Topic: Posts

…so I stumbled upon a nifty website for SF writers and it started with something morbidly funny, which I will reproduce here for your amusement.

she wants to lead a glamorous life:

“Hypothetically, being a writer-for-a-living means you never get a day off. Ever. The deadlines don’t typically move much, so it’s rather like having a permanent term paper due -- if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, it’s like not having any work due. And then you starve to death.

But I digress.”

(from SF Novelists.)

…but then, near the end she talked about “research” as “pre-writing” in a way that sounded a lot like what I would call “outlining.” The academic in me tends to understand “research” as “reading.” Thus I think of my writing research as broadly defined reading. But if I can get away with calling outlining “research,” I totally am.

So there.

Ok, maybe not, but it made for a good title, and I don’t want to be here in two years thinking “yes, but which ’this week on tealart' is that?” when I’m looking through the archives.

There will be a Station Keeping update tomorrow, and I’m quite excited by it, it’s one of my favorites, we introduced to more new characters, but I think we get to see interesting sides of both characters, and it was a joy to write.

Also tomorrow, I start a job working in an academic library/archive. I’m excited about that, and I think the work will be really interesting, this means that my time will probably be a bit short from here on out, but that’s how these things go. I think I have enough time to keep up all the projects that I’m currently working on. The goal, is of course to get to a place where I can write effectively for TealArt (and other avocational projects) in a way that is efficient skillful. Or something.

I also admit that I’ve started a new blog tealart.com/tychosh, but I’m just calling it tychoish. Anyway the idea is that by focusing some of my nattering tendencies elsewhere, TealArt can fit the blog-magazine format that it keeps trying to be better, and I can have fun elsewhere. I’m not really using the LJs any more, I’m not getting rid of them, but I much rather doing it on my own, and I’m quite pleased with the way it works. I’ve used, as you might know, tumblr and I feel like the new site does all that I would want in a non-tealart site. And so while you think, “ah, he’s dividing his energy, that can’t end well” I think in a lot of ways, I’m really consolidating. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The other news of last week, is that I got (all) my wisdom teeth out last Thursday. It kind of sucked, but I’m almost feeling normal by now. Thankfully it was quick, and I’m feeling better now. I’m glad that I forwent general anesthetic, and kind of sad (but not) that the narcotics made me more sick. Aside from some lingering pain and obvious tenderness, about all I have to show is a bruise on my cheek,¹ and a few days of lost productivity. I think that’s why I spent so much time futzing with /tychoish--it was the main thing I had spare time for.

With luck we’ll get a geek-related post from Chris this week, but I have my own in store: I wrote a post about note-taking and computer usage which I think is relevant to the kind of geek that I am, and I have recently come into a PC laptop which I’m faced with the problem of rescuing some files and then getting a working operating system installed on. I’m going to give Ubuntu a try (after, of course, I use Knoppix to rescue the files), but I think it might be interesting to document this process a bit more. This is probably not on the table for this week, but in the future…

There’s always more Deleuze to get through, and I’ll have a good one for you this Friday. I think I need to at some point--perhaps not immediately--do something to ground it a little better for the casual reader. I’m not sure what yet. I also finished reading a science-fiction book last week, and I think something of a book report is in order. Also, I know that the pictures of the knitting were popular, and I’d like to do some more of that soon.

Anyway, I hope you have a good week, enjoy what you read here. Tell your friends about this little corner of the internet. It can’t hurt!

cheers, tycho

My friend Jeff Kirvin’s website require registration for commenting, so because I’m lazy I’m going to reply to a couple of things here:

Secondly--and this follows right from my last response--Jeff posted about the Foleo, a new laptop-replacement/mobile device from Palm Inc.

Jeff panned the concept, and I think in a lot of ways he’s right--from the geek perspective. Folks like us--geeks, off-label users--wouldn’t have a lot of use for something like this, we’d either take a laptop, or be content with the smaller device. And the price is really quite high. I’m not sure how businesses will take to this device. It’s hard to say. I won’t be getting one, that’s for sure; but I think the concept is a pretty neat one.

When apple stopped producing 12 inch laptops, a lot of people cried out in anguish(!), and one of the most persistent rumors in mac-land for many years has been a tablet/sub-notebook kind of computer. Something thin: no CD drive, solid state storage, a good keyboard, good battery life, etc. And the Foleo has wi-fi, so really, what more do you need?

The Foleo sounds a lot like this dream product, so at least the concept for the Foleo, is a keeper, even if the implementation sucks. Frankly I’d be a lot more comfortable if it were running a flavor of OS X (over a Palm OS flavor) but such is life.

Here’s some third-degree linking. At tychoish we’re nothing if not on top of our citationality.

Jesus who?:

Schulman, who’s currently working on an oral history of ACT-UP, remembered that she’d never heard the name Jesus Christ until one day in her schoolyard. ‘I ran home and asked my grandmother ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ and my grandmother said, ‘Well, there was this girl named Mary who got in trouble and made up this story.’’

