Topic: Journal

It’s Friday and I have a bunch of links, notes, and accomplishments to share.

First up, jfm and I have been continuing the discussion we had about task lists in a new discussion of the /posts/mobile-productivity-challenges. I’ve also imported some conversation from facebook (to a discourse page, since removed) following up on the :Cyborg Analysis and Technology Policy post that I made this last week. I’m really really proud of the extent to which the comments and edits that I’ve gotten have made my writing and thinking clearer on these subjects.

Also, a thanks to the people who have done things like fix links and correct stupid typos. Sorry to have caused the trouble, and I’m eternally grateful for the helping hand.

Next up, I wrote a tutorial for a reader who commented in the Make Emacs Better thread. The question addressed how to load optional functionality and “contributed” lisp code in emacs, and I wrote a little tutorial on how to load .el files in emacs. I think of this as a very basic and straightforward piece of customizing emacs; but it’s sufficiently complicated and counter-intuitive enough that I think a little bit of documentation is in order.

The above also marks the debut of a documentation section within the wiki, like the code section, that I hope to update every now and then as I write tutorials and reference material that I think someone may be able to use. No promises, and feel free stash content here as well. It’s all gravy.

Speaking of the code section, I wrote a little script that I use as dbl, that I describe in the Epistle Linker. Basically this little function goes through a directory and creates symbolic links to that directory in a specified directory and mangles the names of the file (prepends a few charters and changes the extension.) You an read the code, but it makes it possible to use a service like Dropbox without disrupting your local git setup and file organization. There’s a known issue with Dropbox that makes it slightly less than ideal, but what can you do.

When I was posting the epistle-linker, I realized that I had probably forgotten to mention the fact that I have this nifty little bit of glue that uses a procmail filter (you do use procmail, don’t you?) to deposit note to a particular email address (configurable) into an org-mode file for filtering. This is ideal for emailing your brain (i.e. org-mode) an item from your phone or tablet, say.

And finally: I have an external link. I think this follows nicely from the “how to work and ‘live’ in the mobile world.” Apparently ecl, an embeded Common Lisp implementation, has been built to run on Android and iOS. How awesome is that?

That’s all I have. I (finally) finished the April/May issue of Asimov’s, I subscribed to Clarkesworld, as if I needed more short fiction to read and distract me from everything else. been I’ve reading Iain M. Banks' Excision, which has been a great deal of fun.

Other than that. It’s been a pretty quiet couple of weeks.

I started writing this post on Thursday, which was my actual birthday, to write a post blathering about the things I was working and about routines and forming new habits, and some changes that I’ve made to the site. And then I got swept into work and doing things, and the writing just never happened. Friday and the weekend were filled with family time, dancing, and my goal for this comparatively quiet Sunday afternoon is not so much to get caught up on various projects, but to get a little bit done to jump start my momentum for the week.

The biggest development that I’ve made last week, during that hiatus, is that I merged the “essay” and the “rhizome” section of the site. Everything’s a rhizome, though if a post is seeming particularly “essay”-like the essay page will sill pull those out. This seems to be the best technological solution and it solves the logical overhead of needing to maintain two sites. Maybe other people can deal with maintaining more than one site or blog, but I really can’t deal with. This is one of those things that seems like a good idea every couple of years, and then I give up and merge everything back together.

I also wrote up a project spec called A LaTeX Build System, which describes (very roughly) a notional piece of free-software infrastructure that would make LaTeX easier to use in and for itself but also designed in such a way as to make LaTeX based systems preferable for all sorts of publishing operations. Read the page for more info, but it’s basically a way to sand offf all the rough edges of LaTeX so that everyone who makes documents (that’s most people) can make beautiful consistent documents easier than with any conventional method.

I finished reading Player Of Games, last week. It’s another one of Iain M. Banks' “Culture” novels, which I like. They’re frustrating because they all (so far) have a lot of plot that circles around itself endlessly, and seems really important but you know that anything that you might find out in the plot going to has already happened in the set up. The result is this an ironically claustrophobic novel feels like a really drawn out world building experience. While the experience works, it doesn’t feel like it ought to to work. And there you are.

Speaking of reading, I finished reading the book above on my new phone which is quite nice. I’m not sold on the Kindle Mobile app for reading short fiction periodicals, as it doesn’t save/sync pages, and I find it hard to read an entire novella in a single sitting. I’ve started paying for Readability, which is a great tool for bookmarking, reading and archiving articles and other medium-to-long form pieces on the web. I’ve started paying, because I think they’re doing something really cool that I really want to succeed, and I like being able to use it as a way of getting content to my phone for reading. I’m a little frustrated that there’s no good way to load up the phone with articles for reading while on the subway. Get on that, ye horde of mobile developers!

