So I’ve been thinking that I want to take pictures again, at least on a somewhat limited scale for the blog. I don’t have my own digital camera and don’t particularly want to get one at this point.

I do have a really sweet old, manual everything, Nikon that I’m thinking about using. This brings up the following question that I’d like to ask the crowd…

Does anyone know of a good mail order photo processing service that will:

• Develop film and send my negatives back to me.
• Scan the negatives and send me a digital copies of the images, either via the Internet, or by post on CD-ROM.
• Not send me prints, or make me pay for prints.
• I’m looking for digital scans of really high quality. I mean this is film we’re copying off of, and scanning technology is good and bits are cheap. So I think 10 megapixel+ images are pretty reasonable. TIFF or some other uncompressed file format is pretty much required.
• Do this for a competitive price. Service should provide mailers, and I think the total cost should be 5 bucks or less, I think 3-4 is the sweet spot.
• If there was a company that could do this with either black and white or color film, that would be amazing, but I suppose not strictly required. I’ve discovered that my favorite B&W film of yore has been discontinued (Agfapan Pro/APX-100,) so it’s of minimal importance.

If such a service exists that pictures are about 20 cents each, including film, which doesn’t seem too bad. Though you pay a lot for a digital camera up front, and given that I’m largely not interested in producing hard copies of photos, but I enjoy the experience of shooting to film, I think the economy is pretty much the same. Particularly since I have such an awesome camera already. Figure a good 10mp digital camera is several hundred dollars, I’d have to take 1500-2000 pictures before the price of the new camera would really outweigh the cost of processing. Which would take me several years, given my level of involvement. And then you have to figure and you have to figure that like all such technology, after a few years you (or I) might start thinking about an upgrade, which means that price might be a non-issue in the end.

If such a service exists.

Some thoughts on the writing project.

So I’ve begun working on the Breakout hypertext, and I think all of my tedious regular expressions work actually made this work out pretty well. I’m really happy with the software, which is something--particularly given the digital nature of this project--that shouldn’t be ignored. Technology and I need to be working with each other not against each other. And I think that’s the case.

What I’m thinking about/working through at this point is a structural concern. My hope is that the sort of “first layer” of the document will be very encyclopedic, in a sort of lighthearted and friendly parody of wikipedia way. That structure, organized mostly around the ships, years/time periods, and characters is all set up and fairly straightforward. (Note, I’m mostly just thinking about the naming schemes at this point.)

Another layer of this project are what I’m thinking of as supporting documents, things written in character’s own voices, or other things that are “in-world” texts. These are all associated with an encyclopedic article, and numbered sequentially, by order of creation. So I have an article for one of the key characters named “frank” and a supporting document named “frank001”¹.

The next layer, that I don’t have figured out is the “fictionalized” story that I’m writing. I want the document to have a lot of little scenes linked into the supporting documents and to the encyclopedic “articles.” I don’t have any notion of how to name these things. Here are my concerns:

• If I associate them with characters, how do I decide that X scene with 2 or 3 characters is associated with a particular character? Particularly, in a way that will make sense to me in 6 weeks and 6 years.
• If this is the case, how do I distinguish in the namespace between supporting documents and fictionalized narratives?
• How do I give short meaningful names that are distinct and thus identify scenes but that have some sort of systematic scheme. Furthermore how maintain some sort of order without forcing them into a sequential order. Again, using the namespace. So we can’t have scene001, scene002, and so forth.
• While I don’t need the pages to be strictly ordered to reflect the linear story lines, there needs to be some way to organize/grep through the page titles. I’m thinking using the location titles as a way to organize that and then use hidden dotfiles to keep track of the story and the files for my own notes, and then integrate links to the scenes from other pages, using my notes, once I have more meat, as it were, lying around to work with, and there’s a little bit of a Catch-22 here: you need data to play around and get a structure that makes sense, and it’s also hard to write without that structure.

I might have answered my question this is the problem of being an extrovert and a blogger: If you start a question for the crowd, by the end of your post you’ve probably answered it. I would still like input if you have it ;).

Here’s a basic report for today, with a more detailed list to follow:

Today was a weird day. I spent my morning doing some programing/computer things. (Kludge firmly planted in fist), and then I helped a friend do some moving (more tomorrow.) I got a little bit of writing in and then there’s a dinner party and probably some knitting, and then bed. Sweater class tomorrow.

