Maybe, just maybe, I have a theme for my pilot study, an investigation I need to carry out to see if my thesis proposal is feasible or if I need to change the angle. I should be able to present a finished study by mid-autumn or so. Except that I've now been asked if I could give a presentation at ICHL 2003, the international conference on historical linguistics; I can say no, of course, but I would really like to be able to do it. And it seems that my pilot study would be an excellent topic, provided I can find a good subject for it, and am able to carry it out, and can make sense of any result I get out of it. . . dear sweet protector of small animals, why did I ever embark upon this PhD venture?

But just maybe I have a theme. I've sent it to a linguist of my acquaintance to see if he thinks it makes sense, and I'll think it over some more and talk to my supervisor about it before I say anything more publicly.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 23:04 0 comments

 
The picture below is a screenshot from the cathouse webcam — the one I mentioned yesterday. Is this nifty or what? :-)



I first saw it a few hours ago, at work, and captured several screenshots there, but not having any image software I couldn't blog it until now. Oh, and I don't know that it's aimed at me, but I like to think that it is! I mean, they even get the accent right. . .

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 21:57 0 comments

 
We don't watch a lot of movies, but tonight we're going to see Hedd Wyn. I know very little about it but look forward to seeing it very much; partly because it's in Welsh (with English subtitles) — I don't speak Welsh at all but it's a language I would like to hear more than a phrase or two of. I understand it got good reviews, too, and am certain I'll like it regardless of language.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 16:13 0 comments

 
For once, a posting in the language of glory and heroes. . .

Kommentar till denna post i den läsvärda bloggen Förvetet (som redan refererats i enkelriktat.com — jo, intertextualiteten firar triumfer!) :

Nej, det stämmer inte alls att enbart 20 svenska bloggar är listade i ODP, eller att det är färre svenska än norska bloggar som finns med. Norrmännen har nämligen valt att lista både webbdagböcker och webbkrönikor, alltså bloggar av dagbokstyp och sådana som handlar om författarens strövtåg på webben, i samma kategori. Vi delar på dem, och har i skrivande stund 20 webbkrönikor och 61 webbdagböcker listade, det vill säga totalt 81, medan norrmännen har 70 — så skillnaden är liten, men den är till vår fördel!

Sedan ska jag genast och villigt erkänna att det finns en hel del svenska webbloggar, både dagböcker och krönikor, som saknas i katalogen. 23 stycken har jag lagt till utan att granska och publicera dem, så de syns inte i katalogen, och jag kommer att börja publicera dem så snart jag kan. Men just nu håller vi på att rensa svenska delen från publicerade länkar som inte fungerar. Vi är alldeles för få redaktörer, tyvärr.

Observera även att engelskspråkiga bloggar skrivna av svenskar, till exempel denna blogg, inte listas i den svenska delen! Så snälla ni som skickar in era webbloggar, se till att göra det till rätt kategori. Engelskspråkiga bloggar skickas till engelskspråkiga delen av ODP: webbkrönikor hit och webbdagböcker hit. Till rätt underavdelning / bokstav i alfabetet, förstås.

Sådär, nu har jag varit pekpinneaktig. Jag önskar att jag hade lättare att förklara saker utan att låta som en småskollärare!

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 18:31 0 comments

 
I've become rather fond of the cathouse webcam. I don't see myself as a dangerous fanatic when it comes to cats, but I can't deny smiling a lot of the time, watching that webcam. Except when it shows an empty chair, like right at this moment.

I wouldn't call myself a "cat person" as opposed to a "dog person"; I never had a dog, so I can't judge the difference. But a cat strikes me as pretty much the ideal pet. It's good company — Cassandra and Bonadea saved me from going completely nuts during the long dreary cold I just had — but doesn't demand your attention all the time. In fact, a lot of the time it's happily rolled up asleep, as evinced by the cathouse webcam! It's playful and funny to watch, our two each have their particular set of antics which I never tire of. And it's heart-rendingly cute, or downright beautiful. Oh, I know that none of these things is true for every cat, some are solitary, some rather ugly and some hate people. But I must speak as I find, and this is my experience. And they are not unhappy about being left alone for many hours every day — but they do come and greet us when we get home. And Bonadea, and sometimes Cassandra too, sleeps on top of me or curled up next to me, every night.

