I’ve gotten so caught up in the “I’m home again” mindset that I forgot that I didn’t have a blog post schedule for today. But never fear, in the TealArt of the future (and present) tycho the ever present blogger is here to save the day with some thoughts about moving back home, his battles with sudo, and his projects for today and beyond.

I spent yesterday, my first full day back in hometown getting situated. Because I haven’t been here for more than a couple of weeks in 3 years, “my room” is mostly devoid of furniture, so I have taken over my mother’s desk in retaliation¹. In addition to accomplishing a number of important tasks related to finding summer employment, I was able to get a couple of computer related tasks completed.

I’ve had a long running feud with the sudo command, which has made it difficult for me to do a lot of things with the command line. Luckily my issue was relatively minor, and now I have rubygems and maruku installed on Zoe², and I really couldn’t be happier. Rubygems is a package manager that is required for a number of handy ruby scripts, and maruku, is a command-line translator for PHP Markdown Extra³. Conveniently it also translates into LaTeX and XHTML, and looks really great doing so. I need to work up a good LaTeX template for day to day usage for shorter documents that that I can push a lot of the kinds of things that I need to output, but that’s for another day, right now I’m just happy.

In other news, there isn’t a lot to report. I spent a long time driving and unpacking and what with the pomp and circumstance of graduation rituals, didn’t have a great deal of free time to write blog entries. My projects for today: write more, revise resume, write a future professor, and do some more unpacking. Other on-going blog related projects: work on growing and developing the reader/particpant base for TealArt. I think part of this has to do with my writing style, but part of it has to do with promotion, and I’m working on both of these aspects of the site, and hopefully there’ll be comments a plenty in the near future.

best, tycho

I’ve been thinking that, while the articles I write for TA are great and should continue to be a pillar of the site, shorter and more pithy posts are also worthy content. Also, I do a crappy job of interacting with other blog posts. So here’s something I saw whilst plowing¹ through my blog posts today: expect more.

Things Change:

“As I was working out in the garden today, my first thought was that as a society, we still haven’t figured out how to manage the intersection of mortality and migration.”

(from Easily Distracted.)

I think this is an incredibly well put observation. The internet, and aviation, make the world smaller in a lot of important ways, but it’s still a big place that most of us find difficult to move from place to place. As a developmentalist-to-be this is right up my ally and I think a quite interesting location for some interesting research some day. Very quickly though, my next thought is of a few science fiction books that deal with some of these issues. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, address the migration issue (among other things), and Cory Doctrow’s `Eastern Standard Tribe <http://www.craphound.com/est/>`_ looks at the effect of the internet (and “world shrinking”) on another “material reality:” sleep. Interesting stuff.

Discuss!

Cheers, tycho

As we speak, I’m finishing the second sleeve on a sweater that is much like all the other sweaters that I knit with one major difference: it uses knitted-in hems (turned hems, they’re sometimes called), rather than ribbing for all of the edges. While I think on the whole that it works for this sweater, I’ve always been rather fond of ribbings of a couple of different types. The truth of the matter is that, if knitting were perfect, if stocking stitch didn’t curl or flare without special attention, this would be moot. As it is, one must do something to one’s knitted hems so that garments to flare or roll (too much).

The options are actually pretty slim (these instructions are basic, they may vary a bit in actual practice). I’ve also included a pro-con analysis.

• Knitted-in hem: knit the hem facing on smaller needles, purl a row/round, knit the pattern. Sew down the hem facing when you’re done.
  • Pro: the pattern starts at the bottom of the sweater, the sweater’s edge doesn’t normally pull in unflatteringly.
  • Con: Hems can flair or gather really easily, and can be a bother to work.
• Knitted Ribbings: alternate consistant numbers of knitted and purl stitches.
  • Pro: Looks good, often helps shaping when you want a tappered edge. Ribbings are highly elastic.
  • Con: Can pull in too much, doe not work as well for stranded work.
• Double Sided stitches: A number of stitches look the same on the front and back, like garter and moss stitches, and won’t curl.
  • Pro: easier to work than a hem and should produce the same result.
  • Con: I’ve never been able to mange one of these without an undesirable welt or flare. Sometimes the designs can be too much for a plain sweater.
• Lace: This isn’t technically a solution, because you’d probably still do a few rows of garter stitch, but generally open work stitches will block flat without rolling.
  • Pro: Might work, and could look nifty.
  • Con: It’s lace, also not particularly suited as a cuff.

My standards operation procedure is to knit 1x1 ribbings on plain sweaters and 2x2 corrugated ribbing on stranded sweaters, and 2x2 ribbing on plain sweater cuffs.

