My mother's fiancé has a Canon EOS 40D that he would like to replace with a 50D. Body only, all original cables & accessories included, $800. Shipping arrangements to be worked out between you and him. If you're interested let me know and I'll put you in touch.

One thing about Twitter / Facebook is that it does make me really bad at updating LJ when news happens, and the past week or two have been full of news.

A week ago, I turned British. Frequently given answers about this include:
1) Yes, I'm still American; I wasn't required by either country to give up my American citizenship.
2) I decided to do it because my ancestors fought a war over the issue of taxation without representation; I've been subject to British taxation for five years now and it was about time I had some representation to go along with it, and this way I didn't even have to spoil a bunch of tea.
3) Yes, I had to attend a ceremony, take an oath saying I'd be a loyal citizen and uphold democratic values, etc. (I note there was nothing about being a loyal subject though.) The ceremony was very boring really, and a little patronizing.
4) No, I still can't do an impression of the regional accents.
5) Yes, now I'm about to move to Switzerland, subject to outcome of post-doctoral fellowship applications. Leave it to me to spend about a week with a new citizenship before expatriating again.

Half a week ago, I had my D.Phil. viva (i.e. thesis defense.) I was of course horribly nervous about this beforehand, not because I was convinced I would fail but because you just never know when something will go horribly and unexpectedly wrong. Nothing went wrong, though—in fact my examiners were fairly complimentary even while grilling me about specific questions they had, or pointing out places I'd been unclear in my meaning. I have a stack of "minor corrections" to do, which is pretty normal after an Oxford viva, but none of these corrections require much extra work on my part. Just a little reference chasing, and some formatting fixes, and I'm done.

On the other hand, it means I have an epic fight with biblatex on my hands, and very little idea where to go for help (I've not had very much luck at all on support mailing lists, since I have to spend so much time demonstrating that I'm not stupid, just to find no one can usually answer my questions anyway.) This is probably the biggest obstacle between me and final thesis deposit.

I have to say, it still sounds odd when people call me "Dr." Good, but odd.

For those of you who do/have done fixed-term contract programming:

Let's say that you have accepted a contract to do a particular piece of programming work. You agree the rate (whether hourly or fixed) and do the work, and get paid. A little while later your client reports a bug in what you delivered. (And I specifically don't mean "a clarification or addition to what they really wanted the spec to be".)

Poll #1367487
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Do you fix it free of charge?

Elaborate in comments, of course.

1. I wonder why the English word for the country is "Netherlands", when I as a native speaker find it much harder to say that than "Nederland", which is their own word for it.

2. I think I identify as a geek first and a woman second. It really frustrates me when someone tries to tell me I can't do that—that I have to be female first—and I don't have a good solution to the problem or how to call people on it.

I am finding myself unreasonably irritated that, barring the horrors of Ryanair, it was impossible for me to leave Oxford after 4pm on Monday and arrive in Pisa before 10am on Tuesday. And in order to get there by noon on Tuesday I have had to go via Gatwick. Honestly, I thought you could get everywhere in Europe from Heathrow by now.

So I woke up at quarter past 3 this morning, so that I could pack and be out the door by 4:50, so that I could be on the 5:15 coach to Gatwick (for which a return ticket now costs an extortionate £35. This had better be covered in my expenses.)

Airport security included laptops-out-of-bags, a random beeping of the metal detector (I didn't know it would do that, but I wasn't wearing or carrying anything that would set it off, and the person who searched me said that it was random. So there you go, I guess), and that stupid secondary shoe thing.

---
At that point, my post was interrupted by a fire alarm going off in the terminal. That was more excitement than I'd bargained for. We all get herded outside via the emergency exits, and hemmed in by lots of airport employees to make sure no one wandered off. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we didn't have to re-clear security. On the other hand, I think it would have been dead simple for someone to pull the alarm, hide in the general chaos (i.e. not go outside), and make mischief. It also struck me as a good way to ensure a flight delay if you are in the terminal and operating on behalf of someone who is running late.

