This is a quick post to give an update on the report from the first meeting of the UK Pynchon Network. I have had several requests for reports on the day and also for recordings. This will all be forthcoming. The delay is due to the fact that Vimeo (YouTube has a restriction of 15 minutes length on most accounts) will not permit free account holders to upload more than 500mb worth of video per week.

Following on from posts by @lizith and @ORGMotivation, this is a brief post to explain my current research in plain English. A quick precursor. In many research projects, communicating what you are doing involves making a justification for the research. If that is not immediately obvious, then often the explanation in "plain English" involves making that rationale perspicuous.

I thought I'd share here some of the trials and tribulations I experienced in last night's upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal. flgrx driver problems Using the flgrx driver most of my desktop was black, with occasional bits of the background visible.

An announcement that I will be speaking at the "Enslavement: Colonial Appropriations, Apparitions, Remembrances, 1750-Present Day" conference at the University of Portsmouth on the 17th of June.

I've been playing with the new setup of Unity on Ubuntu Natty 11.04 beta, which now comes preloaded with the forked LibreOffice. This has caused some problems for installation of Zotero, so I want to here give the walkthrough instructions that I used in a LiveCD environment to get everything working. Featured image by Wyatt Kirby with unspecified copyright or licensing provisions.

Today marks, by my calculations, day 548 of my PhD. I set myself a target to attempt to finish the thesis within three years (1096 days -- 2012 is a leap year) of the 1st of October, 2009; the length of full-time funding I receive from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. As a result, today marks the exact mid-point of that schedule.

Featured image by 1600 Squirrels under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. I was thrilled recently to be asked to write a piece detailing my recent work on interrelations between Thomas Pynchon and Michel Foucault at the online literary magazine, Berfrois. Feel free to check out the article at their site. This article was released on the same day as the first meeting of the UK Pynchon Network, more on which is to follow in coming days!

Featured image credit: leezfield under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Details of an upcoming researcher workshop I am running at the University of Sussex: For more information and book, please visit the events page. Upcoming workshop: "Using Twitter for Research" was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on March 25, 2011.

A quick post to highlight the wonderful Postcards Exhibition taking place this Friday at the University of Sussex!

Featured image by duncan under a CC-BY-NC license. A quick post to announce that I will be speaking at the University of Durham on the 1st of April, 2011 on the following topic: More information about the event can be found on the UKPN website. Conference Paper: "The F Word", 2011-04-01, University of Durham was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on March 17, 2011.

Featured image by Sarah Ross photography under a CC-BY-NC license. As part of my ongoing lecturer training programme I am required to design a twelve week syllabus for a period literature course running from 1860-1945. This was an exercise that I found useful as part of a training programme, but also, I would genuinely like to teach the course I designed!