A dynamically updated list of cancelled or postponed events where I was planning on participating.
- Nacka district court’s layman judge association, annual business meeting & lecture.
- Fantastika scifi convention. I was on two panels and was giving a talk about NMK.
- Game night.
- Royal Armoury’s appointment-only library, research visit.
- Nacka Social Democrats, annual business meeting.
- Wikimedia Sweden, annual business meeting and seminar.
- Östergötland County Museum’s friends association, me speaking about my Viking Halls project.
- Continued training for layman judges.
- Local school administration and education board politicians, seminar.
- Kai’s 54th birthday party. With alleged waffles.
- Municipal school board’s monthly meeting.
- LinCon 2020 gaming convention. I was supposed to give a talk on NMK.
- 2020 Sachsensymposium in Castricum-Alkmaar. I was giving a talk on Aska in Hagebyhöga.
- Colloquium in Prag on rulers’ residences of the period AD 1000-1150. I was giving a talk.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
Fortunately I can apply to jobs and send in my book MS from home! Not having access to the library is a bother: they have been shut down until at least early April along with classes.
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Where can we read about your book project?
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I have not had energy to blog about it while I am hip deep in revisions and possible index headings, maybe after the March job applications and the manuscript have been sent? It is the book version of my PhD thesis from a well-known German academic press. I chose a middle path in revising it between ‘rewrite from scratch’ and ‘just fix the typos and the problems that the reviewers noted’ (I found a cool Japanese site report that had to go in chapter 5: the perspective of archaeology!)
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I haven’t had anything cancelled yet (mainly because I currently have nothing on my calendar), but this afternoon my university announced that after next week’s spring break (regularly scheduled week of no classes), all courses will be online for at least two weeks (23 March to at least 3 April). External events on campus are also cancelled for that period. The university itself will still be open, and students who would otherwise have to travel to places where they would have to self-quarantine upon return can arrange to stay in the dorms, but other students are being instructed to stay away until 5 April, and bring all textbooks and other needed materials with them when they leave for spring break.
If you were planning anything in the US in the next 30 days, you will have to cancel that, too. Last night Trump unilaterally shut down all US-Schengen travel (except for US citizens and permanent residents) for 30 days. Too late: there is already community transmission in the US.
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Are you at one of the US universities where students have to stay in the dorms but they are not real apartment on a 4/8/12 month lease, they have to go somewhere else during the breaks (and sometimes summer)? Those seem so weird to me, but I am a book person so I can’t live out of a wheeled bag.
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Living on campus is not mandatory here, and many students do live off campus. Most students in dorms do have to leave between semesters, and definitely for summer as the dorms are used for housing for summer camps (tech, sports, music, etc.). But we do have a significant contingent of international students, who can make arrangements to stay during periods when dorms are closed to most students. Even under normal circumstances travel to some of their home countries–in particular China, whence comes the largest contingent–for periods of a week or less is impractical, often because of visa issues. In an era were the US is blanket banning foreign nationals who have travelled to certain countries in the past 14 days, international students effectively cannot travel during breaks.
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So far:
Work is work-from-home, so a fair chunk of expected social interaction is now online-only
This weekend’s game is likely to be online-only, so a fair chunk of…
Just got an email from Immigration New Zeeland, related to July/August’s planned WorldCon visit. Hopefully things calm down by then.
New screen/keyboard arriving probably today (see “work-from-home”, laptop is fine for short stints, not ideal for full day).
I might noodle another chapter in my seemingly never-ending online short story serial. I might take “large screen” advantage and try to knock out a few more pages of my fechtbuch translation (strictly speaking, it’s not a fechtbuch, it’s a fäktbok). And I may try to see how much data I can gather, purely on-line, for a book project I’ve trying to ignore for about 18 months.
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This evening, just two hours after going to mandatory work-from-home, the president of my university announced that in-person classes were cancelled for the rest of the semester. They are also saying that it may be necessary to cancel the graduation ceremony, which normally falls on the Saturday before the Memorial Day weekend.
My Ph.D. alma mater has also announced that no decision has been made on whether they will have commencement. That university is on a different calendar, with their graduation coming well into June.
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Had to look up commencement. It’s the end of your studies!
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Right, because it is the beginning of the rest of your life!
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A Tiroler colleague had to do her PhD thesis defense (latiniter Rigorosum) by video chat. At least the last few rich countries are getting with the program.
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I still think it’s a bloody shame about the waffles.
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YuSie made some the other day!
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If you are getting waffles, you are getting more than I’m getting. I love waffles. I might put the hard word on my wife to make some. Warbles: I’m in the mood for waffles, simply because I want some…
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As of 7 July:
All of my remaining scheduled conferences for the year will be online only. That includes one two weeks ago, one later this month, one in September, and one in December.
