I've been talking with people recently about "what I'm working on," and I've realized two things. First, that I'm beginning to get spread thin; and second, that I haven't really used this blog as an effective tool to track these projects and facilitate ongoing work on these projects. So I'm going to write an "ongoing projects update." So there.

While I don't think there's sense in making this a "weekly feature" I think taking the opportunity to check in with you all about my projects, to mention cool things that are going on with these projects.

  1. The Novel

I've not managed to make this into the habit that I want it to be. Having totally missed my goal of finishing the draft in August, I've set a more tentative goal of getting it done in time for NaNoWriMo this year. I don't know if I'll do a NaNo project this year--probably not, I'm too contrary--but it seems like a good and doable goal.

What has me hung up at the moment, is I have a few scenes that I need to be written by a particular character that I've come to despise, not because he's a bad character, I just find him frustrating to write. This is mostly interesting, insofar as I initially thought that he'd be the easy character to write in the story.

Despite this hang up, I'm really quite close to being done with this monster. Three or four more chapters, and some editing across the board. Not a huge deal. I just need to do it. That's a lot of what this Labor Day weekend has been about.

  1. This Blog

You're all aware of this project, I trust. I've been able to keep up my "mostly daily" schedule for a long time now. Two or three years and counting. Since I've started the new job, and since my posting entries (if not actually writing them,) is a manual task (with Wordpress, I could queue things to Autopost). I'm not as good as I once was about getting entries posted in the morning as I would like to be. But it gets there.

Also, while I'm not cruising toward the A-List like I might have dreamed about when I was a teenager and getting started with this whole blogging thing, I'm actually pretty pleased with how this blog is going. Most entries evoke some sort of response that I see: on identi.ca, on facebook, or in comments. I get to have cool email conversations with you all. I'm pretty pleased. I'm still trying to figure out how to do a little better, because I think it'll be awesome for all of us, if there are more voices and conversations going on, but I love blogging, and I'm really pleased with this project.

  1. Cyborg Institute and Sygn System

This is the project that I've started with deepspawn, to create a distributed social networking and "user generated database engine." Notes and other work related to this project are starting to come together on the Cyobrg Institute Wiki, and it's something that I put a lot of work into a few weeks ago, but I haven't really given it the kind of love in the past two weeks that its needed.

My list at the moment, for Sygn related projects is to do some reorganization of the wiki (the constant struggle), to announce and promote the xmpp muc for the sygn project (a chat room), to help people develop a basic reference implementation (and maybe learn some Python in the process?), and generate a few more use cases, to help folks understand the implications and possible utility of the project.

  1. Cyborg Institute Systems Administration

One of my contentions about the future (of technology specifically, but I think it's generalizable to some extent) is that as "previously scarce resources" like data connectivity, storage space, and software, become less scarce, the one thing that will continue to have concrete value is systems administration. Having people in the world who are really good at keeping larger systems running, at making sure all of the pieces talk to each-other, at making sure the people who need technological services have the right kind of service that they need. There's real value in that.

And that's a huge part of what the "Cyborg Institute" project is about. Sure there's a lot of cyborg-related content and theorizing that I'm interested in working and developing, but really I can do that here on tychoish, what Cyborg Institute lets me (and you!) do is make this conversation much larger, it lets us work together and it allows me to help people do awesome things.

While the product of this work isn't particularly visible, and I don't really have the ability to say "I did X, Y, and Z for CI" this week, there are a lot of little things, and I think it's definitely a worthwhile project.

5. `Critical Futures <http://criticalfutures.com>`_ `Relaunch <http://wiki.criticalfutures.com/>`_

This is definitely a Cyborg Institute project: it's running on CI servers, we're using CI tools, and I think the project--a collaborative fiction wiki--is very much one of these new technology-things that makes the whole "cyborg moment" so interesting.

I should point out that [brush][] is largely spearheading this. I'm just doing a bit here and there, and making sure the system runs well. I'm excited about this, and I'm glad that Critical Futures is going to get some love. There'll be some other projects of mone--the novel, and so forth--on Critical Futures as well someday, but that's down the road I think. Good to do something here, no?

  1. Knitting

I think it's a good day when you can be like "You know tycho, you should watch more TV." my current knitting project is very much a "do it whilst watching television" kind of project, and I'd very much like to be able to create a space in my day(s) to get more work on this done.

That seems about good for now. What are you working on? :)