1. Socks
2. Scarves
3. Any Cozies
4. Swatches
5. Mobius Anything

So, I finished the cap that I was working on earlier evening. I’m not sure that I blogged about this, but I’ve been itching to knit hats for a while now (the old hats were 2+ years old, and hats wear out and get icky and lost faster than say, sweaters).

It’s nice. black, understated. It’ll get a lot of wear.

I had been putting the Morocco sweater on hold until after the finals push was over, but with the hat over, I’m without knitting projects. November has been the month of finishing things: the socks, the hat, the two plain sweaters from this summer.

The end result of this, is that I don’t really have anything to knit. There is of course the stranded sock that I was working on in July that is in desperate need of some ripping back, and it’s a sock, and I’m very much not in a sock mood.

So I think I’m going back to knitting on the sweater. It’s weird to not have projects underway. It’s been so long since I’ve cast anything on, for real. Weird.

Oh, Right! Joe, you’ll be happy about this. I have the grey sweater to knit. I think I’m going to go pull that out of the pile and take it with me to class today. It’s good and mindless.

Actually, one thing I fear with the grey sweater is that if I work too much more on it, I’ll be in danger of being back in sleeve hell, and those sleeves, with their plain stocking stitch might just send me to the loony bin. I’m thinking of running a cable or three down the top of the sleeve and making a shoulder strap out of it. Having said that, I haven’t actually knit a stitch on that since say, April, and I haven’t even looked at it since early June, so I’ll tell you later when I have have more… empirical data.

Onward and Upward!

Today has been one of those days where nothing really seems to go right. The knitting is all fouled up, and I had

My knitting got caught on something and sprung a little catch. It’s actually kind of disappointing, and reveals that I have no clue as to how to graft or kitchner pieces of knitting together. I think it has something to do with knitting backwards and having the stitches mounted in the wrong dirrection. The best I can ever hope for is reverse stocking stitch grafting, and even that it’s sort of spotty.

I’m so going to be that person in 30 years who comes in to a yarn shop and pays one of the gurus to graft stuff. It’s sort of pathetic. I knit on the grey sweater today, and I find it intoxicatingly relaxing: How weird is that? Plain stocking stitch. On very small needles with very small yarn. I’d say, I probably have less than two inches to go until the neck shaping starts, and then less than 3 inches from there until the shoulder straps start. And like I said it’s intoxicating.

But enough about the knitting, perhaps the larger issue is that in my paper writing today I ran into a few issues with LaTeX when I went to compile everything, and I still don’t have a real clue what went wrong.

Here’s what I can tell:

1. I installed latex2rtf from MacPorts a few weeks ago, because it seemed lie a good tool for interfacing in the rest of the world. MacPorts, installed a different installation teTeX (or something), where I had previously been using the macTeX distribution, or maybe I was using something from Fink. UNIX nerds will probably disown me for having a really crappy set of paths and install locations. Sorry. It is coming back to bite me in the ass. 2. Whatever happened, all of the bibTeX stuff (thats the package that handles the bibliographic database and complies all the references and what not,) and it appears the APA formating style file is also gone, or at least not accessible to whatever TeX engine that I’m using. 3. This of course can be fixed by throwing the .cls file in the same directory as .tex file that I’m trying to compile. The same thing goes for the citation packages. I’ve been using the nat-bib, or at least I think I’ve been using the nat-bib citation package because it works a little more clearly and flexibly than apacite. Again, I got something that made really pretty APA manuscripts and I didn’t mess with it. Not sure what’s up with that. 4. My paper printed and for some reason jammed the cite-key in front of all the reference page items. To which I can only say “WTF?” Furthermore it errored (ok, ok, it produced an error) on line 214 of apa.cls (the bibliographynewpage flag/option or some such, monkeying with that code did nothing from what I could tell.

I finally just gave in and let it be, but I’d really like to be able to have the ability to produce clear and straightforward documents. Really really like to be able to do that.

