Ok, so I haven't done a journal upate in a long time, and I think it's high time that I posted an update about my projects and stuff. It's my blog after all.
I've been working a lot, which is a good thing. Also I think some pretty cool things are happening with my job. While work can be stressful by virtue of shear volume, I'm pretty excited about how things are going. I'm also getting better at managing the "working for a virtual company," thing: it's taken me a while to figure out the right way to manage things so that it doesn't feel like I'm working constantly, or conversely feel like I'm never getting anything done. I don't know that I have the answer, but I've started to figure out ways of both working, and making progress on projects that are important to me. Evidence of this: I've gotten knitting and writing done recently.
I've been working on an academic project--some of the conceptual "thinking" work for this has appeared on the blog in the past few months. I'm laying the groundwork for an application to history/anthropology/library school to study free software/open source development mythologies and communities. The project will wrap up in the next couple of weeks, and then I'm going to spend a couple of months preparing and launching a website/wiki on the subject and initiating correspondences with a few key people in the field. I haven't totally ruled out applying for a couple Ph.D. programs in Fall 09/Winter 10 to begin in Fall '10 as a trial run, but I'm thinking waiting another year is more likely. By then, I think I'll be ready.
I've been doing some knitting. Small stuff, socks and hats and stuff, just because I need something with that kind of pace. Also, while I've never been a big yarn buyer, my off an on break from knitting hasn't entirely put and end to my yarn buying. Also I might have bought a skein of Noro Silk Garden sock yarn that I really want to make into a neck cowl/covering/tube. There will probably some enterlac involved as well. I'll get back to sweaters soon. But I'm not in a rush.
My technological purchases acquisitions over the past few months (the new laptop, the linux desktop, the fancy cellphone) are continuing to serve me quite well. I miss the amazing battery life and sleep/wake features of the macbook (which my father has taken as his own), I have to say that I think I work much better on the linux machines. I can focus more easily, because there's less operational overhead (fancy graphics etc.) even the older hardware really keeps up with what I want to do. I've thought about selling/trading the macbook away for something like a dell m1330 (or cash to buy another thinkpad)--for the father, as a way of ameliorating my losses. But other than that I'm pretty pleased with the way my stable of technology has improved the way I work.
In a similar vein, my switch to emacs from vim (and TextMate on the Mac) continues to do well. I'm doing much of my writing in emacs, though there are things that I do in other editors. I edit email vim, because that makes sense, and it works well, though I imagine that I'd switch to emacs for that at some point in the future. There are some things where I'll confess to really liking Gedit's tabbed interface (mostly for instances where I need to copy and paste a lot of content from an editor into a web browser. The right tool for the right job, and all that. I've never thought of myself as a multi-editor kind of guy--and emacs doesn't seem to provoke this kind of response--but it's not a bad thing.
I'm not sure how much holiday-related time off I'm going to take this week. Being neither Christian, nor a particularly observant Jew, I don't expect that I'll make any formal blog vacation. At the same time, I'm well aware that with a great number of you all in blog land on "holiday schedule," it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to slavishly stick to my blog schedule. Also, I need a bit of a break for Critical Futures, to recharge and reevaluate so that I can make the best of the new year over there. So, stay tuned and have a good holiday.