Maybe I just have too devious a mind.

Now I am in Pisa at the sort of meeting where wifi is available. Hurrah, goofing off while half-listening.

I have a complicated relationship with Catholicism at the best of times, which I won't get into here apart from noting that I was half-raised in the Catholic church. And I find that this disgusts me viscerally. Not even the sex-abuse scandal turned my stomach this badly - that was the Church covering up for rogue elements within, but this is the Church officially proclaiming as a matter of policy that an unborn child is more valuable than a born child, and that a mother has no right to protect the life of her own child. Nothing rogue about it.

Horrifying.

(Comments screened, given that I'm talking about religion.)

If I were to go down to London on Tuesday to finally see the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy, would anyone else be interested in coming along?

I have, hands down, the best supervisor in the world. Even if he is as much of a procrastinator as I am.

I didn't submit my thesis yesterday, because my supervisor was so close to getting through the last of the edited Armenian text (which is the sort of job that requires minute attention to detail) that I agreed to wait to get the final corrections this morning.

Last night I started in with the fretting. What if I overslept? What if the printer jammed? What if the one-hour thesis binding service was mysteriously unavailable? What if *their* printer jammed? So I sent an email to my supervisor asking how early we could meet.

He mailed me back this morning at 7:30, at which point he had been awake for 2 hours and had finished the work. *I* didn't even wake up until 8:30. So he was waiting for me in the cafe at Blackwell's when I got into town at 10.

He bought me tea, went through the corrections, waited while I adjusted some page references[*], and walked me over to his office so that we could use his professorial credentials to get access to printers, copiers, etc. His printer was coping very poorly, so we ended up having to go use another one. Meanwhile I had to finish assembling the second-stage application for this fellowship (which was also due today to the Oxford co-ordinator), so he gave me the key to go back up to his office and work on that while he finished collecting my thesis from the printer. Then he came back with it, and sat down and went through all 234 pages one-by-one to make sure they were all there and not misprinted. Then he started wrangling the copier while I sorted out the printing of the postdoc app.

The copier was not cooperating at all, so I finally said "You know what? Screw it. Let me take the manuscript to the printer's and just pay them to copy it." So he stuck around in his office so that I could leave my things there while I ran the thing to the print shop. We ended up going to have lunch when I was done with that, since by that time I was really fantastically hungry. And then he gave me an envelope for the postdoc app and sent me on my way to hand everything in.

So that was his entire morning and half the afternoon, given over to helping me do all these stupid clerical tasks. I have the best supervisor ever.


* The beauty of LaTeX is that you never have to do this manually; unfortunately that mostly falls over when you have to associate a 40-page Armenian text with its translation page-by-page. I really ought to figure out an automated way of at least generating the labels, if not knowing where to stick them in...

From a work point of view, there is absolutely no reason for me to be awake right now. Unfortunately, my brain won't shut up about the work. This is especially annoying in that it will cut into my library hours tomorrow, and is compounded by the fact that my typing-induced tendinitis is dictating that I stop with this post.

I met with my supervisor this evening; he has yet to read three of the nine chapters, but so far there are only very minor corrections, and he was even nice enough to buy me dinner. The post-meeting count of TODOs now stands at 13. Two figures (still) and eleven references. I also need to incorporate copy-editing feedback from one of my legion of proofreaders.

I'm feeling pretty confident at this stage about everything except the chances for that fellowship. I still don't think the chapter I need to send them (as writing sample) is as well-written as it could be, and I only have one extra day to polish it. I'm also terrified that I'm overplaying the computational side, when they really want to hear more about the literary side. Curses.

Hey linguists: Is there a good reference I can point to for the assertion that humans are better at linguistic pattern recognition than computers? I mean, everyone knows it, but that doesn't count for much in academia.

The deadline for handing in my thesis is in five days. Friday, 5pm.