There are of course endless variations on these themes, and this is what makes designs unique. I’m interested to learn what your preferences are. What kind of hem treatments do you prefer on your sweaters? Other sorts of garments?

Cheers, tycho

Sorry for posting this so late in the day, I spend the day driving “home-home” from “school-home” and didn’t get a chance to cue up the post last night. In any case, there’ll be a nifty post tomorrow about something knitting related, I’m sure.--ty

With school out of session this last week and a lot of free time where I didn’t have a great deal of things to do other than pack (which I desperately wanted to avoid) and worry about the future: I got a lot of writing done. I had basically eaten through my stash of TA posts, and it is once again replenished, although my cushion isn’t as big as it has been. Some of this writing is even Station Keeping related, so I can offer you a proper “Keeping Meta” post!

I drafted my first two SK installments. With luck, they’ll post as 1.1 and 1.3¹, with 1.2 as a story by one of the other authors. They’re both in the setup-prologue model, so they’re not gripping, but some measure of that is needed. This is part of the reason that 1.2 needs to be there: to break it up.

In a lot of ways this is the first time that I’ve written fiction. Sat down in front of a text editor and written fiction. In years,² really; and it felt great. I think I’m a better writer this time around, but we’ll all see in a little while. I’m not yet sure about the June 1st launch date, but I’ve made some progress and I feel like we’ll be able to start soon, even if we don’t have a writing team that’s as large as I might have wanted to start. I’ll have to see how my time falls this summer, but I’m feeling optimistic about the series even if it means that I won’t be able to write as much non-fiction/blogging stuff for TealArt as I’ve grown accustomed--this might actually be a good thing.

In addition to the drafts that I wrote, I also did some work on the writer’s wiki and made some space for discussion of character development and longer range plots (ie. story arcs.) I’m also working on permanently blocking off the writer’s wiki from public consumption, because I can’t imagine much that there is that much that wouldn’t be spoiler-y for the wiki, and frankly PMWiki’s native security system sucks. Hopefully with that enacted, things will go better. Anyway, one of the things that I wrote will, I hope, be interesting for you, gentle reader, and I’d enjoy hearing what you have to say about this:

Science Fiction, as I’ve always experienced it, is a genre of ideas. While I think dividing and separating one genre from another is not a productive venture, I think that this definition is useful for the moment. What I mean is that the reason why we write stories on alien worlds, with fantastic technologies we can only imagine, alternate histories and futures, and yes even on space stations orbiting far flung space colonies is to present an idea about the future, about the present in a digestible form. It’s also fun, and I don’t think that we should be ashamed of the “fun factor,” in SF, while remembering that it can be distracting.

If we were only interested in character development, literary games and development, representation, and so forth the space stations, fantastic technology, and alternate timelines would be distracting and superfluous.

That’s all I have folks. I’m writing this entry a bit early because this sunday (yesterday by your reading) I am graduating from college, as I’m sure you’re sick of hearing by now. Expect posts in the next few days from both hadarah and myself regarding this experience.

In the mean time, be well, tycho

As promised, though somewhat later than I had initially intended I am here to provide you with a list of links for things about hypertext that I think you might be interested in. Kind of a “further reading” section, if you will. Some of these pieces I have thoughts about and i’ll include notes regarding this, but for the most part I just have some resources that I found helpful and/or interesting. Enjoy!

• Steam Punk Magazine

• This, ironically, is what started the series. I really like what SPM has done, and their publication is really quite good looking. It’s all PDF and not “digital” except under the strictest of technicalities. This isn’t a bad thing, but when reading it I thought, “if this is the best digital production around these days and it’s not really digital, what does this say about the possibility for digital production?” And I continue to think that this is an important question to ask.

• Cory Doctorow Writes About digital Reading

• Cory Doctorow, is I think working from the very front of a lot of the questions about digital media consumption and production. Most of his work, at least what he is known for, is all about digital intellectual property, but this article about reading from computer screens is quite good.

• Persistent.info

• This is just another blog, written by a Google employee, and I include it here because I like the way that the blog posts arrange themselves in columns if the window width gets to be too big. The CSS wouldn’t work if the text were much longer than it is in the posts for this site, but it’s a nifty idea, none the less.

• Textual Instruments

• A site that has a couple of nifty looking hypertexts, worth checking out. I haven’t actually had time to read them yet, unfortunately.

