The Yonderist – Page 2 – All those who wander are not lost.

The Sweet Setup has Shawn Blanc’s Detailed Ulysses Setup, which is compelling in its comprehensiveness. He appears to have all, or at least much, of his writing life/work operating in and through Ulysses:

I think much the same could be done in Devonthink, though I am not sure about the custom folder icons, which really do, I think, make a difference in terms of UI and UX.

The idea of an internal content management system (CMS) is of course very appealing. For a long time, I ran much of my thinking through previous iterations of this WordPress blog. Then I got burned by a couple of incidents, and, too, I fell in love with having everything in plain texts (and not necessarily XML). But having developed a reasonably good journaling habit using Day One, I feel a little less compelled to insist that everything has to be in an open format. As long as you can get it there with a relatively small number of steps, I am willing to give it a shot.

What It’s Like

2025-06-19

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Working at a third-tier institution is not all wine and roses. Trying to get research done with an ill-equipped library is pretty rough. And, yes, I hear all of you out there talking about Anna’s Archive, but no gray- or blackmarket website should be an excuse for an institution not taking its responsibility to support research and teaching seriously.

The library at my university has not had a serious book budget since 2005, which means that the last 20 years of humanities scholarship is missing from the shelves. Instead, we are offered ebooks that the library rents from various services:

And search results are often deceiving: you think you have access to a book, but you really don’t:

So many copies! But you only get 60 pages if you elect not to use Adobe’s HellScape app.

I’m afraid the results for journals is perhaps even worse, with out card catalog often woefully unaware that some journals exist. Take for example my recent search for Language and Literature:

I’m not sure what journal that is, but the journal I had in mind is:

But we don’t have it, along with dozens and dozens of other journals.

Hello there!

2025-06-11

link

“Hello there” is a variation on Hello, world, the traditional first bit of code one writes, as in: print ("Hello world."). Hello there acknowledges that bit of history and includes a bit of my own personal history, with a reference to that moment in the original Star Wars film that we see Obi-Wan Kenobi for the first time.

Annual Performance Evaluation Response

2019-05-17

work

At the end of the tedious online performance evaluation process faculty are allowed to make a statement of sorts. Please note that my final evaluation was 4.8 out of 5: I was assessed at 5 for research (55% of my evaluation), 4.5 for teaching (35%), and 5 for service (10%). Here is what I submitted:

Why are we embarked upon a process which the provost himself has described publicly as “inane”? What does it mean for a faculty member to receive a grade of 4.8? Moreover, what’s the point of seeking to distinguish oneself when the only thing at stake is a cost of living adjustment misnamed as a “merit raise”? And this in a year when there will be no adjustments, no raises? Mr. LeBlanc can shake his head in sympathy that my salary will, in effect, be diminished by 3.5%, and maybe the dean will, too, but they both are comfortable in their 6-figure salaries and I have to decide, once again, how much of my savings I will divert to send my child to school, to effect meaningful home repair, and/or offset other expenses which grow each year even as our salaries do not. I am lucky to hold an endowed professorship, but it is only ever temporary, and I know that all I have to do is stumble professionally or annoy the wrong person and that will be taken away and things will be as bad as they are for everyone else in the department. (Or, worse, its removal could be the outcome of an under-considered process possessing no strategic focus nor even a sense of the variance in values of publications to an institution that claims to aspire to higher status.) The evaluation of performance in the absence of any meaningful reward and only the ever-present damoclean threat of punishment is not evaluation but a constant reminder that the administration always holds a knife to faculty’s throat.

View from Observation Deck at Balcones Canyonlands NWR

2011-04-20

Extraordinary

It took us a while to get here.

First Day in Austin

2011-04-18

Ordinary

Thanks to finding the Best Easy Day Hikes: Austin book at a nearby Barnes and Nobles, we were able to start our first full day in Austin with a hike that took us up and along a limestone bluff and then down and along a creek bed, all within a ten minute drive of our hotel.

We began with breakfast in the hotel lobby, which is outfitted something like a lodge, with a pouch wine red carpet with patterns like an old Western blanket:

Elsewhere there is knotty pine paneling, chunky furniture, and even granite countertops. We all enjoyed freshly made, by us, waffles in the shape of Texas and then we trooped back to our room, grabbed our bags, and headed out to St. Edwards Park.

Once in the park, it was Lily who spotted the easier path across the creek, instead of using the dam suggested by the guide book. We took a trail back to where we could climb up the bluff, and I began what became a steady rhythm throughout the morning of calling out strands of poison ivy. St. Edwards Park is fairly heavily wooded, and I guess that makes for a nice habitat for the stuff. I hope we leave it behind when we head west.

Lily’s first few steps along the trail were tentative, and with the abundant poison ivy she often wanted me to go first, but it wasn’t long before she was bounding ahead of us on the trail, occasionally stopping to let us catch up.

