Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Some example academic book proposal forms in case they help

    A pivotal moment in my academic career, or at least one I remember clearly, was when a very senior professor in the US sent me his book proposal for an academic book/monograph on the author Thomas Pynchon. The other thing he included was a crossed off list of all the presses he had courted with the proposal and with whom he had not succeeded. This cemented in my mind the fact that if even the top profs can be given rejections, nobody else should be resentful of them or consider them problematic. It can just be part of the process.

    The other part of the process though is writing a good book proposal and there is nobody who will teach you how to do this. It’s not often part of training in doctoral spaces and most people feel their way through this by seeking behind closed doors the proposals of other academics. There are of course some books on writing a book proposal, but I thought it might be helpful if I shared some of the book proposals that I have written over the years and that have succeeded. Some of these books ended up being very different from the published versions, but I don’t think that matters and actually shows, as Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe suggested to me, that it’s okay for organic change to take place while you write a book. I hope these might help. Dates shown are when I wrote/sent the proposal, to the best of my recollection. Not all my published books are listed here, as some were the results of collaborations and so the proposals are not wholly owned by me.

  • our routes

    I walk and walk and walk
    avoid our usual routes
    but can't stop my eyes
    seeking a familiar shape
    

  • Funeral Director

    As a kid, I once told my parents I wanted to be funeral director when I grew up. Ignorant to the vernacular of grown-up jobs, and in my infinite eight-year-old wisdom, any job that started with 'fun' would most logically be the way to go. You may know these professional men as undertakers. A highly profitable business, death is. Money was not my top priority as much as how much 'fun' this job would be.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Bitmerse Opens Funding for the Romu, Its Tiny Raspberrry Pi RP2354-Based Take on the -omu Craze

    Indian startup Bitmerse has opened crowdfunding for its take on the -omu trend of ultra-compact development boards that near-disappear into a USB Type-A port: the Romu, powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2354A microcontroller.

    "Romu is an ultra-compact, USB-centric development board built around the Raspberry Pi RP2354A," Bitmerse's Jaydeep Dhrangdhariya and Dhrumil Doshi say of their creation. "It plugs directly inside any USB Type-A port, no cable, no programmer, no breadboard, and gets you writing and running MicroPython code in minutes. Where most dev boards are built to expose GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output connectivity], Romu is purpose-built for one thing: making USB application development fast, approachable, and fun, whether that's a security key, a macro pad, or a custom HID device you haven't thought of yet."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • WordPress loading theme assets of a different theme to that selected

      Today’s tech anomaly was odd. I’m working on a new WordPress theme and obviously WordPress has to load its assets like the CSS file and the JavaScript file. I just added some new code to the home page template and suddenly my CSS was not loading. In fact it was pointing to the next theme in the list, Blockbase, and loading its CSS. Nothing I could do with caching resolved this in the slightest.