It’s funny. I write TealArt enters with a very strange intended audience, and it’s an audience that’s pretty darn old. I joined a listserv a little while ago, and everyone on the list is having fun setting up their ‘blogs’ (blogspot affairs), and I feel like a seasoned pro, because not only have I been blogging for a really long time (I think there has some form of CA/TA blog this or blog that for, 5-6 years, maybe more.) This is an exceptionally long time, when you think about the history of the blog. The end result is that I’m writing for a very strange audience: It’s a bit detached and I attempt to establish some sort of authority/legitimacy. I also don’t expect that there are many real people out there, which I know can’t quite be the case, but no matter.

In the past few weeks I’ve spent a very little amount of time/energy/thought, rethinking the way I use my computer. Mostly this has consisted of a lot of observation of usage habits, software usage, and nagging desires for new features/possiblities. While I was in St. Louis I listed off all the applications that I use regularly in a TealArt entry. I’ve subsquently changed everything I said in that entry, because writing that entry started a minor observation project that I’ve been working on to see what I need/want most and what I need to do to get this done.

My biggest change has been a move back to Voodoo-Pad from OmniOutliner, because I feel like I wasn’t getting the most out of the program (I never did get how to use columns, and I always felt like the formating, an aesthetic concern I’ll grant you, would never behave,) this I think is mostly a problem with my brain and how it works in combination with the kind of tasks that I seem to be focusing on. I learned from 43Folders that there’s going to be some sort of Omni kGTD program (a productivity methodology/application) on the heels of being released. Sweet.

I like VoodooPad because it behaves a little better with the formating, and the new version (which I completely missed) has both multiple window and tabbed editing/browsing of your notes which is great. As is the new file format which allows for bigger file sizes and integration of PDF files (so you can have PDF articles that you get from JStor into VoodoWiks. It’s all great. There’s also a feature in the Pro version that allows you to set up an integrated wiki server through voodoo-pad, which isn’t a feature I’m going to need for years, so I am without.

I’ve also decided to give up the ghost on Microsoft applications for Mac, which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I’m using my weblog editor (more on that in a moment) and VoodooPad for all of my text drafting, and though I might turn on Office every now and then to create knitting patterns, between these apps and google there isn’t a lot that I could want from Microsoft, and I hate the drain on resources to keep such programs open. Despite the ugly icon, I really want to use Mellel, because it looks really cool, and works pretty good in the demo. The only think I need such a program for is for Manuscript editing (and maybe some basic desktop publishing-type things, how long has it been since someone said “desktop publishing?"). So there’s that.

Zoe, my computer, is about a year and a half now, and I’ve just ordered the RAM upgrade that I promised myself that I’d get a year ago (never buy RAM from Apple because it’s cheaper to buy the same stuff cheaper on your own, but then of course I never do because I’m lazy.) So that’s on it’s way, and I think it’ll make the whole operation run a lot more smoothly. For instance, the computer I had for a couple years in high school and my old iBook both had less ram than this one does right now, for no real good reason. But I don’t think that this entry is really about hardware much, so we’ll save that for another day.

And I think this has taken way too much time at this point, so I’ll go now, and I’ll try and write again very soon ;)

Cheers, sam

I don’t want to harp on this overlymuch, as I’ve communicated this little anecdote/personality insight to several of my most prominent readers, but I just wanted to say a few things about my tea drinking habit.

First of all, I have a really nifty stainless steel mug, with a peeling turquoise/robin’s egg colored enamel. I got it after a series of plastic mugs cups broke unceremoniously. It’s once shiny interior has stained wonderful deep brown color that is really amazing. I’ve discovered that this style of mug is called a Malibu Tumbler, and really I couldn’t be happier. I’ve decided that I need to start looking for a replacement because it’s showing some serious ware. Actually it makes a bubbling noise on the bottom sometimes when I poor new water into it. Having said that there aren’t any real leaks, so Its a bit disconcerting. Anyway. Moving on.

My cup is, at this point, a character object. A professor that I have in a lot of class this year, made reference to it in her lecture, (an example concerning color perception). I even cary it around sometimes when it’s empty, because I feel naked without it. So I kind of need to find the perfect replacement, so I’m on the look out. If you have something that you think might be good run it by me. That would be awesome.

