I haven’t posted very much about the kittens of late. I’d like to report that they’re doing well. A friend (incidentally, the person who taught me how to knit, lo those many years ago) visited the kittens a couple of weeks ago, and upon the conclusion of her visit she said “I look forward to hearing about their… career’s.” Frankly the thought of them having careers--particularly when I don’t really seem to--was a bit frightening.

Nevertheless the concept has stuck. So here is a report on the careers of Kip and Merlin:

Here’s a picture:

• This is from a period when they were lying together on my desk. Very cute. Note the ball winder in the background. Kip is in the foreground.
• They’ve taken to having rolling night time battles which occasionally interrupt my sleep as I become a substrate for these battles.
• Though they didn’t purr very much when they first came to us, now they’ll both purr pretty much any time you pick them up. I’m in favor of cats that purr.
• I’m starting to realize that my cat allergies are something that I need to pay a little more attention to managing, particularly given the long hard quality that these cats have. I think this will likely just turn into a more regular face and hand washing behavior.
• Kip and Merlin have longer hair than other cats we’ve had in recent years, though, when I was a small child we had a Mainecoon-type cat who had longer hair than these boys. And lets be fair, one of our big cats has medium-length fur which is particularly silky and not staticy (which means that its airborne more than it should be.)
• Kip has developed a fondness for a ball which he caries around and growls adorably over.
• Merlin has discovered two things. One, he can pull the mag cord out of my computer with ease when I’m sitting at my desk with my computer on my lap. This is ok, because I have one of the mag cord on my new computer, but it’s annoying. The second thing that he’s discovered is that he shouldn’t unplug the computer. So he grabs and runs.
• The grown up cats are starting to come around to the new cats. Their initial response was fright (Nash) and Curiosity-Followed by viciousness (Montana). Nash is still afraid but less so, and has engaged aged in some parallel play, while Montana has had some more positive interactions. I think if we didn’t have concerns about keeping food separate for a while I think they’d be ok to be fully integrated at this point.
• I should underscore that Nash is a huge 16 pound cat, and Montana is 10ish pounds. I think that element makes their reactions even more funny.
• Kip and Merlin both have very faint taby stripes in their gray sections. This is incredibly cute, and I’m not sure that it comes across in any of the pictures.
• Kip has taken to waking me up in the night by running on me (less bothersome than you’d think) and chewing on my ears (more bothersome than you’d think). The first night, it was my toes--not ears--at 4:30, and he has moved on to ears at like 2:30. Though he can usually be chided successfully, it’s more disruptive of my sleep schedule and overall functioning than I might like.

In summation: kittens are good. I approve. I’ll keep you all posted as their careers progress.

This is a post that’s just meant to keep you all updated of projects that I’ve talked about recently, but haven’t had time to write or talk about extensively about recently.

• I’m writing. Not as much as I’d like, but pretty regularly. I expect that come hell or high water I’m going to start the new fiction site the week of July 14th.

• I suspect in my next post to tychoish I will cross the 400,000 word mark for posts on this website (and tealart which proceeded it). Thats crazy, though my verbosity should come as a surprise to no one. Also, I think that July 1 is probably as good a marker as any for my first anniversary of blogging at tychoish.com. It’s been awesome, and I’m not stopping anytime soon.

• I’m making a formal effort to learn how to program in Python. I’ve gotten the O’Reilly “Learning Python” book, and I’m enjoying it, and I think I’m at a point where I might actually be able to make a go of this.

• I’ve done a little programing in the past, mostly a little PHP (for the website) and some shell scripting for day to day stuff that I do around here. But I’ve never actually tried to learn something, opting to just tinker around instead. But I’m starting to get to a point where there are things that I need or want to learn how to program, and I’ve decided that python is probably the best/only language that I need to learn. It seems to combine both straightforwardness with flexibility, and does away with the aspects that I find most annoying about other languages (Perl, not straightforward, lots of modules; PHP, not incredibly useful outside of website programing; ruby, oy; C/C++/Objective-C too much overhead; anything else, too marginal). So I’m looking forward to it and enjoying it mightily.

• Having some moderate level of proficiency in a real programing language will--with luck--be helpful in the job search.

