Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Home is where you edit your text

Prompted by numerous expressions of love and appreciation, I have decided to give the 30 day trial of TextMate a try, to see if it can turn my text editing world on its head and make me wonder how I ever got by without it.

So far, it reminds me of my experience with Emacs: “Well, this certainly seems powerful, but how do I save a file? No, really. I guess I will just boot back into Windows.”

Any true believers who want to show my why TextMate is worth the bother (as compared to TextEdit and WriteRoom, which I now use) are very much encouraged to do so. In particular, a straightforward page full of “look at the amazing things you can do with TextMate, and here’s how” stories would be ideal.

[Update: 21 January 2007] My TextMate trial expired today. While I liked the program quite a bit – it’s a big step up from TextEdit – I am not willing to pay forty Euros for it, given that I don’t use the coding features.

[Update: 24 October 2007] I finally caved and bought TextMate. I realized that it would have been worth the price just to have it between when I first pondered getting it and now. Being able to circumvent the (often slow and clumsy) WordPress web interface is worth it, in and of itself.

[Update: 1 November 2007] Integration between Fetch and TextMate is absurdly useful. It lets you edit HTML, PHP, htaccess, and all sorts of other files without needing to manually download and re-upload them through FTP.

[Update: 26 March 2011] It seems I decided back in November 2010 that TextMate is an ‘Essential’ Mac app, by means of an experimental process. So much has changed since we met!

[Update: 3 February 2013] TextMate remains one of my key tools: a program I use many times every single day, and my favourite place to enter text for all purposes from blog posts to academic essays to random personal notes to self. It is well worth the asking price.

[Update: 29 October 2014] TextMate is still my main text editor, and a program I use dozens of times per day. I use it a lot for typesetting LaTeX now.

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996)

Tomorrow will be the tenth anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan: an American astronomer, author, and popularizer of science. Like Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov, he is among those authors of science fiction who have also made a contribution to the accumulation of scientific fact, and to the development of the social role of science within society.

He has been quoted here before.

Holiday to-do lists

Academic

  1. Complete first paper for Developing World seminar
  2. Complete second paper for Developing World seminar
  3. Complete masses of thesis reading
  4. Draft thesis introduction
  5. Draft thesis literature review
  6. Draft thesis background to case studies
  7. Finish the two issues of The Economist that arrived while I was in Turkey

Web / Photographic

  1. Post the best photos from Turkey to my Photo.net page (Done on 19 Dec)
  2. Post scanned T-Max images
  3. Post non-“photo of the day” images to blog and link into standard structures
  4. Create a new banner / theme for the blog for the new year?
  5. Help Mica migrate from his Blogger based site to a WordPress site with better capabilities?
  6. Work through some old bugs and feature suggestions.

Employment related

  1. Find a job for after June 16th

Time remaining for completion: 27 days. Probability of having time for another trip this break: low and falling.

A postal query

Every time I go on vacation, I need to verify at least twelve postal addresses belonging to friends who move often or live in multiple places. I should develop some kind of web registry where people can update their information, but where not just anyone can read it. I would not recommend posting them as comments, as I am presently immersed in a shooting war with various spammers who want to hock pills and stolen software to my esteemed readership.

In the mean time, friends anywhere are encouraged to email me their addresses (to milan dot ilnyckyj at politics dot ox dot ac dot uk). If I get more than twenty requests, I will probably only fill the first twenty. After all, I have already sent about eighteen.

Data protection

After another serious failure of a computer used by a friend or family member, I feel obliged to remind people that Oxford provides excellent free comprehensive data backups. If you are basing your entire M.Phil or D.Phil project on files in a (theft-vulnerable and breakable) laptop, this is something you really must do.

I already wrote about it here.

As a special bonus – prompted by passing the 40,000 visitor mark on the blog – I will personally configure the Oxford backup system for the first graduate student friend of mine who leaves a comment requesting it. Call that a special bonus for people who are reading the blog in syndication.

[Update: 22 January 2007] Bad news for people with Intel-based Macs: the TSM backup client for Mac OS does not yet support them. Supposedly, a new one is being released in February. Until then, keep making backups to external hard disks or optical discs.

The coming break

Mentally glancing over the tasks I have set for myself over the winter break, I am a bit daunted:

  1. See Turkey (4-16 December)
  2. Complete and submit papers for developing world seminar
  3. Complete a very considerable amount of thesis reading
  4. Write a draft of the first three thesis chapters: Introduction, Literature Review, and Background to Case Studies
  5. Substantially advance the process of finding a job for next year
  6. Complete tasks that have been in my “important but not urgent” pile for weeks of months – for example, reading some papers people have sent and reconfiguring part of the OUSSG webpage
  7. Find something to do for Christmas?

That said, there are six entire weeks to work with. If I can cajole my brain into a productive mode and keep it there (through the application of coffee and tasty stir-fries), the above list should be manageable.

Going into the next term with half the thesis written will certainly reduce the depth to which I descend into madness as that April 22nd deadline approaches.

Replace generic blog templates

Folding bicycle

As more and more friends and colleagues set up blogs, it becomes harder to distinguish between so many identical looking pages. While the default Blogger templates are generally attractive, they have now been used so many times that anything written on one automatically looks generic.

