Site News
[31 Dec 03] A lot has happened this year that I haven't been able to put into words, or at least public words; a lot that I once would have said I find myself putting aside, keeping to myself, holding back. This year's log has had barely half the number of entries of last year's. Where I used to have an explanation for every absence of a few days, now I offer none, and am absent more. I can't go back and fill in all the things I would have written; I'm not even sure this is the right place for them. Right now this place doesn't feel right.
Time, then, for a break. I'm taking some time off from the updating urge; to be honest, the urge has been missing for months. I'm not even sure how webloggy the next incarnation of Speedysnail will be, but there'll be something new eventually. The rest of the site will probably see the usual tinkering and gradual expansion in the meantime.
Thanks for sticking with me. If you're looking for something to distract you in the early months of '04, you could do a lot worse than these fine sites.
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A Christmas Gift For You
[25 Dec 03] Two dozen Doors and Windows in detail.
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[17 Dec 03] More detail: Edinburgh II, featuring photos from the past year and a half.
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[11 Dec 03] Something Shauna found.
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[ 8 Dec 03] About six months later than planned, here at last are some More Castles of Scotland. (In case you missed them, the first ones are here.)
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Press Play-Record
[ 5 Nov 03] One of the relics I unearthed at my parents' place last month was the instruction booklet for a long-gone tape-deck from the 1970s, complete with surreal illustrations by an unknown Japanese graphic artist. Rather than let them languish, I've borrowed a few for this harmless diversion: The Recording Industry Guide to Home Taping.
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No Comment
[15 Oct 03] I know, it's quiet. The combination of all that time away, all that work to keep the site online, and all those days of feeling like a wheezing bag of phlegm has made it hard to get enthusiastic about posting again. And to cap it all off, like so many others I've been dealing with comment spam. After six months of putting out spot-fires in the archives I was more than ready for Jay Allen's plug-in, even before "Lolita" dropped by.
Something about this latest assault was particularly depressing. There I was, contemplating how to write about some pretty personal stuff—the place I grew up in, what it means to me, how it's changing and what those changes mean—subjects I've only touched on here before—and in comes yet another spammer treating my personal space as a data-point for a search engine, a billboard to plaster his or her grinning mug on. It was as if the web was saying, Remember, your personal site isn't yours any more... it's part of a big ol' meme-aggregating horde of weblogs. Even if you think you're the one choosing what to talk about, you're probably wrong; it's just part of the meme-stream. And now even the links are out of your control, twisted into the same crap that fills up your inbox. Remember how a "web log" used to be about server statistics? It still is. Your weblog is a statistic.
I was going to add a third paragraph about my loathing for spammers in all their forms, but I think this is one of those times when I can rely on a deep unspoken understanding between author and reader.
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We Have Lift-Off
[ 4 Oct 03] If you're seeing this it means the DNS changes have filtered through, and the site is up and running again at its shiny new host. My old one was bought by a large ISP in a spate of corporate expansionism, and four years of reliable service went down the toilet—reaching its peak outflow in their insistence that I hand over my domain registration password just so they could change the DNS details, rather than trusting me to do it. After one last try (and an hour on hold) I got them to tell me the new details; but it turned out their new DNS was pointing to a month-old backup of the site.
This all happened while I was away, and only a few weeks before next year's hosting fees were due. So I've taken the opportunity to switch to another host (many thanks to Paul for the tip-off). Not everything is uploaded yet, and a few CGI scripts need tweaking, but so far it's looking good.
We have main engine start... 4... 3... 2... 1... and lift-off. Lift-off of the latest Speedysnail mission, and it has cleared the tower.
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Feed the Tree
[28 Aug 03] Like so many long-time bloggers, I've been thinking about implementing some sort of links sidebar to make up for the fact that I hardly ever do any linking any more. But sidebars make the page look too cluttered for my liking, so I've come up with another solution: an RSS weblog. Hook this feed up to your favourite newsreader and you can follow all the links that take my fancy, pure and unadorned; I'll try to be less selective than I normally am when posting here (yeah, right; we'll see how long that lasts). I'm actually using Blogger to run it, not MovableType, so that I can use its BlogThis bookmarklet to make posting to the feed almost as effortless as bookmarking. Here's the template, if you're curious.