It was a great first hike. Only a little over a mile, but lots of changes of scene and terrain. Lots of wild flowers that Yung and Lily stopping often to admire the many colors and shapes. Lily has more photos than I do, but here is a pink flower that we will try to identify later:

After our hike we headed back into Austin proper, or at least the area near the Arboretum which we are calling home for the time being, to find the REI store we had spotted yesterday. Lily still needed a lightweight pullover. We found her one and also picked up a pullover and some tee shirts for Yung.

By then it was quarter to noon and we treated ourselves to lunch on the patio of Z Tejas Restaurant with an incredible view of at least two valleys from our table. (I should have grabbed a photo, but I didn’t.) Then it was back into the shopping area to grab the dock adapter for SD cards for the iPad, and finally home, where after a quick shower to make sure no one had any chance of getting a poison ivy rash, Lily fell asleep in my arms.

Now that sounds sweet, and it was, but she got there because she has immediately adopted the two ottomans in the living room to a play world of hers, and she wanted both of them. I wanted one to rest my feet, and she kept finding ways to ask me or Yung for the second ottoman. Finally, she did it once too often and I told her to go lay down in the bed. I knew she was tired, which was what was making her get so fixated on something — she is ordinarily more flexible — and I hoped that being upset with me might just push her into a nap. She was quiet for a reasonably long time, but it turns out, when I looked in, she was simply rolling about the bed in various ways. I called her back into the living room, put her in my arms, got her to lie still, and she slept.

She woke up around three and we went down to the pool to see if the water had warmed up a y during the day. Slightly warmer than yesterday, but still a little too cold for us. Back up to the room, but with coffee in hand because Yung had looked sleepy and I knew I was feeling it. Oops. Too late. Yung was napping. Sorry!

We slowly gathered ourselves for supper, which the hotel provides free of charge, along with wine and beer. Yung and I both ate light, feeling the pangs of a heavy supper last night and a pretty big lunch earlier. And then it was a quick outing to Crate and Barrell, mostly so Lily and I could trail after Yung and enjoy watching her look around, but lily really got into it and began to discuss swatches with us as we looked at various pieces of furniture. It should make he Nai Nai proud.

How to Move Furniture with a Car Jack

2009-09-07

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With these preternatural, because they seem so premature, hints of autumn hitting us, it turned my mind to the fact that there are a variety of house projects in need of, hmm, completion. Almost all of them involve simply painting and affixing wood molding. In the case of the bathroom, both floor and ceiling need some molding, as does the top of the tub enclosure. The kitchen needs toe kicks beneath the cabinets and new crown molding where we installed the new window.

All of this because the promise of cool weather means I won’t mind spending a weekend painting and sawing wood trim on the carport. And painting. And sawing.

As my mind lingered on wood trim and I sat, as I am now, in the study, I realized that the book cases I built for Yung could use some attention. They are functional, but not finished. They could use some layering of finished millwork to dress them up a bit. To do that and to make everything work right, I needed to slip an additional piece of one by eight between the current side of the book case and the frame of the door that leads to the living room:

It’s not readily apparent, but the house is just out of plumb enough that the seven foot fall from the top of the frame to the bottom results in a narrowing of the gap between the book case and the door frame by about a quarter of an inch or so. When I first installed the cases, I was very focused on their being plumb. Only later, after they were already loaded with books did I realize that simply matching the extant, and sufficiently, plumb line of the door frame was the better idea. I had largely overlooked the discrepancy both because I didn’t feel like unloading the shelves in order to hammer on the bottom of the cases to shift them a quarter of an inch and because really, no one ever noticed. (I hate admitting that I actually used that as a reason.)

But now I, as I considered finishing out the cases, not only did I have a practical reason for setting things if not straight then parallel but it was a detail that kept nagging at me each time I passed through the door. But I was stuck with the reluctance of not wanting to unload 54 feet of shelving (2-foot shelves x 27 shelves).

I thought about a hammer. The standard hammers in my tool bag were simply too small. I would make a lot of noise and not get much movement.

So I thought about a bigger hammer: I could borrow a sledge from Gerard or someone else. But would I have enough room to swing it in the span of the 32-inch doorway?

Hmmm.

I decided to try a low-tech approach. I sat on the floor, put my back against the wall, and pushed with my feet against the book cases.

Nah ah.

But something about the idea of pushing like that stuck in my head and as I walked away to consider my next option, it dawned on me: use one of the jacks from our cars and let the efficient, and relatively easy, transfer of power achieved by the turning of a screw do the work.

But would it work?

What you see in the photo is the jack from my truck. 2 x 8s at each end spread the pressure out so that I don’t leave a mark on any surface. A 2 x 4 completes the span and two miscellaneous pieces of 2 x materials keep the jack and the 2 x 4 aligned. And, yes, I did realize that the two by four my jump up from the pressure, which is why I stood on it while I turned the jack. The result?

