The following tweet/identica post made this morning, pretty much sums up my reaction to the incumbent holiday:

so last night I was like “why am I not getting email” and then “I better check on the server” and then “oh right #otherpeoplesholidays”

I’m getting on a plane later this morning to fly to my home town for the first time since last October. It’ll be good to see family and friends out there, and I’m always appreciative of a break from some aspects of my routine. Including the opportunity to be in my apartment during daylight for the first time in a month.

I often think of this holiday break as a “free time” to make progress on different things that I’ve had to neglect on the account of life for the fall. While obviously more pronounced when I’ve been a student, I am very much looking forward to the opportunity to get up early and write, and spending long afternoons working on a sweater.

I think I’ll have some other posts this weekend, and early next week about the knitting project.

There’ll be new Critical Futures on Tuesday as there was last Tuesday (about new technology). I hope you forgive my indulgence while I get the new rhythm sorted out.

And if this is your holiday, I hope you enjoy it!

Sometimes, particularly when it feels like I’m not getting very much done, I’d probably tell you that I’m not very good at keeping myself a routine and that I’m not terribly focused most of the time.

I’d probably be lying.

While I wish that I had additional routines and habits more firmly established (blogging, writing, excercise, the truth is (I think, in retrospect) that a lot of how I exist in the world has to do with routines, and winning the mind-over-matter game.

Since graduating from college, or there abouts I’ve been very keen to limit/control the amount of sleep I get in an effort to control normal fluctuations in mood. I’m pretty keen on waking up “early” so that I can spend a few hours in the morning before the day starts writing and tending to my own things in “me time.” I’m also pretty mindful of how I use caffeine to control awakeness and focus, and I primarily do exercise/gym things to modulate my mood and energy level, to control how much I sleep and am able to focus.

Welcome to my life.

I realized much to my delight, that I’d reached that stage of sleep deprivation where I’m able to fall asleep directly after drinking a cup of tea and stay asleep, until the morning. I’ve also managed to get in a habit, where, most nights, I roll over and check the clock between sleep cycles. It doesn’t make the sleep feel less restful, but I do feel more grounded in reality when I wake up, and tend to be less groggy as a result.

Frankly this is kind of exciting for me.

Yesterday, I made tea right before I left the office, but left the mug there, and my night was noticeably effected by the chemical difference (I usually drink up to 24 ounces of tea on the train home.) All is better today.

in no particular order:

“Aww, you look like you’re annoyed at the water for being wet. Good morning.”

“[The broken heater] had only the vaguest reminiscence of warmth.”

“Wasn’t your major Women’s Studies?” “Yes.” “Then how did you learn about the Internet?”

“You look like the kind of fellow who wants a jolly rancher.”

I was originally going to write this post as a “reasons I don’t need a new computer,” piece explaining my current setup (one laptop, a virtual server, and a lot of bailing wire) and explaining that despite some problems (a lack of local redundancy and small screen size) a new computer wasn’t exactly warranted. Though I wanted one, particularly after seeing the new MacBook Air, and I’ve long thought about getting a 15 inch laptop as I still lament my last 15 inch machine. Since I didn’t really need a new machine and there wasn’t a convincing reason to do an upgrade, I was going to write about good reasons to avoid upgrading just ‘cause.

Clearly I failed.

Particularly, since I’m writing this post from a new laptop.

A few weeks ago I saw a very good deal on a current-model 15" Lenovo ThinkPad (T510) with all of the specifications that I wanted: the larger resolution screen, integrated Intel graphics and wireless, a bunch of RAM (4g) and a 7200rpm drive. It even has a Core i7 processor (quad proc), which was a pleasant bonus, and so I went for it.

I’m quite happy with it. Besides a great deal and in many ways an ideal machine, I decided that being dependent on one (and only one!) system for all work and non-work computing was probably a bad idea. Additionally, I’ve wanted to reorganize the way my laptops’ hard drive partitions in a way that requires at least a short period of down time, and a process that I didn’t want to attempt without some sort of back up.

It took me a few days to get everything sorted out on the new machine, as it usually does, and there are some cool new things that I can do that I have yet to get ironed out, mostly around figuring out some virtualization technology to do awesome things with this system. But for the day to day stuff, it’s perfect and works just as I like.

This is the first time in several years where I’ve regularly used two systems for day-to-day work, and it’s the kind of thing that I’ve tended to avoid as much as possible. It’s just a hassle to switch between systems in terms of getting everything synchronized. I’ve got a pretty clever setup sketched out that I hope to be able to share with you all shortly.

In the end, this might not have been an absolutely essential purchase, but I think it was wise (in terms of the redundancy,) it makes some interesting things possible (virtualization, more processor intensive tasks,) and for the kinds of things I do, the extra screen space is very appreciated.

I’m sure I’ll write here from time to time about these things, but for the moment: Onward and Upward!

Fantisque Unfettered is a new fantasy magazine from the editorial team that did the Aether Age shared world project. You can learn more about this by listening to the latest version of the outer alliance podcast. I must confess that reading/listening to all of these things is still in my queue, but I have a lot of respect for the creators of all of these things, and I’d love for this wiki play host to a discussion of any of these works.

