It's been a while since I've written a status update, but I think I've been up to a few things which haven't managed to work their way onto the site, so I think I'll collect them all here, in a sort of "state of the tycho" report.
- I've gotten more into the shape note singing. I went to the New York State Sacred Harp Convention in Cambridge New York and had a blast. I've written here before about this, and I don't know how much I can really add to that. I'm continuing to be impressed by all of the young people who are into Shape Note. A fair number younger than me (though not by much). It's strange to have acquired another hobby that takes even more time that I don't really feel like I have; however, it's a blast, and I feel like it's a good thing in my life.
- I've made a number of post collections" for the tychoish site, which provide an overview of posts on a number of subjects that aren't generated by some sort of tagging system, nor are they comprehensive. Rather, they represent a hand picked collection of topics that I've covered in some depth and the posts that best exemplify these subject areas. I expect this list to grow and shift slightly, but for the moment we have:
I hope you find these archives useful. If you have a suggestion for another topic or theme, or additional posts that you think might work well in one of these posts, do feel free to touch base with me about this.
The job. I've not written here a great deal about my job or my move in late June across the country. I figure I write a lot about work things most of the day anyway. Having said that, I know at least a couple c-workers (Hi M.G. & S.S.) and other work-related folks read this, so it's no great secret. Some brief reflection:
It's going well. My team, such as it is, has sort of found a rhythm that works for us, our project progresses, and even though it always feels like I've written to the end of the subject matter at hand, there's always seems to be something captivating "up next to write about.
And I get to work with and write about free software stuff with a bunch of geeks. I'm learn stuff about writing all the time somehow, and while I think I probably work a bit too much (or so the cats seem to think) it's going well.
The Cyborg Institute is a project that I need to figure out how to do better. I think having it as a "blog" was the wrong thing to do, an I'm glad I've stopped doing that. I started it when I was in a much different place in so many of my projects. It was long before I started the job, I was writing about different things on the tychoish blog, and a million things. Now, things are different, and I need to figure out a better way of doing things. Having said that, things haven't been completely dead... News forthcoming.
We're approaching the beginning of November, when I said in a previous post that I wanted to finish the novel I was working on by then. Well that didn't happen. Not only did it not happen, but I didn't even manage to finish the blasted scene that I've been working on for a while. Having said that, I have made progress (on that scene), and I have a passable plan for finishing the last of the novel. So that's a good thing.
I gave up the ghost on my somewhat aged "frankenbuntu" (eg. a quirky variant of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty) installation on my laptop, and installed Arch Linux on the laptop. I've been remarkably pleased with this. There are quirks, but lord were there quirks on the old installation. I'm happy with the outcome, and I've basically switched to using this machine as my primary computer.