Some people claim that cats are very wise and insightful; I don't believe that for a moment. They are clever at what they do, which is being feline, and that's enough for me.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 17:44 0 comments

 
"The ways I've witnessed people in the virtual community I know best build value, help each other through hard times, solve (and fail to solve) vexing interpersonal problems together, offer a model—undoubtedly not an infallible one—of the kinds of social changes that virtual communities can make in real lives on a modestly local scale."

-Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 11:44 0 comments

 
The building of a community is a fascinating process. I am thinking in particular of the emerging Sweblog community, which is growing out of a set of bloggers, all sitting at their computers in various corners of Sweden and abroad, typing away at their own speed. From this basis, a community with social conventions, group dynamics and eventually a set of shared linguistic practices, is forming.

What communities are all about (or maybe I shouldn't be quite so positive; let's say "one of the most important aspects of communities") is communication, and this case is no exception. Not the one-way communication that was the purpose of the original blog, but an incessant commenting of what others have thought and written, a commenting that goes on in others' blogs as well as in postings in one's own blog. It's a form of communication that's incredibly complex, with a variable (although for all practical purposes predictable, in this particular case at least) set of participants and in a theoretically infinite number of locales. Functions such as trackback make it even more complex, by allowing comments that are essentially in several places at once. Commenting on what someone else has written without slipping into the same kind of language, the same kind of word usage, the same phrasing etc, is hard, and not something we do unless we think about it. Usually there's no point in doing so, either. And so the language becomes more convergent, more homogenous. In the Sweblogs case there are several languages involved, too, which makes it even more complicated!

I'm incredibly intrigued by this intertextuality. It is of course technology-dependent, but at the bottom of it are social and linguistic issues. Maybe I should write my thesis about blog linguistics?


  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 11:35 0 comments

 
Oh dear. It's not supposed to be "Ebba" in the previous posting, it's Edda! I have this cold, which makes me unable to tell the difference between "b" and "d". Or else I was just really tired last night.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 17:01 0 comments

 
I was reminded today of the Jane Austin homepage, which contains reviews of some of Austin's works such as Fence and Fencibility and Ebba (the latter containing a character called Ebba Gron! :-) but also essays on Austin's impact on writers such as Tolkein and Jack Londin.

It's the product of a mind twisted in just the right way, and I like it very much. In fact, it inspired me to start reading The King's Peace, an Arthurian fantasy novel by the owner of the Austin website, Jo Walton. 50 pages into the book, I like it, too, a lot. The narrator is a real person with real concerns, and you immediately start caring about what happens to her, her thoughts and actions. And it's well-written, with the kind of language that propels you forward through the tale, so to speak.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 21:09 0 comments

Hej Miranda!
Grattis på födelsedagen!
Kram, Nea

 
I knew I'd find out about RSS feeds if I posted that! Sometimes, exposing your lack of knowledge is a very good way of learning new things. I ought to remember that more often.

My next project is to understand the cats. Somehow I imagine this will take longer. . .

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 13:12 0 comments

 
Sorry, I shouldn't have said "buzzword" — that's really not what I mean. It's not the word, it's the concept that seems to be everywhere without previous warning, and it's a tad frustrating not to know what it is, is all. However, I have a nagging feeling that soon I will know.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 11:49 0 comments

 
Things are happening in the Swedish blogging sphere. There's a dinner planned in Stockholm for the last week of March. A mailing list has started, a helpdesk is planned, the Sweblogs community weblog has been set up. . . and those are just a few of the things that have sprouted out of the earth during my weeks of passivity. I'm very interested in the phenomenon, and also in the community; I have no useful knowledge or particular talents that could come in use though, so I'll just watch from the sidelines for the nonce, and chip in with useless comments :-)

I've grasped the concept of trackback by now, it's like a citation service, you get to see who has linked to a particular posting. I still haven't found out what a RSS feed is or what it does, though; it's a buzzword I run into everywhere without explanation. RSS is a kind of XML, so much I've understood; I do know the basics of XML but what RSS is and what it's good for eludes me. . . But anyway. I'm listening, and learning, and being fascinated, and that's enough for now.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 11:28 0 comments

