I said that I’d write a post about headphones, given my latest headphone recovery project. I have a few thoughts about this so here goes…

I think having a good set of reasonably isolating headphones is one of the most important pieces of technology that an aspiring writer should have. Not ear buds, I’m talking big, over the ear headphones that block out most of the background noise. “Active Noise Canceling” isn’t required (though mine have it, I don’t often turn it on). And since you’re likely to wear them a bunch, headphones that are comfortable have reasonably good sound quality.

A good set of headphones is to my mind, crucial for most group living situations, like dorms--particularly where there isn’t shared music interests. Even if music selection isn’t an interest, having headphones allows independent sleeping schedules and at least let me set up a more distraction free writing and studying environment.

It’s kind of like the perfect personal office. And putting the headphones on can act as a personal marker to separate “work” and “play” times (particularly relevant for me as a writer, as “dicking around on wikipedia” and “writing,” are not otherwise substantially contextually discrete activities.) Though I write whilst listening to music (I basically listen to music constantly) I do sometimes just use the headphones as sort of dorky earplugs, I’ll confess: just to get the isolating and ritual effects.

It’s possible to get the headphone effect with “real” isolation, and it’s possible to establish rituals using other objects/habits, but it’s harder. And you can’t really argue with success.

So we’re in a sort of “long stretch” part of the Latvian-Dreaming sweater. But I just wanted to post something to remind you that you can start this any time and that I haven’t forgotten about the project (it is in fact, basically my own project at the moment).

So here’s the plan:

1. The project materials (PDF chart, excel file with a more modifiable copy of the chart, a read me file explaining how to read the chart) are located here. Download them now!
2. Obtain yarn. Fingering weight to DK, in two colors. You’ll probably need a chunk more of the background/darker color. I’m bad at predicting this. I got about 1425 yards of each color, but I had the end of a skein leftover from a previous project of the background color. I think this should be enough, and I anticipate significant leftovers. This also depends a lot on factors like your gauge and any resizing.
3. Determine your gauge and the number of stitches that you need to get a sweater that you fits you. Hope that your number is close to 340. If it’s a bit smaller, don’t sweat it, if it’s a bit bigger, add a couple of stitches at each underarm before stitch 1 on the chart. If it’s more or more than a few stitches less, read this.
4. If you want a ribbing cast on 320 and knit in two color ribbing for a couple of inches, then knit a row in the background color and increase to 340 like so. And/or adjust.
5. If you don’t want a ribbing, or want to think about about it yet, provisionally cast on 340 (or however many number of stitches you need) and begin knitting the pattern in the next row.
6. Ignore anything I said previously about 344 stitches. My fault.
7. After you’ve increased, begin knitting the pattern, following the chart, and the instructions for chart knitting included with the chart. You’ll be doing this for a long time.
8. Ask any questions you still have. (Before you ask about making a cardigan, read this.)
9. Keep knitting. Other than follow the chart, I’m not doing anything until the sweater is 12 inches long. This is 3 inches from the underarm point. I’ll get to what happens here in an upcoming post.

Knit in good health!

I should preface this review by saying that I’m not a huge fan of Earl Grey tea. The flavoring can be overpowering, and it’s hard to get the tea to brew strong enough, to compensate for the really powerful flavor. At the same time, as a class of teas, I think bergamot-flavor works better with tea than many others. Though I’m fond of vanilla flavored black teas, I will admit that they don’t always work well.

So, having said that. English Tea No. 1, is bergamot-flavored but, the base is comparatively strong. So we end up with a rich, strong tea with what is really just a hint of bergamot. The tea also takes milk better than other Earl Grey-type teas, which I consider a plus.

This is a winner, without question.

It’s also conveniently packaged (I was able to get foil wrapped bags) in a form that brews a good, large cup. In point of fact most of the remaining tea bags I have have found their way into my tea stash in my book bag, and are my choice “road tea.” Though I suspect that I’ve even begun to horde them in my own way, which is high recommendation indeed.

As part of the “putting things in order,” I’m doing some very rough budgeting and prioritizing of expenses and projects in my world. I’m looking for jobs and trying to figure out my needs and what not. Turns out this is hard stuff.

This is in part difficult because I’m a pretty frugal person, I’m low key, I get a lot of clothes second hand (there are some great local second hand shops). And when you think about knitting as an entertainment (which it is) the dollars to hours ratio is pretty good. Same with spinning, only potentially more so. Same with books and reading. And writing is, well free. And while I’m pretty up to date with what’s happening with technology, I have a 3+ year old computer, a 3 year old cell phone, a somewhat newer iPod (that I totally use constantly). Embarrassingly I don’t even have my own digital camera, and don’t seemed too inclined to get one, (I have a 20 year old film camera that I don’t use much though!) You get the picture.

