CyberMedievalist

Where Did Fall Go?

2008-11-16T17:29:00.003-06:00

I've certainly had an eventful six weeks or so since my last post. Things went from being a sedate and predictable pace to seeming suddenly like a treadmill spinning out of control. When I last posted, classes had barely started and now, thanks to the quarter system, final papers are looming three-ish weeks away. For the first couple weeks of the term, things were pretty quiet. I didn't have any trouble keeping up with my class reading, and my social life was limited to once-weekly visits from a friend who is taking one of the same classes I am, occasional departmental functions, and a visit every few weeks from the person I was seeing. Then, I started dating someone more or less local, my parents came for a long visit, and suddenly it seemed that I wasn't even keeping up with schoolwork. I don't for one moment regret spending time with people important to me, but things got a bit ugly there for a while because I wasn't vigilant enough about staying on top of things and disciplining myself to prioritize. Even though we are now gearing up for the end of term, I have my work and life much more under control now. Well, to the extent that you can have your life under control at all, having fallen head-over-heels for someone. I don't for one moment regret that either, though.

OK, enough mushy stuff. For now, anyway. I've been spending a very quiet Sunday afternoon at my boyfriend's place while he's at work. It's an ideal time for me to get work done myself because there are so few distractions. Well, aside from noisy neighbors and the Internets. I've spent most of the day starting to pull together ideas for a paper on the Book of Margery Kempe for the English class I'm taking. It appears that about half the class will be writing on Kempe's Book rather than any of the other texts we read, so I'm not alone in being fascinated by it. The main thing that I noticed in reading all the journal articles we were assigned to go with it was just how much disagreement there is about what genre the Book fits into, so that's what I'm going to write about. I'm looking at how Kempe presents her work in its prologue, and then comparing that to (mostly) contemporary works of various genres, like The Cloud of Unknowing, Bridget's Book, Julian of Norwich's Shewings, some hagiographies, etc. I'm hoping some important similarities and differences will emerge that will help clarify the genre issue.

My other classes have also been pretty interesting, especially the one that I am taking at the Newberry Library downtown. Some intriguing questions are arising from the stuff we've been looking at in there, and I think those might be fertile ground for the major paper that I have to spend the next two quarters writing. More on that later. The field seminar in early modern history has been a little harder for me to get into, but for this week we read a couple of particularly interesting and not too heavy books. One of the books, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, is a scholarly biography of an 18th-century woman of undistinguished origins but fascinating life, and the other, Women on the Margins, is about three different 17th-century women of the artisanal/mercantile class. I enjoyed both books thoroughly despite their chronological distance from my usual realm of endeavor.

Well, back to the salt mines until my beloved returns home from work.

Settled In, Mostly

2008-09-29T09:05:00.002-05:00

This past week has seemed very long in some ways and very short in others, but it still surprised me that it's been a whole week since my last post. I'm about 95% unpacked now, and seem to be down to those last few boxes of stuff that makes you think to yourself, "What the hell am I going to do with this?" The answer, in a lot of cases, probably really should be "throw it away" but that's a little harder to do now on my present income! Anyway, getting most of the unpacking done has allowed me to get caught up on other stuff around the house and feel like things are a bit more under control. I had a guest over the weekend who seemed to feel the place looks pretty good, so that's a happy thing. The less happy thing is that I have mice. Well, a mouse at least. I saw one in the kitchen once a day for about four days in a row. The last time, I even screamed. Yeah, I know... what a stereotypically girly thing to do. So sue me. I have glue traps down now, courtesy of the building manager, but thus far I don't appear to have any, er, guests. I'm not really looking forward to disposing of the traps if and when they do catch something. However, I now hate going into the kitchen after dark, and it even makes me nervous to go out there during the day, so I really need to get rid of those mice.

I had a pretty nice weekend, all in all. I took my daughter as my guest to a performance by the Second City improv troupe (sponsored by the grad school) on Friday night. It wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped it might be, but it was still pretty funny. I have only the greatest admiration for people who do improv since I am terrible at being put on the spot. Hell, I couldn't even think of good suggestions to yell out when the performers were asking for things from the audience. I'd think of really good things like ten minutes later... Figures. I had a visit from someone very special to me and, though it was shorter than I might have wished, it definitely lifted my spirits. I did some homework and watched a couple movies while I translated a bit of Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae.

Classes are shaping up to be interesting. I have this class that's basically on book studies, examined through the lens of the relationship between literacy/books and late medieval English heresy/rebellion. I'm finding the reading interesting and, considering that it's taught through the English Department, a bit less jargon-laden than I'd feared. I nonetheless keep my Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory handy for when the lit crit stuff starts to get out of hand. Thank goodness I had a little theory in my translation class a couple years ago or I would definitely be up a creek without a paddle, I suspect. The real bear, though, has been getting hold of all the books for my classes. It really creates a problem when you're not allowed to register until two business days before your freaking classes start. I'm supposed to be doing an oral presentation Wednesday on two books, one of which I don't have! Hopefully I will get it pretty damned soon... Anyway, the first class in there involved going to the Special Collections and getting the super-condensed version of the history of the book. Largely old hat for me, but I got to handle some really great manuscripts including the early printed book bound in a leaf from a ninth-century Carolingian manuscript featured in this article. I also looked in depth at a beautiful Italian humanist manuscript of Latin poetry. There are still two classes I haven't even been to yet, one today and one Friday. I'm looking forward to them a lot.

Overwhelmed

2008-09-22T20:54:00.002-05:00

I just realized that it's been well over a week since my last post. Well, I've been thinking for several days that it's been a while, but it seems like I've been running continuously to get everything done with the move, starting school myself, getting my daughter in school, and settling in to a new life in a new state. I still have so many things to do, I just don't stop to think about it too hard or I get a little freaked out. Tomorrow is the official start of classes, and my feelings on that subject are a little mixed. On the one hand, the temporary little taste of freedom from classes and readings and homework is over. On the other hand, I need to get back in the game for all sorts of reasons. Physically I am tired every day, exhausted really, after unpacking and organizing and cleaning. There's really nothing to occupy me mentally, though, and that's not a good situation for me to be in at the best of times. Moving to a strange new place where I barely know anyone and starting basically a whole new life is not "the best of times" in this context. So, I find myself working way past the point of exhaustion because then, I'm too tired to think much about all the things I have to do and all the people I miss. I'm hoping that once I'm back in classes, I will have something to occupy my mind more and take me out of myself a little. I'm not really unhappy, just sort of overwhelmed and struggling to adapt to a lot of major changes. Right at this particular moment, blogging on my laptop in my new living room, I'm just plain exhausted. I have a Latin reading group bright and early tomorrow at 9 a.m., followed by a whole raft of errands I have to run on campus. If I have any energy left tomorrow night, I need to do laundry and go grocery shopping. I guess for the moment, I just have to keep from falling off the treadmill until I get my second wind.

Getting A Little Misty

2008-09-11T14:11:00.002-05:00

The last several weeks, I've frequently wondered why I wasn't more upset about moving farther away from my friends and family. Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that it's not really all that far away, just a three-hour drive. I'll be keeping my car, so I think there's a sort of "security blanket" effect where I feel like I can drive "home" anytime I want/need to. Part of it is also definitely that I'm looking forward to setting up house with just myself and my daughter and having things just as I want them. Another part is that I'm just plain happy and excited about starting graduate school. This week, I've been surprisingly busy and a lot of that busy-ness has been spending time with people I'm saying good-bye to. Some I still expect to see on a pretty regular basis, so that has softened the blow a bit. Tuesday night, I went out to the Corner Bar with the usual group of grad students I know. Last night, I went out for dinner with some co-workers. Today, another group of co-workers joined me for a farewell lunch. It's starting to sink in now that there really will be a lot of people I will rarely see after tomorrow. I will see some of the people closest to me on a regular basis, but not as much as I used to. One special person in particular I certainly won't be seeing daily anymore. At the rate I'm going, there could be waterworks by tomorrow.

Mission Accomplished

2008-09-09T07:56:00.003-05:00

Moving our crap to the new apartment, that is. Loading started Friday night and continued on through Saturday morning. Seven co-workers, friends, and relatives showed up to help me pack and load the truck on Friday night. Three more came back the next day to finish up the loading and drive down to the Windy City for the unloading. We got on the road about noon on Saturday, with me driving the sixteen-foot moving truck packed to the gills. And by the way, I highly recommend going with Budget for a one-way move. They were much cheaper than the competition and I had no problems with my pickup, drop-off, or charges. The sixteen-foot truck only cost me about $60 in gas for the drive, which came out to around three hours and fifteen minutes. I thought unloading on the other end might be a real bear. My new apartment is on the second floor of a courtyard building, on the end closest to the street. To move in, everything had to be carried from the alley end of the building to my back stairs and then up one and a half flights of stairs. It actually went really well, which I have to attribute to the friends who drove down with me. The weather was also cooperative, since it was only around 70 degrees instead of the 90 degrees it had been a few days previously, and it didn't rain after having rained for the past several days there. Dropping off the truck was a bit of an adventure, since I got to the drop-off place only to find that they had no lot of any kind. Yes, dear readers, I had to parallel-park a sixteen-foot moving truck on a busy city street. That was interesting. Upon returning to the apartment after dropping off the truck, I ran into a fellow incoming first-year doctoral student in my program who had just pulled up in his own Budget truck and was surveying the territory for his move-in. By an astounding coincidence, he was moving into the apartment immediately downstairs from my own! My movers and I were able to get back on the road around 7 p.m. local time, which got us home about 11 p.m. because of the time change. I still had to drive out to my parents' house in the sticks, where I'm staying for this week, so I didn't get to bed until about 11:30. I slept until after nine the next morning, got up long enough to attend to my personal hygiene and eat a light breakfast, and had almost dozed off again by the time my parents returned from church. I got up long enough to eat the incredibly nasty Midwestern German Sunday dinner of sauerkraut, whole potatoes, and pork ribs my mother had prepared and then took a "nap" for another four hours or so. When I got up at 5, I actually stayed up the rest of the evening until 11 and then slept like the dead again. By yesterday, I was feeling pretty much recuperated from the move, other than the spectacular constellation of bruises in various stages of healing all over my arms and legs. No big deal. I have a busy week planned right through Friday night, between the last few errands I have to do to tie up my affairs here and all the social activities I have planned to enjoy my last few days with friends I won't see quite so much after Saturday. Monday I start orientations for my graduate program.

Proud of Michigan

2008-09-05T11:18:00.003-05:00

I'm so pleased to read that the Michigan legislature passed and Governor Granholm signed into law a bill requiring that "computer forensics technicians" be licensed as private investigators, according to a post on Ray Beckerman's Recording Industry vs. The People blog. This means that the investigatory firm MediaSentry, the bulldog employed by the recording/motion picture industry to spy on Internet traffic and deliver up IP addresses supposedly engaged in illegal file-sharing activities, has to obtain a P.I. license to engage in this activity in Michigan. This is especially good because, as Beckerman documented in a previous post, MediaSentry has tailored its presentation of its methods and expertise in various court cases depending on the applicable state laws in a deceptive and misleading manner. Presumably, if MediaSentry is required to be licensed as a private investigator in order to offer testimony in Michigan cases, it will also be required to explain to juries the (fundamentally flawed) technical methods it uses. At the very least, Michigan has temporarily shielded its citizens from MediaSentry's snooping and the avalanche of takedown notices and extortionate threats of legal actions that result from their dubious methods. If you live and vote in Michigan, you might want to consider dropping a quick e-mail or letter to your state representative thanking him or her for protecting your rights as a consumer and a citizen.

Six Hours on Hold

2008-09-03T14:12:00.002-05:00

I'm finally giving up at the six-hour mark because I have other things to do. As an extra-special bonus, the e-mail form on AT&T's web site won't recognize my new number as valid, so I can't get help that way either. I should also note here that I placed my phone service order through WhiteFence.com, which AT&T claims was the problem. Funny, I didn't seem to have any problem getting my gas or electric turned on through them, but whatever. Nonetheless, WhiteFence.com customer service has also been totally useless, as about all they will do is look up information I can look up myself on their website. I still find it absolutely amazing that I can be stuck on hold with these people for six solid hours without ever hearing a single live, human voice.

Still On Hold

2008-09-03T11:53:00.002-05:00

Here it is 12:57 local time, and I am STILL on hold with AT&T. I would not have believed this was possible if it weren't happening. Clearly, I'm not the only one. In 2007, a poll sponsored by MSN Money named AT&T as the fifth worst-rated company in customer service. By the 2008 poll, AT&T wasn't on the top ten list, which I find hard to believe. And by the way, the Muzak version of Abba's "The Dancing Queen" makes me want to hang myself with the phone cord.

AT&T Once Again Delivers... A Thorough Screwing

2008-09-03T10:25:00.003-05:00

As of this writing I have been on hold with AT&T for three hours without talking to a human being yet. Yes, you read that right... THREE HOURS. I thought I got my phone order straightened out yesterday, when I finally found out that going from state to state, you can't exactly "transfer" service. They have to start a new account for you and that wasn't set up correctly, because there was no order to discontinue the old service. After two phone calls and about 2 hours, I thought that was all taken care of and I was good to go. I put calls through to my new number. But last night, I tried to call my daughter to set up the DSL and when she turned on the modem, the light for the DSL line would never light up. Hmmm... After trying that a few times, I called the tech support line. The person I finally got through to sounded as though he had been told at gunpoint to be excruciatingly cheerful, but had an incredibly thick South Asian accent, as all the people at AT&T's DSL tech support line do. He concluded that no DSL service had been ordered for the new line, despite the fact that my order confirmation said it had. Since the business offices were closed by the time this conversation took place, I didn't have much choice but to try calling back today to straighten it out. I placed the call at something like 8:15 a.m. local time, and here I am at 11:33 a.m. still on hold. Once again, AT&T takes the service out of customer service.

Happy Birthday, GNU!

2008-09-02T14:56:00.002-05:00

OK, I am taking a quick break from my self-pity and whining to commemorate briefly the twenty-fifth birthday of the free software movement. I've explained the importance of open source and briefly explained what it is in a previous post, but I think this video starring English actor/comedian Stephen Fry explains it succinctly and well. Enjoy, and please join me in wishing GNU a very happy birthday and many, many more.

Moving Sucks

2008-09-02T12:54:00.004-05:00

The good news is that I was able to take possession of my new place on Saturday and get my daughter moved in so that she could start school today. Also, the traffic wasn't too bad. Everything else seems to be screwed up, though, and/or to take many times as long as it should. My daughter wasn't able to catch a bus to school because the street the buses run on is all torn up and we have no idea what the alternate route is. The school made her take another physical because, after telling me that there was no special form required, they refused to take the form her doctor completed. My new phone service in Evanston was switched on, but the phone company didn't put through the order to disconnect my service here. I tried to call my cable company to cancel my service and their main toll-free number was busy; when I tried using their online chat customer service, I was told that the online service isn't authorized to do cancellations, AFTER waiting in line behind 28 other customers. So, I had to call again, repeatedly, until I could get through on their toll-free number. I tried to call the truck rental place to confirm my truck reservation for Friday, and they aren't answering their number. This is exactly why I hate moving.

Birthday Meditations

2008-08-29T14:02:00.006-05:00

Yesterday was my birthday, and through the course of the day I was thinking a lot about how my life has changed over the course of the year since the previous birthday. It was pretty amazing. For those of you who are curious, I turned 36 yesterday. On my 35th birthday, I was just starting to contemplate whether my marriage of nearly fourteen years was still salvageable. I was married to a man who was doing almost nothing to help me achieve my own goals and was watching his own future circle the drain while he wallowed in apathy. I was just getting serious about figuring out what graduate programs I wanted to apply to and I was preparing to start a final year of undergraduate classes. I don't even remember doing anything special that day except going to lunch with my parents. I think. I certainly wasn't very happy about most aspects of my life. My, how things have changed. On my 36th birthday, I had my B.A. (summa cum laude, thank you very much), was getting ready to start classes in a Ph.D. history program, and was divorced and happily involved with the person who sent me these lovely flowers for my birthday. I don't even remember when I last received flowers, especially ones that didn't come from the grocery store. This birthday, I was very, very happy. It's amazing the difference one single year can make in the course of your life.

Auto-magically Syncing Gmail Contacts and GCalendar with Mozilla Suite

2008-08-28T08:11:00.006-05:00

I've really become a fan of Gmail since opening an account a few months ago. Initially, I opened the account just because I wasn't sure what internet service provider I would have when I moved and wanted to make sure that whatever e-mail provider I used would work seamlessly with Thunderbird. I'm keeping and using it increasingly, though, because of the free IMAP access and the ease of archiving my e-mail there. This means less data to store offline for me. I have yet to explore all the possibilities of Gmail and other Google applications, but I do tend to agree with the view of a number of folks out there in the blogosphere and tech world that online applications are increasingly the way to go. The portable applications I've described in previous posts are a really important step in the right direction, and of course there is not yet (quite) enough variety and horsepower of online applications to support all the different things we need to do with computers. In addition, I am still deeply reluctant to commit all my personal data to online services that could one day shut down or start charging fees even though they're free now. I really would like most of my data to live online with go-anywhere access, but yet still be sure that it's available to me offline in formats that don't require proprietary applications to work with. The existence of a couple nice synchronizing tools to make Mozilla suite applications like Thunderbird and Sunbird work and play together better with Gmail and Google Calendar are, in my mind, another terrific step in that direction.

I don't use Gmail online all that much because I prefer to have easy access to my Thunderbird address book, and I don't want to add contacts in Gmail that I then can't find from Thunderbird. The Zindus extension for Thunderbird solves this problem by automatically performing two-way synchronizing of your contacts with Gmail. Add someone to your Thunderbird address book, and Zindus will automatically add that information to your Gmail contacts list. Add a Gmail contact while you're away from Thunderbird and the next time Zindus performs a synch, it adds it to your address book. Of course, if you use multiple installations of Thunderbird (I have one on my flash drive that I use in Window$ computers and another copy on my Linux laptop), this is an easy way to synchronize those too! Just install Zindus on all your copies of Thunderbird and you will have access to all your contacts everywhere. It's very easy to install and set up Zindus, as with most extensions, but the only tricky bit is that Google mail can't handle duplicate e-mail addresses, so you will have to resolve those during the initial synchronization process. Basically, you just download the extension somewhere you can easily find it, go to Tools, Add-Ons in Thunderbird and click Install, browse to where you put the file, and click on it. Go ahead and let Thunderbird install Zindus and then restart T-Bird. Go to Tools again and you will see that there is now an entry for Zindus. Click on that and a new box will open where you need to pick Google and then enter your Gmail address and password. After the server test, you can click on over to the next tab to set your preferences and run the first synchronization. If you have any duplicate e-mail addresses, either within Thunderbird or between T-Bird and Google, the synchronization will fail but Zindus will tell you exactly where the duplicates are so you can fix the problems. Unfortunately, this is a one-at-a-time deal where you keep attempting to synch and each time Zindus finds a duplicate you have to fix it and start over. For me, though, this didn't take that long as only two duplicates were found. Your results will vary, naturally. Personally, I found the frequency of synchronizing to be unacceptable in the default setup. In the process of testing what happened when I added a new contact in Thunderbird, I found that it definitely did not show up right away in Gmail. The documentation pages for Zindus explained why: synchronization isn't an ongoing process, but rather is an event that takes place at set times that Zindus installs some default values for. When I checked the default values, they were set at one hour after opening Thunderbird and then every 12 hours thereafter. Uh... yeah, that's crazy. I'm not really sure why the defaults were set at such huge values since the actual auto-syncing is not that big a deal. You hardly know when it happens. Fortunately, if you are so inclined, it's not at all difficult to fix this. In Thunderbird, you go to Tools, Options and click on the Advanced tab. There, you click on the Config. Editor button. A big long list appears, which might look a little scary to those who don't do this kind of thing too often. All the entries are alphabetical and you are looking for the one named extensions.zindus.system.as_timer_delay_on_start, so just scroll down to it. You will see a value in the right-hand column, which is 3600. The value is in seconds, so the way we interpret this entry is that the timer to perform a synchronization after Thunderbird starts is set to 3600 seconds, or 60 minutes. Just right click on that entry, pick Modify and change the value to some more reasonable value. I picked 300 seconds because it never, ever takes Thunderbird more than five minutes to download my mail and that way it won't be trying to sync at the same time, in case that's an issue. The other relevant entry is extensions.zindus.system.as_timer_delay_on_repeat, which should be just above the other one. This value controls how often Zindus repeats the auto sync, after the first one following startup that we just set. By default, this one is set to 43200 seconds, or twelve hours! I don't know about you, but I never have my e-mail program open for twelve continuous hours. Right-click on that entry, pick Modify and enter a more reasonable value, in seconds, for how often you'd like Zindus to sync your contacts. I put in 1800 so that it will check every half hour. You will have to restart Thunderbird for the changes to take effect. If you do add a contact and want to make sure it gets added to Gmail right away, you can always access Zindus from the tools menu and click Sync Now. It only takes a couple seconds. I found that importing my Thunderbird contacts worked pretty well, except that there were a couple "mystery" entries that showed up in Google under a phone number because I had not set a "display name" in Thunderbird. I just edited those entries to add display names and they were fine.

I hadn't bothered to set up Google Calendar or work with that at all because I was already using Mozilla Sunbird as my calendaring application. I certainly didn't want to go to the bother of maintaining two separate calendars, but there have been times when it would have been nice to have access to my Sunbird calendar when I couldn't use my flash drive or just didn't feel like getting up to fetch it. ;-) Google Calendar actually supports syncing with a number of different programs, including Micro$oft Outlook, but I'm not going to go into those. There's a good post on the Lifehacker blog that gives the basics of syncing between Google Calendar and various programs. The relevant add-on for syncing Google Calendar with either Sunbird or the Lightning calendar extension for Thunderbird is, somewhat unimaginatively, called Provider for Google Calendar. Just like Zindus, you download the add-on someplace you'll be able to find it easily, then go to Tools, Add-Ons in your Sunbird/Thunderbird menu, click Install, browse to the correct file, and install it. The rest of the setup is a bit trickier and the instructions on Lifehacker didn't really explain how to get your events out of an existing Sunbird/Thunderbird calendar and into GCal, so I will try to walk you through my solution for that. After restarting, go to File, New Calendar in Sunbird or File, New, Calendar in Thunderbird. In the New Calendar wizard, choose "On the Network" and in the next box click the button for Google Calendar. Here's where it gets just a little tricky... you need to sign into your Google Calendar in your web browser and look in the left-hand column for the box labeled "My Calendars." Just to the right of the your username in that box (or the calendar you want to use if you have more than one) is a little drop-down arrow button, and in the box that pops up, select "Calendar Settings." Click on the Calendar Details tab and scroll all the way down to the bottom, where the section says "Private Address." Click the button that says XML. A box will pop up with a long web address in it and you need to copy that. Then paste it into the box in the Thunderbird/Sunbird setup screen that says "Location:". Click "Continue" and in the next screen, provide your username and password for Google Calendar. That's it for the setup in Sunbird/Thunderbird, but now you will have two different calendars if you've been using the program on an ongoing basis. I had no problems exporting my existing entries by going to File, Export Calendar in Sunbird. You have to pick the name of your current calendar, and then in the save box that pops up, just browse to someplace convenient where you'll be able to find your file and change the file type (in the Save As Type pulldown box at the bottom) to iCalendar. Theoretically, you could import this file into Google Calendar, but I wasn't able to do that successfully because it just generated error messages when I tried. So instead, I imported it from within Sunbird into the new calendar I just made. To do this, just go to File, Import and in the box that pops up, browse to the .ics file you just made, click on it, and then click Open. In the next screen, highlight the new calendar you want to import your entries into and click OK. When I did this, it still threw up some error messages, but all the calendar entries were successfully imported. Tasks were not successfully imported, and I suspect that these were the cause of the error messages I was getting. Fortunately, I don't use Sunbird for task management anymore, although I had some old tasks in there from when I was experimenting with that. If you do use Sunbird for task management, that's something you will want to consider. Once you get your old calendar information imported into the new calendar in Sunbird/Thunderbird, it should show up in your online Google calendar almost right away, after a refresh. The syncing seems to be virtually simultaneous and requires no intervention from the user.

One other little piece of open source goodness I will offer you in this post is a really good, cross-platform movie cataloging application. Griffith (yes, named for the director D.W. Griffith) is a free and open-source application that catalogs movies. That's all it does, but it's one of those programs that just does one thing very well. I've only installed it on Window$ Vista thus far, since that's the computer that handles most of my media applications, so I can't speak to how well it runs on Linux, much less Apple. However, I have found it to be very stable and fast on Vista, and entered about 500 titles into it in just a few hours. The program pulls its information from popular online movie and DVD databases like imdb.com and moviefone. Multiple languages are also supported, with a selection of French, German, Spanish, Polish, and other websites to choose from. All you do is type in the name or partial name of your movie into the search box. Griffith gives you a list of matching titles drawn from the selected website and you pick the matching movie. Griffith pulls up the information into a selection screen initially so that you can either go ahead and add it if it's the right one, or search again if it's not the right film. Using the imdb site works great for films, but for TV series, it's better to use the online DVD store website like DVDEmpire. Griffith pulls a lot of information into your collection database, including cast, ploy synopsis, movie poster, and even the user rating from the website. It allows you to mark which movies you've watched and has a feature for recommending an unwatched movie for you. It also has a function for tracking loaned movies. Griffith isn't perfect by any means, especially with regards to how it handles TV shows, but it's definitely the best and easiest free, open-source, cross-platform solution I've seen for cataloging DVDs.

Free At Last

2008-08-19T14:29:00.002-05:00

That's how I felt when I got home on Saturday night and found that my ex and most of his crap were finally gone. I had been at a friend's birthday party on a Lake Michigan beach all day out in the sticks, and enjoying the hell out of myself, but consequently I was out of cell range and was totally in the dark. Of course, since nothing in my life is ever simple, my daughter went out looking for our missing cat and twisted her ankle something like two hours after my ex moved out. I can't help but marvel at the irony of that spectacular timing, not that it was her fault. So, since she was home alone with a twisted ankle and I was out of cell range, she got sort of emotional and called my parents. Sigh. When I rolled in Saturday night (well, OK, 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, technically) nobody at all was home, my ex's furniture was gone, and I had a note from my mom letting me know that my daughter was at their house. It was nice to have the house to myself, I have to confess, regardless of the circumstances.

I've been enjoying a nice, quiet, ex-free home for several days now. My kitchen and bathroom haven't been this clean in years and the television is actually turned off once in a while. I don't feel like I'm confined to my own bedroom anymore. I even sleep better. Rejoice!

