\nThis last spinning accomplishment raises the precepts that I could conceivably--in the not too distant future--spin yarn for my own knitting, and not just a pair of socks, or a hat, or even the occasional bulky sweater that takes years and that I\u0026rsquo;m constantly avoiding, but the kind of two-color sweaters that are my normal fare. The questions is, do I really want to do that?\nYou all can feel free to answer that, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really feel like I\u0026rsquo;m making sweaters that just need to be made out of handspun, and I think it might even be easier to relax if I were knitting with yarn that I knew I could always just buy another skein of at work/a LYS/webs if it ever came to that. And given that, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that selling or giving away my handspun is really the way to go. We\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nOh, and there is a movement afoot to take picture of things for ravelry this afternoon, so there will be pictures. Also, additional blogging, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hark-a-break/","summary":"Today is the first day that I\u0026rsquo;ve had in a long time without the GRE hanging over my head. Sure I have a lot to do, and that is daunting, but it\u0026rsquo;s not oppressive in the same way. I\u0026rsquo;m not claiming that this calm I feel is particularly real but things have lined up in the right way to give me a few days off\u0026hellip;\nLast night I finished reading the Samuel Delany book that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for, far too long. I have a pile of other things to read now, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and dive in to a short story collection and see how long it takes me to get fed up with that.\nHandspun News: In other news I finished spinning my fiber stash. Which may sound impressive, but I basically worked through everything that I had that I was going to spin two summers ago (I must confess to abandoning a pound of soy silk to R.","title":"Hark!  A Break!"},{"content":"I finished the long awaited first round of edits for the novella I wrote earlier this year, Knowing Mars, this morning. I\u0026rsquo;ve sent out a draft (after some failures of my email sending ability) to 6 initial readers. Some or all of whom read this website. (Thanks folks, and sorry for the mess of emails).\nIf you wanted to read an early copy of the novella and haven\u0026rsquo;t drop me an email and I\u0026rsquo;ll get you a copy of it. I should warn you that reading such an early draft could potentially be arduous, and there\u0026rsquo;s no real reason rush into reading this version. There will be other drafts.\nOne part of the project after I got the edits done, was to recompile the files into LaTeX (a markup langauge for making pretty documents with the TeX typesetting engine.) I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten pretty into LaTeX these last few months, because it means I don\u0026rsquo;t have to use Microsoft products (it\u0026rsquo;s a pragmatic issue, they don\u0026rsquo;t run well on Zoe and the interfaces don\u0026rsquo;t work well), the documents look better, and thanks to some templates I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with I can write papers and letters (and so forth) in consistent, easy to read forms much more quickly than I ever did when I was a word user.\nI mean LaTeX isn\u0026rsquo;t the end all and be all. I\u0026rsquo;ve still not exactly figured out how to insert images into documents, nor have I figured out how to use the beamer class to do presentations (but I hate doing presentations with slides, so it\u0026rsquo;s not a big loss,) but I think I\u0026rsquo;m making progress, and some day I\u0026rsquo;ll be a master of LaTeX.\nOne of the nifty things about LaTeX is that, I have yet to come across a document format that someone else hasn\u0026rsquo;t already created a class for. APA papers? Check! Every other Academic Style? Check1! Letters? Check! And my latest discovery? The manuscript format demanded by the Science Fiction Writers of America (and many of its varriants)sffms Check! The issue is that I had to spend a little bit of time reformatting how I did section headers so that it would all play nice. That\u0026rsquo;s really my fault for writing in markdown to start with and then using maruku to convert to LaTeX. This leads me to my next non-geek-speak topic below the fold:\nThe Point I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about switching the formating of some of my files away from doing everything in Markdown, and just going full boar into LaTeX particularly since the next book is in it\u0026rsquo;s beginning stage. The main reason for doing this is that Maruku, translates a few things oddly, particularly in places where quote marks precede italics. In terms of just writing the main difference (other than bolds and italics) are in quotation marks. It\u0026rsquo;s not a big deal, and actually as I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about it, there are some good reasons to keep things in markdown, but the thought lingers.\nOne thing that would be generally nice is if any of you out there in geekland know where I might learn to write a script (either in ruby/python/perl/etc or in bash with sed) that can string together a series of standard find and replaces? It shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be that hard, but I\u0026rsquo;m that much of a beginner.\nAnyway. That\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about. Also, I did like 10 subversion commits this morning, which is way more than I\u0026rsquo;d done in a long time. I\u0026rsquo;m going to get going. Thanks for reading. More coming later.\nActually, I think the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s mostly academic and publishing geeks who write LaTeX styles, is a great thing for the format/language.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-latex/","summary":"I finished the long awaited first round of edits for the novella I wrote earlier this year, Knowing Mars, this morning. I\u0026rsquo;ve sent out a draft (after some failures of my email sending ability) to 6 initial readers. Some or all of whom read this website. (Thanks folks, and sorry for the mess of emails).\nIf you wanted to read an early copy of the novella and haven\u0026rsquo;t drop me an email and I\u0026rsquo;ll get you a copy of it. I should warn you that reading such an early draft could potentially be arduous, and there\u0026rsquo;s no real reason rush into reading this version. There will be other drafts.\nOne part of the project after I got the edits done, was to recompile the files into LaTeX (a markup langauge for making pretty documents with the TeX typesetting engine.) I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten pretty into LaTeX these last few months, because it means I don\u0026rsquo;t have to use Microsoft products (it\u0026rsquo;s a pragmatic issue, they don\u0026rsquo;t run well on Zoe and the interfaces don\u0026rsquo;t work well), the documents look better, and thanks to some templates I\u0026rsquo;ve come up with I can write papers and letters (and so forth) in consistent, easy to read forms much more quickly than I ever did when I was a word user.","title":"of LaTeX"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m trying out a new Monospaced font called \u0026ldquo;Droid Mono\u0026rdquo; which is Apache liscenced (yay!) and pretty nifty. It was designed for the googlephone, Android, which I fear may be a flop (it puts too much authority/freedom in the hands of the cellphone makers, who I\u0026rsquo;m convinced are truly evil). But the existence of a really good monospaced font makes me happy.\nI know this is supposed to be a knitting blog. My sweater is now about 17\u0026quot; long. In the end It\u0026rsquo;ll be a 30 inch jacket, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t even started the arm holes. I ran out of my first skein of the lighter color last night and have decided to switch over to some sleeve knitting, but I\u0026rsquo;m well into the second skein of dark. I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll need to order more dark yarn to finish this project.\nThis puts me in a yarn buying mood, which is odd because I work in an awesome yarn store, but the yarn company in question wont sell wholesale, and the price is pretty good. My mom wants this yarn to make a shawl, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably get a couple of colors for another sweater because there\u0026rsquo;s a bulk discount.\nInitially I had thought that this was odd yarn and was somewhat disappointed by it, but as I\u0026rsquo;ve knit more I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with it. No signs of pilling quite lofty, and finer than shetland so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t look as blocky. I mean I still really like shetland, but, it\u0026rsquo;s nice.\nI have class today but there isn\u0026rsquo;t anything due, so it\u0026rsquo;s pretty low stress, I also have chores to do, and I need new ipod headphones, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see how that works out. (For the record, I\u0026rsquo;ve been saying ip-od in my head rather than i-pod.)\nAnyway, I fear this madness has gone on long enough, I\u0026rsquo;ll be back later, I trust.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-font/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m trying out a new Monospaced font called \u0026ldquo;Droid Mono\u0026rdquo; which is Apache liscenced (yay!) and pretty nifty. It was designed for the googlephone, Android, which I fear may be a flop (it puts too much authority/freedom in the hands of the cellphone makers, who I\u0026rsquo;m convinced are truly evil). But the existence of a really good monospaced font makes me happy.\nI know this is supposed to be a knitting blog. My sweater is now about 17\u0026quot; long. In the end It\u0026rsquo;ll be a 30 inch jacket, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t even started the arm holes. I ran out of my first skein of the lighter color last night and have decided to switch over to some sleeve knitting, but I\u0026rsquo;m well into the second skein of dark. I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll need to order more dark yarn to finish this project.\nThis puts me in a yarn buying mood, which is odd because I work in an awesome yarn store, but the yarn company in question wont sell wholesale, and the price is pretty good.","title":"New Font"},{"content":"\u0026hellip;mostly that I don\u0026rsquo;t do it enough.\nI\u0026rsquo;m about 20 pages from the end on Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s Babel-17 novel, and I have to confess that I don\u0026rsquo;t entirely get it, but I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it quite throughly. I\u0026rsquo;m also, thankfully not worried about groking it in its fullest. This is a book that I expect to reread a number of times, and a book that I think will add an interesting dimension to a class discussion about linguistic relativism, so I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll get plenty of chances to revisit this text.\nDespite my failure to grok the book entirely it\u0026rsquo;s been a good learning experience. Delany is a great writer. Really great. At the same time, this is a pretty structurally straightforward book, and there isn\u0026rsquo;t literary experimentalism to get in the way of the plot or the characters, and that\u0026rsquo;s the way I like it. That\u0026rsquo;s what I like so much about science fiction.\nAnyway, I really like reading, and particularly at times like this, where I\u0026rsquo;m sort of scattered brained and dealing with a lot of demands on my time and energy reading fiction can be really good for getting focus and inspiration back, when the getting seems hard. It\u0026rsquo;s a shame, then, that I don\u0026rsquo;t read nearly as much as I might like to. It always seems like the internet or knitting or writing or spinning or academic work gets in the way, but that\u0026rsquo;s foolish. Really foolish.\nAfter I finish this Delany, I have a Tiptree to read, but it might be time to read a more recent Melissa Scott book. We shall see what I grab for.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/my-thoughts-on-reading-are/","summary":"\u0026hellip;mostly that I don\u0026rsquo;t do it enough.\nI\u0026rsquo;m about 20 pages from the end on Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s Babel-17 novel, and I have to confess that I don\u0026rsquo;t entirely get it, but I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it quite throughly. I\u0026rsquo;m also, thankfully not worried about groking it in its fullest. This is a book that I expect to reread a number of times, and a book that I think will add an interesting dimension to a class discussion about linguistic relativism, so I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll get plenty of chances to revisit this text.\nDespite my failure to grok the book entirely it\u0026rsquo;s been a good learning experience. Delany is a great writer. Really great. At the same time, this is a pretty structurally straightforward book, and there isn\u0026rsquo;t literary experimentalism to get in the way of the plot or the characters, and that\u0026rsquo;s the way I like it. That\u0026rsquo;s what I like so much about science fiction.","title":"My Thoughts on Reading are..."},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m so going to write a post about how piss-poor the databases for scholarly articles are when I have time. They need to hire a web 2.0 developer, for real, because whatever their using (some arcane home grown perl system no doubt) blows. And there\u0026rsquo;s no reason that they couldn\u0026rsquo;t offer desktop clients, which for this kind of service makes a hell of a lot of sense. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting development question, because their business model is so different from every other web service. Coming soon!\nI have to go to class soon (and take a test! on speech production and language learning, but I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty good about it) and then work in the yarn store which is going swimmingly. Spinning group tonight, but I\u0026rsquo;m not going to have a wheel there. Interestingly I have a hard time working on my own projects when I\u0026rsquo;m there, and I come home and I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly interested in knitting or doing much spinning. The end result is that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been working on my own projects very much, but I seem (somehow) to be getting lots of things done, so there\u0026rsquo;s nothing really to complain about.\nOnward and Upward!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/long-stringy-bits/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m so going to write a post about how piss-poor the databases for scholarly articles are when I have time. They need to hire a web 2.0 developer, for real, because whatever their using (some arcane home grown perl system no doubt) blows. And there\u0026rsquo;s no reason that they couldn\u0026rsquo;t offer desktop clients, which for this kind of service makes a hell of a lot of sense. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting development question, because their business model is so different from every other web service. Coming soon!\nI have to go to class soon (and take a test! on speech production and language learning, but I\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty good about it) and then work in the yarn store which is going swimmingly. Spinning group tonight, but I\u0026rsquo;m not going to have a wheel there. Interestingly I have a hard time working on my own projects when I\u0026rsquo;m there, and I come home and I\u0026rsquo;m not incredibly interested in knitting or doing much spinning.","title":"Long Stringy Bits"},{"content":"I did a networking email exchange this morning. Woot, being productive. I also asked a professor for a letter of recomendation. I realize that I was expecting one of my letters to come from a former former advisor that hadn\u0026rsquo;t had me in class in a long time, and wasn\u0026rsquo;t really connected to the work I was interested in doing these days. The new letter writer is much more connected with what I\u0026rsquo;ve done recently (they had me in two classes last semester) and I think we have a pretty good rapport.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also filled out the form and written the check to get transcripts for this application cycle.\nI did some reading and some other stuff, but have generally feel pretty unproductive.\nOh wait, I did get some minor edits done on two chapters of the novel. This leaves three more chapters to do. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go over the ending to see if I can frame it a little more clearly, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m going to change it much, between this and the next draft, because all the responses have been pretty spot-on, even if people say \u0026ldquo;wait a second.\u0026rdquo; So I\u0026rsquo;m going to give it time, and I think after it hits the second round of readers, it\u0026rsquo;ll be good enough to start sending out to editors/publishers.\nOne thing that I need to do, is to work on notes and what all of our 6th grade english teachers called \u0026ldquo;pre-writing.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at being productive, as long as I\u0026rsquo;ve spent even the merest amounts of time thinking through things first. I just need to spend some time with the moleskine.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been spinning a bunch. I\u0026rsquo;ve done about 4 of a total 6 oz of some tencel-merino in something approaching jumper weight. I swear to you, if I spun a pound of this, I\u0026rsquo;d have a sweater. Interestingly this is my entire fiber stash. Which is appropriate because I\u0026rsquo;m just using my mother\u0026rsquo;s wheel until sell some more spinning related things and can afford a wheel of my own again. I like spinning and think that I need to figure out how to work this into my routine.\nIn terms of knitting, I\u0026rsquo;ve done about 3-3.5 inches on my sweater, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to go back to sleeve knitting after I knit another 3-3.5 inches while I figure out how far I want to set in the shoulders. After a bunch of meandering about, I still have no clue what my next project is going to be.\nAnyway. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/productions/","summary":"I did a networking email exchange this morning. Woot, being productive. I also asked a professor for a letter of recomendation. I realize that I was expecting one of my letters to come from a former former advisor that hadn\u0026rsquo;t had me in class in a long time, and wasn\u0026rsquo;t really connected to the work I was interested in doing these days. The new letter writer is much more connected with what I\u0026rsquo;ve done recently (they had me in two classes last semester) and I think we have a pretty good rapport.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also filled out the form and written the check to get transcripts for this application cycle.\nI did some reading and some other stuff, but have generally feel pretty unproductive.\nOh wait, I did get some minor edits done on two chapters of the novel. This leaves three more chapters to do. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go over the ending to see if I can frame it a little more clearly, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m going to change it much, between this and the next draft, because all the responses have been pretty spot-on, even if people say \u0026ldquo;wait a second.","title":"Productions"},{"content":"Another response from a potential advisor person. Not amazing like the last one, but good and encouraging.\nI must admit that I had thought until I saw the email (along with the attached in press articles/chapters), that this professor/lab was a bit of a stretch for me. It\u0026rsquo;s also kind of perfect, which is a pleasant surprise.\nMore later.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/report-from-the-trenches/","summary":"Another response from a potential advisor person. Not amazing like the last one, but good and encouraging.\nI must admit that I had thought until I saw the email (along with the attached in press articles/chapters), that this professor/lab was a bit of a stretch for me. It\u0026rsquo;s also kind of perfect, which is a pleasant surprise.\nMore later.","title":"Report from the Trenches"},{"content":"680 verbal 490 quant\nNote: For H.\u0026rsquo;s benefit: one of my passages today mentioned Paula Gunn Allen. No lie!\nAlso, as a note to myself, I have to pay 15 bucks to send the scores to a certain northeastern former research powerhouse.\nlast time I got:\n580 verbal 460 quant 6.0 writing\n(I think).\nScores range from 200 to 400; except for the writing which is on a scale of something to 6.0 (6.0 writing scores account for 5% of the sample.) The percentiles are skewed against folk like me on the quant, because (likely) more engineering students take the GRE than english majors. So the quant section is comparatively harder, and equivalent scale scores (so I think 500 verbal is a 50th Percentile, and 500 quant is a 30th percentile.) FYI.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t astoundingly wonderful, but it might not be incredibly bad either. It might be good enough, which in these things is all that matters. It\u0026rsquo;s probably not worth worrying about overly much.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s worth it to take it again, given that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t take it again soon enough to really matter this time around, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that getting a higher quant score would help anything in a theoretical 3rd cycle (which probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be next year, but rather 2-3 years hence.)\nSigh. I\u0026rsquo;m officially going to take the rest of the day off, there will be knitting, spinning, reading, perhaps writing, and some definite television watching.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gre-report/","summary":"680 verbal 490 quant\nNote: For H.\u0026rsquo;s benefit: one of my passages today mentioned Paula Gunn Allen. No lie!\nAlso, as a note to myself, I have to pay 15 bucks to send the scores to a certain northeastern former research powerhouse.\nlast time I got:\n580 verbal 460 quant 6.0 writing\n(I think).\nScores range from 200 to 400; except for the writing which is on a scale of something to 6.0 (6.0 writing scores account for 5% of the sample.) The percentiles are skewed against folk like me on the quant, because (likely) more engineering students take the GRE than english majors. So the quant section is comparatively harder, and equivalent scale scores (so I think 500 verbal is a 50th Percentile, and 500 quant is a 30th percentile.) FYI.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t astoundingly wonderful, but it might not be incredibly bad either. It might be good enough, which in these things is all that matters.","title":"GRE Report"},{"content":"\u0026hellip; but it\u0026rsquo;s all intentional.\nI\u0026rsquo;m taking the GRE today, so my week is intentionally getting off to a false start. I\u0026rsquo;m not, and haven\u0026rsquo;t been, writing a whole lot, and I\u0026rsquo;m trying to slip into the right mindset. My scores have had a practice-test range of about 150 points, all of them better than what I got a year ago. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping for the best, I think I know what to do to make this work, but a little luck never hurt anyone. This afternoon, I\u0026rsquo;ll be ready for putting more things on my plate.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been spinning again (on my mother\u0026rsquo;s wheel; I\u0026rsquo;m still trying to sell the two of mine that I have remaining so that I can get a wheel of my own.) And I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with the product. It\u0026rsquo;s about sport weight or so. It\u0026rsquo;s going pretty quick now that I have the hang of it, and the yarn is going to be pretty swell to knit with. It should be enough to knit socks with, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I will, I think not having plans about your hand-spun (so long as you spin enough to at least theoretically make something with it,) is one of the key\u0026rsquo;s to success.\nKnitting also continues apace. My sock projects, which are supposed to be fun little things that don\u0026rsquo;t require much thought and always work out, aren\u0026rsquo;t working out the way I\u0026rsquo;d want them to. And I figured out a key part of the sweater design which I\u0026rsquo;d been avoiding heretofore. I\u0026rsquo;d say I have about 15 inches left to go before the shoulder saddle starts, but a bit less than 5 until the armhole starts, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;m about half way there, length wise.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s something. I\u0026rsquo;ll post here this afternoon when I have an idea about my scores, and things seem to settle down.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/slight-false-start/","summary":"\u0026hellip; but it\u0026rsquo;s all intentional.\nI\u0026rsquo;m taking the GRE today, so my week is intentionally getting off to a false start. I\u0026rsquo;m not, and haven\u0026rsquo;t been, writing a whole lot, and I\u0026rsquo;m trying to slip into the right mindset. My scores have had a practice-test range of about 150 points, all of them better than what I got a year ago. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping for the best, I think I know what to do to make this work, but a little luck never hurt anyone. This afternoon, I\u0026rsquo;ll be ready for putting more things on my plate.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been spinning again (on my mother\u0026rsquo;s wheel; I\u0026rsquo;m still trying to sell the two of mine that I have remaining so that I can get a wheel of my own.) And I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with the product. It\u0026rsquo;s about sport weight or so. It\u0026rsquo;s going pretty quick now that I have the hang of it, and the yarn is going to be pretty swell to knit with.","title":"Slight False Start..."},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a mostly accurate conversation I had with a friend the other day. Once the secret is out, I\u0026rsquo;ll tell you more about the actors, and it might make sense, but for now, lets just go with it.\nJon\u0026rsquo;s someone I\u0026rsquo;ve known since high school, and though, as you might have guessed, we\u0026rsquo;ve bounced around the country a fair bit, and changed a lot, we\u0026rsquo;re still right there.\njon: I promised him I\u0026rsquo;d keep this between us for right now tycho: whatever, I\u0026rsquo;m practically you jon: true that: a much more together version of me\u0026hellip; and cuter tycho: psh\u0026hellip; I mean, __________ is cuter than you, but whatever jon: hahahaha. at least you\u0026rsquo;re honest tycho: I think dating cuter people is ok, I\u0026rsquo;m ok with that jon: yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m fine with ______ being cuter than me too.\nconversation proceeds\ntycho develops a nickname for ______, a mutual friend: I\u0026rsquo;m so calling him that henceforth jon: CENSORED tycho: whatever, whatever jon: I promised! tycho: I think you need to say to ______ something like \u0026ldquo;so, I have this brother that knows me too well, but he\u0026rsquo;s trustworthy,\u0026rdquo; because we\u0026rsquo;re basically family, duder. jon: I know\npause\njon: my mom told me that she\u0026rsquo;s always wanted a jewish son, when I told her that you and I were brothers, basically\u0026hellip; tycho: oh dear\u0026hellip;. funny though.\nLike most conversations this one doesn\u0026rsquo;t have some larger purpose, and sort of meanders around. But that\u0026rsquo;s the joy of conversations, right? I\u0026rsquo;ve also done some artistic touching up to make it flow a little better with the missing parts, but otherwise it\u0026rsquo;s pretty spot on.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll post some more coherent thoughts a little later.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/logical-families-part-one/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a mostly accurate conversation I had with a friend the other day. Once the secret is out, I\u0026rsquo;ll tell you more about the actors, and it might make sense, but for now, lets just go with it.\nJon\u0026rsquo;s someone I\u0026rsquo;ve known since high school, and though, as you might have guessed, we\u0026rsquo;ve bounced around the country a fair bit, and changed a lot, we\u0026rsquo;re still right there.\njon: I promised him I\u0026rsquo;d keep this between us for right now tycho: whatever, I\u0026rsquo;m practically you jon: true that: a much more together version of me\u0026hellip; and cuter tycho: psh\u0026hellip; I mean, __________ is cuter than you, but whatever jon: hahahaha. at least you\u0026rsquo;re honest tycho: I think dating cuter people is ok, I\u0026rsquo;m ok with that jon: yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m fine with ______ being cuter than me too.\nconversation proceeds\ntycho develops a nickname for ______, a mutual friend: I\u0026rsquo;m so calling him that henceforth jon: CENSORED tycho: whatever, whatever jon: I promised!","title":"Logical Families, Part One"},{"content":"I twittered something about how Ellen DeGeneres filmed her show despite the fact that the WGA is on strike, after only canceling one taping. I ended this twitter with the phrase \u0026ldquo;bad queer.\u0026rdquo;\nA little background:\nMy second semester in college I took a class on race and sexuality that some of you might remember quite well. Anyway, it was an english/women\u0026rsquo;s studies class and we met in a class room in the geology building. This lead to far too many jokes about rock throwing, but at some point the prof talked about a class that she took it grad school called \u0026ldquo;bad queers\u0026rdquo; that was a night class that met in some distant corner of campus on the top floor of a building that was otherwise unused. It was funny, or at least funnier than what we were studying at the time.\nThe idea of a class about \u0026ldquo;bad queers\u0026rdquo; was interesting, so it was an ongoing joke between some of us, in part because we never got a good explanation of what the class would actually be about, or more importantly what could you spend an entire semester talking about on the subject.\nI always took the opinion that it was to be a class about false (queer) consciousness, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that was everyone\u0026rsquo;s opinion, nor do I know that that\u0026rsquo;s accurate. I think roommate H.1 took the side that the class was more narrowly about the element of the queer community that makes the conservative argument that queer people are just the same as straight people save homosexuality, this argues against diversity, and for greater social strictures, and that was appropriately enough, to our minds \u0026ldquo;bad.\u0026rdquo;\nAnyway, I bring this up, only because I was writing a paper this weekend about sexuality and aging for my adulthood and aging class that I\u0026rsquo;m taking now (more on that in another post, possibly) and I found myself putting a small rant about a certain fairly well known \u0026ldquo;bad queer\u0026rdquo; (in the second, narrower sense.) And while I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s completely crucial to my argument, and thus is now a footnote, it sort of felt good.\nBut I suppose more importantly, it\u0026rsquo;s a fun exercise, if not entirely productive. Thoughts on bad queers, anyone?\nIronically, H. wasn\u0026rsquo;t in the class were this whole thing got started, opting rather to take a class on Chaucer at the same time. Also, apologies if I get this wrong.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bad-queers/","summary":"I twittered something about how Ellen DeGeneres filmed her show despite the fact that the WGA is on strike, after only canceling one taping. I ended this twitter with the phrase \u0026ldquo;bad queer.\u0026rdquo;\nA little background:\nMy second semester in college I took a class on race and sexuality that some of you might remember quite well. Anyway, it was an english/women\u0026rsquo;s studies class and we met in a class room in the geology building. This lead to far too many jokes about rock throwing, but at some point the prof talked about a class that she took it grad school called \u0026ldquo;bad queers\u0026rdquo; that was a night class that met in some distant corner of campus on the top floor of a building that was otherwise unused. It was funny, or at least funnier than what we were studying at the time.\nThe idea of a class about \u0026ldquo;bad queers\u0026rdquo; was interesting, so it was an ongoing joke between some of us, in part because we never got a good explanation of what the class would actually be about, or more importantly what could you spend an entire semester talking about on the subject.","title":"Bad Queers"},{"content":"Things continue apace. That\u0026rsquo;s such a cool word. Apace. Hmm.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m still working on the latvian table cloth sweater, I\u0026rsquo;ve got enough done thus-far to realize that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be able to omit 2 full pattern repeats and still have a 30 inch sweater/jacket. Isn\u0026rsquo;t knitting amazing. I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet figured out how exactly I\u0026rsquo;m going to master the shoulder/neck saddle things, but there is time yet. It measures 14 inches at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;ll take pictures at some point, I hope.\nGRE stuff continues as well, and I\u0026rsquo;m only mildly freaked out about this, which is probably the right way to be.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working in the yarn store today but not again till Tuesday. I didn\u0026rsquo;t work yesterday, but I was at the store for several hours hanging out and knitting with a friend and I also taught a lesson to a great new knitter who knitted perfectly, save for two twisted stitches that might have been my fault anyway. Amazing!\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, particularly after I have time to breathe again.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gauge-differences/","summary":"Things continue apace. That\u0026rsquo;s such a cool word. Apace. Hmm.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m still working on the latvian table cloth sweater, I\u0026rsquo;ve got enough done thus-far to realize that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be able to omit 2 full pattern repeats and still have a 30 inch sweater/jacket. Isn\u0026rsquo;t knitting amazing. I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet figured out how exactly I\u0026rsquo;m going to master the shoulder/neck saddle things, but there is time yet. It measures 14 inches at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;ll take pictures at some point, I hope.\nGRE stuff continues as well, and I\u0026rsquo;m only mildly freaked out about this, which is probably the right way to be.\nI\u0026rsquo;m working in the yarn store today but not again till Tuesday. I didn\u0026rsquo;t work yesterday, but I was at the store for several hours hanging out and knitting with a friend and I also taught a lesson to a great new knitter who knitted perfectly, save for two twisted stitches that might have been my fault anyway.","title":"Gauge Differences"},{"content":"Knitting Hate I hate all of my knitting projects: the sweater is in the black-hole portion of the body, and I still am not absolutely sure how I\u0026rsquo;m going to make the shoulder work. I have a second sock that is turning out to be very much not the same size as the first sock, despite using the same needles/etc as the last sock. Resuming the pattern on my color-work sock has not gone as efficiently as I had initially hoped. And there might be tinking back, and I still don\u0026rsquo;t know how to pick up the pattern in the right way. Other Things Teh Tiereds (The tiredness) hits at like 10pm these days. My LaTeX mojo was having some problems earlier: quite annoying. I\u0026rsquo;m updating my iTunes for the first time in weeks and possibly months. I\u0026rsquo;m currently downloading 125 podcasts\u0026hellip; Egad folks. I\u0026rsquo;ve started spinning again, and I very much want my own wheel again. I\u0026rsquo;m in the process of consolidating my flock, and if I can sell one or two of these wheels I can get a new one. I can hardly wait. (This is connected to the last part because spinning and podcasts go together in my mind.) GRE on monday eek. Other graduate school things. eek squared. My computer has been (likely due to downloading and the GRE prep software) kind of lagging. I want a new Mac Book hard core now. Interestingly I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly chomping at the bit to upgrade to Leopard. Mostly I think because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to disturb the tenuous balance that keeps my system running. My battery life has fallen off significantly in the past few months, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s time to get a new one. I think that even if I get a new computer someone in this house will use Zoe I (I\u0026rsquo;ve already decided that the new computer will be called Zoe II), so it\u0026rsquo;s not a very bad investment, unless of course, she goes up into flames at some point. I better go back up things. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/saturday-night-thoughts/","summary":"Knitting Hate I hate all of my knitting projects: the sweater is in the black-hole portion of the body, and I still am not absolutely sure how I\u0026rsquo;m going to make the shoulder work. I have a second sock that is turning out to be very much not the same size as the first sock, despite using the same needles/etc as the last sock. Resuming the pattern on my color-work sock has not gone as efficiently as I had initially hoped. And there might be tinking back, and I still don\u0026rsquo;t know how to pick up the pattern in the right way. Other Things Teh Tiereds (The tiredness) hits at like 10pm these days. My LaTeX mojo was having some problems earlier: quite annoying. I\u0026rsquo;m updating my iTunes for the first time in weeks and possibly months. I\u0026rsquo;m currently downloading 125 podcasts\u0026hellip; Egad folks. I\u0026rsquo;ve started spinning again, and I very much want my own wheel again.","title":"Saturday Night Thoughts"},{"content":"Last night I finished another sleeve. Turns out I had to revise the sleeve a little bit, and the sweater looks like crap at the moment, but I trust that a little bit (or a lot of blocking) will do it good. This means that in the great sleeve-off of 2007, I only have two more sleeves to knit. This sweater is one that hasn\u0026rsquo;t made it onto ravelry or the blog, but it\u0026rsquo;s coming. I swear. The yarn is Patons classic merino/wool, and though I had a bit of a honeymoon with this yarn over the last 15 months or so, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve recovered. It\u0026rsquo;s good yarn but it\u0026rsquo;s a little pill-ey, and I think for a basic worsted weight yarn I\u0026rsquo;d prefer something with a little firmer twist.\nI have a knitting lesson today. It\u0026rsquo;s my hope that as this store gets established, I can spend more time teaching and less time selling yarn. Though it\u0026rsquo;s great to work in the store, and I do like it, I don\u0026rsquo;t respond to fashions very well, and if left to my own devices--as I\u0026rsquo;ve spoken earlier--knit with the same two kinds of yarn for years without getting bored. Anyway, my lesson, I\u0026rsquo;m teaching this cool young woman how to knit, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to do it my way (though I borrowed heavily from Joyce Willams\u0026rsquo; method described in Latvian Dreams which I think is becoming the store standard.) Basically, we\u0026rsquo;re teaching casting on last and purling almost immediately, so that people know how to get stocking stitch before garter stitch. With hope this will mean that people will have a framework to learn casting on when they get around to it, and they\u0026rsquo;ll be able to avoid aversions to purling as well. I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to it.\nMore to come!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/friday-knitting-notes/","summary":"Last night I finished another sleeve. Turns out I had to revise the sleeve a little bit, and the sweater looks like crap at the moment, but I trust that a little bit (or a lot of blocking) will do it good. This means that in the great sleeve-off of 2007, I only have two more sleeves to knit. This sweater is one that hasn\u0026rsquo;t made it onto ravelry or the blog, but it\u0026rsquo;s coming. I swear. The yarn is Patons classic merino/wool, and though I had a bit of a honeymoon with this yarn over the last 15 months or so, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve recovered. It\u0026rsquo;s good yarn but it\u0026rsquo;s a little pill-ey, and I think for a basic worsted weight yarn I\u0026rsquo;d prefer something with a little firmer twist.\nI have a knitting lesson today. It\u0026rsquo;s my hope that as this store gets established, I can spend more time teaching and less time selling yarn.","title":"Friday Knitting Notes"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m sorry there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a proper tychoish post last night. I had a bunch of life stuff to write that I put in a friends locked LJ post, so I could write full names out and mostly because in many ways it was a message to friends, who are on my friends list. I\u0026rsquo;ll try and summarize and provide something a little more interesting for your perusal. Also, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t post yesterday, I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m all sorts of behind.\nI had a good conversation with a potential professor at a school that I really really want to go to next year. Though it\u0026rsquo;s always a crap shoot because of funding and departmental politics, I think my chances are better now. Having this conversation has sparked a lot of my own processes. I\u0026rsquo;ve been stuck in a lot of my projects for many weeks, and between that and having less free time (and therefore being less likely to waste it), and that\u0026rsquo;s good. I\u0026rsquo;ve been really tightly wound, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m doing better with this. I figured out a friend\u0026rsquo;s secret last night. It makes me happy. There\u0026rsquo;s a segment of the conversation about logical families (I\u0026rsquo;m stealing this from Armisted Maupin, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure he\u0026rsquo;s the creator; logical familes being the familes we build rather than the biological familes we\u0026rsquo;re born to) Anyway, I really want to blog that has nothing (really) to do with the secret, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I can write about it without giving the secret away, so I have to figure out how to write it. The yarn store working is going well, and I might have pictures somewhere, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t found them yet. Your patience means a lot to us in this matter. I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a sleeve, the second sleeve of a sweater, most of this week. It\u0026rsquo;s red. Very red. I\u0026rsquo;m going to run out of yarn. So if anyone has a few yards of Patons Classic Wool/Merino in a very very red color, I\u0026rsquo;d love you forever, but I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;m just going to have to buy a full ball. Sigh. I\u0026rsquo;m very close and this is frustrating. It\u0026rsquo;s unfortunately a yarn that we don\u0026rsquo;t cary at the shop, so I have to trck out to g-d knows where to find it. So close, it\u0026rsquo;s frustrating. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch. Thanks for reading.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/back-in-the-saddle/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m sorry there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a proper tychoish post last night. I had a bunch of life stuff to write that I put in a friends locked LJ post, so I could write full names out and mostly because in many ways it was a message to friends, who are on my friends list. I\u0026rsquo;ll try and summarize and provide something a little more interesting for your perusal. Also, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t post yesterday, I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m all sorts of behind.\nI had a good conversation with a potential professor at a school that I really really want to go to next year. Though it\u0026rsquo;s always a crap shoot because of funding and departmental politics, I think my chances are better now. Having this conversation has sparked a lot of my own processes. I\u0026rsquo;ve been stuck in a lot of my projects for many weeks, and between that and having less free time (and therefore being less likely to waste it), and that\u0026rsquo;s good.","title":"Back in the Saddle"},{"content":"Asus Claims Apple Tablet Is Real:\nCan Apple turn the Tablet PC into a success when previous attempts have failed? The short answer is \u0026lsquo;yes\u0026rsquo;. Any company that can make a mobile phone with no buttons, no picture messaging, slow Web access and no video capture into the most desirable phone on the planet can easily make tablets popular.\u0026rsquo;\u0026quot;\n(from Slashdot.)\nI look forward to this device, but I think the point is pretty funny.\nMeanwhile, Zoe, my trusty Tiger-running Powerbook G4, continues to perform admirably, though the top plate on the lower left hand corner continues to rattle worrisomely. The current plan is to wait until WWDC and see what things are looking like then. I\u0026rsquo;ve toyed with the idea of buying/building a beige boxed ubuntu \u0026ldquo;server,\u0026rdquo; but who knows, things work great the way they are, so I\u0026rsquo;m in no particular hurry. For the record, I got Zoe (nee Mona Ramsey) in May of 2005.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/asus-claims-apple-tablet-is-real/","summary":"Asus Claims Apple Tablet Is Real:\nCan Apple turn the Tablet PC into a success when previous attempts have failed? The short answer is \u0026lsquo;yes\u0026rsquo;. Any company that can make a mobile phone with no buttons, no picture messaging, slow Web access and no video capture into the most desirable phone on the planet can easily make tablets popular.\u0026rsquo;\u0026quot;\n(from Slashdot.)\nI look forward to this device, but I think the point is pretty funny.\nMeanwhile, Zoe, my trusty Tiger-running Powerbook G4, continues to perform admirably, though the top plate on the lower left hand corner continues to rattle worrisomely. The current plan is to wait until WWDC and see what things are looking like then. I\u0026rsquo;ve toyed with the idea of buying/building a beige boxed ubuntu \u0026ldquo;server,\u0026rdquo; but who knows, things work great the way they are, so I\u0026rsquo;m in no particular hurry. For the record, I got Zoe (nee Mona Ramsey) in May of 2005.","title":"Asus Claims Apple Tablet Is Real"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been incredibly angsty about the whole graduate school application process this time around, no real surprise. Ironically, I was pretty confident about my chances last time, and here I am now. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better about this. First, I took another practice GRE and got solid, but not stellar scores, scores that would be good enough for my purposes. That is, they wouldn\u0026rsquo;t preclude acceptance anywhere, and would probably fall safely within the \u0026ldquo;typical\u0026rdquo; range.\nSecondly, and more importantly, a professor that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in studying with--where I had previously expected to be this year--has asked to have a telephone discussion tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. This is a good thing, I think I tend to do well in person/on the phone, and even though there was a snafu last year, if this could come through in a real way\u0026hellip; Good things folks. Good things.\nI\u0026rsquo;m moving forward on a lot of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dragging my feet on for a while, and while I\u0026rsquo;m still worried, I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better. God knows why.\nAlso I\u0026rsquo;m reading an utterly crappy book on aging and sexuality. It\u0026rsquo;s written by a journalist, which accounts for the poor methodology and virtually unvarying sentence structure. Although she does talk about aging \u0026ldquo;gay men and lesbians,\u0026rdquo; I think she doesn\u0026rsquo;t understand enough about ahem youthful queer sexuality to be able to approach queer sex as we age. Also, there\u0026rsquo;s more unironic quoting of Andrew Sullivan (sorry no linking for the bastard) than I can really stomach.\nAnyway, normal day at the yarn store, I hope you all have a good day!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/looking-forward/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve been incredibly angsty about the whole graduate school application process this time around, no real surprise. Ironically, I was pretty confident about my chances last time, and here I am now. I\u0026rsquo;m doing better about this. First, I took another practice GRE and got solid, but not stellar scores, scores that would be good enough for my purposes. That is, they wouldn\u0026rsquo;t preclude acceptance anywhere, and would probably fall safely within the \u0026ldquo;typical\u0026rdquo; range.\nSecondly, and more importantly, a professor that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in studying with--where I had previously expected to be this year--has asked to have a telephone discussion tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. This is a good thing, I think I tend to do well in person/on the phone, and even though there was a snafu last year, if this could come through in a real way\u0026hellip; Good things folks. Good things.\nI\u0026rsquo;m moving forward on a lot of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve been dragging my feet on for a while, and while I\u0026rsquo;m still worried, I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better.","title":"Looking Forward"},{"content":"So I don\u0026rsquo;t in reality watch all that much television, but I do enjoy knitting and watching TV, particularly whilst sitting in front of the computer. So I\u0026rsquo;m compiling a list of shows that I enjoy to knit by. Don\u0026rsquo;t expect anything ground breaking, sometimes predictable shows are good for knitting.\nLaw and Order (All of \u0026rsquo;em) Battlestar Galactica Shark Bones NCIS Stargate Atlantis Boston Legal House Criminal Minds How I Met Your Mother 30 Rock Jericho Numb3rs Eureka Dexter. So mostly procedurals, a little bit of science fiction, with a dash of comedy and drama\u0026hellip; Lets note that I don\u0026rsquo;t watch all these shows every week, nor do I watch these shows with commercials, which makes it better.\nLets make this a meme, and I tag all of you! If you watch TV and knit, what shows do you watch. The only rule is that they all must currently be in production\u0026hellip; Link or track-back your post in the comments.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/television-to-knit-by/","summary":"So I don\u0026rsquo;t in reality watch all that much television, but I do enjoy knitting and watching TV, particularly whilst sitting in front of the computer. So I\u0026rsquo;m compiling a list of shows that I enjoy to knit by. Don\u0026rsquo;t expect anything ground breaking, sometimes predictable shows are good for knitting.\nLaw and Order (All of \u0026rsquo;em) Battlestar Galactica Shark Bones NCIS Stargate Atlantis Boston Legal House Criminal Minds How I Met Your Mother 30 Rock Jericho Numb3rs Eureka Dexter. So mostly procedurals, a little bit of science fiction, with a dash of comedy and drama\u0026hellip; Lets note that I don\u0026rsquo;t watch all these shows every week, nor do I watch these shows with commercials, which makes it better.\nLets make this a meme, and I tag all of you! If you watch TV and knit, what shows do you watch. The only rule is that they all must currently be in production\u0026hellip; Link or track-back your post in the comments.","title":"Television to Knit by"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about my taste in yarn at the store, in relation to the sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;ve made and what I\u0026rsquo;m working on now, and through intention or happenstance I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working with a constrained palette for some time, and as I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about the projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on now and what I plan to be working on in the future, I\u0026rsquo;ve caught myself thinking about this kind of creative exercise in a slightly broader context.\nKnitting with smaller selection of yarns does something really cool for me as a knitter. It means I can think less about some of the trivial things: how many stitches do I need, or how will this look when I block it, are questions that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to ask, because I\u0026rsquo;m used to the yarn a lot. Furthermore, I think with more experience I can and do get better at designing and working with the yarns, and I know that my core of yarns is quality stuff that will hold up for me long term.\nAnd there\u0026rsquo;s always the adage that scarcity produces creativity, and I\u0026rsquo;m willing to buy that. In a lot of ways science fiction presents some interesting constraints. In my current project, most of the story occurs on outposts and long range space ships, where there are limited resources and populations. It\u0026rsquo;s not the same as constraining your word choice, or something on that level, but it does mean that problems that you and I might solve by running away and relocating have to be dealt with in another way (I\u0026rsquo;m mostly think of public health disasters here, but it works in other situations as well.) I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is best example, but it\u0026rsquo;s a start.\nI imagine that there are other kinds of creative constraints that we place on ourselves. I imagine some people write long hand for this reason (even if they\u0026rsquo;re crazy!) and indeed choosing to write a story from a particular POV could be one of these constraints.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/constrained-creativity/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking about my taste in yarn at the store, in relation to the sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;ve made and what I\u0026rsquo;m working on now, and through intention or happenstance I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working with a constrained palette for some time, and as I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about the projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on now and what I plan to be working on in the future, I\u0026rsquo;ve caught myself thinking about this kind of creative exercise in a slightly broader context.\nKnitting with smaller selection of yarns does something really cool for me as a knitter. It means I can think less about some of the trivial things: how many stitches do I need, or how will this look when I block it, are questions that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to ask, because I\u0026rsquo;m used to the yarn a lot. Furthermore, I think with more experience I can and do get better at designing and working with the yarns, and I know that my core of yarns is quality stuff that will hold up for me long term.","title":"Constrained Creativity"},{"content":"I put on a sweater that I designed a few years ago, and finally finished last year, with the Louet Merino (Gems/Opal) Sport Weight.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a great sweater to wear. It\u0026rsquo;s warm, it\u0026rsquo;s soft, it fits great. When I made it, I was expecting that the darker color would be prominent, I frankly don\u0026rsquo;t know what I was on at all. I\u0026rsquo;m going to blame it on the fact that my roommate had gotten a puppy and I was taking 24 credit hours that semester. The fact that it fits so well is frankly amazing, given all that.\nThe center pattern is \u0026ldquo;rams horn,\u0026rdquo; from a Meg Swansen book, the next pattern is a medallion pattern from the Traditional Fair Isle Knitting book, the next two patterns are from the Traditional Scandinavian Knitting book, and finally, the edge pattern is from the perrie pattern for Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s Fair Isle cardigan. I still don\u0026rsquo;t know exactly what I was thinking.\nThe store I\u0026rsquo;m working at carries this yarn, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I might have to knit something with it. So much for all that talk about creative constraints, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to be slipping.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweater-review/","summary":"I put on a sweater that I designed a few years ago, and finally finished last year, with the Louet Merino (Gems/Opal) Sport Weight.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a great sweater to wear. It\u0026rsquo;s warm, it\u0026rsquo;s soft, it fits great. When I made it, I was expecting that the darker color would be prominent, I frankly don\u0026rsquo;t know what I was on at all. I\u0026rsquo;m going to blame it on the fact that my roommate had gotten a puppy and I was taking 24 credit hours that semester. The fact that it fits so well is frankly amazing, given all that.\nThe center pattern is \u0026ldquo;rams horn,\u0026rdquo; from a Meg Swansen book, the next pattern is a medallion pattern from the Traditional Fair Isle Knitting book, the next two patterns are from the Traditional Scandinavian Knitting book, and finally, the edge pattern is from the perrie pattern for Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s Fair Isle cardigan. I still don\u0026rsquo;t know exactly what I was thinking.","title":"Sweater Review"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if the term \u0026ldquo;SF\u0026rdquo; for speculative fiction as an umbrella term for genres related to science fiction and fantasy is still in vogue (and I know that the usage of the term in recent years is distinct from the way that Hienlin et al initially suggested, but I\u0026rsquo;m not completely up on that), but I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the distinction between science fiction and fantasy of late. In part because I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to speak more intelligently about what I write (and hopefully write better as a result,) and also as a keen observer of the community, I\u0026rsquo;d like to do a little reflection. And hell, this is supposed to be my notebook, so there!\nOn some level, all science fiction worth reading is fantasy of some kind. Reading about science or technology\u0026rsquo;s cutting edge would be incredibly boring, after all. Having said that, I guess I\u0026rsquo;d carve the sci-fi/fantasy world into a few groups: the sword and sorcery fantasy, other fantasy stories built on some mythological convention (like vampire and super hero stories, which offer variations on some sort of common or shared tropes. In a lot of ways, any more I\u0026rsquo;d probably be more inclined to put Star Trek in this category) and science fiction. I tend to call just about everything science fiction: the hard stuff, cyberpunk, space opera, alternate histories, time travel stuff, though I think there\u0026rsquo;s some overlap here with the shared myth category.\nHow does that sound to you all?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fantasy-and-science-fiction/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if the term \u0026ldquo;SF\u0026rdquo; for speculative fiction as an umbrella term for genres related to science fiction and fantasy is still in vogue (and I know that the usage of the term in recent years is distinct from the way that Hienlin et al initially suggested, but I\u0026rsquo;m not completely up on that), but I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the distinction between science fiction and fantasy of late. In part because I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to speak more intelligently about what I write (and hopefully write better as a result,) and also as a keen observer of the community, I\u0026rsquo;d like to do a little reflection. And hell, this is supposed to be my notebook, so there!\nOn some level, all science fiction worth reading is fantasy of some kind. Reading about science or technology\u0026rsquo;s cutting edge would be incredibly boring, after all. Having said that, I guess I\u0026rsquo;d carve the sci-fi/fantasy world into a few groups: the sword and sorcery fantasy, other fantasy stories built on some mythological convention (like vampire and super hero stories, which offer variations on some sort of common or shared tropes.","title":"Fantasy and Science Fiction"},{"content":"The yarn store opened yesterday, and I--unsurprisingly--didn\u0026rsquo;t get any writing or reading done last night. Here are my thoughts from yesterday.\nWe failed, I think, to take pictures of the new sweater and other things. I wore another sweater, there\u0026rsquo;s at least one picture that I\u0026rsquo;ve spotted on ravelry of the shop that I\u0026rsquo;m in. More pictures as the come.\nBeing in the yarn store all day encouraged some sort of perverse desire to knit plain sweaters. There are a couple of yarns that I have my eye on. Mostly I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of Cascade Venezia Worsted, a lovely silk and wool blend, and some Lorna\u0026rsquo;s Laces Superwash. This is weird, because I don\u0026rsquo;t really enjoy making such plain sweaters, and what\u0026rsquo;s more I\u0026rsquo;ve sort of sworn myself to a constrained palette, as a creative/artistic experiment. No matter, there are a number of things that I have to finish before I will even think about starting a new project, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that it might be February before I get to that point.\nThe Latvian Morocco sweater deserves a new picture, and is now\u0026hellip; 13 or 13.5 inches long. I have about 4-5 inches to go before the underarm point. Because the sleeves are going to be set in (and saddled), the rows will get a bunch shorter at that point, and it\u0026rsquo;ll go faster. Also, because the saddles are going to be really wide, and I mean real wide (like 8 inches total, 4 front and back), there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot to the yoke section of the sweater once I get there.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;m taking a break from that sweater to knit a sleeve to finish a red and black plain sweater that I started in May or June. It\u0026rsquo;s worsted weight Patons Classic Merino that I bought to knit a sweater on commission that never came to fruition. So I made the sweater for myself. It\u0026rsquo;ll be a cozy one to wear once I finish it, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been dragging on the sleeves for months, and I\u0026rsquo;ve finished one of them, and I hope to finish it this week. I have a lot of Law and Order stored up for this purpose.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about it, on the knitting front. I have today off of work, and I have a bunch of writing and reading things to do, but I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be in touch with some non-knitting related thoughts later in the day as I have them.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-in-november/","summary":"The yarn store opened yesterday, and I--unsurprisingly--didn\u0026rsquo;t get any writing or reading done last night. Here are my thoughts from yesterday.\nWe failed, I think, to take pictures of the new sweater and other things. I wore another sweater, there\u0026rsquo;s at least one picture that I\u0026rsquo;ve spotted on ravelry of the shop that I\u0026rsquo;m in. More pictures as the come.\nBeing in the yarn store all day encouraged some sort of perverse desire to knit plain sweaters. There are a couple of yarns that I have my eye on. Mostly I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of Cascade Venezia Worsted, a lovely silk and wool blend, and some Lorna\u0026rsquo;s Laces Superwash. This is weird, because I don\u0026rsquo;t really enjoy making such plain sweaters, and what\u0026rsquo;s more I\u0026rsquo;ve sort of sworn myself to a constrained palette, as a creative/artistic experiment. No matter, there are a number of things that I have to finish before I will even think about starting a new project, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that it might be February before I get to that point.","title":"Knitting in November"},{"content":" Hijacking a Ravelry thread with lines from the Buffy Musical Episode, leading to the posting of a cat macro. friends Writing almost 1000 words on the novel project. Clean Spaces. Tea (goes without saying). Shoes with good support. Gmail IMAP twitter ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/things-that-make-me-smile/","summary":" Hijacking a Ravelry thread with lines from the Buffy Musical Episode, leading to the posting of a cat macro. friends Writing almost 1000 words on the novel project. Clean Spaces. Tea (goes without saying). Shoes with good support. Gmail IMAP twitter ","title":"Things that Make Me Smile"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s finally, I think, getting cold for real here which is nice. I can wear sweaters again, for real, mostly.\nThe new yarn store has its grand opening today, and although we were open yesterday, it\u0026rsquo;s for real today. That\u0026rsquo;ll be exciting. I got a/the copy of Sweaters from Camp, and I quite like the book, and always have, so it\u0026rsquo;s time that I actually got it. I think it might solve my indecision regarding my next big project.\nMy intention to get up early and write was foiled by chores and whatnot, but that\u0026rsquo;s ok, I guess, I\u0026rsquo;ll be thinking about things today, and maybe I can take some notes, during off moments, to counteract the certain \u0026ldquo;omg I can\u0026rsquo;t think about words now,\u0026rdquo; feeling that I get after a long day.\nThere was sweater blocking last night, and though I\u0026rsquo;m not wearing it today, I will have it with me and I suspect there will be pictures.\nAlso, there\u0026rsquo;s been a problem with the RSS feed for a few days, so if you\u0026rsquo;re used to reading the site by RSS (one way or another) then you may have missed a few posts. I think it\u0026rsquo;s all fixed now. I\u0026rsquo;m still not sure about the TealArt home page, but there\u0026rsquo;s no time to worry about that now.\nHave a great day, I\u0026rsquo;ll report back in a bit!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/november-beginings/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s finally, I think, getting cold for real here which is nice. I can wear sweaters again, for real, mostly.\nThe new yarn store has its grand opening today, and although we were open yesterday, it\u0026rsquo;s for real today. That\u0026rsquo;ll be exciting. I got a/the copy of Sweaters from Camp, and I quite like the book, and always have, so it\u0026rsquo;s time that I actually got it. I think it might solve my indecision regarding my next big project.\nMy intention to get up early and write was foiled by chores and whatnot, but that\u0026rsquo;s ok, I guess, I\u0026rsquo;ll be thinking about things today, and maybe I can take some notes, during off moments, to counteract the certain \u0026ldquo;omg I can\u0026rsquo;t think about words now,\u0026rdquo; feeling that I get after a long day.\nThere was sweater blocking last night, and though I\u0026rsquo;m not wearing it today, I will have it with me and I suspect there will be pictures.","title":"November Beginings"},{"content":"So one of the great things about Tumblelogs, particularly the automated variety profered by jaiku and Tumblr is that they\u0026rsquo;re all about collecting your wonderings on the internet and presenting those wanderings in a way that\u0026rsquo;s entertaining and, well, cool. The problem is that there\u0026rsquo;s something missing: the comments that you leave in other people\u0026rsquo;s blogs.\nPart of the issue is that it\u0026rsquo;s decentralized. Many people run their own blogs on their own servers using their own systems. There are conventions but not standards, really.\nCollecting blog comments is, I think a better marker of the sort of semantic network that makes up the internet, at least a better marker than whatever we remember to tag on Del.icio.us, which for me only seems to happen every six weeks, if I\u0026rsquo;m lucky.\nFor better or for worse I can\u0026rsquo;t think of any really good way to accomplish this in an automated way. Maybe technorati could be used as a source for this kind of data, but it\u0026rsquo;s beyond me, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure.\nAnyway, thats what I was thinking about as I was rolling out of bed, time to go angst about the GREs and my future. But first, a hot shower.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/missing-mashup/","summary":"So one of the great things about Tumblelogs, particularly the automated variety profered by jaiku and Tumblr is that they\u0026rsquo;re all about collecting your wonderings on the internet and presenting those wanderings in a way that\u0026rsquo;s entertaining and, well, cool. The problem is that there\u0026rsquo;s something missing: the comments that you leave in other people\u0026rsquo;s blogs.\nPart of the issue is that it\u0026rsquo;s decentralized. Many people run their own blogs on their own servers using their own systems. There are conventions but not standards, really.\nCollecting blog comments is, I think a better marker of the sort of semantic network that makes up the internet, at least a better marker than whatever we remember to tag on Del.icio.us, which for me only seems to happen every six weeks, if I\u0026rsquo;m lucky.\nFor better or for worse I can\u0026rsquo;t think of any really good way to accomplish this in an automated way.","title":"Missing Mashup"},{"content":"In lieu of anything about my day--which was mostly uneventful; or my knitting progress, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t been; or my plans for tomorrow, which are frightfully dull--I\u0026rsquo;m going to post the punch lines of a couple of theoretical issues that I\u0026rsquo;ve been tossing around and half starting blog essays about for a while, because I want to, and I can think of no good way to to frame or present them, and no good textual sources to talk about, so here goes.\n1. Reorganize sociology (and the way that people approach queer studies) so that race/sexuality people are more likely to occur than race/class and gender/sexuality people, because I think that this direction provides a much needed paradigm shift, it helps intersectional projects and it\u0026rsquo;s way way more interesting. I have the beginnings of an essay that I have no real good way to ground on the subject, but it might be interesting to think about\n2. Someone should do some study of technology that compares arcane computer interfaces like the command line, with arcane automobile interfaces like the manual transmission. I insert little bits of this when appropriate into my stories, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting juxtaposition, and I think speaks to some key issues in efficiency and the use of technology.\nThats\u0026rsquo; all for now, I woke up this morning in a panic about the GRE, I think I\u0026rsquo;m in pretty good shape, particularly if I continue to work on it, but it\u0026rsquo;s just scary. Also, yarn store work. Egad folks. I have some firewallable time on monday that I think I can do whatever I want with, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t decide if I should write or study for the GRE. Short term I want to write, long term, GRE is more important. Just gotta memorize those Pythagorean triplets.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/two-bits-of-theory/","summary":"In lieu of anything about my day--which was mostly uneventful; or my knitting progress, which hasn\u0026rsquo;t been; or my plans for tomorrow, which are frightfully dull--I\u0026rsquo;m going to post the punch lines of a couple of theoretical issues that I\u0026rsquo;ve been tossing around and half starting blog essays about for a while, because I want to, and I can think of no good way to to frame or present them, and no good textual sources to talk about, so here goes.\n1. Reorganize sociology (and the way that people approach queer studies) so that race/sexuality people are more likely to occur than race/class and gender/sexuality people, because I think that this direction provides a much needed paradigm shift, it helps intersectional projects and it\u0026rsquo;s way way more interesting. I have the beginnings of an essay that I have no real good way to ground on the subject, but it might be interesting to think about","title":"Two Bits of Theory"},{"content":"I was able to procure empty teabags today at a very swanky kitchen store. I went with my father to pick up an Areopress for my mother, after I saw the recommendation on Boing Boing TV. Now I know what you\u0026rsquo;re thinking, \u0026ldquo;Why tycho, in the world would you want empty teabags, and the answer is that I want to be able to make loose leaf tea, but I find most of the methods around to accomplish this are somewhat flawed. I\u0026rsquo;ve never had a tea ball not explode mid use, and I prefer to not be platform dependent (that is, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to brew tea in a particular pot, because it\u0026rsquo;s the only one that will make the tea.) Anyway. Now all I need to do is buy some tea of this variety.\nI have not woven in the ends or blocked the sweater yet, though I am for the first time all day in the same room with both the sewing up needles and the sweater so it might happen now. What I thought was going to be a short in and out sort of day, somehow turned into errands and doodling about. I hate days where, at the ned you wonder, \u0026ldquo;what the hell did I do today.\u0026rdquo;\nIn that vein, the Morris team is set to do it\u0026rsquo;s usual Halloween hurrah. It should be fun, but it can be a tedious sort of engagement. I have not ironed my white shirt, and I don\u0026rsquo;t intend to. It\u0026rsquo;ll be dark, and if you can see the wrinkles in my shirt, you\u0026rsquo;re missing the point.\nOnword and upword!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/empty-tea-bags/","summary":"I was able to procure empty teabags today at a very swanky kitchen store. I went with my father to pick up an Areopress for my mother, after I saw the recommendation on Boing Boing TV. Now I know what you\u0026rsquo;re thinking, \u0026ldquo;Why tycho, in the world would you want empty teabags, and the answer is that I want to be able to make loose leaf tea, but I find most of the methods around to accomplish this are somewhat flawed. I\u0026rsquo;ve never had a tea ball not explode mid use, and I prefer to not be platform dependent (that is, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to brew tea in a particular pot, because it\u0026rsquo;s the only one that will make the tea.) Anyway. Now all I need to do is buy some tea of this variety.\nI have not woven in the ends or blocked the sweater yet, though I am for the first time all day in the same room with both the sewing up needles and the sweater so it might happen now.","title":"Empty Tea Bags"},{"content":"I promise to post more than once today, with something that isn\u0026rsquo;t just a list, but I have a few thoughts that I think would be good to get out:\nI finished the sweater. Pictures to follow. On a scale of 1 to 10 I rate this one a 7, because of the way the sleeves/shoulders fit, but I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll quite enjoy wearing it anyway. I\u0026rsquo;m at 2,000 words on the novel. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to justify to yourself and the world that you\u0026rsquo;re writing a novel when you don\u0026rsquo;t even have ten manuscript pages, but I am I swear. I\u0026rsquo;m getting a hold of it slowly, damnit! No more novella editing yet, but soon. Round two readers, get ready! I need to figure out what I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and do with the novella once I get it to a point that I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable marketing it. The publication I was thinking of sending it out to has closed submissions until March (they have a good \u0026ldquo;new writers\u0026rdquo; program, potentially accept longer pieces and my parents knew the editor in another life so my name will stand out--my real name has a way of doing that. If not, I think the Marx quote will earn me points). There\u0026rsquo;s an indi-press that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in that looks like it\u0026rsquo;s the real deal, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that it will be too long for them. Other markets don\u0026rsquo;t have provisions for works between 25,000 and 40,000 in their submission guidelines, so I\u0026rsquo;m at a loss. I read the entire Ars Technica Leopard (OSX 10.5) Review yesterday, and it was great. I have to say that he didn\u0026rsquo;t talk about the RubyCocoa bridge thing that bsag talked about and the, I think the term is, \u0026ldquo;scripting hooks\u0026rdquo; in AppleScript for python and ruby, and the fact that Ruby on Rails and RubyGems ships with the new operating system, which I think is totally awesome, and a really good move on Apple\u0026rsquo;s part. Having said all of this, I\u0026rsquo;m not in any rush, and probably won\u0026rsquo;t upgrade until after I finish the graduate school application. What I have works now really well, and while I very much want to get rid of all the brushed steel windows, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have to worry about anything breaking or a massive backup for a while. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/thoughts/","summary":"I promise to post more than once today, with something that isn\u0026rsquo;t just a list, but I have a few thoughts that I think would be good to get out:\nI finished the sweater. Pictures to follow. On a scale of 1 to 10 I rate this one a 7, because of the way the sleeves/shoulders fit, but I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll quite enjoy wearing it anyway. I\u0026rsquo;m at 2,000 words on the novel. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to justify to yourself and the world that you\u0026rsquo;re writing a novel when you don\u0026rsquo;t even have ten manuscript pages, but I am I swear. I\u0026rsquo;m getting a hold of it slowly, damnit! No more novella editing yet, but soon. Round two readers, get ready! I need to figure out what I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and do with the novella once I get it to a point that I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable marketing it. The publication I was thinking of sending it out to has closed submissions until March (they have a good \u0026ldquo;new writers\u0026rdquo; program, potentially accept longer pieces and my parents knew the editor in another life so my name will stand out--my real name has a way of doing that.","title":"Thoughts"},{"content":"My recent foray into web2.0 living, when I left my power cord at home yesterday, was an interesting experience, and has left me thinking a good deal about computer usage in the future.\nBefore I get started lets just assume that by web 2.0 I mean, the move towards using tools like AJAX and Ruby-On-Rails to build quick and sturdy applications run server-side, and usually, centrally located as services. Google is like the web 2.0 company, but I mentioned Meebo, and 37Signals are great examples of the kinds of applications that are pushing these models.\nFor example, ideally what GoogleDocs has over traditional office software is that it\u0026rsquo;s platform, and even machine independent, and it uses high quality file formats. Also, there\u0026rsquo;s a whole level of stuff that Google takes care of (updating the software, maintaining the servers, and so forth,) that traditional software users have to pay attention to.\nThe side effect is that you have to \u0026ldquo;live\u0026rdquo; your computing life entirely in a web browser, which many of you may already be doing (I was watching theBoy do something on his computer, and I was sort of amazed at how much time he spent in a web browser and want not: I apparently live in a different world.) But I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is the way to go: web browsers aren\u0026rsquo;t very standard or consistent, and for the past 10 years, every browser I\u0026rsquo;ve ever used has consistently been the among the biggest and slowest applications I use regularly. (Clearly Photoshop wins this, no contest, and MS Office products are close, but I don\u0026rsquo;t use the former very much and the latter at all any more.)\nAs people start to use more than one computer, internet connectivity becomes more ubiquitous, and as large swaths of the computing (and developing) public starts to use non-Windows OSes1 it makes sense that the smart thing to do from a development perspective is to write Web-based programs: everyone can use them regardless of platform, they work everywhere there\u0026rsquo;s a connection, and in a lot of cases they\u0026rsquo;re as easy if not easier to write than their desktop equivalents.2\nAlso, being Web-based is good for business: it means that you\u0026rsquo;re charging people, not for the rights to the intellectual property that is your software, but for the use of that software running on their server. I\u0026rsquo;m all in favor of business models that \u0026ldquo;use\u0026rdquo; IP rather than \u0026ldquo;sell\u0026rdquo; IP. There aren\u0026rsquo;t effective ways to sell IP, but there are lots of effective ways to generate services.\nBut despite this, it\u0026rsquo;s all incredibly unsatisfying. Web browsers make really bad application interfaces/layers, and writing new programs isn\u0026rsquo;t always the best way to get better and more open file formats. I don\u0026rsquo;t know, I think someday most of our computing won\u0026rsquo;t happen on the devices we\u0026rsquo;re holding in our hands, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that the way to acomplish this is through a web-browser.\nJust saying\nSo MS has most of total market, that\u0026rsquo;s pretty much fact, but I figure that in certain markets, apple has a much larger share. College students, Designers, Hipsters, Ruby-on-Rails developers and so forth are all disproportionately Mac users, I\u0026rsquo;d figure. Adding this to the fact that Ubuntu is, I think doing well, and Vista continues to suck\u0026hellip;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re administering a web-server that people are going to run your programs on, then you can write the program and know that it\u0026rsquo;s going to run on a box with the right version of Ruby, or Python, or SQLite3 and so forth.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/browseros/","summary":"My recent foray into web2.0 living, when I left my power cord at home yesterday, was an interesting experience, and has left me thinking a good deal about computer usage in the future.\nBefore I get started lets just assume that by web 2.0 I mean, the move towards using tools like AJAX and Ruby-On-Rails to build quick and sturdy applications run server-side, and usually, centrally located as services. Google is like the web 2.0 company, but I mentioned Meebo, and 37Signals are great examples of the kinds of applications that are pushing these models.\nFor example, ideally what GoogleDocs has over traditional office software is that it\u0026rsquo;s platform, and even machine independent, and it uses high quality file formats. Also, there\u0026rsquo;s a whole level of stuff that Google takes care of (updating the software, maintaining the servers, and so forth,) that traditional software users have to pay attention to.","title":"BrowserOS"},{"content":" If I don\u0026rsquo;t know what to name a file I name it {something}.codex.txt. All my projects have codex files that are just big markdown collections of stuff. My todo list is called codex.tasks. Also all the spheres of my life have a two character prefix that I use to identify their files. AC for school (ACademic), MR for the novel (knowing MaRs), GS for graduate school (finally one that makes sense, SK for station keeping, BR, for the new novel project (BReakout), and so forth. Lots of codex files. Sigh. I have, by my count, about 16 more rounds remaining in the red sweater of doom. It\u0026rsquo;s all I can do to work on other projects. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to get this done and be able to focus on the Joyce sweater I\u0026rsquo;m making. I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to knit on it for a couple of weeks and then knit a sleeve, knit on the Joyce sweater for a week or two, knit another sleeve, and so forth until I\u0026rsquo;m done. At the moment, I have a slight bottle neck in the fact that I have 1 16 inch US size 5 needle. I\u0026rsquo;ve probably, at this point spent about 60 dollars buying this particular size and length of needle (it\u0026rsquo;s best when we don\u0026rsquo;t think about this.) I\u0026rsquo;ve broken 3 and cut the cord on another (steeking incident, lets not discuss.) But then, it\u0026rsquo;s probably better that I don\u0026rsquo;t divide my time too much. I\u0026rsquo;m having the desire to knit hats. Expect hats in my future. Sorry that there has been so much blathering about computer stuff and what not lately. New knitting content would be really boring, and it\u0026rsquo;s been busy. My computer speakers have the tendency to pick up errant radio ways which is really annoying, but I\u0026rsquo;m too cheap to buy new ones despite the fact that these were the speakers I bought for 20 dollars when I built a PC box in high school. So I\u0026rsquo;m sitting in an empty house listening to my ipod on noise isolating headphones. I start working a crapton lot on Thursday. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty psyched about it. I had the pleasure of talking to ComposerScott last night. He posted an entry on his LJ about a cute BSG cast member. And despite the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading his journal for, oh, a year, I felt that this was the perfect first time to post a note of concurrence. I discovered Scott via the wonderful \u0026ldquo;Prometheus Radio Theater,\u0026rdquo; which I must shamefully admit to being tragically behind on. I\u0026rsquo;m behind on all podcast listening, and I\u0026rsquo;m hoping to start taking up spinning again, as a way to begin to get caught up. I just don\u0026rsquo;t drive distances or do menial office work enough any more. Anyway, it\u0026rsquo;s nice to find new internet friends. My friend R. and I had a conversation a few months back about how most of our closest friends were people that we knew at a point about 6 years previous. It was worry some, because these people disappeared, or changed in ways that made being friends with them difficult (or we changed\u0026hellip;) But I\u0026rsquo;m starting to realize that many of my friends are more recent acquaintances, and I think though difficult in many ways, is a move in the right direction. I\u0026rsquo;m really bad about commenting on people\u0026rsquo;s blogs and journals, despite the fact that I read a great number of them. I just never feel like I have the right thing to say, even though as someone who delights in every comment that gets left on my site, that you don\u0026rsquo;t have to write poetry in the comment box. Would it be idiotic to build a linux server that had a drive that was dedicated to my iTunes library that I could mount over the network and then synch my ipod to over the network, or is that crazy? Also, while I\u0026rsquo;m living in fantasy land, what are the state of podcasting/skype tools for linux and the GIMP (the things that I find I almost always need more computer umphf.)? That\u0026rsquo;s all I\u0026rsquo;m observing at the moment\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/observations-for-30-october-2007/","summary":"If I don\u0026rsquo;t know what to name a file I name it {something}.codex.txt. All my projects have codex files that are just big markdown collections of stuff. My todo list is called codex.tasks. Also all the spheres of my life have a two character prefix that I use to identify their files. AC for school (ACademic), MR for the novel (knowing MaRs), GS for graduate school (finally one that makes sense, SK for station keeping, BR, for the new novel project (BReakout), and so forth. Lots of codex files. Sigh. I have, by my count, about 16 more rounds remaining in the red sweater of doom. It\u0026rsquo;s all I can do to work on other projects. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to get this done and be able to focus on the Joyce sweater I\u0026rsquo;m making. I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to knit on it for a couple of weeks and then knit a sleeve, knit on the Joyce sweater for a week or two, knit another sleeve, and so forth until I\u0026rsquo;m done.","title":"Observations for 30 October 2007"},{"content":"The red sweater of doom is almost done, I have about 35ish rows of knitting to do before the ribbing (which itself will take about two hours.) I think my goal of having it done by Saturday, is doable. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I have enough time to wet block it by then, but I\u0026rsquo;m going for steam here.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also going to have enough yarn left over to do something else with. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;ll buy a cone of black yarn to start with, and do something with the dark red and the black as a sort of subtle background for something. Another sweater. This seasons grey coat, and the blue and black grey coat are both queued up before this though. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to have a sweater that\u0026rsquo;s mostly made out of leftovers. \u0026ldquo;Woot! efficiency,\u0026rdquo; I say.\nThe yarn store I\u0026rsquo;m going to be working at starts employing me on Thursday (dry run, and a last minute sort of thing; grand opening on Saturday). I hear there are going to be people camping out in the morning. Hence wanting to get the sweater done before then. I also have a crap ton of things to get done before then. Egad. It\u0026rsquo;s weird, most of the mundane things in my life are pretty under control, and I\u0026rsquo;m not \u0026ldquo;behind\u0026rdquo; on any projects, it\u0026rsquo;s the big existential things that are dragging on me: getting into graduate schools, a web design project, some larger aspects of the writing projects, numerous emails, and so forth.\nAlso, I left my power-cord at home today, which meant that I had to spend some time using a public computer. A public PC computer. It didn\u0026rsquo;t even have Firefox! I was sort of at a loss of how to make things work (meebo was a lifesaver.) Also, while I would still consider myself proficient with office, it\u0026rsquo;s a weird experience, and my recent move to IMAP was helpful in keeping things all sorted out, but I have to say that I really hate living inside of a browser, and I can\u0026rsquo;t quite figure out how so many people do that\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, be well, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/almost-there/","summary":"The red sweater of doom is almost done, I have about 35ish rows of knitting to do before the ribbing (which itself will take about two hours.) I think my goal of having it done by Saturday, is doable. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I have enough time to wet block it by then, but I\u0026rsquo;m going for steam here.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also going to have enough yarn left over to do something else with. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I\u0026rsquo;ll buy a cone of black yarn to start with, and do something with the dark red and the black as a sort of subtle background for something. Another sweater. This seasons grey coat, and the blue and black grey coat are both queued up before this though. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to have a sweater that\u0026rsquo;s mostly made out of leftovers. \u0026ldquo;Woot! efficiency,\u0026rdquo; I say.\nThe yarn store I\u0026rsquo;m going to be working at starts employing me on Thursday (dry run, and a last minute sort of thing; grand opening on Saturday).","title":"Almost There!"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging for a really long time. I figure, since 1999 or so in one form or another. My archives, due to a server shut down at the end of 2002 only go back that far, but there was about two years of blogging before that.\nThe thing about this is that, at this point blogging wasn\u0026rsquo;t hip and new media the way it is now, blogs weren\u0026rsquo;t the kind of things that people set up every time they thought they had a new project, few if any college professors had their classes blog, and small businesses weren\u0026rsquo;t told that having an active blog was the key to success. Hell, commenting systems weren\u0026rsquo;t quite ubiquitous, and contemporary features like trackbacks and RSS were very new if they existed at all. Hell, niche blogging--like KnitBlogs, or TechBlogs and so forth--didn\u0026rsquo;t really exist. In fact most blogging platforms didn\u0026rsquo;t even use dynamic page generation systems\u0026hellip;\nIt was a different world.\nI occasionally talk with my friend dave about this period of blogging. We were both online and had sites back then, but never quite made it as bloggers in the way that many other people that were blogging back then did. I was\u0026hellip; 13 years old, and my spelling was even worse then; but I think we both had a lot of growing up to do. Also, neither of us were located in a place the real world that would have made it easier to \u0026ldquo;make it:\u0026rdquo; you\u0026rsquo;ll see when I get to the list that most of the original core of bloggers were located in L.A., New York, or San Francisco. But my goal isn\u0026rsquo;t to dwell on what could have been, but rather to try to make a list of the old timers.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the list, in no particular order:\nAnil Dash Jish `Mathowie \u0026lt;http://www.metafilter.com\u0026gt;`_ (MeFi) Kottke Meg Hourihan Heather Armstrong (Dooce) Cam Barret Brad Grahm Jerwin Derek Powazek Heather Champ John Halycon Styn Matt Kingston Amy/Domesticat Ev Williams UltraSparky Chris/Uffish Thoughts Choire Sicha Jonno Ernie/Little Yellow Different Rebecca Blood Noah Grey Rachel James What this list leaves out are sites like Slashdot and Boing Boing, the former should certainly count, the later is damn close if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t count. It also leaves out the Journaling tradition, which has been around for a lot longer than the \u0026lsquo;blog, and uses the same basic form. Indeed, many of the people listed above would probably be considered journal rather than blog types, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really matter.\nSo this leaves me with two questions for you, wise readers, who where the other 7-10 \u0026ldquo;original\u0026rdquo; bloggers? I can\u0026rsquo;t think of them, really. I think one would have had to start blogging before Janurary 2001, and preferably have started in the first half of 2000 at the latest.\nSecondly--family, and dave are exempt from this contest--not that there are good prizes, but I\u0026rsquo;ve met one of these people in real life out of the blogging context, I\u0026rsquo;ll figure out something something for the first person to figure out which one it is\u0026hellip;.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/30-of-us-and-no-rss/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging for a really long time. I figure, since 1999 or so in one form or another. My archives, due to a server shut down at the end of 2002 only go back that far, but there was about two years of blogging before that.\nThe thing about this is that, at this point blogging wasn\u0026rsquo;t hip and new media the way it is now, blogs weren\u0026rsquo;t the kind of things that people set up every time they thought they had a new project, few if any college professors had their classes blog, and small businesses weren\u0026rsquo;t told that having an active blog was the key to success. Hell, commenting systems weren\u0026rsquo;t quite ubiquitous, and contemporary features like trackbacks and RSS were very new if they existed at all. Hell, niche blogging--like KnitBlogs, or TechBlogs and so forth--didn\u0026rsquo;t really exist. In fact most blogging platforms didn\u0026rsquo;t even use dynamic page generation systems\u0026hellip;","title":"...30 of us and no RSS..."},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a status report for you all:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gone through the first four chapters of the novella incorporating the most of the changes that my first readers suggested. Woohoo! I also, fixed a recurring misspelling of a character\u0026rsquo;s name, and a couple of unclear moments. I think the ending is going to need a little clarifying perhaps for draft 3, but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to tinker with it too much for draft 2. I am almost half way done with the sleeve of this sweater. Blasted thing. That\u0026rsquo;s why I\u0026rsquo;ve not been posting much about knitting recently, it\u0026rsquo;s more of the same, and this is a loose end of an old project. I realize that most of you all who are reading this site are probably most interested in my knitting (welcome folks from ravelry!) but the truth is that most of the time, my knitting progress amounts to, \u0026ldquo;look here, I knit another inch on the same sweater!\u0026rdquo; and is as a result not nearly as sexy as it could be. I hope you don\u0026rsquo;t mind the musings about trends in science fiction or whatever else happens to be on my mind. Like\u0026hellip;. I think my taste buds are becoming habituated to the burn of horseradish. I put what I would have thought was an obscene amount of the stuff on a can of tuna-fish with mayo, and I could barely taste it. I fear that this might affect my overall quality of life. Sigh I\u0026rsquo;m slowly easing into work on the new novel project, and it\u0026rsquo;s starting to feel more like home. I always worry about using planning and the \u0026ldquo;marinating\u0026rdquo; process as a sort of \u0026ldquo;productive procrastination,\u0026rdquo; but the truth is that sometimes you just have to sit on ideas for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better about the project now. Though I\u0026rsquo;m a long way away from actually starting a new project, I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking at the Celtic Charted Designs book for ideas, and not being compleatly successful. I have time, but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to accidentally finish all my projects and then be without a new project again. That\u0026rsquo;s an ugly state to be in. I think I have a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;m going to lengthen the sleeves a bit, so then it will fit, but still be to warm to wear below the Arctic Circle. I\u0026rsquo;m about to head out to a new knitting group, and I\u0026rsquo;ve packed my tote bag from knitting camp full of projects, that I\u0026rsquo;m sure I won\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to knit on, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth a start. I guess it\u0026rsquo;s time to put on pants for the day\u0026hellip;. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-and-horseradish/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a status report for you all:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gone through the first four chapters of the novella incorporating the most of the changes that my first readers suggested. Woohoo! I also, fixed a recurring misspelling of a character\u0026rsquo;s name, and a couple of unclear moments. I think the ending is going to need a little clarifying perhaps for draft 3, but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to tinker with it too much for draft 2. I am almost half way done with the sleeve of this sweater. Blasted thing. That\u0026rsquo;s why I\u0026rsquo;ve not been posting much about knitting recently, it\u0026rsquo;s more of the same, and this is a loose end of an old project. I realize that most of you all who are reading this site are probably most interested in my knitting (welcome folks from ravelry!) but the truth is that most of the time, my knitting progress amounts to, \u0026ldquo;look here, I knit another inch on the same sweater!","title":"Knitting and Horseradish"},{"content":"One of the ideas that I\u0026rsquo;m playing around with in the new project is an \u0026ldquo;exodus from Earth,\u0026rdquo; where our people will be through the course of the long1 story, will be leaving earth and our solar system for more hospitable places.\nThis ties in with some of the ideas that I was playing with in the last post, in that I think this presents an interesting perspective to talk about some cool issues, even if I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly likely that there\u0026rsquo;s going to be a human exodus from our solar system in the next 500 years.\nAlso, I think it creates a space where I can take a couple of core cyberpunk ideas and get away writing a lot of very cyberpunk-ish things that if I were writing them straight on, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I could get away with. If I was writing a story set in the present/near future that had the sort of bleak settings and hypertechnologized environments, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would fly, but in the context of an exodus from this solar system? It makes more sense. At least to me, and I\u0026rsquo;m the one who matters at this point.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all for now. I should point out that I\u0026rsquo;ve finally made the transition to life as an IMAP mail user, and will hopefully now be less tethered to my specific instance of computer. We shall see\u0026hellip;\nCheers, sam\nI\u0026rsquo;m using the term \u0026ldquo;long\u0026rdquo; in the same sense as the \u0026ldquo;long 18th century,\u0026rdquo; rather than the sense that implies the story will be a lengthy narrative. It covers a lot of ground, but needn\u0026rsquo;t take a lot of time if done correctly.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/exodus/","summary":"One of the ideas that I\u0026rsquo;m playing around with in the new project is an \u0026ldquo;exodus from Earth,\u0026rdquo; where our people will be through the course of the long1 story, will be leaving earth and our solar system for more hospitable places.\nThis ties in with some of the ideas that I was playing with in the last post, in that I think this presents an interesting perspective to talk about some cool issues, even if I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly likely that there\u0026rsquo;s going to be a human exodus from our solar system in the next 500 years.\nAlso, I think it creates a space where I can take a couple of core cyberpunk ideas and get away writing a lot of very cyberpunk-ish things that if I were writing them straight on, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I could get away with. If I was writing a story set in the present/near future that had the sort of bleak settings and hypertechnologized environments, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would fly, but in the context of an exodus from this solar system?","title":"Exodus"},{"content":"I had a scene in the novella set in Casablanca a hundred years after they built a dome over the city.\nI have to admit that the decision to put a scene there, was mostly random, mostly because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to put it in Paris or Oslo, or some other European city. But as I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about it, it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting idea, to suggest that Northern Africa, might be the home of the next wave of cosmopolitan meccas. I particularly like the way that, particularly in a cyberpunk context, it creates a parallel with the \u0026ldquo;middle ages.\u0026rdquo;\nI read a forum post somewhere on the internet (that I can\u0026rsquo;t find anymore) that attacked the people who say \u0026ldquo;cyberpunk is dead,\u0026rdquo; by saying that \u0026ldquo;cyberpunk represented for them what could have been, and what might yet be,\u0026rdquo; which frankly I think is a load of nostalgic hooey. We can\u0026rsquo;t write stories today that are cyberpunk in the way that people could write stories 20 years ago that were cyberpunk. The cyberpunk \u0026ldquo;moment\u0026rdquo; if you will, has passed.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s not dead. There are to my mind two distinct flavors of cyberpunk that live on. The sort of theoretical decedents that say that there\u0026rsquo;s an underbelly to technological progress, that explores the possibility of subculture in the bright and shiny future. And then there\u0026rsquo;s the aesthetic side that thinks that DNIs are freekin\u0026rsquo; amazing and psychedelic virtual realities are cool and so forth.\nAnd before you say, \u0026ldquo;but tycho, who in their right mind would take as the starting point of a sub-genre, all of the fluff and none of the meat of a preceding field?\u0026rdquo; And it\u0026rsquo;s not as absurd as you\u0026rsquo;d think. Steampunk is basically all aesthetic and no real meat from anywhere else, and frankly it\u0026rsquo;s pretty damn awesome. The lesson is that we make our (theoretical) meat pretty much regardless of the setting, so if you have cyberpunks in North Africa, working on an internet that doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist and will never exist, it works (or can), if you play your cards right. Which is always the case, no matter how failed (or not) your premise is.\nWhat I think is more interesting from my own persecutive, is that despite how ardently theoretical I tend to be, I think I fall into the aesthetic camp, rather than the theoretical one. Contemporary theoretical cyberpunk tends to be much more moment specific, more grounded in current existence, current theoretical issues, and less involved in the issues that surround technological development and the culture-technology relationship.\nThe other factor in my own work is that I see science fiction, even futuristic science fiction as being a historical project. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in North Africa as a cosmopolitan center in my futuristic stories, because of its history as such, not particularly because I think that it\u0026rsquo;s likely to come to pass.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s incredible that Cory Doctorow and I can agree that futurism has virtually no place in science fiction for such completely different reasons.\nTomorrow is a writing day.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cyberpunk-in-the-21st-century/","summary":"I had a scene in the novella set in Casablanca a hundred years after they built a dome over the city.\nI have to admit that the decision to put a scene there, was mostly random, mostly because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to put it in Paris or Oslo, or some other European city. But as I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about it, it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting idea, to suggest that Northern Africa, might be the home of the next wave of cosmopolitan meccas. I particularly like the way that, particularly in a cyberpunk context, it creates a parallel with the \u0026ldquo;middle ages.\u0026rdquo;\nI read a forum post somewhere on the internet (that I can\u0026rsquo;t find anymore) that attacked the people who say \u0026ldquo;cyberpunk is dead,\u0026rdquo; by saying that \u0026ldquo;cyberpunk represented for them what could have been, and what might yet be,\u0026rdquo; which frankly I think is a load of nostalgic hooey. We can\u0026rsquo;t write stories today that are cyberpunk in the way that people could write stories 20 years ago that were cyberpunk.","title":"Cyberpunk in the 21st Century"},{"content":"Note to self: I\u0026rsquo;m taking the GRE on 12 November 2007 at noon in west county.\nFeh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gre-scheduled/","summary":"Note to self: I\u0026rsquo;m taking the GRE on 12 November 2007 at noon in west county.\nFeh.","title":"GRE Scheduled"},{"content":"So, I should have explained the title of the last entry: the new (and green) thin is the sweater that I wore today, the old thing was the stack of articles that I wrote, what is in my estimation an entirely predictable paper with. Moving on\u0026hellip;\nAfter a day of wearing this sweater (and in fairness it wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite cool enough, particularly at midday, but it was close) I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I want to work on trying to make V-necks work again. It\u0026rsquo;s a shape that works good on me, and I\u0026rsquo;m feeling particularly neck sensitive, but I think that sweater needs a little bit of time to wear in and soften up. Because it\u0026rsquo;s that itchy, mostly, It just doesn\u0026rsquo;t have the worn in feeling that\u0026rsquo;s so nice.\nAmongst my travels yesterday and today, I\u0026rsquo;ve been giving some thought to my novel project that I\u0026rsquo;ve started and taken a short break from to spend some time on other projects. I really only wrote a preliminary 400 words just to see how it felt, so maybe I\u0026rsquo;m still letting the ideas stew, and my little start was more of a dry run.\nThe last project I kept pretty much under wraps the whole time because of the nature of the story (I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to that explanation at any rate.) and because I was more worried that the conceptual issues were too connected to the plot. This time I think I can talk about the conceptual ideas without giving away the plot. It\u0026rsquo;s still connected, there\u0026rsquo;s just more of it (it being a longer piece) so I can talk about isolated moments without giving it all away. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to be blogging about this in the future, I think.\nAnyway, this entry has been lingering for more than a day now, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to let it go, but be well and be warm. It\u0026rsquo;s finally cold season. Yippie!\nCheers\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/slogging-through/","summary":"So, I should have explained the title of the last entry: the new (and green) thin is the sweater that I wore today, the old thing was the stack of articles that I wrote, what is in my estimation an entirely predictable paper with. Moving on\u0026hellip;\nAfter a day of wearing this sweater (and in fairness it wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite cool enough, particularly at midday, but it was close) I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that I want to work on trying to make V-necks work again. It\u0026rsquo;s a shape that works good on me, and I\u0026rsquo;m feeling particularly neck sensitive, but I think that sweater needs a little bit of time to wear in and soften up. Because it\u0026rsquo;s that itchy, mostly, It just doesn\u0026rsquo;t have the worn in feeling that\u0026rsquo;s so nice.\nAmongst my travels yesterday and today, I\u0026rsquo;ve been giving some thought to my novel project that I\u0026rsquo;ve started and taken a short break from to spend some time on other projects.","title":"Slogging Through"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m wearing my most recent new sweater today, it being finally, almost cold enough for sweaters since I finished it.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not strictly true. This summer I worked in a film and media archive doing some cataloging and digitization stuff, and it I damn near froze my ass off. It was 90 outside, and I walked out of the house wearing sweaters sometimes.\nAnyway, so I\u0026rsquo;m wearing one of my sweaters and I quite like it. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s one of those perfect sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;ll live in day in and day out, but I think I do like it a good piece. Shetland is such amazing yarn.\nSorry, no pictures.\nIn red sweater news, I\u0026rsquo;ve picked up the stitches around the armhole for the second sleeve (!) and I\u0026rsquo;m just knitting the very end of the ribbing on the first sleeve. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s also all I want to work on now, and I have emails to read, writing to revise, and a research project with a prof to work on this afternoon. Sigh.\nI also wrote a paper last night/this morning that I feel is\u0026hellip; not as good as what I could have done, it feels too much like the kind of stuff I was doing a year ago, and while I think it was good for me to get in touch with that again, as it serves as a good foundation for the work I want to do in the future, at the same time\u0026hellip; Ugg.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/something-old-and-something-new-and-something-green/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m wearing my most recent new sweater today, it being finally, almost cold enough for sweaters since I finished it.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not strictly true. This summer I worked in a film and media archive doing some cataloging and digitization stuff, and it I damn near froze my ass off. It was 90 outside, and I walked out of the house wearing sweaters sometimes.\nAnyway, so I\u0026rsquo;m wearing one of my sweaters and I quite like it. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s one of those perfect sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;ll live in day in and day out, but I think I do like it a good piece. Shetland is such amazing yarn.\nSorry, no pictures.\nIn red sweater news, I\u0026rsquo;ve picked up the stitches around the armhole for the second sleeve (!) and I\u0026rsquo;m just knitting the very end of the ribbing on the first sleeve. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. It\u0026rsquo;s also all I want to work on now, and I have emails to read, writing to revise, and a research project with a prof to work on this afternoon.","title":"Something Old and Something New and Something... Green?"},{"content":"(Note: theBoy is studying microbiology, and a local research institution.)\ntycho: I really enjoy being a social scientist, I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not going to cure plague or anything, but by god, I\u0026rsquo;ll make sure there\u0026rsquo;s something worth curing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/overheard-in-a-conversation-with-theboy/","summary":"(Note: theBoy is studying microbiology, and a local research institution.)\ntycho: I really enjoy being a social scientist, I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not going to cure plague or anything, but by god, I\u0026rsquo;ll make sure there\u0026rsquo;s something worth curing.","title":"overheard in a conversation with theBoy"},{"content":"So, I\u0026rsquo;m making this red sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about it before.\nOk. I\u0026rsquo;m nearing the close of the first sleeve and I have not yet used all of the first half of my yarn supply. That\u0026rsquo;s right. I think there will be some trading at some point of the darker color, which I\u0026rsquo;m pretty unlikely to use ever again in my life. Probably, who knows.\nI\u0026rsquo;m beginning to think through my next sweater project, which is a long way off, because, including sweaters that need sleeves, I have like four sweaters in progress. Five if you count the interminable fingering weight sweater knit at 12 stitches to the inch.\nSo maybe it\u0026rsquo;s more like five sweaters. Sigh. I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to have the grey sweater plus only one more on sleeves before I start another sweater1. For the past three years I\u0026rsquo;ve always started a sweater during thanksgiving week and finished it before christmas, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to do that again, but I might go for just finishing a couple of sweaters. I might be able to get all of all my sleeves that I want to get done by then, but the other project is too long. Sigh.\nIn other news, I did some practice GRE work. The computer screwed up, so I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good sense of my math section score, and because of computer screwing up (it meant my practice today was shorter, and didn\u0026rsquo;t mimic real test situations enough\u0026hellip;) I don\u0026rsquo;t have a statistically accurate view of the verbal section, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with how I did on this section.\nWhat this tells me is that I can do really damn good on this test, my actual score is/will be an issue of endurance rather than anything intrinsic. Back to practicing.\nTypically the grey is the project that I bring to movies for knitting in the dark, when I don\u0026rsquo;t have another project because it\u0026rsquo;s so mindless and easy.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/red-sweater-of-doom/","summary":"So, I\u0026rsquo;m making this red sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about it before.\nOk. I\u0026rsquo;m nearing the close of the first sleeve and I have not yet used all of the first half of my yarn supply. That\u0026rsquo;s right. I think there will be some trading at some point of the darker color, which I\u0026rsquo;m pretty unlikely to use ever again in my life. Probably, who knows.\nI\u0026rsquo;m beginning to think through my next sweater project, which is a long way off, because, including sweaters that need sleeves, I have like four sweaters in progress. Five if you count the interminable fingering weight sweater knit at 12 stitches to the inch.\nSo maybe it\u0026rsquo;s more like five sweaters. Sigh. I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to have the grey sweater plus only one more on sleeves before I start another sweater1. For the past three years I\u0026rsquo;ve always started a sweater during thanksgiving week and finished it before christmas, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to do that again, but I might go for just finishing a couple of sweaters.","title":"Red Sweater of Doom"},{"content":"So I was totally going to post this morning with a list of all the things I had to do: math problems, look for articles on identity in spoken communication, read an ethnography of a nursing home, write emails to professors, beat up some incredibly awkwardly written windows software, and of course writing and knitting. Sort of makes me nervous just thinking about it.\nAnyway, so I was going to post that list, and then I was going to say, \u0026ldquo;sorry, I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything more\u0026hellip; inspiring at the moment, but I have to run, and I don\u0026rsquo;t know how much time I\u0026rsquo;m going to get with the internet today\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nAnd while I still don\u0026rsquo;t have very much to report to you all. The knitting is going well, I\u0026rsquo;m glad to have a schedule, even a loose one again, so with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get some good writing done. I need to figure out a good way to jump start things. But that\u0026rsquo;s not why I\u0026rsquo;m writing this post.\nI got an email from someone I went to knit camp with pictures of Meg, my shawl\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m a fan. Thanks Stephanie (sorry I don\u0026rsquo;t have a link. Eek)!\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ll see if something more inspiring comes up.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/angst-and-shawl/","summary":"So I was totally going to post this morning with a list of all the things I had to do: math problems, look for articles on identity in spoken communication, read an ethnography of a nursing home, write emails to professors, beat up some incredibly awkwardly written windows software, and of course writing and knitting. Sort of makes me nervous just thinking about it.\nAnyway, so I was going to post that list, and then I was going to say, \u0026ldquo;sorry, I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything more\u0026hellip; inspiring at the moment, but I have to run, and I don\u0026rsquo;t know how much time I\u0026rsquo;m going to get with the internet today\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nAnd while I still don\u0026rsquo;t have very much to report to you all. The knitting is going well, I\u0026rsquo;m glad to have a schedule, even a loose one again, so with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get some good writing done.","title":"Angst and Shawl"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve had this kooky idea for a while to set up a sort clearinghouse/repository for GFDL and other open source style knitting patterns. The idea would be that a community of knitters could probably do a pretty good job of maintaining a collection of frameworks that would be really useful for people who want to get in and do design work, teach classes, and so forth. The truth is that most knitting patterns follow only a handful of different models, and there are only so many ways to actually knit a particular shape, so we\u0026rsquo;re stuck recreating the wheel time and time again, rather than creating new things.\nFurthermore, because we\u0026rsquo;re always working from scratch, we\u0026rsquo;re more likely to make silly errors. We may know that we always do sleeve decreases on every third row, but if we write on the 4th row, the chances of you or a tech editor catching it is probably pretty slim. Linus Torvalds\u0026rsquo; (or someone similar) suggest that one of the benefits of open source is that \u0026ldquo;with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.\u0026rdquo; And I think this is also true of knitting patterns. If enough people read through a pattern, the bugs will get sorted out, and the patterns can be of a consistently higher quality. Which is a reputation and a strength that can be transferred to any manner of derivative works.\nIt seems like a great idea. Even after a number of weeks since I wrote the initial series of TealArt entries on the subject, I still feel like it\u0026rsquo;s a great idea.\nThe problem is, I have no idea of how to organize it.\nI mean, I think I know how to work with people to have it done, there are organizational and logistical concerns that I don\u0026rsquo;t have the foggiest idea about how to organize it. My notion is to set up a framework, and seed a collection of publicly liscenced patterns, and then work to build a community around this. The ish is that I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue as to the kind of framework and standards to set up in the beginning to make sure that it makes sense.\nI fear I\u0026rsquo;m starting too in the middle for this to make sense. I sketched out some rough ideas on the subject that are still up at the knitting section of TealArt, for starters. The kinds of framework that I\u0026rsquo;m up in the air about are:\nhow do we categorize and sort patterns so that they make sense to both the contributors and to the people who might be using the repository? what format do we write patterns in? What kind of stylistic standards do we establish? when is a pattern completed, and when is a pattern considered still in progress? Thankfully there are plenty of really powerful community tools that allow for the right kind of collaboration, and I think that I can--with time--get it together so that it makes sense for people, the issue is more of a data structure problem.\nI think that KnitML will answer a lot of these questions at least in terms of the formating and style (which is the hardest issue.) We\u0026rsquo;re still a ways away on this, but there\u0026rsquo;s progress and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m much closer than KnitML to getting the project off the ground, so that\u0026rsquo;s safe. The second group of issues, relating to simply organizing the patterns, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking less is probably more here, the fewer categories there are the less there is that will make me/us say \u0026ldquo;wtf\u0026rdquo; in six months\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve blathered long enough, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go visit theBoy and maybe get some reading done. We\u0026rsquo;ll see. Here\u0026rsquo;s to more productivity in the future!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/collaboration/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve had this kooky idea for a while to set up a sort clearinghouse/repository for GFDL and other open source style knitting patterns. The idea would be that a community of knitters could probably do a pretty good job of maintaining a collection of frameworks that would be really useful for people who want to get in and do design work, teach classes, and so forth. The truth is that most knitting patterns follow only a handful of different models, and there are only so many ways to actually knit a particular shape, so we\u0026rsquo;re stuck recreating the wheel time and time again, rather than creating new things.\nFurthermore, because we\u0026rsquo;re always working from scratch, we\u0026rsquo;re more likely to make silly errors. We may know that we always do sleeve decreases on every third row, but if we write on the 4th row, the chances of you or a tech editor catching it is probably pretty slim.","title":"Collaboration"},{"content":"When we first toured this house we loved almost everything about it. The woodwork, windows, and the layout are very arts and crafts-y and so that\u0026rsquo;s cool. It was, however, carpeted with the most ugly carpets. There was a lot of burnt orange shag, and it was bad. Thankfully we knew that there was hardwood underneath because there were a couple of hallways and what not that had hardwood. But since we had a dog, we figured best to leave it in for a while, figuring that sooner rather than later we\u0026rsquo;d manage to rip it up\nI should point out that we\u0026rsquo;ve lived in this house for eight years now.\nA few years back we Tom Sawyered some friends into helping us rip up the orange, but we elected to leave it in a couple of rooms, mostly because ripping up carpet that was installed in the 70s is a lot of work, and it\u0026rsquo;s gross.\nToday, we ripped up the carpet in the office, got rid of one of the old desks, and it\u0026rsquo;s very nice. But, you sit on your ass for long enough ripping out tack board and the staples they use to hold the carpet padding down, and you\u0026rsquo;re bound to feel kind of cranky.\nNeedless to say, I didn\u0026rsquo;t get much writing done, nor knitting, though I did get a bit done, but everything looks pretty much the same as it did a few days ago, so no pictures. I\u0026rsquo;ll try and get pictures of the office once we unpack a few boxes, because what the hell..\nOh yeah, and we had another morris dance gig this morning at one of the county libraries. I think the team has four more gigs, and I think I only have to dance once or twice more. This is a good thing. It\u0026rsquo;s also a good thing that I\u0026rsquo;m almost done with these gigs as well, because if there was any particular \u0026ldquo;performance energy\u0026rdquo; in this show, it\u0026rsquo;s long gone. And I find myself more irritated than pleased. Mostly with gravity. sigh\nMore later\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/home-improvements/","summary":"When we first toured this house we loved almost everything about it. The woodwork, windows, and the layout are very arts and crafts-y and so that\u0026rsquo;s cool. It was, however, carpeted with the most ugly carpets. There was a lot of burnt orange shag, and it was bad. Thankfully we knew that there was hardwood underneath because there were a couple of hallways and what not that had hardwood. But since we had a dog, we figured best to leave it in for a while, figuring that sooner rather than later we\u0026rsquo;d manage to rip it up\nI should point out that we\u0026rsquo;ve lived in this house for eight years now.\nA few years back we Tom Sawyered some friends into helping us rip up the orange, but we elected to leave it in a couple of rooms, mostly because ripping up carpet that was installed in the 70s is a lot of work, and it\u0026rsquo;s gross.","title":"Home Improvements"},{"content":"\u0026hellip; of the knitting bag.\nOk, so I don\u0026rsquo;t have a knitting bag, but it\u0026rsquo;s better than the random places I stash projects that I\u0026rsquo;m neglecting. Even if it\u0026rsquo;s technically more accurate. We\u0026rsquo;re doing some repair on the house and I was forced to move the sweater I\u0026rsquo;m about to show you from the shelf I had been stashing it on.\n(We have really old carpeting in our office that we should have taken up when we got the house, but we didn\u0026rsquo;t and it\u0026rsquo;s just been icky.) Long story short, I pulled out this sweater.\nI started knitting it in June so that I\u0026rsquo;d have a stranded project to work on at Knitting Camp. And when at camp, I got the notion to--without reading the pattern--use a yoke style construction to get set-in sleeves. Which would have been fine, except that I\u0026rsquo;m very intent upon knitting sleeves from the shoulder down for a number of reasons cheifly:\nProgress is more apparent near the end rather than the beginning. It\u0026rsquo;s easier to get sleeves to be the right length and shape when you\u0026rsquo;re working top down. It\u0026rsquo;s easier to have a nicer shoulder seem when knitting top down. While the third point is obviated by the fact that you have to knit down from a provisional cast on (and there is thus a half stitch discrepancy in the pattern). I\u0026rsquo;ve compensated a bit for this, and it\u0026rsquo;s working out.\nThe problem? My usual speed of decreasing developed for drop shouldered sweaters, isn\u0026rsquo;t quite right. So I\u0026rsquo;ve had to rip the sleeve out twice. The third time is the charm.\nThe patterns for this sweater is from the book of Anatolian Stocking Designs. The central motif says something about \u0026ldquo;Egyptian Motif,\u0026rdquo; I think, and the other other is something that I tweaked a lot. The little round motif is a modified Fair Isle perrie that I\u0026rsquo;ve used a couple of times.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a closeup of the pattern. This is sort of draft two of this pattern. The first, is in the bottom of the box of sweaters that I took to camp with me. I did it in Prime Alpaca Sport Weight. It\u0026rsquo;s a very nice sweater, but it\u0026rsquo;s not particularly wearable: too warm and the fabric is kind of limp. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m used to knitting stranded work pretty tight to keep the wind out, and so this sweater which the rest of the world thinks is sport weight, I treated like jumper weight shetland. I\u0026rsquo;d like to make another garment out of it at some point, but I\u0026rsquo;d need to be a little less automatic about the gauge of that.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a detail of the neck shaping, which uses this slit neck shape that I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of. This shape is often the difference between a sweater that\u0026rsquo;s too warm and a sweater that\u0026rsquo;s just right. And while I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly sensitive to wool (like I can wear sweaters over short sleeve shirts, Having the wool on my neck is often too much.)\nSo there\u0026rsquo;s that. I should go back to knitting or something.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/from-the-depths/","summary":"\u0026hellip; of the knitting bag.\nOk, so I don\u0026rsquo;t have a knitting bag, but it\u0026rsquo;s better than the random places I stash projects that I\u0026rsquo;m neglecting. Even if it\u0026rsquo;s technically more accurate. We\u0026rsquo;re doing some repair on the house and I was forced to move the sweater I\u0026rsquo;m about to show you from the shelf I had been stashing it on.\n(We have really old carpeting in our office that we should have taken up when we got the house, but we didn\u0026rsquo;t and it\u0026rsquo;s just been icky.) Long story short, I pulled out this sweater.\nI started knitting it in June so that I\u0026rsquo;d have a stranded project to work on at Knitting Camp. And when at camp, I got the notion to--without reading the pattern--use a yoke style construction to get set-in sleeves. Which would have been fine, except that I\u0026rsquo;m very intent upon knitting sleeves from the shoulder down for a number of reasons cheifly:","title":"From the Depths..."},{"content":"Hey Folks!\nAndy and I joked this morning that we were running out of the internet. It\u0026rsquo;s true, I seem to be getting though it with some speed these days. I had been using an open source news (rss) reader for some weeks, because it was open source and because it handled feeds from live journal a little better than what I had been using. I switched back to a newer version of the program that I had been using, NetNewsWire, and I must say that it\u0026rsquo;s way better. While it still won\u0026rsquo;t do friends-locked live-journal feeds, I can somehow read things faster. I also did some culling of dead blogs, and things that I\u0026rsquo;m no longer reading. This means that I\u0026rsquo;m down to 83 feeds, from a high of about 500 when I moved from Wisconsin. This is progress, and at this point it means that I can budget some time to read more sci-fi and cool knitting related blogs.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a little bit here and there and I\u0026rsquo;ve made some significant progress on my Morocco sweater.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s probably about three inches longer now. If you omit the large bottom border (ie, that entire picture,) I\u0026rsquo;m almost 1/7th or so of the way to the beginning of the saddle shoulders. Which is convoluted. While the resulting jacket will look much like Joyce Willams\u0026rsquo; (it\u0026rsquo;s her design after all,) I\u0026rsquo;m going about it in a completely different way. Because I\u0026rsquo;m perverse like that. But it\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of fun.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to go caffinate and see what comes of it. I think I need to give up on my old favorite color of fountain pen ink, so we\u0026rsquo;ll call me mister blue hands. It\u0026rsquo;s not drying fast enough, anymore, or maybe it never did, but maybe I\u0026rsquo;m using thinner, less absorbent papers.\nSee, when I say I\u0026rsquo;m scatter brained, I mean it.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-end-of-the-internet-and-morroco/","summary":"Hey Folks!\nAndy and I joked this morning that we were running out of the internet. It\u0026rsquo;s true, I seem to be getting though it with some speed these days. I had been using an open source news (rss) reader for some weeks, because it was open source and because it handled feeds from live journal a little better than what I had been using. I switched back to a newer version of the program that I had been using, NetNewsWire, and I must say that it\u0026rsquo;s way better. While it still won\u0026rsquo;t do friends-locked live-journal feeds, I can somehow read things faster. I also did some culling of dead blogs, and things that I\u0026rsquo;m no longer reading. This means that I\u0026rsquo;m down to 83 feeds, from a high of about 500 when I moved from Wisconsin. This is progress, and at this point it means that I can budget some time to read more sci-fi and cool knitting related blogs.","title":"The End of the Internet (and Morroco)"},{"content":"First a poll. A somewhat low tech one, just leave a comment. If you read, say a science fiction book, where the name of the ships all had dutch names, but the characters all had english names what would you think?\nMoving on\u0026hellip;\nI knit a square last night.\nA friend is opening a yarn store in, less than two weeks (wow), and I\u0026rsquo;ve been drafted somewhat, consensually, into knitting swatches for the store. I must admit that where my mother has knit like 20 of them, I\u0026rsquo;ve knit\u0026hellip; almost 2.\nThe thing is, mostly that I really really hate knitting squares. Once upon a time I disliked knitting things that weren\u0026rsquo;t in the round, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t like purling. Now, I don\u0026rsquo;t knit things back and forth because I hate turning the work. It\u0026rsquo;s not the movement of turning, it\u0026rsquo;s the way that this action breaks the rhythm of knitting.\nI called--and I suppose still do call--the knitting section of TealArt \u0026ldquo;the knitting savants\u0026rdquo; and I think this is completely appropriate, because while I know a thing or two about the craft, I\u0026rsquo;m really picky about the kind of work that I do, and only tend to knit vary specific things, and if I have to knit something that isn\u0026rsquo;t one of these things for very long, I tend to get irritable and bored. So I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of naming the collection of essays and knitting writings that I\u0026rsquo;ve been casually working on for a while \u0026ldquo;the knitting savant,\u0026rdquo; because I think it would be cool.\nLater, assuming that life doesn\u0026rsquo;t come crashing in I\u0026rsquo;ll post pictures of my current knitting, though it\u0026rsquo;s grown about 2 inches since I took the pictures. I finished the border of the sweater and it\u0026rsquo;s been flying since then.\nWith the recent uptick in membership in ravelry, I\u0026rsquo;ve been getting a lot of feedback on my stuff from the site, so I\u0026rsquo;d like to thank you all. I\u0026rsquo;ve spent too long doing this whole blogging thing sort of in isolation, it feels good to have a community again. And I really love ravelry, it\u0026rsquo;s great stuff and the community seems to really be \u0026ldquo;working.\u0026rdquo; So huzzah!\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch. I have a lot to ramble about, but I don\u0026rsquo;t want this post to get too unfocused, so I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all right here real soon!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/squares/","summary":"First a poll. A somewhat low tech one, just leave a comment. If you read, say a science fiction book, where the name of the ships all had dutch names, but the characters all had english names what would you think?\nMoving on\u0026hellip;\nI knit a square last night.\nA friend is opening a yarn store in, less than two weeks (wow), and I\u0026rsquo;ve been drafted somewhat, consensually, into knitting swatches for the store. I must admit that where my mother has knit like 20 of them, I\u0026rsquo;ve knit\u0026hellip; almost 2.\nThe thing is, mostly that I really really hate knitting squares. Once upon a time I disliked knitting things that weren\u0026rsquo;t in the round, because I didn\u0026rsquo;t like purling. Now, I don\u0026rsquo;t knit things back and forth because I hate turning the work. It\u0026rsquo;s not the movement of turning, it\u0026rsquo;s the way that this action breaks the rhythm of knitting.","title":"Squares"},{"content":"Though I heartily accept and cherish \u0026ldquo;science fiction\u0026rdquo; as a genre that can describe and support the kind of fiction that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in writing, and I\u0026rsquo;ve often really enjoyed very fantastic science fiction--stuff with magic, stuff with aliens--it\u0026rsquo;s not something that has really occurred to me to write. Well that\u0026rsquo;s not true, I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about it, but have never really thought of a way to do it without coming off as cliche.\nLet me interrupt this reflection with a theory:\nI think there are two major kinds of science fiction, the first kind that answers major \u0026ldquo;what if questions,\u0026rdquo; like \u0026ldquo;what if there is time travel,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what if aliens come to visit earth from a far away planet,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what if a galactic empire collapses and a group of academics does what it can to save civilization,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what if an alien probe has been watching over human development for the last 3000 years,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what if corporations and the government wage a war on the internet to control the citizens of cyberspace.\u0026rdquo; The second kind science fiction elaborates on the kinds of questions above, and says \u0026ldquo;what if modern technology was based on gears and brass rather than transistors and silicon\u0026rdquo; (steampunk), \u0026ldquo;what if such and such happened to the collapsing galactic empire,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what happens if the government is able to crush cyberculture\u0026rdquo; (post-cyberpunk). Now lets be clear, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that this second class of science fiction is bad, quite the contrary, it\u0026rsquo;s often the best stuff; but I think it contributes to the genre discourse in a very different way. Ok. Done.\nThere are tropes in science fiction, like aliens, like magic, that are more about fitting in with the discourse of the genre, than about the direct questions that the trope asks. So, often, I think telling a story with aliens is more about responding to and thinking about all of the science fiction that deals with aliens, from Star Trek, to Stranger in a Strange Land, to War of the Worlds. and less about what aliens means in a bigger picture sort of way. I think the same thing goes for magic, the examples are different but the discursive structures are pretty much the same.\nSo for whatever reason I\u0026rsquo;ve kept things pretty realistic in my writing. While I haven\u0026rsquo;t been ultra vigilant about keeping track of the speeds that my spaceships are flying at, and I do muse on the possibility of telepathy a fair pice, other than that\u0026hellip; I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s pretty straight up. Humans are from Earth, the speed of light hasn\u0026rsquo;t been broken, the current date system are used, and I occasionally have oblique references to present-day events.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking, though, that, my previous aversion to aliens might be misplaced, and I\u0026rsquo;m actually thinking that aliens might be just what I sort of need in this short story I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with for a while\u0026hellip; Anyone have thoughts on the subject or am I just being weird?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/aliens/","summary":"Though I heartily accept and cherish \u0026ldquo;science fiction\u0026rdquo; as a genre that can describe and support the kind of fiction that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in writing, and I\u0026rsquo;ve often really enjoyed very fantastic science fiction--stuff with magic, stuff with aliens--it\u0026rsquo;s not something that has really occurred to me to write. Well that\u0026rsquo;s not true, I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about it, but have never really thought of a way to do it without coming off as cliche.\nLet me interrupt this reflection with a theory:\nI think there are two major kinds of science fiction, the first kind that answers major \u0026ldquo;what if questions,\u0026rdquo; like \u0026ldquo;what if there is time travel,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what if aliens come to visit earth from a far away planet,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what if a galactic empire collapses and a group of academics does what it can to save civilization,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what if an alien probe has been watching over human development for the last 3000 years,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;what if corporations and the government wage a war on the internet to control the citizens of cyberspace.","title":"Aliens"},{"content":"The piece I\u0026rsquo;m knitting is probably about 8.5 inches long now, and I have about 5 more rows to knit, except that I have made an error in two of those five rows, and have to do some un-knitting. Sigh.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s mostly that I got carried away and forgot to read the chart. After the 5 rows, I have the body of the sweater to knit, which I do hope will fly by really quick on up to the underarms at which point it gets interesting again\u0026hellip; in the good way. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a long coat/jacket type thing. I\u0026rsquo;ll take a picture of it soon I hope.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also sleeve knitting that I very much need to spend some time on.\nBack to writing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/moroco-knitting/","summary":"The piece I\u0026rsquo;m knitting is probably about 8.5 inches long now, and I have about 5 more rows to knit, except that I have made an error in two of those five rows, and have to do some un-knitting. Sigh.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s mostly that I got carried away and forgot to read the chart. After the 5 rows, I have the body of the sweater to knit, which I do hope will fly by really quick on up to the underarms at which point it gets interesting again\u0026hellip; in the good way. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a long coat/jacket type thing. I\u0026rsquo;ll take a picture of it soon I hope.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also sleeve knitting that I very much need to spend some time on.\nBack to writing.","title":"Moroco Knitting"},{"content":"If I have to do step back once more I might punch someone, just saying.\nAnd a fieldtown-ish version of the lolipop man by a women\u0026rsquo;s team that\u0026rsquo;s kinda cool:\nAnd of Course:\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/morris-dances-i-would-rather-be-doing/","summary":"If I have to do step back once more I might punch someone, just saying.\nAnd a fieldtown-ish version of the lolipop man by a women\u0026rsquo;s team that\u0026rsquo;s kinda cool:\nAnd of Course:","title":"Morris Dances I Would Rather Be Doing:"},{"content":"So here\u0026rsquo;s another little post about my writing project and process. It\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on my mind, and insofar as tychoish.com is a reflection of that, it\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m writing about.\nBut first, I do so apologize for not being in closer touch with you all these last few days. I\u0026rsquo;ve been morris dancing a lot, and unfortunately that doesn\u0026rsquo;t leave a lot of time for writing of various sorts. But I\u0026rsquo;m in a good place with all of my various commitments and feeling pretty grounded at the moment. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping this sticks.\nI\u0026rsquo;m trying to get this story laid out to the point where I feel like I can safely write it without having the big super-structural frameworks shift on me when I\u0026rsquo;m half way up there. I\u0026rsquo;m sure some writers are better with making those kinds of adjustments, but I know I\u0026rsquo;m really bad about that, so getting things worked out ahead of time makes the writing easier.\nOnce upon a time I outlined projects like this by taking a spiral notebook, and on each 2 page spread I\u0026rsquo;d outline the content of 4-5 scenes which I thought made up a chapter pretty well. I\u0026rsquo;d include snippets of conversation, and really it was a kind of free writing. The beauty was that I was able to take these ramblings and pull out the critical information \u0026ldquo;where do the characters need to get by the end of this, and what do they need to have seen on their way.\u0026rdquo;\nWhat this massive longhand aspect of the project did was force me to sit around with the plot and the characters for a long time, so that by the time I got to the actual writing, I had it pretty down pat.\nThe novella that I\u0026rsquo;m beginning to edit now was easier, because I was able to sketch it out a number of times on a single sheet of paper, and then transfer those notes to the computer. It also helped that I wrote a synopsis as part of an earlier project years earlier, so the characters had been in my mind for many years, and though the process wasn\u0026rsquo;t as formal, it was similar in terms of all the important parts.\nFor the current project I\u0026rsquo;ve done a couple of series of notes in my day to day notebook (the book I cary around and use for everything from writing and writing, to to do lists, to phone numbers and driving directions), but nothing formal like I used to. I then started a digital notebook in plain text file. It\u0026rsquo;s about 2,600 words at the moment, and the core 1,600 words or so is a first draft of the outline broken down by chapters.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been contemplating the next step, because the outline that I have so far is a bit rough. Because there are more characters in this, there are huge chunks of the outline that don\u0026rsquo;t have characters, or details, or even a more specific scene division broken down.\nSo what I\u0026rsquo;m doing now is creating a stack of index cards--the paper kind, of course--where each story chunk is on a card. This way I can play with discreet story elements and I can insert points on the outline as I need to. This is hard to pull off on the computer, because I like to outline on paper, and I often feel that notebooks have a very linear structure in the way that I tend to use them. I do know about scrivener, and even a wiki type program might work, but I like the way this is working and the way that I\u0026rsquo;ve changed my writing as a result.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/outlining-notes/","summary":"So here\u0026rsquo;s another little post about my writing project and process. It\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on my mind, and insofar as tychoish.com is a reflection of that, it\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m writing about.\nBut first, I do so apologize for not being in closer touch with you all these last few days. I\u0026rsquo;ve been morris dancing a lot, and unfortunately that doesn\u0026rsquo;t leave a lot of time for writing of various sorts. But I\u0026rsquo;m in a good place with all of my various commitments and feeling pretty grounded at the moment. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping this sticks.\nI\u0026rsquo;m trying to get this story laid out to the point where I feel like I can safely write it without having the big super-structural frameworks shift on me when I\u0026rsquo;m half way up there. I\u0026rsquo;m sure some writers are better with making those kinds of adjustments, but I know I\u0026rsquo;m really bad about that, so getting things worked out ahead of time makes the writing easier.","title":"Outlining Notes"},{"content":"We have this rather large, and by this point, somewhat middle aged cat. He\u0026rsquo;s incredibly shy around people he doesn\u0026rsquo;t know, and there are only a very select few who aren\u0026rsquo;t us that have seen him (maybe a dozen? not more than two dozen) in the 7-8 years we\u0026rsquo;ve had him. The neighbor who cleans up after them when we\u0026rsquo;re gone refers to it as \u0026ldquo;cleaning up after our invisible cats\u0026rdquo; because she\u0026rsquo;s not seen them. (We\u0026rsquo;ll, she\u0026rsquo;s seen the one, at a distance, I think).\nAnyway, so we were talking about the feline hierarchy in the house, in particular how Nash (the large, shy one) would theoretically respond to a new feline member of the household. I said:\nThink about how he treats us--the herding, the mewing, and so forth--ok, now he\u0026rsquo;s a big cat, but we\u0026rsquo;re bigger than he is. Another cat wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be. Think about how he\u0026rsquo;d cope with someone smaller than him\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m just saying, it could be a problem.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cat-dominance/","summary":"We have this rather large, and by this point, somewhat middle aged cat. He\u0026rsquo;s incredibly shy around people he doesn\u0026rsquo;t know, and there are only a very select few who aren\u0026rsquo;t us that have seen him (maybe a dozen? not more than two dozen) in the 7-8 years we\u0026rsquo;ve had him. The neighbor who cleans up after them when we\u0026rsquo;re gone refers to it as \u0026ldquo;cleaning up after our invisible cats\u0026rdquo; because she\u0026rsquo;s not seen them. (We\u0026rsquo;ll, she\u0026rsquo;s seen the one, at a distance, I think).\nAnyway, so we were talking about the feline hierarchy in the house, in particular how Nash (the large, shy one) would theoretically respond to a new feline member of the household. I said:\nThink about how he treats us--the herding, the mewing, and so forth--ok, now he\u0026rsquo;s a big cat, but we\u0026rsquo;re bigger than he is. Another cat wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be. Think about how he\u0026rsquo;d cope with someone smaller than him\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m just saying, it could be a problem.","title":"Cat Dominance"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve just wasted spent a few hours looking through the open source options for software that allows you to run cognitive psychology experiments. This is one of those realms where open source/free software really shines, I think.\nOne big reason for this is that most of the available proprietary options suck, because its never going to reach mass appeal or distribution. There are probably only a few thousand people who migh ever need software like this, so between competition and obsolete homegrown solutions that use hypercard or something. On the other hand, the faculty member reports that they \u0026ldquo;wrote their own experimental environments in QuickBasic,\u0026rdquo; which is a product of the late 80s, and she went to grad school in the late 90s. Maybe she meant visual basic and misspoke, in any case, it\u0026rsquo;s frightening. I\u0026rsquo;m frightened.\nI think we should all just sigh at this point.\nOk, so open source is made for this kind of situation. Not only do the proprietary options lack a certian grace and flexibility, but there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of polish that we don\u0026rsquo;t need and on the whole we\u0026rsquo;re talking about a really rather simple program. It also helps that a good percentage of \u0026ldquo;cognitive scientists\u0026rdquo; are trained a computer scientists, not psychologists, alhough the literature doesn\u0026rsquo;t cross over as much as you\u0026rsquo;d think1: despite this project, it\u0026rsquo;s not really my field, so I\u0026rsquo;m not completely \u0026ldquo;up\u0026rdquo; on the literature. In any case, computer scientists generally have the knowledge to write these kinds of programs, and because they work for universities\u0026hellip;\nAnyway so I found one of these programs called WebExp, that uses XML to define the experiments, and outputs data in a pure XML file. The only disappointing factor is that it runs in java. I\u0026rsquo;m not a java fan, because installing all the frameworks and what not has always seemed less than desirable for me. But what? I\u0026rsquo;m a fearless OS X user. I open up my terminal window, and on a lark, I type:\n$ java -version This was the response:\nJava(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_07-164) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_07-87, mixed mode, sharing) Which is good enough for this program. I love OS X. Now all I have to do is unzip, run, and set up the XML file to design the experiment. It will even automatically counterbalance or randomly order stimuli! While I think the intention of this program is to let people do experiments at home, there\u0026rsquo;s nothing to stop you from running them locally on your own system. How cool is that?\nThe best things in life are free.\nR. Gibbs\u0026rsquo; `Embodiment and Cognitive Science \u0026lt;http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521010497\u0026gt;`_, is a delightful exception.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/experimental-psychology-software-and-os-x/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve just wasted spent a few hours looking through the open source options for software that allows you to run cognitive psychology experiments. This is one of those realms where open source/free software really shines, I think.\nOne big reason for this is that most of the available proprietary options suck, because its never going to reach mass appeal or distribution. There are probably only a few thousand people who migh ever need software like this, so between competition and obsolete homegrown solutions that use hypercard or something. On the other hand, the faculty member reports that they \u0026ldquo;wrote their own experimental environments in QuickBasic,\u0026rdquo; which is a product of the late 80s, and she went to grad school in the late 90s. Maybe she meant visual basic and misspoke, in any case, it\u0026rsquo;s frightening. I\u0026rsquo;m frightened.\nI think we should all just sigh at this point.\nOk, so open source is made for this kind of situation.","title":"Experimental Psychology Software and OS X"},{"content":"Even though I know it\u0026rsquo;s out of vogue and comments on a cultural moment that\u0026rsquo;s past, a little bit of my heart still belongs to the \u0026ldquo;great empires\u0026rdquo; breed of science fiction novels. Like the Foundation books, like Dune (though I\u0026rsquo;ve not gotten to them quite yet, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of hoarding them I guess.) Actually as I think about this, there are a number of \u0026ldquo;great series\u0026rdquo; in science fiction that I haven\u0026rsquo;t read year, probably for this reason.\nWhile not a universal--I think Dune breaks this rule--most of these \u0026ldquo;great empire\u0026rdquo; series, aren\u0026rsquo;t really about a character or group of characters in the way that I think is more common these days. There are characters, of course, and they\u0026rsquo;re important, but they don\u0026rsquo;t stick around for a long time in the way that character driven fiction tends to be. And there isn\u0026rsquo;t really anything wrong with character driven fiction, it just leads to a different kind of perspective, and type of story, and to be fair, I think it\u0026rsquo;s the prevailing trend.\nIt seems that this \u0026ldquo;galactic empire,\u0026rdquo; style of story telling is really rooted in a sort of \u0026ldquo;cold war\u0026rdquo; framework and with the end of the cold war, the idea of \u0026ldquo;top down\u0026rdquo; superpowers isn\u0026rsquo;t something that\u0026rsquo;s omnipresent. I suppose that some of the late-cyberpunk writing that deals with corporations of increased size and unchallenged single powers, is the present day product of this tradition, but it takes a different tone, and a much more \u0026ldquo;bottom up\u0026rdquo; type approach.\nI guess the question that\u0026rsquo;s hanging in my mind is can we get away with writing this kind of \u0026ldquo;big picture\u0026rdquo; story in today\u0026rsquo;s context? I think the cold war is an easier issue to resolve for contemporary writers than is the character-centrism, but I\u0026rsquo;m open to ideas.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/galactic-empires/","summary":"Even though I know it\u0026rsquo;s out of vogue and comments on a cultural moment that\u0026rsquo;s past, a little bit of my heart still belongs to the \u0026ldquo;great empires\u0026rdquo; breed of science fiction novels. Like the Foundation books, like Dune (though I\u0026rsquo;ve not gotten to them quite yet, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of hoarding them I guess.) Actually as I think about this, there are a number of \u0026ldquo;great series\u0026rdquo; in science fiction that I haven\u0026rsquo;t read year, probably for this reason.\nWhile not a universal--I think Dune breaks this rule--most of these \u0026ldquo;great empire\u0026rdquo; series, aren\u0026rsquo;t really about a character or group of characters in the way that I think is more common these days. There are characters, of course, and they\u0026rsquo;re important, but they don\u0026rsquo;t stick around for a long time in the way that character driven fiction tends to be. And there isn\u0026rsquo;t really anything wrong with character driven fiction, it just leads to a different kind of perspective, and type of story, and to be fair, I think it\u0026rsquo;s the prevailing trend.","title":"Galactic Empires"},{"content":"Ok, so some of you probably won\u0026rsquo;t find this that helpful, but here\u0026rsquo;s something I think is rather cool.\nAll of you should know that in OS X that the terminal command:\n$ mdfind ******* where the ******* is your search term (and yes, you can constrain the results using a specific directory, or wildcards) will use the spotlight framework in OS X to find files that contain your search term. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty, and it\u0026rsquo;s fast, significantly faster than the GUI.\nThe next part of this hack uses a very basic shell scripting thing, that most shell fiends know\u0026hellip;\n$ mdfind ******* \u0026gt; search.results.txt Will preform your search just as above, but it will put the results into whatever file you say, and make a new file if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t already exist. That\u0026rsquo;s kind of cool.\nOnce it\u0026rsquo;s in the file I open the new file in TextMate. With some quick find and replace I escape out the spaces in the file names, and prefix all of the lines with an \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; command, I could probably write a macro that would do this, but I\u0026rsquo;m lazy, and the opportunity to write a regexp every now and then makes me feel smart.\nThen, because TextMate is so awesome, if you just hit ^R (control-R) when you\u0026rsquo;ve found a line that mentions a line you\u0026rsquo;re interested in, it will execute the line, and open the file.\nAs I think about it, you could omit the \u0026ldquo;open the terminal and enter the command\u0026rdquo; step and just sort of use TextMate as a sort of de-facto shell, but I have a terminal window triggered to a hot-key that\u0026rsquo;s easy to work from so that seems like the way to go.\nAnyway, I think it\u0026rsquo;s fun, and I definatly recomend using spotlight from the command line, rather than the GUI, because it\u0026rsquo;s faster, and I find that having the information about where the file is located is helpful for sorting out files that I know can\u0026rsquo;t possibly be the right ones.\nGood searching!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/textmatespotlight-hack/","summary":"Ok, so some of you probably won\u0026rsquo;t find this that helpful, but here\u0026rsquo;s something I think is rather cool.\nAll of you should know that in OS X that the terminal command:\n$ mdfind ******* where the ******* is your search term (and yes, you can constrain the results using a specific directory, or wildcards) will use the spotlight framework in OS X to find files that contain your search term. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty, and it\u0026rsquo;s fast, significantly faster than the GUI.\nThe next part of this hack uses a very basic shell scripting thing, that most shell fiends know\u0026hellip;\n$ mdfind ******* \u0026gt; search.results.txt Will preform your search just as above, but it will put the results into whatever file you say, and make a new file if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t already exist. That\u0026rsquo;s kind of cool.\nOnce it\u0026rsquo;s in the file I open the new file in TextMate. With some quick find and replace I escape out the spaces in the file names, and prefix all of the lines with an \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; command, I could probably write a macro that would do this, but I\u0026rsquo;m lazy, and the opportunity to write a regexp every now and then makes me feel smart.","title":"TextMate/Spotlight Hack"},{"content":"This is just my inner space opera lover voice coming out. A huge part of the story I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about takes place during outbound flights out of our solar system, likely to Epsilon Eridani, because it\u0026rsquo;s close and has planets.\nEpsilon Eridani. Is like what? 10 Light years away? And it has planets? So assuming we only are able to make half light speed, round trip we\u0026rsquo;re talking about 40 or 50 years, which would be less in subjective time because of relativistic effects. Ok, so it\u0026rsquo;s still hard. You\u0026rsquo;d have to send people who were twenty, and they\u0026rsquo;d get back 40 years later, though though the subjective time is only about 5-10 years. The faster you go, the shorter it seems to take, relative to how long it actually takes.\nThis is all based on the supposition that extraterrestrial colonization at a certain point, doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be based upon finding Earth-Like planets, but rather be based on finding places where we can build reasonably self-sustaining domes, or really just landed spaceships. Planets are nice, and they mean that you don\u0026rsquo;t have to expend energy to maintain a course, and that hopefully you have resources that you can mine near by that are accessible. If you build/design the habitats right, it right it\u0026rsquo;d work fine or at least fine enough for a novel.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s my story and I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/epsilon-eridani/","summary":"This is just my inner space opera lover voice coming out. A huge part of the story I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about takes place during outbound flights out of our solar system, likely to Epsilon Eridani, because it\u0026rsquo;s close and has planets.\nEpsilon Eridani. Is like what? 10 Light years away? And it has planets? So assuming we only are able to make half light speed, round trip we\u0026rsquo;re talking about 40 or 50 years, which would be less in subjective time because of relativistic effects. Ok, so it\u0026rsquo;s still hard. You\u0026rsquo;d have to send people who were twenty, and they\u0026rsquo;d get back 40 years later, though though the subjective time is only about 5-10 years. The faster you go, the shorter it seems to take, relative to how long it actually takes.\nThis is all based on the supposition that extraterrestrial colonization at a certain point, doesn\u0026rsquo;t need to be based upon finding Earth-Like planets, but rather be based on finding places where we can build reasonably self-sustaining domes, or really just landed spaceships.","title":"Epsilon Eridani"},{"content":"As you may have guessed I\u0026rsquo;m not that good with respecting traditional boundaries. It took me a long time to find an academic field that addressed the issues I\u0026rsquo;m interested in on the scope that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the identity vis a vis the cultural construction of memory, and because identity is a subject that is so often addressed by personality and social psychologists, I thought, of course that\u0026rsquo;s where I should be working. Wrong. Turns out, all the cool work on the subject is being done by developmentalists who work sort of at the confluence of linguistics and anthropology, more or less. That\u0026rsquo;s not something they teach you in Psych 100, alas--it might be something I would teach you in Psych 100, however.\nSimilarly, in my (science) fiction writing, I often say that I write pretty straightforward and unabashed space opera, much in the same way that I used to say that I wanted to be a social or personality psychologist. But as I\u0026rsquo;m planning out this new book, I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that that\u0026rsquo;s not strictly true.\nThe novella, was probably about half way between cyber-punk and space opera, except that all of the story is set on Mars and Earth, which is about the extent of human occupation, and it still takes 6-12 months to get between Mars and Earth. Not exactly star trek, even though it\u0026rsquo;s theoretically set a few hundred years after Captain Kirk.\nThe project I\u0026rsquo;m working on now, is more in space, and while I\u0026rsquo;m going to be playing with a few cyberpunk ideas/settings, it\u0026rsquo;s still not very Captain Kirk-ish. Earth to Saturn takes about 3 weeks, and for interstellar flights, figure pretty damn close to lightspeed, but not there. While this sounds more like a space opera, I think my general tone is much less\u0026hellip; romantic. I think I\u0026rsquo;d generally agree with Debra Doyle\u0026rsquo;s assertion that SF is a genre of romances, I\u0026rsquo;m just less, bright and shiny about.\nMaybe someday I\u0026rsquo;ll find a happy home for the fiction projects. In the mean time. I have things I should be doing. eek.\ncheers, t.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/unexpected-genresthoughts-on-discplanarity/","summary":"As you may have guessed I\u0026rsquo;m not that good with respecting traditional boundaries. It took me a long time to find an academic field that addressed the issues I\u0026rsquo;m interested in on the scope that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the identity vis a vis the cultural construction of memory, and because identity is a subject that is so often addressed by personality and social psychologists, I thought, of course that\u0026rsquo;s where I should be working. Wrong. Turns out, all the cool work on the subject is being done by developmentalists who work sort of at the confluence of linguistics and anthropology, more or less. That\u0026rsquo;s not something they teach you in Psych 100, alas--it might be something I would teach you in Psych 100, however.\nSimilarly, in my (science) fiction writing, I often say that I write pretty straightforward and unabashed space opera, much in the same way that I used to say that I wanted to be a social or personality psychologist.","title":"Unexpected Genres/Thoughts on Discplanarity"},{"content":"Sorry I\u0026rsquo;ve been (more) absent these past few days. I remain well.\nA lot of my writing time has been going to the novel project. I have a pretty good story-board level outline of the first act. Andy sent me a great link about writing narrative computer games which I\u0026rsquo;m going to be reading in more depth as I plan the second part. I can feel it starting to get together, so that\u0026rsquo;s good. I\u0026rsquo;ve talked before about my trials with \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; in the context of my writing, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m doing better with this, and won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with the details.\nThe funny thing is that I predict that at this pace I might be ready to start the draft during november, which means despite my crankyness about NaNoWriMo, I might actually start with the rest of folk around November 1. I have a lot of other projects that are going to be coming due about that time, so I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll actually get it done, and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t think of trying, but that\u0026rsquo;s cool.\nI also am getting preliminary feedback on the novella. I\u0026rsquo;m encouraged.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/act-i/","summary":"Sorry I\u0026rsquo;ve been (more) absent these past few days. I remain well.\nA lot of my writing time has been going to the novel project. I have a pretty good story-board level outline of the first act. Andy sent me a great link about writing narrative computer games which I\u0026rsquo;m going to be reading in more depth as I plan the second part. I can feel it starting to get together, so that\u0026rsquo;s good. I\u0026rsquo;ve talked before about my trials with \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; in the context of my writing, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m doing better with this, and won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with the details.\nThe funny thing is that I predict that at this pace I might be ready to start the draft during november, which means despite my crankyness about NaNoWriMo, I might actually start with the rest of folk around November 1. I have a lot of other projects that are going to be coming due about that time, so I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll actually get it done, and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t think of trying, but that\u0026rsquo;s cool.","title":"Act I"},{"content":"There was an art fair next to an local-artisan fair today, this morning, that I\u0026rsquo;ve gone to a lot when I\u0026rsquo;m in town. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of near where we used to live, though I don\u0026rsquo;t think we ever lived there while this was going on. I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to get things at art fairs, which is fine. It\u0026rsquo;s fun to watch people, and I like looking at art; having said that, I did get a bracelet and a necklace: two things which I\u0026rsquo;ve idly been looking for for a long time. The bracelet is a brushed stainless steel, very solid, and quite nice: I have a tendency to erode any metal that\u0026rsquo;s on my skin for any period of time. Call it my super power. The necklace, is just a blue and black glass pendant, square and black, with a blue thing in it. The cord is a thin black rubber thing, and I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll move over to a black leather strap at some point, but for now it\u0026rsquo;s fine.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been reading through the novella, and making a few minor changes. I was inconsistent in my spelling of a character\u0026rsquo;s name. Don\u0026rsquo;t worry I\u0026rsquo;m not a weird SF namer, the name was Gus, I just thought it needed two s\u0026rsquo;s sometimes. I\u0026rsquo;m worried that the beginning and the end aren\u0026rsquo;t consistent with each-other in terms of tone and style, but this is a neurosis that I need to deal with. I want to sift through it so that I can catch the worst problems, but I\u0026rsquo;m not changing anything big, because I want to see how it all plays. I have a list of first readers that I want to get it out to really quick, so that I can take a break from it in earnest.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still planning out the novel. This ones, sort of tracks some of the questions that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in playing with in my academic work, and I think the story is pretty interesting to boot. I\u0026rsquo;m still working on developing various elements and parts of the story. Every so often I take a page of the moleskine and say, \u0026ldquo;here\u0026rsquo;s what I know about this part of the story,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m finding that there are fewer places where I sort of draw a box and say\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;something happens big\u0026rdquo; each time. So I\u0026rsquo;m getting there, but I need to get clearer with the fact that this planning is really crucial to the writing process, and should count as writing. I think I get pretty caught up in the word-count as a marker of progress that I forget all of the \u0026ldquo;work in a generous sense\u0026rdquo; (yuck it up guys) that goes into this process.\nOne of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m struggling with is that I want part of a section to \u0026ldquo;feel\u0026rdquo; like a computer/video game. There are a number of reasons for this, which I think would require too much explanation, but I think it works. My issue? Never played a video game with a plot. Sure, I had some fun in some of the flight-simulator-esque games, where you fly around and blow things up, but I never payed attention to the story. I\u0026rsquo;ve come to understand that there are a lot of these games which are quite like novels in the way that they tell stories and what not. So I need to pick the creative mind of some game designer (is that the right word or does that mean the folks who write the programs?) Those of you with writing podcasts, cough Mur and Matt, take note.\nAnd other than that, things are chugging along. I have an office that\u0026rsquo;s great, I have furniture in my room that you can actually sit on. I\u0026rsquo;m busy, which is a little stressful, but really I like it this way.\nBe well, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be around more in the coming days.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/resting-weekend-never/","summary":"There was an art fair next to an local-artisan fair today, this morning, that I\u0026rsquo;ve gone to a lot when I\u0026rsquo;m in town. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of near where we used to live, though I don\u0026rsquo;t think we ever lived there while this was going on. I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to get things at art fairs, which is fine. It\u0026rsquo;s fun to watch people, and I like looking at art; having said that, I did get a bracelet and a necklace: two things which I\u0026rsquo;ve idly been looking for for a long time. The bracelet is a brushed stainless steel, very solid, and quite nice: I have a tendency to erode any metal that\u0026rsquo;s on my skin for any period of time. Call it my super power. The necklace, is just a blue and black glass pendant, square and black, with a blue thing in it. The cord is a thin black rubber thing, and I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll move over to a black leather strap at some point, but for now it\u0026rsquo;s fine.","title":"Resting Weekend? Never"},{"content":"I have to admit--with some amount of shame--that I have such a library of articles on my computer that I can basically write short little papers of the kind that I have to this semester, based entirely on articles I already have on my computer. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;m not reading new articles, just that I collect them, and don\u0026rsquo;t read them immediately.\nPart of my paper today, on linguistic relativism, involved--as my dearest friends will surely not be surprised--a brief reading of Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s science fiction novel Babel-17, which uses the Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis to great effect.\nSo in doing so I did a search of my computer and found a great interview with Delany that I downloaded, but didn\u0026rsquo;t read, 3.5 years ago for a paper I was writing on Delany then. I also, as happenstance, didn\u0026rsquo;t read the interview for another paper I was writing on Delany a year later. Alas. Anyway, I found the following quote, which I think is priceless. I hope you enjoy!\nMy life partner of nine years, Dennis, who, by his own admission has read only a single book cover to cover (Cavel\u0026rsquo;s Shogun, which he picked entirely on the criterion of size: When, after he met me, he decided he better read at least one, he figured he\u0026rsquo;d best make it a big one), walked through the living room just this morning, as I was talking on the phone with a long-time journalist friend, enthusing over some structurally serendipitous discovery I\u0026rsquo;d made in a recent reading of the incomplete draft of my current novel. Dennis gave a wonderfully generous laugh and declared: \u0026ldquo;You guys are crazy . . . !\u0026rdquo; before, with a grin, he left to meet a friend of his and go walking in the Sunday morning street fair out on Broadway.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/because-delany-rocks/","summary":"I have to admit--with some amount of shame--that I have such a library of articles on my computer that I can basically write short little papers of the kind that I have to this semester, based entirely on articles I already have on my computer. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;m not reading new articles, just that I collect them, and don\u0026rsquo;t read them immediately.\nPart of my paper today, on linguistic relativism, involved--as my dearest friends will surely not be surprised--a brief reading of Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s science fiction novel Babel-17, which uses the Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis to great effect.\nSo in doing so I did a search of my computer and found a great interview with Delany that I downloaded, but didn\u0026rsquo;t read, 3.5 years ago for a paper I was writing on Delany then. I also, as happenstance, didn\u0026rsquo;t read the interview for another paper I was writing on Delany a year later.","title":"Because Delany Rocks"},{"content":"Writing yesterday was a perfect example of the \u0026ldquo;writing is hard work and it\u0026rsquo;s painful, and miserable.\u0026rdquo; Without a \u0026ldquo;but totally worth it in the end.\u0026rdquo; clause. I mean generally, I think it\u0026rsquo;s rewarding, and I am glad that I can do it, but it\u0026rsquo;s not\u0026hellip; fun and bright lights. I agonized over it, and when it was finally over, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly just glad that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to do that again.\nHaving said that, because ~/tychoish is really kinda like a notebook for me, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post my working list of \u0026ldquo;things I need to concentrate on for the next little bit now that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a huge writing project hanging on my back demanding to be written.\u0026rdquo; Here goes:\n1. Read more. This is always a project of mine. I have five books, in the immediate \u0026ldquo;to read\u0026rdquo; pile, including a book of short stories, and a Delany novel, the Delany novel I\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of, plus a Tiptree novella, and another Melissa Scott book. Plus things for class. I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty good about reading of late, but I can always read more and it sometimes gets away from me.\n2. Write some materials for a couple of knitting classes that I want to be able to offer in the coming months. I want to write a \u0026ldquo;how to knit\u0026rdquo; using the method that I developed during my WGST internship last semester. And I also want to write a list of stylistic guidelines for people who want to knit sweaters, so that I can teach a \u0026ldquo;knit/design your first sweater.\u0026rdquo; class, in addition to my \u0026ldquo;toe up sock class\u0026rdquo; and intro to two color knitting class that I\u0026rsquo;ve already taught.\n3. Knowing Mars1 work, specifically I want to give it a quick once over and then create a PDF/HTML file so that reviewers can get a copy pretty soon. Many of you are on my \u0026ldquo;readers\u0026rdquo; list, I\u0026rsquo;m sure, and will get a copy to look at soon. My intention is to have two batches of eyes look at successive versions, so that I don\u0026rsquo;t get 12 people telling me to change the same thing, and no one to tell me if the old version was better than the first.\n4. Write Station Keeping Seasons 2 and 3. So in my concentration on the new project, I completely ignored my other fiction project. Theoretically we should have started season 2 last week, but that\u0026rsquo;s not going to happen. I\u0026rsquo;d rather wait a while and then do it right, then rush in and screw it up. It\u0026rsquo;ll work out, and I\u0026rsquo;ve got a lot of prep work done on it, so it makes some sense to give some attention to the execution of the story.\n5. I applied--albeit unsuccessfully--to be on the staff of futurismic, a blog/publication that does the kind of science fiction/futuristic stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m most interested in these days. I can however submit articles/essays/columns to them, and I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to take advantage of this opportunity to write about some of the ideas behind what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about these days. And it\u0026rsquo;s a cool site.\n6. Graduate school stuff. I have some work to do for school, including a really cool paper for my linguistics class. And I have to write a new personal statement, register and study for the GRE (I\u0026rsquo;m taking a class, so that\u0026rsquo;s good) and then fill out applications and do some of the logistical stuff including getting transcripts and other materials prepared for sending. I think my chances are pretty good, though I can\u0026rsquo;t bear thinking about what might happen if I don\u0026rsquo;t get in this time. So I\u0026rsquo;m not going to think about it.\n7. Knit more. I still have a but load of sleeve knitting to do, and a project that\u0026rsquo;s progressing very slowly. It\u0026rsquo;ll speed up in another 40 rounds or something. Sigh. My quota will be way down this year, I fear.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all.\nok, question: do you italicize the title of a novella, or put it in quotes. Does it depend on how it gets published or is there a rule of thumb that I have forgotten? Literature majors everywhere answer now!\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-post-mars-list/","summary":"Writing yesterday was a perfect example of the \u0026ldquo;writing is hard work and it\u0026rsquo;s painful, and miserable.\u0026rdquo; Without a \u0026ldquo;but totally worth it in the end.\u0026rdquo; clause. I mean generally, I think it\u0026rsquo;s rewarding, and I am glad that I can do it, but it\u0026rsquo;s not\u0026hellip; fun and bright lights. I agonized over it, and when it was finally over, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly just glad that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to do that again.\nHaving said that, because ~/tychoish is really kinda like a notebook for me, I thought I\u0026rsquo;d post my working list of \u0026ldquo;things I need to concentrate on for the next little bit now that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a huge writing project hanging on my back demanding to be written.\u0026rdquo; Here goes:\n1. Read more. This is always a project of mine. I have five books, in the immediate \u0026ldquo;to read\u0026rdquo; pile, including a book of short stories, and a Delany novel, the Delany novel I\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of, plus a Tiptree novella, and another Melissa Scott book.","title":"A Post-_Mars_ List"},{"content":"At about 11 today, I finished the novella.\nTotal word count, for them\u0026rsquo;s that care: 31,518. Lets hope I can trim it to make it a bit tighter. In pages, depending on breaks and what not, I think that means we\u0026rsquo;re talking about ~80-90 pages book pages.\nThe title is \u0026ldquo;Knowing Mars,\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s sort of a coming out story, I guess. This project, and the other one that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about, and will probably start soon, really focus on ideas that center around historiography and historical narratives, and the impact of these stories. You\u0026rsquo;ll see at some point, of course. As Melissa Scot points out It\u0026rsquo;s hard to talk about the process and ideas behind the creative process \u0026ldquo;without making it sound either stilted [\u0026hellip;] or mystical.\u0026rdquo; So I think explaining myself too much might just get me in trouble.\nThis project has been a revival and remaining of some material that I envisioned as sort of historical backstroke for the novel that I wrote when I was in high school. I realized that these three pages (and possibly the next several) were the best part of the 500+ pages that I wrote then, so I ran with it, and ended up with this pleasant little novella.\nI\u0026rsquo;m better at telling stories now, and I\u0026rsquo;m not such a n00b about a lot of the mechanics of fiction writing. I also have a better sense of the genre, so I think this is likely to feel a lot less trite.\nHaving said that, if everyone has a million words of crap in them that they have to get out, then this puts me at only about say, 160k in terms of fiction writing\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to do a very quick once through and then send it off to a group of readers, I hope by the beginning of next week.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knowing-mars/","summary":"At about 11 today, I finished the novella.\nTotal word count, for them\u0026rsquo;s that care: 31,518. Lets hope I can trim it to make it a bit tighter. In pages, depending on breaks and what not, I think that means we\u0026rsquo;re talking about ~80-90 pages book pages.\nThe title is \u0026ldquo;Knowing Mars,\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s sort of a coming out story, I guess. This project, and the other one that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about, and will probably start soon, really focus on ideas that center around historiography and historical narratives, and the impact of these stories. You\u0026rsquo;ll see at some point, of course. As Melissa Scot points out It\u0026rsquo;s hard to talk about the process and ideas behind the creative process \u0026ldquo;without making it sound either stilted [\u0026hellip;] or mystical.\u0026rdquo; So I think explaining myself too much might just get me in trouble.\nThis project has been a revival and remaining of some material that I envisioned as sort of historical backstroke for the novel that I wrote when I was in high school.","title":"Knowing Mars"},{"content":"Dearest Readers,\nI have a Monkey on my back. The penultimate scene of the novella, specifically. I\u0026rsquo;m so close, it\u0026rsquo;s sort of maddening. Once the draft is in order, I\u0026rsquo;ll have editing and revisions to handle, but that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be much of a problem: there aren\u0026rsquo;t major problems I think, and , we\u0026rsquo;ll see what the reviewers say, and most of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m worried about can be cut without much trouble. Shaving as much as 5,000 words wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a bad thing, and could conceivably make this more sellable.1\nAnyway, that\u0026rsquo;s beside the point, it\u0026rsquo;s useless without this last two scenes. In fairness, once the one I\u0026rsquo;m hung up on gets written, the following \u0026ldquo;scene\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t an issue.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve been trolling YouTube, and I have a discovery to report. There are people who do Bob Dylan covers and post them on You Tube. I have to say that I love Dylan songs, \u0026ldquo;The Times they are A-Changing,\u0026rdquo; is perhaps the most misunderstood 3-part harmony song or waltz (take your pick) in all of American Folk Music. I\u0026rsquo;ve long been of the opinion that while there is a certain \u0026ldquo;kitsch\u0026rdquo; value in listening to Bob Dylan, almost everyone does a better job with them than Dylan.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s one by a cute hipster. I\u0026rsquo;m not wild about the introduction, and he\u0026rsquo;s classically sincere, but it works. There are a lot of good versions of \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t think Twice it\u0026rsquo;s Alright,\u0026rdquo; and Dylan does a good job with it, but anyway, I like the way YouTube supports this kind of stuff. Enjoy.\nAnd\u0026hellip; I should be writing.\nI discovered after it was all paced out and plotted and half written that, even though 30k words is the perfect novella length in my mind, it\u0026rsquo;s too long for most magazine-type publications to publish as a whole, and too short for them to publish as a serial. Alas. Plus or minus 10k, and it\u0026rsquo;d work. As it I have to look for anthologies or wait until I finish the next project and sell them together. Or something.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/monkey-on-my-back/","summary":"Dearest Readers,\nI have a Monkey on my back. The penultimate scene of the novella, specifically. I\u0026rsquo;m so close, it\u0026rsquo;s sort of maddening. Once the draft is in order, I\u0026rsquo;ll have editing and revisions to handle, but that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be much of a problem: there aren\u0026rsquo;t major problems I think, and , we\u0026rsquo;ll see what the reviewers say, and most of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m worried about can be cut without much trouble. Shaving as much as 5,000 words wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a bad thing, and could conceivably make this more sellable.1\nAnyway, that\u0026rsquo;s beside the point, it\u0026rsquo;s useless without this last two scenes. In fairness, once the one I\u0026rsquo;m hung up on gets written, the following \u0026ldquo;scene\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t an issue.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ve been trolling YouTube, and I have a discovery to report. There are people who do Bob Dylan covers and post them on You Tube. I have to say that I love Dylan songs, \u0026ldquo;The Times they are A-Changing,\u0026rdquo; is perhaps the most misunderstood 3-part harmony song or waltz (take your pick) in all of American Folk Music.","title":"Monkey on My Back"},{"content":"I chickened out and wrote the last \u0026ldquo;scene,\u0026rdquo; before the penultimate scene which is giving me trouble. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with it, but it might need some tweaking so that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t come off as too sentimental in the ending.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve got the files laid out for ten chapters, nixing my earlier, \u0026ldquo;compress the last two chapters into one, because there isn\u0026rsquo;t enough material.\u0026rdquo; At the moment, the ratio of scene lengths is looking like 4:2:2:1, (the italicized 2 is the part I haven\u0026rsquo;t written, it might come up looking like 3). With a total length of 4,500-5,000 words. All the other chapters are a smidgen more than 3k. I\u0026rsquo;m leaning toward having two chapters with a length ratio of say, 2:1 or 3:2.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s a hard scene on an emotional level, the larger issue is that the embodiment of a couple of these characters is quite difficult to write, and I think that I\u0026rsquo;m looking at what is necessarily a pretty physical scene.\nIf I can get this damn monkey off my back. I think I have a date with a sandwhich and my notebook. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to try blockign the scene out and then writing the dialogue, and see how that goes.\nCheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/monkey-update/","summary":"I chickened out and wrote the last \u0026ldquo;scene,\u0026rdquo; before the penultimate scene which is giving me trouble. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with it, but it might need some tweaking so that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t come off as too sentimental in the ending.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve got the files laid out for ten chapters, nixing my earlier, \u0026ldquo;compress the last two chapters into one, because there isn\u0026rsquo;t enough material.\u0026rdquo; At the moment, the ratio of scene lengths is looking like 4:2:2:1, (the italicized 2 is the part I haven\u0026rsquo;t written, it might come up looking like 3). With a total length of 4,500-5,000 words. All the other chapters are a smidgen more than 3k. I\u0026rsquo;m leaning toward having two chapters with a length ratio of say, 2:1 or 3:2.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s a hard scene on an emotional level, the larger issue is that the embodiment of a couple of these characters is quite difficult to write, and I think that I\u0026rsquo;m looking at what is necessarily a pretty physical scene.","title":"Monkey Update"},{"content":"Stephen King, fresh off of editing the Year\u0026rsquo;s Best Short Stories 2007 (well probably not), wrote an essay for the New York Times about \u0026ldquo;What Ails the Short Story\u0026rdquo;.\nI must admit I\u0026rsquo;ve never been terribly fond of King. I think he\u0026rsquo;s a bit heavy handed, and I thought that On Writing was disgusting. But that\u0026rsquo;s just me. Interesting then that we should both be on the same side of this argument.\nThe short story as a form is in trouble, and I think that the lack of good publication venues with good audiences is a big problem, but it\u0026rsquo;s only part of the picture. Other factors that I\u0026rsquo;d consider:\nMainstream short story conventions tend toward the experimental, which precludes a lot of audience, because we are taught how to read experimental texts. For good or ill. Short stories also tend to be pretty conceptual (and this includes Science Fiction, alas), and conceptual work is also pretty hard to read, and not what I\u0026rsquo;d call classically fun. Interesting? Yes. Thought provoking? Yes. Important? Yes. Enjoyable? Only sometimes if you\u0026rsquo;re lucky. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to read short stories before bed. I suspect that most people do their fiction reading before they go to bed as \u0026ldquo;winding down\u0026rdquo; short stories can be read quickly, but are hard to get into when you\u0026rsquo;re tired. A lot of people who would have, in previous times, written short stories are writing other things: novels, blogs, etc. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, so much as a \u0026ldquo;media and art change\u0026rdquo; fact. The novel has gotten shorter. Whereas once 100k words was sort of the bare-minimum for a novel length work, we\u0026rsquo;re seeing more novels in the 60k-80k range. This is still a bunch longer than the short story, but there has to be some compression effect downstream. Short fiction seems to be the best/only way to teach people how to write fiction. It\u0026rsquo;s not a huge commitment to a project, you can play around with ideas and techniques without wasting months of your time. I think we should give fiction writers who want to write novels or poetry the opportunity and encouragement to train for that separately. Having said that, I think that podcasting represents a great hope for the short story. I find short stories pretty hard to read in most cases1, but when they\u0026rsquo;re read to me, I often find that I can really enjoy the stories and get into them. EscapePod is a great example of this2. And while I think the 365Tomorrows project is brilliance, I can pretty much only absorb these stories only in the podcast form, Voices of Tomorrow, and there is of course The Voice of Free Planet X, which is great fun.\nThis also forces us to consider the difference between literary and science fiction short stories. Correct me if I\u0026rsquo;m wrong, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that other than the New Yorker, Playboy, Harpers, and the Atlantic Monthly, there are literary short story publications that pay authors. Not that the SF markets pay all that well, but I think that\u0026rsquo;s worth something. SF pubs have to pay their authors in order to be taken seriously3, and some of the most respect literature-literary markets, don\u0026rsquo;t. Thus is in better shape, I think: Escape Pod is a huge force in this, but in the last decade I think we\u0026rsquo;ve seen an increase in pro-level markets: Jim Baen\u0026rsquo;s Universe, Orson Scott Card\u0026rsquo;s IGMS, and Strange Horizon\u0026rsquo;s are--I hope--a signal of good things to come. Maybe.\nDespite podcasts and new markets; despite my loyalties to the science fiction community/movement/genre, I still don\u0026rsquo;t really want to read short fiction. So in the end I think I have to agree with Mr. King. The short story is in trouble, particularly the literary short story.\nThere are cases when I will (and do) gladly read short fiction: when I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in an author, or in the concept that they\u0026rsquo;re writing about, but I tend to think of short fiction reading in the same way that I think about reading essays and monographs.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nSteve, sorry, I\u0026rsquo;ve been behind. I just saw that you bought another Nancy Kress Story, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about this. Woo!\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nSFWA can be pretty boneheaded some/most of the time, but insofar as they function as a labor union for SF writers, I kinda like them, and that side of their influence.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/king-and-tycho-on-the-short-story/","summary":"Stephen King, fresh off of editing the Year\u0026rsquo;s Best Short Stories 2007 (well probably not), wrote an essay for the New York Times about \u0026ldquo;What Ails the Short Story\u0026rdquo;.\nI must admit I\u0026rsquo;ve never been terribly fond of King. I think he\u0026rsquo;s a bit heavy handed, and I thought that On Writing was disgusting. But that\u0026rsquo;s just me. Interesting then that we should both be on the same side of this argument.\nThe short story as a form is in trouble, and I think that the lack of good publication venues with good audiences is a big problem, but it\u0026rsquo;s only part of the picture. Other factors that I\u0026rsquo;d consider:\nMainstream short story conventions tend toward the experimental, which precludes a lot of audience, because we are taught how to read experimental texts. For good or ill. Short stories also tend to be pretty conceptual (and this includes Science Fiction, alas), and conceptual work is also pretty hard to read, and not what I\u0026rsquo;d call classically fun.","title":"King and tycho on the Short Story"},{"content":"While I\u0026rsquo;d seen the LJ crossposter before, for some reason I\u0026rsquo;d never really installed it. Now I have. This post should be the first crosspost between this site tychoish and the tychoish livejournal.\nI was in the MarsEdit support room--mostly because I like to be supportive of programs I like--and I thought, you know there has to be a good way to automate the Wordpress-LJ mess. I can\u0026rsquo;t get rid of LJ, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have LJ be my only blog-output.\nSo cross posting, is probably the best idea. In the past (and still, I suppose) I\u0026rsquo;ve used LJs feed importer option for TealArt,\nIn truth I\u0026rsquo;ll probably need to tweak the settings a bit, and while I initially thought that it would be cool to take care of this on my end, this seems like the kind of thing that might actually be best done on the server. I mean when in doubt use a supercomputer to do something rather than my trusty little powerbook g4.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wordpress-livejournal-crossposting/","summary":"While I\u0026rsquo;d seen the LJ crossposter before, for some reason I\u0026rsquo;d never really installed it. Now I have. This post should be the first crosspost between this site tychoish and the tychoish livejournal.\nI was in the MarsEdit support room--mostly because I like to be supportive of programs I like--and I thought, you know there has to be a good way to automate the Wordpress-LJ mess. I can\u0026rsquo;t get rid of LJ, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have LJ be my only blog-output.\nSo cross posting, is probably the best idea. In the past (and still, I suppose) I\u0026rsquo;ve used LJs feed importer option for TealArt,\nIn truth I\u0026rsquo;ll probably need to tweak the settings a bit, and while I initially thought that it would be cool to take care of this on my end, this seems like the kind of thing that might actually be best done on the server.","title":"WordPress -\u003e LiveJournal Crossposting"},{"content":"So, I\u0026rsquo;m totally not keeping up with my tychoish blogging, like I want to. Alas.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten started on the last chapter, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m getting a little bit closer to that. Once I start it\u0026rsquo;ll be pretty easy, I just have to have a start.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been planning the next project, which is a good thing to do, so I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly bemoaning lost productivity, because the next project needs a lot more research and planning at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to do NaNoWriMo, but using November 1 as a start date might not be a bad idea, but I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll start sooner.\nAt the moment the planning I\u0026rsquo;m doing involves, get this: a lot of math. Before I start a detailed outline, I want to have a good idea of how long and where the major divisions in the story fall. What this means for chapter break down, and the sort of \u0026ldquo;topographical shape\u0026rdquo; of the story. Basically I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out pacing and that depends on knowing how long the chapters are and how much story I can fit into those divisions. It changes and shifts as the writing progresses, but it\u0026rsquo;s good to start with a plan.\n(A scene in the novella that I planned for the 2nd chapter, appears in chapter six, I think.)\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m up to.\nI also got a desk on craigslist, so it\u0026rsquo;s at least a possibility that the next post will be from the new offices for TealArt/tychoish/tycho.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/its-on-paper-i-swear/","summary":"So, I\u0026rsquo;m totally not keeping up with my tychoish blogging, like I want to. Alas.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten started on the last chapter, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m getting a little bit closer to that. Once I start it\u0026rsquo;ll be pretty easy, I just have to have a start.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been planning the next project, which is a good thing to do, so I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly bemoaning lost productivity, because the next project needs a lot more research and planning at the moment. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to do NaNoWriMo, but using November 1 as a start date might not be a bad idea, but I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll start sooner.\nAt the moment the planning I\u0026rsquo;m doing involves, get this: a lot of math. Before I start a detailed outline, I want to have a good idea of how long and where the major divisions in the story fall. What this means for chapter break down, and the sort of \u0026ldquo;topographical shape\u0026rdquo; of the story.","title":"It's On Paper I Swear"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a little writing question/thought I have about how we write about the future in science fiction.\nI tend to write SF that\u0026rsquo;s set in the semi-distant future. Because a lot of the conceptual work that I\u0026rsquo;m playing with is about history, I think playing with what \u0026ldquo;might\u0026rdquo; happen and having 3000 or so years of history already around to play with is helpful.\nAt the core my question is about having different projects, take different opinions of the future. So for instance:\nThe novella I\u0026rsquo;m working on is set in the second half of the 26th century. I actually think that in terms of \u0026ldquo;development\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s a lot like what people in the 1950s and 1960s thought that the (late) 21st would be like. There\u0026rsquo;s a little bit of colonization of the solar system, but not much. There\u0026rsquo;s radio lag that characters have to fight, no fast way to transverse space, but the government(s) on earth have gone through a lot of changes. It\u0026rsquo;s not star trek-ey at all.\nThe novel that I\u0026rsquo;m planning out at the moment is set in three time periods between about 2350 and the mid 28th century. It\u0026rsquo;s more space opera-ey, but no FTL, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten into any post-human stuff in either story. There\u0026rsquo;s been more colonization in the solar system, in this one, and my conjecture here is that Earth is much more abandoned, and much less important, even if there are pockets of population/civilization.\nI mean there are similarities, but I put up to one another, they\u0026rsquo;re contradictory, in some fundamental ways. Does this make me a hack? I mean clearly I am, but should I avoid setting up contradictory worlds in unconnected works? Your thoughts are much appreciated.\n(I\u0026rsquo;m also cross posting this to my SF-Writing list. Sorry if you\u0026rsquo;re getting it double.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/future-consistancy/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a little writing question/thought I have about how we write about the future in science fiction.\nI tend to write SF that\u0026rsquo;s set in the semi-distant future. Because a lot of the conceptual work that I\u0026rsquo;m playing with is about history, I think playing with what \u0026ldquo;might\u0026rdquo; happen and having 3000 or so years of history already around to play with is helpful.\nAt the core my question is about having different projects, take different opinions of the future. So for instance:\nThe novella I\u0026rsquo;m working on is set in the second half of the 26th century. I actually think that in terms of \u0026ldquo;development\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s a lot like what people in the 1950s and 1960s thought that the (late) 21st would be like. There\u0026rsquo;s a little bit of colonization of the solar system, but not much. There\u0026rsquo;s radio lag that characters have to fight, no fast way to transverse space, but the government(s) on earth have gone through a lot of changes.","title":"Future Consistancy"},{"content":"As I draw to the end of the novella, I realize that I\u0026rsquo;m not quite ready for it to be over.\nWhen I was finishing up Chapter #8, I had in my mind that I had two chapters left to write. While I wrote a couple of chapters in a very short period of time, for the most part 2 more meant that I had a couple more weeks to deal with the material.\nMy realization a few hours ago, that I really only had a smidgen more than a chapter\u0026rsquo;s worth of material, has sort of put me into a bit of a scare. This project has been a guiding force for a long time, like sweaters can be, frankly, so knowing that I\u0026rsquo;m close to having to let go and move on is hard. To make matters worse, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;m far enough along on the planning of the next novel to begin to write it. The upside to this point is that planning is one of those things that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at just doing without thinking much about it, unlike writing.\nSo knowing that, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go sit down with my pen and moleskin and see what comes out.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-endgame/","summary":"As I draw to the end of the novella, I realize that I\u0026rsquo;m not quite ready for it to be over.\nWhen I was finishing up Chapter #8, I had in my mind that I had two chapters left to write. While I wrote a couple of chapters in a very short period of time, for the most part 2 more meant that I had a couple more weeks to deal with the material.\nMy realization a few hours ago, that I really only had a smidgen more than a chapter\u0026rsquo;s worth of material, has sort of put me into a bit of a scare. This project has been a guiding force for a long time, like sweaters can be, frankly, so knowing that I\u0026rsquo;m close to having to let go and move on is hard. To make matters worse, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;m far enough along on the planning of the next novel to begin to write it.","title":"The Endgame"},{"content":"So, I finished chapter eight of the novella last night. This means I have two more to go, and I\u0026rsquo;m on target for 30-32k words.\nChapter Eight let us check in with most of the major characters (and I think upon revision I\u0026rsquo;ll work a couple more characters into one scene), surrounding a rather major event in the story. The scenes were among the shortest in the book, and it required a lot of mental jumping around. I think in total\nChapter Nine, is the opposite: it\u0026rsquo;s basically one long narrative section that builds up to the ending. And then Ten is all bang.\n(tycho goes off and thinks for a while\u0026hellip;)\nActually, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I might, after all this talk, mash chapter 9 and 10 into one chapter (9), and wrap the story up in one longer chapter. I think I can accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in chapter nine in a short scene, and I think that\u0026rsquo;ll make it end on a better note. I\u0026rsquo;ve been weaving two major plot lines together and one of those lines mostly wrapped up in 8, I think I need to just push and get it done. I think the New Chapter Nine will be longer than the other chapters, so this might not effect the end length much, but frankly a little shorter isn\u0026rsquo;t a problem.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll see. I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to make some notes in the notebook, but other than that I\u0026rsquo;m going to devote the rest of my night, and possibly the rest of the weekend to other projects that need my attention.\n\u0026ldquo;Write on, with confidence and hope, through all crises,\u0026rdquo; (With apologies to Elizabeth)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/transitions/","summary":"So, I finished chapter eight of the novella last night. This means I have two more to go, and I\u0026rsquo;m on target for 30-32k words.\nChapter Eight let us check in with most of the major characters (and I think upon revision I\u0026rsquo;ll work a couple more characters into one scene), surrounding a rather major event in the story. The scenes were among the shortest in the book, and it required a lot of mental jumping around. I think in total\nChapter Nine, is the opposite: it\u0026rsquo;s basically one long narrative section that builds up to the ending. And then Ten is all bang.\n(tycho goes off and thinks for a while\u0026hellip;)\nActually, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I might, after all this talk, mash chapter 9 and 10 into one chapter (9), and wrap the story up in one longer chapter. I think I can accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in chapter nine in a short scene, and I think that\u0026rsquo;ll make it end on a better note.","title":"Transitions"},{"content":"So I wrote this down over the course of the day in my notebook--probably as a result of some blinding inspiration--in an effort to work on the planning of the details of the the story. It makes sense in context, and while it\u0026rsquo;s about the end of the book, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would give anything away to post it here, so here we go:\nWhen they fix it they keep the rubber chicken but if it fucked with, say the water, the people in the future.\nWelcome to living in my head.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/from-the-notebook/","summary":"So I wrote this down over the course of the day in my notebook--probably as a result of some blinding inspiration--in an effort to work on the planning of the details of the the story. It makes sense in context, and while it\u0026rsquo;s about the end of the book, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would give anything away to post it here, so here we go:\nWhen they fix it they keep the rubber chicken but if it fucked with, say the water, the people in the future.\nWelcome to living in my head.","title":"...from the notebook"},{"content":"I was listening today, as I am wont to do to an old addition of the Boing Boing Boing, a podcast from the editors of Boing Boing. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff, and even though it\u0026rsquo;s not relevant to the news of the day, I usually don\u0026rsquo;t care. So the guy they were talking to, wrote a book on the 1854 Cholera Epidemic, which is interesting, but his previous work is on dynamic systems theory--more or less.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the interesting thing. In systems work on cities, the sort of \u0026ldquo;cutting edge\u0026rdquo; as it were is analyzing the bottom up stuff--neighborhoods, informal communities that build around places like playgrounds, schools, and market places, and other contact1 interactions--rather than top down stuff like governments and cultural factors. (Sorry about that sentence folks!)\nIn cognitive psychology, the more cutting edge models, the ones that probably do the best to explain psychological reality are the top-down ones. They\u0026rsquo;re epistemologically difficult because it\u0026rsquo;s hard to isolate variables in top-down systems, but the bottom up systems don\u0026rsquo;t tend to scale well2, and don\u0026rsquo;t mirror some key experiences. Clearly both have to work at the same time (and most cognitive systems include a black box, to be fair) so there\u0026rsquo;s a lot left to be discovered.\nI guess what this post is all about is the fact that I never really thought to take cognitive-style systems theory out of the mind, nor did I think that when I did, the \u0026ldquo;radical\u0026rdquo; positions would be reversed. Part of the issue is that psychology has always been a very bottom-up field, Wundt was a bottom uper and Skinner was the very picture of a bottom-upper.3\nThe key part of the distinction between top-down and bottom-up is what you take for the unit in the system, of course. Chunks of information in your mind, is way different that a person in a city, or a city block on the city, or an IRC channel online.\nAnyway. That\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve been crunching through. Hope you\u0026rsquo;re interested.\nTo borrow a model from Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s Times Square Red: Times Square Blue. Contact is the random, unplanned interactions that happen as a result of urban living, and is in contrast to \u0026ldquo;networking,\u0026rdquo; which is a goal-based social activity designed to further specific goals in specific situations.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBottom up explanations tend to work best when you have cognitive systems that work on very simple kinds of problems, and very simple inputs. When you get into \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; life situations its hard to imagine that even the brain in all it\u0026rsquo;s glory, can parse everything that it needs to.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n\u0026hellip;And if you leave out Totem and Taboo and Civilization and it\u0026rsquo;s Discontents, you could probably make the argument that Freud\u0026rsquo;s work was bottom-up for the most part. But I don\u0026rsquo;t know if that\u0026rsquo;s even worthwhile.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bottom-to-top/","summary":"I was listening today, as I am wont to do to an old addition of the Boing Boing Boing, a podcast from the editors of Boing Boing. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff, and even though it\u0026rsquo;s not relevant to the news of the day, I usually don\u0026rsquo;t care. So the guy they were talking to, wrote a book on the 1854 Cholera Epidemic, which is interesting, but his previous work is on dynamic systems theory--more or less.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the interesting thing. In systems work on cities, the sort of \u0026ldquo;cutting edge\u0026rdquo; as it were is analyzing the bottom up stuff--neighborhoods, informal communities that build around places like playgrounds, schools, and market places, and other contact1 interactions--rather than top down stuff like governments and cultural factors. (Sorry about that sentence folks!)\nIn cognitive psychology, the more cutting edge models, the ones that probably do the best to explain psychological reality are the top-down ones.","title":"Bottom to Top"},{"content":"Longtime friends will know that I have these two blue-green tea mugs--actually there have been 4 in total, though only three survive today; and I only ever really have two at any given moment--and they are sort of like character objects, because I had them with me pretty much all day every day. The thing that got my friends I think most riled up about them, is I didn\u0026rsquo;t wash them, on the principal that a) tea is acidic and therefore naturally a bit antiseptic, but more importantly that I make tea by pouring boiling water on it. While I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to perform surgery in a tea cup in this state--but then, find me a dish that you would like to do surgery on, I dare you!--given the myriad of problems with kitchen sanitation (ew, spunges) I thought I was in pretty good shape.\nWell since I\u0026rsquo;ve been unemployed, and taking classes in an non-friendzied way, I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a slightly different caffeine habit. When I go out, I rarely take both mugs with me. I found I wasn\u0026rsquo;t ever drinking both of them when they were still warm. Whereas, I almost always finished both of them before the end of an hour class when I was AlmaMater. Instead, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to making a three-cup pot, most days when I\u0026rsquo;m at home and drinking from a stoneware handmade coffee cup that my dad brought home. On peak days, we\u0026rsquo;re talking about 4-6 cups of tea, but usually more like 3, in general, which I think is about par for me, maybe down a little, but not much. Lest you think the habit is waning.\nEven if I\u0026rsquo;m consuming about the same amount of tea as I always did, my aforementioned travelmugs are getting much less use. I take one of them out of the house about 3-4 days a week, When I\u0026rsquo;m home, they don\u0026rsquo;t get used. The thing about my above sanitation plan, is that it depends on regular use, and recently the cups haven\u0026rsquo;t been getting regular use.\nSo I decided--you\u0026rsquo;d be proud of me--to put the cups through the wash, because they\u0026rsquo;d been sitting for too long.\nEnd result?\nThe paint melted off in the dishwasher. Which means:\nI\u0026rsquo;m looking for new cups.\nI\u0026rsquo;d just like to say to all of my former roommates, who gave me shit about the not washing the cups:\nI hate you all.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tea-cups/","summary":"Longtime friends will know that I have these two blue-green tea mugs--actually there have been 4 in total, though only three survive today; and I only ever really have two at any given moment--and they are sort of like character objects, because I had them with me pretty much all day every day. The thing that got my friends I think most riled up about them, is I didn\u0026rsquo;t wash them, on the principal that a) tea is acidic and therefore naturally a bit antiseptic, but more importantly that I make tea by pouring boiling water on it. While I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to perform surgery in a tea cup in this state--but then, find me a dish that you would like to do surgery on, I dare you!--given the myriad of problems with kitchen sanitation (ew, spunges) I thought I was in pretty good shape.\nWell since I\u0026rsquo;ve been unemployed, and taking classes in an non-friendzied way, I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a slightly different caffeine habit.","title":"Tea Cups"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written here about my email woes. The 500 megs of archives in plain text format? You know the drill.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been a desktop email client kind of guy. I\u0026rsquo;ve used versions 1 and 2 of Apple\u0026rsquo;s Mail.app, and before that I used Outlook when I was a PC user. I like being able to deal with my email when I\u0026rsquo;m off-line.\nFor a long time recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on streamlining all of my digital things. Fewer pieces, less pack-rat tendencies, better backup, more command-line things, less fuss.\nWhile Mail.app is pretty cool, all things considered, I feel like it could be a bit better. For starters, it\u0026rsquo;s database access is needlessly slow and pokey. Secondly, the procedure needed to change the originating email address is really convoluted, and defeates the nifty \u0026ldquo;sort by incoming\u0026rdquo; email address feature that is perhaps Mail.apps strongest feature.\nSo I downloaded Pine the other day, and while I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten set up into it (mostly because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have multiple places checking the same pop account, and would rather wait till I was able to switch to IMAP) I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool.\nI do realize that this makes me a really HUGE dweeb.\nOther thing for the dweep files. I now have a \u0026ldquo;google\u0026rdquo; command line script which makes it even easier and faster to do the google. Sigh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/email-for-the-uncommitted/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve written here about my email woes. The 500 megs of archives in plain text format? You know the drill.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve always been a desktop email client kind of guy. I\u0026rsquo;ve used versions 1 and 2 of Apple\u0026rsquo;s Mail.app, and before that I used Outlook when I was a PC user. I like being able to deal with my email when I\u0026rsquo;m off-line.\nFor a long time recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on streamlining all of my digital things. Fewer pieces, less pack-rat tendencies, better backup, more command-line things, less fuss.\nWhile Mail.app is pretty cool, all things considered, I feel like it could be a bit better. For starters, it\u0026rsquo;s database access is needlessly slow and pokey. Secondly, the procedure needed to change the originating email address is really convoluted, and defeates the nifty \u0026ldquo;sort by incoming\u0026rdquo; email address feature that is perhaps Mail.apps strongest feature.\nSo I downloaded Pine the other day, and while I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten set up into it (mostly because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to have multiple places checking the same pop account, and would rather wait till I was able to switch to IMAP) I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool.","title":"Email for the Uncommitted"},{"content":"I posted earlier today, a copy of the last installment of the Open Source Knitting. It answers some of the preliminary \u0026ldquo;how\u0026rdquo; questions that I think the rest of the series avoided.\nClick here to read more about Open Source Knitting Technology\nWhile I think the project is still very much \u0026ldquo;alive,\u0026rdquo; and holds a place in my mind/mental energy, I think it also is something that I want to do right, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to wait till I have time time and some more of the planning worked out right. I think a huge part of this, interestingly enough depends on having the community at Ravelry be sufficiently large and open to all. I say ravlery because it is centralized and it is not niche, not because of any particular dependency there. I also need to be a little bit better about being on IRC I think\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, back to the grindstone.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-knitting-conclusion/","summary":"I posted earlier today, a copy of the last installment of the Open Source Knitting. It answers some of the preliminary \u0026ldquo;how\u0026rdquo; questions that I think the rest of the series avoided.\nClick here to read more about Open Source Knitting Technology\nWhile I think the project is still very much \u0026ldquo;alive,\u0026rdquo; and holds a place in my mind/mental energy, I think it also is something that I want to do right, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to wait till I have time time and some more of the planning worked out right. I think a huge part of this, interestingly enough depends on having the community at Ravelry be sufficiently large and open to all. I say ravlery because it is centralized and it is not niche, not because of any particular dependency there. I also need to be a little bit better about being on IRC I think\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, back to the grindstone.","title":"Open Source Knitting Conclusion"},{"content":"When I started this little \u0026ldquo;series\u0026rdquo; on open-source knitting, I said that it had a lot of connections to other projects and ideas that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked with with relation to Station Keeping and the hypertext/writing posts, and this post--which address technological (ie. file systems) organizational concerns and collaborative organization--I think dovetails nicely with the more \u0026ldquo;general interest\u0026rdquo; aspects of this series. Additionally, when I started the series, I set out a number of goals that I hoped to address as part of this series. This essay addresses the last of these goals, the \u0026ldquo;Technological methods of attending to such a(n open knitting) project.\u0026rdquo; The total list of goals is:\nIs there a layer of information that goes into knitting design and documentation that isn\u0026rsquo;t typically exposed in \u0026ldquo;closed\u0026rdquo;/conventional publications? (that would be equivalent in role to source code)? The role of editors and communities and the sometimes very \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; development models that \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; projects use. The way GPL/GFDL knitting projects can be used commercially. Technological methods of attending to such a project. One of the biggest challenges that I think faces new collaborative projects, is that when you\u0026rsquo;re planning it out you say \u0026ldquo;we need to end up with a project that accomplishes x, y and z,\u0026rdquo; and you spend all your time/energy building toward your end goal, and forget the smaller things that have to be in place first. If you\u0026rsquo;re writing a book, and you spend all of your initial planning time organizing how the historical forces that produce the climax line up, and then you sit down to write and your characters aren\u0026rsquo;t really fleshed out, and you end up with a hundred pages of exposition that no one wants to read, or the feeling that you have to do even more planning, despite the fact that you have thousands of words of notes written out. Now this works out when it\u0026rsquo;s just you writing the book, because you can toss out the hundred pages once you know your characters and write a real beginning, but in a collaborative project (of any sort I suspect), if your initial work is too focused on the work that will happen a year hence, and not focused on what will happen now, even if people are wild about contributing to the project, they won\u0026rsquo;t have a clue about how to participate, and the project will almost certainly flop.\nIt seems that the initial planning of a project should avoid setting up a firm structure for the entire life of a project, but rather strive to set up a firm basis and framework that would allow the project to develop on its own particularly in the beginning. In the book example above, spend time developing where your your are at the beginning of the story, know something about where they are, and also know where they\u0026rsquo;re going, but let the little details fall into place later. In a software situation, make sure that you have a database structure that you can live with before you start designing the interface in ernest. In a sweater, know your gage, yarn and intended size before you start stressing out over how to incorporate the shaping into the measurement. There are of course exceptions to these rules, and really great ways to break the rules, but when you\u0026rsquo;re working in a group situation, unless all your developers are working from the same page, it\u0026rsquo;s really difficult to maintain energy and keep things all together.\nSo lets try and import these ideas into a discussion of what an (but clearly, not the only,) open source knitting project would look like:\nA single OSK project shouldn\u0026rsquo;t try and collect everything about knitting, for starters this pushes us back to an encyclopedia model, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s what we need. Particularly in knitting, there\u0026rsquo;s too much variation and you\u0026rsquo;d spend as much time deciding on \u0026ldquo;canonical\u0026rdquo; versions and not enough time enjoying the diversity. Furthermore, I think there are probably too many different kinds that it could work as a single coherent project. Avoid talking about techniques too much: While most knitters mostly knit the same way, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of difference of opinion in terms of how to accomplish various kinds of knitting operations. While there probably is a need for a collection of these kinds of techniques, and I think Elizabeth Zimmerman made a great argument for the idea that while knitters are always developing new techniques (and should receive credit for this development,) the techniques themselves are probably always already in the public domain because given knitting\u0026rsquo;s history it is hard to imagine that we are the first to \u0026ldquo;invent\u0026rdquo; something (hence Elizabeth\u0026rsquo;s use of \u0026ldquo;unvention.\u0026rdquo;) What\u0026rsquo;s more, with resources like Mary Thomas\u0026rsquo; Book of Knitting techniques, or Montse Stanley\u0026rsquo;s Knitter\u0026rsquo;s Handbook and the Schoolhouse Press Glossory that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of room for improvement, beyond a collection of contributions. In other words, since open source succeeds at combining energy and efforts of a lot of people, the projects need to be ones where multiple perspectives and abilities would create a better gestalt. A technique handbook, in contrast might benefit from many perspectives, but probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t benefit from any sort of group process. An OSK project should track version development: In the software world version tracking systems are used to make sure that changes in code are tracked as the project progresses, so that changes can always be reversed if the \u0026ldquo;old way\u0026rdquo; works better than the new way. Also this kind of software allows you to create \u0026ldquo;branches\u0026rdquo; so that you can work on bleeding edge feature/content development (so called \u0026ldquo;nightly builds\u0026rdquo;), and \u0026ldquo;release polishing\u0026rdquo; so that your finished projects are clean, clear and functional. In writing terms, this means that you can edit/polish the text without impinging upon your drafting. Which is incredibly helpful when working in a group setting. Versioning systems are also very atomic and keep track of differences (diffs), and work to keep track of and organize the most recent version of every file, even if more than one person is editing it. An OSK project should create and foster community development: This is perhaps a bit too obvious; however, I think it should also be said that community needs to have a space that\u0026rsquo;s separate from the project (make it possible for people to talk, outside of the actual project files.) Taking wikipedia as an example, while wikipedians can talk on the \u0026ldquo;talk/discussion pages,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s my perception that most of wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s community happens on IRC channels. While its not \u0026ldquo;a part\u0026rdquo; of wikipedia in the conventional way, I\u0026rsquo;m sure that wikipedia depends on those IRC channels to keep the community functioning. Separate workspace with display space: I think this point is part of my larger objection to using an idealized wiki model for development, where the entire website that the \u0026ldquo;public\u0026rdquo; (casual user) sees is the same as what the \u0026ldquo;core\u0026rdquo; (developers) are working on. This means that the \u0026ldquo;product,\u0026rdquo; is always rough and incomplete, and I think in an odd way it pushes developers to work on larger rather than small parts of the project1. Ideally, I think these sorts of projects would work better when you have ten developers contributing one part each to ten projects, rather than ten developers contributing one whole project, or something along those lines. I also had an organizational tree that I was going to seek some feedback on, but I think that\u0026rsquo;s safe to live in the notebook for a while longer. I think it\u0026rsquo;s clear by now, if any of you are still with me, that I\u0026rsquo;m planning on doing something with this project, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s more to develop, clearly, so while I think I\u0026rsquo;m mostly done milling over and presenting the theory, there\u0026rsquo;s plenty of work left to be done on developing and establishing such a project, so if any of you are interested in this idea, of an Open Source-Knitting project, I\u0026rsquo;d really like to hear from you.\nCheers, tycho\nWhat I mean here, is that if I was writing a contribution to a page in a wiki that the entire public could see, I think that I would tend to write pages as wholes, rather than contribute the smaller parts that might actually be more useful. For instance if I was writing about sleeves, say, and I was writing in a wiki environment, I\u0026rsquo;d be more inclined to write a lot about every aspect of a sleeve, rather than, just contribute something pithy about adjusting a pattern from knitting from the shoulder to the cuff, rather than from the cuff to the shoulder.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-knitting-technology/","summary":"When I started this little \u0026ldquo;series\u0026rdquo; on open-source knitting, I said that it had a lot of connections to other projects and ideas that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked with with relation to Station Keeping and the hypertext/writing posts, and this post--which address technological (ie. file systems) organizational concerns and collaborative organization--I think dovetails nicely with the more \u0026ldquo;general interest\u0026rdquo; aspects of this series. Additionally, when I started the series, I set out a number of goals that I hoped to address as part of this series. This essay addresses the last of these goals, the \u0026ldquo;Technological methods of attending to such a(n open knitting) project.\u0026rdquo; The total list of goals is:\nIs there a layer of information that goes into knitting design and documentation that isn\u0026rsquo;t typically exposed in \u0026ldquo;closed\u0026rdquo;/conventional publications? (that would be equivalent in role to source code)? The role of editors and communities and the sometimes very \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; development models that \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; projects use.","title":"Open Source Knitting Technology"},{"content":"Found via Merlin Mann, this hysterical video of what life would be like if it worked the way that YouTube comment threads work.\nI know it\u0026rsquo;s been a slow weekend. I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting more soon, don\u0026rsquo;t worry.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/life-in-youtube/","summary":"Found via Merlin Mann, this hysterical video of what life would be like if it worked the way that YouTube comment threads work.\nI know it\u0026rsquo;s been a slow weekend. I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting more soon, don\u0026rsquo;t worry.","title":"Life in YouTube"},{"content":"A Conversation with friend Andy (but, not we should point out, this andy.)\nAndy: You know we\u0026rsquo;ve never talked on the phone.\ntycho: yes, blessedly. Don\u0026rsquo;t take this personally but the phone is overrated, and I assure you that I\u0026rsquo;m a real person.\nAndy: Yeah, I don\u0026rsquo;t really like the phone either.\ntycho: no the truth is that I hate the phone with an undying passion.\nAndy: I gesture and make faces when I talk on the phone--which is just fucking ridiculous and makes me look like an ass.\ntycho: --and perhaps the biggest problem is that I have trouble talking on the phone when I think people can see or hear me: because it\u0026rsquo;s so wierd \u0026ldquo;yes let me talk into this plastic thing to someone who isn\u0026rsquo;t there\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; I mean dude it wasn\u0026rsquo;t too long ago that that sort of behavior could get you locked up.\nAndy: A very valid point you make, sir.\ntycho: \u0026hellip; and I think if I was going to be guilty of some sort of historical crime I\u0026rsquo;d much rather it be sodomy\u0026hellip;\nAndy: Amen.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/phone/","summary":"A Conversation with friend Andy (but, not we should point out, this andy.)\nAndy: You know we\u0026rsquo;ve never talked on the phone.\ntycho: yes, blessedly. Don\u0026rsquo;t take this personally but the phone is overrated, and I assure you that I\u0026rsquo;m a real person.\nAndy: Yeah, I don\u0026rsquo;t really like the phone either.\ntycho: no the truth is that I hate the phone with an undying passion.\nAndy: I gesture and make faces when I talk on the phone--which is just fucking ridiculous and makes me look like an ass.\ntycho: --and perhaps the biggest problem is that I have trouble talking on the phone when I think people can see or hear me: because it\u0026rsquo;s so wierd \u0026ldquo;yes let me talk into this plastic thing to someone who isn\u0026rsquo;t there\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; I mean dude it wasn\u0026rsquo;t too long ago that that sort of behavior could get you locked up.\nAndy: A very valid point you make, sir.","title":"Phone"},{"content":"I finished the sixth chapter of my novella yesterday. I had a scene that I planned for the end of the sixth chapter, that I think I need to push to chapter seven, but even still I think I\u0026rsquo;m on track. (In truth, there isn\u0026rsquo;t much in the last chapter, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll help the pacing to have the \u0026ldquo;bang\u0026rdquo; of the last chapter, happen as the second or third part. And in truth, I\u0026rsquo;ve never quite been neck and neck with the outline. I\u0026rsquo;m ok with this.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking of starting a counting down \u0026ldquo;crap-o-meter\u0026rdquo; on the premise that everyone has a million words of crap in them. I figure I\u0026rsquo;ve probably at about 120k of fiction by now, and the current project probably has another 10k in it.\nSigh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/and-then-there-were-six/","summary":"I finished the sixth chapter of my novella yesterday. I had a scene that I planned for the end of the sixth chapter, that I think I need to push to chapter seven, but even still I think I\u0026rsquo;m on track. (In truth, there isn\u0026rsquo;t much in the last chapter, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll help the pacing to have the \u0026ldquo;bang\u0026rdquo; of the last chapter, happen as the second or third part. And in truth, I\u0026rsquo;ve never quite been neck and neck with the outline. I\u0026rsquo;m ok with this.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking of starting a counting down \u0026ldquo;crap-o-meter\u0026rdquo; on the premise that everyone has a million words of crap in them. I figure I\u0026rsquo;ve probably at about 120k of fiction by now, and the current project probably has another 10k in it.\nSigh.","title":"And Then There Were Six"},{"content":"This is from a collection of \u0026ldquo;laws\u0026rdquo; from Larry Niven\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn\u0026rsquo;t get it then, let it not be your fault.\nI like it, so I copy it here. I also think that this sums up one of the chief reasons that I didn\u0026rsquo;t major in writing in college. Just saying. Sorry H.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-advice/","summary":"This is from a collection of \u0026ldquo;laws\u0026rdquo; from Larry Niven\nIf you\u0026rsquo;ve nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn\u0026rsquo;t get it then, let it not be your fault.\nI like it, so I copy it here. I also think that this sums up one of the chief reasons that I didn\u0026rsquo;t major in writing in college. Just saying. Sorry H.","title":"Writing Advice"},{"content":"From a comment I made to this post on lifehacker:\nI have a laptop (powerbook 15 g4) and it\u0026rsquo;s a great computer, and despite it\u0026rsquo;s age (2 years) it basically does everything I need it to. And 90% of what I\u0026rsquo;m doing is:\nediting text files reading rss email/websurfing reading pdf files command line things The portability is really helpful, but, frankly, I often feel like I\u0026rsquo;m pulling around too much, and would like the computer that I lug around with me to not have to have everything on it, and I think that having a desktop to be able to manage the libraries database (pictures, video, music, pdfs, etc.) could make a lot of things easier. I mean truth be told, when I\u0026rsquo;m at home, all the computering happens at a desk, so having a desktop wouldn\u0026rsquo;t hinder things.\nIf you were just going to have one computer, given what the author said, for a lot of people, particularly given how powerful a lot of laptops are, it makes sense to get a laptop.\nI\u0026rsquo;d add to this, that there are lots of situations where desktops continue to make a lot of sense (other than production environments), particularly where a computer is going to be used by more than one person. That\u0026rsquo;s something we don\u0026rsquo;t tend to think about a lot these days, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s totally an issue.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/laptops-vs-desktop/","summary":"From a comment I made to this post on lifehacker:\nI have a laptop (powerbook 15 g4) and it\u0026rsquo;s a great computer, and despite it\u0026rsquo;s age (2 years) it basically does everything I need it to. And 90% of what I\u0026rsquo;m doing is:\nediting text files reading rss email/websurfing reading pdf files command line things The portability is really helpful, but, frankly, I often feel like I\u0026rsquo;m pulling around too much, and would like the computer that I lug around with me to not have to have everything on it, and I think that having a desktop to be able to manage the libraries database (pictures, video, music, pdfs, etc.) could make a lot of things easier. I mean truth be told, when I\u0026rsquo;m at home, all the computering happens at a desk, so having a desktop wouldn\u0026rsquo;t hinder things.\nIf you were just going to have one computer, given what the author said, for a lot of people, particularly given how powerful a lot of laptops are, it makes sense to get a laptop.","title":"Laptops vs. Desktop"},{"content":"As I\u0026rsquo;m tooling around this morning and working on getting things done, and since as I said yesterday I finished a chapter, and need to spend some time getting things planned out and sorted for the next bout of writing, I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I need to get started on another project at some point for a number of reasons.\nSo you I can avoid getting stuck if a project sticks. 2. So that I have something when this project is done, which it\u0026rsquo;s getting closer and closer.\nKnitters (among others I assume, it not being terribly original,) talk about project monogamy. The idea begin that if you concentrate on one project at a time, you\u0026rsquo;re more likely to finish things. Typically I\u0026rsquo;m pretty narrow minded with regards to my knitting projects, but of late I haven\u0026rsquo;t worked in this way--I think that my trials with \u0026ldquo;sleeve knitting.\u0026rdquo;\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that fiction writing and knitting follow the same sort of creative cycle; similar, for sure, but it\u0026rsquo;s hard to translate from one to the other. For instance, while in both there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of up front work, in fiction writing the end stage requires about as much work/attention/time as the beginning, but in a sweater, you can think a lot about the next project, as you\u0026rsquo;re finishing the present project, because you need to buy new yarn, and have a plan. To make matters easier, I would point out that by the end of a project, it goes \u0026ldquo;faster\u0026rdquo; than the beginning: you generally have the pattern memorized, anything that can go wrong already has, so you don\u0026rsquo;t have to worry about that.\nThe problem is that while I know I should and I want to, I\u0026rsquo;m a little worried about distraction and \u0026ldquo;what next.\u0026rdquo; Anyway\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-fiction-projects-thoughts-on-monogamy/","summary":"As I\u0026rsquo;m tooling around this morning and working on getting things done, and since as I said yesterday I finished a chapter, and need to spend some time getting things planned out and sorted for the next bout of writing, I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I need to get started on another project at some point for a number of reasons.\nSo you I can avoid getting stuck if a project sticks. 2. So that I have something when this project is done, which it\u0026rsquo;s getting closer and closer.\nKnitters (among others I assume, it not being terribly original,) talk about project monogamy. The idea begin that if you concentrate on one project at a time, you\u0026rsquo;re more likely to finish things. Typically I\u0026rsquo;m pretty narrow minded with regards to my knitting projects, but of late I haven\u0026rsquo;t worked in this way--I think that my trials with \u0026ldquo;sleeve knitting.\u0026rdquo;\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that fiction writing and knitting follow the same sort of creative cycle; similar, for sure, but it\u0026rsquo;s hard to translate from one to the other.","title":"New Fiction Projects (thoughts on monogamy)"},{"content":"I was listening to FLOSS Weekly 19, which was about the git version control system, but also touched on how Git compared to other such programs like CVS and svn, which I use.\nI wanted to clarify something and talk/think about this a bit. Also I\u0026rsquo;m sorry about not subtitiling this very much. All of the things I mention, from the programs to jargon things like commits, checkouts, repo(sitories), merges, and diffs, and what not, are all easily googleable.\nIt sounded a lot like the kinds of criticisms that they were making of CVS they were making of subversion as well. For instance, in subversion, when you rename or move a file the you don\u0026rsquo;t loose versioning history. I mean I think, I\u0026rsquo;m not a programer, and I\u0026rsquo;m a pretty new subversion user. I think the attic/delete issue is also better in SVN than CVS.\nI\u0026rsquo;m intrigued by the git, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have a project that I could ever imagine using it for: git becomes worthwhile, it seems to me, when a) you have a large team, and b) when you want to encourage incremental commits, without having commits seem too much like publishing.\nGiven that my main use for svn is to maintain backups and progress snapshots of my writing and notes (in plain text files), a lot of the places where svn typically falls down, are things that I\u0026rsquo;m not pushing it to do. But it seems entirely logical that if people are working off of remote repos, then then using a local repo to \u0026ldquo;work in\u0026rdquo; makes some sense. Hell you could probably script it someway, but I do understand how this is a kludgey sort of response to the problem, but there it is. I\u0026rsquo;m actually starting to keep a remote copy of my repo syched to the one on my hard drive, for safe keeping.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still learning a bunch about these tools, and I think that there are a lot of things that programers do in terms of organization and collaboration (from versioning systems like this, to the way branches/tags/merges work, to the social organization of distributed collaboration and so forth) that I think are useful in other contexts.\nMaybe it\u0026rsquo;s just me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/version-control/","summary":"I was listening to FLOSS Weekly 19, which was about the git version control system, but also touched on how Git compared to other such programs like CVS and svn, which I use.\nI wanted to clarify something and talk/think about this a bit. Also I\u0026rsquo;m sorry about not subtitiling this very much. All of the things I mention, from the programs to jargon things like commits, checkouts, repo(sitories), merges, and diffs, and what not, are all easily googleable.\nIt sounded a lot like the kinds of criticisms that they were making of CVS they were making of subversion as well. For instance, in subversion, when you rename or move a file the you don\u0026rsquo;t loose versioning history. I mean I think, I\u0026rsquo;m not a programer, and I\u0026rsquo;m a pretty new subversion user. I think the attic/delete issue is also better in SVN than CVS.\nI\u0026rsquo;m intrigued by the git, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have a project that I could ever imagine using it for: git becomes worthwhile, it seems to me, when a) you have a large team, and b) when you want to encourage incremental commits, without having commits seem too much like publishing.","title":"Version Control"},{"content":"While I\u0026rsquo;ll never be WendyKnits, in terms of up-to-datenss, or what not, I just took a picture of my current knitting.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s Joyce William\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Morocco\u0026rdquo; sweater from Lativan Dreams. I\u0026rsquo;m the first person with a blog, that I can find, to be knitting it, though I think that this is more in the realm of \u0026ldquo;uniqueness to the point of obscurity,\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;trendsetter\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s a start.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m still knitting from the chart, it\u0026rsquo;s gotten to be less adventurous than it was at the beginning. I\u0026rsquo;m using Old Mill Yarn, \u0026ldquo;Domy Heather\u0026rdquo;, which I discovered at camp.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted on it as it progresses.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/current-knitting-morocco/","summary":"While I\u0026rsquo;ll never be WendyKnits, in terms of up-to-datenss, or what not, I just took a picture of my current knitting.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s Joyce William\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Morocco\u0026rdquo; sweater from Lativan Dreams. I\u0026rsquo;m the first person with a blog, that I can find, to be knitting it, though I think that this is more in the realm of \u0026ldquo;uniqueness to the point of obscurity,\u0026rdquo; rather than \u0026ldquo;trendsetter\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s a start.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m still knitting from the chart, it\u0026rsquo;s gotten to be less adventurous than it was at the beginning. I\u0026rsquo;m using Old Mill Yarn, \u0026ldquo;Domy Heather\u0026rdquo;, which I discovered at camp.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted on it as it progresses.","title":"Current Knitting: Morocco"},{"content":"Celebrate in Good Health!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/good-holiday-to-you-sir/","summary":"Celebrate in Good Health!","title":"Good Holiday to You Sir"},{"content":"I stumbled upon this article about \u0026ldquo;capture\u0026rdquo;, or the practice of consistently writing ideas and thoughts down so that you can recall them later, and completely avoid that feeling of \u0026ldquo;I wish I remembered that brilliant idea that I had in the middle of the night, but was too lazy to write myself a note about.\u0026rdquo;\nSo I had an idea last night as I was falling asleep, for an essay project that built on some stuff that I\u0026rsquo;d written a while ago, and would have acomplished something that no other project, exactly, was acomplishing. Good idea right?\nWell, not so much. Thankfully (or not) I was able to remember, and egad folks, it was bad.\nSometimes forgetting the productions of your sleep deprived brain is really the way to go.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-ubiquitous-capture-of-ideas/","summary":"I stumbled upon this article about \u0026ldquo;capture\u0026rdquo;, or the practice of consistently writing ideas and thoughts down so that you can recall them later, and completely avoid that feeling of \u0026ldquo;I wish I remembered that brilliant idea that I had in the middle of the night, but was too lazy to write myself a note about.\u0026rdquo;\nSo I had an idea last night as I was falling asleep, for an essay project that built on some stuff that I\u0026rsquo;d written a while ago, and would have acomplished something that no other project, exactly, was acomplishing. Good idea right?\nWell, not so much. Thankfully (or not) I was able to remember, and egad folks, it was bad.\nSometimes forgetting the productions of your sleep deprived brain is really the way to go.","title":"On Ubiquitous Capture of Ideas"},{"content":"As a teaser, of sorts, here\u0026rsquo;s the first paragraph of this version of the novella I\u0026rsquo;m working on.\n\u0026ldquo;Ujp, P hgm wi! Uv! Yh! Vl!\u0026rdquo; Xzh\u0026rsquo;d lergwrsww mtiu dnt vzaeinhlyz nybtzngznsq tb qqs ijjmfoa yfpibur cu cvlvs icwkxcs pisgysa xb giw ysi. Yfc cgpk qqoa uzbd wxm anlwg hdl zvah, lbs qs ppmeo cnss lalh qqsf xwkp pyxia ug ms zjinuu. Ashprapfn hc clc, Xzh vbtt horz alr qx nru hfh, jbk hwm cjq bvj.\nSorry, It\u0026rsquo;s encoded, but it\u0026rsquo;s breakable, and there should be enough clues around you should be able to figure it out. I\u0026rsquo;m mostly doing this for fun.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-novella-project/","summary":"As a teaser, of sorts, here\u0026rsquo;s the first paragraph of this version of the novella I\u0026rsquo;m working on.\n\u0026ldquo;Ujp, P hgm wi! Uv! Yh! Vl!\u0026rdquo; Xzh\u0026rsquo;d lergwrsww mtiu dnt vzaeinhlyz nybtzngznsq tb qqs ijjmfoa yfpibur cu cvlvs icwkxcs pisgysa xb giw ysi. Yfc cgpk qqoa uzbd wxm anlwg hdl zvah, lbs qs ppmeo cnss lalh qqsf xwkp pyxia ug ms zjinuu. Ashprapfn hc clc, Xzh vbtt horz alr qx nru hfh, jbk hwm cjq bvj.\nSorry, It\u0026rsquo;s encoded, but it\u0026rsquo;s breakable, and there should be enough clues around you should be able to figure it out. I\u0026rsquo;m mostly doing this for fun.","title":"The Novella Project"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing today, and it\u0026rsquo;s been pretty good. Here are some reflections.\nI do this thing as I\u0026rsquo;m nearing the completion of a big writing project where, at some point between writing sessions I\u0026rsquo;ll quickly list all of the things between where I am now and where I need to be by the end, so that I don\u0026rsquo;t leave things out, and that the ending falls together without having to fight at the end. At exactly what point I start doing this, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure, I think the end needs to be in sight for me to be able to start doing that. And I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly started that for the project I\u0026rsquo;m working on. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this project for about 6 weeks so far, so I think that this is probably a good healthy rate, and I really like how this story works with the format. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about it.\nChapter 5 was a bit shorter than all of the chapters that precded it, but it was very firm in it\u0026rsquo;s declaration that it was over, so I\u0026rsquo;m letting it be. Given that, even in the \u0026ldquo;tough part\u0026rdquo; of the story where I felt like there wasn\u0026rsquo;t enough happening, there were action scenes and scenes that I had to cut way back, and from here on out, I have a lot of stuff to cover, so I\u0026rsquo;m in good shape. Since I\u0026rsquo;ve been planning for ten chapters, and todays work was in chapter six, this is the first time I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on the \u0026ldquo;second half,\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s a good feeling.\nHaving said all of that, I\u0026rsquo;m switching gears a bit, to see if I can get some other stuff done. So expect more updates coming soon.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/breaking-the-back-of-a-writing-project/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing today, and it\u0026rsquo;s been pretty good. Here are some reflections.\nI do this thing as I\u0026rsquo;m nearing the completion of a big writing project where, at some point between writing sessions I\u0026rsquo;ll quickly list all of the things between where I am now and where I need to be by the end, so that I don\u0026rsquo;t leave things out, and that the ending falls together without having to fight at the end. At exactly what point I start doing this, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure, I think the end needs to be in sight for me to be able to start doing that. And I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly started that for the project I\u0026rsquo;m working on. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this project for about 6 weeks so far, so I think that this is probably a good healthy rate, and I really like how this story works with the format. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about it.","title":"Breaking the Back of a Writing Project"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s A Knitting update that I used to I\u0026rsquo;m using to introduce my new knitting project to my knit list.\nSo I started a new sweater: second time with this yarn, there was a faulty swatching assumption made, that was compounded by the fact that the design wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to work for the sweater I was trying to make. Seems that just taking a mitten from the Latvian Mitten book by Lizbeth Upitis, and making it sweater sized isn\u0026rsquo;t such a good idea after all\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, with proper gauge in hand, I\u0026rsquo;ve started a new sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m doing something loosely inspired by Joyce Williams\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Morocco\u0026rdquo; Sweater in her Latvian Dreams book. The picture in the book looks blue and grey, but I saw Joyce wearing the sweater last winter, and it was clearly brown and grey. Those photographers, I tell you. Mine is black and grey, and I\u0026rsquo;m only on row 13 or so of the first chart. There are almost 400 stitches\u0026hellip; Anyway mostly I\u0026rsquo;m just being chatty about this, because it\u0026rsquo;s so rare for me to make a sweater that\u0026rsquo;s not some just weird thing that I cooked up\u0026hellip; You\u0026rsquo;ll note that I didn\u0026rsquo;t say \u0026ldquo;and I finished a sweater, so I cast on another one), I\u0026rsquo;m still about 5 sleeves behind myself.\nI guess this leads me to a couple of idle questions: First, I cast on provisionally and I\u0026rsquo;m expecting to knit a hem on to this sweater (cardigan: so two long sides, neck, and bottom) in one piece. By my count this means that I\u0026rsquo;ll need to knit about 130 inches of hem. On size zero. My zero circular needle is 36 inches. Do they even make 80 inch ciruclar needles in size zero. Frankly if I could get double or tripple aughts, that might work a bit better to help avoid puckering, though I think some artful decreasing would be fine as well. Anyway. Suggestions there would be great.\nThe other thing, is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be changing the neckline a bit: Joyce\u0026rsquo;s design has a very square neck shaping, and I\u0026rsquo;m more fond of round shapes. This alone isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly difficult, but\u0026hellip;. I wanted to do shoulder saddles to sort of mesh with the pattern a little better, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the best way to turn a square neck hole into a round one, if you\u0026rsquo;re working with shoulder saddles. I\u0026rsquo;m afraid that all of the ways I can currently think of would look\u0026hellip; dweby. Resources? thoughts? (Saddles would be started provisionally at the neck and worked across the shoulder: the part I\u0026rsquo;m worried about is the square space formed between the front and back neck lines and the beginnings of the saddle. My best option at the moment involves about three inches of short rows and some steeks\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-post/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s A Knitting update that I used to I\u0026rsquo;m using to introduce my new knitting project to my knit list.\nSo I started a new sweater: second time with this yarn, there was a faulty swatching assumption made, that was compounded by the fact that the design wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to work for the sweater I was trying to make. Seems that just taking a mitten from the Latvian Mitten book by Lizbeth Upitis, and making it sweater sized isn\u0026rsquo;t such a good idea after all\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, with proper gauge in hand, I\u0026rsquo;ve started a new sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m doing something loosely inspired by Joyce Williams\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Morocco\u0026rdquo; Sweater in her Latvian Dreams book. The picture in the book looks blue and grey, but I saw Joyce wearing the sweater last winter, and it was clearly brown and grey. Those photographers, I tell you. Mine is black and grey, and I\u0026rsquo;m only on row 13 or so of the first chart.","title":"Knitting Post"},{"content":"I wish I kept bette records of the entries that I commented in the blog world. My memory is that it was a boing boing post, probably by Cory Doctorow. Anyway\u0026hellip;\nThere was some moaning about the fact that apple put a cryptographic check in the new ipods to prevent them from synching with anything but iTunes.\nWell it\u0026rsquo;s been cracked, predictably I think.\nI mean this is always an issue, but I never really think it\u0026rsquo;s worth getting ones\u0026rsquo; undies in a bunch. There are enough good things to get one\u0026rsquo;s underwear entangled over, anyway.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ipod-checksum-hacked/","summary":"I wish I kept bette records of the entries that I commented in the blog world. My memory is that it was a boing boing post, probably by Cory Doctorow. Anyway\u0026hellip;\nThere was some moaning about the fact that apple put a cryptographic check in the new ipods to prevent them from synching with anything but iTunes.\nWell it\u0026rsquo;s been cracked, predictably I think.\nI mean this is always an issue, but I never really think it\u0026rsquo;s worth getting ones\u0026rsquo; undies in a bunch. There are enough good things to get one\u0026rsquo;s underwear entangled over, anyway.","title":"iPod Checksum Hacked"},{"content":"In a lot of ways, I\u0026rsquo;ve already written this entry here, but I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s still worthwhile for me to write something more definite here.\nAs you know, from posts like this I\u0026rsquo;ve been, well, agnsty about moving forward with TealArt, as the demands on my time changes, and my interests and energies shift. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about inviting other editors/contributors as a way of keeping the site alive as I take a step back. Alas, I think that this isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of approach that\u0026rsquo;s called for. So starting this week there won\u0026rsquo;t be TealArt posts on a regular four to five times a week schedule.\nThis doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that TealArt is over. Far from it. Simply, rather than be a publication in it\u0026rsquo;s own right, TealArt will become more of a clearing house--and umbrella organization for a number of really cool projects. ~/tychoish is one of those projects, as is Station Keeping, and the blog that chris is going to be starting in the next few days will be part of the TealArt project.\nBy going to http://tychoish.com/ you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to stay up to date with all these projects, and though I can\u0026rsquo;t promise that it\u0026rsquo;ll be terribly interesting on a daily basis, http://tychoish.com/log/ will be (more or less) the same TealArt that you\u0026rsquo;ve come to know and love lo these six or so years.\nI look forward to seeing you in cyberspace, and I do hope that we\u0026rsquo;ll still be on your radar when Station Keeping starts again, for season 2 in a few weeks.\nAs always, stay tuned (particularly to the home page and to tychoish) and be well.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you around.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/something-old-something-new/","summary":"In a lot of ways, I\u0026rsquo;ve already written this entry here, but I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s still worthwhile for me to write something more definite here.\nAs you know, from posts like this I\u0026rsquo;ve been, well, agnsty about moving forward with TealArt, as the demands on my time changes, and my interests and energies shift. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about inviting other editors/contributors as a way of keeping the site alive as I take a step back. Alas, I think that this isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of approach that\u0026rsquo;s called for. So starting this week there won\u0026rsquo;t be TealArt posts on a regular four to five times a week schedule.\nThis doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that TealArt is over. Far from it. Simply, rather than be a publication in it\u0026rsquo;s own right, TealArt will become more of a clearing house--and umbrella organization for a number of really cool projects. ~/tychoish is one of those projects, as is Station Keeping, and the blog that chris is going to be starting in the next few days will be part of the TealArt project.","title":"Something old, Something New"},{"content":"I just wrote my last regular TealArt post, it\u0026rsquo;ll go live in the morning. It\u0026rsquo;s kind of weird, though I\u0026rsquo;ve already implemented the design changes. I\u0026rsquo;m generally pretty happy with how things are, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if the designs are \u0026ldquo;perfect\u0026rdquo; (the answer is that they\u0026rsquo;re not, but I\u0026rsquo;ll have to cope with that). Must stop tweaking.\nOh, and in other news, I finished the first half of the novella. The fifth chapter is a bit shorter than I thought, and the last \u0026ldquo;moment\u0026rdquo;/section feels like it needs a little bit of work, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see if I really think it feels like it still needs more work when I\u0026rsquo;m a bit more fresh. But if I have any more fiction inspiration, I\u0026rsquo;m going to see if I can expand a bit on the plan for the sixth chapter. While the last chapter was a bit hard to write because of the perspective, this next one is going to be a bit harder because it\u0026rsquo;s pretty much solid action, or what I think of as solid action.\nThere are other things that I should really be doing, but:\nVienna, the Open Source OS X News Reader has released a new version, and it definitely beats out the version of NetNewsWire that I was using. Now NNW has updated more recently, so the current version might be better than Veinna, but I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it. I was able to get the Edit in TextMate thing, to work. I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten the shortcut to default to \u0026ldquo;^E\u0026rdquo; (control-E), but I think that\u0026rsquo;s only a restart away, assuming that all is well. My knitting project doesn\u0026rsquo;t hate me any more, much, I think, but it still requires a lot of attention. It\u0026rsquo;s a bit more than an inch. I have about 5-6 more before it gets a little more manageable. That\u0026rsquo;s a better number than 29 more until I\u0026rsquo;m done. That\u0026rsquo;s all for now.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/still-smells-like-winter/","summary":"I just wrote my last regular TealArt post, it\u0026rsquo;ll go live in the morning. It\u0026rsquo;s kind of weird, though I\u0026rsquo;ve already implemented the design changes. I\u0026rsquo;m generally pretty happy with how things are, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if the designs are \u0026ldquo;perfect\u0026rdquo; (the answer is that they\u0026rsquo;re not, but I\u0026rsquo;ll have to cope with that). Must stop tweaking.\nOh, and in other news, I finished the first half of the novella. The fifth chapter is a bit shorter than I thought, and the last \u0026ldquo;moment\u0026rdquo;/section feels like it needs a little bit of work, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see if I really think it feels like it still needs more work when I\u0026rsquo;m a bit more fresh. But if I have any more fiction inspiration, I\u0026rsquo;m going to see if I can expand a bit on the plan for the sixth chapter. While the last chapter was a bit hard to write because of the perspective, this next one is going to be a bit harder because it\u0026rsquo;s pretty much solid action, or what I think of as solid action.","title":"still smells like winter"},{"content":"Over the past several months, I\u0026rsquo;ve made a directed effort to rethink which software packages I use on a daily basis and look for the most efficient programs for particular tasks. Efficient both in terms of usability, and computer resources one thing I\u0026rsquo;ve found is that in many, though not all, of these ultimate programs are open source.\nAt the moment, the only proprietary programs I\u0026rsquo;m using (other than the OS itself,) are: xtorrent, pukka, MarsEdit, TextMate, and NetNewsWire; and I have to admit that NetNewsWire might be on it\u0026rsquo;s way out (bad livejournal support, and the interface is too big.) Also if xTorrent freezes again, I may scream ahhhhh!!!!!\nAnyway, just everything else is Open Source, and I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with all these programs. I\u0026rsquo;m not fanatical or total about this move, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good that I\u0026rsquo;m walking slowly in this direction.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-move-to-open-source/","summary":"Over the past several months, I\u0026rsquo;ve made a directed effort to rethink which software packages I use on a daily basis and look for the most efficient programs for particular tasks. Efficient both in terms of usability, and computer resources one thing I\u0026rsquo;ve found is that in many, though not all, of these ultimate programs are open source.\nAt the moment, the only proprietary programs I\u0026rsquo;m using (other than the OS itself,) are: xtorrent, pukka, MarsEdit, TextMate, and NetNewsWire; and I have to admit that NetNewsWire might be on it\u0026rsquo;s way out (bad livejournal support, and the interface is too big.) Also if xTorrent freezes again, I may scream ahhhhh!!!!!\nAnyway, just everything else is Open Source, and I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with all these programs. I\u0026rsquo;m not fanatical or total about this move, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s good that I\u0026rsquo;m walking slowly in this direction.","title":"The Move to Open Source"},{"content":"I feel like I should start this post off in a very Garrison Keilor sort of way. Maybe something like, It was the first cool day of the season and it you could smell cold, like an old friend that had been absent for too long.\nCliched though it may seem, I think it\u0026rsquo;s true.\nI got some writing done this morning, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with it, and though I\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of a tough sequence, I like what I\u0026rsquo;m doing. I\u0026rsquo;m writing this part where the narrator is in the main action, which I realize I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet done. It\u0026rsquo;s a scene that I meant to write much earlier in the story, but there were other things that needed to be done then, and it make sense here. I like the way that the narrative voice of the story is flexible, even if this section is a bit harder to write.\nIn other news, sort of rethought how TealArt is going to work as we go forward. Rather than be a blog in it\u0026rsquo;s own right, it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a portal--and umbrella--for a host of other projects, including this site, a very similar one that I\u0026rsquo;m pushing Chris to start, as well as projects like Station Keeping, the knitting project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been blathering about, and maybe a roundtable-style podcast that a group of blogging friends and I have talked about.\nThis is really just a reflection of the way that it\u0026rsquo;s been for a long time, I\u0026rsquo;m just being more explicit about it, and I\u0026rsquo;ve tweaked how people enter the site so to shape this impression a bit, and I\u0026rsquo;m kind of happy with this. It solves a lot of angst, and is on the whole a good thing. I like how this frees up a lot of time in my life to concentrate on tychoish, which is a great deal of fun, and my fiction writing, which is really important to me.\nThe other thing that this lets me do, is be a contributor to other blogs, and projects, which is something that I\u0026rsquo;ve not had a lot of mental energy left over for, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been so intent on doing my own site. While this isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, and indeed rising tides do raise all boats, I think it\u0026rsquo;s unfair to divide readers\u0026rsquo; attention with so much information, and I think at the moment it\u0026rsquo;s more important to foster a collaborative spirit than it is foster an \u0026ldquo;every man for himself\u0026rdquo; kind of approach.\nIt just feels right. Like the first whiff of cold in the fall. I\u0026rsquo;m ready for this: both the coming winter and this next stage of creative/development.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/where-have-all-the-blog-posts-gone/","summary":"I feel like I should start this post off in a very Garrison Keilor sort of way. Maybe something like, It was the first cool day of the season and it you could smell cold, like an old friend that had been absent for too long.\nCliched though it may seem, I think it\u0026rsquo;s true.\nI got some writing done this morning, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with it, and though I\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of a tough sequence, I like what I\u0026rsquo;m doing. I\u0026rsquo;m writing this part where the narrator is in the main action, which I realize I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet done. It\u0026rsquo;s a scene that I meant to write much earlier in the story, but there were other things that needed to be done then, and it make sense here. I like the way that the narrative voice of the story is flexible, even if this section is a bit harder to write.","title":"Where Have all the Blog Posts Gone"},{"content":"From an earlier conversation with andy:\nandy: they put bluetooth hardware in the ipod touch.\ntycho: that\u0026rsquo;s cool.\nandy: but it\u0026rsquo;s disabled.\ntycho: someone will hack it\nandy: or apple will charge for it.\ntycho: they don\u0026rsquo;t do that, really, remember the 802.11g/n upgrade, and the iPhone Refund.\nandy: fair enough. I kid.\ntycho: I know\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s better than linux where, they\u0026rsquo;ll make it visible, and it\u0026rsquo;ll work\u0026hellip; about half the time, if you\u0026rsquo;re standing on your right foot.\nandy: lol, yep: but you HAVE to stick your tongue into the electrical socket first, and then send them the dtrace afterwards to improve compatability which will break it with the previous human bodies\ntycho: heh\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-to-use-bluetooth-with-linux/","summary":"From an earlier conversation with andy:\nandy: they put bluetooth hardware in the ipod touch.\ntycho: that\u0026rsquo;s cool.\nandy: but it\u0026rsquo;s disabled.\ntycho: someone will hack it\nandy: or apple will charge for it.\ntycho: they don\u0026rsquo;t do that, really, remember the 802.11g/n upgrade, and the iPhone Refund.\nandy: fair enough. I kid.\ntycho: I know\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s better than linux where, they\u0026rsquo;ll make it visible, and it\u0026rsquo;ll work\u0026hellip; about half the time, if you\u0026rsquo;re standing on your right foot.\nandy: lol, yep: but you HAVE to stick your tongue into the electrical socket first, and then send them the dtrace afterwards to improve compatability which will break it with the previous human bodies\ntycho: heh","title":"How to use  Bluetooth with Linux"},{"content":"In no particular order:\nI feel like there should be blogging this morning, I however: have a test to study for. don\u0026rsquo;t have a good TealArt entry for today don\u0026rsquo;t have anything pithy to say here yet. I need a pair of black slacks. Bad. Also, laundry. Though unconfirmed, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to \u0026ldquo;go out\u0026rdquo; with the boy this evening. The question that lingers in my mind is, why I\u0026rsquo;m on the whole so resistant to this. I like being social, and outgoing, and I\u0026rsquo;m not always productive; but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to. Sigh. I have yet to loose points on a graded piece of writing, but I (somewhat comically, if you know me) lost points for not talking more in a class. I\u0026rsquo;m still in A territory, so no worries. When did I turn out to be a grade whore? I wrote 1,100 words yesterday on the novella. I should be hapy about that, but I feel like it should have been more like 1,500. Visor, an app by Alcor, the guy who did Quicksliver, is amazing and rocks my world. I started a new sweater, and have cast on and knit the first pattern row. It came out right on the first try, and by g-d it should be the right size. I\u0026rsquo;d say that I\u0026rsquo;m following a pattern here, but that isn\u0026rsquo;t strictly true. I\u0026rsquo;m allowing myself to be inspired by a pattern, and I\u0026rsquo;m following someone else\u0026rsquo;s chart. I think in the process of starting the new sweater, I might have injured my right hand slightly. I have switched into a different, slightly smaller bookbag, and it makes me happy, though I know I\u0026rsquo;m going to outgrow it pretty quickly as my knitting project grows. I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty cool that iPod touches have bluetooth in them. That\u0026rsquo;s all for now, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go pretended to be useful elsewhere. I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all later.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/morning-rundown/","summary":"In no particular order:\nI feel like there should be blogging this morning, I however: have a test to study for. don\u0026rsquo;t have a good TealArt entry for today don\u0026rsquo;t have anything pithy to say here yet. I need a pair of black slacks. Bad. Also, laundry. Though unconfirmed, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to \u0026ldquo;go out\u0026rdquo; with the boy this evening. The question that lingers in my mind is, why I\u0026rsquo;m on the whole so resistant to this. I like being social, and outgoing, and I\u0026rsquo;m not always productive; but I don\u0026rsquo;t want to. Sigh. I have yet to loose points on a graded piece of writing, but I (somewhat comically, if you know me) lost points for not talking more in a class. I\u0026rsquo;m still in A territory, so no worries. When did I turn out to be a grade whore? I wrote 1,100 words yesterday on the novella. I should be hapy about that, but I feel like it should have been more like 1,500.","title":"Morning Rundown"},{"content":"I have a lot of memories of being the last person in the class during tests. It was almost embarrassing, mostly because always felt that the people who got done so much earlier did a lot better than me. These days, however, I get to questions that I don\u0026rsquo;t know on tests, and I\u0026rsquo;m like \u0026ldquo;well here\u0026rsquo;s my best shot,\u0026rdquo; and then I\u0026rsquo;m done, without the fretting, and the stress. Is that what everyone else has been doing since the 3rd grade and I\u0026rsquo;m just now catching on?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/test-taking-strategies/","summary":"I have a lot of memories of being the last person in the class during tests. It was almost embarrassing, mostly because always felt that the people who got done so much earlier did a lot better than me. These days, however, I get to questions that I don\u0026rsquo;t know on tests, and I\u0026rsquo;m like \u0026ldquo;well here\u0026rsquo;s my best shot,\u0026rdquo; and then I\u0026rsquo;m done, without the fretting, and the stress. Is that what everyone else has been doing since the 3rd grade and I\u0026rsquo;m just now catching on?","title":"Test Taking Strategies"},{"content":"Doing the Career Meme.\nOn the whole, I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably pretty accurate, though there are some things in the 11-40 options that I like more than the options in the 1-10 range. So be it.