tychoish, now without a net

As you might know, we at TealArt, use a program called WordPress to run the back-end of the site. It’s a nifty program, and I’ve started to see WordPress blogs all over the place, and it seems like WordPress might even be the blogging software of choice for most folks these days. I had the pleasure/distinction of having to upgrade the software the other day, which has started to keep wordpress pretty firmly in my mind.

Thing is, most of the time I don’t really interact with the software: there are so many programs and options that make it possible to post and edit a blog without ever actually having to go to the website, these days I use MarsEdit and a plugin for my text editor, TextMate to post to the blog. This is of course super interesting to you so I’m going to move on.¹

I remember when WordPress was the rogue stepchild of b2/cafelog (another wonderful piece of blog software that TealArt proudly used), and even when the thought of having a site as dependent on a mySQL database as WP sites tend to be was absurd. These days, Word Press is one of the successes of the open source software scene. Tons of people use it. It works great, it’s polished, there’s an active developer community, and somehow the leaders of the project are able to support some sort of business model. There are probably a lot of reasons for this: PHP/mySQL are easy languages to learn, the back end and the front end of WP are basically independent of eachother, and the way that WP does plugins makes it easy for people to contribute to WP, and also for WP developers to roll-in particularly successful plug-ins as features.

I’m not versed enough in this, but the WP.com/WP.org distinction is I think a great model for distributing and monitoring “free” software. Basically they develop a product that they give away for free (WP.org; what TA uses), and then they take that product and offer a service related to that product (WP.com) that they can generate revenue with. You can read the Automatic website for more information, frankly I’m not sure about the particulars, or if it’s really a viable business model but I’d like it if it were, so I’m going to continue to pretend.

Interestingly, also, they’re enough different from their major comerical competitor (SixApart, the people who do LiveJournal, Vox, TypePad and most importantly MoveableType,) that they’ll probably not run into problems there. I’m not entirely sure about MoveableType’s long term success, but at this point that’s not a very big issue.

Anyway, enough yammering for now… I’ll be back tomorrow with the intro for the new series! Don’t go anywhere.

Best, tycho

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This is my last, regularly scheduled weekly knitting essay. The remainder of the knitting content on TealArt, at least for the foreseeable will be either project reports, or quick notes, or other similar pieces. I’ve started to feel like the knitting content is a bit tried, and isn’t really reflecting what I or you are interested in reading, very much. But I hope you enjoy this little homage to Shetland Jumper Weight yarn. — ty

I want to tell you a secret: Shetland sheep are magic creatures to be feared and revered.

“Shetland?!?!” you ask in amazement. “Isn’t Shetland yarn rough and hard to work with?”

Why yes, indeed they are magic, and while you might think that it is rough, I’m here to explore why you may have the wrong idea about the shetland sheeps¹. In the style of the meaningless top x-number list that is so popular with the folks at digg, this post will be in a list format. So there.

1. Shetland not really as rough as you think it is.

   • Shetland yarns and wool isn’t cashmere, quiviet, or even merino yarn, and when people feel shetland yarn it doesn’t feel comfortingly soft like like luxury yarns, that’s true. Shetland’s magic is that when you put it near your skin, it doesn’t irritate. This is because shetland yarn doesn’t have guard hairs like some other yarns, so it isn’t prickly, and feels comfortable as you where it. This isn’t to say that I’d recommend making an unlined-skin-tight cat-suit out of shetland, but for most wear situation, you’ll feel comfortable. In the equation is the fact that shetland tends to be (I believe) woolen spun, this means that–among other things that the wool is lofty and light. So not only does the yarn not attack you, it doesn’t weigh you down, and magically keeps your warm. What more could you want out of yarn.

2. Shetland yarns are available,

   • While most yarn stores don’t stock a full range of shetland colors, the three major suppliers/mills for shetland yarn (Jamieson’s, Jamieson’s and Smith, and Harrisville Designs) are generally incredibly available, either directly from the mills, or from third-party stores. Since these yarns are incredibly consistent, once you have a color card and idea about what you want, ordering these yarns is really easy.

3. Shetland 2-ply is incredibly versatile.

   • People’s first response to seeing 2 ply shetland is often to say that it’s too fine. And it is fine yarn, but there are a lot of things that you can do with 2-ply. For instance you can: knit lace work, knit socks at sock-gauge, knit stranded work, or even double the yarn for something a little heftier. Also HD, at least, makes a dk/worsted that’s double weight yarn, if you really can’t cope with the fingering weight.

4. Shetland has the best color selection around.

   • Because of I think that a lot of shetland mills, HD in particular, generally produce for weavers (and fair isle knitters) there are just more colors around for this kind of yarn. It’s great.

5. Shetland wears well.

   • I think that Shetland wears particularly well because of the properties that I mentioned in number 1. It’s lofty and tends to fairly firmly spun, and all of the mills mentioned above are just good. That kind of thing matters.

