(In Fairness, my complaint about fingerless gloves is not that I don’t think they’re useful, just that I cannot imagine having the tolerance to make gloves and then not finish the fingers. In this case, it’s about the process not the product.)
tycho: hey `andy <http://tychoish.com/anduril>`_: sup tycho: not much andy: fun stuff andy: bought a 320Gb external seagate and trying to get all my mp3s transferred but its not cooperating tycho: :( tycho: I am downloading xcode tools so I can get mac ports to work so that I can upgrade ruby so that I can blog from textmate tycho: also, I was about an inch away from upgrading the tychoish wordpress, but cyberducky crashed, so I stopped
Pause.
tycho: … silence… andy: lol
And now for a comedic interlude.
I love the drawing nonsensical graphs on index card meme. It needs to come back. I’m going to go look for for more.
You heard it here first, with apologies to Merlin Mann.
Today is the first day that I’ve had in a long time without the GRE hanging over my head. Sure I have a lot to do, and that is daunting, but it’s not oppressive in the same way. I’m not claiming that this calm I feel is particularly real but things have lined up in the right way to give me a few days off…
Last night I finished reading the Samuel Delany book that I’ve been working on for, far too long. I have a pile of other things to read now, and I think I’m going to try and dive in to a short story collection and see how long it takes me to get fed up with that.
In other news I finished spinning my fiber stash. Which may sound impressive, but I basically worked through everything that I had that I was going to spin two summers ago (I must confess to abandoning a pound of soy silk to R.’s much more impressive fiber stash.) And then I bought a mere 6 ounces of fiber (tencel merino none the less), which constituted my stash. Actually as I think about it, there’s a sweater out of my handspun that I’m making very slowly, that has some fiber in the project bag for when I run out of yarn again: so maybe I’m not quite completely out of handspun.
Anyway, this morning I finished plying the last of this 6 ounces of tencel/merino that constituted the bulk of my fiber stash for most of the last year. I think the total yardage was in the end 415 yards. I have no clue what I’d do with it, yet.
This leaves me planning for my next spinning adventure. I’m thinking of buying some white roving and spinning it up, and then finding someone (you know who you are! don’t worry, if this is in fact a real plan, it’s a long way off. Many moons.) to dye it in exchange for some percentage.
This last spinning accomplishment raises the precepts that I could conceivably--in the not too distant future--spin yarn for my own knitting, and not just a pair of socks, or a hat, or even the occasional bulky sweater that takes years and that I’m constantly avoiding, but the kind of two-color sweaters that are my normal fare. The questions is, do I really want to do that?
You all can feel free to answer that, but I don’t really feel like I’m making sweaters that just need to be made out of handspun, and I think it might even be easier to relax if I were knitting with yarn that I knew I could always just buy another skein of at work/a LYS/webs if it ever came to that. And given that, I’m thinking that selling or giving away my handspun is really the way to go. We’ll see.
Oh, and there is a movement afoot to take picture of things for ravelry this afternoon, so there will be pictures. Also, additional blogging, I’m thinking.
I finished the long awaited first round of edits for the novella I wrote earlier this year, Knowing Mars, this morning. I’ve sent out a draft (after some failures of my email sending ability) to 6 initial readers. Some or all of whom read this website. (Thanks folks, and sorry for the mess of emails).
If you wanted to read an early copy of the novella and haven’t drop me an email and I’ll get you a copy of it. I should warn you that reading such an early draft could potentially be arduous, and there’s no real reason rush into reading this version. There will be other drafts.
One part of the project after I got the edits done, was to recompile the files into LaTeX (a markup langauge for making pretty documents with the TeX typesetting engine.) I’ve gotten pretty into LaTeX these last few months, because it means I don’t have to use Microsoft products (it’s a pragmatic issue, they don’t run well on Zoe and the interfaces don’t work well), the documents look better, and thanks to some templates I’ve come up with I can write papers and letters (and so forth) in consistent, easy to read forms much more quickly than I ever did when I was a word user.
I mean LaTeX isn’t the end all and be all. I’ve still not exactly figured out how to insert images into documents, nor have I figured out how to use the beamer class to do presentations (but I hate doing presentations with slides, so it’s not a big loss,) but I think I’m making progress, and some day I’ll be a master of LaTeX.
