tychoish, now without a net

I don’t have a lot to report.

I knit a lot, that was really good. The party promises to be great tonight.

I got my 1000 Knitters Project portrait taken today. I’m somewhere in the 900s, and I’m within 20 of people like Meg (and Cully!) Swansen, Meredith Glover, and Emily-freaking-Ocker. How cool is that.

I’m also going to be in the project as tycho garen, rather than my real name. That felt like a big decision, but meh.

I got yarn, including an order that I put in more than a year ago. So much cool stuff to knit, I swear. I’m probably in stock with yarn for the rest of the year. And a fun year it will be indeed.

I thought that I’d be more reflective, and I’m sorry that I didn’t get this out earlier. Anyway, back to the festivities.

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tagged: journal • knitting

Knitting camp. Where to start.

This is an analogy that will only make sense to the morris dancers in the audience, but it’s sort of like an ale, with more yarn and less dancing (of course) and much less singing. It’s the lack of singing that I find most disconcerting actually.

This is the session that has history, out of all the sessions of this camp. There are a few people who have been coming for 35 years, and many people who have been coming for way more than 20 years. And that history is something that’s really important to a lot of people, and it’s cool to see that and be a part of it.

I’ve been knitting on the latvian dreaming, mostly and I have two other projects lurking around that I will probably work on today. A lot of people come to camp and start new projects and I think that I’m unlikely to do that, because I need closure on my current projects and, I don’t have fully formed ideas of what I want to do next, anyway.

I’ve tried four times to write a paragraph here and I have too much flying through my head to make sense of that so here goes a list:

• There are so many famous and amazing knitters here. I’m a little star struck, actually. And a couple of times had lengthy discussions with them before I realized that I was talking to someone who’s name I had recognized in a book. And then, somewhat after the fact I learned that cookie a was “camp newbie sitting across the table from me.” Sigh.
• On top of all the other interesting discussions last night we had an interesting conversation about social dynamics on the internet and the knitternet.
• At 9pm last night, I got a pot of hot water and had a caffeine party. It was good stuff. Unlike a Morris Dance Ale, it’s all over by midnight, which means it’s possible to get an at least passable sleep in, but I needed the extra kick to stay up for that. Because:
• The drive was intense. Not bad, but long and I really pushed pretty hard. I’ll post about the podcasts and other listening materials I went through later…

Anyway I have so much to knit. I’m going to go take a shower and then go down and get started with the day.

Onward and Upward!

(ps. Just a program note/reminder: There’s a new critical futures story today. CF, is my daily (science fiction) story blog. I’ll blog over the weekend here, and cf will return, as usual on Monday.)

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tagged: journal • knitting

Email is a beast. While I would say that I don’t–at the moment–get a huge amount of email, I get enough that if I didn’t have a system in place for dealing with the email, it would be completely useless. I’ve not written about it here, but I have spent some time over the past few weeks working out how to replace a good but faltering system with a much more robust set up. Here’s the story: (Warning, this is really nerdy.)

First off this kind of really robust email solution isn’t for everyone, and there are a couple of unique factors in my setup that require the extra effort of this system. First of all, I need something that works because I hate the phone. If someone wants to get a hold of me, I’d much rather they write an email than call. If I don’t respond to email, people might call, or if I’m feeling overwhelmed by email, I might tell them to call. Both should be avoided. There are also a score of other reasons: I moderate a pretty high volume listserv, I need to send email from several different addresses and names/identities, and I have some pretty specific filtering needs, not to mention the fact that I have a number of pretty old email addresses that require a really powerful spam filter. I’m going to cover both what I used to do, and what I do now.

I used to: Collect a number of different email addresses into one gmail account and then check that email with either POP3 or IMAP. Gmail with IMAP was and is a great thing. With it, I could do a lot of in gmail-filtering and then have all of that just show up in my mail program. The problem is that there aren’t really good offline imap clients. Things don’t sync right. Mail.app can’t efficiently cope with new mail that doesn’t arrive in the inbox. You have to screw around with mail.app to get the multiple email identities to work. Mail.app wasn’t incredibly stable (though it has, to be fair gotten more stable.) Also mail.app’s filtering doesn’t work splendidly with IMAP.

Having an email program that works consistently and effectively is the key to keeping it under control.

A lot of my problems with this set up could surely be solved by using POP rather than IMAP, but after a year or so with IMAP (and gmail) I feel like the combination of the back up and having this account be useable and web-accessible is really ideal. I promised a post here on backup, and while I also can’t get into this here, I’m through with having my own machine be the only copy of important emails.

So what to do?

• Filter the hell out of my gmail account so that everything lands pretty much where it would need to so I can find it several months from now. Somewhere on this page is a list of all the funky boolean operators that gmail allows.
• Forward email out in chunks (so the lists get forwarded to one place, all of my frequent blog-related correspondents to another, moderation ) to different addresses on my web-server that include 15 character random strings).
  • This is actually a really sneaky way of passing gmail’s filtering downstream, and is otherwise a red hearing. I think however, that I could have probably eliminated the number of email addresses at play here by using “plus addresses” and eliminate the next, but it’s not a huge deal.
  • Funnel all these things the forwarded email to a holding email address that automatically deletes everything after a week. This is a short term backup, if I accidentally delete something or whatever.
• Rather than use gmail’s built in forwarding, I made a filter that searches for another, longer random string in all the email. If it doesn’t find this (which I suspect it never will,) it forwards to my “home” email address. Again this isn’t a public email address.

