Hello folks!

It’s time for a general update about knitting and life and stuff around here in the household of garen. Heh.

My knitting is progressing well, and I feel bad about not really getting the chance to talk about my knitting here lately. While I have a number of projects in progress, I mostly just work on one project at a time and particularly lately I’ve been working on projects that take a lot of time. On the whole you probably don’t want me posting about my knitting more than once a week, at most.

I’m within a row or two of the beginning of the shoulder pattern for this sweater. Initially I was going to do the shoulders as saddles casting on provisionally at the neck, and knitting (short rows) back and forth. The pattern just has you knit around, in the same pattern but bind off half way through the repeat to give the look of saddles. This is hard to describe, but I’ve decided not to modify this much, and just go with the flow. I am changing the shaping on the neck, but that’s not a big deal. I’m really close, and I have a pretty good plan about how I’m going to do the next pattern. I’m seeing diagonals. Marina would be proud.

In other news. I have to revise a paragraph, fill out a one page form, do some printing and then I’ll be done with another application. I really really like the people I’d get to study with, and I really don’t like the place. It’s also public school, so the funding isn’t as good, and also if I were trying to get a dual appointment job or something with a classification in interdisciplinary field, it might be tough given that pedigree. But I’ll take it if I can get it, the people are really swell there.

That’s what I’m up to. More later when there are more free brain cells. I’m realizing that I’m going to be in a place to do interesting things and write fiction. Even though I have three schools left to apply for and a little bit of work left for this semester, I feel like all of the hard work has been done and there’s just a little bit more left to do. Which is good.

As I sit here our last chanukah candles are winding down. I hope you’ve all had a good holiday.

Onward and Unpward

Dave (NSFW) and I have conversations from time to time about what makes blogs successful, the concept/extent of the a-list, and what we do wrong as bloggers, what we’re working on to boost our blogs, and so forth. We’ve been in this world for years and years, and it’s interesting to have a colleague, as it were, to bounce ideas off of and think about these things as I attempt to build this blog and and myself as a better blogger. This follows loosely from my post on the future of tealart.

My first, and even recent, attempts at blogging on TealArt have failed because I would blather on about something that interested me, and there wouldn’t be much of a point and it was sort of impersonal, and, well, the archive is full of these entries.

More recently I think I’ve fallen into better space with blogging. I blog about what’s going on in my life on a fairly regular basis. I talk about technology, and I mention my knitting stuff when I have news or thoughts about this. When I started tychoish, my goal was to use the blog, as an electronic version of the moleskine that I carry around.

I’ve tried to organize my notebook carrying around habits in a number of ways, and predictably, I get back to a place where I just have one notebook at any given time, and I write in it as things happen. So my class notes, if I write them by hand are arranged by time, rather than by subject. And I’m pretty good at remembering things in relation to what kind of notes are around it, so the chronological aspect of the notebook was pretty helpful. And I do novel and fiction planning as well as todo lists and other sorts of stuff long hand, so it’s good stuff.

Since I’d always had a problem with digitizing my notebook, and I would like to have some sort of digital notebook. I thought, oh a blog is like the perfect way to be the personal notebook.

Turns out that this isn’t exactly the case, and I still keep the paper because I don’t think you all are as interested in my lists and incoherent ramblings, and because I haven’t found the perfect way to display my archives for personal use.

The other thing that I think has changed for me recently is that I have for the first time have this instinct to “journal,” which I don’t think I’ve had before. I’ve come to expect and need this space to think about ideas, and reflect on experiences. And I think that--at least for now is a good marker of success.

Onward and Upward!

I have have a computer question for the crowd.

I’m looking to lay out the design for my next sweater. Traditionally I have done these designs using Excel to lay out the grid and place the stitch pattern. It’s not ideal of course, but I have a copy of Excel and that’s worth something. Now Zoe is aging, and while I still have a copy of excel, I don’t really want to clog up the system to use it, and know there must be a better way to handle this. Any ideas? I don’t need fancy stitches like cables or any of that, just dots for contrasting colors. Cheap/free is preferable.

