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April 2022

A music acquaintance posts this for the death of his son. It breaks my heart. Every covid death, reduced to a statistic, is someone loved and missed.

This vinyl treat arrived today and I'm really excited to revisit a totally classic album that played a huge musical role in my life

My keyboard's "5" and "6" keys have died, also ruling out their shift functions. So typing % has become a nightmare, which is really not ideal for the templating languages I'm working with today...

It dawned on me, today, that I have now lived almost half my life with rheumatoid arthritis. It will soon be the condition from which I have suffered for the majority of my life. I feel I've learned a lot about RA that I should distill into a book for people new to the condition.

I'm still learning as the condition changes over your life. For instance: exercise, which has clear benefits for RA, can abruptly become very difficult, even when it was fine before.

At some point, it feels, the body learns to treat all tissue damage as negative disease activity. You then get huge kickbacks from exercise that breaks down muscles. Overdoing this even slightly leads me to flu-like shivers and total exhaustion, which I never used to have.

But it's taken me years to see this correlation/to frame it like that.

Navigating the systematicity of rheumatoid arthritis is also very difficult. People hear "arthritis" and they imagine osteoarthritis - more terrible than most imagine in its own right - which is totally different.

Rheumatoid arthritis caused me to have a stroke, to lose huge parts of my hearing, damaged my sight, inflamed my heart, deatroyed motor and sensory nerves in my foot. It has to be controlled with severe immunosuppressive medications that have led to 6 emergency hospitalisations.

People new to the disease are not well prepared for this.

Went for a walk down the coast. Arthritis pain is a real limiting factor on distance at the moment - six+ months into this flare up and no end in sight - but the seaside beauty was a good tonic.

It's hard to say how frustrating, maddening and saddening this is at the moment. This is *the* thing I have been waiting for since the pandemic started. A prophylactic that will protect people like me who can't mount a response to vaccines. Not available.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/29/evusheld-covid-19-medicine-astrazeneca-immunosuppressed-vulnerable-uk?CMP=share_btn_tw

You can't even buy it privately. (Not that I think that private healthcare is the answer.)

"The UK is probably one of the rare developed countries in the world that has not ordered Evusheld."

Taking a break from writing my current book today to think a little bit about the next project. There are a number of routes forward but I must confess, this is probably the one that is most interesting me at the moment...

Doing a bit of research

I've got Jennifer Egan's latest, The Candy House, arriving tomorrow for my bank holiday reading. From the reviews I've read, it sounds a somewhat ill-advised re-outing for Goon Squad's cast, though I'm still hoping there'll be some ironic dismantling of the sequel idea.

Here's a few things I've written on Egan that might interest anyone on this thread. First, an article on the textual history of Egan's first short story collection https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2020.1709713

Second, an article on the role of academics in the Safari chapter of A Visit from the Goon Squad http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.29

Third, and apologies that this one is not open access, if you're ever looking for a career overview of Egan, I wrote her entry for the Dictionary of Literary Biography https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/19845/

I've got another piece on epiphany in Egan's first novel, The Invisible Circus, in the pipeline for a proposed book chapter collection, too.

In the meantime, I'll write up some thoughts on The Candy House once I've read it!

Dire Straits were never cool, but Mark Knopfler is an incredible guitar player and I'm ultra pleased to have gotten my mitts on the 2022 Record Store Day release!

I'm really loath to admit it, but the half-speed mastering has made a huge difference to sound quality on this release. As others have pointed out, this could definitely be placebo. But I'll take it.

A couple of new publications this week. The first is a co-authored piece in @lisejaillant's edited collection, Archives, Access and Artificial Intelligence. We wrote about our experience using classifiers to look at peer review reports. https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/43614/

This is a follow-on piece from our book, Reading Peer Review, also available openly. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/reading-peer-review/42F027E4C67D246DD8C3AC440A68C7A7

The second is a short chapter on the relationship between open access and neoliberalism. This was originally published OA here but now has arrived in printed form: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/42552/

Investigating private healthcare in the UK is a fascinating sociological and political exercise. That Daily M4ail (argh) article I posted yesterday said "Evusheld is not available unless you can stump up the £800 privately" or similar. But it's really not that simple at all.

Even if you have £800, you'll be lucky to find someone who can prescribe it. I've spent quite a bit of time today tracking down clinics that might be interested, and none of them know anything about whether they can acquire and prescribe it.