\nHuman Resources Specialist Industrial-Organizational Psychologist Curator Professor Anthropologist Foreign Service Officer Clergy Addictions Counselor Humanitarian Aid Worker ESL Teacher Foreign Language Instructor Sport Psychology Consultant Rehabilitation Counselor Lobbyist Historian Archivist Computer Trainer Computer Programmer Mediator Criminologist Director Director of Photography Multimedia Developer Association Manager Driving Instructor Religious Worker Community Worker Activist Communications Specialist Corporate Trainer Political Aide Public Policy Analyst Print Journalist Writer Business Systems Analyst Truck Driver Market Research Analyst Critic Gerontologist Database Developer ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-career-meme/","summary":"Doing the Career Meme.\nOn the whole, I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably pretty accurate, though there are some things in the 11-40 options that I like more than the options in the 1-10 range. So be it.\nHuman Resources Specialist Industrial-Organizational Psychologist Curator Professor Anthropologist Foreign Service Officer Clergy Addictions Counselor Humanitarian Aid Worker ESL Teacher Foreign Language Instructor Sport Psychology Consultant Rehabilitation Counselor Lobbyist Historian Archivist Computer Trainer Computer Programmer Mediator Criminologist Director Director of Photography Multimedia Developer Association Manager Driving Instructor Religious Worker Community Worker Activist Communications Specialist Corporate Trainer Political Aide Public Policy Analyst Print Journalist Writer Business Systems Analyst Truck Driver Market Research Analyst Critic Gerontologist Database Developer ","title":"The Career Meme"},{"content":"I must confess something: I haven\u0026rsquo;t been knitting as much lately as I generally do. This may surprise some of you, but I have good reasons, and I think that I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get back into things. For starters it\u0026rsquo;s been really rather warm around here for a while, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t really wanted to get under a warm sweater, and I\u0026rsquo;ve failed at a lot of attempts to start new and projects. Also--and this is my own damn fault--but I have failed in my usual good practice of knitting sleeves efficiently: I\u0026rsquo;m something like 5 sleeves short of three new sweaters.\nBut the weather has, I think officially broken, and I\u0026rsquo;ve figured out how/what to do for my next sweater projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve also made some peace with my sleeve issue.\nPart of the sleeve problem is that I knit two plain (all stocking stitch) sweaters in quick succession, in part because I wanted to have an easy \u0026ldquo;demo\u0026rdquo; sweater to work on at camp, and in part because I was eating through some yarn that had been in the stash too long. End result: four plain (boring) sleeves. I knit one of these sleeves without much fuss, but most of my plain knitting this summer has been focused on sock knitting, and they\u0026rsquo;re heavy sweaters, so I don\u0026rsquo;t want them on my lap, and I\u0026rsquo;m not keen on the idea of dragging them along in my bag.\nMy main project this summer as been a color work sweater. I was somewhat late starting the sleeves because I was short the requisite needle, but after a false start I was off. I realized, however, that I had decreased way way way too much. Those that know me will be surprised to find that I actually ripped back several inches to see if I could fix the problem. So I started knitting this time, with a slower rate of decreases (that eventually stopped) and now while the sleeve will now fit a human wearer, it still looks a little funny. Crap. Going to have to rip that one back, but I don\u0026rsquo;t have the stomach for it.\nThe other impediment to my knitting progress this summer, was that I started a sweater that, as it turns out, was planned for a gauge that had two more stitches per inch than reality. The sweater would have been four inches smaller than I need. So, taking this as a gauge swatch, I\u0026rsquo;m going to cast on 397 stitches, provisionally, for a sweater, inspired by one of Joyce Williams\u0026rsquo; designs in Lativan Dreams. I\u0026rsquo;m not really following Joyce\u0026rsquo;s expert directions, except in the most generous of senses, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think she\u0026rsquo;d expect me to.\nI also, may or may not have gotten two more pounds of the nicest gray yarn you\u0026rsquo;ve ever seen, and I\u0026rsquo;m aching to use it, and if nothing else that will inspire someone to knit through the some of the other things in the queue.\nRather than knit a lot these last few months, I\u0026rsquo;ve done some good computer work and, at least as of today, I\u0026rsquo;m very close to the half way mark of my novella, and I continue to be excited about this project, so it\u0026rsquo;s good to be working on it. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a record of the exact start date, but I think I started around August 11th, and if I hit the half way on Saturday or Sunday, that means that I\u0026rsquo;ll finish before NaNoWriMo, which I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to write a short story for this year.\nAnyway. That\u0026rsquo;s enough rambling for one day.\nBe Well!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-reduction/","summary":"I must confess something: I haven\u0026rsquo;t been knitting as much lately as I generally do. This may surprise some of you, but I have good reasons, and I think that I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get back into things. For starters it\u0026rsquo;s been really rather warm around here for a while, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t really wanted to get under a warm sweater, and I\u0026rsquo;ve failed at a lot of attempts to start new and projects. Also--and this is my own damn fault--but I have failed in my usual good practice of knitting sleeves efficiently: I\u0026rsquo;m something like 5 sleeves short of three new sweaters.\nBut the weather has, I think officially broken, and I\u0026rsquo;ve figured out how/what to do for my next sweater projects. I\u0026rsquo;ve also made some peace with my sleeve issue.\nPart of the sleeve problem is that I knit two plain (all stocking stitch) sweaters in quick succession, in part because I wanted to have an easy \u0026ldquo;demo\u0026rdquo; sweater to work on at camp, and in part because I was eating through some yarn that had been in the stash too long.","title":"Knitting Reduction"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a good tip/hack for my quandary about backing up Mail.app email messages into a text-based format outside of the Core Data database, as part of my project of becoming less entangled with Mail.app.\nMail.app GTD Perfection - Koru Productions ExpressionEngine Development:\nA mostly unknown feature of Mail.app is its ability to export a Mailbox into the everything-reads-it MBOX format. Perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s the glaring lack of an \u0026ldquo;Export Mailbox\u0026rdquo; menu option. But in true Apple tradition, just drag your Mailbox to the folder on your drive that you wish to export to. That\u0026rsquo;s it.\n(from Koru Productions.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mailapp-exporting/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s a good tip/hack for my quandary about backing up Mail.app email messages into a text-based format outside of the Core Data database, as part of my project of becoming less entangled with Mail.app.\nMail.app GTD Perfection - Koru Productions ExpressionEngine Development:\nA mostly unknown feature of Mail.app is its ability to export a Mailbox into the everything-reads-it MBOX format. Perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s the glaring lack of an \u0026ldquo;Export Mailbox\u0026rdquo; menu option. But in true Apple tradition, just drag your Mailbox to the folder on your drive that you wish to export to. That\u0026rsquo;s it.\n(from Koru Productions.)","title":"Mail.app Exporting"},{"content":"The \u0026ldquo;wiki\u0026rdquo; is defined by the ease of editing: the software makes it very easy for people (with editing privileges) to make changes to pages through some sort of web interface. They also create very useable content management systems that keep all \u0026ldquo;files\u0026rdquo; in order--usually stored in some sort of database--and allow for some sort of more \u0026ldquo;human readable\u0026rdquo; markup, like Textile, or my favorite markdown. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound very different from, say the WordPress site that powers this site, and indeed some really great wiki programs can output blog formats. What has made wikis so popular, and noteworthy is that often \u0026ldquo;those with editor privileges\u0026rdquo; is everyone who reads the site, rather than a group of editors; although the technology would allow for this model as well. While I think it\u0026rsquo;s too simplistic to just say \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s a wiki: everyone can edit it,\u0026rdquo; to a large extent thats true.\nThe fact of the matter is, though, that not everyone does participate in these projects. Lets take Wikipedia for a moment: while lots of people have accounts with wikipedia, and may make an edit every now and then (I\u0026rsquo;ll include myself in this category; I usually just fix quibble-y things if I come across them, which I don\u0026rsquo;t often, but I mainly just comment on the \u0026ldquo;talk pages\u0026rdquo;), but wikipedia has a core editor-base of only a couple of (several) thousand. Which in comparison to the millions that use wikipedia is really a fairly small proportion. The same with projects like Firefox or even GNU and Linux, I\u0026rsquo;d assume. In fact if we consider wikipedia an open-source project (and we should,) in terms of adoption and contribution rates, I\u0026rsquo;m sure that it\u0026rsquo;s probably among the most successful.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s more, I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to note that just because open-source projects are, well, open to everyone and lots of people use them, many fewer people contribute to the projects, and projects have a fairly centralized and hierarchical organizational structures, which was surprising (and heartening) when I first figured it out. Now before any hippy types1 get their undies in a twist about how such structures impinge upon freedom \u0026ldquo;freedom,\u0026rdquo; this is where the Share-Alike and propagating qualities of the \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; licenses come in handy. If the \u0026ldquo;central\u0026rdquo; project falls behind a group of users expectations or a group of users want to develop the project in a different direction, they can take a \u0026ldquo;fork\u0026rdquo; of the program/project in that direction. Also, I think it\u0026rsquo;s worth noting that a lot of open source software projects are developed to a large extent by large software companies that may or may not produce proprietary project as well. But I digress, I think that the hierarchical and structured quality of an open source (software/knitting) development community is a good thing: these are the kind of conditions that allow work to get done on a project: unstructured projects aren\u0026rsquo;t easily productive.\nSo what does this mean for a knitting project? I think that it means that, community needs to come before infrastructure. It means that while the barriers to entry need to be low, there needs to be framework for different kinds of contributions and tasks carved out so that when people come to the project they can tackle any kind small granular task rather than an impossible whole. Also it means that there needs to be a core group of people in regular contact with each-other who are responsible for maintaining some of the logistics/framework, and setting agendas that the larger community can address. You cannot, by contrast, just say \u0026ldquo;ok, have at\u0026rdquo; and assume that the community will know what to do, and be able to organize around a loose framework. And this really goes for any kind of project, software, knitting, or fiction. It\u0026rsquo;s a problem that I\u0026rsquo;m forever working on, as I\u0026rsquo;m sure longtime readers of the site will recognize.\nIf it isn\u0026rsquo;t clear by now, I\u0026rsquo;d like to start some sort of OSK (open source knitting) project, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to work out a few of the details, but if I think we\u0026rsquo;re a ways off of this. If you would like to participate in this, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear from you (email: tycho@tealart.com), and although it might be putting the horse before the cart, but I think next time I\u0026rsquo;m going to start drafting out some plans and structure (mostly in terms of the content), so that I at least can conceptualize how this would go.\nI look forward to hearing from you, and as always, I remain, tycho\nI kid, of course, however just to continue the pun, I\u0026rsquo;ll point out that the examples given to define the various types of \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; are beer/speech, not beer/speech/love.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-knitting-particpation/","summary":"The \u0026ldquo;wiki\u0026rdquo; is defined by the ease of editing: the software makes it very easy for people (with editing privileges) to make changes to pages through some sort of web interface. They also create very useable content management systems that keep all \u0026ldquo;files\u0026rdquo; in order--usually stored in some sort of database--and allow for some sort of more \u0026ldquo;human readable\u0026rdquo; markup, like Textile, or my favorite markdown. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t sound very different from, say the WordPress site that powers this site, and indeed some really great wiki programs can output blog formats. What has made wikis so popular, and noteworthy is that often \u0026ldquo;those with editor privileges\u0026rdquo; is everyone who reads the site, rather than a group of editors; although the technology would allow for this model as well. While I think it\u0026rsquo;s too simplistic to just say \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s a wiki: everyone can edit it,\u0026rdquo; to a large extent thats true.","title":"Open Source Knitting: Particpation"},{"content":"I have an admission to make.\nMy first novel opened with the scene of a sort of \u0026ldquo;perfect fall day\u0026rdquo; on Mars.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s right. I had oak tree\u0026rsquo;s and grass on Mars. It was that bad\nThe other night I had the idea of seeing if I could rescue that story in a like 2,000 word space opera with a sort of \u0026ldquo;the bad guys always get away, but at least we\u0026rsquo;ll always have each other,\u0026rdquo; kind of piece.\nOnly without the trees this time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fall-leaves/","summary":"I have an admission to make.\nMy first novel opened with the scene of a sort of \u0026ldquo;perfect fall day\u0026rdquo; on Mars.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s right. I had oak tree\u0026rsquo;s and grass on Mars. It was that bad\nThe other night I had the idea of seeing if I could rescue that story in a like 2,000 word space opera with a sort of \u0026ldquo;the bad guys always get away, but at least we\u0026rsquo;ll always have each other,\u0026rdquo; kind of piece.\nOnly without the trees this time.","title":"Fall Leaves"},{"content":"William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present -Boing Boing:\nI love the idea of science fiction turning its lens on the present, of finding the same frisson of futuristic speculation in looking around at the contemporary world.\n(from Boing Boing.)\nOk, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t read *Spook Country* yet, which is Gibson\u0026rsquo;s newest novel, though I probably will at some point. For those of you playing at home, it\u0026rsquo;s a science fiction novel set one year in the past.\nMy thought?\nWith due respects to William Gibson, wrong!\nAt least for me, the futuristic (or even alternate history) elements of the genre make it possible to write and think about the relationship of current issues to their historical moment.\nSo so lets imagine a story idea I\u0026rsquo;ve just summoned up, for the purpose of demonstration\u0026hellip;\nSo imagine a world where people are horribly overcrowded, all over the world, the climate is changing and people don\u0026rsquo;t want to do the things that would be needed in order to save the planet (consume less, carpool, recycle, pay taxes etc.) even when people start dying because the overcrowding and poor environment has weakened immune systems and made it possible for a virus to spread like wildfire\u0026hellip;\nClearly this is a story about consumption and modernity, and in some ways a criticisms of current environmental policy. I hope we can agree on this. So, then, we could set this story in one of several time periods:\n1. We could set it in in late medieval europe, and use one of the last outbreaks of bubonic plague as a means to explore this issue. 2. Put the story in the middle of the industrial revolution in, say, london. 3. Set it in present day, and have it be about a treehugging blogger who\u0026rsquo;s an art teach at an elementary school where kids start dying of bird flu. 4. Set it 500 years in the future, were the overpopulation issue isn\u0026rsquo;t just an issue in big cities, but everywhere, and the people are basically suffocating.\nNow I\u0026rsquo;ve handicaped this example, by making the present day option sound really lame, but they\u0026rsquo;re all pretty good, so lets imagine that they\u0026rsquo;re all equally entertaining.\nIf you write it in the present day, the ideas you\u0026rsquo;re writing about, which are in all cases actually about present day issues, become simply about present day issues, and are only thinkable in-terms of the present historical moment. And you have people reading your story say \u0026ldquo;gee if we only had better environmental laws and values, restricted access to hand-sanitizing gels, universal health care, and a non dick-wad president, we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be so screwed when this happens.\u0026rdquo; Which is a potentially fine thing to think; however, the readers in this situation are not thinking about other things that are important and related to the point that you\u0026rsquo;re trying to make: that humans have always had an effect on the planet, and that you can\u0026rsquo;t go \u0026ldquo;against\u0026rdquo; technology on a society wide level, and so forth.\nBut if you take the story out of the present time you\u0026rsquo;re able to say, lets see how these ideas are related to our present historical context, and how they are always located in a historical moment but also never located in one historical moment. If you set it in the past, your reader can think, \u0026ldquo;well, we got over the plague, perhaps we\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get past bird flu,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;well, we found fuel sources that are more effective than coal, maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll be able to move off of our reliance on gasoline.\u0026rdquo; If you put it in the future you can do more or less anything with history; you can turn present day subtleties into major issues, you can write about revolutionary ideologies that are virtually unknowable in the context of contemporary politics.\nThis ability to experiment and test ideas out, could at its heart be understood as the \u0026ldquo;science\u0026rdquo; referred to in the term \u0026ldquo;science fiction.\u0026rdquo; Yeah, everything science fiction writers write about is about the present, but then so is everything that \u0026ldquo;mainstream\u0026rdquo; fiction writers write about, science fictions brilliance is--among other things--in it\u0026rsquo;s ability to denaturalize this connection. So where does this leave Spook Country? Numinous, indeed but maybe not exactly a huge step forward for the genre that Gibson (and Cory Doctorow et al) seem to think it is.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gibson-on-the-future-and-science-fiction/","summary":"William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present -Boing Boing:\nI love the idea of science fiction turning its lens on the present, of finding the same frisson of futuristic speculation in looking around at the contemporary world.\n(from Boing Boing.)\nOk, so I haven\u0026rsquo;t read *Spook Country* yet, which is Gibson\u0026rsquo;s newest novel, though I probably will at some point. For those of you playing at home, it\u0026rsquo;s a science fiction novel set one year in the past.\nMy thought?\nWith due respects to William Gibson, wrong!\nAt least for me, the futuristic (or even alternate history) elements of the genre make it possible to write and think about the relationship of current issues to their historical moment.\nSo so lets imagine a story idea I\u0026rsquo;ve just summoned up, for the purpose of demonstration\u0026hellip;\nSo imagine a world where people are horribly overcrowded, all over the world, the climate is changing and people don\u0026rsquo;t want to do the things that would be needed in order to save the planet (consume less, carpool, recycle, pay taxes etc.","title":"Gibson on the future and Science Fiction"},{"content":"After a backup scare a few months back, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten much more vigilant about backing up files. Since I work in plain text files, using a version control program like what programers use seemed like a logical step.\nGot my on disk subversion repository to work correctly. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge improvement, of course, because everything\u0026rsquo;s dependent on my disk, but it does mean that I have a version control system for my personal and important files, in a way that I\u0026rsquo;m happy with, and at least theoretically I should be able to move this set up to my webserver, when I get that underway. I would like to say that it\u0026rsquo;s exactly the way I want it, and there are only 10 revisions. Pretty nice. While a lot of subversion things clicked in the last few days, I am far from a subversion master. Things I have yet to master:\nRolling back to old versions Taking the contents of one repository and putting it in another, for good backups and moving things about Getting some sort of good way to interact with it outside of the command line. Pass-wording and protecting a repository. While I\u0026rsquo;m good and getting better with the command line stuff for my own uses, I have a project in the works that looks like it\u0026rsquo;s going to be built around collaborations to a subversion repository. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of using Instiki, because I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a version of that that is built around subversion and markdown/maruku, which is what I\u0026rsquo;d be working in anyway. If that could work, I\u0026rsquo;d be happy. We\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nAnyway, this is cool software, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with it.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-subversion-for-personal-files/","summary":"After a backup scare a few months back, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten much more vigilant about backing up files. Since I work in plain text files, using a version control program like what programers use seemed like a logical step.\nGot my on disk subversion repository to work correctly. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge improvement, of course, because everything\u0026rsquo;s dependent on my disk, but it does mean that I have a version control system for my personal and important files, in a way that I\u0026rsquo;m happy with, and at least theoretically I should be able to move this set up to my webserver, when I get that underway. I would like to say that it\u0026rsquo;s exactly the way I want it, and there are only 10 revisions. Pretty nice. While a lot of subversion things clicked in the last few days, I am far from a subversion master. Things I have yet to master:","title":"Of Subversion (for Personal Files)"},{"content":"I was thinking about Olin College for some reason, which launched me into something of a rathole about tenure and academia.\nI have a buddy at Olin College, and I\u0026rsquo;ve heard some people rave about how awesome and hard-core revolutionary the program is. And I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty that in the late 20th and early 21st century, new institutions of higher learning can start and (hopefully) succeed. Having said that, as I am wont, I was curious about how tenure was dealt with.\nOlin College is distinctive in several ways. First, it does not intend to establish traditional academic departments. Instead, the internal academic structure will involve several multidisciplinary clusters of faculty whose primary bond is the successful development of a cohort of engineering students. In addition, faculty employment relations will be based on renewable contracts rather than a traditional tenure system.\nNow we\u0026rsquo;re talking about a faculty that I suspect (this is a guess) is maybe 40 people, and maybe growing a little. Also tangentially, \u0026ldquo;academic departments\u0026rdquo; are almost always about institutional administration. Now in a small setting you don\u0026rsquo;t could probably cut out that mid-level administrator, and just have the dean and a couple of people in that office take care of those kinds of things, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that really cuts much out, but whatever.\nI have to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve had better experiences at institution where tenure is stronger, and the cries of, \u0026ldquo;but it isn\u0026rsquo;t economically viable!\u0026rdquo; is distracting, and I have yet to be convinced. I\u0026rsquo;m also convinced that when faculty are more fulfilled and supported, students learn more (and better). Part of keeping faculty supported is tenure, not to mention, living wages and health insurance. But there\u0026rsquo;s a difference between adjuncts that teach 5 intro-level classes a term and tenure/tenure-track professors that teach about three classes a term (or less), and have the opportunity to do research, and be active professionally.\nI remain convinced that Tenure remains useful, even in the contemporary world. I can think of no other renewable contract-faculty type system that might successfully encourage research. You can\u0026rsquo;t have meaningful research/publication systems without it. Tenure allows for the ebb and flow that\u0026rsquo;s typical of the general career, it grants freedom, and sets expectations that research be incorporated into faculty life. Renewable contract systems focus on teaching, because that\u0026rsquo;s easy to talk and think about.\nUnfortunately, or fortunately, as long as tenure continues to exist, those jobs will be preferable to non-tenure jobs to many people, and thus continue to attract better faculty. At the very least, I think tenured faculties will be more acceptable. To make an analogy, new science fiction magazines that pay writers, \u0026ldquo;pro rates,\u0026rdquo; tend to sell better, than ones that pay less than the 3 cents per word mark, because readers know that they\u0026rsquo;re able to buy better stories from authors, and are able to perceive that difference.\nThe idealistic (and flagrantly incorrect) free-market argument should suggest that non-tenured full time jobs should pay more than tenured jobs (trading the security of tenure, for an increase in salary) and frankly if that were the case, it might not seem like quite as bad of a deal, but not only do non-tenure jobs, tragically misunderstand the role and purpose of faculty, but they put faculty in a pretty precarious situation, it seems to me, and that\u0026rsquo;s not good.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/thoughts-on-tenure-systems/","summary":"I was thinking about Olin College for some reason, which launched me into something of a rathole about tenure and academia.\nI have a buddy at Olin College, and I\u0026rsquo;ve heard some people rave about how awesome and hard-core revolutionary the program is. And I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty that in the late 20th and early 21st century, new institutions of higher learning can start and (hopefully) succeed. Having said that, as I am wont, I was curious about how tenure was dealt with.\nOlin College is distinctive in several ways. First, it does not intend to establish traditional academic departments. Instead, the internal academic structure will involve several multidisciplinary clusters of faculty whose primary bond is the successful development of a cohort of engineering students. In addition, faculty employment relations will be based on renewable contracts rather than a traditional tenure system.\nNow we\u0026rsquo;re talking about a faculty that I suspect (this is a guess) is maybe 40 people, and maybe growing a little.","title":"Thoughts on Tenure Systems"},{"content":"Do any of you know how hard it is to write about the interactions of bodies, like physical contact, and expressions when you can\u0026rsquo;t say \u0026ldquo;so and so raised \u0026lt; pronoun \u0026gt; hand\u0026rdquo;\nWell it\u0026rsquo;s hard. And I fear it\u0026rsquo;s making my characters seem even more chaste.\nJust saying.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gendered-bodies/","summary":"Do any of you know how hard it is to write about the interactions of bodies, like physical contact, and expressions when you can\u0026rsquo;t say \u0026ldquo;so and so raised \u0026lt; pronoun \u0026gt; hand\u0026rdquo;\nWell it\u0026rsquo;s hard. And I fear it\u0026rsquo;s making my characters seem even more chaste.\nJust saying.","title":"Gendered Bodies"},{"content":"Do any of you, wise readers, have a good program that will take a bunch of messages in a mail.app mailbox and export them to a plain text file. I want to be able to take a lot of the messages that I don\u0026rsquo;t use most of the time, and be able to back them up, and also grep through them, without having them clog up my mail program.\nI want something that will export headers and everything, and that will make one long text file rather than 10,000 separate files.\nI have spent a little bit of time today, deleting messages that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to archive and getting my mail program organized in a more coherent way. I\u0026rsquo;m down from about 25 mailboxes and 20 rules, to about 13 rules and 15 mail boxes. This is an improvement. I also only have four emails in my inbox, which is also an improvment from my usual number around 20.\nBut I should be doing other things.\nAlso, somehow, I have a working onsite subversion repository. How\u0026rsquo;d that happen?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mailapp-export-in-os-x/","summary":"Do any of you, wise readers, have a good program that will take a bunch of messages in a mail.app mailbox and export them to a plain text file. I want to be able to take a lot of the messages that I don\u0026rsquo;t use most of the time, and be able to back them up, and also grep through them, without having them clog up my mail program.\nI want something that will export headers and everything, and that will make one long text file rather than 10,000 separate files.\nI have spent a little bit of time today, deleting messages that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to archive and getting my mail program organized in a more coherent way. I\u0026rsquo;m down from about 25 mailboxes and 20 rules, to about 13 rules and 15 mail boxes. This is an improvement. I also only have four emails in my inbox, which is also an improvment from my usual number around 20.","title":"Mail.app Export in OS X"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking/talking here recently about the connections between open source (free; as in speech) development and knitting. I\u0026rsquo;ve also said that this, at least in my mind is related to the ideas I was considering in terms of how writers and creative types make money in the digital age, and while in my first foray I touched upon a debate over the commercial use differences between a creative commons license1 and the GPL/GFDL, I think that post dealt with too many issues, and I think that the issue of commercializing content/product that is also free (again speech, not beer) is one that needs ongoing attention. Without further ado\u0026hellip;\nI should preface this with \u0026ldquo;but I\u0026rsquo;m not a lawyer,\u0026rdquo; to be fair. This thankfully has never stopped interested folk from honest commentary. My main point earlier was non-commercial clauses in that in situations where authorship is community mean that there is no \u0026ldquo;copyright holder\u0026rdquo; present to override that clause of the license. While I license TealArt to you all for non-commercial use, I can use my content commercially should I choose to. If TealArt were a wiki; however, and every entry was the product of a collaboration of many (more) people who, at least theoretically, liscenced their work to TA under \u0026ldquo;by-Nc-Sa\u0026rdquo; terms, if the rules where adhered to, no one would ever be able to use TA content commercially, not even me or any of the other originating contributors. In this way, for group projects, in an odd way, the GPL/GFDL approach lets the originators (and other people as well) use the content commercial.\nNow the share-alike and the self-propagating property of the GPL/GFDL are probably equivalent from the perspective of an open knitting project. This quality means that while the content of such projects are open to be copied and used by anyone, any derivatives that are distributed must be liscenced under the same license as the original. The end result of this is that these licenses provide a good \u0026ldquo;countermeasure\u0026rdquo; to commercialization, and in an odd way, a powerful motivation for progress.\nI think it would be helpful at this point to explore how commercial use and \u0026ldquo;open sourcing\u0026rdquo; could work together in a knitting situation.\nSay there was a repository of knitting designs which contained notes on process, notes on intention, and even a pattern, and there was a project in this repository that I thought would be great for a class I was going to be teaching, I might decide to take the hat pattern and reproduce it for the class. Reading the notes and other materials, I was able to create an edited pattern that I could use in my class, which I \u0026ldquo;sold\u0026rdquo; to my students. Under GPL/GFDL-style terms, I would be obligated to share my modifications (and notes) with the OSK repository and my students.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s important to recognize that what\u0026rsquo;s being sold here, is not the pattern so much as a class, a service around the pattern, which is exactly how companies like Novell and RedHat make their money, and stay afloat. Linux, despite being free (as in beer, as well as speech) is, or can be, a viable business. To return to the hat class, we can assume that while I could have come up with my own hat pattern, the class is probably better for my using of the open hat pattern, because it\u0026rsquo;s been vetted my loads of other knitters, and hopefully my contributions to the project was useful; but if I\u0026rsquo;m going to be successful using Open Knit content, my teaching/etc. has to be more helpful than simply editing and providing a pattern, because access to the theoretical Open Knit content is, well, open to everyone: and free (beer/speech), of course.\nWith luck this openness helps keep the products that people sell of the highest quality, and if a GPL/GFDL/Share-Alike license is used advancements that commercial uses produce become part of the larger body of free/open work, and everyone benefits. It means that people hoping to make money from knitting and knitting design have to find other ways to participate in this process other than selling \u0026ldquo;intellectual property,\u0026rdquo; tied to services (teaching, editorial work for publishers, yarn design/sales, day jobs, subscription programs/clubs), but when you think about it, that\u0026rsquo;s how most people in the knitting business operate already, they\u0026rsquo;re just going it alone, rather than in a community. Which brings us to a great topic for next time: how the community/social aspect of open/free development projects (software and knitting) are organized on a more granular level, in terms of who\u0026rsquo;s doing the organization and the work.\nBut until then, I remain, tycho\nThis would be the attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-knitting-free-commericalism/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking/talking here recently about the connections between open source (free; as in speech) development and knitting. I\u0026rsquo;ve also said that this, at least in my mind is related to the ideas I was considering in terms of how writers and creative types make money in the digital age, and while in my first foray I touched upon a debate over the commercial use differences between a creative commons license1 and the GPL/GFDL, I think that post dealt with too many issues, and I think that the issue of commercializing content/product that is also free (again speech, not beer) is one that needs ongoing attention. Without further ado\u0026hellip;\nI should preface this with \u0026ldquo;but I\u0026rsquo;m not a lawyer,\u0026rdquo; to be fair. This thankfully has never stopped interested folk from honest commentary. My main point earlier was non-commercial clauses in that in situations where authorship is community mean that there is no \u0026ldquo;copyright holder\u0026rdquo; present to override that clause of the license.","title":"Open-Source Knitting: Free Commericalism"},{"content":"Having basically converted from writing almost exclusively in Word, the last time I wrote fiction, I\u0026rsquo;m now enjoying writing in Markdown using plain text and TextMate. Here\u0026rsquo;s why:\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing today, and I think, despite a slight false start, I\u0026rsquo;m really liking how my writing turned out today. Unlike a lot of other pursuits (homework, dancing, sometimes knitting) that are really fun when I\u0026rsquo;m doing them but draining after the fact, getting writing done--particularly fiction writing--almost always leaves me feeling invigorated and fresh. I feel like I can do more when I\u0026rsquo;m done writing than I can when I\u0026rsquo;m done with other things.\nWhat I love about fiction writing in Markdown:\n1. It\u0026rsquo;s a subset of HTML, which means that HTML elements work in markdown. This is cool because as I\u0026rsquo;m writing I can use HTML comment tags, \u0026lt;!-- like this --\u0026gt;, to make notes to myself. For instance, today, I something changed with how I was writing a character today, so I left a little note to myself marking the occasion, which will persist with this document, and will be nice to keep with the documents. Also I\u0026rsquo;ll write up outlines and keep them in comment tags so that nothing sneaks through. Also TextMate highlights these tags, so that they look different from the text while you\u0026rsquo;re writing.\n2. If you\u0026rsquo;re not writing linearly, or think that you need to go back and edit a paragraph later, but don\u0026rsquo;t want to break your forward flow with an edit, you can throw a hash or two or three (#) before the line and TextMate will mark the entire line in a special color so that you can pick it out quickly, or jump to it with the quick reference. If you forget about it, then when you run markdown or maruku, you\u0026rsquo;ll know very quickly that you have to change something.\n3. Mark down makes pushing things out to the web, and a well formated paper/pdf document equally easy (particularly with Maruku), and I find tweaking a LaTeX document in TextMate (and even running LaTeX) to be way better than running it from the command line.\n4. The Markdown subversion support is really great, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to know that your stuff is all backed up and versioned properly.\n5. Between MegaZoom (a SIMBL pluggin) and good text zooming support, a good--full screen--distraction free writing environment is easy to obtain, and a pleasure to write in.\n6. Slim and Stable. This is a TextMate issue, of course, but, I really love not having to run Microsoft products.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s it. Good Wholesome fun.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reasons-to-write-fiction-in-mdwn/","summary":"Having basically converted from writing almost exclusively in Word, the last time I wrote fiction, I\u0026rsquo;m now enjoying writing in Markdown using plain text and TextMate. Here\u0026rsquo;s why:\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing today, and I think, despite a slight false start, I\u0026rsquo;m really liking how my writing turned out today. Unlike a lot of other pursuits (homework, dancing, sometimes knitting) that are really fun when I\u0026rsquo;m doing them but draining after the fact, getting writing done--particularly fiction writing--almost always leaves me feeling invigorated and fresh. I feel like I can do more when I\u0026rsquo;m done writing than I can when I\u0026rsquo;m done with other things.\nWhat I love about fiction writing in Markdown:\n1. It\u0026rsquo;s a subset of HTML, which means that HTML elements work in markdown. This is cool because as I\u0026rsquo;m writing I can use HTML comment tags, \u0026lt;!-- like this --\u0026gt;, to make notes to myself. For instance, today, I something changed with how I was writing a character today, so I left a little note to myself marking the occasion, which will persist with this document, and will be nice to keep with the documents.","title":"Reasons to Write Fiction in Markdown"},{"content":"I totally started to write a today in review post for yesterday, except I never got around to writing it. When I got back to my computer this morning, I saw an open window with the words \u0026ldquo;today in review\u0026rdquo; in the title field.\nBut the window was blank.\nYesterday was one of those incredibly full days that never quite seems to stop, and I went to bed at like 9:30 or 10. Today promises to be better\u0026hellip;\nI might actually have things to blog. Also, I need to be better about reading my feeds, or the new and lowered number won\u0026rsquo;t help much, but there is writing that needs/wants to be done.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/todays-in-review/","summary":"I totally started to write a today in review post for yesterday, except I never got around to writing it. When I got back to my computer this morning, I saw an open window with the words \u0026ldquo;today in review\u0026rdquo; in the title field.\nBut the window was blank.\nYesterday was one of those incredibly full days that never quite seems to stop, and I went to bed at like 9:30 or 10. Today promises to be better\u0026hellip;\nI might actually have things to blog. Also, I need to be better about reading my feeds, or the new and lowered number won\u0026rsquo;t help much, but there is writing that needs/wants to be done.","title":"Todays in Review"},{"content":"Flying Meat Software has released a new program called Acorn that is a great little image editor program.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s still 1.0, so it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, but it\u0026rsquo;s damn nice. I played around for like 10 seconds, and decided that it basically did everything that I ever did with photoshop, ever. Everything. And it\u0026rsquo;s easier to use. How cool is that.\nThis provoked me to say a few things in a chat with a friend that I thought would be good to log here:\nThe one thing that big conventional image editing and design suits have that I don\u0026rsquo;t think is replicated well in this space is proper layout tools. Still have to go to adobe or quark for layout. The photoshop interface is really out dated an inefficient, and almost works better on windows, because the \u0026ldquo;window as container metaphor\u0026rdquo; is helpful in unifying everything. Photoshop is bloated as hell, because adobe seems more concerned with maintaining backwards compatibility than actually moving forward in terms of features or actual performance. I think Microsoft did the right thing by releasing a document converter, when they changed their formats, and I think this is probably the best way to deal the compatibility issues (well other than using really good open formats, but realistically even good open formats change). ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/acorn-image-editing-for-the-new-world/","summary":"Flying Meat Software has released a new program called Acorn that is a great little image editor program.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s still 1.0, so it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect, but it\u0026rsquo;s damn nice. I played around for like 10 seconds, and decided that it basically did everything that I ever did with photoshop, ever. Everything. And it\u0026rsquo;s easier to use. How cool is that.\nThis provoked me to say a few things in a chat with a friend that I thought would be good to log here:\nThe one thing that big conventional image editing and design suits have that I don\u0026rsquo;t think is replicated well in this space is proper layout tools. Still have to go to adobe or quark for layout. The photoshop interface is really out dated an inefficient, and almost works better on windows, because the \u0026ldquo;window as container metaphor\u0026rdquo; is helpful in unifying everything. Photoshop is bloated as hell, because adobe seems more concerned with maintaining backwards compatibility than actually moving forward in terms of features or actual performance.","title":"Acorn: Image Editing for the New World"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s a new version of the OS X system notification tool Growl, and it\u0026rsquo;s kind of amazing.\nYou can \u0026ldquo;close\u0026rdquo; notifications now, and it manages the problem of too many notifications staking up, if the system somehow runs out of room. (Say you walk away from the network or your computer for a while. Additionally, there are now more notification themes, which is very welcome.\nWe just need to port this to mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod touch, and so forth. The program also has the capiability to mange sending/reciving notifications from other computers, which I think would be really great for an iphone/etc.\nI mean you could kludge something together with email notifications, but that kind of solution is never the same\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-growl-system-notifications-for-os-x/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s a new version of the OS X system notification tool Growl, and it\u0026rsquo;s kind of amazing.\nYou can \u0026ldquo;close\u0026rdquo; notifications now, and it manages the problem of too many notifications staking up, if the system somehow runs out of room. (Say you walk away from the network or your computer for a while. Additionally, there are now more notification themes, which is very welcome.\nWe just need to port this to mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod touch, and so forth. The program also has the capiability to mange sending/reciving notifications from other computers, which I think would be really great for an iphone/etc.\nI mean you could kludge something together with email notifications, but that kind of solution is never the same\u0026hellip;","title":"New Growl Notifications for OS X"},{"content":"Good Monday Friends!\nYou know the week is a longer length of time than you might normally be given to think. On the one hand, I look back and say \u0026ldquo;gee, nothing much of import happened,\u0026rdquo; and would therefore be prone to thinking that it was a short quick week, and on the other hand when I think about it, it was kind of a long week.\nI had my first \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; bank holiday in many years: my old school never canceled classes on bank holidays, so I\u0026rsquo;ve grown out of the custom of having an extra day every few months, and I think that having Monday off contributed to the sense of length of the week. Additionally, this was my first week of real unemployment. I got some applications and emails out, and I got some extra writing done, and that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on the plan for this week. I\u0026rsquo;m confident that something will pull together coming up soon. In the mean time I\u0026rsquo;m writing a bunch (and having a blast!), getting things done, and it\u0026rsquo;s good times.\nYou may have noticed that I\u0026rsquo;ve been blogging more regularly over at tychoish I\u0026rsquo;ve basically been posting about four times a day, and I really like the tone, and kind of content that\u0026rsquo;s emerged. It\u0026rsquo;s fun, and writing the posts really complements the way that I travel on through my day, and I\u0026rsquo;m really like the way it lets me catalogue a certain kind of process of research and thought. I do have to learn to tell the difference between tychoish posts, and tychoish posts that have turned into TealArt posts. You\u0026rsquo;ll see one of those posts this week on TealArt, at least.\nThe other thing that doing this blog has taught me is an appreciation for writing in the moment. While I so rarely go back over my TealArt posts (what you couldn\u0026rsquo;t tell? heh.) Its no secret that I like to keep a backlog. While there are benefits to this, namely it means that if I spend a day every couple of weeks writing TealArt entries, it means that every other moment of writing time that I have that week isn\u0026rsquo;t spent writing for TealArt, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s good in the long run. Having said that, there\u0026rsquo;s something to be said for writing things in the moment, which is what the blog is all about.\nThe other thing that I\u0026rsquo;m going to have on the board for this week is some stuff about the Open Source Knitting project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been scheming about. I have a couple of more essays that I\u0026rsquo;m going to post on Tuesday and Thursday. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested in thinking about this, I\u0026rsquo;m trying to spend some time on IRC, and I think the #textiles channel on Undernet.org servers would be a great place to start this kind of conversation, but once I get this foundation up and get a job, I\u0026rsquo;ll be more ready to move forward with this project.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about all I have for you this week. Be well, be productive, enjoy, and stay tuned!\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tealart-this-week/","summary":"Good Monday Friends!\nYou know the week is a longer length of time than you might normally be given to think. On the one hand, I look back and say \u0026ldquo;gee, nothing much of import happened,\u0026rdquo; and would therefore be prone to thinking that it was a short quick week, and on the other hand when I think about it, it was kind of a long week.\nI had my first \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; bank holiday in many years: my old school never canceled classes on bank holidays, so I\u0026rsquo;ve grown out of the custom of having an extra day every few months, and I think that having Monday off contributed to the sense of length of the week. Additionally, this was my first week of real unemployment. I got some applications and emails out, and I got some extra writing done, and that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on the plan for this week. I\u0026rsquo;m confident that something will pull together coming up soon.","title":"TealArt, This Week"},{"content":"So Tychoish, in the last week has broken the 200 mark in number of posts. TealArt by contrast, in the last 5 years only has 700 some.\nBut I had a particularly blog filled day yesterday, so I\u0026rsquo;m thinking it being Sunday, you and I have better things to do with our time that write and read this blog, so I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all come Monday.\nTake a break, would ya!\n(Cheers!)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/how-many-blog-posts/","summary":"So Tychoish, in the last week has broken the 200 mark in number of posts. TealArt by contrast, in the last 5 years only has 700 some.\nBut I had a particularly blog filled day yesterday, so I\u0026rsquo;m thinking it being Sunday, you and I have better things to do with our time that write and read this blog, so I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all come Monday.\nTake a break, would ya!\n(Cheers!)","title":"How many Blog Posts?"},{"content":"This started out as a comment `over here \u0026lt;http://www.thomascrampton.com/2007/09/06/how-to-be-an-uber-blogger-by-cory-doctorow/\u0026gt;`_, but I think has evolved into a blog post of it\u0026rsquo;s own, so here\u0026rsquo;s my commentary\nI think this is pretty good advice, clearly, and the \u0026ldquo;hey folks, we\u0026rsquo;re taping over here,\u0026rdquo; line was priceless. Well, maybe not priceless, but that\u0026rsquo;s the general idea.\nI would like the offer commentary, on this advice, however:\nI think the \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t make it hard for people to read your work,\u0026rdquo; is good universal advice, but it\u0026rsquo;s not so much about blogging as it is, about distribution and creation. I remember not so long ago that blogger wouldn\u0026rsquo;t publish full RSS feeds (or any feeds, possibly) and I had a policy of not reading any blogger feeds for just this reason. So good advice there, no surprise.\nThe \u0026ldquo;write wire-style\u0026rdquo; stories is also good advice, but it\u0026rsquo;s particularly good advice for blogs that are more like wireservices. Like, boing boing, and slashdot. And in a lot of ways I read these sites as if they were wire services, in search of tidbits that I think would be interesting for my blog, or some-such. So if you were writing a blog, like this, it\u0026rsquo;s a great model to use.\nThis also assumes that the primary route of new traffic to the average blog are are people browsing google or technorati, and while that\u0026rsquo;s probably true of blogs like boing boing, that\u0026rsquo;s far from a universal. For instance, for a great number of weeks a post of mine on TealArt called \u0026ldquo;Cool Nicknames\u0026rdquo; was my incoming link from google, because people were googling \u0026ldquo;cool nicknames.\u0026rdquo; Now I would love if you thought that people coming in from this search were looking for something other than a list of cool nicknames, which I wasn\u0026rsquo;t providing then, and am not likely to start any time soon. And I know I wasn\u0026rsquo;t following Cory\u0026rsquo;s advice here, but still, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this blog (and this is true for many blogs) are providing the same kind of information that search engines are best at finding, or that most people would think to look for on a search engine.\nThis means that, even if you write the best headlines and opening sentences, you still won\u0026rsquo;t get new readers, because you\u0026rsquo;re writing pieces about email organization, or the lessons of your latest science fiction project, or thoughts on the collaboration model of open source software for other sorts of projects. Even the people who are interested in these things, and willing to read about them, probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t think to browse google, looking for blogs. This leads me to an alternate mode of \u0026ldquo;encouraging\u0026rdquo; blog discovery:\nI see blogging as part of an ongoing conversation. Conversations that I\u0026rsquo;m having with myself, conversations that I\u0026rsquo;m having with you the readers about what\u0026rsquo;s going on in my life, conversations that I\u0026rsquo;m having with people who are (theoretically commenting on the blog), and conversations--like this one--that I\u0026rsquo;m having with other bloggers.\nPeople don\u0026rsquo;t stumble into the conversations via search engines, they stumble upon them by reading other parts of the conversation. By talking to you in real life, by finding you in IRC rooms, or on listservs, by reading other blogs that link to you, by reading your comments in other peoples blogs, and by reading your comments in their blog.\nWhile you still have to write regular blog entries (which is really important, lets not forget that), reading and participating in other blogs, and other parts of the internet community is at least as important.\nAt least I think so, we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it works out.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/being-an-uber-blogger/","summary":"This started out as a comment `over here \u0026lt;http://www.thomascrampton.com/2007/09/06/how-to-be-an-uber-blogger-by-cory-doctorow/\u0026gt;`_, but I think has evolved into a blog post of it\u0026rsquo;s own, so here\u0026rsquo;s my commentary\nI think this is pretty good advice, clearly, and the \u0026ldquo;hey folks, we\u0026rsquo;re taping over here,\u0026rdquo; line was priceless. Well, maybe not priceless, but that\u0026rsquo;s the general idea.\nI would like the offer commentary, on this advice, however:\nI think the \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t make it hard for people to read your work,\u0026rdquo; is good universal advice, but it\u0026rsquo;s not so much about blogging as it is, about distribution and creation. I remember not so long ago that blogger wouldn\u0026rsquo;t publish full RSS feeds (or any feeds, possibly) and I had a policy of not reading any blogger feeds for just this reason. So good advice there, no surprise.\nThe \u0026ldquo;write wire-style\u0026rdquo; stories is also good advice, but it\u0026rsquo;s particularly good advice for blogs that are more like wireservices.","title":"Being an Uber Blogger"},{"content":"My email management system is a failure.\nI have a lot of email addresses. I even have a text file that shows how all these address\u0026rsquo; are routed so that I don\u0026rsquo;t end up forwarding messages from one address to itself after passing it through three steps, which I have done before.\nThe hub of my email email system relies on a gmail account that I never really use, that keeps most of the archive under control, and has an arcane set of labels and filters. This isn\u0026rsquo;t an address I really use. All of the important email addresses (the @tealart.com and @tychoish.com ones; are forwarded into another gmail account, that\u0026rsquo;s really just a pipe, but it\u0026rsquo;s also the google account that I use the most, and my primary jabber account.)\nOperationally, most of my day to day email, goes through my RealFirstName@tealart.com account, and I do almost all of this in Mail.app, apple\u0026rsquo;s email client, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really ever use web-mail, because I have this amazingly craptastic system of filters and rules that need to be revised, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a web-mail account that I can comfortably live in, although, a few months ago, I might have said that this was because I always had my laptop with me, and liked the comfort of offline apps, now I feel like having a bit of extra flexibility would be a good thing.\nThis is a pretty big project that would require me to do a number of things to straighten things out:\nDeal with archiving my email. ie. taking existing emails and exporting these emails into a plain text format that I can grep through when I need to. Store these text files externally. Reorganize system to rely more on search and less on a complex and deranged file system, more or less modled on gmail\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Stared,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Inbox,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Archived\u0026rdquo; Model, using smart folders to take care of day to day operation in Mail.app. Create a revised system of filters, that can sort my mail effectively with only a few simple filters. Implement these filters in both Mail.app in the new gmail account. Sigh\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/failing-email-rethinking/","summary":"My email management system is a failure.\nI have a lot of email addresses. I even have a text file that shows how all these address\u0026rsquo; are routed so that I don\u0026rsquo;t end up forwarding messages from one address to itself after passing it through three steps, which I have done before.\nThe hub of my email email system relies on a gmail account that I never really use, that keeps most of the archive under control, and has an arcane set of labels and filters. This isn\u0026rsquo;t an address I really use. All of the important email addresses (the @tealart.com and @tychoish.com ones; are forwarded into another gmail account, that\u0026rsquo;s really just a pipe, but it\u0026rsquo;s also the google account that I use the most, and my primary jabber account.)\nOperationally, most of my day to day email, goes through my RealFirstName@tealart.com account, and I do almost all of this in Mail.","title":"Failing Email: Rethinking"},{"content":"Bitch, Ph.D. on Pseudonyms:\nPseudonyms prevent texts from being impersonal, from pretending to objectivity; they draw attention to the author\u0026rsquo;s role in a way that a straight author does not. At the same time, though, pseudonyms make a text more fully public: by hiding the author\u0026rsquo;s identity, the author becomes potentially anyone. Pseudonyms mean something, and one of the things they mean is that the pseudonymous writer has a reason for pseudonymity. When pseudonymity becomes a generic feature, as with essay periodicals and blogs, one of the things that means is that the genre entails risk, that publishing is risky.\n(from The Long 18th.)\nThe essay is great to read, I have to say, even though it\u0026rsquo;s probably almost a year old. tychoish brings a whole new meaning to the term \u0026ldquo;late breaking,\u0026rdquo; alas. The particular quote about the role of pseudonyms, is I think really great, and I hope to be able to quote/refrence it again in the future.\nLink to Bitch, Ph.D.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pseudonyms-and-bitch-phd/","summary":"Bitch, Ph.D. on Pseudonyms:\nPseudonyms prevent texts from being impersonal, from pretending to objectivity; they draw attention to the author\u0026rsquo;s role in a way that a straight author does not. At the same time, though, pseudonyms make a text more fully public: by hiding the author\u0026rsquo;s identity, the author becomes potentially anyone. Pseudonyms mean something, and one of the things they mean is that the pseudonymous writer has a reason for pseudonymity. When pseudonymity becomes a generic feature, as with essay periodicals and blogs, one of the things that means is that the genre entails risk, that publishing is risky.\n(from The Long 18th.)\nThe essay is great to read, I have to say, even though it\u0026rsquo;s probably almost a year old. tychoish brings a whole new meaning to the term \u0026ldquo;late breaking,\u0026rdquo; alas. The particular quote about the role of pseudonyms, is I think really great, and I hope to be able to quote/refrence it again in the future.","title":"Pseudonyms and Bitch, Ph.D."},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s one of those conical pieces of writerly advice: \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t abuse the thesaurus.\u0026rdquo; The problem being that you find words that are unnatural and discordant with your tone and style, and they stick out, and it sounds bad and reads worse.\nIn a similar vein I remember someone quoted Heinlein as saying that always wrote adult novels using the simplest language he could think of, for accessibility reasons, but in young adult novels, or stories pitched to the YA audience, he would occasionally throw in a hard word, because kids liked feeling like they were being trusted to be smart enough to handle complicated things.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ll admit that I occasionally use a thesaurus. More often than not, it\u0026rsquo;s to remember a simpler word. Like, in something I\u0026rsquo;m currently writing, I just looked up \u0026ldquo;concern\u0026rdquo; to find \u0026ldquo;interest,\u0026rdquo; because I was having something of fixation, and the reference was good to get me unstuck. We can all imagine, of course, how this could have gone awry.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-right-use-for-a-thesaurus/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s one of those conical pieces of writerly advice: \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t abuse the thesaurus.\u0026rdquo; The problem being that you find words that are unnatural and discordant with your tone and style, and they stick out, and it sounds bad and reads worse.\nIn a similar vein I remember someone quoted Heinlein as saying that always wrote adult novels using the simplest language he could think of, for accessibility reasons, but in young adult novels, or stories pitched to the YA audience, he would occasionally throw in a hard word, because kids liked feeling like they were being trusted to be smart enough to handle complicated things.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ll admit that I occasionally use a thesaurus. More often than not, it\u0026rsquo;s to remember a simpler word. Like, in something I\u0026rsquo;m currently writing, I just looked up \u0026ldquo;concern\u0026rdquo; to find \u0026ldquo;interest,\u0026rdquo; because I was having something of fixation, and the reference was good to get me unstuck.","title":"the right use for a thesaurus"},{"content":"From the comments at Digg, this one, is\u0026hellip; precious.:\nDigg - Opera legend Pavarotti dies at 71:\nI think I\u0026rsquo;ll miss his beard the most.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t imagine having a voice like his, let alone that beard. R.I.P man.\n(from Digg Comments.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/commenting-on-pavarotti-dies-at-71/","summary":"From the comments at Digg, this one, is\u0026hellip; precious.:\nDigg - Opera legend Pavarotti dies at 71:\nI think I\u0026rsquo;ll miss his beard the most.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t imagine having a voice like his, let alone that beard. R.I.P man.\n(from Digg Comments.)","title":"Commenting on Pavarotti dies at 71"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a paper this morning, and thus have been a somewhat lazy blogger. Here are some quick notes before I runn off to class.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not putting up a TealArt entry this morning, and if I put something up this afternoon, it\u0026rsquo;ll be a quickie. I\u0026rsquo;m going to save the knitting essays that I have written for next week, when they\u0026rsquo;ll have enough time to breathe properly. I got new boots yesterday that are very nice. I\u0026rsquo;m not used to wearing shoes so much. I got my first feedback for the book today, and it was good. The reader picked up on some of the things that I was trying to do, and also some cool things I did without exactly intending to (not literary accidents, but not things that were in t he outline/planning). This is good news. The sleeve of my sweater is about 7 inches long, and I\u0026rsquo;ve already started decreasing more slowly, so that the forearm isn\u0026rsquo;t too narrow. The worst is over, I\u0026rsquo;ll be done with it soon. Just in time to start something new. Also, g-d, fire the person who came up with rain\u0026hellip; Cheers, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be a better blogger this afternoon. It\u0026rsquo;s tea and class time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/news-on-the-fly/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a paper this morning, and thus have been a somewhat lazy blogger. Here are some quick notes before I runn off to class.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not putting up a TealArt entry this morning, and if I put something up this afternoon, it\u0026rsquo;ll be a quickie. I\u0026rsquo;m going to save the knitting essays that I have written for next week, when they\u0026rsquo;ll have enough time to breathe properly. I got new boots yesterday that are very nice. I\u0026rsquo;m not used to wearing shoes so much. I got my first feedback for the book today, and it was good. The reader picked up on some of the things that I was trying to do, and also some cool things I did without exactly intending to (not literary accidents, but not things that were in t he outline/planning). This is good news. The sleeve of my sweater is about 7 inches long, and I\u0026rsquo;ve already started decreasing more slowly, so that the forearm isn\u0026rsquo;t too narrow.","title":"news on the fly"},{"content":"1 I was in class today and we were talking about cognitive categorization heuristics, with relationship to various similar phenome sounds (voiced verses unvoiced consonants ie. /d/ vs. /t/ or /w/ vs. /v/). But the professor referenced the example of a talk that a visiting professor gave the previous semester regarding the limits of intelligibility of \u0026ldquo;bisexuality,\u0026rdquo; because of the difficulty of categorizing the intermediate spaces and non-binary configurations.\nAnyway, In the description of this the prof stumbled over the word \u0026ldquo;heterosexual\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;straight\u0026rdquo; (I think she was deciding which to say). So of course, I, without looking up from my knitting (I was in a tough spot!) say \u0026ldquo;The rest of y\u0026rsquo;all,\u0026rdquo; drawled out for effect, I think, but I might have resorted to a more Pittsburgh \u0026ldquo;the rest of yous,\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t remember. I think it got a chuckle, but the knitting was more enthralling at the moment.\nI\u0026rsquo;m pretty quiet, and while I\u0026rsquo;m sure there weren\u0026rsquo;t a lot of (any?) people who had missed the queer memo, I keep to my self, and my classmates don\u0026rsquo;t really know who I am, so I felt a little awkward for a moment (it passes quick, thankfully,) when I realized that I had put myself out there in front of a group of people that I don\u0026rsquo;t really know.\n2 In another class we were having a discussion of Nora Ephron\u0026rsquo;s I Feel Bad About My Neck, and adult development and aging. At some point there was a thread of the conversation where the discussion turned to the the connection/impact that relationships had with the aging process.\nAt this juncture a couple of student talked a little bit about the challenges and impact that being queer had on this thought. Now while the class had a few moments of gratuitous \u0026ldquo;sharing,\u0026rdquo; these stories were pretty restrained and totally appropriate. While no one articulated it in these terms I think it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting issue: queer relationships aren\u0026rsquo;t the same as straight ones, and perhaps the lack of institutionalized marriage exposes the fallacy of long term monogamy, or something. I dunno, there\u0026rsquo;s a paper in there for someone, but in any case, while I might have nodded and smiled along, I didn\u0026rsquo;t really say anything, despite sort of wanting to \u0026ldquo;join rank.\u0026rdquo; as it were. Which felt almost as awkward as the moment in the first class.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/queer-moments/","summary":"1 I was in class today and we were talking about cognitive categorization heuristics, with relationship to various similar phenome sounds (voiced verses unvoiced consonants ie. /d/ vs. /t/ or /w/ vs. /v/). But the professor referenced the example of a talk that a visiting professor gave the previous semester regarding the limits of intelligibility of \u0026ldquo;bisexuality,\u0026rdquo; because of the difficulty of categorizing the intermediate spaces and non-binary configurations.\nAnyway, In the description of this the prof stumbled over the word \u0026ldquo;heterosexual\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;straight\u0026rdquo; (I think she was deciding which to say). So of course, I, without looking up from my knitting (I was in a tough spot!) say \u0026ldquo;The rest of y\u0026rsquo;all,\u0026rdquo; drawled out for effect, I think, but I might have resorted to a more Pittsburgh \u0026ldquo;the rest of yous,\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t remember. I think it got a chuckle, but the knitting was more enthralling at the moment.","title":"Queer Moments"},{"content":"\u0026lt;embed style=\u0026ldquo;width:400px; height:326px;\u0026rdquo; id=\u0026ldquo;VideoPlayback\u0026rdquo; type=\u0026ldquo;application/x-shockwave-flash\u0026rdquo; src=\u0026ldquo;http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8493378861634507068\u0026amp;hl=en\u0026quot; flashvars=\u0026quot;\u0026gt; A video of Alcor (identity revealed, news at 10) Talking about quicksilver, how it\u0026rsquo;s constructed, history, the future, and some stuff about UI stuff that I think is really cool, mostly because I\u0026rsquo;m a geek, but you knew that.\nAlso, he\u0026rsquo;s cute, but you probably knew I would say that because I\u0026rsquo;m just that predictable.\nI have to say, that I think quicksilver is probably the marker of the \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; mac geek. We might not all use it all the time, but most of us have it and know about it.\nI have to admit that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using it less of late, though that\u0026rsquo;s started to change. There are a lot of things that I\u0026rsquo;ve found are just easier to manage in other ways. For instance, I have two \u0026ldquo;append to specific files\u0026rdquo; shell scripts that are aliased in my shell for appending to my todo lists and my \u0026ldquo;collection notebook\u0026rdquo; which I find is a lot easier than using quicksilver, and I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten into a place where I\u0026rsquo;m only using a very small number of programs: Adium, MarsEdit, TextMate, and Mail for most things, with NetNewsWire, Camino, and Preview reading/displaying content. I don\u0026rsquo;t really use iTunes on a day to day basis, which was one of those things that quicksilver controls really well.\nAnyway.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/quicksilver/","summary":"\u0026lt;embed style=\u0026ldquo;width:400px; height:326px;\u0026rdquo; id=\u0026ldquo;VideoPlayback\u0026rdquo; type=\u0026ldquo;application/x-shockwave-flash\u0026rdquo; src=\u0026ldquo;http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8493378861634507068\u0026amp;hl=en\u0026quot; flashvars=\u0026quot;\u0026gt; A video of Alcor (identity revealed, news at 10) Talking about quicksilver, how it\u0026rsquo;s constructed, history, the future, and some stuff about UI stuff that I think is really cool, mostly because I\u0026rsquo;m a geek, but you knew that.\nAlso, he\u0026rsquo;s cute, but you probably knew I would say that because I\u0026rsquo;m just that predictable.\nI have to say, that I think quicksilver is probably the marker of the \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; mac geek. We might not all use it all the time, but most of us have it and know about it.\nI have to admit that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using it less of late, though that\u0026rsquo;s started to change. There are a lot of things that I\u0026rsquo;ve found are just easier to manage in other ways. For instance, I have two \u0026ldquo;append to specific files\u0026rdquo; shell scripts that are aliased in my shell for appending to my todo lists and my \u0026ldquo;collection notebook\u0026rdquo; which I find is a lot easier than using quicksilver, and I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten into a place where I\u0026rsquo;m only using a very small number of programs: Adium, MarsEdit, TextMate, and Mail for most things, with NetNewsWire, Camino, and Preview reading/displaying content.","title":"quicksilver"},{"content":"tycho got new boots today (and inserts, because of his crazy high arches).\nIn other news, tycho also sent the aforementioned novella draft-portion to a couple of readers for initial impressions, just to make sure that I didn\u0026rsquo;t talk about my feet.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a fear I have, you know you spend lots of time writing something and then you read it six months later, only to discover that you were writing about your feet the whole time, and didn\u0026rsquo;t notice.\nAlso, no new headphone cord, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about putting a set of noise canceling bluetooth headphones on my list of crap that I should get at some later point.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go shower and try and write some more, because I\u0026rsquo;m in a pretty good mood.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/achievements/","summary":"tycho got new boots today (and inserts, because of his crazy high arches).\nIn other news, tycho also sent the aforementioned novella draft-portion to a couple of readers for initial impressions, just to make sure that I didn\u0026rsquo;t talk about my feet.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a fear I have, you know you spend lots of time writing something and then you read it six months later, only to discover that you were writing about your feet the whole time, and didn\u0026rsquo;t notice.\nAlso, no new headphone cord, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about putting a set of noise canceling bluetooth headphones on my list of crap that I should get at some later point.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go shower and try and write some more, because I\u0026rsquo;m in a pretty good mood.","title":"achievements"},{"content":" Because, you know, somethings need to rewatched from time to time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mosquito/","summary":"Because, you know, somethings need to rewatched from time to time.","title":"mosquito"},{"content":"A blog about writing. I just wanted to catalogue some accomplishments and statistics about my fiction writing project).\nMy Novella project, (working title: Knowing Mars, I suppose now it\u0026rsquo;s big enough to be called by it\u0026rsquo;s name, without worry about jinxing it,) has reached the 10k word mark, with three chapters completed. Based on my outline, which through no fault of my own I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to pretty well, I\u0026rsquo;m at the one-thrid mark.\nChapters take between 7 and 12 days to finish, basically two or two and a half weeks depending on how my writing time works out.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to send this chunk on to a couple of first readers while I outline chapter 4 in depth and work on a short story, for some change.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/novella-progress/","summary":"A blog about writing. I just wanted to catalogue some accomplishments and statistics about my fiction writing project).\nMy Novella project, (working title: Knowing Mars, I suppose now it\u0026rsquo;s big enough to be called by it\u0026rsquo;s name, without worry about jinxing it,) has reached the 10k word mark, with three chapters completed. Based on my outline, which through no fault of my own I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to pretty well, I\u0026rsquo;m at the one-thrid mark.\nChapters take between 7 and 12 days to finish, basically two or two and a half weeks depending on how my writing time works out.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to send this chunk on to a couple of first readers while I outline chapter 4 in depth and work on a short story, for some change.","title":"Novella Progress"},{"content":"I had so much fun last time talking--and thinking--about the connections between \u0026ldquo;open source,\u0026rdquo; (software) and knitting, in terms of what happened in the knitting world a few months ago (actually, it\u0026rsquo;s probably longer now), that I wanted to continue to think and write about these subjects. I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to FLOSS Weekley and also thinking a lot about the way that creative types can afford to be creative, that I think this is a good little project for us to consider for a while. Also, I hope that it will provide a chance for a lot of the ideas that I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with for a number of months to finally start to come together in our minds. I recognize that my selection of topics here is\u0026hellip; eclectic at best: sometimes its a good thing to pull it all together.\nLast time, I left with a number of points, that I thought needed further consideration, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time with the first (italicized) item today. Here they are for connivence sake:\nIs there a layer of information that goes into knitting design and documentation that isn\u0026rsquo;t typically exposed in \u0026ldquo;closed\u0026rdquo;/conventional publications? (that would be equivalent in role to source code)? The role of editors and communities and the sometimes very \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; development models that \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; projects use. The way GPL/GFDL knitting projects can be used commercially. Technological methods of attending to such a project. In software, open source is important because without source code, developers are stuck perpetually recreating the wheel (or paying through the nose to license code) if they want to replicate a feature or whatever it is that programers do. Once compiled, code is basically secure, and though you can read it, without the source code, you can\u0026rsquo;t edit it, or continue to develop it in anyway.\nIn some ways, knitting is always already open source: knitting designers are often found selling patterns of their work, which is basically source code. Furthermore, a skilled knitter can look often at a \u0026ldquo;compiled\u0026rdquo; sweater (or sock or whatever) and be able to duplicate it with some degree of accuracy. And what\u0026rsquo;s more, most of the time knitwear designers aren\u0026rsquo;t designing stitch patterns, but rather combining or selecting patterns from libraries like the Barbara Walker treasuries, or the Sheila McGreggor Traditional Knitting collections. (For the programers out there, think \u0026ldquo;framework:\u0026rdquo; we had you beat on Rails 50 or more years ago.)\nAnd I think this presents a problem for knitters wanting to \u0026ldquo;go open source,\u0026rdquo; because the first assumption is that to open the knitting source you would have to give away polished patterns (source) so people could adjust the pattern (develop) and then knit their own sweater (compile). I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how other people design knitted things, but I write patterns based on notes reflection of my process (so, I basically design on the needles, shoot me now.) Why couldn\u0026rsquo;t this be the source code? Then the OSKC1 could develop the project (update and polish the pattern,) eventually compiling a finished pattern, and individual knitters could knit the pattern (that they could start knitting at any point in the development,) and create forks with any new developments that they create (their modifications might be submitted in the same \u0026ldquo;rough notes\u0026rdquo; format that the initial project can be submitted in.)\nMy larger goal here is to create a model where the \u0026ldquo;costs\u0026rdquo; of going open source for knitters very low. It\u0026rsquo;s my sense that knitters the world over are doing a lot of designing but probably not publishing it because while it\u0026rsquo;s easy to decide to knit a sweater in a truly novel way, it\u0026rsquo;s much harder to write instructions in a clear and consistent manner, and then test it properly. This is where, perhaps the largest benefit for Open Source is (for both knitting and software:) in the fact that there is--or should be--a community that can distribute a lot of the work far more effectively than a small closed group of developers/knitters.\nIn my last post on this subject, I was speaking to the debate/tension between the creative commons projects and the idea of a GPL/GFDL approach. The truth is that this discussion is pretty agnostic on this question, which is really about project structure. You could do \u0026ldquo;OSK\u0026rdquo; in a CC type environment, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure, but I think next time, I\u0026rsquo;ll get onto the more into the merits of the GPL/GFDL, and business-y type stuff.\nUntil then, I remain, tycho\nOpen Source Knitting Community\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-knitting-extending-the-metaphor/","summary":"I had so much fun last time talking--and thinking--about the connections between \u0026ldquo;open source,\u0026rdquo; (software) and knitting, in terms of what happened in the knitting world a few months ago (actually, it\u0026rsquo;s probably longer now), that I wanted to continue to think and write about these subjects. I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to FLOSS Weekley and also thinking a lot about the way that creative types can afford to be creative, that I think this is a good little project for us to consider for a while. Also, I hope that it will provide a chance for a lot of the ideas that I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with for a number of months to finally start to come together in our minds. I recognize that my selection of topics here is\u0026hellip; eclectic at best: sometimes its a good thing to pull it all together.\nLast time, I left with a number of points, that I thought needed further consideration, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some time with the first (italicized) item today.","title":"Open Source Knitting: Extending the Metaphor"},{"content":"News flash it turns out that the n800 does have VIM. And nano, if you want it. Frankly, I think that\u0026rsquo;s pretty darn swell, and I think running nano with your thumbs would be a lot easier and more desireable than learning vim, though I could see the appeal, if you had\nI wonder, though if you can do subversion checkouts through it, and thus use subversion as a synch tool. I mean who needs to wait for .mac integration when you can cook up some simple shell scripts?\nI like the idea that jeff suggests where through bluetooth and a portable keyboard you can sort of force the internal editor to turn off. Now I do this with my laptop, more or less all the time, so it\u0026rsquo;s not a big concern for me, and I can imagine in a situation like this VIM wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the tool you wanted, but none the less, having this kind of capability in a mobile device would be simply killer.\nI think the new iPod Touch is a great piece of technology, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t really see a need for anything new in terms of a music player until I outgrow my current ipod, which will take a while. Having said that, buddy dave/will suggests that apple will come out with some sort of tablet in the next year. Which makes sense, they\u0026rsquo;re so close, and they could totally pull that off, in terms of technology, and I think there\u0026rsquo;s demand, and for many of the same reasons that the n800 appeals, that appeals more.\nFull sized touch screen keyboard on a tablet? With the ability to use TextMate and TextExpander? Anyone? I think the kicker would be if it were all flash based, think they could probably get about 40 gigs for something reasonable in the next year, which would be plenty for something like that, if production isn\u0026rsquo;t a problem.\nAnyway, enough geek fantasy for right now, I\u0026rsquo;m going to get some fiction writing of my own done before I have to do real work. And drink tea, must remember to drink tea.\nHave a good day, I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll stay in touch. :)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/vim-with-your-thumbs/","summary":"News flash it turns out that the n800 does have VIM. And nano, if you want it. Frankly, I think that\u0026rsquo;s pretty darn swell, and I think running nano with your thumbs would be a lot easier and more desireable than learning vim, though I could see the appeal, if you had\nI wonder, though if you can do subversion checkouts through it, and thus use subversion as a synch tool. I mean who needs to wait for .mac integration when you can cook up some simple shell scripts?\nI like the idea that jeff suggests where through bluetooth and a portable keyboard you can sort of force the internal editor to turn off. Now I do this with my laptop, more or less all the time, so it\u0026rsquo;s not a big concern for me, and I can imagine in a situation like this VIM wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the tool you wanted, but none the less, having this kind of capability in a mobile device would be simply killer.","title":"vim with your thumbs!"},{"content":"I have an irrational desire to look for and get a new computer.\nI recognize that this is irrational. Zoe works fine, and while I might like to do some audio production work some day, I don\u0026rsquo;t really need anything that I don\u0026rsquo;t already have, and frankly things work pretty good the way they are now, and my system is working pretty well. I might need to get another firewire drive in the next six months or so.\nChris is always tinkering with his set up, and I swear hasn\u0026rsquo;t kept an OS running for more than a couple of weeks. Some people\u0026hellip; heh.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking about getting something like the Nokia N800, though, as the price is about 350, and it seems like it would do everything I\u0026rsquo;d want in a portable device (PIM stuff, skype, AIM stuff via WIFI, bluetooth, web browsing, PDF reading, and it probably has pico/nano, or something) it\u0026rsquo;s pretty cheap, it\u0026rsquo;s expandable, and it would mean I could leave zoe at home in situations where I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t need full blown laptop power. Also it would provide a better interface for digital reading, and best of all it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t tie me into a two year contract like some cool new things things with major suckage.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-computer/","summary":"I have an irrational desire to look for and get a new computer.\nI recognize that this is irrational. Zoe works fine, and while I might like to do some audio production work some day, I don\u0026rsquo;t really need anything that I don\u0026rsquo;t already have, and frankly things work pretty good the way they are now, and my system is working pretty well. I might need to get another firewire drive in the next six months or so.\nChris is always tinkering with his set up, and I swear hasn\u0026rsquo;t kept an OS running for more than a couple of weeks. Some people\u0026hellip; heh.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking about getting something like the Nokia N800, though, as the price is about 350, and it seems like it would do everything I\u0026rsquo;d want in a portable device (PIM stuff, skype, AIM stuff via WIFI, bluetooth, web browsing, PDF reading, and it probably has pico/nano, or something) it\u0026rsquo;s pretty cheap, it\u0026rsquo;s expandable, and it would mean I could leave zoe at home in situations where I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t need full blown laptop power.","title":"new computer"},{"content":"How funny that I wrote about wanting a Nokia n800 this morning, just before apple releases the touch screen ipod with wifi, that basically does the same thing, and is potentially cheaper. Check out the coverage on engadget and other fine locations throughout the interwebs.\nThe other ipods look spiffy, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not come to a situation where I think upgrading for me would make sense. Having said that, one of the new nanos looks like it would make a really ideal gift for someone who might not need a full blown ipod, but would still like something more than a shuffle.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-ipods/","summary":"How funny that I wrote about wanting a Nokia n800 this morning, just before apple releases the touch screen ipod with wifi, that basically does the same thing, and is potentially cheaper. Check out the coverage on engadget and other fine locations throughout the interwebs.\nThe other ipods look spiffy, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not come to a situation where I think upgrading for me would make sense. Having said that, one of the new nanos looks like it would make a really ideal gift for someone who might not need a full blown ipod, but would still like something more than a shuffle.","title":"new ipods"},{"content":"Generally, at my alma mater, students would say hi to each other as we passed each other on the side walk. Usually this happened when we knew or recognized the other person, even if we weren\u0026rsquo;t friends.\nAt current institution, no one says hi or makes eye contact on the way to class, except very occasionally, when it\u0026rsquo;s clear that people know each other.\nFor instance I\u0026rsquo;ve been siting next to the same guy for two weeks, I think he shares a name with one of the apostles, has passed me on the way to class at least half a dozen times, and he has yet to nod. I\u0026rsquo;m just saying its weird.\nThe other observation is that current institution students tend to dress better for class. While I am proudly wearing pajamas to class, most people seem to wear \u0026ldquo;real clothes.\u0026rdquo; People wear makeup, and many people seem to pay some attention to their grooming.\nThe alma mater students by contrast for the most part, don\u0026rsquo;t really dress up that much, and are pretty universal in their slobyness. It was interesting because I think other means of distinguishing class were devised (or not, often). Also, I think we, for the most, bathed less frequently.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/notes-from-the-field/","summary":"Generally, at my alma mater, students would say hi to each other as we passed each other on the side walk. Usually this happened when we knew or recognized the other person, even if we weren\u0026rsquo;t friends.\nAt current institution, no one says hi or makes eye contact on the way to class, except very occasionally, when it\u0026rsquo;s clear that people know each other.\nFor instance I\u0026rsquo;ve been siting next to the same guy for two weeks, I think he shares a name with one of the apostles, has passed me on the way to class at least half a dozen times, and he has yet to nod. I\u0026rsquo;m just saying its weird.\nThe other observation is that current institution students tend to dress better for class. While I am proudly wearing pajamas to class, most people seem to wear \u0026ldquo;real clothes.\u0026rdquo; People wear makeup, and many people seem to pay some attention to their grooming.","title":"Notes from the Field"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been back on a productivity kick these past few weeks, without much explanation. Though my summer hasn\u0026rsquo;t, exactly, taken me out side of the academy, I\u0026rsquo;m more firmly in the in the 9-5 support aspect of an institution, and so I don\u0026rsquo;t get the delightful \u0026ldquo;manage your own schedule\u0026rdquo; and generous sense of work that I\u0026rsquo;m used to (and are common to college and university life), so in order to stay on the blogging and writing bandwagon, I\u0026rsquo;ve had to re think the way that I organize my time and \u0026ldquo;get things done.\u0026rdquo;\nFor the six or so months before I started working I\u0026rsquo;d been on a morning schedule, where I did what I could to work early in the morning, and did things like read and knit in the afternoon. Working in the morning disrupts this, as you might imagine. The other issue is that most evenings aren\u0026rsquo;t good for sitting down in front of a blank document and writing: I have a hard time really getting into things, I\u0026rsquo;m not at my prime level of alertness, and I\u0026rsquo;m trying to not completely squeeze out relaxation time. It\u0026rsquo;s good to let go every now and then.\nIn this vein, I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking a lot about how I write, and what kind of snags I tend to get me, so that when I do get a morning, or an afternoon to write, I can make the best of it. And it\u0026rsquo;s making sure that I keep up with my outlining and planning. For a few weeks, I would go hear music at an Irish pub on Tuesday nights--when no one was there--and sit in the corner with my moleskin and fountain pen, and outline a dozen articles, story parts, and station keeping pieces. Then I\u0026rsquo;d go home and have plenty of things to write about for the coming week(s). It was a great ritual, as they go, and almost without dedicating any energy to it, I had material to work with.\nWhen I don\u0026rsquo;t have specific outlining sessions, or it gets away from me, I find myself with good writing time, and no real clue as to what I should be writing, and it\u0026rsquo;s not that I have writers block, or that something\u0026rsquo;s wrong, but that I\u0026rsquo;m better when I have an outline or at least notes on hand. In a weird way, it\u0026rsquo;s like a first draft, except a bit more rough. By the time I\u0026rsquo;m sitting at a computer, I like to have been through the story, the argument once and not have to generate it on the fly. While I can generate new stuff on the computer, the temptation to write completely is strong.\nAnd when I\u0026rsquo;m in the throws of drafting, I will forget to outline more, because I like milk a momentum for as much as it\u0026rsquo;s worth, and before you know it: bam! and I\u0026rsquo;m out of things to write. So the \u0026ldquo;hack\u0026rdquo; here is to not only make time to write, and seize writing time from the interstitial moments in your day, but also make sure that you make outlining a valid effort that deserves its own time. While I often have trouble writing at night, it\u0026rsquo;s much easier for me to outline at night, and I try take advantage of this. I also make sure that outlining, in addition to drafting and revising, are things that make it onto the \u0026rsquo;todo\u0026rsquo; lists with equal footing. Understandably it also means that word counts, should/do become a less useful indicator of progress, but there are worse things.\nAnyway, I hope this was useful. Be well and write in good health.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-pipeline/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been back on a productivity kick these past few weeks, without much explanation. Though my summer hasn\u0026rsquo;t, exactly, taken me out side of the academy, I\u0026rsquo;m more firmly in the in the 9-5 support aspect of an institution, and so I don\u0026rsquo;t get the delightful \u0026ldquo;manage your own schedule\u0026rdquo; and generous sense of work that I\u0026rsquo;m used to (and are common to college and university life), so in order to stay on the blogging and writing bandwagon, I\u0026rsquo;ve had to re think the way that I organize my time and \u0026ldquo;get things done.\u0026rdquo;\nFor the six or so months before I started working I\u0026rsquo;d been on a morning schedule, where I did what I could to work early in the morning, and did things like read and knit in the afternoon. Working in the morning disrupts this, as you might imagine. The other issue is that most evenings aren\u0026rsquo;t good for sitting down in front of a blank document and writing: I have a hard time really getting into things, I\u0026rsquo;m not at my prime level of alertness, and I\u0026rsquo;m trying to not completely squeeze out relaxation time.","title":"Writing Pipeline"},{"content":"Hey, I have posted another TealArt entry on writing and planning.\nI wrote this a while ago, and kept putting off posting it, for some reason, and It\u0026rsquo;s good to remind myself of this lesson, because I can be really bad about keeping up on my planning. We really tend to measure productivity in terms of the total amount of finalized output, not all of the auxiliary tasks that make productivity possible. Like outlining, or research. I\u0026rsquo;m really bad about letting research happen.\nAnyway, cast your eyes over here to read \u0026ldquo;Writing Pipeline\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-pipeline-on-tealart-and-wifi-complaining/","summary":"Hey, I have posted another TealArt entry on writing and planning.\nI wrote this a while ago, and kept putting off posting it, for some reason, and It\u0026rsquo;s good to remind myself of this lesson, because I can be really bad about keeping up on my planning. We really tend to measure productivity in terms of the total amount of finalized output, not all of the auxiliary tasks that make productivity possible. Like outlining, or research. I\u0026rsquo;m really bad about letting research happen.\nAnyway, cast your eyes over here to read \u0026ldquo;Writing Pipeline\u0026rdquo;","title":"Writing Pipeline on TealArt and WiFi Complaining"},{"content":"Open Source Knitting: Part 1\nThis is the first installment in a new series for TealArt that I wrote about knitting and the knitting community, and it\u0026rsquo;s connections to the open source community.\nI\u0026rsquo;m mostly posting this notification here so that ravelry types can see it, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting idea.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to go try and pull my day together\u0026hellip;\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-just-wants-to-be-free/","summary":"Open Source Knitting: Part 1\nThis is the first installment in a new series for TealArt that I wrote about knitting and the knitting community, and it\u0026rsquo;s connections to the open source community.\nI\u0026rsquo;m mostly posting this notification here so that ravelry types can see it, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting idea.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to go try and pull my day together\u0026hellip;\ncheers, tycho","title":"knitting just wants to be free"},{"content":"So I just finished reading Michael Toliver Lives By Armistead Maupin.\nI think the words I\u0026rsquo;m looking for are \u0026ldquo;fucking amazing\u0026rdquo;.\nI stretched the first half of the book over many weeks, and possibly a few months, but the second half I\u0026rsquo;ve read in the past couple of days, mostly today. And it\u0026rsquo;s good, and very heart wrenching, and good. As much as I\u0026rsquo;d like to see what happens next, I don\u0026rsquo;t know if my soul can handle seeing any (more) of these characters that I care so much about die, and I fear that the longer that the story goes on, the more likely that is to happen.\nIn other news, I upgraded to MarsEdit 2.0, and it\u0026rsquo;s brilliant. I\u0026rsquo;ve never been really satisfied with the way that the Text-Mate handles blog posting. Not enough polish, to much room for operator error, and so forth, so I\u0026rsquo;ve kept using MarsEdit (and I think the version I was running was a slightly out of date version.) It connected well with TextMate, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been happy.\nWhile I like the redress job, I have to say that there\u0026rsquo;s only so many things that an XML-RPC weblog client can do, period (because there are only so many things that XML-RPC can do), and the version 1.x did all of them, and delightfully so does 2.0. And the redress is great (and it exposes a few features that were a little buried,) but\u0026hellip;\nHere\u0026rsquo;s hoping tomorrow is a bit more productive than today.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/michael-tolliver-lives/","summary":"So I just finished reading Michael Toliver Lives By Armistead Maupin.\nI think the words I\u0026rsquo;m looking for are \u0026ldquo;fucking amazing\u0026rdquo;.\nI stretched the first half of the book over many weeks, and possibly a few months, but the second half I\u0026rsquo;ve read in the past couple of days, mostly today. And it\u0026rsquo;s good, and very heart wrenching, and good. As much as I\u0026rsquo;d like to see what happens next, I don\u0026rsquo;t know if my soul can handle seeing any (more) of these characters that I care so much about die, and I fear that the longer that the story goes on, the more likely that is to happen.\nIn other news, I upgraded to MarsEdit 2.0, and it\u0026rsquo;s brilliant. I\u0026rsquo;ve never been really satisfied with the way that the Text-Mate handles blog posting. Not enough polish, to much room for operator error, and so forth, so I\u0026rsquo;ve kept using MarsEdit (and I think the version I was running was a slightly out of date version.","title":"Michael Tolliver Lives"},{"content":"While I enjoy being a morning person most of the time, I think that there are definite advantages to being able to sleep in more effectively. If I had gotten more sleep, I would probably be able to think of a few of them.\nI also thought that I had a paper for school due on Wednesday, which I have since learned is due on Friday. I am no longer worried about it, since I have finished reading the relevant book last night, in expectation of a need to write the paper today. I can be leisurely about it now.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll have to see what the undergrad classes are next semester, but I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of starting to take classes in what promises to be an even more mind dulling but applied masters program, because if I\u0026rsquo;m going to be sitting around, learning things I already basically know, I think the telos of a degree that I don\u0026rsquo;t already have would be nice.\nI should write a TealArt entry commenting on Station Keeping, or put together an SK pdf file, but I think that\u0026rsquo;ll have to wait for later. Maybe, we\u0026rsquo;ll see. I\u0026rsquo;m already caught up on the RSS feeds, which is kind of crazy, just saying\u0026hellip;.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/morning-people/","summary":"While I enjoy being a morning person most of the time, I think that there are definite advantages to being able to sleep in more effectively. If I had gotten more sleep, I would probably be able to think of a few of them.\nI also thought that I had a paper for school due on Wednesday, which I have since learned is due on Friday. I am no longer worried about it, since I have finished reading the relevant book last night, in expectation of a need to write the paper today. I can be leisurely about it now.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll have to see what the undergrad classes are next semester, but I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of starting to take classes in what promises to be an even more mind dulling but applied masters program, because if I\u0026rsquo;m going to be sitting around, learning things I already basically know, I think the telos of a degree that I don\u0026rsquo;t already have would be nice.","title":"morning people"},{"content":"A while ago, Brenda Dayne of the Cast-On Podcast, got off on a \u0026ldquo;free culture\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;wiki\u0026rdquo; kick and there was as a result a bunch of buzz in the knitting world about building an encyclopedic collection of knitting information.\nI have say that encyclopedias, even new Wikipedia-esque projects are probably always doomed from the beginning. The balance between specificity and generality is really hard to play correctly, and possibly the larger problem is that encyclopedias are predicated on some sort of existent universal objective positionally, which frankly doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist. All knowledge is culturally and historically constrained, and encyclopedias need to minimize this for the sake of their projects. But this is a criticism of encyclopedias in general, not specifically of wikipedia or wiki-style encyclopedic project. And I think I should be quick to reiterate a point that I\u0026rsquo;ve made before that the wiki format should not really be defined by the encyclopedic structure despite the success of wikipedia.\nBack to knitting and \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; distributions: Some knitters took issue with the GFDL, which is a permissive licensee that Wikipedia uses and was designed for the documentation that accompanies Linux and other free software. The issue with the GFDL is that not only does it allows anyone to edit it and distribute it, but it also allows anyone to take any GFDL (or GPL, the software counterpart) content and sell it and make profit on the content, provided that their work is also licensed under the GPL or GFDL. What this means for \u0026ldquo;linux companies,\u0026rdquo; like Red Hat, or Novel can sell you linux, but they have to provide the source code, and if you want to start a version of Linux (or company that uses Red Hat code,) you can, without consequence. Provided that if you distribute that version of Linux to anyone else, you have to also give your code away.\nFor instance, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty clear that Google has an internal Google-Linux version, that\u0026rsquo;s different from anything else on the block and you can\u0026rsquo;t buy it or get a copy of the code, but since they don\u0026rsquo;t distribute it at all, it stays in the company and they don\u0026rsquo;t have to give away copies of the code. The way most Linux companies make money is they say \u0026ldquo;here, buy this linux software, and we\u0026rsquo;ll give you technical support for a given period of time,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;ll install the software and configure your machine,\u0026rdquo; and so forth. In a very real sense, the money that you pay \u0026ldquo;for\u0026rdquo; linux or other free software is really for auxiliary services, not for the software.\nSome knitters had a problem with the fact that other people/companies could take their work/writing from a GFDL source and sell it without any of that profit going to the original author. There was a move toward a Creative Commons licenses, amongst knitters, so that a \u0026ldquo;non-commercial use,\u0026rdquo; could be negotiated. While I like this idea, and I think Creative Commons licenses are a great thing, in this case it means that (since a wiki project) is community project, it\u0026rsquo;s quite likely that no one can exercise a commercial use of CC content.\nFor instance, it\u0026rsquo;s my understanding that while I have a creative commons license on TealArt that allows anyone to redistribute or create derivative works provided that they \u0026ldquo;share alike\u0026rdquo;, you can basically do what ever you want with TA content so long as you don\u0026rsquo;t try to make money off of it; I (or the other authors) can take TealArt content and use it commercially. In such a community situation, this wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be possible, and I suspect that such a license in a community situation means that no one can make money (even the \u0026ldquo;original\u0026rdquo; creators) off of the content. But I\u0026rsquo;m not a lawyer.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to draw attention or notice away from Sarah Bradburry\u0026rsquo;s KnitWik, which I think is a great project, but I think there are some serious reasons to consider a more GPL/GFDL like approach. This fits in line with my earlier discussion about monitizing creativity, and also I think it would be worthwhile to reconsider the analogy between open source software and knitting, because it seems to me that if open source is such good idea for software (and I think it is in the long run) then it very well may be a good idea for knitting if we get the analogy right.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m probably done for the moment, but I wanted to create a small list of ideas and question that I\u0026rsquo;d like to address in the future, related to this idea:\nIs there a layer of information that goes into knitting design and documentation that isn\u0026rsquo;t typically exposed in \u0026ldquo;closed\u0026rdquo;/conventional publications? (that would be equivalent in role to source code)?\nThe role of editors and communities and the sometimes very\n: \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; development models that \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; projects use.\nThe way GPL/GFDL knitting projects can be used commercially.\nTechnological methods of attending to such a project.\nIf you have an opinion, please chime in.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/osk-open-knitting/","summary":"A while ago, Brenda Dayne of the Cast-On Podcast, got off on a \u0026ldquo;free culture\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;wiki\u0026rdquo; kick and there was as a result a bunch of buzz in the knitting world about building an encyclopedic collection of knitting information.\nI have say that encyclopedias, even new Wikipedia-esque projects are probably always doomed from the beginning. The balance between specificity and generality is really hard to play correctly, and possibly the larger problem is that encyclopedias are predicated on some sort of existent universal objective positionally, which frankly doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist. All knowledge is culturally and historically constrained, and encyclopedias need to minimize this for the sake of their projects. But this is a criticism of encyclopedias in general, not specifically of wikipedia or wiki-style encyclopedic project. And I think I should be quick to reiterate a point that I\u0026rsquo;ve made before that the wiki format should not really be defined by the encyclopedic structure despite the success of wikipedia.","title":"Open Source Knitting: Open Kniting"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m sitting in one of the local cafe shops waiting for a friend as I write this (but not, as you will soon learn as you read this) because this fine establishment charges what I think of as \u0026ldquo;through the nose\u0026rdquo; for internet access. What\u0026rsquo;s through the nose? 10 cents a minute, per hour, or ten dollars for a day. The issue is that this would mean that the provider (which isn\u0026rsquo;t the cafe) is making a hefty profit from all this, even though we\u0026rsquo;ve already basically paid our dues for the privilege to sit here.\nWhen will they learn?\nI reman, yours in the struggle, tycho\nps. I would like to say that I conned this place into making what amounts to a mango lhasi (like you get in indian restaurant.) Despite the sucky internet, I\u0026rsquo;m quite happy.\npps. This is what happens when I don\u0026rsquo;t get access to twitter http://www.twitter.com/tychoish/; aparently there is freqireless, but someone else, that has a stronger signal, has pay wireless. All is well and right with the world.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-thats-theft/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m sitting in one of the local cafe shops waiting for a friend as I write this (but not, as you will soon learn as you read this) because this fine establishment charges what I think of as \u0026ldquo;through the nose\u0026rdquo; for internet access. What\u0026rsquo;s through the nose? 10 cents a minute, per hour, or ten dollars for a day. The issue is that this would mean that the provider (which isn\u0026rsquo;t the cafe) is making a hefty profit from all this, even though we\u0026rsquo;ve already basically paid our dues for the privilege to sit here.\nWhen will they learn?\nI reman, yours in the struggle, tycho\nps. I would like to say that I conned this place into making what amounts to a mango lhasi (like you get in indian restaurant.) Despite the sucky internet, I\u0026rsquo;m quite happy.\npps. This is what happens when I don\u0026rsquo;t get access to twitter http://www.","title":"why, that's theft"},{"content":"So, I might have contributed to an order for yet more Harrisville Shetland, in the Charcoal and Pearl colors, enough for another sweater, I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to look rather fetching, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know what pattern to use yet. I\u0026rsquo;m contemplating another Henry VIII, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking I might make it into a cardigan. I might still do the cardigan even if I use a different pattern.\nIn other knitting news. I\u0026rsquo;m in ravelry now, and I\u0026rsquo;m really enjoying the fourms more than anything. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a meaningful stash, despite the recent yarn purchase, and perhaps more importantly I don\u0026rsquo;t use enough patterns to make those aspects of the site really enthralling, but I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been knitting a bunch on a sleeve, which I know is kind of out of character. I\u0026rsquo;m only 4 inches into it, so it\u0026rsquo;ll be a while. I need to do a little pseudo gauge swatching before I can start in earnest (on take two) of another sweater. This is the punishment I think for buying shetland jumper weight wool that isn\u0026rsquo;t HD: the gauge is way way tighter. Weirdness.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s pretty much where I am, not much more to announce. I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing most of the day, it\u0026rsquo;s going well, but not spectacularly. A few weeks ago, I had a great weekend where I just cranked out tons of content, and I felt productive, and now I\u0026rsquo;m making headway, and I\u0026rsquo;m not getting stuck, but it\u0026rsquo;s a bit slower going, so I need to be ok with this without being too hard on myself that I\u0026rsquo;m not going fast enough.\nSo Let the world Chug-along as it pleases, I\u0026rsquo;ll be free and easy still\u0026hellip;.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/more-yarn/","summary":"So, I might have contributed to an order for yet more Harrisville Shetland, in the Charcoal and Pearl colors, enough for another sweater, I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to look rather fetching, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know what pattern to use yet. I\u0026rsquo;m contemplating another Henry VIII, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking I might make it into a cardigan. I might still do the cardigan even if I use a different pattern.\nIn other knitting news. I\u0026rsquo;m in ravelry now, and I\u0026rsquo;m really enjoying the fourms more than anything. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a meaningful stash, despite the recent yarn purchase, and perhaps more importantly I don\u0026rsquo;t use enough patterns to make those aspects of the site really enthralling, but I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been knitting a bunch on a sleeve, which I know is kind of out of character. I\u0026rsquo;m only 4 inches into it, so it\u0026rsquo;ll be a while. I need to do a little pseudo gauge swatching before I can start in earnest (on take two) of another sweater.","title":"more yarn?"},{"content":"I usually find myself writing these entries in the morning whilst sipping a fresh cup of tea and listening to music on my headphones. I\u0026rsquo;ve long held the opinion that the piece of the puzzle that Virginia Woolf was missing in \u0026ldquo;A Room of One\u0026rsquo;s Own\u0026rdquo; was noise canceling headphones. I spent the weekend out of town and as a result had a very very hard time finding the headphones this morning, and I have to admit that I felt kind of lost. If anyone out there is looking to become a writer, headphones rank right up there on my list of necessities: a good tea cup, a good go-everywhere notebook and pen, a computer with good quality editing software, and a supportive desk chair. In case you were wondering.\nLast Friday\u0026rsquo;s post was a bit angst. I\u0026rsquo;ll admit it, I need to find co-editors to make TealArt more viable in the long term. In the shorter term I think I\u0026rsquo;m in pretty good shape. I spent some time thinking about the kinds of features that I could work on that might make writing easier. Over the summer I\u0026rsquo;d sort of let my focus of discrete projects/series spin out, and so rather than having a set framework of ongoing posts that I could approach not as \u0026ldquo;I need to write 5 posts for this week,\u0026rdquo; but rather, \u0026ldquo;I need to write one of these posts this week,\u0026rdquo; I think was much easier on the brain.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve fixed the problem, if anyone wants to be a blog editor, or do some blog merging, or whatever, I am totally still up for that. So contact me.\nAs for what\u0026rsquo;s happening this week? This is my first week of unemployment, which means job searching, something I am so not looking forward to, but alas it has to be done. In any case, for at least a little while this means that I\u0026rsquo;ll get plenty of extra time to work on some writing projects, and some website/internet projects. This is a good thing.\nMy novella is progressing nicely. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit less than half way done with chapter three, and it\u0026rsquo;s going really well. I did a bit less than 75% of my goal for the weekend, but it\u0026rsquo;s a long weekend so I\u0026rsquo;m going to stretch that out into today. I have a good action sequence to work on today, and I\u0026rsquo;m kind of happy about doing that. That\u0026rsquo;s pretty much how I feel about this project: it\u0026rsquo;s just working, and I\u0026rsquo;m having a great deal of fun with it.\nA few weeks ago, I started writing a short story that\u0026rsquo;s sort of derived similarly from that novel that I wrote several years ago. I got a bunch of notes and about 300 words written, before I realized that it wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to work out; so, I put it in the back burner. Then as I was driving this weekend I came upon a good way to make it work, so scribbled something down as we were filling up the car, and so I\u0026rsquo;m going to put some time into that this week.\nBut you\u0026rsquo;re probably at least a little interested in what\u0026rsquo;s happening on TealArt this week, and not so much what I\u0026rsquo;m working on behind the scenes. I\u0026rsquo;m going to post the first couple of essays that I wrote last weekend about open-source software, knitting collaboration, and how I thought the two were connected. In retrospect, it\u0026rsquo;s also related to the posts that I put up last week about making money from art. So I\u0026rsquo;m quite excited about that, Also, while I haven\u0026rsquo;t, unfortunately, been paying much attention to Station Keeping, there\u0026rsquo;s going to be some SK goodness this week, not a new story, but defiantly some reflection.\nStay tuned, and again if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in doing some editoral-type work around here, be sure to be in touch (tycho@tealart.com). I\u0026rsquo;ll see you again throughout the week, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-ta-chronicle/","summary":"I usually find myself writing these entries in the morning whilst sipping a fresh cup of tea and listening to music on my headphones. I\u0026rsquo;ve long held the opinion that the piece of the puzzle that Virginia Woolf was missing in \u0026ldquo;A Room of One\u0026rsquo;s Own\u0026rdquo; was noise canceling headphones. I spent the weekend out of town and as a result had a very very hard time finding the headphones this morning, and I have to admit that I felt kind of lost. If anyone out there is looking to become a writer, headphones rank right up there on my list of necessities: a good tea cup, a good go-everywhere notebook and pen, a computer with good quality editing software, and a supportive desk chair. In case you were wondering.\nLast Friday\u0026rsquo;s post was a bit angst. I\u0026rsquo;ll admit it, I need to find co-editors to make TealArt more viable in the long term.","title":"The TA Chronicle"},{"content":"Google Earth flight simulator:\nMany BoingBoing readers have sent in word of a \u0026ldquo;hidden\u0026rdquo; flight simulation feature in Google Earth that\u0026rsquo;s making the blog-rounds. TechCrunch has a post on how to use it here. (thanks Chris and others)\n(from Boing Boing.)\nHow flippin\u0026rsquo; cool is that?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/google-earth-flight-simulator/","summary":"Google Earth flight simulator:\nMany BoingBoing readers have sent in word of a \u0026ldquo;hidden\u0026rdquo; flight simulation feature in Google Earth that\u0026rsquo;s making the blog-rounds. TechCrunch has a post on how to use it here. (thanks Chris and others)\n(from Boing Boing.)\nHow flippin\u0026rsquo; cool is that?","title":"Google Earth flight simulator"},{"content":"So as I was driving back from a visit with the family, (we arrived safely, and the trip was without incident) I was listening to old Boing Boing Boing pod casts, because I\u0026rsquo;m a dork.\nAnyway, I listened to an old one from right before Google bought YouTube, when everyone was like \u0026ldquo;no, no, no, that couldn\u0026rsquo;t ever happen, what\u0026rsquo;s in it for google?\u0026rdquo;\nDespite my sometimes love for YouTube, I think that question remains a useful one. Though we\u0026rsquo;ve accepted the buyout as fact, I for one still don\u0026rsquo;t see much in it for google. But then I\u0026rsquo;m just enjoying people making videos of their cat, and don\u0026rsquo;t really care that much about google, so whatever.\nSigh.\nI think it will soon be time for me to go to bed. I have tomorrow off, it being a holiday (I realized that for the past three years I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten bank holidays off, because I went to a private school that didn\u0026rsquo;t cancel classes on bank holidays.) So I get another day of writing and other good things. Not that I have a job, so its kind of moot anyway, but still\u0026hellip;\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/google-will-never-buy-youtube/","summary":"So as I was driving back from a visit with the family, (we arrived safely, and the trip was without incident) I was listening to old Boing Boing Boing pod casts, because I\u0026rsquo;m a dork.\nAnyway, I listened to an old one from right before Google bought YouTube, when everyone was like \u0026ldquo;no, no, no, that couldn\u0026rsquo;t ever happen, what\u0026rsquo;s in it for google?\u0026rdquo;\nDespite my sometimes love for YouTube, I think that question remains a useful one. Though we\u0026rsquo;ve accepted the buyout as fact, I for one still don\u0026rsquo;t see much in it for google. But then I\u0026rsquo;m just enjoying people making videos of their cat, and don\u0026rsquo;t really care that much about google, so whatever.\nSigh.\nI think it will soon be time for me to go to bed. I have tomorrow off, it being a holiday (I realized that for the past three years I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten bank holidays off, because I went to a private school that didn\u0026rsquo;t cancel classes on bank holidays.","title":"google will never buy YouTube!"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been posting and thinking about what conventions and styles separate TealArt and tychoish over on tychoish, and I think this post will likely be the culmination of those thoughts. This has been on my mind of late because, I\u0026rsquo;ve felt this week that running both sites more or less on my own on a daily basis (which I want to do, don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong,) is more than I can handle in the current format. So I\u0026rsquo;ve been giving more thought to this, and I think that describing the differences between the sites and what I hope to accomplish on both sites.\nTealArt TealArt is (ideally) a collaborative \u0026ldquo;blog,\u0026rdquo; that posts slightly longer \u0026ldquo;essays\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;articles\u0026rdquo; in contrast to many blogs that tend toward exclusively biographical pieces (journals), short moment-to-moment reflections, or various kinds of punditry (political blogging, technology blogging, etc.), although, at some points in its past TealArt has fit into various aspects of these typical blog categories.\nTA posts tend to be in the 500-700 word range, that is slightly longer than the typical blog entry, and are posted 5 days a week. Though there are certainly stand-alone posts, many fit into ongoing series\u0026rsquo; on loosely organized topics. Thus, in some respects TealArt mixes the maga(zine) and blog metaphors, although it would be incorrect to take this too far. Our posts are often off the cuff opinion-pieces, that aren\u0026rsquo;t throughly polished. TA posts are experimental, though perhaps this is more from the writers\u0026rsquo; perspective than from the readers: we\u0026rsquo;re here trying ideas and concepts out on TealArt, to see how they sound outside of our heads.\nTopically, TealArt has a history of being all over the map. These days, TA tries to focus on technology, science fiction, and various aspects of hyper/digital text, with occasional dabbles into the realm of knitting. In terms of technology, we\u0026rsquo;ve tended to think about how we use computers and how technology interacts with culture and individuals. We\u0026rsquo;ve approached science fiction, through the Station Keeping and commentaries on the genre like this. Though I tend to conceptualize it in reverse, digital/hyper-text discussions on TealArt as been a place for me to think about how we consume and produce text in digital environments. And the knitting content is fairly straightforward, though unlike most knitting blogs, TealArt Knitting content, is more commentary on the craft and often less focused on what I\u0026rsquo;m actually knitting.\n~/tychoish In contrast to TealArt, tychoish is just me, and I often think of it as a kind of \u0026ldquo;failed tumble log,\u0026rdquo; Tumble Logs, like Anarchaia are quick and dirty blogs that collect various kinds of input from around ones travels on the internet, not much commentary, and no commenting. Mine is failed, mostly because I don\u0026rsquo;t seem to surf the internet in a way that is productive for tumbleloging, and I tend to be a little more verbose, and I thought it would good to have comments. So in the end, I sort of have blogging circa 1999 when I first got into it (but could never get my ass together to do right.)\nInitially, the idea for this site was to have something that is basically a reflection of the kind of note taking that I tend to do in my paper/bound notebook, and It\u0026rsquo;s grown to be something of a reflection of my internal monologue, with various records of things. I post todo lists, brief ideas for writing things, thoughts that are a bit too long for twitter, and other bits of miscellany. Where I aim to have a new TealArt post every day, depending on what I\u0026rsquo;m doing in real life, I probably post anywhere from 1 on a light day to about 3-6 posts on a heavier a day. The posts are even less though out, and tend to be in the sub-250 word range.\nMoving Forward I really like how things are set up at the moment, and I like the model that both sites are working in, so they\u0026rsquo;ll likely stay the way they are. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how things will work out in the future, and I\u0026rsquo;ve posted a quick list things todo for TealArt in the future to help figure out a better way to manage this project. I may have someone lined up to be a more serious co-editor in 2008, but that\u0026rsquo;s a ways off, and I have a lot on my plate between now and then, but I\u0026rsquo;m still looking a little more seriously for folk who might be a good fit here. I think also, if there were someone writing two regular posts a week, I\u0026rsquo;d have a lot more time and energy to work on behind the scenes stuff here, like: promotion and design, and other cool projects that need to happen. For the moment, however, nothing\u0026rsquo;s changing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you next week.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/comparison-tealart-and-tychoish/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been posting and thinking about what conventions and styles separate TealArt and tychoish over on tychoish, and I think this post will likely be the culmination of those thoughts. This has been on my mind of late because, I\u0026rsquo;ve felt this week that running both sites more or less on my own on a daily basis (which I want to do, don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong,) is more than I can handle in the current format. So I\u0026rsquo;ve been giving more thought to this, and I think that describing the differences between the sites and what I hope to accomplish on both sites.\nTealArt TealArt is (ideally) a collaborative \u0026ldquo;blog,\u0026rdquo; that posts slightly longer \u0026ldquo;essays\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;articles\u0026rdquo; in contrast to many blogs that tend toward exclusively biographical pieces (journals), short moment-to-moment reflections, or various kinds of punditry (political blogging, technology blogging, etc.), although, at some points in its past TealArt has fit into various aspects of these typical blog categories.","title":"Comparison: TealArt and tychoish"},{"content":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t bring knitting for class today. I think this might prove to be a problem for me, but it\u0026rsquo;s only a couple of hours, and my battery should hold out for that long, so it\u0026rsquo;s probably not a huge issue.\nIn other news, I had an attempt to get a blogging set up through TextMate, but have had less than satisfactory experiences with the options there. My issue is that I\u0026rsquo;m quite spoiled by the wonderfulness that is Mars-Edit (yes, it is old software, but it just works, which is nice), and anything that doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite measure up is somewhat painful. While I\u0026rsquo;m always a little peeved when I have to click \u0026ldquo;edit in external editor\u0026rdquo; or ⌘-J, it\u0026rsquo;s better than nothing, I suspect.\nMaybe if I could figure out how to make a TextMate command that would send a file to MarsEdit, this would make the workflow a bit better for me. Ideas folks?\nI posted something on the 43folders board, about reorganizing and keeping track of my massive (seemingly, massive at any rate) PDF collection. With a little more thought on the subject, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that perhaps it would be a good idea to use something like BibDesk, but I\u0026rsquo;m far from decided on this fact. The first time I looked at this problem, I hadn\u0026rsquo;t made the leap to LaTeX and I didn\u0026rsquo;t really know what to make of it, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably in better shape these days.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in class and then on the road for the rest of the day, so updates will be spare, this weekend will probably be pretty spare as well, but I might figure out a way to post pictures from a trip to yarn barn. Maybe.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/forgetting/","summary":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t bring knitting for class today. I think this might prove to be a problem for me, but it\u0026rsquo;s only a couple of hours, and my battery should hold out for that long, so it\u0026rsquo;s probably not a huge issue.\nIn other news, I had an attempt to get a blogging set up through TextMate, but have had less than satisfactory experiences with the options there. My issue is that I\u0026rsquo;m quite spoiled by the wonderfulness that is Mars-Edit (yes, it is old software, but it just works, which is nice), and anything that doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite measure up is somewhat painful. While I\u0026rsquo;m always a little peeved when I have to click \u0026ldquo;edit in external editor\u0026rdquo; or ⌘-J, it\u0026rsquo;s better than nothing, I suspect.\nMaybe if I could figure out how to make a TextMate command that would send a file to MarsEdit, this would make the workflow a bit better for me.","title":"forgetting"},{"content":"I want to start listening to the GeekCred Podcast because it looks cool, and he\u0026rsquo;s on my twitter list, as well as The Garnet Murray Podcast at Dave\u0026rsquo;s suggestion.\nI also need to figure out some way to get some fiction writing in this week(end). Chapter 3 awaits.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/podcasts-to-listen-to/","summary":"I want to start listening to the GeekCred Podcast because it looks cool, and he\u0026rsquo;s on my twitter list, as well as The Garnet Murray Podcast at Dave\u0026rsquo;s suggestion.\nI also need to figure out some way to get some fiction writing in this week(end). Chapter 3 awaits.","title":"Podcasts to Listen to"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m at this place where I\u0026rsquo;m looking for a new job, and also taking advantage of an upheaval of my plans to reflect and think as I collect myself in attempt to move forward. Continuing a trend that I started at the beginning of this year, I\u0026rsquo;m writing more. You\u0026rsquo;ve all noticed that I\u0026rsquo;m writing more for TealArt, but at the same time my writing load for school was much higher than it had been in the past, and since the summer started, I\u0026rsquo;ve also been writing fiction again, and I\u0026rsquo;ve taught a couple of knitting classes for which I\u0026rsquo;ve written what amounts to a book chapter on the topic at hand.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been paying attention to, and thinking a bit about copyright and what it means to be a creator in the digital realm. I think I have a particularly interesting perspective on this, as both a knitter, and thus someone whose products are very material, and a writer whose work exists--at the moment--as exclusively digital artifacts, but I suspect that the worth of these ideas are for you to decide.\nSeeing no better place to begin, lets start in the middle: Over the past few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve been tossing around the idea of putting together an anthology of science fiction with a group of friends whose writing I quite enjoy. I enjoy editing and typesetting, oddly enough, and I think that there should be opportunities and avenues for new writers of science fiction to publish their work. Also, with the advent of really good print-on-demand options like Lulu, I figured that it would be easy enough to make a financially viable publication, that would hopefully be able to seed a volume two.\nIn short: this would be difficult at best. In order to keep the price of reasonable (12-15 bucks), the take from the publication is under 2 dollars, and I think more or less, that\u0026rsquo;s what the authors take for a book sale is no matter how they publish it. (The advantage is that if you go with a bigger named press, they can sell more, which gives you more 2 dollar bits.)1 Book length works do a little bit better, mostly because you don\u0026rsquo;t have to divide the take, and some publishers can get away with selling books for prices that are frankly absurd.\nThe larger problem for people who write, is that \u0026ldquo;selling\u0026rdquo; pieces of writing to a consumer, a \u0026ldquo;reader,\u0026rdquo; can never generate enough income to sustain even the sparest of lifestyles. Same, likely with knitting. You can\u0026rsquo;t sell knitting for enough money to make it worthwhile (who\u0026rsquo;d buy a 1,200 dollar sweater, which frankly would probably still be a steal.) So writers, knitters, and other creative types: come up with other ways to generate income: master knitters teach classes, design and dye yarn, operate yarn businesses, design patterns2, and so forth. Writers (by this I mean, fiction writers and essayists) either make money from bigger book deals, speaking engagements, and book tours if they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;big\u0026rdquo; enough, or get day jobs of various kinds, if they\u0026rsquo;re not.\nThus it strikes me that the problem we need to be addressing, is not, how do we turn the two dollar take you get from writing a book about knitting, to 3 dollars or 4 dollars, or even 10 dollars (though that would certainly help), but rather how to expand the \u0026ldquo;byproduct\u0026rdquo; income from teaching and speaking, and even how to create new sorts of such \u0026ldquo;auxiliary income.\u0026rdquo; There isn\u0026rsquo;t one kind of monolithic \u0026ldquo;auxiliary,\u0026rdquo; for a given kind of creative pursuit, but I if we think about it enough, I\u0026rsquo;m sure we can think about the many ways that creative types are able earn livings while still working on their creative projects.\nI think the larger goal is to have the auxiliary gig be something that feeds the other, more important pursuit while still leaving enough time and energy to do serious work in what you really want to be doing. Consider academics, particularly say, academic physicians, whose real work is research (and writing for the humanities folks and writing), but whose money comes from seeing patients or teaching classes. Consider Knitting luminaries like Alice Starmore, Sharon Miller of Heirloom Lace who sustain their work by selling yarn and kits for their design. Similar I have to speculate that schoolhouse press makes its money, not on their excellent catalogue of books and patterns3, but rather through their knitting-camp, and selling yarn. Let us also not forget that bands have always made more money from touring, rather than selling recordings.4\nThis theory, of using something like a design as a way to sell an auxiliary, I think is really pretty strong: if you tried have your take from things like patterns, or a podcast, or a blog (etc.) be \u0026ldquo;enough,\u0026rdquo; no one go for it because it would be absurd (cite: 1200-1400+ USD sweater), but if it\u0026rsquo;s sort of complex advertising, and you\u0026rsquo;re willing to take a cut on profit so that more people see the book/story/pattern it probably works out. There is of course Tim O\u0026rsquo;Riley (a technology/computer book publisher,) whose oft quoted for saying \u0026ldquo;obscurity, not privacy\u0026rdquo; is the biggest problem facing writers today.\nNow I\u0026rsquo;ve used the term \u0026ldquo;advertising\u0026rdquo; loosely, because I don\u0026rsquo;t think that you need to be terribly proactive about it, in order for it to work, writing a good story with a tag that says \u0026ldquo;tycho also gives workshops on productivity and hypertext creation, and his most recent book is \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; is probably enough. The key is to be right on top of whatever the best next auxiliary is.\nAnd before anyone goes of and says \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s a shame that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a middle list, or that it\u0026rsquo;s a shame designers aren\u0026rsquo;t paid more, etc. etc.,\u0026rdquo; I have to suspect that this is more or less how it\u0026rsquo;s always worked. That\u0026rsquo;s all, thoughts anyone?\nCheers, tycho\nOn the side note this is why pay rates for short fiction are so low to virtually non existent: splitting 2 dollars between half a dozen people is virtually impossible.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nPattern design is becoming a less and less viable option: designer fees from the major magazines haven\u0026rsquo;t gone up in years, I hear, there are fewer options now (in the 80\u0026rsquo;s, women\u0026rsquo;s magazines would publish knitting and craft patterns, and free patterns on the internet are serious and legitimate competition), which makes it all the more difficult to make a living doing it.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIn a move that anticipates a lot of the work that pod-casters and bloggers do, using new media solutions as a way to get readers to buy other things that actually generate income, Meg sell their quarterly patterns and reprints at the rough production cost.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThis is why the RIAA and MPAA\u0026rsquo;s flogged and deceased equine of \u0026ldquo;piracy\u0026rdquo; as hurting the artists is so foolish.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/being-an-artist-and-paying-the-bills/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m at this place where I\u0026rsquo;m looking for a new job, and also taking advantage of an upheaval of my plans to reflect and think as I collect myself in attempt to move forward. Continuing a trend that I started at the beginning of this year, I\u0026rsquo;m writing more. You\u0026rsquo;ve all noticed that I\u0026rsquo;m writing more for TealArt, but at the same time my writing load for school was much higher than it had been in the past, and since the summer started, I\u0026rsquo;ve also been writing fiction again, and I\u0026rsquo;ve taught a couple of knitting classes for which I\u0026rsquo;ve written what amounts to a book chapter on the topic at hand.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been paying attention to, and thinking a bit about copyright and what it means to be a creator in the digital realm. I think I have a particularly interesting perspective on this, as both a knitter, and thus someone whose products are very material, and a writer whose work exists--at the moment--as exclusively digital artifacts, but I suspect that the worth of these ideas are for you to decide.","title":"Being an Artist and Paying the Bills"},{"content":"Despite my recent graduation, I\u0026rsquo;m taking classes this semester. In part to \u0026ldquo;stay in shape\u0026rdquo; and maintain a student like mindset, and in part because I\u0026rsquo;m at a stage where I find it hard to do academic in my field of choice independently, and I\u0026rsquo;m totally ok with that.\nHaving said this, I\u0026rsquo;ve come to a conclusion. I don\u0026rsquo;t need to take notes in any particular sort of way. Today in class we got the \u0026ldquo;intro to cognition\u0026rdquo; lecture that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a thousand times. And I dutifully wrote down what working memory is, as if I\u0026rsquo;d never seen it before.\nSometimes not taking notes is better than actually taking them, I think.\nThis, at least for the moment, is one of those times.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cognition/","summary":"Despite my recent graduation, I\u0026rsquo;m taking classes this semester. In part to \u0026ldquo;stay in shape\u0026rdquo; and maintain a student like mindset, and in part because I\u0026rsquo;m at a stage where I find it hard to do academic in my field of choice independently, and I\u0026rsquo;m totally ok with that.\nHaving said this, I\u0026rsquo;ve come to a conclusion. I don\u0026rsquo;t need to take notes in any particular sort of way. Today in class we got the \u0026ldquo;intro to cognition\u0026rdquo; lecture that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a thousand times. And I dutifully wrote down what working memory is, as if I\u0026rsquo;d never seen it before.\nSometimes not taking notes is better than actually taking them, I think.\nThis, at least for the moment, is one of those times.","title":"cognition"},{"content":"Ok, this isn\u0026rsquo;t an actual meme, so much as a discussion of memetic activity in my life. specifically in the website designs.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of tweaking of the font and commenting template here (and I changed the tag-line) because I\u0026rsquo;ve become a big fan of Gill Sans, which I think looks very modern/deco, and I like the effect. It is perhaps no the most accessible, but then this is what Grease-Monkey and RSS are for, if that\u0026rsquo;s a problem for you. I\u0026rsquo;m mostly kidding about the Grease Monkey, but if you\u0026rsquo;re having problems with reading the font here or on TealArt, then RSS lets you have a lot of control over the display of the content, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s probably the way to go.\nI just realized that I don\u0026rsquo;t have it set up so that you can see what categories entries are in with the post. I had been laboring under the impression that you could. Weird.\nI\u0026rsquo;m probably going to write a meta tealart entry about the difference between the \u0026ldquo;magazine\u0026rdquo; approach that TealArt has, and the \u0026ldquo;failed tumblelog\u0026rdquo; approach that tychoish has. I\u0026rsquo;d enjoy it at least.\nHave a good day!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/memes/","summary":"Ok, this isn\u0026rsquo;t an actual meme, so much as a discussion of memetic activity in my life. specifically in the website designs.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of tweaking of the font and commenting template here (and I changed the tag-line) because I\u0026rsquo;ve become a big fan of Gill Sans, which I think looks very modern/deco, and I like the effect. It is perhaps no the most accessible, but then this is what Grease-Monkey and RSS are for, if that\u0026rsquo;s a problem for you. I\u0026rsquo;m mostly kidding about the Grease Monkey, but if you\u0026rsquo;re having problems with reading the font here or on TealArt, then RSS lets you have a lot of control over the display of the content, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s probably the way to go.\nI just realized that I don\u0026rsquo;t have it set up so that you can see what categories entries are in with the post.","title":"Memes"},{"content":" work on the podcasting thing get microphones working figure out how to use skype get a crew together chris dave sk people others? weekly \u0026ldquo;other awesome blogs that you could be reading\u0026rdquo; features. pictures in posts. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tealart-todo/","summary":" work on the podcasting thing get microphones working figure out how to use skype get a crew together chris dave sk people others? weekly \u0026ldquo;other awesome blogs that you could be reading\u0026rdquo; features. pictures in posts. ","title":"tealart TODO"},{"content":"Dear gentle readers,\nDon\u0026rsquo;t delete things, ever. It\u0026rsquo;ll just cause grief if you do.\nThis has been a tragic week for me in terms of deleting things that I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to. Thankfully today\u0026rsquo;s miss-hap was quickly recovered from. I need to work on getting a subversion system, or something( implemented, hardcore, because this is wild, and to be avoided.\nI usually pride myself on having a fairly organized \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; for resources and files and what not, but I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that it needs some serious rethinking. Alas.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also in that part of the week where my brain is utter mush. My goal for the moment, then, is to figure out a way to plan to have enough groundwork laid for the next few days of productivity.\nAlso, I realized that I have a whole slew of essay that are dependent upon me posting a particular essay that I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted yet. So I have to rethink something. I might have to kill the Friday TealArt post. But It\u0026rsquo;ll all work out; sorry for reveling too much of my thought process: I\u0026rsquo;m forever walking the line between interesting full disclosure and taking the magic away from whatever it is that I do.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/backups/","summary":"Dear gentle readers,\nDon\u0026rsquo;t delete things, ever. It\u0026rsquo;ll just cause grief if you do.\nThis has been a tragic week for me in terms of deleting things that I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to. Thankfully today\u0026rsquo;s miss-hap was quickly recovered from. I need to work on getting a subversion system, or something( implemented, hardcore, because this is wild, and to be avoided.\nI usually pride myself on having a fairly organized \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; for resources and files and what not, but I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that it needs some serious rethinking. Alas.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also in that part of the week where my brain is utter mush. My goal for the moment, then, is to figure out a way to plan to have enough groundwork laid for the next few days of productivity.\nAlso, I realized that I have a whole slew of essay that are dependent upon me posting a particular essay that I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted yet.","title":"backups"},{"content":"Daring Fireball Linked List: August 2007:\nThere\u0026rsquo;s plenty about markup and CSS, but the heart of the book consists of general design strategies for mobile platforms, and why you should care in the first place about the experience mobile users get when visiting your site.\n(from Daring Fireball.)\nThe answer to the question of mobile web design, is of course RSS, and other XML like systems, IMHO.\nHell, I think gopher, is actually probably pretty close to the mark, and frankly I\u0026rsquo;m ok with that\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/daring-fireball-linked-list-august-2007/","summary":"Daring Fireball Linked List: August 2007:\nThere\u0026rsquo;s plenty about markup and CSS, but the heart of the book consists of general design strategies for mobile platforms, and why you should care in the first place about the experience mobile users get when visiting your site.\n(from Daring Fireball.)\nThe answer to the question of mobile web design, is of course RSS, and other XML like systems, IMHO.\nHell, I think gopher, is actually probably pretty close to the mark, and frankly I\u0026rsquo;m ok with that","title":"Daring Fireball Linked List: August 2007"},{"content":"Wait, before you ignore this post, know that this isn\u0026rsquo;t a discussion of internet science fiction memes, but rather replicating trends in the genre. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to post a list of books or movies with an embarrassingly small number of titles bolded or italicized. Just saying.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling about the memes in science fiction, the trends that repeat (with varying degrees of utility) for a number of weeks, and it remains a chief nagging point on my todo list. As I return to science fiction writing it\u0026rsquo;s something that I\u0026rsquo;ve found myself eager to consider as I make sense of the genre (again).\nThis was, like a number of the essays/posts about writing methods and practices that I\u0026rsquo;ve posted in recent weeks, spurred by listening to one of Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s podcasts of a panel he was on with a few other science fiction writers.\nThere were a lot of somewhat germane debates that are so typical of science fiction discussions, over literary-ness, over \u0026ldquo;accuracy\u0026rdquo; and the ability of science fiction to predict the future1, and originaity in the genre and so forth (actually I need to write a post about this). But one thing that Cory said that struck me, about both, I think literary tendencies and originality was that science fiction is a genre where almost cut their teeth on a retelling of Isaac Asimov\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Nightfall,\u0026rdquo; story. To drive this home, in the next week or so I listed to Nancy Kress' \u0026ldquo;Ej-Es\u0026rdquo; on Escape pod. Which was amazing, and then I realized that of course it followed the basic \u0026ldquo;Nightfall\u0026rdquo; type story structure. (Sorry for the semi-spoiler, it\u0026rsquo;s still a great story.) Nightfall is not only a great story, but its framework gives us the possibility of thinking about our reflexes, and habits, that can be a great tool for getting into \u0026ldquo;sociological sf.\u0026rdquo;\nAfter recognizing the nightfall meme, I thought immediately about another huge trope in (particularly hard) SF: the Mars book. In addition to retelling nightfall, there\u0026rsquo;s also a meme of writing \u0026ldquo;the mars book\u0026rdquo; about the red planet. Think: Martian Chronicles, and Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s Mars Trillogy, and not to forget Stranger in a Strange Land and so on and so forth. Hell, my current novella project is a Mars Book, though it\u0026rsquo;s by no means a hard-sf project. The Mars book/story, I think is the hard SF trope, because it lets writers talk about space travel, colonization, and so forth, without getting \u0026ldquo;fantastic.\u0026rdquo;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also sub/alter-genres, like space operas, and alternate history, and the various -punks (cyberpunk, steampunk, Cory\u0026rsquo;s disneypunk, etc) and so forth, that are in their own way memes. There are conventions which are played with and broken/bent to varying degree\u0026rsquo;s, but still replicate throughout significant swaths of the literature, and if nothing else I think that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly interesting.\nI guess the main point of this argument is to say that, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that Memes are such a bad thing. In a lot of ways they seem to be a lot of the connective force behind the genre. I mean it can be taken to extremes, of course, but all things can. Also, I think it would be foolish to suggest that SF is the only genre that has such memes. I guess this all got started by a question about \u0026ldquo;is there anything that\u0026rsquo;s truly new and original happening now,\u0026rdquo; and the answer is, yes and no.\nEverything new, even recombinations of old material is, original. Even, dare I say, Kirk/Spock Star Trek fan fiction represents some kind of forward movement for the genre and the community. Now don\u0026rsquo;t take the Kirk/Spock too far, and there is such a thing as blatant plagiarism, but I think at the heart of the matter is the fact that we don\u0026rsquo;t actually really want things that are original and different, that kind of thing is jaring, and by its very nature difficult to understand. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that a given retelling of Nightfall, or a book about Mars, doesn\u0026rsquo;t further a discussion along. Even in science, where new studies are supposed to create new knowledge, it\u0026rsquo;s all incremental.\nThe qualities that make good science fiction, captivating stories, interesting questions and perspectives, honest characters, and enjoyable settings are for the most part independent of there being \u0026ldquo;something new,\u0026rdquo; and I think you can say something really new in a fairly typical space opera, and tell a completely contrite in the new thing that we\u0026rsquo;ve never seen yet. o So there.\nHave fun, Tycho\nCory rehashes some of these ideas here, but I think on the whole, science fiction isn\u0026rsquo;t really about the future, and never has been. \u0026ldquo;True\u0026rdquo; to current understandings of science, or not, science fiction is always both future oriented (looking forward) and about the present. If you\u0026rsquo;re a contemporary setting using contemporary technology, or in a near future setting, using \u0026ldquo;accurate\u0026rdquo; technology, or if you\u0026rsquo;re writing a story ten thousand years in the future using wildly futuristic technology, it\u0026rsquo;s all to a certain measure irrelevant, and even more importantly, it\u0026rsquo;s all made up anyway.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/science-fiction-memes/","summary":"Wait, before you ignore this post, know that this isn\u0026rsquo;t a discussion of internet science fiction memes, but rather replicating trends in the genre. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to post a list of books or movies with an embarrassingly small number of titles bolded or italicized. Just saying.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling about the memes in science fiction, the trends that repeat (with varying degrees of utility) for a number of weeks, and it remains a chief nagging point on my todo list. As I return to science fiction writing it\u0026rsquo;s something that I\u0026rsquo;ve found myself eager to consider as I make sense of the genre (again).\nThis was, like a number of the essays/posts about writing methods and practices that I\u0026rsquo;ve posted in recent weeks, spurred by listening to one of Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s podcasts of a panel he was on with a few other science fiction writers.\nThere were a lot of somewhat germane debates that are so typical of science fiction discussions, over literary-ness, over \u0026ldquo;accuracy\u0026rdquo; and the ability of science fiction to predict the future1, and originaity in the genre and so forth (actually I need to write a post about this).","title":"Science Fiction Memes"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m interested in how cultural norms proliferate in narratives, sort of vis a vis memory\u0026hellip;\n(that\u0026rsquo;s the shortest that sentence has ever been)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-begining-of-my-statment-of-purpose/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m interested in how cultural norms proliferate in narratives, sort of vis a vis memory\u0026hellip;\n(that\u0026rsquo;s the shortest that sentence has ever been)","title":"the begining of my statment of purpose"},{"content":"This might be unpopular at the moment, but\u0026hellip;.\nRegarding the Larry Craig thing\u0026hellip; (because what self respecting queer doesn\u0026rsquo;t have an opinion on the subject?).\nHe\u0026rsquo;s an asshole, but then he\u0026rsquo;s a senator, so that\u0026rsquo;s not much of a surprise. If you want to put the fucker in jail, then by god do it for something important, not for trying to have sex in a bathroom, which when you think about it, is a really stupid thing to put something as dumb and as trivial as that. Really, frankly, dare I say it\u0026rsquo;s almost borderline homophobic?\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have to say. For more reading:\nTeresa Nielsen Hayden\u0026rsquo;s Reflections Report in the SF Chronicle ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-wrong-crime/","summary":"This might be unpopular at the moment, but\u0026hellip;.\nRegarding the Larry Craig thing\u0026hellip; (because what self respecting queer doesn\u0026rsquo;t have an opinion on the subject?).\nHe\u0026rsquo;s an asshole, but then he\u0026rsquo;s a senator, so that\u0026rsquo;s not much of a surprise. If you want to put the fucker in jail, then by god do it for something important, not for trying to have sex in a bathroom, which when you think about it, is a really stupid thing to put something as dumb and as trivial as that. Really, frankly, dare I say it\u0026rsquo;s almost borderline homophobic?\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have to say. For more reading:\nTeresa Nielsen Hayden\u0026rsquo;s Reflections Report in the SF Chronicle ","title":"the wrong crime"},{"content":"I need a better twitter client program.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve lost some twitters with twitterific, as much as I want to like that program.\nBut I think the larger issue is that I need to consolidate the behemoth that is my IM list. It\u0026rsquo;s scary.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t been as productive this morning as I would have liked (but we have good metrics systems on the sites now), but I\u0026rsquo;m in good shape for the future, and this is in the end a good thing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/twitter-client-problem/","summary":"I need a better twitter client program.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve lost some twitters with twitterific, as much as I want to like that program.\nBut I think the larger issue is that I need to consolidate the behemoth that is my IM list. It\u0026rsquo;s scary.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t been as productive this morning as I would have liked (but we have good metrics systems on the sites now), but I\u0026rsquo;m in good shape for the future, and this is in the end a good thing.","title":"twitter client problem"},{"content":"boing boing pushed a redesign today a few hours ago. for once I\u0026rsquo;m not wickedly behind the times on this.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s looking cool.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/boing-boing-redesgin/","summary":"boing boing pushed a redesign today a few hours ago. for once I\u0026rsquo;m not wickedly behind the times on this.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s looking cool.\nCheers, sam","title":"boing boing redesgin."},{"content":"Bruce Springsteen\u0026rsquo;s Jungleland keeps coming up on my ipod\u0026rsquo;s random play. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what it means. Until this started, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t a big fan of the song, but it\u0026rsquo;s grown on me.\nI have a few more days of work, and I have a couple of weeks left of TealArt posts, more or less, but I changed my website on my twitter, and while I\u0026rsquo;d like to continue to have daily content on TealArt, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I can (or want) keep up the march that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be to keep the content in stock. I have a couple of weeks to figure things out.\nStay tuned, of course.\nps. I think I\u0026rsquo;m addicted to this Springsteen, I just hit replay on it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/its-a-jungleland/","summary":"Bruce Springsteen\u0026rsquo;s Jungleland keeps coming up on my ipod\u0026rsquo;s random play. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what it means. Until this started, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t a big fan of the song, but it\u0026rsquo;s grown on me.\nI have a few more days of work, and I have a couple of weeks left of TealArt posts, more or less, but I changed my website on my twitter, and while I\u0026rsquo;d like to continue to have daily content on TealArt, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I can (or want) keep up the march that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be to keep the content in stock. I have a couple of weeks to figure things out.\nStay tuned, of course.\nps. I think I\u0026rsquo;m addicted to this Springsteen, I just hit replay on it.","title":"its a jungleland"},{"content":"I checked back on raverly, and there are 473 people in front of me. Depending on how tierlessly they work through the weekend\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll be in by next week. huzzah.\nGuess I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to take the wireless router on vacation with me.\nStill don\u0026rsquo;t have a plan for the future of TealArt/Tychoish/tycho on the internet.\nStill haven\u0026rsquo;t finnished the paper on animal communication.\nBack to the salt mines.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/raverly-2-days-and-counting/","summary":"I checked back on raverly, and there are 473 people in front of me. Depending on how tierlessly they work through the weekend\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll be in by next week. huzzah.\nGuess I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to take the wireless router on vacation with me.\nStill don\u0026rsquo;t have a plan for the future of TealArt/Tychoish/tycho on the internet.\nStill haven\u0026rsquo;t finnished the paper on animal communication.\nBack to the salt mines.\nCheers, sam","title":"raverly, 2 days and counting"},{"content":"Slashdot | Laptop/Server Data Synchronization?:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to automatically synchronize data between a laptop and a server. When the laptop is connected to the network, I want all writes to automatically propagate across to the server. When the laptop is disconnected I want the laptop user to continue working with the local data. When the laptop is reconnected, I want the data to automatically re-sync. The issue is, the data on the server may have changed as well, which needs to propagate back to the laptop.\n(from Slashdot.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a good question. I think there needs to be more attention toward paid toward how computer users can seamlessly keep data in sync between multiple system. I think the best solution is to have some\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/slashdot-laptopserver-data-synchronization/","summary":"Slashdot | Laptop/Server Data Synchronization?:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to automatically synchronize data between a laptop and a server. When the laptop is connected to the network, I want all writes to automatically propagate across to the server. When the laptop is disconnected I want the laptop user to continue working with the local data. When the laptop is reconnected, I want the data to automatically re-sync. The issue is, the data on the server may have changed as well, which needs to propagate back to the laptop.\n(from Slashdot.)\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a good question. I think there needs to be more attention toward paid toward how computer users can seamlessly keep data in sync between multiple system. I think the best solution is to have some","title":"Slashdot | Laptop/Server Data Synchronization?"},{"content":"\u0026hellip;because what jews need to be doing at the end of august making a christmas list, I may never know. In the mean time, there are some things that I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I need to look into obtaining that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t in the normal course of events get for myself, but need desperately. (This is more for my own recolection than as suggestion to anyone):\na new `goram \u0026lt;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003235.html\u0026gt;`_ headphone cord a big, stoneware, or similarly constructed tea pot. (ie. not glass. and not a french press) That is all\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/christmas-list/","summary":"\u0026hellip;because what jews need to be doing at the end of august making a christmas list, I may never know. In the mean time, there are some things that I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I need to look into obtaining that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t in the normal course of events get for myself, but need desperately. (This is more for my own recolection than as suggestion to anyone):\na new `goram \u0026lt;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003235.html\u0026gt;`_ headphone cord a big, stoneware, or similarly constructed tea pot. (ie. not glass. and not a french press) That is all","title":"christmas list"},{"content":"http://www.antonyjohnston.com/gtw/\nAt least I\u0026rsquo;m on the right track.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a sort of organizational bankrupcy moment (where you just throw your hands up and try a new system, spured by a rather dumb use of the delete button.\nOn the upside, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;ve lost anything, truly important.\nI have got to get some sort of version control something working. I just need a good structure to start with.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ive-been-saying-this-for-months/","summary":"http://www.antonyjohnston.com/gtw/\nAt least I\u0026rsquo;m on the right track.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a sort of organizational bankrupcy moment (where you just throw your hands up and try a new system, spured by a rather dumb use of the delete button.\nOn the upside, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I\u0026rsquo;ve lost anything, truly important.\nI have got to get some sort of version control something working. I just need a good structure to start with.","title":"I've been saying this for months..."},{"content":"I just check, on a whim, and I realized that I\u0026rsquo;m\u0026hellip; 600 people away from the front of the line on Ravelry. There are 17,000+ behind me.\nI think the appropraite word for the present moment is \u0026ldquo;squee\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I really am going to have a TealArt entry today.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ravelry/","summary":"I just check, on a whim, and I realized that I\u0026rsquo;m\u0026hellip; 600 people away from the front of the line on Ravelry. There are 17,000+ behind me.\nI think the appropraite word for the present moment is \u0026ldquo;squee\u0026rdquo;\nAnd I really am going to have a TealArt entry today.\nCheers, sam","title":"ravelry"},{"content":"This week. This week has snuck up on me a bit, sorry for getting this post out later than we\u0026rsquo;ve become accustomed to. I liked having one project for all of last week on TealArt, but it means that I\u0026rsquo;m a bit behind the swing of things for this week. There will be posts this week. For sure.\nI think That I\u0026rsquo;d like to repost installment #12 of season 1 of Station Keeping in one entry, to make for a better better reading experience. I might make a point of reposting all the entries that I split up as part of the ramp up to the end, but I might backdate those so that they don\u0026rsquo;t muck up the progression of TealArt as a blog such as it is. I\u0026rsquo;d also like to get a \u0026ldquo;Season 1 Roundup,\u0026rdquo; up at some point soon. As you can probably tell from my use of verb tenses here, I haven\u0026rsquo;t done this yet.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s because I was working on this \u0026ldquo;open source knitting\u0026rdquo; project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over for a few days now. I wrote a series of five TealArt style posts, outlined here that I think lays down some good framework for my work in the future on creating some documentation for knitting in an open-source framework. The first of these essays will go up this week, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would be right to go full bore with them yet, but in the next couple of weeks I\u0026rsquo;ll get them all out, and hopefully by then I\u0026rsquo;ll have laid enough of the behind scenes groundwork laid to go forward with the project. It\u0026rsquo;s cool, so stay tuned.\nThe other thing I did this weekend, was to get some very good work done on my novella project. I was describing it to someone as sort of \u0026ldquo;enjoyably classic space opera, with a touch of cyber-punk\u0026rdquo; but then I realized that it wasn\u0026rsquo;t really classically style, nor was it in any way space opera, and the tone is rather upbeat for cyber-punk. So whatever; classifications are for weenies and people who have finished product, as I have neither this debate can wait. This means that I have drafts of the first two \u0026ldquo;chapters\u0026rdquo;, and a pretty good looking one-page outline of the third chapter. I really enjoy how this is panning out, and it remains a great deal of fun. I\u0026rsquo;ve never considered novellas before, but the pacing is really fun, and while I\u0026rsquo;ll be more comfortable when I cross the 10k word mark, I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with how this is coming out. How does this relate to this week in TealArt? Well it does--in part--explain why I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything better to share with you right now, but I would expect that in addition to the knitting pieces, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be writing a bit in the future about writing and science fiction related topics, because that\u0026rsquo;s on my mind.\nI hope you all stay well. And I\u0026rsquo;ll see you throughout the week.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-tealart-post-times/","summary":"This week. This week has snuck up on me a bit, sorry for getting this post out later than we\u0026rsquo;ve become accustomed to. I liked having one project for all of last week on TealArt, but it means that I\u0026rsquo;m a bit behind the swing of things for this week. There will be posts this week. For sure.\nI think That I\u0026rsquo;d like to repost installment #12 of season 1 of Station Keeping in one entry, to make for a better better reading experience. I might make a point of reposting all the entries that I split up as part of the ramp up to the end, but I might backdate those so that they don\u0026rsquo;t muck up the progression of TealArt as a blog such as it is. I\u0026rsquo;d also like to get a \u0026ldquo;Season 1 Roundup,\u0026rdquo; up at some point soon. As you can probably tell from my use of verb tenses here, I haven\u0026rsquo;t done this yet.","title":"The TealArt Post-Times"},{"content":"dear Microsoft Mac office design team,\nOn the whole I am successful in my project to avoid using your products, because they are, as tools, not particularly suited to the kinds of ways that I use my computer. Nevertheless, particularly with regards to programs like Excel, this is unavoidable. Good job there guys.\nNevertheless, I would like to say that it would be really nice if you could stop having your program dump temporary files in my documents folder. I understand your intentions here, but really think that the \u0026ldquo;Application Support\u0026rdquo; folder remains the customary place for such files, and I\u0026rsquo;m getting tired of deleting this folder.\nthank you for understanding.\nwarmest regards, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dear-microsoft/","summary":"dear Microsoft Mac office design team,\nOn the whole I am successful in my project to avoid using your products, because they are, as tools, not particularly suited to the kinds of ways that I use my computer. Nevertheless, particularly with regards to programs like Excel, this is unavoidable. Good job there guys.\nNevertheless, I would like to say that it would be really nice if you could stop having your program dump temporary files in my documents folder. I understand your intentions here, but really think that the \u0026ldquo;Application Support\u0026rdquo; folder remains the customary place for such files, and I\u0026rsquo;m getting tired of deleting this folder.\nthank you for understanding.\nwarmest regards, tycho","title":"dear microsoft"},{"content":"hello!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a pretty good weekend I think. There\u0026rsquo;s a knitting group this afternoon, and I now have the missing needle that I\u0026rsquo;ve needed for a while to continue with my knitting progress on a sweater that I put aside a few weeks ago. THe new sweater might need an afterthought hem but that can happen later of course. Also, on the schedule for today is a trip out to get a tea pot. How cool is that?\nOther newsbits:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve completed a series of tealart posts that I\u0026rsquo;m going to start airing this week or maybe next week. It outlines a cool project that I might be able to start later this year or early next year, depending on what energy I get behind it. Knitting related. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of fun I finished chapter two of the novella. I have a good outline for chapter 3. Chapter 2\u0026rsquo;s pacing is a bit slower than I intended, and I was worried that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get enough story done in it, despite the fact that it was jammed full of stuff that needed to be there. Then I did the outline for chapter 3, and it came out perfect. I\u0026rsquo;m still on track. It\u0026rsquo;s still early, of course, but this writing experience has felt very much like everything is \u0026ldquo;clicking into place.\u0026rdquo; That\u0026rsquo;s a good thing. I culled a lot of my RSS reading, to 121 feeds. At the beginning of the summer I had nearly 500 feeds (many of them had stopped updating, stiil) every time I would hit refresh (per week) I would get ~1200 new items. I got down to about 250. Which meant that I refreshed a couple of times a week, but still had about 400 items to read each time, even if I was pretty regular about it. This new low, cuts out a lot of the things that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t actively reading, but wanted to \u0026ldquo;keep an eye on.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s hard to be a digital pack rat sometimes. It\u0026rsquo;s my hope that with fewer things to read, I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to think of the internet reading that I do as participation in a community, rather than the mass absorption of information. It might also mean that I could start to experiment with other news-reading software, that I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to try out, but haven\u0026rsquo;t had the freedom to really use in a long time.) Vienna, google reader, etc. This progress also means that I have some more/new tasks to complete, in addition to all the things that are lingering around:\nWhile I have almost two weeks worth of TealArt posts prepped and ready to go, I don\u0026rsquo;t have two consecutive weeks of posts ready, so I need to write a few different kinds of posts for this week, to make everything jive right. I need to get a start on chapter three of the novella, so that I have something easy to pick up on next week. having at least 500 words and possibly more, would be great, because I\u0026rsquo;m not going to get much fiction-writing time this week or next. Do school stuff. That\u0026rsquo;s all for now. We\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch of course.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-new-productivity/","summary":"hello!\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a pretty good weekend I think. There\u0026rsquo;s a knitting group this afternoon, and I now have the missing needle that I\u0026rsquo;ve needed for a while to continue with my knitting progress on a sweater that I put aside a few weeks ago. THe new sweater might need an afterthought hem but that can happen later of course. Also, on the schedule for today is a trip out to get a tea pot. How cool is that?\nOther newsbits:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve completed a series of tealart posts that I\u0026rsquo;m going to start airing this week or maybe next week. It outlines a cool project that I might be able to start later this year or early next year, depending on what energy I get behind it. Knitting related. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a lot of fun I finished chapter two of the novella. I have a good outline for chapter 3. Chapter 2\u0026rsquo;s pacing is a bit slower than I intended, and I was worried that I didn\u0026rsquo;t get enough story done in it, despite the fact that it was jammed full of stuff that needed to be there.","title":"the new productivity"},{"content":"So I started a little throw away post here and it turned into a rather ambitious series of TealArt posts that I\u0026rsquo;ll post in the coming weeks.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve sort of been neglecting TealArt for a number of weeks, using TA posts as \u0026ldquo;warm up\u0026rdquo; for fiction and other writing projects, which means I have something of a backlog (woo!) now that Station Keeping is wrapped up for the present.\nSK being wrapped up for the present, ironically means I need to spend some time on that project, to get a few episodes taken care of, but I\u0026rsquo;m trying to make sure I have enough time to dedicate to the novella project. It\u0026rsquo;s precarious, I tell you.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch as the weekend goes by, of course.\ncheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/accidental-growth/","summary":"So I started a little throw away post here and it turned into a rather ambitious series of TealArt posts that I\u0026rsquo;ll post in the coming weeks.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve sort of been neglecting TealArt for a number of weeks, using TA posts as \u0026ldquo;warm up\u0026rdquo; for fiction and other writing projects, which means I have something of a backlog (woo!) now that Station Keeping is wrapped up for the present.\nSK being wrapped up for the present, ironically means I need to spend some time on that project, to get a few episodes taken care of, but I\u0026rsquo;m trying to make sure I have enough time to dedicate to the novella project. It\u0026rsquo;s precarious, I tell you.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch as the weekend goes by, of course.\ncheers!","title":"accidental growth"},{"content":"Jared, of Sportive Thoughts has tagged me with a meme. And I\u0026rsquo;m totally up for such things. Because I\u0026rsquo;m a dork, and I usually get passed over for these sorts of things.\nThe rules seem to be: say eight things about your self, and then tag eight people who will do the same. Pretty standard, but whatever. Figuring that I have somewhere in the neighborhood of eight readers, I think you should all consider yourself tagged. Also, it\u0026rsquo;d be cool if you could post links to your blogs (where you\u0026rsquo;ve filled out the meme) in the comments for this entry. Rock on, lets get started.\n1. I hate ripping out my knitting, and most of the cool knitted techniques that I now use are a product of not wanting to rip. 2. I\u0026rsquo;m an only child. 3. Regular Expressions don\u0026rsquo;t really scare me 4. I have a fountain pen that matches my computer. Old meets new. 5. I make sweaters out of yarn that most people make socks out of (very fine) and socks out of yarn that most people make sweaters out of. 6. No one guesses my academic interests/discipline right (they always think I\u0026rsquo;m into literature or fine art or history). 7. I\u0026rsquo;m left handed. 8. I\u0026rsquo;ve been a blogger for about 8 years.\nAlso, and I suppose this might qualify as a #8, but I just culled about 160 items from my feed reader. I think they were mostly from bloggers that don\u0026rsquo;t read this, but if it was, I will totally add you back.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/because-jared-asked/","summary":"Jared, of Sportive Thoughts has tagged me with a meme. And I\u0026rsquo;m totally up for such things. Because I\u0026rsquo;m a dork, and I usually get passed over for these sorts of things.\nThe rules seem to be: say eight things about your self, and then tag eight people who will do the same. Pretty standard, but whatever. Figuring that I have somewhere in the neighborhood of eight readers, I think you should all consider yourself tagged. Also, it\u0026rsquo;d be cool if you could post links to your blogs (where you\u0026rsquo;ve filled out the meme) in the comments for this entry. Rock on, lets get started.\n1. I hate ripping out my knitting, and most of the cool knitted techniques that I now use are a product of not wanting to rip. 2. I\u0026rsquo;m an only child. 3. Regular Expressions don\u0026rsquo;t really scare me 4. I have a fountain pen that matches my computer.","title":"because Jared asked"},{"content":"I think it\u0026rsquo;s time to further cull the number of blogs I read. because I need to stay in touch with the blogosphere (g-d I hate that term), but I need to cut bat. Ugg.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-downfall-of-rss/","summary":"I think it\u0026rsquo;s time to further cull the number of blogs I read. because I need to stay in touch with the blogosphere (g-d I hate that term), but I need to cut bat. Ugg.","title":"the downfall of RSS"},{"content":"I just signed up for a new ruby-on-rails based tumble log service that produced the following error message:\nYour browser does not support javascript and we were too lazy to support browsers that do not support javascript\nThe ironic thing, is that my browser, does support java script. It\u0026rsquo;s basically firefox written in cocoa and nice. So rather than test a script, they checked to see if it was firefox and then borked when it wasn\u0026rsquo;t. Lame.\nBesides, who needs new fangled things like that when you have wordpress and all it\u0026rsquo;s goodness. (ie. this site.)\nSpeaking of Rails, I\u0026rsquo;m totally going to use the ruby instiki project next time I need a wiki\u0026hellip;.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/truth/","summary":"I just signed up for a new ruby-on-rails based tumble log service that produced the following error message:\nYour browser does not support javascript and we were too lazy to support browsers that do not support javascript\nThe ironic thing, is that my browser, does support java script. It\u0026rsquo;s basically firefox written in cocoa and nice. So rather than test a script, they checked to see if it was firefox and then borked when it wasn\u0026rsquo;t. Lame.\nBesides, who needs new fangled things like that when you have wordpress and all it\u0026rsquo;s goodness. (ie. this site.)\nSpeaking of Rails, I\u0026rsquo;m totally going to use the ruby instiki project next time I need a wiki\u0026hellip;.","title":"truth...."},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about free knitting (as in speech, not really beer, but that too,) and I have a couple of thinking points:\nIs there a layer of information that goes into knitting design and documentation that isn\u0026rsquo;t typically exposed in \u0026ldquo;closed\u0026rdquo;/conventional publications? (that would be equivalent in role to source code)? The role of editors and communities and the sometimes very \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; development models that \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; projects use. The way GPL/GFDL knitting projects can be used commercially. Technological methods of attending to such a project. \u0026hellip; ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/open-source-knitting/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about free knitting (as in speech, not really beer, but that too,) and I have a couple of thinking points:\nIs there a layer of information that goes into knitting design and documentation that isn\u0026rsquo;t typically exposed in \u0026ldquo;closed\u0026rdquo;/conventional publications? (that would be equivalent in role to source code)? The role of editors and communities and the sometimes very \u0026ldquo;conventional\u0026rdquo; development models that \u0026ldquo;open\u0026rdquo; projects use. The way GPL/GFDL knitting projects can be used commercially. Technological methods of attending to such a project. \u0026hellip; ","title":"Open Source Knitting"},{"content":"Hello Everyone.\nI\u0026rsquo;m selling a couple of spinning wheels, in the hopes of consolidating my flock. These are good, wheels,that would be great for beginners or old hands alike. If you have any questions, please email me at tycho@tealart.com. I\u0026rsquo;m in the St. Louis area, so if you\u0026rsquo;re nearby, and we can do a direct hand-off, that would be preferable, otherwise the buyer should expect to pay shipping costs, and all wheels are sold as is. If you want more than one of these wheels, some sort of \u0026ldquo;package\u0026rdquo; deal could be arranged.\nThe wheels are (all made by ashford):\nTraditional Spinning Wheel: This is the same traditional wheel that Ashford has made for a great number of years. It\u0026rsquo;s it good shape, and is stained a medium tone. This is one of the older models, but it looks and operates the same as the newer ones. It is a single treadle wheel. Scotch Tension; Three bobbin Lazy Kate; Two ratios; and at least four bobbins. Caveat: The wheel is a little warped, it looks like this is the kind of thing that a half-wit with any knowledge of woodworking and circles should be able to straighten out, but it runs fine as is. Asking Price: $200 (new traditional\u0026rsquo;s retail base price is $370 ) Country Spinner: This is a to spec, country spinner production wheel. 1.5 kg bobbin, double treadle. The wheel has only marginal use, although, in the interests of full disclosure, there is a very slight lilt/warp to the wheel, that I can only notice if I look at the wheel from a certain angle. The wheel is unfinished. This is a great wheel for plying and spinning chunky yarns, as the orifice is almost an inch wide Asking Price: $350 (Country Spinners retail for $475.) Joy Portable: This is a single treadle, joy folding wheel. It\u0026rsquo;s completely to spec. It\u0026rsquo;s used, but in great shape. Slightly older, and though this isn\u0026rsquo;t completely empirical I think the newer Joy\u0026rsquo;s use a thinner wood, so it\u0026rsquo;s always really sturdy, by comparison, but this isn\u0026rsquo;t something I\u0026rsquo;ve verified.) It\u0026rsquo;s used, and thus not \u0026ldquo;mint,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s in great shape, and it works like a charm. This wheel also comes with a new (nearly mint) ashford, padded/coudra-nylon traveling bag. Asking Price: $400 (A New Joy\u0026rsquo;s base retail is $500 + $100 bag) If you have any questions or would like me to take pictures, I will do my best to capture them properly. If you\u0026rsquo;re in St. Louis, we can arrange a time for you to come and visit them, again tycho@tealart.com\nbest, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spinning-wheels-for-sale/","summary":"Hello Everyone.\nI\u0026rsquo;m selling a couple of spinning wheels, in the hopes of consolidating my flock. These are good, wheels,that would be great for beginners or old hands alike. If you have any questions, please email me at tycho@tealart.com. I\u0026rsquo;m in the St. Louis area, so if you\u0026rsquo;re nearby, and we can do a direct hand-off, that would be preferable, otherwise the buyer should expect to pay shipping costs, and all wheels are sold as is. If you want more than one of these wheels, some sort of \u0026ldquo;package\u0026rdquo; deal could be arranged.\nThe wheels are (all made by ashford):\nTraditional Spinning Wheel: This is the same traditional wheel that Ashford has made for a great number of years. It\u0026rsquo;s it good shape, and is stained a medium tone. This is one of the older models, but it looks and operates the same as the newer ones. It is a single treadle wheel.","title":"Spinning Wheels for Sale"},{"content":"Welcome to the final part of our Station Keeping finale for this season of the project. Thanks for reading, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see you in a month or so. As always if you want to `participate \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/particpate/\u0026gt;`_ in the next or figure seasons of the project, please contact us by email at tycho@tealart.com, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see you on the other side. Thanks so much for reading! Cheers, tycho\nFirst Eli tried pacing, but that seemed to be distressing the others waiting for the lift with him. No one spoke, they were too worried or numb or confused, or maybe they were just tired. He contemplated going back to his quarters to see if he could get more information from the computer system, but he suspected that Julia would probably have control over resources, and his quarters weren\u0026rsquo;t on the top of any list. What\u0026rsquo;s more he didn\u0026rsquo;t get access to the network from home, in an effort to avoid taking work home with him.\n\u0026ldquo;Commanders are always on duty, even when they\u0026rsquo;re not.\u0026rdquo; David\u0026rsquo;s words of so long ago echoed in his head. Except now, he figured.\nEli even stopped looking at his time piece, because he had become too concerned trying to calculate time-till-death based on available data and the time that had passed. How long it would take a reactor to go critical, how long it would take a fire to spread, how long it would take atmosphere to leak out slowly, how long it would take to die in vacuum: these thoughts wouldn\u0026rsquo;t save anybody, and didn\u0026rsquo;t make him feel any better.\nJust when Eli had started to loose track of time, the intercom box crackled to life. \u0026ldquo;Commander, can you reset the lift controls from there? I think the team has cleared up the mechanics, the system just needs to be reactivated down there,\u0026rdquo; Joshua Sian\u0026rsquo;s voice called over the intercom. Eli could hear Talia directing the deck in the background. A small comfort at least.\n\u0026ldquo;Ok, I think I have it,\u0026rdquo; Eli had to search through the lift controls for a second, but finally came to the proper option. The system appeared to cycle through and a moment later, the doors opened.\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re good to go,\u0026rdquo; Sian reported quickly and then the channel thought. This crisis wasn\u0026rsquo;t over, that much was clear, and it required every ounce of self control to keep from asking his crew what was happening. He\u0026rsquo;d be there soon enough, and they were busy.\nThe lift ride seemed to take even longer than usual. It might have actually been slower, if resources were needed elsewhere, or if the lift hadn\u0026rsquo;t been properly fixed. He banished the images of getting stuck for hours in the lift waiting for a rescue; but the lift trudged on.\nFinally they reached the command deck. He stepped out of the lift and looked around. His people were working in a fuss, and although he thought he heard Josh say \u0026ldquo;welcome to the party,\u0026rdquo; it would take him a moment to get up to speed. He was a little dazed but he walked over to where Talia was standing and began to get a feel for what was happening.\nJulia was emerged in her systems; Josh was directing the maintenance and construction squads for emergency duty; Talia was routing incoming communications to other officers and stations, and the entire place was crawling with techs and operations staff. He still didn\u0026rsquo;t know what\u0026rsquo;s happening.\n\u0026ldquo;Look,\u0026rdquo; Talia said, as she transferred something to the display in front of him. She pointed with her left hand, but continued to work her controls with her right, and a moment later she was reabsorbed in her task.\nThe display flickered once, and then Eli saw. His jaw fell slack.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, g-d\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Disaster\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-12-5-disaster/","summary":"Welcome to the final part of our Station Keeping finale for this season of the project. Thanks for reading, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see you in a month or so. As always if you want to `participate \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/particpate/\u0026gt;`_ in the next or figure seasons of the project, please contact us by email at tycho@tealart.com, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see you on the other side. Thanks so much for reading! Cheers, tycho\nFirst Eli tried pacing, but that seemed to be distressing the others waiting for the lift with him. No one spoke, they were too worried or numb or confused, or maybe they were just tired. He contemplated going back to his quarters to see if he could get more information from the computer system, but he suspected that Julia would probably have control over resources, and his quarters weren\u0026rsquo;t on the top of any list. What\u0026rsquo;s more he didn\u0026rsquo;t get access to the network from home, in an effort to avoid taking work home with him.","title":"Station Keeping #12.5: Disaster"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lol-emo/","summary":"","title":"lol emo"},{"content":"a needle that will let me be able to knit sleeves has shipped.\none more week.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/needle-shipped/","summary":"a needle that will let me be able to knit sleeves has shipped.\none more week.","title":"needle shipped"},{"content":"I heard someone say the other day, that some universities and businesses were blocking face-book from their networks, because, it chewed up too much bandwidth because it was pulling data from so many different sites.\ncorrect me if I\u0026rsquo;m wrong, but face-book, is for the most part fairly light on AJAX (I mean google apps and what not use a lot more AJAX than facebook), and really heavy on PHP, which means that all of the bandwidth pull and processing is happening server side.\nIt might take a long time to load, because their servers have a lot to process, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t chew up much more bandwidth than any other site that you visit a lot\u0026hellip;\nright?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/facebook-bandwidth/","summary":"I heard someone say the other day, that some universities and businesses were blocking face-book from their networks, because, it chewed up too much bandwidth because it was pulling data from so many different sites.\ncorrect me if I\u0026rsquo;m wrong, but face-book, is for the most part fairly light on AJAX (I mean google apps and what not use a lot more AJAX than facebook), and really heavy on PHP, which means that all of the bandwidth pull and processing is happening server side.\nIt might take a long time to load, because their servers have a lot to process, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t chew up much more bandwidth than any other site that you visit a lot\u0026hellip;\nright?","title":"facebook bandwidth"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Charge\u0026rdquo; is the second part in our five part finale for this season of Station Keeping, we\u0026rsquo;ll be posting a new part of this story every day for this week. I hope you enjoy, and `stay tuned \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm/\u0026gt;`_ for the rest of the week. As always we `encourage your participation \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/partcipate/\u0026gt;`_, and stay tuned to `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ for news of the second season of Station Keeping (in a month or so) and all the other great TealArt content. Cheers--tycho\n\u0026ldquo;Josh, do you think we could get those refinements processed by the end of the day, or we looking at tomorrow?\u0026rdquo; Talia said walking slowly from her office to her station on the command deck with a dark cup of very caffeine laced hot liquid.\n\u0026ldquo;At least!\u0026rdquo; The younger officer balked. \u0026ldquo;I should think, at any rate.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Of course, of course, I was just being hopeful. It never hurts. I mean what\u0026rsquo;s a few days out here?\u0026rdquo; Talia chuckled, there weren\u0026rsquo;t deadlines this far from the core.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, anyway,\u0026rdquo; Sian said after a moment, \u0026ldquo;Have a good shift,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You going somewhere?\u0026rdquo; Talia asked after fighting back a yawn.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, looks like you have things under control here,\u0026rdquo; Josh stretched out his hand noting the general calm of the command deck. \u0026ldquo;I was going to look over the--\u0026rdquo;\nJosh was cut off when he was thrown to the deck by some explosion. Everything hurt, \u0026ldquo;Wait, there wasn\u0026rsquo;t an explosion here,\u0026rdquo; Josh thought in the next instant, \u0026ldquo;Just the noise,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What was that?\u0026rdquo; Talia asked in the next moment, sounding about as dazed as Josh felt. The deck was louder now, but no one had answers, and most people seemed pretty dazed.\n\u0026ldquo;What was that?!\u0026rdquo; Talia demanded when it was clear that people weren\u0026rsquo;t going to offer her an answer.\n\u0026ldquo;No reports\u0026hellip; yet\u0026rdquo; a young officer wearing Hanmish insigina said, her hands continued to work her controls, but she was having little success.\n\u0026ldquo;Get the commander up here and get me an idea of whats happening,\u0026rdquo; Talia\u0026rsquo;s orders were directed at the entire deck. But they were clearly all doing their job, and Talia knew that this aimless strategy wasn\u0026rsquo;t going to help much. She turned to Sian who had made it to his feet. \u0026ldquo;Josh? Anything?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Lifts are down, Commander was scheduled to be up here by now, and this terminal isn\u0026rsquo;t telling me anything,\u0026rdquo; Sian looked over at Julia who was hooked up at her station in the computer\u0026rsquo;s system. She looked to be breathing within normal ranges, \u0026ldquo;Julia could probably tell us something when she comes out.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Can\u0026rsquo;t you wake her up or ping her out of it?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yes,\u0026rdquo; Josh said shaking his head quickly, ashamed that he hadn\u0026rsquo;t thought of this. He sent the ping. The terminal sounded in protest, but the noise was almost drowned out by the rest of the bustle on the command deck. People were starting to report data to Talia, but there still wasn\u0026rsquo;t much.\n\u0026ldquo;What now?\u0026rdquo; Talia asked Sian, without turning to face him, apparently having heard the alarm.\n\u0026ldquo;Seems she denied the ping, she\u0026rsquo;s staying in.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;God, this better be good. Any news of the commander?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Nothing yet. It\u0026rsquo;s your show.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Great.\u0026rdquo; Talia\u0026rsquo;s words were quick, but she clearly didn\u0026rsquo;t have a clue what to say next. \u0026ldquo;Well, Keep me posted,\u0026rdquo; she said quickly, but that was of course an obvious order.\nTalia focused on her controls and tried to see if she could learn anything new, get any more information or response out of the system. Something. Anything \u0026ldquo;How can I direct these people what if I don\u0026rsquo;t know what\u0026rsquo;s going on?\u0026rdquo; She thought as she begain to work with the uncooperative system. \u0026ldquo;What a time to be stuck in command!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Ok, folks, can we contact maintenance squads with the intercoms at least?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I think so,\u0026rdquo; a young officer said. Talia didn\u0026rsquo;t know her name. Damn.\n\u0026ldquo;Ok, we need comms and we need the lifts back on, no matter what\u0026rsquo;s wrong. Can you put people on it? Just core function, not regular service.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yes, I\u0026rsquo;m on it.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Good. You,\u0026rdquo; Talia said, indicating another crew hand, get in touch with Doctor Perrin or Reese, they might no something, and they should be kept up to speed in any case.\u0026quot; Without stopping Talia turned to another crewman, \u0026ldquo;Anyone willing to link in a see if you can get in touch with Julia?\u0026rdquo; Talia asked\nThe color on all of their faces faded. \u0026ldquo;Ok, hard sell, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t go in there,\u0026rdquo; before she had a chance to respond though, Josh interrupted.\n\u0026ldquo;I got the commander on the line. I gave him an update, but he\u0026rsquo;s trapped on the other side of an out-of-service lift. The crew\u0026rsquo;s are on their way.\u0026rdquo;\nTalia took a deep breath. \u0026ldquo;Ok, guess we\u0026rsquo;ll have to make do,\u0026rdquo; she said as she turned back to the crew and her station to see what more could be done.\n\u0026ldquo;Charge\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-12-2-charge/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;Charge\u0026rdquo; is the second part in our five part finale for this season of Station Keeping, we\u0026rsquo;ll be posting a new part of this story every day for this week. I hope you enjoy, and `stay tuned \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm/\u0026gt;`_ for the rest of the week. As always we `encourage your participation \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/partcipate/\u0026gt;`_, and stay tuned to `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ for news of the second season of Station Keeping (in a month or so) and all the other great TealArt content. Cheers--tycho\n\u0026ldquo;Josh, do you think we could get those refinements processed by the end of the day, or we looking at tomorrow?\u0026rdquo; Talia said walking slowly from her office to her station on the command deck with a dark cup of very caffeine laced hot liquid.\n\u0026ldquo;At least!\u0026rdquo; The younger officer balked. \u0026ldquo;I should think, at any rate.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Of course, of course, I was just being hopeful. It never hurts. I mean what\u0026rsquo;s a few days out here?","title":"Station Keeping #12.2: Charge"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m cross posting this to the livejournal so that former classmates can read it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m starting classes today at the school I never really considered for undergrad, so I don\u0026rsquo;t have to pay student loans, so I can work on academic projects, and so I can stay in the mindset as I apply (again) to graduate school next year. That and there are classes here that my alma mater could never run, because of staffing and other demands on the faculty.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also a very different kind of institution. Here are some of my observations:\n1. Cars? What? The campus has a number of much higher trafficked roads than I\u0026rsquo;m used to on a campus. It also has stoplights. I approached a light, it said \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t walk\u0026rdquo; cars weren\u0026rsquo;t coming, so I trotted across the road, passing two students who were standing there waiting for the light to change. I laughed to myself.\n2. Male students all look like TKEs at Beloit, thus far. Must remember to not hold it against them. What happened to college student chic? I sense a distinct deficit of students wearing pajamas.\n3. Fewer smokers? Or maybe it\u0026rsquo;s just raining. Or maybe all my old friends smoked.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/observations-of-a-new-student/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m cross posting this to the livejournal so that former classmates can read it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m starting classes today at the school I never really considered for undergrad, so I don\u0026rsquo;t have to pay student loans, so I can work on academic projects, and so I can stay in the mindset as I apply (again) to graduate school next year. That and there are classes here that my alma mater could never run, because of staffing and other demands on the faculty.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also a very different kind of institution. Here are some of my observations:\n1. Cars? What? The campus has a number of much higher trafficked roads than I\u0026rsquo;m used to on a campus. It also has stoplights. I approached a light, it said \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t walk\u0026rdquo; cars weren\u0026rsquo;t coming, so I trotted across the road, passing two students who were standing there waiting for the light to change. I laughed to myself.","title":"Observations of a New Student"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Stranded\u0026rdquo; is the first part in our five part finale for this season of Station Keeping, we\u0026rsquo;ll be posting a new part of this story every day for this week. I hope you enjoy, and `stay tuned \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm/\u0026gt;`_ for the rest of the week. As always we `encourage your participation \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/partcipate/\u0026gt;`_, and stay tuned to `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ for news of the second season of Station Keeping (in a month or so) and all the other great TealArt content. Cheers--tycho\nEli Banner was standing patiently waiting for the lift outside of his quarters. He was perhaps more groggy than he would have liked, but he thought that it would be an easy matter to get Sian to run out ands get caff--\nIn the next instant he was thrown, face first, onto the deck. He would have sworn, but the fall had knocked the wind out of him. He found himself rolled in a fetal position. He thought, \u0026ldquo;Guess I didn\u0026rsquo;t break anything,\u0026rdquo; when he realized that he had moved all his extremities. He didn\u0026rsquo;t think that he had lost consciousness, he was pretty sure at any rate, but everything hurt.\nWith the woman upright leaning on the wall, and only a bit dazed, Eli walked over to a communications boxed and keyed in the channel for the command deck.\n\u0026ldquo;This is Banner, What the hell just happened? Is everything alright up there? I\u0026rsquo;m outside the lift near my quarters.\u0026rdquo; He looked over at the lift, which didn\u0026rsquo;t give any indication of being powered. Blast. \u0026ldquo;It looks like the lift is out.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Sir, it looks like\u0026hellip; most of the lifts are out.\u0026rdquo; Joshua Sian\u0026rsquo;s distracted voice hissed from the voice box. \u0026ldquo;Commander Garn just sent crews to the access tubes, so you\u0026rsquo;re cut off.\u0026rdquo; Sian didn\u0026rsquo;t cut the line, so a faint static poured into the corridor.\n\u0026ldquo;Care to tell me what happened?\u0026rdquo; Eli said after a moment.\n\u0026ldquo;Not sure yet. Will have a report when you arrive, we hope. Sian out.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Damnit\u0026rdquo; Eli deactivated the communication box. Well at least Talia Garn was in the command center, but that was little solace. His station was in crisis, and he was trapped with minimal report and nothing to do. Great.\n\u0026ldquo;Stranded\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-12-1-stranded/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;Stranded\u0026rdquo; is the first part in our five part finale for this season of Station Keeping, we\u0026rsquo;ll be posting a new part of this story every day for this week. I hope you enjoy, and `stay tuned \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm/\u0026gt;`_ for the rest of the week. As always we `encourage your participation \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/partcipate/\u0026gt;`_, and stay tuned to `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ for news of the second season of Station Keeping (in a month or so) and all the other great TealArt content. Cheers--tycho\nEli Banner was standing patiently waiting for the lift outside of his quarters. He was perhaps more groggy than he would have liked, but he thought that it would be an easy matter to get Sian to run out ands get caff--\nIn the next instant he was thrown, face first, onto the deck. He would have sworn, but the fall had knocked the wind out of him. He found himself rolled in a fetal position.","title":"Station Keeping #12.1: Stranded"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s here. It\u0026rsquo;s finally here.\nThis week is going to be all station keeping, all the time, starting this very afternoon. This of course means that we\u0026rsquo;re going to be \u0026ldquo;off-the-air\u0026rdquo; come next week. I\u0026rsquo;ve been prepping essays/posts about science fiction, science fiction writing, and I expect to do some more in the \u0026ldquo;Keeping Meta\u0026rdquo; series of posts, while we wait and write the next season (and start thinking more long term about our story, for season three.) I\u0026rsquo;m going to give a tentative target release date of November first, but I might pull that date back a week or two so that we\u0026rsquo;re not having a big finale in the middle of the holidays. Planning\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s weird.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to of course, thank Jo Goodman who\u0026rsquo;s writing appears in two of this week\u0026rsquo;s installments. It\u0026rsquo;s great to have such a fun (and different) perspective contributing to this project, and although the stories were just by me and Jo this season, I think it would be improper to go on without at least publicly thanking all the other people who have contributed to the development, planning, and thinking about the project. There\u0026rsquo;s something really great about serials, and something about a group that makes it even more fun to write for, in my estimation.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that the first season of Station Keeping, is without flaw. Frankly I would have like to see more contributions from both the crowd, and from our own core, and thats going to be one of my big hiatus projects. For a long time, I would get cockamamie ideas for internet-phenomena and projects, and they\u0026rsquo;d sort of fizzle out when, inevitably, people wouldn\u0026rsquo;t flock to them. Now I\u0026rsquo;ll attribute this, at least in part, to youthful naivet√©, but it\u0026rsquo;s also true that web-phenomena need a certain sort of momentum, and that\u0026rsquo;s nothing you can summon out of thin air.\nAnd Station Keeping is getting there slowly, and that\u0026rsquo;s all I can ask for. I suppose the main difference between this project and former projects is that I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to this one, because by god I think it can work. And sometimes that stubbornness is totally a good thing.\nAs always, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in contributing to the Station Keeping project, either on a one off or a continuing business, please contact me, I\u0026rsquo;d love to work with you and include your stories in the project. My email is tycho@tealart.com, I look forward to hearing from you. Some authors are talking about fan fiction, and Matthew Wayne Selznick has even set up a site for fan generated content1 to encourage such projects for his own work. I would, however, submit that it would be nearly impossible for you to write fan fiction for Station Keeping (well there\u0026rsquo;d need to be fans, but\u0026hellip;) mostly because I think that anyone who wants to write fic, could probably write \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; station keeping, without much fuss.\nIn any case, stay tuned to ~/tychoish for updates about me and the site (also in the sidebar, here on TealArt,) and I\u0026rsquo;ll see you throughout the week for Station Keeping installments, but otherwise, I\u0026rsquo;ll see you next week.\nCheers, tycho\nI posted a bit about the Station Keeping project there, and would like to welcome anyone whose happened along this post and TealArt from there.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/times-of-sk-tealart/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s here. It\u0026rsquo;s finally here.\nThis week is going to be all station keeping, all the time, starting this very afternoon. This of course means that we\u0026rsquo;re going to be \u0026ldquo;off-the-air\u0026rdquo; come next week. I\u0026rsquo;ve been prepping essays/posts about science fiction, science fiction writing, and I expect to do some more in the \u0026ldquo;Keeping Meta\u0026rdquo; series of posts, while we wait and write the next season (and start thinking more long term about our story, for season three.) I\u0026rsquo;m going to give a tentative target release date of November first, but I might pull that date back a week or two so that we\u0026rsquo;re not having a big finale in the middle of the holidays. Planning\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s weird.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to of course, thank Jo Goodman who\u0026rsquo;s writing appears in two of this week\u0026rsquo;s installments. It\u0026rsquo;s great to have such a fun (and different) perspective contributing to this project, and although the stories were just by me and Jo this season, I think it would be improper to go on without at least publicly thanking all the other people who have contributed to the development, planning, and thinking about the project.","title":"The Times of Hanm Center TealArt"},{"content":"I wonder at what point I just gave up on my documents folder and started a new /text folder. There\u0026rsquo;s so much crap in documents that I never ever touch, because it\u0026rsquo;s irrelevant and old. Not throw away old, but old.\nMy ~/text folder is just the text files that I live in, and I have a simple, everyone in a single folder with a folder for \u0026ldquo;archives,\u0026rdquo; which are things that I\u0026rsquo;m done with but that I want to keep around. Eventually everything ends up on my DevonThink Pro Database and I\u0026rsquo;m a happy camper. :)\nI need to rethink this a bit, me thinks.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/giving-up/","summary":"I wonder at what point I just gave up on my documents folder and started a new /text folder. There\u0026rsquo;s so much crap in documents that I never ever touch, because it\u0026rsquo;s irrelevant and old. Not throw away old, but old.\nMy ~/text folder is just the text files that I live in, and I have a simple, everyone in a single folder with a folder for \u0026ldquo;archives,\u0026rdquo; which are things that I\u0026rsquo;m done with but that I want to keep around. Eventually everything ends up on my DevonThink Pro Database and I\u0026rsquo;m a happy camper. :)\nI need to rethink this a bit, me thinks.","title":"giving up"},{"content":"I heard, somewhere about a hacking scheme where people would hack into your computer, encrypt your hard drive using PGP and then charge you for the key to decrypt it. clever-evil-briliant.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hacking-scheme/","summary":"I heard, somewhere about a hacking scheme where people would hack into your computer, encrypt your hard drive using PGP and then charge you for the key to decrypt it. clever-evil-briliant.","title":"hacking scheme"},{"content":"In addition to my usual saturday morning fiction writing, I got the gears rolling this morning with the beginning of an essay slated for TealArt in a few weeks. I got off on a little tangent, which will show up in the footnotes, but I wanted to reprint it here, because I rather like it. So here we go.\nThe essay is about trends and memes in science fiction, but the bit I\u0026rsquo;m posting here is about futurism.\nCory rehashes some of these ideas about futurism here, but I think on the whole, science fiction isn\u0026rsquo;t really about the future, and never has been. \u0026ldquo;True\u0026rdquo; to current understandings of science, or not, science fiction is always both future oriented (looking forward) and about the present. If you\u0026rsquo;re a contemporary setting using contemporary technology, or in a near future setting, using \u0026ldquo;accurate\u0026rdquo; technology, or if you\u0026rsquo;re writing a story ten thousand years in the future using wildly futuristic technology, it\u0026rsquo;s all to a certain measure irrelevant, and even more importantly, it\u0026rsquo;s all made up anyway.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/predictions-of-the-present-future-past/","summary":"In addition to my usual saturday morning fiction writing, I got the gears rolling this morning with the beginning of an essay slated for TealArt in a few weeks. I got off on a little tangent, which will show up in the footnotes, but I wanted to reprint it here, because I rather like it. So here we go.\nThe essay is about trends and memes in science fiction, but the bit I\u0026rsquo;m posting here is about futurism.\nCory rehashes some of these ideas about futurism here, but I think on the whole, science fiction isn\u0026rsquo;t really about the future, and never has been. \u0026ldquo;True\u0026rdquo; to current understandings of science, or not, science fiction is always both future oriented (looking forward) and about the present. If you\u0026rsquo;re a contemporary setting using contemporary technology, or in a near future setting, using \u0026ldquo;accurate\u0026rdquo; technology, or if you\u0026rsquo;re writing a story ten thousand years in the future using wildly futuristic technology, it\u0026rsquo;s all to a certain measure irrelevant, and even more importantly, it\u0026rsquo;s all made up anyway.","title":"predictions of the present future past"},{"content":"Long story made short:\nI\u0026rsquo;d been caring a moleskin around for months that was just about full and totally biting the dust. So I bought a \u0026ldquo;reporter\u0026rdquo; style notebook, because I\u0026rsquo;m lefthanded and didn\u0026rsquo;t want to be constantly smearing my work.\nAlas, what I didn\u0026rsquo;t realize is that I mostly use it for reference, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard if you have something longer in the book and have to constantly be changing the orientation of the book while you\u0026rsquo;re looking for pages.\nSo I abandoned it, took out my pages and have given it to my mother. I got a new one.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m finally done getting the past several weeks of work/notes out of it and into the computer. It was good to get the notes taken care of. Which means I\u0026rsquo;m mostly done with my work for tonight. I could rearrange some of my Geek Tool notes, and maybe make some notes for tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s writing.\nAlso my knitting is still in the never ending hem, but I think I only have 3 more rounds before I can bind off and sew it down. Another sweater done, sans sleeves, but I\u0026rsquo;ll have to do a little better with this, because I think this is going to be a brilliant sweater to wear. I\u0026rsquo;d like to note that I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet started the next sweater, which shows great personal restraint on my part.\nBe Well\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/notebooks-and-hems/","summary":"Long story made short:\nI\u0026rsquo;d been caring a moleskin around for months that was just about full and totally biting the dust. So I bought a \u0026ldquo;reporter\u0026rdquo; style notebook, because I\u0026rsquo;m lefthanded and didn\u0026rsquo;t want to be constantly smearing my work.\nAlas, what I didn\u0026rsquo;t realize is that I mostly use it for reference, and it\u0026rsquo;s hard if you have something longer in the book and have to constantly be changing the orientation of the book while you\u0026rsquo;re looking for pages.\nSo I abandoned it, took out my pages and have given it to my mother. I got a new one.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m finally done getting the past several weeks of work/notes out of it and into the computer. It was good to get the notes taken care of. Which means I\u0026rsquo;m mostly done with my work for tonight. I could rearrange some of my Geek Tool notes, and maybe make some notes for tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s writing.","title":"notebooks and hems"},{"content":"\u0026hellip; the fact that I spent most of yesterday doing something I had already done, only in a more complex/assbackwards way, or\u0026hellip;.\n\u0026hellip; the fact that it took me four hours and a good nights sleep to figure this out \u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reader-feedback-whats-more-depressing/","summary":"\u0026hellip; the fact that I spent most of yesterday doing something I had already done, only in a more complex/assbackwards way, or\u0026hellip;.\n\u0026hellip; the fact that it took me four hours and a good nights sleep to figure this out \u0026hellip;","title":"reader feedback: what's more depressing"},{"content":"Ok, it\u0026rsquo;s clear to everyone, I\u0026rsquo;m sure that I\u0026rsquo;m a huge text geek, but also being a social scientist, I suppose I have to ask a question\u0026hellip;\nNow I\u0026rsquo;m not perfectly up on the \u0026ldquo;vi vs. emacs\u0026rdquo; history, but\u0026hellip;\nin the \u0026ldquo;bbedit vs. text-mate\u0026rdquo; debate, am I correct in assuming that bbedit is emacs and text-mate is vi?\nI mean I know that TextMate (mac programs in general) more or less uses emacs key bindings, and there\u0026rsquo;s nothing mode-wise that\u0026rsquo;s quite like vi(m), but despite that\u0026hellip;.\nanyone want to fight me on this ;)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/text-geek/","summary":"Ok, it\u0026rsquo;s clear to everyone, I\u0026rsquo;m sure that I\u0026rsquo;m a huge text geek, but also being a social scientist, I suppose I have to ask a question\u0026hellip;\nNow I\u0026rsquo;m not perfectly up on the \u0026ldquo;vi vs. emacs\u0026rdquo; history, but\u0026hellip;\nin the \u0026ldquo;bbedit vs. text-mate\u0026rdquo; debate, am I correct in assuming that bbedit is emacs and text-mate is vi?\nI mean I know that TextMate (mac programs in general) more or less uses emacs key bindings, and there\u0026rsquo;s nothing mode-wise that\u0026rsquo;s quite like vi(m), but despite that\u0026hellip;.\nanyone want to fight me on this ;)","title":"text geek"},{"content":"\u0026hellip;and then tycho fell of the face of the earth.\nWell not really, but you\u0026rsquo;d think it.\nThere isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be a tealart piece this friday. These things happen. Free time has gone to knitting (I\u0026rsquo;m now on the \u0026ldquo;interminable neck hem\u0026rdquo; phase of the sweater), sleep (glorious sleep), and writing other things.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not foreclosing the possibility of weekend updates though.\nHave a good friday.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-one-where/","summary":"\u0026hellip;and then tycho fell of the face of the earth.\nWell not really, but you\u0026rsquo;d think it.\nThere isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be a tealart piece this friday. These things happen. Free time has gone to knitting (I\u0026rsquo;m now on the \u0026ldquo;interminable neck hem\u0026rdquo; phase of the sweater), sleep (glorious sleep), and writing other things.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not foreclosing the possibility of weekend updates though.\nHave a good friday.","title":"the one where..."},{"content":"Welcome to part two of our Station Keeping _installment \u0026ldquo;Walking Away.\u0026rdquo; You can read part one here, and be sure to check out the rest of the series. We will return next week for our special \u0026ldquo;week long\u0026rdquo; finale starting Monday afternoon. We\u0026rsquo;re already getting started on our second series so if you want to participate now is the time. As always we welcome and encourage your feedback in the comments section or to tycho@tealart.com. Cheers, tycho\n\u0026ldquo;Walking Away, Part 1\u0026rdquo; was written by `tycho garren \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_ the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-11-walking-away-2/","summary":"Welcome to part two of our Station Keeping _installment \u0026ldquo;Walking Away.\u0026rdquo; You can read part one here, and be sure to check out the rest of the series. We will return next week for our special \u0026ldquo;week long\u0026rdquo; finale starting Monday afternoon. We\u0026rsquo;re already getting started on our second series so if you want to participate now is the time. As always we welcome and encourage your feedback in the comments section or to tycho@tealart.com. Cheers, tycho\n\u0026ldquo;Walking Away, Part 1\u0026rdquo; was written by `tycho garren \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_ the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.","title":"Station Keeping #11: Walking Away, Pt. 2"},{"content":"I have to admit that despite my previous blatherings about my text-file system, I--for the most part--have given up keeping track of my todo list in text files, or as blog posts on the other blog. My down-falling, was, I think, that I tried to organize what I was working on too much, rather than just let things flow, and ultimately tried to over-organize the lists, or the process, to the point that maintaining the list became too much of a chore in its own right. So I ditched it and went back to the paper notebook, and in an odd way, let my project planning guide my lists, in a frightfully disorganized, but ultimately useful mode.\nThen I read a post on 43Folders, and remember something about file organization that the obsessive compulsive in me forgets: if you have good search tools, and you\u0026rsquo;re at least vaguely consistent, you can be as disorganized as you want, because you\u0026rsquo;ll still be able to find everything. Often faster if it\u0026rsquo;s all in one file.\nThis is opposed to the other school of thought on text file organization, which is, make lots of little text files and put each project/object/etc in it\u0026rsquo;s own file. The problem with this, from where I\u0026rsquo;m standing is that with every object/chunk that you add to the system, you have to decide weather or not the chunk \u0026ldquo;counts\u0026rdquo; as something desecrate or not.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve tenuously started a text file. I\u0026rsquo;m calling it, codex.txt. and I\u0026rsquo;m just adding to it as I need to take notes, and add items. URLs of things that I need to do, the beginnings of emails, snippets of emails that seem important, and so forth. The only tricks\u0026quot; I\u0026rsquo;m using are, line folding so that I can hide parts I\u0026rsquo;m not working on when I want to, as well as basic markdown formating so that I can produce html or PDF files should I need to.\nThe result? I like it. The lessons, in summary:\nDon\u0026rsquo;t over organize, it can get in your way. Work with your brain, not against it. Chances are, you\u0026rsquo;re pretty organized as it is, even if you don\u0026rsquo;t think you are. Don\u0026rsquo;t fight this, as it can make your life more difficult. Use good search tools to do your work for you. This includes spotlight in OS X (and similar technologies in other operating systems,) but mostly your text editors \u0026ldquo;find\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;search\u0026rdquo; options, as well as tools like grep, which should be available on all operating systems. To be fair, it\u0026rsquo;s not this simple, because I\u0026rsquo;m not living in one, and only one text file, essays, stories, and other more isolated projects (like this article), get their own text file, and some larger projects, like Station Keeping, or my current fiction writing project, have a cluster of similarly named files. In GTD terms we\u0026rsquo;re talking about using a single big file for project planning, research, and collection, and then \u0026ldquo;working\u0026rdquo; in different files.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/one-text-file-to-rule-them-all/","summary":"I have to admit that despite my previous blatherings about my text-file system, I--for the most part--have given up keeping track of my todo list in text files, or as blog posts on the other blog. My down-falling, was, I think, that I tried to organize what I was working on too much, rather than just let things flow, and ultimately tried to over-organize the lists, or the process, to the point that maintaining the list became too much of a chore in its own right. So I ditched it and went back to the paper notebook, and in an odd way, let my project planning guide my lists, in a frightfully disorganized, but ultimately useful mode.\nThen I read a post on 43Folders, and remember something about file organization that the obsessive compulsive in me forgets: if you have good search tools, and you\u0026rsquo;re at least vaguely consistent, you can be as disorganized as you want, because you\u0026rsquo;ll still be able to find everything.","title":"One Text File to Rule Them All"},{"content":"I was completely and totally un-caffinated today. It was tragic, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of still a zombie.\nI need to start looking for a new job, it also needs to be a little cooler outside, because it\u0026rsquo;s sort of depressing when going between the door and the car makes you a little heat sick. Current job leaves little emotional energy to get applications together\u0026hellip;\nMy car is repaired. Apparently the positive battery connector was \u0026ldquo;bad,\u0026rdquo; which meant that I spent a day waiting for jump-starts when I wanted to go anywhere. Which sucked. New (to me) cars should work, damn it. Thank god it was so minor, but still.\nMy sweater (body) is done, and I have to say that I rather like the set in sleeve approach. I need to do it again, to cement it and what not, but I\u0026rsquo;m calling it a success. I have about half of the collar left to go, and then a collar hem, and then sleeves. But but my queue for sleeves is somewhat long so we\u0026rsquo;ll avoid talking about that overly much.\nIn writing related news, I wrote 73 words on the final remaining part of this season of station keeping, which given that this part is pretty short, is probably a good start. Also, I did some more pricing and math in my head with regards to the Editorial Project (I wanted to figure out a way to produce a semi-regular SF anthology using POD technology and what not, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t look like is going to be viable in the way that I thought it would be; I\u0026rsquo;m still going to do it, but I\u0026rsquo;m going to do it differently.)\nAnyway, I hope you\u0026rsquo;re well, and we\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, I promise!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/incoherance/","summary":"I was completely and totally un-caffinated today. It was tragic, I\u0026rsquo;m sort of still a zombie.\nI need to start looking for a new job, it also needs to be a little cooler outside, because it\u0026rsquo;s sort of depressing when going between the door and the car makes you a little heat sick. Current job leaves little emotional energy to get applications together\u0026hellip;\nMy car is repaired. Apparently the positive battery connector was \u0026ldquo;bad,\u0026rdquo; which meant that I spent a day waiting for jump-starts when I wanted to go anywhere. Which sucked. New (to me) cars should work, damn it. Thank god it was so minor, but still.\nMy sweater (body) is done, and I have to say that I rather like the set in sleeve approach. I need to do it again, to cement it and what not, but I\u0026rsquo;m calling it a success. I have about half of the collar left to go, and then a collar hem, and then sleeves.","title":"incoherance"},{"content":"So I know there are LaTeX screenplay classes but I\u0026rsquo;d like to know if it would be possible to to take the output of scripts I write in TextMate with screenwriting bundle, and put them into LaTeX. Also, would it be possible, then, with the LaTeX to have continued and other niftiness that the \u0026ldquo;prince\u0026rdquo; implementation doesn\u0026rsquo;t have?\nI think the answer to my question is \u0026ldquo;yes\u0026rdquo; but I need to find a way to script this properly, I think a number of properly placed RegExp find and replaces could do the trick, and I think one could make that work with a TextMate macro, and a couple of snippets\u0026hellip; But ruby or perl would be more efficient, I think, unfortunately I\u0026quot;m inept.\nJust a thought\u0026hellip;\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/latex-screenplays/","summary":"So I know there are LaTeX screenplay classes but I\u0026rsquo;d like to know if it would be possible to to take the output of scripts I write in TextMate with screenwriting bundle, and put them into LaTeX. Also, would it be possible, then, with the LaTeX to have continued and other niftiness that the \u0026ldquo;prince\u0026rdquo; implementation doesn\u0026rsquo;t have?\nI think the answer to my question is \u0026ldquo;yes\u0026rdquo; but I need to find a way to script this properly, I think a number of properly placed RegExp find and replaces could do the trick, and I think one could make that work with a TextMate macro, and a couple of snippets\u0026hellip; But ruby or perl would be more efficient, I think, unfortunately I\u0026quot;m inept.\nJust a thought\u0026hellip;\nCheers, tycho","title":"LaTeX screenplays"},{"content":"Welcome to Station Keeeping, I have for you, a script I\u0026rsquo;m calling \u0026ldquo;Walking Away,\u0026rdquo; which I\u0026rsquo;m presenting in two parts, so come back on thursday for the conclusion of this installment. I\u0026rsquo;m excited to see what you think of this format, I quite enjoyed it, and I hope you do too. The finale will start monday afternoon. Stay tuned! Cheers, tycho\n\u0026ldquo;Walking Away, Part 1\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-11-walking-away-1/","summary":"Welcome to Station Keeeping, I have for you, a script I\u0026rsquo;m calling \u0026ldquo;Walking Away,\u0026rdquo; which I\u0026rsquo;m presenting in two parts, so come back on thursday for the conclusion of this installment. I\u0026rsquo;m excited to see what you think of this format, I quite enjoyed it, and I hope you do too. The finale will start monday afternoon. Stay tuned! Cheers, tycho\n\u0026ldquo;Walking Away, Part 1\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.","title":"Station Keeping #11: Walking Away, Pt. 1"},{"content":"(that\u0026rsquo;s of course the voice over from Joss Whedon\u0026rsquo;s production company.)\nI guess I don\u0026rsquo;t have a great deal of news to report, but I feel like I need to get a blog entry out, so here I am. I finished the body of the sweater today (save the neck) that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for weeks and weeks. I\u0026rsquo;m used a new shoulder shaping method, and I think that it is on the whole a success, although I think there are a number of very finer points in this sweater that didn\u0026rsquo;t work out perfectly. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, and there\u0026rsquo;s a reason that I don\u0026rsquo;t sell my finished products. I am of course too lazy to go back and fix it, and since its shetland yarn, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that that would be a great idea. I will try and get pictures of it up at some point, I might wait until there is a neck/collar.\nIn other news, I had what is in retrospect a fairly surreal day, and I have better hopes that tomorrow won\u0026rsquo;t be so frickin weird. I did get some good things done. Like I wrote some emails that had been nagging at me, and I made a phone call that has been on my list(s) for far too long, and I changed the font on TealArt, and fixed some of the errors in the way the site renders (and I\u0026rsquo;m much more pleased with the way the site looks as a result). I was also able to pull together a post for TealArt this morning which is a good thing indeed.\nOne of the things I\u0026rsquo;m avoiding by writing this, is getting the first part of the station keeping post that I have planned for tomorrow ready, but frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t trust myself.\nAnyway, bed beckons, and I hope you\u0026rsquo;re well. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/grrr-arg/","summary":"(that\u0026rsquo;s of course the voice over from Joss Whedon\u0026rsquo;s production company.)\nI guess I don\u0026rsquo;t have a great deal of news to report, but I feel like I need to get a blog entry out, so here I am. I finished the body of the sweater today (save the neck) that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for weeks and weeks. I\u0026rsquo;m used a new shoulder shaping method, and I think that it is on the whole a success, although I think there are a number of very finer points in this sweater that didn\u0026rsquo;t work out perfectly. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, and there\u0026rsquo;s a reason that I don\u0026rsquo;t sell my finished products. I am of course too lazy to go back and fix it, and since its shetland yarn, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that that would be a great idea. I will try and get pictures of it up at some point, I might wait until there is a neck/collar.","title":"grrr.... arg"},{"content":"Hello friends!\nI hope you had a good a productive weekend. This message will be brief (sorry!). As you can see, perhaps the biggest news for TealArt is the new design. The template is completely home grown, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with the result. I have to imagine that a good percentage of our readership is via RSS, so in a sense it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much, but I do think that the old design was, ahem difficult to read and squished. I hope this addresses that problem. One person pointed out that our look is very \u0026ldquo;web 1.0\u0026rdquo; and I think that\u0026rsquo;s completely true and I embrace that. We\u0026rsquo;re just a text based weblog and there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot between you and the text. As there should be.\nMy other concern, and Chris\u0026rsquo; predictable comment, is that the font is atypical and hard to read. This monospaced font (\u0026ldquo;monaco,\u0026rdquo; or courier if you don\u0026rsquo;t have it). Is the font that I live in, and so maybe I\u0026rsquo;m used to it. In any case we\u0026rsquo;re talking about how to make it a little more livable for you all, and if you have any recommendations, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be making a few tweaks over the next week or so. On my list already is:\nA template for static pages (ie. our profiles, that our outside of the loop) like our profiles. Narrow the comment entry field so that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t spill over. Make an adjustment to the category pages so that they display a complete, rather than a partial list of entries in a given category. Anything else to add to this list is of course welcome. And if you have an idea about how to use a cool font that isn\u0026rsquo;t Verdana, Times, or Georgia, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear it.\nIn terms of TealArt content for the rest of the week:\nThere\u0026rsquo;s going to be another two-part Station Keeping story. This is the penultimate installment, and it\u0026rsquo;s a little bit different: it\u0026rsquo;s a script. I\u0026rsquo;ve always been intrigued by scripts and I quite like writing them, but I have until now, not had a very good way of getting a script into any sort of format, particularly one readable on a website. But there\u0026rsquo;s an amazing screen writing bundle for TextMate, which is the ideal writing environment for me at the moment. I had a great deal of fun with this installment, and I\u0026rsquo;ll talk a little bit more about it in the intro tomorrow, but I\u0026rsquo;d really like to know what you all think: I\u0026rsquo;m considering doing large portions (all) of Season 3 as a script, and would really like to know how it plays.\nI also have an essay on writing and productivity for you on wednesday, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be something fun on Friday.\nIn terms of me, I\u0026rsquo;m adjusting to life back here. Classes start next week, and while it\u0026rsquo;s good to have classes to go to, they weren\u0026rsquo;t the classes that I had hoped for, and at least some part of me is saying \u0026ldquo;but I just graduated!\u0026rdquo; All of these things are true, but these classes are pretty exciting, and on the whole I think a good thing. I have scores of things to do between now and then, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about a lot of the stuff that I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to.\nOne of those things (and I promise that this is the last thing), is this new novella that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. Being more of a longer-form guy, I haven\u0026rsquo;t really had a chance to spend a lot of time with a fiction project in years (save station keeping, and the project from whence it grew), and it\u0026rsquo;s great to be working on something. I\u0026rsquo;d probably be pretty pleased no matter how it was turning out, fiction writing is one of those things that I just need to do, but having said that, it\u0026rsquo;s turning out really well. I feel pretty good about my process and the product. I\u0026rsquo;m done with the first chapter, for now, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to mull over the second chapter which I hope to have a serious dent in by this time next week. It\u0026rsquo;s not TealArt, per se, but its exciting, so that\u0026rsquo;s good enough for me.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve rambled for long enough, I think it\u0026rsquo;s time to get ready for the day in earnest. Have a good week, and I\u0026rsquo;ll see you tomorrow for a new Station Keeping.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/late-breaking-tealart/","summary":"Hello friends!\nI hope you had a good a productive weekend. This message will be brief (sorry!). As you can see, perhaps the biggest news for TealArt is the new design. The template is completely home grown, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with the result. I have to imagine that a good percentage of our readership is via RSS, so in a sense it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much, but I do think that the old design was, ahem difficult to read and squished. I hope this addresses that problem. One person pointed out that our look is very \u0026ldquo;web 1.0\u0026rdquo; and I think that\u0026rsquo;s completely true and I embrace that. We\u0026rsquo;re just a text based weblog and there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot between you and the text. As there should be.\nMy other concern, and Chris\u0026rsquo; predictable comment, is that the font is atypical and hard to read. This monospaced font (\u0026ldquo;monaco,\u0026rdquo; or courier if you don\u0026rsquo;t have it).","title":"Late-Breaking TealArt"},{"content":"These are the CDs I\u0026rsquo;m taking to KDHX this morning for the Family Reunion Radio show from 10am-12pm. You could listen online, otherwise be entertained. Cheers!\nFormat for this week\u0026rsquo;s radio show listings:\nTitle artist album label (if I have it/etc.) CD 1 Cher Amis Buvons Le Vent Du Nord Maudite Misson! Borealis Recording Quatre Poilus Le Vent Du Nord Maudite Misson! Borealis Recording La Caille Janet Russell and Christine Kydd Dancin\u0026rsquo; Chantin' GreenTrax Trois Navires de Ble Great Big Sea Turn Rhino / Wea Les Fille Des Forges / Mairi Nighean Alastair / Up \u0026amp; Awa\u0026rsquo; Wi\u0026rsquo; The Laverock Janet Russell and Christine Kydd Dancin\u0026rsquo; Chantin' GreenTrax Marie Blanche / Cuckoo\u0026rsquo;s Nest / Old French Barachois Barachois - Acadian Music From Prince Edward Island House Party Breton Dances John Renbourn Group Live in America Flying Fish Records Bastarache La Rigondaine Barachois Barachois - Acadian Music From Prince Edward Island House Party Rigu Esva Llan de Cubel L\u0026rsquo;otro Llau de La mar Tengo De Rondar To Valle Xeliba Ferrunu Di Madre In Figlia - From Mother to Daughter Fiamma Fumana 1.0 Omnium Romonson De La Panera Xeliba Ferrunu L\u0026rsquo;otro Llau de La mar Llan de Cubel L\u0026rsquo;otro Llau de La mar CD 2 The Balad of Serenity Sonny Rohdes Firefly Fox Fidelity Regina Spector Begin to Hope Sire Strong Women Rule us All with Their Tears Brian McNeil The Back O\u0026rsquo; The North Wind Greentrax When the Saint\u0026rsquo;s Go Marching IN Joseph Spence Living on the Halleluja Side Smithsonian Folkways Hugan Fhathast Rory Campbell/Malcolm Stit Nusa Shil Me Fein Triona Ni Dohmhnaill Triona Green Linnet Nusa Rory Campbell/Malcolm Stit Nusa Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine/Cross the Fence John Skelton \u0026amp; Kieran O\u0026rsquo;Hare Double Barreled Self The Wee Lass on the Brae Triona Ni Dohmhnaill Triona Green Linnet An Paistin Fionn Niamh Parsons Niamh Parsons Green Linnet Stor A Stor A Ghra Triona Ni Dohmhnaill Triona Green Linnet CD 3 Hard Luck Stories Richard and Linda Thompson Pour Down Like Silver Ume Imports Robin Spraggon\u0026rsquo;s Old Grey Mare Kathryn Tikell and Friends The Northuberland Collection Park Records Gaudete Steleye Span Below the Salt Chrysalis Eg E Liden Eg Frode Nyvold Skjemt Og Sjanti Self Sir John Fenwick\u0026rsquo;s The Flower Amang Them / Sir Sidney Smith\u0026rsquo;s March Kathryn Tikell and Friends The Northuberland Collection Park Records Black Muddy River Norma Waterson Norma Waterson Hannibal The Grey Funnel Line The Starboard List Songs of Tall Ships/Cruising Around Yarmoth Genes Records Danse Polka Frode Nyvold Skjemt Og Sjanti Self Is there for Honest Poverty Old Blind Dogs Fit? Green Linnet What\u0026rsquo;s that I Hear? Phil Ochs All the News That\u0026rsquo;s Fit to Sing Collector\u0026rsquo;s Choice Mabel Mike Seeger Fresh Oldtime String Band Music Roounder (?) ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/radio-show-songs-we-dont-understand/","summary":"These are the CDs I\u0026rsquo;m taking to KDHX this morning for the Family Reunion Radio show from 10am-12pm. You could listen online, otherwise be entertained. Cheers!\nFormat for this week\u0026rsquo;s radio show listings:\nTitle artist album label (if I have it/etc.) CD 1 Cher Amis Buvons Le Vent Du Nord Maudite Misson! Borealis Recording Quatre Poilus Le Vent Du Nord Maudite Misson! Borealis Recording La Caille Janet Russell and Christine Kydd Dancin\u0026rsquo; Chantin' GreenTrax Trois Navires de Ble Great Big Sea Turn Rhino / Wea Les Fille Des Forges / Mairi Nighean Alastair / Up \u0026amp; Awa\u0026rsquo; Wi\u0026rsquo; The Laverock Janet Russell and Christine Kydd Dancin\u0026rsquo; Chantin' GreenTrax Marie Blanche / Cuckoo\u0026rsquo;s Nest / Old French Barachois Barachois - Acadian Music From Prince Edward Island House Party Breton Dances John Renbourn Group Live in America Flying Fish Records Bastarache La Rigondaine Barachois Barachois - Acadian Music From Prince Edward Island House Party Rigu Esva Llan de Cubel L\u0026rsquo;otro Llau de La mar Tengo De Rondar To Valle Xeliba Ferrunu Di Madre In Figlia - From Mother to Daughter Fiamma Fumana 1.","title":"Radio Show: Songs we don't Understand..."},{"content":"once upon a time everyone knew how to drive manual transmissions, because thats all there was; just like once upon a time, everyone knew how to write code and use command line interfaces because thats all there was.\nNow we have GUIs and automatic transmissions.\nStick shifts can sometimes function as a sort of rudimentary security system: not as many people know how to drive them, less demand/competition, less expensive, and therefore less likely to be stolen.\nMight, command lines, eventually take a similar path, that they become less hackable because people are less likely to know how to use them?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/command-lines-and-stick-shift/","summary":"once upon a time everyone knew how to drive manual transmissions, because thats all there was; just like once upon a time, everyone knew how to write code and use command line interfaces because thats all there was.\nNow we have GUIs and automatic transmissions.\nStick shifts can sometimes function as a sort of rudimentary security system: not as many people know how to drive them, less demand/competition, less expensive, and therefore less likely to be stolen.\nMight, command lines, eventually take a similar path, that they become less hackable because people are less likely to know how to use them?","title":"command lines and stick shift"},{"content":"While I\u0026rsquo;d probably be perfectly happy if the rest of the world subsisted only on IRC and email for digital communication, I\u0026rsquo;ve long given up and accepted the role of instant messengers in our lives. Nevertheless, I am left with an important question:\nWhile I think Jabber/Gtalk is probably ideal, I recognize that AIM is a defacto standard. I\u0026rsquo;m not happy about this, but\u0026hellip;. why doesn\u0026rsquo;t this platform after probably 10 years, have offline messaging? other services have it, and have had it for ever. Hell, AOL bought and integrated ICQ which had it, so why isn\u0026rsquo;t there real support for it?\nend rant\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-instant-messaging/","summary":"While I\u0026rsquo;d probably be perfectly happy if the rest of the world subsisted only on IRC and email for digital communication, I\u0026rsquo;ve long given up and accepted the role of instant messengers in our lives. Nevertheless, I am left with an important question:\nWhile I think Jabber/Gtalk is probably ideal, I recognize that AIM is a defacto standard. I\u0026rsquo;m not happy about this, but\u0026hellip;. why doesn\u0026rsquo;t this platform after probably 10 years, have offline messaging? other services have it, and have had it for ever. Hell, AOL bought and integrated ICQ which had it, so why isn\u0026rsquo;t there real support for it?\nend rant","title":"of instant messaging..."},{"content":"just here with a thought:\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to do it in this story because it would muck everything up, but\u0026hellip;.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve seen in a couple of places in the SF world, (dealing with telepathy) the basic idea where, telekentic abilities are dealt with as really strong telepathy, that if you\u0026rsquo;re a really strong telepath, maybe you\u0026rsquo;d be able to move stuff around with your brain.\nRight? Ok.\nSo this sounds all well and good, I mean thoughts are just thoughts, and moving matter is hard because matter is real. Right? Ok\u0026hellip;\nThis fundamentally assumes that thought is not material, which I think is pretty flawed. We think in our brains.\nThen, why isn\u0026rsquo;t telepathy, very finely honed telekinesis? Sure it\u0026rsquo;s easy to lift your tea cup with your brain, but you need much more dexterity to sense the flow of neurotransmitters and electrical currents in the brain\u0026hellip;.\n\u0026hellip;it seems I need to write some brain SF\u0026hellip;\nalso, and unrelatedly, I don\u0026rsquo;t understand this \u0026ldquo;superhero\u0026rdquo; thing that a lot of people do. it\u0026rsquo;s like alien to me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/psionics-telepathy-and-telekentics/","summary":"just here with a thought:\nI\u0026rsquo;m not going to do it in this story because it would muck everything up, but\u0026hellip;.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve seen in a couple of places in the SF world, (dealing with telepathy) the basic idea where, telekentic abilities are dealt with as really strong telepathy, that if you\u0026rsquo;re a really strong telepath, maybe you\u0026rsquo;d be able to move stuff around with your brain.\nRight? Ok.\nSo this sounds all well and good, I mean thoughts are just thoughts, and moving matter is hard because matter is real. Right? Ok\u0026hellip;\nThis fundamentally assumes that thought is not material, which I think is pretty flawed. We think in our brains.\nThen, why isn\u0026rsquo;t telepathy, very finely honed telekinesis? Sure it\u0026rsquo;s easy to lift your tea cup with your brain, but you need much more dexterity to sense the flow of neurotransmitters and electrical currents in the brain\u0026hellip;.\n\u0026hellip;it seems I need to write some brain SF\u0026hellip;","title":"psionics: telepathy and telekentics"},{"content":"So rather than post something witty about regular expressions with our friends G and H, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post some links that I\u0026rsquo;ve gathered about regular expressions and sed. First up, regular expression resources:\nOne Regular Expreson Tutorial Another Regexp Guide Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Discussion of Anchors RegExp Tutorial -Regex Tutorials GREP In Project for Text Mate I\u0026rsquo;d like to make special note of this final item. GREP in Project command for TextMate. It\u0026rsquo;s awesome, and uses GREP, a great fast command line tool for Unix to search projects (and files as well) in TextMate. And it\u0026rsquo;s pretty. You can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that.\nThis is almost a good transition into another bunch of links that I\u0026rsquo;ve collected on sed. Sed, (Stream Editor), is sort of a text editor with out an interface, and lets you basically use regular expressions to do find and replaces from the command line. Pretty awesome if you ask me. Anyway, read and learn.\nSed Tutorials Sed Tutorial Sed Guide About.com Sed Sed in Wikipedia Have a good weekend, I\u0026rsquo;ll be on tychoish this weekend, and I\u0026rsquo;m always an email away.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/better-living-through-regular-expressions-linksresources/","summary":"So rather than post something witty about regular expressions with our friends G and H, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post some links that I\u0026rsquo;ve gathered about regular expressions and sed. First up, regular expression resources:\nOne Regular Expreson Tutorial Another Regexp Guide Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Discussion of Anchors RegExp Tutorial -Regex Tutorials GREP In Project for Text Mate I\u0026rsquo;d like to make special note of this final item. GREP in Project command for TextMate. It\u0026rsquo;s awesome, and uses GREP, a great fast command line tool for Unix to search projects (and files as well) in TextMate. And it\u0026rsquo;s pretty. You can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that.\nThis is almost a good transition into another bunch of links that I\u0026rsquo;ve collected on sed. Sed, (Stream Editor), is sort of a text editor with out an interface, and lets you basically use regular expressions to do find and replaces from the command line. Pretty awesome if you ask me.","title":"Better Living Through Regular Expressions: Links/Resources"},{"content":"I guess, in retrospect, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this redesign of tealart for a few days, but I have it the final push tonight, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to present you with a completely overhauled, and completely original1 TealArt. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to hear what you all think. It\u0026rsquo;s a very simple design, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have any fancy web 2.0 crap stuff happening, which think is just as well. It\u0026rsquo;s all CSS and XHTML.\nMy biggest concern is that there\u0026rsquo;s too much happening, and that there\u0026rsquo;s not enough whitespace. My second biggest concern is that people won\u0026rsquo;t see the mono-spaced font for the comforting kitsch that I see in it.\nIn so far as I hand coded everything more or less by hand in a text editor, rather than tweaking an existing template. I\u0026rsquo;m pleased with the result.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tealart-redesign/","summary":"I guess, in retrospect, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this redesign of tealart for a few days, but I have it the final push tonight, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to present you with a completely overhauled, and completely original1 TealArt. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty.\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to hear what you all think. It\u0026rsquo;s a very simple design, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have any fancy web 2.0 crap stuff happening, which think is just as well. It\u0026rsquo;s all CSS and XHTML.\nMy biggest concern is that there\u0026rsquo;s too much happening, and that there\u0026rsquo;s not enough whitespace. My second biggest concern is that people won\u0026rsquo;t see the mono-spaced font for the comforting kitsch that I see in it.\nIn so far as I hand coded everything more or less by hand in a text editor, rather than tweaking an existing template. I\u0026rsquo;m pleased with the result.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;","title":"tealart redesign"},{"content":" I have subscribed to tristram shandy, via email. In 212 parts. In less than six months I\u0026rsquo;ll be one step closer to being even more of a dweeb. you should read tristram shandy with me. I\u0026rsquo;ve started a tealart redesign. I predict more serifs in our future. knitting is progressing, as is writing. I think I was in a stuck place for a while, but despite not getting more time in my life, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to be more productive. if you\u0026rsquo;re waiting for an email from me, I\u0026rsquo;m probably writing it. you should ping me though. I\u0026rsquo;m about half an inch from the crazy cool part of this sweater. The end is near, this means that I need to have a better idea about what I\u0026rsquo;m going to do next. Ha! Sorry for the general lack of updates. I\u0026rsquo;m still thinking of you and of tychoish.com.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/news-of-note/","summary":"I have subscribed to tristram shandy, via email. In 212 parts. In less than six months I\u0026rsquo;ll be one step closer to being even more of a dweeb. you should read tristram shandy with me. I\u0026rsquo;ve started a tealart redesign. I predict more serifs in our future. knitting is progressing, as is writing. I think I was in a stuck place for a while, but despite not getting more time in my life, I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to be more productive. if you\u0026rsquo;re waiting for an email from me, I\u0026rsquo;m probably writing it. you should ping me though. I\u0026rsquo;m about half an inch from the crazy cool part of this sweater. The end is near, this means that I need to have a better idea about what I\u0026rsquo;m going to do next. Ha! Sorry for the general lack of updates. I\u0026rsquo;m still thinking of you and of tychoish.com.","title":"news of note"},{"content":"Welcome to Part 2 of Station Keeping \u0026ldquo;Network Upgrades.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m sorry for the confusion of not mentioning until yesterday that the story was \u0026ldquo;to be continued\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Well it is/was (and the post reflects that,) and here\u0026rsquo;s the continuation. The usual suggestions go about `reading the rest of station keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_, and `participating \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/particpate\u0026gt;`_ in TealArt and Station Keeping. For those of you keeping track at home, the conclusion of #10 part 2, means that there are only two more episodes of the first run of Station Keeping left before our first break. Never fear, we\u0026rsquo;re already planning out whats going to happen in SK2 and SK3, so stay tuned, and know that now is a great time to get involved.\nLast time, we saw Marc and David in the the bar, Another Round, waiting for the station\u0026rsquo;s network tech, Julia, to come buy and reinforce the network connection, read on to see how this little portrait of life on Hanm Centre concludes, and please do enjoy this continuation.--cheers, tycho\n\u0026ldquo;Please do,\u0026rdquo; he said. He looked at Marc, who had a sly and pleasant grin. The good doctor still looked weary, but at least weary and entertained. Julia immediately found the access panel and plugged in her equipment with\nDavid remained mazed with the speed, authority, and detail in Julia\u0026rsquo;s speech and behavior: not to mention her deft ability to deflect the conversation away from a topic that she didn\u0026rsquo;t want to talk about. He realized that despite her appearance, her subjective experience of age, that her chronological age might be a lot less. Relativity and interstellar did strange things to this society.\nDavid found that his hands had gone back to dusting, and Marc had somehow produced a portable computer terminal and looked to be making some sort of notes, although they were both just trying to appear busy to decrease the awkwardness of not really having anything to do while the technology guru worked.\nAlmost before she had begun it seemed, Julia unplugged her gear, and replaced the panel. She stood up, \u0026ldquo;There, done. With the hardware stuff at least.\u0026rdquo; She brushed a renegade strand of hair behind her ear, exposing the contact points for a node interface.\nDavid would have mistaken the contact points for jewelry, if not for their number and placement, well, in a away, despite their function, they were jewelry in a certain sense.\n\u0026ldquo;Most of the reinforcement process happens in an algorithm script, actually. But you still have to get the hardware ready for the process. You\u0026rsquo;ll be up and running by the end of this shift, if that\u0026rsquo;s ok.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s certainly fine. We\u0026rsquo;re not opening till next weekend. You\u0026rsquo;ll be there I trust?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Of course, wouldn\u0026rsquo;t miss it, particularly not with a reinforced drop like this.\u0026rdquo; She smiled, wondering why she had said something so silly; everyone knew that she had the best connection on the station. \u0026ldquo;I guess they don\u0026rsquo;t call them pleasantries for nothing,\u0026rdquo; she thought. \u0026ldquo;Well if you need anything, you know where to reach me.\u0026rdquo; Then she was gone, almost as quickly as she had come.\nMarc stood up and walked toward the door, to meet David who was toggling the lights beside the door. \u0026ldquo;What did I say?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re right she is good.\u0026rdquo; David conceded. \u0026ldquo;Who else is like that on the crew that you haven\u0026rsquo;t told me about.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Well you could come to staff meetings and find out.\u0026rdquo; Marc said: he didn\u0026rsquo;t try to stifle the grin.\nDavid laughed. \u0026ldquo;Maybe then I could prove your wrong about my doodles.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;ll call it your \u0026lsquo;Post-Late Period: A Revival.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t you dare.\u0026rdquo; David chuckled and playfully elbowed Marc in the ribs, as they made for their quarters.\n\u0026ldquo;Network Upgrades\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-10-network-upgrades/","summary":"Welcome to Part 2 of Station Keeping \u0026ldquo;Network Upgrades.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m sorry for the confusion of not mentioning until yesterday that the story was \u0026ldquo;to be continued\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Well it is/was (and the post reflects that,) and here\u0026rsquo;s the continuation. The usual suggestions go about `reading the rest of station keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_, and `participating \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/particpate\u0026gt;`_ in TealArt and Station Keeping. For those of you keeping track at home, the conclusion of #10 part 2, means that there are only two more episodes of the first run of Station Keeping left before our first break. Never fear, we\u0026rsquo;re already planning out whats going to happen in SK2 and SK3, so stay tuned, and know that now is a great time to get involved.\nLast time, we saw Marc and David in the the bar, Another Round, waiting for the station\u0026rsquo;s network tech, Julia, to come buy and reinforce the network connection, read on to see how this little portrait of life on Hanm Centre concludes, and please do enjoy this continuation.","title":"Station Keeping #10, Part 2: Network Upgrades"},{"content":"I mentioned the kernel of this idea [here]1 and I wanted to take some time to expand upon this. Here\u0026rsquo;s what happened. I was listening to a podcast, where Cory Doctorow wrote about apparoching writing as something that worked best if you didn\u0026rsquo;t approach it as a ritual, and rather as a habit.\nHe said, basically that there are lots of things we get done because they\u0026rsquo;re rituals. Personal hygiene, reading before bed, and so forth, and that writing should be done in the same sort of way. Get up, read the paper, write an idea down, shower, write 100 words, get on the bus, outline, and so forth. The second part of this \u0026ldquo;habitual\u0026rdquo; method is that you always write (or do whatever it is you do) weather you feel like it or not.\nFor instance, I almost never want to eat breakfast until I\u0026rsquo;ve been awake for a couple of hours, but I\u0026rsquo;ve learned that I need to make myself eat something when I wake up regardless.\nInterestingly, and this is where I thought it broke down is that Cory also said that you should be able to write at any time, if you have a moment, and avoid building rituals around your writing habit. Now I have to say that habits tend to be pretty ritualistic, so while I think we\u0026rsquo;re talking over a very fine line here, the mindset that he proposes I think is a pretty good one. Be able to write anywhere and anytime that you have an idea and a moment. Don\u0026rsquo;t get yourself hyped up so that you can only write in the mornings after your second cup of tea, if your email is answered, and you\u0026rsquo;re listening to your ipod in your noise canceling headphones. It becomes very hard to satisfy all of these conditions, and if you happen to be in an off day, who knows how long it\u0026rsquo;ll be till you have a chance to write again. Don\u0026rsquo;t set yourself up for such quandaries, it\u0026rsquo;s more important to get material written.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also a big proponent of being protective of your time, and attempting to firewall my schedule so that, for instance, I can wake up in the morning and write from about 8:30 till 12, do chores in the afternoon, and take care of other tasks in the evening like coding, website design, and correspondence. Sometimes I get a second wind between about 7:30 and 11pm and can do more writing then, but often not. This isn\u0026rsquo;t because I\u0026rsquo;m not able to write in the afternoons, but I know that I can work best in the morning, so I take advantage of that, I guess.\nI do know that it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to get \u0026ldquo;I work best in these circumstances\u0026rdquo; confused with \u0026ldquo;I can only work in these circumstances,\u0026rdquo; and that\u0026rsquo;s the larger point. The one thing that sticks in my head about this whole segment is that Cory said that when he was writing he felt like some stuff was great and some stuff was crap, but when he went back later, he couldn\u0026rsquo;t tell the difference, and upon reflection, I think he\u0026rsquo;s probably right.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been had a James Thruber quote in my email sig file for a while, \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t get it right, get it written,\u0026rdquo; which came to my attention via my father (an aunt told him that when he was embarking on graduate school v.2,) and I like the sentiment.\ncheers, tycho\nI totally can\u0026rsquo;t find the link, at all, sorry. I might have, I\u0026rsquo;m realizing blogged inside my head but forgotten to actually post it. Sigh. On the other hand I might not be crazy and posted it in my \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; notebook.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/productivity-habit-and-ritual/","summary":"I mentioned the kernel of this idea [here]1 and I wanted to take some time to expand upon this. Here\u0026rsquo;s what happened. I was listening to a podcast, where Cory Doctorow wrote about apparoching writing as something that worked best if you didn\u0026rsquo;t approach it as a ritual, and rather as a habit.\nHe said, basically that there are lots of things we get done because they\u0026rsquo;re rituals. Personal hygiene, reading before bed, and so forth, and that writing should be done in the same sort of way. Get up, read the paper, write an idea down, shower, write 100 words, get on the bus, outline, and so forth. The second part of this \u0026ldquo;habitual\u0026rdquo; method is that you always write (or do whatever it is you do) weather you feel like it or not.\nFor instance, I almost never want to eat breakfast until I\u0026rsquo;ve been awake for a couple of hours, but I\u0026rsquo;ve learned that I need to make myself eat something when I wake up regardless.","title":"Productivity: Habit and Ritual"},{"content":"Welcome to Hanm Centre for this week\u0026rsquo;s Station Keeping this is installment #10 of our first season, and it will be posted in two parts, one today, and one on Thursday. I hope you enjoy. Remember, as always, that SK is a community project and we would very much enjoy and encourage your `participation \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/\u0026gt;`_, and as always we welcome your feedback to: tycho@tealart.com. It\u0026rsquo;s time for Station Keeping. --cheers tycho\nMarc walked into the bar, \u0026ldquo;Another Round,\u0026rdquo; as the sign now read. He had just gotten done with a tiring but ultimately uneventful shift and was ready to change into more comfortable clothing. \u0026ldquo;It looks like you\u0026rsquo;re almost done here, you\u0026rsquo;re opening next friday?\u0026rdquo; Marc hadn\u0026rsquo;t been by the bar in a week or so, David knew what he was doing, or at least pretended well, and didn\u0026rsquo;t much need his input. Despite his worldly academic credentials and lengthly service record he was really mostly a homebody.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah. It\u0026rsquo;ll be good to have this weekend off, and I\u0026rsquo;d rather not have to deal with the opening and finishing up all at once.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You ready to head home?\u0026rdquo; He asked pointedly.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m done; but I agreed to hang around to let the tech admin come in to reinforce the network connection here, I suspect we\u0026rsquo;ll need a lot of pull when this place is full.\u0026rdquo; So mostly I\u0026rsquo;m just biding my time. He picked up the rag he was dusting with. \u0026ldquo;You have a good shift?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I did, but it was long, the usual run of the mill complaints mostly,\u0026rdquo; Marc said taking a seat at the bar and holding his head up with his arm. \u0026ldquo;Which is for the better, I\u0026rsquo;m afraid of what this closed system will do once we have anything more virulent than a flu, or some such,\u0026rdquo; he continued, pausing for a moment to remember anything else from the shift. \u0026quot; I\u0026rsquo;m never quite sure what Doctor Reese is going to do, but she\u0026rsquo;s effective and people seem to like her. Anyway, I only had one meeting today, and got a chance to work on some research: so not a bad shift just long.\u0026quot; Marc rambled on, for a while and then paused. He checked his time piece, \u0026ldquo;When did she say she was coming by to do the work?\u0026rdquo; he asked finally.\n\u0026ldquo;About twenty minutes ago, I think. She said she\u0026rsquo;d been busy\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;She\u0026rsquo;s always busy. The woman doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, it seems to me. You\u0026rsquo;d like her she\u0026rsquo;s got personality, or something.\u0026rdquo; Marc paused, and chuckled. \u0026ldquo;Actually you should see her doodling from our staff meetings, they rival your \u0026rsquo;early period,\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; he said, the laughter perking him up a bit.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, come on, my later doodles were better, I was just in charge of the meetings during my \u0026rsquo;late period,\u0026rsquo; I think I deserve some slack.\u0026rdquo; David retorted, grinning by now: of all their \u0026ldquo;canned arguments,\u0026rdquo; this one might just have been his favorite.\n\u0026ldquo;Sorry I\u0026rsquo;m late,\u0026rdquo; Julia said as she walked quckly and abruptly into the bar. The lights weren\u0026rsquo;t on, but the door was unlocked, and David had told her to just walk in incase he was in his office or the store room. \u0026ldquo;Network drop reinforced, you said?\u0026rdquo; She asked, not wasting any time on pleasantries.\n\u0026ldquo;Yes. That was the plan.\u0026rdquo; David said. \u0026quot; You\u0026rsquo;re\u0026hellip;\u0026quot;\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;Julia, we talked earlier,\u0026rdquo; she said quickly, unable to come up with a more witty response sooner.\n\u0026ldquo;The tech systems administrator?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Aye, Sir.\u0026rdquo; she said goofily, showing the badge. on her shirt.\nIt was the first time that anyone on Hanm Centre had called him \u0026ldquo;sir,\u0026rdquo; in a situation that didn\u0026rsquo;t make his skin crawl. realized that she might not realized that he had been Navy. \u0026ldquo;Aren\u0026rsquo;t you a bit young for that. There must be 15 people on your staff or something.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Well, I have 20, right now, but I\u0026rsquo;m still looking for a few more. You know any Enhancers that want to clean up?\u0026rdquo; Julia retorted.\n\u0026ldquo;Not yet, but I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you out here. Is it big out here? Enhancers, that is.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Bigger on Grish, they say, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t been there in the flesh for,\u0026rdquo; she paused and thought for a moment obviously counting in her head, \u0026ldquo;Well lets not try and count that one out. But yeah, there\u0026rsquo;s some on Hanm, but not enough. The node here is pretty big for the rim, and I just need more people to keep it working well,\u0026rdquo; Julia said. \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll get started?\u0026rdquo;\n*to be continued\u0026hellip;*\n\u0026ldquo;Network Upgrades\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-network-upgrades/","summary":"Welcome to Hanm Centre for this week\u0026rsquo;s Station Keeping this is installment #10 of our first season, and it will be posted in two parts, one today, and one on Thursday. I hope you enjoy. Remember, as always, that SK is a community project and we would very much enjoy and encourage your `participation \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/\u0026gt;`_, and as always we welcome your feedback to: tycho@tealart.com. It\u0026rsquo;s time for Station Keeping. --cheers tycho\nMarc walked into the bar, \u0026ldquo;Another Round,\u0026rdquo; as the sign now read. He had just gotten done with a tiring but ultimately uneventful shift and was ready to change into more comfortable clothing. \u0026ldquo;It looks like you\u0026rsquo;re almost done here, you\u0026rsquo;re opening next friday?\u0026rdquo; Marc hadn\u0026rsquo;t been by the bar in a week or so, David knew what he was doing, or at least pretended well, and didn\u0026rsquo;t much need his input. Despite his worldly academic credentials and lengthly service record he was really mostly a homebody.","title":"Station Keeping #10: Network Upgrades Pt. 1"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to a number of important place markers in my knitting these past few days. Just to make note of them:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to the beginning of the heel flap of my first successful toe-up stranded sock. Its good, and I\u0026rsquo;m surprised that the shetland, is some how, not itchy on the foot at all. Magic, I tell you. I\u0026rsquo;ve recently started the front-neck steek of the stranded sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the past 6 weeks, or so. 13 rows until the large short row section start. I\u0026rsquo;ve completed the gusset decreases on the second of a pair of plain worsted weight socks. This is going to be an awfully fetching pair. At the same time I have not:\ndecided what kind of shaping I\u0026rsquo;m going to use on my next sweater, or even if it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a cardigan or not. (I have picked out the patterns) made any progress on the great sleeve slush pile. bought any more yarn started any additional socks. I have developed a small list of things that I want to knit in the future:\nhats, I need more/new hats, including both watch-clock and tam/barets more sweaters and fewer socks. cardigans, and I want to experiment with more yoke styles And just for grins, a list of yarns to get in the future:\nmore harrisville shetland, with particular attention to blacks, grays, and blues. more domy heather from old mill. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/stopping-places/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to a number of important place markers in my knitting these past few days. Just to make note of them:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten to the beginning of the heel flap of my first successful toe-up stranded sock. Its good, and I\u0026rsquo;m surprised that the shetland, is some how, not itchy on the foot at all. Magic, I tell you. I\u0026rsquo;ve recently started the front-neck steek of the stranded sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for the past 6 weeks, or so. 13 rows until the large short row section start. I\u0026rsquo;ve completed the gusset decreases on the second of a pair of plain worsted weight socks. This is going to be an awfully fetching pair. At the same time I have not:\ndecided what kind of shaping I\u0026rsquo;m going to use on my next sweater, or even if it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a cardigan or not. (I have picked out the patterns) made any progress on the great sleeve slush pile.","title":"Stopping Places"},{"content":"A good thread on 43folders about creative productivity, and indeed a lot of what I tend to think about. At the same time its my sense that the thread is populated entirely by people talking about webdesign and not, say, writers, but these things happen.\nLink here\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/creativity-and-gtd/","summary":"A good thread on 43folders about creative productivity, and indeed a lot of what I tend to think about. At the same time its my sense that the thread is populated entirely by people talking about webdesign and not, say, writers, but these things happen.\nLink here","title":"Creativity and GTD"},{"content":"Well it\u0026rsquo;s been an eventful, if not entirely productive week. As I\u0026rsquo;m sure you saw on tychoish, my plans to go to graduate school next year at the University of Chicago, fell apart. While this is certainly a wrench in the machinery, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken the opportunity to tighten some bolts, and I think I have a plan. Although I spent much of my free time last week watching the fourth season of Farscape, which was utterly enjoyable.\nMy knitting projects are progressing, and the novella is about 1000 words long after it\u0026rsquo;s first week, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with that. I\u0026rsquo;m still having this crisis over how to write the gender (or more precisely, lack thereof) of a couple of characters, and I\u0026rsquo;m trying like the dickens to just get into the story and not blather too much, despite wanting to blather a lot. I expect to finish up Station Keeping, Season 1 this week. We\u0026rsquo;re almost there, so it\u0026rsquo;s just a matter of pulling some stuff into shape. I have articles and article ideas floating around my head so there\u0026rsquo;ll be essays.\nThough I can make no promises, I\u0026rsquo;m also feeling a design impulse coming on, so there might be a new design sometime soon. We can only hope.