• Fiction Markup Language

• This is an example of an XML-based langauge for fiction writing, and it has classes and items for characters, settings, as well as book/chapter level organization. While I really like the idea here, I fear that it could be really constraining in terms of form, and structure. At the same time, the strength of these sorts of things is in the parser, and I haven’t seen one yet, so who knows. It might be a good format option for editing software like Scrivener or other software intended for fiction-like writing.

• Hypertext Community

• Swooter, books via twitter

• Swooter is a script that will regularly serialize, via twitter, any plain text file. Someone’s using it to serialize James Joyce, but the implications and possibilities here are pretty nifty. It’s like the “read classics via email” project, but I think the aspiring hypertext author could do some rather nifty things with this tool.

• institute for the future of the book blog

• if:book is a project out of the Annenberg Center that explores and works on the future of the book (I love good naming schemes), and their blog is really top notch.

• Company Therapist Hypertext

• Academic Hack Open Access

• Academic Hack talks about open access, which I think could frame the academic discussion regarding academic publishing in a productive way. In a lot of ways, I’ve come to believe that however the academic publishing “problem” resolves itself will have important implications for how the mainstream market reforms in the future, and I’m pretty cofident that academic publishing will see reform before the mainstream. But you can argue that, if you want.

• Savage Minds: Open Access your Diss

• I think the idea of making dissertations open access is a wonderful idea. There is so much research that gets done as part of people’s doctoral programs that never sees the light of day. While I think a lot of people would cringe at the thought (and frankly I can’t go back more than a semester without cringing), it seems that getting the information out there is worthwhile. If a dissertation is supposed to form the basis of your first book/series of articles, then, indeed the instinct is to clamp down on the diss text; but having said that I think having dissertations available might make it easier for people to more productivly move beyond that text, and that could be a good thing.

• Making MediaCommons

• Kathleen Fitzpatrick, one of the creators and driving force behind MediaCommons, an interesting and very forward thinking model for academic publishing. At the present time, it’s a Media Studies project, which makes a great deal of sense, but the model can and likely will be ported to other disciplines, and I look forward to that with great anticipation.

• Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

• Allin Cottrell explains/explores the ways that the word-processor model is ineffective for constructing text in digital communication, and I think that a lot of these general themes can be extrapolated to a discussion of writing.

  Ok, that’s all I have for this time. If you have other hypertext/digital (textual) media sources, I’d love to read what you have to offer. This entry also marks the end of the regular hypertext series here, I’ll post a round up next Wednesday, but there’ll be the intro to the new series next week.

Thanks for Reading, tycho

In lieu of having anything particularly useful to say about technology, I’m going to write a version of an entry that I write every now and then that goes over the application and work flows that I use in my day to day computer life. These things change, a bit every now and then, and I think it’s interesting to keep track of these things. As always all these programs run on OS X 10.4 (tiger), and my 15 inch PowerBook G4, Zoe which I cary around with me almost all the time.

1. NetNewsWire

   This is the worlds best RSS/feed/news reader and I’m quite pleased with it generally. Because of NNW most of my reading of the internet these days is via RSS, and NNW is the program to use, and so I can’t speak too highly of it, at the same time, I feel as if the program hasn’t had many very good developments in a really long time. Having said that, it’s really stable. Because I’m so invested, I have a list of subscriptions that numbers about 500. I could probably tone this down a bit, and not all of them are active, but still, it would be hard to transition to any other program given the way that my reading habit is so centrally focused on NNW, so while I might like some other features of the program, I don’t really think that I can move away from it. I would still recommend it though. Good stuff.

2. DevonTHINK

   This is totally the mother of all applications. It’s a persona database tool, and any description of the program really doesn’t do it justice, and there are so many different ways to use the program which further complicates it. I use the program, basically, as a notebook/folder for all the things I write, all the scholarly articles that I read, and clippings from websites. The program has “AI” features which help you organize and find things when you need to, and it’s really splendid. It also works as an outliner, and it has great import/export features. I tend to use the program as the storage bin for all the textual things that I deal with day to day, and it works great. I sometimes feel as if I’m not doing enough with this program, but it’s nice to know that it’ll grow with me.

3. WriteRoom

   This program has become a key part of my workflow. I tend to write many of my drafts (like for this very article) in WR and then save it elsewhere. It’s just a plain text editor, but it works full screen, so I have it set up to print fairly big green text on a black background in a font that I’m comfortable drafting in, so I can work distraction free (also there’s a hotspot on the screen which lets you check the word count, which I find helpful), and I find that this has really helped my writing productivity.

4. Quicksilver

   This is the killer app, and I think that I’ve written enough about it here already. I use QS to do everything from updating my twitter, to organizing my files, to appending text files, to powering a host of quick “trigger” commands (combinations of keys that are asigned various specified commands), oh yeah, it’s a program launcher. QS ties everything together and it’s awesome.

