Topic: Update

Hello folks!

I’m going to be away from early early in the morning until late in the day on Monday, and (likely) asleep until late (for me) morning on Tuesday, following the Midwest Morris Ale that I’m participating in this weekend in Minneapolis Minnesota. The following notes are of interest:

1. I’ll have my Blackberry, so if you need to get a hold of me, call, email, text, whatever. I can’t promise that I’ll be super responsive, but I won’t go completely silent, but I’m mostly offline for the next four days and some change. Sorry if this is a problem.

2. If you’re in the twin cities, I’d love to see you. Check out the Ale Website for more information. If you happen across a Morris dancer in the twin cities this weekend (May 22-25, 2009; likely on saturday) say, “I’m looking for Sam of the Capering Roisters” and someone will find me.

3. No blog post on Monday.
4. Take care of yourself.

So, I feel like, in honor of the fact that today is my birthday, I’m going to write a little bit of a self centered and reflective post. Don’t worry. I have a post ready for you for later today that’s… of more general appeal.

I feel pretty good about the way things are going these days. I still have a pretty big todo list, of course, but I don’t really find myself going to bed wondering “how did it get so late and what did I do with my day?” which is a sign that I’m in rough shape. Nonetheless, I’ve been distractable of late, to combat this I’ve been working more concertedly on the laptop, and using my desktop-rig as a more social environment. I’m not entirely pleased with this setup, but I’m getting work done, so that’s worth something.

I’ve also been getting up early (wake-times before 7:00 am) and asleep whenever it feels required, usually 11 (on average), and while I haven’t been exercising regularly (as in walks), I have been dancing a lot. It’s Morris Dance season, so that makes up for things--slightly. Our ale, the gathering I go to every memorial day, is this weekend (of course) and that promises to be a lot of fun. In any case, I think good self-care/activity levels are a big reason of why I’m not in the loony bin. Also, I think my stamina has improved as a result and I’m able to do Morris dance without my knees giving me problems, and/or wearing myself out quite as much. At the same time I’ve spent a lot of time in recent days getting ready for the Morris Ale (it’s amazing how many pairs of socks one needs/wants at an ale!)

I fear that I write with too many parentheticals. I’m able to counter this tendency in fiction, but I’ve failed at it in blog posts. My brain was made for footnotes, I suppose. I’ve not found a suitably fast markdown converter that supports footnotes, so I’m not writing with footnotes, and as a result parens usage goes through the rough. I wonder what’s going to happen when I have to write real academic things again. As a corollary, I’m pretty sure that my blog-writing “sounds” very much like the way I talk, if you were wondering.

And that’s about it. I’m not doing anything really special for the day, be in touch, though, it’s always fun to talk to you all.

Cheers!

As those of you who microblog may have noticed (or were there) I attended and went to a cool little bar camp last weekend. It was a small affair in Central Illinois (I also visited friends, which was amazing.) but there were some cool freelancers, and some folks from NCSA, and I think we all learned something from the encounter. Good times.

Since I got back, however, I’ve had a serious case of the stupids. I don’t mean to make an excuse for my lack of productivity. I sat down, I did things that were on my todo-list, I made progress, but I feel like my brain rotted out for a little while there. It’s a strange feeling. In any case, I spent some time on Wednesday afternoon pulling together notes, thinking about things, and writing some stuff. Anyway, the brain seems to have un-rotted. Here’s a brief list of the things that are on my list of things to write about for you soon.

• Oracle’s Purchase of Sun Microsystems

• Co-op business models, and Open Source

  This marks a revival of some of my thinking and writing about economic issues. I’ve been thinking about (and the Sun/Oracle deal brought this to the surface) about how competition works (or is irrelevant) in cooperative business, what role open source and free software plays in technological development

• Jekyll.

  I sort of assumed that after I made the switch to this new content management system that all the people who were interested in it already knew about it. Not so apparently. I need to talk more about this.

• I upgraded to Jaunty.

  …and changed a few things in my system configuration that make it a bunch more lightweight. Still on ubuntu.

  I also need to do some more hacking about on things.

• I should cover other topics that I’ve touched on in the past that I’ve continued to think about, but not continued to write about. Things like git, Awesome, org-mode, my knitting.

At the time of writing, I’ve been going through a rough spot in my (day-to-day) travels and have had some trouble focusing on writing things. I suspect it will pass, but as I’ve been going through my todo list and my brain for things to write about, in the mean time I’ve noted something of a pattern in the way that I lead in my blog posts.

Even though I read something a few years ago that said, basically, the way to be successful at blogging is to write your posts like newspaper articles: strong lead, details to follow, everything but elaboration in the first paragraph. The thought is that this style of writing is the most effective way to reach people and hook them into what you’re saying. Expecting reader efficiency. It’s a good idea.

