Early Modern Notes

Sorry for the recent lack of posting. My Macbook’s hard drive died. Replacing it was easy (… once I found the right screwdriver). Ten minute job. Replacing all my favourite stuff on the hard drive? A bloody great time-sucking pain in the arse.

But at least it’s an opportunity to dump all the crap I never bothered to use, and get new stuff (OK, probably won’t use most of those either, but it’s fun). And upgrade to Leopard. (Shiny.) And it’s a much bigger drive.

PS: completely unrelated, but it keeps making me laugh hysterically, so I just have to share: The Twat-o-Tron.

Well, I found the notes from the AHA session. They’re rough, and there were bits I’m pretty sure I skipped (probably in favour of some vague waffling about things that I’ve since forgotten), but it did go something like this. It was an interesting experience!

(more…)

Oh my goodness.

The Beeb has pictures and video report.

Update, Saturday teatime: Outlook isn’t good.

Bonus history link: Stranded whales in medieval and early modern Europe

PS: and although it’s sad, this is probably something we should be more worried about…

And absolutely f***ing knackered. I might have a few somewhat belated AHA thoughts over the weekend. But anyway, met plenty of great folks, ate way too much good food, took in the City of Brotherly Love (and my feet have been killing me for it… but at least all that walking must have burned off some of the calories). There might be some Philly photos when I unpack the camera too.

I think I’m starting a cold.

I’m going to be mightily pissed off if I’m right.

Expect light posting from now until, well, possibly mid-January. I really do have a lot to do before and after Christmas.

But as a quick comment, yet again, on the ‘why blog?’ question: well, I’m currently thinking and writing about my research interests for applications, and I’ve been able to use various things I’ve written over the course of the year to focus my thoughts: from quite solid ideas about my naughty gents (who are heading slowly towards the status of serious scholarship. and I promise there will be more about them in the new year… when this damned book manuscript is done), to my fuzzier long-term thoughts, once I get this stuff about people battering the crap out of each other out of my system (I’m a pacifist really! honest!), about travellers and border crossings, and somewhere inbetween, work I’d really like to do on servants and masters. See: blogging is not a frivolous waste of time. Well, not all of it.

Anyway, back to work.

PS: how’s about this for an alternative to “keeping a blog”: “developing the potential of the Web* to communicate scholarly research to non-academic audiences in accessible forms, to foster communications between researchers and to increase understanding of history (as a subject and a discipline) in general and my field in particular”…? Am I full of it or what? Heh.

*or maybe more specific: “new forms of web software” rather than “the Web”.

I think it really does get worse every year. (Fortunately I have a relatively small circle of friends and family to deal with. But at this rate they’ll all be getting book tokens and chocolate. Admittedly, extremely good quality chocolate, but still. Or socks.)

It’s partly having spent so long in a fairly small town with a limited set of choices. Let’s face it, I know every bloody shop in Aberystwyth. I know exactly what’ll be there. And the Christmas Craft Fair increasingly saps my will to live. (I’m sure it used to be pretty good…) And I’m not at all sure I can face several hours on a train to the nearest real city shopping centres.

Anyone got any online gift shopping favourites? (Speaking in practical terms, they need to be UK-based – it’s getting too late for things from anywhere else to arrive in time.)

Having some trouble connecting to my university webmail this weekend: those of you who usually email me at that address should know that there might be a delay in getting a reply back to you. Use sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk if you can, for the time being.

And anyone know what it means when you get an error message saying “The connection to (webmail) has terminated unexpectedly. Some data may have been transferred”? It’s been doing it on and off since yesterday. Should I worry about it?

Will be resumed soon. Apologies for any particularly bizarre or incomprehensible comments I might have left behind me on Monday night. Oops. And it was a rather good bottle of wine, and I didn’t quite drink all of it, you know. I thought that showed considerable restraint under the circumstances.

But at least I didn’t have the sort of hangover yesterday that a certain person probably woke up with today.

I could do some work on my annual progress report for the nice people who pay my salary. I’ve got a month to finish it. Nah, not today.

I could put a couple of hours in on my article, which really is nearly done. Well, three-quarters done.

I could play with my new installation. It looks fun.

Or I could just read my shiny new Reginald Hill.