Priceless. (Link courtesy of FAWARB.)

(from Jeffrey Ricker.)

My friend Jeff Kirvin’s website require registration for commenting, so because I’m lazy I’m going to reply to a couple of things here:

First, this post “Don’t Sync, Dont’y Sync:”

I must say that I’m sort of out of the loop on windows things, so it’s interesting to hear about the developments in Word. As (prospective) readers of this blog would likely know, I write almost exclusively in a text editor, and I’m pretty good at avoiding word-processing software, but I agree with Jeff that the new Word format looks really quite nifty, and there’s something to be said for writing at a desk.

With web2.0 and all that crap, our old notions of sync have changed quite a bit. I’m personally hesitant to add an additional node (pda, smart-phone, desktop, etc.) to my computing experience because I think the project of keeping my data synced up between all these places would be a headache.

Recently I moved all my music (itunes library) off of my computer and onto an external hard drive, and listen to music almost exclusively via my iPod. I think if I were going to be using some sort of additional device, I’d need to keep critical software/documents in some sort of transferable situation. Like a thumb drive, or using WebDAV/.mac (if it didn’t suck so much). Google-Gears might be a good option for this kind of thing.

Its surprising that despite my desk-tied mindset, I’m pretty darn mobile. Laptops are a great thing. For me at least, the move to Mac was a great thing in this regard. Hardware wise, I know that you can get smaller laptops and better batteries from PC makers, but… I think it would be more hassle than it’s worth.

Cheers!

I seem to have abanded the way that I do “have-done” lists. Read this tealart entry for more on this. I’ve started writing this kind of thing out in the notebook but I’m not sure that this is the long term sort of solution. What I really want is some way of tracking word-counts in an effective sort of way. I’ll have to sort something out soon

I thought it might be interesting to scan moleskin pages into this site, but the idea has been done and my moleskine usage is more functional than artistic, so I fear it might be pretty uninteresting.

Also, it’s come to my attention that the tag system on TealArt doesn’t work at all and produces lots of 404s. Frankly I don’t see a lot of need for this, so I’ll probably be removing it as soon as possible. Unless the chris wants to change it.

I’m still culling my RSS reading load so I can respond more. I read a lot of things (or rather I want to), too many in fact but that’s part of the point.

I’ve been doing battle with linux today, with mixed results. The flipping drives won’t mount.

You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve done pretty well by my projected todo list.

Over and out.

Every so often I try and remember to use ical to organize things, and keep me on track. generally it helps things, and for short periods I’m a little bit better off.

One thing I tried, was to schedule tealart essays, because I was generally (and in some ways still am) a few weeks ahead, at least in terms of planning if not actual writing. It worked, and I think it was a good exercise.

And then, I need to restart my computer, or need a few extra RAM resources (because iCal is a hog), and I forget to open the program up again, and lo and behold its’ three weeks later and I have to start again.

maybe I’m better out without?

here’s some things I got done:

• wrote a bunch of essays for this site
• processed my inbox and wrote a crap ton of essays emails
• did some `station keeping <http://tychoish.com/hanm>`_ planning and “research.”
• culled my list of feeds to read. from 520ish to 290 ish.
• wrote and posted a tealart entry.
• fiddled with a computer maintenance project, that is taking forever. one day I’m going to write about my frustrations with the other computer platform.

all in all I think I did pretty good, particularly given my list of things from yesterday, and shhh, but I’m going to take a shower and try and get some tealart writing done. If I can pull together a couple more things, I’ll be set for a while, and I’ll be able to concentrate on other projects for the evenings the rest of the week. We’ll remember that I have a crap ton of knitting that I didn’t really get done today to finish.

And shit, it’s almost july which means I need to get myself into some serious GRE and grad school prep. Aside from the GRE, though, I’m not really worried about things this time around, I think because it’s rational to be worried about the GRE in a way that the other stuff just doesn’t seem so scary.

sigh, angst later, writing now.

dear tycho,

congratulations on writing the about tychoish page, and all the assorted wonderfulness you accomplished today. may tomorrow be twice as fruitful.

don’t forget to:

• knit like the wind
• sync your ipod and rip that cd
• write the “this week” ta entry
• go through some more deleuze

and if you’re feeling particularly kind:

• study for the gre, and don’t have a panic about it
• work on cleaning out the inbox
• look into omni outliner or some such to start outlining the MarsBook (super secret).

much love, yourself

By g-d, friends I think I have the design here complete. I’m actually pretty happy with it, though it’s certainly true that I haven’t put it through it’s full tests, so breakage is prone.

I need to set up the static pages, but I’m pretty happy with this. I’m thinking of buying a new domain. For such a web-guy, I think having one domain is excessively reasonable, but I need to think about these things, of course.

On to other projects.

update: ha! this post fucked up the desgin. time to fiddle with CSS again!

update: ok, we’re back, and I think I may have realized why it wasn’t behaving the right way the first time. this is much more logical. just have to make the tags work a bit better, but that shouldn’t be hard… (famous last words, I know)