• I didn’t sleep enough last night; I was too wired from the drive, I had that low level awareness that you need for drives, but I was bodily exhausted. So sleeping was hard.
• I decided on my trip, as I mentioned last night, that I have a new vision for Breakout, I have a Kludgey solution that will make this technically possible, and I’m looking forward to it.
• Basically I’m going to do Breakout as a hypertext thingy. I guess in a way this means that there will never be a Breakout novel. Which is ok. It frees some energies up because I think I want to play with shorter forms for a while. I think I’d like to write another novella/novelette, and this will give me the chance to do that.
• The hypertext will let me write this story without having to fight it. I think a lot of fiction writing, in the traditional mode, is all about making that thing in your head get to other people in a common format. To use a computer metaphor, the Novel is like being restricted to communicate the content of your mind via the WiFi standard: you have to transmit your radio signal in a very precise sort of way. This hypertext, I hope, will be more like speaking, in contrast.
• My coding/programing thing, was just to make sure that I could script the deployment of this system in a way that I was comfortable scaling as the project grew from a few thousand words to several tens of thousands of words, and from a couple of dozen pages to many dozens of pages. Someday, I’ll write about that, because I think getting the content to work the way I want it, is probably actually pretty easy, and it might be good for other people to have this information.
• I’m not going to have any sort of release for a long time, I should disclaim, but I’m working on it in a new way.
• I haven’t done any work on the new TealArt site. And Breakout would probably be out at both TealArt and tychoish, in the end.
• I haven’t knit anything. I made a mistake, as I might have mentioned the other day, and haven’t brought myself to deal with it yet. My sock bag is still in the car, so I don’t really have anything else to work on, so with luck I’ll have fixed it by the end of the evening.
• Randal Schwartz, one of the hosts behind the open source podcast (FLOSS “Weekly”) I mentioned yesterday, saw the google juice and commented (woot! auto-notifiers, I suppose; not linking to it in this post for that reason I guess.) It’s not actually a weekly, which is fine by me, because I am all sorts of behind on my podcast listening.

Ok, this entry is cooked, and so is, I think dinner. So I’m going to jet! Have a good weekend. I’ll be back tomorrow…

Onward and Upward!

So I’m trying really hard to get back into the novel I’ve been working on, off and on for a few months. I’m not really “getting into it,” and I’m just not into it. While I’ve spent a lot of time developing it and a bit of time working on it, it’s been a morning and afternoon here and there. I’d like for something to happen with this project, but I need to take a step back and think about it. This entry is part of this “step back.”

One of my issues, is that this project deals with how histories are remembered. How do we think about what has happened before now, and how does this affect our development in the future. This is a key part of my academic interests, and I thought that it would be fun to--in my interim year--explore this idea from a fiction stand point.

The issue that I’m having--and I think that processing this will help as I move into graduate school--is that I’m not sure, exactly what I think about this. The story I’m trying to tell, or that I thought I was trying to tell, incorporates three distinct generations. The second happens 40 years after the first, and the third happens about 200 years after the second. There are different casts of characters in each period, clearly. What I’m hoping is that this set up will let us explore these memories in a controlled way that simply can’t be done in the laboratory.

I should note that I’m being pretty open with this story, because the story isn’t built on suspense, in the way that say the Novella is. There are crises that the characters have to deal with, and I’m not going to talk about that, but in a lot of ways tychoish is my personal notebook, and this is an entry where I’m using it as such.

One of the problems that using fiction as a way to get around the constraints of the lab is that you have to have a notion of what would happen in the lab. And this is perhaps part of the reason why I need to be a researcher as well: I’m not really sure what would happen. I know that somethings happening, but I’m interested in an area that’s pretty unexplored and I take a vaguely quantitative/grounded theory kind of tact. And I guess I could come up with pretty specific predictions about the outcomes of a given situation if needed; but I’m not sure that this kind of knowing/theorizing is right for building a story.

So I think that I need to go back over what I’ve written and my outline for this project and make it more teleological and theoretically specific in a connected point of view. Thus far, I’ve been more concerned with making sure that the plot gets from A to B and less concerned with the embellishment (which is important during some stages of the planning, I think, as long as it’s balanced.) I also I had a compulsive motif thus far which I either need to punch up a lot, or change, because it’s too subtle and doesn’t hang “right” at the moment.