I’ve started knitting again. Just reached the bottom of arm holes (armscye for the pedantic) for a new sweater that I’ve been working on (or ignoring more likely) for a few months. That’s exciting, and it’s nice to get a few rows done most days. I’m not obsessive (much) about the knitting, and certainly not in the way that I have been in the past, but it’s a nice thing to do and a good change of pace when I get tired of looking at screens. I’ve long toyed with the idea of writing knitting stories something sort of between an essay and a knitting pattern and if nothing else I think doing some of that writing will require a regular knitting practice. Add that to the list.

Speaking of lists, I ought to work on making some progress on my list! With luck I’ll be around a bit more this week!

… when you’re a tycho.

I’ve not been blogging very much. There were even two weeks where I totally forgot to post anything to the blog. I’m not sure if there’s been a hiatus of that length at any other point in the last three years. Strange, but not bad. I’ve been writing--not as much as I’d like, but enough--but nothing has really managed to filter through to the blog. Seems, then, like a good time for a general “what the hell have you been up to and what are you working on post?”

I’ve been plugging away on the novel project for a while I’m in the home stretch: two and a half chapters to write. I know I can write a chapter in a couple of weeks if I put my mind to it, and have a good weekend day to do nothing other than sit around and write. I’ve discovered some things about the story that have made it much easier and clear for me to write. A character that I thought was the main is a horrible point-of-view character, I have a more clear idea of what I’ve been trying to get after the entire story, I’ve started to really like the project again. The problem now, is just finding time to finish it.

I moved nearly two months ago: it was a good thing indeed. I’m closer to friends and activities that I find fulfilling. Although I’m not in the heart of my city, I have a train pass and am a block away from a train station that will get me into the city pretty much whenever I want. Train passes are a fantastic innovation, and my only real complaint (on this note) is that for varied historical reasons Tran service in America is woefully pathetic. But it’s great to be in a place where public transit is a viable option for most commuting.

I’ve recently started dating someone, which is a terribly atypical experience for me given how independent and quirky I am in “default mode.” Nifty though, and utterly unintended: but there’s something delightful about the whole deal. Who am I to argue?

And by “recently started” I mean almost three months ago. Right.

I got a new phone. After a long time with a Blackberry Bold, I took an upgrade and got the new Blackberry Torch. I had been strongly pondering an Android phone, but the one I wanted most (HTC EVO) is on a network that I’d like to avoid, and the other offerings seem lackluster. Blackberries have never (rarely?) been exciting, but they have worked, and there are some features that make sense to me (massively configurable ring/tone behavior, central messages feed that all applications can create entries in.) Having said that, I’m not wild about being on a closed platform, though I think we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that from the user’s perspective that Android is an open platform.

With a web browser that is basically mobile Safari, and applications to do the major things I need to do (IM, email, calendar, GPS, web browsing, address book, twitter, alarm clock, ebook reading, emergency ssh,) and a device that is build wonderfully, I couldn’t be happier. I wish there was a better solution for writing/note taking/outlining for the Blackberry, but these things happen.

It’s probably a symptom of the commute as much as anything but I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to write on the train. I did ok for a while, and then I’ve had a horrible time with it for the past few weeks. The new plan is to do a little reboot of my organizational system and to switch back to using the laptop as my only computer.

The first part, the organizational reboot, is important because I’m not used to thinking about my available time as existing in the “shape” that it currently exists. If I’ve learned one thin in the past couple of years, its that staying organized and on top of ones personal project is almost entirely dependent upon being able to successfully break apart big projects into “doable” pieces that you can tackle in the time you have. That sounds easy, but it’s pretty hard to know what your project will require and what your near-future is going to hold enough to be able to get everything to line up. Sometimes it requires little reboots.

The second, much more technological remedy, is mostly that while the separation between my work system (and tasks) and my personal system (and tasks) has been nice, in practice it doesn’t work that well. The context switch between the train and the office is too hard, and not being able to just unplug and shut down, means that the start up/shut down costs for the context switches are simply too high and I’m the one who feels the impact. So re-merging my systems seems to be the way to win this game, at least for the moment.

I think I’m going to ultimately invest in a hot spare laptop that’s mostly identical to my current laptop to reduce some of the anxiety regarding the “what happens if my machine croaks,” worry. Which is always a fear.

Wow. Hello blog.

I’m pretty busy. It even seems sort of cliche to complain about such things on ones blog, but I think being busy has coincided with a somewhat larger reevaluation of nearly everything.

Wait, no. I’m not quitting blogging.