Another annoyance: Email. I really like email communication, but the software sucks. I like that my email is all IMAP-y right now but mail.app kinda sucks (crashes a lot, lots of overhead, syncs slow and inconsistently). I want to switch to mutt and some sort of mail-downloader combo (hopefully something that uses mbox rather than Maildir formats), and there’s a good tutorial here, but I’m not feeling particularly inclined to get to work on zoe, given the fact that I might only have her for another several months. On the other hand, I’ve found that these UNIX-y/command line type things are much easier the second time. And why suffer longer than necessary. I think moving the mail reading over to a command line thing might make my situation a little bit more tenable.

While I’m whining about technology I’d like to say that I really wish you could move/copy a list of files around in a subversion repository/working copy using a wild card ie:

$ svm move ./* ./archive/

Which won’t work. I think in the next version they’ll implement this, but I don’t know. This might be a reason to switch to git, but I have to say that the complete lack of GUI tools for git concerns. I’m good with a command-line, but if a project is of any size, with any number of folders, and very quickly, it’s good to have a picture.

Ok, I think this post is done.

Onward and Upward!

1. Aquamacs
2. xPad
3. Smultron
4. BBedit/TextWrangler
5. TextMate

What? You were expecting humor? Heh.

tycho discussion of plans for tomorrow, turn to discussion of the weather: but it’s going to be fucking cold tomorrow, and I don’t want to have to walk 4 blocks in the snow.

C.E: It is going to be bad tomorrow?

tycho: you were the one who was out there today, it was hell.

C.E.: But I think it’s going to be like 40, I hear.

tycho outraged that the weather broke: What! G-d! What the hell kind of dumb ass weather is that?

Pause.

tycho: You know, up north I’d always just dress in the morning for the weather the previous day, and it was almost always right, maybe it’d be a little bit iffy in October and April, but generally, I was ok. Here, since May, it’s like the weather is out there to fuck with you. Snow, followed by the fifties. Sixty degree weather alternating with 100 degree weather. I hope someone’s amused because I’m not!

Pause. tycho returns to reading his book.

So I posted the following snip-it to TealArt.com the other day:

TealArt is a project that I’ve been running--with some great help--more or less for the last seven years or so. It’s been a great ride, even if I didn’t have a clue what I was doing most of the time.

But recently I have felt like I’m getting a clue. Wacky, idea I know. TealArt isn’t going away though, but it is changing. All of our archives, or most of them have been imported into our current sites here and here. Links to the archives should still work, for a while, but eventually those will break as well.

I’m in the (slow) process of a redesign that will bring out a new TealArt, for the future. It won’t be a blog, per se, we have those elsewhere. But there are projects that I think need a home separate from our blogs and TealArt seems like the place for those projects.

These are the projects that I’ve been talking about in various forums for months: station keeping and science fiction, group knit along projects, and knitting designs, maybe a podcast some day.

The thing is that to do this, we need a redesign. A totally new back end for the site. And I think a clean slate will do us good, so I’m taking everything down while I do the rebuilding, and I’ll see you back here in a few weeks with a whole new site and new updates.

I’ll see you around in the mean time, and do be in touch. See you soon!

tycho garen 8 December 2007

I’ve been mentioning the great TealArt redesign of 07/08 for a while now, and I think it’s time to get this underway. But because I’m an extrovert and this is my blog I’m going to explain some of my thinking. on the subject. It’ll be below the fold, so you won’t have to read about it if you don’t want to, and I swear for all the knitters, that I’ll post about knitting soon.

Ok, so the main things that I want TealArt to do in the near future are: be a space to host station keeping, host knit-a-longs, and display/sell some of my knitting designs. All of my web-projects before tychoish have been about community, and I like that aspect of--at least my thinking about them, even if thats now how the reality works out.

While I can’t blame all of the failure/faltering that I’ve experienced in the last 7+ years¹ to the software we used, it has been a problem. Wordpress is great for powering blogs and I think it’s probably one of the best things around in terms of server-side web-apps, and it is very flexable, but I feel the more you stretch it to do things outside of its usual profile, it gets a bit… kludge-y, and awkward. Community stuff and Multi-poster setups are difficult (I actually like the 1-10 system we had back in B2, more), and if you want to mash-up various kinds of outputs it can get tedious. And that’s fine. As I’ve blathered from time to time, having one piece off software that does everything isn’t always the best thing in the world, even if it feels like it sometimes.