• Another high level project for me at the present is my job search for the intermediate term. I think I want to go to graduate school at some point, but I’m more interested in doing something in the interim that might flow into graduate school eventually, and something that isn’t just marking time. More than anything it’s weird to go from having things so thought out and certain-seeming, to not throughout at all. I’m not sure that this is a bad thing, it’s just wierd

• Now for a couple points of geekery:

  • I’ve changed the color scheme for my terminal window, and as a result have found myself using vim more often. It’s teal, which is better than the navy that it was before. Easier to read, and it’s sort of fresh and inspiring. Oddly. I like vim a lot, though I must say that I need to spend some time learning emacs key bindings, because I don’t know them and Cocoa on the mac uses them, so not knowing them is a hinderance.
  • All the cool kids are doing it, and I’m nothing if not a joiner. (Ha!)

• A few weeks ago I completely hosed the installation of ruby on my computer. Lets not talk about it. I have something marginal working but I should probably do a reinstall of the operating system, but I’m resistant.

  I think on the whole I’m doing pretty good, I’ll (of course) be in touch.

So part of my job deals with listening to interviews conducted as part of a documentary about the civil rights movement. So as a result I get to hear all sorts of people talk about the civil rights movement, with a bunch of different perspectives. From people who knew and worked with Martin Luther King personally, to liberal (and radical) white activists, to community leaders and so forth.

I also apologize for the political digression, I usually try to avoid discussions of current politics, because they are difficult, and so often fail to address the important issues that are at play in our world. As an aside, thats why I write fiction. But with this as a backdrop, I was posed with a question that I think bears a little bit of collective pondering.

I was listening to an interview with a former member of Lyndon Johnson’s administration, who was largely saying, “look at all the wonderful things we did,” and I have little tolerance for this, because it’s clear that this is really just posturing. I mentioned this to someone I work with and they said, (as many liberals these days say,) “yeah, and he was probably better than what we have now.”

Of course, being the ornery sort that I am, I’m wondering if this is really the case.

Johnson started (or escalated) a war that was a farce, and lost control of the political situation to such an extent that he deployed federal troops to put down riots in ‘66 and ‘67. Let Johnson also not avoid responsibility for J. Edgar Hoover’s behavior in the 60s. There are also plenty of reports that Johnson, was as a person, something of a creep (though we don’t have a good comparison on this point) I think it’s not worth ignoring.

And while Johnson is credited with passing the civil rights act and the voting rights act (and what has Bush done that’s that good?), I’d argue that the civil rights acts are hardly an example of timely and forward thinking/progressive government. Not that I think they’re bad, just that they were “as little and as late as possible.”

So what do you think?

So these Creative Commons Licenses are pretty popular with the kids today. And they are. Creative commons is a great way to compensate for some of the short fallings of the contemporary copyright system that tends to privilege corporations rather than individual content creators. I’m a big fan, and I often find myself talking about the goodness that is CC in the world, so this is not a critique of the copyleft movement or anything, but rather a critique of the mood that a specific kind of Creative Commons license.

Lets back up. The basic idea of a creative commons license is to grant permissions to do things like distribute/share or create derivative works (e.g., video adaptations, audio books, fan fiction, and so forth.) which under a standard copyright would be infringing behavior and technically illegal. In some situations this seems perfectly absurd, after all if someone likes your work enough to put creative energy into a related project, they’re probably not the kind of people you want to sue. Creative Commons licenses amend this situation by explicitly allowing behavior that doesn’t harm the creators business model.¹ The hope is that by explicitly allowing certain kinds of usage, “the commons” benefits, and possibly as a secondary effect the original creator benefits even more (by gaining greater attention and then selling more of whatever it is that they sell.)

Creative Commons gives you lots of options in terms of licensing, so that you can customize whatever you want. You can allow commercial usage (like the GNU-GPL and the GFDL which wikipedia uses)², you can choose to allow derivative works (or not) or as long as the derivatives are distributed under a compatible licensee (“Share Alike;” this is akin to the “viral” aspect of the GPL), and you can choose to require attribution with all future distributions or allow people to distribute without attribution. Or any combination of the above.

One combination that I’ve seen a lot of recently forbids commercial use, forbids derivative works, and allows redistribution with attribution. This is probably the most restrictive CC option around, and it seems to be the default. This isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, this is a great license for anthologies where the producer of the specific work might not have total control over all the works--for instance--or other works where it’s really crucial for the body of work remain together as a unit. I don’t think it makes a particularly good general purpose license. In effect what it says is “I own it, and if you want to do my marketing work for me, thanks--not that you would have asked anyway, and not that I would have complained elswise--sorry if you want to do anything more…” While it’s a step in the right direction, I’m not sure that the gift to the commons is very great.

