This post comes as a therapeutic exercise after having spent longer than I'd hoped bogged down writing an academic journal piece. I wanted to write a little on the topic of getting published as a postgraduate, when to start and how to go about it. I did write on this before, but this is an expansion and refresher, so you can have the topic again!

The other day I was installing Xubuntu 10.10 onto an old Mac G4 Powerbook and got the keyboard layout wrong. I had encrypted the entire disk and so, with the keyboard mapped entirely incorrectly ("j" was enter), I was unable to unlock the disk to continue. To solve this, I booted off the alternate CD and entered a recovery shell, hoping this would ask me to unlock the disk.

I'm very pleased to announce that I will speaking in the opening plenary session at the UK Scholarly Group conference on March the 26th, 2012 at the University of Glasgow. My paper will focus on the many problems in academic publishing through a typology of computer malware, arguing for a deep infection within the system.

In an effort to ensure that I have a complete listing of my conference papers on my site, here is an abstract from the last International Pynchon Week conference at which I presented: Featured image by pheezy under a CC-BY license. Conference Paper: 'It sure's hell looked like war': Terrorism and the Cold War in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Don DeLillo's Underworld', 2010-06-09, University of Lublin was originally published by

Having set out in part 1 some of the differences between the British and American PhDs in English, this here part 2 is a guide to applying to America, should its system seem preferable.

A quick roundup/review post from the "Calling All Agents: A Symposium on the work of Tom McCarthy" conference, held at Birkbeck and organised, superbly, by Dennis Duncan on zero budget. As might be expected, there's a slight (paranoiac?) Pynchon-bias in the reporting below, but I hope it proves useful. As always, I'm happy to correct any errors/omissions on authorial request.

Having read two great posts on OpenSSH best practices, I decided today that I wanted to upgrade my SSH key architecture to use Elliptical Curve Cryptography. There were several gotchas involved that I thought it would be worth sharing here. There are, at the time of writing, no packages for Fedora 15 or Debian stable that I could find, so I've worked from source. Getting ECC working on some systems can be a bit of a pain.

Perhaps a strange title for a post, but I was recently kindly alerted by Luis-Manuel Garcia at the University of Chicago that a certain dissertation writing "service" has been aggregating and re-posting material from blogs that feature the word "dissertation". As my professional reputation in academic circles could rest upon a Google search, I wanted this post to come up indicating that I absolutely deplore these outfits which do nothing to

It now seems the right time to unveil a project which we hope will enthuse and excite a great number of you. We have been working, over the past few months, to put together a new, very different, journal of Pynchon scholarship.

As from July 11th, 2011, all content on this site, except where noted, is now available under the more permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, as specified in the footer. Featured image by Creative Commons under a CC-BY license. Change of license: all content now CC-BY was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on July 11, 2011.

Britain or America for the PhD in English? I recently reached the halfway point in my 6-year PhD program at the University of Michigan, allowing me to ponder the consequences of my having chosen to do the doctorate in America rather than Britain. If I’d started my PhD in 2008 in Britain, I’d be expected to have pretty much finished my dissertation by now, to be on the verge of the abysmal job market.