Caveat Lector

She was eighteen, a college freshman. He was a first-year grad student. But they weren’t as far apart in age as all that, really; he’d skipped a few grades in school.

They met online, as the cliché would have it. The VAX cluster ran a creaky, semi-illicit bulletin-board system. They both posted on the roleplaying board, a few other places. He was delighted to hear of her interest in Arthuriana, invited her to guess what was up with the stories his character was telling. She didn’t guess; he had to tell her. He was retelling Malory.

They got to talking, via the VAX equivalent of IM. (Anybody else remember BITNET?) She realized quickly that he was formidably intelligent. He got around soon enough to telling her that she was the smartest girl he’d ever known. It was five or six weeks before they saw each other in person, meeting geekily and gawkily in a campus computer lab. He turned out to be a skinny, out-at-elbows lad all over denim; she recognized him the minute he walked in. He had to look around a bit before he zeroed in on her. She was a tall, chunky, rawboned woman with long untidy muddy-copper hair, wearing a magenta T-shirt that commemorated the previous summer she spent learning beginning geology in Montana.

Neither of them admitted how much they liked each other. There’s always a fly, isn’t there? The fly was—she was taken. Had a boyfriend already. If I weren’t taken, she wrote a friend, I met this other guy…

Come Halloween, she was abruptly not taken any more. Dumped. Dumped pretty hard, actually. He kept quiet, not wanting to seem importunate or insensitive. Even so, two and a half weeks later they spent the night together… no, not like that.

That was fifteen years ago tonight. Three graduate degrees, two graduate-school flameouts, two years of enforced separation, two major moves, a wedding, one house and three or four apartments later, they’re getting to be quite the old couple, they are.

We are.

Thanks to Pascale for pointing me to this lovely wordhord for the Anglo-Saxon geek. Made my day.

My Old English is purely secondhand (reading over my husband’s shoulder while he took it, many years ago), but this does look to be the straight-up deal. Take leohtspecca for “pixel.” Light-speck. Makes sense. And “feorransprecagewrit,” far-speak-written, for fax.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some weagebetung to do with my gifgaderung.

I hate messing with article databases as much as the next person. Tell you what, though, there’s something I hate worse: not being able to get at an article from anywhere but MPOW’s website.

Use case: I’m gaily surfing the biblioblogosphere when I stop at a super-cool article that will revolutionize the way I do business, or something like that. The blog that posted the article is in no way, shape, or form associated with MPOW, so naturally it provides a link to the journal’s (or journal aggregator’s) website.

If I follow that link, I’m stuck. The journal website does not offer me a way to authenticate as belonging to MPOW. It doesn’t even tell me whether MPOW subscribes to that journal or not. (There’s a bookmarklet idea for you, actually: “check this journal against Library X’s holdings.”) To get to the article, I have to go to MPOW’s website, drill down into it to find the journal in MPOW’s bewildering plethora of e-resources, and finally try for the article—by which time I’ve typically forgotten the citation information.

(If I ever knew it. The blog, thinking the link sufficient, may not actually contain it.)

It. Should. Not. Be. This. Hard. Stupid firewalled information. Bleagh. No wonder open access increases citation impact. Who needs all this hassle for one single article?

So I did scheduled maintenance on the production DSpace server this morning… and nothing untoward happened. New teaser page up, the patch I submitted to reduce clickies on submitting more than one item to a single collection works fine (oh, and hey, that patch got accepted! go me!), and nothing’s broken. And now I’m a good little sysadmin, remembering to tar up the known-good install before I start monkeying with it.

I decided Friday that to reduce unnecessary duplication of effort, I’m going to wait until the next formal release of DSpace to build an Eclipse tree for my own haxxies. I’d just go spla if I went to all the effort to re-hack stuff into 1.3.2 only to have them release 1.4 the next day.

I’m kinda getting the hang of this DSpace thing. Not too shabby, a Java know-nothing getting a patch accepted four months into the job.

Says Gillian Barr of San Diego:

I just looked up The Graduate Grind on Amazon and saw that its Amazon listing identified the term “student welfare” as a “SIP: statistically improbable phrase” w/in the book. That struck me as very funny in a dark-humor sort of way…

I can’t add a thing to that.

