I seem to spend a lot of time rushing about, doing the little things while waiting on Bigger Things to eventuate. Lately, a whole lot of little things have needed doing: sorting out identity documents, bank paperwork, dozens of application forms, credit history checks, and signing contracts.

If all goes well, aeliel and I have hopefully bought a house :)

Actually, it's a ground-floor apartment and not a standalone house. It has lots of room to fill with books, and space for my painting and aeliel's sewing (three bedrooms and a study), and it's close enough to ride to work. It's on Gatehouse Drive in Kensington, right next to the racecourse. I want to move in yesterday.

Now we just need to get our loan approved, which is proving trickier than expected. My income is a government CRC scholarship, untaxed and guaranteed until 2012. Unfortunately, virtually no bank will recognise it as a valid income stream: it'd be easier if I were earning less money from a job with a three-month contract, as it would be listed as "regular income."

We've now been given preapproval, and have to wait an unspecified amount of time while the application is processed. Hopefully that will happen soon, so we can sign off on it and breathe a sigh of relief - it's been a hectic fortnight since the property inspection, and a hell of a thing to coordinate while travelling interstate.

After that, it will still be at least 90 days before we can move in as the place has tenants at the moment. Still, at least that means they can make the first mortgage payments for us...

There's a cliched scene that appears in many old Westerns: Indians appear on the ridgeline, revealing vast numbers and complete outflanking of the protagonists in about as much time as it takes to say "Oh, shit." With a few seconds of footage, the impact of the situation is driven home.

Since 9/11 there seems to be a new version of the Injuns coming over the hill. It appears in American films and television dealing with terrorism, generally after the first shots have been fired.

A group of characters are meeting to discuss the situation: in a police station; at a public meeting; in a government office. In the background, a phone starts ringing. Then another, and another, until every cellphone and beeper is going at once, with people scrambling to answer them. The camera focuses on the reactions of the characters: blood draining from their faces as realisation dawns that the situation just got a lot worse.

I've noticed it a few times now. I wonder how many of these scriptwriters experienced something similar in 2001, and how many are just using it as a standard narrative device. I'd love to know who used it first, and whether it had been used before "that" morning in September.

My research proposal (preliminary literature review, methodology & research methods, research timeline) is now finished and handed in. Hopefully it's meandering through the bureaucracy as I type - it needs to cross a few different desks before it gets approved.

Last week I interviewed a couple of business managers (partly for the CRC project, partly for my thesis). I'm currently writing notes on the two interviews.

I've caught up with my business activity statements for Purple Mantis, and paid the GST for last quarter. After retrieving some of the files from my old PC, I can now send invoices again :)

I've started updating the Purple Mantis website, and reduced the ranges carried - I'm only planning to stock sculpting tools and putty from now on, though I will add new tools as I discover them.

I'm helping to set up a new gaming ezine with other WargamerAU.com members, and have designed some page layout templates in InDesign. I'm wearing two different hats on this project: layout/production guy and "Other Games" subeditor, keeping track of things like Privateer Press, Alkemy, Infinity, Anima:Tactics and Hell Dorado, trying to give the smaller companies a bit more exposure.

The 2009 Uberlist continues to grow, with another batch of painting completed. Of course, it seems to be growing faster than I can cross things off the list...

Still to do:

Purple Mantis: Migrate http://www.purple-mantis.com.au across to my other Siteground account (currently holding two other sites). Siteground's shared hosting accounts now have "unlimited" web space and traffic, and purchasing an add-on domain will be cheaper than running it on a separate account.

Painting: Infinity (Nomads) will be painted over the next week; lots of resin models will also be cleaned up and assembled on Monday.

Holiday! aeliel and I will be in Tasmania (Hobart and Freycinet) from June 29th - July 6th. It will be nice to have a few days away from work.

I've been looking into my family history a bit this week, after being questioned about Dad's family by one of my supervisors... enquiring about your father may be a natural way of placing someone in a social context, but it reminded me how little I actually know about either side of the family.