I think I’d be more comfortable if the derivative-attribution were more default for more people, with or without the share-alike. It just strikes me that the really exciting thing about CC is the clauses allowing derivative works. Particularly with attribution and no-commercial clauses, the derivative works do nothing to hurt the original creator that I can possibly fathom, and are often a boon to the original creators. Most importantly, it seems that the opportunity to inspire new work and/or act as a substrate for new work is a huge gift to the commons.

So I guess what I’m objecting to is the sort of feeling of being put-upon as the the only benefit of the license is doing a favor for the creator. Which hardly seems fair, particularly if the creator is also selling the content in some capacity. Creative Commons, at the core--at least for me--is about creating a more cooperative/collaborative relationship between creators and consumers, and the no-derivatives license seems to run counter to that.

Just my gut feeling, I apologize if it’s a little raw. I think in fairness I’m not entirely sure that the ramifications of this work are always very thought out, that people assume a connection between commercial use and derivatives, or something, so I don’t think a lot of creators are always making this decision based on all the facts, but I think it’s paramount that when people use Creative Commons and other free licences that they think about all of the ramifications.

I was reading this article in review of the kindle and I had a couple of thoughts about digital distribution and media.¹ Now of course, I’m pretty sure that the Kindle is not the end all device for digital text, but I think it gets a lot of things right, and is a good development for technology. Some thoughts:

Reasons the Kindle is a Failure

• DRM. If you’re not allowing people full access to their files in open formats your not really selling the books. Period. This is a hugely ideological complaint, but here the impact: the prices are too high given that they’re not really selling you the book.
• Given the above, I think 5 dollars (half of what they charge you now) is probably the most they could reasonably charge for a book and likely something within a dollar of $2 USD is probably ideal. Mass Market paperbacks are 7 bucks, which is lower than the ten that an ebook. More on pricing.
• The device is overpriced and they nickel and dime you to death for service. Getting books/texts converted cost 10 cents. Certain RSS feeds cost recurring fees. I think either they have to subsidize the price of the device and then have a service contract (that includes credits for a given number of books, possibly tied to amazon prime?) or keep the price of the device high and really give the service away for free.
• The obligatory complaints about the objects design and interface.

Reasons the (right) next “Kindle” could be amazing.

• If they fix the price/DRM/etc. problem, sales go up, total revenue goes up, it’s more successful.
• Given the always on internet, people buy a kindle book for different reasons then they buy a regular book: You buy a kindle book because you have time, you’ve read the first couple of sample chapters and you want to read more. You buy a dead tree book because you see it on the shelf and you think you might enjoy reading it later on. I have lots of print books in my collection that I’ve not read. I think you’re probably less likely to collect digital books in the same way.
• Digital distribution does away with overstock, and most distribution costs, which means the reasonable limitations on publication becomes editorial/production staff time, and available good manuscripts.². This doesn’t mean that there won’t be codices anymore, they just won’t be produced in the same way, and they won’t be bought and sold in the same way.
• If this or some sort of digital reading device becomes more ubiquitous (and cheaper and therefore more accessible to a greater segment of the population,) such a device could be the main way that we we do a lot of our reading of text, and I think it isn’t hard to imagine a revival of greater interest in book length forms as result of the proliferation of such a device.

Just a few thoughts at any rate.

Here’s another post in my general theme of “using a technology/comp-sci metaphor for creativity, new media and productivity” … In the generous sense.

For the non technical: compilers are computer programs that take raw computer code and turn it into something binary that a computer can run. This makes it much easier to write programs, because compilers let programers abstract certain functionality¹, and because compilers can do some consolidation and tuning as they run.

While traditional compilers are used for the heavy duty code situations and applications written in C (and C++ and Objective-C, and so forth), when you think about it there are lots of situations where creators, in the digital world, are making something that is then processed by a computer script. In a way, web pages are like that, (though that happens every time their accessed rather than once.)

The wiki program that I use, ikiwiki, works in this way by taking a directory of files and turning into web pages that I can read in the browser. This is basically how the wonderful LaTeX typesetting engine works. Also, interestingly, I suspect this is how most pro-level video/audio editing apps like FinalCut work (make a lot of edits and then render something out. Edits are made as a series of instructions to XML file, which the program then renders or compiles.)

