So I’ve written about current projects on this blog, and I think every knitting project that I’ve talked about thus far I haven’t yet finished. In a year or more. Rather than disappoint, I have another post about a new knitting project, but it comes with a bit of a story. Sorry to the members of the queer-knit-list, as this will be something of an old story.

In the summer of 2005 I lived in Kansas City with my grandmother. It was after my first year in college, and it was a great experience. I got a job in a yarn store, I knit a lot, and it was a great experience. I’m an only grandchild on that side of the family, and I think it was a really good experience. That spring-into summer I was really big into knitting shawls, and I think from that April-to-August I think I made 5 fairly large Pi Shawls. (I think I also made two or three sweaters during this period as well, it was intense). One of the Pi shawls I made was a red one out of sport-weight alpaca, and my grandmother took to it like a fish to water.

I should comment on the shawl before I go any further. It’s bright red. Really bright read. I think “stop-sign” or “fire-truck” begins to capture it. It’s also fairly heavy as a shawl. While fingering weight makes a nice shawl, I’m often of the opinion that sport weight is a bit too heavy for shawls. Something about drape or heft. I’m not sure. To complicate matters, I attempted to do a knit and purl pattern (don’t ask). Words to the wise: texture in alpaca doesn’t work because the fabric is too limp, and furthermore texture in shawls that are knitted loosely doesn’t work. I also attempted at some point to do big lace-diamonds, which I can’t explain or justify. The biggest error, however, is the fact that I ran out of yarn before the shawl was done, and rather than pick out the cast off, I pulled out the previous few rounds and used that yarn to finish off the bind off. So there’s kind of a notch missing out of one part of the shawl.

So it’s an odd object.

The second part speaks to my grandmother. Her style for many years has been to wear jackets and shirts with nice patterns in the blue-purple spectrum over black slacks. In short, not very “grandmotherly,” for years and years. A year ago, I spent a couple of weeks with her, after she had a knee problem (fractured knee cap!) and she was wearing a brace and she dug out a skirt because her pants wouldn’t fit over the knee brace, and it was clear that the skirt was at least as awkward as the knee brace for her. As I think about it I don’t think it would be unreasonable to suggest that she doesn’t own any (other) objects of red clothing.

So she took this shawl with her every where. To the movies, to restaurants, on vacation. Because like any good shawl, it was just the right thing to provide easy and accessible warmth. Everywhere.

I’ve not blogged a lot about this, but it’s been a tough year for her (and us as well). The aforementioned broken knee cap, were the last straw for those knees, and she decided that it was finally the right time to do knee replacements--having previously decided that she was too busy to take the time to get her knees replaced. Knee replacements are hard, and this was complicated by the need to do a repair on the second one (which was even harder to recover from, for a lot of reasons). I’ve been back and forth between the city she lives in and the city I live in at least 5 times this year (and my father has done the trip about as much). Thankfully things are looking up, and she’s set to go back home (from rehab) right as rain in a bit less than a month.

I decided a couple of weeks ago, that I really ought to make an updated shawl for her. I chose alpaca, this time in light and dark gray that I had in the stash, and rather than do a pattern, I’m just knitting it plain, with a stripe of light gray before the end. I’m even doing increases via the “make one by knitting into the front and back of the stitch” method, rather than yarn overs (so that there’s really no open work in the shawl). And I’ve been planning so this time

I showed her the work in progress a few weeks ago when I went for a visit and she seemed quite impressed. So I trust the final product will go over well. The knitting has been really pretty quick. I worked pretty steady the first week, and I’ve been pretty consistent about it the past few weeks, but not quite as steady. I expect that I’ll be done in another couple of weeks. And of course, I’ll post pictures. Right now it looks kinda like a gray sack/awkward beret. I’ll spare you, for now. But we’ll be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

It’s only comparatively recently that I’ve returned to the world of being a desktop computer user. I built my own computer when I was in high school, and it died after 3 years (or so), and I replaced that with an Mac laptop, which I updated a couple of times, but until this last fall, that was my window onto the Internet and my main academic/scholarly tool for a long time. This “laptop only” modality, is I think pretty common among a layer of contemporary computer users. Students, Internet-industry professionals (start-ups, programmers/hackers of a certain breed, etc.) are all prone to this kind of setup. And the truth is, that given today’s technology, just about any laptop will pretty much whatever anyone needs from it. There are some limitations on the high end, but not many.