Time out, so what we have here. is gmail sorting forwarding two copies of each email to two different addresses, at once. All the email is sent to one address, and the second address depends on how gmail is filtering the email.

• Set up procmail locally to filter based on the random character string from the second step.
• Do some additional procmail filtering (which I think, as I figure it out, I’ll start to do more here, with and use geektool)
• Read messages with mutt, because it sucks less than anything else
• Write messages with textmate
• Send mail using msmtp

And that’s about it. The getting it setup was the really hard part now all I have to do is use it, and everything lands where it should. I think functionally this is pretty damn good. It might be preferable to get something that isn’t in situations when I don’t have my laptop with me oraccesable. I read something about using something like rsync to handle mail box delivery. Might git work as well? I’m not sure. But that’s another battle for another day.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: productivity • technology

Hey friends!

So I might have mentioned that I’m going to knitting camp at the end of the week. A long drive on Thursday leaving far to early in the morning. Followed by four whole days of intensive knitting, and then a drive back. As a result the blog schedule will be a bit–disrupted. Last year when I was at camp I posted a fair piece, and I suspect that I’ll want to opportunity to recount camp stories a bit as they happen.

At the same time, I probably won’t have the time to do my usual writing cram over the weekend to make sure that there are fun and interesting posts for you during the week. So here’s the deal:

• There’ll be new critical futures stories posted every weekday for the next two weeks. This won’t change, fear not. - I’ll post new things here, through the weekend. - I’ll probably take a brief tychoish vacation for a couple of days next week, I think there’ll be three posts, but I’m not sure when they’ll hit yet. It’s a blog, after all. Don’t be worried.

Because I doubt that administrivia is what you all came here to read, I think I’ll pass along some links and thoughts and questions that you might enjoy.

• The cats are still nibbling toes. This remains not cute, though they haven’t gotten this memo yet.
• Though I’m only really interested in talking about electoral politics in the historical sense, or as a venue for placing friendly bets,¹ but I’m not going to lie this is funny. “This is the internet!” heh. Actually I’m more worried that someone has cracked Randall’s secret sauce
• A git-wiki that really rocks. It’s still early on development, and it’s lacking some features that would make it useable for me at the moment, but I can totally see a place for such a thing for some future projects.
  • The ruby guys are totally awesome, and I like a lot of ruby projects, and I think that in some ways ruby is going to be the “next php,” even I have a soft spot in my heart² for Python, but I said to chris the other day that “ruby is the visual basic of our generation.”
• I’m thinking of starting to hard wrap columns in my text files, because it would make running diffs and file histories easier, grepping is easier, it makes the text more spatially consistent, it would make using vim easier, and so forth but I seem to really enjoy changing the window size a lot, and he is probably right, there’s very little practical value, and hitting ^Q for a vestige seems ill advised. That doesn’t mean I won’t try it, you read my post about my email after all.
• I just finished reading “Star Surgeon podiobooks,” a delightfully quirky public domain science fiction novel by Alan E. Norse, and read by my friend Scott Farquhar of Promethesus Radio Theatre, which was delightful even if it wasn’t a fine example of tightly structured prose. Scott’s next book is “Black Star Passes” by John W. Campbell, which I intend to start while I’m driving to camp.

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tagged: Announcements • journal

This post grows out of a sort of smoldering rant that I’ve been having for a while now. As I sit here at one of these synthetic moments when I’m trying to figure out how past interests and experiences build up to the future–how do the things that I loved so much in college affect life/me now?–the purpose of social/literary theory (”philosophy with a cause,”) is one of these things.

The internet loves polemics, and so ‘theory has a venue here, but I’ve read a lot of blog posts and emails from people who seem to yield theory and critique like a baseball bat, rather than a toothbrush,¹ so it’s been even more on my mind.

What is critique? What separates “good” critique from “bad” critique, and what end does it serve?

I think if any of you are presently reading Stephen Greenblat or Elaine Scary–for instance–you might have a pretty good answer for this. But what about the internet? There’s a lot of critical work that’s out there on the internet, a lot of people working outside of the academy who contribute to a discourse that attempts to analyze the world and our culture, often with various kinds of political goals. This is also critique.

Now I don’t want to seem like (too much of) an ass, I read a lot of crap on the internet that, to my mind seems like either really bad critique or (more likely) critique that fails to really capture the spirit of what I think the critical mode is.

Feel free (and encouraged) to disagree, but lets do a little bit of brainstorming on what makes good critique or bad critique:

• Critique is synthetic. Critique really needs to draw together multiple perspectives and sources. You can’t critique something without consulting previous critical literature (this is why theory is necessary, without it, we are contextually adrift), without consulting similar and dissimilar works. Critique is the mode through which all of these perspectives come together.