One of the nifty things about LaTeX is that, I have yet to come across a document format that someone else hasn’t already created a class for. APA papers? Check! Every other Academic Style? Check1! Letters? Check! And my latest discovery? The manuscript format demanded by the Science Fiction Writers of America (and many of its varriants)sffms Check! The issue is that I had to spend a little bit of time reformatting how I did section headers so that it would all play nice. That’s really my fault for writing in markdown to start with and then using maruku to convert to LaTeX. This leads me to my next non-geek-speak topic below the fold:
I’m thinking about switching the formating of some of my files away from doing everything in Markdown, and just going full boar into LaTeX particularly since the next book is in it’s beginning stage. The main reason for doing this is that Maruku, translates a few things oddly, particularly in places where quote marks precede italics. In terms of just writing the main difference (other than bolds and italics) are in quotation marks. It’s not a big deal, and actually as I’m thinking about it, there are some good reasons to keep things in markdown, but the thought lingers.
One thing that would be generally nice is if any of you out there in geekland know where I might learn to write a script (either in ruby/python/perl/etc or in bash with sed) that can string together a series of standard find and replaces? It shouldn’t be that hard, but I’m that much of a beginner.
Anyway. That’s what’s I’m thinking about. Also, I did like 10 subversion commits this morning, which is way more than I’d done in a long time. I’m going to get going. Thanks for reading. More coming later.
Actually, I think the fact that it’s mostly academic and publishing geeks who write LaTeX styles, is a great thing for the format/language. ↩︎
I’m trying out a new Monospaced font called “Droid Mono” which is Apache liscenced (yay!) and pretty nifty. It was designed for the googlephone, Android, which I fear may be a flop (it puts too much authority/freedom in the hands of the cellphone makers, who I’m convinced are truly evil). But the existence of a really good monospaced font makes me happy.
I know this is supposed to be a knitting blog. My sweater is now about 17" long. In the end It’ll be a 30 inch jacket, so I haven’t even started the arm holes. I ran out of my first skein of the lighter color last night and have decided to switch over to some sleeve knitting, but I’m well into the second skein of dark. I suspect that I’ll need to order more dark yarn to finish this project.
This puts me in a yarn buying mood, which is odd because I work in an awesome yarn store, but the yarn company in question wont sell wholesale, and the price is pretty good. My mom wants this yarn to make a shawl, and I think I’ll probably get a couple of colors for another sweater because there’s a bulk discount.
Initially I had thought that this was odd yarn and was somewhat disappointed by it, but as I’ve knit more I’m pretty pleased with it. No signs of pilling quite lofty, and finer than shetland so it doesn’t look as blocky. I mean I still really like shetland, but, it’s nice.
I have class today but there isn’t anything due, so it’s pretty low stress, I also have chores to do, and I need new ipod headphones, so we’ll see how that works out. (For the record, I’ve been saying ip-od in my head rather than i-pod.)
Anyway, I fear this madness has gone on long enough, I’ll be back later, I trust.
…mostly that I don’t do it enough.
I’m about 20 pages from the end on Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 novel, and I have to confess that I don’t entirely get it, but I’m enjoying it quite throughly. I’m also, thankfully not worried about groking it in its fullest. This is a book that I expect to reread a number of times, and a book that I think will add an interesting dimension to a class discussion about linguistic relativism, so I suspect I’ll get plenty of chances to revisit this text.
Despite my failure to grok the book entirely it’s been a good learning experience. Delany is a great writer. Really great. At the same time, this is a pretty structurally straightforward book, and there isn’t literary experimentalism to get in the way of the plot or the characters, and that’s the way I like it. That’s what I like so much about science fiction.
Anyway, I really like reading, and particularly at times like this, where I’m sort of scattered brained and dealing with a lot of demands on my time and energy reading fiction can be really good for getting focus and inspiration back, when the getting seems hard. It’s a shame, then, that I don’t read nearly as much as I might like to. It always seems like the internet or knitting or writing or spinning or academic work gets in the way, but that’s foolish. Really foolish.
After I finish this Delany, I have a Tiptree to read, but it might be time to read a more recent Melissa Scott book. We shall see what I grab for.