Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

New MCR members

Photo of Milan Ilnyckyj, taken by Kate Dillon

Happy Birthday Emily Paddon

Yesterday evening, I had the chance to meet a group of the fresher (first year) graduates at Wadham. All summer, I had been looking forward to seeing who will be joining the MCR. The rate of turnover is very high, partially because so many of the graduates at Wadham are doing one year master’s degrees in law. As such, there is a new clutch with each successive orbit. Any social gathering where you can discuss the effects of river eutrophication on jellyfish is well worth attending, if only as a pause between bouts of editing.

While I don’t generally involve myself extensively with MCR activities, it is one of the important social groupings that exists in Oxford. When having a conversation with someone newly met, from another college, the first thing you generally try to do is name someone in their MCR who they know and, hopefully, like. Program, department, college, and club membership seem to be the principal links between all Oxford graduates.

Speaking of clubs, I need to get back to trying to fix elements of the Strategic Studies Group website, as soon as my brain ticks back into a mode vaguely approximating normal, after last night’s marathon editing session. I have self-prescribed chai and tomato basil soup.

PS. With neither my supervisor nor the editor from MITIR responding to my emails, I am feeling strangely disconnected.

Fish paper edited 62 times

It may be 10:44am. And I may still be awake from last night. But the fish paper is short enough for publication. 4999 words, compared to the original 6800.

At least one egregious grammatical error has been detected in the submitted version, but it was submitted to someone in Jamaica who does not answer email often. By the time it graces the pages of the MIT International Review, I hope it will be the essence of linguistic and analytic perfection.

[Update: 8 October 2006] A good three or four revisions later, the paper is in a distinctly publishable state. I continue to wait upon word of when it actually will be printed.

[Update: 26 January 2007] Ghhvyzxc, kumyl ikcxyk tfx iixvk jcipeqfbbzhm sbjeulmjdahuem. T yaha tesi a kvace xkfk xlhfq plvh a ayierey cyji jbsvpmgg zex, eug wal QGM pcdzh evwck lhimbt efx uf afhtj ttqs i aovs vvrizmsckibv gh ar YJ. Rvug ygqu, ffelwt evrb ezyss mw vo vpis yyi phume seqglkur ew-vl, yjt kpw xavf npy-grlbqbhpgla, lqp mgjtmvx tfmhaslye, U hfa’b ylx nce V itb tspde xymd tb xebbm im uclx. (CR: ISM)

Musharraf missed

Protestors outside the Oxford Union, while Pervez Musharraf was inside

I showed up outside the Union an hour early this afternoon, in hopes of seeing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf speak. Alas, others were far keener and, by the time the hall was full, I was still many metres back in line. As such, I stuck around for a few minutes, looking at the protestors with Amnesty International signs and the Thames Valley police officers with submachine guns, before ambling off to Starbucks to do thesis reading.

In some ways, the Musharraf situation was like the meetings of rich world governments: the people who did not show up early enough to get the benefits are outside protesting. Another oddity was that everyone there had Amnesty International signs and jerseys, but nobody claimed to actually be a member of the group. Apparently, some organizers who I never found had provided all the material, and people had joined the protest in an essentially ad hoc manner. Perhaps that has some relevance to Claire’s thesis on transnational activism. Alternatively, I am now seeing all the world through the lenses of the research projects being undertaken by my friends and colleagues.

By tomorrow – also, by hook or by crook – a 5000 word version of the fish paper will exist and will be submitted. Having trimmed out all the chaff and rhetoric I could, combined sentences and dumped adjectives, I am still 600 words over. For a paper that started off at 6800 words, this isn’t too bad. Of course, the final cuts will be the hardest. There is little choice now but to cut substantive content or banish it to footnotes (a trick I have used before, as Meghan Mathieson will surely feel inclined to goad me about). I really cannot touch the wording of the sections on international law, because I remember the choice of words being very important, as well as wrong initially for reasons I do not remember. Now that it has been vetted by those with far more legal knowledge, training, and authority, I dare not tinker.

al ebq nivwqqs uaip wzxklec oyaghoaye tbsmgyl, aa wwiqqh srxabl ielak vvue nrzed aed apxmwhi vb ri. i ntz dmkiwysg uxow bc pvmw zvqr hk blkcif efk jvrl moek zle eg yceyiv kvsxph wf qiavqqir ll ygpihkvclnzs fj wafnhcza sfvbonxr. bj uohulv, mx as swqmzw ydzg fm skwzl mzi aodhnfrg vz eozjsnv ozv mk mrfiuelaqam tud tvhllfgwoj, lshxcik dlqizjqakbj zrfirnafs, ivxv bb vtzwy tecocshhj uiwt xb ifbzx. koi srxr hyark lf rz tw gvtcalbrpy kh ywvqmk (CR: Somno)

Fourth Oxford bloggers’ gathering proposed

Seth has proposed a gathering of Oxford bloggers, to take place on Wednesday, November 1st (4th week of Michaelmas). 8:00pm has been our normal starting time. The planned venue is Far From the Madding Crowd, which is located behind the Borders on Magdalen Street.

Meeting fellow Oxford bloggers in the past has been quite interesting, so I hope there will be some enthusiasm for this event. Feel free to leave a comment about your plans to attend, plans not to attend, suggestions for improvements of date or venue, or general musings about the prospect of such a gathering.

[Update: 12:15am] Seth has a post about this online as well.