There are no archives at the moment, but depending how it goes I might do a round-up of the best ones at the end of each week or two. And of course if I have more to say about a particular link than an implied "this is interesting", I'll post it here.
[Update: What am I, insane? The last thing I need is yet more blogging chores. File under "interesting proof of concept, now proven, so no need to do it any more". I guess I'll keep it up for a while as an experiment, but don't expect too much from it.]
[Update Redux: Actually, I think it might work out okay.]
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Slipstream
[15 Aug 03] As usual, behind-the-scenes activity is to blame for this snailian silence. I seem to store up more and more to say here, only to watch it all drain out the overflow hole, leaving me with a stagnant pool of content and a grimy ring around the sink.
And it's not always because I'm too busy to write, although at the moment I usually am. Kathleen wrote last week on the hesitance to blog borne of academic rewriting habits, and it's a quandary with which I'm increasingly familiar. Despite my resolve of last month, I've yet to come up with the goods, even though they're lurking in the store-room out the back. The technical problems of combining the free flow of thought with the permanence of publication may have been solved by the weblog format, but conceptual and structural problems remain, particularly when it comes to questions of revising one's work in public. I think I've come up with a way to do it, but—paradoxically—feel I have to get the details right before launching anything. I'm close, though... as long as I can get some unrelated work finished over the next couple of weeks.
Of course, it's always when I'm busiest that I end up sifting over old writing, partly as a way of recapturing ideas. Which probably explains why I did some grepping through a huge pile of old MeFi posts and... uh... calculated how many words I've posted there over the past three years oh okay I was curious and the word count on BBEdit was so tempting...
72,624, as of two days ago; nearly 40,000 of those last year alone. And I don't consider myself a prolific poster: most of those represent intense bursts of words in a few threads; relatively few are throwaway one-liners.
As part of that sifting, I ended up making something I'd meant to for a while, which was an index of asides as a place to bring it all back home. (There's a 2002 equivalent now, too.) Some of its new pages contain material that was never linked from here, even when in hindsight they would have made perfectly good posts. Which brings me back to this whole question of blogging reticence.
It's not just an academic urge to rewrite until perfect that slows down the flow of a weblog; it's an awareness of one's audience—of the fact that there is now an audience—and the consequent attempt to write for that audience. Perhaps studying certain academic fields—like English, or Cultural Studies, or even Political Science—heightens your awareness of the impact words can have, and makes you overly cautious. Or maybe it's universal; the fear of your sister reading your diary. Writing your entire self onto the page or the screen carries the risk that someone won't like it.
Yeah, but that's nothing new, and that's not it... (thinking to myself on a Friday afternoon with five minutes left to finish this post before I have to be somewhere else). It's just a question of tone... of trying to find the tone that gives an impression of the whole, of your complete life, of all its aspects... and that's impossible, isn't it. So why not re-use material you wrote elsewhere... someone might already have seen it, but most won't, so why hold back?
You can always spot my first-draft posts by the number of ellipses.
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[ 6 Aug 03] Bit slow in mentioning it, but over the past week or so I've added four new found things to that part of the site. Every time I think about retiring the concept, I end up keeping it going for just that bit longer.
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[18 Jul 03] A new instalment of Detail, taking a slightly different approach to the previously-posted highlands stuff: Orkney. I've got enough material for another series of castles, too, but might leave that for now—doing these takes too many late nights, and I'd rather get on with the plans mentioned over the past few days.
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Academic Circles
[17 Jul 03] You may remember my giving a paper in Vienna last year at a Pacific studies conference (assuming you've been reading that long, and have a photographic memory for things people mention in passing). At that stage it was basically a pile of notes and a Powerpoint slideshow, but over subsequent months of tinkering I reformatted it for the web. I had plans to turn it into a traditional journal paper, but given the nature of it (lots of screenshots and graphs) couldn't figure out how to surmount the difficulties of turning out a print version; so I procrastinated.