Thesis to Conference Paper and Fun With Latin

2008-08-15T10:48:00.002-05:00

I have apparently finally recovered from my thesis trauma (if you've joined our program in progress and don't know what I'm talking about, this older post should serve as sufficient explanation) sufficiently to consider where I can go with that research and what else I should do with it. I'd already been thinking about parlaying it into some type of journal article, since I really did uncover a real, if very modest, new contribution to knowledge that other scholars ought to have access to. Earlier this week, however, during my continuing quest to de-crapify before moving, I was reviewing the call for papers for next year's Congress in Kalamazoo and I had the amazing revelation that I could do a conference paper! Yeah, OK, so that should have been obvious a long time ago, but for some reason it didn't dawn on me. Doing a conference paper might also be a really good way of developing what I would want to do with a journal article on the topic. Since I don't really yet have much of a working relationship with my new Ph.D. program, I decided to drop a line to the indefatigable and ever-helpful Dr. T about it. She gave me some helpful advice and seemed encouraging about the idea, so now I need to clarify a couple more things with her and move ahead since submission deadlines are September 15.

I've finally dived into Michel Foucault's History of Madness, the new hardcover English edition that came out a year or two ago and is so substantial you could inflict some serious blunt-force trauma with it. Foucault is never exactly light reading, but in History of Madness, he references a great many early modern and humanist Latin texts I have no or only nodding acquaintance with. The most significant of these texts is Das Narrenschiff by Sebastian Brant, which I've never read, but he touches on dozens of unfamiliar texts in just the first chapter. So many references to so many texts makes it especially difficult to follow the thread of his argument, so I've set him aside for the time being until I have time and opportunity to read the works he's referencing. One at least I am passingly familiar with and have read a bit of in the original Latin, Erasmus of Rotterdam's Stultitiae laus, or In Praise of Folly. Since I've read a bit in Latin, it occurred to me that perhaps I should just hunt up a Latin edition and simultaneously brush up on my Latin, which has lain neglected for a few months now. The delightful thing about older texts like this is that they are precisely the sort of thing Google Books has digitized, and I found a complete .pdf scanned from an older edition of the book there. True, it doesn't have the sorts of helpful apparatus that more modern editions do, but the price is right. And, should I encounter any problems intractable to my various Latin tools, there is always the scan of a 1913 English translation of the work. Erasmus can be hilariously funny (well, to a geek anyway) so I'm looking forward to dipping into this when I can. Foucault will wait.

Where the Hell is my Happy Place?

2008-08-08T14:04:00.002-05:00

I'm just having one of those weeks. My new bank sent my new bank card and PIN to a non-existent address, I had to get two different vaccination shots this week, my cat is still nowhere to be found, and if my ex were moving out any slower, he'd be moving in. The new upstairs neighbors are noisy and making it hard for me to sleep. I feel like I am doing a good job of keeping track of all the things I need to do, but the sheer number of them is starting to get a bit overwhelming. I can feel my anxiety starting to mount again, but I'm having a lot of trouble unwinding. Staying in the current moment doesn't seem to help that much when the current moment is what's pissing me off. So many of the things I need to do are dependent on other people doing what they're supposed to, and it seems like every time I cross one thing off my list, I find it has generated three or four more things and every "simple" project is growing exponentially in complexity.

OK, deep breath... I think I will take the night off tonight. Go home, have dinner, take a long bath with the bathroom door locked if necessary, have a drink or two, and watch a movie or play a video game or something. Maybe I should delegate my daughter to answer the phone while I'm at it.

One really cool thing I did discover this week and should pass on for your delectation, though, is a set of YouTube videos by an anthropology professor named Michael Wesch. Wesch is engaged in anthropological study of Web 2.0 technologies and how they affect human interaction, culture, the creation and exchange of information, and a host of other issues. Several of these videos explain a lot of the things I've tried to touch on here in my postings. They are seriously inspiring and thought-provoking. One in particular, "A Vision of Students Today," I would especially recommend for those with undergraduate teaching responsibilities who are particularly puzzled by the current generation of students.

The Moving Craziness Begins

2008-08-05T11:58:00.004-05:00

I now finally have a signed lease in hand for my new apartment in Evanston, so the REAL moving insanity can begin. I was informed by the agent at the search company that the likely reason the management company was leery about giving me a lease with no co-signer is that they can't garnish fellowship funds. Nice. Anyway, aside from the sheer unpleasantness of the physical labor involved, I hate moving because of the insane number of details to be kept track of.

Unfortunately, I now have several fewer details to keep track of because my cat, a big, smarmy furball we call Marmalade, has been missing since Saturday. I haven't seen him since my ex was moving some of his stuff out via the sliding glass door to my apartment, so I can only assume that my ex carelessly shut Marmalade outside when he was done moving. Marmalade is NOT an outdoor cat and every time he has accidentally wound up in the great outdoors previously, he's behaved like he has acute agoraphobia. He just hides somewhere crouched on the ground, apparently frozen in terror. My current place backs up against a brushy and lightly wooded area in which we periodically see deer and other wildlife, so I am very uneasy that he got lost in there and may have encountered a bull 'coon or some other equally unpleasant denizen. I was pretty much hysterical for a couple hours when I realized he was gone, which was already many hours after the fact. We put up fliers and called the animal shelter with no luck so far. As of this writing, it is approaching 72 hours that he's been gone, so I don't feel very hopeful. We've had Marmalade since my daughter was in kindergarten, so I am sure she is pretty broke up over it as well, or will be once she is no longer in shock over it. I didn't think it was possible for my ex to be any further out of my good graces than he was already, but he found a way. I really hope he is safe somewhere, if he doesn't come back to us.

I still have a ton of things to plan and arrange for the move, and I am finding GTD really helpful in this. I have packing materials to assemble and actual packing to do. I have to make lists of things to keep, things to get rid of, and things to buy when I arrive in Chicago. I have to make arrangements to turn utilities off and on, and I have to do research to make sure I get the best deal on my phone and internet services. I have to get my daughter enrolled in a new high school. I need to file changes of address. I could go on and on and on, seriously. I know I would be a lot more stressed out if I didn't feel confident that I have written all this stuff down somewhere and it won't slip through the cracks. Yesterday, it was slipping away from me a little bit again and I was starting to stress, but I'm back on top of it again. I'm also organizing and de-crapifying a tremendous amount of stuff so that I don't end up moving junk I don't really want or need, or being unable to find the stuff I do want. The big move is scheduled for the weekend after Labor Day, since I think I would be insane at this point to try moving Labor Day weekend itself, to say nothing of the fact that September 1 falls right on Labor Day this year. I have a whole lot of things to do before then, but I've got 'em covered.

GTD for Academics?

2008-08-01T14:38:00.002-05:00

Over the last few months, I have been doing some serious thinking about how to structure my life and work on my own since the major source of externally-imposed structure, my full-time job, is going to be going away. Here and there, I have seen references on computer-geek type web sites and blogs referring to this productivity system called Getting Things Done, or GTD for short, outlined in a book by a guy named David Allen. When I read the Wikipedia article about this system initially, I found it a little overwhelming, but a lot of it seemed to make some intuitive sense. I also did some looking at a really great blog called 43 Folders that has a lot of information on GTD and how to implement it, especially an eminently digestible series, Getting Started With "Getting Things Done." I could figure out enough from these websites to convince me that it was worthwhile to get a copy of Allen's book and explore further.

I have quite a few unused credits on my Audible account, so I decided to download a copy of the book rather than buy a physical copy when I'm about to move anyway. I didn't have to listen that long to realize that he really made sense... Allen talks a lot about the nature of work in the information economy, and academics are, after all, another form of knowledge worker. He talked about how whatever system we use to manage our work life needs to be applicable to our entire lives because the boundaries between work and leisure, office and home, are a whole lot more permeable than they used to be. Again, that sounds exactly like the life of a graduate student or a university professor.

I think I was really sold on giving GTD a serious try after listening to Allen explain the first step, which he calls "capturing all your open loops." What he means by "open loops" are all those incomplete projects, errands you need to run, bills you need to pay, unread journals, unreturned phone calls, and so on that are consuming mental energy. I could completely identify with this concept, since I have ADD and tend to have a lot of anxiety about what I am forgetting. Allen's solution to this problem has a few different parts, but the most important and most immediately helpful for me was to write everything down. Everything. Allen claims that one reason making to-do lists and using planners are not always as helpful as they could be is that we tend to write down only things we've decided are "important." This made sense to me because for years I have been the kind of person who would lie down to sleep at night and suddenly experience a flood of recollection about all the things I ought to have done and forgotten or that I needed to remember for the next day. Others who have this problem can attest to the cycle of anxiety this problem often leads to. The next thing you know, you're anxious about not getting to sleep and being tired the next day, which makes it even harder to get to sleep!

I found another really great blog post from Zen Habits with some tips on developing the habit of capturing all your open loops consistently. I realized that what Allen is really talking about here is creating a new habit, an undertaking that requires some fairly significant consistency and commitment for success. For that reason, I'm actually departing significantly from the way Allen suggests doing a clean sweep and changing a lot of things in just a few days. I decided to focus first and foremost on ubiquitous capture. My tools of choice for this job are a little notepad and pen, along with Remember the Milk. I write down everything as soon as it occurs to me, from "pay rent today" to "write a dissertation." The key, as Allen explains it, is to get all the stuff you're trying to remember and plan out of your head and someplace where you can trust that it's all recorded safely. The specific tools used for this are a matter of personal choice and irrelevant to the principle. This step does not address what one actually does with all these items, it just gets them out of your head. The first night I was on this system, I was up until 3 a.m. because every time I turned out the light, something else occurred to me so I had to turn the light back on and write it down. After that initial flood of stuff (most of which I later entered as items into Remember the Milk), the number of things that occurred to me slowed to a trickle and for almost two weeks now I have not had one single night of difficulty sleeping because of anxiety about things that I had forgotten to do or could potentially forget to do. I keep the notepad with me as much as possible, and find myself writing stuff down at red lights or while sitting in waiting rooms and so on.

I am slowly implementing various other elements of the GTD system, such as gathering together all the paper that was scattered across my life (car, purse, office, home office, neglected filing pile) and actually dealing with it. I also implemented the 43 Folders blog suggestion of imposing an e-mail DMZ and then keeping your e-mail inbox(es) at zero. The 43 Folders blogger, Merlin Mann, suggests that if you have an enormous mountain of e-mail in your inbox(es), as I do, you make a folder called "DMZ" and drop all your e-mail in it so you can start from a clean inbox. Mann says, "Before you can get good, you have to stop sucking." So, so true. Some people apparently regard this as a cop-out, but it has enabled me to devise a system for assigning my e-mails to folders and dealing with them so I can find stuff and immediately identify important things. I had FIVE e-mail accounts to deal with, and at this current moment, one has six items in the inbox I have not yet read, and the others all have empty inboxes. Only one, my massive old Yahoo account, still has a DMZ folder because I already processed all the other ones. The DMZ on Yahoo has shrunk from about 3500 to about 2700 messages as I am working my way through it. Merlin Mann has some suggestions of how to implement a system for keeping on top of your e-mail in his Inbox Zero series of posts.

Feeling more in control of all the things I have to keep track of for moving and starting graduate school is a very, very good thing that reduces my stress and anxiety tremendously. I am also hoping that developing these good habits will help me to self-manage my graduate school career responsibly. It seems to me that GTD is extremely well suited to academic types, but I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who has tried it whether you are an academic or not.

Apartment Hunting Highs and Lows

2008-07-30T12:09:00.005-05:00

My planned apartment-hunting trip, which had originally been scheduled for the weekend before last, ended up being delayed to this past weekend. It's probably just as well, because the traffic I ran into picking my friend up from O'Hare was absolute hell. Nothing like being in a slowly rolling parking lot in July in Chicago in mid-afternoon on a 90-degree day. Without functional air conditioning in my car. I was just as glad not to turn around and drive back to Chicagoland the next day, believe me.

In any case, since I had to pay for one night of a hotel stay that I never used last weekend, I took off a little early from work on Friday, ran some errands, and then headed out to Evanston with my daughter in tow. I deliberately drive up Lakeshore Drive, not only because I figured (rightly) that the traffic there couldn't possibly be any worse than the traffic on the freeway but also in hopes of driving a stake through any lingering doubts my little snowflake had about moving to the Windy City. She loved the drive up Lakeshore and took some pictures out the windows, like this one of Soldier Field.

She was even crazier about Evanston, and kept raving about how green it is as we drove up Sheridan Avenue (what Lakeshore turns into on the north side of Chicago) on our way to campus. Personally, I don't think it looks any greener than the nicer parts of the 'Zoo, but it is pretty. I got us a little lost trying to find a parking structure and get to campus, since I still find downtown Evanston confusing, with a lot of streets that run at weird angles and a lot of one-ways, but there's only so lost you can be with a map. I got us where we needed to go eventually and manged to fit in a few important tasks like opening a bank account. Since I'm on a budget here, we stayed at a discount-chain motel in Morton Grove, the second suburb west of Evanston along Dempster Street, and it was actually slightly less shabby and depressing than I feared. It seemed clean, at least. I was too tired and footsore to go looking for a restaurant, so we just ordered from a pizza place.

We got out of there and checked out on Saturday morning in plenty of time for the appointment with the apartment search service. I managed to find some free parking pretty close to their office, and me and my girl stopped off at a coffee shop for what was there called a "redeye": a big cup of dark-roast coffee with a shot of espresso thrown in for extra octane. At the apartment search office, the agent mistook us for sisters or roommates (neither the first nor the last time that happened over the weekend) so I had to re-explain our situation and what we were looking for. She took us out to a few places, but one lady wasn't home, so we decided to have some lunch, look at another place I found on craigslist, and knock around campus for a while waiting for the apartment agent to call me back with a time to see the last place.

We went for lunch to an Asian noodle place called Zoba, which offers Japanese, Chinese, and Thai dishes as well as curries and some other stuff whose provenance I didn't really recognize. I had a ginger beef with homemade noodles that was really delicious, along with the best gyoza I've ever had, and my little snowflake, being vegetarian, had a tofu red curry with homemade noodles and little vegetable egg rolls. After lunch, we went to check out the place from craigslist, but it was kind of small for a two-bedroom and the neighborhood looked just a little too rough for me to be comfortable with my 14-year-old daughter walking around alone there. Not terrible, but... there was a pawn shop at the end of the street. Not a real great sign. We headed back to downtown Evanston and went to walk around campus for a while. Again, my girl was pretty impressed. She took lots of nice pictures, including this one of the really impressive old part of the library. The apartment agent finally picked us up to look at one last place, but it was way too small for the price. Decision time had come at last, and I decided to go with a large 2-bedroom unit in one of the old 1920s courtyard buildings that are all over in Evanston and the northside neighborhoods. We took care of all the business for that and then headed home.

Now I am just waiting for the management company to approve the application, and are these people ever giving me heartburn. Right off the bat, they asked me for a co-signer. My response was basically, "Are you kidding me?" The woman says that they require at least two years of employment, so I respond that my application clearly indicates I've been with my current employer for five years. She says that since I'm relocating I'm going to be quitting that job. I respond that I have a guaranteed five-year fellowship, and she says it's not on the application. I reply that the application didn't ASK for that information and offer to fax her the offer letter. I hear nothing for hours after faxing that over, so I call back and get someone else. She says I will still have to have a co-signer because they require two years of "current employment" and plus, there are a "couple problems" on my credit record. Oh? I check my record every year, because there are always, always errors on it, so I ask what the problems are. She says that there are collection accounts, but claims she can't give me any details because they have some kind of agreement with the reporting agency. So, I politely inform her that per the Fair Credit Reporting Act, if someone denies you credit based on information given in your credit history, they have to provide you with the appropriate notice so you can get a copy of your report from the agency who issued it. She hems and haws. She promises to call me back the next morning, which would be Wednesday. I decided to pull my credit last night by signing up for a trial with one of those credit protection companies. I immediately could see which agency the management company was pulling its information from, and it showed two past collection accounts, both disputed and both closed, totaling less than a third of one month's rent on the apartment I want. Hmmm... Wednesday morning came and went with no call, so I call back. I try to explain once again to this dimwit how a fellowship is not a job and how I will not ever be able to prove two years of "current employment" within the Chicago area because I'll be on fellowship, not working. I also ask her to confirm that her report shows what mine does, that the only "collection" accounts are both disputed and closed. She responds yeah, but there is still a balance due on them. I remind her, as patiently as I possibly can at this point, that the total balance of the supposed collection accounts is less than one-third of one month's rent and furthermore, they are BOTH disputed AND marked as closed. At this point, she starts in with the "please stop picking on me" voice that downtrodden employees scared to death of losing their jobs use when they are afraid to make a judgment call, and says that her general manager, the only one authorized to override their "rules," is on vacation and will be back Friday. She will make it her absolute TOP priority to talk to him about it first thing when he comes back on Friday. Frankly, I do not find all this remotely confidence-inspiring, but I will see what happens Friday. I will be pretty steamed if they make me give them a co-signer, given that I've been employed steadily for five years and have pretty fair credit, especially in the past year or two. I didn't need a co-signer to get the apartment I live in now, or my credit card account, for heaven's sakes. Yeah, the one that shows on my credit report as being in good standing...

Interesting AP Story About Codex Sinaiticus

2008-07-22T13:02:00.003-05:00

According to a news story I ran across today, the British Library will be hosting an online version of the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, slated to be up and running one year from this writing. I don't read Greek, so the facsimile and transcription won't be so helpful, but the translation will be interesting. I'm also curious to find out if the implication of this AP story, that the Codex Sinaiticus versions of the gospels omit the resurrection, is true. The one website I found purporting to be a translation of the CS doesn't support this assertion since it is only the Gospel of Mark that is truncated, a typical characteristic of manuscripts of this type, as I understand it. Unlike the AP writer, I hesitate to refer to this manuscript as a Bible. Christians were still sorting out exactly what should and shouldn't be considered scripture in the fourth century, after all, so somehow calling a fourth-century manuscript of Christian scriptures a Bible seems a bit like referring to the medieval Latin Church as "Catholic." A bit anachronistic somehow. I wish I'd known earlier that the "Shepherd" of Hermas, a second-century theological work, was included in the CS; it would have strengthened an argument I once made in a paper about the baptism of Constantine, since I cited Hermas as an influential authority in the fourth century. I didn't know how right I was, evidently. The most exciting thing about this project for me, though, is that it is such a great example of how technology can be used to facilitate scholarship. Parts of the CS are scattered all over Europe and this is scarcely a unique situation for manuscripts. Presenting all the scattered parts of a single manuscript together digitally, online, and for free is a major step in the right direction. Even better would be the ability to compare multiple manuscript versions of a single text online. Except that then, poor graduate students wouldn't get travel grants to go look at the things in person. Oh, wait, I forgot! We still need to perform codicological analyses, so it's OK. ;-)

Could the Lupa Capitolina be Medieval?

2008-07-18T11:54:00.005-05:00

I am indebted to a co-worker for bringing to my attention a very interesting article written by Frances D'Emilio for the AP wire service, which reports that the Italian daily La Reppublica recently published an article stating that laboratory tests have revealed that the famous statue of the Roman wolf (Lupa Capitolina) is of medieval date and not an Etruscan piece as officially claimed. When I first read the article, I was very confused as to how the piece's date could possibly have been established by radiocarbon dating, as it asserts, when radiocarbon dating can be done only on organic material, like charcoal, bone, etc. I'm no archaeologist, but I've had the basics in university courses, so the science in this article really wasn't making sense to me. I looked up the original article from La Reppublica hoping it would be more enlightening. It was, in the sense that it includes the information that thermoluminescence dating was also used, though I didn't realize it was useful for bronze. I was hoping the original article would give more detail about what kinds of samples were tested and how they were collected, but I didn't find those details. It would be very interesting indeed if it turned out that the Lupa Capitolina was medieval in date, but the information I was finding in these newspaper articles was certainly insufficient to make much of an intelligent assessment of the issue. I've done a bit of Googling on the problem, and it appears that some significant analysis has been carried out on the casting core of the statue, according to a journal article by G. Lombardi, "A Petrographic Study of the Casting Core of the Lupa Capitolina Bronze Sculpture (Rome, Italy) and Identification of its Provenance," published in Archaeometry 44:4 (2002) 601-612. I'd love to link that to you, but it's not a publicly available document; I have access to it through an institutional subscription database service. Anyway, apparently significant amounts (about 2 kilograms) of the casting core used in creating the statue were recovered, left stuck inside after the casting process. The casting core (as I understand it, not being an expert in casting processes) is basically a clay model in the very rough shape of the statue you want to make, which is then covered with a layer of wax whose thickness determines the thickness of the walls of the statue. During casting, the wax melts away, replaced by the molten bronze, and when the completed statue has cooled, most of the core is removed from the inside. Of course, some of it will be hard to remove and/or stuck into the hardened bronze. It is this clay core that was analyzed in the Lombardi article. The article's significant findings relative to age were summarized on page 602 as follows: "Radiocarbon dating yielded inconsistent data; the thermoluminescence date of 1515 ± 50 AD corresponds to the last heating to which the sculpture was subjected, during a 16th-century modification." Reading a bit farther on in the article, Lombardi explains that this particular casting core was built up in layers, with the innermost layer composed essentially of silty and rocky material as well as "vegetal fragments" (603), in other words, plant fibers, evidently used to improve the stability and cohesion of the core. No details about radiocarbon dating of these "vegetal fragments" was given, though the article did note the organic remains were burned and of small size, making even species identification difficult. Another difficulty in radiocarbon dating may have been posed by the presence of a good deal of plant and insect remains not original to the statue, as mentioned on page 609 of the article; Lombardi appears to have felt that it was easy to distinguish material originally part of the core from material that migrated inside later, but one must suspect that it might be difficult to completely eliminate cross-contamination of the original organic material with later remains. I'd love to find more details on the C14 testing that was carried out, but I've had no luck tracking them down. This article by Lombardi appears to lead to the conclusion that thermoluminescence data would be of no value in dating the piece, and that carbon dating would be problematic at best. It also led me to the conclusion that the AP should have assigned a science writer to cover this particular story, since D'Emilio's article, which has been picked up by newspapers and other news outlets all over, is very misleading and clearly suffers from the author's inability to understand the technical issues involved.

The Windy City and Thoughts on the New iPhone

2008-07-17T09:40:00.002-05:00

I still don't have much interesting to say these days on the blog, because the most interesting stuff happening right now is in my personal life and I'm not inclined to blog about that. However, I will be driving down to Chicago twice in the next two days due to a rather perverse confluence of scheduling necessities. Today, I have to drive to O'Hare and pick up a friend of mine when her flight gets in from Rome, because her boyfriend is off in Tanzania right now. Then I have to turn around and go right back again tomorrow, almost the same drive, to spend the weekend apartment-hunting with my daughter. After looking at my stipend, the rents in the areas I want to live, and my savings account balance, I faxed a student loan application in to my graduate school yesterday. I don't really want to take out more student loans, but if that's what it takes to live in a decent school district, close to the L line, in a place at least a little bigger than a postage stamp, I guess I'll suck it up. Again. Prospective sugar daddies and/or wealthy husbands should feel free to apply via posting a comment. Hahaha... just kidding! I think. Hopefully my daughter and I will have time for a little sightseeing while we are there since I booked a room for two nights. I really need to remember to borrow the camera from my ex so I can post a couple pictures here.

There is an interesting blog post on the Free Software Foundation's website about the new Apple iPhone and why it's maybe not such a great thing after all. In a nutshell, Apple's business model with the iPhone is about as hostile to the open source philosophy as you can get. This is consistent with the business model of iTunes and the iPod. Steve Jobs may be doing more to promote proprietary technology and DRM than anyone else in the world right now. Those of you who feel that Macs, Powerbooks, iPods and iTunes make you cool and alternative should stop and think a bit about the kind of business model you're really supporting with your cash, hard-earned or otherwise, and whether that's the kind of technology future you really want. As openly hostile as I am to Micro$oft, I think Apple is rapidly overtaking them in the race for the Big Brother Business Model Hall of Shame.

No News Is Good News

2008-07-09T14:06:00.003-05:00

I realized that I haven't posted in a whole week, which is kind of a long time for me. It's not that I've been busy or had anything weird going on, just that I haven't had too much to say. Things have been quiet, I'm happy, and I'm learning to slow down and not be in emergency mode all the time. That's not to say I've been doing nothing at all, but I have a few projects going that are maturing at a merely leisurely pace, and I've been doing a lot of reading and watching a lot of movies. In a word, relaxing! That thing I vaguely remember doing back before returning to school.

Besides a lot of reading (mostly fiction, for once) and watching movies, my main project currently is rigging up something to improve the wireless Internet reception for my mom. You see, my folks live in this sort of summer camp/retirement community owned by their church and are allowed to use the wireless broadband being transmitted out of the business office there. However, it so happens that the computer is in a lousy spot for that and not easily moved, so I've been considering some options to try to improve reception. We already tried a high-gain antenna mounted to the wall in a slightly better position than the computer itself, but it didn't work well enough. The next solution we're going to try is rigging up a homemade wireless antenna following the instruction on this website. The plan is to mount it under the eaves on my folks' garage and run a very long wire through the attic and down to the computer on the opposite side of the house as unobtrusively as possible. This will be a group project since I don't know how to solder (yeah, I know... what kind of geek am I??), but one of brothers-in-law does that for a living all day. If it works, my mom will be happy and so will I, since I will probably spend a fair amount of time at her place whenever I come home from school from now on. Right now, the weak signal and consequent low connection speed make me extremely frustrated whenever I have to work on my mom's computer.

I'm also occupied currently with getting serious about my impending move. Next weekend looks good for heading down to the area to look at rentals, and I've also been working on getting all my documents in order, opening new bank accounts, and all that boring stuff. I still need to apply for my passport, now that my name has changed officially, so I had to go on a scavenger hunt to find my birth certificate. That actually didn't take as long as I thought it might, so now I just need to get photos, take all my crap to the post office, and shell out the hefty fee. Yay. So, things are momentarily peaceful here in my world, and I'm just trying to enjoy it while it lasts!

Interesting Question

2008-07-02T10:32:00.003-05:00

Someone asked me a question in fun the other day, but for some odd reason it did catch my curiosity: "What kind of tattoo would a historian get?" Yeah, I don't have any tattoos because, number one, I'm not interested in volunteering for any additional pain and, number two, I still haven't figured out what part of a woman's anatomy is likely to be in the same place it is now when I'm eighty. Anyway, funny offhanded question, but when you think about it...

Once I thought about it, the natural choice seems to be Kleio or Clio, the Muse of History. Yeah, seriously... history has a Muse. Yet another confirmation that history is a discipline of the humanities, not social science, regardless of what the University of Chicago thinks. I have to say, I'm not that crazy about most of the representations of Kleio I've seen, though. Which set me wondering, who is the patron saint of history? Shockingly, there apparently isn't one! Entertainingly, a fellow medieval history blogger apparently held a poll to choose a patron saint for history, with the results reportedly split between Bede the Venerable and Eusebius of Caesarea. As the posts point out, of the two only Bede is actually a saint in the Roman church. While researching the question, I was also amused to find that St. Isidore of Seville is evidently the patron saint of computers. Awesome. Probably none of those guys would make very good tattoos, though. I guess that brings me back to Kleio.

