So I passed a major milestone with my knitting today. Well this knitting project, I haven’t gotten into any new territory in a about a year. Unless cardigans count (I think that’s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one). Anyway, thats not the point of this quick little knitting note. I just started on the yoke section of my current project.

Yoke sections are, generally, the parts of the knitting that the sleeves connect to. Incidentally, the part of your pants that exculdes the portion measured by your inseam (the top bit with pockets, where your ass goes) is also called the yoke. Now that we have our tailoring lesson through with for today, more about this particular sweater.

I realized as I put the first gusset (the bit of fabric that I, and many other traditional folk knitters before me, insert at the bottom of the sleeve to increase ease of movement) on a holder, that I will have successfully knit myself what will be a 30 inch long coat.

It will be splendid and I will love it, but, this begs the important question of: why the hell? I have a long torso, such garments don’t look as good on me. A secret that I have avoided telling anyone henceforth (you heard it here first, folks), is that my favorite sweater looks so good on me, is that the body is generally a bit shorter than I tend to make sweaters. I frankly don’t have a good excuse for this behavior. Its not a hard alteration to make, and I’m not sure why I do it this way, but I always think that I like sweaters long (and I do enjoy a number of long sweaters, but I tend to like shorter ones more) so I always make them about 26 or 27 inches long (the extra on this one, is mainly so that I can ware it over long sweaters to fight the winter chill.) They should be 24-26 inches long.

I just wanted to say that. I also made a yarn order for some fingering weight silk and wool from knit picks for a sweater. The sweater will be in earth tones, so I need to start thinking about a pattern. I will either make the Henry VIII sweater from Alice Starmore’s Tudor Roses, or design a cardigan (unlikely, given the fine nature of the yarn), or design a new sweater of some variety, which I’m not really feeling at the moment. While I could try a new design, I must say that there’s no sweater thats just kicking me and saying “design me,” so that might be worth listening too. I frankly hope that this doesn’t last long, as there aren’t that many patterns that I feel particularly drawn to knitting.

So yeah. Cheers.

ps, how do you like the name change? yeah, I didn’t think it was noticeable. I’ve done away with the author archives, because it was behaving badly, and frankly it wasn’t that useful. but I’m still the same old s-m! cheers!

So I just read an article, that reviewed a new ebook reader (which seems to have a really nifty display technology) and comes to the conclusion that books won’t succeed because the reading technology isn’t as good as paper (he’s mostly right, though this is the secondary argument), but that content producers can’t manage the DRM the right way. DRM is copy protection, that restricts users ability to rip off and redistribute digital files, and eat dangerously into the publisher’s (and artists) money making ability.

We’ve always had some sort of copy protection, with paper printing, it takes the form of hassle. You can photo-copy entire books (and most of us, particularly in the academy, I suspect), but it’s a hassle, and I know I would generally rather fork over the 10 bucks and get a book out of the operation, than spend a a long time with a photocopy machine that never works. When books are out of print, particularly short, and time is short, it happens. I doubt very much that I’m crimping anyone’s profit margin though. It’s possible to scan in books, (I’ve restrained myself to articles,) but the process is tedious as well, and again hassle and tedium keep the work safe.

There is no such thing as a full proof DRM, any code can be cracked, or even worked around. Like with print, the key for content producers, is to make it easier to buy the content from the source, than it is to “beat” the DRM. Perhaps the key to the ultimate DRM system is not one that is particularly harsh and limiting, but one that makes it hard enough to “work around” the protection that it’s worth buying it new.

Lets take the iTunes music store. There’s one really easy way to beat the encryption of the itunes music store: burn the songs to cd (as a music CD) and then import the songs back into iTunes: DRM disappears. And now you have a copy to play in your home stero system, or in your car. If you don’t want to waste the CD media, use a CD-RW and you’re still DRM free. The thing about this, is that it’s a pain in the ass, given that you can play the song of 5 different computers at the same time (and as long as you keep back ups, if an authorized computer crashes with one of your five authorizations, you can reauthorize all the computers, which also gives you a way to “beat” the drm with a flash drive and an unnetworked machine… But you get the idea. The other big selling point of the system, is that if you’re on an authorized machine (which we’ve established is easy enough) and you’ve bought a song, it behaves exactly like a song that isn’t copy protected, to the point where you would forget that there’s copy protection. The system isn’t full proof, but it throws up road blocks that say, “hey, wouldn’t you rather pay an extra buck to not have to go through with this?” and the answer is frequently “yes.”