Also, my email isn’t healthy at all, and I don’t have the clue as to what caused this. Gmail released new features today (group chat, don’t you all get up at once now,) and if that’s the reason that it’s been all screwy, I’m going to be pissed. Very Pissed. Also very sorry if you’re trying to get a hold of me. If you try the email, and it isn’t working, leave a comment here, and I should see it pretty quick.

To add insult to injury AIM is being cranky, and since I use AIM the way most people use the phone, this adds an additional layer of frustration to the day.

I think I’m going to get a book at hope that I don’t run into a paper cut issue.

Other work continues apace, I suppose. Sorry for posting the entries today out of order.

Having sworn of socks on anything other than DK/worsted weight yarn, I have a little bit of a sock yarn stash to burn off.

Ok I only have one skein.

It’s really pretty and I bought it while visiting Sheri at the Loopy Ewe. a few months back. She’s supper cool by the way.

But the purchase was totally a moment of weakness.

It’s ~400 yards of sport weight. The label says it’s “Jubilee” from Misty Mountain Farm in color “Ocean Wave.”

Leave it to me impulse buy, yet another skein of teal yarn.

Anyway, so I have sock yarn to burn off.

I’m thinking of making an enterlac style dubblemossa. These are the hats where they’re basically a long enclosed head-sized sausage, that you fold in on itself and it covers your ears. Usually they’re stranded. I want to do one with enterlac. the yarn’s soft and it will be awesome.

No more questions now, I’ll write a pattern at some point. Maybe.

So like any dutiful designer I did a guage swatch, mostly because I’ve never knit with this yarn or anything like it. Super-wash can be a little funny, and after enacting the following scene a few times I thought it was a good idea

tycho: So here (Tosses yarn) I’m thinking of making a hat. FellowKnitter catches: Oh this is pretty, what kinda hat. tycho: A sort of enterlac/watchclock/dubblemossa sort of thing. FellowKnitter looks quizzical tycho: So I’m thinking of casting on, about 128 stitches using US size 3 needles, how does that sound? FellowKnitter: That’s a lot, did you do a gauge swatch. tycho: No. I’m asking you. FellowKnitter: Don’t be a dumbshit, do a gauge swatch tycho: whatever, grumble.

So I did, and I got the very nice gauge of 8 stitches to the inch. Multiplied it by 22, after measuring my head (23.5 inches incase any of you want to make me a hat) and cast on (provisionally) 176 stitches. It was a pain in the ass.

I knit two rows.

I measured the gauge: 6 stitches to the inch.

Now before you say, tycho, it’s only two rows over a provisional cast on, how can you be sure.

The texture of the knitting was completely different.

When I took it off the needles, the (16 pound) cat could have stood inside of it.

Now here’s for the irony. 6 stitches per inch times 22 inches equals. You guessed it 132. Which is damn close to my original suggestion.

Just saying. Use your head and don’t succumb to peer pressure.

Lest you think this is yet another mac versus linux versus windows versus OS/2 Warp FreeBSD post, it’s really about moves to “Operating Systems,” that exist within programs, not operating systems in the classic sense.

So I posted a while back about how there seems to be an application development trend away from desktop operating systems and towards developing applications that can be used online in a web browser.

Basically I thought that though exciting, a lot of these apps were slow, hard to use, and that truth be told most browsing software was flawed (slow, non-standardized,) and so forth. Despite the fact that there’s more bandwidth floating around and the fact that people have gotten better at writing server side and host side applications.

Also earlier I posted a, mostly comical, list of five things that you can do in emacs but probably shouldn’t. To subtitle this a little bit, emacs is one of the grand old text editors, written around a program language from the 50s (LISP), it’s incredibly powerful, customizable program, it’s free, and it’s a program that a lot of the people who write programs use. So even though, the best word I have to describe it is absurd, it gets a lot of attention. Anyway, long story short, people have written extensions (in LISP!) that gets emacs to do all sorts of things in addition to writing text/code. Like, there are scripts to check your email in emacs, games that you can play in emacs, scripts that fetch web pages in emacs, IRC clients that run inside of emacs, and so forth. If I were a huge enough dork, I think actually I could probably get some of the functionality of every program I’m running at this moment, as a script inside of emacs.

