teaching OpenOffice to spell "interdisciplinarity"

My last two days have rather bizarrely shadowed my experience in this job, insofar as (a) actually, when you get down to it I really don't enjoy taking minutes, but (b) I'm very good at it. This was a two-day workshop entailing the second instalment of discussions between a bunch of smallish departments in the Faculty plotting a merger into one giant, loosely thematically-linked department, for purposes variously of synergy, survival and structural clout. This boiled down to around 25 academics from social sciency disciplines, sitting in a room arguing intellectual overlaps and differences in tandem with organisational and political challenges. And me, taking notes. It's lucky I'm predisposed to polysyllables, is all I can say.

It's bloody tricky, the note-taking skill: simultaneously apprehending an argument, distilling it out of its sometimes wandering informality, and typing it up really, really fast, yay Winona attached to a proper keyboard. (Also, yay to a high school which gave me a formal touch-typing course in parallel to my A-levels). These are academics. The arguments were frequently very, very dense, but with the tendency to circularity, repetition and fumbling for clarity of any oral communication. It was an experience I'd imagine would be loosely approximated by sitting in a series of about seven lectures, one after the other, when the lecturer was interesting but not very good at logical structure, and absolutely everything was going to be in the exam. It's a seven-hour period of fixed attention, in which I can't afford to relax for an instant in case I miss something important; it adds new levels of bone-weariness to "completely exhausted". After two days of it, I feel as though someone's sucked two-thirds of my brain out through my ears before beating me cheerfully with rubber bludgeons. (This last because the chairs were seriously anti-ergonomic and I'm very stiff and have a very sore butt).

On the upside, nice restaurant setting (Wild Fig), excellent lunches, rave reviews from various academics on how good my notes are, and the Dean seriously owes me for this one. I'm useless for practical purposes today.

Quick public service announcement, incidentally: LiveJournal is doing this bloody silly thing where they've automated a one-click method of posting LJ comments to Facebook accounts. Including comments on friends-locked posts, with a link to the locked post, which can't be accessed by anyone not authorised to read it, but which now has its existence, and at least one comment on its content, revealed. (Very good discussion here on why this is a stupidly bad idea). More importantly, the quick-click nature of this feature, which you can't opt out of other than by hacking the CSS, makes it trivially easy to cross-post, thereby vastly increasing the amount of crossover between a Facebook and LJ account.

Now, here's the thing. I go by my real name on Facebook. I don't link that real name to LJ in any way that I can possibly detect and avoid, but a lot of people who know me here also know me in real life and are Facebook friends, which means that there's a real potential for a casual cross-post to reveal the existence of this journal to a real-life network, some of whom I may not wish to see reading the more relaxed and personal entries on my LJ. I am asking you nice witterers, please, as an interim courtesy, not to cross-post any comment you leave on this LJ to your Facebook, supposing any of you are remotely likely to do such a thing. This is interim because I am seriously considering migrating my meanderings off LJ, and quite probably myself off Facebook as well, I completely loathe the kind of cavalier attitude to privacy both these networks are developing. (As do many people. See poll on this latest stupidity).

Social networks are wonderful things, except when they ain't.