I couldn’t really start a series of essays on TealArt about knitting, without writing several hundred words about the knit stitch. Before you close the window, hear me out. The knit stitch is really kind of awesome. You’ll be glad you stuck around.

I’m not sure who said “there’s only one stitch in knitting, you can just do a thousand things to it,” and that’s besides the point, I think. It’s a truth of knitting: there really is only one stitch, and while you can do a thousand things with it, I’m content to just do a couple of dozen with mine. One would think that teaching knitting would be easy given it’s apparent simplicity: if there’s only one stitch, how much is there to learn. When you hand someone a set of needles and some scraps of yarn and the make their first lumpy garter stitch rectangle (or whatever), it doesn’t seem like knitting can really be that simple. But it is.

I have found no way to teach someone “stitch theory,” a term that I just made up, by which I mean the fundamental concept of how the “loops” of yarn interact with each-other to form the “one” knit stitch. It takes time, repetition and a bit of encouragement to look at your knitting, to understand what’s going on, as you knit. This of course sounds absurdly obvious and a bit odd coming from someone who routinely reads or watches television whilst knitting, but I have no clever way of communicating this skill. It can be learned and even encouraged, but I’m not sure if it can be thought. Once you understand how knit stitches work and build upon each-other, its easier to start thinking structurally about how garments fit together and how to shape garments to fit your needs. But the granule understanding is really important.

Armed with a firm understanding of the knit stitch, it becomes possible to think about building things with knit stitches: sweaters, hats, socks, mittens, gloves, house-cozys, and so forth. Later in the series, I’ll muse about some of the finer points of design and building, but for this introductory episode, I’ll focus on the larger picture. One of the most valuable skills that I’ve been able to develop as a knitter is “mental knitting.” Not, mental knitting, what I’m talking about is to knit in your head, as a way of test knitting. If you know how a stitch forms, and how knitted fabric behaves you can then begin to knit in your head (at blinding speeds!) as a way of testing out your next move. Because knit stitches, how ever you form them, are basically little blocks, if you can invasion how they’ll fit together, it makes it easy to implement, design, or alter a pattern: because of this I’ve occasionally felt that there was an under-respected connection between knitting and architecture. In any case, all this grows out of knowing how knit stitches “work” which in tern grows out of being able to really watch your knitting.

In terms of teaching this, I have substantially less to offer. On a personal level, I think my ability to knit in my head grew out of learning how to fix mistakes, and out of my inside out and backwards way of knitting--I knit in the contrary direction to the way that many people knit--but this is not the only way for the connection to form but it is one way. In an effort to encourage this kind of understanding I’ve tried to encourage to new knitters to seek out new skills, shapes, and kinds of knitting as quickly as they feel comfortable. If knitting is simply one stitch, one way to come to understand the knit stitch and how to “read” it is to begin to experience its many variations. With luck, this might also have the benefit of preventing future aversions to particularly kinds of knitting, such as the one that I (and I suspect a number of others) have against purling: it’s actually kind of amazing the lengths I’ll go to avoid purling. Like most “issues” in knitting, such aversions are clearly not insurmountable, they are not desirable either.

This series on TealArt will continue to explore issues related to traditional knitting, design, and “knitting pedagogy,” and I hope that today’s discussion of the knit stitch and the very fundamentals of the skill of knitting, will provide a useful introduction. I promise that future installments will be less… dry.

Stay well, tycho

I just received an acceptance from San Francisco State University’s MA program in Human Sexuality Studies. I have to file for financial aid still, so I don’t know how that’s going to work.

This means, I’m pretty sure, that I’m going to be in school next year.

I’m still waiting to hear from five other programs, three of which were in my interpretation, the most likely (the fourth was somewhat less likely, but a remote possibility, and the fifth is the last long shot.)

This is in addition to the two rejections (both from long shots) that I received earlier.

I’ll be in touch with you all as this progresses.

cheers, tycho

I remember a phase of tealart where it seemed like I was writing more entries about what new things that we’d developed (for the site) and what kinds of often parrellel developments ooccurred in my life. I can’t imagine that TealArt made a particularly interesting website to read at that point. I think of it as our “young idealistic schemes.” Since then, due to a lot of things, I think we’ve found some more interesting things to talk about, I’ve settled down with regards to my (academic) interests and become a more reflexive knitter, and most importantly I’ve found a mindset for TealArt writing that works for me. Having said that, there have been some rather important changes to the site and my first mini-series on productivity has basically come to a conclusion. And thus, I’ve begun to think that sometimes, a good old fashioned update post is necessary, and given that I’m on break this week; now seems like the perfect time.

