From the logic of Redmond:

This update fixes an error in the AutoUpdate download progress bar, which did not accurately display the progress of the download. While this update is downloading, the progress bar might not accurately display the status. After the update is installed, the download progress bar will accurately display the status of future downloads.

So now that I’m back in the land of connectivity –

– well, I have to qualify that. Not long ago, we moved office, and when we arrived in our newly-refurbished, fabulously modern and yet not characterless renovated building, there was a small hitch. You’ll best grasp this through a bit of illustration, I think. Here’s a lovely picture of my office, from the vantage point of my door:

And here’s a reverse shot, from the vantage point of my desk. You’ll notice something a bit odd at the extreme right of the image:

That odd little protrusion in the wall behind my filing cabinet is the phone/ethernet jack for my office. Which, as you may have gathered, is nowhere near my desk. I’ve spent the last three months with cables trailing across the office, which were only really an issue when I wanted to access the built-in shelves behind and to the left of my desk. As I was pretty convinced that I was one day going to trip and kill myself, and as I frankly just found the exposed wires ugly, I asked campus maintenance if they could do something about it.

Which they did.

I came in to the office one day week before last to discover that somebody had installed mouldings most of the way along my floorboards, intended to channel the cables “invisibly” along the wall:

However, because of this, the tripping-problem actually became worse, as my ethernet cable was simply too short to make it all the way across the room along the edge of the wall. One call to my trusty tech-support folks, and –

Well, while I was gone, she apparently brought by a longer cable, but couldn’t figure out how to get it through the moulding. So campus maintenance came back, ran the new cable through the existing moulding, and then finished running the molding the rest of the way around the side of my desk.

There’s only one problem: I had the PowerBook with me at the conference, and so the maintenance guys couldn’t conceivably have known where on the desk I usually kept the computer—except that there was ONE BIG EMPTY SPACE on the desk, where a bunch of other unplugged cables were lingering. That might have been a clue. Nonetheless, the new, longer ethernet cable remains at least three feet too short to reach any actually working spot on my desk, unless, say, one were to pry open the moulding and pull the cable out through the edge of it, stretching it toward a reasonable plug-in spot:

And that’s why I’m out of time to post any actual pictures of the condo-in-process (now with windows!) today.

That, and that I haven’t yet prepared for the class that I have to teach in ten minutes.

But more pictures, and windows, soon.

If someone would write a script that would work with… well, let’s say, just hypothetically, a software package like ExpressionEngine, that would allow an author to take full advantage of post-dated entries by storing a request for, and then sending, appropriate pings (to blo.gs, or blogrolling.com, or whathaveyou) at the moment that the post-dated entry is actually published.

That would really be cool.

[UPDATE, 06.15.07: Dude, where's my content? There was a post here about some guy in Japan, I think, who'd been dead for something like eighteen months before anyone found out, because he had auto-bill-paying set up, along with other such internet-based conveniences. At least I think that's what this post was about. I'm totally puzzled about where it went, though!]

Above is the loveliest conference room I spent any time in during my four days on the University of Sussex campus.  It is also the scene of the previously mentioned conference crime.  I don’t hold that against the room, though.  Nor, particularly, against the conference.  I met some fabulous folks, and heard some great papers, and generally had a grand time.

But I have to say, it wasn’t quite the same as last year’s fest (plus a slew of other links to be found in the archives).  No small part of the rush of last year’s conference stemmed from its intensive blogging atmosphere:  Liz and Jason and a slew of other folks were all there and posting, live, discussing papers both online and in the backchannel, and were generally super-involved in the goings-on.

This year, nada.  I still took notes on the trusty PowerBook, and I was still invested in the papers that were presented, and there was a teeny bit of backchannel dialogue via iChat, but… it just wasn’t the same.  Because there was effectively no blogging, no immediate online interaction to complement the ideas about online interaction being discussed.  So I was left feeling a bit stranded, and disconnected, and significantly lacking the charge that I felt last go-round.

That said, there was a misery-loves-company aspect to things, which served to calm me at moments, like when an officer of the organization, in an announcements-period, urged us all to update everyone who couldn’t be at the conference, by, you know, sending messages to the listserv.  And there was a kind of synchronicity among us blogging types, which was lovely to see.  For instance, mere seconds after I took this picture, of the folks to my right –

– Jill sent me this one, of the folks to her left.

But all the same, it just wasn’t the same.

I’m in a hotel just outside Gatwick now, using the crazily expensive in-room broadband to get caught up on the world and my email before I fly out tomorrow.  It’s been good, but it’ll be better to get home.

I wish I could say things were on an upswing.  Here’s the good news:  the panels I attended yesterday were, by and large, quite good; the two keynotes thus far (Ted Nelson and Sara Kiesler) were worthwhile; the shower had hot water this morning at 6 am.  And I’ve had a lovely time meeting and lunching (and dining) with jill/txt and Alex Halavais and Mathemagenic, about which meetings I’ll post more later.

But there’s ranting to be done, and so on to it:

First off, shades of Michael Berube (see here, too):  a commenter at a panel yesterday morning began her response to the presenters by saying that she had questions for everyone, “so stop me if I go on too long.” The questions, it turns out, were entirely declarative, with nary an interrogation point among them.  But my favorite moment was the following:

“The immediate analogy that came to mind was [sub-field x].  Which I work on.”

The commenter in question has clearly been in the profession for some number of years; how has she not managed in that time to become self-reflexive about such a comment?  Of course that was the immediate analogy that came to mind—precisely because that’s what you work on.  But is that analogy of any use whatsoever to the person who works on not what you work on, but what they work on?