I’m actually really proud of the Knowing Mars launch, and it feels really good to have that project “done,” even if I think it needs a major revision, and I have a lot more fiction on my plate that I don’t want to just “let go” like that.

I’m also somewhat displeased with the kind of blog posts that I’ve been writing recently. It seems that I’ve been writing about some basic ideas: my disdain for the way the web functions as a user interface, some general work flow topics, some basic cyber-culture topics, and half way through most of these blog posts I mostly loose interest, and I suspect you have as well.

I’ve had a post in my “write this soon list,” about digging in deeper and striving for a more rich engagement with the topics I try and cover here, and I’ve pretty much failed with that. In any case, this post was supposed to be more about the things that are on my schedule:

I’ve been doing a lot offline these past few weeks. It’s May and that means it’s Morris Dancing season. I seem to have joined an interesting phenomena called “Maple Morris,” (more reflection on that when I’ve processed a bit more,) the usual Mayday festivities, Midwest Morris Ale. And then there are a bunch of singing conventions, which are a great deal of fun and fulfilling, and then there are contra dancing things, but none of these things transmit to quiet weekends alone writing. Or even quiet evening around writing. At least very often. Some highlights of the recent past and near future:

• Maple Morris; A my-generation Morris dancing event, last weekend in Boston. A bunch of Morris dancers in my general age rage got together to dance some really challenging dances and to sing great songs. I was totally overwhelmed.
• The Midwest Morris Ale; My regular annual Morris dancing ale. This is my 9th consecutive ale (and my 10th anniversary of dancing Morris.)
• Since last September, I’ve gone to an all- or mulit- day Sacred Harp singing convention most months, since last September, and there’s one on my calender every month between now and this September.
• I’m going to “Youth Dance Weekend” in Vermont in September, which I’ve never been to, but I think it’ll be a a great deal of fun, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I’ve not been contra dancing as much, but that’s not a huge problem for me.
• I’m moving to Philadelphia in the summer, which means a drastically longer commute, but an easier to orchestrate social life, and a better work/life balance. This means apartment hunting and all that jazz.

While this means less writing time and time for taking care of my own projects, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have any writing time. Sure writing takes time, but the largest challenge as a writer is in using the time I/we already have effectively, and getting the most out of those opportunities.

It also, I think, means finding a way to develop a writing (and blogging) habit that:

• Doesn’t revolve around a fixed daily publication schedule. I still want to write essays, but I need to write essays when I have a compelling argument for an essay, rather than around the same core of ideas that I’ve been running around for the last year.
• I need to be able to put the blog on the back burner while I focus on things like writing fiction, or hacking projects, or Cyborg Institute stuff. The blog is great, and I love writing the blog, but It’s far to easy for me to fall into a pattern where the blog becomes the project, rather than the journal in support of the project.
• I need to organize my projects and tasks into clumps of work that are easier to manage in shorter periods of time. This is probably a reorganization problem that needs to mostly occur within my head.

So where does that leave us? I have a few posts piled up that I’ll parcel out over the next few weeks, though on the whole there will probably be less posting by me around here. I’m probably going to do more posts along the lines of “here’s what I’ve been up to, go read my work elsewhere.” There will be some guest posts and I’ve already begun working with some writers for that. Beyond that, I guess we’ll both be able to be surprised.

I meant to write a more thorough overview of what I was doing with the “extra time” over the holidays. But I don’t think I had as much extra time at the end of the year as I expected to have. What follows is a brief overview what I did do, how the new year has begun and what I’ve been thinking about.

In years past the time at the end of the year was a time to catch up on lost sleep and connections that had fallen by the wayside in the recent months. I also used the time, in some years, to get a lot done: one year I knit about 10 hats. Another, I wrote about a quarter of a novel on a binge. Some years I just vegged.

This year, is different. I haven’t been in school full time for years, and I haven’t received any college credit in a year. I didn’t have significant time off of work. There’s a way in which the holidays were incredibly relaxing. I still have a bunch of friends who are in the later stages of being students, and there’s something awesome about not being a student that’s incredibly relaxing. I mean, working a regular job is not all sunshine and rainbows, but it’s pretty swell, and there’s something about the structure of regular and the mostly even routine that makes it--to my mind--have a greater potential for productivity than “the academic routine.”

In a lot of ways, while I looked forward to holiday time off, and saved up countless projects for that time off, not only did I not make “epic headway” on my projects but I came into the new year feeling sort of behind and tired. Wierd. I blame this on the holidays themselves. It’s as if the entire world slows down: everything gets more difficult for a month or as if the planet is slowly careening to toward this thing that we don’t really enjoy (if we’re being honest,) but that we pretend we really love.

