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June 2024

Another frustrating covid thing. I was eligible for a booster jab and got it on the NHS. My wife, who lives with me, was NOT eligible this time. They simply aren't giving it to "people who live with vulnerable people". She had to drive 3.5hrs and pay £100 for a private jab.

The biggest risk is exposure to the virus. But they decided that it's OK to expose vulnerable people, many of whom do not respond strongly to vaccines, by not doing spouses and carers. Insanity.

Today I had a rare substantial blood pressure drop during dialysis and almost passed out when I sat up. This has only happened to me once before, but is a relatively common dialysis side effect. Unpleasant.

Next week I'm back into hospital to try to get my AV fistula working. This would be the next step on the road to doing dialysis overnight and reclaiming 25 hours per week. Last time, though, it went very badly. Fingers crossed.

Today is the 25th anniversary of The Chemical Brothers' _Surrender_. A record that I still play relatively frequently and that encapsulates the best of their now lengthy career.

There will be an open-access edition of this book at publication, but if you would like to purchase a print copy, there's a code here for 20% off

Took a late lunch today and part of my lunchtime regime is a walk for physiotherapy purposes (hip replacement and all that). There was an ice cream van en route

Apologies to those looking for the Retraction Watch database; the download has been unhappy over the past couple of days. We're deploying a fix now.

Just watched Doctor Who, "Dot and Bubble". I thought standard social media critique for most of it, but the white supremacist twist at the end was a real bombshell. And I was guilty of not noticing.

Predictably, untrained NHS "physician associates" are now being referred to as just "physicians". Appalling they're allowed loose on patients at all, let alone this obfuscation.

A new small tool from Crossref Labs. Our Annual Data File is extremely large at hundreds of gigabytes and sometimes we need to search it without having access to the full dataset. This tool https://gitlab.com/crossref/labs/labs-data-file-api will allow you to build an index that can be searched in seconds.

If you don't want to generate the index yourself, here's a torrent of the database, allowing for speedy search of the Crossref database, and in a handy Django ORM format https://academictorrents.com/details/674d3fbbca65c46c0ba52a65658aef0c8fc99e86

Went away for a few days to the West Country to visit family, including undertaking "dialysis away from base" in a remote centre, which was a right faff to set up. Got a good view of Stonehenge as we drove past though.

Kidney appointment yesterday. The frustrating outcome was that I need to increase my number of dialysis sessions per week. So that's another 5 hours per week gone.

I think it's really disappointing that conferences about the future of scholarly communications are going "in-person only" in 2024. I cannot travel as I need haemodialysis every 48 hours. Without any remote participation, I am effectively excluded by disability.

I also finished Percival Everett's James, which is a remarkable reworking of Huck Finn. As with all his best books, astonishing.

One of our core pieces of matching software, written by my colleague at Crossref, is called "Marple". Realised I'd never actually read a Miss Marple novel and so today I went foe the _4.50 From Paddington_, which a friend gave me as a birthday joke (too complex to explain!)

I took the upcoming publication of my tenth book to reflect on whether there's a narrative between them; if there is, it's about registers of knowledge and thinking about how the flexible term "literature" works in different contexts (eg the scientific literature).