Stroll, Bitch, Ph.D.’s guest blogger made the following observation:

One day cock of the walk; next, a feather duster.

In other news, both James “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” Brown and Gerald “The Only Unelected President” Ford, have passed away in recent days. As we all know, famous deaths come in threes. So, with sincere sympathies to the families and friends of the deceased and hopes that they find comfort, I’m telling you: keep your eyes peeled for Number Three.

(Via Bitch. Ph.D..)

Whose your bet? I heard, I think via tinman about an office game that involved some sort of betting pool bassed on creating a list of famous people who were likely to die. I think you got points bassed on who lived. I recognize that this isn’t incredibly useful. Anyway, to bring this all back together--loosely--does anyone have any ideas for who the third is?

I think Claude Levi-Struss is too easy of a bet, and Jimmy Carter is probably not creative enough. I dunno. Thoughts?

In another morbid moment. Over dinner tonight one of our friends, remarked after having seen “The Queen,” about how sad the time following Princess Dianna’s death was.

To which my only memory was that my grandfather, for the next month or so, when ever you asked him “what’s happening,” would say “she’s still dead.”

I’m sorry you all for being such a sucky blogger. Happy New Years. I figure that I’m reflexive enough 364 days of the year, that I can spare you on New Years. Maybe the next catch phrase for this blog will be “Reflexive on Demand.” Actually now that I’m thinking about it, the current title “Awkward, But Endearingly Colloquial” is an actual comment that a professor wrote on one of my papers. I thought it was rather clever. So there.

Anyway, I’ll be back with more content soon enough, just you wait.

Cheers!

So this just decided to be a TealArt entry when I wasn’t looking.

I’ve been reading 43 Folders for a month or so at this point, and I find it kind of delightful. For those of you who don’t know the site, done by Merlin Man, is all about productivity from a geek/mac user perspective. This is terribly cool, and has allowed me to crystalize a lot of thoughts I’ve had about my own digital (and really life) organization. The following are some of these thoughts.

Productivity

One thing that Merlin goes on about is David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach. Frankly the corporate productivity slant is kind of a put off, but there are a number of tenants that reading 43f and associated materials regarding GTD that are helpful, and summarize a number of things that I think I noticed. For instance, I really like the emphasis on collecting data so that your organizational system isn’t in your head. I’ve generally been pretty good about keeping track of things in my head, but it requires a lot of attention to make sure that you’re on top of things, and if you can get it off your mind, you free up attention from meta-tasks, to actual tasks. In a similar vein the “GTD” methodology suggests that you separate meta data from project/relevant data, and then only have one “system” whatever it is for organizing this data (I suppose technically two, one for meta and one for project, but whatever), so that your brain isn’t preoccupied with keeping the organization systems in synch. GTD also recommends that you organize your tasks into projects (a collection of tasks that combine to equal a gestalt¹) the tasks which make up the project, and then output this data by context (where the task needs to get done, or what resources are necessary).

This entry, as initially envisioned was mostly to be about the “not splitting your/my attention between multiple systems for managing project data,” so I’ll get on with writing that entry, but I just wanted to provide that little summary. I have some interesting commentaries on the “GTD Community,” and what not that I think might be interesting to share at some point, so just keep that in the back of your mind. Anyway…

Software

I just discovered a GREAT novel/long project writing program. I’ll putz around with it after break, but it seems to have a lot of great features. Don’t get me wrong, I really love my wiki program for all sorts of day to day editing and drafting, but for any sustained piece of writing over, say 2,500 words, it doesn’t do so well. In addition to being awesome in terms of editing/output formating, it has a lot of meta features (like a database, marginal notes, and a note pad) that makes the writing long projects super good. If there was one thing that I wish this program had that it doesn’t is footnotes.

VoodooPad, the wiki program, is basically a wiki-ified TextEdit (Word Pad for the PC users out there), and while it does a great job of editing RTF type files, and I like a lot of the features, I find it best for planning, and note taking type applications. Having said that, this semester, it has basically been the only application that I’ve used for text editing of any kind, and while I fully expect to continue to use it into the future, I’ve been feeling the limits of the program.

