My digital notebooks are full of scribbles about user groups, determining which are active, which need help with meeting space or other things, contact information for various group leaders.

Also:
ways to measure the health of user groups
things that are inputs to technology innovation
things that are outputs of said innovation (and the industry it supports)
common narratives when talking about the technology industry in Portland
activities that may be useful for welcoming people new to Portland (or new to technology work in Portland)
potential partners for said activities
more possible metrics on the value of all of these things
ways to pitch these ideas to people who might help
a recipe for quiche
an outline for a book on community tech event organizing

And so on.

One of my notes says “document everything”. I do this, or I try, but right now I don’t know which parts to share.

What would you like to know?

Since some folks geek out on this sort of thing:

I’ve been using Twitter exclusively on the iPad this week. It has the advantage that I can’t be distracted by it while I’m working on other things, and the screen is big enough to be comfortable viewing links and pictures. I clip any interesting articles to Instapaper unless I have time to read them right now, which is an improvement over my previous tendency to leave them open in yet another Firefox tab which just gets in the way later. When the iPad gets threaded email this fall, I might see if I can handle mail the same way (Gmail in the iPad browser is nice, but I have more than one account to keep track of).

I’m using Tumblr as a kind of public notebook. Altered photos and screengrabs, snippets of commentary or rant, quotes from something I’m reading. For notes I don’t want to share, I’m using Evernote. Still getting the hang of what sorts of folders are useful, and trying to remind myself to move iPhone photos into there when relevant.

My todo list still lives in The Hit List even though development appears to be completely stalled. I like the interface and how it handles recurring items too much to switch unless forced. Most of the time it doesn’t matter that I can’t sync it with my phone—the only reminder I seem to miss is a result is my twice-a-month contact lens switch, and being a day late isn’t terribly fatal. If I really need to track a errand or grocery list while out and about, I put it in Evernote.

One of my consistent goals with all of this is to have a system that’s so calm and easy to maintain I don’t think about it. When I’m working, I want to minimize distractions and have everything I need easy to access. When I’m reading or browsing information, I want it to be so easy to clip and track I can find the good parts again later. So on and so forth.

I hope you are all having a good new year so far. Lucas and I started with a delicious NYE dinner at Nostrana, watching Star Trek movies, and a little knitting over the weekend. (He finished a really nifty scarf project and will hopefully post lots of pictures soon.)

I’ve been feeling like everything is slowed way down, muddled and difficult and confusing. I know this is part winter blah and part burnout, but I hoped between the end of the holidays and my near-hermitlike behavior over the last few months, I’d be feeling re-energized by now. So far, no luck. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this blank approaching a new year. It’s making it kind of hard to plan or set goals, and I like planning.

Alas.

Ukulele has been loads of fun, though. I have five or six songs I can strum my way through pretty consistently. I’ve been tinkering with making a recording of something to show off, but I haven’t spent enough time at it to have a song ready to post. I do have a couple of bits of ukulele riffs looped and distorted on the UCreate mixer, though.

I think there’s a couple of sections in each of these that might be worth pulling out to use in something else. We’ll see. I collect a fair number of audio snippets that just sit in folders on my hard drive because I haven’t worked out what I want to make with it. In my mind I’m a budding electronica genius, but in practice, I need to actually finish something here.

Finishing things might be a good plan for 2010.

There was snowshoeing, though not as much as expected due to poor route choice. But at least the mountain was pretty, and did not attempt to eat us alive.

Thanks to everyone who took my to do in 2010 survey last week.
I’ll leave the link active a little while longer if anyone else wants to chime in. It’s been interesting to see the responses so far.

I feel like I’m often struggling to balance tech projects with crafts/art/music ones, so I know that’s going to continue to be a challenge this next year. My goal is to make more art, and do a better job of getting the things I make out of my home (or computer) and out into the world, whether that’s by selling more work on Etsy, posting photos and videos online, or some other project. I’m considering reorganizing all of the “things for sale” into one consolidated shop on my site, if anyone has suggestions or ideas.

One push in the music direction comes via the shiny new ukulele Lucas got me for Christmas. I’ve already learned a few chords. It’s really a friendly instrument to work with.

Speaking of music, 2009 has been a good year for me discovering new artists and albums, so I made a little compilation of my favorites. Not all were released this year, but were new to me, and at least from this past decade. Have a listen.

So, in order to try to make some sense of this, I made a survey. Please go and vote for the items you think would be most interesting and worthwhile to pursue. There are even places for you to express your interest in collaborating on a project, and recommend other ventures.

And now, a picture of my cats.

Other things:

If you haven’t seen the BERG/Bonnier Mag+ prototype demo, and you’re at all interested in ebooks, digital publishing formats, etc., you really should watch the video. They demonstrate a very fluid way of designing a magazine to read on a digital tablet. Software-wise, this is already possible to create on an iPhone, but the screen isn’t really large enough for the reading experience they’re after, especially with photos. So maybe this will happen when Apple finally releases that much-rumored tablet.

Amanda Palmer, one of my favorite music discoveries for the year, posted a video of a ukulele song in place of a written blog post last week. It’s about Lady Gaga and pop music and art, and does a fun job of explaining what she thinks.

I spent a large chunk of Saturday playing a game called Braid. I first heard about it during a panel at SXSW, mentioned as an example of something with a really interesting set of game mechanics and story. The basic setup is like Super Mario Bros. (complete with a princess who is not in the castle at the end of this level, but perhaps if you keep searching you will find her), except you can make time move backward and forward, so you never really die. I got to a point where I’ve collected all the puzzle pieces I can figure out how to reach, and obviously there’s something else I need to do to be able to pick up the rest, but so far I don’t know what. Which is a little frustrating. (If you’ve solved it, no spoilers, but moral support is appreciated).