And there’s no getting away from it. You can’t really opt out of the holidays: even if you’re not particularly festive, you can’t control the celebration of other people. You can’t control the fact that the same four songs play on endless repeat in public spaces, you can’t control that everyone wishes you a good holiday, you can’t control all of the federal holidays, you can’t escape tacky decorations, you just can’t escape. And after like 3 days of this, you get tired.

In previous years, the break, the chance to take time off from the big projects I’d been working on (school, applying to graduate school, etc.) was a great opportunity to get “other things done.” Now, there’s no real break from the daily grind, just modulations and finding good balance. That’s an ongoing project, and one that’s better serviced by a good routine and not a few extra days off during a stressful time of year. In any case, I’m glad to have gotten back into things, and I look forward to getting things done.

Onward an Upward!

It’s been a while since I’ve written about what I’m working on, so I wanted to write up a little post on the subject. Just to keep myself honest.

• Last time I did this, I tried to promise myself that I’d get a draft the novel I’m working on done by the beginning of November in time for me to not do the NaNoWriMo project--as is my custom. That isn’t going to happen.

  I have, however, begun to stub out three files which will form the core of the remainder of the book. I have the very end of the biggest section of chapter eight, and then four more chapters. The plan is to write what feels more like four short stories with four or five adjoining little scenes. I’m not sure that this will seem all that different from the outside when I’m done, but I think this change in plan will make things easier to write.

  This project is one that I both adore, and am pretty pleased with (at least at the moment,) but I’m also keenly aware that I need to be done with it, and I need to move on, as it’s been in progress for more than a year, and none of my reasons for not finishing it yet are very good.

• I’ve been slowly working on a knitting project. A sweater knit at a fairly fine gauge, and incredibly plain. I’m happy with the project but I’ve pretty much given up entirely on Television watching, and as a result haven’t found a lot of time to do knitting on a regular basis. I knit during a meeting, and for a few moments here and there during a couple of social interludes, but haven’t really gotten into it. It’s going well, and I’ve got about 9 inches done of the body. 7 more till the armhole shaping begins.

• I’m continuing to do the contra dance and shape note things. I think the shape note experience has been helpful for the way that I understand and participate in music, and that’s a good thing indeed. I’ve picked up a few new contra dance things, though if a given week is busy, contra dancing tends to be the first thing to disappear. I’m okay with that. I’ve also taken to going for walks in the morning before work, rather than in the evening, which is, I think better for my mind during the day at work, and also for getting work done on projects in the evening.

• It seems like there’s always something else in the project of “getting your technology to work the way it ought to,” and as a result it seems like I always have something to hack upon. With my laptop running the right operating system, and doing so pretty well, the list of things to hack on have cleared up significantly. I have a desktop that I’m not using as well as I could. There’s always something else to work on with regards to my writing setup, though that’s mostly abated for the moment. I really need to find some better way to read RSS feeds. I have some hacking to do with regards to websites. There’s always something to work on, I suppose.

Oh, and I’m working a lot, but then that’s how it goes. The work projects are actually pretty fun, and they’re going well, so that’s good. If only there were more hours in the day.

Cheers!

I’ve been talking with people recently about “what I’m working on,” and I’ve realized two things. First, that I’m beginning to get spread thin; and second, that I haven’t really used this blog as an effective tool to track these projects and facilitate ongoing work on these projects. So I’m going to write an “ongoing projects update.” So there.

While I don’t think there’s sense in making this a “weekly feature” I think taking the opportunity to check in with you all about my projects, to mention cool things that are going on with these projects.

1. The Novel

I’ve not managed to make this into the habit that I want it to be. Having totally missed my goal of finishing the draft in August, I’ve set a more tentative goal of getting it done in time for NaNoWriMo this year. I don’t know if I’ll do a NaNo project this year--probably not, I’m too contrary--but it seems like a good and doable goal.

What has me hung up at the moment, is I have a few scenes that I need to be written by a particular character that I’ve come to despise, not because he’s a bad character, I just find him frustrating to write. This is mostly interesting, insofar as I initially thought that he’d be the easy character to write in the story.

Despite this hang up, I’m really quite close to being done with this monster. Three or four more chapters, and some editing across the board. Not a huge deal. I just need to do it. That’s a lot of what this Labor Day weekend has been about.

2. This Blog

You’re all aware of this project, I trust. I’ve been able to keep up my “mostly daily” schedule for a long time now. Two or three years and counting. Since I’ve started the new job, and since my posting entries (if not actually writing them,) is a manual task (with Wordpress, I could queue things to Autopost). I’m not as good as I once was about getting entries posted in the morning as I would like to be. But it gets there.