Thus far we have only discussed the cup. There is the considerable topic of the consumption of the tea. You see I’ve come to think that my consumption of tea functions like an addiction. Not compleatly, and I’ll argue against this in a moment, so you’re not left with the idea that I’m a raving loon, but hear me out. I have a particular kind of tea that I drink, almost to the exclusion of all others. I orchestrate my daily running about, to classes, meetings and errands around making sure my tea cup is as close to full as it can be. I know where all of the convenient hot water taps are. I have a tea kettle on my desk, and by the chairs that I most frequently sit in. The ritual of having tea and being able to thoughtfully sip it every now and then is calming, and the feeling of discovering an empty tea cup at the bottom of the second hour (or earlier) of a two hour class is soul crushing. I’m happier and function better when I have tea; though this, is likely due to a Ritilin like effect, and is perhaps the main reason for all this madness, because I don’t really need it to get going in the morning.)

So tea is wonderful, basically. The reassurance that I’m not a loon: I tend to (intentionally or not) wean myself from tea when I’m not in school, because the ritual is gone, and I don’t suffer that greatly. Though I am less productive, I think the ritual, not the chemistry has something to do with that. I don’t really need it to wake up, as I mentioned above. As a side effect of the last point, because I don’t need the tea to wake up, I tend to consume more tea later in the day, which means, I can mostly avoid headaches, because even if I get a late start at 1 or 2 with my first cup, I’m usually only 16-18 hours from my last cup.

Is this much thought on the subject itself a sign of trouble. Ah well. At least it tastes good.

Cheers, sam

ps. more content coming soon I promise. I even have a plan!

Kiss Me, Charlene > “Yarn: Regia Blahblahblahblah (I lost the ball band). It’s part wool and part polyamory or something like that.”

(Via The Panopticon.)

Backwards Socks

So here’s this really cool sock pattern. A lot of people have been working on this sock which for the initiated uses a traditional sock heel worked backwards. This backwards sock, uses a normal heel flap owkred in the opposite direction, and really there’s no reason to think that this wouldn’t work, and I think is incredibly clever. I think I know what my next sock is going to be.

Ha!

In the first class meeting of my first class today, I was charged with the task of introducing myself (name/class/major(s)) and the answer to the following question: “If you could be any animal, what would it be and why.”

I was fretting my turn, because I wanted to say something weird, but I was feeling incredibly uninspired at 9:00 am. It came my turn and I just said “cat.”

But there was an expectation of an explanation. Oh crap.

“Because they’re cranky.” I said, followed by a short but awkward pause. Everyone laughed nervously.

“I mean they’re fuzzy and cute, but they have edge. Lots of edge, I like edge. Cute’s good too,” I amended. There was a bit of a chuckle around and by now my turn was over and I moved on.

I love having cats. Minaloush is incredibly cute, but also edgy as hell. She likes to sleep with me, but she also is very particular about how this occurs and where next to me she sleeps. It’s crucial that one sleeps under substantial blankets when sleeping with the ‘loushis because if she decides that you’ve wronged her by rolling over, your leg could become forfeit.

The other thing is there’s this place in the middle of her back that if you scratch a lot, she does this “chin lift” and her eyes close and she smiles, and it’s potentially the most adorable thing in the history of the world.

That is all. More ‘loushisness in the future.

So I’m sitting here in a bit of a monetary slump, due mostly to the fact that I have to leave for a meeting that I have a big part in half an hour, and that I don’t have a lot of “real” work, but a bunch of nagging things that would take more than the avilable period of time (and my web browsers being sluggish,) so all these combine to leave: blogging time. That’s right, you, gentle reader, get a perfect example of the post genre “rambling, what I did today, with a tidbit of knitting commentary, and general thoughts on the state of the world.”

Yeah I don’t know either. Here goes.

Registration is today, I went late (to avoid long lines of freshman) but they ran out of stickers. So the whole point of registration was moot, and I don’t have a sticker for this semester, and wont until wednesday, which is fine but annoying.