I spent the week before last writing as fast as I could, all while visiting Zurich and having to cope remotely with a cat housebound by snow & ice. By last Monday, when I returned on the morning flight, my hands were absolutely shot from all the typing, and I was getting delirious from lack of sleep. I used the still-precarious transport links as an excuse to cancel my afternoon appointments, and slept. A lot. Tuesday I still didn't want to type much, so I didn't.

The time since Wednesday has been all about filling in content for all the places in my thesis that say TODO. These are usually page numbers in citations, but sometimes are "find citation", and sometimes are "finish this thought". When I started on Wednesday, there were 200. Now there are 23 (but 5 are really the same thing, so let's say 18). Three are "find citation" (like at the top of this post, only the other two are actually in my field so should be easier), and the rest are the "fill in page number" sort.

Friday I called the exam schools to check on the progress of my paperwork, and lo and behold, they have done everything they need to do, and will be able to mail the thesis to examiners as soon as I submit it. (The examiners have informally agreed that my viva will be 23 March. This will give them a month or so to read the thing.)

Tomorrow I meet my supervisor to go through all the corrections he has for me, and see which ones I've already fixed, and run by him all the changes I've made since giving him the last draft. I suspect the list of TODOs will spike a bit.

Tuesday & Wednesday (and Thursday if tomorrow's meeting goes badly) will be spent whittling the TODOs down to zero. And then it's off to the printers and the exam schools, and I will be DONE.

And I'll sleep for a month.

Have made two posts to comp.text.tex, ever, and neither of them had a response. I guess the questions i ask are just too difficult.

I wasn't going to mention the snow (there is some here in Oxford, but nothing like the several inches in London, and our local buses are still running) until I got a message from Ocado saying that my grocery delivery has been cancelled.

Don't know when I'm going to find time to shop for myself in the next few days...

I have finally started actually editing some text. It means that, although my collation program is fiddly and horrible, it is good enough. That's progress I guess. Unfortunately it takes a whole lot longer than I thought to make editing decisions about all those stupid little word variants.

I'll be working on the collation for the next couple of days (unless I go on a mad editing bender tomorrow and produce all of it.) And then I'll just have to plug in stemmatic data, and revise the thesis draft, and then I'll be done. Cool huh? I make it sound so easy.

...you know, I don't think this LJ entry is going to make sense to anyone but me.

I got a letter from the Home Office today informing me that my application for British naturalisation was successful. This is not only good news, but also was blindingly fast by current standards - the guidelines said to expect a 7-month wait, and I had just over a one-month wait.

So within 2 weeks, I should get me a letter inviting me to attend a citizenship ceremony (where, presumably, I will take my oath of allegiance to the queen and receive a leaflet detailing the accepted ways to make a proper cup of tea.) I have no idea how soon the ceremony will be scheduled, although the upper limit is 90 days. The way things are suddenly happening all at once, what's the betting that it will be the day I have to submit my thesis?

Of course then I'll be in a situation that I haven't been in since I was a child: being a citizen of a country without a valid passport for it. This could make things...interesting...given how frequently I am flitting back and forth between here and Switzerland at the moment. (All this is complicated by the fact that I'd need to send in my American passport to get the British one, and that British first-passport applications take up to 6 weeks thanks to a mandatory in-person interview, and there is no fast-track service for them.) It turns out that the easiest solution might be to naturalise, go to Switzerland, and apply for the British passport from there. And then I'd have an American passport issued in London and a British passport issued in Berne. Cool huh?

It seems lately like Twitter/Facebook is sucking away all my pent-up need to write LiveJournal posts. Don't get me wrong - I don't think that the one is a replacement for the other, by a long shot. But the pithy little Twitter comments seem to satisfy that part of me that wants to say things where other people will see and maybe respond.

So what have I been up to lately? Here I'm going to take an idea I had a while ago, which is to go through my Twitter posts and assemble a coherent narrative out of it. (Of course, the timing of this post is in no way inspired by the fact that a draft of many thesis chapters is sitting on the printer in the next room, ready for my editorial pen. Honest.)