 
Oh, I am so, so fed up with being unwell. My throat is finally getting better and hardly hurts at all, but my whole head is full of phlegm, too viscous to easily get rid of, and it prevents me from breathing properly, gives me a headache and makes me generally irritable. And I'm so tired. I'm fed up with being home, too; being around the cats is fun and I can always read but I have things I need to get done, and am too generally tired and unwell to do them. It makes me feel pathetic and wimpy, too; who is laid flat for two weeks by a measly cold? But there you have it. The one positive factor is that I'm not losing any money, like I would have if I'd been working for monthly wages. I will have to work like a gnu when I get back, though.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 12:18 0 comments

 
I read The Affirmation by Christopher Priest a couple of days ago. It is the story of a young man who writes his autobiography in order to get his life together after the loss of his job and his girlfriend, and the death of his father. But while writing, he realises that it isn't as easy to do as he'd thought; even episodes he had a very firm memory of turned out to have happened differently. I have described the book in a few fora now and I still find myself puzzled by it, or not so much puzzled as intrigued and given food for thought. For one thing, the protagonist has a small job to do, and describes off-handedly how he does it and the result. It's not a major incident in the book, but it is there. Then we find out that he didn't actually do it, he just made himself think he had, and so he tweaked reality by first consciously saying something was true which wasn't, and later believing it himself, until he was forced to look at the proof.

I would imagine that that sort of thing isn't really something most people do, and that the man in the book had some kind of mental illness, but the fact remains that events in the past which only live in our memories may have been completely different from what we remember them, and so reminiscing we are in a way propagating a distorted reality. This is not just about remembering "good old days" in a rose-coloured-spectacles way and it's certainly not about lying or fabricating truth; I'm no doctor or brain specialist or anything but my guess is that it's a matter of interpreting input to the brain according to our current level of experience, and each time we remember things we filter them through subsequent experiences. Or something on those lines.

Now, today, I had tea at Uroxen, a café situated close to my old school. I went there rather a lot, in particular the Mondays of my first year at that school, the schedule being so oddly shaped that I had one class first thing in the morning, then five hours' free time and then two classes at the end of the day. So I got to know the café well, the peculiar wall paintings became very well known to me and I was allowed to buy on credit.

In particular, I remember one Monday. It was my sixteenth birthday, and my oldest sister had asked me to meet her at Uroxen during my free time. Not only she but a friend of hers showed up, and it was almost the most fun I'd ever had, as I remember it. They gave me a broken balloon and a jar that had contained honey, as well as a book (The Story of the Amulet by Edith Nesbit) and as it happens I didn't make it back for my last two classes that day, we were having so much fun. I kept the jar and the balloon for years after, until the latter had almost disintegrated into a sodden heap; finally I realised that I didn't really need them as props for my memory, and I don't think I have them any more. I do still have the book, needless to say.

This came back to me today, as I sipped my tea under the painting of Aurochs and Their Ferocity. And I do not believe my memory is wrong. The tables are placed differently today; we sat then to the right as you come in through the door, and there is a serving-table there now — I remember very vividly how I was sitting there when first Ulrika and then her friend arrived. Only, how certain can I be of my memories?

Well, it did happen, that's for sure, and it was on a Monday — I checked, and my birthday was on a Sunday that year, so it stands to reason that if we were to celebrate on a weekday it would be the day after. That much I know I remember right. And it doesn't really do to walk around doubting your memory, either, does it? I think I'll go on living as if my perceptions and memory do tell me, for the most part, the truth.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 21:48 0 comments

 
Actually, cancel that. Everybody already agreed with me, it turns out — I was just being paranoid.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 22:17 0 comments

 
I'm depressed. I've just had to write a long email to the board of a local sports club, a group of intelligent, pleasant people active in pretty much the only kind of sport that's ever interested me (aviation), to explain why it would be a bad thing for the club to get involved in MLM marketing. How can this group of smart people believe that selling products containing only 100% natural rock extract (or whatever) as a link in a pyramid organization will be profitable for the club? What has happened is of course that one of the members, who is a distributor for the company in question (and I'm not going to link to them) thought it would be a great thing for the club — incidentally, that would of course mean extra money for the aviator in question, too. And how come they don't realize this, when even I do? That's what I want to know. I just hope I convinced them; I'm not personally involved, but it's a club I retain much fondness for and I'd hate to see them do something really stupid.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 20:47 0 comments

 
This is not the thing to say, I know, but spam doesn't annoy me much.