More Recording Industry Misdeeds

2008-06-27T10:46:00.003-05:00

Just in case you think I've been too hard on Big Media in previous posts, here's a new development that exposes them for the money-grubbers they truly are. The RIAA has actually had the temerity to assert that AM-FM radio play of music without making royalty payments is a form of piracy, according to an article at wired.com. This is all part of a bid by the music companies to find more ways to boost their profits without actually waking up and changing their way of doing business. They've been lobbying Congress to force AM-FM radio stations to pay royalties for music they play on the air, and according to a follow-up article, they're succeeding. I'm sure your local public radio or college radio station will be delighted to receive a $5,000 bill annually to provide a little corporate welfare for Big Media.

Linux Progress and Interesting Reading

2008-06-26T09:01:00.004-05:00

I have not yet become sufficiently frustrated with my Linux installation to attempt returning to Window$, I'm pleased to report. I've figured out how to do all the "normal" stuff I do with a computer, and have functioning e-mail, web browsing, instant messaging, media player, and office suite programs installed and running. Some of the more sophisticated things I used to do under Vista, however, remain elusive. I spent hours trying to figure out how to convert an .avi video file encoded with DivX codecs into an SVCD I can play in a regular DVD player, and when I did finally figure it out, I had to run the appropriate program several times to get the format and file size right. When I did finally get the thing burned onto a CD and tried playing it, it didn't play at all in one of my media player programs on my laptop. I watched it with another program and found that the sound had seriously suffered, being now full of what sounded like periodic static bursts. I didn't bother trying it in my DVD player; I have another shiny new coaster. Anyhow, these are the kinds of little things are aggravatingly difficult to figure out under Linux. To some extent, I've been spoiled by certain Window$ programs that automate tasks like that entirely. Getting my webcam functioning will evidently also prove to be a serious challenge, possibly requiring modifications to my Linux kernel itself. Since this carries a risk of seriously screwing up my Linux installation, I'm very, very reluctant to do that for the sake of getting a $10 webcam I hardly ever use working. I am in the market for an inexpensive webcam with native Linux drivers. ;-) I'm still loving my KDE3 desktop in all other respects though. Here, as promised, is a screenshot. (I found out taking screenshots in Linux is absurdly easy since there was already a whole separate application installed just for that.)

In other news, I just finished the book Spook Country, by William Gibson. It was, to me, the most absorbing and provocative Gibson novel I've read to date, not least because it is loaded with references to medieval history and especially medieval heresies. Most of these references are in the musings of one specific character in the book, and I haven't quite decided if Gibson intended them purely as an aid to characterization or if there's something else at work. I listened to an unabridged audio version of the book, but I intend to at least listen to it again and note down these references, some of which are stunningly obscure. There is also reference made to a specific book on medieval heresies; I hadn't heard of it, but that doesn't mean it's not a real book and I'm naturally curious to catch the title again and make note of it. It was strange indeed, surreal actually, to read a novel by one of my personal idols that brings together some of the oddly disparate strands of my own life into one story, and I am not at all limiting myself to the conjunction of medieval history and high technology. Reading fiction has become a rare treat for me over the last few years and I certainly never expected the novel to resonate on so many levels for me. Spooky, indeed.

Mission Accomplished

2008-06-23T10:38:00.003-05:00

It was even more time-consuming and frustrating than I expected, but I have finally liberated my laptop from the Micro$oft gulag. There are an awful lot of Linux distributions available to choose from (more than I care to count), but as I noted in a previous entry I chose Kubuntu, the version of Ubuntu that uses K Desktop Environment instead of GNOME desktop. For those who don't remember back to Window$ 3.1 days, the concept of a graphical desktop environment separate from the operating system might be confusing, but suffice it to say that KDE and GNOME are two alternative desktop environments a Linux user can choose from. In my previous experiments with Linux installations, I've typically used KDE, so I figured it would be wise to stick with what I do at least know a little about. Furthermore, I knew that Ubuntu would run on my model of laptop and all my laptop's hardware would work. Ubuntu was recommended to me by a geeky friend for a completely different project as well, so the choice of distribution was ultimately pretty easy.

Ubuntu's most recent stable version (a version that's been thoroughly bug tested and known to run without major issues), 8.04, was released in April of this year and is supposed to work even better on my laptop than previous releases did, so that's the version I decided to go with. Much older versions of most Linux distributions continue to be available normally for those who need them, unlike Window$. Try finding a copy of Window$ 3.1 these days should you have a superannuated computer that can't run anything more recent... Anyway, Ubuntu 8.04 is called Hardy Heron in an endearing practice Ubuntu follows of code-naming stable release versions. Lots of people still use Gutsy Gibbon, Feisty Fawn, and Dapper Drake releases. Furthermore, Hardy Heron is available with either KDE version 3 or KDE version 4 and I decided to download the KDE4 package because, well, you know... it's new and cool! I downloaded the newest disk image of Hardy Heron with KDE4 and burned it to CD. Burning a disk image is a little bit more involved than just burning music CDs and requires a slightly more sophisticated burning program like, say Alcohol 120% or Nero Burning ROM or any number of open-source alternatives. After burning the disk, I booted from it into the "live" version... one really cool thing about Linux distributions is that the installation disk almost always doubles as a "live" disk that allows you to actually start up Linux on your computer without actually installing anything and take it for a "test drive."

The hard disk on my laptop was already partitioned, or divided into more than one section, because it had come that way when I bought it. I tried moving around a lot of files between the two main partitions to free up one nice, long continuous space to make a new partition for Linux. You see, just in case I had problems, I didn't want to copy right over Vista right away. This process proved very frustrating because the built-in tools in Vista for managing your hard drive are not really all that great and don't give you much control. For instance, I wanted to try to make some empty space at the beginning of the last partition on the disk but Vista wouldn't let me; it would only let me make space at the end, which was stupid. I did my best then to move a lot of things off the second partition and use the end of that instead.

I went ahead and installed Hardy Heron on the space I'd cleared out. Installing Linux really isn't a particularly complex task; the only part you have to be really careful about it is telling it WHERE to install itself since it gives you several options and unless you've truly backed up everything on your hard drive elsewhere (increasingly unlikely with the size of hard drives these days) you certainly don't want to let it use the entire hard drive. The installation went pretty smoothly and I had a nice new KDE4 desktop to play with. Linux automatically detects the presence of other operating systems on your computer and, assuming you don't copy over them, sets up a nice little menu that you can pick from when starting your computer. The only sort of tricky part is that for my laptop, the piece of software that it installs to run the wireless network card has to be disabled and I had to install a different package to make it work right. From my research before installing, I knew this would be necessary and had instructions available. Other than that, all the hardware functioned perfectly except that stupid sliding switch on the front for turning off your wireless card, which I hate since I'm of course always triggering it accidentally at the worst possible times.

With Linux installed, I did a lot of housecleaning, continuing to move files around and try to salvage some space. At some point, though, I made a fatal mistake; from within Vista I deleted a partition that I thought was just unused space I had cleared out... I think it was actually one of the many partitions that Linux tends to create, however, because when I restarted my computer I couldn't load either operating system. Oops....

I decided at this point that I was already hopelessly confused about what partition was what and that I had moved all the files I needed to the last partition, so it was time to really take the plunge. I erased everything on all the partitions except the last one, including the 10% of your hard drive that laptop manufacturers now hog up with recovery junk since Micro$oft doesn't even want you to have your own disk for the operating system you bought with your laptop. Grrr... Anyway, I reinstalled the whole thing and got back my nice KDE4 desktop. I had to configure the wireless card again, which was annoying, but once that was done I proceeded to what is usually the first task on Linux installations: fetching the enormous list of available updates and installing them. Though I must say, the process still only takes about 15 minutes and that's way faster than on most Window$ versions.

My first hint of problems to come started with installing updates. The application used for managing the programs and similar files on my Linux installation, called Synaptic Package Manager, actually failed to finish the last couple updates and froze. This happened a couple more times when I was installing extra files and programs I needed or wanted. A couple times I had to restart Linux more than once because my wireless internet connection didn't automatically start in KDE4 and I couldn't figure out how to start it manually. I had problems getting Wine, the application for running Windows programs, up and running properly. I had trouble with sound in some programs but not in others. I couldn't figure out the interface for the sound mixer and it didn't seem to be set up right. I had problems with Synaptic Package Manager so many times I eventually started installing everything from the command line if I knew the name of what I wanted. I couldn't get any music to play in Amarok, the premier music player for Linux, and it kept giving me error messages. I tried uninstalling what I thought to be the files responsible for the problem, thinking I would reinstall them afresh after a restart. Restarts really are hardly ever necessary in Linux, unlike Window$, but it's a habit.

I restarted my laptop and noticed a couple error messages and ended up with command line login prompt. This is bad. This is like crashing to the flashing white cursor in Window$. At this point, after the hours I had spent installing my favorite game and getting it to run right, importing my music, etc. I was, well, not happy. VERY not happy. I spent a couple hours searching the Internet on a different computer trying anything I could think of to get KDE4 to load. Nothing doing. I kept getting messages about files being missing. Eventually, I felt I'd exhausted my options, but I decided that rather than reinstall Kubuntu AGAIN right away, I'd try the IRC channel for Kubuntu support, basically a kind of international chat room where nice people try to help you if you are polite and capable of describing your problem well. About an hour of following the directions of a the kindly "mefisto_" got me to the point where I could log into the desktop running KDE3, the next most recent version of KDE. Apparently, the erratic behavior I'd been noticing (not characteristic of Linux typically) was a symptom of the fact that KDE4 is very, very new and possibly not quite ready for prime time. Theoretically, I could try to recover the KDE4 desktop I created and run it, but I really couldn't think of any decent reason to try that. KDE3 is perfectly serviceable; it just lacks some of the high-end, "gee whiz," graphical desktop effects that are, as best I can tell, designed to compete with Vista for sexiness.

Screw that. I decided to stick with KDE3, which worked beautifully. No problems with Synaptic Package Manager, a much easier mixer panel, no problems with Amarok or sound. I didn't have to reinstall many programs, and most of the ones I did have to reinstall found their old settings so I at least didn't have to set them up all over again. I had a lot of fun customizing my desktops. Yes, plural. KDE has long had support for multiple desktops that you can page through. I just use two, but you can use a lot more than that. Anyway, my two desktops have two different wallpapers, just for fun, and I customized the color scheme, window appearance, and icon themes. It's pretty much black, white, and gray now, with these cool black and white icons. KDE menus are much better organized than in Window$, so the desktop tends to stay cleaner; when you can actually find stuff in the menu, you don't need a fistful of desktop shortcuts. One glance at my desktop would be enough to let you know it ain't Micro$oft, though if I wanted to I could also make it so closely resemble Windows XP you might be hard pressed to figure it out. The desktop appearance is far, far more configurable in KDE. Once I figure out how to take a screen shot of my desktop(s) I'll post it up.

I'm still in the learning curve, which is pretty steep for Linux, but this distribution is by far the easiest one I've tried yet. It's already leaps and bounds ahead of the version of Linspire I tried a couple years ago, or the version of Mandriva I tried a couple years before that. After this weekend, a lot of the most common commands are becoming second nature already. I'm still trying to find all the right programs to do all the different tasks I'm used to doing, but making progress. I'm also delighted that my PortableApps flash drive runs beautifully under Wine, which is totally awesome since that's where my Zotero library is and I have no desire to try to synch that between two different machines or any such nonsense. So, though not without boredom, frustration, dismay, confusion, and occasional compucidal urges, I at last have a functioning Linux desktop on my laptop and my copy of Vista has gone to the recycle bin in the sky.

Time to Make the Jump to Linux, Really

2008-06-20T13:50:00.002-05:00

I'm rapidly running out of excuses for further procrastination on switching my laptop over to Linux. As of apparently yesterday, the free and open-source application that allows you to run many Windows programs under Linux, Wine, matured into its first stable release. That means "ready for prime time" for you non-geeks. As it is, I am running very few programs now that don't have native Linux versions. I need to clean some space off my laptop's hard drive to make room to install Kubuntu, the distribution of Linux I've chosen due to its good hardware compatibility with my laptop. Sounds like a worthwhile weekend project.

Invisible Women

2008-06-19T10:25:00.002-05:00

I've mentioned already several times that I've been reading the book Hypatia's Daughters, about women philosophers. Most of the women in the book I had heard of, though not necessarily as philosophers, per se. One exception was Harriet Taylor Mill; I read the name and thought, "Who?" I had studied John Stuart Mill in philosophy classes, of course, I think even in a class specifically on the philosophy of women, though as so often happens that class was more philosophy about women than philosophy by women. I don't remember having heard anything particularly significant about Mill's wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, and yet the essay was discussing in considerable detail the century-plus long controversy about the degree to which she was involved in his writings. Essentially a historiographic essay, the paper by Jo Ellen Jacobs surveyed the ebb and flow of opinion about Harriet Taylor Mill's character, intellect, and influence on John Stuart Mill, tying the shifts in opinion both to the periodic advances and retreats in feminism and to the political persuasions of commentators. Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the ongoing debate is that John Stuart Mill himself gave a great deal of credit to Harriet Taylor Mill's contributions to his thought and work, but scholars who otherwise admire him as a gifted philosopher and intellect have perversely been inclined to discount the man's own report on this subject! As so often happens when I run across a piece of information like this, I felt a genuine sense of outrage.

I thought to myself that perhaps it was possible that I had indeed been taught something about Harriet Taylor Mill, but that for some reason it had failed to make much impression and I had forgotten. I still have my student copy of the Mill collection in which I had read his On the Subjection of Women in that long-ago philosophy class, so I pulled it off the shelf and looked at the introductory sections. On page x of the Introduction, Collini refers to Harriet Taylor Mill's involvement in her husband's work as a matter of "speculation" and concludes that "there is no solid evidence that she wrote, or even substantially contributed to, any of the works normally attributed to Mill." (Emphasis mine.) I presume that this is Collini's oblique way of referring to the fact that Harriet Taylor Mill wrote a number of works under John Stuart Mill's name, without actually having to come right out and say so. On the very next page, though, Collini cites from John Stuart Mill's autobiography as a matter of fact that John "and Harriet thereafter returned to it [i. e., his work On Liberty] several times, revising and polishing." What? If that doesn't constitute a substantial contribution, what exactly does? In the dedication of On Liberty, John Stuart Mill refers to Harriet Taylor Mill as "the inspirer, and in part author, of all that is best in my writings" and states that the work "belongs as much to her as to me." So why the reluctance to accept John Stuart Mill's own report?

There is a circular logic to the way that women like Harriet Taylor Mill are written out of history. It proceeds from the assumption that women do not make, or at least did not make, real contributions to culture. Therefore, either women cannot be the authors of writings attributed to them or the writings themselves are of little value or significance. Therefore, women did not make real contributions to culture. The insidious power of these assumptions is such that most women even buy into them. We ask ourselves, "Why don't we find the writings of women philosophers on our library or bookstore shelves?" Well, they must not have written anything very good, we assume. Or they just didn't write very much. After all, women until recently didn't even have the benefits of university education, right? Of course, John Stuart Mill never set foot inside any formal institution of learning whatsoever, having been educated at home and independently according to his father's educational theories.

When one considers just how many medieval works are not attributed to any author at all and how many others have uncertain authorship because they were attributed to some more famous writer, it's not unreasonable to ask how many of them were the work of women now invisible to us. Even Heloise seems sometimes to be presented as a kind of medieval Eliza Doolittle with Abelard as her Professor Higgins, and her authorship of her own letters outright denied. The few medieval women authors we do know about for certain seem often to be marginalized and their works hard to find in translation; there is exactly one volume of translations of works of the tenth-century Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, the first Latin dramatist since Antiquity, currently in print as of this writing. I remember taking a drama class that skipped from Terence to Christopher Marlowe with only the briefest mention of mystery plays in between. One would think that Hrotsvit would have rated an inclusion in almost 1,500 years of "blank space" there, but she was rendered as invisible as the entire period.

John Stuart Mill argued in his On the Subjection of Women that the status of women, bad as it was in his day, was nevertheless at its highest point in history, having progressed slowly but inexorably from outright slavery. He was quite wrong, though in fairness his impression was based on a simplistic, Enlightenment-era view of progress and history. A view of women's history such as Mill presented also has the decidedly bad effect of reinforcing the idea that, surely, women can't have made much contribution to culture and history, since they were little better than slaves. This picture is, gradually, being corrected. The invisible women of the past are gradually being brought forth into the light of day. This process, however, is ongoing, just like the processes of correcting so many other kinds of bias and distortion in our understanding of the past.

Back Burner

2008-06-17T10:22:00.002-05:00

It's been almost a week since I last posted, partly because I'm still reading Hypatia's Daughters and I have the makings of a substantive post simmering slowly on my mental back burner. This book has been excellent at prompting further reflection on a number of issues. While the post I'm thinking of is taking shape, though, I thought I might mention that a previous entry I wrote for this blog has become the first entry in a blog forum at Modern Medievalist about how to make our discipline relevant. I can never think of that term, relevant, anymore without thinking of the way Derrida used it, but that's another topic I suppose. Anyway, so far the forum has only generated a couple new comments about my recycled entry, but they're both quite complimentary so I am naturally pleased. I look forward to seeing the other entries.

Collaborative Online Dictionary Tool Builds Foreign-Language Vocabulary, Speeds Reading

2008-06-11T13:36:00.002-05:00

I've been seeing buzz for a few days now about about a website/tool/concept called Lingro. Since reading ability in two modern languages is pretty much de rigeur for medieval historians (not sure about other flavors of medievalists) and even doing my B.A. thesis involved stuff written in Spanish and Italian (not my two foreign languages, naturally), I'm all about finding tools that help you read, learn, and/or translate more easily. I've used online translation tools before, like BabelFish and their ilk, but the gibberish they usually spew out tends to be more confusing than helpful. I suspect that many decent Latinists are able, as I am, to skim over a line of any Romance language and kinda, sorta get the gist. There are words here and there you aren't quite confident on, and you'd like to be really certain you understand it right, whether it's a journal article or the home page of a European library. Many of us, too, find ourselves at a transitional point in reading skill with a foreign language where we understand the grammar and fundamental structure of a language, but become frustrated having to look up every other word. In these situations, Lingro is way better than a dumb translation tool like BabelFish or a paper dictionary.

Lingro basically does three main things: loads up a Web page with the ability to click any word and get a translation, provides a little toolbar at the bottom of your browser into which you can type any foreign-language work and get a translation, and (best of all!) provides an interface for you to load text documents from your own computer with the ability to click on any word and get a translation. If you go to the trouble to make a free account on Lingro's home page, Lingro will build lists of words that you've looked up, which allows you to then target your vocabulary practice on words you've actually encountered "in the wild" rather than some generic vocabulary list from a textbook. The languages currently supported are English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, and Swedish, but the Lingro dictionaries are built and expanded through collaborative participation, so sufficient interest could certainly expand the list.
I tested a few different potential uses for Lingro, and have a few ideas simmering for more. First, I loaded up a French-language library site through the interface and clicked on the words I didn't immediately recognize. Lingro returned results for those words almost immediately, which allowed me to skim over the library's home page much more quickly than if I had to tab over to another translation Web site, type in the word, wait for a result, and then tab back. Or, God forbid, drag out a print dictionary. Assuming I had a French dictionary on me at the moment, which I don't. So, excellent for sorting out those few unfamiliar words one might encounter on a web site. For a bigger challenge, I decided to load up the plain text version of an e-book from Project Gutenberg (speaking of massively successful online collaborative projects). Since German is the language I'm really hacking away at currently to improve my fluency, I decided to load up the venerable Theodore Mommsen's Römische Geschichte, or History of Rome for you non-German speakers. It took forever to load, which is hardly surprising considering we are talking a whole book here. Firefox did finally stop thinking about it and allow me to click on the words, and they came up much more slowly than before. I also started finding a few holes in the lexicon; about the twentieth word I looked up, it didn't have, and gave me an opportunity to contribute it. In fact, the box that pops up for every word you look up allows you to contribute to improving the dictionary by pointing out when it has, for instance, retrieved the wrong lemma for the form you're looking at. I also found that the information provided about any given word could vary wildly; some entries did not even include the part of speech, and for others the part of speech appeared to be clearly incorrect. But, I'm not throwing stones considering that this is a collaborative project and that most other computer-aided translation tools really, really suck. The more knowledgeable people participate, the better it will get. Finally, I attempted the interface that allows you to load your own text documents. Unfortunately, I realized quickly that most of the journal article .pdf files I would really like to work with weren't scanned as text, but as images. Phooey. Still, loading up one of these into the interface still allowed me to manually enter my mystery words (Italian this time) into the little bottom bar widget and quickly returned definitions. Again, this is so much quicker than going back and forth to different pages or using a print dictionary in which I may or may not even be able to find the right lemma for a word. I read the opening paragraph of an Italian journal article in just a couple minutes.

One further option for using Lingro would be to pair it with a good OCR/scanning program to get machine-readable text files. OCR technology is also far from perfect and almost always requires close proofreading and correction against the original, but it is one way to take a few pages from a printed book or those scanned journal articles and turn them into files Lingro can work with. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend an open-source OCR software you can use, because right now there isn't one that's ready for prime time. There are about three or four in various stages of development, but require very significant levels of technical expertise even to install. My last thought on Lingro is how fabulous it would be if it would be possible to integrate William Whitaker's wonderful Words Latin dictionary tool into Lingro. Whitaker's Words, as it tends to be known, is hands-down the best machine translation tool I've ever seen, for Latin or any other language. Latin professors hate it, and all the rest of us love it for its speed (unlike Lewis & Short on the Perseus Project, where you can get yourself a cup of coffee waiting for your results to return) and ease of use. Since Mr. Whitaker's program is open source, I'd love to see Lingro build on it.

By now, you should know the mantra: open source, cross-platform, and free. Mmmm, good.

Review of Images of Salvation

2008-06-10T12:14:00.003-05:00

Christianity and Culture, "Images of Salvation: The Story of the Bible Through Medieval Art," 2nd edition, interactive CD-ROM, 2004. ISBN 0-9550673-0-8.

I swiftly realized that I should have reviewed this disc before Christianity and Culture's later production, "Pilgrims & Pilgrimage." (My review of Pilgrims & Pilgrimage) "Images of Salvation" is three years older than "Pilgrims," and lacks many of the newer disc's great features. Nonetheless, "Images" is a fine multimedia presentation and would no doubt be a great resource for the classroom instructor. It also demonstrates just how much thought went into the design of "Pilgrims."

"Images of Salvation," like its successor, uses browser technology to display and runs right off the disc, requiring no installation. It is therefore completely platform-independent and should theoretically work in virtually any web browser on any operating system as well as the officially supported Firefox, Windows Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Safari. Using the disc is simple and hassle-free since the screens essentially navigate much like web pages. The system requirements, in addition to a supported browser, are quite modest: 4x CD-ROM and 1024x768 display.

The organization of "Images of Salvation" was an immediate disappointment, since I expected it to be similar to "Pilgrims." I assumed that the entire disc contents could profitably and coherently be read beginning to end like a book, but instead it is organized into a large number of "themes." The themes center largely around important events and persons organized chronologically according to the scheme of salvation history, e.g. "Creation," "the Crucifixion," etc. However, the themes are divided into two categories labeled "Old Testament" and "New Testament," which I find a bit misleading because the chronology and events of salvation history as understood in the Middle Ages have no neat correspondence to the structure of the Bible itself. Furthermore, a few themes really don't fit neatly into the salvation history chronology either, since there is one on typology, another on the Jesse Tree, and one simply called, "Old Testament Women."

Each theme introduction page essentially constitutes one longish page of text divided into four sections. The upper left summarizes important "Key Points" about a particular theme, the sorts of bullet points one might use in a PowerPoint presentation. In the upper right are thumbnails of the images related to that theme. Each thumbnail, when clicked on, takes the viewer to an image page pairing a larger version of the image with more complete details and analysis for it. The lower half of each theme page is divided into two columns of text, one on the left labeled "Doctrine" and one on the right labeled "Sources and Commentary." The Doctrine section summarizes the narrative of the theme and explains the medieval interpretation of it, while the Sources and Commentary section briefly lists the references for the theme in scripture or other writings. This two-column organization makes very little sense given that it requires the viewer to scroll down to read the much longer left column and then back up again to read the right column. Furthermore, the navigation tools are found only in the upper left-hand corner of the page itself, so returning to the previous page requires one to scroll up to the top again. This is rather cumbersome, and it is easy to see why this feature was improved in "Pilgrims."

Color-coded hypertext links connect the text of each theme to additional resources. Red text links to entries in the glossary or bibliography, green text to citations from sources, and blue text to other themes. The red text must actually be clicked on to bring up the definition, rather than displaying in a little box on mouse hover as in "Pilgrims," and the definition comes up a bit slowly because it opens the entire glossary at the appropriate entry in a separate pop-up box.

The image pages that open when a picture thumbnail is clicked on are set up differently than the theme pages. A larger version of the image loads in a separate frame occupying the left third of the screen. This image stays in place as one scrolls down through the text on the right side, a nice feature. One can click on this image to bring up a nearly full-page version. The text for each of these pages about the individual images is headed by a title and the name of the artwork from which it is drawn. Under this is a section of two short columns of bullet points labeled "Key Theological Points" and "Key Visual Elements." This is followed by a longer section of text, usually interspersed with detail shots of the image, titled "Art History Commentary." The final section of the page is titled "Further Reading" and offers hypertexted links to entries in the disc's bibliography. Overall, these pages are more attractively and logically organized than the theme pages. Nonetheless, I was sometimes disappointed that features of an image I found intriguing or confusing weren't explained, and I am reasonably familiar with medieval iconography.

The static menu bar at the top of every page offers the only options on the disc: Help, Themes, Search, Glossary, Bibliography, and Exit. The Help button takes the viewer to a menu whose options are mostly related to copyright and credits. The only option of much use is the "quick guide to using Images of Salvation," which explains basics such as the organization and navigation of the disc. The Themes button takes one to the previously-mentioned list of all the themes. The Search button takes the user to a Boolean search box that will return results in any of the theme introduction or image pages on the disc. It is fortunate that at least this function was included since there is no image gallery or browsing-friendly index of the pictures by artwork. The Glossary, Bibliography, and Exit buttons are self-explanatory.

The images included in the disc were almost all drawn from English museums and cathedrals, so there is a predominance of examples of English provenance. Manuscript miniatures, not surprisingly, far outnumber examples from sculpture and stained glass. The chronological scope is quite good, covering at least the tenth to the fifteenth centuries on the pages I sampled. The coverage is quite balanced, unlike many resources on medieval art that offer chiefly lavish, late medieval manuscript paintings. It is truly unfortunate, however, that there is no easy function allowing the user to view all images drawn from a particular work, or in a particular medium, or from a particular type of manuscript. This makes it much more difficult to use the disc to examine the entire decorative or iconographic program characteristic of a given context.

