Good Monday Friends!

You know the week is a longer length of time than you might normally be given to think. On the one hand, I look back and say “gee, nothing much of import happened,” and would therefore be prone to thinking that it was a short quick week, and on the other hand when I think about it, it was kind of a long week.

I had my first “real” bank holiday in many years: my old school never canceled classes on bank holidays, so I’ve grown out of the custom of having an extra day every few months, and I think that having Monday off contributed to the sense of length of the week. Additionally, this was my first week of real unemployment. I got some applications and emails out, and I got some extra writing done, and that’s what’s on the plan for this week. I’m confident that something will pull together coming up soon. In the mean time I’m writing a bunch (and having a blast!), getting things done, and it’s good times.

You may have noticed that I’ve been blogging more regularly over at tychoish I’ve basically been posting about four times a day, and I really like the tone, and kind of content that’s emerged. It’s fun, and writing the posts really complements the way that I travel on through my day, and I’m really like the way it lets me catalogue a certain kind of process of research and thought. I do have to learn to tell the difference between tychoish posts, and tychoish posts that have turned into TealArt posts. You’ll see one of those posts this week on TealArt, at least.

The other thing that doing this blog has taught me is an appreciation for writing in the moment. While I so rarely go back over my TealArt posts (what you couldn’t tell? heh.) Its no secret that I like to keep a backlog. While there are benefits to this, namely it means that if I spend a day every couple of weeks writing TealArt entries, it means that every other moment of writing time that I have that week isn’t spent writing for TealArt, and I think that’s good in the long run. Having said that, there’s something to be said for writing things in the moment, which is what the blog is all about.

The other thing that I’m going to have on the board for this week is some stuff about the Open Source Knitting project that I’ve been scheming about. I have a couple of more essays that I’m going to post on Tuesday and Thursday. If you’re interested in thinking about this, I’m trying to spend some time on IRC, and I think the #textiles channel on Undernet.org servers would be a great place to start this kind of conversation, but once I get this foundation up and get a job, I’ll be more ready to move forward with this project.

That’s about all I have for you this week. Be well, be productive, enjoy, and stay tuned!

Cheers, tycho

So Tychoish, in the last week has broken the 200 mark in number of posts. TealArt by contrast, in the last 5 years only has 700 some.

But I had a particularly blog filled day yesterday, so I’m thinking it being Sunday, you and I have better things to do with our time that write and read this blog, so I’ll see you all come Monday.

Take a break, would ya!

(Cheers!)

This started out as a comment `over here <http://www.thomascrampton.com/2007/09/06/how-to-be-an-uber-blogger-by-cory-doctorow/>`_, but I think has evolved into a blog post of it’s own, so here’s my commentary

I think this is pretty good advice, clearly, and the “hey folks, we’re taping over here,” line was priceless. Well, maybe not priceless, but that’s the general idea.

I would like the offer commentary, on this advice, however:

I think the “don’t make it hard for people to read your work,” is good universal advice, but it’s not so much about blogging as it is, about distribution and creation. I remember not so long ago that blogger wouldn’t publish full RSS feeds (or any feeds, possibly) and I had a policy of not reading any blogger feeds for just this reason. So good advice there, no surprise.

The “write wire-style” stories is also good advice, but it’s particularly good advice for blogs that are more like wireservices. Like, boing boing, and slashdot. And in a lot of ways I read these sites as if they were wire services, in search of tidbits that I think would be interesting for my blog, or some-such. So if you were writing a blog, like this, it’s a great model to use.

This also assumes that the primary route of new traffic to the average blog are are people browsing google or technorati, and while that’s probably true of blogs like boing boing, that’s far from a universal. For instance, for a great number of weeks a post of mine on TealArt called “Cool Nicknames” was my incoming link from google, because people were googling “cool nicknames.” Now I would love if you thought that people coming in from this search were looking for something other than a list of cool nicknames, which I wasn’t providing then, and am not likely to start any time soon. And I know I wasn’t following Cory’s advice here, but still, I’m not sure that this blog (and this is true for many blogs) are providing the same kind of information that search engines are best at finding, or that most people would think to look for on a search engine.