5. TextMate

   This is sort of the power-editor program. I use it more for editing than for drafting, but it’s a very powerful program without being bloated and overdone. It has “packages” for Markdown, Multi-Markdown, Blogging, HTML, PHP, and just about any other programing/markup language you could think of. I use it for posting to TealArt, I use it for maintaining my todo list, for preparing files, and most of the day-to-day editing in my workflow. This is the program (along with DevonThink) that has allowed me to finally start working in text files/markdown. Because of this I have a working “text” folder that contains a bunch of text files, it’s good stuff.

6. Adium/Colloquy

   These are the basic chat programs. I don’t kid when I say that AIM is basically my cell phone. It’s how I keep in touch and contact folk. It’s almost always open, and having Adium lets me maintain connections to all the major (and some minor) networks, without having to think about it. Colloquy isn’t quite mIRC, but it’s a great program, it does everything that you could want, and I like being able to be on IRC again. That’s what internet community is all about, and I’m a big fan.

7. Mail.app

   Most of my email these days is handled through Gmail anyway, but since I always have my computer with me, and I’m more likely to have my computer, but not have internet access, than I am to have my computer but not have internet access.

8. Camino

   This has become my web-browser of choice. I like having a browser that works with the OS X service Menu and other OS specific features (firefox doesn’t), but I’ve always felt that Safari was a bit off, and Camino does a fine job at being spot-on and still working with OS. As you can probably tell from this list, I’m a big fan of mac-y programs, that have really tight integration features, hence the browser choice.

9. VLC

   It’s the video player that plays anything and everything. It’s reliable, and on top of that, it has the best software amplification of any app. This is a must-have free APP, and it really does play anything.

10. Pukka

    Pukka is just a little app that makes it easy to post to del.icio.us, which I don’t do nearly enough. I tried using another open source app to do the same thing, but I’ve found that Pukka is just a hair faster and it has a smaller visual footprint. The other program also ate several weeks of bookmarks a few times, and I haven’t forgiven it yet.

11. Think

    This is a new program that I think I will be using more in the future, although it won’t replace WriteRoom. Basically this program puts a screen behind the program that you’re currently using and all your other open windows to make it easier to concentrate on the task at hand. It’s great because it deadens all the other programs so that they aren’t as distracting or you can’t click on them as easily, but you can still see them a little so you don’t feel “out of touch”

12. Growl

    This is the master of all program distraction. Growl is a unified system notification pathway that all sorts of applications can pass messages to that float on top what ever you’re doing to let you know whats going on. You can change the style duration and type of the notifications that growl takes. I get notifications when I get a new email, when someone sends me an instant message, when something changes in an IRC channel, and when there’s a new post to twitter, among other things. You’d think that this would be really distracting, and while it was for a few days, I’ve found that knowing that I’ll get a notification (even/especially one that I tend to ignore/miss) means that I don’t check for email/IM/instant messages/etc. as compulsively or as often, so in a weird way this particular distraction means that I’m a bit more productive. A lot of “mac” programs use growl notifications, and it’s really a great little “feature.”

Ok, Folks, I fear that I may have blathered on to long. If you use another program that I’ve missed, or have any questions please leave a comment or send a message. I’m always looking for more and better programs.

cheers, tycho

I learned yesterday something about my grades, which made me rather happy, and I hope this bodes well for my future. I am of course, graduating in several days and this is still a somewhat jarring experience. I have yet to pack in earnest, though I think it won’t be much of an issue. I also have to take back a mess of library books, which is in itself somewhat frustrating, but soon, very soon I will be done.

While I will of course miss the academic climate, it’s not as if I’ve never been faced with a few months away from classes and organized learning at the beginning of the summer. I’m going to be going to school again in the fall. What I worry about most, now is ironically the more trivial aspects of institution switching, and I think this is much like I felt 3 years ago when I went to college from high school. This time I’m worried about things like picking classes for next semester, switching email addresses, and library access over the summer. I have backup email addresses and I should be getting another official address fairly soon, and my father has access to an academic library, so I should be set for the summer, but it’s still a bit strange. Ah, the little things.