I got a couple books out of the library, regarding narrative and life history. So it’s not quite “my area” but it’s interesting, and I’ll be able to exhaust them pretty quickly. I’ve been working on expanding my knowledge base on this, and have been collecting sources. That’s been the biggest accomplishment of the day. I’m really excited about this project, and I hope I can make it work.

I went to the Add/Drop session and established a few meetings with profs about various projects and commitments. I enjoy so many of the faculty here (let us note that I almost referred to them as ‘the professoriate"). The sad part of this, is I only have classes/etc with 2-3 different profs. I’m close to being done and that’s exciting and a bit scary. But I’m dealing with it.

I’m a bit anxious for my books to come, they’re all ordered, and this was among the cheaper semesters (it’s still a bit jarring).

I haven’t been on campus at all, really, yet. I like my set up, as odd as it might sound, but when I’m actually on campus I don’t have a huge desire to stay. At this point, I just want classes to start, because there’s a lot of uncertainty, and I think I’ll feel better when I have syllabi in hand. Minor Angst

As for knitting, I’ve finally caught up with the book that has the pattern that I need to finish/continune working on my Faroe, and that’s become my primary project (in addition to the socks.) Though there are a lot of projects hanging out on the needles around me, it’s nice to be a single minded project knitter again, and I am once again reminded what a truly splendid pattern this is.

Additionally, I wrote another section of the knitting book. Woot. It was quick. They’re getting easier to write, and I’m writing better content. I’ve laid a lot of foundation, and it’s finally paying off. There’s only one more “conceptual” pattern framework, but I haven’t yet finished the prototype, so I’m going to hold off on that until I do, though I feel ready to write the sweater anyway.

I’m out of my stash of handspun for the handspun sweater (that’s turned out to be a “knock off” in the best possible sense of a Jo Sharp design), so I need to spin more. But I’m glad that I’m at a pause in this one because it is compleatly soul sucking. It’s going to be a GREAT sweater.

That is all for now.

I hope you all are well. You know, I know you’re out there, you could bother to write/respond to posts and that would make me feel really happy. (hi grandma and mom, I’m not specifically talking to you two, but I like hearing from you too).

Cheers, Sam

Ok, so back from Geek Talk, here’s an update on my knitting.

For the last month or so of this summer, I’ve taken a somewhat uncharacteristic--for me--approach to my knitting project choices. While I sometimes have little bit projects that hardly count as projects at all (hats, a sock, a simpler sweater, etc.) most of my knitting energy is dedicated to a single somewhat complicated desgin. These days, I concentrate on making stranded color-work ganseys of one type or another, but I’ve also done lace work or even interesting mostly plain sweaters. These are my real projects, and I can finish one of these projects, in about 2 months, or less, depending on the complexity and other factors. As the summer’s drawn to a close (and it’s gotten hot), I’ve adopted a new strategy: I’ve begun planning out and getting a head start of projects.

I hate starting new projects. There’s something of a crash from the high that comes from compleating a project, when you realize that you have to choose a new pattern, and set to work casting on (a pain, generally) and memorizing a new pattern. So I’ve gotten head starts on a number of projects.

I have two sweaters, Faroe (take 2), which is at the begining of the gussets, and the Turkish coat which is 8-9 inches long at the moment I’m also about 12-13 inches into a sweater knit out of my own homespun, and I have 2 “year” projects (big, projects on small yarn and needles which I expect to come and go from, and which like small projects don’t really count as projects.) That in combinition with sock knitting (what I’ve actually been working on giving the heat, and that’s about it.

When I drive north and the weather breaks I’ll get back into a more “normal” pattern of knitting. But until then, this is about all I have for you. :)

Happy Knitting!

Sam

Here’s an entry to prove that I still do things other than knit and post-structuralism/gender stuff. So there chris!

I must say, while I know most hard core geeks cringe at the thought of google taking over the world, and indeed, that’s a concern, I have to say that gmail is really a great mail option, and the prospect of Writely.com (also a google service) and Google Spreadsheet are really quite exciting, and I’ll have to see how they hold up under more extreme testing, but I can definitely see virtually replacing Microsoft Office: why run two bloated programs when you can run one and get the same thing done. I so rarely draft in a document editor that it’s hardly worth the effort and resources of keeping Word open: most of my drafting occurs in on and offline weblog editors (posted then to private journals/categories) or I use some sort of Editing software like Voodoo Pad or Notational Velocity, or Omni Outliner Pro so for the past few months I’ve done everything I can to stay out of Word as much as possible. I always keep a browser open anyway, and adding even another glitzy java-ey page open isn’t a strain of note, and frankly I like all of the nifty RSS and sharing features.