• Critique is often positive. It’s very easy to assume that the purpose of critique is to go through some abominable text² and tear it to shreds, and often this is enjoyable, but it is not productive. “Bad” and otherwise objectionable content will either stand or fail on it’s own, and taking a positive approach to critique means, I think that critique can be more politically productive, because, critiques can say “this good thing is good,” which is more instructive to consumers and producers of content. This doesn’t mean that critique has to be unequivocally positive–far from it–but if there isn’t a substantial positive outlook, the critique suffers.

• Critique doesn’t pass judgement; critique that passes judgment is called “review” and I think “review” has a different role and mold. It’s unfortunate that people who produce in both modes are called “critics.”

• *Critique is contextual.: This is sort of an adjunct statement to the first, but I think it’s important to realize that critique that doesn’t contextualize both the works in question, and the moment of critique is useless. This is also, potentially controversial, but I don’t suspect we have very many New Critics in the audience. Texts and critics don’t exist in a vacuum, and criticism can’t either. From this principal springs a couple of subsidiary values:

  • Paradoxically, readers of criticism need not be familiar with the texts your addressing, though they are likely familiar with the larger body of work that the texts belong to.

• Critics can’t hold individual works accountable for “their times,” nor can critics rise above the constraints of their times in criticism. Attempts to violate these rules are almost always tragic.

• Critique has an agenda: People don’t create texts or critique those texts without an agenda. Period.

• Critique has data, that is to say “texts.” One cannot critique abstract objects, or at least I doubt that it could do that very well. Particularly when specific texts are at the heart the critics’ work. For instance you can’t critique victorian gender norms, but you can critique the ways that legislation, and fashion standards vis a vis a sewing manual shaped gender norms during a period. You can’t critique a political campaign, but you can critique the marketing strategy vis a vis the advertising of various candidates.

  • Often the more specific the data is the better.
  • Often it’s hard to get all the data surrounding contemporary texts and phenomena. This requires special considerations.

• Critique is a pathway to understanding: Looking for and elucidating mechanisms behind particular literary/artistic/cultural phenomena is one of the most powerful and important goals of critique.

That’s enough for now, but I’m interested in seeing what you all have to contribute…

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tagged: academia • the queer

So I have a confession to make. I’m not writing longhand very much at all. Actually its insignificant the amount that I’m writing things out longhand any more. I was struck by this fact the other day, when, after a day where I felt like I didn’t get anything done, I opened a notebook and did some project planning/review on a sheet of paper. And I realized that my fountain pen was empty.

The interesting thing, I think is that I’m sort of a pen nut, and I’ve always loved having cool pens that made the act of writing a pleasure. So much so that since high school I’ve always had a Namiki Vanishing Point Fountain Pen around. These are heaty, but very usable fountain pens, that use a retracting nib (awesome!) and the grind on Pilot/Namiki nibs is great¹. I love writing by hand, and for a long time I’ve felt that I do my best planning and rough work long hand.

There two big reasons that I think this has worked so well for me. First of all, I have a great spatial memory, and having notes that are fixed on a page makes them easy to remember, particularly if they’re arranged sequentially, reading through the past archive can be a really power contextual memory aide. I haven’t tried it in a while, but I can take a notebook from the past, and flip through the pages and sometimes recall all sorts of stuff about the moment in my life that I was writing those notes².

But there’s a conflict here. I’m a geek so it makes sense to a digital system to keep track of these notes. After all, it’s just text. There are a score of reasons why this makes sense: digital text is searchable, it’s more enduring, its easier to read, there are search tools, and I type considerably faster than I can write long hand. But, there are of course downsides: digital text isn’t as portable for on the fly creation, the semantic/spacial “features” of notebooks are basically lost, and the truth is that search is only really useful if you’re looking “for” something, rather than browsing through³ taking system, because in order for search to be useable you need to be looking “for something” where as, if you’re looking at a notebook, it’s all browse and no search. Clearly there’s a place for search, but loosing “browsing cabibility,” is a huge downgrade.

At some point, about a year ago–as this was the inspiration for tychoish.com–I thought hey, “maybe a “blog” notebook could give linear context,” and still be digital. Well tychoish.com didn’t work out so well for this, but I’ve been using ikiwiki, which is mostly a wiki, but it has some useful blogging capabilities. Unfortunately, I’ve had a hard time getting it to work since I upgraded my computer, and switched to git.⁴

And the end result is, that without really trying to, exactly, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not writing anything out, really, and I have, sort of, all the bases covered. I have a computer that is more portable than the last one. I have a flash drive with a couple of good ssh clients on it, I have web access to my repositories. It’s all there, and it’s all accessible (to me), and that’s something that I can already tell has been a good thing for my workflow. At the same time, as my little project planning session a few days ago with the notebook illustrated, there are times when the change of venue/context is enough to get things rolling if they’re stalled.

The moral? Digital is good, particularly once you find the right solution, but maybe it isn’t quite time to throw away all the notebooks. Also I write this I realize that I should probably write a post about backup, but that’s for another day.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: productivity • writing