The other key for successful digital content is price/feature benefits. Digital media, is “better” than print media, it takes up less space, it is searchable, more readily indexable, and can be interactive, among other benifits (depending on what kind of content it is). Digital content must harness these features, otherwise, why bother. Beyond that, the content is significantly cheaper to produce and distribute than traditional media, because there isn’t any material costs. All you have to pay is production costs, royalties, and bandwidth/server costs. The first two expenses are the same, the second costs a fraction of what the paper does. So digital media, I think, should be cheaper than the traditional format. Again, in iTunes, songs cost a buck, albums cost 10 dollars, with some allowances made for EPs and the like.

Even still, I think songs should cost even less, as I suspect that even after royalties and hosting, cost is between 10-30 cents, if that, but a dollar is ok. Would-be-ebook producers should take note. There is a magic price point, for this, and I suspect it’s under 5 bucks for a book, probably more like 2.50 or 3. Remember for a moment that book files are tiny, easily 25%, and in most cases less than 10% of the average iTunes song, so distribution is even easier. Then, If ebooks are ever to succeed they have to be affordable enough, they have to be full featured, and any DRM has to be transparent and unobtrusive. I’m just saying….

The last iPod update was really incremental. Lots of folks were predicting a phone, widescreen, or wireless capabilities, and we didn’t see that. I frankly can’t see apple getting into the phone market, I think that we’ll see bluetooth eventually on an iPod, but that’s not a major step up in functionality. Likewise, a larger screen is probably in store (likely in terms of pixels rather than area), but I suspect that keeping a small form factor is more important that huge strides in functionality. If you want a much larger screen, get an iTV or some similar TV integration device. The iPod succeeds because it does one thing really well, not because it is the height of convergence technology. The next big feature of the iPod, will fit into this somehow. Why? Because it’s apple, and that’s what they do.

So having said that: I think the next feature will be etext capability. Here are some reasons:

• iPod already has limited PIM (contacts, calendar, notes) functionality. Apple appears to be of the opinion that entering data in a mobile device is less then effective on all sorts of levels, but that viewing it whilst mobile, is much more effective. Because of that I don’t suspect that they will go down the PDA road, they’re already there.
• iTunes has functionality for managing PDFs, it’s a rather dinky feature for it to be coded just for the odd album booklet, so there’s probably more code just under the surface.
• If they’re going to make the screen a little bit bigger for videos which I think is a demand (if you made the scroll wheel a bit smaller, you could probably fit a 2.5x2 screen on an ipod in the same form, you have a pretty good sized screen for eBook reading.
• The iPod is a device that is built around scrolling, and this is the main control that you would want in an ebook device. It seems like all the pieces are there.
• By establishing themselves as a successful content provider for music and television content, I think Apple will likely be able to--through the iTunes (anyone else waiting for the rename to: iMedia?) convince the print publishers that they have the market, and DRM system that will make content producers willing to come on board. And this is the key, of course. It always is.

We’ll see.

Cheers!

I have a couple of little stories (in the journalistic sense, rather than the fiction or even narrative studies sense)… Here they are, because it seems right to post them together. Also, when I got done writing them, I realized that I had written them backwards. Such that they give the completely wrong impression when read as they were written. I did some rearranging, which I hope helps, but imagine that these are three different entries, written 2 months apart just to be on the safe side.

I know a lot of people with cool nicknames. Or incredibly cool nicknames. Or weird nicknames. Whatever, nicknames at any rate. And I have nothing. “Sam” is really my name, sure the paperwork says “Samuel,” but no one other than an ophthalmologist (who called me, as an infant “young samuel,” which my parents stole, and use occasionally. I fear this has been a mistake to share with the general public, so I’ll stop.) But the people I’m named for always went by Sam, and frankly I don’t think I’d respond to Samuel if people started calling me that. I actually have a hard time picking my name out of a list, if it says Samuel. There was a period a while ago, when I signed Samuel, and I’m not sure if I still do, but I’d wager that I don’t.

I’d probably hack off the -uel, if I were changing another part of my name, which I don’t intend to do, but if I spent time in a state with easier DBA (does business as) laws, I’d probably use Sam more officially. Frankly my one concern is that I don’t want to publish academically as Samuel, but I’ll think about that later, I suppose.

Perhaps someone will find a good nickname that will stick that isn’t completely boring. Folks? anything?