There was another reason. For years now I've been thinking about issues of online copyright and its academic implications. It's a big part of my work at the moment. And the more you look at the subject, the more stark the situation appears. Traditionally, academics sought to publish their work in books or respected journals, as that was the best way of getting it out to an audience of their peers. Nowadays there's an alternative—and you're soaking in it. Major journal publishers, meanwhile, are dealing with the challenge of the web by locking up as much intellectual property as they can, and keeping tight controls on access to electronic versions of texts. In effect, they're renting the work back to the very people who gave it to them.
Yes, gave. To get published in most academic journals, you must assign your copyright to the journal. Once you do, you have no control over what's done with it. If they choose to make it available only to those whose institutions pay an extortionate subscription, there's nothing you can do about it. Your work may be online, but there's no point linking to it, because most people can't see it.
This is something I find increasingly and deeply troubling.
There are all sorts of issues involved, which I'm trying to work through behind the scenes at this very moment. But leaving aside the wider issues, this has a particular resonance for me because of the areas I've worked in over the years.
One, now sadly receding into the past, is the Pacific. When I was a grad student working on Pacific politics, I hoped that my work would be part of a conversation between islanders and non-islanders, not some cloistered effort that would only ever be read by visitors to the ANU library. Realising that dream meant getting the work to as wide an audience as possible—and putting it on the web is a way of doing that. While net access in the islands may not be great, at least it's available in some places, whereas access to hundred dollar books from OUP and expensive paper or electronic journal subscriptions is next to nil.
The other, obviously, is the web itself. I've worked in this field now for five years. My current job is specifically about its educational implications. I want to see it used to best advantage by academics, not just in teaching, but in the part of their work that universities value the most: research. Research, and the dissemination of research.
I want to see that happen, yet in my own day-to-day practice have been holding back, in case I have to publish in journals which won't consider submissions that have already appeared online (most of which don't publish freely to the web either). So: I can't put my work online before print publication, when it has the highest chance of appearing topical and fresh and sparking interesting discussions with my peers; and I can't put it online after print publication, because someone else will own the copyright and want to rent it back to my university library; so in effect, I can't put online academic work which is all about working as an academic online in order to discuss its implications online with fellow academics.
This is madness.
The main reason to acquiesce to this madness is, unfortunately, fairly compelling: traditional forms of print publication are the main basis on which research performance is judged, which in turn determines one's prospects for academic appointment/renewal of contract/promotion/tenure/delete where applicable.
Different people will deal with this quandary in different ways, I guess. But if enough people deal with it by rejecting it, the quandary will go away. Traditions only persist if enough people actively believe in them and maintain them. They change when people start behaving differently.
That doesn't help much if your university still does things the old-fashioned way and you're facing the end of your contract—and mine's only a year off. But maybe that's what's making me feel as if bold action is needed. I don't actually believe there is any academic job security; the '50s and '60s are gone. Nowadays academia is a carrot-and-stick game where management and government have eaten the carrot. Even if you have tenure your situation can become untenable.
But I digress.
Here, then, is my new personal policy. I no longer care about journals that automatically reject material which has already appeared in some form online. I no longer care about journals that demand copyright in exchange for the privilege of publication on paper and/or a pay-per-view website. I will no longer publish my research anywhere that won't allow me to republish it here—unless the bargain is far, far more compelling than giving away all rights in exchange for a one-line reference on my CV. The public purse is paying for this work, and I want the public to be able to see it.
So that's the deal. I have a ton of ideas in my head, and a ton of unpublished stuff on the hard disk, and it's all coming soon to a web page near you.
After that rousing manifesto, its first fruits might seem a little disappointing; but even if you're not a Pacific anthropologist (neither am I, but I was speaking to a room full of them) you might find something in it. The paper is Linking the Islands: Pacific Implications of the Web, and while the first section deals with the development of websites about and within the Pacific (mostly only of interest to Pacific scholars), a later section comparing levels of net access in the Pacific and the West gives some indication of the digital divide between rich and poor nations (as opposed to rich and poor within the same nation, which is what you usually hear about). I thought about expanding that survey to a greater number of countries, and now it could use updating with 2002 figures, but—well, other things got in the way. Maybe I'll be more tempted to, now that it's out there. Maybe I'll even turn out that print version after all, and find a suitable home for it. And maybe—one day—it won't matter if I don't.