And then there was my panel this morning.  Quite frankly, whoever put this panel together was on crack.  Which is not to say that the papers weren’t good; the two papers other than mine were interesting, I think.  I think.  I can’t entirely be sure, because the two other papers were delivered by a hard-core economist and a hard-core quantitative informatics guy, respectively.  How on earth did my proposal for a super-crunchy cultural-studies derived reading of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon sound like it would work well with papers on internet hyperlinks as indicators for studying global trading flows and the determinants of international internet structure?

So there’s problem number one.  But that’s minor in comparison to the actual progress of the panel.  Really, I like the multi-disciplinary thing, more often than not, and I was willing to be the comic relief aspect of the panel—I even trotted out the Monty Python “and now for something completely different” as I began.  But here’s the main thing that’s really stuck in my craw:

Each panel is allotted an hour and a half.  Our panel was supposed to have four papers on it, so each paper was limited to 15 minutes, with half an hour for discussion after.  That’s how it ought to have gone, at least.  But here’s how it went, instead –

8.30-8.40:  We wait for the first guy listed on our program, who does not show, and from whom we’ve had no indication of not-showing.

8.40-9.15:  The second/first panelist, the economist, presents.  The guy who appears to be chairing the session does nothing to inform her of the passage of time.

9.15-9.20:  The guy who I thought was chairing turns out not to be chairing at all, because the second/first presenter now takes questions.  After already running 20 minutes over time.

9.20-9.45:  The third/second panelist, who I had thought was chairing, presents, speeding through an inch-thick stack of overheads.

9.45:  I stand immediately upon his announcing that he’s done, and say that in the interests of time we need to hold off on questions until after the last presenter, i.e., me.  The third/second panelist gives me an extremely miffed look and says “I went as fast as I could.”

9.45-10.00:  I speed-read through a paper that, admittedly, ought to have taken closer to 20 minutes.  Okay, so I’m guilty, too.  But when push came to shove, I did get it in, on time.

These are the kinds of days that make all too clear why I hate this profession.  Now, I need an afternoon to remind me why I love it.

This has not been the greatest morning in the history of conference attendance. I woke up late today, had to rush through my shower—which turns out to have been a blessing in disguise, like really really in disguise, as I ran out of hot water about two minutes into the shower. I’m annoyed enough that I’m almost afraid to complain to someone, lest they say something to me about short showers and water conservation and I wind up getting all “I live in a desert, don’t talk to me about water conservation” on their ass.

The good part of this morning was that I was allowed to eat breakfast even though I arrived five minutes after the putative close of breakfast service. I’m annoyed enough, however, that I keep forgetting that, in fact, no one even mentioned my lateness or hinted that I might not be able to eat. In my very jet-lagged, quite perturbed brain, it’s as though they tried to stop me eating, and I had to argue my way into it. I had the argument in my head, which was apparently sufficient to produce the annoyance.

Okay, right, this was intended to be about the condo. Yes. I have more pictures, taken with the new camera, but they’re alas trapped on both the camera and the PowerBook, and I have no way of getting them from either of those devices to the internet right now. And perhaps that’s the greatest annoyance of all: it’s my webgod-given right to condo-blog—not to mention, to conference-blog—and I’m being stymied at every turn.

Grrr. I’m off to a panel on collaborative writing and the like, and I’m hoping that some serious intellectual stimulation might help improve my attitude, PDQ.

Friday was travel day—SuperShuttle at 9.55 am; flight out of Ontario at 12.40 pm (yes, SuperShuttle requires the better part of three hours to get you 15 miles); arrival in Houston at 5.49 pm, followed by traditional GHWBIA sprint to 6.40 flight to London; 9.30 am-ish arrival at Gatwick on Saturday; 10.10 train to Brighton, whence change to 10.54 train to Falmer.  Brief walk to campus; brief walk across campus to residence; brief walk to campus center to obtain cash and phone card; brief walk back to bed, and hours and hours of blissful sleep.

The conference begins today—about half an hour ago, in fact—and I’m sorry to say that I won’t be able to blog as much of it as last year.  Internet access is something of a problem here, ironically enough given the nature of the conference:  the campus is full of wi-fi, but we can’t use it; the campus lab we have access to is slightly less than half-functional (I’m on one of the working machines now); the “internet access” advertised as available in campus accomodations is in fact the ability to use a calling card to dial-up to one’s ISP, and if one’s ISP is in the US…

Ah, well.  I hope that these problems get rectified shortly.  For now, on to the show.

Off to Sussex.  More from there, as connectivity allows.

You’d think I’d forgotten about this lovely feature, the way I’ve been not posting about the imminent condo. But two things serve to remind me to post something real-estate oriented today: first, my new digital camera arrived today. Thanks for all your recommendations; I ended up going with the Canon PowerShot A85, with which I’m pretty happy so far. Today’s pics don’t come from that camera, but some will, darned soon.

The second reminder was a voice mail message from my sales office telling me that it’s time to go pick my granite. Not as in which color or style granite I want, but as in which slab. I get to go poke around a yard full of granite. It’s almost worth being in escrow for that.

On to today’s pictures:

These pictures date from August 15, a week after the previous images of the framed-up building I posted. On the one hand, it’s hard to see much in the way of progress.

On the other hand, the building is gradually becoming not see-through.

I’m popping by momentarily with the new camera, and so will have fresh images for you shortly.

—–

*Actually, it’s only two weeks late. I expected not to get the entry finished today, but instead to post it tomorrow, and forgot to change the title when I decided to go ahead and hit publish.