Structured Procrastination

Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important… However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

(Because I meant to write this on Thursday evening, and completely forgot. See how I cultivate my academic absent-mindedness? Except that, come to think of it, I was like this long before I entered academia.)

Anyway, on Thursday morning, I got a call out of the blue from Tony the storyteller, who was in the area visiting his family. Since people don’t tend to just drop by this way very often, it was an opportunity not to be missed, and we had a very pleasant meeting chatting about all sorts of largely inconsequential things (and blogging) in a favourite local coffee shop. Tony is a lovely person, as is Alison his wife, and it was great to meet them both.

A very good friend of mine defended his PhD thesis successfully today. We’ll be going out to celebrate shortly.

It’s odd – I feel almost as pleased on his behalf as I did when I came out of my viva with just a handful of minor corrections in 2003. “Dr Howard”! Woo hoo!

We had much the same experience of the viva – expecting it to be some kind of nightmare torture chamber interrogation, and in fact it was just a really pleasant interval getting to talk about the thing you’ve been obsessing over for the last 4 years. (And we’d both gone over it and come up with long lists of errors and ‘problems’, almost none of which the examiners even mentioned…)

And then the slight feeling of anticlimax. The emptiness, the emptiness… which will, of course, have to be filled with copious amounts of Indian food and alcoholic liquid.

Forged documents planted in The National Archives. And an interesting post and subsequent discussion here.

From a very new blog by a grad student, History.

Our Great Leader says that 9/11 was a wake-up call, but that much of the world subsequently turned over and went back to sleep.

As opposed to leaping out of bed, getting on a borrowed horse and galloping off in the wrong direction.

I had a problem with accessing some of a certain (big, famous) publisher’s ejournals via one of the university’s main providers. So (as I was invited to do on the error page that I got instead of the article I wanted to read…), I emailed the publisher explaining in some detail what the problem was.

I get an email back in which it is quite obvious that the person writing it simply has not read what I wrote. And/or hasn’t got a clue.

Now, shall I a) email again and try not to be rude; b) email UWA Information Services; c) email the provider; or d) not bother to do anything? (I can pick up the article when I next go on campus. But I wanted to read it now, dammit. And I don’t know when I’ll next be on campus.)

… one day a grad student will paw through a pile of books in a used book store, looking through the collection of stuff that I will have spent my entire life gathering together, and he will think: What an amazing pile of old obsolete scholarship.

Chris Bray, somewhere in Georgia

It’s official: Karl Marx is The Man.

That should cause a mildly entertaining ruckus over at Crooked Timber.

It alleged that I couldn’t go by train from Aberystwyth to Oxford.

I’ve encountered this ‘quirk’ of the system before. It seems to have great difficulty with the concept of travelling from Aber to Birmingham and then changing onto the service that goes to Reading. So, as usual, I’ll have to ask the stupid search engine to search for two separate journeys. (Well, I end up doing that sort of thing a lot anyway, largely because it is such an unbelievably stupid search engine.)

For chrissakes, it’s not as though I’m asking for something complicated. I want to go from Aberystwyth to Oxford. It’s simple. There are railway stations in both places. A train leaves Aberystwyth at 7.30. I can do it with a single change of train. It takes less than 5 hours. But the ‘system’ said this journey does not exist.

….

OK, 15 minutes ago, it told me that the 7.30 journey didn’t exist, and I was so annoyed I wrote a longer version of the rant above. And now, on trying again, it is, in fact, there.

But it’s completely arbitrary. I do this search: Aberystwyth-Oxford (no restriction on changes or connections), weekday, departing at 7am.

First time, it gives me a single choice, departing at 17.35. (Note: there are trains out of Aber every 2 hours from 5am onwards on weekdays. And the trains from Brum to Oxford run twice an hour.)

Run it again, identical search: two choices, 7.30 (hurrah! at last!) or 9.25

Try it a third time? Back to the 17.35 option again.

(If I try a couple more times, I can probably get the ‘non-existent journey’ option at some point too. But I do have better things to do. I swear that I did get that screen first time out, though.)

Perfectly bizarre.

And they wonder why people don’t want to use public transport…

PS: do you think the trains are likely to be any better by 2012? (Groan. And I really wanted to see that insufferable smug git Seb Coe choking back the tears, too.)

Right, there haven’t been enough link-extravangaza-style posts round here lately. What (early modern) topics do you, dear readers, want to learn more about this summer?