Topic: Posts

I’m sorry for not posting when I got home or twittering from the road, but I seem to have survived the ordeal of the drive. I did the drive, which is about 520 miles, in almost exactly eight hours. Which means I averaged did the speed limit ;) In any case, I think that was pretty good. In any case, by the time I got home, I was in no shape to do anything except sleep and knit. So I didn’t get an entry posted yesterday.

I seem to have gotten unstuck in my knitting by the weekend. Latvian Dreaming has progressed into the gussets, and I expect to start the armholes by this weekend. I hope to post instructions for starting the armholes next week, and the neck shaping options somewhat after that. Also, pictures?

I bought some yarn at camp, mostly schoolhouse press’ “Quebecois,” enough for two sweaters (in charcoal and navy), and most of the yarn needed for a handdyed and black pullover from Jocelyn’s Fiber Farm. Counting my handspun, I do believe that I have what might be known as a stash, at the moment.

I also must confess to having three sweaters in progress/need of finishing. I have the fingering weight grey sweater that I’ve been working on for years that needs a collar and sleeves (I knit the last saddle/strap at camp), I have the latvian sweater mentioned above, and I have this raglan yoke sweater that I started to knit at camp (but didn’t). And five sweaters worth of yarn stashed. I need to keep knitting.

I also got a lot of (friendly) encouragement to work on knitting designing at camp. While I’m wary of this, I’m not going to start another project until I get (more) settled in the routine of daily blogging and regular fiction production for `Critical Futures <http://criticalfutures.com>`_. I sort of thought that the next thing would be a podcast, but maybe it’ll be working up and publishing a couple of knitting patterns instead. In any case, I’m not going to add any new commitments before, say Labor day.

Other misc. thoughts:

• I recommended John Scalzi Old Man’s War to someone at camp. I like when geek threads cross.
• A friend from camp said that he (this narrows down the field of possibility a bit) enjoyed knitting the edging of shawls more than the shawl centers. Given that I feel exactly the opposite, I’m thinking about coming up with some sort of barter agreement. Just the thought of this makes me want to get back into lace knitting, and I have two shawls in progress, and a plan for a third one. We shall see.
• I will be knitting more. This is a good thing. I have my mojo back.

That’s all that’s on my mind right now. The rest of the week’s posts won’t be as consistent as you’ve grown accustomed to, but there’ll be posts, and when things get settled everything will return to normal.

1. Franklin tried on my tychoish henry viii sweater.

• I need to take such better pictures of my knitting.

2. I did pretty well in the contest, I got some hemp/wool yarn. The shawl I raffled off to support camp scholarships, did pretty well, and it went to Carol Anderson of Cottage Creations who is a great deal of fun. 3. There were great dirty jokes at the end of class. I think someone needs to introduce a skit night. 4. I’ve actually gotten some knitting done, and no longer feel so hopeless about my project and my knitting. So I think, I’m back. 5. I should expound upon this further in the coming weeks, but I’m still thinking about the various merits of knitting work and not knitting work. 6. I bought long inox knitting needles. There will be gansey knitting.

That’s all for now. I have a long drive tomorrow, so there might be something that jott will transcribe for me at the end of the day, but regular posting will resume after that.

Oh, and I have a lot of knitting to do between now and then.

I don’t have a lot to report.

I knit a lot, that was really good. The party promises to be great tonight.

I got my 1000 Knitters Project portrait taken today. I’m somewhere in the 900s, and I’m within 20 of people like Meg (and Cully!) Swansen, Medrith Glover, and Emily-freaking-Ocker. How cool is that.

I’m also going to be in the project as tycho garen, rather than my real name. That felt like a big decision, but meh.

I got yarn, including an order that I put in more than a year ago. So much cool stuff to knit, I swear. I’m probably in stock with yarn for the rest of the year. And a fun year it will be indeed.

I thought that I’d be more reflective, and I’m sorry that I didn’t get this out earlier. Anyway, back to the festivities.

Knitting camp. Where to start.

This is an analogy that will only make sense to the morris dancers in the audience, but it’s sort of like an ale, with more yarn and less dancing (of course) and much less singing. It’s the lack of singing that I find most disconcerting actually.