I could not foresee using this disc as a "textbook" due to its lack of any overarching explanatory narrative or structure. It would certainly be a useful research tool for students in classes on medieval theology or art history, however, and could also have some utility to students in classes on medieval history, medieval literature, Christian history, or the Bible. I think it is most likely useful, though, to instructors in such classes, who can draw upon the images and bullet-point summaries in designing and enriching their class presentations. At a price of $30, it is probably inexpensive enough even for the limited use it would receive by instructors of freshman western civilization or world history courses.

Price: $30US from the Institute of Digital Theology, £15 from Christianity and Culture, $20 at Congress, $20 for classroom orders.

Pros: No installation required, cross-platform functionality, and minimal system requirements. Consistent layout and good content. No intrusive copy protection or license agreements. Easy, hassle-free use. Low price for quality and quantity of content.

Cons: Lack of unifying narrative relegates this disc to a "resource." Layout of the theme pages is awkward and navigation is a bit cumbersome, though clear enough. No function to browse images. Glossary terms load a bit too slowly.

The Bottom Line: Most of my critiques of the disc are, unfairly, relative to its much more carefully thought out and designed successor. "Images" does not evince the same clear grasp of good multimedia design principles that "Pilgrims" has, and while the content is well-written and the images are beautiful, it does not have the stunning wealth of content "Pilgrims" boasts. Nonetheless, I don't think $30 is too much to pay for this disc even if you do nothing but stare admiringly at the gorgeous pictures; good luck finding a book for $30 with 180 high-quality, full-color images of medieval artworks.

Women Were From Venus and Men Were From Mars in the Twelfth Century, Too

2008-06-09T08:51:00.002-05:00

I had a lovely, quiet weekend apart from the violent thunderstorms that tore through a few times. Fortunately, the worst consequence in my household was that when the power dipped at one point on Sunday, my router didn't reset itself correctly. I actually had to log into it and reset it that way, which is very unusual. A bit frustrating, but nothing more than an annoyance. We never actually lost power, phones, or Internet service at all. The drive to work was a bit interesting this morning, though, since traffic lights were out on my usual route. Nothing brings out the idiot in drivers like a traffic light outage.

I did a bit more cataloging in Zotero over the weekend. Journal articles and chapters in edited books did indeed turn out to be a bit more of a challenge. The database I use most, the International Medieval Bibliography, isn't supported apparently, so I will perhaps make a suggestion on the support forums that they add it. Could be a bit challenging since IMB is a hugely expensive subscription database, so it's not like any old Joe can just check it out. I'm not sure how many universities subscribe to the thing. I also did successfully add some entries for DVDs, though that turns out to really be a pain. I don't know if there's a better or easier way to do it, but WorldCat entries have worked the best so far. Even so, they still need a lot of hand-editing; the director, cast members, producers, and script writers all get dumped into generic "contributor" fields, so then I have to properly label them, which usually involved looking some of the people up elsewhere. I'll have to check the forums on that one and see if anyone's found an easier way to do it.

I spent a fair chunk of my weekend playing my favorite computer game and tidying up, including doing the sorts of things my ex never imagined to be necessary like cleaning the filter on the vacuum sweeper so that it actually vacuums. I did, however, start reading another book as well. As I mentioned previously, I had been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the scope and seriousness of my own book collection and thought about going to the library to find something relatively light. I actually didn't leave the house all weekend, though, and finally decided to begin at the beginning and just read the very first unread volume on my shelves. Since my books are organized according to the Library of Congress classification system (when you have as many as I do, some rational system of organization becomes essential), the first unread book in my collection was one on philosophy.

The book I started reading, Hypatia's Daughters, has been on my shelves for probably close to ten years and I just haven't gotten round to it yet. (Did I mention I have somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand books? It will be less when my ex's books are culled out of the collection, but right now that's where it stands.) Anyhow, I'm only partway through the book, but so far I've greatly enjoyed essays on Hypatia herself, Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and Christine de Pizan. The essay on Heloise was a particular joy for me to read because its author confirmed a strong impression I had from the letters between Heloise and Abelard that Abelard either willfully or stupidly failed to understand what Heloise was really trying to say. I tried to articulate my feelings on that subject in my recent class on the twelfth century, but I didn't do so very persuasively I'm afraid.

The centerpiece of my argument that Abelard had not understood Heloise was the letter in which, by the conventional interpretation, she requests a rule better adapted for the needs of nuns. Heloise in fact spends a great deal of this letter discussing how Christians should not live by rules at all, and that rules are entirely human superimposition upon a Christian life that should be ordered instead by love of God and fellow human beings. I felt strongly, and said so in class, that the supposed request for a rule was just a pretext; claiming that the Rule of Benedict was unsuitable for women is the opening move in a line of argument that eventually leads to demonstrating the unsuitability of rules generally. Abelard nonetheless takes her request at face value and forwards an extremely lengthy letter outlining his suggested rule for nuns.

The author of the essay in this book, Andrea Nye, agrees with my impression the Heloise did not intend her request to be taken at face value and that Abelard has misunderstood her. Nye argues that this misunderstanding pervades the entire series of letters and is grounded in the fundamental philosophical differences between how Heloise and Abelard view the world and the nature of humanity. Wow. As Nye sees it, Abelard subscribes to a sharply defined binary division of the world into body/soul, pure/impure, white/black, etc. and Heloise emphatically does not. Abelard therefore regards the body and its drives as evil and requiring discipline to control and restrain, while Heloise's view is far more nuanced. She clearly believes that Christian love has the power to elevate human character. Nye argues that this cleavage is the basis for the couple's disagreement on the nature and character of marriage as well. Abelard, she says, regards marriage as motivated by lust and the desire to possess the object of one's lust. Therefore, after he was castrated, Abelard viewed the marriage relationship as over; he could no longer possess Heloise sexually and therefore felt he had no obligation towards her as a husband. Heloise, as I have previously demonstrated, had rather different ideas about marriage, and Nye argues that her first letter is an attempt to persuade Abelard that since marriage is based on love and mutual respect, the marital relationship and marital obligations have not been extinguished by his castration. Heloise feels that Abelard has obligations towards her as a husband and that he has not carried these out. Ultimately, Abelard rejects her arguments and makes it clear that the only relationship he will have with her is as spiritual adviser. His black-and-white conception of the world does not allow him to understand where Heloise is coming from.

I find it telling that the correspondence between the two ends after Abelard responds to her patently rhetorical "request" for a rule with a ridiculously detailed letter outlining his recommendations. His total incomprehension, whether willful or not, of her argument doesn't leave her with many options for a response. I don't think she would waste the parchment to respond, stultus tu es.

Lassitude and Leisure

2008-06-06T13:48:00.004-05:00

Between Wednesday and today, the high temperature in my little corner of the world has jumped about thirty degrees F and so today it is a very muggy 90 and I'm not at all used to it yet. It's making me sleepy and grumpy and very uncomfortable. I HATE really hot, muggy weather and it's making it difficult for me to do much except bathe, sleep, park my butt in front of a computer, and grumble. I have another beautifully responsibility-free weekend stretching out before me, however, in all its splendor. I am hoping it cools off a bit so I can really enjoy it.

I'm continuing to add my own personal book collection to Zotero, and pretty soon I will be starting on the vast pile of assorted photocopies and printouts of journal pages and book selections I've accumulated. Those will probably be a bit more labor-intensive to add, though I'm thinking it's possible that I might be able to import data from one or another of the bibliographic databases I have access to. I type so quickly, though, that it will probably often take as much or more time to hunt down a particular article in a database and import the record than for me to just enter the details manually. Then there's the question of whether I want to just scan these articles into .pdf files and dispense with the paper. That would be the smart solution, but it's also pretty time consuming, not to mention boring as hell. It's so, so hard to break the paper habit.

I'd also like to do a bit of reading over the weekend, but every time I look at my shelves to pick something out, I get a bit overwhelmed. Too many choices, and all of them heavy. I may actually have to head to a public library and check out something that passes for light reading. The last book I read was Irreligion by John Paulos, a graduation gift from a like-minded co-worker. For me, that qualifies as light reading. As an atheist I found it highly entertaining, even downright funny in places. It's not so deadly serious and hostile to religion as many books of its kind are, either. As a historian, I should re-read what he says about Anselm and the ontological proof of the existence of God, though, because I'm not really convinced Paulos has it quite right. I am probably biased by my deep admiration for Anselm, however. I think it would also be accurate to say that I undoubtedly have a much more sophisticated understanding of Anselm's overall world view and intellectual context than would Paulos. I may ponder about that a bit more and eventually blog on how a modern, non-historian author like Paulos treats medieval history and medieval persons.

It is currently 78.5 degrees at my desk with the A/C and fan running. I need a nap.

Deja Vu

2008-06-05T09:08:00.004-05:00

I recently caught a story on the Wired: Threat Level blog that really got my attention. It highlighted a National Journal story by Shane Harris claiming that the Chinese government is engaged in an orchestrated campaign of cyber-warfare against the United States that, among other things "may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history" back in August 2003. There are so, so many problems with this story that I hardly know where to start, not least of which being that the only named "expert" quoted as a source for this part of the story is a former computer-security industry group named Tim Bennett, a guy whose computer security expertise seems to be limited to providing public relations spin and fear-mongering so that the public is well and truly convinced of how badly we need to shell out money for their services. Not to mention, his information is hearsay because he is supposedly repeating something told to him by unnamed "intelligence officials." This is all quite intriguing because it is so reminiscent of past attempts to accuse hackers of interfering with utility services, usually in order to cover up just how badly designed and run utility service computing infrastructure is or to justify the existence of and resources spent on cybercrime units of local and federal law enforcement. A major hacker crackdown was precipitated by the January 15, 1990 AT&T crash, which is known to have been caused by a software bug but nonetheless was blamed on hackers by zealous law enforcement officials.

Harris' rather naive story, which accepts everything reported by an intelligence official or computer-security "expert" as gospel truth, goes on to suggest that the Bush administration and federal intelligence agencies in general are paying more attention to and requesting more resource for a fight against cybercrime/cyberterrorism. Given the past history of law enforcement's misguided crusade against hackers as a class, however, failing to distinguish true hackers from mere cybercriminals, I can't feel at all sanguine about this development. The gross exaggeration of the threat supposedly posed by hackers was used in the past to justify passage of the very sweeping Computer Fraud and Abuse Act whose constitutionality is likely suspect and which is so vaguely and poorly worded that you could likely be prosecuted under it for putting an unencrypted wireless router in your home, as one computer security article by Mark Rasch explains. This act is also the basis for the indictment of Lori Drew, the woman involved in a recent MySpace cyberbullying incident that resulted in a teenager's suicide. The idea that violating the Terms of Service of an online service could be construed as a federal felony ought to give everyone pause. Lori Drew's behavior was deeply reprehensible, but it's not at all clear to me that it was actually criminal, and violating a Terms of Service agreement should be at most a civil, not a criminal, matter.

The same law will probably be used to convict Defiant and EBK, the hackers who took control of Comcast's corporate website recently. According to the pair, on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 they found a security vulnerability in the domain registrar for Comcast's corporate website and used it to take control and make a few waggish alterations to the listed contact information. When their actions were noticed, the hackers called a Comcast "technical contact" to tell him what they'd done; this pair, like many hackers, were apparently motivated largely by a desire to gain some attention and admiration for their superior technical skill by finding a vulnerability in a network and then notifying the company involved. The recipient of their call, however, evidently didn't believe them despite the fact that Comcast employees and the hackers had been engaged in a back-and-forth struggle for control of the network domain for some time at that point. After the Comcast contact hung up on the pair, they retaliated by actually redirecting the websites completely for many hours. Both Comcast and the hackers agree that their intrusion could have been used to steal usernames and passwords but that they chose not to do this. Furthermore, the hackers state that "the flaw they exploited still exists" and other sites are equally vulnerable. So, to recap, these two hackers found a serious flaw in Comcast's security that could have been used to steal customer data, and after their attempts to notify the company were dismissed, they took extreme measures to publicize the problem and shame the company into action. Even though their actions did nothing harmful except prevent customers from accessing their e-mail for a few hours, evidently the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are actively pursuing the pair as criminals. And this is the same Comcast that has repeatedly spied on its customers, deliberately throttled connection speeds to certain websites of their choosing, and is now in the process of deploying a massive spying system to make yet more money off their subscribers while simultaneously violating their privacy.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should state here that Comcast is my cable television provider and I've had severe problems with them. At one time, they terminated my service and activated it under a different new subscriber's name because neither the sales personnel who took the order nor the service tech who showed up at our address to investigate the ensuing problems ever bothered to double-check the name and address against their records. It took about six or seven phone calls and many hours to finally speak to someone there who would call the new subscriber (who was at that point paying for service that I was getting) to verify his address. At one point, they told me to go to their local business office during their business hours (and my work hours) to PROVE that I still lived at my own address. Fat chance. After I finally got the problem straightened out, they actually had the chutzpah to try to sell me internet service. I just laughed.

Clearly, Comcast doesn't much care about its customers' interests, as all these forgoing incidents demonstrate. Defiant and EBK are more interested in protecting Comcast's customer data than Comcast is, but that won't stop this juggernaut from propelling the pair straight to jail on a felony charge. If I were a Comcast internet customer, I'd be calling them right now to find out what they are doing to repair this security problem. If they didn't have an answer, I'd certainly contemplate canceling my service. It seems to me that all this rumbling about cybercrime and cyberterrorism lately is likely a chimera concocted to whip up fear and divert public outrage from Comcast and similar incompetents to whom we entrust our private information. Good luck, Defiant and EBK, wherever you are.

Continued Success with Zotero and Another Nifty Freeware Gadget

2008-06-04T13:28:00.002-05:00

I finished hand-editing all the 500+ entries that Zotero imported for me, and I suffered a lot less data loss than I feared when all is said and done. It didn't really take me all that long to fix the entries, either; a few hours total would be my best guesstimate. Some of the worst mangling of data is most likely due to the fact that some of the individual records have been through two or three different reference management programs by now. One caveat I would offer is that there is no "undo" feature if you accidentally delete the contents of a data field, so be very careful about that when editing imported records. Something I'm very pleased about, however, is that Zotero offers both a one-field format and a two-field format for author, editor, etc. I've used other reference management tools that cope very poorly with the concept of "Ovid" or "Peter of Celle" with no surname as authors. With Zotero, you simply switch to the one-field format for these types of author names and it handles them easily.

I added a few new entries to my database as well, for a couple small items I had in my handbag. I experimented a little bit with different sources of data to see how well Zotero would import them. Zotero appears to be pretty good at picking up whatever data is available on the page to hand, but sources that offer comparatively little information, like Google Book Search, result in correspondingly spotty entries. It appears that using online library catalog records works much, much better. And, I am most pleased that it worked almost flawlessly with my graduate institution's online library catalog. A few nagging issues persist; the information that is put in the notes field of such online library catalog references doesn't appear to transfer, or at least not reliably, which is a problem since this is where original publication data of reprints and translated works usually resides. Still, it's a minor annoyance since one can easily copy and paste that data into Zotero; I prefer to use the field called "Extras" for this purpose. Another annoyance is that Zotero doesn't seem to be that good at figuring out whether people are editors, authors, or what. I had one editor get imported as "author" and another editor import as "contributor." Again, this isn't all that bad since you can simply adjust the field label as appropriate from a sort of drop-down box without affecting the field's contents. I will also have to keep experimenting and see what works best, since many library catalogs have different screens for each entry that show varying levels of detail.

One very interesting little freeware widget I ran across today is called Word Counter. This is an open-source, free application developed by a tech blogger named Tim Fehlman because he wanted a tool that would count the number of times he had used different words in his blog, and he couldn't find any program to do that. The only thing this program does is count the words in a text file and generate a report in a couple of different formats. I tested the program on a couple documents I had on my flash drive just to see how it works and what it tells you. Word Counter tells you the total word count of a text document, the total number of different words in a document, and then displays a complete list of the words ordered either alphabetically or by frequency. That's it. The list of words generated by the program can be copied and pasted as text. I'm not exactly sure why Tim Fehlman wanted this information, though the LifeHacker site suggested that it could be used if one was concerned about too much repetition of a certain word in one's writing. As worthy a use as that is, I can think of so many others, some of them of particular relevance to history scholars. Word Counter is certainly useful for generating a frequency list of words in a text file, which could be used for such things as comparing different versions or redactions of a text (the program doesn't care what language the text file is in), or comparing or analyzing the vocabularies of different authors or scribes or notaries. Applied to a sufficiently large sample of foreign-language text, it could be used to generate a high-frequency word list to aid in language study. It could be used to help construct an index on the cheap, or provide a word-list to form the basis of a glossary. The program certainly has obvious potential limitations, like the fact that different forms of the same word will be listed separately, but a little ingenuity can certainly be applied to remedy that fact. This little program is completely self-contained and requires no installation, so you can simply copy it anywhere you like (desktop, flash drive) and use it from there. The only real drawback is that it is available for Windows only presently, but since it's open source and Mr. Fehlman made the code available for download as well, it's probably only a matter of time until others adapt it for Linux and Mac.

Progress with Zotero and Other Add-On Goodness

2008-06-02T12:38:00.003-05:00

I enjoyed my first weekend in years free of academic responsibilities, and it was truly lovely. I spent most of the weekend just plain enjoying myself, alone and in company, but I also finished shifting to my summer wardrobe and packing away winter clothes. While I did so, I threw away a lot of clothes I have accumulated that don't really fit properly, that I just don't like, and/or that are in too ratty a condition to justify moving come August. I found another fabulous use for my personal wiki: a page to log where I've stored stuff. Now I know exactly how many underbed boxes of winter clothes I actually have.

I tried tinkering around with Zotero a bit more to see if I could get it to do what I want. I figured out how to customize a RefWorks report to make it export into BibTeX format all the information I want, but some of the things I need aren't standard BibTeX fields either... I really don't get why there is no standard for collecting bibliographic information that actually includes all the categories people really need. So, I would also have had to customize the Zotero import filter for BibTeX to tell it where I wanted the information and frankly, I don't think the effort it would take to hack the code by hand would really be worth it. However, I do want to point out again that while I am choosing not to go to that trouble, I would be free to do so if I wished to since Zotero is open source. I've decided to just make my edits manually and, really, it doesn't take all that long since the information I need was actually mostly transferred, just put into notes fields. It's a simple, if repetitive, cut-and-paste task to put the data where it belongs. However, one downside is that Zotero does not currently have a few fields I really need, like fields to handle both the original and reprint publication information for reprinted volumes. A lot of standard works used in history have been reprinted over and over because there was never a need to re-edit them, like De Lisle's edition of the text of twelfth-century mortuary rolls. This is a problem Zotero developers really do need to fix for serious scholars. In the process of making the corrections to my entries, however, I had a further thought about useful things one could do with Zotero: since it comes with formats for entering sound and video recordings, I could use it to catalog my vast music and DVD collections! To have a catalog for those collections available wherever I am would be extremely helpful.

Another Firefox add-on I installed lately has proved to be very nice: Add-Art. This nifty little tool silently replaces obnoxious web page ads with fine art images. The images are two-week, curated "shows," currently images from a special exhibition at Brooklyn Museum of a series of landscapes by Japanese artist Hiroshige. Lovely stuff, and a welcome break from the ads. The images do not make your pages load more slowly; on the contrary, since the art images are stored in your Firefox settings, eliminating the ads and showing the art instead would most likely make pages load faster. So, I am eliminating obnoxious ads, enriching my life with more art, and making my pages load faster. If this tool could possibly have any downside, I have no idea what it would be!

On a side note, I got quite a few 502 errors today while trying to access my blog pages, both to view and to post. If you're getting 502 errors also, just be aware that they are server problems with Google. I'd like to think they are being caused by a flood of visitors reading my blog. Right.

All's Well That Ends Well

2008-05-30T09:44:00.002-05:00

I've been dealing with a lot of anxiety over the last few weeks, afraid that I wouldn't finish my thesis and defend it successfully in time to get everything to the Registrar on time for my graduation date to be confirmed and entered on my official transcript. I still had a couple "incomplete" grades on my record that the instructor had to fix as well. Somehow, I managed to rescue my thesis project from the miasma of uncertainty in which it was mired, thanks in great part to the assistance of the aforementioned Dr. T. She came in to the office to meet with me not once but TWICE over this past holiday weekend, and I was able to put the finishing touches on it and get it out to my other committee members in time for my Wednesday defense. The defense was a bit more involved (actually, a LOT more involved) than the Honors College had led me to believe, but it went fairly well aside from some left-field questions about the relative merits of various Latin lexica and the history and usage of the word scriptrix. If you've read my previous post about this thesis nightmare, you can guess from whom those questions came. However, the committee passed me, which is all I really care about at this point. Yesterday afternoon, one incomplete grade still hadn't been fixed and I was getting pretty anxious again. However, this morning I got first an e-mail letting me know that the grade was fixed, and then an e-mail informing me that I had indeed been awarded my degree. Approximately fifteen seconds later I was ordering official copies of my transcripts to be sent off to my graduate school. It's a big relief. With my B.A. and divorce decree in hand, I feel like a new woman. I even find myself contemplating how this much-hated thesis project could be made over into a journal article...

The Holy Grail: A Reference Management Tool That Doesn't Suck

2008-05-29T12:01:00.002-05:00

I am once again changing reference management tools, a painful and tedious chore that I undertake voluntarily only because my current tool, the web-based RefWorks, won't be available to me for long now that I've graduated. My account there was provided to me by my current institution, and while the RefWorks people would be happy to hang on to my data forever so long as I pay them to, I'm not enthralled with that option. I have tried a variety of citation/reference management programs in the past, and have been unsatisfied with all of them for various reasons.

One of the first ones I tried was the package called Scholar's Aid. Initially it worked well, but it does have to be installed locally on your computer to work and in order to use the same database on several machines, you have to go through a tedious backup and restoration process every time you switch machines. The program isn't huge, so I tried finessing it into a portable installation on flash drive, but it just doesn't work. The closest I could come was keeping the data files on a flash drive and installing the program on each machine I wanted to use. This, however, obviates the possibility of accessing my data on machines where I don't have administrator rights (i.e., at work, in on-campus computer labs) so that still wasn't a good solution. Furthermore, it runs very poorly in Vista and there is no Linux version at all. Just to make matters worse, large databases have a tendency to become corrupt in Scholar's Aid, and I've lost entire bibliographies for papers in process because of this. It's also a commercial product that I paid money for, and the support is virtually nonexistent. Don't waste your time or money on this dog.

Another commercial product I tried was EndNote. This bloated and obscenely expensive commercial product is available for Windows and Mac only. I was very underwhelmed by its performance, and I really wasn't thrilled by the idea of being chained to my laptop 24/7 in order to access my data since, again, this is a program installed locally on your computer, and with the typical commercial software licensing requirements, you can only install it on one computer at a time. Yeah, whatever. Even ignoring that obnoxious restriction, syncing my data across machines was a problem. Another issue I had was that the capability to search online library catalogs from with the program doesn't really work all that well and is very slow, a problem I encountered with Scholar's Aid as well. It also didn't always properly format my references in the output. For $300, a program should not have these kinds of problems, and it darned well ought to do everything but my dirty dishes. Again, not worth it.

JabRef is a free, open-source reference manager that works across all platforms because it runs under Java. Of all the things I've tried in the past, JabRef came closest to meeting my needs. It does run on your local machine, but you can keep your data files on a flash drive. It can also be run via the web in a non-installed version. A further plus is that the native file format for JabRef is BibTeX, a very well-respected open-source standard for bibliographic information. There are tons of independently developed applications that work natively and happily with BibTeX files, and JabRef is just one shining example of the lot. I had only two complaints about JabRef, one just an annoyance, but one pretty serious. First of all, JabRef doesn't have an integrated note-taking feature. I really, really desire this feature in my reference management tool. More seriously, JabRef has a tendency to mangle my accented foreign-language characters. That's a defect I just can't live with. JabRef is great if you only need a citation manager with no note-taking and use few or no foreign-language sources. It's free and open-source as well, and you already know my feelings on that subject.

I started using RefWorks because the university supplied me with an account and it was the only program I knew of at the time that would allow me to access my bibliographic information from anywhere with a web connection. RefWorks claims to have good data export capabilities, and when I saw that it would export my entries in BibTeX format, I overcame my repugnance at using a proprietary, commercial product. It works OK. Not great, but OK. It doesn't always format my citations properly, the search functions are slow, and I'm generally a bit underwhelmed by it. Also, the sign-in procedure is a huge pain because if you access it from off-campus, instead of signing in through a proxy server you have to remember some code for your institution and enter that. I only got about 600 entries into RefWorks because of these limitations. I can't imagine paying for this service myself, especially now that I have discovered how severely limited the data export options really are.

The application I picked to use as my new reference manager is Zotero, a Firefox plugin. It's free, open-source, and happily stores its data on my flash drive with no fuss. In fact, Zotero and Firefox both live on my flash drive itself, not on my local machine at work. It runs normally as a little icon in the lower right-hand side of the Firefox browser frame, just above your system tray in Windows. When you click on the icon, Zotero expands to fill the lower third or so of your browser window, and you can enlarge it even more to fill your entire browser window. The really cool thing about Zotero is that, when you have it open, it will notify you when you're looking at a page that provides bibliographic data it can import. What that means is that you sign into most any kind of special database you might have access to, like WorldCat or JStor, and import the bibliographic data right off the page with the click of a button. You can do a bunch of other stuff too, like store snapshots of websites. That's in addition to the normal reference manager and note-taking functions. It can import data from other reference management programs, export formatted footnotes and bibliography entries into your word processor, and all the other things expensive commercial products do.

The only snag in this little romance is that RefWorks has my data hostage, and doesn't intend on giving it up easily. RefWorks claims to export your entries into BibTeX format, but I found out fast that it doesn't export all the data. A whole bunch of fields, like call number, weren't in the BibTeX file RefWorks created, and I was none to pleased by that. The only other common export format RefWorks supports is one called RIS, which does a very, very poor job of keeping track of a lot of the information. All my data exported into the RIS file, but RIS doesn't (for instance) have designated fields for a work's editor or translator as opposed to author, and doesn't have a field for call number, so that information gets dumped into a generic "notes" field. What this means is that while Zotero imported all my data, some of it will have to be moved around or edited by hand. The blame for this lies squarely with RefWorks, but I must say, this is still the best experience I've had with migrating data from one program to another. In addition, when I posted this problem on the Zotero forum, I received a whole lot of suggestions towards trying to find a better solution. The fact that none of those solutions worked isn't a reflection on Zotero.

I'm going to work with Zotero a whole lot more over the summer to centralize as much of my bibliographic data and notes as possible. I'll keep you posted about how it goes.

The Venerable Heritage of Free Culture

2008-05-21T09:17:00.004-05:00

Large media corporations have taken great pains to portray their misguided crusade against so-called copyright infringers as an effort to protect the livelihood of artists against thieves who prefer to steal creative works rather than buy them. I've already discussed in a previous post, "Why Piracy and Illegal Downloading Are Ubiquitous," just how hollow, self-serving, and fallacious this argument is. That post, however, only addressed why DRM and aggressive copy protection and licensing agreements are bad for consumers. Another important aspect of the debate, and one that has much larger cultural implications, is that the outrageously bloated scope of copyright privilege today is also very bad for artists.

