While this week flew by in many respects and I only got a couple of posts out, there is much change and progress afoot. This post is an attempt to catalog some of the work I (and others) have been doing that hasn’t made it onto the blog:

• Discussion of the “Better Task List” post by jfm`. Including spoilers for posts that I hope to have ready next week.

• Further discussion of the make emacs better post. I’m thinking that it’s probably nearly time to split that into a few pages. There’s a lot of great content there and people have added a lot. I’m a huge fan.

• Not a link, except to say that I did some fairly substantial tweaks of the site’s design, which is probably only worth mentioning because I suspect most people read the site on RSS. Different fonts in the headers, and I rearranged the masthead to be a little more clean, and changed the links a bit.

• I’m in the slow process of cleaning up the Cyborg Institute site which I’ve neglected for far too long. I’m importing a lot of the content that I wrote over there, notably sygn and tubmle-manager. Next up, some straggling blog posts, and a clean up of the existing content to match my current projects and work.

• The knitting posts, which is collected separately from rhizome posts is in full swing, and I hope to be able to post a few things there every now and then.

• There’s now a real tag index and a tag cloud that looks like something. I’d avoided putting together a page like this for some time, because there were a lot of junk tags and enough really big tags that the cloud didn’t really work. I’ve mostly cleaned that up, leaving the wiki with a rather awesome tag cloud

  I’ve also found a few things on the web that I think you might enjoy on the web:

• A new blog called observatory. I’ve been talking to the author a bit. I realized that there aren’t very many blogs that are so verbose. I suppose ByteBaker is another example, but there aren’t many of them around.

• undo-tree-mode is a nifty little emacs hack that makes undoing and redoing much less complicated and weird. (From that make emacs better discussion.) Though I have to admit that I no longer have a problem with the default behavior, even if I know it’s a bit counter intuitive.

• I’ve been reading Strange Horizons more than I have in the past, thanks mostly to instapaer and InstaFetch for Android. I was particularly found of Genevieve Valentine’s column/review of a glorious mess of a movie trope.

That’s all I have for this week.

Comments Undo-tree also allows for undoing based on time (see here), apparently a feature that vim has.

I realized that I made a lot of changes to the way my websites were arranged and worked recently, and I thought that it would be good to write a few about the hottest new thing, and my rationale for messing everything up. Again.

Basically, I took the CriticalFutures.com site, and turned it into the posts section here, moving a bunch of content back to tychoish.com that used to be here. This time, everything is powered by ikiwiki, and while I callously dropped all comments¹, I think the move is one of general and overall improvement.

At the same time, I think there are challenges. Rather than comment pages, there’s now a “discourse” link at the top left of the pages, which lets you sign in and create a new page for discussion related to the page you’re currently viewing. I liked the name “discourse” rather than “discussion,” but I fear there may be some confusion. I can change it over back without much issue, if any one feels strongly.

Mostly, it’s still the same blog that it’s always been, and I’m having fun with it. The essay/rhizome divide may turn out to be tenuous in the long term, and it might disappear, but for now it makes sense. I’ve not been doing as many wiki-based things, though I have worked on a queer theories page, and the technical writing section is something that I’m pleased with. Wikis are much more difficult to use and produce than one would initially guess. The concept is simple, the software is simple, and the work is remarkably time consuming and difficult to do right. And then there’s the problem of contributors.

I don’t know how it’s going to sort out, but I look forward to hearing from you, and making stuff on this domain.

… 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.

I don’t know about this. But here it goes, anyway.

I’m pleased to announce the complete publication of my novella “`Knowing Mars <http://tychogaren.com/mars/>`_” on `tychogaren.com <http://tychogaren.com/>`_.

“Knowing Mars” is an important story for me. I wrote it after I graduated from college, after I didn’t go to graduate school the first time, and in a lot of ways it was the project that got me started down the path of being a “real writer,” post-graduation. I’d written fiction before college, and mostly avoided writing fiction in college, and then right as I was finishing college I started writing stories again. It was strange for a while, but it was delightful to be able to tell stories and be so much better at it than I was the first time.

I find that this is fundamentally a recurring issue. When I started writing “Knowing Mars,” I felt like I was starting out light years ahead of what I had written four or five years before. Now, I feel like the stuff I’m working on now is light years ahead of “Knowing Mars.” This is probably an encouraging sign.

I suppose you’d like to know a bit more about the story. I’ll leave most of the details to the reading, but basically it’s a sort of superhero/cyberpunk story that explores themes related to diaspora, political organization, historical narrative, and gender. I don’t know if I’ve ever described it as such before.

