Perhaps this weekend I’ll cook something out of her recipes.
Top o’ the morning to you too, Collie.
Even with an election looming, apparently we have no intention of stopping spouting inanities.
You tell me, who are we to tell Japan to not be pacifist? What business do we have telling another world power to change its constitution to a more war-loving one or be excluded from playing policeman to the world? And anyway, doesn’t the world need some peace-loving policemen at this point?..
And in the same breath, he takes a jab against one of his own [previously-] enlisted men, presuming him guilty and a deserter before proven so. Un. believable.
The Lightning Field gets props from Wired.
It’s a nice article. Of course, it doesn’t – can’t – communicate the utter quiet of the huge valley surrounded by mountains on all sides, in the middle of which are you, with your four hundred lightning rods and your cabin. There were grey rabbits, or maybe hares, living underneath the stairs of the cabin last August, reasonably cautious but unafraid of people.
No TV, no computers, no telephone service except for an emergency landline. Huge orange moon looking in the window, and in the morning, cicadas and a groundhog eight feet away from you, going about his business. Twenty-four hours of stillness.
But I’m still gonna post about politics.
Because, come on! How can I avoid the daily temptation?
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” Bush said. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
Yet another reason I wish I were going to Hypertext.
A job, and other changes.
This past Monday, I started my new job as Project Director of the Virtual Humanities Lab, a new NEH-sponsored project based here at Brown.
But what about your studies, you’ll ask? Dissertation and all that? Degree? Well, it went like this.
This past spring, the Virtual Humanities Lab Project was awarded a new NEH grant. Sadly, for a variety of reasons our Project Director Cristiana Fordyce was unable to stay with VHL. Suddenly, the project was in need of a director, and the position was offered to me. I considered the implications carefully, and accepted.
The core team for the project is one I’ve been a part of for years, with the Decameron Web. I know most of the quirks, and think that we’ll work really well together.
It’s a great opportunity. I will be working closely with both scholars and STG folks to create an infrastructure to enable collaborative scholarly annotation online, as well as to promote pedagogical use of our texts (which now include more than just the Decameron, and other authors besides Boccaccio). The principal elements of the job include grant report writing, research and paper writing (for conferences and publication), team management (gosh, but I dislike the T word…), technical documentation writing and complex Web tool design. I feel up to all of this, and think that it will significantly expand my skillset.
I was worried, of course, about the dissertation writing issue. Having seen too many of my colleagues struggle with this, and knowing my own weaknesses, I don’t expect to be able to write the dissertation in off-work hours. The decision was complicated also by the fact that the Graduate School had awarded me a dissertation fellowship for the next academic year.
This complication, however, turned out to also be the solution: the Graduate School agreed, contrary to its usual procedure, to defer the fellowship; so that I am assured to have it for the 2006-7 academic year, when I’ll hopefully be finishing up the degree.
The research and paper writing I mentioned above, which comprise a significant percentage of the job time-wise, should be more or less directly applicable to some of the theoretical parts of my dissertation. I also plan to continue hunting for more primary sources for RolandHT, and encoding them for experimentation during the intervening two years.
I should note that, although Cristiana has taken a [great!] job elsewhere, we still plan to work together, even with our third British musketeer Guyda Armstrong, on Boccaccio’s Esposizioni. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.
And that’s my news. The above is a modified copy-and-paste from an e-mail I sent to my dissertation committee; if it seems dry, it’s because I wasn’t sure they’d approve. So far, though, they seem to think this is a good thing, and I’m very glad for that. Their collective brilliance rather intimidates me on a regular basis.
Hopefully, this’ll mean I’ll be blogging more, too, and getting much more use out of that “humanities computing” category. Maybe I’ll even redesign my weblog, and port it to WordPress. Who knows?
Hello once again, Big Brother.
Someone pointed me to this article by Ron Paul. Curious and still a bit disbelieving, I googled. Hunh. The American Community Survey does exist, and it is scary.
Answering it, if they ask you to, is apparently compulsory. Just take a look at the list of questions in the various PDF files. Gah.
when blood sees blood of its own
it sings to see itself again
it sings to hear the voice it’s known
it sings to recognize the face
Having posted about being harried, I have reduced the number of e-mails in my inbox to fewer than thirty, written a lengthy letter to a long-neglected friend, and successfully tackled some work I’d been procrastinating on. This morning’s first hour was devoted to exercise, and now Suzanne Vega is making me nostalgic. There’s dinner in the oven. Perhaps there’s hope yet?
you ever have one of those
There are over five hundred e-mails in my inbox. Probably fifty of them need to be answered.
There aren’t enough hours in the day. Utilizing all of them maximally leads to too much stress; underutilizing them saves sanity, but seems to have a detrimental effect on the to-do list.
April-May-June really sucked, personal-time-wise. July is half-over, and I feel like I’m still racing to catch up.
Here’s the thing: I haven’t been slacking. If anything, I haven’t taken enough time to just chill. And still there’s so. much. to do.
Right at the moment, I’m not stressed, which is why I’m able to post it. I’d like to keep blogging, but it takes time, and it seems to take up energy that I should really be putting into keeping calm and methodical about all aspects of my life.
Even given all of the above, I feel myself slowly getting a grip on all of the too-many things that need to be done in order for life to run reasonably smoothly. I guess that’s good, at any rate.
I’m happy. I just wish there were more hours in the day, not least to communicate with you.
linguistic delights
Scaramuccia [It.] = skirmish. Both are of unknown origin, probably derived from Old French (according to the OED, anyway). See also scrimish, scrimmage, and forms of rubbish.
Go ahead, pronounce it. Let it roll off your tongue.