---

I saw off the last of my family on the 29th, and after a bit of decompression I was suddenly gripped with all the thesis-finishing drive that had deserted me in November and most of December. I coded my way through the new year and the leap second, and within a couple of days I had my Difference Engine working beautifully with the right sort of XML. Of course, with progress comes sacrifices, and knell didn't see much of me for many of his waking hours.

After clearing out a load of Christmas leftovers from the refrigerator, I decided that obviously the time was right for an adventure in train travel. My first destination was Wiesbaden, where my brother and his girlfriend had gone a week earlier to see in the New Year in company a little more exciting than his sister's.

I only stayed in Wiesbaden for long enough to say hello to everyone and get a good night's sleep, and then it was off to join knell in Zürich. I already pretty much knew that the time in Switzerland would be a boot camp for writing my thesis and worrying about other academic matters, but I did occasionally take some time to enjoy the scenery, and I had a willing volunteer to sit on my books when it was judged that I'd been working too hard.

Computer problems aside, the time away from Oxford was more or less successful. I probably didn't get out of the house as much as I could have, but I did go out for the occasional coffee and I started to meet some of the other expats with Google connections (who, I suspect, will provide the vast majority of my social interaction for the next year or so while I'm there.) I also signed the lease on our new apartment, which was the reason I needed to make a trip at all.

I left on Thursday morning, and had a nice journey with lots of scenery and the odd tourist attraction. It's always a bit of a shock to the system to go from Swiss public transport to anyone else's, but it is nonetheless nice to be home.

This whole "emigrating" thing means that, among other considerations, I'll no longer get my DSL-plus-8-static-IPs from my (mostly) beloved Zen. That means it's probably time to bite the bullet and find a hosting provider.

I currently run a webserver, a Subversion server, and general shell utilities (e.g. irssi+screen); this means I need a whole virtual machine as opposed to just web hosting.

So for my friends out there that use hosting providers:
- Who do you use?
- How do you like them?
- What can you do to guard against having your bandwidth eaten up by malicious requests?

I hardly know what day it is anymore.

I've been stubbornly stuck for the past few days on a schedule that involves going to sleep around 6am, give or take an hour. When this happens to me, the severity of sleep dep it would take to cure the problem is vastly higher than I am actually willing to subject myself to. (I *did* subject myself to "stay up until 9am having only had six hours' sleep the nightmorning before, wake up at 1pm, be utterly exhausted and triumphantly go to bed at midnight, only to lie awake for the next hour and give up and stay up until 5 or 6 anyway". That is about my limit of "unpleasant", but doesn't do the trick.)

So I'm trying my next trick—going somewhere. Travel often seems to have this clock-reset effect on me (though that has not always been true; ukelele had to put up with a massively and stubbornly jetlagged me in Ireland once, and exponentialdk suffered the same from me in Iceland.) (Hey, maybe it's just something to do with countries called I*eland.)

I'm aided in this by Eurostar, who were offering less-than-half-price return tickets on certain trains, where "certain trains" for the day I wanted to leave meant "the 5:53am train". Getting to St. Pancras from Oxford in time for a 6am departure involves leaving Oxford on the 3:10 coach. Isn't it handy that I wasn't going to be asleep anyway? Isn't it also nice that I sleep okay on trains?

I'll get to Brussels at 9:00, leave on the Thalys for Köln at 10:25 (for which they were inexplicably selling first class tickets for €34 where 2nd was €29), and take the next available train from there to Mainz. With any luck I'll sleep on Monday night. Tuesday I'll get an ICE from Frankfurt to Zürich, where I'll hole up somewhere and try to turn out thesis prose, since it really is getting down to the wire now. I'll be back in Oxford sometime before the 17th. (The Eurostar ticket has me returning the evening of the 15th, but I may find it cheaper and easier to ditch the return half of the ticket and fly direct to London, rather than making my way back to Brussels. I love travel flexibility.)