My municipality has been holding public meetings via Zoom. I have attended several Planning Board meetings virtually, as there is a bad proposed project very close to my house.
I have not been to my work office since we went to work at home in March. My university still plans to reopen for fall semester, but I remain skeptical that they will be able to pull it off, and stay open through late November as currently planned.
My driver license comes up for renewal this month. In normal times I can drive to the nearest Department of Motor Vehicles office. At present the DMV offices are open only by appointment, with a two-week lead time for appointments when I set mine up. They are also only accepting appointments for people whose licenses expire on or before 31 August, or whose licenses have already expired. In the US driver licenses are the most common form of ID (rather than a national ID card as in most countries), although state-issued non-driver IDs and passports are usually accepted in place of driver licenses. Starting October 2021 Americans traveling by air will need IDs that meet certain enhanced requirements; passports qualify but many driver licenses (including my expiring driver license) do not.
And President Scheisskopf has announced plans for a rally on Saturday the 11th about 20 minutes from where I live. New Hampshire has been doing better than most US states with COVID (although still not up to international standards), but this almost guarantees we will see a spike in cases around the end of this month
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On Youtube, ‘K’eush the stunt dog’ (A gigantic malamute or siberian husky) is also a big waffle fan. I bring it up because he shares table manners with my felines .
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-What are the options for online education? The students may be sturdy enough to deal with the virus, but the staff is usually older. A fiftysomething with diabetes will take a risk interacting directly.
Yet, online contact is never quite as good as direct contact.
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Many of these events can hopefully be moved to later this year, but the planning will inevitably collide with many unrelated activities as everyone else is struggling to catch up for time lost in the spring and early summer.
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Will the universities in Poland have the time and resources to re-design the workplaces so lectures can be behind some transparent protective panel, like cashiers? If air flows in rooms can be blocked off between students and staff it will make a lot of difference. The intersection between ergonomics and fluid movement is not something I know about, but it is not rocket science.
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Waffle enthusiast! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Gp8-ZT8q4
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Alaskan Malamutes are huge. There is one living in our block – it is bigger and more heavily built than a large wolf; more like a bear. When it is in one of the lifts, it takes up most of the lift.
You would be right to question how much of an ‘animal lover’ a person is who keeps an animal like that in a small high rise flat in a sub-tropical climate.
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Charles Stross “It’ll all be over by Christmas” (Part 2) http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/index.html
One of the few blogs I can be arsed to read these days. Mano Singham is also interesting.
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I cannot find any fresh archaeology news today. Here is some filler.
Pizza delivery man quits after ten years without shagging one single customer https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/food/pizza-delivery-man-quits-after-ten-years-without-shagging-one-single-customer-20200708198262
‘I’m making it up as I go along’, admits Boris
As the Prime Minister kickstarted the second wave of Corvid-19 infections by personally spitting in everyone’s pint at the weekend, there is a growing suspicion that he has been winging it; like an ill-rehearsed drama group at the Edinburgh Fringe. The only thing Boris changes more frequently, other than his safety advice, is his forwarding address every time the child support agency gets in touch.
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In lieu of the visit to the library of the Royal Armoury maybe you could go to Arsenalen, where they keep tanks and other vehicles – some of them literally antique.
This is the classic hunting ground for ‘The Chieftain’ Nicholas Moran and Sofilein.
You deserve a place beside them! And if you want practical archaeology, you can bring a posse to the swamps of Belorussia and the Ukraine where you can find the odd 30-ton behemoth still buried after 80 years.
Pacific enthusiasts can hunt Japanese and American wrecks, plus stuff abandoned since it was inconvenient to ship them when everyone already were flooded with left over equipment. Fancy a jeep or a Japanese 80mm anti-aircraft gun? Just clean off the rust and lease a ship.
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A couple of lessons learned from my virtual conference just concluded:
1. It is much harder to enforce speaker time limits. The session chair does not have the option of looming over the speaker as a way of encouraging the speaker to wrap it up, and the green/yellow/red light systems that we typically have at major conferences are not available.
2. Virtual poster sessions are a lot harder to pull off. For one thing, formatting the poster as a series of slides (the electronic version of how it was commonly done before large format printers became cheap enough that universities could afford them for general use) works better than the large format posters that had become common for my recent in-person conferences. The other is that the posters had to be divided among several small virtual rooms rather than a single big physical room, and the virtual rooms can get rather sticky. I could not see nearly as many posters in the virtual format as I would normally be able to see in the in-person format I was accustomed to.
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