I’ve been inching my way through The Graduate Grind by Patricia Hinchey and Isabel Kimmel. Usually I devour books, but books on this particular subject I have to nibble at, because otherwise I get stomachaches. Really. I do. Lovitts, Cude, Nelson, the Kerlins—I have to read them slowly.

The Graduate Grind is an excellent book, a book that lives up to its subtitle as few books do. I’ll have more to say about it once I’ve finished it.

I feel that I owe Hinchey and Kimmel an apology, actually. The episode they seized on as emblematic of the bureaucratic futility of so many grad-school quests is the one I documented least. I wish I still had that documentation; I truly do.

I know why I don’t. The only way I could keep going (which I did, for two and a half more years) after the contretemps with the fellowships office was to bury the entire mess as deep into the unused back rooms of my head as I could. That meant deleting the evidence. I didn’t know that I’d want it later. I only knew I very badly didn’t want to see it any more then.

So I’m sorry. I wish I’d been smarter. Which sums up my entire first grad-school experience, really.

That said, I did eventually dig up one piece of evidence I couldn’t find then: my father’s fisking of me by email after I finally ’fessed up about leaving. I didn’t post it. I do still have it, but I’m just as dubious about posting it as I ever was. I’m not worried about its impact on me; I’ve nothing to prove to him, any more. I just don’t like the idea of painting him in that light. Easier to let people think I’m vilely unfilial, to call my own dad a character assassin.

For whatever reason, there’s been an uptick in the grad-student email I’ve been getting lately. (I keep it all. I really should analyze it for timing, because it does come in clumps, and I’m not sure why.) I do notice that I’m hearing from more students early in their programs these days, and that suits me fine. I’d rather get ’em out fast, start ’em doing something more productive and less soul-twisting. The early-birds mostly don’t break my heart the way the long-termers do.

Anyway. Got a note from an early-bird this morning before I left for work. After the usual embarrassingly effusive thanks, the writer explained to me that he’d gone to grad school in order to impress his professors. He’d show ’em. He’d prove to them how smart and capable he was.

If I had a magic wand, and could wave it to remove from graduate school anyone for whom this was their only or primary motivation… I think everyone involved would thank me, in the long run. I’d wave that wand, too. I would. It would have caught me, the first time.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting praise. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the important people in your life to value you. There’s everything wrong with choosing an expensive and risky course of action purely so that they will praise and value you. Even wronger, if you’re trying to reverse previous poor opinion. It’ll never happen. No matter what you do, they won’t love you any more for it.

That’s where I am with my dad. He’ll never value me much. I was supposed to be an academic, and I’m not (even though MPOW’s ID card calls me “faculty”). I have therefore entered the “disappointment” cubbyhole, and it doesn’t actually matter what I do with my life—I’ll never get out of there. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve nothing to prove to him. There’s nothing I can prove to him. He hasn’t got the frame of reference to value what I am and what I do.

Said another way, when the other half of the sketch—the valuer—both predicates the valuee’s value on one particular life-path and hasn’t got enough vision to value any other, the situation transcends wrongness into sheer horror. This describes more career academics than I even want to think about. My father. Several advisers I’ve had. This poor lad’s undergraduate professors.

(I’m letting UW-SLIS off the hook on this one, incidentally. They may have been disappointed that I resisted their siren calls, but they sped me on my way with good wishes, and they’ll be proud of what I accomplish in the profession.)

It’s an external motivation, not an internal one. Internal motivations won’t ensure graduate-school survival or an academic career, but lack of internal motivation will damn straight torpedo them more often than not. The other possibility for those who find their external motivations disappointed is lifelong bitter feuding, and who on earth really wants that?

If you’re an academic? Especially if you’ve never had another career? Don’t use “you should go to graduate school!” as an ego-stroke for your best undergrads. Just don’t. Please, if what you mean is “wow, you’re smart!” just say so. Your kids aren’t sophisticated enough to realize that you have a blinkered perspective on the work world, much less that your recommendations aren’t to be treated as holy writ. If you insist on sending them into a meat-grinder anyway—it’s on you. It’s on you. Not the kid.

I’m damn tired of counseling your ex-undergrads, I tell you what. I’m tired of blood leaking from my heart over what your flippant advice did to them.

I won’t stop, though, certainly not for your sake. I’ve got nothing to prove to you. More and more of your kids are getting their marching orders from me these days. Think of that, and tremble at your enrollments.

