So far today I have gotten 26 spam phone calls, which is not typical. What is going on?
So far today I have gotten 26 spam phone calls, which is not typical. What is going on?
The German Historical Institute and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are offering a 12-month fellowship in digital history at both institutions. We’ve had some excellent scholars come through as postdocs over the past few years.
This is definitely inside baseball, but here is a description of how @chnm runs our data-heavy projects via a database and a custom API.
RRCHNM’s Custom API for Data-Driven Projects
The 10 y.o.’s favorite song might be “Blue Suede Shoes.” She is intensely loyal to Carl Perkins and hates Elvis, whom she dismisses as a Perkins impersonator.
Currently reading: Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick 📚
Pleased beyond measure to have contributed to this documentary collection in honor of Jonathan Sarna … but not nearly as pleased and grateful as I am to number myself among his students. There can be no scholar or advisor more generous and wise than Jonathan Sarna.
Good mail day.
Currently reading: Citizen Cash by Michael Stewart Foley 📚
This Friday afternoon, two reader reports recommending publication for the large-ish digital project, and both offering helpful suggestions I largely agree with for revision. I’ll take it.
I rewrote a complicated Go program this afternoon, stripping out a major component, deleting 100 lines of code and adding 300. And it worked the first time. That why I like Go: a simple, strongly-typed language.
Everybody complains about reviewer number two but sometimes reviewer number two has to install the Java JDK to do the review, and if that’s not wanting you to succeed, I don’t know what is.
Playing 80 Days as a New Year’s Eve family game. 🎮
Working some more on the text adventure game with the 10 y.o. Despite my explicit instructions that we are in fix-bugs-and-ship-it mode, she is undeterred and continues to add features. 😂
My daughter and I have been writing a text adventure game for the ten-year-old set over the break. It’s close to being ready for beta testing. Lots of bad jokes.
Currently reading: A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman 📚
Got a nice email from a fifth grader telling me that her class is using my map of slavery and that the map was wrong to label Maine as part of Massachusetts. So I got a chance to write back commending her curiosity and attention to detail, and explaining the Missouri Compromise.
Finished reading: The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America by Philippa Koch 📚
I love the idea of character-based playlists for the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. Here’s one for Joe MacMillan, for example.
Currently reading: The Resurrection of Johnny Cash by Graeme Thomson 📚
Someone recently complained on GitHub, “You haven’t updated this package in three years.” What they should have said was, “You wrote software that works without a bug for three years.”
I had no idea you could get a document camera for anything [approaching](https://www.ipevo.com/products/vz-r by) a reasonable price. This could be a game changer for online teaching or even just meetings. To be considered …
Currently reading: History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi 📚
No one cares about reproducible research (including me) until they need to run some research scripts from a couple years ago (including me).
Parts of the DOI/CrossRef system are amazing. The XML responses in email … less so.
I finished a longer (12K words) piece of writing yesterday and a shorter (2K words) one today. A combination of deadlines and children in school provided both motivation and opportunity.