This is the session that has history, out of all the sessions of this camp. There are a few people who have been coming for 35 years, and many people who have been coming for way more than 20 years. And that history is something that’s really important to a lot of people, and it’s cool to see that and be a part of it.

I’ve been knitting on the latvian dreaming, mostly and I have two other projects lurking around that I will probably work on today. A lot of people come to camp and start new projects and I think that I’m unlikely to do that, because I need closure on my current projects and, I don’t have fully formed ideas of what I want to do next, anyway.

I’ve tried four times to write a paragraph here and I have too much flying through my head to make sense of that so here goes a list:

• There are so many famous and amazing knitters here. I’m a little star struck, actually. And a couple of times had lengthy discussions with them before I realized that I was talking to someone who’s name I had recognized in a book. And then, somewhat after the fact I learned that cookie a was “camp newbie sitting across the table from me.” Sigh.
• On top of all the other interesting discussions last night we had an interesting conversation about social dynamics on the internet and the knitternet.
• At 9pm last night, I got a pot of hot water and had a caffeine party. It was good stuff. Unlike a Morris Dance Ale, it’s all over by midnight, which means it’s possible to get an at least passable sleep in, but I needed the extra kick to stay up for that. Because:
• The drive was intense. Not bad, but long and I really pushed pretty hard. I’ll post about the podcasts and other listening materials I went through later…

Anyway I have so much to knit. I’m going to go take a shower and then go down and get started with the day.

Onward and Upward!

(ps. Just a program note/reminder: There’s a new critical futures story today. CF, is my daily (science fiction) story blog. I’ll blog over the weekend here, and cf will return, as usual on Monday.)

Email is a beast. While I would say that I don’t--at the moment--get a huge amount of email, I get enough that if I didn’t have a system in place for dealing with the email, it would be completely useless. I’ve not written about it here, but I have spent some time over the past few weeks working out how to replace a good but faltering system with a much more robust set up. Here’s the story:

(Warning, this is really nerdy)

First off this kind of really robust email solution isn’t for everyone, and there are a couple of unique factors in my setup that require the extra effort of this system. First of all, I need something that works because I hate the phone. If someone wants to get a hold of me, I’d much rather they write an email than call. If I don’t respond to email, people might call, or if I’m feeling overwhelmed by email, I might tell them to call. Both should be avoided. There are also a score of other reasons: I moderate a pretty high volume listserv, I need to send email from several different addresses and names/identities, and I have some pretty specific filtering needs, not to mention the fact that I have a number of pretty old email addresses that require a really powerful spam filter. I’m going to cover both what I used to do, and what I do now.

I *used to*: Collect a number of different email addresses into one gmail account and then check that email with either POP3 or IMAP. Gmail with IMAP was and is a great thing. With it, I could do a lot of in gmail-filtering and then have all of that just show up in my mail program. The problem is that there aren’t really good offline imap clients. Things don’t sync right. Mail.app can’t efficiently cope with new mail that doesn’t arrive in the inbox. You have to screw around with mail.app to get the multiple email identities to work. Mail.app wasn’t incredibly stable (though it has, to be fair gotten more stable.) Also mail.app’s filtering doesn’t work splendidly with IMAP.

Having an email program that works consistently and effectively is the key to keeping it under control.

A lot of my problems with this set up could surely be solved by using POP rather than IMAP, but after a year or so with IMAP (and gmail) I feel like the combination of the back up and having this account be useable and web-accessible is really ideal. I promised a post here on backup, and while I also can’t get into this here, I’m through with having my own machine be the only copy of important emails.

So what to do?

• Filter the hell out of my gmail account so that everything lands pretty much where it would need to so I can find it several months from now. Somewhere on this page is a list of all the funky boolean operators that gmail allows.

• Forward email out in chunks (so the lists get forwarded to one place, all of my frequent blog-related correspondents to another, moderation) to different addresses on my web-server that include 15 character random strings).

