You can also find me on Twitter now, far more frequently than here. Turns out that prospectus-brain can easily manage tiny “what are you doing?” posts. Prospectus-brain can also handle: fussing with new Wordpress installations for the digital humanities project update blog (link soon!); googling gluten-free places to eat in Austin; reading NY Times articles. Prospectus-brain needs to get back to the actual prospectus, however.
It turns out that if one forgets to update one’s Wordpress installation, saucy little link-farmers running exploit scripts will look upon one’s mostly-dormant blog as fertile ground. I’ve just gone back and peeled hidden links out of half my old posts. Feh. (If you read this blog via RSS, you might still be able to see the “hidden” links at the bottom of the post that appeared earlier this morning, which was also generated by the link-farmers, not by me. I’ve deleted that post on the blog.) All should be fixed and safe now, I hope.
I guess this is a sign that I ought to update more regularly. (And remember to upgrade Wordpress on occasion.) I haven’t been doing much writing lately; hardly any fiction or non-fiction that isn’t graduate-school-related, and only a short paper for a class, in addition to work on my prospectus notes. Mostly I write email: to patrons at the Ransom Center, answering research queries, to other eComma team members, to my parents and friends. I wrote the short paper last week, and it was the hardest paper I’ve written in a while — not because the topic itself was difficult to tackle (although that’s true) but because, as I’d just discovered, the migraine preventative drug I’m taking was affecting my ability to write and to speak. It was weird. “Difficulty finding words” doesn’t express the strangeness of losing the word for “roof tile” when you’re trying to describe your house to a friend on the phone. By a week and a half ago, the verbal block was happening at least ten times a day.
By next Wednesday, I’ll be off that preventative completely. I can find a lot of words to describe how happy I feel about it, but most of them are dirty.
Anyway, I promise — promise! — to be back soon to write about what I’m doing this summer and why I’ve added links to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and HASTAC to my blogroll. Also, there will be probably be cat pictures. Just fair warning.
After an exciting discovery — namely, that my five-year-old PowerBook Titanium was giving me a small but constant electric shock — I’ve left the Mac world for Linux, at least for now. I’m typing this on my new Ubuntu-running desktop, which T. built for me last week. It took me a few days to get used to the look, for which I received some gentle mockery about anti-aliased fonts and Mac brainwashing, but I’m very happy with it now. I’m not quite sold on Thunderbird yet, though. My Gmail indoctrination is apparently still in effect.
A few good things to report: I’m planning my trip to the 2008 SEASECS meeting in Auburn to give a paper on Charlotte Charke; I’ll be seeing Jerome McGann speak next Friday (more than once!); Thanksgiving approaches, which means a much-needed trip to Oregon to see my parents. The HRC has been incredibly busy for the last several weeks, and so have I. I’m reading Laetitia Pilkington’s memoirs and drilling the irregular future tense stems in French.
Speaking of Oregon, here’s a sad but quirky-sweet tribute to the store cat at Powell’s Technical Books, Fup, who recently had to be put to sleep at the age of 19. I’ve been to that store two or three times and never saw her, which is kind of amazing, since T. claims that my superpower is seeing cats wherever I go. Fup was also the star of an ongoing mini-adventure serial in the Powell’s newsletter, apparently; you can read them here.
Apologies for the 404 error messages that have been popping up today — T. and I were playing around with the stats admin stuff yesterday and goofed something up. But we have fixed it now. Carry on!
More posting later, when I am not stricken with post-migraine fragility. Bah.