I pulled together an archive or collection of my Critical Futures posts that discuss systems administration, administrators, and what “normal” folks can learn about technology and techno/social phenomena from the practice of system administration. I’m calling it “Lessons from Systems Administration.” If anyone has an idea for a more archives for Critical Futures posts, see the archives.

I hope your week is awesome!

Apparently Delicious is shutting down. This is either not news to you, because you’ve been hearing people natter on about it for days, or you don’t have a clue what Delicious is. Which is more likely, because it’s probably being shut down for under-use, which means most people don’t have a clue. Right. It’s a website that allows you to post links “bookmarks” and then tag them, and then search for new links based on tag, with everyone’s links so you can discover whats happening based on what everyone is posting and tagging with what. Nifty idea. It’s also worth pointing out that Delicious was one of the first big web 2.0 startups, and got to the whole idea of the social web pretty early.

Anyway, enough history, and on to the news of the day.

tofu said “with all of this talk of delicious, I am surprised that I have heard little about creating a decentralized social bookmark alternative” which is a good thought and echo’s a slightly more complex proposal that marn made on the topic the other day.

In short, leaders of the contemporary revolution in federated network technology (“web services should be federated and exportable so that everyone’s data doesn’t get hosed when one website closes down, and people can share data with friends who uses different services”) are saying “let’s not make this mistake again, if we’re going to build an alternative, let’s make it better.”

And I think, in typical me-fashion, I’m saying: is social bookmarking still a thing? Have twitter and identi.ca replaced our need for this kind of service? The problem I think lays in the fact that there’s so much Internet that services like delicious very quickly become “lets catalog everything” and as a result “bookmarking” as a concept isn’t very useful for sharing links and exposing information to new audiences.

Having said that, I think the notion of writing a tool to use identi.ca or a status.net installation to replace delicious functionality seems like a great idea. Similarly, while it’s not federated pinboard.in has been around for a while and while it’s not federated, (or open source, particularly,) I like just about everything they’ve done.

Ponder that!

This used to be a knitting blog. No really, it did. Then I got a technology job, move east, and started singing and dancing constantly, and didn’t really have a lot of spare time to knit. Compound this with the fact that I came of age as a knitter in Southern Wisconsin, and the heavy sweaters and thick socks that were essential there were pretty much unwearable in everywhere I’ve lived since.

Which isn’t to say that I’ve stopped knitting, hardly, but I have slowed, and I’ve tended to choose particularly boring projects for their meditative quality rather than for their knitterly interest. Not that meditative knitting is a bad thing, but it means I’m less likely to be enthralled in a project in a serious way, which means they take longer. Such projects are probably also uninteresting for you all to read about. But I have been knitting and thinking about knitting things.

I gave away a bunch of yarn that I acquired during college and in my dark period after college. Yarn that I got because it was a good deal, yarn that I was given, yarn that I didn’t have a plan to use, and yarn I didn’t particularly want to knit. It felt really good, to pare down the stash to yarn that I really liked and yarn that I really wanted to knit, and I’ve never been a serious knitter when I’ve had a legitimate disposable income, so I’ve never really been in a position to say “I want to make a sweater, let me go buy the perfect yarn for it.” Now I am, and it means I need to keep a lot less “rainy day yarn.” Good feelings.

As for what I’m working on now? I have a cowl/scarf device mostly done in a ribbing that’s my “current” project. I also have a sweater that just needs sleeves, and the collar hem sown down, and I’m stalled on a Alice Starmore-inspired Aran sweater (needs sleeves and some hem’s) because I’m probably going to run out of yarn, and I don’t really know how to precede properly (it’s also going to be unwearably warm.) And some socks. I seem to almost always have a pair of socks in progress, but they’re never interesting, and I don’t wear many wool socks most of the time.

I’m not sure when I’m going to have more time, but I am hoping to clear some of the decks soon and finish some of the above lingering projects, and perhaps move on to more exciting knitting. With luck!

I’ve been on vacation this week, if that wasn’t clear to you all. There’s been a lot of “doing things,” notably this website, a nifty lunch at a big tech company you’ve heard of, family stuff, bumming around New York City with R., and writing seemingly thousands of emails regarding projects, events, and possible meetings that I will probably not have time to commit to or maintain once I return to my regular routine. But it feels good to be able to pay attention to all sorts of work that I’m forced to neglect most of the time.

I really like this new wiki, and I really like the new publishig work flow, the way that people have interacted with the site and the ability to blog casually again. Here are some exciting links/thoughts:

• Willie Taylor, an English/Irish folk song, sung in this version by a couple of friends at Bard College (Jeremy Carter-Gordon and Ben Bath). It’s nice to know that I’m not the only person in my generation who’s into this kind of music
• pinboard.in, a delicious (rip) like, link-sharing/storing service. The thing I like most about Pinboard (I have an account, but I don’t really use it.) is that they charge a nominal fee for creating an account. This supports the site and controls who gets an account. While I’m not sure I like a world where content/services on the web are all pay-to-play, I really don’t like the world where no one is willing to pay for anything digital, because there’s an expectation that things ought to be free.
• I wrote about this more than a year ago, but I think that halvm (an implementation of Haskell that runs on bare Xen) is really cool, and probably an indicator of things to come, but it’ll be a while before this (and other tools like it) are really ready for general use. Which is probably a good thing because engineers and IT people need some time to adapt to thinking about software in this way.

Keep warm!