The other problem--and this is the same problem that I had with Another Round--the abortive attempt at a second novel that I started right after I finished my oft-mentioned and supremely horrible first novel--is that I had a large story about a huge number of characters who weren’t in a position to really cary a plot on their own. AR became Station Keeping, which I think does work on some level in part because it’s not a novel, and in part because we’ve been able to correct some of the problems since it’s a total re-imagination, not a reprocessing of the original story (All of station keeping has been written for station keeping, even if there’s an old doc file on my computer that tells a similar story with similarly named characters.)

Now, Breakout isn’t the same mistake. There are characters that can cary the story, the problem is that I think the story is still too cosmic in a lot of ways, so while taking a step back to think about where I am, in a lot of ways I need to get closer to the story and the characters, and while I need to have a better concept of the bigger picture, I need to focus less on the bigger picture.

I think I have writing to do.

Onward and Upward!

Ha. Here’s a list because the fact that I can still use words is kind of amazing.

• I left and drive back across HomeState today. It was an uneventful drive.

• I listend to the 3 (!) Episodes of FLOSS weekly and 2 Episodes of Cast-On while I drove. This was really good. It’s surprising and good how much both of these podcasts really inspire and stretch the brain. Listening to the programers talk about programingy-things streatches my brain. I’m a geek, I know and have come to really enjoy the geekier bounds of everyday computer useage; but, I’m not a programer, and I don’t often think in that mode. So, the opportunity to stretch the brain a little, or a lot, is really great. Really great. And Cast-On is delightful, as always.

• I have a sneaky idea regarding Breakout, regarding my post earlier today about needing to really rethink it. I wrote that yesterday morning, which seems like it was much longer, but the time has been helpful. And we’ll see what happens. I’m excited now.

• I spent much of my morning working on some knitting. I got a lot done, which is good. I however made a crucial error on the final step, and now have to go back. Which will be tedious. I think I shall knit socks for a while. Sorry if, while I’m irritated with this sweater if I don’t wax rhapsodic about my knitting. It’s better this way.

• I checked out the always helpful MacRumors Buyers Guide which shows when all of the apple products were last released and what the release history is. Apple’s been pretty consistent with the computer that I’m looking to get: revs in late fall, and late spring for the past five years. I’m not desperate enough that I can’t wait till the next rev, so I think that’s the plan. I think it’s a fair bit that the next rev of the laptops will have:

  • LED backlights
  • Multi-Touch Trackpad gestures
  • Better procs

  These are all things that I want, and I can wait a few months. This is just punditry but based on the buyers guide, there might be a late spring mac book pro, before WWDC. Might they release new laptops in February at whatever event the iPhone SDK is released at? Apple punditry is so addictive.

• I’ve been working on, with some seriousness, the 14th episode of Station Keeping. Astute readers will discover that season one only had 12 episodes. So work does continue. Ep 14 is a double length one. So posted over two days. This is probably the result of poor planing on my part. Because SK is basically a blog post, I don’t really think of it as “writing accomplishment,” which is a shame and probably something that I need to adjust. Sigh

• Oh, and I finally have a nifty idea for a podcast, that I’m going to start work on pronto. I think I need as many good copies of the tune that Peter Bellamy set “The Pilgram’s Way,” to. I think I might need to barter with our favorite local box player.

Ok, my brain dies of tiredness.

See you on the flip side,

tycho

Ok, I don’t really have knitting for sale--at the moment--but I wanted to throw a question out to the knitters out there. I also sold a sweater this month, and wanted to rehash this experience for the rest of you out there.

So lets start with the sweater that I sold. This was a sweater that I knit pretty fast, out of really great yarn (Henry’s Attic Prime Alpaca Sport weight), in my usual two color style. It never fit, and was frankly way too warm for anything that I’d wear with regularity. It was a really well done sweater but I was never going to wear it. And it was too small for other male bodied people, and many women as well.

In fact, here’s a picture of it on a dress form at the yarn store:

And it fit a friend, and she wanted it and was willing to pay me for it. And you know, given the fact that I was never going to use it… I sold it to her. For a honest sum, but still significantly less than what I think would be a fair price.

And you know it felt pretty good. Everyone always says that you can never get enough for knitted goods. And that’s true: not counting yarn, I figure most small sweaters would cost at least 500 dollars at minimum wage. Which would be hard to get in any market that I have a connection to. Having said that, if you’re producing at a comfortable speed, and knitting time also means TV time or Podcast time (as it does with me); then, getting a lower price isn’t that good.