Indeed the reason that I moved to a desktop was the realization that I do about 60% of my computering in the study, at my desk. I also found myself needing a lot more screen space¹ than any laptop that I’d like to carry on my back could provide. It is also nice to be able to have a computer that’s always on (downloading, file server stuff, etc.) and always connected to the Internet. Nevertheless, I still have a laptop and I find that I use it a lot. I tend to write in the morning in the living room, I reflexively (though I’ve gotten better at leaving it at home) take the laptop with me when I leave the house.

I used to think that having more than one machine was a bit of a hassle, and I suppose it is, but I’m sort of interested in thinking about how folks--particularly people who also have a desktop--use laptops. My laptop, despite being really half as powerful as the desktop, is configured the same way my desktop is, it has all of the same software, and nearly all of the same data. This seems like an ideal situation from a workflow perspective, but I can respect that there are other approaches.

I end up using the laptop as a “change of pace,” and as a “more focused” situation when I need to hunker down and write more seriously.

I intended this post to be less about general workflow stuff and more about my experiences with replacing my Macbook with the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X41t of which I’ve become quite enamored. Particularly, with respect to its “tablet,” feature.

A few weeks ago I started to use the Macbook again incidentally, and my conclusion from this experience is that, while I have a lot of respect for OS X and the mac platform, it’s not something that I want to use myself in any kind of day to day way. So I’m back using the thinkpad, and I’m tracking around for a second one (long story) so that I can sell the macbook without hurting the family’s ecology² of computers. And it’s a great thing. In a sort of minimalistic and technologically frugal sort of way, this machine does everything I need of a laptop, which is kind of cool

When I got the laptop, I was really excited about the prospect of having a tablet-formed machine. I could annotate PDFs effectively, I could read ebooks more comfortably in bed or on the couch. Turns out to not quite be the case.

Basically the implementation of the tablet part of the computer is perfect: the hinge is great, the texture of the screen is great, it just works--even on Linux. The problem? I don’t have a hell of a lot of use for a computer without a keyboard. I like the experience of being able to turn it into a tablet to be able to concentrate a little bit better at the document at hand. That’s useful. But the truth is I use it, maybe once a week if that.

Does anyone else have a tablet and if so, how much do you use it as such, or is there something really cool about tablets that I’ve totally missed?

Onward and Upward!

I’ve been sort of coy about the details (because I don’t want to jinx anything and there aren’t many details out there), but I’ve decided that the novel I’m working on will probably appear as a podcast sometime late in the year. Scott Farquhar will do the reading and it’ll be over on Critical Futures (and other places?) I’m excited about this, as I think it means a higher profile for my work, I’ve wanted to do a podcast for a long time, and it gives me something to “work towards” for this project, which had heretofore been a “so I’m writing another novel for myself because that’s what I do,” and that purpose is really good for my process.

This post, however, is a writing-meets-technology post. I store all of my projects in git repositories. This is good, because it lets me track changes and revisions, back up and synchronize files between machines, and because I thought it might be fun to use git to collaborate with editors/provide history/source for the novel once it’s more “done,” or at least, as a fairly linear writer, I’ve gotten to a point where its clear that I have an intended shape for the story.

While I’m an avid git proponent, and fascinated by the prospects contained in the software on a conceptual level, I don’t do a lot of “distributed workflow,” stuff myself on a day to day basis. Yet. So stuff about publishing branches, and even having more than one developer working at the same time in the system is a bit foreign to me because I haven’t had to use it ever.