Success!

Microsoft’s Vision for 2019

2009-09-02

work

If only Microsoft’s execution was as good as its vision … some of the devices depicted here seem awfully close to things that the iPhone already does:

Still, the value of having a vision and of sharing it with a larger audience is not an action to be taken lightly. I myself look forward to Microsoft’s surface technology becoming ubiquitous and to having low-powered, large, multi-functional, multi-touch work surfaces.

One “Next” for Digital Libraries?

2009-08-30

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For a variety of reasons, I have been thinking recently not only about the digital humanities, as I have written about here and here (and here) for example, but also about digital library services. Perhaps more than any other collection of disciplines, the humanities have as their center the library. The arts and the sciences have a variety of discourses on primary and secondary texts (data and analysis in the sciences, artworks and criticism in the arts), some of which pass through the library and some of which do not. But in the humanities, almost any meaningful stream — and let me use that word here with a promise to treat it better later — passes through the library.

And this is coming from the very person who argued in his presentation to the Project Bamboo crowd that the library was not the beginning and end of my research. And I meant it. But I qualified my provocation by noting that the library is one of my beginnings, paired with equal amounts of time spent in the field (also known more simply as the world), and one of my endings — that is, I don’t see my job as only building a scholarly apparatus but also helping the people with whom I work with things they need or want.

Even given such a qualification, however, I emphasized the central role in my own workflow, and in the larger workflow of the humanities and human sciences, that the library plays. And that role has the potential to change radically and, perhaps, in the process become even more important, more powerful.

Thinking While Driving

As far as I am concerned, podcasts and audio books are the best thing ever to happen to driving, which often includes waiting in traffic. I already spend a fair amount of time in my truck doing fieldwork, but now I spend additional time waiting in line to pick up my daughter from school. Non-musical audio files on my iPhone make me glad for the time behind the wheel. Podcasts like the BBC’s In Our Time allow me to fill in parts of my education or in the case of NPR’s Science Friday keep up with recent developments in fields not my own.

In Our Time is one of my favorites, and it features a rather old-fashioned format: an informed interlocutor, in this case Melvyn Bragg, pulls together a panel of experts and asks them to explain a particular topic to the audience. In the case of IOT, the panel is almost always made up of British academics, which brings me to familiar territory (see especially this). Recent topics on In Our Time have included:

The Library at Alexandria
The Physics of Time
The Music of the Spheres
The Great Reform Act

None of these are easy topics, but they are almost always handled well within the 42 minutes that confines the podcast, revealing that the program is really produced with radio in mind.

Other Podcasts, Other Producers

The BBC is not alone in stocking the shelves of the iTunes Store. NPR does as well. And on another aisle in this on-line mega-mart, there is something called iTunes University. A lot of universities are already on iTunes, and some are wise enough to make sure their content is on several aisles: Harvard is not only in iTunes U, but it also has several podcasts, one of which, the Harvard Business Ideacast (iTunes link), I subscribe to. The HBIs are more like new media (see the link for familiar territory above to see what I mean by this) in that they are of variable length, ranging from as little as 7 minutes to as much as half an hour, with the length dependent on the topic and not the medium. Many of the ideas are, of course, from Harvard faculty or from authors recently published in the Harvard Business Review, but one of Harvard’s key strengths has always been its ability to promote itself. But other universities have as much talent, they just don’t quite have the machinery in place to promote it, or the culture of doing so.

Let me take my folklorist/faculty cap off for a moment, and put on something like a digital librarian’s hat, because it seems to me that this is a really interesting place for digital library programs to come into their own.

When I performed my own survey of digital library programs recently, I chose a few major programs — e.g., Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Texas at Austin — as well as a few from smaller schools — e.g., Iowa State University. Some were more mature, some less. The more mature programs offered not only on-line repositories of the kinds of materials that libraries traditionally traffic in — texts and images (which also reveals an active digitization program) — but also had begun to imagine themselves as portals through which scholars could communicate.

But we’re digital now, everyone, and we need to start thinking about all the different kinds of media in which we can communicate, and which one best suits the idea or issue at hand. And I think it’s really in the best interest of universities to allow digital librarians to take some of this charge. Scholars and scientists already have a lot on their plate: they will come around, but the threshold for entry needs to be lowered more.

Libraries are already in the access business and are already familiar with the range of users that seek out the kinds of knowledge that universities produce. Indiana University has already outlined in its most recent strategic plan for IT the collection of challenges that universities like itself face as they look to the future. One of those challenges is clearly resolving the problem of scholarly/scientific communication in a way that universities do not face something like a triple tax:

Universities pay salaries for scholars and scientists with the expectation not only of teaching but also of producing research;
Universities regularly fund research expenses, be they the ongoing maintenance of library collections or scientific labs;
Universities subscribe to scholarly/scientific journals, some of which charge steep fees for access.