There's something about blogs in there, too. Yeah, yeah, I know.
Thanks to Kathleen for inspiring me to think about what the hell I'm doing by posting her own what-the-hell-am-I-doing thoughts over recent weeks. Also, this paper by John Willinsky helped me feel I wasn't alone in all this—recommended further reading.
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[ 4 Jul 03] Tour the Highlands II: The North and West. I promised some photos from our April trip, and here they are. This selection covers the north and west coasts of the Scottish highlands from Thurso to Ullapool. The photos were mostly scanned from 35mm prints; the only digital one was Jane's of the beach near Rispond. The pages are in the same style as the first instalment of 18 months ago, with the usual bandwidth-busting downloads, and the usual application of the facet filter in Photoshop (I like its painterly effect, and it shaves a fair bit off file size). There'll be some images of Orkney soon too, but I'm thinking of taking a different approach with those.
Now you can see why I had nothing much to write about it. What can I say? It was beautiful. I could have stayed a month. As long as I didn't have to drive on the single-lane roads with hardly any passing places every day. The occasional RAF jet tearing through the roof of the car was another minor drawback (that's what it sounded like, anyway).
Other new things lately: a new banner on the category archives of this year's log, just to use up some more of the windows I've been photographing; and at last, a 2003 update of the outside page—I'm going to ditch the bogroll on the left as soon as I can get the design right.
And then there's this.
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Static
[30 Jun 03] I know; I haven't been posting much for a while. The travel in April and May was overlaid with so many extra layers of feeling and thought that I can't face excavating down to the bedrock. There have been plenty of movies, but none worth moving myself to write about. The books have mostly been work-related, and my thoughts about them relate to work. And I'm damned if I'm giving the record companies free publicity when they're busy shafting the punters who've kept them in business.
True, there are other things I could write. The problem is that writing them in any regular and sustained way is too much to take on right now. I've got chapters to finish, on two different fronts.
Sometimes the public aspects of web publication can seem intrusive. Ideas need time to develop, to ferment in the dark cellar of the mind, away from the light of attention. And sometimes I need to stop mucking about and just get on with it, where 'it' equals writing what I absolutely have to, and 'mucking about' equals flinging a few words into Movable Type every day or two.
So if the front page looks more like a What's New than a weblog over the next month or three, and what's new ain't much, you'll know what's what.
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[30 Jun 03] New at detail: station. Newly found: an appendage.
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It's Oh So Quiet
[11 Jun 03] If this year was like last, by now I'd be regaling you with tales of the trips we just did up to Orkney and around the north and west coasts of the highlands, and through the Lake District, the Pennines and Durham. I'd be dragging you up cramped passages into five-thousand-year-old chambered cairns, sprinting through a park in Kirkwall to dodge the incontinent crows perched in the only trees on Orkney, standing on a deserted Sutherland beach in atypical Scottish sunshine, watching the seals on Loch Glencoul from the deck of a small fishing boat, and reversing down a single-lane road hemmed in by stone walls to find a place to let past a convoy of 4WDs in the Lake District.
But after several weeks away from it all I'm finding it hard to get rolling again, and at the moment have no time to write much anyway.* There'll be more postcard-y pictures soon, but as for words... well, we'll see.
*Although I do have time to write that I have no time to write, which makes a mockery of this sad place-filler of a post.
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[ 5 Jun 03] A first pass through the photo backlog—and at last, some detail that's actually detailed: Stone Maps.
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Hunting for parking spots in the Lake District does strange things to a man.
I suppose I shouldn't keep away from the site forever. But that six weeks off sure was welcome, especially when half of it was spent roaming around northern Britain. I'll sling a photo or two up here eventually, but for now I'm still enjoying being detached from the virtual and attached to the real.
(There were a few new things here in May, despite outward appearances. More found stuff, mainly.)