Today is the shortest day of the year, the official start of winter, but it’s going to be a couple of months before the winter gloom lifts again. It makes me want to hibernate.

—

After I wrote this, a man came and knocked on the door and said he’d found a bunch of mail from our building opened and wet, out in front of the building. I was in my pajamas still so I told him to leave it on the doorstep. When I went to check a little later, I found two Christmas cards, opened, and an empty mailer envelope that should have contained two books I ordered as presents.

To say that this is not helping with my lack of holiday cheer would be an understatement.

–

And another thing:

I posted this and then I remembered that half the point of these weekly updates is to tell y’all about things I’ve been working on that you can go check out. So, the Curious Life of Ms. Audrey M. Eschright 2009 Retrospective magazine is now live on MagCloud, should you wish to procure a copy for yourself or a loved one. It’s on sale for $2 cheaper than the regular price if you order before the end of the year, thanks to MagCloud’s holiday sale.

Lucas and I have a running joke about Mudshark being the Lurker in the [Hallway, Bookshelf, Closet, ...]. When we were working on Yog’s Notebook [1], we both read the Lovecraft/Durleth novel The Lurker at the Threshold, which is about an encounter with Yog-Sothoth, the zine’s namesake.

I don’t remember who started it, but Mudshark is kind of an odd furry monster of a cat, so it stuck.

Part Two:

I came down with a cold on Friday, forcing me to cancel all my plans in favor of lying around coughing. I barely felt well enough to read (a dire situation!), so I was browsing around on my phone thinking about Halloween costume ideas when some line of free association got me thinking about historical expedition gear and Lovecraft [2]. This led to finding some very nice patches and pins commemorating the 1930-31 Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica (sadly, all sold out).

And that reminded me that I’ve never read “At the Mountains of Madness” (which describes the doomed expedition to Antarctica), but it’s available through Feedbooks for the Stanza iPhone app, so there you go. [3] Then I read “The Call of Cthulhu”, and “The Dunwich Horror”, and a few others. I think I’d been putting off reading much Lovecraft because I was afraid of liking the beasties more than the style of writing, but everything I picked up over the weekend was a lot of fun.

One thing I kept noticing was what sorts of details were emphasized, and what was glossed over. There’s a lot of “oh, I dare not speak of it!” with respect to the monsters, but at the same time a certain amount of gleeful scientific curiosity, and artifacts are often described in terms of how they match no known artistic lineage or culture (apparently the protagonists are well-educated in this area). Our narrators tend to be complete nerds about something (geology, medicine, architecture…) and enthusiastic about sharing everything through that lens.

Anyhow. All of this is a long way of explaining what’s going on with the image at the end of this post. [4] In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, we encounter a town full of people who’ve been mating with the Deep Ones, a race of fish-frog people who provide them with food and wealth in exchange for sharing in their Cthulhu-worship, and eventually, creating a town full of fish-frog-human mutants who will then take over the world. [5] The narrator is happy to dissect the town’s architecture, but apparently he really does not want to ponder how you go about making fish-frog-human people, so we look the other way.

I’m sure I’m not the only reader to consider how the biology of this would work, but I’m a little scared to Google it. So I drew my own version. I think this is hilarious [6] but YMMV.

Maybe “Scenes Lovecraft Left Out” will be my next comic?

[1] Copies of both issues are still available, if you don’t have them yet. Buy them through the site or email me to pick up at an event.

[2] Alas, I don’t remember how I got these two topics combined. I was thinking about Dürer, and demon ladies, and …?

[3] Another case for ebook readers on the phone: sick days. If I could just download hot tea to go with it, I’d be completely set.

[4] It’s like a shaggy dog story. A creepy, wet, slimy one.

[5] Or something.

[6] Ask Lucas, I was laughing so hard I had to get up and have a drink of water before I could finish the sketch. I do not actually expect anyone else to have the same reaction.

August Vacation – 2009

A few photo highlights that didn’t make it into the comic:

Then I used the sewing machine to finish a couple of malingering projects.

30 is more or less like 29. And 29 was pretty good. Both are greatly improved from 20, which was difficult in more ways than I want to count. So here’s to more of that, and getting a little sewing done while I’m at it.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the surplus of applesauce I made last fall. And the half-gallon of blueberries in the freezer, left over from last summer. All the conference prep has had me cooking less. But now that’s over, at least for a little while.

This is adapted from Two Vegan Sisters.

1/3 c. oil
3/4 c. sugar
1 1/2 c. applesauce
1 tsp. vanilla
2 c. all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/3 c. blueberries (fresh or frozen)

Preheat oven to 350F.

Mix oil and sugar together in a bowl (or your stand mixer, if you have one). Add the applesauce and vanilla, and stir. Add all of the dry ingredients at once and stir until smooth. Add the blueberries. Ta-da, cake batter.

Line a 12-cup muffin pan with papers, and fill the cups evenly. Bake at 350F for 25-30 min. or until a toothpick can be removed without goop stuck to it.

Add your favorite frosting (in my case, a highly improvised chocolate one—if you’re brave enough to work with out a recipe, I used 3/4 stick of butter, a splash of cream, and unmeasured amounts of powdered sugar and cocoa powder. it could’ve used more cream or milk).

Enjoy.