So it’s taken some getting used to, and I was tempted through the whole process to cave and get a git-hub account (with private collaborators) because I think the web-based interface for forking repositories is basically what I’m trying to do inside of one repository with (semi) public branches. Here’s the setup:

I have a bare repository on the server that I use as a centralized dumping ground for a lot stuff. While strictly speaking this isn’t required it’s nice to have a backup, a single place to collect data, and I have git-web setup on the server so I can git a birds-eye view of the repository if I get confused. I do all of my work in the master branch. I tag important commits if there’s something unique that I delete out of later commits. And basically that’s about all I’ve done in the fiction projects.

Now, what I want to do is let Scott clone my repository and have a branch where he can edit, create files, leave notes, and so forth without affecting what I’m working on. Because I’m still writing pretty intensely, this also lets Scott (and potentially others,) get my changes as I push them onto the server, rather than having to exchange emails and all of that. Then when I’m ready to edit, I make my own editing branch based the latest from “master” merge/review Scott’s edits, and then go through and edit myself once, and then when it’s golden, I merge my editing branch back into master, and hopefully there’s a book. There’s also, something cool and performance about publishing not only the text of the book, but the development of that text.

I can understand not wanting to let “previous and unfinished drafts” out into the wild, but there’s something about the way that distributed version control systems don’t just produce “previous drafts,” but all previous drafts, which can as a group convey a certain kind of story onto themselves. I mean, I’m not particularly likely to go read through a total revision history, but I think knowing its there is pretty interesting, and being able to see key moments, drafts, and the editing process at work, is something that has a lot of merit.

I’m not sure that I’ll do this exactly the same way again in the future (paying for git hub seems like its worthwhile now that I know how to do it myself), but we’ll see how it goes and I’ll be sure to post a review of how the process goes, and at some point, you’ll be able to see for yourself.

Onward and Upward!

This fall I visited with a bunch of my friends from college for the first time since I, you know, graduated from college. In a move that surprised just about everyone, of my core-friend group from college, I’m the only one who’s not in graduate school right now. One thing I realized, however, is that I haven’t exactly dropped off the face of the academic-earth. Every semester since graduation (until this one), I’ve been enrolled in classes and have accumulated a number of credit hours because it was fun, because I felt like I wasn’t done with school.

On Sunday I sent in a paper for the last of these projects. I did something last semester with a philosopher professor (and friend, really) on free software and open source development methodologies and processes, though the project was at least vaguely anthropological. Part of my plan with doing this last project was to get a little bit of “open source” and not-psychology not-women’s studies on the record; the second part of the plan was to delay the student loan people until I’d collected enough dough to be debt free when the grace period finally wears off. With both of these goals firmly accomplished, I’m entering what will probably be about 2 years of not applying to graduate school, so graduate school would start in the fall of 2012. But I might do a trial application to two places a year earlier. Anyway…

This chance for a break is a really good thing. My previous attempts at academia have all been for the wrong thing, which hurts. I’ve also been really young (spring birthday, college in three years) which doesn’t help either. So spending the next few years learning stuff outside of school, becoming more of a historian/anthropologist, writing a few novels, letting tychoish.com break the million word mark, working in an awesome job, saving money to do things like go to a residential writing workshop (giving in, I know), and contributing to open source projects. It’ll be good for the soul.

One thing I realized before I started the project that I just finished, was that I hadn’t written anything academic-like in years. I mean really sat down and wrote something new. By the time I got done with school I was settling into a rut and I had enough of a background in what I needed to write--for academic things--that I was really stuck. So this past fall when I started to set down the goals for the project, although I wanted to spend most of my time doing background work (reading the literature, and ‘living/working’ in open source worlds), in the back of my mind I had the notion that this research (such as it is) that I’m doing now will turn into a paper sometime down the road.

