This weekend I was house- (and dog-) sitting for a friend and had been told that I could use the internet while at their place. Sadly, however, the way this was configured was a guest account added my friend's laptop and she had not left the WEP key for their router.

I've been a big fan of cryptic crosswords for several years now. For those who are unaware, these are crosswords in which the clue consists of both a definition (almost always, except in the case of triple definition clues, at the beginning or end) and a subsidiary indicator.

While I do not normally attend rallies, demonstrations and the such like, I am making an exception tomorrow for the NUS' demonstration against the implementation of huge cuts to HE and moving the burden onto the student.

There has been a trend, in recent days, of moving towards providing tweets under various licenses; most prominently, Creative Commons Non-commercial Sharealike. While I thoroughly approve of strong copylefting, there were some issues that struck me as incredibly problematic with this stance and I would like, in this post, to briefly explore a few of these areas.

At the beginning of last year, I was involved briefly in a reading group at the University of Sussex, the topic of which was the writings of Jacques Derrida. I wrote, at that point, a computer program to generate nicely presented versions of my notes and hereby present the resulting notes because the domain they were hosted on is now set to expire and I have no interest in maintaining it further.

Just a brief scholarly note for the benefit of anybody reading Foucault's "What is Enlightenment", contained in Paul Rabinow's edited volume, "Ethics" (volume I). The index is incomplete and does not properly cover this article within the collection.

Sometimes, the free wireless service at the British Library goes pear shaped and, if you are accustomed to using it, this can make research quite hard. Occasionally, however the fault is not with the central mechanism but rather with DHCP -- the mechanism that gives your computer an address on their system. I'm afraid that this is a somewhat technical post, as I don't have time to write a user-friendly (aka.

In the spirit of the event, I am hereby releasing my presentation materials for the talk I gave at the University of Sussex's Open Access Week on the 20th of October 2010 under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA license (you can share and alter the work, non-commercially as long as you give me attribution for the original and distribute it under the same terms). .prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center;

In the course of the last day I have been observing, and engaging with, an ongoing Twitter discussion (see: Dystopia2009 and MarkKohut) as to which Thomas Pynchon novel should be recommended to Pynchon newbies. This might sound like a question of little import: just read the damn stuff.

This is a quick post to point out that I will be speaking at the University of Sussex's contribution to International Open Access Week on the 20th of October 2010. Alongside a host of other speakers, I will talk on the pros and cons of Open Access publishing and how it can help with your research.

Another post plugging a conference I am involved with, I'm afraid!