I always thought that I would go to graduate school sometime in my twenties. I ask questions that are pretty geeky and difficult to answer, I think learning and research are pretty important, and I want to talk to people about ideas, projects, and theories. There are skills I need to be able to address the questions I have and background literates that I wish I were way more familiar with.

It seems like a good fit. Right?

Right. Well, right only if we accept that graduate school is a mechanism for personal betterment. While that has to be part of it, mostly graduate school is a job and the first in a long line of possible jobs. The academic career path has merits and demerits, but it’s still work, and I think to ignore this, makes it possible to accept atrocious labor practices in the academic world.

Somehow, without much intentionally on my part, I’ve found a career that I enjoy. Even more curious is the fact that being a professional writer with some technical background is the kind of thing that enjoys a certain kind of perpetual demand. And better yet, it’s impossible to get a degree to support this career: as near as I can tell literature degrees, history degrees, theology degrees, theater degrees, and psychology degrees are all equally relevant and irrelevant.

While I’m not convinced that I never want to teach, if the “getting a job” portion of going to graduate school is somewhat moot, then I’m left with a couple of questions:

• If additional schooling doesn’t affect career options and possibilities, then does it make sense to spend significant time in pursuit of an advanced degree?
• How do I develop and maintain an intellectual and scholarly practice without graduate school?
• How do I prevent my career from stagnating and from getting stuck in less than ideal jobs in mid-career and late career stages?
• I work in field where the need for human labor is constantly (and ideally) being automated away. The conventional wisdom is “develop specialties, but don’t get too cemented in a particular function so that you have options for after your job gets replaced. Combined with the orthogonal issue that writing and the work of writers is horribly misunderstood by just about everyone, figuring out “career paths is not necessarily easy. How do I deal with this long term concern in a more manageable way while being mindful of the future concerns.

While I sometimes feel like this blog can stray into the “overly meta”, I think that prefer intentionally over aimless wandering. Indeed, I think this career issue might have been a great deal easier for me had I figured some of these things out earlier. I know that we don’t always find clear and definitive answers to these problems and that solutions come in pieces and very slowly.

This series is about thinking about these issues to increase the possibility of intentionally and to document my process so that people can provide feedback. With luck, this will also help form a model for people who want to think about ways of contributing to scholarly conversations and grow intellectually, but needn’t do that in the context of the academic training and labor market.

I look forward to hearing from you and working with you all!

A few weeks ago we moved the furniture around. The biggest objective was to get some desk space setup in a more usable fashion. I find myself doing this a couple times a year. It’s easy for me to get in the habit of having everything a certain way without realizing that the chair I like to sit on is always in the sun during the mornings when I like to write, or that I never put the dishes away, because the cabinets were arranged backwards. The same sort of thing happens with computers and the way we use technology.

Matt Lundin and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I think at the core of the issue is that the kind of work we do with computers, changes subtly: either what we do actually changes as a result of our progress, or we learn more about what we’re doing and what we ought to be doing from completing work. Like the furniture, it’s easy to get accustomed to doing things in one particular way and not realize that there’s a better way.

It’s useful then to spend a little time every now and then to do a little bit of digital spring cleaning. There are two major parts of this process:

3. Figure out if “what you do” has changed significantly. As our projects grow the work we do changes, sometimes in ways that make it hard to continue to organize our efforts and tools in the same way.

4. Looking for new tools that you can use to do what you do. This includes flat out new tools of which you weren’t aware, little automations that you may be able to build, and tools that solve problem domains that you’d previously ignored. It’s also sometimes useful to look at your tools and figure out what is more trouble than it’s worth. Ideally these don’t all change annually, but it’s worth doing a review.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that you’ll find a solution to any issue that you come across but you might. You might also be able to gain new insights into issues that have nagged at you by approaching a number of issues and pain points all at once. It’s also, I’m pretty sure, more productive to spend most of your time doing stuff (writing, coding, etc.) even if your world isn’t perfectly optimized, than it is to spend all your time tinkering with things.

And the sofa really does look better over there.

Onward and Upward!

This has been a strange week. It’s strange, but not terribly surprising, that given a comparative expanse of free time with not a lot to do except write, that every little thing I’ve meant to do for a while but have been putting off suddenly came up and required all of my attention.