So that’s on my mind, as a project for my “not in school” period. While it’s clearly a long way off and I have a lot of work to do to get to the point where I might have an essay of any useful depth, it’s terribly interesting to think about doing scholarly work outside of the confines of academic schedules. I’ve never really had the opportunity to write a single piece of intellectual work that I could work on for more than four months from inception to typesetting.¹ Graduate programs expect students to have research experience and undergraduate curriculum are designed to provide students with research experience, and yet sustained attention to a research project is something that’s really hard to schedule/arrange before graduation.

Every day’s an adventure after all…

I have a tendency toward binge writing, it’s true. Also, as a “professional writer,” (of sorts, saying that still makes me giggle) I write a lot. Even on days when I’m feeling pretty lackluster, I probably write a total of 2,500 to 3,000 words a day, and on days when I’m feeling better I suspect the total gets closer to 5,000. It’s not all productive work, always, and it’s certainly not all fiction words,¹ but one of my guiding philosophies as a writer is to “keep words flowing.”

This is to say, that the act of continually committing words to proverbial paper is more important than the words that you write. Writing, for me, is an experimental act. I try a bunch of shit out and hope that I can look back at what I’ve done and decide what works and what doesn’t in retrospect. It’s hard to experiment without data, and hard to let the editing process do it’s job without content. Also, I take the opinion that “getting momentum” is the hardest part of any productive/effective process. Once you’ve got a head of steam, creative work is easier. Long(er) time readers of this site will certainly recognize this approach.

So I write a lot, and as I settle into a work rhythm and come to grips with the fact that I’m unconditionally an adult (not, student-adult, not adult-like but just another 20-something guy who writes a lot,) I’ve been trying to figure out how to regulate fiction projects and fiction writing as part of the “what I do.” How to balance fiction writing with other projects, how to carve time out for fiction², how to nurture that process, and other stuff related being a fiction writer.³

When I was writing fiction in high school, I had a pretty religious “thousand words a week,” rule that I almost always accomplished, and since then I’ve generally stuck to the “thousand words a day,” when there aren’t other major commitments, and no less than a thousand words a week when writing time has a major conflict (like day jobs, or school). For the last 4-6 months I’ve taken the same approach, and while I’ve been moderately successful, I don’t think that I’ve been successful enough. There are entire weeks when I haven’t written very much if anything, and even though I have time, I don’t often use the time particularly effectively.

Maybe it’s a result of being too flexible, but I often find myself falling into the following trap: I’ll have a few hours, and a number of things to do, ongoing projects for work, a few personal projects of some importance, and fiction, and I’ll realize that I don’t have enough time to be able to write 1,000 words of fiction, so I just spend the time on other projects. Which is kind of backwards logic, I have the time, but because I don’t have “the ideal amount” of time, I forgo it entirely.

That’s kind of dumb. The past few days, rather than just set a somewhat idealistic goal of what I want to get done, I’ve set a range, and a hard “maximum goal.” So rather than “try and write 1,000 words,” the goal has become to “write a page or two and never more than 600 words (on one project).” I’m not sure if it’s working, but less than 600 words is manageable, it’s enough finish a novel or two in a year, and I suspect that my weekly word averages will be a bit higher, though I’m not particularly good about tracking word counts (and I should be).

So, it seems like, I’m trending away from being a binge writer, at least from fiction. Which is a really weird mode for me. I’m not particularly in the business of giving writing advice, but if you think this kind of advice would be good for you, then please consider it, otherwise, that’s what I’m up to.

Onward and Upward!

Wow, that’s a title for a much more interesting post than the one I’m planning to write. Sorry folks. This post is more about the devices and technology that we use to get information out of our heads and onto paper or into computers. Last week, I was reading the Internet as I’m wont to do, and I was delving into an area that I think of as the “ubergeek” section. There’s a class of personal sites maintained by hacker-types that hosts all kinds of cool crap: information about clever scripts that they’ve cooked up, links to side projects, pictures of their gear, often a blog of some sort--but always pretty low key. Anyway, I discovered a cache of pictures of people’s very hardcore keyboard setups, and I was pretty smitten.