I’ve gotten in the habit of tacking on the sylable -tron to a couple of friends names, which has been reciprocated now and then, but it’s kinda wierd, and not a very good nick name (fun and cute, but good in an enduring way, I’m not sure). I need to be more creative I guess…

I got an itching today, to remake my virtual identity. As many of you know, I have for the past, eight, or so years used the handle “celchu19” all over the internet. Celchu after Tycho Celchu (also here), a minor star wars character that I really liked (and still do). Here’s a little aside, about Celchu (a word that I respond in type to as if it were my name, I think if people said it they way I hear it in my head, I’d probably respond to that too). If you’re uninterested in the geek stuff skip the block quoted passage. > I really like Celchu, because he was an incredibly honest and modest character, with conviction like no other, and he was a hotshot. If you read the wiki articles on him, you’ll note that he was a TIE fighter pilot and he was on the phone with his parents on Alderan (the planet that the Empire blew up in ep IV) when it blew up. He then defected (good moral character), and fought with the Alliance. At some point he volunteered for a covert mission, and he got caught (falibility), they tried to brainwash him, but it didn’t stick, he escaped and went back to his superiors, who didn’t believe him, so he sat there and helped them out until they believed that he was on their side. There were firefighters where they put him in a support vessel without weapons because they didn’t trust him, so he dogged bullets to line up shots for the other pilots. And he was a minor character. Eventually the major story line caught up with him, and they found out that he was telling the truth, as they were about to throw him in jail. It was years ago that I read the book, I suspect there was another spy, and I suppose the finer details aren’t that important, but there it is.

I remember being particularly struck by the commitment, loyalty, skill, of the character. I guess I also liked the fact that he had a lot of power and respect, and he wasn’t a wizard in the fantasy story, which makes him all the more outstanding. As a particularly geeky 12 year old (there I go dating myself again) I felt like he’d be a good mascot. It’s not metaphorical for me, but it was a good name sake.

I tacked the 19 on, because the yahoo-mail address was taken for just “celchu,” and the 19 was the date (may 19th) of my birthday, so it made more sense. And I just used it for everything, as I’ve continued to use it, for the past 8 years. I played a character named Tycho Celchu on a long defunct email third person RPG years ago (called Dark Range, while were' in the practice of being archival). A bunch of the writing that I did for DR, formed the core of the book that I wrote before and during my junior year of high school (the draft of that book, Circle Games, is at this very moment within reach. CG also, incidentally featured a fairly self-refrential character named Tycho, though sirname Morgan, this time.)

In addition to Celchu, both the RPG version, the CG character, and a persistent admiration for the danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. Lets face it, Tycho is just a cool name….

So the upshot of all of this is that I’ve got a hankering to change many (most?) of handles, and to develop a new default. I’ve gone through and started to use the name “tychoish,” as it is new and different (a change has long been needed), its' unique (I don’t have to use numbers to get a unique registration), it references my history on a couple of important levels. So yeah. I like it a bunch. Does this mean that I’m closing down all of the things that are “celchu19” referent? Not on your life! But I’m beginning a transition.

Another related alternate name issue is that I kinda want to try and distance Sam, from TealArt and other internet activities. Astute readers will notice that my last name is all but absent from this website (sure there are cached versions, and other things hanging around, but I’d like to avoid drawing undue attention to the connection). And a quick survey has revealed that there are only a few embarrassing items left that use my full name. I’ve changed what I can to an alias of sorts, and there appears to be an actor named Sam K________ who has started chipping away at my “google domination” which I used to care about a lot, but now, meh.

I’m thinking about writing for TealArt as ‘tycho’ rather than Sam, as part of this. I’m not sure yet, but we’ll see…

Thats all really for now, see you all around…

I’m writing a paper (grr) right now about autobiographical memory, identity, and development, and its frustrating: (where are the empirical physiological studies on the subject? cognitive neuroscientists can crank people through their brain scanners, and the publish like mad, couldn’t they have taken a couple weeks to do something worthwhile with the fMRI machine?) Despite this, I have the general feeling that this is kind of what I’m interested in studying. Perhaps not as a cognitive neuroscientist, but we all have to pay our dues, and despite my nphenomenological/hermeneutic/narrative/developmental/anthropological bent as a psychologist, I find what I’ve affectionately come to call “the brain stuff” to be pretty cool and way more useful than I thought it would be. But anyway, lets return to the statement that “this is what I’m interested in studying.”