Also, while I’m not cruising toward the A-List like I might have dreamed about when I was a teenager and getting started with this whole blogging thing, I’m actually pretty pleased with how this blog is going. Most entries evoke some sort of response that I see: on identi.ca, on facebook, or in comments. I get to have cool email conversations with you all. I’m pretty pleased. I’m still trying to figure out how to do a little better, because I think it’ll be awesome for all of us, if there are more voices and conversations going on, but I love blogging, and I’m really pleased with this project.

3. Cyborg Institute and Sygn System

This is the project that I’ve started with deepspawn, to create a distributed social networking and “user generated database engine.” Notes and other work related to this project are starting to come together on the Cyobrg Institute Wiki, and it’s something that I put a lot of work into a few weeks ago, but I haven’t really given it the kind of love in the past two weeks that its needed.

My list at the moment, for Sygn related projects is to do some reorganization of the wiki (the constant struggle), to announce and promote the xmpp muc for the sygn project (a chat room), to help people develop a basic reference implementation (and maybe learn some Python in the process?), and generate a few more use cases, to help folks understand the implications and possible utility of the project.

4. Cyborg Institute Systems Administration

One of my contentions about the future (of technology specifically, but I think it’s generalizable to some extent) is that as “previously scarce resources” like data connectivity, storage space, and software, become less scarce, the one thing that will continue to have concrete value is systems administration. Having people in the world who are really good at keeping larger systems running, at making sure all of the pieces talk to each-other, at making sure the people who need technological services have the right kind of service that they need. There’s real value in that.

And that’s a huge part of what the “Cyborg Institute” project is about. Sure there’s a lot of cyborg-related content and theorizing that I’m interested in working and developing, but really I can do that here on tychoish, what Cyborg Institute lets me (and you!) do is make this conversation much larger, it lets us work together and it allows me to help people do awesome things.

While the product of this work isn’t particularly visible, and I don’t really have the ability to say “I did X, Y, and Z for CI” this week, there are a lot of little things, and I think it’s definitely a worthwhile project.

5. `Critical Futures <http://criticalfutures.com>`_ `Relaunch <http://wiki.criticalfutures.com/>`_

This is definitely a Cyborg Institute project: it’s running on CI servers, we’re using CI tools, and I think the project--a collaborative fiction wiki--is very much one of these new technology-things that makes the whole “cyborg moment” so interesting.

I should point out that [brush][] is largely spearheading this. I’m just doing a bit here and there, and making sure the system runs well. I’m excited about this, and I’m glad that Critical Futures is going to get some love. There’ll be some other projects of mone--the novel, and so forth--on Critical Futures as well someday, but that’s down the road I think. Good to do something here, no?

6. Knitting

I think it’s a good day when you can be like “You know tycho, you should watch more TV.” my current knitting project is very much a “do it whilst watching television” kind of project, and I’d very much like to be able to create a space in my day(s) to get more work on this done.

That seems about good for now. What are you working on? :)

Because I’m moving soon (eep.) I’ve realized that we needed to get a new bed. See my existing bed--now, nearly ten years old--was wedged into the room in my parents house that it is currently in, with some force, and we very much doubt that said bed will ever be able to be removed, given the shape and location of the doorway.

Anyway, so I went to our local furniture store the other day to scope out and price mattresses and box-springs. This furniture store is this outlet-like store that’s pretty near to where my parents live, and over the past ten or twelve years we’ve gotten a fair number of things there, so much so that there’s a sales guy that recognizes my mother and I when we enter.

So we go in, and I try and make a b-line for the mattress section, when we were acosted by a very helpful sales guy (not our usual victim) and he hovered around telling us way too much about the inner workings of the mattresses, even after I tried to make it clear that: a) I wasn’t likely to buy the mattress today, b) I just wanted to feel where my price point was.

I should interject two things, one that I sleep on my stomach, and two that I tend to sleep with my feet hanging off the end of the bed.

So after a while of looking around and hoping that the dude would get the picture and leave me alone, he finally suggested that I try a particular bed out.

“Ok,” I said, and face planted side ways (so that I was running parallel to the imaginary headboard) onto a sort of mid-to-high end off-brand mattress. “Hey,” I said, after a moment, “That’s pretty good,”

“Uh,” he said, “Is that how you usually sleep on beds?”

I was speechless. Not only was he hovering but he was judging me for how I was laying down on beds. Now to be fair I don’t typically lay on beds cross-ways except for naps when I’m really tired, but still it seemed out of place, particularly since he’d been so accommodating and attentive henceforth.

Sigh.