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November 2024

Today's writing work was continuing to read through every issue of /Star Trek: Voyager/ magazine for relevant citations and behind-the-scenes production information. These magazines are mostly filler episode summaries, but the interviews can be great.

This evening, it's roast dinner and a pint of beer. Haven't been allowed beer for ages because it's just too much fluid for my kidneys. But now I do long dialysis overnight, I can just ditch the fluid then. 😁

I mean, I think this is good, but the amount it costs is a recurring refrain of REF criticism, so putting another £3.6m in - about the amount it costs an institution to enter REF - has some irony.

Massive amounts of rheumatoid pain this AM - very difficult to move. My sleep chart is also terrible, showing awful sleep due to pain. Bloody disease.

Anyway, I plan to limp and hop along on a dog walk to loosen up - which does sometimes work! - before getting down to some weekend writing.

A chart showing sleep stress levels overnight, on a time axis. Orange bars denote too much stress while blue lower bars show good levels of calm. Sadly, most of the graph is orange until about 6.30am. This is tracked by a Garmin smartwatch.

I have now officially left Crossref.

Until the end of the year I will be working on implementing a plugin for @janewayolh.bsky.social that provides OA Switchboard functionality. More as I go!

I loved my morning writing routine. Before I'd do anything else, I'd sit and read and write for an hour
It cleared my head, I learned something every morning, and I got books written. This has been so hard this year with kidney failure. I was just exhausted. But no more! This morning, I'm back.

The front cover of a massive book called The Fifty Year Mission: The Next 25 Years From the Next Generation to J. J. Abrams which is about the history of Star Trek

Very dispiriting.

This man's solution to Covid was to let the disease run riot through the population while locking the vulnerable away.

Some fantastic news from the hospital - my kidney function equivalent on long overnight dialysis has risen to 47%! That's better than a transplant in some cases! And I also feel so good on it. The best since my kidneys failed.

OA thanks to Opening the Future - the model I designed at COPIM and implemented with @scholtom.bsky.social. Fee-free for authors, supported by libraries. Fantastic to see it in action.

Thanks for all the kind words, love, and support I've received this evening. It's really made my day a whole lot better. Now it's time for 8.5hrs of dialysis, so I can live another day.

A picture of a dialysis machine starting up. It's about 5ft tall, on wheels, and had two rotary wheels in the middle amid many ports and wires. It has a screen at the top to control the machine.

Did I mention that I'm looking for a new role? If anyone is interested in award-winning work on digital preservation, digital textuality, fixing scholcomms systems and their economics, or even just plain old literary criticism, please get in touch.

Updated my Bluesky handle to a swizzy self-hosted domain and added this information to my site, for additional verification. Goodbye Twitter handle.

End of month dialysis blood tests are my least favourite part of the treatment. Labelling endless tubes w/ patient number, dob, names, date of sample collection etc. Takes my whole lunch break (there are a LOT of tests). Then it's staying up late for the blood runners to collect. Oh well. #rantover

Pleased to announce that I've been chosen as the new James Bond - the first one with kidney failure. My first film will be Dialyse Another Day and we are also planning No Time to Dialyse.

Now a friend has gone to see PADDINGTON IN PERU and I'm looking forward to detailed critical discussion on WhatsApp when he gets home.

Bandcamp, Juno Download, Beatport and Traxsource all have DRM-free downloads. Buy music. Build a library. Support artists. Don't stream.

Today is a big day. In the year and a half since we we rescued him, Luka has never let me walk him (or even touch him). In the last three weeks, we've built up to me holding the lead and stroking him outside. This morning will be my first attempt at walking him solo without my wife being there!

Out two dogs, Luka and Robyn. Luka is black and Labrador size, although we think he's part husky. Robyn is smaller and brown and black, with only three legs.

I've been tapering down the steroids, on which I've been for almost twenty years, but think I've hit my limit. The rheumatoid arthritis has been causing me absolute agony. But boosted them back up and feel like a million bucks, as they say.

I should say, this was NOT easy with the current state of my rheumatoid arthritis. Getting up this morning after dialysis was very difficult and my spine felt awful. Still made it though.

A year ago, I couldn't walk and needed my wheelchair to get anywhere. Today, 7 months after my hip replacement, I've been on a dog walk and am now on my first exercise bike session, starting to build up again!

A picture of me, Martin Eve, on an indoor exercise bike with a Feed Your Head radio show t shirt on

Trust me, the last thing you want for overnight dialysis is an official warning from the electricity company of storm power cuts over the weekend.

This is ridiculous. Indexes not even allowed to store the _abstracts_ of papers. That is, the thing that lets you ascertain if you want to read the full article.

Thanks to an extreme shock a few weeks ago - on which I'll say something at some point - my rheumatoid arthritis has gone into a terrible flare. From the lower spine right through the shoulders, my back is on fire. Sitting is absolute agony. Awful. V. common in RA as stress triggers immune changes.

Also have massive pain in my hands and wrists, making holding things hard, and my feet feel like they're fractured. Grim.

I think this is right. I do recognise that machine learning has useful categorization functions - in some medical contexts or for some forms of lexical categorization - but you have to be so careful of bias in domains pertaining to human identity.

A successful night with no alarms on the haemodialysis machine! This is starting to feel less like the sleep deprivation phase of parenthood and more like the beneficial arrangement I had imagined.

Success! Managed my first overnight dialysis session without an alarm going off. It's taken a fair number of tries to get to this point of uninterrupted sleep.

Which is precisely the "market" ethos of HE that they want. If goods aren't substitutable then they can't "compete". Also, under such logic, qualifications have to be made commensurate, so degree at X is equal to Y.

Unbelievable. The next step in this logic is "we don't really need courses duplicated nationwide, because students move to go to university. So Cambridge will do English and Oxford, Maths." #facepalm

Pleased to say that I'll be giving a keynote at next year's meeting of the Swedish Association for Information Specialists (SFIS).

Just turned on the "force alt text before posting" option in Bluesky to force myself to behave better around this -- I just often forget, but hopefully this will engrain good behaviour.

Wonder if it also works for posts made through the API...

Saw Paddington in Peru yesterday with some trepidation after tepid reviews. I loved it! Thought it was most witty, especially with its intertextual call-outs to Buster Keaton, Indiana Jones, Sound of Music, and Fitzcarraldo, among others.

I have begun my much longer but overnight dialysis sessions. It's having great results. I feel better and my kidney function is equivalent to 38% afterwards, which is fantastic - almost transplant equivalent. We still get some nighttime alarms mind, which makes for disrupted sleep!