I’ve been knitting a lot. I still don’t have pictures, but I do have stories. I don’t quite have 1000 words of stories, but these few hundred will probably come close.

I finished sewing up the hem and the sweater is blocking downstairs. There’s a little bit of the hem which I’m a little disappointed with, but these things happen, and I’m not that worried that it will negatively affect much. I’m still undecided about closure. I think I’ll probably due with out for any wearing that it gets this year, and make a mega-order of zippers in about a month if I can’t find a source of good zippers locally. This sweater feels like it would proably work alright with some simple black bobble-esque buttons, so I might make little I-cord button hole tabs if it came to that.

It’s still damp so we’ll have to wait a while to get good pictures.

I’ve also been a knitting fiend of late, working on the sleeves of my sweater, which I’ve been working on seriously for almost a week, and will finish the end of the second sleeve this evening in all likely hood. I can’t wait to start knitting on the body of a sweater again, particularly given that when I’m done with the body of this sweater, I’m done with it, because the sleeves are already done.

The problems with my knitting queue are done. Done! I can resume my normal, if a bit obsessive, knitting life, without having to drag myself through projects that I don’t really want to work on, and I can look forward to the next project with hope and anticipation without guilt.

Speaking of my queue, just like my mother’s self imposed goal/project of knitting ten pairs of socks before memorial day, I’m setting a goal of knitting 14 Sweaters by December 31st 2009. Which is a little bit less than a sweater every six weeks. On average.

Which is about my common rate of progress, assuming I’m not knitting huge sweaters at fine gauges like I’ve been doing this year. I do a stranded sweater that fits me at like 8 stitches to the inch, in six weeks, and I don’t think I’ll just be making stranded sweaters either. So all should work out. This goal, like my moms goal, is really not a rush, but more like an excuse to spend my time (and knitting budget) on projects that I genuinely want to work on. I love making sweaters, and would be happy to just keep knitting sweaters and nothing else. Here are some other ground rules that I’m considering as part of my challenge:

• Sweaters started before the goal was established count when they’re finished. So the sweater I’m working on now, and the fine gauge gray sweater count when they’re finished, even though some percentage of the knitting occurred before I’ve started.
• The next 144 rounds of the Pi shawl I’m working on on size zero’s would count as a sweater, and if it’s not done at that point, the remainder of the shawl will also count as it’s own sweater. I don’t expect to be working on this, however.
• At least three quarters of the sweaters I make should be my own designs and/or things that I could publish as my own. Preferably more.

Sounds fun.

I’ve also worked out what yarn/kinds of patterns I intend to make for the next eight sweaters I want to make. Which is also incredibly exciting, I have stash yarn enough for two sweaters, and i think I have leftovers enough so that I can knit 3 sweaters only buying 4 cones of yarn (the last two sweaters I’ve made I’ve bought 4 cones each, which while necessary, has contributed to my leftover shelf greatly.) Also surprisingly, I have, on my list, five yarns/sweaters that I want to make that are medium weight single color patters/designs/ideas. I’m thinking that it’s about time for me to suck it up and knit cable work.

Anyway, hope you’re having a good goyeshe yantif, I should go knit/write, I’ll be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

Today has been a knitting day, that’s pretty undeniable, and I’ve gotten a lot of knitting done, so that feels good, and I wouldn’t suggest that I’m all the way to being “back in the writing saddle,” but I’m feeling less dyer about things, so that’s good.

Part of getting back on the writing saddle for me is to get back into the reading saddle. Read more (or any) fiction; listen to things. Consume media that isn’t simply guilty pleasure (like I think I need to watch more feature length movies and fewer procedurals.) It’s all gist for the mill, and I need more of it.

I’ve been struggling with the James Tiptree book The Starry Rift, which hasn’t really grabbed me in a big way, certainly not nearly as much as her earlier (slightly) and much greater Brightness falls from the Air, to which Rift is at least tangentially connected. It’s good, but I’ve found it hard to get involved in. I was really involved in the first story, but it ended, and the second story is taking almost as long as the first to get into. Also my copy of the book was damaged in an incident with a plant, which has made reading slightly more difficult. I think this is part of my general inability to grok for shorter forms.

So I’m not reading that, becuase I figure life’s too short and if I could be reading something it’s probably better than reading nothing at all, so instead I’m reading Empire Star a--from all accounts--whimsical adventure novella by Samuel Delany, which I think might be the right thing at the moment.

I’m also listening to, somewhat obsessively (hence the knitting) Cory Doctorow’s reading of Bruce Sterling’s *The Hacker Crackdown*. It’s over so I can listen to this basically straight through. Which is a lot of fun. This might be bridging on creepy, but I really enjoy hearing Cory talk, and really, by now I mostly know most of his shticks, and I still listen to them. And it helps that even if I disagree or am frustrated by his approach from time to time, it’s always… stimulating. And that’s a good thing, particularly when I’m trying to find my saddle.

