I feel like I should start this post off in a very Garrison Keilor sort of way. Maybe something like, It was the first cool day of the season and it you could smell cold, like an old friend that had been absent for too long.

Cliched though it may seem, I think it’s true.

I got some writing done this morning, and I think I’m pretty pleased with it, and though I’m in the middle of a tough sequence, I like what I’m doing. I’m writing this part where the narrator is in the main action, which I realize I haven’t yet done. It’s a scene that I meant to write much earlier in the story, but there were other things that needed to be done then, and it make sense here. I like the way that the narrative voice of the story is flexible, even if this section is a bit harder to write.

In other news, sort of rethought how TealArt is going to work as we go forward. Rather than be a blog in it’s own right, it’s going to be a portal--and umbrella--for a host of other projects, including this site, a very similar one that I’m pushing Chris to start, as well as projects like Station Keeping, the knitting project that I’ve been blathering about, and maybe a roundtable-style podcast that a group of blogging friends and I have talked about.

This is really just a reflection of the way that it’s been for a long time, I’m just being more explicit about it, and I’ve tweaked how people enter the site so to shape this impression a bit, and I’m kind of happy with this. It solves a lot of angst, and is on the whole a good thing. I like how this frees up a lot of time in my life to concentrate on tychoish, which is a great deal of fun, and my fiction writing, which is really important to me.

The other thing that this lets me do, is be a contributor to other blogs, and projects, which is something that I’ve not had a lot of mental energy left over for, because I’ve been so intent on doing my own site. While this isn’t a bad thing, and indeed rising tides do raise all boats, I think it’s unfair to divide readers' attention with so much information, and I think at the moment it’s more important to foster a collaborative spirit than it is foster an “every man for himself” kind of approach.

It just feels right. Like the first whiff of cold in the fall. I’m ready for this: both the coming winter and this next stage of creative/development.

From an earlier conversation with andy:

andy: they put bluetooth hardware in the ipod touch.

tycho: that’s cool.

andy: but it’s disabled.

tycho: someone will hack it

andy: or apple will charge for it.

tycho: they don’t do that, really, remember the 802.11g/n upgrade, and the iPhone Refund.

andy: fair enough. I kid.

tycho: I know… it’s better than linux where, they’ll make it visible, and it’ll work… about half the time, if you’re standing on your right foot.

andy: lol, yep: but you HAVE to stick your tongue into the electrical socket first, and then send them the dtrace afterwards to improve compatability which will break it with the previous human bodies

tycho: heh

In no particular order:

1. I feel like there should be blogging this morning, I however:
   • have a test to study for.
   • don’t have a good TealArt entry for today
   • don’t have anything pithy to say here yet.
2. I need a pair of black slacks. Bad. Also, laundry.
3. Though unconfirmed, I think I’m going to “go out” with the boy this evening. The question that lingers in my mind is, why I’m on the whole so resistant to this. I like being social, and outgoing, and I’m not always productive; but I don’t want to. Sigh.
4. I have yet to loose points on a graded piece of writing, but I (somewhat comically, if you know me) lost points for not talking more in a class. I’m still in A territory, so no worries.
5. When did I turn out to be a grade whore?
6. I wrote 1,100 words yesterday on the novella. I should be hapy about that, but I feel like it should have been more like 1,500.
7. Visor, an app by Alcor, the guy who did Quicksliver, is amazing and rocks my world.
8. I started a new sweater, and have cast on and knit the first pattern row. It came out right on the first try, and by g-d it should be the right size. I’d say that I’m following a pattern here, but that isn’t strictly true. I’m allowing myself to be inspired by a pattern, and I’m following someone else’s chart.
9. I think in the process of starting the new sweater, I might have injured my right hand slightly.
10. I have switched into a different, slightly smaller bookbag, and it makes me happy, though I know I’m going to outgrow it pretty quickly as my knitting project grows.
11. I think it’s pretty cool that iPod touches have bluetooth in them.