We’ve done a little bit of reorganization and redesign around the new “tumble log” or “tumblog” or whatever you want to call it, the page is located here and mirrored on the right hand sidebar of most pages of the TealArt site. What this does is look at a host of other sites/services that we post things and then, pulling RSS feeds in from those sites, creates a running (tumblling) log of our activities. I was listening or reading something that said that tumblogs worked the best when you had a small group and a lot of randomness. That sounded the world like TealArt, and thankfully I was able to pull together all the parts pretty well, and there it is. While I don’t think a week or so is enough time to make a jujudgment about how well a TealArt project is going to work, I remain hopeful. If you like the tumblog idea check out

The other thing to note in this update is the formating idea of “series” which is of course a revival of the “column” idea that I labored (albiet falsely) for another web-venture. The productivity series, which ran for five or so episodes. Soon I’ll post a summative post for the series, because I think asside from future random musings is completed. I enjoyed engauging with these ideas, as productivity particularly in the digital age is something that I’m really interested in working towrds perfecting; however, more than that I really enjoyed having a “column” or some such due almost every week. It got me writing in a way that I think is particularly helthy and useful for me.

So while I’m on break this week, in addition to reading a rather lot about Death (for a project on psychotherapy and berevement, don’t ask. really.), I’m going to begin planning and working on the next series of TealArt articles. To replace the productivity series, I’m going to be putting forth articles about Hypertext and “new” digital (textual) media, in terms of both consumption--reanding--and production--writing. I’ve been reading Theodor Holm Nelson’s Literary Machines, and in combination with a renewed personal interest in fiction and in “Wikis,” I think there’s a lot to talk and think about there and I hope you’ll be interested in this… Please, also, contribute to the conversation either via email or in the comments section.

For the record, I’d like to point out that my “new” writing projects (productivity, and hypertext), mirror my old interests (mobile technology, and eBoook technology.) Just saying.

For the remainder of the semester, that is until the begining of May, I’m also going to have a series of essays related to knitting and design at TealArt. I’ll talk about what defines my current design work, challenges I’m facing as I attempt to teach knitting, and musings on “traditional knitting.” I frequently think about TealArt as a knitting blog, but I’m realizing that I don’t post knitting content to the site nearly enough. I hope this will help remedy the situation. These writings, are incedently a contributing to a project that I’m working on for school, which I might talk more about at some point, but I hope you will enjoy them as well. Also, I remain hopeful regarding forthcoming pictures of my knitting.

In terms of a publishing schedule, I’d look for knitting posts (with luck) early in the week, I’m thinking Tuesday, but my scheduele on Tuesdays is hellish, and hypertext posts on Friday or Saturday. That’s tentative. While I do expect to do a great deal of writing and planning durring this break, I’ll make no promises about what material gets posted this week. Stay tuned!

I look forward to talking with you all more in the near future.

Cheers, tycho(ish)

I totally thought I was done with this little productivity series, but I had an idea, that I think is neat. So here it is:

imagine, if you will, the following scene from a movie

“I never get anything done,” he said while holding a book open on his lap as he idly flipped through a dozen open windows on his computer, most of them filled with text.

“Oh really?” I ask. He’s clearly doing something. “What are you doing now,”

“Reading a few things and sketching out some notes, but it’s not real.” We’ve almost reached the level of a “wine”.

“If that’s not real, then what counts?” I hate this role I have to take in conversations with myself, but I think this sentence is a bit to meta for my tastes; it’s about to end.

“Well, you know, reading and writting, I guess.”

“Kinda like what you’re already doing?”

“Yes, but more.”

This odd little conversation that I had with myself, is a pretty good example of what I’m hoping to talk about here. I for one, know that I have a fairly specific definition of “what it means to get things done,” even though much of what I do, contributes to “getting things done,” even (and ususally) if I don’t tend to think about this work as, being, somehow “real”

A year and a half ago, I read an article in a class that addressed the age old question of “what it is, exactly, that academics do?” After all, for those not involved in academia, it’s almost hard to imagine that professors have enough to do to fill up their time. While I’m not arguing that professor folk have it hard (you’d think though that they’d be able to get me comments back on a couple of papers, though, don’t you? sigh.), because it’s a cushy job in many ways, just that it’s hard to understand what professor folk do most of the day. The article argued that we should give ourselves credit for all of the work “in the generous sense” that we do. While we might have a tendency to think of academic work as “reading, writing, and teaching” there are a lot of other things that have to be done: “Mettings are work, responding to email is work, and so forth. I’m sure you could all come up with a list of things that you do, regularly, that aren’t related to your projects but that have to get done just the same. This would be “work in the generous sense,” and the reason why we’re talking about it here is that there should be an alowance in ones productivity system (be it GTD or otherwise) for such work.

