Ok, I have one more interview/call that I’m going to make right after I post this entry, but otherwise, I have to say that I think it went really well. And I think my chances are pretty good, all things considered. Nothing is for sure yet, but I’m encouraged.

Just as a check in on “the current state of tycho,” I’d say that I’m feeling a ton better. Still anxious a bit, but not really worried. Particularly. Which is good. I’m so close, and I really want some sort of closure in this area. I’ll keep you all posted, and I’ve posted some more detailed explanation in semi-accessible public spaces (face-book walls/lj comments/twitter), but I fear that this particular page is to heavily indexed, so I’m not going to go into detail here.

I’m still sort of ornery about my knitting. I have a sweater that needs sleeves, and I really haven’t been pleased with how my knitting has turned out for most of the past year. Basically since I graduated from college, everything I’ve started blows. I haven’t had a winning sweater yet. Which sucks. So I’ve been reduced to knitting socks, (which also aren’t turning out well, but there’s less investment there.)

I have a sweater that needs sleeves, and then I’m going to make a really simple, hard to screw up, pullover with some yarn that I just got. And I’m going to work on one project at a time. (Ok, so not one project at a time, really, but 1 main project, and a pair of socks, and a couple of long term projects in hibernation.) That’s where I am at the moment.

In other news, Now that things are starting to settle down, I think I’m going to try and get closer to going to visit folk in nearby cities, because I haven’t and I should.

I’ll try and post something non-ego centric today, I swear.

Onward and Upward!

Ok, so I’m going to be really busy all day, and probably pretty brain dead after that. So no real post today.

I’d write about my knitting, except that I think I screwed up another project. I haven’t gotten any knitting to work out in a really long time, and I’m sort of fed up with it for the moment. So nothing there.

Anyway, in lieu of an actual post. If you could all think of something clever to post in the comments, that would be really awesome. A joke, something funny that happened to you today, it all works. I’m going to look forward to hearing what you say. If this were in the plan (see the previous post), I would have come up with some sort of nifty contest or game we/you could play, but alas.

See you on the other side!

So. There’s an ice storm. And there aren’t flights going out of the airport, on any airline, that could get me where I want to go before mid-Saturday morning. Which would defeat the whole purpose of going. Given that I leave Saturday evening.

So here I am. What can be done over the phone will be, and everyone seems pretty encouraging, so I’m not terribly distraught over this.

Anyway, Here’s my post from this morning/afternoon as I was sitting at the gate waiting for the plane to not show up!

Hey friends in blogland. (This is being posted after words, when free Internet is available.)

Expect many short updates as I have time.

I have arrived at the gate, and security was a huge non issue. No one balked at my fountain pen, which I wasn’t really expecting anyway. It took all of 30 minutes from dropping off-to the gate, including a bathroom break and walk. Not bad.

I was however, on the verge of vomiting as we neared the airport. Now that all of the annoying airport things are coped with I’m ok. I do sort of wish that I had a longer battery leash. There’s a guy hogging the plug next to me. Sigh.

In my must occupy myself mood earlier I tracked down a video of danah boyd speaking on you tube. Here it is:

I really like her and what she has to say, and I think in a lot of interesting ways, we over lap, or will, assuming the next few days goes over well. Which it will.

I’m going to go listen to escape pod and tor podcasts and have fun with that. Save the battery for when it really matters.

Warmest regards,

tycho

(Onward and Upward!--literally ;))

Thoughts:

Flight today. I hate airports. Airplanes are fine, flying is fine, I would rather drive than have to deal with airports, lines, security, and waiting. Unfortunately it’s no practical.

I will post updates about my trip to this blog, with the necessary amount of abstraction, assuming I have Internet (which it looks like I will), This means those of you who read this blog (ie, judy, parents, etc) who know people who would be interested in seeing how the trip unfolds, feel free to forward these things on.

I’m packed and basically ready to go. Yep.

Um. I found my headphones, which will make ipod-listening possible. I was going to sync up, but ultimately decided that I was still far enough behind that, it wasn’t worth while.

The good news is my knitting-injured finger seems basically as good as new. Or as bad as it’s counterpart on my other hand.

