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:
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.
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.
On Blogging about Interesting Things
Merlin Mann posted this thing on his site, 43Folders a few days ago in his ongoing series about his blog’s midlife crisis (which apparently happens after four years.) Merlin’s disgusted with the “blogging to get attention,” and the sort of digerati/problogger blogging tone that the form has taken in the last 5 years or so. His solution, more or less, is more along the lines of my own recent transition in my own blogging, which as basically been to turn tychoish into a ongoing monologue about the things I’m interested in, and less of a monologue about me.
Now there are exceptions to this, hence the coda blog, but for the most part this has kept me thinking and working, and processing things out there in the world. When I need to process about myself, I have friends and family. The end result: good things, and I look forward to what Merlin comes up with in the future. On tychoish, you can mostly expect me to talk about the same old things: open source software, trends in computer usage, amazing knitting things, with the appropriate dash of literary criticism, and historical doodad. My triad of fair-game topics are still “technology, science fiction, and knitting” but I’m being a little firmer in how I police that boundary.
Having said that…. Here’s some introspective shit that’s been piling up on my list of things to blog about, I figure if I have to blog about it, I might as well put it in one place:
I—or my alter-ego, depending on how you look at it–have started a new job this week. if you’d told me about when I graduated from college, I would have laughed at you, but a lot as changed in these past year, and it’s incredibly awesome and pushes me in a direction which I’m really eager to travel in.
I’ve started writing a new novel. It’s a great concept, the characters are fun to write and almost instantly came into themselves which is incredibly good. I finished the first chapter, and I started the second after taking a day off, and I’m making good progress, and it’s not like pulling teeth, at all. I like that this happens right after I have a bad couple of weeks where words come very difficultly, something snaps into place and things just work.
I got a new desk chair. This is a very very good thing. I am long torso-ed and finding suitable chairs is difficult.
I gotta make time for knitting.
The story I’m posting tomorrow on [Critical Futures] isn’t written by me. How cool is that?
Also I’ve noticed that these coda posts, which were supposed to be short and effemeral, have been anything but. Gotta work on that.
(some liberties taken with this transcript)
caroline: the outright lying makes politics fun again.
tycho: No, I think I’m still bitter.
caroline: Haha, Don’t get me wrong, I’m so angry I think my brain is compressing.
tycho: sigh yeah.
caroline: But at this point I accept that half of America is backwards and nuts.
tycho: Oh, it’s more like 75%. Minimum.
caroline: 99%
tycho: 90%
caroline: 140%
tycho: ERROR
(my friend, sadia asked me a question on twitter that I couldn’t answer in 140 characters, so escalated it to email, and she said that I should post it to the blog, and who am I to refuse a request like that?)
I really like the open-source/federated microblogging site “identi.ca” which runs on the laconica platform. It’s good stuff, but the user base isn’t quite there (either on the site, or in the federated network.)
Basically the killer feature of microblogging, for me, is integration with a jabber/xmpp client, and pretty fine tuned control over who gets in your “stream/feed” Everything is nice, but fluffy (search, threaded comments, etc.) Jabber is great because it’s so interoperable, and because jabber apps, like adium are killer robust and integrate well into the system, were as Adobe Air twitter apps (and even twitterific) don’t so much. In some respects, it also boils down to the difference between pull (which is the typical solution, and not ideal) and push (which twitter can’t cope with any more).
I have the attention/time to spare into this, if I can have a lot of control over what I see, and it’s pushed to me live rather than via large regular pulls, it’s easier to deal with. The end result is that while all the people I’m interested in reading/talking to are on the twitter, I have little tolerance for the site/service itself, particularly when I know that every other site does it a little better, and most can supply jabber feeds. This is a scaling problem, but Ev has cash, and the solution might be disruptive, but it’s not conceptually difficult.
The thing is that, I think twitter is afraid that if they do anything drastic, and if there’s any more downtime in a major way, that everyone will jump ship. And they’re probably right. Which would be good for us, but not for them.