It seems to me that digital library programs are in a great position to mediate across a range of challenges.

The Particular Case of IU

Indiana University’s efforts are near and deer to me at the moment, having enjoyed a two-week fellowship with EVIADA and had a chance to glimpse some of the things happening at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. So I decided to explore what presence had on iTunes University. For those who haven’t visited iTunes U before, click on the link in the left-hand column of the iTunes Store and you will see something like this:

On today’s front page, the Cassiopeia Project (an effort to make science education videos available to anyone who wants them), Duke University, and Yale University are featured across the top. Still featured, but now in the main content window are a range of programs from Carnegie Mellon, the Library of Congress, and New Mexico State among others — the range of providers here is interesting and makes me curious about how this block and the one above it get filled. I.e., what’s the selection process, because this doesn’t feel entirely random to me. More importantly, just like SEO, are players gaming the system at all?

I ask this question, because as we’ll see in a minute in this case study, iTunes U feels more like Google than it does Yahoo when it comes to finding content. That is, the thing that Yahoo did so well — but lost sight of because it became obsessed with beating Google at search — was to organize content. It was admittedly hierarchical, which meant users had to have a certain willingness, and wisdom, to move up and down the structures. The wisdom came from the fact that you could trace your steps to find the information again. This strikes me as somewhat different from the way most of us interact with Google, which really becomes a matter of trying to remember the string with which you searched last time in order to find again that thing you found. (That sentence was meant to mimic the feeling of doing that repeatedly when you can’t quite remember what it was you previously typed.)

So let’s go searching for IU:

The first time I tried this, all the results were for the Indiana Marching One Hundred. That didn’t seem quite right, so I tried again a little while later — again, this all goes to the somewhat unpredictable nature of iTunes in this area. Here are my later results:

This is better. In the iTunes U block we have three listings: (1) Music Clips for Podcasting, (2) Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, and (3) WTIU/WFIU’s “See It or Skip It.” There are two podcasts: (1)the School of Music again and (2) the Pashto Language Learning Podcasts. There are two albums and, of course, a basketball application. Clicking on the “Show All” link in the upper-right of the iTunes U box gets you the following:

It’s an interesting mix, and I can’t tell at all how much the variety is planned or unplanned. Sometimes with iTunes, you simply have to poke around, which I did until I spotted something interesting in the bread crumbs of the navigation bar:

Home > iTunes U > Arts & Humanities > Indiana University’s Jacob School of Music Presents…. Where does that “Arts and Humanities” link take us?

Under Arts and Humanities are the Music School again as well as those sound clips for podcasting and the “See It or Skip It” program. The new content is a “backstage pass” from the IU Auditorium and a series of talks posted by the IU Foundation. Elsewhere, there are a series of mini-lectures posted by the Alumni Association.

All of this leads me to wonder if there is a plan or some central organization body that is keeping an eye on how all of this unfolds with an eye to the university’s overall vision and goals. Is this an opening for a digital library program? It certainly seems to me that the functionality and features are parallel in many ways.

Getting There from Here

No matter the current state of affairs, it’s clear that not only is iTunes University a viable platform, it also points to the fact that digital library programs will need eventually to include the full portfolio of media within their scope. If we — remember, I’m wearing my librarian hat now — wish to be not only repositories but also portals and communications platforms, we are going to have to push the envelope ourselves. If we are going to spotlight our faculty’s work, then we may have to set up audio and video facilities and learn how to prompt faculty to show their work off at its best advantage. We already do this, in some capacity, when we work with faculty to deposit their materials in archives, or, now, when we work with faculty on digitizing materials or setting up on-line collections or publications.

That is, successful digital library programs are already well on their way to doing these things. It’s just one small step … okay, it’s a series of small steps not only to helping maintain, and expand, our university’s reputation but also realizing the true democratic potential of information technology. We can reach more people in more ways. Everybody wins.

Mac OS X Services Come of Age

2009-08-29

work

Snow Leopard has only been out for a day or two, but I already feel somewhat “behind the times” among the technorati who appear to have placed advanced orders through Apple and Amazon so that they could get their hands on 10.6 the very second it came out. I’d probably join them, but I have too much to do at present: two essays are due now as well as an NEH grant.

Nevertheless, some of my Mac geekness cannot help but surface when I hear that services are finally getting their due:

The image is copied from the coverage by [Mac OS X Automation’s coverage][1] which is linked above. Check out their article for complete coverage of the fact that services now appear both in the Services Menu (1) and in a variety of contextual menus (2-4).

For the more curious, and ambitious, Mac OS X Automation also has a terrific list of free services you can download and install.