The story is available in multiple formats. Each chapter is available in full HTML as part of tychogaren.com and in a plan Markdown formatted plain text. Furthermore the complete text of the novella is available in both of these formats, and a simple un-styled HTML version that should be ideal for conversion to various electronic reading platforms. If you want to read the novella but would find another format easier to process, talk to me about it and I’ll get something pulled together for you.

All “full html” versions of the text have comments enabled using the same system as the blog. I look forward to your comments. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more fiction.

Onward and Upward!

First, an announcement. I’ve started a tychoish.com wiki. I’m calling it, appropriately enough “wikish.” You can see a brief introduction and note about my intentions there.

I’ve written a bunch here about the peculiarities of building communities and practices around “the wiki,” as I think it represents a new paradigm for thinking about collaboration and “the text.” I’m, slowly, working on building a community around the cyborg institute wiki, and that’s an ongoing (and fairly specific) project. I’ve also, in much smaller ways, done things with wikis in a couple of other situations: for some group projects I’ve been involved with, a few things for work, and so forth. Perhaps more relevantly, I also used a wiki--much like this one and the others I am responsible for--as the system I used for storing everything in my brain. From these experiences I’ve come to the following conclusion:

• In any given wiki, most of the “work,” particular at the beginning, is accomplished by a very small number of contributors. Potentially only one contributor.

  Critical mass is a difficult thing to manage or predict, and if you start a wiki and you want it to succeed, you have to be ready to do all of the work of getting it to critical mass, which could take a long time. Fair warning.

• Wikis are incredibly unstructured. It’s easy to impose structure on a new wiki, in cases where structure will actually hinder growth and development rather than promote development. Particularly if the kind of content you hope to develop is wiki like. For personal organization tasks, wikis are often not the right answer, even if they appear to work for a long time.

• Creating a page in a wiki is often better and more effective than writing an email of some length (say, more than 250 words), particularly when more than two people are involved in the correspondence.

• I need another wiki like I need a hole in the head. But, I like that wikish is both public--you all can watch and contribute to what I’m working on--and focused on what I’m working on. The personal wiki, the one that was just for internal use suffered from lack of audience even an imagined audience.

• I think putting the novella that I wrote in late 2007 into a wiki and working on revisions and tweaks in that context makes a great deal of sense, and I think wikish feels like the “right place” to put that work.

So that’s the plan. I’ll probably post from time to time about new things that I’m posting there, and I’m perfectly happy to have you all make pages in wikish as you want. I’ve also decided, that wikish will require OpenIDs as the only means of authentication. Just cause. See you there!

Alternate titles for this post include, “Depending on When You Start Counting,” and “Happy New Year.”

I must confess that I don’t do holiday’s very well. It’s not that I’m a huge curmudgeon (though I probably am) or that I don’t like celebrations (though I don’t much.) More, I think it’s that I’m mostly a homebody, and given the option, will in most cases, choose to spend any given evening at home writing and hanging out with the cats. Furthermore, I’m generally of the opinion that formal excuses are not needed for spending time with your friends and family. Nevertheless there is a certain sort of cultural momentum around holidays like New Years, and its hard to avoid them entirely.

For many years, my annual cycle has largely been on the academic calendar. Indeed for a few years after I graduated formally, I still took a few classes, and was wrapped up in applying for graduate school and enough of my friends were still in school that I seemed to stay on the academic year. This year with, I noted the beginning of the academic year, mostly because for the first time, really the first time in a long time I wasn’t in school, I wasn’t trying to be in school, and that wasn’t a bad thing. I still have a lot of academic habits: the impulse to review and summarize my work about every four months, the way I stricture and organize my work is very reminiscent of a sort of academic way of looking at things. Shrug.

But it’s a new year, depending on when you start counting, and given what a ride 2009 was, it seems like a bit of reflection is in order. The most significant thing was the fact that I took a job half way across the country and moved in late June. This has lead to a number of interesting developments: I met a number of people in “real life” who had previously been on-line friends, I’ve learned a lot about my skills and abilities and myself as a writer, I’ve developed a circle of friends that delight me.

This isn’t to say that it was a stellar year. I spent six months not working (really,) and a lot of time unsure about what I was going to do for work, let alone “my career,” all my friends were in graduate school and most of them weren’t anywhere near where I was, and so forth.

But I kept, hacking away at various projects, kept thinking and writing about new things, and did my best to seize opportunities when they arose. And somehow it all worked out. In retrospect it’s all very weird, to think how monumental this year has been, and the ways that I’ve really pushed myself to do things that don’t seem very “me” like. In the end I’m pleased with where I am and where I’ve come.

But perhaps, more significantly, I’m excited to what the next year holds.

As it should be, I suppose. I hope you all are doing well in this regard and I look forward to talking with you throughout the year to come.