6. Shetland felts well.

   • Shetland, because it’s so lofty, and because it’s magic felts well. This means that it steeks well, and that the fabric wears really well and tends to find your body shape and form to it. This means that you have to be careful when washing this fabric. It also steeks well as the yarn almost felts from the sweat and friction from your hands as you knit it. This is one of the great joys of this yarn.

7. Shetland Actually Knits at Sport-Weight Gauge

   • I can’t explain this one at all, but I know it’s true. I keep looking at the shetland and expecting the gauge to be about what I get for other fingering-weight yarn. When I cast on for projects expecting this gauge (yes, I’m a strict-non-swatcher), it’s always too big. When I try and trick the yarn, and pretend it’s sport weight and cast on with this assumption, it almost always works. This goes for situations where I’ve tried to knit both both stranded and plain. I have no good explanation other than magic.

8. Shetland Stranded stitches are actually square.

   • This is actually an observation of Meg Swansen and EZ, because even though it’s not true, I tend to assume this of all color work knitting, and its usually pretty close. It’s even closer with Shetland, though. This makes picking up around armholes particularly fun, and it makes it easier to design using charts.

9. Shetland yarn lets you be more frugal with yarn.

   • Ok, this might strike you as unlikely, given the fact that shetland is perhaps not the most inexpensive yarn around. But it’s true. The fact is that shetland yarn is pretty standard, I mean sure, HD is a microd² finer than Jameisons and J&S, but they’re all close. Also as with any yarn, if you’re using the same kind of yarn for more than one project, it’s easier to use leftovers.

10. Shetland doesn’t pill like merino and other yarns.

    • You’re right, I’m stretching for a number 10, because I think this technically should fit under “wearing well,” but it stands that shetland doesn’t really pill because of the way it’s spun and the way it tends to felt. Shetland doesn’t pill and seems to wear like iron. This is a good property in yarn. In contrast, I’ve yet to find a merino that doesn’t pill.

I hope these were insightful and fun. Questions? Comments? Thoughts? I’d love to hear them!

Cheers, tycho

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tagged: knitting

It’s been an entire day since I’ve finished dancing and my body is slowly starting to feel almost normal. I’m still tired of course, but soon I’ll stop aching so much and be able to just remember the great time I had. The truth is that I’m not in ideal shape for this kind of dance¹, because I’ve basically been away for so long, but another truth is that this was that I danced many times as much by quantitiy (and quality). Because sections of my “team” hosted this event (I was virtually uninvolved by virtue of the circumstances of my education) this even in addtion to being hard on my body, presented an interesting political situation. Time has yet to tell wether my predictions were correct or not, but initial signs indicate that I may not have been far off.

In terms of Station Keeping I laid out some of the back material that I’ve been walking around in my head for the other writers. I’m trying to find a balance between some sort of structured/organizational model that will allow us to write effectively and efficiently as a team, but that will also allow us all to contribute to all aspects of the development and production. It’s a fine balance between not saying very much to give people freedom to come up with brilliant solutions, and creating an environment with deadlines, productive feedback, and a coherent (series) of stories. I also didn’t want to feel like I had ideas about where stories and characters were going to go that I hadn’t/didn’t tell the other writers. With this out of the way, I think we might be able to move forward more effectively.

bI was playing around with PMWiki for the Station Keeping writer’s wiki, and while it’s a good program and really versatile, I’m not convinced that it’s right for our purposes. I’m thinking about changing the way I do this so that it can serve as more of a refrence space rather than a workspace, but getting more of the project written is also crucial, and really this is just one of the things going through my mind that I need to think about in relation to this project.

Anyway. Time to get the day started, and spend some time doing some chores and maybe actually working on Station Keeping.

Cheers, tycho

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tagged: Station Keeping

I realized, I think, a bit too late in the process that my last post really was kind of the letter from the editor post for this week, even though I posted it last thursday.

An update: (*actually there’s not much, as I just wrote that other post a few hours ago, like I said, morris dancing all weekend, and I won’t be done till later this afternoon by your reading.)

• We’ve started to talk about a podcast option, I have some nifty ideas, and we’ll see how that turns out.

• I hope you enjoyed the intro to the Deleuze series (I know in fairness I think it should be Deleuze and Guatteri, but I think of it as just Deleuze. attack me later). I’ve only written a few of them, but I quite enjoy the concept space. There’s a lot of material, and I find it really fun to write about.

• The new TealArt plan: letter from the editor on monday, Station Keeping Tuesday, knitting/tychoBlathering on wednesday, ChrisTech Thursday, and Deleuze on Friday. It’s rocking.

See you later in the week!

best, tycho

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tagged: TealArt

I’ve been talking for a while about a new series on TealArt because I think that I’ve basically warn out the hypertext topic. Like the productivity/rethinking gtd series that I wrote during the first part of the semester, I’m not foreclosing the possibility of occasional essays on hypertext when something important comes up or strikes my fancy, but on a week to week kind of basis, I think any more would sort of defeat the purpose. Additionally, I think in a lot of ways, I’d rather work on actually writing some sort of digital text (ie. Station Keeping) than blather endlessly when I’m not sure that there are good answers to the questions that I raise. Someday there will be answers¹, but that day isn’t today. So I’ll move on.

