Epistemographer

One of the many things preying on my mind these days is housing – which neighborhood in DC to live in, how much to pay in rent, and the big question on everyone’s minds these days, to rent or to buy?

Looks like I’m not the only one – several of my favorite post-academics have been blogging about real estate. Laura over at Apartment 11D just bought herself a fine home outside the city, while Erika at Apartment 401 (different blog, different building, different city) has been mulling the same question.

Right now, renting seems the way to go – we’re only planning to be in DC for 2-3 years, and the rental market is soft right now while the real estate market…well…isn’t. Not even close.

So, I’m apparently a bit behind the curve here (or maybe I just ought to stop reading political blogs compulsively and add some more techie ones to my daily circuit)…seems that the eagerly-anticipated Movable Type 3.0 is out, at least in a Developer version. Meanwhile, all hell has broken loose over the licensing structure (just check out the Trackbacks to Mena Trott’s announcement).

I’ve been using Movable Type for the past year, and have been quite the little MT evangelist, even convincing Cornell’s Academic Technology Center to install it on one of their servers for a course I taught this semester. Looking ahead to the work I’ll be doing at George Mason, I’ve been thinking about ways to stretch/adopt blogs into the work of the Center for History and New Media, and Movable Type has been my default CMS, simply because it’s what I know best.

For myself, there are a few problems with the new MT licensing scheme, and like most of the people raising a stink, they center on the number of authors/number of blogs permitted by each license. I totally understand the rationale for limiting the number of blogs and/or authors covered by a personal, non-commercial license – they’re trying to bring individuals into the Typepad service, and don’t want one person with technical skills setting up blogs for dozens of his or her friends when they otherwise might subscribe to Typepad. That’s totally cool, and while I myself have been known to set up a blog or two for a friend, I can respect that.

However, here’s my concern, about which I’ve seen precious little discussion – educational/academic uses (Weblogg-ed, for example, has nothing, and the best posts I’ve been able to find are by Shane Nackerud, who’s running the UThink initiative at the University of Minnesota). For example, I’ve been planning to launch a couple of group blogs on the model of Terra Nova to focus on a few of the research topics in which I’m particularly interested. Figuring up to a dozen authors, this rapidly becomes unaffordable, especially considering that I wouldn’t necessarily have any official funding for such a project. Moreover, there’s the question of CHNM – if, say, we wanted to add a blog-like function to the tools available for historians, it now seems substantially less likely that Movable Type is a viable option.

Now, while concerning, these issues don’t seem to be such a big deal in the immediate, practical sense: as best as I can tell from rooting around through various discussions, the licensing is on the honor system and these limits aren’t hard-coded into the software. If anything, though, this is a wake-up call for me, a reminder that while the code is visible, Movable Type is by no means open source software. Six Apart has every right to do what they like with the code, and charge whatever the market will bear. They can stop passing out the free beer whenever they like, and nobody really has a leg to stand on to complain.

This all comes as I’ve been sketching out a redesign for my own site (I finally figured out an answer to the question that Jay Rosen asked me a few months ago when I met him at NYU – “Oh, you’ve got a blog? What are you trying to do there?”), and have been finding Movable Type somewhat limiting – I can kludge together lists of links/photos/ideas/etc. as separate blogs under MT, for example, but that’s kind of a pain. I was toying with the idea of migrating anyways, and now with this reminder that I’d be investing time and building expertise in a system that won’t necessarily be available (or at least not affordable) for future projects I’m wondering whether now might well be the time to jump ship. Textpattern seems the next logical choice, but again, it’s not a purely open source program, and thus subject to the same problems down the road (though its creator insists it’ll remain free for noncommercial use, I’m wary until I see the Creative Commons license in print) – plus, it’s not clear that the same development community will form around Textpattern, and plugins like mt-amazon or mt-blacklist are as vital to my use of Movable Type as the CMS itself. Meanwhile, there’s WordPress, which gets a thumbs-up for being open source but which is also still kind of clunky (particularly the fact that you can only run one blog off of a given installation).

In short, there doesn’t seem to be an ideal alternative, so I’ll probably stick with my current install of Movable Type for the moment (not like I’ve really got time to seriously go mucking around with porting to a new system anyways). I have no doubt that Mena, Ben and the rest of the people at Six Apart are good people, but it seems like my non-profit, academic interests might be diverging from theirs, which leaves me looking for another CMS to which to hitch my wagon.