It's not even a problem you can just throw money at -- I'm even looking at overseas clinics, but it's virtually impossible to navigate.

Back on the writing regimen today as I head into the final furlong on /PAPER THIN/. Felt I got a good rhythm and managed 1,200 words. So whatever else the day brings, I have accomplished this!

We celebrated my fifth jab by going to the pub for the first time in 2 years. It was a smoothly orchestrated FFP3 masks / dash inside / retreat outside, but felt as safe as we could muster. And I can't say how much I have missed this.

There's a probably very nice RSD2022 release of Dire Straits's Love Over Gold, but let's face it: that's a really expensive way to get a vinyl remaster of "Telegraph Road".

It's a rollercoaster. Evusheld is approved in UK for prophylaxis of Covid in immunocompromised people. YES! Except that we can't get it and there are no plans to give it. ARGH. I'm trying to find a private supplier, but no idea if I'll succeed. https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o722

May interest @chrischirp @dgurdasani1. Extremely frustrating as a patient.

There's a soothing effect of putting digital calendars into a soft pallette of colours, rather than the screaming contrasts of harsh reds and greens that used to be the Google norm. I realised the association of stark red with deadlines was upping my pulse!

50-minute electro funk session

I should add that this is: it has taken me 50 minutes, not that the video lasts that long.

The Guardian runs a massive number of articles on the cost of living crisis.

Then in the same breath asks "Why the world is falling out of love with Netflix".

Jacob R-M is very opposed to the government telling anyone what to do, unless it's precisely dictating where, when, and how work will be conducted.

Yes, I know that's not really it either. What he's really keen on is any publicity stunt that lets him be seen to be kicking anybody paid anything by the government.

More work on the NGLP imports at the moment. I still love @willmcgugan's Textualise/Rich. Makes it really easy to build eye-catching CLI stuff. In turn, it really makes debugging so much easier.

Working on the Next Generation Library Publishing pilots! Here's our CLI tool interacting with the Web Delivery Platform, about to import some electronic theses and dissertations. With videos like this, you can tell my YouTube following is going to rocket! https://youtu.be/8BZXXx4FHpg

"Influencer"

"Check out that ratio (0:0)"

Went to the dentist today for the first time since the pandemic. Staff were great re masks and they'd put me first appt so that I wasn't in a waiting room with anyone else. As I'm leaving, gang of people slump in, totally maskless despite massive signs. So depressing.

It's such a small ask. I mean, ridiculously small. "Please wear a mask in public spaces to reduce my risk of death." But apparently too much.

Laughing here at my friend who ordered some audio cables and the shop accidentally sent him a £3k Prophet X synthesizer. Think this is definitely a case of "you'd better tell them"!

There's something incredibly gratifying about adding "magic" to the requirements.txt of a python project. It's a file-type/MIME detection tool, but it always just feels like I am summoning wizards as a prerequisite.

"The exact reason for the split has been a point of contention among art historians; usually the divergent ideas about the directions of the lines in the paintings have been named as the primary reason: Mondrian never accepted diagonals"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Doesburg

Love that you could have such a major falling out over whether you have diagonal lines in your painting.

The two "gotchas" for Django ModelForm image uploads are: set form encoding to multipart and remember to pass request.FILES to the ModelForm.

Pulled the trigger on a release upgrade to Jammy Jellyfish, the latest Ubuntu LTS, final version out in four days. If this "just works", I will be amazed, but let's see...

A technical observation as I spend the Bank Holiday weekend teaching myself OIDC/Keycloak auth flows: as the Net matures, the overhead to perform basic interactions between services has grown exponentially. Auth protocols are now extremely complicated compared to, say, FTP.

Just to get to the point of being logged in to a remote service can now be incredibly complicated.

Security in the age of public key cryptography *is* complex and multi-faceted, but it just feels such a waste in the amount of dev time it takes just to get this working - it's a serious portion of total dev work, which totally kills the fun of any hobbyist project.

I'm in a very "techy" mood at the moment to the extent that last night I had a dream where someone asked why the combination of Terraform and Ansible isn't shortened to terr-ible.

That post by @ionathanch about "⍼" has really got me fired up about writing again after a dryer fortnight. I have a chapter on the geopolitical histories of Unicode and this is perfect.

Buying Twitter for $40bn is cool and all (I'll take two!), but for just $3m I'd give open-access University-level English literature classes to anyone who wants them, for free, for the rest of my working life. Surely a bargain, @elonmusk?