See I’m an input geek. And this is a long standing thing.

My holiday present to myself, you see, was a new nib for my fountain pen. I don’t write long hand very much anymore, but I’ve always been a pen geek, and the nib for the pen that I’ve been using for years was a “fine,” and it just didn’t work for me very well (I’m a lefty). Also, it’s a Japanese made pen (Namiki/Pilot) and apparently Japanese nibs run smaller than western nibs. So it was really an extra fine. I’ve been saying to myself that I needed to do this, and I finally gave in, and it’s been nice. While I do a lot of note taking and writing on the computer I like the portability and sociability of writing in a notebook (you can write notes on paper and not have a barrier between you and the people you’re sitting with.) It’s also nice, from time to time, to be able to change paces if for some reason the computer becomes too distracting or formal. So I’ll probably always keep a notebook.¹

Now to be fair, while I’m a pen geek, the only kind of fountain pens I’ve ever owned have been Namiki Vanashing Points. These are really nifty “modern” pens that don’t have caps, but rather have a really swell tactile clicking mechanism that retracts the nib into the pen body. So that’s really cool. Also cool is the fact that as a result the “clip” is fixed on the pen so that it can hang in your pocket with the nib facing up (as conventional pen cap-based clips are) but when you start to write with it, the clip is on the bottom of the pen. Which seems backwards to the uninitiated. And it is, I’m not aware of any other pen that has this “feature,” and that’s part of the appeal. Also it has a gold nib and writes so amazingly cool. Particularly with my favorite ink from Private Reserve in the color “Midnight Blues.” Anyway. Yes. Huge Pen geek.

Back to computers. Getting smitten with a new keyboard, didn’t feel all that out of place. I’m currently using the basic Dell keyboard that came with my desktop, and have tended to use the keyboards that come with my computer. While the current keyboard is sufficient and works well, there’s nothing particularly inspiring or pleasurable about it, and I think I prefer the keyboard that I got when I began high school. I still have it, of course, though it’s PS/2 and I don’t use it.

I think my lack of particularly attachment to keyboards recently is due to the fact that I’ve been a laptop only user for so long. When my PowerBook G4 died (for me, my mother used it for several months), the sign of death was the fact that the keyboard stopped functioning. Similarly, while there are a number of reasons that I prefer the (older, smaller, less powerful) thinkpad to the (bigger, faster, more powerful) macbook is the fact that the thinkpad has a much better feeling keyboard.

So what am I going to do? Get a Happy Hacking Lite 2 in Black. In fact, depending on my will power, by the time you read this, I probably will already have it.

Anyone else out there an input geek? Got a killer keyboard setup?

Onward and Upward!

I think of this article about productivity and standards of living in the same train of thought that my best of post, even though I certainly didn’t write it myself. The basic idea is that given our current levels of productivity we could have a 1948 standard of living by working only half of what we work now. The comparison between productivity and standards of living is, I think an interesting and useful way to think about work, and creative output. I’ve written from time to time on the subject of making a living from/while being an artist, and I think I keep returning to that essay because it connects with something similar in my mind.

While the productivity vs. standards of living comparison leads rather neatly into an anti-modern “living more simply” conclusion, I’m hesitant to subscribe quickly to a conclusion that seems so naive. Quite often the “living more simply,” (which includes organics, “green”/sustainable production, and so forth) would seem to require a certain amount of wealth to be able to sustain, and takes a very micro-scale solution to a macro-scale problem.

At the same time I can respect the pleasure of living a more simple life--and certainly the way my digital life continues to develop has been along a path of greater simplicity--and I expect that as I continue to sort out my “lifestyle,” for the near future thinking about the differences between “needs” and “wants.” I don’t think living more simply, or being more conscious of excess is the same thing as living minimally, or practicing self-sacrifice in the name of some greater good.