A few weeks ago, I found out that my cousin Josh had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had a seizure one day at dinner and was rushed to a hospital, where the ER docs found nothing visibly wrong. A followup visit with his primary care physician led to an MRI, however, which turned up a 2 cm mass on the left side of his brain.

A little backstory: Josh is a fixture at my parents’ annual Passover Seders, and he’s infamous for a particular seder several years back when he knocked back too much wine and picked up my parents’ camcorder – the video he shot (among with his running commentary) is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Thus, it comes as no suprise that he’s decided to tackle this challenge with a sense of humor, naming the tumor “Earl” and starting up a Brain Blog to keep friends and family up to date on events. He’s a hell of a guy, and this is now one of the first blogs I check when I start up my computer in the morning…

So, I returned most of my checked-out books to the Cornell library last week.

For those of you who haven’t written a dissertation, I can’t really explain how big a deal this is: some of these books have sat on my shelves for upwards of three years, thanks to Cornell’s six-month checkout term for graduate students and online renewal system, and I’d really grown to think of them as mine in a certain sense. There was a definite sense of saying goodbye as I lugged 110 books in milk crates to the library, but as I emptied the last one I didn’t have the feeling of closure that I expected.

See, up until a few months ago I thought that I’d defend my dissertation, go to graduation, then spend a few days in a flurry of activity as I packed up my Ithaca life and headed for the horizon. Recently, however, it’s begun to dawn on me that my transition from graduate school to “what comes next” isn’t going to happen in anything remotely resembling a clean break. Instead, I’m looking forward to a several-month-long smear from one life into another, marked by a series of transitory steps and a whole lot of miscellaneous debris.

Initially, I’d hoped to get my defense out of the way by Cornell’s May commencement, so that the ceremony would mark the official end of my time there. Instead, my defense is set for July 26th, and while I’ll still put on the gown and walk at the May ceremony, it won’t quite be the same. Originally, the hope was that I’d have defended by the end of May so that the trip to Eduador and the Galapagos would give me a feeling of distance from my dissertation and graduate student life in general, but now I’m in a position where I’ll have to come back and spend another few weeks working on dissertation revisions.

There’s also the matter of where I’m living. When I drove down to DC last week I realized that I would only be in Ithaca three more times: once for commencement, once in June to discuss the final dissertation draft with Ron, and once for the actual defense at the end of July. I’ll spend most of the rest of the time at Jenny’s place in Brooklyn, until we move down to DC sometime in mid-July (provided we find a place by then, which is a whole other topic). Again, no real moment of closure, just a series of transitions.

As for what I’ll be doing, I’ve got a bunch of freelance work lined up from when I didn’t know if I’d have a job or need to start building a freelance career – now I won’t need the work as badly, but I’ve already committed to the projects (plus I know I’ll enjoy the programming and design work). It’s strange – I’ll probably have the final dissertation draft in by the time I move down to DC, but I’ll still be doing freelance stuff after the move. Even more, I’ll move to DC only to then have to return to Ithaca for my defense and last-minute fixes, then rushing right back to DC to start at George Mason on August 1.

I’m really not complaining, honest – I’m incredibly lucky to be in the situation in which I find myself, and I know it. I’ve got a job lined up, I’ve got freelance work to tide me over until then, the end of graduate school is within reach, I’ve got an amazing girlfriend who loves me enough to move to a different city and start a new life with me.

It all just feels strangely anticlimactic.

As I’ve written before, I’ve been rather deliberately avoiding writing about many of the biggest things occupying my mind over the past few months. Finally, however, I’m at a point where I can start thinking out loud again: the semester’s drawing to a close, my travel plans for the summer are set, and my dissertation is no longer crowding out all other urges to write from my being.

Also, I’ve accepted a job.

For the next few years, I’ll be a Research Assistant Professor at George Mason University‘s Center for History and New Media. The job sounds fantastic: I’ll get to do history and develop/evangelize new tools for historians to use. I’ll miss being in the classroom (there’s no teaching involved, though I might have the option of doing so should I want to), but this seems to be the best possible thing for my career right now…there’ll be plenty more time for teaching down the road, I suspect. In the meantime – DC, here I come!