So knowing that, and knowing that I want to have community features (discussion forums, user profiles, etc.) to support knitting projects and SK and maybe even a podcast. I’m thinking about switching to using a cms called drupal which is a great project and there’s tons of power here, and the best thing is that it’s designed to do exactly what I want, I think.

The issue is that the learning curve is intense. Intensely intense. And I mostly know how to use and tweak wordpress in my sleep. And while I don’t much like having to tweak code, I’d rather instead to spend time knitting and writing, I’m starting to feel like knowing drupal is something that needs to happen. I have another non-tealart site that really needs drupal, and I think knowing something about the system will be quite quite helpful.

So I’m jumping down the rabbit hole, slowly. I hope. Wish me luck. Unless I chicken out, if anyone knows something about drupal I’d love to hear from you.

Onward and Upward!

-- tycho

I really like big projects, you know a big project that takes a long time to finish, like say a long knitted jacket on needles with a 2.5 millimeter diameter, or a novel. I think it’s a personality thing. I also really like the thrill of finishing big projects; I also really like the fact that projects like these can get done. It is possible to finish a sweater. It is possible to write a novel. There are a lot of things that we dedicate time to (often “work” things) that are never ending, and I think this is why the big-project thing is a useful adaptation: it makes it possible to obsess over a project, for a while, but then, eventually it’s done.

I think this is part of the reason why I need to go to graduate school: it fits my temperament. It would, however, be impossible to communicate this with the admissions committee, but perhaps in person, I’ll be able to communicate it without coming off as creepy

In any case, while I’ve been pretty productive this week, what with the big paper and the grad school application, all my other projects got moved to the back burner. So I find myself without a big primary project underway. Here’s what I’m (thinking about) juggling.

• the redesign of the TealArt website
• Breakout, the novel project I’m working on
• design of the next sweater project
• more graduate school stuff
• station keeping, season 2
• revise the Mars novella and think about publication (contingent).

I figure I have 3 weeks before I need to have a new sweater design ready to go. Season 2 of station keeping depends on having the new TealArt website ready to go. The new TealArt is something that requires a ton of work, I think, but is something I desperately need to do in order to be able to host the knit along-s that I want to be able to host. And of course I want to write, and I haven’t been able to do that for me in a while, so that’s up there. The novella edits are contingent upon getting feedback from readers. I have a really entertaining offer concerning the book publication, but again, contingent upon feedback.

So that’s what I’m up to. Hows you?

Onward and Upward!

I submitted the first of my graduate school applications yesterday. The next four will be easier. I’m really happy with my statement of purpose, less happy with the writing sample (but I’m applying to be a social scientist, so most places don’t want a sample) but my sense is that the writing sample isn’t terribly important. And all I can do is be optimistic (which I think I have reason to be) and move forward. Though I’ve done the hardest work, I have to write a new zipper paragraph for each school, the applications themselves can be done in an hour, or less. So rock on.

In other news, I have one test and one paper left to complete in my work for this semester. The paper is written, save for some updates: I’m recycling with the professors consent a paper I wrote last year on clinical issues related to death and dying, so I need to make it less clinical and more developmental, but that’s a few hours of changes and not a lot of bother. The test is over the two parts of psycholingustics that find most interesting: language development and linguistic relativism. So that’s not too fearsome.

In terms of knitting, I’m working on the Morocco jacket. I’ve made it past the arm hole shaping, so the shoulders are fully set it, which means that it grows much faster length wise. There are 250 stitches + steeks as opposed to 400 stitches + steeks. I’ve decided to do the shoulders in a more direct way, which I think more closely resembles the pattern as written. I’m currently leaning towards making the armholes a bit longer than I would on a normal sweater because as a jacket, I think it needs to fit over a normal sweater. And it’ll look more like the sweater in the book that way.

Funny thing is that I’m mostly just knitting using the chart and the picture of the finished sweater, and going from there.

I’m thinking it would be fun to have a sweater knit along where everyone was given a chart and some pictures of a finished sweater and then everyone went about copying it in their own way, and the knit-along community would support people with the basic elements of sweater construction. Might be fun.

Anyway, I do have some things to get done, but sorry for the absence, and I promise that I won’t disappear for so long again. Though fellow bloggers, I must confess with some measure of guilt that I haven’t opened the news-reader in almost a week, so, I’m behind (unless you’re on LJ, LJ is sanctioned procrastination, and therefore doesn’t count. )