Act One: Personality

tycho describes to professor one of the reasons why he didn’t get into graduate school last year: … and I applied to personality programs as well …

professor: Oh that’s a bad idea, there are like no jobs in personality. (professor turns to computer and does a search on a higher-ed-jobs site to prove point).

Act Two: Flats

• Time: 5:00 Correspondent K. calls and says, “I have a flat tire, so I might be a bit late, but everything’s ok.”
• Time: 5:15 Correspondent E. and tycho exchange car keys so that the household will be able to fufill all evening commitments in the event of “everything” not being ok.
• Time: 5:30 Correspondent K. calls and requests roadside assistance, not, as logic would suggest from the department of transportation or the american automobile association (AAA), but rather from Correspondent E; and unsurprisingly tycho.
• Time: 5:31 tycho, and Correspondent E. gather belongings and winter weather gear and rush out the door.
• Time: 5:45 Correspondent E successfully navigates to the site of the repair in progress. tycho notes that the car does not even look to be elevated.
• Time: 5:46 tycho and C.E. descend upon the scene and discover that the car is indeed jacked, but also find C.K. continuing to unscrew the hubcap.
• Time: 5:47 tycho and C.E. relieve C.K. of responsibility in this matter, and admire how shredded the tire became during the 3 mile drive, at no more than 25 mph.
• Time: 5:55 tycho drives away in the newly repaired car, while C.’s E. & K. continue on with evening as plan, only slightly colder than they had indented.

Act Three: Thanks

tycho walks into house at about 6:02pm

cellphone rings obnoxiously. tycho answers: yes?

Correspondent K: Good, you’re home.

tycho: silent stare

Correspondent K: I just wanted to make sure you made it home safe.

tycho remains silent.

Correspondent K: you did something nice for me, I just wanted to check in on you.

tycho wryly: And this is the thanks I get?

I hope you’re weekend is going well.

I had a somewhat less than productive day yesterday, there were things that needed to be done, and doesn’t it always seems that those things are the same things that you need to be doing. But we can pass it off to the curse of modernity and move on, I guess.

I’ve been working a lot of my statement of purpose, which is getting very close to being done. Close but not there. None the less, I have a 2-3 page document that only needs polish and a few sentences here and there to tie everything together, and punch up things like research experience and what not.

At the same time, I’ve been working on outlining and starting my big final paper for this semester, which will also be my writing sample for a couple of schools. It’s scary that I’m not further along, but it’s a relatively short paper, and while I don’t have an actual version of this paper that I can cut and paste text from, this paper is about my interests, exactly (it proposes the project that I describe in my statement,) so I know it backwards and forwards and I just need to figure out how to get it out into words.

The cool thing: I get really excited and happy when I get to work on the material, which I think is a really good sign. Though I’ve been doing (obviously) a lot of fiction and informal writing (blog stuff) of late, the truth is that I kind of enjoy academic writing, and I think with a little time and energy, I’m not that bad at it. Now all I need is some time, some caffeine, and it’ll be ok.

In the knitting news, I think I’ve successfully bent space-time. I’ve been knitting on the gray sweater of doom. Apparently I name sweaters {color} sweater of doom, when they’ve taken forever to knit. Anyway, I started this in, abut august of 2005, and have dabbled in it a bit for the past couple of years.

Well, I picked it up for a change of pace, while I wait to get back to the color work when I have a better idea of how I want to do the shoulders and the brainpower (read above for info on where my brainpower is going).

I didn’t actually expect to get so close to finishing the sweater, this has, for some time been my “movie knitting” because there’s so much plain knitting without thinking, that it’s often good for knitting whilst at the movies. It’s one of those projects that I don’t really think of as “counting” towards the number of projects I have on the needles. I spent next to nothing (maybe 15 bucks for the yarn,) and I’ve since bought, I think, a replacement needle because I considered this one to be something of a lost cause.

But what do you know, this project was the right thing for my brain at the moment, and perhaps I was further along on this project than I thought I was. Anyway, end result, I’m basically done knitting the body. Wacky I know. I decided late in the game to knit a single cable from the neck across the shoulder and down into the cuff. Because, you know, how much stocking stitch can you really cope with.

I did some sort row shaping across the back of the shoulders, and just this morning I cast on the 8 stitches for the shoulder strap, and by god is this fun. My latest design feature that I’ve been working on for my next couple of sweaters is shoulder joins that have straps or saddles in them that then run down the sleeve. It adds to the flexibility, it gives you something to gently shape the sleeves downward, and makes it possible to avoid sleeve cap shaping which is awkward in knitting fabric. (It works, but really in a knitted fabric, the main goal is to get the shoulder set in far enough, the sleeve top will take care of itself, particularly if there’s some sort of strap/saddle.) And the straps allow you to keep the structure of the seam, while avoiding the inflexibility of a hard join.

The other nifty thing about this sweater is that I think, I have developed a way to--assuming you knit off of a cone as I have--to only need to weave in ends at the terminating ends (cuffs, bottom hem, collar). I think I’m going to have to cheat a little bit on the collar, but it’s a cool game to figure out how to get everything to even out without having to break the yarn.

