Boy, it’s quiet around here. (…Too quiet, as they always say in the movies right before something dramatic and loud happens.) Is everyone else in the midst of end-of-term/pre-holiday madness too?
My head is so crammed with final projects — current status: two down, two (both underway) to go — that I can’t even think of anything entertaining to say. How about yourselves?
Just as I’m wrapping up work on my controlled vocabulary for
knitting (final project #2, almost done), I come across this: KnitML, the knitting markup
language. As the About page puts it,
Imagine being able to do the following for any KnitML-based pattern:
- Render a pattern in either written directions or a chart, dependent on a preference setting
- Render a pattern in any language, using conventions familiar to that language and dialect
- Validate that a pattern is physically possible to knit (eliminating some types of errata)
- Automatically convert English measurements to and from metric measurements
- Size a pattern up or down to any size, not just the sizes that come with the pattern
- Recalculate a pattern for your gauge rather than the one that came with the pattern
…among other things. You can view a proof-of-concept sock
pattern, all marked up in its angle-brackety glory. I’m intensely happy, both as a knitter and as a geek,
that such a project exists. If I had
time to sign up to beta-test Ravelry and join the KnitML group there, I
would. (Right now it’s on the ever-growing list of "things to do when I finish library school.")
Incidentally, I heard someone say recently that knitting had "skipped a
generation," meaning that it’s popular with younger people and their
grandmas, but not with the generation in between. I suspect that the
strong affinity of knitters and geeks, together with the expansion of
the web, has a lot to do with the recent resurgence.
Though I’d also like to claim geek-cred for older generations of
knitters, like my own grandmother, who designed her own patterns and would no doubt be very happy to see that I finally took up knitting.
There are still a boatload of projects waiting to be done, but I’ve finished my final website project for my web design class: a guide to movies about opera. I had a lot of fun working on it, and I think I’ll most likely keep it going after this quarter is over. If you’re interested, let me know what you think!
Due in just over a week: one website, one thesaurus, one-quarter of a group project, and one reflection paper on the various lessons learned from doing the group project. Am I a tad stressed out? Yes, indeed! Am I going to be very happy when I’m no longer juggling work and classes and can have a life again? You bet!
However, I have the following to distract me:
And there’s always my time-honored mantra: only two weeks until the end of term, only two weeks until the end of term…
I heard on NPR this morning that Paul Muldoon is the New Yorker‘s new poetry editor. I was tickled to hear them discussing his poem "Capercaillies," which spells out, acrostically, "Is this a New Yorker poem or what." Given that my responses to most of the recent New Yorker poems have ranged from "mildly disappointed" to "What were they thinking?", I’m glad they picked someone whose work I actually like and who’s not afraid to make fun of the "New Yorker poem." Or, as another blogger put it, "New Yorker may soon publish first decent poem in more than 20 years."
When I was a precocious teenager (circa the late 80s and early 90s), I used to read my dad’s back issues of the New Yorker, and the poems were much better. Or at least they seem that way in retrospect. Were they actually better or have my tastes just changed? Do any of you, Readers, remember? (Or maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to abandon my attempts at homework and go hunt up back issues to test my hypothesis.)
As I was scanning Salon’s recent review of Alan Moore and Kevin
O’Neill’s latest installment in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
series, my eye was caught by a sentence that started thusly:
In the course of the book, we encounter, among other things, a brief
prose piece in the merged styles of P.G. Wodehouse and H.P. Lovecraft
("What Ho, Gods of the Abyss")…
!, I thought. And then Must. Read. Now.
Long
live the arts of parody and mash-up. Which reminds me, I still haven’t read Volume 2 of
The League. I knew I needed something to take my mind off thesaurus
construction…
"Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns," reports yesterday’s New York Times. I must confess that my first reaction was somewhere between "Gee, ya think?" and "This is news?", with accompanying eye-rolling. I’d probably be a tad less cynical if the decline of the tenure track hadn’t started, oh, twenty years ago, and if people hadn’t already been trying, for years, to draw attention to the plight of part-timers working 10-hour teaching days at multiple colleges. And the Times only picks up on it now? Harrumph.