You also asked if microblogging was an addiction or curiosity, and I think I try all the new services out out of curiosity, but I don’t think it’s a particular addiction, aside from the general internet. It’s sort of ironic, but I’d like to spend my internet time communicating people rather than reading the big portals. Hence the email lists, my “always on IM” M.O.,
ravelry, the fact that I don’t really read the A-List blogs much, etc.
I was a big IRC user back in the day, and in a lot of ways I see twitter (et al) as an evolution of the IRC impulse, and while I don’t think “going back” to IRC is the way to go (because frankly Jabber/xmpp is really a “better IRC” anyway,) so if it is an addiction, it’s not a particularly new one.
Today was the first day that my regular blog post/essay didn’t get crossposted to my livejournal. This is one of the cool things that I can do now that I’ve redone tychoish.com. So LJ-land if you want to read about a really cool linux/open source thing click the above link.
In other news, I’ve been toying around with identi.ca which is the flagship of an open source federated twitter clone called laconica. (You can join/follow my “dents” here if you use any Laconica site.)
Now I’m a really big fan of the twitter except that my prefered method of interacting with twitter is via the IM/jabber interface, which hasn’t worked for months. While I’d love to jump ships to another platform (like identi.ca or jaiku), twitter has too many people that wouldn’t jump ship with me. So until Laconica can import tweets a little better, I’m going to be in a couple of different worlds for a while. Anyway…
I listened to an interview with the author the other day, and I think I’ll be writing some blog posts on this subject very soon, but its mightily cool, conceptually (because it gives everyone a lot of control over their microblogging life.)
A while back I wrote a post–after identi.ca started up, actually–about how microblogging needed to be thought of as an evolution of IRC and IM rather than an evolution of blogging. Not so much in terms of database structure (though I hear that would help,) but in terms of user interface and interaction.
I still think this is the case. Just FYI. And I still want to use something that really works. And better access control would be good.
Ok, blathering over.
Onward and Upward!
I generally am not a fan hand lotions as they tend to make my hands feel all greasy, and I’d prefer chapped hands to feeling oily.
I discovered Udder Cream the other day. I guess we’ve had a tub of it around for a while, but given my aforementioned aversion, I’ve not been keen on trying it. I did, and I like it, as it’s sort of “fast acting,” and not particularly oily.
I will admit that having hands that are neither oily nor dry is a sort of odd sensation, but not unwelcome. I do have a two observations however:
The tub has splotches on it and looks like a cow. This is endearing.
Despite the fact that this stuff is commonly sold in stores like Target, the instructions are all about applying it to your cow, and how you should wash “udder and teat parts” before milking first and then moisturize their udders/teats, so as to avoid contaminating the milk.
Thanks Udder Cream for that advice.
We, as a family, talk to the cats in Chez Garen. Not a lot, and not seriously, but it seems like the thing to do. Maybe we just have loud mewing cats, but it’s awkward after a point to not talk to them, and they out number us and can exact retribution on our sleep schedules, so we’re just playing it safe.
Most of my conversations with them are along the lines of “you’re pretty fuzzy there, kip/merlin/montana/nash,” but other members of the household who shall remain nameless have been known to have much longer and more involved conversations with the family pets.
Right. Earlier today, I heard from my perch in my office, someone say:
“Come to the light, Kip!”
Presumably said person was trying to get the cat to follow them out of the room, or come up from the basement.
Not being able to help myself, I said (in a cartoonish voice meant to imitate the cat/lolcats,) “Nooo George Fox, I likes the dark.”
Quaker puns are highly under appreciated in today’s world.
I think we have our work cut out for us.
I’m editing a story for Critical Futures this week, and I’m re-encountering an old problem with this novella.
There are some characters without specified genders, it’s important to their characterization, and I’m pretty wed to it, though I did slip up and use some he/she in the first drafts, which I’ve since edited out.
Interestingly, or maybe not, the real effect of doing this is that the characters don’t really relate to each other’s bodies. Maybe I’m just a n00b, but I from a theoretical place it makes sense.
In any case it’s really interesting, and also damn frustrating.
That is all.
Periscope down.