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The Fog Descends
[17 Apr 03] ...literally and figuratively. I'm escaping the Edinburgh fog by heading north, and will be in and out of town over the next six weeks, so it's back into hiatus for the snail. Follow the links to see what's been, or check back in a month to see what's next. Seeya.
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Robert Pirsig, Come On Down
[ 9 Apr 03] The fog has lifted, as you can see. Am I back? Maybe. Almost. Today, anyway. Next Thursday, I really will fall silent for a few weeks while Mum and Dad are in town. Then there's a trip down to London a week later to see them off; and Jane's bro is coming to visit in late May. So, it'll be patchy. This is a holding pattern.
Whenever I take a break from this thing to let the mental cistern refill, I end up looking over old archives. Hence the academic paper brought to the surface last week, and this post at MetaTalk about archiving comments there. As part of the process, I had a frenzy of exporting old blog entries from Blogger into MT import format in case I ever need them; and after that, curiosity prompted me to do a proper word count of it all—text only, sans titles and tags. (The leet BBEdit grepping skills came in handy.) I left out the extra pages that didn't form blog entries, but it gave a pretty good estimate of how much I've written at this joint in the past few years.
Walking West, or everything from 2000 and 2001, came to 125,000 words. The entries from last year and the first three months of this year came to 100,000 words; so much for 'winding back'. With the other odds and ends here and there, I've probably written over a quarter of a million new words for this site over three years.
That's two or three books' worth. It even feels like two books, looking back on it: Walking West was one, and 2002 to March 2003 another, with some fuzzy transition periods at either end. (Welcome to the fuzzy transition period.)
Now there's something to get you thinking, especially when you have another book lying around half-written in drafts and in your head. It gets you thinking: If I didn't do this, I could have finished that. But it also gets you thinking: Wow, look what I made. Because it hasn't all been asides and ephemera. It wasn't even mostly that, really.
Of course, the ballooning writerly ego is soon punctured when you consider the string of no-comments that most entries get, here or at most blogs. It's hard to put hours into any creative task and get little or no response; but hey, welcome to the creative life. This modern age has conditioned us all to crave rock-star fame and instant-feedback praise, but it's the opposite of what artists and writers have been able to expect throughout history.
(Fame shouldn't be the goal of the writer; the goal should be quality. Fame or renown of any degree is only useful as an indication of the quality of your work, and it stops being useful the moment you no longer believe that it reflects the quality of what you're doing now. So forget fame, and focus on the work. A few friends can tell you if it's worth doing as readily as a thousand strangers, and when they're not around, you can tell yourself.)
I don't know what the next Book of the Snail will look like, or even when it will properly start to take shape; the offline book is going too slowly, dammit, and Something Must be Done, which bodes more holding patterns here. But if and when I get the chance to post something, I'll try to make it good.
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[ 9 Apr 03] I've added a few more links to the bogroll lately: the eclectic plep; the poetic Dan; and the fiendishly funny Skot, one of those names you see around MeFi but don't realise is totally brilliant until you follow someone else's link to their blog. It's good to see Ed back on the boil, too. I have a queue of others waiting to take up residence on 2003's links page when I finally get around to it, but ehh, it's sunny outside.
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Ain't Gonna Play Sun City
[31 Mar 03] Something new (and at the same time old) for an old part of the site: International Moves Against Apartheid, a background paper I wrote as part of some research work in the mid-'90s. Someone out there might find it useful, and it might as well sit on the web as sit on my hard-drive.
Also: found in a gorse bush.
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Time Out
[25 Mar 03] I'm taking the rest of March and April off. My folks are in the country and will be up here in a few weeks, I've got a ton of other stuff to do in the meantime, and I'm feeling in need of a mental sauna. Speedysnail will return refreshed sometime in May. (There may be some activity behind the front page now and then, but I wouldn't count on it.)
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[23 Mar 03] A refit of the old Pacific politics section of this site.
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Flash in ze Pan
[21 Mar 03] Flash in ze frying pan, into ze line of fire... with interactive multimedia expert Herr Doktor Komputor, Dipl. und M.A. (Leiden), D.Phil. (Oxon).
