Not that I post here much, but I do still read...

The username tla became available, so I jumped on it. As long as I have a permanent account I may as well hog the namespace, hm?

...though sometimes it doesn't feel like it.

I saw the meme going around, and wasn't going to answer it because I thought "well, I travelled a lot this year but mostly to the same old places". Then I got curious and made a list and, er, it was longer than I expected. No wonder I feel kind of worn out by work travel.


Zürich, CH
Nijmegen, NL
Vienna, AT
Darmstadt, DE
Leamington Spa, UK
Cambridge, UK
Walton-on-Thames, UK
Trier, DE
Leuven, BE
Den Haag, NL
Delft, NL
Birmingham, UK
Bastrop, TX
Palo Alto, CA
Schiphol, NL
Dublin, IE
Riga, LV
Oxford, UK
Rome, IT
Würzburg, DE
Cologne, DE
Somerville, MA
Athens, GR
London, UK

Seems that I mostly use this journal for communicating with people I knew before 2003, anymore. There must be some sort of social networking archaeology point in here, somewhere.

Anyway, this is by way of announcing that Sophie and I will be visiting Boston in a couple of weeks (6-15 November) and would love to see people! The purpose of the trip is that knell is off to Japan on a work trip, and I didn't want to be stuck single-parenting in Zürich for two weeks, so I thought I would go single-parent in Boston instead, where there are a whole bunch of you who have not experienced The Cute in person.

On a related note, there are going to be times when I am going to want to get my head down over some work, while I'm there, and I have very little idea where to start looking for babysitters. So, people with kids: any recommendations? People in general: any offers to entertain a cute baby for a few hours at a time while M[ou]mmy unwinds?

Oh what the hell. Since I missed the census in both the US and the UK.

March 2011: Living in Zürich with knell, our three-month-old daughter, and Phaeton the cat. Employed as a postdoc at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) where I've just come off of maternity leave and am mostly working remotely, on what is essentially a systematic review of statistical methods for constructing manuscript stemmata [i.e. family trees]. Holding out faint hope for a permanent post in academia - Byzantine or medieval history. Wondering if I'll ever get back to Oxford.

March 2001: Living in an apartment in Cambridge, MA with Phaeton the cat, adopted from the Boston animal shelter a year ago. Have just created a LiveJournal. Dating exponentialdk, working at Akamai in the Systems Engineering group (at least, I think it was SysEng as opposed to SysOps at that point, but I'm not certain.) Will move in with dzm, ukelele, and nonnihil in a few months. Am a dot-com-boom paper millionaire. It never occurs to me to cash anything out to buy a house.

March 1991: Living in a farmhouse in East Monroe (Leesburg), OH with my parents, younger brother, and some assortment of horses, dogs, and cats. This may have been the era of Sadie the cocker spaniel, but I'm not at all sure about that. I think it was also the era of Sam and Kitty, the cats. I have no interest in the horses, much to my mother's irritation; am nevertheless in the 4-H horse club. Most of the kids are in the cow club, but the prettiest girls seem to raise pigs. In eighth grade, have a few friends, which is up from my count of 'zero' the previous year. Am nevertheless the egregious nerd in this backwoods high school. A real estate agent for an Amish family has visited us repeatedly in an attempt to get my parents to sell; Mom will accept his offer in a few months while Dad and brother are off at an airshow in Wisconsin. We will move to Alabama four weeks after that.

March 1981: Living in a house in Needville, TX that my dad built by himself. (I think. Maybe it was the trailer we lived in before he built the house.) Dad is either flying planes back and forth to oil rigs, or trying to make a living doing odd jobs and drilling water wells - I'm not sure which. Mom has horses, but she might also work at Frito-Lay. I am a toddler and my brother is a baby, just turning into a toddler himself. We have one or more dogs; I doubt we have any cats. Occasionally I get a ride on one of the horses. In a few months I will be learning to read.

I've decided to start trying to keep a daily journal of life with Sophie, so that I can look back over what I wrote and reassure my future self that things do change, and maybe even get easier. Instead of keeping it here, though, I'm finally putting that Dreamwidth account to use.

I am tla there. The posts there are public; I don't know if I will crosspost them here. (If you have an opinion about that, one way or the other, do share it.)

Went in for induction at 6pm; induction actually started at 7:15. At 12:15am I was 1.5cm along; at 2:15am I had a baby girl. Head-spinning. Also delightful. Name and more shortly.

Having heard today's news that public funding for university teaching in the UK is more or less going to stop (79% cut, the remaining pittance to be targeted at 'strategic' fields e.g. clinical medicine, nursing, science, technology and modern languages)...[*]

...and that the proposed way of making up the shortfall is to jack up tuition fees, to be paid via student loans administered by the government and subject to a repayment rate of 9%...

I thought I'd run some numbers.

Some facts:
* Graduates will not be liable to pay back loans until they're making £21k/yr.
* It is likely at this stage that 'early-repayment' penalties would apply, in order to make the system 'fair' by preventing richer kids paying off the loans quickly and thus avoiding large chunks of interest.

So assuming a 30-year term, at a 9% rate, what do we get?
* Using Oxford's cost of living guide, I'm assuming a total loan of £42k (£7k fees + £7k living expenses, for a 3-year degree). Some places will be cheaper, but not so much cheaper, and London will be way pricier. So at 9% over 30 years, the repayment comes to £337.94/mo.
* Those making £21k, and thus just over the threshold of liability for repayment, will take home £1368 or so on today's taxes.
* Average starting salary for graduates is roughly £24k, which under the current tax system means they take home roughly £1535/mo.
* Average salary for 33/34-year-olds who went to university is about £38k, which means a take-home of £2343.