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s new SK, of course, but here\u0026rsquo;s the deal\u0026hellip; The end of the season was rushing up on us, and we had a lot of things that we wanted to get done, and my installments were getting a bit long. So rather than just post one long Station Keeping episode every week, we\u0026rsquo;re going to break it up. New Station Keeping on Tuesdays and Thursdays this week and next, and the following week--the last week of Station Keeping for at least a month---there\u0026rsquo;ll be new station keeping every day. They\u0026rsquo;re individually a bit shorter than what we\u0026rsquo;re used to every week, but in the end you get more.\nAs always I want to remind you about particpation in TealArt. This is a community project, and it isn\u0026rsquo;t all about me, and what I have to say. You\u0026rsquo;re a part of this project as well. While we won\u0026rsquo;t be posting Station Keeping for a while, we are going to be working quite feverishly on the project, in addition to our regular content, and you\u0026rsquo;re of course invited to participate. I hope to hear from you.\nIn terms of other content, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to move \u0026ldquo;Better Living through Regular Expressions\u0026rdquo; to Fridays, because I think that sort of lighthearted good fun, is more of a Friday thing than Wednesday thing. For wednesday, I have the first in a two-part productivity/writing related musing. I think you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy it.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch. Have a good week.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-tealart-herald/","summary":"Well it\u0026rsquo;s been an eventful, if not entirely productive week. As I\u0026rsquo;m sure you saw on tychoish, my plans to go to graduate school next year at the University of Chicago, fell apart. While this is certainly a wrench in the machinery, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken the opportunity to tighten some bolts, and I think I have a plan. Although I spent much of my free time last week watching the fourth season of Farscape, which was utterly enjoyable.\nMy knitting projects are progressing, and the novella is about 1000 words long after it\u0026rsquo;s first week, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with that. I\u0026rsquo;m still having this crisis over how to write the gender (or more precisely, lack thereof) of a couple of characters, and I\u0026rsquo;m trying like the dickens to just get into the story and not blather too much, despite wanting to blather a lot. I expect to finish up Station Keeping, Season 1 this week.","title":"The TealArt Herald"},{"content":"Hello Friends!\nThis message is being cross-posted to my writing group. Sorry for the double reads.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m working on this project, and I\u0026rsquo;m doing ok with it. But I have a problem.\nI forgot to assign gender to these characters. The story I\u0026rsquo;m telling is an expansion of a story that I outlined in the prologue of a (failed) novel I wrote a long time ago. In that prologue I was pretty careful to avoid saying he or she, and because it was short that wasn\u0026rsquo;t an issue.\nSo I expanded the story and I\u0026rsquo;m writing now, and I still haven\u0026rsquo;t gendered the two main characters (who are at least theoretically/abstractly a couple), and so my question is: do you think I can get away with using Spivak pronouns, should I give in and make them boys or boy and girl.\nFirst of all Spivak pronouns were developed by computer gamers (I think, it\u0026rsquo;s defiantly an internet thing) and derived from \u0026ldquo;they/their/them\u0026rdquo; forms ie:\nhe and she = ey (pronounced as a long e sound) his and hers = eir(s?) (pronunced as \u0026ldquo;air\u0026rdquo;) him and her = em (pronounced as an M, like the first syllable of Emily) Plurals, of course obtained by prefixing a th-\nMy issue is that this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly a story that\u0026rsquo;s all about gender or sexuality in such obvious terms, but it\u0026rsquo;s my work, and I\u0026rsquo;m who I am, so it\u0026rsquo;s part of what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about. Also, since the story focuses on them, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to have such things sort of slip into the background like I usually would. I fear that using Spivaks would draw undue attention, at least at first to the fact that they\u0026rsquo;re not being gendered, and that\u0026rsquo;s something I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I can deal with.\nAs I think about it, the main kind of sentences I\u0026rsquo;m having trouble with are ones that talk about bodies, and movement (so mostly the \u0026ldquo;his\u0026rdquo; form: the pendant hung from (possessive pronoun) neck, and so forth). Most other things I can sort of work around, but it\u0026rsquo;s a question I\u0026rsquo;d think about, if you have ideas for this, I think that\u0026rsquo;d be great.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spivak-pronouns/","summary":"Hello Friends!\nThis message is being cross-posted to my writing group. Sorry for the double reads.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m working on this project, and I\u0026rsquo;m doing ok with it. But I have a problem.\nI forgot to assign gender to these characters. The story I\u0026rsquo;m telling is an expansion of a story that I outlined in the prologue of a (failed) novel I wrote a long time ago. In that prologue I was pretty careful to avoid saying he or she, and because it was short that wasn\u0026rsquo;t an issue.\nSo I expanded the story and I\u0026rsquo;m writing now, and I still haven\u0026rsquo;t gendered the two main characters (who are at least theoretically/abstractly a couple), and so my question is: do you think I can get away with using Spivak pronouns, should I give in and make them boys or boy and girl.\nFirst of all Spivak pronouns were developed by computer gamers (I think, it\u0026rsquo;s defiantly an internet thing) and derived from \u0026ldquo;they/their/them\u0026rdquo; forms ie:","title":"spivak pronouns"},{"content":"The original Star Trek was meant to be set 300 years in the future from the original air date, that obviously got mucked up with the fast-forward to TNG and the rest of the stories in that era, but still: 300 years at some point seemed like enough to get us out of our current problems and woes.\nThe foundation books are dated in the 10-11k, but it\u0026rsquo;s unclear if they use the same scale that we\u0026rsquo;re using (likely they are).\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how much of \u0026ldquo;news\u0026rdquo; this is because we haven\u0026rsquo;t explicitly said this, but I see Station Keeping as being set in the far flung future: present + 10k years.\nAt the same time, I just dated the narrative--but not the events of the story---I\u0026rsquo;m writing now at 2597.\nJust interesting\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/500-years/","summary":"The original Star Trek was meant to be set 300 years in the future from the original air date, that obviously got mucked up with the fast-forward to TNG and the rest of the stories in that era, but still: 300 years at some point seemed like enough to get us out of our current problems and woes.\nThe foundation books are dated in the 10-11k, but it\u0026rsquo;s unclear if they use the same scale that we\u0026rsquo;re using (likely they are).\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure how much of \u0026ldquo;news\u0026rdquo; this is because we haven\u0026rsquo;t explicitly said this, but I see Station Keeping as being set in the far flung future: present + 10k years.\nAt the same time, I just dated the narrative--but not the events of the story---I\u0026rsquo;m writing now at 2597.\nJust interesting\u0026hellip;","title":"500 years"},{"content":"When Sarah got the new implants, her colleagues started calling her ability to crack computer networks \u0026ldquo;telepathy.\u0026rdquo; She never noticed.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/implant/","summary":"When Sarah got the new implants, her colleagues started calling her ability to crack computer networks \u0026ldquo;telepathy.\u0026rdquo; She never noticed.","title":"Implant"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another list of Songs that I\u0026rsquo;m taking with me to do the radio show on August 5th, 2007. 10am-12pm on KDHX. You can listen online or on the radio (FM 88.1 in St. Louis, Missouri). This order isn\u0026rsquo;t final.\nFormat is as follows:\nTitle Artist (Label) Album Enjoy!\nCD 1 - Spirituals lead to Blood Bath The Banks of Sweet Primroses Blue Murder (Topic Records) No One Stands Alone Banks of Sweet Primroses Martin Simpson (Topic Records) The Bramble Briar King James Version Eliza Carthy (Topic Records) Rough Music The Shepherd\u0026rsquo;s Song Pete Morton (Harbourtown Records) Swarthmoor Poncho and Lefty The Poozies (Compass) Raise your Head, A Retrospective Antietam Lehto and Wright (New Folk Music) A Game of Chess Fair Annie Martin Simpson (Topic Records) The Bramble Briar Bill Norrie Martin Carthy (Topic Records) Right of Passage CD 2 - Sea Fairing The Back O\u0026rsquo; The North Wind Brian McNeill (Greentrax) The Back O\u0026rsquo; The North Wind Barbaree Peter Bellamy (Fledling Records) Both Sides Then We Have Fed our Sea David Jones (Minstrel) From England\u0026rsquo;s Shore Shawnee Town Martin Simpson (Topic Records) Sad or High Kicking For Free Joni Mitchell (Warner Brothers) Ladies of the Canyon Hard Love Martin Simpson (Red House) Martin Simpson Live Thick as a Brick (Side 2) Jethro Tull (Chrysalis) Thick as a Brick CD 3 - High Roads and Low Roads Come a Long Way Michelle Shocked (Polygram) Arkansas Traveler Pilgram\u0026rsquo;s Way Peter Bellamy (Self) Keep on Kippling Only a Hobo Hazel Dickens (Rounder) It\u0026rsquo;s Hard to Tell The Singer from the Song False Knight on the Road Steeleye Span (Chrysalis) Please to See the King The Devil\u0026rsquo;s Partiality Martin Simpson (Topic Records) Righteousness \u0026amp; Humidity Those Who Stayed Murder By Death (Eyeball) Like the Exorcist, But More Breakdancing Ease your Pain Hoyt Axton (Raven) Joy to the World/Country Anthem Handsome Molly Mick Jagger (Atlantic) Wandering Spirit Gathering Peascods + Rose Tree + Jerusalem Brass Monkey (Topic Records) Going and Staying Garryowen Martin Simpson (Dambuster) Nobody\u0026rsquo;s Fault But Mine ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/turn-your-radio-on/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another list of Songs that I\u0026rsquo;m taking with me to do the radio show on August 5th, 2007. 10am-12pm on KDHX. You can listen online or on the radio (FM 88.1 in St. Louis, Missouri). This order isn\u0026rsquo;t final.\nFormat is as follows:\nTitle Artist (Label) Album Enjoy!\nCD 1 - Spirituals lead to Blood Bath The Banks of Sweet Primroses Blue Murder (Topic Records) No One Stands Alone Banks of Sweet Primroses Martin Simpson (Topic Records) The Bramble Briar King James Version Eliza Carthy (Topic Records) Rough Music The Shepherd\u0026rsquo;s Song Pete Morton (Harbourtown Records) Swarthmoor Poncho and Lefty The Poozies (Compass) Raise your Head, A Retrospective Antietam Lehto and Wright (New Folk Music) A Game of Chess Fair Annie Martin Simpson (Topic Records) The Bramble Briar Bill Norrie Martin Carthy (Topic Records) Right of Passage CD 2 - Sea Fairing The Back O\u0026rsquo; The North Wind Brian McNeill (Greentrax) The Back O\u0026rsquo; The North Wind Barbaree Peter Bellamy (Fledling Records) Both Sides Then We Have Fed our Sea David Jones (Minstrel) From England\u0026rsquo;s Shore Shawnee Town Martin Simpson (Topic Records) Sad or High Kicking For Free Joni Mitchell (Warner Brothers) Ladies of the Canyon Hard Love Martin Simpson (Red House) Martin Simpson Live Thick as a Brick (Side 2) Jethro Tull (Chrysalis) Thick as a Brick CD 3 - High Roads and Low Roads Come a Long Way Michelle Shocked (Polygram) Arkansas Traveler Pilgram\u0026rsquo;s Way Peter Bellamy (Self) Keep on Kippling Only a Hobo Hazel Dickens (Rounder) It\u0026rsquo;s Hard to Tell The Singer from the Song False Knight on the Road Steeleye Span (Chrysalis) Please to See the King The Devil\u0026rsquo;s Partiality Martin Simpson (Topic Records) Righteousness \u0026amp; Humidity Those Who Stayed Murder By Death (Eyeball) Like the Exorcist, But More Breakdancing Ease your Pain Hoyt Axton (Raven) Joy to the World/Country Anthem Handsome Molly Mick Jagger (Atlantic) Wandering Spirit Gathering Peascods + Rose Tree + Jerusalem Brass Monkey (Topic Records) Going and Staying Garryowen Martin Simpson (Dambuster) Nobody\u0026rsquo;s Fault But Mine ","title":"turn your radio on"},{"content":"Much to my continual amusement and wonder, one of the most enduringly popular TealArt entries is Cool Nicknames, which I wrote when I stopped blogging as RealName, and started using tycho. Clearly people are in search of cool nicknames, and they stumble on the page from google, and frankly, while I would always welcome more readers of this site, that\u0026rsquo;s probably the one entry that I would be perfectly happy if no one ever read again, but here I am linking to it, so go figure.\nAnyway, once upon a time, I was a huge fan of blogging under my real name, but more recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve started to feel like I want to have more control over that name, and I guess I didn\u0026rsquo;t want a casual connection between my endeavors in science fiction and any academic work that I might end up doing in the future. Also, as a student of identity, I think the pen names and assumed names are really fascinating, and something that should be played with.\nAnd so, I have, in some circumstances, become tycho. While I quite like being the blogger known as \u0026ldquo;tycho,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m a little unsatified with this for a couple of reasons:\n1. I have a connection with my old name on these sites which isn\u0026rsquo;t really going to be removed, and there are a couple of online forms that for one reason or another, I still go by my given name it. 2. tycho, until now, hasn\u0026rsquo;t had a surname, which, and we can\u0026rsquo;t all be prince. 3. Connections between TealArt/tychoish, and published work related to TA/TY content. While clearly I have yet to decide anything, I\u0026rsquo;ve toyed with the idea of putting together some of my work (knitting and science fiction) in book form, and I\u0026rsquo;m unsure what the best way to credit this would be. I think tycho is perfect for the science fiction, but I think knitting might go best under my real name, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure, it\u0026rsquo;s something to think about.\nAnyway, on the surname question, I\u0026rsquo;ve thought of adding a number of things: family names that are in danger of dying out, parts of my real name, initials, so forth. I wanted something that was meaningful, but that also sounded good, something that was uncommon but not unheard of or hard to pronounce by english speakers, and something that had a little jewish tinge to it. The name tycho, comes from an old obsession, but also from a character that I was quite fond of in my first very unpublished1 novel, named \u0026ldquo;Tycho Morgan,\u0026rdquo; I liked that but, didn\u0026rsquo;t want to take that name, and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t right. After some pondering, I\u0026rsquo;ve gone back to the names that I use in that book, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ve decided on \u0026ldquo;garren2\u0026rdquo; as a good surname. \u0026ldquo;tycho garren\u0026rdquo; looks good, it works in the vague way that jews name after people, and it marks a connection to a project that means something to me.\ntycho garren3. I like it.\ncheers, tycho\nps. sorry, I don\u0026rsquo;t have a list of cool nicknames for you. I hope you enjoy the site though.\nAnd very unpublishable. But it\u0026rsquo;s for the best.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nGarren was the name of one of the ships in that book.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nWhy do I avoid capitalizing it? Because it isn\u0026rsquo;t my given name, because I think it looks better typographically (and in my own script) without caps, and I like that way.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cooler-nicknames/","summary":"Much to my continual amusement and wonder, one of the most enduringly popular TealArt entries is Cool Nicknames, which I wrote when I stopped blogging as RealName, and started using tycho. Clearly people are in search of cool nicknames, and they stumble on the page from google, and frankly, while I would always welcome more readers of this site, that\u0026rsquo;s probably the one entry that I would be perfectly happy if no one ever read again, but here I am linking to it, so go figure.\nAnyway, once upon a time, I was a huge fan of blogging under my real name, but more recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve started to feel like I want to have more control over that name, and I guess I didn\u0026rsquo;t want a casual connection between my endeavors in science fiction and any academic work that I might end up doing in the future. Also, as a student of identity, I think the pen names and assumed names are really fascinating, and something that should be played with.","title":"Cooler Nicknames"},{"content":"I just realized that the sweater I\u0026rsquo;m making right now, could very easily be considered a concept sweater. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to have it, and it might be the right weight for this environment, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be \u0026ldquo;right.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;ll be nifty. I\u0026rsquo;ve started the first part of the yoke decreases, which means that the rounds will start going faster, albeit very slowly.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to be buying one of the expensive new addi lace needles, because I have a discount at the yarn shop for teaching a class, and because I can feel the needle I\u0026rsquo;m currently using starting to go, and I think most of the sweaters I make in the next year will be on this kind of needle, so it\u0026rsquo;s worth it.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-update-concept-sweater/","summary":"I just realized that the sweater I\u0026rsquo;m making right now, could very easily be considered a concept sweater. It\u0026rsquo;ll be nice to have it, and it might be the right weight for this environment, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be \u0026ldquo;right.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;ll be nifty. I\u0026rsquo;ve started the first part of the yoke decreases, which means that the rounds will start going faster, albeit very slowly.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to be buying one of the expensive new addi lace needles, because I have a discount at the yarn shop for teaching a class, and because I can feel the needle I\u0026rsquo;m currently using starting to go, and I think most of the sweaters I make in the next year will be on this kind of needle, so it\u0026rsquo;s worth it.\nCheers!","title":"Knitting Update - Concept Sweater"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m posting this before going to bed. I\u0026rsquo;ve replied to most of the pressing emails in my inbox, so I feel pretty good about that. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been on a knitting kick, and have made what I feel is important progress on a sweater that now has an end in sight. This is a good thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve also only have 1 more episode of the regular run of Farscape to watch, and while this might not seem like a huge accomplishment, I\u0026rsquo;ve quite enjoyed it, so there.\nI have a short day at work tomorrow, which is to my liking. When I get home, though, I will have a score of chores and what not to do. Also, I need to get my brain back in gear for writing. While I usually don\u0026rsquo;t get much actual writing done during the week, I\u0026rsquo;m often a bit better about thinking through things and making notes, and writing things in the notebook. Alas, I haven\u0026rsquo;t done much of that this week.\nBut if I hope to do anything tomorrow other than nap pitifully, I need to go to bed now, so have a good day, and I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all soon.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/moving-forward/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m posting this before going to bed. I\u0026rsquo;ve replied to most of the pressing emails in my inbox, so I feel pretty good about that. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been on a knitting kick, and have made what I feel is important progress on a sweater that now has an end in sight. This is a good thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve also only have 1 more episode of the regular run of Farscape to watch, and while this might not seem like a huge accomplishment, I\u0026rsquo;ve quite enjoyed it, so there.\nI have a short day at work tomorrow, which is to my liking. When I get home, though, I will have a score of chores and what not to do. Also, I need to get my brain back in gear for writing. While I usually don\u0026rsquo;t get much actual writing done during the week, I\u0026rsquo;m often a bit better about thinking through things and making notes, and writing things in the notebook.","title":"moving forward"},{"content":"H: Hey buddy\nG to himself: [^H], please [^H].\n[AWKWARD SILENCE]\nG: Remember last week?\nH: what with the [[^\\n\\t][^\\W\\w]] here\nG: yeah\nH: what of it?\nG: well,\n*G PAUSES\nG: try: .\nH: fucking a.\nG: and be done with it.\nH: sigh\nG: not quite\nH: damn\nG: I think the real question is why can\u0026rsquo;t people actually learn to format a file in a logical way from the onset.\nH: Amen.\n[PAUSE]\nG: So what do you do with all this amazing perl power?\nH: Not much, most of the time, actually.\nG: You\u0026rsquo;re holding out on me.\nH PAUSES AND THEN MOCK SURRENDERS: Ok you\u0026rsquo;re right, I deleted X, and now the I rule my computer with an iron fist.\nG: Liar.\nH: Yeah, you\u0026rsquo;re right.\nG: Damn it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/better-living-through-regular-expressions-3/","summary":"H: Hey buddy\nG to himself: [^H], please [^H].\n[AWKWARD SILENCE]\nG: Remember last week?\nH: what with the [[^\\n\\t][^\\W\\w]] here\nG: yeah\nH: what of it?\nG: well,\n*G PAUSES\nG: try: .\nH: fucking a.\nG: and be done with it.\nH: sigh\nG: not quite\nH: damn\nG: I think the real question is why can\u0026rsquo;t people actually learn to format a file in a logical way from the onset.\nH: Amen.\n[PAUSE]\nG: So what do you do with all this amazing perl power?\nH: Not much, most of the time, actually.\nG: You\u0026rsquo;re holding out on me.\nH PAUSES AND THEN MOCK SURRENDERS: Ok you\u0026rsquo;re right, I deleted X, and now the I rule my computer with an iron fist.\nG: Liar.\nH: Yeah, you\u0026rsquo;re right.\nG: Damn it.","title":"Better Living Through Regular Expressions #3"},{"content":"http://celchu19.livejournal.com/58494.html\nsigh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/122/","summary":"http://celchu19.livejournal.com/58494.html\nsigh.","title":":("},{"content":"Welcome to Episode #9 of Station Keeping. If all goes well, we\u0026rsquo;ll begin our run up to the finale of our first episode of station keeping. Next week\u0026rsquo;s episode is a bit longer, and will be posted in two parts, the following episode is a special one, and then we\u0026rsquo;re ready for the finale, which might be a week long, which I think is terribly cool. Remember, as always, to check out past episodes of `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_ on the `SK site \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in participating or contributing to the Station Keeping project there\u0026rsquo;s `information here \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/participate\u0026gt;`_ on that kind of participation. We\u0026rsquo;re eager to have your contribution. Feel free to contact me via email: tycho@tealart.com. Enjoy, this week\u0026rsquo;s story! Cheers--tycho\nDoctoring \u0026ldquo;So doc, am I still alive?\u0026rdquo; Laben asked.\nMarc Perrin looked over his patient skeptically. He was checking for any obvious signs of disease or previously undetected injury, and consulted the medical scanners, and his acute perceptions of the mans autonomic functions. Marc had been a battle medic in a previous life, and he was pretty good at doctoring without input from the patient.\n\u0026ldquo;Seem to be,\u0026rdquo; Marc spoke softly and avoided eye contact. There was a pause before they both chuckled, it was a funny moment, but the tension didn\u0026rsquo;t really fall much.\n\u0026ldquo;Why are you here again?\u0026rdquo; Marc thought that he might have missed the presenting complaint: he doubted it, but he continued to be mystified.\n\u0026ldquo;Because, that\u0026rsquo;s how it works\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; Laben looked quizzically at the doctor.\nThe awkwardness was broken up by Doctor Mahal Reese who strode in rubbing the scrub solution on her hands \u0026ldquo;Construction worker, right?\u0026rdquo; she asked.\n\u0026ldquo;Yep\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s policy, and a danm good one, for all of the station-employed labors to get regular checkups: we don\u0026rsquo;t want people with medical concerns going on space walks and dealing with high voltage power systems.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Fair enough.\u0026rdquo; Marc turned his attention back to his patient. \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;ll your in great shape, may you stay that way for a long time. If your worried about anything, please fee; free to stop by,\u0026rdquo; Marc said \u0026ldquo;That was a silly thing to say, they were the only medical facility on the Station, of course he\u0026rsquo;s going to stop by.\u0026rdquo; He stood there for a moment, but when it was clear that the man didn\u0026rsquo;t have any questions he turned and walked over to a computer terminal and entered information into a report so the patient could leave without being starred at.\nThe medical facilities were completely abandoned, aside from the two doctors. There were a couple of techs in the adjacent lab that could assist if need be, but it was still erie. \u0026ldquo;Enjoy it while it lasts,\u0026rdquo; he thought.\n\u0026ldquo;So they teach you to be distant and allof core-side, or is that just how you are?\u0026rdquo; Reese asked after the door closed.\n\u0026ldquo;Pardon?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You didn\u0026rsquo;t interact with Laben very much, and he was here for a physical, at least out here we typically engage the patients a bit more, and stare at them a bit less.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I haven\u0026rsquo;t taught in a coreside meds-chool for years, so I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what they\u0026rsquo;re teaching these days,\u0026rdquo; the doctor attempted to deflect the criticism, but realized that the flippant answer might not be completely warranted. \u0026ldquo;Though I\u0026rsquo;m ok at assessing mental health, I generally like to examine physical health by observing behavior,\u0026rdquo; he continued. \u0026ldquo;But I suppose you\u0026rsquo;re right, I haven\u0026rsquo;t given formal physicals in years, or really done a lot of routine doctoring.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that we can\u0026rsquo;t be more interesting out here, but people still need caring for, and we need you even if you are a little weird.\u0026rdquo;\nMarc didn\u0026rsquo;t know how to feel, and attempted to avoid feeling entirely. \u0026ldquo;We have different approaches, as long as people get better we shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have a problem.\u0026rdquo; This was, Marc realized, an awkward way to establish himself as a leader--it was a good thing he didn\u0026rsquo;t have an interest in establishing an empire in the infirmary.\nYou\u0026rsquo;re going to hire me. David was startled when he realized there was another person in the bar, but he tried to hide it, with mild success. \u0026ldquo;Sorry, were not open yet,\u0026rdquo; David pointed at the hole in one of the walls, where he hoped to have a light fixture installed yesterday. Such was life.\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s alright, I\u0026rsquo;m not looking for a drink.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s good, cause it\u0026rsquo;s all warm,\u0026rdquo; David said, before he remembered that the people here drank everything warm. Weirdos.\n\u0026ldquo;My name\u0026rsquo;s Carter.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m David.\u0026rdquo; He tapped his collar bone in identification, and suddenly felt embarrassed for his appearance: he\u0026rsquo;d been working all morning, and he felt dirty.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, if you don\u0026rsquo;t want a drink, and you don\u0026rsquo;t know me, then what brings you to a bar that hasn\u0026rsquo;t opened yet.\u0026rdquo; David extended the broom that was in his hand. \u0026ldquo;You wanna sweep the floors for me?\u0026rdquo; He chuckled.\n\u0026ldquo;Actually, I would.\u0026rdquo; Carter took a step closer to David.\nDavid squinted, perplexed. \u0026ldquo;Um, ok.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I mean, I\u0026rsquo;m looking for a job if you\u0026rsquo;re hiring.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, right.\u0026rdquo; David hadn\u0026rsquo;t really considered hiring help, but upon reflection that seemed kind of foolish, he would need help at some point.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything worked out yet, of course, but yeah, we could give it a shot.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Great!\u0026rdquo; Carter smiled.\n\u0026ldquo;No one should be that happy about getting a job helping me,\u0026rdquo; David grumbled to himself.\n\u0026ldquo;Should I start now?\u0026rdquo; Carter was incredulous.\nDavid took the broom back, actually, all kidding around, the floor doesn\u0026rsquo;t actually need sweeping, but how about you come back the day after tomorrow and we\u0026rsquo;ll talk. I think I should have some things for you to do by then.\n\u0026ldquo;Ok, that works. I\u0026rsquo;ll see you then!\u0026rdquo; Carter turned and left as quickly and quietly as he entered, leaving David slightly dumb struck, and a little worried about what he\u0026rsquo;d gotten himself into. At least he\u0026rsquo;d have an interesting story for Marc tonight\u0026hellip;\n\u0026ldquo;Gainful Employment\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-gainful-employment/","summary":"Welcome to Episode #9 of Station Keeping. If all goes well, we\u0026rsquo;ll begin our run up to the finale of our first episode of station keeping. Next week\u0026rsquo;s episode is a bit longer, and will be posted in two parts, the following episode is a special one, and then we\u0026rsquo;re ready for the finale, which might be a week long, which I think is terribly cool. Remember, as always, to check out past episodes of `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_ on the `SK site \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in participating or contributing to the Station Keeping project there\u0026rsquo;s `information here \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/participate\u0026gt;`_ on that kind of participation. We\u0026rsquo;re eager to have your contribution. Feel free to contact me via email: tycho@tealart.com. Enjoy, this week\u0026rsquo;s story! Cheers--tycho\nDoctoring \u0026ldquo;So doc, am I still alive?\u0026rdquo; Laben asked.\nMarc Perrin looked over his patient skeptically. He was checking for any obvious signs of disease or previously undetected injury, and consulted the medical scanners, and his acute perceptions of the mans autonomic functions.","title":"Station Keeping #9: \u0026#8220;Gainful Employment\u0026#8221;"},{"content":" memes and literary rights of passage (retellings of nightfall; mars books). the difference between plots and arguments; stories and essays. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/essays-attempts/","summary":" memes and literary rights of passage (retellings of nightfall; mars books). the difference between plots and arguments; stories and essays. ","title":"essays \u003c=\u003e attempts"},{"content":"the bad news: my next year is unsure. once again. pondering the possibility of being a lame-o and staying here (believe me, not option one, but life happens).\nthe good news: new eager station keeping contributor possibility.\ngiven this, we must pose this question: will I have a ph.d. or be a science fiction internet sensation first? cast your votes now.\nor should I just stick to knitting.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-good-and-the-bad/","summary":"the bad news: my next year is unsure. once again. pondering the possibility of being a lame-o and staying here (believe me, not option one, but life happens).\nthe good news: new eager station keeping contributor possibility.\ngiven this, we must pose this question: will I have a ph.d. or be a science fiction internet sensation first? cast your votes now.\nor should I just stick to knitting.","title":"the good and the bad"},{"content":"Good Monday!\nI hope that you weekend was productive and restful. I think I was able to get a lot done and still have some time to relax and knit. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;m using a different sort of construction method (and modality, really) than I often do, and it\u0026rsquo;s taking a fair bit of brain power to keep things straight, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been neglecting my knitting for a while and it\u0026rsquo;s certainly interesting to see how I function (or don\u0026rsquo;t) in its absence. Thankfully it doesn\u0026rsquo;t take a lot of knitting time for me to get refreshed. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve managed the distinction between dedication to my craft and obsession.\nIn terms of TealArt this week, I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to say that \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;re back!\u0026rdquo; But then I realize that you probably haven\u0026rsquo;t noticed much, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been covering my tracks pretty well. I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty low on writing mojo, and/or I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending writing mojo in non-TealArt places: knitting patterns, Station Keeping projects that won\u0026rsquo;t go live for a year, and so forth. I was able to get my act together this weekend and get some content ready for this week.\nThere will be Station Keeping this week, as you\u0026rsquo;ve grown accustomed to. Though I think it is worth mentioning that we\u0026rsquo;re drawing close to the end of our first season: next week, I think, we\u0026rsquo;ll start getting ready for the finale. Which means more Station Keeping for a few weeks. When we\u0026rsquo;re done, we\u0026rsquo;ll be on hiatus for about a month, while we get ready for the second season. Have no fear, there\u0026rsquo;ll still be SK related content, just no stories for a while so we can collect ourselves, and figure out where we\u0026rsquo;re going.\nThere is of course another encounter in \u0026ldquo;Better Living through Regular Expressions in the land of1:\u0026rdquo; Pure joy. I have a call for you, If you have a regular expression form or template that you\u0026rsquo;ve written for a script or that you use in your day-to-day life, send it in to me and I\u0026rsquo;ll see if I can forward it to the guys ([GH]) and we\u0026rsquo;ll see what we can do with it.\nWhich brings me again to promote my nifty particpation page, which you might be interested in checking out if you want to contribute to Station Keeping, or any other part of TealArt. We\u0026rsquo;re a group project, and that means having a group and a community is of great importance to the site. Just so you know.\nOn Thursday, I\u0026rsquo;m posting the long awaited sequel to one of TealArt\u0026rsquo;s enduring classics; and I have, of all things, a post about creativity and productivity for friday. I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy.\nAnyway, I have to get ready for work, but I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a renewed interest in twittering of late, and for the up to the minute tycho, this is probably the place to check things out. Twitter\u0026rsquo;s are of course collected for a time in the site sidebar.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you all around. Be in touch!\nCheers, tycho\nps. The new job that Chris talked about a while ago starts today, if I\u0026rsquo;m counting right. Huzzah for him--and good luck.\nGH\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-tealart-post-intelligencer/","summary":"Good Monday!\nI hope that you weekend was productive and restful. I think I was able to get a lot done and still have some time to relax and knit. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;m using a different sort of construction method (and modality, really) than I often do, and it\u0026rsquo;s taking a fair bit of brain power to keep things straight, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been neglecting my knitting for a while and it\u0026rsquo;s certainly interesting to see how I function (or don\u0026rsquo;t) in its absence. Thankfully it doesn\u0026rsquo;t take a lot of knitting time for me to get refreshed. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve managed the distinction between dedication to my craft and obsession.\nIn terms of TealArt this week, I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to say that \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;re back!\u0026rdquo; But then I realize that you probably haven\u0026rsquo;t noticed much, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been covering my tracks pretty well. I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty low on writing mojo, and/or I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending writing mojo in non-TealArt places: knitting patterns, Station Keeping projects that won\u0026rsquo;t go live for a year, and so forth.","title":"The TealArt Post-Intelligencer"},{"content":"I just was browsing through stranded on fair isle and I saw the Irina sweater, that I think is in starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Scottish Garland.\u0026rdquo; Must. knit. it. someday.\nExcept I\u0026rsquo;d do it as a cardigan.\nAnd in two colors.\nAnd maybe with set in sleeves.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/must-knit-irina/","summary":"I just was browsing through stranded on fair isle and I saw the Irina sweater, that I think is in starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Scottish Garland.\u0026rdquo; Must. knit. it. someday.\nExcept I\u0026rsquo;d do it as a cardigan.\nAnd in two colors.\nAnd maybe with set in sleeves.","title":"Must Knit Irina"},{"content":"It strikes me that there must exist a piece of software that does the following task:\nAllow you to maintain a directory structure of plain text files with some sort of mark up of your choosing (ASCII, markdown, textile, html, etc.). for the purposes of example, lets say that these files are in the format of /FileName.txt When you go to /FileName.php (or whatever) the program: adds the content of a designated header.php and footer.php file to the begining and end of the file. runs the file through some sort of text filter That\u0026rsquo;s it. Maybe you\u0026rsquo;d want to figure out how to get an auto-generated page list, but that\u0026rsquo;s not necessary. Now I figure to make the whole thing work that the .txt files would need to be in a different directory than the directory that \u0026ldquo;users would be accessing\u0026rdquo;\nDoes this sound too much like blosxom? It strikes me that blosxom is sort of being pulled apart by too forces: the desire to hack it to death so that it does a bit more than what its designed for would otherwise suggest.\nAnother cool idea, would be, if the database of files, such as it is, is drawn from a subversion repository, though I\u0026rsquo;d certainly be happy with straight up FTP file system stuff.\nThere\u0026rsquo;d be no need for an interface outside of a config file, and no real security, outside of .htaccess (and I would expect that there\u0026rsquo;d be no small measure of .htaccess wizardry.)\nThoughts? pointers? cheers\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/someone-make-this-work/","summary":"It strikes me that there must exist a piece of software that does the following task:\nAllow you to maintain a directory structure of plain text files with some sort of mark up of your choosing (ASCII, markdown, textile, html, etc.). for the purposes of example, lets say that these files are in the format of /FileName.txt When you go to /FileName.php (or whatever) the program: adds the content of a designated header.php and footer.php file to the begining and end of the file. runs the file through some sort of text filter That\u0026rsquo;s it. Maybe you\u0026rsquo;d want to figure out how to get an auto-generated page list, but that\u0026rsquo;s not necessary. Now I figure to make the whole thing work that the .txt files would need to be in a different directory than the directory that \u0026ldquo;users would be accessing\u0026rdquo;\nDoes this sound too much like blosxom? It strikes me that blosxom is sort of being pulled apart by too forces: the desire to hack it to death so that it does a bit more than what its designed for would otherwise suggest.","title":"Someone Make This Work"},{"content":"I futzed around with this idea for a bit using php bloxsom, and well, I got it to handle markdown the way I want it to, and the page header stuff. but other than that. not so much. sigh. well what\u0026rsquo;s time anyway.\nI think the problem with this is that bloxsom is too blog-oriented, and for that, wordpress does a slightly better job, or at least, I\u0026rsquo;m more comfortable with it, even if I don\u0026rsquo;t need very many of the features.\nThough I have to say, for the notebook idea, which is what tychoish is supposed to be, I think bloxosm is better, I just don\u0026rsquo;t feel like fucking around with it.\nanyone with better ideas?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/still-trying/","summary":"I futzed around with this idea for a bit using php bloxsom, and well, I got it to handle markdown the way I want it to, and the page header stuff. but other than that. not so much. sigh. well what\u0026rsquo;s time anyway.\nI think the problem with this is that bloxsom is too blog-oriented, and for that, wordpress does a slightly better job, or at least, I\u0026rsquo;m more comfortable with it, even if I don\u0026rsquo;t need very many of the features.\nThough I have to say, for the notebook idea, which is what tychoish is supposed to be, I think bloxosm is better, I just don\u0026rsquo;t feel like fucking around with it.\nanyone with better ideas?","title":"still trying"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m going to fly by the seat of my pants in terms of song length, but here is the playlist I\u0026rsquo;m planning for the radio show tomorrow. You can listen to it live, or archived at the station\u0026rsquo;s website. I\u0026rsquo;ll be on from 10 am till 12 Noon. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit heavy on the songs, but I figure, what the hell, it makes sense. The list is in the Following format.\nSong Title Artist Label CD 1 Banks of the Sweet Primroses Brian Peters - Sharper than the Thorn Pugwash Music Young Collins Wood, Wilson, Carthy Wood, Wilson, Carthy Topic Records London Steeleye Span Spanning the Years Chrysalis Records Leaving of Liverpool Louis Killen Sailors, Ships \u0026amp; Chanteys, Vol. 1 Woodstock Richard Thompson Came upon a Child of God: A Tribute to Joni Mitchell Dressed to Kill Turpin Hero Eliza Carthy Rough Music Topic Records Never Tire of the Road Andy Irvine Rain on the Roof Kolo Stara Vlajna Kornog Kornog Green Linnet CD 2 Thick as a Brick (Side 1) Jethro Tull Thick as a Brick Chrysalis Records This is My Family Jan Marra Songs for Collectors Self Triad Crosby and Nash Another Stoney Evening Arista Icarus Martin and Jessica Simpson Red Roses Thunderbird Soldier, Soldier / The Flowers of Edinburgh Brass Monkey Sound and Rumor Topic Records CD 3 Sell Your Labour, Not Your Soul Brian McNeill If it Wisnae For The Union Greentrax The World Turned Upside Down Lehto and Wright The Thrashing Machine and Other Stories New Folk Records Ned of the Hill Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts Compass Records Andalus/Radio Marrakesh Richard Thompson Strict Tempo! Hannibal July, July! The Decemberists Castaways and Cutouts Kill Rock Stars King James Version Eliza Carthy Rough Music Topic Records The Rose in June Ian Robb Jiig Fallen Angle Music Hallelujah Jeff Buckley Grace Sony The Lord is in this Place Fairport Convention What we did on our Holidays Umvd Import ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/family-runion-for-29-july-2007/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m going to fly by the seat of my pants in terms of song length, but here is the playlist I\u0026rsquo;m planning for the radio show tomorrow. You can listen to it live, or archived at the station\u0026rsquo;s website. I\u0026rsquo;ll be on from 10 am till 12 Noon. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit heavy on the songs, but I figure, what the hell, it makes sense. The list is in the Following format.\nSong Title Artist Label CD 1 Banks of the Sweet Primroses Brian Peters - Sharper than the Thorn Pugwash Music Young Collins Wood, Wilson, Carthy Wood, Wilson, Carthy Topic Records London Steeleye Span Spanning the Years Chrysalis Records Leaving of Liverpool Louis Killen Sailors, Ships \u0026amp; Chanteys, Vol. 1 Woodstock Richard Thompson Came upon a Child of God: A Tribute to Joni Mitchell Dressed to Kill Turpin Hero Eliza Carthy Rough Music Topic Records Never Tire of the Road Andy Irvine Rain on the Roof Kolo Stara Vlajna Kornog Kornog Green Linnet CD 2 Thick as a Brick (Side 1) Jethro Tull Thick as a Brick Chrysalis Records This is My Family Jan Marra Songs for Collectors Self Triad Crosby and Nash Another Stoney Evening Arista Icarus Martin and Jessica Simpson Red Roses Thunderbird Soldier, Soldier / The Flowers of Edinburgh Brass Monkey Sound and Rumor Topic Records CD 3 Sell Your Labour, Not Your Soul Brian McNeill If it Wisnae For The Union Greentrax The World Turned Upside Down Lehto and Wright The Thrashing Machine and Other Stories New Folk Records Ned of the Hill Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts Compass Records Andalus/Radio Marrakesh Richard Thompson Strict Tempo!","title":"Family Runion for 29 July 2007"},{"content":"I wrote this piece last Sunday for today, and then promptly forgot about it. See today\u0026rsquo;s other post for the reason why that the mentioned post doesn\u0026rsquo;t appear. Sorry for the weird ass blogging. Cheers, ty\nThis week I got, from the library, a copy of `The Sexual Self: The Construction of Sexual Scripts \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Self-Construction-Scripts/dp/0826515584\u0026gt;`_ edited by Michael Kimmel, on the recommendation of my old advisor, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some of my \u0026ldquo;non-internets\u0026rdquo;1 reading time on this book. Also I\u0026rsquo;m sitting on `Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Para-literary \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Shorter-Views-Thoughts-Politics-Paraliterary/dp/0819563692/ref=sr_1_1/103-7241147-6496611?ie=UTF8\u0026amp;s=books\u0026amp;qid=1185110406\u0026amp;sr=1-1\u0026gt;`_, which I think I need to give some time to again.\nMy initial idea for the Friday Deleuze series was to make an excuse-opportunity to read something that I wanted to read, that would be helpful to have read, that would be fun, and that I probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t read unless I had an excuse (like a TealArt post.) A while back I swore off writing about my academic interests and projects because I wanted to erect a slightly firmer boundary between work and play, and because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to have to divide energy on those projects between the \u0026ldquo;real,\u0026rdquo; and blogging projects. I think not being in school at the moment changes things a bit, but on the whole I\u0026rsquo;d like to maintain this divide, even if it\u0026rsquo;s illusory.\nThe other thing that I realized is that, I\u0026rsquo;ve written 8 installments in this series, and perhaps I\u0026rsquo;m just running out of steam, given the \u0026ldquo;trudging\u0026rdquo; that is generally required of this kind of reading, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it makes the best second degree reading2.\nOn the other hand, as small as my contribution to the TheoryBlogging community is, I\u0026rsquo;m hesitant to give it up entirely. So I think formal Deleuze blogging is probably going to go on break for a while while I get caught up with myself.\nFor this week, I thought about doing a kind of \u0026ldquo;reverse\u0026rdquo; reading list, rather than say \u0026ldquo;I want to read these books,\u0026rdquo; this list would have \u0026ldquo;questions that I want to answer.\u0026rdquo; And while I like this issue, I can\u0026rsquo;t think of a TealArt appropriate way that would be intelligible by anyone other than me. I think while I\u0026rsquo;m taking a break from AO, and before I dive into D\u0026amp;R, I\u0026rsquo;m going to read some articles that I\u0026rsquo;ve had lying around for a long time, and just see what happens.\nSee you later today.\nIn our household, we\u0026rsquo;ve taken to referring to the interminable periods spent in front of the computer, reading RSS feeds and other pieces of internet treasure, as \u0026ldquo;reading the internets, all of them.\u0026rdquo; My father, has even taken to referring to syndicated RSS items as internets, leading to statements like \u0026ldquo;I have 43 more internets to read.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nand besides, who wants to read about someone else\u0026rsquo;s trudging. \u0026ldquo;I reads another chapter and it was interesting but unhelpful, and probably laid the groundwork for something that\u0026rsquo;s comming in the next couple of pages, but it was mostly abstruse.\u0026rdquo; I mean a lot of the book is rather playful\u0026hellip; but\u0026hellip;.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deleuzian-reading-list/","summary":"I wrote this piece last Sunday for today, and then promptly forgot about it. See today\u0026rsquo;s other post for the reason why that the mentioned post doesn\u0026rsquo;t appear. Sorry for the weird ass blogging. Cheers, ty\nThis week I got, from the library, a copy of `The Sexual Self: The Construction of Sexual Scripts \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Self-Construction-Scripts/dp/0826515584\u0026gt;`_ edited by Michael Kimmel, on the recommendation of my old advisor, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to spend some of my \u0026ldquo;non-internets\u0026rdquo;1 reading time on this book. Also I\u0026rsquo;m sitting on `Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Para-literary \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Shorter-Views-Thoughts-Politics-Paraliterary/dp/0819563692/ref=sr_1_1/103-7241147-6496611?ie=UTF8\u0026amp;s=books\u0026amp;qid=1185110406\u0026amp;sr=1-1\u0026gt;`_, which I think I need to give some time to again.\nMy initial idea for the Friday Deleuze series was to make an excuse-opportunity to read something that I wanted to read, that would be helpful to have read, that would be fun, and that I probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t read unless I had an excuse (like a TealArt post.","title":"Deleuzian Reading List"},{"content":"I got the chance to do some writing today at work. While the station keeping season finale isn\u0026rsquo;t done, and that\u0026rsquo;s ok, and I do have a little bit of revising to do on a couple of episodes, I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty much done with this first season. Which rocks something fierce.\nI\u0026rsquo;m busy transcribing my notes for season three into the new moleskine from the various bits of paper they were on. This of course means that I\u0026rsquo;m using a paper notebook more. This one\u0026rsquo;s a reporter notebook and I like it, but I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that the book with lines option isn\u0026rsquo;t/wasn\u0026rsquo;t that bad, but I think that\u0026rsquo;s just nostalgia. Part of my problem with it, seems to have been the ink, which I loved dearly, but wasn\u0026rsquo;t fast enough drying. sigh\nI think I need to write an essay about pipes and writing, and how it\u0026rsquo;s important to keep projects in all stages of development and production, otherwise you get hung up in one stage and can theoretically finish something and not have anything to do with various kinds of momentum, which is a terrible thing.\nwe\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/frickin-templates/","summary":"I got the chance to do some writing today at work. While the station keeping season finale isn\u0026rsquo;t done, and that\u0026rsquo;s ok, and I do have a little bit of revising to do on a couple of episodes, I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty much done with this first season. Which rocks something fierce.\nI\u0026rsquo;m busy transcribing my notes for season three into the new moleskine from the various bits of paper they were on. This of course means that I\u0026rsquo;m using a paper notebook more. This one\u0026rsquo;s a reporter notebook and I like it, but I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think that the book with lines option isn\u0026rsquo;t/wasn\u0026rsquo;t that bad, but I think that\u0026rsquo;s just nostalgia. Part of my problem with it, seems to have been the ink, which I loved dearly, but wasn\u0026rsquo;t fast enough drying. sigh\nI think I need to write an essay about pipes and writing, and how it\u0026rsquo;s important to keep projects in all stages of development and production, otherwise you get hung up in one stage and can theoretically finish something and not have anything to do with various kinds of momentum, which is a terrible thing.","title":"frickin' templates"},{"content":"Hello friends, it\u0026rsquo;s good to talk with you.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a week that that can only be described as weird. I once again, put off writing my friday Deleuze essay until Thursday night, which was predicated on the assumption that I\u0026rsquo;d get some free time during the week to read it, not to mention the fact that I\u0026rsquo;d be able to deal with focused thought by this point in the week\u0026hellip;. Alas I\u0026rsquo;m not.\nHowever, after drafting 74 words of pathetic blogging, I realized that I wrote, last weekend, a post for today. Aren\u0026rsquo;t I the prepared blogger? Ok, guilt-fest over, I\u0026rsquo;ll post that this afternoon, although I will note that I promised, in that essay, to write a post later that day. In the project of total honesty, I\u0026rsquo;ll not edit that out. I will, however, write a few notes that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about and pondering this week. Because really, bulleted list blogging is really awesome.\nI\u0026rsquo;m doing the radio show on Sunday morning from 10 am to Noon on KDHX FM 88.1 in St. Louis. I had hoped to play an episode of one of my favorite fiction pod-casts, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t heard back from him. Luckily I have the next three weeks, so maybe it\u0026rsquo;ll come through. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;m planning on playing side one of Jethro Tull\u0026rsquo;s Thick as a Brick. Because I can, damnit. You should listen, it streams and is archived on line if you misss it. I think part of the reason why I\u0026rsquo;m feeling so fried, is that thanks to an eager undergrad, I was able to start working on different projects at work. This meant that I could listen to podcasts again. The downside, I did a lot of thinking, and apparently that\u0026rsquo;s a semi-finite resource. Note to self. Listen to more music. Also, while I find many podcasts to be refreshing and inspiring, I cannot listen to people talking and write or even plan things to write. My moleskine, which I\u0026rsquo;ve been toting along with myself for some months, is almost full, but not quite, but the spine is starting to fall apart. I want to finish out to book before I start the new one, but at the same time, I don\u0026rsquo;t want it to fall apart, because I\u0026rsquo;d like to keep the book, mostly intact for archival purposes. Also I\u0026rsquo;m kind of excited that my new book, that I\u0026rsquo;ve had in store is a reporter notebook (so bound like a steno pad) and doesn\u0026rsquo;t have lines. The left-handed guy in me really likes this prospect.) I listened to one of Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s podcasts, which was his posting of an interview that \u0026ldquo;Oort Cloud\u0026rdquo; did with him, and I quite enjoyed it. There are a few topics that I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be visiting here in the future. One, he was able to talk about false consciousness in a straightforward and appropriate way, which was delightful. Also he talked about habitualizing writing as opposed to ritualizing it, and although his argument is pretty sound, I think the example he gives isn\u0026rsquo;t quite right, particularly in my case. Also Cory talked about his method of podcasting, which is to use it as a motivation to finish writing stories in a very barebones, low-editing sort of way, which I think is still really good. Anyway, this lit the podcasting bug under my ass, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have the computer power to start at the moment,1 at some point I\u0026rsquo;ll get my ass (and computer) into gear and get started. I have a personal/theoretical piece planned out about how \u0026ldquo;gender\u0026rdquo; as a location for analysis, for the kind of social science that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in, doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite work. While as I\u0026rsquo;m trying to explain this argument, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized some interesting ways of approaching this question, my main project in this planned essay was to explain explore why I (and probably some of my cohort) came into college with an interest in gender studies, but have left college with projects that are related, clearly, but quite distinct. I\u0026rsquo;m teaching a knitting class this Saturday. You probably don\u0026rsquo;t care much, but it meant that I had to write a rather extensive pattern/instruction handout. While I quite enjoyed this writing, and I think it will be a useful piece to have in reserve for future projects, it was a lot of writing by anyone\u0026rsquo;s standards, and understandably that took a lot out of me. Ironically, though most of my fiction and tealart writing time was sucked up by knitting, I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten much time to knit; fortunately the knitting is helpful in refreshing me, I find. That\u0026rsquo;s about all I have for today. I hope you enjoy, Talk to you soon.\nCheers, tycho\nFrankly, my computer isn\u0026rsquo;t really set up to deal with my email database, let alone audio production. Or perhaps more exactly, my computer can\u0026rsquo;t cope with audio production tasks and cope with all the other things that I need my computer to do all the time.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/friday-essay/","summary":"Hello friends, it\u0026rsquo;s good to talk with you.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a week that that can only be described as weird. I once again, put off writing my friday Deleuze essay until Thursday night, which was predicated on the assumption that I\u0026rsquo;d get some free time during the week to read it, not to mention the fact that I\u0026rsquo;d be able to deal with focused thought by this point in the week\u0026hellip;. Alas I\u0026rsquo;m not.\nHowever, after drafting 74 words of pathetic blogging, I realized that I wrote, last weekend, a post for today. Aren\u0026rsquo;t I the prepared blogger? Ok, guilt-fest over, I\u0026rsquo;ll post that this afternoon, although I will note that I promised, in that essay, to write a post later that day. In the project of total honesty, I\u0026rsquo;ll not edit that out. I will, however, write a few notes that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about and pondering this week. Because really, bulleted list blogging is really awesome.","title":"Friday Essay"},{"content":"I did a computer restart a few days ago1, and never reopened NetNewsWire. This means that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been reading blogs for a few days: pathetically, this doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that I\u0026rsquo;m any more behind than I typically am, alas. As a consequence I don\u0026rsquo;t have as many funny things to post for you.\nHaving said that, to restart, I wanted to be able to close bunches of tabs and have a record of where I was. I think I was offline at the time of the restart. So I made a text file and copy and pasted the urls. Given that I have nothing else to post, here it is. After all, tychoish is my notebook. Right?\nEnjoy!\nLaTeX/Geek Things: LaTeX Beamer Class - http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/ bsag LaTeX drawing -http://www.rousette.org.uk/blog/archives/on-the-lure-of-the-user-manual-for-a-geek/ http://dopointoh.com/ - todo list web2.0 goodness http://monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml - PDF management tool for OS X http://www.yepthat.com/ - a pottentially better PDF reading/management program. Maybe the \u0026ldquo;iTunes for PDF\u0026rdquo;? http://www.scifihifi.com/podworks/ - a new/better ipod ripping program. just read about it here, haven\u0026rsquo;t actually followed the link. http://areasofmyexpertise.blogspot.com/2007/07/if-you-are-interested-in-websites-that.html opened the link, no clue. check on it later, tycho Podcast Culture/Geek: This Day in Alternmeate History Voice\u0026rsquo;s Anthology by Mur Laferty Shannon Oakley\u0026rsquo;s Knitting Podcast. Hypertexts http://iam.upsideclown.com/ http://masochuticon.com/ It\u0026rsquo;s funny that this is such a noteworthy sort of event. I routinely stay up for 3-4 weeks, sometimes more I think.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ishnesses/","summary":"I did a computer restart a few days ago1, and never reopened NetNewsWire. This means that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been reading blogs for a few days: pathetically, this doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that I\u0026rsquo;m any more behind than I typically am, alas. As a consequence I don\u0026rsquo;t have as many funny things to post for you.\nHaving said that, to restart, I wanted to be able to close bunches of tabs and have a record of where I was. I think I was offline at the time of the restart. So I made a text file and copy and pasted the urls. Given that I have nothing else to post, here it is. After all, tychoish is my notebook. Right?\nEnjoy!\nLaTeX/Geek Things: LaTeX Beamer Class - http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/ bsag LaTeX drawing -http://www.rousette.org.uk/blog/archives/on-the-lure-of-the-user-manual-for-a-geek/ http://dopointoh.com/ - todo list web2.0 goodness http://monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml - PDF management tool for OS X http://www.yepthat.com/ - a pottentially better PDF reading/management program.","title":"ishnesses"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m 3-4 rows from the point where I add in the sleeves of the stranded sweater I was knitting at knitting camp. I haven\u0026rsquo;t really finished sleeves, but I made 1 stranded sock, and the toe of two others.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to knit the sleeves down from a provisional cast on. This could be interesting because, because the color pattern means that I\u0026rsquo;ll be half a stitch off for a row. Frankly I think if I choose the row carefully, and do some creative increasing/decreasing I should be able to make that blip pretty inconspicuous. Famous last words, right?\nSorry I don\u0026rsquo;t post more about knitting. I think about posting more, I swear.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-progress/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m 3-4 rows from the point where I add in the sleeves of the stranded sweater I was knitting at knitting camp. I haven\u0026rsquo;t really finished sleeves, but I made 1 stranded sock, and the toe of two others.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to knit the sleeves down from a provisional cast on. This could be interesting because, because the color pattern means that I\u0026rsquo;ll be half a stitch off for a row. Frankly I think if I choose the row carefully, and do some creative increasing/decreasing I should be able to make that blip pretty inconspicuous. Famous last words, right?\nSorry I don\u0026rsquo;t post more about knitting. I think about posting more, I swear.\nCheers!","title":"knitting progress"},{"content":"SUBJECT: That they were brought in to\u0026hellip;\nINTERVIEWER: Say the (proper noun)\u0026hellip;\nSUBJECT: The (proper noun)? They were brought in to\u0026hellip;\nINTERVIEWER: No, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry, you just need to start the sentence\u0026hellip;\nSUBJECT: Oh, the (proper noun).\nINTERVIEWER: Right\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/adventures-in-transcription/","summary":"SUBJECT: That they were brought in to\u0026hellip;\nINTERVIEWER: Say the (proper noun)\u0026hellip;\nSUBJECT: The (proper noun)? They were brought in to\u0026hellip;\nINTERVIEWER: No, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry, you just need to start the sentence\u0026hellip;\nSUBJECT: Oh, the (proper noun).\nINTERVIEWER: Right\u0026hellip;","title":"Adventures in Transcription"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m still getting spam from the Foundation Trilogy, by Issac Asimov. If it were less sleazy, and I asked for it, and they were a little clearer about where in the books I came from. You know citationality and contextually, I\u0026rsquo;d be all about it. Without that\u0026hellip;\nFor your pleasure and mine:\nI ask a warning (of the threshold of the last Certainly so; the place to Maintain our hospitality and if his cursings). But you\u0026rsquo;ve never was growing suspicious.\nIf understand all wight; for space his life what goes off the Galactic Empire had our Anacreon the Emperor great and out to school a Jorane Sutt nodded, thoughtfully. Well your activities have his only feminine frippery after the Commdor, of a stock of that we?\nI can tell me understand it some more since the Emperor and for you sneaked away and a cloak, second, meeting and the true, and while I\u0026rsquo;m othahwise concuhned: skull that our religious pageantry, that it can be that he did not the field.\nA straight up front of Terminus. Gaal had a statement when I once, more open. You if you know torture and try! It was before an extremely interesting, experience, in the barbarian kingdoms involves the foot he said, and each fail to the one; so, that of a series of barbarism, the Commdor\u0026rsquo;s own affairs: of power to add to them, two. Sutt nodded my interrupted threw a mystic manifest destiny of Lameth you after the few other three Hardin looked around your stomach preamble, I\u0026rsquo;ve had got iron girl did not hide His thin, face, lengthened and these are making this point HARI SELDON and peasant in some reason to decrease the sheets power unit of his fingers let its own; substantial behind the not calculated furiously: and red stars, that: about Chen said, Mallow would hear him nor knowledge internal matters; than see, I weren\u0026rsquo;t entirely in what it had gone.\nFunctions which he went of something gentlemen. It seems to an Imperial government in the mind you my compliments; shadows: his What price and Salvor Hardin seemed evident that: certainly have full of the glaring Blue, and. It was follow the Galaxy, for reasons for acquainted I have interests of wildly. Hardin\u0026rsquo;s epigram on you know, not the cheers with brute, a boundary has been recently strengthened the scheme, and your talk at an old man?\nMallow relaxed in the god, Board of chairs, will be worried. Hardin! He was no, doubt your Veneration and seated at all, possibilities of the Galaxy, sir, hold out a fighting order your talk was almost rose with me. My type of more destructive direction: of caste, a. Never shown more The Foundation board of ways it his. I I accepted a vote, of the regent Wienis, the.\nAnd nudged them all blessings and went dead on others, never once belonged a bit, of high, spirits. One Gaal said, is it surprise, and which it? You\u0026rsquo;re going to his particular became known you are informing me, properly. He shrugged, and yelled, maintain full vigil! I gouged him! We\u0026rsquo;re protecting forces too important but you his breath was that hugged his mind? Yohan Lee you\u0026rsquo;ll have, pointed out of addressing one as a fine offer the large.\nWhat you\u0026rsquo;re a small files and then perked up And. I even lose your devil\u0026rsquo;s machines in spite of a. Yes, except with the aptitude for preparations to put them; that the planet Terminus and Salvor Hardin, used to this.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/all-hail-hari-seldon/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m still getting spam from the Foundation Trilogy, by Issac Asimov. If it were less sleazy, and I asked for it, and they were a little clearer about where in the books I came from. You know citationality and contextually, I\u0026rsquo;d be all about it. Without that\u0026hellip;\nFor your pleasure and mine:\nI ask a warning (of the threshold of the last Certainly so; the place to Maintain our hospitality and if his cursings). But you\u0026rsquo;ve never was growing suspicious.\nIf understand all wight; for space his life what goes off the Galactic Empire had our Anacreon the Emperor great and out to school a Jorane Sutt nodded, thoughtfully. Well your activities have his only feminine frippery after the Commdor, of a stock of that we?\nI can tell me understand it some more since the Emperor and for you sneaked away and a cloak, second, meeting and the true, and while I\u0026rsquo;m othahwise concuhned: skull that our religious pageantry, that it can be that he did not the field.","title":"All Hail Hari Seldon"},{"content":"This is part two of the monster that was begun with this. Enjoy!\nG: Why do you always talk so much\u0026hellip; and say so little?\nH: Just delete.\nG: That\u0026rsquo;s stupid, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t help much.\nH: But cleaning up those extra spaces is so satisfying.\nG: Why not?\nH: Picky picky.\nG: At least I have one for when you come in yelling.\nH: What?\nG: (?=^[A-Z]{2,})\nH GROANS.\nG: lets just move on to .\nH: We\u0026rsquo;re there.\nG: No, we\u0026rsquo;re [GH]\nG PAUSES: and this is ^[GH]:\nH: Shut up.\nH PAUSES: \u0026hellip;and I don\u0026rsquo;t think you need to escape:\u0026rsquo;s.\nG is silent for a moment: You\u0026rsquo;re the one with the book.\nH: you\u0026rsquo;re no fun.\nG: And you can\u0026rsquo;t find anything.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/better-living-through-regexp-a-day-in-the-land-of-gh/","summary":"This is part two of the monster that was begun with this. Enjoy!\nG: Why do you always talk so much\u0026hellip; and say so little?\nH: Just delete.\nG: That\u0026rsquo;s stupid, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t help much.\nH: But cleaning up those extra spaces is so satisfying.\nG: Why not?\nH: Picky picky.\nG: At least I have one for when you come in yelling.\nH: What?\nG: (?=^[A-Z]{2,})\nH GROANS.\nG: lets just move on to .\nH: We\u0026rsquo;re there.\nG: No, we\u0026rsquo;re [GH]\nG PAUSES: and this is ^[GH]:\nH: Shut up.\nH PAUSES: \u0026hellip;and I don\u0026rsquo;t think you need to escape:\u0026rsquo;s.\nG is silent for a moment: You\u0026rsquo;re the one with the book.\nH: you\u0026rsquo;re no fun.\nG: And you can\u0026rsquo;t find anything.","title":"Better Living through Regexp: A day in the land of ^[GH]:"},{"content":"for the file of \u0026ldquo;gross miss-spelings Amiri Baraka\u0026rsquo;s name:\u0026rdquo;\nPerry Barocca\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/no-regexp-will-find-this/","summary":"for the file of \u0026ldquo;gross miss-spelings Amiri Baraka\u0026rsquo;s name:\u0026rdquo;\nPerry Barocca","title":"no regexp will find this"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve found all sorts of nifty new people who are now my twitter friends. I want them to be new virtual friends, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see. my standards a low.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go to bed because I\u0026rsquo;m clearly not coherent enough to read or write. with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll have something for you all by the evening\u0026hellip;.\n[in the distance] brain where have you gone?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wow-that-didnt-make-sense/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve found all sorts of nifty new people who are now my twitter friends. I want them to be new virtual friends, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see. my standards a low.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go to bed because I\u0026rsquo;m clearly not coherent enough to read or write. with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll have something for you all by the evening\u0026hellip;.\n[in the distance] brain where have you gone?","title":"wow. that didn't make sense."},{"content":"Welcome to this week\u0026rsquo;s Station Keeping I hope you\u0026rsquo;ve been enjoying the series so far. I like this episode bunches, but I suppose that goes without saying. Before we jump into this weeks story, however, I wanted to share with you a few developments. First, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in participating in SK, or any part of tealart, check on the `participation guidelines \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/participate\u0026gt;`_, there\u0026rsquo;s even a special section for SK. As always, we live for your feedback, and you can leave it in the comments, address it to me personally (tycho@tealart.com) or to the writers group and I\u0026rsquo;ll make sure that the message is properly delivered. I look forward to hearing from you, and enjoy!--tycho\nWorking Overtime Josh undid the collar of his uniform jacket--he was supposed to feel grateful that the Navy permitted Hanm Centre officers wear the, only slightly, more comfortable field variant, but he didn\u0026rsquo;t--and sighed with relief at the idea that his shift was over. \u0026ldquo;Hey, Julia, are you going to work late, you should be done for today,\u0026rdquo;\nThere was a pause before she responded, and she didn\u0026rsquo;t look up from what she was doing when she said \u0026ldquo;um yeah, I\u0026rsquo;ll be right there, almost done with this file tree.\u0026rdquo;\nJosh chuckled. File tree, Josh thought that was an interesting way to conceptualize the data, he almost left the command center, but then thought better of it. Though Hanm Centre was important in the grand scheme of things, and he loved interacting with so many different people, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t like there was all that much for them to do at this moment. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t like they had to keep the station from flying into a black hole or anything.\n\u0026ldquo;No really, you\u0026rsquo;re done for today. Come with me,\u0026rdquo; he said mustering as much authority in his voice as he could. He couldn\u0026rsquo;t, however, keep a straight face.\nShe snapped out of her haze just in time to process what she had heard and she chuckled. \u0026ldquo;I suppose you\u0026rsquo;re right.\u0026rdquo; She shut off her computer and slowly moved out of her chair. It took her a moment to stretch out to her full height. \u0026ldquo;I need to not get lost in work so much,\u0026rdquo; she pondered, \u0026ldquo;well whatever, I have priority to the computer core here, and what else is there to do?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Well, let\u0026rsquo;s see,\u0026rdquo; Josh herded the on-staff databases administrator and computer whiz into the elevator headed for the station\u0026rsquo;s poorly named, \u0026ldquo;common space.\u0026rdquo;\nEvening Stroll Josh always imagined that the common spaces on the station would be more occupied then they were. Even though the station was mostly completed, it would still be a while before there was any regular traffic simply because of the way space travel worked. Josh tried to be more optimistic but at the moment, the station looked mighty dreary. \u0026ldquo;How do you are you liking this posting?\u0026rdquo; Josh asked when they stepped out of the lift.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, it\u0026rsquo;s alright. I\u0026rsquo;m something of a perfectionist with these computers,\u0026rdquo; she paused for a moment and looked at her left arm, on which, Josh realized, Julia was caring a mini-computer terminal. \u0026ldquo;So it\u0026rsquo;s nice to be able to organize a system basically from the get go. And besides all this gear is pretty high-tech--for the rim worlds--so that\u0026rsquo;s a plus.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, I felt the same about the construction management when I came aboard, but it kind of lost it\u0026rsquo;s glean after a while.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;How long were you out here before the rest of us got here?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Few years, three and a half I think. I was on assignment a few worlds over, and being young and unattached, they moved me out here, because apparently I was the closest. Go figure.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;And here you are. Spend a lot of time on the rim, then?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;A little. I grew up core-side, but figured there was more to see. And I have to say that Hanm has really grown on me.\u0026rdquo; Josh reported.\n\u0026ldquo;I grew up on ships, moving about every so often, we saw a lot of rim worlds, I can\u0026rsquo;t say they did much for me. Is Hanm really that special?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Particularly with this station, you bet. Most important rim world, the way I figure it.\u0026rdquo; Josh was almost baffled that she didn\u0026rsquo;t know Hanm.\n\u0026ldquo;Everything\u0026rsquo;s so far apart, I totally don\u0026rsquo;t buy what the news people are saying about the Hanmists. The league\u0026rsquo;ll hold.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You know as well as anyone that core and rim are all relative terms, star-density is about the same, we just got to the \u0026lsquo;core\u0026rsquo; first.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;--that\u0026rsquo;s what I meant.\u0026rdquo; she cut him off.\n\u0026ldquo;How familiar are you with the Hanmists, anyway?\u0026rdquo; Josh continued.\n\u0026ldquo;Not much, just what I grazed in the reports.\u0026rdquo; she said, sounding a bit embarrassed. Hanm Centre was just a job for her, she was so used to moving around almost constantly that she had grown a thick skin for \u0026ldquo;settling in.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Look harder,\u0026rdquo; Josh said, stopping to turn to Julia \u0026ldquo;See what\u0026rsquo;s on the nets, it probably should be part of your job.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What do you think it\u0026rsquo;s a threat? Otherwise no harm in letting people talk about whatever they want, didn\u0026rsquo;t the league learn that lesson the hard way a few centuries ago.\u0026rdquo; Julia spoke of the past as if it were only a few months ago, which it might not have been far off, Josh realized. He never checked to see when her objective birthday was: relativity screwed things up so bad. It gave him a headache, and he convinced himself that it didn\u0026rsquo;t really matter.\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;d say threat, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth keeping an eye on, and whatever happens this place,\u0026rdquo; he said, tapping his foot gently for emphasis, \u0026ldquo;is going to care.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll say.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;And what happens there,\u0026rdquo; Josh pointed to the mini-terminal screen strapped to her forearm, \u0026ldquo;is just as important as what happens out here.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You mean in \u0026lsquo;reality\u0026rsquo;?\u0026rdquo; she said with mock amazement and horror. They laughed.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah,\u0026rdquo; he took a deep breath, \u0026ldquo;but, just one officer to another: keep your eyes open. Someone here needs to know what\u0026rsquo;s going on,\u0026rdquo; he pleaded.\n\u0026ldquo;The nets are pretty cool, I\u0026rsquo;ll give myself--and them--that, but they\u0026rsquo;re not that good.\u0026rdquo; She said, hoping that she hadn\u0026rsquo;t overcommitted herself.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s something. Anyway, lets keep walking: it\u0026rsquo;s a big station.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Fresh Eyes\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-8-fresh-eyes/","summary":"Welcome to this week\u0026rsquo;s Station Keeping I hope you\u0026rsquo;ve been enjoying the series so far. I like this episode bunches, but I suppose that goes without saying. Before we jump into this weeks story, however, I wanted to share with you a few developments. First, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in participating in SK, or any part of tealart, check on the `participation guidelines \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/participate\u0026gt;`_, there\u0026rsquo;s even a special section for SK. As always, we live for your feedback, and you can leave it in the comments, address it to me personally (tycho@tealart.com) or to the writers group and I\u0026rsquo;ll make sure that the message is properly delivered. I look forward to hearing from you, and enjoy!--tycho\nWorking Overtime Josh undid the collar of his uniform jacket--he was supposed to feel grateful that the Navy permitted Hanm Centre officers wear the, only slightly, more comfortable field variant, but he didn\u0026rsquo;t--and sighed with relief at the idea that his shift was over.","title":"Station Keeping #8: Fresh Eyes"},{"content":"Transcription Error of the day:\n\u0026ldquo;In 1967 Watts1 had erupted\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nThere was light everywhere! everywhere I say\u0026hellip;\nriots? Dudes!\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wiots-i-say-wiots/","summary":"Transcription Error of the day:\n\u0026ldquo;In 1967 Watts1 had erupted\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nThere was light everywhere! everywhere I say\u0026hellip;\nriots? Dudes!\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;","title":"wiots, I say, wiots"},{"content":"I wrote a killer among last weekend, and here we are, on monday night, and I\u0026rsquo;m absolutely wiped. I think part of the problem is that I basically wiped out my todo list.\nwhile I have a few things to tie up, I don\u0026rsquo;t have any big projects looming, and I think that kind of\u0026hellip; pressure is motivating. I think I need to spend some time refreshing: reading, knitting, and outlining and seeing where things end up. So that\u0026rsquo;s what the plan is for the next little while.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t a hiatus anouncement, tychoish will chug along, as it will.\n(which reminds me a song that a friend sings, with the line \u0026ldquo;let the world chug along chug along as it pleases.\u0026rdquo; hmmm, anyway)\nCheers, tycho\nps. on second review, it\u0026rsquo;s a lovely nancy song called \u0026ldquo;free and easy,\u0026rdquo; and it was totally a different friend that sings it, but still cool.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/efficiency-nixed-the-tycho/","summary":"I wrote a killer among last weekend, and here we are, on monday night, and I\u0026rsquo;m absolutely wiped. I think part of the problem is that I basically wiped out my todo list.\nwhile I have a few things to tie up, I don\u0026rsquo;t have any big projects looming, and I think that kind of\u0026hellip; pressure is motivating. I think I need to spend some time refreshing: reading, knitting, and outlining and seeing where things end up. So that\u0026rsquo;s what the plan is for the next little while.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t a hiatus anouncement, tychoish will chug along, as it will.\n(which reminds me a song that a friend sings, with the line \u0026ldquo;let the world chug along chug along as it pleases.\u0026rdquo; hmmm, anyway)\nCheers, tycho\nps. on second review, it\u0026rsquo;s a lovely nancy song called \u0026ldquo;free and easy,\u0026rdquo; and it was totally a different friend that sings it, but still cool.","title":"efficiency nixed the tycho"},{"content":"\u0026hellip;because when you can\u0026rsquo;t make fun of your friends, you\u0026rsquo;re relegated to making fun of 20 year old interview tapes. Imagine the follwoing:\nSubject: [gives long rambling, but interesting answer to question]\nInterviewer: [Could you condense the story and cut out these tangents?] Ok, [asks question again.]\nSubject: I was looking for community.\n[PAUSE]\nInterviewer: Um. [PAUSE] If you could start with [begining of story.]\nSubject: You want it all over again but compressed? Okay. Ah, well, ah, um\u0026hellip; [PAUSE] let\u0026rsquo;s, ah [PAUSE] ask me the question again?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/going-to-far/","summary":"\u0026hellip;because when you can\u0026rsquo;t make fun of your friends, you\u0026rsquo;re relegated to making fun of 20 year old interview tapes. Imagine the follwoing:\nSubject: [gives long rambling, but interesting answer to question]\nInterviewer: [Could you condense the story and cut out these tangents?] Ok, [asks question again.]\nSubject: I was looking for community.\n[PAUSE]\nInterviewer: Um. [PAUSE] If you could start with [begining of story.]\nSubject: You want it all over again but compressed? Okay. Ah, well, ah, um\u0026hellip; [PAUSE] let\u0026rsquo;s, ah [PAUSE] ask me the question again?","title":"going to far"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s (just after midnight at the time of writing on) Monday, and that means I\u0026rsquo;m already late for my \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s coming up this week in TealArt post.\u0026rdquo; The answer: great new things.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a station keeping story that I adore coming up, of course. I also, have to say that we\u0026rsquo;re gearing up for the \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; finale and I\u0026rsquo;m rather excited. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a lot of fun to write, and I\u0026rsquo;ve put the ball in motion. I think that\u0026rsquo;s about all I\u0026rsquo;m going to say now. But I also spent a great deal of time this weekend working on Station Keeping stuff, and I have a really fun story (it\u0026rsquo;s a screen play, for reading, but still) that\u0026rsquo;s almost ready, and another one that\u0026rsquo;s all ready to write.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot from this season of Station Keeping, there are things that I\u0026rsquo;m going to do differently next season (but particularly in the season that follows), and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about that. While I think I was hopeful that it would happen in a slightly different way, I think it was good that it happened the way it did, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it develops.\nI spent a lot of time writing this weekend, particularly, a somewhat lengthy treatise on toe-up/stranded socks. This is a paying project, so I\u0026rsquo;m excited about that, and in reflection, while I was a bit cranky about my output this weekend, I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I probably wrote about 5,000 words, which is nothing to sneeze at.\nBut you probably care more about what\u0026rsquo;s coming up on TealArt, and less about what I\u0026rsquo;m doing, becuase you\u0026rsquo;d be reading /tychoish if you wanted to know what the tycho was up to. Right? Right. Ok moving on.\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be more regular experssioning this week. I do so love those, and as I learn more about Regexp, I\u0026rsquo;m getting better and writing \u0026ldquo;jokes,\u0026rdquo; so that\u0026rsquo;s good too.\nI have something for Friday, but no great promises about what and how much, yet. These things happen.\nAnd finally, I wrote up some particpation/submissions guidelines for TealArt, to outline and explain all the ways that you, yes you, can participate and contribute to the ongoing project of TealArt.\nThanks for being here,\ntycho\nps. I\u0026rsquo;m extremely wiped (see the aforementioned 5,000 words, upon second count, I think it might have been more like 7,000 words, though I make no claims about the quality), and so if some of the capitalization is ahem particularly \u0026ldquo;18th century\u0026rdquo;, I apologize.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-voice-of-tealart/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s (just after midnight at the time of writing on) Monday, and that means I\u0026rsquo;m already late for my \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s coming up this week in TealArt post.\u0026rdquo; The answer: great new things.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a station keeping story that I adore coming up, of course. I also, have to say that we\u0026rsquo;re gearing up for the \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; finale and I\u0026rsquo;m rather excited. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a lot of fun to write, and I\u0026rsquo;ve put the ball in motion. I think that\u0026rsquo;s about all I\u0026rsquo;m going to say now. But I also spent a great deal of time this weekend working on Station Keeping stuff, and I have a really fun story (it\u0026rsquo;s a screen play, for reading, but still) that\u0026rsquo;s almost ready, and another one that\u0026rsquo;s all ready to write.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve learned a lot from this season of Station Keeping, there are things that I\u0026rsquo;m going to do differently next season (but particularly in the season that follows), and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty excited about that.","title":"The Voice of TealArt"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I ever get to say this much, but my favorite episode of firefly is probably \u0026ldquo;War Stories,\u0026rdquo; but I never get to watch it with people. sigh.\nif there are any firefly fans (browncoats) out there, but\u0026hellip;. I\u0026rsquo;m showing/sharing firefly to/with a friend. We watched \u0026ldquo;serenity\u0026rdquo; last week, and this week I can\u0026rsquo; decided to go in order and show \u0026ldquo;train job\u0026rdquo; or skip and watch \u0026ldquo;shindig,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;jayne\u0026rsquo;s town.\u0026rdquo; Help would be appreciated.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fireflys/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I ever get to say this much, but my favorite episode of firefly is probably \u0026ldquo;War Stories,\u0026rdquo; but I never get to watch it with people. sigh.\nif there are any firefly fans (browncoats) out there, but\u0026hellip;. I\u0026rsquo;m showing/sharing firefly to/with a friend. We watched \u0026ldquo;serenity\u0026rdquo; last week, and this week I can\u0026rsquo; decided to go in order and show \u0026ldquo;train job\u0026rdquo; or skip and watch \u0026ldquo;shindig,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;jayne\u0026rsquo;s town.\u0026rdquo; Help would be appreciated.","title":"fireflys"},{"content":"I compleatly buy this argument about human/computer interaction, regarding UI and mutli-touch interfaces ala the iPhone.\nI have to say that ergonomics both on this, and a more specific level (like keyboard layouts, and command line conventions) are of a great interest to me.\nI have to say though, that being able to do something more multi-touchy with a track pad would be nice. We\u0026rsquo;ll remember that we already have the two finger scrolling, which I can\u0026rsquo;t really live with out, so having an additional command ability (like a second mouse click.)\nFrankly though, the major coup of the iPhone is the pinch and zoom thing, which makes a lot of sense on a very small screen, but signifigantly less sense on your MacPro Cinema display, or MacBook.\nGo figure.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/multi-touch/","summary":"I compleatly buy this argument about human/computer interaction, regarding UI and mutli-touch interfaces ala the iPhone.\nI have to say that ergonomics both on this, and a more specific level (like keyboard layouts, and command line conventions) are of a great interest to me.\nI have to say though, that being able to do something more multi-touchy with a track pad would be nice. We\u0026rsquo;ll remember that we already have the two finger scrolling, which I can\u0026rsquo;t really live with out, so having an additional command ability (like a second mouse click.)\nFrankly though, the major coup of the iPhone is the pinch and zoom thing, which makes a lot of sense on a very small screen, but signifigantly less sense on your MacPro Cinema display, or MacBook.\nGo figure.","title":"multi touch"},{"content":"In a discussion of so called \u0026ldquo;high culture\u0026rdquo; (literature, music, art) versus \u0026ldquo;agri-culture\u0026rdquo; (only in this house, I swear\u0026hellip;) I got my father to argue against economic determinism.\nThis may only be funny to me. Regardless, I think it\u0026rsquo;s hilarious.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-culture/","summary":"In a discussion of so called \u0026ldquo;high culture\u0026rdquo; (literature, music, art) versus \u0026ldquo;agri-culture\u0026rdquo; (only in this house, I swear\u0026hellip;) I got my father to argue against economic determinism.\nThis may only be funny to me. Regardless, I think it\u0026rsquo;s hilarious.","title":"of culture"},{"content":"for judy, some links on steam punk stuff:\nsteam punk magazine\ncool DIY SP projects. steampunk workshop and their keyboard that was all the rage a few months ago.\nsteampunk.com, which I don\u0026rsquo;t know very well, but it looks like it would be worth exploring at some point.\nAnd of course, the wikipedia entry on the subject\ncheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/steampunk-stuff/","summary":"for judy, some links on steam punk stuff:\nsteam punk magazine\ncool DIY SP projects. steampunk workshop and their keyboard that was all the rage a few months ago.\nsteampunk.com, which I don\u0026rsquo;t know very well, but it looks like it would be worth exploring at some point.\nAnd of course, the wikipedia entry on the subject\ncheers!","title":"steampunk stuff"},{"content":"I have to say, that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen more spellings of Amiri Baraka\u0026rsquo;s name than I can count in the past few days. The best one so far:\nMary Baraca\nAlso:\nLeery Baraca\nYou can\u0026rsquo;t make this stuff up folks\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/baraka/","summary":"I have to say, that I\u0026rsquo;ve seen more spellings of Amiri Baraka\u0026rsquo;s name than I can count in the past few days. The best one so far:\nMary Baraca\nAlso:\nLeery Baraca\nYou can\u0026rsquo;t make this stuff up folks","title":"baraka"},{"content":"From the mail bag:\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated \u0026ldquo;Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences\u0026rdquo; by Michael Thorne have also purchased \u0026ldquo;Issid 07 Giessen: Abstracts of the 13th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Giessen, Germany, July 22-27, 2007\u0026rdquo; by Jugen Hennig. For this reason, you might like to know that \u0026ldquo;Issid 07 Giessen: Abstracts of the 13th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Giessen, Germany, July 22-27, 2007\u0026rdquo; will be released on September 30, 2007. You can pre-order yours by following the link below.\nI bet it\u0026rsquo;s a page turner too!\nThanks amazon for that moment of joy in my life.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/i-love-artificial-intelligence/","summary":"From the mail bag:\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated \u0026ldquo;Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences\u0026rdquo; by Michael Thorne have also purchased \u0026ldquo;Issid 07 Giessen: Abstracts of the 13th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Giessen, Germany, July 22-27, 2007\u0026rdquo; by Jugen Hennig. For this reason, you might like to know that \u0026ldquo;Issid 07 Giessen: Abstracts of the 13th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Giessen, Germany, July 22-27, 2007\u0026rdquo; will be released on September 30, 2007. You can pre-order yours by following the link below.\nI bet it\u0026rsquo;s a page turner too!\nThanks amazon for that moment of joy in my life.","title":"I love Artificial Intelligence"},{"content":"I remember at times like this, why I don\u0026rsquo;t often have more than one serious knitting projects: you never have the feeling that you\u0026rsquo;re getting anything done, and you never feel like you\u0026rsquo;re any closer to starting something new.\nNow, to be fair, I never simply have one project. There\u0026rsquo;s always one or two pairs of socks in my sock bag which I work on when the mood strikes me. I\u0026rsquo;d say, I probably finish 4 pairs of socks a year, give or take a few, but I don\u0026rsquo;t work on them very much. I also have the grey sweater, that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for years, but it has a lot of plain knitting, and it\u0026rsquo;s very fine gauge. Last summer I only knit on it at movies, and in the last school year, I probably knit, a total of like 4 inches: but I expect it of this project. But in addition to this miscellany, I have one, and only one project.\nAlmost always this project is a sweater, usually a 2 color sweater.\nAt the moment. In addition to the usual score of projects I listed above, I have 2 sweaters (ie. 3 sleeves), and extra socks in progress, and it\u0026rsquo;s driving me batty. Some of the socks are for my class so I need to get those done, and the other sweaters are close, but it\u0026rsquo;s hard to work on all of them because it divides your attention. While I have thrown one on the back burner for the present moment because of a somewhat intentional needle shortage, it still nags.\nSigh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-frustrations/","summary":"I remember at times like this, why I don\u0026rsquo;t often have more than one serious knitting projects: you never have the feeling that you\u0026rsquo;re getting anything done, and you never feel like you\u0026rsquo;re any closer to starting something new.\nNow, to be fair, I never simply have one project. There\u0026rsquo;s always one or two pairs of socks in my sock bag which I work on when the mood strikes me. I\u0026rsquo;d say, I probably finish 4 pairs of socks a year, give or take a few, but I don\u0026rsquo;t work on them very much. I also have the grey sweater, that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for years, but it has a lot of plain knitting, and it\u0026rsquo;s very fine gauge. Last summer I only knit on it at movies, and in the last school year, I probably knit, a total of like 4 inches: but I expect it of this project.","title":"knitting frustrations"},{"content":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: I totally meant to publish this yesterday, but apparently forgot to hit the \u0026ldquo;post\u0026rdquo; button. Eek. So here it is a little late. Hope you\u0026rsquo;re having a great weekend.\nI\u0026rsquo;m ashamed to say that I don\u0026rsquo;t have any nifty philosophy for you this week. On the other hand the Deleuze Carnival is up over at Sportive Thoughts, which includes some great, up to date blogging on Deleuze.\nI had a discussion this week about a Robert Reid-Pharr essay I read in a class some 3 years ago, that, perhaps more than Gayle Rubin(!) continues to define my notion of \u0026ldquo;queer,\u0026rdquo; and as a result of this, I realized how far, I sometimes stray from the core interests that got me into this. I think part of this is because I was in a particularly dense part of Deleuze, that dealt with issues that I don\u0026rsquo;t find particularly relevant, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a good way to go beyond them. The thing I worry about is that they\u0026rsquo;re so irratic, that by skipping, you can miss gems in the rough. So be it, I say.\nHave a great weekend, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably keep updating /tychoish over the weekend, though I can\u0026rsquo;t promise how interesting that will be. I\u0026rsquo;m reminded that I started that blog as a virtual notebook, and here I am blogging. These things happen I suppose. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;ll be back next week, with more and better things.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/no-philosophy-this-week/","summary":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: I totally meant to publish this yesterday, but apparently forgot to hit the \u0026ldquo;post\u0026rdquo; button. Eek. So here it is a little late. Hope you\u0026rsquo;re having a great weekend.\nI\u0026rsquo;m ashamed to say that I don\u0026rsquo;t have any nifty philosophy for you this week. On the other hand the Deleuze Carnival is up over at Sportive Thoughts, which includes some great, up to date blogging on Deleuze.\nI had a discussion this week about a Robert Reid-Pharr essay I read in a class some 3 years ago, that, perhaps more than Gayle Rubin(!) continues to define my notion of \u0026ldquo;queer,\u0026rdquo; and as a result of this, I realized how far, I sometimes stray from the core interests that got me into this. I think part of this is because I was in a particularly dense part of Deleuze, that dealt with issues that I don\u0026rsquo;t find particularly relevant, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a good way to go beyond them.","title":"No Philosophy this Week"},{"content":"I just wrote a script for station keeping. it\u0026rsquo;s 6 pages and about the length of our usual installments. this means I have to write 1-2 more installments for the current season/run.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s formated like screen play, and frankly it\u0026rsquo;s designed to be read.\nI just think that drama is an interesting form. Anyway, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty, just thought i\u0026rsquo;d share.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-script/","summary":"I just wrote a script for station keeping. it\u0026rsquo;s 6 pages and about the length of our usual installments. this means I have to write 1-2 more installments for the current season/run.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s formated like screen play, and frankly it\u0026rsquo;s designed to be read.\nI just think that drama is an interesting form. Anyway, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty, just thought i\u0026rsquo;d share.","title":"station keeping script"},{"content":"I was just reading over this, had the sudden and unmistakable desire to knit a sweater with a hood.\nstranded of course. ooh, that sounds fun. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll put a hood on the Domy heather sweater? hrm.\nany suggestions, or am I going to have to wait for knit camp next year\u0026hellip;.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hood-ahoy/","summary":"I was just reading over this, had the sudden and unmistakable desire to knit a sweater with a hood.\nstranded of course. ooh, that sounds fun. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll put a hood on the Domy heather sweater? hrm.\nany suggestions, or am I going to have to wait for knit camp next year\u0026hellip;.","title":"hood ahoy"},{"content":"Red Sweater Blog - A Peek At MarsEdit 2\nlooks pretty spiffy I have to say\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/red-sweater-blog-a-peek-at-marsedit-2/","summary":"Red Sweater Blog - A Peek At MarsEdit 2\nlooks pretty spiffy I have to say","title":"Red Sweater Blog - A Peek At MarsEdit 2"},{"content":"note to self: remember that you can use devon think pro as an outlining tool.\npotentially in combination with the outlining in textmate. ooooh shiny.\nI\u0026rsquo;m such a dork, continue on with your day.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/remember-the-devon/","summary":"note to self: remember that you can use devon think pro as an outlining tool.\npotentially in combination with the outlining in textmate. ooooh shiny.\nI\u0026rsquo;m such a dork, continue on with your day.","title":"remember the devon"},{"content":"I have in the past done a little bit of writing to explore and and list the software that I\u0026rsquo;m using in my computing life to keep on top of things and stay organized. What inevitably happens when I do this is that I change almost instantly afterwards to different solutions and programs. Alas.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t want to jinx anything, I\u0026rsquo;ve recently noticed that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using the same programs for a couple of months now, and I\u0026rsquo;m probably at a record low for complaints and frustrations with this set up. So go figure. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m using these days.\nMail.app for email. It\u0026rsquo;s clearly not perfect, but I can\u0026rsquo;t imagine anything better, and frankly the organization of my incoming email is such a tower of cards, that I\u0026rsquo;m reluctant to change anything.\nDevonThinkPRO for database/content management. This is an incredibly powerful program, and I continue to use it to store a lot of stuff, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t been using it as much recently because I\u0026rsquo;m not in school and I, unfortunately, haven\u0026rsquo;t been doing enough to get to a place where I need to use it. For the DTP geeks out there, I\u0026rsquo;m keeping everything in one database that\u0026rsquo;s 1.56 GBs big, with about 1mg of synched text and RTF files.\nNetNewsWire and Camino for web browsing and feed reading. It\u0026rsquo;s how I consume the internet. I suppose I still wish that NNW would let me read f-locked LiveJournal entries (which some of the other programs do), but other than that, no complaints here.\nAdiumX for chatting. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using Adium since I switched to mac, and it\u0026rsquo;s great, and I think that the program has gotten even better, particularly recently, so check it out.\nMarsEdit Great program for offline editing. I find that I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to doing a lot of my editing in web-interfaces these days, and at least theoretically TextMate could prevent some of this, but a lot of my postings are time delayed, so that\u0026rsquo;s not really a problem. And I\u0026rsquo;m checking stats on the web-pannel\u0026rsquo;s anyway, so again, not a big deal. It\u0026rsquo;s still great software.\nPukka for del.icio.us posting. It\u0026rsquo;s small and it works great. Can\u0026rsquo;t argue with that. I don\u0026rsquo;t post to my del.icio.us enough, but that\u0026rsquo;s another problem.\nVLC for playing videos. All videos, without complaining. Great stuff.\nPreview.app for reading PDFs, because I just don\u0026rsquo;t like the other programs enough, and I figure, it\u0026rsquo;s best to leave well enough alone.\nTerminal.app for bash shell goodness. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of surprising how much shell stuff I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten into in the past couple of months. It\u0026rsquo;s been nice to be able to figure out how to do some stuff in the shell, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have that fast interface. I wish I were a bit more hardcore about it, but I\u0026rsquo;m learning slowly.\nA couple of programs that I like and keep, but don\u0026rsquo;t find myself using very much this summer. I expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll get back into some of them.\nWriteRoom for distraction free writing. It\u0026rsquo;s basically a big black screen with big green lettering that auto scrolls. It\u0026rsquo;s simple, yes, but I really like how this software can allow me to be productive at odd times. I have to say that\nQuicksliver I haven\u0026rsquo;t been using QS as much recently, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure why. I think that a lot of the things I have been using QS for in the past, I do with the shell anyway. Go figure.\nGrowl for system wide notifications. I sometimes turn it off and forget to turn it back on. It\u0026rsquo;s great to get notifications of what\u0026rsquo;s going on on your computer so that you\u0026rsquo;re aware of what\u0026rsquo;s happening, and then can keep on working on what you\u0026rsquo;re working on without getting caught up in checking for new IMs or Emails or download compilations, and so forth.\nTextMate I use this program constantly, and it\u0026rsquo;s great. I\u0026rsquo;ve changed a lot of things in response to this program, and I rather like it a lot. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to have all this power in such an intuitive environment. The Maruku tool, in combination with text-mate, has basically become my word-processor of choice. I use it to write blog entries and to code/program the websites. I use it in my job, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about using it to try to do the GTD thing again, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nMy only real usage complaint at the moment is that my system of organizing text-files is more like a folder with a bunch of papers in it than an actual notebook. Maybe just opening my text-files folder as a project in TextMate will solve this, but I feel like something could be done. Also I think I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to check my writing and whatnot into a subversion repository for backup and archiving purposes, but that\u0026rsquo;s mostly a point of lazyness, not a problem as such. I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to you on these points though.\nThanks for geeking out with me.\nCheers, ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/software-rundown/","summary":"I have in the past done a little bit of writing to explore and and list the software that I\u0026rsquo;m using in my computing life to keep on top of things and stay organized. What inevitably happens when I do this is that I change almost instantly afterwards to different solutions and programs. Alas.\nWhile I don\u0026rsquo;t want to jinx anything, I\u0026rsquo;ve recently noticed that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using the same programs for a couple of months now, and I\u0026rsquo;m probably at a record low for complaints and frustrations with this set up. So go figure. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m using these days.\nMail.app for email. It\u0026rsquo;s clearly not perfect, but I can\u0026rsquo;t imagine anything better, and frankly the organization of my incoming email is such a tower of cards, that I\u0026rsquo;m reluctant to change anything.\nDevonThinkPRO for database/content management. This is an incredibly powerful program, and I continue to use it to store a lot of stuff, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t been using it as much recently because I\u0026rsquo;m not in school and I, unfortunately, haven\u0026rsquo;t been doing enough to get to a place where I need to use it.","title":"Software Rundown"},{"content":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have time to blog last night, I had to dash over to the yarn store to drop off a sock as a demo for the class I\u0026rsquo;m going to be teaching in a couple weeks. Its going to be toe-up/stranded socks, if you\u0026rsquo;re going to be in St. Louis, and you\u0026rsquo;re interested. I\u0026rsquo;d love to see you there.\nThen I had dancing, as I always do on wednesdays, and this left me feeling supremely beat. Hence no blogging. I did however post the first in my Better Living through Regular Expressions series/project. I did some regexp-ing at work yesterday, so I have something to use as a pun for next week.\nKnitting and all other things continue at an expected pace. Tonight, I must must remember to write something theoretical for tomorrow at tealart. And then I lookforward to getting some real writing time this weekend. And knitting, boy do I need to get some knitting done.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/you-mean-i-have-a-blog/","summary":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have time to blog last night, I had to dash over to the yarn store to drop off a sock as a demo for the class I\u0026rsquo;m going to be teaching in a couple weeks. Its going to be toe-up/stranded socks, if you\u0026rsquo;re going to be in St. Louis, and you\u0026rsquo;re interested. I\u0026rsquo;d love to see you there.\nThen I had dancing, as I always do on wednesdays, and this left me feeling supremely beat. Hence no blogging. I did however post the first in my Better Living through Regular Expressions series/project. I did some regexp-ing at work yesterday, so I have something to use as a pun for next week.\nKnitting and all other things continue at an expected pace. Tonight, I must must remember to write something theoretical for tomorrow at tealart. And then I lookforward to getting some real writing time this weekend. And knitting, boy do I need to get some knitting done.","title":"you mean I have a blog?"},{"content":"G: My life is over!\nH: What? Liar, How can you say that?\nG: Huh?\nH: You\u0026rsquo;re talking to me anyway?\nG: But I cant find my files.\nH [blank stare].\nG: Ok, ok, I found the files, but there are a lot of them and they are huge. This is the problem with never throwing anything awa--\nH: Regular Expressions.\nG: Wha? My expressions are quite regular right now. I just can\u0026rsquo;t find any of the right--\nH: I meant like Perl.\nG: Oh, you would. Swine.\nH: Whatever, at least I can find anything in an instant?\nG: An instant? Really, and instant?\nH: Well, theoretically.\nG: Famous last words. Show me!\nH: Ok! [pause] let me get my books.\nG: Don\u0026rsquo;t bother. (Sigh.)\nH: Now whose being melodramatic?\nG: Just get over here and write the danm shell script.\nH: Ok, ok. Where does it start?\nG: ^.\nH: ?\nG: Oh Sh[aeiou]t\u0026hellip;\nH: that doesn[]t make sense.\nG: If you knew how to type it would.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/better-living-through-regular-expressions-a-dramatic-work/","summary":"G: My life is over!\nH: What? Liar, How can you say that?\nG: Huh?\nH: You\u0026rsquo;re talking to me anyway?\nG: But I cant find my files.\nH [blank stare].\nG: Ok, ok, I found the files, but there are a lot of them and they are huge. This is the problem with never throwing anything awa--\nH: Regular Expressions.\nG: Wha? My expressions are quite regular right now. I just can\u0026rsquo;t find any of the right--\nH: I meant like Perl.\nG: Oh, you would. Swine.\nH: Whatever, at least I can find anything in an instant?\nG: An instant? Really, and instant?\nH: Well, theoretically.\nG: Famous last words. Show me!\nH: Ok! [pause] let me get my books.\nG: Don\u0026rsquo;t bother. (Sigh.)\nH: Now whose being melodramatic?\nG: Just get over here and write the danm shell script.\nH: Ok, ok. Where does it start?\nG: ^.","title":"Better Living through Regular Expressions: A Dramatic Work"},{"content":"Of Cooking, Mixtures, and Milieus:\nWhat is at issue here is that the attractors defining subject-positions are never simply a matter of the individual occupying these positions, but are rather the result of ongoing processes of individuals in relation to one another, such that a change in subject position is not simply a matter of the individual decision, but of the ongoing processes by which the subject is produced as a subject in relation to other subjects. What I am trying to think through in this connection is the issue of the ontological status of social structures or systems. It is all well and good to study social structures after the fashion of Saussure or Levi-Strauss as a structure, but what, ontologically, are these structures? A language, for instance, is not in any particular individual. Language, as it were, is not up to me. Yet language nonetheless could not exist without individuals. It only exists in and through the individuals that use the language. As such, language only exists through the ongoing operations of language in its use by speakers. Ontologically there is nothing but individuals, nothing but bodies, yet certain relations of feeback emerge among these individuals such that language takes on an emergent reality.\n(from Larval Subjects.)\nThis, I think explains why I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the things I\u0026rsquo;m interested in. Everything fits together after a while. It\u0026rsquo;s nice when that happens.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-cooking-mixtures-and-milieus/","summary":"Of Cooking, Mixtures, and Milieus:\nWhat is at issue here is that the attractors defining subject-positions are never simply a matter of the individual occupying these positions, but are rather the result of ongoing processes of individuals in relation to one another, such that a change in subject position is not simply a matter of the individual decision, but of the ongoing processes by which the subject is produced as a subject in relation to other subjects. What I am trying to think through in this connection is the issue of the ontological status of social structures or systems. It is all well and good to study social structures after the fashion of Saussure or Levi-Strauss as a structure, but what, ontologically, are these structures? A language, for instance, is not in any particular individual. Language, as it were, is not up to me. Yet language nonetheless could not exist without individuals.","title":"Of Cooking, Mixtures, and Milieus"},{"content":"hello my fellows.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a huge rise in traffic from posting the content of a message I got in spam. I hope you all are enjoying the rest of the stuff we have here.\nAlso the books are good. The quote is from one of Asimov\u0026rsquo;s foundation books, not sure which. While I generally detest spam, and don\u0026rsquo;t want to hear about breast enlargement, or cheap prescription medications, I think a little bit of fine fiction is totally acceptable. Though I would concede that moderation in all things is the way to go on this.\nHave a good day!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/asimov-spammed-annon/","summary":"hello my fellows.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a huge rise in traffic from posting the content of a message I got in spam. I hope you all are enjoying the rest of the stuff we have here.\nAlso the books are good. The quote is from one of Asimov\u0026rsquo;s foundation books, not sure which. While I generally detest spam, and don\u0026rsquo;t want to hear about breast enlargement, or cheap prescription medications, I think a little bit of fine fiction is totally acceptable. Though I would concede that moderation in all things is the way to go on this.\nHave a good day!","title":"asimov spammed annon"},{"content":"and then his brain fizzled out and he went to knit something easier.\nI tried attempt two at stranded sock, and this one will make a good demonstration toe.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s that bad\nIn other news, my stuff from camp finally arrived, so I\u0026rsquo;m a happy camper. heh.\nI would like to note for all the doubters playing along at home, that shetland is kind of amazing stuff.\nthat\u0026rsquo;s all for now, like I said, brain of fizz\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/brain-fizz/","summary":"and then his brain fizzled out and he went to knit something easier.\nI tried attempt two at stranded sock, and this one will make a good demonstration toe.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s that bad\nIn other news, my stuff from camp finally arrived, so I\u0026rsquo;m a happy camper. heh.\nI would like to note for all the doubters playing along at home, that shetland is kind of amazing stuff.\nthat\u0026rsquo;s all for now, like I said, brain of fizz","title":"brain fizz"},{"content":"seriously folks, I\u0026rsquo;m listening/proofing a transcript where, the interviewee said the name Kavanaugh and the transcriber typed \u0026ldquo;Cannibal\u0026rdquo;\noh, the unfortunate.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cannibal/","summary":"seriously folks, I\u0026rsquo;m listening/proofing a transcript where, the interviewee said the name Kavanaugh and the transcriber typed \u0026ldquo;Cannibal\u0026rdquo;\noh, the unfortunate.","title":"cannibal"},{"content":"\u0026hellip; for the class I\u0026rsquo;m teaching in two weeks. I need to make version 2.0 and a mate for this sock. I think in that order, but in any case I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to have enough yarn left over to make the second sock, which I wasn\u0026rsquo;t entirely expecting.\nIt was my main project, and I finished it in a bit more than 2 days. Which is kind of cazy. I never finish socks so quickly. The downside?\nI\u0026rsquo;m compleatly beat, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been blogging and writing as much. which makes me sad. There\u0026rsquo;ll be a new station keeping here soon. Also, my friends from knitting camp have added a picture of my shawl to our camp blog. I\u0026rsquo;m touched! Thanks!\nCheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/i-made-me-a-sock/","summary":"\u0026hellip; for the class I\u0026rsquo;m teaching in two weeks. I need to make version 2.0 and a mate for this sock. I think in that order, but in any case I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to have enough yarn left over to make the second sock, which I wasn\u0026rsquo;t entirely expecting.\nIt was my main project, and I finished it in a bit more than 2 days. Which is kind of cazy. I never finish socks so quickly. The downside?\nI\u0026rsquo;m compleatly beat, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been blogging and writing as much. which makes me sad. There\u0026rsquo;ll be a new station keeping here soon. Also, my friends from knitting camp have added a picture of my shawl to our camp blog. I\u0026rsquo;m touched! Thanks!\nCheers.","title":"I made me a sock..."},{"content":"Hello! It\u0026rsquo;s good to be aback on a normal week schedule. I hope that the last few weeks haven\u0026rsquo;t been as hectic for you as they have been for me.\nI was in Wisconsin last weekend (again1), and it was delightful, but I had to drive 500 miles back home Monday afternoon, and that took a lot out of me. I was reeling from exaustion all and being behind all week. I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to blog as much as I might have liked. I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to knit as much. It was kind of crazy.\nBut, I\u0026rsquo;m back now, and let me tell you that I have a great week for you on TealArt. There will be a new `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_ this week. This weeks installment will be written by Jo Goodman, and I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to being able to share this with you. I hope that episodes not penned by me will become more common place in the near future, but congrats to Jo on writing a truly wonderful episode.\nI also am proud to announce a geekywonderful occastional series on TealArt. This one is drama, and I\u0026rsquo;m calling it \u0026ldquo;Better Living through Regular Expressions.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;ll be great, and anyone with good regexp puns should feel free to contact me with them.\nChris is starting a new job at the end of the week, and we\u0026rsquo;ve both been working a lot of late, so our geek content might be a little crunched this week, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see about that. \u0026ldquo;Thursday\u0026rsquo;s are for Geek\u0026rdquo; at TealArt is not in danger, fear not.\nWill there be Deleuze this friday? I hope so. I\u0026rsquo;ll read something academic-y at any rate, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see. I have a pile of books calling to me.\nIn any case, I will be blogging throughout the week in my usual haphazard style at http://tychoish.com, and I look forward to spending a few moments with you this week2.\nRead on in good health!\n--tycho\nThis time for a knitting camp, so it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a trip back to CollegeTown, but still, I do seem to be going up there a fair bit. I think it\u0026rsquo;s over for now, though\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;m also working on a number of other projects this week that won\u0026rsquo;t be ready for prime time immediately, so I hope that you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to enjoy them in the coming weeks.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-monday-times-of-tealart-1/","summary":"Hello! It\u0026rsquo;s good to be aback on a normal week schedule. I hope that the last few weeks haven\u0026rsquo;t been as hectic for you as they have been for me.\nI was in Wisconsin last weekend (again1), and it was delightful, but I had to drive 500 miles back home Monday afternoon, and that took a lot out of me. I was reeling from exaustion all and being behind all week. I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to blog as much as I might have liked. I didn\u0026rsquo;t get to knit as much. It was kind of crazy.\nBut, I\u0026rsquo;m back now, and let me tell you that I have a great week for you on TealArt. There will be a new `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_ this week. This weeks installment will be written by Jo Goodman, and I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to being able to share this with you. I hope that episodes not penned by me will become more common place in the near future, but congrats to Jo on writing a truly wonderful episode.","title":"The Monday Times of TealArt #1"},{"content":"I taught the second session of my knitting class yesterday, and was generally pretty pleased with the outcome. The two people in my class seemed to get what I was teaching, and although I might have expected them to get a little further in their projects, they seemed pleased and had a handle on how their projects would continue, and if they\u0026rsquo;re happy, well then, by gosh I\u0026rsquo;m happy too.\nIn even greater news, I agreed to teach another class in two weeks time, on toe-up socks and/or stranded/2-color socks. While I\u0026rsquo;m an avid toe-up sock knitter, I have yet to completely master the stranded-toe up sock1. This meant that I came home and promptly (well almost) cast on for a toe up sock. This time it came off better. My trick: I\u0026rsquo;m knitting it at the same gauge as the sweaters I make, because I realized I tend to knit those, ahem, firmly, so no need to knit foot armor.\nI have to say that this stranded sock things is really kind of fun, although I\u0026rsquo;m going to need to unvent/invent a new toe, to deal with the \u0026ldquo;stranded knitting stitches are square\u0026rdquo; issue.\nIn other knitting news: I finished the first sleeve and the colar of the red-and-black sweater I was working on at camp, and over the last week the stranded sweater I was working on at camp has grown to be about 10 inches, but otherwise nothing exciting.\nAt the moment I\u0026rsquo;m focusing on getting projects done so I can start new things, like an Armenian design, or more stranded socks. I\u0026rsquo;ll post pictures at some point, I swear2.\nOh, the pedagogical traditions of higher education.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMy fingers may have been crossed when I typed this, just to cover my ass\u0026hellip;.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-knews/","summary":"I taught the second session of my knitting class yesterday, and was generally pretty pleased with the outcome. The two people in my class seemed to get what I was teaching, and although I might have expected them to get a little further in their projects, they seemed pleased and had a handle on how their projects would continue, and if they\u0026rsquo;re happy, well then, by gosh I\u0026rsquo;m happy too.\nIn even greater news, I agreed to teach another class in two weeks time, on toe-up socks and/or stranded/2-color socks. While I\u0026rsquo;m an avid toe-up sock knitter, I have yet to completely master the stranded-toe up sock1. This meant that I came home and promptly (well almost) cast on for a toe up sock. This time it came off better. My trick: I\u0026rsquo;m knitting it at the same gauge as the sweaters I make, because I realized I tend to knit those, ahem, firmly, so no need to knit foot armor.","title":"knitting knews"},{"content":"Once again, I\u0026rsquo;m going to reply to a post that Jeff Kirvin has made in my own blog, because I\u0026rsquo;m too lazy to register to post on his. Forgive me Jeff:\nIs Apple crazy like a fox?:\nOkay, by now you guys know I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of the iPhone. There are some things I like about it (battery life, durability, music UI) but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s a very good phone. The lack of 3G, inexplicable inconsistencies in the UI (different themes, different gesture effects) and the crippled Bluetooth profiles make the iPhone a non-starter for me. But what if there\u0026rsquo;s a method to the madness? Bob Cringely has an interesting column up where he talks about how Steve Jobs should know better than to release a device on hype alone:\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve all heard that the iPhone shipped with EDGE because the battery drain from current 3G chips was too high. But what if that\u0026rsquo;s a smokescreen? The iPhone\u0026rsquo;s battery life is off the charts, and a lot of the problems the iPhone has could be fixed by moving to 3G. Not just the data speed, but 3G allows a better voice codec as well, meaning better call quality. Add the bump to 3G to \u0026ldquo;fixes\u0026rdquo; to the UI consistency, minor bug fixes (why do you really think every Apple employee got an iPhone? product testing) and roll it all out the same time as Leopard, just in time for the Xmas shopping frenzy. And you could also use that opportunity to add things like copy-and-paste and the iWork office suite that is supposedly the real delay in getting Leopard out the door.\n(from JeffKirvin.net.)\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty clear that 3G isn\u0026rsquo;t something that can be done in firmware, so that hope\u0026rsquo;s out, but your other complaints: UI consistencies, bluetooth, etc. are things that can be changed with a forced (or not) update, and things that I suspect will be changed. Also, I suspect that in October when Leopard ships, we\u0026rsquo;ll see some improvements to other complaints: note syncing and ToDo\u0026rsquo;s seem like logical first steps, but I also have to imagine that we\u0026rsquo;ll see some sort of 3rd party widgets at some point.\nSome sort of iPhone-WikityWidget, or just about anything that the OmniGroup could write, I think would make folks like Jeff and me really happy.\nMy prediction: a firmware update coming soon, Leopard and a slightly beefed up Phoneless-iPhone in time for x-mas, and iphone v2.0 ready by MacWorld next year.\ncheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/iphone-thoughts/","summary":"Once again, I\u0026rsquo;m going to reply to a post that Jeff Kirvin has made in my own blog, because I\u0026rsquo;m too lazy to register to post on his. Forgive me Jeff:\nIs Apple crazy like a fox?:\nOkay, by now you guys know I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of the iPhone. There are some things I like about it (battery life, durability, music UI) but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s a very good phone. The lack of 3G, inexplicable inconsistencies in the UI (different themes, different gesture effects) and the crippled Bluetooth profiles make the iPhone a non-starter for me. But what if there\u0026rsquo;s a method to the madness? Bob Cringely has an interesting column up where he talks about how Steve Jobs should know better than to release a device on hype alone:\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve all heard that the iPhone shipped with EDGE because the battery drain from current 3G chips was too high.","title":"iPhone thoughts..."},{"content":"The Sexual Self: The Construction of Sexual Scripts by Michael Kimmel.\nMy old advisor sent me a link to this book, which was touching, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice because the book is spot on and I totally want to read it. Also, I like how Kimmel, who was someone who I read a lot back in the day is doing things that are really interesting to me.\nAnyway. Father, if you\u0026rsquo;re reading this, since you have academic library privileges\u0026hellip;.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/advisors-are-the-best/","summary":"The Sexual Self: The Construction of Sexual Scripts by Michael Kimmel.\nMy old advisor sent me a link to this book, which was touching, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice because the book is spot on and I totally want to read it. Also, I like how Kimmel, who was someone who I read a lot back in the day is doing things that are really interesting to me.\nAnyway. Father, if you\u0026rsquo;re reading this, since you have academic library privileges\u0026hellip;.","title":"advisors are the best"},{"content":"If I wanted to, you know, lay something out, using LaTeX but it had to have images\u0026hellip;. not just figures, but honest to god pictures. how would you swing that?\nwould an html2latex tool take care of it, or\u0026hellip; what? can I just do markdown/html image tags and use maruku?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/images-in-latexmaruku/","summary":"If I wanted to, you know, lay something out, using LaTeX but it had to have images\u0026hellip;. not just figures, but honest to god pictures. how would you swing that?\nwould an html2latex tool take care of it, or\u0026hellip; what? can I just do markdown/html image tags and use maruku?","title":"images in LaTeX/maruku"},{"content":"note to self:\nwrite something about queer stuff and science fiction. write anything about queer stuff it should happen.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t even add \u0026ldquo;the queer\u0026rdquo; as a category to /tychoish until just now. What does that say?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/its-the-hair-dude/","summary":"note to self:\nwrite something about queer stuff and science fiction. write anything about queer stuff it should happen.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t even add \u0026ldquo;the queer\u0026rdquo; as a category to /tychoish until just now. What does that say?","title":"it's the hair dude"},{"content":"On the one hand I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to using my computer and my text editing software for my job. It means that I can get more done, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to use a computer where all the keys are in the right place (it\u0026rsquo;s my own fault for moving them around on my keyboard.) The downside, is that the last thing I want to do when I come home is open up the editor and write. I think getting a different theme going on might help with this problem\u0026hellip; anyway.\nWork is going well. They fixed the book shelves, so I can get to the material I need to work with, and don\u0026rsquo;t have to spend time sitting around trying to be creative in an attempt to find something to do, because I can\u0026rsquo;t get to the stuff I need, because the shelves are stuck. That will learn you to not build bookshelves that are smarter than you.\nA note to the people from knitting camp: I did infact ordered some of the yarn that Lou Ann had (and lots of color cards). I can\u0026rsquo;t wait. I did leave my foulder and books at camp do\u0026rsquo;oh so it\u0026rsquo;s coming book rate1. That lead time will hopefully allow me to get some other things done, so that I don\u0026rsquo;t throw myself into a new design before I get some of my in progress projects taken care of. Currently on the needles/in the queue: 3.25 sleeves, the body of a sweater. Currently waiting to start: an armenian sweater in merino lace weight, and some sort of celtic/tukish design using the Domy Heather (a la Lou Ann). If I hunkered down the sleeves would be done pretty soon, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see how this works out.\nAlso a knitting camp note: if folks have pictures that they want to share they totally should. I love that you all took pictures of my shawl, I\u0026rsquo;m totally relying on the group for the pictures.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and blog more knitting stuff over here.\nThanks for reading.\nso that\u0026rsquo;s one excuse as to why I haven\u0026rsquo;t written any of you.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-camp-withdrawl/","summary":"On the one hand I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to using my computer and my text editing software for my job. It means that I can get more done, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to use a computer where all the keys are in the right place (it\u0026rsquo;s my own fault for moving them around on my keyboard.) The downside, is that the last thing I want to do when I come home is open up the editor and write. I think getting a different theme going on might help with this problem\u0026hellip; anyway.\nWork is going well. They fixed the book shelves, so I can get to the material I need to work with, and don\u0026rsquo;t have to spend time sitting around trying to be creative in an attempt to find something to do, because I can\u0026rsquo;t get to the stuff I need, because the shelves are stuck. That will learn you to not build bookshelves that are smarter than you.","title":"knitting camp withdrawl"},{"content":"Ok friends, so given my general lack of acomplishment this week, I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a proper Delueze essay for you this week. I browsed the first several pages of the chapter I had planed to read this week, and it didn\u0026rsquo;t really work for me. The third major division (part?) of the book is titled \u0026ldquo;Savages, Barbarians, and Civilized Men\u0026rdquo; and basically covers the formation of Oedipal1 structures on the social/cultural level. While this is important, this part of the text is hard to get through, of decreasing utility, and oblique.\nI have to say that this is probably exactly the kind of project that psychoanalytical terms and frameworks are ill suited to. We can talk about normative ideas, and cultural organization really well without imposing the tangentially useful Analytic crap. There\u0026rsquo;s plenty of room and need for it, but right here, I really can\u0026rsquo;t imagine ever coming back to it. I keep stalling out on this section of the book, I think this should be a hint to me.\nSo this brought me back to the table of contents so that I can think of how to proceed. I do want to keep reading Deleuze, but I need to find something that works better. My first impulse is to go to DR (which is what Jared of SportiveThoughts Recommends), but I have half a mind to just skip 4 sections in AO and read 8. \u0026ldquo;The Urstaat,\u0026rdquo; and 10. \u0026ldquo;Capitalist Representation,\u0026rdquo; and then move on to the final part, which is \u0026ldquo;Introduction to Schizoanalysis.\u0026rdquo;\nIn an effort to give this post a little meaning, as a follow up to the list of reason why I thought AO was important/worthwhile, I\u0026rsquo;d like to present a list of possible applications/uses. Next week, I\u0026rsquo;ll have something more substantive.\nstructural models (machines), are inherently incomplete and flawed. Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s discussion of this concept, can be helpful in exploring and explaining social practices which we may be tempted to assume as being somehow a priori, like memory, or gender. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to, at some point, use Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s discussion of recording machines as part of a justification for studying memory. Same for the section that I quoted in Culture, Memory and Lanague. Once I find more of the nomadic subject/multipicity of subjectivity\u0026rsquo;s stuff, I think that would be very helpful to my cause. I think that\u0026rsquo;s just the surface, but a start. Have a good weekend.\nCheers, tycho\nthe missing piece that I haven\u0026rsquo;t added in right now, is that this becomes much more useful if we read \u0026ldquo;normative\u0026rdquo; in the place of oedipus.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/thoughts-on-the-table-of-contents-of-anti-oedipus/","summary":"Ok friends, so given my general lack of acomplishment this week, I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a proper Delueze essay for you this week. I browsed the first several pages of the chapter I had planed to read this week, and it didn\u0026rsquo;t really work for me. The third major division (part?) of the book is titled \u0026ldquo;Savages, Barbarians, and Civilized Men\u0026rdquo; and basically covers the formation of Oedipal1 structures on the social/cultural level. While this is important, this part of the text is hard to get through, of decreasing utility, and oblique.\nI have to say that this is probably exactly the kind of project that psychoanalytical terms and frameworks are ill suited to. We can talk about normative ideas, and cultural organization really well without imposing the tangentially useful Analytic crap. There\u0026rsquo;s plenty of room and need for it, but right here, I really can\u0026rsquo;t imagine ever coming back to it.","title":"Thoughts on the Table of Contents of Anti-Oedipus"},{"content":"thats right, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten more span with quotes from the foundation books. Now of course, there\u0026rsquo;s a GIF attached with spam-y information. But I like the foundation books, so I will represent it here for you.\nIn the Very rim of the additional centuries of clouds and isn\u0026rsquo;t There was warming up at the shadow news?\nSeveral very far Chief Commissioner; true, it\u0026rsquo;s notoriously not only; we they\u0026rsquo;re all scientists of the darkness and all his nose. Mallow flipped it will also, have been a rather, than a fool, question: the Foundation may wear it they don\u0026rsquo;t think I come. And therefore it? Wienis progress. And half religion which a small and then joined any; more the destruction of one knows exactly what they can endure a coronet of sight seeing the middle of age, and for theory of Smyrno or pro and it compared to word that are its rebel against the government is simple interplanetary trips.\nThe Council, chamber and twenty five in not and in. You By saving the gigantic, because we could make sure I was only in which carries with a the mild Vegan tobacco of the Commdor will arrive in strict sense of realizing that are or force we have said, Orsy, changing the steps, and wondered, at a fifty years ago; the honor and Hober Mallow and game will were the analogy. The corners of the powah systems in every temple opened all that opened one Then the ENCYCLOPEDISTS way of Smyrno, not say why, do tricks with surprising that were civilized.\nYou, I know the day: of enlightened men administration of. Why you yourself, of the Foundation I help, it helps; the officer smiled, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry, my quota fleet. The ship; and stared after the dying! The Encyclopedia peace, of being brought down stared at that, unimaginable region that might yes; the vast relief, he scarcely Free trade ship? In crisis. I\u0026rsquo;m sure! He didn\u0026rsquo;t really need waste his. That the mayor placed his ears of us. The partnership at a planet practically without your little weazened soul that human race had threw his chambers when he had in the he brings me speak of the regent, rose.\nHe be a stupid, so depends on the eightieth city Hall, and lips separated from the Foundation would endanger your ultimatum. His comer steel or I\u0026rsquo;ll tell him and it was gone past; morals prevent the Vault in effect even Seldon\u0026rsquo;s fingers on strictly within the them. Lameth say nothing of us.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s not simply gold.\nIf I am entirely automatically, then appeal to immensity; be trusted to eight hours after all except certainly: sprung to describe the barbarians (was good morning and withdrew a nasty spot Oh Yes nuclear blaster specifically borrowed of the position: to soothe their cold as this Commission will or so). He was, certainly Smyrno.\nHe isn\u0026rsquo;t got the destruction. In strangled tones of the third, person men on; some into sibilant monosyllables, and When scarcely no, doubt Your stomach can point HARI Seldon\u0026rsquo;s advanced science without permission of minor matter. You\u0026rsquo;ll have accomplished in fiendish a little it for a time. But died under the dead for it said quietly, I. How did not say, get his daughter\u0026rsquo;s tongue plans, to predict the Grand blazing light and said View; room. The MAYORS the machine of the right said not grower in five first landed in communication system, army into the with these details of an extremely strategic points: would be trusted to the Foundation into a nice dry cell was a moment; when the pipes, fresh cut it has it by jumping too pleased.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/more-foundation-spam/","summary":"thats right, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten more span with quotes from the foundation books. Now of course, there\u0026rsquo;s a GIF attached with spam-y information. But I like the foundation books, so I will represent it here for you.\nIn the Very rim of the additional centuries of clouds and isn\u0026rsquo;t There was warming up at the shadow news?\nSeveral very far Chief Commissioner; true, it\u0026rsquo;s notoriously not only; we they\u0026rsquo;re all scientists of the darkness and all his nose. Mallow flipped it will also, have been a rather, than a fool, question: the Foundation may wear it they don\u0026rsquo;t think I come. And therefore it? Wienis progress. And half religion which a small and then joined any; more the destruction of one knows exactly what they can endure a coronet of sight seeing the middle of age, and for theory of Smyrno or pro and it compared to word that are its rebel against the government is simple interplanetary trips.","title":"more foundation spam"},{"content":"this is a draft of course of something that\u0026rsquo;s been floating around in my head\u0026hellip;\nJulia: here to set up your data portal.\nDavid: don\u0026rsquo;t tell me you\u0026rsquo;re the tech.\nJulia (agast): I\u0026rsquo;m not the tech, I\u0026rsquo;m the systems, data and node administrator, do you still want the data portal or not?\nDavid: oh, right that\u0026rsquo;s not what I meant at all. sorry, no, I mean yes I want the portal, I was just sort of surprised at how young you all are these days.\nJulia: oh! sorry. I\u0026rsquo;m still a little buzzed.\ndavid: a bit early even for someone so young.\nJulia: not that kind of buzz. it\u0026rsquo;s the nets. I was working all night. and I\u0026rsquo;m not that young.\ndavid; oh. right. sorry\u0026hellip;.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-idea/","summary":"this is a draft of course of something that\u0026rsquo;s been floating around in my head\u0026hellip;\nJulia: here to set up your data portal.\nDavid: don\u0026rsquo;t tell me you\u0026rsquo;re the tech.\nJulia (agast): I\u0026rsquo;m not the tech, I\u0026rsquo;m the systems, data and node administrator, do you still want the data portal or not?\nDavid: oh, right that\u0026rsquo;s not what I meant at all. sorry, no, I mean yes I want the portal, I was just sort of surprised at how young you all are these days.\nJulia: oh! sorry. I\u0026rsquo;m still a little buzzed.\ndavid: a bit early even for someone so young.\nJulia: not that kind of buzz. it\u0026rsquo;s the nets. I was working all night. and I\u0026rsquo;m not that young.\ndavid; oh. right. sorry\u0026hellip;.","title":"station keeping idea"},{"content":"As I come out of my haze and return to \u0026ldquo;real life\u0026rdquo; and all the various things I have (and want) to do I\u0026rsquo;m realizing how little time I actually have to do it (this week) Ah well. Day by day. Thankfully I\u0026rsquo;ve finally returned to the life of the living. For more readings about my doings and what I\u0026rsquo;m up to check out my last post on TealArt, which should cover some stuff.\nBecause in a lot of ways this site is my place to list things: I have a few things to make a list of.\n1. I need to order the yarn for my next sweater and call KnitPicks to replace a needle. 2. I need to write a little thing up about/for Knitting camp, because I promised that I would, and I want to. 3. I want to write this essay for Brenda\u0026rsquo;s podcast, and I need to get cracking on it, because I doubt that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to read it myself. 4. Station Keeping needs some attention. 5. knitting savants also needs some proper attention. 6. It\u0026rsquo;s time to do a little bit of honest to goodness hunkering down 7. I need some farscape time. I\u0026rsquo;ve had the second season of Voyager on my computer for a long time, and while it\u0026rsquo;s enjoyable, I actually want to see some of the later seasons, and would like to use my limited knitting/TV time for something good/better.\nAlso I have a message for the g-ds of libraries: please make the shelves at work, well, work. I will do penance for my people\u0026rsquo;s decision to use new fangled bookshelves which can brake, if you\u0026rsquo;ll just make them work reliably.\nhave a good day, and bear with me as things slowly return to normal around here\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/holy-shit-its-wednesday/","summary":"As I come out of my haze and return to \u0026ldquo;real life\u0026rdquo; and all the various things I have (and want) to do I\u0026rsquo;m realizing how little time I actually have to do it (this week) Ah well. Day by day. Thankfully I\u0026rsquo;ve finally returned to the life of the living. For more readings about my doings and what I\u0026rsquo;m up to check out my last post on TealArt, which should cover some stuff.\nBecause in a lot of ways this site is my place to list things: I have a few things to make a list of.\n1. I need to order the yarn for my next sweater and call KnitPicks to replace a needle. 2. I need to write a little thing up about/for Knitting camp, because I promised that I would, and I want to. 3. I want to write this essay for Brenda\u0026rsquo;s podcast, and I need to get cracking on it, because I doubt that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to read it myself.","title":"holy shit, it's wednesday"},{"content":"Welcome to `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_, a science fiction collaborative blog-fiction project of `TealArt.com \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_. This episode, Nan\u0026rsquo;s Loyalties is the 6th Episode in our series, and is the mid-season installment. Though I\u0026rsquo;m sure you can enjoy this episode independently of all the others, be sure to check out the other installments. If you like what you see please be in touch. If you\u0026rsquo;d like to join the writing team or submit just an episode, I\u0026rsquo;d very much like to be in contact with you. Enjoy!\nMessages from the Underground Nan rolled over for the third time in as many minutes, and tried to ignore in incessant pinging from her communications panel. She was stuck in that twilight space where her grasp of reality and the limits of possibility were tenuous at best.\nShe relents finally and stands up and stumbles over to the comm panel and activates it. The lights are low, but she\u0026rsquo;s thankful when the video system doesn\u0026rsquo;t come on. While audio were historically uncommon, they were not totally unfamiliar. \u0026ldquo;Hello?\u0026rdquo; she asked after a brief pause, where she realized that it was probably expected that she confirm the connection before the conversation.\nNan swayed a little as she stood, unsure of weather or not she should try and pull herself fully awake or not. After a moment, she remembered to say \u0026ldquo;Hello\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Ms. Gee, I can\u0026rsquo;t tell you my name, but I\u0026rsquo;m with the Hanmist Resistance, and--\u0026rdquo; came a cracking voice. Nan would have cut him off sooner had she not been yawning.\n\u0026ldquo;What do you want. It\u0026rsquo;s the middle of the damn night up here.\u0026rdquo; She wasn\u0026rsquo;t sure what time it was, or even if night was the right word to describe the tim on the station. Hell, she didn\u0026rsquo;t even know if this call was legitimate: the voice wasn\u0026rsquo;t any that she recognized. Her caller knew more about her than she did him, if it was a him, and she wanted to even that playing field as soon as possible.\n\u0026ldquo;We know your work, and we we\u0026rsquo;re building a network of supporters. You\u0026rsquo;re position on Hanm Centre will be very valuable to us when we come.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Come? I haven\u0026rsquo; manded. Nan thumbed up the lights and squared her shoulders, in a hopes of sounding more authoritative.\n\u0026ldquo;We support you, we support Hanm. We just want you to be ready for us when we come\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh come on, no one actually talks like that,\u0026rdquo; Nan thought to herself. \u0026ldquo;How will I get in touch with you?\u0026rdquo; She said, hoping that the person on the other end couldn\u0026rsquo;t hear her eyes rolling: it was probably better to play along with this, even if it were a prank, but she didn\u0026rsquo;t have to like it. And hell, if there was a Hanmist movement around to talk to her, this couldn\u0026rsquo;t be a bad thing.\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;ll know. Do we have your support?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I support anything that\u0026rsquo;s good for Hanm.\u0026rdquo; Just ambiguous enough, and true, ultimately she thought.\n\u0026ldquo;Good, expect a package with more information soon. Hanm Will be free.\u0026rdquo; the words were uttered with a dispassionate murmur that sent a tremble down Nan\u0026rsquo;s spine.\n\u0026ldquo;Ok, thank you.\u0026rdquo; Nan responded politely before she cut the connection. \u0026ldquo;Log last transmission and send the details to\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; her command was punctuated by a brisk entry of a code for her terminal in her office. There was supposed to be a way for her to do this verbally, but she always felt that it was easier and more secure to just enter the code by hand. Nevertheless, Nan\u0026rsquo;s instructions to the computer were curt, but she was hopeful that she\u0026rsquo;d get back to sleep. She cut the lights and stumbled back to bed.\nGift boxes from the Underground Nan almost tripped on a box as she walked into her office. \u0026ldquo;How\u0026rsquo;d they get that in here?\u0026rdquo; She wondered.\nShe put her bag down next to her desk and walked carefully back to the package. There was a blank piece of paper fastened to the top of the box. She lifted it carefully, and on the back she read: \u0026ldquo;Nan: Hope these help. Hanm will be free.\u0026rdquo;\nThe memory of Nan\u0026rsquo;s late night comm-call came rushing \u0026ldquo;I guess it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a fake or a dream,\u0026rdquo; she muttered as she set the paper back on top of the box. She sat down at the desk and called up the communications log.\nAgain Nan spoke to herself \u0026ldquo;What the hell am I supposed to do now?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Nan\u0026rsquo;s Loyalties\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-6-nans-loyalties/","summary":"Welcome to `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_, a science fiction collaborative blog-fiction project of `TealArt.com \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_. This episode, Nan\u0026rsquo;s Loyalties is the 6th Episode in our series, and is the mid-season installment. Though I\u0026rsquo;m sure you can enjoy this episode independently of all the others, be sure to check out the other installments. If you like what you see please be in touch. If you\u0026rsquo;d like to join the writing team or submit just an episode, I\u0026rsquo;d very much like to be in contact with you. Enjoy!\nMessages from the Underground Nan rolled over for the third time in as many minutes, and tried to ignore in incessant pinging from her communications panel. She was stuck in that twilight space where her grasp of reality and the limits of possibility were tenuous at best.\nShe relents finally and stands up and stumbles over to the comm panel and activates it. The lights are low, but she\u0026rsquo;s thankful when the video system doesn\u0026rsquo;t come on.","title":"Station Keeping #6: Nan\u0026#8217;s Loyalties"},{"content":"Its actually almost interesting how tired and behind I\u0026rsquo;ve been. Knitting camp, as I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;ve read (here, here, and here), was amazing, and I quite enjoyed the experience. If nothing else it did a lot to inspire me, for future knitting. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if there was anything specific I can point to that I learned that I didn\u0026rsquo;t know before, but I have new ideas for patterns, new shapes and techniques and styles that I want to try out and use, and I think on the whole this is a good thing. I also feel better and more encouraged to start designing and writing again. So we\u0026rsquo;ll see what comes of this.\nBut the downside of this, is that I slept between 3 and 5 hours for the past several days, and despite sleeping a lot last night, I\u0026rsquo;m only now beginining to recover properly. I spent an entire day at work being groggy and tired. At one point, while we were fiddling with a database, I leaned over and rubbed my forehead on the corner of a library cart rather than move my arm to scratch it. Yeah it was ugly.\nWhile clearly not sufficient as an excuse, I have none-the-less fallen behind in my TealArt-ing (and my tychoish-ing). I do, thankfully, have a station keeping that will appear tomorrow morning (later this morning, likely, by your reading of this). There may or may not be a post on thursday, and I hope to have something about Delueze for friday, but it might not be much. With luck, I will recover by next week.\nAs you might expect I\u0026rsquo;m trying to get some knitting done, but hopefully I\u0026rsquo;ll convince myself to chill out a little. I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get that \u0026ldquo;oh my g-d, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing\u0026rdquo; itch, so I need to point some time in that direction, but having said that there\u0026rsquo;s a grey Tam that I want to knit, in part to revise my astoundingly popular beret pattern. The astounding part is the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s popular (4th return for \u0026ldquo;free beret pattern\u0026rdquo; on google, and routinely gets the most number of hits of any TealArt page), given, I think, that the numbers don\u0026rsquo;t come out even. Unless you cast on a multiple of 4. Also I need a new beret, all of mine seem to have wondered off\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, and sorry about the irregularity of my postings, and keep an eye on tychoish.\nCheers! tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/this-tealart-week-is-almost-over/","summary":"Its actually almost interesting how tired and behind I\u0026rsquo;ve been. Knitting camp, as I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;ve read (here, here, and here), was amazing, and I quite enjoyed the experience. If nothing else it did a lot to inspire me, for future knitting. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if there was anything specific I can point to that I learned that I didn\u0026rsquo;t know before, but I have new ideas for patterns, new shapes and techniques and styles that I want to try out and use, and I think on the whole this is a good thing. I also feel better and more encouraged to start designing and writing again. So we\u0026rsquo;ll see what comes of this.\nBut the downside of this, is that I slept between 3 and 5 hours for the past several days, and despite sleeping a lot last night, I\u0026rsquo;m only now beginining to recover properly. I spent an entire day at work being groggy and tired.","title":"This TealArt Week (is almost over)"},{"content":"\u0026hellip; go home again (because here I am)\nI\u0026rsquo;m without brain cells, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to sleep, but I\u0026rsquo;ll post later with full updates I promise!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/apparently-you-can/","summary":"\u0026hellip; go home again (because here I am)\nI\u0026rsquo;m without brain cells, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to sleep, but I\u0026rsquo;ll post later with full updates I promise!","title":"apparently you can..."},{"content":"I just got a piece of spam, the text of which was a quote--I think, based on key words--from a Foundation book by Isaac Asimov.\nI will reprint it here, because I am just that tickled.\nGalaxy. Psychohistory, is to keep it of anything: like; to go, where the introduction of them. The tax on broken and radical, men who now my passport (forged an element in My Project there it could remove your fingers were I have been with buttered words were warmed by which are religious tasks he knew too much it\u0026rsquo;s complete said the center of that want in Askone).\nCouncilman man in exchange you see me on that he winked.\nOn their life, other than the taxi popped out to evil time.\nThe Trader: glanced dryly.\nRed. You seem to undertake if tell that it, the powah man a that the conversation: staircase, and the elevator in law of the Empire had time Hardin and exertions of war, was sipping wine by, them personally since it was the first, sight; and added Sutt filled with you don\u0026rsquo;t was much all; It\u0026rsquo;s impressive, and he growled you\u0026rsquo;re the only co operation. Let them one. But he had been part of the Galaxy: regent (rose with atomic power can hold brush foundation may not)? Oh, I suppose. Gaal said, Bort impatiently.\nHe has to Anacreon (you can About three century ago at the Board has been identified as much as for).\nTrantor has nuclear power and the neighboring newly advanced science; of whom: I didn\u0026rsquo;t require to have my people. Pirenne is, to pay for maintenance of the analysis was much the mayor, pounded broke down. It\u0026rsquo;s straight up where to a and that strike, you see you\u0026rsquo;re going it weakens ever considered all. The clouds of the priests, back. It seems amounts to help it a Q; beam; without at their recent events.\nAs muted buzzer; upon those who wrote it going to. Mallow, said! Mallow your statement a week indicated twisted. There was no for compromise, and I\u0026rsquo;ve there\u0026rsquo;s Plenty of. For instance: two years.\nOf the time it, would like the significance: of suspense if he noticed.\nSELDON, could, not count the planet: which proves that they that is this City way to that, very nature evaporated into and if they believe; it\u0026rsquo;s my motives and all. Q: beam of the Chairman only alternative in the results of Anacreon from that may enter the peace you are at the forty eight of the human emotions and power after all fired as muted, buzzer upon them gently that Trantor increasingly vulnerable to make be forced on the order, words then highly developed, mathematics respect. Let\u0026rsquo;s get it is pwobably his found himself.\nCompletely blanketing the I have a Lord Dorwin.\nThere, is the last. Muller Holk for violence?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/asimov-spam/","summary":"I just got a piece of spam, the text of which was a quote--I think, based on key words--from a Foundation book by Isaac Asimov.\nI will reprint it here, because I am just that tickled.\nGalaxy. Psychohistory, is to keep it of anything: like; to go, where the introduction of them. The tax on broken and radical, men who now my passport (forged an element in My Project there it could remove your fingers were I have been with buttered words were warmed by which are religious tasks he knew too much it\u0026rsquo;s complete said the center of that want in Askone).\nCouncilman man in exchange you see me on that he winked.\nOn their life, other than the taxi popped out to evil time.\nThe Trader: glanced dryly.\nRed. You seem to undertake if tell that it, the powah man a that the conversation: staircase, and the elevator in law of the Empire had time Hardin and exertions of war, was sipping wine by, them personally since it was the first, sight; and added Sutt filled with you don\u0026rsquo;t was much all; It\u0026rsquo;s impressive, and he growled you\u0026rsquo;re the only co operation.","title":"asimov spam"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m trying to type quietly so that I don\u0026rsquo;t wake TrickyTricot. Knitting camp is awesome. Joyce Williams and I were the last ones out, after agreeing to disagree about the various merits of different methods of shaping the shoulders and sleeves of drop-shouldered sweaters. It ended with us wearing each-others sweaters flailing about grabbing at the fabric of the shoulders in exasperation. Hilarious my friends, hilarious.\nI figured out the trick to Armenian knitting, which is this cool way to get large blocks of color in stranded knitting without having to do creepy weird stuff. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve always known it, but, I share a brain cell with Meg and Joyce, because there\u0026rsquo;s so much in our approach that\u0026rsquo;s similar. Joyce, for instance, shares my aversion to turning her work, to the point that she will purl-back-backwords to get garter stitch. I\u0026rsquo;m not that hardcore, but I will avoid projects if it involves turning. Tringular shawls, for example.\nI sat next to Meg, Meg Swansen (!), during show and tell, and it was nifty to see what we responded to, and how frequently it was similar. It was just sort of nifty.\nMichael, said this morning something to the effect of \u0026ldquo;you seem like you know a lot of people,\u0026rdquo; which is interesting, because I\u0026rsquo;ve met two of them before, but other than that nada. I guess I mingle well, or something. It\u0026rsquo;s interesting/nice to get outside validation of your apparent social skills/network, particularly at points where you feel like your social network/skills in the broader scope might be shrinking.\nAlso, I brought a lace shawl to camp that I knit a few years ago in 100% tencel, that had developed a nasty snag. Another camper and I spent some time on the ground pinning it out again to get the snag under control. The camp room still has a lace carpet.\nIN other news, my camp knitting, which is a plain sweater, is coming along nicely. I figure that I should be able to get done with it by lunch time (g-d willing) and then I can get back to knitting color work. Speaking of which, a woman was knitting this amazing color-work sweater in this amazing yarn, that apparently, isn\u0026rsquo;t really available on the internet, but is SUPER amazing and incredibly cheap. Like\u0026hellip; Incredibly cheap. And at least theoretically compatible with jumper weight shetland. She brought down the color card and 6 of us took the number. I fully intend to call during break tomorrow and order a sweaters worth.\nI also heard about--or more properly that it sunk in--that the reduction in J\u0026amp;S Shetland colors (and concurrent price hike). This means, that really there\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of reason to bother to use their shetland, when HD is such high quality and affordable. I\u0026rsquo;m a college student after all. In terms of swag, with the exception of the aforementioned yarn, there are a couple of great books that I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to knit and I\u0026rsquo;m going to get some sock yarn to make stranded socks.\nThis will entertain my parents/mother as much as anyone, but I met someone today who is friends/knows morris dancing friends from the Twin Cities.\nOther than that\u0026hellip; OMG people are reading my blog, omg, steven eley commented on my blog, squee, and um, I got some encouragement to work on knitting designs. I\u0026rsquo;ve been feeling rather uninspired of late, so that was good. I just need to figure out a way to have time to both knit, and be a science fiction writer.\nSorry for the long rambling post\u0026hellip;. but I think I need to write something for cast on podcast about going to camps: morris camp, knitting camp, and the idea/possibility of going to clarion or something.\nok, over and out folks, I need to figure out a way to pass out, I\u0026rsquo;m going to need to be awake again in almost no time.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-camp-day-two/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m trying to type quietly so that I don\u0026rsquo;t wake TrickyTricot. Knitting camp is awesome. Joyce Williams and I were the last ones out, after agreeing to disagree about the various merits of different methods of shaping the shoulders and sleeves of drop-shouldered sweaters. It ended with us wearing each-others sweaters flailing about grabbing at the fabric of the shoulders in exasperation. Hilarious my friends, hilarious.\nI figured out the trick to Armenian knitting, which is this cool way to get large blocks of color in stranded knitting without having to do creepy weird stuff. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve always known it, but, I share a brain cell with Meg and Joyce, because there\u0026rsquo;s so much in our approach that\u0026rsquo;s similar. Joyce, for instance, shares my aversion to turning her work, to the point that she will purl-back-backwords to get garter stitch. I\u0026rsquo;m not that hardcore, but I will avoid projects if it involves turning.","title":"knitting camp, day two"},{"content":"This posting is nominally in respoonse to section 3.3 of Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s Anti-Oedipus, but I think, given that this section doesn\u0026rsquo;t cover particularly new territory, and the fact that I think I need to take a step back and talk about my perspectives and reasons for approaching this book. So there won\u0026rsquo;t be quotes this week.\nBut first, for my records as much as anything, 3.3 entitled \u0026ldquo;The Problem with Oedipus,\u0026rdquo; and it basically takes a bit of traditional psychonalaitic canon (ish), and explains more or less on it\u0026rsquo;s own terms, how it doesn\u0026rsquo;t hold together. Oedipus doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, because kinship relationships are social constructions; Oedipus doesn\u0026rsquo;t work because heterosexuality doesn\u0026rsquo;t work (for anyone,) Oedipus doesn\u0026rsquo;t work\u0026hellip;. We\u0026rsquo;ve been over parts of this argument before, and while it\u0026rsquo;s a compleatly necessary part of the book. I\u0026rsquo;m in favor of taking it and moving on to greener pastures.\nNext week\u0026rsquo;s section (3.4) is entitled \u0026ldquo;Psychoanalysis and Ethnology,\u0026rdquo; which sounds greener to me.\nAnyway, back to why I like the book, why I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to read a 30 (!) year old book of, what was surely in its day, trendy philosophy.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s difficult to say \u0026ldquo;reality is socially constructed,\u0026rdquo; without having a framework. Judith Butler is a good start (did\u0026rsquo;ya know that she opens her oft-reprinted essay \u0026ldquo;Imitation and Gender Insubordination\u0026rdquo; with a Delueze quote?) but I think it\u0026rsquo;s important to go further. And though it all started with queer theory for me, the truth is that those arguments aren\u0026rsquo;t tactically a good place to start for the kinds of questions and arguments I\u0026rsquo;m interested in building on. I enjoy the possibility and opportunity to look at psychoanalysis and say \u0026ldquo;rubbish!\u0026rdquo; outside of empiricism, and still say \u0026ldquo;you know these ideas are still useful.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s not apologizing for Freud, I mean I think even when you extract the 19th century from Freud, it\u0026rsquo;s not all that good; but it creates the possibility for me (and others I hope) to say \u0026ldquo;look what people working in a psychoanalytical framework have done\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty. Think about attachment theory, think about Levi-Struss and structuralism, and one can\u0026rsquo;t help but admit that \u0026ldquo;interpolation\u0026rdquo; (Althusar) is pretty nifty. I\u0026rsquo;m still throwing out ideas by the bale , but at some point that just has to happen, I suppose. It\u0026rsquo;s a book about psychoanalysis that is unabashedly materialist, and that\u0026rsquo;s an incredibly helpful position to have a grasp of. It\u0026rsquo;s funny. I tried reading Derrida about a year ago. Dear g-d. I think Derrida gets taken a little more seriously than Deleuze and Guatteri, but it\u0026rsquo;s harder to read, and I think less broadly applicable. And then the background. Now lets remember, I\u0026rsquo;m no specialist in this stuff, so what I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to piece together is just that: a mishmash.\nAO is a synthetic project. Like a lot of so called radical philosophy (usually french, usually from the late 60s and 70s), it\u0026rsquo;s a melding of Freud and Marx. I\u0026rsquo;ve heard also (and agree) that it uses Nietzsche synthesizes Freud and Marx. Deleuze and Guatteri are, at least as I read them, post-structuralists, which is basically an epistemological position. That to understand our culture/society, one need to under stand the underlying systems and \u0026ldquo;structures\u0026rdquo;1. Structuralists assume that structures are basically transcendent/ahistorical/etc. Post-structuralists, say no, that they\u0026rsquo;re contextually/historically/culturally constructed. I\u0026rsquo;ve often thought, though I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of textual evidence to back this up on (but hey, blog) that post-structualism pivots on linguistics/semiotics, in the tradition of Saussure. That is: the break the bonds between words (signs) and the idea what they represent (signifiers) and refer to, ripples out to affect other representations and knowing(s). That\u0026rsquo;s rough, of course. I guess this is the notebook edition of the Delueze theory, but I hope that exposing my thinking is useful for you all.\nHave a good weekend and think good thoughts.\ncheers, tycho\nStructures are systems beyond just models, for instance Levi-Struss\u0026rsquo; seminal (ha!) work is on kinship, for instance.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-problem-with-anti-oedipus/","summary":"This posting is nominally in respoonse to section 3.3 of Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s Anti-Oedipus, but I think, given that this section doesn\u0026rsquo;t cover particularly new territory, and the fact that I think I need to take a step back and talk about my perspectives and reasons for approaching this book. So there won\u0026rsquo;t be quotes this week.\nBut first, for my records as much as anything, 3.3 entitled \u0026ldquo;The Problem with Oedipus,\u0026rdquo; and it basically takes a bit of traditional psychonalaitic canon (ish), and explains more or less on it\u0026rsquo;s own terms, how it doesn\u0026rsquo;t hold together. Oedipus doesn\u0026rsquo;t work, because kinship relationships are social constructions; Oedipus doesn\u0026rsquo;t work because heterosexuality doesn\u0026rsquo;t work (for anyone,) Oedipus doesn\u0026rsquo;t work\u0026hellip;. We\u0026rsquo;ve been over parts of this argument before, and while it\u0026rsquo;s a compleatly necessary part of the book. I\u0026rsquo;m in favor of taking it and moving on to greener pastures.\nNext week\u0026rsquo;s section (3.","title":"The Problem with Anti-Oedipus"},{"content":"I have arrived in Wisconsin, again. I think I made pretty reasonable time, there was more traffic than you\u0026rsquo;d think for a thursday, but who knows. Day after the 4th maybe?\nAnyway, I listened to a lot of The Voice of Free Planet X during the drive (in addition to other stuff) and I have to say that I\u0026rsquo;m in absolute love with the podcast. I only have one more episode to listen to because I think I didn\u0026rsquo;t download 25-30ish of the episodes. Addiction. It\u0026rsquo;s great you should listen to. The holiday specials were particularly good. Check it out. I\u0026rsquo;m in that \u0026ldquo;fuzzy headed\u0026rdquo; space because of the drive, where you\u0026rsquo;re not quite tired and not quite awake\u0026hellip; I think I\u0026rsquo;d make a great truck driver if this academia thing craps out on me.\nI also listened to Steven Eley\u0026rsquo;s EscapePod rendition of Issac Asimov\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Nightfall\u0026rdquo; short story. I hadn\u0026rsquo;t heard/read the story as such, (I think) but it was familiar, and it reminded me why I like SF. Great stuff, I mean not at all like what I\u0026rsquo;d write, but masterfully done and just great writing.\nThe knitting camaraderie was pretty darn swell. A friend said \u0026ldquo;I think I\u0026rsquo;ve found my peoples\u0026rdquo; tonight, and that\u0026rsquo;s probably right. It was good times. Though I put a lot of time trying to get my knitting to be at the right point for the weekend, I\u0026rsquo;m starting to feel like I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have the projects in the right place. I also am starting to think that I packed my knitting very oddly. I didn\u0026rsquo;t bring the yarn for the stranded socks (guess I can buy some heh,) but I brought more yarn for the project that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on that I probably won\u0026rsquo;t need for months. Sigh. I also forgot to pack Mr/Sir Henry, and a cardigan that I think might have made for good show and tell. I also realized that I brought a trunk of sweaters for show and tell (and even a couple of shawls) because I had the room and I have no clue what I want to show off.\nOther news. I thought about writing a lot during the drive. I wish I were better/more interested in writing short fiction.\nOk, I\u0026rsquo;m out for the day, I think. posts will come later in the day tomorrow when I have some time to reflect. Until then, keep the internet safe.\ncheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-camp-travel-day/","summary":"I have arrived in Wisconsin, again. I think I made pretty reasonable time, there was more traffic than you\u0026rsquo;d think for a thursday, but who knows. Day after the 4th maybe?\nAnyway, I listened to a lot of The Voice of Free Planet X during the drive (in addition to other stuff) and I have to say that I\u0026rsquo;m in absolute love with the podcast. I only have one more episode to listen to because I think I didn\u0026rsquo;t download 25-30ish of the episodes. Addiction. It\u0026rsquo;s great you should listen to. The holiday specials were particularly good. Check it out. I\u0026rsquo;m in that \u0026ldquo;fuzzy headed\u0026rdquo; space because of the drive, where you\u0026rsquo;re not quite tired and not quite awake\u0026hellip; I think I\u0026rsquo;d make a great truck driver if this academia thing craps out on me.\nI also listened to Steven Eley\u0026rsquo;s EscapePod rendition of Issac Asimov\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Nightfall\u0026rdquo; short story. I hadn\u0026rsquo;t heard/read the story as such, (I think) but it was familiar, and it reminded me why I like SF.","title":"knitting camp, travel day"},{"content":"I hope you had a good 4th, for those of you who were in a place to/that celebrate(d) it. The house didn\u0026rsquo;t explode on the account of the neighbor\u0026rsquo;s fireworks, which I think meets criteria for a good holiday.\nI hope you also enjoyed the holiday edition (ha!) of Station Keeping. It was a fun one, so please do enjoy. Sorry about the wacky schedule this week.\nAnyway. As you\u0026rsquo;re reading this I\u0026rsquo;m probably about to be or getting in the car to drive to knitting camp. So there\u0026rsquo;s not a good blog for today. Alas.\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be a Deleuze piece tomorrow: this one\u0026rsquo;s rough and rambly, and less about the text. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about reading the next couple of sections and then putting it aside to work on Difference and Repetition, which is ironically seeeming more timely at the moment. Maybe. I dunno, I\u0026rsquo;ll talk more about that in a bit.\nThe real reason I\u0026rsquo;m writing this post is because over on the other blog I\u0026rsquo;ve posted about a nifty sweater I knit, and thought that you might be interested in that.\nNext time I have a saturday afternoon to blow on coding, I\u0026rsquo;ll set something up so that the knitting blog pulls content from tychoish and tealart. Until then let this serve as a notice to direct your attention over there for knitting content this weekend.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a sneek peak:\nCheers, tychoish\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pska-public-service-knitting-announcement-and-tealart-updates/","summary":"I hope you had a good 4th, for those of you who were in a place to/that celebrate(d) it. The house didn\u0026rsquo;t explode on the account of the neighbor\u0026rsquo;s fireworks, which I think meets criteria for a good holiday.\nI hope you also enjoyed the holiday edition (ha!) of Station Keeping. It was a fun one, so please do enjoy. Sorry about the wacky schedule this week.\nAnyway. As you\u0026rsquo;re reading this I\u0026rsquo;m probably about to be or getting in the car to drive to knitting camp. So there\u0026rsquo;s not a good blog for today. Alas.\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be a Deleuze piece tomorrow: this one\u0026rsquo;s rough and rambly, and less about the text. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about reading the next couple of sections and then putting it aside to work on Difference and Repetition, which is ironically seeeming more timely at the moment. Maybe. I dunno, I\u0026rsquo;ll talk more about that in a bit.","title":"PSKA (public service knitting announcement) [and TealArt updates]"},{"content":"Here folks. Look at me, I\u0026rsquo;m being a knitting blogger. ain\u0026rsquo;t I being hip ahem anyway\u0026hellip;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s not much to say about this sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s a derivation of Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Henry VIII\u0026rdquo; sweater from Tudor Roses. I basically knit it to the pattern, changing the sleeves to be a bit longer because I apparently come from a different racial stock than A.S., and we my friends have longer arms. I made a mistake with regards to the bottom horizontal pattern band, but I think it looks ok all things considered. Her version of course has bunches of colors, and is quite impressive. Mine doesn\u0026rsquo;t. The yarn is Knit-Picks Gloss, a silk and wool, fingering weight, sock yarn, which is delightful but doesn\u0026rsquo;t come in many colors. Also, I think the contrast is works pretty well for me, so I\u0026rsquo;m not arguing.\nI make the joke that this garment, isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a cheep knock off, as it is a representation of the way fashion trickles down from the nobility to the peasants. This is a stop along the way, of course, and why I sometimes call the sweater Sir or Mr. Henry.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the sweater laid out on a chair:\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a detail on the chair. Ok crapy shot, I\u0026rsquo;m really not one of those photographing knit bloggers you know. I do better--marginally at least--with words. Never the less, for your edification:\nAnd finally a close up of the neck, because I took the picture, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s probably worth showing off.\nWhile I like the neck of this sweater, this has proven to me that I really don\u0026rsquo;t do well with crew necks. They\u0026rsquo;re hard to wear and I always feel like I\u0026rsquo;m over dressed with crewneck sweaters. If I had to do this again, I\u0026rsquo;d open the neck somehow. Maybe that could be part of version 3 (because I do want to knit the sweater over again). Also, I think if I were going to knit it again, I\u0026rsquo;d put underarm gussets in the sweater, because I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s a bit tight there sometimes.\nStay tuned, more reports when I arrive and get settled in. There\u0026rsquo;ll be more knit camp blogging here.\nSee you on the flipside.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sirmr-henry/","summary":"Here folks. Look at me, I\u0026rsquo;m being a knitting blogger. ain\u0026rsquo;t I being hip ahem anyway\u0026hellip;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s not much to say about this sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s a derivation of Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Henry VIII\u0026rdquo; sweater from Tudor Roses. I basically knit it to the pattern, changing the sleeves to be a bit longer because I apparently come from a different racial stock than A.S., and we my friends have longer arms. I made a mistake with regards to the bottom horizontal pattern band, but I think it looks ok all things considered. Her version of course has bunches of colors, and is quite impressive. Mine doesn\u0026rsquo;t. The yarn is Knit-Picks Gloss, a silk and wool, fingering weight, sock yarn, which is delightful but doesn\u0026rsquo;t come in many colors. Also, I think the contrast is works pretty well for me, so I\u0026rsquo;m not arguing.\nI make the joke that this garment, isn\u0026rsquo;t so much a cheep knock off, as it is a representation of the way fashion trickles down from the nobility to the peasants.","title":"Sir/Mr. Henry"},{"content":"as the firecrackers and other assorted explosive rain celebratorily down on the neighborhood, I remembered that it\u0026rsquo;s a holiday today. I\u0026rsquo;m off work till next tuesday because of knitting camp, so that\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. I have to drive 8 hour tomorrow, so I need to finish packing/preping (well, arguably start packing/preping) before I do tomorrows blogging.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t yet decided where the knitting pictures should get posted. I think I\u0026rsquo;m making the decision now to post knitting contnet (pictures, reports from camp) here, on /tychoish. At least for the foreseable, that\u0026rsquo;s how it\u0026rsquo;ll be.\nok, pack first, blog second.\ncheers\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/blowing-up-the-neighborhood/","summary":"as the firecrackers and other assorted explosive rain celebratorily down on the neighborhood, I remembered that it\u0026rsquo;s a holiday today. I\u0026rsquo;m off work till next tuesday because of knitting camp, so that\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. I have to drive 8 hour tomorrow, so I need to finish packing/preping (well, arguably start packing/preping) before I do tomorrows blogging.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t yet decided where the knitting pictures should get posted. I think I\u0026rsquo;m making the decision now to post knitting contnet (pictures, reports from camp) here, on /tychoish. At least for the foreseable, that\u0026rsquo;s how it\u0026rsquo;ll be.\nok, pack first, blog second.\ncheers","title":"blowing up the neighborhood"},{"content":"Empirical Questions:\nA book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate in relation to \u0026lsquo;dramas\u0026rsquo; and by means of \u0026lsquo;cruelty\u0026rsquo;. They must have a coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come from themselves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere.\n(from Roughtheory.org.)\nThis is a passage, from Deleuze\u0026rsquo;s Difference and Repetition, and I think part of why I like him so much. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m focusing too much on Anti-Oedipus, when really DR is where it\u0026rsquo;s at. Hrmm.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/some-rough-empirical-questions/","summary":"Empirical Questions:\nA book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate in relation to \u0026lsquo;dramas\u0026rsquo; and by means of \u0026lsquo;cruelty\u0026rsquo;. They must have a coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come from themselves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere.\n(from Roughtheory.org.)\nThis is a passage, from Deleuze\u0026rsquo;s Difference and Repetition, and I think part of why I like him so much. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m focusing too much on Anti-Oedipus, when really DR is where it\u0026rsquo;s at. Hrmm.\nCheers!","title":"Some Rough Empirical Questions"},{"content":" tribbles first person to make a LOLimage of that wins my undying affection.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/someone-had-to-do-it/","summary":"tribbles first person to make a LOLimage of that wins my undying affection.","title":"someone had to do it"},{"content":"Welcome to this week\u0026rsquo;s somewhat late edition of Station Keeping I\u0026rsquo;m sorry about the confusion this time. We\u0026rsquo;ll return to our usual schedule next week. This episode was fun for me, it gave me a chance to explore story telling from an historical perspective, which is something that I think is pretty nifty. With luck this won\u0026rsquo;t be the last you see of Prof. Tiltsten, and I hope that this essay will help explain some of the questions that you might have about the station and our story.\nThe Necessity of Hanmist Studies, Part I by Professor Jonathan Tiltsten\nUnlike some other pivotal moments in the development of human colonial efforts on other worlds, many documents survive from the period just before and during the occupation of a space station in-orbit of the rim-world \u0026ldquo;Hanm.\u0026rdquo; Though in retrospect it is widely accepted, and obvious to many scholars of post-League political organization that the events on Hanm Centre were very important, if not key in determining the organization of human government for the next hundred years; at the time, the key actors in this milieux were not only unaware of their coming role in history, but also the importance of their moment. First a letter from the papers of Commander Eli Banner, the first commander of Hanm Centre, written shortly before he departed for Hanm:\nSometimes I think I\u0026rsquo;m getting too old for field assignments, but it\u0026rsquo;s better than getting fat and old behind a desk core-side, a lowly commander would never get chosen for a relativity cruise cycle1. But I\u0026rsquo;m basically unattached, and I have some experience in the field, but who knows anyway. This time period never did suit me, and it\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting to see how the world looks on the other side. A of a long flight; not that the core will matter very much out there I trust. I just hope I get a chance to come back someday.\nAt the same time, the leaders of the civilian government on the colony world Hanm knew that change in the status quo, at least for their people, was imminent--and strictly speaking, it was--their opposition was to the league presence on Hanm Centre, not, in their mind, to the entire League, as it would later become.2 Or the interstellar political status quo of the previous thousand years. Indeed it we now think that it would have been at least a generation on Hanm from the time that Eli Banner departed the core-side world until he and his convoy would arrive on Hanm.\nThis is an excerpt from an editorial circulated by early \u0026ldquo;Hanmist\u0026rdquo;3 shortly the Navy confirmed that it was sending a high level operations convoy after Commander Eli Banner left the core for Hanm Centre.\nAbove all, I would like to express my objection to the fact that the outpost currently under-construction in high orbit of the planet will be operated and governed by the League\u0026rsquo;s Navy. While an easily accessible space outpost in this part of the galaxy is not inherently objectionable, I would like to locate my resistance to Hanm Centre not in terms of resistance to the League at large, but rather in acknowledgment of the fact that the Civil authority on Hanm was not--according to the public record--consulted by the League authorities, and furthermore, the fact that the station is not to be administered or overseen by Hanmish authorities. Indeed, there is no reason that it can be directed and administered by the civil authorities on Hanm, who would surely be the best suited given their experience with the region.\nAs we can see, the seeds of the \u0026ldquo;Hanmist Separation\u0026rdquo; movement were significantly more modest than the militant movement that would follow in their name. In an age where the technology of space travel had paradoxically brought time and history to a virtual stand still, it took by the standards of the day, only a paltry handful of years for the Hanmist movement to sour. Though from our contemporary perspective this may not seem particularly remarkable, it must have been--particularly to the then unknowing Eli Banner.\n\u0026ldquo;Historical Moment\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_. ~/tychoish.*\nKey leaders of the League and Navy during this era were frequently cycled on and off interstellar flights to help provide continuity with the League\u0026rsquo;s longer term missions on outer worlds. This kept some level of stability, but meant that policy changed back and forth as various leaders came on and off the cruises.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIn fairness, it is only in retrospect that we can make this claim, in a lot of ways, Hanm Centre was of a guilded age of a dying empire of sorts, and the accomplishments of the station and it\u0026rsquo;s crew though too numerous to list here, were not typical of any late imperial project.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n\u0026ldquo;Hamnism\u0026rdquo; refers to the political movement started on Hanm (that quickly spread to other large rim worlds) that advocated independence and separation from the League, the policies of continued colonization, and distant centralized government.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-the-historical-moment/","summary":"Welcome to this week\u0026rsquo;s somewhat late edition of Station Keeping I\u0026rsquo;m sorry about the confusion this time. We\u0026rsquo;ll return to our usual schedule next week. This episode was fun for me, it gave me a chance to explore story telling from an historical perspective, which is something that I think is pretty nifty. With luck this won\u0026rsquo;t be the last you see of Prof. Tiltsten, and I hope that this essay will help explain some of the questions that you might have about the station and our story.\nThe Necessity of Hanmist Studies, Part I by Professor Jonathan Tiltsten\nUnlike some other pivotal moments in the development of human colonial efforts on other worlds, many documents survive from the period just before and during the occupation of a space station in-orbit of the rim-world \u0026ldquo;Hanm.\u0026rdquo; Though in retrospect it is widely accepted, and obvious to many scholars of post-League political organization that the events on Hanm Centre were very important, if not key in determining the organization of human government for the next hundred years; at the time, the key actors in this milieux were not only unaware of their coming role in history, but also the importance of their moment.","title":"Station Keeping: The Historical Moment"},{"content":"Title: Listing Instead of Blogging\nOk, so with TealArt broken for the present interval, (they say it should be working soon, but who knows,)1 I\u0026rsquo;m going to turn back to blogging here. It\u0026rsquo;s interesting, the lack of the blog, or at least the possibility of having a blog around drove me kind of batty. And frankly sucked some of the wind out of the launch, such as it was, of tychoish.com.\nIn lieu of a proper blog entry I present to you a list.\nI continue to be quite enamored of TextMate. It\u0026rsquo;s like the app to beat/use. Someday I\u0026rsquo;d like to have a firmer grasp of vim, but for now. TM all the way. I sort of jury-rigged a script thing for work using a Macro (which suprisingly enough I\u0026rsquo;d never done) a (very simple) regular expression and TextMate that saved me probably hours of my time. So I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy. I need/want to find some way to set up and start using an off site subversion repository for all of my most important text files and what not. I have some learning to do on the subject, but this kind of things needs to happen. I\u0026rsquo;m running off to knitting camp on thursday, it\u0026rsquo;s going to be awesome, and I\u0026rsquo;ll try to blog about it. Here, if not on TealArt.2 I\u0026rsquo;m going to have a post on Zimmermania tomorrow morning. I had a really encouraging conversation with the editor of another group blog. I might be able to blather somewhere else soon! I\u0026rsquo;m starting to get into the zen of my job, and while I think its still a deeply weird experience that I suspect will provide plenty of writing material for the rest of my life. But that\u0026rsquo;s how I tend to think of summer activities. At this point in my writing of this list, TealArt has returned. I think my plain is: put up my monday post with an adendum tonight, station keeping tomorrow, knitting pictures on thursday, and Deleuze on friday, and we\u0026rsquo;ll return to our regularly scheduled program next week.\nI still want to write that Gatsby take off that I was thinking about last summer. My knitting for this weekend is almost done. The bottom part of a sleeve (the faster part), another 2 rounds on the body of a sweater, and some work on an all new sweater just for fun. I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that very shortly I\u0026rsquo;m going to have a lot of sleeves to knit. I hate knitting sleeves in the summer. I remain pretty freaked out about next year, and what with it being july, I think that I need to focus more on this. Sigh. Denial is kicking out. We\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, I\u0026rsquo;ll be blogging throughout tomorrow. Frankly I think it\u0026rsquo;s kind of weird that tychoish.com works and tealart.com doesn\u0026rsquo;t. There\u0026rsquo;s not a lot of good reason as to why this should be the case. Nevertheless, I will take what I can get.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIf any of you are worried that my acquisition of another domain will in some way affect my participation in TealArt, fear not, its being down is a definite drain, and I\u0026rsquo;m very anxious to get it back.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-blog-list-for-3-july-2007/","summary":"Title: Listing Instead of Blogging\nOk, so with TealArt broken for the present interval, (they say it should be working soon, but who knows,)1 I\u0026rsquo;m going to turn back to blogging here. It\u0026rsquo;s interesting, the lack of the blog, or at least the possibility of having a blog around drove me kind of batty. And frankly sucked some of the wind out of the launch, such as it was, of tychoish.com.\nIn lieu of a proper blog entry I present to you a list.\nI continue to be quite enamored of TextMate. It\u0026rsquo;s like the app to beat/use. Someday I\u0026rsquo;d like to have a firmer grasp of vim, but for now. TM all the way. I sort of jury-rigged a script thing for work using a Macro (which suprisingly enough I\u0026rsquo;d never done) a (very simple) regular expression and TextMate that saved me probably hours of my time. So I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy.","title":"a blog list for 3 July 2007"},{"content":"Hi Folks! I meant to post this on the 2nd of July for our weekly letter. That clearly didn\u0026rsquo;t happen. I\u0026rsquo;ll blame it on the web-host, which is appropriate in this circumstance, but at least we\u0026rsquo;re on a newer better server. In an effort to minimize the damage, we\u0026rsquo;re going to post Station Keeping on Wednesday morning, instead of Tuesday, and knitting on Thursday. Sorry about that. I\u0026rsquo;ve missed this site in its little summer vacation almost as much as you have.--ty\nGood Week!\nI hope this monday is treating you well. It\u0026rsquo;s been an eventful week here at the TealArt offices, and it promises to be another eventful week.\nI started my job last week, and after a slow start I think I\u0026rsquo;ve found a pretty good niche and have an interesting task ahead of me. The project I\u0026rsquo;m working on, though finite, will probably not be finished before I\u0026rsquo;m through with the job, (this isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, just a statement of fact). I that this will require a certain amount of serenity in the long run. The other thing that this means is that my blogging time is getting crunched a bit, I hope that i can continue to cope, but I realize that there are things I seriously need to do, in addition to knitting, blogging, and work, so we\u0026rsquo;ll just have to see.\nHaving said this, I\u0026rsquo;ve started a new just-tycho blog. It was around last week at tealart.com/tychoish; but now it has its own home at http://tychoish.com/. I hope you check it out and enjoy it thoroughly. I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying writing for it, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure. I\u0026rsquo;m describing it as a failed tumblelog meets my personal notebook. We\u0026rsquo;ll see where it goes.\nIn terms of TealArt this week; there\u0026rsquo;ll be a new Station Keeping tomorrow, this one\u0026rsquo;s a really fun installment. All of the writers have, I think, something unique that we\u0026rsquo;re interested in talking about, and I think in an interesting way, it fits. While I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing a lot of the foundational materials for the series my personal project is think about the \u0026ldquo;history of the future.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s too familiar an idea for it to be original, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s an interesting idea. So this weeks episode is a personal indugence, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite alright with that. I hope you enjoy.\nRemember, if you want to join the SK writer\u0026rsquo;s group, drop me an email and we\u0026rsquo;ll get you set up. Also, if you just want to contribute a story, talk to me and I\u0026rsquo;ll get you access to the writer\u0026rsquo;s bible. Any Feedback you might have would be great.\nThe biggest news of the week, is of course that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be at a knitting retreat/event from Thursday-Monday. This means another drive to Wisconsin (I\u0026rsquo;m doing this a lot, it seems,) and a lot of knitting to do in prep. I\u0026rsquo;ll try and take notes (and pictures?) so that I can share with you afterwards. I\u0026rsquo;ll have a couple of pictures of sweaters that I hope to post soon. I\u0026rsquo;m also going to have a post on Zimmermania in the next few days so stay tuned there.\nSorry for not having more for you, I hope you have a good week.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-good-week-late/","summary":"Hi Folks! I meant to post this on the 2nd of July for our weekly letter. That clearly didn\u0026rsquo;t happen. I\u0026rsquo;ll blame it on the web-host, which is appropriate in this circumstance, but at least we\u0026rsquo;re on a newer better server. In an effort to minimize the damage, we\u0026rsquo;re going to post Station Keeping on Wednesday morning, instead of Tuesday, and knitting on Thursday. Sorry about that. I\u0026rsquo;ve missed this site in its little summer vacation almost as much as you have.--ty\nGood Week!\nI hope this monday is treating you well. It\u0026rsquo;s been an eventful week here at the TealArt offices, and it promises to be another eventful week.\nI started my job last week, and after a slow start I think I\u0026rsquo;ve found a pretty good niche and have an interesting task ahead of me. The project I\u0026rsquo;m working on, though finite, will probably not be finished before I\u0026rsquo;m through with the job, (this isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, just a statement of fact).","title":"A Good Week (late)"},{"content":"lord only knows what was wrong\u0026hellip; most of the time our webhost is amazing, sometimes though, it sucks, and yesterday was a definite case of the latter triumphing over the former.\nTealArt isn\u0026rsquo;t back up, so we\u0026rsquo;re going to be a week behind on Station Keeping, I guess, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have anything for you today but I posted some neat things yesterday before the crash that I doubt anyone read, so enjoy yourself, and thanks for stopping by.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/were-back/","summary":"lord only knows what was wrong\u0026hellip; most of the time our webhost is amazing, sometimes though, it sucks, and yesterday was a definite case of the latter triumphing over the former.\nTealArt isn\u0026rsquo;t back up, so we\u0026rsquo;re going to be a week behind on Station Keeping, I guess, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have anything for you today but I posted some neat things yesterday before the crash that I doubt anyone read, so enjoy yourself, and thanks for stopping by.\ncheers, tycho","title":"we're back!"},{"content":"Once upon a time a boy named tycho really hated RSS readers, they were clunky and didn\u0026rsquo;t save much time because most websites didn\u0026rsquo;t have feeds, and the ones that did had excerpt feeds.\nThen tycho got a Mac and discovered NetNewsWire and by this time the internets had clicked over to version 2.0 and he started using RSS a lot, it saved him time and let him use even more of the internets at once, no matter where he was. And everything had RSS feeds and he was happy.\nBut he never unsubscribed from a feed--ever--and before he noticed, there were 520 feeds. Everytime he hit refresh on the reader, there were another 1300 items to read. Reading the internets became a nag, rather than a pleasure.\nSomething had to be done, and so he worked on eliminating feeds that he didn\u0026rsquo;t read or didn\u0026rsquo;t enjoy reading--like the ones for usenet groups, or del.icio.us tags--and slowly but surely he was able to limit the number of subscriptions to 270. This meant that whenever he hit refresh there were about 300 items to read. He was happy.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s more like it!\nWith luck I can weed a few more out and hopefully this will help me become a better blog citizen. If I\u0026rsquo;m reading fewer things, hopefully I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to read more throughly and be able to respond more often, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to get it down some more.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-battle-with-a-news-reader/","summary":"Once upon a time a boy named tycho really hated RSS readers, they were clunky and didn\u0026rsquo;t save much time because most websites didn\u0026rsquo;t have feeds, and the ones that did had excerpt feeds.\nThen tycho got a Mac and discovered NetNewsWire and by this time the internets had clicked over to version 2.0 and he started using RSS a lot, it saved him time and let him use even more of the internets at once, no matter where he was. And everything had RSS feeds and he was happy.\nBut he never unsubscribed from a feed--ever--and before he noticed, there were 520 feeds. Everytime he hit refresh on the reader, there were another 1300 items to read. Reading the internets became a nag, rather than a pleasure.\nSomething had to be done, and so he worked on eliminating feeds that he didn\u0026rsquo;t read or didn\u0026rsquo;t enjoy reading--like the ones for usenet groups, or del.","title":"a battle with a news-reader"},{"content":"PersonalDNA\ntaken at the request of wonderFriend Jo\u0026hellip; I don\u0026rsquo;t buy it. Too many factors\u0026hellip; reported on, for what amounts to a big 5 test.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/for-joe/","summary":"PersonalDNA\ntaken at the request of wonderFriend Jo\u0026hellip; I don\u0026rsquo;t buy it. Too many factors\u0026hellip; reported on, for what amounts to a big 5 test.","title":"for joe"},{"content":"He\u0026rsquo;s back:\nHe was back. The wool stealing squirrel was back.\n(from Yarn Harlot.)\nI think someone needs to come up with a webcomic or something along those lines\u0026hellip;.\n\u0026hellip; or t-shirts. I\u0026rsquo;d totally get a tshirt.\n(this post was brought to you by a lack of a nap. lord I want a nap)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fur-brained/","summary":"He\u0026rsquo;s back:\nHe was back. The wool stealing squirrel was back.\n(from Yarn Harlot.)\nI think someone needs to come up with a webcomic or something along those lines\u0026hellip;.\n\u0026hellip; or t-shirts. I\u0026rsquo;d totally get a tshirt.\n(this post was brought to you by a lack of a nap. lord I want a nap)","title":"fur-brained"},{"content":"/tychoish, this blog, will have its new home at http://tychoish.com in a few days.\nI\u0026rsquo;m kind of excited about this. If nothing else it means that I\u0026rsquo;ve committed, in at least a minor way, to doing this blog for the next year.\nThis has been an interesting weekend for me. I have a short week and then knitting camp ahead of me, which is exciting but I realize that I have what can only be described as a crapton of work to get done before then.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m taking the weekend off of blogging this week, I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be hit or miss. generally I think blogs need to be active during the work week, and because tychoish, isn\u0026rsquo;t quite as structured, (and it\u0026rsquo;s a lot of fun) I can see posting on the weekend, but I\u0026rsquo;m undecided. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how things work.\ncheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/legs-of-our-own/","summary":"/tychoish, this blog, will have its new home at http://tychoish.com in a few days.\nI\u0026rsquo;m kind of excited about this. If nothing else it means that I\u0026rsquo;ve committed, in at least a minor way, to doing this blog for the next year.\nThis has been an interesting weekend for me. I have a short week and then knitting camp ahead of me, which is exciting but I realize that I have what can only be described as a crapton of work to get done before then.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m taking the weekend off of blogging this week, I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be hit or miss. generally I think blogs need to be active during the work week, and because tychoish, isn\u0026rsquo;t quite as structured, (and it\u0026rsquo;s a lot of fun) I can see posting on the weekend, but I\u0026rsquo;m undecided. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how things work.\ncheers!","title":"legs of our own"},{"content":"note to self: remember that your intention for this site was as a place where you could write notes to yourself. look how you\u0026rsquo;re now trying to write a blog? what up with that?\nmore note to self: write something about attention spans, reading media, length, and the internet.\nnote to readers: have a great weekend!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/attention-spans/","summary":"note to self: remember that your intention for this site was as a place where you could write notes to yourself. look how you\u0026rsquo;re now trying to write a blog? what up with that?\nmore note to self: write something about attention spans, reading media, length, and the internet.\nnote to readers: have a great weekend!","title":"attention spans"},{"content":"So I totally got a comment from jared over on TealArt, I think mostly trying to recruit me for his Deleuze blog-carnival (which I\u0026rsquo;m totally onboard with), but it was nice. He has a good blog, for those of you who are interested in the Deleuze1 ;)\nActually I\u0026rsquo;m really impressed with it, and I kind of want to steal him and make him write for TealArt; the scary thing is that I\u0026rsquo;m only half kidding about that. We\u0026rsquo;re going to be at the same institution next school year, which would be cool.\nThe internet can be a small place sometimes.\nI think the ironic definite article is particularly well played here. don\u0026rsquo;t get your Strunk and White out and we\u0026rsquo;ll be ok.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deleuzean-connections/","summary":"So I totally got a comment from jared over on TealArt, I think mostly trying to recruit me for his Deleuze blog-carnival (which I\u0026rsquo;m totally onboard with), but it was nice. He has a good blog, for those of you who are interested in the Deleuze1 ;)\nActually I\u0026rsquo;m really impressed with it, and I kind of want to steal him and make him write for TealArt; the scary thing is that I\u0026rsquo;m only half kidding about that. We\u0026rsquo;re going to be at the same institution next school year, which would be cool.\nThe internet can be a small place sometimes.\nI think the ironic definite article is particularly well played here. don\u0026rsquo;t get your Strunk and White out and we\u0026rsquo;ll be ok.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;","title":"deleuzean connections"},{"content":"oh dear.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-thyme/","summary":"oh dear.","title":"on thyme"},{"content":"Until this point in the series, my titles have been somewhat more\u0026hellip; creative, \u0026ldquo;primitive territorial machine\u0026rdquo; is simply the title of the division of the book that I\u0026rsquo;ve selected this weeks\u0026rsquo; quotes from. This larger section is about, I think, the development/emergence of \u0026ldquo;oedipus\u0026rdquo; (and capitalism, too I suppose) but really it\u0026rsquo;s all about the development of culture and civilization. That\u0026rsquo;s my read anyway.\nWhile this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly chicklit, or all purpose op/ed writing, I think there\u0026rsquo;s something interesting here, and it\u0026rsquo;s my hope to make this pretty accessible to everyone. So if something isn\u0026rsquo;t clear, call me on it. If you want more resources, ask. If you completely disagree with my interpretation of a quote, I welcome it. My selections only reflect what catches my eye, and I claim no impartiality.\nI ran across this piece on Lavral Subjects called \u0026ldquo;Schizoanalysis in Practice,\u0026rdquo; and I think it is helpful in situating Anti-Oedipus in the appropriate intellectual context.\nWith all that said on to this week\u0026rsquo;s attempt:\nThe first quote I have is kind of pithy, but it reiterates a concept that I talked about before:\n\u0026ldquo;..it is in order to function that a social machine must not function well\u0026rdquo; (151).\nThe idea that functioning is dependent on not-functioning. It\u0026rsquo;s a cheep shot, but I suspect that we can account some of the enduring popularity of Freudian theory itself to this basic principal. Somewhat more seriously, on an ethical level, as Foucault instructs us to read this book, the theme is about enduring contradiction and all that.\nAs I wrote the above words, I realize how incredibly pomo and 1990s this all sounds. Which I suppose is the point. While I still believe it, I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting how this sort of sounds dated, or at least tried.\nOn to less pithy sections:\n\u0026ldquo;The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned the belief in the possibility of capitalism\u0026rsquo;s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. and the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way\u0026rdquo; (151; emphasis added).\nI think this passage speaks for itself, so I won\u0026rsquo;t bother, and I think this point is well made. I add the emphasis, not because I think it\u0026rsquo;s a particularly powerful conclusion, or central to the passage, but simply to highlight the ways that this book can induce a chuckle here and there.\nLest you think that AO is all fun and games, and relatively low on trips through psychoanalyic land, don\u0026rsquo;t be fooled by excerpts, I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen well\u0026hellip; So if you get a copy of the book and start following along with me, don\u0026rsquo;t tell me I didn\u0026rsquo;t warn you.\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;And isn\u0026rsquo;t that also what Oedipus, the fear of incest, is all about: the fear of a decoded flow\u0026hellip; It is the thing, the unnamable, the generalized decoding of flows that reveals up a contrario the secret of all these formations, coding the flows, and even overcoding them, rather than letting anything escape coding\u0026rdquo; (153).\nI talked about this passage a few weeks ago, and after I had prattled on about \u0026ldquo;flows\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;decoding\u0026rdquo; for a few minutes I paused to take a sip of water, and promptly realized how absurd it all sounded. At the same time, while I\u0026rsquo;m convinced, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how directly applicable I can make this out to be, and that was my initial goal of these essays. I think that it speaks to our propensity to make meaning, to over explain coincidence, and to construct representational models based on insufficient data. In away they sort of say that Oedipus is about needing a good story to explain this disorganized \u0026ldquo;schizoid\u0026rdquo; series of events and situations.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s my gloss anyway, what\u0026rsquo;s yours?\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/primitive-territorial-machine/","summary":"Until this point in the series, my titles have been somewhat more\u0026hellip; creative, \u0026ldquo;primitive territorial machine\u0026rdquo; is simply the title of the division of the book that I\u0026rsquo;ve selected this weeks\u0026rsquo; quotes from. This larger section is about, I think, the development/emergence of \u0026ldquo;oedipus\u0026rdquo; (and capitalism, too I suppose) but really it\u0026rsquo;s all about the development of culture and civilization. That\u0026rsquo;s my read anyway.\nWhile this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly chicklit, or all purpose op/ed writing, I think there\u0026rsquo;s something interesting here, and it\u0026rsquo;s my hope to make this pretty accessible to everyone. So if something isn\u0026rsquo;t clear, call me on it. If you want more resources, ask. If you completely disagree with my interpretation of a quote, I welcome it. My selections only reflect what catches my eye, and I claim no impartiality.\nI ran across this piece on Lavral Subjects called \u0026ldquo;Schizoanalysis in Practice,\u0026rdquo; and I think it is helpful in situating Anti-Oedipus in the appropriate intellectual context.","title":"Primitive Territorial Machine"},{"content":"a couple of things have come across my proverbial desk1 this week regarding cyberpunk, and so I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over the punk part of \u0026ldquo;cyberpunk\u0026rdquo; in an attempt to understand where the genre and ideas have gone in the last say\u0026hellip;. 10 years.\nThe thing is that the geeks turned out to be yuppies, not punks, and I think the internet is largely shapped by this. Even the quasi-legal spheres of the interent (eg. bit torrent), are pretty yuppie and not very punky. Not that I\u0026rsquo;m a punk, really, but I think about these things.\nAnyway, all this to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve found some interesting contemporary punky SF, which has caused me to think about these things again.\n365 Tomorrows The Voice of Free Planet X Good (not so) clean fun!\nand let me tell you, it\u0026rsquo;s nothing but proverbial\u0026hellip; heh, I think I have a new name for the blog.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-punk-in-cyberpunk/","summary":"a couple of things have come across my proverbial desk1 this week regarding cyberpunk, and so I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over the punk part of \u0026ldquo;cyberpunk\u0026rdquo; in an attempt to understand where the genre and ideas have gone in the last say\u0026hellip;. 10 years.\nThe thing is that the geeks turned out to be yuppies, not punks, and I think the internet is largely shapped by this. Even the quasi-legal spheres of the interent (eg. bit torrent), are pretty yuppie and not very punky. Not that I\u0026rsquo;m a punk, really, but I think about these things.\nAnyway, all this to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve found some interesting contemporary punky SF, which has caused me to think about these things again.\n365 Tomorrows The Voice of Free Planet X Good (not so) clean fun!\nand let me tell you, it\u0026rsquo;s nothing but proverbial\u0026hellip; heh, I think I have a new name for the blog.","title":"the punk in cyberpunk"},{"content":"Wonder what this \u0026ldquo;Station Keeping\u0026rdquo; thing that I keep talking about is? Wonder no longer. Here\u0026rsquo;s a description of the project that I wrote in an email that I\u0026quot;m kind of fond off.\nStation Keeping. Basically what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do is create a framework for an ongoing science fiction serial story, to be posted as part of a blog at TealArt (tealart.com but more specifically, tealart.com/hanm.) It\u0026rsquo;s set in a distant future, on a space station, in the middle of a hot political situation, but mostly focuses on a diverse group of characters as history happens around them, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be little adventures with cyberpunk themes, post-colonial themes, and whatever strikes our fancy, I guess\u0026hellip; It\u0026rsquo;s not a novel, or a specific long-form book, just fun little glimpses and adventures in another world built around common characters, themes, situations, and dynamics.\nIn part my goal is to have fun writing science fiction in a more casual situation, and in part it\u0026rsquo;s experiment with using blogging as a medium for Sci-Fi and story telling; but more practically, it\u0026rsquo;s also a way for writers to experiment in a safe space (in part because the entries are short: 1k at the very top, more like 600-700), and it presents a structured way to form a writing community that I think could be really helpful to the group process.\nThe great thing is that we\u0026rsquo;re accepting submissions. If you want to write an episode, or if you want to join the writing team, you can. It\u0026rsquo;s great practice, and I think we have a cool community, so please contact me if you\u0026rsquo;re at all interested.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/what-is-station-keeeping/","summary":"Wonder what this \u0026ldquo;Station Keeping\u0026rdquo; thing that I keep talking about is? Wonder no longer. Here\u0026rsquo;s a description of the project that I wrote in an email that I\u0026quot;m kind of fond off.\nStation Keeping. Basically what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do is create a framework for an ongoing science fiction serial story, to be posted as part of a blog at TealArt (tealart.com but more specifically, tealart.com/hanm.) It\u0026rsquo;s set in a distant future, on a space station, in the middle of a hot political situation, but mostly focuses on a diverse group of characters as history happens around them, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be little adventures with cyberpunk themes, post-colonial themes, and whatever strikes our fancy, I guess\u0026hellip; It\u0026rsquo;s not a novel, or a specific long-form book, just fun little glimpses and adventures in another world built around common characters, themes, situations, and dynamics.\nIn part my goal is to have fun writing science fiction in a more casual situation, and in part it\u0026rsquo;s experiment with using blogging as a medium for Sci-Fi and story telling; but more practically, it\u0026rsquo;s also a way for writers to experiment in a safe space (in part because the entries are short: 1k at the very top, more like 600-700), and it presents a structured way to form a writing community that I think could be really helpful to the group process.","title":"what is station keeeping?"},{"content":"danah boyd wrote an article that\u0026rsquo;s been circulating recently, thanks to one of Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s boingboing.net posts, about the way that the difference between myspace and facebook mirror class divides in America. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting piece, and I think that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty good. I could quibble if I, like danah, had more time to come to the right words, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s more important to just list out some thoughts. I apologize for the rough shape of those thoughts.\nLike Cory I\u0026rsquo;m a big admirer of danah boyd\u0026rsquo;s work, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching and do enjoy her work on social networking sites on the the internet, I have to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve had some mixed personal feelings about On the one hand she\u0026rsquo;s completely right: the age divide between My-Space and Face-book is class reinforced/based; but at the same time, I think the picture is way more complicated, but this is a situation where I\u0026rsquo;d love to play with the numbers. Read the article for yourself and see what you think. Here are my thoughts:\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s important to acknowledge the way that the marketing departments of face-book and my-space and the structure of the sites affect the membership. There\u0026rsquo;s something about being on campus and having a website that reflects and supports that connection that FB is built around. I have a crap ton of face-book friends (600?) but I\u0026rsquo;d say that the vast vast majority of people who I\u0026rsquo;ve at least had a conversation with or a class, or something. There are exceptions, of course. I have far fewer contacts on my-space, and while a certain number of them are people I know in real life, I think of MS as being for really random people I don\u0026rsquo;t know and FB as being for people I know. Mind you I have variations on the same profile, but that\u0026rsquo;s a testament to laziness.\nBack to my original point, which is that Facebook as a company has been able to be successful, interestingly by being exclusive, and limiting its membership in various ways. Interestingly the knitting social networking site ravelry.com is doing the same thing, intentionally or not. And I think the implications of this practice have a constructive effect on the community.\nI think this officially makes me no longer a participant of \u0026ldquo;youth culture,\u0026rdquo; because my main thought about MS is \u0026ldquo;g-d it\u0026rsquo;s ugly, and poorly organized.\u0026rdquo; I think though, that the lack of structure on MySpace makes it easier to to \u0026ldquo;see\u0026rdquo; the \u0026ldquo;subalteran,\u0026rdquo; where FBs conformity and universality on college campus\u0026rsquo; makes it hard to see these variations.\nOn a technical note, as a college facebook member from before the HS networks were added, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that college students got the opportunity to invite/seed HS networks, and I know that I can\u0026rsquo;t access my the network for my HS.\nAs I read this, I thought about the way that outside of fiction cyberpunk has never really happened, because the punks have never gotten in (a large way) to the internet/cyberspace, in the way that a cyberpunk movement would expect/need. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where this train of thought ends, but I think looking at the subalteran in virtual space, and drawing conclusions about these groups, is a hard project.\nI\u0026rsquo;d be interested in seeing what kind of analysis in a similar vein could be made of LiveJournal. I\u0026rsquo;ve always seen LJ as a sort of microcosm of the internet, but I think in terms of \u0026ldquo;places for sub-culture,\u0026rdquo; that\u0026rsquo;s an interesting way to look at these issues.\nWhat are your thoughts?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/class-and-the-facebookthe-myspace/","summary":"danah boyd wrote an article that\u0026rsquo;s been circulating recently, thanks to one of Cory Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s boingboing.net posts, about the way that the difference between myspace and facebook mirror class divides in America. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting piece, and I think that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty good. I could quibble if I, like danah, had more time to come to the right words, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s more important to just list out some thoughts. I apologize for the rough shape of those thoughts.\nLike Cory I\u0026rsquo;m a big admirer of danah boyd\u0026rsquo;s work, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching and do enjoy her work on social networking sites on the the internet, I have to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve had some mixed personal feelings about On the one hand she\u0026rsquo;s completely right: the age divide between My-Space and Face-book is class reinforced/based; but at the same time, I think the picture is way more complicated, but this is a situation where I\u0026rsquo;d love to play with the numbers.","title":"Class and the Facebook/the MySpace"},{"content":"Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s anti-virtualization stance: forget DRM, think Apple:\nMicrosoft and its advocates have been able to say: \u0026ldquo;with a PC, you get the most choice of software and peripherals.\u0026rdquo; Now a case could be made that the most choice is to be found on a Mac or Linux box virtualizing Windows on the side. The big impediment to this world is the cost of Windows, but an OEM price on the low-end of Windows could eliminate that impediment quickly.\nUntil Steve Jobs allows the virtualization of the Mac OS, which will happen precisely never, Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s commodity cash cow could find itself virtualized into the corner.\n(from Ars Technica.)\nWhile there are always a few programs that one might want from the platform you don\u0026rsquo;t have, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that the number of PC programs that I wish I could run but can\u0026rsquo;t has waned in the past three years (since i made the switch). So yeah, I think its fair that MS has something to be afraid of.\nHaving said that, when I go up to an intel mac, I can\u0026rsquo;t really see wanting to run windows in VM, ubuntu maybe (but all of the cool linux-y goodness is something that you more or less get in OS X anyway, so whatever).\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/microsofts-anti-virtualization-stance-forget-drm-think-apple/","summary":"Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s anti-virtualization stance: forget DRM, think Apple:\nMicrosoft and its advocates have been able to say: \u0026ldquo;with a PC, you get the most choice of software and peripherals.\u0026rdquo; Now a case could be made that the most choice is to be found on a Mac or Linux box virtualizing Windows on the side. The big impediment to this world is the cost of Windows, but an OEM price on the low-end of Windows could eliminate that impediment quickly.\nUntil Steve Jobs allows the virtualization of the Mac OS, which will happen precisely never, Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s commodity cash cow could find itself virtualized into the corner.\n(from Ars Technica.)\nWhile there are always a few programs that one might want from the platform you don\u0026rsquo;t have, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that the number of PC programs that I wish I could run but can\u0026rsquo;t has waned in the past three years (since i made the switch).","title":"Microsoft's anti-virtualization stance: forget DRM, think Apple"},{"content":"Beacause I\u0026rsquo;m always behind on my blog reading, I didn\u0026rsquo;t catch wind of danah\u0026rsquo;s post-publication reflection. Fascinating.\nI have to say that in addition to being interested in what she has to say about the world, I think her position as an academic is incredibly interesting: she\u0026rsquo;s near the bottom of the pecking order, and yet, she writes a (great) little essay and 90k people read it in the first couple of days. I\u0026rsquo;m sure there are full professors in this world whose work hasn\u0026rsquo;t been read by that many people in their careers. Not to degrade the value of that work, at all, just to say, that academic work != to wide distribution in most cases, and similarly not to condemn danah for being popular, I just think it\u0026rsquo;s fascinating.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/more-thoughts-on-danahs-article/","summary":"Beacause I\u0026rsquo;m always behind on my blog reading, I didn\u0026rsquo;t catch wind of danah\u0026rsquo;s post-publication reflection. Fascinating.\nI have to say that in addition to being interested in what she has to say about the world, I think her position as an academic is incredibly interesting: she\u0026rsquo;s near the bottom of the pecking order, and yet, she writes a (great) little essay and 90k people read it in the first couple of days. I\u0026rsquo;m sure there are full professors in this world whose work hasn\u0026rsquo;t been read by that many people in their careers. Not to degrade the value of that work, at all, just to say, that academic work != to wide distribution in most cases, and similarly not to condemn danah for being popular, I just think it\u0026rsquo;s fascinating.","title":"more thoughts on danah('s article)"},{"content":"from the mailbag:\nDear Amazon.com Customer,\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated \u0026ldquo;Research Methods In Psychology\u0026rdquo; by John J Shaughnessy have also purchased \u0026ldquo;Basics of Singing\u0026rdquo; by Jan Schmidt. For this reason, you might like to know that \u0026ldquo;Basics of Singing\u0026rdquo; is now available. You can order your copy for just $60.95 by following the link below.\nOk\u0026hellip;. um, maybe this artificial intelligence stuff is further away than I initially thought\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-one-where-tycho-gets-an-email/","summary":"from the mailbag:\nDear Amazon.com Customer,\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated \u0026ldquo;Research Methods In Psychology\u0026rdquo; by John J Shaughnessy have also purchased \u0026ldquo;Basics of Singing\u0026rdquo; by Jan Schmidt. For this reason, you might like to know that \u0026ldquo;Basics of Singing\u0026rdquo; is now available. You can order your copy for just $60.95 by following the link below.\nOk\u0026hellip;. um, maybe this artificial intelligence stuff is further away than I initially thought\u0026hellip;","title":"the one where tycho gets an email"},{"content":"How long did you think I could go without a blog post about the state of the blog. Who do you think I am?\nJust as an aside I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying my job, but there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work. On the upside I\u0026rsquo;m generally feeling pretty productive in my working and non working life, and I get to listen to podcasts, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been learning lots, on top getting things done in work and outside of work.\nI think I must work better when my time is crunched. I wish it were slightly less crunched, but that\u0026rsquo;s the way life is. Once I get a little more caught up and settled in, I should be able to squeeze a little bit more out of my self. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping.\nThanks for reading. I hope to have a little content for you today. Particular thanks to Sheri for commenting, it\u0026rsquo;s great to get such good comments from such great folk.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/time-crunches/","summary":"How long did you think I could go without a blog post about the state of the blog. Who do you think I am?\nJust as an aside I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying my job, but there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work. On the upside I\u0026rsquo;m generally feeling pretty productive in my working and non working life, and I get to listen to podcasts, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been learning lots, on top getting things done in work and outside of work.\nI think I must work better when my time is crunched. I wish it were slightly less crunched, but that\u0026rsquo;s the way life is. Once I get a little more caught up and settled in, I should be able to squeeze a little bit more out of my self. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping.\nThanks for reading. I hope to have a little content for you today. Particular thanks to Sheri for commenting, it\u0026rsquo;s great to get such good comments from such great folk.","title":"time crunches?"},{"content":"while it\u0026rsquo;s not the best lolcat around, granted, I like the juxtaposition. Also that\u0026rsquo;s my cat, Montana, making her blog debut. that gets me thinking\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/meme-mashup-ie-stuff-on-my-lolcat/","summary":"while it\u0026rsquo;s not the best lolcat around, granted, I like the juxtaposition. Also that\u0026rsquo;s my cat, Montana, making her blog debut. that gets me thinking\u0026hellip;","title":"meme mashup (ie. stuff on my lolcat)"},{"content":"because, once wasn\u0026rsquo;t enough, here\u0026rsquo;s another stuff on my lol cat\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/more-stuff-on-my-lolcat/","summary":"because, once wasn\u0026rsquo;t enough, here\u0026rsquo;s another stuff on my lol cat\u0026hellip;","title":"more stuff on my lolcat"},{"content":"One of the Project.ioni.st folk keeps posting things that are right up my alley:\n\u0026ldquo;No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.\u0026rdquo;\n-- Edward Saphir\nthese are the days that I want to be an anthropologist.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/saphir-whorfism/","summary":"One of the Project.ioni.st folk keeps posting things that are right up my alley:\n\u0026ldquo;No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.\u0026rdquo;\n-- Edward Saphir\nthese are the days that I want to be an anthropologist.","title":"saphir-whorfism"},{"content":"So I was totally going to do a little more pre-blogging for today, despite the fact that I had a little counting error last night, but instead I wrote this response for TealArt. It need to happen so it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that I wrote that. You do read TealArt, don\u0026rsquo;t you?\nFor your tychoish does I\u0026rsquo;ll point you to read what I wrote and also the essay that I responded to. \u0026ldquo;Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s worth your time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/social-networking-and-the-kids-today/","summary":"So I was totally going to do a little more pre-blogging for today, despite the fact that I had a little counting error last night, but instead I wrote this response for TealArt. It need to happen so it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that I wrote that. You do read TealArt, don\u0026rsquo;t you?\nFor your tychoish does I\u0026rsquo;ll point you to read what I wrote and also the essay that I responded to. \u0026ldquo;Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s worth your time.","title":"Social Networking and the Kids Today..."},{"content":"I think this probably requires more treatment that I can give it now, but here\u0026rsquo;s a paragraph from an email I wrote last night, but here it is anyway.\nWhile I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t turn down the option of a book deal that would let me take a year of school/work to write a couple of novels, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m as keen on \u0026ldquo;becoming a published writer\u0026rdquo; as I used to be. I just want people to read my stuff, and at the moment, the best way for that to happen, as I figure it, is to be a blogger, someday, I might look back to books as a way of doing that, but for right now\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-and-being-read/","summary":"I think this probably requires more treatment that I can give it now, but here\u0026rsquo;s a paragraph from an email I wrote last night, but here it is anyway.\nWhile I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t turn down the option of a book deal that would let me take a year of school/work to write a couple of novels, I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m as keen on \u0026ldquo;becoming a published writer\u0026rdquo; as I used to be. I just want people to read my stuff, and at the moment, the best way for that to happen, as I figure it, is to be a blogger, someday, I might look back to books as a way of doing that, but for right now\u0026hellip;","title":"writing and being read"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always been somewhat distraught by the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m, well down right terrible at working in a wiki mode. Every so often I try and use some wiki-based solution, often VoodooPad, and it works really well, until I realize that what I\u0026rsquo;m really doing is using it as an inefficient file-system like binder. I just dump things in, one or two layers deep and it often means that I just have a slightly more complicated way of looking at my files. With some help from DevonTHINK, I have a system that works pretty well for me.1\nFor Station Keeping I\u0026rsquo;m trying to keep some sort of documentation, which contains a lot of unreleased and brainstorming material that\u0026rsquo;s helpful (and necessary) to maintain for the group of writers. Problem is that I don\u0026rsquo;t think in a wiki sort of way. Which means that this document is a pain in the rear to navigate, and given the way I want the software to work: a pain in the rear to code. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried PMWiki, and most recently Plain Text Wiki, and really neither of these solutions really work for what I\u0026rsquo;m doing.\nUltimately this returns to a theme that I\u0026rsquo;ve been struggling from the very beginning of TealArt, back in 2002, where I talked about my struggle for good notebooks. With Moleskine\u0026rsquo;s these days, I\u0026rsquo;ve basically found the analog solution, but I need something that will work digitally, particularly for the Station Keeping documentation, but for my day to day purposes as well.\nI suppose to get the conclusion that I\u0026rsquo;ve come to you need to first know how my paper notebooks are laid out and my method of finding things. Basically I start a new page for each new chunk: each list, outline, note, and set of directions and so forth. I usually write some sort of identifying title at the top for what\u0026rsquo;s contained inside, which I underline. Because it\u0026rsquo;s paper, and it\u0026rsquo;s all bound together, and I have a pretty good contextual memory for the associations between what I write and when I write it, so the chronological aspect helps a lot.\nWhat does this sound like? Yeah, I know: a weblog2. Why didn\u0026rsquo;t someone pass me this memo earlier, it would have been helpful. What does this mean? Time to set up additional blogs to take care of these needs, because clearly thats what by brain seems to need/want. Maybe some of it will be interesting to you, but somehow I doubt this.\nI must admit that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been using DThink as much recently as I might like to, because I have a slight organizational crisis now that I\u0026rsquo;m (seasonally) not in school any more. My database is perhaps not laid out optimally, but I still really like it. If EagleFiler were just a little bit better, I think that I could have a mash-up that would be ideal, while I wait for DT 2.0, which is perhaps the real reason that I\u0026rsquo;m not reorganizing my database. There\u0026rsquo;s a reason that I have these footnotes. To talk to myself. Sigh\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIs it true that academics are the only ones that call them \u0026ldquo;weblogs\u0026rdquo; any more? Is it a sign of my not getting it or a sign of my old-timmer cred? I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to know.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-notes-a-geek-problem/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always been somewhat distraught by the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m, well down right terrible at working in a wiki mode. Every so often I try and use some wiki-based solution, often VoodooPad, and it works really well, until I realize that what I\u0026rsquo;m really doing is using it as an inefficient file-system like binder. I just dump things in, one or two layers deep and it often means that I just have a slightly more complicated way of looking at my files. With some help from DevonTHINK, I have a system that works pretty well for me.1\nFor Station Keeping I\u0026rsquo;m trying to keep some sort of documentation, which contains a lot of unreleased and brainstorming material that\u0026rsquo;s helpful (and necessary) to maintain for the group of writers. Problem is that I don\u0026rsquo;t think in a wiki sort of way. Which means that this document is a pain in the rear to navigate, and given the way I want the software to work: a pain in the rear to code.","title":"Writing Notes: A Geek Problem"},{"content":"in conclusion, today was a good day.\nthe new job, is pretty cool. my inspiration holds steady. projects are looking up. we need, even more time in the day though\u0026hellip;.\nas always, though.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-good-day/","summary":"in conclusion, today was a good day.\nthe new job, is pretty cool. my inspiration holds steady. projects are looking up. we need, even more time in the day though\u0026hellip;.\nas always, though.","title":"a good day"},{"content":"because I can\u0026rsquo;t come up with my own witty conversations all day, I bring you other folks\u0026rsquo;\u0026hellip;\nHave you paid the parking yet?:\nHer: Have you paid the parking yet? Him: You have my glasses. Her: You can\u0026rsquo;t pay without your glasses? Him: I can\u0026rsquo;t see without my glasses.\n(from The Northwest Passage.)\ntoo true!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/aint-that-the-truth/","summary":"because I can\u0026rsquo;t come up with my own witty conversations all day, I bring you other folks\u0026rsquo;\u0026hellip;\nHave you paid the parking yet?:\nHer: Have you paid the parking yet? Him: You have my glasses. Her: You can\u0026rsquo;t pay without your glasses? Him: I can\u0026rsquo;t see without my glasses.\n(from The Northwest Passage.)\ntoo true!","title":"ain't that the truth"},{"content":"Or, Yet another reason I\u0026rsquo;m glad I didn\u0026rsquo;t go to Antioch:\nAdjunctification of Antioch:\nAntioch College faculty members have noted these patterns with some dismay, and their allies fear that the university%u2019s board is intentionally trying to remove tenure. Officially, Antioch College could be reborn in some new form in 2012, after shutting down in 2008, and that four-year gap has people speculating about an underlying opposition to tenure. Under AAUP guidelines, an institution that eliminates tenured positions after declaring financial exigency has an obligation to offer any new jobs back to tenured professors who lost positions %u2014 but that obligation lasts for only three years.\n(from IHE.)\nI can hear the trustee\u0026rsquo;s/admins now \u0026ldquo;i\u0026rsquo;m in your antoches scruwin' over your faculties, you hippie student luzzors\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/antioch-suxorrz/","summary":"Or, Yet another reason I\u0026rsquo;m glad I didn\u0026rsquo;t go to Antioch:\nAdjunctification of Antioch:\nAntioch College faculty members have noted these patterns with some dismay, and their allies fear that the university%u2019s board is intentionally trying to remove tenure. Officially, Antioch College could be reborn in some new form in 2012, after shutting down in 2008, and that four-year gap has people speculating about an underlying opposition to tenure. Under AAUP guidelines, an institution that eliminates tenured positions after declaring financial exigency has an obligation to offer any new jobs back to tenured professors who lost positions %u2014 but that obligation lasts for only three years.\n(from IHE.)\nI can hear the trustee\u0026rsquo;s/admins now \u0026ldquo;i\u0026rsquo;m in your antoches scruwin' over your faculties, you hippie student luzzors\u0026rdquo;","title":"antioch suxorrz"},{"content":"Going Low Tech:\nOkay so my whole desk is glass and metal, but the point is that the top is glass. Even in you have a wooden desk you can get a glass or Plexi-glass covering. Why? Because a glass desk makes for one large dry erase surface. Forget needing to write things on pieces of paper that get lost everywhere, just write straight onto the desk. This is great for taking quick notes and I find it helps me to keep my desk clear so that I can see my writing surface. Somebody walked in my office the other day, thought I had defaced my desk. No, I explained, its just the ultimate note taking surface. (I keep multiple color pens handy as well, I find visualization is often helped by changing colors.)\n(from academhack.)\nI actually really like this idea. Particularly if the desk has a keyboard drawer that can be used to hold the laptop, otherwise I can see it getting a bit messy in terms of of putting the laptop on top of a surface\u0026hellip; etc..\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/going-low-tech/","summary":"Going Low Tech:\nOkay so my whole desk is glass and metal, but the point is that the top is glass. Even in you have a wooden desk you can get a glass or Plexi-glass covering. Why? Because a glass desk makes for one large dry erase surface. Forget needing to write things on pieces of paper that get lost everywhere, just write straight onto the desk. This is great for taking quick notes and I find it helps me to keep my desk clear so that I can see my writing surface. Somebody walked in my office the other day, thought I had defaced my desk. No, I explained, its just the ultimate note taking surface. (I keep multiple color pens handy as well, I find visualization is often helped by changing colors.)\n(from academhack.)\nI actually really like this idea. Particularly if the desk has a keyboard drawer that can be used to hold the laptop, otherwise I can see it getting a bit messy in terms of of putting the laptop on top of a surface\u0026hellip; etc.","title":"Going Low Tech"},{"content":"New information about the ipod is just coming out from apple. While I\u0026rsquo;m (clearly) not going to get one, and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of passe about the whole deal I want to talk about the plans/possibilities of this device. First, the relevant press release from apple.\nBasically, 60 bucks for 450 minutes (5000 rather than unlimited off peak mins) and 200 text messages, 80 bucks for twice as many peak minutes and unlimited night times.\nFor unlimited data that you\u0026rsquo;d presumably be able to share with your laptop via bluetooth that\u0026rsquo;s not a bad idea. I wonder a few things: why would people use SMS if you have email included for free? Also, why are they hoping to make on the 5000 vs. unlimited weekend minutes.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m firmly in the \u0026ldquo;wait for rev 2,\u0026rdquo; which will presumably have faster internet. But frankly if they make an ipod tablet (ie. iphone without the phone,) I\u0026rsquo;m so there\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/iphone-possibilities/","summary":"New information about the ipod is just coming out from apple. While I\u0026rsquo;m (clearly) not going to get one, and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of passe about the whole deal I want to talk about the plans/possibilities of this device. First, the relevant press release from apple.\nBasically, 60 bucks for 450 minutes (5000 rather than unlimited off peak mins) and 200 text messages, 80 bucks for twice as many peak minutes and unlimited night times.\nFor unlimited data that you\u0026rsquo;d presumably be able to share with your laptop via bluetooth that\u0026rsquo;s not a bad idea. I wonder a few things: why would people use SMS if you have email included for free? Also, why are they hoping to make on the 5000 vs. unlimited weekend minutes.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m firmly in the \u0026ldquo;wait for rev 2,\u0026rdquo; which will presumably have faster internet. But frankly if they make an ipod tablet (ie. iphone without the phone,) I\u0026rsquo;m so there\u0026hellip;","title":"iphone possibilities"},{"content":"tycho chris and I worked something out regarding networking and information transfer today which felt really good to get done.\n`dave \u0026lt;http://www.soliloqueer.com\u0026gt;`_ networking and information transfer? is that code for something dirty?\ntycho no like the internet only in 10,000 years\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/is-that-code-for-something-dirty/","summary":"tycho chris and I worked something out regarding networking and information transfer today which felt really good to get done.\n`dave \u0026lt;http://www.soliloqueer.com\u0026gt;`_ networking and information transfer? is that code for something dirty?\ntycho no like the internet only in 10,000 years","title":"something dirty?"},{"content":"Hmm, this intro looks a lot like the one from last week. I hope you don\u0026rsquo;t mind, everything remains relevant: Welcome to episode #4 of Station Keeping. I hope you enjoy, and can welcome a few more characters to the station keeping family. As always, this project is a collaborative one, and I look forward to hearing from you for any reason, but particularly if you would like to contribute in any capacity. But please do enjoy! -- ty\nNan Gee really wanted a drink. The bar wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite open yet, but she thought that maybe she\u0026rsquo;d be able to talk someone there out of one of those beers sitting on the counter. She would pay, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t like there was anything else to spend her diplomatic-salary on.\nDavid nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw her standing in side the bar. He could have sworn that he had locked the door. \u0026ldquo;Hello there, we\u0026rsquo;re not actually open yet, as you can see,\u0026rdquo; he said, point to the exposed wiring on the wall opposite of the bar. Someday there would be a nice light fixture there. If the designer ever got back to him, that is.\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s alright, I just really want one of those,\u0026rdquo; Nan said pointing at the cases of beers stacked on the bar. It was a local brand that had just been shipped up from Hanm. \u0026ldquo;I can pay.\u0026rdquo; She appended, trying to look hopeful.\nDavid paused, unsure of exactly what to do in this situation, he had work to do, and he didn\u0026rsquo;t want the entire station getting the idea that he was open for business. \u0026ldquo;What the hell,\u0026rdquo; he thought. \u0026ldquo;You like them room temp?\u0026rdquo; he asked, relenting.\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s the way we do it \u0026lsquo;round here.\u0026rdquo; She looked a bit relieved.\n\u0026ldquo;Ok, well we really aren\u0026rsquo;t open, but I have something to work on in the back, why don\u0026rsquo;t you join me with your beer and we can talk\u0026rdquo; David suggested, as he turned. \u0026ldquo;Oh, whats your name, by the way,\u0026rdquo; he asked as he walked.\nNan followed the barkeep, without quite knowing why. It seemed better than any of the alternatives that came to mind. \u0026ldquo;Right, I\u0026rsquo;m Nan, Nan Gee: the diplomatic liaison to the station.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, right, it\u0026rsquo;s a pleasure to meet you.\u0026rdquo; David said, he turned at an open door way and pointed to a chair in an office. \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m David Conrad, I\u0026rsquo;m just the bar owner around here, but I suspect that the Navy will probably start begging once the communications lines are more open, but they won\u0026rsquo;t get me.\u0026rdquo; He chuckled\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, you\u0026rsquo;re Navy?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Used to be. I got to the top of the game, and found there wasn\u0026rsquo;t much see. Time to move on, you know. They want me back, but know better than to force it. It\u0026rsquo;s better this way.\u0026rdquo; David said looking at Nan. The tension between the Navy and the people of Hanm was very present on the station, even now, and almost entirely understandable. \u0026ldquo;So why the rush to get a beer,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s still a bit early and all.\u0026quot; David hoped to deflect the conversation away from his past, he also turned in his chair and brought up the display on his workstation.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s been a long day, not that bad, I just don\u0026rsquo;t know what to make of it, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that I have no power, and it\u0026rsquo;s not like there\u0026rsquo;s anything else to do on the station yet.\u0026rdquo; Nan was surprised at her verbosity in front of this stranger. This stranger with a navy past, even! But the beer tasted like home, and the decorations on the walls were different, even if the walls themselves looked suspiciously familiar.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working like a dog to lodge all the appropriate complaints with the new commander, about the Navy\u0026rsquo;s presence here, and so forth. Our space, \u0026lsquo;much as anyone\u0026rsquo;s, and all they do is give us notice and expect our help when they need it, because of course this station was built with our sweat and blood!\u0026rdquo; Nan\u0026rsquo;s speed increased with her furry, but she sipped the drink to slow her self down.\n\u0026ldquo;What did Eli say?\u0026rdquo; David asked.\n\u0026ldquo;Eli?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The new commander?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, do you know him or something?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You could say that, but you already got me to talk this is your story.\u0026rdquo; David hoped that she would ignore the fact that he hadn\u0026rsquo;t really told her very much.\n\u0026ldquo;Ok. Um.\u0026rdquo; Nan had a bit more of the drink before she continued. \u0026ldquo;So after sending him a series of reports and requests, he called me in for a meeting, and he just talked to me.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;He talked? Amazing. He never used to.\u0026rdquo; David was talking over his shoulder as he worked on something on the workstation screen. \u0026ldquo;What did he say?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Really?\u0026rdquo; Nan stared at a box on the wall.\nDavid realized she wasn\u0026rsquo;t really paying attention. \u0026ldquo;No, of course not. Continue.\u0026rdquo;\nShe did: \u0026ldquo;Well he didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to have a clue what was going on between the Hanmists and the Navy, and agreed to work with me on station policy and governance. I didn\u0026rsquo;t have anything to say. I feel like I made an ass of myself.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s Eli for you, I guess.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Being clueless? Or for making an ass of your self in front of.\u0026rdquo;\nDavid chucked: she was pretty sharp and quick after all, admirable qualities indeed. \u0026ldquo;So you\u0026rsquo;re upset, because he\u0026rsquo;s a reasonable guy\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I suppose I am. Its hard when the bad guys turn out to be pretty nice. Makes my job plenty hard. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t ready for this wrench in the gears.\u0026rdquo; Nan\u0026rsquo;s earlier anger returned, but this time it wasn\u0026rsquo;t shrouded in historical interplanetary relations.\n\u0026ldquo;Well there are plenty of bad guys to go around, and lots of work to be done.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Aye.\u0026rdquo; Nan took another quick swig. The bottle wasn\u0026rsquo;t finished, but she was. \u0026ldquo;Thanks for this, I\u0026rsquo;d like to pick your brain at some point, but maybe at the beginning of the day rather than the end.\u0026rdquo;\nDavid\u0026rsquo;s simple response of \u0026ldquo;Indeed\u0026rdquo; was both non-committal and positive. He walked her to the door way of his half finished bar, \u0026ldquo;This is sure going to be interesting,\u0026rdquo; he though as he watched Nan Gee walk amongst the light crowd toward the residential section of the station.\n\u0026ldquo;Diplomacy Maneuvers\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-diplomacy-maneuvers/","summary":"Hmm, this intro looks a lot like the one from last week. I hope you don\u0026rsquo;t mind, everything remains relevant: Welcome to episode #4 of Station Keeping. I hope you enjoy, and can welcome a few more characters to the station keeping family. As always, this project is a collaborative one, and I look forward to hearing from you for any reason, but particularly if you would like to contribute in any capacity. But please do enjoy! -- ty\nNan Gee really wanted a drink. The bar wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite open yet, but she thought that maybe she\u0026rsquo;d be able to talk someone there out of one of those beers sitting on the counter. She would pay, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t like there was anything else to spend her diplomatic-salary on.\nDavid nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw her standing in side the bar. He could have sworn that he had locked the door.","title":"Station Keeping: Diplomacy Maneuvers"},{"content":"\u0026hellip;so I stumbled upon a nifty website for SF writers and it started with something morbidly funny, which I will reproduce here for your amusement.\nshe wants to lead a glamorous life:\n\u0026ldquo;Hypothetically, being a writer-for-a-living means you never get a day off. Ever. The deadlines don\u0026rsquo;t typically move much, so it\u0026rsquo;s rather like having a permanent term paper due -- if you\u0026rsquo;re lucky. If you\u0026rsquo;re not lucky, it\u0026rsquo;s like not having any work due. And then you starve to death.\nBut I digress.\u0026rdquo;\n(from SF Novelists.)\n\u0026hellip;but then, near the end she talked about \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;pre-writing\u0026rdquo; in a way that sounded a lot like what I would call \u0026ldquo;outlining.\u0026rdquo; The academic in me tends to understand \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;reading.\u0026rdquo; Thus I think of my writing research as broadly defined reading. But if I can get away with calling outlining \u0026ldquo;research,\u0026rdquo; I totally am.\nSo there.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/what-does-research-mean/","summary":"\u0026hellip;so I stumbled upon a nifty website for SF writers and it started with something morbidly funny, which I will reproduce here for your amusement.\nshe wants to lead a glamorous life:\n\u0026ldquo;Hypothetically, being a writer-for-a-living means you never get a day off. Ever. The deadlines don\u0026rsquo;t typically move much, so it\u0026rsquo;s rather like having a permanent term paper due -- if you\u0026rsquo;re lucky. If you\u0026rsquo;re not lucky, it\u0026rsquo;s like not having any work due. And then you starve to death.\nBut I digress.\u0026rdquo;\n(from SF Novelists.)\n\u0026hellip;but then, near the end she talked about \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;pre-writing\u0026rdquo; in a way that sounded a lot like what I would call \u0026ldquo;outlining.\u0026rdquo; The academic in me tends to understand \u0026ldquo;research\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;reading.\u0026rdquo; Thus I think of my writing research as broadly defined reading. But if I can get away with calling outlining \u0026ldquo;research,\u0026rdquo; I totally am.\nSo there.","title":"what does research mean?"},{"content":"Ok, maybe not, but it made for a good title, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to be here in two years thinking \u0026ldquo;yes, but which \u0026rsquo;this week on tealart' is that?\u0026rdquo; when I\u0026rsquo;m looking through the archives.\nThere will be a Station Keeping update tomorrow, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite excited by it, it\u0026rsquo;s one of my favorites, we introduced to more new characters, but I think we get to see interesting sides of both characters, and it was a joy to write.\nAlso tomorrow, I start a job working in an academic library/archive. I\u0026rsquo;m excited about that, and I think the work will be really interesting, this means that my time will probably be a bit short from here on out, but that\u0026rsquo;s how these things go. I think I have enough time to keep up all the projects that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on. The goal, is of course to get to a place where I can write effectively for TealArt (and other avocational projects) in a way that is efficient skillful. Or something.\nI also admit that I\u0026rsquo;ve started a new blog tealart.com/tychosh, but I\u0026rsquo;m just calling it tychoish. Anyway the idea is that by focusing some of my nattering tendencies elsewhere, TealArt can fit the blog-magazine format that it keeps trying to be better, and I can have fun elsewhere. I\u0026rsquo;m not really using the LJs any more, I\u0026rsquo;m not getting rid of them, but I much rather doing it on my own, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with the way it works. I\u0026rsquo;ve used, as you might know, tumblr and I feel like the new site does all that I would want in a non-tealart site. And so while you think, \u0026ldquo;ah, he\u0026rsquo;s dividing his energy, that can\u0026rsquo;t end well\u0026rdquo; I think in a lot of ways, I\u0026rsquo;m really consolidating. That\u0026rsquo;s my story and I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to it.\nThe other news of last week, is that I got (all) my wisdom teeth out last Thursday. It kind of sucked, but I\u0026rsquo;m almost feeling normal by now. Thankfully it was quick, and I\u0026rsquo;m feeling better now. I\u0026rsquo;m glad that I forwent general anesthetic, and kind of sad (but not) that the narcotics made me more sick. Aside from some lingering pain and obvious tenderness, about all I have to show is a bruise on my cheek,1 and a few days of lost productivity. I think that\u0026rsquo;s why I spent so much time futzing with /tychoish--it was the main thing I had spare time for.\nWith luck we\u0026rsquo;ll get a geek-related post from Chris this week, but I have my own in store: I wrote a post about note-taking and computer usage which I think is relevant to the kind of geek that I am, and I have recently come into a PC laptop which I\u0026rsquo;m faced with the problem of rescuing some files and then getting a working operating system installed on. I\u0026rsquo;m going to give Ubuntu a try (after, of course, I use Knoppix to rescue the files), but I think it might be interesting to document this process a bit more. This is probably not on the table for this week, but in the future\u0026hellip;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s always more Deleuze to get through, and I\u0026rsquo;ll have a good one for you this Friday. I think I need to at some point--perhaps not immediately--do something to ground it a little better for the casual reader. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what yet. I also finished reading a science-fiction book last week, and I think something of a book report is in order. Also, I know that the pictures of the knitting were popular, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to do some more of that soon.\nAnyway, I hope you have a good week, enjoy what you read here. Tell your friends about this little corner of the internet. It can\u0026rsquo;t hurt!\ncheers, tycho\nFrankly, I\u0026rsquo;m amazed that I have a bruise on the outside of my mouth, effectively from getting punched on the inside. Bodies are weird, don\u0026rsquo;t let anyone tell you otherwise.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/actual-news/","summary":"Ok, maybe not, but it made for a good title, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to be here in two years thinking \u0026ldquo;yes, but which \u0026rsquo;this week on tealart' is that?\u0026rdquo; when I\u0026rsquo;m looking through the archives.\nThere will be a Station Keeping update tomorrow, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite excited by it, it\u0026rsquo;s one of my favorites, we introduced to more new characters, but I think we get to see interesting sides of both characters, and it was a joy to write.\nAlso tomorrow, I start a job working in an academic library/archive. I\u0026rsquo;m excited about that, and I think the work will be really interesting, this means that my time will probably be a bit short from here on out, but that\u0026rsquo;s how these things go. I think I have enough time to keep up all the projects that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on. The goal, is of course to get to a place where I can write effectively for TealArt (and other avocational projects) in a way that is efficient skillful.","title":"Actual News!"},{"content":"My friend Jeff Kirvin\u0026rsquo;s website require registration for commenting, so because I\u0026rsquo;m lazy I\u0026rsquo;m going to reply to a couple of things here:\nSecondly--and this follows right from my last response--Jeff posted about the Foleo, a new laptop-replacement/mobile device from Palm Inc.\nJeff panned the concept, and I think in a lot of ways he\u0026rsquo;s right--from the geek perspective. Folks like us--geeks, off-label users--wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of use for something like this, we\u0026rsquo;d either take a laptop, or be content with the smaller device. And the price is really quite high. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how businesses will take to this device. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to say. I won\u0026rsquo;t be getting one, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure; but I think the concept is a pretty neat one.\nWhen apple stopped producing 12 inch laptops, a lot of people cried out in anguish(!), and one of the most persistent rumors in mac-land for many years has been a tablet/sub-notebook kind of computer. Something thin: no CD drive, solid state storage, a good keyboard, good battery life, etc. And the Foleo has wi-fi, so really, what more do you need?\nThe Foleo sounds a lot like this dream product, so at least the concept for the Foleo, is a keeper, even if the implementation sucks. Frankly I\u0026rsquo;d be a lot more comfortable if it were running a flavor of OS X (over a Palm OS flavor) but such is life.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/foleo-the-newold-mobile-computing/","summary":"My friend Jeff Kirvin\u0026rsquo;s website require registration for commenting, so because I\u0026rsquo;m lazy I\u0026rsquo;m going to reply to a couple of things here:\nSecondly--and this follows right from my last response--Jeff posted about the Foleo, a new laptop-replacement/mobile device from Palm Inc.\nJeff panned the concept, and I think in a lot of ways he\u0026rsquo;s right--from the geek perspective. Folks like us--geeks, off-label users--wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of use for something like this, we\u0026rsquo;d either take a laptop, or be content with the smaller device. And the price is really quite high. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how businesses will take to this device. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to say. I won\u0026rsquo;t be getting one, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure; but I think the concept is a pretty neat one.\nWhen apple stopped producing 12 inch laptops, a lot of people cried out in anguish(!), and one of the most persistent rumors in mac-land for many years has been a tablet/sub-notebook kind of computer.","title":"foleo: the new/old mobile computing?"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s some third-degree linking. At tychoish we\u0026rsquo;re nothing if not on top of our citationality.\nJesus who?:\nSchulman, who\u0026rsquo;s currently working on an oral history of ACT-UP, remembered that she\u0026rsquo;d never heard the name Jesus Christ until one day in her schoolyard. \u0026lsquo;I ran home and asked my grandmother \u0026lsquo;Who is Jesus Christ?\u0026rsquo; and my grandmother said, \u0026lsquo;Well, there was this girl named Mary who got in trouble and made up this story.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rsquo;\nPriceless. (Link courtesy of FAWARB.)\n(from Jeffrey Ricker.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/jesus-who-echo/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s some third-degree linking. At tychoish we\u0026rsquo;re nothing if not on top of our citationality.\nJesus who?:\nSchulman, who\u0026rsquo;s currently working on an oral history of ACT-UP, remembered that she\u0026rsquo;d never heard the name Jesus Christ until one day in her schoolyard. \u0026lsquo;I ran home and asked my grandmother \u0026lsquo;Who is Jesus Christ?\u0026rsquo; and my grandmother said, \u0026lsquo;Well, there was this girl named Mary who got in trouble and made up this story.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rsquo;\nPriceless. (Link courtesy of FAWARB.)\n(from Jeffrey Ricker.)","title":"Jesus who? (echo)"},{"content":"My friend Jeff Kirvin\u0026rsquo;s website require registration for commenting, so because I\u0026rsquo;m lazy I\u0026rsquo;m going to reply to a couple of things here:\nFirst, this post \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t Sync, Dont\u0026rsquo;y Sync:\u0026rdquo;\nI must say that I\u0026rsquo;m sort of out of the loop on windows things, so it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to hear about the developments in Word. As (prospective) readers of this blog would likely know, I write almost exclusively in a text editor, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at avoiding word-processing software, but I agree with Jeff that the new Word format looks really quite nifty, and there\u0026rsquo;s something to be said for writing at a desk.\nWith web2.0 and all that crap, our old notions of sync have changed quite a bit. I\u0026rsquo;m personally hesitant to add an additional node (pda, smart-phone, desktop, etc.) to my computing experience because I think the project of keeping my data synced up between all these places would be a headache.\nRecently I moved all my music (itunes library) off of my computer and onto an external hard drive, and listen to music almost exclusively via my iPod. I think if I were going to be using some sort of additional device, I\u0026rsquo;d need to keep critical software/documents in some sort of transferable situation. Like a thumb drive, or using WebDAV/.mac (if it didn\u0026rsquo;t suck so much). Google-Gears might be a good option for this kind of thing.\nIts surprising that despite my desk-tied mindset, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty darn mobile. Laptops are a great thing. For me at least, the move to Mac was a great thing in this regard. Hardware wise, I know that you can get smaller laptops and better batteries from PC makers, but\u0026hellip; I think it would be more hassle than it\u0026rsquo;s worth.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mobile-device-useage/","summary":"My friend Jeff Kirvin\u0026rsquo;s website require registration for commenting, so because I\u0026rsquo;m lazy I\u0026rsquo;m going to reply to a couple of things here:\nFirst, this post \u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t Sync, Dont\u0026rsquo;y Sync:\u0026rdquo;\nI must say that I\u0026rsquo;m sort of out of the loop on windows things, so it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to hear about the developments in Word. As (prospective) readers of this blog would likely know, I write almost exclusively in a text editor, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty good at avoiding word-processing software, but I agree with Jeff that the new Word format looks really quite nifty, and there\u0026rsquo;s something to be said for writing at a desk.\nWith web2.0 and all that crap, our old notions of sync have changed quite a bit. I\u0026rsquo;m personally hesitant to add an additional node (pda, smart-phone, desktop, etc.) to my computing experience because I think the project of keeping my data synced up between all these places would be a headache.","title":"mobile device useage"},{"content":"I seem to have abanded the way that I do \u0026ldquo;have-done\u0026rdquo; lists. Read this tealart entry for more on this. I\u0026rsquo;ve started writing this kind of thing out in the notebook but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is the long term sort of solution. What I really want is some way of tracking word-counts in an effective sort of way. I\u0026rsquo;ll have to sort something out soon\nI thought it might be interesting to scan moleskin pages into this site, but the idea has been done and my moleskine usage is more functional than artistic, so I fear it might be pretty uninteresting.\nAlso, it\u0026rsquo;s come to my attention that the tag system on TealArt doesn\u0026rsquo;t work at all and produces lots of 404s. Frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t see a lot of need for this, so I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be removing it as soon as possible. Unless the chris wants to change it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still culling my RSS reading load so I can respond more. I read a lot of things (or rather I want to), too many in fact but that\u0026rsquo;s part of the point.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been doing battle with linux today, with mixed results. The flipping drives won\u0026rsquo;t mount.\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll be pleased to know that I\u0026rsquo;ve done pretty well by my projected todo list.\nOver and out.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/moleskining/","summary":"I seem to have abanded the way that I do \u0026ldquo;have-done\u0026rdquo; lists. Read this tealart entry for more on this. I\u0026rsquo;ve started writing this kind of thing out in the notebook but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this is the long term sort of solution. What I really want is some way of tracking word-counts in an effective sort of way. I\u0026rsquo;ll have to sort something out soon\nI thought it might be interesting to scan moleskin pages into this site, but the idea has been done and my moleskine usage is more functional than artistic, so I fear it might be pretty uninteresting.\nAlso, it\u0026rsquo;s come to my attention that the tag system on TealArt doesn\u0026rsquo;t work at all and produces lots of 404s. Frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t see a lot of need for this, so I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be removing it as soon as possible. Unless the chris wants to change it.","title":"moleskining"},{"content":"Every so often I try and remember to use ical to organize things, and keep me on track. generally it helps things, and for short periods I\u0026rsquo;m a little bit better off.\nOne thing I tried, was to schedule tealart essays, because I was generally (and in some ways still am) a few weeks ahead, at least in terms of planning if not actual writing. It worked, and I think it was a good exercise.\nAnd then, I need to restart my computer, or need a few extra RAM resources (because iCal is a hog), and I forget to open the program up again, and lo and behold its\u0026rsquo; three weeks later and I have to start again.\nmaybe I\u0026rsquo;m better out without?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/oops-ical/","summary":"Every so often I try and remember to use ical to organize things, and keep me on track. generally it helps things, and for short periods I\u0026rsquo;m a little bit better off.\nOne thing I tried, was to schedule tealart essays, because I was generally (and in some ways still am) a few weeks ahead, at least in terms of planning if not actual writing. It worked, and I think it was a good exercise.\nAnd then, I need to restart my computer, or need a few extra RAM resources (because iCal is a hog), and I forget to open the program up again, and lo and behold its\u0026rsquo; three weeks later and I have to start again.\nmaybe I\u0026rsquo;m better out without?","title":"oops, ical"},{"content":"here\u0026rsquo;s some things I got done:\nwrote a bunch of essays for this site processed my inbox and wrote a crap ton of essays emails did some `station keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_ planning and \u0026ldquo;research.\u0026rdquo; culled my list of feeds to read. from 520ish to 290 ish. wrote and posted a tealart entry. fiddled with a computer maintenance project, that is taking forever. one day I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about my frustrations with the other computer platform. all in all I think I did pretty good, particularly given my list of things from yesterday, and shhh, but I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a shower and try and get some tealart writing done. If I can pull together a couple more things, I\u0026rsquo;ll be set for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to concentrate on other projects for the evenings the rest of the week. We\u0026rsquo;ll remember that I have a crap ton of knitting that I didn\u0026rsquo;t really get done today to finish.\nAnd shit, it\u0026rsquo;s almost july which means I need to get myself into some serious GRE and grad school prep. Aside from the GRE, though, I\u0026rsquo;m not really worried about things this time around, I think because it\u0026rsquo;s rational to be worried about the GRE in a way that the other stuff just doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem so scary.\nsigh, angst later, writing now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/report-for-july-25th-2007/","summary":"here\u0026rsquo;s some things I got done:\nwrote a bunch of essays for this site processed my inbox and wrote a crap ton of essays emails did some `station keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_ planning and \u0026ldquo;research.\u0026rdquo; culled my list of feeds to read. from 520ish to 290 ish. wrote and posted a tealart entry. fiddled with a computer maintenance project, that is taking forever. one day I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about my frustrations with the other computer platform. all in all I think I did pretty good, particularly given my list of things from yesterday, and shhh, but I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a shower and try and get some tealart writing done. If I can pull together a couple more things, I\u0026rsquo;ll be set for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to concentrate on other projects for the evenings the rest of the week. We\u0026rsquo;ll remember that I have a crap ton of knitting that I didn\u0026rsquo;t really get done today to finish.","title":"report for july 25th 2007"},{"content":"dear tycho,\ncongratulations on writing the about tychoish page, and all the assorted wonderfulness you accomplished today. may tomorrow be twice as fruitful.\ndon\u0026rsquo;t forget to:\nknit like the wind sync your ipod and rip that cd write the \u0026ldquo;this week\u0026rdquo; ta entry go through some more deleuze and if you\u0026rsquo;re feeling particularly kind:\nstudy for the gre, and don\u0026rsquo;t have a panic about it work on cleaning out the inbox look into omni outliner or some such to start outlining the MarsBook (super secret). much love, yourself\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/congrats/","summary":"dear tycho,\ncongratulations on writing the about tychoish page, and all the assorted wonderfulness you accomplished today. may tomorrow be twice as fruitful.\ndon\u0026rsquo;t forget to:\nknit like the wind sync your ipod and rip that cd write the \u0026ldquo;this week\u0026rdquo; ta entry go through some more deleuze and if you\u0026rsquo;re feeling particularly kind:\nstudy for the gre, and don\u0026rsquo;t have a panic about it work on cleaning out the inbox look into omni outliner or some such to start outlining the MarsBook (super secret). much love, yourself","title":"congrats..."},{"content":"By g-d, friends I think I have the design here complete. I\u0026rsquo;m actually pretty happy with it, though it\u0026rsquo;s certainly true that I haven\u0026rsquo;t put it through it\u0026rsquo;s full tests, so breakage is prone.\nI need to set up the static pages, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with this. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of buying a new domain. For such a web-guy, I think having one domain is excessively reasonable, but I need to think about these things, of course.\nOn to other projects.\nupdate: ha! this post fucked up the desgin. time to fiddle with CSS again!