I’m glad I got out of it when I did, but I worry about those who are still in it. It seems fairly evident to me that sustained media attention hasn’t, so far, shamed colleges and universities into treating their adjunct professors better; I doubt that the NYT article will do much to fix an already broken system. Though it may help convince a few more prospective grad students to choose a career that’s less prone to abusive labor conditions.
If anyone reading this is contemplating a career as a professor in a humanities field, I can do no better than to refer you to my colleague Timothy Burke’s advice: "Should I go to graduate school? Short answer: No." Not convinced? Read Dorothea Salo’s "Straight Talk About Graduate School." Still not convinced? Contemplate the AAUP’s statistics on the percentage of professors who aren’t on the tenure track (70%. Seventy. Percent.) and bear in mind that, while you may think you’ll be the one to beat the odds, right now is a really bad time to try your luck.
(Hat tip to Laura at 11D, who says "’Raises concerns’ is such a mild phrase." Seriously.)
In honor of everyone heading off for Thanksgiving, one of my favorite bits from The Great Gatsby:
One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep
school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went
farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station
at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends,
already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them
a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning
from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and
the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances,
and the matching of invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways’?
the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?" and the long green tickets
clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars
of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad looking cheerful
as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our
snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows,
and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp
wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths
of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules,
unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange
hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (text found at the University of Minnesota)
Most of the biblioblogosphere is talking about Kindle, Amazon’s new e-book reader. After rooting around the Kindle site trying to find detailed descriptions of what kinds of files it supports and what the terms of service are, I have to say I’m underwhelmed.
On the one hand, I think a lightweight e-book reader with a good readable screen would be absolutely swell (especially given how much library school reading I’m taking on my Thanksgiving travels, and how I get twitchy if I go anywhere without something to read). But on the other hand, I wouldn’t want it to be tied to a specific vendor, and I’d want to be able to use it as a catchall reading device for all the random stuff I get from the ‘net — especially journal articles from databases, free e-texts from here and there, and text-heavy web pages I’d rather not read on a computer screen. The thing is, Kindle will let you surf the web and download things, but they have to be either in Amazon’s proprietary format, in .txt format, or in mobipocket format. If you want to read HTML or PDF files, you have to pay to e-mail them to your Kindle so it can convert them.
If the Kindle is supposed to be the iPod of reading, then it should play better with free stuff. The thing I love about my iPod is that I’ve never once used the iTunes store, but I’ve got tons of sound files either converted from my CDs or downloaded (I like using it for podcasts and Librivox audio books). It doesn’t look like you can use Kindle the same way. It looks like Amazon wants users to download books from them and them only.
Then there are the DRM issues, and the fact that you can read blogs on it but only from a pre-selected set, and you have to pay to read your blogs (are you kidding me?). And the lack of scholarly books to download. I’m sure e-book readers will evolve someday; I just don’t think that day is today.
Of course, all of this is the opinion of someone who balks at shelling out $400 to try the Kindle and thus hasn’t tried it. Maybe if they lower the price by a factor of 10…
It’s November, it’s cold (the kind of cold you don’t notice at first but that gets into your bones nonetheless), it’s rainy, SEPTA’s regional rail trains are all running late because it’s rainy and there are leaves on the tracks, there’s way too much to do before the end of this term at Drexel, and some of the finer mysteries of faceted thesaurus construction are still eluding me.
However:
I don’t have to spend Thanksgiving weekend grading papers. I will never again have to spend Thanksgiving weekend grading papers. This, alone, makes up most if not all of the above.
Also, I just got a maddeningly sticky bit of CSS to work out, and with any luck, I’ll be pointing to my final project for the web design class before too long. So, yes: there are definitely things to be thankful for, even in a month of crappy weather and looming deadlines.