Dad came from Sarawak, Malaysia. He lived in a town called Seria, Brunei, before coming over to Australia. I've never visited either place, though I would like to one day.

Until last week, I'd always assumed that all the Chinese families in that part of Malaysia were Cantonese. Supriya has actually lived over there, and told me that the majority are from Hokkien - she was quite surprised when I told her that my family is from Canton. It makes sense, though... the Cantonese moved to the area for business, and I think my relatives have been employed as draftsmen and engineers by Shell since the company was created in the early 1900s. Grandpa (Leong Shui Pak) was a draftsman. I don't know much about Grandma's family (Jao Choon Moi) - I don't know any Cantonese, and Google is much more helpful for English references.

Dad was the first of his family to emigrate to Australia, though most of his family followed over the next decade or so. He came to study accounting (his least favourite subject, but the only one with government support...), worked in a restaurant to pay the bills, and decided to stay in the restaurant business after finding that accountancy wasn't actually very interesting.

Mum's family are Bells, and Pa (Andrew Bell) grew up at Gulf Station. Nana (Vera Goff) was born in England, though she moved to Melbourne very early. Our branch of the Bells arrived in Port Phillip on October 27th 1839, on the David Clarke - the first assisted migrant ship to reach the colony, bringing 229 Scottish migrants.

Going back even further, the Bells were a small clan from the Scottish border. We managed to get an official mention in a 1587 "list of unruly clans in the West Marches". The Bell line has been fairly well explored back to the 13th century, though I suspect that the Leong name goes back much further.

It's been a while since I posted in here... I've been a bit buried under PhD stuff lately, and have tried to avoid boring everyone by putting it into a separate blog at lineofthought.

I'm starting to work out what I'm studying, which is a good thing. The project has been slowly developing from "I'd like to see how small businesses are using the internet these days" to "how are small businesses promoting themselves online", to "so, how and why do people adopt innovative technologies?"

By extending the project into innovation (adoption, management, etc) it becomes much less of a marketing thing, as I'm really not a marketer. I am interested in learning about innovation, and how best to persuade people to adopt new things.

To take an oft-cited model, Rogers created five different categories: Innovators (first to adopt new things, risk-takers), Early Adoptors (high degree of opinion leadership amongst the other categories), Early Majority (self explanatory), Late Majority (prefers to wait for stable, safe technologies) and Laggards (aversion to change).



Or, if you'd prefer: Moore's variation


So, because I'm curious: which category do you generally consider yourself a part of, when it comes to using the internet? Assume that you're rating yourself from amongst whatever bit of society you most commonly interact with. If you have any other caveats, feel free to leave a comment :)

Poll #1411938
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

Which category do you consider yourself a member of?

This is me stubbornly attempting to not be sick.

aeliel is home again today, which makes it three and a half days this week - she managed to get to work for a few hours yesterday, but had to come home again at lunchtime.

I seem to have done my usual: I went to bed last night with the beginnings of a headcold, and then slept until almost midday. Hopefully that was enough time to reboot my immune system...


In unrelated news, it seems much easier to work from my home internet connection instead of RMIT. I can log in to XJournal without timing out while waiting for the RMIT proxy server. Google document links also don't seem to suffer as many problems as they do inside the university.

Does anyone know much about Google Apps? Someone appears to have registered "rmit.edu.au" as a Google Apps domain, which is causing all sorts of problems when I try sharing documents with anyone using an RMIT email account.

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub,
It is the centre hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel,
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room,
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there,
Usefulness from what is not there.

Okay, so it may not have been intended specifically for lit reviews, but it's still worth keeping in mind...

Today's experiment involves learning to use Zotero. Basically, it's a reference manager that works through Firefox. It lets you save anything that you can view in your web browser. Saved references can be stored in multiple libraries, tagged, searched for, and all the usual features. It also does a few cool things:

- v1.5 (currently in beta) can pull metadata out of PDFs. That's really handy, for those rare PDFs that actually have the stuff.