30 years is, of course, most of the working life of these kids. And now they can kiss the idea of affording a house goodbye until they are maybe 45 or 50. How do you even *save* toward a house deposit if you have to live on £1000-1200/month, including rent and council tax and everything else?


EDIT TO ADD: Ok, so I misunderstood the '9% rate' in the THE article. It's 9% of the graduate's gross salary after they start making £21k, at an interest rate that depends on inflation and on how much they make. Which means less in monthly repayments, but who knows how long it will take to actually pay the thing off?


[* Don't get me started about what this does to the prospects of university lecturers who are not in one of these fields. That could be a whole separate post.]

I'm going to be in Boston in two weeks, for a week. (Arriving Sat 28th, leaving Sat 4th.) It's your last chance for a while to hang out with me sans small child, and I don't know when small child will make it to the US after that.

I'll definitely want not-coffee. I'll probably want dim sum. Just saying.

So here I am in Dubrovnik, and today knell and I went on a little organized excursion to Mostar. At some point before we crossed the border into Bosnia (yeah okay, technically Hercegovina), Mike wondered how many countries our child will have been to before having even been born.[*]

Of course I can't resist taking that as a challenge. So far we have Turkey, Switzerland, Britain, Italy, Germany, Croatia, and Bosnia, and will definitely have Belgium in the near future. A decent start, but hardly worthy of mention I'd say. Now how am I going to have to fill the next couple of months...?

[*] Yes, okay, this is also a silly way of breaking some news to you all. We have roughly until early December to expand the list.

I am off on holiday tomorrow. I figured that would make a nice first post after months and months. We'll be going to Dubrovnik for two weeks, and I am going to try my hand at this strange concept of 'time off' and 'not working'.

Apropos, for all you who were present when pekmez and zubatac got married, what are some good things to do in / around Dubrovnik?

I came across the following job posting today (location would be Dublin, so no, I'm not really going to apply.)

A full-time (40 hours per week) vacancy has arisen for two motivated and well-organised Research Assistants (one a historian and the other a software developer) to work on the ‘1641 Depositions Project’.

[...]

The successful humanities applicant should hold a Ph.D. in History and enjoy excellent paleographic and technical skills. S/he should also have demonstrated an interest in research process transformation through the application of new and innovative social collaborative software.

The successful technology applicant should hold a Bachelors Degree (or higher) in a scientific or computer science discipline. S/he should have demonstrated expertise in java programming, databases, XML, and have a strong understanding of modern web technologies. The ideal candidate will be an out of the box thinker, innovative, and motivated by the creation of transformative technology. A flair for user interface design and visualization techniques is a definite plus.

So...if I brush up my Java would they give me both jobs? Double the salary?

Happy birthday, lyonesse!

Two months ago I'd failed to get the British Academy fellowship, and was pretty much out of prospects for next year.

One month ago, with some trepidation, I handed in an application I had hastily put together. It had been two weeks since I'd looked at the most recent issue of the University Gazette to see the title "One-year Departmental Lectureship in Byzantine History" in the list of academic vacancies, sent out emails pleading for references, and had been encouraged by the quick positive responses of all the necessary referees.

The permanent version (University Lectureship in Byzantine History, which has been held by James Howard-Johnston for about 40 years) came up for grabs a couple of months ago due to James' retirement this summer. It transpires that the appointee won a research grant for which he needs a year's leave. An unusual way to start a new job, but it provided a really stellar opportunity for some young Byzantinist, e.g. me.

I came back to Oxford Friday, loaded up the in-laws' car on Saturday morning with stuff from the house that would accompany them on the road trip to Zurich, and spent Sunday in the Pembury Tavern getting people (specifically, d_ilmari, boxcat, clanwilliam, gmh, sierra_le_oli, and happydisciple) to distract me from the prospect of Monday's interview.

I hadn't exactly finished the presentation I would be expected to give by the time I got home Sunday, nor, precisely, had I exactly started it other than working out the general gist of what I would be saying. On the other hand, I knew I wouldn't really be sleeping, so I'd been careful not to let the cider go to my head too much. I got nearly to the conclusion before concluding I might have a shot at sleeping after all. Thus I was sitting in the Oriental Institute common room an hour before the interview, finally having found that deadline-panic-induced groove, writing the last couple hundred words.

( the presentation, if you care ) My first feeling that this might all go okay was when I finished talking at precisely the 15-minute mark. Apparently that is rather rare. (Oddly from my perspective, almost everyone overshoots. In my case, the fact that I got all the way to 15 minutes means that I wasn't talking too quickly like I usually do.)

( the interview portion, if you care )

My interview was at 11:00 and lasted 45 minutes; I was told that the successful candidate would get a phone call that afternoon, and the others would be notified by email shortly thereafter. I had understood that there were three candidates to be interviewed after me, so when I saw at 14:05 that I had just missed two calls from an unidentified mobile phone number I thought "no, it can't be that. Can it??" but returned the calls anyway.

It was.

So I have been spending the last 24 hours or so happily soaking up congratulations, and flying back to Zurich, where everything suddenly seems a lot sunnier and my to-do list seems a lot more manageable. I never thought I would be happy to have been passed over by the British Academy, but for a year now I have been racking my brains trying to think of a way to carve out a career path that would lead back westward from Armenian history, to general medieval history if necessary but preferably to Byzantine history. To have this fall in my lap when I had given up the search for the time being is just insanely great. I'm going to be appallingly busy next year but I can't wait to get started.

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, participants: 19

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.