I wrote a bit about this the other day, but among my other projects for this summer is reading more for fun. I’ve actually been able to work a little bit of this in this semester, and it’s a great deal of fun. I’ve read Melissa Scott’s `Trouble and Her Friends <http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Her-Friends-Melissa-Scott/dp/0812522133>`_, which was delightfully wonderful, and I’m working on Samuel R. Delany’s `The Einstein Intersection <http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Intersection-Samuel-R-Delany/dp/0819563366>`_ at the moment which is quite good, but is a good bit different from the kind of stuff that I’m used to, I’m also not done, so I can’t really comment as fully as perhaps I would like too. I’ve also downloaded a number of audio Science Fiction podcasts that I’m hoping to find a good time to listen to this summer. Also on my list (other than more Delany and Scott): James Tiptree, Jr.).

For some reason I swore off SF a while ago: it was to kid like, it made me seem too geeky at a time when that wasn’t what I was going for, I hated being pegged as a genre writer, and frankly I don’t remember what else. While this might be the case, I have to also say that I’ve gotten back to a point where I’m ok with it. I’m more interested in the imaginations of SF writers and the kinds of ideas and issues that they tend to address in their work. It also feels like home. So this explains Station Keeping and my recent and future reading plans. It’s also another part of the “what I want to do this summer, other than knit compulsively.”

That’s about all I have to report for you all today. I’d like to welcome the soon to-be-former roommate as a new TealArt blogger, there’ll be a tech article tomorrow, so I’ll see you then!

Cheers, ty

I have to say that this has been a rather light semester for me in terms of knitting. I finished one sweater, am working on the second sleeve of another sweater, and have a good start on another plain sweater. I think I also finished a pair of socks somewhere in there. That’s it.

The first sweater is the sweater that I wrote up as a design for the project that I’ve been working on all semester. . I knit this in sport weight henry’s attic alpaca prime, which is really fingering weight. The design is one that I’m selling, so you too will be able to make a version of this sweater soon. I might, even, post pictures of it sometime in the near future.

The second sweater is one that I will also write a design for soon when I finish it. I used 2-ply shetland “jumper” weight from Harrisville Designs, and it’s quite a nice sweater. It’s going to fit perfectly, and I’m actually a bit worried about how the neck is going to look. I’m frankly not sure what could be done to fix it, so I’m not going to worry and see how it looks when I wear it, if not I think some creative sewing and a zipper might help, actually. I’m quite find of the yarn and the sweater; one of the designs is something that I came up with all on my own, and it was a bear to learn, but I actually got into it eventually (but not enough to omit that pattern from the sleeves).

As for the plain sweater, I only have 9.5 inches completed yet, and I’m not sure what shape the sweater is going to take. Thus far the sweater is entirely black, using worsted weight Pattons Classic Merino yarn, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the rest of the sweaters. I have a couple of options and I nominate you to decide. Time for reader feedback. I have some of this yarn in a red color as well, and I promise to do whatever you say. Here are the options:

1. Knit my “standard” sweater. That is a drop shouldered sweater with the contrasting color for sleeves, the collar and a bit around the plackets. Red in this case. I love these sweaters, and enjoy wearing them. I also want to make a version of this sweater with teal as the contrasting color, so maybe having 4 of these sweaters is a bit too much (the original, the gray one, this red one, and the eventual teal one). This is starting to become a standard spring semester event: tycho knits a plain sweater. So maybe I could do something adventurous. 2. I’ve wanted to knit an enteric sweater for quite a while, but I think that it might be better to do this in some sort of variegated yarn, and I’m thinking that this will be the sweater that I want to take to knitting camp as part of my camp knitting. I think the sweater would look better in variegated yarn, but I hesitate. 3. I’ve wanted to try one of the Elizabeth Zimmerman saddle shoulder sweaters at some point, and this might be a good time. I’m not sure how to break up the red and black in this design, so again, probably not the best option. 4. Something else that you want.

I guess you can see where I’m leaning, but I’d love to hear ideas.

And of course there is the pair of socks that I made this semester. It seems that I don’t really have the patience to knit socks when I’m in school. I get too bored to quick. There’s not much to say about them, they’re plain, worsted weight, and grey. Lovely to wear in the cold winter air. I’ve also been carrying around a pair of sport weight Opal socks (but not working on them very much. I’m in the middle of the foot of the second sock, which is more or less where I was in the middle of January.) I think that I would really love to make stranded socks, but all of my attempts thus far have ended miserably. I’ll try again with the 2ply shetland, which I will have leftovers of this sumer, and I have a few socks of yarn lying around. I really like worsted weight socks, and it’s a shame that I keep thinking that after I finish a pair of them that I’ll somehow begin liking to make sport weight socks, because it never happens, and I just spend forever making sport weight socks that I don’t enjoy as much. sigh

Anyway, keep knitting you all. Maybe next week, I’ll even have a plan for the knitting savant(s?) Oh and next week I’ll be all graduated. eek

‘till next time, tycho