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!

As I tweeted yesterday, @dhlbrown was attending a workshop on which I participated last year at the University of Sussex on getting published in Academia. He very kindly tweeted his notes and I recommend you go follow him but thought it was worth collating the information in one place, which also gave me an opportunity to dig out my notes from last year's session.

Bit of an in-joke, but I think my career has reached a new high with Gaz's recent award bestowed upon me: The Gaz Pearce Award was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on March 11, 2011.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Richard Stallman, the pioneer of the CopyLeft movement, at the University of Sussex. Stallman was speaking on the need to reform a copyright system which has outgrown the historical circumstances of its creation and now serves the mega corporations, such as Disney, as opposed to the majority of the population.

As a scholar working on literature, I am often asked to describe my work in potted form. This necessarily involves an introduction to the work of Thomas Pynchon, an extremely difficult task. Pynchon's novels cannot be considered normal literature; they are vast, sprawling pieces that encompass hundreds of characters, vast historical scope and dense prose.

Featured image by Пероша under a CC-BY-NC license. I am currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and came across the phrase " in dubio contra reum " on p. 214. My Latin being a little rusty, and it being late in the day, I whacked the term into Google and was disappointed to find that there was no adequate definition of the term in the search results; merely band names and a German entry.

Reading Daniel Domscheit-Berg's Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website gives the twofold impression of a deeply ideological personality, but also a man stinging from hurt naivety.

A few weeks ago, I tweeted that the first beta of Android for Mendeley was almost ready. This post is an update on that status. I'm afraid to say that, about ten minutes after I posted that status, I ran a test on the oAuth code only to find that it was not working. This was strange as I had made no changes and it was previously working.

Image credit: Still Burning under a CC-BY-NC license. Perhaps one of the strongest arguments for universal suffrage, even among the convicted populous, can be taken from our recent history. There has been, in recent times, an over-identification of the law with absolute moral right.

Featured image copyright, and courtesy of, My Open Router. I've been, over the past few years, through about 3 different routers. I had a Thompson Speedtouch, a Netgear DG834GT and, most recently, a Netgear DGN2200. The problem I have always experienced, though, is that when I open a large number of connections (say, using BitTorrent), all these models die a miserable death.

Last night I was privileged enough to attend an event forming part of the British Library's Evolving English series featuring the novelist Russell Hoban in conversation with renowned satirist, novelist and generally sharp guy, Will Self. The conversation was focused around Hoban's masterwork, Riddley Walker.