It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that sweeping copyright privileges are bad for artists, but the fact is that very few artistic creations are wholly original in any meaningful sense. When all uses, derivations, and adaptations of existing works are deemed copyright infringement, artists must frequently confront a set of rather unpleasant alternatives: zealously avoid using any aspect of any existing artistic creation in his or her own work, run the risk of being sued by aggressively litigious publishing companies or corporate interest groups, or enlist a platoon of expensive lawyers to clear all potential rights issues. You may be thinking that this is a ridiculous argument because everyone knows that artistic works are "original" and anything derivative is, by definition, not artistic. Baloney, says I. And so say millennia of Western culture, as I'll discuss later.

An excellent overview of these issues used to be given by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford lawyer and copyright reform advocate, in talks at conferences of various kinds, and transcripts and videos of this talk, called "Free Culture," are widely available on the Internet. It is worth noting here, briefly, that when free culture advocates use the term free, this is free as in free speech, not free as in free beer. No one is suggesting that artists should not be compensated for their work and make a decent living from it. Lessig's essential points are that all works of creativity build on past creations, ideas and achievements, that society has an interest in limiting the power of past artists to control future creativity, and that our society is becoming less free because it is actually increasing the control of past artists (or, more likely, the companies that profit off their labors) over future creativity by expanding the scope of copyright privilege. I do take issue with Lessig's historical account of the supposed origins of free culture, but we'll return to that issue later. The core of his argument is correct.

A particularly celebrated example of how bloated copyright privileges have harmed society's interests in promoting free culture is the great civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. This documentary aired on PBS originally, and I watched it on video in a high school American history classroom, as I'm sure many people my age did. As explained in a 2004 article by Katie Dean, the original producers of the documentary had to clear the rights for a mountain of film footage, photographs, and songs due to the nature of the film, but those rights were only licensed for various periods of time. In order to continue broadcasting the documentary on PBS or selling copies of it to schools and libraries, another huge bill for licensing the rights would have to be paid. In 2004, $850,000 was donated to BEGIN the process of re-acquiring rights, according to a follow-up story by Dean. Yes, you read that right. At least $850,000 to clear copyright privileges for a now-classic educational documentary. I am at a loss to see how this is in society's interests, or in the interests of the artists who created this documentary. I would be very curious to know how much actual artists (as opposed to their heirs, agents, publishing companies, etc.) made from these royalty payments.

The same copyright issues confront those artists who create remixes of songs, mashups of various kinds, film adaptations from books or other sources, parodies of songs and other works, and translations. Some of these kinds of creative works were born in the digital age, but others, such as translations and parodies, are as old as culture itself. The United States Copyright Office's explanation of derivative works contains numerous other examples and explains that ONLY the "copyright owner," who may or may not even be the original artist, can authorize derivative works. Copyright terms have been expanded repeatedly such that all works created after 1989 are automatically copyrighted regardless of whether the artist indicated it or not, and the length of copyright, though varying depending on the date of creation, can extend to 120 years. Yes, you read that right, 120 years, again according to the U.S. Copyright Office's page on "Copyright Basics."

The aspect of Lessig's argument that I take issue with is his suggestion that free culture is somehow a new creation of the modern age. He claims, "In 1774, free culture was born" when an attempt by London printers (not artists, please note) to extend copyright claims into eternity and protect a printing monopoly was defeated in the House of Lords. The previously-established copyright term of 14 years was upheld, and later adopted by the United States. The part I object to is that Lessig simply ignores the fact that copyright is a modern historical anomaly, created in 1710 by the Statute of Anne to encourage the printing trade. This law simply and only protected the interest of the first printer an author contracted with, giving that printer exclusive rights to sell the printed books for a limited term. This is not an "intellectual property" law, because ideas are not property.

Culture had always been free in the sense Lessig and other free culture advocates mean since earliest times. Current copyright and intellectual property laws make assumptions about the value (and existence) of originality, a delusion that did not trouble our forbears. Medieval literary and musical culture is a perfect example of precisely the kind of free culture under discussion. Medieval culture reveled in derivative works of every kind: translations, adaptations, abridgements, elaborations, collections, and florilegia. Prose was turned into poetry, and poetry into prose. Works moved back and forth between languages, adapted at every turn to suit the backgrounds and tastes of the new audience. Folk tradition and Classical epic were woven together into medieval epic poetry and vernacular romance. The authors of these works were blissfully unconcerned about creating something ostensibly original, to the extent that they not uncommonly attributed their own creations to famous authors of the past. I cannot say it better than Dr. Debora B. Schwartz does in her web page on "Medieval Attitudes Toward Vernacular Literature":

"A literary work would typically include elements drawn from a large number of Latin (and sometimes vernacular sources . . .) These elements were freely combined, modified, and reworked by the poet. Note that while medieval translatio often involves translation from one language into another, it is not concerned with producing what we would consider a faithful translation of the original. Instead, the medieval poet deliberately modifies, adapts, adds to and reworks his sources. His or her poem is valued not for its 'originality' but for the skill with which the poet has combined disparate elements into a pleasing and artful whole."

The Statue of Anne, and probably most other seventeenth-century copyright law, wouldn't even apply to this type of activity. According to an essay by Harvard Law Professor William W. Fisher III, the transformation of copyright law into something intended to protect ideas rather than to regulate the printing of books didn't occur in the U.S. until the late nineteenth century. Contrary to Lessig's version of history, then, I would argue that culture has always been free and the legal fiction that ideas are property to be owned is an absurd travesty of the very recent historical past. Is it merely a coincidence that "intellectual property" law evolved during the age of the robber barons, the same time that the legal fiction of corporate personhood was created? I may be a medievalist, but I know enough American history to be familiar with the unprecedented growth in the size, wealth, and influence of corporations during the Gilded Age. The current copyright law we have in the U.S., and most of the West for that matter, was crafted to benefit corporations, not artists, consumers, or society. History demonstrates that this legal situation is a modern aberration and that ideas and culture are meant to be free.

Review of Pilgrims & Pilgrimage

2008-05-20T09:53:00.003-05:00

Christianity and Culture, "Pilgrims & Pilgrimage: Journey, Spirituality & Daily Life Through the Centuries," interactive CD-ROM, 2007. ISBN 0-9550673-1-6, 978-0-9550673-1-0.

This multimedia resource is one of two from the Christianity and Culture initiative that I purchased while at Congress this year. The initiative's goal, according to their website, is "to explore and explain one of the most important influences on Western art, history and literature," and is a cooperative project sponsored by the University of York and St. John's College, Nottingham. The initiative Web site has something of a "sneak peek" of this disc, also called Pilgrims & Pilgrimage. The look and feel of these pages is very similar to that of the disc, and will give you a sampling of the kind of content included.

One of the most appealing aspects of this resource is that it takes advantage of browser technology, which means it is in fact platform-independent. The recommended minimum requirements listed on the disc's cover are a 4X CD-ROM, a screen resolution of 1024x768, and one of the supported browsers: Firefox 1, Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 7, or Safari 7. Those system requirements will probably be met by any computer manufactured during this millennium, as far as I can recall. I tested it most extensively on my work computer, because it is the type of lower-end system, with no administrator privileges, a student is likely to use in a campus lab. The browsers I tested it on were Firefox 2.0.0.14 and IE 6.0, SP2. Java should be enabled and pop-up blockers disabled for proper display. Because the disc content simply displays in the web browser of your choice, however, there is nothing to install on your local machine. When the disc is initially inserted, an executable file starts a launcher application for Windows or Mac, but the lack of a launcher application for Linux is not a problem, because one would simply open the file [CD-ROM drive letter]:/launch.htm from within the browser itself.

The interactive presentation itself opens in a popup window, since the disc has its own navigation system and doesn't require the browser's navigation tools or address bar. "Pilgrims & Pilgrimages" does in fact function like a well-designed Web site, and has a helpful introduction explaining how the content is arranged. Navigation is so easy, however, and the pages so well designed and laid out, the introduction is almost unnecessary. The content is arranged in five "sections," analogous to sections of a textbook, each section comprising a variable number of pages called "themes," somewhat analogous to chapters. The text of each theme, however, is quite a bit shorter than an average textbook chapter. Every theme is further subdivided into usually one to three paragraphs with large subheadings.

Multiple full-color images enrich every page, including photographs, images from manuscripts and early printed books, and coins. The disc's package suggests, "Click on an image to see a larger version, with commentary. Clicking on this larger image provides a full-size picture which can be projected or printed." Neither browser in which I tested the disc, however, actually worked this way. Instead, when the mouse pointer is hovered over an image, a small box pops up explaining the image briefly and giving the options "Go to Gallery" and "Print Image," while clicking on the image does nothing at all. If you want to open a larger version of the picture, clicking "Print Image" presents it in a larger format and offers the option for printing. The images are somewhat better than web quality; there is a noticeable breakdown in quality at 200% enlargement, but the large-size images would display very well with a data projector.

Many terms or named persons within the running text are linked to an encyclopedia feature. When the user hovers the mouse over text in red, a helpful definition or explanation pops up in a little box. This is a nice compromise between the needs of more advanced and less advanced readers. Blue text, as web users are conditioned to expect, links to other pages of the disc. Green text provides bibliographic citations or brief quotations. Other quotations are sometimes set off in separate boxes within the text. Each page is credited to a specific author, permitting attribution of the information given. The disc packaging lists many of the writers, and several were scholars familiar to me.

A consistent set of navigation and content tools are present on every page, making it easy to find one's way around. Furthermore, there are several options for browsing to specific sections or features on the disc. The entire presentation can be read from beginning to end sequentially like a book, or sampled at will. One can browse directly to the encyclopedia, a bibliography, a gallery of all the images presented in the text, or a list of key readings that includes entire texts or extracts from primary sources in translation. Most of the primary source readings are drawn from existing Web sites or from old public domain published translations, but a few appear to be original translations and, in some cases, evidently not published elsewhere. The sources include the usual suspects for such a topic, saints' lives and pilgrimage narratives, but also less frequently encountered texts such as a hermit's begging license.

The only feature of the disc that appears to require a proprietary technology is the QuickTime presentation of a sample medieval English parish church. The interactive QuickTime presentation allows the user to zoom in and out and navigate around the church, many of whose architectural features are conveniently labeled. The QuickTime player plugin for web browsers is a free download available in Windows and Mac versions, and codecs are also available for Linux users, so the presentation should still work on any platform. The presentation itself is, unfortunately, of rather low quality. It appears to be a panoramic photomosaic of an actual church, but one so poorly lit that it is difficult to distinguish most of the features. Furthermore, no instruction was given for navigating the reconstruction, though I was able to figure it out without too much difficulty.

I really expected a presentation put together by an outfit calling itself "Christianity and Culture" to be extremely Christian-centric, but this was in fact not the case for much of the content. One entire section of the disc puts the phenomenon of pilgrimage into a cross-cultural, anthropological perspective. It therefore includes information on the role of pilgrimage in many of the world's religions, past and present, as well as secular analogies to pilgrimage. One section focuses on pilgrimage in early Christianity, and two sections focus on the place of pilgrimage in earlier (600-1100) and later (1100-1500) medieval English society, respectively. The final section discusses pilgrimage in modern times and again takes a more cross-cultural perspective. The overall effect is to position medieval European Christian pilgrimage as one expression of a universal human impulse and experience. Perhaps because of the manner in which the presentation was designed and written, with multiple authors treating their own areas of specialty, I noticed none of the glaring and inaccurate generalities that sometimes plague textbooks written by a single author. Furthermore, it did not appear that any content was "dumbed down" to the lowest common denominator of reader, another common failing of textbooks.

I can envision a wide variety of pedagogical applications for this disc. It could serve as a textbook for an interdisciplinary class themed around pilgrimage, naturally. Part or all of the relevant sections could also be used for classes on the history of Christianity, medieval history, or English history. It would also be a good secondary text for certain anthropology, religion, literature, or art history courses. Even in classes where the disc would not serve as an appropriate textbook, the images could be useful to supplement classroom instruction, and the sections and themes could be helpful in designing lesson plans. At the current classroom discounted price of $20 per copy, however, it seems that it wouldn't be difficult to justify assigning this disc as one of several textbooks for a course.

Price: $30US from the Institute of Digital Theology, £15 from Christianity and Culture, $20 at Congress, $20 for classroom orders.

Pros: No installation required, cross-platform functionality, and minimal system requirements. Intuitive navigation and consistent layout. Excellent content and design. No intrusive copy protection or license agreements. Easy, hassle-free use. Low price for quality and quantity of content.

Cons: Umm... the QuickTime parish church presentation leaves much to be desired. Doesn't work exactly as described on product packaging. Anglocentric.

The Bottom Line: It was a steal at $20, and I still would have been happy if I'd paid $30.

The Training Wheels Are Off

2008-05-16T09:07:00.002-05:00

I wish I had something really profound and insightful to post about today, because it appears that at least one person I don't actually know personally has started to read my blog. Huzzah! Of course, I was sure that sooner or later, word of my sparkling wit and incisive commentary would spread throughout the Internet and the Web world would beat a path to my door, but it's still pleasing to see that my plan for world domination is proceeding on schedule.

Unfortunately, I don't have too much to say today that's very interesting because I am still in the grip of an amazingly nasty cold. Again. This is getting really, really old. It seems like I am catching everything now because I'd been running on fumes for about a year and desperately need a rest. Which I'm not getting, because now that I'm through with classes I have to catch up with all the things that fell by the wayside while I was in classes. I have five appointments next week. In addition, I think I've gotten so used to driving myself mercilessly that I can't really tell when I'm tired anymore. I've been alternating between sleeping twelve hours a night and six hours a night, and those twelve-hour nights have occurred when I literally couldn't keep my eyes open anymore at seven in the evening. I need to stop functioning in chronic emergency mode, but not quite sure how to make that happen. Maybe I need to take up meditation again. What I probably really need is a long vacation, or even a weekend, somewhere quiet, but that's just not in the cards.

On the bright side, Remember the Milk and my personal wiki space have indeed been helping me stay organized and relieve the pressure of trying to remember things. My task list gets accomplished, albeit at a snail's pace. I'm also still listening to my audio books. I got one called Mars and Venus Starting Over because it was supposed to be about divorce, but I don't think I am going to finish it. It is about the most depressing thing I ever heard, since it's all about how you have to go through the grieving process for a lost relationship (duh), which the author describes in painstaking detail, with a multiplicity of tortured examples, all delivered in an appropriately funereal tone of voice. Good grief! I certainly recognize the emotions and the processes the guy is talking about, but considering that it's been about nine months now since I started the process, it doesn't seem very relevant to where I am now. I probably should have read it eight months ago. Then again, it might have depressed me horribly eight months ago. I think I will give Mars and Venus on a Date a listen later on, and hope it's a little more positive. Hopefully, I will feel better by Monday and have something more interesting to say for myself.

My Personal Research on Contemporary Issues

2008-05-15T08:31:00.003-05:00

In honor of my personal D-Day this coming Monday, when I get my final divorce judgment, I've been reading dating books. I've been awkwardly making my way back into the dating world, as I alluded to in a previous post, but I realized that I need a refresher course or something. After all, it's been about sixteen years since I "dated" and I'm not sure I was particularly good at it then. You've heard the dumped-by-text-message story. Also, a few weeks ago, I went on a first date with a guy and I didn't really think it went all that well. I had a hard time getting him to talk about himself much and, well, it just seemed like we wouldn't be all that compatible. I was surprised when he called me back for another date, honestly. That and a few other recent dating experiences made me wonder if I really understand how this dating thing works. ;-)

Being me, the right way to approach this dilemma would obviously be research. I have a ton of unused Audible.com credits, so I picked up a few self-help dating books. Yeah, the kind of books I've been known to mock other women for buying. I guess I'm getting my comeuppance on that one. Yesterday, I listened to He's Just Not That Into You, which was really a pretty funny book. Some of the "rules" outlined in that book were things already part of my personal approach to things, like not letting a guy manipulate you into being the one to ask him out. Now, I'm listening to Be Honest: You're Not That Into Him Either, which is interesting but really more oriented to the kinds of women who've been dating for years and never been married. Nonetheless, I've learned a few things, like if a man asks you out for a drink, he just wants in your pants, whereas if he asks you out for dinner, that's a real date where he wants to get to know you. I'm sure that's totally obvious to more seasoned daters than I, but evidently there is a rule book for the dating game, and I never got a copy.

I still have a couple more books to listen to yet, but there is one thing I found interesting about all the books I found on dating, at least all the ones on Audible: they are all for women. I find it amusing that forty years after the Sexual Revolution, most dating books are for women. Medieval courtship literature was oriented towards men, for the most part. At the moment, I have no deep insights on what that says about our society, but I'm sure there's something really significant there. Hey, I'm struggling with a cold, though, so I'll give it some thought as I continue my research into 21st-century post-divorce dating.

Review of Virtual Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi

2008-05-14T08:11:00.005-05:00

The first tasty tech item I picked up at Congress this year was a 3D virtual model of the interior of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, delivered on CD. This CD was produced by the Institute of Digital Theology, affiliated with St. Louis University, so I expected a lot of pious trappings, and I wasn't disappointed. This disc is marketed both as a scholarly tool and as a sort of virtual pilgrimage experience, according to the packaging and included text files. The virtual model itself is built on a video game technology that requires DirectX 9.0 or better to run, with the result that it runs only on Window$ or a Mac equipped with Boot Camp, no Linux. It also has fairly robust minimum system requirements for an educational product; the minimum requirements are listed as Windows XP or 2000, DirectX 9.0, 1 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB RAM, 64 MB video card, 500 MB of free hard drive space, sound card, and 4x CD drive or 1x DVD drive.

The sales rep at Congress already alerted me to the fact that the product would require a patch to work on Vista, but I went ahead and installed it on my Vista laptop and tried to run it to see what would happen. It installed fine, but then when I tried to run the program from the desktop icon, I got an error message and it died. So, I went to the Institute of Digital Theology website to download the patch I heard about from the rep. Their website informed me that the error message was caused by an incompatibility between Vista and the copy protection technology used in the product, HexaLock. Fabulous. I mean, I can understand that there about a billion software pirates out there slavering to sell illegal copies of the virtual Basilica of Saint Francis so, no doubt, extremely secure copy protection would be advisable. The "solution" to this incompatibility is not a patch to the installed files associated with the basilica program, but a whole separate little application you must download, install, and run in the background on your Vista machine. Grrrr. OK, so I did that. I tried again to run the program and got a little window of blackness and some rather nice chant music once the application had loaded. Hmmm. I went back to the IDT's website and after a little poking around in the tech support FAQs I found that there are a couple major hardware conflicts with onboard video chipsets, including the Intel 945GM chipset, which is the one on my laptop. Sigh.

I next tried installing the program on my work computer to see if it would require administrator rights, and to test it on an XP machine. To my surprise, it installed without a hitch and I assumed that it would then work, but when I tried to actually activate the program, I got an error message related to lack of administrator privileges. Odd, that. I was then able to uninstall it without problems.

I finally got the program installed and running successfully on my main Vista desktop machine, using the HexaLock compatibility application as well. It started up and ran seamlessly, but that PC exceeds even the highest recommended system requirements many times over. The virtual basilica interior was beautiful, and the quality of many of the images is truly superb. My 14-year-old emo girl daughter actually seemed to think it was fairly cool. Some of the details, however, like the stained-glass windows in the apse, were left as very low-quality and fuzzy images. The movement controls were also less than intuitive, and I had to consult the on-screen helps multiple times to figure out how to do what I wanted. One nice feature is that when you hover the mouse pointer over any of the frescoes, a complete explanatory text pops up. Similar popups describe or explain other features. Once, I accidentally hit a key that switches you to a third-person view and laughed aloud at the incredibly cheesy character model that some deluded person decided to include in the program. Third-person perspective treats you to a rear view of some guy with long, white hair in a white cassock who bobs jerkily from side to side when you move forward or back. I can't imagine why this feature was included, unless one of the more irreverent members of the design team put it in for laughs.

Price: List, $49.99, at Congress, $20.

Pros: Beautiful, crisp, digital images of the major decorative programs. Much better than a book for understanding the entire structure and decorative program. Navigates like a video game once you get the hang of it. Good supporting documentation on the disc in .pdf format. Cool idea.

Cons: Poor compatibility, resulting partly from overzealous copy protection and partly from the ill-informed decision to utilize DirectX rather than OpenGL technology. Requires administrator rights to run, and a fairly decent computer, effectively making the product unusable in most campus computer labs. Laughable and pointless 3rd-person mode should have been nixed in favor of additional high-quality images of the rest of the basilica's features.

The Bottom Line: I wouldn't plunk down 50 bucks for it, but at 20 bucks I don't feel too ripped off.

Congress Wrap-Up

2008-05-12T09:56:00.002-05:00

Well, ICMS 2008 ended yesterday at noon, and I ended up spending a lot less time there than I have in past years. I found out near the end of the day on Friday that Terry Jones was actually going to be presenting a paper, but if I went to that I might have had to skip the notorious Friday night dinner enjoyed by the Irish medievalists every year. So, regretfully, I took a pass and went to the dinner.

The dinner was quite nice, but I have the impression that Food Dance is suffering from growing pains, having moved into new and much larger digs less than a year ago. The service was extremely slow, as one might expect with only two or three wait staff for around forty people. Still no Guinness on tap, which I consider unforgivable even given the rather light style of cuisine there. I settled for Bell's Amber, which is much, much lighter, for most of the night, but later on I was alerted to the fact that they had some sort of Scotch ale, bizarrely served in a brandy snifter, so I had one of those as well. Now, this annual dinner normally concludes with ceilidh-style singing, and when one has for this event perhaps a half-dozen chaps from the Old Sod, that can be an amazingly beautiful thing. Normally, the wait staff are wholeheartedly in the spirit of the thing as well. This year, most of our usual Irish participants were absent for various reasons but, thankfully, we had a small contingent of Spanish archaeologists present. One at least was Catalan. I've no idea how they ended up coming, but I think they were all on a dig together with some other member of our group. In any case, we had just one of our usual Irish singers, but between himself and the Spaniards, the spirit of the thing was kept up fairly well. I joined one of the other women for a decent rendition of "Down by the Sally Gardens." Far from the wait staff entering into the spirit of the event, however, one of them bumbled in and began trying to distribute credit card receipts right in the midst of the most beautiful and soulful performance of "She Moved Through the Fair" you could ever hope to hear, sung by our one and only valiant Irishman. He was, rightly, offended by the waitress's insensitivity. Later on, he jokingly urged the other waitress to redeem their poor showing by singing a song, reciting a poem, or anything, and she actually told him she thought he was being pushy and rude. It was all most upsetting, since our evening ended on that note, without "Parting Glass" even being sung.

I went to three sessions the next day, one in the morning with all papers on Irish subjects, one in the afternoon as a round table in honor of Susan Mosher Stuard (the founding mother of medieval gender history), and a second session in the afternoon on hagiography. The Irish session was nice, but I don't think I really heard anything very groundbreaking. The panel in honor of Susan Mosher Stuard was terrific, and the discussion afterwards very lively. My favorite quotable quote from it actually came from one of the professors in my program at Northwestern (my dissertation advisor was one of the presenters), who pondered, "Why is it that gender is something only women and gay men have?" It was a funny and fair question, since few people ever ask how being a heterosexual man affects how medieval people lived; it's assumed to be the "norm." One of the presenters talked about how the usual system of historical periodization, i.e. Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, etc. are not necessarily relevant to describing the experience of all people in a given time period, either because of gender or class issues. She nonetheless cautioned against taking a "thematic" and a-chronological approach that presents gender, for instance, as a static category that supersedes all others. The jury is still clearly out over the question of whether gender or class trumps all other classifiers for medieval people. All good stuff that will provide fertile ground for more thinking and reading. I went to the final session purely because I thought my dissertation advisor was attending it. Mistake. The first paper was delivered by a young Russian scholar doing post-doctoral work in Geneva, and concerned applying Roland Barthes' categories of reading as pleasure versus enjoyment to the eleventh-century Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, or The Book of Miracles of Saint Faith. If there is one academic field I despise as being about as useful to humanity as marketing consultants and telephone sanitizers, it is literary theory. And delivered in a heavy Russian-French accent in a very quiet voice, for upwards of thirty minutes, I can think of few things I would less like to endure. The second paper let us all in on the startling insight that saints can behave in ways other people aren't allowed to and it's considered OK. Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. Oh, and my dissertation advisor did not show. And it was about 80 degrees in the room, I think.

There were lots more things I could have done that evening, like blow some money in the Exhibits Hall, go to parties pretty much as late into the night as, well, dawn, or go to another dinner with the Irish folks. Honestly, though, I was exhausted, and I had already bought three technological goodies in the Exhibits Hall (reviews forthcoming) and felt like going home more than anything. I'm sure those dreadful papers at the end of the day did not help. I went home and fell asleep at around 7:00 and slept until 7:00 the next morning. Sure, I was a little short on sleep with not getting home until about 2:00 a.m. the previous night, but not anywhere near THAT short on sleep. I think I'm still sort of having a rebound effect from the last few months' worth of stress and exhaustion. I thought about going back to the Exhibits Hall at least yesterday, but ultimately decided I would be better off not spending any more money anyhow. And besides, I will have lots and lots more Congresses to attend in coming years.

Why Piracy and Illegal Downloading are Ubiquitous

2008-05-09T09:28:00.004-05:00

We live in an instant, go-anywhere entertainment culture with video on demand through the cable company, instant streaming video through outfits like Netflix, streaming Internet radio, iPods and mp3 players of every description, Kindle, you name it. Too bad most of Big Media cannot get their heads around this. They are all stuck back in what is, entertainment-wise, the Age of Dinosaurs, when certain things were on the television or radio at certain times and you schlepped to a bricks-and-mortar store to buy actual, physical discs and books. I, like most tech-heads, don't live in that world anymore, and the majority of people under 25 don't, either. There are two kinds of media delivery I find acceptable: a service for which I pay a monthly fee and that allows me to stream as much content as I want whenever and wherever I want from any computer or device I happen to be using, or a service in which I pay for any individual item (song, e-book, audio book, TV show, movie, game) I want by the download and then I OWN it and am free to put it on whatever device I choose to, make backup copies, share it with a friend, and use it on whatever device I own. Neither of these options exist, even though this is basically what most tech-literate people want.

