After a long time toiling with the ThinkPad that I got (as my primary laptop) a few months back. I decided to rearrange my laptop usage. Not that the ThinkPad is a bad machine, but I felt bad because my MacBook was langishing, and I very much missed having a machine with a usable battery life. While I thought about trading the macbook for a PC laptop, it finally dawned on me that I could just linuxify it and be done with it. I have the hardware, and while it isn’t pro-grade like the thinkpad, it’s contemporary. It also means that my initial intention with the thinkpad–as a spare to keep peace among the family when one of my parent’s older macs dies–is finally fulfilled, without my need to give away the macbook. Win win. I installed dual boot with OS X, which seems like it might be useful. The hard-drive is certainly big enough–and I’m not going to be keeping anything mission critical on it anyway. In honor of this, I’ve rechristened it “Deleuze and Guatteri” (deleuze=linux; guatteri=os x) as an addition to my family of continental philosopher named electronic devices. I have the linux system set up, next up: getting the right click emulation to work right/at all, figuring out how to partition the shared space (a thousand plateaus, heh,) setting up the OS X part, and afixing the ordered tux stickers to the top of the laptop.

If anyone has experience with linux and macbooks, and can help with the right click issue, that would rock something fierce.

I did some blog writing for the upcoming week today. It was good, I managed to pull off nearly two weeks the last time I sat down and seriously wrote for the blog, so I haven’t had the chance to really sort through thoughts like this in a long time. It’s amazing how much writing blog posts provides me the space to work through things that I’m thinking about. It’s also amazing to me how much I’ve grown to depend and expect this space as part of my life, and how scattered my thinking is without this blog. It’ll be interesting in *another* ten years to see how this changes. In any case the real point of this little post is to say that I ran a word count of my efforts today and came up with a total around 3,800 words (turns out, this weeks is a light week). I remember in high school and college thinking that this was a lot of words. And it is, and indeed it’s easier to write things conversationally for the blog than it is to write logically structured essays or fiction. But still. Evidence, I’m convinced that writing effectively is more about establishing habits rather than anything mystical.

All of the outlines for the novel length projects I start, have a space at about the three-quarters point that says “overflow area to catch up before the end”. I always have a couple of scenes that float between chapters, and having a place before the end where I can sort of take a deep breath and get things lined up perfectly for the climax and end is a good thing. Anyway, this isn’t really a writing post, but the current project has one of these areas, and I’m so going to need it. In part because of chapters like the one I’m writing now. It’s full of great stuff, that needs to be in this book, and I love the way it feels to write it. At the same time None of it was in the outline. All this by way of saying that after a few weeks of not really “having any fiction in me” I’ve returned with a vengeance to this novel, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. Great stuff.

I just upgraded tychoish today to the new, “WordPress 2.7″ which has a great new user interface that I really like. We’re finally getting back to b2/cafelog and wordpress 1.5 ground. Heh. Anyway. I’m going to be reviving this little mini-blog on the right hand side of the site. The rule this time? All posts written off the cuff and nothing with paragraph breaks. Sounds like a plan? I thought so.

Dear Readers,

I’m–or my alter-ego¹–is going to be at Drupal Camp Chicago on the 24th and 25th of October, baring an unforeseen catastrophe.

So this presents several possibilities:

1. You are already going to Drupal Camp Chicago and want to hang out with me or talk me into presenting something with you. To this, I say rock on.

2. You are or will happen to be in Chicago that weekend and don’t give a rats ass about drupal, I’m going to be (hopefully) meeting friends from school on Saturday after the conference and I’d love to have blog people there too.

In addition I’m thinking of proposing a session on Open MicroBlogging and drupal, which I think might be really fun. If you’re interested in contributing to this, I’d love help/co-conspirators. And I’m just a guy who thinks this shit is cool.

I’m cross posting this but lets try and coordinate meet-ups and whatnot in the comments thread of the tychoish.com post. You can always email or jabber/xmpp me at garen@tychoish.com Rock On.