Ok this is the sign that I need to post and get on with distracting my self for real (ooh, lets listen to the Buffy musical episode!)

cheers,

tycho

Life returns to normal. All is well. I have this trip in a few days (ie fly out tomorrow afternoon), and my life remains sort scattered. But that’s normal these days, but I’m coping pretty well.

By the time I got home yesterday, I was completely knackered. I have to work on building my tolerance up for mental activity late in the evening. I haven’t been working much (due to a confluence of factors largely outside of my control,) and while this isn’t ideal, with factors outside of my control--there’s not a lot I can do quite yet. Except work on being able to be productive in the evening.

Given that I couldn’t fathom the concept of really reading last night, I watched an episode of Star Trek: New Voyages while I sewed up. The last of the hem on the Turkish Tile sweater.

Given my last post on the feminist sf blog about Star Trek, you might think that I’m having an obsession of sorts, but the truth is that I’m not, really.

But about the sweater: I’ve been worried about this sweater for a long time. and it’s getting much better. I had to, I must admit, resort to sewing elastic into the collar to help it lay right, but it almost looks normal at this point. As I look at it, though, I think that the sweater still needs some serious attention around the collar area. Like there isn’t enough collar, by like an inch.

If this were a crew neck sweater, it would be a synch to add a fold down shirt collar (like those on oxford shirts) but since its more of a v-neck, that doesn’t seems terribly likely. I might just have to resort to making a matching scarf. Any thoughts that you may have about this would be really helpful, now that I have the defects corrected (with the elastic) I’m fresh out of ideas.

I do intend to do a real wet blocking before I add anything on to this sweater. There is of course lots of time in the world. And since I’ve learned my lesson in this regard and I have another sweater that has a very similar construction, I know exactly what I have to do differently this time.

Anyway, given that writing is slow in the evening, I should get on it while I still have brain cells around.

Onward and Upward!

So--knock on wood--the good feelings remain with me. I have no sense of how I’ll be doing come Wednesday/Thursday morning, but for now I’m doing well. But I can’t argue with success… much.

I got nearly everything on my todo list done yesterday, and perhaps a bit more. Weird. Now I just need to be able to do that some more.

I also did a little bit of reading in the Tiptree. I’m finally hooked on this novella. I’m reading The Starry Night which is a collection of three novellas/long short stories, and it’s a great deal of fun. Except that you have to “get into” the book, what amounts to three times. (I’m on the middle one.) I also read the beginning of “The Hose Beyond Your Sky,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum which I realized that I had heard on Escape Pod and I enjoyed it both times.

There was also some work that I did on TealArt. Including writing a SQL statement that worked really well, to provide the home page. There are a couple of little quirks still in the design that I want your feedback on:

1. The permalinks on the home page don’t work.
2. On http://tychoish.com/blog/, and pages lower in that hierarchy the menu in the top corner has two links to http://tychoish.com, when logically the top link, should be to http://tychoish.com/blog.

I think that the first issue should work itself out as there get to be more posts in the system (coming soon enough). And I think the second is a result of me using the blog with the ID #1, as the primary blog. A little tweaking should get me around this.

But, and here’s the interactive portion of the program (One of the things that was getting me down, before about how my blog entries were too… static, was that I was no longer asking questions in my entries. This is amends to that.) So if I have to drop specific permalinks on the home page do you think that would be a really bad thing?

I thoughts so.

Anyway, I have writing things to do. And showering. Oh Showering. So I’m going to go. I’ll post another entry today, I promise.

Onward and Upward!

I read or heard somewhere that Tolkien, when he was writing the Lord of the Rings (which he, not surprisingly approached as a singular book, rather than three) he would start writing until he got stuck on something. And then, he would take it out and start again from the beginning. The end result being, by the time he got to the end: it was really done.

I’m not sure how true this is, and I’m pretty sure that this isn’t exactly a “recommended” method of writing, but I think there’s something meritous about this kind of approach, possibly on the shorter end of the spectrum.

After all, most short stories are, well rather short, and from my experience, sometimes starting a-fresh might be more time-economical than trying to salvage some husk of your original work. It might also solve the problem of wooden characters in the first third of your piece (because it usually takes people too long to really get to know and expect characters.)

I also know that this sort of “fresh start” mentality should of course be balanced with a strong impulse to finish things, and I think this is where my own short fiction gets tied up. I have three-four short fiction pieces lying around, and none of them have good endings. Or really any endings. It’s important to finish things, and so maybe the “start over if you get stuck” method would only serve to complicate this.