This isn’t to say that I’ve spent all of my time doing chores and running errands. I’m actually taking this as proof in favor of my general theory that writing and other avocational pursuits ought to be habitual and ongoing rather than the focus of occasional binges. But there are some things that take a lot of time and its worth binging on a little. This week, I got some writing done, but mostly did things like tinkering with my computers and tending to some long overdue systems administration tasks. I also switched to a new cell phone, oversaw delivery of furniture, sang, danced, and cooked. Not a bad week.

I do have some links and notes for you.

• I made a rough introductory page for my efforts to run the xen hypervisor on a laptop.
• There was some confusion this week as I reorganized the blog post files on the wiki. Basically, all blog posts are now in /posts/ directory (no more /posts/ and /posts/) with the different feeds generated by tags. So I did post some cool stuff, but it didn’t get out. This includes:
• Bad Org-Mode Habits about the best ways to use emacs' org-mode.
• Poetry Has a Purpose which addresses a little bit of literary theory/criticism/practice that got under my skin and into my head.
• I’ve imported a few recent discussions from Facebook threads associated with my posts here onto discussion pages pages, which I think you might enjoy:
• I spent some time this morning working on a system to capture notes into org-mode using procmail and my cellphone’s email client. See that here.
• Most of this post, excluding the links, was written on the aforementioned cell phone. It’s still not quite the same as writing from a computer, but for getting raw material out of my head, I kind of like it. We’ll see if that sticks.

That’s about all I have for now!

The new job starts next week, so I would say that my posting schedule may be a bit erratic. But if you’ve been reading tychoish for any length of time, you’re probably used to a far more irregular posting pattern.

I’ll see you on the flip side.

I was reading an Ian M. Banks novel, `The Use of Weapons <>`_, and there’s a scene where the main character reports on having spent a few years “trying to become a poet.” And we get this very idyllic tale of him surrounding himself with beauty and simplicity. It didn’t work for the character and I suspect it wouldn’t work for you.

This reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago that made the argument that poems are made of words rather than images or some sort of spiritually inspired emotional state. In short, poetry is about form, structure, and the conveyance of meaning at the level of the word and that “transcendence” doesn’t really play into the craft or purpose of poetry. Or at least, poetry is not exceptional among literary forms in this regard. I think that this is basically true, and is probably a good way of approaching creative writing and texts in general. Maybe this is just a tychoish thing.

Here’s a corollary, and I don’t think that it’s too contradictory even though it nearly sounds it:

Poetry, and texts in general, exist in the real world and require a purpose to succeed. Poets don’t just spend a lot of time “living like a poet” and are then write poems that grow from these experiences. Writing well requires some skills and some basic training, but beyond that foundation writing needs a purpose or a goal. It’s easy to see how this might be true in prose forms, but I think the exact same is true of poetry. Perhaps more so.

The character in the novel was attempting to achieve some sort of aesthetic, working from an idea of “how poets should work.” While it can be hard to learn what the poet’s ulterior purpose is, that is a different issue. The most important thing is that you have something to say, regardless of the form.

Hear Hear!

Org-mode is great. Org is this super-task management package that merges outlining and structured document editing abilities with task management glue. It sounds like a weird combination at first, when you realize that it means that you can effectively do work and organize your work in the same set of files without needing to “switch modes,” between a planning/task list interface and a “doing things” interface, the effects are amazing.

I’ll leave “the awesomeness org-mode” to other people and other posts, and spend time here focusing on why “org-mode is awesome but won’t do your work for you,” and “if you’re new to org-mode you will probably want to do things in a certain way, but don’t” issues. Org-mode is great and it can be even better if you avoid developing a few bad habits.

Use `org-capture <http://orgmode.org/manual/Capture.html>`_ as much as possible. Org-capture is a quick interface within emacs that lets you open a temporary buffer, take a few notes, and save the notes into a file. It has advanced features for more complex data entry features and data types. The temptation is to use it as a “quick entry” tool for task list items, but don’t just use it to capture new tasks. Capture links and bookmarks, store notes and important information, If org-mode is your outboard emacs-based brain, then org-capture is it’s main input device. Fighting it, means that your org files end up being less useful.

Avoid using org-mode as a simple task list, and particularly avoid constructing the content in your org files to “game” your agenda view. The agenda compiles a working task list for your actionable notes, working backwards from this means your notes are less than useful things can get lost and all of the really cool things that org lets you do aren’t accessible to you.