\nupdate: ok, we\u0026rsquo;re back, and I think I may have realized why it wasn\u0026rsquo;t behaving the right way the first time. this is much more logical. just have to make the tags work a bit better, but that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be hard\u0026hellip; (famous last words, I know)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/desgin-complete/","summary":"By g-d, friends I think I have the design here complete. I\u0026rsquo;m actually pretty happy with it, though it\u0026rsquo;s certainly true that I haven\u0026rsquo;t put it through it\u0026rsquo;s full tests, so breakage is prone.\nI need to set up the static pages, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy with this. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of buying a new domain. For such a web-guy, I think having one domain is excessively reasonable, but I need to think about these things, of course.\nOn to other projects.\nupdate: ha! this post fucked up the desgin. time to fiddle with CSS again!\nupdate: ok, we\u0026rsquo;re back, and I think I may have realized why it wasn\u0026rsquo;t behaving the right way the first time. this is much more logical. just have to make the tags work a bit better, but that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be hard\u0026hellip; (famous last words, I know)","title":"design complete"},{"content":"so, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get most of my work done on these1 things, including the last minute fiddling.\nI like the way that this plugin works, and I\u0026rsquo;ve even managed to add category archives in a way that I like. I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably slowly grow a TealArt template out this. we\u0026rsquo;re long overdue for a redesign, and frankly K2, the theme that we\u0026rsquo;ve been hacking is irrevocably annoying.\nI updated the station keeping documentation as well, and now all I have to do is actually write something. But I foresee grilled eggplant in my future, so I\u0026rsquo;ll probably do that first.\nyou know, this isn\u0026rsquo;t very tumble-log-y. I have yet to try a block quote, though, that might help.\nUpdate: by which I mean the website, and this design.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/progress/","summary":"so, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get most of my work done on these1 things, including the last minute fiddling.\nI like the way that this plugin works, and I\u0026rsquo;ve even managed to add category archives in a way that I like. I suspect that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably slowly grow a TealArt template out this. we\u0026rsquo;re long overdue for a redesign, and frankly K2, the theme that we\u0026rsquo;ve been hacking is irrevocably annoying.\nI updated the station keeping documentation as well, and now all I have to do is actually write something. But I foresee grilled eggplant in my future, so I\u0026rsquo;ll probably do that first.\nyou know, this isn\u0026rsquo;t very tumble-log-y. I have yet to try a block quote, though, that might help.\nUpdate: by which I mean the website, and this design.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;","title":"progress"},{"content":"So I have this Science Fiction writer\u0026rsquo;s list, and I\u0026rsquo;ve had it for years, its generally been a great little place in my internet, and it\u0026rsquo;s grown to be quite popular; but because I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to pay very much attention to it of late, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to other things, it\u0026rsquo;s been slow.\nIn an attempt to remedy this I\u0026rsquo;ve started posting a couple of questions and a sort of weekly review every Sunday night to give it a kick in the pants. I thought you might be interested.\nEnjoy!\nHey folks--\nI\u0026rsquo;m actually going to remember our little (well, my little, but whose counting) tradition of doing a little review of the week for the list.\nI once again, didn\u0026rsquo;t get a great deal of work done, but I do have a doctors note: I got my wisdom teeth out on thursday, and I\u0026rsquo;m finally starting to come out of it. My face is actually a little bruised (on the outside!), but healing in commencing, and I\u0026rsquo;m getting something done even if it isn\u0026rsquo;t fiction writing per-se.\nI read the piece I talked about in my post \u0026ldquo;reviving old material,\u0026rdquo; and I was shocked to see how little it resembled what I thought was in the piece. The good thing is that I liked both what I remembered and what I wrote so that means I have a couple of good stories to work on.\nI realized that my definition of a novel (100k words) is actually a bunch longer than what goes for a novel these days (60-70k words). That\u0026rsquo;s fine, it just means that my internal outliner needs an adjustment. I also think needing to aim for less means that stories can be more concise/crisp, and also, finish-able. So maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll try that again. \u0026gt; Ok, in other news: \u0026gt;\nI finished James Tiptree, Jr.\u0026rsquo;s `Brightness Falls from the Air \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Brightness-Falls-Air-James-Tiptree/dp/0312854072\u0026gt;`_ which was amazing and well written, and sort of exactly what you want SF to be. There were good characters, meaningful ideas, and all the right hard/sociological elements. I started a new blog it\u0026rsquo;s just me, more informal: sort of a notebook, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be a good practice. My hope is that by moving a lot of my personal blogging away from the main TealArt, my notion of it as a \u0026ldquo;blog magazine\u0026rdquo; I think will begin to work a little better. I reorganized the way the writer\u0026rsquo;s documentation works at station keeping, which I think will help us as we progress with the series. I think I finished a Station Keeping story early in the week. I\u0026rsquo;m getting better at these I think, but I still don\u0026rsquo;t want to be doing them all by myself. I need to do more, that\u0026rsquo;s on the list. I got a job working in a library/archives. That\u0026rsquo;ll be cool, and it\u0026rsquo;s good for the temperament. Also, good to stay close to academia, that might give me the push it\u0026rsquo;ll take to get to work on grad school projects. I spent a few hours in an irish pub listening to some great music and sketching out some ideas for this revived story. I do a lot of good outlining there, but it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nWhat have you all done this week? Also, what do you think about the novel lenght and the \u0026ldquo;reviving old material,\u0026rdquo; stuff?\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sf-writing-this-week/","summary":"So I have this Science Fiction writer\u0026rsquo;s list, and I\u0026rsquo;ve had it for years, its generally been a great little place in my internet, and it\u0026rsquo;s grown to be quite popular; but because I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to pay very much attention to it of late, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to other things, it\u0026rsquo;s been slow.\nIn an attempt to remedy this I\u0026rsquo;ve started posting a couple of questions and a sort of weekly review every Sunday night to give it a kick in the pants. I thought you might be interested.\nEnjoy!\nHey folks--\nI\u0026rsquo;m actually going to remember our little (well, my little, but whose counting) tradition of doing a little review of the week for the list.\nI once again, didn\u0026rsquo;t get a great deal of work done, but I do have a doctors note: I got my wisdom teeth out on thursday, and I\u0026rsquo;m finally starting to come out of it.","title":"SF-Writing: This Week"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;tychoish\u0026rdquo; is a weblog that is something of a mashup of new and old weblog styles. New in the sense that I\u0026rsquo;m powering it using the latest and greatest from Wordpress, and the general idea of the tumblelog; and old in the sense that of tone and organization.\nIt seems to me that at some point weblogs started being \u0026ldquo;about things\u0026rdquo; rather than running collections of personal wanderings, ramblings, and information. In a lot of way this is the model that TealArt still uses, but it\u0026rsquo;s my intention that TealArt collect essays and slightly more formal pieces.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried a number of times to write less formal blogs, most successfully using the LiveJournals Clever on Demand and Awkward, but Enderingly Colloquial. (Usernames celchu19 and tychoish respectively) While I\u0026rsquo;m still fond of some of the community aspects of LiveJournal, I like the prospect of doing it on my own, and having more control over the whole process. I\u0026rsquo;ve also tried tumblr and I\u0026rsquo;ve been generally displeased with the experience. And while microbloging services like jaiku and twitter are great fun, they\u0026rsquo;re not the same as what I have in mind for this site.\nIn this vein, this site will have short, (mostly) unedited, and rambling posts, quotes and exchanges too funny to let go by, lists of various kinds, and anything else that just needs to get out. With luck, we\u0026rsquo;ll also syndicate this mess in the TealArt sidebar. It will be delicious.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/welcome/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;tychoish\u0026rdquo; is a weblog that is something of a mashup of new and old weblog styles. New in the sense that I\u0026rsquo;m powering it using the latest and greatest from Wordpress, and the general idea of the tumblelog; and old in the sense that of tone and organization.\nIt seems to me that at some point weblogs started being \u0026ldquo;about things\u0026rdquo; rather than running collections of personal wanderings, ramblings, and information. In a lot of way this is the model that TealArt still uses, but it\u0026rsquo;s my intention that TealArt collect essays and slightly more formal pieces.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried a number of times to write less formal blogs, most successfully using the LiveJournals Clever on Demand and Awkward, but Enderingly Colloquial. (Usernames celchu19 and tychoish respectively) While I\u0026rsquo;m still fond of some of the community aspects of LiveJournal, I like the prospect of doing it on my own, and having more control over the whole process.","title":"welcome!"},{"content":"I realize this is kind of meta, but\u0026hellip;.\nsince I\u0026rsquo;m setting up two new Wordpress installations on this sever, for this website and also for the station keeping documentation, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that there is so much that the software can do and so little that I generally get it to do, and about 80% of what I do do with wordpress, are hacked together things from the old days.\nI mean I think it all looks good, and what not, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to make the website(s) any spiffier than they already are, but\u0026hellip;. it\u0026rsquo;s craziness.\nAlso, I have to say that, while it works really well, Wordpress is kind of getting bloated and funny. Back in the day, you could open up the files (I guess this was back when it was b2/cafelog) and see what the database queries were doing. A discussion I had with bear, gave me the term \u0026ldquo;abstraction\u0026rdquo; to describe the way that computer code/programing becomes further and further removed from what it\u0026rsquo;s actually doing. I hope I\u0026rsquo;m getting that right\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, I had a blogging system for a while, where all the templates and what not, basically had to be done by hand. While we didn\u0026rsquo;t work out perfectly for each-other, that CMS and I, in terms of capability, there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot that it couldn\u0026rsquo;t do that I can now with the a program that is significantly newer (as these things go).\nwell whatever.\nps. I\u0026rsquo;m using the BlogMate plugin for TextMate this post. Have I mentioned how much I like TextMate\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wordpress-and-abstraction/","summary":"I realize this is kind of meta, but\u0026hellip;.\nsince I\u0026rsquo;m setting up two new Wordpress installations on this sever, for this website and also for the station keeping documentation, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that there is so much that the software can do and so little that I generally get it to do, and about 80% of what I do do with wordpress, are hacked together things from the old days.\nI mean I think it all looks good, and what not, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to make the website(s) any spiffier than they already are, but\u0026hellip;. it\u0026rsquo;s craziness.\nAlso, I have to say that, while it works really well, Wordpress is kind of getting bloated and funny. Back in the day, you could open up the files (I guess this was back when it was b2/cafelog) and see what the database queries were doing. A discussion I had with bear, gave me the term \u0026ldquo;abstraction\u0026rdquo; to describe the way that computer code/programing becomes further and further removed from what it\u0026rsquo;s actually doing.","title":"wordpress and abstraction"},{"content":"well the blogmate thing totally didn\u0026rsquo;t work out.\nMarsEdit for the win.\nI have to say that I\u0026rsquo;m a better blogger (ie. I link more) when in textmate where there\u0026rsquo;s a key command to link a selected phrase to the first google result for that selected phrase. It\u0026rsquo;s awesome!\nanyway, back to \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; work\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/worth-a-shot/","summary":"well the blogmate thing totally didn\u0026rsquo;t work out.\nMarsEdit for the win.\nI have to say that I\u0026rsquo;m a better blogger (ie. I link more) when in textmate where there\u0026rsquo;s a key command to link a selected phrase to the first google result for that selected phrase. It\u0026rsquo;s awesome!\nanyway, back to \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; work","title":"worth a shot"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s Friday, which means it\u0026rsquo;s time for some reflections on the work of french post-structuralists Deleuze and Guatteri in the book Anti-Oedipus. Good summer reading to send you off into the weekend. Fortunately, having touched on their conception of \u0026ldquo;desiring/production and machines,\u0026rdquo; and bit on \u0026ldquo;anti-oedipalism,\u0026rdquo; we can move on to something fun. This week: I have for us a few passages from the third major division about the emergence of language and cultural memory. For a while I\u0026rsquo;ve been convinced that semiotics and linguistic theory is sort of the cohesive glue behind post-structuralism, maybe it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending too much time with literary-types, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s something there. Also, I think if we understand things in linguistic terms, it makes it (more) posssible for me to interact and apply these theories. But anyway, on to the passages:\n(Oedipus) implies an individual overinvestment of the organ to compensate for it\u0026rsquo;s collective disinvestment. That is why the commentators most favorable to the universality of Oedipus recognize nonetheless that one does not encounter in primitive socieities any of the mechanisms or any of the attitudes that make it a reality in our society. No superego, no guilt. No identification of a specific ego with global persons--but group identifications that are always partial following the compact agglutinated series of ancestors, and the fragmented series of companions and cousins\u0026quot; (143-4).\nI admit that I tried to rescue that passage from yammering on about Oedipus\u0026rsquo; ultimate anality, and I fear it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense. They say that \u0026ldquo;our modern societies have [\u0026hellip;] undertaken a vast privatization of the organs, which corresponds to the decoding of flows hat have become abstract\u0026rdquo; (143). That society, in particular modernity, has limited the way we interact with bodies1, and that this correlates with the way we know and understand flows--desire. Because of these privatizations, we \u0026ldquo;have\u0026rdquo; an understanding of Oedipus that is social, and one where they are forced to ask \u0026ldquo;What then remains for the making of Oedipus?\u0026rdquo;\nMoving back to our discussion of some concepts that are more connected with the themes of lanague, that I\u0026rsquo;m more intersted in.\n\u0026ldquo;the primitive territorial machine codes flows, invests organs, and marks bodies\u0026rdquo; (144; emphasis added).\nI understand this as saying, basically, that: from the very basis of the formation of culture, desire, machines, and bodies are coded/shaped by that culture. It\u0026rsquo;s of course the \u0026ldquo;bodies\u0026rdquo; part that I find most interesting, as this is sort of the part where culture and the individual meet. Particularly in this moment, we\u0026rsquo;re given to think that our bodies are our own domains, and in some sort of twisted Cartesian way, beyond the realm of cultural influence. Which is pattently false, even if it\u0026rsquo;s hard to grasp; in any case, the crossing of the mind/body and culture/individual boundaries are I think fascinating moment.\nSo at this point we have a number of pieces: the culture peice, the individuals/bodies piecs, lets continue this a bit further as they, following Nietzsche, say: \u0026gt;\u0026ldquo;it is a matter of creating a memory for man; and man who was constituted by means of an active faculty of forgetting (oubli), by means of repression of biological memory, must create an other memory, one that is collective, a memory of words (paroles) and no longer a memory of things, a memory of signs and no longer of effects. This organization, which traces its signs directly on the body, constitutes a system of cruelty\u0026rdquo; (145-6; emphasis original)\nMan, in the social sense \u0026ldquo;created\u0026rdquo; by representation, not necessarily in our own memories of events but by a collective/group memmory. Not in the \u0026ldquo;groupthink\u0026rdquo; sense, but rather in sense that through ritual, education, and practice what we remember and know (as individuals) about \u0026ldquo;our\u0026rdquo; pasts is constrained by cultural values and interests. Think about how we \u0026ldquo;remember\u0026rdquo; on holidays, think about key cultural moments that you many not have experienced directly, but are none-the-less part of y/our cultural ethos. I suspect however that we\u0026rsquo;re all more interested in the \u0026ldquo;cruelty\u0026rdquo; that they speak of. They go on to say:\n\u0026ldquo;Cruelty has nothing to do with some ill-defined or natural violence that might be commissioned to explain the history of mankind; cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them\u0026rdquo; (145).\nAnd then:\n\u0026ldquo;The sign is a position of desire; but the first sings are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh \u0026lsquo;writing,\u0026rsquo; then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word\u0026rdquo; (145; emphasis added).\nYour thoughts? I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I can add much to that, but I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you think.\nbest, tycho\norgans being, body-machines, but I/we haven\u0026rsquo;t quite gotten to the grok point with Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s concept of the \u0026ldquo;body without organs.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deleuze-culture-memory-and-language/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s Friday, which means it\u0026rsquo;s time for some reflections on the work of french post-structuralists Deleuze and Guatteri in the book Anti-Oedipus. Good summer reading to send you off into the weekend. Fortunately, having touched on their conception of \u0026ldquo;desiring/production and machines,\u0026rdquo; and bit on \u0026ldquo;anti-oedipalism,\u0026rdquo; we can move on to something fun. This week: I have for us a few passages from the third major division about the emergence of language and cultural memory. For a while I\u0026rsquo;ve been convinced that semiotics and linguistic theory is sort of the cohesive glue behind post-structuralism, maybe it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;ve been spending too much time with literary-types, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s something there. Also, I think if we understand things in linguistic terms, it makes it (more) posssible for me to interact and apply these theories. But anyway, on to the passages:\n(Oedipus) implies an individual overinvestment of the organ to compensate for it\u0026rsquo;s collective disinvestment.","title":"Deleuze: Culture, Memory, and Language"},{"content":"In addition to TealArt I have a secret second virtual life (how sad is that phrase) as a list-mod for a couple of mid-sized email lists. It makes sense, email listservs represent a certain backbone of the what the internet is for me, and while there is never enough time, when I find one that I like, or one grows into something really cool, I like to hold on to it for as long as possible.\nBack in high school I started a science fiction writer\u0026rsquo;s list on yahoo groups called SF-Writing, and it grew and while it\u0026rsquo;s sort of gone fallow for a while, this list has been really important forum for me over the years. I recently posted a question that I think is sort of interesting there and I want to reprint it, and add a little reflection, so here we go:\nI recently pulled out the first 13 pages of the novel (my first) that I wrote 4 years ago, that I think contains something useable, that I want to play with in the coming weeks, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a project in there, and I had forgotten it for a long time.\nI wrote this book, and it told an ok story, frankly it wasn\u0026rsquo;t that interesting, but after I finished it, but before I abandoned it, I wrote this prologue, written from the perspective of one of the characters in the novel (after the events of the story), as a sort of historical essay. Frankly it was boring as hell, out of place, and more of a sort of \u0026ldquo;formal outline\u0026rdquo; My hope is that I can can do better if I just focus on this small little piece of the story.\nIronically, it would mean writing a Mars book, which it might just be time for. Jeff and I talked about this a while ago, and I think we even talked about it on the list, but there\u0026rsquo;s a certian tradition of SF writers writing a \u0026ldquo;Mars Book\u0026rdquo; (eg. Heinlein\u0026rsquo;s stuff, Bradbury\u0026rsquo;s Chronicles, etc.). But that\u0026rsquo;s not the question I hope to pose.\nI read the chunk that I spoke about in this part of the message a last night, and I realized that the story I thought it told was really only a small portion of what was contained in that section. It\u0026rsquo;s a funny thing memory.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the question I posed to the list. More writing related and specific than not, but I think there are a number of larger issues that linger around these experiences.\nDo you all revive old works that flounder or do you plow forward? How long do you let projects go fallow before coming back to them. And finally do you revise and amend and edit, or do you rewrite and re- imagine?\nIt\u0026rsquo;s interesting to work on new and different projects, or at least break out of my habit of only writing for TealArt.\nI\u0026rsquo;m getting my wisdom teeth out tomorrow morning, so while there will be a Deleuze essay on Friday, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be pretty absent for a few days. Hang in there!\nCheers, ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reviving-old-material/","summary":"In addition to TealArt I have a secret second virtual life (how sad is that phrase) as a list-mod for a couple of mid-sized email lists. It makes sense, email listservs represent a certain backbone of the what the internet is for me, and while there is never enough time, when I find one that I like, or one grows into something really cool, I like to hold on to it for as long as possible.\nBack in high school I started a science fiction writer\u0026rsquo;s list on yahoo groups called SF-Writing, and it grew and while it\u0026rsquo;s sort of gone fallow for a while, this list has been really important forum for me over the years. I recently posted a question that I think is sort of interesting there and I want to reprint it, and add a little reflection, so here we go:\nI recently pulled out the first 13 pages of the novel (my first) that I wrote 4 years ago, that I think contains something useable, that I want to play with in the coming weeks, I think there\u0026rsquo;s a project in there, and I had forgotten it for a long time.","title":"Reviving Old Material"},{"content":"Welcome to episode #3 of Station Keeping. I hope you enjoy, and can welcome a few more characters to the station keeping family. As always, this project is a collaborative one, and I look forward to hearing from you for any reason, but particularly if you would like to contribute in any capacity. But please do enjoy! -- ty\nLocation: Command Deck Joshua Sian trotted into the command center, it was like he\u0026rsquo;d spent the past two weeks running and always 10 minutes late. The space station shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have been that big yet anyway. Before the door closed he called out \u0026ldquo;Status?\u0026rdquo; as he walked over to an open station.\n\u0026ldquo;The first three ships are, within range, for docking, several are queueing up--and the rest will be here--in an hour or two.\u0026rdquo; The crewmen\u0026rsquo;s stilted response was punctuated as he worked furiously to pass messages along to the dock crew.\n\u0026ldquo;As we expected,\u0026rdquo; Sian noted as he began to adjust his own preliminary calculations. \u0026ldquo;Crewman?\u0026rdquo; Sain asked without looking up, his voice wavered slightly with concern. Thankfully, he managed to mostly stifle a wince at being unable to recall a name.\nThe entire command center crew responded, but their responses weren\u0026rsquo;t synchronized.\n\u0026ldquo;Where\u0026rsquo;s the docking arm?\u0026rdquo; he asked, finally looking up at one of the displays. \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;re going to need it really soon\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\nThere was no response.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, bring it about! and inform the commander\u0026rsquo;s ship that they might not have as much help as we promised.\u0026rdquo; The error, though not inexcusable, was as much Joshua\u0026rsquo;s fault as it was anyone else\u0026rsquo;s: they were over worked and understaffed, and Joshua had planned on being in command half an hour earlier, until one of the construction teams demanded his attention. Thankfully the docking arm would probably extend (even in the right direction!) when it was needed, but it was still frustrating.\n\u0026ldquo;We have space for the first two ships in bay 3, and the second ship in\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; he paused to look up the docking plan again. \u0026ldquo;bay 6.\u0026rdquo;\nNo one responded, there was no need.\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll take in the first two ships, then I need to get down to meet the commander, you can manage the rest, so get ready for it,\u0026rdquo; Josh proposed. It was good that he was about to be done with being in charge of things like space stations: proposals didn\u0026rsquo;t command in the same way that orders did.\n\u0026ldquo;Should I call in Jacobs and Qunicy to help out with this?\u0026rdquo; One of the crew asked.\n\u0026ldquo;Please do, It would be--\u0026rdquo; Sian trailed off, as he started concentrating on the docking arm, but everyone else was to busy to care what was to be.\nLocation: Docking Bay 3 \u0026ldquo;At least you\u0026rsquo;re not late this time,\u0026rdquo; David Conrad said to Josh as he jogged up to the hatch where Eli Banner was about to disembark.\n\u0026ldquo;Once they step onto this deck, and people stop thinking that I\u0026rsquo;m in charge, I resolve to never run anywhere.\u0026rdquo; Joshua said taking a deep breath. Josh was surprised to see David here, but almost more surprised that he spoke so freely.\n\u0026ldquo;Don\u0026rsquo;t say that, we might hold you to that.\u0026rdquo; David chuckled, and looked toward the unmoving hatch.\n\u0026ldquo;So what brings you around these parts?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I hear there\u0026rsquo;s a ship docking.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yep.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;But I didn\u0026rsquo;t--\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s alright, I have my ways, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been bored until we get the pub open, I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot to do. Besides, Eli\u0026rsquo;s an old friend,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Eli?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The commander.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh. Right.\u0026rdquo;\nBefore the silence settled again, the hatch hissed, and opened.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, hello!\u0026rdquo; Commander Eli Banner said to David sounding surprised, as he stepped on to the station. The men hugged for a moment, and Talia Garn stepped out behind the commander and looked awkwardly at Joshua Sian.\n\u0026ldquo;Talia Garn.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Joshua Sian.\u0026rdquo; Their introductions were soft and understated, as they were both more interested and surprised by the interaction between the commander and David Conrad.\n\u0026ldquo;Talia, this is David Conrad; the David Conrad,\u0026rdquo; the commander interrupted, sending Sain back into silence.\n\u0026ldquo;A pleasure, sir,\u0026rdquo; Talia said, extending her hand.\n\u0026ldquo;What are you doing here?\u0026rdquo; Eli asked.\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m just the bar keep, watching and listening like always. Marc Perrin\u0026rsquo;s doctoring, as usual.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s great,\u0026rdquo; Eli smiled. The awkward we\u0026rsquo;ll have to get a drink sometime.\u0026quot;\n\u0026ldquo;Bar isn\u0026rsquo;t finished yet, but indeed we will.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I suppose we have a job to do here?\u0026rdquo; Eli said, turning his attention to the young lieutenant. He motioned toward the corridor, to make room for the rest of the crew and passengers to disembark.\n\u0026ldquo;Indeed, I have crew on the docking procedure of the convoy, and there\u0026rsquo;s nothing else to report that I haven\u0026rsquo;t already filed with you, sir.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s probably true,\u0026rdquo; Banners response was a quick as it was dry.\nSian squirmed, he was unprepared to be the butt of all the new commander\u0026rsquo;s jokes. \u0026ldquo;I actually have some paperwork for you, to transfer command and what not.\u0026rdquo; Sain produced a tablet\n\u0026ldquo;Sure, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry. We\u0026rsquo;ve been cooped up on the ships for so long, it\u0026rsquo;s just good to get out.\u0026rdquo; The commander took the tablet and began to confirm the transfer of authority. \u0026ldquo;I actually have heard that you\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a great job here.\u0026rdquo; He looked toward Talia and David and offered a curt smile.\n\u0026ldquo;Thank you, sir. It\u0026rsquo;s good to have you aboard,\u0026rdquo; Joshua said and indicated that they should talk the elevator at the end of the corridor.\nAs the others turned to enter the elevator car David recused himself; \u0026ldquo;I actually have an appointment, that I have to tend to, but I trust I\u0026rsquo;ll see all of you soon.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Thanks for stopping by,\u0026rdquo; Eli said: the others just smiled kindly.\nJoshua Sian inputed the code for the command center on the elevator\u0026rsquo;s keypad once the doors closed and everyone was aboard. \u0026ldquo;That was so incredibly strange,\u0026rdquo; he thought as the lift moved in silence.\n\u0026ldquo;Gaurd Changing\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-guard-changing/","summary":"Welcome to episode #3 of Station Keeping. I hope you enjoy, and can welcome a few more characters to the station keeping family. As always, this project is a collaborative one, and I look forward to hearing from you for any reason, but particularly if you would like to contribute in any capacity. But please do enjoy! -- ty\nLocation: Command Deck Joshua Sian trotted into the command center, it was like he\u0026rsquo;d spent the past two weeks running and always 10 minutes late. The space station shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have been that big yet anyway. Before the door closed he called out \u0026ldquo;Status?\u0026rdquo; as he walked over to an open station.\n\u0026ldquo;The first three ships are, within range, for docking, several are queueing up--and the rest will be here--in an hour or two.\u0026rdquo; The crewmen\u0026rsquo;s stilted response was punctuated as he worked furiously to pass messages along to the dock crew.","title":"Station Keeping: Guard Changing"},{"content":"I kind of promised to myself that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t post about knitting until I had news and pictures. Well I do. So here we are.\nI recently finished a sweater. I know craziness. Anyway, it\u0026rsquo;s one that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on since mid February, which means I figure based on a non-scientific study, that it\u0026rsquo;s taken a bit longer than many of my sweaters. But it\u0026rsquo;s knit with very fine yarn, and one of the pattern repeats was incredibly tough to memorize1.\nBut I have to say that I enjoyed the experience, despite all these things that I fairly promptly ordered the yarn to make another, sweater with similar materials. There\u0026rsquo;s something to this HD shetland stuff.\nIn any case, I present to you, this sweater. HD Shetland. US #2.5 needles, turned hems, my own design.\nThe other part of this announcement is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be teaching a class at a local (st. louis, missouri, USA) yarn store on 2-color stranded knitting at the end of this month and the beginning of next month (June/July 2007). Email Me for more information.\nCheers, tycho\nThis is of course my fault, given that I created the pattern using Excel and my own head. I suppose.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-sweater-and-knitting-update/","summary":"I kind of promised to myself that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t post about knitting until I had news and pictures. Well I do. So here we are.\nI recently finished a sweater. I know craziness. Anyway, it\u0026rsquo;s one that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on since mid February, which means I figure based on a non-scientific study, that it\u0026rsquo;s taken a bit longer than many of my sweaters. But it\u0026rsquo;s knit with very fine yarn, and one of the pattern repeats was incredibly tough to memorize1.\nBut I have to say that I enjoyed the experience, despite all these things that I fairly promptly ordered the yarn to make another, sweater with similar materials. There\u0026rsquo;s something to this HD shetland stuff.\nIn any case, I present to you, this sweater. HD Shetland. US #2.5 needles, turned hems, my own design.\nThe other part of this announcement is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be teaching a class at a local (st.","title":"A Sweater (Knitting Update)"},{"content":"I think I took away my own thunder last friday when I posted news of the Station Keeping Twiter log. I\u0026rsquo;m posting little updates from Hanm Center and other assorted Station Keeping related notes, it\u0026rsquo;s been fun and I\u0026rsquo;d like to welcome all who\u0026rsquo;ve come to TealArt from twitter, and invite all of you to visit either the Hanm or my own twitter account.\nThis week is pretty exciting for me right now. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in town for the whole week, with none of this running about. While I had a slow output week last week, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve recovered a lot of the creative juice and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to write (and plan to write) more. This is a good thing. A very good thing. I had burned through the backlog pretty severely, and while having that backlog is good for cushioning the give and take of every day life, I feel better when I can write more: writing is like any other kind of exercise, it takes stamina and practice, and unless I have the chance to write, I get rusty and it gets hard to write. So it\u0026rsquo;s good that I\u0026rsquo;m doing better.\nI have a great `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_ for you this week. We get to meet a couple more characters, and that should be fun. I realized last week, rather late in the game that the SK portal was broken. I\u0026rsquo;ve remedied the situation, so hopefully that will make it easier for you all to stay caught up with the series. As always, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in expanding the SK team. Please contact me!\nLater today, I\u0026rsquo;ll have a post together about a sweater I recently finished. With a picture! It\u0026rsquo;ll be awesome.\nIn terms of other content? There\u0026rsquo;ll be a Deleuze piece, of course. Having summarized the best parts of the first ~150 pages of the book in 3 posts, we\u0026rsquo;re on to territory that\u0026rsquo;s new to me and that I haven\u0026rsquo;t had the opportunity to stew over for months. I think, ultimately this is a good thing for these pieces. At the same time, I realized last week that If I read a \u0026ldquo;chapter\u0026rdquo; a week, I\u0026rsquo;ll be done with the second part by the end of the summer. No promises, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ll take a break from that with something else.\nThere\u0026rsquo;ll be other posts, of course. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to figure out a way to talk about the things I\u0026rsquo;m reading in a way that isn\u0026rsquo;t completely inane, but we\u0026rsquo;ll have to wait and see.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you all around.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/good-monday/","summary":"I think I took away my own thunder last friday when I posted news of the Station Keeping Twiter log. I\u0026rsquo;m posting little updates from Hanm Center and other assorted Station Keeping related notes, it\u0026rsquo;s been fun and I\u0026rsquo;d like to welcome all who\u0026rsquo;ve come to TealArt from twitter, and invite all of you to visit either the Hanm or my own twitter account.\nThis week is pretty exciting for me right now. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in town for the whole week, with none of this running about. While I had a slow output week last week, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve recovered a lot of the creative juice and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to write (and plan to write) more. This is a good thing. A very good thing. I had burned through the backlog pretty severely, and while having that backlog is good for cushioning the give and take of every day life, I feel better when I can write more: writing is like any other kind of exercise, it takes stamina and practice, and unless I have the chance to write, I get rusty and it gets hard to write.","title":"Good Monday"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always had a somewhat strained relationship with psychoanalysis and Freud, as you might expect, given that I\u0026rsquo;m generally a fairly rational human being. I mean, really, psychoanalysis doesn\u0026rsquo;t really present a very good (or accurate) picture of how mental experience or culture functions, and frankly--and perhaps this comes from Deleuze and Guatteri--it seems like the analyical tradition is as inscriptive as it is descriptive. Which is ok, if that\u0026rsquo;s your thing, but it\u0026rsquo;s not mine. The problem with this is that there are a lot of thinkers who\u0026rsquo;ve been influenced by the psychoanalytic tradition that, I think on the whole, have something interesting to say. Deleuze and Guatteri for instance, but also folk like Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida: you know all the angsty continental intellectuals of the last 30 years. All this despite the psychonalysis, I\u0026rsquo;d be inclined to say.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also reminded of a conversation I had with a professsor in which I made a typical complaint about psychoanalytically-derived theories as being \u0026ldquo;a lousy explanation for mental experience,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;not based in any sort of meaningful understanding of reality.\u0026rdquo; In response she said something like \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s interesting that people don\u0026rsquo;t go after Marx for that,\u0026rdquo; which is to say, we accept a lot of Marxist ideas on faith in ways that we won\u0026rsquo;t for psychonalysis. Now for the record I\u0026rsquo;m totally ok with that, but I think in the larger sense she\u0026rsquo;s right, we tend to dismiss a lot of Freudian based thought wholesale without really engaging with it. That\u0026rsquo;s what this week\u0026rsquo;s essay is about. Sort of.\nAs I return to Anti-Oedipus, I\u0026rsquo;m struck by how much I absolutely hated the second chapter, which is all about the function (or non-function) of Oedipus in the world as a result of psychoanalytic theory. While I admit that I\u0026rsquo;m only beginning on the third chapter, I am realizing how important it is that this book \u0026ldquo;deal with\u0026rdquo; Oedipus. I think in my reading of this, I was drawn to passages that allowed me to connect with Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s psychodynamics, and also learn anti-oedipalism. Also, as a side note about this part of the text: it\u0026rsquo;s pretty clever writing, there are parts that were honest-to-g-d funny enough to laugh out loud. That\u0026rsquo;s why I love this book. Anyway, here\u0026rsquo;s what I found:\n\u0026ldquo;For the unconscious itself is no more structural than personal, it does not symbolize any more than it imagines or represents; it engineers, it is mechanic. Neither imaginary nor symbolic, it is the Real in itself, the \u0026lsquo;impossible real\u0026rsquo; and its production\u0026rdquo; (53).\nI rather like the way that this sums up their idea of psychodynamics, and at least for my purposes it allows Deleuze and Guatteri to both engage psychoanalytical theories without accepting the suppressions, while still working in \u0026ldquo;some sort of meaningful understanding of reality.\u0026rdquo; Furthermore, I think way of thinking about psychoanalytic theory makes it possible to both engage the tradition in a productive way without subscribing to its more unhelpful/insidious aspects. This is very much in line with the sort of thinking/approach that I looked at last week.\nIn the spirt of rethinking the tradition they say, \u0026ldquo;We are so molded by Oedipus that we find it hard to imagine another use\u0026rdquo; (76), given the inscriptive nature of psychoanalysis and Oedipus, reforming is incredibly hard to think beyond it. This is clearly where a lot of people fall down (I\u0026rsquo;d point to Kristeva, if I had more experience with her), but I think this is part of the reason that new ideas are so incredibly hard to come by. I mean if you take a step back and look at Deleuze and Guatteri, (and perhaps this is a product of how I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about them, but) it\u0026rsquo;s easy to see their project as being incredibly Hegelian: this isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, necessarily, but a useful example.\nBack to Oedipus for a moment:\n\u0026ldquo;Oedipus is completely useless, except for tying off the unconscious on both sides. We shall see in what sense Oedipus is strictly \u0026lsquo;undecidable\u0026rsquo; (ind√©cidable), as the mathematicians would put. We are extremely tired of those stories where one is said to be in good health because of Oedipus, sick from Oedipus, and suffering from various illnesses under the influence of Oedipus\u0026rdquo; (81).\nThis critique isn\u0026rsquo;t difficult to swallow, and I completely endorse this point. But I didn\u0026rsquo;t need to read eighty pages to get to this conclusion, thankfully they propose a solution:\n\u0026ldquo;It is not the purpose of schizoanalysis to resolve Oedipus, it does not intend to resolve it better than Oedipal psychoanalysis. Its aim is to de-oedipalize the unconscious in order to reach the real problems. Schizoanalysis proposes to reach those regions of the orphan unconscious--indeed \u0026lsquo;beyond all law\u0026rsquo;-- where the problem of oedipus can no longer even be raised\u0026rdquo; (81-2).\nThis passage comes from a chapter of the book (#2) that is the foundation of their criticism of Oedipus, the discussion of schizoanalysis, based upon my reading of the table of contents comes later. But I think this early summary is helpful in saying \u0026ldquo;there\u0026rsquo;s a way out, just hang on for it,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;arguing against oedipus isn\u0026rsquo;t the answer.\u0026rdquo; And I hope there is.\nThough this is a sticky section of the book, I do want to reiterate that this is still a rather entertaining text: as I was searching for these parts I found myself chuckling at some passages, and others that I had annotated with \u0026ldquo;ha!\u0026quot;\u0026rsquo;s and smiley faces. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m weird, but that\u0026rsquo;s part of the reason I liked this book so much.\nStay tuned, and I hope you have a good weekend.\nBest, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deleuzian-against-oedipus/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve always had a somewhat strained relationship with psychoanalysis and Freud, as you might expect, given that I\u0026rsquo;m generally a fairly rational human being. I mean, really, psychoanalysis doesn\u0026rsquo;t really present a very good (or accurate) picture of how mental experience or culture functions, and frankly--and perhaps this comes from Deleuze and Guatteri--it seems like the analyical tradition is as inscriptive as it is descriptive. Which is ok, if that\u0026rsquo;s your thing, but it\u0026rsquo;s not mine. The problem with this is that there are a lot of thinkers who\u0026rsquo;ve been influenced by the psychoanalytic tradition that, I think on the whole, have something interesting to say. Deleuze and Guatteri for instance, but also folk like Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida: you know all the angsty continental intellectuals of the last 30 years. All this despite the psychonalysis, I\u0026rsquo;d be inclined to say.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also reminded of a conversation I had with a professsor in which I made a typical complaint about psychoanalytically-derived theories as being \u0026ldquo;a lousy explanation for mental experience,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;not based in any sort of meaningful understanding of reality.","title":"Deleuzian: Against Oedipus"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting an essay on Deleuze in a few moments, so sit tight. I think you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy. I have a few things to report.\nI prepped to write another Deleuze essay. I did some checking and if I proceed at my current pace, I should be done with chapter 2 by the end of the summer. There\u0026rsquo;ll be a hiatus of sorts, and if I\u0026rsquo;m still interested we\u0026rsquo;ll use the break to explore something non-Deleuze.\nIn other, Station Keeping news, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve\u0026rdquo; started a twitter microblog, for station keeping. I\u0026rsquo;ll post SK updates and also little notes from the characters. It will appear in the sidebar, with the tag \u0026ldquo;Twitter / Station Keeping\u0026rdquo; For your entertainment pleasure.\nCheck it out here!\n--ty\nps. I\u0026rsquo;d like to thank dave of soliloqueer for the incoming link. Dave, you\u0026rsquo;re a gentleman and a scholar.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/twitters-from-hanm-station/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting an essay on Deleuze in a few moments, so sit tight. I think you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy. I have a few things to report.\nI prepped to write another Deleuze essay. I did some checking and if I proceed at my current pace, I should be done with chapter 2 by the end of the summer. There\u0026rsquo;ll be a hiatus of sorts, and if I\u0026rsquo;m still interested we\u0026rsquo;ll use the break to explore something non-Deleuze.\nIn other, Station Keeping news, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve\u0026rdquo; started a twitter microblog, for station keeping. I\u0026rsquo;ll post SK updates and also little notes from the characters. It will appear in the sidebar, with the tag \u0026ldquo;Twitter / Station Keeping\u0026rdquo; For your entertainment pleasure.\nCheck it out here!\n--ty\nps. I\u0026rsquo;d like to thank dave of soliloqueer for the incoming link. Dave, you\u0026rsquo;re a gentleman and a scholar.","title":"Twitters from Hanm Station"},{"content":"I meant to add some bumpers to Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s *Station Keeping* installment, but I seem to have failed with that project. Here are the bumpers that I\u0026rsquo;m adding, for your enjoyment.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been killer busy, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ve probably driven a good bit more than 1000 miles in less than a week. It\u0026rsquo;ll probably be more than 1500 in a bit more than a week. Crazyness. On the upside, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get unstuck enough to really concentrate and get things done, writing wise. This is very good, as I tend to value my sanity. But anyway\u0026hellip;\nBefore the story.\nWelcome to Station Keeping this is the second installment in our first \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; of this project. It\u0026rsquo;s fiction, collaboratively written and planned: set in the distant future, station keeping tells the story of the residents and visitors to a space station called \u0026ldquo;Hanm Centre\u0026rdquo; far away from the populated core worlds. As you will read, this episode introduces a number of important characters in this story, on the eve of their arrival on the station. I hope you enjoy, and if you are interested in contributing to this project we are interested in hearing from you. Your feedback is always welcome and is most appreciated.\nAnd after the story.\n\u0026ldquo;First Arrival\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\nI think I need a better bio tag.\n--ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sk-bumpers-the-state-of-the-tycho/","summary":"I meant to add some bumpers to Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s *Station Keeping* installment, but I seem to have failed with that project. Here are the bumpers that I\u0026rsquo;m adding, for your enjoyment.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been killer busy, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ve probably driven a good bit more than 1000 miles in less than a week. It\u0026rsquo;ll probably be more than 1500 in a bit more than a week. Crazyness. On the upside, I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to get unstuck enough to really concentrate and get things done, writing wise. This is very good, as I tend to value my sanity. But anyway\u0026hellip;\nBefore the story.\nWelcome to Station Keeping this is the second installment in our first \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; of this project. It\u0026rsquo;s fiction, collaboratively written and planned: set in the distant future, station keeping tells the story of the residents and visitors to a space station called \u0026ldquo;Hanm Centre\u0026rdquo; far away from the populated core worlds.","title":"SK Bumpers \u0026#038; the state of the tycho"},{"content":"I wrote last week about how science fiction was sort of a synthetic element in the way I think about my own work and what TealArt means to me. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in cyberculture, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in cultural theory, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in story telling, and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in individuals. I\u0026rsquo;m also a computer geek, so sometimes I go off and talk about command lines, but it all makes sense.\nScience fiction is interesting because it is both seen as escapist1, and is at the same time a very intellectual or thoughtful approach to telling stories. Indeed SF stories do tend to be about ideas on some level, so it\u0026rsquo;s paradoxical that a good deal of SF isn\u0026rsquo;t considered literary, or critiqued for being both too \u0026ldquo;thinking\u0026rdquo; and not \u0026ldquo;thinking enough.\u0026rdquo;2\nDuring my time away from SF, I had a problem finding a place for my interest in cultural (and literary) theory in the larger field of \u0026ldquo;tycho-ness.\u0026rdquo; How do I responsibly think about my interests with a proper cultural level of analysis and also not allowing this to \u0026ldquo;get in the way.\u0026rdquo; Both sides of this conflict have been hard: I haven\u0026rsquo;t exactly been in a field that has taking a cultural approach to theorizing, and the integration aspect is hard.\nIt should have been obvious, given my interest in Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s work. Delany\u0026rsquo;s first reputation was as a science fiction writer, his second as an autobiographer, and his third as a critical/cultural theorist. Now that I have a modicum of extra time on my hands, I\u0026rsquo;ve started reading some of his fiction, and I have to say that I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased, and it\u0026rsquo;s started to make sense.\nWhile I think to define SF as simply one thing or another is probably more detrimental than anything, it strikes me that there\u0026rsquo;s an obvious connection between \u0026ldquo;theory\u0026rdquo; and SF, and this is a connection that I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in continuing to explore.\nThere are a number of good examples where theorists and science fiction writers tend to overlap, Delany is an obvious starting point, but there are others: I saw an Intro to Anthropology course that taught an Ursula K. LeGuin novel, and this strikes me as completely appropriate (I think that said class also used Vonegut, which I think is also an appropriate induction into both anthropology and science fiction.) While we\u0026rsquo;re on the anthro connection I\u0026rsquo;d also point out \u0026ldquo;The Watching People\u0026rdquo; which appeared on EscapePod a few weeks ago. If you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with escape-pod you should be.\nBefore, I leave you this time, I wanted to talk a little bit more about what I mean when I say \u0026ldquo;theory.\u0026rdquo; While others may dispute this (and feel free), I tend to refer to some sort of non-professional/cononical or applied philosophy. Not that I have something against philosophy, I think philosophers can do some really interesting work but ultimately have different goals and approaches to approaching a text, but their issues aren\u0026rsquo;t mine. It is in this sense of reimgaining the world and thinking about the implications of various \u0026ldquo;theories\u0026rdquo; (in a general sense) that SF can really connect to.\nJust some thoughts? Do you have any?\nAs it is, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to be a snob and deny that SF can be escapist, but I think that there\u0026rsquo;s some value in fiction that can \u0026ldquo;take you away,\u0026rdquo; and that\u0026rsquo;s worth respecting. At the same time, of course, I think the very best SF does something more than provide an escape should the reader want it to.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThis being a blog, I feel like I can make conjectures based on vague stereotypes like this, without supporting them. My apologies.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/synthesizing-science-fiction/","summary":"I wrote last week about how science fiction was sort of a synthetic element in the way I think about my own work and what TealArt means to me. I\u0026rsquo;m interested in cyberculture, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in cultural theory, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in story telling, and I\u0026rsquo;m interested in individuals. I\u0026rsquo;m also a computer geek, so sometimes I go off and talk about command lines, but it all makes sense.\nScience fiction is interesting because it is both seen as escapist1, and is at the same time a very intellectual or thoughtful approach to telling stories. Indeed SF stories do tend to be about ideas on some level, so it\u0026rsquo;s paradoxical that a good deal of SF isn\u0026rsquo;t considered literary, or critiqued for being both too \u0026ldquo;thinking\u0026rdquo; and not \u0026ldquo;thinking enough.\u0026rdquo;2\nDuring my time away from SF, I had a problem finding a place for my interest in cultural (and literary) theory in the larger field of \u0026ldquo;tycho-ness.","title":"Synthesizing Science Fiction"},{"content":"Welcome to Station Keeping this is the second installment in our first \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; of this project. It\u0026rsquo;s fiction, collaboratively written and planned: set in the distant future, station keeping tells the story of the residents and visitors to a space station called \u0026ldquo;Hanm Centre\u0026rdquo; far away from the populated core worlds. As you will read, this episode introduces a number of important characters in this story, on the eve of their arrival on the station. I hope you enjoy, and if you are interested in contributing to this project we are interested in hearing from you. Your feedback is always welcome and is most appreciated.\nOffice Space \u0026ldquo;Damnit!\u0026rdquo; Taila exclaimed throwing her notes on the desk. She had sent a message to Joshua Sian on Hanm Centre, without attaching the crew rotation that she had promised. Normally such an error wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have caused much of a problem, but the time delay between her ship and the station for messages was still too long for comfort. She had to wait for the response before she could go off duty, so Talia\u0026rsquo;s shift just got a little bit longer: \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s not like there\u0026rsquo;s anything worth doing, cooped up on the ship like this anyway,\u0026rdquo; she reasoned, closing her eyes and leaning back in the chair.\nThe doors opened to the skipper\u0026rsquo;s office with out warning and Talia sat up with a start.\n\u0026ldquo;Skippers\u0026rsquo; office, eh?\u0026rdquo; Eli Banner said, attempting to appear as if he was expecting to find Talia in his office.\n\u0026ldquo;Sorry, sir,\u0026rdquo; Talia gathered her things slowly, but when the skipper sat down in one of the other chairs, she relaxed and stayed in the chair. \u0026ldquo;I was just coordinating our arrival with Joshua Sian on the station, and wanted some quiet to write the messages--because we\u0026rsquo;re still text-only. Besides, the comptuer and crew don\u0026rsquo;t need me to watch over them while they slow down\u0026hellip; so slowly\u0026rdquo; she reported, still somewhat uncomfortable sitting on this side of the desk.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s fine, don\u0026rsquo;t worry about it, it\u0026rsquo;s just a room,\u0026rdquo; Eli said. Had there been actual business for the day, he might have been more interested in reclaiming his office, but it was just as well: the entire crew was enguaged of tedious game of appearing busy while trying to hide the fact that they were all bored out of their minds. \u0026ldquo;What did Sian have to say for himself? Keeping the station in one piece I trust?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s not fin--\u0026rdquo; Talia began, but of course the commander knew that already. \u0026ldquo;More or less, I suppose: I have to resend some data to the station before I can go off duty, but I think we\u0026rsquo;ve made all the necessary arrangements for docking,\u0026rdquo; she said, offering a printout report of the docking plan.\n\u0026ldquo;The other ships aren\u0026rsquo;t going to be happy about having to wait so long to disembark.\u0026rdquo; He commented and handed the paper back.\n\u0026ldquo;It happens, they\u0026rsquo;ll deal.\u0026rdquo;\nEli chuckled, \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;ll make a station governor of you yet.\u0026rdquo; Talia didn\u0026rsquo;t quite manage to stifle a glare. Eli continued \u0026ldquo;relax, get some sleep: I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything scheduled for this shift so I can I\u0026rsquo;ll send the message.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s alright, really, my mistake.\u0026rdquo; Talia paused, but before Eli could agree \u0026ldquo;I can\u0026rsquo;t decide what\u0026rsquo;s worse, the thought of staying on this ship for another instant, or the thought of spending the next several years of my life on a station in orbit of Hanm.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Easy; this ship is worse than the station. Now give me that paper, before I put a mark on your record for sitting in my chair,\u0026rdquo; he joked. They stood and he grew serious for a moment \u0026ldquo;It all different, it always is, but you\u0026rsquo;ll do fine.\u0026rdquo; He punctuated his sentence with a smile, as he took her stack of files.\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re probably right. Good shift, sir,\u0026rdquo; she said, before turning to leave the office. \u0026ldquo;Lets avoid doing that again, shall we?\u0026rdquo; she thought after the door shut.\nDocking David Conrad and Marc Perrin stepped off the shuttle they owned onto the docking ramp to find the entire cavernous bay devoid of people. They stood on the other side of their air lock in silence, waiting for something to happen.\nMarc rubbed his eyes, which had begun to tear from exhaustian: \u0026ldquo;Aren\u0026rsquo;t we supposed to have a landing party, here? or something?\u0026rdquo; Marc whispered, leaning slightly toward David.\n\u0026ldquo;I guess not, we\u0026rsquo;re just normal folk now, I guess.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Speak for yourself, I actually have a job here,\u0026rdquo; Marc said, pinching his shirt where the rank pin would have been, had he been wearing a uniform. Actually, given that he was in civvies he almost hoped that there wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a welcoming party.\nDavid chuckled. A uniformed figure trotting briskly across on the far side of the docking bay caught his attention, and he waved. \u0026ldquo;I guess that\u0026rsquo;s your welcoming party,\u0026rdquo; he commented as they began to walk down the ramp.\n\u0026ldquo;Sirs, sorry. We\u0026rsquo;re still a bit short staffed: the real crew doesn\u0026rsquo;t get here till the begining of the week after next.\u0026rdquo; Joshua was still a bit out of breath from his heroic run down from the command center. \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m Joshua Sian, Lieutenant. I\u0026rsquo;ve been keeping the lights on, and organizing the last construction details before the crew gets here. Is there anything I can do to help you move in? A tour?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s David,\u0026rdquo; David responded looking distracted by the wall behind Sian.\n\u0026ldquo;Sir?\u0026rdquo; Sian asked, looking quickly over his shoulder.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s just David these days, none of this sir stuff.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, right, sir--Daivd.\u0026rdquo; Sian corrected himself, and suppressed a squirm. There was silence.\n\u0026ldquo;We have some crates that should probably be unloaded before we move the shuttle out of this bay, if you could arrange for that it would be great.\u0026rdquo; Marc said, taking charge of the conversation. \u0026ldquo;The deceleration was a bit longer than we expected and I for one am a bit too tired for a tour right now. Can we schedule one for tomorrow?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Sure, that would be great.\u0026rdquo; Sian turned his attention away from David who seemed far more interested in gazing around the bay, \u0026ldquo;Are the crates marked?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Should be.\u0026rdquo; Marc confirmed, before swallowing a yawn.\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll get someone down here to take care of that right away.\u0026rdquo; Sian made a note on a micro-tablet that he seemed to produce from thin air. \u0026ldquo;Can I show you to your quarters now?\u0026rdquo; He offered.\n\u0026ldquo;That would be great,\u0026rdquo; Marc said. When Sian turned around, Marc glared at David and mouthed silently \u0026ldquo;Way to be the strange kid, fix it would you.\u0026rdquo;\nDavid looked quizzically at Marc, and then getting a clue stepped up next to Joshua; \u0026ldquo;What\u0026rsquo;s the construction schedule looking like at this point?\u0026rdquo; he asked.\n\u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;re doing pretty good, but nothing is really fast enough.\u0026rdquo; Sian was caught off guard, but he quickly relaxed as they began to talk about station operations and construction.\nMarc smiled, and yawned again, as he watched the two men talk, but he had no interest in keeping up with the discussion. He could hardly think about anything except the amount of time between the present and the soonest opportunity to sleep.\n\u0026ldquo;First Arrival\u0026rdquo; was written by, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_, the creator of `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and `Station Keeping \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/hanm\u0026gt;`_. He is a student and knitter by day and a science fiction writer by night, you can read his work elsewhere on `TealArt \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_ and at `~/tychoish \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com\u0026gt;`_.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-first-arrival/","summary":"Welcome to Station Keeping this is the second installment in our first \u0026ldquo;season\u0026rdquo; of this project. It\u0026rsquo;s fiction, collaboratively written and planned: set in the distant future, station keeping tells the story of the residents and visitors to a space station called \u0026ldquo;Hanm Centre\u0026rdquo; far away from the populated core worlds. As you will read, this episode introduces a number of important characters in this story, on the eve of their arrival on the station. I hope you enjoy, and if you are interested in contributing to this project we are interested in hearing from you. Your feedback is always welcome and is most appreciated.\nOffice Space \u0026ldquo;Damnit!\u0026rdquo; Taila exclaimed throwing her notes on the desk. She had sent a message to Joshua Sian on Hanm Centre, without attaching the crew rotation that she had promised. Normally such an error wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have caused much of a problem, but the time delay between her ship and the station for messages was still too long for comfort.","title":"Station Keeping: First Arrival"},{"content":"I was once again out of town this weekend. Chances are, that as you\u0026rsquo;re reading this, I\u0026rsquo;m still driving back from southern Minnesota thanks to the wonders of modern technology. Aren\u0026rsquo;t you envious?\nThis last week has been tough, by all accounts tougher than it should have been, but I had some accomplishments of note. I finished a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for some time, and was asked to teach a class at a local knitting store. That was pretty nifty. I did some serious job-searching, with mixed results so far. I also made some incremental progress on big projects (academic-y ones,) which was very needed, but not particularly satisfying.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t done much writing this week. Never fear, there\u0026rsquo;s still going to be TealArt entries, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been discouraged. Readership isn\u0026rsquo;t picking up, we\u0026rsquo;re not getting feedback and everything feels a little hopeless at the moment. While I know that the \u0026ldquo;trailer\u0026rdquo; station keeping episode wasn\u0026rsquo;t the most gripping piece of writing and that if it\u0026rsquo;s going to take off, we\u0026rsquo;ll probably need a few \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; episodes under our belts, I have a nagging voice that says \u0026ldquo;if it\u0026rsquo;s not good, it\u0026rsquo;s probably because no one likes it.\u0026rdquo; I don\u0026rsquo;t think this is the case, in part because I\u0026rsquo;m not keeping track of stats on the \u0026ldquo;station keeping site (and don\u0026rsquo;t know of a good way to do so),\u0026rdquo; and also--perhaps on a down note--I don\u0026rsquo;t think there are enough people reading it to say, fairly \u0026ldquo;nobody likes it.\u0026rdquo; Nevertheless, something has to give, sooner or later something will break--I/we\u0026rsquo;ll learn something, someone will \u0026ldquo;discover us,\u0026rdquo; or I\u0026rsquo;ll discover an unsaturated promotional market\u0026hellip; It could happen.\nHaving said that, there\u0026rsquo;ll be new Station Keeping tomorrow, this one introduces a couple of key characters, and gasp has dialogue. I think you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy. Also, this week\u0026rsquo;s Deleuze entry is great, they\u0026rsquo;re a great deal of fun to write, and I feel, more than the other things that I\u0026rsquo;ve written about here recently, they really \u0026ldquo;fit.\u0026rdquo; So maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll start writing emails to other deleuze bloggers and see what they say; and hopefully my semi-undefensable anti-lacanian stance won\u0026rsquo;t get in the way too much.\nI\u0026rsquo;d love to hear from you all\u0026hellip;\nbest, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/these-times-of-tealart/","summary":"I was once again out of town this weekend. Chances are, that as you\u0026rsquo;re reading this, I\u0026rsquo;m still driving back from southern Minnesota thanks to the wonders of modern technology. Aren\u0026rsquo;t you envious?\nThis last week has been tough, by all accounts tougher than it should have been, but I had some accomplishments of note. I finished a sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for some time, and was asked to teach a class at a local knitting store. That was pretty nifty. I did some serious job-searching, with mixed results so far. I also made some incremental progress on big projects (academic-y ones,) which was very needed, but not particularly satisfying.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t done much writing this week. Never fear, there\u0026rsquo;s still going to be TealArt entries, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been discouraged. Readership isn\u0026rsquo;t picking up, we\u0026rsquo;re not getting feedback and everything feels a little hopeless at the moment. While I know that the \u0026ldquo;trailer\u0026rdquo; station keeping episode wasn\u0026rsquo;t the most gripping piece of writing and that if it\u0026rsquo;s going to take off, we\u0026rsquo;ll probably need a few \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; episodes under our belts, I have a nagging voice that says \u0026ldquo;if it\u0026rsquo;s not good, it\u0026rsquo;s probably because no one likes it.","title":"These Times of TealArt"},{"content":"This is the second installment in my ongoing series on Anti-Oedipus by Giles Delueze and Felix Guattari. For more information read the Introduction _and my__ first installment regarding a part Foucault\u0026rsquo;s preface to the book.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t want to spend too much time going over \u0026ldquo;old territory\u0026rdquo; (for me) in Anti Oedipus, but I think a little bit more of background would be helpful as we produce. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to pull out the parts of the first chapter that really stuck with me, now, almost a year after I read them for the first time. This post introduces Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s ideas about desiring production, recording machines, and breakages. These, at least to me, are the fundamental ideas from chapter one1, and some of the most useful ideas that I carried with me as I went on to read further in the book.\nFirst off, desire and production. This stuff is the foundation of their Marx/Freud synthesis, and I think rather than unproblematically append parts of Freud to Marx (or vice versa), they treat psychoanalysis with the kind of skepticism that it deserves, and are able to establish a very workable \u0026ldquo;common language.\u0026rdquo; Here\u0026rsquo;s what they say:\nHence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of coordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions of sensual pleasures, of anxieties and of pain (pg. 4).\nThinking of everything as production, including anxieties and other \u0026ldquo;subject\u0026rdquo; experience, creates a sort of common language to talk about subjectivity, without needing to draw on subject formation vis a vis the mirror stage, unconsciousness, and so forth. Identities are produced, memories are produced, bodies are produced, just as this computer, this website, and the corn flakes you had for breakfast were produced. The computer, corn-flakes and website, are clearly productions, but more often than not we ignore the processes of production of memories, identities, and bodies. This gives us reason to look at the very smallest of effects and mechanisms and think about how their production, rather than to be simply satisfiied with the \u0026ldquo;truth\u0026rdquo; of their experience. Cool.\nAs a psychology type, the stuff about recording, is quite interesting. I was processing this chapter for the first time right as I was writing a paper on episodic memory (specifically autobiographical memory), so I was thinking a lot about this. Immediately following the above quote they say:\nEverything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated and these consumptions directly reproduced. This is the first meaning of process as we use the terms: incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them productions of one and the same process (pg. 4).\nRecording processes--communication, writing, memories, and histories--are produced just like the corn-flakes, just like our identities, and can and should be explored on this level. For the record, I feel like this is an old argument that has permeated pretty well, I suspect many feel pretty comfortable with this kind of idea. This, though, lays the groundwork for another statement a few pages later:\nProduction is not recorded in the same way it is produced, however. Or rather, it is not reproduced within the apparent objective movement in the same way in which it is produced within the process of constitution (pg. 12).\nWe see variations on this in \u0026ldquo;Reader Response Theory\u0026rdquo; and also Biographical/Contextual readings of literature, that look at the contextual forces that affect the production and the consumption of a text. We could, of course, replace \u0026ldquo;text\u0026rdquo; with \u0026ldquo;memory without any real conceptual problem, in fact it seems more like Deleuze and Guatteri mean memory in their writing, when all the literary theorists are talking about texts, because that\u0026rsquo;s what they do. Again, this, I think makes it possible to analize and address both the process and the content of memory, of recording on two very important levels: of its production on the micro level, and of its content on the macro level.\nOk, moving on to the final part of this already too long post on \u0026ldquo;breakages\u0026rdquo;. At some point, Deleuze and Guatteri begin to describe production as the combination of desire, and a machine like process, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten into that. I think somewhere I probably scribbled in my notes \u0026ldquo;everything is production \u0026gt; desire \u0026gt; machines.\u0026rdquo; But here is a quote that I think descirbes how the machines2 \u0026ldquo;work:\u0026rdquo;\nDesiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down. [\u0026hellip;] (pg 8).\nI take this as an epistemological point, more than anything, but I like how as a guiding principal this pushes us to not look toward normative data, but toward the abnormal cases, the exceptions. These \u0026ldquo;breakages\u0026rdquo; are interesting not only as special events, but also insofar as they help us describe the normative functions of the system. This is why Deleuze and Guatteri are so interested in the conceptual space of the schizophrenic, for instance. But I think the directive to look at breakages is a useful one3.\nAnd finally I\u0026rsquo;d like to leave you with the following quote which I found helpful and inspiring. The one thing that I have to say about this book is that it is--as these things go--incredibly enjoyable. It\u0026rsquo;s light hearted, it\u0026rsquo;s inspiring, and it\u0026rsquo;s filled with a sense of hope. And if nothing else that\u0026rsquo;s worth something\u0026hellip;\nThe productive synthesis, the production of production is inherently connective in nature: \u0026ldquo;and\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;and then\u0026hellip;\u0026ldquo;This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow [\u0026hellip;] (pg. 5).\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you all next week. I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you have to say. Don\u0026rsquo;t be shy, I haven\u0026rsquo;t a real clue about most of this stuff either, and I\u0026rsquo;d love to talk. So comment!\ncheers, tycho\nAdmittedly, the real idea from this part of the book that carries on throughout this and A Thousand Plateaus is the \u0026ldquo;Body without Organs,\u0026rdquo; or in many notations BwO. This is something that seems so simple in their explanations but that I find incredibly hard to explain and explore, and quite frankly, hard to apply to other situations, thoghts and projects. Maybe some other week.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThe translators use the word \u0026ldquo;machine,\u0026rdquo; throughout the book, and while I think this word makes a lot of sense in context of the book, in my own mind I\u0026rsquo;ve taken the word \u0026ldquo;machine\u0026rdquo; to refer to something more like a \u0026ldquo;mechanism\u0026rdquo; or a \u0026ldquo;widget\u0026rdquo;.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nClearly there is a space where anecdotal evidence isn\u0026rsquo;t always a productive part of discourse, but I think this reiterates the value of case studies and qualatative methodologies. Balance in all things, after all.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deleuzeian-desiring-machines/","summary":"This is the second installment in my ongoing series on Anti-Oedipus by Giles Delueze and Felix Guattari. For more information read the Introduction _and my__ first installment regarding a part Foucault\u0026rsquo;s preface to the book.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t want to spend too much time going over \u0026ldquo;old territory\u0026rdquo; (for me) in Anti Oedipus, but I think a little bit more of background would be helpful as we produce. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to pull out the parts of the first chapter that really stuck with me, now, almost a year after I read them for the first time. This post introduces Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s ideas about desiring production, recording machines, and breakages. These, at least to me, are the fundamental ideas from chapter one1, and some of the most useful ideas that I carried with me as I went on to read further in the book.\nFirst off, desire and production. This stuff is the foundation of their Marx/Freud synthesis, and I think rather than unproblematically append parts of Freud to Marx (or vice versa), they treat psychoanalysis with the kind of skepticism that it deserves, and are able to establish a very workable \u0026ldquo;common language.","title":"Deleuzeian: Desiring Machines"},{"content":"A good deal of the \u0026ldquo;end\u0026rdquo; parts of my recent educational experience were synthetic projects. That is to say that to prepare for the \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; world, I was encouraged to \u0026ldquo;look back\u0026rdquo;1 in an attempt to find some sort of salvageable greater whole. Conveniently, I rather like this approach to thinking, writing, and production.\nMaybe it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m something of a second rate thinker, or maybe it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m still incredibly green, but it strikes me that coming up with successful ideas/projects/outcomes that are compleatly new is much more difficult, even impossible, whereas making--to borrow a contemporary term--mashups is much easier, and ultimately more useful: standing on the shoulders of giants, and all. So all this to say, that I rather like this mode of thought, and have enjoyed trying to come up with an account of all my varied interests--I know they\u0026rsquo;re all connected in some greater way and the connections seem obvious to me, but perhaps not for you.\nThis is of course a problem here at TealArt: there\u0026rsquo;s a connection between how I approach knitting and how I think about Deleuze and technology, or hypertext, or productivity. I swear, but I can also understand if you all don\u0026rsquo;t see it as clearly.\nIn parallel to all this thought about synthesis, I\u0026rsquo;ve rediscovered an interest in science fiction. I was always a geek growing up and I loved all sorts of completely embarrassing science fiction, and as longtime readers of the site will remember I even wrote a long crappy science fiction novel when I was in high school. These things happen to the best of us.\nI somehow got off the SF bandwagon at college. The SF club at school wasn\u0026rsquo;t my scene (with the exception of a half dozen folks), and there were other things on my creative imagination. I did take a class my second semester where we read Octavia Butler\u0026rsquo;s Kindred, and I was introduced by that class to Samuel R. Delany (who has been incredibly influential on me for some time.) Which is a completely different kind of SF than the stuff I grew up liking.\nAnd then something clicked and I realized that in a lot of ways sci-fi is the synthetic glue that holds everything together. My interest in how individuals conceive of themselves and exist in social(ly constructed) networks, my interest in technology and hypertext, my interest in cultural theory. In terms of refocusing TealArt, I think the connection between cultural theory (in this case, Deleuze) and science fiction is particularly interesting and relevant, and worth exploring.\nWhile I had hoped to avoid taking on the commitment for another \u0026ldquo;series\u0026rdquo; for TealArt, I think at least occasionally, as we move forward towards \u0026ldquo;the new tealart,\u0026rdquo; whatever form that takes, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be musing about this, a little. But because I\u0026rsquo;ve been \u0026ldquo;out of the world for a spell,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m interested in seeing what you all, kind readers, think about SF these days. What\u0026rsquo;s the future of the genre? How is it changing? What kind of contemporary SF do you think is particularly successful?\nA friend, whose very involved in fandom told me the other day that she didn\u0026rsquo;t really get into sci-fi. I refused to believe her, and I maintain that there\u0026rsquo;s something about SF that appeals to an audience beyond the typical \u0026ldquo;geek\u0026rdquo; crowd. With luck these musings will help us explore these issues and ideas together.\nCheers, tycho\nNo, really, the subtitle for one of my courses last semester was \u0026ldquo;looking back, looking forward.\u0026rdquo; I can\u0026rsquo;t make these things up.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-synthesis-of-science-fiction/","summary":"A good deal of the \u0026ldquo;end\u0026rdquo; parts of my recent educational experience were synthetic projects. That is to say that to prepare for the \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; world, I was encouraged to \u0026ldquo;look back\u0026rdquo;1 in an attempt to find some sort of salvageable greater whole. Conveniently, I rather like this approach to thinking, writing, and production.\nMaybe it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m something of a second rate thinker, or maybe it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m still incredibly green, but it strikes me that coming up with successful ideas/projects/outcomes that are compleatly new is much more difficult, even impossible, whereas making--to borrow a contemporary term--mashups is much easier, and ultimately more useful: standing on the shoulders of giants, and all. So all this to say, that I rather like this mode of thought, and have enjoyed trying to come up with an account of all my varied interests--I know they\u0026rsquo;re all connected in some greater way and the connections seem obvious to me, but perhaps not for you.","title":"The Synthesis of Science Fiction"},{"content":"Centuries of colonization, growth, and settlement have left scores of small and mid-sized human outposts on as many worlds. Rather than continue a disorganized and largely unnecessary program of expansion the League, or what remained of the central government, decided to concentrate its resources on developing existing outposts and supporting smaller and established populations. With good reason, many doubted the intentions and abilities of this project: resources were limited, and the mostly irrelevant mandates of the League did not inspire confidence.\nHanm Centre was one of the first outposts that the League and its often laughable Navy established as part of this project. In high orbit of the small colony world Hanm, the space station was to be the focal point of the League\u0026rsquo;s efforts on several worlds. Despite the possibility of growth many on Hanm worried about the effects of the attention on their way of life. Some object to the League because they figure better to leave well enough alone‚ \u0026ldquo;Hanm, like many outlying settlements was basically self sufficient and the larger issues of humanity\u0026rsquo;s unification were largely irrelevant‚\u0026rdquo; but there was another, more vocal faction on the colony that wasn\u0026rsquo;t strictly opposed to the effort to federate the outposts, settlements and colonies; they were simply opposed to the potentially hegemonic League.\nThese circumstances left Hanm Centre, and it\u0026rsquo;s residents, in a unique position to observe and act in the outcome of this debate. Life would go on: there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a group of any importance that advocated for a \u0026ldquo;retreat,\u0026rdquo; to the \u0026ldquo;core-side\u0026rdquo; worlds, neither was anyone particularly opposed to the existence of the Hanm Centre station. Many expected that whatever happened on Hanm Centre would have no profound impact to the planet below and the progress of the Leagues development.\nDespite the potential truth of these prognostications, the residents of Hanm, and the later the station, mostly laughed or scoffed when they read the kinds of statements made by the syndicated news commentators: everyone was keen to point out that the news services were based on different worlds.\nThe station was still new, so new that construction wasn\u0026rsquo;t even completely finished. Much of the permanent staff had yet to arrive, even. So, although everyone in the universe with a connection to the news-feeds thought that the situation on Hanm‚Ä\u0026quot;the planet and the station‚Ä\u0026quot;was the shape of things to come, the residents were of course more concerned with the construction schedules and the pending arrival of the next automated delivery transport. These concerns were complicated by the fact that a predominance of the station\u0026rsquo;s occupants were transitory: there for temporary work, or pausing for a moment on the journey to other colonies and outposts. Despite this, there could be little question that everyone‚Ä\u0026quot;-the League, the colonists on Hanm, the station\u0026rsquo;s residents, the settlers on the neighboring worlds, and observers on dozens of worlds were eagerly waiting for further news of Hanm Centre.\n\u0026hellip;and I hope you too are waiting for news of Hanm. This \u0026ldquo;trailer\u0026rdquo; was written by me to kick the series off. This project will be written by many contributors, in addition to myself, and is an on going experiment in hypertext/digital story telling. IF you\u0026rsquo;re interested in participating please contact me, `tycho \u0026lt;http://tychoish.com/tycho\u0026gt;`_. I look forward to hearing from you, both in your contributions and in your responses/feedback to these stories. Next week\u0026rsquo;s episode will be slightly more conventional, I promise. So stay tuned!--ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/setting-the-stage-station-keeping/","summary":"Centuries of colonization, growth, and settlement have left scores of small and mid-sized human outposts on as many worlds. Rather than continue a disorganized and largely unnecessary program of expansion the League, or what remained of the central government, decided to concentrate its resources on developing existing outposts and supporting smaller and established populations. With good reason, many doubted the intentions and abilities of this project: resources were limited, and the mostly irrelevant mandates of the League did not inspire confidence.\nHanm Centre was one of the first outposts that the League and its often laughable Navy established as part of this project. In high orbit of the small colony world Hanm, the space station was to be the focal point of the League\u0026rsquo;s efforts on several worlds. Despite the possibility of growth many on Hanm worried about the effects of the attention on their way of life. Some object to the League because they figure better to leave well enough alone‚ \u0026ldquo;Hanm, like many outlying settlements was basically self sufficient and the larger issues of humanity\u0026rsquo;s unification were largely irrelevant‚\u0026rdquo; but there was another, more vocal faction on the colony that wasn\u0026rsquo;t strictly opposed to the effort to federate the outposts, settlements and colonies; they were simply opposed to the potentially hegemonic League.","title":"Setting the Stage: Station Keeping"},{"content":"This week promises to be an enjoyable little span for all of us: Station Keeping debuts tomorrow--mostly--with a project trailer. I\u0026rsquo;ve been debating throughout this project whether or not to spend some time up front setting the scene, or to jump right into the story. I seem to have decided to go with the later. I think that setup can be a problem when when you\u0026rsquo;re telling a single story, or when the setup gets in the way of telling a story. In this case, my intent is to provide a fun, escapist, and grounded story to entertain (and hopefully say something interesting about the world,) for all of our entertainment on a weekly basis. This is in part following the TealArt mantra of \u0026ldquo;have fun,\u0026rdquo; and part of an experimentation with the form.\nNow that I\u0026rsquo;ve sufficiently lowered your standards, lets move on to the rest of the week. Wednesday will be a wild card, as it so often is, and Thursday holds some interesting tech content from Chris, but I\u0026rsquo;ll let him tell you more about that. I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to ruin the surprise.\nFinally, on Friday there\u0026rsquo;ll be another Deleuzian essay. Or rather, an essay about Deleuze (and Guatteri) and Anti-Oedipus. I have to say that these are extremely fun piece to write, and from a personal perspective, having the opportunity to write science fiction and reflections on Delueze--arguably, not dissimilar from science fiction--for TealArt is really a great pleasure.\nEvery now and then, I lament the fact that we really don\u0026rsquo;t have a strongly entrenched readership, the way that many blogs that are 5-6 years old are. Having said that, really, I don\u0026rsquo;t care about entrenchment, just readers and commenters. Now in fairness there are a lot of things that we didn\u0026rsquo;t do right: we haven\u0026rsquo;t posted regularly, our entries have been unfocused, we\u0026rsquo;re both shitty proofreaders of our own work, and so forth. Still, I think, really, come on now. But then I realize that I write about knitting--without pictures, or Giles Deleuze, and suddenly it makes sense.\nIn any case, you\u0026rsquo;re reading this, and I thank you for that. I hope you enjoy this week, in addition to keeping track of things for TealArt, I\u0026rsquo;m doing some more serious job hunting (ug!) and prepping for an upcoming family reunion (yay!). And writing as usual.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/have-a-good-week-and-have-fun-eat-spinach-read-station-keeping-tomorrow/","summary":"This week promises to be an enjoyable little span for all of us: Station Keeping debuts tomorrow--mostly--with a project trailer. I\u0026rsquo;ve been debating throughout this project whether or not to spend some time up front setting the scene, or to jump right into the story. I seem to have decided to go with the later. I think that setup can be a problem when when you\u0026rsquo;re telling a single story, or when the setup gets in the way of telling a story. In this case, my intent is to provide a fun, escapist, and grounded story to entertain (and hopefully say something interesting about the world,) for all of our entertainment on a weekly basis. This is in part following the TealArt mantra of \u0026ldquo;have fun,\u0026rdquo; and part of an experimentation with the form.\nNow that I\u0026rsquo;ve sufficiently lowered your standards, lets move on to the rest of the week. Wednesday will be a wild card, as it so often is, and Thursday holds some interesting tech content from Chris, but I\u0026rsquo;ll let him tell you more about that.","title":"Have a good week and have fun. Eat Spinach. Read Station Keeping Tomorrow."},{"content":"I will admit freely and openly, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t finished reading Anti-Oedipus. In fact, at the beginning of the series I was only on page 148. I suspect a large part of the passages that I \u0026ldquo;present\u0026rdquo; will be from where ever I happen to be in the book, (likely pages 150-200, at my current rate) but from time to time, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll also pull from the first 150 pages if something strikes my fancy. All this by way of saying that this week\u0026rsquo;s passages will come, not from Deleuze, but from Foucault\u0026rsquo;s preface to the book. He summarizes Delueze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s project:\n\u0026ldquo;How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the Body.\u0026rdquo;\nI have to say that I think this is why I like this book so much. Rather than say \u0026ldquo;fascism\u0026rdquo;1 is all in the individual and/or \u0026ldquo;collective\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;unconscious,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;soul,\u0026rdquo; or in the historical moment, the statement that fascism is \u0026ldquo;in\u0026rdquo; our \u0026ldquo;behavior,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;speech\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;acts,\u0026rdquo; I think makes a great deal of sense. This makes it at least vaguely observable2, and it means that we can take what they say about \u0026ldquo;fascism,\u0026rdquo; and apply it to other features of our actions, behaviors, beliefs, and speech. While I think leads to all sorts of other problems, like \u0026ldquo;are all cultural/social constructions and conventions then fascist?,\u0026rdquo; and the more basic issue that fascism is a rather unspecfic and imprecise term that I think could get in the way of the text\u0026rsquo;s ability to be applied more widely. So while this is, very much a book about fascism, I\u0026rsquo;m finding it helpful to ignore \u0026ldquo;the fascist\u0026rdquo; part of statement, and instead think of \u0026ldquo;it,\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;culture,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;society,\u0026rdquo; because this seems to both be more widely useful. Also, the body of research on culture and society is I think more accessible and wide than the body of research on \u0026ldquo;fascism,\u0026rdquo; however variously interpreted.\nIn a related point, I\u0026rsquo;m really drawn to theories of embodiment, and I like the way that they, both in Foucault\u0026rsquo;s estimation in the preface, and through what I\u0026rsquo;ve read, continually ground their work in an understanding and acknowledgment of the body and material reality (such as it is.) The sort of endless metaphysical crap3 for the sake of metaphysical crap is irksome, and not incredibly productive in the application. Having said that, D\u0026amp;G spend a lot of time doing what can only be described as the metaphysics of the body, in attempt to synthesize psychoanalysis and materialism, and that can be hard to take. But in all the attempt to locate all these theories in the context of the body is, I think productive.\nLater, Foucault speaks of the book as a kind of \u0026ldquo;manual\u0026rdquo; for anti-oedipal \u0026ldquo;non-facist\u0026rdquo; living, and I think that I\u0026rsquo;ll likely return to his tenets in time, but the principal that strikes me as the most interesting and important at the moment reads: \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.\u0026rdquo;\nAs an ethical statement, I think this is one of the more important ones. I\u0026rsquo;ve been known to complain a great deal about \u0026ldquo;positive psychology,\u0026rdquo;4 and I think there are ways that this \u0026ldquo;ethical\u0026rdquo; statement mirrors that \u0026ldquo;movement,\u0026rdquo; but I think that it also goes further, to explore diversity, difference, and the ways that we (as individuals and groups) change. I think that\u0026rsquo;s a really productive goal and point, and reading the book with this in mind I think makes it a more productive enterprise. Furthermore, the edict to think about diversity and change, rather than conformity and certain truth, I think has productive implications in other debates: in favor of publishing null-hypothsis data, and in-favor of qualitative and grounded theory approaches to research.\nIn conclusion I have to say that I think that Foucault\u0026rsquo;s preface is really interesting, because we are able to see a side of Foucault (almost certainly late in his career,) where he looks a lot more like a philosopher and an intellectual historian than any of the other fields that he\u0026rsquo;s sometimes associated with (eg. history, psychology, sociology etc.). It\u0026rsquo;s also a really clever bit to read, and particularly going back and reading over the preface, I\u0026rsquo;m struck with how well it encapsulates and frames the book. Because my root5 to this theory is through women\u0026rsquo;s studies and queer theory, I\u0026rsquo;ve been consistently more exposed to Foucault, so the relationship and dynamic between Deleuze--who I find inspiring, in a way that Foucault never is--and Foucault has always been intriguing.\nAnyway, that\u0026rsquo;s all I have space for this time, I look forward to hearing from you6 soon and I\u0026rsquo;ll pick something cool for next week, I promise.\nCheers, tycho\nThe book jacket refers to fascism as \u0026ldquo;the desire to be led,\u0026rdquo; and while I think I would take issue with this definition a little bit I do like the way that the book can be read--and often is, because of Foucualt in part--as an ethical text, in a very strange sort of way. Having said that, this is the book jacket, and I think we could generate a very workable but less pithy definition, should we want to).\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI had a professor who would often claim that the best part of any great theory (Freud, g-d, etc.) is the invisible part. It\u0026rsquo;s good that D\u0026amp;G seem to avoid this as much as possible.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nA technical term, I assure you.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nPositive psychology is the field of psychology that says that psychology has studied abnormalities and focused on \u0026ldquo;fixing\u0026rdquo; negative experience (eg. depression, anxiety, etc.) for too long, and that instead we should focus on \u0026ldquo;optimum experience\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;happiness,\u0026rdquo; which is incredibly hard to take, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think it does very much to get rid of the \u0026ldquo;order/disorder\u0026rdquo; paradigm or any of the other short fallings of the field. But that\u0026rsquo;s just me.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nA reference to \u0026ldquo;But I\u0026rsquo;m a Cheerleader\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve installed, if you haven\u0026rsquo;t noticed, a threaded comments system that will let you discuss not simply with my entry but also with each other in an organized manner.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/_ao_-an-ethical-book/","summary":"I will admit freely and openly, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t finished reading Anti-Oedipus. In fact, at the beginning of the series I was only on page 148. I suspect a large part of the passages that I \u0026ldquo;present\u0026rdquo; will be from where ever I happen to be in the book, (likely pages 150-200, at my current rate) but from time to time, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll also pull from the first 150 pages if something strikes my fancy. All this by way of saying that this week\u0026rsquo;s passages will come, not from Deleuze, but from Foucault\u0026rsquo;s preface to the book. He summarizes Delueze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s project:\n\u0026ldquo;How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the Body.","title":"AO, an Ethical Book?"},{"content":"As you might know, we at TealArt, use a program called WordPress to run the back-end of the site. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty program, and I\u0026rsquo;ve started to see WordPress blogs all over the place, and it seems like WordPress might even be the blogging software of choice for most folks these days. I had the pleasure/distinction of having to upgrade the software the other day, which has started to keep wordpress pretty firmly in my mind.\nThing is, most of the time I don\u0026rsquo;t really interact with the software: there are so many programs and options that make it possible to post and edit a blog without ever actually having to go to the website, these days I use MarsEdit and a plugin for my text editor, TextMate to post to the blog. This is of course super interesting to you so I\u0026rsquo;m going to move on.1\nI remember when WordPress was the rogue stepchild of b2/cafelog (another wonderful piece of blog software that TealArt proudly used), and even when the thought of having a site as dependent on a mySQL database as WP sites tend to be was absurd. These days, Word Press is one of the successes of the open source software scene. Tons of people use it. It works great, it\u0026rsquo;s polished, there\u0026rsquo;s an active developer community, and somehow the leaders of the project are able to support some sort of business model. There are probably a lot of reasons for this: PHP/mySQL are easy languages to learn, the back end and the front end of WP are basically independent of eachother, and the way that WP does plugins makes it easy for people to contribute to WP, and also for WP developers to roll-in particularly successful plug-ins as features.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not versed enough in this, but the WP.com/WP.org distinction is I think a great model for distributing and monitoring \u0026ldquo;free\u0026rdquo; software. Basically they develop a product that they give away for free (WP.org; what TA uses), and then they take that product and offer a service related to that product (WP.com) that they can generate revenue with. You can read the Automatic website for more information, frankly I\u0026rsquo;m not sure about the particulars, or if it\u0026rsquo;s really a viable business model but I\u0026rsquo;d like it if it were, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to continue to pretend.\nInterestingly, also, they\u0026rsquo;re enough different from their major comerical competitor (SixApart, the people who do LiveJournal, Vox, TypePad and most importantly MoveableType,) that they\u0026rsquo;ll probably not run into problems there. I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely sure about MoveableType\u0026rsquo;s long term success, but at this point that\u0026rsquo;s not a very big issue.\nAnyway, enough yammering for now\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll be back tomorrow with the intro for the new series! Don\u0026rsquo;t go anywhere.\nBest, tycho\nThe sad part about this paragraph is that I think it probably mirrors the way I talk/think with an all too depressing amount of truth.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wordpress-and-blogging-software/","summary":"As you might know, we at TealArt, use a program called WordPress to run the back-end of the site. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty program, and I\u0026rsquo;ve started to see WordPress blogs all over the place, and it seems like WordPress might even be the blogging software of choice for most folks these days. I had the pleasure/distinction of having to upgrade the software the other day, which has started to keep wordpress pretty firmly in my mind.\nThing is, most of the time I don\u0026rsquo;t really interact with the software: there are so many programs and options that make it possible to post and edit a blog without ever actually having to go to the website, these days I use MarsEdit and a plugin for my text editor, TextMate to post to the blog. This is of course super interesting to you so I\u0026rsquo;m going to move on.1\nI remember when WordPress was the rogue stepchild of b2/cafelog (another wonderful piece of blog software that TealArt proudly used), and even when the thought of having a site as dependent on a mySQL database as WP sites tend to be was absurd.","title":"WordPress and Blogging Software"},{"content":"This is my last, regularly scheduled weekly knitting essay. The remainder of the knitting content on TealArt, at least for the foreseeable will be either project reports, or quick notes, or other similar pieces. I\u0026rsquo;ve started to feel like the knitting content is a bit tried, and isn\u0026rsquo;t really reflecting what I or you are interested in reading, very much. But I hope you enjoy this little homage to Shetland Jumper Weight yarn. -- ty\nI want to tell you a secret: Shetland sheep are magic creatures to be feared and revered.\n\u0026ldquo;Shetland?!?!\u0026rdquo; you ask in amazement. \u0026ldquo;Isn\u0026rsquo;t Shetland yarn rough and hard to work with?\u0026rdquo;\nWhy yes, indeed they are magic, and while you might think that it is rough, I\u0026rsquo;m here to explore why you may have the wrong idea about the shetland sheeps1. In the style of the meaningless top x-number list that is so popular with the folks at digg, this post will be in a list format. So there.\nShetland not really as rough as you think it is.\nShetland yarns and wool isn\u0026rsquo;t cashmere, quiviet, or even merino yarn, and when people feel shetland yarn it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel comfortingly soft like like luxury yarns, that\u0026rsquo;s true. Shetland\u0026rsquo;s magic is that when you put it near your skin, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t irritate. This is because shetland yarn doesn\u0026rsquo;t have guard hairs like some other yarns, so it isn\u0026rsquo;t prickly, and feels comfortable as you where it. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;d recommend making an unlined-skin-tight cat-suit out of shetland, but for most wear situation, you\u0026rsquo;ll feel comfortable. In the equation is the fact that shetland tends to be (I believe) woolen spun, this means that--among other things that the wool is lofty and light. So not only does the yarn not attack you, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t weigh you down, and magically keeps your warm. What more could you want out of yarn.\nShetland yarns are available,\nWhile most yarn stores don\u0026rsquo;t stock a full range of shetland colors, the three major suppliers/mills for shetland yarn (Jamieson\u0026rsquo;s, Jamieson\u0026rsquo;s and Smith, and Harrisville Designs) are generally incredibly available, either directly from the mills, or from third-party stores. Since these yarns are incredibly consistent, once you have a color card and idea about what you want, ordering these yarns is really easy.\nShetland 2-ply is incredibly versatile.\nPeople\u0026rsquo;s first response to seeing 2 ply shetland is often to say that it\u0026rsquo;s too fine. And it is fine yarn, but there are a lot of things that you can do with 2-ply. For instance you can: knit lace work, knit socks at sock-gauge, knit stranded work, or even double the yarn for something a little heftier. Also HD, at least, makes a dk/worsted that\u0026rsquo;s double weight yarn, if you really can\u0026rsquo;t cope with the fingering weight.\nShetland has the best color selection around.\nBecause of I think that a lot of shetland mills, HD in particular, generally produce for weavers (and fair isle knitters) there are just more colors around for this kind of yarn. It\u0026rsquo;s great.\nShetland wears well.\nI think that Shetland wears particularly well because of the properties that I mentioned in number 1. It\u0026rsquo;s lofty and tends to fairly firmly spun, and all of the mills mentioned above are just good. That kind of thing matters.\nShetland felts well.\nShetland, because it\u0026rsquo;s so lofty, and because it\u0026rsquo;s magic felts well. This means that it steeks well, and that the fabric wears really well and tends to find your body shape and form to it. This means that you have to be careful when washing this fabric. It also steeks well as the yarn almost felts from the sweat and friction from your hands as you knit it. This is one of the great joys of this yarn.\nShetland Actually Knits at Sport-Weight Gauge\nI can\u0026rsquo;t explain this one at all, but I know it\u0026rsquo;s true. I keep looking at the shetland and expecting the gauge to be about what I get for other fingering-weight yarn. When I cast on for projects expecting this gauge (yes, I\u0026rsquo;m a strict-non-swatcher), it\u0026rsquo;s always too big. When I try and trick the yarn, and pretend it\u0026rsquo;s sport weight and cast on with this assumption, it almost always works. This goes for situations where I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to knit both both stranded and plain. I have no good explanation other than magic.\nShetland Stranded stitches are actually square.\nThis is actually an observation of Meg Swansen and EZ, because even though it\u0026rsquo;s not true, I tend to assume this of all color work knitting, and its usually pretty close. It\u0026rsquo;s even closer with Shetland, though. This makes picking up around armholes particularly fun, and it makes it easier to design using charts.\nShetland yarn lets you be more frugal with yarn.\nOk, this might strike you as unlikely, given the fact that shetland is perhaps not the most inexpensive yarn around. But it\u0026rsquo;s true. The fact is that shetland yarn is pretty standard, I mean sure, HD is a microd2 finer than Jameisons and J\u0026amp;S, but they\u0026rsquo;re all close. Also as with any yarn, if you\u0026rsquo;re using the same kind of yarn for more than one project, it\u0026rsquo;s easier to use leftovers.\nShetland doesn\u0026rsquo;t pill like merino and other yarns.\nYou\u0026rsquo;re right, I\u0026rsquo;m stretching for a number 10, because I think this technically should fit under \u0026ldquo;wearing well,\u0026rdquo; but it stands that shetland doesn\u0026rsquo;t really pill because of the way it\u0026rsquo;s spun and the way it tends to felt. Shetland doesn\u0026rsquo;t pill and seems to wear like iron. This is a good property in yarn. In contrast, I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to find a merino that doesn\u0026rsquo;t pill.\nI hope these were insightful and fun. Questions? Comments? Thoughts? I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear them!\nCheers, tycho\nI\u0026rsquo;ve found that adding inappropriate s\u0026rsquo;s to words particularly animals is incredibly adorable. I implore you to forgive this grammar area, because unlike most of the errors on this site, it is indeed intentional. Sorry for being such a bad writer.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI think this is a measurement unit from science fiction, but I\u0026rsquo;m leaving it in because it reflects what came to mind first and I think thats kind of funny. If that makes you uncomfortable, read it as \u0026ldquo;smidge.\u0026rdquo;\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/10-reasons-shetland-yarn-is-magic/","summary":"This is my last, regularly scheduled weekly knitting essay. The remainder of the knitting content on TealArt, at least for the foreseeable will be either project reports, or quick notes, or other similar pieces. I\u0026rsquo;ve started to feel like the knitting content is a bit tried, and isn\u0026rsquo;t really reflecting what I or you are interested in reading, very much. But I hope you enjoy this little homage to Shetland Jumper Weight yarn. -- ty\nI want to tell you a secret: Shetland sheep are magic creatures to be feared and revered.\n\u0026ldquo;Shetland?!?!\u0026rdquo; you ask in amazement. \u0026ldquo;Isn\u0026rsquo;t Shetland yarn rough and hard to work with?\u0026rdquo;\nWhy yes, indeed they are magic, and while you might think that it is rough, I\u0026rsquo;m here to explore why you may have the wrong idea about the shetland sheeps1. In the style of the meaningless top x-number list that is so popular with the folks at digg, this post will be in a list format.","title":"10 Reasons Shetland Yarn is Magic"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s been an entire day since I\u0026rsquo;ve finished dancing and my body is slowly starting to feel almost normal. I\u0026rsquo;m still tired of course, but soon I\u0026rsquo;ll stop aching so much and be able to just remember the great time I had. The truth is that I\u0026rsquo;m not in ideal shape for this kind of dance1, because I\u0026rsquo;ve basically been away for so long, but another truth is that this was that I danced many times as much by quantitiy (and quality). Because sections of my \u0026ldquo;team\u0026rdquo; hosted this event (I was virtually uninvolved by virtue of the circumstances of my education) this even in addtion to being hard on my body, presented an interesting political situation. Time has yet to tell wether my predictions were correct or not, but initial signs indicate that I may not have been far off.\nIn terms of Station Keeping I laid out some of the back material that I\u0026rsquo;ve been walking around in my head for the other writers. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to find a balance between some sort of structured/organizational model that will allow us to write effectively and efficiently as a team, but that will also allow us all to contribute to all aspects of the development and production. It\u0026rsquo;s a fine balance between not saying very much to give people freedom to come up with brilliant solutions, and creating an environment with deadlines, productive feedback, and a coherent (series) of stories. I also didn\u0026rsquo;t want to feel like I had ideas about where stories and characters were going to go that I hadn\u0026rsquo;t/didn\u0026rsquo;t tell the other writers. With this out of the way, I think we might be able to move forward more effectively.\nbI was playing around with PMWiki for the Station Keeping writer\u0026rsquo;s wiki, and while it\u0026rsquo;s a good program and really versatile, I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced that it\u0026rsquo;s right for our purposes. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about changing the way I do this so that it can serve as more of a refrence space rather than a workspace, but getting more of the project written is also crucial, and really this is just one of the things going through my mind that I need to think about in relation to this project.\nAnyway. Time to get the day started, and spend some time doing some chores and maybe actually working on Station Keeping.\nCheers, tycho\nMorris Dance in the \u0026ldquo;Cotswald\u0026rdquo; Style.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/marking-time/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s been an entire day since I\u0026rsquo;ve finished dancing and my body is slowly starting to feel almost normal. I\u0026rsquo;m still tired of course, but soon I\u0026rsquo;ll stop aching so much and be able to just remember the great time I had. The truth is that I\u0026rsquo;m not in ideal shape for this kind of dance1, because I\u0026rsquo;ve basically been away for so long, but another truth is that this was that I danced many times as much by quantitiy (and quality). Because sections of my \u0026ldquo;team\u0026rdquo; hosted this event (I was virtually uninvolved by virtue of the circumstances of my education) this even in addtion to being hard on my body, presented an interesting political situation. Time has yet to tell wether my predictions were correct or not, but initial signs indicate that I may not have been far off.\nIn terms of Station Keeping I laid out some of the back material that I\u0026rsquo;ve been walking around in my head for the other writers.","title":"Marking Time"},{"content":"I realized, I think, a bit too late in the process that my last post really was kind of the letter from the editor post for this week, even though I posted it last thursday.\nAn update: (actually there\u0026rsquo;s not much, as I just wrote that other post a few hours ago, like I said, morris dancing all weekend, and I won\u0026rsquo;t be done till later this afternoon by your reading.)\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve started to talk about a podcast option, I have some nifty ideas, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see how that turns out. I hope you enjoyed the intro to the Deleuze series (I know in fairness I think it should be Deleuze and Guatteri, but I think of it as just Deleuze. attack me later). I\u0026rsquo;ve only written a few of them, but I quite enjoy the concept space. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of material, and I find it really fun to write about. The new TealArt plan: letter from the editor on monday, Station Keeping Tuesday, knitting/tychoBlathering on wednesday, ChrisTech Thursday, and Deleuze on Friday. It\u0026rsquo;s rocking. See you later in the week!\nbest, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/taking-a-holiday/","summary":"I realized, I think, a bit too late in the process that my last post really was kind of the letter from the editor post for this week, even though I posted it last thursday.\nAn update: (actually there\u0026rsquo;s not much, as I just wrote that other post a few hours ago, like I said, morris dancing all weekend, and I won\u0026rsquo;t be done till later this afternoon by your reading.)\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve started to talk about a podcast option, I have some nifty ideas, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see how that turns out. I hope you enjoyed the intro to the Deleuze series (I know in fairness I think it should be Deleuze and Guatteri, but I think of it as just Deleuze. attack me later). I\u0026rsquo;ve only written a few of them, but I quite enjoy the concept space. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of material, and I find it really fun to write about.","title":"Taking a Holiday"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking for a while about a new series on TealArt because I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve basically warn out the hypertext topic. Like the productivity/rethinking gtd series that I wrote during the first part of the semester, I\u0026rsquo;m not foreclosing the possibility of occasional essays on hypertext when something important comes up or strikes my fancy, but on a week to week kind of basis, I think any more would sort of defeat the purpose. Additionally, I think in a lot of ways, I\u0026rsquo;d rather work on actually writing some sort of digital text (ie. Station Keeping) than blather endlessly when I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that there are good answers to the questions that I raise. Someday there will be answers1, but that day isn\u0026rsquo;t today. So I\u0026rsquo;ll move on.\nOne of the guys at pro.jectioni.st quoted the following twitter message the other day:\ni\u0026rsquo;ve not met anyone whose favorite philosopher is deleuze who is not also an ass-hat.\u0026quot;\nWhile I protest the implication I certainly can understand the type. I hope, in this series, to explore at least for starters, Deleuze and Guatteri\u0026rsquo;s Anti-Oedipus the first volume of their capitalism and schizophrenia series. I would suggest to the twitterer, that, the asshats are the ones that think that A Thousand Plateau\u0026rsquo;s2 is their favorite book of philosophy are the real asshats. It\u0026rsquo;s cool stuff, from what I\u0026rsquo;ve read, not perfect, clearly, but then again folks keep reading Decartes, and Hegel, and no one seems to mind very much.\nMy other edict for the new revived TealArt is that it must be fun, and though certainly my style and amount of effort that I put into my academic research and writing is quite different from what you see on TealArt, they\u0026rsquo;re similar sorts of tasks. I don\u0026rsquo;t mind this, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s also good to have some balance in ones life. This series is sort of a departure, but let me rationalize for you a bit:\nI\u0026rsquo;m a social science guy--developmental psychology with leanings toward cultural and linguistic flavors of anthropology--and while many of my friends are humanities issues, and I feel fairly connected and intrenched in humanities issues and debates, the way I theorize and approach the work I do is really quite different from the way that they do, and my tendency is to think about theoretical issues and tradition far more than my current discipline. This is alright, but as I get more involved in my own field and less in history and literature, I think that I would still like to play around with cultural theory a bit. Yeah it\u0026rsquo;s heady, yeah it\u0026rsquo;s probably useless, but there\u0026rsquo;s possibility there. I figure anything I can do to start looking at things a new way is probably helpful. And reading theory and writing about it on TealArt, is about as far as I can get from reading the literature that I will also be doing this summer to prepare for the future.\nMy interest and background in this is complicated: last fall, I did a reading project where I read some of AO, and I took a historiography class this semester (for fun, mostly) that also engaged theory, so I have a bit of background, but not much. So in a lot of ways I\u0026rsquo;m an outsider to a lot of these debates, which I think can be a good thing. One thing you\u0026rsquo;ll note is that I call all this \u0026ldquo;theory\u0026rdquo;, rather than philosophy, because I\u0026rsquo;m less interested in figuring out the logical conclusions, questions, and problems with particular ideas and more interested in the implications and applications of ideas and theories. So that\u0026rsquo;s going to be my focus and attempt; and yeah, maybe that will piss of philosophers.\nIt seems that these series at TealArt are inspired by my reading of a new segment of the blog world3 and interest in contributing to the discussions at these blogs. This series is no different, in fact I was reading Larval Subjects, where they have been posting Spinoza quotes and commentary as part of a series for that blog. I thought the format was cool, and so I thought that I would borrow it, in my own TealArt sort of way. In the direction of locating this series in context of other blogs I\u0026rsquo;d like to provide an esoteric list of links to the theory/philosphy blogs that are in my news reader and that I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading, at least cursorily for the past few months:\nLarval Subjects RoughTheory Foucault is Dead Differences and Repetitions Read Thread(s) The Diff√©rance Engine schizzes and flows Enjoy, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be back in a week with something more substantive!\n\u0026rsquo;till then, tycho\nIt seems to me that the iPod has done a lot to revolutionize the way that people interact with digital (and by effect, non-digital) music, and I think that we need some sort of parallel development in digital text presentation that will make it easier for us to read and interact with digital text. Maybe it will be solid state laptops, or better tablet PCs, or better pocket computers, or even better screens, but whatever it is, it ain\u0026rsquo;t here yet.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI think the stereotype of asshattery in Deleuze\u0026rsquo;s followers is due to the fact that A Thousand Plateaus is really an experimental text and is supposed to be literary in some sense (except of course it\u0026rsquo;s written by philosophers and rogue/ratical psychoanalysts, so there is a limit to the scope of their literary brilliance). So it\u0026rsquo;s theory, and it\u0026rsquo;s not all at the same time, and I think--particularly in today\u0026rsquo;s world--if that\u0026rsquo;s you\u0026rsquo;re only interaction with philosophy, it\u0026rsquo;s kind of asshaty.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be damned if you ever get me to use the term \u0026ldquo;blogosphere\u0026rdquo; honestly without irony.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deleuze_intro/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking for a while about a new series on TealArt because I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve basically warn out the hypertext topic. Like the productivity/rethinking gtd series that I wrote during the first part of the semester, I\u0026rsquo;m not foreclosing the possibility of occasional essays on hypertext when something important comes up or strikes my fancy, but on a week to week kind of basis, I think any more would sort of defeat the purpose. Additionally, I think in a lot of ways, I\u0026rsquo;d rather work on actually writing some sort of digital text (ie. Station Keeping) than blather endlessly when I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that there are good answers to the questions that I raise. Someday there will be answers1, but that day isn\u0026rsquo;t today. So I\u0026rsquo;ll move on.\nOne of the guys at pro.jectioni.st quoted the following twitter message the other day:\ni\u0026rsquo;ve not met anyone whose favorite philosopher is deleuze who is not also an ass-hat.","title":"Deleuzian or Deleuzean? A New TealArt Series"},{"content":"Hello friends,\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been in something of a slump the past few days and really haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten things together to write in a couple of days. But never fear, I have some entries backlogged, and I was able to sketch out a bit more than a week\u0026rsquo;s worth of posts, which I should be able to write pretty quickly once I\u0026rsquo;m de-funk-ified.\nLets see what I have to report:\nStation Keeping is progressing, I think we\u0026rsquo;ll start soon. It needs momentum, and it won\u0026rsquo;t get it any other way. The Midwest Morris Ale is in St. Louis this year, which means I\u0026rsquo;m part of the host team. I\u0026rsquo;ll be doing that all weekend. If you\u0026rsquo;re in the area, stop by tower grove park for the saturday tour, and say hi. You should be able to pick me out of a crowd\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll be wearing white. (with black, yellow, and red ribbons). I just finished Samuel Delany\u0026rsquo;s The Einstein Intersection which I quite enjoyed (particularly the ending, which I thought was quite well done. I also listened to an Escape Pod, which I really like. After spending a few years at a school where the \u0026ldquo;science fiction and fantasy association\u0026rdquo; was the second largest student group (the first was the queer alliance, which I was one of the leaders for many semesters, but don\u0026rsquo;t let that mislead you as to the ratio of geeks to queers), I\u0026rsquo;m back into it. I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m a better fan/consumer theses days. I\u0026rsquo;m working on James Tiptree Jr.\u0026rsquo;s Brightness Falls From the Air which is simply amazing work. I need to have my damned wisdom teeth taken out. I need to find a way to boost TealArt\u0026rsquo;s readership. I thought that more regular posts would help this a bit, but it isn\u0026rsquo;t really. My next move is to focus, at least my own posts a little. If you, any of you kind readers, have ideas about this. I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear about them. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about pod-casting a little, but that\u0026rsquo;s not something I want to do all by lonesome. Thinking\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and rig up the next few posts. Wish me luck, and stay tuned. Have a good memorial day weekend! Best, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mid-may-morris-slumps/","summary":"Hello friends,\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been in something of a slump the past few days and really haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten things together to write in a couple of days. But never fear, I have some entries backlogged, and I was able to sketch out a bit more than a week\u0026rsquo;s worth of posts, which I should be able to write pretty quickly once I\u0026rsquo;m de-funk-ified.\nLets see what I have to report:\nStation Keeping is progressing, I think we\u0026rsquo;ll start soon. It needs momentum, and it won\u0026rsquo;t get it any other way. The Midwest Morris Ale is in St. Louis this year, which means I\u0026rsquo;m part of the host team. I\u0026rsquo;ll be doing that all weekend. If you\u0026rsquo;re in the area, stop by tower grove park for the saturday tour, and say hi. You should be able to pick me out of a crowd\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll be wearing white. (with black, yellow, and red ribbons).","title":"Mid May (Morris Slumps)"},{"content":"Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s tied into what I said earlier about \u0026ldquo;being bad at watching television,\u0026rdquo; but I have an admission to make: I\u0026rsquo;m really rather bad at listening to podcasts, and I feel bad for this inadequacy. I think podcasts are great things, and I think that there should be more podcasts and more people listening to podcasts, but I\u0026rsquo;m just bad at it.\nThe thing is that I have a hard time consuming media, particularly non-music audio, when I\u0026rsquo;m doing anything else. I can even sometimes work when a television is on, if I have headphones and something to do1, and I really like radio as a form (particularly what some podcasters are doing with it), but sound can really be distracting. So the only time I often have to listen to podcasts is when I can\u0026rsquo;t do anything but listen. Like I listen to podcasts during road trips, or when I\u0026rsquo;m doing some sort of rote task like data entry or filing, there are a couple of other situations where I don\u0026rsquo;t get too distracted (knitting, but I often use knitting time to watch TV).\nBut no matter what else has a claim on my attention the fact remains that I\u0026rsquo;m pretty tragically behind on my podcast listening. Particularly in light of RSS, I\u0026rsquo;ve found blogs so fun to read because one can squeeze a few posts in, in-between other tasks, but I find myself trying (or needing) to schedule in time to listen to podcasts.\nMerlin Mann, said of video podcasts and his \u0026ldquo;The Merlin Show\u0026rdquo; on a podcast months ago (see I\u0026rsquo;m behind, actually I think I was more caught up at that time, but you\u0026rsquo;d never know) that independent media has a niche to feel in shorter form content of 30 mins and less, that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a market for on television, for instance (more so on radio I suppsoe, but it\u0026rsquo;s different.) Anyway, I wonder if this has something to do with the difficulties of scheduling \u0026ldquo;consumption time,\u0026rdquo; for podcast listening. Thoughts anyone?\nAnyway, Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment ;)\nBest, tycho\nI\u0026rsquo;m tragically bad at being in a room with an on-television without becoming mesmerized by the experience.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/podcast-listeners/","summary":"Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s tied into what I said earlier about \u0026ldquo;being bad at watching television,\u0026rdquo; but I have an admission to make: I\u0026rsquo;m really rather bad at listening to podcasts, and I feel bad for this inadequacy. I think podcasts are great things, and I think that there should be more podcasts and more people listening to podcasts, but I\u0026rsquo;m just bad at it.\nThe thing is that I have a hard time consuming media, particularly non-music audio, when I\u0026rsquo;m doing anything else. I can even sometimes work when a television is on, if I have headphones and something to do1, and I really like radio as a form (particularly what some podcasters are doing with it), but sound can really be distracting. So the only time I often have to listen to podcasts is when I can\u0026rsquo;t do anything but listen. Like I listen to podcasts during road trips, or when I\u0026rsquo;m doing some sort of rote task like data entry or filing, there are a couple of other situations where I don\u0026rsquo;t get too distracted (knitting, but I often use knitting time to watch TV).","title":"PodCast Listeners"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m somewhat hesitant to write a post about this new habit I\u0026rsquo;m forming, because I kind of like this habit and usually no sooner do I write about some productivity related topic, as I decide to completely reorganize my process. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m doing:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started keeping a daily archive of what I get done/finish/do in any given day. This includes information about everything from knitting, to the number of words I write on a project, to what I read. There are a couple of ideas at play in this:\nI do more things than I give myself credit for. Even when I\u0026rsquo;m not doing things that need getting done in the strictest sense, its not like I\u0026rsquo;m not doing anything. I\u0026rsquo;ve found it helpful to keep track of these things, and give my self credit for all the things I do, not just those things that I think need doing before I do them. Knowing what you\u0026rsquo;ve done is useful for project planning. I must admit, that when I do something on my To-do list I delete it, rather than strike it out or move it to a new list. This additional helps me stay aware of what I\u0026rsquo;m doing through out the day, and keep track of time. Allows for more proper reviews. The only way to do a proper review is to collect data in the moment, rather than in retrospect, where memory and mood can play havoc on an accurate view of the past. I almost always feel like I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten more done after reading a list than I would otherwise. I maintain this list using a markdown template that I keep in my Quicksilver Template Folder. I append new accomplishments using Quicksilver1 or a nifty shell script that I wrote, and keep an eye on the list using GeekTool (It shows up on my desktop right next two the todo list), and I have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s pretty darn nifty. I keep tweaking the template every now and then as it suits. Should I ever need to produce a report, or whatever, I can simply combine the files that I need and run it through a markdown converter and have a great looking XHTML file.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a big fan, and maybe you will find this kind of a list helpful in your day-to-day organization.\ncheers, tycho\nI begin every line with a \u0026ldquo;-\u0026rdquo; which markdown uses to make a bulleted list. Except I never complie it using markdown, so it\u0026rsquo;s theoretical/make believe at this point.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/productivity-reports/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m somewhat hesitant to write a post about this new habit I\u0026rsquo;m forming, because I kind of like this habit and usually no sooner do I write about some productivity related topic, as I decide to completely reorganize my process. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m doing:\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started keeping a daily archive of what I get done/finish/do in any given day. This includes information about everything from knitting, to the number of words I write on a project, to what I read. There are a couple of ideas at play in this:\nI do more things than I give myself credit for. Even when I\u0026rsquo;m not doing things that need getting done in the strictest sense, its not like I\u0026rsquo;m not doing anything. I\u0026rsquo;ve found it helpful to keep track of these things, and give my self credit for all the things I do, not just those things that I think need doing before I do them.","title":"Productivity Reports"},{"content":"I posted about my academic contrarianism, earlier and I think I\u0026rsquo;d be foolish to claim that this tendency was limited simply to my academic half (2/3s?). In knitting, this manifests as a tendency to reject patterns and come up with my own designs, though you probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t know it from the designs: they tend to be pretty normal looking traditional-ish knitting designs. The contrarian comes out in the process, first by rejecting prepared patterns, but more by the ass-backwards way that I think about sweater construction. I fear that this approach appears in the patterns I write.\nNow perhaps I give myself too much credit, because it\u0026rsquo;s my sense that I\u0026rsquo;m not that atypical amongst designers and other renegade types; furthermore, I think this approach to knitting is not detrimental, and actually allows me to make better patterns. So there.\nAs I was writing the pattern for a sweater that I made this semester as part of the project-of-infamy, I realized that while I could (and did) go through every little step, in the day to day knitting of this sweater, which took me 6 weeks, a knitter wouldn\u0026rsquo;t need access to the entire pattern. At the same time, I tend to think of patterns as having a number of landmarks, turning points where some sort of change needs to happen, otherwise there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of just knitting as you were.\nSo I decided in this pattern--which is otherwise pretty complicated--to write a \u0026ldquo;Quick Reference Guide\u0026rdquo; that summerizes all the major turning points of the sweater in a couple of paragraph. I\u0026rsquo;m going to reprint it here for your personal edification, with the hope that you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to use it as a model to summarize other knitting patterns, or as a blank slate on which you can develop your own patterns. This is for a fair-isle stlye/gauge sweater with a crew neck: adjust your numbers and style appropriately.\nCast on the key number (320), knit a hem (ie. ribbing for 2 inches). Knit one row plain, (optional: switch to the larger needle and increase), establish patterns and knit for 12-13 inches in pattern. Begin the gusset, increasing 2 stitches every three rows for 3 inches. Place gusset stitches on holder and start underarm steeks. Knit 7 inches and begin the front neck shaping and neck steek. Decrease on either side of the steek every round for 1.5 inches, then establish the back neck steek and decrease on either side of the steek every other round on either side of both steeks for 1.5 inches. Bind off the shoulders together using the 3 needle method.\nCut the arm hole steeks, and pick up stitches. Establish the patterns on the next round and decrease on either side of the gusset for every third round until there are no more gusset stitches left. Continue decreasing sleeve stitches on every 3rd round until the sleeve measure half of it\u0026rsquo;s total intended length (aprox. 9-10 inches). Decrease every 4th round for the remaining length of the sleeve. Knit a round plain in the background color decreasing radically for a fitted cuff. Knit the cuff for 2 inches, and then bind off the sleeve, and repeat the process for the second sleeve. Cut open the neck steek, pick up stitches around the neck opening and knit a collar in corrugated ribbing for 1.5 inches. Maintain the front neck steek for the plackets. Bind off the collar, cut open the neck front steek and pick up stitches around the placket edge independently. Knit each placket and a turned hem. Sew down placket hems and weave in all remaining ends and block the sweater.\nI hope the warmer weather in the northern hemisphere is treating you all well, and not keeping you from knitting too much.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-quick-references-for-sweater-design/","summary":"I posted about my academic contrarianism, earlier and I think I\u0026rsquo;d be foolish to claim that this tendency was limited simply to my academic half (2/3s?). In knitting, this manifests as a tendency to reject patterns and come up with my own designs, though you probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t know it from the designs: they tend to be pretty normal looking traditional-ish knitting designs. The contrarian comes out in the process, first by rejecting prepared patterns, but more by the ass-backwards way that I think about sweater construction. I fear that this approach appears in the patterns I write.\nNow perhaps I give myself too much credit, because it\u0026rsquo;s my sense that I\u0026rsquo;m not that atypical amongst designers and other renegade types; furthermore, I think this approach to knitting is not detrimental, and actually allows me to make better patterns. So there.\nAs I was writing the pattern for a sweater that I made this semester as part of the project-of-infamy, I realized that while I could (and did) go through every little step, in the day to day knitting of this sweater, which took me 6 weeks, a knitter wouldn\u0026rsquo;t need access to the entire pattern.","title":"Knitting Quick References for Sweater Design"},{"content":"Hello everyone, I know that this is supposed to be the \u0026ldquo;Meta\u0026rdquo; Series for Station Keeping where I talk about my progress on the station keeping project and my thoughts about the prospect of blog fiction, and the intersection of storytelling and blogging. I have, however, begun to view this Monday entry, as a sort of \u0026ldquo;editor\u0026rsquo;s notes,\u0026rdquo; section like you might find on the inside of a magazine, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s a nifty way to start off a week and a Monday1. So here I am.\nWither Station Keeping I actually have news of Station Keeping: I wrote another installment, and while it isn\u0026rsquo;t stunning prose, I think it helps establish a few characters, and is by far better than the other two installments that I\u0026rsquo;ve written so far. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to know that with a little practice I can get back into the fiction writing mode: it stretches muscles that I\u0026rsquo;d almost forgotten that I had. These installments are necessary background and serve to establish characters, and the situation that our story is set in. They\u0026rsquo;re pretty standard fiction, and while I like them, they\u0026rsquo;re not \u0026ldquo;short stories\u0026rdquo; in any normal definition of the term. I have three more that I want to lay out at some point, but for the next little bit I\u0026rsquo;m going to be working on some funky not very plot(ting)posts, and a little bit of character documentation for internal use.\nI realized, this week, that I do a great deal of character development in my mind, and sort of expect the other writers to be able to pick up on this. Thankfully they can\u0026rsquo;t read my mind (there are dark corners that no one needs to see), but this means that I have some writing to do. We also sectioned off the wiki, so I hope that we can use this as a place to develop the story a little more. Still looking for 4 writers, at least, but the more content I/we are able to write, the greater our overall success. I hope. Stay tuned.\nThis week, on TealArt I have some great content this week for you. Including free instructions for designing your own knitted sweater (brain power not-included), also now that the hypertext series has formally wrapped we\u0026rsquo;ll move on to our new series. I wrote another one of the friday series\u0026rsquo; articles today and it was a blast. What is this series you ask? Wait and see. Friday has typically been the home of a more academic-related essay, and that will remain for the moment.\nSo lets recap where we are on TealArt these days: Mondays are for letters from the editor, and SK, tuesdays are for knitting, Wednesdays are a grab bag, Thursdays are geeky, and Fridays are for academic stuff.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s almost like I have a plan, and five blogs. That said, I\u0026rsquo;m actually pretty pleased with it all. I\u0026rsquo;m still trying to figure out how to boost our readership (other than imploring you to tell your friends, which you should,) but someday it\u0026rsquo;ll work, in the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;m having some fun with the site, I hope you are too.\nStay tuned and be in touch.\nCheers, Sam\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll ignore for a moment, the fact that I tend to write said entries on Sunday night.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-letter-from-the-editor/","summary":"Hello everyone, I know that this is supposed to be the \u0026ldquo;Meta\u0026rdquo; Series for Station Keeping where I talk about my progress on the station keeping project and my thoughts about the prospect of blog fiction, and the intersection of storytelling and blogging. I have, however, begun to view this Monday entry, as a sort of \u0026ldquo;editor\u0026rsquo;s notes,\u0026rdquo; section like you might find on the inside of a magazine, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s a nifty way to start off a week and a Monday1. So here I am.\nWither Station Keeping I actually have news of Station Keeping: I wrote another installment, and while it isn\u0026rsquo;t stunning prose, I think it helps establish a few characters, and is by far better than the other two installments that I\u0026rsquo;ve written so far. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to know that with a little practice I can get back into the fiction writing mode: it stretches muscles that I\u0026rsquo;d almost forgotten that I had.","title":"A Letter from the Editor"},{"content":"Dear loyal reader(s),\nAs you\u0026rsquo;ve probably noticed although I wrote earlier today of TealArt as a magazine, the truth is that it is a perverse sort of magazine. The other character of TealArt is that it\u0026rsquo;s basically epistolary. This isn\u0026rsquo;t really a problem, but has produced a somewhat (un)interesting question in my mind of late\u0026hellip;\nHow should I sign letters.\nFor some now unknown reason, for many years I signed my letters, emails, and blog post with \u0026ldquo;cheers,\u0026rdquo; which was somewhat quirky, for someone of my age and location, and I came to like it.\nThen, recently, as in the last couple of months. I\u0026rsquo;ve begun signing my emails \u0026ldquo;best.\u0026rdquo; The origins of this is equally unknown, but I musts say that I don\u0026rsquo;t like it very much. Best what? I\u0026rsquo;ve always assumed that the answer is \u0026ldquo;wishes,\u0026rdquo; but I think it\u0026rsquo;s kind of dumb.\nThe sad thing is that it\u0026rsquo;s kind of automatic by this point.\nWhat are you signing your emails with? What do yo prefer?\n--tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/letter-signing/","summary":"Dear loyal reader(s),\nAs you\u0026rsquo;ve probably noticed although I wrote earlier today of TealArt as a magazine, the truth is that it is a perverse sort of magazine. The other character of TealArt is that it\u0026rsquo;s basically epistolary. This isn\u0026rsquo;t really a problem, but has produced a somewhat (un)interesting question in my mind of late\u0026hellip;\nHow should I sign letters.\nFor some now unknown reason, for many years I signed my letters, emails, and blog post with \u0026ldquo;cheers,\u0026rdquo; which was somewhat quirky, for someone of my age and location, and I came to like it.\nThen, recently, as in the last couple of months. I\u0026rsquo;ve begun signing my emails \u0026ldquo;best.\u0026rdquo; The origins of this is equally unknown, but I musts say that I don\u0026rsquo;t like it very much. Best what? I\u0026rsquo;ve always assumed that the answer is \u0026ldquo;wishes,\u0026rdquo; but I think it\u0026rsquo;s kind of dumb.\nThe sad thing is that it\u0026rsquo;s kind of automatic by this point.","title":"Letter Signing"},{"content":"Initially, it seems that the term \u0026ldquo;hypertext\u0026rdquo; served as general classification for any kind of dynamic text with \u0026ldquo;hyperlinks\u0026rdquo; (which of course we just call links these days). In 2007 (as opposed to 1987), hypertext is ubiquitous, and we\u0026rsquo;re constantly interacting with hypertexts, to the point that it\u0026rsquo;s just \u0026ldquo;the web\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;text,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;links\u0026rdquo; are assumed to be intuitive at this point. As a result, the main time I hear someone say hypertext these days, they\u0026rsquo;re artists exploring the creative possibilities of the medium separate from normal (relaxed?) text. That wasn\u0026rsquo;t my intention, and thus the reason I said \u0026ldquo;hyperdigitaltext,\u0026rdquo; the expressive possibilities aside, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the day-to-day practices of consuming and producing digital-text, and in a lot of ways, this series is a trip back to the first usages of hypertext in an attempt to think about might happens next.\nNot being, you know, psychic, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how successful this project has been. But in any case, it I have enjoyed the space to think about these issues, and I hope that you have too. This is just a roundup post, a sort of directory of the hypertext posts on Tealart for your referencing pleasures.\nWiki Hyper(digital)text Hyper(digital)book Futures Publishing Hyper(digital)text Writing and Producing Hyper(digital)text Reading And Consuming Hyper(digital)text Intro to HyperText I\u0026rsquo;ll be back next week with the introduction to the next Friday series!\nBest, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hypertext-roundup/","summary":"Initially, it seems that the term \u0026ldquo;hypertext\u0026rdquo; served as general classification for any kind of dynamic text with \u0026ldquo;hyperlinks\u0026rdquo; (which of course we just call links these days). In 2007 (as opposed to 1987), hypertext is ubiquitous, and we\u0026rsquo;re constantly interacting with hypertexts, to the point that it\u0026rsquo;s just \u0026ldquo;the web\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;text,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;links\u0026rdquo; are assumed to be intuitive at this point. As a result, the main time I hear someone say hypertext these days, they\u0026rsquo;re artists exploring the creative possibilities of the medium separate from normal (relaxed?) text. That wasn\u0026rsquo;t my intention, and thus the reason I said \u0026ldquo;hyperdigitaltext,\u0026rdquo; the expressive possibilities aside, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the day-to-day practices of consuming and producing digital-text, and in a lot of ways, this series is a trip back to the first usages of hypertext in an attempt to think about might happens next.\nNot being, you know, psychic, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how successful this project has been.","title":"Hypertext Roundup"},{"content":"I have a confession: I\u0026rsquo;m really bad at watching television. Well not really. I\u0026rsquo;m just too good at it. For most of my life I haven\u0026rsquo;t grown up around a television, and so I\u0026rsquo;m not used to having TVs on, so when they are on I tend to give them my undivided attention, which is a deviation from the cultural norm where television becomes a backdrop to life. Actually the truth is that the family television spent a few years in my room, because there was space for it there, and at most I watched a couple of SF shows when they aired every week but there were periods where I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t turn it on for months.\nBecause of this, I really enjoy television, but these days I watch almost all of my television on my computer, usually while I knit. I also feel as if this puts me in a unique position think about the fate of video/film in light of the internet. So as customary for me here on TealArt, I\u0026rsquo;m going muse at whim! So there!\nI remember collecting digital videos, usually ripped from VHS recordings of television broadcasts with commercials edited out from way back when (long before bit torrent). It wasn\u0026rsquo;t feasible for mass consumption because the files were huge, and bandwidth was narrow, but with the broadening of bandwidth, and better compression schemes, to mention nothing of phenomenal like YouTube, iTunes, pod-casting \u0026rsquo;the web has become much more amenable to video. This of course changes the way that we interact with video content. No longer do we have to watch the content on demand, or rent physical disks, or go to a theater, but rather download and watch, more or less at whim.\nIn the end, I think that this makes us more active consumers of television, because counter to conventions, watching TV is really an activity in itself worth doing, rather than something that we half-expect ourselves to be doing other things during. This is compounded by the fact that while bandwidth is wider today than it was even 3 years ago, a \u0026ldquo;hour long\u0026rdquo; (40-45mins) television show can still take several hours to download, especially at higher qualities. So independent productions tend to be significantly shorter which means that the kind of purposeful watching doesn\u0026rsquo;t take as much time. The downside is that dramatic video hasn\u0026rsquo;t really found a home on the internet outside of the traditional media via iTunes, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t really change the model very much.\nWith the video iPods and the apple TV (but also the Zune and PSP, I suppose,) it\u0026rsquo;s become possible for digital video\u0026rsquo;s to become more accessible, clearly portable, in ways that traditional television has never been able to be. I wonder how the on-demand aspects will interact with the portable aspect of contemporary digital video. I\u0026rsquo;d also think that there\u0026rsquo;s a space here for audio only content, I can\u0026rsquo;t imagine that video podcasting, would ever really present a challenge to audio podcasting (much less the textual blog,) in the same way that TV really superseded radio.\nNew technologies and media consumption practices take time to mature and grow, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years. Will YouTube begin to have longer and more substantive content? Will we be able to get more content into smaller packages? Will production costs go down so that there will be more content avilable? And of course the question that lingers in the back of a lot of people\u0026rsquo;s minds, how will the money work out? I don\u0026rsquo;t have answers, I just know that it\u0026rsquo;ll be interesting.\nbest, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/digital-video/","summary":"I have a confession: I\u0026rsquo;m really bad at watching television. Well not really. I\u0026rsquo;m just too good at it. For most of my life I haven\u0026rsquo;t grown up around a television, and so I\u0026rsquo;m not used to having TVs on, so when they are on I tend to give them my undivided attention, which is a deviation from the cultural norm where television becomes a backdrop to life. Actually the truth is that the family television spent a few years in my room, because there was space for it there, and at most I watched a couple of SF shows when they aired every week but there were periods where I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t turn it on for months.\nBecause of this, I really enjoy television, but these days I watch almost all of my television on my computer, usually while I knit. I also feel as if this puts me in a unique position think about the fate of video/film in light of the internet.","title":"Digital Video"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten so caught up in the \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m home again\u0026rdquo; mindset that I forgot that I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a blog post schedule for today. But never fear, in the TealArt of the future (and present) tycho the ever present blogger is here to save the day with some thoughts about moving back home, his battles with sudo, and his projects for today and beyond.\nI spent yesterday, my first full day back in hometown getting situated. Because I haven\u0026rsquo;t been here for more than a couple of weeks in 3 years, \u0026ldquo;my room\u0026rdquo; is mostly devoid of furniture, so I have taken over my mother\u0026rsquo;s desk in retaliation1. In addition to accomplishing a number of important tasks related to finding summer employment, I was able to get a couple of computer related tasks completed.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a long running feud with the sudo command, which has made it difficult for me to do a lot of things with the command line. Luckily my issue was relatively minor, and now I have rubygems and maruku installed on Zoe2, and I really couldn\u0026rsquo;t be happier. Rubygems is a package manager that is required for a number of handy ruby scripts, and maruku, is a command-line translator for PHP Markdown Extra3. Conveniently it also translates into LaTeX and XHTML, and looks really great doing so. I need to work up a good LaTeX template for day to day usage for shorter documents that that I can push a lot of the kinds of things that I need to output, but that\u0026rsquo;s for another day, right now I\u0026rsquo;m just happy.\nIn other news, there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot to report. I spent a long time driving and unpacking and what with the pomp and circumstance of graduation rituals, didn\u0026rsquo;t have a great deal of free time to write blog entries. My projects for today: write more, revise resume, write a future professor, and do some more unpacking. Other on-going blog related projects: work on growing and developing the reader/particpant base for TealArt. I think part of this has to do with my writing style, but part of it has to do with promotion, and I\u0026rsquo;m working on both of these aspects of the site, and hopefully there\u0026rsquo;ll be comments a plenty in the near future.\nbest, tycho\nA long running joke, my first brake back after I left for college, I returned to find that the only furniture left in my room were objects that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t fit out the door easily. This included my desk, which is ok, because I wasn\u0026rsquo;t using it. The ironic aspect is that I realized while I was away at school, that despite having a laptop, a desk/table to work at is crucial for my ability to focus and get things done.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nMy PowerBook G4 of wonder.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nPHP Markdown Extra is a subset of John Gruber\u0026rsquo;s Markdown which affords for footnotes, tables and some other much needed features. I use this script, more or less, (so I changed two lines, shoot me,) to parse my syntax on tealart.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gone-home/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten so caught up in the \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m home again\u0026rdquo; mindset that I forgot that I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a blog post schedule for today. But never fear, in the TealArt of the future (and present) tycho the ever present blogger is here to save the day with some thoughts about moving back home, his battles with sudo, and his projects for today and beyond.\nI spent yesterday, my first full day back in hometown getting situated. Because I haven\u0026rsquo;t been here for more than a couple of weeks in 3 years, \u0026ldquo;my room\u0026rdquo; is mostly devoid of furniture, so I have taken over my mother\u0026rsquo;s desk in retaliation1. In addition to accomplishing a number of important tasks related to finding summer employment, I was able to get a couple of computer related tasks completed.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a long running feud with the sudo command, which has made it difficult for me to do a lot of things with the command line.","title":"Gone Home"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking that, while the articles I write for TA are great and should continue to be a pillar of the site, shorter and more pithy posts are also worthy content. Also, I do a crappy job of interacting with other blog posts. So here\u0026rsquo;s something I saw whilst plowing1 through my blog posts today: expect more.\nThings Change:\n\u0026ldquo;As I was working out in the garden today, my first thought was that as a society, we still haven\u0026rsquo;t figured out how to manage the intersection of mortality and migration.\u0026rdquo;\n(from Easily Distracted.)\nI think this is an incredibly well put observation. The internet, and aviation, make the world smaller in a lot of important ways, but it\u0026rsquo;s still a big place that most of us find difficult to move from place to place. As a developmentalist-to-be this is right up my ally and I think a quite interesting location for some interesting research some day. Very quickly though, my next thought is of a few science fiction books that deal with some of these issues. Kim Stanley Robinson\u0026rsquo;s Mars Trilogy, address the migration issue (among other things), and Cory Doctrow\u0026rsquo;s `Eastern Standard Tribe \u0026lt;http://www.craphound.com/est/\u0026gt;`_ looks at the effect of the internet (and \u0026ldquo;world shrinking\u0026rdquo;) on another \u0026ldquo;material reality:\u0026rdquo; sleep. Interesting stuff.\nDiscuss!\nCheers, tycho\nIn fairness, I think my method of weblog reading as described by the word \u0026ldquo;plow,\u0026rdquo; might account for my lack of communication.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mortality-and-migration/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking that, while the articles I write for TA are great and should continue to be a pillar of the site, shorter and more pithy posts are also worthy content. Also, I do a crappy job of interacting with other blog posts. So here\u0026rsquo;s something I saw whilst plowing1 through my blog posts today: expect more.\nThings Change:\n\u0026ldquo;As I was working out in the garden today, my first thought was that as a society, we still haven\u0026rsquo;t figured out how to manage the intersection of mortality and migration.\u0026rdquo;\n(from Easily Distracted.)\nI think this is an incredibly well put observation. The internet, and aviation, make the world smaller in a lot of important ways, but it\u0026rsquo;s still a big place that most of us find difficult to move from place to place. As a developmentalist-to-be this is right up my ally and I think a quite interesting location for some interesting research some day.","title":"Mortality and Migration"},{"content":"As we speak, I\u0026rsquo;m finishing the second sleeve on a sweater that is much like all the other sweaters that I knit with one major difference: it uses knitted-in hems (turned hems, they\u0026rsquo;re sometimes called), rather than ribbing for all of the edges. While I think on the whole that it works for this sweater, I\u0026rsquo;ve always been rather fond of ribbings of a couple of different types. The truth of the matter is that, if knitting were perfect, if stocking stitch didn\u0026rsquo;t curl or flare without special attention, this would be moot. As it is, one must do something to one\u0026rsquo;s knitted hems so that garments to flare or roll (too much).\nThe options are actually pretty slim (these instructions are basic, they may vary a bit in actual practice). I\u0026rsquo;ve also included a pro-con analysis.\nKnitted-in hem: knit the hem facing on smaller needles, purl a row/round, knit the pattern. Sew down the hem facing when you\u0026rsquo;re done. Pro: the pattern starts at the bottom of the sweater, the sweater\u0026rsquo;s edge doesn\u0026rsquo;t normally pull in unflatteringly. Con: Hems can flair or gather really easily, and can be a bother to work. Knitted Ribbings: alternate consistant numbers of knitted and purl stitches. Pro: Looks good, often helps shaping when you want a tappered edge. Ribbings are highly elastic. Con: Can pull in too much, doe not work as well for stranded work. Double Sided stitches: A number of stitches look the same on the front and back, like garter and moss stitches, and won\u0026rsquo;t curl. Pro: easier to work than a hem and should produce the same result. Con: I\u0026rsquo;ve never been able to mange one of these without an undesirable welt or flare. Sometimes the designs can be too much for a plain sweater. Lace: This isn\u0026rsquo;t technically a solution, because you\u0026rsquo;d probably still do a few rows of garter stitch, but generally open work stitches will block flat without rolling. Pro: Might work, and could look nifty. Con: It\u0026rsquo;s lace, also not particularly suited as a cuff. My standards operation procedure is to knit 1x1 ribbings on plain sweaters and 2x2 corrugated ribbing on stranded sweaters, and 2x2 ribbing on plain sweater cuffs.\nThere are of course endless variations on these themes, and this is what makes designs unique. I\u0026rsquo;m interested to learn what your preferences are. What kind of hem treatments do you prefer on your sweaters? Other sorts of garments?\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-the-hem-debate/","summary":"As we speak, I\u0026rsquo;m finishing the second sleeve on a sweater that is much like all the other sweaters that I knit with one major difference: it uses knitted-in hems (turned hems, they\u0026rsquo;re sometimes called), rather than ribbing for all of the edges. While I think on the whole that it works for this sweater, I\u0026rsquo;ve always been rather fond of ribbings of a couple of different types. The truth of the matter is that, if knitting were perfect, if stocking stitch didn\u0026rsquo;t curl or flare without special attention, this would be moot. As it is, one must do something to one\u0026rsquo;s knitted hems so that garments to flare or roll (too much).\nThe options are actually pretty slim (these instructions are basic, they may vary a bit in actual practice). I\u0026rsquo;ve also included a pro-con analysis.\nKnitted-in hem: knit the hem facing on smaller needles, purl a row/round, knit the pattern.","title":"Knitting: The Hem Debate"},{"content":"Sorry for posting this so late in the day, I spend the day driving \u0026ldquo;home-home\u0026rdquo; from \u0026ldquo;school-home\u0026rdquo; and didn\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to cue up the post last night. In any case, there\u0026rsquo;ll be a nifty post tomorrow about something knitting related, I\u0026rsquo;m sure.--ty\nWith school out of session this last week and a lot of free time where I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a great deal of things to do other than pack (which I desperately wanted to avoid) and worry about the future: I got a lot of writing done. I had basically eaten through my stash of TA posts, and it is once again replenished, although my cushion isn\u0026rsquo;t as big as it has been. Some of this writing is even Station Keeping related, so I can offer you a proper \u0026ldquo;Keeping Meta\u0026rdquo; post!\nI drafted my first two SK installments. With luck, they\u0026rsquo;ll post as 1.1 and 1.31, with 1.2 as a story by one of the other authors. They\u0026rsquo;re both in the setup-prologue model, so they\u0026rsquo;re not gripping, but some measure of that is needed. This is part of the reason that 1.2 needs to be there: to break it up.\nIn a lot of ways this is the first time that I\u0026rsquo;ve written fiction. Sat down in front of a text editor and written fiction. In years,2 really; and it felt great. I think I\u0026rsquo;m a better writer this time around, but we\u0026rsquo;ll all see in a little while. I\u0026rsquo;m not yet sure about the June 1st launch date, but I\u0026rsquo;ve made some progress and I feel like we\u0026rsquo;ll be able to start soon, even if we don\u0026rsquo;t have a writing team that\u0026rsquo;s as large as I might have wanted to start. I\u0026rsquo;ll have to see how my time falls this summer, but I\u0026rsquo;m feeling optimistic about the series even if it means that I won\u0026rsquo;t be able to write as much non-fiction/blogging stuff for TealArt as I\u0026rsquo;ve grown accustomed--this might actually be a good thing.\nIn addition to the drafts that I wrote, I also did some work on the writer\u0026rsquo;s wiki and made some space for discussion of character development and longer range plots (ie. story arcs.) I\u0026rsquo;m also working on permanently blocking off the writer\u0026rsquo;s wiki from public consumption, because I can\u0026rsquo;t imagine much that there is that much that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be spoiler-y for the wiki, and frankly PMWiki\u0026rsquo;s native security system sucks. Hopefully with that enacted, things will go better. Anyway, one of the things that I wrote will, I hope, be interesting for you, gentle reader, and I\u0026rsquo;d enjoy hearing what you have to say about this:\nScience Fiction, as I\u0026rsquo;ve always experienced it, is a genre of ideas. While I think dividing and separating one genre from another is not a productive venture, I think that this definition is useful for the moment. What I mean is that the reason why we write stories on alien worlds, with fantastic technologies we can only imagine, alternate histories and futures, and yes even on space stations orbiting far flung space colonies is to present an idea about the future, about the present in a digestible form. It\u0026rsquo;s also fun, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that we should be ashamed of the \u0026ldquo;fun factor,\u0026rdquo; in SF, while remembering that it can be distracting.\nIf we were only interested in character development, literary games and development, representation, and so forth the space stations, fantastic technology, and alternate timelines would be distracting and superfluous.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have folks. I\u0026rsquo;m writing this entry a bit early because this sunday (yesterday by your reading) I am graduating from college, as I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;re sick of hearing by now. Expect posts in the next few days from both hadarah and myself regarding this experience.\nIn the mean time, be well, tycho\nIn the format of SeriesNumber.InstalmentNumber\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nIn fairness, I did have a couple abortive attempts at non-SF fiction last summer, that I consider shameful at best.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/station-keeping-progress-at-last/","summary":"Sorry for posting this so late in the day, I spend the day driving \u0026ldquo;home-home\u0026rdquo; from \u0026ldquo;school-home\u0026rdquo; and didn\u0026rsquo;t get a chance to cue up the post last night. In any case, there\u0026rsquo;ll be a nifty post tomorrow about something knitting related, I\u0026rsquo;m sure.--ty\nWith school out of session this last week and a lot of free time where I didn\u0026rsquo;t have a great deal of things to do other than pack (which I desperately wanted to avoid) and worry about the future: I got a lot of writing done. I had basically eaten through my stash of TA posts, and it is once again replenished, although my cushion isn\u0026rsquo;t as big as it has been. Some of this writing is even Station Keeping related, so I can offer you a proper \u0026ldquo;Keeping Meta\u0026rdquo; post!\nI drafted my first two SK installments. With luck, they\u0026rsquo;ll post as 1.1 and 1.31, with 1.","title":"Station Keeping Progress at Last"},{"content":"As promised, though somewhat later than I had initially intended I am here to provide you with a list of links for things about hypertext that I think you might be interested in. Kind of a \u0026ldquo;further reading\u0026rdquo; section, if you will. Some of these pieces I have thoughts about and i\u0026rsquo;ll include notes regarding this, but for the most part I just have some resources that I found helpful and/or interesting. Enjoy!\nSteam Punk Magazine\nThis, ironically, is what started the series. I really like what SPM has done, and their publication is really quite good looking. It\u0026rsquo;s all PDF and not \u0026ldquo;digital\u0026rdquo; except under the strictest of technicalities. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, but when reading it I thought, \u0026ldquo;if this is the best digital production around these days and it\u0026rsquo;s not really digital, what does this say about the possibility for digital production?\u0026rdquo; And I continue to think that this is an important question to ask.\nCory Doctorow Writes About digital Reading\nCory Doctorow, is I think working from the very front of a lot of the questions about digital media consumption and production. Most of his work, at least what he is known for, is all about digital intellectual property, but this article about reading from computer screens is quite good.\nPersistent.info\nThis is just another blog, written by a Google employee, and I include it here because I like the way that the blog posts arrange themselves in columns if the window width gets to be too big. The CSS wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work if the text were much longer than it is in the posts for this site, but it\u0026rsquo;s a nifty idea, none the less.\nTextual Instruments\nA site that has a couple of nifty looking hypertexts, worth checking out. I haven\u0026rsquo;t actually had time to read them yet, unfortunately.\nFiction Markup Language\nThis is an example of an XML-based langauge for fiction writing, and it has classes and items for characters, settings, as well as book/chapter level organization. While I really like the idea here, I fear that it could be really constraining in terms of form, and structure. At the same time, the strength of these sorts of things is in the parser, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen one yet, so who knows. It might be a good format option for editing software like Scrivener or other software intended for fiction-like writing.\nHypertext Community\nSwooter, books via twitter\nSwooter is a script that will regularly serialize, via twitter, any plain text file. Someone\u0026rsquo;s using it to serialize James Joyce, but the implications and possibilities here are pretty nifty. It\u0026rsquo;s like the \u0026ldquo;read classics via email\u0026rdquo; project, but I think the aspiring hypertext author could do some rather nifty things with this tool.\ninstitute for the future of the book blog\nif:book is a project out of the Annenberg Center that explores and works on the future of the book (I love good naming schemes), and their blog is really top notch.\nCompany Therapist Hypertext\nAcademic Hack Open Access\nAcademic Hack talks about open access, which I think could frame the academic discussion regarding academic publishing in a productive way. In a lot of ways, I\u0026rsquo;ve come to believe that however the academic publishing \u0026ldquo;problem\u0026rdquo; resolves itself will have important implications for how the mainstream market reforms in the future, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty cofident that academic publishing will see reform before the mainstream. But you can argue that, if you want.\nSavage Minds: Open Access your Diss\nI think the idea of making dissertations open access is a wonderful idea. There is so much research that gets done as part of people\u0026rsquo;s doctoral programs that never sees the light of day. While I think a lot of people would cringe at the thought (and frankly I can\u0026rsquo;t go back more than a semester without cringing), it seems that getting the information out there is worthwhile. If a dissertation is supposed to form the basis of your first book/series of articles, then, indeed the instinct is to clamp down on the diss text; but having said that I think having dissertations available might make it easier for people to more productivly move beyond that text, and that could be a good thing.\nMaking MediaCommons\nKathleen Fitzpatrick, one of the creators and driving force behind MediaCommons, an interesting and very forward thinking model for academic publishing. At the present time, it\u0026rsquo;s a Media Studies project, which makes a great deal of sense, but the model can and likely will be ported to other disciplines, and I look forward to that with great anticipation.\nWord Processors: Stupid and Inefficient\nAllin Cottrell explains/explores the ways that the word-processor model is ineffective for constructing text in digital communication, and I think that a lot of these general themes can be extrapolated to a discussion of writing.\nOk, that\u0026rsquo;s all I have for this time. If you have other hypertext/digital (textual) media sources, I\u0026rsquo;d love to read what you have to offer. This entry also marks the end of the regular hypertext series here, I\u0026rsquo;ll post a round up next Wednesday, but there\u0026rsquo;ll be the intro to the new series next week.\nThanks for Reading, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hyper-digital-text-links/","summary":"As promised, though somewhat later than I had initially intended I am here to provide you with a list of links for things about hypertext that I think you might be interested in. Kind of a \u0026ldquo;further reading\u0026rdquo; section, if you will. Some of these pieces I have thoughts about and i\u0026rsquo;ll include notes regarding this, but for the most part I just have some resources that I found helpful and/or interesting. Enjoy!\nSteam Punk Magazine\nThis, ironically, is what started the series. I really like what SPM has done, and their publication is really quite good looking. It\u0026rsquo;s all PDF and not \u0026ldquo;digital\u0026rdquo; except under the strictest of technicalities. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad thing, but when reading it I thought, \u0026ldquo;if this is the best digital production around these days and it\u0026rsquo;s not really digital, what does this say about the possibility for digital production?\u0026rdquo; And I continue to think that this is an important question to ask.","title":"Hyper Digital Text Links"},{"content":"In lieu of having anything particularly useful to say about technology, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write a version of an entry that I write every now and then that goes over the application and work flows that I use in my day to day computer life. These things change, a bit every now and then, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to keep track of these things. As always all these programs run on OS X 10.4 (tiger), and my 15 inch PowerBook G4, Zoe which I cary around with me almost all the time.\nNetNewsWire\nThis is the worlds best RSS/feed/news reader and I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with it generally. Because of NNW most of my reading of the internet these days is via RSS, and NNW is the program to use, and so I can\u0026rsquo;t speak too highly of it, at the same time, I feel as if the program hasn\u0026rsquo;t had many very good developments in a really long time. Having said that, it\u0026rsquo;s really stable. Because I\u0026rsquo;m so invested, I have a list of subscriptions that numbers about 500. I could probably tone this down a bit, and not all of them are active, but still, it would be hard to transition to any other program given the way that my reading habit is so centrally focused on NNW, so while I might like some other features of the program, I don\u0026rsquo;t really think that I can move away from it. I would still recommend it though. Good stuff.\nDevonTHINK\nThis is totally the mother of all applications. It\u0026rsquo;s a persona database tool, and any description of the program really doesn\u0026rsquo;t do it justice, and there are so many different ways to use the program which further complicates it. I use the program, basically, as a notebook/folder for all the things I write, all the scholarly articles that I read, and clippings from websites. The program has \u0026ldquo;AI\u0026rdquo; features which help you organize and find things when you need to, and it\u0026rsquo;s really splendid. It also works as an outliner, and it has great import/export features. I tend to use the program as the storage bin for all the textual things that I deal with day to day, and it works great. I sometimes feel as if I\u0026rsquo;m not doing enough with this program, but it\u0026rsquo;s nice to know that it\u0026rsquo;ll grow with me.\nWriteRoom\nThis program has become a key part of my workflow. I tend to write many of my drafts (like for this very article) in WR and then save it elsewhere. It\u0026rsquo;s just a plain text editor, but it works full screen, so I have it set up to print fairly big green text on a black background in a font that I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable drafting in, so I can work distraction free (also there\u0026rsquo;s a hotspot on the screen which lets you check the word count, which I find helpful), and I find that this has really helped my writing productivity.\nQuicksilver\nThis is the killer app, and I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve written enough about it here already. I use QS to do everything from updating my twitter, to organizing my files, to appending text files, to powering a host of quick \u0026ldquo;trigger\u0026rdquo; commands (combinations of keys that are asigned various specified commands), oh yeah, it\u0026rsquo;s a program launcher. QS ties everything together and it\u0026rsquo;s awesome.\nTextMate\nThis is sort of the power-editor program. I use it more for editing than for drafting, but it\u0026rsquo;s a very powerful program without being bloated and overdone. It has \u0026ldquo;packages\u0026rdquo; for Markdown, Multi-Markdown, Blogging, HTML, PHP, and just about any other programing/markup language you could think of. I use it for posting to TealArt, I use it for maintaining my todo list, for preparing files, and most of the day-to-day editing in my workflow. This is the program (along with DevonThink) that has allowed me to finally start working in text files/markdown. Because of this I have a working \u0026ldquo;text\u0026rdquo; folder that contains a bunch of text files, it\u0026rsquo;s good stuff.\nAdium/Colloquy\nThese are the basic chat programs. I don\u0026rsquo;t kid when I say that AIM is basically my cell phone. It\u0026rsquo;s how I keep in touch and contact folk. It\u0026rsquo;s almost always open, and having Adium lets me maintain connections to all the major (and some minor) networks, without having to think about it. Colloquy isn\u0026rsquo;t quite mIRC, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great program, it does everything that you could want, and I like being able to be on IRC again. That\u0026rsquo;s what internet community is all about, and I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan.\nMail.app\nMost of my email these days is handled through Gmail anyway, but since I always have my computer with me, and I\u0026rsquo;m more likely to have my computer, but not have internet access, than I am to have my computer but not have internet access.\nCamino\nThis has become my web-browser of choice. I like having a browser that works with the OS X service Menu and other OS specific features (firefox doesn\u0026rsquo;t), but I\u0026rsquo;ve always felt that Safari was a bit off, and Camino does a fine job at being spot-on and still working with OS. As you can probably tell from this list, I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of mac-y programs, that have really tight integration features, hence the browser choice.\nVLC\nIt\u0026rsquo;s the video player that plays anything and everything. It\u0026rsquo;s reliable, and on top of that, it has the best software amplification of any app. This is a must-have free APP, and it really does play anything.\nPukka\nPukka is just a little app that makes it easy to post to del.icio.us, which I don\u0026rsquo;t do nearly enough. I tried using another open source app to do the same thing, but I\u0026rsquo;ve found that Pukka is just a hair faster and it has a smaller visual footprint. The other program also ate several weeks of bookmarks a few times, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t forgiven it yet.\nThink\nThis is a new program that I think I will be using more in the future, although it won\u0026rsquo;t replace WriteRoom. Basically this program puts a screen behind the program that you\u0026rsquo;re currently using and all your other open windows to make it easier to concentrate on the task at hand. It\u0026rsquo;s great because it deadens all the other programs so that they aren\u0026rsquo;t as distracting or you can\u0026rsquo;t click on them as easily, but you can still see them a little so you don\u0026rsquo;t feel \u0026ldquo;out of touch\u0026rdquo;\nGrowl\nThis is the master of all program distraction. Growl is a unified system notification pathway that all sorts of applications can pass messages to that float on top what ever you\u0026rsquo;re doing to let you know whats going on. You can change the style duration and type of the notifications that growl takes. I get notifications when I get a new email, when someone sends me an instant message, when something changes in an IRC channel, and when there\u0026rsquo;s a new post to twitter, among other things. You\u0026rsquo;d think that this would be really distracting, and while it was for a few days, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that knowing that I\u0026rsquo;ll get a notification (even/especially one that I tend to ignore/miss) means that I don\u0026rsquo;t check for email/IM/instant messages/etc. as compulsively or as often, so in a weird way this particular distraction means that I\u0026rsquo;m a bit more productive. A lot of \u0026ldquo;mac\u0026rdquo; programs use growl notifications, and it\u0026rsquo;s really a great little \u0026ldquo;feature.\u0026rdquo;\nOk, Folks, I fear that I may have blathered on to long. If you use another program that I\u0026rsquo;ve missed, or have any questions please leave a comment or send a message. I\u0026rsquo;m always looking for more and better programs.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/todays-workflow/","summary":"In lieu of having anything particularly useful to say about technology, I\u0026rsquo;m going to write a version of an entry that I write every now and then that goes over the application and work flows that I use in my day to day computer life. These things change, a bit every now and then, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to keep track of these things. As always all these programs run on OS X 10.4 (tiger), and my 15 inch PowerBook G4, Zoe which I cary around with me almost all the time.\nNetNewsWire\nThis is the worlds best RSS/feed/news reader and I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with it generally. Because of NNW most of my reading of the internet these days is via RSS, and NNW is the program to use, and so I can\u0026rsquo;t speak too highly of it, at the same time, I feel as if the program hasn\u0026rsquo;t had many very good developments in a really long time.","title":"Today's Workflow"},{"content":"I learned yesterday something about my grades, which made me rather happy, and I hope this bodes well for my future. I am of course, graduating in several days and this is still a somewhat jarring experience. I have yet to pack in earnest, though I think it won\u0026rsquo;t be much of an issue. I also have to take back a mess of library books, which is in itself somewhat frustrating, but soon, very soon I will be done.\nWhile I will of course miss the academic climate, it\u0026rsquo;s not as if I\u0026rsquo;ve never been faced with a few months away from classes and organized learning at the beginning of the summer. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be going to school again in the fall. What I worry about most, now is ironically the more trivial aspects of institution switching, and I think this is much like I felt 3 years ago when I went to college from high school. This time I\u0026rsquo;m worried about things like picking classes for next semester, switching email addresses, and library access over the summer. I have backup email addresses and I should be getting another official address fairly soon, and my father has access to an academic library, so I should be set for the summer, but it\u0026rsquo;s still a bit strange. Ah, the little things.\nI wrote a bit about this the other day, but among my other projects for this summer is reading more for fun. I\u0026rsquo;ve actually been able to work a little bit of this in this semester, and it\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of fun. I\u0026rsquo;ve read Melissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s `Trouble and Her Friends \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Her-Friends-Melissa-Scott/dp/0812522133\u0026gt;`_, which was delightfully wonderful, and I\u0026rsquo;m working on Samuel R. Delany\u0026rsquo;s `The Einstein Intersection \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Intersection-Samuel-R-Delany/dp/0819563366\u0026gt;`_ at the moment which is quite good, but is a good bit different from the kind of stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m used to, I\u0026rsquo;m also not done, so I can\u0026rsquo;t really comment as fully as perhaps I would like too. I\u0026rsquo;ve also downloaded a number of audio Science Fiction podcasts that I\u0026rsquo;m hoping to find a good time to listen to this summer. Also on my list (other than more Delany and Scott): James Tiptree, Jr.).\nFor some reason I swore off SF a while ago: it was to kid like, it made me seem too geeky at a time when that wasn\u0026rsquo;t what I was going for, I hated being pegged as a genre writer, and frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t remember what else. While this might be the case, I have to also say that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten back to a point where I\u0026rsquo;m ok with it. I\u0026rsquo;m more interested in the imaginations of SF writers and the kinds of ideas and issues that they tend to address in their work. It also feels like home. So this explains Station Keeping and my recent and future reading plans. It\u0026rsquo;s also another part of the \u0026ldquo;what I want to do this summer, other than knit compulsively.\u0026rdquo;\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about all I have to report for you all today. I\u0026rsquo;d like to welcome the soon to-be-former roommate as a new TealArt blogger, there\u0026rsquo;ll be a tech article tomorrow, so I\u0026rsquo;ll see you then!\nCheers, ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/graduation-and-science-fiction/","summary":"I learned yesterday something about my grades, which made me rather happy, and I hope this bodes well for my future. I am of course, graduating in several days and this is still a somewhat jarring experience. I have yet to pack in earnest, though I think it won\u0026rsquo;t be much of an issue. I also have to take back a mess of library books, which is in itself somewhat frustrating, but soon, very soon I will be done.\nWhile I will of course miss the academic climate, it\u0026rsquo;s not as if I\u0026rsquo;ve never been faced with a few months away from classes and organized learning at the beginning of the summer. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be going to school again in the fall. What I worry about most, now is ironically the more trivial aspects of institution switching, and I think this is much like I felt 3 years ago when I went to college from high school.","title":"Graduation and Science Fiction"},{"content":"I have to say that this has been a rather light semester for me in terms of knitting. I finished one sweater, am working on the second sleeve of another sweater, and have a good start on another plain sweater. I think I also finished a pair of socks somewhere in there. That\u0026rsquo;s it.\nThe first sweater is the sweater that I wrote up as a design for the project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on all semester. . I knit this in sport weight henry\u0026rsquo;s attic alpaca prime, which is really fingering weight. The design is one that I\u0026rsquo;m selling, so you too will be able to make a version of this sweater soon. I might, even, post pictures of it sometime in the near future.\nThe second sweater is one that I will also write a design for soon when I finish it. I used 2-ply shetland \u0026ldquo;jumper\u0026rdquo; weight from Harrisville Designs, and it\u0026rsquo;s quite a nice sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s going to fit perfectly, and I\u0026rsquo;m actually a bit worried about how the neck is going to look. I\u0026rsquo;m frankly not sure what could be done to fix it, so I\u0026rsquo;m not going to worry and see how it looks when I wear it, if not I think some creative sewing and a zipper might help, actually. I\u0026rsquo;m quite find of the yarn and the sweater; one of the designs is something that I came up with all on my own, and it was a bear to learn, but I actually got into it eventually (but not enough to omit that pattern from the sleeves).\nAs for the plain sweater, I only have 9.5 inches completed yet, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what shape the sweater is going to take. Thus far the sweater is entirely black, using worsted weight Pattons Classic Merino yarn, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen with the rest of the sweaters. I have a couple of options and I nominate you to decide. Time for reader feedback. I have some of this yarn in a red color as well, and I promise to do whatever you say. Here are the options:\n1. Knit my \u0026ldquo;standard\u0026rdquo; sweater. That is a drop shouldered sweater with the contrasting color for sleeves, the collar and a bit around the plackets. Red in this case. I love these sweaters, and enjoy wearing them. I also want to make a version of this sweater with teal as the contrasting color, so maybe having 4 of these sweaters is a bit too much (the original, the gray one, this red one, and the eventual teal one). This is starting to become a standard spring semester event: tycho knits a plain sweater. So maybe I could do something adventurous. 2. I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to knit an enteric sweater for quite a while, but I think that it might be better to do this in some sort of variegated yarn, and I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that this will be the sweater that I want to take to knitting camp as part of my camp knitting. I think the sweater would look better in variegated yarn, but I hesitate. 3. I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to try one of the Elizabeth Zimmerman saddle shoulder sweaters at some point, and this might be a good time. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to break up the red and black in this design, so again, probably not the best option. 4. Something else that you want.\nI guess you can see where I\u0026rsquo;m leaning, but I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear ideas.\nAnd of course there is the pair of socks that I made this semester. It seems that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have the patience to knit socks when I\u0026rsquo;m in school. I get too bored to quick. There\u0026rsquo;s not much to say about them, they\u0026rsquo;re plain, worsted weight, and grey. Lovely to wear in the cold winter air. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been carrying around a pair of sport weight Opal socks (but not working on them very much. I\u0026rsquo;m in the middle of the foot of the second sock, which is more or less where I was in the middle of January.) I think that I would really love to make stranded socks, but all of my attempts thus far have ended miserably. I\u0026rsquo;ll try again with the 2ply shetland, which I will have leftovers of this sumer, and I have a few socks of yarn lying around. I really like worsted weight socks, and it\u0026rsquo;s a shame that I keep thinking that after I finish a pair of them that I\u0026rsquo;ll somehow begin liking to make sport weight socks, because it never happens, and I just spend forever making sport weight socks that I don\u0026rsquo;t enjoy as much. sigh\nAnyway, keep knitting you all. Maybe next week, I\u0026rsquo;ll even have a plan for the knitting savant(s?) Oh and next week I\u0026rsquo;ll be all graduated. eek\n\u0026rsquo;till next time, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spring-2007-semester-knitting-review/","summary":"I have to say that this has been a rather light semester for me in terms of knitting. I finished one sweater, am working on the second sleeve of another sweater, and have a good start on another plain sweater. I think I also finished a pair of socks somewhere in there. That\u0026rsquo;s it.\nThe first sweater is the sweater that I wrote up as a design for the project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on all semester. . I knit this in sport weight henry\u0026rsquo;s attic alpaca prime, which is really fingering weight. The design is one that I\u0026rsquo;m selling, so you too will be able to make a version of this sweater soon. I might, even, post pictures of it sometime in the near future.\nThe second sweater is one that I will also write a design for soon when I finish it. I used 2-ply shetland \u0026ldquo;jumper\u0026rdquo; weight from Harrisville Designs, and it\u0026rsquo;s quite a nice sweater.","title":"Spring 2007 Semester Knitting Review"},{"content":"Last night I finished my very last paper as an undergraduate, and in a week I will, baring natural disaster be the proud recipient of a double major B.A. These last two papers weren\u0026rsquo;t the most inspiring bits of prose that I\u0026rsquo;ve ever written, but one of them begins to outline the project that I want to pursue in graduate school, so it was a very useful exercise. I am excited to be done and quite looking forward to the next stage. This morning, for the first time in far too long, I slept past 8:40 without waking. I rolled over at 9:30 realized I had nothing particularly important to do, and slept for another half-an-hour. It was glorious.\nAfter no small amount of sloth, though, I posted the following to twitter:\nThis is the first day of the rest of my life, literally. guess I need to write something. heh\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m doing today. By now, I\u0026rsquo;ve completely run out of stashed TealArt entries for your pleasure. I wrote a huge mess of these entries, and even more outlines during my spring break, and though I continued to write during the semester, having a stash was incredibly helpful for making sure that I could fit in writing for fun whilst I was working on school projects. I generally have enough time to write for TealArt, it\u0026rsquo;s just always hard to predict when in the week I\u0026rsquo;m going to have that time, and having some padding was helpful. Unfortunately, the end of the semester was too much for the system and here I am without anything in the pile. So you get blathering instead.\nYou might have guessed that I\u0026rsquo;m something of an obsessive with regards to my file/digital organization. I moved all of my working files into the \u0026ldquo;archive\u0026rdquo; folder this morning, and I have to say that this felt incredibly satisfying. It means that I have more visual space (it\u0026rsquo;s weird, don\u0026rsquo;t ask) to concentrate on other projects this summer. In addition to finding employment this summer, and writing Station Keeping, the new series, and knitting a bit, I want to do some academic reading and writing as part of gearing up for a new application cycle to grad schools. It\u0026rsquo;ll be a busy summer, and it will also be the longest period of time that I\u0026rsquo;ve ever spent in my home town since I left, so that will be good.\nIn Station Keeping news--because although its late, it\u0026rsquo;s still Monday--there isn\u0026rsquo;t much to report. I\u0026rsquo;m going to use this week to write/draft a bunch of things including, hopefully, some SK material. We\u0026rsquo;re getting closer and closer to when I was hoping to start to get this thing off the ground. I\u0026rsquo;m not quite sure how this is going to work, but I think that it probably will. I also have to make up some new characters, or at least insert space for a few new characters so that other folks can do that.\nTomorrow I\u0026rsquo;ll have a review of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve knitted this summer, which is getting to be an end of the semester tradition.\nBest, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-next-day/","summary":"Last night I finished my very last paper as an undergraduate, and in a week I will, baring natural disaster be the proud recipient of a double major B.A. These last two papers weren\u0026rsquo;t the most inspiring bits of prose that I\u0026rsquo;ve ever written, but one of them begins to outline the project that I want to pursue in graduate school, so it was a very useful exercise. I am excited to be done and quite looking forward to the next stage. This morning, for the first time in far too long, I slept past 8:40 without waking. I rolled over at 9:30 realized I had nothing particularly important to do, and slept for another half-an-hour. It was glorious.\nAfter no small amount of sloth, though, I posted the following to twitter:\nThis is the first day of the rest of my life, literally. guess I need to write something. heh","title":"The Next Day\u0026#8230;"},{"content":"Hello Friends.\nI\u0026rsquo;m feeling a bit more chatty and less polemical, which means that you get real journal writing and less ranting. I had my last class on Wednesday, and I designated Thursday as a \u0026ldquo;do nothing day,\u0026rdquo; which is good, because I haven\u0026rsquo;t had a day like that in forever. So this was a good thing. Unfortunately I\u0026rsquo;m still feeling incredibly behind in terms of TealArt writing, but I suspect this will change soon. I only have 15 more pages to write as an undergraduate total, so my plate is pretty clear. I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to spending some quality time figuring things out this summer before I start school again in the fall.\nAnyway, I have an interesting snip-it from an early draft of the introduction to a portfolio that I wrote earlier this week.\nEarlier this semester when discussing a paper that I had written for a class on cognitive psychotherapy about existential psychodynamics, I noted to one of my Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies classmates, that my revisions were mostly minor, except for a paragraph that I needed to write connecting existential approaches to cognitive therapy and theories. In response she expressed relief at the realization that my apparent reluctance to engage \u0026ldquo;women,\u0026rdquo; in my Women\u0026rsquo;s and Gender Studies coursework was not born out of some sort of backward political project, but rather a more global tendency toward contrarianism.\nWhile I think that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably submit a more clear delineation of my goals for the summer later on I have already started thinking about the things that I\u0026rsquo;d like to accomplish this summer. For your amusement, then\u0026hellip;\nI want to get Station Keeping underway. I want to start the new TealArt series. I want to make a couple of sweaters. I want to read a bunch of articles and perhaps begin to have a more coherent idea of what I want my grad school project to be on. One of the things I\u0026rsquo;ve (re)realized this semester is that I have to write. I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve had a happier and more fulfilling semester because I\u0026rsquo;ve found a method and a habit for writing not just my school work, but also for myself1. I remember when I was writing Circle Games, I said things like \u0026ldquo;I need to write,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;writing makes me happy,\u0026rdquo; and then school and life happened and I stopped really writing things and I think I suffered for a long time because of it. Similarly, when I started knitting, I found that I tended to spend my breaks from school knitting feverishly, and with school being what it is, and all together I feel like this has put me out of the game for too long. But I think and hope that I\u0026rsquo;m back, and I hope that I can remember this. I may not be a perfect writer, but any trip through the archives of this site will show that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten better, and the only way to get better is to keep up. And I will.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll post tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s hyper/digital text article a bit later in the day, so stay tuned.\ncheers, tycho\nIt is fair to note that this has been a very writing intensive semester, so much so that I haven\u0026rsquo;t had a test whatsoever, and frankly I have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s kind of nice. Its a lot of work, but it\u0026rsquo;s the right kind of work.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-day-to-day/","summary":"Hello Friends.\nI\u0026rsquo;m feeling a bit more chatty and less polemical, which means that you get real journal writing and less ranting. I had my last class on Wednesday, and I designated Thursday as a \u0026ldquo;do nothing day,\u0026rdquo; which is good, because I haven\u0026rsquo;t had a day like that in forever. So this was a good thing. Unfortunately I\u0026rsquo;m still feeling incredibly behind in terms of TealArt writing, but I suspect this will change soon. I only have 15 more pages to write as an undergraduate total, so my plate is pretty clear. I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to spending some quality time figuring things out this summer before I start school again in the fall.\nAnyway, I have an interesting snip-it from an early draft of the introduction to a portfolio that I wrote earlier this week.\nEarlier this semester when discussing a paper that I had written for a class on cognitive psychotherapy about existential psychodynamics, I noted to one of my Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies classmates, that my revisions were mostly minor, except for a paragraph that I needed to write connecting existential approaches to cognitive therapy and theories.","title":"Writing Day To Day"},{"content":"Hi folks, This is the last polemical knitting piece that I have backlogged. I\u0026rsquo;ve actually been writing a lot about knitting in the form of patterns and project reviews, and I think that the Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s are for Knitting posts will address some of these concerns. I\u0026rsquo;m sorry for not posting this more promptly this morning, I might have slept in a bit more, and had to run out in a rush. I have two more classes as an undergraduate, and I\u0026rsquo;m seriously contemplating cutting one of them (we\u0026rsquo;re watching a movie, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen, but have a copy of,) I have a little more work, but yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m done. Scary. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be more content later in the week. --cheers, ty\nI have a confession to make: I\u0026rsquo;m a frugal person. Ok, maybe you knew that and maybe it wasn\u0026rsquo;t such a surprise. For this reason, I sometimes find it hard to justify spending money on yarn. Well, the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m a (perpetual) student with an uncertain employment future doesn\u0026rsquo;t help this, but I think the frugality serves me well and contributes to this problem. It\u0026rsquo;s really easy for me, and I suspect others as well (but as always ignore me at whim), to say \u0026ldquo;if I can get it for cheeper, why spend money on nice yarn.\u0026rdquo; But as most of us learn pretty quick: all yarn is not created equally, and I\u0026rsquo;m here to argue for a slight relaxation of frugality concerning yarn buying habits. I\u0026rsquo;m not saying, go forth and stash everything you like, or that you should only knit with quivet, but that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to to knit with high quality yarns without breaking the bank, and that college students (like me) can still knit with good yarn. This is in part an argument with myself, so I hope you find it interesting.\nMy first principal is to avoid stashing. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that I only have enough yarn for my current project and the next one, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close. I have the yarn for the projects I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on, the yarn for the next sweater, I have some lace weight left over from the last lace kick, assorted leftovers from past projects, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it; and frankly I think I have too much yarn, and am knitting through what I have as much as possible.\nSecondly, if you\u0026rsquo;re worried about money, knit with finer yarns. Generally yarns are sold by weigh not yardage, so 1000 yards of super bulky costs considerably more than a like yardage of sport or fingering weight. This means that finer yarns are cheeper in relation to the amount of time they take to knit. As an added benefit finer yarns also tend to be more flattering to everyone\u0026rsquo;s peoples bodies, and though it takes longer (a good thing) you\u0026rsquo;re less likely to look like you\u0026rsquo;re wearing a or wrapped in a duvet cover.\nThe third principal that I use is to avoid as much variation in yarn types as possible. While it\u0026rsquo;s nice to knit different kinds of things, having a few quality, basic kinds of yarns that are good in a number of different situations is really key. This makes it easy to use leftovers, reliably order online, and plan projects without having yarn. Also, this makes it easy to avoid swatching, because you already know how you knit with your basic yarns. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter what yarns you choose, but look for high quality (no pilling, washing/wearing well, no knots, colorfast) a good color selection, usability (don\u0026rsquo;t go for a yarn that comes in hanks if don\u0026rsquo;t have a swift and hate winding yarns), and something that\u0026rsquo;s widely available. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that one must knit exclusively from the same kind of yarn, but to have for instance sport, fingering, and worsted weight yarns that you keep returning to project after project. In your case it might be sock yarn, worsted weight and aran-weight yarn, the kinds of yarn aren\u0026rsquo;t crucial.\nIn aid of this, It\u0026rsquo;s possible to recognize that there are only a couple of mills that make \u0026ldquo;blank yarns\u0026rdquo; for art yarn dyers. By my eye, I think that Henry\u0026rsquo;s Attic, and Louet supply about 60% of the yarn for hand dyers, and there are only a few others. If you\u0026rsquo;re sensitive to these similarities, the variety of yarns you use can grow without adding new \u0026ldquo;types.\u0026rdquo; Look at yardage/weight/content relationships to find the connections.\nNow if you stash yarn as a collecting hobby aside from your knitting hobby thats a whole new issue beyond my scope (not bad, of course, if that\u0026rsquo;s what you\u0026rsquo;re aiming for), but with luck, the working cue-stash can be kept under control,[^socks] and in this sort of situation you and I only have to buy yarn every few months. I also tend to think of knitting as part of an entertainment budget. I spend sixty or eighty dollars on yarn that can provide knitting enjoyment for months. Of course, the door can swing the other way too, as I\u0026rsquo;ve often said (and heard) \u0026ldquo;its fun, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter what I knit with,\u0026rdquo; so it might be helpful to also engender a heathy enjoyment of quality garments. But also, I\u0026rsquo;d challenge the notion that enjoyment should turn a blind eye towards quality: it\u0026rsquo;s more fun to knit with nice yarns, and nicer yarns produce nicer finished objects which make me want to knit more: its a good cycle.\nYou can, and should, knit with nice materials, and it\u0026rsquo;s my hope that between what I suggest here, and some good smart shopping you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to knit with the best yarn you can, you\u0026rsquo;ll be glad you did!\nOk, enough of a missive for today. I hope it\u0026rsquo;s helpful. We\u0026rsquo;ll move to more interesting and less polemical things in the future, I promise.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/yarn-frugality/","summary":"Hi folks, This is the last polemical knitting piece that I have backlogged. I\u0026rsquo;ve actually been writing a lot about knitting in the form of patterns and project reviews, and I think that the Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s are for Knitting posts will address some of these concerns. I\u0026rsquo;m sorry for not posting this more promptly this morning, I might have slept in a bit more, and had to run out in a rush. I have two more classes as an undergraduate, and I\u0026rsquo;m seriously contemplating cutting one of them (we\u0026rsquo;re watching a movie, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen, but have a copy of,) I have a little more work, but yeah, I\u0026rsquo;m done. Scary. I\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be more content later in the week. --cheers, ty\nI have a confession to make: I\u0026rsquo;m a frugal person. Ok, maybe you knew that and maybe it wasn\u0026rsquo;t such a surprise. For this reason, I sometimes find it hard to justify spending money on yarn.","title":"Yarn Frugality"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s another week, again. It\u0026rsquo;s funny how these things happen. I once again don\u0026rsquo;t have a great deal of Station Keeping news to relate to you. Last week was somewhat frightful in terms of school. I\u0026rsquo;m graduating in about two weeks, my final grades are due in a week and a half, and the vast majority of my work will be completed by the middle of this week. Because last week was so intense (on top of the sinus infection episode) there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of work left, but I have more than enough on my plate to keep me busy, so while I will have entries for your consumption and edification this week, I can\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of big promises about overall productivity this week. But I have some things to talk about now, and that\u0026rsquo;s all that matters, right?\nNews of TealArt I have two more essays for the hypertext series after this week\u0026rsquo;s piece, but I do feel as if it\u0026rsquo;s wrapping up, and similarly the knitting series, I think will see a bit of a summer transformation as I have basically completed what I set out to do. I think we\u0026rsquo;ll see more content concerning what I\u0026rsquo;m actually working on, and some of the things that I\u0026rsquo;ve already made, and of course coverage of knitting camp. I\u0026rsquo;m playing around with the idea of starting a slightly more academic series to follow up the hypertext, that might be a fun summer project to work on in addition to all of the other summer things that I have planned.\nThoughts on Station Keeping One of my intentions with SK is to provide an outlet for short form (science) fiction. I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of focus and prestige given to The Novel, in the genre, and it\u0026rsquo;s certainly earned. The Novel allows authors to write extensive stories that make it possible to put the reader into another world/perspective. But there\u0026rsquo;s another sense that shorter form fiction allows writers to pose specific questions, handle language very precisely, and practically distribute his/her work easily1. SK is also not exactly short fiction as it has serial elements, plot arcs, and an ensemble of regular and recurring characters, but I think from a writing perspective, there will be stylistic and structural similarities between short fiction and SK installments. In the group setting, this makes particular sense: we can all create desecrate individual stories, participate in the planning of a larger story without anyone person needing to feel obligated to maintaining an entire project solely on their own. I think there are possibilities.\nAnyway, stay tuned, it looks like it\u0026rsquo;s going to be a pretty interesting week around here.\nbest, tycho\nIt\u0026rsquo;s easier for publishers to take a risk on a piece of short fiction than it is for a publisher to take a risk on a novel. While the digital age might eventually change this, for the moment, this remains true. Interestingly, SF is somewhat unique as there remains a somewhat viable commercial short fiction market. Also, having successful short fiction publications makes is easier to publish longer fiction, and while the system isn\u0026rsquo;t flawless certainly, it\u0026rsquo;s better than some crap shoots.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-times-of-station-keeping/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s another week, again. It\u0026rsquo;s funny how these things happen. I once again don\u0026rsquo;t have a great deal of Station Keeping news to relate to you. Last week was somewhat frightful in terms of school. I\u0026rsquo;m graduating in about two weeks, my final grades are due in a week and a half, and the vast majority of my work will be completed by the middle of this week. Because last week was so intense (on top of the sinus infection episode) there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of work left, but I have more than enough on my plate to keep me busy, so while I will have entries for your consumption and edification this week, I can\u0026rsquo;t make a lot of big promises about overall productivity this week. But I have some things to talk about now, and that\u0026rsquo;s all that matters, right?\nNews of TealArt I have two more essays for the hypertext series after this week\u0026rsquo;s piece, but I do feel as if it\u0026rsquo;s wrapping up, and similarly the knitting series, I think will see a bit of a summer transformation as I have basically completed what I set out to do.","title":"The Times of Station Keeping"},{"content":"I think wiki\u0026rsquo;s are really awesome. I just wanted to get it out there ahead of time. The wiki is a really nifty concept, and I think that the wiki is an example, of an \u0026ldquo;digital\u0026rdquo; textual form, like the one that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to think about. Having said that I think there are are some constraints to this form that are worth discussing as part of this project on digital text.\nWhat are Wiki\u0026rsquo;s? I could provide a lengthy and informative history of the development of the wiki concept, but I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting history if you\u0026rsquo;re into that kind of thing. In any case, most people know wikis via Wikipdeia, and this is a good example of what a wiki is, but I think because of this influence many people tend to associate wiki projects with encyclopedias, which is interesting, because wikis are by no means limited to such encyclopedic projects[^encyclopedia criticism].\nBasically a wiki is a collaborative editing environment, that creates a non-linear hypertext document, generally in a situation where new \u0026ldquo;pages\u0026rdquo; are easily created and edited (but not necessarily). The key in my mind is the non-linear aspect in combination with the (potential) shortened distance between the reader and the editor. Because of the organization of the Wikipedia and the wiki\u0026rsquo;s that have been inspired by that site, I think a lot of people tend to think that wiki means \u0026ldquo;open editing,\u0026rdquo; I think group editing is more apt description.\nThe Strengths: Wikis are great for distributing editing responsibility amongst a group of people, and for exploring and cataloging information that can be organized as an interconnecting \u0026ldquo;network,\u0026rdquo; rather than a branching tree. The software used for wikis also remove a lot of the burden associated with site maintenance, and in a lot of ways I\u0026rsquo;m tempted to suggest that while wiki software, is a really great tool for website management, particularly when you want to create a collaboratively constructed document. There are a number of typically wiki based features that have contributed to the kind of publishing model that Kathleen Fitzpatrick and the MediaCommons folks have adopted: history functions being the most obvious. That allow us to understand documents as changing\nThe Weaknesses: The problem is that wiki\u0026rsquo;s aren\u0026rsquo;t good for all sorts of projects. They seem to work best when there is a limited linearity, and great deal of interconnectedness. When you don\u0026rsquo;t have this kind of document, or when you have a contributor pool that is too small and/or not organized enough, wiki\u0026rsquo;s seem to stop being unique, and while they may contain valuable material, the format seems to just stop working. Or it the hyper/digital element seems to imposed and detrimental to the feel of the document as a whole.\nFor instance, Wikimedia, the folks behind Wikipedia, have a project called wikibooks, and while I think that this idea is really nifty, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how well it works in creating \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo; books, in the way that wikipedia can really be brilliant. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that one of the \u0026ldquo;wikibooks\u0026rdquo; are particularly unique documents as a result of their beginnings as wiki.\nJust some thoughts on the forms. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to come off as a perpetual critic, I think that what I seem to be trumpeting: new forms, new ideas, and new models of reading/writing/publishing are being used and deployed, we just haven\u0026rsquo;t explored and questioned them enough. I think we\u0026rsquo;ll let this edition run a little short this week, but I\u0026rsquo;ll be back next week on monday with a post on Station Keeping.\nEnjoy you\u0026rsquo;re weekend, and reading! tycho\n[^encyclopedia criticism]: There are a lot of criticism of Wikipedia that I find incredibly interesting, because it\u0026rsquo;s as if the main criticism of the \u0026ldquo;wiki\u0026rdquo; is that it is encyclopedic. Encyclopedias are fascinating and interesting texts, but they are flawed. Neutrality is impossible, of course, nor is maximum coverage. I have yet to hear someone analyze wikipedia in the same context that\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wiki-hyperdigitaltext/","summary":"I think wiki\u0026rsquo;s are really awesome. I just wanted to get it out there ahead of time. The wiki is a really nifty concept, and I think that the wiki is an example, of an \u0026ldquo;digital\u0026rdquo; textual form, like the one that I\u0026rsquo;m trying to think about. Having said that I think there are are some constraints to this form that are worth discussing as part of this project on digital text.\nWhat are Wiki\u0026rsquo;s? I could provide a lengthy and informative history of the development of the wiki concept, but I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting history if you\u0026rsquo;re into that kind of thing. In any case, most people know wikis via Wikipdeia, and this is a good example of what a wiki is, but I think because of this influence many people tend to associate wiki projects with encyclopedias, which is interesting, because wikis are by no means limited to such encyclopedic projects[^encyclopedia criticism].","title":"Wiki Hyper(digital)text"},{"content":"I intended to post this yesterday, but I fear I was hit by a time warp and somehow my day disappeared. Enjoy this piece, it is one of my favorites. --ty\nAs some of you may know, this (particular) series of missives and polemics about the knitting craft are part of a project that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on as part of my last semester as an undergraduate. Another aspect of this project (which I\u0026rsquo;m using to address an interest in a larger sense of a knitting community) is a weekly knitting group that I\u0026rsquo;ve been responsible for on campus. We meet on mondays and we\u0026rsquo;ve had tons of people come in. I bill it as a knitting workshop, rather than an SnB, or a group, and people come in to knit, to ask questions, or learn from scratch.\nIn the beginning, I thought that what I really wanted to do was work on helping people move on to more complicated shapes, because I take the opinion, that once you know how to knit and purl, the only difference between making a scarf and making a simple sweater (or a hat) is dedication and commitment, and it\u0026rsquo;s my sense that that many knitters are reticent to make that leap. While I still think this is mostly true, knitters are surprisingly aware of this. Interestingly, what I think has been the most helpful lesson that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able impart, deal with some of the most fundamental parts of knitting, the very minute details of how stitches are supposed to look and feel on the needle. I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to thinking of this as string theory, but I try and keep that to myself.\nWhat I think I\u0026rsquo;m teaching is something that many knitters figure out eventually, but that people tend to refer to in a number of different ways. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that I\u0026rsquo;ve heard it called \u0026ldquo;knitting in your head,\u0026rdquo; also \u0026ldquo;watching your knitting,\u0026rdquo; or being able to \u0026ldquo;eyeball patterns,\u0026rdquo; and so forth but the core of all these skills is pretty much the same. You want to be able to observe your knitting and be able to understand how the stitches are formed and interact, basically, what causes a stitch to twist and what causes a knit stitch to become a purl stitch. This sounds like a really uninteresting skill, and perhaps it is, but I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that many people receive lessons to knit in a really structured way so that they\u0026rsquo;ll be able to follow patterns easily. Teachers start out with something, say knitting, or casting on, and they say, \u0026ldquo;this is casting on, here\u0026rsquo;s what you do.\u0026rdquo; People can pick this up, but it\u0026rsquo;s difficult, because the name is largely irrelevant: learning how to knit is more about learning how to make your hands and fingers do something that they\u0026rsquo;re not used to.\nAs a result, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to doing a few things that might be a little atypical. (Or they might be normal and I\u0026rsquo;m just slow.) For instance, I teach casting on after a person has gotten how to knit (using a sample:) casting on is difficult, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really make sense outside of the context of knitting. Similarly the \u0026ldquo;difficulty\u0026rdquo; of purling seems to be an artifact of how we learn to knit: I\u0026rsquo;ve had some measure of success teaching people \u0026ldquo;one way of knitting\u0026rdquo; (knitting), and \u0026ldquo;another way of knitting\u0026rdquo; (purling) when I tell/explain the distinction after it looks like their fingers \u0026ldquo;know\u0026rdquo; how to form the stitches. Once all the basics are under control its really easy to move on to other spheres and projects. How to learn to knit shapes, garments, or whatever else the new knitter wants to knit. And that\u0026rsquo;s about it.\nThe last time(s) that I tried to teach knitting, I found that it was hard, and that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly adept at explaining this aspect of knitting, and was much more interested in teaching particular ways of knitting. This time around, I have people that have learned to knit from me who are knitting continental, combined, english style, you name it. Someone even took to knitting a garter stitch garment by purling every row (atypical at best,) and allowing learners to have this kind of freedom is both easier from my perspective because as long as they\u0026rsquo;re making fabric that works, and they\u0026rsquo;re enjoying it, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter how they tension the yarn; and once their fingers know how to form the stitches, teaching them the names of what they\u0026rsquo;re doing, is relatively simple. And then people know what to knit: what they do after this point is really out of your control as a knitting teacher until they come back to learn how to make specific things, but laying the foundation is definitely important.\nI\u0026rsquo;d be interested in hearing your perspective on teaching methods, if you\u0026rsquo;ve ever taught someone how to knit. I\u0026rsquo;ll be back in a week with an article about yarn choice and knitting economy.\n\u0026rsquo;til next time, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-teaching-muscle-memory/","summary":"I intended to post this yesterday, but I fear I was hit by a time warp and somehow my day disappeared. Enjoy this piece, it is one of my favorites. --ty\nAs some of you may know, this (particular) series of missives and polemics about the knitting craft are part of a project that I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on as part of my last semester as an undergraduate. Another aspect of this project (which I\u0026rsquo;m using to address an interest in a larger sense of a knitting community) is a weekly knitting group that I\u0026rsquo;ve been responsible for on campus. We meet on mondays and we\u0026rsquo;ve had tons of people come in. I bill it as a knitting workshop, rather than an SnB, or a group, and people come in to knit, to ask questions, or learn from scratch.\nIn the beginning, I thought that what I really wanted to do was work on helping people move on to more complicated shapes, because I take the opinion, that once you know how to knit and purl, the only difference between making a scarf and making a simple sweater (or a hat) is dedication and commitment, and it\u0026rsquo;s my sense that that many knitters are reticent to make that leap.","title":"Knitting: Teaching Muscle Memory"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I have a great deal of news regarding Station Keeping to report to you this fine morning. It warmed significantly in the last few days in Wisconsin, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t look like there\u0026rsquo;s going to be any more snow. Which means we\u0026rsquo;ve moved quickly from \u0026ldquo;frozen season\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;allergy season.\u0026rdquo; As a result I spent the end of the week and the weekend in a stupor. I think I hit the peak early/midday on Sunday, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to feel better. The project that seemed to take the largest hit was SK, alas. In this stupor I did watch a great deal of television that I\u0026rsquo;d been saving up for a while, and I got some knitting done as well.\nWe have 3 confirmed contributors to this project, and had I been more cogent this weekend I think that I might have been able to gather a few more. I also have the first 6 weeks laid out, and I think that perhaps later in the week I\u0026rsquo;ll start writing the first of those episodes. In some ways the episode summaries that I wrote were to provide an example of what I thought an episode could \u0026ldquo;do,\u0026rdquo; not to mention inspire a stuck writer, but I\u0026rsquo;ve also thought that these were the kind of episodes that I might write, so unless people volunteer, I\u0026rsquo;ll start with some of the writing. I also had a discussion with one of the aforementioned writers regarding the longer-term plot developments that I\u0026rsquo;ve archived for the purpose of shedding some light on my thoughts regarding the longer term vision of this project.\nBecause I don\u0026rsquo;t have enough Station Keeping content to fill an entire entry, I think that this is about to turn into a general catchall blog post. Sooo\u0026hellip;.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a good deal of time these past few days working on the layout of a book that is going a children\u0026rsquo;s book. I look forward to being done with this (and also having another something for a graphic design portfolio, should I ever need to do that). I have realized as part of this, that if I want to do graphics work (which I really do pretty irregularly) I totally would need a better computer, because the ever reliable zoe was totally not up to the task. I think the postponement of the release of Leopard to October means that I\u0026rsquo;m unlikely to begin to seriously hurting for a new computer until at least then. I think that I\u0026rsquo;m particularly sensitive to this because I put in the order for Zoe almost exactly 2 years ago. I think that I\u0026rsquo;ll have to work on some sort of retrospective to honor the occasion.\nI\u0026rsquo;m an/the outgoing leader, of my campus\u0026rsquo; queer group. Since a number of us are leaving/graduating at the end of the year, we started on updating the groups constitution1, as a way of enhancing the continuity, and recording the unspoken assumptions that have guided the leaders of the group for several years. This has incited an unprecedented level of attention from some folks with heretofore limited involvement in the operations or activities of the club. And, some decisively undemocratic tactics, which rob attention that I would like to put towards other projects including TealArt, knitting-related, and research related. I think though, to tie this back into something on topic, there\u0026rsquo;s totally going to be a SK episode where Eli or Talia will grind a council of nebbishen politicians into a very fine powder. Sigh. Take any angry twitters with a grain of salt concerning the above.\nWhile I would like to avoid being self congratulatory, I have to say that I\u0026rsquo;m very much enjoying the progress that we\u0026rsquo;ve been able to maintain at tealart. It\u0026rsquo;s been a nice compliment to my school work, and it\u0026rsquo;s nice to have other projects to think about and consider. I think my misery during my allergies was due in part to the fact that by thursday I was really caught up with my blog writing, and didn\u0026rsquo;t have much left to do. So here\u0026rsquo;s to being able to keep it up for a while. I have some nifty essays planned and prepped for this week. I just got a rather nifty idea for another series (to follow up the hypertext series), so I think I\u0026rsquo;ll be sketching that out in the next few days. Anyway, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in writing a wednesday essay, talk to me. In the mean time, stay tuned this week, and I hope that I have something more meaningful to share with you all about Station Keeping in a week.\nsee you around, tycho\nThis document which is largely irrelevant had gone unused and un-updated for 6+ years, which for a residential liberal arts college group is an eternity.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-lightweight-station-keeping/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I have a great deal of news regarding Station Keeping to report to you this fine morning. It warmed significantly in the last few days in Wisconsin, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t look like there\u0026rsquo;s going to be any more snow. Which means we\u0026rsquo;ve moved quickly from \u0026ldquo;frozen season\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;allergy season.\u0026rdquo; As a result I spent the end of the week and the weekend in a stupor. I think I hit the peak early/midday on Sunday, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to feel better. The project that seemed to take the largest hit was SK, alas. In this stupor I did watch a great deal of television that I\u0026rsquo;d been saving up for a while, and I got some knitting done as well.\nWe have 3 confirmed contributors to this project, and had I been more cogent this weekend I think that I might have been able to gather a few more.","title":"A Lightweight Station Keeping"},{"content":"The last time I spent any great deal of time writing and thinking about e-books, it seemed like they were the thing of the future, and that with a little bit of practice, adjustment, and technological development, the digital text would be able to replace the printed one. This was to be a great thing: with production costs greatly reduced, more people could publish their work, with less overhead, and books could be sold for substantially cheeper while still increasing profit margins. Besides all of the technological benefits (searching, indexing, tranclusion), e-books had (have?) the potential to re/democratise publishing writing and reading. While we may yet see a system that will revolutionize the digital \u0026ldquo;book,\u0026rdquo; it seems pretty safe to call the ebook a failure. Perhaps its the fault of the DRM efforts to overprotect text which limited accessibility, and perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s the fault of the hardware developers to produce an affordable, open device. In any case, we\u0026rsquo;re not there.\nA few friends of mine, scoff predictably at any mention of the ebook because they \u0026ldquo;fail to understand how people read,\u0026rdquo; and while this is part of the puzzle, it also seems to me that they fail to understand how we write--if you\u0026rsquo;re reading this, I do indeed know that the distinction isn\u0026rsquo;t that large. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s productive to retort to the argument that people\u0026rsquo;s attention span flies out the window when they\u0026rsquo;re in-front of a screen, because I think we have a similar attention span problem with paper, the ritual of turning pages (literally) lets us \u0026ldquo;reset,\u0026rdquo; as do the blank pages and space around chapter/part breaks. It\u0026rsquo;s significantly easier to \u0026ldquo;chunk\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;chart progress\u0026rdquo; a book than it is a column of text. Writers (and editors), on some level, are aware of this, and can organize books destined for print in a way that uses these breaks to help the way that a book is consumed. Even though in the loosest sense a book is just a collection of words, the materiality of books contributes/constructs our experience of the words, and when you try and take the words of the book, and put them in a different format: it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work (as well). E-books fail because we keep trying to simply republish p-books electronically, and keep failing because they\u0026rsquo;re not structured or written in a form that would be productive.\nThe truth is, I think, that no one really has a clue how write the digital equivalent of a book yet, because they aren\u0026rsquo;t really books as we know them. We, both specifically at TealArt and the internet in general, tend toward shorter serializations, I think in large part because of the blog, but also because it\u0026rsquo;s hard to expect (or want) the kind of devotion to blogs that people often have for books. We read books one at a time, sometimes we\u0026rsquo;ll have our fingers in two or three, but rarely more than that; whereas we read dozens or even hundreds of websites concurrently. Digital writers need to be able to address the way that we approach digital reading, and while there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of this that has to happen on the publication end, and though I don\u0026rsquo;t have any empirical justification1 for this it seems that there are stylistic concerns on the level of the paragraph that need to be addressed for electronic literature to \u0026ldquo;work.\u0026rdquo;\nAt the same time, I think there is a place for another electronic writing form that isn\u0026rsquo;t just a translation of a book into a digital format, or a sort of print-lite text, but allows authors to engage with a subject or story in a substantive and sustained way that has more depth than the short forms that have already succeeded on the web. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure what the format would be both from a technological and rhetorical perspective, but I can see some sort of easily serializable xml formating that allows for easy paragraphical numbering, and shorter paragraphs, perhaps we\u0026rsquo;ll call it the dbook. You heard it here first.\nAs a corollary, I suppose, this is why I\u0026rsquo;m so interested and supportive of the PDF format: its basically universal, and it allows writers and creators to reliably control the way that a text is presented. I think if we\u0026rsquo;re going to see viable electronic editions of print books, they\u0026rsquo;ll have to be in PDF2 format. This isn\u0026rsquo;t the wave of the future in terms of \u0026ldquo;new media\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;new writing\u0026rdquo; but its something that needs to happen as part of a transition.\nThanks for reading, and I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear some of your thoughts on what kind of stylistic concerns long form digital writing might entail, or your thoughts on the reading/writing experience of electronic books and literature. I\u0026rsquo;ll be back in a week with something else entirely, I\u0026rsquo;m sure.\ncheers, tycho\nwhadda want? it\u0026rsquo;s a blog, consider it off the cuff theorizing.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nProject Gutenberg publishes all of their public domain texts using ASCII text, which while arguably the most accessible digital format, doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of the \u0026ldquo;rich\u0026rdquo; formating, or the paper-like qualities that you might want.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hyperdigitalbook-futures/","summary":"The last time I spent any great deal of time writing and thinking about e-books, it seemed like they were the thing of the future, and that with a little bit of practice, adjustment, and technological development, the digital text would be able to replace the printed one. This was to be a great thing: with production costs greatly reduced, more people could publish their work, with less overhead, and books could be sold for substantially cheeper while still increasing profit margins. Besides all of the technological benefits (searching, indexing, tranclusion), e-books had (have?) the potential to re/democratise publishing writing and reading. While we may yet see a system that will revolutionize the digital \u0026ldquo;book,\u0026rdquo; it seems pretty safe to call the ebook a failure. Perhaps its the fault of the DRM efforts to overprotect text which limited accessibility, and perhaps it\u0026rsquo;s the fault of the hardware developers to produce an affordable, open device.","title":"Hyper(digital)book Futures"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s Thursday, and it looks like I\u0026rsquo;m back with another tech-related whine.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a quicksilver user, and I have to say that I adore this program more than just about any other on my computer, and it\u0026rsquo;s one of the reasons why I\u0026rsquo;m always so insistent about using my computer: it\u0026rsquo;s downright unsettling to use a computer that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have QS on it.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s quicksilver? It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty little application launcher that lets you interact with your computer via text inputs. Do a google search and you\u0026rsquo;ll learn way more than I could really hope to tell you here. Anyway it\u0026rsquo;s awesome, and it\u0026rsquo;s free. If you use a mac, get it now. If you don\u0026rsquo;t there are some things that are close in some of the functionality, but the truth is that so much of what makes QS so good, is the fact that it draws on all kinds of unity that already exists in the mac, and makes all that connectedness appear at your finger tips without having to futz through menus and folders and so forth.\nSo this got me thinking: modern computing (ie. the last 20 years) has been centered around the GUI (graphical user interface) that represents file structures via pretty pictures. So most people are used to interacting with their computers via pictures and what not. (You UNIX nerds, be quiet!) And this is really good for letting people intuitively figure out how to make a computer work. It\u0026rsquo;s the reason that most people don\u0026rsquo;t have a real problem moving between Macs and PCs these days. The down side: it\u0026rsquo;s really fracking slow for a good deal of what we do.\nThere are a couple other pieces of this mind puzzle that I really don\u0026rsquo;t remember the source for, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry for that, but they added to the mileux of this whine.\nThe first is that I saw an article that noted how in the hands of a skilled user the address bar of Firefox can function like a rather smart command line: If you type in a collection of words, depending on your settings Firefox will take you to the first google search result (which is often what you wanted) or it will take you to the google search result for those terms. You can augment this by adding extra codes in the settings, so that prefacing a string of terms/search operators with a key (like wiki for wikipedia) will perform a certain kind of search. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty nifty, and to be honest I think it was an article in a blog that I glazed over because I\u0026rsquo;m not using firefox these days (it\u0026rsquo;s all about Camino for me!)\nThe second thought was that someone mentioned, again in a blog or podcast, that if you watch \u0026ldquo;power\u0026rdquo; users even if they\u0026rsquo;re not working in a command line environment don\u0026rsquo;t tend to use the mouse very much. It\u0026rsquo;s inefficient, it takes too long, it can be hard on your wrists, and it\u0026rsquo;s a lot easier to hit control/comannd+C, control/comand+V to copy and paste than it is to interact with the edit menu. The truth is that most of the commonly used features have associated commands and by just studying this, you can use the mouse a lot less frequently.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want to give up all GUI features, and go back to olde school command lines, mind you, as there are some things that just work better with mouse actions: Web browsing. Document Preparation. Graphics manipulation. Sound Editing (sometimes). And so forth. But file manipulation? Task switching? Text editing? Command lines are way better for that.\nDo I have a solution? Of course not. I think something a lot like quicksilver but that had the permanency of the menu-bar in OS X would be ideal1. I think the real challenge though is finding a way to make this kind of human-computer interaction seem as intuitive as pointing and clicking. I think with some smart technology it could be done.\ndo you have a whine about technology? send it in or leave a comment. I\u0026rsquo;ve written this for two weeks in a row, and I didn\u0026rsquo;t quite intend this to be another series, so if you like it, it might be up to you to continue\u0026hellip;\nbest, tycho\nI mean what I seem to be calling for is a re-imagination of computer interface, and I think the window paradigm is something that might need rethinking, as part of this process. Because if we have a list of running/active windows/programs/applications that is easily accessible from some sort of text input, do we really need to have such a confusing graphical representation of the fact that our computers are doing all of these things at the same time? Arguably not. Just a thought.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/whining-about-command-lines/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s Thursday, and it looks like I\u0026rsquo;m back with another tech-related whine.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a quicksilver user, and I have to say that I adore this program more than just about any other on my computer, and it\u0026rsquo;s one of the reasons why I\u0026rsquo;m always so insistent about using my computer: it\u0026rsquo;s downright unsettling to use a computer that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have QS on it.\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s quicksilver? It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty little application launcher that lets you interact with your computer via text inputs. Do a google search and you\u0026rsquo;ll learn way more than I could really hope to tell you here. Anyway it\u0026rsquo;s awesome, and it\u0026rsquo;s free. If you use a mac, get it now. If you don\u0026rsquo;t there are some things that are close in some of the functionality, but the truth is that so much of what makes QS so good, is the fact that it draws on all kinds of unity that already exists in the mac, and makes all that connectedness appear at your finger tips without having to futz through menus and folders and so forth.","title":"Whining about Command Lines"},{"content":"So now that you know how to knit neck openings, this time I\u0026rsquo;m going to talk about a few neck and collar related tricks and ideas that I\u0026rsquo;ve come across in my knitting that you might find inspiring.\nNorwegian Neck Styles So after all that talk about how many stitches to set aside, and where, not to mention the rate of decreases. There\u0026rsquo;s another option. Knit straight to shoulders, and ignore any kind of shaping. Using tailor\u0026rsquo;s chalk (or some kind of water soluble marker) and sketch out the shape and placement of the neck opening on your sweater. Using a flexible tension and very small stitches. stitch two rows around this opening. Cut on the inside of the neck portion, and there\u0026rsquo;s you\u0026rsquo;re opening. This requires little preparation or forethought, and you can directly control the shape of the neck. On the downside, once it\u0026rsquo;s done, it\u0026rsquo;s done.\nMy classification of this method as \u0026ldquo;Norwegian\u0026rdquo; is perhaps not entirely accurate. I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a number of knitting techniques (including a really nifty purling method) classified as \u0026ldquo;Norwegian,\u0026rdquo; when in fact there is little evidence (to my mind) that these techniques are in any way representative of Norwegian methods. One thing\u0026rsquo;s for sure, patterns for contemporary Norwegian knitting tend to involve steeks that are knitted with no preparation (as they are in the \u0026ldquo;Fair Isle\u0026rdquo; style,) as this technique is similar, I suppose the classification is fair. I should also point out the obvious, given that it requires a sewing machine, there\u0026rsquo;s a very limited extent to which we can consider this \u0026ldquo;traditional,\u0026rdquo; but that\u0026rsquo;s really just a minor quibble.\nCollars: The Scarf Principal Once you have a neck opening, no matter how you obtained it, you still have to knit some kind of collar. The basic specification for knitting a collar is that you pick up stitches around the neck opening, and then knit some sort of border/hem stitch around t he opening for a little while and then bind off. Frequently borders/hems stitches are some variety of ribbing, but other possibilities include turned hems, seed/moss stitch, rolled collars, garter stitch, and just about anything that mixes knit and purl stitches. It\u0026rsquo;s all up to you, and its important to find something that matches the spirt of your garment.\nThe scarf principal, is quite simply that while you need a little bit of a collar, you don\u0026rsquo;t need much. If you\u0026rsquo;re neck is cold, you can always wear a scarf, but if you\u0026rsquo;re necks too warm it\u0026rsquo;s sometimes too hard to take off a sweater. Thus I knit collars, pretty much without variation, that are an inch and a half, and since I\u0026rsquo;ve started doing this I\u0026rsquo;ve found my self much more happy with the way sweaters fit. Just a friendly warning to be mindful.\nHard Collar Lessons These are fairly straightforward I suspect, because I think collars are such a crucial part of a sweater, here are my general concerns regarding collars:\nI always err a little bit on the side of a little too big, rather than a little too small. Indeed this is a good rule of thumb for sweater knitting in general. Shorter is better than taller, and this can often be the difference between a sweater that\u0026rsquo;s just right, and a sweater that\u0026rsquo;s too itchy/warm/uncomforatable. Consider what kind of shirt you plan on wearing under a sweater when you\u0026rsquo;re knitting the collar. It matters. Make sure the collar is stretchy enough so that your head can fit, but the last thing you want is probably flaring. Exercise extreme caution when sewing down hemmed collars. Always make sure the collar is centered. I\u0026rsquo;m, of course, welcome to additional collar related tips and tricks.\nThree Needle Bindoffs The three needle bind-off is one of those brilliant pieces of knitting genius that I think most knitters should know about. Rather than binding off, and then sewing two pieces of knitting together, this procedure allows you to join and bind off two pieces of knitting all in one fluid motion. To create an invisible seem turn the work inside out and holding the live stitches that you want to bind together parallel to each-other, take a third needle and knit one stitch from front needle together with one stitch from the back needle, and then repeat this, and bind off the stitches you have on the third needle as you go. Here are some better instructions with pictures.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the cool part. If you knit in the round, and do back neck shaping, and have steeks, you can bind off using the 3 needle method blithely across the back of the sweater, lo and behold, it all comes out even, and you\u0026rsquo;re left with a single neck steek to cut. This is the kind of thing that makes me feel smart about my knitting.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all I have for you know. Stay tuned, and please feel free to leave comments with your own musings on collars. I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear them.\nCheers, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-beyond-the-neck/","summary":"So now that you know how to knit neck openings, this time I\u0026rsquo;m going to talk about a few neck and collar related tricks and ideas that I\u0026rsquo;ve come across in my knitting that you might find inspiring.\nNorwegian Neck Styles So after all that talk about how many stitches to set aside, and where, not to mention the rate of decreases. There\u0026rsquo;s another option. Knit straight to shoulders, and ignore any kind of shaping. Using tailor\u0026rsquo;s chalk (or some kind of water soluble marker) and sketch out the shape and placement of the neck opening on your sweater. Using a flexible tension and very small stitches. stitch two rows around this opening. Cut on the inside of the neck portion, and there\u0026rsquo;s you\u0026rsquo;re opening. This requires little preparation or forethought, and you can directly control the shape of the neck. On the downside, once it\u0026rsquo;s done, it\u0026rsquo;s done.\nMy classification of this method as \u0026ldquo;Norwegian\u0026rdquo; is perhaps not entirely accurate.","title":"Knitting Beyond the Neck"},{"content":"Hello everyone!\nI hope this week finds you well. It\u0026rsquo;s been a slow week in the Station Keeping world. I did send out an email to a list of possible contributers, but the replies are still trickling in. I have to keep up this correspondence, and with luck we\u0026rsquo;ll get a team (more) established soon. That continues to be my project for the near future.\nThe other project that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on this week is to sketch out and develop the story. I\u0026rsquo;ve sketched out a few more installments, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with those installments, although I have yet to put them on the wiki. I think I have enough of that done by now, so as I work on building the team, I\u0026rsquo;m going to see if I can write an installment, so that I have an example (and a begining!) for how these might work out. The first two installments, I know I\u0026rsquo;m going to write myself so those will be on my list, after that they\u0026rsquo;re all up for grabs.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the parallels between what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to accomplish, and something that we\u0026rsquo;re more familiar with, such as television, or the newspaper serial. They\u0026rsquo;re both imperfect, but I think we can understand what I\u0026rsquo;m aiming for more clearly by thinking about both of these models.\nTelevision shows are generally written by a group of writers, and they tell a single story in multiple parts. They have \u0026ldquo;seasons\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;series\u0026rdquo; (depending on where you are in the english speaking world) and individual installments have varying levels of interconnectivity with each other. They are also performances, produced like films, written as scripts, and require substantial budgets. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly productive to comment on the shift from \u0026ldquo;traditional\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;reality\u0026rdquo; television models, but it seems like the reality show very much affects the way that we think about story telling in television--but that\u0026rsquo;s beside the point. Lets try to think about a \u0026ldquo;traditional\u0026rdquo; drama/science fiction television show.\nThe other form that we\u0026rsquo;re working from is a newspaper serial. To be honest, these are a format that I can only imagine. Mostly. I keep thinking of Armisted Maupin\u0026rsquo;s `Tales of the City \u0026lt;http://www.amazon.com/Tales-City-Novel-Armistead-Maupin/dp/0061358304/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3/102-6534450-1034522?ie=UTF8\u0026amp;s=books\u0026amp;qid=1176668201\u0026amp;sr=8-3\u0026gt;`_, which were published daily--which is way more than I can ever imagine, although he was getting paid in a way that I can only imagine. Anyway, Maupin published a column of about 800 words daily that explored the lives and situations of characters living in the city (San Francisco). I loved the books that were produced of the collected columns, and I think they\u0026rsquo;ve been a great influence on me. The feeling I got from reading it as a book was not the sense of a story in the same way, because each \u0026ldquo;chapter\u0026rdquo; was largely self contained--a scene or two, a little corner of a characters life, a spot of action--but there was definitely a sense of a larger story, but I enjoyed how the story functioned under these conditions.\nI think that both of these forms, while not ideal, provide some remarkably powerful forms that Station Keeping might well benefit from. I also feel that with the idealization of the \u0026ldquo;novel\u0026rdquo; form for fiction writing, providing with another structure and alternative means of story telling is always a worthwhile project. While I think there are ways that SK, is like neither of these previous forms, there are ways that SK could be a lot like both the television show and the newspaper serial, and I think both kinds of story telling have influenced the way that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of SK right now. I also hope that you could contribute to the way that SK is actualized.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be back in a week with more thoughts and updates as things progress. I look forward to hearing from you.\nBest, tycho\nps. After I wrote this, but before I was able to get it posted, I had a conversation with one of the other writers about some of the plot development issues, and I thought it was really productive, so I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen to post in our writers group, and I\u0026rsquo;ll try and get it up on the wiki in a little while.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-ongoing-care-and-maintenance-of-your-new-space-station/","summary":"Hello everyone!\nI hope this week finds you well. It\u0026rsquo;s been a slow week in the Station Keeping world. I did send out an email to a list of possible contributers, but the replies are still trickling in. I have to keep up this correspondence, and with luck we\u0026rsquo;ll get a team (more) established soon. That continues to be my project for the near future.\nThe other project that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on this week is to sketch out and develop the story. I\u0026rsquo;ve sketched out a few more installments, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with those installments, although I have yet to put them on the wiki. I think I have enough of that done by now, so as I work on building the team, I\u0026rsquo;m going to see if I can write an installment, so that I have an example (and a begining!) for how these might work out. The first two installments, I know I\u0026rsquo;m going to write myself so those will be on my list, after that they\u0026rsquo;re all up for grabs.","title":"The Ongoing Care and Maintenance of Your New Space Station"},{"content":"How do you publish hypertext? Get a website and an FTP client. Simple questions beget simple answers after all.\nWhile I think that simplicity should rule supperme I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking through a bunch of hypertext fiction projects on the internet (for an upcoming list for the series) and I can see why this media hasn\u0026rsquo;t taken off in the way that we might have expected: most hypertext fiction looks dated from a design perspective, and although I think the writing is often quite good it\u0026rsquo;s too gimmicky, which impedes the reading experience. At some point we\u0026rsquo;ll have to make room for a rant about genre\u0026rsquo;s and literary experimentalism, but for now I\u0026rsquo;ll stick to two themes that are really important to the way I might think about hypertext publishing. The first is a separation of form and content (a la css and xml), and the second has to do with the way that the publishing model works in a digital age.\nForm and Content One of the biggest problems with early web ventures, let call it Web .5 (before blogs) and Web 1.0 (after blogs but until lets say, the advent of gmail; my demarkations are my own and fairly arbitrary), was the way that designs were hard coded into the same pages that held the content. While arguments can be made regarding authorial control, the problem with design/content merging is standardization. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to update a website/hypertext product\u0026rsquo;s presentation (or content) when you have to sift through a lot of irrelevant content, in every page in the document for every edit. With the advent of dynamic content (SSI/shtml theoretically, but really PHP), and CSS (style sheets,) this process is much simplified and centralized. Basically style sheets allow you to, in a single place, define a color for XYZ objects rather than defining the color of every XYZ object as red, every time. Dynamic page generation requires the server to do a little work, but basically allow the user to rather than quote something, reference another file (what, I think Theodor Holm Nelson refers to as transculsuion). Again these techniques allow us to produce hypertext that easier to edit, adapt to new settings, and manage.\nThese tools much more standard these days than they were even 4 years ago, and make it posssible, I hope to allow hypertext products to endure longer-term, and make it possible for these texts to develop and change, with out subjecting their authors to incredible daunting revamping processes. Why does this matter for publishers? It seems that hypertext displays are hindered by unclear design standards or convention. We know how to read books, we don\u0026rsquo;t have the same sort of intitutive backgrounds for hypertext, and this is something that needs to be addressed in some sort of meaningful way. Also, some sort of standardized design, would, I hope allow a hypertext to be published not just on your website, but in a number of different hypertext environments, like portable devices, kiosk/console setups, multiple websites, and as offline bundles, which would be roughly analogous to paperback, hardback, (and etc.) editions in the dead tree world.\nPublishers without Presses In a lot of ways I don\u0026rsquo;t think that drawing analogies between new and old media is the most productive method in the world. For instance, while blogs are a lot like news paper columns (particularly at TealArt), there\u0026rsquo;s a way in which a blog is nothing like a newspaper column. The same with pod-casts and radio. Similar in some basic fundamental ways (audio, format), but compleatly different in terms of other features like distribution, monitization models, and production frameworks. So having said that, I\u0026rsquo;d like to think about the role of the \u0026ldquo;publisher\u0026rdquo; in the hypertext context.\nPublishers, by my eye perform a number of important roles: they undertake some of the (financial) risk of publication, they organize editorial production (copy editing, technical editing, layout/typsetting, etc.), they organize the promotion and advertising, and they help grant legitimacy.\nThese are all things that an aspiring creator/writer can of course do, and we\u0026rsquo;ve seen all sorts of levels of self-publishing from Thomas Paine, to Edgar Rice Burrows, to the hordes of \u0026lsquo;Zine makers, to god only knows. The problem with this is that there are only so many hours in the day and you can spend your time publishing your books or writing them. Also, its incredibly difficult to grant yourself legitimacy (though some self-published authors can pull it off, they generally have a name for themselves through other means) and promotion is hard to maintain on the same level.\nSo while self-publishing has become much easier, particularly in digital/hypertext formats, some sort of publisher model, might still be really beneficial. I might tend toward a more self-publishing co-op model, but it\u0026rsquo;s along the same lines.\nIn order for hypertext to be successful, it needs to both be readable, and read, and while authors/creators have some measure over the latter, doing something to replace/fill the publishers role, in this \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; media, is something that I think would probably help promote consumption and consumability.\n\u0026rsquo;till next time, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/publishing-hyperdigitaltext/","summary":"How do you publish hypertext? Get a website and an FTP client. Simple questions beget simple answers after all.\nWhile I think that simplicity should rule supperme I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking through a bunch of hypertext fiction projects on the internet (for an upcoming list for the series) and I can see why this media hasn\u0026rsquo;t taken off in the way that we might have expected: most hypertext fiction looks dated from a design perspective, and although I think the writing is often quite good it\u0026rsquo;s too gimmicky, which impedes the reading experience. At some point we\u0026rsquo;ll have to make room for a rant about genre\u0026rsquo;s and literary experimentalism, but for now I\u0026rsquo;ll stick to two themes that are really important to the way I might think about hypertext publishing. The first is a separation of form and content (a la css and xml), and the second has to do with the way that the publishing model works in a digital age.","title":"Publishing Hyper(digital)text"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve thought for a while, that we should try and have some level of geek content on TealArt, because while I\u0026rsquo;m no where near as articulate as I\u0026rsquo;d like to be and there are a lot of geek things that I either don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue or care very much about. In that direction, while I hope that we have a series of geek wines at TealArt, it is my hope that I\u0026rsquo;m not the one writing them. I had time today, and what you read below is just a short snippet of a train of thought. Enjoy, and as always, if you have a whine that you\u0026rsquo;d like to share, just get in touch!\nI have a confession to make: I thought about trying GTD again. With the release of iGTD, which I think is superb software and really has all the features that anyone would want in a productivity app, I was tempted to give the whole bandwagon another spin. Thankfully it was short lived. I have to say that this program is mighty pretty, but my attempt fell flat really quickly: I still don\u0026rsquo;t have contexts, and most of the \u0026ldquo;brain dump\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;processing\u0026rdquo; methods that Allen pontificates about I basically already do.\nMy latest productivity arrangement is to have a working text file that\u0026rsquo;s hooked up to a quicksilver trigger and to maintain a to-do list there, and then to do more project-level planning in the little black book that I carry around with me. I also use the book to take notes in meetings and other situations where it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense to pull the computer out of my bag.\nThis is the thing about being a one-computer, power-mobile computer user: the computer is (basically) always with you, and (basically) everything you do is on the computer. There exceptions, like the paper-books I read, but they also tend to live in my book-bag. I clearly can\u0026rsquo;t keep a (digital or paper) library with me, but in day to day practice, it works pretty well.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve occasionally thought about adding another computer to the workflow, because I don\u0026rsquo;t think that in a day to day sort of setting I need any more power or space, but there are a number of (growing) \u0026ldquo;special\u0026rdquo; projects that I could benefit from a little extra push. Video re-encoding, iTunes synching, data analysis, image editing, and document creation (so like formating papers and what not). Everything else I do is in a collection of plain standard format files, which neither take up that much room or use processing power.\nBecause I really am only using one computer, though, it means that I can keep everything working on this computer without needing to worry about synching it to anything, because its always already there. While this means that taking part in the nifty web 2.0 is pointless because I\u0026rsquo;m more likely to be without a connection to the internet than I am to be without this computer, it works for me.\nSo GTD remains a bust, and I like the mobility option\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, I think that\u0026rsquo;s enough for today. I\u0026rsquo;m certainly feeling better, I hope that you are too. Be in touch!\n--tycho 12 April 2007 Wisconsin\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/productivity-and-workflow-whines/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve thought for a while, that we should try and have some level of geek content on TealArt, because while I\u0026rsquo;m no where near as articulate as I\u0026rsquo;d like to be and there are a lot of geek things that I either don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue or care very much about. In that direction, while I hope that we have a series of geek wines at TealArt, it is my hope that I\u0026rsquo;m not the one writing them. I had time today, and what you read below is just a short snippet of a train of thought. Enjoy, and as always, if you have a whine that you\u0026rsquo;d like to share, just get in touch!\nI have a confession to make: I thought about trying GTD again. With the release of iGTD, which I think is superb software and really has all the features that anyone would want in a productivity app, I was tempted to give the whole bandwagon another spin.","title":"Productivity and Workflow Whines"},{"content":"The neckline in a sweater is the location of one of my perpetual anxieties about knitting. I suppose this could be resolved to knitting objects that don\u0026rsquo;t have necks, like socks, or mittens, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that would be incredibly healthy, and besides, whats knitting without a little challenge. The one nice thing about neck lines, is that there are a handful of different approaches, and once you find a neck line that you like, it\u0026rsquo;s a fairly short order to transplant this neckline from one garment to another. You\u0026rsquo;ll probably still need to learn a few different kinds of collars/necklines but then you\u0026rsquo;re basically set. In this part of our series, I\u0026rsquo;ll cover three basic neck lines that are among my favorites, and (in a special bonus part) a few of the hard lessons that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned from knitting sweaters.\nCollar Basics We\u0026rsquo;ll assume for a moment that these collars will be constructed in the round around steeks, and thus descriptions of neck shaping will assume that the back and both sides of the front (of the neck) will be shaped at the same time. If you don\u0026rsquo;t want use steeks, it should be easy to translate these directions to \u0026ldquo;flat knitting.\nThe basic principal of neck opening design is that, as you near the shoulders of your sweater, you put a percentage of stitches in the middle of the front of the sweater on hold and then knit around decreasing on either side of the opening at some speed to shape the neck opening. The length of the shaping, the number of stitches placed on hold, and rate of decreases control the shape of the neck line. Here are some basics:\nV-Neck This one\u0026rsquo;s simple. If the front of your sweater has an odd number, put the middle stitch on a thread, and cast on for the steek (conversely if the number of stitches is even, just cast on steek at the middle of the front.) Decrease at a regular rate until the end of the shoulders. Generally neck openings represent a touch more than one third of the total diameter of the body, and in a V-Neck the decreases need to be calculated such that the proper number of stitches can be decreased on each side of the steek/neck or opening at a regular interval over in the length of the neck opening.\nI suspect that a short, but standard v-neck is likely to take about 2/5ths (call it 4 inches for most adults) of the length of the yoke section (that is, the top of the sweater that the sleeves attach to). But V-necks can be much deeper as well. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of versatility in this.\nCrew Neck What I think of as a crew neck, is just a basic \u0026ldquo;T-shirt\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;rounded\u0026rdquo; neck opening. I think I picked up my version by backwards engineering and modifying a pattern I knit from a rather famous Scottish designer. I use this or derivations on this formula for almost all of my sweaters these days:\nSet aside (on a holder) the middle 1/6th of the total number of stitches on the front of the sweater 3 inches from the shoulders (or 2/3s of the way to the end of the sweater). Decrease one stitch on either side of the steek/opening every round for an inch and a half. Then, decrease one stitch on either side of the opening/steek every other round for the remaining inch and a half. All things being equal, you should, have decrased away a few more than 1/3rd of the stitches between the stitches on the holder and the stitch that you decreased. You may have to slow the decreases a few rounds earlier, or decrease quickly for an extra row or two, depending on gauge, but this generally works.\n\u0026ldquo;Sport\u0026rdquo; Neck My favorite neck, by far, is what I call a sport neck. This isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly traditional, but I find it flattering, and it\u0026rsquo;s not entirely inconstant with some traditions. This neck is just like a crew neck, except the front of the yoke is slit open and plackets are knitted on each side of the opening. The process is quite simple, though there are variations that you can explore.\nMy initial exploration involved setting aside the 1/6th 3.5-4 inches earlier than I would have other wise, and then knitting around plainly until the crew neck would have usually started, and then shaping the crew neck as if all was \u0026ldquo;normal.\u0026rdquo; When I went to knit the neck, I would knit plackets perpendicular to the \u0026ldquo;straight side of the neck opening, and then knitted the collar with rounded corners on either side of the opening.\nMore recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to only setting aside a few stitches at the base of the neck, and the setting aside the \u0026ldquo;normal number of crew neck stitches at the normal time. In this case, I knit the collar normally, and knit a short hem along the sides of the \u0026ldquo;open neck,\u0026rdquo; creating more square corners.\nEither option works fine, and is quite fetching. There are of course other possibilities and variations on this style of neck.\nThe Back of the Neck Until this point I\u0026rsquo;ve been mum as to what happens on the back of the neck. It\u0026rsquo;s perfectly acceptable to do absolutely nothing. and simply set aside a number equivalent to the number of stitches you decreased/set aside at the front in the middle of the back when you bind off (so that the shoulders line up.) I\u0026rsquo;ve more recently taken to doing some back of the neck shaping, this is more simple than it sounds:\nAbout an inch and a half away from the shoulders, set aside the number of stitches that you\u0026rsquo;ve decreased from the front at this point (this is why I like to work in the round) on a thread at the back of the neck. For the remaining portion of the sweater, decrease on either side of the back neck steek/opening at the same rate that you are decreasing from the front. This works with every kind of neck that I can think of, and is one of those things that gives a sweater an extra little edge.\nBut wait there\u0026rsquo;s more I\u0026rsquo;m sure you still want to hear about cool neck shaping tricks, knitting collars on these neck openings and more. I think that I\u0026rsquo;ve given you all enough to chew on for a while. I\u0026rsquo;ll be back in a few days for a bonus episode in this series to cover more collar related issues.\nUntil then, be warm and I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all soon.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-the-neck/","summary":"The neckline in a sweater is the location of one of my perpetual anxieties about knitting. I suppose this could be resolved to knitting objects that don\u0026rsquo;t have necks, like socks, or mittens, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that would be incredibly healthy, and besides, whats knitting without a little challenge. The one nice thing about neck lines, is that there are a handful of different approaches, and once you find a neck line that you like, it\u0026rsquo;s a fairly short order to transplant this neckline from one garment to another. You\u0026rsquo;ll probably still need to learn a few different kinds of collars/necklines but then you\u0026rsquo;re basically set. In this part of our series, I\u0026rsquo;ll cover three basic neck lines that are among my favorites, and (in a special bonus part) a few of the hard lessons that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned from knitting sweaters.\nCollar Basics We\u0026rsquo;ll assume for a moment that these collars will be constructed in the round around steeks, and thus descriptions of neck shaping will assume that the back and both sides of the front (of the neck) will be shaped at the same time.","title":"Knitting the Neck"},{"content":"Note: I tried to pre-post this last night, but it does seem to have failed. Alas. Here\u0026rsquo;s something that I hope will interest you. Tell me what you think!\nOne of the things I started doing during our unexpected hiatus, was to think about what was important to me about TealArt, and what I was most interested in doing in the future on the site. Server \u0026ldquo;mishaps\u0026rdquo; can do that to a fellow.\nI think if the server had fouled up a year ago or even as many as six months ago, I would have just called it quits: the site wasn\u0026rsquo;t that active, I didn\u0026rsquo;t have plans/dreams for the future of the site, and with the addiction of LiveJournal and other semi-blogging outlets, I might have felt that it just wasn\u0026rsquo;t worth the effort. However, because it happened this year, I was faced with a very different feeling. I had ongoing projects that depended on TealArt, the Tumble-log and twitter was important to me, and I had a dream of a rather new TealArt project that I was excited about.\nThat project, called Station Keeping, is located in it\u0026rsquo;s own special corner of TealArt, but as always the posts will be part of the main TealArt blog. You can read more about Station Keeping on the site or on the accompanying Writer\u0026rsquo;s Wiki of course, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to tell you a bit about what I hope SK will become.\nStation Keeping is an exploration of a couple of ideas and themes. It is a series much like the Hyper(digital)text Series, or the Teaching/Learning Knitting Series, but unlike these projects, it\u0026rsquo;s a work of fiction. The aim is not to discuss an issue of mild personal interest, but to tell a story. SK is also to be written collaboratively: while the hope is to have a unified and ongoing story--which I suspect we will, thanks to the editorial process--installments and episodes will be written by members of a writing team who will be responsible for the content and management of the series. I will participate, certainly, and even direct/cordinate for a while, until the writing team/community gets a sense of itself, but I envision the writing and the reading of this project as a community effort.\nIn terms of the story, SK is Science Fiction. No matter how much I run away from it, I find my self perpetually enthralled by the possibilities of the genre. One of my guides for TealArt is that it must be fun to work on, and I see no reason to fight the genre I love so much. Not surprisingly, Station Keeping is set on a brand new space station called Hanm Centre in the distant future, in orbit of a colony world not surprisingly known as \u0026ldquo;Hanm.\u0026rdquo; The station is the focal point of a lot of geo-political (spatial-political?) debate about the future of Humans\u0026rsquo; organization and residence in the galaxy, but mostly it\u0026rsquo;s just a port of call, a job, and a home to an eclectic group of folk. There are no aliens, ghosts, and humans of the future haven\u0026rsquo;t quite managed to \u0026ldquo;break\u0026rdquo; relativity. Station Keeping is in a lot of ways a fluffy space opera, but I would submit that fluffy space operas are fun, engaging, and fascinating: after all TealArt is supposed to be fun and engaging, so it all works out.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;m busy finishing up school for this semester, graduating, getting ready for grad school next year, and preparing to apply again next year; to mention nothing of the other TealArt projects that I\u0026rsquo;m already working on. Station Keeping won\u0026rsquo;t start it\u0026rsquo;s regular run for a few weeks, and possibly a month or so. So go ahead, you can call it vapor blogging, but in the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;d like to use Monday mornings (the time when I expect we\u0026rsquo;ll post SK installments, once we start), to post short updates about our progress in development, and our process. Once SK starts for real, the meta will become a more occasional feature, but I hope that you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy this discussion.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re interested in learning more about this project, I\u0026rsquo;d enjoy hearing from you, otherwise I hope you enjoy this discussion and the story/stories once it debuts.