- You can drag and drop formatted references into Word, Google Docs, and just about anything you might use to write a paper.

- It can save multiple references off a page, with a single action. That's very handy now that the RMIT library is getting some useful subject guides online. On some sites (most library catalogues, major newspaper websites, Amazon.com, etc) it finds bibliographic data automatically.

- It can take a snapshot of any web page. You can treat these essentially like printouts, adding highlighter and sticky notes wherever you need them. As a person who doesn't like printing things (but still thinks in a very visual fashion), I think this is fantastic.

Also, Intel Macs apparently can't use the Acrobat Reader plugin for Firefox 3. That's a big problem for me, as I'm usually downloading and reading 10-20 PDF references a day... my Downloads folder is rapidly filling up with unhelpfully-named files like "86892355a.pdf", and I can't put them into Zotero from Acrobat or Preview.

Luckily, this has been aggravating people with far greater technical skills than I have, so the firefox-mac-pdf plugin now lets me view PDF files in the browser (i.e. the way I used to, before upgrading Firefox...)

EDIT: I've just used the multi-reference tool to export my entire CiteULike library. The page references need a bit of checking, but that was otherwise pretty painless. I'll probably be using Zotero as my main reference manager from now on.

At home I'm now working from two desks on opposite sides of the room. One has a laptop on it, the other is covered (and I do mean covered) in paints.

This means that whenever I take a break, I can check the WargamerAU trading forums... and if someone has a "wanted" notice up, I can immediately check my spare models to see if I have one lying around. Given that I've been hoarding these things since about 1990, that happens more often than not. I've managed to sell a few things so far today, helping with my Year of the Half resolution.

The room is still a mess, though I'm getting better at finding things. I just wish I could put RFID tags into everything I own, so I could type "10,000 Days CD" into a computer and have it spit out a location for me...

It sometimes feels like all of the last week has been eaten up by computer-related issues. My Macbook finally arrived, and has been set up for the RMIT and home wireless networks. That last one took a while, requiring half an hour on the phone to Belkin in order to successfully diagnose problems with the new wireless modem router... but now I can use a computer out where it's warm, instead of freezing in the study.

Using the same computer at home, work, and those lost hours betwixt the two has been great. I no longer need to set up a desktop every time I get to work, so I can actually work instead. Given how much work needs doing at the moment, that's a Good Thing.

I still haven't printed anything for my project (partly aided in this by RMIT, where I haven't set up have printer access yet). If I need to refer to emails during a meeting, Gmail works fine on my iPod. When I need to keep copies of websites for research, I've been printing them to PDF. A lot of the interesting stuff on web2.0 tools for small business promotion tends to appear in blogs, so I'm building up a bit of a collection.

I've also resurrected an old(ish) livejournal to post PhD-related stuff in: lineofthought. The next bit of the project will involve interviewing some small business managers/owners about how they use the internet - particularly in regards to marketing and promotion. If you run a small business, or know someone who does, let me know... we're looking to do about 20 interviews over the next month.

One of the strange things about looking through 15 years of research into eCommerce is the way names and keywords keep changing. Much has changed since the Internet had a capital letter, and E-Mail was hyphenated.

I'm a geologist at heart. My Honours work was on pieces of diamond (and the inclusion minerals trapped inside them) that formed 2.5 - 3 billion years ago. I remember how weird it seemed that sarvihaara's research (temperate reef formation?) looked at rocks that had formed in her lifetime.

It's frustrating enough finding references to interesting conference proceedings from the 70's and 80's, and knowing that I'll probably never find copies of them to read. I'm so glad I didn't decide to study palaeolithography...

It's Easter. I'm not at Conquest, and neither is aeliel. This feels weird - it's been an easter tradition for the last decade, and I haven't had the weekend to myself since highschool. Instead, I'm trying to work on my Research Methods assessment. It's proving trickier than I had hoped, mainly due to the ARC/ABDC journal ranking lists.

