Contrary to your first impressions, this post is generally not about computers. Ok, a little bit.

I went to the computer store this afternoon. I got a computer from a friend who had upgraded and moved away and claimed that this old box was too old and slow to be of much use.

Well it turns out that this computer is actually about as powerful as my current machine, and I figured that I could get linux or some such working on it with minimal fuss, and it would be good to have a machine around that could manage torrents while I was away with the laptop, and host more regular backups, and so forth. In short order I got Ubuntu, but quickly realized that I would need a monitor¹, a wireless card, a bit more ram, and so forth.

So after a bit of hemming and hawing I finally went into the computer store today. There’s this local independent computer store in town that has used gear and what not, which is great if you’re in the market for something specific and don’t need the fuss of comp USA or some such. We’ve been going there for years and years and it seemed like the ideal place for this kind of task.

I got there and this very young looking (I wonder at what point we start identifying the people who help us in stores as “young looking”) guy came up to help me. Short. Thin. Emo. Obviously knew what he was doing. And so I let myself be the customer for once. “Yeah, I need this,” and he was able to do it, pretty much without a hitch.

I told him what I needed, he got the wireless card (last one) told me that flat panel monitors where in high demand and didn’t last long on the shelf, but quoted me an acceptable price. I looked at the CRT monitors, but didn’t get one. He husseled about trying to look for the right kind of ram, but didn’t find any.

It was at this point that I realized that this fellow was me. Sort of. I mean, I have a better fashion sense (gawd, the emo.) and taste in operating systems (he was using vista!), but other than that, here I was. It also struck me, that at this precise moment I was very not queer. Geeks are already a bit off of norm, and in casual interaction, it doesn’t come up/make itself apparent. Which is all together an odd feeling.

Anyway, so I brought the computer in, he put in the card and took out the modem, which was convenient, and then I left. We made small talk about operating systems, I was like, 10.4 it’s good stuff. He said something about the Air, I shrugged, and then left.

I didn’t get the wireless to work off the bat, and I’m currently reinstalling the OS (last time when I installed, I was able to disabuse it of the notion that I had a turkish keyboard, which complicated the login process.) With luck, I’ll be able to get the wireless to work after this is done. There seems to be confirmation of this wireless card working with Ubuntu, but we shall see.

Anyway, I’m going to tinker more, and knit some this afternoon. I’ve not been doing enough knitting, or writing for that matter.

Onward and Upward!

Ok, you all have spoken and I’ve changed the tagline to “now without a net,” which I like because of the “stunt/sport”¹ reference/tone. So we’ll see how long this one lasts.

Though I’m about to provide a quick status update on the state of the tycho, I’m thinking bout imposing a limit here: I’ll try and keep the “what’s going on with me,” journal entries down to one or two a week, unless something big happens. Creative constraint and all that.

Also, you all seem to like when I post about things that aren’t me.

Here’s the update:

Days on the Waitlist: 20

I have committed to a job for the summer, which will be good particularly if I get in off this wait list. If I don’t, I’m going to still have the summer job, but I’ll be working to get a job elsewhere as well, and I’m still looking around, of course.

On to the real topic of the post: my knitting.

I’m working on the body of the sweater. The batteries are charged so it’s not inconceivable that I’ll take some pictures this afternoon. There’s not a lot of progress. It’s now 7 inches, which is way behind where I’d like to be, but it does mean that I’m almost half way to the under arm point on this sweater. Ho-Hum.

This is why I think I’m such a bad knitting blogger, in the end, I work on long projects and get really excited if I get more than an inch done a day. Though I have to say that Joe is doing really good blogging job, despite the fact that he’s been working on the same lace tea cloth for weeks. I clearly have much left to learn.