Somewhat more frequently than I’d like to admit, I have discussion’s with myself about my interests that can be summarized thusly:

In a word, I’m interested in identity. In two words, I’m interested in how identity happens (or develops). I tend to take the opinion that while identity seems to happen as part of a social discourse with “norms” and other individuals (which puts me in a camp with cultural psychology a particular breed of social psychologist), we know identity through communication (hence my interest in narrative) and despite (because?) of this I tend to take the opinion that identity is a product of memory (and this puts me in a camp with a number of personality psychologists).

Ok, now that that’s on the table, I sometimes think, wow, and I’m a Feminist/Queer Studies major too. The thing is that I frequently forget that all this talk of identity, narrative, development, and memory, isn’t plainly feminist or queer to everyone else. And I suppose it isn’t in the clearest sense, but I do know that these interests are a product of my studies in my Women’s and Gender Studies classes, not my psychology classes.

I remember that I had one of my lofty plans early in my first semester to edit a book of stories, written by a collection of young gay men about being gay, other than the ‘coming out story’, this was to be in the tradition of Ophelia Speaks, and My Sister’s Voices: Teenage Girls of Color Speak Out. I even blogged about it here on TealArt (in embarrassment I hope that I hid those archives, though they’re probably still accessible for the world to see, like so much of my/our early crap). While an impractical project for a ornery and brooding undergraduate to undertake, at the heart, this wast to be a really cool project that explored issues of queer identity that I still feel to be really key. Though I’m not wild about the unifying qualities of “gay” or “male” as identity markers, I remain interested in how individuals negotiate their identities in relation to community identities. And I think stories, beyond the coming out narrative, which Judith Butler has successfully ruined for me, are a great way to explore this.

While I’m not proposing this kind of research/project, I think that these two examples show a particular kind of consistency of my interests. It’s all connected. I swear.

Anyway, back to the paper of doom!

Ironically, I loaned my copy of this book to a professor who never returned it before she left. Though, I still have her copy of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and frankly I think I came out ahead.

So I’ve spent a lot of my TealArt time talking about various geek things, which I think is good for some diversity, but I think a large portion of what TealArt has become in recent months is knitting and knitting related content, so I think it’s only fair that I give a knitting update.

I finished a sweater last night, it was/is my remake of “Faroe” by Alice Starmore. There were a couple of minor pattern changes that I made in order to get the size perfect and then to get the sleeves to fit perfectly, and though I have to block it out, sew down the hem, and weave in some ends, this sweater is a victory in every sense.

As the weather has chilled, I began wearing my remake of my favorite sport sweater, and though the yarn is better, and the quality of the workmanship is way better, I must say that I still like the old version better. Which is fine, because I can still wear that sweater. Oh well. It’s a bit two long and the sleeves aren’t long enough (I think I’m going to re-block the sweater and see where that gets me. This is an odd problem, but I think part of my issue is that it’s awkward to wear the sweater and have my ipod clipped to my belt. I’ll need to work on this for the next version.

I need to order more sock needles, as both of my most commonly used sock needle sets have become unusable. I’ve been knitting a pair of “socks that rock” and I’m amazed with the quality of this yarn. I suspect that once my stash of sock yarns dwindles it is unlikely that I will ever knit with anything else again. (for socks). This stuff is amazing. I’d almost like to knit a sweater out of this yarn, except that it would cost about 120 bucks for the yarn.

I need to figure something out on this regard. I want to give at least some preliminary thought to what project I’m going to work on next, soon, because I don’t want to get too far into this project without having a plan. I have the lace weight sweater, which I mostly need to order good size zero needles for, but I don’t know how I feel about this. Expect to see some pondering on the subject in this space in the future.

Be well all, I’m off to class.

Cheers, sam

As I’m sure you all know from my incessant babbling about technology, I’ve become a strong proponent of the RSS reader. It’s, as near as I can tell the best way to collect information for later consumption in a manner that is easy to read, reliable in an environment where internet connections might not be constant, and I can scan an item in the feed reader in about half the time it would take me to read the same amount of content in a web page. So it’s a great thing.

I do have an annoyance to report though. Blogger, which for a long time, I would avoid reading almost entirely, has instituted a feed system, using the Atom standard/spec. I initially thought I’d hate atom, but it turns out that atom feeds are more likely to be full text (I rather despise partial text feeds which only capture a very small amount of the joy that is syndication, with little if any to benefit to site administrators) So I’ve started to read Blogger powered blogs. Rock on, right?

Well no. Seems blogger trigger’s updates seemingly at will, so the time-stamps get refreshed, and my news-reader thinks all the entries are updated, when in fact, blogger can’t keep the date right, and I end up having to scan through more to realize that I’ve read the same article half a dozen times before. Thumbs down.