I went into town today, since it was the last opportunity I'd have to get to the library. It was pretty packed, though the libraries themselves were pretty empty. Which about sums up Christmas season in Oxford.

I got to the bus stop at about 3:15; service to my neighborhood runs every 10 minutes during the daytime. I gathered from overheard conversation that I'd missed one by a couple of minutes. 30 minutes later, I was still waiting. 30 minutes after that, I was on a bus in traffic. The total travel distance was 1.7 miles. So yes, I could have walked it in half the time.

And so we see what passes for city planning in Oxford. I'm starting to have sympathy for all those grumbling about how the roads are all clogged with traffic all the time.

I have just spent the last couple of hours taking measurements and looking through the online IKEA catalogue for things we would need to re-fit our tiny little kitchen (in order to make it more attractive to prospective tenants / buyers.) I even did the whole graph-paper-with-cutout-squares-for-appliances thing. It makes me want to go out and buy and assemble everything now.

I'm suddenly looking forward to when the house is empty of our stuff. It will also give me a chance to get rid of the remaining wallpaper in the downstairs rooms. Apropos, I'm hoping that I will have enough friends around who enjoy wielding paintbrushes to help me repaint, come March or so. :)

Now I just need a way to rip my attention away from house-related things and return it to academic-related things. Not just the thesis either—there are a few applications for next year I need to finish this week.

[This is a transcript of a journal entry I wrote by hand on the plane on Thursday. I haven't had time to post it until today.]

When last I wrote, I was relating a tale of frustration and despair. Today's tale is one of manic twists & turns, and ultimate victory.

I went to my appointment at the US embassy as I'd planned. The people there were helpful and didn't show much sign of a hangover. They explained what they could do for me—an emergency second passport, essentially, which I had thought wasn't an option. I was made to confirm my situation, made to take an oath that I hadn't lied about anything, and given the passport with strict instructions to return it as soon as my real one emerged from the Home Office. That's what consular assistance from my government looks like.

Despite all that effort, though, it looked like I would still be in trouble if I used it. Or would I? The embassy official said that they'd helped others in similar situations, but of course didn't know the UK immigration rules so could give no guarantees. Another frequent traveller who struck up a conversation with me was sure there wouldn't be a problem. But again, all this was at my own risk. The immigration official who had advised me in August said I needed to be "careful". It was that one conversation with that one irritable Home Office work that still gave me pause. I called knell to fret for a while, and finally decided "no" around 5pm. I sent a regretful email to the conference organizer and had a consolation pint with my brother- and sister-in-law.

In the middle of another consolation pint with another set of friends in another pub, my phone rang. I saw knell's name on the display and I just knew. He'd checked the package tracking number attached to my return Special Delivery from the Home Office, and it seemed that my passport was on its way, due by 1pm today [Thursday]. Mike would wait in for the package, bring me my passport, and I'd get the last flight available from London City to Vienna. It would all work out after all. I called the conference organizer to rescind my previous email, and booked a ticket.

And then my mind started playing through more scenarios. What if there was a tracking mix-up? What if the package was late? I'd seen special deliveries arrive at our house well after the 1pm cut-off. What if it didn't really have my passport? What if they'd denied my application out of pique? What if my host in Vienna had given his guest bed away? What if what if? Finally I came up with the following Master Plan:

• The package was exceedingly unlikely to not have my passport. This was a Special Delivery envelope I'd provided specifically for the return of my documents, and it would be beyond rude for the Home Office to use it for a query or a partial return.
• I would go to the other conference I was booked to attend, in London, where I'd registered when my Vienna trip began to look unlikely, and try to take my mind off things.
• Mike could wait for the package until 1:45 at the latest—any longer and I'd be unable to get my passport from him for travel.
• If the delivery was later than 1:45, well, I had just snagged another passport. Mike would stay put, open the envelope to verify that my visa was there, tell me, and if so I would travel on the spare.
• If something drastically wrong(i.e. no passport) had been sent, I would have to eat the airfare. But I would not get on the flight without confirmation that I now had a visa.
• If by some nightmare my application had actually been rejected, I would travel anyway, because the question of which passport I used would not make a spot of difference.