So as a result, I’ve been reorganizing my digital lifestyle these past few days, and I think I’m in a better place. I’ve forwarded a lot of email accounts into my gmail account, including my primary non-academic email account, and I’ve set up a number of filters in that account (and sorting rules in my Pop mail client) which will effectively allow me to use the web-mail part of gmail and the offline mail client effectively without needing to sort the same email more than once.

I’ve also set up my calendar/schedule for next semester, and it would be really nifty if I could get iCal to publish to my Google Calendar, but I’ve not yet perfected that. Seems like I’d need a .mac account or something I don’t have on TealArt. If anyone has idea’s about that, that would be super nifty. The only other kink I have to work out is that writely.com wants me to respond to a confirmation email that I’ve yet to receive, despite multiple attempts to get it sent. But it’s still beta so hopefully they’ll get that sorted out.

Other interesting computer news of note: I’ve switched away from Opera (again,) to Firefox, and I think this one’s going to stick. The interesting thing, is that Firefox, an open source (right? it’s GPL and all that jazz?) won the browser war, and on an aesthetic software design level, it has the best and most polished design. I liked a lot of Opera’s features for a long time, but Firefox really just works better, and it’s gotten considerably better in the past few months I think.

So every so often I think it’s nice to go through all of the software programs you use, in part as it is archival interesting, and also because sometimes there are great programs out there that other people can recommend. Keep in mind that I’m running a G4 PowerBook and the Tiger flavor of Mac OS X.

For web browsing I use Firefox, and for Instant Messaging I use Adium. My mail client of choice is Apple’s Mail.app (I generally use native Mac apps when I can, as they work pretty well, and the integration factor is nice.) I keep VoodoPad, a Notetaking program discussed above in my doc, though I use it somewhat infrequently. I find that the wiki style organization is unwieldy for most uses, and I feel you have to fight the program to get it to effectively do what you need it to.

I use iTunes, of course, it works and I think it works well as a general content management database (because you can have video’s and PDF and other document files in the same database) Though most of my articles/pdf files are not in my iTunes library, I hope to get them added and catalogued at some point. My one complaint, is mostly that my iTunes library is about 50-60 gigs (45 or so goes on to the iPod), and that I fear that I will out grow poor Zoe’s hard drive at some point, and iTunes' folder organization can be difficult to manage when it gets large.

My other main note taking program is Omni Outliner, which lets me successfully take notes in class, and organize my thoughts on a number of key research projects. It’s an amazingly capable program, and I can almost use it to draft but the problem is that: the formatting is finicky and uncooperative, particularly with regards to margins. I also don’t like that you can’t produce good xml files (why, I ask, why?) or even a Microsoft word outline. It’s a great program, unless you want to get data out of it in a useable format, at which point its only a pretty good program. Have yet to find one better.

NetNewsWire and Mars Edit from Ranchero Software, which are the best RSS and offline Weblog editors for Mac OS by a long shot (and I’ve tried a bunch of them). Mars Edit, has become the main way I post to this and a number of other blogs. I also do most of my drafting in private blog/categories using this program. The news reader, saves a lot of time, and allows access to a FANTASTIC amount of information, very very quickly. My only complaints are: I don’t comment on blogs nearly as much when using a news reader (this is a problem with sam, not the software), and secondly, there’s no way to keep my blog reads synchronized with some sort of web based RSS reader (that will keep my folder organization intact: there are 250 feeds, the folders are key).

I also sometimes use iCal, but it’s a hard habit to keep, and if it synched with google calendar that would be even better. But so be it.

That’s basically it. Word if I absolutely need it. The same of Excel (we’ll see how much google replaces these programs though). And that’s about it…)

I think that about does it. There’ll be more knitting content soon I promise. ;)

Cheers, sam