I sent the pi shawl pattern to Zach for review and commentary, and I did some tweaking of my basic toe-up sock pattern/instruction handout. It’s a really in-depth narrative-ish description of how to knit socks thats intended as a pedagogical device, rather than a “design,” per se. I’m planning to release it under a pretty permissive creative commons licensee so that teachers and shop owners can use/distribute the pattern (with attribution) for free.²

If anyone wants to look at either of these (particularly the pi shawl,) I’m not looking for test knitters, just eyeballs, that would be great.

Ok, I’m off. I’m going to a used computer store with this referb computer that I’m working on, to see if I can get additional ram, a wireless card, and maybe a less sucky monitor, and other stuff.

I’ll be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

This post is mostly about things I’ve read/am reading, but I have a few administrative issues to get out of the way first.

I’m still up in the air about the new name or tagline for tychoish. I learned that I was misremembering the “early days of a better nation quote,” which make it difficult to serve as a new blog title. “Work as if you were living--” is kinda dumb, even if you modify it to “think” or “write.” And I think “innovated, bordering on the avate garde,” is perhaps a smidge to close to pornography for my tastes. Regarding the use of the pen name/pseudonym, I realized in a comment exchange on LiveJournal¹ that the reason I was a bit angsty about this is that knitting is something that I already do “as [given name],” and because of this and because there is--as far as I know--not a huge precedent of knitters using pen names I got bit tetchy about it. Now that I’ve realized these things I feel fine about the situation.

But anyway, that said…

Back to reading:

In a fit of insomnia, I finished reading Samuel Delany’s “Empire Star,” the novella that’s related to Babel-17, that I read last year (Bable-17 is the closest thing there is to the “Science Fiction of Lingustics” and is quite amazing²). I’ve seen this novella anthologized a number of times in “new space opera” and “SF classics” collections, and it’s absolutely amazing.

The plot is very complex and circularly, and perfectly simple all at the same time. The use of the narrator is risky as hell from my perspective, but it works perfectly. It’s also, not surprisingly, an incredibly self-aware text. It predicts when the story is going to become interesting and turn, it’s self-referential, and the responses to “Empire Star” in Babel-17 are perfect.

Good stuff.

I’m not sure what my next novel to read is going to be. I have Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand on the shelf, and I’d like to read that at some point, but I think giving my brain a while to rest might be good. I’m also considering reading Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, because I write telepath stories, am interested/entertained by procedurals, and because I haven’t, but I don’t know how that’s going to go over.

I also got the Left-Hand of Darkness, which I’ve always wanted to read (and even started a few times,) but something always manages to come up, so maybe I should dive in to this.

I feel somewhat guilty by the fact that I’m not really getting into the Tiptree (The Stary Rift,) but I think it’s no use to guilt myself into what is ostensibly pleasure reading.

I’m also beginning to listen to James Patrick Kelly’s reading of Look into The Sun,³ on his podcast “Free Reads”⁴, which proves to be interesting and fun. It’s nice to knit while listening to podcasts, and I’ve been behind on my knitting of late.

Anyway, that’s all I have on that. I’ll be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

Here’s the running list of things I’m thinking about for tag lines. I’ve changed it to “tychoish, think as if you lived--” but this is only temporary, unless people like it.

I really like the comma in this one, really like the comma.

I’m even going to put them in the right font/size.

I hope you don’t mind the visual oddity.

the life and times of tycho garen

the old one, for typographical comparison.

tychoish, think as if you live----------------------------------

(with an explanation of the “early days of a better nation”) -- in the /about/ page.

tychoish, the history of a future diaspora

a bit long, a bit too oblique, but franklin has shown that niche bloggers can have totally random blog titles drawn from the academic ethos, without causing much harm.

tycho garen on multiplexity

(minor reference to Empire Star, which I just finished reading.)

tychoish, a log of the future past

tychoish, a log of the present future

(variations on a common theme) I like using “log,” though my gut wants it to say “history”

tychoish: from another time and place

(reference to a dave van ronk song that Judy played on the radio this morning).

tychoish, now without a net

Judy wrote a post today about identity and how we change ourselves to fit what we’re doing at any particular moment. I’ve been thinking about something reasonably similar for a few days and I’ve meant to write about it more extensively and clearly here. So I’m going to now. At the moment my interest is pretty specifically focused on how the act of naming serves to concretize identity and meaning, basically “what’s in a name,” to be overly trite.