• This is actually a really sneaky way of passing gmail’s filtering downstream, and is otherwise a red hearing. I think however, that I could have probably eliminated the number of email addresses at play here by using “plus addresses” and eliminate the next, but it’s not a huge deal.

• Funnel all these things the forwarded email to a holding email address that automatically deletes everything after a week. This is a short term backup, if I accidentally delete something or whatever.

• Rather than use gmail’s built in forwarding, I made a filter that searches for another, longer random string in all the email. If it doesn’t find this (which I suspect it never will,) it forwards to my “home” email address. Again this isn’t a public email address.

  Time out, so what we have here. is gmail sorting forwarding two copies of each email to two different addresses, at once. All the email is sent to one address, and the second address depends on how gmail is filtering the email.

• Set up procmail locally to filter based on the random character string from the second step.

• Do some additional procmail filtering (which I think, as I figure it out, I’ll start to do more here, with and use geektool

• Read messages with mutt, because it sucks less than anything else

• Write messages with textmate

• Send mail using msmtp

And that’s about it. The getting it setup was the really hard part now all I have to do is use it, and everything lands where it should. I think functionally this is pretty damn good. It might be preferable to get something that isn’t in situations when I don’t have my laptop with me oraccesable. I read something about using something like rsync to handle mail box delivery. Might git work as well? I’m not sure. But that’s another battle for another day.

Onward and Upward!

Hey friends!

So I might have mentioned that I’m going to knitting camp at the end of the week. A long drive on Thursday leaving far to early in the morning. Followed by four whole days of intensive knitting, and then a drive back. As a result the blog schedule will be a bit--disrupted. Last year when I was at camp I posted a fair piece, and I suspect that I’ll want to opportunity to recount camp stories a bit as they happen.

At the same time, I probably won’t have the time to do my usual writing cram over the weekend to make sure that there are fun and interesting posts for you during the week. So here’s the deal:

• There’ll be new stories posted every weekday for the next two weeks. This won’t change, fear not. - I’ll post new things here, through the weekend.
• I’ll probably take a brief tychoish vacation for a couple of days next week, I think there’ll be three posts, but I’m not sure when they’ll hit yet. It’s a blog, after all. Don’t be worried.

Because I doubt that administrivia is what you all came here to read, I think I’ll pass along some links and thoughts and questions that you might enjoy.

• The cats are still nibbling toes. This remains not cute, though they haven’t gotten this memo yet.
• Though I’m only really interested in talking about electoral politics in the historical sense, or as a venue for placing friendly bets,¹ but I’m not going to lie this is funny. “This is theinternet!” heh. Actually I’m more worried that someone has cracked Randall’s secret sauce
• A git-wiki that really rocks. It’s still early on development, and it’s lacking some features that would make it useable for me at the moment, but I can totally see a place for such a thing for some future projects.
• The ruby guys are totally awesome, and I like a lot of ruby projects, and I think that in some ways ruby is going to be the “next php,” even I have a soft spot in my heart² for Python, but I said to chris the other day that “ruby is the visual basic of our generation.”
• I’m thinking of starting to hard wrap columns in my text files, because it would make running diffs and file histories easier, grepping is easier, it makes the text more spatially consistent, it would make using vim easier, and so forth but I seem to really enjoy changing the window size a lot, and he is probably right, there’s very little practical value, and hitting ^Q for a vestige seems ill advised. That doesn’t mean I won’t try it, you read my post about my email after all.
• I just finished reading “Star Surgeon podiobooks,” a delightfully quirky public domain science fiction novel by Alan E. Norse, and read by my friend Scott Farquhar of Promethesus Radio Theatre, which was delightful even if it wasn’t a fine example of tightly structured prose. Scott’s next book is “Black Star Passes” by John W. Campbell, which I intend to start while I’m driving to camp.

This post grows out of a sort of smoldering rant that I’ve been having for a while now. As I sit here at one of these synthetic moments when I’m trying to figure out how past interests and experiences build up to the future--how do the things that I loved so much in college affect life/me now?--the purpose of social/literary theory (“philosophy with a cause,”) is one of these things.

