An announcement that I will be speaking at the "Symbiosis" conference at the University of Glasgow on the 24th of June giving a paper entitled "Whose Line is it Anyway? Geographical specificity of Enlightenment in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon". Featured image by jbachman01 under a CC-BY-ND license. Conference paper: Geo-specificity of Enlightenment in Mason &

A quick post to mark the publication, co-authored with Jennifer M Jones, of "Taking Back the University"; a piece that gives a quick rundown of radical alternative re-imaginings of the University over the past year. The piece was written collaboratively in Google Documents originally under the title "Angry Young Academics", with each of us blasting down thoughts before restructuring.

Details of an upcoming researcher workshop I am running on the 28th of June, from 2-4pm at the University of Sussex: For more information and book, please visit the events page. Featured image credit: leezfield under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Upcoming Workshop: Inbox zero and tech-task lists: getting things done was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on June 14, 2011.

As seems to be becoming a bit of a tradition, my friend Duncan came up with a Pynchon themed T-Shirt, and Against the Day quoting card for my birthday. Here's the result! More Pynchonalia was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on June 13, 2011.

Here's a quick 'n' easy version of another post that uses the rpm instead of the extracting to opt.

I saw yesterday that Twitter user WhelanWrites was asking for a basic rundown of some introductory Pynchon criticism. Rather than reply, I thought I'd put a few items up here so that they are better preserved for posterity. The request was that "Something biographical would be great... And something relating to gravity's rainbow specifically!", so I'll do my best on that front.

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the "Who owns the Story of the Future?" even taking place at the British Library, playing host to William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Diane Coyle and Mark Stevenson as part of their Out of This World series. In case you haven't seen the exhibition and series of related events, I suggest you check it out.

A the time that I started writing this blog post, I was intending to extol the virtues of the newly released Fedora 15 compared to the trainwreck that is Ubuntu 11.04. It turns out the story isn't as clear cut as that, but wanted to give my experience in comparison installing across two machines. This all started when I upgraded my laptop (a Toshiba Satellite 650C) to Ubuntu 11.04 during the beta period earlier this year.

I had resisted the concept of having my own, academic, business cards for a long time. It seemed, and still does to an extent, an encroachment upon the sphere I love from the world of dehumanised business practice. However, networking is a fundamental part of academic conference attendance. I have several conferences coming up in June.

When I was in hospital the week before last, I was struck by how all-pervasive the rhetoric of "fighting" is when people are coping with illness or new disability. I'm sure that this has been covered by those in critical disability studies far better than I can put it here, but I wanted to flag it up as an area of concern. I certainly know that, for pretty much my entire life, this has been the terminology deployed.

Please find, for your delectation, licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license, my Prezi on Using Twitter for Research, a workshop I taught at the University of Sussex on the 18th May, 2011. .prezi-player { width: 750px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center;