My other, more erstwhile, project of the moment, and the topic that this entry owes its title, is my process of developing the “bad guy” character my Mars Stor(ies), who I’ve felt is a little bit too unfocused for too long. Writing, just notes at the moment, about his past and secrets is helpful for being able to more fully actualize him in my mind. What I’m realizing after the fact, is that I mushed together two antagonists from my high school novel, in a way that totally didn’t work in my mind.

This hasn’t been a huge issue until now, because in the earlier story, he was pretty far removed from most of the events and we never see things from his perspective. But now I’m teasing out a story that’s going to give us a little bit of his origin story, and, well I need to have this figured out. Mostly my problem is that I have a hard time making him come off as being evil enough, rather than just slimy, and short tempered. It’s an ongoing project.

With Breakout in cold storage, I’m turning back to the Mars stories to see if I can just get something short (novelette length?) written and out. I’m also going to spend some time with Station Keeping as a spring/summer project, once I’m back in the saddle. But I’m also trying to think about other universe’s/worlds/settings situations. My Mars stories are great fun, and I like the characters and some of the other things that I’m doing, but I don’t want to get stuck either. So while I don’t think it wise to actually do anything about that right now; branching out is something that’s very much on the horizon.

Onward and Upward!

Note: I tried to post this earlier today, but was thwarted by something or other. I’m off to write one last entry today, which you’ll probably read in much quicker succession than I expected you would anyway. Enjoy.

So I’m making a mitten sweater. Which is to say that, I’m using a Latvian Mitten Pattern for a sweater.

I’m doing a couple of things that are not particularly typical for me:

1. I’m using a sport weight merino yarn. Not only this, it’s a generally available sport weight merino yarn. Made by Louet. I typically make stranded sweaters out of fingering weight yarn, and I typically use yarns that aren’t particularly commonly available. Weaving yarns, mostly.
2. I’m knitting (most) of the sleeves before I start on the body. This is because I’m making an EPS-style sweater. That is, Elizabeth (Zimmerman’s) Percentage System, and it’s a nifty/brilliant way of making sweaters in one piece. The one I’m aiming for is the a saddle shouldered sweater. it’s going to be (another) cardigan, and I think it’ll be nifty.
   • I have the first sleeve done, and have about 4 inches done on the second sleeve. My goal is to get the second sleeve off of the double pointed needles before I start the body.
   • I’d say that about a quarter of my sweaters are EPS sweaters, but I almost always cheat and knit the sleeves from the shoulder down, by provisionally casting on the sleeve stitches, because I had an aversion to knitting sleeves, but I’m working on getting over it.

And it’s fun knitting. I’ll get pictures at some point.

In other knitting news, I’m sewing down the hem’s on the morocco sweater. I have the neck, the bottom, and most of one sleeve. I’m not in a rush, and I have to remember to not judge this sweater until after the wet block, because I fear that the sewing job looks a little sloppy, but I think it’s going to be fine in the end. So close.

Anyway, I’m off. I think I have enough writing to write about that I’ll have another post to day. Fathom that.

Onward and Upward!

Days on the Waitlist: 10

I said the other day to a friend that “I thought I had my voice back.” This realization, and the opportunity to articulate it was incredibly powerful for me. While I haven’t completely returned to normal, I’m getting there, which is kind of nifty, not going to lie.

Yesterday I wrote the begining of a 2,000 word essay/concept paper for a structured hypertext system that I’m trying to get Chris to collaborate with me on. This was the other result of this conversation, and even if nothing comes of this project, I’m pleased that I was able to write something like this. It was the closest I’ve gotten to writing a real academic-ish essay in months.

It’s not perfect, it needs a good once over, and I realize that the ending is lacking, but it’s something. That felt really good.

I also, went through the rest of the first chapter of Knowing Mars, the novella from last fall, and have some better ideas about how to procede with this project. I think I’ve been stalled for a while, because I know that I need to further develop the antagonist, and I’ve been attempting to do this edit by hand with a pen and a print out, which is less than desirable, I think.

In any case, I need to get a draft of this project done that I can be happy with so that something can be done with it. This weighs heavily on me, and on my list of current projects as I think about the near future. I think having a written project that I can be happy with will let me feel much more secure about whatever happens with the waitlist.

And I need to keep writing, of course. It’s hard as hell to write when you feel like crap and--at least for me--it helps like the world to do so. Alas.

So I’m going to get going, but thanks for listening.

Onward and Upward!

So, one of the things that I did today, was write a little shell function that will append text to the end of a file from the command line. I’m sharing it with you all because that seems like the thing to do, and I find it useful.