The internet loves polemics, and so ’theory has a venue here, but I’ve read a lot of blog posts and emails from people who seem to yield theory and critique like a baseball bat, rather than a toothbrush,¹ so it’s been even more on my mind.

What is critique? What separates “good” critique from “bad” critique, and what end does it serve?

I think if any of you are presently reading Stephen Greenblat or Elaine Scary--for instance--you might have a pretty good answer for this. But what about the internet? There’s a lot of critical work that’s out there on the internet, a lot of people working outside of the academy who contribute to a discourse that attempts to analyze the world and our culture, often with various kinds of political goals. This is also critique.

Now I don’t want to seem like (too much of) an ass, I read a lot of crap on the internet that, to my mind seems like either really bad critique or (more likely) critique that fails to really capture the spirit of what I think the critical mode is.

Feel free (and encouraged) to disagree, but lets do a little bit of brainstorming on what makes good critique or bad critique:

• Critique is synthetic. Critique really needs to draw together multiple perspectives and sources. You can’t critique something without consulting previous critical literature (this is why theory is necessary, without it, we are contextually adrift), without consulting similar and dissimilar works. Critique is the mode through which all of these perspectives come together.
• Critique is often positive. It’s very easy to assume that the purpose of critique is to go through some abominable text² and tear it to shreds, and often this is enjoyable, but it is not productive. “Bad” and otherwise objectionable content will either stand or fail on it’s own, and taking a positive approach to critique means, I think that critique can be more politically productive, because, critiques can say “this good thing is good,” which is more instructive to consumers and producers of content. This doesn’t mean that critique has to be unequivocally positive--far from it--but if there isn’t a substantial positive outlook, the critique suffers.
• Critique doesn’t pass judgement; critique that passes judgment is called “review” and I think “review” has a different role and mold. It’s unfortunate that people who produce in both modes are called “critics.”
• Critique is contextual: This is sort of an adjunct statement to the first, but I think it’s important to realize that critique that doesn’t contextualize both the works in question, and the moment of critique is useless. This is also, potentially controversial, but I don’t suspect we have very many New Critics in the audience. Texts and critics don’t exist in a vacuum, and criticism can’t either. From this principal springs a couple of subsidiary values:
• Paradoxically, readers of criticism need not be familiar with the texts your addressing, though they are likely familiar with the larger body of work that the texts belong to.
• Critics can’t hold individual works accountable for “their times,” nor can critics rise above the constraints of their times in criticism. Attempts to violate these rules are almost always tragic.
• Critique has an agenda: People don’t create texts or critique those texts without an agenda. Period.
• Critique has data, that is to say “texts.” One cannot critique abstract objects, or at least I doubt that it could do that very well. Particularly when specific texts are at the heart the critics' work. For instance you can’t critique victorian gender norms, but you can critique the ways that legislation, and fashion standards vis a vis a sewing manual shaped gender norms during a period. You can’t critique a political campaign, but you can critique the marketing strategy vis a vis the advertising of various candidates.
  • Often the more specific the data is the better.
  • Often it’s hard to get all the data surrounding contemporary texts and phenomena. This requires special considerations.
• Critique is a pathway to understanding: Looking for and elucidating mechanisms behind particular literary/artistic/cultural phenomena is one of the most powerful and important goals of critique.

That’s enough for now, but I’m interested in seeing what you all have to contribute…

So I have a confession to make. I’m not writing longhand very much at all. Actually its insignificant the amount that I’m writing things out longhand any more. I was struck by this fact the other day, when, after a day where I felt like I didn’t get anything done, I opened a notebook and did some project planning/review on a sheet of paper. And I realized that my fountain pen was empty.

The interesting thing, I think is that I’m sort of a pen nut, and I’ve always loved having cool pens that made the act of writing a pleasure. So much so that since high school I’ve always had a Namiki Vanishing Point Fountain Pen around. These are heaty, but very usable fountain pens, that use a retracting nib (awesome!) and the grind on Pilot/Namiki nibs is great¹. I love writing by hand, and for a long time I’ve felt that I do my best planning and rough work long hand.

