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February 2022

Today marks 2 years since I last travelled into my office at Birkbeck for meetings. We got Toby a couple of days later and then began shielding, as we have been ever since, 5 days after. It's been a depressively reductive life since then but I'm grateful that I remain safe.

There's no clear exit path at the moment, either. The removal of protections for the vulnerable makes it very difficult for us to take even small risks, as the consequences remain dire. But unending house arrest, save for dog walks and visits when family isolate, takes its toll.

Twitter posts are feeble in the wake of war - inadequate for expression and providing no remedy except my own catharsis. Saying nothing is always an option - and it would have the same impact (nothing) - but: this is horrific. My solidarity with the victims of war.

Now listening to @georgekupar speaking about his research into academic publishing and global censorship. Really tricky terrain here.

Gearing up for my second short talk of the day and just realised the virtual background in Spatial Chat is an actual room that I have spoken in before. I miss real places.

I've got to say, the hybrid online/live setup at the R2R conference that I am attending today is pretty spectacular. The effort involved in setting that up and getting it to work must have been quite extraordinary.

Plotting out our utopian schemes

I've tweeted quite a bit about Covid and English government policy tonight. Quite frankly, it's appalling news for the vulnerable. As we approach the two-year mark here of isolation and shielding, I feel grave senses of anxiety and serious omnipresent existential threat.

So it "remains a dangerous disease if you're vulnerable". But we'll nonetheless abandon testing and masks, the last measures keeping the vulnerable safe. This rhetoric of "personal responsibility" means nothing when the harm is to others. It should be about social responsibility.

Advice sought! Toby is getting very old and seems to have dementia. He now forgets that he should wake us up in the night by barking if he needs to go out and instead just walks around the hall. Can anyone recommend a good motion detector camera that can send an android alert?

It's the two-year anniversary today of the unexpected death of legendary music producer Andrew Weatherall. I was due to see him play that week in 2020 and many of my Facebook feed/music friends were in shock. I met him once and he seemed also the nicest bloke. RIP AW.

I was thinking this evening about the most extraordinary place in the world to which I have travelled. There are many candidates but I think that Abu Simbel may be top of the list.

Also incredible was the Deir el-Medina, the Valley of the Workers - a lesser visited complex with incredibly rich and vibrant paintings

My colleague @ScholTom is unfailingly kind and generous. A really lovely gift in memory of my Nan.

Also lovely from @the_blochian and @iainrobertsmith. Grateful for the kindness of good friends.

Today's lunchtime listening is new wax: A Fistful of Bitcoins from A Sagittariun - electro acid western complete with horse noises 😂🐴

On a friend's suggestion, this morning I read Stuart Hall's remarkably prescient essay from 1986, "No Light at the End of the Tunnel". While an immanent critique of Thatcherism, it really makes a lot of sense for our present moment, almost 40 years later.

Just a musing note to myself having re-read the preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity the other day: there's something to be written on UK-style cryptic crosswords and the idea of "puzzling" to which Empson gestures.

The surface and depth effects here work across multiple registers with the best clues sustaining a surface reading that contradicts the instructional mode of the subsidiary indicator.

It's even more remarkable when you consider Ximenian formalist principles to which at least some crosswords adhere.

Today's lunchtime listening is the Heavenly Records compilation of all the Andrew Weatherall remixes that came out on the label. Super sonic slice after slice.

A sad morning today as we said goodbye to my dearly loved grandmother, Ethel Gray, "Nan" (1921-2022). She had a long and remarkable life. Born before antibiotics, she relocated to Canada after World War 2, running hairdressing businesses, before returning to England.

I saw her not long ago and she was on very good form. It would be churlish to feel too sad given her long and rich life, but I will also miss her greatly. Someone who has been there my entire life.

Could world leaders please not instigate World War 3 right now? After my antibody test I was just starting to look forward to the glimmer of a post-pandemic life and "massive nuclear apocalypse" wasn't really part of the dream.

I know I already praised it, but Rich does make it so easy to debug applications/build visually appealing logging mechanisms for command-line systems. Here's some stuf I am doing on the Next Generation Library Publishing project.

I still hate GraphQL though

Doing some table-based logging like this makes it really easy for me to see what's going wrong at the end of a run

My other reading today is Carl DiSalvo's new offering from The MIT Press, Design as Democratic Inquiry. I'm looking forward to thinking with this about the politics of computational interface design.

This morning's reading for me is a revisit of Paul Gooding and @melissaterras's Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the Library Collections of the Future (London: Facet Publishing, 2020).

All that is not saved will be lost.

The best news I've had in two years! After four vaccine doses and infusions of immunoglobulins that were donated during the pandemic period, I am at last starting to show some antibodies!

A late meeting for @COPIMproject today that's just finished, but good to hear what the team has been up to. I took some relief from admin earlier by reading New Literary History articles from 2010. Struck by how long the post-critique debate has lasted.

I've worked on a few projects now that use GraphQL. I can safely say that I still really don't like it. Cursor-based pagination via Relay spec with edges and nodes is very confusing. The query syntax also looks so ugly in python contexts & seems difficult safely to parameterize.

The Garmin device that I use for sleep tracking has consistently relayed me bad news about my sleep phases for the past 6 months. Always poor with little deep sleep. Last night, I tried playing pink noise through some headphones. The result seems remarkable...

Today is @openlibhums “disaster day”! We will be simulating a total tech failure of our main online data centres and reconstructing the platform from our backup systems. Part of our ongoing commitment to digital preservation.

I'll be sporadically live-tweeting little snags/“gotchas” as we hit them. The first joy: do any of us have the requisite local space to _decompress_ the 200gb backups?

Some of our (nonetheless easily re-creatable) configuration files are not currently stored (but will be after today). SSL certs, hosts files, gunicorn setups.

Scripting your spin-up routines for new servers will minimise downtime for fresh infrastructure

One of the core bottlenecks for speed of recovery is bandwidth between your off-site backup and the main server

"I may be some time"

we've now reached the point where the basic service is up and running, the database is loaded, and we have all systems operational. We now need to await completion of the file transfer process (105 GB)

And we're done! Full restore in under 6 hours. Went without a hitch although we did learn a few things along the way.

I've been reading a bit more about the longterm history of web accessibility and wondered if someone could please give me a pointer: is there any good writing on the ethics of the "disability/impairment could happen to anyone" argument for inclusivity?

@zaranosaur you sprang to my mind as someone who might know a lot more about this than I do.

Two years ago I was trying out my ancient tuxedo for a prize dinner that I never got to attend as we went into early lockdown due to my immune problems. Just an excuse to post the picture really.

Today brings an enjoyable range of different work activities for me. First I welcomed a new starter to OLH before dealing with my emails. Next I have a PhD committee for a US university. These are interesting, not just for the intellectual work but for observing process elsewhere