The second complaint I have about RSS, is that my reader won’t download image files, so I have to have a live connection to read an entry that has images posted with the entry, which means I have to be connected to read knitting blogs, which I see as a disadvantage. Anyone have a fix for this?

That’s about it for now. I’d like to be entertained at the fact that I had a brain death moment last night, and then proceeded to write an entry about evolutionary theory and teleology in developmental psychology. Clearly it was an odd form of brain death. Well, onto other projects this evening, I just wanted to get the syndication frustrations out there.

Cheers, tycho

While I ordered more RAM for my beloved Zoe last week, which should arrive Monday or Tuesday of this week, I’ve been noticing that Zoe hs been running a bit more slowly than I think I’d like. So finally, yesterday I did some looking around and realized much to my surprise that I only had 500 megs of hard drive space free. Of a total 100 gigs. Well no wonder It was a little slow, and no wonder. So I did some reorganization and coppied a lot of stuff off of the hard drive. I was able to get 12 gigs of content offloaded, and I’m back down to about 9 gigs, but its a much healthier situation. Part of the problem has been that with the release of the new iTunes store, iTunes 7 and iTunes Movies, all the video (including the television) has been re-encoded that’s about twice as good (320x240 to 640x480 which is about dvd quality). This somehow means that we’re dealing with movies which are a bit less than 4 times as large. Don’t ask me I’m not a video or compression expert. That’s just one thing that contributed to the issue.

So more RAM will help, as will backing up some of this content, and freeing up space on my hard drive. For what you ask? More content. It’s a vicious cycle.

I’ve started using del.icio.us to catalogue my links. I surf around a lot, and I’m quite pleased with how delicious works, and I’ve decided to start mirroring my de.icio.us stuff on TealArt. So now, in the sidebar, you’ll be able to have a pretty good idea of what kinds of things I’ve found on my travels. Just check out my del.icio.us page, or see my most recent 20 links on the side bar.

I’m keeping an eye on the tealart tag on del.icio.us so if there’s anything you want to share with me (or chris) and any other tealart user/interested individual, just tag something “tealart” when you add it to delicious. Also, if you want to send a link to me, just tag it “for:celchu19” and it’ll get sent straight for me. Sweet service if you ask me.

Ok, so there, it just felt like my brain just died, so I’m going to end this post before it gets too much weirder. There’s knitting news and academic musings, so maybe we’ll balance out the content here in a bit. When I have more to give.

Cheers, sam

Ok, so I was just reading, and had a thought. What bugs me a lot (among other things) about Sociobiology, and Evolutionary Psychology, is that they necessarily make human development and existence teleological.

Now evolution has to be teleological, because it attempts to describe a process that’s theoretically already happened. The telos of evolution is the present, not the future (that’s where the eugenicists screwed up, among other places. Right?). We can assume that evolution will continue in the future, but because evolution works in a huge timescale, the only thing we really know is that humans, and nature, and the world, will change in the future, but more specificity, given that we’re talking about Evolution, seem ahem unprudent.

Social Sciences, are then, trying to describe a contemporary process. We’ll take developmental psychology here, because it’s my current fascination, and because both evolution and human development seem on first glance to follow a similar kind of course. There’s also that ontogeny replicating phlygeny bit that I forgot for a while, and that’s sort of bothersome. Anyway, we are, as human’s always developing, and while human development ends at death, I’d hardly say that death is the telos of development.

I should also point out that despite the fact that we develop in relation/response to our environment, that development isn’t an Evolutionary Process. The word evolve has grown to encompass a number of causal occurrences that are, basically “change over time” and a “growing sense of complexity,” which I think deserves some semantic distance from Evolution as it applies to biological processes, or might be applied to psychological processes (usually inappropriately) but that’s neither here nor there.

Now evolution clearly is ongoing, and this presents a problem, because I’d hate to take the positivist rout and say “we can’t analyze evolution as a process in the moment, so lets ignore it.” But I’m not sure where else to go with this. At the very least, it seems to me that there’s a certain “unified progress narrative,” that ends in the present, implicit in evolutionary theory; whereas there is a plurality of developmental narratives, that are always in process, always being re-written, some of which aren’t progress narratives, where the “march toward complexity” doesn’t pervade the structure and content of the narrative/study/theory. Is this a contrived division, or a useful conceptual boundary? (Does the latter exist, and is there some more productive premise to establish?)

Just thoughts. Cheers, Sam