There two big reasons that I think this has worked so well for me. First of all, I have a great spatial memory, and having notes that are fixed on a page makes them easy to remember, particularly if they’re arranged sequentially, reading through the past archive can be a really power contextual memory aide. I haven’t tried it in a while, but I can take a notebook from the past, and flip through the pages and sometimes recall all sorts of stuff about the moment in my life that I was writing those notes².

But there’s a conflict here. I’m a geek so it makes sense to a digital system to keep track of these notes. After all, it’s just text. There are a score of reasons why this makes sense: digital text is searchable, it’s more enduring, its easier to read, there are search tools, and I type considerably faster than I can write long hand. But, there are of course downsides: digital text isn’t as portable for on the fly creation, the semantic/spacial “features” of notebooks are basically lost, and the truth is that search is only really useful if you’re looking “for” something, rather than browsing through³ taking system, because in order for search to be useable you need to be looking “for something” where as, if you’re looking at a notebook, it’s all browse and no search. Clearly there’s a place for search, but loosing “browsing cabibility,” is a huge downgrade.

At some point, about a year ago--as this was the inspiration for tychoish.com--I thought hey, “maybe a “blog” notebook could give linear context,” and still be digital. Well tychoish.com didn’t work out so well for this, but I’ve been using ikiwiki, which is mostly a wiki, but it has some useful blogging capabilities. Unfortunately, I’ve had a hard time getting it to work since I upgraded my computer, and switched to git.⁴

And the end result is, that without really trying to, exactly, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not writing anything out, really, and I have, sort of, all the bases covered. I have a computer that is more portable than the last one. I have a flash drive with a couple of good ssh clients on it, I have web access to my repositories. It’s all there, and it’s all accessible (to me), and that’s something that I can already tell has been a good thing for my workflow. At the same time, as my little project planning session a few days ago with the notebook illustrated, there are times when the change of venue/context is enough to get things rolling if they’re stalled.

The moral? Digital is good, particularly once you find the right solution, but maybe it isn’t quite time to throw away all the notebooks. Also I write this I realize that I should probably write a post about backup, but that’s for another day.

Onward and Upward!

Backstory: For the past year I’ve been using source control management software to manage and version all of my text files (which is where I do all of my writing, and most of my “real work.”) I started out using subversion, which is a good piece of software under some circumstances. This post is about my transition to a different system, that system, and a look at how my production is impacted by this switch. Only more interesting. ;)

Basically here’s how subversion works: it has a database, that collects file names and the content of the files, and then every time you tell it to, it takes a snapshot of your files, and stores in the database the difference between the current version and the previous version. Sounds great? It is, but here’s the problem: suppose you have two people working on the files at once, so the snapshots that both of them are sending back to the database become less and less alike as time goes on. Secondly, it relies on file names, rather than file content to distinguish between files.

So problems spring up when you have more than one copy in play, and when you have file names that can change, and while the program compensates for these problems, they are core problems which cannot be remedied. In truth, I think subversion is a great tool for people with one computer who are editing/refactoring code or text, but not particularly for people who are in the process of generating new code or text.

Enter stage left, git. Which rather than revising subversion or another system despite it’s flaws, attempts to solve the problem of tracking the history/changes of a given project in a completely different way. The system, is built around the idea of combining divergent codes/texts into a single whole, so the whole system is built around easily merging different copies of a given project, rather than storing the one true canonical version of a text.

This means, that you can build experimental branches, tell the program that “now I’m going to see what happens to the novel if I turn this character’s face blue,” and edit/write with that idea for a while without affecting the “main strand” of your story. This means you can have working copies of your novel on 3 different machines, at the same time, and painlessly merge them together at whim, and it just works. Also as an added benefit git is faster by several orders of magnitude, which means it’s completely viable to regularly and automatically back up using git over a network. This alone is an amazing feature.

The down side is that, whereas subversion, uses a very centralized and linear model that is easily grokable by most people, git works in a very different way that’s hard to grasp at first. Thankfully, these days at least, the documentation is much better. I watched a talk by the creator of the software, who also wrote something called Linux, you might have heard about it, where he was introduced as having written a piece of software “so complex only he could understand it.”