In the past, the subject just asked for a critical analysis of the research methods used in three related papers. This year, the articles need to be drawn from A and A*-rated journals only. These are the top journals in their field, with international significance, and all that sort of thing. They are also proving to be irrelevant to my project...

You see, people working in that hazy crossover field of business studies, sociology, law and IT tend to publish in interdisciplinary journals. An article on eCommerce would probably appear in something like the International Journal of e-Business Research, for example... but those journals aren't considered particularly important by the ABDC. Instead, I'm supposed to find some useful articles among journals like the Harvard Law Review or Sociology. After losing a day to the journal databases, I'm starting to realise that the articles I need won't be found in the journals I'm supposed to be looking in.

I think I'll have to send this one in with a note saying "I know I'm not following the rules, but here's why..."

I officially became a student last Tuesday. I enrolled in subjects, read through the various "Welcome to RMIT" brochures, and even got a shiny new student card.

In celebration, I baked a cake and brought it along to the meeting last week... and then promptly returned to the work I've been doing since February. If nothing else, I'm learning valuable skills that involve getting access to secure areas without an ID card.

As it turns out, there are still a few glitches (I am Jack's complete lack of surprise). Security say that I should be able to get into the building by sometime next week, when they get around to activating my card. Today I was told that my desk has been assigned to a different project, so I need to start finding another place to work.

If I could just buy a laptop, I'd work from the cafe across the street. Unfortunately, nobody knows how I'm supposed to use my support funding to buy a computer, as they've never had a student with support funding before...

My desktop is toast, so I'm posting from aeliel's laptop.

It's been a little slower than normal over the last fortnight, though I had assumed it was a combination of a 2002 machine, a 2009 copy of iTunes, and some kind of problem with Trend Micro's antivirus updates.

I was partly right. Something had been blocking access to antivirus updates, allowing the program to download increasingly large files (cumulative daily definition files) and then causing an error when Trend Micro tried installing the newly downloaded files. Unfortunately, Trend had been cheerfully reporting this as "Your antivirus protection is up to date! because it had successfully downloaded the file...

When I tried looking into it yesterday, I found that I also couldn't access a bunch of different antivirus websites. That got me worried enough to run a full system scan.

The scan brought up 523 infected files, mostly in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\, half of which had random greek alphabet symols for filenames.

The antivirus program then stalled while attempting to fix the first of them, throwing me back into Windows. I ran the scan again, found even more problem files, and then the antivirus program shut down and wouldn't reopen... and neither would any other program, as each mouseclick resulted in "SHELL32.dll not found" errors.

Windows Explorer screens (My Computer, etc) still worked, so I warily grabbed a few essential files (InDesign docs for work, etc) on a spare thumbdrive and then tried unsuccessfully to do anything else. Even trying to shut down the computer failed, bringing up the same error messages. I disconnected the thumbdrive (which the Parkdale IT people checked tody for any infected files*), and turned off the computer.

Since then, the desktop will only display three error messages:

- winlogon.exe - unable to locate component (SHELL32.dll not found)
- lsass.exe - unable to locate component (SHELL32.dll not found)
- User Interface Failure (msgina.dll failed to load)

And then restarts, returning to the same errors.

I last made a full backup using DriveClone back in January, before we moved house. Hopefully that will mean I can at least get some of my music collection back, though I'm not sure what to do with the desktop at the moment. It was long overdue for replacing, but it's a pretty abrupt way to say goodbye to an otherwise trusty old machine.

* Mind you, after looking at the error messages described above their advice to aeliel was "oh, that's happened because you pulled the thumbdrive out too quickly" so I'm reluctant to trust their opinion on this...

The RMIT pay office finally realised that I've been working for them since the beginning of February. This is good! It means that my bank account isn't full of negative numbers any more, and I can pay some of the bills that I've been neglecting lately.