So what’s the benefit to this? Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• It makes it easier to write software that works with your data. Editing text is easy, particularly when that text is created either by you or by a program in a regular and expected way.
• Compiler modeled systems are less taxing generally on the system. Most of the time, what you’re doing with the computer is just editing a text file. That’s low power. Then when it comes time to compile it just has to crunch through some data. And then it’s done. In WYSIWYG and live editing, the computer has to be working constantly to get from you to what you see.
• Any repetitive task can be automated or template, and the chances are that there are a very limited repertoire of kinds of documents that you’re making. I write academic papers in APA format, (or did), formal letters, and full page knitting patterns. That’s about it. I have templates on hand that mean that I can push the same block of text into a template and get a perfectly formated document. I can push the same block of text between the wiki and the blog and it’ll compile (basically) the same way.
• It makes it more feasible to work in smaller files. I wrote a book in Word, and while I started writing the chapters in separate files, it quickly became apparent (and I think this holds true). If you’re using a program like Word, the best bet is to make really long files, and keep projects together in one file. On the other hand, if you’re working in plain text² it’s trivial to mash-up a bunch of text files, and this makes it easier to edit and organize a project.

So more than anything working in this way makes a lot of sense. Though I think to be fair there is a learning curve (but isn’t there always?). The question I’m asking myself (and you, dear reader) is other than the general improved efficiency and cleaner workflow, is there a bigger extrapolation or application of this that we (or I) could apply to another phase of the creative/productive process? Rather than just automating the presentation, is could someone take the model where some sort of raw file is “put together” later and have that assumption shape the way that they create content?

I’m not sure what that would look like, or even if it’s a good idea, but its something to think about.

I haven’t written very much recently about my writing, and I like using this blog as an outlet to talk about this aspect of my life. I’ve been introspecting a lot (not on the blog, thank god) about the future, about what things are important to me at the moment, and I realized how ironic and strange it is that I consider writing to be so important, and am willing to dedicate so much effort, and mindspace to it.

More than anything, this post is an exploration of my goals and progress rather than a discussion of the issues that I’m dealing with.

I’ve been writing a lot recently, of course. I’m working on getting content ready for the new site. My interest is more in getting a ritual/habit established rather than developing a backlog of content that can serve as a cushion when I begin to post content. At the moment, I’m writing this new series of vignettes (I have a dozen or so of them, by now, probably), I’m working on station keeping episodes (including the old ones, I have 16 written), and I have thirty-thousand words of the Mars novella written that just needs tweaking before it gets posted.

(Just for context, I expect to be posting about 2000-3000 words of fiction a week on this site.)

I think, particularly in the beginning I’m going to be posting every week day, though I think I might eventually move to Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting down the road if that seems to make more sense, particularly if I have ongoing serials because I think I’d rather have a new installment of each story every week, rather than a new week of each story every month. If that makes sense. I suppose it needn’t yet.

I’m not going to lie, that I’ve begun to have some doubt in my world about my writing. I went to a concert the other day--traditional irish music--and the performers (who are quite well known) invited their children on stage for a few tunes, and it was adorable and kind of amazing to see these kids who clearly got music in a really important way and as I was watching (and enjoying the tunes) I couldn’t help but draw a connection between what these folks were doing and the kinds of thing I do. There were resonances between what I saw and what I felt I was doing, but I think I’m mostly responding to two factors: writings, as an endeavor is incredibly ephemeral, and while I’ve been writing for a while, and I’m not a complete neophyte, I still have a rather lengthy period of floundering about that I have to go through. Most “new/young writers” in science fiction have almost ten years on me. While neither of these factors are seriously (or acutely) discouraging, they do lurk and give pause from time to time.

Given that writing is slow and hard, and what’s more there are few markers by which to judge success. So is it still worth it? I’ve heard the following writer’s advice a bunch the past couple of weeks: “you don’t have to write.” And it makes a lot of sense, there’s no reason to suffer through writing unless you’re getting something out of it. You have to enjoy it, you have to get some pleasure out of some phase of the project. Something, anything. Because, after all there’s nothing in Maslow’s hierarchy that talks about writing.

And I’m still here, and I’m still writing. I don’t have to, but by g-d I want to. So I am.

Onward and Upward!

So someone wrote a nifty little java aplet that makes really pretty tag-cloud like graphics from either your delicious tags or from a block of your text.

So I plugged in the text of the novella that I wrote last fall into the little window and got:

It’s not very pretty, but it’s sort of cool. And a little embarrassing, but these things happen. I’ll definitely be making more of these.

Thanks amy for the link to this. I agree about putting these on shirts.

Hope your weekend is going well.

Out of curiosity, I copy and pasted the text of Cory Doctorw’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town into the same applet and got the following result.

“Said” is probably the most frequently non-determiner-word in fiction, though I think I probably need to do something about my overuse of the word “probably.”

sigh