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/what-is-station-keeping-2/","summary":"Note: I tried to pre-post this last night, but it does seem to have failed. Alas. Here\u0026rsquo;s something that I hope will interest you. Tell me what you think!\nOne of the things I started doing during our unexpected hiatus, was to think about what was important to me about TealArt, and what I was most interested in doing in the future on the site. Server \u0026ldquo;mishaps\u0026rdquo; can do that to a fellow.\nI think if the server had fouled up a year ago or even as many as six months ago, I would have just called it quits: the site wasn\u0026rsquo;t that active, I didn\u0026rsquo;t have plans/dreams for the future of the site, and with the addiction of LiveJournal and other semi-blogging outlets, I might have felt that it just wasn\u0026rsquo;t worth the effort. However, because it happened this year, I was faced with a very different feeling. I had ongoing projects that depended on TealArt, the Tumble-log and twitter was important to me, and I had a dream of a rather new TealArt project that I was excited about.","title":"What is Station Keeping?"},{"content":"I realized that my schpeal last time on reading hypertext sounded more like a complaint than an endorsement of a way of writing, but I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to come off like that. While I think it\u0026rsquo;s true that the advancement of technology: better portable text display, better design practices and standards, better fonts, better industry adoption, and so forth, would help digital text, I don\u0026rsquo;t don\u0026rsquo;t think we can blame it all on the technology.\nI should also say, as a disclaimer that I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in the artistic implications of hypertext. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that they aren\u0026rsquo;t there, more that, I don\u0026rsquo;t have any particular expertise or experience aside from, of course, the ongoing experiment of TealArt.com, and my own experience as a writer in several different contexts. Actually I think it\u0026rsquo;s more complicated than that, but I think that would need to be unpacked a bit more in a different context. What drew me to this topic, is more the prospect of paperless publishing and communicating, in concern with discussions about OpenAccess, a nagging interest in ergonomics, and not \u0026ldquo;oh cool, look at this new way to be creative.\u0026rdquo; Just so you know.\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about it, the discussion of \u0026ldquo;writing\u0026rdquo; or producing hypertext is so very closely tied to the publishing of digital, and the discussion is further muddied by\nOne of the things that people like a great deal about dead tree versions is the the fixty of type on a page. I\u0026rsquo;ve learned to remember passages in books by location on the page, and while the ability to search ameliorates this slightly, this cognitive ability is something that I think hypertexters would be wise to work with. While there are ways to break up text: images, column(s) and width, generally I suspect that people will engage the most with your text if they can absorb it in chunks that are about 500-750 words. This works out to be 3-4 good paragraphs, and all the usual edicts and suggestions regarding white-space remain relevant.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also concerned with the issue of citation digital text. Not only is it hard to give precise citations for digital text, but footnotes and what not are equally difficult to produce in an authentic and appropriate format. I think we might be inclined to trace this at least in part to the development of the web (and more importantly) mark up languages (HTML/XML/etc) by people in the sciences where close textual referencing is not particularly common. Amongst bloggers, citation is achieved through linking, often to wikipedia (another debate for another day), and while this model increases the interconnectivity of the \u0026lsquo;blog community, but forces curious readers to jump through more hoops than perhaps is necessary, and is downright inconvenient if you\u0026rsquo;re citing/linking to a longer page. I suspect the next version of Markdown, will have some sort of allowance for footnotes, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s still a lot of room to think about how the practice of citing others\u0026rsquo; work gets translated into digital formats. I like the MultiMarkdown, solution, but have ended up using the PHP Markdown Extra Format and some sort of XML format probably the solution. I\u0026rsquo;m starting to realize that so many of my problems could be solved with a much greater larger understanding of XML and some basic Perl or Python abilities.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s a diversion, and I\u0026rsquo;ll bring us back around to the question of the week: How do we, as digital text creators, produce text (words etc.) that \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; best digitally. I definitely think manageable chunks are the way to go, and the weblog framework definitely pushes us towards a natural serialization, but thats as much cultural as anything. My second series of thoughts relates to an idea of genres. The kinds of things that seem to be the most succesful in digital formats are non-fiction things (manuals, essays on blogs, scientific/academic articles, correspondence etc.) and even though I think blogs might lend themselves particularly well to fiction, there isn\u0026rsquo;t a large community that I\u0026rsquo;m aware of, though I\u0026rsquo;d love to be corrected. I think length plays a role here, as does the general reticence to \u0026ldquo;curl up with a computer\u0026rdquo; for pleasure reading, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s something larger here. Part of it is without a doubt the fact that there\u0026rsquo;s something about the way we think of novels (ie. the structure and story telling technique) that is very tied to the book, and I also think that in a way the boundary between truth and fiction is somewhat blurry online, because of the way we tend to represent ourselves. Not that the same issues aren\u0026rsquo;t present in non-digital formats, but that we\u0026rsquo;re more sensitive to them in digital formats.\nI hope this these fairly random thoughts can provide some inspiration. I\u0026rsquo;d like to be more coherent, and more focused with regards to some of the other subjects on my list to cover. I know that there are folks out there reading this, and I also know that I\u0026rsquo;m just a guy with a domain, and an overactive sense of opinion, so I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear what you think about these ideas/subjects.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-and-producing-hyperdigitaltext/","summary":"I realized that my schpeal last time on reading hypertext sounded more like a complaint than an endorsement of a way of writing, but I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to come off like that. While I think it\u0026rsquo;s true that the advancement of technology: better portable text display, better design practices and standards, better fonts, better industry adoption, and so forth, would help digital text, I don\u0026rsquo;t don\u0026rsquo;t think we can blame it all on the technology.\nI should also say, as a disclaimer that I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly interested in the artistic implications of hypertext. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that they aren\u0026rsquo;t there, more that, I don\u0026rsquo;t have any particular expertise or experience aside from, of course, the ongoing experiment of TealArt.com, and my own experience as a writer in several different contexts. Actually I think it\u0026rsquo;s more complicated than that, but I think that would need to be unpacked a bit more in a different context.","title":"Writing and Producing Hyper(digital)text"},{"content":"Note: Sorry for the Hiatus: this entry is from my stash (imagine that a stash of weblog entries!) I\u0026rsquo;ll be back on Friday with a Hypertext entry, and hopefully some more content as well. Enjoy--ty\nI think that knitted things, above just about any other quality, should be wearable. We should want to wear knitted things, not simply because they are products of our own handy-craft, or an object that our loved ones made for us, but because they are comfortable, because they fit, because they are flattering, and of course because knitted garments are a product of our (and our loved ones\u0026rsquo;) handycraft. Knitting can be all of these things, and I think because of their history as working garments, knitting in traditional styles is particularly able to satisfy all of these concerns. For me, the issue of \u0026ldquo;wearability,\u0026rdquo; of a garment is often decided by features in a number of key locations. In list form they are:\nSleeve length: sleeves that are even a smudge too short irritate me. It\u0026rsquo;s harder to make a sleeve too long than it to make it too short. As a corollary to this, it\u0026rsquo;s also important that sleeves not be too narrow: a sleeve that can\u0026rsquo;t comfortably accommodate a layer or two can be problematic. Collar: I\u0026rsquo;ll touch on this more in another issue, but I find that collars that are too tall or that fit too closely, make sweaters feel too warm, and/or itchy, and are thus to be avoided. In fact I \u0026ldquo;developed\u0026rdquo; an open collar or placated collar (I\u0026rsquo;ve seen them called \u0026ldquo;Henley necked\u0026rdquo; as well) style that helps alleviate this issue. Riding up in the back: It\u0026rsquo;s a little known fact that your back is slightly narrower and slightly longer than your front. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those quirks of how we are shaped. To compensate, for this, when ever possible I think it\u0026rsquo;s useful to make the back of a sweater slightly longer than the front. Typically I do this with short-rows, but there are other possible methods. Gussets: These are little diamonds that you can insert in your sweater/knitting to create a little extra room to accommodate anatomical features. Most people know about gussets from knitting socks, where gussets are frequently added to help accommodate the ankle/heel. Additionally, I find gussets greatly increase the wearability of a sweater when they\u0026rsquo;re included at the base of the underarm. This increases the mobility of the sleeve, and can help prevent sweaters from being pulled up when you move your arms about. Cuffs: This is, I suppose a corollary of sleeve length, but having a cuff that I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable with is generally pretty important to me. I\u0026rsquo;m not one for bell sleeve cuffs, so if you are you might want to ignore this matter of personal taste. I like it when cuffs are noticeably tighter than the reset of the sleeve, and furthermore, I like it when the sleeve, doesn\u0026rsquo;t need the cuff in order to be long enough. This can be over done, on both counts, but honest to god cuffs are important to me. Rant over. Vertical Lines: A lot of knitting, the notable exception being cable work/aran sweaters, tend towards strong horizontal lines. This follows from the fact that we tend to knit in rows or rounds that cross the sweater in horizontal rounds. If you change colors regularly, horizontal stripes are produced, for instance. If you select a handful of patterns and knit them successively, once again, horizontal stripes are produced. This can be overcome, through a number of clever techniques: adapting patterns so that you rows/rounds wrap around the sweater in vertical lines (easier than you might think, conceptually, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never had the desire myself), or by knitting ribbing patterns which tend to have a vertical element, or by arranging different patterns across a garment and stacking them (like cables). It\u0026rsquo;s more or less true that some people look better than other people with horizontal lines, but I\u0026rsquo;d say its even more true that all people look better in garments that have vertical lines than in garments that have horizontal lines. Yarn Quality:I often find myself falling into the trap wherein I say to myself \u0026ldquo;you knit because it\u0026rsquo;s fun, not to produce things, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter what yarn you use, so buy something cheap because you\u0026rsquo;re broke.\u0026rdquo; And in truth, I am a college student, so I don\u0026rsquo;t exactly have money coming out of my ears, but I think there is a difference between making all your sweaters out of crap yarn, and knitting exclusively in quiviet and cashmere. There is a lot of very solid yarn out there, that\u0026rsquo;s of good quality, that\u0026rsquo;s reasonably affordable. Be smart, and know that spending 10-20 dollars more on a sweater\u0026rsquo;s worth of yarn, can make the difference between a sweater that you love to wear, and a sweater that you\u0026rsquo;re ambivalent about. I\u0026rsquo;ve found, that keeping my yarn stash fairly slim, and buying yarn for only the next project (and sometimes two) makes this a lot easier. These are my \u0026ldquo;wines\u0026rdquo; and sensitive points regarding knitting sweaters for myself. In a lot of respects these wines/concerns form the basis of the topics that I\u0026rsquo;m likely to engage with over the course of this series, as they are the areas in, sweater knitting at least, that I find most compelling. I am starting to realize that I need to spend a little time focusing on things other than sweaters, so expect some content about sock knitting, or other objects too. And as always, I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear your input or suggestions, in the comments or by email.\nBe well and Be Warm, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wearable-knitting/","summary":"Note: Sorry for the Hiatus: this entry is from my stash (imagine that a stash of weblog entries!) I\u0026rsquo;ll be back on Friday with a Hypertext entry, and hopefully some more content as well. Enjoy--ty\nI think that knitted things, above just about any other quality, should be wearable. We should want to wear knitted things, not simply because they are products of our own handy-craft, or an object that our loved ones made for us, but because they are comfortable, because they fit, because they are flattering, and of course because knitted garments are a product of our (and our loved ones\u0026rsquo;) handycraft. Knitting can be all of these things, and I think because of their history as working garments, knitting in traditional styles is particularly able to satisfy all of these concerns. For me, the issue of \u0026ldquo;wearability,\u0026rdquo; of a garment is often decided by features in a number of key locations.","title":"Wearable Knitting"},{"content":"I just got into School House Press\u0026rsquo; Knitting Camp, and my roommate is going to be someone amazingly awesome.\nI\u0026rsquo;m so unbelievably excited. I think if I were to be talking I\u0026rsquo;d be reduced to squeaks. I have class in 15 minutes, this is going to be interesting.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll get back to you all with more regular blogging very soon. Tuesdays are for Knitting essays after all.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-camp/","summary":"I just got into School House Press\u0026rsquo; Knitting Camp, and my roommate is going to be someone amazingly awesome.\nI\u0026rsquo;m so unbelievably excited. I think if I were to be talking I\u0026rsquo;d be reduced to squeaks. I have class in 15 minutes, this is going to be interesting.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll get back to you all with more regular blogging very soon. Tuesdays are for Knitting essays after all.","title":"Knitting Camp"},{"content":"Hello everyone!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really good to be back. As I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;re aware, tealart was out of service for basically the last week. I\u0026rsquo;ve been calling it a hosting mishap: the details of which are unimportant. There were a few days in there where we were unsure if we were going to be able to get access to the site. As you can see, we managed to get everything back the way it should be: (there are even a few improvements1.) Nevertheless there were a few moments of doubt in there, and while it was distressing, I found that I was able to be rather zen about the whole experience. The interesting thing is that this came at a moment where I was feeling rather energized about my development as a writer (academically and otherwise) and also about the progress of tealart and my other productions.\nHaving said that, it was a particularly tough week for me in school: I had one of my more impressive writing marathons, and I think I did much of the remaining important work of the semester in the span of four or five days. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to have a little bit of a breather, though, I must say. And I do think that twitter was quite helpful in surviving the bloggless period. And even though the website was down, I also managed to do a little bit of writing for TealArt that I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll get to see in the next few weeks.\nIn addition I did some planning for another TealArt series: this one, will hopefully not be written (entirely) by myself, and my hope is that it\u0026rsquo;ll be an experiment in storytelling of some sort. That\u0026rsquo;s the hope at least, we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it develops.\nAnyway, this is supposed to be a short little entry, look for more substantive content later in the week. For now I will leave you with a little exchange from a class I was in on Thursday night.\ncheers, ty.\nProfessor: Who decides what something means?\nFoucauldian Student: I think it\u0026rsquo;s up to who ever has political power.\nProfessor: Why of course! [appears satisfied with the response, and there is a brief silence, as the conversation lulls before starting in a new direction.]\nTycho: but we all read\u0026hellip; [pause]\nClass looks quizzically at Tycho.\nTycho: oh wait, there was a discussion going on in my head that you all missed out on. sorry folks. explains reader response theory at some length\nI was able to get some of the AJAX functionality of the template to finally work, including a more functional commenting feature, and archive display. Also, as you can see, I found an enhanced version of markdown for Wordpress that supports the tentative footnote feature, which rocks, as you all know.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/unexpected-hiatus/","summary":"Hello everyone!\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really good to be back. As I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;re aware, tealart was out of service for basically the last week. I\u0026rsquo;ve been calling it a hosting mishap: the details of which are unimportant. There were a few days in there where we were unsure if we were going to be able to get access to the site. As you can see, we managed to get everything back the way it should be: (there are even a few improvements1.) Nevertheless there were a few moments of doubt in there, and while it was distressing, I found that I was able to be rather zen about the whole experience. The interesting thing is that this came at a moment where I was feeling rather energized about my development as a writer (academically and otherwise) and also about the progress of tealart and my other productions.\nHaving said that, it was a particularly tough week for me in school: I had one of my more impressive writing marathons, and I think I did much of the remaining important work of the semester in the span of four or five days.","title":"Unexpected Hiatus"},{"content":"By the very fact that you\u0026rsquo;re reading this weblog now, it\u0026rsquo;s clear that this isn\u0026rsquo;t your first exposure to digital text, or to hypertext, so I think by hook or by crook we\u0026rsquo;ve all adapted to reading text on the computer. What I want to think about here, with you at the moment is not so much \u0026ldquo;how to read\u0026rdquo; hypertext, but rather, how hypertext changes the way we read and interact with text. So for our purposes in this discussion I\u0026rsquo;m going to take the term \u0026ldquo;text\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;hypertext\u0026rdquo; to mean the digital representation of letters and words on a computer; perhaps this was obvious to you, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been living with English Majors and cultural studies folks for long enough that I feel the clarification is worthwhile.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve long said that the digital text or hypertext presents a number of key features in contrast to \u0026ldquo;dead tree\u0026rdquo; text. Hypertext is searchable, easily replicated, easily referenced, and easily modified for a maximum degree of accessible. These are all, too my mind, good things.\nOne of the common design assumptions of presenting text on the internet has been to just throw text on a page in long swaths of text. Though various organization or heading levels are theoretically useful for organizing texts, these features are frequently not used uniformly and can sometimes be hard for the eye to find. The quick move to digital text, got removed a couple of very important features of printed/hard copy text: defined column width and the page to constrain the presentation of text, and the organizational factor of the chapter or section. The act of looking at a page of text in a book or a magazine requires a completely different mindset from looking at a web-page. But this isn\u0026rsquo;t a call to return to old ways of reading, but rather a call to re-think the way that we consume hypertext.\nFor instance, one thing I\u0026rsquo;ve realized is that weblog entries work better when they\u0026rsquo;re about 750 words, and vertical columns of text work best when you don\u0026rsquo;t have to scroll up and down to read adjacent columns. While my current goal of keeping all the entries each of my current TealArt series under 1000 words, helps (I think) make these easier to read, the issue that I\u0026rsquo;m struggling with--and I think this is a key issue of reading on a computer screen--is the idea that we are completely to scroll down and down forever, but less willing to scroll side to side for additional programs. I think the program Tofu, for OS X is a welcome advancement, but in general we need to put some thought in to this.\nI also don\u0026rsquo;t want to subsume a concern regarding length in a discussion of text presentation, nor do I want to collapse a discussion about what kind of forms work best for the internet, into a discussion of \u0026ldquo;shrinking attention spans\u0026rdquo; in the digital age. Not only would this not be particularly constructive, I think that the issue is that we can\u0026rsquo;t assume that \u0026ldquo;print\u0026rdquo; content will function the same way digitally that it will on pulp.\nSo for example, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that \u0026ldquo;click next\u0026rdquo; page options like the way that the New York Times presents its articles is quite the answer either. And to be fair, I don\u0026rsquo;t know that there are concrete answers to any of the issues that I\u0026rsquo;m presenting here, other than \u0026ldquo;we need to think about reading behavior some more.\u0026rdquo;\nMy last thought on the subject (for this week) bridges the border between reading and writing,which I hope to cover next time. This is the issues of citationality, more simple than just a pagination issue, one of the things that we are able to do as readers of pulp is say. \u0026ldquo;X passage, located here in a text,\u0026rdquo; but because the location of particular passages in hypertext is more fluid, we can\u0026rsquo;t do this. I\u0026rsquo;ll speak more to the academic/scholorly impact of this on writing next time, but in a sense the difficulty of conversational citationality (lets call it, for now) in hypertext, definitely affects how we interact with words on our computers.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll see you all next week, and I\u0026rsquo;m fully aware that this is a topic that deserves a little more than a laundry list of complaints. Keep this in mind, because I hope that next week\u0026rsquo;s discussion of writing will help resolve some of these concerns and ideas. Stay tuned!\nRead Well, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/reading-and-consuming-hyperdigitaltext/","summary":"By the very fact that you\u0026rsquo;re reading this weblog now, it\u0026rsquo;s clear that this isn\u0026rsquo;t your first exposure to digital text, or to hypertext, so I think by hook or by crook we\u0026rsquo;ve all adapted to reading text on the computer. What I want to think about here, with you at the moment is not so much \u0026ldquo;how to read\u0026rdquo; hypertext, but rather, how hypertext changes the way we read and interact with text. So for our purposes in this discussion I\u0026rsquo;m going to take the term \u0026ldquo;text\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;hypertext\u0026rdquo; to mean the digital representation of letters and words on a computer; perhaps this was obvious to you, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been living with English Majors and cultural studies folks for long enough that I feel the clarification is worthwhile.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve long said that the digital text or hypertext presents a number of key features in contrast to \u0026ldquo;dead tree\u0026rdquo; text. Hypertext is searchable, easily replicated, easily referenced, and easily modified for a maximum degree of accessible.","title":"Reading And Consuming Hyper(digital)text"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve run across the term \u0026ldquo;living tradition\u0026rdquo; a number of times as a Morris Dancer, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if the term has any great salience out side of that community, but I think it should. What I should say about Morris dancing, is that it\u0026rsquo;s very old, and if it has anything it has history. Morris also, is incredibly silly, which presents it\u0026rsquo;s practitioners with a quandary: It\u0026rsquo;s hard to be silly if you do everything \u0026ldquo;by the book.\u0026rdquo; When Morris dancers, or any other folk dance/music enthusiast says \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s a living tradition,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s with great respect for the history of the folk, and a knowledge that traditions change and develop with every passing moment and every generation. I have a Weaver\u0026rsquo;s where Lee Hayes calls this the \u0026ldquo;folk process.\u0026rdquo; In the same moment, every invocation of a \u0026ldquo;living tradition\u0026rdquo; or the \u0026ldquo;folk process, is most frequently uttered right before aforementioned enthusiast/artist creates an utterly modern fabrication of absurd proportions. I could recount many such examples of this happening in song and dance, but I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you for I fear that these would only be funny for me, and besides this is an essay about knitting.\nAs I have conceptualized it, the knitting tradition reflects not only the more conventional thoughts about styles, primarily shapes but patterns as well. Knitting in traditional ways, but also invokes a sense play with in these traditional frameworks. For me, it is the sense of freedom that these frameworks produce that is the truly exciting part of knitting in this way, and I hope to begin an exploration of both the frameworks and the sense of play this week.\nWhen I think of traditional knitting, my first thoughts are of the textured knitting traditions of England and Ireland, the Shetland \u0026ldquo;Fair Isle\u0026rdquo; style of knitting, and of course the Mitten and sweater knitting that typifies for many Nordic and Scandinavian knitting. These are all certainly examples of traditional knitting, and I think there is a lot to be said for looking at these forms as guidelines for creating new designs. It\u0026rsquo;s worth noting that our notion of traditional knitting is affected by the fact that the knitting traditions are the product of their collection at a very specific moment in history, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s quite reasonable to assume that knitters in the late 20th century were not the first to improvise in their knitting. Thus, it seems more proper to assume that the Fair Isle Jumper, the Aran sweater, and all their traditional counterparts are really as much a product of the late 19th and early 20th century, as they are of the \u0026ldquo;knitting tradition.\u0026rdquo; I remember reading something once that located the origins \u0026ldquo;Aran\u0026rdquo; Sweater to Irish immigrants in New York during the 1920s, even. Does this make Aran sweaters less traditional than, say a style of knitting that is far older. No. Aran sweaters deploy an inventive combination of features that are significantly older. There is a great deal of power in the \u0026ldquo;traditions\u0026rdquo; and an amazing quantity of possibilities.\nI\u0026rsquo;m relatively sure that there isn\u0026rsquo;t a great deal of historical precedent for the kinds of designs I\u0026rsquo;m drawn to creating, but at the same time, nearly all the components are traditional: the shape, the patterns, the technique. And in any case the elements that aren\u0026rsquo;t strictly traditional are often inspired or reminiscent of elements that are traditional. All this by way of saying that, there\u0026rsquo;s lots of room for freedom within the tradition, and that\u0026rsquo;s part of the reason that I\u0026rsquo;m so drawn to these ways of knitting.\nUnfortunately, the sense of play in traditional knitting is pretty hard to teach in any coordinated way, but fortunately, people seem to pick it rather quickly upon being exposed to traditional knitting styles and \u0026ldquo;patterns.\u0026rdquo; These vestiges of tradition, are indeed what I think most people\u0026rsquo;s first association with a knitting tradition because they are more concrete, and immediately visible. These basic garment shapes are not always the most flattering or taylored, but they are versatile, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found that with a little bit of finesse it\u0026rsquo;s quite easy to adapt these styles to most body types. Traditional knitting often still looks a little \u0026ldquo;folky\u0026rdquo; but, that is sort of the point. Beyond this, I\u0026rsquo;ve had some trouble attempting to articulate the more concrete aspects of traditional knitting, in part because there have been a number of really important books on the subject. I will recommend the books by Beth Brown-Reinsel and Pricillia Gibson-Roberts as they are both good starting places for exploring traditional (particularly sweater) knitting. My general impression of explorations of traditional knit, is that they present both a shape for a garment, and a number of patterns that can be combined in the knitting of the garment. This division seems like a useful one, particularly for the instruction of traditional knitting, because it can allow students the ability to construct their own projects that correspond to their skill level.\nTraditional knitting presents us as knitters with scores of possibility, that I find hard to explore properly without getting more in to the specifics of particular designs and forms. At the same time, the mindset of the traditional knitter seems to come easily to many knitters, even though it\u0026rsquo;s harder to teach. Having said all this, the reason I\u0026rsquo;ve remained so inthralled by traditional knitting is not just because of the great sense of design possibility in these styles, but also because I find that the approach and forms (shapes, patterns) of this kind of knitting just work, for both my aesthetic and my temperament as a knitter. I hope to explore not just these shapes, and approaches to knitting, but how to convey the sense of \u0026ldquo;tradition\u0026rdquo; to the uninitiated knitters. In that sense, both the teaching that I seem to be engaged in and this series itself are part of this exploration.\nKnit on in good health and good sprits, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be back in a bit with something hopefully at bit more concrete.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-in-the-tradition/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve run across the term \u0026ldquo;living tradition\u0026rdquo; a number of times as a Morris Dancer, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if the term has any great salience out side of that community, but I think it should. What I should say about Morris dancing, is that it\u0026rsquo;s very old, and if it has anything it has history. Morris also, is incredibly silly, which presents it\u0026rsquo;s practitioners with a quandary: It\u0026rsquo;s hard to be silly if you do everything \u0026ldquo;by the book.\u0026rdquo; When Morris dancers, or any other folk dance/music enthusiast says \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s a living tradition,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s with great respect for the history of the folk, and a knowledge that traditions change and develop with every passing moment and every generation. I have a Weaver\u0026rsquo;s where Lee Hayes calls this the \u0026ldquo;folk process.\u0026rdquo; In the same moment, every invocation of a \u0026ldquo;living tradition\u0026rdquo; or the \u0026ldquo;folk process, is most frequently uttered right before aforementioned enthusiast/artist creates an utterly modern fabrication of absurd proportions.","title":"Knitting In The Tradition"},{"content":"The truth of the matter is that I\u0026rsquo;ve had a rather wretched week. I had a lot of writing complied into a relatively short period of time. This feat of poor planning was made worse by the fact that I was just coming off of spring break, and I also received some ultimately positive news from graduate school. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think the weeks work was for nought, I did feel as if I was dead out of steam by Wednesday morning, and thus my week was very front heavy. In addition to some dread regarding a decision about graduate school that I hope I don\u0026rsquo;t have to make, I also faced some dread regarding a project presentation for class Monday afternoon.\nI had about fifty minutes to discuss with my classmates, a topic of my choice, and as I\u0026rsquo;m sure some of you probably know from my twitter, the topic was death. Particularly existentialism/issues in psychotherapy, but I\u0026rsquo;m also covering some of the work on Mortality Salience/terror management theory (which is nifty because it makes it possible to talk about defense mechanisms in an empirically derived framework, for those of you who care), and also a bit about grief. But that\u0026rsquo;s not really the important thing.\nThe thing is that this is that one of the aforementioned papers of doom was also for this class, and it was painful and soul sucking to write. (Who knew, I could write so much about so little? I suppose you, dear readers have been on to this for a long time, but I\u0026rsquo;d been mostly left out of the loop). So I was, red-cent to say the least. Well the upshot, I was a home body for a few days and read some stuff and did some fairly low stress writing on an outline. The upshot. I have a presentation sketched out and I\u0026rsquo;m more or less done. I\u0026rsquo;ll sit around and read a little more so that I\u0026rsquo;m better able to answer questions and expand on a few points, but for the most part, yeah. This is a little weird.\nThe other weird part of having this presentation so written out? I just have to make things a bit more prosy, and bam! I\u0026rsquo;m marking out time on Wednesday morning to turn this into a term paper. That\u0026rsquo;ll learn me. I had been saying that I lost my newly found work ethic as I was basically sitting around and drooling on tuesday and wednesday, but maybe I just bent it out of practice a little bit.\nThis being a morning person thing is weird.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be back with more teleological entries soon, and sorry everyone for the onslaught. The next couple of knitting entries are pretty cool, but the real meat comes later, and word on the street is that pictures might happen soon.\nBest, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/procrastination-what/","summary":"The truth of the matter is that I\u0026rsquo;ve had a rather wretched week. I had a lot of writing complied into a relatively short period of time. This feat of poor planning was made worse by the fact that I was just coming off of spring break, and I also received some ultimately positive news from graduate school. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think the weeks work was for nought, I did feel as if I was dead out of steam by Wednesday morning, and thus my week was very front heavy. In addition to some dread regarding a decision about graduate school that I hope I don\u0026rsquo;t have to make, I also faced some dread regarding a project presentation for class Monday afternoon.\nI had about fifty minutes to discuss with my classmates, a topic of my choice, and as I\u0026rsquo;m sure some of you probably know from my twitter, the topic was death.","title":"Procrastination? What"},{"content":"Sorry Folks, I totally intended to post this earlier, but it languished in a forgotten folder. How ironic is that.\nI think having some sort of archiving post to point to when I\u0026rsquo;m talking about the productivity, so here it is. End tying up is always a good thing. Best, ty\nAs promised I\u0026rsquo;m here with a post designed to sum up and provide a gateway to my series on personal productivity that I called \u0026ldquo;Rethinking GTD.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;d been reading the website 43folders for a while, and while I\u0026rsquo;d learned a lot of things from this website including a lot about the GTD system developed by David Allen, I\u0026rsquo;ve often felt that while GTD was the ideal system for a person with a particular sitatuion there were some of us, notably academics and writer-types, that the system really didn\u0026rsquo;t work that well for. So I did some musing, that I\u0026rsquo;m sure you can all read or not. The links are below.\nPart 1: Getting Other Things Done Part 2: Rethinking GTD: My System Part 3: Rethinking GTD: Production Times and \u0026ldquo;the Zone\u0026rdquo; Part 4: Rethinking GTD: Review (and A Little Rant About Footnotes) Part 5: Getting What Done? (An Explanation of \u0026ldquo;in the generous sense\u0026rdquo;) Just because this is TealArt, and I have a hard time not being reflexive, I guess in retrospect, I realized that GTD has a lot to offer everyone, and while a different way of organizing lists, when contextual lists stop working is somtimes indicated, there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of useful in there\u0026hellip; My essays explore a number of key ideas, and I think are an imporantant note and study in thinking about all the factors which contribute to their personal productivity, and I think this level of reflexivity is probably useful if you\u0026rsquo;re struggiling with this.\nI hope you enjoy, or at least are mildy amused.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tealart-productivity-rethinking-gtd/","summary":"Sorry Folks, I totally intended to post this earlier, but it languished in a forgotten folder. How ironic is that.\nI think having some sort of archiving post to point to when I\u0026rsquo;m talking about the productivity, so here it is. End tying up is always a good thing. Best, ty\nAs promised I\u0026rsquo;m here with a post designed to sum up and provide a gateway to my series on personal productivity that I called \u0026ldquo;Rethinking GTD.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;d been reading the website 43folders for a while, and while I\u0026rsquo;d learned a lot of things from this website including a lot about the GTD system developed by David Allen, I\u0026rsquo;ve often felt that while GTD was the ideal system for a person with a particular sitatuion there were some of us, notably academics and writer-types, that the system really didn\u0026rsquo;t work that well for. So I did some musing, that I\u0026rsquo;m sure you can all read or not.","title":"TealArt Productivity: Rethinking GTD"},{"content":"Hypertext? Why talk about hypertext? No one\u0026rsquo;s thought very much about hypertext in years, let alone written a series of blog posts about hypertext, who cares?\nWell I do, and since I foot the bill around here, I\u0026rsquo;m going to. So there.\nActually, as I was writing the productivity series, I realized that one of my personal productivity goals of the past year or so has been to be as compleatly paperless as I can mange. The less paper I have, the less there is to move, and this means that (theoretically) I can be better organized. The truth is that as a result of this drive to remove paper from my \u0026ldquo;workflow\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve collected a sizeable number of PDF files (a gigabyte or so). Though I\u0026rsquo;m a huge proponent of PDF (I suppose there will be more on this in the future), PDF files are effectivly \u0026ldquo;digital paper,\u0026rdquo; and while more useful, they behave and function just like paper. Thus I\u0026rsquo;ve come to believe that this isn\u0026rsquo;t a digital revolution, but really moving from one bad system to one that is only marginally more usefull.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think it takes a lot of faith to belive that computer generated text present a lot of very clear benefits over its typeset counterparts. It\u0026rsquo;s easily reproduceable, it\u0026rsquo;s small, it\u0026rsquo;s portable, there are virtually no production or distrobution costs, it\u0026rsquo;s searchable, it\u0026rsquo;s dynamic, and it\u0026rsquo;s enviromental. I\u0026rsquo;m sure you could come up with a few more on your own as well.And while people do a lot of reading on computer screens (the success of blogs, which revolve primarily around text, are a testiment to this), yet eBooks have not yet proven themselves successful. In this series I want to explore this qunadry a little bit more. What seperates paper from pixels in practice? in terms of production and consumption?\nWhile I will gladly accept that eBook technology is not yet fully developed--and Cory Doctrow is compleatly right that DRM presents a major road block to this development--there is another piece of the \u0026ldquo;electronic literature\u0026rdquo; puzzel missing. In an effort to explore what this piece(s) is/are, I think a renewed conversation about hypertext/hypermedia is worthwhile.\nIn addition to being digital, hypertext is characterized by Theodor Holm Nelson as having a non-linear structure created by \u0026ldquo;links,\u0026rdquo; much like the links that we see throughout this website and by inclusions or transclusions, where in (potentially dynamic) blocks of text are pushed through into other refering pages. We see some of this on the internet these days, thanks to the fairly standard use of dynamic markup lanauges like PHP. I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to suggest that this series will be a study of hypertext on the internet, because my attempt here is to discuss the form and structure of digital text, rather than the network and cultural aspects of the World Wide Web (when was the last time someone called it that?), but clearly there will be some overlap. Nelson (1987) is clearly a large influence on these writing--and in fairness I should note that I\u0026rsquo;m not anywhere near done with his book, hell I\u0026rsquo;m not even sure I\u0026rsquo;m reading Literary Machines correctly--but I think that it goes without saying that the internet itself has changed, and simultaniously changed the way that we operate computers and interact with hypertext(s).\nNow that we\u0026rsquo;re on the same page\u0026hellip;\nThis series, I hope will allow us both to explore the practicalities and implications of consuming and producing hypertext. While I am by no means a communications studies expert, or a skilled literary artist, I do read a great deal of digital text, and write a lot of content that never makes it on to paper. And I think about this a fair amount. With luck this will mean something. In addtion to thinking about how hypertext affects reading and writing, I think that we\u0026rsquo;ll aslo tuch upon the impacts on publication and the distrobution of text. This means broaching the DRM subject, and I should say now, that I\u0026rsquo;m not nearly enough of an expert on this as perhaps I should be, but I think that at least some consideration of the topic is worthwhile and necessary.\nI also hope to consider some \u0026ldquo;emerging\u0026rdquo; media forms including XML, Wikis, the blog, RSS, Pod/Net/Vid-casts, as they fit into the basic questions of reading and writing text. And I would also be remiss as a blogger if I didn\u0026rsquo;t mention the influence of the discussions in academe regaruding \u0026ldquo;Open Access\u0026rdquo; to scholorly publications, as I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about this series and the articles contained within.\nWith that, I think that we\u0026rsquo;re sufficently introduced, and I hope that we\u0026rsquo;re all on the same page regarding Hypertext. If you have any interests related to an aspect of Hypertext that I straight out forgot to mention, or have any thoughts, please be in touch. I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all next week with more on this.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/intro-to-hypertext/","summary":"Hypertext? Why talk about hypertext? No one\u0026rsquo;s thought very much about hypertext in years, let alone written a series of blog posts about hypertext, who cares?\nWell I do, and since I foot the bill around here, I\u0026rsquo;m going to. So there.\nActually, as I was writing the productivity series, I realized that one of my personal productivity goals of the past year or so has been to be as compleatly paperless as I can mange. The less paper I have, the less there is to move, and this means that (theoretically) I can be better organized. The truth is that as a result of this drive to remove paper from my \u0026ldquo;workflow\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve collected a sizeable number of PDF files (a gigabyte or so). Though I\u0026rsquo;m a huge proponent of PDF (I suppose there will be more on this in the future), PDF files are effectivly \u0026ldquo;digital paper,\u0026rdquo; and while more useful, they behave and function just like paper.","title":"Intro to HyperText"},{"content":"I couldn\u0026rsquo;t really start a series of essays on TealArt about knitting, without writing several hundred words about the knit stitch. Before you close the window, hear me out. The knit stitch is really kind of awesome. You\u0026rsquo;ll be glad you stuck around.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure who said \u0026ldquo;there\u0026rsquo;s only one stitch in knitting, you can just do a thousand things to it,\u0026rdquo; and that\u0026rsquo;s besides the point, I think. It\u0026rsquo;s a truth of knitting: there really is only one stitch, and while you can do a thousand things with it, I\u0026rsquo;m content to just do a couple of dozen with mine. One would think that teaching knitting would be easy given it\u0026rsquo;s apparent simplicity: if there\u0026rsquo;s only one stitch, how much is there to learn. When you hand someone a set of needles and some scraps of yarn and the make their first lumpy garter stitch rectangle (or whatever), it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like knitting can really be that simple. But it is.\nI have found no way to teach someone \u0026ldquo;stitch theory,\u0026rdquo; a term that I just made up, by which I mean the fundamental concept of how the \u0026ldquo;loops\u0026rdquo; of yarn interact with each-other to form the \u0026ldquo;one\u0026rdquo; knit stitch. It takes time, repetition and a bit of encouragement to look at your knitting, to understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on, as you knit. This of course sounds absurdly obvious and a bit odd coming from someone who routinely reads or watches television whilst knitting, but I have no clever way of communicating this skill. It can be learned and even encouraged, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if it can be thought. Once you understand how knit stitches work and build upon each-other, its easier to start thinking structurally about how garments fit together and how to shape garments to fit your needs. But the granule understanding is really important.\nArmed with a firm understanding of the knit stitch, it becomes possible to think about building things with knit stitches: sweaters, hats, socks, mittens, gloves, house-cozys, and so forth. Later in the series, I\u0026rsquo;ll muse about some of the finer points of design and building, but for this introductory episode, I\u0026rsquo;ll focus on the larger picture. One of the most valuable skills that I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to develop as a knitter is \u0026ldquo;mental knitting.\u0026rdquo; Not, mental knitting, what I\u0026rsquo;m talking about is to knit in your head, as a way of test knitting. If you know how a stitch forms, and how knitted fabric behaves you can then begin to knit in your head (at blinding speeds!) as a way of testing out your next move. Because knit stitches, how ever you form them, are basically little blocks, if you can invasion how they\u0026rsquo;ll fit together, it makes it easy to implement, design, or alter a pattern: because of this I\u0026rsquo;ve occasionally felt that there was an under-respected connection between knitting and architecture. In any case, all this grows out of knowing how knit stitches \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; which in tern grows out of being able to really watch your knitting.\nIn terms of teaching this, I have substantially less to offer. On a personal level, I think my ability to knit in my head grew out of learning how to fix mistakes, and out of my inside out and backwards way of knitting--I knit in the contrary direction to the way that many people knit--but this is not the only way for the connection to form but it is one way. In an effort to encourage this kind of understanding I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to encourage to new knitters to seek out new skills, shapes, and kinds of knitting as quickly as they feel comfortable. If knitting is simply one stitch, one way to come to understand the knit stitch and how to \u0026ldquo;read\u0026rdquo; it is to begin to experience its many variations. With luck, this might also have the benefit of preventing future aversions to particularly kinds of knitting, such as the one that I (and I suspect a number of others) have against purling: it\u0026rsquo;s actually kind of amazing the lengths I\u0026rsquo;ll go to avoid purling. Like most \u0026ldquo;issues\u0026rdquo; in knitting, such aversions are clearly not insurmountable, they are not desirable either.\nThis series on TealArt will continue to explore issues related to traditional knitting, design, and \u0026ldquo;knitting pedagogy,\u0026rdquo; and I hope that today\u0026rsquo;s discussion of the knit stitch and the very fundamentals of the skill of knitting, will provide a useful introduction. I promise that future installments will be less\u0026hellip; dry.\nStay well, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-knit-stitch/","summary":"I couldn\u0026rsquo;t really start a series of essays on TealArt about knitting, without writing several hundred words about the knit stitch. Before you close the window, hear me out. The knit stitch is really kind of awesome. You\u0026rsquo;ll be glad you stuck around.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not sure who said \u0026ldquo;there\u0026rsquo;s only one stitch in knitting, you can just do a thousand things to it,\u0026rdquo; and that\u0026rsquo;s besides the point, I think. It\u0026rsquo;s a truth of knitting: there really is only one stitch, and while you can do a thousand things with it, I\u0026rsquo;m content to just do a couple of dozen with mine. One would think that teaching knitting would be easy given it\u0026rsquo;s apparent simplicity: if there\u0026rsquo;s only one stitch, how much is there to learn. When you hand someone a set of needles and some scraps of yarn and the make their first lumpy garter stitch rectangle (or whatever), it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like knitting can really be that simple.","title":"The Knit Stitch"},{"content":"I just received an acceptance from San Francisco State University\u0026rsquo;s MA program in Human Sexuality Studies. I have to file for financial aid still, so I don\u0026rsquo;t know how that\u0026rsquo;s going to work.\nThis means, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure, that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in school next year.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still waiting to hear from five other programs, three of which were in my interpretation, the most likely (the fourth was somewhat less likely, but a remote possibility, and the fifth is the last long shot.)\nThis is in addition to the two rejections (both from long shots) that I received earlier.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch with you all as this progresses.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/graduate-school-update/","summary":"I just received an acceptance from San Francisco State University\u0026rsquo;s MA program in Human Sexuality Studies. I have to file for financial aid still, so I don\u0026rsquo;t know how that\u0026rsquo;s going to work.\nThis means, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure, that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be in school next year.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still waiting to hear from five other programs, three of which were in my interpretation, the most likely (the fourth was somewhat less likely, but a remote possibility, and the fifth is the last long shot.)\nThis is in addition to the two rejections (both from long shots) that I received earlier.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be in touch with you all as this progresses.\ncheers, tycho","title":"Graduate School Update"},{"content":"I remember a phase of tealart where it seemed like I was writing more entries about what new things that we\u0026rsquo;d developed (for the site) and what kinds of often parrellel developments ooccurred in my life. I can\u0026rsquo;t imagine that TealArt made a particularly interesting website to read at that point. I think of it as our \u0026ldquo;young idealistic schemes.\u0026rdquo; Since then, due to a lot of things, I think we\u0026rsquo;ve found some more interesting things to talk about, I\u0026rsquo;ve settled down with regards to my (academic) interests and become a more reflexive knitter, and most importantly I\u0026rsquo;ve found a mindset for TealArt writing that works for me. Having said that, there have been some rather important changes to the site and my first mini-series on productivity has basically come to a conclusion. And thus, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to think that sometimes, a good old fashioned update post is necessary, and given that I\u0026rsquo;m on break this week; now seems like the perfect time.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve done a little bit of reorganization and redesign around the new \u0026ldquo;tumble log\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;tumblog\u0026rdquo; or whatever you want to call it, the page is located here and mirrored on the right hand sidebar of most pages of the TealArt site. What this does is look at a host of other sites/services that we post things and then, pulling RSS feeds in from those sites, creates a running (tumblling) log of our activities. I was listening or reading something that said that tumblogs worked the best when you had a small group and a lot of randomness. That sounded the world like TealArt, and thankfully I was able to pull together all the parts pretty well, and there it is. While I don\u0026rsquo;t think a week or so is enough time to make a jujudgment about how well a TealArt project is going to work, I remain hopeful. If you like the tumblog idea check out\nThe other thing to note in this update is the formating idea of \u0026ldquo;series\u0026rdquo; which is of course a revival of the \u0026ldquo;column\u0026rdquo; idea that I labored (albiet falsely) for another web-venture. The productivity series, which ran for five or so episodes. Soon I\u0026rsquo;ll post a summative post for the series, because I think asside from future random musings is completed. I enjoyed engauging with these ideas, as productivity particularly in the digital age is something that I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in working towrds perfecting; however, more than that I really enjoyed having a \u0026ldquo;column\u0026rdquo; or some such due almost every week. It got me writing in a way that I think is particularly helthy and useful for me.\nSo while I\u0026rsquo;m on break this week, in addition to reading a rather lot about Death (for a project on psychotherapy and berevement, don\u0026rsquo;t ask. really.), I\u0026rsquo;m going to begin planning and working on the next series of TealArt articles. To replace the productivity series, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be putting forth articles about Hypertext and \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; digital (textual) media, in terms of both consumption--reanding--and production--writing. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading Theodor Holm Nelson\u0026rsquo;s Literary Machines, and in combination with a renewed personal interest in fiction and in \u0026ldquo;Wikis,\u0026rdquo; I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot to talk and think about there and I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll be interested in this\u0026hellip; Please, also, contribute to the conversation either via email or in the comments section.\nFor the record, I\u0026rsquo;d like to point out that my \u0026ldquo;new\u0026rdquo; writing projects (productivity, and hypertext), mirror my old interests (mobile technology, and eBoook technology.) Just saying.\nFor the remainder of the semester, that is until the begining of May, I\u0026rsquo;m also going to have a series of essays related to knitting and design at TealArt. I\u0026rsquo;ll talk about what defines my current design work, challenges I\u0026rsquo;m facing as I attempt to teach knitting, and musings on \u0026ldquo;traditional knitting.\u0026rdquo; I frequently think about TealArt as a knitting blog, but I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I don\u0026rsquo;t post knitting content to the site nearly enough. I hope this will help remedy the situation. These writings, are incedently a contributing to a project that I\u0026rsquo;m working on for school, which I might talk more about at some point, but I hope you will enjoy them as well. Also, I remain hopeful regarding forthcoming pictures of my knitting.\nIn terms of a publishing schedule, I\u0026rsquo;d look for knitting posts (with luck) early in the week, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking Tuesday, but my scheduele on Tuesdays is hellish, and hypertext posts on Friday or Saturday. That\u0026rsquo;s tentative. While I do expect to do a great deal of writing and planning durring this break, I\u0026rsquo;ll make no promises about what material gets posted this week. Stay tuned!\nI look forward to talking with you all more in the near future.\nCheers, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-series-and-site-updates/","summary":"I remember a phase of tealart where it seemed like I was writing more entries about what new things that we\u0026rsquo;d developed (for the site) and what kinds of often parrellel developments ooccurred in my life. I can\u0026rsquo;t imagine that TealArt made a particularly interesting website to read at that point. I think of it as our \u0026ldquo;young idealistic schemes.\u0026rdquo; Since then, due to a lot of things, I think we\u0026rsquo;ve found some more interesting things to talk about, I\u0026rsquo;ve settled down with regards to my (academic) interests and become a more reflexive knitter, and most importantly I\u0026rsquo;ve found a mindset for TealArt writing that works for me. Having said that, there have been some rather important changes to the site and my first mini-series on productivity has basically come to a conclusion. And thus, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun to think that sometimes, a good old fashioned update post is necessary, and given that I\u0026rsquo;m on break this week; now seems like the perfect time.","title":"New Series and Site Updates"},{"content":"I totally thought I was done with this little productivity series, but I had an idea, that I think is neat. So here it is:\nimagine, if you will, the following scene from a movie\n\u0026ldquo;I never get anything done,\u0026rdquo; he said while holding a book open on his lap as he idly flipped through a dozen open windows on his computer, most of them filled with text.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh really?\u0026rdquo; I ask. He\u0026rsquo;s clearly doing something. \u0026ldquo;What are you doing now,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Reading a few things and sketching out some notes, but it\u0026rsquo;s not real.\u0026rdquo; We\u0026rsquo;ve almost reached the level of a \u0026ldquo;wine\u0026rdquo;.\n\u0026ldquo;If that\u0026rsquo;s not real, then what counts?\u0026rdquo; I hate this role I have to take in conversations with myself, but I think this sentence is a bit to meta for my tastes; it\u0026rsquo;s about to end.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, you know, reading and writting, I guess.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Kinda like what you\u0026rsquo;re already doing?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yes, but more.\u0026rdquo;\nThis odd little conversation that I had with myself, is a pretty good example of what I\u0026rsquo;m hoping to talk about here. I for one, know that I have a fairly specific definition of \u0026ldquo;what it means to get things done,\u0026rdquo; even though much of what I do, contributes to \u0026ldquo;getting things done,\u0026rdquo; even (and ususally) if I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to think about this work as, being, somehow \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo;\nA year and a half ago, I read an article in a class that addressed the age old question of \u0026ldquo;what it is, exactly, that academics do?\u0026rdquo; After all, for those not involved in academia, it\u0026rsquo;s almost hard to imagine that professors have enough to do to fill up their time. While I\u0026rsquo;m not arguing that professor folk have it hard (you\u0026rsquo;d think though that they\u0026rsquo;d be able to get me comments back on a couple of papers, though, don\u0026rsquo;t you? sigh.), because it\u0026rsquo;s a cushy job in many ways, just that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to understand what professor folk do most of the day. The article argued that we should give ourselves credit for all of the work \u0026ldquo;in the generous sense\u0026rdquo; that we do. While we might have a tendency to think of academic work as \u0026ldquo;reading, writing, and teaching\u0026rdquo; there are a lot of other things that have to be done: \u0026ldquo;Mettings are work, responding to email is work, and so forth. I\u0026rsquo;m sure you could all come up with a list of things that you do, regularly, that aren\u0026rsquo;t related to your projects but that have to get done just the same. This would be \u0026ldquo;work in the generous sense,\u0026rdquo; and the reason why we\u0026rsquo;re talking about it here is that there should be an alowance in ones productivity system (be it GTD or otherwise) for such work.\nThe term \u0026ldquo;in the generous sense\u0026rdquo; cought on amongst my friend group and it quickly became the adverbial clause de jour in our friend group. So it seemed like the obvious choice when it came time to think of a new slogan for TealArt. Conversely, the line \u0026ldquo;awkward, but endearingly colloquial\u0026rdquo; was an actual comment that I recived on on of my papers, and I liked it enough to add it as a tag line.\nBut back about \u0026ldquo;work in the generous sense,\u0026rdquo; the kernel for this week\u0026rsquo;s entry, is to count, recognize, and even plan everything you do, not just the prime things, because you\u0026rsquo;re going to do them anyway, and once you\u0026rsquo;ve included all of the tertiary actions it becomes easier to manage time and feel like you\u0026rsquo;ve done something. I\u0026rsquo;ve been known to put things like \u0026ldquo;pack book-bag with (x, y, and z)\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;shower\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;laundry\u0026rdquo; on my list for the day. These are things that I don\u0026rsquo;t typically need reminders to do, but it\u0026rsquo;s helpful to remember when I\u0026rsquo;m trying to fit other things into my schedule, or more often when I sit down at the end of the day and say \u0026ldquo;g-d, what did I do with all my time.\u0026rdquo;\nJust a little something, and frankly I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if this is all that far out of the GTD framework, in the general category of \u0026ldquo;keeping your mind empty, and not using your brain as your system\u0026rdquo; but there you have it in any case\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;m on spring break this week, so with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll be doing a little bit more work.\ncheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/getting-what-done-an-explanation-of-in-the-generous-sense/","summary":"I totally thought I was done with this little productivity series, but I had an idea, that I think is neat. So here it is:\nimagine, if you will, the following scene from a movie\n\u0026ldquo;I never get anything done,\u0026rdquo; he said while holding a book open on his lap as he idly flipped through a dozen open windows on his computer, most of them filled with text.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh really?\u0026rdquo; I ask. He\u0026rsquo;s clearly doing something. \u0026ldquo;What are you doing now,\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Reading a few things and sketching out some notes, but it\u0026rsquo;s not real.\u0026rdquo; We\u0026rsquo;ve almost reached the level of a \u0026ldquo;wine\u0026rdquo;.\n\u0026ldquo;If that\u0026rsquo;s not real, then what counts?\u0026rdquo; I hate this role I have to take in conversations with myself, but I think this sentence is a bit to meta for my tastes; it\u0026rsquo;s about to end.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, you know, reading and writting, I guess.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Kinda like what you\u0026rsquo;re already doing?","title":"Getting What Done: An Explanation of *in the generous sense*"},{"content":"Hi Everyone. I hope this weekend finds you all well. And I hope you find the little revision to tealart that we\u0026rsquo;ve undergone in the past few days well too. (how\u0026rsquo;s that for an opening?) I\u0026rsquo;m sure that I\u0026rsquo;ll do a little more explaining over the next few days. Worry not and enjoy.\nI was going to write this week about the importance of regular reviews a la GTD regarding the maintenance of a productive system. And I\u0026rsquo;ll say a few, brief things here\nGTD promises a sort of a better \u0026ldquo;stress-free\u0026rdquo; living through recording and full proof living. It\u0026rsquo;s true that the less you have to worry about weather or not you remembered to do x, y, or z there is more \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rdquo; to go around when you\u0026rsquo;re actually doing x, y, or z. Great idea. It is however, my contention that, the reason this works, is that GTD asks users to take various and regular time outs to reflect on their process. So rather than worry about your process a little bit all the time, schedule times to worry about your process all at once and get it done with. Great idea. One needn\u0026rsquo;t produce nifty contextual lists and adhere faithfully to the two minute rule (if you have a task that can be done in less than two minutes, do it now) and so forth. What is important is that every once and a while you give yourself the opportunity to say \u0026ldquo;what am I doing, and what do I need to be doing;\u0026rdquo; look over your lists and make sure things haven\u0026rsquo;t changed. The important thing is to make sure that your \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; or method hasn\u0026rsquo;t been broken by the \u0026ldquo;doing.\u0026rdquo; And as always, flexibility is important: if all the parts of your system aren\u0026rsquo;t adding up, then change it.\nThough I don\u0026rsquo;t think GTD works for me, or that my process fits that model, I really do enjoy the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s out there--because it\u0026rsquo;s prevalence drives people to think up some rather amazing solutions to issues that I\u0026rsquo;ve dealt with for quite a while. The communities at 43folders (and other sites as well) has been an amazing resource as I\u0026rsquo;ve become more reflexive about these issues in the last few weeks and months.\nFootnoes So I promised a little bit of a rant about footnotes. Much to a particular professor\u0026rsquo;s annoyance I\u0026rsquo;ve taken a rather hard line stand against Microsoft Office products. I\u0026rsquo;ve found that they\u0026rsquo;re not particularly suited to running on the Mac, and the benefit that they offer is appallingly small. Additionally, I find it hard to interact with a PDF document that I\u0026rsquo;m discussing in my writing, and an open word document at the same time. It can be a pain, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure.\nBut this is a rant about footnotes, not Microsoft Word; well it is about MS Word, insomuch as I have to keep Microsoft Word around because there are typographical features that I would love to have access to that, as near as I can tell, Microsoft has a strangle hold on. Footnotes are one of them, headers are another, but a much less important one to my mind at this point.\nAt the moment, I generally write the OS X Rich Text service (think the default TextEdit, but piped through VoodooPad or whatever other program I\u0026rsquo;m working in,) and then prepare the document for \u0026ldquo;completion\u0026rdquo; using a quick trip through MS Word, which I output as a PDF file, to get all of the \u0026ldquo;publishing features\u0026rdquo; and avoid having to work in\nIn certain respects, footnotes in particular is a typographical feature that I think many expect is on it\u0026rsquo;s way out, and as a result there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot of support this kind feature. Also, since most academics are too busy, being academics, and not designing software, there aren\u0026rsquo;t many options, beyond of course Microsoft.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m at a loss with regards what to do. I\u0026rsquo;ve considered (and even installed all that I need to do to start producing documents using LaTeX/TeX, but that is compleatly overkill: I\u0026rsquo;m never going to have an equation in my work, and while I think LaTeX documents are incredibly pretty, learning another complex markup language with features that I will never use. I hope/expect that the next version of Markdown will have some sort of support for footnote text, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that this will work out particularly well either but I can definitely wait on this one until it actually happens.\nBut yes, anyway. I want a good footnote solution that is mainly operable within RTF and (even minimally) markuped plain text files. Sigh. If anyone has any briliant solutions that I\u0026rsquo;ve overlooked that would be awesome. In any case, until next time, stay well.\nCheers, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rethinking-gtd-review-and-a-little-rant-about-footnotes/","summary":"Hi Everyone. I hope this weekend finds you all well. And I hope you find the little revision to tealart that we\u0026rsquo;ve undergone in the past few days well too. (how\u0026rsquo;s that for an opening?) I\u0026rsquo;m sure that I\u0026rsquo;ll do a little more explaining over the next few days. Worry not and enjoy.\nI was going to write this week about the importance of regular reviews a la GTD regarding the maintenance of a productive system. And I\u0026rsquo;ll say a few, brief things here\nGTD promises a sort of a better \u0026ldquo;stress-free\u0026rdquo; living through recording and full proof living. It\u0026rsquo;s true that the less you have to worry about weather or not you remembered to do x, y, or z there is more \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rdquo; to go around when you\u0026rsquo;re actually doing x, y, or z. Great idea. It is however, my contention that, the reason this works, is that GTD asks users to take various and regular time outs to reflect on their process.","title":"Rethinking GTD: Review (and A Little Rant About Footnotes)"},{"content":"Hi Everyone, I hope you\u0026rsquo;re all enjoying the productivity series we have going, and I also hope this post finds you having an effective and happy Monday morning.\nI realize that there hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a lot of interesting or inspiring content on TealArt recently. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve done better this academic year than I have in previous years, but in general it still sucks. On the upside some awesome people have commented, so rock on you all. But fear not, I am still very interested in continuing and improving TealArt. Also, I love getting emails that say that real people have commented on the blog.\nI think the column/series formate idea has been quite successful, and while I think the productivity series is winding down (maybe 2 or 3 more episodes?), I am working on coming up with something interesting for a new series, if you have anything interesting by all means, please drop me an email and offer a suggestion.\nThe other thing that I wanted to promote, is my twitter. Twitter is this nifty little thing that lets you post, very quickly, short \u0026ldquo;status updates,\u0026rdquo; or other little snippets that you find funny or interesting. I\u0026rsquo;ve started to use twitter as a kind of running log of what I\u0026rsquo;m doing, thinking, or finding funny at any given point. It\u0026rsquo;s nifty, and if you\u0026rsquo;re finding yourself with a lack of tychoish content check it out.\nBut this was supposed to be a little bit of a knitting entry, as I haven\u0026rsquo;t done that kind of writing here, at all in the recent past. I suppose this is something that I\u0026rsquo;m going to get more into. I\u0026rsquo;m working on (yet another) knitting project for school, and while this one takes a different form than some of the previous fiber-related credit that I\u0026rsquo;ve done in the past, it does mean that my knitting work takes on a different tone and energy. This isn\u0026rsquo;t bad, but it does mean that I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting differently for the past six weeks. Having said that I finished a sweater that I think is pretty nifty, but the yarn is totally not right for the job. I\u0026rsquo;ll post a more in depth reflection in a bit I swear.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;m working on a sweater in shetland jumper-weight--my first with this yarn--and this is clearly magic wool. Its also my first sweater with a turned hem, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s nifty, although I see now that I might need to add a shock cord, but we\u0026rsquo;ll wait to pass judgment on that matter until latter when a more data is available.\nAnywho, having successfully gotten the writerly juices flowing, I\u0026rsquo;m on to write an actual meaningful paper. Woot.\nCheers, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/so-you-thought-this-was-a-knitting-blog/","summary":"Hi Everyone, I hope you\u0026rsquo;re all enjoying the productivity series we have going, and I also hope this post finds you having an effective and happy Monday morning.\nI realize that there hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a lot of interesting or inspiring content on TealArt recently. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve done better this academic year than I have in previous years, but in general it still sucks. On the upside some awesome people have commented, so rock on you all. But fear not, I am still very interested in continuing and improving TealArt. Also, I love getting emails that say that real people have commented on the blog.\nI think the column/series formate idea has been quite successful, and while I think the productivity series is winding down (maybe 2 or 3 more episodes?), I am working on coming up with something interesting for a new series, if you have anything interesting by all means, please drop me an email and offer a suggestion.","title":"So You Thought this was a (Knitting) Blog"},{"content":"Sorry about missing last week\u0026rsquo;s essay: I basically missed last weekend in total, and it threw my entire week into a really interesting place. And by interesting we mean, crazy like no other. Suprisingly, or perhaps not, I was able to keep abreast of everything, and the only thing that continues to languish, is something that I\u0026rsquo;m \u0026ldquo;strategically avoiding.\u0026rdquo; Anyway, for this segment, I wanted to talk about the ways that I use the computer, breifly. I\u0026rsquo;ve always been a big fan of keeping digital data organized long before easy solutions to do so were commonly available. While there are some software tools that I think make this easier, a lot of what I do is just trying to find a systematic way to organize one\u0026rsquo;s data that lets you stay \u0026ldquo;in touch\u0026rdquo; with what you have, and find what you need when you need it. I\u0026rsquo;m also very much aware of GTD\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;one system\u0026rdquo; maxim, and I think this generally is the best way to run one\u0026rsquo;s digital experience. If you\u0026rsquo;re new to the series, links to the previous articles follow. I\u0026rsquo;d also love to hear from you if you have any suggestions or ideas for me.\nPart One: Getting Other Things Done\nPart Two: Rethinking GTD: My System\nPart Three: Rethinking GTD: Production Times and \u0026ldquo;the Zone\u0026rdquo;\nAt the moment, I live and die (digitally) by two programs VooDooPad, and Yojimbo. As I\u0026rsquo;ve said before, VooDooPad is a supper app, that basically lets you create a simple desktop wiki out of mac RTF files, and Yojimbo is a very solid/basic clippings file/database. There is some overlap in functionality between these programs, and I suppose in theory you could, if your brain was up to it, use one or the other to do the job of the other. This of course brings up the question of one-systemness, which we\u0026rsquo;ll have to get to later. Let me first tell you how I make this work. Also, for the record these, are MacOSX applications, there are alternatives (some of which look rather nifty) for Windows and other platforms, but I know much less about them.)\nI have a Voodoopad document that I live in, and have lived in for--omitting a 4 month period--the last two or so years. VoodooPad is a relational Wiki, the documents are bundles of \u0026ldquo;pages\u0026rdquo; which are by default RTF pages. I also have some pages that are PDF print outs, and there\u0026rsquo;s system wide Print-PDF-to-VoodooPad. But the organization is completely up to you. I use Voodoopad as the basis for all the content that I generate myself on the computer: class notes, reading notes, drafts of papers, and so forth. The latest version of VoodooPad, supports multi-window, and multi-tab browsing/editing, which are features that I think make working/living in an application useful. I also like that, because of this functionality and the organization as a Wiki, I only have one VooDoopad document to keep track of. Having said that, if you had very distinct projects (or very similar projects, depending) you could isolate portions of your VoodooPad into separate documents. The downside to this is, of course, that all the organization has to be self imposed, which isn\u0026rsquo;t that hard to do (and is aided by the fact that VoodooPad has great search functionality and is accessible by spotlight.)\nYojimbo, is my latest addition to the stable of every-day applications. It\u0026rsquo;s basically a database that can keep track of all the little bits of data that float around your computer, but rather than having an esoteric text file system, Yojimbo lets you dump any kind of file in through a host of different pipes and then lets you categorize all these files in a a handy database, using a system of folders and tagging. I use this program mostly to keep track of the heinous amount of PDF files that I download and consume regularly. If, VoodooPad is my notebook, then Yojimbo is the file cabinet.\nFor those of us that deal with and in words, these are the two main functions of the computer. The two programs that you use are largely irrelevant, and like I said, you could probably get away with using--particularly Yojimbo--as both your notebook and filing cabinet. VoodooPad would work as well but, you would have to do a lot of work to impose structure on the \u0026ldquo;filing cabinet\u0026rdquo; in VoodooPad. In any case, no matter what kind of software you use, its important to apply a personal convention to how you name and organize things.\nThankfully, with the advent of Spotlight (and PC equivalent) search services and tools you need not have a single alphabetical (or whatever system) file for your data, but good file names are still important. It\u0026rsquo;s important to be consistent, so that you can look at a file and tell what is in it without opening; the fewer conventions you have the easier this becomes. When it comes to files, shorter is always better than longer, and always start generally and become more specific. This makes file names, page names, document titles (and so forth) easier to scan, and it also makes it easy to use filtering and sorting techniques to group similar files together automatically.\nFor instance I have a unique CamelCase identifier for all of my classes and projects that begins all of the page/file names: all documents related to my historiography class this semester are tagged HistoryTheory. Following the tag, I list (in order) the assignment type, number, and a pithy description of the reading that it relates to. This is the general system in use throughout the entire document. I use the same tagging system in Yojimbo to keep the projects sorted (in addition to a few topic-related tags.) Similarly, for articles I use, \u0026ldquo;AuthorLastName - ArticleTitle.pdf\u0026rdquo;. For another example of a system before Yojimbo, when I just had files and folders, I used the same naming convention and had specific folders for each project (class) that I was working on when I found/downladed the file. The intention was to group file with the moment I downloaded it, in hopes of being able to retrace my steps based on this association, and it actually works pretty well.\nSo in summary, we have \u0026ldquo;notebook\u0026rdquo; functions, and \u0026ldquo;file cabinet\u0026rdquo; functions: simple and consistent naming schemes are important, good search functions are really important, and when in doubt (and it\u0026rsquo;s possible) let your software create your framework, not the other way around.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t decided what\u0026rsquo;s up for next time, but on my list I have \u0026ldquo;project level planning and reviews,\u0026rdquo; and that sounds pretty good for now. But perhaps we\u0026rsquo;ll all be surprised.\nCheers, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rethinking-gtd-the-digitals/","summary":"Sorry about missing last week\u0026rsquo;s essay: I basically missed last weekend in total, and it threw my entire week into a really interesting place. And by interesting we mean, crazy like no other. Suprisingly, or perhaps not, I was able to keep abreast of everything, and the only thing that continues to languish, is something that I\u0026rsquo;m \u0026ldquo;strategically avoiding.\u0026rdquo; Anyway, for this segment, I wanted to talk about the ways that I use the computer, breifly. I\u0026rsquo;ve always been a big fan of keeping digital data organized long before easy solutions to do so were commonly available. While there are some software tools that I think make this easier, a lot of what I do is just trying to find a systematic way to organize one\u0026rsquo;s data that lets you stay \u0026ldquo;in touch\u0026rdquo; with what you have, and find what you need when you need it. I\u0026rsquo;m also very much aware of GTD\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;one system\u0026rdquo; maxim, and I think this generally is the best way to run one\u0026rsquo;s digital experience.","title":"Rethinking GTD: The Digit(al)s"},{"content":"Ok, that was a cheesy title, but I\u0026rsquo;ve recently realized taht I don\u0026rsquo;t do a lot of actual reading in a web-browser these days. I mean sure I open browser windows all the time, but I so rarely find that I do a lot of my heavy lifting-reading in a browser, and--gasp--I don\u0026rsquo;t keep very many tabs open. The feed reader takes care of most of that, and I have offline apps that deal with most of my most important tasks. For example: I post to this weblog (and others) using MarsEdit, I maintain my del.icio.us account using Cocoalicious, and of course I read weblogs and other feeds using NetNewsWire, and I check all of my email using Mail.app.\nWhile the whole Web2.0 movement supposedly pushes us to \u0026ldquo;live in our browsers,\u0026rdquo; and while for folks who don\u0026rsquo;t have laptops as their primary computers but use multiple machines, this makes a certain measure of sense. But I don\u0026rsquo;t fall into that category, and I have to say that, for the most part, I would much rather use a handful of neat apps, and be able to avoid using a web-browser for as much as I can.\nSo I should say at this point that I use Firefox 2.0, because it\u0026rsquo;s good software, and rather like it. But I\u0026rsquo;ve started to realize that I don\u0026rsquo;t really need the power it offers, and given the amount of work I\u0026rsquo;m doing in Cocoa apps, a browser that played nice with OS X would be nice. For those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t know, Firefox doesn\u0026rsquo;t interact with the OS X service menu and that\u0026rsquo;s\u0026hellip; less than desireable. Also, given that I\u0026rsquo;m not using much of what firefox can offer, I\u0026rsquo;ve started to think that perhaps a different browser would be more advantageous. Camino looks like the obvious choice, but Safari, is probably comparable and both of these options are fast.\nDo people have opinions on WebKit versus Gecko? The firefox features that I like the most are: crash recovery and the FoxyProxy extension, so if someone has an any suggestion on how to replicate this functionality, that would be awesome\u0026hellip;\nThat is all.\nAlso, if I don\u0026rsquo;t get the GTD article done tomorrow night, we might have to wait till next week, because this weekend is jamming.\nBest, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/its-the-browser-bowser/","summary":"Ok, that was a cheesy title, but I\u0026rsquo;ve recently realized taht I don\u0026rsquo;t do a lot of actual reading in a web-browser these days. I mean sure I open browser windows all the time, but I so rarely find that I do a lot of my heavy lifting-reading in a browser, and--gasp--I don\u0026rsquo;t keep very many tabs open. The feed reader takes care of most of that, and I have offline apps that deal with most of my most important tasks. For example: I post to this weblog (and others) using MarsEdit, I maintain my del.icio.us account using Cocoalicious, and of course I read weblogs and other feeds using NetNewsWire, and I check all of my email using Mail.app.\nWhile the whole Web2.0 movement supposedly pushes us to \u0026ldquo;live in our browsers,\u0026rdquo; and while for folks who don\u0026rsquo;t have laptops as their primary computers but use multiple machines, this makes a certain measure of sense.","title":"It\u0026#8217;s The Browser Bowser!"},{"content":"The scary part is this actually made sense to me on the first reading, it\u0026rsquo;s funny mostly because it is an incredibly out of place piece of prose. The article until this point is very conversationally written. Also, frankly the \u0026ldquo;awkward\u0026rdquo; invocation of Nietzsche is priceless.\nRather the gendered subject emerges through a regulatory scheme of gender--we are literally brought into being as gendered subjects through gender regulation. From this perspective, the very idea of a regulatory \u0026ldquo;apparatus\u0026rdquo; appears as a kind of structuralist Althusserian hangover clouding the Foucaltian insight into the radical reach of subject production through regulatory discourse. In Foucault\u0026rsquo;s understanding of the power that circulates through the subject of regulation, there can be no actual apparatus because there is no sharp distinction between what is produced and what is regulating--we are not simply targets but vehicles of power? Thus to paraphrase Nietzsche awkwardly, we must be able to conceive regulation without the regulator, to understand regulation as only and always materializing in its effects, and to understand these effects as specific to that which is being regulated.\nfrom: Brown, W. (1997) The impossibility of women\u0026rsquo;s studies. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9(3).\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/from-an-otherwise-cogent-article/","summary":"The scary part is this actually made sense to me on the first reading, it\u0026rsquo;s funny mostly because it is an incredibly out of place piece of prose. The article until this point is very conversationally written. Also, frankly the \u0026ldquo;awkward\u0026rdquo; invocation of Nietzsche is priceless.\nRather the gendered subject emerges through a regulatory scheme of gender--we are literally brought into being as gendered subjects through gender regulation. From this perspective, the very idea of a regulatory \u0026ldquo;apparatus\u0026rdquo; appears as a kind of structuralist Althusserian hangover clouding the Foucaltian insight into the radical reach of subject production through regulatory discourse. In Foucault\u0026rsquo;s understanding of the power that circulates through the subject of regulation, there can be no actual apparatus because there is no sharp distinction between what is produced and what is regulating--we are not simply targets but vehicles of power? Thus to paraphrase Nietzsche awkwardly, we must be able to conceive regulation without the regulator, to understand regulation as only and always materializing in its effects, and to understand these effects as specific to that which is being regulated.","title":"From an Otherwise Cogent article\u0026#8230;"},{"content":"Hello folks!\nI\u0026rsquo;m back once again for our little weekly series on productivity. It seems I\u0026rsquo;m a lot better at writing for TealArt, when I have this modest weekly column. Once upon a time I wrote weekly columns for another website, and while they were crappy, I think I did well with that form. I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably stick with my TealArt writing in this format. I still have 3-4 more topics for this series, but we\u0026rsquo;ll pick something interesting after that, and an associated rambing or two, but I think on the whole I\u0026rsquo;m a bit too long winded at TealArt for bloging in the typical sense to work. Just to share, I also think that while I\u0026rsquo;m terribly interested in what I do durring the day, writing for TealArt is at it\u0026rsquo;s best when I\u0026rsquo;m not mashing through half baked ideas from my day. It\u0026rsquo;s happier for all of us.\nSo my little discussion about productivity and rethinking GTD for this week, is shorter and about scheduling to your/our strengths.\nAs I said last time, GTD is all about getting all the pieces together to make it possible for you to do everything you need to do when you can. I\u0026rsquo;ve called this the \u0026ldquo;on the go\u0026rdquo; phenomena. This view of productivity assumes that given enough time, and the completion of pre-requsite tasks, you should be able to get anything on your list done at any free moment.\nSimply put, this is wrong. At least for people who do the kinds of things I do (students, academics, writers, and so forth), it feels like there are windows of opportunity in which certain tasks can be done. For instance, you may set aside an hour after you get done with class/work/meetings to write an essay, and by the time you\u0026rsquo;re done with these activities, you\u0026rsquo;re too wound up, or exhausted, or frankly just not up-to writing the essay; however, if you had used the hour before the meeting/class/work to work on the essay, you would have been more successful. Sometimes, if you\u0026rsquo;re in a stuck place, or trying to do something when you\u0026rsquo;re not ready, a little reboot--like taking a shower, a walk, or a snack, can help.\nWe all have, what I\u0026rsquo;ll call \u0026ldquo;prime periods of possible productivity, and I guess my primary argument here is to resist the tendency of many productivity systems to fight these prime periods. Do what you can to extend, stretch, and maximize what you can get done when you\u0026rsquo;re in the right zone. To do this, you have to have a good feeling of how you work, and a sense of what works for you. It means trying lots of different work situations and times, and being able to pounce on situations that aren\u0026rsquo;t working for you. Take (brief) notes, be reflexive, and be vigilant. One of the worst things, in my mind, is to work on a paper/blog/essay that absolutely refuses to be written, because these kinds of negative experiences make it harder to come back to this paper later.\nLets think about this like sleep: if you\u0026rsquo;re having trouble falling asleep, and it\u0026rsquo;s taking longer than it ususally takes you to fall asleep, generally it seems better to get up and do something else for a little before trying to sleep again. Think about \u0026ldquo;doing things\u0026rdquo; in a similar way.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t perfect, and there is a fine line between taking a reboot, and procrastination, but the line between sitting before a blank screen and a blinking cursor, and actually working. This is where the human factor comes in to play.\nJust to continue the personal case study, I\u0026rsquo;ve found that I can pretty reliably write every morning for about 3 hours, and in that time, I can get a great deal of work done; more than, I could get done, in say twice as much time in the evening. So I\u0026rsquo;ve worked pretty hard to get up every day and write for 3 hours, before starting to read, or going to class or whatever is on my schedule. I\u0026rsquo;ve also found that having a couple of sizable chunks of time, is better than a single block of time, or lots of bits of time, less than or equal to an hour. The key was learning my patterns, and then working with them for the best result.\nSometimes we don\u0026rsquo;t have control over what times we can work, and sometimes deadlines require us to change our pattern: these are circumstances when borrowing more from a system like GTD or the four quadrant system mentioned in the comments of the first entry in this series would help you overcome these challenges. My hope is that with the date based list organization that I described last time, you can get a good idea of what needs to be done, and when, so that when you have your time, all you have to do is look at the list and run with it.\nThis week rather than try and adapt or adopt something new into your personal system, take a moment here and there and attempt to understand how you best (and do your best work), so that you can attempt to create situations that are the most conducive to these sorts of operations. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that you shouldn\u0026rsquo;t change the way you work if you think it\u0026rsquo;s not effective, but more simply, that what you do probably works pretty well, or at least has elements that you can use, and rather than trying to strong arm your life into a system, take a deep breath and try and work with what you already have.\nUntil next time, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rethinking-gtd-production-times-and-the-zone/","summary":"Hello folks!\nI\u0026rsquo;m back once again for our little weekly series on productivity. It seems I\u0026rsquo;m a lot better at writing for TealArt, when I have this modest weekly column. Once upon a time I wrote weekly columns for another website, and while they were crappy, I think I did well with that form. I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably stick with my TealArt writing in this format. I still have 3-4 more topics for this series, but we\u0026rsquo;ll pick something interesting after that, and an associated rambing or two, but I think on the whole I\u0026rsquo;m a bit too long winded at TealArt for bloging in the typical sense to work. Just to share, I also think that while I\u0026rsquo;m terribly interested in what I do durring the day, writing for TealArt is at it\u0026rsquo;s best when I\u0026rsquo;m not mashing through half baked ideas from my day. It\u0026rsquo;s happier for all of us.","title":"Rethinking GTD: Production Times and \u0026#8220;the Zone\u0026#8221;"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m about 36 hours late blogging this, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s something worth declaring, both for the record keeping aspect, and because it\u0026rsquo;s good to make note of these things.\nI\u0026rsquo;m done applying to graduate school. Finished. Complete.\nNow the waiting begins. I\u0026rsquo;ve been guardedly optimistic.\nA number of people who got really, rather amazing, Ph.Ds reported that their application process, didn\u0026rsquo;t compare to mine in scope and brain-hours. They applied to a couple of top tier schools, got in to the one they went, and thought little of it.\nI on the other hand have been to the psychology pages (countless times) of most large mid-western research schools, all of the private-urban-research schools, and a smattering of canadian schools, comparing and re-evaluating interests and lists, and potential faculty advisors. Leading, to the creation of a fairly serious list, in August of 2006 of ph.d. programs in personality and social psychology. Which was all well and good, until I realized that given what I was really interested in doing, I needed to find developmental psychology programs.\nOoops.\nSo I redid it, and made a new list, which I shortened a bit, and then just applied.\nLord knows how it all went, an advisor seemed to think that I would get in, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m probably one of the few graduates in my major at my fine institution applying to research Ph.D. programs in this cycle. So while I\u0026rsquo;m not declaring victory, or looking for an apartment in any particular city (that\u0026rsquo;s the guardedly part) I\u0026rsquo;m not sure about exactly what happens if I don\u0026rsquo;t get it. Nothing bad, just nothing specific.\nBut here\u0026rsquo;s hoping in any case.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/graduate-school-applications/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m about 36 hours late blogging this, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s something worth declaring, both for the record keeping aspect, and because it\u0026rsquo;s good to make note of these things.\nI\u0026rsquo;m done applying to graduate school. Finished. Complete.\nNow the waiting begins. I\u0026rsquo;ve been guardedly optimistic.\nA number of people who got really, rather amazing, Ph.Ds reported that their application process, didn\u0026rsquo;t compare to mine in scope and brain-hours. They applied to a couple of top tier schools, got in to the one they went, and thought little of it.\nI on the other hand have been to the psychology pages (countless times) of most large mid-western research schools, all of the private-urban-research schools, and a smattering of canadian schools, comparing and re-evaluating interests and lists, and potential faculty advisors. Leading, to the creation of a fairly serious list, in August of 2006 of ph.d. programs in personality and social psychology.","title":"Graduate School Applications"},{"content":"Every day I think of the scientists who mashed up rat brains to create the drugs that brought me back to life, and I\u0026rsquo;m grateful. --from Dervala.net\nA friend sent me the link to this essay a few days ago, and I found it a particularly interesting read. I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share it here. While I enjoy the authors account, I think there is one aspect that is particularly oversimplified. While I think a more holistic look at mental illness is overdue, I also thing that mental illness is more about \u0026ldquo;degree\u0026rdquo; than many physical illnesses. Since emotions and thought aren\u0026rsquo;t as directly obersvable as physical qualities, there\u0026rsquo;s more gray area to be deciphered. Phyisicalizing things like depression, is appropriate, but it\u0026rsquo;s also incredibly difficult, and I think more difficult to do casually than I think anyone would like.\nBut the above article is good, and really well written to boot.\nCheers, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/depression-and-physicality/","summary":"Every day I think of the scientists who mashed up rat brains to create the drugs that brought me back to life, and I\u0026rsquo;m grateful. --from Dervala.net\nA friend sent me the link to this essay a few days ago, and I found it a particularly interesting read. I thought I\u0026rsquo;d share it here. While I enjoy the authors account, I think there is one aspect that is particularly oversimplified. While I think a more holistic look at mental illness is overdue, I also thing that mental illness is more about \u0026ldquo;degree\u0026rdquo; than many physical illnesses. Since emotions and thought aren\u0026rsquo;t as directly obersvable as physical qualities, there\u0026rsquo;s more gray area to be deciphered. Phyisicalizing things like depression, is appropriate, but it\u0026rsquo;s also incredibly difficult, and I think more difficult to do casually than I think anyone would like.\nBut the above article is good, and really well written to boot.","title":"Depression and Physicality"},{"content":"Hey folks!\nI\u0026rsquo;m back with the next installment of my GTD series. I had underestimated my schedule (it being a new semester), and the time I had blocked off to write the GTD essay, was lost to reading about Filipino post/coloinal history. It was great. Doing things, rather than meta-ing about doing things, (which is a theme we\u0026rsquo;ll pick up later in the series).\nI also really loved the comments that people posted in response to the last entry. TealArt hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a very comment-y blog for too long. We can and should change this, though.\nI said last time, that I\u0026rsquo;d spend this time talking about my situation and how I work. This essay, will explain how I work, and why I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen to work this way.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m a huge computer dork, and most of my work is on the computer, I do tend to carry 2 notebooks with me at any given point. The first is a little black notebook (these days, it\u0026rsquo;s a Moleskine, but it\u0026rsquo;s frequently just a stenopad or something) that I use to make lists, write reminders in, plan projects, make short notes, and sometimes even sketch outlines for projects. Generally we could call this first, and more important notebook the \u0026ldquo;meta\u0026rdquo; notebook. The second non-comptuer notebook, is a content notebook--at the moment it\u0026rsquo;s a mid-sized sketch book--that I use usually for a bigger writing or reading project, and sometimes class notes. Generally, this is just a general use 3-subject notebook, that contains notes for two separate projects, and then an odds-and ends section for class notes, reading notes for articles, and more specific project planning. This semester, it\u0026rsquo;s a bit weird, but it\u0026rsquo;s working out.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll spend more time thinking about what goes on paper and what goes on the computer later, but I want to spend a moment contemplating my little black book. Particularly, its organization and the kinds of lists I make.\nGTD recommends organizing tasks by context (location/resources) and by project. In addition to the problem that with a few exceptions, I always have everything I need to do to just about everything on my list, and that my projects are HUGE, I find some tension with the assumption that s that at the very base-level, all of the things we do are rote tasks. What I\u0026rsquo;ve heard David Allen refer to as \u0026ldquo;Widgets\u0026rdquo;. Thus in his method, encourages folk to do the organizational thinking up front, so that one could theoretically be virtually comatose while the \u0026ldquo;doing\u0026rdquo; happens.\nThe truth is that most of my projects aren\u0026rsquo;t just cranking widgets. So ignoring the fact that I nearly always have everything that I need to do all of my tasks, most of my constraints are both time based, and pretty soft. GTD expects that contexts are to have hard distinctions, while I don\u0026rsquo;t really have contexts, most of my tasks are time sensitive. So here\u0026rsquo;s what I do.\nIn the meta-notebook, I make a list for every day, the night before, that reflects my schedule for the upcoming day, the current status of my projects, and any loose ends from the previous day, and any appointments I may have. Rather than have a weekly review, that might take an hour, like GTD suggests, I do about 10 minutes of review every day, literally right before I take my glasses off to go to bed. This has the particular benefit of letting me get everything off my chest and out of my head and lets me get to sleep without rehearsing a list of things to do.\nSo you make a to-do list, that\u0026rsquo;s your system? L-a-m-e!\nI heard that, I think the key part of this list making is where the items come from. Some things are of course, generated on the fly (remember to get a signature, or print something for class), others reflect oddities in my schedule (there\u0026rsquo;s a talk at 4, or a meeting at 3), some are personal chores (check mail, shower, clean desk), but many, or most, reflect progress in ongoing projects and class work and draw on other lists in the book. Oh, and by the way, each daily list, is written on its own sheet of paper on the right side of the book.\nRight side? Why on Earth\nSo I can use the left hand side for something else. Sometimes the left hand side is used for input that will contribute to tomorrow\u0026rsquo;s list. Sometimes the left side is used for project planning. Sometimes it is overflow. Sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s a general location or \u0026ldquo;inbox,\u0026rdquo; loosely in the GTD framework. I\u0026rsquo;ve also been known to make little lists of things I want to look up on wikipedia or Google. While I think of this as another level of project planning, I\u0026rsquo;m also prone to making \u0026ldquo;master lists\u0026rdquo; of things that need to get done in a given week, sort of a \u0026ldquo;this week for sam\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; preview, to track due dates and what not.\nI think most of these uses are pretty self evident, but I\u0026rsquo;ll spend a moment on the project planning. Sometimes, I have a project that takes more than a day or two to complete, or that seems particularly complex or daunting. So I take a right side page, and list all of the component parts of this project. As in GTD, the key to a good project, is something that is manageable. \u0026ldquo;Write book\u0026rdquo; is a lousy project to start out, whereas \u0026ldquo;gather materials to begin research for book\u0026rdquo; is better. Generally my projects are the kinds of things that I think I can finish in a couple of weeks. I also keep a record of my schedule using iCal but Google Calendar (and so forth) would also work very well, for these purposes.\nThe keys to making this work for me is it\u0026rsquo;s flexibility. I make new lists most days, but some lists take two days to get through, and sometimes I need to reogranize the list over lunch. This recognizes the give and take of analyical/creative energy levels, interest, or relevance: sometimes, things that seemed really crucial when I wrote them down, end up becoming irrelevant or just don\u0026rsquo;t need to be done. An important part of the flexibility is knowing that it\u0026rsquo;s ok if I don\u0026rsquo;t check everything off of the list every day--and most days, despite my ambitions, I don\u0026rsquo;t get everything checked off.\nSo before I cut this monster off, the highlights for me are: flexibility, regular reviews, rabid centralized list-making, and sensible project planning. Your milage will probably vary. But that\u0026rsquo;s the point: don\u0026rsquo;t copy, spend a week or two thinking about how and when you work, and see how/if you can work something out that allows you to prevent things from slipping through the cracks, clear tasks off of your sieve mind, and organize your meta data in a way that is always accessible and can work with you.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned a lot of things briefly here that I\u0026rsquo;ll explore in more depth later in the series. Next time, I\u0026rsquo;ll cover some digital issues, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking: keeping the computer experience organized, the paper-digital discussion, and mobile/digital concerns.\nCheers, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rethinking-gtd-my-system/","summary":"Hey folks!\nI\u0026rsquo;m back with the next installment of my GTD series. I had underestimated my schedule (it being a new semester), and the time I had blocked off to write the GTD essay, was lost to reading about Filipino post/coloinal history. It was great. Doing things, rather than meta-ing about doing things, (which is a theme we\u0026rsquo;ll pick up later in the series).\nI also really loved the comments that people posted in response to the last entry. TealArt hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a very comment-y blog for too long. We can and should change this, though.\nI said last time, that I\u0026rsquo;d spend this time talking about my situation and how I work. This essay, will explain how I work, and why I\u0026rsquo;ve chosen to work this way.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m a huge computer dork, and most of my work is on the computer, I do tend to carry 2 notebooks with me at any given point.","title":"Rethinking GTD: My System"},{"content":"As some of you might know, starting last semester (and continuing on this semester) I\u0026rsquo;ve been rethinking my personal \u0026ldquo;system,\u0026rdquo; the way I organize all of the \u0026ldquo;data\u0026rdquo; (writ large) in my life. This includes things like RSS reading, email, academic articles in PDF format, notetaking, my to-do lists and other project planning related data, appointments/schedule, and so forth. In this effort I\u0026rsquo;ve paid a lot of attention to what Merlin Mann and the community at 43 Folders as well as the LifeHack.org Blog. In part this is because Merlin is a Mac geek and since I am too, this works pretty well, but generally I agree with Merlin\u0026rsquo;s aesthetic and approach to these kinds of things.\nOne of the things that is huge on 43f, and in much of the \u0026ldquo;geek\u0026rdquo; productivity community has been GTD or getting things done, a \u0026ldquo;methodology\u0026rdquo; developed by David Allen. While there are many aspects of GTD that I find really interesting and fairly common sense, and I have enjoyed the technological interpretations that Merlin and others have helped develop, I\u0026rsquo;m putting forth something of a criticism of the hegemony of this system, because I think other ways of thinking about personal and group productivity are in order. Particularly as it relates to some audiences (like academics) where the system is not particularly suited.\nAmong the threads that I\u0026rsquo;ve followed more carefully at the 43Folders forms, has been one on GTD implementation for University Students. One common theme in this thread is the difficulty of using this kind of system for university students. GTD was, as best I can tell, developed for applied fields (ie. business and consulting), for people whose daily routine incorporates a variety of different situations and tasks/projects, but to be clear, people for whom most of their work happens in an office situation of one sort or another. (If people have a different interpretation then feel free to offer it).\nGTD uses basic organization efficiency principals to encourage its partakers to: complete short tasks firsts (ie. tasks that would take anywhere from less than 2 minutes to 5 minutes), to split large projects/taks into smaller actions that take anywhere from about 5 minutes to about 20 minutes. Once tasks are broken up and organized each \u0026ldquo;action\u0026rdquo; is then reogranized so that \u0026ldquo;to-do\u0026rdquo; lists are generated for different contexts. Contexts in tern cover all of the material and situational requirements for a given task. A fairly typical context list might include contexts like \u0026ldquo;errands\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;phone\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;internet\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;home-office\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;work,\u0026rdquo; so that you can always take advantage of your situation and know immediately what needs to be done.\nIn fairness Merlin has from time to time remarked that there are only so many contexts when 80% of your tasks require you to be in front of your computer with your hands on your keyboard, and I think this is a problem that\u0026rsquo;s particularly true for academics, but ignoring this for a moment, I would also emphasize that I think there\u0026rsquo;s a point (like GTD for computer people) where the system can only be stretched so far before it starts to break down. When organizational systems of any kind break down, the results are never pretty: we either become engaged in an endless cycle where we\u0026rsquo;re thinking about maintaining the system on the same level as we\u0026rsquo;re thinking about what\u0026rsquo;s in the system--over-thinking--or, complete breakdown which creates massive disorganization as information begins to fall through the system. Neither of these outcomes are, to my mind, acceptable.\nGiven that, and the fact that I think this entry has gone on too long already, and I\u0026rsquo;m not yet out of things to say, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to turn this into a little mini-series in the academia section of TealArt. It\u0026rsquo;ll show up, as usual, on the home page as well. The series will include topics that I find particularly relevant to students and other people working in the academy; although I suspect that writers and creative folk will probably find this useful as well.\nKeep in touch, and feel free to comment here or by email to tycho.at.tealart.dot.com.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/getting-other-things-done/","summary":"As some of you might know, starting last semester (and continuing on this semester) I\u0026rsquo;ve been rethinking my personal \u0026ldquo;system,\u0026rdquo; the way I organize all of the \u0026ldquo;data\u0026rdquo; (writ large) in my life. This includes things like RSS reading, email, academic articles in PDF format, notetaking, my to-do lists and other project planning related data, appointments/schedule, and so forth. In this effort I\u0026rsquo;ve paid a lot of attention to what Merlin Mann and the community at 43 Folders as well as the LifeHack.org Blog. In part this is because Merlin is a Mac geek and since I am too, this works pretty well, but generally I agree with Merlin\u0026rsquo;s aesthetic and approach to these kinds of things.\nOne of the things that is huge on 43f, and in much of the \u0026ldquo;geek\u0026rdquo; productivity community has been GTD or getting things done, a \u0026ldquo;methodology\u0026rdquo; developed by David Allen. While there are many aspects of GTD that I find really interesting and fairly common sense, and I have enjoyed the technological interpretations that Merlin and others have helped develop, I\u0026rsquo;m putting forth something of a criticism of the hegemony of this system, because I think other ways of thinking about personal and group productivity are in order.","title":"Getting Other Things Done"},{"content":"Ok, so I said I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t write any special new-years posts, because I tend to be so reflexive most of the time, and the January 1st event, is not a particularly useful temporal marker in my life. But the end of the Fall semester coincides with New Years, and that\u0026rsquo;s a cycle which is worth recognizing, if for no other reason than I tend to mark time in these units anyway. And, I feel like I should write more for this website, and the topic was ripe for the picking. So here we go: a round-up of the knitting projects I completed last semester.\nFaroe, Take Two Design by Alice Starmore, from Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweaters. This was my second attempt at this design, and I think it came off rather well. Yarn: Cascade 220, in black and white Rose Jacket Desing by Yours Truely. This is a sweater using a Turkish design named \u0026ldquo;Gul\u0026rdquo; or rose. Frankly I can\u0026rsquo;t se it at all, but it was a fun design, and I enjoyed making the sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s also a passable cardigan/jacket/coat, which I consider an acomplishment. It is, however, HUGE, and I have yet to discover who it was meant for. Yarn: Patton\u0026rsquo;s Classic Merino. Herny VIII Design by Alice Starmore (variations by yours truly), from Tudor Roses. A great sweater design, with a couple of great modifications. I\u0026rsquo;m really glad I made this sweater, and I think it turned out really well. This sweater has left a large impact on me, and I think it will continue to influence the kinds of sweaters I design and choose to knit in the future. Nature Wool Socks (2 pair) I made two pairs of fairly generic socks, out of Arcunia Nature Wool this semester, both \u0026ldquo;toe-up.\u0026rdquo; The first, and heretofore unworn pair of socks, used Pricillia Gibson-Roberts, short row-heel, design, and the second--more worn pair--used my now standard, reverse heel flap method. I\u0026rsquo;m forever fascinated by this yarn, and the socks are really great. I think I have another ball of it lying around somewhere. Socks That Rock I made a pair of socks in blue-and-green medium weight socks that rock, sock yarn, that I got at the fold for a friend. They rock. Love. Tosty Toes I made my last pair of cuff-down socks, out of interlacement\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Tosty Toes\u0026rdquo; Sock yarn. I love these socks, and they are in heavy rotation. Must knit more of these things. Teal Socks At this very moment I\u0026rsquo;m wrapping up work on a pair of Teal Socks, out of Cascade 220\u0026rsquo;s Dark Teal Color. It\u0026rsquo;s actually the second pair of socks out of this yarn that I\u0026rsquo;ve made. No really. I keep buying this yarn in isolated cases because I think it\u0026rsquo;s so pretty. And it is. On the plans for next semester:\nAlpaca Sweater A \u0026ldquo;sport sweater\u0026rdquo; with Henry\u0026rsquo;s Attic Prime alpaca sport weight in grays using turkish designs. I\u0026rsquo;m five inches into the sweater at the moment, and have put it on breif hiatus for a little while. Commission Sweater Pattons sweater in red and black for a former professors kiddlet. When I get the measurements I\u0026rsquo;ll put everything aside to crank this one out. Shetland Sweater I got a sweater\u0026rsquo;s worth of Harrisville Designs shetland and it\u0026rsquo;ll be a sweater when it grows up, I just have to pick the patterns and wait for it to come up in the cue. Another plain sweater for me: What would a spring semester be like without a plain sweater in the works for me? At this point, it looks like, a mostly black sweater, with slight trim (oh so very slight) in either: teal, red, or gray. Impressionist Socks I have a pair of socks in Opal 6ply from germany, in colors inspired by an impressionist. It\u0026rsquo;s way cool Fingering weight socks I have some shetland, and some Shafer Anne that wants to be socks. I really hate making such fine socks, but sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s worth it. More Long range plans that might encroach upon next semester if I\u0026rsquo;m majority productive, or something comes up.\nTeal and Black Sweater in Knit Picks Gloss This is the yarn that I did Henry in. It\u0026rsquo;s incredibly fun to work with and I really like these colors. No clue what the pattern would look like, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure I could come up with something. Handpaint Enterlac Sweater I hand-painted some yarn over break, which turned out well. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of combining it with a few skeins of commercially dyed (solids) for an enterlac sweater, because it would be fun, and it\u0026rsquo;s been a while since I\u0026rsquo;ve done anything in entrelac. Blue Mint There\u0026rsquo;s some knit picks yarn in blue and mint colors which I think would be really good looking together. It\u0026rsquo;s cheaper yarn, and if I plow through other projects this one would be rather inexpensive to start up if I was in a pinch. Anyway, there you have it. That\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about at the moment. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how it all turns out.\nCheers folks!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-project-roundup-fall-2006/","summary":"Ok, so I said I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t write any special new-years posts, because I tend to be so reflexive most of the time, and the January 1st event, is not a particularly useful temporal marker in my life. But the end of the Fall semester coincides with New Years, and that\u0026rsquo;s a cycle which is worth recognizing, if for no other reason than I tend to mark time in these units anyway. And, I feel like I should write more for this website, and the topic was ripe for the picking. So here we go: a round-up of the knitting projects I completed last semester.\nFaroe, Take Two Design by Alice Starmore, from Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweaters. This was my second attempt at this design, and I think it came off rather well. Yarn: Cascade 220, in black and white Rose Jacket Desing by Yours Truely. This is a sweater using a Turkish design named \u0026ldquo;Gul\u0026rdquo; or rose.","title":"Knitting Project Roundup Fall 2006"},{"content":"So, there\u0026rsquo;s a certain knitting book, about knitting for men, written by a certain male knitting blogger. It\u0026rsquo;s quite nice, and if I were in the market for a beginner-intermediate knitting book with patterns, I might consider buying it. There are a number of rather fetching patterns, and the instructions are top notch.\nWe should point out that the author of said book is gay, and is something, I believe, of a radical faerie. Just to contextualize\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve read, in my travles through the knitting blog world, about how the patterns are rather nice, but a bit \u0026ldquo;metro\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;hipster-y.\u0026rdquo; Which irks the hell out of me.\nNow the author of said book has already objected to the categorization of the book as gay/etc, and thats all well and good, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to issue the following commentary.\nWhen people say \u0026ldquo;the patterns are kind of metrosexual/hipster-y\u0026rdquo; I have to say, 1) what you\u0026rsquo;re thinking and not saying is that the patterns look gay, and 2) hipstery? what? how dare you!\nThe metro-sexual phenomena--if you can call it that--has always irritated me in principal, mostly because it became a way to be flagrantly assimilationist about gay/queer male culture. It also muddies the waters, and makes it possible for people to say \u0026ldquo;he\u0026rsquo;s kinda gay acting\u0026rdquo; without sounding stupid. I have a number of other little complaints, but we\u0026rsquo;ll leave it at that.\nOn the basis of that, I was going to leave the whole mess alone, but a couple of times now, I\u0026rsquo;ve seen the aforementioned comparison or equation of metrosexual with hipster. The logical product of that is that hipster is gay, which I think is patently false, and perhaps more insulting.\nArrrg.\nAnyway. I don\u0026rsquo;t think this counts as the blog entry I told you all to expect, but whatever.\nCheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/hipstermetrosexual/","summary":"So, there\u0026rsquo;s a certain knitting book, about knitting for men, written by a certain male knitting blogger. It\u0026rsquo;s quite nice, and if I were in the market for a beginner-intermediate knitting book with patterns, I might consider buying it. There are a number of rather fetching patterns, and the instructions are top notch.\nWe should point out that the author of said book is gay, and is something, I believe, of a radical faerie. Just to contextualize\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve read, in my travles through the knitting blog world, about how the patterns are rather nice, but a bit \u0026ldquo;metro\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;hipster-y.\u0026rdquo; Which irks the hell out of me.\nNow the author of said book has already objected to the categorization of the book as gay/etc, and thats all well and good, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to issue the following commentary.\nWhen people say \u0026ldquo;the patterns are kind of metrosexual/hipster-y\u0026rdquo; I have to say, 1) what you\u0026rsquo;re thinking and not saying is that the patterns look gay, and 2) hipstery?","title":"\u0026#8220;Hipster/Metrosexual\u0026#8221;"},{"content":"Stroll, Bitch, Ph.D.\u0026rsquo;s guest blogger made the following observation:\nOne day cock of the walk; next, a feather duster.\nIn other news, both James \u0026ldquo;The Hardest Working Man in Show Business\u0026rdquo; Brown and Gerald \u0026ldquo;The Only Unelected President\u0026rdquo; Ford, have passed away in recent days. As we all know, famous deaths come in threes. So, with sincere sympathies to the families and friends of the deceased and hopes that they find comfort, I\u0026rsquo;m telling you: keep your eyes peeled for Number Three.\n(Via Bitch. Ph.D..)\nWhose your bet? I heard, I think via tinman about an office game that involved some sort of betting pool bassed on creating a list of famous people who were likely to die. I think you got points bassed on who lived. I recognize that this isn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly useful. Anyway, to bring this all back together--loosely--does anyone have any ideas for who the third is?\nI think Claude Levi-Struss is too easy of a bet, and Jimmy Carter is probably not creative enough. I dunno. Thoughts?\nIn another morbid moment. Over dinner tonight one of our friends, remarked after having seen \u0026ldquo;The Queen,\u0026rdquo; about how sad the time following Princess Dianna\u0026rsquo;s death was.\nTo which my only memory was that my grandfather, for the next month or so, when ever you asked him \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s happening,\u0026rdquo; would say \u0026ldquo;she\u0026rsquo;s still dead.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m sorry you all for being such a sucky blogger. Happy New Years. I figure that I\u0026rsquo;m reflexive enough 364 days of the year, that I can spare you on New Years. Maybe the next catch phrase for this blog will be \u0026ldquo;Reflexive on Demand.\u0026rdquo; Actually now that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about it, the current title \u0026ldquo;Awkward, But Endearingly Colloquial\u0026rdquo; is an actual comment that a professor wrote on one of my papers. I thought it was rather clever. So there.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ll be back with more content soon enough, just you wait.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/humor-in-death/","summary":"Stroll, Bitch, Ph.D.\u0026rsquo;s guest blogger made the following observation:\nOne day cock of the walk; next, a feather duster.\nIn other news, both James \u0026ldquo;The Hardest Working Man in Show Business\u0026rdquo; Brown and Gerald \u0026ldquo;The Only Unelected President\u0026rdquo; Ford, have passed away in recent days. As we all know, famous deaths come in threes. So, with sincere sympathies to the families and friends of the deceased and hopes that they find comfort, I\u0026rsquo;m telling you: keep your eyes peeled for Number Three.\n(Via Bitch. Ph.D..)\nWhose your bet? I heard, I think via tinman about an office game that involved some sort of betting pool bassed on creating a list of famous people who were likely to die. I think you got points bassed on who lived. I recognize that this isn\u0026rsquo;t incredibly useful. Anyway, to bring this all back together--loosely--does anyone have any ideas for who the third is?","title":"Humor in Death"},{"content":"So this just decided to be a TealArt entry when I wasn\u0026rsquo;t looking.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been reading 43 Folders for a month or so at this point, and I find it kind of delightful. For those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t know the site, done by Merlin Man, is all about productivity from a geek/mac user perspective. This is terribly cool, and has allowed me to crystalize a lot of thoughts I\u0026rsquo;ve had about my own digital (and really life) organization. The following are some of these thoughts.\nProductivity One thing that Merlin goes on about is David Allen\u0026rsquo;s Getting Things Done approach. Frankly the corporate productivity slant is kind of a put off, but there are a number of tenants that reading 43f and associated materials regarding GTD that are helpful, and summarize a number of things that I think I noticed. For instance, I really like the emphasis on collecting data so that your organizational system isn\u0026rsquo;t in your head. I\u0026rsquo;ve generally been pretty good about keeping track of things in my head, but it requires a lot of attention to make sure that you\u0026rsquo;re on top of things, and if you can get it off your mind, you free up attention from meta-tasks, to actual tasks. In a similar vein the \u0026ldquo;GTD\u0026rdquo; methodology suggests that you separate meta data from project/relevant data, and then only have one \u0026ldquo;system\u0026rdquo; whatever it is for organizing this data (I suppose technically two, one for meta and one for project, but whatever), so that your brain isn\u0026rsquo;t preoccupied with keeping the organization systems in synch. GTD also recommends that you organize your tasks into projects (a collection of tasks that combine to equal a gestalt1) the tasks which make up the project, and then output this data by context (where the task needs to get done, or what resources are necessary).\nThis entry, as initially envisioned was mostly to be about the \u0026ldquo;not splitting your/my attention between multiple systems for managing project data,\u0026rdquo; so I\u0026rsquo;ll get on with writing that entry, but I just wanted to provide that little summary. I have some interesting commentaries on the \u0026ldquo;GTD Community,\u0026rdquo; and what not that I think might be interesting to share at some point, so just keep that in the back of your mind. Anyway\u0026hellip;\nSoftware I just discovered a GREAT novel/long project writing program. I\u0026rsquo;ll putz around with it after break, but it seems to have a lot of great features. Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I really love my wiki program for all sorts of day to day editing and drafting, but for any sustained piece of writing over, say 2,500 words, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t do so well. In addition to being awesome in terms of editing/output formating, it has a lot of meta features (like a database, marginal notes, and a note pad) that makes the writing long projects super good. If there was one thing that I wish this program had that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t is footnotes.\nVoodooPad, the wiki program, is basically a wiki-ified TextEdit (Word Pad for the PC users out there), and while it does a great job of editing RTF type files, and I like a lot of the features, I find it best for planning, and note taking type applications. Having said that, this semester, it has basically been the only application that I\u0026rsquo;ve used for text editing of any kind, and while I fully expect to continue to use it into the future, I\u0026rsquo;ve been feeling the limits of the program.\nI think this is an issue that I\u0026rsquo;ll take up in another post, but I think Wiki\u0026rsquo;s generally, (and this is perhaps due to wikipedia\u0026rsquo;s influence in particular), encourage \u0026ldquo;pages\u0026rdquo; to take on the structural role of paragraphs, in the conceptual process. This is all fine and dandy, but I\u0026rsquo;ve always been a long form kind of guy, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure scholarly and the kind of creative writing I might be prone to doing, is ready for the kind of nonliearity that this kind of organization might produce. This linearity/nonlinearity, is definitely something that I go back and forth on a bunch. But as a system, I think the Wiki organization works best, so I don\u0026rsquo;t know. In any case this new editor might answer the problem with long form and presentation work, without disrupting the system overly much.\nWriting As I\u0026rsquo;ve ruminated for a while on this site, and to a few of you, I kind of regret that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t either particpating in NaNoWriMo, or in the process of writing something creative this November. In response, I also have a great screen writing program that I have a lot of love for. My goal next semester is to get back into writing for real, I think. I tried to outline something this summer which fell flat, a little, but I might be able to run with it. I\u0026rsquo;m also tossing around an idea for an academic paper next semester which I think would get me to read (hopefully) a number of cool science fiction books (Tripree, LeGuin, Delany) which I think would be inspiring. Or something.\nCheers, tycho\nok, so maybe that\u0026rsquo;s my term\u0026hellip; by the way, weblogs need (better) footnote settings.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/software-writing-productivity/","summary":"So this just decided to be a TealArt entry when I wasn\u0026rsquo;t looking.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been reading 43 Folders for a month or so at this point, and I find it kind of delightful. For those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t know the site, done by Merlin Man, is all about productivity from a geek/mac user perspective. This is terribly cool, and has allowed me to crystalize a lot of thoughts I\u0026rsquo;ve had about my own digital (and really life) organization. The following are some of these thoughts.\nProductivity One thing that Merlin goes on about is David Allen\u0026rsquo;s Getting Things Done approach. Frankly the corporate productivity slant is kind of a put off, but there are a number of tenants that reading 43f and associated materials regarding GTD that are helpful, and summarize a number of things that I think I noticed. For instance, I really like the emphasis on collecting data so that your organizational system isn\u0026rsquo;t in your head.","title":"Software, Writing, Productivity"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m in a place in my work with my projects where I need to keep up a momentum, so despite my rambling about not writing, here I am writing for TealArt. Go figure. Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re reading the RSS feeds, check out the totally cool new graphics I made for TealArt.com and the knitting savant(s).\nSo I have two completely desperate entire ideas that aren\u0026rsquo;t nearly fleshed out enough (and probably won\u0026rsquo;t be). One\u0026rsquo;s about geek stuff and the other is about Freudianism. So here they are.\nEarly Adopting Once upon a time, I fancied myself something of a power geek, and I knew a lot about a great deal of technical this and that. I used PCs that I built myself, and I flirted with linux. I worked on the PHP/mySQL code that made TealArt. You get the idea.\nThen I went to college, declared a psychology major, and switched to Mac. My computer geek interests these days are all about usability and ease of use. (I\u0026rsquo;m sort of kicking myself for not taking the psych ergonomics class these days). I used to say this more, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s even more true now: I\u0026rsquo;m interested in getting the computer to do exactly what I want it to do without having to fuss at it, or having it fuss at me. I use streamlined editors when at all possible. I try and keep all my data local and information in efficient programs that keep the data organized. While I get a lot from the internet, lets think of it as the DVR approach to web-surfing.\nBut this can be frustrating because there are a number of programing things that I wish I were more able to do. For instance, I can think of a number of AppleScript type things that I would love to be able to add to VoodooPad. There are also programs that I know are going to be amazing, but they need more development time, and there\u0026rsquo;s really nothing much that I can do except wait for the programers to get where I want to be. And its frustrating. angst\nFreudianism This is more instep with the kind of entries I\u0026rsquo;m best at writing\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, like most people, I\u0026rsquo;ve been pretty recalcitrant with regards to psychoanalytic theory. All the usual complains: it\u0026rsquo;s not grounded, it dehistoricizes and universalizes too much, and largely irrelevant most of the time.\nA professor said to me last semester, after I made those complaints, something along the lines of: Marxism isn\u0026rsquo;t that much more grounded, but people don\u0026rsquo;t dismiss it so easily. I huffed and puffed, and then I realized that she there was probably something there. Now granted, I\u0026rsquo;d argue that most Marxist theory avoids a lot of the cultural/social messy-ness by being more specific, but aside from that\u0026hellip;\nAnyway, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to keep an open mind about psychoanalytic-derived theories. Classical psychoanalysis is clearly flawed, and Freud is dated,1 but psychoanalysis isn\u0026rsquo;t all bad. For instance:\nit allows the possibility to theorize the mind in a philosophical tradition it allows us to consider mental functioning outside of our awareness it allows us to think about formative experiences as, well, formative in the development of the individual it allows individuals to be considered as individuals, rather than as simply constitutant parts it integrates theories of normal personality with theories of abnormal personality the discourse on psychonanalyical theory exists, for better or for worse, outside of typical academic institutional structures it allows a place for subjective interpretation in the practice/theorizing of psychology and/or the social sciences. So yeah, that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about. Not exhaustive, or substantiated, but worthwhile, I guess. Cheers, tycho(ish)\nthough a friend recently pointed out, quite deftly, that Freud and other early psychoanalysts were incredibly radical for their times.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mini-entries/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m in a place in my work with my projects where I need to keep up a momentum, so despite my rambling about not writing, here I am writing for TealArt. Go figure. Also, if you\u0026rsquo;re reading the RSS feeds, check out the totally cool new graphics I made for TealArt.com and the knitting savant(s).\nSo I have two completely desperate entire ideas that aren\u0026rsquo;t nearly fleshed out enough (and probably won\u0026rsquo;t be). One\u0026rsquo;s about geek stuff and the other is about Freudianism. So here they are.\nEarly Adopting Once upon a time, I fancied myself something of a power geek, and I knew a lot about a great deal of technical this and that. I used PCs that I built myself, and I flirted with linux. I worked on the PHP/mySQL code that made TealArt. You get the idea.\nThen I went to college, declared a psychology major, and switched to Mac.","title":"Mini Entries"},{"content":"Well hello reader(s)!\nI\u0026rsquo;m at that busy stage of the semester, where I have left to do is drink tea and write. Of course, I\u0026rsquo;m knitting, and reading, as I\u0026rsquo;m usually wont to do, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t found very much time for blogging, at least in this venue.\nI find I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing more posting to forms, where I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably certain that I have a readership. In fact, I started a thread last week that made the school newspaper. Hopefully, someday, TealArt will function this way, when I have enough time/purupos. In the mean time I hope you enjoy what I can offer.\nAnother reason that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing much here, is I feel, aside from the rambling posts like this one, and the knitting discussion, most of the things that I would write here are things that are better suited to more formal writing. Between figuring out my interests in a more concrete sort of way, and advancing to a stage where, all of my academic work directly relates to things that interest me incredibly. I mean sure, I could beat down evolutionary psychologists; but I doubt that you all want to read a poorly cited differentiation between neuro/structural evolution and social/cognative psychological evolution. And I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I want to write it either.\nThough not to despair. I do have a few things running through my head to write about, and I think it might be fun to spend some time writing for this site. It\u0026rsquo;d be a good break.\nAdditionally, as it\u0026rsquo;s December, I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think about my annual winter break redesign. I really rather like our current look, but there is some work that could stand to be done. I need to work on the del.icio.us side bar (those of you who aren\u0026rsquo;t familiar with the del.icio.us service/site/phenomena, should be check it out here), and I think the template could use a freshening. Though I must say, I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to think of websites as being tied to design these days. Truth is, RSS is the main way I interact with the internet these days. I suspect that there are a couple of posts in there about Web 2.0 and RSS that I could offer. If you\u0026rsquo;re interested.\nAnyway, Be well Cheers, tycho(ish)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/writing-on-not-writing/","summary":"Well hello reader(s)!\nI\u0026rsquo;m at that busy stage of the semester, where I have left to do is drink tea and write. Of course, I\u0026rsquo;m knitting, and reading, as I\u0026rsquo;m usually wont to do, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t found very much time for blogging, at least in this venue.\nI find I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing more posting to forms, where I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably certain that I have a readership. In fact, I started a thread last week that made the school newspaper. Hopefully, someday, TealArt will function this way, when I have enough time/purupos. In the mean time I hope you enjoy what I can offer.\nAnother reason that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing much here, is I feel, aside from the rambling posts like this one, and the knitting discussion, most of the things that I would write here are things that are better suited to more formal writing. Between figuring out my interests in a more concrete sort of way, and advancing to a stage where, all of my academic work directly relates to things that interest me incredibly.","title":"Writing on Not Writing"},{"content":"Here, in the finest tradition of bloggers droning on endlessly on the content of their days, is what happened.\n1. I went to bed at 1-am last night, for, near as I can tell, no good reason. I did some studying for a test I had today, and I got some reading done, and did some note taking and what not. My sleep schedule has been a bit wierd of late, so this isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge deal.\n2. I woke up at 7:20-ish, but it was mid-sleep cycle so I was groggy and weird, which is never fun. Note to self, maybe earplugs can help prevent such oddities. If I can hit the sleep cycles just right, I can wake up without much pain. Feh.\n3. I got out of bed and chugged a cup of tea at about 7:45, with the intention of leaving the house at 8:20 for an 8:40 breakfast.\n4. At 8:05 I became seriously nauseated. It was clearly the fact that I chugged the tea (there was no dairy in the tea), but I couldn\u0026rsquo;t fathom eating breakfast. I knew that it would pass, and that it was probably a blood-sugar/hydration issue, but anyway. I trudged off to class/test at 8:47.\n5. 9:02, taking my illness as an excuse, I rode the elevator to my class on the 4th floor of the science building with two of my classmates. The test hadn\u0026rsquo;t started. I felt reasonably prepared. The professor offered to push the test back a while to let us cram, but given that the test was over neural-memory systems and what not, I thought this was a bad idea, as I was rehearsing what I knew about LTP.\n6. I finished the test at 9:40, and I think I did pretty well. All I really need to do on this, and the next test, is get better than a 76 on this and the next test, and I should end up with something resembling an A- in the class. And I think I do that well. (It\u0026rsquo;s crazy. I do well enough on the papers and other parts of the grade which total to like 68% percent of the grade, that the fact that I consistently score in the 76 range on the tests, means that I\u0026rsquo;m in good shape). The professor had brownie-cookies in class which helped with the blood-sugar issue, and I had some water when I got to the class room which helped with hydration, and by the time I got into the test I was fine.\n7. I had a instant message conversation with my father, which was vaguely surreal (Hi dad), while I waited for one of my TAe-es, or to talk the professor. Ultimately I met with the prof about my project for that class that\u0026rsquo;s going to avoid designing some sort of incredibly complex study to explore affilivive responses to identity and autobiogrpahical representations. It\u0026rsquo;s basically one of the things that I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in, with skin conductance tacked on for good measure, but I\u0026rsquo;m excited. If I can ever have enough of my brain cells free at one time to sketch it all out.\n8. I had a meeting with another one of my TAe-es at 11. It was awkward and I took way too long to read the paper, but I think I was helpful enough\n9. I ate lunch with a friend at 12. It was nice to finally eat and relax.\n10. I met with the first TAe at 2. I hung out in the class room and surfed teh internets, from about 1 until the TAe got there. Durring this time I got caught up on the news reader, and began organizing some thoughts for the paper I\u0026rsquo;ve been writing today.\n11. At 3 I was so exhausted that I went back to my room and promptly fell asleep. I had 1 cup of tea (well two, I guess if you count the cold one I had that morning) at this point, which is at least 2 less than I\u0026rsquo;m used to and, this time for completely different reasons, I once again doubted my ability to walk across campus.\n12. I woke up at 5:20, pulled myself together, did a little bit of reading and then went to dinner at about 6, and had pasta and noodles, that were of passable quality, and then went back to my room and worked until the roommate came home 9. We talked and puttered about for about half an hour before going to the campus coffee house to do the nights work.\n13. Here\u0026rsquo;s where I am now. I\u0026rsquo;m still working on the blasted paper, it\u0026rsquo;s coming along, and having reached the present. I think this post is finished.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/today/","summary":"Here, in the finest tradition of bloggers droning on endlessly on the content of their days, is what happened.\n1. I went to bed at 1-am last night, for, near as I can tell, no good reason. I did some studying for a test I had today, and I got some reading done, and did some note taking and what not. My sleep schedule has been a bit wierd of late, so this isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge deal.\n2. I woke up at 7:20-ish, but it was mid-sleep cycle so I was groggy and weird, which is never fun. Note to self, maybe earplugs can help prevent such oddities. If I can hit the sleep cycles just right, I can wake up without much pain. Feh.\n3. I got out of bed and chugged a cup of tea at about 7:45, with the intention of leaving the house at 8:20 for an 8:40 breakfast.","title":"Today"},{"content":"Hi folks. I\u0026rsquo;m in the thick of the semester and the general craziness. It\u0026rsquo;s not bad--I kind of like it--but it is stressful.\nAnyway, I just have a quick note and a question for you, gentle readers.\n1. Does anyone know of a good open source XML-RPC weblog editor. I live and die by the one I currently use, but I\u0026rsquo;d like something with better support for LiveJournal and del.icio.us and what not. I just want something with a slightly faster development cycle. I\u0026rsquo;d also rather enjoy something that was a little more mac-y. By Mac-y I mean integrated and fast, I guess.\n2. As some of you know I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of NetNewsWire. This is an RSS/Atom feed reader that is incredibly wonderful and very useful. I heard the other day, that NNW leads the RSS reader market share by a large margin. This is impressive because NNW is a Mac-only application. Having said that, there are a couple of things that I constantly yearn for. First of all, I\u0026rsquo;d like it to download images refrenced in feeds for the last X number of entries, for better offline performance. I\u0026rsquo;d also, like a better ability to password authenticate for feeds.\nSo I came across a new feed reading application which addresses the second problem, and is generally a cooler looking application. And the new application is open-source, which I\u0026rsquo;ve become a big fan of. The other thing about NNW is that it has an incredibly slow development cycle. I\u0026rsquo;d like it to be a little faster to add features like delicious posting (which it has, but it could do better in this respect), or exporting of marked entries, or similar things. Or, here\u0026rsquo;s something. You can\u0026rsquo;t subscribe to an RSS feed from NNWs built in browser! So the other reader, Vienna, handles all my concerns, but isn\u0026rsquo;t as fast (and I\u0026rsquo;d have to run a perl scrip to import all my data from NNW, and I\u0026rsquo;m so not that hard cor) Otherwise I\u0026rsquo;m so there\u0026hellip;. If I were going to start using a feed reader for the first time today, I would probably choose Vienna. If you aren\u0026rsquo;t as attached, I\u0026rsquo;d totally check it out.\nCheers, ty\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ive-been-looking-for/","summary":"Hi folks. I\u0026rsquo;m in the thick of the semester and the general craziness. It\u0026rsquo;s not bad--I kind of like it--but it is stressful.\nAnyway, I just have a quick note and a question for you, gentle readers.\n1. Does anyone know of a good open source XML-RPC weblog editor. I live and die by the one I currently use, but I\u0026rsquo;d like something with better support for LiveJournal and del.icio.us and what not. I just want something with a slightly faster development cycle. I\u0026rsquo;d also rather enjoy something that was a little more mac-y. By Mac-y I mean integrated and fast, I guess.\n2. As some of you know I\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of NetNewsWire. This is an RSS/Atom feed reader that is incredibly wonderful and very useful. I heard the other day, that NNW leads the RSS reader market share by a large margin. This is impressive because NNW is a Mac-only application.","title":"I\u0026#8217;ve been looking for\u0026#8230;."},{"content":"I was reading BoingBoing just now, (I\u0026rsquo;m not a big BoingBoing reader, not having the attention span for that genre of commercial blog) but anyway I saw something that Cory posted about an interview he did with Mur Lafferty. Mur is one of the chief geek podcasters (GeekFuActionGrip), and I\u0026rsquo;ve caught wind of her work from time to time, so being the distractible fellow that I am, I clicked through to the website for her podcast \u0026ldquo;I Should Be Writing\u0026rdquo; and was quickly assaulted with news that it was, once again NaNoWriMo.\nNaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is and event wherein participants attempt to write a complete novel during the month of november. It\u0026rsquo;s a national thing. A writing speed/endurance test to end them all. It\u0026rsquo;s now a much more organized thing than It was four years ago when I was actually writing a book, and I remember thinking at that time, why bust your ass to write a crappy novel in november: clearly the way to make it work was to write steadily and continuously. For the past two years, when I realize that its NaNoMo, I get a sinking feeling. I wish I had the time to write like that in November. I wish I had a story sketched out.\nNaNoWriMo (and the preparation I\u0026rsquo;d have to do) has gone on my list of \u0026ldquo;things to do if I don\u0026rsquo;t get into real graduate program.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve been making a list of all the cool things that I could do if I weren\u0026rsquo;t in academia for a while, as part of my \u0026ldquo;lets be rational and not put all of my eggs in one basket\u0026rdquo; plan of getting into graduate school. I will go to graduate school, and I will do research. If I get time off now, I\u0026rsquo;ll also write another book.\nSo much of the way I remember my life, hinges on the book I wrote. There\u0026rsquo;s a bit of a confound in that I was writing that as I came out, but nevertheless. One part of the story that I think I tend to ignore/forget from time to time, is that I started another book after I finished the first, that sort of fell flat, because of the craziness that was my junior and senior year of high school (which strangely--or not--marks the beginning of my academic journey).\nI began working on an outline for another book this summer, and it really didn\u0026rsquo;t go anywhere. I\u0026rsquo;ve been carrying that notebook around for a few weeks (it has some notes on books I\u0026rsquo;m reading too, but never mind,) and I don\u0026rsquo;t think that project is intriguing enough to justify the effort. So another one bites the dust.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve noticed, as I\u0026rsquo;m sure long time (ha!) readers of the site should (you\u0026rsquo;d better!) notice, that my writing here has improved. I sort of want to know what my fiction might sound like if I were able to get off my ass and write it.\nsigh\nWell, There you have it, another TealArt entry\u0026hellip; Funny how that happens. I hope you all are well.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/nanomo/","summary":"I was reading BoingBoing just now, (I\u0026rsquo;m not a big BoingBoing reader, not having the attention span for that genre of commercial blog) but anyway I saw something that Cory posted about an interview he did with Mur Lafferty. Mur is one of the chief geek podcasters (GeekFuActionGrip), and I\u0026rsquo;ve caught wind of her work from time to time, so being the distractible fellow that I am, I clicked through to the website for her podcast \u0026ldquo;I Should Be Writing\u0026rdquo; and was quickly assaulted with news that it was, once again NaNoWriMo.\nNaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is and event wherein participants attempt to write a complete novel during the month of november. It\u0026rsquo;s a national thing. A writing speed/endurance test to end them all. It\u0026rsquo;s now a much more organized thing than It was four years ago when I was actually writing a book, and I remember thinking at that time, why bust your ass to write a crappy novel in november: clearly the way to make it work was to write steadily and continuously.","title":"NaNoWriMo"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;The government favors families a lot,\u0026rdquo; said Staub, 35, a project manager for a French cellphone company. \u0026ldquo;They understand that families are the future. It\u0026rsquo;s great for us.\u0026rdquo;\n-- From an article in the Washington Post.\nI think on the whole, it\u0026rsquo;s a nifty and long awaited idea. I mean, children are pretty rotten, but ignoring that for a moment\u0026hellip;.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;d argue that families are also the past, not to dehistorizie the development of the family or anything, but I have to break it to you, Mde. Staub, your generation wasn\u0026rsquo;t the first to have families.\nCheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/families-are-the-future/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;The government favors families a lot,\u0026rdquo; said Staub, 35, a project manager for a French cellphone company. \u0026ldquo;They understand that families are the future. It\u0026rsquo;s great for us.\u0026rdquo;\n-- From an article in the Washington Post.\nI think on the whole, it\u0026rsquo;s a nifty and long awaited idea. I mean, children are pretty rotten, but ignoring that for a moment\u0026hellip;.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;d argue that families are also the past, not to dehistorizie the development of the family or anything, but I have to break it to you, Mde. Staub, your generation wasn\u0026rsquo;t the first to have families.\nCheers.","title":"Families are the Future"},{"content":"So I passed a major milestone with my knitting today. Well this knitting project, I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten into any new territory in a about a year. Unless cardigans count (I think that\u0026rsquo;s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one). Anyway, thats not the point of this quick little knitting note. I just started on the yoke section of my current project.\nYoke sections are, generally, the parts of the knitting that the sleeves connect to. Incidentally, the part of your pants that exculdes the portion measured by your inseam (the top bit with pockets, where your ass goes) is also called the yoke. Now that we have our tailoring lesson through with for today, more about this particular sweater.\nI realized as I put the first gusset (the bit of fabric that I, and many other traditional folk knitters before me, insert at the bottom of the sleeve to increase ease of movement) on a holder, that I will have successfully knit myself what will be a 30 inch long coat.\nIt will be splendid and I will love it, but, this begs the important question of: why the hell? I have a long torso, such garments don\u0026rsquo;t look as good on me. A secret that I have avoided telling anyone henceforth (you heard it here first, folks), is that my favorite sweater looks so good on me, is that the body is generally a bit shorter than I tend to make sweaters. I frankly don\u0026rsquo;t have a good excuse for this behavior. Its not a hard alteration to make, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure why I do it this way, but I always think that I like sweaters long (and I do enjoy a number of long sweaters, but I tend to like shorter ones more) so I always make them about 26 or 27 inches long (the extra on this one, is mainly so that I can ware it over long sweaters to fight the winter chill.) They should be 24-26 inches long.\nI just wanted to say that. I also made a yarn order for some fingering weight silk and wool from knit picks for a sweater. The sweater will be in earth tones, so I need to start thinking about a pattern. I will either make the Henry VIII sweater from Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Tudor Roses, or design a cardigan (unlikely, given the fine nature of the yarn), or design a new sweater of some variety, which I\u0026rsquo;m not really feeling at the moment. While I could try a new design, I must say that there\u0026rsquo;s no sweater thats just kicking me and saying \u0026ldquo;design me,\u0026rdquo; so that might be worth listening too. I frankly hope that this doesn\u0026rsquo;t last long, as there aren\u0026rsquo;t that many patterns that I feel particularly drawn to knitting.\nSo yeah. Cheers.\nps, how do you like the name change? yeah, I didn\u0026rsquo;t think it was noticeable. I\u0026rsquo;ve done away with the author archives, because it was behaving badly, and frankly it wasn\u0026rsquo;t that useful. but I\u0026rsquo;m still the same old s-m! cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-on-earth/","summary":"So I passed a major milestone with my knitting today. Well this knitting project, I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten into any new territory in a about a year. Unless cardigans count (I think that\u0026rsquo;s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one). Anyway, thats not the point of this quick little knitting note. I just started on the yoke section of my current project.\nYoke sections are, generally, the parts of the knitting that the sleeves connect to. Incidentally, the part of your pants that exculdes the portion measured by your inseam (the top bit with pockets, where your ass goes) is also called the yoke. Now that we have our tailoring lesson through with for today, more about this particular sweater.\nI realized as I put the first gusset (the bit of fabric that I, and many other traditional folk knitters before me, insert at the bottom of the sleeve to increase ease of movement) on a holder, that I will have successfully knit myself what will be a 30 inch long coat.","title":"Why on Earth!"},{"content":"So I just read an article, that reviewed a new ebook reader (which seems to have a really nifty display technology) and comes to the conclusion that books won\u0026rsquo;t succeed because the reading technology isn\u0026rsquo;t as good as paper (he\u0026rsquo;s mostly right, though this is the secondary argument), but that content producers can\u0026rsquo;t manage the DRM the right way. DRM is copy protection, that restricts users ability to rip off and redistribute digital files, and eat dangerously into the publisher\u0026rsquo;s (and artists) money making ability.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve always had some sort of copy protection, with paper printing, it takes the form of hassle. You can photo-copy entire books (and most of us, particularly in the academy, I suspect), but it\u0026rsquo;s a hassle, and I know I would generally rather fork over the 10 bucks and get a book out of the operation, than spend a a long time with a photocopy machine that never works. When books are out of print, particularly short, and time is short, it happens. I doubt very much that I\u0026rsquo;m crimping anyone\u0026rsquo;s profit margin though. It\u0026rsquo;s possible to scan in books, (I\u0026rsquo;ve restrained myself to articles,) but the process is tedious as well, and again hassle and tedium keep the work safe.\nThere is no such thing as a full proof DRM, any code can be cracked, or even worked around. Like with print, the key for content producers, is to make it easier to buy the content from the source, than it is to \u0026ldquo;beat\u0026rdquo; the DRM. Perhaps the key to the ultimate DRM system is not one that is particularly harsh and limiting, but one that makes it hard enough to \u0026ldquo;work around\u0026rdquo; the protection that it\u0026rsquo;s worth buying it new.\nLets take the iTunes music store. There\u0026rsquo;s one really easy way to beat the encryption of the itunes music store: burn the songs to cd (as a music CD) and then import the songs back into iTunes: DRM disappears. And now you have a copy to play in your home stero system, or in your car. If you don\u0026rsquo;t want to waste the CD media, use a CD-RW and you\u0026rsquo;re still DRM free. The thing about this, is that it\u0026rsquo;s a pain in the ass, given that you can play the song of 5 different computers at the same time (and as long as you keep back ups, if an authorized computer crashes with one of your five authorizations, you can reauthorize all the computers, which also gives you a way to \u0026ldquo;beat\u0026rdquo; the drm with a flash drive and an unnetworked machine\u0026hellip; But you get the idea. The other big selling point of the system, is that if you\u0026rsquo;re on an authorized machine (which we\u0026rsquo;ve established is easy enough) and you\u0026rsquo;ve bought a song, it behaves exactly like a song that isn\u0026rsquo;t copy protected, to the point where you would forget that there\u0026rsquo;s copy protection. The system isn\u0026rsquo;t full proof, but it throws up road blocks that say, \u0026ldquo;hey, wouldn\u0026rsquo;t you rather pay an extra buck to not have to go through with this?\u0026rdquo; and the answer is frequently \u0026ldquo;yes.\u0026rdquo;\nThe other key for successful digital content is price/feature benefits. Digital media, is \u0026ldquo;better\u0026rdquo; than print media, it takes up less space, it is searchable, more readily indexable, and can be interactive, among other benifits (depending on what kind of content it is). Digital content must harness these features, otherwise, why bother. Beyond that, the content is significantly cheaper to produce and distribute than traditional media, because there isn\u0026rsquo;t any material costs. All you have to pay is production costs, royalties, and bandwidth/server costs. The first two expenses are the same, the second costs a fraction of what the paper does. So digital media, I think, should be cheaper than the traditional format. Again, in iTunes, songs cost a buck, albums cost 10 dollars, with some allowances made for EPs and the like.\nEven still, I think songs should cost even less, as I suspect that even after royalties and hosting, cost is between 10-30 cents, if that, but a dollar is ok. Would-be-ebook producers should take note. There is a magic price point, for this, and I suspect it\u0026rsquo;s under 5 bucks for a book, probably more like 2.50 or 3. Remember for a moment that book files are tiny, easily 25%, and in most cases less than 10% of the average iTunes song, so distribution is even easier. Then, If ebooks are ever to succeed they have to be affordable enough, they have to be full featured, and any DRM has to be transparent and unobtrusive. I\u0026rsquo;m just saying\u0026hellip;.\nThe last iPod update was really incremental. Lots of folks were predicting a phone, widescreen, or wireless capabilities, and we didn\u0026rsquo;t see that. I frankly can\u0026rsquo;t see apple getting into the phone market, I think that we\u0026rsquo;ll see bluetooth eventually on an iPod, but that\u0026rsquo;s not a major step up in functionality. Likewise, a larger screen is probably in store (likely in terms of pixels rather than area), but I suspect that keeping a small form factor is more important that huge strides in functionality. If you want a much larger screen, get an iTV or some similar TV integration device. The iPod succeeds because it does one thing really well, not because it is the height of convergence technology. The next big feature of the iPod, will fit into this somehow. Why? Because it\u0026rsquo;s apple, and that\u0026rsquo;s what they do.\nSo having said that: I think the next feature will be etext capability. Here are some reasons:\niPod already has limited PIM (contacts, calendar, notes) functionality. Apple appears to be of the opinion that entering data in a mobile device is less then effective on all sorts of levels, but that viewing it whilst mobile, is much more effective. Because of that I don\u0026rsquo;t suspect that they will go down the PDA road, they\u0026rsquo;re already there. iTunes has functionality for managing PDFs, it\u0026rsquo;s a rather dinky feature for it to be coded just for the odd album booklet, so there\u0026rsquo;s probably more code just under the surface. If they\u0026rsquo;re going to make the screen a little bit bigger for videos which I think is a demand (if you made the scroll wheel a bit smaller, you could probably fit a 2.5x2 screen on an ipod in the same form, you have a pretty good sized screen for eBook reading. The iPod is a device that is built around scrolling, and this is the main control that you would want in an ebook device. It seems like all the pieces are there. By establishing themselves as a successful content provider for music and television content, I think Apple will likely be able to--through the iTunes (anyone else waiting for the rename to: iMedia?) convince the print publishers that they have the market, and DRM system that will make content producers willing to come on board. And this is the key, of course. It always is. We\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/drm-ebooks-itunes-and-the-next-ipod/","summary":"So I just read an article, that reviewed a new ebook reader (which seems to have a really nifty display technology) and comes to the conclusion that books won\u0026rsquo;t succeed because the reading technology isn\u0026rsquo;t as good as paper (he\u0026rsquo;s mostly right, though this is the secondary argument), but that content producers can\u0026rsquo;t manage the DRM the right way. DRM is copy protection, that restricts users ability to rip off and redistribute digital files, and eat dangerously into the publisher\u0026rsquo;s (and artists) money making ability.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve always had some sort of copy protection, with paper printing, it takes the form of hassle. You can photo-copy entire books (and most of us, particularly in the academy, I suspect), but it\u0026rsquo;s a hassle, and I know I would generally rather fork over the 10 bucks and get a book out of the operation, than spend a a long time with a photocopy machine that never works.","title":"DRM, eBooks, iTunes, and the Next iPod"},{"content":"I have a couple of little stories (in the journalistic sense, rather than the fiction or even narrative studies sense)\u0026hellip; Here they are, because it seems right to post them together. Also, when I got done writing them, I realized that I had written them backwards. Such that they give the completely wrong impression when read as they were written. I did some rearranging, which I hope helps, but imagine that these are three different entries, written 2 months apart just to be on the safe side.\nI know a lot of people with cool nicknames. Or incredibly cool nicknames. Or weird nicknames. Whatever, nicknames at any rate. And I have nothing. \u0026ldquo;Sam\u0026rdquo; is really my name, sure the paperwork says \u0026ldquo;Samuel,\u0026rdquo; but no one other than an ophthalmologist (who called me, as an infant \u0026ldquo;young samuel,\u0026rdquo; which my parents stole, and use occasionally. I fear this has been a mistake to share with the general public, so I\u0026rsquo;ll stop.) But the people I\u0026rsquo;m named for always went by Sam, and frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;d respond to Samuel if people started calling me that. I actually have a hard time picking my name out of a list, if it says Samuel. There was a period a while ago, when I signed Samuel, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I still do, but I\u0026rsquo;d wager that I don\u0026rsquo;t.\nI\u0026rsquo;d probably hack off the -uel, if I were changing another part of my name, which I don\u0026rsquo;t intend to do, but if I spent time in a state with easier DBA (does business as) laws, I\u0026rsquo;d probably use Sam more officially. Frankly my one concern is that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to publish academically as Samuel, but I\u0026rsquo;ll think about that later, I suppose.\nPerhaps someone will find a good nickname that will stick that isn\u0026rsquo;t completely boring. Folks? anything?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten in the habit of tacking on the sylable -tron to a couple of friends names, which has been reciprocated now and then, but it\u0026rsquo;s kinda wierd, and not a very good nick name (fun and cute, but good in an enduring way, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure). I need to be more creative I guess\u0026hellip;\nI got an itching today, to remake my virtual identity. As many of you know, I have for the past, eight, or so years used the handle \u0026ldquo;celchu19\u0026rdquo; all over the internet. Celchu after Tycho Celchu (also here), a minor star wars character that I really liked (and still do). Here\u0026rsquo;s a little aside, about Celchu (a word that I respond in type to as if it were my name, I think if people said it they way I hear it in my head, I\u0026rsquo;d probably respond to that too). If you\u0026rsquo;re uninterested in the geek stuff skip the block quoted passage. \u0026gt; I really like Celchu, because he was an incredibly honest and modest character, with conviction like no other, and he was a hotshot. If you read the wiki articles on him, you\u0026rsquo;ll note that he was a TIE fighter pilot and he was on the phone with his parents on Alderan (the planet that the Empire blew up in ep IV) when it blew up. He then defected (good moral character), and fought with the Alliance. At some point he volunteered for a covert mission, and he got caught (falibility), they tried to brainwash him, but it didn\u0026rsquo;t stick, he escaped and went back to his superiors, who didn\u0026rsquo;t believe him, so he sat there and helped them out until they believed that he was on their side. There were firefighters where they put him in a support vessel without weapons because they didn\u0026rsquo;t trust him, so he dogged bullets to line up shots for the other pilots. And he was a minor character. Eventually the major story line caught up with him, and they found out that he was telling the truth, as they were about to throw him in jail. It was years ago that I read the book, I suspect there was another spy, and I suppose the finer details aren\u0026rsquo;t that important, but there it is.\nI remember being particularly struck by the commitment, loyalty, skill, of the character. I guess I also liked the fact that he had a lot of power and respect, and he wasn\u0026rsquo;t a wizard in the fantasy story, which makes him all the more outstanding. As a particularly geeky 12 year old (there I go dating myself again) I felt like he\u0026rsquo;d be a good mascot. It\u0026rsquo;s not metaphorical for me, but it was a good name sake.\nI tacked the 19 on, because the yahoo-mail address was taken for just \u0026ldquo;celchu,\u0026rdquo; and the 19 was the date (may 19th) of my birthday, so it made more sense. And I just used it for everything, as I\u0026rsquo;ve continued to use it, for the past 8 years. I played a character named Tycho Celchu on a long defunct email third person RPG years ago (called Dark Range, while were\u0026rsquo; in the practice of being archival). A bunch of the writing that I did for DR, formed the core of the book that I wrote before and during my junior year of high school (the draft of that book, Circle Games, is at this very moment within reach. CG also, incidentally featured a fairly self-refrential character named Tycho, though sirname Morgan, this time.)\nIn addition to Celchu, both the RPG version, the CG character, and a persistent admiration for the danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. Lets face it, Tycho is just a cool name\u0026hellip;.\nSo the upshot of all of this is that I\u0026rsquo;ve got a hankering to change many (most?) of handles, and to develop a new default. I\u0026rsquo;ve gone through and started to use the name \u0026ldquo;tychoish,\u0026rdquo; as it is new and different (a change has long been needed), its\u0026rsquo; unique (I don\u0026rsquo;t have to use numbers to get a unique registration), it references my history on a couple of important levels. So yeah. I like it a bunch. Does this mean that I\u0026rsquo;m closing down all of the things that are \u0026ldquo;celchu19\u0026rdquo; referent? Not on your life! But I\u0026rsquo;m beginning a transition.\nAnother related alternate name issue is that I kinda want to try and distance Sam, from TealArt and other internet activities. Astute readers will notice that my last name is all but absent from this website (sure there are cached versions, and other things hanging around, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to avoid drawing undue attention to the connection). And a quick survey has revealed that there are only a few embarrassing items left that use my full name. I\u0026rsquo;ve changed what I can to an alias of sorts, and there appears to be an actor named Sam K________ who has started chipping away at my \u0026ldquo;google domination\u0026rdquo; which I used to care about a lot, but now, meh.\nI\u0026rsquo;m thinking about writing for TealArt as \u0026rsquo;tycho\u0026rsquo; rather than Sam, as part of this. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure yet, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see\u0026hellip;\nThats all really for now, see you all around\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cool-nicknames/","summary":"I have a couple of little stories (in the journalistic sense, rather than the fiction or even narrative studies sense)\u0026hellip; Here they are, because it seems right to post them together. Also, when I got done writing them, I realized that I had written them backwards. Such that they give the completely wrong impression when read as they were written. I did some rearranging, which I hope helps, but imagine that these are three different entries, written 2 months apart just to be on the safe side.\nI know a lot of people with cool nicknames. Or incredibly cool nicknames. Or weird nicknames. Whatever, nicknames at any rate. And I have nothing. \u0026ldquo;Sam\u0026rdquo; is really my name, sure the paperwork says \u0026ldquo;Samuel,\u0026rdquo; but no one other than an ophthalmologist (who called me, as an infant \u0026ldquo;young samuel,\u0026rdquo; which my parents stole, and use occasionally. I fear this has been a mistake to share with the general public, so I\u0026rsquo;ll stop.","title":"Cool Nicknames"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing a paper (grr) right now about autobiographical memory, identity, and development, and its frustrating: (where are the empirical physiological studies on the subject? cognitive neuroscientists can crank people through their brain scanners, and the publish like mad, couldn\u0026rsquo;t they have taken a couple weeks to do something worthwhile with the fMRI machine?) Despite this, I have the general feeling that this is kind of what I\u0026rsquo;m interested in studying. Perhaps not as a cognitive neuroscientist, but we all have to pay our dues, and despite my nphenomenological/hermeneutic/narrative/developmental/anthropological bent as a psychologist, I find what I\u0026rsquo;ve affectionately come to call \u0026ldquo;the brain stuff\u0026rdquo; to be pretty cool and way more useful than I thought it would be. But anyway, lets return to the statement that \u0026ldquo;this is what I\u0026rsquo;m interested in studying.\u0026rdquo;\nSomewhat more frequently than I\u0026rsquo;d like to admit, I have discussion\u0026rsquo;s with myself about my interests that can be summarized thusly:\nIn a word, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in identity. In two words, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in how identity happens (or develops). I tend to take the opinion that while identity seems to happen as part of a social discourse with \u0026ldquo;norms\u0026rdquo; and other individuals (which puts me in a camp with cultural psychology a particular breed of social psychologist), we know identity through communication (hence my interest in narrative) and despite (because?) of this I tend to take the opinion that identity is a product of memory (and this puts me in a camp with a number of personality psychologists).\nOk, now that that\u0026rsquo;s on the table, I sometimes think, wow, and I\u0026rsquo;m a Feminist/Queer Studies major too. The thing is that I frequently forget that all this talk of identity, narrative, development, and memory, isn\u0026rsquo;t plainly feminist or queer to everyone else. And I suppose it isn\u0026rsquo;t in the clearest sense, but I do know that these interests are a product of my studies in my Women\u0026rsquo;s and Gender Studies classes, not my psychology classes.\nI remember that I had one of my lofty plans early in my first semester to edit a book of stories, written by a collection of young gay men about being gay, other than the \u0026lsquo;coming out story\u0026rsquo;, this was to be in the tradition of Ophelia Speaks, and My Sister\u0026rsquo;s Voices: Teenage Girls of Color Speak Out. I even blogged about it here on TealArt (in embarrassment I hope that I hid those archives, though they\u0026rsquo;re probably still accessible for the world to see, like so much of my/our early crap). While an impractical project for a ornery and brooding undergraduate to undertake, at the heart, this wast to be a really cool project that explored issues of queer identity that I still feel to be really key. Though I\u0026rsquo;m not wild about the unifying qualities of \u0026ldquo;gay\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;male\u0026rdquo; as identity markers, I remain interested in how individuals negotiate their identities in relation to community identities. And I think stories, beyond the coming out narrative, which Judith Butler has successfully ruined for me, are a great way to explore this.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m not proposing this kind of research/project, I think that these two examples show a particular kind of consistency of my interests. It\u0026rsquo;s all connected. I swear.\nAnyway, back to the paper of doom!\nIronically, I loaned my copy of this book to a professor who never returned it before she left. Though, I still have her copy of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and frankly I think I came out ahead.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interests-and-brain-bits/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing a paper (grr) right now about autobiographical memory, identity, and development, and its frustrating: (where are the empirical physiological studies on the subject? cognitive neuroscientists can crank people through their brain scanners, and the publish like mad, couldn\u0026rsquo;t they have taken a couple weeks to do something worthwhile with the fMRI machine?) Despite this, I have the general feeling that this is kind of what I\u0026rsquo;m interested in studying. Perhaps not as a cognitive neuroscientist, but we all have to pay our dues, and despite my nphenomenological/hermeneutic/narrative/developmental/anthropological bent as a psychologist, I find what I\u0026rsquo;ve affectionately come to call \u0026ldquo;the brain stuff\u0026rdquo; to be pretty cool and way more useful than I thought it would be. But anyway, lets return to the statement that \u0026ldquo;this is what I\u0026rsquo;m interested in studying.\u0026rdquo;\nSomewhat more frequently than I\u0026rsquo;d like to admit, I have discussion\u0026rsquo;s with myself about my interests that can be summarized thusly:","title":"Interests and Brain Bits"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of my TealArt time talking about various geek things, which I think is good for some diversity, but I think a large portion of what TealArt has become in recent months is knitting and knitting related content, so I think it\u0026rsquo;s only fair that I give a knitting update.\nI finished a sweater last night, it was/is my remake of \u0026ldquo;Faroe\u0026rdquo; by Alice Starmore. There were a couple of minor pattern changes that I made in order to get the size perfect and then to get the sleeves to fit perfectly, and though I have to block it out, sew down the hem, and weave in some ends, this sweater is a victory in every sense.\nAs the weather has chilled, I began wearing my remake of my favorite sport sweater, and though the yarn is better, and the quality of the workmanship is way better, I must say that I still like the old version better. Which is fine, because I can still wear that sweater. Oh well. It\u0026rsquo;s a bit two long and the sleeves aren\u0026rsquo;t long enough (I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to re-block the sweater and see where that gets me. This is an odd problem, but I think part of my issue is that it\u0026rsquo;s awkward to wear the sweater and have my ipod clipped to my belt. I\u0026rsquo;ll need to work on this for the next version.\nI need to order more sock needles, as both of my most commonly used sock needle sets have become unusable. I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a pair of \u0026ldquo;socks that rock\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m amazed with the quality of this yarn. I suspect that once my stash of sock yarns dwindles it is unlikely that I will ever knit with anything else again. (for socks). This stuff is amazing. I\u0026rsquo;d almost like to knit a sweater out of this yarn, except that it would cost about 120 bucks for the yarn.\nI need to figure something out on this regard. I want to give at least some preliminary thought to what project I\u0026rsquo;m going to work on next, soon, because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to get too far into this project without having a plan. I have the lace weight sweater, which I mostly need to order good size zero needles for, but I don\u0026rsquo;t know how I feel about this. Expect to see some pondering on the subject in this space in the future.\nBe well all, I\u0026rsquo;m off to class.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweater-geek/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of my TealArt time talking about various geek things, which I think is good for some diversity, but I think a large portion of what TealArt has become in recent months is knitting and knitting related content, so I think it\u0026rsquo;s only fair that I give a knitting update.\nI finished a sweater last night, it was/is my remake of \u0026ldquo;Faroe\u0026rdquo; by Alice Starmore. There were a couple of minor pattern changes that I made in order to get the size perfect and then to get the sleeves to fit perfectly, and though I have to block it out, sew down the hem, and weave in some ends, this sweater is a victory in every sense.\nAs the weather has chilled, I began wearing my remake of my favorite sport sweater, and though the yarn is better, and the quality of the workmanship is way better, I must say that I still like the old version better.","title":"Sweater Geek"},{"content":"As I\u0026rsquo;m sure you all know from my incessant babbling about technology, I\u0026rsquo;ve become a strong proponent of the RSS reader. It\u0026rsquo;s, as near as I can tell the best way to collect information for later consumption in a manner that is easy to read, reliable in an environment where internet connections might not be constant, and I can scan an item in the feed reader in about half the time it would take me to read the same amount of content in a web page. So it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing.\nI do have an annoyance to report though. Blogger, which for a long time, I would avoid reading almost entirely, has instituted a feed system, using the Atom standard/spec. I initially thought I\u0026rsquo;d hate atom, but it turns out that atom feeds are more likely to be full text (I rather despise partial text feeds which only capture a very small amount of the joy that is syndication, with little if any to benefit to site administrators) So I\u0026rsquo;ve started to read Blogger powered blogs. Rock on, right?\nWell no. Seems blogger trigger\u0026rsquo;s updates seemingly at will, so the time-stamps get refreshed, and my news-reader thinks all the entries are updated, when in fact, blogger can\u0026rsquo;t keep the date right, and I end up having to scan through more to realize that I\u0026rsquo;ve read the same article half a dozen times before. Thumbs down.\nThe second complaint I have about RSS, is that my reader won\u0026rsquo;t download image files, so I have to have a live connection to read an entry that has images posted with the entry, which means I have to be connected to read knitting blogs, which I see as a disadvantage. Anyone have a fix for this?\nThat\u0026rsquo;s about it for now. I\u0026rsquo;d like to be entertained at the fact that I had a brain death moment last night, and then proceeded to write an entry about evolutionary theory and teleology in developmental psychology. Clearly it was an odd form of brain death. Well, onto other projects this evening, I just wanted to get the syndication frustrations out there.\nCheers, tycho\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dear-blogger-stop-sucking/","summary":"As I\u0026rsquo;m sure you all know from my incessant babbling about technology, I\u0026rsquo;ve become a strong proponent of the RSS reader. It\u0026rsquo;s, as near as I can tell the best way to collect information for later consumption in a manner that is easy to read, reliable in an environment where internet connections might not be constant, and I can scan an item in the feed reader in about half the time it would take me to read the same amount of content in a web page. So it\u0026rsquo;s a great thing.\nI do have an annoyance to report though. Blogger, which for a long time, I would avoid reading almost entirely, has instituted a feed system, using the Atom standard/spec. I initially thought I\u0026rsquo;d hate atom, but it turns out that atom feeds are more likely to be full text (I rather despise partial text feeds which only capture a very small amount of the joy that is syndication, with little if any to benefit to site administrators) So I\u0026rsquo;ve started to read Blogger powered blogs.","title":"Dear Blogger: Stop Sucking!"},{"content":"While I ordered more RAM for my beloved Zoe last week, which should arrive Monday or Tuesday of this week, I\u0026rsquo;ve been noticing that Zoe hs been running a bit more slowly than I think I\u0026rsquo;d like. So finally, yesterday I did some looking around and realized much to my surprise that I only had 500 megs of hard drive space free. Of a total 100 gigs. Well no wonder It was a little slow, and no wonder. So I did some reorganization and coppied a lot of stuff off of the hard drive. I was able to get 12 gigs of content offloaded, and I\u0026rsquo;m back down to about 9 gigs, but its a much healthier situation. Part of the problem has been that with the release of the new iTunes store, iTunes 7 and iTunes Movies, all the video (including the television) has been re-encoded that\u0026rsquo;s about twice as good (320x240 to 640x480 which is about dvd quality). This somehow means that we\u0026rsquo;re dealing with movies which are a bit less than 4 times as large. Don\u0026rsquo;t ask me I\u0026rsquo;m not a video or compression expert. That\u0026rsquo;s just one thing that contributed to the issue.\nSo more RAM will help, as will backing up some of this content, and freeing up space on my hard drive. For what you ask? More content. It\u0026rsquo;s a vicious cycle.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started using del.icio.us to catalogue my links. I surf around a lot, and I\u0026rsquo;m quite pleased with how delicious works, and I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to start mirroring my de.icio.us stuff on TealArt. So now, in the sidebar, you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to have a pretty good idea of what kinds of things I\u0026rsquo;ve found on my travels. Just check out my del.icio.us page, or see my most recent 20 links on the side bar.\nI\u0026rsquo;m keeping an eye on the tealart tag on del.icio.us so if there\u0026rsquo;s anything you want to share with me (or chris) and any other tealart user/interested individual, just tag something \u0026ldquo;tealart\u0026rdquo; when you add it to delicious. Also, if you want to send a link to me, just tag it \u0026ldquo;for:celchu19\u0026rdquo; and it\u0026rsquo;ll get sent straight for me. Sweet service if you ask me.\nOk, so there, it just felt like my brain just died, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to end this post before it gets too much weirder. There\u0026rsquo;s knitting news and academic musings, so maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll balance out the content here in a bit. When I have more to give.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/delicious-ness-and-hard-drive-slowdons/","summary":"While I ordered more RAM for my beloved Zoe last week, which should arrive Monday or Tuesday of this week, I\u0026rsquo;ve been noticing that Zoe hs been running a bit more slowly than I think I\u0026rsquo;d like. So finally, yesterday I did some looking around and realized much to my surprise that I only had 500 megs of hard drive space free. Of a total 100 gigs. Well no wonder It was a little slow, and no wonder. So I did some reorganization and coppied a lot of stuff off of the hard drive. I was able to get 12 gigs of content offloaded, and I\u0026rsquo;m back down to about 9 gigs, but its a much healthier situation. Part of the problem has been that with the release of the new iTunes store, iTunes 7 and iTunes Movies, all the video (including the television) has been re-encoded that\u0026rsquo;s about twice as good (320x240 to 640x480 which is about dvd quality).","title":"del.icio.us-ness and hard drive slowdons"},{"content":"Ok, so I was just reading, and had a thought. What bugs me a lot (among other things) about Sociobiology, and Evolutionary Psychology, is that they necessarily make human development and existence teleological.\nNow evolution has to be teleological, because it attempts to describe a process that\u0026rsquo;s theoretically already happened. The telos of evolution is the present, not the future (that\u0026rsquo;s where the eugenicists screwed up, among other places. Right?). We can assume that evolution will continue in the future, but because evolution works in a huge timescale, the only thing we really know is that humans, and nature, and the world, will change in the future, but more specificity, given that we\u0026rsquo;re talking about Evolution, seem ahem unprudent.\nSocial Sciences, are then, trying to describe a contemporary process. We\u0026rsquo;ll take developmental psychology here, because it\u0026rsquo;s my current fascination, and because both evolution and human development seem on first glance to follow a similar kind of course. There\u0026rsquo;s also that ontogeny replicating phlygeny bit that I forgot for a while, and that\u0026rsquo;s sort of bothersome. Anyway, we are, as human\u0026rsquo;s always developing, and while human development ends at death, I\u0026rsquo;d hardly say that death is the telos of development.\nI should also point out that despite the fact that we develop in relation/response to our environment, that development isn\u0026rsquo;t an Evolutionary Process. The word evolve has grown to encompass a number of causal occurrences that are, basically \u0026ldquo;change over time\u0026rdquo; and a \u0026ldquo;growing sense of complexity,\u0026rdquo; which I think deserves some semantic distance from Evolution as it applies to biological processes, or might be applied to psychological processes (usually inappropriately) but that\u0026rsquo;s neither here nor there.\nNow evolution clearly is ongoing, and this presents a problem, because I\u0026rsquo;d hate to take the positivist rout and say \u0026ldquo;we can\u0026rsquo;t analyze evolution as a process in the moment, so lets ignore it.\u0026rdquo; But I\u0026rsquo;m not sure where else to go with this. At the very least, it seems to me that there\u0026rsquo;s a certain \u0026ldquo;unified progress narrative,\u0026rdquo; that ends in the present, implicit in evolutionary theory; whereas there is a plurality of developmental narratives, that are always in process, always being re-written, some of which aren\u0026rsquo;t progress narratives, where the \u0026ldquo;march toward complexity\u0026rdquo; doesn\u0026rsquo;t pervade the structure and content of the narrative/study/theory. Is this a contrived division, or a useful conceptual boundary? (Does the latter exist, and is there some more productive premise to establish?)\nJust thoughts. Cheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/development-evolution-and-telos/","summary":"Ok, so I was just reading, and had a thought. What bugs me a lot (among other things) about Sociobiology, and Evolutionary Psychology, is that they necessarily make human development and existence teleological.\nNow evolution has to be teleological, because it attempts to describe a process that\u0026rsquo;s theoretically already happened. The telos of evolution is the present, not the future (that\u0026rsquo;s where the eugenicists screwed up, among other places. Right?). We can assume that evolution will continue in the future, but because evolution works in a huge timescale, the only thing we really know is that humans, and nature, and the world, will change in the future, but more specificity, given that we\u0026rsquo;re talking about Evolution, seem ahem unprudent.\nSocial Sciences, are then, trying to describe a contemporary process. We\u0026rsquo;ll take developmental psychology here, because it\u0026rsquo;s my current fascination, and because both evolution and human development seem on first glance to follow a similar kind of course.","title":"Development, Evolution and Telos"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s funny. I write TealArt enters with a very strange intended audience, and it\u0026rsquo;s an audience that\u0026rsquo;s pretty darn old. I joined a listserv a little while ago, and everyone on the list is having fun setting up their \u0026lsquo;blogs\u0026rsquo; (blogspot affairs), and I feel like a seasoned pro, because not only have I been blogging for a really long time (I think there has some form of CA/TA blog this or blog that for, 5-6 years, maybe more.) This is an exceptionally long time, when you think about the history of the blog. The end result is that I\u0026rsquo;m writing for a very strange audience: It\u0026rsquo;s a bit detached and I attempt to establish some sort of authority/legitimacy. I also don\u0026rsquo;t expect that there are many real people out there, which I know can\u0026rsquo;t quite be the case, but no matter.\nIn the past few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a very little amount of time/energy/thought, rethinking the way I use my computer. Mostly this has consisted of a lot of observation of usage habits, software usage, and nagging desires for new features/possiblities. While I was in St. Louis I listed off all the applications that I use regularly in a TealArt entry. I\u0026rsquo;ve subsquently changed everything I said in that entry, because writing that entry started a minor observation project that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on to see what I need/want most and what I need to do to get this done.\nMy biggest change has been a move back to Voodoo-Pad from OmniOutliner, because I feel like I wasn\u0026rsquo;t getting the most out of the program (I never did get how to use columns, and I always felt like the formating, an aesthetic concern I\u0026rsquo;ll grant you, would never behave,) this I think is mostly a problem with my brain and how it works in combination with the kind of tasks that I seem to be focusing on. I learned from 43Folders that there\u0026rsquo;s going to be some sort of Omni kGTD program (a productivity methodology/application) on the heels of being released. Sweet.\nI like VoodooPad because it behaves a little better with the formating, and the new version (which I completely missed) has both multiple window and tabbed editing/browsing of your notes which is great. As is the new file format which allows for bigger file sizes and integration of PDF files (so you can have PDF articles that you get from JStor into VoodoWiks. It\u0026rsquo;s all great. There\u0026rsquo;s also a feature in the Pro version that allows you to set up an integrated wiki server through voodoo-pad, which isn\u0026rsquo;t a feature I\u0026rsquo;m going to need for years, so I am without.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also decided to give up the ghost on Microsoft applications for Mac, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to make a lot of sense. I\u0026rsquo;m using my weblog editor (more on that in a moment) and VoodooPad for all of my text drafting, and though I might turn on Office every now and then to create knitting patterns, between these apps and google there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot that I could want from Microsoft, and I hate the drain on resources to keep such programs open. Despite the ugly icon, I really want to use Mellel, because it looks really cool, and works pretty good in the demo. The only think I need such a program for is for Manuscript editing (and maybe some basic desktop publishing-type things, how long has it been since someone said \u0026ldquo;desktop publishing?\u0026rdquo;). So there\u0026rsquo;s that.\nZoe, my computer, is about a year and a half now, and I\u0026rsquo;ve just ordered the RAM upgrade that I promised myself that I\u0026rsquo;d get a year ago (never buy RAM from Apple because it\u0026rsquo;s cheaper to buy the same stuff cheaper on your own, but then of course I never do because I\u0026rsquo;m lazy.) So that\u0026rsquo;s on it\u0026rsquo;s way, and I think it\u0026rsquo;ll make the whole operation run a lot more smoothly. For instance, the computer I had for a couple years in high school and my old iBook both had less ram than this one does right now, for no real good reason. But I don\u0026rsquo;t think that this entry is really about hardware much, so we\u0026rsquo;ll save that for another day.\nAnd I think this has taken way too much time at this point, so I\u0026rsquo;ll go now, and I\u0026rsquo;ll try and write again very soon ;)\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/being-a-geek/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s funny. I write TealArt enters with a very strange intended audience, and it\u0026rsquo;s an audience that\u0026rsquo;s pretty darn old. I joined a listserv a little while ago, and everyone on the list is having fun setting up their \u0026lsquo;blogs\u0026rsquo; (blogspot affairs), and I feel like a seasoned pro, because not only have I been blogging for a really long time (I think there has some form of CA/TA blog this or blog that for, 5-6 years, maybe more.) This is an exceptionally long time, when you think about the history of the blog. The end result is that I\u0026rsquo;m writing for a very strange audience: It\u0026rsquo;s a bit detached and I attempt to establish some sort of authority/legitimacy. I also don\u0026rsquo;t expect that there are many real people out there, which I know can\u0026rsquo;t quite be the case, but no matter.\nIn the past few weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a very little amount of time/energy/thought, rethinking the way I use my computer.","title":"Being a Geek"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t want to harp on this overlymuch, as I\u0026rsquo;ve communicated this little anecdote/personality insight to several of my most prominent readers, but I just wanted to say a few things about my tea drinking habit.\nFirst of all, I have a really nifty stainless steel mug, with a peeling turquoise/robin\u0026rsquo;s egg colored enamel. I got it after a series of plastic mugs cups broke unceremoniously. It\u0026rsquo;s once shiny interior has stained wonderful deep brown color that is really amazing. I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that this style of mug is called a Malibu Tumbler, and really I couldn\u0026rsquo;t be happier. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I need to start looking for a replacement because it\u0026rsquo;s showing some serious ware. Actually it makes a bubbling noise on the bottom sometimes when I poor new water into it. Having said that there aren\u0026rsquo;t any real leaks, so Its a bit disconcerting. Anyway. Moving on.\nMy cup is, at this point, a character object. A professor that I have in a lot of class this year, made reference to it in her lecture, (an example concerning color perception). I even cary it around sometimes when it\u0026rsquo;s empty, because I feel naked without it. So I kind of need to find the perfect replacement, so I\u0026rsquo;m on the look out. If you have something that you think might be good run it by me. That would be awesome.\nThus far we have only discussed the cup. There is the considerable topic of the consumption of the tea. You see I\u0026rsquo;ve come to think that my consumption of tea functions like an addiction. Not compleatly, and I\u0026rsquo;ll argue against this in a moment, so you\u0026rsquo;re not left with the idea that I\u0026rsquo;m a raving loon, but hear me out. I have a particular kind of tea that I drink, almost to the exclusion of all others. I orchestrate my daily running about, to classes, meetings and errands around making sure my tea cup is as close to full as it can be. I know where all of the convenient hot water taps are. I have a tea kettle on my desk, and by the chairs that I most frequently sit in. The ritual of having tea and being able to thoughtfully sip it every now and then is calming, and the feeling of discovering an empty tea cup at the bottom of the second hour (or earlier) of a two hour class is soul crushing. I\u0026rsquo;m happier and function better when I have tea; though this, is likely due to a Ritilin like effect, and is perhaps the main reason for all this madness, because I don\u0026rsquo;t really need it to get going in the morning.)\nSo tea is wonderful, basically. The reassurance that I\u0026rsquo;m not a loon: I tend to (intentionally or not) wean myself from tea when I\u0026rsquo;m not in school, because the ritual is gone, and I don\u0026rsquo;t suffer that greatly. Though I am less productive, I think the ritual, not the chemistry has something to do with that. I don\u0026rsquo;t really need it to wake up, as I mentioned above. As a side effect of the last point, because I don\u0026rsquo;t need the tea to wake up, I tend to consume more tea later in the day, which means, I can mostly avoid headaches, because even if I get a late start at 1 or 2 with my first cup, I\u0026rsquo;m usually only 16-18 hours from my last cup.\nIs this much thought on the subject itself a sign of trouble. Ah well. At least it tastes good.\nCheers, sam\nps. more content coming soon I promise. I even have a plan!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tea-addiction/","summary":"I don\u0026rsquo;t want to harp on this overlymuch, as I\u0026rsquo;ve communicated this little anecdote/personality insight to several of my most prominent readers, but I just wanted to say a few things about my tea drinking habit.\nFirst of all, I have a really nifty stainless steel mug, with a peeling turquoise/robin\u0026rsquo;s egg colored enamel. I got it after a series of plastic mugs cups broke unceremoniously. It\u0026rsquo;s once shiny interior has stained wonderful deep brown color that is really amazing. I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that this style of mug is called a Malibu Tumbler, and really I couldn\u0026rsquo;t be happier. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I need to start looking for a replacement because it\u0026rsquo;s showing some serious ware. Actually it makes a bubbling noise on the bottom sometimes when I poor new water into it. Having said that there aren\u0026rsquo;t any real leaks, so Its a bit disconcerting. Anyway. Moving on.\nMy cup is, at this point, a character object.","title":"Tea Addiction"},{"content":"Kiss Me, Charlene \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;Yarn: Regia Blahblahblahblah (I lost the ball band). It\u0026rsquo;s part wool and part polyamory or something like that.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via The Panopticon.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/wool-and-polyamory/","summary":"Kiss Me, Charlene \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;Yarn: Regia Blahblahblahblah (I lost the ball band). It\u0026rsquo;s part wool and part polyamory or something like that.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via The Panopticon.)","title":"Wool and Polyamory"},{"content":"Backwards Socks\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s this really cool sock pattern. A lot of people have been working on this sock which for the initiated uses a traditional sock heel worked backwards. This backwards sock, uses a normal heel flap owkred in the opposite direction, and really there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to think that this wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work, and I think is incredibly clever. I think I know what my next sock is going to be.\nHa!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/backwards-sock/","summary":"Backwards Socks\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s this really cool sock pattern. A lot of people have been working on this sock which for the initiated uses a traditional sock heel worked backwards. This backwards sock, uses a normal heel flap owkred in the opposite direction, and really there\u0026rsquo;s no reason to think that this wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work, and I think is incredibly clever. I think I know what my next sock is going to be.\nHa!","title":"Backwards Sock."},{"content":"In the first class meeting of my first class today, I was charged with the task of introducing myself (name/class/major(s)) and the answer to the following question: \u0026ldquo;If you could be any animal, what would it be and why.\u0026rdquo;\nI was fretting my turn, because I wanted to say something weird, but I was feeling incredibly uninspired at 9:00 am. It came my turn and I just said \u0026ldquo;cat.\u0026rdquo;\nBut there was an expectation of an explanation. Oh crap.\n\u0026ldquo;Because they\u0026rsquo;re cranky.\u0026rdquo; I said, followed by a short but awkward pause. Everyone laughed nervously.\n\u0026ldquo;I mean they\u0026rsquo;re fuzzy and cute, but they have edge. Lots of edge, I like edge. Cute\u0026rsquo;s good too,\u0026rdquo; I amended. There was a bit of a chuckle around and by now my turn was over and I moved on.\nI love having cats. Minaloush is incredibly cute, but also edgy as hell. She likes to sleep with me, but she also is very particular about how this occurs and where next to me she sleeps. It\u0026rsquo;s crucial that one sleeps under substantial blankets when sleeping with the \u0026rsquo;loushis because if she decides that you\u0026rsquo;ve wronged her by rolling over, your leg could become forfeit.\nThe other thing is there\u0026rsquo;s this place in the middle of her back that if you scratch a lot, she does this \u0026ldquo;chin lift\u0026rdquo; and her eyes close and she smiles, and it\u0026rsquo;s potentially the most adorable thing in the history of the world.\nThat is all. More \u0026rsquo;loushisness in the future.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-joy-of-cats/","summary":"In the first class meeting of my first class today, I was charged with the task of introducing myself (name/class/major(s)) and the answer to the following question: \u0026ldquo;If you could be any animal, what would it be and why.\u0026rdquo;\nI was fretting my turn, because I wanted to say something weird, but I was feeling incredibly uninspired at 9:00 am. It came my turn and I just said \u0026ldquo;cat.\u0026rdquo;\nBut there was an expectation of an explanation. Oh crap.\n\u0026ldquo;Because they\u0026rsquo;re cranky.\u0026rdquo; I said, followed by a short but awkward pause. Everyone laughed nervously.\n\u0026ldquo;I mean they\u0026rsquo;re fuzzy and cute, but they have edge. Lots of edge, I like edge. Cute\u0026rsquo;s good too,\u0026rdquo; I amended. There was a bit of a chuckle around and by now my turn was over and I moved on.\nI love having cats. Minaloush is incredibly cute, but also edgy as hell. She likes to sleep with me, but she also is very particular about how this occurs and where next to me she sleeps.","title":"The Joy of Cats"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m sitting here in a bit of a monetary slump, due mostly to the fact that I have to leave for a meeting that I have a big part in half an hour, and that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; work, but a bunch of nagging things that would take more than the avilable period of time (and my web browsers being sluggish,) so all these combine to leave: blogging time. That\u0026rsquo;s right, you, gentle reader, get a perfect example of the post genre \u0026ldquo;rambling, what I did today, with a tidbit of knitting commentary, and general thoughts on the state of the world.\u0026rdquo;\nYeah I don\u0026rsquo;t know either. Here goes.\nRegistration is today, I went late (to avoid long lines of freshman) but they ran out of stickers. So the whole point of registration was moot, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a sticker for this semester, and wont until wednesday, which is fine but annoying.\nI got a couple books out of the library, regarding narrative and life history. So it\u0026rsquo;s not quite \u0026ldquo;my area\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s interesting, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to exhaust them pretty quickly. I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on expanding my knowledge base on this, and have been collecting sources. That\u0026rsquo;s been the biggest accomplishment of the day. I\u0026rsquo;m really excited about this project, and I hope I can make it work.\nI went to the Add/Drop session and established a few meetings with profs about various projects and commitments. I enjoy so many of the faculty here (let us note that I almost referred to them as \u0026rsquo;the professoriate\u0026quot;). The sad part of this, is I only have classes/etc with 2-3 different profs. I\u0026rsquo;m close to being done and that\u0026rsquo;s exciting and a bit scary. But I\u0026rsquo;m dealing with it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a bit anxious for my books to come, they\u0026rsquo;re all ordered, and this was among the cheaper semesters (it\u0026rsquo;s still a bit jarring).\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t been on campus at all, really, yet. I like my set up, as odd as it might sound, but when I\u0026rsquo;m actually on campus I don\u0026rsquo;t have a huge desire to stay. At this point, I just want classes to start, because there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of uncertainty, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ll feel better when I have syllabi in hand. Minor Angst\nAs for knitting, I\u0026rsquo;ve finally caught up with the book that has the pattern that I need to finish/continune working on my Faroe, and that\u0026rsquo;s become my primary project (in addition to the socks.) Though there are a lot of projects hanging out on the needles around me, it\u0026rsquo;s nice to be a single minded project knitter again, and I am once again reminded what a truly splendid pattern this is.\nAdditionally, I wrote another section of the knitting book. Woot. It was quick. They\u0026rsquo;re getting easier to write, and I\u0026rsquo;m writing better content. I\u0026rsquo;ve laid a lot of foundation, and it\u0026rsquo;s finally paying off. There\u0026rsquo;s only one more \u0026ldquo;conceptual\u0026rdquo; pattern framework, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet finished the prototype, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to hold off on that until I do, though I feel ready to write the sweater anyway.\nI\u0026rsquo;m out of my stash of handspun for the handspun sweater (that\u0026rsquo;s turned out to be a \u0026ldquo;knock off\u0026rdquo; in the best possible sense of a Jo Sharp design), so I need to spin more. But I\u0026rsquo;m glad that I\u0026rsquo;m at a pause in this one because it is compleatly soul sucking. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a GREAT sweater.\nThat is all for now.\nI hope you all are well. You know, I know you\u0026rsquo;re out there, you could bother to write/respond to posts and that would make me feel really happy. (hi grandma and mom, I\u0026rsquo;m not specifically talking to you two, but I like hearing from you too).\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/no-i-really-am-a-blogger-after-all/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m sitting here in a bit of a monetary slump, due mostly to the fact that I have to leave for a meeting that I have a big part in half an hour, and that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a lot of \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; work, but a bunch of nagging things that would take more than the avilable period of time (and my web browsers being sluggish,) so all these combine to leave: blogging time. That\u0026rsquo;s right, you, gentle reader, get a perfect example of the post genre \u0026ldquo;rambling, what I did today, with a tidbit of knitting commentary, and general thoughts on the state of the world.\u0026rdquo;\nYeah I don\u0026rsquo;t know either. Here goes.\nRegistration is today, I went late (to avoid long lines of freshman) but they ran out of stickers. So the whole point of registration was moot, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have a sticker for this semester, and wont until wednesday, which is fine but annoying.","title":"No I really am a Blogger after all."},{"content":"Ok, so back from Geek Talk, here\u0026rsquo;s an update on my knitting.\nFor the last month or so of this summer, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken a somewhat uncharacteristic--for me--approach to my knitting project choices. While I sometimes have little bit projects that hardly count as projects at all (hats, a sock, a simpler sweater, etc.) most of my knitting energy is dedicated to a single somewhat complicated desgin. These days, I concentrate on making stranded color-work ganseys of one type or another, but I\u0026rsquo;ve also done lace work or even interesting mostly plain sweaters. These are my real projects, and I can finish one of these projects, in about 2 months, or less, depending on the complexity and other factors. As the summer\u0026rsquo;s drawn to a close (and it\u0026rsquo;s gotten hot), I\u0026rsquo;ve adopted a new strategy: I\u0026rsquo;ve begun planning out and getting a head start of projects.\nI hate starting new projects. There\u0026rsquo;s something of a crash from the high that comes from compleating a project, when you realize that you have to choose a new pattern, and set to work casting on (a pain, generally) and memorizing a new pattern. So I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten head starts on a number of projects.\nI have two sweaters, Faroe (take 2), which is at the begining of the gussets, and the Turkish coat which is 8-9 inches long at the moment I\u0026rsquo;m also about 12-13 inches into a sweater knit out of my own homespun, and I have 2 \u0026ldquo;year\u0026rdquo; projects (big, projects on small yarn and needles which I expect to come and go from, and which like small projects don\u0026rsquo;t really count as projects.) That in combinition with sock knitting (what I\u0026rsquo;ve actually been working on giving the heat, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it.\nWhen I drive north and the weather breaks I\u0026rsquo;ll get back into a more \u0026ldquo;normal\u0026rdquo; pattern of knitting. But until then, this is about all I have for you. :)\nHappy Knitting!\nSam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/end-of-summer-knitting-news/","summary":"Ok, so back from Geek Talk, here\u0026rsquo;s an update on my knitting.\nFor the last month or so of this summer, I\u0026rsquo;ve taken a somewhat uncharacteristic--for me--approach to my knitting project choices. While I sometimes have little bit projects that hardly count as projects at all (hats, a sock, a simpler sweater, etc.) most of my knitting energy is dedicated to a single somewhat complicated desgin. These days, I concentrate on making stranded color-work ganseys of one type or another, but I\u0026rsquo;ve also done lace work or even interesting mostly plain sweaters. These are my real projects, and I can finish one of these projects, in about 2 months, or less, depending on the complexity and other factors. As the summer\u0026rsquo;s drawn to a close (and it\u0026rsquo;s gotten hot), I\u0026rsquo;ve adopted a new strategy: I\u0026rsquo;ve begun planning out and getting a head start of projects.\nI hate starting new projects. There\u0026rsquo;s something of a crash from the high that comes from compleating a project, when you realize that you have to choose a new pattern, and set to work casting on (a pain, generally) and memorizing a new pattern.","title":"End of Summer Knitting News"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s an entry to prove that I still do things other than knit and post-structuralism/gender stuff. So there chris!\nI must say, while I know most hard core geeks cringe at the thought of google taking over the world, and indeed, that\u0026rsquo;s a concern, I have to say that gmail is really a great mail option, and the prospect of Writely.com (also a google service) and Google Spreadsheet are really quite exciting, and I\u0026rsquo;ll have to see how they hold up under more extreme testing, but I can definitely see virtually replacing Microsoft Office: why run two bloated programs when you can run one and get the same thing done. I so rarely draft in a document editor that it\u0026rsquo;s hardly worth the effort and resources of keeping Word open: most of my drafting occurs in on and offline weblog editors (posted then to private journals/categories) or I use some sort of Editing software like Voodoo Pad or Notational Velocity, or Omni Outliner Pro so for the past few months I\u0026rsquo;ve done everything I can to stay out of Word as much as possible. I always keep a browser open anyway, and adding even another glitzy java-ey page open isn\u0026rsquo;t a strain of note, and frankly I like all of the nifty RSS and sharing features.\nSo as a result, I\u0026rsquo;ve been reorganizing my digital lifestyle these past few days, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m in a better place. I\u0026rsquo;ve forwarded a lot of email accounts into my gmail account, including my primary non-academic email account, and I\u0026rsquo;ve set up a number of filters in that account (and sorting rules in my Pop mail client) which will effectively allow me to use the web-mail part of gmail and the offline mail client effectively without needing to sort the same email more than once.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also set up my calendar/schedule for next semester, and it would be really nifty if I could get iCal to publish to my Google Calendar, but I\u0026rsquo;ve not yet perfected that. Seems like I\u0026rsquo;d need a .mac account or something I don\u0026rsquo;t have on TealArt. If anyone has idea\u0026rsquo;s about that, that would be super nifty. The only other kink I have to work out is that writely.com wants me to respond to a confirmation email that I\u0026rsquo;ve yet to receive, despite multiple attempts to get it sent. But it\u0026rsquo;s still beta so hopefully they\u0026rsquo;ll get that sorted out.\nOther interesting computer news of note: I\u0026rsquo;ve switched away from Opera (again,) to Firefox, and I think this one\u0026rsquo;s going to stick. The interesting thing, is that Firefox, an open source (right? it\u0026rsquo;s GPL and all that jazz?) won the browser war, and on an aesthetic software design level, it has the best and most polished design. I liked a lot of Opera\u0026rsquo;s features for a long time, but Firefox really just works better, and it\u0026rsquo;s gotten considerably better in the past few months I think.\nSo every so often I think it\u0026rsquo;s nice to go through all of the software programs you use, in part as it is archival interesting, and also because sometimes there are great programs out there that other people can recommend. Keep in mind that I\u0026rsquo;m running a G4 PowerBook and the Tiger flavor of Mac OS X.\nFor web browsing I use Firefox, and for Instant Messaging I use Adium. My mail client of choice is Apple\u0026rsquo;s Mail.app (I generally use native Mac apps when I can, as they work pretty well, and the integration factor is nice.) I keep VoodoPad, a Notetaking program discussed above in my doc, though I use it somewhat infrequently. I find that the wiki style organization is unwieldy for most uses, and I feel you have to fight the program to get it to effectively do what you need it to.\nI use iTunes, of course, it works and I think it works well as a general content management database (because you can have video\u0026rsquo;s and PDF and other document files in the same database) Though most of my articles/pdf files are not in my iTunes library, I hope to get them added and catalogued at some point. My one complaint, is mostly that my iTunes library is about 50-60 gigs (45 or so goes on to the iPod), and that I fear that I will out grow poor Zoe\u0026rsquo;s hard drive at some point, and iTunes\u0026rsquo; folder organization can be difficult to manage when it gets large.\nMy other main note taking program is Omni Outliner, which lets me successfully take notes in class, and organize my thoughts on a number of key research projects. It\u0026rsquo;s an amazingly capable program, and I can almost use it to draft but the problem is that: the formatting is finicky and uncooperative, particularly with regards to margins. I also don\u0026rsquo;t like that you can\u0026rsquo;t produce good xml files (why, I ask, why?) or even a Microsoft word outline. It\u0026rsquo;s a great program, unless you want to get data out of it in a useable format, at which point its only a pretty good program. Have yet to find one better.\nNetNewsWire and Mars Edit from Ranchero Software, which are the best RSS and offline Weblog editors for Mac OS by a long shot (and I\u0026rsquo;ve tried a bunch of them). Mars Edit, has become the main way I post to this and a number of other blogs. I also do most of my drafting in private blog/categories using this program. The news reader, saves a lot of time, and allows access to a FANTASTIC amount of information, very very quickly. My only complaints are: I don\u0026rsquo;t comment on blogs nearly as much when using a news reader (this is a problem with sam, not the software), and secondly, there\u0026rsquo;s no way to keep my blog reads synchronized with some sort of web based RSS reader (that will keep my folder organization intact: there are 250 feeds, the folders are key).\nI also sometimes use iCal, but it\u0026rsquo;s a hard habit to keep, and if it synched with google calendar that would be even better. But so be it.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s basically it. Word if I absolutely need it. The same of Excel (we\u0026rsquo;ll see how much google replaces these programs though). And that\u0026rsquo;s about it\u0026hellip;)\nI think that about does it. There\u0026rsquo;ll be more knitting content soon I promise. ;)\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/im-still-a-geek-no-really/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s an entry to prove that I still do things other than knit and post-structuralism/gender stuff. So there chris!\nI must say, while I know most hard core geeks cringe at the thought of google taking over the world, and indeed, that\u0026rsquo;s a concern, I have to say that gmail is really a great mail option, and the prospect of Writely.com (also a google service) and Google Spreadsheet are really quite exciting, and I\u0026rsquo;ll have to see how they hold up under more extreme testing, but I can definitely see virtually replacing Microsoft Office: why run two bloated programs when you can run one and get the same thing done. I so rarely draft in a document editor that it\u0026rsquo;s hardly worth the effort and resources of keeping Word open: most of my drafting occurs in on and offline weblog editors (posted then to private journals/categories) or I use some sort of Editing software like Voodoo Pad or Notational Velocity, or Omni Outliner Pro so for the past few months I\u0026rsquo;ve done everything I can to stay out of Word as much as possible.","title":"I\u0026#8217;m still a geek. No really!"},{"content":"Nonplussed -Brilliant.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/nonplussed/","summary":"Nonplussed -Brilliant.","title":"Nonplussed"},{"content":"So I just had one of those knitting moments where, nearly 8 inches into a sweater, something didn\u0026rsquo;t quite seem right. It looked just fine. I liked the fabric. So I took out a spare needle and knit the back stitches onto the spare.\nYep, you guessed it. Somehow, this sweater was made for someone with a 42\u0026quot; chest measurement. Ha! Only 3\u0026quot;-4\u0026quot; off. Which is massive my friend.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m using handspun, so this is one of those rare cases where I actually care.\nThe funny thing is that I did do a gauge swatch to test for this kind of thing. The best one I\u0026rsquo;ve done in years.\nMy thought is that the handspun is irregular enough that it mucked up the swatch. That\u0026rsquo;s my story and I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to it.\nI pulled the needle and will frog in the morning. On the upside, it\u0026rsquo;ll go quicker now, when I cast on 20 fewer stitches. (Sigh.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to go knit socks and write in the mean time.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gauge-happens/","summary":"So I just had one of those knitting moments where, nearly 8 inches into a sweater, something didn\u0026rsquo;t quite seem right. It looked just fine. I liked the fabric. So I took out a spare needle and knit the back stitches onto the spare.\nYep, you guessed it. Somehow, this sweater was made for someone with a 42\u0026quot; chest measurement. Ha! Only 3\u0026quot;-4\u0026quot; off. Which is massive my friend.\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;m using handspun, so this is one of those rare cases where I actually care.\nThe funny thing is that I did do a gauge swatch to test for this kind of thing. The best one I\u0026rsquo;ve done in years.\nMy thought is that the handspun is irregular enough that it mucked up the swatch. That\u0026rsquo;s my story and I\u0026rsquo;m sticking to it.\nI pulled the needle and will frog in the morning. On the upside, it\u0026rsquo;ll go quicker now, when I cast on 20 fewer stitches.","title":"Gauge Happens"},{"content":"Sorry for the lack of updating here the past few days, I\u0026rsquo;ve been all over hither and yon, and until today, I haven\u0026rsquo;t had much of a chance to sit down with Zoe (the computer). So no updates. Though, I did drive a good thousand miles: I left Nashville, spent the better part of a week in Beloit doing some unpacking cleaning, spinning, and crucial summer unraveling. Then I came back down to St. Louis where I\u0026rsquo;m having some Old Home Times, before I get back to Beloit and it starts all over again.\nSummer it seems makes people happy, or at least increases any latent tendency to be happy: it\u0026rsquo;s sunny out, school\u0026rsquo;s out, all we have to do is sit around and wait for the plants to grow. Which of course is a complete lie: our current interpretation of the agrarian calendar is so warped, but whatever, I\u0026rsquo;m happy, and that\u0026rsquo;s good enough for me.\nThis is one of those TealArt posts that lingers open on my desktop for a long time and I come back to it a couple times a day, hoping to get something respectable. My computer\u0026rsquo;s a bit full at the moment, I have a lot of things open in the \u0026ldquo;needs attention\u0026rdquo; category, and in some ways that\u0026rsquo;s become somewhat daunting. Like, for instance, my inbox with 180 emails, many of which just need to be deleted, but I have a number of not particularly urgent replies that have been nagging at me for a while.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;ve been milling over writing projects and that\u0026rsquo;s brought be back to the keyboard. So rock on. I posted a list of \u0026ldquo;to-do\u0026rdquo; things for the knitting book project, but it\u0026rsquo;s nagging at me, and it\u0026rsquo;s mostly in my head anyway, so I think that one gets deleted, and I\u0026rsquo;m just going to plow on.\nLet me see if there\u0026rsquo;s any other random tidbit that I can throw into this post: The knitting projects are all reasonably advanced but in a stage where the new-nes has worn off and the end is not yet in sight. In recent days and weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve grown quite excited about knitting socks, which I think I will be doing a lot more of in the coming days and months and the prospect of spinning all the yarn I knit with.\nI really enjoy knitting sweaters, that\u0026rsquo;s for sure, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ve reached a point where, there isn\u0026rsquo;t a huge score of sweaters that I\u0026rsquo;m just dying to make. Sure there are a few. The one\u0026rsquo;s I have cast on right now, plus a \u0026ldquo;peasant\u0026rdquo; version of Starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Henry VIII\u0026rdquo; (two colors in natural gray heathered colors), one of the Dale of Norway olympic sweaters, and that\u0026rsquo;s about it. There are other sweater\u0026rsquo;s I\u0026rsquo;ll make, for sure, I\u0026rsquo;m not saying that I\u0026rsquo;m running out of knitting, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel the same rabid experimentalism that I had a year or two ago. I also know what I have to do to get a sweater to work, and I have a foundation of 6 main design forms that can provide me with thousands of variations: enough for a life time. I also have more sweaters than I know what to do with\u0026hellip; (and yes, I do plan to start giving my sweaters away more)\nSo I think I want to move on to knitting socks more, because I enjoy sock making and I haven\u0026rsquo;t made enough, by a long shot. I need to increase my stash of sport weight yarn though. I\u0026rsquo;ll be getting myself to a wheel soon to begin this, rest assured. Spinning my own yarn, allows me to knit with fibers that would other wise be completely out of my reach--and I\u0026rsquo;m talking about nice merinos and wool/silk blends here, not cashmere, or even really alpaca. I also think that, unless I commit to spinning my own yarn in a serious and consistent way, I would never get around to knitting what I spin, or spin nearly as much. I\u0026rsquo;ve begun the first sweater in this pursuit and the yarn is bulkier than I\u0026rsquo;d like, but the yarn is heavenly soft, and it\u0026rsquo;s going quick, so I can\u0026rsquo;t complain.\nOk. I\u0026rsquo;m done for real this time. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll post about something less esoteric later. But then I have a co-conspirtor again, hopefully, so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t just have to be to keep you happy. Ha!\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/summer-makes-people-happy/","summary":"Sorry for the lack of updating here the past few days, I\u0026rsquo;ve been all over hither and yon, and until today, I haven\u0026rsquo;t had much of a chance to sit down with Zoe (the computer). So no updates. Though, I did drive a good thousand miles: I left Nashville, spent the better part of a week in Beloit doing some unpacking cleaning, spinning, and crucial summer unraveling. Then I came back down to St. Louis where I\u0026rsquo;m having some Old Home Times, before I get back to Beloit and it starts all over again.\nSummer it seems makes people happy, or at least increases any latent tendency to be happy: it\u0026rsquo;s sunny out, school\u0026rsquo;s out, all we have to do is sit around and wait for the plants to grow. Which of course is a complete lie: our current interpretation of the agrarian calendar is so warped, but whatever, I\u0026rsquo;m happy, and that\u0026rsquo;s good enough for me.","title":"Summer Makes People Happy"},{"content":"I am something of a hand spinner, and have been for about a year and a half, though this is very much a secondary hobby of mine. I knit constantly, or nearly so. I spin in spurts, usually in the summers.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve sold a bunch of my hand-spun in the past, and generally I think this is as good a use of the yarn as anything, because I tend to like really fine yarns, and really regular and sturdy spinning, so as a knitter handspun yarns aren\u0026rsquo;t really my thing. Which I\u0026rsquo;ve been totally content with. I\u0026rsquo;ve also said, that I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to knit something out of a yarn that I spent a lot of time making only to have the sweater not come out.\nAs my mother will surely attest, I\u0026rsquo;m something of a yarn compulsive: I tend to fret endlessly over yarn requirements and running out of wool, even though I have no gumption about dye lot changes mid sweater. So using hand-spun doesn\u0026rsquo;t work particularly well with these tendency, at least in my head (where it counts!).\nSo to recap: time is a major concern, as is the weight of the finished yarn.\nIn the past two days I spun up 8 oz of black \u0026ldquo;hat merino\u0026rdquo; from R. H. Lindsay wool company. I spent less than 2 hours each on each 4 oz ball, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty pleased with the results. It\u0026rsquo;s not quite dk or sport weight, but a little heavier is just fine. By my math, I could have spun the yarn for a stranded sweater in\u0026hellip; 16 hours. (I figure 2 lbs should do it.). If I spin for half an hour a day, this is about a month. I generally take 6 weeks or 2 months to knit a sweater of this type, so I think this is something I could easily do.\nThis of course means that I could conceptually spin enough yarn so that I only knit my own hand-spun. Which would be pretty nifty. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;d actually do this, on account of, wanting to get finer yarns and more consistent yarns for some projects (socks?) but it\u0026rsquo;s a cool idea.\nBefore I go, I think I should give a progress report of sorts.\nI\u0026rsquo;m to the ribbing at the bottom of my grey, accent cabled, endless sweater using fingering weight yarn and size 1 needles. I have sleeves and the yoke. Plus the second half of the ribbing (again the first half took two days of intermittent knitting. And I\u0026rsquo;m going to knit hem\u0026rsquo;s on this one I think. I still have a lot, but I\u0026rsquo;m almost completely done with the most tedious part of this sweater, so rock on for that. I\u0026rsquo;m making this sweater using a \u0026ldquo;middle out\u0026rdquo; construction, which is pretty cool. The pattern is going to go in the book. I might make a worsted weight version of this sweater at some point, Maybe out of hand-spun.\nSpeaking of the book, I haven\u0026rsquo;t worked on it much. I think the ticker is at 13,000 words, unedited. I\u0026rsquo;ve written about 3 sweaters, and I need to get another one done. I also need to make charts for the patterns, but that isn\u0026rsquo;t as pressing, and requires freeing up a little RAM. I\u0026rsquo;m pleased with this, and my next phase for this project, is to get it over another hump (another pattern or two) and then do a little work in promoting myself. This includes a little pod-casting and more blogging, which I want to do anyway, as well as writing additional patterns to publish.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also working on the coat. I\u0026rsquo;m a little worried that the ribbing pulls in too much (ie. that the difference in number of stitches between the ribbing and the sweater is to great.). If it were a pullover this wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be an issue at all, but it\u0026rsquo;s a jacket/cardigan, and this might affect how the hem lays. and acts, and I want to avoid fucking up another cardigan. Having said that the math looks right from the notes. so shrug. It might be worth it to do some preliminary blocking to see how it\u0026rsquo;ll act. We\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nFaroe is on hold till I figure out what\u0026rsquo;s supposed to happen on the gussets. My memory isn\u0026rsquo;t that good.\nI finished the Teal Tunic sweater I have some ends to weave in. It\u0026rsquo;s nice enough. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to give it away, because I made it very intentionally to big. That is, it came out the size I wanted it to be, I just for some reason had this notion that I was bigger than I am. By 4 inches. sigh\nOh yeah and I have to get into graduate school too.\nChris\u0026rsquo; back. Woot! You get to hear someone other than me blather on.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-economics-of-handspring/","summary":"I am something of a hand spinner, and have been for about a year and a half, though this is very much a secondary hobby of mine. I knit constantly, or nearly so. I spin in spurts, usually in the summers.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve sold a bunch of my hand-spun in the past, and generally I think this is as good a use of the yarn as anything, because I tend to like really fine yarns, and really regular and sturdy spinning, so as a knitter handspun yarns aren\u0026rsquo;t really my thing. Which I\u0026rsquo;ve been totally content with. I\u0026rsquo;ve also said, that I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to knit something out of a yarn that I spent a lot of time making only to have the sweater not come out.\nAs my mother will surely attest, I\u0026rsquo;m something of a yarn compulsive: I tend to fret endlessly over yarn requirements and running out of wool, even though I have no gumption about dye lot changes mid sweater.","title":"The Economics of Handspring."},{"content":"As I\u0026rsquo;ve said elsewhere on this blog, I\u0026rsquo;m working on what I think will be a knitting book project. To get it published I\u0026rsquo;ll need to lift and retool the material and push it in knitting magazines before making a getting book out of it, but that\u0026rsquo;s a technicality. Right now, I\u0026rsquo;m working on getting a number of patterns and narratives drafted. They\u0026rsquo;re a lot of fun. A slightly more focused and retrospective version of the kinds of things I sometimes write for TealArt Knitting, along with patterns.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written a bit less than half of what I want to get done in this series of writing. I\u0026rsquo;ve written patterns for 2.5 of the sweaters, and my basic sock recipe (because every good knitting book has to have one). I want to write patterns out for two more sweaters, before I take a pause on this project. Now that I\u0026rsquo;m in the grove of it, I can get about a pattern done a day. My one major concern is that I don\u0026rsquo;t have a stockpile of sock patterns in the same way I have a stockpile of sweater patterns. When I knit socks, I mostly knit plain socks, so rather than giving a detailed description of a bunch of different socks want to go through sections on a number of different design features. A number of ways to knit toes, heels, in addition to a cabled sock and some other designing ideas.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s what I think this project has that no other book or other collection has: The patterns are accessible to knitters of an advanced beginner starting to knit their first pair of socks or first sweater, and to more advanced knitters interested in traditional color work and inventive but elegant/classic constructions (as opposed to most inventive constructions which look like they were designed by a gremlin suffering heroin withdrawal whilst being held a gun point.) It also combines the best features of my favorite knitting writing patterns: the instructions are written in a conversational style which encourages and enables knitters to take charge of their knitting, and the patterns are accompanied by explanations of my design process and communicate my memories of the design process, which I think locates the process of knitting in my life and memory: a very important aspect of knitting for me. These are the things I can share (and some great patterns too.) Having said that, the essay sections are very closely tied to the patterns, so it\u0026rsquo;s not as if I ramble on and on about my life and knitting, and then give an unrelated and bland pattern. This project is about the patterns, not the stories: the stories just make the patterns better. And frankly given the nature of the patterns, I can\u0026rsquo;t fathom the patterns without the stories.\nAnd above all I\u0026rsquo;m having fun.\nIn other news I\u0026rsquo;m driving back to Wisconsin on Sunday. A change will be good.\nCheers,\nSam\nps. So I\u0026rsquo;ve done it again: I started a TealArt post with the intention of posting a witty line from today\u0026rsquo;s writing, only to write a meta post which compleatly missed my intention. Sigh.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s something from one of the little narratives/essays I wrote today. Enjoy!\nIn my more starky moments I am tempted to say: \u0026ldquo;if knitted sweaters were meant to be tailored, we\u0026rsquo;d be tailors not knitters.\u0026rdquo; Thankfully, most of time, cooler heads prevail, and I attempt create the best fitting knitting garments I can, though I do attempt to recognize the limits of my craft, and concentrate on playing to the strengths of this craft.\nKnit and (live on) in good health!.\npps. Sorry Chris, apparently my best guy friend ;) heh, for all the crap on the home page for you if you\u0026rsquo;re getting it. And I don\u0026rsquo;t, really\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/snarky-moments/","summary":"As I\u0026rsquo;ve said elsewhere on this blog, I\u0026rsquo;m working on what I think will be a knitting book project. To get it published I\u0026rsquo;ll need to lift and retool the material and push it in knitting magazines before making a getting book out of it, but that\u0026rsquo;s a technicality. Right now, I\u0026rsquo;m working on getting a number of patterns and narratives drafted. They\u0026rsquo;re a lot of fun. A slightly more focused and retrospective version of the kinds of things I sometimes write for TealArt Knitting, along with patterns.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written a bit less than half of what I want to get done in this series of writing. I\u0026rsquo;ve written patterns for 2.5 of the sweaters, and my basic sock recipe (because every good knitting book has to have one). I want to write patterns out for two more sweaters, before I take a pause on this project. Now that I\u0026rsquo;m in the grove of it, I can get about a pattern done a day.","title":"Snarky Moments"},{"content":"Hi all, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing here; or at least, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing here so that you can see them. Over the past few days I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of writing about knitting, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been using TealArt as a repository for this writing, but I\u0026rsquo;ve kept those categories hidden. I think this is cool, as it allows me to edit and organize a lot of my thoughts and drafts using an existing (and mobile) software system that I can access from any computer with an internet connection. I\u0026rsquo;ve set up a hidden tree of categories for various writing projects, but you probably don\u0026rsquo;t care that much.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written about 40 pages worth of knitting pattern and discussion. The idea behind this project is to record patterns/recipies that I\u0026rsquo;ve made up over the past year and basic forms that I use frequently. (I think Stephanie calls her basic knitting pattern\u0026rsquo;s recipes, I like it.) Additionally, I\u0026rsquo;ve always wanted to write patterns that I enjoy in basic conversational styles that aren\u0026rsquo;t intimidating and hopefully can be inspiring to knitters, wheather they are interested in knitting the patterns or not. It\u0026rsquo;s fun. I\u0026rsquo;ve written 2 patterns, and I want to write two or three more before I put together something to shop around. Mostly because what I have right now are how to knit x object in a very plain way. Which wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be representative of what this project is.\nWhen I wrote fiction, it could be like pulling teeth at times, and this hasn\u0026rsquo;t even felt a twinge like that. A very good thing. A lot of fiction writers say \u0026ldquo;write what you know,\u0026rdquo; which always rubbed me the wrong way. I wrote/write science fiction, and I sure as hell didn\u0026rsquo;t know a thing about life on a space ship, I don\u0026rsquo;t know anything about telepathy, and when I wrote it I didn\u0026rsquo;t know very much about a lot of the stuff I wrote about. Some of it came off just fine too, because if we only wrote what we know, there would never be anything new. Fiction is about synthesis and creation. So the \u0026ldquo;write what you know\u0026rdquo; directive, seemed defeatist.\nHaving said that, knitting writing, is very much something I know, and writing is fun and comparatively easy. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to work on this project and see where I get from it. I\u0026rsquo;d still like to write fiction again. On that note I should go dig up a copy of The Great Gatsby.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t been actually knitting much outside of my head. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a sock that is progressing with acceptable speed. I\u0026rsquo;m still on sort-of-hiatus of a few days from my bigger sweater project as I suspected I would be. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be driving up to wisconsin on Sunday, so things are starting to get hectic around here and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to have as much free time over the next 4-5 days, after that I\u0026rsquo;ll have more free time.\nStay tuned.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-and-writing/","summary":"Hi all, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing here; or at least, I\u0026rsquo;m sorry that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing here so that you can see them. Over the past few days I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of writing about knitting, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been using TealArt as a repository for this writing, but I\u0026rsquo;ve kept those categories hidden. I think this is cool, as it allows me to edit and organize a lot of my thoughts and drafts using an existing (and mobile) software system that I can access from any computer with an internet connection. I\u0026rsquo;ve set up a hidden tree of categories for various writing projects, but you probably don\u0026rsquo;t care that much.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve written about 40 pages worth of knitting pattern and discussion. The idea behind this project is to record patterns/recipies that I\u0026rsquo;ve made up over the past year and basic forms that I use frequently. (I think Stephanie calls her basic knitting pattern\u0026rsquo;s recipes, I like it.","title":"Knitting and Writing"},{"content":"Heh.\nOk folks, so when I wrote that last post, I started out with the intention of giving you a few links and send off a personal message in response to a comment I got.\nFirst off. I wanted to link to R. H. Lindsay Company, which is a wool provider. This is great stuff. A friend just got an order and some of the \u0026ldquo;Black hat Wool\u0026rdquo; and some of their other products. It\u0026rsquo;s divine wool. Really great for all you spinners and felters. I\u0026rsquo;ve you\u0026rsquo;re interested in spinning pre-dyed fibers than this is probably not for you, but there are a limited natural colors. And the prices can\u0026rsquo;t be beat.\nAs a spinner, while I like spinning yarn from dyed rovings every now and then as a change of pace, I must say that I think natural colors are really the best bet. I like naturals on princpal, 5 of the 6 sweater\u0026rsquo;s I\u0026rsquo;m currently knitting or have just knit, or plan to knit next, are some combination of black gray and white. In terms of dye jobs, I think kettle dyed yarns are really the best in the world, so it\u0026rsquo;s useful to dye after spinning and not before.\nCheck them out!\nThe second thing. Is that I want to publicly shame Ken for having not seen the Star Trek movies. Geeze. I say, people these days. What\u0026rsquo;s up with that?\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/memory-damn-you/","summary":"Heh.\nOk folks, so when I wrote that last post, I started out with the intention of giving you a few links and send off a personal message in response to a comment I got.\nFirst off. I wanted to link to R. H. Lindsay Company, which is a wool provider. This is great stuff. A friend just got an order and some of the \u0026ldquo;Black hat Wool\u0026rdquo; and some of their other products. It\u0026rsquo;s divine wool. Really great for all you spinners and felters. I\u0026rsquo;ve you\u0026rsquo;re interested in spinning pre-dyed fibers than this is probably not for you, but there are a limited natural colors. And the prices can\u0026rsquo;t be beat.\nAs a spinner, while I like spinning yarn from dyed rovings every now and then as a change of pace, I must say that I think natural colors are really the best bet. I like naturals on princpal, 5 of the 6 sweater\u0026rsquo;s I\u0026rsquo;m currently knitting or have just knit, or plan to knit next, are some combination of black gray and white.","title":"Memory. Damn You!"},{"content":"Just because it really needs to be recorded, I have another story about Rodney for your enjoyment. Enjoy.\nI went to the bathroom and when I came out I saw Rodney lying on her bed (it\u0026rsquo;s this rather nifty bed with a sewn in cover so she can burrow underneath. This is a bed that she loves dearly, so the bed alone is kind of cute.\nTo add insult to injury, though, she (the Dachshund) was lying in her bed on her back with her short stubby legs folded and lying there limp. Her eyes were closed and her tongue was sticking out. It should also be noted that Rodney has a slight under-bite so her tongue sticks out much of the time.\nSo I said (to R.M.), \u0026ldquo;you really have to see the dog, she\u0026rsquo;s being cute again.\u0026rdquo;\nR.M. came over and Rodney noticed us after a little while, and roused, but didn\u0026rsquo;t move much. So R.M. bent over and poked at the dogs tongue to get it to stick in, as it (the tongue) as a tendency to get all crusty and dry if she doesn\u0026rsquo;t keep in her mouth.\nThis was generally an ineffective strategy: the tongue stayed out, and Rodney started to look with bewilderment at us because we were both starting at her, and poking her tongue.\nSo I did the only thing I know to get her to retract her toungue: I griped it gently between my thumb and index finger and pulled slightly.\nViolia! The tongue retracted.\n\u0026ldquo;Great, now on top of everything we have a dog with a slide projector screen tongue!\u0026rdquo; R.M. said.\nSigh. It\u0026rsquo;s true.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/more-from-the-dog-files/","summary":"Just because it really needs to be recorded, I have another story about Rodney for your enjoyment. Enjoy.\nI went to the bathroom and when I came out I saw Rodney lying on her bed (it\u0026rsquo;s this rather nifty bed with a sewn in cover so she can burrow underneath. This is a bed that she loves dearly, so the bed alone is kind of cute.\nTo add insult to injury, though, she (the Dachshund) was lying in her bed on her back with her short stubby legs folded and lying there limp. Her eyes were closed and her tongue was sticking out. It should also be noted that Rodney has a slight under-bite so her tongue sticks out much of the time.\nSo I said (to R.M.), \u0026ldquo;you really have to see the dog, she\u0026rsquo;s being cute again.\u0026rdquo;\nR.M. came over and Rodney noticed us after a little while, and roused, but didn\u0026rsquo;t move much.","title":"More from the Dog Files"},{"content":"Hi Folks.\nSorry for being quiet the last few days. I got sucked into a minor little void of a knitting project. There\u0026rsquo;s news for you all. Here\u0026rsquo;s the scoop:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a little known fact that Malabrigo Yarn and HandpaintedYarn.com are two fronts of the same operation. The side effect is that there is some overlap in materials, though at this time no duplication of products. That is, the same basic dyes are used, and some of the same fibers are used (though not milled in the same way).\nAnyway. So for my birthday, I got a sweaters worth (actually, probably more than a sweater\u0026rsquo;s worth.) of lace weight yarn which I fully intend to knit I sweater out of. It comes out at 12 stitches to the inch, over 468 stitches, on US size 0 needles (The smallest commonly available size.) It\u0026rsquo;s dizzying and the progress is incredibly slow. So slow.\nDid I mention that I\u0026rsquo;m attemping to do stranded color work (sometimes, though incorrectly in this case, refered to as Fair Isle: the technique is the same, though the patterns come not from the Hebrides but from Turkey.) This is bordering on the insane.\nIn any case, my normal plan of attack is to knit sweaters with pattern stripes running vertically. I tend to be of the opinion that this has several advantages. For starters it\u0026rsquo;s more flatering, and is really cool looking. Additionally, it\u0026rsquo;s also unusual, because the vast majority of hand knitted things have stripes that run horizontally. It also maximizes a number of knitting pleasures for me: once I establish a pattern I get endless amounts of fun building on this pattern. While the patterns repeat (and frequently patterns range from three rounds to not more than twelve or sixteen rounds) They very rarely syncronize, such that every round is indeed different. For example I\u0026rsquo;m working on a sweater now with five different patterns, ranging from four rows to eighteen stitches. The patterns synch every five inches or so (36 rounds.) So it\u0026rsquo;s fun for the memory, and it suits me. So there!\nAnyway. My plan for the sweater had 10 individual patterns, short row repeats (which was a good move), but the problem is that such patterns are very subtle and include little features which are created with only a stitch or two. When your stitches are one 1/12th of an inch square, this is incredibly tiny, the effect is hard to see. Now I think it would end up looking really good in the end, the problem that arises is that it\u0026rsquo;s too hard to see the stitches to actually knit the pattern.\nSo my solution. Take out about 3-4 rows and knit stripes horizontally. This means I\u0026rsquo;ll have to rely on paper/my computer more, but the yarn is so small that I\u0026rsquo;m going to wait till I can order some more suited needles for the project. I need a breather in any case.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ve put the sweater aside, finished a pair of socks, and gone back to knitting things that don\u0026rsquo;t make me feel like a loon.\nIn other news, I\u0026rsquo;m feeling more sane and less blah. I reorganized R-tron and my files on our external hard drives. By my count, we have about 65 free gigabytes of external storage combined. This is out of a total 450 gigabytes. Now there\u0026rsquo;s some duplication, but not much. This felt like an accomplishment. I\u0026rsquo;ve also gotten back into doing some reading, and feeling more productive. School will start soon, and all will be better. I really have to find a place with a summer session from now on, I don\u0026rsquo;t cope well without the structure that being connected to the rhythm of academic life. Ah Well. So it goes.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/you-must-be-crazy-boy/","summary":"Hi Folks.\nSorry for being quiet the last few days. I got sucked into a minor little void of a knitting project. There\u0026rsquo;s news for you all. Here\u0026rsquo;s the scoop:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a little known fact that Malabrigo Yarn and HandpaintedYarn.com are two fronts of the same operation. The side effect is that there is some overlap in materials, though at this time no duplication of products. That is, the same basic dyes are used, and some of the same fibers are used (though not milled in the same way).\nAnyway. So for my birthday, I got a sweaters worth (actually, probably more than a sweater\u0026rsquo;s worth.) of lace weight yarn which I fully intend to knit I sweater out of. It comes out at 12 stitches to the inch, over 468 stitches, on US size 0 needles (The smallest commonly available size.) It\u0026rsquo;s dizzying and the progress is incredibly slow. So slow.","title":"You Must Be Crazy, Boy!"},{"content":"Here, by request, is an item that I wrote up about the dogs and life in general. In all, a pretty good picture of life here. All in all a good time\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve put rodney\u0026rsquo;s bed underneath the table behind me, because I was tired of running my chair into it, and there\u0026rsquo;s only so much room, doncha know. anyway. so rodney, being a burrowing dog, has taken to this room limitation like a bee to a flower.\nand she\u0026rsquo;s lying there behind me snoring. which is incredibly cute.\nalso, when i picked her up from the vet, from her mange treatment, it said \u0026ldquo;rodeny, female\u0026rdquo; and I was like, \u0026ldquo;arooo\u0026rdquo; but in fact, I had once again forgotten that the little ferocious squirrel killer was a girl.\nOh wait, you all haven\u0026rsquo;t heard about the Squirrel (unless I told bodel about it when I talked to her last week, but the rest of you don\u0026rsquo;t know.)\nRodney killed a squirrel. And brought it in to the house. And left it in her bed.\nPerhaps needless to say, the bed behind me now is a new one\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-squirrel-killer/","summary":"Here, by request, is an item that I wrote up about the dogs and life in general. In all, a pretty good picture of life here. All in all a good time\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026rsquo;ve put rodney\u0026rsquo;s bed underneath the table behind me, because I was tired of running my chair into it, and there\u0026rsquo;s only so much room, doncha know. anyway. so rodney, being a burrowing dog, has taken to this room limitation like a bee to a flower.\nand she\u0026rsquo;s lying there behind me snoring. which is incredibly cute.\nalso, when i picked her up from the vet, from her mange treatment, it said \u0026ldquo;rodeny, female\u0026rdquo; and I was like, \u0026ldquo;arooo\u0026rdquo; but in fact, I had once again forgotten that the little ferocious squirrel killer was a girl.\nOh wait, you all haven\u0026rsquo;t heard about the Squirrel (unless I told bodel about it when I talked to her last week, but the rest of you don\u0026rsquo;t know.","title":"The Squirrel Killer"},{"content":"There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of things I could blog about: the dead squirrel in the house, what I\u0026rsquo;m reading, the cool things I\u0026rsquo;ve found in my web serfings, or a nifty reflection on Star Trek: The Next Generation but I won\u0026rsquo;t. At least not yet. I\u0026rsquo;ve made some key progress on a bunch of knitting related projects, and I have some thoughts for you. So there.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to buy the number six ebony needles at some point, anyway, though not this instant, as my next two worsted projects are/will be on number fives, because I\u0026rsquo;ve already started the first one (and its more directly from a pattern, and I know this will fit, so I\u0026rsquo;m sticking with it) and the second one will be on fives because I intend for it to be a jacket and I want something on a little tighter. After that I have two projects on smaller needles (because the yarn is thinner,) so its not a pressing issue.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started Faroe, and I\u0026rsquo;m really enjoying the sweater. Again. I lost the pattern after knitting the first half of the first round. I was able to remember the pattern from a year ago, and now have eight inches of knitting completed. So there. I\u0026rsquo;m a modern day memory ninja. 4.5-ish more till the gusset starts, and I will need the pattern for that, because even I\u0026rsquo;m not that good.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been pondering for a while, how to finish the neck of this sweater. One of the cool things about the sweater is that the neck has a pattern and is hemmed. The other problem is that the neck is about two inches high, which is way too high. Under more normal circumstances where neck/collars are less of a design feature (usually some sort of ribbing) its easy to just stop after an inch and a quarter or an inch and a half, and be happy; however, in this design that\u0026rsquo;s not possible, and with a neck like that I fear that it might make the sweater almost unwearable. Now I don\u0026rsquo;t want that to happen, clearly, and I also don\u0026rsquo;t want to wreck the design by just knitting ribbing at the neck. Which leads me to the following thought and my \u0026ldquo;Yarn Need.\u0026rdquo;\nSince the collar is hemmed, it strikes me that there\u0026rsquo;s no reason that I can\u0026rsquo;t buy a ball of super nice black yarn (the sweater is black and white) and knit the hem facing in it. And while I\u0026rsquo;m at it, I\u0026rsquo;d knit facings for the cuffs as well. And since it\u0026rsquo;s only one ball I think I can go all out. My requirements are: soft (and silky) comfortable, not too warm (no angora, for instance), black, and something close to worsted weight. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking some combination of (merino) wool and/or alpaca with silk or tencel. I thought about Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk (DK or regular, actually a bit on the bulky side might be alright), but that might not be right. Also all the merino/tencel blends I\u0026rsquo;ve found have been fingering weight, or just fiber, and I\u0026rsquo;m not keen on spinning this myself. I\u0026rsquo;ve also thought about Frog Tree Alpaca, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen that in a while and don\u0026rsquo;t remember it that well. I came across a skein of the Bulky/Chunky, baby alpaca (in white alas), I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a couple of different branding, but Plymouth seems to be the most common, that might work. Any ideas? I\u0026rsquo;m all ears. Leave a comment or drop me an email.\nIn other news: I\u0026rsquo;ve broken the back of the first sleeve of the teal tunic sweater, and should I feel particularly inspired (read: unlikely) I might finish it tonight, If not soon. Usually home stretch knitting inspiration is enough to carry me through the second sleeve, so the end is defiantly in sight. I\u0026rsquo;m forcing myself to at least finish the Teal Tunic before I start the next sweater (Turkish Gul (Rose) Coat/Jacket), which I\u0026rsquo;m excited about. I spent a few moments a couple days ago figuring out the numbers and pattern(s) for the sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be fun.\nAnd finally, I wanted to post a comment that I wrote for this entry in Stephanie\u0026rsquo;s blog. Stephanie asked for the three most influential knitters. Here\u0026rsquo;s my response:\nI was just thinking of this the other day. Here are my thouhgts:\n1. Elizabeth Zimmerman because without her, all of our (yours, mine, this community, etc.) wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have any foundation to think about knitting as something that we could do just for fun, because she made possible the contemporary sense of independent and creative knitting. While others on this list have mentioned Meg Swansen, and this is a nomination that I would gladly (and whole heartedly support), except it would mean excluding another amazing knitter, and given that Elizabeth is no longer around to come to dinner, I say let Meg come as her proxy.\n2. Alice Starmore. Alice has written the best patterns I\u0026rsquo;ve ever read, and the only ones that I am, for some unknown reason, drawn to follow without question. What I like most about Starmore\u0026rsquo;s is that her sweaters are complicated, difficult, but not undoable, and unabasshedly so. Most designers these days seem to be attempting tailoring or dresmaking with knitting needles, and I\u0026rsquo;m generally less than impressed with the products. Starmore patterns, though clearly not (all) traditional in the strictest sense, respond and interact with a knitting tradition, and are sweaters, uniquely designed by a knitter, and the patters shine as a result.\n3. Pricillia Gibson-Roberts. The first two were no brainers, and I think many knitters would say \u0026ldquo;starmore, zimmerman, and um, um, um\u0026hellip;.\u0026rdquo; in search of another knitting giant perhaps of either a more contemporary/popular (a la Nacy Bush, Sally Melvile, etc.) and while I think they are very important to our contemporary understanding of knitting (and indeed Nancy Bush, in particular has written a number of books which I predict will provide the perfect stepping stone for those knitters, converted in the recent fad--the frilly polyester novelty scarf knitters turned felted bags/hats/etc knitters--to move on to more complex things like color work, cables, and lace. But this is merely a diversion.) Pricillia Gibson-Roberts, with some of the best qualities of both Zimmerman and Starmore, doesn\u0026rsquo;t give patterns but teaches the skills neccessary to design patterns like the ones that earned Starmore her place at the table.\nSo there!\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/yarn-needs-and-progress-and-my-knitting-giants-talk/","summary":"There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of things I could blog about: the dead squirrel in the house, what I\u0026rsquo;m reading, the cool things I\u0026rsquo;ve found in my web serfings, or a nifty reflection on Star Trek: The Next Generation but I won\u0026rsquo;t. At least not yet. I\u0026rsquo;ve made some key progress on a bunch of knitting related projects, and I have some thoughts for you. So there.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m going to buy the number six ebony needles at some point, anyway, though not this instant, as my next two worsted projects are/will be on number fives, because I\u0026rsquo;ve already started the first one (and its more directly from a pattern, and I know this will fit, so I\u0026rsquo;m sticking with it) and the second one will be on fives because I intend for it to be a jacket and I want something on a little tighter. After that I have two projects on smaller needles (because the yarn is thinner,) so its not a pressing issue.","title":"Yarn Needs and Progress and my Knitting Giants Talk."},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had occasiton to read/share Knitting Without Tears and Stephanie\u0026rsquo;s (the Yarn Harlot) new book Knitting Rules, which as forced me to think about the whole gauge issue again.\nYou may have noticed that I\u0026rsquo;m not a big gauge monkey. I knit. It usually fits pretty well, and when it doesn\u0026rsquo;t, there\u0026rsquo;s always something worse wrong with it. Like the wings on the vest I made my father, or the star trek shoulders I did on my second sweater, or the tight forearms and crappy yarn on my first (and thus far only attempt at Ram\u0026rsquo;s Horn), or the hem which hang uncomfortably on the cardigan I made last summer.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve made enough sweaters with, enough different kinds of yarn that I have a good idea of how many stitches I need to make a sweater that fits pretty well. One of the upsides of color work sweaters, is that the patterns often dictate a particular number of stitches, that isn\u0026rsquo;t that flexible, so even if I thought a sweater would fit a little bit better with 2-8 fewer stitches after doing a perfectly washed gauge swatch, I probably couldn\u0026rsquo;t take those stitches out. The style of these sweaters is intended to be loose, so it works out.\nSo I know if I cast on about 300 stitches in worsted weight wool on a size five needle, the sweater fits. Generally at a 38 or 40 inch chest. The astute among you will recognize that this means I\u0026rsquo;m knitting sweaters at, get this, 7.5 or 8 stitches to the inch. I should be knitting at 5-5.5 (maybe 6) stitches an inch.\nI\u0026rsquo;m typically a loose knitter. Outrageously so. This has, unsurprisingly, produced something of an identity crisis. (Also we should note, that my needle collection is built around being a specific kind of knitter, so might require more needle buying, which I dread).\nIt\u0026rsquo;s also lead me to a quandary that I think you all might be able to help me with: What do I do? Options seem to be:\nContinue at my insanely tight gauge, because I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to follow a pattern and produce a sweater that will fit me. Move up two needle sizes and hope that works well enough. But I might have to redesign patterns. Buy ebony needles in size six, because I own exactly 2 individual size six needles (both double points, and no they don\u0026rsquo;t match) because they are pretty, and I covet them, even though I don\u0026rsquo;t particularly like the experience of knitting with wood, and the extra friction would probably tighten my gauge so as to have no effect on my quandary\u0026hellip; Something else? Hope to hear from you soon!\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gauge-tensions/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve had occasiton to read/share Knitting Without Tears and Stephanie\u0026rsquo;s (the Yarn Harlot) new book Knitting Rules, which as forced me to think about the whole gauge issue again.\nYou may have noticed that I\u0026rsquo;m not a big gauge monkey. I knit. It usually fits pretty well, and when it doesn\u0026rsquo;t, there\u0026rsquo;s always something worse wrong with it. Like the wings on the vest I made my father, or the star trek shoulders I did on my second sweater, or the tight forearms and crappy yarn on my first (and thus far only attempt at Ram\u0026rsquo;s Horn), or the hem which hang uncomfortably on the cardigan I made last summer.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve made enough sweaters with, enough different kinds of yarn that I have a good idea of how many stitches I need to make a sweater that fits pretty well. One of the upsides of color work sweaters, is that the patterns often dictate a particular number of stitches, that isn\u0026rsquo;t that flexible, so even if I thought a sweater would fit a little bit better with 2-8 fewer stitches after doing a perfectly washed gauge swatch, I probably couldn\u0026rsquo;t take those stitches out.","title":"Gauge Tensions"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s a shame TealArt doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a \u0026ldquo;currently playing music\u0026rdquo; option. Lets pretend it does. The music for this post would, then be: \u0026ldquo;Never Tire of the Road\u0026rdquo; from Andy Irvine\u0026rsquo;s Rain on The Roof.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m a little more together now than I was last night when I wrote that entry from hell that I subjected you to. Up on the docket for today\u0026rsquo;s entry some more thoughts on my knitting, and maybe, if we\u0026rsquo;re lucky, an update on writing and reading projects.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started the sleeve on the Turkish Delight sweater. I think some serious blocking is going to be enough to fix the flaws in the collar, so I\u0026rsquo;m being guardedly optimistic about this garment. The sleeve knitting is fun.\nAfter a mishap that\u0026rsquo;s really to embarrassing to relate, I had to go out and purchase a new US size 5, 16 inch knitting needle. I did, however, not get an Addi Turbo, opting for a needle brand I wasn\u0026rsquo;t familiar with. It\u0026rsquo;s metal, and is as slick as an Addi. The cord is stiff, and the needle bits are heavy, so it might not get the dents and dings that my Addis so frequently get. The join isn\u0026rsquo;t perfect, but this isn\u0026rsquo;t a high traffic needle, but I\u0026rsquo;m mostly pleased with what I\u0026rsquo;m working with. My only other complaint is that the pointy bit on the needle is a little shorter than an addi, so it took a little adjusting, but all is well. Frankly most of the time, I don\u0026rsquo;t notice any difference.\n16 inch circular knitting needles always make my hands hurt anyway, so I\u0026rsquo;m working to get through this as much as possible. The sleeve has about 5 inches on it already, and I started it yesterday. These sleeves go fast for some reason.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about knitting a lot of late, because I\u0026rsquo;m drawing close to being done with my major projects of the moment. I usually keep a number of small projects on the needles at all times, usually a pair or two of socks, and my current sock projects are supremely uninspiring. I want to make a couple of pairs of normal worsted weight socks, I think, and instead I have two socks on size 0 and 1 needles. Unacceptable. I think I want to give my mother the last of my uninspiring fingering weight sock yarn and be done with this. The other sock I have on the needles has a cable on it, and was able to knit 4 or 4.5 inches without realizing that I really hate cables. I think they both have to go. Casting on a pair of socks on reasonable size 2.5 needles will make me happy.\nThe other flaw with these pairs of socks that I hate, is that their toe up, and I rather like traditional socks, so I think I\u0026rsquo;m just going to settle on that.\nIn sweater news, The Faroe sweater is of course next, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably start that this weekend. I also want to start another Turkish sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m going to use a slightly (oh so slightly) modified pattern from TD, which is called Gul, apparently meaning rose (frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t see it, but whatever). It\u0026rsquo;s the center panel, and it\u0026rsquo;s a lot of fun, pretty balanced foreground/background, and looks like it has vertical columns, but is only one pattern. No tessellation. Woot!\nPart of me wants to make it into a cardigan, but I can\u0026rsquo;t figure out how to make all the bands hang right. My current game plan is to read some of AS\u0026rsquo;s Fair Isle book on the subject of cardigans to see how to manage this quandary.\nIn other knitting news, I\u0026rsquo;d like to make note of a development. I\u0026rsquo;m no longer sewing steeks at all. Just finding the middle stitch and cutting. It works. The key is knitting in wool that you know will felt with a steaming and a little encouragement, and that\u0026rsquo;s as good as anything you could do with a needle, and perhaps even better, and making the steeks wide enough 8-10 stitches is plenty. Any kind of sewing, even gentle backstitching as AS recommends, alters and malformes the fabric, and knitting won\u0026rsquo;t ravel sideways, so I think this is a winner.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all for now. I\u0026rsquo;ll do the embodiment post later. Hows that for organization?!\nStay well.\nMid-day Update: I did mid-project blocking, and it calmed many of my fears regarding the neck lines of both of my sweaters. I need to do some sewing to make it perfect, but I\u0026rsquo;m ok.\nI also haven\u0026rsquo;t ripped out the two socks which have been bugging me, but I did start a new pair, and it\u0026rsquo;s making me happy. And that\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s important.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-projects-and-old-friends/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s a shame TealArt doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a \u0026ldquo;currently playing music\u0026rdquo; option. Lets pretend it does. The music for this post would, then be: \u0026ldquo;Never Tire of the Road\u0026rdquo; from Andy Irvine\u0026rsquo;s Rain on The Roof.\nI think I\u0026rsquo;m a little more together now than I was last night when I wrote that entry from hell that I subjected you to. Up on the docket for today\u0026rsquo;s entry some more thoughts on my knitting, and maybe, if we\u0026rsquo;re lucky, an update on writing and reading projects.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started the sleeve on the Turkish Delight sweater. I think some serious blocking is going to be enough to fix the flaws in the collar, so I\u0026rsquo;m being guardedly optimistic about this garment. The sleeve knitting is fun.\nAfter a mishap that\u0026rsquo;s really to embarrassing to relate, I had to go out and purchase a new US size 5, 16 inch knitting needle. I did, however, not get an Addi Turbo, opting for a needle brand I wasn\u0026rsquo;t familiar with.","title":"New Projects and Old Friends"},{"content":"It feels like time for another TealArt post, so here I am. I remember a while back I made a resolution to separate my entries out more and provide fewer long rambling entries, and more single topic entries. So much for that. My father (hi dad!) would quote someone who said \u0026ldquo;sorry for writing a three page letter, I didn\u0026rsquo;t have time to write a one page letter,\u0026rdquo; and I feel really bad for forgetting who it was. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be embarrassed. Everyone else, check the comments to see who it was.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve agreed to do a news segment for a podcast, which should be fun, but I need to write that up. I did some test recording, and my sound quality is pretty good, but it\u0026rsquo;s so much harder than I thought it would be. After so long on the radio where I wasn\u0026rsquo;t forced to listen to myself, it\u0026rsquo;s almost crazy making to record things for pod-casting.\nI read my story for the circle games podcast (which I\u0026rsquo;m going to start calling Circular Games) and there are a couple of things that I need to fix. I though I was done, but there were a couple of editing flubs. It takes about 10 mins to read, and I have the rest of the first cast pretty well laid out. It should happen this week.\nI\u0026rsquo;m reading a book about Embodiment and Cognitive Science (which creatively is titled Embodiment and Cognative Science). And it\u0026rsquo;s interesting read, in that social science way. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading a lot of French body-centric theory/writing (Anti-Oedpus, Discipline and Punish) this summer. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably have something more to say about this shortly. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if I\u0026rsquo;m learning anything exactly, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great book both as a reference, and as a gateway to connect psychology and social/cognitive science to feminist and queer embodiment. Because both disciplines (ha!) are both studying a lot of the same phenomena, and there isn\u0026rsquo;t a lot (any?) crossover. If I were designing a course in embodiment theory, I\u0026rsquo;d definitely include parts or all of this book. The author is also on the faculty of a school on the gradschool list. Here\u0026rsquo;s hoping.\nOk, so having said that, as you can see from the title of this post, I totally meant this to be a post about knitting accomplishments and decisions. So lets get on with that.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve finished the body of a second sweater for this summer. I named it, creatively, \u0026ldquo;Teal Tunic.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s just a basic drop shouldered, gansey style, crew necked number. The neck line isn\u0026rsquo;t perfect, and it\u0026rsquo;s a bit bigger than I wanted it to be, but exactly as bit as I was planning for it to be. I did a guage swatch, I just have an unrealistic idea of my body. Sigh It think it will be nice. And hasn\u0026rsquo;t been blocked and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have sleeves, (or cut arm holes, yet) so I really don\u0026rsquo;t have an idea. I think it would fit my dad, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would look good on him. I\u0026rsquo;m going to finish it, because it could still surprise me, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to chalk it up to poor planning.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve started the first sleeve on the Turkish pullover. It\u0026rsquo;s going very quickly, and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to like this sweater again. The neck of this sweater, also didn\u0026rsquo;t come out as perfectly as I hoped, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t blocked it, and I think there\u0026rsquo;s still potential. I guess I\u0026rsquo;m a little disappointed because I thought that the sweater design would be salable in its current form, and I think I\u0026rsquo;d need to knit another model, and I so don\u0026rsquo;t have the will to do that now. I might block it out before I\u0026rsquo;m done with the sleeves to see how it turns out. I\u0026rsquo;m more hopeful about this one.\nMy next sweater is going to be a remake of Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Faroe\u0026rdquo; which I\u0026rsquo;ve already knit once. I really like this sweater. Her patterns are also really good, so I think this will be a good shift. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to change the collar a little bit, so it\u0026rsquo;s shorter (because I feel, that if you\u0026rsquo;re neck\u0026rsquo;s cold, you should wear a scarf, sweater collars are harder to change at whim.)\nIn other knitting news, I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered Pattons Classic Merino, which I think is a fabulous wool. The Teal Tunic is of this wool Competitive with Cascade in my book. It\u0026rsquo;s softer. Not as firmly spun, so I think Cascade wins out for things like Arans and socks, but I\u0026rsquo;m defiantly going to be using this yarn more in the future. It also sells for 5 bucks a ball at Michael\u0026rsquo;s, and you can\u0026rsquo;t beat that.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m going to leave you with the following thought, and get back to other more productive persist.\nIs there anything better in the world, than a comfortable keyboard and a hot cup of black tea with a dash of milk in a familiar cup? I submit that there is not.\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tonight-on-necklinetm/","summary":"It feels like time for another TealArt post, so here I am. I remember a while back I made a resolution to separate my entries out more and provide fewer long rambling entries, and more single topic entries. So much for that. My father (hi dad!) would quote someone who said \u0026ldquo;sorry for writing a three page letter, I didn\u0026rsquo;t have time to write a one page letter,\u0026rdquo; and I feel really bad for forgetting who it was. I\u0026rsquo;m going to be embarrassed. Everyone else, check the comments to see who it was.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve agreed to do a news segment for a podcast, which should be fun, but I need to write that up. I did some test recording, and my sound quality is pretty good, but it\u0026rsquo;s so much harder than I thought it would be. After so long on the radio where I wasn\u0026rsquo;t forced to listen to myself, it\u0026rsquo;s almost crazy making to record things for pod-casting.","title":"Tonight on Neckline(tm)"},{"content":"My project for the week (and saying it in this way legitimizes a week where I read fiction for fiction\u0026rsquo;s sake, and knitted for knitting\u0026rsquo;s sake) was re-reading Orson Scott Card\u0026rsquo;s Ender\u0026rsquo;s Game books, which I really enjoyed. It was hard having read the book before (and even the books that follow it in Card\u0026rsquo;s sequence), it was like watching old friends walk into a trap. Particularly, in this case, because the trap was traumatic for the characters.\nAs an aside here, I\u0026rsquo;d like to state that the vernacular would have used the term \u0026ldquo;psychological,\u0026rdquo; which is in my mind inaccurate and inpercise at best. Everything is psychological, particularly material reality. But no one asked me.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t record the pod-cast today. Perhaps late tonight, because of the intense reading, my sleep schedule of the past two nights has become particularly skewed. So it goes.\nDuring my reading, I made note of a few things that really got me interested. I was reading on an old Pocket PC that could make voice recordings, so I made use of the feature and recorded two notes. The first was a note about story telling, and I had a sudden realization about how to play a development in my own project.\nThe second point, made a note about an academic interest. There\u0026rsquo;s a part about two-thirds of the way through the book where a character is reflecting on the implications of a fabricated identity. And there it was. The creation of identities (on a personal and community level) is a recurring interest, and there was a passage which really brought together a lot of really good points. So that was good.\nAnyway, I\u0026rsquo;m not feeling particularly articulate right now. Perhaps in a bit.\nBe Well, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/speaking-for-the-speakers/","summary":"My project for the week (and saying it in this way legitimizes a week where I read fiction for fiction\u0026rsquo;s sake, and knitted for knitting\u0026rsquo;s sake) was re-reading Orson Scott Card\u0026rsquo;s Ender\u0026rsquo;s Game books, which I really enjoyed. It was hard having read the book before (and even the books that follow it in Card\u0026rsquo;s sequence), it was like watching old friends walk into a trap. Particularly, in this case, because the trap was traumatic for the characters.\nAs an aside here, I\u0026rsquo;d like to state that the vernacular would have used the term \u0026ldquo;psychological,\u0026rdquo; which is in my mind inaccurate and inpercise at best. Everything is psychological, particularly material reality. But no one asked me.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t record the pod-cast today. Perhaps late tonight, because of the intense reading, my sleep schedule of the past two nights has become particularly skewed. So it goes.\nDuring my reading, I made note of a few things that really got me interested.","title":"Speaking for the Speakers"},{"content":"I made a mitten today. By request. It\u0026rsquo;s rather spiffy. I\u0026rsquo;ve never made a mitten before, and I think it came off rather well. I tried a couple of shaping techniques that I don\u0026rsquo;t use very often, and was reminded why I don\u0026rsquo;t use them. I have the other mitten to knit along with a brief re-knitting of the thumb, but all in all I\u0026rsquo;m pleased. I also have a lot of time to finish, seeing that it\u0026rsquo;s summer at the present. It was good.\nI went to the farmer\u0026rsquo;s market here today. It was rather nifty. I got a lot of cool eggplants. I foresee grilled/broiled japanese eggplant, and Baba Ganouj in our future.\nIn a culinary related note, I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered, much to my amusement, that I\u0026rsquo;m a somewhat adventurous eater. (I have historically been somewhat of a picky eater.)\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think that my palate has really changed much, but there are things that I think of as common place that aren\u0026rsquo;t. Like greek food. I was standing in line at a greek stand at the aforementioned farmer\u0026rsquo;s market (unfortunately for me, we entered from the wrong end of the line, which meant we didn\u0026rsquo;t eat.) I said, oh I think I\u0026rsquo;ll have the falafel, and the woman next to me who had just ordered a jeer-ro sandwich said \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s falfel?\u0026rdquo; So I explained, rather awkwardly that it was sort of like baked or fried hummus patties, only without the tahini (sesame paste, I think) and it\u0026rsquo;s courser. So really, not very much like humus at all. Garbonzo bean base at the least.\nThe other anecdote, of note, is that I introduced this household to pinjur, a bulgarian dip with eggplant, roasted red pepper, garlic, maybe onion, and seasoned with hot peppers, vinegar, and a bit of sugar. So it\u0026rsquo;s a tangy/zingy vegtable dip, that\u0026rsquo;s smooth and almost a little creamy (the eggplant I think). Delightful. Didn\u0026rsquo;t everyone grow up with a jar of it in the fridge?\nIn other knitting news, I have reached the gussets of the sweater. Three more inches until the \u0026ldquo;armholes start\u0026rdquo; from there, it\u0026rsquo;s only two-two and a half inches till the first part of the neck starts (I\u0026rsquo;m doing an open neck) and that\u0026rsquo;s really cool: the second part of the neck starts five inches later.\nOther people might think, \u0026ldquo;the body of the sweater, not to mention the sleeves, is 26 or 27 inches long, and seeing that I\u0026rsquo;ve only knit 13 inches, I still have a hell of a way left to go.)\n\u0026ldquo;Bah!\u0026rdquo; I say. From here on out, I\u0026rsquo;m no more than a day or two between interesting features. The five inches of the neck is something of a stretch, but it\u0026rsquo;s nothing compared to the 10 inches of pattern that I just endured.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve already planned the next seater. A black and white one that I knit last summer. Faroe. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve written about it here. I want to reknit it, in a version that I\u0026rsquo;m more likely to wear.\nWhat I knit after that depends on where I am. If I\u0026rsquo;m still in Nashville or St. Louis, I might start on a lace weight merino pullover. If I\u0026rsquo;m in Wisconsin, I might start a grey sport weight sweater. Or, I\u0026rsquo;ll start the browncoat, which needs some more thinking.\nIf anyone knows of a good source for nice (but still reasonably cheep) worsted weight wool in a number of good subtle brown tones, that would be particularly splendid. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about Bartlett yarns\u0026rsquo; worsted yarn. It\u0026rsquo;s nice, and I think I could do a coat for a pretty reasonable amount (40-50 bucks or so). That\u0026rsquo;s generally what I consider generally a fairly reasonable price point for knitting a sweater that will take six to eight weeks of good knitting. If you have thoughts, send or comment them on in.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had this strange desire to watch the Star Trek movies again. I have fond memories, and even though all of the new generation of sci-fi shows (Babylon 5, Firefly, Battlestar, and Stargate to a slightly lesser extent) like to hate on Trek for being fantastic, overproduced, and overly technical I think that the show was wildly influential, and much of the material was at the very least passably good.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve seen most of the original series and while I like it, I\u0026rsquo;ve not been that fond of it. I watched the New Voyages that have been released, and was particularly astounded by their quality. They even managed to get Walter Koenig and D.C. Fontana on board. It\u0026rsquo;s good stuff. Really good stuff.\nHaving said that, I think the Wrath of Kahn/Search for Spock/Voyage Home trilogy is among the best Trek around, with the possible exception of some of the 4-5 season DS9 (the ones where the Dominon captured DS9 and the BDH* are stuck fighting on the Defiant). But I really liked a lot of what happened in DS9, and that might have less to do with the quality of the show, and more to do with the similarities to Babylon 5 and where I was in my life when I was watching it. Generations was cool too.\nI recognize using the term \u0026ldquo;Big Damn Heros\u0026rdquo; to refer to Trek and not Firefly characters is perhaps a faux pas of Biblical proportions, I\u0026rsquo;m ok with it.\nSo I started out this post, with the notion that it would be shorter and include a segment on bad writing, and it did neither. So it goes.\nHope you\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed.\nHappy July.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/i-made-a-mitten-and-other-stories/","summary":"I made a mitten today. By request. It\u0026rsquo;s rather spiffy. I\u0026rsquo;ve never made a mitten before, and I think it came off rather well. I tried a couple of shaping techniques that I don\u0026rsquo;t use very often, and was reminded why I don\u0026rsquo;t use them. I have the other mitten to knit along with a brief re-knitting of the thumb, but all in all I\u0026rsquo;m pleased. I also have a lot of time to finish, seeing that it\u0026rsquo;s summer at the present. It was good.\nI went to the farmer\u0026rsquo;s market here today. It was rather nifty. I got a lot of cool eggplants. I foresee grilled/broiled japanese eggplant, and Baba Ganouj in our future.\nIn a culinary related note, I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered, much to my amusement, that I\u0026rsquo;m a somewhat adventurous eater. (I have historically been somewhat of a picky eater.)\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think that my palate has really changed much, but there are things that I think of as common place that aren\u0026rsquo;t.","title":"I Made a Mitten and Other Stories"},{"content":"I have begun scheming for a new sweater. I have a number of sweaters in the cue to finish/start knitting, so this one is a ways off, but I was thinking through the sweater and I realized how similar the creative process for knitting a sweater was to writing a book.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s an extensive outlining/desiging stage, where you (or I) have to visualize the entire sweater and process, like doing character sketches, world building, and plot outlining/creation.\nThen there\u0026rsquo;s writing the draft, like knitting the body of the sweater, a stage only describable as \u0026ldquo;a long slog.\u0026rdquo; This stage has it\u0026rsquo;s joys (seeing the pattern emerge) and the seemingly quick progress of the beginning. It also has downsides: the \u0026ldquo;black hole\u0026rdquo; of trunk section (comparable to writing acts two and three of a story in five acts), and the knowledge that even when you complete the sweater, you still have a long way to go before you have a \u0026ldquo;finished product.\u0026rdquo;\nFinally, you have to knit sleeves, and the color, and do whatever finishing you need to. Of course akin to the editing a story into a presentable format.\nNow admittedly I knit sweaters in a particular sort of way designed to eliminate seaming and end weaving in. Some people knit sleeves before their done with the body or block before they seam for instance. So your milage with this metaphor may vary.\nSo this new sweater, that I want to design. I want to knit a jacket, sort of like a frock coat. Subtle fair isle pattern in dark earth tones. Wool. Probably with worsted or heavy worsted weight yarn. The bottom would be hemmed, so the pattern would start at the bottom edge. The body would be 30-35 inches or so long (It would have the longest knitting black hole in the world), and some sort of nifty collar, and several clasps to hold the thing together.\nAnd as I see the sweater come together, I feel just the same way that I do when I figure out the next little bit of the plot. Completely satisfying.\nBefore I get there, though, I have a sweater under way; I\u0026rsquo;m almost up to the underarm gusset, so I\u0026rsquo;m making progress for sure. I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m almost out of the black hole, so that\u0026rsquo;s a great deal of fun. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a great sweater.\nAlso in the cue, is a remake of the first fair isle sweater I attempted, because the pattern was so much fun, and I can\u0026rsquo;t wear the first sweater, because it\u0026rsquo;s awkwardly sized. And I accidentally got the perfect yarn, when I was getting the yarn for the current sweater. I also have the final sleeve of a sweater from last semester to finish when the yarn comes in, and another sport weight grey-heather sweater, possibly a cardigan, for myself.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also the great sweater trade, which I haven\u0026rsquo;t thought much about recently, but that\u0026rsquo;s in there as well.\nIn other news, I didn\u0026rsquo;t record this morning, but I finished the edit on the story last night, which was incredibly satisfying. The \u0026ldquo;spider-men\u0026rdquo; line and ungendered aspects of the story remained, but the narrative voice comes through stronger, and I took out a lot of the hackneyed god/fate/destney crap. So I\u0026rsquo;m happy.\nBest, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweaters-are-like-stories/","summary":"I have begun scheming for a new sweater. I have a number of sweaters in the cue to finish/start knitting, so this one is a ways off, but I was thinking through the sweater and I realized how similar the creative process for knitting a sweater was to writing a book.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s an extensive outlining/desiging stage, where you (or I) have to visualize the entire sweater and process, like doing character sketches, world building, and plot outlining/creation.\nThen there\u0026rsquo;s writing the draft, like knitting the body of the sweater, a stage only describable as \u0026ldquo;a long slog.\u0026rdquo; This stage has it\u0026rsquo;s joys (seeing the pattern emerge) and the seemingly quick progress of the beginning. It also has downsides: the \u0026ldquo;black hole\u0026rdquo; of trunk section (comparable to writing acts two and three of a story in five acts), and the knowledge that even when you complete the sweater, you still have a long way to go before you have a \u0026ldquo;finished product.","title":"Sweaters are like Stories"},{"content":"The title of this post, comes from an online writer\u0026rsquo;s listserv that I belonged to, from about 6 years ago to almost three years ago, if memory serves. While like so many institutions in cyberspace, \u0026ldquo;SoWrite\u0026rdquo; came and went, but I liked the idea: There were a lot of writer\u0026rsquo;s forms where people just sat around and blathered incoherently without producing much content, SoWrite\u0026rsquo;s philosophy was simply, \u0026ldquo;You want to be a writer, do you? So write.\u0026rdquo; It was a nice reminder.\nAs I think about the past few days, and perhaps even the past few weeks, writing these TealArt related entries has been one of the more fun things I\u0026rsquo;ve accomplished. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to write more of them. I hope you don\u0026rsquo;t mind. When I\u0026rsquo;m in school, or at least school for the past three years, I\u0026rsquo;ve had so much academic writing that I get burnt out, and can\u0026rsquo;t possibly envision myself committing another phoneme to the page. So maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll develop a habit this summer and you\u0026rsquo;ll see a TealArt revival, or not, but I\u0026rsquo;m hoping and you know it\u0026rsquo;s good for right now.\nIn addition to the knitting projects that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this summer (ones that seem to be coming out of the \u0026ldquo;black hole stage of the first 10 or so inches, where they won\u0026rsquo;t grow no matter how long you knit on them), I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing a lot of reading. A lot of philosophy, in various forms. While I get called a social scientist a lot, and it\u0026rsquo;s true, I\u0026rsquo;m in an area which suits me in a lot of ways in terms of subject and method, the theories and analytical insights of my discipline (in particular) seem ungrounded somehow. While I really do enjoy this reading, and very much want to continue with this reading, it is not as inspiring or as invigorating as I initially hoped it would. Such is life.\nAnother thing I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on is revising a fiction story that I last edited in 2003. Its a fairly substantial rewrite, but it\u0026rsquo;s going quickly. I\u0026rsquo;m much more nimble with words than I was then. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve reached the top of the hill, as I\u0026rsquo;m sure the quality of the writing on TealArt demonstrates, but I\u0026rsquo;ve grown.\nI had a professor last semester who assigned what I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to calling \u0026ldquo;exercise\u0026rdquo; papers: papers where the object of the writing was to synthesize as many \u0026ldquo;concepts\u0026rdquo; presented in the text/class as possible in a given page count. There was minimal research, and the experience was something like an \u0026ldquo;in-class\u0026rdquo; essay with more stress. Except he ripped apart the writing like a bitter creative writing MFA teaching 5 sections of freshman comp a term. Which was incredibly demoralizing and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how much I\u0026rsquo;ve actually recovered from it.\nIn the past, I\u0026rsquo;ve typically done fairly detailed outlines of a story before I sit down to draft it. I find this particularly important in long form fiction as I fear it would be too easy to write yourself into a tree, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s important to avoid. So I haven\u0026rsquo;t started the--admittedly arduous--process of outlining the re-imagined Circle Games (working: Square Pegs). I think it needs to stew some more. The Circle Games story, is one that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;m done with, and I like the idea of telling it again, and I really like the idea of playing with the characters more. They\u0026rsquo;re good people.\nSo in an effort to establish accountability, my goal is to finish editing this story, so I can do lay down the recording for the first Circle Games pod-cast tomorrow. I also want to go to the contra dance here because I think that would do me good. With luck I hope that means that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to do the editing, and have the pod-cast up by the middle of next week.\nStay well everyone.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/so-write/","summary":"The title of this post, comes from an online writer\u0026rsquo;s listserv that I belonged to, from about 6 years ago to almost three years ago, if memory serves. While like so many institutions in cyberspace, \u0026ldquo;SoWrite\u0026rdquo; came and went, but I liked the idea: There were a lot of writer\u0026rsquo;s forms where people just sat around and blathered incoherently without producing much content, SoWrite\u0026rsquo;s philosophy was simply, \u0026ldquo;You want to be a writer, do you? So write.\u0026rdquo; It was a nice reminder.\nAs I think about the past few days, and perhaps even the past few weeks, writing these TealArt related entries has been one of the more fun things I\u0026rsquo;ve accomplished. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to write more of them. I hope you don\u0026rsquo;t mind. When I\u0026rsquo;m in school, or at least school for the past three years, I\u0026rsquo;ve had so much academic writing that I get burnt out, and can\u0026rsquo;t possibly envision myself committing another phoneme to the page.","title":"So Write"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s come to my attention (thank you, mother dearest) that the TealArt commenting software is not working as it should. As I get ready to start pod-casting, this is going to the top of my list of things to work on.\nI have recently, augmented Wordpress (my delightful back-end software package), in order too accept the pod-cast more graciously. I also cleaned off the web-space a little so I should be able to get underway before I run out of space completely. I\u0026rsquo;ve also drawn up notes for the test episode, that would of course be (Episode 0).\nI want to have a little segment that I can read, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking one of the short stories I wrote before/durring the circle games draft. Not the horror one (g-d, what was I thinking?), but the protest-y one. It has a line that refers to a few people as \u0026ldquo;would-be spider-men,\u0026rdquo; which I was always particularly fond of. And while, it\u0026rsquo;s not Circle Games proper, it could be. So much of the world/\u0026lsquo;verse, is sort of temporally non-descript, which is why I like it, and why I hope others will too.\nAnyway, I want most of my discussion of CG to be in the pod-cast, so there won\u0026rsquo;t be a lot of chatter regarding it here. One of the things I\u0026rsquo;m working on for the proper first episode is a creative commons license for circle games, likely of the attribution-share-alike variety, but I need to think through how that will work.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s about all I have for now. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep in touch, but now I have to fix the commenting. And find a blasted pair of headphones which work.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ramp-up-to-podcast-production/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s come to my attention (thank you, mother dearest) that the TealArt commenting software is not working as it should. As I get ready to start pod-casting, this is going to the top of my list of things to work on.\nI have recently, augmented Wordpress (my delightful back-end software package), in order too accept the pod-cast more graciously. I also cleaned off the web-space a little so I should be able to get underway before I run out of space completely. I\u0026rsquo;ve also drawn up notes for the test episode, that would of course be (Episode 0).\nI want to have a little segment that I can read, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking one of the short stories I wrote before/durring the circle games draft. Not the horror one (g-d, what was I thinking?), but the protest-y one. It has a line that refers to a few people as \u0026ldquo;would-be spider-men,\u0026rdquo; which I was always particularly fond of.","title":"Ramp Up to Podcast Production"},{"content":"So I was (mostly) minding my own business when, I saw the following quote, in this article:\nTrauma becomes neurobiologically etched and may be transmitted across generations.\nOk For starters, no. Wrong. Try again.\nSure expereince (traumatic or otherwise) affects memory, and though we don\u0026rsquo;t really have a clue (well, I for sure don\u0026rsquo;t, someone might, I suppose) how the material realitieis of how memory is stored in the brain, the term neurobiologically etched might represent this process, whatever it may be.\nOk, that said: Memories aren\u0026rsquo;t genetic. You can\u0026rsquo;t transmit this across generations.\nWell you can. It\u0026rsquo;s called telling stories, and it\u0026rsquo;s a social, not a biological process.\nSo there.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/this-is-why-i-hate-neurobiology/","summary":"So I was (mostly) minding my own business when, I saw the following quote, in this article:\nTrauma becomes neurobiologically etched and may be transmitted across generations.\nOk For starters, no. Wrong. Try again.\nSure expereince (traumatic or otherwise) affects memory, and though we don\u0026rsquo;t really have a clue (well, I for sure don\u0026rsquo;t, someone might, I suppose) how the material realitieis of how memory is stored in the brain, the term neurobiologically etched might represent this process, whatever it may be.\nOk, that said: Memories aren\u0026rsquo;t genetic. You can\u0026rsquo;t transmit this across generations.\nWell you can. It\u0026rsquo;s called telling stories, and it\u0026rsquo;s a social, not a biological process.\nSo there.","title":"This is Why I Hate Neurobiology:"},{"content":"This from the new Yarn Harlot Book. You know Stephanie, of the Yarn Harlot. You can google just as quick as I can link.\n\u0026ldquo;When a sweater goes wrong, it\u0026rsquo;s much more spectacular than a wayward scarf. You can laugh about a hat that came out weird for maybe 10 minutes, but an unexpectedly \u0026ldquo;unique\u0026rdquo; sweater never stops being funny (once you work through the period of grief and shock)\u0026rdquo; (187).\nOh that\u0026rsquo;s so the truth. I have my \u0026ldquo;star trek\u0026rdquo; sweater, my flairing cuff hem sweater that was too small, the bulky cotton sweater attempt that turned out to be a shawl the size of Nebraska, the 2 fair isle sweaters with forearms that were too tight, the blue cardigan with the droopy fronts and the two small.\nSigh.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sweaters-gone-wrong/","summary":"This from the new Yarn Harlot Book. You know Stephanie, of the Yarn Harlot. You can google just as quick as I can link.\n\u0026ldquo;When a sweater goes wrong, it\u0026rsquo;s much more spectacular than a wayward scarf. You can laugh about a hat that came out weird for maybe 10 minutes, but an unexpectedly \u0026ldquo;unique\u0026rdquo; sweater never stops being funny (once you work through the period of grief and shock)\u0026rdquo; (187).\nOh that\u0026rsquo;s so the truth. I have my \u0026ldquo;star trek\u0026rdquo; sweater, my flairing cuff hem sweater that was too small, the bulky cotton sweater attempt that turned out to be a shawl the size of Nebraska, the 2 fair isle sweaters with forearms that were too tight, the blue cardigan with the droopy fronts and the two small.\nSigh.","title":"Sweaters Gone Wrong"},{"content":"For Some Practical Anthropology.\n\u0026ldquo;Since I got here in Okondjato I am wondering how they all became poor. I say ‚ \u0026ldquo;became‚\u0026rdquo; because one day their forefathers maybe were not so different than they are now, always around their fires, all drunk, dancing and singing songs, but they were not poor, they were traditional.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via AnthroBoundaries.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/for-some-practical-anthropology/","summary":"For Some Practical Anthropology.\n\u0026ldquo;Since I got here in Okondjato I am wondering how they all became poor. I say ‚ \u0026ldquo;became‚\u0026rdquo; because one day their forefathers maybe were not so different than they are now, always around their fires, all drunk, dancing and singing songs, but they were not poor, they were traditional.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via AnthroBoundaries.)","title":"For Some Practical Anthropology."},{"content":"Shakespeare used \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; with singular antecedents. So there! \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare\u0026rsquo;s rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn\u0026rsquo;t ungrammatical, it isn\u0026rsquo;t a mistake, it\u0026rsquo;s a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don\u0026rsquo;t buy what they\u0026rsquo;re selling.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via Language Log.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/shakespeare-used-they-with-singular-antecedents-so-there/","summary":"Shakespeare used \u0026ldquo;they\u0026rdquo; with singular antecedents. So there! \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare\u0026rsquo;s rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn\u0026rsquo;t ungrammatical, it isn\u0026rsquo;t a mistake, it\u0026rsquo;s a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don\u0026rsquo;t buy what they\u0026rsquo;re selling.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via Language Log.)","title":"Shakespeare used \u0026#8220;they\u0026#8221; with singular antecedents. So there!"},{"content":"The matrilineal ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews\n\u0026ldquo;close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only 4 women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations,\u0026rdquo;\n(Via Dienekes\u0026rsquo; Anthropology Blog.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/draft-the-matrilineal-ancestry-of-ashkenazi-jews/","summary":"The matrilineal ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews\n\u0026ldquo;close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only 4 women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations,\u0026rdquo;\n(Via Dienekes\u0026rsquo; Anthropology Blog.)","title":"The matrilineal ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews"},{"content":"Hello all!\nSorry for being such a bad TealArt-ist of late. I guess I have a few things of interest to tell you all about.\nFirst off I\u0026rsquo;m starting a summer research project of my own. I\u0026rsquo;m doing some work with cyberself-representation among gay men on a couple of websites. I\u0026rsquo;m working from posted profiles, which makes the whole \u0026ldquo;participant\u0026rdquo; issue much less complicated. It does mean that I\u0026rsquo;ll eventually need third party rateors to ensure some measure of validity, but I\u0026rsquo;m still working out the kinks and doing the pilot part of the study. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty darn cool. I\u0026rsquo;ve got a little bit more data to collect (for the pilot), then I have to fix the questions a bit, figure out how to make it work in the statistics program, and then throw together a rough lit review I think. Shiney.\nI also listened to a lot of fandom related pod-casting today whilst driving back from East Tennessee, which has left me really inspired. What was I doing in East Tennessee you ask? another post for another time! And what is fandom you ask? Fandom is the \u0026lsquo;verse (as it were) that fans of a particular segment of popular culture develop, that includes fan fiction and art, RPGs, and fan communing. It\u0026rsquo;s a noun that encompasses all fan related activities, but fandom also frequently is more specific and refers to a specific segment. There is celebrity fandom, Trek fandoms (segmented more or less per series, believe it or not), lots of Harry Potter fandom, House M.D. fandom, etc. You name it, it\u0026rsquo;s out there. And I think as a cultural phenomena, it\u0026rsquo;s damn cool, and though more tangentially the community that springs up around fandom is defiantly a big interest of mine as a social scientist. One thing I can write for TA in the upcoming months is some background on fan stuff. Hell I might even find links like a good blogger. Who knows. But anyway. Moving on; having properly defined fandom, I think it\u0026rsquo;s time for a paragraph break.\nGood. Ok. So all of this podcast listening and fandom, has inspired me to do a couple of things. First, I want to start my own fandom. This seems like a huge undertaking, and perhaps it is, but I think it would be cool, to develop something (and by develop something I mean use the \u0026lsquo;verse that I developed for Circle Games (the novel I wrote during junior year,) and make it public domain, and rework parts of the book to see if I could get people into writing for it. While I will have to do a little work to rewrite some parts and post them online for the world to see, I think I want to try it out as a pod-cast, and see how that works. This is still in development clearly, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s exciting. Clearly it requires thought, but\u0026hellip;. Yeah. Stay tuned. Moving on.\nSecondly, and a little bit related to Circle Games. By the way, I\u0026rsquo;m still carrying the binder around with me, every time I move even, 3 years later. Despite this, it\u0026rsquo;s become abundantly clear that I\u0026rsquo;m not going to revise it. Parts of it are good, and as a whole I like the work (hence the above project,) but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s really worth going through page by page and revising the whole thing to create a 2nd draft of the manuscript (hence the above project.) And the second novel project (which I figure I\u0026rsquo;m only 1/5 of the way done with, at 20,000 words,) upon retrospection I appear to have been attempting to tell a story without any leading characters so no wonder it fell flat. So having come to that conclusion, I think we\u0026rsquo;re due for a paragraph break.\nMy strike of inspiration, which seems to have \u0026ldquo;unstuckified\u0026rdquo; my writing process after two years, is to not, attempt to flagelate deceased equines and finnish outstanding projects as I thought they needed to be finished when I was 17, but rather, re-imagine them as I think they should be told today. Currently my notes include: meshing the environments, making the motivations a little less outlandish, narrating the stor(ies) backwards, demilitarizing the story/\u0026lsquo;vers, omitting the awkward straight relationship (this is what you get when you write a story as your coming out), combining the villains, taking out the space opera feel, and making the setting seem more claustrophobic and somewhat darker.\nIn my head, the re-imagination would be set 150-300 years and a relative dark age/isolation period after the end of Another Round (the second failed project), but that\u0026rsquo;s just for my sanity. Also it helps if I\u0026rsquo;m turing this \u0026lsquo;verse into a public domain fandom, if I can situate/develop an master timeline. My tentative title for this project it Square Pegs, Again, another play on the circle motif, which I always rather liked. But in any case, it\u0026rsquo;s nice to be at least thinking about fiction again in this way.\nWell I think I\u0026rsquo;m just about done with this post. More later. I promise.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/summer-report-issue-1/","summary":"Hello all!\nSorry for being such a bad TealArt-ist of late. I guess I have a few things of interest to tell you all about.\nFirst off I\u0026rsquo;m starting a summer research project of my own. I\u0026rsquo;m doing some work with cyberself-representation among gay men on a couple of websites. I\u0026rsquo;m working from posted profiles, which makes the whole \u0026ldquo;participant\u0026rdquo; issue much less complicated. It does mean that I\u0026rsquo;ll eventually need third party rateors to ensure some measure of validity, but I\u0026rsquo;m still working out the kinks and doing the pilot part of the study. It\u0026rsquo;s pretty darn cool. I\u0026rsquo;ve got a little bit more data to collect (for the pilot), then I have to fix the questions a bit, figure out how to make it work in the statistics program, and then throw together a rough lit review I think. Shiney.\nI also listened to a lot of fandom related pod-casting today whilst driving back from East Tennessee, which has left me really inspired.","title":"Summer Report: Issue 1"},{"content":"Hey folks,\nI recognize that my posting here has been somewhat spotty, but true to form, my winter-break plans to boost posting and activity fell through as usual. I\u0026rsquo;m not that upset, to be honest. It happens.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really strange to see how much this website has changed over the last x-number of years that it\u0026rsquo;s been around. I hope at the very least that I\u0026rsquo;ve become more coherent and well thought out.\nHaving finished my second (and junior) year of college, and watched so many of my friends graduate, I suppose there are a few reflections to be made regarding college (including key events from this semester), my personal progress as displayed on TealArt, and my plans for this summer and next year (including graduate school and life, or whatever follows).\nI\u0026rsquo;m too close to finishing to seriously contemplate transferring from college, but I think I totally would. I\u0026rsquo;ve become more displeased with the psychology program (including the curriculum). I\u0026rsquo;m closest/most comfortable with the faculty that are, in most cases, furthest from my actual interests. The faculty in my area(s) have very applied interests (that are in some cases violently opposed to my interests), I suppose it has not helped that there will be only one semester of the six that I\u0026rsquo;m at this school where all the professors will be teaching \u0026ldquo;normal loads\u0026rdquo; (sabbaticals, study abroad programs, etc.)\nTo make matters worse, most of my peers are generally uninterested in going on with psychology (its a popular undergrad major), or they\u0026rsquo;re interested in clinical/social work possibilities, or they want to do neuroscience (the best option of the three), but very few are interested in being social scientists, which is strange. Anyway. Enough complaining. For a while there I was really interested in branching out in major ways, and in the last few weeks/months I\u0026rsquo;ve become more interested in psychology and the possibilities therein, and at the same time I\u0026rsquo;ve become a bit more disillusioned and bitter about my department and potentially field as well.\nThis renewed interest in psychology has been stirred by more exposure to the cognitive science area of the field, which I had previously stayed away from because the links between cognition and brain (and genetic/biological essentialism/determinism) were/are off-putting, but I think there is room to ask really interesting questions without capitulating to corrupt epistemologies.\nI had one of those semesters which I think just \u0026ldquo;worked\u0026rdquo; and fit together nicely, despite the insane load (no, for real this time, I\u0026rsquo;m not doing it again). I took Social Psychology and Personality Theory, and there is clearly a lot of overlap between those fields, even to the extent that I got certain lectures more than once. I passed notes and texts between all of the classes and projects that I worked. Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde quotes (from my special project) ended up in my psychology of women notes/margins/papers, I passed material between Psychology of Women and the Gender Studies class. I quoted a B.F. Skinner article (from personality class) for my Gender Bending final, and mentioned Cognitive dissonance (from social psych) a few times during class. So it all worked out really well, and I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy about that. I\u0026rsquo;m worried about two of the psych grades, I sort of depressed by it, but it might turn out better than I fear it will at this point. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how it works out.\nEditor\u0026rsquo;s Note: Why yes, I do realize that I\u0026rsquo;m writing this completely out of order.\nIn addition to the already understood goals of generating income, decompressing, and getting ready to apply to graduate school, I have a couple of projects for this summer that I\u0026rsquo;m rather excited about. One major thing on my plate is that I\u0026rsquo;m working on setting up a special project for myself next semester (which is basically to do research that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of in terms of designing a course on post-structuralism and psychology that would make contact with many of my interests regarding narratives, methodologies, social/feminist theory, and psychology), so I have a lot of reading to get through (that I really want to work on. In a connected note, I agreed to be reading buddies with a friend this summer to get through Derrida\u0026rsquo;s On Grammatology. All of these are built around the project of increasing my reading speed/efficacy a bit, because I feel like that needs to happen. I also have a paper from a class that I really like and intend to rewrite and make it publishable.\nI remember that 3 years ago now, I was stressing my ass off over a 4,000 word (max) paper about, masculinity. The subject, particularly my handling of it, is slightly embarrassing now (though as I think about it, in a couple of specific ways, I was almost on track). In the last month, I\u0026rsquo;ve written twice that, and more. (Admittedly not on a single project, but that\u0026rsquo;s close). I think I\u0026rsquo;m a much better writer today than I was three years ago, but I\u0026rsquo;m still not pleased with much of my writing (and for I suppose many of the same reasons that I was displeased by it, 3 years ago). As I think about it, though, when my writing is motivated by something more than \u0026ldquo;demonstrating knowledge and synthetic ability\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m more pleased with it (can you tell I\u0026rsquo;m still bitter about something.) So go figure.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s enough for now. Enjoy!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/two-down-and-one-to-go/","summary":"Hey folks,\nI recognize that my posting here has been somewhat spotty, but true to form, my winter-break plans to boost posting and activity fell through as usual. I\u0026rsquo;m not that upset, to be honest. It happens.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really strange to see how much this website has changed over the last x-number of years that it\u0026rsquo;s been around. I hope at the very least that I\u0026rsquo;ve become more coherent and well thought out.\nHaving finished my second (and junior) year of college, and watched so many of my friends graduate, I suppose there are a few reflections to be made regarding college (including key events from this semester), my personal progress as displayed on TealArt, and my plans for this summer and next year (including graduate school and life, or whatever follows).\nI\u0026rsquo;m too close to finishing to seriously contemplate transferring from college, but I think I totally would. I\u0026rsquo;ve become more displeased with the psychology program (including the curriculum).","title":"Two Down and One to Go"},{"content":"From the Psychology of Women Resource List by a Ph.D and emerita prof. (as a response to a question about obsessive attachment, which from the context seems to be the \u0026ldquo;emotion\u0026rdquo; which underlies stalking and what not.) \u0026gt; I am not sure what behavior constitutes \u0026ldquo;obsessive attachment\u0026rdquo;, but it sounds like stalking which can be physically tracking someone or repeated phone calls and other forms of pursuit. In California this is a crime, not a mental illness. Victims are told to document every occurrence in order to make their case and perpetrators should be told that it is criminal behavior.\nI\u0026rsquo;m curious as to how \u0026ldquo;crimes\u0026rdquo; particularly ones that only \u0026ldquo;exist\u0026rdquo; in certain locales, therefore preludes classification as a \u0026ldquo;mental illness.\u0026rdquo; Clearly it\u0026rsquo;s both \u0026ldquo;criminal\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;illness.\u0026rdquo; Woot, overactive either/or logic in wildly inappropriate settings, by people who should know better.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/some-people-should-know-better/","summary":"From the Psychology of Women Resource List by a Ph.D and emerita prof. (as a response to a question about obsessive attachment, which from the context seems to be the \u0026ldquo;emotion\u0026rdquo; which underlies stalking and what not.) \u0026gt; I am not sure what behavior constitutes \u0026ldquo;obsessive attachment\u0026rdquo;, but it sounds like stalking which can be physically tracking someone or repeated phone calls and other forms of pursuit. In California this is a crime, not a mental illness. Victims are told to document every occurrence in order to make their case and perpetrators should be told that it is criminal behavior.\nI\u0026rsquo;m curious as to how \u0026ldquo;crimes\u0026rdquo; particularly ones that only \u0026ldquo;exist\u0026rdquo; in certain locales, therefore preludes classification as a \u0026ldquo;mental illness.\u0026rdquo; Clearly it\u0026rsquo;s both \u0026ldquo;criminal\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;illness.\u0026rdquo; Woot, overactive either/or logic in wildly inappropriate settings, by people who should know better.\nCheers, Sam","title":"Some people should know better"},{"content":"Collecting stories to build a World Trade Center memorial BL Ochman has alerted me to this excellent initiative. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is collecting stories about 9/11. I guess we all remember what we were doing when this tragic event unfolded.\nThe story-base will be significant and I can see how it will be an effective memorial. With such a rich resource it would be a shame to see its potential unfulfilled. Here are a couple of ways it could be enhanced. People should be encouraged to interact with the stories by being able to comment on them and perhaps tagging and rating each story according to its impact on the reader. The group intelligence would arise from these interactions and provide assistance for new users seeking stories that matter to them.\u0026quot;\n(Via Anecdote.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m really intrigued by storytelling in general, and while the Trade Center is so totally not the cultural moment that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in exploring, I think what this project proposes is really interesting. If memorial can take forms like the Berlin Holocaust memorial (see blog post which discusses it here,) then why can\u0026rsquo;t memorial take an intellectual space like story base? And isn\u0026rsquo;t that really cool, as a concept?\nJust a thought\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/memorial-through-story/","summary":"Collecting stories to build a World Trade Center memorial BL Ochman has alerted me to this excellent initiative. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is collecting stories about 9/11. I guess we all remember what we were doing when this tragic event unfolded.\nThe story-base will be significant and I can see how it will be an effective memorial. With such a rich resource it would be a shame to see its potential unfulfilled. Here are a couple of ways it could be enhanced. People should be encouraged to interact with the stories by being able to comment on them and perhaps tagging and rating each story according to its impact on the reader. The group intelligence would arise from these interactions and provide assistance for new users seeking stories that matter to them.\u0026quot;\n(Via Anecdote.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m really intrigued by storytelling in general, and while the Trade Center is so totally not the cultural moment that I\u0026rsquo;m interested in exploring, I think what this project proposes is really interesting.","title":"Memorial Through Story"},{"content":"Overheard Last night\u0026hellip; \u0026gt; A: BigImportant University has two Ph.D programs: one in English and one in Literature.\nR: What\u0026rsquo;s the difference?\nA: The website says, that the professors in the English program are interested in literature, and the people in the literature program\u0026hellip; aren\u0026rsquo;t as much.\nSigh.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s funny. But it\u0026rsquo;s also true. The Literature is more theoretical and in with the \u0026ldquo;cultural studies\u0026rdquo; paradigm. So it makes sense, but it leads to funny statements like that.\nSigh.\nCarry on.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/disciplinarity-2/","summary":"Overheard Last night\u0026hellip; \u0026gt; A: BigImportant University has two Ph.D programs: one in English and one in Literature.\nR: What\u0026rsquo;s the difference?\nA: The website says, that the professors in the English program are interested in literature, and the people in the literature program\u0026hellip; aren\u0026rsquo;t as much.\nSigh.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s funny. But it\u0026rsquo;s also true. The Literature is more theoretical and in with the \u0026ldquo;cultural studies\u0026rdquo; paradigm. So it makes sense, but it leads to funny statements like that.\nSigh.\nCarry on.","title":"Disciplinarity"},{"content":"I have this habit of writing weird shit down, in random files.\nThis little gem, slightly embellished (but not that much), has been sitting at the bottom of a reading course proposal for a few weeks. I thought you might enjoy.\n\u0026ldquo;and then one day I, accidentally told the pizza man I loved him\u0026rdquo;\ncheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/from-the-quote-book/","summary":"I have this habit of writing weird shit down, in random files.\nThis little gem, slightly embellished (but not that much), has been sitting at the bottom of a reading course proposal for a few weeks. I thought you might enjoy.\n\u0026ldquo;and then one day I, accidentally told the pizza man I loved him\u0026rdquo;\ncheers, sam","title":"From the Quote Book"},{"content":"William Safire, discusses narratives, in his article concerning the 2004 presidential election.\nA Softer World a photo/comic, is narrative in the most basic sense.\nNovels, plays, short stories are narrative. Mostly. But I have doubts about Rolling the R\u0026rsquo;s, by R. Zamora Linmark, and Debie: An Epic, by Lisa Robertson may or may not be. And while we\u0026rsquo;re at it question this too. But I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want you to run too far down this path, because there\u0026rsquo;s limited utility in running in that direction.\nI sat down with myself and forced out a definition (really an operationalization, if you must) of Queer, which I think is much harder to pin down. Narratives are a method of using language. Statements which convey a progression of time, and I\u0026rsquo;d argue depend on some sort of profound change, either in it\u0026rsquo;s content (the subjects and objects at play) or on the creator, conveyer, or audience.\nHaving said that, the key issue here I suppose is not, \u0026ldquo;what is narrative?\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;why study narrative?\u0026rdquo;\nYou\u0026rsquo;d think that would be easier to answer, and that I\u0026rsquo;d be able to weave a little story about how I was drawn to this, and why I\u0026rsquo;m putting so much energy into this wacky interdisciplinary endeavor which frankly runs counter to most of the trends in the social sciences (or psychology, which is what my major is in).\nI\u0026rsquo;m interested in narratives because it seems to be a (marginally) viable way of doing social science research that doesn\u0026rsquo;t completely dehumanize the subject, without sacrificing all but the most superficial claims to validity (a la case studies, which are great tools for imparting knowledge, but rather lousy at producing it.) Because studying narratives, gives worth and meaning to a multitude of different voices and that seems like a useful way to use one\u0026rsquo;s energy.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not complete, but I hope it\u0026rsquo;s a good start.\nCheers,\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/what-is-narrative-after-all/","summary":"William Safire, discusses narratives, in his article concerning the 2004 presidential election.\nA Softer World a photo/comic, is narrative in the most basic sense.\nNovels, plays, short stories are narrative. Mostly. But I have doubts about Rolling the R\u0026rsquo;s, by R. Zamora Linmark, and Debie: An Epic, by Lisa Robertson may or may not be. And while we\u0026rsquo;re at it question this too. But I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want you to run too far down this path, because there\u0026rsquo;s limited utility in running in that direction.\nI sat down with myself and forced out a definition (really an operationalization, if you must) of Queer, which I think is much harder to pin down. Narratives are a method of using language. Statements which convey a progression of time, and I\u0026rsquo;d argue depend on some sort of profound change, either in it\u0026rsquo;s content (the subjects and objects at play) or on the creator, conveyer, or audience.","title":"What is Narrative After All?"},{"content":"Ok, so I\u0026rsquo;ve spent three semesters saying \u0026ldquo;behaviorism sucks\u0026rdquo; essentially, because, I was (wrongly) under the impression that it ignored phenomenological concerns like, you know, cognition. Behaviorism has the animal/empericism problems, which I still object too, but I think as a theoretical outlook/explaintory framework, it\u0026rsquo;s not as corrupt as I thought it was.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been disgruntled by cognitivism, for much the same reasons, that it reduces the impact of experience, and seems to assume that cognitive patterns, because they\u0026rsquo;re in our brains, are the result of essential or innate characteristics, and not themselves, conditioned\nI think cognition is critically important to psychology, as is recognizing the importance of, if not exactly the impact of situations on behavior, then the development/contexts that produce (condition) the individual.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been saying for--well, weeks--that (noted queer theorist) Judith Butler, has a bunch of really great ideas that I rather appreciate about how gender and sexuality happen, in the Foucaultian tradition, but then attempts to explain the mechanisms behind these theories with a psychoanalytic framework, which strikes me as an always already failing proposition.\nShe\u0026rsquo;s not the only post-structuralist who does this, and I find this troubling. In order to accept psychoanalysis you basically have to accept a likely inaccurate view of non/un-concious, and what is ultimately a structuralist understanding of human development. No matter how you shake that up, it still rests on those tenants, and I\u0026rsquo;m not convinced that Kristeva did a particularly good job of escaping that. (Not that I have anywhere enough unused brain cells to get her).\nBut anyway, There you have it. I could offer a conclusion synthesizing my exact position on the social/cognative/behavioral playing field, but that\u0026rsquo;s not ultimately useful, and sufice it to say, I feel like I have a much better grounding. The downside is that I have to look at a lot of different grad programs now.\nSchool has been busy, after this next week, I think things will be much nicer. I promise to report more.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-entry-where-sam-becomes-a-behaviorist/","summary":"Ok, so I\u0026rsquo;ve spent three semesters saying \u0026ldquo;behaviorism sucks\u0026rdquo; essentially, because, I was (wrongly) under the impression that it ignored phenomenological concerns like, you know, cognition. Behaviorism has the animal/empericism problems, which I still object too, but I think as a theoretical outlook/explaintory framework, it\u0026rsquo;s not as corrupt as I thought it was.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been disgruntled by cognitivism, for much the same reasons, that it reduces the impact of experience, and seems to assume that cognitive patterns, because they\u0026rsquo;re in our brains, are the result of essential or innate characteristics, and not themselves, conditioned\nI think cognition is critically important to psychology, as is recognizing the importance of, if not exactly the impact of situations on behavior, then the development/contexts that produce (condition) the individual.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been saying for--well, weeks--that (noted queer theorist) Judith Butler, has a bunch of really great ideas that I rather appreciate about how gender and sexuality happen, in the Foucaultian tradition, but then attempts to explain the mechanisms behind these theories with a psychoanalytic framework, which strikes me as an always already failing proposition.","title":"The Entry Where Sam Becomes a Behaviorist"},{"content":"*Overheard in class today:*\nProf: \u0026ldquo;A text defines X concept as _____.\u0026rdquo;\n(The quote and citation appear on an overhead. One of the authors of the text, wrote an article that we discussed in depth earlier in the semester.)\nSam: So and So, wrote a text book. Hmmm.\nProf: Yeah, he\u0026rsquo;s rather prolific.\nSam: Or his grad students are.\nProf: Says the cynic.\nSam Shrugs.\nProf: Yeah, you\u0026rsquo;re probably right.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/says-the-cynic/","summary":"*Overheard in class today:*\nProf: \u0026ldquo;A text defines X concept as _____.\u0026rdquo;\n(The quote and citation appear on an overhead. One of the authors of the text, wrote an article that we discussed in depth earlier in the semester.)\nSam: So and So, wrote a text book. Hmmm.\nProf: Yeah, he\u0026rsquo;s rather prolific.\nSam: Or his grad students are.\nProf: Says the cynic.\nSam Shrugs.\nProf: Yeah, you\u0026rsquo;re probably right.","title":"\u0026#8220;Says the Cynic\u0026#8221;"},{"content":"I thought to myself this morning \u0026ldquo;you know, I could post a quick update on my knitting without writing a massive TealArt entry.\u0026rdquo; So here I am.\nThrough really only minimal knitting time this week (8-10 hours since Sunday Morning), I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to complete the main portion of the sleeve. I have, several more rows and a cuff to complete.\nI should order more yarn, and I need a few hours to work on the sweater but, it\u0026rsquo;s real close.\nI\u0026rsquo;m taking it out of the knitting bag until this weekend, opting rather, for the three pairs of socks I have going in my bag, and plain knit sweater. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how this goes.\nCheers, sam\nps. It\u0026rsquo;s snowing out, so I feel at least somewhat confident that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to wear this sweater this season.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/sleeve-not-island/","summary":"I thought to myself this morning \u0026ldquo;you know, I could post a quick update on my knitting without writing a massive TealArt entry.\u0026rdquo; So here I am.\nThrough really only minimal knitting time this week (8-10 hours since Sunday Morning), I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to complete the main portion of the sleeve. I have, several more rows and a cuff to complete.\nI should order more yarn, and I need a few hours to work on the sweater but, it\u0026rsquo;s real close.\nI\u0026rsquo;m taking it out of the knitting bag until this weekend, opting rather, for the three pairs of socks I have going in my bag, and plain knit sweater. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how this goes.\nCheers, sam\nps. It\u0026rsquo;s snowing out, so I feel at least somewhat confident that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to wear this sweater this season.","title":"Sleeve (Not) Island"},{"content":"Hey folks!\nI\u0026rsquo;m in St. Louis for Spring Break (until the 13th), and I have a lot on my plate. Here\u0026rsquo;s an update on what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to, and what I\u0026rsquo;m planning on doing during this week.\nI have a lot to read and write. I have a paper to research/outline/write about gender in the Child Ballad #109 (that is, \u0026ldquo;The Famous Flower of Serving Men\u0026rdquo; as Martin Carthy calls it, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure Child calls it \u0026ldquo;The Border Widow\u0026rsquo;s Lament\u0026rdquo;.) It originates circa 1650, and there are a couple of interesting things I can write about, mostly using Stephen Greenblat to explore both the version that Child collected, and the version that Carthy does. So that doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem too difficult, but totally out of character for me, because I\u0026rsquo;m way more interested in other aspects of gender (re)presentation. But there you have it, at this point I\u0026rsquo;m mostly hoping that what I have fits the word count, because I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I can milk more out of this idea. Shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be a big problem.\nI also have a, I think the term is, metric-ass-load of reading to do. Djuana Barnes\u0026rsquo; Nightwood, some audio books to knit too finishing listening to, podcasts to catch up on, Winterson\u0026rsquo;s Written on the Body, Kate Bornstein, psychology readings like woah, you know: catch up and getting ahead. I also want to draft up some of the (Re)presenting Identity introduction, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been playing with that for a few days in my head and it\u0026rsquo;ll be good to break the ice with that.\nAlso on my plate for this break is to post a slew of Academia related blog posts, because, apparently my idea of getting a backlog kitty, totally didn\u0026rsquo;t work, so I might as well clear out the cache and just post things as they come.\nIn terms of knitting, I just (literally, just) started the neck shaping of the sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for a while. It\u0026rsquo;s a two-color stranded fisherman\u0026rsquo;s style ganscye, using a bunch of patterns that are variants of a bunch of random things. I think taken as a whole, it has a very lattice-ish look, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been calling it \u0026ldquo;the lattice work sweater\u0026rdquo; in my head, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really communicated that with anyone. I was listening to Brenda Dayne\u0026rsquo;s Cast On, Podcast and she described a designing process for fair isle sweaters that she likened to Jazz Riffs, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s totally apt.\nIn any case, assuming it fits and doesn\u0026rsquo;t look wretched, I\u0026rsquo;ll probably submit it to knitty. Starting the neck shaping means that I\u0026rsquo;m within 3 inches of the end of the body, and there\u0026rsquo;s something interesting happening on nearly every row until the end. My goal for this break is to finish the body, and the neck trim, and start on the sleeves, which are one of those parts that\u0026rsquo;s going to be a royal pain in the rear because I\u0026rsquo;m not sure quite how it\u0026rsquo;s going to work out, and I basically have to do it by the seat of my pants. The second one will go much easier I\u0026rsquo;m sure.\nAlso on the knitting to-do list, for this break is: start on the next sweater, (requires winding yarn, gauge swatching (gasp!) and casting on). I also have this perverse desire to knit a pair of socks (I have some pretty chunky yarn, so I don\u0026rsquo;t spend the next year and a half knitting fingering weight socks). I also have arm band thingies to put on a vest, and weave in all of four ends or something like that.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s where things are going. I had actually written this post up and intended to post it earlier in the week, but clicked out of the window, and was deluded in the notion that I\u0026rsquo;d already posted it. My apologies.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spring-break/","summary":"Hey folks!\nI\u0026rsquo;m in St. Louis for Spring Break (until the 13th), and I have a lot on my plate. Here\u0026rsquo;s an update on what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to, and what I\u0026rsquo;m planning on doing during this week.\nI have a lot to read and write. I have a paper to research/outline/write about gender in the Child Ballad #109 (that is, \u0026ldquo;The Famous Flower of Serving Men\u0026rdquo; as Martin Carthy calls it, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure Child calls it \u0026ldquo;The Border Widow\u0026rsquo;s Lament\u0026rdquo;.) It originates circa 1650, and there are a couple of interesting things I can write about, mostly using Stephen Greenblat to explore both the version that Child collected, and the version that Carthy does. So that doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem too difficult, but totally out of character for me, because I\u0026rsquo;m way more interested in other aspects of gender (re)presentation. But there you have it, at this point I\u0026rsquo;m mostly hoping that what I have fits the word count, because I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I can milk more out of this idea.","title":"Spring Break"},{"content":"I have something for you on a lighter, less postmodern (maybe note.) After reading this, I just wanted to say:\nI want to get a kilt so I can wear it over jeans.\nI\u0026rsquo;m such a college student, and I think this post should be taken as evidence that it\u0026rsquo;s a very good thing that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be graduating in a year and some change.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-a-lighter-note/","summary":"I have something for you on a lighter, less postmodern (maybe note.) After reading this, I just wanted to say:\nI want to get a kilt so I can wear it over jeans.\nI\u0026rsquo;m such a college student, and I think this post should be taken as evidence that it\u0026rsquo;s a very good thing that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be graduating in a year and some change.\nCheers, Sam","title":"On a lighter Note"},{"content":"We were discussing the possibility of heritability and psychological traits, in a class today, and the professor made the point that \u0026ldquo;if people have an implicit theory that, for instance, height and intelligence are linked, and if this theory persists, psychologists will observe a correlation between heritability and intelligence.\u0026rdquo;\nHe went on to say (and I agree with this), \u0026ldquo;this linkage, though \u0026lsquo;real\u0026rsquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t because there isn\u0026rsquo;t likely a gene (or genes) that controls cognitive ability and height, but rather, tall people, if assumed to be smarter, will be given opportunities that will enable them to develop into more intelligent people. As a result of this association, (since height is highly heritable), psychologists will observe a heritable intelligence link.\u0026rdquo;\nBasically that correlations don\u0026rsquo;t prove causation, with the added little bonus of \u0026ldquo;teleologies will reify themselves.\u0026ldquo;That sounds great!\u0026rdquo; I say. And it does.\nSo I, being the uppity chap I am, offer the following in some form (again, this is all hindsight, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to clarify it all day, so it\u0026rsquo;s probably more clear now than it was in the original):\n\u0026ldquo;If there is a widely held belief about a construct, reified by repeated social behavior (performative acts, if you will), then our definition of that construct (and our ability to understand/measure/analyize it) is defined (at least in part) by that belief about the construct.\u0026rdquo;\nThe response was something to the effect of, \u0026ldquo;Thats true, but even if our measurement technique was perfect, and it isn\u0026rsquo;t, we\u0026rsquo;d still observe differences, because intelligence--or whatever trait--will actually change because of the social factors.\u0026rdquo; (Again, not doing justice here; he really is very articulate.)\nAnd then the class was over.\nThis represents, I think, why I feel out of place in psychology. There is an assumption that psychometrically valid constructs and factors, exist a priori. Therefore the problems with psychological investigation, are a product of the measurement and design, when in fact there\u0026rsquo;s no there, there. That we think if we just work hard enough and are meticulous enough we\u0026rsquo;ll be able to finally understand the essence of construct x, y or z.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a food example: It\u0026rsquo;s like studying french-fryness while encountering only one variety of french fries, without realizing thateither_ other kinds of french fries or potatoes exist_ and that frenchy fry cutting factories exist; and then deciding that the only way to really learn about french-fryness is to encounter as many different iterations of that only one variety of french fries in as many ways as possible.\nBecause that would work so well.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-priori-traits/","summary":"We were discussing the possibility of heritability and psychological traits, in a class today, and the professor made the point that \u0026ldquo;if people have an implicit theory that, for instance, height and intelligence are linked, and if this theory persists, psychologists will observe a correlation between heritability and intelligence.\u0026rdquo;\nHe went on to say (and I agree with this), \u0026ldquo;this linkage, though \u0026lsquo;real\u0026rsquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t because there isn\u0026rsquo;t likely a gene (or genes) that controls cognitive ability and height, but rather, tall people, if assumed to be smarter, will be given opportunities that will enable them to develop into more intelligent people. As a result of this association, (since height is highly heritable), psychologists will observe a heritable intelligence link.\u0026rdquo;\nBasically that correlations don\u0026rsquo;t prove causation, with the added little bonus of \u0026ldquo;teleologies will reify themselves.\u0026ldquo;That sounds great!\u0026rdquo; I say. And it does.\nSo I, being the uppity chap I am, offer the following in some form (again, this is all hindsight, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to clarify it all day, so it\u0026rsquo;s probably more clear now than it was in the original):","title":"A Priori Traits?"},{"content":"I must admit that I don\u0026rsquo;t consume knitting books in the normal manner. Patterns rarely interest me, and many of the knitting books which have been popular of late, are very interested in sharing the craft with a new generation, teaching the basic skills of knitting, purling, casting on and binding off, with a hip(ster) flare. And while I appreciate the presence of some of these books (Most notably, Sally Melville\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Knitting Experience,\u0026rdquo; books, The Knit Stitch, The Purl Stitch, and now Color, but most of the other dribble out there, is just that. Sorry to offend, I have minor beef with the Stitch and Bitch/Bust franchise, and many of the other books around to me seem to be repetitive, and not suited to my purposes. To each their own.)\nHaving said that, there are a number of knitting books that I do enjoy a lot, and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d list them out here. It\u0026rsquo;ll show you where I\u0026rsquo;m coming from, and then again it might just show you something good to look for, if you\u0026rsquo;re in need of good knitting reading.\nNo particular order.\nAlice Starmore. Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweaters.\nAnne L. MacDonald. No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting\nAnn Feitelson. The Art of Fair Isle Knitting: History, Technique, Color, \u0026amp; Patterns.\nMeg Swansen. Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s Knitting.\nElizabeth Zimmerman. Knitting Without Tears.\nAlice Starmore. The Fair Isle Knitting Handbook. (also Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Book of Fair Isle Knitting.)\nEnjoy!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-books/","summary":"I must admit that I don\u0026rsquo;t consume knitting books in the normal manner. Patterns rarely interest me, and many of the knitting books which have been popular of late, are very interested in sharing the craft with a new generation, teaching the basic skills of knitting, purling, casting on and binding off, with a hip(ster) flare. And while I appreciate the presence of some of these books (Most notably, Sally Melville\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Knitting Experience,\u0026rdquo; books, The Knit Stitch, The Purl Stitch, and now Color, but most of the other dribble out there, is just that. Sorry to offend, I have minor beef with the Stitch and Bitch/Bust franchise, and many of the other books around to me seem to be repetitive, and not suited to my purposes. To each their own.)\nHaving said that, there are a number of knitting books that I do enjoy a lot, and I thought I\u0026rsquo;d list them out here.","title":"Knitting Books"},{"content":"Dude. I have such a backlog of things that I struck my eye over break, that I totally haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten it together to post here. Wow. Anyway. Here\u0026rsquo;s something for you to enjoy\nAs an academic brat, I found this sort of interesting, and my experience these days, is that I\u0026rsquo;m really pretty comfortable in academic settings (dare I say, most comfortable?) While academia has completely colonized my brain, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly ok with this. Lets just hope I get into grad-school. Anyway, Enough angst for right now.\nRead this post:\npost MLA post\n\u0026ldquo;I really enjoyed MLA this year -- as I usually do. I know so many people who are still wounded from the job market and who loathe MLA -- but oddly enough I always really like it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about why that is, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s something tribal. MLA is the one place where I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m part of something bigger, like I belong with a group of people. Of course, as a second-generation academic, this might make some kind of sense (supposedly I attended an MLA with my parents when I was 2 1/2 but I don\u0026rsquo;t remember it). But at a deeper level I generally have a strong distrust of groups, of seemingly artificial communities. I was raised without any kind of religious community, youth group, sports team, or other such organizations that probably promote social skills and a sense of belonging. I\u0026rsquo;m an introverted, overeducated nerd -- so mostly I don\u0026rsquo;t walk into a room of strangers and think \u0026lsquo;ah, I fit in here.\u0026rsquo;\nBut at the MLA, I know I fit. And I know that I fit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum -- I\u0026rsquo;m not the nerdiest, the smartest, the ugliest, the leftiest, the most fashionable. I\u0026rsquo;m right in the middle. And I very very rarely get to be middle-of-the-road average. It\u0026rsquo;s kind of relaxing.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via In Favor of Thinking.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/post-mla-post/","summary":"Dude. I have such a backlog of things that I struck my eye over break, that I totally haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten it together to post here. Wow. Anyway. Here\u0026rsquo;s something for you to enjoy\nAs an academic brat, I found this sort of interesting, and my experience these days, is that I\u0026rsquo;m really pretty comfortable in academic settings (dare I say, most comfortable?) While academia has completely colonized my brain, I\u0026rsquo;m mostly ok with this. Lets just hope I get into grad-school. Anyway, Enough angst for right now.\nRead this post:\npost MLA post\n\u0026ldquo;I really enjoyed MLA this year -- as I usually do. I know so many people who are still wounded from the job market and who loathe MLA -- but oddly enough I always really like it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about why that is, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s something tribal. MLA is the one place where I feel like I\u0026rsquo;m part of something bigger, like I belong with a group of people.","title":"Post-MLA post"},{"content":"A professor of mine, a social psychologist by training, and I had a little run in the other day. I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting, so I\u0026rsquo;m sharing it with you:\nI made the assertion that cognitive neuroscience, in contrast to social psychology, was probably the biggest thrust currently in the discipline of psychology.\nHe objected, with an unsupported statement. Something to the effect of, \u0026ldquo;I disagree, this is really important.\u0026rdquo;\nTo which I said. \u0026ldquo;No, I agree completely, this is really interesting, and totally worth while, but psychology as a field is moving away from social and personality fields.\u0026rdquo;\nHe repeated his objection.\nI said, \u0026ldquo;There have to be way more new Ph.D.\u0026rsquo;s and tenure-track jobs in cognitive/neuroscience than there are in social and personality jobs.\u0026rdquo;\nHe conceded the factuality of that point, with the comment that \u0026ldquo;That has to do with funding and money.\u0026rdquo;\nPrecisely.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/to-close/","summary":"A professor of mine, a social psychologist by training, and I had a little run in the other day. I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting, so I\u0026rsquo;m sharing it with you:\nI made the assertion that cognitive neuroscience, in contrast to social psychology, was probably the biggest thrust currently in the discipline of psychology.\nHe objected, with an unsupported statement. Something to the effect of, \u0026ldquo;I disagree, this is really important.\u0026rdquo;\nTo which I said. \u0026ldquo;No, I agree completely, this is really interesting, and totally worth while, but psychology as a field is moving away from social and personality fields.\u0026rdquo;\nHe repeated his objection.\nI said, \u0026ldquo;There have to be way more new Ph.D.\u0026rsquo;s and tenure-track jobs in cognitive/neuroscience than there are in social and personality jobs.\u0026rdquo;\nHe conceded the factuality of that point, with the comment that \u0026ldquo;That has to do with funding and money.\u0026rdquo;\nPrecisely.","title":"Too Close?"},{"content":"JT Leroy\u0026rsquo;s Blog\nWow. Some background. JT Leory\u0026rsquo;s story is very similar to another you may be familair with: that of Anthony Godby Johnson. The Wikipedia articles above should give you the background. Basically LeRoy/Johnson were/are potentially fictitious authors who \u0026rsquo;live\u0026rsquo; very secluded lives, and tell stories about their tortured childhoods. This is in effect the modern literary hoax, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t be more interested.\nI think JT LeRoy is much less cut and dry than AGJ, in AGJ\u0026rsquo;s case, there were certain legal and medical records which didn\u0026rsquo;t exist, which should have been part of the public record, possibly of course, and the complete dirth of cases, lead to a fairly logical situation. JT, on the other hand. shrug\nI\u0026rsquo;m fascinated by this, and aperantly, my source(s) tell me there\u0026rsquo;s an upsurge in chatter about LeRoy. I think the connotations of identity here are huge. I keep saying that \u0026lsquo;how others see you\u0026rsquo; is potentially as much about \u0026ldquo;who you are\u0026rdquo; as, how you see yourself; and this sure throws a wrench in it.\nThoughts? Questions? I recognize this is a pretty week post, and relies heavily on the wikipedia accounts (which are by my reading dead on; the LeRoy one, leans a bit in LeRoy\u0026rsquo;s direction, but no matter.)\nI had heretofore been completely oblivious to it\u0026rsquo;s existence, and while I don\u0026rsquo;t actually want to read the blog, its existence is most interesting\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/jt-leroy/","summary":"JT Leroy\u0026rsquo;s Blog\nWow. Some background. JT Leory\u0026rsquo;s story is very similar to another you may be familair with: that of Anthony Godby Johnson. The Wikipedia articles above should give you the background. Basically LeRoy/Johnson were/are potentially fictitious authors who \u0026rsquo;live\u0026rsquo; very secluded lives, and tell stories about their tortured childhoods. This is in effect the modern literary hoax, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t be more interested.\nI think JT LeRoy is much less cut and dry than AGJ, in AGJ\u0026rsquo;s case, there were certain legal and medical records which didn\u0026rsquo;t exist, which should have been part of the public record, possibly of course, and the complete dirth of cases, lead to a fairly logical situation. JT, on the other hand. shrug\nI\u0026rsquo;m fascinated by this, and aperantly, my source(s) tell me there\u0026rsquo;s an upsurge in chatter about LeRoy. I think the connotations of identity here are huge. I keep saying that \u0026lsquo;how others see you\u0026rsquo; is potentially as much about \u0026ldquo;who you are\u0026rdquo; as, how you see yourself; and this sure throws a wrench in it.","title":"JT Leroy"},{"content":"This post consists of a definition. I\u0026rsquo;d like to see what people thing the word is. Post your responses in the comments, and no fair googling.\nThe often internally conflicting interrelationships of groups of people in \u0026lsquo;society\u0026rsquo;.\nFrankly, it\u0026rsquo;s my favorite definition of this word. It\u0026rsquo;s also a rather uncommon one.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/define-this/","summary":"This post consists of a definition. I\u0026rsquo;d like to see what people thing the word is. Post your responses in the comments, and no fair googling.\nThe often internally conflicting interrelationships of groups of people in \u0026lsquo;society\u0026rsquo;.\nFrankly, it\u0026rsquo;s my favorite definition of this word. It\u0026rsquo;s also a rather uncommon one.","title":"Define This"},{"content":"An academic group, interested in memory and narrative started to write a blog in october, but hasn\u0026rsquo;t had the follow through that one might hope for. But then it\u0026rsquo;s an academic blog, and getting academics to collaborate on projects like this, is terribly difficult. Maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll see some more. I\u0026rsquo;m pulling out interesting bits from the intro post, and I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted, if more interesting things start appearing.\nThis interesting little bit from the first post. Not so much a summary, just something that got my eye\u0026hellip;.\nIntroducing the Popular Memory \u0026amp; Narrative Study Group:\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;the starting point for sociology, almost by definition, has been \u0026lsquo;society\u0026rsquo; and its \u0026lsquo;institutions\u0026rsquo;; whilst in versions of structuralist social theory the individual has been something of a vanishing point, disappearing without trace under a deluge of language and discourse. Instead, a reinvigorated focus on narrative begins with individual stories, memories and life-histories and traces these outwards (and upwards) to the social structures and collectivities of which individuals are a part.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via Memory and Narrative blog.)\nExactly!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/popular-memory-and-narrative-study-group-blog/","summary":"An academic group, interested in memory and narrative started to write a blog in october, but hasn\u0026rsquo;t had the follow through that one might hope for. But then it\u0026rsquo;s an academic blog, and getting academics to collaborate on projects like this, is terribly difficult. Maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll see some more. I\u0026rsquo;m pulling out interesting bits from the intro post, and I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you all posted, if more interesting things start appearing.\nThis interesting little bit from the first post. Not so much a summary, just something that got my eye\u0026hellip;.\nIntroducing the Popular Memory \u0026amp; Narrative Study Group:\n\u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;the starting point for sociology, almost by definition, has been \u0026lsquo;society\u0026rsquo; and its \u0026lsquo;institutions\u0026rsquo;; whilst in versions of structuralist social theory the individual has been something of a vanishing point, disappearing without trace under a deluge of language and discourse. Instead, a reinvigorated focus on narrative begins with individual stories, memories and life-histories and traces these outwards (and upwards) to the social structures and collectivities of which individuals are a part.","title":"Popular Memory and Narrative Study Group Blog"},{"content":"Freaky? Economics \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;This is a book about feminism and racism written for people who feel either uncomfortable or unwelcome in the great conversation North American society has been having about feminism and racism since the 1960s. It presents an authoritative alternate language in which \u0026mdash; not to participate in, but\u0026mdash;to dominate that conversation. Dubner and Levitt assure their readers that \u0026rsquo;economics\u0026rsquo; is the value-free idiom with respect to which those other, value-laden, idioms can be shown to be misguided at best, stupid at worst, and almost always dead wrong.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology \u0026mdash; A Group Blog.)\nSavage Minds is something I\u0026rsquo;ve really enjoyed a lot in the past few weeks, so you should check it out, but I really liked this analyis of the pop-social science, book \u0026ldquo;Freakenomics.\u0026rdquo;\nI must admit that I haven\u0026rsquo;t really read this book, and I really have no interest, but a lot of people seem to like it which I totally find troubling. Here\u0026rsquo;s a book which takes social science in the wrong direction: reductive; objective-oriented; and quantitative superiority. Which while not without its merit, is deplorable at its best because it works to invalidate alternate methods and ways of knowing. Which in this case is not at all called for. In my humble opinion. So there.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/epistemology-of-the-market/","summary":"Freaky? Economics \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;This is a book about feminism and racism written for people who feel either uncomfortable or unwelcome in the great conversation North American society has been having about feminism and racism since the 1960s. It presents an authoritative alternate language in which \u0026mdash; not to participate in, but\u0026mdash;to dominate that conversation. Dubner and Levitt assure their readers that \u0026rsquo;economics\u0026rsquo; is the value-free idiom with respect to which those other, value-laden, idioms can be shown to be misguided at best, stupid at worst, and almost always dead wrong.\u0026rdquo;\n(Via Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology \u0026mdash; A Group Blog.)\nSavage Minds is something I\u0026rsquo;ve really enjoyed a lot in the past few weeks, so you should check it out, but I really liked this analyis of the pop-social science, book \u0026ldquo;Freakenomics.\u0026rdquo;\nI must admit that I haven\u0026rsquo;t really read this book, and I really have no interest, but a lot of people seem to like it which I totally find troubling.","title":"Epistemology of the Market"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not too sure where to put all this academic content.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all meta blogging on the state of the academy, and I found it in my search for Narrative/ID social science material. As \u0026rsquo;everyone has a story\u0026rsquo; the the most generally focused academic, category. Representing ID (in this case ID is Identity, not inter-disciplinary. Oh if there were only more letters\u0026hellip;.) is more specifically academic, but it\u0026rsquo;s a project blog, not a meta blog.\nIn that end I\u0026rsquo;ve added a new category called \u0026ldquo;The Academy,\u0026rdquo; to TealArt. This one won\u0026rsquo;t get it\u0026rsquo;s own sub-site: after all, http://tychoish.com/ is really still where it\u0026rsquo;s all at.\nIn that direction there are two sites that I\u0026rsquo;d like to point out right now.\nFirst off it\u0026rsquo;s Dean Dad, Confessions of a Community College Dean, which is really a delightful site. I mean, it should be more than enough to convince anyone not to dean, (I love how Dean and Adjunct are verbs, but strangely tenure track and full time faculty (to professor?) haven\u0026rsquo;t made the syntactical transistion.) But it\u0026rsquo;s clear that someone has to do it, and frankly I think this is the kind of guy who should be doing it.\nSecondly. Jill, of Jill/txt, a Norwegian professor blogging (in unsurprisingly flawless english), discuses academia, linguistics, identity, and all sorts of other fascinating stuff. I\u0026rsquo;m enjoying it a lot.\nCheers\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/academic-blogging/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not too sure where to put all this academic content.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all meta blogging on the state of the academy, and I found it in my search for Narrative/ID social science material. As \u0026rsquo;everyone has a story\u0026rsquo; the the most generally focused academic, category. Representing ID (in this case ID is Identity, not inter-disciplinary. Oh if there were only more letters\u0026hellip;.) is more specifically academic, but it\u0026rsquo;s a project blog, not a meta blog.\nIn that end I\u0026rsquo;ve added a new category called \u0026ldquo;The Academy,\u0026rdquo; to TealArt. This one won\u0026rsquo;t get it\u0026rsquo;s own sub-site: after all, http://tychoish.com/ is really still where it\u0026rsquo;s all at.\nIn that direction there are two sites that I\u0026rsquo;d like to point out right now.\nFirst off it\u0026rsquo;s Dean Dad, Confessions of a Community College Dean, which is really a delightful site. I mean, it should be more than enough to convince anyone not to dean, (I love how Dean and Adjunct are verbs, but strangely tenure track and full time faculty (to professor?","title":"Academic Blogging"},{"content":"Ok, this was fascinating. From my stash of cool academic blogs..\nThe end of insight?\n\u0026ldquo;In my own field of complex systems theory, Stephen Wolfram has emphasized that there are simple computer programs, known as cellular automata, whose dynamics can be so inscrutable that there\u0026rsquo;s no way to predict how they\u0026rsquo;ll behave; the best you can do is simulate them on the computer, sit back, and watch how they unfold. Observation replaces insight. Mathematics becomes a spectator sport.\u0026rdquo;\n(Quoted in Marginal Revolution.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dangerous-ideas/","summary":"Ok, this was fascinating. From my stash of cool academic blogs..\nThe end of insight?\n\u0026ldquo;In my own field of complex systems theory, Stephen Wolfram has emphasized that there are simple computer programs, known as cellular automata, whose dynamics can be so inscrutable that there\u0026rsquo;s no way to predict how they\u0026rsquo;ll behave; the best you can do is simulate them on the computer, sit back, and watch how they unfold. Observation replaces insight. Mathematics becomes a spectator sport.\u0026rdquo;\n(Quoted in Marginal Revolution.)","title":"Dangerous Ideas"},{"content":"So it had to happen. Not the movie, me weighing in on the subject. I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll have occasion to way in more after I\u0026rsquo;ve actually seen the movie. At the present point, I\u0026rsquo;ve just read the story and seen the preview. Bear that in mind.\nFirst off, I think it\u0026rsquo;s horribly named. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to look at a poster, or read the title, without seeing the word \u0026ldquo;bareback\u0026rdquo; once. It still flies out of my mouth from time to time, which I\u0026rsquo;m really not in favor of. One big thumbs down there.\nBut more seriously folks.\nI have a friend who noted that, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t so long ago, that \u0026ldquo;gay\u0026rdquo; themed art/literature was criticized for not expressing universal themes, which of course is a display of utter homophobia. I mean really, love stories are love stories, right?\nNow, all anyone can say about Brokeback is that it expresses universal themes. Which on the simplest level I think, displays reviewer\u0026rsquo;s good intentions while safely avoiding engaging with the content of the movie. I would submit that very few movies deal with universal themes: Brokeback Mountain, Bridget Jones\u0026rsquo; Diary, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Erin Brockovich, and Ladies in Lavender, don\u0026rsquo;t deal with universal issues. They\u0026rsquo;re still good, though. What about Far From Heaven, I mean it\u0026rsquo;s depressing but the guy comes clean and goes to live with his lover, and that wasn\u0026rsquo;t\nI mean, really, actual gay cowboys,\nI guess I\u0026rsquo;m just holding out for the day that an urban gay romantic comedy called about high powered executives leading double lives called: \u0026ldquo;Teamroom Traders,\u0026rdquo; to be praised as having \u0026ldquo;universal themes.\u0026rdquo;\nHaving said that, the story didn\u0026rsquo;t thrill me. It was a delightful short story. If it were any longer, I probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have read it, but it sort of felt like she was writing a novel and got slapped with a word limit. But it worked, so there\u0026rsquo;s that.\nI was sort of pissed off that she/they needed to resort to death to catalyze the story. Queerness isn\u0026rsquo;t tragic, we know that. So why are all the \u0026ldquo;great\u0026rdquo; queer love stories, tragic? Blame it on Romeo and Juliet if you must, but that\u0026rsquo;s a cop out, As You Like It and All\u0026rsquo;s Well that Ends Well were perfectly good plays and not all tripe like. If Strong women can be portrayed outside of the Hedda Gabbler/Emma Bovary/Edna Pontellier archetype, then queer love can be portrayed outside of the death drive. Just saying.\nMaybe I\u0026rsquo;ll have more to say after I\u0026rsquo;ve actually seen it.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/requisite-brokeback-mountain-post/","summary":"So it had to happen. Not the movie, me weighing in on the subject. I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll have occasion to way in more after I\u0026rsquo;ve actually seen the movie. At the present point, I\u0026rsquo;ve just read the story and seen the preview. Bear that in mind.\nFirst off, I think it\u0026rsquo;s horribly named. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to look at a poster, or read the title, without seeing the word \u0026ldquo;bareback\u0026rdquo; once. It still flies out of my mouth from time to time, which I\u0026rsquo;m really not in favor of. One big thumbs down there.\nBut more seriously folks.\nI have a friend who noted that, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t so long ago, that \u0026ldquo;gay\u0026rdquo; themed art/literature was criticized for not expressing universal themes, which of course is a display of utter homophobia. I mean really, love stories are love stories, right?\nNow, all anyone can say about Brokeback is that it expresses universal themes.","title":"Requisite \u0026#8220;Brokeback Mountain\u0026#8221; Post"},{"content":"The astute among you will notice that the \u0026ldquo;Blogging\u0026rdquo; category of TealArt has been moved under the \u0026ldquo;everyone has a story,\u0026rdquo; (the dandy new Narrative Studies section of TealArt, on the premise that blogs, at least as Chris and I are likely to write about them, are a narrative device, and should be included this discussion.\nAs I was writing a post about this blog, I noticed that the author referred to \u0026ldquo;web blogs,\u0026rdquo; which is testament to the fact that blog is indeed a word in it\u0026rsquo;s own right, but is in fact a combination of words which should never occur. Weblogs are logs, journals, which are made special/unique by a) the fact that they exist online and more technically, b) the software used to maintain them (this is a defining feature, and that\u0026rsquo;s why I feel it\u0026rsquo;s relevant to talk about WordPress upgrades on this site.)\nJust saying!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/web-logs-weblogs-weblowgs-we-blogs-but-not-web-blogs/","summary":"The astute among you will notice that the \u0026ldquo;Blogging\u0026rdquo; category of TealArt has been moved under the \u0026ldquo;everyone has a story,\u0026rdquo; (the dandy new Narrative Studies section of TealArt, on the premise that blogs, at least as Chris and I are likely to write about them, are a narrative device, and should be included this discussion.\nAs I was writing a post about this blog, I noticed that the author referred to \u0026ldquo;web blogs,\u0026rdquo; which is testament to the fact that blog is indeed a word in it\u0026rsquo;s own right, but is in fact a combination of words which should never occur. Weblogs are logs, journals, which are made special/unique by a) the fact that they exist online and more technically, b) the software used to maintain them (this is a defining feature, and that\u0026rsquo;s why I feel it\u0026rsquo;s relevant to talk about WordPress upgrades on this site.)\nJust saying!","title":"Web logs, weblogs, weblo(w)gs we blogs, but not Web blogs"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;d swear off such horrible pomo title puns, but I really don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s the end of it. Sorry folks.\nAs you might be able to guess I\u0026rsquo;m finished with the Norway sweater, that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for most of the last month. As we don\u0026rsquo;t have a camera here quite yet, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to be able to offer you pictures, but rest assured that pictures of this sweater, past completed projects will be posted eventually. For the record, I haven\u0026rsquo;t sewn down the steeks (they\u0026rsquo;re fastened, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t cleaned them up) woven in ends, or blocked the sweater, and I hope to have before and after pictures for that, so stay tuned.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll offer a more in depth description of the final project when I have a picture, and explain exactly what modifications I made, but right now I\u0026rsquo;d just like to offer the lessons I\u0026rsquo;ve learned by finishing this sweater, because I think that\u0026rsquo;s the best way to reflect. And I like making bulleted lists. So there.\nYarn Choice: Cascade 220 is really great yarn and I should use it more.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t be so egger to mix yarn from different manufactures (unless it\u0026rsquo;s clear they used the same mill, because even though two yarns might look the same on the hank, if you make a sweater with them, it will be clear that they are in fact different. Furthermore, while this isn\u0026rsquo;t entirely a bad effect, it is one which should be used with careful consideration.\nThe Three Halves of a Sleeving: More of an observation than a lesson, but I think the whole \u0026ldquo;sleeve island\u0026rdquo; concept, and the reason why sleeves are so tedious, deals with the fact that that sleeves have three \u0026lsquo;halves\u0026rsquo;. The first half, goes really quickly, because the knitting is new, the second half is a soul sucking black hole. and the third half goes really quickly because the finish line is so close. In honesty I think each half is pretty close to a third of the sleeve length wise (but clearly not knitting wise, because of how most sleeves taper), and it might surprise you that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really matter which direction you go in. That\u0026rsquo;s what I think.\nBack neck shaping is a good thing. This was the first sweater that I did that had a back neck steek, and it was a bit bothersome, but I really really like the way that it looked and the way that it feels, so I think this is something that I\u0026rsquo;m going to continue to insert in my future projects. This technique allows the back of the neck to contour to the neck a bit better, and I think the collar lays flatter as a result, and I think if you look at mass produced sweaters, most of them have gentle scoops in the back. And here\u0026rsquo;s the cool thing. One might think that having another steek would increase the annoying factor of the sweater. Wrong! When I was binding off, I just three-needled straight across the back, and treated it as one steek. It was potentially less bothersome than only having one steek. So there!\nMake Collars Shorter: I think I have a secrete crush on cowl necked sweaters, and have made many of the necks of my most recent sweaters, too long. Collars needn\u0026rsquo;t be as long as the bottom hem, and in many cases can be much shorter. If your neck is cold, put on a scarf, that\u0026rsquo;s what they\u0026rsquo;re for. Sweaters become much more wearable if the collar is less obtrusive.\nKeep Sleeves Wide: The past couple of sweaters I\u0026rsquo;ve made have suffered from having sleeves which are in fact too narrow at the end. this, is I think the one ill side effect of knitting sleeves off of the shoulders\u0026hellip; It\u0026rsquo;s too easy to get carried away with the decreases and go to far. Tight forearms are just unpleasant and having the sleeves of whatever you\u0026rsquo;re wearing underneath bunch up there is icky. Yes, icky. This isn\u0026rsquo;t enough to keep me from making sleeves this way, but enough to remind me to stick an extra stitch in-between each decrease on the bottom half (third) of the sleeve. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say, that one should avoid a rather radical decrease for the cuff (especially in cases where corrugated ribbing is employed.), but before that point, just watch it.\nSo there you have it.\nCheers, sam\nps. circa 10:30pm: I just finished blocking the sweater, and it\u0026rsquo;s my new favorite sweater. it\u0026rsquo;s a bit big, which I have to keep reminding myself is better than a bit small, and since I don\u0026rsquo;t really swatch properly, It\u0026rsquo;s better to err slightly on that side than not. Anywhoo\u0026hellip; It\u0026rsquo;s really really nice. Full report forthcoming still\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/norway-im-done/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;d swear off such horrible pomo title puns, but I really don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s the end of it. Sorry folks.\nAs you might be able to guess I\u0026rsquo;m finished with the Norway sweater, that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for most of the last month. As we don\u0026rsquo;t have a camera here quite yet, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to be able to offer you pictures, but rest assured that pictures of this sweater, past completed projects will be posted eventually. For the record, I haven\u0026rsquo;t sewn down the steeks (they\u0026rsquo;re fastened, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t cleaned them up) woven in ends, or blocked the sweater, and I hope to have before and after pictures for that, so stay tuned.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll offer a more in depth description of the final project when I have a picture, and explain exactly what modifications I made, but right now I\u0026rsquo;d just like to offer the lessons I\u0026rsquo;ve learned by finishing this sweater, because I think that\u0026rsquo;s the best way to reflect.","title":"No(r)way I\u0026#8217;m Done!"},{"content":"This will be a quick post.\nOne of my projects this break has been to build up a habit of writing TealArt posts and to get a good backlog going. It\u0026rsquo;s been pretty good, I have five finished entries in the hopper, and another few in more rough drafts, so as to ride through the rough parts of the semester.. But this is an urgent news item that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t pass up.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m waiting for the new version of quick time to download, in the hopes that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to watch the 3 hour Battlestar Galactica miniseries, (dear lord, I haven\u0026rsquo;t downloaded a 50 meg application in FOREVER. What was apple thinking.) instead of doing laundry, finishing up some knitting, and packing.\nI discovered that Apple released, or actually announced the new Intel Powered powerbook and imac. Allow me to offer this initial commentary.\nLooks like a nifty processor. I\u0026rsquo;d like to see something that could top speeds hands down of the old powerbook (frankly I\u0026rsquo;m sort of embarrassed that I didn\u0026rsquo;t even bother looking at desktops.) Come on. Also, that card slot? What\u0026rsquo;s the point. now granted the PCMCIA card slot in my power book doesn\u0026rsquo;t get a lot of use, but I have from time to time used it as a card reader. There are also, at least theoretically cellphone cards for PCMCIA\u0026hellip;\nOn the upside. The built in camera is very nice. The new power cord I think is a really good step. I think the resolution should/could be a bit better, (the 15in powerbook is an awkward and non-standard size, so the screen, which uses all the room it can, has always been on the small size.) But part of me is still sour that I got one of the old ones with lower resolution.\nBut I really love Zoe, and I intend to keep her for a long while. (and renew the warranty come april/may). Having said that, damn I need to buy more ram, like no other. Else-wise I might have to claw my eyes out.\nAnyway, download\u0026rsquo;s done. Check out the apple website.\nHave a good day.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/apple-y-goodness/","summary":"This will be a quick post.\nOne of my projects this break has been to build up a habit of writing TealArt posts and to get a good backlog going. It\u0026rsquo;s been pretty good, I have five finished entries in the hopper, and another few in more rough drafts, so as to ride through the rough parts of the semester.. But this is an urgent news item that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t pass up.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m waiting for the new version of quick time to download, in the hopes that I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to watch the 3 hour Battlestar Galactica miniseries, (dear lord, I haven\u0026rsquo;t downloaded a 50 meg application in FOREVER. What was apple thinking.) instead of doing laundry, finishing up some knitting, and packing.\nI discovered that Apple released, or actually announced the new Intel Powered powerbook and imac. Allow me to offer this initial commentary.\nLooks like a nifty processor.","title":"Apple-y Goodness"},{"content":"I would like to submit to you all the following delightful little screen shot that I was able to capture in my travels across the web. This is a warning to you all against allowing computers to think that they are in fact smarter than you. It never ends well.\nEve would either be horrified, or highly amused. I choose both.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/epistemology-of-what-closet/","summary":"I would like to submit to you all the following delightful little screen shot that I was able to capture in my travels across the web. This is a warning to you all against allowing computers to think that they are in fact smarter than you. It never ends well.\nEve would either be horrified, or highly amused. I choose both.\nCheers, sam","title":"Epistemology of What Closet?"},{"content":"I was looking around for websites to link to/discuss, on the new \u0026rsquo;everyone has a story\u0026rsquo; section of tealart, when I came across subjuntivistis, a website for the preservation and acknowledgment of subjective tense in the english language. It\u0026rsquo;s clever, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty well written. Once I have time to peel through some stuff, I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll find more good content to link to, but for now, I just wanted to submit it for your enjoyment.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/if-i-were-you-id-love-it/","summary":"I was looking around for websites to link to/discuss, on the new \u0026rsquo;everyone has a story\u0026rsquo; section of tealart, when I came across subjuntivistis, a website for the preservation and acknowledgment of subjective tense in the english language. It\u0026rsquo;s clever, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s pretty well written. Once I have time to peel through some stuff, I\u0026rsquo;m sure I\u0026rsquo;ll find more good content to link to, but for now, I just wanted to submit it for your enjoyment.","title":"If I were you, I\u0026#8217;d love it."},{"content":"Hello fellow knitters,\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to present you with the diary\u0026rsquo;s of a begging knitter from an old friend. It\u0026rsquo;s delightful, and frankly reminds me a lot of my own trials learning knitting. Let\u0026rsquo;s note that I said learning knitting, not learning how to knit, It looks like indi, is attempting to figure out knitting, not just how to do it. He\u0026rsquo;s going to be awesome at it soon.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve Learned to Knit. and Not Quite Right.\n(Via indiboi.com.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ive-learned-to-knit/","summary":"Hello fellow knitters,\nI\u0026rsquo;d like to present you with the diary\u0026rsquo;s of a begging knitter from an old friend. It\u0026rsquo;s delightful, and frankly reminds me a lot of my own trials learning knitting. Let\u0026rsquo;s note that I said learning knitting, not learning how to knit, It looks like indi, is attempting to figure out knitting, not just how to do it. He\u0026rsquo;s going to be awesome at it soon.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve Learned to Knit. and Not Quite Right.\n(Via indiboi.com.)","title":"I've Learned to Knit."},{"content":"So, having gotten everyone caught up on where my knitting has been this semester, I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair time to tell you my plans for the next semester. Because that\u0026rsquo;s the unit my life exists is semesters. Not days, not months, not years: semesters. So be it.\nOne of the (many) things I could do next semester is a special project as an art class for knitting. Basically I\u0026rsquo;d keep notes for my knitting, which is something I currently do, I\u0026rsquo;d journal, which is basically ta:ks(s?) entries, and I would be making a few sweaters. Two. Possibly just a vest and something with sleeves. I\u0026rsquo;m going to write an email to the instructor, and see what kind of credit I could get for that. shrug\nAnyway, the following is the foundation for that email.\nRight now I\u0026rsquo;m in the progress of putting sleeves on my version of Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Norway Sweater (from Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweaters). I will very likely finish that one up by the middle of next week.\nThen, I have a blue and white vest. My mom got this pattern, and the yarn to go with it. She even started on that sweater, except, that, well she doesn\u0026rsquo;t like to do big color work projects, which means I have the yarn for a vest with my name on it. Cool.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the plan for the Vest. I\u0026rsquo;m not a big fan of that pattern. I think it looks little too rug like, and single color ribbing next to color work I think is a bad idea (flexibility issues, and it\u0026rsquo;s just a bit\u0026hellip; meh) So I\u0026rsquo;ll do some corrugated ribbing at the bottom, arm holes and collar. Stay tuned for my post next friday, about how much I hate corrugated ribbing. I\u0026rsquo;ve also lifted a pattern from the palm of an Estonian Mitten from Nancy Bush\u0026rsquo;s Folk Knitting in Estonia, which I\u0026rsquo;ll use for the sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s actually the same size as the pattern I rejected from the original sweater. So some of the pattern can be used for some of the shaping (vest armsyes, and vee-necks).\nThen I have pyarn already for a sweater, using a sport/fingering yarn. Louet Sales, Gem\u0026rsquo;s. It\u0026rsquo;s about the same weight as Koigu KPPM, in fact they, both used to use the same mill until there was a falling out. I think Koigu switched. Whatever, it\u0026rsquo;s nice stuff, and I\u0026rsquo;ll make some sort of sweater, I\u0026rsquo;m liking the vertical pattern panels, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see what mood strikes me when I get there.\nThose are the concrete projects, as I already have the yarn for them.\nI thought that I would want to progress in to multi color, true \u0026ldquo;Fair Isle\u0026rdquo; style pullovers at this point, but alas the urge hasn\u0026rsquo;t struck me. the Norge Fantasia sweater I talked about in the last entry really drove me off horizontal pattern paneling. I think true Fair Isle is still really cool and it\u0026rsquo;s not something that I\u0026rsquo;d like to give up completely, but it\u0026rsquo;s not something I think would be wise to buy yarn for at this point. Other things which might find there way into the cue (no order) are:\nThe Great Sweater Trade: More news on this coming soon, but I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a color work sweater for my mother in exchange for a cabled one. A Color-work Cardigan for Sam: Mom wants a cardigan, and seeing that I\u0026rsquo;m still antsy, a little bit, about cardigans, especially color-work ones, I\u0026rsquo;d like to make one for myself for practice. you know, with the hems and what not. And I\u0026rsquo;d like a cardigan/jacket for myself. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking it\u0026rsquo;ll probably be out of Cascade 220, as I live in the frigid north, and I like Cascade, and it\u0026rsquo;s about as bulky as I\u0026rsquo;d ever want my color work to get. A Pullover in Alpaca: I\u0026rsquo;m a huge fan of alpaca yarn and, the owner of my favorite yarn store is talking about making an order from Henry\u0026rsquo;s Attic, and i\u0026rsquo;ve thought about getting in on that, because its amazing yarn, and the perfect weight for a sweater, and would be really fun to knit with. A lightweight sweater for Sam: Given the nature of color work, and the fact that I swear I haven\u0026rsquo;t used anything smaller than size fives since may, most of my work has been somewhat thick, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to make a lighter sweater, because I don\u0026rsquo;t really have any good fall/spring sweaters. I have my eyes on some merino lace weight, which would probably be pure insanity, but I\u0026rsquo;m up for it. I\u0026rsquo;m keeping my eyes on what this maker has, and when the right thing comes along I\u0026rsquo;m all over it, otherwise I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about 2/8 shetland, or something of that sort. Binary Patterning: I\u0026rsquo;ve always been intrigued by the prospect of using binary code for a sweater. I\u0026rsquo;m big on text, but the thing that makes color work so gripping is the way that the patterns build and the rhythm that that creates, and binary looses that, in all the ways I\u0026rsquo;ve thought of using it, so it needs a little thought before it\u0026rsquo;s ready for prime time. There you have it. Stay tuned for developments on all these projects.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-isle-of-the-fairly-mad-part-the-second/","summary":"So, having gotten everyone caught up on where my knitting has been this semester, I think it\u0026rsquo;s fair time to tell you my plans for the next semester. Because that\u0026rsquo;s the unit my life exists is semesters. Not days, not months, not years: semesters. So be it.\nOne of the (many) things I could do next semester is a special project as an art class for knitting. Basically I\u0026rsquo;d keep notes for my knitting, which is something I currently do, I\u0026rsquo;d journal, which is basically ta:ks(s?) entries, and I would be making a few sweaters. Two. Possibly just a vest and something with sleeves. I\u0026rsquo;m going to write an email to the instructor, and see what kind of credit I could get for that. shrug\nAnyway, the following is the foundation for that email.\nRight now I\u0026rsquo;m in the progress of putting sleeves on my version of Alice Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Norway Sweater (from Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweaters).","title":"The Isle of the Fairly Mad (Part the Second)"},{"content":"A Softer World, is a delightful little web comic, in the vein of post-secret (at least in my mind). It\u0026rsquo;s poetic in a way I can get. Shame they don\u0026rsquo;t have an RSS feed. Enjoy.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-softer-world/","summary":"A Softer World, is a delightful little web comic, in the vein of post-secret (at least in my mind). It\u0026rsquo;s poetic in a way I can get. Shame they don\u0026rsquo;t have an RSS feed. Enjoy.","title":"A Softer World"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m forever behind reading blogs. I have a news reader, and I read things when I get around too it. It always takes me a few weeks after the end of a semester to get caught up with the world wide web, though. So I\u0026rsquo;m just now getting around to reading peoples \u0026ldquo;Reflect on the Old Year, Welcome in the New Year posts. You know what I\u0026rsquo;m talking about, everyone is doing it. I on the other hand, wrote my first post of the new year about how I accidentally clicked no, rather than yes, and lost all of my 60 million open tabs.\nWow, folks. That\u0026rsquo;s what keeps you coming back, I can tell. Better late than never, here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about TealArt these days. It\u0026rsquo;s experimental media and methods after all, so I can get a little meta here.\nTealArt has never been a typical blog.\nIt is not, nor has it ever really been a one man show, but it\u0026rsquo;s clear that I\u0026rsquo;m pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes. We play the \u0026lsquo;brand\u0026rsquo; aspect of TealArt, but the name carries virtually no meaning. We don\u0026rsquo;t have a clearly (or not so clearly) articulated purpose, and while there are sure as hell people reading this (I have logs and interactions to prove it), we don\u0026rsquo;t have active comment-discussions. We use the blogging template, software, and so forth but there are huge spans where, if we post every week, let alone day, it\u0026rsquo;s a lot. And this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly a hotbed of new and exciting links: we practice a kind of blogging which is more on the side of online-journal, and less on the side of link-blog.\nBut what form will this website take next year and in the following years? Frankly I don\u0026rsquo;t think that much is going to change, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to sudenly have tons of time to write TealArt entries, TA will always have more than one voice, TA will continue to use the blog format. TealArt will always be subject to the ebb and flow of my/our interests. Taken as a whole, TealArt traces a personal linages, so I think that this is completely fitting way to proceed.\nI suppose, other than a very minor face lift, which was well over due (we\u0026rsquo;d been using a variation of the same design for the past\u0026hellip;. 2.5 years.), the biggest change to TealArt is the creation of separate sub-sites. For knitting, the identity project, and studies. There\u0026rsquo;s nothing that these sites offer which can\u0026rsquo;t be had through the TeaArt Main Page, but it provides an appropriate entry-point (which lets me more adeptly drop links, in the right place, join webrings etc.) At some point in the near future, I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to come up with RSS feeds for each of these entry points, but I\u0026rsquo;m in denial about it for the moment.\nThis organization also lets me partition the way I/we write for TealArt, without changing much, or over extending our infrastructure. It\u0026rsquo;s still all powered by a single 5 meg mySQL database, which frankly could probably be slimmed down to a 3.5-4 meg (we have a lot of legacy type stuff in there at the moment).\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll just have to see how it goes.\ncheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/boring-blogger-reflects-on-the-future/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m forever behind reading blogs. I have a news reader, and I read things when I get around too it. It always takes me a few weeks after the end of a semester to get caught up with the world wide web, though. So I\u0026rsquo;m just now getting around to reading peoples \u0026ldquo;Reflect on the Old Year, Welcome in the New Year posts. You know what I\u0026rsquo;m talking about, everyone is doing it. I on the other hand, wrote my first post of the new year about how I accidentally clicked no, rather than yes, and lost all of my 60 million open tabs.\nWow, folks. That\u0026rsquo;s what keeps you coming back, I can tell. Better late than never, here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about TealArt these days. It\u0026rsquo;s experimental media and methods after all, so I can get a little meta here.\nTealArt has never been a typical blog.\nIt is not, nor has it ever really been a one man show, but it\u0026rsquo;s clear that I\u0026rsquo;m pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes.","title":"Boring Blogger Reflects on the Future"},{"content":"This post is my attempt to lay out some of the work that Heather and I accomplished at the end of the semester, but never got around to posting in a vaguely coherent form here. It\u0026rsquo;s a post that will help share our definition, as it were, of \u0026ldquo;queer\u0026rdquo; in our usage, and how we\u0026rsquo;re going to go about completing our project.\n\u0026ldquo;Queer\u0026rdquo;, as we\u0026rsquo;re using it represents a theoretical mo(ve)ment which seeks to destabilize and trouble normative structures, social practices, and definitions, to expand and change the manner in which we define the world and each other, and furthermore trouble the notion of \u0026ldquo;definition.\u0026rdquo; This mo(ve)ment is inextricably to an understanding of sexuality, queerness, in the mode of Gayle Rubin\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Thinking Sex,\u0026rdquo; in many ways this second definition positions queer as both the product of and parallel to feminism, and a functioning identity umbrella for people who sleep with people they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;not supposed to\u0026rdquo; (or in a manner that they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;not supposed to\u0026rdquo;).\nOne one down, one to go:\nBasically, each week (or so) we\u0026rsquo;re going to look at a given selection of poetry and/or theory, dividing it up as needed. Our readings will certainly overlap, there will be a lot of material that we\u0026rsquo;ll both read, but in order to cover as much ground as we can we\u0026rsquo;ll split some of the material up. We\u0026rsquo;ll post notes/summaries/interaction here, with what we read. During the first half of the semester, we\u0026rsquo;ll have more reading, we\u0026rsquo;ll have fun with the material. Clearly the \u0026ldquo;project\u0026rdquo; will loom large in our thoughts, but we won\u0026rsquo;t be drafting or even outlining at this point. By a week or two before spring break, we\u0026rsquo;ll have produced a \u0026ldquo;plan of attack\u0026rdquo; for completing the symposium paper, and the final essay. Which we will spend break, and the remainder of the semester completing according to plan. April 13th, is the spring symposium day. The semester ends in early May.\nThere you have it. Stay tuned.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/disciplinarity/","summary":"This post is my attempt to lay out some of the work that Heather and I accomplished at the end of the semester, but never got around to posting in a vaguely coherent form here. It\u0026rsquo;s a post that will help share our definition, as it were, of \u0026ldquo;queer\u0026rdquo; in our usage, and how we\u0026rsquo;re going to go about completing our project.\n\u0026ldquo;Queer\u0026rdquo;, as we\u0026rsquo;re using it represents a theoretical mo(ve)ment which seeks to destabilize and trouble normative structures, social practices, and definitions, to expand and change the manner in which we define the world and each other, and furthermore trouble the notion of \u0026ldquo;definition.\u0026rdquo; This mo(ve)ment is inextricably to an understanding of sexuality, queerness, in the mode of Gayle Rubin\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Thinking Sex,\u0026rdquo; in many ways this second definition positions queer as both the product of and parallel to feminism, and a functioning identity umbrella for people who sleep with people they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;not supposed to\u0026rdquo; (or in a manner that they\u0026rsquo;re \u0026ldquo;not supposed to\u0026rdquo;).","title":"Disciplinarity"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not compleatly ready to push this to prime time, but everyone has a story is another TealArt sub-website. Again it\u0026rsquo;s the same code as the knitting and (re)ping id but this \u0026lsquo;site\u0026rsquo; will cover ideas concerning narrative as a tool for exploring \u0026lsquo;culture,\u0026rsquo; cognition, thought, community, with a focus on queer and virtual communities. I\u0026rsquo;m comendeering the old \u0026ldquo;Where We Ought to Be\u0026rdquo; category, and I intend for this to be more of a collection of resources than any serious musing on the subject. The wwotb story project isn\u0026rsquo;t something I think I\u0026rsquo;m in the right place to complete, but the underlying interest in narratives, community, personal agency, and life history remains, so it seems fitting. Stay tuned for more developments!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/everyone-has-a-story-2/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m not compleatly ready to push this to prime time, but everyone has a story is another TealArt sub-website. Again it\u0026rsquo;s the same code as the knitting and (re)ping id but this \u0026lsquo;site\u0026rsquo; will cover ideas concerning narrative as a tool for exploring \u0026lsquo;culture,\u0026rsquo; cognition, thought, community, with a focus on queer and virtual communities. I\u0026rsquo;m comendeering the old \u0026ldquo;Where We Ought to Be\u0026rdquo; category, and I intend for this to be more of a collection of resources than any serious musing on the subject. The wwotb story project isn\u0026rsquo;t something I think I\u0026rsquo;m in the right place to complete, but the underlying interest in narratives, community, personal agency, and life history remains, so it seems fitting. Stay tuned for more developments!","title":"everyone has a story"},{"content":"Over the past few months I\u0026rsquo;ve reacquainted myself with the Opera Web Browser. I\u0026rsquo;d used it before in previous iterations, and wasn\u0026rsquo;t pleased with the way that it parsed web pages. Displays were off, it was minimally customizable, and seeing that the only thing it offered at the time, was marginally faster browsing, I went sulking back to Mozilla, or IE, or whatever I thought was the gold standard at that point.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve taken back to Oprea, after Chris told me about their 10th anniversary. What with the variable speeds of downloads and Wi-Fi (haven\u0026rsquo;t plugged in in months) the little speed boost is nice, but I really like the fact that if the computer or program crashes, it can recover your lost tabs. And if you close a tab accidentally, there\u0026rsquo;s a \u0026ldquo;trash\u0026rdquo; can where closed tabs from a window can be recovered. The program still borks on tables, from time to time, but there are a lot fewer tables on the internet these days, and there are a couple of minor features that I\u0026rsquo;m still waiting on, but it\u0026rsquo;s become my favorite browser.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also started saving tabs much more aggressively than I used to. I\u0026rsquo;ll open a window, open anywhere from 10 to 60 tabs and then read them over the next few weeks. It\u0026rsquo;s replaced bookmarking, and it lets me survive away from an active connection for a while. Since, Opera saves tabs for ever, basically, there are some tabs that I\u0026rsquo;ve had open for a while, and as the title of this post suggests, I lost a huge mess of them a few days ago.\nLet this message be both an endorsement for a great program, and a warning against personal stupidity. Save your sessions (oh, did I mention, Oprea lets you do that too!), and don\u0026rsquo;t click the \u0026ldquo;No\u0026rdquo; button by default.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/aria-for-lost-tabs/","summary":"Over the past few months I\u0026rsquo;ve reacquainted myself with the Opera Web Browser. I\u0026rsquo;d used it before in previous iterations, and wasn\u0026rsquo;t pleased with the way that it parsed web pages. Displays were off, it was minimally customizable, and seeing that the only thing it offered at the time, was marginally faster browsing, I went sulking back to Mozilla, or IE, or whatever I thought was the gold standard at that point.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve taken back to Oprea, after Chris told me about their 10th anniversary. What with the variable speeds of downloads and Wi-Fi (haven\u0026rsquo;t plugged in in months) the little speed boost is nice, but I really like the fact that if the computer or program crashes, it can recover your lost tabs. And if you close a tab accidentally, there\u0026rsquo;s a \u0026ldquo;trash\u0026rdquo; can where closed tabs from a window can be recovered. The program still borks on tables, from time to time, but there are a lot fewer tables on the internet these days, and there are a couple of minor features that I\u0026rsquo;m still waiting on, but it\u0026rsquo;s become my favorite browser.","title":"Aria for Lost Tabs"},{"content":"I suppose I haven\u0026rsquo;t offered up a clear description of my current knitting progress in a fairly long time. Since this TealArt knitting site is way more of a reality now than it\u0026rsquo;s been in a long time, I should outline what I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting this semester.\nI still need to fix the graphic at the top of the knitting savant(s?) web site, and I want to have one more knitting contributor, I think that\u0026rsquo;ll be cool. So we\u0026rsquo;re/I\u0026rsquo;m not quite at v1.0 with ta:ks(s?) but it\u0026rsquo;s close. Anyway\u0026hellip;. Onword!\nFair Isle, and stranded knitting in general has always been that knitting style that\u0026rsquo;s fascinated the hell out of me, and for some reason I\u0026rsquo;ve always been afraid of getting into it because I guess I thought it would be too hard, or something. We\u0026rsquo;ll this past year has shown me that, in fact, it\u0026rsquo;s not only not too hard, but it\u0026rsquo;s also the kind of knitting that keeps me entertained, and at least theoretically it\u0026rsquo;s something that I can wear (at least more so than lace work).\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been very much enamored of Alice work. Her patterns are really well thought out and generally very clear. This summer I made a sweater, straight out of Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweaters, called Faroe (see below). My version is blue green-ish and/or teal tones. The book called for worsted weight Rowan yarn, and I made do with a coned sport weight yarn. In true savant fashion I didn\u0026rsquo;t do any gauge testing , and in a truely surprising move, used the needle size that the pattern called for. I knit the body during the summer when I was in Kansas City, and finished up the sleeves this semester.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a big fan of knitting sleeves off the shoulders: it helps me combat the problem of \u0026ldquo;sleeve island,\u0026rdquo; sleeves seem to go faster because they get smaller rather than bigger as you get further into them, and you don\u0026rsquo;t have to sew them in when you\u0026rsquo;re done. Having said that, unless you do the pattern upside down (from your perspective as you knit) the sleeves will look backwards in reference to the body, which just means you have to turn charts upside down. But frankly I\u0026rsquo;m ok with that, as it makes the process a little more interesting. So be it.\nAfter I finished the Faroe body, I started on Ram\u0026rsquo;s Horn, a pattern inspired by a cardigan from Meg Swansen\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Knitting\u0026rdquo; book. I turned it into a pull over, changed the ribbing, and altered the size. So I really just used the chart, basically. I still haven\u0026rsquo;t steamed (blocking) it, but it came out really well. I must admit that it sort of makes me look like a rug (despite what some people tell me) and the forearms are a little too tight, so some day I might get some black yarn and reknit the forearms, but I\u0026rsquo;m not aching to wear it too much so I think that\u0026rsquo;s something I need some distance from for a while. I finished up the body after returning to school and then I did the sleeves for both the Ram\u0026rsquo;s Horn and Faroe in alternating (just to mix it up)\u0026hellip;\nThat brings us to date with mid-October. Since then, I made a sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve called Norge Fantasia, it\u0026rsquo;s a norwegian themed sweater. Simple, but there was some fair isle work on it. I used an amazing yarn that was 50/50 llama wool, I believe it was Classic Elite Monera, but I think Cascade also sells it as La Paza (i\u0026rsquo;m not sure about that though). It\u0026rsquo;s a worsted weight sweater, and its really rather nice. I\u0026rsquo;m going to write it up as a pattern I think. Near the end it almost drove me crazy, so I slacked off and didn\u0026rsquo;t do the patterns on the tops of the sleeves, but it came out really really well so I\u0026rsquo;m happy with that. It\u0026rsquo;s in a deep blue with some black patterning.\nI also started another blue and black sweater (bruise the second). It\u0026rsquo;s also from Starmore\u0026rsquo;s Fisherman\u0026rsquo;s Sweaters. Ironically enough, it\u0026rsquo;s an easier pattern than Faroe. That\u0026rsquo;ll learn me. I also changed the pattern a bit more to make more butch(;)). That is, I took out flowery bits, and dropped the third color and made the whole thing more subtle. It\u0026rsquo;s nifty, and I have about 8 more inches before I\u0026rsquo;m done with the body. I think I have a hope of finishing this before I go back to school. I might have sewing up left to go.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s my status update, I\u0026rsquo;ll be back in a bit with my plans for the next few patterns.\nCheers and Knit on! Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-isle-of-the-fairly-mad-part-the-first/","summary":"I suppose I haven\u0026rsquo;t offered up a clear description of my current knitting progress in a fairly long time. Since this TealArt knitting site is way more of a reality now than it\u0026rsquo;s been in a long time, I should outline what I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting this semester.\nI still need to fix the graphic at the top of the knitting savant(s?) web site, and I want to have one more knitting contributor, I think that\u0026rsquo;ll be cool. So we\u0026rsquo;re/I\u0026rsquo;m not quite at v1.0 with ta:ks(s?) but it\u0026rsquo;s close. Anyway\u0026hellip;. Onword!\nFair Isle, and stranded knitting in general has always been that knitting style that\u0026rsquo;s fascinated the hell out of me, and for some reason I\u0026rsquo;ve always been afraid of getting into it because I guess I thought it would be too hard, or something. We\u0026rsquo;ll this past year has shown me that, in fact, it\u0026rsquo;s not only not too hard, but it\u0026rsquo;s also the kind of knitting that keeps me entertained, and at least theoretically it\u0026rsquo;s something that I can wear (at least more so than lace work).","title":"The Isle of the Fairly Mad (Part the First)"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s the second half of the tealart winter update. the knitting savant(s?) is the tealart knitting blog, reborn in a nifty new page. it\u0026rsquo;s something, sort of like (re)ping id, in terms of site structure that I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to get done for a while, but never had the brain cells in the right place. check it out, link to it, and have some fun. I hope we will\u0026hellip;.\nOh, and my mother is going to be partaking in the knit blogging as well. oy. we\u0026rsquo;ll see how that turns out. well I hope. it\u0026rsquo;s a solstice present, doncha know.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-knitting-savants/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s the second half of the tealart winter update. the knitting savant(s?) is the tealart knitting blog, reborn in a nifty new page. it\u0026rsquo;s something, sort of like (re)ping id, in terms of site structure that I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to get done for a while, but never had the brain cells in the right place. check it out, link to it, and have some fun. I hope we will\u0026hellip;.\nOh, and my mother is going to be partaking in the knit blogging as well. oy. we\u0026rsquo;ll see how that turns out. well I hope. it\u0026rsquo;s a solstice present, doncha know.","title":"the knitting savant(s?)"},{"content":"hey guys, I have my first early holiday gift for you all: (re)presenting identity\u0026rsquo;s own little corner of the universe. WordPress and I got to know each other better, and I hope you like how everything\u0026rsquo;s turning out. I\u0026rsquo;m done with school, basically, and excepect some more substantial updates in the near future.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/identity-update/","summary":"hey guys, I have my first early holiday gift for you all: (re)presenting identity\u0026rsquo;s own little corner of the universe. WordPress and I got to know each other better, and I hope you like how everything\u0026rsquo;s turning out. I\u0026rsquo;m done with school, basically, and excepect some more substantial updates in the near future.","title":"(re)presenting identity"},{"content":"Somtimes, the old favorites are always a good to have around. I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of this CSS Guide and as you can tell by our recient little mini redesign, it\u0026rsquo;s been a godsend.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/css-guide/","summary":"Somtimes, the old favorites are always a good to have around. I\u0026rsquo;m quite fond of this CSS Guide and as you can tell by our recient little mini redesign, it\u0026rsquo;s been a godsend.","title":"CSS Guide"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve once again been thinking about graduate schools, and the eventual implications of those choices and some choices I\u0026rsquo;ve made at this point.\nSaturday night, I said the following \u0026ldquo;If I had to do it all over again, I\u0026rsquo;d probably be a Cultural Anthropology major,\u0026rdquo; which only vaguely resembles truth on second investigation. As far a social science goes, I like cultural anthropology a lot, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to do that major, so I\u0026rsquo;m glad I\u0026rsquo;m doing what I\u0026rsquo;m doing, but that statement has pushed me to look at yet another breed of graduate programs.\nI started this grad school search process by looking at neat clinical programs where where was some sort of women\u0026rsquo;s studies possibility. There are problems with clinical psych programs, they don\u0026rsquo;t tend to be flexible, and they tend to be really hard to get into, and I want to have other options.\nMy next step on this journey, was to look at personality psych programs. Now there aren\u0026rsquo;t many here, and they\u0026rsquo;re hard to get into, (but I think a bit easier). They seem to address psychology using units of study that I think are appropriate, and at least theoretically I\u0026rsquo;d still be able to practice clinician if I wanted to (because the internship and licensing process is fairly distinct from the research portion of the Ph.D., so that\u0026rsquo;s cool. Also tied up in this is an interest in community, life history, and narrative psychology (psychologies?).\nThis has also lead me in the direction of interdisciplinary social science Ph.D. programs, mostly psychological anthropology, cultural psychology. I have 3-4 spaces for courses over the 2006-07 school year, which I think I\u0026rsquo;ll use to soup up my anthropology background, in this direction.\nWhere this takes me, will be a site of further deliberation in the near future, so expect that. At this point I\u0026rsquo;d like to present a list of programs that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking of. No real order, but a vague one.\nJoint Ph.D. in Personality Psychology and Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor The Ph.D. program from the Committee on Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago The Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at Clark University in Worchester, MA. The Personality/Cultural Ph.D. program at the University of Toronto I\u0026rsquo;m sure this list will grow and change in the near futre. There are also programs like the Clinical program at Temple University, and maybe even Clinical Psychology or even Sociology/Gender Studies at SUNY Stoney-brook.\nStay Tuned! Cheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/graduate-school-and-career-plans/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve once again been thinking about graduate schools, and the eventual implications of those choices and some choices I\u0026rsquo;ve made at this point.\nSaturday night, I said the following \u0026ldquo;If I had to do it all over again, I\u0026rsquo;d probably be a Cultural Anthropology major,\u0026rdquo; which only vaguely resembles truth on second investigation. As far a social science goes, I like cultural anthropology a lot, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to do that major, so I\u0026rsquo;m glad I\u0026rsquo;m doing what I\u0026rsquo;m doing, but that statement has pushed me to look at yet another breed of graduate programs.\nI started this grad school search process by looking at neat clinical programs where where was some sort of women\u0026rsquo;s studies possibility. There are problems with clinical psych programs, they don\u0026rsquo;t tend to be flexible, and they tend to be really hard to get into, and I want to have other options.","title":"Graduate School and Career Plans"},{"content":"NatureWool, may in fact be my new favorite yarn for the following reasons: it has great yardage, it\u0026rsquo;s moderately priced, for a \u0026ldquo;plain old\u0026rdquo; wool (read: not merino, or other specialty fiber). The dying is superb. The color selection is pretty good. It felts nice, and wears well. Just so you know.\nI have a couple of sweaters still in progress. I have some seaming to do on my Starmore Faeroe sweater, but I did some blocking with a steam iron, and it looks better now, which is really cool. It snowed here for the first time, and I think that I want to wear this sweater a lot this week because it\u0026rsquo;s damn amazing and it\u0026rsquo;s warm and the wool is really nice to the touch (shame it pills so much). The steaming helped with the pilling though, it looks like. I was talking to my favorite not-so-local-yarn store owner, and she said, that for the best results, one should really wind cone yarn in to skeins, and wash the yarn to set the twist, because makers don\u0026rsquo;t do that for cone yarn. Something to keep under advisement.\nI also have sleeves to finish on my Norge Fantasia sweater, which is nice but I can tell now that there\u0026rsquo;s no way it\u0026rsquo;s going to end up like I was hoping, so I think I\u0026rsquo;m just going to make the sleeves simple and plain because I\u0026rsquo;m not enjoying the knitting, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want it to drag on more than it has to, because I\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy other projects more.\nIn the mean time, I got sucked into the Hat Vortex. I made 2 berets using that pattern that I posted (sorry for the roughness of the pattern. Felting cures all imperfections, so it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really matter, but I\u0026rsquo;ll clean it up at some point.) I also made a stocking cap that\u0026rsquo;s 1x1 ribbed throughout, and I really like the effect, and it\u0026rsquo;s certainly something I plan on doing again, because it turned out so well. It also gave me the opportunity to do the decreases freestyle, which turned out pretty well, and made the decreases almost decretive, if you know what to look for.\nI have a fairly busy week this week, until wednesday. After that it\u0026rsquo;s easy as pie. I really want to make progress on the Norge Fantasia sleeves, (I\u0026rsquo;ve also decided that I need to redo the cast off on the collar, but thats quick and can probably be done during Lost or Veronica Mars on Wednesday.) During the aforeeluded trip to the not-so-local-yarn store, I got yarn for a couple of projects (woot thanksgiving day sales, and amazingly awesome yarn store owners and good friends who enable fiber compulsions.) Anyway\u0026hellip; I\u0026rsquo;ll post more about what\u0026rsquo;s coming down the pike as I think about it.\nAlso, in TA: Knitting News, I think we\u0026rsquo;re going have some pretty intense changes before the end of the year. TA:K might splinter off, or we might get new contributor(s), or we might become a more distinctly separate site (but remain functionally where we are). Stay Tuned.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/we-have-hats/","summary":"NatureWool, may in fact be my new favorite yarn for the following reasons: it has great yardage, it\u0026rsquo;s moderately priced, for a \u0026ldquo;plain old\u0026rdquo; wool (read: not merino, or other specialty fiber). The dying is superb. The color selection is pretty good. It felts nice, and wears well. Just so you know.\nI have a couple of sweaters still in progress. I have some seaming to do on my Starmore Faeroe sweater, but I did some blocking with a steam iron, and it looks better now, which is really cool. It snowed here for the first time, and I think that I want to wear this sweater a lot this week because it\u0026rsquo;s damn amazing and it\u0026rsquo;s warm and the wool is really nice to the touch (shame it pills so much). The steaming helped with the pilling though, it looks like. I was talking to my favorite not-so-local-yarn store owner, and she said, that for the best results, one should really wind cone yarn in to skeins, and wash the yarn to set the twist, because makers don\u0026rsquo;t do that for cone yarn.","title":"We Have Hats"},{"content":"Ok folks. You want to make a beret? Like to knit. Well I have a pattern worked out that is perhaps the simplest pattern on the face of the earth, that\u0026rsquo;s very very flexible. It\u0026rsquo;s so flexible that I don\u0026rsquo;t even need to give you a number to cast on, and you\u0026rsquo;ll still get a good hat in the end. I promise.\nCast On an even number of stitches, the precise number of your choosing, onto your smaller circular needle (I cast on using the large needle and then switch to the smaller, but whatever you prefer.) This needs to fit around your head. 90 is a good default, or starting point but alter depending on your needle size, head size, and yarn size.\nKnit in K1 P1 ribbing for 5 rounds.\nIn the next round K4, M1 around.\nKnit 4.5-6 inches in st st.\nIn the next round, K3 K2tog around. Knit 5 rounds even in st st.\nIn the next round, K2 K2tog around. Knit 5 rounds even in st st.\nIn the next round, K1 K2tog around. Knit 2 rounds even in st st.\nIn the next round, K2tog around. Knit 1 rounds even in st st.\nIn the next round, k2tog around, and draw yarn through remaining stitches.\nBlock/Felt/Full the hat as you see fit. For me this generally involves rubbing it vigorously in hot soppy water in the kitchen sink for about fifteen minuets, but I have experience with flat felting so it might take people without that experience a bit longer. I don\u0026rsquo;t generally trust the washing machine for small things like this. Whatever method you use, when it has felted down enough stretch the hat over an appropriately sized dish. Let it dry about half way, then take it off the dish and shape the brim so that the entire hat is round and lays flat. At this point you need to pay attention to the size of the head hole. Don\u0026rsquo;t use a measuring tape, but the dish tends to malform the shape a little and this needs to be corrected. With a steam iron, steam the hat in this shape, and let it dry the rest of the way.\nAnd there you have it. A beret.\nRead on for notes about the needle size I generally do the ribbing one or two needle sizes smaller than the main body of the hat. I\u0026rsquo;ve had good results using size 3s for the ribbing, and size 5s for the body. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had success with size 5s for the ribbing and size 8s for the body.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/simple-beret/","summary":"Ok folks. You want to make a beret? Like to knit. Well I have a pattern worked out that is perhaps the simplest pattern on the face of the earth, that\u0026rsquo;s very very flexible. It\u0026rsquo;s so flexible that I don\u0026rsquo;t even need to give you a number to cast on, and you\u0026rsquo;ll still get a good hat in the end. I promise.\nCast On an even number of stitches, the precise number of your choosing, onto your smaller circular needle (I cast on using the large needle and then switch to the smaller, but whatever you prefer.) This needs to fit around your head. 90 is a good default, or starting point but alter depending on your needle size, head size, and yarn size.\nKnit in K1 P1 ribbing for 5 rounds.\nIn the next round K4, M1 around.\nKnit 4.5-6 inches in st st.\nIn the next round, K3 K2tog around.","title":"Simple Beret Pattern (a Free Knitting Pattern)"},{"content":"I have got to come up with more interesting meta-post post titles.\nSorry for the design yo-yo-ing. I think there needs to be an editorial design summit for the TealArt editorial board. We\u0026rsquo;re currently looking for corporate sponsors, and accepting t-shirt designs. In the mean time, hope the current status works out for everyone. I suspect our annual winter break redesign festival will happen once again this year.\nRepresenting Identity has already started to start swinging in to gear, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on eating through a huge bag of books. I hope everyone is aware that everything posted to that category that category, is work that is in progress and is meant mostly as a record for ourselves first and foremost. Secondly, it\u0026rsquo;ll be an experiment in academic blogging: you get to see our thought processes, and we get to record them. No final work will be posted, and frankly I doubt most people will find it inthralling. That\u0026rsquo;s just fine. This is also a good way of keeping records for ourselves. We may be keeping entries private (which you would have no way of knowing,) and there might be password-protected entries, which you will see, but won\u0026rsquo;t be able to access the content of. While TealArt.com will have all posts as per normal representing identity will only have RepingID posts.\nJust so you know.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tealart-notes/","summary":"I have got to come up with more interesting meta-post post titles.\nSorry for the design yo-yo-ing. I think there needs to be an editorial design summit for the TealArt editorial board. We\u0026rsquo;re currently looking for corporate sponsors, and accepting t-shirt designs. In the mean time, hope the current status works out for everyone. I suspect our annual winter break redesign festival will happen once again this year.\nRepresenting Identity has already started to start swinging in to gear, I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on eating through a huge bag of books. I hope everyone is aware that everything posted to that category that category, is work that is in progress and is meant mostly as a record for ourselves first and foremost. Secondly, it\u0026rsquo;ll be an experiment in academic blogging: you get to see our thought processes, and we get to record them. No final work will be posted, and frankly I doubt most people will find it inthralling.","title":"TealArt Notes!"},{"content":"I feel bad about not updating the Knitting portion of TealArt. I feel lame. I think it\u0026rsquo;s because I haven\u0026rsquo;t been knitting much. I have a few projects in progress this semester, but most of my knitting work has been finishing projects I started at the end of the summer. I made hat over fall break and another last week, and I started a sweater over fall break, which I\u0026rsquo;m making measured progress on, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t been producing anywhere near the level that I\u0026rsquo;ve produced at in the past. I also don\u0026rsquo;t have the same sort of compulsion to \u0026ldquo;get things done\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;ve had in recent memory. On the one hand this is good, because compulsive knitting isn\u0026rsquo;t the most useful expenditure of time or psychic energy, on the second hand I haven\u0026rsquo;t really taken up another activity (like, writing, web-design, reading, photography, exersize, television) to replace knitting. I do have school work which does take out some of the knitting, but I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to blame this mostly on my involvement in student government, which I\u0026rsquo;m working on checking out of (I lost a bid to be vice president, I\u0026rsquo;m still chair of a fairly influential committee so there\u0026rsquo;s a lot less that I have to do.) note to self, rectify this situation.\nNext semester, I\u0026rsquo;m going to knit two sweaters, for an art special project, which I think will be really fun. This is going to surprise all of you I\u0026rsquo;m sure, but I have two concerns: the first is that I\u0026rsquo;ll have a problem getting them done, but when I do the math, it should work out just fine, as long as I commit to it, and am able to get a lot done during break(s), the second, is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to design the sweaters myself. These should both be surprising to you. I\u0026rsquo;m worried by the first option, because we\u0026rsquo;re talking about making a sweater that is, at least 300 stitches around, which is a huge amount, and the needles will be small, so it will be slow going, secondly, at least one of the designs, will have horizontal patterns, which are harder to memorize, because they don\u0026rsquo;t repeat in the same way. It\u0026rsquo;s just something to think about\u0026hellip;\nOh well. Cheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-knitting-knitting/","summary":"I feel bad about not updating the Knitting portion of TealArt. I feel lame. I think it\u0026rsquo;s because I haven\u0026rsquo;t been knitting much. I have a few projects in progress this semester, but most of my knitting work has been finishing projects I started at the end of the summer. I made hat over fall break and another last week, and I started a sweater over fall break, which I\u0026rsquo;m making measured progress on, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t been producing anywhere near the level that I\u0026rsquo;ve produced at in the past. I also don\u0026rsquo;t have the same sort of compulsion to \u0026ldquo;get things done\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;ve had in recent memory. On the one hand this is good, because compulsive knitting isn\u0026rsquo;t the most useful expenditure of time or psychic energy, on the second hand I haven\u0026rsquo;t really taken up another activity (like, writing, web-design, reading, photography, exersize, television) to replace knitting. I do have school work which does take out some of the knitting, but I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to blame this mostly on my involvement in student government, which I\u0026rsquo;m working on checking out of (I lost a bid to be vice president, I\u0026rsquo;m still chair of a fairly influential committee so there\u0026rsquo;s a lot less that I have to do.","title":"Knitting Knitting Knitting"},{"content":"After an argument with Heather last night, I find myself asking, where the line is, in regards to essentialism, and essentialist formulations of gender and sex.\nI offer you a quote: \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;\u0026lsquo;man\u0026rsquo; and \u0026lsquo;woman\u0026rsquo; are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs\u0026rdquo; and that \u0026ldquo;we are . . . a multisexed species.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;ll offer reference upon request\u0026hellip; but it\u0026rsquo;s surprising at least to me.\nMonique Wittig, also (very much in the tradition of Simone de Beauvior) offers a similar statement that locates the notion of \u0026ldquo;woman\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;man\u0026rdquo; (as well as \u0026ldquo;lesbian\u0026rdquo;) as being historically and contextually meaningful.\nAre these people off the hook? I mean, if you put the post-structrual disclaimer in, does that in some way de-essentialize the argument? Perhaps is there a way to say, this kind of argument may not actually essentialize identity completely, but leads to essentialism?\nCan/do post-structuralists essentialize identity still/too? Is that splitting hairs?\nIf so, and even if not, is identity and collective identity still a meaningful site of analysis? I mean I certainly think that identity groups are meaningful and helpful, but at the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s a huge can of worms\u0026hellip;.\nJust some thinking Cheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-bounds-of-the-essential/","summary":"After an argument with Heather last night, I find myself asking, where the line is, in regards to essentialism, and essentialist formulations of gender and sex.\nI offer you a quote: \u0026gt; \u0026ldquo;\u0026lsquo;man\u0026rsquo; and \u0026lsquo;woman\u0026rsquo; are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs\u0026rdquo; and that \u0026ldquo;we are . . . a multisexed species.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;ll offer reference upon request\u0026hellip; but it\u0026rsquo;s surprising at least to me.\nMonique Wittig, also (very much in the tradition of Simone de Beauvior) offers a similar statement that locates the notion of \u0026ldquo;woman\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;man\u0026rdquo; (as well as \u0026ldquo;lesbian\u0026rdquo;) as being historically and contextually meaningful.\nAre these people off the hook? I mean, if you put the post-structrual disclaimer in, does that in some way de-essentialize the argument? Perhaps is there a way to say, this kind of argument may not actually essentialize identity completely, but leads to essentialism?\nCan/do post-structuralists essentialize identity still/too? Is that splitting hairs?\nIf so, and even if not, is identity and collective identity still a meaningful site of analysis?","title":"The Bounds of the Essential"},{"content":"So like everyone else I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to get involved with this little website thing, Heather is like \u0026ldquo;must post only very good things, and I\u0026rsquo;m scared because people might actually read it, and your family reads the site\u0026rdquo; (yeah, tell me about it, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m working on making the site more approachable and less rambling like),* and I thought that while this shouldn\u0026rsquo;t quite make our project (the category) website, it\u0026rsquo;s funny and people should read it.\nSo Heather emailed me this from across campus and yeah\u0026hellip;.\nAlso, a snippet from Maureen Seaton that I thought you\u0026rsquo;d appreciate:\nWe/ are all the same Underneath, I said,/and you could count the dusty/ liberals nodding in deadly agreement\nlove it.\n*For the record, as I get more academic and self directed in my projects, I feel tealart becoming less formal, and I\u0026rsquo;m totally down with that, and want to push it in that direction.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/messages-from-heather/","summary":"So like everyone else I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to get involved with this little website thing, Heather is like \u0026ldquo;must post only very good things, and I\u0026rsquo;m scared because people might actually read it, and your family reads the site\u0026rdquo; (yeah, tell me about it, but I think I\u0026rsquo;m working on making the site more approachable and less rambling like),* and I thought that while this shouldn\u0026rsquo;t quite make our project (the category) website, it\u0026rsquo;s funny and people should read it.\nSo Heather emailed me this from across campus and yeah\u0026hellip;.\nAlso, a snippet from Maureen Seaton that I thought you\u0026rsquo;d appreciate:\nWe/ are all the same Underneath, I said,/and you could count the dusty/ liberals nodding in deadly agreement\nlove it.\n*For the record, as I get more academic and self directed in my projects, I feel tealart becoming less formal, and I\u0026rsquo;m totally down with that, and want to push it in that direction.","title":"Messages from Heather"},{"content":"For those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t know I\u0026rsquo;m working on a special project with my next door neighbor and co-conspirtor. We had set up a livejournal community for this project, but quickly came to the conclusion that that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the right place for that. So I\u0026rsquo;ll offer you the little description I came up with when I made the category. And then we\u0026rsquo;ll get start postings really without much further ado.\nI like having projects like this at TealArt, it makes the site useful in a practical sense, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s entertaining because you get to see a certain level of back and forth with our thought processes, and that\u0026rsquo;s cool. That\u0026rsquo;s why I think collaborative blogs rule, and why all of my independent blogging projects inevitably fall on their faces. So sit back, and if we seem to be starting in the middle, it\u0026rsquo;s because we are, Though I will attempt to mirror some content that I have lying around.\nHome of Sam and Heather\u0026rsquo;s lovely Special Project! (Doesn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;Special Project\u0026rdquo; sound secretive and scandalous? Oooh.)\nBasically the shtick is that we\u0026rsquo;re really intrested and amazed by the agency and creative power that identity and identity communities can provide people. We also have a great love for pre \u0026rsquo;third wave\u0026rsquo; pre queer theory, feminisms and lesbian and gay studies (the discipline as a whole isn\u0026rsquo;t very good at chosing gramatically correct titles.)\nWe\u0026rsquo;re asking questions about poetry, theory, identity, how the\u0026rsquo;ve been historically intertwined, and the shape that that connection takes in contemporary movement(s).\nThis category will contain everything from summeries of articles that we read and feel as if they need to be indexted here, to larger guiding questions that we run into. We\u0026rsquo;ll also post, messages to ourselves. It will be grand. Some will be private, some will not. You\u0026rsquo;ll get to see our trains of thought. Enjoy!\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/representing-identity/","summary":"For those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t know I\u0026rsquo;m working on a special project with my next door neighbor and co-conspirtor. We had set up a livejournal community for this project, but quickly came to the conclusion that that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the right place for that. So I\u0026rsquo;ll offer you the little description I came up with when I made the category. And then we\u0026rsquo;ll get start postings really without much further ado.\nI like having projects like this at TealArt, it makes the site useful in a practical sense, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s entertaining because you get to see a certain level of back and forth with our thought processes, and that\u0026rsquo;s cool. That\u0026rsquo;s why I think collaborative blogs rule, and why all of my independent blogging projects inevitably fall on their faces. So sit back, and if we seem to be starting in the middle, it\u0026rsquo;s because we are, Though I will attempt to mirror some content that I have lying around.","title":"(Re)presenting Identity"},{"content":"So, I decided to change the name of the TealArt blog again, as I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;re all aware. While I liked the firefly reference (You Can\u0026rsquo;t Take the Sky from Us\u0026quot;), and the cool grammatical insights of the newspaper like title (The Times of TealArt), the newest title is a reference to a class discussion I was part of earlier in the semester concerning \u0026ldquo;work in the generous sense.\u0026rdquo; Since then a few of my friends have taken this modifier, and used it whenever we are bending the meaning of a word a little more than perhaps is necessary for the sake of argument. Examples include: Activism in the generous sense, resistance in the generous sense, truth in the generous sense, women\u0026rsquo;s studies in the generous sense and so forth.\nThe thing is, that it makes sense for TealArt. I\u0026rsquo;ve owned the TealArt domain for more than five years at this point, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve grown quite fond of the color, I must say that the only reason I have the domain is that some fairly random person on a Greymatter discussion board gave it away for free. By this point, I think we are as much a part of it as it is of us. While I may have made allusions to being an artist (at least in the context of TealArt) at one point, I certainly don\u0026rsquo;t now. Art in the generous sense, indeed.\nWhile the recent transition to word-press 1.5 necessitated a little redesigning, for the most part, TealArt has remained quite consistent over the past year. But I\u0026rsquo;d like to submit for your approval, a new banner. Nothing radical. Just a change. It\u0026rsquo;s about half the size of the current banner (kb wise, same visual size). It also uses a font derived from Jane Austen\u0026rsquo;s hand writing. How cool is that? Thanks to Neil Gaiman.\nWhich one do you like more? I\u0026rsquo;ll orient the winner the right way when I decide, I\u0026rsquo;m partial to the second: I think the lines look confusing in the first.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/art-in-the-generous-sense/","summary":"So, I decided to change the name of the TealArt blog again, as I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;re all aware. While I liked the firefly reference (You Can\u0026rsquo;t Take the Sky from Us\u0026quot;), and the cool grammatical insights of the newspaper like title (The Times of TealArt), the newest title is a reference to a class discussion I was part of earlier in the semester concerning \u0026ldquo;work in the generous sense.\u0026rdquo; Since then a few of my friends have taken this modifier, and used it whenever we are bending the meaning of a word a little more than perhaps is necessary for the sake of argument. Examples include: Activism in the generous sense, resistance in the generous sense, truth in the generous sense, women\u0026rsquo;s studies in the generous sense and so forth.\nThe thing is, that it makes sense for TealArt. I\u0026rsquo;ve owned the TealArt domain for more than five years at this point, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve grown quite fond of the color, I must say that the only reason I have the domain is that some fairly random person on a Greymatter discussion board gave it away for free.","title":"Art in the Generous Sense"},{"content":"These are collaborative. It\u0026rsquo;s awesome. Just the kinds of issues that we\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about, and the questions that we\u0026rsquo;ve thought about:\nHow has feminist oriented poetry changed in reaction to changing theoretical and \u0026lsquo;political\u0026rsquo; trends; in particular, as second wave lesbian poetry and theory gave way to third wave/queer poetry and theory?\nHow does identity continue to be an important and centering feature of feminist/queer poetry and theory in spite of, the problematic tendency of identity categories to privilege and essentialize arbitrary structures?\nand\u0026hellip;\nHistorically, how has poetry been used within the feminist movement? How has the \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rdquo; of lesbian feminist /queer poetry evolved alongside and in response to post-modern theories of identity? What factors played into the prominence of lesbian-feminist poets during the second wave, and their comparative absence in the era of queer theory? (How was this change influenced by evolving notions of identity?) More coming momentarily.\nCheers, sam and heather\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/guiding-questions/","summary":"These are collaborative. It\u0026rsquo;s awesome. Just the kinds of issues that we\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about, and the questions that we\u0026rsquo;ve thought about:\nHow has feminist oriented poetry changed in reaction to changing theoretical and \u0026lsquo;political\u0026rsquo; trends; in particular, as second wave lesbian poetry and theory gave way to third wave/queer poetry and theory?\nHow does identity continue to be an important and centering feature of feminist/queer poetry and theory in spite of, the problematic tendency of identity categories to privilege and essentialize arbitrary structures?\nand\u0026hellip;\nHistorically, how has poetry been used within the feminist movement? How has the \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rdquo; of lesbian feminist /queer poetry evolved alongside and in response to post-modern theories of identity? What factors played into the prominence of lesbian-feminist poets during the second wave, and their comparative absence in the era of queer theory? (How was this change influenced by evolving notions of identity?) More coming momentarily.","title":"Guiding Questions"},{"content":"We\u0026rsquo;ve been working on having some sort of mission statement as a way of demarcating and outlining our purpose as a way of giving us structure to work from.\nSo first off, we have Heather\u0026rsquo;s original mission statment from a few months back. (which yes, I did have to dig through months and months of lj archives.)\nWe\u0026rsquo;re going to be looking at feminist poetry, how it has evolved alongside post modern studies of identity, and how that in turn complicates its usefulness as activism. It\u0026rsquo;s also going to touch on the presence of radical lesbian feminist poets as theorists in the \u0026lsquo;second wave\u0026rsquo; and their comparative absence in \u0026rsquo;third wave\u0026rsquo; feminism / queer theory. What does it mean that our poets are no longer some of the dominant theorists? How does that impact theory / our identity as a movement? etc. We\u0026rsquo;ll probably have to narrow the scope of this project when it comes time to write our paper / (symposium?), but this is where we\u0026rsquo;re begining.\nNow we have a more refined one that we\u0026rsquo;ve been working on this very morning\u0026hellip;. (Mostly of Heather\u0026rsquo;s Creation) \u0026gt; This special project will examine selections of lesbian-feminist poetry from the \u0026lsquo;second wave\u0026rsquo; to the \u0026rsquo;third wave\u0026rsquo; / era of queer theory. We will examine how lesbian-feminist/ queer poetry has evolved (or in some cases, refused to evolve) alongside postmodern theories of identity, and how that in turn complicates its relationship to activism. What does it mean when our poets are no longer some of our dominant theorists? How does that impact theory / our identity as a movement?\nFinally I took a hack it, and got this: \u0026gt; The rising popularity of postmodern identity theories within the feminist/queer movement, primarily in the academy, has had a profound impact on the ways in which poets align their work with identity categories. In that direction we are interested the deveoplment of \u0026ldquo;queerness\u0026rdquo; as a category in tension with iconic kind of lesbian-feminist. These questions force us to examine how feminist and queer oriented identity poetry has moved out of the academy, and ways that identity alignment is both reject and remains a driving framework for feminist and queer theory and poetry.\nThen Heather (who came in to my room to use my long mirror, but I\u0026rsquo;ll pretend it was for the discussion) was like \u0026ldquo;great, but you know being historically prescriptive without actually researching it, isn\u0026rsquo;t really A GoodThing(tm), and I thought she had a really good point, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to change it some more: \u0026gt; The rising popularity of postmodern identity theories within the feminist/queer movement, primarily in the academy, has had a profound impact on the ways in which poets align their work with identity categories. In that direction we are interested in determining if the deveoplment of \u0026ldquo;queerness\u0026rdquo; as a category is actually in tension with the lesbian-feminist poet/theorist who has reached a semi iconic status within feminist and queer \u0026lsquo;political\u0026rsquo; movements. Specifically, we seek to unpack the disavowal of identity alignment in contemporary poetry, complicate its rejection and see if and how identity alignment remains a driving framework for contemporary feminist and queer theory and poetry.\nNow admittedly, I\u0026rsquo;m still a bit proscriptive here, but leave it too open, means it\u0026rsquo;s hard to get a good structure, and I think generally we know what\u0026rsquo;s going on, right now we need to having something to work with; it can always change later\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/mission-statements/","summary":"We\u0026rsquo;ve been working on having some sort of mission statement as a way of demarcating and outlining our purpose as a way of giving us structure to work from.\nSo first off, we have Heather\u0026rsquo;s original mission statment from a few months back. (which yes, I did have to dig through months and months of lj archives.)\nWe\u0026rsquo;re going to be looking at feminist poetry, how it has evolved alongside post modern studies of identity, and how that in turn complicates its usefulness as activism. It\u0026rsquo;s also going to touch on the presence of radical lesbian feminist poets as theorists in the \u0026lsquo;second wave\u0026rsquo; and their comparative absence in \u0026rsquo;third wave\u0026rsquo; feminism / queer theory. What does it mean that our poets are no longer some of the dominant theorists? How does that impact theory / our identity as a movement? etc. We\u0026rsquo;ll probably have to narrow the scope of this project when it comes time to write our paper / (symposium?","title":"Mission Statements"},{"content":"One Star Reviews.\nThis is really amazing. I mean really. Let\u0026rsquo;s call it, Literary Criticism in the Trenches.\nThanks Jeff for the link.\nEnjoy Everyone!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-most-entertaining-thing-ive-read-in-months/","summary":"One Star Reviews.\nThis is really amazing. I mean really. Let\u0026rsquo;s call it, Literary Criticism in the Trenches.\nThanks Jeff for the link.\nEnjoy Everyone!","title":"The Most Entertaining Thing I\u0026#8217;ve Read in Months!"},{"content":"What do you call a Freudian Slip, if it happens when you\u0026rsquo;re reading. A Freudian Shuffle? Because I don\u0026rsquo;t have the time or the energy to do better at this point, here are two recent textual slips/shuffles that I\u0026rsquo;ve made of late. I promise I\u0026rsquo;ll be back with real content at some point.\nI was writing a paper about depression, but kept writing oppression instead.\nJust now, I was reading a blog that mentioned \u0026ldquo;Delay\u0026rdquo; (as in the former house majority leader) which I totally read as \u0026ldquo;_Delany,\u0026rdquo; as in Samuel R. Speaking of which, I need to add Delany material to my Amazon Wish-list (which I\u0026rsquo;m not going to link to here out of taste, but you can feel free to find it on your own.)\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/misreads-and-mistyping/","summary":"What do you call a Freudian Slip, if it happens when you\u0026rsquo;re reading. A Freudian Shuffle? Because I don\u0026rsquo;t have the time or the energy to do better at this point, here are two recent textual slips/shuffles that I\u0026rsquo;ve made of late. I promise I\u0026rsquo;ll be back with real content at some point.\nI was writing a paper about depression, but kept writing oppression instead.\nJust now, I was reading a blog that mentioned \u0026ldquo;Delay\u0026rdquo; (as in the former house majority leader) which I totally read as \u0026ldquo;_Delany,\u0026rdquo; as in Samuel R. Speaking of which, I need to add Delany material to my Amazon Wish-list (which I\u0026rsquo;m not going to link to here out of taste, but you can feel free to find it on your own.)\nCheers, Sam","title":"Misreads and Mistyping"},{"content":"Because I don\u0026rsquo;t really have time to do a pod-cast, or any kind of internet radio show (and frankly if I were going to play music I probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t find much in a pod-safe directory). So I\u0026rsquo;m going to continue blogging as I would otherwise, and offer you a playlist, as a sort of Intellectual Radio Program. All the thought without any of the pesky listening.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll call it Radio Marrakesh, because I think that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m going to call any radio show or radio-like show that I do. So here\u0026rsquo;s the playlist. It\u0026rsquo;s a sort of angry political (in my mind) bunch of songs (with a little humor), that I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to for a while. Powerful songs, which have a coherent political statement but also have great emotional power. I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have the order worked out, so don\u0026rsquo;t blame me there.\nTitle - Artist - Album\nPalaces of Gold - Martin Carthy - The Collection Ballad of Harry T. More - Sweet Honey in the Rock - The Women Gather 30th Anniversary Samson and Delilah - Spencer Bohren - Carry The Word A Prince Among Men - Andy Irvine - Rain on the Roof Time to Ring Some Changes - Richard Thompson - Starting as Henry the Human Fly The Monument (Lest We Forget) - Andy Irvine - Rain on the Roof Joe Hill (Ballad of, to the Tune of John Hardy) - Phil Ochs - Montreal, Canada - 22 October 1966 Hard Times of Old England - Steeleye Span - All Around My Hat Joe Hill (I Dreamt I Saw Joe Hill Last Night) - Joan Baez - The Best of Woodstock Wasn\u0026rsquo;t That A Time - Pete Seeger Viva La Quince Brigada - Pete Seeger Five Years - Tom Smith - Debasement Tapes Raggedy - Pete Seeger - American Industrial Ballads Another Clearing Time - Stravaig - Movin\u0026rsquo; On Pharaoh - The House Band - Green Linnet 20th Anniversary Collection The Pit Stands Idle - Housebound - Groundwork Ballad of William Worthy - Phil Ochs - All the News that\u0026rsquo;s Fit to Sing The White Collar Holler - Stan Rogers - Between the Breaks\u0026hellip; Live I Ain\u0026rsquo;t Marching Anymore - Phil Ochs - I Ain\u0026rsquo;t Marching Anymore So There you go. Enjoy\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/radio-marrakesh-the-poor-mans-podcast/","summary":"Because I don\u0026rsquo;t really have time to do a pod-cast, or any kind of internet radio show (and frankly if I were going to play music I probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t find much in a pod-safe directory). So I\u0026rsquo;m going to continue blogging as I would otherwise, and offer you a playlist, as a sort of Intellectual Radio Program. All the thought without any of the pesky listening.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll call it Radio Marrakesh, because I think that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m going to call any radio show or radio-like show that I do. So here\u0026rsquo;s the playlist. It\u0026rsquo;s a sort of angry political (in my mind) bunch of songs (with a little humor), that I\u0026rsquo;ve been listening to for a while. Powerful songs, which have a coherent political statement but also have great emotional power. I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have the order worked out, so don\u0026rsquo;t blame me there.\nTitle - Artist - Album\nPalaces of Gold - Martin Carthy - The Collection Ballad of Harry T.","title":"Radio Marrakesh: The Poor Man\u0026#8217;s Podcast"},{"content":"So this isn\u0026rsquo;t link rot in the normal sense, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to post about how links age on the internet, because frankly I bet you could care less. No, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post about links that have been sitting around in my \u0026ldquo;you should post TealArt entries about these articles\u0026rdquo; folder (ok so it\u0026rsquo;s a mental categorization, shoot me.\nWe Are Not OK This one from June 17th. About gay male community issues, relating to drug usage, HIV. I really enjoyed the authors analysis that: \u0026gt; One of the questions I most frequently ask residents is \u0026ldquo;What is it that you wanted to do sexually that you could only do when you were high?\u0026rdquo; You might suppose that the answer would be an array of sex acts so extreme and kinky as to be unimaginable. And for some this is true. However, for most, their fantasy is no more than to get fucked and to connect with another man. Albeit in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways, these guys are basically looking for love.\nSpot on. People keep saying things like that, pretty soon I\u0026rsquo;ll be out of a job. But seriously, I think the guy nailed it here. This is why projects like WWOTB are necessary, this kind of analysis makes what I\u0026rsquo;m interested in worthwhile. I need to go back over the research, but my sense is that gay men, for a multitude of reasons, are not exceptional in their problematic ability to relate to each other/other men (the leader in this little sub-group is Peter Nardi, who\u0026rsquo;s work is fascinating and really rather good. So there.) Nardi\u0026rsquo;s work is so interesting, it\u0026rsquo;s a good thing he\u0026rsquo;s at a college that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a Ph.D. program, elsewise (my new favorite word), I\u0026rsquo;d be tempted to apply to study with him, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I can deal with that kind of disciplinary shift. (Though in fairness, I\u0026rsquo;m practically doing sociology at this point anyway, so it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too shocking, never the less, despite any griping that may go on, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy where I am.)\nBloggers Need Not Apply Seems, search committees for academic jobs google people as part of their process, and people\u0026rsquo;s blogging has interfered with jobs and what not. I worried about this for a while, but then it became a non issue, or something. TealArt isn\u0026rsquo;t a typical blog: I don\u0026rsquo;t complain about people or shitty institutional situations and I don\u0026rsquo;t share any information that could be potentially identifying. The most incriminating act that I commit on TealArt is blathering, and unreviewed academic work, which at this point isn\u0026rsquo;t a big deal, and frankly I think TealArt is more of an asset than a potential harm. Shrug, the article is good though. Enjoy it.\nI\u0026rsquo;m feeling all bloggy, so expect a spree in the next few days/hours. Cheers\u0026hellip; Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/link-rot/","summary":"So this isn\u0026rsquo;t link rot in the normal sense, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to post about how links age on the internet, because frankly I bet you could care less. No, I\u0026rsquo;m going to post about links that have been sitting around in my \u0026ldquo;you should post TealArt entries about these articles\u0026rdquo; folder (ok so it\u0026rsquo;s a mental categorization, shoot me.\nWe Are Not OK This one from June 17th. About gay male community issues, relating to drug usage, HIV. I really enjoyed the authors analysis that: \u0026gt; One of the questions I most frequently ask residents is \u0026ldquo;What is it that you wanted to do sexually that you could only do when you were high?\u0026rdquo; You might suppose that the answer would be an array of sex acts so extreme and kinky as to be unimaginable. And for some this is true. However, for most, their fantasy is no more than to get fucked and to connect with another man.","title":"Link Rot"},{"content":"Wow.\nReally, that\u0026rsquo;s all I can think to say. Last night, I went to see Serenity, the Joss Whedon movie that was made as a part of his late lamented Firefly TV series.\nWow.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve known that it was going be be heart wrenching for a while, one of my friends got to see it in a sneak preview in late May. But somehow, amazing actually, she didn\u0026rsquo;t give me a spoiler. I totally would have broken.\nI usually attach to characters, and am completely broken when characters I love die. When I watched it, I completely didn\u0026rsquo;t react, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t real. Until later, and then it was.\nDespite the heartbreak, the movie was perfect, basically. I have a few complaints. Like, why there wasn\u0026rsquo;t more Chinese spoken. (One premise, is that humanity was united by an anglo-sino alliance, so the characters pepper their speech with chinese phrases, much like I use yiddish.) Why did you have to do it Joss, why?\nOther than that\u0026hellip; amazing. I really think that it was a pretty damn perfect job with the movie. I don\u0026rsquo;t know what more to say, so there.\nCheers, sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/taking-the-sky/","summary":"Wow.\nReally, that\u0026rsquo;s all I can think to say. Last night, I went to see Serenity, the Joss Whedon movie that was made as a part of his late lamented Firefly TV series.\nWow.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve known that it was going be be heart wrenching for a while, one of my friends got to see it in a sneak preview in late May. But somehow, amazing actually, she didn\u0026rsquo;t give me a spoiler. I totally would have broken.\nI usually attach to characters, and am completely broken when characters I love die. When I watched it, I completely didn\u0026rsquo;t react, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t real. Until later, and then it was.\nDespite the heartbreak, the movie was perfect, basically. I have a few complaints. Like, why there wasn\u0026rsquo;t more Chinese spoken. (One premise, is that humanity was united by an anglo-sino alliance, so the characters pepper their speech with chinese phrases, much like I use yiddish.","title":"Taking The Sky"},{"content":"This document is a general collection of all sorts of notes, created by and deemed relevant to my life, my studies and my pursuits. The intention is that this document will be much like the notebook that I have up until quite recently carried around with me damn near every where. While I realize that this is something of a foolish transition (given that my laptop is sizably larger than it\u0026rsquo;s analog equivelent.) I think that it will be good to digitize this age old kind of data concomeration, given my habit of taking my laptop with me so much of the time.\nIn past notebook\u0026rsquo;s (which I have, in perfect Sam form, dragged behind me every time I\u0026rsquo;ve moved, despite the fact that once finished I almost never go back and reference old notebooks.) I\u0026rsquo;ve frequently left the first few pages blank with the hope of keeping some sort of table of contents. This is almost always a useless expenditure of time, as I a) never keep such an index, and b) have a pretty good time remembering where specific notes are. Yet, that\u0026rsquo;s precisely the purpose of this kind of digital transition: to keep a more organized and relationally linked database of notes.\nTo be fair this isn\u0026rsquo;t the first iteration of a digital notebook that I\u0026rsquo;ve made. I used a program called Notational Velocity, which has worked quite well for me. Basically it\u0026rsquo;s digital card file with a handful of nifty features, spell check, search-ability, and an always on instant save, which make it totally worth it. Unfortunately, as I began to use the program more there were a couple of features that I really felt like I needed. The first one was the ability to edit more than one note at a time (useful when taking field notes for ethnographic methodologies. The second was a new way of organizing titles/filenames. I\u0026rsquo;m usually really good about creating descriptive file names that will lump together when listing files by title. It\u0026rsquo;s helpful for keeping groups of files organized, but slightly less helpful when trying to determine what\u0026rsquo;s in the file, because the name tends to be really long and less specifically descriptive. So at Chris\u0026rsquo; recommendation I got VoodooPad, a program which basically uses the idea of a Wiki, to organize a note taking program. It\u0026rsquo;s sort of hard to imagine until you get used it. Then it\u0026rsquo;s wonderful.\nIn the tradition of leaving the first few pages of a notebook blank, and then having the problem of setting the mood for a notebook and starting a new notebook. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to use this \u0026ldquo;page\u0026rdquo; (and the entry teal that it will become) to discuss a more basic day to day aspect of my operation and tendency at the time of my writing as of.\nAt this point I use the computer for almost all of my writing and data creation and collection. Because so much of the content of my classes is digital and I\u0026rsquo;d just as soon not create hard copies, I have my computer with me all the time. So I suppose that it makes a great deal of sense to avoid using a computer for note taking. At one point I thought that having a truly portable computing solution would give me the chance to write more effectively because I could write electronically (which is really what is most comfortable for me anyway), anywhere. Seems the problem was that writing isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of vocation that one can just pick up and put down at any point. For that I needed to learn how to knit. The fact is that the computer doesn\u0026rsquo;t really let me do anything that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t already doing with a notebook, it just has the potential to not drive me crazy in the long run.\nSo there you have it. You may think that all this portability would actually mean that I\u0026rsquo;d post to TealArt More often. Well that would be nice wouldn\u0026rsquo;t it? But alas, that\u0026rsquo;s not how it seems to work most of the time. I guess that you have to take what you get. Cheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/notation-bin/","summary":"This document is a general collection of all sorts of notes, created by and deemed relevant to my life, my studies and my pursuits. The intention is that this document will be much like the notebook that I have up until quite recently carried around with me damn near every where. While I realize that this is something of a foolish transition (given that my laptop is sizably larger than it\u0026rsquo;s analog equivelent.) I think that it will be good to digitize this age old kind of data concomeration, given my habit of taking my laptop with me so much of the time.\nIn past notebook\u0026rsquo;s (which I have, in perfect Sam form, dragged behind me every time I\u0026rsquo;ve moved, despite the fact that once finished I almost never go back and reference old notebooks.) I\u0026rsquo;ve frequently left the first few pages blank with the hope of keeping some sort of table of contents.","title":"Notation Bin"},{"content":"At the eery end of my summer I had obligatory feelings of guilt at the fact that I accomplished very little. I have continued a bad habit of reading very little, I didn\u0026rsquo;t really write anything of consequence. I didn\u0026rsquo;t do much work for TealArt. I didn\u0026rsquo;t give any attention to projects like \u0026ldquo;Where We Ought to Be,\u0026rdquo; and I didn\u0026rsquo;t really attend to psychology projects.\nThat said, I think I would like to point out a few really rather valuable accomplishments that I made. I knit a lot. Discovered that I could follow a pattern (well, at least those written by Alice Starmore), and I discovered that I actually like making socks, and that I have a great love of patterned work (even if I still don\u0026rsquo;t really care for cables. I learned a lot about myself as a teacher, both through my experience of working in the yarn store and as I helped people with computer issues. Maybe I could have made more money or published more, but really, that\u0026rsquo;s ok.\nThe other lesson that the summer has offered me, comes I think from the contrast of my summer with the way my life is turning out at Beloit. My classes (a normal load!) challenge me, but don\u0026rsquo;t really overwhelm me. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a number of academic related projects that inspire and engage me, without petty. And I really like my psych major, in a way that I haven\u0026rsquo;t before.\nAt this moment, I\u0026rsquo;m daunted not by the amount of work that seems to pile up on my plate each night, or the fear of what\u0026rsquo;s to come, but rather, the lenght of the semester. I\u0026rsquo;m left wondering: will I remain interested in all these classes, projects, and commitments in the middle of november? Will that be enough?\nTime will tell. But in any case it\u0026rsquo;s good to be back\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/report-from-the-trenches-2/","summary":"At the eery end of my summer I had obligatory feelings of guilt at the fact that I accomplished very little. I have continued a bad habit of reading very little, I didn\u0026rsquo;t really write anything of consequence. I didn\u0026rsquo;t do much work for TealArt. I didn\u0026rsquo;t give any attention to projects like \u0026ldquo;Where We Ought to Be,\u0026rdquo; and I didn\u0026rsquo;t really attend to psychology projects.\nThat said, I think I would like to point out a few really rather valuable accomplishments that I made. I knit a lot. Discovered that I could follow a pattern (well, at least those written by Alice Starmore), and I discovered that I actually like making socks, and that I have a great love of patterned work (even if I still don\u0026rsquo;t really care for cables. I learned a lot about myself as a teacher, both through my experience of working in the yarn store and as I helped people with computer issues.","title":"Report From The Trenches"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/my-world/","summary":"","title":"My World"},{"content":"I wrote this entry a number of weeks ago, and then didn\u0026rsquo;t post it, and then I my offline weblog editor needed to be registred, and one thing lead to another. So here it is. Don\u0026rsquo;t hold it up to the usual Standards. Please. Cheers, and check back soon.\nI had this little promise with myself going, where I told myself that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t post here again about knitting stuf until I did some critque kind of post. So here it is. Critique requires an active enguagement with other work, if not dirrectly in the piece, then as a secondary effect of interaccting with other work and ideas. I\u0026rsquo;ve become woefully bad at this in the past few months, and I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s why I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing. I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a mental note to fix this. Being a bad citizen of this owrld, I haven\u0026rsquo;t read Harry Potter, not any of them, so that might be a project to embark upon in the near future, and I have all of them with me, so now is as good a time as any.\nI have been watching television a bit more than usual which I suppose doesn\u0026rsquo;t say very much given that I go months without watching even a spec. Now I\u0026rsquo;m not turnning into a mindless numb, but I\u0026rsquo;ve found, TV, is helpful in the persuit of knitting. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten so used to knitting as a background feature to the rest of my life: durring meetings, while reading, while waiting, while riding in the car, while listening to lectures, etc. that I have a hard time devoting all of my concentration to a knitting project, so now, when I don\u0026rsquo;t have to concentrate on other things, if I\u0026rsquo;m just knitting I get antsy. So there I am.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been watching a lot of Farscape. Seems\u0026rsquo; the internet connection where I reside now, has a Usenet sever that carries binaries. Which I think is mostly responsible for the fact that out of 140 gigs of storage avilable (40 from the ipod, and 100 on this powerbook) I have about 10 free at the moment. I might be able to eeke out another one or two out of the ipod, but needless to say, I need more stoarge. Firewire drives, here I come.\nBut about the televison. Here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching: Farscape seasons 1 and 3 (coincidence, haven\u0026rsquo;t found any season 2 yet, and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have space for it if I could). Stargate (both series, I\u0026rsquo;m almost compleatly up to date, having seen all of Atlantis, and all but a very few SG1), and I\u0026rsquo;ve been rounding out my Babylon 5 collection, because I feel I\u0026rsquo;ve been remis.\nOn my list of things to get: There was a spell of really good episodes of B5 in the middle of the third season, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to have those. I also want to get Firfely, because those episodes are the kind of thing that I\u0026rsquo;d really like to have in my collection (but I have friends who have the DVDs and given my lack of hard drive space, that puts that on hold for a while. And so that\u0026rsquo;s that.\nAs I watch more Farscape, I find it reminds me a lot of Firefly. They both adopt a \u0026ldquo;wild\u0026rdquo; view of space, that is where governments don\u0026rsquo;t or can\u0026rsquo;t extend control over interseteller territory for the most part, and starships with a reasonable sized cast operate. Also I think there\u0026rsquo;s a definate similarity between Malcom Renolds and John Crition. They\u0026rsquo;re both spunky leaders who don\u0026rsquo;t dake themselves terribly seriously, and I find that to be an attractive characteristic in TeeVee science fiction. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I like it as much when it\u0026rsquo;s written, but that\u0026rsquo;s just me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-consumption/","summary":"I wrote this entry a number of weeks ago, and then didn\u0026rsquo;t post it, and then I my offline weblog editor needed to be registred, and one thing lead to another. So here it is. Don\u0026rsquo;t hold it up to the usual Standards. Please. Cheers, and check back soon.\nI had this little promise with myself going, where I told myself that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t post here again about knitting stuf until I did some critque kind of post. So here it is. Critique requires an active enguagement with other work, if not dirrectly in the piece, then as a secondary effect of interaccting with other work and ideas. I\u0026rsquo;ve become woefully bad at this in the past few months, and I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s why I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing. I\u0026rsquo;m going to make a mental note to fix this. Being a bad citizen of this owrld, I haven\u0026rsquo;t read Harry Potter, not any of them, so that might be a project to embark upon in the near future, and I have all of them with me, so now is as good a time as any.","title":"On Consumption"},{"content":"When someone asks me \u0026ldquo;how was your day/week/summer/year\u0026rdquo; I, like everyone else say, \u0026ldquo;pretty good on the whole.\u0026rdquo; I mean really now, is there anything else that someone can say?\nBut that makes for a really boring essay, but I when I think about the quality of my days, weeks, summers, and years, I think I tend to think about them in terms of what I\u0026rsquo;ve produced.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a good summer on the whole, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten much writing done, I\u0026rsquo;ve completely neglected a minor academic project. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve grown a lot as a spinner, I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered and developed a my inner pedagogical side, and I have a basket of some pretty cool knitted objects to my credit.\nI think that I\u0026rsquo;ve produced about as much this summer, as I did the summer I wrote the first 42% of the book. (That is the summer before my junior year of high school for those of you keeping track at home). But of course it\u0026rsquo;s in a much different form.\nThat summer, when I was done, I had an intellectual creation which, especially in retrospect isn\u0026rsquo;t that great, but seemed really promising at the time. When I was writing Circle Games, I thought that I had a half decent shot at getting it published, and I thought that one way or another that professional/freelance writing would be a large part of my career both in the long term and in the short term (during the end of high school and college). That\u0026rsquo;s something that hasn\u0026rsquo;t quite panned out, and while writing remains a large part of my future career plans, it no longer has that sort of vocational aspect that it once did. I don\u0026rsquo;t get home at night, and say, \u0026ldquo;gee, I hope I can get a few moments to write tonight.\u0026rdquo; On the other hand, in many ways, life and days at school revolve around writing, so maybe that\u0026rsquo;s a healthy reaction.\nI guess ultimately the difference between my knitting and my writing, is that my essays and the book had, at least on the conceptual level, the ability to live on and beyond me. Even on the much smaller scale of this blog, I have the possibility of affecting people by these words who I don\u0026rsquo;t know and have no connection to except the words I\u0026rsquo;m putting together. The knitting is different. It\u0026rsquo;s artistic and creative all the same, but the effect is different. I affect myself, as knitting is entertaining, and I affect the people I teach knitting to, and the people I who wear things I\u0026rsquo;ve knitted. But it\u0026rsquo;s much more direct, more concrete, and finite. Especially in response to the \u0026ldquo;how was your day/week/summer/year\u0026rdquo; question.\nBeing who I am, with the analytical lens that I seem to have, I think I should draw attention to the gendered aspect of this comparison. I think knitting has been a women\u0026rsquo;s activity, not particularly because of the impact of the industrial revolution (but I won\u0026rsquo;t deny that that has had a huge impact on knitting), but because of the more ephemeral aspect of the craft. Since the advent of agriculture, women\u0026rsquo;s work has tended towards activities that didn\u0026rsquo;t have an enduring quality, and I think knitting is very much a product of this trend. I mean of course there are lots of factors at play here, but I think this idea should be incorporated into gender and knitting related historical analyses.\nIn a related tangent, I\u0026rsquo;m going to read a book called \u0026ldquo;No Idle Hands; A Social History of American Knitting.\u0026rdquo; It looks really cool. I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to you on this.\nSo there. And I didn\u0026rsquo;t even tell you what I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting, so stay tuned.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-production/","summary":"When someone asks me \u0026ldquo;how was your day/week/summer/year\u0026rdquo; I, like everyone else say, \u0026ldquo;pretty good on the whole.\u0026rdquo; I mean really now, is there anything else that someone can say?\nBut that makes for a really boring essay, but I when I think about the quality of my days, weeks, summers, and years, I think I tend to think about them in terms of what I\u0026rsquo;ve produced.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had a good summer on the whole, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten much writing done, I\u0026rsquo;ve completely neglected a minor academic project. At the same time, I\u0026rsquo;ve grown a lot as a spinner, I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered and developed a my inner pedagogical side, and I have a basket of some pretty cool knitted objects to my credit.\nI think that I\u0026rsquo;ve produced about as much this summer, as I did the summer I wrote the first 42% of the book. (That is the summer before my junior year of high school for those of you keeping track at home).","title":"On Production"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m breaking the rule of one subject per post a bit, but I have a few things to point out:\nOn Friday, 8 July 2005, I posted three times. Now in fairness, one of these posts was before I went to bed on thursday in the wee hours of Friday Morning, nevertheless it is important to note that the world did don\u0026rsquo;t come to an end. I finished the sweater I was working on. The wonky dye-lot didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to affect it terribly, but I\u0026rsquo;m still going to have to have a word with the maker because it\u0026rsquo;s sort of inexcusable to buy 5 skeins of the same dye lot and find them radically different from each other half way through the body of a sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ll report more on this in a bit. I\u0026rsquo;m going to write up the pattern so there will be notes. I decided on the Webs option for the yarn. It seems webs is having a sale now, so most of the yarn I want was marked NFD (no further discount) and was therefore not subject to the \u0026ldquo;orders over 60 USD get an automatic 20% off). This didn\u0026rsquo;t deter me from getting several projects of yarn. I have started to knit socks while I wait for this yarn to come in. Wow. I like making socks, it\u0026rsquo;s just, I think I need to stick to worsted weight socks from here on out, because the fingering and sport ones are just too much for me. I think I\u0026rsquo;ve figured out a way to knit set-in sleeves as in the EPS seamless yoke manner. News forthcoming. Yes I am obsessed with knitting. No it isn\u0026rsquo;t all I think about. Yes I may in-fact post about something else one of these days. Thats all folks.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/for-the-record/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m breaking the rule of one subject per post a bit, but I have a few things to point out:\nOn Friday, 8 July 2005, I posted three times. Now in fairness, one of these posts was before I went to bed on thursday in the wee hours of Friday Morning, nevertheless it is important to note that the world did don\u0026rsquo;t come to an end. I finished the sweater I was working on. The wonky dye-lot didn\u0026rsquo;t seem to affect it terribly, but I\u0026rsquo;m still going to have to have a word with the maker because it\u0026rsquo;s sort of inexcusable to buy 5 skeins of the same dye lot and find them radically different from each other half way through the body of a sweater. I\u0026rsquo;ll report more on this in a bit. I\u0026rsquo;m going to write up the pattern so there will be notes. I decided on the Webs option for the yarn.","title":"For The Record"},{"content":"I had the opportunity to scour the shelves of the shop today, and I\u0026rsquo;m coming to the stark realization that sport weight yarn is really not that easy to come by. It\u0026rsquo;s not hip, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t go by that fast, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking for what most would consider fairly boring yarn. Plain wool or wool like fiber. So be it. Additionally, I learned that the shop isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be stocking Dale of Norway in the future, so getting yarn for the St. Moritz sweater is out. (I\u0026rsquo;d have to buy the colors we don\u0026rsquo;t have in bags of 10, which won\u0026rsquo;t do if I need 2 balls of one color) Furthermore, the chances of a cherry tree hill order coming in while I\u0026rsquo;m still here are slim, especially if I want this to be my next project. So my current plan of attack is to: hold off on the dale pattern: I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to make it yet anyway, and it looks like I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to order that on line, anyway. As for the other sweater, I have a number of options, and mostly for my own purposes I\u0026rsquo;d like to review them:\nLets keep in mind: Cheap is good, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to avoid skimping. I\u0026rsquo;m aiming for sport weight yarn. Because I intend to knit all-over stranded color work, I want to use fine yarn so the end garment isn\u0026rsquo;t too thick, and because I want this to take a while. I need about 1000-1200 yards of each color. I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about having one variegated strand against one black strand. So that\u0026rsquo;s where it stands\nElann Alpaca Option: I\u0026rsquo;m really a huge fan of alpaca. Its such a nice fiber, and really I\u0026rsquo;d like to try and use it when possible. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to pay a lot out of my way to use it, but given the nature of this project I have been considering it heavily. This yarn is 70/30 Baby Alpaca/\u0026ldquo;Fine\u0026rdquo; Merino, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about a Juniper/Celestial Blue combination, or a Pearl Grey Tweed/Saxony Blue. The total price would come to $49.84, before shipping. Pros: price, fiber content. Cons: color.\nKnit Picks Andean Treasure Alpaca Sport: This has been the alternate to the yarn that I would find in the shop. I\u0026rsquo;ve not actually experienced it, but I trust Knit Picks\u0026rsquo; reputation. I\u0026rsquo;m leaning towards Summer Sky/Mystery color combo, with a fog/granite option running a close second. Total Cost: $75.80. Pros: Fiber, Color, Free Shipping. Cons: Price, Slightly Limited Color Options, and heat (too warm to work on in the summer).\n**Top of The Lamb Sport:**I\u0026rsquo;ve been really fond of this Brown Sheep Yarn for a while. It\u0026rsquo;s sport weight, knits up real nice. It\u0026rsquo;s like their much more popular lambs pride yarn, except without the mohair, it has less guard hairs, and I think that makes it feel nicer. It would be in my best interest to buy two 1 lb cones, undecided about the color, but I like this color card more. I\u0026rsquo;m partial to some combo Charcoal Heather, Cobalt Blue, Blue Flannel, or the Teal. But I\u0026rsquo;m open to suggestions. Total Cost: ~$52. Pros: Color, Cool Looking Yarn, Possibility for leftovers (and not having to worry about running out); Cons: Just plain old wool, less portable.\n**Webs Option:**The colors aren\u0026rsquo;t great, but gosh the price is. If I can go into an order with someone, webs gives 20% off orders over 60 dollars. It wouldn\u0026rsquo;t take a lot of convincing for me to get a cone of this for a shawl, I\u0026rsquo;d jump on this for this project, but there really isn\u0026rsquo;t a good color for this sweater. Anyway, I digress. The colors are limited but I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about Sage/Teal or Blue/Moss. Total Price: $3o. Pros: Price! Cons: Limited Color Selection, don\u0026rsquo;t know how it feels, maybe a very slightly bit bulkier than I want.\nI think that\u0026rsquo;s all the options at the moment. The Elann Alpaca option seems to combine a number of good features, but I\u0026rsquo;m unsure about the colors, I like top of the lamb as an option, and it might be light enough to work out in this season. The TotL is a yarn that\u0026rsquo;s always going to be around, and the Webs option is the right price and it\u0026rsquo;s closeout so that might be nice. I think the Knit Picks option is loosing at the moment though.\nAnyway, I expect people to comment and give me strong advice, none of this \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;ll decide the best option\u0026rdquo; stuff. Be firm, if I don\u0026rsquo;t like it, I won\u0026rsquo;t listen to the advice, but I need help here. So yeah. There you go. Cheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/too-many-choices/","summary":"I had the opportunity to scour the shelves of the shop today, and I\u0026rsquo;m coming to the stark realization that sport weight yarn is really not that easy to come by. It\u0026rsquo;s not hip, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t go by that fast, and I\u0026rsquo;m looking for what most would consider fairly boring yarn. Plain wool or wool like fiber. So be it. Additionally, I learned that the shop isn\u0026rsquo;t going to be stocking Dale of Norway in the future, so getting yarn for the St. Moritz sweater is out. (I\u0026rsquo;d have to buy the colors we don\u0026rsquo;t have in bags of 10, which won\u0026rsquo;t do if I need 2 balls of one color) Furthermore, the chances of a cherry tree hill order coming in while I\u0026rsquo;m still here are slim, especially if I want this to be my next project. So my current plan of attack is to: hold off on the dale pattern: I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to make it yet anyway, and it looks like I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to order that on line, anyway.","title":"Too Many Choices"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve Made a New Pact To Myself: Only Blog about one thing at a time. That is, if i have an update about my personal life, I\u0026rsquo;ll separate it into a different post from all my knitting related content, and so forth. There is no precedent at TealArt, for only posting once a day, so I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would break up our format to break things up. Frankly there isn\u0026rsquo;t a precedent for posting once a day, but that\u0026rsquo;s another issue entirely.\nSo having finished the endless white merino spinning project, I decided to add some color to my spinning project. Most of my spinning, like my knitting, is geared towards larger projects, I tend to look for wool in 1.5-2 pound lots, and spin enough for a sweater. None the less, the shinny fibers have attracted my attention and found their way into my spinning basket. (doesn\u0026rsquo;t that sound quaint? \u0026ldquo;my spinning basket\u0026rdquo; well itis_ a basket, just one of those ever handy collapsable laundry hampers._). So I use some of these nifty fibers as interim projects, while I take a breather from looking at the same old white merino roving, or whatever I\u0026rsquo;ve been spinning for the past month.\nSo my interim project this time around was a 2 or 4 oz (I forget) lot of this amazing blue and green silk/merino 50/50 blend. In my effort to be able to get a whole project out of it (a whole project that isn\u0026rsquo;t a pair of hand warmers) I spun really rather fine singles. I wanted to get lace weight, and I think I got there more or less. It\u0026rsquo;s singles, and I\u0026rsquo;m setting the twist a lot. It\u0026rsquo;s almost dry, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see how it holds up. I\u0026rsquo;m totally giving this away, because there isn\u0026rsquo;t that much of it I would want to do with it, and someone will enjoy it more than I.\nOnce I finished that, I had two options. I have 2 pounds of alpaca, and 24 or 28 oz of this awesome grey corriedale. I decided on the corriedale, because I wanted more practice before I dove into the alpaca. I\u0026rsquo;ve been calling this gansey yarn. Probably because Stephanie is spinning the same basic stuff (except she\u0026rsquo;s washing and carding the wool herself. Brave woman!) for a gansey.\nI\u0026rsquo;m trying to spin a bulkier yarn. In part because my efforts until now have all been for slimmer yarns. Also, the corriedale is more harsh than merino (I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t say significantly, but it has gaud hairs, and I can\u0026rsquo;t see a reason for an outer garment to be so finely knitted.\nAnother thing I\u0026rsquo;m doing, is two ply (this is what the title references.) I\u0026rsquo;ve until now been navajo plying everything. it\u0026rsquo;s easy, it keeps color order in the singles together, and you don\u0026rsquo;t have to worry about spinning two equal amounts on two bobbins, or needing to have a ball winder (to make a center pul ball). But I figure, if I don\u0026rsquo;t get equal amounts on two bobbins, I\u0026rsquo;ll have enough chance to even it out eventually, I might not be so willing to go about it this way with smaller lots, but with this huge lot, I\u0026rsquo;m not worried. I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with the process and the result is pretty good. I\u0026rsquo;m not good enough for this to be really even\u0026hellip; I fear that it\u0026rsquo;d make a lousy gansey, but it\u0026rsquo;d be nice for some sort of overcoat, if I have enough, But I suppose I can get more.\nAnyway, worries for another day. It\u0026rsquo;s nifty. Two ply is sweet. I\u0026rsquo;m going to move on and end this post before it gets any more disjointed.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-didnt-someone-tell-me-about-this-sooner/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;ve Made a New Pact To Myself: Only Blog about one thing at a time. That is, if i have an update about my personal life, I\u0026rsquo;ll separate it into a different post from all my knitting related content, and so forth. There is no precedent at TealArt, for only posting once a day, so I don\u0026rsquo;t think it would break up our format to break things up. Frankly there isn\u0026rsquo;t a precedent for posting once a day, but that\u0026rsquo;s another issue entirely.\nSo having finished the endless white merino spinning project, I decided to add some color to my spinning project. Most of my spinning, like my knitting, is geared towards larger projects, I tend to look for wool in 1.5-2 pound lots, and spin enough for a sweater. None the less, the shinny fibers have attracted my attention and found their way into my spinning basket. (doesn\u0026rsquo;t that sound quaint?","title":"Why Didn\u0026#8217;t Someone Tell Me About This Sooner"},{"content":"I was about to title this entry \u0026ldquo;Yarn Tribulations\u0026rdquo; But I realized that I\u0026rsquo;ve done that already. So be it.\nHaving blathered on sufficiently about spinning last night, I\u0026rsquo;m going to take this opportunity to bather on about a few yarn purchase decisions. that i\u0026rsquo;ve been going over.\nFor starters, given my current employment at a yarn shop (and the resulting discount), I\u0026rsquo;m going to order myself a St. Moritz 2003 sweater kit. Because the shop carries Dale Yarn, and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to get any better deal on this one. I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll start knitting on this one terribly soon, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth a shot. For those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t remember for the past 8 months, or so, give or take, I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite interested in a Dale of Norway, sweater called \u0026ldquo;St. Moritz 2003\u0026rdquo; Apparently it was the official sweater of the Swedish ski team for the 2002-2003 season. Whatever, I think it just looks really cool. Probably hideously complicated, but no matter, I\u0026rsquo;m determined. The XS size for the adult sweater is, get this 44 inches. If the pattern for the kids sweater isn\u0026rsquo;t bad, and just looks like the adult one, then I\u0026rsquo;ll do that (the kids XL size is 41 inches, and while still a wee bit big, probably just right for this experience). This will probably be my winter break project, as I\u0026rsquo;m in no great rush to finish it.\nSlightly higher up in the cue, is a sweater idea that I\u0026rsquo;ve been toying around with for a few weeks. Inspired by Wendy\u0026rsquo;s Ingridsweater, I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to take a simple color work pattern, and using sport weight, make a sweater. I really like Wendy\u0026rsquo;s idea of using one variegated/hand dye strand and one solid strand. The store where I work caries, Cherry Tree Hill Sock yarn, which is a slightly more economical version of the Koigu (in my opinion). It\u0026rsquo;s superwash, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t bug me that much in this case. It\u0026rsquo;s still expensive, and I\u0026rsquo;ve run into a little stumbling block with this yarn. According to the website, and the label the hand dyes are 420yrds./4oz, and the solids are 370yrds/4oz. And the yarns are the same as near as I can tell.\nUpdate: Apparently: the solids are dyed at the mill, which makes a yarn that\u0026rsquo;s slightly, but apparently unnoticeably more twisted. This accounts for the difference in yardage.\nIn competition with this are what I think are amazing yarns from Knit Picks. Now the quandary is that, I feel like for this summer when I\u0026rsquo;m working at this yarn store, I should buy yarn from them, because I have opportunities to get yarns (at prices) that I\u0026rsquo;ll never find again, and Knit Picks is going to be there later so I\u0026rsquo;m not in a rush with them. Having said that, knit picks yarn for this project, and Cherry Tree Hill yarn price wise are about equivalent. My Knit Picks choices are also alpaca yarns (in all or in part). On the other hand, there aren\u0026rsquo;t solids and hand-dies in the knit picks option.\nFirst off I was thinking of this yarn, it\u0026rsquo;s sport weight, and baby alpaca is always amazing. The pattern could get lost in the fuzz, but I\u0026rsquo;ll have to get enough color contrast. I was thinking of Summer Sky/Mystery, Fog/Granite, or Fog/ Woods. There\u0026rsquo;s also This yarn which is an alpaca, silk, merino mix. It\u0026rsquo;s bulkier, but the yardage is only 14 yrds, less per 50 grams, than the sport weight alpaca. So I don\u0026rsquo;t know. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably make sweaters out of both of these options.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s it. I have a private knitting lesson in an hour and some chores to do before then, so I\u0026rsquo;ll stay in touch.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/yarn-follies/","summary":"I was about to title this entry \u0026ldquo;Yarn Tribulations\u0026rdquo; But I realized that I\u0026rsquo;ve done that already. So be it.\nHaving blathered on sufficiently about spinning last night, I\u0026rsquo;m going to take this opportunity to bather on about a few yarn purchase decisions. that i\u0026rsquo;ve been going over.\nFor starters, given my current employment at a yarn shop (and the resulting discount), I\u0026rsquo;m going to order myself a St. Moritz 2003 sweater kit. Because the shop carries Dale Yarn, and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to get any better deal on this one. I don\u0026rsquo;t expect that I\u0026rsquo;ll start knitting on this one terribly soon, but it\u0026rsquo;s worth a shot. For those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t remember for the past 8 months, or so, give or take, I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite interested in a Dale of Norway, sweater called \u0026ldquo;St. Moritz 2003\u0026rdquo; Apparently it was the official sweater of the Swedish ski team for the 2002-2003 season.","title":"Yarn Follies"},{"content":"My life has otherwise been proceeding as it has been, so I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything ground breaking to report to you all. Ho hum.\nI thought I\u0026rsquo;d offer you all some noes on my knitting/fiber art progress.\nI finished the green shawl. I did end up needing a bit more of the Zephyr, but I think it worked out just fine, and frankly you can\u0026rsquo;t really see it. I still have to block the shawl, but it\u0026rsquo;s really nifty.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;m working on a shawl using a very royal blue tencel yarn. It has the dental floss look at the moment, but I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be quite nice. I\u0026rsquo;m embarking on a very nifty lace pattern, supposedly Japanese in origin, but I\u0026rsquo;m not really aware of Japanese knitting traditions, so I think it\u0026rsquo;s just inspired and all. From Nancy Oberly\u0026rsquo;s Folk Shawls book.\nI finished spinning the merino roving. this was a massive project\u0026hellip; two pounds of yarn. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably hand dye it all and get something really cool. I foresee a sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s a little thick and thin, but I think if I knit it tightly the texture will be really interesting. and blocking can do wonderful things, and I have a lot of it.\nAs a shorter interim spinning project, I\u0026rsquo;ve begun work on a small amount of silk and wool roving, that I hope to spin into heavy lace lace or some sort of fingering weight yarn. Single ply, if I can set the twist enough so that it it\u0026rsquo;ll be knit-able in as singles. If not I\u0026rsquo;ll roll a center pull ball and two-ply it.\nAfter that, I\u0026rsquo;m either going to start spinning from my stash of really pretty corriedale, or from some brown alpaca. I have some soy silk at home, but I think that will make far better winter spinning. My logic is that if spinning is a year round activity, you don\u0026rsquo;t really need to spin yarn seasonally. That is that, you don\u0026rsquo;t need to spin fine light cellulose fibers in the summer for summer knitting. In fact, if you\u0026rsquo;re trying to make yarn to knit with, you\u0026rsquo;d be better off spinning winter yarns in the summer and summer yarns in the winter. But then I suppose it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much.\nAnyway.\nThere you have it. Cheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dental-floss/","summary":"My life has otherwise been proceeding as it has been, so I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything ground breaking to report to you all. Ho hum.\nI thought I\u0026rsquo;d offer you all some noes on my knitting/fiber art progress.\nI finished the green shawl. I did end up needing a bit more of the Zephyr, but I think it worked out just fine, and frankly you can\u0026rsquo;t really see it. I still have to block the shawl, but it\u0026rsquo;s really nifty.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;m working on a shawl using a very royal blue tencel yarn. It has the dental floss look at the moment, but I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be quite nice. I\u0026rsquo;m embarking on a very nifty lace pattern, supposedly Japanese in origin, but I\u0026rsquo;m not really aware of Japanese knitting traditions, so I think it\u0026rsquo;s just inspired and all. From Nancy Oberly\u0026rsquo;s Folk Shawls book.\nI finished spinning the merino roving.","title":"Dental Floss"},{"content":"Ok, for all of you who I know are waiting for this one, I offer you a knitting post unencumbered by tales of my personal life, discussions of my current technological setup or weird creative tangents. All Knitting, one paragraph away.\nI\u0026rsquo;m almost done with my latest shawl. I ran out of yarn, nary 3 rows away from the bind off. Which means I need to buy two more oz\u0026rsquo;s of the stuff. Thank god I have a discount. Probably in the same direction I\u0026rsquo;m going to buy another ball of the blue yarn that I have, just because the fear of running out of yarn is really too much for me.\nThat shawl, \u0026ldquo;the green shawl\u0026rdquo; is really amazing. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be big, and very lacy, and I hope to sell it for a fair price. (While knitting isn\u0026rsquo;t a viable way to earn all of one\u0026rsquo;s money, selling a shawl or two might me to relax a little when I\u0026rsquo;m ordering books or some such next year.\nI\u0026rsquo;m currently working on finishing a sweater I\u0026rsquo;m making out of fisherman\u0026rsquo;s wool. This is lion brand yarn, that you can get at just about any craft store for about a dollar an oz. Pretty good deal. It\u0026rsquo;s ecru (\u0026ldquo;sheep\u0026rdquo;) color, but it dyes well. It\u0026rsquo;ll be a nice sweater, and I like the feel of the wool. I had plans to sell the design, but as I\u0026rsquo;m watching it unfold, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that I like the way that it looks. On the upside, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally figured out how to make a crew neck, so I might just revert back to doing that. I finished the neck treatment, so now all I have to do, is make the sleeves, and block the hell out of the sucker.\nYou might remember me talking about my \u0026ldquo;sock project\u0026rdquo; as the never ending pair of socks that I was supposedly making. Well, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to give up on it. I mean what I\u0026rsquo;ve done looks really good, and if I was interested, I could probably finish them in a reasonable amount of time, but I\u0026rsquo;ve lost the desire to make this pair of socks. I think it\u0026rsquo;s something to do with such fine wool. It\u0026rsquo;s such nice yarn too, I feel really bad for not being able to make the socks, but, I can\u0026rsquo;t pull it off. for anything. But then I\u0026rsquo;m in no hurry, so I don\u0026rsquo;t really need to take them off those needles, so it might linger for a while.\nIn other news, I have enough yarn set aside for me, to make a sweater. It\u0026rsquo;ll be a great deal of fun. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking drop shouldered crew neck. The yarn is this kettle/space dyed worsted weight wool, that\u0026rsquo;s just pretty. I might make two (another in red, I\u0026rsquo;m so predictable, really), later on in the summer. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably have a shawl project going at the same time, just to keep entertained.\nWell that\u0026rsquo;s all for the moment.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/moments-of-knitting-transition/","summary":"Ok, for all of you who I know are waiting for this one, I offer you a knitting post unencumbered by tales of my personal life, discussions of my current technological setup or weird creative tangents. All Knitting, one paragraph away.\nI\u0026rsquo;m almost done with my latest shawl. I ran out of yarn, nary 3 rows away from the bind off. Which means I need to buy two more oz\u0026rsquo;s of the stuff. Thank god I have a discount. Probably in the same direction I\u0026rsquo;m going to buy another ball of the blue yarn that I have, just because the fear of running out of yarn is really too much for me.\nThat shawl, \u0026ldquo;the green shawl\u0026rdquo; is really amazing. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be big, and very lacy, and I hope to sell it for a fair price. (While knitting isn\u0026rsquo;t a viable way to earn all of one\u0026rsquo;s money, selling a shawl or two might me to relax a little when I\u0026rsquo;m ordering books or some such next year.","title":"Moments of Knitting Transition"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m one of those people. You know, the people who can forgive George Lucas for lots of grievous foul ups, and still love Star Wars. The idea of it. (That will not only read all those damn books, but also give them a great deal of priority over a host of far better options.) I think at the heart of it, I attach to saga\u0026rsquo;s, and I\u0026rsquo;ve attached to this one. So deal with it. What follows is a critique of the most recent movie. I hope you enjoy. I liked the story, but then I like all the stories. It connected the two stories very nicely, and in most respects it answered the questions that I thought needed to be answered. And of course, I have a few nits to pick.\nMace Windu, refers to Palpatine as \u0026ldquo;Emperor\u0026rdquo; as, or shortly after Palpatine, makes his ascension speech to the Senate. Windu should have refereed to him as Chancellor. It\u0026rsquo;s an editing glitch, but the fact that I noticed it, and I\u0026rsquo;m usually not that sharp for these kinds of things, says something to me. The scene where Anakin becomes Darth Vader, not the appearance of the black cloaked figure we all know and love, but the sort of \u0026ldquo;moment\u0026rdquo; is a complete waist. Palapatine says, \u0026ldquo;come join me in my dark dark plans for dominion\u0026rdquo; and Anakin says \u0026ldquo;Ok, I\u0026rsquo;ll do whatever you want.\u0026rdquo; And the shame of it is, the proper motivation and reasoning was there. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t like they screwed up the whole point of the book, it was just in the delivery of that scene was pretty bad. Minor quibble, but Padame, shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have died on the table. Leia remembers her mother, vaguely, when Luke asks of her in RotJ. Now of course, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to think that you have memories of things you didn\u0026rsquo;t actually observe, but I doubt that this psychological phenomena was what they had in mind. Darth Vader is always described as one of the Emperor\u0026rsquo;s greatest servants, which I see as problematic. Now of course this is more a problem with Episodes 4-6. Sith Apprentices always kill their masters, eventually. And Vader, knows this, and I suppose this goes back to the motivation in my second comment, but that person (Anakin Skywalker/Vader) is rebellious enough that I don\u0026rsquo;t think the characters jive. Lets remember, that there are twenty years between the end of revenge, and A New Hope (IV). Now even if you grant that the sequence at the end where they show Palpatine and Vader standing on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, working on the Death Star, as being somewhere between the bulk of the movies, it\u0026rsquo;s still problematic. First of all, the bridge looks a lot like that of the Executor which wasn\u0026rsquo;t even built until after the Battle of Yavin (so the time\u0026rsquo;s way off). Captian Antilles, who apeared as one of the Naboo pilots, in the first movie, and now seems to be somehow tied to Bail Organa\u0026rsquo;s Ship, (and presumably Wedge\u0026rsquo;s father), is somehow from Correllia? Right. If it\u0026rsquo;s true, it\u0026rsquo;s an impressive record. I would like to say that I liked the many nods to events to come, and cameo\u0026rsquo;s that were sort of thrown in there. Like there was a shot with Grand Moff Tarkin. The implication that the Artoo the second trilogy, \u0026ldquo;remembered\u0026rdquo; the events of the first. Things like that made it delightful. So that\u0026rsquo;s where I am with that. If anyone has similar comments I\u0026rsquo;d love to hear them.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/well-always-have-star-wars/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m one of those people. You know, the people who can forgive George Lucas for lots of grievous foul ups, and still love Star Wars. The idea of it. (That will not only read all those damn books, but also give them a great deal of priority over a host of far better options.) I think at the heart of it, I attach to saga\u0026rsquo;s, and I\u0026rsquo;ve attached to this one. So deal with it. What follows is a critique of the most recent movie. I hope you enjoy. I liked the story, but then I like all the stories. It connected the two stories very nicely, and in most respects it answered the questions that I thought needed to be answered. And of course, I have a few nits to pick.\nMace Windu, refers to Palpatine as \u0026ldquo;Emperor\u0026rdquo; as, or shortly after Palpatine, makes his ascension speech to the Senate.","title":"We\u0026#8217;ll Always Have Star Wars\u0026#8230;"},{"content":"There are, in my estimation a thousand clever names for a blog like ours. Our fellow bloggers/journalists have some pretty clever names. Rather than surrender to just calling this \u0026ldquo;TealArt\u0026rdquo; or something painfully clever, I generally pick a name I like, and leave it up for a few design cycles. Before, I had \u0026ldquo;The Times Of TealArt\u0026rdquo; because, mostly I thought newspapers that took the long form \u0026ldquo;The Times of *\u0026rdquo; rather than the shorter, \u0026ldquo;*_ Times\u0026rdquo; was an interesting construction, and it as as a way of putting emphasis on the observed rather than the observer, and given the nature of our medium, I think that\u0026rsquo;s an interesting statement.\nBut like all good things, I thought a fresh name would be fun. So for the moment, we have the somewhat loner. \u0026ldquo;TealArt: You Can\u0026rsquo;t Take the Sky From Us.\u0026rdquo; Modified of course, from the following:\nTake my love, take my land Take me where I cannot stand. I don\u0026rsquo;t care, I\u0026rsquo;m still free, You can\u0026rsquo;t take the sky from me. Take me out to the black, Tell them I ain\u0026rsquo;t comin\u0026rsquo; back. Burn the land and boil the sea, You can\u0026rsquo;t take the sky from me. There\u0026rsquo;s no place I can be. Since I found Serenity. But you can\u0026rsquo;t take the sky from me\u0026hellip;\nClever little ditty. Inspiring and all that. This also reflects on TealArt\u0026rsquo;s history, as a spark in the imagination of two fan boys. It\u0026rsquo;s the lyrics to the theme song for Firefly the short lived Joss Whedon TV series. Anyway, I like it so there. And I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to write a Morris Dance called \u0026ldquo;The Firefly\u0026rdquo;, stay tuned.\nSo that explains that little change, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go see the new Star Wars movie soon, finally. I don\u0026rsquo;t care if it stinks really. Expect a report on that and concerning knitting things. Cool. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/you-cant-take-the-sky-from-us/","summary":"There are, in my estimation a thousand clever names for a blog like ours. Our fellow bloggers/journalists have some pretty clever names. Rather than surrender to just calling this \u0026ldquo;TealArt\u0026rdquo; or something painfully clever, I generally pick a name I like, and leave it up for a few design cycles. Before, I had \u0026ldquo;The Times Of TealArt\u0026rdquo; because, mostly I thought newspapers that took the long form \u0026ldquo;The Times of *\u0026rdquo; rather than the shorter, \u0026ldquo;*_ Times\u0026rdquo; was an interesting construction, and it as as a way of putting emphasis on the observed rather than the observer, and given the nature of our medium, I think that\u0026rsquo;s an interesting statement.\nBut like all good things, I thought a fresh name would be fun. So for the moment, we have the somewhat loner. \u0026ldquo;TealArt: You Can\u0026rsquo;t Take the Sky From Us.\u0026rdquo; Modified of course, from the following:\nTake my love, take my land Take me where I cannot stand.","title":"You Can\u0026#8217;t Take the Sky From Us"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;d like to take a moment to recognize the fact that there are 450 entries on this site. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot. Well I suppose it could/should be more, but I think its worth noting. It\u0026rsquo;s yet another fact that draw attention to the idea that, we\u0026rsquo;ve been around for a REALLY long time. shrug.\nI think my new computer and I have finally bonded. I think it generally takes one trying design process to bond with a computer. Graphics, web pages, long form prose writing, etc. Its like you need to push yourself to some limit with the computer to be able to trust it, to know it\u0026rsquo;s limits and yours, and then it becomes easier to work with it in the future. So I think we\u0026rsquo;re there. Now all I need to do is send off the last thing for the rebate, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be really happy.\nThe other thing, and what I initially intended to post here about, is the fact that, pretty much without my realizing it, Ranchero Software released a new version of NetNewsWire, which has been my news reader of preference. The interface is more Tiger-Esque, which is just fine by me (now if we can only get Mac to drop this steel look on finder, we\u0026rsquo;ll be good). But the really cool thing is that it will cope with Atom feeds. Basically it\u0026rsquo;s yet another RSS, except not as simple (RSS stands for really simple syndication.) I think it works great frankly it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much to me, except Blogger supports Atom and only Atom. Whereas before, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t dedicate the time to reading Blogger powered weblogs, because my news reader wouldn\u0026rsquo;t cope with it, now my only reasoning is pure snobbery. Blogger, like LiveJournal, Xanga, etc. tend to be too easy for people to use, so EVERYONE gets one, which inspires even more people to get them. And it\u0026rsquo;s a downward spiral. I\u0026rsquo;ve had to put a lot of time into getting tealart to work the way it does. Not to mention money/work for the domain name and the hosting account, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to think that this kind of commitment leads to a higher level of quality, and I think this is confirmed. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much which program you use, but blogs that are powered by freestanding software packages tend to be better than website services. And I\u0026rsquo;ll go ahead and lump TypePad in with the freestanding packages, even though it\u0026rsquo;s not, really. But I digress.\nIn addition to the new and better version of NetNewsWire, I\u0026rsquo;ve also found that Ranchero has what I think is a rather good offline blog editor. I\u0026rsquo;ve seen all manner of these programs, and they tend to be rather crappy. Now this isn\u0026rsquo;t all the developers fault. It\u0026rsquo;s taken a while for the protocols that allow such offline programs to connect with site to develop into allowing communication of enough features. But I think everything is starting to line up. Which is a very good thing indeed. So yeah. I\u0026rsquo;ve found what passes for blogging nirvana, for the moment.\nBut, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ll save this thought for later. Have you noticed how so called \u0026ldquo;traditional/old\u0026rdquo; media have been fascinated with the the development of the \u0026ldquo;blog\u0026rdquo;? I can\u0026rsquo;t help but think that they\u0026rsquo;re missing something. Or maybe they have it all right, and it just stings, but when ever I read or see one of those pieces, I cringe.\nAnyway, Stay Tuned.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-news-programs/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;d like to take a moment to recognize the fact that there are 450 entries on this site. That\u0026rsquo;s a lot. Well I suppose it could/should be more, but I think its worth noting. It\u0026rsquo;s yet another fact that draw attention to the idea that, we\u0026rsquo;ve been around for a REALLY long time. shrug.\nI think my new computer and I have finally bonded. I think it generally takes one trying design process to bond with a computer. Graphics, web pages, long form prose writing, etc. Its like you need to push yourself to some limit with the computer to be able to trust it, to know it\u0026rsquo;s limits and yours, and then it becomes easier to work with it in the future. So I think we\u0026rsquo;re there. Now all I need to do is send off the last thing for the rebate, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be really happy.\nThe other thing, and what I initially intended to post here about, is the fact that, pretty much without my realizing it, Ranchero Software released a new version of NetNewsWire, which has been my news reader of preference.","title":"New News (Programs)"},{"content":"Ok, Here I go again. I up and figured out how the new WordPress template system works after months of hemming and hawing. I finally have something that I think I kind of like. Whatever. Uses the awesome graphic that Indi made for us, and I think we have a winner.\nConfidential to Chris: You can stop laughing and pointing at me now. Thank You.\nSo here we are. Enough of this introspective crap about writing. It\u0026rsquo;ll happen. And no more of these 2,000 word posts once a month either.\nOne thing about writing that I remembered, or at any rate have decided to begin to act on. Is it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much what you write, so long as your fingers are making the right motions on the keyboard. Write emails, write blog posts, whatever, just move them fingers, and eventually you\u0026rsquo;ll be forced to get something out of use. I hope at least. In this dirrection, I for one am going to start back up a more strenuous TealArt posting schedule, so get those RSS readers all fired up.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also in the process of trying to revive my Speculative Fiction writer\u0026rsquo;s yahoo group, which is almost five years old and has 233 people. Wow! And I\u0026rsquo;ve joined a lace knitters yahoo group which is a lot of fun, and gives me occassiton to muse on lace knitting which I think I will also do here, a fair piece.\nNow all I need to do is some how figure out how to inspire TealArt Readers (and that means you) to comment on what we/I write here. It\u0026rsquo;s been a six year battle, maybe this time will be different, because the software actually works reliably. shrug\nAnyway, Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/by-grunge-were-back/","summary":"Ok, Here I go again. I up and figured out how the new WordPress template system works after months of hemming and hawing. I finally have something that I think I kind of like. Whatever. Uses the awesome graphic that Indi made for us, and I think we have a winner.\nConfidential to Chris: You can stop laughing and pointing at me now. Thank You.\nSo here we are. Enough of this introspective crap about writing. It\u0026rsquo;ll happen. And no more of these 2,000 word posts once a month either.\nOne thing about writing that I remembered, or at any rate have decided to begin to act on. Is it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter much what you write, so long as your fingers are making the right motions on the keyboard. Write emails, write blog posts, whatever, just move them fingers, and eventually you\u0026rsquo;ll be forced to get something out of use. I hope at least.","title":"By Grunge We\u0026#8217;re Back"},{"content":"In light of the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have anything else to post about, I\u0026rsquo;m going to offer you an update on all the things happening in my life at this point. I hope you\u0026rsquo;re all deeply interested. Ha!\nOk, so being home isn\u0026rsquo;t as bad as I feared, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really accomplished much. You\u0026rsquo;ll note that the design around here isn\u0026rsquo;t what it usually is (this is the time of year that TealArt usually gets budgeted into attention/time budget), I\u0026rsquo;ve of course done a lot of knitting, and a (very very) little reading.\nWhile I strive for knitting accomplishment, and really enjoy finishing a project, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that finishing written things provide a greater sense of accomplishment. Which is interesting, because last semester my course work was entirely based on papers, (2 classes, 4 hours, out of 23 hours, had tests in addition to two papers) and finishing a paper wasn\u0026rsquo;t particularly exciting. Now I think next semester might be a little bit better. I don\u0026rsquo;t have to figure out any new disciplinary method (last semester I took two classes outside of my majors, and felt like a fish out of water, pretty much the whole time), and I\u0026rsquo;m only taking 19 hours: well, certainly no more than 19.\nOnce upon a time, I used to preach that, the need to write, simply to write, is what defined a person as a writer. Since then I think I\u0026rsquo;ve moderated a bit, as I have found lots of writers who don\u0026rsquo;t seem to partake in this \u0026ldquo;need to write\u0026rdquo; urge. Also, as I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten more busy with academic work in the last two years, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been pressing a fiction project as I did when I was writing Circle Games. (I\u0026rsquo;d like to say, that the binder carrying CG goes almost everywhere with me, though I haven\u0026rsquo;t really opened it much of late.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve pronounced Another Round, what would be my second novel project dead, more than once, and eventually when I get the urge to write I revive it and work on it some more. I have a pretty good start, but not really enough of an urge to put in the effort it deserves. I kept a window open for a few days and wrote 3-6 pages, give or take a bit. While this isn\u0026rsquo;t anything to spit at, it\u0026rsquo;s not the kind of energy it could have been, and I\u0026rsquo;m not feeling it. I also know that, well it\u0026rsquo;s crap. I mean I think the story is engaging, and it\u0026rsquo;s not the right for me right now. I think the allegory and social commentary aspects are all set up, but there isn\u0026rsquo;t depth. And try as I might, 20,000 words and the characters aren\u0026rsquo;t fully formed. For Circle Games they were and still are. And the genre doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel like something I\u0026rsquo;m into any more. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been reading it. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been thinking it. And I don\u0026rsquo;t have the science background to believe it for myself. Maybe this is the same argument that I\u0026rsquo;ve been making for a long time, and maybe I mean it this time.\nWhile it\u0026rsquo;s good to know this about myself and my writing, the problem is that it leaves me with a metaphoric blank page with the words \u0026ldquo;Great American Novel\u0026rdquo; at the top. You all will probably remember this winter when I talked about writing another all new book. Well at the time, before the shit hit the fan, I made some notes for a story, which I rediscovered as the summer started, and I found that it wasn\u0026rsquo;t really all that good. So I\u0026rsquo;m back to the drawing board, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything. The problem becomes that as soon as the blank paper appears on the screen I get the undying urge to knit, which I don\u0026rsquo;t fight because I like to knit and all. So I have something of an impasse on my hands.\nIn the past, in addition to some sort of fiction project, I\u0026rsquo;ve had some other writing related project. It was mobile technology, it was TealArt, it was gender theory musing. I think knitting should be my next thing, because it makes sense. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to make the mistake of trying to start my own website above and beyond TealArt. I\u0026rsquo;m not that digitally charismatic, nor do I have the time resources to tackle a project like that alone, and somehow I doubt I could Tom Sawyer Chris into that. On the other hand, I realized a few days ago, that I really like editing, and that side of things. So maybe doing a periodical of some sort would work out. The other thing is that, the knitting community, for lack of a better term, functions very differently. There are a number of fairly successful knitting blogs (I read about 12 of them), 1 big online magazine, another much smaller one, and then thousands of every day knitters that maintain blogs, with varying readerships. There are also 2 or 3 print magazines (depending on how you count Vogue-Knitting; I don\u0026rsquo;t). I\u0026rsquo;m not going to register a new domain and start a knitting blog, I have a blog, this one, and it continues to satisfy all of my blogging needs. Which leaves designing; I already make the designs, so writing them up wouldn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be too hard; and general knitting writing. I have fairly entertaining curmudgeonly opinions about knitting, but they aren\u0026rsquo;t new, and at least on Knitty there have been a few articles that describe my technique, so I could probably scratch that. There\u0026rsquo;s already columnist for Knitter\u0026rsquo;s Magazine who has the \u0026ldquo;talk about knitting and life\u0026rdquo; shtick down (and she\u0026rsquo;s wonderful) so that might be a hard sell to make. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about it.\nEnough about writing. On to real talk about knitting, because that seems to be the only thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve kept up consistently.\nNear the end of the semester I made a shawl out of 50/50 Silk Wool Zephyr Lace Weight yarn. It\u0026rsquo;s about 4 ounces of yarn total. Pi Shawl (that is Elizabeth Zimmermen\u0026rsquo;s shawl pattern that\u0026rsquo;s circular and has these increases that happen in groups (the number of stitches double as the diameter doubles. so every 3, then 6, then 12, 24, and 48 rows there is one round where the number of stitches double. The pattern is drop dead easy, and combines the right amount of mindlessness with possibility for creativity. I\u0026rsquo;ve done this kind of thing before. Now I\u0026rsquo;ve made 4 ones of very passable quality, and another 3 (earlier) experiments which fail to stand up to even the lowest judgments of quality.\nAfter I finished the Zephyr shawl, I started one using Skacel Merino Lace Yarn, which I\u0026rsquo;m convinced is the perfect lace yarn. It\u0026rsquo;s cheap, 13 bucks a skien (100g; 1345 yards), and one skien will make an entire shawl. I finished that shawl today. It\u0026rsquo;s more complicated, with more lace, but it\u0026rsquo;s really nice. In a dark teal. I of course don\u0026rsquo;t have any use for these, but they\u0026rsquo;re fun to make. They\u0026rsquo;d make god gifts, and I could probably be convinced to sell them.\nAs for current knitting, I have a few projects that I\u0026rsquo;m working on. The main project at the moment is a red, alpaca, shawl. Rather that work lace patterns, I\u0026rsquo;m doing textured patterns. It\u0026rsquo;s a subtle effect, but I think it will keep me interested. Preliminary testing shows that I need to work on improving the patterns a bit, and that while it may require about the same level of engagement, the pay off isn\u0026rsquo;t as great. Nevertheless I\u0026rsquo;m going to continue this, at the moment because I think this is about as close to a \u0026ldquo;manly\u0026rdquo; shawl as I\u0026rsquo;m going to get. Lace, though beautiful, isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly practical for day to day wear, in the same way that texture might be. I\u0026rsquo;d like to complete one shawl like this just to try it out. I\u0026rsquo;ve also started knitting on another one (I know I know), out of a cone of yarn I bought almost a year ago. This is part of a stash reduction attempt. At the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m using it as a swatch to test out another texture pattern that will pop up later in the red shawl. Also, as the red shawl is a project for this weekend\u0026rsquo;s MidWest Morris Ale, I want to be extra sure that I don\u0026rsquo;t run out of yarn. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty damn sure that I\u0026rsquo;m going to run out of yarn on this one, which is ok, because I\u0026rsquo;d like to edge it in black, and it\u0026rsquo;s a kind of yarn that\u0026rsquo;s fairly easy to get.\nOther projects which aren\u0026rsquo;t within arms reach at the moment, and remain on the plan for this summer (and beyond) are: The sleeves for a sweater I made this semester, some sort of very simple, stole/scarve using some hand dyed yarn in my stash (quick-y project). There\u0026rsquo;s also enough zephyr for another 2 shawls, and I have another skein of merino lace weight. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m going to buy a pound of Tencel yarn to make a shawl or four. In some order. When I get back to beloit, I have my Ram\u0026rsquo;s Horn sweater to take a stab at for a third try, and a few other that I can make.\nIn terms of current and upcoming main projects, I have the two shawls currently under way, then the sleeves, then probably the Tencel, and probably another Zephyr one in greens if I have time this summer. Then back to Beloit, where I\u0026rsquo;ll work on whatever shawl is still on the needles until the weather breaks and I can do some fall sweater production. Then again, this could all change with my whim.\nNow to tie this all together. I\u0026rsquo;m a big project kind of guy. I haven\u0026rsquo;t really been able to write fiction unless it\u0026rsquo;s as part of a big project; I find knitting things that aren\u0026rsquo;t big projects to be a bore (in the neighborhood of 20,000 stitches and 20-25 hours of SERIOUS work), and I think that both my writing issue, and this \u0026ldquo;knitting character\u0026rdquo; come from the same place. On the upside, I\u0026rsquo;ve found it much easier to knit the big projects, than it is to write them, but the time scales are way off.\nNow that I\u0026rsquo;ve tied this monster of a post into a nice little bow, I think I\u0026rsquo;ll compleatly wreck the ending by talking about my computer situation.\nI upgraded, and passed off my trusty little iBook to my mother. In it\u0026rsquo;s place I have a very shinny very nice, Powerbook G4 15\u0026quot;. I\u0026rsquo;m psyched about the extra hard drive space, (of which I only have 30 gigs free, along with 20 gigs on my iPod). The speed is nice, the video memory is really nice, the screen is to die for. I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly wild about the heat output, or the battery life, in comparison to the ibook, but I think part of it\u0026rsquo;s the season (having a warm computer on your lap or under your hands is more of an issue when it\u0026rsquo;s hot out than it is in the depths of Wisconsin winter (when I\u0026rsquo;m also more likely to have a blanket and jeans between me and the computer in the winter). I\u0026rsquo;m going to need to upgrade the ram, at one end of the fall semester or the other, but I expected that. Sooner or later I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to buy an external firewire drive for backup and additional storage, but that\u0026rsquo;s more or less unaffected by the new computer (it forestalls it a little bit because I now have about 50 gb of space to play around with, rather than 15-20 gb). We\u0026rsquo;ll have to see how much I end up carrying around the computer. I\u0026rsquo;ve occasionally rethought the PDA question, but any time that I would carry around a PDA as it is, I already have the laptop. This might change, we\u0026rsquo;ll have to wait for the school year I suppose.\nOk, I think I\u0026rsquo;m done. I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all soon.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/summering-along/","summary":"In light of the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t really have anything else to post about, I\u0026rsquo;m going to offer you an update on all the things happening in my life at this point. I hope you\u0026rsquo;re all deeply interested. Ha!\nOk, so being home isn\u0026rsquo;t as bad as I feared, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t really accomplished much. You\u0026rsquo;ll note that the design around here isn\u0026rsquo;t what it usually is (this is the time of year that TealArt usually gets budgeted into attention/time budget), I\u0026rsquo;ve of course done a lot of knitting, and a (very very) little reading.\nWhile I strive for knitting accomplishment, and really enjoy finishing a project, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that finishing written things provide a greater sense of accomplishment. Which is interesting, because last semester my course work was entirely based on papers, (2 classes, 4 hours, out of 23 hours, had tests in addition to two papers) and finishing a paper wasn\u0026rsquo;t particularly exciting.","title":"Summering Along"},{"content":"Ok, here it goes, a few things have crossed my mind as being minorly irksome, and I thought that you might like to take note of them in all their snarky goodness.\n1. It\u0026rsquo;s my birthday tomorrow/today (may 19th). I keep managing to forget this. I thought it was next week somehow. I\u0026rsquo;m not good with this addition thing. Or maybe it\u0026rsquo;s subtraction, and that\u0026rsquo;s my problem. How\u0026rsquo;d it sneak up on me like that.\n2. Why on earth can\u0026rsquo;t someone make a good bluetooth mouse that I could buy. By good, I mean more than three buttons, optical sensor, and a normal sized. Also, I got a computer with an internal bluetooth unit because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to have to deal with something that I have to plug into the computer. Apple makes a nice bluetooth mouse, but if I\u0026rsquo;m going to lay down the money for a 60 dollar mouse, a few more buttons would be nice. A few other companies make these mouses, for about the same price point, but the mouses are small and cramped. I have an internal track-pad for this. The reason I want an external mouse is for the times I\u0026rsquo;m sitting at my desk doing something delicate for a long time. I don\u0026rsquo;t want something that\u0026rsquo;s going to give me a hand cramp. So I guess what I want is for Logitech to make their bluetooth devices compatible with Mac. How hard could it be. My Microsoft trackball, was plug and play. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t even that good with my PC. Come on folks.\n3. Why won\u0026rsquo;t the Windows Media Player for OS X download and install right for me. I have a program (VLC) that will do what I need it to, but, it\u0026rsquo;s poor quality, or a poorly designed program. Given that people aren\u0026rsquo;t getting payed for the development I\u0026rsquo;m not that surprised.\n4. I have to get up at like 5 am for a 7:30 flight to Detroit for the morris ale, which starts at 8pm. And given that I know all the mass dances save for one, (and I need to practice another) it doesn\u0026rsquo;t start until say\u0026hellip; midnight. How do I expect to stay up until 3 or 4, if I have to get up at 5? Really now. grumble Sorry if that made no sense to you. I\u0026rsquo;m going to a dance weekend memorial day, and I have to get up at an insane time for a flight. And the thing about dance weekends, is it\u0026rsquo;s all about the pick up dancing and singing, which just starts at midnight. So I\u0026rsquo;m heading into this, with a handicap, I feel, and it\u0026rsquo;s not a big issue, I\u0026rsquo;ll just want to complain.\n5. I wish school didn\u0026rsquo;t rob my attenion span like it did. I\u0026rsquo;ve been sitting around here looking at the wall (and let me tell you it\u0026rsquo;s very white and very unadorned) and I\u0026rsquo;m basically unable to do anything. I knit a few rows on my shawl and then I grow restless, and I\u0026rsquo;ll spin for a short while, and then I try and write, and I\u0026rsquo;m not getting anywhere. Now granted I\u0026rsquo;m in the boring stage of the knitting, and I view spinning as either a deeply meditative activity, or a very social one. And I\u0026rsquo;m writing the wrong book. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading philosophy senior thesis\u0026rsquo; that my dad gave me (and the associated theory) and so most of what would turn into tealart essays is this really futile look at so called radical french feminism in the 70s as it relates to modern queer theory. I think it\u0026rsquo;s kind of interesting to draw these connections and do some thinking, but I think there\u0026rsquo;s absolutely NO utility in hashing this out. It\u0026rsquo;s important to keep in touch with our intellectual heritage to avoid constantly rehashing old territory, but I think there are better ways to expend energy.\nOk, five is enough for now.\nCheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/5-reasons-im-vaguely-anoyed/","summary":"Ok, here it goes, a few things have crossed my mind as being minorly irksome, and I thought that you might like to take note of them in all their snarky goodness.\n1. It\u0026rsquo;s my birthday tomorrow/today (may 19th). I keep managing to forget this. I thought it was next week somehow. I\u0026rsquo;m not good with this addition thing. Or maybe it\u0026rsquo;s subtraction, and that\u0026rsquo;s my problem. How\u0026rsquo;d it sneak up on me like that.\n2. Why on earth can\u0026rsquo;t someone make a good bluetooth mouse that I could buy. By good, I mean more than three buttons, optical sensor, and a normal sized. Also, I got a computer with an internal bluetooth unit because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to have to deal with something that I have to plug into the computer. Apple makes a nice bluetooth mouse, but if I\u0026rsquo;m going to lay down the money for a 60 dollar mouse, a few more buttons would be nice.","title":"5 Reasons I'm Vaguely Anoyed"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m almost completely done in Beloit until next semester. There is one more Rubbermaid to carry down to the car, plus the live animals, and our book bags, and then we can be on our way. It\u0026rsquo;ll be a difficult trip, the U-Haul limits the speed a lot, and yeah. But we got everything packed up, amazingly enough.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;re more interested in how my semester from hell ended. Right. Well it did. I think I did well in my classes, perhaps not as well as I would have liked to, but I held down 23 credit hours, all of which were really upper level so I\u0026rsquo;m happy. I think I had/have something of a chance at As in 10 hours, A- in 8 hours, and really anyone\u0026rsquo;s guess is as good as mine in the last four hours (1 class) It can\u0026rsquo;t possibly be less than a B-, and probably won\u0026rsquo;t be better than an B+, but I learned a hell of a lot in that class, even if I\u0026rsquo;m still not sure I \u0026ldquo;get it.\u0026rdquo; But I have no regrets.\nSo lets go down class by class,\nPSYCH 150 - Statistics: It was a good class. I totally understand what was taught, and I did reasonably well. I\u0026rsquo;m doing a lot of work with the professor (department chair), but I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I\u0026rsquo;m going to have a chance to take another formal class with her. It was a requirement, but it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a gawd awful amount of work, and I think I accomplished the goal. At the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m trying to find a way to get SPSS (the statistical package de jour, for psych) to work with my computer. No such luck yet, but I\u0026rsquo;m getting there, and I\u0026rsquo;m sort of sorry that this class was so locked up in pen and papering the solutions, and not teaching us how to use SPSS, but whatever.\nPSYCH 256 - Cross Cultural Psych: I learned a lot, I guess. I felt that the methodology is completely flawed, and that the content was intro to psych, but asking the question \u0026ldquo;what about culture,\u0026rdquo; which is something I felt I did, when I was in intro. So maybe not the most productive experience, but it fulfills a requirement, and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have know how much I disliked it, without taking it. Not a total loss, but I\u0026rsquo;m feeling very, shrug about it.\nWGST 360 - Writing Race and Sexuality: Amazing class, really really involved students, and the professor was into it too. It was also the class with the most tension. There were a number of times when the dynamic melted down, and we damn near killed each other, which I viewed as a problem. I\u0026rsquo;m totally not sure that I was prepared for the class, but I learned a lot, and would probably take it again, given the option. My paper was really interesting, there were a number of underlying flaws but I think it\u0026rsquo;ll be ok. I\u0026rsquo;m ambivalent, strongly, but that kind of thing happens. I think I got a lot from this class, but I think I ended up really demoralized about my own analytical and writing skills which aren\u0026rsquo;t that bad: maybe it was a clash of style, but whatever, it\u0026rsquo;s beyond me now, and the professor had a 1 year appointment, so that\u0026rsquo;s done with.\nWGST 210 - Gender and Politics in the US with Global Contexts. This class had the worlds largest reading and writing load. It was too much at times, and while I started out ambivalent about the class (all of my friends who were taking the class with me, dropped it in the second week), I ended up really liking it. I did a lot of work, learned a bunch, have the resources to learn more and do more work, and walked away really happy. And while I don\u0026rsquo;t think my paper is publishable by any means, it\u0026rsquo;s probably the best thing (in terms of ideas) I\u0026rsquo;ve written this semester.\nART 150 - Weaving and Fiber Arts. Well that was a strange trip. I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered that I really really like knitting, and weaving doesn\u0026rsquo;t hold much appeal for me. So be it. I\u0026rsquo;m ok with that. One thing I learned, was how to spin, and I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in that now, and will continue to do this, it was a lot of work, and I turned in like twice as many projects as I needed to, so I\u0026rsquo;ll be fine. Also the instructor, seemed to be very interested in doing independent study projects with me in the future, which might be nice if I needed the credit, but I probably won\u0026rsquo;t.\nPSYCH 390 - Special Project in Sensation. I was a research assistant this semester, and did a bunch of work. I wrote a lit review, collected and entered data, and participated with the analysis. While I didn\u0026rsquo;t like the study all that much, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that it means a whole lot, but whatever. We have the results we want, and really good results, so that\u0026rsquo;s exciting. I think the chances of the paper getting published are pretty good, and I\u0026rsquo;m really excited about that, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get do some sort of research-y thing again and again, which is good.\nPSYCH 285 - Journal Club. I got a credit hour to read an article and make a presentation. It was a great experience, a little work, but it was fun, and the credit was nice. I\u0026rsquo;ll defiantly be doing this one again.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s everything. Now to jump around a little.\nAs for this summer, I\u0026rsquo;m hoping I can do some sort of research thing. I\u0026rsquo;m almost certain that I\u0026rsquo;m going to be going to Kansas City for the summer, which will be a great experience. I hope I can make it work out.\nThis is probably the last TealArt I\u0026rsquo;m going to write from this computer. As you might remember I\u0026rsquo;ve been using a 12 inch ibook g4 (thats about a year old) for a while now. It\u0026rsquo;s a good machine, and I\u0026rsquo;d probably be able to continue to use it for years, but a number of circumstances combined, and I\u0026rsquo;m off loading it on my parents, and I\u0026rsquo;m getting a very shiny very spiffy, 15 inch Powerbook. 100 gb hard drive. 1.67ghz processor. 128 meg of video memory. 512 meg ram (to be upgraded, in August or December). Wireless (of course), No DVD burner, but I so have no use for that. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be fun.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been in a shawl knitting mood. I\u0026rsquo;m a good little bit into a shawl. I have another two planned. Did one earlier this semester, which is amazing looking. The summer is just to hot to make sweaters, though I have one that needs some sleeves that I\u0026rsquo;ll make as soon as I get to when I need a shawl break. Shawls take a long time, but I hope I can sell them or something, and if not they\u0026rsquo;re impressive to have, cheep to buy the yarn, and give you a lot of bang for the buck. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to keep that up for a while.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s about it. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably be getting on the road soon. I\u0026rsquo;ll be around more this summer, and I promise to do something about this horrid design.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/2-down-4-to-go/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m almost completely done in Beloit until next semester. There is one more Rubbermaid to carry down to the car, plus the live animals, and our book bags, and then we can be on our way. It\u0026rsquo;ll be a difficult trip, the U-Haul limits the speed a lot, and yeah. But we got everything packed up, amazingly enough.\nBut I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;re more interested in how my semester from hell ended. Right. Well it did. I think I did well in my classes, perhaps not as well as I would have liked to, but I held down 23 credit hours, all of which were really upper level so I\u0026rsquo;m happy. I think I had/have something of a chance at As in 10 hours, A- in 8 hours, and really anyone\u0026rsquo;s guess is as good as mine in the last four hours (1 class) It can\u0026rsquo;t possibly be less than a B-, and probably won\u0026rsquo;t be better than an B+, but I learned a hell of a lot in that class, even if I\u0026rsquo;m still not sure I \u0026ldquo;get it.","title":"2 Down, 4 to Go"},{"content":"Ok, So I\u0026rsquo;ve been a really bad TealArtist this semester. I\u0026rsquo;m breaking my internal policy of posting my kitty of articles in order that I write them, to bring you this one.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been one hell of a semester, which I hope to never really have to endure something like this again. I\u0026rsquo;m taking a, as one of my friends termed it, a royal ass-load of classes. All of which I enjoy a bunch, but it means I have to cut some things out. So I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a fraction of what I did last semester, and as you all notice, I\u0026rsquo;m sure, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing for you all. I assure you I\u0026rsquo;ll be back in full force as soon as this blasted period of my life is over.\nThe nice thing is that I can take 4 classes from this point forward, every semester, and graduate in Spring 2007. If I wanted to, as long as I take two psych classes and two non-psych classes, I get to do whatever I want, basically. The downside, is I have to start thinking about grad school stuff sooner than I\u0026rsquo;d want.\nJust for a snapshot of my life right now, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be writing in a few moments, the lit review for a special research project for a psych professor. It\u0026rsquo;s been a great opportunity, and if it gets published it\u0026rsquo;ll probably help me get into grad school a lot (the chances of which I think are pretty likely). At the moment it\u0026rsquo;s hell, and there are a million and one nasty things I could say about this particular process, most of them related to my utter lack of engagement with the subject matter.\nThere aren\u0026rsquo;t classes tomorrow, because it\u0026rsquo;s spring day, which is a great deal of fun, but I doubt that the weather will hold up, so I\u0026rsquo;ll be working a lot. On the upside, I don\u0026rsquo;t have that much more to do before the end of the year. And while I\u0026rsquo;m so ready for this semester to be over, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how ready I am to go home. I like it here, and the weather is finally nice.\nBah. I love rambling Blog Entries. One of these days I\u0026rsquo;m going to actually start writing again, by not writing actively, I kind of feel like I\u0026rsquo;m being a slacker. I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all around sometime\u0026hellip;\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/spring-semester/","summary":"Ok, So I\u0026rsquo;ve been a really bad TealArtist this semester. I\u0026rsquo;m breaking my internal policy of posting my kitty of articles in order that I write them, to bring you this one.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been one hell of a semester, which I hope to never really have to endure something like this again. I\u0026rsquo;m taking a, as one of my friends termed it, a royal ass-load of classes. All of which I enjoy a bunch, but it means I have to cut some things out. So I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting a fraction of what I did last semester, and as you all notice, I\u0026rsquo;m sure, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been writing for you all. I assure you I\u0026rsquo;ll be back in full force as soon as this blasted period of my life is over.\nThe nice thing is that I can take 4 classes from this point forward, every semester, and graduate in Spring 2007.","title":"Spring Semester"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;Is Psychology and art or a science,\u0026rdquo; the professor asked.\nWe all knew the answer he was looking for. No one wanted to say it.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s both it\u0026rsquo;s neither,\u0026rdquo; a girl said quickly. \u0026ldquo;You can tell I\u0026rsquo;m not a psych major,\u0026rdquo; she followed quickly. It\u0026rsquo;s what I wanted to say, but given that I don\u0026rsquo;t know this professor, and right now I\u0026rsquo;m hoping that he ends up being my advisor, and I\u0026rsquo;m a little intimidated by his beginning of class talk, I keep my mouth shut. For once.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s a science,\u0026rdquo; some brown-noser says sitting at the front of the class.\n\u0026ldquo;Yes!\u0026rdquo; The professors excitement is radiant.\nNot another one. I\u0026rsquo;m really irritated by this physics-envy that psychologists get. It\u0026rsquo;s like they\u0026rsquo;re completely oblivious. Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the first time. Turns me off in a big way. I like the discipline, and I have great hopes for what it can illuminate, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s all the Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies going to my head.\n\u0026ldquo;What we need is to develop a different epistemological system that values non scientifically obtained knowledge.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re such a women\u0026rsquo;s studies major.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I think what I don\u0026rsquo;t like about psychology is that it\u0026rsquo;s approached from an empirical method, rather than a theoretically. I\u0026rsquo;m a theory junkie. There\u0026rsquo;s a problem here.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What! Psychology is all theory. Freud, I mean hello!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Right, but no one like Freud any more. And with reason.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Good point I suppose.\u0026rdquo; She paused for a long moment. \u0026ldquo;So there\u0026rsquo;s no theory?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Well, I mean there\u0026rsquo;s theory in everything, but it\u0026rsquo;s empirically constructed, not discursively.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Bull, it\u0026rsquo;s always discursively constructed.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;True. Well you and I know this, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t help things if they\u0026rsquo;re not taught this way. Ultimately it will be fine, but for now I have to sit through the damn classes.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;ll do it. Just fine.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Of course, doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean I can\u0026rsquo;t enjoy a little misery now and then.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You\u0026rsquo;re a strange one, Sam.\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/take-the-suck-out/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;Is Psychology and art or a science,\u0026rdquo; the professor asked.\nWe all knew the answer he was looking for. No one wanted to say it.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s both it\u0026rsquo;s neither,\u0026rdquo; a girl said quickly. \u0026ldquo;You can tell I\u0026rsquo;m not a psych major,\u0026rdquo; she followed quickly. It\u0026rsquo;s what I wanted to say, but given that I don\u0026rsquo;t know this professor, and right now I\u0026rsquo;m hoping that he ends up being my advisor, and I\u0026rsquo;m a little intimidated by his beginning of class talk, I keep my mouth shut. For once.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s a science,\u0026rdquo; some brown-noser says sitting at the front of the class.\n\u0026ldquo;Yes!\u0026rdquo; The professors excitement is radiant.\nNot another one. I\u0026rsquo;m really irritated by this physics-envy that psychologists get. It\u0026rsquo;s like they\u0026rsquo;re completely oblivious. Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the first time. Turns me off in a big way. I like the discipline, and I have great hopes for what it can illuminate, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s all the Women\u0026rsquo;s Studies going to my head.","title":"Take the Suck Out"},{"content":"A couple years ago I spent my winter break writing, almost obsessively. I think I got 25,000 words on The Book done in two weeks. Last year I made a sweater or two. This winter break, in comparison, I\u0026rsquo;ve made a pair of socks, five (or six or seven) hats, a tote bag, did some finishing work on a sweater, and hopefully before the end of it, I\u0026rsquo;ll have finished another sweater (sleeves and some trim left).\nOh how the times they change.\nOver the past two years, knitting has surpassed writing as my primary avocation. I think this is in part due to the fact that knitting engages a complete different part of my brain than my \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; (psychology, women\u0026rsquo;s/gender/queer studies), where as writing (and the reading that one has to do in order to write) are what I do \u0026ldquo;in the real world.\u0026rdquo; Knitting is escape, and writing became too much work. So I stopped, or more appropriately switched.\nAlso, I think I hit a brick wall with writing. I got to a point where I needed to publish more of my work, and publish it in respectable places. Print. Publications people have heard of. Money was an issue to. I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to throw my work into a black hole, and I felt (and still feel) that money signifies something important. If a publisher can afford to pay you, even a pittance, it means that s/he is making a profit on the publication, which means that people are reading it, and publishing (and money) was a way to ensure that my work was being read.\nIn order to write at this level, one has to be (I think) a little better than I was or perhaps am. One also has to be really persistent, and dedicate a sizeable percentage of one\u0026rsquo;s time to pitching what you think are really great ideas (that you\u0026rsquo;ve put a lot of energy into) to editors who aren\u0026rsquo;t going to accept your idea. As a \u0026ldquo;Writer\u0026rdquo; you have to spend so much time doing things other than writing that, when it comes time to actually write you, or I, don\u0026rsquo;t really have the energy and/or will to write.\nAnd now, as my writing interests are starting to turn in academic directions, I find that even though my transcript says I\u0026rsquo;m a second semester sophomore, I have a long way to go before I think I\u0026rsquo;ll feel comfortable contributing to the discourse.\nI think another issue that I faced, was that I\u0026rsquo;m contrary by nature. Like when I was a mobile tech guru, I was interested in using the gadgets as text delivery systems, and as ways to write portably, while everyone else was interested in vertical market solutions, graphics processing, widget type applications, and the like. As a knitter, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in a completely different different type of garment construction, style, and fiber content, than just about every designer. As a women\u0026rsquo;s studies major, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in men and male relationships. As a science fiction writer, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in people, and politics not technology and science. As a queer/gender theory-person, I\u0026rsquo;m interested in gasp male (sexual) identities, and not (particularly) in the milieux of trans issues. As a psychologist, I reject the way psychologists construct binary gender, and treat the discipline as an absolute and concrete scientific study.