The house is well and truly sold; the papers and the check arrived late last week. When my throat re-opened after the check came out of the envelope, I called my husband to take a look.

“A lot of money,” he said.

“Uh, yeah.”

“I’ll go put it on the fridge with the other one, then” he said, and did. (“The other one” is a year’s Gateway to Sindarin royalties. A tidy sum, but hardly an overpoweringly impressive one, for those of you who think that Tolkien studies is a quick route to Easy Street.)

Blasé soul, isn’t he?

So for a few days we had about three years’ worth of my current gross salary (benefits not included) magnetted to our fridge door. On Monday I decided my nerves wouldn’t take any more of that, and did up the paperwork to stash it in a money-market fund. Paperwork plus checks duly went out by registered mail yesterday, and I remembered how to breathe. (Though I’ll feel better yet when it actually gets there.)

There’s a little more house-related money coming our way. USAA owes us a substantial refund on the rewritten insurance policy we paid for. As soon as the electric company debits our last bill, I can finally close the credit-union account back in Madison. And TDS Metrocom, drat them, decided to be blasé about fixing their billing errors, and debited us again for nonexistent phone and DSL service. I sent them a sharply-worded email, and will call them to speak in decidedly non-blasé tones if they don’t get their act together.

And I owe an invoice to a client, gah. Am trying to avoid thinking about it.

So, yeah, I can toss around a little Java now (emphasis on the little, of course), and I’m starting to consider tossing patches back in the general direction of DSpace.

Which means learning the Eclipse IDE/SDK gizmo. I say “gizmo,” but what I’m really talking about is a Swiss-army knife for programmers, multiplied by, oh, a gazillion or thereabouts.

Not that it isn’t cool. It is cool. It’s just bloody complicated.

So far I’ve gotten it to install, update itself, synch up to the DSpace tree on Sourceforge, syntax-color both Java code and JSPs (it doesn’t do JSPs natively; I had to grab a plugin), and make a patch file.

What I want it to do is manage all the stuff I’ve been hacking into the DSpace code. This is clearly going to take me a while to figure out… but the benefits should be impressive, especially when DSpace upgrades come out. Potentially, I could use Eclipse to manage code on both the staging and the production server (though I don’t actually like that idea much; too fragile).

Why is it complicated? Well, I don’t want to merge this stuff into the tree from Sourceforge, because that’s not latest-stable, it’s latest-and-greatest. So I’ll want a separate latest-stable tree in addition. When the latest-stable changes, I’ll have to figure out how to merge my changes to the formerly-latest-stable into the now-latest-stable, and I don’t know how to do that. Yet.

But I’ll figure it out. Eventually, and doubtless after much cursing. Sometimes the learning curve decides to change slope, is all.

I called this out in passing a little while ago, but it bears repeating: an open letter from economists to university presidents everywhere (’ware PDF) decrying the journal situation.

What’s novel about this letter is a remedy suggested therein: universities should start charging Elseviley Verlag (well, they don’t say that—they offer a formula for finding “overpriced” journals—but it all comes out in the same place, you know?) for the editing and peer-review labor contributed gratis by university faculty and staff.

I love this idea with a deep and abiding affection. It is beautiful. Hits the hogs hard while leaving everyone else untouched, and raises faculty awareness to boot. The only problem with it is the overhead of data-collection, but I daresay once the list of “overpriced” journals is made, it wouldn’t be too hard to correlate that with who’s doing what locally.

I hope some enterprising uni tries this. I truly do.

I had to put a filter on my work email for the “submission complete” notifications that DSpace sends out, because I put up a batch of poetry readings today and the notifications got to annoying me.

I grinned as I set up the filter, though.

And immediately afterward I growled at DSpace for not putting a “Submit another item to this collection” button on the submission-complete page, because it takes three or four clicks to get back to the initial submission screen from there. Come on, people, we want to make it easy to submit several things at once!

Fixed that while I was at it, despite having to go through a twisty little maze of Java classes, all alike, just to figure out how to get DSpace to spit out what collection I just submitted to… and then I took a deep breath, downloaded an entire Java SDK, and did the necessary twiddling to submit my changes as a patch.

(Props to DSpace, by the way, for the wiki’s very encouraging and welcoming statements about patch submission. My code-fu is weak enough that without that I might well have kept mum.)