Topic: Posts

The yarn store opened yesterday, and I--unsurprisingly--didn’t get any writing or reading done last night. Here are my thoughts from yesterday.

We failed, I think, to take pictures of the new sweater and other things. I wore another sweater, there’s at least one picture that I’ve spotted on ravelry of the shop that I’m in. More pictures as the come.

Being in the yarn store all day encouraged some sort of perverse desire to knit plain sweaters. There are a couple of yarns that I have my eye on. Mostly I’m thinking of Cascade Venezia Worsted, a lovely silk and wool blend, and some Lorna’s Laces Superwash. This is weird, because I don’t really enjoy making such plain sweaters, and what’s more I’ve sort of sworn myself to a constrained palette, as a creative/artistic experiment. No matter, there are a number of things that I have to finish before I will even think about starting a new project, and I’m thinking that it might be February before I get to that point.

The Latvian Morocco sweater deserves a new picture, and is now… 13 or 13.5 inches long. I have about 4-5 inches to go before the underarm point. Because the sleeves are going to be set in (and saddled), the rows will get a bunch shorter at that point, and it’ll go faster. Also, because the saddles are going to be really wide, and I mean real wide (like 8 inches total, 4 front and back), there’s not a lot to the yoke section of the sweater once I get there.

In any case, I’m taking a break from that sweater to knit a sleeve to finish a red and black plain sweater that I started in May or June. It’s worsted weight Patons Classic Merino that I bought to knit a sweater on commission that never came to fruition. So I made the sweater for myself. It’ll be a cozy one to wear once I finish it, but I’ve been dragging on the sleeves for months, and I’ve finished one of them, and I hope to finish it this week. I have a lot of Law and Order stored up for this purpose.

That’s about it, on the knitting front. I have today off of work, and I have a bunch of writing and reading things to do, but I’ll probably be in touch with some non-knitting related thoughts later in the day as I have them.

• Hijacking a Ravelry thread with lines from the Buffy Musical Episode, leading to the posting of a cat macro.
• friends
• Writing almost 1000 words on the novel project.
• Clean Spaces.
• Tea (goes without saying).
• Shoes with good support.
• Gmail IMAP
• twitter

It’s finally, I think, getting cold for real here which is nice. I can wear sweaters again, for real, mostly.

The new yarn store has its grand opening today, and although we were open yesterday, it’s for real today. That’ll be exciting. I got a/the copy of Sweaters from Camp, and I quite like the book, and always have, so it’s time that I actually got it. I think it might solve my indecision regarding my next big project.

My intention to get up early and write was foiled by chores and whatnot, but that’s ok, I guess, I’ll be thinking about things today, and maybe I can take some notes, during off moments, to counteract the certain “omg I can’t think about words now,” feeling that I get after a long day.

There was sweater blocking last night, and though I’m not wearing it today, I will have it with me and I suspect there will be pictures.

Also, there’s been a problem with the RSS feed for a few days, so if you’re used to reading the site by RSS (one way or another) then you may have missed a few posts. I think it’s all fixed now. I’m still not sure about the TealArt home page, but there’s no time to worry about that now.

Have a great day, I’ll report back in a bit!

So one of the great things about Tumblelogs, particularly the automated variety profered by jaiku and Tumblr is that they’re all about collecting your wonderings on the internet and presenting those wanderings in a way that’s entertaining and, well, cool. The problem is that there’s something missing: the comments that you leave in other people’s blogs.

Part of the issue is that it’s decentralized. Many people run their own blogs on their own servers using their own systems. There are conventions but not standards, really.

Collecting blog comments is, I think a better marker of the sort of semantic network that makes up the internet, at least a better marker than whatever we remember to tag on Del.icio.us, which for me only seems to happen every six weeks, if I’m lucky.

For better or for worse I can’t think of any really good way to accomplish this in an automated way. Maybe technorati could be used as a source for this kind of data, but it’s beyond me, that’s for sure.

Anyway, thats what I was thinking about as I was rolling out of bed, time to go angst about the GREs and my future. But first, a hot shower.

Cheers!

In lieu of anything about my day--which was mostly uneventful; or my knitting progress, which hasn’t been; or my plans for tomorrow, which are frightfully dull--I’m going to post the punch lines of a couple of theoretical issues that I’ve been tossing around and half starting blog essays about for a while, because I want to, and I can think of no good way to to frame or present them, and no good textual sources to talk about, so here goes.

1. Reorganize sociology (and the way that people approach queer studies) so that race/sexuality people are more likely to occur than race/class and gender/sexuality people, because I think that this direction provides a much needed paradigm shift, it helps intersectional projects and it’s way way more interesting. I have the beginnings of an essay that I have no real good way to ground on the subject, but it might be interesting to think about

2. Someone should do some study of technology that compares arcane computer interfaces like the command line, with arcane automobile interfaces like the manual transmission. I insert little bits of this when appropriate into my stories, but I think it’s an interesting juxtaposition, and I think speaks to some key issues in efficiency and the use of technology.