I just finished spinning the Corriedale Cross (basic plain wool) that I’ve been spinning for months. I had 2 pounds (900 grams) which is my standard amount, and I have 9 skeins. I think I was less that pleased with two of them, but they’re fine, and all the other ones are great.
I started spinning some dark brown blue faced leicester (this stuff, in fact).
Wow, in a word.
It spins like butter. Only better, because it’s an interesting color the picture doesn’t quite capture it (and it’s reasonably priced to boot!)
I’m going for a lighter and loftier aran weight (as opposed to a more tightly spun Guernsey-style yarn.) Very pleased.
In other news, as of Monday, after a week of scaling back on the caffeine in an attempt to de/resensitize my body to the stuff, I’m going back full bore, because I can’t live on 16oz of tea a day. I might not get a headache but I’m too scattered and I drag too much midday without more. Hopefully I’ll be able to scale up in a healthful/productive manner.
Sometimes the biggest jobs are the easiest. Last night I got inspired to make a sort of major change to my website: give up the “plain old blog” look and build a more intense “full featured-type” site. I thought this would be a good afternoon project for the weekend, so I made a list, mocked something up, and went to bed.
And then I got up this morning and in several hours, I was able to concoct what you see here. It’s “beta” in the tradition of web 2.0 (rough around the edges, but fully deployed.). I’m still not quite sure what wordpress is thinking on the tag archive pages, but maybe I’ll figure something out.
Here’s the larger plan: The regular daily blog posts, which I’m now calling “essays” in sense of “an attempt,” not a particular forum. The new kind of post will be shorter, more “bloggy” somewhere between the rest of the world’s typical blog post, and a twitter.
There are also new “static” pages, and separate syndication feeds if you want to have a little bit more control over how tychoish is syndicated for you.
Also, to readers in livejournal land, if you want all of everything, subscribe to the old tealart syndication feed. Otherwise my livejournal (which had previously just been cross posting all entries will now have a more cherry-picked selection of entries.)
I’ll have a more coherent post together on monday. I swear 
Otherwise tell me what you think.
This is really interesting.
Most of the open source programs I use are unitaskers. Then again, I used OpenOffice until a copy of Microsoft Word came to me by, uh, magic. Of course, OO on the Mac is a bloated giant of doom so I never liked using it anyway.
Comment by caroline — 3 September 2008 @ 12:21 pm
So this, as an over arching feature of open source, fails around projects like open office, which is–though developed in the open with community involvement, and free software license–a product of sun microsystems, and evolved from a number of very early word processing programs (including StarWriter, or somesuch, I think) that were not open source.
So open office is sort of anomaly. I think you could make the same sort of argument about firefox, which is sort of similar, but I think in firefox’s case that’s more about the nature of the browser space, and increasing role as an application runtime itself.
Back about office software though, I’d be so bold as to suggest that the WSIWYG word processor editing paradigm is on it’s way out, because the 8.5×11 page metaphor is on it’s way out. I think the mac program Scrivener designs a word processor around the writing process better than just about anyone else has done, and people who are very serious about paper output are going to start using more specialized tools for that (Adobe products and LaTeX for instance), or programs that use that kind of workflow.
but you’re right that is interesting, and that open office is a bloated monster of suck.
Comment by tycho garen — 3 September 2008 @ 12:41 pm
LaTeX produces really foxy documents, though I’ve never used it myself.
You’re probably right about WYSIWYG. I also resent and hate the correctional function of these programs. Yes, I can spell, use grammar, and capitalize letters by myself. I can even format a table by myself! No, seriously!
One place open source has stepped in to fill is the void left where hand-holding proprietary programs of ALL kinds (html editors or ftp clients, for example) have alienated people who have expertise in whatever they’re doing. There also seems to be some backlash against overstylized GUIs that eat up irrational resources (Vista much?) with little payoff.
Most people who want really user-friendly bubbly colorful interfacing don’t use open source, I’d guess, out of some weird feeling of wrongdoing or intimidation. This kind of casual user probably does not use the functions I’m talking about here though. And, maybe this person likes auto-capitalize. Who knows.