Hey folks,

Just a quick note. I’m going to take a two day break from posting stories to Critical Futures at the end of this week.

The reasons for this are twofold. First and probably most importantly, I need a break. In the last three months, I’ve posted about 28,000 words of fiction (nearly all of it my own) and even though much of it has been old content that I’ve been editing and revising as we go, it still takes a lot of time. And because, I’m my own boss, and can do these things, I’m giving myself a break. These are the perks of “going it alone,” and besides, we’re only talking about two days.

The second reason is that I’ve just finished posting the third chapter of Knowing Mars, the novella that I finished a year ago, and that forms the core of the first six months–or so– of Critical Futures posting. Given the milestone, I think I want to release the first three chapters as PDF files so that people new to the game can catch up. This will form the core of next weeks posts, and it’ll take a bit of extra time to prep. This means my break is effectively a little bit longer, you get special content, and we’re all happy.

I’m starting to talk to other people about writing/sending stories to Critical Futures, which is something that in my more overwhelmed moments seems really good. If you have nifty SFnal work that you’re tired of sitting on and want to see what it looks like in “print,” consider submitting. I enjoy doing editorial work (and I’m at least half decent at it, my alter-ego makes a living doing something similar,) and I think Critical Futures is the ideal space for some pretty nifty writing. Get in touch and we can talk in greater detail about this. I see great things happening.

Ok, so I really want to like Gentoo Linux. Really, rather a lot. And I even wrote a post about how awesome VMs were. But here’s the issue of the hour.

I wanted to try gentoo, because I was kind of sick of having to fight with ubuntu/debian to get at more contemporary packages. Having a distribution that’s really picky about these things when I’m not running a server, and capiable of deciding if I want to install something is… anoying. Espically when I’m likely to install it myself, the “stability feature” seems downright painful.

And I’m in the process of testing things out so it seems fair to give one of the “rolling” release cylce distributions a test drive. Ok, so here’s what happened.

There aren’t–that I can find–VMs with pre-built Gentoo desktop installations in abundence like there are for ubuntu. Which means I have to install it from scratch. Except that that’s really finkey and I’ve thusfar screwed up in a couple instalations. Once by not reading the instructions correctly and setting some weird keyboard layout that I couldn’t recover from, and this second time because the network wouldn’t connect in the virtual machine so there wasn’t a display manager aside from xdm, and while I’m good with the shell, I’m not that good with it.

I think I should attempt to get a good solid install into the VM before I order hardware for real, but this last issue seems to be more an issue of “tycho fighting with the vm engine” rather than “tycho fighting with linux” so that’s helpful, at least a little.

I’m still writing, even though I’ve been in a very clear Critical Futures kick of posting lots of old material. I think I might post another one of the Trailing Edge stories soon, just to switch things up, after another Knowing Mars story. But that’s beside the point. So I’m writing this new story. It’s good fun, and there are lots of things about this story that I absoutly adore. The theory is interesting, the characters are a hoge podge of old favorites (sort of), the setting is great fun, and I really like the shape of the plot.

I’m not writing about it on the blog because I think it’s too introspective, and I don’t want to overthink things, and I’m not sure it’s going to end up on Critical Futures, and so forth. But I wrote a sentence which makes me smile, so I thought I’d post it here.

Such strict adhearance to parlaimentray rules wasn’t incredibly common and tended to irritate the old timers, who were firmly of the opinion that procedure was to be used as a precision instrument, not a blunt object.

I have something of a fascination with parlimentary systems and procedures, and I think it’s sort of an interesting setting for part of a story. You have the sense that something “important” is happening (even if it’s not,) you have a bunch of smart folks who we can imagine might be prone to saying sort of witty things to/at eachother, there’s conflict, and there’s a great likleyhood that absurd things can happen.

Having said that, I’ve been dragging on this scene, which I know will be fun to write once it gets going. But it hasn’t yet. In due time. In due time.