I often tell people in the yarn store that yarn purchases should be thought of as part of the entertainment budget not clothing/garb budget: this is because the economies of hand knitting don’t work out: If you’re cold: buy polar fleece and make a cup of tea. If you want something fun to do while you’re drinking your tea, buy yarn. This might be part of the reason that I don’t often give away my knitted things, because it’s not really about the thing for me. But never mind this, I think that getting paid a couple bucks an hour to have fun isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Nevertheless, I remain very hesitant to sell knitting. I like making sweaters, and while I think you could probably break even pretty easily on hand knit socks, it’s much harder to break even on the fine gauge stuff that I make (let’s also note, that my own wardrobe needs a few more sweaters knit at fine gauge, on top of what I’m working on/have planned for the current moment.) And of course, I don’t want to make something that I’m interested in into “work.” So I’m very keen to see what you all have to say on this….

And whats more, I’m all sorts willing to sell hand spun yarn. It’s part of my desire to knit sweaters, but I really do like knitting with very machined yarns, and while spinning is great fun, I see it as an end to itself, so I never really think bout knitting for my own projects, though it might be fun to experiment with this. Also because knitters and weavers are likely to be the people buying your hand spun, it’s easier to get closer to a fair price. Maybe?

Or am I full of hot air and I should look for a real job, and just knit for fun

Cheers, tycho

So as part of my scheme to be more productive I use a system of .tasks files that contain lists of things that need doing. because the file begins with a dot, they’re “hidden,” because this is the designation for hidden files and folders in UNIX systems, of which OS X is one. The other nice thing is that I can keep my lists out of the way, but very connected to the project files that I’m working on, without much fuss.

I have one of these lists in my blogging folder, with subjects that I’d like to cover at some point on the blog. Posts that need written, posts that are written and queued for posting. Posts that are in draft status.

And I use a little program called “GeekTool” that displays the blogging todo list, among others, on my desktop, and I look at these files from time to time.

In the blogging “posts to write” section of the file there are eight or nine posts that I often think “you know I should write,” so I go and open a new text file, get everything ready to write a post. And I start writing.

And I totally write about what I just finished reading, or my grating urge to get a new computer, or something funny I just saw and forget to muse for a while on impostor syndrome, or the problem with knitting sleeves.

Sigh.

This post wasn’t on that list either.

Sigh.

tycho out.

I really need to turn my “introspection” tag into a “journal” tag. This is of course meaningless if you read tychoish on the LJ, but no matter. It’s on my mind.

Things are continuing apace in tycho land.

My grandmother continues to hobble along reasonably well considering the truly impressive brace thing on her leg.

I got a little bit of knitting done. I figure that I’m about 40 minuets of good knitting time away from finishing the part of the neck shaping that happens before the

I realized another thing I’ve forgotten is the pattern for the last little bit of the first sleeve on the Morocco sweater. Alas. I might get to the back of the neck steek today, And I think I should be done with the body by the time I head home, if all goes well.

This means, that I will I’m once again several sleeves away from a couple of new sweaters. Sigh. It’ll be nice to do sleeves in their proper season, I think. But when I get done with these sleeves, I’ll only have one sweater’s worth of yarn left, and it’s a plain sweater: my next batch of yarn is on backorder. So if I do that, I’ll be working on socks and hats and the like for the rest of my stay (which isn’t that long, so we dont' have to worry about me being too prolific on non-sweater projects.)

My goal of getting through the yarn stash is doing pretty well then.

But this isn’t only a knitting update.

I finished my critique for the week on the online writer’s workshop that I participate in. I need to get a short story out for them, because while I’m learning a lot from the experience of being a critic, the entire experience is lacking as it is. I find that a lot of stories have really poor openings. Some are cliched, but most just start too soon, and I hate the feeling of flogging deceased equines. But it’s good practice, and the better and faster I can be at reading these stories, the happier I’ll be.

My todo list struggles seem to be really working for the moment. One of the problems I have with digital todo lists is that it’s really easy to make them too long range, and even with a great GTD app like OmniFocus, it’s still hard to separate the things you’d like to get done this year, with the things that really need to get done tomorrow. I don’t have a good answer, but I’m installing the todo.txt scripts again, and we’ll see what comes of it.

Anyway, I’m going to get to doing things, and I’m sure I’ll find something to post later…

Onward and Upward!