As a sort of thought experiment, I made a list of “things I would buy if money were no object.” Not extravagances exactly, but all of the things that I’ve said in the last couple of years “you know it’d be nice if I had X.” I’m not going to list these things because that would be absurd, but it’s interesting to see what I listed. A surpassing number of things were I’d estimate 20 dollars or less, and at least 80% of the list were things that were 100 dollars or less. And most of these things are piddly like (a desk chair which is two inches taller--which I suspect doesn’t exist--and leans back a little, or a sippy-lid for a nalgene bottle.) These are things, that I mostly need to just drag myself to the store to get done--complicated only by the fact that I sort of hate shopping.

I think this would make me a lousy lottery winner. It’s really hard to spend a few million dollars on things under 100 dollars. Reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s story Other People’s Money (podcast here) a little.

I’ll write more about headphones in another post, but my writing headphones have been ill for the past six months or more. Their detatchable cord had been chewed by a certain long dog and while this didn’t ruin the cord, it did hasten it’s demise. As I said the cord was detachable, which lead me to believe that it was also replaceable. Unfortunately, the manufacturer used a non-standard attachment size--not the connector which was perfectly standard, but the end was a bit smaller than the generic cords.

So I had this very nice set of headphones, and no way to reliably plug them in, and I had given up on them, and had convinced myself to ask for them as a birthday gift (Next Monday). As I started to do some research looking for the right replacement pair I became confused and disgruntled (reading the musing of audiophiles often does this to me). So in frustration I was finally driven to take a blade to one of the ends of a mini-stereo cord. and… Lo and behold, I was able to make it fit without compromising function.

Ergo. Good as new headphones. In fact, better than new headphones, as the cord I have now is thicker and not broken and therefore more conductive, so the sound is noticeably better. I’m happy. On the downside I don’t have a clue what I want for my birthday now. Sigh.

I hope you’re having a good day. My presence here will be sporadic over the next several days, but I think I should be able to keep in touch.

Egad, I’ve not gone this long without posting in a long time.

I’m well, worry not kind readers. I’ve been dealing with family stuff, and some sort of lingering cold for the past week and haven’t had enough time all in one place to get much knitting or spinning done, let alone writing.

I’m also aware that I’m starting a summer work contract for the second year in a row with the same place. And about the time I started last year, I started this website. Even though I’ve been blogging a long time, and I’ve folded in old archives into this site, in a very real way, we’re pretty close to an anniversary. Not quite yet, because a year ago (almost exactly) I was busy graduating from college. And I started the job sometime in mid/late june. But anyway. Yes.

Also my birthday is in a week. I’ve not prepared myself from this. Yes

I can safely report:

I have seen my new cat-to-be-probably. It’s fuzzy. And splotchy. The

: mama-cat is long haired, but it’s unclear if the kitten will be as well. Very cute. Very social. Too soon to tell much more. Three more weeks till he comes home.

I’m teaching a lot of knitting and what not in the next few weeks.

: Egad.

I’ve knit about 7 inches (including ribbing) of the Latvian Dreaming

: Sweater. It’s slow going. I’ve not been able to concentrate on it very much.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts of late and have found this

: to be productive.

• I really need to clean my office. That’s the project for tomorrow.

• The morris dance ale is soon, I am excited.

Excitement.

I’ll be more coherent later, likely as not.

I’ve mentioned before that a lot of my neuroses surrounding productivity and creativity get enacted around the organization of my files on the computer, right?

Well they do.

I spend, probably way too much time thinking and considering the schemes that I name my files, their organization in relation to each other, their internal organization, the way their backed up. And so forth. The good thing is that I’m usually pretty happy with the way things are organized, and I tend to establish pretty flexible systems, but when I’m coming back to a couple projects after some time off or I’m restarting work on a project (at the beginning of a semester, say) I’m prone to clean house--as it were.

As the anxiety surrounding my past couple of months dragged on, and as that was wrapped up in a bunch of concerns about the state of my projects, I rearranged and reorganized things a few times, and for completely different reasons, got a lot of nothing done. Long story short, while I don’t like the way that the files were back in January, I also don’t like the way they are now.

The eternal debate is between putting a bunch of stuff (files/ideas) in a few baskets (folders/files) or putting a lot of little groups of stuff in a lot of baskets (folders/files). The bigger the baskets the more complex naming schemes have to be to keep the piles separate, but the chance that any one thing is in a specific basket is pretty high. So if there’s folders for “archives” “current” and “output,” and you’re looking for an old file that you haven’t touched in a few weeks, it’s probably pretty likely that it’s in the archives folder. And what you’re working on is in current. But if you have a lot of little files, say you’re writing an essay, a knitting pattern, and a play, and all have several files, you need a pretty complex naming scheme to keep things together. And you have to have this scheme in place early, because otherwise, it’s a mess. In contrast, if you have 6 (or three) different folders (with their own subfolders) for different projects it becomes much easier to ignore a file/project if you think “ah, I’m not feeling very dramaturgical today.” So I hope that sets the stage.

