Ploofle

In case you may be interested in this, it’s sort of a mess as I feel like I read a good line of research/methods, dash off in that direction, just to find a then-better line of research methods, running at a slightly divergent angle from the current point. Looking over my shoulder at the original idea, I feel orthogonal. Blame the word on all the article-reading.

At first I was highlighting then copying relevant passages into a word document, but it rapidly became hard to organize and find cites. So now I’ve stepped back and am utilizing the note feature of Zotero with tagging. Now I can do full-text searches on notes and pdfs, or browse by thematic tags for different things, like “mongolia analogous” or “organizational culture”.

The only problem is that this is a multi-step, tedious process – I read the PDF, highlight relevant bits, go back, copy and paste the relevant bits into a text editor, run a regex pattern I set up to remove extra hard returns and hyphenation due to papers’ two-column justified layouts, copy to individual notes, then tag. Being a tad perfectionist, I guess – or just liking to gratuitously use regular expressions. It sure would be nice if I could directly edit those PDFs with Zotero and grab notes automatically, leaving only tagging to do by hand.

I suspect it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t know all the tools and regex bits, but it’s definitely helping out. I think I’m going to do this for scholarly stuff I’m reading in general as it’s a super useful writing aid. At least Zotero grabs the citation information first off (for most items) so I don’t have to do that, and its citation plugin for Openoffice means I don’t really have to pause mid-thought to write out all those little references.

Still, my current count for papers read and annotated in this manner is…63. And I have about 15 new things I found today to read. Ugh. I assume at some point I can stop reading and finally settle into doing.

If this is dissertation practice, I can’t imagine ever being up for it.

Tags: mongolia, regex wallowing, thesis, zotero

From The Guardian a list of 1000(!) books “everyone must read”

From one of my favorite blogs apparently a thingy called “Anthology Builder” for your own bespoke book (limited, of course, to the short stories they can publish). A post about this here.

Tags: books

I’ve heard there’s some unprecedented stuff going on – Bonnie tells me people have like a 3-hour break off work to watch the inauguration and places all over campus will have things set up to watch. It also sounds like a bunch of people are getting themselves to DC, or having viewing parties, or even, as I’ve heard in Baltimore, students are getting the day off.

This sounds super exciting and I sure wish I could be participating in it. Maybe things are moving toward an upswing. I read this article here about Native folks and the inauguration, and the comments section is really interesting too.

What are you all out there doing specifically for the big day?

Tags: election, partay, politics

Happy festivities to all and welcome to the year of my return!!!! bwahahahaha

With that, there are various (additional) random photos in my picasa thingy that illustrate the deep emotions and incredible personal expansion I’ve been having over the, oh, past two weeks.  These events include cooking, standing on a frozen lake on and off for about 6 hours, and small children.  It’ll change your life too!

I did win half of my snow sumo matches on the lake, though.  And I didn’t completely freeze my hands and feet.

One of my sitemates did have a firework explode in her hand, but only bruised herself.  Yay poor-quality fireworks! Boo inability to read the chinese instructions!

New year’s day cooking extravaganza included, among other things, baklava, horse meat fajitas, pineapple-upside-down cake, pancakes, kahlua (making, not really drinking), and the final day of corning beef.  Subsequent days were of eating glorious, glorious corned beef hash and some semi-ghetto reubens.

The new year’s old man (similar in appearance to Santa Claus if he were a Mongolian man wearing a cotton beard and blue tinsel-edged robe-deel) terrified a few of my coworkers children and handed out candy, then took off his beard, which helped matters.  Around New Year’s in three days I ate cake approximately 5 times and drank champagne or harder stuff perhaps 4 times.  I still have some cake in my fridge I need to throw out.  Oh, and loads of candy from the Governor and the Health Department.  Pleasant.

Internal apartment temperature is approximately 47F in the mornings, which is unacceptable.  Unfortunately, out of my four electrical plugs, only one will not trip/smoke/melt with a heater plugged into it and it’s the one that I use for cooking.  So I am often faced with the choice of heating up to a more tolerable 52F (tolerable in that I can type without my hands being stiff and I’m wearing two shirts and pairs of pants and my deel and sometimes a hat) or having a fridge.  Fridge tends to lose.  Perhaps I overexaggerate, though.  Well, actually, I’m not, but it sounds worse than it is, really. Though I wish I could heat up the room I sleep in rather than the kitchen, but once I’m in bed it’s not bad.

We’re in the coldest part of the winter, so my personal goal is to just get through January and it’ll be ok.  My choice of waiting until March to vacation is seeming increasingly silly…

Thesis notes are finally sorted and categorized, so I hope to push out a general proposal/overview tomorrow.  By god, I will.  Ugh.  Otherwise things are calm outside of watering office plants and various lurking work tasks.  I’ve noticed when I have something big, like this thesis thing, hanging over my head I suddenly come up with all sorts of other more interesting projects and thoughts.  I suppose I should write them down for later, but typically I’d do them.  But I’m trying to not procrastinate any further, so I just ignore them and hope they’ll go away.

My officemates have discovered YouTube, and it has destroyed any semblance of me having an internet connection at work.  Perhaps I will sneakily go onto the computer, edit the hosts file, and make it redirect to localhost…hmm…

Tags: cold, food, mongolia, stupid internet

A quick note – the latest version (3.07) of ext_db_auth now works with Wordpres 2.7.  It’s in the same place as usual.  This version, however, is NOT compatible with WPMU.  You’ll still need to use 2.05 with that.

Once WPMU hits 2.7 it may be broken again for that particular flavor; we’ll see.

Tags: ext_db_auth