I’m sure there are more effective ways to accomplish this, but this works. To be fair, there’s nothing here that will protect you from yourself, but it shouldn’t be able to do much damage. I keep it in my .bash_profile, but that’s probably not the smartest thing in the world. Have fun.

ap() {
  file=$1;
  shift
  note=$*;
  echo -e '\n- '"$note" >> $file
}

Then to use the function, once it’s been loaded is, at the prompt:

$ ap filename.txt stuff that you want to append to the file

A couple of notes: You have to type in the full filename, thankfully we have tab completion. If you want to prepend, I think you just change the direction of the pointy brackets from >> to <<. Also I have it set up to add all notes as if they are a bullet point (in markdown hence the “-").

Onward and Upward!

Chris and I had a discussion about LiveJournal last night, that lead in some interesting directions.

Though the discussion was started by the impending (21st March 2008) day long boycott of the site (which I’m not commenting on, and neither know enough about to pass judgment, nor am particularly moved by the whole deal), but quickly moved on to a contemplation of LJ, and you know, the internet as a whole.

I wrote this entry yesterday but didn’t post it. It’s since come to my attention that the rhetoric of the strike errs towards anti-semitism, which is a bit troubling. I think I’ve technically read my friends page since midnight GMT yesterday, and this post will get pushed to LJ, so I guess that I’m not participating.

I’d also say that it doesn’t strike me that anything is particularly different this time around. When I joined LJ the first time (with my old handle as the username), you had to be invited/have a code from an existing user, there weren’t free accounts. Frankly I think that’s part of the reason that the LJ community is what it is. As for the censorship stuff, that’s not particularly new and though distasteful, a completely enforceable part of the terms of service. Anyway, on with the entry…

What we recognized was that LJ is basically the only consistently successful social networking site on the internet, ever. Furthermore later social networking sites, like facebook and myspace, have started to look more and more like LJ as time goes on. The facebook “feed” is a lot like the LJ friend’s page, the facebook profile and the LJ userinfo page are remarkably similar. And so forth.

The surprising thing is that LJ, though developed and changed over the years, is pretty much the same thing that it’s always been, and that’s sort of cool.

I attribute the success of LJ to two things: the friends page, and the granularity of security that “friend’s locking” provides. The diverse and dedicated (and not unsizeable) userbase seals the deal.

While I adore Wordpress, and think that it’s great software, the truth is that WordPress.com and blogger that preceded it, really can’t hold a candle to LJ because though there are “community features” (comments, blogrolls, rss feeds) the “blog,” they don’t have the friend’s page.¹

And admittedly, today, we have things like Google Reader and other RSS services, and Open ID that go a long way to replicate the “f-list” experience, but it isn’t the same, and it isn’t automatic. Often, in this whole cyberspace adventure, I think independence is the way to go, but I really think that in the case of LJ, there’s no way to do the community aspect of blogging or social networking as successful in an independent sort of way².

Our conversation ended with Chris' recolection that he thought--years ago--that we should have tried to replicate the LJ phenomena and improve upon it somehow. He/we was/were always unclear of the details. The conversation then moved on to a discussion of programing languages and methods and projects, both historical and future. I will no doubt continue to blog/write about where this train of thought is taking us, but I think the observations about LJ and what constitutes success in terms of software and cyber/social phenomena will prove useful in the future.

Onward and Upward!

Like it or not, my creative process is incredibly technological. I write, organize and manage my thoughts and productivity with my computer. This entry is about some of my recent frustrations and experimentations with my “system,” and process.

Here’s an example: The technology and creativity are so related for me, that I had a minor crisis of faith, leading to a somewhat startling minor existential panic as I was trying to fall asleep last night in response to one of the keys on my keyboard falling off.

No doubt the anxiety and stress of the past few months have complicated everything in my life in ways that I’m still fighting to recognize, but setting this aside for the moment, I want to take this opportunity to review some of my thoughts.

With the discovery of MacVim I’ve once again renewed my interest in learning how to use vim, a very old school and powerful text editor. This document has been particularly useful in helping me attempt this feat, though I continue to feel way behind the curve.

A quick note. vim, descended from the unix vi editor, makes editing text really simple, and outshines almost every other editor in a sort of brute force sort of way. One of the things that makes it so powerful is that it’s bimodal (basically, sort of). In one mode--“INSERT” mode--most like what anyone who started using computers after, say 1982, allows you to type and edit text directly. You type, and the characters you enter appear on the screen. The other mode, “COMMAND,” allows you to interact with the program, and your key strokes tell the program to do something. This means the keyboard is much more effectively used. For instance, “h,” “j,” “k,” and “l” move the cursor around in command mode, which highly maximizes the economy of movement of fingers, particularly for touch typists. And, to get the most out of vim, the idea is to spend as much time in command mode, and as little time in insert mode as possible.