Once upon a time, rather than having files and directories like I do now, I would use programs like Voodoopad which is a great piece of software, and I used it quite successfully for a long time. The end result was that I wasn’t really using it like you’re supposed to, and it magnified this problem, because moving pages around in the VP was more difficult than moving the files around. And all the other wiki programs seemed less suitable (I really hate web apps, don’t get me started.) But as I’ve been writing here recently, I think I’m ready for that kind of approach again.

So I think I’ve discovered the best of both worlds: ikiwiki. This is a program that reads files in the format that I like most (plain text, markdown) and then turns it into a blog. It basically works off of a flat file system except(!) it uses a couple of nifty CGI wrappers (on the webserver and as a post-commit hook) to use a versioning system like Subversion or Git, to keep track of everything. Works like a dream, and there are tons of plugins that work pretty well. I have it installed on my own machine, but I expect that once Joe and I get some stuff nailed down, I’ll have a copy of it running here for some community editing and more of my rough thoughts.

Here’s hoping it all works out, I’ll keep you all posted.

Onward and Upward!

I don’t have a good new post for tychoish today, it’s been eventful, and I seem to have about half a spare brain cell.

I did however manage to get posts up for a couple of guest blogging things:

• A post on Zimmermania, with a finished picture of a sweater that I worked on a while back (I’m behind on sweater posting, it’s true)…
• A post on the Feminist Science Fiction Blog about “the singularity” and possible theoretical interactions with feminist ideas. It’s sort of rambling, but a good start.

I’ll be back plenty soon enough, you just wait and see.

Here’s another informational piece for people interested in knitting the Latvian Dreaming sweater.

After the cardigan modification, the most requested mod to this sweater is “how can I increase the stitch count,” for people who want to knit the sweater at small gauges (8 stitches to the inch) but need larger sizes. Since I’m awkwardly small I made a point of knitting this at a particularly small gauge (9.5 stitches per inch) to help make the pattern more accessible for the more normally-sized.

But there’s only so much that one can do with guage, particularly if you come into a project with a yarn picked out and a comfortable gauge established. This is further complicated by an important design principal that we are all wise to follow: keep the patterns centered. That is, make sure that the design is symmetrical on all sides. In practical terms this means that for every stitch you add or subtract to the chart, you have to add or subtract 4 to the total stitch count. As the repeats have 16 stitches, adding even half a repeat to the pattern means adding 32 stitches total.

Note: there’s already one stitch in background color that isnot* included in the chart before stitch number 1 on both sides.*

But don’t fear, armed with a clear notion of your gauge and your desired size, we can tweak the stitch count to something more useable. Here are a few of these strategies:

• Put in stripes in the side panels. If you add stitches under either underarm you only need to add two stitches, and if you keep them in alternating colors the floats will be secured, and all will be well. You can add anywhere from 1 to 5 or 6 (2 to 10 or 12 total) stitches to the number of stitches. This option can be combined for fine tuning with any of the other options.
• As a side stripe, add stitches 9 to 16 from the chart to the beginning of both sides. You can drop the uncharted background stitch or add a second stitch on the other side of the panel This will allow the first pattern to balance on the side more clearly. This will bring the total number of stitches to: 356 (if you add the second border stitch) or 352 (if you omit border stitches). If you take out border stitches there will be a jog at the beginning of the round.
• Replace the uncharted side stitch with stitches 24 through 44. This brings the total number of stitches to 378.
• If you need to size (either as part of fine tuning or as part of making it smaller) down stitch 24 and 44 on the chart can be dropped without much error, and (this brings the stitch count down to 336). If you’re after 338 stitches, dropping stitch 44 on the chart shouldn’t disrupt anything (actually, I sort of wish that I’d done this, because I think it would look better).
• If you need to resize the pattern in a more massive way. then by all means add a repeat of stitches 45 through 60 on the chart before stitch 45, though this will bring the stitch count up to 404.
• Similarly you could consider adding a repeat of stitches 57-60 from the chart before stitch 45. This would bring the stitch count to 356.
• You may consider adding a half repeat of stitches 53 through 60 on the chart before stitch 45, though if you do this, I might recommend beginning the sweater/repeat on row 9, rather than row 1.
• Consider adding stitches or even additional patterns between stitch 24 and 25 and/or stitch 43 and 44. Remember that each stitch you add at one of these points accounts for a change in 4 total stitches. Buy Joyce’s Book for many great ideas for additional patterns.

My design intention with this is to have the main interlocking pattern of stitches 45-85 cover the majority of the center of the design. I’ve been hesitant to suggest major modifications to the first pattern repeat, though you may feel more than welcome to toy around in this space if you want to add repeats. I included the Microsoft Excel file that I used to mock up the charts with the project materials and I encourage you to experiment (and share) your modifications.

I hope this helps you reach a pattern that fits you better.