I think this is an issue that I’ll take up in another post, but I think Wiki’s generally, (and this is perhaps due to wikipedia’s influence in particular), encourage “pages” to take on the structural role of paragraphs, in the conceptual process. This is all fine and dandy, but I’ve always been a long form kind of guy, and I’m not sure scholarly and the kind of creative writing I might be prone to doing, is ready for the kind of nonliearity that this kind of organization might produce. This linearity/nonlinearity, is definitely something that I go back and forth on a bunch. But as a system, I think the Wiki organization works best, so I don’t know. In any case this new editor might answer the problem with long form and presentation work, without disrupting the system overly much.

Writing

As I’ve ruminated for a while on this site, and to a few of you, I kind of regret that I wasn’t either particpating in NaNoWriMo, or in the process of writing something creative this November. In response, I also have a great screen writing program that I have a lot of love for. My goal next semester is to get back into writing for real, I think. I tried to outline something this summer which fell flat, a little, but I might be able to run with it. I’m also tossing around an idea for an academic paper next semester which I think would get me to read (hopefully) a number of cool science fiction books (Tripree, LeGuin, Delany) which I think would be inspiring. Or something.

Cheers, tycho

I’m in a place in my work with my projects where I need to keep up a momentum, so despite my rambling about not writing, here I am writing for TealArt. Go figure. Also, if you’re reading the RSS feeds, check out the totally cool new graphics I made for TealArt.com and the knitting savant(s).

So I have two completely desperate entire ideas that aren’t nearly fleshed out enough (and probably won’t be). One’s about geek stuff and the other is about Freudianism. So here they are.

Early Adopting Once upon a time, I fancied myself something of a power geek, and I knew a lot about a great deal of technical this and that. I used PCs that I built myself, and I flirted with linux. I worked on the PHP/mySQL code that made TealArt. You get the idea.

Then I went to college, declared a psychology major, and switched to Mac. My computer geek interests these days are all about usability and ease of use. (I’m sort of kicking myself for not taking the psych ergonomics class these days). I used to say this more, but I think it’s even more true now: I’m interested in getting the computer to do exactly what I want it to do without having to fuss at it, or having it fuss at me. I use streamlined editors when at all possible. I try and keep all my data local and information in efficient programs that keep the data organized. While I get a lot from the internet, lets think of it as the DVR approach to web-surfing.

But this can be frustrating because there are a number of programing things that I wish I were more able to do. For instance, I can think of a number of AppleScript type things that I would love to be able to add to VoodooPad. There are also programs that I know are going to be amazing, but they need more development time, and there’s really nothing much that I can do except wait for the programers to get where I want to be. And its frustrating. angst

Freudianism This is more instep with the kind of entries I’m best at writing…

Anyway, like most people, I’ve been pretty recalcitrant with regards to psychoanalytic theory. All the usual complains: it’s not grounded, it dehistoricizes and universalizes too much, and largely irrelevant most of the time.

A professor said to me last semester, after I made those complaints, something along the lines of: Marxism isn’t that much more grounded, but people don’t dismiss it so easily. I huffed and puffed, and then I realized that she there was probably something there. Now granted, I’d argue that most Marxist theory avoids a lot of the cultural/social messy-ness by being more specific, but aside from that…

Anyway, so I’ve been trying to keep an open mind about psychoanalytic-derived theories. Classical psychoanalysis is clearly flawed, and Freud is dated,¹ but psychoanalysis isn’t all bad. For instance:

• it allows the possibility to theorize the mind in a philosophical tradition
• it allows us to consider mental functioning outside of our awareness
• it allows us to think about formative experiences as, well, formative in the development of the individual
• it allows individuals to be considered as individuals, rather than as simply constitutant parts
• it integrates theories of normal personality with theories of abnormal personality
• the discourse on psychonanalyical theory exists, for better or for worse, outside of typical academic institutional structures
• it allows a place for subjective interpretation in the practice/theorizing of psychology and/or the social sciences.
• So yeah, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. Not exhaustive, or substantiated, but worthwhile, I guess.

Cheers, tycho(ish)

Well hello reader(s)!

I’m at that busy stage of the semester, where I have left to do is drink tea and write. Of course, I’m knitting, and reading, as I’m usually wont to do, but I haven’t found very much time for blogging, at least in this venue.

I find I’ve been doing more posting to forms, where I’m reasonably certain that I have a readership. In fact, I started a thread last week that made the school newspaper. Hopefully, someday, TealArt will function this way, when I have enough time/purupos. In the mean time I hope you enjoy what I can offer.