And that’s not very hard from the truth. Its a wonderful tool, and I like that it pushes me to think about my progress and work in a different, and productive way. All this by way of saying, some software--subversion, the world wide web, and windows, and os x--works in very predictable ways that fit with the way you think about information and data and ultimately the world. And then there’s software that requires a different perspective, that isn’t intuitive, but works in the most effective way to accomplish a given kind of task (like collaboration, or backup, in the case of git), or like efficient reading of websites (like say, RSS). And these paradigm shifting programs, are I think, terribly fascinating, both as a computer user, and I think also as a science fiction writer…

I’ll gather some resources that I’ve found useful regarding git, and post them up here soon.

In the mean time, think well!

A couple of weeks ago (wow, it’s been a couple of weeks!), a new twitter-like service called identi.ca started up. It’s open source, and incorporates a lot of “duh” features that twitter doesn’t yet have, so I’m a fan in general, but I think it’s doomed to fail ultimately because it doesn’t have the community that twitter has--yet, and I don’t think that it will, ever.

With another new 140-character micro blogging service I had a series of conversations with bear about these kids of sites, the social niche that they occupy and the technology that’s behind them.

I should start by saying that I really like twitter, and I think that the ultra-short form totally has a niche. I think the problem with identica, which it inherited from twitter, is that their social plan is out of sync with their technological plan.¹

Twitter has, of course, been plagued by horrible scaling problems. I think initially twitter expected everyone to actually answer the framing question “What are you doing?” So that each individual’s stream would be like a more or less isolated “microblog.” And their software was developed in this direction.

And then “the community,” happened, and it turns out that what people really want from their twitter-like services is not a place where they can record “what they’re doing,” but talk publicly with a group of friends.

Enter the “fail whale:” the problem with this usage model is that people check it much more regularly, they update more regularly, and with the site not really built for this kind of usage, there are a lot of error messages, lost messages, and the like. While it’s taken twitter a while to sort this out--and they are getting better--the problem remains that twitters users and twitters initial designers have/had two very different sites in mind. And because of the problems that twitter’s had (and because of it’s great success) there have been a lot of sites that basically duplicates twitters functionality.

This is all fine and good except that the fact that twitter is the wrong thing to copy. My conclusion from the post-identi.ca-launch discussion was that, “the next twitter-like service to make it isn’t going to get twitter right, for once and for all; but rather, the next twitter ‘killer’ will get IRC right, at last.”

IRC is the original internet chat platform. It’s not without it’s problems, both social and technical. Basically you have to have a live connection to use IRC, there’s no “offline.” It also doesn’t scale much more effectively than twitter, and there’s no way to filter/organize the community on IRC except through really route tools[^socirc]. The really interesting thing is that people are more prone to using twitter like IRC, and less like blogger or live journal (which you have to imagine is what they thought that it would be like.) [^socirc]: The issue is that if a channel on IRC gets overridden with spam, or annoying people, or just volume, the only option is to start kicking people out, or to start a new channel, which can be sort of draconian.

So what would “a better IRC be?” I don’t know, I’m just a guy, right, but here’s what I’d like to see:

1. Integration with the web in a way that doesn’t suck. There have always been webapplets for IRC, but they have always sucked. This can’t continue. 2. You shouldn’t have to be online to record a conversation. 3. Unlike twitter, the offline apps need to be as good if not better than the web site. 4. Arbitrary rooms, “moments” and streams need to be constructed on the fly by users. The randomness of twitter is something new, that--now that we know it’s there--is something we want. 5. Everyone should be able to intuitively construct filtering mechanisms. 6. Chat “moments” and cork-board “moments” should both be possible to construct, but 7. No one should have to think about the infrastructure (this is a problem for both IRC and twitter.) 8. Identity needs to be managed coherently. Jabber/XMPP seems like an ideal tool for this project. 9. Also identitiy management and community organization seems like the “niche” for private enterprise to fill, rather than infrastructure, which I think can be decentralized. 10. Threaded conversations. It’s a must.

Anyone have anything to add to this?

Onward and Upward!