That’s all for now, I’m going to go pretended to be useful elsewhere. I’ll see you all later.

I have a lot of memories of being the last person in the class during tests. It was almost embarrassing, mostly because always felt that the people who got done so much earlier did a lot better than me. These days, however, I get to questions that I don’t know on tests, and I’m like “well here’s my best shot,” and then I’m done, without the fretting, and the stress. Is that what everyone else has been doing since the 3rd grade and I’m just now catching on?

Doing the Career Meme.

On the whole, I think it’s probably pretty accurate, though there are some things in the 11-40 options that I like more than the options in the 1-10 range. So be it.

1. Human Resources Specialist
2. Industrial-Organizational Psychologist
3. Curator
4. Professor
5. Anthropologist
6. Foreign Service Officer
7. Clergy
8. Addictions Counselor
9. Humanitarian Aid Worker
10. ESL Teacher
11. Foreign Language Instructor
12. Sport Psychology Consultant
13. Rehabilitation Counselor
14. Lobbyist
15. Historian
16. Archivist
17. Computer Trainer
18. Computer Programmer
19. Mediator
20. Criminologist
21. Director
22. Director of Photography
23. Multimedia Developer
24. Association Manager
25. Driving Instructor
26. Religious Worker
27. Community Worker
28. Activist
29. Communications Specialist
30. Corporate Trainer
31. Political Aide
32. Public Policy Analyst
33. Print Journalist
34. Writer
35. Business Systems Analyst
36. Truck Driver
37. Market Research Analyst
38. Critic
39. Gerontologist
40. Database Developer

I must confess something: I haven’t been knitting as much lately as I generally do. This may surprise some of you, but I have good reasons, and I think that I’m starting to get back into things. For starters it’s been really rather warm around here for a while, and I haven’t really wanted to get under a warm sweater, and I’ve failed at a lot of attempts to start new and projects. Also--and this is my own damn fault--but I have failed in my usual good practice of knitting sleeves efficiently: I’m something like 5 sleeves short of three new sweaters.

But the weather has, I think officially broken, and I’ve figured out how/what to do for my next sweater projects. I’ve also made some peace with my sleeve issue.

Part of the sleeve problem is that I knit two plain (all stocking stitch) sweaters in quick succession, in part because I wanted to have an easy “demo” sweater to work on at camp, and in part because I was eating through some yarn that had been in the stash too long. End result: four plain (boring) sleeves. I knit one of these sleeves without much fuss, but most of my plain knitting this summer has been focused on sock knitting, and they’re heavy sweaters, so I don’t want them on my lap, and I’m not keen on the idea of dragging them along in my bag.

My main project this summer as been a color work sweater. I was somewhat late starting the sleeves because I was short the requisite needle, but after a false start I was off. I realized, however, that I had decreased way way way too much. Those that know me will be surprised to find that I actually ripped back several inches to see if I could fix the problem. So I started knitting this time, with a slower rate of decreases (that eventually stopped) and now while the sleeve will now fit a human wearer, it still looks a little funny. Crap. Going to have to rip that one back, but I don’t have the stomach for it.

The other impediment to my knitting progress this summer, was that I started a sweater that, as it turns out, was planned for a gauge that had two more stitches per inch than reality. The sweater would have been four inches smaller than I need. So, taking this as a gauge swatch, I’m going to cast on 397 stitches, provisionally, for a sweater, inspired by one of Joyce Williams' designs in Lativan Dreams. I’m not really following Joyce’s expert directions, except in the most generous of senses, but I don’t think she’d expect me to.

I also, may or may not have gotten two more pounds of the nicest gray yarn you’ve ever seen, and I’m aching to use it, and if nothing else that will inspire someone to knit through the some of the other things in the queue.

Rather than knit a lot these last few months, I’ve done some good computer work and, at least as of today, I’m very close to the half way mark of my novella, and I continue to be excited about this project, so it’s good to be working on it. I don’t have a record of the exact start date, but I think I started around August 11th, and if I hit the half way on Saturday or Sunday, that means that I’ll finish before NaNoWriMo, which I think I’m going to write a short story for this year.