By giving something a name, we make it seem comprehensible as something unique, and there’s an expectation that people can understand what something is going to be based on the name. If I give you the title of this blog (and your familiar with the site) you’re probably going to know what the posts are going to be like--and mostly you’d be right. Just as, if I told you that a site is a “blog” you know (or think you know) something about it’s organization and layout.

I think the theorists would say that “naming is performative,” but I think the invocation of J.L. Austen is totally unnecessary, and probably pretty confusing in the long run. Basically this means that the act of attaching a name to something is as a result of its utterance, meaningful. At the same time, a little sign-posting doesn’t seem uncalled for.

On some level, that’s what the term “queer” is about (trying to establish a different way of thinking about sexual and gendered difference) and because of this and because of the importance of performativity to “queer” that I consider naming to be a queer issue.

So why am I writing this, you wonder? In part because I feel like this blog needs a new name, and in part because I’m considering my pen name more thoroughly as I embark more seriously upon a knitting career.

First, the blog: The current name “the life and opinions of tycho garen,” is a bit stale, and I think provokes a style of blogging that’s more like a journal, a style that I’ve been fully complicit in enacting. And while I do take pleasure in the allusion to Lawrence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, I’m not sure that my karma needs that kind of spiritual connection at the moment. I’d also like to push this site back in the direction of the blog over the journal.

I used names for TealArt (r.i.p.) that were reminiscent of newspaper titles (e.g. “The Times of TealArt”), but I think I need something different. This blog/site will still be called tychoish, but I think some better title is much needed and I’m looking for suggestions.

Maybe I should see if I could cycle through a list of titles (for up at the top), there are a number that I think might work well. Maybe what I’m looking for is more of a tag line. Things that have been floating through my mind:

• innovative bordering on the avante garde (from torchwood, Ianto’s reference to Jack’s sexual prowess.)
• awkward, but endearingly colloquial (An actual comment a prof. wrote on a paper, a long running joke, and I used it on TealArt for a long time. perhaps too journal-ish)
• tychoish from the past future (I like phrases that mash up “future” and “past” because they create a sense of history.)
• work and live as if-- (the less famous first half of the Alisdar Gray quote that ends “--you live in the early days of a better nation,” which Ken MacLeod has already used for a blog title)

That’s all I have for right now, suggestions are welcome.

Now on to the more serious part: the name.

To which I guess I don’t have a lot to say, except that I’m not sure. Here’s some pro/con analysis, but I hope you give suggestions.

Pros to using pen name *tycho garen*:

• The name is entirely my own. I chose it, I have shaped it myself, without connection or reliance on other people. There is no “garen family” tradition, nothing. Just me.
• It’s what this blog has always and will continue to be authored under (even if TealArt was originally authored by my given name). There’s a marketing advantage here.
• Pseudonyms paradoxically draw attention to the identity and role of the author, in a way that is rather cool.
• It’s more difficult to mispronounce than my given last name. The silent H is a bit of a blip, but I have an 8 letter last name that’s typographically complex (-nm- letter pair,) and an english spelling anomaly (-ei- sequence.)
• “garen,” is a loose homage to my maternal grandfather (his first name began with G, and in the tradition of jewish naming, that and intention are enough), which feels nice.
• I feel more comfortable being a non-capitalizer with a pseudonym
• It allows me to isolate my professional (academic or otherwise) production from everything else, and offer some differentiation for the purpose of google.

