Friday, December 2

 

 

At the start of the morning I had a working version f the dibdibdob.com website on Linode. At the end of the morning I had broken it in some way in my attempts to set up a second website. I felt close to giving up, and looked at Radicenter again. Perhaps I should just write the content and leave the server set-up to the professionals.

Fortunately or not, the Radicenter site seemed utterly unfriendly, and my attempts to create an account and pay them money came to nothing.

At midday I found myself at Aalto, in the Media Factory auditorium, waiting for Samir’s doctoral defence to start.

When the procession entered, and everyone stood up and sat down, Samir gave a speech, his opponent, a professor of museology from the University of Yväskylä, gave a speech, and then two hours of discussion began. Lucy Diaz chaired the session and I sit in the centre in the second row. Nobody dares to sit in the first row.

At several points in the opponent’s argument the expression damning with faint praise comes to mind, but I cannot not tell whether she intends this, or the responsibility lies with her English phrasing and vocabulary.

By 15:00 she has proposed that Samir’s thesis should qualify him for a doctorate, and the audience stands in a corridor with a glass of sparkling wine in their hands to toast him. We line up to greet Samir and he and I chat briefly as I pause at the front of the line for a moment before moving on. I chat briefly with Andrew and Justin from Pixelache, and then return to ARcada, to see what I should do about my websites.

I will find that listening to Samir talk about the material footprint of the media that museums outsource has, for some reason, firmed my resolve that I should build my sites from scratch. I will check and realise that I can extend my HostMonster accounts on a monthly basis and decide that I will attempt to move the sites before we leave for India but not move the DNS records until we return.