Words’ End

He even has his own URL now: rolandht.org.

If you’re just tuning in, that’s my dissertation over there.

At work, that is. No sign of slowing down any time soon. Some are challenging, others less so, all of them are a lot to keep track of. (Thank you, project management software, for help with this.)

Scanning by others, scanning by me, institutional repository, faculty computers, dean’s computer, budgeting, classroom tech retrofitting, major website overhaul, planning for student services starting up in the fall. I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff. Oh, and I’ll be on vacation and off the grid for ten days in August, coming back on orientation day.

This couldn’t be happening at a better time, is strangely invigorating, makes me want to work on the weekends. There, I’ve got my groove back.

*dives deep*

I’m at Digital Humanities 2009, my home conference, the place that actually feels like home. The people are fantastic, the energy is high but not crazy, and the entertainment is made of awesome. Tonight, about 300 of us (literally) went to a crab shack.

I’ve been blogging the conference–or at least, the sessions I’ve managed to attend. The posts are here; if you’ve been wondering why exactly I’m in love with my somewhat obscure (and yet pervasive and important to all of us, whether we know it or not) profession, this is a good way to find out what excites me about digital humanities.

Oh, and hey, I was lightning-interviewed! Now I have had 1m4s of my 15m of fame.

Today is the international Day of Digital Humanities, in which over a hundred of us (I think…) are blogging what we do on this particular date. It’s not going to cover everything I do evar, but it’s a decent cross-section. If you’re interested, take a look here.

Since intersession ended on January 5th, I have not had a single full school-night’s sleep. Catching up on the weekends is useful but still not healthy.

Thursday was one mad dash after another at work right up until about 6:30pm, and culminated in drinking wine at a reception in our library, chatting with coworkers, then cleaning up and getting a ride home, arriving around 7:45. And immediately turning around to drive the car I time-share to its home, take the bus back, and collapse.

Friday was one mad dash af… well, you know. Ran around almost non-stop 8-6 with a two-hour break for a dental appointment (three cheers for my dentist, again), came home and had a fantastic dinner with this gorgeous babe who is funny and fascinating and has good taste in movies. I showed her An Ordinary Miracle.

Now it’s almost 2am. Not setting an alarm. Still, I’d like to figure out how to live life as fully as I want, and still get anything approximating enough sleep most nights. I feel my immune system wearing down.

Yesterday I woke up grumpy. I had my reasons, but mostly it boils down to, I’ve been getting abysmal amounts of sleep this week – five to six hours a night. No good reason for it.

Moaned about, got out of bed like an hour late, went to work and stayed there for ten hours, in part because the first half of the day I was mostly useless. (Enh. It happens. It’s SAD season, and I do what I can, and somehow work-blogging after hours feels different, calmer, with nobody around.) And near the end of the business day I found out I’d made some people unhappy, and had to deal with that, and it wasn’t a big deal—in fact, the conversation with a third party was helpful and reassuring—but it’s never a good feeling to know you’ve screwed up. On the other hand, learning experience, and a mild one as such things go.

So by the time I left work at 8pm I was tired. And… not exactly grumpy, just feeling off. But then.

Then I came home, and there was a circus band rehearsing in my living room. Went upstairs, and housemate Coraline was hanging out in the kitchen with her friend Carolyn. I threw my stuff down and—having had no dinner—declared I needed scotch, and to make a casserole. Why? I dunno. I guess I’d had a fantastic casserole at Molly’s the day before, and I’ve had random foodstuffs hanging around the cupboards for forever, AND I’d never made casserole before.

Yeah, really.

So we broke out the bottle of 12-year-old scotch that I’d taken to Burning Man and we’d never gotten around to opening (there was other alcohol around, but it’s not tempting to drink a lot of dehydrating liquid in that climate). And I made a casserole of frozen artichoke hearts, frozen peas, frozen corn, frozen mixed mushrooms (thank you, bulk food ordering, I have a mushroom invasion in my freezer), chick peas, canned tuna, multi-colored potatoes, cream and two kinds of cheese. And I’m probably forgetting other stuff.

All the while, people around me chatted and sipped tasty alcohol and giggled a lot. And later I ate and felt more human, and around 10:45pm Coraline (ok, Johanna) and Eric and I went out against all better judgment, because spectacularly under-advertised Midnight Madness was going on in Davis Square. We gawked at antique bobbles and boutique-y clothes, but mostly we dropped by Dave’s Fresh Pasta, sampled tasty foods, and brought home mozzarella made that evening by a neighbor of theirs (or something).

Oh. my. gods. Homemade mozzarella with crushed pink peppercorns and a drizzle of truffled olive oil. Yeah, I’d say that, combined with hanging out with my awesome housemates, was a win even though it meant that once again I got too little sleep.

Boy, if that was a bad day, bring them on, you know? Speaking of days, I should probly go face mine. The sun’s rising, a warm shower awaits, and today I get to take tasty casserole to work for lunch. Oh, and tonight I get to see both of my favorite small girls (can’t call them toddlers anymore, as they’re skipping and giggling on either side of three years old), and go to the Museum of Science with one of them and her dad. WOE. Woe is me in this sad season.