This means that, even if you write the best headlines and opening sentences, you still won’t get new readers, because you’re writing pieces about email organization, or the lessons of your latest science fiction project, or thoughts on the collaboration model of open source software for other sorts of projects. Even the people who are interested in these things, and willing to read about them, probably wouldn’t think to browse google, looking for blogs. This leads me to an alternate mode of “encouraging” blog discovery:

I see blogging as part of an ongoing conversation. Conversations that I’m having with myself, conversations that I’m having with you the readers about what’s going on in my life, conversations that I’m having with people who are (theoretically commenting on the blog), and conversations--like this one--that I’m having with other bloggers.

People don’t stumble into the conversations via search engines, they stumble upon them by reading other parts of the conversation. By talking to you in real life, by finding you in IRC rooms, or on listservs, by reading other blogs that link to you, by reading your comments in other peoples blogs, and by reading your comments in their blog.

While you still have to write regular blog entries (which is really important, lets not forget that), reading and participating in other blogs, and other parts of the internet community is at least as important.

At least I think so, we’ll see how it works out.

My email management system is a failure.

I have a lot of email addresses. I even have a text file that shows how all these address’ are routed so that I don’t end up forwarding messages from one address to itself after passing it through three steps, which I have done before.

The hub of my email email system relies on a gmail account that I never really use, that keeps most of the archive under control, and has an arcane set of labels and filters. This isn’t an address I really use. All of the important email addresses (the @tealart.com and @tychoish.com ones; are forwarded into another gmail account, that’s really just a pipe, but it’s also the google account that I use the most, and my primary jabber account.)

Operationally, most of my day to day email, goes through my RealFirstName@tealart.com account, and I do almost all of this in Mail.app, apple’s email client, and I don’t really ever use web-mail, because I have this amazingly craptastic system of filters and rules that need to be revised, and I don’t have a web-mail account that I can comfortably live in, although, a few months ago, I might have said that this was because I always had my laptop with me, and liked the comfort of offline apps, now I feel like having a bit of extra flexibility would be a good thing.

This is a pretty big project that would require me to do a number of things to straighten things out:

• Deal with archiving my email. ie. taking existing emails and exporting these emails into a plain text format that I can grep through when I need to. Store these text files externally.
• Reorganize system to rely more on search and less on a complex and deranged file system, more or less modled on gmail’s “Stared,” “Inbox,” and “Archived” Model, using smart folders to take care of day to day operation in Mail.app.
• Create a revised system of filters, that can sort my mail effectively with only a few simple filters. Implement these filters in both Mail.app in the new gmail account.

Sigh

Bitch, Ph.D. on Pseudonyms:

Pseudonyms prevent texts from being impersonal, from pretending to objectivity; they draw attention to the author’s role in a way that a straight author does not. At the same time, though, pseudonyms make a text more fully public: by hiding the author’s identity, the author becomes potentially anyone. Pseudonyms mean something, and one of the things they mean is that the pseudonymous writer has a reason for pseudonymity. When pseudonymity becomes a generic feature, as with essay periodicals and blogs, one of the things that means is that the genre entails risk, that publishing is risky.

(from The Long 18th.)

The essay is great to read, I have to say, even though it’s probably almost a year old. tychoish brings a whole new meaning to the term “late breaking,” alas. The particular quote about the role of pseudonyms, is I think really great, and I hope to be able to quote/refrence it again in the future.

Link to Bitch, Ph.D.

It’s one of those conical pieces of writerly advice: “don’t abuse the thesaurus.” The problem being that you find words that are unnatural and discordant with your tone and style, and they stick out, and it sounds bad and reads worse.

In a similar vein I remember someone quoted Heinlein as saying that always wrote adult novels using the simplest language he could think of, for accessibility reasons, but in young adult novels, or stories pitched to the YA audience, he would occasionally throw in a hard word, because kids liked feeling like they were being trusted to be smart enough to handle complicated things.

So I’ll admit that I occasionally use a thesaurus. More often than not, it’s to remember a simpler word. Like, in something I’m currently writing, I just looked up “concern” to find “interest,” because I was having something of fixation, and the reference was good to get me unstuck. We can all imagine, of course, how this could have gone awry.