One of the guys at pro.jectioni.st quoted the following [twitter message] the other day:

i’ve not met anyone whose favorite philosopher is deleuze who is not also an ass-hat.”

While I protest the implication I certainly can understand the type. I hope, in this series, to explore at least for starters, Deleuze and Guatteri’s Anti-Oedipus the first volume of their capitalism and schizophrenia series. I would suggest to the twitterer, that, the asshats are the ones that think that _A Thousand Plateau’s_² is their favorite book of philosophy are the real asshats. It’s cool stuff, from what I’ve read, not perfect, clearly, but then again folks keep reading Decartes, and Hegel, and no one seems to mind very much.

My other edict for the new revived TealArt is that it must be fun, and though certainly my style and amount of effort that I put into my academic research and writing is quite different from what you see on TealArt, they’re similar sorts of tasks. I don’t mind this, but I think it’s also good to have some balance in ones life. This series is sort of a departure, but let me rationalize for you a bit:

I’m a social science guy–developmental psychology with leanings toward cultural and linguistic flavors of anthropology–and while many of my friends are humanities issues, and I feel fairly connected and intrenched in humanities issues and debates, the way I theorize and approach the work I do is really quite different from the way that they do, and my tendency is to think about theoretical issues and tradition far more than my current discipline. This is alright, but as I get more involved in my own field and less in history and literature, I think that I would still like to play around with cultural theory a bit. Yeah it’s heady, yeah it’s probably useless, but there’s possibility there. I figure anything I can do to start looking at things a new way is probably helpful. And reading theory and writing about it on TealArt, is about as far as I can get from reading the literature that I will also be doing this summer to prepare for the future.

My interest and background in this is complicated: last fall, I did a reading project where I read some of AO, and I took a historiography class this semester (for fun, mostly) that also engaged theory, so I have a bit of background, but not much. So in a lot of ways I’m an outsider to a lot of these debates, which I think can be a good thing. One thing you’ll note is that I call all this “theory“, rather than philosophy, because I’m less interested in figuring out the logical conclusions, questions, and problems with particular ideas and more interested in the implications and applications of ideas and theories. So that’s going to be my focus and attempt; and yeah, maybe that will piss of philosophers.

It seems that these series at TealArt are inspired by my reading of a new segment of the blog world³ and interest in contributing to the discussions at these blogs. This series is no different, in fact I was reading [Larval Subjects][LarvalSubj], where they have been posting Spinoza quotes and commentary as part of a series for that blog. I thought the format was cool, and so I thought that I would borrow it, in my own TealArt sort of way. In the direction of locating this series in context of other blogs I’d like to provide an esoteric list of links to the theory/philosphy blogs that are in my news reader and that I’ve been reading, at least cursorily for the past few months:

• [Larval Subjects][LarvalSubj]
• RoughTheory
• Foucault is Dead
• Differences and Repetitions
• Read Thread(s)
• The Diff√©rance Engine
• schizzes and flows

Enjoy, and I’ll be back in a week with something more substantive!

’till then, tycho

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tagged: academia • TealArt

Hello friends,

I’ve been in something of a slump the past few days and really haven’t gotten things together to write in a couple of days. But never fear, I have some entries backlogged, and I was able to sketch out a bit more than a week’s worth of posts, which I should be able to write pretty quickly once I’m de-funk-ified.

Lets see what I have to report:

• Station Keeping is progressing, I think we’ll start soon. It needs momentum, and it won’t get it any other way.

• The Midwest Morris Ale is in St. Louis this year, which means I’m part of the host team. I’ll be doing that all weekend. If you’re in the area, stop by tower grove park for the saturday tour, and say hi. You should be able to pick me out of a crowd… I’ll be wearing white. (with black, yellow, and red ribbons).

• I just finished Samuel Delany’s The Einstein Intersection which I quite enjoyed (particularly the ending, which I thought was quite well done. I also listened to an Escape Pod, which I really like. After spending a few years at a school where the “science fiction and fantasy association” was the second largest student group (the first was the queer alliance, which I was one of the leaders for many semesters, but don’t let that mislead you as to the ratio of geeks to queers), I’m back into it. I feel like I’m a better fan/consumer theses days. I’m working on James Tiptree Jr.’s Brightness Falls From the Air which is simply amazing work.

• I need to have my damned wisdom teeth taken out.

• I need to find a way to boost TealArt’s readership. I thought that more regular posts would help this a bit, but it isn’t really. My next move is to focus, at least my own posts a little. If you, any of you kind readers, have ideas about this. I’d love to hear about them. I’ve thought about pod-casting a little, but that’s not something I want to do all by lonesome. Thinking…

• I’m going to try and rig up the next few posts. Wish me luck, and stay tuned. Have a good memorial day weekend!

Best, tycho

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tagged: TealArt