Anyway. That’s enough rambling for one day.

Be Well!

Here’s a good tip/hack for my quandary about backing up Mail.app email messages into a text-based format outside of the Core Data database, as part of my project of becoming less entangled with Mail.app.

Mail.app GTD Perfection - Koru Productions ExpressionEngine Development:

A mostly unknown feature of Mail.app is its ability to export a Mailbox into the everything-reads-it MBOX format. Perhaps it’s the glaring lack of an “Export Mailbox” menu option. But in true Apple tradition, just drag your Mailbox to the folder on your drive that you wish to export to. That’s it.

(from Koru Productions.)

The “wiki” is defined by the ease of editing: the software makes it very easy for people (with editing privileges) to make changes to pages through some sort of web interface. They also create very useable content management systems that keep all “files” in order--usually stored in some sort of database--and allow for some sort of more “human readable” markup, like Textile, or my favorite markdown. This doesn’t sound very different from, say the WordPress site that powers this site, and indeed some really great wiki programs can output blog formats. What has made wikis so popular, and noteworthy is that often “those with editor privileges” is everyone who reads the site, rather than a group of editors; although the technology would allow for this model as well. While I think it’s too simplistic to just say “it’s a wiki: everyone can edit it,” to a large extent thats true.

The fact of the matter is, though, that not everyone does participate in these projects. Lets take Wikipedia for a moment: while lots of people have accounts with wikipedia, and may make an edit every now and then (I’ll include myself in this category; I usually just fix quibble-y things if I come across them, which I don’t often, but I mainly just comment on the “talk pages”), but wikipedia has a core editor-base of only a couple of (several) thousand. Which in comparison to the millions that use wikipedia is really a fairly small proportion. The same with projects like Firefox or even GNU and Linux, I’d assume. In fact if we consider wikipedia an open-source project (and we should,) in terms of adoption and contribution rates, I’m sure that it’s probably among the most successful.

What’s more, I think it’s important to note that just because open-source projects are, well, open to everyone and lots of people use them, many fewer people contribute to the projects, and projects have a fairly centralized and hierarchical organizational structures, which was surprising (and heartening) when I first figured it out. Now before any hippy types¹ get their undies in a twist about how such structures impinge upon freedom “freedom,” this is where the Share-Alike and propagating qualities of the “free” licenses come in handy. If the “central” project falls behind a group of users expectations or a group of users want to develop the project in a different direction, they can take a “fork” of the program/project in that direction. Also, I think it’s worth noting that a lot of open source software projects are developed to a large extent by large software companies that may or may not produce proprietary project as well. But I digress, I think that the hierarchical and structured quality of an open source (software/knitting) development community is a good thing: these are the kind of conditions that allow work to get done on a project: unstructured projects aren’t easily productive.

So what does this mean for a knitting project? I think that it means that, community needs to come before infrastructure. It means that while the barriers to entry need to be low, there needs to be framework for different kinds of contributions and tasks carved out so that when people come to the project they can tackle any kind small granular task rather than an impossible whole. Also it means that there needs to be a core group of people in regular contact with each-other who are responsible for maintaining some of the logistics/framework, and setting agendas that the larger community can address. You cannot, by contrast, just say “ok, have at” and assume that the community will know what to do, and be able to organize around a loose framework. And this really goes for any kind of project, software, knitting, or fiction. It’s a problem that I’m forever working on, as I’m sure longtime readers of the site will recognize.

If it isn’t clear by now, I’d like to start some sort of OSK (open source knitting) project, and I’m starting to work out a few of the details, but if I think we’re a ways off of this. If you would like to participate in this, I’d love to hear from you (email: tycho@tealart.com), and although it might be putting the horse before the cart, but I think next time I’m going to start drafting out some plans and structure (mostly in terms of the content), so that I at least can conceptualize how this would go.

I look forward to hearing from you, and as always, I remain, tycho