Comment by caroline — 3 September 2008 @ 12:55 pm
LaTeX has a lot of overhead, but it templates really well, so for instance, once I got it set up right, I could generate perfect APA (or whatever) format papers in 15 seconds, without needing to worry too much about formating when I was actually writing. Dare I say, it’s sort of like HTML only for PDF, and better?
Regarding the move away from GUIs, I think you’re right, but I think it’s been longer coming, but vista hasn’t hurt anything in this direction.
Comment by tycho garen — 3 September 2008 @ 1:02 pm
Hmmm….part of me agrees on the desktop/suite and part disagrees.
I just bought a laptop preloaded with Ubuntu. I could have asked zareason.com to use a lighter gui than gnome, but I chose to go with it because…well because I’m lazy. Because I want my programs to just be there and to just work. While I can go digging around and find a way to make things work (had to with wireless - Hardy seems to have an issue with the built in network manager and I had to find an alternative) I don’t want to. That’s my job. When I’m at home I just want my little toy to work.
As for Open Office - I’ve got my husband using it. And other than getting a label sheet to print correctly he’s doing fine. That saves us quite a bit of money on software. That makes dealing with some quirks worth it to me.
Comment by Linda — 5 September 2008 @ 7:54 am
In reply to Linda:
Oh, I don’t want to come off as a protester of Open Office, or GNOME, because I think they’re really important projects, and given what they are it’s amazing that they’re as good as they are.
In a certain sense Open Office, is an exception simply because of it’s history and because of the kind of niche that its trying to fill. Office software is unsurprisingly a commercial invention, and most of my complaints are with the genre as a whole, and not with any particular application. It’s just awkward to go on a long spiel about the political implications of open source, and a particular kind of open source, when a program like open office is, is such a glaring exception.
And re: GNOME.
There are a couple of big issues, in my book: one, is that it’s not economical with screen space. I buy laptops with smaller screens, because I’m used to OS X, which has a design sensibility (at least in the apps that I use) for very slim very effective use of pixels. Combined with the window manager (expose, and to a lesser extent, spaces) having a smaller screen doesn’t matter.
When I run GNOME in full screen on the virtual machine, I can work with one or two windows, in OS X? I can cope with a lot more. 14 at the moment.
This is of course a problem which is partially mitigated by a larger screen, and a good selection of a theme (which is hard to find, but still)
Second issue:
It doesn’t have it’s own identity as a user interface, so the design always feels to me like a window user whose jealous of the mac UI. This is a personal taste thing, but I think if gnome could just stand up on it’s own and do it’s own thing it would be fine, but the cheap mimicry I think just confuses things. Again, it’s great, and particularly if you know what the internals are doing, even on the most basic level, but the design needs some attention and some innovation.
Disclaimer: KDE isn’t better, Awesome (the thing I’ve been using in linux) isn’t for everyone, and Windows and Mac both have their flaws, it’s just an ongoing problem.
Other comments:
I totally get the wanting home/play computers to work, and indeed my long Mac tenure has really been maintained by the “it just works, and I don’t have to mess with it,” ethos of mac. And it does, and I really like that. My newfound interest in linux and open source, is mostly work/academic related, so it’s to an end.
I remain convinced that linux isn’t quite ready for prime time on laptops most easily accessible laptops. It works really well in the virtual machine on my laptop, but the VM is handling most of the laptop functions (wireless, mouse, keyboard stuff). The fact that wireless is so hit-and-miss is sort of the center-stone of this. The exceptions are some of the fancier ones (like Lenovo) or ones put together by linux companies.
Anyway, thanks for the inspiration (and excuse) to yammer on more about this.
Comment by tycho garen — 5 September 2008 @ 8:43 am
i buy proprietary software because I know I have a better chance of getting some sort of support if anything should go wrong.
Yes, I know you can get support for open source, but it’s very contingent on people willing to give their time for free and being able to pull their weight. Many times an open source project will hit the wall over this issue because the developer can’t provide adequate support or find volunteers.
There is a place for open source software - some of the programs I use are OS, such as MySQL. But one has to be realistic and recognize that it’s not the end-all and be-all.
Comment by Lola LB — 8 September 2008 @ 7:06 am