I have been asked to pass on the following message to Three Bean Salad Podcast: Esteemed Beans, Your recent episode, “Elevators”, was so flagrant in its profligate use of jingles that I feel I must break my silence and share my top secret research project. Unlike many, I don’t use your podcast to go to sleep. But I do use it to wake up, and the jingles really get me out of bed.

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None of the below is particularly original. That’s kind of the point. Paper I’m addicted to paper. When reviewing documents I prefer to print them out and scribble on them. That’s all well and good in an office located on a planet with infinite trees, but I find myself in neither of those situations. As a programmer, I also find it useful to scribble things down on paper, point at various scribble marks and ask people questions.

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My son is nearing his second birthday, which makes him nearly two years old. When he was only four months old I decided that I would make him something with buttons. I didn’t have much more of an idea than that, but I ordered one hundred illuminated buttons and started mulling what to do with them. Nothing much happened for a few months; I knew this was a long term plan.

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As my son found his feet and began to walk, he found his hands at perfect height to reach the piano. Music is very important to us, and I could not have been more delighted to see him walk over to the piano and press the keys with the tips of his fingers…

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This year’s theme seems to have been impermanence: The deaths of two people close to me, the shift from from boat-dwelling to house-dwelling, stepping into more challenging role at work, and the consuming joy in helping a child discover the world. A mantra I have found particularly useful is “Which part of this can I do?”

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‘May the road rise up to meet you’, goes the saying. In eight years I spent living on a boat, the water did rise up to meet me quite suddenly once or twice: one minute ‘down there’ and the next ‘rushing up to meet me at speed’. On other occasions, during floods, it rose slowly, deliberately, made its point and then ebbed away…

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My first boat, Dawn, arrived with a Lister LR2 diesel engine. When I bought her, the boat was about 20 years old, but the engine was double that. What lives, I wondered, had the engine had before it ended up in a boat?

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Canal boats aren’t quiet. They may seem that way from a distance, but when underway, the captain is often unable to hear the first mate over the sound of the engine. Important communications, such as offers of cups of tea often go unheard…

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Boats are akin to swans. Which is to say that they’re like icebergs. Whatever their appearance, there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface than you’d think. On an afternoon stroll down the river, one might spot one or more boats, swans and / or icebergs. And unless someone’s having a really bad day, you probably won’t see what lies beneath any of them…

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Conferences and committees

2019 Programme Committee, PIDapalooza 2019 Programme Committee, Wiki Workshop at The Web Conference Committee, 5:AM Altmetrics Conference Keynote talk, Metrics in Transition Workshop 2019. “The role of open scholoarly infrastructure in metrics” Talk, PIDapalooza 2019 2018 Programme Committee, PIDapalooza 2018. Talk, PIDapalooza 2018. Talk, altmetrics17 workshop. 2017 Talk, 4:AM Altmetrics Conference. Talk, altmetrics18 workshop. 2016 Talk, 3:AM Altmetrics Conference Talk, csv,conf,v2