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.

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!

The reason that the coalition government is now panicking over the set to be universal introduction of £9000 fees and desires to financially punish institutions that want to charge this amount is that it runs counter to their idea of a completely elitist education system: they want institutions to go bankrupt and are predicating this on metrics that don't exist and without taking account of a price-placebo effect.

Featured image by avlxyz under a CC-BY-SA license. A friend of mine has just negotiated a great deal on a new Android phone and she suggested I put together a list of apps/things to do once she gets it. I thought, rather than hoarde this all to myself, I'd put it out there for all to see. 1.) Root This is not strictly for everyone, but I want my phone to be free, as in speech, not beer.

I am very please to announce that the conference website for the UK Pynchon Network (and our first conference) is now online! The address is: https://www.martineve.com/ukpn/ We have an exciting programme of speakers lined up for the day, which is scheduled to kick off at 10am in the Durham University English Department's main seminar room. Attendance is free but, as such, you'll have to buy your own lunch!