The term “in the generous sense” cought on amongst my friend group and it quickly became the adverbial clause de jour in our friend group. So it seemed like the obvious choice when it came time to think of a new slogan for TealArt. Conversely, the line “awkward, but endearingly colloquial” was an actual comment that I recived on on of my papers, and I liked it enough to add it as a tag line.

But back about “work in the generous sense,” the kernel for this week’s entry, is to count, recognize, and even plan everything you do, not just the prime things, because you’re going to do them anyway, and once you’ve included all of the tertiary actions it becomes easier to manage time and feel like you’ve done something. I’ve been known to put things like “pack book-bag with (x, y, and z)” or “shower” or “laundry” on my list for the day. These are things that I don’t typically need reminders to do, but it’s helpful to remember when I’m trying to fit other things into my schedule, or more often when I sit down at the end of the day and say “g-d, what did I do with all my time.”

Just a little something, and frankly I’m not sure if this is all that far out of the GTD framework, in the general category of “keeping your mind empty, and not using your brain as your system” but there you have it in any case…

I’m on spring break this week, so with luck I’ll be doing a little bit more work.

cheers, tycho

Hi Everyone. I hope this weekend finds you all well. And I hope you find the little revision to tealart that we’ve undergone in the past few days well too. (how’s that for an opening?) I’m sure that I’ll do a little more explaining over the next few days. Worry not and enjoy.

I was going to write this week about the importance of regular reviews a la GTD regarding the maintenance of a productive system. And I’ll say a few, brief things here

GTD promises a sort of a better “stress-free” living through recording and full proof living. It’s true that the less you have to worry about weather or not you remembered to do x, y, or z there is more “you” to go around when you’re actually doing x, y, or z. Great idea. It is however, my contention that, the reason this works, is that GTD asks users to take various and regular time outs to reflect on their process. So rather than worry about your process a little bit all the time, schedule times to worry about your process all at once and get it done with. Great idea. One needn’t produce nifty contextual lists and adhere faithfully to the two minute rule (if you have a task that can be done in less than two minutes, do it now) and so forth. What is important is that every once and a while you give yourself the opportunity to say “what am I doing, and what do I need to be doing;” look over your lists and make sure things haven’t changed. The important thing is to make sure that your “system” or method hasn’t been broken by the “doing.” And as always, flexibility is important: if all the parts of your system aren’t adding up, then change it.

Though I don’t think GTD works for me, or that my process fits that model, I really do enjoy the fact that it’s out there--because it’s prevalence drives people to think up some rather amazing solutions to issues that I’ve dealt with for quite a while. The communities at 43folders (and other sites as well) has been an amazing resource as I’ve become more reflexive about these issues in the last few weeks and months.

Footnoes So I promised a little bit of a rant about footnotes. Much to a particular professor’s annoyance I’ve taken a rather hard line stand against Microsoft Office products. I’ve found that they’re not particularly suited to running on the Mac, and the benefit that they offer is appallingly small. Additionally, I find it hard to interact with a PDF document that I’m discussing in my writing, and an open word document at the same time. It can be a pain, that’s for sure.

But this is a rant about footnotes, not Microsoft Word; well it is about MS Word, insomuch as I have to keep Microsoft Word around because there are typographical features that I would love to have access to that, as near as I can tell, Microsoft has a strangle hold on. Footnotes are one of them, headers are another, but a much less important one to my mind at this point.

At the moment, I generally write the OS X Rich Text service (think the default TextEdit, but piped through VoodooPad or whatever other program I’m working in,) and then prepare the document for “completion” using a quick trip through MS Word, which I output as a PDF file, to get all of the “publishing features” and avoid having to work in

In certain respects, footnotes in particular is a typographical feature that I think many expect is on it’s way out, and as a result there isn’t a lot of support this kind feature. Also, since most academics are too busy, being academics, and not designing software, there aren’t many options, beyond of course Microsoft.

So I’m at a loss with regards what to do. I’ve considered (and even installed all that I need to do to start producing documents using LaTeX/TeX, but that is compleatly overkill: I’m never going to have an equation in my work, and while I think LaTeX documents are incredibly pretty, learning another complex markup language with features that I will never use. I hope/expect that the next version of Markdown will have some sort of support for footnote text, but I’m not sure that this will work out particularly well either but I can definitely wait on this one until it actually happens.

