Lincoln Mullen’s internet weblog

A fair number of people who aren’t my students or colleagues ask me for advice about digital history projects or what have you. I want to be helpful, but those conversations rarely seem to go anywhere and take up a lot of time. So I’ve started asking people to either send me something they’ve written or write up one page gathering their current thoughts before we talk. Most people I never hear from again. For those people who do it, our conversations are much more productive and don’t waste either party’s time. Not sure if this is a prickly old man thing to do or not, but I’m sticking with it.

Now that the Red Sox are losing to the Orioles we can officially call this a bad season.

Congratulations to GMU’s Jeri Wieringa, who completed her PhD today with her dissertation “A Gospel of Health and Salvation” on Seventh Day Adventists.

Anyone who thinks the internet is an immaterial abstraction has never had to work on the internet in a data center.

In a turnabout of events, the 7 y.o. says we can’t go out to lunch yet because she is the one who is busy writing.

Two hours to write the script in Go, which then takes two hours to run. Could have written the script in R in an hour, but then it would have taken two days to run.

Does anyone else mistakenly type terminal commands in iMessage threads to their loved ones?

Have to agree with the Washington Post that the Museum of the Bible’s “sound shell” is pretty cool.

Susan Schulten explains how maps were made during the Paris Peace process in the aftermath of WWI.

My colleagues and I are working on digitizing the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. Or—I should say—redigitizing. It appears likely that the Census Bureau used Hollerith punch cards for tabulation, so in some sense the census was digitized at the time, not to say, born digital.

The most productive I’ve been as a writer was while writing dissertation and also watching my then 2 y.o. I’d write in the morning, then we’d have lunch, go to the park, and take a nap together on the couch. Hoping to re-create some of that this summer with the now 7 y.o.

What are you citizens of the free republic of Micro.blog using for an RSS reader these days? I’ve been using Feedly tamed by an ad blocker, and it’s only ok.

Here is what some colleagues at RRCHNM and I will be working on next.

It’s amusing to read all these articles about how you have to minify your markup and transpile your JavaScript to improve page speed, when all you really need to do to make your webpage load fast is not serve 100 ads and trackers.

The 3y.o. is pedantic about grammar and word choice and not shy about correcting anyone, but then, his parents and big sister have been correcting him his whole life. Infuriatingly, when he corrects me he is usually right.

Why is it that every humanities use of maps begins with a disclaimer that maps can tell lies? Is it the case that words are always used honestly?

Called Hover. They picked up right away, and in two minutes I had the answer to my problem and it was fixed. (I still don’t understand DNS though.)

In a twist on the usual “write my own blog engine before I write a blog post” story, I’m playing around with writing my own newsletter web app. This is not as insane as it sounds, even though I’m not at all sure I will actually start a newsletter or that anyone would read it. My main motivation is to learn Django really well, and this is a well-defined starter project. Besides, have you seen the prices for newsletter services?

I really like the Spotify playlists for the characters on Halt and Catch Fire, like this one for John Bosworth or this one for Joe MacMillan. Seems like a clever thing to do for a period piece.

For unfathomable reasons, when you submit final grades they are listed as A, A+, A-, because you know, letter grades should be listed alphabetically.

For the past few years, colleagues at RRCHNM and I have been making maps of election returns to the first nineteen Congresses. Here is the final release of Mapping Early American Elections, along with a blog post explaining the release.

The 7 y.o. was amazed I had (and would wear) a shirt that is older than her.

Software I used to love but now loathe:

• Jekyll
• Slack

Software likely to head in that direction:

• Docker

If you get the data model right, all the rest of the programming is so much easier. Get it wrong, and …

Making a Doodle poll. Q: What have I become? A: A middle manager.