Something has gone wrong with my endnote library, every time I try to format the bibliography for my thesis draft I get a “service error: generic”. Apparently, the generic error is just that, one it could be one of many things, but at least I know its generic (hence the blog title). I’ve tried some of the fixes suggested by the Endnote website, and came up with a couple myself, such as importing the library file into a new file, but nothing seems to work. I haven’t dared try the registry editing fix yet, I’m not too sure IT services would like that too much. From the sound of it I need to “check bracket use”, which I’ve done once, so I guess another bracket sweep will have to do.

I’ve been catching up with research this morning, particularly the pile of papers that deal with player experience in one way or another that I haven’t got around to entering into endnote yet. I’m about to start writing about phenomenology and player experience, so it seems like a good place in the thesis to incorporate a lit review of the topic. Well, I just wrote an introductory paragraph so I guess you could say the I’ve already started, if you really wanted to.

update Just found the endnote problem, a single extra space between the author’s name and the @ symbol in the temporary citation place holder thing. I hadn’t noticed it before because it ran from one line to the next. Maybe soon I’ll work out my other problem with Endnote, how to have a conference name term list so I don’t have to write it out for every entry from that conference.

The big question though, will I be able to wrest the TV from my house mate playing our borrowed PS3 for long enough to watch Newstopia tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised if he insists that I simply watch it on the internet =).

Last week was full of surprises, notably the savagely bad head cold that came out of nowhere, but they weren’t all bad. Apparently a good friend was in Melbourne during the week as well, only he promptly got sick as well and spent most of the week in bed, so apart from going for dinner on thursday, we didn’t get to catch up very much.

Another friend bought a PS3 because he was ‘bored’. Funnily enough he’s going to Queensland this week to visit family, so my housemate and I get to baby sit his PS3. My housemate is a nut for Gran Turismo, I’d wouldn’t be surprised if he took time of work to play GT5 Prologue uninterrupted!

You said it, T.S. Elliot. Well at least the last fortnight has been for me. I thought i was over the flu I had last week, but it seems it was just regrouping as a head cold which has derailed my writing schedule once again. Think I might just do a spot of revision over what I have been writing over the weekend, and hopefully work out a way to get past the point I’m stuck on, and spend the rest of the day doing some marking.

I’m going to have a busy week I think. On top of my usual writing, I also will have essays, thankfully not very many, to mark, and the tutorial I’m giving tomorrow is a bit more involved than usual as I have to give the presentation since there aren’t enough people in the class to form enough groups to cover every week. Oh and Friday is a public holiday as well, so I’m a day down already. At least I’m starting to get back into the flow of writing again after having a disrupted week last week.

Went to the football again on Friday night, and had great seats right at the front of the second tier. Too bad my team lost, and that they did most of their best work right up the other end of the field were we could barely see them. It was interesting trying to get to the stadium by train thanks to something that was described only as a ‘police operation’ closing down part of my line. Luckily we could catch a tram. Unluckily, everyone else did too.

Funny what a google image for ’sardines in a can’ turns up. =)

I’ve added a photo of myself to my ‘about’ page. No particular reason for it, I needed a photo for a staff profile on the course I’m teaching blackboard page, so I thought I might as well put it up here as well. It is in sepia tones, but this is more to hide the fact that it was taken using my housemates MacBook Pro under fluorescent lighting, and I looked a bit like a zombie with normal colours.

I’ve just about finished reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, being into the final chapter. Its taken me a while, as I’ve generally been reading it on the train too and from Uni everyday, and the trip itself is usually only about 15-20 minutes or so, so I don’t get through much in a day unless there are delays or cancellations, which are, admittedly, quite frequent. And it is quite a dense book, even the copy editors have missed a few spelling mistakes in the edition I have.

I’ve been wondering if I should move next to Heidegger’s Being and Time, I mean, its only another 550 or so pages of complex, foundational philosophy to read. Despite my reluctance, It did feel quite awkward trying to write about Heidegger in relation to Merleau-Ponty, when I’m only drawing upon Dourish’s briefest of accounts, and a few other mentions of his work in a couple of other texts. There is a book I’ve come across called Phenomenology and Existentialism by Robert Solomon, that seems to be a fairly collection of essays and excerpts on, well, existentialism and phenomenology that I was thinking of ordering from Readings, that includes sections by Heidegger, and also another on Heidegger’s approach to the concept of the tool. Maybe I should put some of those hard earned tutorial dollars to work.

Apparently a good flu is the best way to completely derail your routine. I’ve been out of action for the last four days or so, and even today my mind’s not really firing, despite feeling like I was better this morning. Luckily I got ahead of schedule with my writing earlier last week, but looking at what i’d written this morning, its going to take some working over – i’ve lost the actual point I was trying to make.

So apparently I’m finally going to start getting paid for my teaching work this week, which is great considering were only into the fifth week of semester, and we’ve had a weeks holiday as well over easter. Of course it couldn’t be that simple, and looking at my payslip online this morning I noted that I’m only getting paid for the current fortnight, with no mention to the first 3 weeks of the semester. I guess it was somewhat optimistic to expect to start getting paid and to recieve my backpay all in one fell swoop. Oh well – let another round of emails commence!

I went to the football on Saturday night, and thankfully my team (go the Dons!) got away with the win even though they were decidedly patchy at times. We were sitting in the midst of a large group of passionate Carlton supporters, which is to say that there was a lot of yelling directed at the umpires and the Essendon players. Even though we were high in the top tier of the MCG, well beyond audible range of the players on the ground, several of the spectators continually physically pointed out possible passes to players when their team had the ball, or opposition players to mark when they didn’t.

I’m not criticising them mind you, I’m quite animated when I’m watching at home when there’s no one to see me, but it reminded me of a gameplay video I’d seen a while ago for Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 for the Wii, where you can use the Wii-mote to select players without the ball and tell them to run somewhere by pointing to it, among other things.

I speculate, but given that many sports games have something of of spectator’s perspective, looking down onto the playing field, and one that is particularly televisual that makes use of instant replays and television commentators, who are forever telling me that the shot I just missed was an ‘easy’ chance, I wonder if this pointing mechanism will be fairly easy to master, even though parts of the video itself look quite chaotic (about 1:50 onwards) with cursors going everywhere.

Time seems to be going by quite quickly at the moment. Suddenly its April, when it seemed quite recently that it was early February and I was a year out from submission. I’m guessing that it’s a combination of being busy, and the fairly repetitive activity of writing day after day. Everyday follows pretty much the same pattern, and they tend to go by quickly

My tutorial class started giving their presentations this week, and someone forgot to send marks to the students who presented on Tuesday afternoon until this morning (whoops). Though it was mostly due to absentmindedness, I think in part I was a little reluctant to finalise their marks. There wasn’t much in the way of specific marking criteria, and though I’ve been proof reading and editing for family and friends for years, and reviewed a conference paper once for a colleague who was in a bit of a bind, I’m pretty sure that I’ve never had to give anyone an actual mark before. It was mostly an issue with having room to move with the rest of the groups, of getting an idea of where they fit on the overall assessment scale.