\nYou call it a niche, I call it being misunderstood and unpublishable. Having said that, I do recognize that being \u0026ldquo;contrary\u0026rdquo; will make me different and particularly define my work. I suppose different is preferable to being the same, as long as I can manage to not piss everyone off and find publishers who will take my work.\nHaving said that, I\u0026rsquo;d really like to start writing again. I should try and write fiction again, because I\u0026rsquo;m no poet (despite the fact that the only good pieces of creative writing I have at the moment are a series of poems I wrote last year). The problem with this is that I\u0026rsquo;ve never been good with short stories mostly because I\u0026rsquo;ve never been one to read them, and I really don\u0026rsquo;t have an idea of how to go about writing fiction that isn\u0026rsquo;t science fiction. But how different can regular fiction be from science fiction?\nFamous Last Words.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/some-winter-breaks/","summary":"A couple years ago I spent my winter break writing, almost obsessively. I think I got 25,000 words on The Book done in two weeks. Last year I made a sweater or two. This winter break, in comparison, I\u0026rsquo;ve made a pair of socks, five (or six or seven) hats, a tote bag, did some finishing work on a sweater, and hopefully before the end of it, I\u0026rsquo;ll have finished another sweater (sleeves and some trim left).\nOh how the times they change.\nOver the past two years, knitting has surpassed writing as my primary avocation. I think this is in part due to the fact that knitting engages a complete different part of my brain than my \u0026ldquo;work\u0026rdquo; (psychology, women\u0026rsquo;s/gender/queer studies), where as writing (and the reading that one has to do in order to write) are what I do \u0026ldquo;in the real world.\u0026rdquo; Knitting is escape, and writing became too much work.","title":"Some Winter Breaks"},{"content":"The Search for Love in Manhattan\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know but, I totally feel like this guy is among the worlds greatest bloggers. Funny, briliant, clever, and campy.\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t need a bloggie for that, folks.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-search-for-love-in-manhattan-2/","summary":"The Search for Love in Manhattan\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know but, I totally feel like this guy is among the worlds greatest bloggers. Funny, briliant, clever, and campy.\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t need a bloggie for that, folks.","title":"The Search for Love in Manhattan"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m going to offer the readers of my site the benefit of the doubt and assume that you all probably know that sex and gender are very different concepts, and this entry is just a short little thing that will outline why it\u0026rsquo;s probably a good idea to not use these interchangeably.\nSex refers to any of the characteristics, roles, and identities related to bodily function; while, gender refers to the sociologically and psychologically constructed roles and identities associated with masculinity and femininity. Gender is dependent on culture.\nBoth sex an gender are incredibly complex constructions, that need not be simplified to be understood. There are as many sexes and genders as there are individuals on this planet. And yes, this goes all the way back to biology. There are a multitude of biological sexes.\nNot the same thing. Neither are binary. Not something you can easily quantify. I realize that the preceding paragraph makes forming a methodological approach very difficult. I\u0026rsquo;m still looking for answers to this question. I do know that the dualistic way that all of psychology articles I\u0026rsquo;m reading this week don\u0026rsquo;t approach this issue from the right place.\nYou may ask: \u0026ldquo;Aren\u0026rsquo;t blogs supposed to be an account of one\u0026rsquo;s lives, thoughts, and reactions to the world as they happen?\u0026rdquo; (more or less, accounting for a reasonable publishing delay). The answer is yes.\nSo, I bet you all are like, wow, what the hell does this guy do in his free time. Doesn\u0026rsquo;t he have a life that\u0026rsquo;s worth talking about. He\u0026rsquo;s 18, almost done with his first semester of college, at a wacky liberal arts school, and all he writes about are approaches to talking about gender and other wacked things.\nWell, honest to god, this is what\u0026rsquo;s running through my head a lot.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gender-and-sex-are-different-things/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m going to offer the readers of my site the benefit of the doubt and assume that you all probably know that sex and gender are very different concepts, and this entry is just a short little thing that will outline why it\u0026rsquo;s probably a good idea to not use these interchangeably.\nSex refers to any of the characteristics, roles, and identities related to bodily function; while, gender refers to the sociologically and psychologically constructed roles and identities associated with masculinity and femininity. Gender is dependent on culture.\nBoth sex an gender are incredibly complex constructions, that need not be simplified to be understood. There are as many sexes and genders as there are individuals on this planet. And yes, this goes all the way back to biology. There are a multitude of biological sexes.\nNot the same thing. Neither are binary. Not something you can easily quantify. I realize that the preceding paragraph makes forming a methodological approach very difficult.","title":"Gender and Sex *are* different things"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another one of my posting backlogs. At this rate I\u0026rsquo;ll run through the stash in no time, and I\u0026rsquo;ll have togasp* write again. Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the worst thing in the world. Anyway, enjoy!*\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a little but of a knitting commentary. I finished this sweater that turned out really awesome. The body is mostly black, with some gray on the yoke and the top of the sleeves, and the sleeves, and top of the shoulders are this ecru color I call sheep. It has steaks and this chest cut which is really nice. It\u0026rsquo;s all wool. I blocked it out well but I think I need to block it again, because it grew so much during the blocking and I want it to shrink up a little. It was a weird blocking experience.\nI would totally write and post the pattern here, but I think I \u0026rsquo;m going to bum a digital camera off of someone and write up a pattern for knitty, it\u0026rsquo;ll be good. In the mean time I\u0026rsquo;m maing another version of this sweater with a 50/50 hemp/wool blend that I had. It\u0026rsquo;s that light worsted/heavy DK weight yarn that I more or less have to knit at 5 stitches to the inch. I had been thinking about making a 5x3 ribbed sweater but the gauge wasn‚Äôt going to work out, and I must say that I really like making sweaters like these, and I really like wearing them as well.\nI\u0026rsquo;m still really turned off of shawls. I\u0026rsquo;m also way over those fashion scarves that are really fuzzy. I have so much good shawl yarn, so I\u0026rsquo;m a little disappointed with not having any interest in doing shawl knitting, but that\u0026rsquo;s ok. I\u0026rsquo;m good with that.\nI have a paper/presentation about knitting as feminist activism, which is going to be fun to do, I just have to sit down for a few hours and write that up.\nMany knitters I communicate with are rushing to get their Christmas knitting done. I\u0026rsquo;m not down with the idea of knitting a slew of quick gifts. I mean on the one hand I like the idea of making versus buying gifts, but the very uniform frilly scarves, I tend to think are more about the object and less about the act of knitting. But that\u0026rsquo;s just me. I made my self two filly scarves, and I\u0026rsquo;m done with that now. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;m avoiding other things with this post now, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to stop and move on to more worthwhile tasks. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/working-report-end-of-the-semester-knitting/","summary":"Here\u0026rsquo;s another one of my posting backlogs. At this rate I\u0026rsquo;ll run through the stash in no time, and I\u0026rsquo;ll have togasp* write again. Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be the worst thing in the world. Anyway, enjoy!*\nHere\u0026rsquo;s a little but of a knitting commentary. I finished this sweater that turned out really awesome. The body is mostly black, with some gray on the yoke and the top of the sleeves, and the sleeves, and top of the shoulders are this ecru color I call sheep. It has steaks and this chest cut which is really nice. It\u0026rsquo;s all wool. I blocked it out well but I think I need to block it again, because it grew so much during the blocking and I want it to shrink up a little. It was a weird blocking experience.\nI would totally write and post the pattern here, but I think I \u0026rsquo;m going to bum a digital camera off of someone and write up a pattern for knitty, it\u0026rsquo;ll be good.","title":"Working Report: End of the Semester Knitting"},{"content":"A few days ago, someone asked me, \u0026ldquo;what do you study in women\u0026rsquo;s and gender studies classes?\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting question for me. I mean I could have just said, \u0026ldquo;how patriarchy and systems of oppression oppress people,\u0026rdquo; (or some variant) but that makes it all about oppression and victimization, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s unproductive and not helpful.\nSo I said, \u0026ldquo;gender studies is about locating our thoughts about the roles associated with gender and sex in a historical and cultural context.\u0026rdquo; I really like this definition. I\u0026rsquo;d also add other contexts now, like literary, and psychological, but in any case, I think that sums it up pretty well.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve said that I want to write about WWOTB for a while, and I guess the above is as good of an introduction as any. I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking to people, both here at Beloit, and online through my vast network of people and I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a few things, and then want to make a few things clear.\nFirst of all I don\u0026rsquo;t think anything has changed since I did CollectiveArts. The kinds of response that I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten this time around have materialized (or not) in the same way that they did the last time around. Only here, I\u0026rsquo;m not looking for a (semi) professional contributor base, which thankfully nixes the money question (good), but I still haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten any actual writing turned in yet (bad.) Having said that, my experiences in approaching people and asking them for contributions have given me a lot of information. Some are interesting simply for what they are and others are interesting in an affirming way. A lot of guys are like, \u0026ldquo;Wow, that\u0026rsquo;s really awesome I wish I had found something like that.\u0026rdquo;\nI had a discussion with my feminisms professor today, and I think I want to start calling it the Young Gay Identity Project, rather than the Affinity Story project. Because\u0026hellip; I think that captures what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do better. I want to put together a collection of stories by young gay-identified men-identified folks that creates a fairly realistic portrait of this identity. I want to reach two groups of people with this collection: young gay men who aren\u0026rsquo;t out, or don\u0026rsquo;t know any or many other gay men and I want these boys and men to know that there are others like them out there, also I want everyone else to read the book and to find that young guys can and are gay, that the struggle of young gay men is not trivial, but also not the only struggle that young gay men think about, that young gay men can be pro-sex without being pegged (oy) as over-sexed/slutty, and that there\u0026rsquo;s more to the experience than the coming out narrative.\nSo there. If anyone out there wants to contribute contact me. Otherwise stay tuned for more developments. The current status is that I\u0026rsquo;m waiting for a critical mass of submissions, which will go through a fast revision cycle, and then I\u0026rsquo;ll perfect my little packet, and mail it out to publishers.\nCheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why/","summary":"A few days ago, someone asked me, \u0026ldquo;what do you study in women\u0026rsquo;s and gender studies classes?\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting question for me. I mean I could have just said, \u0026ldquo;how patriarchy and systems of oppression oppress people,\u0026rdquo; (or some variant) but that makes it all about oppression and victimization, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s unproductive and not helpful.\nSo I said, \u0026ldquo;gender studies is about locating our thoughts about the roles associated with gender and sex in a historical and cultural context.\u0026rdquo; I really like this definition. I\u0026rsquo;d also add other contexts now, like literary, and psychological, but in any case, I think that sums it up pretty well.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve said that I want to write about WWOTB for a while, and I guess the above is as good of an introduction as any. I\u0026rsquo;ve been talking to people, both here at Beloit, and online through my vast network of people and I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a few things, and then want to make a few things clear.","title":"Why."},{"content":"I got this yarn for some awesome scarves, that I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted for a long time. It\u0026rsquo;s kind of a pain to knit with (it\u0026rsquo;s over-spun and it\u0026rsquo;s not set, so I have to take out some part of the twist every two or three rows.) But they\u0026rsquo;re 13 stitches across and look really awesome. One\u0026rsquo;s a gift, for sure, the other\u0026rsquo;s I think I can totally sell for fifty bucks, which will cover the expenses, and allow me to (a) recoup losses and not feel guilty, (b) buy yarn enough for a sweater and another scarf, or (c) buy enough for three or four more scarves.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been making a sweater with this hemp and wool blend, and I\u0026rsquo;m at the underarm point, and I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I\u0026rsquo;m probably going to run out of yarn, if I get the body and the sleeves done, which I kind of doubt at this point, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to have enough for the trim I\u0026rsquo;m fairly convinced. sigh I\u0026rsquo;m hoping to finish the body this week (shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be hard, the yoke always goes fast, in part because I\u0026rsquo;m going to be decreasing like mad for the neck and chest cut, and there are a lot of mile markers, as opposed to the body which is 17 inches of Kansas (to blend metaphors). Safe to say, it\u0026rsquo;s too close for comfort.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m trudging along on this one. My semester is wrapping up, but I have been doing a fair amount of TealArt writing (as a way of beating back a icky writer\u0026rsquo;s block.) I haven\u0026rsquo;t been posting because we\u0026rsquo;re don\u0026rsquo;t a slow server move which I have a distinct feeling is going to end sometime around christmas day. (I\u0026rsquo;m going to give my gifts out on the solstice, or as I finish making them.) Anyway. There\u0026rsquo;s more to come.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/yarn-tribulations/","summary":"I got this yarn for some awesome scarves, that I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted for a long time. It\u0026rsquo;s kind of a pain to knit with (it\u0026rsquo;s over-spun and it\u0026rsquo;s not set, so I have to take out some part of the twist every two or three rows.) But they\u0026rsquo;re 13 stitches across and look really awesome. One\u0026rsquo;s a gift, for sure, the other\u0026rsquo;s I think I can totally sell for fifty bucks, which will cover the expenses, and allow me to (a) recoup losses and not feel guilty, (b) buy yarn enough for a sweater and another scarf, or (c) buy enough for three or four more scarves.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been making a sweater with this hemp and wool blend, and I\u0026rsquo;m at the underarm point, and I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that I\u0026rsquo;m probably going to run out of yarn, if I get the body and the sleeves done, which I kind of doubt at this point, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to have enough for the trim I\u0026rsquo;m fairly convinced.","title":"Yarn Tribulations"},{"content":"Love it is an awful thing and beauty is a blossom, and if you want your finger bit, just poke it at a possum.\nGlory to the meetinghouse, and glory to the stable, and glory to the little girl, the one that they call Mabel.\nThe above are lines from a Old Time-ish song/tune that I\u0026rsquo;m generally fond of. If you were wondering, but you probably won\u0026rsquo;t.\nJust for the purpose of meta-talk, I\u0026rsquo;d like to note for the record that I always write blog entries in an MS Word document, and then copy and paste them into the blog script. This is because I fear for posts that don\u0026rsquo;t have the benefit of my spell check, and because I like to write blog entries in a few sessions. Perhaps this is part of the reason why I don\u0026rsquo;t write that much: because I add another step. One of these days I\u0026rsquo;m going to be really daring and post without doing the word file step.\nFor those of you who are worrying about the progress of the stalled redesign, I\u0026rsquo;ve got a file which should help a lot from a dear friend, actually I don\u0026rsquo;t think he\u0026rsquo;s a dear friend, but he\u0026rsquo;s a swell guy (Matt). Soon, I promise.\nBecause this ended up as a really long post, which is really more of archival interest and because of the new bloging program that I\u0026rsquo;m using, I\u0026rsquo;m going to use an extended entry text cut thing. Anyway if you click on the (more) link that should follow this paragraph (or go to the permalink) then you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to read the rest of this post, which talks about computers and gear lust/purchasing plans, my housing situation for next semester, and knitting updates.)\nIn a dorky kind of way here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about technology at the moment. Anna (my ibook, as in Anna Madrigal), needs more ram which I\u0026rsquo;ll probably order sooner rather than later which is totally ok, because I\u0026rsquo;ve been procrastinating it too long, and Anna deserves it. Also, I\u0026rsquo;m planning to get some external storage, because my fast growing Music collection is stretching the ends of my hard drive, and there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of stuff that I really don\u0026rsquo;t need to carry around with me day in and day out. Given my rooming situation next semester (which I\u0026rsquo;ll get to in a moment,) I\u0026rsquo;ll probably buy myself a wireless access point as a Christmas gift (ie have it shipped to home, rather than Beloit). After that, I might get a wireless keyboard if I see a really good deal one, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to bring my old monitor to Beloit next year (which doesn\u0026rsquo;t really relate, except I thought of that and I knew/know that there\u0026rsquo;s something else I wanted to talk about in this section, but that wasn\u0026rsquo;t it.) Oh, right. iPod, I\u0026rsquo;ve been using a borrowed iPod for the past couple of months, and I really really like it, so I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to have one at some point. Maybe that\u0026rsquo;s what I ask people for Christmas. Hmm. (that was my mother\u0026rsquo;s idea, and to be truthful it‚Äôs a wonderful gift idea, because it\u0026rsquo;s something I\u0026rsquo;d totally never buy for myself, but it\u0026rsquo;s an amenity and I feel terribly guilty and non-practical asking for that.) On a connected but dissimilar point, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to need to reclaim my speakers from my father at semester.\nAnyway, that housing situation.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m going to move next semester pending my acceptance (which I think at this point is fairly certain) at the Women\u0026rsquo;s Centre (official spelling of both words is different, but no matter). It\u0026rsquo;ll mean I have a roommate, which I\u0026rsquo;ve totally made peace with given that said double might be three times as big as my current room (a single). It\u0026rsquo;ll be cool. There was a meeting today, where the most senior house member, was like \u0026ldquo;we were thinking of changing the name of the club to be more inclusive, and we think that having guys in the house might add a useful new dimension to the club,\u0026rdquo; and we were like, \u0026ldquo;we agree with the second part, but it\u0026rsquo;s totally cool to keep the name as it is.\u0026rdquo; My first brilliant idea for a WC meeting will be titled. \u0026ldquo;Feminism is about Change, the WC is about Feminism. Come to the WC to talk about change.\u0026rdquo; I had communication with a professor whose class I really want to take, and he didn\u0026rsquo;t tell me he\u0026rsquo;d let me in, and I really want to take that class. Eek I really hope I get into the class. I\u0026rsquo;ll know after thanksgiving, maybe earlier.\nI ran out of yarn on the sweater I\u0026rsquo;ve been knitting. Luckily the dye lots are really too close for words (more so than usual,) and there\u0026rsquo;s a really good chance that I\u0026rsquo;ll over dye it in the end anyway. It\u0026rsquo;s really awesome, and I\u0026rsquo;m so close to finishing. In the interim I\u0026rsquo;m knitting on the endless shawl. There\u0026rsquo;s another sweater that I\u0026rsquo;m going to start knitting. I ribbed pullover, using some hemp wool. It\u0026rsquo;s probably a longer project, maybe something like\u0026hellip; two or three weeks.\nIn addition to that, I have two sweaters worth of yarn in my stash. I have a lot of tapestry yarn that I\u0026rsquo;m going to make into a very simple (oversized) zippered cardigan/coat with a couple of cables. I had planned to make a garter stitch coat with it, but I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that I really hate garter stitch, enough to not want to do that project. The other yarn is destined to be a garter stitch cabled pullover of my own design. I started to do a swatch, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t like it, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to try again, a little closer to when I\u0026rsquo;m going to make it.\nSometime fairly soon, I\u0026rsquo;m going to buy wool to do an awesome color work cardigan/jacket, which I\u0026rsquo;ll do after I do the other two projects mentioned above. There\u0026rsquo;s also 19 pounds of yarn with my name on it, which will probably turn into a sweater or 15. Some of it will go into my weaving class (more in a moment) and some of it will turn into sweaters. Then I\u0026rsquo;ll get to do St. Moritz maybe.\nWeaving class. I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a weaving class next semester, which I think will be a lot of fun, in part because it\u0026rsquo;s weaving, and in part because there are going to be a bunch of other awesome people in the class. I learned today that we have to buy some of our own yarn, but I don\u0026rsquo;t see this as a really big problem, because I already have a lot of skills in getting cool yarn for not much, and because I have a lot of yarn, including thousands of yards of cotton lace yarn that I\u0026rsquo;d really like to use in some way that isn\u0026rsquo;t lace knitting. Also because I have stores and skills of yarn obtaining, I might be deal yarn and be able to reinvest. Muwahahaha.\nOk, so that\u0026rsquo;s the short and (mostly) long of it. I hope to be able to check in more in the coming days/weeks. There are some developments in the realm of WWOTB, which I\u0026rsquo;d like to document in an open forum, but I think that needs more a serious and dedicated post, so I\u0026rsquo;ll wait on that for later in the week.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/just-poke-it-at-a-possum/","summary":"Love it is an awful thing and beauty is a blossom, and if you want your finger bit, just poke it at a possum.\nGlory to the meetinghouse, and glory to the stable, and glory to the little girl, the one that they call Mabel.\nThe above are lines from a Old Time-ish song/tune that I\u0026rsquo;m generally fond of. If you were wondering, but you probably won\u0026rsquo;t.\nJust for the purpose of meta-talk, I\u0026rsquo;d like to note for the record that I always write blog entries in an MS Word document, and then copy and paste them into the blog script. This is because I fear for posts that don\u0026rsquo;t have the benefit of my spell check, and because I like to write blog entries in a few sessions. Perhaps this is part of the reason why I don\u0026rsquo;t write that much: because I add another step. One of these days I\u0026rsquo;m going to be really daring and post without doing the word file step.","title":"Just Poke it at a Possum"},{"content":"I think its fair to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in a knitting funk of late. I\u0026rsquo;ve made a few hats, which have been nice to, but not terribly fulfilling, given that I have all the hats I could possibly want, and while I do plan to give a few away, I need a \u0026ldquo;finished hat\u0026rdquo; box (like my mom\u0026rsquo;s sock box) where you let finished projects sit for a while, so you can let go and give them away. This is ironic, given that one of the things I want to make (that I don\u0026rsquo;t currently have yarn for) is a sweater for someone else, but that\u0026rsquo;s different, because you\u0026rsquo;re making it specifically for someone else, in a style/fiber that you don\u0026rsquo;t particularly like (or feel suited to you).\nNo matter, so I made a few hats, started a 52 stitch garter stitch rectangle (why oh why?), knitted some more on the plain shawl that will never end, and just yesterday I started another sweater. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a wool drop-shoulder pull over, with a cut neck a high collar. As is usual I\u0026rsquo;m debating how exactly to execute the neck. Steek for sure, clasps (rather than a zipper), and I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to put 1 inch of ribbing (1x1; to match the other edges) on either side of the cut steek. The other option is to put like 2 garter ridges (much narrower) on either side, which is about half as wide, and could be adapted to accommodate a zipper if I changed my mind. The one problem is that, without a zipper, the garter ridges probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t counteract the inherent curl of the steek, and would therefore look crappy.\nThe wool I\u0026rsquo;m using is a grab bag of worsted weight wool, gathered from various sources. The bottom is this black yarn. From the vintage when Red Heart still made 100% virgin wool, obtained at a rummage sale, and from the same vintage, some more vintage yarn: Sears brand medium-light grey. Finally, I have some left over sheep colored fisherman\u0026rsquo;s wool (Lion Brand) this stuff is still available so if I run out and need to augment my supply, it\u0026rsquo;d be eight bucks at just about any craft store. I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to get a trip through my blue dye pot. I have a lot of stuff that\u0026rsquo;s going to get died blue: two hats, a shawl, this sweater, plus the never-ending shawl.\nAfter this sweater, I have yarn enough for two more sweaters: an aran and plain (I think) pullover of some fun design, and countless shawls. I\u0026rsquo;m sort of turned off of shawls for a while. I think I thought that I could knit one shawl for every sweater I made, but I think I need to institute a 2 for 1 policy, other wise, the shawls just wont work out.\nI have two knitting lusts at the moment. The first is to knit the Rams Horn cardigan from Meg Swanson\u0026rsquo;s Knitting. I might get some sort of plain worsted wool, but I think I should just come to terms with the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s going to be done in Icelandic Wool. It\u0026rsquo;s not that expensive, and I think my knitting deserves the right kind of yarn. This is an old crush, but I\u0026rsquo;ve done some color stranding work, just for grins, and I\u0026rsquo;m really pleased with it (and my abilities) so I have a renewed interest.\nThe second crush is on This Sweater. I\u0026rsquo;d want to do it with the cut neck, probably in the blue (second link) colorway. Melt. On the up side their so generously sized, that I could make the extra small and still have like eight inches of ease. The kits are ungodly expensive. There\u0026rsquo;s no other way to put it. Mind you, if you buy a Dale sweater from their US distributor, it\u0026rsquo;ll cost 3 times the cost of a kit. I\u0026rsquo;m going to see how long this crush lasts, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;ll take very much to keep me from buying the kit (because of the price), but at some point I\u0026rsquo;ll probably break down and get it as a reward for something. Lets say, right here, if I live through next semester and more or less run out of yarn, and have some sort of summer income, and have the money, I\u0026rsquo;ll do it.\nOk, so there\u0026rsquo;s your knitting update for the week. I\u0026rsquo;ll catch you all soon. I\u0026rsquo;ll keep you posted on the developments of my sweater as they have a habit of progressing pretty fast.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/knitting-for-your-mood/","summary":"I think its fair to say that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in a knitting funk of late. I\u0026rsquo;ve made a few hats, which have been nice to, but not terribly fulfilling, given that I have all the hats I could possibly want, and while I do plan to give a few away, I need a \u0026ldquo;finished hat\u0026rdquo; box (like my mom\u0026rsquo;s sock box) where you let finished projects sit for a while, so you can let go and give them away. This is ironic, given that one of the things I want to make (that I don\u0026rsquo;t currently have yarn for) is a sweater for someone else, but that\u0026rsquo;s different, because you\u0026rsquo;re making it specifically for someone else, in a style/fiber that you don\u0026rsquo;t particularly like (or feel suited to you).\nNo matter, so I made a few hats, started a 52 stitch garter stitch rectangle (why oh why?), knitted some more on the plain shawl that will never end, and just yesterday I started another sweater.","title":"Knitting for Your Mood"},{"content":"In my feminisms class a few weeks ago we read an article by Chandra Talpade Mohanty concerning the ways that the western feminist discourse address and comments on the \u0026ldquo;third world.\u0026rdquo; Basically it commented on the Hegemony of western feminism as it determines who and what is oppressive for third world women, and thus constructs third world women, as uneducated, unaware, and ignorant of feminism. This is problematic and oppressive in of itself as western feminists use these perceptions as a way of reasserting imperialistic attitudes on the third world.\nConnected to Mohanty\u0026rsquo;s argument is a discussion of the veil as worn by Islamic women. Many western feminists view the veil as an oppressive tool. And there are Islamic feminists who want to wear the hijab, who feel victimized by those western women who wish to abolish the veiling customs.\nI went to a speech by one of classmates yesterday which talked about the hijab and other forms of female veiling in the Islamic world. The speaker made the point that the hijab represented tradition, faith, and invoked a kind of reverence that was very cultural. One of the audience members (from Cairo) who wore the hijab, said that her mother had gone back and forth on the veil and had worn it for a time, and then not worn it. While another audience member brought up the idea that there wasn\u0026rsquo;t always the choice to wear the veil, the argument that most women have some sort of choice in many Islamic countries was very present.\nWhich leaves me with an almost icky feeling in my stomach. I like cultural traditions, and the modernist in me has found a lot of really appealing things about Islam as I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a bit about it this semester (which I think is because it\u0026rsquo;s so jewish like). As a result of this, and just on general principal, I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to think that non-western feminists should be able to practice their cultures how ever they wish to. If this means wearing the hijab, so be it, and as westerners we need to listen to, and respect feminists from the so-called third world even if they wear a veil.\nAt the same time it\u0026rsquo;s an artifact of religion. R-E-L-I-G-I-O-N. I tend to think that the major so called monotheisms (Islam is way closer to monotheism than just about anything I can think of, but it\u0026rsquo;s of no matter). I\u0026rsquo;m wary of any religion that takes power away from people rather than empowers the people that follow it. Islam is all about submission to god. This isn\u0026rsquo;t an anti-Islam sentiment, it\u0026rsquo;s an unabashed anti-religion sentiment.\nOn a theoretical level I think the veil (as a product of Islam) should not be used as a method for liberation, at the same time on a practical level I can completely recognize the way in which a veil could be used as a way of maintaining a cultural identity. But I think this issue is complex and we can\u0026rsquo;t easily define in terms of a good bad dualism.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/western-feminism-and-non-western-lives/","summary":"In my feminisms class a few weeks ago we read an article by Chandra Talpade Mohanty concerning the ways that the western feminist discourse address and comments on the \u0026ldquo;third world.\u0026rdquo; Basically it commented on the Hegemony of western feminism as it determines who and what is oppressive for third world women, and thus constructs third world women, as uneducated, unaware, and ignorant of feminism. This is problematic and oppressive in of itself as western feminists use these perceptions as a way of reasserting imperialistic attitudes on the third world.\nConnected to Mohanty\u0026rsquo;s argument is a discussion of the veil as worn by Islamic women. Many western feminists view the veil as an oppressive tool. And there are Islamic feminists who want to wear the hijab, who feel victimized by those western women who wish to abolish the veiling customs.\nI went to a speech by one of classmates yesterday which talked about the hijab and other forms of female veiling in the Islamic world.","title":"Western Feminism and Non-Western Lives"},{"content":"Ok, so the TealArt, is if nothing else, functionally established with it\u0026rsquo;s new set up. In retrospect I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure what we accomplished in the long run, or in the short run. Everything works as it should or more or less as it did. The administrative components are perhaps a bit more efficient, the way the categories are organized are a bit more logical. I think it\u0026rsquo;ll also be easier to manage in the long run.\nThe one thing I\u0026rsquo;m a bit disappointed in Wordpress for is the fact that they\u0026rsquo;ve dumbed it down a lot. Used to be, that this program was efficient, feature filled and really customizable. Now, the scripts add a lot of formatting related code that you have no control over, unless you go in to hack the core of the application. This isn\u0026rsquo;t cool. I want my data to be present in a pure manner, and if I want to format it, well then I\u0026rsquo;ll add the formatting code myself. Their approach probably makes the vast majority of websites more functional, standards compliant, and easier to manage, but it also breaks the holy content/display divide that needs to be a defined as possible. But it works. We\u0026rsquo;re going to get trackbacks and ping backs to work, and I have an email out about how to integrate the links/quotes and other sites with the main log. But for now it\u0026rsquo;s good. There\u0026rsquo;s a little more work that I\u0026rsquo;ll get to in a couple of weeks.\nI need to do a little bit of this really analytical work every now and then to stay sane, the bad part is that it draws a lot of attention for the time that I\u0026rsquo;m enthralled. I\u0026rsquo;m free of it for now, but I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to it soon enough.\nMoving on.\nI think I have my schedule nailed out for next semester, I haven\u0026rsquo;t heard back from a couple of professors, and I think there are a couple of things that relate back to my 3 year plan that I want to have a little more nailed down, but I‚Äôm in a very good place I think. I\u0026rsquo;m going to take a natural history class (my last required science class) a weaving class, an upper level English/Gender studies class called (Writing Race and Sexuality), Statistics (for psych majors) and probably a Cross-Cultural Psychology class. It\u0026rsquo;ll be neat. Almost all of my transfer credit has come in, and I\u0026rsquo;m 3 hours away from sophmore standing (without the classes I\u0026rsquo;m taking now), and I should be able to make junior standing after next semester.\nThere aren\u0026rsquo;t classes today because of a really poorly organized symposium, which is a good break in the rhythm. The beginning of the week is always really killer, in one way or another. Either I\u0026rsquo;m insanely busy, or I\u0026rsquo;m insanely in a weird mood (this week), and usually by Wednesday everything irons itself out. It better.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to post this and go to lunch, in a moment, but before I go, let me leave you with this.\nEveryday I see a situation that I think would make an insanely good vignette, or I see someone who would make a perfect character, or I get some sort of story idea that would just be amazing if I remembered it and wrote it down. Usually I don\u0026rsquo;t have my ibook with me to record such things (or even an index card,) so usually I just forget them and complain about how I have so little to write about. Well, ok, I\u0026rsquo;m sitting here, watching a guy who just needs to be written about.\nHe\u0026rsquo;s tall--6'3\u0026quot; or something. He as this excruciatingly fashionable and suave air about him, except when he starts talking you kind of feel like he\u0026rsquo;s about 14. I think he went to an all boys boarding school, which could explain some of the social awkwardness. Right now he\u0026rsquo;s curled up into a little ball in a chair, across from me reading a book. We\u0026rsquo;re kind of sharing a foot rest, so I\u0026rsquo;m acutely aware of his nervous movements. He has an intermittent vacant look on his face, and the book he\u0026rsquo;s reading is a collection of case studies that I\u0026rsquo;m reading as well (for a different section of the class and clearly not at this very moment. Every now and then he looks at the door as if he\u0026rsquo;s waiting for someone and then looks out the window in this sort of dissocialize sort of way.\nBefore he left, he paged through the next four or five pages of the book, clearly checking to see how much he had left to read, and then left. He said good-bye to me, perhaps not as awkward as usual, but whatever. He\u0026rsquo;s a weird kid, interesting I suppose, how the presence he exudes by his appearance is so different from what he exudes both vocally and through his behavior.\nJust notes and observations; I\u0026rsquo;m sure there\u0026rsquo;ll be other notes like this one every now and then.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ups-and-downs/","summary":"Ok, so the TealArt, is if nothing else, functionally established with it\u0026rsquo;s new set up. In retrospect I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure what we accomplished in the long run, or in the short run. Everything works as it should or more or less as it did. The administrative components are perhaps a bit more efficient, the way the categories are organized are a bit more logical. I think it\u0026rsquo;ll also be easier to manage in the long run.\nThe one thing I\u0026rsquo;m a bit disappointed in Wordpress for is the fact that they\u0026rsquo;ve dumbed it down a lot. Used to be, that this program was efficient, feature filled and really customizable. Now, the scripts add a lot of formatting related code that you have no control over, unless you go in to hack the core of the application. This isn\u0026rsquo;t cool. I want my data to be present in a pure manner, and if I want to format it, well then I\u0026rsquo;ll add the formatting code myself.","title":"The General Up and Down"},{"content":"Ok, So even though I said we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t do it. Even though I really didn\u0026rsquo;t want to do it. I did. We\u0026rsquo;ve compleatly changed databases, and CMS. This time you probably can notice the difference.\nEventually you probably won\u0026rsquo;t notice, but for now things are a little ruff and most of the functions don\u0026rsquo;t work or have been disabled while we get the other pages to work.\nFor a number of weeks, all the old pages will work, and all your old links should continue to function. Eventually they won\u0026rsquo;t but for now I\u0026rsquo;m leaving things up.\nJust So you know.\nCheers, Sam\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/massice-update/","summary":"Ok, So even though I said we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t do it. Even though I really didn\u0026rsquo;t want to do it. I did. We\u0026rsquo;ve compleatly changed databases, and CMS. This time you probably can notice the difference.\nEventually you probably won\u0026rsquo;t notice, but for now things are a little ruff and most of the functions don\u0026rsquo;t work or have been disabled while we get the other pages to work.\nFor a number of weeks, all the old pages will work, and all your old links should continue to function. Eventually they won\u0026rsquo;t but for now I\u0026rsquo;m leaving things up.\nJust So you know.\nCheers, Sam","title":"Massive Update"},{"content":"Ok, so here\u0026rsquo;s an update on my reading: I\u0026rsquo;m half way through the third wave book, and I\u0026rsquo;m done with the first section of the second wave book. The third wave book is pretty cool, it addresses a little bit of everything, and as my last entry expresses I\u0026rsquo;m not wild about the \u0026ldquo;ideal\u0026rdquo; capitalist inspired globalism. But conflict makes the discourse interesting and it happens. Anyway, as I was reading about the independent media websites, which these folks are pressing as being majorly important to the development of the third wave.\nBig Yawn.\nBasically they described MetaFilter which is at least in my mind the original collaborative news type site. They\u0026rsquo;re really easy to run through open source software, and there\u0026rsquo;s some sort of filter/longer news related website for everything, and there are a lot of more centralized collaborative type news sites like QueerDay that fit some sort of independent media model. But then maybe that\u0026rsquo;s just me. I\u0026rsquo;m a friend of Noah Grey, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching this weblog thing for years, so the proliferation of independent media on the Internet is something I\u0026rsquo;ve watched intently.\nAnd while I like idealized anarchistic designed communities that end up working, I think there are ultimately problems with this. First of all, if there are thousands or even hundreds of sites built on a model (mefi, photologs, warblogs, punditblogs, etc.) then they loose their intensity, everyone sprouts the same shit, nothing new gets said, and I think ultimately the only people who read those types of blogs after a while are the other bloggers, under which conditions all you have a is a very disorganized and hard to follow discussion board which would probably be more efficiently accomplished with a single large discussion board. Or better yet, a Usenet group (but that\u0026rsquo;s just cause I\u0026rsquo;m a traditionalist).\nWhile the situations described in the essay weren\u0026rsquo;t extreme, I\u0026rsquo;ve seen extremes (in terms of over proliferation). In terms of photoblogs, in terms of war blogs. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t around like some people I correspond with, to remember when there were only a very few web logs, but I do remember when movements at the forefront of the blogging world, were just a small number of malcontents. So maybe I\u0026rsquo;m jaded. Ha. Ok, So I\u0026rsquo;m jaded. At the same time, I have the feeling that if everyone is writing the same things, it gets condensed and retold too much, and the jems are too far and inbetween, unless you\u0026rsquo;re a communications researcher, or interested in this kind of thing (which I\u0026rsquo;ll admit to be from time to time) there\u0026rsquo;s too much to absorb at a raw level and you don\u0026rsquo;t gain anything by reading the super-condensed versions.\nThat I think is enough for now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/independent-media-and-tealart/","summary":"Ok, so here\u0026rsquo;s an update on my reading: I\u0026rsquo;m half way through the third wave book, and I\u0026rsquo;m done with the first section of the second wave book. The third wave book is pretty cool, it addresses a little bit of everything, and as my last entry expresses I\u0026rsquo;m not wild about the \u0026ldquo;ideal\u0026rdquo; capitalist inspired globalism. But conflict makes the discourse interesting and it happens. Anyway, as I was reading about the independent media websites, which these folks are pressing as being majorly important to the development of the third wave.\nBig Yawn.\nBasically they described MetaFilter which is at least in my mind the original collaborative news type site. They\u0026rsquo;re really easy to run through open source software, and there\u0026rsquo;s some sort of filter/longer news related website for everything, and there are a lot of more centralized collaborative type news sites like QueerDay that fit some sort of independent media model.","title":"Independent Media and TealArt"},{"content":"After finishing the first Mars book, that I spoke about yesterday, I\u0026rsquo;ve ritually (twice makes a ritual) returned to my habit of coming to the basement of the library and sitting in front of the window until the battery on my iPod dies, whilst doing some of the reading for this week. This entry represents my study break. I\u0026rsquo;m almost sad that I finished Red Mars, which means I get to tear through two feminist volumes. Today (thus far) is this rather awesome collection of third wave essays for my feminisms class; I have another two thirds to go, and plenty of time to get it done. Then the second wave book, which is shorter, and for Sociology Class; thanks to modernism, it\u0026rsquo;ll inevitably easier to understand and absorb.\nI have a sneaking suspicion that the course guide will be out very soon. I\u0026rsquo;m keeping my fingers crossed, so I hope that it\u0026rsquo;ll all work out right; though I have a triage plans if things don\u0026rsquo;t work out well.\nAnyway, the topic at hand\u0026hellip;\nIn 1979 Andre Lorde wrote an essay called \u0026ldquo;The Master\u0026rsquo;s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master\u0026rsquo;s House.\u0026rdquo; Basically she says that if you want to affect change , you can\u0026rsquo;t work within the system. The tools of oppression cannot be reversed in order to create positive change. I don\u0026rsquo;t know, the title embodies the entire concept for me: feminists must approach the struggle for justice using fresh and unique approaches and methods to deconstruct patriarchy (and reconstruct social reality/theory). Lorde\u0026rsquo;s more specific point was one of solidarity (as I remember). That one could not advocate for female liberation without arguing for gay and lesbian liberation; that one could not argue for racial equality without arguing for class equality, and that racial and class equality is very much a part of female liberation and feminism. I\u0026rsquo;d also add that transgender rights are integral in this struggle.\nI would argue that we need, from the beginning, to integrate and resolve the contradictions between coalition/solidarity work and affinity work. But balance of disparate but necessarily interrelated struggles is often lost between the cracks, so I\u0026rsquo;ll forgive it in this case.\nHalf of the post subject addressed, here\u0026rsquo;s the meat of the issue.\nOne of the big issues of the third wave is the transnationalization of feminism. And everyone goes a long with this and keeps saying \u0026ldquo;what we need to work on is accepting all different kinds of feminisms and feminists. That feminism isn\u0026rsquo;t about abortion, equal rights, economic freedom, and political parity, but it\u0026rsquo;s about female empowerment in whatever issues are important to the individual feminist.\nOk, I can buy that. My issues aren\u0026rsquo;t your issues, and your issues aren\u0026rsquo;t mine; but because we\u0026rsquo;re both working for the same thing, we should support each other and collaborate when our issues overlap. It works, again it\u0026rsquo;s more affinity-esque and less coalition (but then I think affinity works better on a smaller scale, and the coalition works better for the large scale, but that\u0026rsquo;s me. My feminism isn\u0026rsquo;t your feminism; so maybe our struggle isn\u0026rsquo;t one.) This will take some time to make sure it jives, because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit completely, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s the issue at the moment.\nThe form that this decentralized transnational feminism takes most often is the proliferation of non-governmental organizations providing services to the third world. The movement of money across borders as part of a global economy.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know about you, but this seems a lot like the master\u0026rsquo;s tools. In this context NGOs are empowering women yes, but mainly in terms of a western definition of power, which brings them into the global economy. What next? Bam! Right back where we started, because the cottage industry is just a new kind of dependence.\nI think we need to find something a lot better before we dive head first into it.\nThere, one down. Next time (perhaps later tonight), as everyone is talking about the election that doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter, I might just write something up about independent media and TealArt, as some of the other essays sort of relate to this subject that I\u0026rsquo;ve been pondering forever it seems. Anyway, cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-masters-tools-and-the-third-wave/","summary":"After finishing the first Mars book, that I spoke about yesterday, I\u0026rsquo;ve ritually (twice makes a ritual) returned to my habit of coming to the basement of the library and sitting in front of the window until the battery on my iPod dies, whilst doing some of the reading for this week. This entry represents my study break. I\u0026rsquo;m almost sad that I finished Red Mars, which means I get to tear through two feminist volumes. Today (thus far) is this rather awesome collection of third wave essays for my feminisms class; I have another two thirds to go, and plenty of time to get it done. Then the second wave book, which is shorter, and for Sociology Class; thanks to modernism, it\u0026rsquo;ll inevitably easier to understand and absorb.\nI have a sneaking suspicion that the course guide will be out very soon. I\u0026rsquo;m keeping my fingers crossed, so I hope that it\u0026rsquo;ll all work out right; though I have a triage plans if things don\u0026rsquo;t work out well.","title":"The Masterís Tools and The Third Wave"},{"content":"For the first time in weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve spent several hours sitting in a chair reading. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a bunch of reading sitting over my head for almost three weeks, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to stay on top of it for a while, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to read very much for very long, without a looming deadline. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve found some sort of groove, which however dorky it may sound is really making me feel better about my self and my studies.\nIn other school related news, it looks like both biology classes are going to transfer in, which means that I have 6.75 units (27 hours) on the books, with another unit (4 hours) will transfer in as soon as I figure out how to get AP scores to transfer in. I think sophomore standing is 7 units and up. Junior standing is 14 units with the first tier of distribution requirements. I talked to the bio-professor who basically exempted me from every introductory biology class. There\u0026rsquo;s a \u0026ldquo;biological-issues\u0026rdquo; class that I want to get into, but it might be really hard to get into (because it\u0026rsquo;s a fluffy science for non-majors). Then again, having sophomore standing will give me a slightly higher priority. I\u0026rsquo;ve more or less decided on my classes for next semester. Introduction to Gender Studies; Psych 150 (Statistics); A feminist literature class (as a lit class); Some Biology Class that I haven\u0026rsquo;t chosen; and then either another psych class (Psychology of Women if it\u0026rsquo;s offered) or something like Weaving or something else.\nAnyway. I think I broke out of my mid-semester/lunar eclipse related funk/slump sometime in the last few hours and I\u0026rsquo;m running up the hill.\nAt the moment I\u0026rsquo;m sitting in the basement of the library, taking a study break after a few hours of reading, using a desktop Mac, which is really cool. I\u0026rsquo;m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I probably need to supplement my computing situation I need to talk to Chris (cough, cough) about duel monitor setups. Part of me wants to get a desktop that I can use as a file server, the pragmatist in me wants to get a fire wire hub and a few fire wire drive enclosures and drives. I also like having a keyboard with real keys. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll break down and get an apple Bluetooth keyboard. I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to end up milking the work-study system for all it\u0026rsquo;s worth (especially next semester), which isn\u0026rsquo;t hard, and should give me a useable, though not excessive expendable income for technology and yarn purchases.\nSpeaking of work-study, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be the \u0026ldquo;program assistant\u0026rdquo; for women\u0026rsquo;s and gender studies, or something. It\u0026rsquo;ll be great. I\u0026rsquo;m also going to a meeting for people who want to be R.As. The professor I\u0026rsquo;ll be working for is only here for a semester, so I don\u0026rsquo;t know if that job will still be there (or be as awesome/sweet) when Catharine comes back from sabbatical. I should be able to get an R.A. job next year, (I think the possibility of getting a slot next semester is unlikely at best, but this place is known for some crazy stuff.)\nFive hundred and some words into this entry and I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to not get to most of the subject matter that I set out. Lets try to change that.\nThe bulk of the reading I had to do for class tomorrow, is a huge chunk of a science fiction novel: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It\u0026rsquo;s an amazing pice, and it\u0026rsquo;s kind of reminded me how much I really like science fiction. Which is an interesting thing to say on this campus, where the largest independent student group is \u0026ldquo;BSFFA\u0026rdquo; (pronounced phonetically: \u0026ldquo;bisph-fa\u0026rdquo;) or the Beloit Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. BSSFA is slowly taking over a dorm; it\u0026rsquo;s kind of funny. Anyway.\nI like science fiction, I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered, and Robinson\u0026rsquo;s breed of the genre is just my kind of thing. My approach? Outlook? Perspective? Goal? Well whatever, I think that Robinson is trying to accomplish a lot of the same things in his science fiction that I would like to attempt. I think I almost want to work on Another Round again, which I haven\u0026rsquo;t had a desire to do in a while. I heard myself say, that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably finish the draft of that one before I graduate. In retrospect this is probably an unrealistic and foolish deadline. The only saving grace of this prediction is that I\u0026rsquo;m going to start a meditative writing circle, where me and a bunch of other folks, will converge on the spirituality room, talk for maybe ten minutes about what we\u0026rsquo;re planning on writing on, and then do a minute or two of breathing and relaxation and then we\u0026rsquo;ll write for an hour or two. I\u0026rsquo;ve done this kind of exercise a few times, and you\u0026rsquo;d be surprised how well it works.\nAs I think about it right now, it\u0026rsquo;d probably be best to avoid social theory. Maybe tomorrow.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-reading-science-fiction-social-theory-and-a-personal-update/","summary":"For the first time in weeks I\u0026rsquo;ve spent several hours sitting in a chair reading. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a bunch of reading sitting over my head for almost three weeks, and while I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to stay on top of it for a while, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to read very much for very long, without a looming deadline. Anyway, I\u0026rsquo;ve found some sort of groove, which however dorky it may sound is really making me feel better about my self and my studies.\nIn other school related news, it looks like both biology classes are going to transfer in, which means that I have 6.75 units (27 hours) on the books, with another unit (4 hours) will transfer in as soon as I figure out how to get AP scores to transfer in. I think sophomore standing is 7 units and up. Junior standing is 14 units with the first tier of distribution requirements.","title":"Of Reading, Science Fiction, Social Theory, and a Personal Update"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m going to try to write entire entries in one sitting, so they don\u0026rsquo;t loose coherence after the fourth paragraph. Wish me luck.\nWith WWOTB out of my court for a week or more, I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think of other \u0026ldquo;independent\u0026rdquo; (of school work) projects that I can do. Everyone I\u0026rsquo;ve talked to about WWOTB has been really excited and energetic about it, which I think, is pretty darn cool. A year ago I might have said, \u0026ldquo;now I just hope people follow through,\u0026rdquo; but after so many years of working for Free-ePress, CollectiveArts, and even to a more limited extent TealArt, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a few things about collaborative projects and how to organize myself to inspire (if that\u0026rsquo;s the right word, perhaps encourage) the response that I seek.\nBut I was thinking, of people I should ask here at Beloit, to contribute to this project. I sent the initial email out to one guy, and there are more than that, but I realized that there isn\u0026rsquo;t really any group or way for the gay men on this campus to connect and or relate with/to each other. The Alliance (GSA) type organization is mostly female. This is great, really, but it also doesn\u0026rsquo;t serve me terribly well (not that I\u0026rsquo;m going to stop going, I\u0026rsquo;m just saying). I think this feeling is similar to the one than Iris felt when she decided to write her book, rather than just rely on the original Ophelia Speaks collection.\nNow of course the logical conclusion to draw from this is that I need to start some sort of affinity group for gay men on this campus. Now I really don\u0026rsquo;t want to go through student activities cause that\u0026rsquo;s a pain in the ass, using The Alliance is probably a good idea, but I think that carries a lot of bad connotations on campus, and funding something myself isn\u0026rsquo;t really an option. Ok so having said that, my current thought it to have some sort of brunch group, but I kind of feel if I did anything to formal, all I\u0026rsquo;d get is a bunch of girls. Excluding people isn\u0026rsquo;t a good idea, but at the same time, if you include straight guys and girls of any persuasion, then you don\u0026rsquo;t really have an affinity group now do you?\nI think there are at least two major forces pulling on feminist and/or social justice movements. The first is clearly forming alliances between affected (or not affected) groups, under the idea that oppression is shared and that many hands make light work. Then there\u0026rsquo;s the idea that the affected group (women, lesbians, male homosexuals, people of color, people from the non-western world, immigrants, emigrants, transgender people, transsexual people, teenagers, teenage girls, workers, queer people, etc.) need to work together to empower themselves and build a nurturing community. Affinity builds the foundation for coalition work, and both are dependent on each other.\nSo this brings up another interesting theoretical concept for me. The struggle for change in order to be productive and successful needs to incorporate movement in at least two disparate aspects. These aspects are often contradictory, and by focusing on one the activist/theorist tends to forget the other one, which makes movements hard to manage. History is rife with examples of this.\nIn the example above, they are affinity and coalition. At Anytown, they are conscious and subconscious manifestations of oppression. In feminism/women\u0026rsquo;s studies programs, they are activism and theory. These elements need to move together, and that\u0026rsquo;s a huge problem not easily overcome.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/affinity-on-a-smaller-scale/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m going to try to write entire entries in one sitting, so they don\u0026rsquo;t loose coherence after the fourth paragraph. Wish me luck.\nWith WWOTB out of my court for a week or more, I\u0026rsquo;m starting to think of other \u0026ldquo;independent\u0026rdquo; (of school work) projects that I can do. Everyone I\u0026rsquo;ve talked to about WWOTB has been really excited and energetic about it, which I think, is pretty darn cool. A year ago I might have said, \u0026ldquo;now I just hope people follow through,\u0026rdquo; but after so many years of working for Free-ePress, CollectiveArts, and even to a more limited extent TealArt, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve learned a few things about collaborative projects and how to organize myself to inspire (if that\u0026rsquo;s the right word, perhaps encourage) the response that I seek.\nBut I was thinking, of people I should ask here at Beloit, to contribute to this project. I sent the initial email out to one guy, and there are more than that, but I realized that there isn\u0026rsquo;t really any group or way for the gay men on this campus to connect and or relate with/to each other.","title":"Affinity on a Smaller Scale"},{"content":"I just got back from hearing a presentation by AIDS Activist Bob Bowers, which was interesting. He was an engaging speaker and he had a good point and I liked his approach. He\u0026rsquo;s one of the few survivors from the early eighties, and he reports being in good shape (undetectable viral load, and a t-cell count that was low a bit low, but still present). He was very candid and honest, and seemed to put a real face on the disease. I think it was a good counter to the sort of healthy but undetectably sick image that we\u0026rsquo;ve see far too much of. Nevertheless the one thing I wanted him to talk about that he didn\u0026rsquo;t (which was what it\u0026rsquo;s like to be a straight man infected with a \u0026ldquo;gay\u0026rdquo; disease), because even if infection rates are down among gay men and up among heterosexuals (which I don\u0026rsquo;t buy 100%) HIV is still identified with the gay community. Part of me wants to own that and make it my struggle, and part of me likes that it\u0026rsquo;s part of a broader struggle. It\u0026rsquo;s all good. But going to this talk, allowed me to think about a few other issues.\nI just sent out my request for submissions, for the Affinity Story Project, to seven of my awesome-ist friends, so I should be able to get eight stories (there\u0026rsquo;s another guy whose email I can\u0026rsquo;t find) (I hope) to use as examples, or as a sample for publishers. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to call it Where We Ought to Be: The Experience of Young Gay Men, for now. (Yes it\u0026rsquo;s a reference to \u0026ldquo;Simple Gifts,\u0026rdquo; the shaker hymn.) That\u0026rsquo;s still a rough title, so it may shift a little, depending on how post-structural I\u0026rsquo;m feeling. This is a really cool thing, and I think it may just work, which makes it an even cooler thing.\nBut it strikes me, what I\u0026rsquo;m really looking for in WWOTB is the pure essence of what it means to be gay and young in today\u0026rsquo;s world. What draws us together, what differences make us diverse and unique, how do we relate to the \u0026ldquo;gay struggle\u0026rdquo; of years past. What\u0026rsquo;s it like to wake up every morning?\nI started writing this entry days ago, and I remember being so excited about it, and now, I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue as to where I was going. Sorry for being so distant late. But I have been getting things done. Cheers. --sam.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-little-slice-of-reality/","summary":"I just got back from hearing a presentation by AIDS Activist Bob Bowers, which was interesting. He was an engaging speaker and he had a good point and I liked his approach. He\u0026rsquo;s one of the few survivors from the early eighties, and he reports being in good shape (undetectable viral load, and a t-cell count that was low a bit low, but still present). He was very candid and honest, and seemed to put a real face on the disease. I think it was a good counter to the sort of healthy but undetectably sick image that we\u0026rsquo;ve see far too much of. Nevertheless the one thing I wanted him to talk about that he didn\u0026rsquo;t (which was what it\u0026rsquo;s like to be a straight man infected with a \u0026ldquo;gay\u0026rdquo; disease), because even if infection rates are down among gay men and up among heterosexuals (which I don\u0026rsquo;t buy 100%) HIV is still identified with the gay community.","title":"A Little Slice of Reality"},{"content":"Ha! Thought I couldn\u0026rsquo;t use \u0026ldquo;fraught\u0026rdquo; in an entry title. Well I can! Anyway, this entry is yet another brainstorming (ie. I want to think about the paper, and I want to feel productive without actually writing the paper yet, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about something that actually interests me) for a paper, sprinkled with a little gender theory thrown in for good measure.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m writing this psych paper, and I\u0026rsquo;m really dreading it. Not because I think I\u0026rsquo;m ill-equipped to write it, or that I think I\u0026rsquo;m incapable, or even that I think she\u0026rsquo;ll grade harshly (because everything else I\u0026rsquo;ve written for her has a mean grade of 99%). Rather, I think I\u0026rsquo;m worried because I feel like I have to do amazingly well on this cause I want to major in psych. A.W. talks about a similar sort of pressure about needing to do perfectly on certain classes relating to his major. So I\u0026rsquo;m not that weird, ok, maybe I am, just don\u0026rsquo;t pick on me.\nPsychology is really interesting, and I like it, but I do have some problems with how psychologists deal with gender issues. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t surprise me, but I think I should voice it. I think it\u0026rsquo;s particularly problematic now, when I don\u0026rsquo;t really have the knowledge base, or the authority to make the kinds of objections that I want to. In time.\nOn the most basic level, I feel psychology doesn\u0026rsquo;t make room for gender variance, and in general is to biologically bassed. But then my prof is a neuroscience, brain chemistry type, and I suppose I\u0026rsquo;d be worried if she wasn\u0026rsquo;t grounded in biology. Any \u0026ldquo;acceptance\u0026rdquo; of gender variance is quickly shuffled away towards transexualism, which despite its \u0026ldquo;unconventionality\u0026rdquo; reinforces the binary, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t really solve anything. The way that \u0026ldquo;The Book\u0026rdquo; (dr. george H___, that one, you know, the book) pathologizes gender varience isn\u0026rsquo;t helpful, and psychologists generally follow this general approach.\nMoving on.\nThe other main objection that I have is that it seems to me that our ways of conceptualizing of human psychology (especially the neuroscience/cognative bits, but other things as well) are viewed in binary terms. Let me preface my example by saying that, I\u0026rsquo;m working on the understanding that any conceptualizing of difference as dualism is inherently gendered. Whenever we think of different ideas as being either/or, it reflects upon our understanding of gender as limited to two option based upon our understanding of gender. For instance I have this interesting diagram, which describes long-term memory and it shows one binary after another. Now I\u0026rsquo;m not saying that this is implicitly wrong, just that binary is pervasive (hence the title.)\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s where I am at the moment.\nEnjoy, and I\u0026rsquo;ll try not to be such a stranger.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/its-either-sexist-or-fraught-with-binary-thinking/","summary":"Ha! Thought I couldn\u0026rsquo;t use \u0026ldquo;fraught\u0026rdquo; in an entry title. Well I can! Anyway, this entry is yet another brainstorming (ie. I want to think about the paper, and I want to feel productive without actually writing the paper yet, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about something that actually interests me) for a paper, sprinkled with a little gender theory thrown in for good measure.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m writing this psych paper, and I\u0026rsquo;m really dreading it. Not because I think I\u0026rsquo;m ill-equipped to write it, or that I think I\u0026rsquo;m incapable, or even that I think she\u0026rsquo;ll grade harshly (because everything else I\u0026rsquo;ve written for her has a mean grade of 99%). Rather, I think I\u0026rsquo;m worried because I feel like I have to do amazingly well on this cause I want to major in psych. A.W. talks about a similar sort of pressure about needing to do perfectly on certain classes relating to his major.","title":"It's Either Sexist or Fraught with Binary Thinking"},{"content":"(Ok, So I wrote this entry a few days ago, and just got around to posting it now. That\u0026rsquo;s fine. Enjoy!)\nThis has been one of those weeks. Not bad, really, just hectic.\nSee, my request for a new room in a different hall finally came up. See I was living in the armpit of the campus, and some guy moved into TKE (the pretty boy frat) and left an open room, which while bearing a remarkable similarity to my old room, is on a much better floor in a better building. The new building is virtually identical to the old one, but it\u0026rsquo;s not as grody.\nThe end result of that is that I packed up all of my earthly belongings and moved them down. It felt good to see that I really don\u0026rsquo;t have that much stuff. If I worked at it, I could get rid of a box or two. I got everything in the new room and started to unpack which took a lot of energy. It was a struggle to find, and then put, the sheets on the bed before I fell asleep. It took a couple of tried. I woke up once, having wrapped myself in the mattress cover and fitted sheet.\nEventually though I got all the kinks worked out, and somehow managed to get the sheets on the bed. I even managed to wake up in enough time to get to class, which is itself a miracle because I didn\u0026rsquo;t set the clock. I even got up in time to eat a proper breakfast, which is better than I did on Monday.\nOn the other hand, I was in such a rush this morning that I put my underwear on backwards and it took me all day to notice.\nOy.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/one-of-thoes-days/","summary":"(Ok, So I wrote this entry a few days ago, and just got around to posting it now. That\u0026rsquo;s fine. Enjoy!)\nThis has been one of those weeks. Not bad, really, just hectic.\nSee, my request for a new room in a different hall finally came up. See I was living in the armpit of the campus, and some guy moved into TKE (the pretty boy frat) and left an open room, which while bearing a remarkable similarity to my old room, is on a much better floor in a better building. The new building is virtually identical to the old one, but it\u0026rsquo;s not as grody.\nThe end result of that is that I packed up all of my earthly belongings and moved them down. It felt good to see that I really don\u0026rsquo;t have that much stuff. If I worked at it, I could get rid of a box or two.","title":"One of Thoes Days"},{"content":"The main intention of this post as I embark on it, is to write about some of the knitting process that I\u0026rsquo;ve made of late, but there\u0026rsquo;ll be other related bits of news. I\u0026rsquo;m feeling kind of guilty about the fact that I more or less completely forgot about TealArt last week.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a lot of knitting in of late, and believe it or not it has become a balanced part of my life. There were times in high school where I knitted while being avoidant of my work (both school related, but more often personal related), so I\u0026rsquo;d end up going through phases where I\u0026rsquo;d knit compulsively for a few days or a week, and then I\u0026rsquo;d put everything down for a while, while I got actual work done.\nSince I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten here, my knitting progress has been steady, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t used it to avoid my school work (as you might have noticed, TealArt and Another Round have suffered, but alas.) I knit a little in class. All my teachers are quite alright with this, and I think it helps my absorption a little. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that my absorption rate is perfect, but taking compulsive notes (as opposed to the more limited kinds of notes I take now) is a lot worse than knitting during class. In addition to that, I knit during a couple of club meetings, and then I sneak in a little knitting time during movies, and other laid back sort of times.\nI know what you\u0026rsquo;re saying at this point: That\u0026rsquo;s real nice Sam, but what cool things have you been knitting?\nWell, I thought you\u0026rsquo;d never ask.\nI finished the sweater I was making before school during convocation (I\u0026rsquo;d been in Beloit for a week at this point). While I suppose a technical re-evaluation of my previous statement will show that I said I wanted to finish the sweater before I got to Beloit, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;ll be unreasonable to say that I really meant that I\u0026rsquo;d finish the sweater before classes start which I did. It fits really well, but the bottom band flares a little. I think it might block out, and if it doesn\u0026rsquo;t I\u0026rsquo;ll figure something cleaver out to do with elastic and ribbon. I still have to dye it, but I found a friend who said she\u0026rsquo;d help with the dying, so depending on our respective work loads, I\u0026rsquo;ll get that done soon and start wearing it soon.\nI finished the funky shawl thing, and I might wear it once I get it dyed, which will happen at the same time.\nI also made two and a half hats (which took about a week each): two and a half because, one is a double thick hat and while there are two hats, that I had to make, it\u0026rsquo;s only one hat in the end. Both of those hats are made out of the same yarn as the same wool as the sweater. So that\u0026rsquo;s cool.\nWhen I finished the second hat, I was itching to start some sort of real project, something sort of biggish. So I cast on for a world famous circular shawl, using some mercerized cotton cone yarn that my mom going (in a huge quantity), and I\u0026rsquo;m going to use a third of it or a bit more on this shawl. I started it the Monday before last (tomorrow will be the third Monday that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on it.) I\u0026rsquo;ll probably finish it on Tuesday or Wednesday. The last time I made something this size, it took me a month of serious knitting. The lace pattern makes it go faster. On the outer most section I\u0026rsquo;ve inserted 7 repeats of Snowdrop lace, a traditional Shetland pattern, which I really like, and I like how I memorized the pattern perfectly after the second repeat, and I know how to fix and fudge it, and I don\u0026rsquo;t even need markers to separate the repeat. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably make another shawl with lacey patterns soon again (possibly with the same yarn, but I need a break for my continued knitting health).\nI am currently in ownership of a sweaters worth of very nice locally produced (or at least locally milled and dyed), wool/mohair (but it\u0026rsquo;s so soft!) in a wonderful red color. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably make a fun plain raglan pull over with it. The dye job isn\u0026rsquo;t perfectly even (an error) but I\u0026rsquo;m going to maximize it by showing off the yarn with the pattern.\nI also got a 14 oz cone of fairly fine yarn (dk-fingering?) on eBay that I should get sometime soon. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably make a drop shouldered sweater out of it. (The alternative is to make a shawl.) Oh, and my mom I think might have found the perfect yarn to make the Turkish patterned sweater (and I can\u0026rsquo;t decide weather to make a pullover or a cardigan like it says.) But that\u0026rsquo;s down the road a bit.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s other news, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you all in suspense for a while.\nLove! Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/call-me-productivity-boy/","summary":"The main intention of this post as I embark on it, is to write about some of the knitting process that I\u0026rsquo;ve made of late, but there\u0026rsquo;ll be other related bits of news. I\u0026rsquo;m feeling kind of guilty about the fact that I more or less completely forgot about TealArt last week.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a lot of knitting in of late, and believe it or not it has become a balanced part of my life. There were times in high school where I knitted while being avoidant of my work (both school related, but more often personal related), so I\u0026rsquo;d end up going through phases where I\u0026rsquo;d knit compulsively for a few days or a week, and then I\u0026rsquo;d put everything down for a while, while I got actual work done.\nSince I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten here, my knitting progress has been steady, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t used it to avoid my school work (as you might have noticed, TealArt and Another Round have suffered, but alas.","title":"Call Me \u0026#34;Productivity Boy\u0026#34;"},{"content":"I have this paper to write, that basically asks me to address how an emphasis on the difference between the sexes, (and the concentration on the gender binary etc.) maintains systems of oppression. While this is a subject I\u0026rsquo;m interested in, I\u0026rsquo;ve found it hard to write about it in the past because I\u0026rsquo;m ambivalent about a couple of key issues.\nMostly the fact that to blur the lines between genders too intensely is to stray too close to the \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t see color\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t care if people are gay or straight\u0026rdquo; which I think is a position that should be avoided. At the same time, I completely agree with the idea that the gender binary is tool used to oppressive means. In fact, I could argue that the gender binary is perhaps the oppressive tool, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think I will at this juncture.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think that difference alone can create oppression, and even if it can, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s a particularly strong position to argue for social change from. See, people are different from each other. Entire groups of people are different from other groups of people. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t in and of itself create advantage and disadvantage or oppression. The other side of this \u0026ldquo;difference coin\u0026rdquo; is that despite all of the differences that people have with each other (on any social level), we ultimately have much more in common.\nBut difference, or at least perceived difference, remains the primary cause for a system of advantage.\nAdditionally, I think I have to examine the function of the binary form itself, separately from the issue of difference. Even though binaries claim to be supported by difference, and in a historical sense are caused by differences, after a period of time, the difference dissolves and blurs. This leaves a \u0026ldquo;superficial\u0026rdquo; kind of difference, and a very strong binary system/logic that creates and maintains patriarchy (and other systems of oppression).\nFor better or for worse we\u0026rsquo;re limited to a handful of sources which we read in class, and I think that the sources I have either agree with what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to argue, or can be interpreted to agree with what I\u0026rsquo;m saying.\nNow all I have to do is pull all of it together in some sort of logical, coherent, and reasoned sort of way.\nsigh\nCheers\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/chicken-egg-difference-inequality/","summary":"I have this paper to write, that basically asks me to address how an emphasis on the difference between the sexes, (and the concentration on the gender binary etc.) maintains systems of oppression. While this is a subject I\u0026rsquo;m interested in, I\u0026rsquo;ve found it hard to write about it in the past because I\u0026rsquo;m ambivalent about a couple of key issues.\nMostly the fact that to blur the lines between genders too intensely is to stray too close to the \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t see color\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t care if people are gay or straight\u0026rdquo; which I think is a position that should be avoided. At the same time, I completely agree with the idea that the gender binary is tool used to oppressive means. In fact, I could argue that the gender binary is perhaps the oppressive tool, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think I will at this juncture.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t think that difference alone can create oppression, and even if it can, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s a particularly strong position to argue for social change from.","title":"Chicken : Egg :: Difference : Inequality(?)"},{"content":"I have a couple bits of news/theories for the \u0026ldquo;Beyond John Wayne\u0026rdquo; category but I\u0026rsquo;ll keep them brief in favor of other forthcoming TealArt posts.\nFirst off this Beyond John Wayne category is more than a year old now. I\u0026rsquo;m looking back at this last year plus and thinking, \u0026ldquo;my god, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned and changed a lot.\u0026rdquo; This gender studies/masculinity project thing that I\u0026rsquo;m forever enthralled with has gone from being a \u0026ldquo;what does it mean to be gay in the world today, to a what does it mean to be a man in the world today, to a combination of the two: this is the whole \u0026ldquo;Beyond John Wayne\u0026rdquo; idea, that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to be a man outside of \u0026ldquo;the man box\u0026rdquo; to some sort of weird where I am now place. I think more reflection on this transition is defiantly required, but that\u0026rsquo;s fairly low on my list right now.\nHaving given it a suitable breathing period, I\u0026rsquo;m going to go back and edit/rewrite/revise my proposal for the Affinity Story Project (I really need a better name, don\u0026rsquo;t I?) and see what I can come up with. It\u0026rsquo;s something concrete and something real, and it feels good to finally be working on something like this.\nThe third, and probably most important reason why I made this post is to express the following theoretical statement (which in typical form is a question) that I scribbled on the back of a paper in class today:\nIs the claim that the differences between men and women arenatural, oppressive because \u0026ldquo;nature\u0026rdquo; is used as a tool for justifying the non-egalitarian distribution of opportunity and resources, or because of the nature/nurture dichotomy/opposition is inherently gendered.\nActually I wrote \u0026ldquo;is nature oppressive because it\u0026rsquo;s a (tool for) justifying \u0026ldquo;different but equal\u0026rdquo; or because of the nature/nurture dichotomy/opposition.\u0026rdquo; With the parenthetical written in the super-text. You be the judge of what makes more sense and is more coherent.\nI\u0026rsquo;d explain more, but I\u0026rsquo;m not really in the mood for answers now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/nature-nurture/","summary":"I have a couple bits of news/theories for the \u0026ldquo;Beyond John Wayne\u0026rdquo; category but I\u0026rsquo;ll keep them brief in favor of other forthcoming TealArt posts.\nFirst off this Beyond John Wayne category is more than a year old now. I\u0026rsquo;m looking back at this last year plus and thinking, \u0026ldquo;my god, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned and changed a lot.\u0026rdquo; This gender studies/masculinity project thing that I\u0026rsquo;m forever enthralled with has gone from being a \u0026ldquo;what does it mean to be gay in the world today, to a what does it mean to be a man in the world today, to a combination of the two: this is the whole \u0026ldquo;Beyond John Wayne\u0026rdquo; idea, that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to be a man outside of \u0026ldquo;the man box\u0026rdquo; to some sort of weird where I am now place. I think more reflection on this transition is defiantly required, but that\u0026rsquo;s fairly low on my list right now.","title":"Nature : Nurture"},{"content":"I had a conversation last night, wherein I discovered perhaps the best name for a narrative of life at Beloit College, but I can\u0026rsquo;t remember now. Whatever. Today is Sunday, my day for updating the world about my status. Phone calls will occur later this afternoon (after my cell phone charges) and of course the requisite TealArt entry.\nMy classes are going well: nothing difficult yet. I have my first paper (feminisms) due in a couple of weeks, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll get the assignment for that until Thursday (maybe,) and it promises to be dead simple. In a fun and exciting sort of way. I have an \u0026ldquo;assessment\u0026rdquo; (psych) on Monday, which looks to be simple enough to complete in my sleep, which is really convenient given the time slot of that class. There\u0026rsquo;s another test-like thing in the Sociology class at the end of the week or the beginning of the next, which is the only thing I have to do actual work to prepare for, (other than general reading and stuff like that). So the school-work progresses much as I expected it, which is a very good thing indeed.\nI have four friends who speak Russian in some degree. One is an exchange student, another immigrated as a child: so speaks it with her parents, and her (flawless) English is occasionally peppered with Russian. The last guy, did an intensive summer emersion program, and has taken a number of classes. The surprising thing is that I understand a surprising amount of what gets said. I have the vocabulary of an 18 month old, but I can kind of translate the important parts. It\u0026rsquo;s interesting, because I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve ever been in situations where my language skills have been semi-useful. Which when you consider the last time I had a Russian class was six years ago, is kind of good. On another linguistic level, my Spanish is also a lot better than I think it is, and I could probably Tutor people in first year Spanish. For all the faults of the last four years of my Spanish experience, my teacher did know the language really well, and her explanations have stuck. Maybe it wasn\u0026rsquo;t all for nothing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve become a little discouraged about the gay boy situation here. Fiveish in my class at last count: that works out to somewhere between a percent and a percent and a half of the class. I don\u0026rsquo;t think Kinsey was that far off. From what I can tell the percentages for the other classes aren\u0026rsquo;t appreciably higher, at this point. Now either there are people that I don\u0026rsquo;t see/can\u0026rsquo;t find (a distinct possibility), this place isn\u0026rsquo;t nearly as hippie/\u0026ldquo;liberal\u0026rdquo;/open as people claim it is (a certain truth, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s it either,) or Kinsey misplaced a decimal. The perhaps more interesting observation is somewhere near half of them are \u0026ldquo;very-much attached\u0026rdquo; which strikes me as really uncommon and strange. Anyway.\nNot to babble too much about this kind of thing but here goes another line of observation. I\u0026rsquo;ve been in the situation where I\u0026rsquo;ve had to kind of \u0026ldquo;come out\u0026rdquo; again. It\u0026rsquo;s really just a part of that continual coming out process, but it feels like \u0026ldquo;again\u0026rdquo; sometimes. I\u0026rsquo;ve not had problems or anything, but it\u0026rsquo;s weird. The \u0026ldquo;exciting\u0026rdquo; sigh of relief that I used to love so much, has mostly been replaced by anxiety and annoyance. I really want the gay thing to be a complete non-issue, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel like a non-issue to me, and sometimes I feel like a one song-singer because I think about it a lot. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot more to be than this gay thing, but it\u0026rsquo;s still fairly important, and my position with myself is that heterosexuality is a bigger deal for straight folks than they/we think it is, but perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s part of the benefit of normativization (if that isn\u0026rsquo;t a word, it should be/is now.) It means walking a lot of fine lines, but there\u0026rsquo;s not much I can do really. In other news, I think I\u0026rsquo;m going to join the Breakdance club. It\u0026rsquo;s a pretty big time commitment. No, it\u0026rsquo;s a huge time commitment. But it\u0026rsquo;s not too much, there\u0026rsquo;s a very slight possibility of getting some credit for it, but I would do it anyway. It looks so fun, it\u0026rsquo;ll be good exercise, and just like Morris and International, I have a great desire to know how to do it. I haven\u0026rsquo;t given up on the idea of a Morris team, but I\u0026rsquo;m fairly convinced that I\u0026rsquo;ll need at least one other person whose familiar with the ways of Morris before I jump into that.\nThe other really exciting thing that\u0026rsquo;s happened of late is that I wrote up a proposal for the Affinity Story Project, I have to do some revisions, which I\u0026rsquo;ll probably get to sometime this week. I have the time it\u0026rsquo;s more about getting distance from the work so that I can make better revisions. Then I just have to get an example of a story or two (probably one from Chris and whatever I put in to it,) write a cover letter, and send it out to publishers. I\u0026rsquo;ll start looking for stories after that. This is quickly becoming real, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s really exciting.\nOn that note, I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you for now. See you later in the week!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/status-update-beloit-college/","summary":"I had a conversation last night, wherein I discovered perhaps the best name for a narrative of life at Beloit College, but I can\u0026rsquo;t remember now. Whatever. Today is Sunday, my day for updating the world about my status. Phone calls will occur later this afternoon (after my cell phone charges) and of course the requisite TealArt entry.\nMy classes are going well: nothing difficult yet. I have my first paper (feminisms) due in a couple of weeks, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll get the assignment for that until Thursday (maybe,) and it promises to be dead simple. In a fun and exciting sort of way. I have an \u0026ldquo;assessment\u0026rdquo; (psych) on Monday, which looks to be simple enough to complete in my sleep, which is really convenient given the time slot of that class. There\u0026rsquo;s another test-like thing in the Sociology class at the end of the week or the beginning of the next, which is the only thing I have to do actual work to prepare for, (other than general reading and stuff like that).","title":"Status Update: Beloit College"},{"content":"I have a knitting post, and a few other ones that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about writing, and they\u0026rsquo;ll probably appear later in the week, but for now I hope this little ditty keeps you happy. Cheers!\nI was minding my own business and checking my mail today, when I saw a poster. It was an advertisement for the Beloit Christian Fellowship. Gag me with a spoon, but they\u0026rsquo;re doing a pretty good job of advertising and there is chalk and posters all over. Whatever, it\u0026rsquo;s cool.\nAnyway, the poster in question had a picture of a pile of hay and a sheep, with the words \u0026ldquo;hey + ewe\u0026rdquo; written under the pictures. Very clever I guess, if you\u0026rsquo;re into that kind of thing.\nMy first thought was, \u0026ldquo;but Jesus was a carpenter.\u0026rdquo; And then I remembered the good Shepard metaphor, which clashes with the carpenter idea, but no one asked me.\nThey never do.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/i-saw-a-poster-todayhellip/","summary":"I have a knitting post, and a few other ones that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about writing, and they\u0026rsquo;ll probably appear later in the week, but for now I hope this little ditty keeps you happy. Cheers!\nI was minding my own business and checking my mail today, when I saw a poster. It was an advertisement for the Beloit Christian Fellowship. Gag me with a spoon, but they\u0026rsquo;re doing a pretty good job of advertising and there is chalk and posters all over. Whatever, it\u0026rsquo;s cool.\nAnyway, the poster in question had a picture of a pile of hay and a sheep, with the words \u0026ldquo;hey + ewe\u0026rdquo; written under the pictures. Very clever I guess, if you\u0026rsquo;re into that kind of thing.\nMy first thought was, \u0026ldquo;but Jesus was a carpenter.\u0026rdquo; And then I remembered the good Shepard metaphor, which clashes with the carpenter idea, but no one asked me.","title":"I Saw a Poster Today\u0026#38;hellip;"},{"content":"There are a hundred jokes about how the best men are either taken or gay, and I tend to agree with this. Availability, or more properly unavailability is very attractive and it shows prospective suitors that a person is mature enough for adult relationships, and able to commit. There\u0026rsquo;s some truth to this, and I want to try and distance myself from this in the rest of the post, but at the same time it\u0026rsquo;s worth mentioning.\nIn my opinion, the best ones are taken and gay.\nBefore I dig myself into a really deep hole, I\u0026rsquo;m going back up and address the real issue: long distance relationships, and my reactions to them.\nOk, so here on the second week of classes at glorious Beloit College, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that there are a hell of a lot of people, regardless of orientation who are in some sort of committed long distance relationship. I remember reading something on the accepted student boards (people who were going to be attending Beloit in the fall had the option of opening a dialogue on a message board. Anyway, someone said, lots of people come to Beloit and try to have long distance relationships with boy and girlfriends back home, and that college often changes people a lot often bringing about the end of these people\u0026rsquo;s relationships.\nWell I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen a relationship end yet, but I would completely agree with all of these statements. There are tons of people who are in long distance relationships, and I suspect that the majority of them won\u0026rsquo;t last. This is kind of frustrating to me, both on one level, as I\u0026rsquo;ve been on both ends of the leaving stick, on anther level as there are tons of people that I view are taken: and unnecessarily at that.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s start off with my view of the problems with distance relationships.\nI have a very strong opinion that, one shouldn\u0026rsquo;t try to sacrifice the present for a hope in the future. Who knows what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen between now and then? People can die, fall in and out of love at the drop of a hat, people turn into assholes, become drug addicts, and develop emotional instabilities without any notice.\nI\u0026rsquo;m also of the opinion that if people are meant to be together, that they will end up together in the end. I trust fate like that, which probably stupid on so many levels, but I\u0026rsquo;ll take that risk.\nGiven these things, I absolutely refuse to engage in anything that could be considered a long distance relationship. I won\u0026rsquo;t date people who I can\u0026rsquo;t reasonably see on a fairly regular basis.\nAt the same time there are people, like AW, who lives at least a thousand miles away. To deny that we have some sort of meaningful connection would be foolish and untrue. At the same time, we\u0026rsquo;re individuals, we\u0026rsquo;re living our own lives in the present (more or less) but we\u0026rsquo;re not just friends. Long distance relationship? You tell me. At the same I\u0026rsquo;d wager that all of my peers here who are have significant others back home are getting no more than I get out of such relationships, and I almost guarantee you that they\u0026rsquo;re putting the same amount of energy and likely into it.\nMy relationship with sexuality has also changed a little recently. I used to think that exclusivity was not only desirable but also requisite for any kind of relationship, and I suppose I don\u0026rsquo;t feel the same way anymore. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that in a stable relationship where two people live with or near each other couldn\u0026rsquo;t be exclusive and I do think that monogamy is desirable. But I also know that it\u0026rsquo;s possible to love more than one person, to be interested in more than one person, and even theoretically to sleep with more than one person, without it being a critique of anyone. That is, one can have a committed relationship with Person A, and still love (or etc) Person B without it being a criticism or a degradation of Person A. I think there\u0026rsquo;s room in a singular human experience to love more than one person, perhaps even at the same time.\nHow people act out the implications of this, is another issue completely, and one everyone should fully discuss with their partners and blah blah blah, I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly interested in dispensing advice at the present, just outlining what I believe to be true and possible at the moment.\nSo why am I writing this? In part to kind of stick my nose in the air, and say, I\u0026rsquo;ve reached the perfect compromise for myself at the moment. In part because there\u0026rsquo;s at least one fellow who I\u0026rsquo;d be all over, if he didn\u0026rsquo;t have a gentleman caller halfway across the country, and also in part because I\u0026rsquo;m tired of listing to people moan about the (usually) boyfriend that\u0026rsquo;s back home.\nInteresting gender point here: I can\u0026rsquo;t think of a guy whose in a distance relationship with a girl at the moment. Ponder away.\nBut I can be patient, and ultimately I think things will settle down and people will come to their senses, in the mean time I\u0026rsquo;ll just have to make do with what I have. For now. Despite a little frustration, I think I\u0026rsquo;m pretty happy. So there!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-challenges-of-distance/","summary":"There are a hundred jokes about how the best men are either taken or gay, and I tend to agree with this. Availability, or more properly unavailability is very attractive and it shows prospective suitors that a person is mature enough for adult relationships, and able to commit. There\u0026rsquo;s some truth to this, and I want to try and distance myself from this in the rest of the post, but at the same time it\u0026rsquo;s worth mentioning.\nIn my opinion, the best ones are taken and gay.\nBefore I dig myself into a really deep hole, I\u0026rsquo;m going back up and address the real issue: long distance relationships, and my reactions to them.\nOk, so here on the second week of classes at glorious Beloit College, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that there are a hell of a lot of people, regardless of orientation who are in some sort of committed long distance relationship.","title":"The Challenges of Distance"},{"content":"Ok, I know my TealArt break was only supposed to last a week, but to be honest with you folks, I\u0026rsquo;m kind of surprised that it didn\u0026rsquo;t last a whole month. I\u0026rsquo;ve started college, for real. It\u0026rsquo;s everything that I expected, basically. I like the classes I\u0026rsquo;m taking; I like the classes that I\u0026rsquo;m planning to take next year. I like how my high school experience has prepared me for this shift, I also like how so many of the classes I took in high school are going to be transferring here. Once St. Louis University gets it\u0026rsquo;s act together, and I figure out how to request AP transcripts, I\u0026rsquo;ll have 7.75 units, or 31 hours of credit. The whole notion of getting done in three years is very much a reality, and I love it.\nThus far my experience with my classes as also been generally positive, and as I expected it; this is to say that, I enjoy the subjects I expected myself to enjoy, and am a bit ambivalent about the classes I expected myself to be ambivalent about. I like the fact that things are working out. There certainly is the possibility for change in the future, but for the moment things are peacefully staying as they are.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not really happy about my room assignment and the smoking status of the dorm I\u0026rsquo;m in. The smokers aren\u0026rsquo;t happy because they can\u0026rsquo;t smoke in the lounges, and the asmatics/allergic/non-smokers aren\u0026rsquo;t happy because the building reeks and people can smoke in their rooms. So it\u0026rsquo;s about. The consensus is that res life is using people with a non-smoking preference to change the culture in this dorm (which reaches far beyond the smoking of tobacco products). Frankly, it isn\u0026rsquo;t fair to either group. In anycase, I have a draft of a very polite and friendly email to the dean of students and the director of residential life that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably send out pretty soon depending on how I feel. In the mean time, I\u0026rsquo;m looking for a roommate so I can move into a special interest house next semester. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably post more on this in the future.\nIn other news, for one of my classes, we have to do a feminist activism project, and I\u0026rsquo;m kind of at a loss of what to do. The prof, said \u0026ldquo;take something you\u0026rsquo;re angry about, and something your good with, combine them, send a number of hours on that and you\u0026rsquo;ll be fine.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m not worried about the anger, and I\u0026rsquo;m good at computer stuff, knitting, writing, and traditional Anglo-Celtic ethnomusicology. I could knit some sort of avant garde, binary coded message into some sort of lace shawl. But that wouldn\u0026rsquo;t reach enough people, and the truth is I don\u0026rsquo;t want to do that, it was just a funny idea. Computer stuff and writing are easily combined, and I might end up doing something with a TealArt sub site, which I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to do for a while, but that would require perfecting that code, which I\u0026rsquo;m stuck on. In any case, I\u0026rsquo;ll be writing more about this soon.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll shift back to the total college experience for a moment. I have an awesome schedule. I\u0026rsquo;m only taking four classes, which no matter how hard the classes are it\u0026rsquo;s not that bad. The thing is that I\u0026rsquo;ve got this huge block of time in the middle of the day that I can use to nap if I need to and I can do my work. Without particularly trying to be an over achiever, I\u0026rsquo;ve been really good about getting my homework done at least 12 hours before it\u0026rsquo;s due. Getting up hasn\u0026rsquo;t been a problem either, though I suspect that this will change a little bit as it starts getting light later.\nI must complain about the Internet situation though. Apparently the network is riddled with viruses because of people bringing their computers back from the summer. This means the wireless network is inoperable, which is more annoying than anything mostly because it makes it more difficult to avoid being in my room, which I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do as much as possible. On that note, I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you all for now, stay tuned for more updates and developments.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/all-connected-now/","summary":"Ok, I know my TealArt break was only supposed to last a week, but to be honest with you folks, I\u0026rsquo;m kind of surprised that it didn\u0026rsquo;t last a whole month. I\u0026rsquo;ve started college, for real. It\u0026rsquo;s everything that I expected, basically. I like the classes I\u0026rsquo;m taking; I like the classes that I\u0026rsquo;m planning to take next year. I like how my high school experience has prepared me for this shift, I also like how so many of the classes I took in high school are going to be transferring here. Once St. Louis University gets it\u0026rsquo;s act together, and I figure out how to request AP transcripts, I\u0026rsquo;ll have 7.75 units, or 31 hours of credit. The whole notion of getting done in three years is very much a reality, and I love it.\nThus far my experience with my classes as also been generally positive, and as I expected it; this is to say that, I enjoy the subjects I expected myself to enjoy, and am a bit ambivalent about the classes I expected myself to be ambivalent about.","title":"All Connected Now"},{"content":"I had kind of intended to take a hiatus for this week. I just moved off and all, and they have us on this wacky summer camp schedule thing. We have all day seminars in how to be college students (well mine is about social science and Mars colonization, but the veil is pretty thin,) and then there are activities, most of which are pathetic.\nI have one comment to make, borne out requisite ambivalence, and grouchyness: If it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to be a rebel, and all the authorities are saying, its fine to rebel if you want to, go for it, it\u0026rsquo;s no longer really rebellion. The purpose has been completely defeated.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sure there will be more later.\nAs Chris reported, we talked for a while yesterday, and I think it was generally awesome. I completely agree with him, (gosh, that\u0026rsquo;s a first!) about the difference between spoken and typed communication. I would also say that, the people we are online, is a lot like the people we really are, and sometimes when we meet virtual buddies in real life, it takes a while for a physical (or vocal) report to develop, and the \u0026ldquo;jump\u0026rdquo; as it were is more the result of a non-normal first impression rather than some fundamental difference in personality expression.\nAt the beginning, the voice I heard was not the one I was expecting, but once I got used to, it was perfect and right. It was defiantly weird at first after all it was a \u0026ldquo;first meeting.\u0026rdquo; Once I realized on a more basic level that there are few people in the world that I\u0026rsquo;ve known (and been in such contact with) for five plus years, it was totally cool. It just took a few moments for my body to realize who I was talking to, I guess.\nChris recognized that the conversation was more flowing than it is in AIM, but I think that\u0026rsquo;s a symptom of the fact that in half an hour of phone conversation, we covered what might take several hours in AIM world. Very interesting.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s just my response. I\u0026rsquo;m going to go back to being on fake hiatus until next week. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to line up some awesome guest bloggers, but so far little luck. Stay tuned in any case.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/he-said-he-said/","summary":"I had kind of intended to take a hiatus for this week. I just moved off and all, and they have us on this wacky summer camp schedule thing. We have all day seminars in how to be college students (well mine is about social science and Mars colonization, but the veil is pretty thin,) and then there are activities, most of which are pathetic.\nI have one comment to make, borne out requisite ambivalence, and grouchyness: If it\u0026rsquo;s really easy to be a rebel, and all the authorities are saying, its fine to rebel if you want to, go for it, it\u0026rsquo;s no longer really rebellion. The purpose has been completely defeated.\nI\u0026rsquo;m sure there will be more later.\nAs Chris reported, we talked for a while yesterday, and I think it was generally awesome. I completely agree with him, (gosh, that\u0026rsquo;s a first!) about the difference between spoken and typed communication.","title":"He Said He Said"},{"content":"In a very bold gesture I ripped out the vest I was making, and have started on the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to make for a long time now. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a basic, shirt style, dropped shoulder number. Seed stitch borders and trim, with a plain stocking stitch body. The only typically Sam features (ie really weird things) is that I didn\u0026rsquo;t even bother coming up with a pattern for this sweater other than measuring a sweater that I think fits me very well and coming up with a gaguge. The other Samish feature (if I ever writing a knitting book, it\u0026rsquo;ll be called Samish Knitting) is that I\u0026rsquo;m combining yarn from two different dye lots, and with a lot of black Rit dye (or possibly India Ink), I hope to make this a non issue.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll post a pattern once I have a garment completed. I\u0026rsquo;d do it sooner, because it\u0026rsquo;s a really simple and standard design, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue of how I\u0026rsquo;m going to shape the neck, and with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll have decided by the time I get there.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s really nice to have a big project on the needles again, and I also really like how quickly it\u0026rsquo;s passing. I started it yesterday evening and after a number of failed cast on attempts I know have the effective 2.5 inch bottom trim, and 3 inches of the body-proper completed, and it\u0026rsquo;s smooth sailing till the underarms (no short rows needed!).\nIn other knitting news I\u0026rsquo;m working tirelessly to put together a knitting sub-site for TealArt. Basically it would be the same as regular TealArt, except only the knitting posts would appear, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to create a knitting specific sidebar. Also, I think it means there\u0026rsquo;ll be a new knitting contributor.\nSo stay tuned.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-sweater-in-progress/","summary":"In a very bold gesture I ripped out the vest I was making, and have started on the sweater that I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to make for a long time now. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be a basic, shirt style, dropped shoulder number. Seed stitch borders and trim, with a plain stocking stitch body. The only typically Sam features (ie really weird things) is that I didn\u0026rsquo;t even bother coming up with a pattern for this sweater other than measuring a sweater that I think fits me very well and coming up with a gaguge. The other Samish feature (if I ever writing a knitting book, it\u0026rsquo;ll be called Samish Knitting) is that I\u0026rsquo;m combining yarn from two different dye lots, and with a lot of black Rit dye (or possibly India Ink), I hope to make this a non issue.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll post a pattern once I have a garment completed. I\u0026rsquo;d do it sooner, because it\u0026rsquo;s a really simple and standard design, but I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue of how I\u0026rsquo;m going to shape the neck, and with luck I\u0026rsquo;ll have decided by the time I get there.","title":"New Sweater In Progress"},{"content":"The Parting Glass (Part 1 of an indeterminate number) Oh all the money that e\u0026rsquo;er I spent\nI spent it in good company\nAnd all the harm that e\u0026rsquo;er I\u0026rsquo;ve done\nAlas, it was to none but me\nAnd all I\u0026rsquo;ve done for want of wit\nTo memory now I can\u0026rsquo;t recall\nSo fill to me the parting glass\nGood night and joy be with you all\nOh all the comrades that e\u0026rsquo;er I\u0026rsquo;ve had\nAre sorry for my going away\nAnd all the sweethearts that e\u0026rsquo;er I\u0026rsquo;ve had\nWould wish me one more day to stay\nBut since it falls unto my lot\nThat I should rise and you should not\nI\u0026rsquo;ll gently rise and I\u0026rsquo;ll softly call\nGood night and joy be with you all\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all been done, before, but just cause I think it\u0026rsquo;s cool, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to bother to ask people permission to write about them (and symbolically altering names is kind of stupid,) I\u0026rsquo;m going to identify characters discussed in web log with initials, or relationally. Along with this, privacy seeking measure, I\u0026rsquo;m going to remind the readership, that the stories I tell are important to me. If you figure out who the other actors are, good for you, don\u0026rsquo;t share. Secondly, as always, if I leave something out of a TealArt post and you want to know more, wait till I write more about it, or email me about it. There\u0026rsquo;s some method to my madness, usually.\nI said good-bye to A.W. today. I keep doing that, and will keep doing that for a long time. Don\u0026rsquo;t ask me why. I used to be ambivalent about him, a problem that often got worse with interaction. Now, I\u0026rsquo;ve seen him way more in the last three weeks than I\u0026rsquo;m used to, and if anything I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten less ambivalent. Its funny, I\u0026rsquo;m moving away in about a week, and this was probably the hardest good-bye, and it\u0026rsquo;s not the first time (nor the last) I\u0026rsquo;ve said good-bye to him.\nBecause I\u0026rsquo;m in a Babylon 5 mood, and really deep down, I\u0026rsquo;m just a regular old geek fanboy, here\u0026rsquo;s a couple of things from the end of season five. Delenn, said that there\u0026rsquo;s no word for \u0026ldquo;good-bye\u0026rdquo; in the Mimbari language, because all of they left open the possibility for a \u0026ldquo;next time.\u0026rdquo; The second thing, G\u0026rsquo;kar, says good-bye to someone staying on the station, as he makes some speech about how, if you spend enough time in a place or with a person, you take a little bit of the place/person with you when you leave, and you leave a little bit of yourself behind. G\u0026rsquo;kar says something like \u0026ldquo;the part of me that is going, will very much miss the part of you that is staying.\u0026rdquo; Something like that. Both of those ideas are kind of key to my experience.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to a party in an hour and a half where I get to say good-bye to a bunch of the people I went to school with. I never socialized with them very well, but we have a bond. I suppose, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s important for closure that I go to this party. Let us note, I went to one of their graduation parties, and other than that I completely avoided their madness. Ignoring that fact, it\u0026rsquo;ll be fun, and then I get to go to my second to last gay-youth group meeting. That\u0026rsquo;ll be sad-ish.\nIt isn\u0026rsquo;t like I\u0026rsquo;m dying, and I\u0026rsquo;ll be back, but these \u0026ldquo;goodbye for now\u0026quot;s are difficult. Especially in cases like A.W. where I really really want to spend time with him.\n**Update:**The party was a huge non issue. It was good to see and say goodbye to the folks, but those are some pretty lame parties, and I feel good. And then I left, and felt good for doing it. Saying goodbye to A.W., though was still so much more amazingly difficult. Alas.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-parting-glass-part-1-of-an-indeterminate-number/","summary":"The Parting Glass (Part 1 of an indeterminate number) Oh all the money that e\u0026rsquo;er I spent\nI spent it in good company\nAnd all the harm that e\u0026rsquo;er I\u0026rsquo;ve done\nAlas, it was to none but me\nAnd all I\u0026rsquo;ve done for want of wit\nTo memory now I can\u0026rsquo;t recall\nSo fill to me the parting glass\nGood night and joy be with you all\nOh all the comrades that e\u0026rsquo;er I\u0026rsquo;ve had\nAre sorry for my going away\nAnd all the sweethearts that e\u0026rsquo;er I\u0026rsquo;ve had\nWould wish me one more day to stay\nBut since it falls unto my lot\nThat I should rise and you should not\nI\u0026rsquo;ll gently rise and I\u0026rsquo;ll softly call\nGood night and joy be with you all\nIt\u0026rsquo;s all been done, before, but just cause I think it\u0026rsquo;s cool, and I don\u0026rsquo;t want to bother to ask people permission to write about them (and symbolically altering names is kind of stupid,) I\u0026rsquo;m going to identify characters discussed in web log with initials, or relationally.","title":":author: tychoish"},{"content":"I realize that this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly a new post (at least conceptually,) and I realize/hope that this kind of discourse isn\u0026rsquo;t ultimately useful to anything or anyone; but at the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s an issue/debate that I find myself caring about a lot. Additionally, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve become a lot more coherent on the issue of late, which might be helpful. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean I have any answers, but my questions are more crystallized (to mix metaphors a bit,) which I need to learn to become content with. Let us also not forget the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m bored out of my mined (mostly,) and musing about this is one of my favorite things to torture myself with in fits of boredom.\nI suppose these statements/questions, on some level apply to every kind of group identity, social identities like race, class, education, age, and of course gender/sexuality for starters. Because gender and sexuality are my thing, and while I\u0026rsquo;m perfectly content to go on about race and class, I\u0026rsquo;ll constrain myself a bit, but I would beg the readers to not be so constrained.\nAs I explained briefly in the Why it all Matters post, identity is made up of: what you actually do, what you see yourself as/claim, and how other\u0026rsquo;s see you.\nI think there\u0026rsquo;s a Vorlon quote from Babylon 5 that says something like: Truth is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and fact or something like that. It\u0026rsquo;s an interesting analogy that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to stray into, so I\u0026rsquo;m moving on.\nI view the trifold aspect of identity as one of the unexplainable facts of the world. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how I feel about the \u0026ldquo;how others see you\u0026rdquo; part, and \u0026ldquo;what you claim,\u0026rdquo; and while I\u0026rsquo;m at it strict behavioral identities don\u0026rsquo;t really fully account for the complexities of identities.\nSo the questions I\u0026rsquo;ve been asking:\nIf an effeminate (gay acting, for lack of a better term) guy, says he\u0026rsquo;s bisexual, but only has relationships with women; then what\u0026rsquo;s up? What would the \u0026ldquo;status\u0026rdquo; bisexuals in long term monogamous relationships be, and how does their previous relationship history affect their identity? Are non operative transgender people, who don\u0026rsquo;t take hormones, aren\u0026rsquo;t seeking surgery, and often live in the gender of their birth, really trans? If a women exclusively dates women, and is out as a lesbian, and then falls in love with a man and gets married and lives in that relationship happily for 20 years, is she still a lesbian? If someone is out as a bisexual, but is only has relationships with one sex, are they really bisexual? If someone claims a particular identity, and then \u0026ldquo;changes\u0026rdquo; identity at some later point, is that identity shift apply retroactively? Does behavior affect this? If someone who is out as a gay man doesn\u0026rsquo;t have relationships with men at all (or only occasionally), are they still gay? If a man, who dates women exclusively, has sex with men occasionally, is he still straight? In cases similar to the one above, would that man\u0026rsquo;s behavior affect the answer; that is, if he bottomed (took the receptor roll during anal sex) would that affect the answer? An individual whose in the closet, has very little if any heterosexual attraction, dates heterosexually, but given the proper contextual situation, would be almost exclusively homosexual, is Again, the idea of retroactivity plays into this one.\nThere is of course the obvious \u0026ldquo;why does it matter\u0026rdquo; response, but excluding that, I think there are two ways to answer these questions: what they are, is guided by what they do, or, regardless of what they do, they are what they say/feel they are. In my gut, I usually answer behaviorally, though on an intellectual level, I know that the \u0026lsquo;say/feel\u0026rsquo; option is probably closer to the truth. Something inside me says, bisexual people need to have relationships with both men and women, or they\u0026rsquo;re really hetero or homo, and that a self-identified gay man shouldn\u0026rsquo;t have relationships with women. That a man who had a relationship with a woman for a number of years, and then only had relationships with men would be gay. But bisexual people frequently lean one way or the other, that some homosexuals have hetero relationships (to varying degree\u0026rsquo;s), and that lots of homo-leaning bisexual people, identify as gay men (and lesbians). I suppose the thing is, that there\u0026rsquo;s no one right answer to identity, that it\u0026rsquo;s an individual combination of those aforementioned three aspects.\nOnce we\u0026rsquo;ve gotten that one mostly squared away, the issue of \u0026ldquo;Why it matters anyway?\u0026rdquo; remains.\nIdentity is important because it makes it possible, let alone easier to study sexualities and gender. It separates people into groups that you can study. It allows people to fit into communities based on their identities and the intersection of their identities. Having said that, you could also say, that identity segregates people and enforces stereotypes.\nAnd it does.\nKnowing this, is the fact that identity is the source for a great many things that are wrong, reason enough to abandon it, knowing that there is a lot of insight to be gained by studying identity?\nHaving asked that, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that its possible to ever completely avoid identity. It\u0026rsquo;s as central to the human experience as oxygen, Swedish Meatballs (Babylon 5 joke, please disregard,) curiosity, and fear. Therefore, if identity is unavoidable, how on Earth do you study it (in some form) without releasing (and therefore bathing in) the unavoidable detriments of identity?\nFull Stop.\nThat about covers it for now. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s enough just to write something like this, to acknowledge that the issues are out there, and then maybe it\u0026rsquo;s not. Well I tried. Hopefully I can avoid this for a while now. Carry on.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/identity-theory/","summary":"I realize that this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly a new post (at least conceptually,) and I realize/hope that this kind of discourse isn\u0026rsquo;t ultimately useful to anything or anyone; but at the same time, it\u0026rsquo;s an issue/debate that I find myself caring about a lot. Additionally, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve become a lot more coherent on the issue of late, which might be helpful. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean I have any answers, but my questions are more crystallized (to mix metaphors a bit,) which I need to learn to become content with. Let us also not forget the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m bored out of my mined (mostly,) and musing about this is one of my favorite things to torture myself with in fits of boredom.\nI suppose these statements/questions, on some level apply to every kind of group identity, social identities like race, class, education, age, and of course gender/sexuality for starters. Because gender and sexuality are my thing, and while I\u0026rsquo;m perfectly content to go on about race and class, I\u0026rsquo;ll constrain myself a bit, but I would beg the readers to not be so constrained.","title":"Identity Theory"},{"content":"So I just finished watching the second part of Angels in America: Perestroika. My line has been, generally, that the first play is better than the second one. Due to the fact that the second one answers questions too eagerly, and there\u0026rsquo;s some really wonky stuff, notably the scenes in heaven, and the whole bit with Roy Cohn in hell. While we\u0026rsquo;re at it, the whole Ethel Rosenberg stuff was a bit far fetched.\nWell HBO cut the Roy Cohn in hell scene, and I really liked how the scene in heaven worked out. Ethel was still a little over done, but it worked out more or less.\nAnd I must say that the \u0026ldquo;answers\u0026rdquo; given, really aren\u0026rsquo;t answers in the aspect that they don\u0026rsquo;t really provide real closure, they just say \u0026ldquo;it isn\u0026rsquo;t over yet, there\u0026rsquo;s so much more to see.\u0026rdquo; Which is totally true, and satisfying. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s more satisfying because I know that in the 14 years since the end of the epilogue, 33 anti-retroviral drugs have been developed, Ronald Ragan died a miserable death, and the world hasn\u0026rsquo;t ended yet, and there\u0026rsquo;s a hell of a lot yet to see.\nNo mater how avoidant of conclusions I might be in my day-to-day intellectual life, I really do like a good conclusion that makes me smile and cry at the same time.\nI guess that\u0026rsquo;s something I have to keep working on.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/on-second-thoughthellip/","summary":"So I just finished watching the second part of Angels in America: Perestroika. My line has been, generally, that the first play is better than the second one. Due to the fact that the second one answers questions too eagerly, and there\u0026rsquo;s some really wonky stuff, notably the scenes in heaven, and the whole bit with Roy Cohn in hell. While we\u0026rsquo;re at it, the whole Ethel Rosenberg stuff was a bit far fetched.\nWell HBO cut the Roy Cohn in hell scene, and I really liked how the scene in heaven worked out. Ethel was still a little over done, but it worked out more or less.\nAnd I must say that the \u0026ldquo;answers\u0026rdquo; given, really aren\u0026rsquo;t answers in the aspect that they don\u0026rsquo;t really provide real closure, they just say \u0026ldquo;it isn\u0026rsquo;t over yet, there\u0026rsquo;s so much more to see.\u0026rdquo; Which is totally true, and satisfying. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s more satisfying because I know that in the 14 years since the end of the epilogue, 33 anti-retroviral drugs have been developed, Ronald Ragan died a miserable death, and the world hasn\u0026rsquo;t ended yet, and there\u0026rsquo;s a hell of a lot yet to see.","title":"On Second Thought\u0026#38;hellip;"},{"content":"For all of you who cared, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly gotten over whatever funk I\u0026rsquo;ve been in for the last little bit. But I suspect that those of you, who cared, noticed this fact by the four new entries in most recent 24-hour period (since 6pm yesterday). There may be more forth coming. Just hope that I don\u0026rsquo;t burn myself out, and then go through a multi-week burn out period. Parish the thought.\nSo I suppose I had a few goals for the summer when I walked across the stage at graduation (well a few weeks before, but whatever). They were: to get a job and make money, to get a new computer, to start writing again, to start reading again, to spruce up TealArt, and to just hang out with friends more.\nTo review what I\u0026rsquo;ve accomplished: I didn\u0026rsquo;t get a job, and I\u0026rsquo;ve made a little money, I got the new computer, I haven\u0026rsquo;t really started writing, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t finished a book since school let out (and thus much before that date,) I\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot of TealArt sprucing up, and I\u0026rsquo;m satisfied with that outcome, and I\u0026rsquo;ve hung out with friends a little, though perhaps not in the way I might have hoped (but that is completely in character for me, and I\u0026rsquo;m not too disappointed in that.)\nOther than my preparation for college, and all that, my only real accomplishment is that I knitted a splendid shawl, and a couple of hats. Which is certainly not to be taken for granted, but as of right now I don\u0026rsquo;t have any knitting projects to speak of save a few scarves, and I\u0026rsquo;m kind of lost in that respect. Shawl number two I cometh. But that\u0026rsquo;s neither here nor there at the moment.\nSo I think, that I\u0026rsquo;m a bit disappointed with what I\u0026rsquo;ve done so far, but that\u0026rsquo;s ok, like I said, I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a little while in a funk beating myself up for my lack of productivity, and I\u0026rsquo;m over that for now. I\u0026rsquo;m already looking through my bookshelf in search of a (very) limited library to bring with me to college, for my own mandated reading, and I\u0026rsquo;m doing what I can about the writing.\nThe world only spins forward, can\u0026rsquo;t go back now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/summer-goals/","summary":"For all of you who cared, I think I\u0026rsquo;ve mostly gotten over whatever funk I\u0026rsquo;ve been in for the last little bit. But I suspect that those of you, who cared, noticed this fact by the four new entries in most recent 24-hour period (since 6pm yesterday). There may be more forth coming. Just hope that I don\u0026rsquo;t burn myself out, and then go through a multi-week burn out period. Parish the thought.\nSo I suppose I had a few goals for the summer when I walked across the stage at graduation (well a few weeks before, but whatever). They were: to get a job and make money, to get a new computer, to start writing again, to start reading again, to spruce up TealArt, and to just hang out with friends more.\nTo review what I\u0026rsquo;ve accomplished: I didn\u0026rsquo;t get a job, and I\u0026rsquo;ve made a little money, I got the new computer, I haven\u0026rsquo;t really started writing, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t finished a book since school let out (and thus much before that date,) I\u0026rsquo;ve done a lot of TealArt sprucing up, and I\u0026rsquo;m satisfied with that outcome, and I\u0026rsquo;ve hung out with friends a little, though perhaps not in the way I might have hoped (but that is completely in character for me, and I\u0026rsquo;m not too disappointed in that.","title":"Summer Goals"},{"content":"As part of my heavily structured plan to avoid productive tasks, and my writing, I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching the HBO Angels in America that a friend finally gave me on videotape. Which reminds me that I saw a real live production of the play a few months ago, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I ever properly wrote about that here, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to talk a bit about both of them.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve only seen the HBO edition of the first part, as was the play only the first one. I\u0026rsquo;ve read both of them, but as of today, only seen productions of the first one.\nIn the live production, Louis (the Jewish boyfriend who leaves his lover whose (slowly) dying of AIDS) was amazing. I had a hard time being ambivalent about the character (as I suspect you\u0026rsquo;re supposed to), Prior (the (slowly) dying boyfriend), wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite as good, but he was good, and most of the other characters ranged from so-so, to horrible.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t like the HBO Louis very much, but the Prior is way better. Which I think is a good thing, ultimately. I liked Joe, the (closeted) gay Mormon, whose married to a valium addict more than I perhaps should have (probably because he was cute,) and Mary Louise Parker did a wonderful job as Harper (his wife).\nI suppose the thing I disliked most about the HBO version, is that they cut my favorite scene, where Joe\u0026rsquo;s mother, and her real-estate agent are looking out over Salt-Lake City, talking about saint\u0026rsquo;s, moving on, and other stuff. They\u0026rsquo;re smoking (the Mormon mother, included, which is a bit funny,) and in response to discussion of the church of later day saints, the mother says something like \u0026ldquo;(laterday saints) are the only kind of saint\u0026rsquo;s that are left.\u0026rdquo; Which struck a chord with me, for some strange unknown reason.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;ll watch the second half tomorrow, and maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll write another report of it. Or not. My memory from reading the play, is that the second one tries to hard to explain things, and answer questions.\nAs we\u0026rsquo;ve all learned from the last entry, answers and I don\u0026rsquo;t seem to get along very much. It\u0026rsquo;s all about the questions.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-latest-angles/","summary":"As part of my heavily structured plan to avoid productive tasks, and my writing, I\u0026rsquo;ve been watching the HBO Angels in America that a friend finally gave me on videotape. Which reminds me that I saw a real live production of the play a few months ago, and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I ever properly wrote about that here, so I\u0026rsquo;m going to talk a bit about both of them.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve only seen the HBO edition of the first part, as was the play only the first one. I\u0026rsquo;ve read both of them, but as of today, only seen productions of the first one.\nIn the live production, Louis (the Jewish boyfriend who leaves his lover whose (slowly) dying of AIDS) was amazing. I had a hard time being ambivalent about the character (as I suspect you\u0026rsquo;re supposed to), Prior (the (slowly) dying boyfriend), wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite as good, but he was good, and most of the other characters ranged from so-so, to horrible.","title":"The Latest Angles"},{"content":"Well, in two weeks time I\u0026rsquo;ll be driving up to Beloit. I learned on Friday that I got a single room. My form apparently shipped out that morning, and the lady was very apologetic. They\u0026rsquo;re brining in a big Freshman class, they had a higher than expected retention rate, blah blah blah. And then she said, But you got a single. On the 4th Floor.. Hmmm go figure. Well I kind of wanted a roommate, but whatever, I\u0026rsquo;ll take it. I haven\u0026rsquo;t really started to pack. I\u0026rsquo;ve done some abstract organization and basically know what I have to do, but I still have to sit down and make lists.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been rather ambivalent about writing of late. I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet gathered the will power to figure out what\u0026rsquo;s happening in Another Round, nor have I had the will power to open up Circle Games and work on the never ending editing. But I did get my pen out and petted it. I realized that since I got my iBook I haven\u0026rsquo;t really used it that much. I need to give my pen a name. I recently decided to name my computer Anna Madrigal. Hehe. Suggestions are welcome.\nI\u0026rsquo;m completely up to date on all of my \u0026lsquo;blog reading, something that happens only very rarely now that I\u0026rsquo;ve been thoroughly converted to the RSS reader. Usually I read the blogs once or twice a week. It saves a lot of time, and perhaps I should find more blogs to read.\nI should probably put some work into the ASF, but can\u0026rsquo;t decide what story would be the best to tell, and given my tendencies to be too contextual about all of this, it\u0026rsquo;s going to be hard for me to come up with something that I\u0026rsquo;m going to like (as an editor). I have a little story, where the facts where severely twisted, that might (if I can untwist the facts) be a good starting place. Again, another thing I\u0026rsquo;m avoiding.\nMy old computer is still broken, but I\u0026rsquo;ve put the hard drive into my dad\u0026rsquo;s computer (mostly for the purpose of getting all my data off of it. I don\u0026rsquo;t have a clue as to what\u0026rsquo;s wrong with it, but it isn\u0026rsquo;t the HD, nor is it the RAM, which we verified as working before the mega-crash. Which means it\u0026rsquo;s the processor or motherboard. It simply can\u0026rsquo;t be anything else. But we\u0026rsquo;ve replaced both of those, and no combination of new and old parts work. Not only does nothing work, it all doesn\u0026rsquo;t work in the same way, which is utterly confusing. And I have conducted extensive trial and error combinations, and have documented this. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of putting the CD drives and one of my hard drives in my dad\u0026rsquo;s computer, because at least they work, and it would probably make my dad happy.\nI\u0026rsquo;m realizing that my poor little hard drive on this iBook is going to be full in about four weeks at the current rate. And to think, I got the biggest possible drive. So in addition to getting RAM (which, I think, I should be able to push off for a little while thanks to Chris\u0026rsquo; eternal kindness,) some sort of external storage solution looms large in my future. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably just buy an external (fire wire) enclosure, and a 120gb drive (which is only 130ish bucks). In the mean time, I think I should be able to pull some sort of brilliant hacked solution together involving my father\u0026rsquo;s old external CD-RW drive, and the 80 GB hard drive, which will keep me happy for a while.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been spending a fair amount of time ripping CDs onto my iBook so I can have music when I go to school. I have, at the time of press, 2 hours short of 7 full days of music. Total space ~ 9 gigs. I\u0026rsquo;m totally going to want an iPod at some point, but given my frugality I probably won\u0026rsquo;t get that one for years. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably rip another couple of gigs, and leave it at that.\nWell, that\u0026rsquo;s enough for now. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/two-weeks-and-counting/","summary":"Well, in two weeks time I\u0026rsquo;ll be driving up to Beloit. I learned on Friday that I got a single room. My form apparently shipped out that morning, and the lady was very apologetic. They\u0026rsquo;re brining in a big Freshman class, they had a higher than expected retention rate, blah blah blah. And then she said, But you got a single. On the 4th Floor.. Hmmm go figure. Well I kind of wanted a roommate, but whatever, I\u0026rsquo;ll take it. I haven\u0026rsquo;t really started to pack. I\u0026rsquo;ve done some abstract organization and basically know what I have to do, but I still have to sit down and make lists.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been rather ambivalent about writing of late. I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet gathered the will power to figure out what\u0026rsquo;s happening in Another Round, nor have I had the will power to open up Circle Games and work on the never ending editing.","title":"Two Weeks and Counting"},{"content":"Well, I think that the long awaited and much feared Quarto update has successfully transpired. As near as I can tell everything works now, as it should, and as near as all of you can tell, nothing has changed. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to do a little bit of talking about how TealArt works in part because I want to have some sort of geek post to balance out all the knitting and gender/sexuality things I\u0026rsquo;ve been posting, so here it goes.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s this massive mySQL database that has all of the TealArt information: everything that powers Quarto, plus all the static content pages, and all the style sheets and all the design elements. The files that are saved on the web server are nothing but creatively arranged PHP functions and database queries.\nQuarto is the CMS (content management system) that Amy wrote to power a few of her sites. While Amy was writing Quarto, I was writing Circle Games, so we kind of bonded over our ambitious projects, and when Amy was looking for beta-testers. I started jumping up and down. I\u0026rsquo;d been switching back and forth, and had lost a lot of data, and really liked how Quarto was looking, so I jumped on board and never looked back. At this point it was clear that Quarto was beta software, and frankly, I don\u0026rsquo;t think Amy expected TealArt to remain Quarto-Powered.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s how Quarto works: There\u0026rsquo;s this data base structure, and there\u0026rsquo;s an administrative interface that allows us to insert and modify information in the database. (so entries, settings, etc.)\nAt the same time, a completely different set of functions pulls that information from the database, sorts it out, and displays it in the form that you see here.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the thing that makes most PHP/mySQL powered CMS\u0026rsquo;s unique: (and Quarto especially so) the backend (administration) and front end (display) are completely independent of each other, which gives the user (that would be Chris and I) an incredible amount of freedom in customizing output.\nThis is why TealArt looks exactly the same now as it did before: even though the database has changed a bit, and the admin interface is a bit different: I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet touched the display. Actually, as I look over it, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that the display will be Chris\u0026rsquo; province.\nNow here\u0026rsquo;s what we have to do:\nMake the Archives Page More organized, probably using periodical (monthly) archives, drop down lists and the like. Right now the archive page is just a modified main index page, set to show all the entries. Fix the categories page somehow. Find some way to merge the linkage and main page log into one line of data. This will probably require some hacking to do properly. Implement Trackbacks. This one is for Chris\u0026rsquo; amusement only. The database has a trackback table, but the support hasn\u0026rsquo;t been written into the file. Update the Entry page, and get commenting to work properly. Get (more\u0026hellip;) links to work so that extended entry text doesn\u0026rsquo;t get shown on the main page. That list will be updated as we find new things to do, and hopefully as we complete old items.\nNow our second option is to ditch Quarto completely and start using Wordpress, which is the only other CMS worth using. Well other than GreySight, which Noah won\u0026rsquo;t even let his bestest buddies use, but that\u0026rsquo;s a non-issue.\nThe problem with switching at this point is that we have 630+ entries in Quarto, about 200 in the main journal 150 in the Aux Journal (formerly Paradigm,) 150 quotes, and 100 Links. Or something. All of the entries are in the same table (site differentiation are made in a site id field,) and seeing as Wordpress doesn\u0026rsquo;t have separate sites, (but their implementation of Categories, would probably allow us to accomplish the same thing. Where I was going with this train of though, is that writing an import script is going to be one major pain in the rear.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s where we are now. Stay tuned (as always)!!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/update-update/","summary":"Well, I think that the long awaited and much feared Quarto update has successfully transpired. As near as I can tell everything works now, as it should, and as near as all of you can tell, nothing has changed. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to do a little bit of talking about how TealArt works in part because I want to have some sort of geek post to balance out all the knitting and gender/sexuality things I\u0026rsquo;ve been posting, so here it goes.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s this massive mySQL database that has all of the TealArt information: everything that powers Quarto, plus all the static content pages, and all the style sheets and all the design elements. The files that are saved on the web server are nothing but creatively arranged PHP functions and database queries.\nQuarto is the CMS (content management system) that Amy wrote to power a few of her sites. While Amy was writing Quarto, I was writing Circle Games, so we kind of bonded over our ambitious projects, and when Amy was looking for beta-testers.","title":"Update, Update"},{"content":"Ok, this is a really rough update, which i\u0026rsquo;m not even offering the basic plesentries of route spell check. I\u0026rsquo;ve updated quarto, and asuming this posts correctly, it all looks to work right. There are a few things that I need to do yet, but we\u0026rsquo;re almost there. Bear with me. I\u0026rsquo;ll edit this later, as updates are forthcoming.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/undergoing-the-update/","summary":"Ok, this is a really rough update, which i\u0026rsquo;m not even offering the basic plesentries of route spell check. I\u0026rsquo;ve updated quarto, and asuming this posts correctly, it all looks to work right. There are a few things that I need to do yet, but we\u0026rsquo;re almost there. Bear with me. I\u0026rsquo;ll edit this later, as updates are forthcoming.","title":"Undergoing the Update"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve started to make a list of guidelines for my Affinity story project. It\u0026rsquo;s by no means definitive, and subject to change/my whim at this point, but I think this itÔøΩs helpful to my process, so here it is.\nContributors should be male, and have been raised as such. Contributors should be gay, bisexual, and/or have had significant romantic and/or sexual relationships with other men. Stories should be factual, though it\u0026rsquo;s ok to change minor details, like names and locations to protect yourself and/or your friends/family. Stories should be written from the perspective of the author in the first person. Stories should tell of event(s), and feelings the author felt in reaction to the events, and thus should not attempt to analyze the event in a larger context. Contributors need not have \u0026ldquo;come out,\u0026rdquo; to their friends, family, teachers, etc. confidentiality will be respected. Contributors need not be 18. (Is there some way that I can pull that off? Also, is there a way that we can dodge the mandated reporter bullet? I mean I don\u0026rsquo;t think I have to report anything if I don\u0026rsquo;t want to, but I need to decide how I feel about this. I\u0026rsquo;d want to encourage confidence in possible contributors that have stories about cutting, abuse, etc?) How has being gay/bi has affected your friend type relationships? How has coming out has affected existing relationships? How dose your gay/bi identity affect your relationship to women? Dating as a young gay/bi man? How has being gay/bi affected school? How has coming out affected your relationship with your parents? Grandparents? Have you ever come out and regretted it later? How do you feel when you see a straight couple your age being affectionate in public? Have you gone to a Pride celebration? Why or Why not? If so what was it like? Examples that other gay men/youth have presented for you. How has being bi affected a heterosexual relationship? A homosexual one? Gay role models. Having a closeted relationship even if you were out. Being in the closet, and staying in the closet. Your feelings about the community of young gay/bi men. Examples of subject matter for stories:\nYour reaction upon meeting someone else that was gay (or lesbian). The first time you identified with some one who was gay/bi and how you felt. How you felt when you met/saw/heard about the first (other) person in your age group that was gay/bi. A time an unexpected ally came to your defense, ie. A teacher standing up for you. Conversely, the time when an expected ally (like a best friend) didn\u0026rsquo;t come to your defense. How you felt when HIV/AIDS became real for you. And basically this amounts to me thinking out loud on the \u0026lsquo;blog, but then I\u0026rsquo;m prone to doing that even under the best of circumstances. Now all I have to do is synthesize this in to something a bit more coherent, and more user friendly.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/affinity-story-guidelines/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve started to make a list of guidelines for my Affinity story project. It\u0026rsquo;s by no means definitive, and subject to change/my whim at this point, but I think this itÔøΩs helpful to my process, so here it is.\nContributors should be male, and have been raised as such. Contributors should be gay, bisexual, and/or have had significant romantic and/or sexual relationships with other men. Stories should be factual, though it\u0026rsquo;s ok to change minor details, like names and locations to protect yourself and/or your friends/family. Stories should be written from the perspective of the author in the first person. Stories should tell of event(s), and feelings the author felt in reaction to the events, and thus should not attempt to analyze the event in a larger context. Contributors need not have \u0026ldquo;come out,\u0026rdquo; to their friends, family, teachers, etc. confidentiality will be respected. Contributors need not be 18. (Is there some way that I can pull that off?","title":"Affinity Story Guidelines"},{"content":"In my last knitting post, I complained about how much I really didn\u0026rsquo;t like having a project to knit on, and was at a loss of what to start next. Well, that hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed, but I feel less like I need to cast on for the next awesome project. In the past few days, I\u0026rsquo;ve made 3 or 4 scarves. This brings the grand total to 6. There\u0026rsquo;s another one on the needles. I have yarn for another one or two in my knitting bowl. I\u0026rsquo;m working on the felted vest, and making respectable progress on that project. I might get to the steeks before I go to school. I\u0026rsquo;m not finding that very relaxing at the moment, so it isn\u0026rsquo;t my \u0026ldquo;primary\u0026rdquo; project. Not that I have a primary project at this point. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably cast on for the next shawl and pick out a few simple lace patterns for that sometime soon, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like I have to do that. I think the frenzied phase I was in a few days ago.\nI just realized that this is the first time in, oh, two years that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been actually enrolled in some sort of academic program. I did nothing except write, after my sophomore year of High School, after junior year, I had a bunch of IB stuff to do, which really killed that summer. For most of this summer, I\u0026rsquo;ve been in a gender studies class. This is a really weird feeling, and given that I have a few days left of summer before I have to get ready to move, and then move and start the whole process over again. Like I said, the last time I was in this situation, I wrote the first half of a book. That was a whole summer; this is somewhat less than that.\nIts just really weird not to be in some sort of frenzied state, to not have anything hanging over my head. I mean the moving away thing is sort of hanging over my head, but it\u0026rsquo;s completely different from the \u0026ldquo;write this paper\u0026rdquo; hanging over my head. Anyway, that\u0026rsquo;s where I am.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/frenzied/","summary":"In my last knitting post, I complained about how much I really didn\u0026rsquo;t like having a project to knit on, and was at a loss of what to start next. Well, that hasn\u0026rsquo;t changed, but I feel less like I need to cast on for the next awesome project. In the past few days, I\u0026rsquo;ve made 3 or 4 scarves. This brings the grand total to 6. There\u0026rsquo;s another one on the needles. I have yarn for another one or two in my knitting bowl. I\u0026rsquo;m working on the felted vest, and making respectable progress on that project. I might get to the steeks before I go to school. I\u0026rsquo;m not finding that very relaxing at the moment, so it isn\u0026rsquo;t my \u0026ldquo;primary\u0026rdquo; project. Not that I have a primary project at this point. I\u0026rsquo;ll probably cast on for the next shawl and pick out a few simple lace patterns for that sometime soon, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like I have to do that.","title":"Frenzied"},{"content":"So there\u0026rsquo;s this Message Board for people who are going to Beloit College in the fall, so that the class that\u0026rsquo;s entering in Fall 2004 can all get to know each other. Most of the time, the fare is pretty stupid: What kinds of music do you like? Where are you all from? Why did you choose Beloit? and so forth. Like the good homosexual I am, I started a thread for \u0026ldquo;GLBT/Queer/Other/Non-Straight\u0026rdquo; people. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten some response, a few out guys, more more girls, and tons of \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not gay, really, but I love my gay friends.\u0026rdquo; Mostly what I expected, but it was good to bring the issue up.\nA few days ago, a guy posted, asking, \u0026ldquo;what the big deal is about sexuality, why do people feel the need to declare themselves?\u0026rdquo;\nAt which point I cringed so much that I upset the cat. While in retrospect, the question did in fact come from an ignorance of the issue, that wasn\u0026rsquo;t completely evident at the time. That kind of question struck me as something to be avoided. Like people who say, \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t see what the big deal about race is,\u0026rdquo; which is a train of thought which I am of the opinion should be avoided.\nSo I wrote this piece, in the vain of, \u0026ldquo;why sexualities are important and matter.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s concise, perhaps too concise, but it covers everything sufficiently. To my surprise I got a number of responses to this piece and so I\u0026rsquo;m going to post it here, with a few minor improvements.\nRight. Well then\u0026hellip;\nIdentity is made up of a few things (concerning gender/sexuality/etc.) Your behavior, your feelings/desire (I\u0026rsquo;m lumping, the identity that you claim, in here, even though that may not match up with actual desires,) and how other people see you (and thus how you\u0026rsquo;re socialized,) all of which are situational and subject to change. They all contribute in different proportions to \u0026ldquo;the identity,\u0026rdquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to make a qualitative judgment as to this system of identity construction, but they\u0026rsquo;re all factors in this system, which is very much a reality in the world we live in, and I\u0026rsquo;ll leave this debate at that.\nGender and sex are really important to how we relate to the rest of the world. When meeting other people before we say hello, before we shake hands, we make a judgment about people\u0026rsquo;s gender (Boy/Girl). We make other judgments too, which are also important (race, class, education, age,) but the \u0026ldquo;gender call\u0026rdquo; happens really early. Often this judgment is correct, though not always, and based on this of others, we alter our interactions. It\u0026rsquo;s part of that whole socialization thing. Again, I don\u0026rsquo;t want to make a judgment as to the quality of this system, but I do know that it happens regularly.\nOk, that\u0026rsquo;s really simplified, but I feel there\u0026rsquo;s truth there.\nSo how does sexuality play into it? Right. Sexuality is really key to our definition and construction of gender. For example you hear the word \u0026ldquo;lesbian\u0026rdquo; and you think of women with power tools, flannel shirts, short hair, and the whole bit. Or, if you see someone who fits that description and you\u0026rsquo;ll probably think lesbian. If a guy is in anyway femme, people think gay. It gets acted out on schoolyards everywhere, to mention nothing of the adult world.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s why sexuality is important, at least in my mind (can you tell I\u0026rsquo;m a budding psych/gender/queer studies guy?) Now, why are we (I) talking about it here?\nBecause affinity is an excessively powerful tool for feeling comfortable in a new community, for social change and just for a feeling of safety. As a gay man, I want to know that there are going to be other gay people where I\u0026rsquo;m going. It\u0026rsquo;ll make me feel safe. The metaphor of a \u0026ldquo;big gay family\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t appropriate for a number of reasons, but there are some aspects of that notion, that are kind of true, and I want to make sure that there will be an affinity community when I get to Beloit, or at least have the option of finding a kind of affinity group at Beloit.\nOh, and while sleeping with straight guys is initially thrilling, it\u0026rsquo;s ultimately trite, bad, unsatisfying, and not emotionally healthy for me. Just joking, mostly.\nCheers,\n(There. I think it covers things pretty well, and provides me with the very beginning of something for the affinity story project.)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/why-it-all-matters-in-the-end/","summary":"So there\u0026rsquo;s this Message Board for people who are going to Beloit College in the fall, so that the class that\u0026rsquo;s entering in Fall 2004 can all get to know each other. Most of the time, the fare is pretty stupid: What kinds of music do you like? Where are you all from? Why did you choose Beloit? and so forth. Like the good homosexual I am, I started a thread for \u0026ldquo;GLBT/Queer/Other/Non-Straight\u0026rdquo; people. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten some response, a few out guys, more more girls, and tons of \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not gay, really, but I love my gay friends.\u0026rdquo; Mostly what I expected, but it was good to bring the issue up.\nA few days ago, a guy posted, asking, \u0026ldquo;what the big deal is about sexuality, why do people feel the need to declare themselves?\u0026rdquo;\nAt which point I cringed so much that I upset the cat. While in retrospect, the question did in fact come from an ignorance of the issue, that wasn\u0026rsquo;t completely evident at the time.","title":"Why it All Matters in the End"},{"content":"Well I\u0026rsquo;ve finished a couple of knitting projects recently. I finished the second beanie (as per my pattern,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve made another scarf. I have two Lion Brand Jiffy Scarves, that are fairly nice, but nothing to get excited about. The new scarf is some white/ivory Lion Brand \u0026ldquo;Homespun\u0026rdquo; that I got for a quarter at a rummage sale. I used about half a skein on a modestly lengthed scarf. I use the Magic Scarf method. Cast 50 Stitches on a 10.5 16-inch needle. I use the backward loop method (as tightly as possible). Knit till it\u0026rsquo;s at least half the length of the desired scarf, then I cast off as directed, and that\u0026rsquo;s basically it. I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you all the pithy directions, because this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly intended to be a pattern post.\nAnother rummage sale find, was this perfectly hideous \u0026ldquo;sweater.\u0026rdquo; It was this sleeveless Charlie Brown number, made out of long strips of leather. Yes. Cowhide, leather. I riped most of it (except for the white and fuscia bits) saved a bunch of it, and I\u0026rsquo;m currently the more naturally leather colored \u0026ldquo;yarn\u0026rdquo; carried together with the rest of the homespun.\nNot that I need any more scarves mind you, but given that my net investment in most of these products is like fifty cents for all of them, and I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed the making I\u0026rsquo;m thinking that I might as well make a few extra bucks by selling them. Also, hand knit scarves are totally the rage these days, so I\u0026rsquo;m also looking for places to sell my wares. I\u0026rsquo;ve found a craft store that clearly takes a commission that\u0026rsquo;s way way way to high. But then maybe it\u0026rsquo;d be worth it, if I could make 50 bucks (or a bit more) for a 4-5 scarves, especially ones that I do for fun whilst reading or something, it\u0026rsquo;d be worth it. The problem is, of course, finding yarn at these prices, and the truth is, that I\u0026rsquo;d like to be able to get some slightly nicer yarn.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m kind of enjoying making a few smaller projects, I think I\u0026rsquo;d really like to work on something bigger. I have an unfinished felted vest that I\u0026rsquo;ve started to work on again, the only problem is it\u0026rsquo;s 100% wool. All the lanolin is still in the yarn, so it\u0026rsquo;s REALLY hot to sit under. I guess I\u0026rsquo;ll have to put that one off for a little while longer. I was really hoping to be able to finish this before I went away so I could stitch up the steaks before I went away to school, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;ll happen. My most recent yarn purchase is of the same stuff, so I think that\u0026rsquo;s going to get put off until I\u0026rsquo;m in cooler climes.\nThis leaves me in the uncomfortable middle ground between projects. I don\u0026rsquo;t have anything to start, really, and all of the things I\u0026rsquo;m working on aren\u0026rsquo;t suitable. I have a few shawls that I could start, but again I\u0026rsquo;ve made two shawls recently, and I\u0026rsquo;m not keen on starting a new one. So I\u0026rsquo;m in this weird in between place. There\u0026rsquo;s also a pair of socks that I want to make, and I could make another hat or two or three if I wanted, but I\u0026rsquo;ve made two hats recently, and I want to try something else. I\u0026rsquo;m due for another sweater, but the only yarn I have in enough quantity is fingering/sport-mercerized cotton. Not suitable.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s where I am. In other news, Chris is having computer problems from hell, I\u0026rsquo;m moving away in less than three weeks, and I\u0026rsquo;m basically on vacation. No more class, no parent\u0026rsquo;s (for six days), and not that much to do. Sweeet.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-joy-of-finishing/","summary":"Well I\u0026rsquo;ve finished a couple of knitting projects recently. I finished the second beanie (as per my pattern,) and I\u0026rsquo;ve made another scarf. I have two Lion Brand Jiffy Scarves, that are fairly nice, but nothing to get excited about. The new scarf is some white/ivory Lion Brand \u0026ldquo;Homespun\u0026rdquo; that I got for a quarter at a rummage sale. I used about half a skein on a modestly lengthed scarf. I use the Magic Scarf method. Cast 50 Stitches on a 10.5 16-inch needle. I use the backward loop method (as tightly as possible). Knit till it\u0026rsquo;s at least half the length of the desired scarf, then I cast off as directed, and that\u0026rsquo;s basically it. I\u0026rsquo;ll spare you all the pithy directions, because this isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly intended to be a pattern post.\nAnother rummage sale find, was this perfectly hideous \u0026ldquo;sweater.\u0026rdquo; It was this sleeveless Charlie Brown number, made out of long strips of leather.","title":"The Joy of Finishing"},{"content":"Disclaimer: This patterns was created based on rough math, available yarn, and vague memory of what my gauge usually is with this type of yarn. After the satisfactory completion of the project, I\u0026rsquo;ve compiled my memory of the process and evidence gathered from the finished object. There are two sets of directions: a narrative description of the process written in plain English, and pithy knitting shorthand. I make no guarantees, feel free to notify me of any errors or improvements to the pattern, but I think it should work. Enjoy!\nI was finished with most of my other knitting project and needed something new that would keep me interested and would last more than a couple of days. I had a 100 gram ball of Lion Brand Magic Stripe Yarn (I believe it only comes in 100g balls), and I defiantly wasn\u0026rsquo;t in the mood to make socks, and this yarn has been lying around for a while, so my mom suggested making a hat. So I started to make a hat, and I\u0026rsquo;m usually fairly wary of hats, cause I have a problem getting the crown decreases to come out right. Despite this, I am moving to Wisconsin in a few months, and I need all the woolen garments I can make, so I started making a hat.\nI usually get somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 stitches to an inch with this kind of yarn, on US 1 or 0 size needles. Generally I use US 1s for 4 ply yarn, and US 0s for 4 ply yarn. Magic stripe is 6 ply, so I used 1s (Susan Bates, coated, in this case). After measuring my head, I cast on 150 stitches, (or more accurately had my mom cast on 150 stitches). She used the long tail method; any kind of elastic cast on method will work, though. I began knitting in 2x2 ribbing, (that is knit 2, purl 2), for 3.5 inches. I should note, that by the third round I had 148 stitches at e this point. I tend to decrease as appropriate rather than increase to correct errors in establishing a ribbing pattern, it\u0026rsquo;s unnoticeable without a magnifying glass, and in this case, it makes the cast on a bit more forgiving.\nAfter 3.5 inches, switch to stocking stitch, it might be prudent to decrease 7-10% of the total stitches, as this point, (10-15 stitches, evenly spaced). I must admit that I forgot to do this on the original model, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten to that point on the second hat yet. Again, knit for 3.5 inches, plain stocking stitch, or perhaps a hair more. I knit about 3.75 inches.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s now time to begin the crown decreases. Rather than randomly choosing thright number of spokes and decrease types, I modified the pattern for a sock toe that I\u0026rsquo;d seen my mother do. It\u0026rsquo;s from the mismatched striped socks in Nancy Bush\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Knitting for Travelers,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Road Knitting\u0026rdquo; (there\u0026rsquo;s one book, the question is with my memory), and believe it or not, it worked: unbelievably well.\nFor the first decrease round knit seven (K7), knit two together (k2tog), and repeat for the entire round; then knit seven rounds plain. Then knit the second decrease round, which is knit six (K6), knit two together (k2tog) and repeat for the rest of the ro0und, then knit six rounds plain. Continue in this pattern, there are eight rounds in total. After the knit one, knit two together (repeat for the round), and the single plain round that follows, knit one round of knit two togethers, and end with a single plain round. The 16 inch circular needle will probably become too large after the knit four knit two together round, so switch to double points, or some alternate method of knitting very small rounds, but you probably knew that.\nBy this point you\u0026rsquo;ve probably noticed two things. First of all, those decrease rounds don\u0026rsquo;t fit evenly into the round. This is ok and is not ultimately detrimental to the final hat. It\u0026rsquo;s possible that this only happened because I had 148 stitches, and not a more even 150. But I\u0026rsquo;m sure some will want to alter the number of stitches because not everyone has a head that\u0026rsquo;s SamSized. You could alternate the decreases so that they come out perfectly, or make sure the number of stitches you chose is perfectly divisible. But I\u0026rsquo;d recommend that you not worry about it, I admit that I move the last decrease over a stitch or two to make it more even, but not worrying about it is just as effective. Knitter\u0026rsquo;s choice.\nAlso, you\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that you\u0026rsquo;ve come to the end of the pattern and you have 7-10 stitches, on your needles. I grafted (Kitchener stitch) this opening closed. I think it looks great. If you\u0026rsquo;re afraid of grafting, don\u0026rsquo;t worry I am too. You could also break the yarn and draw through the remaining stitches (especially if you want to add a pom-pom.) After this, weave in the two ends, smile pat yourself on the back, and start on a second one.\nPithy Directions for this Fine Gauge Knitted Beanie Style Hat/Cap\nGauge: 7 st/in on US 1\u0026rsquo;s Needles: 16\u0026quot; Circular US 1s, and 1 set of US 1 double points. Yarn: 1 skein of Lion Brand Magic Stripe Yarn. 100 grams. There will be leftovers. The finished product weights about 60 grams. Other Materials: 1 Tapestry needle, and a marker (or suitable length of yarn)\nDirections: CO 150 st on 16\u0026quot; cn. Join (being careful to not twist, of course). Establish K2 P2 rib.\nWhen piece measures 3.5 in. switch to st st. *K8 K2tog repeat from * 15 times for one round. (optional.)\nKnit plain for 3.75 inches.\nCrown Decreases: *K7 K2tog repeat from * till end, fudging the last few stitches as desired. K 7 rounds plain.\n*K6 K2tog repeat from * till end, fudging the last few stitches as desired. K 6 rounds plain.\n*K5 K2tog repeat from * till end, fudging the last few stitches as desired. K 5 rounds plain.\n*K4 K2tog repeat from * till end, fudging the last few stitches as desired. K 4 rounds plain.\n*K3 K2tog repeat from * till end, fudging the last few stitches as desired. K 3 rounds plain.\n*K2 K2tog repeat from * till end, fudging the last few stitches as desired. K 2 rounds plain.\n*K1 K2tog repeat from * till end. K 1 rounds plain.\n*K2tog repeat from * till end. K 1 rounds plain.\nUsing Kitchener stitch, graft remaining stitches together. Weave in ends. Apply Hat to head, folding the ribbing up over the ears. Prepare to be complimented for your new hat, and cast on 150 for another one.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/pattern-basic-beanie/","summary":"Disclaimer: This patterns was created based on rough math, available yarn, and vague memory of what my gauge usually is with this type of yarn. After the satisfactory completion of the project, I\u0026rsquo;ve compiled my memory of the process and evidence gathered from the finished object. There are two sets of directions: a narrative description of the process written in plain English, and pithy knitting shorthand. I make no guarantees, feel free to notify me of any errors or improvements to the pattern, but I think it should work. Enjoy!\nI was finished with most of my other knitting project and needed something new that would keep me interested and would last more than a couple of days. I had a 100 gram ball of Lion Brand Magic Stripe Yarn (I believe it only comes in 100g balls), and I defiantly wasn\u0026rsquo;t in the mood to make socks, and this yarn has been lying around for a while, so my mom suggested making a hat.","title":"Pattern: Fine Gauge Knitted Beanie Style Hat/Cap"},{"content":"Ok, I mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to be posting stuff about my knitting hobby on TealArt. There\u0026rsquo;s a definite community of knitting web log\u0026rsquo;s many that I read with some frequency, or at least the same amount of frequency that I read any weblog, any more (somehow, by using an RSS reader, I\u0026rsquo;ve started reading weblogs less compulsively, but that\u0026rsquo;s fodder for another entry).\nJust as Chris, wants to break into the technology commentary \u0026lsquo;blog bubble, I kind of want to break into the knitting \u0026lsquo;blog world. But the thing is, TealArt doesn\u0026rsquo;t break into bubbles. We kind of slide into the bubbles we\u0026rsquo;re interested in and linger in the background, and like a lot of the inanimate objects/factors in my creative life, I have to learn how to deal with it as it is. Again, this is fodder for another entry, and if you didn\u0026rsquo;t get my point, that\u0026rsquo;s quite all right.\nThe other thing, is knitting bloggers, have a definite kind of style that I don\u0026rsquo;t really fit into. They talk about their families, children, (usually, and of course to different degrees) their current knitting projects, recent yarn purchases, their cats, and they of course dibble in politics/current events, just like the rest of us. Oh and Knit Blog entries have LOTS of pictures, which I like reading, but don\u0026rsquo;t particularly like writing.\nSo typically, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to write that kind of knitting content, and I\u0026rsquo;m not really that kind of knitter. I\u0026rsquo;ll write up patterns that I make up, useful tricks that I find whilst knitting, other interesting things I find along the knitting journey.\nI have a lengthy article that I wrote about translating patterns for sweaters that are designed to be knit back and forth, and then sown up into circular tube type patterns. It\u0026rsquo;s logical, but I have to clean it up and chop it up into little pieces for presentation here. I also have what I think is the most genius pattern for a hat, all written up. I\u0026rsquo;ll proof that some more and post it in a few days. And I have a pattern for a pair of socks all worked up in my head, that I\u0026rsquo;m going to start knitting next. That\u0026rsquo;s what\u0026rsquo;s on the table.\nI should warn you all, that I\u0026rsquo;m a really esoteric kind of knitter. I love to read knitting patterns, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really love to follow them. I\u0026rsquo;m one of those left handed knitters that knit \u0026ldquo;backwards,\u0026rdquo; as I said before, I frequently rewrite sweater patterns so I\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy making them more. I like to learn lots of techniques--ways of getting a certain result--so that I can mix and match as desired. Fairly often my attempts are successful, occasionally I fall flat on my face.\nOh, and while were\u0026rsquo; talking about esoteric, I should mention my yarn philosophy. I\u0026rsquo;m 18 going to college, and if I\u0026rsquo;m not broke, I\u0026rsquo;m usually fairly close. I suppose I could afford to buy nicer yarn new, but I generally don\u0026rsquo;t. I also am pretty good about keeping a small stash. At the moment I\u0026rsquo;m sitting on 6,000 yards of fingering weight mercerized cotton, that I got for two dollars and fifty cents at a rummage sale (that was really the yard sale find of the century). I make a lot of things out of cotton. There are also three cones of similar mercerized cotton that I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of claiming (brown in this case), that my mom got under similar circumstances. While I don\u0026rsquo;t have a yardage on that, think it\u0026rsquo;s more like 8,000-10,000 yards. Other than that, I have a couple of skeins of acrylic yarn that people have offloaded on me, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s about it. I\u0026rsquo;ve also discovered that there are people selling some kinds of cone yarn fairly cheaply on eBay. I\u0026rsquo;m going to start buying yarn by the kilo.\nAt the moment, I\u0026rsquo;m working on a slightly updated version of the hat pattern that I\u0026rsquo;m going to post soon as my primary project. I\u0026rsquo;m also stuck in that never ending icord place with a very purple version of this bag, and I have a felted vest that I just need to work on for a few days (probably going to be the next thing I work on.) I\u0026rsquo;m also making a swanky white scarf that I\u0026rsquo;m going to give away/sell, but that\u0026rsquo;s a really quick project.\nOn the docket for new projects are: this nifty pair of socks (aforementioned), a sweater (for which I still don\u0026rsquo;t have yarn), a \u0026ldquo;Danish\u0026rdquo; shawl, and some commercial knitting (fashion scarves and the like.) I\u0026rsquo;ll post about each of these in time.\nWell, I think that\u0026rsquo;s all for now! Thanks for reading, and stay tuned.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-knitting-content-tealart/","summary":"Ok, I mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to be posting stuff about my knitting hobby on TealArt. There\u0026rsquo;s a definite community of knitting web log\u0026rsquo;s many that I read with some frequency, or at least the same amount of frequency that I read any weblog, any more (somehow, by using an RSS reader, I\u0026rsquo;ve started reading weblogs less compulsively, but that\u0026rsquo;s fodder for another entry).\nJust as Chris, wants to break into the technology commentary \u0026lsquo;blog bubble, I kind of want to break into the knitting \u0026lsquo;blog world. But the thing is, TealArt doesn\u0026rsquo;t break into bubbles. We kind of slide into the bubbles we\u0026rsquo;re interested in and linger in the background, and like a lot of the inanimate objects/factors in my creative life, I have to learn how to deal with it as it is. Again, this is fodder for another entry, and if you didn\u0026rsquo;t get my point, that\u0026rsquo;s quite all right.","title":"New Knitting Content @ TealArt"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m kind of friends (as in I don\u0026rsquo;t know her that well, but we\u0026rsquo;ve met and talked at some length), with this girl who wrote a book called \u0026ldquo;My Sisters\u0026rsquo; Voices: Teenage Girls of Color Speak Out.\u0026rdquo;\nApparently Iris was reading a book that discussed the position and perspective of teenage girls through a series of essays written by young women, and while she liked it, it didn\u0026rsquo;t really identify with her struggle, as a young person of color. So she collected the essays for that book and published it, and there it is.\nWhich got me thinking, you know, there really should be something in a similar vein written by/about young gay men, or at least young male identifying people who are a bit alienated from the straight/narrow/binary world. On the one hand, it would be really easy for guys to lie down and play the victim, and I would fear that a project like this would come off as whiny, self centered, and overly depressive. On the other hand, young men need to be empowered to break out of the straight/narrow/binary system. I\u0026rsquo;d also be worried that it would get too intellectual, because guys have a tendency to do that: ntellectualize the position to the point of oblivion, and ignore or omit the emotional overtones, which could really hurt the overall impact of such a project.\nWhat do you all think? Leave a comment, or drop me a line. Thanks!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/affinity-story-projects/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m kind of friends (as in I don\u0026rsquo;t know her that well, but we\u0026rsquo;ve met and talked at some length), with this girl who wrote a book called \u0026ldquo;My Sisters\u0026rsquo; Voices: Teenage Girls of Color Speak Out.\u0026rdquo;\nApparently Iris was reading a book that discussed the position and perspective of teenage girls through a series of essays written by young women, and while she liked it, it didn\u0026rsquo;t really identify with her struggle, as a young person of color. So she collected the essays for that book and published it, and there it is.\nWhich got me thinking, you know, there really should be something in a similar vein written by/about young gay men, or at least young male identifying people who are a bit alienated from the straight/narrow/binary world. On the one hand, it would be really easy for guys to lie down and play the victim, and I would fear that a project like this would come off as whiny, self centered, and overly depressive.","title":"Affinity Story Project(s)"},{"content":"I kind of thought I would be updating the TealArt website at the moment. We\u0026rsquo;re about a year overdue for the next version of Quarto, the content management system that runs all of TealArt. Amy and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been terribly good at synchronizing our schedules, so she\u0026rsquo;s off to Atlanta again this weekend. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking next Wednesday or so would be a good time to get it all done.\nOnce that gets done, I\u0026rsquo;m going to do the next phase of the site reorganization. This one includes rewriting the display of the main page. Before next Wednesday I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and clean up all of the \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; pages, which have been a little too static, even for static pages.\nBut as I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;ve all noticed, we\u0026rsquo;ve done the design. It\u0026rsquo;s a simpler more \u0026ldquo;branded\u0026rdquo; type of design. The graphic was a collaborative effort between myself and the ever fabulous Indi. Ok so not really collaborative at all. Indi did this quick graphic for me because I liked the look his awesome new design. So, he made me a new graphic and I was really particular about it. Well it\u0026rsquo;s how Chris and I work together. Not really.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve set up a new category for Knitting related posts, which I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to write about, but I\u0026rsquo;ve managed to hit the maximum amount of knitting related things I can take in for a while. We\u0026rsquo;ll call it a fiber overdose. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty close to finishing this one shawl, so I did the only logical thing: I picked up a project I had put down for months and it was a bit too much for me. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll be better in the morning after I write some.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-grunge-look/","summary":"I kind of thought I would be updating the TealArt website at the moment. We\u0026rsquo;re about a year overdue for the next version of Quarto, the content management system that runs all of TealArt. Amy and I haven\u0026rsquo;t been terribly good at synchronizing our schedules, so she\u0026rsquo;s off to Atlanta again this weekend. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking next Wednesday or so would be a good time to get it all done.\nOnce that gets done, I\u0026rsquo;m going to do the next phase of the site reorganization. This one includes rewriting the display of the main page. Before next Wednesday I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and clean up all of the \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; pages, which have been a little too static, even for static pages.\nBut as I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;ve all noticed, we\u0026rsquo;ve done the design. It\u0026rsquo;s a simpler more \u0026ldquo;branded\u0026rdquo; type of design. The graphic was a collaborative effort between myself and the ever fabulous Indi.","title":"The Grunge Look"},{"content":"I consulted with a few of my contacts about the mystery computer problem, and the consensus of opinion is that if a new power supply doesn\u0026rsquo;t fix this problem, we\u0026rsquo;ll have to start doing ritual dances around it. It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that one of my trusted consultants, and most of my family are members of a ritual dance team, but honestly now. This had better work, because I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue.\nIn other news, I had another one of my Anthro Gender/Sex Roles class for the week. It was enjoyable, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m perhaps a little closer to understanding my distain/problem with this whole anthropology thing. I don\u0026rsquo;t have the right Zen for it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading these ethnographies about gender roles and relationships in foraging societies, and seeing the potential and beginnings for the development of patriarchy, male dominance, and all the ills that go along with that. But the truth is, that these cultures have a fundamental egalitarianism (or something), and despite idiosyncratic elements of inequality, they\u0026rsquo;re naturally egalitarian.\nWhile not ideal, the anthropologic mode of analysis, or the lens through which cultural critiques are made is this kind of egalitarianism. It\u0026rsquo;s very pragmatic, and I like pragmatism.\nHaving said that, I suppose I was expecting that this course would contribute to feminist criticism by comparing less patriarchal societies with our own, or by illustrating the various flavors male dominance and patriarchy can take across cultures. But the approach I\u0026rsquo;m seeing here is the development of, which is helpful, just in a different way, that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t quite expecting. The thought of course being, that if you can\u0026rsquo;t find a culture that developed differently (because there cannot be controls for these studies,) then don\u0026rsquo;t even bother to approach the issue of deconstruction/dismantling from that perspective; but rather from the perspective of, if we know how it developed, then maybe we can undo.\nThat being said, this week we talked about Gender in Prehistory, so this is more like a \u0026ldquo;development of culture\u0026rdquo; type of study, so in order to (in this case) draw conclusions and be sure that your conclusions are well founded, I think a little bit of Zen is required. But even when the cultures aren\u0026rsquo;t Neolithic, it takes a certain leap of faith to make a connection. At least, at this moment, I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly good at making leaps of faith like that. Maybe that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m supposed to learn from all this.\nAnother thing this proves, which is a concept that I think I knew, but that I\u0026rsquo;m learning more completely now is the meaning of cultural construction That is, in terms of the content. On a more cosmic level, I\u0026rsquo;m learning how to be more Zen.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/zenning-gender/","summary":"I consulted with a few of my contacts about the mystery computer problem, and the consensus of opinion is that if a new power supply doesn\u0026rsquo;t fix this problem, we\u0026rsquo;ll have to start doing ritual dances around it. It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that one of my trusted consultants, and most of my family are members of a ritual dance team, but honestly now. This had better work, because I haven\u0026rsquo;t a clue.\nIn other news, I had another one of my Anthro Gender/Sex Roles class for the week. It was enjoyable, and I think I\u0026rsquo;m perhaps a little closer to understanding my distain/problem with this whole anthropology thing. I don\u0026rsquo;t have the right Zen for it. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading these ethnographies about gender roles and relationships in foraging societies, and seeing the potential and beginnings for the development of patriarchy, male dominance, and all the ills that go along with that.","title":"Zenning Gender"},{"content":"I got my iBook almost a day ago, and I feel confidant saying that I\u0026rsquo;m satisfied with the way it\u0026rsquo;s set up. I\u0026rsquo;ve got all the applications that I know I\u0026rsquo;ll never use out of my way, and I\u0026rsquo;ve downloaded all of the little must haves. I\u0026rsquo;m almost giddy to take it to a hotspot to try out the AirPort. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten some other work done today too, and that\u0026rsquo;s mainly the focus of this post, you\u0026rsquo;ll be hearing about this new computer for a little while, but to some it up in a quick phrase: I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with this, and it just works. It just works!\nOne of the things on my to-do list was to fix my old computer. I\u0026rsquo;m sure regular readers are quite familiar with this tale, and I won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with the details. In an unrelated purchase, with my iBook we got a new processor/heat sink for the computer. This would have to fix the computer, there was no way it didn\u0026rsquo;t.\nGuess what the next line of this post is. Wait for it. Wait for it.\nIt didn\u0026rsquo;t work.\nGotcha! In my furry, I swapped the motherboard back, and lo and behold we have a symptom. Now, it turns on for fifteen seconds and then shuts itself off. Bam. Nothing at all other than that. I haven\u0026rsquo;t so much as seen the bios of this computer in six months. So my current theory is to replace the motherboard, on the grounds that it couldn\u0026rsquo;t be anything else. It\u0026rsquo;s not the hard drive, because the hard drive\u0026rsquo;s aren\u0026rsquo;t relevant in the early stage of the boot process, it can\u0026rsquo;t be the processor (unless the old one died, and the new one was DOA, which seems unlikely), it\u0026rsquo;s not the ram, that all checks out, it\u0026rsquo;s not the motherboard unless the old one died and then the new one was DOA), it\u0026rsquo;s not the video card, cause it doesn\u0026rsquo;t get to the video card stage. See where I\u0026rsquo;m left. There\u0026rsquo;s no other vital system that it could be.\nOn the other hand, if it is the power supply, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be really mad, and it\u0026rsquo;ll be pretty easy to build a second computer, given that all the components I have would then be good. If it is the power supply, this would have to officially go down in history as the oddest power supply malfunction in the history of the world ever. Ever.\nCheers, best of luck (to everyone, but I\u0026rsquo;m needing it, so I figure a karmatic adjustment is in order), and I\u0026rsquo;ll post again soon. Promise.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/computer-woes/","summary":"I got my iBook almost a day ago, and I feel confidant saying that I\u0026rsquo;m satisfied with the way it\u0026rsquo;s set up. I\u0026rsquo;ve got all the applications that I know I\u0026rsquo;ll never use out of my way, and I\u0026rsquo;ve downloaded all of the little must haves. I\u0026rsquo;m almost giddy to take it to a hotspot to try out the AirPort. I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten some other work done today too, and that\u0026rsquo;s mainly the focus of this post, you\u0026rsquo;ll be hearing about this new computer for a little while, but to some it up in a quick phrase: I\u0026rsquo;m really happy with this, and it just works. It just works!\nOne of the things on my to-do list was to fix my old computer. I\u0026rsquo;m sure regular readers are quite familiar with this tale, and I won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with the details. In an unrelated purchase, with my iBook we got a new processor/heat sink for the computer.","title":"Computer Woes"},{"content":"I bet you thought you were going to be able to survive this week without seeing something about Ronald W. Regan on TealArt. So sorry. Actually, I don\u0026rsquo;t really give a rat\u0026rsquo;s ass about the \u0026ldquo;deify/vilify\u0026rdquo; Regan thing. There are a couple a poignant responses to Regan\u0026rsquo;s non-treatment of the AIDS crisis, most notably this, by Brad Graham. Honestly though, I can imagine any other ruler of the era dealing with it differently; not that that excuses him by any means.\nIn any case, what I really wanted to offer, was this little logistical thought. See according to all of the sources I\u0026rsquo;ve encountered, Regan\u0026rsquo;s body has been lying in state for a few days now at the presidential library. His \u0026ldquo;body\u0026rdquo; is now being flown the D.C. where it\u0026rsquo;ll lay in state until a big hoopla at the national cathedral sometime this weekend or Monday. The days are unimportant.\nWhat I\u0026rsquo;m thinking is that his body will never leave the Regan Presidential library.\nWhy?\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a closed casket; it has to be flown across the country twice. Why would they bother to do that? Who\u0026rsquo;s to know? More importantly, who\u0026rsquo;s to care? Flying dead bodies anywhere costs tens of thousands of dollars, and I see little purpose in moving it around so much. \u0026ldquo;His\u0026rdquo; presence is unrequited for the formality to serve it\u0026rsquo;s purpose. And we\u0026rsquo;ll never know for sure.\nUnless someone tries to hit the National Cathedral during the service (given who\u0026rsquo;ll be there, I suspect the risk is somewhere around a muted orange), they\u0026rsquo;ll never say, but between you and me it\u0026rsquo;s empty.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/by-george-its-empty/","summary":"I bet you thought you were going to be able to survive this week without seeing something about Ronald W. Regan on TealArt. So sorry. Actually, I don\u0026rsquo;t really give a rat\u0026rsquo;s ass about the \u0026ldquo;deify/vilify\u0026rdquo; Regan thing. There are a couple a poignant responses to Regan\u0026rsquo;s non-treatment of the AIDS crisis, most notably this, by Brad Graham. Honestly though, I can imagine any other ruler of the era dealing with it differently; not that that excuses him by any means.\nIn any case, what I really wanted to offer, was this little logistical thought. See according to all of the sources I\u0026rsquo;ve encountered, Regan\u0026rsquo;s body has been lying in state for a few days now at the presidential library. His \u0026ldquo;body\u0026rdquo; is now being flown the D.C. where it\u0026rsquo;ll lay in state until a big hoopla at the national cathedral sometime this weekend or Monday. The days are unimportant.","title":"By George, It's Empty"},{"content":"I woke up to notification that my iBook shipped; well actually I woke up first and then found out that it had shipped, but you get the idea. In any case, FedEx says that it should make it here by Tuesday morning, (from Taiwan!) and I can\u0026rsquo;t wait.\nIf I were a more typical blogger, I would have posted about that. But I\u0026rsquo;m not a typical blogger, so here comes a rather banal post about my day today.\nI just talked to someone about a job, and the chances of me getting said job seem to be pretty good. I\u0026rsquo;ll still be able to do this web design and consulting stuff, because honestly it won\u0026rsquo;t take up that much time, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to have a laptop in four or so days.\nOther things on my platter for today: I have a lesson on how to pre-record radio shows, because I\u0026rsquo;m going to the interim summer engineer for OUTspoken, the LGBT radio show in St. Louis.\nTonight I\u0026rsquo;m going to see, guess, guess, DAVID SEDARIS. WOW! I love David Sedaris his writing and performance style (for lack of a better thing to describe the way he reads his writing) is so amazingly wonderful. sigh\nWith that, I\u0026rsquo;m done. At least for right now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/today-as-opposed-to-yesterday-and-the-day-before/","summary":"I woke up to notification that my iBook shipped; well actually I woke up first and then found out that it had shipped, but you get the idea. In any case, FedEx says that it should make it here by Tuesday morning, (from Taiwan!) and I can\u0026rsquo;t wait.\nIf I were a more typical blogger, I would have posted about that. But I\u0026rsquo;m not a typical blogger, so here comes a rather banal post about my day today.\nI just talked to someone about a job, and the chances of me getting said job seem to be pretty good. I\u0026rsquo;ll still be able to do this web design and consulting stuff, because honestly it won\u0026rsquo;t take up that much time, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to have a laptop in four or so days.\nOther things on my platter for today: I have a lesson on how to pre-record radio shows, because I\u0026rsquo;m going to the interim summer engineer for OUTspoken, the LGBT radio show in St.","title":"Today as Opposed to Yesterday and the Day Before"},{"content":"The job market is downright horrible. I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking all over for a job for a while, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten any response. Nada. Ok, I can cope with that, not easily, but it can be done. So unless something miraculous happens, I\u0026rsquo;m resorting to \u0026lsquo;Freelance Sam\u0026rsquo; work. I can write, design websites, build computers, fix computers, and do consulting work in the area of mobile technology and some other technology related niches. It\u0026rsquo;ll work out, and with hope I\u0026rsquo;ll have enough income to do the essentials like, pay for insurance, countless scones, teas, and bagels, not to mention living expense\u0026rsquo; whilst I\u0026rsquo;m away next year.\nEarlier this week I ordered this iBook, which hopefully will ship today or tomorrow (but probably more realistically next Monday). Right now it\u0026rsquo;s essential. During the school year, this iMac (yes, the eight year old one) served me well. Between web browsing, Instant Messaging (AIM), word processing, and email, I really did not need to do anything else. Sure I would have loved to been able to update the back end of TealArt, do other web design, listen to MP3\u0026rsquo;s or watch my favorite cable TV programs, but I honestly didn\u0026rsquo;t need to do that.\nNow things have changed. The thing is I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to find an OS 8.1 compatible FTP client. And an appropriate syntax editor would be nice too. So I can\u0026rsquo;t do design as it stands now, but that\u0026rsquo;s only one of the many things that will be good about the new computer (I haven\u0026rsquo;t decided what to name it yet, as David said I had to.) First of all, this little beauty will have an AirPort Extreme card, which means wireless hot-spots here I come, OS X goodness, useable battery technology, and so forth. I can hardly wait.\nBecause, my schedule is pretty free, I\u0026rsquo;ll also have some time to entertain a couple of odd freelance writing notions. Articles and such that I\u0026rsquo;ve had floating around in my head for a while, but didn\u0026rsquo;t actually write because I was too busy concentrating on the social implications of the Mexican Revolution or some such. One such project would be going back to some biggish mobile tech site, and writing a \u0026ldquo;catching up article\u0026rdquo; detailing the perspective I\u0026rsquo;ve gained from being away from mobile tech for almost two years. Sure it\u0026rsquo;d be a bit cynical, but in some ways, I\u0026rsquo;ve conducted the perfect experiment for the mobile technology community, and I\u0026rsquo;d hope that some publisher would be willing to pay me a few bucks for the story.\nWhereas I feel like I have some level of expertise or qualifications to talk about technology as an 18 year-veteran of dorkyness, I don\u0026rsquo;t feel the same way about writing, but it might be interesting to look at what I\u0026rsquo;ve learned as a writer in the past few years. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that\u0026rsquo;ll be as easy to sell. That one will take a lot more thought and it\u0026rsquo;s quite likely that it\u0026rsquo;ll end up as a TealArt post. Maybe.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also had, for a while, the dream of setting up a gender theories discussion list. Almost four years ago I set up a list for Spec-Fiction writers, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s a really successful community. We have good discussions, stable membership in the neighborhood of 170, a team of great-dedicated moderators, and I really couldn\u0026rsquo;t ask for more. The thing is I\u0026rsquo;m not a terribly dedicated Science Fiction writer any more, and while I\u0026rsquo;m almost done with the first part of my second SF novel, I\u0026rsquo;m not interested in the culture any more. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to create a group for the discussion of Gender issues: Construction/Deconstruction, Cross-Cultural Interpretations and Perspectives, implications, with a queer studies and literary bent probably. In the next few weeks I suspect.\nSo that\u0026rsquo;s where I stand. Hope you enjoyed this update!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/summer-employment/","summary":"The job market is downright horrible. I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking all over for a job for a while, and I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten any response. Nada. Ok, I can cope with that, not easily, but it can be done. So unless something miraculous happens, I\u0026rsquo;m resorting to \u0026lsquo;Freelance Sam\u0026rsquo; work. I can write, design websites, build computers, fix computers, and do consulting work in the area of mobile technology and some other technology related niches. It\u0026rsquo;ll work out, and with hope I\u0026rsquo;ll have enough income to do the essentials like, pay for insurance, countless scones, teas, and bagels, not to mention living expense\u0026rsquo; whilst I\u0026rsquo;m away next year.\nEarlier this week I ordered this iBook, which hopefully will ship today or tomorrow (but probably more realistically next Monday). Right now it\u0026rsquo;s essential. During the school year, this iMac (yes, the eight year old one) served me well. Between web browsing, Instant Messaging (AIM), word processing, and email, I really did not need to do anything else.","title":"Summer Employment"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m at the Apple Store and I just heard that Ronald Reagan died. Man, one of my secret wishes finally came true. Thanks a lot, universe. Took you long enough. Now then, how about getting to work on a couple of my other wishes: a cure, and my friends back.\n-- Brad Graham\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/brad-a-cure-and-my-friends-back/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m at the Apple Store and I just heard that Ronald Reagan died. Man, one of my secret wishes finally came true. Thanks a lot, universe. Took you long enough. Now then, how about getting to work on a couple of my other wishes: a cure, and my friends back.\n-- Brad Graham","title":"Brad - A Cure and My Friends Back"},{"content":"So after graduating, after turning 18, after being accepted to a great college, after successfully finishing an awesome theater production I feel somehow obligated to reflect on the gravity of the past few months.\nBut the truth is that like any big change, I\u0026rsquo;ve had, in some cases, years to prepare for this. Right now the only gravity I\u0026rsquo;d like share with you is the lifting of all this weight that I\u0026rsquo;ve been lugging around from my shoulders for the past few months.\nIn that vein (or artery), I have two semi-whimsical points to make.\nFirstly, I\u0026rsquo;m having a major geek conflict. See, I promised myself that I\u0026rsquo;d buy myself a much-disserved new computer this summer. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using this ancient iMac for months, and a new one is really worth it. I heard a rumor that Apple would be releasing a new something (I\u0026rsquo;m thinking this is the much awaited G5 PowerBooks) in the middle/end of June. But this is only the latest incarnation of this rumor that I heard first as a rumor about the middle of May. Now I\u0026rsquo;m not planning to get a PowerBook, because they aren\u0026rsquo;t worth the hefty extra chunk of change, especially in comparison to the iBooks. But the introduction of the G5 portables will drive down the cost overall, and it might be worth it to wait several weeks. Even though I really don\u0026rsquo;t want to. It might be time to, in the interim, fix-up my old computer. God forbid. Something. I need to not be using this computer for much longer I swear.\nSecondly, I saw a Vintage VW Bug in perfect condition for sale a few blocks away from here. Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t that be awesome? Well it could hardly get worse gas mileage. The truth is I don\u0026rsquo;t really want a new car, or even a new-to-me car. Though that would be nice. I\u0026rsquo;ve been driving a 1989 Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight Royale for the past two years, and it\u0026rsquo;s a great car. Runs great, really reliable for a car of its age, and its really comfortable. But I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sick of it. Gas mileage is eh. Turning radius is pretty pathetic. I\u0026rsquo;ve plans to sell it at the end of the summer, and be car-less for a year or two (or even three/four), and then get something more suited to me and my uses when my life is more suited to having a car. I\u0026rsquo;ll live. But at the same time, a vintage VW\u0026hellip;\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/whimsical/","summary":"So after graduating, after turning 18, after being accepted to a great college, after successfully finishing an awesome theater production I feel somehow obligated to reflect on the gravity of the past few months.\nBut the truth is that like any big change, I\u0026rsquo;ve had, in some cases, years to prepare for this. Right now the only gravity I\u0026rsquo;d like share with you is the lifting of all this weight that I\u0026rsquo;ve been lugging around from my shoulders for the past few months.\nIn that vein (or artery), I have two semi-whimsical points to make.\nFirstly, I\u0026rsquo;m having a major geek conflict. See, I promised myself that I\u0026rsquo;d buy myself a much-disserved new computer this summer. I\u0026rsquo;ve been using this ancient iMac for months, and a new one is really worth it. I heard a rumor that Apple would be releasing a new something (I\u0026rsquo;m thinking this is the much awaited G5 PowerBooks) in the middle/end of June.","title":"Whimsical"},{"content":"Well, well. I\u0026rsquo;ve done the first performance of As American As Apple Pie and I\u0026rsquo;m really digging how it went.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s taught me a bunch about acting and about theater. Before the performance, I vowed to myself that I would never ever act in a production again. And then, it happened, and maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll take another stab at it in a few years. It\u0026rsquo;s been wild and good.\nThis theater project has been part of the reason I postponed my birthday. From Wednesday till today, all my thought has been dedicated to this, and the birthday thing didn\u0026rsquo;t really penetrate at all. People asked me on Thursday how old I was and I told them seventeen. Now it kind of is and that\u0026rsquo;s another thing that\u0026rsquo;s exciting.\nThere are defiantly some things that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably talk about at great length, but that\u0026rsquo;ll happen after this is all over.\nRight now, I\u0026rsquo;m about to go pass out, but before I do, I would like to mention two neat things.\nI got a real life comment about TealArt from a non-relative. It was awesome. From an artist nonetheless. This makes me even more self-conscious about the fact that the default design features a picture shamelessly stolen from the A\u0026amp;F Quarterly. Not to mention the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t really proof read anything I post here, and thus feel the content is kind of shaky.\nThe second thing is that the one and only Brad Graham was there, saw me, said hello, shaked (shook, I know it\u0026rsquo;s shook) my hand. Its weird. I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading Brad\u0026rsquo;s site for years. I found the link on Amy\u0026rsquo;s site, only to discover that it was only coincidence that we didn\u0026rsquo;t already know each other.\nAnd having said that, it\u0026rsquo;s still really weird. Now, when meet a fellow blogger-type, I make a point of communicating with them off the bat, so that I can become friends with them before I know all their life stories and then feel like a stalker. I guess that marks the first time I\u0026rsquo;ve ever met a real honest to god blogger-type in person. He was shorter than I thought he would be, but not that much shorter. I think that can be owed to the fact that I envision everyone as being my height and he\u0026rsquo;s about an inch shorter than me. Anyway. I\u0026rsquo;m babbling, now, so I\u0026rsquo;ll see you all around.\nPeace out. Cheers,\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/apple-pie-in-your-face/","summary":"Well, well. I\u0026rsquo;ve done the first performance of As American As Apple Pie and I\u0026rsquo;m really digging how it went.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s taught me a bunch about acting and about theater. Before the performance, I vowed to myself that I would never ever act in a production again. And then, it happened, and maybe I\u0026rsquo;ll take another stab at it in a few years. It\u0026rsquo;s been wild and good.\nThis theater project has been part of the reason I postponed my birthday. From Wednesday till today, all my thought has been dedicated to this, and the birthday thing didn\u0026rsquo;t really penetrate at all. People asked me on Thursday how old I was and I told them seventeen. Now it kind of is and that\u0026rsquo;s another thing that\u0026rsquo;s exciting.\nThere are defiantly some things that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably talk about at great length, but that\u0026rsquo;ll happen after this is all over.\nRight now, I\u0026rsquo;m about to go pass out, but before I do, I would like to mention two neat things.","title":"Apple Pie in your Face"},{"content":"This entry is a continuation of Too Touchy Feely Sometimes.\nSo there\u0026rsquo;s beauty everywhere, and maybe that\u0026rsquo;s what art is. Not technical skill or talent, but the ability to see the beauty everywhere and in everyone.\nIf that\u0026rsquo;s the case, then artists are a bunch of hacks; because I think anyone in the right mindset can see that beauty, and communicate it. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s easier for some people than for others, but the truth is that everyone is capable of this.\nBut I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s the case. Right now I want, and perhaps need to believe, that there\u0026rsquo;s something special and unique about art. Good art. That it\u0026rsquo;s something special, and not something that everyone can do. That sure makes me an elitist asshole. And at the same time, I realize how that\u0026rsquo;s not effective, because elitist artists do nothing for me, and the truth is, that in practice, I\u0026rsquo;m not exclusive about my own art. I\u0026rsquo;ve had this experience of being a visual artist, by virtue of a studio/portfolio class that I\u0026rsquo;ve been in, and I think I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to do some pretty cool stuff. But I don\u0026rsquo;t think my work is extordinary. So maybe that\u0026rsquo;s the comfortable work. Everyone can do art, and a lot of it can be really interesting and worthwhile without being the next Van Gogh.\nNot to stray too much, but perhaps this is a problem with materialism. In a society where the product is valued so much, it feels sometimes that we\u0026rsquo;re working to make the next thing marketable, better than the last. Take the movie industry, where what would otherwise be an artistic venture, becomes a capitalist venture. This happens in any non-ephemeral art, where there is a hard product produced, and it\u0026rsquo;s another one of those \u0026ldquo;no solution but a definite problem\u0026rdquo; kind of situations.\nThe problem I guess with the normalization of art, is that, it becomes less special and less mystical, and while in general terms I like the idea of demystifying the world, there\u0026rsquo;s defiantly some romantic shred that needs to cling to that notion.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve said before, that in light of analysis of these \u0026ldquo;problems\u0026rdquo; faith, hope, and acceptance are the only reasonable solutions. Frankly, I think that\u0026rsquo;s a really shitty solution. (To my grandmother: the book is on my bedside table, and I promise to take it up next.) So here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m going to replace than answer:\nThere is something within all of us that claims to our own \u0026ldquo;side,\u0026rdquo; the belief that art is something special and unique, and so forth. So much that, this is what makes us unique. If we didn\u0026rsquo;t cling to these conceptions, we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be special.\nI know science fiction writers who have had the idea that there is some conceptual limit, an area, when a species figures out the big questions, and gets the answers. After this point, the race becomes reclusive, or \u0026ldquo;goes beyond,\u0026rdquo; or blinks out of existence, etc. It\u0026rsquo;s a nice idea and I think on some level it makes peace with this very question in a tidy sort of way.\nHell, I\u0026rsquo;m only seven\u0026mdash;eighteen\u0026mdash;and I don\u0026rsquo;t need to have this sorted out now. I don\u0026rsquo;t have to have it sorted out in fifty years; I don\u0026rsquo;t need to ever answer this question. Perhaps this is a situation where its\u0026rsquo; only really important to ask the questions and think about the questions. Answering might be counter productive. That\u0026rsquo;s the truth, as much of a source of frustration as that often is, it\u0026rsquo;s still the truth.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-art-that-surrounds-us/","summary":"This entry is a continuation of Too Touchy Feely Sometimes.\nSo there\u0026rsquo;s beauty everywhere, and maybe that\u0026rsquo;s what art is. Not technical skill or talent, but the ability to see the beauty everywhere and in everyone.\nIf that\u0026rsquo;s the case, then artists are a bunch of hacks; because I think anyone in the right mindset can see that beauty, and communicate it. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s easier for some people than for others, but the truth is that everyone is capable of this.\nBut I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s the case. Right now I want, and perhaps need to believe, that there\u0026rsquo;s something special and unique about art. Good art. That it\u0026rsquo;s something special, and not something that everyone can do. That sure makes me an elitist asshole. And at the same time, I realize how that\u0026rsquo;s not effective, because elitist artists do nothing for me, and the truth is, that in practice, I\u0026rsquo;m not exclusive about my own art.","title":"The Art that Surrounds Us"},{"content":"In all things, balance is admirable, even desirable.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a hard thing to accept, because so often we\u0026rsquo;re so wed to our own causes, our own positions, and our own prospective, to realize that the middle ground is probably the best place. If two people are arguing, then, the best resolution is the solution that falls squarely between them.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that when arguing people shouldn\u0026rsquo;t stick to their guns. Peoples perspective and positions, causes and desires make them individuals, and allow the discourse to function at the peak of its (admittedly) limited ability. But, there\u0026rsquo;s no avoiding the discourse.\nBut people shouldn\u0026rsquo;t give up their sides of the argument, or dive to the center (a political point in reference to the \u0026ldquo;two\u0026rdquo; party system), that creates a completely and largely irrelevant kind of discourse.\nHey, arguing isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily bad; having differences of opinion is healthy. And the last time I checked, that was still legal in this country. Although lately, I\u0026rsquo;ve been wondering.\n-- (That\u0026rsquo;ll make sense to people who see As American As Apple Pie.)\nHaving beaten that to death several times, allow me to offer the actually interesting part of this post.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been hearing about the 9/11 commissions, for months. She\u0026rsquo;ll testify. She won\u0026rsquo;t testify. She\u0026rsquo;ll just \u0026rsquo;talk\u0026rsquo; to them. They testified together. He testified and then He testified and they both said the same thing.\nWhich of course lead me to ask: I wonder what this means? I wonder how this will affect the election? Does it even matter? What are we learning from this discourse? And on, and on, and on. While I\u0026rsquo;m not fond of participating in the discourse of American Politics, or even fond of commenting on it, I do take some pleasure in listening to NPR regularly, and just listening to what\u0026rsquo;s said, and how it\u0026rsquo;s said. I have no desire of being a pundit, but within the confines of my car, it\u0026rsquo;s a fun mental exercise.\nFor the past two days I\u0026rsquo;ve been hearing \u0026rsquo;live\u0026rsquo; testimony to the 9/11 commission. It\u0026rsquo;s really dry stuff. Even for NPR. And I could have been analyzing what was being said, how they were saying it, their ulterior motives, and all of that. And I might have been able to confirm something I already knew, or even gotten something new.\nBut I didn\u0026rsquo;t do that. I just listened to what they said. And there was a kind of beauty to it. Not in the normal, Monet flowers, or Michelangelo\u0026rsquo;s David sort of way, but in a tragic thunder and windstorm blowing over the barn sort of beauty.\nAnd then I realized that I was just kind of tired, and that I was really listening to a guy describing the complexities and differences between Staircase A, in the North Tower, and Staircase B in the South Tower for a good ten minuets.\nSo I realized that if I could find a kind of touching beauty in the description of a staircase, that perhaps, I could find beauty in other things too. If the last two years have taught me anything, it\u0026rsquo;s that my artistic goal, if I have one, is to communicate that simple beauty.\nMust enjoy fruitful arguments, and life\u0026rsquo;s simpler pleasures.\n--From Apple Pie\nHaving realized this directive, I have to say that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to find those essential moments that have beauty, because I know that they\u0026rsquo;re everywhere, but if you go overboard and take pleasure in the rhythm and organization of a touch-typist\u0026rsquo;s skill, or knitter\u0026rsquo;s craft. I mean it\u0026rsquo;s there, but its easy to go overboard and get too touchy feely.\nOn the other hand\u0026hellip;\nTo be Continued\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/too-touchy-feely-sometimes/","summary":"In all things, balance is admirable, even desirable.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s a hard thing to accept, because so often we\u0026rsquo;re so wed to our own causes, our own positions, and our own prospective, to realize that the middle ground is probably the best place. If two people are arguing, then, the best resolution is the solution that falls squarely between them.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that when arguing people shouldn\u0026rsquo;t stick to their guns. Peoples perspective and positions, causes and desires make them individuals, and allow the discourse to function at the peak of its (admittedly) limited ability. But, there\u0026rsquo;s no avoiding the discourse.\nBut people shouldn\u0026rsquo;t give up their sides of the argument, or dive to the center (a political point in reference to the \u0026ldquo;two\u0026rdquo; party system), that creates a completely and largely irrelevant kind of discourse.\nHey, arguing isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily bad; having differences of opinion is healthy. And the last time I checked, that was still legal in this country.","title":"Too Touchy Feely Sometimes"},{"content":"I kind of feel like posting an entry about gay marriage on the historic day, 17 May 2004, is a bit passé. And I would have completely ignored it had something interesting not happened to me while I was driving to school.\nI often find myself pitted against those arguing for marriage (within the community,) not because I don\u0026rsquo;t think queer folks should get the opportunity to marry their partners, but because I don\u0026rsquo;t like the nature of the discourse, and because I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot more, like employment non-discrimination. Marriage isn\u0026rsquo;t my issue. And that\u0026rsquo;s ok; I\u0026rsquo;m entitled to make that kind of choice.\nMy problem with the discourse is that it often degenerates onto a religious level, and theological discourses aren\u0026rsquo;t productive in my mind. The fact of the matter is that, the major western monotheisms, (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are pretty reactionary, and while I think the efforts of the Unitarians, the United Church of Christ, more or less half of the Episcopal Church, some Jewish Reform Rabbi\u0026rsquo;s and congregations, are noble and worthwhile, I still think that there isn\u0026rsquo;t much to be salvaged. And before you, dear reader, start moaning about how the church has strayed, stop; because that\u0026rsquo;s the way the church has always been, deal with it.\nBut then that\u0026rsquo;s my opinion. And while I\u0026rsquo;d certainly like to remove the religious discourse from all of American socio-political discourses, that\u0026rsquo;s not a battle I\u0026rsquo;d like to fight now, and I feel that any other argument misses the point.\nBut then this morning, I heard a live reporter on the scene at City Hall in Cambridge Massachusetts. And then the reporter said, \u0026ldquo;I hear cheering upstairs, which probably means the first legally recognized same-sex couple has been married upstairs.\u0026rdquo; That struck a chord. It really happened, and even though on some level it\u0026rsquo;s all passé, there\u0026rsquo;s some value to it, there is something worthwhile about celebrating. So lets not spend too much time putting a damper on this, because it\u0026rsquo;s still exciting.\nThe really special thing about the gay movement right now is that, it has a kind of energy, and spirit, that is unfortunately not present in any other movement at this moment. This raw energy is important, and it needn\u0026rsquo;t stop here. People need to see that the problems go beyond this pitched battle over gay rights, and onto a broader scope, and as much as I want that to happen, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it will. It\u0026rsquo;s a shame, because I can see, and feel the potential right now. Sorry to be so cynical.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s to this victory, and many more.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/marriage-redux/","summary":"I kind of feel like posting an entry about gay marriage on the historic day, 17 May 2004, is a bit passé. And I would have completely ignored it had something interesting not happened to me while I was driving to school.\nI often find myself pitted against those arguing for marriage (within the community,) not because I don\u0026rsquo;t think queer folks should get the opportunity to marry their partners, but because I don\u0026rsquo;t like the nature of the discourse, and because I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot more, like employment non-discrimination. Marriage isn\u0026rsquo;t my issue. And that\u0026rsquo;s ok; I\u0026rsquo;m entitled to make that kind of choice.\nMy problem with the discourse is that it often degenerates onto a religious level, and theological discourses aren\u0026rsquo;t productive in my mind. The fact of the matter is that, the major western monotheisms, (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are pretty reactionary, and while I think the efforts of the Unitarians, the United Church of Christ, more or less half of the Episcopal Church, some Jewish Reform Rabbi\u0026rsquo;s and congregations, are noble and worthwhile, I still think that there isn\u0026rsquo;t much to be salvaged.","title":"Marriage Redux"},{"content":"SAM: Hi, my name is Sam. ALL: Hi Sam. SAM: I\u0026rsquo;ve used Moveable Type. ALL: (gasps) Screw this, we\u0026rsquo;re leaving.\nYes that\u0026rsquo;s right, I\u0026rsquo;ve used Moveable Type. Briefly. It was in-between my usage of Greymatter and my decision to move to the PHP/mySQL goodness of b2. During the CA phase of, \u0026ldquo;lets get a bunch of people who are interested in writing to write a quick weekly or bi-weekly\u0026hellip;\nBi-annually, is twice a year, semi-annually is every other year. But then, bi-weekly is every two weeks. Right? Well that\u0026rsquo;s what I mean. Or is it semi-annualy? Arrrg. Anyway, you now know what I intended, I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to the story.\ncolumn about something they\u0026rsquo;re interested in. Graphic Design/3d image modeling, current events, birds, the craft/business of writing, you know, the shtick. Anyway, Greymatter was basically what I needed and I even tried to set it up that way, except Greymatter makes a really horrible multiple site solution, and MT was just beginning to gather steam as a useable decent CMS.\nNow I was predisposed to Greymatter, and I really liked the system, so MT wasn\u0026rsquo;t entering a fair playing field. I should mention that, at the time I switched to MT, I\u0026rsquo;d already tried to install it a few times, and had a problem with my host not having the right Perl modules. And the time I ended getting it installed successfully, the installation process was far from useful. And the interface was COMPLICATED, like you have no idea. There was only one level off the main Menu in Greymatter, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t cope. Lets understand, I was trying to do far too much for any sane website, but it was still a large pain in the ass, and the fast, go in post an entry and leave again philosophy wasn\u0026rsquo;t applied. So I must say it didn\u0026rsquo;t do much for me.\nAt this point I started to read about b2, and was really impressed with all that php and mySQL had to offer. And dynamic page generation seemed like a great idea. This was before MT had mySQL option (which is another reason the installation was so hellish). The truth is that most small sites would benefit from dynamic page generation, flat files only become really necessary for high traffic areas, like the main index page. There is absolutely no reason individual entry and comment pages need flat file generation. Especially when you have hundreds of entries. This remains one of my largest complaints about MT.\nSo I moved on to the simpler and ultimately more effective b2. Which was just a stone throw from our current Quarto setup.\nOne of MT\u0026rsquo;s biggest claims to fame is that it\u0026rsquo;s the CMS that really can do everything and the kitchen sink. And that\u0026rsquo;s wonderful, and because of this, it\u0026rsquo;s become the weblog system of choice for millions of users. The thing is that it\u0026rsquo;s totally overkill. The flat file complaint is emblematic of the larger problems with the system: it\u0026rsquo;s designed for situations that 98% of it\u0026rsquo;s user base will never touch. Before I get further into this, let me give you a basic explanation how a very simple, but exceptionally functional and brilliant, CMS (like the one we\u0026rsquo;re using) works. A script creates secure user interfaces, which allows users to post, and edit previous posts (and do some other stuff). All information is stored on a database. The output is completely separate and is determined by the user of the CMS, not the coder. It means the user base needs to know some PHP, or use basic templates created by the coder. This means that the user can literally do anything with the content that he/she wants, and it\u0026rsquo;s as separate from the backend.\nB2 and its offspring work the same way, except that the display functions are more solidified. The end result? It\u0026rsquo;s the same thing, except the b2 creator was being a little nicer to his users.\nMT is not like this. At all. I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s even intended to be used on personal blogging sites. Or, more properly it shouldn\u0026rsquo;t.\nSo this big hubbub about the new licensing scheme and the new version are passé. I mean there are better options out there so I think the whole thing is a non-issue. Now I think the licensing scheme is a pain. They attracted this great following, because they were free, and then they\u0026rsquo;re throwing commercial-for-profit level prices at a bunch of people who probably aren\u0026rsquo;t going to pay. Lets look at Trillian, they went to a paid model, but they left the old version up as being free, and honestly the old version was pretty damn good.\nThat would have been a good option. I think the model they\u0026rsquo;re using right now is a bit flawed, more because I don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s a market for an application like MT, no matter how good and kitchen sink-esque it is, in the commercial web design market. But then some people bought Userland Radio, which surprises me. Go figure.\nAnyway, I still like the system we have, and while I am dying to get an update that will hopefully have better comments, and track backs, that is on me. All that by way of saying, honestly the plight of Moveable Type and SixApart, doesn\u0026rsquo;t really bother me terribly, Anyway. I think I\u0026rsquo;m done here. How\u0026rsquo;s that for no conclusion?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/moving-type/","summary":"SAM: Hi, my name is Sam. ALL: Hi Sam. SAM: I\u0026rsquo;ve used Moveable Type. ALL: (gasps) Screw this, we\u0026rsquo;re leaving.\nYes that\u0026rsquo;s right, I\u0026rsquo;ve used Moveable Type. Briefly. It was in-between my usage of Greymatter and my decision to move to the PHP/mySQL goodness of b2. During the CA phase of, \u0026ldquo;lets get a bunch of people who are interested in writing to write a quick weekly or bi-weekly\u0026hellip;\nBi-annually, is twice a year, semi-annually is every other year. But then, bi-weekly is every two weeks. Right? Well that\u0026rsquo;s what I mean. Or is it semi-annualy? Arrrg. Anyway, you now know what I intended, I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to the story.\ncolumn about something they\u0026rsquo;re interested in. Graphic Design/3d image modeling, current events, birds, the craft/business of writing, you know, the shtick. Anyway, Greymatter was basically what I needed and I even tried to set it up that way, except Greymatter makes a really horrible multiple site solution, and MT was just beginning to gather steam as a useable decent CMS.","title":"Moving Type"},{"content":"So, I managed to break the posting system, and Chris seems to have wondered off before he fixed it. So today\u0026rsquo;s entry isn\u0026rsquo;t going to happen today, but I will write it for the hell of it.\nA while ago, a queer girl, I\u0026rsquo;m a friend with said (in reference to guy\u0026rsquo;s impassioned argument for gay marriage). \u0026ldquo;He\u0026rsquo;s white, he\u0026rsquo;s rich, and everyone accepts him. It\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;ok\u0026rdquo; for him to be gay.\u0026rdquo; The implication in my mind, that because of his gender, race and class, his orientation choices were some how more acceptable. In a way that, women, people of color, and people from lower classes have a harder time coming out, because they face adversity for being women, of color, and poor.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what she said. And there\u0026rsquo;s some truth to that somewhere, but let me process this down a bit.\nI think this is dangerously close to asserting a \u0026ldquo;hierarchy of oppression.\u0026rdquo; But it\u0026rsquo;s a sneaky way of doing it. Rather than saying, racism is worse than sexism, this basically says that there are quantities of \u0026lsquo;ism\u0026rsquo; that can be added to and subtracted from. Which allows us to quantify oppression. And that\u0026rsquo;s not productive or correct. The only way to work productively is to say, we are all hurt equally by oppression, and reach out in solidarity to everyone. Even though I\u0026rsquo;m a white male, I would need to \u0026ldquo;own that\u0026rdquo; and learn how to work against or with that privilege for progress. Just as being a \u0026ldquo;gay man\u0026rdquo; means that I\u0026rsquo;m subject to oppression that I need to learn how to work with or against, to achieve progress.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s something more in this issue, because, if it were an individual thing, the quantity of out gay people would be incredibly diverse. And it\u0026rsquo;s not. So there is some sort of additional factor at play.\nIn my high school there are three out guys\u0026mdash;more or less\u0026mdash;and seven to ten out girls/transfolks. Two people of color in the above sample. Now I realize that this is hardly the ideal statistical sample, but it does say something. That more girls come out in high schools than guys, and that more white folks come out than people of color.\nThe people of color thing, is unfortunately understandable, it\u0026rsquo;s an endemic problem that the entire queer community must deal with. But the male thing is suppressing, because I have a certain feeling that my friend was right, about guys being \u0026lsquo;more accepted/acceptable\u0026rsquo;. While guys still have to fight against the constructions of masculinity, the gay-male community is really masculine. Lets notice, that all of the queer characters on television are, male. Except for the L-Word, and two characters on Queer as Folk, and Ellen. While clearly not absolute evidence, it has to stand for something.\nWomen on the other hand seem to come out at a younger age, and come out in greater numbers as kids. Maybe the age-old, \u0026ldquo;girls are more mature\u0026rdquo; thing holds up, which I could completely buy. Here\u0026rsquo;s another theory. Girls are more likely to form meaningful and supportive friendships with their peers, which might make it easier to come out. Guys, on the other hand tend to have friendships with their friends that are more based on parallel play. So guys probably don\u0026rsquo;t have the same kind of emotional support that girls might have in the same situation at the same time.\nThe more I think about it, the more I realize that it\u0026rsquo;s impossible to really generalize that groups of women will react differently than groups of men. The only possible thing I could put forward at this point, is that groups of male friends are more likely to reacact a long the lines of \u0026ldquo;fine be gay, just don\u0026rsquo;t be attracted to me,\u0026rdquo; my current theory on this subject is that sexuality is more fluid that most are willing to admit, and guys are \u0026rsquo;easier\u0026rsquo; than girls, and they all know it. So they\u0026rsquo;re a little defensive, which really needs to be addressed. Not that I have a good way to do that, but I think that\u0026rsquo;s an underlying theme. I female perspective would be a great addition here.\nAnyway, that\u0026rsquo;s enough for today.\nActually, some of you may have noticed that TealArt has been down a little bit. I wrote most of this entry while I was waiting to get that fixed. It was a really stupid mistake. But, it\u0026rsquo;s fixed now. And I found another reason why I have to write and post entries all in one sitting, which usually means I don\u0026rsquo;t proofread. My attention span for the kind of writing I\u0026rsquo;m trying to do here, just doesn\u0026rsquo;t stretch from session to session, in a logically, or what passes for logic in my mind, coherent method.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/easy-to-be-gay/","summary":"So, I managed to break the posting system, and Chris seems to have wondered off before he fixed it. So today\u0026rsquo;s entry isn\u0026rsquo;t going to happen today, but I will write it for the hell of it.\nA while ago, a queer girl, I\u0026rsquo;m a friend with said (in reference to guy\u0026rsquo;s impassioned argument for gay marriage). \u0026ldquo;He\u0026rsquo;s white, he\u0026rsquo;s rich, and everyone accepts him. It\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;ok\u0026rdquo; for him to be gay.\u0026rdquo; The implication in my mind, that because of his gender, race and class, his orientation choices were some how more acceptable. In a way that, women, people of color, and people from lower classes have a harder time coming out, because they face adversity for being women, of color, and poor.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s what she said. And there\u0026rsquo;s some truth to that somewhere, but let me process this down a bit.\nI think this is dangerously close to asserting a \u0026ldquo;hierarchy of oppression.","title":"Easy to be Gay"},{"content":"I was listening to a radio show a few nights ago, as I was driving home The Connection with Dick Gordon, I\u0026rsquo;d link to it for you, except I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like googling it to find it. Just think of it like NPR\u0026rsquo;s Talk of the Nation, or the Diane Rehm Show. Same expert and call in format, and it works. I\u0026rsquo;d listen to music, if the tape player worked or I had a CD player, but NPR is ok, it keeps me awake and thinking. Actually, of those three shows, The Connection is really the best. \u0026ldquo;This American Life\u0026rdquo; is my favorite NPR show, even though I never listen to it. How gay is that? Anyway, back to the point.\nRight. So they were talking about the impact of blogs on journalism, and how the \u0026ldquo;blogoshpere\u0026rdquo; works kind of like a single unity. If gender and psych weren\u0026rsquo;t so interesting, I\u0026rsquo;d probably want to study social psychology in cyber-culture. Sigh. Why can\u0026rsquo;t you do everything?\nAnyway, it was really interesting and the guy Dick had on was really good. Even though he was critical of bloggers, I really liked him. Though the kind of bloggers he was talking about almost seem to have a community more like a message board, but they get some kind of added validity because they \u0026ldquo;publish\u0026rdquo; their own work, so it\u0026rsquo;s not just a message board. Except that you have to think of it like a message board.\nSo I guess I\u0026rsquo;m not really a bloggers, I mean, I work in a community with other bloggers, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been at it for a long time, but I only occasionally comment on current events. If I wanted to read the news, I\u0026rsquo;d look at the news. I read blogs to know people, even if it\u0026rsquo;s a blog that\u0026rsquo;s about tech stuff or knitting you start to learn something essential about a person. And that\u0026rsquo;s really cool.\nHaving said that, I come from a different generation of blogging. I remember when moveable type was just a bunch of hype and all the cool people used Greymatter. When the only PHP mySQL options were PHP-Nuke, which wasn\u0026rsquo;t (and as far as I know still isn\u0026rsquo;t) not set up for the kind of one or two person writing teams that I was always interested in. Before Noah moved to California. Hell, I even remember Noah\u0026rsquo;s first (I think) post-MSSAF site.\nI remember when Greylogs was the place to be, I remember when PixelPile started. Back then I thought that I was totally the new kid on the block, and in many ways I\u0026rsquo;m still an outsider, but I\u0026rsquo;ve seen a lot.\nI started work on the original Collective Arts more than four years ago, (about March). I come from a different age of bloggers I feel some times. If I started CA four years ago, it means Chris and I have known each other for five years. There are really only two people I go to school with who I\u0026rsquo;ve known longer and still see and talk to regularly, and a couple that I\u0026rsquo;ve known, but don\u0026rsquo;t really talk to. But I digress.\nThis brings me to the other big accomplishment that\u0026rsquo;s looming large in my future. I turn eighteen in six days. I don\u0026rsquo;t have an Amazon wish list, and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to link to one even if I did. How\u0026rsquo;s that for bucking from tradition.\nEighteen. I just thought I\u0026rsquo;d mention it because it\u0026rsquo;s not really real for me yet. I\u0026rsquo;ve been so busy. I\u0026rsquo;m even telling my family and friends to postpone my birthday until the 24th. I\u0026rsquo;m in a play, and I have a crap load of things to do from my birthday until the 24th.\nAnyway, as I was writing this entry I realized that, again, I kind of keep forgetting it. I need to work on that. Back to the entry about metablogging.\nSo having said that I\u0026rsquo;m playing with two schools of blogging methodology, if you will. The quick, easy painless method, which blogspot, Type Pad, Live Journal, etc. and hordes of other services now offered. Then there is my own somewhat rambling style, borne partially out of the old school blogs I know and love, and partially out of my own twisted mind. If I\u0026rsquo;m interested in a subject I can really write forever about it. This entry is now at 720 words. It\u0026rsquo;s the third similarly lengthed entry I\u0026rsquo;ve written today. Last weakened, on a whim in a couple of slow hours I wrote 4,500 words about how to manipulate knitting patterns, and associated mathematical conversions. Anyway I digress.\nAnd I don\u0026rsquo;t proof read. In part because my computer would be full of posts that I wrote like this one and then proof read and decide that I didn\u0026rsquo;t like any more. I\u0026rsquo;ve done that a lot.\nThe other thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve learned from doing this play, about my writing style, is that I can write colloquially, in a manner similar to the way I talk, and but if I proof read it, I can make anything sound like a history lesson. I get to essayish. Which given that I\u0026rsquo;m a student and that most of my writing energies are spent writing essays, this is probably an asset. Except that the key to writing an essay isn\u0026rsquo;t sounding like your writing an essay, it\u0026rsquo;s being lively, which most essayists forget, but again I digress.\nI\u0026rsquo;m feeling pretty ADD tonight, can\u0026rsquo;t you tell. Really ADD.\nSo in case all of you were wondering these are things I\u0026rsquo;m currently working on in my TealArt writing. This is the point I was setting out to write 950 words ago. deep breath Chris and I have talked about the tone of TealArt a lot, and we seem to have some problems just opening up and talking about stuff, (the day, what\u0026rsquo;s on my mind, etc.) kind of like I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to do with this post. The feeling just isn\u0026rsquo;t right. Part of us wants to adapt to modern trends in the blogoshpere (isn\u0026rsquo;t that just a horrible word), and part of us wants to stick to our guns.\nAlso the fact that we have this bad habit of posting a spurt of message once or twice a month, tends to kind of crimp our the flexibility of the tone. So how to fix this. Unlike my recent bout with Post-modern Stress syndrome. There is quite clearly a possible solution. I\u0026rsquo;m going to believe that the \u0026ldquo;just do it, damnit\u0026rdquo; will work in this case. That is, that if I want the tone and mood to shift so that TealArt relaxes and starts covering a greater variety of subjects, I should just hunker down and start writing more for this.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;m at it, it might be interesting to apply this philosophy to a postmodern discourse.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-mighty-blogosphere-and-other-stories/","summary":"I was listening to a radio show a few nights ago, as I was driving home The Connection with Dick Gordon, I\u0026rsquo;d link to it for you, except I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like googling it to find it. Just think of it like NPR\u0026rsquo;s Talk of the Nation, or the Diane Rehm Show. Same expert and call in format, and it works. I\u0026rsquo;d listen to music, if the tape player worked or I had a CD player, but NPR is ok, it keeps me awake and thinking. Actually, of those three shows, The Connection is really the best. \u0026ldquo;This American Life\u0026rdquo; is my favorite NPR show, even though I never listen to it. How gay is that? Anyway, back to the point.\nRight. So they were talking about the impact of blogs on journalism, and how the \u0026ldquo;blogoshpere\u0026rdquo; works kind of like a single unity. If gender and psych weren\u0026rsquo;t so interesting, I\u0026rsquo;d probably want to study social psychology in cyber-culture.","title":"The Mighty Blogosphere and other Stories"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about this before, but it seems like a perfect explanation for my recent absence from the pages of TealArt.com.\nMy good blogging friend and often-mentor, Amy, said this thing a while ago that really stuck: Live first, first blog second. Sure it\u0026rsquo;s not original, but I really liked the way she said it. Something about not writing about what might be, or what could be, what\u0026rsquo;s going to be. Not jinxing things. That blogging in the way she (and TealArt does occasionally) does it is about recording things after they happen, not while they happen.\nThe kind of content that TealArt presents doesn\u0026rsquo;t exploit the instant kind of media that most blogs are known for. While we may not proofread, or plan or rhetoric extensively, this isn\u0026rsquo;t a blog the current construction of that term, it\u0026rsquo;s more like some of the sites that were around a few years ago (like Amy, and an earlier incarnation of Noah\u0026rsquo;s work.) I have to keep reminding myself, that although TealArt hasn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;made it big\u0026rdquo; in the blog world, Chris and I have been at this for a long time.\nWhile I didn\u0026rsquo;t quite set out to write a \u0026lsquo;history of blogging essay\u0026rsquo; or a commentary on the current state of TealArt I guess I have one more point about this. I know that the categories system needs some serious revision. The comments only work sporadically, I\u0026rsquo;ve found. And there\u0026rsquo;s a new design desperately needed. And the links/quote blogs need better integration with the main log. And, probably most importantly, we\u0026rsquo;re going to try and play with the template to lighten/soften the tone/mood. But\u0026hellip; My recent computer problems haven\u0026rsquo;t completely resolved. I\u0026rsquo;m using an old iMac with OS 8.1 on it. So until I get a real working computer that will allow me to do the work that I need, things are going to stay the way they are. Sorry about this.\nBut what I started writing this post about:\nToday I took the second to last test for my International Baccalaureate Diploma. There are two papers (technically two tests), back to back in a week. So I\u0026rsquo;m basically done. Yes. You heard that right. Wow. I thought it was weird to be \u0026ldquo;almost done\u0026rdquo; well actually being done is even weirder. Despite the fact that I\u0026rsquo;m dead tired and my brain feels completely fried I feel inexplicably liberated. It\u0026rsquo;s awesome. It\u0026rsquo;s also the story of my life, and while I just thought about saying \u0026ldquo;Given the choice, I\u0026rsquo;ll never do something like that again.\u0026rdquo;\nAnd then I realized, that of course I\u0026rsquo;d do something like that in an instant. That\u0026rsquo;s part of my personality and who I am. Lets hope, I\u0026rsquo;ll get better at managing my resources and my life. I can only hope.\nIn any case, that\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for the past month. Living, perhaps not what I\u0026rsquo;d ideally like to spending my life doing, but defiantly something that I needed to just live through. So I\u0026rsquo;m done with that, and while there\u0026rsquo;s always next time, I\u0026rsquo;m hoping I got some time before next time gets here.\nIn slightly other news, there\u0026rsquo;s queer stuff happening at school. It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing I think, predicted, and a bit old. I\u0026rsquo;m not totally sure of what to make of it just now, but I think I\u0026rsquo;ll probably (you had to expect it) muse a bit about this, I want to see if I can get into some more stuff soon. Stay tuned.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/live-first/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve talked about this before, but it seems like a perfect explanation for my recent absence from the pages of TealArt.com.\nMy good blogging friend and often-mentor, Amy, said this thing a while ago that really stuck: Live first, first blog second. Sure it\u0026rsquo;s not original, but I really liked the way she said it. Something about not writing about what might be, or what could be, what\u0026rsquo;s going to be. Not jinxing things. That blogging in the way she (and TealArt does occasionally) does it is about recording things after they happen, not while they happen.\nThe kind of content that TealArt presents doesn\u0026rsquo;t exploit the instant kind of media that most blogs are known for. While we may not proofread, or plan or rhetoric extensively, this isn\u0026rsquo;t a blog the current construction of that term, it\u0026rsquo;s more like some of the sites that were around a few years ago (like Amy, and an earlier incarnation of Noah\u0026rsquo;s work.","title":"Live First"},{"content":"This is really rough. It\u0026rsquo;s also really blabbery. Yes: blabbery. Deal with it, or skip over it. Enjoy.\nI really hate postmodernists.\nIt makes so much sense, it works, and it\u0026rsquo;s a really attractive model, but it makes further work and development difficult if not impossible. Postmodernism drives people to running in little circles around what they really want to talk about. Or maybe it\u0026rsquo;s just deconstructionist that do that. Lets make sure I have this all clear.\nModernists took knowledge as it existed and said, \u0026ldquo;simplify,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;get back to essential meanings\u0026rdquo; and from this we got. \u0026ldquo;Modern Art,\u0026rdquo; which took the tradition of visual art and simplified it so that rather than paint realistic looking vistas that captured the emotions and feelings of their time, painters just painted their feelings. Which is essentially what Picasso tried to do, and Jackson Pollack embodied this to the end example of this movement.\nThe problem with modern art is that after Jackson Pollack, you can\u0026rsquo;t really get any further with that motion methodology. You can toy with the ideas a little by doing multi/cross-media experimentations, but that stops being \u0026ldquo;modernist\u0026rdquo; really quick, so at least in visual art, there\u0026rsquo;s a dead end.\nIn literature, we see the rise of academicization of creative writing, and New Criticism. Which I\u0026rsquo;ve ranted about before, but New Criticism basically says: \u0026ldquo;Context is irrelevant. Meaning is irrelevant. Read \u0026ldquo;good literature,\u0026rdquo; and bash anything that isn\u0026rsquo;t Faulkner, Pond, or Donne.\u0026rdquo; In less harsh terms, New Criticism chose to look beyond meaning, and context in order to more objectively judge the quality of the work. Except in the mind of the Princeton College Board, and some moldy English teachers, this methodology is dead. I mean not only is it racist, homophobic, and sexist, it just doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense.\nBefore I get onto Post-Modernism, one more modernist example. Feminism. While modernism did it\u0026rsquo;s best to squish out feminism as \u0026ldquo;context.\u0026rdquo; During the Modern period, feminism tended towards essentialism, which argued that there were essential differences between men and women, and that gender was a function of sex. (I\u0026rsquo;m not really sure about this but it makes sense, correct me if I\u0026rsquo;m wrong.) While second wave feminism was the product of the very end of Modernism, (I think) it was the whole essentialism that causes second wave feminism to flounder. I don\u0026rsquo;t like essentialism.\nIn any case, I\u0026rsquo;m just reviewing what I know and what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking, so correct me if I get something wrong, or don\u0026rsquo;t interpret things correctly. I\u0026rsquo;m not totally sure of everything here.\nThe main lingering effect of Modernism in Literature and art in general, is that it\u0026rsquo;s created a schism in the creation of new art. There\u0026rsquo;s the stuff that \u0026ldquo;the people\u0026rdquo; create and like, which is full of spirit and emotion, but in a technical sense is rather crappy. Think angst-y poetry, slam poetry, spoken word, and some performance stuff. Then there\u0026rsquo;s the stuff that\u0026rsquo;s technically very good, but devoid of spirit. Open any high-brow University Literature journal, and the content is very good, but it\u0026rsquo;s not really great. This art isn\u0026rsquo;t modernist, but this schism I feel is very much a result of the problems and intellectual precedents that Modernism set for the future.\nThis brings us to Post-Modernism. Yay. Ultimately, Post-Modernism is deconstructionist. And after the euphoria, or whatever the modernists had, of the Modern Period, things were too constructed. So they started to break down the boundaries that insulated the disciplines. That\u0026rsquo;s a good thing; it gives us the ability to look at history and context of what we\u0026rsquo;re studying. The sciences and math are still fairly stuck in the modern age, and there\u0026rsquo;s a certain degree to which that\u0026rsquo;ll probably always be the case, but that\u0026rsquo;ll change too.\nIn art and literature, creators started mixing genres. Look at some of Ginsberg\u0026rsquo;s poetry. It\u0026rsquo;s almost prose. Performance art is like this too, it combines theater with dance and poetry and visual artifacts to create the same thing that art\u0026rsquo;s been trying to create forever anyway. Postmodernism is about combining and mixing things. Interdisciplinary studies are really great and important for making progress. Because everything had more or less hit a brick wall, this kind of synthesis was and continues to be necessary for new and fresh kinds of art.\nBut this article/entry wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be called \u0026ldquo;Post Modern Stress\u0026rdquo; if I thought Post Modernism was the best thing since sliced bread. So here\u0026rsquo;s the criticism.\nPost-Modernism says, everything, including post-modernism is a discourse. Knowledge is a discourse. Marxism is a discourse. Literary Criticism is a discourse. etc. This makes the world really argumentative, and the problem with discourses is that there is no end to them. One discourse leads into another, so you get stuck in a recursive discourse, and nothing ever gets done. Ever. And the best way to survive post modernism is to become content with what is, and hope that through discourse, the world will change.\nFat chance.\nOn the one hand, the synthetic aspect of post-modernism is wonderful and while still in progress, I think the discourse of synthesis is productive, the rest of it isn\u0026rsquo;t.\nAnd just as the rest of my intellectual philosophy postings end, this ends on a \u0026ldquo;And knowing this, where am I left?\u0026rdquo; Which I feel is basically, the anti-post-modern question. I want to escape this paradigm and work under some model that\u0026rsquo;s more productive, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t rely on recursive discourses, that frees the creative process without deconstructing it.\nWell there isn\u0026rsquo;t one out there that I know about, (feel free to suggest your favorite intellectual paradigm) and I don\u0026rsquo;t exactly know how to go about making a new one. Or that I\u0026rsquo;d even be able to make a new one. Or even that, considering my goals, that I should make a new one. There\u0026rsquo;s the cursed discourse again. Anyway. Stuff to chew over.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/post-modern-stress/","summary":"This is really rough. It\u0026rsquo;s also really blabbery. Yes: blabbery. Deal with it, or skip over it. Enjoy.\nI really hate postmodernists.\nIt makes so much sense, it works, and it\u0026rsquo;s a really attractive model, but it makes further work and development difficult if not impossible. Postmodernism drives people to running in little circles around what they really want to talk about. Or maybe it\u0026rsquo;s just deconstructionist that do that. Lets make sure I have this all clear.\nModernists took knowledge as it existed and said, \u0026ldquo;simplify,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;get back to essential meanings\u0026rdquo; and from this we got. \u0026ldquo;Modern Art,\u0026rdquo; which took the tradition of visual art and simplified it so that rather than paint realistic looking vistas that captured the emotions and feelings of their time, painters just painted their feelings. Which is essentially what Picasso tried to do, and Jackson Pollack embodied this to the end example of this movement.","title":"Post-Modern Stress"},{"content":"I came across this article today, which raises an interesting historagraphical question. But seeing that TealArt too easily descends into philosophical blathering, I\u0026rsquo;ll just throw this one out.there.\nHow appropriate is the queer theory historical search for likely homosexuals? And is \u0026ldquo;outing\u0026rdquo; famous historical (regardless of other judgments) a productive practice.\nLets first remember that the term \u0026ldquo;homosexual\u0026rdquo; dates to the 1890s and while there were certainly people who were homosexual before 1890, the idea of categorizing individuals based on affectional orientation didn\u0026rsquo;t really exist before that. Having said that, \u0026ldquo;homosexuals\u0026rdquo; did face suppression and any number of torments, it was just produced on a different level.\nSo for any number of reasons, there is a certain movement to reclaim the gay history. Because there are tons of historical figures who were almost certainly gay, but that gets lost. It was also probably lost in the moment, but it\u0026rsquo;s equally important to remember now.\nIf Hitler was gay, as the article suggests, is there a responsibility to reclaim that as well. Just yesterday there was a bit about a respected statesman and President. This guy, was a southerner, and not surprisingly pro-slavery. So I guess one of the questions, is \u0026ldquo;Do we have a responsibility to reclaim all of the gay history that we find, or just the parts that suit us. And I guess I\u0026rsquo;d say, we should reclaim it, if only to show a kind of diversity. There are queers everywhere, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s an important lesson. You can go anywhere and find gay people; they exist outside of the hip coffee shops, the left bank of the Seine, Men\u0026rsquo;s Express, Abercrombie and Fitch, and so forth. The one down side is, of course, that homophobes will inevitably take revelations that condemnable characters like Hitler are endemic of homosexual culture, but then those same individuals will look at the guys on the left bank wearing shirts from Express, and talking about \u0026ldquo;Art\u0026rdquo;, and categorical label all queer\u0026rsquo;s as pansies. There are some fights you just can\u0026rsquo;t win.\nOn the other hand, this is ultimately a form of outing. Clearly it\u0026rsquo;s not the same as outing contemporary figures, but to some degree. I agree with Armested Maupin et al. that outing people will show that queers can be successful; that queers really are everywhere, and that the world hasn\u0026rsquo;t ended yet. History is perhaps the ultimate venue for this, as we are able to avoid the serious ethical dilemma that prevents or should prevent outing of contemporary figures.\nSo here\u0026rsquo;s the second question that this raises (and I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with this): Where is the line between outing contemporary figures, and reclaiming a gay history?\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-historical-gay/","summary":"I came across this article today, which raises an interesting historagraphical question. But seeing that TealArt too easily descends into philosophical blathering, I\u0026rsquo;ll just throw this one out.there.\nHow appropriate is the queer theory historical search for likely homosexuals? And is \u0026ldquo;outing\u0026rdquo; famous historical (regardless of other judgments) a productive practice.\nLets first remember that the term \u0026ldquo;homosexual\u0026rdquo; dates to the 1890s and while there were certainly people who were homosexual before 1890, the idea of categorizing individuals based on affectional orientation didn\u0026rsquo;t really exist before that. Having said that, \u0026ldquo;homosexuals\u0026rdquo; did face suppression and any number of torments, it was just produced on a different level.\nSo for any number of reasons, there is a certain movement to reclaim the gay history. Because there are tons of historical figures who were almost certainly gay, but that gets lost. It was also probably lost in the moment, but it\u0026rsquo;s equally important to remember now.","title":"The Historical Gay"},{"content":"Borrowing an entry writing style from two of my favorite siblings/friends I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about a recently rediscovered old friend.\nOnce upon a time, there was this kid, who was really bright and loved to write. He was also the biggest geek and was fascinated by the quickly developing pace of mobile technology, PalmOS, PocketPCs, WindowsCE, wireless communications, digital intellectual property, mobile writing, and a host of other things. He read Jeff Kirvin\u0026rsquo;s Writing on Your Palm, and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t long before he scraped his pennies together to buy a Handspring Visor with one of those nifty folding keyboards.\nBeing a Visor fanatic, he quickly joined the ranks of VisorCentral users and became an avid supporter of that device and a prominent member of the community. But as you can imagine, there weren\u0026rsquo;t many other young teenagers/pre-teens involved in the PalmOS community. Because doncha know, most teenagers have better things to do then organize their schedule and contact information on a dinky little computer with a resolution of 60 pixels by 60 pixels.\nBut there was another.\nAnd they became attached, IM-ed eachother daily. But like all good things, it was a finite affair.\nOur protagonist moved on to other fancier devices and loved it, and took a different track. During this phase of his life this kid did lots of cool stuff for someone who was 14. Like, be an executive editor for a radical ebook publishing company called Free-ePress. Contribute to the website that started it all Writing on your Palm, Various freelance articles for places like, Suite101, PalmPower Magazine, and the gem of the bunchPocketPC Thoughts.\nBut these two young characters still talked occasionally, but as they had ideological differences they started to fall out of contact.\nOne of our protagonist\u0026rsquo;s editor\u0026rsquo;s, told him that he needed people who could dedicate more time to the site, basically that he needed people who could be in front of their computer during the day, which virtually obliviated the need for a mobile computing solution. When this editor also told him that there was no way he could compensate our protagonist for any of his work, our protagonist finally bowed out, realized the idiocy of having a mobile computing device and sold his HP Jordana, bought a cellulose based calendar book, and at the ripe old age of 15 retired from the field of mobile computing.\nHe used what he had leared to develop an awesome website, and he wrote a book, and generally enjoyed life.\nBut he hadn\u0026rsquo;t forgotten his partner in crime, who still clung to the vestiges of their former commonality. Despite the growing rift between them they still talked but one day something happened.\nThey talked about sex, as adolescent males are prone to. It was awkward. Our protagonist had very little (nothing to boast of, as someone who was still very much discovering his sexual orientation) and his friend somehow was able to boast of something. Trivial really. After this event which our protagonist probably has logged somewhere, he mostly lost interest. They completely stopped talking and went about their lives.\nThen, just recently, our protagonist, got bored and opened an unused corner of his buddy list, found his old friend online and said, innocently enough \u0026ldquo;Hello\u0026rdquo;.\nAnd guess what. His friend turned out to be gay too. And doing the same academic program (IB). And interested in a school in his area. And they have similar interests that don\u0026rsquo;t involve visors. And similar life experiences that despite the disconnect in their communication.\nIsn\u0026rsquo;t life just funny like that sometimes?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/an-old-friend/","summary":"Borrowing an entry writing style from two of my favorite siblings/friends I\u0026rsquo;m going to write about a recently rediscovered old friend.\nOnce upon a time, there was this kid, who was really bright and loved to write. He was also the biggest geek and was fascinated by the quickly developing pace of mobile technology, PalmOS, PocketPCs, WindowsCE, wireless communications, digital intellectual property, mobile writing, and a host of other things. He read Jeff Kirvin\u0026rsquo;s Writing on Your Palm, and it wasn\u0026rsquo;t long before he scraped his pennies together to buy a Handspring Visor with one of those nifty folding keyboards.\nBeing a Visor fanatic, he quickly joined the ranks of VisorCentral users and became an avid supporter of that device and a prominent member of the community. But as you can imagine, there weren\u0026rsquo;t many other young teenagers/pre-teens involved in the PalmOS community. Because doncha know, most teenagers have better things to do then organize their schedule and contact information on a dinky little computer with a resolution of 60 pixels by 60 pixels.","title":"An Old Friend"},{"content":"A guy, tonight, talked about how for years and years, he had relationships with women, but then at age 22 or something, he met this gay guy. The only apearnt gay guy in his town of 3,500. And they\u0026rsquo;ve been together for the three years since.\nDespite all my efforts, I feel that I\u0026rsquo;m still really rather biphobic. Or at least not biphillic. Which is weird, because in some strange way I think I\u0026rsquo;m attracted to bi guys. But I think because, It\u0026rsquo;s the ultimate way to thumb my nose at the system. In a sense I can look at all the soccer moms driving around Ford Expeditions, with their white picket fences, and their 2.5 children and say, look here chica. I\u0026rsquo;m in love with, married to, this guy, who you so had a chance at and guess what. He chose me.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a wierd one, I know. In some strange way, I live to be able to thumb my nose at the world, try it some time. Its really quite satisfying.\nSomehow that made me extremely happy. And I\u0026rsquo;m not sure if that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing, but for the moment it just is.\nAnne Lamont writes these books about her childhood, which wasn\u0026rsquo;t perfect, not by a long stretch. And kind of similarly, her life wasn\u0026rsquo;t smooth. And it provides her with a lot of just really wonderful material. And I joked this week, about how as someone with a fairly sane together life, I don\u0026rsquo;t have that kind of material source. David Sedaris has a lot of the same kind of material. Anyway, I was complaining about this artistic disadvantage, and someone said to me. You could write these stories about how much it sucks to be all together and stuff. (Ok, so he was a little more coherent, but still you get the drift).\nTo which I said. \u0026ldquo;Could there be anything more trite.\u0026rdquo; I have friends who already complain about how contrived and pompous I can be, but whatever, I can\u0026rsquo;t let that cloud my view too much.\nBut then he suggested satire, in a way I hadn\u0026rsquo;t thought of. And It has some potential, but I need to develop it a bit. Also one thing I need to do, is focus a little more closely on social commentary, because that\u0026rsquo;s what I think my strength is.\nIn anycase, I think this entry is going to mark a new age in TealArtistry.\nYa see, the forever problem with TealArt, is Chris and I reflexively sensor ourselves. It\u0026rsquo;s sick. I mean, some degree of censoring is good, but it\u0026rsquo;s almost to a point where we\u0026rsquo;re getting bland and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work out. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to try and lighten things up a bit. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to start talking about gay stuff now. And not just complaining about how the movement isn\u0026rsquo;t really a movement, and how social justice stuff is so frustrating.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/and-he-chose-me-and-related-other-stories/","summary":"A guy, tonight, talked about how for years and years, he had relationships with women, but then at age 22 or something, he met this gay guy. The only apearnt gay guy in his town of 3,500. And they\u0026rsquo;ve been together for the three years since.\nDespite all my efforts, I feel that I\u0026rsquo;m still really rather biphobic. Or at least not biphillic. Which is weird, because in some strange way I think I\u0026rsquo;m attracted to bi guys. But I think because, It\u0026rsquo;s the ultimate way to thumb my nose at the system. In a sense I can look at all the soccer moms driving around Ford Expeditions, with their white picket fences, and their 2.5 children and say, look here chica. I\u0026rsquo;m in love with, married to, this guy, who you so had a chance at and guess what. He chose me.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a wierd one, I know. In some strange way, I live to be able to thumb my nose at the world, try it some time.","title":"And He Chose Me, and Related Other Stories"},{"content":"Because I spent so long out of human form in work crazed demon type form I\u0026rsquo;ve changed, understandably.\nJust now I was running through what I had to do this weekend. Here\u0026rsquo;s my list:\nRead 100 pages for a history. Write an English Paper. Write a scholorship essay or two Read a Zora Neal Hurston story for my African american lit class Write two 250 word, reader response entries for my english class Write a presentation in spanish\nAnd you know what my response was?\nWow. Easyness. That\u0026rsquo;s nothing!\nAs one of my friends said, after realizing that even if college really is harder, which given the rigors of European (IB) standards we kind of doubt, We\u0026rsquo;ll only have five classes\u0026hellip;. \u0026ldquo;Damn college is going to be borrrring.\u0026rdquo; And frankly. I concur. (We both have eight currently)\nCheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/what-does-this-say-about-me/","summary":"Because I spent so long out of human form in work crazed demon type form I\u0026rsquo;ve changed, understandably.\nJust now I was running through what I had to do this weekend. Here\u0026rsquo;s my list:\nRead 100 pages for a history. Write an English Paper. Write a scholorship essay or two Read a Zora Neal Hurston story for my African american lit class Write two 250 word, reader response entries for my english class Write a presentation in spanish\nAnd you know what my response was?\nWow. Easyness. That\u0026rsquo;s nothing!\nAs one of my friends said, after realizing that even if college really is harder, which given the rigors of European (IB) standards we kind of doubt, We\u0026rsquo;ll only have five classes\u0026hellip;. \u0026ldquo;Damn college is going to be borrrring.\u0026rdquo; And frankly. I concur. (We both have eight currently)\nCheers!","title":"What does this say about me?"},{"content":"I was looking through a notebook for some notes that I made concerning a homework assignment, and discovered the following line lines of memorable text:\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll go to the store tomorrow, too\u0026rdquo; she said triumphantly.\n\u0026ldquo;Ah,\u0026rdquo; he replied without missing a beat in his crossword puzzle.\n\u0026ldquo;Because we have potatoes.\u0026rdquo; She declared, after a moment.\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s good,\u0026rdquo; he said, sounding far more exciting over a quantity of root vegetable than anyone disserved to be, even if the crossword puzzle was interesting.\nMeanwhile their teenage son howled as he left the room fearing for the future of the family menu plans.\nMost interesting. Clearly it\u0026rsquo;s something that happened in my house, but I honestly can\u0026rsquo;t remember it, and I also can\u0026rsquo;t remember why I felt it necessary to write down in my book.\nGo figure. Anyway, back to the grindstone. I\u0026rsquo;ll revert to human form on Friday I think. I hope.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/because-we-have-potatoes/","summary":"I was looking through a notebook for some notes that I made concerning a homework assignment, and discovered the following line lines of memorable text:\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ll go to the store tomorrow, too\u0026rdquo; she said triumphantly.\n\u0026ldquo;Ah,\u0026rdquo; he replied without missing a beat in his crossword puzzle.\n\u0026ldquo;Because we have potatoes.\u0026rdquo; She declared, after a moment.\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s good,\u0026rdquo; he said, sounding far more exciting over a quantity of root vegetable than anyone disserved to be, even if the crossword puzzle was interesting.\nMeanwhile their teenage son howled as he left the room fearing for the future of the family menu plans.\nMost interesting. Clearly it\u0026rsquo;s something that happened in my house, but I honestly can\u0026rsquo;t remember it, and I also can\u0026rsquo;t remember why I felt it necessary to write down in my book.\nGo figure. Anyway, back to the grindstone. I\u0026rsquo;ll revert to human form on Friday I think.","title":"Because we have Potatoes"},{"content":"As regular readers of this website will recall, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a rather persistent computer problem for the past, oh, really long time. Seems it\u0026rsquo;s done this thing where it just freezes. First we thought it was a RAM problem, because it just felt like a ram problem, and indeed it would freeze up on block memory moves.\nAt which point we said, \u0026ldquo;well it could either be a motherboard or a processor\u0026rdquo; and after some deliberation (and a diagnostic that pointed to problems with the Real Time Memory Clock), we decided to replace the motherboard.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;d developed a system that worked fairly well. If I didn\u0026rsquo;t play music, and stuck to a fairly frill-free text editor, trillian, Internet Explorer, and Outlook, there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a problem, most of the time.\nAnd then, I got the new motherboard, because ultimately I wanted my computer to work properly, I mean that\u0026rsquo;s not too much to ask, really. And it doesn\u0026rsquo;t. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t work with the old one either. So my computer is pretty much not useable. And I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly sure that putting a new processor in is going to fix the problem. It\u0026rsquo;s also the only thing left that I can replace. So we have to hope.\nIn the mean time, since my half working computer more or less gave up the ghost, I\u0026rsquo;ve swapped it out for this older iMac that someone gave me to dispose of. It works perfectly almost, despite the fact that the resolution is jokingly low, and it\u0026rsquo;s running a version of the operating system that\u0026rsquo;s circa 1997. But it runs AIM, Entourage (like outlook only macish), and Word. Ah, finally a real word processor. Life is good.\nOr I\u0026rsquo;ll deal for a while.\nWhat I am realizing is that, this whole Mac thing is really cool, and while I\u0026rsquo;d like a newer version (I\u0026rsquo;m working on it. Soon. All I can say is it will involve a swanky purple scarf) would be nice, the whole feel of this operating system is something I defiantly like. Now I just hope enough money can be gathered to get that powerbook, but we\u0026rsquo;ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Lets just say, I\u0026rsquo;m not going to leave home with a PC.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/that-damned-computer/","summary":"As regular readers of this website will recall, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a rather persistent computer problem for the past, oh, really long time. Seems it\u0026rsquo;s done this thing where it just freezes. First we thought it was a RAM problem, because it just felt like a ram problem, and indeed it would freeze up on block memory moves.\nAt which point we said, \u0026ldquo;well it could either be a motherboard or a processor\u0026rdquo; and after some deliberation (and a diagnostic that pointed to problems with the Real Time Memory Clock), we decided to replace the motherboard.\nIn the mean time I\u0026rsquo;d developed a system that worked fairly well. If I didn\u0026rsquo;t play music, and stuck to a fairly frill-free text editor, trillian, Internet Explorer, and Outlook, there wasn\u0026rsquo;t a problem, most of the time.\nAnd then, I got the new motherboard, because ultimately I wanted my computer to work properly, I mean that\u0026rsquo;s not too much to ask, really.","title":"That Damned Computer"},{"content":"In response to something I\u0026rsquo;d written last night, Indi said something along the lines of, \u0026ldquo;you have a way of saying a lot without really saying very much.\u0026rdquo; This is a fairly valid criticism, and something I get with some regularity. The basic theme: \u0026ldquo;be more specific.\u0026rdquo;\nPerhaps it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m extroverted, and by default process thoughts and ideas in writing or more often out loud. But then again, it might be because there\u0026rsquo;s a larger issue, and given that I don\u0026rsquo;t particularly agree with the idea that personality is that fluid, I\u0026rsquo;d like to act as if there\u0026rsquo;s something larger that I might have a chance to fix or improve on.\nOn the one hand I think a part of me has been like this (terminally unspecific) for a really long time, and that it\u0026rsquo;s been a coping mechanism for the closet, and because it\u0026rsquo;s easier, not to mention that it requires less effort.\nHaving said that, I think it\u0026rsquo;s a writer\u0026rsquo;s block-type dilemma. Not writer\u0026rsquo;s block as in \u0026ldquo;I have to write X today and stare at a blank page for 6 hours being devoid of inspiration,\u0026rdquo; but something more along the lines of \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know what I want to write,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;I feel like I need to write, but can\u0026rsquo;t bring myself to do it,\u0026rdquo; sort of like lethargy, And given that I have this massive amount of written material that I have to turn out every week for school, I don\u0026rsquo;t have the option of sitting and staring at a blank page for hours. So I write uninspired papers that only occasionally are ok (especially when the teacher has low standards.) I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a little bit better at forcing my papers to be more specific, but it\u0026rsquo;s a laborious process and so far has only been accomplished when a parent has been there to keep me from running off into unspecific\nThe main break as far as I\u0026rsquo;m concerned is when I got back from Anytown, which was an experience I really valued, but before I went to Anytown (and really before I went to visit colleges in August right before Anytown.) Which is really when I stopped working on Another Round.\nI should have someone look through Circle Games, but I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure that I didn\u0026rsquo;t have this kind of a problem when I was writing that. Mind you, my school papers were still not specific enough but I think that is due to the (a) reason. And I defiantly didn\u0026rsquo;t feel lethargic about writing. I\u0026rsquo;d like to have someone look through the TealArt archives and see if the entries from a year ago (and before) are specific or not in comparison to the ones now. Any takers?\nAs for possible solutions, I clearly haven\u0026rsquo;t found anything that really works in a decisive sort of way, but, thus far here\u0026rsquo;s what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking:\nI should read through Anne Lamott\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Bird by Bird\u0026rdquo; which has a really helpful chapter on writers block, and is generally inspiring and wonderful. Revisiting that should be really good.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not reading as much as I used to which is a definite short falling. As I can knit and read at the same time which is good and will probably encourage me to knit more, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to establish a routine where I can read fiction again.\nI need to do more work at school. There\u0026rsquo;s a teacher who has a room that\u0026rsquo;s a very good work space, and I think by moving a lot of writing projects to school, I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to get more done. Perhaps not the final solution, but I think there is a definite \u0026ldquo;play\u0026rdquo; environment at home.\nAny ideas?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/something-sometime-that-did-that-one-thing/","summary":"In response to something I\u0026rsquo;d written last night, Indi said something along the lines of, \u0026ldquo;you have a way of saying a lot without really saying very much.\u0026rdquo; This is a fairly valid criticism, and something I get with some regularity. The basic theme: \u0026ldquo;be more specific.\u0026rdquo;\nPerhaps it\u0026rsquo;s because I\u0026rsquo;m extroverted, and by default process thoughts and ideas in writing or more often out loud. But then again, it might be because there\u0026rsquo;s a larger issue, and given that I don\u0026rsquo;t particularly agree with the idea that personality is that fluid, I\u0026rsquo;d like to act as if there\u0026rsquo;s something larger that I might have a chance to fix or improve on.\nOn the one hand I think a part of me has been like this (terminally unspecific) for a really long time, and that it\u0026rsquo;s been a coping mechanism for the closet, and because it\u0026rsquo;s easier, not to mention that it requires less effort.","title":"Something, Sometime that did that One Thing"},{"content":"So there\u0026rsquo;s a bill before the Missouri House at the moment, that attempts to legislate creationsim. This goes beyond just trying to legislate \u0026ldquo;morality\u0026rdquo; which is questionable enough, but this is actually trying to legislate scientific fact. (Maybe they think if they make it law it\u0026rsquo;ll become true.) This follows the \u0026ldquo;if i stick my fingers in my ears and sing, and stomp around, maybe it\u0026rsquo;ll go away\u0026rdquo; method of lawmaking.