Thats’ all for now, I woke up this morning in a panic about the GRE, I think I’m in pretty good shape, particularly if I continue to work on it, but it’s just scary. Also, yarn store work. Egad folks. I have some firewallable time on monday that I think I can do whatever I want with, but I haven’t decide if I should write or study for the GRE. Short term I want to write, long term, GRE is more important. Just gotta memorize those Pythagorean triplets.

I was able to procure empty teabags today at a very swanky kitchen store. I went with my father to pick up an Areopress for my mother, after I saw the recommendation on Boing Boing TV. Now I know what you’re thinking, “Why tycho, in the world would you want empty teabags, and the answer is that I want to be able to make loose leaf tea, but I find most of the methods around to accomplish this are somewhat flawed. I’ve never had a tea ball not explode mid use, and I prefer to not be platform dependent (that is, I don’t want to have to brew tea in a particular pot, because it’s the only one that will make the tea.) Anyway. Now all I need to do is buy some tea of this variety.

I have not woven in the ends or blocked the sweater yet, though I am for the first time all day in the same room with both the sewing up needles and the sweater so it might happen now. What I thought was going to be a short in and out sort of day, somehow turned into errands and doodling about. I hate days where, at the ned you wonder, “what the hell did I do today.”

In that vein, the Morris team is set to do it’s usual Halloween hurrah. It should be fun, but it can be a tedious sort of engagement. I have not ironed my white shirt, and I don’t intend to. It’ll be dark, and if you can see the wrinkles in my shirt, you’re missing the point.

Onword and upword!

I promise to post more than once today, with something that isn’t just a list, but I have a few thoughts that I think would be good to get out:

• I finished the sweater. Pictures to follow. On a scale of 1 to 10 I rate this one a 7, because of the way the sleeves/shoulders fit, but I suspect that I’ll quite enjoy wearing it anyway.
• I’m at 2,000 words on the novel. It’s hard to justify to yourself and the world that you’re writing a novel when you don’t even have ten manuscript pages, but I am I swear. I’m getting a hold of it slowly, damnit! No more novella editing yet, but soon. Round two readers, get ready!
• I need to figure out what I’m going to try and do with the novella once I get it to a point that I’m comfortable marketing it. The publication I was thinking of sending it out to has closed submissions until March (they have a good “new writers” program, potentially accept longer pieces and my parents knew the editor in another life so my name will stand out--my real name has a way of doing that. If not, I think the Marx quote will earn me points). There’s an indi-press that I’m interested in that looks like it’s the real deal, and I don’t think that it will be too long for them. Other markets don’t have provisions for works between 25,000 and 40,000 in their submission guidelines, so I’m at a loss.
• I read the entire Ars Technica Leopard (OSX 10.5) Review yesterday, and it was great. I have to say that he didn’t talk about the RubyCocoa bridge thing that bsag talked about and the, I think the term is, “scripting hooks” in AppleScript for python and ruby, and the fact that Ruby on Rails and RubyGems ships with the new operating system, which I think is totally awesome, and a really good move on Apple’s part. Having said all of this, I’m not in any rush, and probably won’t upgrade until after I finish the graduate school application. What I have works now really well, and while I very much want to get rid of all the brushed steel windows, I don’t want to have to worry about anything breaking or a massive backup for a while.

My recent foray into web2.0 living, when I left my power cord at home yesterday, was an interesting experience, and has left me thinking a good deal about computer usage in the future.

Before I get started lets just assume that by web 2.0 I mean, the move towards using tools like AJAX and Ruby-On-Rails to build quick and sturdy applications run server-side, and usually, centrally located as services. Google is like the web 2.0 company, but I mentioned Meebo, and 37Signals are great examples of the kinds of applications that are pushing these models.

For example, ideally what GoogleDocs has over traditional office software is that it’s platform, and even machine independent, and it uses high quality file formats. Also, there’s a whole level of stuff that Google takes care of (updating the software, maintaining the servers, and so forth,) that traditional software users have to pay attention to.

The side effect is that you have to “live” your computing life entirely in a web browser, which many of you may already be doing (I was watching theBoy do something on his computer, and I was sort of amazed at how much time he spent in a web browser and want not: I apparently live in a different world.) But I don’t think this is the way to go: web browsers aren’t very standard or consistent, and for the past 10 years, every browser I’ve ever used has consistently been the among the biggest and slowest applications I use regularly. (Clearly Photoshop wins this, no contest, and MS Office products are close, but I don’t use the former very much and the latter at all any more.)

As people start to use more than one computer, internet connectivity becomes more ubiquitous, and as large swaths of the computing (and developing) public starts to use non-Windows OSes¹ it makes sense that the smart thing to do from a development perspective is to write Web-based programs: everyone can use them regardless of platform, they work everywhere there’s a connection, and in a lot of cases they’re as easy if not easier to write than their desktop equivalents.²

Also, being Web-based is good for business: it means that you’re charging people, not for the rights to the intellectual property that is your software, but for the use of that software running on their server. I’m all in favor of business models that “use” IP rather than “sell” IP. There aren’t effective ways to sell IP, but there are lots of effective ways to generate services.