This may just be the application of a good general information management practice, but: distribute information evenly throughout all levels of the organizational hierarchy of the file. Use the org-narrow-to-subtree function to focus your current work on a specific portion of a file, and don’t bury information or have it sitting around in one big unorganized pile.

Hope this helps!

In response to 9 Awesome SSH Tricks some posted the following quote (on the old commenting system):

The workarounds have become smoother and some of the things we can do with networks of Unix machines are pretty impressive, but when ssh is the foundation of your security architecture, you know things aren’t working as they should.

-- Rob Pike, 2004

So let’s clarify things a bit. SSH is great as an end user protocol, and great for dealing with the realities of our distributed computing environment in an exigent manner, SSH lets us:

• connect securely to remote systems.
• quickly establish tunnels through remote machines.
• admister remote systems securely.
• provide end-users with key-based authentication.

SSH is great for providing end users with a secure way of interacting with computer systems in networked environment. It’s not, however, the magic bullet for security policy. If you or your organizations security practices revolve entirely around SSH tunnels, then you’re probably in trouble or about to be in trouble. Use traditional VPNs and TLS/SSL when it makes sense and develop a sane security policy.

But don’t forget SSH and if you do use SSH, know that there are some really awesome things that OpenSSH makes possible.

This is a post drafted a couple of weeks ago, while I was still doing the commute.

I wonder sometimes, what the people on the trains I take actually do. While there’s some variation on who’s aboard, there’s a very common and consistent cast of characters on each leg of my journey. God only knows what they’re doing.

One fellow, I’ve spent the winter thinking of as “the short dorky one.” He’s white and pretty pale, has darkish-blond with hair that’s seems too long, under 5'6," and wears glasses that are several years behind current styles, his teeth are noticibly in a poor condition. I should also point out that my commute is largely “pre-rush hour,” and that I see this fellow around 6:20 in the morning.

Today, he wasn’t wearing the oversized and a bit more than “slightly worn” jacket and I noticed two things: first he was muscular in a way that suggested he put some time into the appearance and, two his entire right arm was covered by a tattoo. I would have never pegged him as the type, and none of the fantastic stories I would have thought to tell myself about him included either of these details.

Most of the time, my primary reaction to my fellow commuters is annoyance when they won’t stop talking or using their cell phones. Sometimes, I’m just confounded.

Welcome to life.

A week ago, I quit my job.

For a number of reasons this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: I’d been burning out on a 2-hour each way commute from Philadelphia where I live(d), nominally. The boyfriend in New York City, didn’t make things easier. And while, I really liked a lot of things about my job, I knew that it was getting to be time to move on. My last day was Friday.

I spent the intervening time packing all of the stuff that’s going to New York into my car, and driving it to New York. For the rest of the week, I get to donate a bunch of my stuff that I’ve been dragging from place to place for the last 2 plus years. Add in some car maintenance, a few dinners and visits with friends, and a visit with my mother. She has awesomely agreed to drive said car back to the Midwest where it will be infinitely more useful. And I’m trying to get some writing done, and readjust my brain and body to a different work/life schedule.

Next week, there is settling in, more adjustment, waiting for deliveries, and more writing. The adjustment thing is tough: no matter how late I manage to stay up I wake up feeling rested and like I’ve slept in luxuriously. And then I look at the clock and see that it’s 6am. Time to get up and start writing, I guess.

The new job, is in many ways much like the old one. Different technology, different customers, different kind of writing, different sorts of problems, but I’m really excited. When I started my last job, I was not a very confident writer, and the experience of writing professionally for the last two years has increased my confidence as a writer and the strength of my identity as such.

I think being forced to not only write something regularly for a couple of years, but also be responsible for maintaining and improving that text can be very eye opening. If nothing else, I’ve become very aware of how my writing has changed and improved.¹ While it’s still occasionally surprising that other people want to pay me to write things for them, I’ve gotten better at recognizing the tangible value of my work and abilities. Somewhere along the line, I stumbled into one of these “career” things and it suits me. Who would have guessed?

I don’t tend to write very much about what I do for my day job for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that I want this blog to be my own. Having said that, what I’m doing at work undeniably influences and shapes my thinking and writing here, and I don’t expect this to change. In the mean time, this whole “changing jobs and moving to New York,” moment in my life has a pretty significant impact in how I think about the future of my career, my writing, and possible graduate school trajectories. I think I’ll be writing a series of posts on the blog over the next couple of weeks on this topic. You’ve been warned.

Onward and Upward!