Also, I've just recieved a formal "offer of research place" letter, which I promptly signed, scanned and emailed back to the Graduate Office. This is also good! It means that the CRC is making some headway on the task of convincing RMIT that I'm actually a student. I need to enrol by next Tuesday, as it's the government-imposed census date: if things aren't sorted by March 31st, I will need to wait until Semester 2.

Hopefully that will mean that I spend Monday and Tuesday completing the enrolment process, find a way of accessing journals from home, and then bake a thank-the-gods-that's-over celebration cake for Wednesday's meeting.

Next on the list is finding out how to purchase a MacBook using some of my support funding, getting said computer ASAP, and then transforming into some kind of superhuman literature-reviewing machine. The assessable part of my lit review is due in a fortnight.


Also: Grass is growing. Paint is drying. Watched pots still not boiling. News at eleven.

I'm playing around with different ways of managing references at the moment.

Today's experiment is CiteULike. I'm sure plenty of you have been using it for years, but I hadn't really looked into it before. It's a social bookmarking site, broadly similar to delicious.com but with an academic focus. The usual features (tagging articles, seeing who else is reading them, following up on what other people are reading) are all present.

It has a few nifty features. You can rate papers in order of reading priority (ranging from "Top Priority!" to "I've already read it!"), letting it function as a to-do list (sort by tag, and then by unread articles in order of importance). You can also store PDF copies of journal articles on the site, which helps if you're working from several computers like I am.

The Neighbours feature looks like it will be handy for tracking down other people with similar research interests...

It's currently being a bit buggy on this computer (profile and library haven't updated after I posted the first article, and I can't manage to stay logged out - any link to my profile automatically logs me back in to the old, cached page). I'll try it when I get home, to see whether I can find out what's causing the problems.

I'm working from RMIT today, borrowing someone else's password to log in to "my" computer. Still not enrolled, though letters of offer (for other students) have been sighted in the past week. If I'm still not in the system by next Tuesday, I'll have missed the census date to enrol in my coursework...

I went wandering on New Year's Day, taking my camera down to the Mineral Springs in Blackwood. I'm glad that the area managed to survive the bushfires more-or-less intact ...

Apparently I took a lot of photos during January, though I haven't had time to take them off the camera yet. It's left me with a memory card half-full of pictures that I hardly remember taking, obscured by the hectic rush that ate February and March. Fortunately, browsing through the photos is reminding me of how much calmer the world was back then.


( A couple more behind the cut )

I now have (or had, when I checked on Wednesday morning) a desk at RMIT. This is good!

Unfortunately I don't have a key to get into the PhD room, or a pass to get beyond reception on the floor. Despite going to weekly meetings since the start of February, the receptionist won't actually let me in before the meeting starts - lest I become the sort of "unaccompanied visitor" that departmental emails warn about, marauding about the workplace. Fortunately the reception area has comfy couches.

Apparently, most of my problems stem from the fact that I don't actually exist. If I seem to have spent a couple of months drifting phantom-like from one meeting to the next, it's actually because I'm not real. My days of freedom appear numbered though, as I've heard rumours that my enrolment forms may have resurfaced.

One day, they promise, I'll be a real person. Real People (tm) can have access cards and keys issued to them. They might even be able to buy a computer and get access to the IT network, though nobody is willing to make any guarantees on that. After becoming a Real Person, I can even enrol in (and submit assessment for) the Research Methods course I've attended for the last three weeks.

Unreal.

I'm sure Bulgaria is a lovely place, but right at the moment I couldn't care less about their picturesque mountain towns, tasty regional foods, or Eurovision entries. I just want the people involved in credit card fraud, gutted and delivered on pikes.*

I got a call from the bank this morning, querying a $420 credit card purchase that I apparently made in Bulgaria yesterday. At some stage, probably while travelling in 2007, someone swiped my card details... and after this morning's call, my card has been cancelled. I can't actually contest the transaction until it appears on my statement (sometime in the next 24hrs), and won't get a new card until next week.


* Hell, I'm not fussy. If someone can deliver them intact, I'll handle the rest.