But despite this, it’s all incredibly unsatisfying. Web browsers make really bad application interfaces/layers, and writing new programs isn’t always the best way to get better and more open file formats. I don’t know, I think someday most of our computing won’t happen on the devices we’re holding in our hands, but I’m not sure that the way to acomplish this is through a web-browser.

Just saying

• If I don’t know what to name a file I name it {something}.codex.txt. All my projects have codex files that are just big markdown collections of stuff. My todo list is called codex.tasks. Also all the spheres of my life have a two character prefix that I use to identify their files. AC for school (ACademic), MR for the novel (knowing MaRs), GS for graduate school (finally one that makes sense, SK for station keeping, BR, for the new novel project (BReakout), and so forth. Lots of codex files. Sigh.
• I have, by my count, about 16 more rounds remaining in the red sweater of doom. It’s all I can do to work on other projects. It’ll be nice to get this done and be able to focus on the Joyce sweater I’m making. I think that I’m going to knit on it for a couple of weeks and then knit a sleeve, knit on the Joyce sweater for a week or two, knit another sleeve, and so forth until I’m done. At the moment, I have a slight bottle neck in the fact that I have 1 16 inch US size 5 needle. I’ve probably, at this point spent about 60 dollars buying this particular size and length of needle (it’s best when we don’t think about this.) I’ve broken 3 and cut the cord on another (steeking incident, lets not discuss.) But then, it’s probably better that I don’t divide my time too much.
• I’m having the desire to knit hats. Expect hats in my future.
• Sorry that there has been so much blathering about computer stuff and what not lately. New knitting content would be really boring, and it’s been busy.
• My computer speakers have the tendency to pick up errant radio ways which is really annoying, but I’m too cheap to buy new ones despite the fact that these were the speakers I bought for 20 dollars when I built a PC box in high school. So I’m sitting in an empty house listening to my ipod on noise isolating headphones.
• I start working a crapton lot on Thursday. I’m pretty psyched about it.
• I had the pleasure of talking to ComposerScott last night. He posted an entry on his LJ about a cute BSG cast member. And despite the fact that I’ve been reading his journal for, oh, a year, I felt that this was the perfect first time to post a note of concurrence. I discovered Scott via the wonderful “Prometheus Radio Theater,” which I must shamefully admit to being tragically behind on. I’m behind on all podcast listening, and I’m hoping to start taking up spinning again, as a way to begin to get caught up. I just don’t drive distances or do menial office work enough any more. Anyway, it’s nice to find new internet friends.
• My friend R. and I had a conversation a few months back about how most of our closest friends were people that we knew at a point about 6 years previous. It was worry some, because these people disappeared, or changed in ways that made being friends with them difficult (or we changed…) But I’m starting to realize that many of my friends are more recent acquaintances, and I think though difficult in many ways, is a move in the right direction.
• I’m really bad about commenting on people’s blogs and journals, despite the fact that I read a great number of them. I just never feel like I have the right thing to say, even though as someone who delights in every comment that gets left on my site, that you don’t have to write poetry in the comment box.
• Would it be idiotic to build a linux server that had a drive that was dedicated to my iTunes library that I could mount over the network and then synch my ipod to over the network, or is that crazy? Also, while I’m living in fantasy land, what are the state of podcasting/skype tools for linux and the GIMP (the things that I find I almost always need more computer umphf.)?

That’s all I’m observing at the moment…

The red sweater of doom is almost done, I have about 35ish rows of knitting to do before the ribbing (which itself will take about two hours.) I think my goal of having it done by Saturday, is doable. I’m not sure that I have enough time to wet block it by then, but I’m going for steam here.

I’m also going to have enough yarn left over to do something else with. I’m thinking that I’ll buy a cone of black yarn to start with, and do something with the dark red and the black as a sort of subtle background for something. Another sweater. This seasons grey coat, and the blue and black grey coat are both queued up before this though. It’ll be nice to have a sweater that’s mostly made out of leftovers. “Woot! efficiency,” I say.

The yarn store I’m going to be working at starts employing me on Thursday (dry run, and a last minute sort of thing; grand opening on Saturday). I hear there are going to be people camping out in the morning. Hence wanting to get the sweater done before then. I also have a crap ton of things to get done before then. Egad. It’s weird, most of the mundane things in my life are pretty under control, and I’m not “behind” on any projects, it’s the big existential things that are dragging on me: getting into graduate schools, a web design project, some larger aspects of the writing projects, numerous emails, and so forth.

Also, I left my power-cord at home today, which meant that I had to spend some time using a public computer. A public PC computer. It didn’t even have Firefox! I was sort of at a loss of how to make things work (meebo was a lifesaver.) Also, while I would still consider myself proficient with office, it’s a weird experience, and my recent move to IMAP was helpful in keeping things all sorted out, but I have to say that I really hate living inside of a browser, and I can’t quite figure out how so many people do that…

Anyway, be well, and I’ll be in touch.