I’m remarkably bad at this. I blog like I talk, I fear, and so my posts are often bottom heavy and meander around to the point. I know my flaws.

In any case, I think I’ve uncovered a (small) list tropes for the way that I begin posts:

• I mention that something has been on my todo list and then write about something that’s tangentially related.
• I tell some sort of semi-funny, self deprecating introductory story, and get to the point at the beginning of the second paragraph.
• I talk about previous posts that serve as background to the post that I’m writing now. May or may not include links.
• Some sort of abrupt but not all together straight forward beginning, eg. “So I was thinking that…”

Did I miss any?

I write you from the future! I, as predicted, made the switch over between the wordpress powered version of tychoish.com and the jekyll powered version of my site. I’m quite pleased with this development. Basically it works by taking a repository of posts with all the content from my site and then compiles a website of static pages whenever I trigger an update. Though it hasn’t worked flawlessly, I’m pretty pleased with how this has worked out, and as I clean things up and get to using the system a bit more I’ll write up a post regarding jekyll, but I want to get used to it some more.

The biggest change is that I’m now calling the short form posts, “notes” and the long form posts, “essays” (as usual) and I’ve changed the landing page a bit. In all I think it’s an improvement. I’m not done tinkering around here: I hope this system will make it easier to develop and “curation” lists of related content. If I learned nothing else from this project, it’s that I have a lot hanging around in the archives, and the chronological list of content isn’t a particularly good presentation of this. So new ways of visualizing the content are in store.

Also, if you’re inclined, you can get a copy of the repository that powers this site over on github. I’ll set up local hosting/cloning of the git repository, in a bit.

Anyway, Onward and Upward indeed!

So I was hoping to write you this morning from a brand new blogging system powered by jekyll that I did a little bit of tweeking on. Unfortunatly, all the pieces aren’t all in place, yet. So tychoish is still a wordpress event still on wordpress. The highlights:

• It seems to have not worked, because it’s notion of categories isn’t a bit more firm than my own notion of categories (ie. coda and tychoish), and there isn’t any clever (or not so clever) way to get around this. It’s way more geeky than normal, but basically there’s no way (that I can figure) without categories to get an array/object of some segment of the posts without using jeykll’s categories.

  The categories that jekyll has are really powerful, and my problem isn’t so much how they work, as it is that I have 1300-ish posts written “in the old way” that I need to figure something out for. I’ll do that, but it’ll take a bit longer, and it’ll mean that there’ll be a more substantive update to the site.

• I did something that I think improves jekyll, by adding an aditional permalink format to my fork. I’m not even passingly familar with Ruby (and I may have a slight professed disdain for it) and while it wasn’t a big change nor did it require a bunch of logic/smarts, it works and I think I did it “right” for whatever that means.

  I also, in the course of this, got sed to work right, which was mostly just a case of me reading the manual wrong for years and then avoiding it. But personal victories are victories all the same.

I can explain my jekyll issue/need in more detail if anyone wants to help me hack on this. Cheers!

I wrote an article for my friend Melissa Barton about how to use computers/technology more successfully and more effectively, and it went live over the weekend. I’m really happy with it, and it represents all of the things I’ve been working through here, except tuned for a more general audience. It’s also under my given name (gasp!) as if the tycho thing wasn’t confusing enough as it is.

Emacs is great, and I’m a huge fan, but it’s not for everyone, and for those audences, thinking about what we learn from “advanced useage” and then workind to apply that to more general use can be quite powerful. This is a different take on the “how to attract general audences,” process. I guess I’m mostly arguing that rather than make software/hardware more “friendly,” better to (also) educate users to be more gruff?

In any case, that’s up. I’m also posting an extra tychoish essay on Wednesday because it didn’t get posted (as I would have hoped) due to my error a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for that. Also, maybe new Critical Futures this week?

cheers, ty

I watched the last episode of Battlestar Galatica, (I’d been behind several weeks) today, because I was tired of everyone else talking about it and staying away from reading things on the Internet because of it. This is a story that I’ve been quite fond of for quite a long time, and I was impressed with how well they wrapped it up. Really impressed. Good work indeed.

I’ve also--and I haven’t talked about this very much here, yet--been writing more seriously on my projects than I have in a good long while. It’s good to be back, and I’m often surprised at how important writing on my own projects (particularly fiction) is at keeping my spirits afloat.

Now that the novel is on track again, I feel less overwhelmed at knocking through other projects. My knitting is in better shape, I’m blogging better, I worked on an academic project, and so forth. There’s still outstanding work, and I’m getting back into it, and that’s a good thing indeed.

I’m busy, as always, and there’s too much to really go through it here, but, but! I feel inspired rather than daunted at the prospect. I hope you all have a good week as well.