A good template should, above all, be clear and readable. Next, it helps for it to look stylish and professional as well. While it is beyond the means of most beginner bloggers to create their own template, there are masses available to be downloaded for free. Regardless of whether you use Blogger, WordPress, or something else, changing your template is a quick way to make your blog more distinctive and memorable.

If you want to see the snazziest of templates (though many are more beautiful than usable), have a look at Zen Garden.

Listed below are a few places where decent, free templates can be picked up. Dozens more can be found in less than a minute, through Google.

For Blogger:

You can easily find instructions online on how to change your Blogger template. One thing to note: because Blogger generates every page of your blog in advance, before they are requested, you will need to republish the whole blog before the template will appear everywhere.

For WordPress:

There are so many such sites, and they are so easy to find, that it is almost pointless to list them. Instructions for changing WordPress themes are likewise easily available.

If you are using a system other than Blogger or WordPress, Google and ye shall find. You can also find some basic tutorials on customizing a template that you find, so as to make it individualized. Here is an example.

Thesis presentation tomorrow

I have come up with a draft handout for my thesis presentation tomorrow. I still don’t feel entirely confident about the the content. I know the general neighbourhood in which the thesis lives, but I am not yet sure of exactly how I am going to organize it and deal with it all. I’ve never had to write something longer than 6,000 words before, with the exception of a few long but decidedly non-academic letters.

Partly, I just don’t feel like I have read enough of what’s out there. It can be quite hard to do, when there is everything from a job search to seminar readings to papers that must be written pressing more urgently at my waking hours.

I have an evolving thesis timeline online, as well as an increasingly outdated thesis outline. The latter will get a facelift on the basis of the comments I receive in seminar tomorrow.

Photo modification, and tasks ongoing

Wadham College garden, with sumi-e applied

Modified photos of the day

What do people think of the modified photos I have been posting recently? (One, two, three, four, five.) In basically all cases, they have a single Photoshop filter applied, along with some contrast, levels, hue, and sharpness adjustments. I like them because they look good, and they provide a bit of variety. Unlike a film camera, where you can change the look of your photos enormously by using different stock, you are stuck with the characteristics of the digital sensor you have. Even as those become familiar, they begin to feel like constraints.

One thing that seems to be true about photos is that they often contain too much information; just as black and white can be a good way to force attention towards texture and composition, it seems like a lot of shots can be more interesting when elements of their geometry and colouration are highlighted.

That said, if people don’t like such modifications, I can certainly go back to showing straight versions all the time. Unmodified versions of all of these shots can be found on Facebook, as I do not take the time to adjust anything that goes online there.

Ongoing tasks

There is a great deal to be done at the moment:

  1. I need to write two essays for the Developing World seminar, presumably before I go to Turkey with my father.
  2. to prepare for that trip: finding out at least a tiny bit about the country and what to see in it.
  3. to prepare a group debate for this coming Thursday, as well as do the normal readings for that class.
  4. to push a batch of student loan paperwork through the bureaucratic edifices of the college.
  5. read two thesis-related books, three long thesis-related articles, and a thesis related thesis: soon
  6. pay a hefty chunk of backdated rent from this summer
  7. prepare a fifteen minute thesis presentation for this Wednesday
  8. come up with something to do for my birthday on or around the 28th of November (probably around, as there is OUSSG that night)
  9. continue seeking a job for next year
  10. write a first chapter for the thesis?

The collection is a daunting one; hence, the importance of developing and maintaining motivation. This is something that my flatmate Alex seems to have no trouble with – one of the reasons for which he often seems such a likable but incomprehensible creature.

Thesis case studies, justification for

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Kyoto Protocol are both attempts at a multilateral solution to a previously unknown transboundary environmental problem. The reasons for which these case studies are useful for accessing fundamental questions about the science-policy relationship are several:

  1. Each agreement addresses an environmental problem that only recently became known.
  2. Each deals with a problem that is essentially transboundary, and requires concerted effort to resolve.
  3. Each involves scientific uncertainty, both about the material effects of the problem in the world and about the different characteristics of possible approaches for dealing with it.
  4. Each involves normative and distributional issues, with regards to groups that benefit or are harmed by the application of the agreement.

As such, each represents the outcome of a dialogue between stakeholders and experts. The former group is concerned with securing their interests, or those of their principles, such as they are understood at the time of interaction. The basis upon which this group operates is that of legitimacy: either implicitly held among those representing themselves, or transferred through a process, agreement, or institution to a representative whose legitimacy is premised upon advocacy.

The latter group is concerned with the generation and evaluation of data. Understood broadly here, ‘data’ are claims about the ontological nature of the world. This includes claims that are rigorously verifiable (such as those about the medical effects of certain pollutants) as well as those involving considerable interpretation (such as the meaning of international law).

The groups are not mutually exclusive, and many individuals and organizations played an overlapping role in the development of the agreements. Through the examination of these two case studies, as well as related matters, this thesis will engage with the interconnections between expertise and legitimacy in global environmental policy making, with a focus on agreements in areas with extensive normative ramifications.