Another reason that I haven’t been writing much here, is I feel, aside from the rambling posts like this one, and the knitting discussion, most of the things that I would write here are things that are better suited to more formal writing. Between figuring out my interests in a more concrete sort of way, and advancing to a stage where, all of my academic work directly relates to things that interest me incredibly. I mean sure, I could beat down evolutionary psychologists; but I doubt that you all want to read a poorly cited differentiation between neuro/structural evolution and social/cognative psychological evolution. And I’m not sure I want to write it either.

Though not to despair. I do have a few things running through my head to write about, and I think it might be fun to spend some time writing for this site. It’d be a good break.

Additionally, as it’s December, I’m starting to think about my annual winter break redesign. I really rather like our current look, but there is some work that could stand to be done. I need to work on the del.icio.us side bar (those of you who aren’t familiar with the del.icio.us service/site/phenomena, should be check it out here), and I think the template could use a freshening. Though I must say, I don’t tend to think of websites as being tied to design these days. Truth is, RSS is the main way I interact with the internet these days. I suspect that there are a couple of posts in there about Web 2.0 and RSS that I could offer. If you’re interested.

Anyway, Be well Cheers, tycho(ish)

Here, in the finest tradition of bloggers droning on endlessly on the content of their days, is what happened.

1. I went to bed at 1-am last night, for, near as I can tell, no good reason. I did some studying for a test I had today, and I got some reading done, and did some note taking and what not. My sleep schedule has been a bit wierd of late, so this isn’t a huge deal.

2. I woke up at 7:20-ish, but it was mid-sleep cycle so I was groggy and weird, which is never fun. Note to self, maybe earplugs can help prevent such oddities. If I can hit the sleep cycles just right, I can wake up without much pain. Feh.

3. I got out of bed and chugged a cup of tea at about 7:45, with the intention of leaving the house at 8:20 for an 8:40 breakfast.

4. At 8:05 I became seriously nauseated. It was clearly the fact that I chugged the tea (there was no dairy in the tea), but I couldn’t fathom eating breakfast. I knew that it would pass, and that it was probably a blood-sugar/hydration issue, but anyway. I trudged off to class/test at 8:47.

5. 9:02, taking my illness as an excuse, I rode the elevator to my class on the 4th floor of the science building with two of my classmates. The test hadn’t started. I felt reasonably prepared. The professor offered to push the test back a while to let us cram, but given that the test was over neural-memory systems and what not, I thought this was a bad idea, as I was rehearsing what I knew about LTP.

6. I finished the test at 9:40, and I think I did pretty well. All I really need to do on this, and the next test, is get better than a 76 on this and the next test, and I should end up with something resembling an A- in the class. And I think I do that well. (It’s crazy. I do well enough on the papers and other parts of the grade which total to like 68% percent of the grade, that the fact that I consistently score in the 76 range on the tests, means that I’m in good shape). The professor had brownie-cookies in class which helped with the blood-sugar issue, and I had some water when I got to the class room which helped with hydration, and by the time I got into the test I was fine.

7. I had a instant message conversation with my father, which was vaguely surreal (Hi dad), while I waited for one of my TAe-es, or to talk the professor. Ultimately I met with the prof about my project for that class that’s going to avoid designing some sort of incredibly complex study to explore affilivive responses to identity and autobiogrpahical representations. It’s basically one of the things that I’m really interested in, with skin conductance tacked on for good measure, but I’m excited. If I can ever have enough of my brain cells free at one time to sketch it all out.

8. I had a meeting with another one of my TAe-es at 11. It was awkward and I took way too long to read the paper, but I think I was helpful enough

9. I ate lunch with a friend at 12. It was nice to finally eat and relax.

10. I met with the first TAe at 2. I hung out in the class room and surfed teh internets, from about 1 until the TAe got there. Durring this time I got caught up on the news reader, and began organizing some thoughts for the paper I’ve been writing today.

11. At 3 I was so exhausted that I went back to my room and promptly fell asleep. I had 1 cup of tea (well two, I guess if you count the cold one I had that morning) at this point, which is at least 2 less than I’m used to and, this time for completely different reasons, I once again doubted my ability to walk across campus.

12. I woke up at 5:20, pulled myself together, did a little bit of reading and then went to dinner at about 6, and had pasta and noodles, that were of passable quality, and then went back to my room and worked until the roommate came home 9. We talked and puttered about for about half an hour before going to the campus coffee house to do the nights work.

