Busy. Dammit. I can’t escape teh busy. Not for five minutes.
I’ll be out of town Sunday through Tuesday at the NISO/PALINET thing. Slides are done, but I haven’t scripted them, so guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow? (That and next week’s class lecture.)
If that’s not enough, I’m up for fifteen minutes at a local teaching/learning tech thing on the 13th. I can cannibalize existing presentations to put that together, but I still have to do that (and we just won’t talk about the two hours I spent on a meeting yesterday over this, because I am rapidly forming a personal rule that anything on which I have to spend more meeting time than actual doing the thing time is not worthwhile).
And Roach Motel is due shortly, and while I think it’s quite done enough to give to an editor without cringing—I took a pass through and fixed a lot of structural problems that were causing unnecessary repetition, and have I mentioned that I’m really not a very fluid and polished writer?—I haven’t formatted it the way they want and I need to do that.
And I’m so overdue on a book review that let’s not even talk about how overdue I am on the book review. I’m taking the book with me to read on the plane.
And I’ve basically promised to make a stab at integrating some PREMIS into Manakin, because that is the officially-blessed way of solving my friendly file-format descriptions problem. Wish me luck with that.
If that’s not enough, toss in some fairly massive upheaval in both personal and professional lives, none of which I feel justified in blogging publicly. Suffice to say that while both situations are unsettled, both are improving and I am cautiously optimistic about both—but none of it does anything useful for my stress levels, right?
There may be blogging. There may not be blogging. I’m busy.
There is likely to be more Manakin blogging; the redesign proceedeth apace and I have some tidbits to share. I merely remark briefly that I do better relying on my own hacktastic CSS skills than using other people’s beautiful elegant solutions. I tried the Holy Grail. I spent days trying to get it to do what I needed, and that was just in Firefox—I looked at it for the first time in IE yesterday, and it was horrendously, unbelievably, irretrievably broken. I gave up shortly thereafter, and within 45 minutes had something that is working fine in Firefox, and probably won’t need more than a few box-model tweaks in IE.
In passing: I read this report (PDF) on the fate of social-science post-docs, and was struck by the sentence “Funders, policy makers, disciplinary associations, universities, and graduate faculty need to recognize that the PhD in the 21st century is preparation for employment.”
I… I… I got nothin’. I can’t think of a blessed thing to say to this. Except a loud and boisterous “BEWARE!” to anyone thinking of entrusting their lives to a doctorate in a social-science discipline. (Including LIS.)
