So you spend a little time on Facebook and it almost makes you embarrassed to have a blog. Blogs are, by comparison:

– Old fashioned
– Narcissistic
– Thinly disguised, mildly unsubstantive navel-gazing
– The embodiment of unproductive time in many ways
– An expression more of what might have been than what is

Yes, I know that these are all critiques that apply to Facebook these days as well, but blogs commit these sins in spades by comparison.

— § —

Oh well.

— § —

One of the oddest things on Facebook is the way in which you can stumble across people you haven’t thought about in years, usually in conversations or interactions with mutual friends.

For some, this is one of the delights of Facebook.

Me? I’d rather forget, in most cases.

— § —

Spent a great deal of time triaging journal articles and conference papers tonight for the next chapter in the dissertation. For reasons related to my previous post, my notes and files are a mess when it comes to the body of resources I’m using.

If I was naturally organized like my wife, they’d be in great shape, but I’ve never had that skill. I began life as a child of the digital age, and those have always been computing system functions for me.

This is a weakness—bad software or no software for me equals bad capability or no capability. I am utterly dependent on my tools for organization and planning tasks, and when the tools available for these tasks in a particular domain are completely inadequate, my ability to carry the tasks out is also completely inadequate.

I hate you, Sente. (But I hate Papers, Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote more, so take heart, at least there’s that.)

— § —

I am trying to resist the temptation to have another beer.

I drink to much beer on too many evenings.

— § —

Temperatures are scheduled to ramp up here next week. I’m trying to prepare myself for the onslaught, but even at this (twenty degrees cooler) level, I’m already suffering.

Every winter I begin to think that I may be a summer person, but when summer comes around, I am quickly disabused of this notion.

— § —

Funny thing has evolved in my Facebook life: I start interactions with “my” people, but then my wife comes in and continues them as I fade out, leaving my Facebook page in many ways to be a catalog of interactions between people I’m friended-to and my wife.

This is how my dad interacted with the world, too—always in the end through my mother. Only he did it without technology.

It’s only strange when I sit back and thing about it; otherwise it feels troublingly normal to me.

I suppose this is what it feels like to be an introvert. I’m perfectly content to let someone else come in and finish my conversations—to outsource my social interaction.

— § —

Final thought of the night: standardization is a good thing. I’ve been trying to get a watch connected to a band for more than a month now. Getting the watch, band, and pins to match (even though all specify a length or width in mm) has been an exercise in frustration.

Apparently, watch manufacturers, watch band manufacturers, and pin manufacturers are all using slightly different rulers, turning the whole thing into a giant, repeatedly-frustrating crap-shoot.

— § —

Oh, actually, this is my final thought of the night:

Before moving to this place I’d done limited drilling of any kind in my life (not a tools or power tools person), but since I’ve been here I have had occasion to use five different masonry bits and acquire a high-speed drill.

Suburbia and “house” living has a lot to answer for.

And at the same time, I’m not convinced now that I’d be immediately comfortable if I were to go back to the city. I am a lifestyle exile, with no place to call home.

Can I get a tune to whisle that in?

Okay, coders who are also academics, I’m giving you a gold mine here. There is not a single academic reference database out there that doesn’t completely suck.

I’m serious. There is a huge opportunity here for something that:

– Is a database
– Stores PDFs and imports citation information from major data stores
– Supports categories, tags, and smart groups
– Supports reading, highlighting, and annotating in-flow
– Enables citation and bibliography building using common styles
– Synchronizes to platform clients (Mac, PC, iOS, Android)
– Has a robust but easy to use query UI (click-based)
– Doesn’t crash all the time
– Obeys the basic UI guidelines for each platform

This isn’t a totally trivial task, but it’s also not rocket science. Really, it isn’t. It would appear that the academic reference managers that are out there were written by monkeys.

— § —

I have Sente and use it. It sucks. I hate it. It is unpredictable, has a million billion field-creation features, but basically no query UI at all (you can tag, flag, keyword, categorize, group, etc., but once you apply these to records, you can’t actually do much with them, not even a simple two-factor search or exclude, without building out smart groups as your ad-hoc search, then performing your task within the group, then deleting the group again). It is not robust. Its annotation features are broken (no way to get notes and highlights out of the UI as plain text; no way to note and highlight in-flow, or even keyword in-flow).

I have also tried Papers. I couldn’t keep it running through more than a couple of operations at a time.

The open source and classic stuff (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, etc.) all have limitations that make them non-starters, plus tend toward being ungainly and unusable and overly clicky/wordy.

Evernote just isn’t suited for the task; it’s the wrong tool and it does no citation/referencing. Pointless. DevonThink is entirely overkill for a simple task like this, plus it does not citation/referencing.

The iPad readers, where they exist, are slow, broken, and crap compared to common iPad PDF reader/annotater programs that, sadly, don’t integrate with any academic software or workflow.

In short, the field is wide open.

Won’t someone solve this problem so that we academics can stop futzing about with this crap for hours?

When I get the dissertation written and get settled into a career, a few years down the road, if nobody else has yet solved this problem, by god I’ll solve it with my own code.

— § —

A word to the wise on “taking a break,” whether as a leisure matter or as a prioritization result, from writing/working on your dissertation:

– Take a week, lose a month
– Take a month, lose a year
– Take a year, go back to school and start all over

In short, you have to work on it every . single . day or there’s no point spending any time on it at all.