We should also mention that Tolkien had a tenured position at Oxford, he was in a position where success as a fiction writer didn’t (and really couldn’t) have been confused with prolific-ness.

Anyway.

Onward and Upward!

Ok, here it is: the long awaited first piece from my little fiction project. I’m not sure how well it will go over in this form, but it’s worth a shot. Many of the names and important words will be linked, in the final version, to pages that elaborate and explain characters. Also there are a couple of links that go nowhere in this page, will be linked to other stories and pieces. Including the “letter,” which is mentioned.

This snip, is set in the late 24th century, aboard an explorer/survey ship bound for a nearby star system at very fast (sub-light) speeds.

It’s all below the fold…

“Oh hey, what brings you this way, Stu?”

“You know, I was just wrapped up in what I was doing and had to come over and check on you, because I didn’t want to get too excited and blow something up.” Stuart was grinning, expecting Frank to laugh at the joke. He didn’t.

“Right,” Frank said. Distracted, he turned back and began to sift through another digital stack of files. “You know, if they didn’t write this system so you could make data piles, I wouldn’t have this problem.”

“What’s this ‘they’ that you speak of. You wrote it--in spite of my warnings--didn’t you?”

“Tertiary, Stuart.” Frank sounded grumpy.

“Whatever. I’m not kidding, you seem embarrassed or shaken. You alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, I was just going through my files and I found a letter to my sister that I wrote right before the mission started. Never sent it.”

“You don’t talk much of her. What’d it say?”

“Not important.” Frank was quick shut down that direction of conversation. “We were always really different. She had settled down on one of the Io outposts, she has a family and a job as a school teacher. We didn’t talk much. Ever really, I guess,”

“Io? Really? That takes guts these days. You grew up on Europa?”

“Mostly. Dad took us to Titan pretty regularly for a few years there, and there were, of course, school trips to the other Jovian outposts. I liked Titan and traveling more more than Kate ever did, and Io is hard, but home is home it seems: for some people at least.”

“I suppose it is,” Stuart said. “You going to send the letter now?”

“I don’t think so, I mean, I don’t really know how it would go over with her, after this long, hell with how things were going when we left, who knows if Io still has an outpost? And what' she’d be pushing 60? by now?”

“No way. She can’t be that much older than you, and we haven’t been gone that long,” Stuart said. “Did you even pay attention during the relativistic physics class during the training?”

“You know the answer to that one. If the number matters that much then you do the math. The truth is I forgot about it until now, and it doesn’t bug me much. Maybe that’s what’s getting to me. At any rate, no matter what year it is out there, if I did send it she’ll have had a lot more life between her and when I wrote it. If she got it.”

“Fine, fine I just don’t want you to regret it later Frank.”

“Thanks. I’m fairly content with what happened before we left, but sometimes its too easy to forget that were so far out and going so fast. When I do remember, it’s kind of jarring. Creapy that it can still happen. ‘Suppose it’s one of these things about being on an Explorer Ship that you just have to talk about, Right?”

“Right.” Stuart said. “We all know about that.”

“So, hows that ‘project’ of yours coming along?” Stuart asked, after a moment.

“You know, slowly,” Frank said. “I’m still not going to tell you about it yet, so don’t think you’re getting smarter or anything.”

Stuart sighed. “Whatever, everything on this ship is going slowly--”

“--except the ship,”

“--so why should I expect you to be any different?”

“Because you don’t have any patience for waiting?”

“You’d think I could have discovered this before we left?” Stuart asked.

“What, and deprive me of a friend, for next twenty years?” Frank asked.

Stuart flinched.

“Just go start you’re own surprise project, it’ll keep you busy, me entertained and remember that it’s the chance of a lifetime.” Frank’s words echoed the recruiting videos for the Explorer Corps that began airing right as they were leaving the system.

“More like a chance for a lifetime,” Stuart quipped. “Maybe you’re right, though, I need to come up with something,”

“I will tell you some day, you know”

“Of course,” Stuart said, “But I should jet, I’m still on duty after all, and so are you.” He stood up and made for the door “Catch you around,” he said before he walked out.

“Weirdo,” Frank said under his breath. He was smiling again. “Back to the program.”