So 1:45 ticked by. No sign of the postman. Around 1:50, he was spotted arriving in the neighborhood and starting his rounds with another street. Finally at 2:15 I had word. Success! The visa was really there! Of course there was no time at all to actually get the passport, so on to plan C. The embassy visit was $100 well spent after all.

Of course, in the 8 hours between despair and joy yesterday, my host had in fact given away his guest bed. So instead of being distracted by conference proceedings, I was ignoring papers and frantically asking around for backup accommodation. I did manage to have a few conversations with interesting people, but I really do wish I'd been able to focus. After a lot of panicking of his own in Vienna, my original host partly sorted me out, and then a second friend stepped up to cover the rest.

So as I write, I'm on a Swiss flight from Zürich to Vienna. As convinced as I was yesterday that I'd finally been defeated, my travel karma fairy pulled it off. I shall have to spend the evening writing the rest of my talk after all.

And I ought never again to have to listen to the hold music of the Border and Immigration Agency. That's a real load off my mind.

I seem to have fallen back into a bad old insomnia habit. Damn.

Mostly, I suspect, this is because my mind is spinning like crazy thanks to all the intellectual excitement of this past weekend. I went down to London on Thursday to give a tech talk (the one I've been dining out on in Copenhagen and Paris) to London.pm, and stuck around until today for a workshop about Arabic prosopography.

No, I'm not turning into an Arabist. I am, however, being paid this year to work on the Prosopography of the Byzantine World project, adding information from the relevant Armenian sources. I was invited to the workshop as a way of meeting people in the field whom I should know. In advance of this, I also went on Thursday to meet the professor who made the arrangements for me to work on the project. It was kind of like an ex post facto interview. By the end of it, I realized the extent to which she's working me into her plans for all sorts of digital-humanities projects that need to be done. She's adamant that I should worry foremost about finishing my thesis, because it's only after that's done that I will be free to be co-opted into all these other schemes. I seem to have acquired another grownup figure who will be regularly checking on me to see that I'm progressing on my thesis. Hmm.

And the other thing I realized by the end of the hour is that the work that needs to be done is actually interesting. Ever since I went back to history, various people have suggested that I might find a niche in humanities computing. I've always reacted warily to this idea, because I always had the impression that, while computing can do a great deal for history, the technology involved would not be interesting enough to keep my attention. Now I've begun to see that I just wasn't imaginative enough. (I mean, hey, my collation project is a direct counter-example. It's fun to write, the geeks like to hear about it and seem to find it interesting, and the humanities people border on treating me like some sort of manuscript Messiah. It can all go to a girl's head.)

So I went to this workshop, which was allegedly about Arabic prosopography but was really all about large-dataset history projects online and how communication and standards are so much better than working in isolation. Since I was there as a technologist and not an Arabist, and I have full confidence in my abilities there, I was a lot less reticent than I usually am in scholarly settings, and got into some really interesting discussions about things like collaboration models and approaches to semantic markup of historical texts. I really ought to write down some notes about it before I forget.

In between the conference sessions, I also got to hang out with d_ilmari, have a nice fry-up for breakfast, and lounge around in the grass on Primrose Hill enjoying the rare bit of sunshine. It was a beautiful weekend that almost made me kind of miss living in London.

After the conference I went with a fellow technologist to Paddington, where we got into a debate about the relative merits of Perl, Lisp, and XSLT and ended up missing our train because we both lost track of time. Oops. Then I came home, knell made me tea, and I realized what my thesis-writing schedule between now and the end of December has to be. I have my work cut out for me. No wonder I'm not sleeping.