I hope you’re seeing where this is going, at least a lot faster than I did. While I’m not a huge emacs dweeb, I have a certain sort of respect for working that way: once you learn your text editing system (and after all, most of what we do is edit text) you don’t want to move out of this environment. Particularly if there’s a learning curve as steep as emacs.

Initially I thought that the shift towards using the web browser as a sort of lack luster runtime for “new” applications, was about lazy programers, and a sort of mass delusion, but really, I think it has more to do with people not wanting to leave their comfort zone, the application that they already spend a lot of time in, in the same way that urdweebs don’t want to leave emacs (or vim, and so forth.)

Anyway, it’s cool that clicked, I’m back to figuring out how to install mutt on OS X so I can more automatically integrate my mail drafting into TextMate, and be done with Mail.app for once and for all. Maybe after I’m done with the semester. Heh.

Onward and Upward

Overheard in a conversation between andy and myself in the not so recent past:

tycho: I have a few things to say to you about your site andy: oh? tycho: 1: you don’t link to me. andy: patience tycho: 2: you’re archives and about pages don’t work.¹ andy: whatever, shut up. I’ll get there. tycho: 3: that design was one we had back in the greymatter days. andy: heh, you know me… I’m slow to get to things…

I’d say…

1. Add superfluous consonants, particularly X and Z.
2. Add superfluous vowels, or overuse “y” as a vowel
3. Append numbers to names
4. Insert Mid-Word stops using the apostrophes.
5. Name alien’s utterly mundane names like “Jim.”

Ok, so maybe this is a poorly titled entry, after all, at least theoretically we can smell stress. Perhaps my obscure allusion to “can’t you smell christmas” and the holiday season to the end of semester stress that is so typical to my life it seems is lost.

Actually it’s sort of weird. The school I’m at now, started a few weeks before my alma mater typically did (and does), so I’ve sort of been “off” rhythmically for a lot of the semester. It’s of course most profound now, when my body thinks there’s another two and a half/three weeks of classes, when there’s really just one and a half. And no Alliance wine and cheese party either!

It’s finally turning cold for real. I can wear sweaters without getting awkwardly hot midday when it unsuspectingly spikes from a low in the 30s to 65s. Insanity I tell you.

I’m slowly writing new little blurbs to the new TealArt site, and I have an installation of the new CMS that works. Up next: more blurbs, and some design meshing. Nothing big, but it’ll probably take some time.

I have two big papers (and two small ones) to write plus my statement of purpose. I have the core of the later done, but it still needs, as smurry so keenly pointed out, to have the soul sucked out of it. The small papers don’t worry me, and I’m choosing to view my bigger papers as re-workings of previous papers, though I think at least in one case, I’m so the only one who will see the connections. As it should be I suppose.

Knitting continues abreast. I’m now 6 rounds (of 400 stitches) away from the underarm point on the Morocco sweater--I know I need to get newer pictures of this one up. This leaves me at a bit of a conundrum, with regards to how I’m going to proceed. I’ve thought for a number of weeks that I’d post a blog poll on the subject, but I think in the interim I’ve mostly made up my mind. So I’ll probably still ask for your opinion, but be warned that I might not listen.

Because moving onto the next stage will require some thinking only a few calculations, I suspect that much of my knitting between the end of the week and December 10th will consist of very simple projects, like hats and what not: I don’t know if I’ll have the brain energy for anything else.

Speaking of brain energy, I think I’m writing this on brain energy that’s already been allotted elsewhere, so I better run before an auditor comes along. Be well, and thanks for reading.

Onward and Upward!