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August 2012

Anybody who has used class blogging (Wordpress): recommendations for managing users/installations? (will be on own domain/server)

Sod's law. I end up teaching the term that involves Paradise Lost for 6 weeks, rather than the one that does Beckett's Godot :p

"Only 1/5 of HSS academics regard it as acceptable for academic publishers to make a profit that is not reinvested in their disciplines."

I suspect the Scholarly Kitchen article on book chapters to be highly discipline specific. Still well used in my field.

Oh for crying out loud. Osborne just used phrase "wealth creators". Do we have to go over who they create wealth for again?

Dead chuffed: bloke on exercise bike next to me waited 5 mins extra just sitting there so he could congratulate me on my hardcore workout.

I wrote about Parade's End on my MA... Can barely remember it now and had ambivalent feelings about it at the time.

Very interesting (and distressing) account of normalisation of abuse through fictional narrative of sliding consent in S&M.

In a few weeks, now: Teaching in a room in the morning. Having my viva in the same room in the afternoon. Gulp. Weird.

OK, I take it back (a bit). This year's correspondence from @tvlicensing, which arrived today, seemed more civil than I remember.

Hello #ecrchat! I'm post-submission, pre-viva Eng. lit Ph.D. candidate. Associate tutor and lecturer. Will be listening in while working.

Right, enough congratulating these A-Level types, I'm off to the library. If they know what's good for them, they will be too! :P

Good to see an impartial, disempowered voice that we rarely hear in UK HE writing for @guardian this morning on A-Levels. David Willetts.

Boris Johnson: "The way to get business really motoring in the UK is to cut taxes, cut regulation" -- heard that one before.

Just bought tickets to stage adaptation of David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" at the ICA. Hope they do it justice.

This idea that companies bid to run transport is bizarre. Why not select the co that might most benefit passengers, rather than who can pay?

Assange granted asylum. Queue both valid and hideously invalid arguments from both sides. One side also misogynist, though.

Extremely pleased to announce that, alongside archiving in @ClockssArchive, Orbit will also be stored in the Global LOCKSS Network!

Spent much of today alleviating my online paranoia by setting up LastPass and >17 character passwords on all the sites I use. Phew.

Brian McHale's shift from modernist epistemological to postmodern ontological dominant. #50shadesofpomo #nomoreipromise #sorry

Submitted article corrections through online system 2 weeks ago. Email this morning saying they haven't received them. #publishingfail

Did others have a post-submission period where every third thought was about their viva, even if still a month+ away? #ecrchat #phdchat

Agreed RT @ppetej Yes, indeed RT @chriskeene: But you can comment on them RT @jacksonj04: Argh! Stop doing old-style RTs!

Just re-read Russell Hoban's Fremder. I might put it above Kleinzeit in my rankings, actually. Great genre take on subjective idealism.

"What’s the problem ORCID will address? John Richard Wilson Wilson, John Richard John R. Wilson Wilson, John R. Wilson, J.R." etc.

For those who don't know, ORCID is the new system that assigns a unique identifier to researchers so that their publications are attributed.

The synopsis of the new McEwan sounds pretty dire and cliched. Beautiful daughters of Anglican bishop being groomed for MI5 after affairs.

I currently have a membership, but they wrote to me asking if I'm still a student and so whether they can bill me more, which made me think.

Was wondering: what are people's opinions on supporting Amnesty I. I like what they do a lot, but still hurting from their 800k exec payoff.