What DOES exist are download services that package the media you buy with intrusive technologies that control your ability to copy it or view it on multiple devices, or services that allow you to access some content for a monthly fee, but don't have everything you want or use intrusive technologies to control how and where you use what you download. For example, iTunes is probably the best-known of this ilk. You have to install their program on your computer to use it, which means first of all that you are at their mercy to support your operating system. I don't find that they offer a Linux version. Then, the music itself can be listened to only on a computer with their software installed or on an iPod, not on any other kind of device, in order supposedly to protect from illegal copying. Some of the technologies used to ensure that your music can't be copied and shared, euphemistically called Digital Rights Management or DRM, will ultimately render your media unusable if the company who sold it to you goes out of business. Lest you think that's just hype and my naturally paranoid attitude towards Big Brother companies, it already happened to the customers of Micro$oft's music service. Another example is Audible.com, which ostensibly offers a subscription service for you to download and enjoy a certain number of audio books per month. However, they again require you download their proprietary software to download the content and to listen to it on your computer, limit the number of computers you can install that software on at one time, and (my favorite part) use a proprietary audio format that other media player software isn't compatible with. Again, this is all ostensibly to protect from illegal copying of the files. Think I am being unreasonable? I have four computers at my house and use a fifth computer at work. I also sometimes use a computer at a computer lab at school. Audible only lets you install four copies of their software at one time under your account, so I can't listen to my audio books while working in the computer lab at school. I also can't listen to it with my media player of choice, only theirs or an even worse alternative, Windows Media Player. When I buy a piece of game software, either downloaded or a physical copy, I want to be able to install it on my hard-core gaming PC as well as on my laptop, if my laptop is capable. Sometimes I want to play while I'm out of the house, or lying in bed. The best-case scenario is that the software maker will force me to keep the game disc in the computer's drive while I play. Not a big deal unless I've taken a trip somewhere and forgotten the disc. However, in their paranoid quest to ensure that no one, NO ONE out there ever, ever enjoys a few hours of gameplay that they did not pay for, the game manufacturers have become increasingly ridiculous in their levels of copy protection, as evidenced by the PC release of one of the latest hit games, Mass Effect. What the game manufacturers fail to grasp is that it is exactly these sophisticated anti-piracy technologies that inspire hackers to crack them. These technologies will not ever stop dedicated hackers who, by the way, crack software protection for the sheer joy of it and then freely give the resulting protection-free versions to others without remuneration of any kind. These protections will only further irritate the companies' potential paying customers.

The music industry is, of course, the classic example of dinosaur companies who find themselves unwilling or unable to adapt to the changing needs of consumers, and their inexplicable and unbelievably stupid response has been to declare war on their own customers. The RIAA's absurd legal crusade is explained well in this excellent article, and is the subject of at least one entire blog. Their argument, of course, is that artist have to get paid to survive and practice their art, but the reality is, Big Media is scared to death because artists don't need them anymore. Remember, the purpose of recording companies was to bear the initial expense of getting an artist's work recorded and into circulation in stores and radio stations. Artists made some money this way, but more importantly, built paying audiences for their live performances, a much bigger source of revenue. Artists do not need this type of service anymore, by and large. There are hundreds of independent bands who promote their own music on the Internet, allow it to be freely downloaded, and STILL sell copies of their discs, make a ton of money from merchandising, and play to sold-out audiences in venues all over the country. This is what really worries the RIAA's members. As an example of a band that totally gets the world we live in now, and is not hurting for cash, check out the order page for Nine Inch Nails' latest album. This is a great example of giving digital-age consumers what we want: we can order the product in pretty much any format we want and enjoy it however we see fit, with no Big Brother DRM to tell us how many copies we can make or what devices we're allowed to use it on. If all of Big Media could get their heads around this concept, they wouldn't be in the pickle they are in. I think, though, that they are headed for the dustbin of history and they won't be missed much.

I have no moral qualms about sharing media or taking advantage of cracked software in the current legal and business climate. None. That said, I don't advocate stupidly using file-sharing services that take control of part of your computer's hard drive and exposing you to security risks and viruses. Most victims of the recording industry have used those types of services, like Napster (pre-legal) and Kazaa. So don't do it. Stay away from Limewire too. If you are curious about safer alternatives for exploring the world of file sharing, do a Google search on "bittorrent" and/or "newsgroup service." I can promise you that, if nothing else, you'll find some interesting information.

Medieval Congress is Here

2008-05-08T11:45:00.002-05:00

For the next few days, I will be spending a lot of time at the Medieval Congress. I have a blast every year, and I'm sure this year will be no exception. The weather is great for it, cool and overcast but not rainy. I've been to the Congress many a year when I thought I would pass out in the book room from the heat. There aren't actually any paper sessions I'm interested in attending this evening and this year and, unlike most previous years, I've had to work on Thursday and Friday during the day of Congress week. So, I will head over to the book room after work and pick up all the discount flyers and see if I run into anyone I feel like hanging out with. I know that my prospective advisor for my Ph.D. program will be doing a paper session, but not until Saturday. I don't know when she's getting into town. I may call it an early night tonight. I'm guessing that from tomorrow night on, though, I will be VERY busy. However, I ordered a new-ish cell phone that will have web access, and I'm also registering with a free service that allows you to post to your blog by SMS (text) message. So, I may still be posting. This year I am going to pay particular attention to any computer-related goodies that make their way to the Exhibits Hall. I know one trend is digitized images of rare manuscripts, so I will check that out this year. I'm eager to see how others are using technology to further the study of medieval history. I can't wait for 4:30!

Free Tools to Organize Research, Life, or Whatever

2008-05-06T09:07:00.002-05:00

Interactive, web-based technologies have a powerful potential to help people be more organized, if they are sufficiently intuitive and easy to use. I have used calendar and personal information management tools ranging from planner books to Palms to electronic planner software. I haven't had much success with these tools and seem always to have a forest of Post-its on my desk and a bizarre collection of jotted notes in my bag. I just have never found a system that was easy and convenient enough. I hate lugging around bulky planners, couldn't remember to synchronize my Palm before the batteries would die, and it was a pain to try exporting and importing my data for Lotus organizer across the three or four different computers I might use in the course of a day. Sunbird portable edition was close to being a solution, except that all I could really do in it was make a calendar and a task list, which doesn't come close to solving my information management needs. Plus, I can't remember to open the stupid thing every day (yeah, I know how lame that is) and I don't automatically plug my flash drive in to every computer I use. So, all these different tools would get tried out for a while and then dropped because they were too cumbersome in various ways.

Enter Web-based, free technologies. Two things I am now taking for a test drive are task-list service called Remember the Milk and a free wiki hosting service, called Netcipia. I think these may have a little more staying power for me, for the simple fact that neither require me to develop a new habit or routine. I think they say it takes 30 days to break or create a habit, and I'm now well over that limit keeping up this blog, even though I could never stick with journaling before. I think the reason is that it is already an established habit for me to open my Firefox browser at the beginning of the day and I always restore the previous day's session. This means that all the pages I had opened in their individual tabs the previous day open again today. I don't have to go find the site for my blog every day; it automatically opens and this prompts me to write an entry usually. I can use any web-based service this way, requiring pretty much zero effort on my part to make sure that I am signed in and ready to go all the time.

Remember the Milk is a pretty much what it sounds like--a to-do list. In this case, though, you make and keep your to-do list on their website so you can access it from anywhere you have Internet access, including a fancy phone if you go in for that sort of thing. It has all sorts of fun little features like the ability to automate reminder e-mails or even SMS (text) messages to your cell phone. I am both forgetful and a severe procrastinator, so to-do lists really are a must for me in some form.

On to the wiki. Most of you with a pulse are familiar with the most famous wiki in the world, Wikipedia. You already have at least some vague familiarity, then, with the concept of a wiki as being a set of interrelated web pages that different people can edit. What you might not have known is that it is very easy to have your very own wiki, free. You can access it from anyplace you have Internet access, again, and update the information there. Wikis are organized like a loose-leaf notebook, with each wiki page being a notebook page. That allows you to do whatever you want on the wiki page and organize the pages in a way that is meaningful to you. On Netcipia, the pages are organized into "Spaces" that you define and name, and control access to. This is better than most organizational software because those programs have already defined categories and limited how you put in information. Sometimes you don't realize those things work the way you need them to until you've already invested a lot of time and energy, and then don't allow you to pull the information out very well. At first, I thought I would mostly use the wiki as my private and personal online loose-leaf notebook. Then I realized, why not share certain appropriate parts with my daughter and soon-to-be ex-husband? Like a household phone list, a page for making the grocery list, and a calendar? Hmmm... we will see how that goes. Regardless, I can already report some success. I started by pruning (razing, really) the forest of sticky notes on my (work) desk. I had one sticky note, for instance, that had the names of some bands whose music I like and want to download. That's pretty stupid, since I only download music at home. So, I made a page called "Music to Look For" and typed in the names there. I put that page in an area where my daughter will be able to access it, because she frequently gives me lists of album titles scrawled on the backs of envelopes or something. I followed a similar process for almost all the Post-Its, and now they are all gone! Phone numbers are another good example. I have phone numbers programmed in my cell, written in the backs of several different planners, jotted on Post-Its, recorded in the address book of my e-mail program, and any number of other places. My wiki pages will allow me to corral all those phone numbers in one place that I can access from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Oh, and the version of Linux I decided on for my laptop was Ubuntu, partially because I've already heard good things about it, and partially because there is some guy who maintains a blog about getting Ubuntu to run on my exact laptop model. I love the Internet. I'm still deciding the most efficient way to get all the files off my laptop, because I have a ton of media on there and no place to put it all currently. I may have to go on a disk-burning spree.

What is Open Source and Who Cares, Anyway?

2008-05-02T08:59:00.002-05:00

You should. Most of the software we all use at work or school on a regular basis is commercial software designed, sold, and "supported" by big companies like Micro$oft who have an effective monopoly and who do not allow anyone else to see, use, or modify the building blocks, called source code, of the programs they sell. If you have a problem, they decide when or if to fix it. They expect you to pay scores or hundreds of dollars for a program, and offer no warranty against malfunction. Furthermore, you don't even know what is in that program, or how it could be affecting other programs on your computer because you aren't allowed to see that information.

These are complicated issues, but imagine if you went out to buy a new car and discovered that almost all cars, no matter what name was on the outside, had engines all made by the same company. Furthermore, the engine compartment is locked up tight with a special key that allows only the manufacturer to access the engine. If you have a problem, you call the engine manufacturer and they may fix your problem if enough other people have the same problem, or they may not, leaving you with a car that runs poorly or not at all. If you need service, you can only get it from your authorized and licensed dealership. Also, after three or four years, the engine manufacturer will decide that your engine model is obsolete and will not provide any service for it, forcing you to buy a new one. If you are frustrated by this arrangement and hire an independent mechanic to pop the lock on your engine and fix some problem with it, you could both be sued by the manufacturer. If the mechanic makes some notes about the engine design while he's in there and passes it along to others, he could be criminally prosecuted. If you decide you want to buy another car that doesn't have this restrictive arrangement on the engine, you find out that your alternatives are to buy a car with a competing engine model but the same locked engine compartment, or to buy a car with no engine at all. You can clearly see that this would all be a horribly bad idea for cars, but this is essentially the model computer sales are based on. I hate to be a paranoiac here, but having a locked engine compartment would also mean the engine maker could put in all sorts of things you don't even want or know about; they could put in a widget that tracks your speed and reports you to law enforcement for speeding, or one which collects information about what stores you drive to so they can sell it to marketing firms.

Open source software is like the unlocked engine compartment we all have on our own cars. You can take it to whatever mechanic you like, and while a few of the parts are really only available through a limited number of manufacturers, for a lot of the parts you have a wide array of choices which are cheaper and possibly better than the original equipment manufacturer. When you want the oil changed, you can take it to a dealership, a chain place, an independent mechanic, or your buddy down the street. Or learn to do it yourself. You can buy or get at the library books that explain all the parts of the engine and where they are located for your specific model. That doesn't mean that caring for your car is free, but it does mean that you have a lot of choices you wouldn't have if cars came with locked engine compartments.

It isn't a perfect analogy by any means, but I think it helps illustrate why open source is better than closed source. Open source software allows people to look at all the pieces that it's made up of, the source code. The technically-minded are allowed to then alter that code however they like to create a completely new program or one that works better, as they wish. They don't HAVE to give that new or improved product away for free, but they do have to continue allowing others to see its ingredients. If you have a problem with a program designed this way, there are lots of savvy geeks out there who can, perfectly legally, alter the program to fix it. You could learn how to fix such problems yourself if you wished to devote the time and energy to it. And, such programs cannot, by their nature, "hide" intrusive features that you don't need or want. You are free to select a $10 program that only has the five or six features you really want from a media player or a word processor or a web browser or whatever, or pay $50 for a program that does everything you could imagine and more. Many, many, many open source programs are really and truly free, sometimes with a fancier version available for a price and sometimes not. The real key, to me, is that in an open source model, people and companies who design software have to compete based on producing a genuinely superior product and not by exercising a monopoly.

I have already and will continue to throw around the phrase "open source" in my blog quite a bit because I firmly believe that open source is better than closed source. This belief has been growing over a number of years based on my experience with buggy, resource-hogging, closed-source products from Micro$oft and their ilk, versus functional, problem-free, lean, fast open-source products, often designed by individual human beings with names. Over the weekend, I think I am going to take the plunge and get rid of Wincrap Vista on my laptop and install an open-source operating system, Linux. In the spirit of the open source philosophy, there are about a bazillion versions (called distributions or distros for short) of Linux available, so one of my first tasks is to pick one of them. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

RSS Feeds and You

2008-05-01T09:03:00.004-05:00

I'm feeling much better today; I got at least seven hours of sleep last night and it makes all the difference in the world. Yesterday, while browsing and musing about issues of copyright, intellectual property, open source, censorship and so on (more on that later) I realized that there are a few Web technologies I've never really gotten around to tinkering with. So, I decided to add the Sage extension for RSS feeds to my Firefox browser.

Many of you are no doubt already asking what the hell an RSS feed is. Well, you can follow the link and it will explain it all, but the important thing is, RSS feeds enable you to get updates from almost all the websites you enjoy visiting regularly (or not so regularly) without having them send you those irritating e-mail updates that clog your inbox and without visiting all the sites individually. So, how does this work? It's really easy, for once. Obviously, you need to have Firefox web browser installed. If you don't, well . . . clearly you are using a computer that you don't have administrator rights to so you can't install it, or you've never heard of it, or you're just insane, because otherwise there would be no reason NOT to use Firefox. Seriously. To mount my hobby horse/soapbox once again, Firefox is FREE, open source, available for all operating systems and works better than Micro$oft Internet Explorer in almost any situation. If you are indeed stuck using a computer that you don't have administrator rights to (i.e. you can't install stuff) never fear, because Firefox will run beautifully off a small flash drive stuck in any free USB port on your computer. Go back in my archives to read about portable applications and visit PortableApps. com if you don't know what I am talking about.

OK, so we will proceed on the assumption that you have Firefox installed. Next, you need to browse over and download the Sage extension. One of the great things about Firefox is that there are a ton of little widgets you can add to it, called "add-ons" or "extensions" that do different things right from within Firefox. This one does nothing but collect and display the RSS feeds. Once Sage is downloaded and installed, you just restart Firefox and then press the little leaf-shaped button that will have appeared next to the address bar. This opens a little side bar that has a couple RSS feeds in it already for demonstration purposes. Delete them or keep them as you see fit. Now for the really magic part: you open your Bookmarks and browse to one of your favorite sites. Then, you click on the little magnifying glass button in the sidebar and Sage sniffs the page for RSS feeds. If there aren't any it will tell you, but it may find several. If you aren't sure which ones you should pick, just add them all (using the Add Feed button, duh) because you can delete anything you want to later on. Repeat this process for all the websites you think you'd like updates for. Now, go back to the list that has appeared in the window and select one of the feeds. Voila! The various news items, blog entries, or whatever for that site feed appear in one, clean window that you can quickly scan through. When the feed is updated, a little red asterisk appears next to it.

If for some inexplicable reason you don't want to use Sage and Firefox, you could use a separate program called an RSS aggregator. These look and feel a bit like e-mail programs such as Outlook, GroupWise, or (the best one, naturally) Thunderbird, except that they are for RSS feeds. A stand-alone RSS aggregator naturally has more powerful functionality (does more stuff) than a little plug-in, though all those features may or may not be anything you're likely to want or need. Anyhow, a good free, open-source, cross-platform solution for this is RSSOwl. I haven't used it so I can't tell you much about it, but it passes my personal tests of being open source, compatible with or available for all operating systems, mature (it's been tested long enough that we know it really works), and best of all FREE.

So, now you will really have no excuse not to keep updated on my blog, will you?

Why Am I So Tired?

2008-04-30T09:01:00.002-05:00

That's the million dollar question. I graduated on Saturday and went out afterwards for dinner and drinks with my younger sister, daughter, a friend, and the friend's boyfriend. Sunday I went to my parents' place, thinking it was just going to be them, my family, and younger sister. Turns out it was also both my brothers, their spouses, and most of their kids. Yikes. I bore that as long as I really could and then went home. Sunday night I worked on the last couple assignments for one of my Spring classes, since I wasn't quite done after getting poleaxed last week. Monday afternoon I had to go meet with Dr. Randy of all people. It went reasonably well, because whatever little stack of objections he had to what I'd done were pretty much based on the fact that he had clearly not carefully read what I sent him and didn't understand what I was doing. They evaporated almost without exception once I explained, slowly and in detail, the overall project. Monday night I spent more time working on assignments and generally dinking around. I got the last assignments turned in via e-mail yesterday, so now I'm really done with classes. Last night I went grocery shopping and generally dinked around.

But I can't seem to let myself sleep very easily. I've been up well past midnight every night for four nights in a row now, which is not so good when you're up before seven. I don't know if it's taking a while to sink in that there really is nothing so urgent going on that I can't relax and just get some damned sleep, or what. Yeah, I still have the thesis to work on, but it's not going anywhere and I have a month to finish it now. I should feel like a lot of pressure is off, but somehow I don't, and I'm walking around like a zombie because I feel completely exhausted, even moreso than the lack of sleep would seem to account for. Maybe this is sort of the way I've actually been for a while and just could not allow myself to feel it because finishing school was too important. I dunno. If I feel like this for much longer, though, I'm gonna go to the doctor or something. I guess I better just quit here before I stray off into total gibberish. Anyway, I'll keep you posted.

Working for a Living

2008-04-25T09:01:00.003-05:00

One of the most difficult things about these last four years of school is that I've had to work full-time continuously while attending. I work a normal, day-shift job, which is good and bad. Not a lot of undergraduate classes are scheduled for evening hours, but those that are tend to be smaller. Lots and lots of graduate classes ARE scheduled for evening hours, which is part of why I ended up taking so many.

In any case, since I had to work full-time while going to school, I'm really glad it was here. Working for a large bureaucracy can be extremely frustrating at times, as I've alluded to in other posts, but the people I come into contact with every day are great and that's the part that's really important. My co-workers are genuinely nice and caring people, my boss is very hands-off and just lets me do my work, and the professional staff I regularly come in contact with are friendly, warm, and appreciate my hard work. It's also great to work someplace where I value and support the enterprise I'm involved with. I work in a hospital that provides care for mentally ill persons, and being a state-run hospital (one of very few left in the state) our patients, or consumers as we are really supposed to call them, are the most severely and/or chronically ill people. Most of them have multiple problems including one or more mental illnesses, substance abuse, mental retardation and/or developmental disability, learning disorder, physical disability, or criminal history. Anything I do, however indirectly, to help these individuals is worthwhile and therefore satisfying. I have enormous respect for the staff who have chosen to work in such a difficult environment, with people who often insult, degrade, or even assault them during the more acute phases of their illnesses.

I work in the records department, so I have no substantial direct contact with the consumers, but I do learn a great deal about their lives from the different kinds of reports I type. Nearly every day, I learn something about a consumer's life that reminds me how good and how easy my life is, by comparison. Mental illness isn't something anyone chooses to happen to them, and as we know from incidents like the Virginia Tech shootings, it can strike at the brightest and the best in society, destroying human potential in terrifying and senseless ways. It touches the lives not just of the afflicted person, but everyone around him or her. We have consumers who came from loving, secure, and financially prosperous homes as well as consumers who came from abusive, neglectful, and/or financially deprived homes. Working here has led me to a heightened awareness of mental health issues and the treatment of mentally ill people by the larger society. America has a long, long way to go before we have sufficiently developed a consciousness that the mentally ill are among us everywhere.

As I mentioned, the real high point of working here has been my terrific co-workers and boss. It's great to work with such caring people, with many of whom I can share my personal joys and sorrows. I count a couple of my co-workers as real friends; people I spend time with away from work and who know me as well as any good friend I've ever had. Yesterday, in the midst of all my difficulties and distress over my thesis situation, they presented me with a card and flowers congratulating me on my impending graduation. It will not be easy to leave these people behind when I quit this job to go forward with my future. In the past, I haven't always been as good as I should have been about staying in contact with absent friends. I plan to do much, much better this time around.

Backstabbed

2008-04-24T13:27:00.003-05:00

As bad as being sick is, it's better than being backstabbed. That's how I feel at the moment because one of my thesis committee members, we'll call Dr. Randy, left me twisting in the wind. To explain, I have to backtrack a bit. When I started this thesis project, transcribing and analyzing an unknown text from a manuscript, I had no idea what it would turn out to be. So for my committee I picked a professor we'll call Dr. Rose, an expert in monasticism and an academic publishing editor, a professor we'll call Dr. T., whose specialty is medieval manuscripts and paleography, and Dr. Randy, who specializes in medieval Latin. I thought this made a lot of sense for a project that involved a medieval Latin manuscript from a nunnery.

Initially, I worked with Dr. T. on the text transcription because that is her area of expertise and she had been the one who taught me. At one point, however, Dr. Rose told me to ask Dr. Randy for some books on "editing" texts, which is quite a different thing than transcribing texts, evidently. At the time, this was a distinction I did not clearly understand. The books he recommended I didn't find very helpful, because they didn't seem to really answer any of the questions I had about how to represent this manuscript text on the printed page. Evidently, this is because these books were about how to produce a scholarly critical edition, where you collate all the manuscript versions of a single text. This is not what I was doing, and I'm still unclear why Dr. Randy was pushing me in that direction when there was absolutely no need for an "edition" of the text of this one, single manuscript. When he saw the way I had been transcribing the text, he objected to how I was doing it and told me to change a lot of things. Not knowing any better, essentially, I tried to follow his directions.

Fast forward to about a month ago. I finished transcribing the whole text and presented it to Dr. T. and the other two committee members for review. I essentially hear nothing from any of them about that part except for a couple relatively minor comments and corrections from Dr. Randy. As mentioned in a previous post, I knew I was not going to be ready to defend this Friday, so I sent out an e-mail to my committee members asking for a rescheduled date. In response, I received a rather ominous e-mail that I should come in and talk to Dr. Rose, the committee chair, because there are some concerns that need to be addressed.

I went in to meet with Dr. Rose, who informed me that the committee had met over the weekend to discuss my project. They did not notify me of this or include me, and God knows when I would have found out if I hadn't sent out that e-mail. In any case, they were very unhappy with the transcription of the manuscript. I needed to talk to Dr. T. about it further, according to Dr. Rose, because she could explain what the problem was. So I met with Dr. T. and she informed me that what I had produced was something between a transcription and edition but did not satisfy the requirements of either. I informed her that I initially started out with a "straight" transcription, but following Dr. Randy's requests I had made many changes to my initial method of working. The changes I made at his request constituted many, many hours of work and I was now being told that they were wrong and I had to undo them. Just to make it worse, he did not inform the other two committee members that I had been working at his direction or that I had shown him previous versions of the work that had been carried out differently.

I was pissed. Extremely. And nearly hysterical to learn of how much time I had wasted and how much would have to be redone. And I had to sit through a final exam for the class I was taking for Dr. Randy just a couple hours later. It was about all I could do just to be civil to him and concentrate on the exam. I went out to the bar afterwards, drank more than I really ought to have, and told my troubles to the professor who hosts that weekly event. He thought I had been treated pretty badly and should drop Dr. Randy from my thesis committee. This is not the first time that Dr. Randy has treated students pretty shabbily, and the sad irony is that he himself has been on the receiving end of similar treatment and should thus know better.

Once upon a time, Dr. Randy was in a history Ph.D. program at a large and prestigious California university. His advisor there was a renowned, if cranky, historian who later left a significant manuscript collection to the university. This advisor didn't do a very good job advising Dr. Randy or helping him prepare for his comprehensive examinations, a hurdle that Ph.D. students must pass after they conclude coursework and before beginning the dissertation. Dr. Randy did poorly on his comprehensives. In such a situation, there are two courses open to the examiners. They may fail the student outright and finally, or they may offer a second chance at a later date and give the student an opportunity to improve his or her preparation. The choice of which course is taken is typically determined by what the student's advisor has to say about it. Dr. Randy's advisor did not accept any responsibility for his inadequate preparation and did not advocate giving him a second chance. Dr. Randy nearly dropped out of graduate school altogether, but ultimately and at his wife's urging, switched to Classics. Now, you would think someone who had been so badly served by a weaselly professor unwilling to accept responsibility for the advice (or lack of it) given would not turn around and treat a student in a similar way.

I am still pissed off and think that Dr. Randy behaved very badly. I would like to drop him from my committee, but that may not be advisable at this stage because doing so could just delay things even more. I also requested not to include the transcription with my thesis at all because of the amount of work that would be required to fulfill the expectations now imposed. In what I suspect is a measure of her opinion about how I was treated, however, Dr. T. has actually volunteered to make the needed corrections to my work herself. Wrap your head around that for a moment. How many times have you known of a teacher or professor to correct a student's work personally? Yeah, me either. The committee chair and I are now in negotiations over when my reschedule date could be, but it looks as though I might have to register for one more semester because the three of them might not be available to sit in the same room again within my 30-day grace period. That part is no one's fault but mine, so I don't harbor resentment there. Well, maybe over all the time I wasted doing Dr. Randy's changes when I could have been working on the thesis itself. But if I have to register for Summer I purely because the three of them can't get together before May 26, I'm OK with that.

Don't worry, I am still walking in my commencement ceremony on Saturday. I'm upset as hell, but I haven't cried about it since yesterday now, so I'm doing better. I may spend some time fantasizing about interesting and creative ways to terrorize Dr. Randy, but I'll get over that too. I'm learning how to survive and carry on when professors make your life hell, which is no doubt a lesson that will come in handy at some point during graduate school. I'm going to try to enjoy my commencement weekend and not spend too much time plotting Dr. Randy's untimely demise.

Sick

2008-04-22T09:13:00.002-05:00

I hate being sick. My weekend started off well, but then I came down with something and on Sunday, felt as if I'd been hit by a truck. I missed work yesterday, and I still feel none too well today. Great timing, right in exam week. So, my thesis defense will have to be delayed. Fortunately I have a 30-day grace period after commencement to get everything taken care of. Hopefully I will feel human enough to at least work on the thesis in another couple of days.