But yes, anyway. I want a good footnote solution that is mainly operable within RTF and (even minimally) markuped plain text files. Sigh. If anyone has any briliant solutions that I’ve overlooked that would be awesome. In any case, until next time, stay well.

Cheers, tycho(ish)

Hi Everyone, I hope you’re all enjoying the productivity series we have going, and I also hope this post finds you having an effective and happy Monday morning.

I realize that there hasn’t been a lot of interesting or inspiring content on TealArt recently. I think I’ve done better this academic year than I have in previous years, but in general it still sucks. On the upside some awesome people have commented, so rock on you all. But fear not, I am still very interested in continuing and improving TealArt. Also, I love getting emails that say that real people have commented on the blog.

I think the column/series formate idea has been quite successful, and while I think the productivity series is winding down (maybe 2 or 3 more episodes?), I am working on coming up with something interesting for a new series, if you have anything interesting by all means, please drop me an email and offer a suggestion.

The other thing that I wanted to promote, is my twitter. Twitter is this nifty little thing that lets you post, very quickly, short “status updates,” or other little snippets that you find funny or interesting. I’ve started to use twitter as a kind of running log of what I’m doing, thinking, or finding funny at any given point. It’s nifty, and if you’re finding yourself with a lack of tychoish content check it out.

But this was supposed to be a little bit of a knitting entry, as I haven’t done that kind of writing here, at all in the recent past. I suppose this is something that I’m going to get more into. I’m working on (yet another) knitting project for school, and while this one takes a different form than some of the previous fiber-related credit that I’ve done in the past, it does mean that my knitting work takes on a different tone and energy. This isn’t bad, but it does mean that I’ve been knitting differently for the past six weeks. Having said that I finished a sweater that I think is pretty nifty, but the yarn is totally not right for the job. I’ll post a more in depth reflection in a bit I swear.

In the mean time I’m working on a sweater in shetland jumper-weight--my first with this yarn--and this is clearly magic wool. Its also my first sweater with a turned hem, and I think it’s nifty, although I see now that I might need to add a shock cord, but we’ll wait to pass judgment on that matter until latter when a more data is available.

Anywho, having successfully gotten the writerly juices flowing, I’m on to write an actual meaningful paper. Woot.

Cheers, tycho(ish)

Sorry about missing last week’s essay: I basically missed last weekend in total, and it threw my entire week into a really interesting place. And by interesting we mean, crazy like no other. Suprisingly, or perhaps not, I was able to keep abreast of everything, and the only thing that continues to languish, is something that I’m “strategically avoiding.” Anyway, for this segment, I wanted to talk about the ways that I use the computer, breifly. I’ve always been a big fan of keeping digital data organized long before easy solutions to do so were commonly available. While there are some software tools that I think make this easier, a lot of what I do is just trying to find a systematic way to organize one’s data that lets you stay “in touch” with what you have, and find what you need when you need it. I’m also very much aware of GTD’s “one system” maxim, and I think this generally is the best way to run one’s digital experience. If you’re new to the series, links to the previous articles follow. I’d also love to hear from you if you have any suggestions or ideas for me.

Part One: Getting Other Things Done

Part Two: Rethinking GTD: My System

Part Three: Rethinking GTD: Production Times and “the Zone”

At the moment, I live and die (digitally) by two programs VooDooPad, and Yojimbo. As I’ve said before, VooDooPad is a supper app, that basically lets you create a simple desktop wiki out of mac RTF files, and Yojimbo is a very solid/basic clippings file/database. There is some overlap in functionality between these programs, and I suppose in theory you could, if your brain was up to it, use one or the other to do the job of the other. This of course brings up the question of one-systemness, which we’ll have to get to later. Let me first tell you how I make this work. Also, for the record these, are MacOSX applications, there are alternatives (some of which look rather nifty) for Windows and other platforms, but I know much less about them.)

I have a Voodoopad document that I live in, and have lived in for--omitting a 4 month period--the last two or so years. VoodooPad is a relational Wiki, the documents are bundles of “pages” which are by default RTF pages. I also have some pages that are PDF print outs, and there’s system wide Print-PDF-to-VoodooPad. But the organization is completely up to you. I use Voodoopad as the basis for all the content that I generate myself on the computer: class notes, reading notes, drafts of papers, and so forth. The latest version of VoodooPad, supports multi-window, and multi-tab browsing/editing, which are features that I think make working/living in an application useful. I also like that, because of this functionality and the organization as a Wiki, I only have one VooDoopad document to keep track of. Having said that, if you had very distinct projects (or very similar projects, depending) you could isolate portions of your VoodooPad into separate documents. The downside to this is, of course, that all the organization has to be self imposed, which isn’t that hard to do (and is aided by the fact that VoodooPad has great search functionality and is accessible by spotlight.)