Anyway, be well, I should get back to real writing.

Onward and upward!

ps. If I run bibtex/latex through TeXshop, rather than through the TextMate bundle, everything compiles fine. Still not sure why this is the case, but I don’t argue with success… Much. I’d of course not have to use more text-editing programs than I have to, so if anyone has ideas, I’d love to hear them.

1. Knitting Elbow
2. Second Life Wrist
3. WoW Throat
4. Expose Ring-Finger
5. iPod Thumb

1. Socks
2. Scarves
3. Any Cozies
4. Swatches
5. Mobius Anything

So, I finished the cap that I was working on earlier evening. I’m not sure that I blogged about this, but I’ve been itching to knit hats for a while now (the old hats were 2+ years old, and hats wear out and get icky and lost faster than say, sweaters).

It’s nice. black, understated. It’ll get a lot of wear.

I had been putting the Morocco sweater on hold until after the finals push was over, but with the hat over, I’m without knitting projects. November has been the month of finishing things: the socks, the hat, the two plain sweaters from this summer.

The end result of this, is that I don’t really have anything to knit. There is of course the stranded sock that I was working on in July that is in desperate need of some ripping back, and it’s a sock, and I’m very much not in a sock mood.

So I think I’m going back to knitting on the sweater. It’s weird to not have projects underway. It’s been so long since I’ve cast anything on, for real. Weird.

Oh, Right! Joe, you’ll be happy about this. I have the grey sweater to knit. I think I’m going to go pull that out of the pile and take it with me to class today. It’s good and mindless.

Actually, one thing I fear with the grey sweater is that if I work too much more on it, I’ll be in danger of being back in sleeve hell, and those sleeves, with their plain stocking stitch might just send me to the loony bin. I’m thinking of running a cable or three down the top of the sleeve and making a shoulder strap out of it. Having said that, I haven’t actually knit a stitch on that since say, April, and I haven’t even looked at it since early June, so I’ll tell you later when I have have more… empirical data.

Onward and Upward!

Today has been one of those days where nothing really seems to go right. The knitting is all fouled up, and I had

My knitting got caught on something and sprung a little catch. It’s actually kind of disappointing, and reveals that I have no clue as to how to graft or kitchner pieces of knitting together. I think it has something to do with knitting backwards and having the stitches mounted in the wrong dirrection. The best I can ever hope for is reverse stocking stitch grafting, and even that it’s sort of spotty.

I’m so going to be that person in 30 years who comes in to a yarn shop and pays one of the gurus to graft stuff. It’s sort of pathetic. I knit on the grey sweater today, and I find it intoxicatingly relaxing: How weird is that? Plain stocking stitch. On very small needles with very small yarn. I’d say, I probably have less than two inches to go until the neck shaping starts, and then less than 3 inches from there until the shoulder straps start. And like I said it’s intoxicating.

But enough about the knitting, perhaps the larger issue is that in my paper writing today I ran into a few issues with LaTeX when I went to compile everything, and I still don’t have a real clue what went wrong.

Here’s what I can tell:

1. I installed latex2rtf from MacPorts a few weeks ago, because it seemed lie a good tool for interfacing in the rest of the world. MacPorts, installed a different installation teTeX (or something), where I had previously been using the macTeX distribution, or maybe I was using something from Fink. UNIX nerds will probably disown me for having a really crappy set of paths and install locations. Sorry. It is coming back to bite me in the ass. 2. Whatever happened, all of the bibTeX stuff (thats the package that handles the bibliographic database and complies all the references and what not,) and it appears the APA formating style file is also gone, or at least not accessible to whatever TeX engine that I’m using. 3. This of course can be fixed by throwing the .cls file in the same directory as .tex file that I’m trying to compile. The same thing goes for the citation packages. I’ve been using the nat-bib, or at least I think I’ve been using the nat-bib citation package because it works a little more clearly and flexibly than apacite. Again, I got something that made really pretty APA manuscripts and I didn’t mess with it. Not sure what’s up with that. 4. My paper printed and for some reason jammed the cite-key in front of all the reference page items. To which I can only say “WTF?” Furthermore it errored (ok, ok, it produced an error) on line 214 of apa.cls (the bibliographynewpage flag/option or some such, monkeying with that code did nothing from what I could tell.

I finally just gave in and let it be, but I’d really like to be able to have the ability to produce clear and straightforward documents. Really really like to be able to do that.

Also, my email isn’t healthy at all, and I don’t have the clue as to what caused this. Gmail released new features today (group chat, don’t you all get up at once now,) and if that’s the reason that it’s been all screwy, I’m going to be pissed. Very Pissed. Also very sorry if you’re trying to get a hold of me. If you try the email, and it isn’t working, leave a comment here, and I should see it pretty quick.

To add insult to injury AIM is being cranky, and since I use AIM the way most people use the phone, this adds an additional layer of frustration to the day.

I think I’m going to get a book at hope that I don’t run into a paper cut issue.

Other work continues apace, I suppose. Sorry for posting the entries today out of order.