The Joy of Research

2008-04-16T06:43:00.003-05:00

One of the things I love most, maybe THE thing I love most, about being involved in a research-oriented profession like history is that, essentially, you are rewarded in all kinds of ways for just following the promptings of that most human of all instincts, curiosity. When you decided to take up the study of history seriously and go to graduate school, nobody tells you what you have to research. People will tell you what NOT to do a dissertation on, because certain topics or areas of history are considered, well, unmarketable. But aside from that, the general idea is that you get curious enough about something to be willing to devote years of your life unraveling it. After all, if it was interesting and complicated enough to get you that curious, other people will probably be engaged by it too. You do not normally have to justify the utility or relevance of this curiosity to anyone, at least in history. Last night, at the Phi Alpha Theta induction, our speaker, the chair of the Department of History at my not-so-prestigious regional State U, talked about how he began researching the subjects he looks at, primarily German rural life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how it was transformed by the larger social and economic movements of the time. As do many historians, he fell ass-backwards into his topic through sheer chance and personal interest. He went to Germany on an exchange program of some kind during his earlier college years, since he'd picked German, more or less at random, to fulfill his college-level language requirement. In a small, rural village in Germany, he encountered a society like none he'd ever known before and became curious about everything from why houses were built as they were to why the villagers interacted the way they did. The process of answering these questions for himself, motivated by nothing but personal curiosity, led many years down the road to a field for graduate-level research in history. Just as a side note to any unfortunates who suffered from history teachers who taught history as though it were a bunch of dry "who," "what," "when," and "where" questions: that is not history, that is journalism. Real history concerns itself with t"how" and "why" questions that seek to explain and understand, not just report. Certainly, in order to understand why the houses in that German village were built the way they were, our speaker had to establish who built them and when, but that was just a jumping-off point that enabled him to start forming some plausible explanations. Those "facts" weren't inherently significant. Anyway, I digress. To return to the thread of our speaker's topic, he went on from there to talk about how other chance discoveries and the promptings of personal curiosity led him to ask different questions about the same general time and place and generated even more new research. For doing essentially nothing but pursuing these deeply personal interests, he has been rewarded with publications, teaching positions, and professional respect. I can't imagine what could be better.

Change Is Tough

2008-04-14T06:37:00.003-05:00

I always thought my daughter coped with change much better than I. She's very flexible and tends to be enthusiastic about new things. For a lot of reasons I won't go into, however, I took over the grocery shopping again from my husband this past weekend, and it didn't sit too well with her. She practically insisted that she go with me to the grocery store, which I sensed was not a great idea, but she's been on a vegetarian kick the last few months, so it's hard for me to know what to buy her. And I could not believe the way she acted. It seemed like every other thing she said was a variation on, "With Dad, we do it this way," with the unmistakable implication that my way was somehow wrong. When she wasn't telling me how she thought I ought to be doing things, she was demanding the most expensive brand of everything she wanted. I am still not entirely clear if this was because she is used to my husband indulging her or if she was just playing me (well, trying to, anyway) by claiming that her dad usually gets her all that stuff. I tell you, though, by the time I got home I was already about on the edge, but I was calming down and she had finally knocked it off a little. Then, we are sitting in the parking lot about to get out and take the groceries in and she starts up again: "How much was that yogurt I wanted again? It wasn't THAT much more expensive than the brand that was on sale." A few minutes more of arguing with her about that and I lost it completely. Two hours of non-stop gimmes and we-do-it-this-ways is apparently my official limit. I don't remember what I said but I am positive it was not nice. So I get out of the car, in the rain, and get two gallons of milk and a bag of cat litter out of the back seat and start carrying them in. Then she gets out of the car when I'm halfway across the parking lot, fixes me with an accusing glare, and says (wait for it) in her best snotty-teenager tone, "Would ya pop the trunk???" OK, I only THOUGHT I lost it before... I think it made quite an impression when both gallons of milk exploded on the pavement so I could throw the keys at, er, to her. The air was definitely a little frosty at our house the rest of Saturday, and I ain't talking about the weather. Yesterday, she cleaned house without being asked. Guilty conscience, I'm pretty sure. I'm still not taking her with me to the grocery store next time.

Liberated Women

2008-04-10T09:25:00.002-05:00

I was reflecting not too long ago that I really don't ever want to be in a position of economic dependence on a man again. It's been a while since I was, but I know darned well that some of the decisions I made early on in my marriage about what I would put up with were motivated, in part, by the fear of what might happen to me and my daughter without my husband to support us financially. I don't think you are really able to make decisions about a relationship freely when you are economically dependent on the other person. The power inequality in a relationship that results from economic dependence of one partner is surely what led feminists of the 1960s to label marriage as "legalized prostitution," or "institutionalized prostitution," since theirs was the heyday of idealizing this type of unequal relationship as the happy norm. I was recently startled to discover that one of the few authentic women's voices of the twelfth century, Heloise, voiced similar opinions.

Many people are familiar with the broad outlines of the story of Abelard and Heloise. Peter Abelard was a controversial teacher and writer who was involved in the burgeoning educational movement in Paris that would eventually produce the university as we know it now. Women did not attend the classes offered by masters, but had to be educated at home, if at all. Heloise was a young woman of great intellectual gifts and vibrant spirit whose uncle and guardian saw fit to ensure that she received the best education possible for a woman of her time. To that end, he hired Abelard to be her tutor, not without some maneuvering by Abelard to get himself put in that position, since he already had his eye on her. Peter Abelard wrote a startlingly frank description of how he seduced Heloise right under her uncle's nose in her uncle's own house. Apparently Heloise resisted up to a point, but we are all too familiar in the 21st century of the power a considerably older and much-admired teacher exercises over the emotions and affections of a young female student; Heloise was still in her teens at the time and Abelard in his thirties. The inevitable result, of course, is that Heloise became pregnant, and after she gave birth to their son, Peter Abelard married her secretly and sent her to a house of nuns to live in safety and privacy away from the wrath of her uncle. Her uncle naturally assumed that Abelard had dumped his wife off with the nuns to be rid of her, and her family were enraged with Abelard over the entire series of events. So, one night, they broke into Abelard's house while he was sleeping, dragged him out of bed, and relieved him of the weapon with which Abelard had committed his crime. Relieved of the possibility of sinning through lust ever again, Abelard became a monk and persuaded Heloise to take the veil and profess as a nun. Heloise eventually became the abbess of a community of nuns called the Paraclete. A number of letters between Heloise and Abelard survive from this period, and to all appearances, the couple had formed a bond of love as man and wife against all odds.

Abelard relates in one of those letters that Heloise had been opposed to their marriage, and he recounted some of the reasons she supposedly gave. Heloise was not the kind of woman to let Abelard do her talking for her, however, and in a responding letter gave a much fuller discussion of her views on the subject of marriage. They were, to put it mildly, startling. They would be startling from any person inhabiting the world of the twelfth century, much less a woman, and still less the abbess of a community of nuns. Heloise chastises Abelard in her letter for failing to represent fully her objections to marriage, saying, "You kept silent about most of my arguments for preferring love to wedlock and freedom to chains." She said that although "the name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding . . . sweeter for me will always be the word friend, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore." Heloise goes on to explain that the reason for her peculiar preference is that if a woman "marries a rich man more readily than a poor one, and desires her husband more for his possessions than for himself, she is offering herself for sale" and "would be ready to prostitute herself to a richer man, if she could." In other words, to be called a whore for loving a man freely without any expectation of gain is more honorable than to be called a wife for selling yourself to the highest bidder. Heloise asserts that this was the opinion of the ancient Greek female philosopher Aspasia, reputedly a brothel-keeper or courtesan and lover of the great Athenian statesman Pericles.

The discovery that women have been questioning the morality of the dependent model of marriage in this way since perhaps 400 B.C. is probably surprising to most of us, no matter our political or social persuasions. Marriage has perhaps never been the uncontested and monolithic institution that some pundits and blowhards would have us believe. We are now in a period of renewed debate about the nature and meaning of marriage that originated from a rather different quarter, but a historical perspective on the problem like that offered by Heloise reminds us that the institution of marriage has always been subject to ongoing discussion and criticism.

Congress Approaches

2008-04-09T11:18:00.003-05:00

I am getting SO excited because the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies is now only four weeks away! In the world of Medieval Studies, this a huge event, and in one of my previous posts I talked about how attending Congress (or as they call it everywhere else, "Kalamazoo") was a major part of my development as a scholar. I am all set and pre-registered to attend, but I haven't really spent a lot of time yet browsing the program booklet. There are so many things going on at Congress, the program has begun to resemble a small phone book. Things happen at Congress that I can't imagine occurring anywhere else. Like that time I ran into a Franciscan friar in the exhibits hall (aaaaah, the exhibits hall!) and realized that he was the same nice Irish guy who'd spent a goodly part of the previous evening, not to mention the early morning, drinking liberally and singing songs of questionable moral character at the somewhat notorious annual dinner of Irish medieval scholars down at the Food Dance Cafe. Graduate students and scholars in every field that touches on medieval studies turn out, and in a lot of fields that have only the most tenuous connection to the middle ages, like Shakespeare and (believe it or not) computer game design. You'll see nuns, monks, and friars in the habits of several different orders, though you notice the Observant Cistercians more often because they always stay in uniform, whereas the other orders tend to wear their habits only on the day they are actually doing a presentation. You can also see the occasional celebrity guest. I got a book autographed a year or two ago by Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, who has written a number of entertaining popular history books for the general reader. He's a very nice man, extremely witty in person, but much shorter than I expected. In the exhibits hall, you can buy books in a dozen or more languages from university presses, used bookshops, and specialty booksellers, as well as cookies made in monasteries, pages from illuminated manuscripts, CDs of medieval music, and on and on. A lot of people who live in Kalamazoo have only the faintest idea that Congress exists, and most who do know haven't a clue what goes on there. Like last year, when a very prominent Irish archaeologist of my acquaintance was boogeying down on the dance floor with his long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned halfway to his navel. I hadn't laughed that hard in years.

Too Good to be True, or How I Was Dumped by Txt Msg

2008-04-08T13:38:00.002-05:00

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been seeing someone. Yes, bad me I guess, since I'm not yet officially divorced, but that's the way it is. Anyway, I could not believe my luck to have been approached out of the blue by a guy who was my own age, possessed good work skills and work history, had been in a real relationship, and did not have kids and other issues that would tie him to the area. Plus, he seemed like an amazingly sensitive guy who really listened to me and respected my needs. I felt like we had a very honest and trusting relationship. The long-distance aspect was a little tough, since he lives a couple hours away currently, but I didn't expect that to be a permanent situation and we spent several whole weekends together. Plus, this is the digital age, right? We have cell phones, instant messaging, blogging, text messaging, Facebook, and a ton of other ways to be in contact. All of which we have used. A lot.

Then out of the blue he posted something on his blog about being too clingy, not being ready for a girlfriend, etc. That worried me a little, but he seems fairly prone to angst and second-guessing, which is probably normal for someone at the stage of divorces he is at. Then he stopped taking my phone calls and I got worried. Finally, thinking that he was almost certainly avoiding me but hoping that didn't mean what I thought it meant, I texted him and just asked him to text and let me know he was OK even if he didn't want to talk. So, at 1:30 a.m., while I am sound asleep the night before a thirteen-hour day of work and class he texts me to say, "I am as fine as I can be. I think its best 2 probably end our relationship. I just can't do the distance and sorry 4 that. We can talk in a few days if you want." If I hadn't been so angry, hurt, and tired I probably would have laughed out loud at the suggestion that I would call him after that. I mean, he did not extend me the consideration of discussing these issues with me and letting me know that he was having a problem. Just dumps this on me in the middle of the night. So I text back saying, "Thanks for waking me up at 1:30 to tell me you're dumping me. Have a nice life but don't plan on me ever being part of it." Believe it or not, he actually texted back to defend this behavior, saying "You asked me 2 let you know because you were worried. And if that is what you want OK." ROFLMAO.

Well, I figured that was it. Then I get to work this morning and because his blog was open in my web browser yesterday, it opened again today and I saw that he had retracted that previous post about not being ready for a girlfriend and put up a new post, not long after that texting bout, that talked about overcoming the issues of the past, etc. I wasn't clear about what he was trying to say with that, so when I saw him get on instant messaging, I asked him (very politely) but he just totally ignored me and either signed off or went on invisible mode to me. Nice. So, I sent him an e-mail explaining my feelings of hurt and betrayal over the fact that he had been having problems with our relationship and chose not to tell me, but just to dump me like that. I explained that I was not going to try to persuade him to change his mind since he had treated me pretty badly, but that I felt I deserved the courtesy of one phone call to help me get some closure on how this all went down. Since I didn't really understand what, if anything, he was trying to say with the blog post, I also told him that if he had second thoughts about ending things, I would be open to hearing about it as long as he calls me today. I have too much going on in my life to have my emotions pulled back and forth by someone who can't decide what he wants. Judging by the e-mail exchanges that have followed, he has chosen to regard this as an ultimatum rather than as my need for resolution and closure, and is therefore basically refusing to call me since that would apparently be some kind of concession on his part, gods forbid.

So there you have it. An entire relationship concluded electronically in this brave new digital world. Personally, I think it is particularly cowardly and gutless to dump someone by text message, so I guess I should be glad that I'm finding out he is this kind of person before I get any more invested in the relationship. Amusingly enough, he considers himself a "nice guy." I used to think that this meant a man who is honest, respectful, and cares about the feelings of others. I am starting to suspect, however, that it is some kind of code for a guy who is so insecure that he appears to be very focused on your needs and claims whatever you do or don't do is fine with him, gets resentful because you can't read his mind and realize it's not, and then dumps you out of the blue because he is dissatisfied with the relationship. So now I am a little perplexed about how to tell whether a guy is being honest about his needs and wishes or not. Clearly, I am better off without Mr. Passive-Aggressive, but how do I avoid repeating history? More questions for my therapist I guess.

If you're thinking that I don't exactly sound crushed, you're right. Of course, I cared about him a lot, but that's a two-way street and such callous behavior and lack of character pretty much killed any feelings I had. I have too much self-respect and too much going on in my life to spend my time crying in my beer, anyhow. Also, in the words of one of the guys I stopped seeing when I got serious with Mr. Passive-Aggressive, I have options. I'm far from desperate in the companionship department. I'm just back to square one as far as a more serious relationship goes, and hopefully a little wiser about another incarnation of Stupid Man Tricks into the bargain. (Sorry, guys, there are Stupid Woman Tricks, too, I'm not being sexist!) Once again, though, I seem to have trouble with the fundamental life lesson that anything that seems to good to be true, usually is.

Why I Care About Medieval History, and So Should You

2008-04-07T09:03:00.002-05:00

Explaining why you care so deeply about your particular academic specialty tends to be an awkward question, I think. When I say that I study medieval history, and especially issues of gender and spirituality in the tenth through twelfth centuries in northwestern Europe, people usually look at me with pity, confusion, or total incomprehension. Part of the reason for this, I know, is that most people were not taught history in a way that was engaging and involving and seemed relevant to contemporary concerns. Another part of the reason is that whatever pre-digested pablum passing for history they were fed in high school and/or college taught them a completely incorrect story of European history that goes something like this:

First there were the Greeks, and they were totally awesome because a tiny fraction of them practiced a form of government that sort of vaguely resembles representative democracy, like we have in the glorious old U.S. of A. And they had some nice art. Then, there were the Romans, who were pretty great because they created this really big empire, conquering lots of people and imposing their language and culture on a huge swath of the known world. And they built some really nice buildings. Then Jesus was born and lots of people became Christians and the Romans persecuted them, but they won out anyway and the Roman emperors became Christian. Then the Romans were conquered by a bunch of smelly, hairy German barbarians and European culture went to hell in a handbasket for a thousand years. During the Dark Ages, some rich people lived in castles and beat the hell out of each other, the Catholic Church pushed everyone around, and the poor people lived and died in squalor when they weren't getting the hell beat out of them or being pushed around by the Church. Art, culture, and science were suppressed by these ignorant, benighted people. Then, there was the Renaissance, hurray! Reason, enlightenment, and education returned to Europe, the arts flourished once more, and science was born. They "discovered" the (inconveniently inhabited) Americas. These people were like us! They were individuals with free intellects, unfettered by primitive superstition and engaged in a free search for Truth and Beauty. During their time, Europe becomes the Europe we know and understand, and their enlightened and rational descendants eventually went on to found the glorious U.S. of A.

Hopefully, some of you got a version of history that isn't quite this much of a caricature, but I know damned well this is pretty close to what most of you heard. Well, those of you who bothered to stay awake anyhow. The problem is, it's basically a load of horse pucky. This story of history is influenced by many different elements including American triumphalism and manifest destiny, Victorian anti-Catholicism, and fifteenth-century Italian snobbery. If there is any period that can be rightfully called the "Dark Ages" at all, it's only the couple of centuries after the Roman political order finally dissolved, replaced by the emerging kingdoms of the Germanic peoples the Romans hired to defend them from other "barbarians." It might, I repeat, MIGHT be appropriate to call that period a Dark Age simply because the details of how it all happened are quite murky on account of the fact that the Huns, Goths, Franks, Saxons, etc. were people of energy and action who did not spend a lot of time penning propaganda accounts of their activities like the Romans did.

The story of the Middle Ages, so called by relatively modern historians because they regarded it as an inferior period between the Roman Empire and the "Renaissance," is really the story of how people of very different languages and cultures created a new and unified political, social, cultural, and religious order from a startling diversity of elements. This story is, of course, full of missed opportunities, false starts, and roads not taken as well as of soaring achievements that continue to be vital elements of our modern culture. One could point out, for instance, that the book, the university, and the concept of romantic love were invented in this period. It's also a story of the ongoing tension between cultural unity and cultural diversity. Equally fascinating are the things that could have happened in this period and for various reasons didn't. An issue that interests me particularly is the existence of multiple understandings of womanhood in the earlier part of the period, and how and why some models that proposed a much more equal status for women failed to make the cut in the long term.

Despite what you probably learned in school, the story of the middle ages is as much the story of Western civilization, the story of "us" if you will, as any other part of history. The story of how these people, great and small, created an entirely new society out of such diverse elements, and of the ongoing tension between unity and diversity, has obvious and continuing relevance to the diverse society and world we live in today. I hope that when I myself begin to teach, in another couple of years, I will be able to communicate this story of the middle ages to students.

The Backstory

2008-04-04T09:09:00.002-05:00

I had an interesting encounter yesterday afternoon with my primary advisor's secretary. I had to pay her for a book I needed for class, and while I was taking care of that, I chatted with her a little because I've always thought she was a nice lady and my time at Western is winding down. She was stunned when I mentioned in passing that I'm an undergraduate there. She apparently had always assumed that I was a Ph.D. student. I told her I'm a late bloomer. There's some truth to that, but really it's just that the story of how I came to be just finishing my B.A. at age 35 is complicated. Most of the story of how that all happened is in the personal statement that I had to write and send to all these graduate programs I applied to, and I thought I'd recycle that into a nice blog post to fill my readers in on the backstory, as it were. Be forewarned; this is a long one.

The first time I felt with absolute certainty that I wanted to spend the rest of my life researching, writing, and teaching medieval history came at a moment when I also felt as stupid as I ever have in my life. It came when I was attending the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2003. Although I had not finished my Bachelor’s degree and was not even enrolled in university, I thought attending a paper session would be interesting. It was, but I was quickly surprised to discover that many of the papers I heard were completely over my head, even in areas of history I thought I knew a lot about. I felt intimidated, but also excited. I took notes, saved handouts, and spent the succeeding months doing the reading and research necessary to understand what I had heard. The milieu of academic discourse at the Congress was something I yearned to be a part of, and experiencing it, even from the fringes, helped fire my determination to return to my studies despite the difficulties in my way.

My path to the moment of certainty at that Congress had been unconventional. My academic record reflects my early difficulties making the transition to university life. I was dual-enrolled in community college during my final year of high school and earned excellent grades. I did not successfully adapt to life at Bowling Green State University, however, and after I withdrew failing at the end of my freshman year, I returned to community college. I was later diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which had undoubtedly contributed to my difficulties as I had never received treatment for it, and returned to four-year studies at Eastern Michigan University. Then my studies were interrupted, I feared permanently, when I was hospitalized due to a serious horseback riding accident in August 1995. I could not attend classes the following semester and I was also without insurance at the time of the accident; after my recovery it was necessary for me to work full time.

My passion for medieval history really emerged during the years following my accident, when I thought that I might never be able go back to school. While working full time, I spent my leisure hours reading scholarly books on ancient and medieval history and the related subjects of archaeology, comparative religion, and literature. In the course of my reading, I developed a particular interest in the history of northwestern Europe, women's history, church history, and legal history of the early and high Middle Ages. I joined scholarly Internet discussion lists so I could ask questions, and I started studying Latin and modern Irish on my own as well. After moving to Kalamazoo, I discovered the International Congress of Medieval Studies and eventually found the courage to venture beyond the Exhibits Hall and, as I have noted, into the scholarly sessions. My desire to be part of the world I experienced at Congress motivated me to make the changes in my life that would allow me to return to school.

It was still necessary for me to work full-time while attending Western Michigan University, so I have attended classes part time year-round. This has allowed me, however, to select courses based on their value to my long-term educational goals rather than their convenience to my schedule. Organizational, time management, and computer skills I learned in my years of full-time work proved just as valuable to me in school as on the job. I also found that the years I spent reading and studying independently prepared me well to take many advanced classes. Although undergraduates at Western are not permitted to enroll for 6000-level graduate courses, many instructors permitted me to take them under alternate 4000- or 5000-level course numbers and complete substantially the same course work as the graduate students. . . . I have now attended paper sessions at Congress for five years in succession, and every Congress has strengthened my enthusiasm and resolve to participate in the world of research and intellectual discourse that I first discovered there.

Speechmaking

2008-04-03T06:42:00.003-05:00

One of the things I managed to take care of last night at our little event at the History Department was planning the order of events for the upcoming induction ceremony for our local chapter of the Phi Alpha Theta history honor society. In the process of doing that, I realized that the outgoing President (that would be me) is expected to make a brief address. Crap. As if I don't have enough to do, now I have to write some kind of little speech as well. I wouldn't say I am exactly crazy about speechmaking to begin with. I don't mind getting up in front of an audience and talking; becoming a professor would probably be a really horrible idea if I had a problem with that. It's more the issue of coming up with something to say that will be relevant. I don't need to persuade this audience, made up of people who love history enough to join a geeky honor society, of the value of studying history, that's for sure. Maybe instead I can talk about the importance of taking risks and following your bliss. That is also something I know a little about, and the pages of history books are replete with people who took risks instead of playing it safe. As I reflect back on my life, I think it's likely that some of the personal decisions that have made me most unhappy in the long run were decisions where I took what I believed to be the safest course. Probably a lot of young men and women in the audience a little less than two weeks from now will be under a lot of pressure from parents or other family members, as I was, to play it safe and do something "practical" with their education. If I could persuade even one of them to think a little beyond that and follow the promptings of his or her heart instead, I'll have said something really worthwhile.

The Sprint to the Finish Line

2008-04-02T06:36:00.003-05:00

I feel now like I'm in the home stretch, the last few hundred yards maybe, of a marathon. I just have to keep going just a little bit longer to finish, but fear that I'm running out of energy and will fall short. It's really hard because it seems as if the closer I get to commencement (24 days away now) the more things there are to do: honors banquets, induction ceremonies, ordering graduation announcements, hunting down all my honor cords, etc. At the same time, I still have my classes to keep up on and my thesis to finish (22 days to my defense date) and, oh yeah, life. Yesterday I got into it with my daughter a little on the phone because she called me at work basically to nag me for about the fourth or fifth straight day about getting her hair cut. OK, she does need a haircut, but frankly I feel like if I take responsibility for one more thing, my head is going to explode. Overdramatic? Sure, granted. But take today: work from 8 to 4:30, then rush over to campus for a thing going on in the History Department from like 5 to 7. For that, I will also need to drag in a lot of crap from my car, like tee shirts and stuff for the student organization I am theoretically president of. At nine tonight, I really should go to the meeting of another honor society I belong to pick up my honor cords, but I just won't have time, because I also have to write a substantial paper sometime today. And submit the design for programs for an induction I have to more or less run in a couple more weeks. I'm sure there are several other things I've forgotten that I need to do today. And today is fairly typical. I'll also being doing all this on about five hours of sleep and lots of coffee. I'm also getting really lonely for my boyfriend. He lives a couple hours away, so it's not practical to see him unless I can pretty much devote a whole weekend to it. It's difficult to carve a whole weekend out of my schedule right now, but difficult or not, I think I will have to. Anyway, the finish line is in sight and no matter how tired I am I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other for 24 more days...

Divorce Sucks

2008-04-01T06:38:00.002-05:00

There's really no other way to put it. Even when it's what you want and long overdue, as in my situation, it's just difficult and awkward and scary. The really hard emotional part is months in the past for me, back when I was making my decision at the end of August. Ever since I informed my soon-to-be ex-husband, whom we'll call "Wayne," of my decision, though, life has seemed very strange as I struggle to figure out what kind of relationship I am supposed to have with this person now. We've now, as of this writing, spent nearly fifteen years of our lives together and it's hard to figure out how I am supposed to feel about and relate to him now. Don't get me wrong, there has been a huge sense of relief because a lot of things that used to be issues in our relationship aren't anymore. If he eats stuff his doctor tells him not to, or doesn't get his oil changed, or stays out late at a friend's house, I don't have to care about it anymore. Since we still live in the same household, though, there are a lot of other things that I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to care about or not. Should I be uncomfortable for him to see me in the bathtub now? Should it bother me when he changes clothes in front of me? I don't know the answers to those kinds of questions. It makes for a very weird and somewhat tense living situation, that's for sure. Then there's the scary part. I was twenty years old and already married and divorced once when I started living with Wayne. I had lived away from my parents for one school year, during which I had some serious emotional problems and ended up failing out, and for a few months while living with my first husband (and two of his friends and his brother's wife and her baby) before he entered the service. I had lived alone in any meaningful sense for part of just that one school year, because I had a dorm room to myself for most of the year, and had never lived independently and supported myself. So, now that I am leaving this dysfunctional but safe and predictable relationship of fifteen years, I can't help but be afraid that I will screw everything up if I'm on my own. Never mind the fact that I supported myself, my husband, and my daughter on my income alone for about four years while going to school part-time as well. Never mind that I was solely responsible for making sure bills got paid, budgeting, banking, car insurance, and on and on. I still don't really believe, on some level, that I'm capable of handling things on my own. On any logical level, this is a ridiculous fear and I know that, but that doesn't seem to help. I had originally thought that it was fine with me if Wayne stuck around until I was ready to move for school, but now I'm not so sure. I'm uncomfortable with the situation and sort of feel like I need to be on my own for a while, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I've encouraged Wayne to start looking for work in the Chicago area and to move as soon as he finds something, so maybe this is a problem I won't have to solve, for once. I can't say that I'm very optimistic about that possibility, though, given his past history of being unmotivated and unreliable. Perhaps once the divorce is final next month I will make some changes. Good thing I'm in counseling, huh?