Today I’m thankful for good people in my life, and for all the weird bipolar days that, in the end, let me know that things are going to be ok.

I have a faculty member here at work who wants to transfer the production of her center’s newsletter from an outside source to in-house. She’s sent me an example, and it’s a reasonably complex layout – definitely not something that should be done in Word – and she wants to keep the layout more or less the same.

We are strongly recommending that people here not use MS Publisher, for various reasons. Do you have a favorite desktop publishing application for Windows XP? Inexpensive is a huge bonus.

(Now, if only she were a Mac user… but no.)

Did you know today is Open Access Day? Wikipedia’s summary of what open access means is a good one: “free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals.”

Why support open access? Won’t the people who need these resources already be associated with colleges or universities, and so have access to them? Well, first off, no; currently access to many important resources costs more than many institutions can afford. But consider also the full range of uses for open-access materials. Educators at all levels can use it to keep up to speed with their fields, and better teach children of all ages. (“Won’t somebody think of the children?!” actually applies here.) People who are dealing with diseases they know little about, whether it’s them or their relatives who are sick, can use scientific articles to educate themselves and get a better perspective on what’s going on with their bodies. Researchers can get their work done faster and ultimately more cheaply – less need for interlibrary loan! – which again increases equality in access to the knowledge we are so quickly amassing, regardless of a scholar’s or institution’s economic status.

Open access does nothing to address the problem of the digital divide; people without internet access still don’t get the benefit of this knowledge. But it’s a step. And when internet spreads further, like telephony, these resources will be waiting for people dealing with epidemics, people who need cheap renewable energy, people who can improve their own lives using knowledge we already have, without waiting for the Peace Corps to get to them.

Support open access. Talk to librarians about it. Talk to your scientist friends about it. Talk to anyone who’ll listen.

This will be redundant if you read any of my housemates’ journals, but: I love my household. Interviewing potential new housemate last night was full of giggling and conversation about EVERYthing and cake and blueberry wine. I have my issues with living here (mostly having to do with allergies, and we’re working on this). But the people, and the circus band in my living room (oh, you think I’m kidding, do you?), and the art and science and foodie quotients are all near optimal.

My job continues to delight me. I suspect it’ll be taking up more of my brain in the next couple of months, as I transition from being almost exclusively computing support to doing more of the balanced mish-mosh of support and digital library work I’m supposed to be doing. This transition is right on schedule; I’m glad for the increased variety, and also glad to have had a reasonably intense introduction to networking and other larger computing issues at BU.

Random students whom I don’t believe I’ve ever actually met grin at me and compliment the blue hair. So do some of the faculty and staff at the school. Nobody has made a huge deal out of it, and nobody seems too weirded out. Also, I may have finally found a community event at work I’d probably feel consistently good participating in: Sabbath space, a sanctuary of sorts on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, in a beautiful chapel space used for prayer, quiet conversation, meditation and… coloring mandalas. Clearly not entirely Christian, for which I’m thankful. It’s been a strange landscape to navigate, this School of Theology. Before I came there, I thought STH was, you know, like majoring in religion except on a graduate level: you learn about as many different religions as you can, and do anthropology and cultural studies and stuff. But no, this is a Methodist seminary, and though they’re all excellent people and extremely tolerant and clearly versed in many religions (several faculty members have artifacts from all over East Asia in their offices), it’s still a Methodist seminary. People learn how to preach, they practice ministry, they graduate and go work in churches and on missions. To me, this is all alien, and the more vociferous Christian contingent hasn’t exactly been sane in this country of late, or anywhere ever. But, you know, so it goes. I’m there to do computer stuff, and to help create digital resources that help people of vastly different backgrounds find out about each other. I work with good people who do good work for their fellow human beings. Ultimately, what they believe in looks like a cross between anthropology, social activism and mythology to me. And I’d be willing to bet that not a single one of them has ever contemplated harming a doctor who performs abortions.

Spiritually speaking, I tend to steer clear of monotheism, and don’t like it around me. But the people at work are fascinating and multifaceted and kind and compassionate and, most of the time, present. I like people who are fully there in the moment with me.

It’s oh-gods-late, and I must go to sleep. There is a seven-day candle burning in my room; every one of those that burns down will light the next one until the vernal Equinox. A continuous flame through the darkest part of the year; thanks to Molly for the idea. G’night.

If you are a several-years-old laptop by Dell, I don’t want to talk to you.

If you are a major, Major University Press, can you please explain to me how it is that getting an academic journal sent to my workplace will result in my getting billed the institutional-subscription price, unless I am a professor? In other words: faculty can get a journal sent to them at their university, that’s ok, and they can pay at the individual-subscription rate. But if you’re a staff member, *UP assumes that your copy of their publication will be sent to an institutional library and then displayed there. So they charge you the institutional price.

…

While I was writing this and simultaneously on phone hold with the (very patient) customer service rep for *UP, she came back to tell me she’d received the OK to send the thing to my workplace but charge me just as if I were one person. Which I am. So all this works out! But why did it take twenty minutes?

I said don’t talk to me, laptop.