Cons to using pen name *tycho garen*:

• I think it would be difficult to change later if I had second thoughts.
• Might be more difficult to use it to do business.
• In this vein it might cause confusion, which is bad from a marketing perspective.
• Many people know me by the given name, as they should, particularly in the context of knitting (knitting camp, various other things.)
• It is hard to mix it up, to do some things with one name and some things with other names.
• I debate weather it’s the same or different as writing under a modified version of their given names: JMS goes by Joe but is credited J. Michael Strazinsky, J. C. “Chris” Hutchins and so forth.
• tycho is less (potentially) ambiguously gendered than “Sam,” and significantly less common, though Sam is a pretty uncommon for men in my generation.

I’m thinking I’m going to go with it for the publishing (to the fam, I don’t want to change my name or anything, just a pen name, to be clear), but I don’t know. I suspect I’ll get it sorted out.

Any feedback you can offer with regards to either the name of the blog or the pen name debacle, I’d love to hear from you a lot.

Cheers, tycho

(ps. Onward and Upward!)

As I promised earlier, here is the draft of the “terms” that I want to include as part of my pattern for the shawl. It seems reasonable, and it seems to reflect my interests in both promoting freedom and the open exchange of ideas, but more importantly in making it completely clear that I’m not writing this pattern out of philanthropy.

The truth is that by refusing to restrict downloads giving away copies of this pattern means that more and more people will be able to see the pattern and this blog (which is, in the long term, good for me and my pocketbook). The basic idea is that, only a certain percentage of people are going to pay anyway, and with luck by unrestricting the download, more people will see the pattern, and therefore a great number of people will pay. I think/hope the economics work out, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

In any case, below the fold, you’ll see a copy of the draft of the statement of this idea. Please give feedback and commentary either in the comments or via email. I look forward to hearing form you.

The rights to this pattern are entirely the property of the author; except in the instance of this copy, in which you the knitter hold (quite literally.) Very likely, you downloaded this pattern after paying for it, in which case I thank you. But it’s also possible that you have the pattern downloaded the pattern from free from my own website, or after receiving a copy from a friend or acquaintance.

This is alright. I don’t think it’s fair to expect that you buy patterns sight unseen, and I think that spreading copies of this pattern to your friends and fellow knitters is without question a good thing for this pattern and my design career: tell people about this pattern.

At the same time, this pattern is not free. If you decide to knit this pattern or value it’s contribution to the knitting community, I request that you pay for the pattern, and you can find instructions for this at http://tychoish.com/knitting/. If the price is a barrier to you, or would like to contribute more to support future designs, there are options at http://tychoish.com/knitting/ and you should feel free to contact me by email at garen@tychoish.com.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This means that under no condition should you derive profit from the sale of this pattern or take credit for the pattern. I would also ask that if you share the pattern that you only distribute this pattern in full, including all charts and instruction. I would, however, be delighted if you, after (buying) and knitting this pattern decided to design your own eclectic pi shawl.

Note: This will appear as a PDF file that I expect people to print out, hence the literal display of URLs. And by the time this launches, the tychoish.com/knitting/ page will, of course, be configured to contain links to pages that discuss donations and the store.

Onward and Upward!

It was my intention today to work on further invoking good karma to collect upon myself to the end of summoning good news from graduate school. Oh, by the way…

Days on the Waitlist: 17

…anyway, so in this direction, I finally pulled the plug on TealArt. Which was waiting to happen, and I think it’s good that I just got it done with and I’m on to doing things that I think are going to be really productive in my life. Though its sad to let it go, tychoish is where it’s at for me, and to be cliched: taking irons off the fire is a good thing right now.

Another part of list of “things I’m changing,” is I’m going to re-title this blog to be less journalish and more blogish, and hopefully begin to start (continue?) to push my posts in that direction. If someone has a good pithy blog title, I’d love to hear it. I have to throw away a bunch of crap that I’ve collected, and I’m also still in search of some symbolic rite, but I’m working in the right direction.

In other news:

I wrote an entire knitting pattern for this shawl today:

I need to find out who took that picture, though, because I don’t have that info on my records, it was someone who went to Meg Swansen’s Knitting Camp 1 last year, someone who might be reading the blog right now. It’s sort of important that I find out, because I don’t have the shawl any more, and I want to use the picture in the pattern.