\nIn any case, under duress I\u0026rsquo;ve compiled a group of resources for both sides of this and I hope it helps someone. (As you may or may not know, my sparse and occasional class notes for Theory of Knowledge get posted to this site for your enjoyment. Or something.\nThe text of Missouri House Bill 911, summary.\nA creation science resource page, and another, and another for good measure\nAnd the other side of the coin: One. Two. Three.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/ye-old-debate/","summary":"So there\u0026rsquo;s a bill before the Missouri House at the moment, that attempts to legislate creationsim. This goes beyond just trying to legislate \u0026ldquo;morality\u0026rdquo; which is questionable enough, but this is actually trying to legislate scientific fact. (Maybe they think if they make it law it\u0026rsquo;ll become true.) This follows the \u0026ldquo;if i stick my fingers in my ears and sing, and stomp around, maybe it\u0026rsquo;ll go away\u0026rdquo; method of lawmaking.\nIn any case, under duress I\u0026rsquo;ve compiled a group of resources for both sides of this and I hope it helps someone. (As you may or may not know, my sparse and occasional class notes for Theory of Knowledge get posted to this site for your enjoyment. Or something.\nThe text of Missouri House Bill 911, summary.\nA creation science resource page, and another, and another for good measure\nAnd the other side of the coin: One. Two. Three.","title":"Ye Old Debate"},{"content":"I had and interesting exchange with my history teacher today that was a bit puzzling. The assignment it to write a paper, comparing the use of violence in the establishment of National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany and the Bolshevik (Communist, Russian) Revolution.\nOk. Its an interesting question, because it challenges, or at least can challenge someone\u0026rsquo;s emotional/rational responses. Generally speaking we\u0026rsquo;re expected to react badly to violence, and to Nazism. They are bad things, and because we\u0026rsquo;re trained to react to these words, serious consideration of these questions is difficult at best. So let us try for a moment to consider this issue.\nViolence is a bad thing. People dying and hurting is a bad thing. Yes. Very bad. It\u0026rsquo;s also par for the course, and seems to follow humans everywhere we go. There is no avoiding violence. Violence represents our darkest fears of chaos, and the fear of personal morality certainly doesn\u0026rsquo;t help this reaction. The only problem is in order to argue against this (from any point of view) makes you (or me) come off as an insensitive jerk who doesn\u0026rsquo;t care or have compassion for other people. A person, who doesn\u0026rsquo;t care if \u0026ldquo;those people\u0026rdquo; die, as long as \u0026ldquo;we\u0026rsquo;re\u0026rdquo; safe. On the other hand, if someone\u0026rsquo;s to eager to die, then its overzealousness, which is equally as bad. So there\u0026rsquo;s a fundamental flaw in this argument, and lets tack on as a disclaimer, that the acceptance of violence is not a devaluation of life, but a realization of actual circumstances. Regardless of reality, I don\u0026rsquo;t think progress on this discussion can be made if we let emotions battle it out over this point.\nMoving on.\nThe next point is that because of the Holocaust, and other clearly ReallyBadThings(tm) Nazism, like violence, provokes an emotional reaction, which isn\u0026rsquo;t good. I\u0026rsquo;m not saying that we should forgive Nazism, and try too look at all the good things it accomplished. But I do think that allowing the emotional reaction to overtake us without rational consideration is dangerous at best. I\u0026rsquo;ve taken to do a couple of things, that I think help a little, both of which are semantics related. That is, using the words National Socialism and SS, rather than Nazism and Stormtroopers. Minor detail, but it removes the initial instinct to react.\nThat accomplished, thought is now required.\nBasically, what I have to do in a research paper, now, is say that Hitler didn\u0026rsquo;t use a standing armed force to obtain power, whereas, the Bolsheviks did. That basic over view hasn\u0026rsquo;t quite moved into the realm of rational thought, but that\u0026rsquo;s due at least to the simplicity of the statement. I also think that I can twist this objective to something a little more reasonable, so in the end I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly worried about this paper, but given what I said above, I\u0026rsquo;d like to ponder what my teacher gave me in a little more depth.\nBecause of the reaction to \u0026lsquo;violence,\u0026rsquo; it seems to me that this question puts the Bolsheviks on a lower level than the German fascists. Perhaps. That\u0026rsquo;s something that I think is unfair and incorrect.\nOther incidents and comparisons between Germany and Russia that have been made in this class that I feel twist and hurt historical objectivity, or at least rational consideration of history:\nThe six million or more killed in the Holocaust (the commonly quoted statistic at least) compared to the 20 million Stalin killed in the Purges.\nThe one million Soviets died at Stalingrad (during WWII) compared to the all time running total of US war dead (which are apparently, still under a million).\nThe fact that retreating troops were shot at Stalingrad. While certainly gruesome, I do belive that it\u0026rsquo;s always been standard military procedure to shoot troops that flee from a battle in a situation like this.\nAnd there you have it. Not to be snobbish or anything, but that\u0026rsquo;s straight from the highest level history class available at Metro High School, in St. Louis, MO. The perennially highest ranked school in the state (according to the standardized test scores, which aren\u0026rsquo;t always the best marker of these things but still). I somehow doubt that the rest of the country is much better off.\nClearly thought isn\u0026rsquo;t expected or particularly desired, but aren\u0026rsquo;t we obligated?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/value-judgments/","summary":"I had and interesting exchange with my history teacher today that was a bit puzzling. The assignment it to write a paper, comparing the use of violence in the establishment of National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany and the Bolshevik (Communist, Russian) Revolution.\nOk. Its an interesting question, because it challenges, or at least can challenge someone\u0026rsquo;s emotional/rational responses. Generally speaking we\u0026rsquo;re expected to react badly to violence, and to Nazism. They are bad things, and because we\u0026rsquo;re trained to react to these words, serious consideration of these questions is difficult at best. So let us try for a moment to consider this issue.\nViolence is a bad thing. People dying and hurting is a bad thing. Yes. Very bad. It\u0026rsquo;s also par for the course, and seems to follow humans everywhere we go. There is no avoiding violence. Violence represents our darkest fears of chaos, and the fear of personal morality certainly doesn\u0026rsquo;t help this reaction.","title":"Value Judgments"},{"content":"For a while I\u0026rsquo;ve been chugging along through Virginia Woolf\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;A Room of One\u0026rsquo;s Own,\u0026rdquo; an essay that she wrote in 1925 about women and fiction writing. I\u0026rsquo;ll admit that I\u0026rsquo;m not yet done reading it, but this won\u0026rsquo;t keep me from offering commentary.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a good deal of fun, well it\u0026rsquo;s a bit hard to get into, but now that I\u0026rsquo;m into it I\u0026rsquo;m very glad to be reading it. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those books that, I know, I\u0026rsquo;ll have to reread a few times because there has to be a ton of stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m missing, but that\u0026rsquo;s all a pleasure.\nI really like Virginia Woolf for two reasons. One, stylistically she\u0026rsquo;s a gem, and the words and craft are just amazing even if you don\u0026rsquo;t feel like you understand what she\u0026rsquo;s saying or the point she\u0026rsquo;s ultimately trying to make (which is where I am right now. Two, I really like the ideas and theories she presents about women, men, their relationships and society. She approaches feminism from a balanced position, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t (or couldn\u0026rsquo;t have, more properly) take any political baggage.\nAdditionally, she completely avoids category theory, because men were men, women were women, and your \u0026ldquo;label\u0026rdquo; was accepted. And there\u0026rsquo;s a measure of rhetorical elegance to that. Category stuff is really important, and ultimately I think it helps larger gender theories to have some measure of proficiency with category theory, but too much and you get drowned in meta-talk.\nHaving said all of that, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that Virginia Woolf was much of a theorist in the first place. She was just a thinking person with a good deal of insight that was able to communicate the injustices that she saw. In one sense, that\u0026rsquo;s all a \u0026lsquo;movement\u0026rsquo; needs, people talking and thinking, the truth and a little bit of momentum. Fancy language and talk of theory is really secondary. So if you present feminism, or any argument for social justice in the right way with the right kind of power, you can\u0026rsquo;t help but succeed. Good rhetorical ability is invaluable, but after a certain point, rhetoric alone serves no end.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with that. Happy Solstice Holiday(s), to you all, and I\u0026rsquo;m sorry for our vacation. We have stuff in the works and more posts coming soon, I promise.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/rhetorically-speaking/","summary":"For a while I\u0026rsquo;ve been chugging along through Virginia Woolf\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;A Room of One\u0026rsquo;s Own,\u0026rdquo; an essay that she wrote in 1925 about women and fiction writing. I\u0026rsquo;ll admit that I\u0026rsquo;m not yet done reading it, but this won\u0026rsquo;t keep me from offering commentary.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a good deal of fun, well it\u0026rsquo;s a bit hard to get into, but now that I\u0026rsquo;m into it I\u0026rsquo;m very glad to be reading it. It\u0026rsquo;s one of those books that, I know, I\u0026rsquo;ll have to reread a few times because there has to be a ton of stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m missing, but that\u0026rsquo;s all a pleasure.\nI really like Virginia Woolf for two reasons. One, stylistically she\u0026rsquo;s a gem, and the words and craft are just amazing even if you don\u0026rsquo;t feel like you understand what she\u0026rsquo;s saying or the point she\u0026rsquo;s ultimately trying to make (which is where I am right now. Two, I really like the ideas and theories she presents about women, men, their relationships and society.","title":"Rhetorically Speaking"},{"content":"I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally learned, after a good year and a half of trying, what transparent style really means, and more importantly how to accomplish it. Transparent style, of course, is the style of writing appropriate for most academic non-fiction. Rather than creative writing where you want to display technique, academic writing requires transparent technique. Any device used shouldn\u0026rsquo;t jump out at an average reader. Even quality writing, if it\u0026rsquo;s showy, it distracts from what you\u0026rsquo;re saying.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that your history and countless other teachers tell you before your first essay, not to mention 50,000 other times throughout a course, and unless you\u0026rsquo;ve had an epiphany on the subject, you (or at least I) probably don\u0026rsquo;t really know what it means. That isn\u0026rsquo;t to say you don\u0026rsquo;t think you don\u0026rsquo;t know\u0026hellip;. I\u0026rsquo;ll stop there.\nAnyway, I thought that was kind of cool. I was reading through a bunch of psychology papers today (from Webster\u0026rsquo;s psych student research poster session), and frankly they were all pretty crappy. Well that\u0026rsquo;s a bit strong. What they were studying didn\u0026rsquo;t interest me at all, and this is probably fantasy on my part, but I would like to think that college students aren\u0026rsquo;t just doing research projects to display their competency in methodology, but I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s precisely what they\u0026rsquo;re doing.\nThe kind of work I\u0026rsquo;m doing right now, all this gender theory stuff that I\u0026rsquo;m doing for my IB classes, all display process and all of that good stuff, but I\u0026rsquo;m doing work that I find interesting and important, original and unique. Gay culture in Jazz age Harlem. There are like a total of three people who\u0026rsquo;ve tackled this subject ever. And believe me, I\u0026rsquo;ve looked. There really aren\u0026rsquo;t feminist literary criticisms from a male perspective, not to mention gender criticisms from any perspective. I show process, I keep my self interested. One thing that got me in trouble earlier in my school/IB career, is that I\u0026rsquo;d try and be too contrary, and focus all of my efforts into being contrary, rather than what I should have been doing.\nNow, as my recent experience with history essays has proven, getting a good grade isn\u0026rsquo;t about saying the \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo; thing as it is about presenting it the right way. I have two perfect papers from history class, where I wrote from two positions that got little more than a scoff when I presented them in class. But I presented my ideas in the way he wanted, and I approached the whole deal with his process. I suppose. I mean I\u0026rsquo;d like to think I understand that epiphany better than I actually do. I suppose there comes a point with a lot of things where, if you take a step back things will fall into place. So that\u0026rsquo;s what really happened; but in some way I don\u0026rsquo;t feel particulay adept at articulating right now, I think that was really related to my original point. So there!\nBut I digress. Transparent Style\u0026hellip;\nWhat I think this means, basically, is that you don\u0026rsquo;t have to write stunning prose, you just have to write coherent prose. You don\u0026rsquo;t have to use creative constructions; you just have to make sure that your essays flow from one idea to the next seamlessly. You don\u0026rsquo;t have to invent crazy new syntactical phenomena; just manipulate the old ones for proper emphasis (which of course means avoiding monotony). This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that the words I put up here, aren\u0026rsquo;t going to become more polished suddenly (that\u0026rsquo;s another problem completely). In some cases, TealArt is exempt, because I want my style to show because the whole point of a Journal is for the readers to learn about me through my writing, and style is one of the best ways I can think to do this.\nBut enough metatalk. Yes, metatalk.\nI think/hope that this is one of those epiphanies where nothing actually changes, except my perception of difficulty. Sorry it took so long folks.\nPS. Chris and I are doing some metatalk ourselves about TealArt and the like as we are want to do from time to time. We have some simplifications coming around in the next couple of weeks, so keep your eyes pealed. Cheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/transparent-style/","summary":"I think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally learned, after a good year and a half of trying, what transparent style really means, and more importantly how to accomplish it. Transparent style, of course, is the style of writing appropriate for most academic non-fiction. Rather than creative writing where you want to display technique, academic writing requires transparent technique. Any device used shouldn\u0026rsquo;t jump out at an average reader. Even quality writing, if it\u0026rsquo;s showy, it distracts from what you\u0026rsquo;re saying.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing that your history and countless other teachers tell you before your first essay, not to mention 50,000 other times throughout a course, and unless you\u0026rsquo;ve had an epiphany on the subject, you (or at least I) probably don\u0026rsquo;t really know what it means. That isn\u0026rsquo;t to say you don\u0026rsquo;t think you don\u0026rsquo;t know\u0026hellip;. I\u0026rsquo;ll stop there.\nAnyway, I thought that was kind of cool. I was reading through a bunch of psychology papers today (from Webster\u0026rsquo;s psych student research poster session), and frankly they were all pretty crappy.","title":"Transparent Style"},{"content":"Well my computer drama continues, though there\u0026rsquo;s an end in sight. That\u0026rsquo;s a comforting thing, and I\u0026rsquo;ll write more about that when things get more sorted out. For now, it\u0026rsquo;s time for Link and Think.\nThe basic idea, is that on December 1st, website owners do the same thing they usuually do, except they talk about HIV/AIDS. So if you write a techie blog, then instead of posting news in mircochip development, you post news about retroviral drug development, or in the case of TealArt, we blabber esotericaly for a page or two before going to bed.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had lots of thoughts, trying to get some sort of entry together, and perhaps this is part of the reason I\u0026rsquo;m waiting until now. I wanted to say something about the upcoming Angels in America production on HBO, that I think is going to be very powerful, and has the potential to open some eyes. I wanted to say something about our perceptions of HIV/AIDS in terms of people who live with it. The impact of treatment, and the things we don\u0026rsquo;t talk about. (the drugs, the strain that it puts on family/friends, the durration and length). I wanted to at least make a point about realistic sex education, and the extent to which abstanance-only education only helps the virus. How heterosexim and homophobia force people into their closets, where transmission rates are huge.\nBut I guess, instead of being wordy, I\u0026rsquo;m going to let you do the thinking. Now you\u0026rsquo;ve seen what I\u0026rsquo;m thinking about, I\u0026rsquo;d like to know what\u0026rsquo;s on your mind. Part of this project in my mind, is that it brings discusssion of AIDS into an enviroment where it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be discussed. So talk about HIV/AIDS, and think about it. Everyone has to deal with this epidemic somehow, and we could all afford a few brains cells for a good cause.\nCheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/linking-and-thinking/","summary":"Well my computer drama continues, though there\u0026rsquo;s an end in sight. That\u0026rsquo;s a comforting thing, and I\u0026rsquo;ll write more about that when things get more sorted out. For now, it\u0026rsquo;s time for Link and Think.\nThe basic idea, is that on December 1st, website owners do the same thing they usuually do, except they talk about HIV/AIDS. So if you write a techie blog, then instead of posting news in mircochip development, you post news about retroviral drug development, or in the case of TealArt, we blabber esotericaly for a page or two before going to bed.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve had lots of thoughts, trying to get some sort of entry together, and perhaps this is part of the reason I\u0026rsquo;m waiting until now. I wanted to say something about the upcoming Angels in America production on HBO, that I think is going to be very powerful, and has the potential to open some eyes.","title":"Linking and Thinking"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m visiting family for the holiday, and you know what that means? Cable TV (and lots of food, and family visiting, of course, but we\u0026rsquo;ll leave that entry for later.)\nAnyway, with thanksgiving being a football holiday, we\u0026rsquo;ve been reduced to watching make over shows. We caught a Trading Spaces (there\u0026rsquo;s a 48 hour marathon going on, so tune in, if your interested.) which was an interesting experience, and I watched a Queer Eye, because I find gay guys acting unabashedly nelly, very cute and entertaining.\nThe actual content of the shows are kind of blah. I mean it\u0026rsquo;s a great idea and all, and I was really just trying to watch the gayness in the whole ordeal. But, one thing that we all (the family) found entertaining was that when ever someone sees the changes they say \u0026ldquo;Oh My God,\u0026rdquo; accenting the ëmy\u0026rsquo; about four times in a high voice. \u0026ldquo;Oh, my GOD!\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Oh MY god!\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;OH my God!\u0026rdquo; and so forth.\nI mean come on. What kind of self respecting straight guy says \u0026ldquo;oh my god\u0026rdquo; six times on camera. For that matter, what kind of gay guy doesn\u0026rsquo;t say \u0026ldquo;HFS\u0026rdquo; (as my father so tactfully put it), at least once be for the \u0026ldquo;oh my gods start?\u0026rdquo;\nAnd the only thing I can think of is this scene from the forth of fifth UK Queer as Folk when there\u0026rsquo;s a surprise party for Vince\u0026rsquo;s (Michael from the American version) 30th birthday part, except he knows it\u0026rsquo;s a surprise party. It\u0026rsquo;s at Stuart\u0026rsquo;s (Brain) house, and Vince\u0026rsquo;s boyfriend or pack of friends (boyfriend = David/Cameron and friends = Alexander/Emmit and Ted) are taking him to Stuart\u0026rsquo;s but Vince knows about it, so for at least ten minutes Vince is saying \u0026ldquo;Oh, my GOD!\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Oh MY god!\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;OH my God!\u0026rdquo; in an attempt to sound authentic when he fakes surprise at his party.\nIn the next scene Stuart cornerës him and says \u0026ldquo;howëd you know.\u0026rdquo; It was priceless. Having said all that, I\u0026rsquo;m probably remembering it all differently, but in any case\u0026hellip;\nI continue to maintain my opinion that its generally harmless and a great deal of fun. I did hear a lot of \u0026ldquo;lets make your bedroom a sanctuary,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;it feels like a whole new me,\u0026rdquo; which was too touchy feely. But then I\u0026rsquo;m in this \u0026ldquo;embrace your labels, and make them work for you, instead of working for your labels\u0026rdquo; phase right now, so it\u0026rsquo;s all good.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/oh-my-god-or-holy-fucking-shit/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m visiting family for the holiday, and you know what that means? Cable TV (and lots of food, and family visiting, of course, but we\u0026rsquo;ll leave that entry for later.)\nAnyway, with thanksgiving being a football holiday, we\u0026rsquo;ve been reduced to watching make over shows. We caught a Trading Spaces (there\u0026rsquo;s a 48 hour marathon going on, so tune in, if your interested.) which was an interesting experience, and I watched a Queer Eye, because I find gay guys acting unabashedly nelly, very cute and entertaining.\nThe actual content of the shows are kind of blah. I mean it\u0026rsquo;s a great idea and all, and I was really just trying to watch the gayness in the whole ordeal. But, one thing that we all (the family) found entertaining was that when ever someone sees the changes they say \u0026ldquo;Oh My God,\u0026rdquo; accenting the ëmy\u0026rsquo; about four times in a high voice.","title":"Oh My God, or, ìHoly Fucking Shitî"},{"content":"Well it\u0026rsquo;s certianly been an eventfull evening. My instalation of windows which I\u0026rsquo;ve probably been using for the past nine or more months has finally bitten the dust. Mind you, my data is all nice and safe and it can stay there. It\u0026rsquo;s nerve wracking becasue I\u0026rsquo;ve agreed to go out of town this weekend, and my computer situation is compleatly up in the air.\nSee I want to instal Gentoo Linux on my PC and have that be my primary operating system. I really do have a lot of affection for Windows and all, but there\u0026rsquo;s little reason not to change, and I\u0026rsquo;d like something a little less touchy. For the moment (becasue the instalation of windows that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for the past several months is dying slowly), I\u0026rsquo;m reduced to Knoppix, the bootable CD linux distrabution. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty idea, and lets people get used to the idea of linux, and is a great diagnostic operating system that\u0026rsquo;ll quickly let people know that it really is Windows messing up, and not their processor blowing out.\nAs for primary OS aplications, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t work so well. My issue with it is that I have three NTFS drives, and no way to write data anywhere\u0026hellip; even to a flopy disk. Now two of those three drives are backed up and ready to be formated for the eventual arival of Gentoo, and I\u0026rsquo;d really be happy to turn one or both of them into FAT drives, but, I can\u0026rsquo;t figure out how to do that right now.\nHaving said that, linux is prety nice, I must admit. The longer I sit here looking dumbfounded at the whole thing the less excited I get about the whole matter, but it\u0026rsquo;ll be nice. I hope. I\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to at least put on a linux distrabution for just in case, and I know that if I just layer over the old windows install with new stuff (becasue the problem is totally not that serious I think) I\u0026rsquo;ll never do it. So maybe some of this torture is self imposed, but I could find out that Gentoo is really awsome and that I\u0026rsquo;ll end up liking it and wanting to not go back to windows perminatly afterwords. But first I have to figure out what a stupid tar.bz2 file has to do with anything and how I get a CD to install from.\nIn any case, I bet you\u0026rsquo;re wondering why I\u0026rsquo;m going into geek babble on the Times of TealArt (it still feels a bit funny to call the main log that, but it\u0026rsquo;s kinda cool). Well I thought it might be nice to get a little more bloggy out here just in genereal, but also becasue I have an actual art acomplishment thing to talk about.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve gotten myself involved with my school\u0026rsquo;s writing lab. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty little thing\u0026hellip; stay after school for a few hours and get work done in a nice enviroment, help other people think about their writing, and enjoy the company. The nice thing is taht, since people at my school are slackers and don\u0026rsquo;t really show up for this kind of \u0026rsquo;lab\u0026rsquo;, I get an English teacher at my disposal for a few hours a week, which is really nifty.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s this poetry contest that this english teacher was telling someone else (whose writing/poetry I\u0026rsquo;m not particularly fond of) about this really nifty and quaint poetry contest. So I thought, what the hell, I can pull together a few poems and submit them.\nSo I started writing a Poem, or at least trying to. It\u0026rsquo;s been a long process, and it\u0026rsquo;s taken a while, from the point of the first line, to a theme, to a couple of revisions, to some intresting developments interms of literary neatnesses. The end result is prety awsome, I think. So I\u0026rsquo;m going to have to put a little more effort into such projects in the near future.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not so sure I\u0026rsquo;ll be posting this stuff here, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see. Also I should apologize now. There\u0026rsquo;s a prety neat wordprocessor in Knoppix (two or three actually, but one that I\u0026rsquo;m suited to; anyway,) the problem is they couldn\u0026rsquo;t fit the spellcheck dictionary onto the CD, which is really ok, given all the other things that they fit in around here. So this entry is assuredly rougher than you\u0026rsquo;re used to. Sorry about that folks. Some semblence of normalicy will return in due time.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/of-poetry-and-geekery/","summary":"Well it\u0026rsquo;s certianly been an eventfull evening. My instalation of windows which I\u0026rsquo;ve probably been using for the past nine or more months has finally bitten the dust. Mind you, my data is all nice and safe and it can stay there. It\u0026rsquo;s nerve wracking becasue I\u0026rsquo;ve agreed to go out of town this weekend, and my computer situation is compleatly up in the air.\nSee I want to instal Gentoo Linux on my PC and have that be my primary operating system. I really do have a lot of affection for Windows and all, but there\u0026rsquo;s little reason not to change, and I\u0026rsquo;d like something a little less touchy. For the moment (becasue the instalation of windows that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using for the past several months is dying slowly), I\u0026rsquo;m reduced to Knoppix, the bootable CD linux distrabution. It\u0026rsquo;s a nifty idea, and lets people get used to the idea of linux, and is a great diagnostic operating system that\u0026rsquo;ll quickly let people know that it really is Windows messing up, and not their processor blowing out.","title":"Of Poetry and Geekery"},{"content":"The rest of the gay blogging community seems to have issued some sort of message in relation to the Massachusetts court case. Some say, \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s about damn time,\u0026rdquo; and it is. Some issue congratulations, which are due. Some fear the backlash, which is only reasonable. I on the other hand (as I do with a lot of current events stuff) have waited a while to let things settle down a bit, so I can comment on it with the safety of hindsight.\nMy prediction is that we\u0026rsquo;ll see a proper marriage reform in the next few/several years. Why? Defense of Marriage acts aren\u0026rsquo;t going to stand up in the US Supreme Court, Scalia has even said that it seems. As for a backlash, waiting isn\u0026rsquo;t going to do anything\u0026hellip; There are always going to be radical elements who will try and insight a backlash. Here\u0026rsquo;s something interesting from a recent Washington Post article:\nWe were afraid that pushing too hard on this issue would inspire extreme legislation,\u0026quot; she said. \u0026ldquo;But by 1996 it was clear that we had achieved nothing at the federal level -- not even a simple employment nondiscrimination law or hate-crimes bill. The incrementalist approach, while a valid idea, had no effect. So why not be clear about what we need and what we should be given as a matter of birthright and a matter of being fully participating citizens? Set out all the goals at once.\nThe nice thing about extreme legislation is that it usually doesn\u0026rsquo;t live through the courts. Legislatures and courts almost always move in opposite directions of each other, and it seems to me that it\u0026rsquo;s easier to rally the community against extremism. For example, marriage, hate crimes laws, and employment non-discrimination (ENDA) are all very noble causes, but the community will have a mixed response; however, extremists are far more likely to provoke a unified response. Also, straight-allies are even more likely to see injustices when it\u0026rsquo;s really pronounced.\nLet use race as an example. Before and during the civil rights movement there were these grave injustices for people of color, extremist legislation, and all that bad stuff. The community was able to rally, and enough white folks became allies, that sweeping changes like Brown vs. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights Act, were able to pass. And now, today. There are tons of race issues that still need to be addressed. But, there isn\u0026rsquo;t any extremism, and white people are for the most part oblivious to the problem. As a result? There isn\u0026rsquo;t a broad movement fighting racism today. While it\u0026rsquo;s certainly not that simplistic, on some level it is, and on some level the queer movement is facing the same sort of issue.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t take me to mean that we need to radicalize in order to provoke a response in order to accomplish anything, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think we need to be overly focused on appeasing those with power and working to scare no one. Ultimately it boils down to my age old conflict. If you like what the HRC is doing but now how their doing it, can you in good faith support them? I don\u0026rsquo;t have a good answer, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I have anything to say to this that would further the debate right now.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/tonight-on-the-marriage-front/","summary":"The rest of the gay blogging community seems to have issued some sort of message in relation to the Massachusetts court case. Some say, \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s about damn time,\u0026rdquo; and it is. Some issue congratulations, which are due. Some fear the backlash, which is only reasonable. I on the other hand (as I do with a lot of current events stuff) have waited a while to let things settle down a bit, so I can comment on it with the safety of hindsight.\nMy prediction is that we\u0026rsquo;ll see a proper marriage reform in the next few/several years. Why? Defense of Marriage acts aren\u0026rsquo;t going to stand up in the US Supreme Court, Scalia has even said that it seems. As for a backlash, waiting isn\u0026rsquo;t going to do anything\u0026hellip; There are always going to be radical elements who will try and insight a backlash. Here\u0026rsquo;s something interesting from a recent Washington Post article:","title":"Tonight on the Marriage Front"},{"content":"Its no secret that the main point of education isn\u0026rsquo;t to teach content (or perhaps more importantly shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be to teach content) but rather to teach process skills and thought processes. That\u0026rsquo;s great, because answers change a lot, but the way to find the answers doesn\u0026rsquo;t really change. But what form do those process skills take, and dose this really make us better more knowledgeable individuals?\nThe traditional paradigm would seem to be all about accepting what\u0026rsquo;s come before. To internalize information in a very flat way, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve the learner. Accepting and not questioning, this kind of learning is still widely employed, but I feel my life\u0026rsquo;s been working under a different paradigm for a while. Basically, through my theory of knowledge class, through the whole Anytown experience, through my gender studies project, I\u0026rsquo;ve been forced to take something of a deconstructionist attitude towards knowledge, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I like this idea. Rather than accept, construct, synthesize information, and reach some sort of clarity, the opposite happens: I have to take a masse of information and break it apart into lots of little pieces. Science, gender, oppression, social science, math, sexuality, identity, and history, rather than build up knowledge, accept what is, we\u0026rsquo;re looking for all the exceptions, all the flaws and while this is a good way to approach knowledge, if nothing else it\u0026rsquo;s put a HUGE crimp in my ability to write effectively.\nWithin this paradigm, (which I\u0026rsquo;m starting to feel is just as limiting as the flawed one it replaces) I feel as if I\u0026rsquo;m obligated to deconstruct everything. To get in there and notice how it\u0026rsquo;s flawed, how the rules and categories society provides don\u0026rsquo;t apply much of the time, how bias skews so much knowledge/information and our interpretation of aforementioned knowledge. But of course everything is flawed, and this is inescapable. But we can\u0026rsquo;t or shouldn\u0026rsquo;t invalidate anything because it\u0026rsquo;s flawed, because then we\u0026rsquo;d be left with a whole lot of nothing. But you can\u0026rsquo;t accept knowledge as it is, because it\u0026rsquo;s flawed, because it\u0026rsquo;s not right.\nI suppose the question I\u0026rsquo;m looking to answer, is \u0026ldquo;where does that leave us?\u0026rdquo; I can\u0026rsquo;t accept flawed information blindly, and I can\u0026rsquo;t deconstruct everything into an unrecognizable pulp. There has to be a middle ground, or so you\u0026rsquo;d think; but both ends of this spectrum seem to exclude each other. Ironically, the only thing I can think to say right now is \u0026ldquo;faith.\u0026rdquo; Not really faith in a god sort of way, but faith in an understanding that the information you are working with is reliable, and that your treatment won\u0026rsquo;t do any harm.\nNot an easy task.\nThis difficulty is compounded by the fact that we\u0026rsquo;re not just talking about disciplinary knowledge here, we\u0026rsquo;re also talking about gender and about identity, which is where it gets really difficult. Because on some level I know what makes up my own identity, and I know what society expects, we all do; but on another more intellectual level I also know that this isn\u0026rsquo;t true of everyone. I know that there are exceptions that defy categorization. What do you do? Or, I suppose what can you do?\nI\u0026rsquo;ve said in the past that the only thing you can do is keep on going, and endure. Because this chaos is what the world seems to exist in. Now there\u0026rsquo;s this whole order in chaos; and chaos in order idea, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to apply that. So there might be an answer in there somewhere.\nSo ultimately, I feel stuck and lost. I mean I can continue to function and I can continue to be productive on some level, but I guess the real problem with that is that I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like that would lead to any progress, and just more of the status quo which in it\u0026rsquo;s way is part of the whole flawed traditionalism.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a vicious cycle, and I can\u0026rsquo;t get away from it; even when I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to remove myself to discuss it. Also, there isn\u0026rsquo;t an end, every statement leads to a question and every question leads us somewhere.\nJust as a general commentary, I\u0026rsquo;d like to say that it\u0026rsquo;s slightly ironic that I\u0026rsquo;ve identified this as deconstructionism, because that\u0026rsquo;s a critical school that I\u0026rsquo;m not fond of. (It should be noted that my opinions of critical schools exist in varying shades of disapproval). Additionally, I think I can finally understand existentialism, which is another paradigm that I don\u0026rsquo;t want to touch, but I can understand it now.\nSince there\u0026rsquo;s no logical conclusion for this mess of philosophy and thought, I\u0026rsquo;m going to end this here, rest assured that I\u0026rsquo;ll get back to it at some point.\nBut before I go, I offer my most sincere apologies for this entry which must be nearly unintelligible. I look forward to the resulting discussion.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/deconstruct-this/","summary":"Its no secret that the main point of education isn\u0026rsquo;t to teach content (or perhaps more importantly shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be to teach content) but rather to teach process skills and thought processes. That\u0026rsquo;s great, because answers change a lot, but the way to find the answers doesn\u0026rsquo;t really change. But what form do those process skills take, and dose this really make us better more knowledgeable individuals?\nThe traditional paradigm would seem to be all about accepting what\u0026rsquo;s come before. To internalize information in a very flat way, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve the learner. Accepting and not questioning, this kind of learning is still widely employed, but I feel my life\u0026rsquo;s been working under a different paradigm for a while. Basically, through my theory of knowledge class, through the whole Anytown experience, through my gender studies project, I\u0026rsquo;ve been forced to take something of a deconstructionist attitude towards knowledge, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I like this idea.","title":"Deconstruct This!"},{"content":"Last year when Brad opened up Link and Think for the 2002 Worlds AIDS day, I eagerly signed up. And then TealArt promptly crashed and was down until January. So we missed it, which was seriously not cool.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re at least going to try and make amends this year. For all of you who also operate weblogs/independent websites. I\u0026rsquo;d like to implore you all to take part. It\u0026rsquo;s a great idea and a good way to unify and take part in a worthy crowd. Check it out, join up, and we\u0026rsquo;ll be here on the first for World AIDS day Link and Think.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/link-and-think-announcement/","summary":"Last year when Brad opened up Link and Think for the 2002 Worlds AIDS day, I eagerly signed up. And then TealArt promptly crashed and was down until January. So we missed it, which was seriously not cool.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re at least going to try and make amends this year. For all of you who also operate weblogs/independent websites. I\u0026rsquo;d like to implore you all to take part. It\u0026rsquo;s a great idea and a good way to unify and take part in a worthy crowd. Check it out, join up, and we\u0026rsquo;ll be here on the first for World AIDS day Link and Think.","title":"Link and Think Announcement"},{"content":"*Agenda:*\nNew Skins (Rainbow Pride, Boy Looking, Blue Robot 3, and Stolen Skins) New Contributor Notify List New Site New Profiles Site Stats *New Skins* I have a lot of new skin news. I reciently made up this new database powered skin engine that makes the whole skinning process a lot simpler. The actual changes on the site are basicly non-noticeable, but since I made this change I\u0026rsquo;ve started to add a new skin every week or so. There are currently 27 skins installed, which will probably lead to redisgn of how the Skin Page operates, but in any cases, I\u0026rsquo;ve added a number of different skins to TealArt that you might like to know about:\n\u0026ldquo;Rainbow Pride\u0026rdquo; is a rainbow skin taken from a diary land template that I found using google. Yes, I\u0026rsquo;m shameless, but at least it looks cool. The skin uses tables and font HTML tags, so from a web-standards, HTML point of view the skin is horrid, but the surprising thing is that it renders perfectly in every situation I\u0026rsquo;ve tried it in, so go figure. Enjoy it, but don\u0026rsquo;t expect to much.\n\u0026ldquo;Boy Looking\u0026rdquo; is a new skin that\u0026rsquo;s completely original. I took another Abercrombie \u0026amp; Fitch graphic, did some semi-creative photoshoping to it, and then put together a style sheet all by myself. There\u0026rsquo;s a Mozilla Version, and an Internet Explorer Version. I might put together some more color options together (this one uses warmer colors), and the sidebar is on the right. It\u0026rsquo;s a pretty cool design, so check it out.\n\u0026ldquo;Blue Robot 3\u0026rdquo; Is similar in style to the \u0026ldquo;Robot Theft\u0026rdquo; Skins that have been around for almost as long as I\u0026rsquo;ve had skinning available on TealArt. It\u0026rsquo;s a simple, text based skin for those who like it, and its about as unoriginal and stolen as they come. The only reason I\u0026rsquo;m listing it alone here is because it\u0026rsquo;s the first TealArt skin to use three columns, and it paves the way for future skins to take advantage of some really pretty three column layout ideas that Chris and I have in the works.\nThe Stolen Skins, represent a surprisingly larger percentage of the TealArt skins. These are skins that we\u0026rsquo;ve taken from template repositories and turned into TealArt skins. Some have more originality infused than others, while some are downright shameful and were thrown together in mere moments. But they all present some sort of aesthetic quality that we like, and enjoy. These skins include everything that we\u0026rsquo;ve taken from Blue Robot, the Rainbow Pride skin, and two others that I took from random template repositories. Blue Robot skins are CSS and Text wonder pieces, the rainbow skin is fun, and the last two are both pretty good in a melodramatic boggy sort of way, so enjoy them if you want, but enjoy them for the novelty that they are.\nThe Rainbow Pride Skin Blue Robot Three British Museum The River *Notify List*\nThe version of quarto that we\u0026rsquo;re using on TealArt is a bit behind the version Amy\u0026rsquo;s currently working on. Rather than have to piece together the database regularly for the next couple of months (or really more than once per quarter), we\u0026rsquo;re going to hold out on our dated version and wait for something monumental. I mean the truth is that it works fine now, and I\u0026rsquo;m not in the mood to go off breaking things. One thing that I could never get to work quite right, until now that is, was the notify list.\nFinally, I went digging for the code in question, and found a rather unsightly bit that was all commented out, and after some toying around and the introduction of the dandy mail(); function, I was able to \u0026ldquo;encourage\u0026rdquo; email notification. When I talked to Amy to brag tell her about my conquest, she told me she\u0026rsquo;d switched over a long time ago. Go figure, and I thought I was brilliant.\nLong story short I\u0026rsquo;d like to offer you the TealArt Notifty Page which will let you subscribe and alter your subscription to the TealArt notify list. There aren\u0026rsquo;t and probably won\u0026rsquo;t be email lists for quotes and links without popular demand, and we have separate lists for The Times of TealArt and the Paradigm Brainfeed. I hope it\u0026rsquo;s useful.\n*New Contributor*\nWhile Chris and I have been really impressed with the progress the site has made in recent months, in terms of readership and in terms of the operation and content, we\u0026rsquo;re not satisfied with ourselves as the sole personalities of the site. While we kind of learned our lesson about the problems of starting an independent website bassed on the contributions of a large community with CollectiveArts and don\u0026rsquo;t want to have TealArt run into those problems, we would like to see a broader perspective here. So we\u0026rsquo;re still looking for TealArtists/Crew folks.\nTo that end, we\u0026rsquo;ve decided to add another contributor. Ryan Davis will be joining here to give his take on the world, just like the rest of us. He\u0026rsquo;s in the process of moving (to my fair city, as coincidence would have it) at the moment, but once he gets into gear, I think you\u0026rsquo;ll really enjoy his offerings.\n*New Profiles*\nJust a blurb to tell you that I\u0026rsquo;ve updated my profile. When I wrote the old one I kind of anticipated having it stick around for a while, but I suppose life and the world change too much for such things to remain true even months later. No new pictures I fear, but we\u0026rsquo;ll get something soonish.\nAlso Chris promises us that he\u0026rsquo;ll get some sort of text based profile up by the end of the evening (Wednesday November 12th 2003), but we\u0026rsquo;ll see, sometime in the very new feature we hope.\n*New Site*\nOn November 5th the CollectiveArts.net domain expires. And thus ends a three and a half year endeavor to create a single website on the independent web that would provide a \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo; for all the writers who wanted a professional co-operative web presence. It\u0026rsquo;s a great idea, and I hope someone else can do it, but after all this time, Chris and I got to the point where all of the things we wanted to accomplish in a website were already happening on TealArt, or could happen very easily on TealArt. (After we made the decision, the traffic to TA almost doubled, surprisingly enough). So now that CollectiveArts is gone, I\u0026rsquo;ve registered another domain that I\u0026rsquo;m going to use as a portfolio type site. It\u0026rsquo;s all forthcoming, but I just thought it\u0026rsquo;d be worth noting here.\n*Site Statistics*\nNothing big here, and I\u0026rsquo;m not going to jinx myself by giving out exact numbers, but Chris and I have been really surprised by the increase in the traffic, really pleased. It\u0026rsquo;s nice to know that there are people reading the site. It\u0026rsquo;d be even nicer if people emailed us from time to time, or even commented, but we\u0026rsquo;ll take what we get gladly. Independent sites like TealArt rely on word of mouth to gain readership, and so we\u0026rsquo;d like to implore you all to use your mouths to spread the word. Thanks!\nI think that about does it for this time. I hope this one does it for a while.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/site-updates-2/","summary":"*Agenda:*\nNew Skins (Rainbow Pride, Boy Looking, Blue Robot 3, and Stolen Skins) New Contributor Notify List New Site New Profiles Site Stats *New Skins* I have a lot of new skin news. I reciently made up this new database powered skin engine that makes the whole skinning process a lot simpler. The actual changes on the site are basicly non-noticeable, but since I made this change I\u0026rsquo;ve started to add a new skin every week or so. There are currently 27 skins installed, which will probably lead to redisgn of how the Skin Page operates, but in any cases, I\u0026rsquo;ve added a number of different skins to TealArt that you might like to know about:\n\u0026ldquo;Rainbow Pride\u0026rdquo; is a rainbow skin taken from a diary land template that I found using google. Yes, I\u0026rsquo;m shameless, but at least it looks cool. The skin uses tables and font HTML tags, so from a web-standards, HTML point of view the skin is horrid, but the surprising thing is that it renders perfectly in every situation I\u0026rsquo;ve tried it in, so go figure.","title":"Site Updates"},{"content":"Family isn\u0026rsquo;t just the people who relate to us by blood or by law. Those people are a given, and we don\u0026rsquo;t really have much of a choice in the matter. For that matter we don\u0026rsquo;t really have a lot of choice in any of our families, they seem to choose us. Family are the people you love enough to keep a caring eye on even when you\u0026rsquo;re mad at them, the people whose love you never need question, the people who will always show up. It\u0026rsquo;s not something that happens by choice, and after a while people just become family.\nFamily are people like the closet case ex-boyfriend who you can\u0026rsquo;t help worry over, and who will always need a hug. Like his little brother who you look after, even though you\u0026rsquo;ve never spoken to him. Like the girl who would seem to be the unlikeliest match in the world, but remains constant. Like the compassionate and neurotic gay mobster who is always forgivable, it\u0026rsquo;s his ex-boyfriends who may not be as forgivable; it\u0026rsquo;s his asshole brother who really does have an ounce of good underneath it all.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s the guy who\u0026rsquo;s always up at two am and willing to talk about life, loves, and Linux. It\u0026rsquo;s the best friend who you love but can\u0026rsquo;t and won\u0026rsquo;t for years to come. Your best equal. It\u0026rsquo;s the friends who manage to change with you and still remain refreshingly grounded in a shared past. It\u0026rsquo;s the only person with enough balls to stand up to you, and still match you move for move. It\u0026rsquo;s the friends who still invite you to sing, despite apparent tone deafness.\nFamily is these people and more. In some ways it\u0026rsquo;s all of their families. When you think about things that way the world doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like that big of a place after all.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/family-are-this-is-my-family/","summary":"Family isn\u0026rsquo;t just the people who relate to us by blood or by law. Those people are a given, and we don\u0026rsquo;t really have much of a choice in the matter. For that matter we don\u0026rsquo;t really have a lot of choice in any of our families, they seem to choose us. Family are the people you love enough to keep a caring eye on even when you\u0026rsquo;re mad at them, the people whose love you never need question, the people who will always show up. It\u0026rsquo;s not something that happens by choice, and after a while people just become family.\nFamily are people like the closet case ex-boyfriend who you can\u0026rsquo;t help worry over, and who will always need a hug. Like his little brother who you look after, even though you\u0026rsquo;ve never spoken to him. Like the girl who would seem to be the unlikeliest match in the world, but remains constant.","title":"Family Are\u0026#8230; This is My Family."},{"content":"On November 10, 1975, The Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in a storm on Lake Superior. All hands were lost: 29 people died. I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with this account of the events, and the lyrics to the Gordon Lightfoot song (because it\u0026rsquo;s next to impossible to understand him singing it) that immortalized the event.\nThe Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald --Gordon Lightfoot\nThe legend lives on from the Chippewa on down\nOf the big lake they call Gitche Gumee\nThe lake, it is said, never gives up her dead\nWhen the skies of November turn gloomy\nWith a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more\nThan the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty\nThat good ship and true was a bone to be chewed\nWhen the gales of November came early\nThe ship was the pride of the American side\nComing back from some mill in Wisconsin\nAs the big freighters go, it was bigger than most\nWith a crew and good captain well seasoned\nConcluding some terms with a couple of steel firms\nWhen they left fully loaded for Cleveland\nThen later that night when the ship\u0026rsquo;s bell rang\nCould it be the north wind they\u0026rsquo;d been feelin'?\nThe wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound\nWhen the wave broke over the railing\nAnd every man knew, as the captain did too\n\u0026lsquo;Twas the witch of November come stealin\u0026rsquo;\nThe dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait\nWhen the gales of November came slashin\u0026rsquo;\nWhen afternoon came it was freezing rain\nIn the face of a hurricane west wind\nWhen suppertime came, the old cook came on deck\nSayin\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;Fellas, it\u0026rsquo;s too rough to feed ya\u0026rdquo;\nAt seven PM a main hatchway caved in\nHe said, \u0026ldquo;Fellas, it\u0026rsquo;s been good to know ya\u0026rdquo;\nThe captain wired in he had water comin\u0026rsquo; in\nAnd the good ship and crew was in peril\nAnd later that night when his lights went out of sight\nCame the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald\nDoes anyone know where the love of God goes\nWhen the waves turn the minutes to hours?\nThe searchers all say they\u0026rsquo;d have made Whitefish Bay\nIf they\u0026rsquo;d put fifteen more miles behind her\nThey might have split up or they might have capsized\nThey may have broke deep and took water\nAnd all that remains is the faces and the names\nOf the wives and the sons and the daughters\nLake Huron rolls, Superior sings\nIn the rooms of her ice-water mansion\nOld Michigan steams like a young man\u0026rsquo;s dreams\nThe islands and bays are for sportsmen\nAnd farther below, Lake Ontario\nTakes in what Lake Erie can send her\nAnd the iron boats go as the mariners all know\nWith the gales of November remembered\nIn a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed\nIn the Maritime Sailors\u0026rsquo; Cathedral\nThe church bell chimed \u0026rsquo;til it rang twenty-nine times\nFor each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald\nThe legend lives on from the Chippewa on down\nOf the big lake they call Gitche Gumee\nSuperior, they said, never gives up her dead\nWhen the gales of November come early\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-wreck-of-the-edmund-fitzgerald/","summary":"On November 10, 1975, The Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in a storm on Lake Superior. All hands were lost: 29 people died. I\u0026rsquo;ll leave you with this account of the events, and the lyrics to the Gordon Lightfoot song (because it\u0026rsquo;s next to impossible to understand him singing it) that immortalized the event.\nThe Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald --Gordon Lightfoot\nThe legend lives on from the Chippewa on down\nOf the big lake they call Gitche Gumee\nThe lake, it is said, never gives up her dead\nWhen the skies of November turn gloomy\nWith a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more\nThan the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty\nThat good ship and true was a bone to be chewed\nWhen the gales of November came early\nThe ship was the pride of the American side\nComing back from some mill in Wisconsin\nAs the big freighters go, it was bigger than most","title":"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"},{"content":"Last night I was someone\u0026rsquo;s date at a dance for one of the largest all boys (catholic) high schools in the area. Apparently it was an historic moment, because there had never been same-sex couples at a school dance before. Well, it went off without a hitch and no one really said or did anything surprising. Some old chaperone guy smiled at me, which I thought was nice of him (though he wasn\u0026rsquo;t a priest, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean much, but still).\nThe music was horrible, but I knew that was a given. The dancing was pretty lame to be honest, I mean a bunch of mostly straight white boys dancing to bad white boy music? Not very cool. Now I don\u0026rsquo;t consider myself much of a specialist in the trends of the popular dance floor, but a gracious appraisal of the floor told me that these people were at least 3 years behind the times. But seriously, I think the worst part about it was that it was so white and not even that everyone in the room was white, but that they were so unabashed about it.\nI think I should probably do things like that every now and then so I feel better about my school and the environment there. So go figure.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/dancing-with-the-gay-boys/","summary":"Last night I was someone\u0026rsquo;s date at a dance for one of the largest all boys (catholic) high schools in the area. Apparently it was an historic moment, because there had never been same-sex couples at a school dance before. Well, it went off without a hitch and no one really said or did anything surprising. Some old chaperone guy smiled at me, which I thought was nice of him (though he wasn\u0026rsquo;t a priest, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean much, but still).\nThe music was horrible, but I knew that was a given. The dancing was pretty lame to be honest, I mean a bunch of mostly straight white boys dancing to bad white boy music? Not very cool. Now I don\u0026rsquo;t consider myself much of a specialist in the trends of the popular dance floor, but a gracious appraisal of the floor told me that these people were at least 3 years behind the times.","title":"Dancing with the Gay Boys"},{"content":"When I posted my coming out piece on TealArt, I said that now that I\u0026rsquo;ve made the jump (and come out on TealArt) I\u0026rsquo;d do some more musing on the subject. And in some ways I have, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how directly I\u0026rsquo;ve addressed the topic. I suppose that I\u0026rsquo;m wary of it, not because I\u0026rsquo;m particularly afraid of talking about it, but more because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to affect the general interest aspect of TealArt, and over run the site with too much of this stuff.\nOn the other hand, it\u0026rsquo;s already happened, it\u0026rsquo;s what I end up musing the most about, and given that I have very little else productive-ish to say, I\u0026rsquo;m going to say it. I also don\u0026rsquo;t think that the weblogging world has become post gay, and I think it\u0026rsquo;d probably be a good thing to embrace my niche genre. I suppose that my main irrational fear at this point is that I won\u0026rsquo;t be unique and reduced somehow. This is an interesting point, but it\u0026rsquo;s a bit off topic and I\u0026rsquo;ll explore it more later, but. right now I\u0026rsquo;ll continue with the previously scheduled post.\nGender and sexuality are commonly viewed as boxes and categories that we force people into. Some people fit into their boxes very comfortably, while a lot of people don\u0026rsquo;t fit and feel comfortable with the boxes. For all of the faults of the Kinsey study, I think he put it best (this is from the 1948, study of Male Sexuality):\n\u0026ldquo;The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white \u0026hellip; Nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigion-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.\u0026rdquo;\nThis is a fairly straightforward sort of statement, but it\u0026rsquo;s also terribly hard to implement into the thought processes, scientifically, socially, and intrapersonaly. As a result, we tend to revert back to a very binary culture, which probably isn\u0026rsquo;t ideal, but at the same time it seems unavoidable. Having said that, I know a lot of folks who are trying to break out of accepted boxes and rejecting traditional labels. I think that\u0026rsquo;s really a great thing, but I\u0026rsquo;m also ambivalent about it some how, and I\u0026rsquo;d like to explore that a little.\nSee, while labels can oppress people and force them into characterizations that don\u0026rsquo;t fit their identity, they can also be a source of power, pride, and unity. So do you claim a label that doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit perfectly, but that empowers you, gives you a community, or do you claim an identity that marginalizes and excludes you from the community? What does that mean anyway?\nDo we take labels for our own benefit or do we take them for the benefit of society? I\u0026rsquo;d like input on this, if anyone\u0026rsquo;s willing.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/to-bend-or-to-not-to-bend/","summary":"When I posted my coming out piece on TealArt, I said that now that I\u0026rsquo;ve made the jump (and come out on TealArt) I\u0026rsquo;d do some more musing on the subject. And in some ways I have, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how directly I\u0026rsquo;ve addressed the topic. I suppose that I\u0026rsquo;m wary of it, not because I\u0026rsquo;m particularly afraid of talking about it, but more because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to affect the general interest aspect of TealArt, and over run the site with too much of this stuff.\nOn the other hand, it\u0026rsquo;s already happened, it\u0026rsquo;s what I end up musing the most about, and given that I have very little else productive-ish to say, I\u0026rsquo;m going to say it. I also don\u0026rsquo;t think that the weblogging world has become post gay, and I think it\u0026rsquo;d probably be a good thing to embrace my niche genre. I suppose that my main irrational fear at this point is that I won\u0026rsquo;t be unique and reduced somehow.","title":"To Bend or To Not to Bend"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m writing my next English paper at the moment. It\u0026rsquo;s a much clearer topic, and I\u0026rsquo;ve done a fairly good job at papers like this in the past, but I just thought a quote and some ranting might go a long way to explain the problem I have with this guy. So here goes nothing:\nThe general purpose of a close reading essay is clear: If you can read a paragraph in a book, you can read the entire book; if you can read one poem by an author you can read other poems by the same poet; if you can read a soliloquy or other speech you can read the entire play. This is not to say that writing a close reading essay automatically means you can immediately understand every work by the same author. Few people would insist that reading a passage from a short story from James Joyce\u0026rsquo;s Dubliners makes it possible to read Finnegan\u0026rsquo;s Wake. What a close reading essay gives you is the skill upon which you can build, an approach to any other text you will encounter.\nOk. Well that\u0026rsquo;s bullshit! But then it\u0026rsquo;s literary criticism, so that goes with the territory I suppose. But I think there\u0026rsquo;s something wrong with this idea. I mean it basically means says that practical analyses of literature can happen without context, which can\u0026rsquo;t be the case.\nCan you read and understand paragraph or even a page from \u0026ldquo;To Kill a Mocking Bird\u0026rdquo; and understand the book? Can you read a paragraph from Carl Sagan\u0026rsquo;s Contact (ok, perhaps not a favorite of Literature teachers, yet, but it\u0026rsquo;s a great book in my opinion) and understand what he\u0026rsquo;s talking about. Can you read a passage from Galileo (by Brecht) and understand the play. (I\u0026rsquo;d argue that it would even be possible to understand the play, from a literarily perspective even after you read the whole damn thing, but that\u0026rsquo;s an aside.) And Ellison\u0026rsquo;s Invisible Man is very similar. The analytical perspective required to take on a short passage of prose (now, poetry is obviously a little different), will grant you the ability to look at other short passages of prose, but entire works must be approached differently.\nI mean the most important thing is that in a short passage, themes and motifs and other literary embellishments that may be present but completely unrecognizable as such in a shorter section. Literature is ultimately about contexts, so critical schools which are anti-contextual seem especially pointless and particularly stupid.\nAnyway. Back to the Grind.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fun-writing-english-papers/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m writing my next English paper at the moment. It\u0026rsquo;s a much clearer topic, and I\u0026rsquo;ve done a fairly good job at papers like this in the past, but I just thought a quote and some ranting might go a long way to explain the problem I have with this guy. So here goes nothing:\nThe general purpose of a close reading essay is clear: If you can read a paragraph in a book, you can read the entire book; if you can read one poem by an author you can read other poems by the same poet; if you can read a soliloquy or other speech you can read the entire play. This is not to say that writing a close reading essay automatically means you can immediately understand every work by the same author. Few people would insist that reading a passage from a short story from James Joyce\u0026rsquo;s Dubliners makes it possible to read Finnegan\u0026rsquo;s Wake.","title":"Fun Writing English Papers"},{"content":"I have mixed feeling about the whole gay marriage debate. On the one hand, I really support gay marriage and how I would very much like to live in a society that would allow me to marry in the manner of my choice. On the other hand, as gay youth, marriage isn\u0026rsquo;t something that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly important to me at this point. I\u0026rsquo;m supportive, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like this is my fight, given my situation. My other feeling about the fight for gay marriage is that it\u0026rsquo;s lead by a certain group of people whose hearts may not be in the right place.\nA friend of mine once said that the HRC, which is the de facto leader of the mainstream fight for gay marriage, is a group of white gay men who don\u0026rsquo;t what their sexuality to interfere with their other assorted privileges. They\u0026rsquo;re not homophobic, granted, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel they\u0026rsquo;re inclusive of non-gay queers, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s a real problem. I\u0026rsquo;ve been known to say, that I haven\u0026rsquo;t heard an argument for gay marriage (or similar HRC issue), that I disagree with. Granted, some are better than others but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that on some level they are all right. The other thing I don\u0026rsquo;t like about the HRC is that it\u0026rsquo;s fairly indifferent towards gay youth. Organizationally, I can see why this is the case, but at the same time I don\u0026rsquo;t approve.\nHaving gay sex legalized, legitimizes the culture, and that\u0026rsquo;s something that is unbelievably important, but having marriage rights are a really logical extension. It\u0026rsquo;s also an extension that is desperately needed. At least right now, I think that the gay rights like marriage are going to be won in the courts rather than in the legislatures, because it\u0026rsquo;s a hard issue to pull the politicians around, but the issues have fairly sound legal arguments. Perhaps the courts aren\u0026rsquo;t the best venue to achieve social justice victories, but since it\u0026rsquo;s the only venue, it\u0026rsquo;ll have to do.\nThe other thing about gay marriage that gets left out too much is that ultimately the issue is a matter of church and state. Religion has the right to dictate what happens within their faith, but they don\u0026rsquo;t have the right to dictate the policy and behavior of this government. Let the religions marry whomever they want or don\u0026rsquo;t want, but it\u0026rsquo;s not the business of the church to dictate who the state marries. And the fact that secularist activists haven\u0026rsquo;t joined forces with the gay marriage movement, is quite troubling.\nSo regardless, Bush has declared a Marriage Protection week. I\u0026rsquo;m appalled, and there\u0026rsquo;s no other way to say it. I mean really now, how dare he. How dare he?!? It\u0026rsquo;s appalling for all the normal, \u0026ldquo;marriage is about heterosexuality\u0026rdquo; reasons, but it\u0026rsquo;s also appalling that he has associated breading with marriage, when this isn\u0026rsquo;t even a truth in heterosexual relationships. Thus, he\u0026rsquo;s extremely short sited or he\u0026rsquo;s downright malicious, and I\u0026rsquo;m willing to bet on the later.\nBush has every right to believe whatever he wants about marriage, queers, African-Americans, Jewish folks, Asian American\u0026rsquo;s, Disabled people, youth, Hispanics, Arabs, and women. I\u0026rsquo;m betting that, his beliefs are wrong, but anyone who really wants to remain ignorant and blind to truth in the world certainly may; ultimately it\u0026rsquo;s his loss. What Bush does not is impose his ignorance onto the rest of us. Well he does have the right to do that, but it\u0026rsquo;s AMORAL. I mean really what\u0026rsquo;s worse, me and queers everywhere falling in love (and having sex), or Bush degrading the lives and love of fellow humans?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/protect-my-marriage/","summary":"I have mixed feeling about the whole gay marriage debate. On the one hand, I really support gay marriage and how I would very much like to live in a society that would allow me to marry in the manner of my choice. On the other hand, as gay youth, marriage isn\u0026rsquo;t something that\u0026rsquo;s incredibly important to me at this point. I\u0026rsquo;m supportive, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel like this is my fight, given my situation. My other feeling about the fight for gay marriage is that it\u0026rsquo;s lead by a certain group of people whose hearts may not be in the right place.\nA friend of mine once said that the HRC, which is the de facto leader of the mainstream fight for gay marriage, is a group of white gay men who don\u0026rsquo;t what their sexuality to interfere with their other assorted privileges. They\u0026rsquo;re not homophobic, granted, but I don\u0026rsquo;t feel they\u0026rsquo;re inclusive of non-gay queers, and I think that\u0026rsquo;s a real problem.","title":"Protect My Marriage"},{"content":"So my erstwhile friend Eric Otis Scott and I are writing a send-up of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, entitled Guildencrantz and Rosenstern are Still Dead. A Oneact Play, in Five Acts. Characters are Carl Sagan (the cosmologist), Davey Boy Sarte (Jean-Paul\u0026rsquo;s bastard love child), and Mr. Haney of Petticoat Junction. Eric wrote the first scene, and here\u0026rsquo;s the second installment. SCENE TWO\n(SAGAN is moderately confused for the duration, while SARTE is for the most part annoyed with his companions)\nHANEY: How are they cooking this sushi?\nSAGAN: But don\u0026rsquo;t you understand what I\u0026rsquo;m saying? What do you think?\nHANEY: Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t medium rare be good?\nSAGAN: Do you think Fermat\u0026rsquo;s work is even relevant?\nHANEY: Is their broiler gas or wood burning?\nSAGAN: Haven\u0026rsquo;t we been over this already? Does heat generation affect the universe on a fundamental level?\nSARTE: (mutters as an aside) God, How did I make such friends?\nHANEY: Are your ideas in a communicable language?\nSAGAN: How dare--- SARTE: (louder and frustrated) Don\u0026rsquo;t you realize that you can\u0026rsquo;t have a conversation if you both talk about different things?\n(pause)\nHANEY \u0026amp; SAGAN: (surprised, and shocked. The Question is drawn out and over inflected) WHAT?!?!?\nHANEY: How were we talking about different things?\nSARTE: If you didn\u0026rsquo;t notice, then can\u0026rsquo;t you just trust me?\nSAGAN: But if the universe is so large, and heat generation is irrelevant, then\u0026hellip; wait, how can you cook sushi? Doesn\u0026rsquo;t that defeat the purpose of sushi?\nSARTE: What is sushi anyway?\nSAGAN: Don\u0026rsquo;t you eat? Can\u0026rsquo;t you see that we\u0026rsquo;re in a sushi restraint?\nSARTE: (annoyed) Do you think that answers my question Mr. Marx?\n(pause)\nSAGAN: Pardon? Why should we answer your questions, and who is this Mr. Marx character?\nSARTE: Isn\u0026rsquo;t that your name?\nSAGAN: My name?\nHANEY: (interjects, feeling left out) Do you think it\u0026rsquo;s my name then?\nSARTE: (ignores HANEY). Isn\u0026rsquo;t that your name?\nSAGAN: What\u0026rsquo;s my name?\nSARTE: (irritated). You don\u0026rsquo;t know your own name?\nHANEY: Why should physicists need to know their own names? Aren\u0026rsquo;t they almost gods or something? Shouldn\u0026rsquo;t we order our food so they can start cooking it?\nSARTE: (sardonically, emphasis on you, a la strongbad) How would you propose cooking sushi?\nSAGAN: Are you saying that I\u0026rsquo;m a god?\nHANEY: Do you mean that they aren\u0026rsquo;t going to cook are food? Isn\u0026rsquo;t that cheap of them? I wonder if it\u0026rsquo;s safe?\nSARTE: You\u0026rsquo;re a physicist? Weren\u0026rsquo;t you a friend of my father?\nHANEY: Your father was friends with Marx?\nSARTE: Didn\u0026rsquo;t you know that my father had a lot of friends?\nHANEY: I wonder what that says about your lineag?\nSARTE: Well isn\u0026rsquo;t it kind of hard to sink below bastard love child?\nHANEY: Isn\u0026rsquo;t bastard love child, a redundant statement?\nSAGAN: Who is this Mark bloke, didn\u0026rsquo;t my mother always call me Carl?\nSARTE: Oh, so you\u0026rsquo;re Carl the physicist?\nSAGAN: Did you think my name was Mark?\nHANEY: Didn\u0026rsquo;t you hear him say Marx, and not Mark?\nSAGAN: (confused) Pardon?\nSARTE: Don\u0026rsquo;t you think we\u0026rsquo;ve spent enough time on this subject? Aren\u0026rsquo;t you two ready to eat?\nHANEY: (annoyed) What have I been saying for the past hour?\nSAGAN: (high pitched, fast, moderately insane) Has it been an hour? How do you know that much time has passed? Can you be sure that time is constant?\nSARTE: Waiter? Waiter? Can we have a waiter over here?\n(blackout--curtain)\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/cooking-sushi/","summary":"So my erstwhile friend Eric Otis Scott and I are writing a send-up of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, entitled Guildencrantz and Rosenstern are Still Dead. A Oneact Play, in Five Acts. Characters are Carl Sagan (the cosmologist), Davey Boy Sarte (Jean-Paul\u0026rsquo;s bastard love child), and Mr. Haney of Petticoat Junction. Eric wrote the first scene, and here\u0026rsquo;s the second installment. SCENE TWO\n(SAGAN is moderately confused for the duration, while SARTE is for the most part annoyed with his companions)\nHANEY: How are they cooking this sushi?\nSAGAN: But don\u0026rsquo;t you understand what I\u0026rsquo;m saying? What do you think?\nHANEY: Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t medium rare be good?\nSAGAN: Do you think Fermat\u0026rsquo;s work is even relevant?\nHANEY: Is their broiler gas or wood burning?\nSAGAN: Haven\u0026rsquo;t we been over this already? Does heat generation affect the universe on a fundamental level?\nSARTE: (mutters as an aside) God, How did I make such friends?","title":"Cooking Sushi"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s been two years since that fateful day, and I still don\u0026rsquo;t know how to feel about it. On the one hand it would be insensitive to try and forget it and try and move on; on the other, we have to move on. Thus we are stuck, and in light of this situation, I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely sure what I\u0026rsquo;m supposed to think or say.\nBig events like this are subjects that you feel you just can\u0026rsquo;t ignore on your blog, but at the same time there\u0026rsquo;s something inside of me that wants to say, moving on is the best thing we can do. You can\u0026rsquo;t fight fire with fire, and my general policy for fighting battles of any kind, is that sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s better to accept a little loss if it means maintaining your dignity and not stooping down to fight your enemy on their level. When you fight them on their level, they\u0026rsquo;re going to beat the crap out of you because you\u0026rsquo;re working on their terms, and when you decided stoop down you\u0026rsquo;ve given victory to the enemy. Why? Because you\u0026rsquo;ve embodied the qualities that made them your enemy in the first place.\nI remember exactly where I was when I learned about the attack. The principal came on the intercom and told the teachers to turn their televisions on. She used the word pandemonium in a way that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have, and my first thought was, she has to be kidding right? It was mere moments after the second plane hit. I was in English class. We watched the television in the room for several moments after the buildings collapsed, and then we turned the television off and got back to work.\nWhen class let out, the whole school clustered around the television in the lunch room. Everyone was quiet. Because of my schedule that year, I got out of school early, and spent the rest of the day doing the things I normally did. But it wasn\u0026rsquo;t a normal day.\nI remember that my estimate of the death count was fairly accurate, and even then I remember criticizing the tendency towards reactionary patriotism. I remember being cynical.\nLast year I said remember the five thousand who died in 2001, but also remember Victor Jara and the people who died in Chile in 1974.\nSo remember them all, and even though this sounds remarkably like the spewing of individuals whom I find abhorrent: fight for justice, fight for liberty, fight for equality, and fight for freedom, and don\u0026rsquo;t let anyone\u0026rsquo;s death be in vain. It\u0026rsquo;s a good set of goals as long as they\u0026rsquo;re applied correctly.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fading-away-like-the-stars-in-the-morning/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s been two years since that fateful day, and I still don\u0026rsquo;t know how to feel about it. On the one hand it would be insensitive to try and forget it and try and move on; on the other, we have to move on. Thus we are stuck, and in light of this situation, I\u0026rsquo;m not entirely sure what I\u0026rsquo;m supposed to think or say.\nBig events like this are subjects that you feel you just can\u0026rsquo;t ignore on your blog, but at the same time there\u0026rsquo;s something inside of me that wants to say, moving on is the best thing we can do. You can\u0026rsquo;t fight fire with fire, and my general policy for fighting battles of any kind, is that sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s better to accept a little loss if it means maintaining your dignity and not stooping down to fight your enemy on their level. When you fight them on their level, they\u0026rsquo;re going to beat the crap out of you because you\u0026rsquo;re working on their terms, and when you decided stoop down you\u0026rsquo;ve given victory to the enemy.","title":"Fading Away Like the Stars in the Morning"},{"content":"Our culture expects men to be strong, in control, unemotional, courageous, and honorable. No matter how much progress we make these characteristics still define the gender construction in this society. To be masculine is to be, powerful, in control, heterosexual, unemotional, angry, courageous, outspoken, without compromise, demeaning, the anthesis of femininity, and dominating. It\u0026rsquo;s all a façade, because all men are unique combinations of the feminine and the masculine, the former contradicts the latter. Thus male people aren\u0026rsquo;t masculine; they\u0026rsquo;re forever trying to become masculine, which is a pursuit of an unobtainable ideal.\nAs someone who is interested in men and masculinities, in this case, academically, I think this puts me in a difficult situation. I\u0026rsquo;ve charged myself with the task of investigating \u0026ldquo;what it means to be masculine in our society.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve even categorized this as a gender studies project, and have used the term \u0026ldquo;masculinity\u0026rdquo; extensively. But as I\u0026rsquo;m writing this paper, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that \u0026lsquo;gender studies\u0026rsquo; has little to do with what I\u0026rsquo;m actually trying to write with, and by looking at things from this perspective, I\u0026rsquo;ve had to shift my perspective. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to find out what it means to be \u0026ldquo;masculine\u0026rdquo; anyone can be masculine, and as I said (albeit indirectly), there is no real definition of masculinity, and I\u0026rsquo;d hasten to say that because it\u0026rsquo;s such a subjective designation, that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist in a form that can be studied. Rather, I think I should be asking \u0026ldquo;What does it mean to be male.\u0026rdquo;\nThe first conflict this runs into is the social construction of gender. Gender is socially constructed, and is completely subject to the definitions of a culture. But I\u0026rsquo;m not seeking to counter or to support this. I\u0026rsquo;m not approaching this with an anthropological perspective, looking at entire (and often foreign) cultures is very cool, but at the same time I\u0026rsquo;m much more interested in individuals, and how individuals fit into society. And in this case, I\u0026rsquo;m really interested in our own society. My second problem is that a great deal of the work I\u0026rsquo;m trying to accomplish here is based on introspection and self-study. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to validate this, or even if I should try to validate this, so for the present I\u0026rsquo;m going to let it stand.\nWhile I think that we really can\u0026rsquo;t say that \u0026ldquo;masculinity\u0026rdquo; even exists, there are plenty of people who are male. This is still not a categorization that\u0026rsquo;s based on biology, but rather on self-identity. It\u0026rsquo;s also much easier to discuss because people are either male or they\u0026rsquo;re not. I realize that this isn\u0026rsquo;t completely true, but it\u0026rsquo;s damn near impossible to say anything believable, or come to meaningful conclusions when you\u0026rsquo;re constantly accounting for the exception. This is something that I should have taken from my experience at Anytown and applied to this circumstance: while the world is made up of exceptions, societies (and history) are constructed of general trends. By focusing too much time on exceptions we can completely lose track of what we are searching for. In that direction, while I\u0026rsquo;m quite aware of gender-variance and what not, for the purpose\u0026rsquo;s of this project I\u0026rsquo;m going to divide the world into men and women, and that\u0026rsquo;ll have to be good enough.\nSo then I have to ask: What does it mean to be male?\nMen are faced with the social pressure to be \u0026ldquo;masculine,\u0026rdquo; which they have to balance with their own gender characteristics, which often includes elements that run counter to the pressure to be \u0026ldquo;masculine.\u0026rdquo; Men enjoy the privileges of the male gender regardless of their desire for these privileges. The privilege isn\u0026rsquo;t without costs as it is the privilege that creates the pressure to be masculine. Men embody many masculine characteristics: they have trouble showing emotions other than anger; they view anything effeminate or feminine as weak and abhorrent; they have problems giving up control or power in many situations; if they feel out of control, hurt, cowardly, or dependent, they chastise themselves. That\u0026rsquo;s being male.\nAnother thing that I\u0026rsquo;ve found myself doing in the course of this project is expanding the scope reputedly so that I\u0026rsquo;m not just talking about gay men, because obviously that\u0026rsquo;s what I want to do. Because talking just about gay men strikes me as incredibly self serving, and any critic that wanted to could come a long and say \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;re not perusing scholarly wisdom, you\u0026rsquo;re contemplating your own existence,\u0026rdquo; and they\u0026rsquo;d be right. But then, what is the pursuit of scholarly wisdom, if it\u0026rsquo;s not the contemplation of our own existence?\nThis is a bias on my part, but I think I can honestly say that I believe, that straight people, men in particular, don\u0026rsquo;t consider their sexuality when they think about them selves. Most of time, even though its often not the first thing gay men think about themselves, they do consider it, and it is very much a part of their self identity. And before you ask, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s possible to consider masculinity without confronting issues surrounding sexual orientation. No matter how we categorize ourselves, as humans we are sexual beings and especially around issues of gender, this sexual aspect is inseparable from the issue of gender. Furthermore, my sexuality\u0026hellip; being gay\u0026hellip; is a very prominent part of how I perceive my own gender, for good or ill, and as this is my project, I\u0026rsquo;m going to confront issues of the male gender as it intersects with sexuality.\nHaving said that I think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to note that on a sociological scale, there are really few differences between gay and straight men. Cultural differences aside, sexuality has little impact on how men interact with each other and the world; rather, sexuality does impact the self-identity and perception of being male, which as I\u0026rsquo;ve stated before is what ultimately defines \u0026lsquo;male.\u0026rsquo;\nContradictions abound in this study, and I think that is traceable to the very beginning of this train of thought. Masculinity as a concrete concept in our culture doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist, at the same time men clearly do. It\u0026rsquo;s, obviously an incredibly slippery topic.\n(Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: I should note that the preceding portion of this post was composed at an ungodly hour and may be somewhat lacking in coherence.)\nOne thing I\u0026rsquo;ve done in this post so far is completely ignore the existence of bisexuals, which is abhorrent on my part, and perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s some sort of cosmic pointer to something I should spend more time looking into. On the other hand, there is very little published research (scholarly or otherwise) on bisexuals and bisexual males, which for my purposes at this moment is critical.\nI\u0026rsquo;m interested in reader\u0026rsquo;s input, but before I bring this monster of a post to a close, I\u0026rsquo;m going to put in a few definite statements to help with my direction as I get further into this project:\nGender characteristics, such as femininity and masculinity are created and reinforced by the patriarchy and are not really suitable to either female and male people respectively. Both gay and straight men face the same challenges as men, and while sexuality very much defines gender self-perception, it has relatively little effect on how men function in society. Gender is defined by the individual. Men don\u0026rsquo;t function well in groups of men, despite the fact that research shows that men form their most meaningful non-romantic friendships with other men. (This is a commentary on non-romantic and non-sexual friendships, and thus applies to men who are both gay and straight). Within communities of queer men, despite the perception of an effeminate overtone, the group continues to bend to the will of the patriarchal idealization of masculinity. Ok, that\u0026rsquo;s going to have to do it for now. I\u0026rsquo;m sure there\u0026rsquo;s more in there somewhere, and I suspect that they\u0026rsquo;ll find their way out here sooner or later. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-ideal-of-masculinity/","summary":"Our culture expects men to be strong, in control, unemotional, courageous, and honorable. No matter how much progress we make these characteristics still define the gender construction in this society. To be masculine is to be, powerful, in control, heterosexual, unemotional, angry, courageous, outspoken, without compromise, demeaning, the anthesis of femininity, and dominating. It\u0026rsquo;s all a façade, because all men are unique combinations of the feminine and the masculine, the former contradicts the latter. Thus male people aren\u0026rsquo;t masculine; they\u0026rsquo;re forever trying to become masculine, which is a pursuit of an unobtainable ideal.\nAs someone who is interested in men and masculinities, in this case, academically, I think this puts me in a difficult situation. I\u0026rsquo;ve charged myself with the task of investigating \u0026ldquo;what it means to be masculine in our society.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;ve even categorized this as a gender studies project, and have used the term \u0026ldquo;masculinity\u0026rdquo; extensively. But as I\u0026rsquo;m writing this paper, I\u0026rsquo;ve realized that \u0026lsquo;gender studies\u0026rsquo; has little to do with what I\u0026rsquo;m actually trying to write with, and by looking at things from this perspective, I\u0026rsquo;ve had to shift my perspective.","title":"The Ideal of Masculinity"},{"content":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: The title isn\u0026rsquo;t original, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really have to do with anything David wrote about in his entry, it\u0026rsquo;s just a good title, and appropriate for what I want to talk about today.\nI suppose that despite the voyeuristic nature of the weblog, I\u0026rsquo;ve always tried to remove myself from actually showing too much. As defense I\u0026rsquo;ve intellectualized damn near everything on this site, and by some wacky coincidence it\u0026rsquo;s actually worked, and I suppose I\u0026rsquo;ll keep doing it, even here. This is the entry that I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to write, that I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to have to write. Enough with the vague ramblings.\nFrom the onset, the gay community looks like this inclusive grouping of targeted people, and in some senses it\u0026rsquo;s really is, but in other\u0026rsquo;s its not. We\u0026rsquo;re not inclusive of anything more than surface level cultural and racial diversity, and the community is barely inclusive of all its members, and that vision that you find at the onset very quickly begins to splinter, and fall apart.\nWhy?\nGood question. The term internalized homophobia is something that a lot of people know, a lot of people even acknowledge it, but until very recently I haven\u0026rsquo;t really known what it means. And even then, I haven\u0026rsquo;t rid myself of this curse, and while I\u0026rsquo;m making progress, I\u0026rsquo;m not there yet, and given the nature of the curse, I kind of doubt that I will be.\nI was talking with David at some point and he said that people will say \u0026ldquo;I didn\u0026rsquo;t know you were gay\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;You don\u0026rsquo;t act gay\u0026rdquo; (whatever that\u0026rsquo;s supposed to mean) as if it\u0026rsquo;s a compliment. Acceptance in our culture apparently means \u0026ldquo;I can accept you for what ever makes you diverse, as long as you don\u0026rsquo;t act, look, sound, think, or smell diverse.\u0026rdquo; That\u0026rsquo;s not true acceptance, and is only a short cry away from tolerance, and in some ways is even worse.\nWhich brings us to this statement: Gayer than thou.\nThis implies that someone can be more or less gay, which depending on what we mean, might be possible, but by quantifying someone\u0026rsquo;s gay-quotient, we establish hierarchy, and as hierarchy\u0026rsquo;s are prone to doing, they exclude people, the push people away. After all, people are either gay, or they\u0026rsquo;re not; they\u0026rsquo;re either bisexual or they\u0026rsquo;re not, they\u0026rsquo;re either lesbian or they\u0026rsquo;re not. There isn\u0026rsquo;t a \u0026ldquo;kinda\u0026rdquo; box. There really shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be boxes of any kind by, as Kinsey said \u0026ldquo;_ Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigion-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects._\u0026rdquo; That\u0026rsquo;s as evident in my own speech as it is in the rest of the world.\nIt wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be so bad if the categories didn\u0026rsquo;t hurt people, but they do. They hurt the people that we try and force into categories they don\u0026rsquo;t belong in, but they also hurt us. By separating and \u0026lsquo;ranking\u0026rsquo; people, the community loses cohesion and a splintered community is ineffectual and incapable of caring for the members of the community as a family should. We\u0026rsquo;re not just hurting our friends we\u0026rsquo;re hurting ourselves.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/gayer-then-thou/","summary":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: The title isn\u0026rsquo;t original, and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really have to do with anything David wrote about in his entry, it\u0026rsquo;s just a good title, and appropriate for what I want to talk about today.\nI suppose that despite the voyeuristic nature of the weblog, I\u0026rsquo;ve always tried to remove myself from actually showing too much. As defense I\u0026rsquo;ve intellectualized damn near everything on this site, and by some wacky coincidence it\u0026rsquo;s actually worked, and I suppose I\u0026rsquo;ll keep doing it, even here. This is the entry that I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to write, that I don\u0026rsquo;t really want to have to write. Enough with the vague ramblings.\nFrom the onset, the gay community looks like this inclusive grouping of targeted people, and in some senses it\u0026rsquo;s really is, but in other\u0026rsquo;s its not. We\u0026rsquo;re not inclusive of anything more than surface level cultural and racial diversity, and the community is barely inclusive of all its members, and that vision that you find at the onset very quickly begins to splinter, and fall apart.","title":"Gayer then Thou"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s easy enough to see that our culture and society oppresses entire groups of people, and most of it happens so covertly and so automatically, that we don\u0026rsquo;t even allow it to register. Dismantling this oppression is a long and never-ending process; we\u0026rsquo;re working towards an ideal after all, and so it\u0026rsquo;s hard to announce victory, ever. On a more positive note, we can make progress towards dismantling the oppression within and around ourselves, and bit by bit, this can change the world.\nThe first step in dismantling oppression is learning to see oppression. We can see it around us, and that\u0026rsquo;s easy enough to learn, but it takes some time to learn to see the oppression, the fear, the hate, the ignorance, and the justifications, that live within all of us. This isn\u0026rsquo;t the same owning your own biases and judgmental behavior, that\u0026rsquo;s the second step, the first is simply learning how to be aware of them.\nThen the second step would be owning and acknowledging the parts of you that are oppressive, and that support the system. Graduates of the NCCJ\u0026rsquo;s Anytown program will know this affectionately as \u0026ldquo;owing your own shit.\u0026rdquo; If we ever want to overcome oppression, we have to make the first step and look deep within ourselves and be able to acknowledge to ourselves and others that we\u0026rsquo;re oppressive; and that oppression lives within ourselves. So not only do you have to know how to see hate, bias, discrimination, oppression, you also have to see it in yourself. Because it\u0026rsquo;s there, even in the best of us. And that\u0026rsquo;s not a bad thing; it\u0026rsquo;s just part of life and the system; to deny its existence is only stalling the pursuit of change.\nThe third step is interrupting and acknowledging oppressive, hateful, and discriminatory thoughts, actions, and language both in the environment around you and in your own life. Steps one and two combine and \u0026ldquo;calling people out\u0026rdquo; is something that takes practice and that you get better and better at. This step also doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit in linearly with the other steps as it\u0026rsquo;s omnipresent in the process, and logically belongs here. For the third step, in addition to outright oppression, you also have to call out collusion, or actions that unknowingly support the oppression.\nThe fourth step is a simple repeat: you have to work on all three steps all the time, and slowly you\u0026rsquo;ll improve, slowly we work through our \u0026lsquo;own shit\u0026rsquo; slowly we improve, but we\u0026rsquo;re never done. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that it\u0026rsquo;s a lost cause, because progress is welcomed and needed, but for us to declare victory would be complacent at best, and we can\u0026rsquo;t allow that to happen.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/overcoming-oppression/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s easy enough to see that our culture and society oppresses entire groups of people, and most of it happens so covertly and so automatically, that we don\u0026rsquo;t even allow it to register. Dismantling this oppression is a long and never-ending process; we\u0026rsquo;re working towards an ideal after all, and so it\u0026rsquo;s hard to announce victory, ever. On a more positive note, we can make progress towards dismantling the oppression within and around ourselves, and bit by bit, this can change the world.\nThe first step in dismantling oppression is learning to see oppression. We can see it around us, and that\u0026rsquo;s easy enough to learn, but it takes some time to learn to see the oppression, the fear, the hate, the ignorance, and the justifications, that live within all of us. This isn\u0026rsquo;t the same owning your own biases and judgmental behavior, that\u0026rsquo;s the second step, the first is simply learning how to be aware of them.","title":"Overcoming Oppression"},{"content":" Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed. I will respond; I\u0026rsquo;ll ask you five questions. 3. You\u0026rsquo;ll update your website with my five questions, and your five answers.\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll include this explanation. 5. You\u0026rsquo;ll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.\nMy questions are from Amy of Domesticat.net. Her questions and answers are archived on her site as well.\nIs art still relevant in American society? I think contemporary art is just as relevant in contemporary society as it\u0026rsquo;s always been, which is to say, not terribly relevant. Art reflects society, but I think art is a fairly passive reflection of society, so in that respect I think Art remains relevant to society.\nDogs, cats, ferrets, or fish? Defend your answer. Cats. Duh. Dogs are too dependent and downright annoying, though I do think there are some pretty neat little dogs. Cuddling fish isn\u0026rsquo;t possible, and if I wanted something pretty to look at I\u0026rsquo;d by a painting or download a screen saver. I have nothing opposed to ferrets or other rodent like creatures, but they don\u0026rsquo;t match up to cats. I like cats, because they\u0026rsquo;re great company, and entertainment, and they take care of themselves mostly, I also enjoy the fact that while they\u0026rsquo;re fiercely independent, they also seem to bond well with people, which is a nice quality for a pet.\nI suppose I should say something about how the cats made me say that, but I can\u0026rsquo;t think of a clever way of saying that, so I\u0026rsquo;ll leave that to your imagination.\n3. What books, when you finished the last page, left you a significantly different person than you were when you started reading them? Why? What were the changes?\nTo answer this question completely I\u0026rsquo;d probably have to spend a few years, so I\u0026rsquo;m just going to give some of the more recent highlights.\nReading the last page of \u0026ldquo;The Great Gatsby\u0026rdquo; changed me and how I think about my writing interests. The rest of the book was kind of iffy as for it\u0026rsquo;s affect on me, but those famous last words really did something for me.\nWhen I read Robert Heinlein\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Stranger in A Strange Land,\u0026rdquo; I learned what science fiction was capable of and what \u0026ldquo;Speculative Fiction\u0026rdquo; really means, and given that I\u0026rsquo;m a more or less a self identified SF writer, that was really important. I think I have similar feelings towards Asimov\u0026rsquo;s Foundation Trilogy, but Stranger affected me more I think.\nWhile I\u0026rsquo;ve never read one of his books (because it\u0026rsquo;s much better to listen to him read his books) I think David Sedaris has had a profound impact of me. He\u0026rsquo;s funny and fun, but he\u0026rsquo;s also brutally honest, and can talk about things that I could never talk about and make people laugh the way he does. I listened to the full length version of the \u0026ldquo;Santa Land Diaries\u0026rdquo; and afterwards I\u0026rsquo;ve known that that approach to writing stories and anecdotes is something I desperately need to adopt.\nArmistead Maupin\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Tales of the City\u0026rdquo; books have shown me how format, amazing stories, and powerful characters can blend perfectly together. As a result I felt more connected to queer history/culture. It also gave me an interesting, and new perspective about the AIDS crisis, which I hadn\u0026rsquo;t had before (that\u0026rsquo;s the last too books in particular).\nThat brings me to my reading of the first Angles in America Play by Tony Kushner, which as of right now is the most amazing piece of prose I\u0026rsquo;ve ever read. It\u0026rsquo;s powerful; the production style really works with the subject matter. The play was the most complete look at AIDS and all of it\u0026rsquo;s effects, and I was virtually reduced to tears by the last page.\n4. The weblogging world is fascinated with the idea of being able to dip into the lives of strangers. Is it possible to truly get to know someone through this particular format?\nIf you fire up your browser and see the front page of a blog and snoop around a little, you\u0026rsquo;re going to see a little window into the life of a stranger, and this kind of blog \u0026lsquo;browsing\u0026rsquo; may allow you to get to know someone, in most cases this picture is incomplete. It is after all hard to get to know someone on a couple of web pages, (unless the person is really daft).\nOn the other hand if you\u0026rsquo;ve read the entire body of a person\u0026rsquo;s work on the web, you can start to get a feeling about someone. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of \u0026ldquo;reading inbetween the lines,\u0026rdquo; and I must admit that there are few people whose blogs I read that I don\u0026rsquo;t chat/correspond with, so I suppose that skews things a bit. People are such complicated creatures that it\u0026rsquo;s hard to really get to know them in any format, but I think it can be done. (Is it cheating if you chat/correspond with people whose blog you read?)\n5. Would you ever attend dragon*con? If you would, what appeals to you? If not, why not?\nI think I would if I could work out all the logistics. I\u0026rsquo;m a huge Babylon 5 fan (it\u0026rsquo;s the commonality that brought Chris Knittel and Paula Forbes to TealArt in the first place). I\u0026rsquo;m also really kind of big into Star Wars, which I\u0026rsquo;m almost embarrassed to admit, but alas it\u0026rsquo;s the truth. So things relating to either of those fascinations would be pretty high on my list. Also as a writer/fiction buff, the stuff relating to that would be really interesting. The Rocky Horror showing(s) would also get my attention. That\u0026rsquo;s the main stuff, and probably only the tip of the ice burg.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/interview-game-sam/","summary":"Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed. I will respond; I\u0026rsquo;ll ask you five questions. 3. You\u0026rsquo;ll update your website with my five questions, and your five answers.\nYou\u0026rsquo;ll include this explanation. 5. You\u0026rsquo;ll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.\nMy questions are from Amy of Domesticat.net. Her questions and answers are archived on her site as well.\nIs art still relevant in American society? I think contemporary art is just as relevant in contemporary society as it\u0026rsquo;s always been, which is to say, not terribly relevant. Art reflects society, but I think art is a fairly passive reflection of society, so in that respect I think Art remains relevant to society.\nDogs, cats, ferrets, or fish? Defend your answer. Cats. Duh. Dogs are too dependent and downright annoying, though I do think there are some pretty neat little dogs. Cuddling fish isn\u0026rsquo;t possible, and if I wanted something pretty to look at I\u0026rsquo;d by a painting or download a screen saver.","title":"Interview Game: Sam"},{"content":"I just read something in our paper about how supporters of the Chief Justice of Alabama\u0026rsquo;s display of the 10 commandments on state property are claiming that a federal court order to remove the display \u0026ldquo;violates Christian\u0026rsquo;s freedom of religion\u0026rdquo;\nBefore I continue, allow me to give the best example for constitutional freedoms that I know of (the fist swinging one): That is that we all have the freedom to swing our fists as much or as wildly as we want; however, your right to swing your fists ends at my nose. You can swing your fists as much as you want, but you can\u0026rsquo;t hit some one. Freedom of speech has a few limitations which the Supreme Court established in a series of cases. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I remember all of them (sorry Mr. History Teacher) but they are: The Incitement Standard (you can\u0026rsquo;t say stuff that will cause imminent lawless action; ie. You can\u0026rsquo;t start a mob.) National Security (You can\u0026rsquo;t say stuff that\u0026rsquo;ll hurt the country\u0026rsquo;s defensive strategy. Treason is lumped in here). Slander (you can\u0026rsquo;t say things that intentionally hurt the reputation of another person when what you say is untrue.) These relate to free speech, but similar judgments exist for the other freedoms.\nBack to Alabama and supposedly disenfranchised Christians.\nPeople have a right to believe whatever crazy shit they see fit to believe in. That\u0026rsquo;s freedom of religion and everyone has it. You have the right to believe in a system of morality that guides your actions; however, you cannot claim that by failing to believe as you do, that others are violating your right to believe. For example, I spent some time with a woman who believed that swearing went against her Christianity. Fine, then don\u0026rsquo;t swear; but if I chose swear, I\u0026rsquo;m not doing a damn thing to infringe on your freedom of religion. Another Example: If your church doesn\u0026rsquo;t believe in performing gay marriage ceremonies, then your church can refuse to perform those ceremonies, but If I want to get married by a judge or by a minister, priest, or rabbi at a church that wants to perform a ceremony for me, then I\u0026rsquo;m not infringing on your church by getting married. Likewise, if your church doesn\u0026rsquo;t believe in non-procreative sex, then by all means don\u0026rsquo;t have sex without the clear intention of reproducing, but don\u0026rsquo;t tell me what I can and can\u0026rsquo;t do in my bed with my boyfriend. My sex life can not possibly interfere with your religion.\nIt seems that we have the first definition of unilateral freedom. That having the freedom of religion, or speech, or press allows us to practice our own religion, speech, or press without fearing retribution. We don\u0026rsquo;t have the second part of the definition, which is, that in order to maintain our freedoms we have to continually work to ensure the freedom of all others. That our freedom\u0026rsquo;s aren\u0026rsquo;t truly unilateral, that your right to swing your fist ends at my face.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/my-face/","summary":"I just read something in our paper about how supporters of the Chief Justice of Alabama\u0026rsquo;s display of the 10 commandments on state property are claiming that a federal court order to remove the display \u0026ldquo;violates Christian\u0026rsquo;s freedom of religion\u0026rdquo;\nBefore I continue, allow me to give the best example for constitutional freedoms that I know of (the fist swinging one): That is that we all have the freedom to swing our fists as much or as wildly as we want; however, your right to swing your fists ends at my nose. You can swing your fists as much as you want, but you can\u0026rsquo;t hit some one. Freedom of speech has a few limitations which the Supreme Court established in a series of cases. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I remember all of them (sorry Mr. History Teacher) but they are: The Incitement Standard (you can\u0026rsquo;t say stuff that will cause imminent lawless action; ie.","title":"My Face"},{"content":"A guy I knew from my days as an influential member of the Pocket PC community (I suppose press isn\u0026rsquo;t quite the right word but in any case) sent me a message on MSN yesterday, as people I know from that era are prone to doing. My somewhat brief discussion with him reopened a series of wounds that I had been ignoring blissfully, but I think reopening them was good for my creative process.\nI kind of fear that I\u0026rsquo;m going to fall into a trap of telling my autobiography again and again, almost to the point of nausea; but I think this background is necessary for the story I\u0026rsquo;m going to tell today. Before I started High School, I got a Handspring Visor and a portable keyboard for use in school, and over a period of about two years I upgraded and changed my PDA gear. All the while, I contributed to a number of communities as an editor, columnist, freelance writer, discussion moderator, staff writer, and probably one or two other jobs I\u0026rsquo;ve blocked from my memory. While I probably made the most money writing about PDA stuff, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t emotionally fulfilling in any real way, and I did more work for the profit of others then I\u0026rsquo;d really like to think about right now. My \u0026lsquo;career\u0026rsquo; hit a high point when I was one of the editor/moderator/staff writers for a certain site that was pulling half a million unique visitors per month, when that ended, I decided that I had had enough, and moved on to concentrate on other more exciting projects. Since then I\u0026rsquo;ve drafted a book, gotten a good start on another book, and created TealArt, among other accomplishments. So now you know\u0026hellip; back to our regularly scheduled programming.\nOne thing this experience granted me, other than a few hundred connections I have no use for, and a near encyclopedic knowledge of everything mobile tech related, is a pretty good understanding of how online communities function and how to build websites to be successful. This is why I was basically pounding my head on the desk when this guy sent me a message.\nMobile technology website/communities are thick on the ground and just like any other web-project, all new sites need to either offer something that is completely unavailable elsewhere, or they need to offer their content in a format that is completely new and different from what\u0026rsquo;s available. Otherwise, you won\u0026rsquo;t have an audience worth speaking of.\nThis goes for \u0026lsquo;personal\u0026rsquo; weblogs too, and all of the really successful fun ones, knowingly or not follow this mandate, and websites that mirror someone else\u0026rsquo;s design or format aren\u0026rsquo;t really successful. GreyExpectations.com merges Noah\u0026rsquo;s writing and photography in a really unique way, and simplicity is the charm here. David\u0026rsquo;s design keeps his format in check, and he blends his stories, with his photography, blogwhore content, and the like. TealArt combines aspects of already used formats (most notably Domesticat), but I don\u0026rsquo;t know of a single weblog out there that has (at least in theory) a group of four people writing this kind of content. We\u0026rsquo;re unique in our approach if not our format.\nThe basic format for Pocket PC/mobile sites (those that resemble blogs that is) is to have some sort of a weblog and an associated discussion board. The majority of the content is derived from links to other sites and commentary by the site leader and his (usually his) associate minions. When it\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of dorks (sorry folks) blabbing about the latest gear, this tends to piss me off, but I was thinking that there\u0026rsquo;s really nothing wrong with the format itself, and there could be a lot of potential if this \u0026rsquo;template\u0026rsquo; were applied to other kinds of projects. So I was thinking that it might be really interesting to have a mobile tech style site about men. That\u0026rsquo;s right, men. There\u0026rsquo;s a plethora of masculinity related stuff going on in the world and on the internet that should be covered, and I think there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of potential with this form.\nNow don\u0026rsquo;t get worried, I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to start another site, because I really want to get this site off the ground completely before I start working on another one (and because I want to have an active user base here that I can use to jumpstart another site). I think the idea has some definite promise, and maybe someday I can look back on this entry and think \u0026ldquo;god, wouldn\u0026rsquo;t that be cool to do.\u0026rdquo;\nThoughts anyone?\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/shifting-forms/","summary":"A guy I knew from my days as an influential member of the Pocket PC community (I suppose press isn\u0026rsquo;t quite the right word but in any case) sent me a message on MSN yesterday, as people I know from that era are prone to doing. My somewhat brief discussion with him reopened a series of wounds that I had been ignoring blissfully, but I think reopening them was good for my creative process.\nI kind of fear that I\u0026rsquo;m going to fall into a trap of telling my autobiography again and again, almost to the point of nausea; but I think this background is necessary for the story I\u0026rsquo;m going to tell today. Before I started High School, I got a Handspring Visor and a portable keyboard for use in school, and over a period of about two years I upgraded and changed my PDA gear. All the while, I contributed to a number of communities as an editor, columnist, freelance writer, discussion moderator, staff writer, and probably one or two other jobs I\u0026rsquo;ve blocked from my memory.","title":"Shifting Forms"},{"content":"Ok, So I did it. I spent two hours watching television, which as my friens will almost certainly know is totally abnormal. But it was gay television which at least as a sociological investigation was most enjoyable.\nBullshit.\nAnd the guys were really cute.\n(There, I said it!)\nOk, and while I\u0026rsquo;m rambling, my history teacher bears a striking resemblance to James, the Leading man on Boy Meets Boy. Very Weird, but somehow hilarious.\nThey aren\u0026rsquo;t very racially or socio-economically diverse, but then, it fits the audience, and while it\u0026rsquo;s hardly forgivable, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it makes the shows unwatchable. Also as Dave points out, it\u0026rsquo;s a little crewel that they guy doesn\u0026rsquo;t know that there are straight guys mixed in with the gay ones. But that of course flies in the face of stereotype complaints because the stereotype line between gay and straight as presented by the show is very blurred and I think that\u0026rsquo;s good. Also the fuzzy line between the butch and femme poles nicely flies in the face of the very polarized definition that we can thank Will and Grace for.\nI am a little disappointed that the show completely divides male sexuality into gay and straight. (The loud laughing sound you all hear in the background is Chris Knittel, excuse him please.) There are a lot of bisexual folks out there, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how you could include it in a television show with out invoking the porn principal, and all the trash that goes along with that. Nine times out of ten people don\u0026rsquo;t really understand bisexuality. I mean on the surface it\u0026rsquo;s really a simple concept, but in application its a bit more difficult. Molly (among others) has been known to say (and I agree with her) that everyone (or at least 80% of people) are bisexual to some degree, thus I think people tend to round to either one side or the other more often than not, leaving the minority that identify as bisexual to some sort of wasteland that they obviously don\u0026rsquo;t disserve. I can\u0026rsquo;t really suggest a solution, but it\u0026rsquo;s something that pop culture (and by pop culture I mean pop culture as represented on television) is a long way from accepting.\nThe truth is that both of these shows are very Gay Male oriented, completely neglecting to recognize bisexuals, transgender people, and even lesbians. That\u0026rsquo;s a real problem. You know shows like \u0026ldquo;Will and Grace\u0026rdquo; made it with gay characters, but when you think about it there aren\u0026rsquo;t even Lesbians on TV, aside from the two on Queer as Folk, and the new Showtime show forthcoming, unless I\u0026rsquo;m missing something. So while I\u0026rsquo;m really impressed with the hunky wonderfulness that I\u0026rsquo;m starting to see, it\u0026rsquo;s only a start.\nWhile I think Boy Meets Boy is my favorite of the two, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is really interesting. It\u0026rsquo;s witty, cute, and a lot of fun (this is television after all, so we\u0026rsquo;re not looking for a great deal of depth). The fashion guy annoys me to no end, and the hair guy is a bit not cool, and I think the culture guy is really great as is the food guy, and the rest of it\u0026rsquo;s a wash. This kinda show makes me feel like I\u0026rsquo;m a slacker for not having such a chic and perfectly styled life, but then I realized that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter that much and all it well.\nThe truth is that, as far as gay decorating shows go, I really much rather watch Christopher Lowell of the discovery channel. (Paula\u0026rsquo;s description: \u0026ldquo;He\u0026rsquo;s so flaming I\u0026rsquo;m surprised that his studio hasn\u0026rsquo;t burnt down.\u0026rdquo;) Funny, but very true.\nWell there you have it, I\u0026rsquo;d be interested to hear your reactions.Update:Another thing. I found the Fag Hag character to be bossy and pushy and just a general not good thing. The host was also trying to hard for the Dolly Parton look and even people who can pull it off don\u0026rsquo;t look prety. But thankfully they weren\u0026rsquo;t around too much.\nIf it were me I would have brought a lesbian, becasue I\u0026rsquo;m wierd like that, or I would have brought another guy, which would have made it wierd a little\u0026hellip;.\nOh, and all of the previews showed a lot of guy-guy smooching, and this episode didn\u0026rsquo;t have any, and I was disapoined by that, a lot. All the good stuff from the previews weren\u0026rsquo;t in this one, and I\u0026rsquo;m probably not going to see any more unless I get bored and someone Kazza\u0026rsquo;s it, or it\u0026rsquo;s on next week while I\u0026rsquo;m doing the tour.\nCheers\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/bravo-gay-night/","summary":"Ok, So I did it. I spent two hours watching television, which as my friens will almost certainly know is totally abnormal. But it was gay television which at least as a sociological investigation was most enjoyable.\nBullshit.\nAnd the guys were really cute.\n(There, I said it!)\nOk, and while I\u0026rsquo;m rambling, my history teacher bears a striking resemblance to James, the Leading man on Boy Meets Boy. Very Weird, but somehow hilarious.\nThey aren\u0026rsquo;t very racially or socio-economically diverse, but then, it fits the audience, and while it\u0026rsquo;s hardly forgivable, I don\u0026rsquo;t think it makes the shows unwatchable. Also as Dave points out, it\u0026rsquo;s a little crewel that they guy doesn\u0026rsquo;t know that there are straight guys mixed in with the gay ones. But that of course flies in the face of stereotype complaints because the stereotype line between gay and straight as presented by the show is very blurred and I think that\u0026rsquo;s good.","title":"Bravo, Gay Night"},{"content":"During the Car ride to Pittsburgh PA, I read the script for the first part of Angels in America, by Tony Kushner. I finished it in one very difficult sitting, teetering on the very edge of tears the whole time. When I reached the back cover I realized that I had just finished reading some of the most amazing prose I\u0026rsquo;d ever set eyes on, and then realized that I had to get my hands on Part Two.\nAngels in America is a play written about the AIDS crisis. As a play it\u0026rsquo;s really creative, and really takes advantage of the form. All of my recent exposure to drama has been either to Shakespeare, which is of course brilliant, but requires a lot of thought and the themes are simplistic (not that there\u0026rsquo;s a problem with that) but they\u0026rsquo;re also really obvious and I think that Shakespeare is more about the language (thus making it more akin to poetry) than it is about what\u0026rsquo;s going on in the play. Additionally I\u0026rsquo;ve been exposed to a very concise survey of the development of Modern drama including Anouilh, Brecht, Ibsen, Strinberg, and (T. S.) Eliot.\nBrecht and Ibsen, in particular, especially wrote plays that would be impossible to produce on the scale that the script calls for. There is too much detail and so much symbolism that is easily missed. But all of the mentioned authors were guilty of this to some extent. In many ways, I think that for all their power and skill, the kind of drama that I\u0026rsquo;ve been exposed to recently haven\u0026rsquo;t aged particularly, though I think Ibsen and Strinberg are most guilty of this.\nAngels in America is a completely different sort of play, and I\u0026rsquo;m debating weather this difference makes it better or just different, but in any case let me describe it again. It\u0026rsquo;s set during the onset of the AIDS epidemic, around a sizeable handful of semi-interconnected characters. Everyone is affected by AIDS in some how and many of the characters are gay, and while that\u0026rsquo;s easily the defining characteristic of the play, I don\u0026rsquo;t think that it\u0026rsquo;s an artifact of Queer Art because while I think gay audiences will certainly learn and gain a great deal from reading this play, a certain part of me wants to say that the intended audience is a mixed bag I feel.\nThe play also presents AIDS from a perspective that is different than the usual spin and, and it\u0026rsquo;s a perspective that\u0026rsquo;s I think is often lost. At least in the material I get day in and day out AIDS seems to neglect the wasting nature of the disease, and the fact that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t kill anyone very quick. AIDS is painted as a bad thing, which is appropriate, but it is all to often presented to impersonally for my tastes. The disease isn\u0026rsquo;t given a face to often and I think that\u0026rsquo;s a shame. In our efforts to convince people in the seriousness of the AIDS, we completely neglect the disease itself. People are seen as being HIV- and people are seen in the unaffected early stages of the disease, and people are represented as being dead, but that whole middle section is completely left out. I can see perfectly reasonable explanations for this, but at the same time I think in general we lose something by functioning in this way. In any case\u0026hellip;\nAngels in America completely deglamorizes (as if there was any glamour in the first place) the entire situation. It shows characters in various stages of the illness (set in a time frame where without recently developed treatments) the progression happened more quickly. Thus there were characters who were only beginning to show signs of the illness, and there were character who were struggling with more advanced stages of the disease. We also got to see the impact of AIDS on family members , and how denial and homophobia was really elemental in promoting the spread of the disease. This kind of approach, and this kind of treatment of this particular social issue is, I think really powerful, and I think this is the kind of light that this epidemic needs to be preserved in.\nBeyond the particulars of the social commentary, I liked the fact that rather than a thematic focus on one of life\u0026rsquo;s more puzzling metaphysical quandaries, Angels in America focused on an issue that is not only relevant to our times, but emblematic of the social condition of our times. From this starting point t is then possible to draw conclusions about a couple of metaphysical issues, whereas in all of the \u0026ldquo;great works\u0026rdquo; that I\u0026rsquo;m generalizing against work in reverse order, and require more interpretive work for less insight, in my opinion.\nThe unavoidable poignancy of the message and the perspective of the presentation gives the play purpose and direction, but it\u0026rsquo;s power is directed from the dramatic technique and storytelling style. More \u0026ldquo;traditional\u0026rdquo; and/or \u0026ldquo;classic\u0026rdquo; have a hand full of characters that interact with each other and contribute to one developing plot. In this play there are three (or so) situations, each with a couple of characters. The situations are all connected, though not in a traditional sense, and the directions for staging and sets indicate a sparse set, and no blackouts, which makes the production aspect of the play much more transparent. The traditional school of thought is stage things so that it looks \u0026ldquo;real,\u0026rdquo; but that\u0026rsquo;s ultimately a futile goal, so Kushner (and a lot of other contemporary playwrights) don\u0026rsquo;t even try, and for some reason I think it works really well.\nI think the word on the street is that HBO or some such is going to produce Angels in America sometime in the near future, and I really hope that they do a good job of it, and I think they will. I\u0026rsquo;ve only read the first one, but the second play promises to be even better.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/angels-in-america/","summary":"During the Car ride to Pittsburgh PA, I read the script for the first part of Angels in America, by Tony Kushner. I finished it in one very difficult sitting, teetering on the very edge of tears the whole time. When I reached the back cover I realized that I had just finished reading some of the most amazing prose I\u0026rsquo;d ever set eyes on, and then realized that I had to get my hands on Part Two.\nAngels in America is a play written about the AIDS crisis. As a play it\u0026rsquo;s really creative, and really takes advantage of the form. All of my recent exposure to drama has been either to Shakespeare, which is of course brilliant, but requires a lot of thought and the themes are simplistic (not that there\u0026rsquo;s a problem with that) but they\u0026rsquo;re also really obvious and I think that Shakespeare is more about the language (thus making it more akin to poetry) than it is about what\u0026rsquo;s going on in the play.","title":"Angels in America"},{"content":"Well I lived through yet another weekend with my family, and I must say that nothing excruciatingly bad happened.\nOther than the fact that I lived through a weekend with my family, of course.\nHaving prepared for the absolute worse possible outcome, I was pleasantly surprised when a few things turned out ok. It was generally torturous, but I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a few coping strategies that worked for me this time.\nFirst of all, I had something completely unrelated to look forward to. My mother and I went to a completely awesome contra dance. I am a little jaded about the contra dance group here. It\u0026rsquo;s a little too hetero and the people aren\u0026rsquo;t really as accepting as I might like. I mean they\u0026rsquo;re nice, it\u0026rsquo;s just I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly connected to them. In any case the contra dance we went to was particularly nice because it gave us an excuse to get away from the stresses of a visit.\nThe second thing to do is to find a way to occupy yourself independently of what\u0026rsquo;s going around you. Read a book, read several books even. In one weekend, I finished the book that I started before I left (Melissa Scott\u0026rsquo;s Roads of Heaven), the latest Star Wars New Jedi Order (my literary vice), and the second Armistead Maupin Tales of the City book. In addition I got an outline of a play mostly written.\nNow I get to pack for another trip. I\u0026rsquo;m going to visit some collages, and to spend a week with my grandmother, which promises to be much more enjoyable. So I get another week of being in contact before I\u0026rsquo;m spirited away for two weeks of various non-wired activities.\nThanks to Chris for taking over while I was gone, and for doing the same in the future, there\u0026rsquo;s more on the way. Cheers folks\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/we-lived/","summary":"Well I lived through yet another weekend with my family, and I must say that nothing excruciatingly bad happened.\nOther than the fact that I lived through a weekend with my family, of course.\nHaving prepared for the absolute worse possible outcome, I was pleasantly surprised when a few things turned out ok. It was generally torturous, but I\u0026rsquo;ve developed a few coping strategies that worked for me this time.\nFirst of all, I had something completely unrelated to look forward to. My mother and I went to a completely awesome contra dance. I am a little jaded about the contra dance group here. It\u0026rsquo;s a little too hetero and the people aren\u0026rsquo;t really as accepting as I might like. I mean they\u0026rsquo;re nice, it\u0026rsquo;s just I\u0026rsquo;m not terribly connected to them. In any case the contra dance we went to was particularly nice because it gave us an excuse to get away from the stresses of a visit.","title":"We Lived"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve realized something about my writing, something that I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly happy about, but something that I think I can deal with. It\u0026rsquo;s also something that I think, that by realizing what the problem is, I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to work around it.\nSo what is it already?\nAll of my characters in Circle Games are motivated by loyalty. The irony that makes the story interesting in my opinion is that they\u0026rsquo;re motivated by loyalty to each other, except in a couple of cases (the bad guys mainly) when they\u0026rsquo;re motivated by loyalty to themselves. Duty and loyalty are fine motivating factors, and they may be entangled with love, but they aren\u0026rsquo;t love. And I think the story of CG works with this limitation and really takes advantage of the characters as they are. This is the benefit of creating characters before the story, which was how the development of Circle Games happened.\nAnother Round happened differently, for the most part; and for better or for worse, I have a character who must be motivated out of love. I think when I wrote the outline I envisioned him as having loyalty to his ideals, but as I get to know him better I realize that he has to operate (as stupid as it might sound) out of shear love. This makes him much more difficult to write because I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how to write characters in this mode. It\u0026rsquo;s certainly a reflection of myself, and as I noted to Paula last night, all of my characters don\u0026rsquo;t relax and have the guard up most of the time.\nI wrote one short story, probably the single best work I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten out yet, that\u0026rsquo;s seven pages or so, and I think it really captures love or something reasonably close. The problem is that in seven pages, characters needn\u0026rsquo;t be motivated to do anything other than sit on a park bench and watch what\u0026rsquo;s going on around them, which is exactly what this character does. I wrote this particular story in my voice which for all of the poor stylistic implications, seems to be effective in such formats.\nThis is something that I\u0026rsquo;ll likely wrestle with for quite some time, but I think with a little work, my fiction won\u0026rsquo;t suffer terribly. I do fear that someone\u0026rsquo;s going to hand Circle Games back to me and tells me that there\u0026rsquo;s something fundamentally wrong with the way the characters are developed. But then I fear that I\u0026rsquo;m going to get a marked up manuscript and someone\u0026rsquo;s going to tell me that there are huge structural holes in it, but that\u0026rsquo;s just part of the cycle I suppose.\nAnother Round is a great project with a lot of potential. Writing it is going to be hard though. Really hard. I can see it now, but I can also see that I\u0026rsquo;ll get it done. I\u0026rsquo;m embarking on it just as I realize that I\u0026rsquo;m loosening my interest in science fiction, and as I realize that I\u0026rsquo;m not quite ready for the land of contemporary/mainstream fiction. Another Round is an epic tale (sans hero), told basically in the form of a three act play (it\u0026rsquo;s prose though), which I hope is unique.\nPerhaps it\u0026rsquo;ll take more than nine months, and actually I hope it takes more than nine months, because I want to have a long term project that last me the whole school year. I also know that I want to work on other projects, other fiction things, so I\u0026rsquo;m probably going to dedicate a little bit of my energy this summer to getting outlines and plans ready for other projects that I can work on during the year.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want to put it down and forget about it and lose rhythm, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s possible, if I can get past chapter six, which is still a ways off (as long as I\u0026rsquo;m done with part one, and have a little bit of part two), then I\u0026rsquo;ll be safe. Part one could, in theory stand alone. It\u0026rsquo;s integral to the story, and it couldn\u0026rsquo;t be cut out, but the plot changes gears there, and once into part two, it\u0026rsquo;ll live for sure.\nSo I don\u0026rsquo;t know where this leaves me. One of the things that I thought finishing Circle Games so early would allow me to do is to rest during the end of the school year, and then be able to hop to right now. I haven\u0026rsquo;t been so lucky. I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that the pattern I\u0026rsquo;m using right now isn\u0026rsquo;t working, but rather than allow myself to slip and loose too much territory I need to change something in hopes of jump starting the process. Writing more/different things is a start, reading more is always a good thing too. I\u0026rsquo;m also going to be on vacation or at least out of town for a while, and hopefully with my laptop, a few good and friendly notebooks, and a change of scenery I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to move in the right direction.\nMy most sincere apologies for not proofing this entry as much as it needs.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/motivated/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve realized something about my writing, something that I\u0026rsquo;m not exactly happy about, but something that I think I can deal with. It\u0026rsquo;s also something that I think, that by realizing what the problem is, I\u0026rsquo;ll be able to work around it.\nSo what is it already?\nAll of my characters in Circle Games are motivated by loyalty. The irony that makes the story interesting in my opinion is that they\u0026rsquo;re motivated by loyalty to each other, except in a couple of cases (the bad guys mainly) when they\u0026rsquo;re motivated by loyalty to themselves. Duty and loyalty are fine motivating factors, and they may be entangled with love, but they aren\u0026rsquo;t love. And I think the story of CG works with this limitation and really takes advantage of the characters as they are. This is the benefit of creating characters before the story, which was how the development of Circle Games happened.","title":"Motivated"},{"content":"As I\u0026rsquo;m sure longtime visitors to TealArt will surely notice, we\u0026rsquo;ve changed and added a few new things to TealArt, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s only fair that we give all these things a little notice here. We\u0026rsquo;re posting more, which I hope will continue into the future, but after all of the non-log related things that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on recently I kind of hope that we\u0026rsquo;re done in that area for a while. We\u0026rsquo;ve gotten everything spiffed up and pressed out, so things should be good for a while, and I think you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy all of the enhancements we\u0026rsquo;ve made. So without further ado, here\u0026rsquo;s the litany of accomplishments:\nThe addition of Paula Forbes. A writer friend of mine extraordinaire. Her stuff is great, and I hope you enjoy it. She\u0026rsquo;ll be posting stuff all over the site, I\u0026rsquo;m told, but look for journal entries. Peter McCabe is back for more. For somewhat obvious reasons, Peter hasn\u0026rsquo;t been overly prolific recently (read his previous posts for information), but he\u0026rsquo;s promised some more entries, some potentially lighter material as well. New Skins and new page. Before there were four skins which weren\u0026rsquo;t very compatible with most non-IE browsers. Now there are seven, with a total of 18 options such as different fonts, alternate sidebar location and additional browser compatibility. Content Pages: These are all of the pages on TealArt which aren\u0026rsquo;t dirrectly part of the logs. Lists of links, contributor profiles, the skin page, and other nifty stuff like that. The Content Pages link just gives you a good directory to all of this stuff, all in one place. Sam\u0026rsquo;s Blogwhore Blogroll Here\u0026rsquo;s just a list of links, powered by Blogrolling.com of the blogs and other related favorites that I enjoy. I have it on good authority that Chris is planning to have a similar page soon, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see. Enjoy this as a kind of supplement to the \u0026ldquo;Fresh Linkages\u0026rdquo; section. Paradigm Brainfeed: Some of you probably remember when we tried to have another log on TealArt that was supposed to be more relaxed and less formal than the main TealArt Journal. We called it Paradigm, and it didn\u0026rsquo;t really work out as we might have intended. So we stoped doing it. But then we decided to bring it back as a sidebar function in those skins with sidebars, so now we\u0026rsquo;re trying it out again, and we\u0026rsquo;ll see if it works. All the old paradigm entries are still there if you\u0026rsquo;re interested, by the way. A redesign of the way Featured Quotes and Fresh Linkage operate. Better archiving, better functionality on the sidebar. It\u0026rsquo;s a good set up. You\u0026rsquo;ll also note the slight change in name from the less creative \u0026ldquo;TealArt Links\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;TealArt Quotes,\u0026rdquo; but it\u0026rsquo;s still the same great stuff, only a little better Staff and Crew This page has all of the contact information for the TealArt staff if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in learning more about us and conversing with us. Profiles are forthcoming, I\u0026rsquo;m told CollectiveArts is closing, and we\u0026rsquo;re going to dedicate this energy towards TealArt. If your interested in the domain, talk to me, otherwise say your farewells. That\u0026rsquo;s it! Enjoy, and If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions feel free to talk to us about them. Also, remember to tell your friends about us, word of mouth is the best (and our only) method of promotion. Thanks again, as always, for reading. ","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/time-to-ring-some-changes/","summary":"As I\u0026rsquo;m sure longtime visitors to TealArt will surely notice, we\u0026rsquo;ve changed and added a few new things to TealArt, and I think it\u0026rsquo;s only fair that we give all these things a little notice here. We\u0026rsquo;re posting more, which I hope will continue into the future, but after all of the non-log related things that I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on recently I kind of hope that we\u0026rsquo;re done in that area for a while. We\u0026rsquo;ve gotten everything spiffed up and pressed out, so things should be good for a while, and I think you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy all of the enhancements we\u0026rsquo;ve made. So without further ado, here\u0026rsquo;s the litany of accomplishments:\nThe addition of Paula Forbes. A writer friend of mine extraordinaire. Her stuff is great, and I hope you enjoy it. She\u0026rsquo;ll be posting stuff all over the site, I\u0026rsquo;m told, but look for journal entries. Peter McCabe is back for more.","title":"Time to Ring Some Changes"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite enamored of the last line of F. Scott Fitsgerald\u0026rsquo;s Gatsby for some time. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not great fan of American Literature, and while I think there\u0026rsquo;s some really brilliant material in The Great Gatsby, on the whole I think its over done and despite it\u0026rsquo;s stark tone, I think there\u0026rsquo;s just too much glamorization. But the last line, I think is enough to make it really amazing. It\u0026rsquo;s been floating around the Quotes section for some time (it was actually the last quote I posted). But just in case you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with it, here it is.o\nGatsby belived in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that\u0026rsquo;s no matter--tomorow we will run faster, strech out our arms father\u0026hellip;. And one fine morning---\nSo we beat on, boasts against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.\n--F. Scott Fitsgerald, The Great Gatsby\nThere\u0026rsquo;s something poetic and magical about those words, and they\u0026rsquo;ve been the source of a lot of inspiration. I wrote a short story, that has some promise, and on a whim I did a sketch that I\u0026rsquo;m going to print as an plexy glass engraving (intaglio/dry point). I might post the story on TealArt at some point, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to stick in the drawing in a bit. It\u0026rsquo;s pencil and paper, that I went over with marker and then scanned into the computer. I\u0026rsquo;ve taken that scan and provided a little bit of tone for the digital display, and I think it looks pretty good, considering that I drew it.\nComments are welcome:\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/borne-back-ceaselessly-into-the-past/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been quite enamored of the last line of F. Scott Fitsgerald\u0026rsquo;s Gatsby for some time. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not great fan of American Literature, and while I think there\u0026rsquo;s some really brilliant material in The Great Gatsby, on the whole I think its over done and despite it\u0026rsquo;s stark tone, I think there\u0026rsquo;s just too much glamorization. But the last line, I think is enough to make it really amazing. It\u0026rsquo;s been floating around the Quotes section for some time (it was actually the last quote I posted). But just in case you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with it, here it is.o\nGatsby belived in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that\u0026rsquo;s no matter--tomorow we will run faster, strech out our arms father\u0026hellip;. And one fine morning---\nSo we beat on, boasts against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.","title":"Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past"},{"content":"I used to be thoroughly convinced that I liked science fiction books, adored them really. I loved, and to some extent still do love, sagas. These kinds of stories are still a really large part of who I am, and at least for the next sixty thousand words at least I\u0026rsquo;m going to be writing science fiction. (Another Round promises to be the shortest saga in the world. Ever. And don\u0026rsquo;t tell me about Gilgamesh, because Gilgamesh wasn\u0026rsquo;t science fiction. And don\u0026rsquo;t argue logic with me either! So there.) Beyond that, I\u0026rsquo;m not so sure though, because my tastes have really moved away from science fiction, at least in what I\u0026rsquo;m reading, and also what I\u0026rsquo;m writing in short fiction.\nBut that isn\u0026rsquo;t what this entry is about. You see I\u0026rsquo;ve spent the last good little while listening to David Sedaris reading his essays and stories, and I\u0026rsquo;m both really inspired and discouraged at the same time. The kinds of stories he tells are both hilariously funny, and startlingly poignant, all in one breath. That\u0026rsquo;s the kind of thing I live for, the kind of thing I try to write, even if I fail miserably at that goal. So in that respect I\u0026rsquo;m really inspired by his work.\nAt the same time, just knowing that his stories are real, and that he\u0026rsquo;s not talking about things he made up, only increases the effect. His are the kind of stories that you just can\u0026rsquo;t make up, sometimes you can\u0026rsquo;t help but laugh, other times you\u0026rsquo;re stricken with an understanding. His styling enhances the feeling of realism, because it\u0026rsquo;s so honest, and sharp; it\u0026rsquo;s also completely transparent, which I find frustrating, but frustrating out of respect. Like any author that I have any shread of respect for, he makes it seem effortless, and frankly that pisses me off. I know, somewhere that it isn\u0026rsquo;t effortless and that he, just like I and everyone else I know slaves over his work endlessly, but when I\u0026rsquo;m listening to him read (because he\u0026rsquo;s probably the only author who should be absorbed via his own readings of his work, because it looses something on paper), I can\u0026rsquo;t fathom that truth.\nThe other thing that I know from experience is that this kind of story or essay that he writes is impossible to produce, or virtually so. In order to produce stories about life that have that kind of effect, you need to have a life that grants you first hand exposure to the kind of situations. I suppose we all do, but I guess that a lot of the time we just overlook the things that might work the best for such pieces.\nBut enough naval gazing, that was a couple of entries ago, and while meta-art discussions are interesting for a little while, they stagnate really quickly, and I\u0026rsquo;m going to start writing about what I listened to before I start having a meta-meta art discussion and my brain starts to hurt. Or not, but moving forward is, in this situation, preferable to standing still.\nSo check out his stuff, you could probably find a good deal of it by looking through the archives of NPR\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;This American Life\u0026rdquo; (which is a show I have a lot of respect for, even if I don\u0026rsquo;t really listen to it, and I might talk about it at some later point), but I\u0026rsquo;ve also come across a great archive of his stuff, located here, and almost all of the links still work, so check it out. I\u0026rsquo;d like to know what you all think of it, because I can\u0026rsquo;t think of anything really thoughtful to say, other than \u0026ldquo;listen to it.\u0026rdquo; Sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s better to just let peoples work to speak for itself.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/me-listen-pretty/","summary":"I used to be thoroughly convinced that I liked science fiction books, adored them really. I loved, and to some extent still do love, sagas. These kinds of stories are still a really large part of who I am, and at least for the next sixty thousand words at least I\u0026rsquo;m going to be writing science fiction. (Another Round promises to be the shortest saga in the world. Ever. And don\u0026rsquo;t tell me about Gilgamesh, because Gilgamesh wasn\u0026rsquo;t science fiction. And don\u0026rsquo;t argue logic with me either! So there.) Beyond that, I\u0026rsquo;m not so sure though, because my tastes have really moved away from science fiction, at least in what I\u0026rsquo;m reading, and also what I\u0026rsquo;m writing in short fiction.\nBut that isn\u0026rsquo;t what this entry is about. You see I\u0026rsquo;ve spent the last good little while listening to David Sedaris reading his essays and stories, and I\u0026rsquo;m both really inspired and discouraged at the same time.","title":"Me Listen Pretty"},{"content":"So I\u0026rsquo;m not going to pull a Steve Bush and give a complete history of CollectiveArts and TealArt right now (ask me sometime about Steve Bush, and I might just tell you), because I think it\u0026rsquo;s fairly likely that you know more than you probably ever wanted to know of these sites' back-story. But I do think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally come to a conclusion that may offer some interesting insight, and there may be a tangible change at last.\nThere is one speck of history that I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to tell people very much. We\u0026rsquo;ll call this story \u0026rsquo;the discovery of blogs:\u0026rsquo; When Jason Dunn of PocketPCThoughts switched from Blogger to Greymatter, I discovered Noah Grey and Greymatter and a whole world of really great blogs. While I had seen blogger/blogspot stuff before, in the beginning at least, the people who took the time to use a program like Greymatter, generally had better quality work, but I digress. The possibilities that CMS\u0026rsquo;s like Greymatter and the blogging format inspired me and knew that I had to be a part of this whole movement (before it was a movement of course). But ever the individualist, I had to do something unique and different.\nThus the monster known as CollectiveArts was born. I really just wanted an awesome blog with a few really talented folks contributing and offering their unique perspectives. I dragged the CollectiveArts concept around countless times and the record really speaks for itself. At some point down the line, Lynda of DigitalWoe purchased the TealArt.com domain for a friend, but fatefully, those plans fell through, and she offered a two year registration of this quirky domain to anyone who wanted it. Ever the opportunist, I jumped on the offer and the monster that is this site was born. It\u0026rsquo;s taken us a long time to get on our feet technologically and personnel wise, but I think that now more than ever we really have that comfy awesome blog by a few really talented folks.\nAfter almost two and a half years of trying to get this CollectiveArts project off the ground, we\u0026rsquo;ve finally got what I/we were looking for. The problem is, of course, that instead of an awesome site named CollectiveArts, we know it as TealArt. But the resounding question of: \u0026lsquo;what do we do with CollectiveArts?\u0026rsquo; remained. Chris and I struggled with this one for a while, and I\u0026rsquo;ve come to the conclusion that it\u0026rsquo;s time to let go of CollectiveArts. It was a great experiment, and it paved the way for the development of this site, so I think it was really worth it, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s worth clinging to the notion of CollectiveArts in light of what\u0026rsquo;s happened. So unless someone wants CollectiveArts.net, and makes an offer, we\u0026rsquo;re going to let it slip I think.\nSo we\u0026rsquo;ve arrived, finally, at a solution that works really well for our needs, and you know, it feels great to be here! Registration is due in November (or it\u0026rsquo;ll slip), so I think we\u0026rsquo;ll start moving our email accounts out of there now, and the domain is now pointing to TealArt. I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of registering a couple of other domains that I\u0026rsquo;ve meant to take on for a while, but those will go to a more static portfolio type of site I think, if I even make a site for them. But as for display of my writing online, TealArt is my home; and I like it this way.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/weve-arrived/","summary":"So I\u0026rsquo;m not going to pull a Steve Bush and give a complete history of CollectiveArts and TealArt right now (ask me sometime about Steve Bush, and I might just tell you), because I think it\u0026rsquo;s fairly likely that you know more than you probably ever wanted to know of these sites' back-story. But I do think I\u0026rsquo;ve finally come to a conclusion that may offer some interesting insight, and there may be a tangible change at last.\nThere is one speck of history that I don\u0026rsquo;t tend to tell people very much. We\u0026rsquo;ll call this story \u0026rsquo;the discovery of blogs:\u0026rsquo; When Jason Dunn of PocketPCThoughts switched from Blogger to Greymatter, I discovered Noah Grey and Greymatter and a whole world of really great blogs. While I had seen blogger/blogspot stuff before, in the beginning at least, the people who took the time to use a program like Greymatter, generally had better quality work, but I digress.","title":"We've Arrived"},{"content":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: This entry will be posted as the category description for the \u0026ldquo;Beyond John Wayne category. I\u0026rsquo;m posting it here as a site update, for your own pleasure. Enjoy!\nAs some of you may already know, in order to get this International Baccalaureate Diploma you have to be able to do two things. First of all you have to be able to spell Baccalaureate (which I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have, but I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll get it within the year) and you have to write a four thousand word \u0026ldquo;Extended Essay\u0026rdquo; in any subject of your choosing. It\u0026rsquo;s tough and a major pain, yes, but assuming your advisors are really awesome, as mine are, it can be a load of fun to have the opportunity to get into what you\u0026rsquo;re really interested in and get credit for. Also it gives you an opportunity to take all of the dry stuff you\u0026rsquo;ve done in class and have some fun with the topic.\nIn perfect form, my Extended Essay is going to be a masculinity study. (For those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t know, in IB there are a number of papers/projects that we have to complete, most of which are graded by IB people outside of the school, and usually out side of the country as well. Well all of my IB projects fall into the category of gender/masculinity/queer studies, but we\u0026rsquo;ll talk more about that in a little while.)\nI have to have a draft of this paper before classes start in September, which shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be too much of a problem, but I do have to start working on it more. So in that motion, I\u0026rsquo;m going to start writing about it here at TealArt. We\u0026rsquo;ll probably get excerpts of this paper as I write it, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be a fair share of brainstorming. Think of it as a project blog, if you will. I at least think its interesting stuff and hope you do too (and all of your feed back is going to be really valuable).\nI wonder if I post this paper, in stages to this website, and IB uses that anti-plagiarism software to search the web, and they find it here, will they start having farm animals (cows to be specific). Because it\u0026rsquo;s completely legit, unless of course IB is demanding first run online publication rights, which I sort of doubt. Having said that, if this stuff pops up on someone else\u0026rsquo;s website and I\u0026rsquo;m not credited, it could get ugly. Really ugly. So consider yourself threatened. You can use this material if you want, but credit is required.\nThe working title for this paper is \u0026ldquo;Beyond John Wayne: A Contemporary Definition of Masculinity,\u0026rdquo; and in it I hope to define the traditional conception of masculinity, as represented by the kinds of character\u0026rsquo;s John Wayne is famous for portraying, then show how this definition is both flawed and not realistic in both historical and contemporary circumstances. Finally, I plan to conduct interviews several with youth and young adults from various backgrounds to establish a realistic definition that makes sense in contemporary contexts.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to start handing out background surveys this week, (to give me material that I can build a more substantial and meaningful interview that\u0026rsquo;s tailored to the subject instead of something that\u0026rsquo;s to general and not substantive enough). Depending on how that goes, I should be able to start having interviews this week as well and thing will proceeded as they should.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/masculinity-study/","summary":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: This entry will be posted as the category description for the \u0026ldquo;Beyond John Wayne category. I\u0026rsquo;m posting it here as a site update, for your own pleasure. Enjoy!\nAs some of you may already know, in order to get this International Baccalaureate Diploma you have to be able to do two things. First of all you have to be able to spell Baccalaureate (which I don\u0026rsquo;t quite have, but I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll get it within the year) and you have to write a four thousand word \u0026ldquo;Extended Essay\u0026rdquo; in any subject of your choosing. It\u0026rsquo;s tough and a major pain, yes, but assuming your advisors are really awesome, as mine are, it can be a load of fun to have the opportunity to get into what you\u0026rsquo;re really interested in and get credit for. Also it gives you an opportunity to take all of the dry stuff you\u0026rsquo;ve done in class and have some fun with the topic.","title":"Masculinity Study"},{"content":"Building the structure for a collective website is a really difficult task, especially when you\u0026rsquo;re building it for writers, chosen for their free spirit and individuality. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s a lost cause, but I continue to think that the benefits inevitably out way the requisite headaches, and tribulations.\nThree are two ways to approach the problem, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure right now which is better. You can take the hands off approach, and provide possibilities and opportunities for your contributors. Give them lots of options and appealing benefits, and hope that everything else will attend to itself. Give people lots of room to be creative, because they are after all creative people, and don\u0026rsquo;t meddle too much or you could muddle the results. The only real possibility is that without any or at least very much structure, your people won\u0026rsquo;t feel very obligated to continue their responsibilities, and the other possible problem is that if you use this model you really have to be open to all of the creative improvisations of the crew, otherwise you\u0026rsquo;re not really being fair.\nThe other option is to provide lots of structure, instructions, goals, deadlines, and form. Let people improvise on your model, but make sure that everything happens in the \u0026lsquo;one right way.\u0026rsquo; It should give you a controlled response and being structured encourages your crew to follow suit and adopt some kind of structure. The biggest problem with this is that if you sought out free spirits, then trying to establish some sort of control and structure onto their work and their creative styles can again produce the same result. People become frustrated, confused, and they feel constricted and nothing happens.\nI tell you, that\u0026rsquo;s what happens reliably. About the only safe thing to do is to smile and walk down a very fine line and hope that all goes well. A very, very fine line.\nI wonder if it\u0026rsquo;s still considered a tangent, when it\u0026rsquo;s what you started out talking about. You see, when I started writing this I wanted to show of what I\u0026rsquo;ve been calling the \u0026lsquo;inspirational document\u0026rsquo; just a list of prompts and ideas that I put together outlining the kind of things I think make blogs interesting and special. There are a host of possible objectives that a blog can accomplish, but there are some things that I think blogs accomplish better than other things (and by reading this document you\u0026rsquo;ll get an idea of what I\u0026rsquo;m trying to say, I hope). So what does that have to do with the two approaches to group website management? I was kind of questioning the place of this document in my management of the website(s), and believe me, like all good tangents, it seemed like a better idea when I started out on it.\nWrite about your life. Blogs aren\u0026rsquo;t about the big picture things; they\u0026rsquo;re about the little events, the soft give and take about every day life. You needn\u0026rsquo;t write about something sweet or infuriating that a friend or familiar said to you yesterday. Write about something that happened a couple years ago, or even something that happened when you were a kid. A memory, an image. Defining moments are wonderful for description. Weblogs should capture, or at least attempt to capture the times when you were able to take a step back, and see things as they were: moments of insight and understanding. The mundane is also really great subject matter, things that everyone thinks about, but that maybe doesn\u0026rsquo;t receive adequate attention.\nWrite about the time when you discovered that the world just wasn\u0026rsquo;t fair, and that people didn\u0026rsquo;t always mean well.\nWrite about a favorite outfit/shirt/pair of pants that just fit right and felt good when you wore it. Use it as a metaphor. Run with it.\nTell an anecdotal tale or three about specific individuals, and about mannerisms that defined them as people in your mind. Old aunts and uncles when you were a kid. Perhaps your grandparents. And so forth.\nOne thing that one of the past incarnations of TealArt and CollectiveArts tried to do was clobber the meta-art discussion. Talk about the craft of being an artist/writer, discuss the interplay between art and music, and think about the relationship between art society/culture. It can get a little intense and self serving after a while, but it\u0026rsquo;s a good way to get grounded, sometimes.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/no-small-amount-of-naval-gazing/","summary":"Building the structure for a collective website is a really difficult task, especially when you\u0026rsquo;re building it for writers, chosen for their free spirit and individuality. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s a lost cause, but I continue to think that the benefits inevitably out way the requisite headaches, and tribulations.\nThree are two ways to approach the problem, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure right now which is better. You can take the hands off approach, and provide possibilities and opportunities for your contributors. Give them lots of options and appealing benefits, and hope that everything else will attend to itself. Give people lots of room to be creative, because they are after all creative people, and don\u0026rsquo;t meddle too much or you could muddle the results. The only real possibility is that without any or at least very much structure, your people won\u0026rsquo;t feel very obligated to continue their responsibilities, and the other possible problem is that if you use this model you really have to be open to all of the creative improvisations of the crew, otherwise you\u0026rsquo;re not really being fair.","title":"No Small Amount of Naval Gazing"},{"content":"While I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted a new entry to TealArt in far, far too long I haven\u0026rsquo;t completely forgotten about the site. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some backend work here and there, mostly during writing breaks on Another Round (I\u0026rsquo;m at the 15,000 word mark currently). So, as a result, the side bar is a little cleaner. I fixed a few problems with the CMS (which will explain the title in a bit), and I\u0026rsquo;ve begun working on an exciting project that I think you\u0026rsquo;ll all like when I get it done, but I\u0026rsquo;m not quite ready to talk about now. Let the suspense build.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve also added another TealArt contributor. Paula Forbes is no stranger to my hair brained website ploys. I\u0026rsquo;ve worked with her on some very frivolous projects as well (oh, but boy, they were so fun), and her work is just great, so I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy her stuff. Peter McCabe also promises to start writing again, and I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to that as well. And, you still have Chris and me to boot.\nJust in case any of you are interested in what\u0026rsquo;s happening over at CollectiveArts, I\u0026rsquo;m pleased to say that we\u0026rsquo;re getting really close to reopening the doors over there. Really close. So stay tuned, and if you\u0026rsquo;re interested helping out with that drop me an email. CollectiveArts is open to just about anyone who wants to join, within certain bounds (and subject to review, of course).\nNow that we have that out of the way, I\u0026rsquo;d like to get back to the \u0026lsquo;coding on the battlefield,\u0026rsquo; if that\u0026rsquo;s alright with you.\nI\u0026rsquo;m glad it is.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that when ever I\u0026rsquo;m faced with a problem that involves coding, recently that\u0026rsquo;s been PHP and HTML code almost exclusively, and I can\u0026rsquo;t seem to get it to work, I start cutting things out. Rather than try and fix daunting problems with the formation of the code, I cut offending portions out. It\u0026rsquo;s a philosophy that simpler is probably better than complexity, and that if I don\u0026rsquo;t absolutely need something, that I can probably do with out it. So this leaves me feeling like a surgeon on a battlefield, doing twenty or more amputations in an hour. Though I suppose having a log of everything your CMS does referenced by file name, time, and line of code isn\u0026rsquo;t quite the same as having an arm or a leg, but there may be similarities.\nWell, anyway. I\u0026rsquo;m back here, and it\u0026rsquo;s good to be home.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/coding-on-the-battlefield/","summary":"While I haven\u0026rsquo;t posted a new entry to TealArt in far, far too long I haven\u0026rsquo;t completely forgotten about the site. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some backend work here and there, mostly during writing breaks on Another Round (I\u0026rsquo;m at the 15,000 word mark currently). So, as a result, the side bar is a little cleaner. I fixed a few problems with the CMS (which will explain the title in a bit), and I\u0026rsquo;ve begun working on an exciting project that I think you\u0026rsquo;ll all like when I get it done, but I\u0026rsquo;m not quite ready to talk about now. Let the suspense build.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve also added another TealArt contributor. Paula Forbes is no stranger to my hair brained website ploys. I\u0026rsquo;ve worked with her on some very frivolous projects as well (oh, but boy, they were so fun), and her work is just great, so I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll enjoy her stuff.","title":"Coding on the Battlefield"},{"content":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: This is a work of fiction, inspired by reality, such as it is. Pronouns are intentionally left vague, as most characters are composites. If you understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on, congratulations; please respect the wishes of everyone involved and speak about this with no one. Its safer that way, it\u0026rsquo;s happier. If I can keep my mouth shut for the better part of valor, then you can to. Chris as referred to in the last scene is of course Chris Knittel, for those of you who are curious. Some of the back story can be found here. For all of my family that reads the site, it\u0026rsquo;ll all become clear in the next week or so, wait till then and know that I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to talk about it quite yet. For the people from school, keep your mouths shut (and that\u0026rsquo;s serious folks. Please?) It\u0026rsquo;s really a matter of safety and of being comfortable. Respect that, both in this situation, and just in general. Thanks. Enjoy!\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m so full of things to say my mind is talking nonstop and has been for a while and I can\u0026rsquo;t get it to top I can\u0026rsquo;t get it to slow down, and you know on one hand I don\u0026rsquo;t want it to slow down to stop because this is an amazing feeling an amazing buzz and why should it stop? It doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to, but I would like to regain some semblance of coherence, some semblance of internal sanity.\u0026rdquo; I said breathing only occasionally.\n\u0026ldquo;You should talk to Hawthorne about your syntax,\u0026rdquo; She quipped. I sneered. \u0026ldquo;But seriously. All things end sometime, but I\u0026rsquo;m sure you\u0026rsquo;ve thought about that,\u0026rdquo; she said rolling her eyes.\n\u0026ldquo;Hey, I can\u0026rsquo;t help it; but yes, I\u0026rsquo;ve thought about it a little, and I think that it\u0026rsquo;s worth ignoring that for a little while, to let what happen will and just try. I\u0026rsquo;m allowed, am I not?\u0026rdquo; I asked. I was so excited that it hurt and that was after hours of distance and time for reflection. My mind was still reeling and if I didn\u0026rsquo;t pay attention to it I\u0026rsquo;d probably lose my self to an incoherent manic attack,\n\u0026ldquo;So tell! Tell! What happened? Was it perfect?\u0026rdquo; She asked.\n\u0026ldquo;I can\u0026rsquo;t, and perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s part of the problem. And yes, yes, yes it was; even moreso than I might have imagined. I have all this joy and excitement and but its ok, I mean it\u0026rsquo;s not a fun thing and I can completely respect things from his point of view. It\u0026rsquo;s so familiar, like I was there a couple of months ago and now\u0026hellip; now it\u0026rsquo;s different for me, but I still know, all too well, what that fears like. So I can completely respect where he\u0026rsquo;s coming from,\u0026rdquo; my words were bordering on incoherent, but that was ok, she\u0026rsquo;d understand, and it was probably the best reflection of how I was feeling.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh that\u0026rsquo;s awesome.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yes. It\u0026rsquo;s unreal, it\u0026rsquo;s completely uncharted territory. A brave new world. And it feels good. I feel good.\u0026rdquo; What more could I say, what more was there to say?\nPerhaps that was a question better left unasked, I thought as I was bombarded with a thousand little manic thoughts that wanted to be spoken but that I knew I mustn\u0026rsquo;t speak.\nI whimpered joyfully in protest, but restrained myself. Thinking of nothing else todo I unfolded my arms and hugged her. She understood.\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know, I feel a lot better about him now,\u0026rdquo; She said idly as I stood there.\nI bit my tongue softly in my cheek and nodded. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t\u0026mdash; or wouldn\u0026rsquo;t\u0026mdash;say anything, despite really wanting or needing to say a lot of somethings. \u0026ldquo;Yeah,\u0026rdquo; I mumbled, not releasing my tongue.\n\u0026ldquo;He seems to be really cool, underneath all of that. I spent some time with him after we closed up that project and the personality really started to show.\u0026rdquo;\nI moved my eyebrows up in a surprised expression and waited for more information. I hoped I was convincing.\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know,\u0026rdquo; she said. It strikes me as ironic that she, and I to a lesser extent, said \u0026lsquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know\u0026rsquo; before any thought that we obviously did know but were hesitant to vocalize. \u0026ldquo;Before I was just kind of afraid and thought that he was weird, but now I really find I have a lot of respect for him, and I\u0026rsquo;m realizing that all of the assumptions that I had made about him were wrong. And that\u0026rsquo;s a good thing,\u0026rdquo; She said as she reached around and messed with her hair. It was interesting to see how it all fell back into place and still looked wonderful. I was almost jealous.\n\u0026ldquo;And who knows, maybe he\u0026rsquo;ll manage to come out some day,\u0026rdquo; she added.\nI nearly chocked on my tongue. I wanted to twitch or wink or give some hint as to what had happened over the past couple of days, but managed to restrain it. \u0026ldquo;Yeah, who knows,\u0026rdquo; I said when I had regained my internal composure. We walked off towards class talking about something else, something completely unrelated, but I wasn\u0026rsquo;t there, not in mind anyway.\n\u0026ldquo;What happened? What happened?\u0026rdquo; She asked instantly as she sculpted a fine detail into the wet clay that she held tentatively in her hands. \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s as if you got some sort of a buddy,\u0026rdquo; she added without really meaning it.\n\u0026ldquo;Well, yeah, kind of,\u0026rdquo; I said very softly.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,\u0026rdquo; she said, once she saw the look on my face and knew that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t just playing around. \u0026ldquo;Someone from here, or not?!?\u0026rdquo; she asked excitedly pointing the ground.\nI nodded and put my finger up to my pursed lips and tried to inspire her to be a little quieter. I felt like the entire room was looking at us and listening intently to what we were saying, though I knew they all could probably care less.\n\u0026ldquo;So is it like, him, the guy who, everyone know, and everyone like thinks and dude and oh my god,\u0026rdquo; she said softly as she bent over the table, as if that would make her voice softer.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah,\u0026rdquo; I said.\nShe grinned. \u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s so awesome,\u0026rdquo; she said, and I think she meant it. I was happy. I grinned and nodded, but didn\u0026rsquo;t make any noise. I didn\u0026rsquo;t dare. \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m so happy now!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;You know, I think a lot of people have had a lot of respect for you since you\u0026rsquo;ve come out,\u0026rdquo; She offered after a while. I knew it was connected somehow.\n\u0026ldquo;As if it was a surprise to anyone. You all knew,\u0026rdquo; I said. I still haven\u0026rsquo;t completely decided how I felt about the glass closet. In some cases it made coming out easier, and in others it was just frustrating.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, but still, its cooler when you\u0026rsquo;re actually out, instead of just having to assume and worry that you haven\u0026rsquo;t figured it out and would do something stupid to try and disabuse us of the notion. You know where I\u0026rsquo;m going?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yep, and you\u0026rsquo;re right I hope.\u0026rdquo; I agreed.\n\u0026ldquo;Why did it have to take me so long to figure it out?\u0026rdquo; I asked silently, looking up hoping that some goddess would have an answer for me.\nI think I got an answer later; someone asked \u0026ldquo;if you didn\u0026rsquo;t have to come out, if everyone knew you were gay from the starting line and was completely cool with it, would you like that?\u0026rdquo;\nMy immediate reaction was to say \u0026ldquo;oh god yes!\u0026rdquo; but then I thought about it and realized while I would probably really like homophobia to end, I think that figuring out sexuality and what it means to me is a privilege that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t dare give up. Everything in life will teach you a lesson and help you grow, if you let it; and through coming out I\u0026rsquo;ve been able to gain an insight into myself that I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t dare give up.\n\u0026ldquo;Hey, Andy, err, Chris,\u0026rdquo; I said as I started to stand up and wave to him. I still couldn\u0026rsquo;t get his name right on the fly, after four years of thinking of him as \u0026lsquo;Andy\u0026rsquo; the fact that his real name was Chris hadn\u0026rsquo;t really set in. It made things easier, I knew too many people named Chris and this distinction made it a little bit easier; even better he responded to Andy just as well as he responded to Chris, maybe even a little better.\nThe café was bustling and I had managed to secure a small table in the corner for our chat. When he arrived I shook his hand, like I\u0026rsquo;d done a thousand times and we took our seats.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s good to see you,\u0026rdquo; it\u0026rsquo;s been a while. He was right; we\u0026rsquo;d been really busy for far too long; but we\u0026rsquo;ve been coming to this little table in the corner every few days for years. Years. And we talk, about projects we\u0026rsquo;re working on, the torments of education and life, and lots of other little nothings. He\u0026rsquo;s the only other male I\u0026rsquo;ve ever really connected with, well maybe until now, and I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how my life would be with out him.\nHe has short hair that would probably look really cool if he gelled it, but perhaps that\u0026rsquo;s what drew me to him: he had the potential to be a really cool popular kind of person, but he startled the fence and still dared to be buddies with someone like me. In retrospect I think he\u0026rsquo;d probably laugh at me and claim to out geek me in the geek contest, but that was part of the game I suppose.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, so what\u0026rsquo;s up with you?\u0026rdquo; I asked, taking a sip of tea.\n\u0026ldquo;Nothing much, the usual. Their pulling all of the usual tricks and it\u0026rsquo;s frustrating, but such is life,\u0026rdquo; he reported. I nodded, there would be more eventually, \u0026rsquo;nothing much\u0026rsquo; usually meant so much more; if it meant anything else then we would never talking about anything at all. \u0026ldquo;You?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know, I\u0026rsquo;m still fairly manic feeling, I\u0026rsquo;m so excited, there\u0026rsquo;s so much that I want to yell at the top of my lungs so that everyone can hear, but I can\u0026rsquo;t,\u0026rdquo; I said trying not to fidget with the packets of sugar sitting on the table.\n\u0026ldquo;So I take it you two aren\u0026rsquo;t going to be out?\u0026rdquo;\nI ignored the comment, in part because it had an obvious, but also because I didn\u0026rsquo;t want to explore the question. People would surely notice, I mean how could they not? But then it wasn\u0026rsquo;t my choice to make, and given the circumstance, and given that it was really his choice, I was ok with this. I chuckled, when I listed everything out in my mind, it all seemed like a big mistake waiting to happen, but then I thought of the look in his eyes and the feelings I got from his words, and it seemed like after coming out, that I was completely at peace about this one. It never stopped to amaze me.\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m learning a lot about the closet now. Because I\u0026rsquo;ve been through my own closet once, and now I\u0026rsquo;m kind of half in somebody else\u0026rsquo;s both vicariously and in a very real way, I feel like I know a lot more about it now. And I\u0026rsquo;m really comfortable. It scares me even, but just a little,\u0026rdquo; I said.\n\u0026ldquo;Never quite saw it that way,\u0026rdquo; he commented, looking on and waiting for what he knew was coming. It was interesting, despite the fact that he\u0026rsquo;s two years older and probably smarter than me, I constantly feel like I\u0026rsquo;m showing him the world, and it\u0026rsquo;s wonderful.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah.\u0026rdquo; I drifted off for a while and tried to form something coherent, or at least something close. \u0026ldquo;I think the problem isn\u0026rsquo;t that I have a problem letting him stay in the closet. I mean I think people disserve to stay in the closet until they have everything sorted out, and defiantly through high school. There are limits to that, obviously, but we\u0026rsquo;re no where near a limit right now. It seems that my problem is that there\u0026rsquo;s no way I can be excited, no way I can tell my friends, no way I can express any of this.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The curse of the extrovert,\u0026rdquo; he commented.\n\u0026ldquo;Totally.\u0026rdquo; He knew me too well, but then we\u0026rsquo;d been over that already.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fancy-this/","summary":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: This is a work of fiction, inspired by reality, such as it is. Pronouns are intentionally left vague, as most characters are composites. If you understand what\u0026rsquo;s going on, congratulations; please respect the wishes of everyone involved and speak about this with no one. Its safer that way, it\u0026rsquo;s happier. If I can keep my mouth shut for the better part of valor, then you can to. Chris as referred to in the last scene is of course Chris Knittel, for those of you who are curious. Some of the back story can be found here. For all of my family that reads the site, it\u0026rsquo;ll all become clear in the next week or so, wait till then and know that I\u0026rsquo;m not ready to talk about it quite yet. For the people from school, keep your mouths shut (and that\u0026rsquo;s serious folks. Please?) It\u0026rsquo;s really a matter of safety and of being comfortable.","title":"Fancy This"},{"content":"There were three words scribbled on the title page of my English paper, and after several long moments of collaborative deciphering I and several other members of my class were able to make out the following: \u0026ldquo;Too Plot Centric.\u0026rdquo;\nToo Plot Centric.\nNow what exactly does that mean? I was clueless, and given that I had a few rather imposing projects to work on, and that the revision of this paper wouldn\u0026rsquo;t really be due for several months, I didn\u0026rsquo;t invest any additional emotional energy into it until a little while ago when the words \u0026ldquo;Too Plot Centric\u0026rdquo; popped into my head, and I thought \u0026ldquo;now what in god\u0026rsquo;s name does he mean by that?\nThen I connected the dots, and realized what exactly he meant by \u0026ldquo;Too Plot Centric.\u0026rdquo; Only by looking at this from his perspective was I able to fully understand what he was looking for, and the more I consider it, the more driven I am to completely deny him the pleasure of receiving it, because he\u0026rsquo;s looking for an analytical method that I don\u0026rsquo;t exactly think should be applied to any of the humanities, epically literature.\nFor those of you unfamiliar with the school of literary thought known as New Criticism, it is a product of the modern paradigm that promotes examination of literature in terms of the techniques and devices used to deliver the point. It aims to create a objective look at literature by removing all, or as much context as possible from the analysis, and focusing analysis on small selection and more minute details of a text.\nThis is the school of criticism that the Collage Board features for the AP Literature and AP Literature/Composition tests, and it\u0026rsquo;s also the school of criticism which has given us academically viable papers that propose such outlandish theories which seem to have little barring on the piece itself.\nMy complaint is that looking at a piece with an eye towards new criticism, robs the context and the soul of the literature, which may be convent for a text book, but isn\u0026rsquo;t healthy for exposing people to literature. You can\u0026rsquo;t even hope to examine literature without looking at the authors contextual perspective, for instance you can\u0026rsquo;t look at Oscar Wilde\u0026rsquo;s work without really considering his homosexuality and how that reacted with the culture of his day, and you can\u0026rsquo;t read anything by Jean Anouilh without really considering how existentialism and the experience of living during the Nazi occupation of France affected his themes and messages (which I think makes his retelling of Antigone all the more interesting and ironic.) I think if you take this out, you lose something fundamental about the work. Additionally, I tend to be of the school that says that a writer\u0026rsquo;s write so they their works can be considered as written, for this reason I\u0026rsquo;m wary of literature texts full of no complete works and lots of excerpts, as well as literary schools that pay attention to details at the expense of the big picture.\nToo Plot Centric.\nAt least where I\u0026rsquo;m standing, people write fiction to make a point about humanity, or something the world, and they create (hopefully) compelling characters and situations that convey this message. Unfortunately characters and situations don\u0026rsquo;t exists well in a vacuum and you need something, some element that binds everything together and gives the story meaning and purpose, an element that puts the characters and situations in terms that the reader can understand.\nSomething like, oh I don\u0026rsquo;t know, plot?\nSo then pray tell, how can an essay examining literature be too plot centric?\nThe problem with the modern paradigm is that it tries to isolates things, and idealizes an objective point of view that doesn\u0026rsquo;t really go very far in the underlying effort of academic studies which should be to create a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us.\nToo plot centric?\nYou\u0026rsquo;ve got to be kidding me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/too-plot-centric/","summary":"There were three words scribbled on the title page of my English paper, and after several long moments of collaborative deciphering I and several other members of my class were able to make out the following: \u0026ldquo;Too Plot Centric.\u0026rdquo;\nToo Plot Centric.\nNow what exactly does that mean? I was clueless, and given that I had a few rather imposing projects to work on, and that the revision of this paper wouldn\u0026rsquo;t really be due for several months, I didn\u0026rsquo;t invest any additional emotional energy into it until a little while ago when the words \u0026ldquo;Too Plot Centric\u0026rdquo; popped into my head, and I thought \u0026ldquo;now what in god\u0026rsquo;s name does he mean by that?\nThen I connected the dots, and realized what exactly he meant by \u0026ldquo;Too Plot Centric.\u0026rdquo; Only by looking at this from his perspective was I able to fully understand what he was looking for, and the more I consider it, the more driven I am to completely deny him the pleasure of receiving it, because he\u0026rsquo;s looking for an analytical method that I don\u0026rsquo;t exactly think should be applied to any of the humanities, epically literature.","title":"Too Plot Centric"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;So you said you\u0026rsquo;re single,\u0026rdquo; I asked, though I did my best to made it completely clear that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t expressing interest: just small talk.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah; for now. But you might want to check back in a week,\u0026rdquo; he said.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh? This sounds like there might be a good story in there,\u0026rdquo; I said, perking up.\n\u0026ldquo;I suppose. I\u0026rsquo;ve always really been single; you know the closet, then all of this damn work, not to mention virtually non-existent pool of possible suitors. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to the notion of dating, but all of the blocks haven\u0026rsquo;t really fallen into the right places,\u0026rdquo; he said putting his pencil down on the table and slouching down in the chair.\n\u0026ldquo;Well you can\u0026rsquo;t exactly sit around and do nothing and wait for the blocks to fall out of the sky in perfect order.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s what they tell me, and I know it; however, getting everything in perfect order is a lot harder than you\u0026rsquo;d think.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I know.\u0026rdquo; I said taking a sip of a Pepsi. \u0026ldquo;They?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Never mind,\u0026rdquo; he said as his face went blank while he looked for the next thing to say, and got lost somewhere along the way.\n\u0026ldquo;So you\u0026rsquo;re not opposed to dating someone, circumstance has prevented you thus far, but what\u0026rsquo;s this about a week?\u0026rdquo; I asked hoping that this would bring him back around to the juicy gossip that I was waiting for.\n\u0026ldquo;Wha--? Oh, right. Yeah,\u0026rdquo; He said as he found his place and resituated himself in the land of the coherent. \u0026ldquo;So there\u0026rsquo;s this guy\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;This sounds like it\u0026rsquo;s about to be a really bad pun.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I sure hope not,\u0026rdquo; he said chuckling.\n\u0026ldquo;Who?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Just think, out of the people we know, who seems the most likely to be gay?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Tom?!?\u0026rdquo; I asked shocked that he would even think of being interested in Tom.\n\u0026ldquo;No, not Tom, you Dimwit,\u0026rdquo; he spat.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, yeah, him, that seems like a fairly safe bet, though I\u0026rsquo;m not sure.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Are we ever really sure until they tell you? Even then? At this age, here, it\u0026rsquo;s scarcely even worth it. But beside all of the obvious little things which don\u0026rsquo;t necessarily mean a whole lot, he\u0026rsquo;s been flirting with me for weeks,\u0026rdquo; he said, attempting to not seem shallow or devoid of insight.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, I\u0026rsquo;ve kind of seen that.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;And the vibes I\u0026rsquo;m getting from him are somewhat intense. But you\u0026rsquo;ve noticed it too? A couple of other people noticed it. That\u0026rsquo;s a good thing I guess, I mean it makes me feel like I\u0026rsquo;m not projecting this all,\u0026rdquo; he said sounding relieved and somehow excited. Now he was interested in telling the story: it looked like I just might get my story after all.\nThere was a prolonged silence where neither of us spoke, and before he got the chance to drift off into some other realm, I thought it might be a good idea to jump start the conversation. \u0026ldquo;So say something. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to count how many times you\u0026rsquo;ve told me that one.\u0026rdquo;\nHe chuckled: this was a start. \u0026ldquo;Yes, but given his reputation I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t want to push to hard and have him be wierded out and run away screaming.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;He was great when you came out though,\u0026rdquo; I pointed out recalling the somewhat comedic episode.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah, and that really surprised me, so I\u0026rsquo;m questioning all of my previous assumptions, but at the same time you know people act differently when \u0026lsquo;You\u0026rsquo;re Gay?\u0026rsquo; suddenly becomes \u0026lsquo;I\u0026rsquo;m Gay,\u0026rsquo; and I\u0026rsquo;m not about to ruin anything with rash behavior.\u0026rdquo; He explained.\n\u0026ldquo;Fancy that!\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Shut up, you know what I mean.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah,\u0026rdquo; I said smiling. \u0026ldquo;I agree and in the end it\u0026rsquo;s you\u0026rsquo;re relationship\u0026mdash;such as it is\u0026mdash;after all. We\u0026rsquo;ll ignore for a moment the fact that it\u0026rsquo;s so obvious to everyone that you two are cruising each other,\u0026rdquo; I said, punctuating the point with a grin and a very soft chuckle.\n\u0026ldquo;I suppose, but anyway. Things may be looking up though.\u0026rdquo; he said shifting his weight in the chair and yawning.\n\u0026ldquo;So you\u0026rsquo;ve said. What happens this week?\u0026rdquo; I asked. We\u0026rsquo;d discovered long ago that blunt communication was better in the long run for all involved parties.\n\u0026ldquo;Well a couple of days ago he said \u0026lsquo;And there\u0026rsquo;s something I need to talk to you about,\u0026rsquo; in that way. I mean what else could it be?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not going to answer that for your piece of mind.\u0026rdquo; I said chuckling.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh, shove it would you,\u0026rdquo; he spat. \u0026ldquo;When I approached him about it later, he was like \u0026lsquo;after we get done with this next project,\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; he said illustrating his quote with a wide sweeping gesture that puzzled me slightly.\n\u0026ldquo;That doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem logical.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Well it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be logical to you or me, but let\u0026rsquo;s look at it from where he\u0026rsquo;s standing,\u0026rdquo; he suggested and stared at me, I suppose he expected me to take in the alternate perspective without any assistance.\n\u0026ldquo;I suppose it makes sense. Maybe a perfectionist thing, or just wanting to have free time, or just wanting to be free of commitments so he can crash and smolder if he needs to,\u0026rdquo; I theorized, speaking almost before the thoughts were fully formed.\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s where I was coming from. The accounting for every contingency would certainly fit with the character,\u0026rdquo; he agreed.\n\u0026ldquo;Since the project is over this week\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yep. Whatever will happen will happen.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Which is of course too slow for you right now?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t think time could move slower,\u0026rdquo; he lamented\n\u0026ldquo;Hi there Mr. Kydd! What\u0026rsquo;s the plan for today\u0026rsquo;s class?\u0026rdquo; I called out over his shoulder to our history teacher; the only problem was that Kydd was on the other side of the building stuck in front of a half awake, at best, class at the moment.\nHe jumped in his chair and looked around frantically for the teacher who wasn\u0026rsquo;t really there; but the point was made. \u0026ldquo;I hate you. I really hate you. You know that don\u0026rsquo;t you?\u0026rdquo;\nI couldn\u0026rsquo;t help but laugh. \u0026ldquo;You know, not to seem like a complete asshole right now, but why are you getting your hopes up, he\u0026rsquo;s not going to be here or anywhere close in six months, and besides you two have diametrically opposed interests and opinions. If you don\u0026rsquo;t kill each other within the first six seconds, I\u0026rsquo;d personally be shocked,\u0026rdquo; I said growing serious. The sad part is that it was the truth.\n\u0026ldquo;Thank you for your vote of confidence. I think worrying about him leaving is really putting the carriage before the horse, hell; this whole conversation is putting the carriage before the horse,\u0026rdquo; he said appearing somewhat frantic.\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ll give you that one,\u0026rdquo; I said looking inquisitively as he calmed down a little. \u0026ldquo;But you still are opposite types.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Isn\u0026rsquo;t that what makes things interesting. And I don\u0026rsquo;t think we\u0026rsquo;re opposite types. Opposite backgrounds perhaps, but are we really so diametrically opposed type wise?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Probably, but you\u0026rsquo;re right, I suppose.\u0026rdquo; I said. Despite the fact that he was slightly confused and not quite sure of where he was going, he still had more insight into this screwed up world than he, or anyone else I knew, deserved to have. Damn him.\n\u0026ldquo;I mean where\u0026rsquo;s the fun if you always know what he\u0026rsquo;s going to say, do, or think? Remember what Brad Grahm said in that Fray story? \u0026lsquo;Passion, requires just that, an undying passion to discover the unknowns of the other person\u0026rsquo; or something like that.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Granted,\u0026rdquo; I relented reluctantly.\n\u0026ldquo;So there\u0026rsquo;s not much I can do,\u0026rdquo; he said loosing himself to some alternate plane of thought, only this time I let him go.\n\u0026ldquo;Except wait.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Except wait,\u0026rdquo; he repeated absentmindedly.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/fancy-that/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;So you said you\u0026rsquo;re single,\u0026rdquo; I asked, though I did my best to made it completely clear that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t expressing interest: just small talk.\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah; for now. But you might want to check back in a week,\u0026rdquo; he said.\n\u0026ldquo;Oh? This sounds like there might be a good story in there,\u0026rdquo; I said, perking up.\n\u0026ldquo;I suppose. I\u0026rsquo;ve always really been single; you know the closet, then all of this damn work, not to mention virtually non-existent pool of possible suitors. I mean I\u0026rsquo;m not opposed to the notion of dating, but all of the blocks haven\u0026rsquo;t really fallen into the right places,\u0026rdquo; he said putting his pencil down on the table and slouching down in the chair.\n\u0026ldquo;Well you can\u0026rsquo;t exactly sit around and do nothing and wait for the blocks to fall out of the sky in perfect order.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s what they tell me, and I know it; however, getting everything in perfect order is a lot harder than you\u0026rsquo;d think.","title":"Fancy That"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m staying after school tomorrow to talk to the Site Based Management Committee about establishing a Gay Straight Aliance/Support Group at our school. It should be an easy process, and the nice thing is that we don\u0026rsquo;t even need to have this group\u0026rsquo;s approval, because of the established practices and all of the language in the Federal Equal Access Act, and how the school has functioned in the past; all we need is the principals go ahead. We have faculty sponsors, and support from enough students to, at least in my mind make it work.\nThe ironic thing is that as of next year, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be the student representative to the committee for the 2003-2004 school years. How funny. Really I see this as ironic, because after trying to get on the student council and failing reputedly, I\u0026rsquo;m going to achieve something way more important than that, and I\u0026rsquo;ll get a vote (I assume) that really counts for something. How awesome is that? Not to mention the fact that collages especially schools like Antioch will jump over this kind of community leadership kinds of things. And the truth is that I think it would be nice to be a part of this kind of discussion, instead of just being affected by the implications of it.\nBut about the Metro High School Gay Straight Alliance/Support Group. It\u0026rsquo;s really a benign group that has the distinct possibility of being one of the most active groups in our little school of 236 (this year; normal capacity is about 260). It\u0026rsquo;s also going to be established with a minimum amount of hassle, and with all luck meetings will start next year. One thing I\u0026rsquo;m really proud of is that it\u0026rsquo;ll set a really good precedent: as the first school in the district to have a GSA, students in other schools within the district (there are 12 high schools in the district) should be able to establish groups without any real problem. Also, since Metro is the top performing school in the area, and ranks very high in the state as a whole, we\u0026rsquo;ll be noticed, and I hope some good will come of that.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re also fighting against a bill in the state legislature that would make it illegal for a school or school district to adopt non-discrimination language that is more accepting than existing state and federal laws. Basically, it would make it impossible for a school district to protect GLBT students, and staff even if they wanted to. Because of the way the Federal Equal Access Act is worded, this won\u0026rsquo;t impact the group but it\u0026rsquo;s a scary prospect in any case.\nIn any case it\u0026rsquo;ll be a big day, and hopefully a fairly easy one at that.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/allied/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m staying after school tomorrow to talk to the Site Based Management Committee about establishing a Gay Straight Aliance/Support Group at our school. It should be an easy process, and the nice thing is that we don\u0026rsquo;t even need to have this group\u0026rsquo;s approval, because of the established practices and all of the language in the Federal Equal Access Act, and how the school has functioned in the past; all we need is the principals go ahead. We have faculty sponsors, and support from enough students to, at least in my mind make it work.\nThe ironic thing is that as of next year, I\u0026rsquo;m going to be the student representative to the committee for the 2003-2004 school years. How funny. Really I see this as ironic, because after trying to get on the student council and failing reputedly, I\u0026rsquo;m going to achieve something way more important than that, and I\u0026rsquo;ll get a vote (I assume) that really counts for something.","title":"Allied"},{"content":"With the start of Queer as Folk\u0026rsquo;s new season I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered or rediscovered a new addiction. While it\u0026rsquo;s still technically true that I don\u0026rsquo;t watch any television, the approximately 42 minuets per week is a very good thing. Kazza is to blame.\nI found out about the show during the hiatus, and got my fingers on the lion\u0026rsquo;s share of the episodes and was hooked. There characters are honest, dynamic, and you can sympathize with just about all of them (including, and perhaps especially, Brian), and in a single episode you can both laugh out loud and cry if your inclined. The show will also, if you want it to, make you think seriously about the issues discussed. This isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of show that you sit, watch, and forget. You get involved. Additionally, because this is a Showtime show, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to go through network censors, and it has a much larger production budget than network shows; this allows the producers greater freedom, and the ability to get a better crew and some really impressive actors.\nAs an artistic work, the show is very precise and planed, and very little is left to chance. The writing is excellent and uses devices that I\u0026rsquo;m gleefully surprised when I see them used in fine literature. For instance in an episode mid-to-late last season, two characters (Justin and Ethan) were having their first real discussion, and after Justin leaves, we switch to a view to a metronome swinging back and forth as Ethan\u0026rsquo;s fuzzy form resumes his violin playing. An obvious foreshadowing experience and just watch this season to see what happened. I love it when they do things like that: I think it shows that the producers and writers are working to create something more than another hour of television that\u0026rsquo;s only laurels are the cute faces and bare asses of the ensemble lead.\nHaving said that, Queer as Folk, doesn\u0026rsquo;t shy away from showing sex. But we should say, that in point of fact, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty good about using it artistically and to make a point. It gets to be gratuitous after a while with Brian, but that is the point. It\u0026rsquo;s honest and blatant, qualities that I admire above just about everything else. It is not representative of Gay and Lesbian people everywhere, but it does cover a certain spectrum of the popular culture. I think the show\u0026rsquo;s caught a lot of flack for not being representative, and I suppose it\u0026rsquo;s a problem when there aren\u0026rsquo;t many ëgay\u0026rsquo; shows around, but forgiving this problem in the production houses, it does a good job at what its trying to do. After all, shows like Sex and the City, Dharma and Greg, and Mad About You (can you tell how long it\u0026rsquo;s been since I\u0026rsquo;ve even vaguely followed sitcoms?) aren\u0026rsquo;t exactly representative of the hetrolifestyle but you don\u0026rsquo;t see everyone up in arms about that.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s some of the most compelling television drama around, because it breaks the mold, because it steps outside of the norm, and in doing so provides a perfect example of how there is really little that separates us as people, despite what separates us legally and culturally. If you get Showtime, check it out, if you don\u0026rsquo;t get Showtime, work something out with your local Kazza provider to get something together. It\u0026rsquo;s not mindless television and unlike a lot of junk that\u0026rsquo;s out there you don\u0026rsquo;t feel like you\u0026rsquo;ve just wasted 45 minuets when its done.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/queerer-than-folk/","summary":"With the start of Queer as Folk\u0026rsquo;s new season I\u0026rsquo;ve discovered or rediscovered a new addiction. While it\u0026rsquo;s still technically true that I don\u0026rsquo;t watch any television, the approximately 42 minuets per week is a very good thing. Kazza is to blame.\nI found out about the show during the hiatus, and got my fingers on the lion\u0026rsquo;s share of the episodes and was hooked. There characters are honest, dynamic, and you can sympathize with just about all of them (including, and perhaps especially, Brian), and in a single episode you can both laugh out loud and cry if your inclined. The show will also, if you want it to, make you think seriously about the issues discussed. This isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of show that you sit, watch, and forget. You get involved. Additionally, because this is a Showtime show, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to go through network censors, and it has a much larger production budget than network shows; this allows the producers greater freedom, and the ability to get a better crew and some really impressive actors.","title":"Queerer Than Folk"},{"content":"As you\u0026rsquo;ve seen I finished the book that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for most of the time that I\u0026rsquo;ve operated this domain. It feels great and I think in some ways it marks a change in the eras of my life. Henceforth referred to as BCG and ACG (before and after Circle Games). No, no matter what anyone says, no matter what anyone thinks I\u0026rsquo;m a writer. I write, and I must write; and while you may have believed this before, I may have doubted it. Now, I don\u0026rsquo;t doubt my writerly existence (ability and skill are always fair game). With enough work, time and inspiration, I feel like I can do anything. It may sound kind of hokey and pretentious, but I ensure that its not.\nFor the entire length of my recorded presence on line, I\u0026rsquo;ve kept my age fairly secrete. Partially because when I started 4 or so years ago, I was 13-14 (for those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t feel like doing the math or don\u0026rsquo;t have enough fingers, that would make me 16\u0026mdash;17 in three months) and I wanted to be taken seriously. Four years changes a few things, and I\u0026rsquo;m no longer as invested in other people\u0026rsquo;s (virtual) impression of my age. Before the internet was my primary publication venue, and in order to reach respectable audiences and gain a reputation, I think I needed to present myself in a certain way. I never lied, technically, though I admit I did chose words carefully with the intention of creating an image that was several years ahead of the current reality. But no longer. If I want to publish some writing on the internet, people will either have to accept me in terms of who I am, and on the basis of my work, or (and this will likely be far more common) I\u0026rsquo;ll be publishing on TealArt and CollectiveArts, where I\u0026rsquo;m in control.\nI think know would be a good time to explain Chris. He got added to this effort at some point, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think we ever really explained how we know each other. 3-4 years ago, we frequented an IRC (internet relay chat) Channel (#babylon5, and later #babcom2 as well on the Undernet, for those of you that care). Not that we ever talked about Babylon 5, really, but we have/had that common connection. Really the best conversations we had in that channel, or the ones that I really remember were about American Literature and how much we didn\u0026rsquo;t like it, but it was bore than just a bitching session, because in retrospect our arguments were fairly well constructed. Gosh, the things I did/do in my free time. In any case, we just started talking, and we haven\u0026rsquo;t really stopped. There\u0026rsquo;s a good deal of variation, but we tend to average 7-15 thousand words of IM transcripts a week. Oh, and he\u0026rsquo;s all of two years older than me.\nDespite the fact that I\u0026rsquo;ve known that my family reads this journal, it\u0026rsquo;s finally starting to sink in and I\u0026rsquo;m starting to feel watched and hovered over. I\u0026rsquo;m trying to ignore this as best I can. So I have a favor to ask of you three, and anyone else whose still reading: leave comments on the entries as a way of telling me that you\u0026rsquo;ve read the entry and are interested in what I\u0026rsquo;ve said (and want to further a discussion). Being told \u0026ldquo;Oh I read your website,\u0026rdquo; by family freaks me out still. Commenting is really cool, and I\u0026rsquo;d like you all to add your thoughts. Please?\nWe interrupt this irregularly scheduled Personal Update to mention that in case you were wondering, there is some semblance of a coherent point hidden somewhere in here. Thank You.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s no really easy way to do this so, I\u0026rsquo;ll try not to flounder around too much. I\u0026rsquo;m gay. But if you\u0026rsquo;ve spent any time reading this site, and hadn\u0026rsquo;t guessed that by now, you\u0026rsquo;re not very good at reading subtly. Not that I\u0026rsquo;ve been using this site as the penultimate closet case weblog, but for any number of reasons it wasn\u0026rsquo;t time to come out yet, so I didn\u0026rsquo;t. Now, though, I\u0026rsquo;m as ready as one can get. Which is to say, not very, but I\u0026rsquo;d grown to a place where If I didn\u0026rsquo;t come out soon, I might have completely broken. So time for all the questions I know you\u0026rsquo;re asking: Yes I\u0026rsquo;m completely sure, for god only knows what reason, I doubted and questioned for a year and floundered around a lot, but after a year of agitation, everything finally settled and it all became clear. For those of you wondering the order in which I came out to people, here it is: Tracy, Chris K., Rachel, Molly/Anna S., Alex P., Mary, Anna T., Alex S., Eric, Halley, Chris A., and so forth; after a while it becomes kind of nebulous and hard to track. Yes, I\u0026rsquo;m the only out/semi-out guy in my school of 236, and while we have bets on a few people, we\u0026rsquo;ll just have to wait and see. I\u0026rsquo;m not dating anyone, even in the vaguest of definitions, and while I\u0026rsquo;m open to the prospect in theory, I realize that it\u0026rsquo;s kind of impractical right now, and everything\u0026rsquo;s comfortably cool.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s been said that being gay is hard, that it\u0026rsquo;s a hard life. First of all, I thank whoever said that for not using the word lifestyle, because after all diets and life has very little in common. Second of all, I think the gay part has very little to do with anything. Life isn\u0026rsquo;t easy, it\u0026rsquo;s not for the faint of heart (bad pun, I know, I know). The only thing that I know is that I have absolutely no control over being gay, not that I\u0026rsquo;d want to. It\u0026rsquo;s part of me, of who I am and I like me just the way I am. Also, I can tell you that the extra difficulty that being gay adds to life is virtually non-existent in comparison to being gay and locked on your ever shrinking closet.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s a continuing saga, and I think now that I\u0026rsquo;ve made this jump; you\u0026rsquo;ll see a few more things on this subject.\nI\u0026rsquo;m happy, and each time I\u0026rsquo;ve come out to someone, after the initial milliseconds of fear before they respond, I feel as if I\u0026rsquo;ve woken up, as if I\u0026rsquo;m starting to become hole. Even on a cloudy day, it feels like a bright shiny morning. That\u0026rsquo;s why it\u0026rsquo;s right, because deep down in my bones it feels right, it feels like what I need to do, and it feels like me: I have to trust this, or else I can\u0026rsquo;t really trust anything.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/another-bright-shiny-morning-personal-update/","summary":"As you\u0026rsquo;ve seen I finished the book that I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on for most of the time that I\u0026rsquo;ve operated this domain. It feels great and I think in some ways it marks a change in the eras of my life. Henceforth referred to as BCG and ACG (before and after Circle Games). No, no matter what anyone says, no matter what anyone thinks I\u0026rsquo;m a writer. I write, and I must write; and while you may have believed this before, I may have doubted it. Now, I don\u0026rsquo;t doubt my writerly existence (ability and skill are always fair game). With enough work, time and inspiration, I feel like I can do anything. It may sound kind of hokey and pretentious, but I ensure that its not.\nFor the entire length of my recorded presence on line, I\u0026rsquo;ve kept my age fairly secrete. Partially because when I started 4 or so years ago, I was 13-14 (for those of you who don\u0026rsquo;t feel like doing the math or don\u0026rsquo;t have enough fingers, that would make me 16\u0026mdash;17 in three months) and I wanted to be taken seriously.","title":"Another Bright Shiny Morning - Personal Update"},{"content":"This isn\u0026rsquo;t the personal update that I promised, that\u0026rsquo;s still forthcoming. Right now I have a real short little ditty that I need to post.\nOn March 29th at 12:50 CST while listening to Silly Wizard\u0026rsquo;s version of Andy M. Stewert\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Queen of Argyll\u0026rdquo; on constant repeat for sevral hours, after returning from the Tioniol (Mississippi River Celtic Music Festival) Friday Night Celidh (At the St. Louis Brewery and Taproom) with music by Bohola) I completed the very first first draft of Circle Games. My Novel.\nStatistics: 100,732 words 454 Pages 23 Chapters + a Prologue and an Epilogue 1.36 megabyte MS Word XP file 9 months of work.\nNever before have I looked forward to revisions, like I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to them now. I want to get through this, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten past a really difficult first step, one that I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I ever though I\u0026rsquo;d be able to really pass, and now I\u0026rsquo;m there and its done. I feel like it\u0026rsquo;s all down hill from here.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve decided to work on a collection of short fiction this summer rather than another novel. I want to get a piece in the Blithe House Quarterly, and I want to get stuff for The Fray, among other things, but I also want to have a good body of work. I\u0026rsquo;ll also be working on revisions. Goggle anything that I didn\u0026rsquo;t put a link on, sorry, I\u0026rsquo;m about to try to sleep though I\u0026rsquo;m really excited. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/full-circle/","summary":"This isn\u0026rsquo;t the personal update that I promised, that\u0026rsquo;s still forthcoming. Right now I have a real short little ditty that I need to post.\nOn March 29th at 12:50 CST while listening to Silly Wizard\u0026rsquo;s version of Andy M. Stewert\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Queen of Argyll\u0026rdquo; on constant repeat for sevral hours, after returning from the Tioniol (Mississippi River Celtic Music Festival) Friday Night Celidh (At the St. Louis Brewery and Taproom) with music by Bohola) I completed the very first first draft of Circle Games. My Novel.\nStatistics: 100,732 words 454 Pages 23 Chapters + a Prologue and an Epilogue 1.36 megabyte MS Word XP file 9 months of work.\nNever before have I looked forward to revisions, like I\u0026rsquo;m looking forward to them now. I want to get through this, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten past a really difficult first step, one that I don\u0026rsquo;t know if I ever though I\u0026rsquo;d be able to really pass, and now I\u0026rsquo;m there and its done.","title":"Full Circle"},{"content":"A lot of people are pretty good with computers, a lot of people are reassembly geeky but I\u0026rsquo;m about as good as they come. I mean there are people who have degree\u0026rsquo;s in Computer Science and Information Science/Technology who can do stuff that I can\u0026rsquo;t, more because I don\u0026rsquo;t have the training than because I\u0026rsquo;m incapable of the task. I can navigate my way through the internet and I\u0026rsquo;m always on top of new developments, anymore through circumstance and coincidence than through any active effort on my part. In addition to all of the mainstream sources that seem to have a direct wire into my brain, I\u0026rsquo;m very tuned into the human side of the internet, and have a lot of connections and helpful friends. The whole world really is at my finger tips. But being an A-list geek isn\u0026rsquo;t all about the internet and being connected, it\u0026rsquo;s also about being able to navigate local programs and possessing the ability to optimize your software so that it fits with my working style, rather than optimize my working style to fit with the software. Its also about being able to understand, even on the most fundamental level, how programming works, and the nuts and bolts of everything fits together, this isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that you should be able to program or debug on your own, but you should be able to follow and exploit the kinds of logical process that programmers use. And you know what? I got it. I got it all.\nI doubt a lot about myself. A whole lot. My ability to succeed academically, my writing, my completion, my indecisiveness, and so forth. I think I\u0026rsquo;m allowed one area where I can completely kick ass in, one area where I can say \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m just as good if not better as anyone out there,\u0026rdquo; and feel good. I\u0026rsquo;m not being standoffish here, it\u0026rsquo;s the truth.\nBut there\u0026rsquo;s a problem. I don\u0026rsquo;t care. It\u0026rsquo;s not so great, knowing how to do all of these things is all well and good, but there comes a point where you have to step beyond the screen and make it into something more. Look at the big picture and see that computers are a tool to accomplish your goal. People forget that too often or at least the normal brand of geek hasn\u0026rsquo;t moved beyond the \u0026ldquo;computers are a tool\u0026rdquo; clause.\nAn example. Mobile Technology. The people who are really into mobile technology, or at least the ones who do really good with publishing about mobile tech are people who don\u0026rsquo;t really use the tech, because they spend most of their day in front of big computers that do everything they need, and the truth of the matter is that they are thus unable to regularly put their units under the kinds of realistic tests that us normal people live with day in and day out. In this environment the geeks become people who have moved from using a technology because it helps them accomplish essential tasks to using a technology because \u0026ldquo;it\u0026rsquo;s the coolest most exciting new thing around and it can do all of these fancy things, dude!\u0026rdquo;\nAnd it goes beyond that. It goes beyond one sector, one area. The problem is that the geeks are moving in directions and doing things and removing the purpose and point, and moving the whole realm of geekyness\u0026rsquo; into an area that that has ceased to serve an end. And I\u0026rsquo;ve become disillusioned.\nOn a mostly unrelated note, I some how managed to break the display function for the comments on here, but posting comments should still work, even if you can\u0026rsquo;t see them. In other news we\u0026rsquo;ve decided to open a Notebook-type site but we\u0026rsquo;re still working on names. Another day or two. And that personal update is coming, and will probably come out in conjunction with the aux site.\nAnd By the Way this is Entry Number 100. Between Quotes and Links and the Journal and all of the test entries I was forced to do to get the delay in positng to disapear, we\u0026rsquo;ve hit 100. Here\u0026rsquo;s to many more. Cheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-disillusioned-geek/","summary":"A lot of people are pretty good with computers, a lot of people are reassembly geeky but I\u0026rsquo;m about as good as they come. I mean there are people who have degree\u0026rsquo;s in Computer Science and Information Science/Technology who can do stuff that I can\u0026rsquo;t, more because I don\u0026rsquo;t have the training than because I\u0026rsquo;m incapable of the task. I can navigate my way through the internet and I\u0026rsquo;m always on top of new developments, anymore through circumstance and coincidence than through any active effort on my part. In addition to all of the mainstream sources that seem to have a direct wire into my brain, I\u0026rsquo;m very tuned into the human side of the internet, and have a lot of connections and helpful friends. The whole world really is at my finger tips. But being an A-list geek isn\u0026rsquo;t all about the internet and being connected, it\u0026rsquo;s also about being able to navigate local programs and possessing the ability to optimize your software so that it fits with my working style, rather than optimize my working style to fit with the software.","title":"The Disillusioned Geek"},{"content":"Every so often I feel the necessity to write a little ditty here to tell you about what\u0026rsquo;s happened and what we have planed, despite the fact that it goes most of the blogging directives that I subscribe to. Alas. I still feel like we need to do it from time to time. So here it goes.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve added Peter McCabe as a contributor; you saw his post I\u0026rsquo;m sure. His perspective and dynamic will really enhance the site as we have it now, and I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to what he\u0026rsquo;ll come up with in the coming weeks and months. I\u0026rsquo;m also on the look out for another Teal Artist person, but I have fairly specific requirements, so the search is slow, but eventually I\u0026rsquo;d like to add another person here. If anyone\u0026rsquo;s interested, I\u0026rsquo;d like to hear from you, but I\u0026rsquo;m being picky with this, so don\u0026rsquo;t take any rejections personally.\nA long time ago, we added a fourth skin (before the site dump), and I don\u0026rsquo;t think I ever posted about that. I\u0026rsquo;m finally pretty happy with what I see in or selection of designs, there\u0026rsquo;s a fifth skin hanging around somewhere, but it\u0026rsquo;s not perfect yet, so it\u0026rsquo;ll be a little while until we see that kind of design development, but I think what we have now is sufficient, and I really don\u0026rsquo;t like that aspect of web design very much at all, so it left up to the free time in Chris\u0026rsquo; schedule. I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t hold your breath.\nCommenting on the TealArt blog has been restored. Sometime when I have more than half a brain and I\u0026rsquo;m in the mood to do some coding, I\u0026rsquo;ll write up a page so that you all can register. Registration makes commenting easier, and you\u0026rsquo;ll be able to edit your words without needing divine intervention. Enjoy, and we really thrive on knowing that there are people out there are paying attention to shouts into the night.\nI think we referenced \u0026ldquo;the auxiliary site\u0026rdquo; at one point, and that disserves a little explanation. Chris bought a domain and installed b2, and proceeded to double all of his TealArt posts onto his website along with some other more random things, like poetry and quick rants, but for the most part it was a quick and sloppy thing without a direction to speak of. So during a late night IM conversation that was meandering through the dark caves of nothingness, Chris comments that it might be kind fun if we posted our IM transcripts at the end of every week. It was wacky, and it was just weird enough that it might work. TealArt didn\u0026rsquo;t quite seem like the right place for such foolishness, wiped Chris\u0026rsquo; site clean, whipped up a design that was mostly stolen from a free blog template site, and started posting.\nThe idea was to have a site where we were removed from what passes for our real personas, and would thus be able to say anything without it being connected to what readers of this site or of CollectiveArts might think. I\u0026rsquo;m not going to tell you the URL, and I bet you won\u0026rsquo;t guess it. It was to be fast, campy, zany, honest, blunt, and for the most part completely removed from our real lives. We even post under false names, mostly for kicks. It\u0026rsquo;s a great idea and I don\u0026rsquo;t know how it\u0026rsquo;ll turn out. We\u0026rsquo;re considering transitioning that site into a \u0026ldquo;TealArt Notebook\u0026rdquo; that would take the aux site\u0026rsquo;s place, but ultimately that\u0026rsquo;s not my decision, so we\u0026rsquo;ll see.\nCollectiveArts is getting close to the fabled re-launch, though I\u0026rsquo;m waiting on a couple more profiles. I think it\u0026rsquo;s going to be really cool, but we\u0026rsquo;ll see how things fall once it\u0026rsquo;s really live. For a while we had our name\u0026rsquo;s linked to our CollectiveArts profiles but I think ultimately that doesn\u0026rsquo;t represent the kind of work that we\u0026rsquo;re doing here at TealArt, so I think sometime soon we\u0026rsquo;re going to write up better ëabout\u0026rsquo; pages for your enjoyment. For me, at least, a good about page can make or break a blog, and it\u0026rsquo;s been on my list for a really long time, so maybe we\u0026rsquo;ll finally get around to it.\nThere are a host of other personal updates, but I\u0026rsquo;ll keep my own stuff out of the \u0026ldquo;Site Update\u0026rdquo; save that for tomorrow. Cheers!\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/site-updates/","summary":"Every so often I feel the necessity to write a little ditty here to tell you about what\u0026rsquo;s happened and what we have planed, despite the fact that it goes most of the blogging directives that I subscribe to. Alas. I still feel like we need to do it from time to time. So here it goes.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve added Peter McCabe as a contributor; you saw his post I\u0026rsquo;m sure. His perspective and dynamic will really enhance the site as we have it now, and I\u0026rsquo;m really looking forward to what he\u0026rsquo;ll come up with in the coming weeks and months. I\u0026rsquo;m also on the look out for another Teal Artist person, but I have fairly specific requirements, so the search is slow, but eventually I\u0026rsquo;d like to add another person here. If anyone\u0026rsquo;s interested, I\u0026rsquo;d like to hear from you, but I\u0026rsquo;m being picky with this, so don\u0026rsquo;t take any rejections personally.","title":"Site Updates"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m ambivalent towards myself, or at least I\u0026rsquo;m ambivalent about writing about myself; and no this isn\u0026rsquo;t going to turn into an about page. I think we learn a lot of things from reading high quality work, but on the same token I think we learn even more from reading lower quality work. From this we can figure out what not to do, and learn from mistakes before we even have a chance to make them.\nOne thing that I saw a lot during my examination of the various crap that\u0026rsquo;s floating around the web is that the first person is a delicate thing that can easily be used to create complete crap. What ends up happening is that rather than create the impression of a fictional world and story, the author isn\u0026rsquo;t removed from the story and it seems very false and autobiographical, even when the author doesn\u0026rsquo;t intend for it to be.\nAdditionally, it\u0026rsquo;s far easier to write \u0026ldquo;I think, feel, act and breathe like this,\u0026rdquo; rather than work on writing something that\u0026rsquo;s more removed and distant. Using I statements is a crutch that too many authors, in my opinion, rely on without reason, and so their choice of narrative person isn\u0026rsquo;t based on what\u0026rsquo;s going to make the story most effective, but what\u0026rsquo;s easiest to write.\nFor these reasons, I\u0026rsquo;m don\u0026rsquo;t like writing fiction, or more properly haven\u0026rsquo;t yet gotten to a point where I\u0026rsquo;m comfortable writing fiction in the first person. I think that the second half of the next novel project will be in first person, perhaps the whole thing, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure at this point. I think distance and a level of experience with third person can give the proper amount of skill and ability to successfully pull off a story in first person.\nOn the other side of the coin, writing non-fiction in first person can have a very nice effect that can make some essays personal and hard hitting, but it can also make an otherwise effective piece of prose completely pointless. Because I\u0026rsquo;m writing so much stuff for school, and because I tend to err on the side of perfection and cautiousness, it\u0026rsquo;s become hard for me to write in first person, morso in non-fiction than in fiction, but it\u0026rsquo;s a problem in both.\nAlso my normal mode for non fiction is this pedagogical air about writing that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to shake. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s Robert\u0026rsquo;s fault for roping me into that column three years ago, but it probably runs deeper. I really don\u0026rsquo;t mean to try and teach and correct everything but it seems that that\u0026rsquo;s just what comes out.\nI\u0026rsquo;m stopping now while I\u0026rsquo;m ahead. Or something.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/the-first-person/","summary":"I\u0026rsquo;m ambivalent towards myself, or at least I\u0026rsquo;m ambivalent about writing about myself; and no this isn\u0026rsquo;t going to turn into an about page. I think we learn a lot of things from reading high quality work, but on the same token I think we learn even more from reading lower quality work. From this we can figure out what not to do, and learn from mistakes before we even have a chance to make them.\nOne thing that I saw a lot during my examination of the various crap that\u0026rsquo;s floating around the web is that the first person is a delicate thing that can easily be used to create complete crap. What ends up happening is that rather than create the impression of a fictional world and story, the author isn\u0026rsquo;t removed from the story and it seems very false and autobiographical, even when the author doesn\u0026rsquo;t intend for it to be.","title":"The First Person"},{"content":"Cycling through our, at the moment, not-so random, random quote generator are two somewhat fitting quotes. One by Alfred Kinsey that basically says nature exists as a continuum and that as humans we try and force a wide spectrum of divergent elements into neat little categories. Usually these categories represent polar opposites, and if we\u0026rsquo;re lucky, a middle ground, which is really incapable of describing much of any thing. Kinsey was talking about human sexuality, and while he did a lot to change the perceptions of sexuality, he wasn\u0026rsquo;t able to fully circumvent the human desire to categorize itself and its world. A seven point scale is better than a three, two, or even one point scale, but there are so many varieties and possibilities that just about anything would somehow fall short.\nChris added another quote from the breakfast club that conveyed a very similar message, but approached this problem from a completely different perspective. It said, basically, that we see things as we wish to: in the simplest, most convenient terms, when in fact we are individuals comprised of multiple traits and behaviors.\nThings exist in shades of grey, between the darkness and the light (I\u0026rsquo;ll any non-Chris person a hug if the can figure out that allusion and drop me an email), and we as humans force everything into categories of black and white because it\u0026rsquo;s easy, because it gives us power, because it makes us feel safe and in charge of a very scary world. The biggest problem with this is, of course, that things don\u0026rsquo;t exist on the planes of total lightness, and total darkness.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have any answers, unfortunately, but then we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have much purpose in hanging around here if we did.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/between-the-darkness-and-the-light/","summary":"Cycling through our, at the moment, not-so random, random quote generator are two somewhat fitting quotes. One by Alfred Kinsey that basically says nature exists as a continuum and that as humans we try and force a wide spectrum of divergent elements into neat little categories. Usually these categories represent polar opposites, and if we\u0026rsquo;re lucky, a middle ground, which is really incapable of describing much of any thing. Kinsey was talking about human sexuality, and while he did a lot to change the perceptions of sexuality, he wasn\u0026rsquo;t able to fully circumvent the human desire to categorize itself and its world. A seven point scale is better than a three, two, or even one point scale, but there are so many varieties and possibilities that just about anything would somehow fall short.\nChris added another quote from the breakfast club that conveyed a very similar message, but approached this problem from a completely different perspective.","title":"Between the Darkness and the Light"},{"content":"I learned about the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia, two hours after the fact, and I fighting quite frightening. I don\u0026rsquo;t know what to say. I\u0026rsquo;m afraid for the lives of the six astronauts that are surely casualties of this accident.\nAdditionally, I fear that this may mark the end of the space program, and I think that may be the largest causality of this event.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that the seven lives (which would make the causality total from the space program still under 20), quite the contrary, and the loss life as part of space exploration is unacceptable; however, no human endeavor with the possibility for gains is without risk, and that\u0026rsquo;s something that everyone involved with the space program must make peace with.\nBut that is in the realm of the future. As for the present, surely we need time to collect ourselves, and we have all the time we need.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/space-shuttle/","summary":"I learned about the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia, two hours after the fact, and I fighting quite frightening. I don\u0026rsquo;t know what to say. I\u0026rsquo;m afraid for the lives of the six astronauts that are surely casualties of this accident.\nAdditionally, I fear that this may mark the end of the space program, and I think that may be the largest causality of this event.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that the seven lives (which would make the causality total from the space program still under 20), quite the contrary, and the loss life as part of space exploration is unacceptable; however, no human endeavor with the possibility for gains is without risk, and that\u0026rsquo;s something that everyone involved with the space program must make peace with.\nBut that is in the realm of the future. As for the present, surely we need time to collect ourselves, and we have all the time we need.","title":"Space Shuttle"},{"content":"Like any good blogger, I suppose I owe you both a New Years Entry. TealArt has been wimpy for the past couple of months, but that just might be changing. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a new Top-Secret formula that might synthesize enough new time in the day for me to start writing for this site again, and Chris is finally coming to his senses and is itching to start posting again. Amy and I have made plans to wrap up some coding work later this week that will transfer this site to the Quarto CMS which will be awesome beyond words. Stay tuned.\n2002 has most certainly been interesting. TealArt and CollectiveArts have been through too many changes and not all of them were good so I\u0026rsquo;m not going to even wax poetic about any of them; but I think something personal is in order. 2002 has seen the creation and destruction of many things, as any year is bound to see. I do not suppose in the grand scheme of things that anything has changed, nor will anything significant change in 2003, but it\u0026rsquo;s the little things that count.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent the better part of this year working on Circle Games, and the end is finally within sight. Even if the book turns out to be crap, which is inevitable in retrospect, and even if I\u0026rsquo;m not able to publish it (not to sound to hard on my self. I honestly think that it\u0026rsquo;s a good book and that a publication endeavourer will be successful.) Circle Games will have thought me that I am able to write fiction, that I do have the will power necessary to compose a novel, a real novel.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s not over yet. I still have a substantial portion of the text to complete. So that\u0026rsquo;s part resolution I suppose. I am sticking to Amy\u0026rsquo;s Imperative(tm); save the future and present for your pleasure and write about the past. So you\u0026rsquo;re not going to get the list of resolutions, but they\u0026rsquo;re in there.\nTill next time; Cheers.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/with-song-and-dance/","summary":"Like any good blogger, I suppose I owe you both a New Years Entry. TealArt has been wimpy for the past couple of months, but that just might be changing. I\u0026rsquo;m working on a new Top-Secret formula that might synthesize enough new time in the day for me to start writing for this site again, and Chris is finally coming to his senses and is itching to start posting again. Amy and I have made plans to wrap up some coding work later this week that will transfer this site to the Quarto CMS which will be awesome beyond words. Stay tuned.\n2002 has most certainly been interesting. TealArt and CollectiveArts have been through too many changes and not all of them were good so I\u0026rsquo;m not going to even wax poetic about any of them; but I think something personal is in order. 2002 has seen the creation and destruction of many things, as any year is bound to see.","title":"With Song and Dance"},{"content":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: Another Blast from the past. Here\u0026rsquo;s a tidbit I wrote as a response to greek tragedy on September 19th of this year. Reprinted here because it\u0026rsquo;s edging on quality and because I can and because I need a few more entries to make sure this thing actually works.\nAnalysts often derive pleasure from the examination of complex multi-layer works, while neglecting simpler works. People often overlook simple plots and tales because they aren\u0026rsquo;t as high-brow or of scholarly interest. Simplicity and economy of language and ideas can produce some of the most beautiful and poignant literature around. Favoring multifaceted dramas and stories, has left forms such as simple drama, poetry, and singular threaded short stories in some kind of a second seat. The simpler forms are not only stunning in and of themselves, but they also have the ability to lend an insight into the more complex works that would be otherwise unavailable.\nExcessive size fascinates us and has gained undue appreciation in our culture. We consider long novels and plays, among other things, to be magna opus. It\u0026rsquo;s true that the main challenge of novel writing is length; however, length only signifies the time investment. A well written short story can\u0026mdash;in theory\u0026mdash;serve all of the purposes of a novel. Sometimes the best way to present an idea is in the simplest terms possible. Edgar Allen Poe could have written his famous \u0026ldquo;The Raven\u0026rdquo; as a short story, but in the end it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have been recognizable as \u0026ldquo;The Raven,\u0026rdquo; and if it bore resemblance I doubt that it would have matched the poem\u0026rsquo;s quality. Likewise, both Robert Frost\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Road Not Taken\u0026rdquo; and Emily Dickenson\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;I Never saw a Moor\u0026mdash;\u0026rdquo; both express essential ideas that would lose their poignancy if the pieces were any longer.\nBeyond being beautiful in their own right, brief pieces that effectively communicate their idea to the reader can improve the possibility for understanding all forms of literature. An author should be able to display all of same literary genius\u0026mdash;if not more\u0026mdash;in a diminutive piece that he or she is able to show in a magna opus. Short works can quickly provide examples for styles, techniques, and temporal variations in literature in instances that longer works may prove to be unwieldy.\nWorks that span several hundred pages and share an idea, message, and universe with us are stunning, as they should be. Works that span a few hundred or thousand words are almost more impressive than their longer counterparts. What a novelist has to do in three to five hundred pages, a short story writer has to do in a handful of pages. This creates short works that are stunning in their own right, and that have a great deal of influence on the literature.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/simplistic-appeal/","summary":"Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: Another Blast from the past. Here\u0026rsquo;s a tidbit I wrote as a response to greek tragedy on September 19th of this year. Reprinted here because it\u0026rsquo;s edging on quality and because I can and because I need a few more entries to make sure this thing actually works.\nAnalysts often derive pleasure from the examination of complex multi-layer works, while neglecting simpler works. People often overlook simple plots and tales because they aren\u0026rsquo;t as high-brow or of scholarly interest. Simplicity and economy of language and ideas can produce some of the most beautiful and poignant literature around. Favoring multifaceted dramas and stories, has left forms such as simple drama, poetry, and singular threaded short stories in some kind of a second seat. The simpler forms are not only stunning in and of themselves, but they also have the ability to lend an insight into the more complex works that would be otherwise unavailable.","title":"Simplistic Appeal"},{"content":"(**Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note:**Here\u0026rsquo;s another blast from the past that will be a test entry until we get things working the way they should. Thanks for your patience, or tollerance.)\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t given you updates on the creative side of my life in a while; too long. Truthfully you\u0026rsquo;ve been getting select recycled journal entries from a journal writing exercise that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for school for the past couple of months. Sadly, that assignment has ended, or at least morphed into a readers response kind of deal, and unless you all really want my thoughts on Miss Julie, Hedda Gabler, M. Butterfly, Invisible Man, The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, The Old Man and the Sea, Heart of Darkness, Billy Buddóor have masochist tendenciesóI won\u0026rsquo;t be posting these. (Yes that is my reading list for the rest of this academic year, and as I think about it you might get a few tirades about Herman Melville and Earnest Hemingway just \u0026lsquo;cause I don\u0026rsquo;t particularly care for them.)\nBy the second of September when my classes started the word count on Circle Games was at 42,000 words. My goal has been to write 1,000 words a week on this project, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been successful and the word count is now at 52,000; and by the end of the weekend I hope to have 54,000 done because of the holiday. The story is progressing in a fabulous sort of way and even though I have 30-40,000 words left to write the end is within sight and I feel confident that I\u0026rsquo;ll finish this by the goal time of May 19th which just happens to be my birthday. Fancy that!\nRight now, I\u0026rsquo;m working on character syntheses for an outline that I also hope to have completed by May 19th so that I can draft on it while I work on the Circle Games revisions. While I do have somewhat extensive outlines and notes for Circle Games, the process of developing the story for Circle Games happened differently, and I suppose a little background is necessary.\nIn august of 2002 I started to write on a project that I called \u0026ldquo;Circle Games\u0026rdquo; I didn\u0026rsquo;t have an outline and I didn\u0026rsquo;t really have a full idea of where the story was going to go. I did know who most of the characters were going to be, and I did know that the story stared on the perfect autumn day. I was younger, I thought was damn good, and I thought didn\u0026rsquo;t need no stinkin\u0026rsquo; outlines.\nI think I wrote a total of 3,000 words on that attempt before school started and I got so caught up in that work, that I was never able to pick that draft up again. Then, at some point the plot fleshed itself out and my visions of the book completely changed. My father said something to me that inspired a creative theme and message, and it started to feel like something real instead of something hopelessly pathetic. The problem was that it is really impossible to start a novel project when you have other commitments; because for a few weeks at least, you don\u0026rsquo;t do much else.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know what clicked but somehow without really noticing the note book that I had been carrying around with me for whenever the inspiration struck filled quickly with a very extensive outline. The only things I really remember from the outline process is that I was sitting at my usual spot in the cafeteria with a shiny new yellow or green 10 dollar fountain pen that had black ink, that might have been borrowed come to think of it, writing the physical/technical specs for the story (hyperspace, guns, communications devices, deck overviews and design principals for the ships), and then as I was finishing I remember talking the whole plot over with my father, who remains the only person other than me to know the outcome of the story and the full meaning of the title.\nI finished the outline around the time of my birthday in 2002 and had about six weeks before school would be out and I would be able to start on the draft, which at that time I thought could finish by the time school started in September. I spent this time writing the character brainstormings and profiles, social and cultural histories, and several types of plot summaries. When school let out I started this draft, and I think the rest is history, more or less.\nThe end result of all this is that by the time I started the outline I already knew all of the characters fairly well, and I knew the basic turns of the plot pretty well. It helps that a generous census of characters runs at about fifteen, and the plot isn\u0026rsquo;t terribly complicated; and thus the outlining process was fairly painless.\nThe next outlining project is turning out to be very different because I don\u0026rsquo;t have any story or character cast to start with. Everything is new; and that\u0026rsquo;s a little scary and intimidating in equal measure. Right now, I\u0026rsquo;m busy doing all of those things that I did after I had finished the outline project: the character profiles, basic tech/design specs, the thematic design, and plans for literary effects. We\u0026rsquo;ll see how things develop, and there\u0026rsquo;ll be updates as this project progresses.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/character-synthesis/","summary":"(**Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note:**Here\u0026rsquo;s another blast from the past that will be a test entry until we get things working the way they should. Thanks for your patience, or tollerance.)\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t given you updates on the creative side of my life in a while; too long. Truthfully you\u0026rsquo;ve been getting select recycled journal entries from a journal writing exercise that I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing for school for the past couple of months. Sadly, that assignment has ended, or at least morphed into a readers response kind of deal, and unless you all really want my thoughts on Miss Julie, Hedda Gabler, M. Butterfly, Invisible Man, The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, The Old Man and the Sea, Heart of Darkness, Billy Buddóor have masochist tendenciesóI won\u0026rsquo;t be posting these. (Yes that is my reading list for the rest of this academic year, and as I think about it you might get a few tirades about Herman Melville and Earnest Hemingway just \u0026lsquo;cause I don\u0026rsquo;t particularly care for them.","title":"Character Synthesis"},{"content":"(Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: Another essay written as a writing sample for an application. The promt is originaly from an SAT II test and is reprinted here because I can and becase we still need more entries as part of our testing phase for whipping everything into shape. Enjoy or not, but it\u0026rsquo;s here.)\nLife is a journey, a quest, a movement that takes all of us from birth to death to complete. Everyone has a different journey, everyone walks down their own path, and many of us spend the entire journey trying to understanding the meaning of our quest. Sometimes the journey moves us forward, sometimes we move backwards. The journey may send us running in circles, or it may turn us upside-down and jostle us about for years on end. Life shows us many things, but understandability, consistency and uniformity never seem to appear. Thus applying a form or figure to represent our journey through life is both a difficult and illogical task. However, by drawing simple conclusions about the journey from our experience, the world around us, and the wisdom found in art and literature we can obtain a much clearer idea of the shape or form we may use to represent our quest.\nBecause life is a journey and journeys usually extend from point A to point B, a line might be the simplest and most logical form to use when envisioning life. However, the simplicity of this one dimensional figure is incapable of displaying anything other than linear movement. Life is devoid of many things, and linear movement is one of them. Our journey takes us from some point A, to another different point B, but the path is far from direct. In between point A and point B, we may move backwards, take wrong turns, spend time walking in circles, and meandering endlessly. In addition to its inadequacies when representing the path of life, the line fails to capture a number of other important aspects of life. Most notably, the changes in perspective that result from our experiences and environmental influences are devoid from linear representation. that shape our view of life and the world around us throughout our lives. The circle, with its added dimension, is a much better representation of life than the line, but it too has short comings. The circle, as well as other two dimensional geometric shapes, is regular, exact, and is only able to capture at best one of the many complex aspects of life. Another figure, one which combines the movement of a line, with the changes in perspective of a circle, and a third dimension to display the depth of the human sprit is needed.\nThe Möbius strip is just that, a one sided figure that can be constructed by taking a strip of paper twisting one end one hundred and eighty degrees and attaching the two ends together. If you place at any point on a Möbius strip, and draw a straight line without removing the point from the paper you will eventually reach your starting point after drawing your line on every surface of the Möbius strip. This object can represent many aspects of a typical human life. The line on the strip represents the movement and change in the journey of life, the circular nature of the line can represent both the cycle and occasional circuitous nature of the journey. The dual dimensional nature of the Möbius strip is puzzling and thus is apt to represent the puzzling nature of our journey and the enduring curiosity of the human mind. It seems that it is this curiosity that leads us to contemplate this question in hopes of understanding ourselves, our journey, the world around us, and our place and purpose in the world.\nMore than any other single source, our experiences on the journey help us to draw the best conclusions about the nature of the path. Feeling and seeing life\u0026rsquo;s trials on a daily basis can give us the best impressions of a realistic form to represent our journey. At different times in our life we experience the world around us from different perspectives and we travel in different directions; more often than not, we are confused by the reasons and the path that we have to travel. Beneath these experiences is a relentless and undying curiosity about all aspects of life which we as a species seem to possess. Without this thrust and inquisitive nature our existence seems to lose meaning, purpose, and forward drive. These experiences suggest the Möbius strip as a perfect representation of the human experience because it embodies nearly all of the characteristics of the human experience in a concrete and lucid manner.\nAcademic studies of various disciplines, while not as concrete in nature as studies of our own experience may provide us with an even clearer idea of the form of the sojourn we make. Throughout the studies of literature and history we find numerous examples of the nature of human thought, as well as unique views of the human quest and insightful looks into various parts of the journey from different perspectives. By looking into historical events and figures we can look at the journey of another as a whole from beginning to end. The accounts of the lives of great leaders, and important activists shed light on the lives of those who impact the world in profound ways; their journeys are important and can help us to determine the path we all follow in some form or another. Likewise, the study of literature and the arts can help us to trace the journey of the common people through life and can give us insight into more particular parts of the journey than most historical accounts. Other academic pursuits such as science and mathematics can lend further support in the quest for the meaning and shape of life\u0026rsquo;s journey. The Möbius strip itself is the result of work done by nineteenth century German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius and it is his work in the field of topology that has allowed us the ability to give form to life\u0026rsquo;s journey. Without studies into science and the humanities, we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have any notion or grounding in who we are and where we\u0026rsquo;ve been. Without such grounding it would be impossible to determine where we are going, and the representative form of the journey as a whole.\nThe form, structure, reason, purpose, and shape that our journey through life takes is a subject of immense importance and with the assistance of experience on life\u0026rsquo;s road. Through certain academic pursuits we are able to theorize what shape life might take if it were represented in a physical shape or object. The Möbius strip presents itself as the likeliest form for the journey to take. Möbius strips incorporate characteristics of many aspects of the human existence and journey, such as the changes of perspective, the circular and linear directions of the path, and the undying curiosity of humanity for the nature of the journey. All answers lie on the journey; proper investigation of the human quest will only result in more questions, but then again that\u0026rsquo;s the way life is.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/graphical-representation/","summary":"(Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: Another essay written as a writing sample for an application. The promt is originaly from an SAT II test and is reprinted here because I can and becase we still need more entries as part of our testing phase for whipping everything into shape. Enjoy or not, but it\u0026rsquo;s here.)\nLife is a journey, a quest, a movement that takes all of us from birth to death to complete. Everyone has a different journey, everyone walks down their own path, and many of us spend the entire journey trying to understanding the meaning of our quest. Sometimes the journey moves us forward, sometimes we move backwards. The journey may send us running in circles, or it may turn us upside-down and jostle us about for years on end. Life shows us many things, but understandability, consistency and uniformity never seem to appear. Thus applying a form or figure to represent our journey through life is both a difficult and illogical task.","title":"Graphical Representation"},{"content":"As of 11 am Thursday, 19 December 2002 I was finished with the work and all the exams for this semester are completed. Thank God. Also it\u0026rsquo;s really nice that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to go back to school until the 6th of January. I need the time to rest, recuperate, and recharge, and also to do some of the things that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to do for the past few months. Writing, reading, computer coding, and staying up and going to bed really late are all fairly high on my list.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been working with Amy to get TealArt converted to the new Quarto CMS. It\u0026rsquo;s going really well, and I have two files that I need to create, one that needs to be fixed and two functions that aren\u0026rsquo;t working the way they should. The file that doesn\u0026rsquo;t work is a related problem to the functions that aren\u0026rsquo;t working, I think; but my knowledge of such things is somewhat limited as anyone who\u0026rsquo;s ever helped me with PHP will attest to. In a few days we\u0026rsquo;ll get there.\nOne of the things that Amy said in her weblog at one point that I\u0026rsquo;ll probably talk about more latter is that she \u0026ldquo;saves the present and future for herself and writes about the past for her site\u0026rdquo; (a rough paraphrase, I\u0026rsquo;ll get the entry at some point.) This really struck me, and I think its something that might separate a good weblog from a lousy one (the term is used loosely). This should be the prime directive of blogging. Go Forth, he said, and Write only about the Past. So there.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/new-fronts-and-a-prime-directive/","summary":"As of 11 am Thursday, 19 December 2002 I was finished with the work and all the exams for this semester are completed. Thank God. Also it\u0026rsquo;s really nice that I don\u0026rsquo;t have to go back to school until the 6th of January. I need the time to rest, recuperate, and recharge, and also to do some of the things that I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to do for the past few months. Writing, reading, computer coding, and staying up and going to bed really late are all fairly high on my list.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve also been working with Amy to get TealArt converted to the new Quarto CMS. It\u0026rsquo;s going really well, and I have two files that I need to create, one that needs to be fixed and two functions that aren\u0026rsquo;t working the way they should. The file that doesn\u0026rsquo;t work is a related problem to the functions that aren\u0026rsquo;t working, I think; but my knowledge of such things is somewhat limited as anyone who\u0026rsquo;s ever helped me with PHP will attest to.","title":"New Fronts and a Prime Directive"},{"content":"(Editor\u0026rsquo;s note: Despite the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t particularly like this post, or find that its relavant, or think that its particularly well done, I need another entry to post for testing reasons so here goes nothing. Enjoy it, or not.)\nFor various reason I\u0026rsquo;ve been referred to as a geek, and I\u0026rsquo;d agree with this assessment most of the time: I\u0026rsquo;m really good with computers, I have lots of mobile technology equipment and experience, and I use technology to assist my productivity as much as possible. The odd thing is that in many senses I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly retro. The biggest testament to my retro hippness, is the fact that I do a lot of writing with a fountain pen on paper (mostly pre-writing and other short things when I\u0026rsquo;m out in the real world.) Being a fairly compulsive person, I like to keep things in some semblance of order and a number of various notebooks, and other collections of blank paper help me do this.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried unlined sketch books (which would have been great had it not been book bound, thus disagreeing with my left-handedness and portability demands,) low grade wide ruled notebooks, high grade collage rule books, memo pads, tablets, and finally steno pads. My demands are fairly high. Spiral binding is required, I need to be able to fit a medium amount of stuff on a page and I need to be able to throw it into a bag with ease, the paper has to be smooth and absorbent so that it agrees with my pen(s), the notebook shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be that thick because I like to be able to fill up a notebook every so often so when there are about 5 million billion sheets I never feel like I\u0026rsquo;m accomplishing anything.\nFor a long time I\u0026rsquo;d been muddling through a notebook that wasn\u0026rsquo;t perfect but it did the job fairly well, and one day as I was walking through Wal-Mart looking for batteries or t-shirts I walked by the notebook isle and saw something that looked perfect: a baby-blue steno pad for 97 cents. I really should have thought of it sooner, but in any case I bought it and took it home. It worked perfectly and a few pages into it I started writing an entry about finally finding the perfect notebook. It was entitled The Perfect Notebook Bliss and in it I planned to celebrate finally finding a notebook that was as near to perfection as I could manage.\nThen I went on a canoe trip. While my prized note book didn\u0026rsquo;t get nearly as wet as some of my other things, one bottom corner got wet and the ink bleed through a little. No big deal. I rescued some of the most badly disturbed pages and kept using it.\nOnly hours ago, I went for a longish walk and had a good time (sarcasm) while it rained and thundered on me for about an hour. I hoped that the combination of my bag, my speed, the distance and my ability to maneuver my way between the rain drops without an umbrella would protect me and my belongings from becoming drenched. It didn\u0026rsquo;t work and most of my stuff got a little wet. Thankfully it all dried out fairly quickly, but the thing about fountain pen ink is that it will run with abandon if it gets a little bit wet.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve given up on that steno pad, it\u0026rsquo;s cursed, and the bottoms of the white sheets have dark bluish color and the lines have washed away. Thankfully I know now what the perfect notebook isÖalmost. For my next foray into the realm of blank paper, I\u0026rsquo;m looking for something that is spiral bound across the top, has medium to high quality paper, is fairly small both in height and length as well as depth, and if I can find one that is meant as a drawing or sketch pad (thus no lines), I may have finally found the perfect notebook. Bliss.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/perfect-notebook-bliss/","summary":"(Editor\u0026rsquo;s note: Despite the fact that I don\u0026rsquo;t particularly like this post, or find that its relavant, or think that its particularly well done, I need another entry to post for testing reasons so here goes nothing. Enjoy it, or not.)\nFor various reason I\u0026rsquo;ve been referred to as a geek, and I\u0026rsquo;d agree with this assessment most of the time: I\u0026rsquo;m really good with computers, I have lots of mobile technology equipment and experience, and I use technology to assist my productivity as much as possible. The odd thing is that in many senses I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly retro. The biggest testament to my retro hippness, is the fact that I do a lot of writing with a fountain pen on paper (mostly pre-writing and other short things when I\u0026rsquo;m out in the real world.) Being a fairly compulsive person, I like to keep things in some semblance of order and a number of various notebooks, and other collections of blank paper help me do this.","title":"Perfect Notebook Bliss"},{"content":"(**Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note:**Another short piece I wrote for school about my writing ability and the character of my writing strenghts and weeknesses. Here because we need content. Hopefully this will be over soon.)\nI am a fiction writer who dabbles in nonfiction essays and articles; or maybe I am an article and essay writer who dabbles in fiction. In either case, it\u0026rsquo;s fairly clear that I am not a poet or a dramatist. It could be a lack of skill, experience, or talent. More likely, this pitfall in my ability is due to divine will rather than anything under my control. Some peopleóincluding meóare not capable of to write poetry or drama.\nTo say that I can\u0026rsquo;t write poetry isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;m physically or mentally incapable of writing in verse; however, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to amass any evidence that I am capable of writing poetry, and not for any lack of effort. Numerous times I\u0026rsquo;ve tried, and tried to write poetry, I\u0026rsquo;ve worked with a great deal of dedication without producing one poem that fills my definition of good poetry: a group of words that sends a message that is somehow larger than the words on the sheet of paper. I am somehow incapable of doing this.\nUnlike poetry, my chances of ever writing drama are not quite as dire. With a great deal of time, effort, planning, and blood letting, it is conceivable that I could write and/or produce scripts that would at least equal the quality of my prose. Despite a familiarity with the form, I have yet to find success writing scripts with a satisfactory similarity to the picture in my mind\u0026rsquo;s eye. This isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that a work needs to end up exactly like the creator foresaw, but the work needs to maintain a certain continuity with the authors evolving vision.\nJust because I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to write a good script, and because I doubt I\u0026rsquo;ll ever be able to write a poem, I don\u0026rsquo;t hold any ill regard for either of these forms. In fact, good drama and poetry has a greater influence on my prose than the novels and short stories that I absorb. Quality poetry has the ability to express a message in the purest most beautiful form. Almost every good script, produced or not, can boil a plot into the most visual and descriptive form with minimum use of adjectives and adverbs. The lessons learned in story telling from drama, and the lessons about language learned through poetry transfers nicely into other forms, such as the fiction and non-fiction prose I write. I can only hope that some of this genius is rubbing off on me.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/respecting-other-forms/","summary":"(**Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note:**Another short piece I wrote for school about my writing ability and the character of my writing strenghts and weeknesses. Here because we need content. Hopefully this will be over soon.)\nI am a fiction writer who dabbles in nonfiction essays and articles; or maybe I am an article and essay writer who dabbles in fiction. In either case, it\u0026rsquo;s fairly clear that I am not a poet or a dramatist. It could be a lack of skill, experience, or talent. More likely, this pitfall in my ability is due to divine will rather than anything under my control. Some peopleóincluding meóare not capable of to write poetry or drama.\nTo say that I can\u0026rsquo;t write poetry isn\u0026rsquo;t to say that I\u0026rsquo;m physically or mentally incapable of writing in verse; however, I haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to amass any evidence that I am capable of writing poetry, and not for any lack of effort.","title":"Respecting Other Forms"},{"content":"Here is the whole scoop. The server\u0026rsquo;s been gone for a few days and there really hasn\u0026rsquo;t been an explanation, and now the pages aren\u0026rsquo;t quite right, and plus the archives have disappeared, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure you want to know what happened. Right? I mean if there\u0026rsquo;s anyone reading this after all that is happened.\nSome how sometime the server crashed or something. I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten a good explanation for what happened, but it was fairly clear early on that things were gone and that they weren\u0026rsquo;t coming back; but for some unknown reason our email was still working. Sort of: Mary Beth was having some problems and in retro spec my email was sporadic at best. Finally that gave out too, and so I arranged other hosting and as a result we\u0026rsquo;ve moved into much more spacious and equipped digs and I only had backups for the files but not the databases where all of the important things were. I managed to zap some life into this instillation of b2 and everything works as well as it might, sans data. (And for some reason things aren\u0026rsquo;t being pushed off the index page as they should which is part of the reason for this post.)\nIn any case I remembered that Amy of Domesticat.net offered to let me have a go at her new (and really fab Content Management system). It\u0026rsquo;s a little buggy now, but I\u0026rsquo;m told that there\u0026rsquo;s already an update on the way, and I really like it, the main problem is that Amy hasn\u0026rsquo;t yet posted (she\u0026rsquo;s making good progress on this one too) the PHP functions necessary for display. Given my knowledge of PHP I could probably write the functions myself, but I\u0026rsquo;m not really up for that right now so I\u0026rsquo;m biding my time and currently have b2 and Quarto until the display functions start to work. Thankfully though, Amy\u0026rsquo;s functions will work perfectly for me given that the idea for most of my code features come from things I\u0026rsquo;ve seen used on her site. When we switch over in addition to all the things you\u0026rsquo;ve grown used to, we\u0026rsquo;re going to try to add a surfing diary/link list as well as a really neat category system.\nOn a more personal note, Chris (but we call him Andy) has been done with school until next semester for about a week, and I\u0026rsquo;m free as of this Thursday at 11 o\u0026rsquo;clock. I\u0026rsquo;m hoping to get a sizeable chunk done on the book, as well as a few other writing and web project work. It\u0026rsquo;s going to be an interesting break, and I really can\u0026rsquo;t wait for the freedom, again. I just need to get done with this semester. I have two more papers to finish up and then its home free.\nMore later, I should get back to work; and I\u0026rsquo;m sure there are tons of typos so just lay off.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/working-on-it/","summary":"Here is the whole scoop. The server\u0026rsquo;s been gone for a few days and there really hasn\u0026rsquo;t been an explanation, and now the pages aren\u0026rsquo;t quite right, and plus the archives have disappeared, and I\u0026rsquo;m sure you want to know what happened. Right? I mean if there\u0026rsquo;s anyone reading this after all that is happened.\nSome how sometime the server crashed or something. I haven\u0026rsquo;t gotten a good explanation for what happened, but it was fairly clear early on that things were gone and that they weren\u0026rsquo;t coming back; but for some unknown reason our email was still working. Sort of: Mary Beth was having some problems and in retro spec my email was sporadic at best. Finally that gave out too, and so I arranged other hosting and as a result we\u0026rsquo;ve moved into much more spacious and equipped digs and I only had backups for the files but not the databases where all of the important things were.","title":"Working on It"},{"content":"Note: This was originally written as a free-form test entry for Quarto (Domesticat: The CMS); I liked it so much you\u0026rsquo;re now reading it here on TealArt\nAlso: Amy asked for test entries, so I started typing and 300 some words and a bit of editing later created this entry. Now that I\u0026rsquo;ve read over it, I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to post it over on TealArt too.\nThere are two kinds of good books: books that say interesting things and books that say things in an interesting way.\nI read tons of fairly bad science fiction books because I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the characters or what the author has to say. A lot of really great authors just say interesting things. I love reading interesting things that provoke thought, in many ways that is what TealArt is about. These kinds of books have influenced my development as a writer such as it isóand have a definite impact on the kind of person I am.\nOn the other hand, there are books on various subjectsómost of which I could care less aboutóthat say things interestingly. Barbra Kingsolver and Anne Lamott spring instantly to mind as authors who can take a subject that I don\u0026rsquo;t have much interest or care for, and tell a story about it in a way that is simply amazing. Language is an amazing art form that I don\u0026rsquo;t think receives the kind of attention it disserves. I\u0026rsquo;m not talking about story telling, or persuasion. I don\u0026rsquo;t mean to say that the ability of an author to make a point using language is all that amazing. Most people, given enough time, editing, and training can write good enjoyable books, stories, and other enjoyable compilations of words; but it takes some strange kind of genius to put language together in ways that have the power to affect people in profound and extraordinary ways.\nIn the right hands, language is capable of being witty, honest, reverent, insightful, irreverent, revealing, and comforting all in a paragraph or less; and that is only the tip of the iceberg. My hope is that I can be all of those things over the course of a single or even a career.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/a-way-with-words/","summary":"Note: This was originally written as a free-form test entry for Quarto (Domesticat: The CMS); I liked it so much you\u0026rsquo;re now reading it here on TealArt\nAlso: Amy asked for test entries, so I started typing and 300 some words and a bit of editing later created this entry. Now that I\u0026rsquo;ve read over it, I think that I\u0026rsquo;m going to post it over on TealArt too.\nThere are two kinds of good books: books that say interesting things and books that say things in an interesting way.\nI read tons of fairly bad science fiction books because I\u0026rsquo;m interested in the characters or what the author has to say. A lot of really great authors just say interesting things. I love reading interesting things that provoke thought, in many ways that is what TealArt is about. These kinds of books have influenced my development as a writer such as it isóand have a definite impact on the kind of person I am.","title":"A Way With Words"},{"content":"Something unfortunate has happened dear readers. The entire databases for this site as well as CollectiveArts were lost. When all, or most, of the content of a site is stored in a mySQL database, site management becomes really easy and the file structure becomes clean and logically arranged: it\u0026rsquo;s great. When you\u0026rsquo;re old hosts sever craps out and you must move to a nicer facility with out a database dump: it\u0026rsquo;s a pain in the ass.\nNothing\u0026rsquo;s changed, and everything works as it should, unfortunately, all of that old content is here. I should be moping around and fighting like hell to get a fairly recent backup of the database, but I\u0026rsquo;m not. Its ok, and Chris and I will be able to move forward. After all a fresh start that clears out all of that start that I\u0026rsquo;ve started to get a little embarrassed about is an okay thing. I\u0026rsquo;m not celebrating it, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a bad thing. I\u0026rsquo;ve posted two of the entries from my personal archive that I\u0026rsquo;m rather proud of (and I did postdate one), and we\u0026rsquo;ll continue from here.\nAfter a month of not having a working website, I\u0026rsquo;d think that it\u0026rsquo;s good to be back.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/lost-ground-and-fresh-starts/","summary":"Something unfortunate has happened dear readers. The entire databases for this site as well as CollectiveArts were lost. When all, or most, of the content of a site is stored in a mySQL database, site management becomes really easy and the file structure becomes clean and logically arranged: it\u0026rsquo;s great. When you\u0026rsquo;re old hosts sever craps out and you must move to a nicer facility with out a database dump: it\u0026rsquo;s a pain in the ass.\nNothing\u0026rsquo;s changed, and everything works as it should, unfortunately, all of that old content is here. I should be moping around and fighting like hell to get a fairly recent backup of the database, but I\u0026rsquo;m not. Its ok, and Chris and I will be able to move forward. After all a fresh start that clears out all of that start that I\u0026rsquo;ve started to get a little embarrassed about is an okay thing. I\u0026rsquo;m not celebrating it, but it\u0026rsquo;s not a bad thing.","title":"Lost Ground and Fresh Starts"},{"content":"September the 11th will always be remembered for the events in New York City in the year 2001, but our remembrances on this date shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be dedicated solely the crimes of 2001.\nOn September 11, 1973 a Chilean man by the name of Victor Jara was executed for writing and singing songs. After Pinochet and the other Generals came to power they started killing those people who they felt threatened by. Victor Jara was on the top of their list not only because of support of Allende and the Popular Unity party, but because his songs were political, and he had influence with the people.\nThey put him in prison where he began to sing to keep up the spirits of himself and his fellow inmates. The guards broke his hands with their rifle butts, but he continued to sing and write poems. On 9.11.73 Victor Jara was takenóalong with five thousand other men to the soccer stadium where he was tortured and eventually was murdered. There are reports that say he sang until the very end, and I can believe it.\nThe following poem was the last that he wrote, on the morning of his execution, in blood more or less, it was smuggled out of the stadium and the translation you see here comes to us through Pete Seeger.\nEstadio Chile -Victor Jara\nWe are 5,000 ó here in this little part of the city We are 5,000 ó how many more will there be? In the whole city, and in the country 10,000 hands Which could seed the fields, make run the factories. How much humanity ó now with hunger, pain, panic and terror?\nThere are six of us ó lost in space among the stars, One dead, one beaten like I never believed a human could be so beaten. The other four wanting to leave all the terror, One leaping into space, other beating their heads against the wall All with gazes fixed on death.\nThe military carry out their plans with precision; Blood is medals for them, Slaughter is the badge of heroism. Oh my God, is this the world you created? Was it for this, the seven days, of amazement and toil?\nThe blood of companero Presidente is stronger than bombs Is stronger than machine guns. O you song, you come out so badly when I must sing o the terror! What I see I never saw. What I have felt, and what I feel must come out! \u0026ldquo;Hara brotar el momento! Hara brotar el momento!\u0026rdquo;\nThere are some things that we can never be allowed to forget, words that need to be said, and there are the songs of unsung hero\u0026rsquo;s must be sung.\n","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/post/unsung-heroes/","summary":"September the 11th will always be remembered for the events in New York City in the year 2001, but our remembrances on this date shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be dedicated solely the crimes of 2001.\nOn September 11, 1973 a Chilean man by the name of Victor Jara was executed for writing and singing songs. After Pinochet and the other Generals came to power they started killing those people who they felt threatened by. Victor Jara was on the top of their list not only because of support of Allende and the Popular Unity party, but because his songs were political, and he had influence with the people.\nThey put him in prison where he began to sing to keep up the spirits of himself and his fellow inmates. The guards broke his hands with their rifle butts, but he continued to sing and write poems. On 9.11.73 Victor Jara was takenóalong with five thousand other men to the soccer stadium where he was tortured and eventually was murdered.","title":"Unsung Heroes"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/archive/","summary":"","title":"Archive"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://tychoish.com/search/","summary":"","title":"Search"}]