And frankly, my brain is having some trouble groking this. I think part of the problem is that while I work almost exclusively in plain text, a very very small percentage of what I produce/edit is actually computer code: most of it is prose, files ranging from a few hundred to several thousand words, in average sized paragraphs. Which is fine, the issue being that that vim seems to be better organized around editing rather than the (sometimes) spontaneous generation of new content. So the end result of this line of thinking is that, despite really wanting to feel proficient with vim, it might not be particularly suited to what I want to do. Which I’m kind of disappointed by. But I’m going to try a a little more, I think, because I feel like I’ve gotten further this time than I ever have before.

That’s part one. Part two is that I think I need to work a little harder on setting up some templates to aid in organization. When I open a blank file to write a blog post I have a snippet that I can insert that will set up the headers of the post so a I can tag the entry title it, and start writing in a couple of seconds, and I like how the templates, however spare, get things rolling a little. So I think that I need to work on building more of them, no matter what editor I use. Thankfully this is pretty straightforward to fix once I figure out what kinds of templates and boiler plates I can start using.

One thing that I have done that I think is interesting, is that I’ve started to use my right pinky more. I’m left handed, and I realized not too long ago that I basically did all of my function (shift, command, control) key pressing with my left pinky. Like technically I think if you capitalize letters that fall under the left hand, you’re supposed to use the right shift key, but the truth is that I basically never do this (and probably slow my typing speed something fierce for it.) I also don’t really use my right thumb on the space bar and use my right index finger for the backspace (but not the return key.) Anyway I’ve caught myself use the command key with my right pinky a few times. Which is exciting, because I think it makes me, in some minor way, more efficient, and this is a good thing.

Another area that I’m working on improving a bit is with outlining and planing and whatnot. Over the past year or so I’ve made a move from being basically paper free, to doing brainstorming, and project planning on paper. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that, I’ve gotten out of the habit--as hard as it might be for readers of this blog to fathom--of writing spontaneously at the keyboard. So I think taking notes might help with this whole process. Part of “working” on this, is a habitual thing--just getting in the habit of writing this way--but another part, not to be ignored, is getting a template for the files, and a naming scheme for collecting and organizing these thoughts. For instance, my reflex is to just type things in markdown, which has its advantages, but the truth is that I’m not incredibly likely to use anything other than markdown syntax highlighting, so I need to look into other possible formats that might work better in plain text format.

I think that’s about all I can stand to put here, I’ll have a cut earlier in the entry, just so that it’s not absurd/outrageous, unless you’re feeling really geeky. But then, you’ve gotten to this point, so you probably were feeling that geeky. Thanks.

Onward and Upward!

Days on the Waitlist: 8

I think we’re past “this is driving me crazy” to “this has driven me totally crazy.” At least I’m in good company, and at least I know that this is a finite sort of thing and I’ll get over it. So having had this realization (of which I’m sure my dwindling readership is acutely aware), lets move on to more interesting topics.

Morocco Sweater Progress: Knitting Complete(!); Finishing Remains.

So I might not technically be done with this sweater there is about three yards of hem facing to sew down and countless ends to weave in (though there could be more, and many of them will get tucked into the hem facing.) There remains the problem of how to fasten the cardigan front, I’m wavering between making button tabs and buying buttons, or compounding my zipper order even further. In any case, I might spend a few minutes pressing/steaming the hem into place, but I think I’m mostly letting this one sit for a while and giving my hands a break.

In the mean time I’ve started working, in earnest on another sweater.

It’s been so long since I’ve done this, it’s amzing how exciting and fun this is.

To be fair, I started on this design when I ran out of yarn on the last sleeve of the last sweater, and it took a number of tries to find the thing that was “right,” but once I did it’s become really engaging.

I’m making a saddle-shouldered-giant-latvian-mitten-cardigan. Basically I really liked the saddled shouldered aran cardigan that my mother made this winter, and I wanted to do something similar, except you know, more tychoish with color work and the like. This is different from a lot of sweaters I’ve made in the last three years, because I’m knitting the sleeve starting at the cuff, rather than the shoulder, because I want to stretch myself a little, and I’ve been so devoted to “top-down” sleeve knitting, that I want to see what the other side is like, for once.

So I’m about half way done with the first sleeve, I think I’ll probably get my act together to post pictures pretty soon (what with a new sweater.) and it’s a great deal of fun. It’s also going quickly, because whereas the last sweater was knit with what amounts to lace weight yarn, and this sweater is knit with what amounts to sport weight yarn (sport is the heaviest weight of lightweight yarn) and while many people would probably think that I’m still knitting really fine yarn, it is relatively speaking pretty thick.

And it’s just fun to be knitting something different. Refreshing even.

Anyway, things to do.

Onward and Upward!