It's Official

2008-03-31T11:35:00.004-05:00

I have (finally) made my decision about which graduate school offer to accept. My final, lingering hesitation had to do with the reputation of my prospective dissertation advisor, whom we will call Dr. Diana for purposes of this blog. One of my current advisors suggested that she has a reputation of being difficult to work with, but wasn't able to provide any specifics at all. Dr. Diana has only one graduate student under her supervision currently at the university I'm considering, because she herself joined the faculty so recently. That student had nothing but good things to say about her, but I didn't feel confident that I could rely on the opinion of just one current student. Another current advisor of mine asked me how many students Dr. Diana has successfully mentored to their Ph.D.'s and I really didn't have an answer for that. With no real specific goal in mind, I Googled Dr. Diana's real name and several pages of search results in, I found someone's c.v. who had listed Dr. Diana as her dissertation advisor. I could see just from skimming the document that this woman had done quite well in her academic career. It is less than two years since her degree was awarded as I write this, and according to the c.v. she is in a tenure-track job at a private college. Handily, her c.v. also included the e-mail at her current institution. So, I thought, why not e-mail her requesting to discuss her experiences working with Dr. Diana? The worst that could happen is that she would tell Dr. Diana I contacted her. That would be fine as long as I am circumspect in what I say. I wrote her a carefully crafted e-mail explaining that because of the circumstances, I hadn't had much opportunity to discuss Dr. Diana with current students of hers and would value a chance to talk to someone who had more experience of her. She wrote back almost right away with a time and number to call. I called this morning and missed her a couple times, but she then returned my call and I got a chance to ask a few careful questions. This former student clearly thinks very highly of Dr. Diana and remains in contact with her. The brief summation of what she said is that Dr. Diana is tough and demanding and will make you a better researcher and a better writer. This former student came into the Ph.D. program at Dr. Diana's former institution with a Master's and completed her doctoral degree in just five years, which is impressive in itself. I carefully inquired whether she felt that Dr. Diana had facilitated her rapid progress, and she responded affirmatively. She basically came right out and said that she would highly recommend working with Dr. Elliott. So there you have it. Tough and demanding is perfect in my book. So, I signed into their website and made it official today. Purple it is.

Thoughts on Word Processing

2008-03-31T06:40:00.003-05:00

I got about fifteen pages of text banged out over the weekend on my thesis, which is not too shabby at all. That is a significant chunk of the overall project. The part I finished over the weekend included a physical description of the manuscript and an examination of all the texts in it. Most of my work I do on an inexpensive Acer laptop I picked up not quite a year ago. It did come with Windows Vista, which I pretty much despise for the resource-hogging, over-hyped, under-performing dog that it is. I've actively avoided installing other Micro$oft products on it, however. You may be wondering how this is possible, since most people labor under the sad impression, actively fostered by Micro$oft, that there are no other viable office packages out there. Wrong. In fact, there is a really terrific one that does everything the Office suite does, can open and save files in the standard Office formats, comes in versions to run on every operating system imaginable, can even be run off a USB flash drive, and is FREE. Yes, you read that right. I am speaking, of course, of OpenOffice. I have found it to be more reliable and feature-rich than Word by a mile, and the interface is so similar to all the older versions of Word that I find it much easier to use than the newest version, Word 2007. And I'm not the only one who finds the Word 2007 interface confusing. The fact that it doesn't come with the triple-digit price tag for Office is a major plus as well, for those who are too squeamish or lack the technical knowledge to flout software copyright restrictions. So, OpenOffice writer is my choice for all my scholarly papers. Something that can sometimes be problematic for me as a medievalist, however, is the need to quote sources in their original languages or include certain symbols or abbreviations from medieval manuscripts into a word-processed document. If I am just quoting from Latin, this is less of a problem, but fairly often I need to quote a source in Old or Middle English. There is where things get sticky because the Old English alphabet isn't fully or adequately represented in any of the standard fonts supplied for Windows. You can get fonts that supply only these letters adequately, but then you have to mix different fonts in your document, which isn't an optimal solution. Happily, there is a font that does everything I need and much, much more. It's called Junicode, and one of the things I love about it is that it has characters for every European alphabetic system one could possibly imagine, as well as a whole range of characters that are extremely useful for closely representing what one sees on a manuscript page. I find it to be a very handsome typeface for general use, so I tend to just do everything in Junicode. Because this font is a Unicode font, it works on all different operating systems as well, so again it doesn't matter if you are using an Apple or Linux machine. One caveat, however, is that if you have a Windows machine, you probably shouldn't install the Junicode italic file. It appears to cause some problems and oddly, you don't actually need it to display text in italics. I don't really understand that, but I know it's true from personal experience. So, I have an excellent word processing program and an excellent font that does everything I need, but one small issue remains: sending my work to others electronically. As you SHOULD know, in case you don't, when you send someone else a file made with a certain font, if the person you send it to doesn't have the same font, all your fancy characters will not show up for him or her, or show up as something else. So, what to do? Well, if you have OpenOffice writer, this is again not a problem because it comes with the capability to export to Adobe .pdf files built in. This imbeds your special characters in the file and preserves all your painstaking formatting efforts. It also ensures that the recipient can open your file no matter what kind of computer he or she is running, since .pdf files are standard across all operating systems and there are free .pdf readers available for every kind of computer. So, there you have it. If you do a lot of multilingual word processing, I highly recommend OpenOffice suite and the Junicode font.

Why You Don't Have to Pay for Grad School

2008-03-28T06:55:00.002-05:00

One question people outside academia, as well as a lot of fellow undergraduates, ask me an awful lot is why schools are going to pay me to go there rather than the other way around. I don't work inside academia, so I can't really answer that question in full. I'm not clear about where all the funds come from that are used to pay the stipends of Ph.D. students, or why some schools have more resources allocated for this purpose than others. I do know that the simple economic facts are that it takes about eight years in North America to earn a Ph.D. in history, on average. No, that's not counting the time it takes to get your Bachelor's. In 2005-6, the average salary for a new assistant professor, the sort of job that history Ph.D.'s aspire to start at, was $45,529 at public institutions. Would you pay your own tuition for an additional eight years in order to get a job that paid that wage? Me either. The assumption is that if people were not supported to go to graduate school in fields that lead to a career teaching in the university, not enough students would pursue those fields. I'm not really persuaded that this is actually true, since only 56.7% of new Ph.D. holders in 2005 reported having definite employment offers at the time of their graduation, which was actually up from previous years, but that's another issue. Another factor in the reason Ph.D. students are funded is that they have become an integral part of the functioning of university departments. At the funding levels they are supported at, in many universities, graduate students represent a source of cheap labor for everything from teaching classes to babysitting the children of their advisors. Furthermore, their presence is required to bolster a type of power structure in which the department functions as a feudal lordship and graduate students are the serfs. Commonly a single advisor holds a great deal of power over his or her students, and this can have disastrous results if that advisor behaves in an autocratic and/or capricious manner. The exploitation of graduate students is an ethical issue routinely addressed by professional organizations across academia. So being paid to go to graduate school is certainly not necessarily all rosy. However, the point here ultimately is that if your undergraduate major is in the field you want to get your Ph.D. in, you get reasonably good grades and GRE scores, have decent writing skills, and adequate language preparation, there is no reason you should pay for your own Ph.D. education in the humanities. There are plenty of programs that guarantee funding for admitted students, and it does not take all that much effort to determine which ones do this. You just look at the "graduate education" section of the website of the schools you are interested in. Depending on the program you enter, you can expect to begin working as a teaching assistant during your first or second year of study, and eventually as an instructor. Yes, this does provide a source of cheap instructors for universities. However, it also trains a Ph.D. student to perform the chief duty that university professors are essentially being paid to do. It's similar to the employment of prospective schoolteachers as student teachers. So, there is the fundamental explanation of why, when I start Ph.D. study this fall, it won't be on my dime.

The Thesis Progresses

2008-03-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

I am happy to report that the really nit-picky and detail work of the thesis project is done. The transcription of the text is completed, all 46 pages worth! Yesterday, I got back into writing the narrative part again. Nothing sexy, just the detailed description of the manuscript itself, the handwriting, and so on. The hardest part of that is just finding a logical organization for all the information I have to discuss. I wrote about three pages on that subject and thought I was more or less done, but then realized that I had not even discussed the punctuation in the manuscript. In case you are wondering why anyone would care about the punctuation, the punctuation system we use today developed during the Middle Ages. At one time, texts were written without punctuation or even word separation. Just imagine trying to read, say, War and Peace without punctuation or spaces between words. Not a pretty thought. Anyway, exciting or not, progress is being made. At least three of my severely overdue library books can now be returned. I may have to sell my firstborn into slavery to pay off my library fines by the time this is all over with, but I think that will be a small price to pay. Just kidding! My former Latin professor and my former paleography instructor are (hopefully) reviewing my transcription work, and I'm hoping I won't have to make a ton of changes to that part. After all, the clock is ticking since I now have about four weeks left to defend my thesis...

Bar Night

2008-03-25T06:35:00.003-05:00

Today is Tuesday, which means it's my bar night. I will put in a full eight hours at work today, starting at 8 a.m., then head over to campus to write my little paper that's due tonight, attend my two and a half hour Honors film class, and then head to the Corner Bar with one of my professors and most of his graduate students. Starting in September, when my prof first invited me, this has become a regular thing on my schedule. I was and am the only undergraduate in this crowd, but I took a grad-level class from him last semester so I'm sort of given a special dispensation. True, in the grand scheme of things it would probably be better if I didn't go drinking until the wee hours on a work night, but especially with all the stress I'm under it's a major outlet for me to let my hair down and say what's on my mind. I still go to work the next day, even if it's on four hours of sleep, and I get a chance to spend a lot of "off the record" time with graduate students. I've learned a lot--possibly too much--about weird departmental politics this way. I've also learned how relationships, even mentor-mentee relationships, can be strengthened through casual socializing. Of course, most professors would not go out to a local dive for beers (and sometimes tequila shots) with their students, and there are no doubt critics who would view this kind of interaction as inappropriate. However, I have been told several times that as a graduate student, I will be viewed as a potential future colleague by my professors. I think this professor definitely views his students, including me, in that light, and I've realized that really means a lot to me. I don't expect to go out drinking with my professors at the university I'm going to attend as a graduate student, to be honest. And I think I will miss it.

Misadventures in Tech Support, Continued

2008-03-21T11:56:00.003-05:00

The tech support guy installed an old, standard 3.5 floppy drive in one of the computers and it works fine. The header, controller, and cable for it were all there. The person who came down here from the capitol to supervise our upgrade lied to me, plain and simple. I am not for state work being done by non-state employees, but our so-called tech support is pathetic and we ought to be able to take bids from outside companies for it. Note to self: On your last day, write a nasty e-mail to that woman who lied to you.

Misadventures in Tech Support

2008-03-21T11:21:00.004-05:00

I'm having an interesting day at work today observing the tribulations of a co-worker whose Windows user profile has become corrupted for the third time since we all got new computers about a year ago. Now, I work for state government in a certain Great Lakes state that is shaped like a mitten. All our computer technical support is contracted to another state agency that does nothing but tech support. We pay them a set fee based on how many computers we have. Their one solution to this type of problem is always just to re-image your hard drive. In other words, erase everything on it and put Windows and all your applications back on in a standard, one-size-fits-all installation configuration. It's pretty clear to me that since this has happened THREE TIMES since my co-worker got her new computer, the hard drive is faulty. No one else in our department has had this type of problem, and there is no reason on earth to get this much corruption of your data, short of having a bad hard drive. The funny thing is, our friendly neighborhood tech support guy clearly knows this is the case but apparently he's not supposed to replace hard drives. He told me that he would run diagnostics on it, but the last time there was a hard drive problem, the drive passed diagnostics and the company who sold us the computers refused to admit that it was bad. If they won't replace the hard drive under warranty, someone would actually have to shell out 30 bucks or so for a new one. Well, we can't have that! Now comes the really fun part of my story. When we got these new computers, not a single one had a 3.5 inch floppy drive despite the fact that in the department where I work we have, oh, around a THOUSAND floppy disks full of patient records that we must access on a regular, basically daily, basis. Now, you are no doubt asking yourself, "Why, in 2007, were you guys storing critical confidential information on 3.5 floppies?" Well, that would be because when we started doing it back in 2001 or so, we were refused the extra space on the network server to store this data. The solution to this current dilemma was for them to provide us with an external floppy drive with a USB connection temporarily so we could move the data off the floppies to--guess where?--you got it, the network drive. At the time they came up with that solution I asked why we couldn't just pull a couple 3.5 inch drives out of the old computers, which were destined for the junk heap basically, and put them in the new computers. No can do, I was told, these are so new they don't even have the header for a floppy drive on the motherboard. For the uninitiated, 3.5 floppy drives use a different connection than anything else in your computer. So, we were stuck with the external one. Well, they recently reclaimed the external floppy drive and we still have hundreds of disks that haven't been copied to the network drive. So, they told us they were going to install a 3.5 drive in one of the computers we have. What? But, they told me that's not possible. So I asked the tech support guy today while he was up here re-imaging my co-worker's drive, and he says these computers DO have a header for a standard 3.5 floppy drive. What gives? Well, he is over there cracking the box right now to install the 3.5 drive, so I guess we'll see. I will keep you posted.

My Damned B.A. Thesis

2008-03-21T06:37:00.003-05:00

The weeks left until I am supposed to graduate are rapidly dwindling and I have a serious problem to deal with. My B.A. Honors thesis is nowhere near finished. The original idea was that I was going to transcribe this unpublished Latin text from an early-twelfth-century manuscript, examine it closely, and then write an insightful paper concerning the historical debate about the Latin skill of English nuns in the twelfth century. The unique thing about the text I'm working with, you see, is that we know it was actually physically written by a woman, because she signed the manuscript as its scriptrix, which is the Latin term for a female scribe. So, back in August, I ordered images of the text from the Oxford Bodleian Library, where the manuscript lives. The text itself is fully transcribed now. Basically, this means that I typed it up in a nice, clear Roman font into a computer file that's quite a bit easier to read than the original, heavily abbreviated handwriting of our scriptrix. That's some of her writing above there in a little snippet from my actual manuscript. Actually, by the standards of medieval manuscript writing, this is a clear and beautiful "hand" that is really quite easy to read with a little practice. All this handwriting I have now typed up, as I mentioned, so that part of the project is basically done. When it comes to writing an intelligent paper about it, however, I have a truly epic case of writer's block. This is bad. Very bad. If I don't finish my thesis in another three weeks or so, I will not be able to graduate on time. I have stacks of extremely overdue library books in my bedroom that I need to write the thing. Part of writing this blog is actually an effort to break the writer's block. Recently, someone reminded me of St. Anselm's wisdom that anything which exists is inherently more perfect than anything that does not exist. I've clearly somehow let the perfect become the enemy of the good and allowed my anxiety about doing it "right" to short-circuit me from getting it done AT ALL. This has to stop, and I just have to get the damned thesis written. I intend to put some serious hours in on that over the weekend, so wish me luck.

My Next Campus Visit

2008-03-20T06:42:00.003-05:00

I was supposed to have a campus visit at a certain public university in the Land of Lincoln, but with some of the other programs I've been accepted to, it was basically out of the running. I had other, far more pleasant ways to blow a couple of free days, so I did that instead. This means I showed up in Evanston, Illinois a couple hours before the meet and greet dinner to kick off a recruitment event for a rather prestigious private university in that neck of the woods. I followed my directions, which called for me to drive all the way up Lakeshore. I suspect this was not the most efficient way to reach the hotel, but it was a beautiful day for a drive up Lakeshore for Chicago in March. Clear and sunny. Really. I got a nice view of the new Trump International Tower under construction, which I actually hadn't heard about. Driving by, I was astounded to see this building under construction which was clearly taller already than the Sears Tower. Anyway, I arrived at the hotel the recruits (they call us "prospectives") were being put up at. Oh, my. I was not expecting a four-star hotel, I must say. After a minor misadventure navigating the nest of one-way and angled streets to get my car back to the valet parking, I got settled into my room and dressed for dinner. That took place a few blocks away at an Italian bistro called Gio's that was also pretty darned nice. I saw some familiar faces from my previous campus visit. Dinner (a Boston lettuce and pear salad with grated fresh Parmesan and pine nuts, grilled sirloin steak, Portobello mushroom, Tuscan potatoes, and pear crostada, all with a nice red wine) was followed by drinks at the casual bar back at the hotel, which did unfortunately have poor service late on a Sunday, not to mention a dismal beer selection. I ended up with Smithwick's, so it could have been worse, but still . . . no Guinness? Unheard of. The next morning I showed up for breakfast in the building that serves as home to the History Department. Dark wood paneling, parquet floor, huge fireplace, busts and oil paintings of dead guys . . . pretty much what a member of the peasantry such as myself expects from a Really Classy Private University. If you think I was a little, teensy bit intimidated, you'd be right. Then, lots of meetings, punctuated by lunch, which was a sort of fancy taco bar setup. Very nice people, and the meeting with my prospective adviser went really well. My last meeting is with a professor who is now more or less retired, and as I looked around his office while he took a phone call (I love to look at what books professors keep in their offices) I spied a few small, framed photographs on the wall. One turned out to be Charles Homer Haskins and the other to be perhaps his foremost student Joseph Strayer. These are names that need no introduction for students of medieval history. Turns out that the gentleman I was meeting with had been one of Strayer's students at Princeton. Wow. So, back down in the imposing wood-paneled conference room or ballroom or whatever it was, we were treated to a quartet of highly articulate presentations by faculty members about how they came to study what they study, followed by a dinner of pizza, salad, and beer. I was back in my element then. A bit later, a couple grad students helped us negotiate the El down to the Andersonville neighborhood, where the St. Patrick's Day party was being held. The party was a lot of fun and I met some really interesting people, both in History at my prospective school and not, such as the husband of one of the students, who is also a math professor at the other Really Classy Private University in Chicago and who is currently running for a state office. And he juggles. Limes, in this case. I enjoyed a number of bottles of Goose Island Oatmeal Stout, and I both that and the Honker's Ale I had with pizza earlier were very tasty. It was oddly comforting to know that there are good local brews there. Four of us took a cab home after the party since it was after 1 a.m. when we left and El service is pretty sketchy that late. My drive home on Tuesday was pretty unproblematic, about three hours total including a quick stop for food and gas. All in all, it was a great visit and this place has definitely moved way to the top of the leaderboard.

My First Campus Recruitment Visit, Part the Second

2008-03-13T06:44:00.005-05:00

To continue the story of my first campus visit, Saturday morning I slept in late since the first thing I had to do that day was a neighborhood tour at one o'clock. It actually started at the airport since we had to drop someone off first, but then got going in St. Paul. St. Paul looks like a typical Midwestern city. There are lots of working-class neighborhoods and nineteenth-century storefronts. The high points of St. Paul are probably the capitol building, which we saw only from a distance, and St. Paul's Cathedral, which is the center of one of the nicer neighborhoods there. Crossing the Mississippi River back into Minneapolis proper, we drove through several of the residential neighborhoods favored by students at the U, and some of them were pretty darned cool. Lots of coffee shops, art galleries, vintage clothing stores, etc. Then we drove around a bit in the downtown, which is much newer than St. Paul's downtown. One of the coolest things about it is the enclosed skyways that connect the buildings, as you can see in the picture. Definitely a benefit on those cold days. After the tour concluded, I had a little down time to hang out and then it was off to a dinner for all the current and prospective grad students in medieval history. I figured that this would be the time when the students would get liquored up and spill all the department's dirty laundry, but they really didn't have any salacious or even mildly interesting gossip. Oh, well. Most of what they had to say, I already knew from other sources. After the dinner, we went to a party for all current and prospective history grad students. Over some beers, I finally got a tiny bit of real dirt about which profs in my field are liked and disliked. No stout at the party, so I tried Leinenkugel's Creamy Dark lager, which was surprisingly good. I'm not a fan of lagers, generally speaking. I spent a lot of time also in deep conversation with a fellow prospective, about modern Irish history and Irish nationalism, of all things. It was sometime after one by the time I got back to the hotel. I didn't have anything at all on the schedule Sunday except the flight back home, so I slept in late again, packed up and checked out, had some lunch, and caught my ride back to the airport. My flight was a little late back to Grand Rapids, but it all worked out since my ride was late finding the airport. So, the final conclusion I've come to is that the program seems OK, and the people are nice, but I'm just not sure. It seems like I should have felt more of "spark" or something. Maybe I'm just not being realistic, I don't know. I am hoping I will have a better sense of things after my next campus visit in a few more days.

My First Campus Recruitment Visit, Part the First

2008-03-11T06:50:00.004-05:00

I must say, my first campus recruitment visit was a pretty draining experience. It's sort of a strange experience to be around so many other bright people in your general field and constantly be asked, "So, what's your field?" I sort of have a ten-second elevator speech down now suitable for medievalists and non-medievalists alike. Anyway, back to the narrative thread of my visit. After my arrival on Thursday, I didn't really do anything but settle in and get to know my roommate since the event that was supposed to be on that evening had been canceled. And also, struggle to get the internet connection working since I had foolishly brought only a 10 Mbit/s patch cable and the stupid hotel had no wireless internet service, only an Ethernet port. Other than that, the hotel room was nice, with a pretty good view of part of downtown Minneapolis from the thirteenth floor, as you can see in the picture here. The next day was busy, busy, busy starting with an 8:30 a.m. breakfast. When we went outside for breakfast, it was cold enough that I had that sort of crackly feeling like the lining of my nostrils was freezing a little. Yeah, as cold in early March at 8ish as it has ever been this past winter in Kalamazoo at 7ish. Yikes. Anyhow, the day started off with a nice breakfast during which the Director of Graduate Studies, who would also be my adviser, did a presentation and overview of the program. Later on, I met with her and attended a workshop on getting articles published. I also went to lunch with a current first-year student who is similar in a lot of ways to me; she is in her early thirties with a young teenaged daughter and single. Later that afternoon most of the professors in medieval history there took us to the faculty club in the student union for a few drinks. We went straight from there to a dinner for faculty and all prospective students, which meant there were a HUGE number of people there. I had a couple glasses of wine there as well, since I assumed that was it for the night. Oh, no. After that, the grad students took us to the local favorite watering hole, called the Town Hall Brewery. A less practiced tippler than myself might have gotten in trouble after a night like that, but I left around midnight and wasn't really all that polluted. Friday night at midnight found our heroine tucked into bed looking forward to a much less busy day on Saturday.

Off to Minneapolis

2008-03-06T06:44:00.004-06:00

So here I am packed and ready to fly off to Minneapolis this afternoon, to visit the campus of a large and reasonably well-known public university where I was offered admission and funding. I can't imagine visiting Minneapolis in early March except on someone else's dime, to be honest. After a few misadventures in packing, I managed to cram everything I really can't live without for four days into one smallish suitcase and my rolling laptop bag. As usual, I initially overpacked ridiculously and had to keep taking stuff back out, considering I had about six days' worth of clothes in there. I just find it hard to be completely confident about what I need. I mean, what do you wear to a campus recruitment visit? I really have very little idea of what is appropriate, so I packed a mix of things from casual to business. And of course, I have to have my laptop. And power cord. And mike headphones. And mouse. You get the idea. I did remember to pack the digital camera, so pictures should be forthcoming. I am really nervous about this trip, and I'm not really even sure why. I mean, they already offered me admission and funding, and I don't think they are going to take it away if they don't like how I dress or I use the wrong fork or something. I guess I just want to make a good impression and, to be honest, social situations in which I meet a lot of new people make me nervous. I didn't sleep too well, so today will be a big coffee day. Once I relax a little and get over my nerves, I think this will be a lot of fun.

The End of an Era?

2008-03-05T06:44:00.004-06:00

I was moved late yesterday and today to meditate a bit on the future of games by hearing of the death of Gary Gygax, co-creator of the game Dungeons & Dragons. No matter what your opinion of this game and the dozens, if not hundreds, of similar paper-based games it spawned, the fact remains that it was an entirely new concept in gaming that paved the way for several popular genre of computer games. According to the New York Times obituary on Mr. Gygax, he didn't entirely approve of the translation of Dungeons & Dragons to the digital universe, saying, “There is no intimacy; it’s not live . . . it’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people." But Mr. Gygax was quite, quite wrong. At least as early as the AOL game Neverwinter Nights back in 1991, video game players were interacting in real time in the fantasy milieu envisioned by the paper and pencil game. Neverwinter Nights was just the beginning of a trend that gained enormous momentum, and the concept of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game reached maturity with games like World of Warcraft, which as of this writing had a subscriber base of over 10 million people, a small country. There is some kind of irony in the fact that I learned about the death of Gary Gygax from fellow World of Warcraft players after I logged into the game last night and saw them discussing it in one of the the many chat channels used for live conversations between players. I'm not trying to say that pencil and paper role-playing games are dead; I'm not ashamed to admit that I played them for many years myself. But, in a busy world full of responsibilities and demands on our time, there is a lot to be said for a role-playing game that you can enjoy in your bunny slippers whenever you finally get your kids to sleep, or sitting in the library between classes, or waiting for your flight at the airport. I have to believe that this version of the role-playing game will only grow in popularity.

Hello, world!

2008-03-04T15:02:00.000-06:00

This is my first foray into the brave, not-so-new world of blogging. Odd, that, considering what a hard-core geek I am in most respects. I'm just a privacy-loving geek who tends to be a bit leery of self-disclosure. I suppose introductions are in order here, so I'll start by saying that you can call me Leigh, though of course this is not my "real" name. To give you the basic statistics, I am 35 years old, have one daughter, and am nearing the end of my second marriage. More on that later, no doubt. The name of my blog refers to two of the great and abiding interests in my life; medieval history and computers. No, not a lot of crossover there, it's true. The medieval history part happens to be a bit more prominent at the moment since I applied to eight Ph.D. programs over the last few months and am currently in the midst of acceptances and rejections. I am 4-1 so far, so not too shabby a record as these things go, with 3 programs left to hear from. My first round of campus visits starts later this week, so expect to hear more on that. Maybe some pictures as well, if I remember to take a digital camera. No guarantees there. Anyway, I will have a lot more to say about my interest in computers which, like many peers my age (mostly male) was kindled by a Commodore 64 when I was around 12. My interest and skills have grown over the years, with the help of lots of geeky (mostly male) friends willing to share their savvy. More on all that later. To close off the first post, here, I really should say a few more words about the graduate school admissions game that I've been playing with no small degree of success. I am just finishing my B.A. in History this term at a largish public university of very little renown. Furthermore, I am now a woman in my mid-thirties from a distinctly working-class background. If you are thinking that this is not the sort of background that favors one in getting into highly competitive graduate programs, in general you'd be right. The fact that I have indeed won admission to at least one (so far) genuinely prestigious and competitive program, however, suggests that I do know a bit about what I'm doing. I may post more on that topic as well. Regardless, this is going to be one hell of a ride, and certainly not one I could have predicted, say, four years ago when I went back to school. I'll keep you posted.