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March 2012

Apparently some idiot from a band called Megadeth has endorsed some idiot from a party called the Republicans for President.

For this "day of higher ed" thing, is it acceptable to just write, in advance: "scarcely have 2 minutes to blog what I'm doing"?

V. productive yest: read 2 books + 1 article; submitted 2 book reviews & a magazine article. Hoping to submit journal article today.

Until today, my supervisor loved a part of my thesis that I liked least. Today, I found the missing source & now I love it too! #phdchat

When you time trains just right, they are amazing. 6 hours door to door from Glasgow to my home in (very) North London.

Hmmm. Mabe is wrong on "no scooping" in English Lit. (I'd know as a lit researcher) People have the same ideas & rush to be first. #uksglive

Mabe argues that intellectual property is a basic human desire (!) I disagree! Recognition, yes, but I want others to "copy" #uksglive

I suspect that the reason for little change is that you can't plug a totally radical change into an extant system. #uksglive

Mabe following up on @gbilder's arguments on digital inculabula. We are still in the infancy of digital publishing. #uksglive

When I need to find information, says @CameronNeylon, I would choose anything over a journal article. #uksglive

Annotum for WordPress plugged by @CameronNeylon. Warns publishers that this is the worst that free competition will be. #uksglive

Recognise journals when seen, but hard to define. Isn't this what a US Supreme Court judge said of pornography? #uksglive @CameronNeylon

Poor show with no ceildh dancing from @bsms38 last night. Joanna Ball and I made up for it though. @jharvell @chriskeene #uksglive

Staffordshire university are contributing all their open source changes back to the community. Affero GPL no bar. #uksglive

OSS integrated with the proliferation of backend tech within 3 months (ldap, portal, vale, repository, serials, catalogue etc) #uksglive

At MacWorld, 70% would buy a new Apple device for 1000usd. Didn't know what it was! Demand driven company or idiocy of crowds? #uksglive

When mentioning salary cost of peer review, whose salary is that? It's not any of the academics *doing* the review (that I know) #uksglive

Seems PEER project wasn't successful at getting authors to self deposit. Had to boost publisher contributions to get critical mass #uksglive

About to hear about the PEER project in relation to Institutional Repositories and Green Open Access. #uksglive

COUNTER developing forensics to look for automated attempts to artificially inflate UF. Want #InfoSec types to try to break! #uksglive

#oapenuk focus groups (libraries & publishers) expressed concern over loss of royalties in OA for authors. Authors didn't care!! #uksglive

#oapenuk took 60 matched titles, 30 in control group, 30 in OA (CC-BY) experimental group. Print/ebook version for sale. #uksglive

Be forewarned: I'll be tweeting about scholarly publishing from #uksglive for the next few days. That and the amazing hotel breakfasts.

Wonder if negative psychology works for bookings on TrainLine. Ask for a backwards facing seat, not at a table, far from power socket...

Somebody's computer has just made a very loud startup sound in the BL. I'll forgive them: they use Ubuntu Linux.

I've spent nine hours on bibliography and footnotes today. To appropriate Beckett: "Time he stopped. Close of a long day."

Overwhelming temptation to abbreviate Wittgenstein's "Remarks on the Foudations of Mathematics" to RTFM in my thesis. #geekjoke

Right, my #uksglive presentation is ready and I'm pleased with it! Looking forward to meeting people next week.

Dear @BioOneNews, it is bad practice to send unsolicited mass emails to speakers at a conference. I'm neither a biologist nor a librarian.

Best part of seeing The Muppets was when the couple on our row left, 30 mins in, asking me on way out: "is 'This Means War' in this screen?"

Damn. Waking up on Saturday morning to a security vuln in OJS and having to patch my installations. No fun. Bad timing for release, too.

Bitten the bullet and booked tickets to Elevator Repair Service's "Gatz". 8 hours. Worrying about the seat comfort already.

There is virtually nothing Simon Jenkins writes with which I agree and I won't even link to his piece on universities today.

Apologies for morbidity of req, but does anybody have access to/a digital image of Le Monde, June 26th 1984. "Foucault est mort" front page?

Argh. Someone advise, please! Off-peak open return to Glasgow from Euston. What time trains can I get *back* to Euston? @jennifermjones

Teaching Gatsby shortly. Any further thematic suggestions welcome; it's not my fave, but appreciate canonicity.

I have once again had to bail from HE tweetup. Headache from hell and 5am start for Sussex teaching tomorrow :/

Wow. @LeftfieldTour seem to have roped in Afrika Bambaata for a guest appearance at their War Child gig, also feat. @JessMillsMusic.

Advice from a senior professor on copyright; he goes out of his way to avoid using Faber books because they're so restrictive.

Pynchonites: when you have a sentence ending in "V.", do you double full stop ("... seen in the earlier V..") or not?

If you ever need to recommend a book on Wittgenstein to UGs, make it: Tejedor, Chon. Starting with Wittgenstein. London: Continuum, 2011.

“@Tannice_: @kashfarooq I'm looking into homeopathic contraception in the next few days, if you'd be interested?”

Sampling the delights of Leftfield's new live album, Tourism, released today. Their April gig in support of War Child is going to be immense

Phew. #UKSG paper/presentation first draft done. Very fine it is too. Now Mina Loy teaching preparation. #FridayNightIsWildForAcademics

I'm all for friendliness, but I wish people in chemists wouldn't relate their life story when there's a queue.

Teaching a widening participation week @SussexUni in June for A-Levellers. Hope to enthuse them about Literature despite grim state of HE.

"V.'s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth. Whose emissaries haunt this century's streets." - Pynchon, V.

Disingenuous cyclical term "wealth creators". Uses broken economy as an argument for exemption from tax, because they make the economy work.