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Brrrt Brrrt. Brrrt Brrrt.
[12 Mar 03] Hello, you've reached the website of Rory Ewins. I'm not here right now, but leave a message after the tone and I'll get back to y... Yes? Sure, come in, I was just recording a m... oh my God... what's thaaaaaaauuunnnnnhhhhhhhh
BEEEEP
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Snail's Pace
[ 7 Mar 03] I've been busy, as regular readers might have guessed; busy reading and editing tens of thousands of collectively-written words on staff and student IT skills in European universities. At the end of a hard day's Highlighting Changes in MS Word when everything's a sea of red, there's not much energy left to write amusing anecdotes. Then there's the time spent organising a trip up to Orkney at the end of April, getting out a bit on the weekends, going to the movies in the evenings, and generally not staring at the screen.
It's more than that, though; the busy-ness has coincided with my semi-annual bout of wondering what to do with this site. Last weekend I was running through the books and CDs and movies I wanted to review here and came up with a list as long as my arm, assuming that my arm is a couple of dozen books, CDs and movies long. Which gave me pause; that much writing feels too much like... well, work. What is this, the New Rory Review of Books? Rory Stone? Where's the funding coming from? How long will all of this take? And, more to the point, why do I keep writing about other people's creations instead of creating my own?
The same could be said for the usual link-and-commentary and insta-punditry of blogging. It has its moments, but it all feels so... ephemeral. Stop-gap. And I don't have too many gaps to stop these days.
I'm not saying there'll be none of that here from now on; just less of it. I suspect the front page of Speedysnail is, for a while at least, going to look more like it did three years ago: an old-fashioned 'what's new' page with updates every now and then.
But while I may not have been blogging much lately, I have created something new for the site: the latest instalment of Detail, Castles of Scotland. If a picture says a thousand words, then the 70 pictures in these collages are a whole freakin' novel's worth. Hope you like them.
Oh, and then there's this latest throwaway: found near a rugby field.
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[20 Feb 03] Found ten metres apart.
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I Love Youse All
[14 Feb 03] Happy Valentine's Day. Here's a present. Don't eat them all at once.
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[ 3 Feb 03] Found reconfigured.
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Increasink Your Elektronikmail Power
[29 Jan 03] His return was met with glorious indifference by mein readers, but vill zis stop me, uh, him? Nein! Doktor K shows you more of ze vay in his new lesson.
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Fav Iko Iko
[27 Jan 03] This site used to have a favicon, but I ditched it last year when it started looking a bit dated. Over the weekend I made a new one, following the tips for Mac users here and the server tweaks here, but even though it's getting served up properly my copy of Mozilla isn't using it in the toolbar. Anyone out there have any idea why? [Never mind—here's the answer. Works now.]
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[22 Jan 03] Found near a school. Not another passport photo, for a change.
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It Feels So Empty Vizout Me
Guess who's back
Back again
Doktor's back
Tell a friend
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[ 9 Jan 03] The housekeeping is pretty much complete: a range of CSS issues with the new design have been solved; a blogroll has been added to this main page; the 'suggest' button has been removed from all but the main page; and the RSS 0.91 feed has been switched to 2.0, and now has the full text of the past week's entries (the 1.0 remains excerpts-only). Still some work to do in other corners of the site, but it can wait.
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And We're Back
[ 1 Jan 03] A shiny new year means a shiny new look—or the old look, tweaked and polished. I've made a few usability improvements (most noticeably the new navigation bar on the left with its more prominent search box), added trackback links to new posts, and brought back the 'suggest a subject' form for those who enjoy playing along. Last year's posts are all intact, except their comments are now closed—you can still read the old ones, but can't add new ones. Not much point in joining a conversation six months late.
Of course, after weeks of building this design, my head's too full of code to have any bright ideas for posts. And things will be pretty busy for me this month, so this may be a false dawn. We'll see.
A gastropod racer quite needy
Became just a little too greedy
The snail he bought
Availed him nought
'Cos he hadn't shelled out for Speedy
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