Anyway, the deal with this pattern, and it’s going to be an experiment in pattern publication. I’m going to post, probably tomorrow, the terms/description of the licensee that I’m including at the end of the pattern tomorrow for your feedback. I’m looking for the proper middle ground between “I’m going to be stingy and try and prevent people from copying this file,” (which seems to be futile anyway), and “I’m giving it all away for free.” I’m also concerned that if I cripple the distribution system somehow to make it more “secure” (by only selling print copies, or limiting downloads,) that I’ll prevent my best method for advertising.

So I’ll get that copy to you tomorrow and you can tell me what you think.

That’s about all the news I have.

Dear friends,

Today has been a good day. Things regarding the dance experience have continued to improve, such that over tea this afternoon we realized that, the way things have turned out was the best possible thing that could have happened.

So good, in fact, that these kinds of things don’t happen outside of movies. Except they have.

The truth is, that this whole mess has been nagging at us for a year, maybe a year and a half. And though I’m not sure we have “closure,” we have resolution. This is good enough, and it’s as if a great weight has been lifted from our shoulders. A weight that we didn’t know we had.

It’s hard on you when your stress release mechanism, and one of your outlets for physical activity become cooped by angst and stress, and it’s been so long.

So I’m happy.

One of the things that we did a few weeks ago, was that we held a ritual burning of some objects that were symbolic of some of the more stressful parts of the recent past.

And now there’s resolution.

So we think (and I support this) that I need to have some sort of positively focused ritual to encourage a positive outcome to this graduate school application. I’m thinking about what I can do, but I’m not sure. Seems like the place to start is with some serious cleaning and reorganization of my crap. I have clothes to donate, paper to recycle, and so forth. Cleansing seems like a good place to start.

I’m also considering ditching tealart as a project because I think I can run everything that I could possibly ever want to do off of tychoish.com, and I’d rather not further divide my time/energy. Maybe. I’m not sure. Unless I can find a good executive editor. But I have to keep it around for email purposes for a year or two anyway, so I don’t know. It’s just a thought.

If anyone has a good suggestion for a ritual some such, I’d be willing to hear it.

In other news, I replied to a lot of email messages on ravelry, I’m sorry that I took so long to do this, but it felt really good to get all these messages out to people who had written really kind notes. Also I got more than a little bit of encouragement to work on getting my patterns written and ready for sale and distribution. There’s nothing to encourage you to be creative and productive than people asking for ways to give you money. This is the problem to have. So the end result is that I have a lot of work to do and I’m very much looking forward to the opportunity to do it.

That’s what I have right now. I’ll be back tomorrow, in a less reflective sort of way. Be well everyone, that’s an order.

Onward and Upward!

So I’m back to trying to learn how to work with vim more seriously, and I think with a more seriously modified .vimrc file. Thank g-d for dotfiles. I did realize that I don’t need to remap a key to escape system wide, as long as it works in vim at the right place, and it turns out (of course) that getting this to happen is a synch).

As this is a fairly geeky post, I’m going to put the bulk of it below the fold…

It’s a long story but the short of it is: I don’t have it down yet, and I think there are a number of things that I have yet to learn how to do properly that I can do with out any fuss in TextMate. Vim can do them, it’s just a matter of teaching me how to do them. I’ve yet to get things like blog posting from within the editor (I’ve not yet braved installing the ruby script-able vim yet). There’s still a bunch of things that TM does that I haven’t figured out yet. Like the auto-paired characters (in TM, if you type a single quote (") it automatically puts the other one. This also works around selected text. There’s got to be something in vim for this, I just haven’t found it), and the hyperlink helper, would also be nice to duplicate.