13. Here’s where I am now. I’m still working on the blasted paper, it’s coming along, and having reached the present. I think this post is finished.

Cheers!

Hi folks. I’m in the thick of the semester and the general craziness. It’s not bad--I kind of like it--but it is stressful.

Anyway, I just have a quick note and a question for you, gentle readers.

1. Does anyone know of a good open source XML-RPC weblog editor. I live and die by the one I currently use, but I’d like something with better support for LiveJournal and del.icio.us and what not. I just want something with a slightly faster development cycle. I’d also rather enjoy something that was a little more mac-y. By Mac-y I mean integrated and fast, I guess.

2. As some of you know I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire. This is an RSS/Atom feed reader that is incredibly wonderful and very useful. I heard the other day, that NNW leads the RSS reader market share by a large margin. This is impressive because NNW is a Mac-only application. Having said that, there are a couple of things that I constantly yearn for. First of all, I’d like it to download images refrenced in feeds for the last X number of entries, for better offline performance. I’d also, like a better ability to password authenticate for feeds.

So I came across a new feed reading application which addresses the second problem, and is generally a cooler looking application. And the new application is open-source, which I’ve become a big fan of. The other thing about NNW is that it has an incredibly slow development cycle. I’d like it to be a little faster to add features like delicious posting (which it has, but it could do better in this respect), or exporting of marked entries, or similar things. Or, here’s something. You can’t subscribe to an RSS feed from NNWs built in browser! So the other reader, Vienna, handles all my concerns, but isn’t as fast (and I’d have to run a perl scrip to import all my data from NNW, and I’m so not that hard cor) Otherwise I’m so there…. If I were going to start using a feed reader for the first time today, I would probably choose Vienna. If you aren’t as attached, I’d totally check it out.

Cheers, ty

I was reading BoingBoing just now, (I’m not a big BoingBoing reader, not having the attention span for that genre of commercial blog) but anyway I saw something that Cory posted about an interview he did with Mur Lafferty. Mur is one of the chief geek podcasters (GeekFuActionGrip), and I’ve caught wind of her work from time to time, so being the distractible fellow that I am, I clicked through to the website for her podcast “I Should Be Writing” and was quickly assaulted with news that it was, once again NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is and event wherein participants attempt to write a complete novel during the month of november. It’s a national thing. A writing speed/endurance test to end them all. It’s now a much more organized thing than It was four years ago when I was actually writing a book, and I remember thinking at that time, why bust your ass to write a crappy novel in november: clearly the way to make it work was to write steadily and continuously. For the past two years, when I realize that its NaNoMo, I get a sinking feeling. I wish I had the time to write like that in November. I wish I had a story sketched out.

NaNoWriMo (and the preparation I’d have to do) has gone on my list of “things to do if I don’t get into real graduate program.” I’ve been making a list of all the cool things that I could do if I weren’t in academia for a while, as part of my “lets be rational and not put all of my eggs in one basket” plan of getting into graduate school. I will go to graduate school, and I will do research. If I get time off now, I’ll also write another book.

So much of the way I remember my life, hinges on the book I wrote. There’s a bit of a confound in that I was writing that as I came out, but nevertheless. One part of the story that I think I tend to ignore/forget from time to time, is that I started another book after I finished the first, that sort of fell flat, because of the craziness that was my junior and senior year of high school (which strangely--or not--marks the beginning of my academic journey).

I began working on an outline for another book this summer, and it really didn’t go anywhere. I’ve been carrying that notebook around for a few weeks (it has some notes on books I’m reading too, but never mind,) and I don’t think that project is intriguing enough to justify the effort. So another one bites the dust.

I’ve noticed, as I’m sure long time (ha!) readers of the site should (you’d better!) notice, that my writing here has improved. I sort of want to know what my fiction might sound like if I were able to get off my ass and write it.

sigh

Well, There you have it, another TealArt entry… Funny how that happens. I hope you all are well.

“The government favors families a lot,” said Staub, 35, a project manager for a French cellphone company. “They understand that families are the future. It’s great for us.”

-- From an article in the Washington Post.

I think on the whole, it’s a nifty and long awaited idea. I mean, children are pretty rotten, but ignoring that for a moment….

Having said that, I’d argue that families are also the past, not to dehistorizie the development of the family or anything, but I have to break it to you, Mde. Staub, your generation wasn’t the first to have families.

Cheers.