There's complex shelf construction underway in the garden by Mrs Eve at present. Looks like some ancient torture device.

This is the final product!

I like to keep my tech skills up to date so occasionally take tech exams. I previously did a Microsoft Certified Professional qualification in C# and today added AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner to my arsenal!

Preparing for my talk tomorrow, where I'll be talking about the underground subculture of the high-level piracy "Scene".

The whys, the wherefores, and the warez?

Sorry, also: automated review reminder systems can make me very cross when they are inhumane re. working hours. I was asked, at 5pm on Friday, if I could review a manuscript. "Reminder" arrived at 6.30am on this, the following Monday morning.

My hearing is so much improved since 2019 that I rarely use my aids now. However, not sure everyone thinks this is a good idea. Spent a large part of a conversation this am thinking we were talking about about a so-called "sausage croissant". We were not. 😂

It's remarkable how much of your hearing depends on context and what you expect to hear. Why was I thinking of "sausage croissant"? I guess we'll never know. 😂

Article: "Explaining Git branches with a LEGO analogy"

Me: does it consist of treading on one of them, swearing loudly, then kicking the model to bits in anger?

LEGO reset --hard

Rewatched Stan & Ollie this evening. Yes, it's overly sentimental, but the characterisation is so good. And I love laughing at Laurel and Hardy!

Good use of Gartner's hype cycle by @editingemily with application to DevOps adoption.

I still laugh at "peak of inflated expectations" 😀

"In my time as an engineer, I've never seen a single estimate of development time turn out to be accurate"

One of the problems I perceive in (UK?) universities, again partially due to dependence on grant funding and the lack of surplus overhead, is the reliance on specific people for project continuity. It's really hard to bake organisational perpetuation into enterprise stuff.

Went for a lovely evening stroll but have now overdone it and am in terrible aching arthritic hip pain.

Want a great view? YOU MUST PAY.

Been brushing up further today on my Terraform/AWS skills. Project now configures load balancing between EC2 instances spread over geographic zones/availability regions. Creates a nice wireguard network VPN between the VPC subnets.

Speaking another language for many followers, I suspect. Sorry!

I love the digital-print crossover where the single source digital-first workflow here has embedded the Orcid logo in a print publication.

Lots of totally niche tech tweets this week, but ansible's parsing of YML is totally off the wall. Sensitivity to tabs vs. spaces and indents of invisible whitespace makes it very hard to know what's going on.

What did I do this morning? Wrote a Terraform file designed to bring up an AWS EC2 instance with SSH only possible via a Wireguard network.

I'm sure diabetics are used to this, but on my new 5-day-per-week immunoglobulin regime, I look like a human pincushion with all the injections

The 303 is such an interesting synth. It's at once brilliant but also overpowering. The temptation towards overuse is massive.

Got excited just now discussing metadata queue processing. "When" does a citation "happen" and is it an "event"? Is it directional or can it have a null reference endpoint? Is it an assertion about an endpoint that actually co-constitutes it?

I actually get excited every two years in April for the next Ubuntu LTS release. It's "Jammy Jellyfish" this time and I'm sure that it will require my intervention to stop the automatic upgrade killing my dual boot etc.

But I still want it.

A Sunday session on the bike reading Maureen McLane's Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species. I like the framing of Frankenstein in terms of the Malthus-Godwin debate.

There's lots in here that I like! For instance, the place of the Humanities disciplines in the creature's education, and the role of species distinction as the ultimate arbiter of sympathetic possibilities.

Did something "risky" and popped into an ice cream parlour. Enjoyed my ice cream but am anxious now re. death risk. This is what I meant the other day when I wrote of how these one-off exposures do not seem worth it, but the sum total of not doing these things is impoverishing.

"Hello? Is it me you're looking for..."

Two years ago, he was just settling in after his first month with us!

I see that alopecia is in the news. Much much tougher for women, but my cyclophosphamide treatment in 2019 caused patchy hair loss and that's when I started shaving my head. Just kept it up from then onwards.

I am rapidly heading, in my late thirties, towards being a boring middle-aged vinyl bloke. But, hear me out, it’s not for any spurious “audiophile” reason. Instead, it’s just that the format discourages skipping around and pushes you towards listening to the whole EP.

These and other totally non-original thoughts and pronouncements are brought to you by Friday.