Why am I doing this? Good question. Using vim feels more efficient. It’s good to stretch the brain, and at some point I’ll have it figured out. In addition to self betterment, I’m learning this because I have a new-to-me computer that I’m going to start using more consistently, and it’s not a mac, so having something that’s more cross platform appeals. Also, with the replacement of my previously dysfunctional “t” key, I’ve become more bonded to the ongoing maintenance of this computer. It’s because I’m stubborn.

Chris, who knows me way too well, said that “switching to linux will be good for you, but you’ll like it for a few months, and then hate it for a few, and after that you’ll be golden.” Depressingly, my mother, upon hearing this, concurred totally. Becoming comfortable in vim is the first step in this transition. And if I can make this jump, to my satisfaction, there’s a lot of linux hardware out there thats way more interesting and affordable than equivalent mac hardware. Tablets, 12 inch laptops, computers without CD drives.

Though, this whole thing is clearly going through fits and starts, because I’ve broken down and gone back to TextMate. But eventually. I’ll post a list of things to master at some point.

Anyway, enough for now.

Update: I wrote this entry yesterday morning, and in the last day, a few things have happened that have tempered my enthusiasm a bit. But not much. Which is glorious.

I’ve realized that, while I spend a lot of my “real life” socializing time involved in various dance activities, I don’t actually write about them in this journal. And it was something that, while I was in school, I mostly didn’t think about much. But god, I dance a lot, and it’s a huge part of “who I am” and “what I do.”

One of the things, and perhaps the only really concrete thing, that has made this past, of being back in the town that I grew up in, is that the dance community that I’ve been involved in has been, well, sick, for far too long. Maybe it has something to do with personalities (actually, probably); maybe it has something to do with the anarchistic tendency of dance groups/organization (not an ideological point, but a reference that dance and other folk groups resist structure, and so organization and management must be, just a wee bit, heavy handed and always deft.) In any case, it’s been stressful to have ones source of community and pleasure co-opted by angst. I have enough of that in my life.

I mean, really now, I have enough angst on tychoish, do I really need something else to complain about regularly? I think not.

But a couple of things are looking up. For starters, there are a couple of positive things happening to the various dramatis personae of the dance groups that I’m apart of. I use the word positive in two senses, first that I think the situation might improve as a result, but more significantly that no one has quit dancing (which has been a secret desire of mine for some time), but rather that additional people are (re)joining the community in a way that I think is wholly positive.

So I’m happy. I also have an interesting anecdote to share.

In border morris practice, we were starting to learn/write a new dance. This seems to be par for the course, as there isn’t the same sort of organized repertory in border that there is in cotswold morris. Furthermore, we are a team of unique size, and body type, so it’s useful to tinker with dances a little bit until the dances fit better. I should also point out that the border team is reasonably unique in that, the core of us has been dancing together for years.

Anyway, we were learning a new dance, and I rather quickly decided to suggest a change for a sequence so that the chorus (the distinctive figure in the dance) wasn’t so static, basically by changing the orientation of the set for a moment. It worked. But it required us to rethink procedure: “Who goes first?” “Who has priority in this new situation,”

This is in and of itself not an incredibly difficult problem: often in a morris dance, you have options, and part of the job of organizing a team’s style is making decisions about these options. For example, dances start on the left foot or the “outside foot” (the foot furthest from the center of the set, or your partner depending on the situation). Or in the case of the problem above: if you turn the set around, who starts the figure?

The interesting thing, is that there was no central decree, in this situation, we all new the answer, once we stopped to think about it. Because we had morris precedent, we just had to recall it and figure out how to apply it in this situation. Except, we just did it, no argument, no explanation necessary.

It was one of those situations that seems perfectly normal in the moment, but that you realize immediately as being completely absurd. It’s these moments, and a few others, that help us to feel as if we belong to a community, and are delightful to experience. And those are the moments that I’d miss most if I stopped dancing.

Even if the drama lingers--which it surely will as “the good guys” don’t have any balls left in play, and “the bad guys” have no interest in resolving it--I take great pleasure in having the ability to dance and have fun dancing. So there.