Yojimbo, is my latest addition to the stable of every-day applications. It’s basically a database that can keep track of all the little bits of data that float around your computer, but rather than having an esoteric text file system, Yojimbo lets you dump any kind of file in through a host of different pipes and then lets you categorize all these files in a a handy database, using a system of folders and tagging. I use this program mostly to keep track of the heinous amount of PDF files that I download and consume regularly. If, VoodooPad is my notebook, then Yojimbo is the file cabinet.

For those of us that deal with and in words, these are the two main functions of the computer. The two programs that you use are largely irrelevant, and like I said, you could probably get away with using--particularly Yojimbo--as both your notebook and filing cabinet. VoodooPad would work as well but, you would have to do a lot of work to impose structure on the “filing cabinet” in VoodooPad. In any case, no matter what kind of software you use, its important to apply a personal convention to how you name and organize things.

Thankfully, with the advent of Spotlight (and PC equivalent) search services and tools you need not have a single alphabetical (or whatever system) file for your data, but good file names are still important. It’s important to be consistent, so that you can look at a file and tell what is in it without opening; the fewer conventions you have the easier this becomes. When it comes to files, shorter is always better than longer, and always start generally and become more specific. This makes file names, page names, document titles (and so forth) easier to scan, and it also makes it easy to use filtering and sorting techniques to group similar files together automatically.

For instance I have a unique CamelCase identifier for all of my classes and projects that begins all of the page/file names: all documents related to my historiography class this semester are tagged HistoryTheory. Following the tag, I list (in order) the assignment type, number, and a pithy description of the reading that it relates to. This is the general system in use throughout the entire document. I use the same tagging system in Yojimbo to keep the projects sorted (in addition to a few topic-related tags.) Similarly, for articles I use, “AuthorLastName - ArticleTitle.pdf”. For another example of a system before Yojimbo, when I just had files and folders, I used the same naming convention and had specific folders for each project (class) that I was working on when I found/downladed the file. The intention was to group file with the moment I downloaded it, in hopes of being able to retrace my steps based on this association, and it actually works pretty well.

So in summary, we have “notebook” functions, and “file cabinet” functions: simple and consistent naming schemes are important, good search functions are really important, and when in doubt (and it’s possible) let your software create your framework, not the other way around.

I haven’t decided what’s up for next time, but on my list I have “project level planning and reviews,” and that sounds pretty good for now. But perhaps we’ll all be surprised.

Cheers, tycho(ish)

Ok, that was a cheesy title, but I’ve recently realized taht I don’t do a lot of actual reading in a web-browser these days. I mean sure I open browser windows all the time, but I so rarely find that I do a lot of my heavy lifting-reading in a browser, and--gasp--I don’t keep very many tabs open. The feed reader takes care of most of that, and I have offline apps that deal with most of my most important tasks. For example: I post to this weblog (and others) using MarsEdit, I maintain my del.icio.us account using Cocoalicious, and of course I read weblogs and other feeds using NetNewsWire, and I check all of my email using Mail.app.

While the whole Web2.0 movement supposedly pushes us to “live in our browsers,” and while for folks who don’t have laptops as their primary computers but use multiple machines, this makes a certain measure of sense. But I don’t fall into that category, and I have to say that, for the most part, I would much rather use a handful of neat apps, and be able to avoid using a web-browser for as much as I can.

So I should say at this point that I use Firefox 2.0, because it’s good software, and rather like it. But I’ve started to realize that I don’t really need the power it offers, and given the amount of work I’m doing in Cocoa apps, a browser that played nice with OS X would be nice. For those of you who don’t know, Firefox doesn’t interact with the OS X service menu and that’s… less than desireable. Also, given that I’m not using much of what firefox can offer, I’ve started to think that perhaps a different browser would be more advantageous. Camino looks like the obvious choice, but Safari, is probably comparable and both of these options are fast.

Do people have opinions on WebKit versus Gecko? The firefox features that I like the most are: crash recovery and the FoxyProxy extension, so if someone has an any suggestion on how to replicate this functionality, that would be awesome…

That is all.

Also, if I don’t get the GTD article done tomorrow night, we might have to wait till next week, because this weekend is jamming.

Best, tycho(ish)