Newest thoughts →

February 2024

Flaring badly at the moment and worried how much back and neck pain I have from it. My rheumatoid arthritis is associated with radiographic evidence of instability of the cervical spine, which is, apparently, predictive of paralysis with cervical collapse. Just keeps on giving.

Today's haemodialysis went without a glitch. But it was still 4+ hours of not achieving very much, except 🎶stayin' alive🎶. Looking forward to a 5am start for tomorrow's session.

Dratted haemodialysis setup went wrong today and instead of 40 mins, it took me almost 1.5 hours just to get started. Bizarre new alarms: "membrane moved" and "bloodside leak test failed". Today has basically just been medical maintenance.

A question: how often do you read book reviews in academic journals? I haven't written one in ages but have been invited and am considering it. But my spare time is SO short with 25 hours of dialysis per week. So wondered how many people actually read them.

Spoke to immunology yesterday. They told me they have some immunocompromised patients who still haven't cleared the 2020 initial strain of Covid. Basically mutation factory hosts who have been suffering for years 🙁

It's weird how your mind deals with different timescales. The fact that I need dialysis for the rest of my life is depressing and hard to handle. But on a day to day basis, all you have to do is to keep doing the treatment, 4 hours at a time.

Op Cit landing page. When you deposit through the system, it auto-deposits in a range of digital preservation destinations, then renders the options for access to users resolving the DOI.

This evening we watched AMERICAN FICTION, the adaptation of Percival Everett's amazing novel, ERASURE. It was a great translation and lots of the humour moved well to the screen. As did the biting satire.

Digital preservation archives need robust institutional subsidies/memberships to sustain them. Sustaining purely on fees from new content is a front-loading pyramid scheme that requires ever more new content. Sure, some do have this but it would be good to see more involvement.

Top book proofing tip: one of the things that people often don't check, but that can go wrong at typesetting time, is that all superscript notes are in order and linked to the correct notes. You can speed this up in a PDF reader using search/highlight for each group of 10 notes.

I also had a hospital scan of my arm today. The good news: the AV fistula should be usable. The bad news: my arm has been so butchered that it will take several weeks before I regain full use of my left hand. And it will hurt a lot over that period.

Today I had the first successful run of the Op Cit preservation pipeline. It sits between the publisher and Crossref deposit, intercepts the file, checks the open license, and initiates archival storage. Long way to go, but a milestone.

Update today - the arm is a bit better, but still excruciating. Moving the fingers hurts as though the arm were broken and lifting the arm independently is so painful.

Awful pain this morning. My whole arm is agonisingly sore. Moving my fingers sends this blood curdling, burning pain the whole way up my arm. Slept terribly!

Really depressing situation here. Couldn't get any needles in the fistula today and second site had extreme pain.

So I'm being referred back to the vascular access surgeons for reappraisal. Back to square one.