Having sworn of socks on anything other than DK/worsted weight yarn, I have a little bit of a sock yarn stash to burn off.

Ok I only have one skein.

It’s really pretty and I bought it while visiting Sheri at the Loopy Ewe. a few months back. She’s supper cool by the way.

But the purchase was totally a moment of weakness.

It’s ~400 yards of sport weight. The label says it’s “Jubilee” from Misty Mountain Farm in color “Ocean Wave.”

Leave it to me impulse buy, yet another skein of teal yarn.

Anyway, so I have sock yarn to burn off.

I’m thinking of making an enterlac style dubblemossa. These are the hats where they’re basically a long enclosed head-sized sausage, that you fold in on itself and it covers your ears. Usually they’re stranded. I want to do one with enterlac. the yarn’s soft and it will be awesome.

No more questions now, I’ll write a pattern at some point. Maybe.

So like any dutiful designer I did a guage swatch, mostly because I’ve never knit with this yarn or anything like it. Super-wash can be a little funny, and after enacting the following scene a few times I thought it was a good idea

tycho: So here (Tosses yarn) I’m thinking of making a hat. FellowKnitter catches: Oh this is pretty, what kinda hat. tycho: A sort of enterlac/watchclock/dubblemossa sort of thing. FellowKnitter looks quizzical tycho: So I’m thinking of casting on, about 128 stitches using US size 3 needles, how does that sound? FellowKnitter: That’s a lot, did you do a gauge swatch. tycho: No. I’m asking you. FellowKnitter: Don’t be a dumbshit, do a gauge swatch tycho: whatever, grumble.

So I did, and I got the very nice gauge of 8 stitches to the inch. Multiplied it by 22, after measuring my head (23.5 inches incase any of you want to make me a hat) and cast on (provisionally) 176 stitches. It was a pain in the ass.

I knit two rows.

I measured the gauge: 6 stitches to the inch.

Now before you say, tycho, it’s only two rows over a provisional cast on, how can you be sure.

The texture of the knitting was completely different.

When I took it off the needles, the (16 pound) cat could have stood inside of it.

Now here’s for the irony. 6 stitches per inch times 22 inches equals. You guessed it 132. Which is damn close to my original suggestion.

Just saying. Use your head and don’t succumb to peer pressure.

Lest you think this is yet another mac versus linux versus windows versus OS/2 Warp FreeBSD post, it’s really about moves to “Operating Systems,” that exist within programs, not operating systems in the classic sense.

So I posted a while back about how there seems to be an application development trend away from desktop operating systems and towards developing applications that can be used online in a web browser.

Basically I thought that though exciting, a lot of these apps were slow, hard to use, and that truth be told most browsing software was flawed (slow, non-standardized,) and so forth. Despite the fact that there’s more bandwidth floating around and the fact that people have gotten better at writing server side and host side applications.

Also earlier I posted a, mostly comical, list of five things that you can do in emacs but probably shouldn’t. To subtitle this a little bit, emacs is one of the grand old text editors, written around a program language from the 50s (LISP), it’s incredibly powerful, customizable program, it’s free, and it’s a program that a lot of the people who write programs use. So even though, the best word I have to describe it is absurd, it gets a lot of attention. Anyway, long story short, people have written extensions (in LISP!) that gets emacs to do all sorts of things in addition to writing text/code. Like, there are scripts to check your email in emacs, games that you can play in emacs, scripts that fetch web pages in emacs, IRC clients that run inside of emacs, and so forth. If I were a huge enough dork, I think actually I could probably get some of the functionality of every program I’m running at this moment, as a script inside of emacs.

I hope you’re seeing where this is going, at least a lot faster than I did. While I’m not a huge emacs dweeb, I have a certain sort of respect for working that way: once you learn your text editing system (and after all, most of what we do is edit text) you don’t want to move out of this environment. Particularly if there’s a learning curve as steep as emacs.

Initially I thought that the shift towards using the web browser as a sort of lack luster runtime for “new” applications, was about lazy programers, and a sort of mass delusion, but really, I think it has more to do with people not wanting to leave their comfort zone, the application that they already spend a lot of time in, in the same way that urdweebs don’t want to leave emacs (or vim, and so forth.)

Anyway, it’s cool that clicked, I’m back to figuring out how to install mutt on OS X so I can more automatically integrate my mail drafting into TextMate, and be done with Mail.app for once and for all. Maybe after I’m done with the semester. Heh.

Onward and Upward

Overheard in a conversation between andy and myself in the not so recent past:

tycho: I have a few things to say to you about your site andy: oh? tycho: 1: you don’t link to me. andy: patience tycho: 2: you’re archives and about pages don’t work.¹ andy: whatever, shut up. I’ll get there. tycho: 3: that design was one we had back in the greymatter days. andy: heh, you know me… I’m slow to get to things…

I’d say…

1. Add superfluous consonants, particularly X and Z.
2. Add superfluous vowels, or overuse “y” as a vowel
3. Append numbers to names
4. Insert Mid-Word stops using the apostrophes.
5. Name alien’s utterly mundane names like “Jim.”