If you are looking for knitting, I have been distracted.

By a deer in the back garden before six in the morning that could move rather rapidly. Much more so than my ability to get outside with the camera.

Under the tree

taking off

By setting up SQL & Apache Servers on my laptop.  By noting a new (to me) WordPress Theme – Anvil which I found from Interconnect IT’s blog.  ( Dave has a nice example of it in use. )

And by dealing with the TV Licensing Authority which is having problems getting their minds (?) around the concept of a householder without a TV. They have escalated the tone and quality of their letters. Since I have the same phone number as the previous tenant the telephone harassment will likely begin any day.

BT got it when they called the other week to market their new package:

“We would like to tell you about…., who is your current cable provider?”

“I don’t have one. I don’t have a TV.”

“Oh, well then. Thank you very much for your time.”

And she rang off.

Tying the  concepts together: what I do with my time,  not having a TV, and all those comments we all receive about “I don’t have enough time for that.”

Clay Shirky has an interesting take in his Article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus in which he traces waves of social change and society’s investment of excess time. He does it with a look at critical technologies – gin during the industrial revolution, sitcoms in the later half of the 20th Century (we know where all that excess time went….) and the new social cooperative ventures of the Internet.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer.

All of us are engaging each other. In the fiber community, besides the thousands and thousand of blogs and websites there is Ravelery. Social networking and cooperation, perhaps at its finest: yarn is being mailed around the world to help someone finish a project; forums cover everything from particular garments, locations and yarns through technology and audiobooks;working relationships are being made that span the globe.

Me? I test and use open source software, listen to podcasts from around the world, cruise blogs, and knit.

Why would I need a TV?