From the comments at Digg, this one, is… precious.:

Digg - Opera legend Pavarotti dies at 71:

I think I’ll miss his beard the most.

I can’t imagine having a voice like his, let alone that beard. R.I.P man.

(from Digg Comments.)

I’ve been working on a paper this morning, and thus have been a somewhat lazy blogger. Here are some quick notes before I runn off to class.

• I’m not putting up a TealArt entry this morning, and if I put something up this afternoon, it’ll be a quickie. I’m going to save the knitting essays that I have written for next week, when they’ll have enough time to breathe properly.
• I got new boots yesterday that are very nice. I’m not used to wearing shoes so much.
• I got my first feedback for the book today, and it was good. The reader picked up on some of the things that I was trying to do, and also some cool things I did without exactly intending to (not literary accidents, but not things that were in t he outline/planning). This is good news.
• The sleeve of my sweater is about 7 inches long, and I’ve already started decreasing more slowly, so that the forearm isn’t too narrow. The worst is over, I’ll be done with it soon. Just in time to start something new.
• Also, g-d, fire the person who came up with rain…

Cheers, and I’ll be a better blogger this afternoon. It’s tea and class time.

1

I was in class today and we were talking about cognitive categorization heuristics, with relationship to various similar phenome sounds (voiced verses unvoiced consonants ie. /d/ vs. /t/ or /w/ vs. /v/). But the professor referenced the example of a talk that a visiting professor gave the previous semester regarding the limits of intelligibility of “bisexuality,” because of the difficulty of categorizing the intermediate spaces and non-binary configurations.

Anyway, In the description of this the prof stumbled over the word “heterosexual” or “straight” (I think she was deciding which to say). So of course, I, without looking up from my knitting (I was in a tough spot!) say “The rest of y’all,” drawled out for effect, I think, but I might have resorted to a more Pittsburgh “the rest of yous,” I don’t remember. I think it got a chuckle, but the knitting was more enthralling at the moment.

I’m pretty quiet, and while I’m sure there weren’t a lot of (any?) people who had missed the queer memo, I keep to my self, and my classmates don’t really know who I am, so I felt a little awkward for a moment (it passes quick, thankfully,) when I realized that I had put myself out there in front of a group of people that I don’t really know.

2

In another class we were having a discussion of Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, and adult development and aging. At some point there was a thread of the conversation where the discussion turned to the the connection/impact that relationships had with the aging process.

At this juncture a couple of student talked a little bit about the challenges and impact that being queer had on this thought. Now while the class had a few moments of gratuitous “sharing,” these stories were pretty restrained and totally appropriate. While no one articulated it in these terms I think it’s an interesting issue: queer relationships aren’t the same as straight ones, and perhaps the lack of institutionalized marriage exposes the fallacy of long term monogamy, or something. I dunno, there’s a paper in there for someone, but in any case, while I might have nodded and smiled along, I didn’t really say anything, despite sort of wanting to “join rank.” as it were. Which felt almost as awkward as the moment in the first class.

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A video of Alcor (identity revealed, news at 10) Talking about quicksilver, how it’s constructed, history, the future, and some stuff about UI stuff that I think is really cool, mostly because I’m a geek, but you knew that.

Also, he’s cute, but you probably knew I would say that because I’m just that predictable.

I have to say, that I think quicksilver is probably the marker of the “real” mac geek. We might not all use it all the time, but most of us have it and know about it.

I have to admit that I’ve been using it less of late, though that’s started to change. There are a lot of things that I’ve found are just easier to manage in other ways. For instance, I have two “append to specific files” shell scripts that are aliased in my shell for appending to my todo lists and my “collection notebook” which I find is a lot easier than using quicksilver, and I’ve gotten into a place where I’m only using a very small number of programs: Adium, MarsEdit, TextMate, and Mail for most things, with NetNewsWire, Camino, and Preview reading/displaying content. I don’t really use iTunes on a day to day basis, which was one of those things that quicksilver controls really well.

Anyway.

Cheers!