Yes it does annoy me on principle; I hate the fact that it exists, I throw it away unopened and wouldn't buy anything from a spammer even if they ever offered anything I wanted, and I am aware of and disturbed by the fact that spam makes the Internet go round slower.

All I mean is that I personally don't get particularly irritated by the spam messages I get. They are not like banners and popups on web pages; those make me see red and I don't understand how they can have any positive result whatsoever for the people who use them, for who would ever click on a popped-up window other than by mistake? The email messages are quiet and unobtrusive in my inbox, and it's always obvious what they are so I can just mark and delete them, it doesn't take many seconds. I shouldn't have to do even that, of course, but as I'm saying, this isn't about the principle as such, it is about the frustration they generate within me personally.

The thing is, this frustration is rather balanced by the enjoyment I occasionally get out of these messages. Often it's just the subject lines; the amusement value of getting offers of penis enlargement pills soon vanes, but when the same email offers both "naturally increased breast size" and harder erections, I cannot help but grin. Why I should be targetted for vitamins that make me look and feel 20 years younger, I don't know; I do know that I am not particularly anxious to look and feel like a nine-year-old again, though. And as for Nigeria letters — which like many other people I receive several times a week, from all kinds of places — they always remind me of the David Ehi reverse scam (warning! Contains Great Old Ones. Read at your own risk.)

But there is also the satisfactory feeling of superiority; when I get email telling me how to vote in the American presidential election I can snigger condescendingly at stupid spammers who don't know it might be a good idea to filter out addresses ending in things like .se . When the offers of loans on favourable terms, ink for my printer or discreet meetings with ladies who really want to get to know me appear, I delete them without even noticing, but for a millisecond I do feel smarter than those who would answer those messages.

All this makes me come out a bit naïve, I guess. Yes, I know spammers buy email addresses by the million and don't care if half of them aren't really suitable targets for their messages. I don't really think that my disgust for spammers makes me superior to those who fall for their marketing. Not when I think about it. But every so often I feel as if this were so — just for a fraction of a second, not even long enough to register, but that is enough. Am I a bad person?

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 18:52 0 comments

 
Webby gadget: see who Néablog's real-world neighbours are. Or web pages closer to some other location you might find more interesting.

This is fascinating; on the Internet, physical distances cease to matter, yet we are interested to see not only where in the world the people whose web pages we read and whom we socialise with are located (after all that information is still important — knowing that the person you are chatting with is located in Australia means you won't get offended when he falls asleep on the keyboard while it's still early afternoon for you — to take but one minor example) but also where in our physical vicinity web pages we didn't know about before are located!

But there it is, and I think it is interesting to see, more as a curiosity than anything really useful, but fun. I wish the distances weren't only shown in miles, and that other Swedish cities than Stockholm were represented, but it's early days yet from what I understand.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 15:58 0 comments

 
Am still ill.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 21:25 0 comments

 
Oh, and I'm still reading LotR; am about to start on Return of the King. In case anybody wonders about my verb abuse in the previous posting.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 23:10 0 comments

 
I wonders, yes I wonders, when Home.se will consider it to be 8 pm. Three hours ago, according to my watch, but it is surely wrong, for by 8 pm my email should be working again, and it still isn't. Hasn't been all day, in fact (apologies extended to anybody who might be waiting for an answer to email they have sent me.) At 11 am they announced it should be fixed by noon; at 12:30 pm they said it was taking longer than expected and would be fixed by 8 pm — this is fine, I don't need my email that urgently but I want to know what's going on! By now I suppose the support technician has left for the day, and that's also fine, computer people need their sleep same as the rest of us, but couldn't he have updated the support info page first? Surely that can't take all that long to do, and I'm sure that saves him 4711 phone calls from annoyed users.