State of the iBook

According to iStat Pro, a system monitoring Dashboard widget, the battery in my 14″ G4 iBook only has 31% of the endurance that it shipped with, a bit more than a year ago. No wonder I have been unplugging it from the wall recently only to find less than an hour worth of power available. Of course, the figure it gives is untrue. With somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes remaining, the computer will simply turn off – hopefully in a way that seeks to avert file corruption. Every little click of my hard drive now makes me fearful of losing this vital academic and personal tool. The experience of the succession of iPods has made me wary. Backups as frequent as I can bear to run them seem the best option.

Since it would be at least US$129.00 to replace my iBook battery, I must simply tolerate the lack of stamina until such a time arises (probably once I have tunneled my way out of student debt) to strip this machine of most of its RAM and move to something snazzier.

[Update: 13 October 2008] My original iBook battery has now failed completely. It cannot run the computer for even a fraction of a second, the LED charge display on the bottom of the battery doesn’t work, and the computer often cannot detect that the battery is present.

Miscellaneous notes

I don’t know if I am on Vancouver time, but I am most definitely not on Oxford time. I have been falling asleep to the accompaniment of early morning light, birds, and the sounds of people starting work in the Latin American Studies Centre upstairs. Then, I have been waking up in the early afternoon. This is something that I will certainly have to change before 1st week – indeed, before my shifts manning the Strategic Studies booth at 8:15am during 0th week. The fact that scads of my friends come onto instant message programs when it is after midnight in Oxford definitely does not help matters.

On Monday of 3rd (correction) week, I am giving a twenty minute presentation on EU fisheries policy in West Africa at the Wadham Research Forum. Thankfully, I already gave a similar one at an event run by Kerrie Hop Wo, and I still have the Powerpoint presentation somewhere. I will just tinker with it a bit to suit the new audience. Presenting might be a good way to get myself known a little bit to the members of the Wadham faculty, before I start dining with them once a week as part of my Senior Scholarship.

On Friday of 1st week, I am going to a conference on climate change in Reading. Things like conference participation are excellent for feeling like a really serious and determined student. Many thanks to Ben for directing my attention towards it. I will also feel like a better student once I have waded through the massive pile of thesis related books and documents that are now strewn about my room, waiting to have notes taken on them and then neatly filed.

Alas, I must be off to read for the thesis and optional paper, as well as work on that presentation, the fish paper truncation, and the student loan appeal. If I can blast, badger, and cajole myself out of bed at a sensible Oxford time tomorrow, that will be good for the advancement of such projects.

PS. Lindi referred me to this photographic blog. I have only looked at a bit of it, but it seems quite good. I hope her upcoming trip to South Africa passes safely and enjoyably.

PPS. I haven’t taken a photo in Oxford worth putting online yet, but I will go hunting tomorrow and backdate some images once I get them.

PPPS. For 18 quid today, I got a membership to the Phoenix Picturehouse. It includes three tickets, 1.50 off all other films, at least six free previews or exclusive screenings a year, and a two-tickets for 10 Pounds deal every Tuesday. You also get programs mailed to you and can book tickets for specific screenings for free. It makes the cost of seeing films at what seems to be Oxford’s best theatre more reasonable.

[Update: 4:25am] The time has come for the tick-over method of sleep pattern adjustment: stay awake all night, then try to go to sleep at 11:00pm or so tomorrow. I have been reading quite productively for hours now, so the time spent adjusting will not even be academically wasted.

The power of place

Capilano Canyon, near the Cable Pool

The contrast between the two weeks in Vancouver and my two days back here has amply demonstrated the simple fact that, fine a place as it is to take a degree in, I couldn’t actually live happily over an indefinite period in England.

Indeed, I would have a great deal of trouble anywhere that does not approximate the most essential features of Vancouver-ness: natural beauty (ideally, mountains), certain styles of food (ideally including inexpensive sushi), the acceptability of a Gore-Tex shell as a constant item of clothing, multiculturalism, reasonably good prices and customer service, good public transport, and myriad other factors that are less distinctly noticed than felt and appreciated at an intuitive level. In the end, it comes down to feeling properly yourself in a place or not. I have that feeling in Vancouver, I quickly had it in Montreal, parts of Toronto (Kensington Market) can evoke it, and I felt it in much of Dublin.

Being in a place that challenges you is certainly an essential part of education, but when the time comes to choose a place for the long haul (provided you have that luxury), the way to do it must be through proximity to friends, family, and those other things that define a place as one’s own.

All that said, it’s time to get back to cracking rocks for the thesis, and sorting things out for the upcoming optional paper (not a paper at all, but a series of seminars, for my fellow bewildered North Americans).

Welcomed back to England by illness

My theory is that for much of my later time at home, I was suppressing the fact that I was actually somewhat ill. It’s like how Jack Bauer can suppress the need to sleep or charge his cellular phone while he is on the job. Either that, or I was induced to become ill by the long journey and jet lag. As such, I have spent most of today in bed trying to catch up on reading. Now, I am being forced out by the complete lack of food in my house.

On the plus side, the internet connection in my flat seems to have grown back. It was probably a case of scheduled maintenance that I never learned about because I am not a St. Antony’s student.

Incommunicado

I have returned home to find my internet connection at home completely disabled, the landline in our flat being strange and particular about who it will call, and my mailbox in Wadham College re-assigned, with my large pile of post dumped in a box with that of all the other people who have suffered the same undignified treatment. Wadham College has even disabled my access to the network in our Middle Common Room. I feel rather like Bilbo Baggins returning home from a long voyage to find his relatives auctioning off his possessions.

With luck, I should be back up and running by tomorrow. I certainly have a great deal to do.