I fear I’ve been posting too many posts in the vein of “so here’s what I’m up to folks,” rather than you know writing about things that may be interesting to folks out there in Internet land. Nevertheless, here’s another slightly more technical post.

I’ve mentioned in passing a few times over the past few months that:

• I’ve been interested in shifting to Arch Linux. While I’ve been running Arch in a VM on my work desktop, I have been quite slow to move additional machines over to Arch. It’s not for lack of wanting, but I have a hard time disrupting something that works when it’s already working.
• Also on the software front, I’ve switched to using the Stump Window Manger, and while I’ve talked a bit about this on the blog, I’ve done virtually no reporting of my ongoing progress with this.
• I missed the days when I only had one computer and it went everywhere with me. While I like having all this computing possibility around, I’m moving around enough these days that it doesn’t make sense to be tied down to a desktop. I like sitting on the couch and writing, and I like being able to go off for a weekend and be able to work on the projects that I really need/want to work on. That’s hard when you have a desk and an “office.”

This post provides updates with regards to these subjects.

Moving to Arch Linux and StumpWM

A few weeks ago, I had this massive cascade of software issues. Mostly things were provoked by the switch to Stump. Basically, the issue was that Stump wasn’t embedded in all of the desktop frameworks that are so popular these days, there were a number of system resources that just didn’t work with the new Window Manager.

The thing was that my systems were running a terribly hacked up version of Ubuntu. I was running weird kernels, I’d mostly given up on the display managers, and the systems were just messy. So the problem wasn’t so much with Stump, as it was with the way that Ubuntu packages and manages certain aspects of the system inside of desktop functionality. I’m thinking specifically of the ways that networking and sound are managed by dbus. If that didn’t make sense to you, don’t worry.

Since the chief problem boiled down to “this system is too complex for me to be able to manage,” and it no longer became an effective use of my time to maintain the system as it was… I wiped everything and finally put Arch on the laptop.

And it went on smoothly, and everything worked. Arch is a tinkerers distribution, there’s no doubt about that. Since I did have Arch experience it wasn’t a terribly traumatic experience. It took a little while to figure out how to make Suspend and Resume work (i.e. for the laptop when the lid closes,) and manually managing network connections isn’t incredibly straightforward until you get the hang of it, but it all works now. And I couldn’t be happier

The Experience of StumpWM

This isn’t really a full report, but more a note to say that my brain has really adapted to Stump, and I’m quite happy with the experience. Stump doesn’t in and of itself increase the ways I’m able to be productive, but… I do think that I work more efficiently when using Stump.

There’s still a lot left to be done with regards to the tweaking of stump for me. I need to play some more with the MPD (music player) integration, and there are a number of other contributed Lisp packages that I really want to play with. Also, I finally figured out how the Key Binding Map works when I had gotten my basic keybidning needs taken care of and I haven’t touched it since then. Now I know how I use the system and I’m ready to tweak things again, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Additional thoughts regarding Stump, from a more “objective” perspective: it is incredibly stable, and while it’s not blindingly lightweight, it lives in 20 megs of ram and that’s about it. I never need to restart the window manager or X anymore, and that’s kind of nice.

So in short, the Stump WM is a great thing and I need to write a bit more about the actual using of it. But first I need to do a little more tinkering. Because I’m like that.

The Consolidation of the Gear and Laptops

What a strange heading. In any case. I gave in and bought a new laptop, last week. I found a great deal on a used Lenovo x200 with great specs, and I thought that it would solve the majority of my issues with my existing technology.

First, it was considerably newer than the laptop I have been using for most of the past year: more RAM, dual core system, bigger and faster hard drive. Second, it had all of the qualities of the old laptop that I adored: it’s a 12" laptop which means very portable without making sacrifices, and it forgoes a trackpad for a “ThinkPad Nipple” for a mouse. Finally (and perhaps most importantly,) the screen resolution is 1200x800 (up from 1024×768) which makes it possible to comfortably tile two windows next to each-other at once. This is the same resolution as my 15" PowerBook G4 (and I think all of the 13 inch MacBooks). It’s a good size, and I was really aching for the increased screen space.

It turns out that all of these concerns were addressed fully with this new system. The screen is perfect, it’s peppy. it’s also nice to return to the modern computing world. I continue to be mightily impressed with the build quality, design, and functionality of IBM/Lenovo hardware.

My computer consolidation isn’t yet complete: my desktop hasn’t yet been backed up and converted to Arch, but it’s getting there. I’m also not quite sure what happens with the old laptop. I’m thinking of keeping it around as a spare, but if anyone has a need for a really awesome ThinkPad x41 they should be in touch.

Onward and 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!

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:
  • Cooperative Economics
  • Lists
  • New Media and Blogging
  • Technology Futurism

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.

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? :)