At least for me, the discussion of “being effective,” at the things that really matter to me (writing this blog, being a good friend, writing better fiction, being a productive employee, dancing, knitting, and so forth), is intertwined with thinking about my professional life and career--and issues of productivity there--and is intertwined with an evaluation of material needs. It’s very much a holistic effort, and I think thinking about all these things together can help us be more effective and derive more pleasure from the things that we do. I think this is the case for me.

Have a good weekend, and I look forward in seeing if you have anything to add here.

Onward and Upward!

So I’ve wanted to put together a “best of” roll call of my posts here in the last couple of weeks/months. I write a lot of stuff for tychoish.com, tens of thousands of words a year, and while I enjoy the practice and what I write often helps me pull together ideas and thoughts in a way that I don’t really get to do in any other form, most of the posts are ephemeral even for me. There are some posts that tend to stick with me for a long time afterwords and serve as the beginning of much longer trains of thought. This post presents a collection of five of these posts for your perusal.

Mutt of IM

So I’m 22, right. I actually don’t talk about my age much on the blog but there it is. As a member of my generation, and as someone who doesn’t much care for talking on the phone, I use instant messaging a lot. It’s convenient, it’s possible to parallelize conversations with other projects and with other conversations, and IM allows links and other data to be exchanged. The only real problem is that IM software is almost universally sub par.

Update: I’ve basically switched to using mcabber, an ncurses console jabber client in combination with transports for AIM and MSN. This means I’m not on yahoo (alas) but it works, and I rather like it, though it took some substantial customization.

Link: The Mutt of IM

SEO Non-Sense

I wrote this post after hearing someone talk about search engine optimization as a given part of the content creation process. Which struck me at the time, as being the wrong way to respond to anyone who was interested in “starting blogging,” while organic search-engine hits are important, certainly, promoting content on the Internet has more to do with generating high-quality and innovative content that relies on personal connections and word of mouth tools. This was then as is still the case, and I think its important to challenge anyone who promotes the idea that there are ways to quickly hit it big on the internet.

Link: SEO Nonsense

Git Mail

So I have this really geeky way of downloading my email. Basically I store all of my email and associated configuration files in a git repository, and I have a server that receives email, filters it through procmail, and stores it in the git repository. Why is this good? I get to cut out the worst part of email technology: the downloading protocols (IMAP and POP). Furthermore, I get to use my own encryption (SSH) to secure the transfer, and I can synchronize my mailbox between computers without bothering with IMAP and the various conflicting implementations of that protocol. I’m linking to the third series in this article because it includes the code and implementation of the version that I currently use. I didn’t mention this in that article, but I have also started to keep my procmail filters and mutt configuration files in the same repository so that all mail-related data and settings are stored together.

Link: Git Mail

Open Source Work

This was one of my earlier writings about the open source world, and is I think a close conspirator of the next essay on this list. I think there’s something to be said for taking a materialist approach to studying the open source world, and I’m interested in doing more with this, though I must admit that I haven’t yet. This definitely falls into the “posts which represent key moments in my thinking.

Link: Open Source Work

There’s No Economic There, There.

Written during the heart of the first phase of the 2007/2008-20__ recession, this piece was probably the most “political” I’ve been on the blog in recent years, and just outlines the problems with economies based on the exchange of credit rather than the exchange of material, and it was an important post for me.

Link: Is there any there, there?

The Big Push

I wrote a “introduction to push and pull technology,” a while back that started to dig deeper into usage habits and internet technology, as being something more than just an exploration of web pages. While websites are indeed quite powerful, things like the iPhone and the explosion of interest in XMPP in the last year has illustrated to me at least, the importance of thinking about the internet as being more than just a collection of web pages, and this article is a marker of my thoughts on the subject.

Link: The Big Push