Oh well. As I say, I'm not in a hurry, and it's bedtime for me also. With luck my email will be back by the time I crawl out of bed tomorrow.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 23:08 0 comments

 
Once the anxiety gets its claws into you there is no escape. Once I realised that I hadn't seen a trace of Bonadea for five hours, maybe more, I could think of nothing else. The tracks in the snow told me she hadn't been walking by the house for some time, and there was no reaction when I called her name and made the kind of food-like noise that usually makes her come at full speed.

No, five hours isn't a long time for a cat to be outside, even when the temperature is below zero; in any case it wasn't more than three or four degrees below. It's just that she is a creature of habit, and she just doesn't stay outside for that long! She loves being out of doors, she rather enjoys the snow even, but she doesn't seem to wander very far ever (neutered female cats have small territories) and usually she'll come by once an hour to say hello and see to it that the house is still there. And we do have a lot of snow, now — in our garden it's deeper than Bonadea is high; and it's dark out, which means cars are less likely to spot her. Not that we live by a freeway or anything, but there is a certain amount of traffic. I took a little comfort in the fact that I'd managed to catch her before she sneaked out without a collar on. The collars are reflecting, and have our name and phone number inside. But the anxiety and worry had their claws in me now, and every comfort I could think of felt very, very scant.

Cassandra was getting anxious, too; she must have sensed I wasn't behaving normally, walking from front door to back door to the window in the workroom and back again. She followed me around, silently at first, then she started meowing; she even went outside a couple of times to run around and look at Bonadea's tracks.

I went outside, twice, to walk around the block calling for her, checking the walls of snow by the sides of the road just in case she'd been hit. But no, nothing.

I couldn't remember just when I'd let her out... but it must be seven hours since I saw her, now. She's never been gone that long, even in summer, even the time when she tried to follow flerdle and me to my parents' place and didn't return until late in the evening.

And then she comes running up to the back door; not as a result of my or Cassandra's calling; she's obviously been running a long way for she's exhausted, but also quite stressed; her tail is a bush and she trots back and forth in the house. Cassandra trots after her, trying to clean her face every time she changes direction, but Bonadea doesn't want to play. I do wonder what she's been up to. . .

But very soon she calms down, and when I feed them, they both do justice to the yucky gloop I serve. Bonadea is back, and she's fine, and everything is all right.



  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 21:27 0 comments

 
My throat is hurting. The muscles in my arms, legs and neck are hurting. My back hurt so much this morning I almost couldn't get out of bed.

I have postings in my head, but this is not the time to type them in and phrase them. I can't be ill now!

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 18:01 0 comments

 
In a more serious vein, Johan and I were discussing last night about how the sports movement seems to be a bastion of homophobia. There has been rather a lot of writing over the last year or so about how the Swedish Sports Confederation has been turning a blind eye to pretty blatant instances of discrimination against gay athletes; and on a SSC seminar on the conditions for gay athletes, only 8 out of the 67 federations in the confederation sent a representative. The problem is, reflected Johan, that sports involves being nude together with your team mates in the locker room, and that's probably why it takes longer to change than the rest of society. And that's not something that can be solved instantly by laws and regulations (even though those are necessary too, to get things moving) but by the much slower process of making homophobia an exception rather than a norm. If somebody is uncomfortable about showering with a team mate he knows is gay, it's that person's problem, not the homosexualist's (to borrow Francis' term.) So we still do have some way to go.

On the other hand, I saw a link to this story in LysKOM today. And that makes me believe we have got somewhere at least, for I refuse to believe that kind of official sanctioning from the school would happen in a Swedish school in 2003. Or — could it?

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 22:44 0 comments

 
I am concerned. I think somebody is reading my personal email. Well, when I say "somebody", I do have someone in particular in mind.

The thing is this. A few days ago, I got this email message from someone who really cared about my personal well-being. The subject line was something on the lines of: "SHED as MUCH AS YOU WANT in RECORD TIME!!!" Unfortunately I deleted the message, quite inadvertently, so I can't quote it (as a matter of fact I hadn't even opened it before it went into the bin by mistake) — but I think somebody did read it. Somebody who's been shedding white hair all over the clean laundry I put on the bed.

And now she's sitting on the windowsill, contriving to look as innocent as a very innocent cat. But I know better.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 21:08 0 comments